108 China in World History
leaving no one with time or energy to assess the dynasty’s need for long-
term political and economic reforms. There were Confucian offi cials in
the late nineteenth century who called for “self-strengthening,” learning
from the West, and who began to build modern weapons, steamships,
railroads and telegraph lines. But the Qing Empire was a vast, poor,
mostly agricultural and overpopulated territory with a small, weak gov-
ernment, and the modernization efforts were confi ned to tiny coastal
areas that had little impact inland.
No Qing emperor in the nineteenth century was very capable, and
in any case the problems facing the dynasty were so great and complex
that even a capable and engaged emperor would have had great dif-
fi culty in meeting the twin challenges of internal rebellion and external
aggression. In 1860, the Tongzhi Emperor took the throne as a young
man while real power was shared between his uncle, Prince Gong, and
his mother, the Empress Dowager Cixi. Having entered the palace as
a low-ranking concubine, Cixi became, through her combination of
beauty, ambition, and shrewdness in cultivating allies among offi cials,
the most powerful single individual in the Qing court, from her initial
rise as empress dowager in 1860 to her death in 1908. No woman since
the Tang Empress Wu had ever held as much power and infl uence in
Chinese politics as the Empress Dowager Cixi.
The Empress Dowager has often been blamed by modern Chinese
nationalists for selling out the interests of the Chinese people and living in
splendid luxury in the palace while foreigners continued to increase their
power and infl uence over China. She rebuilt the Summer Palace, which
Western troops had burned down in 1860, and among other excesses she
used funds originally intended for naval expansion to have a pleasure
boat carved in marble beside the lake there. Today, tour groups from all
over are shown this boat as a symbol of Cixi’s selfi sh indulgences and the
corruption of the late Qing court. In retrospect, she was more a symptom
than a cause of Qing weakness. The court was torn between conserva-
tive and reformist offi cials, and she maintained her power by alternating
appeals to each group, allowing neither to dominate for long.
In 1894–1895, fi ghting over infl uence in Korea, Japanese troops
quickly and soundly defeated Qing forces. This was a great shock to
China and to the whole world, as the small island nation of Japan was
roughly the size of one Chinese province and had long been regarded as a
weak peripheral state. The Qing court agreed to pay Japan two hundred
million ounces of silver and to cede to Japan the island of Taiwan, and
the Pescadores chain of islands. Suddenly, all Western nations feared the
coming collapse of the Qing dynasty, and each nation pressured the court