In November 1861, in the throes of the political chaos resulting from the Second Opium War and the sudden death of the Xianfeng Emperor, two of the Emperor's former consorts seized power in a palace coup, executing the eight regents who had held the reins of state in the months since the Emperor's passing. The state they had claimed was already decrepit, undermined by local clientelism and the creeping influence of the foreign powers through the ports and waterways opened by force by the recent wars; in addition, it was still in the midst of a brutal civil war with the millenarian Taiping rebels, who, it was suspected, were backed by the British and French despite their claims otherwise.
Despite these serious challenges of state, the new clique turned rapidly to infighting, with a divide emerging between Empress Cixi, mother of the five-year-old Tongzhi Emperor for whom the regency legally operated, and Empress Cian, who was the Xianfeng Emperor's primary wife and had the backing of Prince Gong, the former emperor's brother whose support had made their coup possible. In August 1864, with yet another defeat of the imperial army at the hands of the Taiping rebels outside of Nanjing, Cixi decided to make her move, issuing a decree in her son's name dismissing the Prince from his offices on grounds of incompetence and disrespect towards the Emperor.
Unwilling to accept Cixi's power grab, Gong and Cian quickly assembled their own counter-coup, which would attempt to seize the emperor and imprison Cixi. Despite having the loyalty of much of the ethnic Han army and personal connections with many ethnic Manchu officials, their rapidly-planned plot failed, with Cixi and Tongzhi escaping to the imperial resort town of Chengde. Returning with an army raised in the Manchu heartland in spring 1865, Cixi swept Gong and Cian out of the capital, forcing them to flee to the south, where the powerful private Xiang Army, assembled by local nobles to resist the Taiping invasion of Hunan after the failure of the imperial army, provided them refuge. The stage was set for another ten years of three-sided civil war. With the country thrown into chaos, local officials and landowners - particularly in the far south - began to make independent deals with the French and British, who were able to provide arms and a modicum of security in exchange for trade concessions and influence. Slowly but surely, de facto European rule began to creep up the Pearl and Yangtze along with the gunboats.
In 1874, having finally crushed Gong & Cian's armies in Hunan and the last gasp of Taiping resistance in Guangdong, Cixi had finally consolidated her authority in the country and was ready to begin her intended program of military reform and weeding out foreign influence. But in a great irony of history, the very next year, the Tongzhi emperor - still only 14 - died of smallpox. The division of the imperial family in the civil war had left no traditionally legal heirs. Cixi's solution was to force through a reform of the traditional inheritance laws, allowing Princess Rong'an - the Xianfeng Emperor's only other surviving child - to be crowned as the Guangxu Empress, the first empress in her own right in 1200 years, only the second in the country's ancient history, and, as it turned out, the last monarch of China.
Local nobles furiously resented what they saw as a mockery of imperial law and tradition, and going forward, many reactionary writers would say they considered the Qing Dynasty to have ended in 1875. Fearful of plots, Cixi and her new puppet empress focused on internal palace security over all else - ironically opening the door for the true rot on their power in the form of further decentralization of power and informal deals between local power brokers and outside interests. Nevertheless, the dynasty as it was plodded along for another twenty four years before the facade of unity and stability shattered.
In the late 1890s, crisis came in the form of the rapid growth of secret societies, both anti-foreign and anti-Manchu, who began to carry out attacks on foreign merchants and missionaries as well as court officials across the country. In June 1900, an organized mass group of nationalist rebels - now known collectively as the 'Boxers' - seized control of Beijing, besieging the extensive foreign possessions as well as the imperial palace. They forced Cixi into hiding and the Guangxu empress to abdicate in favor of Prince Zaifeng, a distant relative of the Xianfeng emperor, who reluctantly took power as the Xuantong Emperor and declared war on the European powers.
Embarrassingly for the rebels, almost every provincial governor in the country - who they had assumed were secretly on their side - refused outright to implement the declaration of war and cut side deals with the alliance of imperial powers which was then assembling to relieve their besieged legations. They stormed Beijing and imposed on the country a draconian treaty which formally stripped it of most of its coastal territory, divided the remainder into spheres of influence, and reinstated the Guangxu Empress as a puppet - this time of a council of ambassadors who were to rule de facto at the threat of a new invasion. Cixi herself was placed under house arrest in Chengde, where she died in 1904.
Especially in these final years of the dynasty, the Guangxu Empress is often portrayed as a do-nothing who passively allowed Cixi and then the foreign powers to destroy the country. But in her defense, she has been raised from birth for passivity and kept her whole life from the information and connections she would need to exercise her power. To her credit, after Cixi's exile, she proved a quick study at power politics and made an honest attempt at administrative and education reform in the last years of her reign. But the damage was done. As soon as the paper was dry on the so-called Boxer Protocol, individual provincial governors stopped even pretending to take orders from Beijing, instead coming to arrangements with local nationalists or with the colonial powers, which the council of Ambassadors then forced the Imperial Court to ratify.
Nearly every year after 1901, new 'addenda' were imposed to China's arrangements with the great powers which stripped it of even more territory. In February 1911, Guangxu was forced to hand over practical administration of the vast bulk of the country outside Zhili province to foreign 'advisors,' and when in October she refused to give imperial consent to a series of brutal laws intended to crack down on nationalist activists, she was unceremoniously deposed and sent into exile in the United States.
Formally, China lost its independence for only eight years, when German North China was declared a republic under Japanese mandate after the First World War. But true independence had to wait until the 1940s, when the brutal Chinese front of the Second World War finally exhausted the resistance of the colonial powers to calls for freedom. Reunification remains a popular buzzword for politicians across the former empire, but has been stalled by continuous geopolitical rivalry between China-Beijing and China-Wuhan and by decades of 'nationalization' programs in Sichuan and the south Chinese republics.
Cixi and Guangxu both are complex figures in Chinese historiography, and different portrayals of the period of the loss of Chinese independence have substantial political undertones which color histories written across the region. One area, however, where Guangxu is remembered fondly is in the Chinese community of California, where she lived her final years as a philanthropist and anti-colonial activist. One of San Francisco's major avenues is now named after her, and her great-granddaughter was elected as the city's first Asian-American mayor in 2011. The former Empress died in 1918, heartbroken by the destruction of her country as a major front in a European war. Her descendants claim the throne of China to this day, and a minor political party in China-Wuhan actively advocates for a restoration.
