Tongzhi Emperor

Biography

Zaichun, the only surviving son of the Xianfeng Emperor and the consort later known as Empress Dowager Cixi, was born in the Forbidden City in 1856. When his father died in 1861 he became emperor at the age of five. The group of regents his father had named, led by Sushun, was soon pushed aside, and real power passed to his mother Cixi and to Empress Dowager Ci'an, with Prince Gong also serving as regent in the early years.

His reign gave its name to the Tongzhi Restoration, an effort to revive the dynasty after the Taiping Rebellion and the defeats of the Opium Wars, during which officials began the Self-Strengthening Movement of arsenals, shipyards and technical schools modelled on Western technology. The young emperor himself had little part in these policies and grew up headstrong and at odds with his mother.

He married in 1872 and took personal power in February 1873, when he received foreign envoys in an audience that avoided the kowtow. In 1874 he quarrelled with his uncles Prince Gong and Prince Chun over his plan to rebuild the Old Summer Palace while the treasury was empty, and dismissed them, but the dowager empresses had them restored. He fell ill with smallpox that December and died in January 1875, aged 18 and without a son; the dowagers then placed his three-year-old cousin on the throne as the Guangxu Emperor.