The Wuxu Coup
In 1898 the Guangxu Emperor, on the advice of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, carried out reform, issuing over a hundred edicts in a hundred days. Rumor spread that the reformers plotted to "surround the Garden and seize the Dowager," and Cixi returned from the Summer Palace to resume her rule: Guangxu was confined at Yingtai for ten years, and Tan Sitong and the other Six Gentlemen were beheaded at the Caishikou without trial. Tan Sitong could have fled and did not: "In no country has reform come without bloodshed; today China has heard of none who shed blood for reform, and that is why the nation does not flourish. If there must be, let it begin with me, Sitong."
Declaring war on eleven nations
In 1900 the Boxers, "support the Qing, destroy the foreign," entered Beijing, and Cixi, misled by false intelligence that the powers meant to force her to return power, summoned the Boxer leaders in a single day and then, in Guangxu’s name, declared war simultaneously on eleven nations — Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and others — a solitary case in the history of diplomacy. Two months later the Eight-Nation Alliance entered the capital, and she fled west in Han-woman’s dress with Guangxu, ordering Consort Zhen thrown down a well before she left. The next year the Boxer Protocol: an indemnity of four hundred and fifty million taels, principal and interest together nine hundred and eighty million — "one tael a head, as a mark of humiliation."