Hundred Days Reform Fails

September 21, 1898

After a hundred days of frantic modernizing edicts by the young Guangxu Emperor - on railways, schools, exams, everything - the Dowager Empress Cixi emerged from retirement, placed the emperor under house arrest in a Forbidden City pavilion, and executed his reformers. China's chance at Meiji-style top-down change had, for this generation, just died.