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Historical person
1831–1861
The Xianfeng Emperor was the Qing ruler of China from 1850 to 1861, inheriting a state already under severe fiscal, social and foreign pressure. Early in his reign the Taiping Rebellion expanded from Guangxi into the Yangtze valley and captured Nanjing, while the Nian uprising and other regional conflicts further strained imperial forces. Much of the effective military response increasingly depended on provincially organised armies rather than the older Banner and Green Standard establishments.
Xianfeng’s reign also encompassed the Second Opium War. The treaties of Tianjin in 1858 widened foreign diplomatic and commercial privileges, and renewed fighting in 1860 ended with Anglo-French forces entering Beijing and destroying the Old Summer Palace. The emperor withdrew to the imperial resort at Rehe, where he died in August 1861. He left his young son, the Tongzhi emperor, under a board of regents, but Cixi, Ci’an and Prince Gong removed them in the Xinyou Coup within months.
Xianfeng appears in Anchee Min’s Empress Orchid and The Last Empress, Pearl S. Buck’s Imperial Woman, George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon and Robert Elegant’s Mandarin, all of which use the Taiping and foreign-war crises surrounding his court. The two linked biographies titled Empress Dowager Cixi also treat Xianfeng as the emperor whose death opened the regency struggle that brought Cixi to power.
Series
The ‘Twas on the China Station series follows George Mayhew as he leaves naval life and builds a merchant house in Shanghai during the violent transformation of mid-nineteenth-century China. Beginning in 1850, the novels place commercial ambition beside the Taiping Rebellion, Qing political weakness and the expanding power…
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The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…
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Anchee Min’s two-volume Empress Orchid sequence reimagines the life of Empress Dowager Cixi, called Orchid or Tzu Hsi in the novels. The first volume follows an impoverished young noblewoman into the Forbidden City, where the birth of the Xianfeng Emperor’s surviving son gives her a place within the…
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The Imperial China Trilogy traces the collapse, survival and reinvention of Chinese imperial power across three centuries. Manchu follows a European artilleryman through the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest; Mandarin moves to the nineteenth-century crisis of the Qing state; and Dynasty carries a Eurasian Hong…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
