There will always be China ................

It’s not a very original observation but it will do as an introduction to this week’s programme on Empress Dowager Cixi from Radio Four’s In Our Time.

Empress Dowager Cixi , 1905

I am a great fan of In Our Time but was less than excited by the offering on the Empress who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court.

But scolding myself for being too Eurocentric I listened and was rewarded by an excellent 40 minutes which challenged my very limited knowledge of this period of China’s history.

Like many I was appalled at how the Great Powers had treated China in the 19th century including our own outrageous use of the Opium Wars to further our own self-interest.

And to my shame my views were coloured by the 1963 film 55 Days at Peking in which a stellar cast of actors including David Niven, Charlton Heston and Ava Gardiner battled the Boxer Rebellion.

Of course even then I knew that the portrayal of the Chinese was pure hokum, ranging as it did from perfidious, and sinister to cruel and unthinking.

What today’s programme did was reveal the truth that the Boxer’s were part of a peasant revolt from a  devastated area of north China where there had been awful drought and poverty.

All of which was revealed by Melvyn Bragg and his guests who discussed the Empress Dowager Cixi, her early life, and her successful and not so successful decisions while framing Chinese policy.

She was born in1835 and died in 1908.

55 Days at Peking, 1963

The sleeve notes describe how she  “started out at court as one of the Emperor's many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. 

When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. 

However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere.

With Yangwen Zheng, Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester, Rana Mitter, The S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and Ronald Po, Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production” 

Picture; Empress Dowager Cixi, 1905, Hubert Vos  (1855–1935)  wikidata:Q845989, Harvard Art Museums   wikidata:Q3783572, Fogg Museum, Accession number, 1943.162 (Harvard Art Museums) Edit this at Wikidata, Theatrical poster for the film 55 Days at Peking 1963 reproduced from 55 Days at Peking, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Days_at_Peking 

*Empress Dowager Cixi, In Our Time Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001zdw0