This is the text of a talk delivered at a symposium at Sias University in May, 2010. I have tried to keep it simple, as the audience was made up of non-native English speakers. It’s about women, but it’s also about the uses and abuses of history, and about critical thinking. Historians have a responsibility for maintaining the highest level of integrity, and one of their greatest sins is to destroy another person’s reputation. This essay is about two people who have been particularly maligned, and is an attempt to set the record straight.

I’m going to talk about probably the two most famous women in Chinese history – and the two most evil.
Wu Zetian & Cixi
Wu Zhao (Wu Zetian) was a concubine of Emperor Tang Taizong (Li Shimin) (reigned 626-649 AD)
She captivated his son, the emperor Tang Gaozong (649-683)
She suffocated her own newborn daughter, accused the empress of the crime, & then replaced her
She began to rule in the name of her husband, who was weak & ill
She put her own supporters & family in power & brutally murdered her opponents
When Gaozong was paralyzed by a stroke in 660, Empress Wu dominated China until her death in 705
She had Gaozong’s wife, ex-empress Wang, and beautiful concubine Xiao murdered
She cut off their arms & legs, & threw them into a wine vat to die
She killed or exiled their supporters & countless others
She murdered 12 branches of the imperial family
She created a secret police which ran a reign of terror
She purged the scholars & killed or exiled them & their families
She manipulated the succession after Gaozong’s death
She had the crown prince Li Hong poisoned
She had the other princes exiled
She had her 3rd son declared emperor
After just 6 weeks she had him charged with treason & deposed
She then replaced Emperor Zhongzong with his brother Ruizong
For 6 years she treated Ruizong as a puppet
Finally in 690 she took the throne & became China’s only woman emperor
She promoted herself as a deity & took the title of “Sage Mother”
She made her lover the abbot of White Horse Temple
He rewarded Wu by finding the “Great Cloud Sutra”
This was a fake document claiming the Buddha Maitreya would return as a female deity
She established temples in every prefecture to preach this doctrine
She took the title of “Maitreya the Peerless”
She had the great stone buddha at Longmen Grotto carved in her image
She declared herself “Holy and Divine Emperor” of a new Zhou Dynasty
She took two young Zhang brothers as lovers
They bullied, got drunk, gambled, & flouted all moral conventions
Bribery & corruption ran rampant
Finally the Zhangs were assassinated & Wu forced to abdicate
Her reign of tyranny and evil became a warning to future generations
At least this is the story that has come down to us in history
When you study history, you need to ask the question, “Who wrote the history?”
Why did they write it?
Who was paying them to write their history?
Why should we take their word for it?
“History is what historians say it is”
Historians have biases
Historians want us to believe what they tell us
History is always written by the winner
This is not only a Chinese problem
All countries everywhere use & abuse history for their own purposes
All winners try to convince the world that they are right and good
All winners try to convince the world that their enemies are wrong and bad
Understanding these questions is the task of historiography
Historiography can be defined as the Philosophy of History, the History of History, or the Study of History resulting from a study of the historians who write the history
“All History is Historiography”
You cannot understand history unless you understand the people who wrote the history
Who wrote Wu Zetian’s history?
Confucian scholars who were employed by the government
That means they were in the service of the Li family (the emperor)
The Wu family had been their rivals
In 705 the Li family was the winner
Wu Zetian and her family were the losers
But also, Empress Wu was a woman
Women were not supposed to govern countries
This had never been done before – at least not openly
This violated the order of the universe
Naturally, she had to be punished
The best way to do this was to punish her reputation
Confucian historians told the world all about the evil reign of the tyrant Wu
Let’s examine Wu Zetian again
Under her reign China expanded to its great extent
She provided for the needs of the people
Her government was generally regarded as more successful than that of the Li family
Even though she persecuted high officials, she was generous to the lower ranks
Commoners were given the opportunity to work for the government for the first time
She gave promotions & salary increases to her officials
She provided relief in times of famine & natural disaster
So what do historians say about Wu Zetian now?
Most historians seem to think that her reign was fairly good for the common people
She was not a great ruler, but she was a good ruler
Did she do all those evil things the historians tell us she did?
Probably
But so did many or most emperors and kings in most cultures and countries
The historians only tell us the bad part of her reign
They overlook the good parts
So when we read about the evil tyrant Empress Wu, we must first ask ourselves, “Who wrote that history?” and then we must try to make a balanced view of her reign
There was definitely some evil
But there was also definitely some good

Now I want to say something even more controversial
This is not the stuff you learned in your history books
The information is relatively new, but I believe it is correct
Let us look at Empress Dowager Cixi – the “Dragon Lady”
She was concubine of Emperor Xianfeng (1851-1861)
She was mother of Emperor Tongzhi (1862-1874)
She was suspected of murdering the emperor
She was noted for violent rages
She supposedly had many lovers
She engaged in sexual orgies
She diverted state money into the Forbidden City
She diverted state money into the Summer Palace
Marble Boat was built with money stolen from the navy
Emperor Guangxu (1875-1908) was terrified of her
She held him as a prisoner in the Summer Palace
She crushed the “Hundred Days” reform movement & killed its leaders
She encouraged the Boxers (Yihetuan) to destroy all things foreign & kill foreigners
When the 8 Powers invaded China, she urged the emperor to flee & murdered his concubine who urged him to face the enemy
She died in 1908, but not before she had the emperor killed to prevent him from pursuing more reforms
She had effectively ruled China for 50 years from “behind the curtain”
But is this the real woman people called the “Old Buddha”?
Our main source for the life of Cixi is Sir Edmund Backhouse
Backhouse wrote China under the Empress Dowager in 1910
He also wrote Annals and Memoirs of the Court in Peking in 1914
The first book went through 8 printings in 18 months
It was translated into many languages, including Chinese
It was used by both republican & communist scholars for many years
These books provided all the shocking details of the depraved life of Cixi
Amazingly, only Backhouse seemed to know most of those details
But historians to this day continue to rely on his works
They largely ignore the letters & diaries of many people who had far more first-hand acquaintance with Cixi than Backhouse ever had
These accounts nearly all portray a Cixi very different from the evil monster of Edmund Backhouse
So who was Edmund Backhouse?
In 1974 Hugh Trevor-Roper published Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse
He revealed Backhouse to be a counterfeiter, con man, and a complete fraud
Backhouse and his friends had supported themselves in Peking by forging and selling Chinese literary masterpieces, court papers, and court diaries
This was the material he used to fabricate his life of Cixi
If the source material Backhouse used was a fraud, then it follows that the two books he wrote based on that source material are also frauds
But people don’t want to think logically about this
They prefer the stories of sex, scandal, and evil which fill the pages of Backhouse’s books
After all, those stories are far more exciting
Backhouse understood his audience
England in the “Victorian Age” publicly thought of sex as evil, but privately were fascinated with it
Backhouse understood this and catered to their prejudices
His own history helps to explain his methods and motives
Backhouse had an unhappy childhood
He hated his mother, Florence
This probably influenced the hateful image he portrayed of Cixi
Backhouse squandered his inheritance trying to join Oscar Wilde’s circle of homosexuals
He fled England to avoid bankruptcy and ended up in Peking (Beijing) in 1899
He was, however, a genuinely gifted linguist
He translated documents for Morrison, the correspondent of the Times of London
In fact, he was probably the author of many of Morrison’s articles
But no one in Peking knew Backhouse supported himself by writing homosexual pornography
His obsession with pornography probably explains why the theme of sexual perversion underlies all his writings about Cixi
In 1943 he published his memoirs claiming he had a love affair with Cixi beginning in 1902 when he was 29 and Cixi was 67
He claimed his first orgy with the Empress took place at the Summer Palace
He claimed he had some 200 sexual encounters with Cixi until her death 6 years later
He also claimed many hundreds or even thousands of love affairs with men
Backhouse’s memoirs are full of pages of pornographic depictions
They are also totally improbable
But his image of Cixi is useful
A thoroughly evil Empress of China helps to justify the genuinely evil actions of Western imperialists in China at the turn of the 20th century
One rule of history: always make your enemy or your victims look as evil as possible
This makes your actions appear to be just and good
Remember this fundamental rule of history:
The winners write the history
The winners in 1900 blamed the invasion of China on the evil folly of Cixi
To this day, this is the version taught in textbooks
But if we examine the historical sources, we discover that Westerners shot hundreds of Chinese before the siege of Peking began
It appears that the Westerners provoked the war, rather than the Boxers
And it was the foreigners who pillaged and burned the Hanlin Library
That atrocity has always been blamed on the Chinese
Again, Morrison’s stories based on Backhouse’s forgeries form the basis for our interpretation of the “Boxer Uprising” and the entire era
Backhouse gave us a false picture of Cixi, but he also gave us a false picture of China and of many other historical events
People believe them because they want to believe them
Unfortunately, they are largely lies
Scholars are beginning to discover the truth about Backhouse and his work
But many people oppose these new scholars
The works of the older scholars are based on Backhouse, and if Backhouse is proven wrong, then their own works are discredited
But now we know that Backhouse was a liar and a fraud
Has anyone tried to re-examine the life of Cixi by using sources besides Backhouse?
Yes, in 1992 Sterling Seagrave published a book, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China
He sought out the sources that most historians have ignored for the last century
He gave us a very different image of Cixi
Cixi was not perfect – she really did have a bad temper – but she appears to be far more human
Emperor Guangxi was not terrified to be around her
She did not engage in wild orgies – no concubine would have had such freedom
She did not squander vast sums of money – that was done largely by the Manchu princes who actually did rule
And many people who actually met her found her quite charming
Much more can be said, but it should be clear that you cannot always trust the official history
“History is what historians say it is”
If the historians are not telling the truth, then the history cannot be trusted
Lesson to be learned: Don’t believe everything people tell you
Don’t believe everything you read
Think – and critically examine all relevant pieces of information
If you want to be a leader, you must have correct information before you can lead