Empress Dowager Cixi was the most powerful woman in China. Unfortunately, although she was also a woman with great power, she did not have the same iron fist means as Empress Lü and Emperor Wu, nor did she work hard for state affairs like Liu E and Empress Dugu, and she did not assist the emperor as much as Empress Xiaozhuang did.
She spent all her power on eating, drinking and having fun, only for her own enjoyment, and could not correctly decide on major state affairs, so some people said that the disillusionment of the Qing government could not all blame Cixi, she was just a "scapegoat" who was pushed out by politicians and put on the surface, without intelligence, and used extravagance to stabilize the hatred of the people of the whole country. But it is undeniable that whether Cixi is innocent or not, it is a fact that her corpse is vegetarian and squanders when the people are not happy.
Emperor Puyi of the late Qing Dynasty recorded in his autobiography "The First Half of My Life" that he had more than 30 dishes in a meal alone, which was only provided by the imperial dining room, in fact, he did not touch these dishes, he really ate the "love meal" that Empress Longyu and other concubines added to him, and there were also as many as twenty or thirty dishes.
According to the "Inventory of Chickens and Ducks in The Inner and Outer Dining Rooms and Various Places in the First to The Thirtieth Day of September of the Second Year of Xuanun", Puyi had 660 catties of meat in a month, in addition to 150 catties of soup meat, 20 fat chickens, 90 ducks and rookies, and 30 catties of lard. Empress Longyu was even more exaggerated, and had to supply 1860 catties of meat a month, and other ingredients were also not cheap.
But all this is simply "frugal" compared to Empress Dowager Cixi. Empress Dowager Cixi had a hundred dishes for a meal alone, but this was already the most "ordinary" of all her expenses. How luxurious was Empress Dowager Cixi's life? We will know this by using Kangxi and Qianlong.
In 1713, the 60th birthday of the Kangxi Emperor, he held the first banquet in the history of the Qing Dynasty, inviting more than 7,000 elderly people over the age of 65 to participate, and the banquet specifications were high, which was the highest in the Qing Dynasty at that time. Later, in 1722, when Kangxi was 69 years old, he held the second Feast of the Thousand Sorrows in order to wish himself his 70th birthday.
Qianlong, as an emperor who even had to look up to Kangxi during his reign, naturally did not let go of such a grand event as the Banquet of the Thousand Sorrows, and in the fiftieth year of Qianlong, that is, in 1785 AD, in order to celebrate his new fifth grandson, he held an unprecedented and huge banquet of thousands of people, and more than 3,000 more than 60-year-old people gathered together. In 1796, although the 85-year-old Qianlong handed over the throne to the Jiaqing Emperor, as emperor Taishang, he once again held a thousand feasts, which was also the last one in the history of feudal history.
These 4 thousand feasts cost millions of dollars, and only Kangqian Shengshi could afford such a huge expenditure. However, the sum of the four thousand feasts cost was no more than the banquet on Cixi's 60th birthday. In the early tenth of October 1894, the late Qing Dynasty ushered in the 60th birthday of Empress Dowager Cixi in the midst of the storm, and the Qing government allocated 230 million taels of silver as a banquet expense, which still did not take into account the money obtained by the officials in order to send generous gifts to Cixi and frantically amass wealth.
And the birthday gift that Empress Dowager Cixi gave herself was even more luxurious to dare not imagine, just jewelry is worth 10,000 taels of gold, here note that gold is not silver, and the purchase of clothes costs 230,000 taels of gold. Isn't someone curious about where the military expenses of the Beiyang Marine Division went? Oh, it's all here.
Cixi's luxury is reflected in every aspect, even the paper she uses to go to the toilet. A large piece of cotton white paper is first cut separately, gently sprayed with water mist on the small piece of paper with a watering can, and then carefully blanched with an iron, and finally cut into thin strips, and then ironed underneath with a damp cloth pad, so that it is finished. The reason why it is ironed twice is, on the one hand, for cleanliness and hygiene, and on the other hand, to make the paper soft and hairless.
When Sun Dianying opened the tomb of Cixi, he found that the coffin was covered with gold silk woven jewelry brocade, and there were 12,604 large and small pearls on it, and this was only a layer of pearls on top of the brocade. If you count silk bedding, gold-woven bedding, and quilts embellished with pearls, there are nearly a thousand pearls. And these are just the number of pearls in the coffin, and the other rare treasures are innumerable.
No wonder some people say that what was buried for Cixi was not the gold and silver jewelry she collected, but the entire Qing Dynasty.