Without her the progressive Emperor Kuangshu would certainly have gone on with his reforms.

But the regime became suffocating and unsustainable, and ended with the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Castor Pang, strategist at Sun Hung Kai Financial, says the results are unlikely to lift market sentiment in Hong Kong, where HSBC is the biggest bank.

The ignorant old woman who ruled for the entire last half of the nineteenth century did more than any other single person to hold back China's progress.

He won a scholarship to study medicine in Japan - a country that Chinese radicals regarded with awe for its success in reinventing itself as a modern, imperialist nation.