Empress Dowager Cixi

Born into the Manchu Yehe Nara clan in 1835, Cixi entered the imperial court as a concubine and gave birth to the Xianfeng Emperor's son in 1856. When that emperor died in 1861, she and the late emperor's widow ousted the appointed regents and seized the regency for themselves. She tightened her grip in 1875 by installing her own nephew as the Guangxu Emperor after her son's death. Under her rule the court embraced military modernization while rejecting Western political structures, but in 1898 she crushed the Guangxu Emperor's Hundred Days' Reform and placed him under house arrest - he likely died by arsenic poisoning, though whether by her hand or another's remains unclear. She backed the Boxers during their rebellion, a miscalculation that brought foreign armies to Beijing and sent her fleeing to Xi'an; the resulting Boxer Protocol nearly finished the dynasty. She spent her final years pushing constitutional reforms before dying in November 1908, two days after the imprisoned emperor, leaving power to conservative regents in a country already tearing apart.