Xianfeng Emperor

The Xianfeng Emperor reigned for eleven years, during which the Qing dynasty came closer to destruction than at any point before 1911, and he died at thirty in exile from his own capital. He came to the throne in 1850, months before the Taiping Rebellion began; within three years the Taiping held Nanjing and much of the Yangtze valley, and the war that followed killed something between twenty and thirty million people, which makes it the deadliest civil war in history. The Nian rebellion ran in the north at the same time and the Panthay and Dungan revolts in the southwest and northwest. The dynasty survived because the emperor allowed Chinese provincial officials - Zeng Guofan, and later Li Hongzhang - to raise regional armies outside the Manchu banner system, a decision that saved the state and permanently shifted military power to the provinces. The Second Opium War then brought a British and French expedition that defeated the imperial forces at Baliqiao in 1860; the court fled to the hunting lodge at Chengde, and Lord Elgin ordered the Summer Palace burned in reprisal for the torture and killing of a captured negotiating party. The Convention of Peking legalised the opium trade, opened more ports, ceded Kowloon and admitted foreign legations to the capital. He never returned to Beijing and died at Chengde in August 1861, leaving a five-year-old son. His consort, the boy's mother, became the Empress Dowager Cixi within weeks by overthrowing the regents he had appointed, and dominated the dynasty for the next forty-seven years. His reign is the one in which the Qing stopped being able to refuse. He was the last Chinese emperor to hold real personal power. Every ruler after him was a child, a figurehead or both.

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