Cixi

Late Reforms: Foot-Binding, Education, Examinations, and Constitutionalism

From 1901 until her death in 1908, Cixi increasingly endorsed institutional reforms intended to strengthen the state and, to a limited extent, improve women’s status. This period, sometimes called the New Policies, involved changes to administration, law, education, and infrastructure.[19][3]

On 4 September 1902, she issued an edict banning foot-binding throughout the empire, becoming the first Chinese ruler to formally prohibit the practice.[4][2] Foot-binding had long been a marker of elite feminine respectability but caused lifelong disability for many women. Cixi’s edict ordered officials to discourage the custom and promote natural feet, reflecting both humanitarian concerns and a belief that physical strength was essential to national vitality.[4][1] Enforcement was inconsistent, and the practice persisted in some regions, but the decree provided crucial state support for anti–foot-binding activists.

In education, Cixi backed the expansion of modern schools and accepted reforms that opened new curricula beyond the classical texts.[19][3] On 17 September 1907, she approved the “Regulation for Women’s Education”, a decree that officially recognized that women should receive structured schooling and mandated the establishment of girls’ schools.[1][4] As scholars of late imperial gender history note, this was the first empire-wide policy explicitly endorsing women’s education, offering an ideological foundation for later Republican-era advances.[1][14]

Equally transformative was the abolition of the imperial civil service examination system. On 2 September 1905, under Cixi’s authority, the Qing issued an edict ending the examinations, which had selected officials based on mastery of Confucian classics for more than a millennium.[19][1] The decision responded to arguments that modern governance required expertise in fields such as science, technology, economics, and international law. Abolition disrupted the old scholar-gentry pathway and accelerated the development of new educational institutions, including universities and specialized academies.

Between 1901 and 1908, Cixi also supported steps toward constitutional reform. The court dispatched investigative missions to study foreign political systems and announced plans for a future parliament and staged introduction of provincial assemblies.[19][3] Drafts of modern legal codes and administrative regulations were prepared, though implementation remained partial and slow. These initiatives were intended to preserve imperial rule by adapting it, but they proved insufficient to contain rising revolutionary sentiment.

Awards, Honors, and Recognition

Cixi’s status as Empress Dowager brought ceremonial honors rather than discrete awards in the modern sense. She held the highest female titles in the Qing hierarchy, including honorifics that emphasized benevolence and auspiciousness.[5][15] Court ritual and architecture, such as the rebuilding of the New Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), were used to project her prestige and legitimacy.[15][12]

Internationally, foreign diplomats and missionaries often portrayed her ambivalently, alternately depicting her as a shrewd stateswoman or a symbol of reaction and corruption.[6][8][12] In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, historical reassessment and popular biographies—most notably Jung Chang’s study framing her as "the concubine who launched modern China"—have repositioned her in global narratives as one of the most consequential women in political history.[1][8]

Personal Life and Courtly Relationships

Cixi’s personal life unfolded largely within the confines of the imperial palace. As a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor, she navigated complex hierarchies among consorts and eunuchs.[19][12] Her relationships with Empress Dowager Ci’an and key princes were crucial to her political survival; contemporary accounts suggest a blend of cooperation and tension, particularly as Cixi’s influence grew.[19][3]

She had one biological son, the Tongzhi Emperor, who died young and whose brief, troubled reign generated both hopes of restoration and concerns about court decadence.[2][19] Cixi’s adoption of the Guangxu Emperor made her his legal mother and placed her at the center of his upbringing and education, though their relationship later became strained as he sought independent reformist initiatives.[19][6]

Within the palace, Cixi cultivated a reputation for artistic taste and personal discipline. She patronized painters, porcelain makers, and craftsmen, shaping late Qing court aesthetics.[12][17] Anecdotal sources, some embellished, portray her as attentive to fashion and garden design, with the restored Summer Palace becoming a visible expression of her preferences.[15][12] While later rumors and fictionalized accounts attribute romantic intrigues to her, reliable evidence for such stories is limited, and serious historians emphasize her political rather than romantic entanglements.

Legacy and Historical Impact

Cixi’s legacy is complex and hotly debated. She is often described as one of the most powerful women in Chinese history, having effectively controlled the Qing government from 1861 until her death in 1908.[2][3][19] Her decisions shaped responses to internal rebellions, foreign invasions, and the challenges of modernization.

Critics, particularly in early twentieth-century nationalist and Western narratives, cast her as a reactionary "dragon lady" whose conservatism doomed China to humiliation and delayed reform.[4][7][12] They highlight her suppression of the Hundred Days’ Reform, alleged diversion of military funds, and initial support for the Boxers as evidence of misrule. These views fed into broader critiques of the Qing and helped justify revolutionary calls to overthrow the dynasty.

More recent scholarship has offered a nuanced reassessment. Historians such as Jung Chang and analysts writing in venues like ChinaFile emphasize her role in bringing aspects of modernity to China: supporting the Self-Strengthening Movement, authorizing railways, telegraphs, and modern industries, abolishing cruel punishments such as death by a thousand cuts, and eventually banning foot-binding and endorsing women’s education.[1][8][9] They argue that many failures of the late Qing arose from structural constraints—fiscal weakness, foreign aggression, entrenched bureaucracy—rather than solely from her personal decisions.

From a gender-historical perspective, Cixi’s significance is manifold. She demonstrated that a woman, operating within the patriarchal framework of an imperial court, could wield sustained, high-level authority over a vast state.[2][3] Her late-life reforms concerning women’s bodies and minds—prohibiting foot-binding and institutionalizing women’s education—provided legal and ideological foundations for subsequent campaigns in the Republican and communist eras.[4][1][14] At the same time, she did not articulate a feminist program in modern terms; her primary objective remained the preservation and strengthening of the dynasty.

Cixi’s image continues to evolve in public culture. Museums, academic projects, and media productions revisit her life as a case study in the intersections of gender, power, and modernization.[11][12][6] She appears alternately as villain, victim of misrepresentation, and pragmatic reformer, reflecting broader debates about China’s path into the twentieth century.

Later Life and Death

In her final years, Cixi divided her time between the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, receiving audiences with officials and occasionally foreign visitors.[12][6] She continued to approve reform edicts, including steps toward constitutionalism, expansion of modern education, and reorganization of the military.[19][3] Her health declined in 1908, coinciding with mounting political unrest and the spread of revolutionary ideas.

On 15 November 1908, Cixi died in the Hall of Graceful Bird in the Forbidden City, Beijing.[19][5] The Guangxu Emperor had died the previous day under circumstances that have prompted speculation of poisoning, though definitive proof is lacking and historians remain divided.[19][3] Her death ended nearly half a century of female-centered regency politics.

The following day, 16 November 1908, the court announced the enthronement of Puyi as the Xuantong Emperor, a succession choice attributed to Cixi’s final instructions.[19] Puyi’s minority and the absence of Cixi’s personal authority left the dynasty vulnerable. Within three years, the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 toppled the Qing, and the Republic of China was proclaimed.

Cixi was buried in an opulent mausoleum among the Eastern Qing Tombs, reflecting both her personal power and the longstanding ritual traditions of the Manchu court.[15] In 1928, warlord Sun Dianying’s troops infamously looted her tomb, desecrating her remains and removing precious artifacts, an event that symbolized the collapse of imperial sanctity and the disorder of the warlord era.[15][9]

Today, Cixi’s life is the subject of ongoing research and reinterpretation. Scholars continue to examine archival documents, diplomatic correspondence, and material culture to refine understanding of her policies and personality.[3][8][14] Her story occupies a central place in global women’s history as an example of a woman exercising extraordinary power within a premodern empire, whose choices helped shape the trajectory from imperial China to the modern nation-state.