Empress Dowager Cixi Quotes

“One piece of information that made an impression on her was that individual Chinese lives mattered to the Westerners.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Cixi’s lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity.

Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi’s future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons’ brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines’ wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more “than nine million taels of silver had gone missing.

Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty.

Cixi’s great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amounted to 43,200 taels – a colossal sum, next to which his official salary had been a pittance. As he had died a long time ago, his son, Cixi’s grandfather, was obliged to pay half the sum, even though he worked in the Ministry of Punishments and had nothing to do with the state coffer. After three years of futile struggle to raise money, he only managed to hand over 1,800 taels, and an edict signed by the emperor confined him to prison, only to be released if and when his son, Cixi’s father, delivered the balance.

The life of the family was turned upside down. Cixi, then eleven years old, had to take in sewing jobs to earn extra money – which she would remember all her life and would later talk about to her ladies-in-waiting in the court. “As she was the eldest of two daughters and three sons, her father discussed the matter with her, and she rose to the occasion. Her ideas were carefully considered and practical: what possessions to sell, what valuables to pawn, whom to turn to for loans and how to approach them. Finally, the family raised 60 per cent of the sum, enough to get her grandfather out of prison. The young Cixi’s contribution to solving the crisis became a family legend, and her father paid her the ultimate compliment: ‘This daughter of mine is really more like a son!’

Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women. Inevitably their conversations touched on official business and state affairs, which helped form Cixi’s lifelong interest. Being consulted and having her views acted on, she acquired self-confidence and never accepted the com“common assumption that women’s brains were inferior to men’s. The crisis also helped shape her future method of rule. Having tasted the bitterness of arbitrary punishment, she would make an effort to be fair to her officials.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“The Manchus drank tea with a lot of milk. In her case, the milk came from the breasts of a nurse. Cixi had been taking human milk since her prolonged illness in the early 1880s, on the recommendation of a renowned doctor. Several wet nurses were employed, and took turns to squeeze milk into a bowl for her. The nurses brought their sucking babies with them, and the woman who served her the longest stayed on in the palace, her son being given education and an office job.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“The Chinese language is extremely hard to learn. It is the only major linguistic system in the world that does not have an alphabet; and it is composed of numerous complicated characters – ideograms – which have to be memorised one by one and, moreover, are totally unrelated to sounds.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“For Cixi, the whole episode taught her that to survive at court she must hold her tongue about state affairs. This was difficult, as she could see that the dynasty was in trouble. The victorious Taiping rebels not only consolidated their bases in southern China, but were sending military expeditions with a view to attacking Beijing. Cixi felt that she had practicable ideas – in fact it was under her rule that the Taiping rebels were later defeated. But she could not say a word, and could only share non-political interests with her husband, such as music and art.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Cixi was not at the coronation. The majestic main part of the Forbidden City was out of bounds to her – because she was a woman. She still could not set foot in it, even though she was now the de facto ruler. In fact, when her sedan-chair went within sight of it, she had to close the curtain and show humility by not looking at it. Virtually all decrees were issued in the name of her son, as Cixi had no mandate to rule. It was with this crippling handicap that she proceeded to change China.”

Excerpt From: Chang, Jung. “Empress Dowager Cixi.” Random House, 2013-09-25T18:30:00+00:00. iBooks.
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― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“So the story of Wild Fox Kang’s attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Thus on 12 February 1912, Empress Longyu put her name to the Decree of Abdication, which brought the Great Qing, which had ruled for 268 years, to its end, along with more than 2,000 years of absolute monarchy in China. It was Empress Longyu who decreed: 'On behalf of the emperor, I transfer the right to rule to the whole country, which will now be a constitutional Republic.' This 'Great Republic of China will comprise the entire territory of the Qing empire as inhabited by the five ethnic groups, the Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui and Tibetan'. She was placed in this historic role by Cixi. Republicanism was not what Empress Dowager Cixi had hoped for, but it was what she would accept, as it shared the same goal as her wished-for parliamentary monarchy: that the future of China belonged to the Chinese people.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Traditional Chinese administration was a well-oiled machine, which, barring a crisis, would keep ticking over. Initiatives were not required and rarely offered. State policies depended almost entirely on the dynamism of the throne.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“By tradition, a teacher was a most revered figure, a mentor for life, who imparted wisdom as well as knowledge, and who must be respected like a parent. (The murder of a teacher was classified as parricide, which, like treason, was punishable by death of a thousand cuts.) Emperors and princes set up shrines in their homes to honour their deceased tutors.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“The two wills made it unmistakeably clear that it was Cixi’s dying wish that the Chinese should have their parliament and their vote.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Cixi’s style was not to force through drastic change, but to bring it about gradually through perseverence.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Intelligent and competent, Louisa Pierson was far more than a source of information or advisor on diplomatic etiquette.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“A picture of vulnerability, she made the men feel protective and forgiving, happy to use the occasion to help a woman in need. But anyone stepping over a line would see a very different person as County Chief Woo witnessed.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“For Cixi, what the Viceroy as done was best left unsaid.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“increasingly weak. Then, half a century after Lord Macartney’s failed mission, the closed door was pushed ajar by Britain through the Opium”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Few of her achievements have been recognised, and when they are, the credit is invariably given to the men serving her. This is largely due to a basic handicap: that she was a woman and could only rule in the name of her sons ... In terms of groundbreaking achievements, political sincerity and personal courage, Empress Dowager Cixi set a standard that has barely been matched.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“As events would show, Cixi was indeed opposed to the foreign policy of her husband and his inner circle – but for very different reasons. Silently observing from close quarters, she in fact regarded their stubborn resistance to opening the door of China as stupid and wrong. Their hate-filled effort to shut out the West had, in her view, achieved the opposite to preserving the empire. It had brought the empire catastrophe, not least the destruction of her beloved Old Summer Palace. She herself would pursue a new route.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“It was Cixi who championed women’s liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on its female population-a practice to which she put an end.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“A night passed while Cixi dealt with one matter after another, conscious all the time that she just murdered her adopted son. She was forced to stop working at about eleven o’clock in the morning as death was imminent. She died less than three hours later.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Foreign opium imported into China was chiefly produced in British India and shipped solely from British ports.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Finally, in 1888, Cixi approved the Western-style Navy Regulations. It was in endorsing these Regulations that she effectively unveiled China’s first national flag. The country had had no national ensign, until its engagement with the West at the beginning of her reign necessitated a triangular-shaped golden yellow flag for the nascent navy. Now she endorsed its change into the internationally standard quadrangular shape. On the flag, named the Yellow Dragon, was a vividly blue, animated dragon, raising its head towards a bright-red globe, the sun. With the birth of this national flag, remarked contemporary Western commentators, ‘China proudly took her proper place among the nations.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“In 1957, the then-emperor, Qianlong, who ruled China for sixty years (1736-95) and is often referred to as 'Qianlong the Magnificent' for his achievements, closed the door of the country, leaving only one port open for trade, Canton.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“She was a giant, but no saint.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“For all her faults, she was no despot.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“The past hundred years have been most unfair to Cixi, who has been deemed either tyrannical and vicious or hopelessly incompetent or both.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“In the absence of clear knowledge, rumours have abounded and lies have been invented and believed.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Louisa and her husband gave their daughters unheard-of-freedom to enjoy Paris to the full. They socialised, frequented the theatre (where they were mesmerized by Sarah Bernhardt) and took dancing lessons with the famed Isodora Duncan. They performed at their parents’ parties and dnaced European-style ballroom dancing with close body contact with foreign men. The family’s lifestyle, including Louisa letting a Frenchman kiss her hand, raised not only eyebrows, but also rancour: the family was denounced to the throne by outraged mission officials.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China