A Brief History
On June 18, 1900, the Dowager Empress Cixi of China proclaimed war against the colonizing powers in China, including diplomats and their families. This order was made during the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), a popular uprising of Chinese against foreign Imperialists who had been imposing their will upon China. For 55 days, foreigners and Christian Chinese were held under siege at a legation/embassy in Peking, now modern-day Beijing.
Digging Deeper
A major motion picture, 55 Days at Peking (1963), starring Charlton Heston, David Niven and Ava Gardner is loosely based on this event; it flopped at the box office, however, earning only $10 million in spite of its huge budget (for the time) of $17 million. Not surprisingly for that era in Hollywood, Chinese characters were mostly played by Caucasian actors.
The political situation in China at the turn of the last century was incredibly muddled, with royal intrigue between the Emperor Guangxu and his various consorts (wives) who vied for power. Despite their efforts, though, real power was held by the Dowager Empress Cixi, Guangxu’s aunt. When both the Emperor and Dowager Empress Cixi died within days of each other in 1908 and Guangxu’s nephew Puyi succeeded him, Empress Xiaodingjing, one of Guangxu’s wives, jumped at the opportunity to consolidate power by adopting the boy as she had no children of her own. Now known as Dowager Empress Longyu, she thus became the regent of the “Last Emperor of China,” and in effect ruled until the revolution of 1911 to 1912 when she signed an abdication on behalf of the 6-year-old boy Emperor, ending China’s imperial rule.
In 1913, Empress Longyu died at age 45 of natural causes following an illness. As for Emperor Puyi, he was back on the throne for a 2-week reign in 1917 and was later installed as a puppet ruler by the occupying Japanese during World War II. After the war, Puyi was tried as a war criminal and was jailed for 10 years. In 1967, he died at the age of 61 of kidney cancer, escaping persecution by the Communist Party. A 1987 film about Puyi called The Last Emperor was a box-office hit and earned over $43 million, $20 million more than its budget! At least in this movie, the Chinese characters were played by people of Asian descent!
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see:
Chang, Jung. Empress Dowager Cixi. Knopf, 2013.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of Empress Dowager Cixi and women of the American legation, is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or fewer. This image is now in the public domain in China, because its term of copyright has expired. According to copyright laws of the People’s Republic of China (with legal jurisdiction in the mainland only, excluding Hong Kong and Macao) and the Republic of China (currently with jurisdiction in Taiwan, the Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, etc.), all photographs and cinematographic works, and all works whose copyright holder is a juristic person, enter the public domain 50 years after they were first published, or if unpublished 50 years from creation, and all other applicable works enter the public domain 50 years after the death of the creator.
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