The Gilded Demise: The Extravagant Life of Empress Cixi

Empress Dowager Cixi led an extraordinarily lavish existence, residing in the elaborately restored Palace of Gathered Elegance where her daily routine included rituals like wearing custom non-elastic silk socks that required thousands of seamstresses to produce and were worn only once. Her dining was equally extravagant, featuring 120 dishes per meal from which she would take only a few bites, and special occasions like the Lunar New Year involved grand pageantry with 500 eunuchs serving a "Four King Kongs, 500 Arhats" banquet. This lifestyle of excess continued into death with a funeral boat burned for her afterlife and a tomb filled with millions of taels of silver worth of jewels and a pearl-encrusted coffin, though her resting place was barbarically looted by warlord Sun Dianying twenty years later.