Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧太后
The Strategist
You play the long game — and you are still at the table when everyone else has left.
- Shrewd
- Adaptable
- Relentless
She entered the Qing palace at sixteen as a concubine of modest rank. When the emperor died in 1861 and left her out of the regency, she allied with the senior empress and a prince, took control in about ten weeks, and governed China from behind a curtain of yellow silk for most of the next forty-seven years.
You read people well and you choose them carefully: much of her early success came from backing capable officials and keeping them. You can also change course — having crushed the reformers of 1898, she later enacted much of their programme herself, abolished the thirteen-hundred-year-old examination system and issued an edict against foot-binding. Her mistakes were as large as her power, above all the war of 1900.
