With the Empress Dowager of China

Dowagers, joined them, anarchy might have followed; and, at least, there would have been serious foreign complications, for this anti-foreign party would never have come to terms with the foreigners, who were then in Peking. It was most important for the ruling Power, that is, the party which should become Regents, to have the support of the Empresses who held the Sacred Person of the young Emperor, under their care. They were approached by both parties. The young Empress of the Western Palace, absolutely unversed in Statecraft, and, up to that time, ignorant of all that was passing outside the Palace walls, showed wonderful perspicacity and rare judgment in her keen grasp of the situation at this time. She repudiated the anti-foreign party and joined forces with Prince Kung, whose name was then synonymous with Progress in China⁠—an enlightened Prince and the most pro-foreign of all the Imperial Family⁠—and she and the first Empress were appointed Regents for the young Emperor. Prince Kung was the Minister who, thanks to this cooperation of the Empress of the Western Palace, carried the negotiations with France and England to a successful conclusion.

This first political act of the young Empress of the Western Palace brought her into immediate notice, and showed the progressive statesmen of China that they had an intelligent aid in her. The Grand Council and the Princes of the Imperial Family at once recognized her superior ability and they have always stanchly supported her throughout her career and remained true to her in all vicissitudes. In fact, she has known how to inspire loyalty and great devotion in all by whom she has been surrounded.

It was through her wonderful grasp of the situation at this time and the great executive ability she showed later, that the two Empresses brought the Emperor Tung-Chih through his minority, and when he began to reign in his eighteenth year, internal troubles had been quelled and foreign complications avoided, and China was in a much more settled and prosperous condition than when he came to the Throne, twelve years before.

There was an interval of but two years in their long Regency for the two Emperors, when the Emperor Tung-Chih, having reached his majority, reigned. The death of her son, the Emperor, at the early age of twenty, after only two years of actual reigning, was a dreadful blow to the Empress of the Western Palace. She had, however, but a short time for grief. With heart bleeding and sore, she was obliged almost immediately to again assume the duties of Co-Regent with the Empress of the Eastern Palace, for her nephew and adopted son, the young Emperor Kwang-Hsu. The two Empresses had then another boy Emperor only five years old, to protect, prepare for reigning, and to govern for.

One has only to be cognizant of events in China since the Dowager Empress Tze-Hsi has ruled, to know the facts of her government. When she took up the Regency, China was seething with rebellion and there were foreign complications, requiring great tact and keen intelligence. She has steered the ship of State between the two extremes, though she has sometimes run it against the rocks of Scylla in trying to avoid the whirlpool of Charybdis, and she has always been a moderate in her political course. China having, for so many centuries, had no relations with foreign powers, her statesmen being so absolutely unversed in modern methods of diplomacy, has not made a brilliant record in her foreign relations, and she has so frequently been made the dupe of European diplomacy, it is not wonderful China has tried to defend herself by duplicity: using what she thought the same methods she saw were so efficacious in the hands of Europeans.

When the Empress Dowager gave up the reins of government to the Emperor Kwang-Hsu, in the year 1889, after twenty-eight years of Regency, the Great Empire was at that time in a prosperous condition. Its ports had been opened to foreign trade, a fine Customs organization had been established upon a firm basis, and China was at peace with the world.

The first part of the young Emperor’s reign was uneventful. He was directed in most things by his ministers, and followed the moderate policy laid down by the Empress Dowager. He seemed to have no special views of his own and no designs of progress for China. Until the war with Japan with reference to the suzerainty of Korea, in 1894, he was a passive figurehead. The Japanese victories changed all this. Their victory gave China one of her most humiliating lessons; for the Chinese, who had given Japan the nucleus of its literature, its art and architecture, looked down upon the Japanese as a race of imitators and had a deep-seated contempt for them as a nation. This victory almost awoke the passive leviathan⁠—that is, China⁠—from its long sleep of national self-content. The young Emperor, smarting under this galling defeat, felt that China had only been conquered by Japan’s use of modern methods of warfare and determined on sweeping reforms in the government. Full of youthful enthusiasm, he felt he could put the Great Empire on the road to progress and wished to institute sweeping reforms in all departments. He immediately abandoned the moderate policy of the Regency and surrounded himself by a number of hotheaded, self-seeking reformers, each pushing some new method of reform. The reformers wished, at one fell swoop, to change the system of education, the system of government⁠—in fact to make such sweeping changes that this conservative nation would have risen in a mass had they been carried out. Besides the Radicals, who were the reform party, there were also a number of discontents among the ultraconservatives, who, seeing the Emperor’s anxiety and desire for change, began to push forward certain schemes of their own. Finally, the ultraconservatives and reactionaries decided they would join forces with the Radicals, hoping by so doing to change the National policy and the then existing state of