Cixi was a powerful and charismatic woman who unofficially but effectively controlled China for almost half a centure during the reigns of Tongzhi and Guangxu. Her rule didn't bring stability and prosperity to the Qing Dynasty, and she was unable to defend the country from external threats. Instead, she entered into a series of humiliating threats, leading to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty after ruling China for more than 200 years.
Background
Was born to a mid-ranking Manchu family of the old Yehe Nara clan. Despite intermarriage with the family of Nurhaci, the tribal alliance soured into a feud, resulting in a legend that the Qing dynasty would some day be destroyed by the Yehe descendants, Cixi entered the palace as a low-level imperial concubine in 1851 at the age of sixteen.
Education
Cixi spent exorbitantly to celebrate her sixtieth (by Chinese reckoning) birthday, including massively renovating the Summer Palace in Beijing's northwestern suburbs. The court had to appropriate the navy budget to finance her birthday party on the eve of the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894, in which the Chinese navy was routed; hence the irony of the marble boat Cixi constructed at the Summer Palace.
She carefully arranged the reception rooms to create the desired impression, temporarily removing Buddha figures and substituting Western clocks. She also accepted an American painter, Katherine Carl, into the palace to paint her portrait for public exhibition - a true break with traditions, because most portraiture in China, especially of imperial persons, was used only on ancestral altars, after their deaths.
Career
In the summer of 1861, the Xianfeng emperor died in the imperial hunting park at Rehe (Chengde) after fleeing the invading Anglo-French army during the Second Opium War. With her five-year-old son enthroned as Emperor Tongzhi, Cixi was made junior Empress-dowager.
The two deposed the eight senior courtiers appointed as regents by the late emperor and had three of them executed. It is probable that the most ambitious and ruthless Cixi played a decisive role in this life-and-death plot. The two Empresses-dowager then formed a joint regency, and were said to rule 'from behind screens', sometimes actually sitting hidden behind the throne. Popularly differentiated by the location of their respective residence, the senior lady became the 'Eastern Empress-dowager' and Cixi the 'Western Empress-dowager'. The Eastern Empress-dowager was far less politically inclined then Cixi, and she allowed Cixi, who had a much better education in Chinese, gradually to assume the dominating role.
Though the regency was formally terminated when the young emperor reached maturity, Cixi continued to exert political and domestic control.
After the son's death, Cixi chose her nephew, aged three, as his successor, so the two elder Empress-dowager could continue their regency. In 1881, the Eastern Empress-dowager died rather suddenly, removing the last restraint on Cixi.
When her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, reached maturity in 1889, Cixi 'retired', but she never really let go her control of the court. The young emperor, stunned by China's repeated humiliations and loss of territories to foreign powers, especially the cession of Taiwan after losing the 1894 war with Japan, wanted to enact drastic institutional reforms to revive the moribund Qing dynasty. The conservatives, backed by Cixi, stubbornly resisted.
The reform clique then called upon Yuan Shikai, a rising Han general, asking him to force Cixi's abdication. The scheming General Yuan, however, is said to have quickly betrayed the plot to Ronglu, the Governor-general of the capital province. Cixi launched a countercoup in September 1898, imprisoned her nephew, executed six leading reformers, and reversed the critical reform measures.
Cixi became increasingly bitter about Western encroachment, to the point of approving the attack on foreign embassies by the Boxers (peasant mobs) and government troops in 1900. In responce, a coalition force from eight countries invaded and occupied Beijing to relieve the siege of the foreign legations, forcing Cixi to flee.
The crisis was settled through the tireless negotiations of the able courtier Li Hongzhang, but China paid a huge indemnity totalling 450 million taels of silver, though much of it was later waived or used to educate young Chinese abroad. Cixi returned to Beijing unscathed and became less hostile to the outside world. An astute politician, she made the decision to receive foreign ladies at court, and the wives of senior diplomats and missionaries were charmed by this apparently welcoming old lady who invited them to sit on her bed and offered them tea in Worcester porcelain.