In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, the Qing Government signed many unequal treaties, and it was the incompetence of the Qing Government that made the Qing Dynasty decline step by step and eventually perish. In 1901, a Japanese photographer Kazuma Ogawa came to China, and the photographs of the imperial palace showed that the Qing Dynasty government, which had not yet perished, was in ruins.
It was also this year that the Eight-Nation Alliance began to enter Beijing, burning and looting, and many rare treasures and precious cultural relics were robbed, which can be described as no evil, and a fire destroyed the Yuanmingyuan.
This set of photos taken by Ogawa Kazuma is also the earliest and most authoritative photo of the imperial palace that has been circulated so far, and it truly records the original appearance of the Forbidden City at that time, and such photos also have the historical significance of submission. During the filming, Cixi and Guangxu and other members of the royal family had already fled, and at this time, the imperial palace had become an empty city, which was very different from the solemn and gorgeous imperial palace we know in film and television works.
People go to the empty palace, overgrown, the window paper is broken, the damaged door cabinets are not repaired, in this photo, you can clearly see the eunuchs who are still in the palace, at this time they have long lost confidence in the life of the lost master, in order to save their lives had to start serving foreigners who came to visit the Forbidden City.
At that time, the Eight-Nation Alliance even held a military parade outside the noon gate, and cixi at this time knew that foreigners were so good at playing for the tiger in their own territory, and not only that, after the parade, many foreign soldiers stole a lot of treasure.
In such a dilapidated palace, only a few eunuchs were seen, and in the place where the eunuchs lived, it could be seen that even their houses were as uninhabited as if they were perennial, and all of them were as if they were walking dead.
I have to say that no dynasty can escape the law from the beginning to the prosperity and demise, the Qing Dynasty is no exception, but also in the late Qing Dynasty, capitalism replaced the feudal society, which is also in line with the trend of history.