Perception and Authenticity:

Characterizing the Empress Dowager Cixi’s Relationships

With Foreign Women

Jean Bemesderfer

China and the World in the Age of Empire

December 15th, 2015

The procession was full of pomp and circumstance. Dozens of representatives

from the foreign legations, accompanied in the appropriate fashion by imperial eunuchs

and grooms, were escorted through the streets of Beijing promptly at 11 o’clock in the

morning. Indeed, attention to detail and maintaining appearances mattered significantly

to the Qing Dynasty. The Diplomatic Corps comprising the parade of guests en route to

the Imperial Winter Palace brimmed with excitement. It was December 13th, 1898.

Cultural and political tensions mounted in the background of the festivities and soon the

animosities between foreigners, the Chinese, and the Qing would culminate in the Boxer

Rebellion – but not just yet. December 13th, 1898 was reserved for the first encounter

between the Qing Imperial Court and, specifically, the wives of the Diplomatic Corps.

The exchange marked the first occasion that foreign women would set eyes upon the

rulers of China, including the mythologized Empress Dowager Cixi, whom these women

sought to honor for her sixty-fourth birthday. The occasion also marked the first time

that Cixi, the principal ruler of China, would receive foreign women of any kind. And

according to the foreign women given this honor, the Empress Dowager received them

with elation, kindness, and great honor.

Historians have suggested that the Empress Dowager Cixi developed close

relationships with foreign women only after the signing of the Boxer Protocol in 1901.1

Because the protocol mandated increasing interactions between China and other imperial

powers, historians have implied that any relationships Cixi developed with westerners

would have essentially been created under pressure or to gain political stability rather

than of her own accord. But because historians cast these relationships as mere political

maneuverings on the part of the Empress Dowager, in effect reducing these encounters to

1 Yuhang and Zurndorfer, “Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi,” 6.

1

being born of necessity rather than desire, there has been little urgency to investigate the

authenticity of these relationships. While it may be true that Cixi’s direct contact with

foreign women and men necessarily increased after 1901, she had in fact been developing

relationships with foreign women for several years prior to the Boxer Rebellion. She also

had indirect contact with foreign women stretching back even further – at least as early as

1894.2 The Empress Dowager Cixi, a cultivator of self-image and master of etiquette,

exhibited many elements of authentic affection and fondness in her relationships with

foreign women that surpassed what one would consider propriety and adherence to

imperial custom.

Given the name Yehenala at birth, the Empress Dowager was born in 1835 to the

Manchu Huizheng family, whose political background spanned several generations in the

Qing Empire. In 1852, as a teenage girl of this well-to-do family, Yehenala was given

the opportunity to become one of several concubines to the Xianfeng Emperor. Although

the emperor selected her as well as many others, she was given a low-ranking status

among the other concubines. She would soon become the first and only one of all

Xianfeng’s concubines to bear him a son, the Tongzhi Emperor, in 1856. Her good

fortune to do so afforded her the ascension to guifei (the second ranking imperial

concubine), ranking second only to Empress Zhen. The chance birth of her son put the

future Empress Dowager in a unique position of power, one she fought to keep and

preserve through political savvy, subsequent coups and rumored assassinations. The

death of the Xianfeng Emperor just five short years after the birth of their son, who was

the sole and uncontested heir to the throne, swiftly elevated her status to that of Empress

Dowager, a title she unprecedentedly shared with Empress Zhen (now Empress Dowager

2 Liu, Clash of Empires, 142.

2

Ci’an). It was then that Empress Dowager took the name Cixi, meaning “motherly” and

“auspicious” – a befitting name for a woman who in less than five years ascended from

the lower ranks in concubinage to the de facto ruler of the Qing Empire for the next half

century.

Her reign, which began at the heels of the Opium Wars in 1861 and ended only a

few years before the establishment of the Republic of China in 1908, enveloped several

formative events in late Qing history. The final years of the Taiping Rebellion, the Sino-

Japanese War, the Self-Strengthening Movement, and the Boxer Rebellion all unfolded

during Cixi’s rule. All of these events, as well as the increase in foreign presence and

neo-imperial influence that resulted as a consequence, caused China to experience ebb

and flow in anti-westernism, anti-imperialism, proto-nationalism, and Chinese identity

formation throughout the last half of the 19th century. The increasing pressures from both

foreign imperial powers (via various treaties) and the Chinese people (via various

rebellions) forced Cixi and the Qing government into a position whereby most decisions

could have hardly pleased everyone, especially considering that the demands from

foreigners and Chinese were oftentimes incompatible if not outright antithetical to one

another. Cixi herself, in what may have been her greatest failing as a ruler, also

vacillated in her approach to policy as a means of placating various and oftentimes

competing foreign and domestic interests while simultaneously trying to preserve the

Qing Empire. Her sudden and seemingly uncharacteristic support of the Boxers during

the Boxer Rebellion is arguably the strongest (if not the most well known) example of her

political flip-flopping.

3

Amidst this chaotic sociopolitical environment, it is of little wonder that Cixi’s

reputation and legacy are replete with competing ideas about who she was, what she

thought, and why she acted the way that she did. Some of her adversarial

contemporaries, Kang Youwei and Lang Qichao spearheaded a great deal of criticism

towards the Empress Dowager, attacking not only her politics but also her personal life.3

An especially vicious rumor involved her lascivious relationships with her imperial

eunuchs.4 At a time when gender and sexual norms favored women’s piety and chastity

(norms that were in no way unique to China), attacking Cixi’s life behind closed doors

would have been an effective means of appealing to public sentiment and morality on an

international scale. Foreign contemporaries J.O.P Bland and Edmund Backhouse,

claiming to have intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of the Qing court, published

their memoir China Under the Empress Dowager in 1910. Their account continued the

trend of depicting Cixi as an oversexed, cruel, and corrupt ruler. Although historians

ultimately proved the book was a forgery in terms of content, the seeds of “conventional

wisdom” regarding Cixi’s life and negative image had already taken root.5 In fact, well

into the 1970’s, Cixi was used as a quintessential example among many Chinese for “ the

damage caused by a woman participating in the affairs of the state.”6 It was not long after

Cixi’s death that many women, most of whom were foreign, began challenging the

increasingly negative image of the Empress Dowager that had crystallized in the minds of

3 Yuhang and Zurndorfer, “Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi,” 5.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., 8.

6 Ibid., 10.

4

many. It is within these accounts that insight can be gained regarding the levels of

intimacy and authenticity that Cixi developed in her relationships with western women.

Sarah Pike Conger, a New Englander and college-educated wife of American

Minister John Conger, provided a detailed – albeit sympathetic – account of Cixi’s first

audience with foreign diplomatic women in her memoir Letters from China: With

Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and Women of China. Published in 1909

within months of Cixi’s death (and in the throes of early American feminism), Conger’s

memoir contains her many letters written to family members in the United States between

1898 and 1905 during her stay at the American Legation in Beijing. Conger published

Letters from China as a counter-narrative to what she felt were misperceptions of the

Chinese people and, in particular, misrepresentations of Chinese women. Her depictions

of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who Conger eventually refers to intimately as her friend,

unfold with notable reverence. Remarking on the candor of Cixi during the first audience

granted to the foreign legation women on December 13th, Conger specifically notes,

“there was no trace of cruelty to be seen.”7 And throughout the entirety of her memoir,

Conger regularly employs the word cruelty. Conger’s consistent use of the term indicates

that a common misconception that she sought to challenge was the cruel nature of the

Chinese and, more specifically, the Empress Dowager. She continues her description of

the audience with Her Majesty as being filled with “good will,” “enthusiastic

earnestness,” and “freedom and warmth” – rather contradictory descriptions to how many

people at the time may have thought of both China and Her Majesty.8 Conger’s goal of

7 Conger, Letters from China, 41, emphasis added.

8 Ibid., 42.

5

constructing a positive image of Cixi continues unwaveringly throughout the whole of

her narrative, with even greater affection as their encounters increase.

In trying to combat the negative image of Cixi, it seems likely that Conger would

have embellished her account with literary and factual liberties – not only in her telling of

the first audience but throughout her narrative as a whole. However, Conger’s emotional

connection to these events does not necessarily indicate that her version is categorically

untrue even though it may be embellished. Cixi was an increasingly disliked Manchu

ruler who was especially concerned with her image and maintaining appearances.9

Therefore, it seems likely that the Empress Dowager would have gone to great lengths to

give the impression of good will, earnestness, freedom, and warmth to the audience of

women at the Winter Imperial Palace. But was this merely a charade?

Even though it took several months of negotiations for the diplomatic wives to be

granted an audience with Cixi in honor of her birthday, the Empress Dowager’s

willingness to grant an audience with them at the palace in the first place (a highly

unprecedented event) indicates that she had either genuinely held or wanted to give the

impression that she held respect for foreign women in China. However as one exchange

shows, Cixi’s choice of gifts for the diplomatic women strongly indicates the former.

According to Conger, Her Majesty personally placed a heavy gold ring faceted with a

9 See Cheng-Hua Wang, “‘Going Public’: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Circa

1904,” Nan Nü 14 (2012): 119-176.

6

large pearl on each of the women’s fingers.10 Pearls, as photographs and paintings make

clear and as the Princess Der Ling confirmed in her memoirs, were Cixi’s favorite stone

and a common adornment on imperial garb. Her gesture to these women was therefore

potentially symbolically loaded. By bestowing upon them a symbolic token of the

Empire, one reserved for those with power and one she favored above all others, she had

in effect intimately shared small symbols of power and herself from one woman to

another. The initial gift exchange between these women points to the likelihood that Cixi

had not merely performed a ritual but, in fact, harbored respect and affection for the

foreign women who came to see her – even if it wasn’t as grand or magnanimous as

Conger claims.

Several years prior to the first audience, on Cixi’s 60th birthday in 1894, a group

of British, American, and Chinese Christian women presented the Empress Dowager with

a handcrafted version of the New Testament translated by scholar Wang Tao. The

women themselves were not allowed to offer their own translation nor partake in the

physical act of giving the bible to Cixi due to gendered restrictions mandated by both the

church and their respective governments. But women had in fact been the initiators and

planners of this event. The gift itself was meant to convey sense of gratitude on behalf of

the Christian women to their female head-of-state because they felt it was she who had

legally protected them from growing anti-Christian attitudes and violence.11 Although

there are no extant records evincing how Cixi reacted to receiving the New Testament,

she did respond to the women missionaries and converts through the traditional means of

10 Ibid., 41.

11 Liu, Clash of Empires, 145.

7

imperial gift exchange. She chose to send them Nanking silk, satin, needlework, Huchow

crape (another form of silk), and cases of handkerchiefs.

These gifts, banal as they may appear, may have held significant and symbolic

meaning. Contemporaries suggested that Cixi’s selections for the missionaries and

converts were mere “feminine trifles,” resembling little more than “a set of embroidery

requisites.”12 It has since been argued that Cixi selected the gifts not as a mechanism of

female bonding or diplomacy, but instead that “[Cixi] bestowed the ‘feminine trifles’

upon the missionaries from the position of a patriarchal sovereign, an act that would put

the recipients back in their place – a gendered domestic sphere – and remind them of their

womanly duties.”13 While it may true that Cixi preferred to be referred to through

masculine pronouns,14 it seems unlikely that she would have used her position of power

to put the Christian women in their place – at least not through this particular selection of

gifts. In nearly every photograph and painting of the Empress Dowager, she can be seen

clutching a handkerchief, most often in her left hand. And as a child, the Empress

Dowager had mastered the art of embroidery and dress making, and she had even taken

sewing jobs to contribute to the family income.15 Cixi notoriously involved herself in the

imperial garb making process, scrutinizing every detail and oftentimes coming up with

her own designs. As an adult, and even as the Empress, Cixi reportedly constructed some

of her own dresses.16 Given the extraordinary amount of resources (seamstresses,

12 Ibid., 152.

13 Ibid., 164.

14 Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City, 68.

15 Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi, 7.

16 Carl, With the Empress Dowager, 136-137.

8

designers, etc.) that Cixi had at her disposal, and the fact that she did not necessarily have

to partake in much of these processes, it seems likely that the Empress Dowager had a

love of fashion as well as a love of the garment making process. With this in mind, it

then also seems likely that her gifts to the missionaries and converts may also be seen as

another example of the authenticity (and this time particularly feminine authenticity) that

Cixi exhibited in her interactions with foreign women.

The most prolonged and intimate relationship that the Empress Dowager Cixi

developed with a foreign woman was with Katherine Carl. Carl was an American artist

who, per the suggestion and negotiations of Sarah Pike Conger, was commissioned to

paint a portrait of the Empress for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. The purpose of the

portrait was to strengthen the positive image of Cixi that she and others had been

constructing, particularly after the Boxer Rebellion. The portrait required that Carl reside

within palace walls (including the Summer and Sea Palaces) for nearly nine months.

This event was unprecedented in two ways: it was the first time a foreign women would

spend any length of time behind the walls of the palace and it marked the first time a

foreign painter was commissioned to create a portrait of the Empress Dowager.

The extant records of this time period left by Der Ling and Katherine Carl conflict

markedly with one another, as do the conditions under which they chose to share their

experiences. Katherine Carl published her memoir With the Empress Dowager in 1906, a

little over a year after her departure from China. Hers was the first of many emerging

accounts at the turn of the century that challenged long held assumptions about the cruel

and tyrannical nature of the Empress Dowager. Carl explains in her prologue that she felt

compelled to share her experiences at the palaces after several international news sources

9

ran sensationalist stories claiming that Carl viewed Cixi as both a tyrant and an

inhospitable host. Carl also explains her awareness that by publishing an account of her

time with the Empress, she would be transgressing the boundaries of Chinese etiquette

and could consequentially lose the trust and friendship she had built with the women of

the court and Cixi herself (whom Carl had come to hold very dear).17 Nonetheless, Carl

contends that she had a moral obligation to set the record straight regardless of the

consequences to herself.

Der Ling’s memoir Two Years in the Forbidden City was published in 1911,

roughly five years after she left the court and five years after Carl published With the

Empress Dowager. The foreward of Der Ling’s book, written by American journalist

Thomas Millard, explains that she wrote her account at the urging of her friends after she

got engaged to an American man named Thaddeus White. The engagement ultimately

led the Qing court to sever ties with Der Ling. During Der Ling’s time at court, the

Empress Dowager had customarily arranged a marriage between the “princess”

(according to Grant Hayter-Menzies, an erroneous title she likely bestowed upon herself

after arriving in America) and a prince whom Der Ling rejected due to her growing

concerns about her father’s health.18 Der Ling explains that “this made Her Majesty very

angry, and she considered me very ungrateful for all she had done for me.”19 While it can

only be speculated whether Cixi maintained any negative feelings about this that

contributed to the severance with the court, what is certain is that Der Ling’s subsequent

marriage to an American man, her taking of United States citizenship, and her

17 Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, xxii.

18 Ibid., 1-12.

19 Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City, 375.

10

willingness to publish a memoir about her role in the Qing court deeply transgressed not

only Chinese custom and etiquette but also millennia of imperial tradition. Her apparent

defense of these transgressions can be seen plainly when she ends her memoir stating, “at

heart I was a foreigner.”20

There is a vitally important difference between Der Ling and Carl’s accounts that

informs whether Cixi developed any sort of authentic relationship with Katherine Carl –

whether or not the Empress actually sat for the portrait. As Carl points out, “every

portrait-painter knows the sort of intimacy that establishes itself between him and his

sitter . . . they get to know each other better by the time the portrait is finished than they

could otherwise have done, perhaps in years.”21 She goes on to say that “though I saw

Her Majesty so intimately at other times, I felt I was not seeing her ‘face to face’

(figuratively speaking), except at the sittings.”22 Throughout Carl’s entire memoir, she

says consistently that Cixi was unable to sit for prolonged periods of time, typically

having sat for only an hour each morning and even shorter amounts in the afternoons. So

although Carl clearly perceived her relationship with Cixi as intimate and authentic, it

was less than she desired given the time constraints of the painting process. But Der Ling

challenges Carl’s assertion that there was anything figurative about this lack of face-to-

face intimacy, insisting that she (Der Ling), at Cixi’s request and to Carl’s dismay, sat on

the throne in her stead.23 However, in the whole of Katherine Carl’s account, she makes

no reference to this whatsoever. And overwhelmingly, Carl’s grievances at the palace

20 Ibid., 382.

21 Carl, With the Empress Dowager, 112.

22 Ibid.

23 Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City, 239.

11

(which she had no problem recounting in her book) relate to either the constraints she had

as an artist under Cixi’s meticulous supervision or to her desire to have more time to

paint precisely because the Empress did not give extended sittings. One concern, then, is

whether we can take Der Ling, a known “fantasist” and “self-publicist”, at her word.24

Both Carl and Der Ling’s accounts corroborate the fact that Carl’s stay at the

palace lasted for roughly nine months. While Carl suggests that this was due primarily to

the short sittings that she received from the Empress, Der Ling offers little explanation

for this. And the contradictions between Der Ling and Carl’s accounts raise many

practical questions regarding the length of time it took Carl to complete the portrait

process. For instance, if Der Ling had been tasked with sitting in the Empress’s stead,

why would it have taken nine months to complete the portrait? Wouldn’t Der Ling have

been able to sit for longer periods of time than the Empress? And shouldn’t this have

aided in completing the portrait sooner? In fact, Der Ling claims to have sat for four

hours a day – over two and a half times longer than Conger claims the Empress could

withstand sitting.25 Had Conger actually been afforded four hours per day with a subject,

given her experience and professionalism, it stands to reason that she would have

completed the portrait far earlier. Also, if the Empress Dowager approved of Carl

working on the portrait when she was not there, which Carl states on numerous occasions

was not the case, wouldn’t this artist have taken some much-desired opportunities to

work on the portrait without a sitting subject and thus sped up the process even more?

These questions and the length of Carl’s stay at the palace seriously complicate Der

Ling’s claim that it was she who sat for the portrait – as do many other inconsistencies.

24 Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, xxvi.

25 Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City, 239.

12

While many contradictions exist between Carl and Der Ling’s accounts, Der Ling

contradicts herself entirely in one passage regarding an incident on the throne during the

emperor’s birthday party:

… one of the ladies of the party made a mistake and sat upon one of Her

Majesty's thrones. I noticed her at once, and before I had a chance to warn her,

Her Majesty made a sign of annoyance to me. . . The trouble was this, although

Her Majesty felt that no one had the right to sit upon her throne, she expected me

to get this lady off the chair and at the same time not to tell her the reason why.26

While it could have been possible for Katherine Carl to paint Der Ling without her sitting

on the actual throne (considering that even Cixi was evidently not required to be there

either), and on several occasions Der Ling intimates that this may have been so, she

eventually recalls a conversation that she had with Cixi that contradicts even this idea.

When the Empress Dowager stated, “I think you yourself are getting tired of sitting, and

want me to take it up again, but I have already had quite enough of it,” Der Ling states

that “[she] told her that instead of being tired of it, [she] enjoyed sitting on her throne,

which [she] regarded as a great honor.”27 Indeed, it would have been an unspeakably

great honor; one that even Der Ling states Cixi felt – and that millennia of imperial

custom dictated – belonged solely to emperors and empresses.

Carl, Der Ling, and Sarah Conger’s accounts all describe Cixi as being

meticulously involved in the construction of her image to the world – an idea echoed

among historians as well.28 From her wardrobe to her surroundings to the affairs of state,

26 Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City, 265, emphasis added.

27 Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City, 284.

28 Wang, “‘Going Public’: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Circa 1904,” 166.

13

that one thing that is clear from these women’s accounts is that Cixi maintained control at

all times. Attributing this in part to Chinese culture, Carl explains that Cixi was “a great

believer in one of the rules that Confucius lays down for the attainment of “Illustrious

Virtue”; she “[cultivated] her person.”29 This again challenges Der Ling’s claim that she

sat as Carl’s subject. Because if extant records indicate time and again that Cixi went to

painstaking lengths to create a particular version of herself, this is irreconcilable with her

alleged willingness to let another woman sit in her stead. It is also irreconcilable with the

way Cixi and the court treated the painting itself. Upon Carl’s arrival to the palace,

several easels were constructed for her in imperial yellow; her brushes and painting box

were painted imperial yellow; and at the end of each day, the painting itself was covered

with an imperial yellow cloth. Carl recalls that, “the portrait was treated, from its very

beginning, as an almost sacred object, with the respect a reverent officiant accords the

Holy Vessels of the Church. Even my painting materials seemed to be invested with a

sort of semi-sacred quality.”30 If Cixi and the court viewed the portrait with such great

reverence, it makes Der Ling’s claim that she sat in Cixi’s stead that much more fantastic

and that much less believable.

Katherine Carl’s time at the various palaces also involved a great deal of

socializing when she was not engaged with the portrait. She recounts nearly daily

promenades and meals with Cixi and the court ladies, boat rides, and she explains in

vivid detail her attendance of the emperor’s birthday party. But she also emphasizes

several interpersonal encounters that she shared with the Empress Dowager that indicate

that they had developed quite an authentic relationship outside of the intimacy developed

29 Carl, With the Empress Dowager, 137.

30 Ibid., 90.

14

during the portrait painting process. Carl explains that, “I saw her, not only when she sat

for the portrait; I was with her the greater part of the day, and I began to let myself go in

my admiration of her.”31 Indeed, Carl had developed warm feelings towards Cixi, but the

extent to which the Empress Dowager reciprocated those feelings can only be ascertained

through her actions – and several small gestures indicate that she did.

Carl recalls that during one walk, Cixi spontaneously had a eunuch gather several

pieces of grass that she wove into a rabbit and then gave to Carl.32 On another occasion,

Cixi had learned of Carl’s affection for the Empress Dowager’s many dogs (whom Cixi

adored and cared for as meticulously as anything else), and gifted Carl the one she

understood to be her favorite.33 And on yet another private walk, the Empress took note

of Carl’s discomfort in the cold and had a eunuch fetch one of her own wraps – which she

then personally placed around Carl’s shoulders and told her to keep as her own.34 These

exchanges, and these are only a few of the many that Carl references, far surpass any

custom or etiquette that would have forced Cixi to intimately engage with a foreign

woman. And Carl’s descriptions of these events are remarkably intimate, albeit a little

romanticized. But even if she, like Conger, took liberties in her characterization of the

Empress Dowager Cixi, and even if Carl’s affections for Cixi surpassed any feelings the

Empress held for her, given the length of Carl’s stay at the palaces as well as the close

contact she appears to have had with the Empress over those nine months, it is far more

likely that these two women developed an authentic fondness for one another.

31 Ibid., 100.

32 Ibid., 115.

33 Ibid., 56.

34 Ibid., 116.

15

Many of the Empress Dowager Cixi’s relationships with foreign women are best

characterized as having been genuine, intimate, and born of her own accord. Her tokens

of affection to foreign women, which have typically been analyzed as little more than

political goodwill, show that she had some sense of universal womanhood and desired to

engage with women on an interpersonal level. And she did so with authenticity. As the

sole ruler during the last years of the Qing Empire, Cixi would not have found herself in a

position to develop friendships per se – let alone with outsiders whose influence was

under such intense and justified scrutiny by the people of China. And whether Cixi

personally considered these foreign women her friends, as they did her, is entirely

unknowable. But she certainly engaged with them in a way that indicated her own desire

for intimacy rather than a need for propriety.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Carl, Katharine Augusta. With the Empress Dowager of China. New York: The Century

Co., 1906. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Conger, Sarah Pike. Letters from China, with Particular Reference to the Empress

Dowager and the Women of China. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.,

1909. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company,

1912.

Secondary Sources

16

Chang, Jung. Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China.

New York: Anchor Books, 2013.

Hayter-Menzies, Grant. Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling. Hong

Kong: University Press, 2008.

Liu, Lydia. Clash of Empires. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Wang, Cheng-Hua. "’Going Public’: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Circa

1904." Nan Nü 14 (2012): 119-176.

Yuhang, Li, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer. "Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi Through the

Production of Art." Nan Nü 14 (2012): 1-20.

Zhang, Zhan. "Cixi and Modernization of China." Asian Social Science 6, no. 4 (2010):

154-159.

17