The New Summer Palace, the Yiheyuan, was Cixi's gilded cage. It was a place of breathtaking beauty, a sprawling landscape of man-made lakes, ornate pavilions, and meticulously designed gardens. It was also a monument to her political exile. Here, she was surrounded by luxury but stripped of all real power. She was a dragoness with her claws and teeth pulled, left with nothing but her wealth, her memories, and her simmering, impotent rage.
She spent her days in a state of restless boredom and furious contemplation. Her network of loyal eunuchs still brought her news from the Forbidden City, and every piece of news was another bitter pill to swallow. The new regency, led by her hated rival Prince Gong and her treacherous sister-in-law Ci'an, was moving with a speed and purpose that was both shocking and deeply impressive.
Her loyal eunuch informant knelt before her on the veranda of the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity, reporting the latest developments from the capital. He spoke of the unanimous passing of the new military reforms in the Grand Council, the tripling of the budget for the Northern Fleet, and the creation of the new Office of Western Affairs, a powerful body now firmly under the control of the modernist Viceroy, Li Hongzhang.
Cixi listened, a string of perfectly round, luminous South Sea pearls running through her fingers, the clicking of the beads the only sound besides the eunuch's deferential voice. Each piece of news was a testament to her own defeat, a confirmation that the new government was systematically undoing her legacy of conservative, controlled rule and replacing it with a radical, foreign-influenced agenda.
"This is not Prince Gong's work," she murmured, more to herself than to the eunuch. Her mind, no longer consumed with the day-to-day running of the government, was now free to obsess over the mystery of her own downfall. "He is a bull. A powerful, charging bull, but he has no finesse, no grand strategy. He has the courage to charge the gate, but not the cunning to lay such a perfect, intricate series of traps."
Her informant, seeking to please her, then offered a piece of seemingly trivial gossip, a tidbit from the inner life of the palace. "And a strange thing, Your Highness," the eunuch whispered. "The young Emperor has a new game. The attendants say he spends hours by the lake, playing with small toy boats. And he speaks often of the Japanese, a strange obsession for a child."
Cixi's fingers stopped moving on the string of pearls. The toy boats. She remembered that day by Kunming Lake, just before her world had collapsed.
"He also asks his tutors the strangest questions," the eunuch continued, unaware of the sudden, intense stillness of his mistress. "Just before the Ryukyu crisis erupted, they say he was demanding lessons on the history of the kingdom, questioning its strategic value. It is as if the boy has the gift of prophecy."
Cixi stared out at the tranquil lake before her, but she was no longer seeing the willow trees and the marble bridge. She was seeing a chessboard, a game that had been played against her where she hadn't even realized she was a player. Her sharp, analytical mind, finally free from the fog of her own political battles, began to connect the pieces, to see the pattern that had been staring her in the face all along.
The boy's strange "dream" of the white bear, which had perfectly predicted the Russian incursion in Xinjiang and had led directly to the appointment of the independent General Zuo Zongtang, a man she could not control.
His "coincidental" and obsessive practicing of the name of Li Fengbao, an obscure diplomat who was then miraculously proposed as the perfect, unassailable candidate to run the new naval office.
And now, this. His "childish" game with the toy boats, his "random" interest in the forgotten Kingdom of Ryukyu, which had perfectly anticipated and then exacerbated the diplomatic crisis with Japan, a crisis that was now being used to justify a massive expansion of the very fleet she had opposed.
The random comments. The prophetic dreams. The innocent games. They were not random at all. They were a breadcrumb trail, a perfectly executed series of calculated moves, each one designed to anticipate and shape every major political event of the last several months. It was a strategy of such profound depth, such patient and terrifying foresight, that it made Prince Gong's bull-headed charges look like the clumsy fumblings of an amateur.
She looked down at the pearls in her hand, their cool, smooth surfaces a familiar comfort. And she remembered the final, damning charge that had sealed her fate—the scandal of the pearl shawl, the accusation that she had embezzled naval funds for her own vanity. An accusation that had come from nowhere, armed with evidence that should have been impossible to obtain.
A single, horrifying, and utterly insane thought began to form in her mind.
"It's him," she whispered, the words escaping her lips in a breath of pure disbelief. "It was always him."
She finally understood. Her true enemy was not Prince Gong. Her adversary was not some hidden cabal of reformist ministers whispering in the shadows. Her true nemesis, the grandmaster who had been playing her from the very beginning, was the small, sickly boy she had placed on the throne herself. The puppet she had chosen for his weakness and pliancy.
The child was a facade. The quiet, shy, sickly boy was a mask. And behind that mask was a terrifying, ancient, and inhuman intelligence that had outmaneuvered her at every single turn. She had been engaged in a political struggle, while he had been waging a war she didn't even know existed.
She opened her hand. The string of pearls, a symbol of her wealth and status, slipped from her grasp. It fell to the marble veranda with a soft, rattling clatter, the beads scattering across the floor like priceless, frozen tears.
A new kind of fear settled into her heart, a fear far deeper than the loss of political power. She was no longer just a deposed regent living in luxurious exile. She was a woman who had been utterly and completely outwitted by something she could not possibly comprehend. And she knew a secret that no one else in the court did—the secret of the Emperor's true nature. And in the deadly game she now realized she was in, she knew that possessing such a secret did not make her powerful. It made her a liability. And liabilities, in the world she came from, were always, eventually, eliminated.