In the last decade of her life, the empress dowager tried to polish her image by making herself more accessible, especially to Western diplomats. But in the end, she could barely overcome the impression that, like many royals in the West, she was most interested in her dogs, gardening and fancy clothing, wrote Sterling Seagrave in his empathetic biography, “Dragon Lady.”

Pictures of her are banished to a pavilion near the exit of the palace grounds, where a large sepia photo shows her, surrounded by ladies in waiting, dressed in an embroidered gown with pearls said to be the size of canary eggs, and long, talon-like fingernails.

The day before she died, the young emperor, Guangxu, was found dead — of natural causes, imperial records show. In 2008, Chinese medical investigators found extraordinarily high levels of arsenic in his remains, leading to a popular conclusion that the empress had killed him to try to stop him from introducing political reforms after her own death.

Did she do it? “I am going with Cixi,” said Mr. Jenne, the historian.

In her final years, she was known as the “old Buddha,” a term that friendly biographers say was a term of endearment. Others see it as an appropriately scornful term for a woman who was barely literate, left little for other women to emulate and led the bankrupt Qing dynasty to its downfall in a country whose government remains as male-dominated as ever.