The Empress and the Boxers: Cixi, Lost Wars, and the Crisis of 1898–1901

Act I: The Empress Dowager (Review Question 10)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 324–325. Reading-guide sentence (p. 324): "Cixi was a skillful political operator."

The succession of 1875

Cixi (1835–1908) entered the palace as a low-ranking consort of the Xianfeng emperor and rose because she bore his only surviving son. After the coup of 1861 she and the senior empress dowager, Ci'an, ruled as co-regents for the Tongzhi emperor (Lecture 3). Tongzhi began to rule in his own name in 1873 and died in January 1875, officially of smallpox, at eighteen (nineteen by Chinese reckoning, the age Ebrey gives) (slide D).

He had no son. Cixi chose her sister's son, the child of Prince Chun, who was three years old (four sui). The choice broke the rule that an heir should come from the next generation, so that he could perform the rites for the dead emperor as a son. The boy, the Guangxu emperor, was adopted as Xianfeng's son, and the two empresses dowager resumed their regency. In 1879 the censor Wu Kedu killed himself in protest at the irregular succession. Ebrey's explanation is blunt: "By selecting a boy of four, Cixi could continue in power as regent for many years to come" (p. 324; slide E). Ci'an died in 1881, leaving Cixi alone. She formally retired in 1889, when Guangxu married and began to rule, but she kept the power to approve senior appointments.¹

The operator

Ebrey's portrait (slide F) is balanced and worth quoting: Cixi "presented herself" to the Manchu establishment "as a staunch defender of Manchu privileges," and "She needed modernizers like Li Hongzhang and cajoled them with titles and honors, but she kept them in check by also encouraging their conservative critics" (p. 324). Those critics were the qingliu, the "pure stream" officials such as Zhang Peilun and Zhang Zhidong, who won fame by denouncing compromise with foreigners.²

The hard-liners and the French war

Vietnam had sent tribute to the Qing for centuries, but France had annexed its south (Cochinchina) in the 1860s and pushed into the north in the 1880s (slides G–H). Li Hongzhang and Prince Gong wanted a negotiated settlement; the qingliu demanded resistance. Cixi sided with the hard-liners (slide I). In April 1884 she dismissed Prince Gong and the whole Grand Council, ending his career as leading minister for a decade. A settlement Li signed with the French in May 1884 then broke down after a clash at Bac Le in northern Vietnam.

On 23 August 1884 Admiral Amédée Courbet's squadron, already anchored in the Min River below Fuzhou, opened fire on the Fujian fleet and the Fuzhou Navy Yard (slide J). The fleet was destroyed in about half an hour: nine of its eleven warships, mostly wooden, were sunk or burned, along with many war junks, and the French shelled the yard. Ebrey says the French destroyed "all but two of the twenty-three Chinese warships" and that "About three thousand Chinese were killed" (p. 324). The death toll is too high. Chinese records give figures of roughly 500 to 800 killed, while Courbet's own estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 included the fighting of the following days as his ships destroyed the forts on the way down the river. The qingliu official Zhang Peilun, who was in charge at Fuzhou, fled. Ebrey adds that Li Hongzhang had disobeyed an order to send his northern fleet south to help.

The war did not end in simple defeat. The French were repulsed at Tamsui on Taiwan in October 1884, and in March 1885 Qing forces under Feng Zicai defeated a French army at Zhennanguan on the Vietnam border and drove it back through Lang Son, a defeat that brought down the French government. Even so, by the Treaty of Tianjin of June 1885 the Qing recognized the French protectorate over Vietnam.³

Act II: The End of the Tribute System (Review Question 11)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 324–327. Reading-guide sentence (p. 324): "It was under Cixi's watch that the old tribute system was finally dismantled."

Tributary states in a world of sovereign states

Korea, the Ryukyu kingdom and Vietnam had been the most regular tributaries of the Qing (slide G). They governed themselves, but they sent missions, received investiture and used the Qing calendar. In the language of European international law this looked like dependence without responsibility, and outside powers exploited the ambiguity. In 1874 Japan sent an expedition to Taiwan to punish aborigines who had killed shipwrecked Ryukyuan sailors, and the Qing paid an indemnity, which implicitly accepted Japan's claim to speak for the Ryukyuans. Ebrey's reparations table dates this to 1873 (p. 325). In 1879 Japan annexed the kingdom as Okinawa Prefecture (slide H).⁴

Korea and the war with Japan

Korea was the decisive case. Japan forced a treaty on Korea in 1876. Li Hongzhang answered by encouraging Korea to sign treaties with Western powers and by stationing troops and, from 1885, a resident, the young Yuan Shikai, in Seoul. In 1894 the Tonghak rising led the Korean court to ask for Qing troops; Japan sent a larger force (slide L). On 25 July 1894 a Japanese cruiser sank the British-flagged transport Kowshing, carrying Chinese troops, and war was declared on 1 August. Japan won at Pyongyang in September.

On 17 September 1894, off the mouth of the Yalu River, the Beiyang Fleet under Ding Ruchang met the Japanese Combined Fleet (slide M). Ebrey writes that "four of the twelve Chinese ships involved were sunk, four were seriously damaged, and the others fled. By contrast, none of the twelve Japanese ships was seriously damaged" (p. 326). The first half is close; the second is wrong. China lost five ships: the cruisers Zhiyuan, Jingyuan and Chaoyong were sunk, Yangwei ran aground and was destroyed, and Guangjia ran ashore and was later blown up. The two German-built ironclads, Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, took hundreds of hits and survived. Japan lost no ships, but its flagship Matsushima was wrecked by a heavy shell from Zhenyuan that killed or wounded about a hundred men, and three other ships, Hiei, Akagi and the armed merchant cruiser Saikyō Maru, were badly damaged and left the action. Japanese casualties were about 300; Chinese casualties were far higher.⁵ The battle shows the problems of the Beiyang Fleet better than Ebrey's version: no new ships had been bought since 1888, shells were in short supply, the fleet fought in an awkward formation, and Japan's faster ships and quick-firing guns took advantage of it.

Japan then took Port Arthur in November 1894, massacring many of its inhabitants, and in early 1895 took the forts of Weihaiwei from the land side and turned them on the trapped fleet. Ding Ruchang surrendered the remaining ships and killed himself (slide N). Ebrey's verdict, "a defeat not of Chinese weapons but of Chinese organization and strategy" (p. 326), fits the evidence.

Shimonoseki and the scramble

Li Hongzhang negotiated the peace at Shimonoseki and was shot in the face by a Japanese assailant during the talks, on 24 March 1895 (slide O). The treaty of 17 April 1895 recognized Korea's independence, which ended the last tributary tie; ceded Taiwan, the Penghu (Pescadores) islands and the Liaodong peninsula; imposed an indemnity of 200 million taels; opened four more ports; and allowed Japanese to build factories in China. Within a week Russia, France and Germany forced Japan to return Liaodong (the Triple Intervention), and in November 1895 China paid another 30 million taels for it. Ebrey's table dates this payment to 1897 (p. 325).

The indemnity had to be paid with foreign loans secured on customs revenue; as Ebrey notes, from this point "until 1949, China was continually in debt to foreign banks" (p. 326). Then came the scramble (slide P). Russia won a concession for a railway across Manchuria in 1896. In November 1897 Germany seized Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong after two German missionaries were murdered there, and leased it in 1898. Russia leased Port Arthur and Dalian, Britain leased Weihaiwei and the New Territories next to Hong Kong, and France leased Guangzhouwan. Each power marked out a sphere of influence, and the United States answered in 1899 with the "Open Door" notes, asking for equal commercial access.⁶

Act III: Why Reform Fell Short (Review Question 9)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Failures of Reform," pp. 323–324. Reading-guide sentence (p. 323): "For a while, China seemed to be taking the same direction as Meiji Japan (see Chapter 20), but resistance in China proved much stronger."

Ebrey's explanation is about will and structure (slide S). Many officials believed that copying the West "compounded defeat." The Mongol grand secretary Woren opposed adding mathematics and astronomy to the Tongwen Guan in 1867, arguing that "from ancient down to modern times" no one had used mathematics to save a nation in decline (p. 323; slide T). Even reformers, Ebrey notes, saw technology as a tool for preserving the existing order.

Guo Songtao, China's first resident minister in Britain (1877–1879), went further (slide U). He praised Britain's parliament and industry in letters to Li Hongzhang, and his diary of the voyage to London, printed by the Zongli Yamen, called Western states civilized. Critics led by He Jinshou attacked him in 1877, and the court ordered the printing blocks destroyed while he was still in London. Ebrey places the order "on his return" (p. 324). Guo came home in 1879 to an obscure retirement.⁷

Historians add structural reasons. The enterprises depended on individual patrons like Li Hongzhang, not on national ministries. Revenue was divided among the provinces, so the Beiyang and southern fleets were rival regional forces. The examination system still rewarded classical learning, so talented men had little reason to study engineering. The court also feared that a strong modern army, especially one led by Han Chinese, could threaten the dynasty. The contrast with Meiji Japan is that Japan changed its political structure first, abolishing the domains and the samurai class, and then built its army and navy.⁸

Act IV: 1898 and the Boxers

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 327–330, and the chapter summary, p. 332.

Kang Youwei and the petition of 1895

Kang Youwei (1858–1927) was a Cantonese scholar who argued that Confucius himself had been a reformer (slide X). In the spring of 1895, while the Shimonoseki terms were being debated, provincial graduates in Beijing for the metropolitan examination sent many petitions against the peace. Ebrey follows Kang's own account: "Some twelve hundred signed the 'ten-thousand word petition' written by Kang Youwei" (p. 327). Archival studies by Huang Zhangjian and Mao Haijian have revised this. The surviving list of signers has about 600 names, and Kang's petition was never submitted: the treaty was ratified before it could be presented, and Kang dropped it. Meanwhile other groups of graduates and officials sent more than thirty petitions through regular channels. Kang's later account turned his unsent petition into the founding moment of the reform movement.⁹

Kang and his student Liang Qichao then built study societies and newspapers. Ebrey notes the Hunan societies of 1897–1898, the largest with more than twelve hundred members (p. 327); the reforming governor of Hunan, Chen Baozhen, and the young Tan Sitong made the province a laboratory of reform.

The Hundred Days

In January 1898 Kang presented his ideas to the ministers of the Zongli Yamen, and his memorials reached the Guangxu emperor, now in his twenties. On 11 June the emperor declared a policy of reform, and on 16 June he received Kang in audience (slide Y). Ebrey calls it "a five-hour audience" (p. 327); Kang himself told the China Mail in October 1898 that it lasted two hours. Over the next hundred days the emperor issued more than a hundred decrees: replacing the eight-legged essay in the examinations, founding the Imperial University (the ancestor of Peking University), creating modern schools, abolishing sinecure offices, and encouraging railways, mines and patents.

Ebrey says that "He was redesigning the Qing as a constitutional monarchy" (p. 327). That was Kang's goal, but the decrees themselves did not create a constitution or a parliament, and Kang later edited the texts of his 1898 memorials to make them sound more constitutional than they had been. Luke Kwong's study of the Hundred Days shows a program of administrative and educational reform, ambitious and disorderly, rather than a constitutional revolution.¹⁰

The coup of September 1898

The decrees threatened officials, examination graduates and Manchus. In September the emperor dismissed the senior officials of the Board of Rites for blocking a memorial and appointed four young reformers, including Tan Sitong, to his Grand Council secretariat. Reformers began to speak of advisers from Japan, and the former Japanese prime minister Itō Hirobumi was in Beijing. Cixi, living at the Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), returned to the Forbidden City on 19 September and on 21 September announced that she would again "instruct in government"; Kang, warned, had left Beijing the day before (slide Z).

Ebrey writes that Cixi "staged a coup with the help of Yuan Shikai's army" (p. 327). The detailed chronology established by Mao Haijian does not support that. On the night of 18 September Tan Sitong asked Yuan Shikai, who commanded a modern army near Tianjin, to use his troops to kill the Zhili governor-general Ronglu and surround the Summer Palace. Yuan pretended to agree and told Ronglu. But Cixi had already decided to resume power before his report reached her, and no troops were used. Yuan's disclosure of the plot turned a change of rulers into a purge: Tan and five others, the "Six Gentlemen," were arrested and beheaded on 28 September, and the emperor was confined on an island in the palace lake for the rest of his life.¹¹ Most decrees were revoked, though the Imperial University survived. Kang and Liang escaped to Japan.

The Boxers

The Boxer movement grew in northwest Shandong, a poor, flood-prone region where German missionaries, Catholic converts' lawsuits and the new German presence at Jiaozhou fed resentment (slide AA). The Yellow River flooded catastrophically in August 1898, and drought followed in 1899–1900. Ebrey notes that missionaries forbade converts to contribute to village festivals (p. 328). Joseph Esherick distinguishes the Big Swords, a gentry-linked self-defense society that attacked Christians in southwest Shandong, from the Spirit Boxers of the northwest, whose rituals of mass spirit possession and invulnerability could be learned by any young villager. The latter became the Boxers United in Righteousness (Yihequan), with the slogan "Support the Qing, destroy the foreign" (slide BB). Young women joined as the Red Lanterns.¹²

In 1899–1900 the movement spread into Zhili. Boxers killed Chinese Christians and missionaries, cut railways and telegraphs, and entered Beijing and Tianjin. On 10 June an allied relief column under Admiral Edward Seymour set out from Tianjin and was turned back. On 17 June allied warships seized the Dagu forts, an attack Ebrey does not mention but which the court took as an act of war. On 20 June the German minister, Clemens von Ketteler, was killed in the street, and on 21 June Cixi declared war on the powers (slides B and CC). Ebrey writes that "she deluded herself into thinking that if the people became sufficiently enraged, they could drive all eight out" (p. 329). Paul Cohen shows that the court's decision is better understood as a desperate gamble by a divided government, shaped by the Dagu attack, by a forged foreign demand that she hand power back to the emperor, and by pro-Boxer princes such as Prince Duan.¹³

Foreigners and Chinese Christians held out in the legation quarter and the Northern Cathedral (Beitang) from 20 June to 14 August (slide CC). Ebrey notes the role of the cathedral, two miles from the legations. In Shanxi the governor, Yuxian, had missionaries and their families executed at Taiyuan. Most of the regional governors-general, including Li Hongzhang at Guangzhou, Liu Kunyi at Nanjing and Zhang Zhidong at Wuchang, refused to follow the declaration of war and agreed with the consuls to keep the peace in the south; Yuan Shikai, then governor of Shandong, kept his province quiet. Ebrey calls Yuan a governor-general (p. 330). An eight-nation force of about 20,000 relieved the legations on 14 August, and the court fled to Xi'an (slide DD). Allied punitive expeditions hunted Boxers through north China for months, and Russia occupied Manchuria.

The Boxer Protocol

The Protocol signed on 7 September 1901 (slide EE) imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels, to be paid over 39 years at 4 percent interest, which brought the total to about 982 million taels. It required the execution or suicide of officials who had backed the Boxers, apology missions to Germany and Japan, a permanent foreign-guarded legation quarter, the razing of the Dagu forts, a ban on arms imports, and foreign garrisons along the railway from Beijing to the sea. Ebrey says the examinations were cancelled for five years as "punishment for gentry collaboration" (p. 330). The Protocol suspended them for five years only in the cities and districts where foreigners had been killed or mistreated, about forty-five places. The whole examination system was abolished by the Qing itself in 1905, as part of the New Policies that open Chapter 24. Cixi returned to Beijing in January 1902 and presided over those reforms until her death in November 1908, the day after the Guangxu emperor died.

Pierian Spring: New Voices and Old Soldiers

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 327–328.

Liang Qichao (1873–1929), Kang's student, became the most influential political writer of his generation. From exile in Japan he argued that China needed citizens, not just subjects, and a sense of nationhood (slide HH).¹⁴ Mai Menghua, a twenty-four-year-old follower of Kang, wrote the 1898 essay that Ebrey reprints, arguing that Western governments were stronger than China's because they controlled currency, taxes and law across their territory (pp. 328–329; slide II). The printed text refers to China's "80 provinces" (p. 329), probably an error for the eighteen provinces of China proper.

Ebrey's comparison of bannermen and samurai (p. 327; slide JJ) is a good teaching contrast: both were hereditary military castes, but Meiji Japan abolished the samurai's status and pensions and many found new careers, while the Qing kept the banners on stipends it could not afford, leaving many bannermen poor and unprepared for a modernizing economy.¹⁵

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), explains succession and the regency; Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), places Cixi in the longer story of late Qing power. ↩

2. Lloyd E. Eastman, Throne and Mandarins: China's Search for a Policy during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880–1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). ↩

3. Bruce A. Elleman, Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795–1989 (London: Routledge, 2001); Eastman, Throne and Mandarins. ↩

4. Gregory Smits, Visions of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early-Modern Thought and Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999). ↩

5. S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997). ↩

6. Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011). ↩

7. J. D. Frodsham, trans., The First Chinese Embassy to the West: The Journals of Kuo Sung-t'ao, Liu Hsi-hung and Chang Te-yi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). ↩

8. Ting-yee Kuo and Kwang-Ching Liu, "Self-strengthening: The Pursuit of Western Technology," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 491–542; Benjamin A. Elman, "Naval Warfare and the Refraction of China's Self-Strengthening Reforms into Scientific and Technological Failure, 1865–1895," Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2004): 283–326. ↩

9. Huang Zhangjian, Wuxu bianfa shi yanjiu (Studies in the history of the 1898 reforms) (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1970); Mao Haijian, Wuxu bianfa shishi kao (Studies of the facts of the 1898 reforms) (Beijing: Sanlian, 2005). ↩

10. Luke S. K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984). On Kang's later editing of his memorials, see Huang Zhangjian, Wuxu bianfa shi yanjiu. ↩

11. Mao Haijian, Wuxu bianfa shishi kao (2005), on the chronology of the coup; for the older view that Yuan's betrayal caused the coup, see Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, The Rise of Modern China, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). ↩

12. Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). ↩

13. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Lanxin Xiang, The Origins of the Boxer War: A Multinational Study (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). ↩

14. Hao Chang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). ↩

15. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Lloyd E. Eastman, Throne and Mandarins (1967). Court politics and the qingliu during the French crisis; the best guide to Cixi's balancing in practice.

S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 (2003). The war from Chinese, Japanese and Russian sources, with a clear account of the naval battles.

Luke S. K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days (1984). The reforms of 1898 rebuilt from the edicts, not from Kang's memoirs.

Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (1987). The definitive account of how the Boxers arose in Shandong.

Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys (1997). The Boxers as event, as lived experience, and as myth in later Chinese and Western memory.

Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary's Curse: Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (2013). A Shanxi Catholic village before, during and after 1900.

Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Wobbling Pivot (2010). A provocative synthesis of late Qing politics and the rise of provincial power.

Mao Haijian, Wuxu bianfa shishi kao (2005). For readers of Chinese: the archival reconstruction of 1895 and 1898 on which several corrections above rest.