Who they were
She entered the palace as a junior consort of the Xianfeng Emperor and bore his heir. After the 1861 coup that followed Xianfeng’s death she became co-regent, and from behind the curtain dominated the court for the rest of her life.
What they did
She tolerated the Self-Strengthening Movement’s arsenals and fleets, but crushed the Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898 and placed the Guangxu Emperor under palace confinement. In 1900 she sided with the Boxers against the foreign powers, a war that ended in the punitive Boxer Protocol of 1901; she then sanctioned the late “New Policies”, including the abolition of the imperial examinations in 1905. She died in November 1908, one day after the Guangxu Emperor, having installed the infant Puyi.
Legacy
Her reputation is contested: long blamed as the reactionary who doomed the Qing, she is credited in some modern accounts with real skill at holding power in an unraveling empire.