Unleashed Voices: Beijing’s increasingly Forbidden City / Part II

Xi Jinping, China’s most recent emperor, reaches deep into his nation’s past for a new lease on an ancient kingdom…We pick up the story with the Emperor Dowager through The Imperial Way 2023. Part II

By Audrey Ronning Topping

The controversial Empress Dowager Tzu-chi joined her ancestors on November 15, 1908, at the Hour of the Goat (between 1 PM and 3 PM). She had planned her own funeral which cost the already bankrupt nation 1.5 million silver taels (perhaps $40 million today). Thus ended China’s 2,000-year-old Imperial Dynastic Cycle. The `Mandate…