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What, now, was the Empress Dowager doing while Kuang Hsu was
issuing all these reform edicts, which, we are told, were so
contrary to all her reactionary principles? Why did she not
stretch forth her hand and prevent them? She was spending the hot
months at the Summer Palace, fifteen miles away, without offering
either advice, objection or hindrance, and it was not until two
delegations of officials and princes had appeared before her and
plead with her to come and take control of affairs and thus save
them from being ousted or beheaded, and herself from
imprisonment, did she consent to come. By thus taking the throne
she virtually placed herself in the hands of the conservative
party, and all his reform measures, except that of the Peking
University and provincial schools, were, for the time,
countermanded, and the Boxers were allowed to test their strength
with the allied Powers.
Passing over the two bad years of the Empress Dowager, which we
have treated in another chapter, we find her again, after the
failure of the Boxer uprising, and the return of the court to
Peking, reissuing the same style of edicts that had gone out from
the pen of Kuang Hsu. On August 29, 1901, she ordered "the
abolition of essays on the Chinese classics in examinations for
literary degrees, and substituted therefor essays and articles on
some phase of modern affairs, Western laws or political economy
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