China’s Qing dynasty empresses, their lives and power they wielded, take centre stage at US show
- Exhibition at Washington’s Smithsonian examines the power of women in Qing dynasty China using items almost entirely from Beijing’s Palace Museum
- While it argues these women wielded significant influence, the show also acknowledges they were ‘inalienable possessions of the monarchy’
In 1905, seven years before the end of China’s Qing dynasty, Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, visited Beijing’s Forbidden City. She met the ailing Empress Dowager Cixi, who presented her with a black Pekinese dog named Manchu.
Ignoring the Confucian maxim that “Women should not take part in public affairs”, Cixi had made herself China’s de facto ruler, taking control of state affairs and international relations. In the United States, meanwhile, anti-Chinese sentiment was rife, and Roosevelt’s high-level visit could not smooth over the countries’ differences over an immigration treaty. Roosevelt went home with Manchu, but China continued its boycott of US products.
Was Cixi’s power unusual for a woman in China? Who were the Qing dynasty’s previous powerful empresses? And what, anyway, is an “empress dowager”?
These are among the questions addressed in a superb exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in the US capital Washington. There are others, too, such as: What did Qing empresses look like? What things did they own, wear and use? And what do these things tell us about them, about imperial rule and about China in general?
“Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644-1912”, which runs until June 23 and is the biggest show at the Sackler in a decade, comes to Washington 40 years after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China. It is the fruit of a collaboration between two American museums and the Palace Museum in Beijing, also known as the Forbidden City.