The death of the Pearl Concubine
It was in these northeast halls that the hurried conferences of Cíxǐ and her court took place as the foreign armies approached Běijīng during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
Imperial tutor Reginald Johnston, played unforgettably by Peter O’Toole in Bertolucci’s bowdlerized film The Last Emperor, was an Oxford-educated Scot turned Confucian, with fluent Mandarin and a deep love of China. He had worked in the British administration…
The Dowager Empress Cíxǐ (慈禧太后) was born in 1835, the daughter of a minor Qīng official, and was one of 28 Manchu girls selected for the Xiánfēng emperor (reigned 1851–61).
She was made a concubine of the fifth rank at the age of 17, eventually giving birth to…
The last remains of the Míng and Qīng emperors are widely scattered. And who was really the last emperor?
Emperors went through several names in their lifetimes and after their deaths, but to foreigners and to modern Chinese the one by which almost all Míng and Qīng…
How most of the emperors’ greatest treasures came to be in Taipei
It is surprising that any of the vast collection of art objects and antiquities assembled haphazardly by the emperors over many hundreds of years actually survived into the 21st century. The…
Ancient guildhalls once home away from home for visitors from the provinces
The emperors were as wary as China’s modern rulers of citizens who organised themselves into groups or societies of any kind. But association based on a common trade or point of origin was not…