boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005
Watching and waiting on events from within Peking's fabled pink-walled Forbidden city was the "Old Buddha", Tzu Hsi, the sixty-five-year-old Empress Dowager of China. A reactionary to the core, she had recently incarcerated her nephew the emperor for daring to lead a reform movement
She shared the boxers' loathing of the foreigners in china and was astute enough to realise 2 things: first, the boxers could help her sweep the hated interlopers out of china, and second, their genuine social and economic grievances had to be harnessed or they might be turned against her and the manchu dynasty. It proved her greatest mistake
Both Tientsin and Peking were thoroughly and indiscriminately looted by all nationalities and all classes. Many innocent civilians commited suicide rather than face being raped and akilled. Moats, rivers, and wells became clogged with bodies. It was a bloody bloodbath and it backfired badly on Tzu Hsi.
In her final years she was forced to embrace the very reforms she had earlier resisted and indeed to introduce them so quickly that they undermined the dynasty she had fought to preserve
The last emperor, Pu Yi, was deposed in 1911, just three years after her death
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Watching and waiting on events from within Peking's fabled pink-walled Forbidden city was the "Old Buddha", Tzu Hsi, the sixty-five-year-old Empress Dowager of China. A reactionary to the core, she had recently incarcerated her nephew the emperor for daring to lead a reform movement
She shared the boxers' loathing of the foreigners in china and was astute enough to realise 2 things: first, the boxers could help her sweep the hated interlopers out of china, and second, their genuine social and economic grievances had to be harnessed or they might be turned against her and the manchu dynasty. It proved her greatest mistake
Both Tientsin and Peking were thoroughly and indiscriminately looted by all nationalities and all classes. Many innocent civilians commited suicide rather than face being raped and akilled. Moats, rivers, and wells became clogged with bodies. It was a bloody bloodbath and it backfired badly on Tzu Hsi.
In her final years she was forced to embrace the very reforms she had earlier resisted and indeed to introduce them so quickly that they undermined the dynasty she had fought to preserve
The last emperor, Pu Yi, was deposed in 1911, just three years after her death
--