Biography
Empress Xiaodingjing née Yehenara （叶赫那拉氏） was the second daughter of Vice General Guixiang （桂祥） by his wife of Mongolian origin. Lady Yehenara was born in the seventh year of Emperor Tongzhi's reign and lived from 1868 to 22 February 1913. In 1889, it was decided that the Guangxu Emperor had to marry before ruling the country in his own right. Among many girls, Lady Yehenara was chosen as the Empress Consort because her aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, wanted to strengthen the power of her own family. She married the Guangxu Emperor, her cousin, on 26 February 1889, and became his Empress directly after the wedding ceremony. The wedding ceremony of Guangxu and Longyu, an extremely extravagant and spectacular occasion, took place on 26 February 1889. However, prior to the wedding, on 16 January 1889, the Forbidden City caught fire, and the Gate of Supreme Harmony was burnt down. According to the traditions of the Qing Dynasty imperial court, the route of the Emperor's wedding procession had to pass through the Gate of Supreme Harmony, which was completely destroyed. As a result, many people took this incident as a bad omen.
Due to the fact that the reconstruction of the gate would be extremely time-consuming, and the wedding date of the Emperor could not be postponed once decided, Empress Dowager Cixi ordered a tent resembling the gate to be constructed. The artisans used paper and wood to build the tent, and after it was done, the tent had exactly the same height and the same width as the original gate, with ornamentation extremely similar to the original. As a result, even people who walked through the inner palace on a regular basis could not tell the difference between the original gate and the temporary tent at first.
However, after their marriage, Yehenara was detested and ignored by the Guangxu Emperor, who favoured Consort Zhen of the Tatara clan (Chinese: 他他拉氏珍妃). At first, Empress Dowager Cixi regarded Consort Zhen favourably, but, after finding out she had overspent her allowance, she demoted her. Cixi eventually grew more hostile to the Imperial Consort, and sent her to a "cold palace", a place reserved for an emperor's disfavoured consorts.
Due to her opposition to the Guangxu Emperor's Hundred Day's Reform of 1898, Empress Dowager Cixi had him imprisoned inside the former Imperial Residence. Lady Yehenara would frequently spy on the Emperor and report his every action to Empress Dowager Cixi. In 1900, during the Boxer rebellion, Lady Yehenara fled with the Empress Dowager and Emperor Guangxu to Xi'an when Beijing was occupied by foreign armies. Upon their return, Consort Zhen drowned in a well within the Forbidden City.
Both the Guangxu Emperor and Cixi died within one day of each other in 1908, after which Empress Yehenara was made Empress Dowager, with the honorable titles Longyu, meaning "Auspicious and Prosperous".
Read more about this topic: Empress Dowager Longyu
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