Empress Dowager Cixi

23 May, 2024 950 History of Asia

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court. Cixi (1835-1908) started out at court as one of the Emperor’s many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Yangwen Zheng 2 episodes
    Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester
  • Rana Mitter 8 episodes
    The S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School
  • Ronald Po No other episodes
    Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University

Reading list

  • Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China
    Pearl S. Buck (Open Road Media, 2013)
  • With the Empress Dowager
    Katharine A. Carl (General Books LLC, 2009)
  • Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
    Jung Chang (Jonathan Cape, 2013)
  • Old Buddha
    Princess Der Ling (Kessinger Publishing, 2007)
  • The Origins of the Boxer Uprising
    Joseph W. Esherick (University of California Press, 1987)
  • China: A New History
    John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman (Harvard University Press, 2006)
  • Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China
    Peter Gue Zarrow and Rebecca Karl (eds.) (Harvard University Press, 2002)
  • Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling
    Grant Hayter-Menzies (Hong Kong University Press, 2008)
  • The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China
    Keith Laidler (Wiley, 2003)
  • Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing
    Keith McMahon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
  • The Last Empress
    Anchee Min (Bloomsbury, 2011)
  • Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi's Image Making
    Ying-Chen Peng (Yale University Press, 2023)
  • Letters from China: with Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China
    Sarah Pike Conger (Forgotten Books, 2024)
  • Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age
    Stephen Platt (Atlantic Books, 2019)
  • Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World
    Liang Qichao (trans. Peter Zarrow) (Penguin Classics, 2023)
  • Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China
    Sterling Seagrave (Vintage, 1993)
  • The Search for Modern China
    Jonathan D. Spence (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)
  • Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a Formidable Concubine
    X. L. Woo (Algora Publishing, 2003)
  • Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History
    Zheng Yangwen (Manchester University Press, 2018)

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Programme ID: m001zdw0

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Auto-category: 951.03 (Modern China (1644-1912))

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. The Empress Dowager Cixi, 1835 to 1908, was the dominant figure in the Chinese court for almost 50 years.