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Few students of modern China would dispute that the Hundred Days Reform of

1898 ushered in a major nation-building effort that, despite false

starts and setbacks, has continued to this day. Thus, history and policy

converged when its centenary in 1998 was widely commemorated—20 years

after reform was again proclaimed China's national agenda (1978). Beida,

or Peking University, which traces its founding to the establishment of the

Imperial College (Jingshi daxuetang) in 1898, celebrated not only the

historical event but also its own evolution over the past century to become

China's leading institution of higher learning. The Palace Museum,

which stands on the grounds of the former Forbidden City, where much of the

1898 drama unfolded, commemorated with an exhibition of archival materials

and historical artifacts. It lasted from June 11 to September 21, the

original dates of the Hundred Days. Historians did not lag behind. In an

outpour of publications, they explored the multifarious facets of the famous

episode. China scholars elsewhere also took note of the centenary. Two

panels at the 1998 meetings of the Association for Asian Studies in

Washington, D.C., for example, presented papers that dealt with, if not

exactly what transpired a century ago, issues somehow related to it.

Compared to missionaries like Timothy Richard (1845–1919) and Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), Dr Alexander Maclean Mackay is a name almost unknown in the annals of Christian evangelism in China. The personnel roster of the London Missionary Society, to which he initially belonged, did boast of such luminaries as Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a pioneering Protestant preacher in early nineteenth-century China and James Legge (1815–1897), a missionary turned Sinologist and Oxford don. But Mackay, as one of the Mission's numerous field workers, is not likely to be found in such distinguished company. In fact, his sojourn in China, in comparison, was relatively brief. It lasted not quite six years, from January 1891 to September 1896, when he died of cholera and was buried in China. In many ways, he was merely another missionary, one of the many men and women, Catholic and Protestant, who had toiled in China, then faded into oblivion, and have since eluded the eye of the historical researcher.

It is a commonplace in modern Chinese history that the twin-concept oft'i–yungespoused a doctrine of cultural conservatism in late-Ch'ing China. Briefly, the dichotomy is seen as a call to preserve the 'substance' (t'i) of the Chinese cultural tradition by adopting the 'function' (yung) of Western technology, or simply, to strengthen Confucian China by implementing Western-inspired reforms; hence, the famous slogan, 'Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application' (Chung-hsueh wei-t'i Hsi-hsueh weiyung). Both the slogan and the position it reflects have long come under criticism. An early, influential critic was Yen Fu, the well-known interpreter of Social Darwinism in late-Ch'ing China. In 1902, in a published open letter to the editor ofWai-chiao pao(Foreign affairs magazine), Yen expanded on an earlier view of a contemporary schlar, Ch'iu T'ing-liang, that the notion oft'i-yung, when properly applied, refers to the two complementary aspects of a single entity and not to attributes from two different juxtaposed objects. To drive home his point, Yen cites an analogy. An ox ast'ihas itsyung, which is to carry heavy loads, whereas a horse ast'ihas itsyung, which is to go long distances. Now the attempt to combine at'iwith an extraneousyungis like ascribing a horse's function to an ox's body, or vice versa, and the result could only be a bizarre mismatch, an affront to nature's purposes.

The significance of the coup d'état of 1861 in late-Ch'ing history has been appraised by many scholars. A fairly typical viewpoint has been expressed by the eminent Chinese historian Wu Hsiang-hsiang: 'Had there not been the coup of 1861, there would not have been the coup of 1898.' One need not entertain the same degree of determinism to acknowledge, with Wu, that the coup of 1861 was important in its effects on the exercise of imperial power in later decades. The coup did, in fact, not only provide the immediate circumstances which favored an unprecedented experiment with the Ch'ing imperial form, namely, a regency formed by the empresses-dowager, but it did also enable the famous (or infamous) empress-dowager, Tz'u-hsi, to secure her rise to a supremacy in court affairs which ended only with her death in 1908. In view of this second development, scholars have long argued that Tz'u-hsi was both the mastermind and chief beneficiary of the coup, which was the product of her intrigues and manipulations. In fact, it has been called her (Yehonala's) coup d'état. While this view will presently be examined, my main purpose here is to define the nature of the political crisis from which the coup of 1861, as well as the idea of the female regency, originated. This, I believe, is one aspect of the subject that has not been sufficiently investigated.