Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧太后 with attendants on Zhonghai Lake, Beijing, 1903. n one series of images—taken in the summer of 1903 at Zhonghai, a lake west of the Forbidden City—Cixi adopts the role of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion. She sits near an array of potted lotuses, before a painted backdrop of the Purple Bamboo Grove of Guanyin. Her attendants adopt the guises of the bodhisattva’s attendants.
