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For herself she had always been a woman of frugal habits, and the successful course of recent Chinese history was largely due to her firmness and resolution. Her associate in the Regency, Tsi Thsi, who has always been more or less of an invalid, still survives.
The unpopularity caused by his proposed innovations proved fatal to Kwangsu; for the party at court, headed by the Empress-dowager Tsi An, took advantage of it to arrest and imprison him. Kang Yu Wei, having received warning of the conspiracy, had fled, and succeeded in gaining an asylum under the British flag, but many of the emperor's personal followers were put to death.
The Manchu dynasty is an admirable illustration of the old story: conquerors taken captive by the conquered. At this moment, the term "K`ang Tsi" is daily on the lips of every student of the Chinese language, native or foreign, throughout the empire.
Mailla relates the following incident: "In the reign of the emperor Ling Wang of the Chow dynasty, 548 B.C., Chang Kong, Prince of Tsi, became enamoured of the wife of Tsouichow, a general, who resented the affront and killed the prince. The historians attached to the household of the prince recorded the facts, and named Tsouichow as the murderer.
In a proclamation issued in her name and possibly at her request, Tsi An described the course of her malady, the solicitude of the emperor, and urged upon him the duty of his high place to put restraint upon his grief. Her death occurred on April 18, from heart disease, when she was only forty-five, and her funeral obsequies were as splendid as her services demanded.
He exclaimed, "What need have I of gold after my death? a few glasses of wine would be more valuable." They complied with his wish, and while he was drunk they strangled him with his own silken girdle. After the Tsi came the Leang dynasty, another of those insignificant and unworthy families which occupy the stage of Chinese history during this long period of disunion.
As the cover of the food-basket was closed down I noticed a cooked fowl, two live pheasants with their legs tied together, a pair of my own muddy boots, a pair of dancing pumps, and a dirty collar, all in addition to my little luxuries and the two pigeons aforesaid. Reader, if thou would'st travel in China, peep not into thy hoh shïh lan tsï if thou would'st feed well.
Liuchi, perceiving that she had made an enemy by her act, at once resolved to remove him from her path, with the relentless and terrible decision with which she had disposed of her former rivals. Covertly dropping the poison, which she seems to have always had ready for use, into a goblet of wine, she presented it to the prince of Tsi, asking him to pledge her in a draught.
But there is no mitigation to the story of the empress Liuchi, who, with poison as her weapon, made herself supreme dictator of the great Chinese realm. The death of the great emperor Kaotsou left two aspirants for the throne, the princes Hoeiti, son of Liuchi, and Chow Wang, son of the empress Tsi.
The one kindred hyena who, at fifty-five, had defied the world was Tsi An, the Chinese Empress, and he had helped to squelch her. Do you see it now? To burglarise the world, this thug had every advantage. The police were asleep. The coast was clear. The jimmies and the dynamite sticks were ready. Even the dark lantern was packed. The kit was complete. He had everything.
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