Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (11 page)

Although she had no direct contact herself with the Western warriors and envoys, Cixi was quick to learn about the West and to grasp ideas from the massive and detailed reports she received from Prince Gong and other officials who dealt with them. In one case, an imperial decree had thanked ‘the English and French’ for shelling Taiping troops. The French envoy complained, pointing out that only the French were involved, not the English. Cixi told her diplomats: ‘
You may say this is foreigners being petty-minded, but you must also see that they are being exact. In the future when you make a report, do not deviate an iota from the facts.’ She had put her finger on a superannuated Chinese tendency to be imprecise.

One piece of information that made an impression on her was that individual Chinese lives mattered to the Westerners. This was often reported by Li Hongzhang, who was the commander of Ward and Gordon. With his manicured goatee and narrowed eyes that had seen a great deal, Li, who was an earl, was the classic Confucian gentleman, but he was to evolve into the most renowned of all China’s reformers. At this early stage, through daily dealings with Westerners, he was already learning from them, when most of his colleagues still regarded them as aliens. Towards the end of 1863, Earl Li and Gordon laid siege to the city of Suzhou, famed for its silks and gardens and canals (some called it China’s Venice), and strategically situated near Nanjing, capital of the Taiping. They persuaded eight defending Taiping chiefs to surrender the city, promising them safety and high office in return. In his camp outside the city gate, Earl Li gave a banquet for the chiefs, to which Gordon was not invited. Halfway through the drinking, eight officers came in, each carrying a mandarin’s hat of honour, with a red button on top and a peacock feather sticking up. The officers moved on their knees to the chiefs and offered the hats to them. All at the banquet got to their feet and watched. The chiefs stood up, untied the yellow headscarves they were wearing and were about to take the hats and put them on when, in a split second, eight swords were drawn, and the eight heads were held by their hair in the grip of the officers. Earl Li, who had absented himself from the banquet just before the officers entered, in order not to be present at the killing, had the chiefs killed to prevent potential treachery, as had happened before. Afterwards, his army raced into Suzhou and massacred tens of thousands of Taiping troops who thought they were safe.

Gordon, who had given the murdered chiefs his word and personally guaranteed their lives, was filled with a righteous wrath and resigned his command of the Ever-victorious Army. Though he could, reluctantly, see Earl Li’s point of view, he felt that as an English officer and Christian gentleman he had to disassociate his name from this act of ‘
Asiatic barbarity’.

Earl Li reported the strong reaction of Gordon to Cixi, as well as the outcry against the killings from the Western diplomats and merchants. Cixi did not comment on the matter, but she could not have failed to view the Westerners with a certain admiration. Confucian ideals also abhorred the killing of the innocent and of those who surrendered. And yet here were the imperial forces committing massacres and behaving no better than the despised Taiping – with the striking exception of the Ever-victorious Army. (Earl Li wrote to a colleague that Gordon’s men ‘can defeat the bandits but will not kill as many as possible, so my army has to be around to assist them’.) Cixi and her circle of officials were shedding the notion that Westerners were ‘barbarians’. In fact, from this time on she seems to have developed a little defensiveness about her own country and its customs.

Gordon started to work with Earl Li to disband the Ever-victorious Army. This came as a relief to Cixi. She had been thinking about what to do with the Army once the war was over, as this invincible fighting force only followed Gordon and did not take orders from Beijing. In her letter to Prince Gong, Cixi said: ‘If Gordon makes proper arrangements to disband the Army, and send the foreign officers home, then it proves that he is truly being good to us, and has been working for our benefit throughout.’ Before his departure, Cixi publicly praised the Englishman in glowing language and offered him liberal rewards, including 10,000 taels of silver. Gordon declined the money on the grounds that he was not a mercenary, but an officer. Cixi asked Prince Gong, somewhat nonplussed: ‘Is this really what he is thinking? Isn’t it the case that foreigners only want money?’ Earl Li and other officials were deputed to find out what would satisfy Gordon. At Earl Li’s recommendation, Cixi awarded him a singular honour: a mandarin jacket in the royal yellow colour, of a kind that only the emperor was allowed to wear. Gordon had given Cixi much food for thought about Westerners.
^fn2

To defeat the Taiping, Cixi promoted Han personages in an unprecedented way: Earl Li for one, and also Zeng Zuofan, whom she made a marquis. It was Marquis Zeng’s army that finally recaptured Nanjing in July 1864. This marked the end of the Taiping, the biggest peasant rebellion in Chinese history, which had caused the deaths of some twenty million people in fifteen years of war. Its leader, Hong Xiuquan, died of illness before the fall of Nanjing, and Hong’s son and successor was caught and put to ‘death by a thousand cuts’, as prescribed by the Qing laws, even though he was aged only fourteen. Other captured Taiping chiefs were also subject to this form of execution. Reports of these bloody deaths, carried by newspapers like the
North China Herald
, complete with graphic photographs, horrified Westerners. Thomas
Wade, now the British chargé d’affaires, wrote to Prince Gong to suggest that now that the rebellion had been destroyed, China should abolish this savage form of punishment. It was ‘too cruel and deeply upsetting’ to people in the West, Wade said, adding that its abolition would win the empire much goodwill and political advantage. His appeal was rejected by Prince Gong, who told Wade that this punishment was rarely used and that it was needed to scare off would-be rebels who might otherwise destroy countless lives. ‘Without this punishment, I am afraid people in China would have nothing to fear . . . and before long, there would be more and more criminals, and it would be hard to ensure peace and stability.’ The prince was plainly admitting that even death penalties such as decapitation would not deter rebels, and the empire could not survive without this cruellest of sanctions. Cixi did not contradict Prince Gong, but neither did she add a personal note, as
Emperor Qianlong had done in 1774 when he wrote in his own hand about a rebel leader, Wang Lun: the man must be put to death by ‘a thousand cuts, which must leave the skin of his body looking like fish scales’, and his family members ‘must all be beheaded, everyone of them, men, women, the old, the young’.

The humane side of Western culture was, to the Chinese, amazingly in tune with their own ideal,
ren
, or benevolence, which, according to Confucius, was the ultimate goal for all rulers. Prince Gong praised Wade for ‘having the spirit of
ren
’, although he lamented that this ideal could not be applied in China just yet.

With the end of the Taiping, other rebellions were also put down one after another. Within a few years of seizing power, Cixi had restored peace. This gave her indisputable authority in the eyes of the elite – and minimised opposition to her forthcoming policies to revive the country, which was in a dire state.
^fn3
The wars had cost more than 300 million taels of silver. The streets of Beijing teemed with beggars; some were women who, normally hidden from public view, accosted passers-by, wearing little more than rags. And yet, with Cixi’s leadership, China would make a stunning recovery in less than a decade and would begin to enjoy a degree of prosperity. One thing that helped crucially was a large new source of income: Customs revenues from the growing trade with the West, as a result of Cixi’s open-door policy.

Cixi had noted the immense potential of international trade, whose centre was now Shanghai, where the Yangtze River, having originated in the Himalayas and having crossed the middle of China, flows into the sea. Within months after her coup, by the beginning of 1862, she had told Prince Gong: ‘
Shanghai is but a remote corner, and is imperilled [threatened by the Taiping] like piled-up eggs. And yet, thanks to the congregation of foreign and Chinese merchants, it has been a rich source for maintaining the army. I hear that in the past two months, it has collected 800,000 taels in import duty alone.’ ‘We must do our best to preserve this place,’ she said. Shanghai showed her that opening up to the West presented a tremendous opportunity for her empire, and she seized it. In 1863, more than
6,800 cargo ships visited Shanghai, a giant leap from the annual 1,000 or so under her late husband.

The expansion of foreign trade obliged China to have an efficient – and uncorrupt – Customs service. At Prince Gong’s recommendation, Cixi appointed a twenty-eight-year-old Ulsterman from County Armagh, Robert Hart, to be Inspector General of Chinese Maritime Customs, where Hart had already been working. Within a year of the appointment, she had given Hart an honour.

Born in the same year as she was, 1835, and educated at Queen’s College in Belfast, Hart had come to China first as a bright, earnest and innocent nineteen-year-old interpreter-to-be in the British consular service. An outstanding linguist, he had also come with an armful of prizes in logic, Latin, English literature, history, metaphysics, natural history, jurisprudence and physical geography. His diaries show him to be a devout Christian, concerned with what was moral and just – and that he felt a deep sympathy for the Chinese. One entry shortly after his arrival in Hong Kong described an evening stroll to the waterfront with a Mr Stace: ‘
He rather surprised me by the way in wh[ich] he treated the Chinese – pitching their goods into the water and touching them up with his cane because they wd not row out from the Quay when he entered the Boat. Then it was supper time with them; and this Hour being sacred with them, they wd not work until supper was finished.’

A decade of work in China established Hart as a fair and remarkably able man, with a talent to mediate and to find acceptable compromises. He knew his strengths and was self-assured. On the morning that the official dispatch arrived announcing his appointment, he did not open it at once and recorded with more than a hint of self-satisfaction:

I ate my breakfast in my usual way, and then, as usual, read my morning chapter and prayed . . . The despatch opened: first a very cordial letter from Sir F. Bruce begging me to accept the Inspectorateship, and assuring me of the support of the foreign ministers; 2nd a long letter . . .; 3rd a long Chinese letter . . .; 4th. a despatch from the [Chinese Foreign Office], appointing me to be Inspector General, &c. &c. &c . . .

Under Hart, Chinese Customs was transformed from an antiquated set-up, anarchical and prone to corruption, into a well-regulated modern organisation, which contributed enormously to China’s economy. In five years, up to mid-1865, it delivered to Beijing duties of
well over 32 million taels.
The indemnities to Britain and France were paid out of the Customs revenue and were completely paid off by mid-1866, with minimal pain for the country at large.

With the new wealth, Cixi began to import food on a large scale. China had long been unable to produce enough food to feed its population, and the dynasty had always banned the export of grain. Systematic, duty-free imports were recorded by the Customs from 1867. That year the
import of rice, the staple food, was worth 1.1 million taels. Food-sourcing and purchasing became a major job of the Customs under Hart, and the employee assigned to the job was honoured by Cixi.

Employing Hart and a large number of other foreigners caused resentment in the civil service. It was a courageous move.

The motto of Cixi’s government was ‘Make China Strong’ –
zi-qiang
. Hart wanted to show Beijing how to achieve this through modernisation. His aim, as he put in his diary, was: ‘to open the country to access of whatever Christian civilization has added to the comforts or well being, materially or morally, of man . . .’ He wanted ‘progress’ for China. And progress in those days meant modern mining, telegraph and telephone, and above all the railway. In October 1865,
Hart presented a memorandum to Prince Gong, offering his advice.

In his eagerness ‘to get a fresh start out of the old dame’ – China – Hart admonished and threatened. ‘Of all countries in the world, none is weaker than China,’ he asserted, blaming the country’s military defeats on its rulers’ ‘inferior intelligence’. He wrote ominously that if China did not follow his advice, Western powers ‘may have to start a war to force it’. These words reflected a common attitude among Westerners, who felt ‘they know better what China wants, than China does itself’, and they ought to ‘take her by the throat’ and ‘enforce progress’.

Prince Gong did not pass on Hart’s memorandum to Cixi for months. This uncharacteristic delay was most likely because he feared that the empress dowager might be so enraged that she would fire Hart, thus killing the goose that was laying the golden eggs. Although Cixi encouraged sharp criticisms and blunt advice from her officials, no one had shown such arrogance or used blatant threats. Prince Gong could not be sure how she would react. He decided to send Hart out of the country, so that if the empress dowager decided to sack him, at least the order would not be carried out straight away, and there would be time to persuade her to change her mind. It was then that Hart was offered a home leave to Europe, which he had been requesting for some time.

Hart departed at the end of March 1866 and his memorandum was presented to Cixi on 1 April, together with another piece of advice by the British chargé d’affaires Thomas Wade, which raised more or less the same issues, and in more or less the same tone – designed to ‘frighten them’, according to Hart. Having presented these documents, Prince Gong felt apprehensive. When the British attaché Freeman-Mitford came to see him to press ‘Railroad, telegraphs’ and ‘all the old stories that have been trotted out a hundred times’, he noticed that the prince ‘was very nervous and fidgety. He twisted, doubled, and dodged
like a hare.’