Empress Dowager Cixi
- Empress Dowager
When the world was created, the Sovereign asked Adam and Eve to name the flora and fauna, but he himself reserved naming the nations he created and determined their fates thereof.
Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin says the Sovereign. “Time’s up,” and thus around the beginning of the 1800s, China’s fate was dealed with the arrival of the west.
By the mid century, with the Porcelain shattered and the Summer Palace burnt, the European demanded trade, territory and treaty. China’s loss in the Second Opium War was undoubtedly a major blow to its line of imperial rules. Emperor Xianfeng fled Beijing for the safety of Rehe in Manchuria. Turning heavily to alcohol and drugs and becoming seriously ill, he died shortly and Empress Cixi presided over a country whose military strategies, both on land and sea, and in terms of weaponry, were vastly outdated. Sensing an immediate threat from foreigners and realizing that China’s agricultural-based economy could not compete with the industrial west, Empress Cixi made a decision that in Imperial Chinese history, China would learn from Western powers and import their knowledge and technology. But the Sovereign had determined that the Dragon be tranquilised. Hence internal divisions, strives and turmoils dominated the problems the country needed to quickly catch up.
China was surrounded; by the Anglo-French who came from the sea, the Russians from the north. Later, Emperor Puyi, was like a pigeon with his two wings clipped by the Japanese, who came to share the spoil with a vengence: the Nanking Massacre in modern day Nanjing where some 300,000 were killed, the biological and chemical Unit 731 at Pingfang in Harbin, where another 580,000 souls were experimented upon with vivisections and the study of the viability of germ warfare against the Chinese populace.
The picture above shows the Empress still sitting on her throne, but she was as powerless as a sheep facing her slaughterers, for the words Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin had been spoken and the Dragon tranquilised for a timeframe of some 200 years. China was shattered; it was no coincidence that during that madness in British history, the war should be called the Opium War. The powerlessness of Empress Cixi was only the initial phase, followed by the Last Emperor Puyi.
This story continues . . .
©) Joel Huan, author of Over Mount Fuji (available from Amazon and Barnes&Noble)
Joel Huan
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