China Under the Empress Dowager
Throughout the years of Chinese self-questioning in the second half of the nineteenth century, Tz’u Hsi, the Empress Dowager, held the stage, untouched by the new thought. By Richard Harris.
Mao Tse Tung was fifteen when the Empress Dowager died in 1908. The one succeeded the other after only forty years. How great seems the incongruity between these two, and how entire the overturning of China in those years! And yet it is not so if one recalls how Tz’u Hsi—to use the Empress Dowager’s honorific title—laid her influence across China like snow in the late spring while the seeds of change germinated beneath. The aspirations that took shape then are those being fulfilled in the China of today.
But we must first evoke the atmosphere in which China began the nineteenth century. We may go back to the Emperor Ch’ien Lung, whose riposte to George III is familiar enough: “...on perusing your memorial so simply worded and sincerely conceived, I am impressed by your genuine respectfulness and friendliness and greatly pleased...” That was the headmaster’s tone. By 1839, when Lin Tse-hsu was sent down to Canton to stop the opium traffic, it had only slightly changed: a note of earnestness creeps in.
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