He initiated the radical Hundred Days' Reform in the summer of 1898 but was abruptly stopped when the Empress Dowager launched a coup on 21 September, after which he was held under virtual house arrest until his death one decade later.

Seeing the country's decline, Guangxu allied with intellectuals like Kang Youwei and his disciple Liang Qichao[4] to launch the Hundred Days' Reform in 1898, attempting to save and rejuvenate the nation.

However, this movement threatened the position of the privileged classes of traditional Chinese society[4] and was soon suppressed by the conservative forces led by Cixi, resulting in his confinement and loss of political power and personal freedom until his untimely death.

The Guangxu Emperor was born on 14 August 1871, receiving the name Zaitian, and was the second son of Yixuan (Prince Chun), and his primary spouse Yehenara Wanzhen, a younger sister of Empress Dowager Cixi.

[6] The other proposed candidates besides Zaitian were the two sons of Prince Gong, Zaicheng and Zaiying, but they were of the same age group as the Tongzhi Emperor and were seen as having been a negative influence on him, so they were distrusted.

[17] Even after the Guangxu Emperor began formal rule he found that the power structure of the Qing court still depended on Empress Dowager Cixi, and he did not know how far his own authority extended.

The emperor tried to take a leading role in the government, especially after she began spending several months of the year at the Summer Palace starting from 1891, but he never became capable of skillfully managing imperial court politics.

[19] In December 1890 the emperor issued a decree stating that he wanted to have an immediate audience with the foreign diplomatic corps in Beijing and to make this an annual occurrence going forward.

[21] The Guangxu Emperor followed his principle of frugality in early 1892, when he tried to implement a series of draconian measures to reduce expenditures by the Imperial Household Department, which proved to be one of his few administrative successes.

When Empress Dowager Cixi retired, Guangxu had control over the administration of the empire and she did not interfere with his actions, but the princes and ministers advised him to bring back the old system in 1894, at the start of the tensions with Japan.

In that document, made on 1 August, the Guangxu Emperor accused Japan of sending armies to force the king of Korea to change his system of government and of violating international law.

[29] The emperor met with a German military advisor who had been present at the Battle of the Yalu, Constantin von Hanneken, to learn what exactly happened, suggesting that he may have not trusted his ministers to tell him the truth.

He tried to shift the responsibility in an edict by asking two officials, Liu Kunyi and Wang Wenshao, to give their opinion on whether to agree to the treaty, because they had told him that the Chinese military was capable of achieving victory.

[35] The emperor and the Qing government faced further humiliation in late 1897 when the German Empire used the murders of two priests in Shandong Province as an excuse to occupy Jiaozhou Bay (including Qingdao), prompting a "scramble for concessions" by other foreign powers.

Germany sent a naval squadron under command of the brother of Emperor Wilhelm II, the admiral Prince Heinrich, who was later received by the Qing monarch at the Summer Palace in May 1898.

Luke Kwong wrote that this was part of what drove the Guangxu Emperor to begin the Hundred Days' Reform in the summer of 1898, because he saw taking radical action to revitalize the Qing dynasty as the only way to make up for his perceived failure.

In April the emperor was presented with a memorial to the throne signed by young metropolitan officials and jinshi graduates that urged him to not trust his ministers and deal with the foreign powers on his own.

[44] The first order, the edict of 11 June 1898, declared the intent of the Qing emperor to pursue reform as response to calls from certain officials since the war with Japan, and asked every one of his subjects to contribute to strengthening China, a project that was going to be based on "Western learning" while maintaining respect for traditional morals.

The last part of his edict of 11 June instructed the Grand Council and the Zongli Yamen, the Qing dynasty's foreign office, to establish the Imperial University right away.

[48] The Guangxu Emperor then issued edicts for a massive number of far-reaching modernizing reforms with the help of more progressive officials such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao.

[48] The emperor also required court bureaucrats to read the writings of the earlier reformist official Feng Guifen and present a report on his suggestions in ten days,[49] encouraged imperial princes to study abroad,[50] and tried to streamline the government by firing 5,000 state employees.

[51] One of the early stumbling blocks for this effort happened on 15 June, when the Guangxu Emperor suddenly dismissed the grand councilor Weng Tonghe from all of his posts, even though he had been the one to draft his first reform edict.

[53] Overall, there was no coherent structure to the Hundred Days' Reform, and the Guangxu Emperor was frantically trying to begin as many changes as he could with his edicts, causing the bureaucracy to be overwhelmed by the large number of documents being written.

[54] Although the decrees between June and August were largely accepted and were creating the basis for reform, starting in September they began targeting the positions of the Manchu nobility and the gentry.

[59] Some of the reformers around the emperor asked Yuan Shikai to use the Beiyang Army to arrest Cixi and to execute Ronglu,[60] a member of the conservative faction who had been appointed to command the military forces in Zhili earlier.

On 14 August 1900, the Guangxu Emperor, along with Cixi, Empress Longyu and some other court officials, fled from Beijing as the forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance marched on the capital to relieve the legations that had been besieged during the Boxer Rebellion.

Returning to the capital on 7 January 1902,[67] after the withdrawal of the foreign powers, the Guangxu Emperor spent the next few years working in his isolated palace with watches and clocks, which had been a childhood fascination, some say in an effort to pass the time until Cixi's death.

In January 1912, the Guangxu Emperor's consort, who had become Empress Dowager Longyu, placed her seal on the abdication decree, ending two thousand years of imperial rule in China.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, historian Fan Wenlan (范文瀾) called the Guangxu Emperor "a Manchu noble who could accept Western ideas".

Empress Imperial Noble Consort Enthroned in 1626 as Khan, Hong Taiji changed the dynastic name to "Great Qing" in 1636 and claimed the title of emperor.In 1644, the Shunzhi Emperor began to rule over China proper, replacing the Ming dynasty.