"Too much mystery surrounds the Forbidden City for us to write about its inhabitants with any certainty. Even when the facts are known, there are two or three versions, each giving a different account of what happened. This vagueness is like the foggy parts of a Chinese painting; it has a charm that it might be a mistake to dispel. Nor is it certain that the historian, if he could lift the veil, would discover the truth".To get more news about last empress of china, you can visit shine news official website.
History can be a slippery stuff, especially when it comes to personalities. A century after the death of China's last and most famous empress, Cixi, the story of her life and reign remains shrouded in different versions of the truth.
Some sources portray her as a veritable Wicked Witch of the East, whose enemies often mysteriously dropped dead. Others link her to tales of sexual intrigue within the palace walls, even questioning whether her favourite eunuch was really a eunuch. But recent scholarly analysis discredits many of these sensational stories and suggests a more complicated woman than this caricature.
What do we really know about this woman who indirectly controlled China's throne for almost half a century in the twilight of the Qing dynasty?
She entered history on 29 November 1835 as an ordinary Chinese girl called Yehenara, although there was a certain prestige in being born into a family of the ruling Manchu minority. At the age of 16, she was taken to the Forbidden City to join Emperor Xianfeng's harem - which may sound like punishment to modern ears, but was considered an ostentatious role for Chinese women at the time.
According to Daniele Vare's book The Last Empress, Yehenara (he calls her Yehonala) rose to the top of the concubine ranks when the emperor overheard her singing and asked to see her. Infatuated, he began picking her name out of the nightly roster to visit his bedchamber, and soon she bore him a son. This earned her the title of Tzu Hsi, meaning 'Empress of the Western Palace', now spelt Cixi.
When Xianfeng died in 1861, Cixi's five-year-old son was his only male heir and became Emperor Tongzhi, making her the 'Empress Dowager' and regent ruler. Cixi relinquished the regency when her son turned 17, but Tongzhi died two years later and Cixi became regent again, this time for her three-year-old nephew Guangxu.
Some historians have pointed to this turn of events as evidence of Cixi's political astuteness, as it broke with tradition for the new emperor to be of the same generation as his predecessor. Moreover, although Tongzhi had no heir when he died, his first concubine, Alute, was pregnant. So it seems far too convenient that Alute and her unborn child died during the debate over the succession. The court ruled it a suicide, but as the New York Times reported at the time, the circumstances "aroused general suspicion".
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