On November 2, 1861, a group of princes and officials led by the empress dowager Cixi and Prince Gong seized the regency that had been set up for the boy emperor Tongzhi and arrested the eight men named to run the government, among them Sushun, who was executed. The Xianfeng emperor had died at Rehe in August, after the court fled Beijing during the war with Britain and France, and his will had given the regency to the eight. The will was set aside. The two empress dowagers took the seals of office.
The plan was made as the imperial party travelled back to Beijing. Cixi was the mother of the child emperor, a consort of middle rank who had learned the business of the court, and she worked with Prince Gong, who had stayed in the capital to make peace with the foreign powers the year before, and they moved before the regents could reach the city with their own troops. The regents were taken. Three were executed or forced to take their own lives and the rest were dismissed.
Once in power the two dowagers ruled from behind a screen in the throne hall. A group of officials and provincial leaders carried out the programme known as the Self-Strengthening Movement, which built arsenals and shipyards and sent students abroad and set up a modern customs service under foreign inspectors. The aim was to borrow western methods and to keep the dynasty. The plan was tried. It produced real results in the 1860s and 1870s and then ran into the limits of a court that would not change its political order.
Cixi held power, with one interval, until her death in 1908, and she dominated the court through the war with Japan in 1894 and the siege of the foreign legations in 1900 and the reforms that followed. Historians have argued about her ever since, and the case for her is that she held a weak state together, while the case against is that the changes she allowed came too late. The quarrel continues.