This is the BBC.
Chinese characters.
Historian Rana Mitter tells the story of China in 20 remarkable lives.
Part 16.
Ambivalent Empress.
In the first decade of the 20th century, the wife of an American diplomat called Sarah Conger could be seen in Beijing taking tea and swapping stories with an elderly Chinese lady.
Her companion was not always as sweet as she looked.
Her nickname was the Dragon Lady, a woman who had relied on sharp wits and ruthlessness to acquire remarkable power.
Meet the Dowager Empress Cixi.
For the last three decades of the Qing, Cixi would be one of the most important figures at court.
From her first position as a concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor in 1852, she rose through court life to become the power behind the screen.
At just 25, she engineered a palace coup to place her young adopted son, Zaiqun, on the throne.
Yet Cixi was much more than a Chinese Anne Boleyn, not least because she died in her bed at a ripe old age.
In the last decade of her life, she made a series of decisions and a sharp reversal of policy that helped reform China.
In the end, Cixi was an instinctive conservative who understood the necessity of profound change, perhaps just a tragic few years too late.
The 1890s were a disastrous period for the Qing.
In 1894, war broke out with Japan over control of the Korean peninsula.
And within a few months, the technologically superior Japanese Navy eliminated the Chinese fleet.
In the aftermath, in 1895, China had to hand over the island of Taiwan.
It would remain a Japanese colony for another half century.
Now there was political and intellectual turmoil in Beijing.
Clearly something had gone very wrong with the polity.
After the death of her adopted son from smallpox, Cixi had helped engineer the rise of her infant nephew.
By 1898, he was grown up, a 27-year-old man who didn't seem that fond of the empress.
When the chance came to push back against her influence, he took it.
The agents of change were several of the most remarkable thinkers in modern China.
Kang Youwei was a polymath by any standards.
A philosopher and political thinker, Kang wanted to explore the ways in which Confucian ideas could be reinvented for the modern world.
So an idea like Great Harmony Datong should be thought of as a way of creating a new sort of universalism.
He was a genuine radical.
He wanted men and women to be equal and for marriages to be renewed on one-year contracts.
Over the years, Kang's schemes could verge on the harebrained.
His ventures included hot-air ballooning and the establishment of a new settlement in Mexico.
But when it came to reform, his ideas were serious.
They were expressed even better by his student, Liang Qichao.
Perhaps the single most important intellectual of the period.
Liang advocated constitutional and democratic reform with great vehemence.
In June 1898, with the Emperor's support, these reformers and their allies put forward ideas for a remarkable set of changes in China.
They proposed abolishing the old system of formal examinations.
For centuries, these have been at the heart of efforts to keep entry to the government rational and fair.
But by the 19th century they had become fixed repetitions of classical formulae with little relevance to the contemporary problems of the country.
Instead, the state would establish a range of new technical colleges to provide training in modern military matters, agriculture and commerce.
Perhaps most fundamentally, the old system of absolute power wielded by the Emperor would end with China becoming a constitutional monarchy, modelled on the country that it hated for defeating it but admired for its rapid modernisation – Japan.
The summer of 1898 in China was a bit like the Prague Spring some 70 years later.
And like that breath of political fresh air in Europe.
It was savagely repressed as the aunt struck back against her nephew.
That September, the Empress Dowager launched a coup d'etat which had the support of the most conservative forces at court.
She had the Guangxu Emperor placed under house arrest.
Kang and Liang fled to Japan.
Tan Sutong, one of their most talented associates, and only 33 years old, refused to flee.
He was caught, arrested and beheaded.
This story has usually been told as one of brave modernisers being stopped in their tracks by reactionary conservatives.
It's not that simple.
Tzu Chi actually did support some reforms, particularly when proposed by senior officials she trusted.
The reformers in turn were brilliant but also impractical, refusing to see how disruptive these sudden changes might be in an already fragile China.
Sadly, there was no meeting of minds.
The tide of change seemed to have been stopped, and Cixi confirmed in her place.
But then rumours started emerging in North China that changed the political climate.
The region was hit badly by drought in the final years of the 19th century.
Groups of destitute peasants were gathering in the countryside, calling themselves the Society of Harmonious and Righteous Fists.
To the diplomats and missionaries from the West, they were known by a simpler name, Boxers.
In the first part of 1900, the Boxers made quite a spectacle in the countryside, wearing red and yellow clothes and demonstrating their own form of magic, which involved physical exercises hence Boxers and incantations.
Their targets were clear the Christian missionaries, the Chinese who they had converted, and the foreign presence in China as a whole.
Exterminate the foreigners, they cried, and defend the Qing dynasty.
Four decades earlier, another political insurgency, the Taiping, had devastated the country.
We've already heard the story of its instigator, Hong Xiuquan, who thought that he was Jesus's younger brother.
But that movement was viciously opposed to the Qing dynasty, regarding its Manchu elite as demons.
Foreigners knew that the imperial house would do anything to destroy the Taiping.
With the Boxers, they weren't so sure.
And they were confirmed in their suspicions in June 1900, when Cixi made a fateful decision.
She declared that the Boxers were righteous people and that the imperial court stood behind their aim of driving the foreigners from the face of China.
Senior officials supported her decision.
In doing so, Cixi helped unleash immense violence.
The Boxers had already been killing missionaries and Chinese Christians.
In some provinces, they now felt empowered to increase their efforts.
In Beijing, nearly 4000 foreigners and Chinese were besieged in the Legation District for much of summer of 1900.
Meanwhile, the foreign powers got together to send an eight-nation expeditionary army of 20000 troops to China.
Among the countries involved were Britain, France and that new imperialist on the block, Japan.
Once again, the technology of advanced weaponry overcame the magic of the boxers and the anger of the Qing court.
The rebels, sensing defeat, melted away into the countryside, discarding their bright red and yellow clothes, as they did so.
The Qing court was not so lucky.
Cixi had to flee her palace, cursing her servants for not looking after her artworks with sufficient care.
The aftermath of the Boxer uprising was deeply traumatic for China.
The country was now saddled with a massive punishment fine the Boxer indemnity of 450 million silver taels, a sum chosen by the foreign powers to add up to one silver piece per head of the Chinese population.
A calculated humiliation.
Within the next year, China undertook a remarkable reversal of political position, endorsed by Cixi.
Her administration put forward the Xinjiang New Government Reforms, and the measures she prescribed looked uncannily like those proposed by her nephew and his advisers just a few years before.
A constitutional monarchy, a move to elected local and then national assemblies, modernisation of education and the abolition of the old examination system.
That system was finally ended in 1905.
After the best part of a thousand years.
The other reforms began to take shape.
Cixi's last decade was spent entertaining some of the foreign diplomatic wives whose elimination she had willed on at the height of the Boxer uprising.
Cixi died in 1908.
Three years later, the Qing dynasty fell and the last emperor abdicated at the start of 1912, making way for a weak Chinese republic.
For the best part of a decade, the court had been implementing reform.
So why did the dynasty still collapse so fast?
Part of the answer lies beyond the manoeuvrings at court, in a society which had changed profoundly, in ways that Cixi and her advisers didn't fully understand.
The end of the Taiping Rebellion, half a century earlier, had been a turning point for the Qing.
To save itself, the empire had had to devolve much of its monopoly on armed force to provincial military leaders.
It never regained that power and could not control the warlordism that marked China in the early 20th century.
This meant that decisions at court after the 1860s were ultimately far less relevant to China as a whole than during the time of the strong emperors in the 18th century.
Power had already shifted to the provinces.
Does that make sushi irrelevant?
Not at all.
She embodies an ambiguity that was true for many Chinese in the late 19th century – men and women, elite and commoners.
That ambiguity was around how to deal with China's crisis.
Why shouldn't China, a country with a long and brilliant past, be able to manage its own future?
Why should it be particularly concerned with the lives and fortunes of foreigners who had made their way into the country with gunboats bearing toxic opium and, in some Chinese eyes, equally toxic new ideologies?
We'll never know whether the Qing could have been saved had Cixi and her allies allowed the reforms of 1898 to go ahead.
If she had, then the Boxer uprising and the crippling economic costs might have been avoided.
The court might also have been able to do more to bring back the interest groups which they needed to hold on to control the provincial militarists, emergent merchant groups and chambers of commerce in the cities.
The bureaucrats who had been tied into an old examination system and needed to be persuaded of the merits of modern education.
It was actually Cixi's old enemy, Yang Qichao, who had the last laugh.
In his exile in Japan, he essentially invented the Chinese reformist political press, using his newspaper to advocate a new public sphere and political reform.
By the time Cixi allowed those reforms to go ahead, it was too late.
Next time, we'll meet more women who made modern China, but whose names are scarcely remembered.
The hard-working, hard-living factory girls behind China's manufacturing revolution.
