VII. DEATH OF THE EMPEROR.
His flight from the capital—Succession of his son—Regency of the two empresses—Prince Kung's sanguinary coup d'état.
Next in importance to the suppression of the Taiping rebellion, the death of the Emperor Hsienfêng marked the period we are now considering. That unfortunate monarch, who deserted his capital against the strongest remonstrances of his advisers, on the approach of the Allied forces, died at his hiding-place in August 1861, and his only son was proclaimed in his stead under the style of Tungchih. The new emperor was a child, and provision had to be made for a regency. How this regency fell into the hands of two empresses—one the mother of the young emperor, the other the true widow of the deceased—was not very well understood by the foreigners then in the capital. Prince Kung's coup d'état, by which the three male members of the regency were elaborately arraigned and then assassinated, was not organised to get rid of any imaginary "anti-foreign faction," as was too easily assumed at the time, but simply and solely to place the empire at the feet of himself and the emperor's mother. "Parties" in Peking have always been, and are to this day, a puzzle to foreigners, who, having seldom at the moment any trustworthy means of informing themselves, are apt to be carried away by "cries," sometimes got up for the purpose of misleading them,—for the Chinese are not at all averse from turning to account the half knowledge on which foreigners are prone to form their opinions.