Empress Dowager Cixi Research Articles

“Jaw Laoshy” and Teaching Chinese

‘‘JAW LAOSHY’’ AND TEACHING CHINESE EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY PERRY LINK University of California INTRODUCTION Perry Link University of California A teacher, in some ways, is like a gardener—crucial at the stage of planting, and helpful in the provision of sufficient light, water, and fertilizer, as well as weeding out unwanted growths. In the end, however, any gardener (teacher) is far from able to control, or even to know about, the number, size, and shape of every leaf that he or she helped to grow. Rulan Chao Pian (a.k.a., Jaw laoshy 趙老師) had two very different kinds of students. Her Ph.D. students in musicology, well represented elsewhere in this issue of CHINOPERL, might be viewed as her most well-tended and carefully pruned fruit trees. She knew each peach and plum well, and in her later years could enumerate them with pride. Her other students, vastly more in number but unknowable in anywhere near the same intimacy, were her Chinese language students. In her quarter-century teaching elementary Chinese at Harvard there were hundreds, perhaps even a thousand, of them. In nurturing these students—this broader field of grain—the correct planting of the seeds was indeed crucial (get your tones right!), but the harvest provided nourishment not only for musicology but for China studies in every discipline—as well, for that matter, as many pursuits outside academe, such as public service, journalism, and commerce. There is no way she, or anyone, could have kept track of the far-reaching effects of her language teaching. The section that follows contains essays by four people who began their study of Chinese with Rulan Pian and one who served as her colleague in language-teaching. The five are all scholars—their fields include political science, history, and literature. (I should apologize, perhaps, for not finding a diplomat, journalist, or banker to contribute, just to illustrate my claim above, but the reader will find that the five pieces below already make this point fairly well.) The five essays, although brief, range widely, touching on topics as various as how long the tongue should rest on the hard palate to produce a certain sound, the pioneering steps of a woman in a male academic world, Chinese disillusionment with Wilsonian promises of cosmopolitan democracy, and the relationship between language learning and performance. This variety, although still insufficient to present its subject in her full complexity, does remind us of some of the important backgrounds to her life, and several of her ancillary competences, that we might otherwise overlook. But beyond the variety of the five essays, readers will notice at least one persistent theme: Rulan Pian was rigorous, and meticulous about the rigor, but CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 33.2 (December 2014): 158–179 # The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2014 DOI: 10.1179/0193777414Z.00000000025 playful at the same time. Life was serious; life was fun. Readers of Bell Yung’s essay in this issue will see that this was just as much a part of her musicological work as her language teaching. RULAN CHAO PIAN June Teufel Dreyer University of Miami I first met Mrs. Pian, in 1961, as a terrified first-year student at the doorway of Chinese Aab in Two Divinity Avenue, home of ‘‘Far Eastern Languages’’ at Harvard University. It is strange to think that she was at least twenty years younger then than I am now. Mrs. Pian greeted me and the others graciously and, although I wish I could say that this assuaged my concerns, I was grateful for her efforts to do so. I’d heard that the course was very difficult; that many people dropped out in the first few weeks. Would I have to return home in disgrace? The other students, some of them faculty members at Harvard or elsewhere, seemed intimidating. Some carried heavy leather briefcases, in stark contrast to my small green bookbag. I ate my lunch sitting on the common room sofa, facing a large oil portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi. She did not look encouraging. The weeks to follow were challenging. I had a difficult time distinguishing second tone from...

Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched modern China

Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) is the most important woman in Chinese history. She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age. At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor's numerous concubines and sexual partners. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China - behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male. In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, telegraph, and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like 'death by a thousand cuts' and put an end to foot-binding. She inaugurated women's liberation, and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot. Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, wars with France and Japan - and the invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager's conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing's Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs - with one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Jung Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new. Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eye-witness accounts, this biography will revolutionise historical thinking about a crucial period in China's - and the world's - history. Packed with drama, fast-paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world's population, and as a unique stateswoman.

The policy decisions of Emperor Guangxu concerning peace with Japan and his relationship to Empress Dowager Cixi

The policy decisions of Emperor Guangxu concerning peace with Japan and his relationship to Empress Dowager Cixi

The Empress Dowager Cixi in American Visual Culture: The Politics of Representation Viewed from a Post-colonialist Perspective

The Empress Dowager Cixi in American Visual Culture: The Politics of Representation Viewed from a Post-colonialist Perspective

A Palace of Her Own: Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) and the Reconstruction of the Wanchun Yuan

Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) is one of the most significant and controversial political figures in modern Chinese history, yet her comprehensive engagement with court art, a symbolic realm of sovereignty in China, remains understudied and is therefore deserving of close analysis. To examine her patronage of art, this paper scrutinizes Cixi’s involvement in the Wanchun yuan (Garden of ten thousand springs) reconstruction project and argues that it not only exemplifies her strategy of asserting political power through art but also provides a rare glimpse of how a patron’s creation and decoration of space can be read as a self-portrait.The author contends that, on the one hand, Cixi utilized the location and scale of her own palace the Tiandi yijiachun (Spring united between Heaven and Earth) as a symbol of her continuous power struggle with Qing imperial tradition; and, on the other hand, that the palace’s layout and interior décor also suggest Cixi’s feminine and religious identities.

The Empress Dowager as Dramaturg: Reinventing Late-Qing Court Theatre

This study argues against the common perception that the Qing court theatre was a closed cultural institution. It suggests that this theatre developed in conjunction with popular performance traditions outside the court that were stimulated by Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). Through close readings of a set of ceremonial dramas (yidian xi) commissioned by the Empress for the birthday celebrations of imperial family members, this essay explores the aesthetic transition from ritual to entertainment in this particular genre. It shows how as Empress Dowager Cixi indulged in her personal fantasies, the court theatre altered. These new plays initiated a paradigm shift from choreographed pageantry to an actor-centered stage, and as such indicate Cixi’s important role in the transformation of ceremonial court theatre.

Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi through the Production of Art

This essay commences with an overview of recent revisionist scholarship about Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) who in her lifetime and thereafter gained a reputation as a formidable opponent of the modernization process in late Qing China. It reviews both past and present studies about the Empress’s political behavior, considers her changing image in more recent historical writing in and outside China, and then focuses on her interest in art and material culture. Discussion of the Empress’s involvement in drama, garden and palace decoration, fashion, and photography introduces the four articles in this journal issue.

Oneself as a Female Deity: Representations of Empress Dowager Cixi as Guanyin

This paper discusses the practice of Empress Dowager Cixi’s embodiment of Guanyin, the most influential female deity in China. Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), the ruling monarch of Qing China, embodied this deity via different media such as painting, fashion, and photographs. This study demonstrates both the religious and historical consequences of Cixi’s particular vision of herself as Guanyin. It explains how Cixi combined theatricality with religiosity in different media and how she fashioned herself in both roles simultaneously as Guanyin and ruling empress Cixi.

“Going Public”: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Circa 1904

Through an examination of both oil portraits and photographs of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), this essay explores the visibility and publicity of portraits of political figures in the last years of China’s imperial history. There are two main issues of concern here. First, the essay discusses how Cixi assumed the role as head of the ‘Great Qing State’ in international diplomacy and politics by using portraits of herself as a public representative to construct a coherent image of her own. Second, the study investigates a new form of political self-fashioning that centered on portraiture, and that emerged in public space in the forms of publication and exhibition. This self-fashioning was tested in public space, which was now conducive to the formation of public opinion, the manipulation of which did not always lie in the hands of political figures such as Cixi.

Piety and Power: The Theatrical Images of Empress Dowager Cixi

Piety and Power: The Theatrical Images of Empress Dowager Cixi

Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s "Swallowing Clouds"

Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s "Swallowing Clouds"

Cixi and Modernization of China

Empress Dowager Cixi, birth mother of the Qing Dynasty Emperor Tongzhi, lived in the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century, and was the actual ruler of the Qing Dynasty from 1861 to 1908. Under her administration, her great support of Westernization during the earlier period promoted modernized revolution of Chinese society, whereas her objection to the political reform during the late period strangled the Hundred Days’ Reform and hindered all-around progress of the Chinese society. Cixi did not only belong to the Renovation Group, but also belonged to the Conservative Liner, and she was an extremely contradictory and complicated historical figure.

Politics, Power and the Chinese Maritime Customs: the Qing Restoration and the Ascent of Robert Hart

On 6 November 1865, Robert Hart, the 30-year-old Inspector General (I.G.) of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, presented to his supervisors in the Zongli Yamen, the Qing Empire's new foreign office, a long memorandum critiquing Chinese administrative practices and offering suggestions for improvement. He criticized corruption and inefficiency at all levels of government, called for tax reform, greater specialization and better technical education of officials, improving contacts with the outside world, and promoting foreign methods and technology. The memorandum, written in Chinese, was entitled the ‘Bystander's View’ (juwai pangguan lun). A few months later it was submitted by the Zongli Yamen to the throne, and together with a similar tract by British diplomat Thomas Wade, distributed to senior Qing officials for comment. It had little impact at the time. But forty years later, when the Empress Dowager Cixi reportedly told the author that she wished she had followed his advice, it became a foundation stone of the mythology of Robert Hart, a symbol of the failure of the Qing court to take full advantage of the Portadown native's wisdom. Hart's premise, encapsulated in the title, was that as an outsider to the Qing system he could see problems that insiders could not. ‘The true face of Mount Lu can only be seen in its entirety by one who stands away from it.’ But the memorandum, for all of its notoriety, was uncharacteristic of Hart.

Breaking the Bonds of Precedent: The 1905–6 Government Reform Commission and the Remaking of the Qing Central State

On January 29, 1901, in the grim aftermath of the Boxer Uprising and the humiliating foreign invasion of north China that followed, the Empress Dowager Cixi issued a famous edict that initiated the New Policy (xinzheng) reforms.The weakness of China is caused by the strength of convention and the rigid network of regulations. We have many mediocre officials but few men of talent and courage. The regulations are used by mediocre men as the means of their self-protection, and taken advantage of by government clerks as sources of profit. The government officials exchange numerous documents but they never touch reality. The appointment of capable men is restricted by regulations so rigid that even men of exceptional talent are missed. What misleads the country can be expressed in one word, selfishness, and what suffocates all under heaven is precedent.

From Teahouse to Playhouse: Theaters As Social Texts in Early-Twentieth-Century China

The qing court had a love-hate relationship with popular drama. From the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) to the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), several Qing rulers were renowned for their doting patronage of popular opera, yet the state was far from sanguine about drama's social effects, viewing public theaters with great suspicion. Theaters, in the eyes of the authorities, were notorious hangouts for ruffians, slackers, gamblers, and insurgents, providing these roustabouts with the ideal environment in which to scheme and swindle. In addition to waging campaigns to censor and weed out “seditious passages” from popular dramas (Guy 1987, 92), emperors throughout the Qing dynasty issued dozens of edicts regulating the construction, location, and clientele of commercial theaters. In rural areas, especially in times of unrest, local authorities often canceled scheduled performances for fear that such occasions offered gangs and secret societies prime opportunities for stirring up trouble (Mackerras 1972, 37). Urban theaters were no safer. According to popular lore, even the Kangxi emperor was cheated by hoodlums when he ventured into a public theater during one of his legendary outings disguised as a commoner (Liao 1997, 80). Yet in spite of their reputation for breeding disorder and moral vice, commercial theaters—commonly known as teahouses (chayuan)—increasingly thrived, and in this new social space, the genre of Peking opera came into full flower during the last century of the Qing dynasty.

The empress dowager CI-XI in western fiction : a stereotype for the far east ?

L’Impératrice douairière Ci-Xi dans le roman occidental : un stéréotype de l’Extrême-Orient ? Selon plusieurs romans historiques occidentaux, l’Impératrice Ci-Xi représente un symbole culturel de l’Extrême-Orient qui réunit les caractéristiques opposées de la femme fatale et de l’Ewig Weibliche. On a attribué le mystère de sa personnalité à la sensibilité esthétique, à la convoitise du pouvoir, et à la nymphomanie. Cependant le roman qui a connu la plus large diffusion dépeint l’Impératrice comme une femme normale plutôt qu’une figure mythique.

A Star Reflects on the Sun

Liu Xiaoqing is an actress from Sichuan. Although her fame has been eclipsed in recent years by Gong Li, Liu remains one of China's most popular leading ladies. She is also remarkable for her brash and outspoken personality-something with which few of her rivals can compete, and she was denounced during the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign for producing an autobiography entitled I Did It My Way (Wode lu). Among her numerous screen roles, her portrayal of the Empress Dowager Ci Xi is, perhaps, most noteworthy. Liu's memoir, from which this excerpt is taken, was written at the height of the Mao Cult and it reflects sentiments that many of her generation have when contemplating their youth, a time when they were enthralled by the revolutionary zeal of the Cultural Revolution. Regardless of the horrors of those years-and there is no dearth of material concerning what Mao's rule did to China-for many, his was an age of passion, excitement, and social engagement. Maoism was suffused with religiosity and c...

Revisionism Reconsidered: Kang Youwei and the Reform Movement of 1898

The reform movement of 1898 sought to move the Qing empire toward comprehensive and unprecedented institutional change and thus was a critical event in modern Chinese history. Had it succeeded, China could have, like Meiji Japan, entered the modern era without revolutions. Yet, however determined and daring its leaders, the historic effort was suddenly and tragically cut short by a coup.The standard view of the Reform Movement has been that, in reaction to China's repeated defeats and humiliation as well as the inadequacy of the Self-strengthening Movement, the reform-minded Kang Youwei (illustration 1) and Liang Qichao finally won support for change from a sympathetic Guangxu Emperor. The reformers then managed to put into effect a nationwide reform program through imperial decrees. But the movement, which lasted barely over one hundred days, came to an abrupt end when the Empress Dowager Cixi and her conservative supporters recaptured political power, executed or imprisoned many of the reformers, and placed the emperor under permanent house arrest.