Neither description does justice to a long and complex career at the end of a doomed dynasty, though her rule necessarily combined elements of both modernisation and reaction. The lady's certainly enjoyed a remarkable comeback a century after her death and the end of imperial rule. Mere decades ago her name was mud, associated with crushing reform, plunging the dynasty into the Boxer disaster, and doing away with at least one emperor. Now we see greater attention to early "self-strengthening" initiatives, substantial domestic peace and eventual reform including partial surrender of divisive Manchu privileges - even if some of the more sympathetic accounts go over the top. Her modernisation efforts were ultimately limited by the imperial power structure and China's poor economic and social development. But "launching modern China" in our sense would surely be the last thing on her mind. She was a conservative reformer, a 19th-century ruler seeking to keep the 20th in its place.