On January 12, 1875, the death knell rang from the Qing Palace. Emperor Tongzhi died of illness at the age of 19, becoming the shortest-lived emperor in the history of the Qing Dynasty.
Emperor Tongzhi ascended the throne at the age of 6, the only son of the Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Xianfeng, and the only candidate in the harem of Emperor Xianfeng who was qualified to be elected prince.
It stands to reason that Emperor Tongzhi could have lived a very chic life.
His succession is logical, and he can be said to be the most uncontroversial person in the history of the Qing Dynasty.
There is a strong biological mother to protect him, and there are no brothers who have a concubine to fight, but he died early at the age of 19, and he ended his life as soon as he began to be in power, which also left a lot of room for imagination for later generations to comment and speculate.
Then why did Emperor Tongzhi die of illness at a young age, and what disease did he have?
Speaking of Tongzhi, it is impossible not to mention his previous emperor, that is, his biological father Xianfeng.
What he left to Tongzhi was not only a sharp royal family relationship, but also a mess of political affiliation.
According to our daily understanding of Qing history, the emperor should have three palaces and six courts, and there are a large number of concubines and princes, but why does Xianfeng only have one child in Tongzhi?
If you want to say why Tongzhi can't have other brothers and sisters, in addition to being busy with political affairs and poor health, the more important reason is that he has an iron-fisted biological mother-Yehenara clan,That is, the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was spurned for a long time.
Cixi was born in the Yehenala clan in Beijing, entered the palace at the age of seventeen, and was given the title of "Lan Guiren" by Emperor Xianfeng.
When Cixi entered the palace, it was in the early days of Emperor Xianfeng's succession, although the situation in the country was complicated, but after all, Xianfeng at this time was still a good emperor, so the palace still maintained a peaceful state in the world.
But Emperor Xianfeng has been relatively weak because of his congenital deficiencies, and he is busy with political affairs, so his physical condition is relatively poor.
Arino Shi once commented that he was because his mother, Empress Xiao Quancheng, took oxytocic drugs during childbirth, which caused Emperor Xianfeng to give birth to poor health and almost difficult to survive.
Whatever the reason, it is a fact that Xianfeng is frail and sickly.
As soon as the young and beautiful Cixi entered the palace, she was given the title of the emperor by virtue of her prominent background, and then won the emperor's favor because of her intelligence.
The two fell in love, and Cixi often served by the emperor's side, and then gave birth to the prince Zaichun, who later became the Tongzhi Emperor.
Xianfeng succeeded to the throne for six years, except for the prince Zaichun, only the eldest daughter of the emperor born to Emperor Zhuang Jing, that is, the lord of Rong'angu.
Previously, because there was no prince, Xianfeng loved this daughter very much, but after all, the throne was not passed on to a daughter, and the eyes inside and outside the palace were staring at him.
This prince is undoubtedly "Purple Microstar Falling from the Sky", Xianfeng loves him very much, and Cixi also followed her mother to rely on her son to be named Concubine Yi.
The status of the concubines in the harem is inseparable from the birth of children, and the queen has no heirs.
Except for the queen, she is almost the only one in the harem, and it can be said that she is only under one person.
And after that, Cixi did not take it lightly, although the emperor was not in good health, but there were many concubines in the palace, she was always wary of other women, and she only looked forward to her child ascending to the throne.
Compared with other concubines, in fact, Cixi's purpose is not only limited to being the "queen mother", she is an ambitious politician
Although it now seems that she brought the Qing Dynasty to the bottomless abyss, it was her helm that kept the crumbling Qing Dynasty alive on the surface, and in a way, she was actually more capable than the emperors who died early in the last years of the Qing Dynasty.
Under this mentality, Cixi was wary of other women in the palace who could pose a threat to her.
Once there was a palace maid in the palace who was favored by Xianfeng and was pregnant, and when Cixi learned the news, she immediately poisoned it, and both mother and child died.
In the eighth year of Xianfeng, Xu Jiashi, a noble woman, gave birth to the second son of the emperor, and Emperor Xianfeng wanted to promote her position and named her a concubine.
Such a thing immediately attracted Cixi's attention, and she immediately bribed the people around her and poisoned the prince.
Although Mei Guiren was promoted to Mei Guifei in the end, the second son of the emperor died early after all, and died before he could take a name, and even his title of county king was posthumously given to him after Tongzhi succeeded to the throne.
Tongzhi has lived in such an environment since he was a child, without a brother as a companion, and his mother is a "control freak", he has a strange personality since he was a child, and he is not close to his biological mother Cixi and his grandmother Ci'an.
In the later years of Xianfeng's reign, the domestic situation was complicated, and the Qing court had already been troubled internally and externally.
During this period, it cost 4500 million taels**, almost exhausting the country's financial resources.
At the same time, the imperialist powers were even more eyeing the Qing Dynasty. In 1856, the Second Opium War broke out, and the Eight-Nation Coalition captured the city of Beijing, burned, killed and looted, and the Old Summer Palace became a ruin.
The entire Qing Dynasty was in turmoil, and the perennial internal and external troubles led to Xianfeng's accumulated illness and great loss of energy.
At this timeCixi, who had a prince and was highly favored, began to intervene in the Qing Dynasty politics, often reviewing the recitals on behalf of Emperor Xianfeng.
Emperor Xianfeng died of a serious illness at the age of thirty-one, and was succeeded by his only son, Zaichun, who was Emperor Tongzhi.
Tongzhi was only 8 years old, and he did not have a clear concept of the dispute over imperial power, so he was inexplicably pushed to the highest position in the world.
The emperor was young, and the queen mother of the two palaces listened to the government, and Tongzhi became a veritable puppet emperor.
After the Empress Dowager Cixi listened to the government, she focused on the court day and night, and had no time to discipline Tongzhi, and the young emperor could only be accompanied by the eunuchs and palace maids around him, having fun every day, and not paying attention to study and homework.
Because at this time, the power of the country still fell into the hands of the eight ministers arranged by Xianfeng before his death, Cixi, who was dissatisfied with the fall of power, said that the Empress Dowager Ci'an was moved, and the two united with Prince Gong Wang Yi and launched a power struggle with the ministers of Gu Ming, which is known as the Xinyou coup d'état.
After the end of the political struggle, the ministers of Gu Ming were successively **.
Prince Gong Yixun was crowned as the foreman of the military aircraft, and Prince Shi became the most reliable political force around Cixi.
Since then, the power of Emperor Tongzhi has been completely hollowed out, and the power of the court has been taken into the hands of Cixi alone.
As he grew up day by day, the ministers in the court thought that the empress dowager should be removed and returned to power, but Cixi was obsessed with power and tried to postpone the emperor's pro-government time for various reasons.
Tongzhi couldn't compete for imperial power, and his anger had nowhere to go, so he could only spend all his time drinking and having fun.
Prince Gong Yi, the most powerful by Cixi's side, his eldest son Zaicheng is the same age as the emperor, and the cousins rely on the power of the previous generation, smelling the same, often going in and out of the flower street and willow lane, and living a happy life of flowers and wine.
The two of them made a generous move and acted absurdly, and soon these things reached the ears of the ministers of the court, and they all played a song to persuade the emperor to change his ways.
Prince Yi Chen, Prince Yi Xun and Prince Gong Wang Yi, the three emperors' uncles and princes advised together, but the absurd Tongzhi first threw the advice to the ground, and then said to Yi Cheng, "How about I give up this position to Yuer?" ”
A few days after the admonition, Tongzhi issued an edict to deprive Yixun of the title of "Prince of Iron Hat" and demote him to the king of the county, and at the same time remove the title of Baylor, the title of the king of Zaicheng County, which is clearly absurd revenge.
This palace farce was finally forced to come to an end under the intervention of the queen mother of the two palaces, and Zaicheng did not dare to take the emperor out of the palace again.
In order to stabilize Tongzhi's heart and consolidate his own power, Cixi began to find a suitable queen candidate for her son, planning to set up the Fucha clan as the queen.
However, Emperor Tongzhi already had his own opinions, and he was unwilling to listen to the opinions of the Queen Mother in everything, so he finally chose the Arut clan as the queen.
This made Cixi extremely dissatisfied, because the maternal grandfather of the Arut clan was Duanhua, Prince Zheng, who was given to commit suicide in the Xinyou coup.
She thinks that she and the queen are not compatible, and the emperor is also separated from herself, and every time the emperor and queen sleep together, she will provoke trouble to show her dissatisfaction, resulting in a gap between the emperor and the queen.
In the twelfth year of Tongzhi, in order to get rid of the interference of the Queen Mother, Tongzhi planned to rebuild the Old Summer Palace destroyed by the British and French forces in 1860 under the sign of "entertaining relatives", so that the Queen Mother could live here.
Pulling the flag of repairing the garden for Cixi, Tongzhi had more opportunities to go out of the palace, he and Zaicheng had a private tour for fun, and in the name of "inspecting the gardener" in the suburbs of Beijing.
On the one hand, Tongzhi has not been able to have a child born because of the rare concubine, and on the other hand, because he was hollowed out when he was out playing, his limbs were weak, and his blood was lost.
In this way, until Emperor Tongzhi reached adulthood at the age of eighteen, Cixi had no reason to prevent the emperor from taking power, so she could only hand over power.
I thought that the political field of the Qing Dynasty would change, but only a year later, Emperor Tongzhi was unwell because of a cold while driving Xiyuan, and he began to be bedridden and had a high fever after a few days.
For his **, history has been arguing endlessly.
It is said that he has been in poor health and has been sick due to a cold; Some people think that according to historical records, Emperor Tongzhi may have been infected with smallpox, coupled with poor health, and finally there is no cure; Some people think that his illness was too coincidental, and it may have been deliberately planned by the Empress Dowager Cixi in order to seize power.
However, most people agree with the statement that Emperor Tongzhi was because he often went in and out of Huajie Willow Lane, and contracted syphilis in the process of getting close to women outside the palace, and finally died.
According to historical records, the poisonous sores on the Tongzhi Emperor ** were red, swollen and ulcerating, the pus was constantly painful, the cheeks were swollen and hard, and the mouth was spewing foul smell, which was very similar to the syphilis patient at his deathbed.
From the analysis of the condition and his life trajectory, it is indeed more likely to be syphilis, and the "smallpox" called in the palace is just to hide people's eyes and ears and save the royal face.
Whatever the reason, Tongzhi was unable to save his life in the end, and died at the age of nineteen, becoming one of the first emperors of the Qing Dynasty to die.
In him, in fact, we can also see the refraction of the Qing Dynasty: if you don't pay attention to martial arts or learn literature, you just know how to do whatever you want, and in the end it won't last long.