Personal Life
The Guangxu Emperor had one empress and two consorts in total. His principal spouse was Empress Xiaodingjing, while his two consorts were Consort Jin and Consort Zhen.
Guangxu was forced by Empress Dowager Cixi to marry her niece (his cousin) Jingfen, who was two years his senior. Jingfen's father Guixiang (Cixi's younger brother) and Cixi selected her as Guangxu's Empress Consort in order to strengthen the power of her own family. After the marriage, Jingfen was made empress and was granted the honorific title of "Longyu", meaning "Auspicious and Prosperous" (Chinese: 隆裕) after the death of her husband. However, Guangxu detested Empress Longyu, and spent most of his time with his favourite concubine Consort Zhen (Chinese: 珍妃), (better known in English as the "Pearl Consort"). Rumours say that in 1900, Consort Zhen was drowned by being thrown into a well on Cixi's order after Consort Zhen begged Empress Dowager Cixi to let the Guangxu Emperor stay in Beijing for negotiations with the foreign powers. That incident happened before Empress Dowager Cixi was preparing to leave the Forbidden City due to the occupation of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900. Like his predecessor, the Tongzhi Emperor, Guangxu died without an issue. After the Guangxu Emperor's death in 1908, Empress Dowager Longyu reigned in cooperation with Prince Chun.
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Famous quotes related to personal life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)