An empress dowager who led the politics of the late Qing dynasty. Coming from the Manchu Yehe Nara clan, she became a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor and gave birth to the future Tongzhi Emperor in 1856. When the Xianfeng Emperor died in 1861, she assisted the young Tongzhi Emperor alongside Empress Dowager Ci'an and seized actual power through the Xinyou Coup. In 1875, she placed her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, on the throne and continued to exert a strong influence on Qing politics over a long period. While supporting modernization policies such as the Self-Strengthening Movement, she thwarted the Guangxu Emperor's reforms in the Wuxu Coup of 1898. In the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, she adopted a policy of supporting anti-foreign forces, but the Qing dynasty was forced to make major concessions due to the military intervention of the Allied powers and the Boxer Protocol. In her final years, she promoted reforms known as the New Policies, but died without resolving the crisis of the dynasty.

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