"The Empress-mother was twenty-seven years old, clever, ambitious, and apparently fearless. … She conceived a scheme by which the position might be reversed, and confided it to her brother-in-law, Prince Kung. … The ambition which the Empress-mother confided to Prince Kung was nothing less than to suppress the Council of Regency, and set up in its place the authority of the two Empresses. Inasmuch, however, as they were ignorant of affairs, and women to boot, the Prince himself was to be the real executive and de facto ruler of the empire. Prince Kung yielded to the seduction, and thus became accessory to the violation of the dynastic law. … The Regents were returning from the obsequies of the deceased Emperor when Prince Kung launched trumped-up charges against them of neglect of certain funeral rites, had them arrested on the road, and executed. By this summary violence the two Empresses were securely established as Regents, with Prince Kung as Chancellor of the empire. For a few years things went smoothly. … The two Regents seldom met. … From the relative position of the buildings in which they had their respective apartments, the ladies were known as the Eastern and Western Empresses, the former being the title commonly applied to the one whom we have termed the true Empress. … {95} "The 'Eastern Empress' was full of gentleness, meditation, and widowhood. … She was, therefore, unequally yoked with her sterner sister, and the pair could never have really worked together to any practical end. The eclipse of the weaker luminary was only a question of time. … The life and death of the young Emperor Tung-Chih, the son of Hsien-fêng and the present Empress-regnante, seems little more than an episode in the career of his imperial—and imperious—mother. He died within two years of his full accession, removed by his own mother as some would have us believe, but by quite other agencies as others no less boldly affirm. … With the disappearance of her son, the last plank in the legal platform of the Empress-mother disappeared. But her appetite had grown by what it fed upon. She had now had fourteen years' schooling in statecraft, and she resolved that, 'per fas et nefas,' reign who might, she would govern. … The story of her second coup d'etat of January, 1875, has been often related,—how the Empress so-called caused her own sister's child to be snatched out of its warm bed on a bitter night and conveyed into the Palace, whence he was proclaimed Emperor at daybreak. By this stroke the Regent at once aggrandised her own family, made a friend of a younger brother-in-law, the father of the child, to replace the elder who had become an enemy, and, to sum up all, secured for herself a new lease of power. For she who could thus make an emperor could also make a regent."