lurked the smiles of favour or the lightning of anger.  No one would take her to be over forty.  She carried tablets on which, even during conversation, she jotted down memoranda.  Her pencil was the support of her sceptre.  With it she sent out her autograph commands; and with it, too, she inscribed those pictured characters which were worn as the proudest decorations [Page 276] of her ministers.  I have seen them in gilded frames in the hall of a viceroy.

The elegance of her culture excited sincere admiration in a country where women are illiterate; and the breadth of her understanding was such as to take in the details of government.  She chose her agents with rare judgment, and shifted them from pillar to post, so that they might not forget their dependence on her will.  Without a parallel in her own country, she has been sometimes compared with Catherine II. of Russia.  She had the advantage in the decency of her private life; for though she is said to have had favourites they have never dared to boast of her favours, nor was a curious public ever able to identify them.

Her full name, including honorific epithets added by the Academy, was Tse Hi Tuanyin Kangyi Chaoyu Chuangcheng Shoukung Chinhien Chunghi.  A few hours before her death, which occurred on the day after the Emperor’s, she named his nephew as successor, and the present ruler, Hsuan-Tung, who was born in 1903, began to reign November 14, 1908.

Let the Dowager be taken as a type of the Manchu woman.  The late Emperor, though handsome and intelligent, was too small for a representative of a robust race.  Tuan Fang, the High Commissioner, is a more favourable specimen.  The Manchus are in general taller than the Chinese, and both in physical and intellectual qualities they prove that their branch of the family is far from effete.

Prince Kung, who for fifteen years presided over the imperial cabinet, was tall, handsome and urbane. [Page 277] Despite the disadvantages of an education in a narrow-minded court, he displayed a breadth and capacity of a high order.  Prince Ching, who succeeded him in 1875, though less attractive in person, is not deficient in that sort of astuteness that passes for statesmanship.  What better evidence than that he has kept himself on top of a rolling log for thirty years?  To keep his position through the dethronement of the Emperor and the convulsions of the Boxer War required agility and adaptability of no mean order.  Personally I have seen much of both princes.  They are abler men than one would expect to find among the offshoots of an Oriental court.