With the few changes necessitated by the different season of the year of the Empress Dowager’s Birthday, everything was carried out as for the Emperor’s except on a larger scale, as she was celebrating more years than His Majesty. The Palace was filled to overflowing with the many ladies invited to be present. Some came from the heart of distant Manchuria, the cradle of the Dynasty. The winter Court dress of the ladies, worn for Her Majesty’s Birthday, was of satin, lined and trimmed with fur, with sable collars. Like the summer Court dress, the winter gown was elaborately embroidered in the golden double dragon. The picturesque summer coiffure had also been replaced by winter hats of fur with jewels across the front and an elaborate crown, studded with precious stones. Brilliant bunches of flowers were worn on either side of the coiffure, in winter as in summer. The celebration of birthday festivities in China is always accompanied by rites and worship of the ancestral tablets, and Her Majesty was obliged to go into Peking several times during the celebration. The ceremonies, themselves, were also very tiring. All this effort to keep up, and to properly carry out her part of the ceremonies, added to her real anxiety, made the forced celebration of her sixty-ninth Birthday far from a happy event to the Empress Dowager of China, who found the Empire she was trying to guide, in so perilous a position--war threatening on its confines, foreign complications of all kinds to deal with, and rebellion within. CHAPTER XXIV THE WINTER PALACE The Summer Palace was always the Empress Dowager’s favorite Palace, but after the Boxer rising and the subsequent occupation of Peking by the Allies, when foreign troops were stationed in both the Peking Palaces, and so much damage done them, she would have preferred to have lived the whole year round at the Summer Palace. As it is, she occupies it from eight to nine months of the year, going out to it at the first opportunity in the spring, and leaving it only when it is so cold as to make it impracticable. There is a system of heating it by furnaces beneath the floors, but Her Majesty never used these, and the small Chinese porcelain stoves, sorts of braziers, were quite insufficient for heating the immense halls. This, however, would not have influenced her, as she never minded the cold, but it was very difficult for the officials to take the long trip to the Summer Palace during the winter, and this consideration alone caused her to move into the Winter Palace when the weather became very cold. The members of the Cabinet and the Princes had summer homes in the immediate vicinity of the Palace, but there were thousands of officials who were obliged to come out every day from Peking.