China

The Self-Strengthening Movement

Upon the Xianfeng emperor’s death at Chengde in 1861, his antiforeign entourage entered Beijing and seized power, but Cixi, mother of the newly enthroned boy emperor Zaichun (reigned as the Tongzhi emperor, 1861–74/75), and Prince Gong succeeded in crushing their opponents by a coup d’état in October. A new system emerged in which the leadership in Beijing was shared by Cixi and another empress dowager, Ci’an, in the palace and by Prince Gong and Wen Xiang, with the Zongli Yamen as their base of operation. The core of their foreign policy was expressed by Prince Gong as “overt peace with the Western nations in order to gain time for recovering the exhausted power of the state.”

The empress dowager Cixi, c. 1904, late Qing dynasty, China.Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.