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Home , Empress Dowager Cixi, Tongzhi Emperor, Xianfeng Emperor

Western Visions of the Cixi: Her Many Roles in a Story of Fictional Fantasy and Political Sexism By Kirsten Schwegler

Note on the Author:

Kirsten Schwegler is a fourth year history major and anthropology minor at the University of Guelph. In the upcoming fall semester, she will be returning to Guelph to pursue her Master of Arts in history. As a history student, she acknowledges the importance of the past in contemporary conflicts and is driven by the endless possibilities to learn.

Western Visions of Cixi

Introduction The (1835-1908) of the late Qing Empire (1644-1912) has been recognized as a woman of immense power in the large number of publications on her life. 1 In these texts, Cixi is also written as a woman of many faces and her story has been told in light of how the author views her personally. Her character developed through key moments in her life and refer to the many roles that she played, roles that many authors have used to illustrate her personality and overall effectiveness as a ruler. As a central figure leading into the twentieth century during a period of controversial Western influence, she is a person of interest in popular research. 2 However, there is little detailed knowledge existing about her apart from gossip and some firsthand accounts, which has led to confusion over whether this information is reliable. When scholars today choose to build off of information already published on the topic without any scepticism they

1 In order to keep consistency throughout the entirety of this paper, Empress Dowager and the English translated honorific name “Cixi” (Tzu Hsi) will be used. 2 Western influence will be used as a broad term to describe the several particular circumstances surrounding European presence within China in an Imperial context. This includes social, political, and economic ideology that European’s held in contrast to (to be explained further in the history of Orientalism). It is described here as controversial in the context of the events that erupted in China in rejection of foreigners, that being many different occasions but in specifics relating to the story of Cixi, it is the Opium Wars (1839-1842)(1856-1860) leading to the disputed in 1858 and a series of unequal treaties imposed on China to follow, the destruction of the “Yuanming Yuan” in 1860, and the in 1900. 30 tend to problematize the concept of “truth” when it comes to documenting history.3 A lack of consistency in narratives surrounding the Empress Dowager add to these issues, as some sources are produced entirely as fiction in the effort to frame the desired image of her in a mission to make conclusions on her life story and capabilities of leading China. This paper will analyze scholarship on the Empress Dowager Cixi, published from the period of her lifetime to the present day. These works will not be criticized based on the validity of the material or viewpoint constructed of the Empress Dowager, neither will there be a new narrative created or any narratives confirmed as the truth. Rather, these publications will be used as a method to describe why she was framed in positive or negative ways based on who was writing about her as highly relevant to China’s contact with the West. With a background of thought on the “Orientalist” and “Imperialist” framework of Western scholars that documented the during the period of the Qing Empire, it will better mark the judgment of scholars that choose to write about Cixi. 4 To compare and contrast the tone of the narratives published on Cixi and the general topic of Western influence in China, this paper will be divided into the series of characters that the Empress Dowager Cixi played within her lifetime.

Orientalism and Imperialism in Asia Western influence was a prevalent force in China before the Empress Dowager was in the Qing imperial palace, and the continuous events of culture contact mediated the ideological narratives about China and their rulers. Such narratives are often plagued by frustration at China’s foreign policies; Edmund Backhouse and J.O.P. Bland documented the history of China’s affairs in refuting foreign presence beyond the trading ports, a dispute that started the First Opium War.5 Scholars documenting the history of China in the 1840s saw the country

3 Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Great Empress of China (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 12-13. 4 This framework in the context of the paper will be defined by explaining the history of European presence in China and the loaded ideologies that were built into the narrative of distinctively acknowledged “Orientalist” scholars or individuals connected to the “Imperialist” mission to allow more European involvement in Chinese society. This framework will mostly reflect on the early writings about Cixi by Backhouse and Bland, along with the long list of writers and scholars who consistently use their texts when writing a paper on China, leading to a certain framework with weighted opinions on the topic. 5 Edmund Backhouse and J.O.P. Bland, Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking (From the 16th to the 20th Century) (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1914), 395. 31 as weak by refusing to modernize and reform to Western technology as Japan had. It relates to theory of evolution believing that the only route for progress was competition, and by refusing this process China was an ineffective power.6 The mentality to highlight is that of superiority in European world venture, for if China was rejecting Europeans, she was also rejecting progress and was succumbing to barbarous tactics in such effort to keep foreign involvement outside of Mainland China. Backhouse and Bland here defined the country’s setbacks in “her contempt for the outer barbarians, her false pride and pinchbeck supremacy, fast set in its massive frame of complacent ignorance.”7 Noting that China is referred to as a “her”, it represents in this instance the oriental ideal that Eastern cultures are feminine and backward; most specifically it is a direct comment on the policies of their female ruler. This vision was the foundation behind Orientalism and by Edward Said’s accounts it was “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”8 Oriental studies have a precarious concentration on the cultural aspects of China and ignore the history, arguably an irrelevant concept when it will only keep China locked in tradition. 9 Opinions were heavily weighted by the conflict with opium, the narcotic of prolonged addiction and desire in the dens and brothels of China; sparking the exotic, glamorous, and strange visions of China.10 In primary texts written in the nineteenth century, China was a location of intriguing mystery but also required dramatic change. Authors exhibited these qualities in Chinese culture as a literary attack on the country and their female leader.

Common Western Portrayals of Cixi In support of getting into the greater details, Backhouse and Bland explained that not many people knew the Empress Dowager; she was a vague figure that was not known or shown any academic interest.11 As notable in the writings of Katharine Carl on her time in China, upon meeting the Empress Dowager she realized that her appearance and her

6 Alison Kaufman, “The ‘Century of Humiliation,’ Then and Now: Chinese Perceptions of the International Order,” Pacific Focus 25 (2010): 6-7. 7 Ibid, 390-391. 8 Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 3. 9 Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” History and Theory 35 (1996): 97-98. 10 Jonathon D. Spench, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Mind (New York: Norton, 1998), 146. 11 Backhouse and Bland, Annals & Memoirs, 466. 32 personality were not what she had preconceived in her expectations.12 In fact, no common person knew her at all; Sarah Conger spoke of the gossip that the Empress Dowager had never seen a “foreign lady” before she called all foreign ministers wives for an audience in 1898.13 With that, there was the additional issue that there was sparse information or evidence to build a story upon, so the life of Cixi became a literary invention. Research on the Empress Dowager for centuries has remained at a standstill, as when scholars look to take on the topic they merely cite each other and all cite Backhouse; continuing the trail of negative personifications of her character.14 The academic interest in making a new contribution to the topic resulted in a series of narratives with the mission to document features of Cixi’s private life, welcoming the presence of an outsider’s prejudiced view. Throughout her life and the century after her death, Cixi was the center of publications in the context of European imperialism and reflecting back on the history of China’s contact with foreign powers.15 Backhouse in the late nineteenth century was arguably used as a tool by Chinese reformer to make an attack on Cixi’s ruling capabilities. Together they created this villainous character that in some instances was fabricated and plagued narratives of the Empress Dowager in a negative light for years to follow. Scholars have ignored other information and evidence of those closest to Cixi in favour of Backhouse’s writings, even though several publications appeared at the start of the twentieth century.16 These included many firsthand accounts from women who were on a variety of occasions staying in or visiting the imperial palace, when speaking of their encounters with the Empress their tone is much different. The one distinguishable difference seems to be that these women were in closer and more prolonged contact, or, they were simply not men and wrote in less critical ways. Yu Der Ling had entered the imperial palace on invitation from the Empress Dowager aware of the rumours of her fierce, wicked character but was convinced otherwise when met with her “kind and gracious” character.17 Regardless of the difference of the gender of

12 Carl, “A Personal Estimate of the Character of the Late Empress Dowager, Tze-Hsi,” Journal of Race Development 4 (1913): 62. 13 Sarah Pike Conger, Letters from China: With Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China (Chicago, Illinois: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1909), 39. 14 Seagrave and Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 13. 15 Christine Doran, “Fantasy as History: The Invention of Cixi, Empress of China.” Femspec 3 (2002): 2. 16 Seagrave and Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 11-12. 17 Der Ling, Two Years in the (Hong Kong: Independent Publishers Group, 2007), 27. 33 the author, there is a persistent divide between those who use Backhouse as a central form of reference and those who use the works of women like Sarah Conger, Katharine Conger, and Yu Der Ling among others to illustrate the Empress Dowager Cixi throughout her life.

The Concubine Cixi was constructed negatively upon her arrival in the Forbidden City of in popular narratives; scholars questioned her motives for so easily coming into power and she was written as a character of seductive yet cruel nature. Upon the fortunate first meeting with the , Cixi had enticed him with her sweet song and he demanded Cixi to be brought to his bedchamber. According to Backhouse and Bland’s accounts, Cixi’s character changed immediately with her promotion to the rank of imperial concubine, she became quite unruly and difficult to control even by the emperor.18 Some scholars argue that the emperors’ ministers and step-mother’s had ordered him to be more involved with his wives and concubines in frustration that he had not yet produced an heir, so his meeting with Cixi was more intentional than accidental. Other scholars have suggested that their meeting was no coincidence, for Cixi had known he was lacking excitement in his daily duties and had been singing in the palace gardens in direct attempts to get his attention. Moving forward, the author continued this story by defining Cixi’s plot to initiate her rise in status, by seducing the emperor and befriending the chief she was well on her way.19 In addition, Cixi had given birth to a son in 1856 and was the mother to the first child of the Emperor that was able to inherit the throne, a position that she hoped to use to enforce more influence in imperial politics.20 Cixi’s presence was illustrated as giving such authority that the court began to ignore Xianfeng; a simple concubine of twenty-two years of age held more of the ability to lead. Authors hooked themselves into forming a plot by stating the emperor fell sick as he grew weaker with age, though he was only thirty-years old. Backhouse, among others, have portrayed Xianfeng as so weak in his ruling capabilities that the country turned to a woman instead, as a last result but also as a play into Cixi’s manipulation of opportunity.21 Without any actual documented

18 Backhouse & Bland, Annals & Memoirs, 470-471. 19 Charlotte Haldane, The Last Great Empress of China, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 24-25. 20 K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (New York: Collier Books, 1969), 130. 21 Bland and Backhouse, China Under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), 13. 34 knowledge, scholars report Cixi asserted herself by assisting Xianfeng in reading over policies and documents, but the emperor soon feared she was too involved and plotted to kill her.22 Backhouse and Bland told of the emperor’s hatred for Cixi as being present throughout their entire relationship, even though she had provided him an heir. Following in suit of Backhouse and Bland, authors today still provide the idea with little evidence that Xianfeng produced a decree on his deathbed warning his officials not to trust Cixi when she was raised to the title of Empress Dowager and on the occasion that “her misdeeds become flagrant, you must summon the chief ministers to your presence and show them this decree, which authorizes you to compel her to commit suicide.”23 With the knowledge of her surviving past this supposedly documented threat, it may mean that this story is all but a fabrication in Backhouse and Bland’s constructed history.

The Mother, The Common scholarly portrayals of Cixi as a mother complement her role as regent over her son and nephew, constructed as frustrated in her limited authority over the emperor’s while clutching for their compliance. Scholars have fed off conspiracies that Cixi had not given birth to the emperor’s son, the later , claiming that Xianfeng was sterile because he was at the time twenty-five years old with no male heir. Some accounts reported that Cixi had purchased the child, while others claim it was actually the child produced from her love affair with Court Official Jung Lu.24 These rumours are easily refuted knowing Xianfeng already had a daughter and son from another concubine, though the son died in infancy. Xianfeng was clearly not sterile, yet the story interpreting Cixi’s motherhood as illegitimate from the start remains.25 Portrayed as a protective mother, scholars have manipulated this relationship to be shaped around politics rather than general concern for her son’s basic safety and health; displaying Cixi as more of a regent than a mother.26 Any positive quality the Empress Dowager had in these roles was negatively constructed to build the idea that she only cared for power. In the relationship with her son, the Tongzhi Emperor, Cixi

22 , Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 14-15. 23 Backhouse & Bland, Annals & Memoirs, 476. 24 Haldane, The Last Great Empress of China, 25-26. 25 Marina Warner, The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, 1835-1908, Empress Dowager of China (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 43. 26 Ibid, 117-118. 35 reportedly preferred to keep him close and control how other people in the palace influenced him as a child. At the age of four Tongzhi began his education and was assigned a tutor that Cixi had approved, hoping to mould him into a disciplined ruler.27 The story meets a twist when the little emperor grew older and began to assert himself more independently with freedom of his mother’s overbearing grip. Thus, he cascaded into a lifestyle similar to his father’s and frequently left the Forbidden City’s imperial palace after dark to “sow his wild oats in the rowdiest and most sordid brothels and opium dens in the city.”28 With the belief that it was more than gossip, scholars have used this evidence to define the Empress Dowager’s shortcomings in controlling her son or that she had little concern for his nightlife entirely; regardless of the true reason, Cixi was blamed for letting it happen.29 While Cixi had thought Tongzhi’s education would be invigorating for him, he found it boring, and when she had thought befriending the palace eunuchs would be wise socialization, they had excited him with stories beyond the Forbidden City walls. As a continuation of Cixi’s master plot, her last attempt to control the Tongzhi Emperor was to be through his wife but she failed again when he chose to marry Alute over her preferred choice, Lady Feng.30 When this plan fell through, it was immediately apparent that the Empress Dowager Cixi was going to be replaced by the young empress, politically and socially, so she had to form a new plot to regain this power once again.31 Theories emerged with the idea that Cixi sought to remove the emperor and the empress all along so that she could again take regency over a minor. With her son’s extravagant lifestyle, Tongzhi’s death could have been considered predetermined in the high chances that he would catch a disease by how frequently he visited brothels. Regardless of how Tongzhi died by either poison or becoming deathly ill on his own, all blame was directed at the Empress Dowager.32 Literary conspiracies took the event of the emperor’s mysterious death to claim that Empress Alute was pregnant and if she had a son, she would be the new legitimate Empress Dowager. Alute’s death was recorded to be approximately seventy days after her late husband, supporting the theory further that Cixi had her killed to eliminate the risk the pregnancy had on her political legitimacy. Other scholars have negated the truth by recognizing

27 Haldane, The Last Great Empress of China, 63. 28 Haldane, The Last Great Empress of China, 80. 29 Ibid, 80. 30 Backhouse and Bland, Annals & Memoirs, 420-421. 31 Haldane, The Last Great Empress of China, 81. 32 Ibid, 82-83. 36 that the Empress Dowager Cixi would only maintain her authority in her seniority; as a grandmother she would be superior to Alute’s regency.33 Nonetheless, news of the young empress’s death has been clouded by the assumption that Cixi was somehow involved in the suicide by starvation or opium overdose.34 This period of her life is filled with the heaviest amount of gossip or rumours, and with little confirmed as true it has influenced scholars to writing more harsh illustrations of the Empress Dowager.

The Feminine, The Sexual The Empress Dowager Cixi has been under academic scrutiny for over a century with most accusations for her evil character being complete fabrications. Edmund Backhouse provided a legacy of erotic ideals on the Empress Dowager when he claimed in his private diaries, recently published in the twenty-first century, that he had a sexual encounter with Cixi in 1902. To explain this claim recent scholars examined the archetype of colonial European men traveling through Asia expressing themselves as entitled individuals that took what or who they wanted. Orientalist ideology explained the interest in the exotic and “other”, secretly wanting to be ruled themselves to feel some nostalgia of inferior desire.35 The vision of China was misted in the imperial pursuit for glamour and pleasure, looking to literally penetrate the Forbidden City and its mysterious female leader that few knew much about. While living in China in the 1920s, Victor Segalen wanted to capture the nostalgic feeling of the country’s past and published a series of poetic stories about a man he met in Peking. Entitled Rene Leys, the novel narrated the travels of a young man who was “drawn by coincidence and lust into the very chambers of the boy emperor’s widowed mother” in a brief affair.36 This affair was similar to Backhouse’s encounter recorded in “Decadence Mandchoue,” a piece independent of his other “scholarly” works. He documented the reportedly crude affair as occurring when he was at least thirty years younger than Cixi, who was at the time sixty- seven.37 In explicit detail, Backhouse told of his own encounter and one he had heard from another; both included a casual atmosphere with rich dialogue and a rather methodical schedule for the actual intercourse. The

33 Warner, The Dragon Empress, 129. 34 Ibid, 129. 35 Erik Ringmar, “Liberal Barbarism and the Oriental Sublime: The European Destruction of the Emperor’s Summer Palace.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 34 (2006): 920. 36 Spence, China in Western Minds, 161. 37 Seagrave and Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 14. 37 narration of the event gave the implication that this was a frequent occurrence in the private chambers of the Empress Dowager, a lonely widow who needed passion.38 These publications fuelled the literary creation of Cixi as a sexual “creature of fantasy”, using her political prowess and dominance to depict her evil nature but also in seeking to objectify her as an inferior and vulnerable woman.39 As a woman and an “Oriental”, the Empress Dowager was of distinct “otherness”, with collectively exotic and strange qualities that made her innately unpredictable and mysterious. Cixi was thus included into literature on the colonial endeavours in China, and due to her cultural and biological difference to Western masculine ideals she was associated with the worst narratives of her country at this time in history.40 Portrayals of Cixi as a depraved widow constructed the idea that she had even manipulated the tradition of palace eunuchs castration for her own pleasure. Authors allude to this theory by referring to her eunuchs as “shams” and describing in great detail their handsome features.41 Backhouse claimed he had his own sexual encounter with one of Cixi’s servants: “The ‘eunuch’ obligingly offered to assist me at my ablution and I, nothing loth, started to fondle him, tactics which he partially returned.”42 By suggesting the eunuch had sexual parts to reciprocate and would engage in such sexual activity with a foreigner, there would be no reason why this ‘eunuch’ would not do so with the Empress Dowager. Negative narratives on Cixi are the result of Western masculine visions of exotic adventure in the East, with judgments on the “otherness” of society and of the biological woman in the attack on the Qing’s Empress Dowager.

The Victim/Villain of Foreign Influence Narratives in the twentieth century emerged to make conclusions on the effectiveness of the Empress Dowager’s leadership skills, how she represented the people of the Qing, and how she embodied the Chinese masses in dislike of foreigners. In the Empress Dowager’s leadership, scholars noted a change in her character as she gained more power from her early regency into her older age, keeping in mind that Chinese women in empire were historically considered usurpers.43 Cixi’s regency

38 Edmund Backhouse, Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2011), 15. 39 Doran, “Fantasy as History,” 3. 40 Ibid, 3-5. 41 Ibid, 5-7. 42 Backhouse, Decadence Mandchoue, 69. 43 Backhouse and Bland, China Under the Empress Dowager, 52. 38 over her son the Tongzhi Emperor (1861-1873) and her nephew the (1875-1889) were periods of cautious action, polite behaviour, and avoiding public attention.44 Cixi most clearly established her strength of authority with her last regency or “usurpation”, when she removed Guangxu from power after his failed attempts at reform in the late nineteenth century.45 The Empress Dowager, as said in popular gossip, was a woman of little hesitation when it came to eliminating family members in order to advance her position in the Empire.46 Yet on the controversial event of the Boxer Movement in 1900, scholars insisted that Cixi was either weak for childishly accepting the movement with the mission of “driving the hated foreigner into the sea”47 or for being so heavily influenced by her eunuchs that she was forced to comply under high pressure.48 For many, the Boxer Rebellion was the final act of China’s resistance against foreign influence and a hatred that had been brewing since the destruction of the Summer Palace Yuanming Yuan in 1860. The looting and then complete dismantling of the palace from the ground up by the British and French forces is often portrayed in literature as the exact example of European colonial history and the event that initiated the fall of the Qing Empire.49 It was not a coincidence then that narratives documenting Chinese history from this point argued that Empress Dowager Cixi kept China on the path of destruction.50 The consequential literary attack on Cixi’s last regency ignored the facts that she supported many modern reforms in the twentieth century. The undertone of humiliation and nostalgia for what Qing China knew before the palace’s destruction is one of the many keys to bitter narratives on Cixi published within the last century of history.

44 In reference to Backhouse & Bland, (Annals & Memoirs, 476), on Emperor Xianfeng’s imperial decree before his death proposing the close monitoring of Cixi’s behavior. 45 Backhouse and Bland, China Under the Empress Dowager, 51-52. 46 Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, 130. 47 Backhouse and Bland, Annals & Memoirs, 443. 48 Warner, The Dragon Empress, 222. 49 Wong, Young-tsu, A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 142. 50 Ibid, 1.

39 Conclusion This paper was constructed in the purpose of explaining the distinctly different narratives that have been written on the history of China and the Qing Empire in how they illuminate the image of the Empress Dowager Cixi’s character. Assumptions on specific details in her life, sometimes told as strictly fiction with little evidence, form this fantastical image of Cixi created to make implications on her overall personality and capability to rule. An issue persisted throughout several scholars’ narratives in the frequent reference to the publications of Edmund Backhouse, and the lack of challenge to the truth of his claims. Throughout many documented histories, authors often come to the same conclusion on the confirmation of her power in both her presence and naturally intuitive mindset. The real possibility for confrontation to highly negative narratives are negated by the influence of “Orientalist” and “Imperialist” attempts to justify foreign presence in China and degrade Cixi to her exotic origins as a concubine. With a simple recognition on the difference of gender in historical narratives, this paper discussed how women who found themselves in meeting the Empress Dowager herself tended to write on her more positive qualities. This paper consulted all of these narratives that were written to make a statement on the personal character of the Empress Dowager and compared on the circumstances that they found reason to write about her in the first place.

40 Bibliography

Backhouse, E. and J.O.P. Bland. Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking (From the 16th to the 20th Century). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914.

Backhouse, Edmund. Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2011.

Bland, John Otway Percy and Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse. China Under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914.

Carl, Katharine A. “A Personal Estimate of the Character of the Late Empress Dowager, Tze-Hsi.” Journal of Race Development 4 (1913): 58-71.

Chang, Jung. Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Conger, Sarah Pike. Letters from China: With Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China. Chicago, Illinois: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1909.

Dirlik, Arif. “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism.” History and Theory 35 (1996): 96-118.

Doran, Christine. “Fantasy as History: The Invention of Cixi, Empress of China.” Femspec 3 (2002): 1-14.

Haldane, Charlotte Franken. The Last Great Empress of China. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965

Kaufman, Alison Adcock. “The ‘Century of Humiliation,’ Then and Now: Chinese Perceptions of the International Order.” Pacific Focus 25 (2010): 1-33.

Ling, Der. Two Years in the Forbidden City. Hong Kong: Independent Publishers Group, 2007.

41 Panikkar, K.M. Asia and Western Dominance. New York: Collier Books, 1969.

Ringmar, Erik. “Liberal Barbarism and the Oriental Sublime: The European Destruction of the Emperor’s Summer Palace.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 34 (2006): 917- 933.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Seagrave, Sterling and Peggy Seagrave. Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Great Empress of China. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: Norton, 1998.

Warner, Marina. The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, 1835-1908, Empress Dowager of China. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972.

Wong, Young-tsu. A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.

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