A low-ranking concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor who, after his death in 1861, seized the regency and became the dominant force in Qing politics for nearly half a century, ruling China from behind a silk screen as regent for two child emperors. She crushed the 1898 Hundred Days' Reform, gambled on the Boxer Rebellion and lost catastrophically, then sponsored sweeping late-Qing reforms before her death in 1908 — and is remembered, depending on the teller, as the reactionary who doomed China or as a pragmatist who held a collapsing empire together.
She ruled a quarter of humanity from behind a screen, because a woman could not sit on the dragon throne in her own name. Cixi entered the palace as a teenage concubine, one of many. She left it, nearly fifty years later, as the most powerful person in China. When her husband died, she did not mourn quietly; she helped engineer a coup, named herself regent for her infant son, and never let go. For decades she governed an empire in its long death-agony, seated behind a curtain while ministers addressed power they were not supposed to see. Her enemies called her a poisoner, a despot, the woman who killed China's last chance to save itself. Her defenders call her a pragmatist dealt an impossible hand. The truth is still being fought over.