The Empress-Dowager, so called, who now recovered her ascendancy over the weak young Emperor, which the reformers had momentarily overcome, and who became again the real Sovereign of the Empire, as she had been for the past thirty years, "was never Empress, not even as imperial consort, having been but the secondary wife of Hsien-fêng, the Emperor who fled from his capital on the approach of the Anglo-French forces in 1860 [see, in volume 1, CHINA: A. D. 1856-1860]. But she took the title as the mother of that ill-starred monarch's heir, in which capacity she was allowed to share with the widow proper the regency during the minority of the Emperor Tung-Chih (or Che, for there is no agreement as to the transliteration of Chinese sounds). … The female duumvirate was not what was intended—was in fact an unforeseen result of the last will and testament of the Emperor Hsien-fêng, who died at his hunting lodge at Jêho, whither he himself had been hunted by the victorious invaders. … "The fundamental law of the Ta-tsing dynasty is the Salic law. No woman and no eunuch can ever reign or rule. Conforming to the laws of his house, the Emperor in his will nominated a Council of Regency during the minority of his infant son, afterwards known as the Emperor Tung-Chih. The Council was composed of two imperial princes and the Minister Sun-che. To his two wives, the true but childless one and the secondary one who was mother of the Prince Imperial, he bequeathed the guardianship of the infant. The Emperor placed his real confidence in the first, the legal wife; but he was fond of the other, the mother of his heir. A serious dilemma thus confronted him, which he thought to evade by placing in the hands of the Empress a private and personal testament, giving her absolute authority over her colleague, only to be exercised, however, in certain emergencies. As a matter of fact, the power was never called into exercise.