The Dowager Empress Cixi

  Was Cixi a good ruler?  Is she responsible for the collaspe of the Chinese Empire?

Edited by Ottoman Emperor

She was a totally selfish *****. Some authors such as Seagraves claim she was an innocent old lady who was just a pawn in the hands of palace intriguers. The facts say otherwise. She went from small-time country girl to Qing Empress, China under most of her rule failed to have a strong Emperor, increasingly found itself unable to meet the challenge of the West. She was a greedy, cruel, intriguer. She was incapable of giving China the leadership it needed, and unwilling to allow someone to rule who could.

The Qing Dynasty would not have survived the Taiping Rebellion and the aftereffects of the Opium Wars without the scholarly gentry, led by prominent leaders such as Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, Li Hongzhang, and Zhang Zhidong.

Zeng Guofan

Zeng Guofan (1811�X�X1872) engineered the demise of the Taiping Rebellions, through the organization of his militia, the Hunan Army.  After supressing the Taiping Rebellion, Zeng Guofan took the first step to help modernize the Qing Army, and his Hunam Army(and its subordinate fleet) became the cornerstone of the new Qing military. 

Sidenote: Zeng was known for his cunningness, his Machiavellian cruelty toward political enemies, and above all, his frugality.  A reputed Confucian, Zeng refused to profit from the loot gathered by his army.

 

Zuo Zongtang 

Zuo Zongtang (1812-1885) , and his Chu Army, were supplementary in helping Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army to supress the Taiping Rebellions.  After supressing the Taiping Rebellions, he was posted in Yili/Xinjiang/East Turkestan, where he was instrumental in supressing Muslim rebellions and holding off Russian aggression in the region.

Sidenote: Zeng Guofan and Zuo Zongtang were allies on major issues, but Zuo Zongtang's fierce temper did not mesh well with Zeng's cunning and cold demeanor.

 

Li Hongzhang

Li Hongzhang (1823-1901) was the prized pupil of Zeng Guofan, and his Huai Army, modeled from Zeng's Hunan Army, also helped to end the Taiping Rebellions, and was mainly responsible for crushing the Nian rebels in Northern China.  His greatest accomplishment, however, was his effort to modernize the Qing military.  Following the footsteps of his tutor Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang pushed throught efforts to build armament factories, machine shops, and engineered the Beyang Fleet (ships purchased from Britain), which, ironically, was the one of the top fleets in the world.  Cixi's reluctance to provide adequate funding for the fleet led, to a great extent, to its defeat at the hands of the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894.  Li Hongzhang's legacy was blemished in the eyes of his countrymen, mainly because the Qing government delegated him to sign treaties that ceded land to Japan and other foreign powers. 

Sidenote: Unlike Zeng Guofan and Zuo Zongtang, Li Hongzhang was not reputed as a frugal man.  Li was known to profit from various deals with foreign companies, and showed no remorse at enriching his pockets while trying to enrich the Qing Empire at the same time.

Another sidenote: Like his tutor Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang was very Machiavellian.  His slaughter of thousands of prisoners after the capture of Suzhou from the Taiping forces led to a major dispute with British general Charles Gordon.  The two men could not see eye to eye after this incident, and Gordon publically protested against Li's action, but to no avail.

 

Zhang Zhidong

Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) did not share the military legacy of the previous three scholar-generals, but he continued their efforts to modernize the Qing military and state.  As the Viceroy of Hunan and Hubei, Zhang Zhitong supported various modernizing enterprises in Southern China, and helped to stablize Southern China amidst the destability after the Boxer fiasco.  His quote "Western learning for use, Chinese learning for essence" is so famous that almost all modern Chinese history textbooks mention it.

Sidenote: Zhang Zhidong often criticized Li Hongzhang because of his corruption, and did not appreciate Li Hongzhang on a personal level. 

To a great extent, the legacy of these four men - Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong - surpass that of CiXi a hundred fold.

These are my own notes on the historical figures, and have no association with Wikipedia.

Edited by poirot

Thanks for all of that Poirot!

I just recently studied these dudes in class, and it was great for you to put a face to the name.

Thanks again!

I am impressed by your replies.  Actually, these four men have been of interest to me a few years ago during my history studies.  If anybody is interested, I can post more information on them, or any other major historical figure during the late Qing Dynasty.  For reference, check out books by Professor Johnathan Spence (Yale) on modern China.

Edited by poirot

Ahhhhhhhhhh, that must be a long time ago, now we are playing the tenth generation.  My favorite is the ninth generation.

When I first touched the Koei RTK games, I was actually quite suprised at the accuracy that the Koei developers put into the game.  It is by far the most accurate to the novel, and also happened to be, ironically, more accurate to history than the novel itself, because it included some historical characters that Luo Guanzhong neglected, such as Li Tong (Cao Cao's general, mostly worked behind the lines) and Chen Dao (Liu Bei's long time follower, ranked immediately behind Zhao Yun). 

I recommend Johnathan Spence's A Search for a Modern China.  It is an old book, so you can find it in any public library.  The book has a good deal of information on China's modernization process starting from the late Ming Dynasty, and coincidentally, has some great photos.

Here is a photo of Li Hongzhang with a foreign ambassador

Li Hongzhang was one of the only Qing bureaucrats who measured up in height to European ambassadors (he was around 1.80 cm, tall for a Qing official at the time!)

 

Here is a second picture of Zhang Zhidong. 

Sidenote, Richard Van Guylick, the Dutch author of the famous Judge Dee series, married one of Zhang Zhidong's granddaughters.

Edited by poirot