Carl, an American painter, painted a portrait of Cixi, who was nearly 70 years old. He said that Cixi had a slim figure, a well-proportioned figure, a good face, soft hands, black hair, a large forehead and picturesque eyes, and the width of her lips matched the width of her nose. Someone on the Internet made a technical repair of a photo of Cixi in her later years. As a result, after posting the possible photos of the old lady when she was young, the internet was really amazing.
However, we can look closely from the side: in terms of aesthetics at that time, Cixi was definitely a beauty, otherwise she would not have entered the palace at all, nor would she have been favored by the emperor in the first year of Xianfeng, and then she was elected to the palace and was honored as a noble person. Cixi lived in the deep palace for decades and dressed up every day. When receiving the wife of the foreign minister, she must put on airs. The minister's wife is also generally beautiful in her eyes. In four years, she was appointed as a concubine. In March of six years, Chen Geng, Mu Zongsheng, entered neither. In seven years, it is easy to enter the imperial concubine. Ten years, from Xingrehe River.
However, most of the photos you see of Cixi were taken in her later years. This era determines that China people are struggling in dire straits, and that's how the sick man of East Asia came. Cixi is also a sinner of China people. This old Yin star has no ability and hates poison, which is inseparable from the nature of "Erhei" in the southwest. I rarely see her face when she was young. I feel that Cixi is as ugly as other concubines in the Qing Dynasty, but in fact she is very beautiful. What's more, her family background is not so good. Among several women in power in history, Wu Zetian is the most beautiful, charming and coquettish, and then Empress Dowager Cixi is first-class in calculation, wrist and tactics, but not as beautiful as Li Fei and Empress Dowager Cixi. The first beauty in the late Qing Dynasty was even more beautiful.