Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (14 page)

The conservatives were annoyed. In his diary, Grand Tutor Weng contemptuously called Burlingame ‘a foreign barbarian chieftain [
yi-qiu
]’. The foreign community was impressed by the idea – ‘singular and unexpected,’ wrote the English-language
North China Herald
. The paper could not believe that the ‘Chinese mind’ was capable of such an inspired initiative, and attributed it to
‘Mr Hart’s brain’.
In fact, Hart was only told about it after it was conceived, and although he expressed support, his subsequent remarks were lukewarm and sceptical, if not downright critical. Perhaps he who was thought of as ‘Mr China’ was somewhat jealous.

The Burlingame mission travelled across America and Europe, attracting much attention wherever it went. It was received by the heads of all the states it visited, among them President Andrew Johnson in America; Queen Victoria in Britain; Napoleon III, Emperor of France; Bismarck in Prussia and Tsar Nicolas I of Russia.
Queen Victoria wrote in her diary on 20 November 1868: ‘to receive the Chinese ambassador, the 1st who has ever come here, but he is an American in European dress, a Mr Burlingham [
sic
]. His colleagues are however 2 real Chinese, – the 2 secretaries being English and French.’

Cixi could not have chosen a more suitable spokesman than Anson Burlingame. Born in New Berlin, New York, in 1820, Burlingame had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as his first minister to China in 1861. Fair-minded, with gentle manners, Burlingame believed in the equality of nations and never looked down on the Chinese. He would represent China to Western audiences most eloquently.

He was already known for his oratorical powers. After Harvard University Law School, he had entered the Massachusetts Legislature as a Senator, and then went into the Congress in Washington DC. There, in 1856, he delivered a powerful verbal thrashing of a fervid advocate of slavery, Congressman Preston Brooks, who had just savagely beaten up Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, with a wooden cane. Burlingame was challenged to a duel by Brooks, and he accepted, naming the rifle as his weapon of choice, and Navy Island, above Niagara Falls, as the place for the meeting. The duel did not take place only because Brooks refused the conditions.

In Beijing, Burlingame was instrumental in getting Western countries to adopt the ‘cooperative policy’ and to substitute fair diplomacy for the doctrine of force. During the trip, his passionate speeches on behalf of China can be glimpsed from the following address to ‘
the citizens of New York’ on 23 June 1868. This was how he introduced his mission: China ‘now itself seeks the West . . . and confronts you with its representatives here tonight . . . she has come forth to meet you . . .’ To loud cheers, he told his audience what Cixi’s government had achieved, and how remarkable the achievements were:

I aver, that there is no spot on this earth where there has been greater progress made within the past few years than in the empire of China. [Cheers.] She has expanded her trade, she has reformed her revenue system, she is changing her military and naval organisations, she has built or established a great school, where modern science and the foreign languages are to be taught. [Cheers.] She has done this under every adverse circumstance. She has done this after a great war, lasting through thirteen years, a war out of which she comes with no national debt. [Long continued applause and laughter.] You must remember how dense is her population. You must remember how difficult it is to introduce radical changes in such a country as that. The introduction of your own steamers threw out of employment a hundred thousand junk-men. The introduction of several hundred foreigners into the civil service embittered, of course, the ancient native employees. The establishment of a school was formidably resisted by a party led by one of the greatest men of the empire. Yet, in defiance of all these, in spite of all these, the present enlightened government of China has advanced steadily along the path of progress [cheers] . . .

Trade, Burlingame informed his audience, ‘has, in my own days in China, risen from $82,000,000 to $300,000,000’ – more than $4.5 billion in today’s currency. These changes were truly impressive, Burlingame reminded politicians and the public, because they involved ‘a third of the human race’. Challenging those who advocated ‘coercing China’ into quick industrialisation, he pointed out that the idea was ‘born of their own interests and of their own caprice’. He condemned those who ‘tell you that the present dynasty must fall, and that the whole structure of Chinese civilization must be overthrown . . .’

Burlingame did more than present the case for China. On behalf of the country, he signed an ‘equal treaty’ with America in 1868, different from any of the ‘unequal’ treaties signed between China and Western countries after the Opium War. It especially protected Chinese immigrants to America by giving them the status ‘enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favoured nation’, and actively tried to stop the trade in slave labourers from China to South America, which was going on at this time.
^fn2
In a 6,000-word article, Burlingame’s friend and admirer Mark Twain vividly described the difference the treaty would make to the Chinese living in America: ‘
It affords me infinite satisfaction to call particular attention to this Consul clause, and think of the howl that will go up from the cooks, the railroad graders, and the cobble-stone artists of California, when they read it. They can never beat and bang and set the dogs on the Chinamen any more.’ Before the treaty, the Chinese had no legal protection, as Mark Twain observed: ‘I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done him.’ Now, the Chinese became voters, and politicians could no longer ignore them. Twain wrote with relish, ‘For at one sweep, all the crippling, intolerant, and unconstitutional laws framed by California against Chinamen pass away, and “discover” (in stage parlance) 20,000 prospective Hong Kong and Suchow voters and office-holders!’ The Burlingame Treaty was ratified by Beijing the following year.

Burlingame’s deputy, Zhigang, admired him for being ‘open, understanding, fair’ and for working ‘with such dedication’ to the country he was now representing. When things were not going as well as he wished, Burlingame was given to ‘inconsolable despondency and frustration’. In Russia, China’s neighbour with whom a border thousands of kilometres long boded potential trouble, the sense of responsibility seemed especially to weigh on him. Mental and physical exhaustion – for he had been on the road for two years – took their toll and Burlingame fell ill the day after his audience with the tsar, in the depths of a Russian winter. He died in St Petersburg in early 1870. Cixi had been kept informed about his tour, and she honoured and rewarded Burlingame with real feeling – before ordering Zhigang to take over, stressing that ‘
it is of utmost importance’ that the mission continue.

Before he left Beijing at the beginning of 1868,
Zhigang had been summoned to an audience with the empress dowager, who was seated behind the yellow silk screen, while Emperor Tongzhi, then eleven years old, sat on a throne in front of the screen. Zhigang went down on his knees as soon as he crossed the threshold and, taking off his mandarin hat and placing it on his left with the feather pointing towards the throne, as required by etiquette, he recited the prescribed greetings to the emperor, in the Manchu language (he was a Manchu himself), before touching his head on the ground. Then he straightened up, put his hat back on, stood up, moved forward and to the right, to a cushion closer to the throne, where he knelt again and waited for Cixi’s questions. Cixi asked him about the route of the journey, to which Zhigang provided a list of the countries he was travelling to and through. It was clear that she had a good idea of the geography of the world – and was well informed about Western customs: she told Zhigang to get his entourage to watch their manners, and ‘don’t let them make a fool of themselves and be laughed at by foreigners’. Showing full awareness of the ostracism that her diplomats suffered at home, she said supportively to Zhigang, ‘Working in foreign affairs, you have to be prepared to take all those snide remarks people make about you.’ At this the young man answered: ‘Even Prince Gong is subject to such things and he does not shy away. We small people can only do our utmost in our jobs.’

Zhigang was a diligent official, and his diary of the trip read very differently from that of the earlier traveller, Binchun. Rather than brimming with effusive enthusiasm for the West, his view was more detached. Some things would not work in China, he believed. Autopsies, for instance, horrified him, although he accepted that they served an important purpose. He felt that the children of the deceased could not possibly consent to their elders being cut up. Among the things he frowned upon were pleasurable pursuits in which men and women took part together, such as dancing, playing on the beach, swimming in the sea, skating on ice and going to the theatre. The Chinese valued sense, he claimed, the Europeans sensuality. He was averse to Christianity, which he thought was a good doctrine, but was hypocritical: ‘Westerners preach the “love of God” and “love of man”, and they seem really to believe it. And yet they wage wars with gunboats and cannons to conquer people by force, as well as imposing opium, a poison worse than plague, on the Chinese – all for profit.’ ‘It looks as though the love of God is less real than the love of profit,’ he wrote.

And yet Zhigang also recorded that in London, at Madame Tussaud’s, he was surprised to see a stately life-size wax figure of Commissioner Lin, the anti-opium crusader whose destruction of opium had led to the Opium War with Britain. Here Lin was, together with his favourite consort, dressed in resplendent costumes, standing majestically in what was effectively the Hall of Fame in London.
Madame Tussaud’s had commissioned the figures from a Cantonese artist and imported them at enormous expense. So it was far from the case that all British Christians were in thrall to ‘the love of profit’ or in favour of the opium trade. Other positive impressions ranged from the courtesy and hospitality of the kings and queens who entertained the mission, to the kindness and friendliness of fellow park strollers. Visiting George Washington’s tomb, Zhigang was struck by its simplicity and paid homage to this ‘very great man’. After witnessing a vote-rigging scandal in France, he ruminated that elections gave opportunities to immoral self-promoters. But Zhigang showed that he was on the whole an admirer of the Western political system. He described how the American Congress worked and commented, ‘with this system, people’s wishes can be expressed at the highest level and so the society is run fairly’. Of the countries he visited, America seemed to him the most sincere in wishing to be friendly with China, not least because its immense size and rich resources meant that it had no reason to covet anything from China. France he disapproved of, for imposing heavy taxation on its people in order to keep a large army for overseas wars. The young official was in favour of industrialisation. Writing in some detail about scientific inventions and modern enterprises, he evinced particular enthusiasm for the telegraph, regarding it as something that did not intrude on nature like the other projects (the machines involved were hardly visible), and could almost be part of nature. All in all, the mandarin concluded, ‘If we are able to do what they are doing, there is no question we, too, can be rich and strong!’

Zhigang and his Chinese companions returned to China at the end of 1870, having travelled to eleven countries in nearly three years.
Their diaries and reports were presented to Cixi. And yet no action followed on from the massive amount of knowledge gained or the goodwill generated. The only move was to send groups of young teenagers to America for education. But this project, whose objective was to produce future pillars of society who really knew the West and Western practices, had been in the pipeline for some time. Earl Li, who had been promoting this programme, was anxious that a comprehensive agenda should be set. He was then the Viceroy of Zhili, with his office in Tianjin, near the capital. In 1872 he asked to come to Beijing to see the empress dowager. But
Cixi told him not to come. She had been in a most vulnerable position since late 1869, when some murderous events had occurred, leaving her struggling to survive and unable to launch major initiatives. Moreover, her son was about to take over, and her retirement to the harem was imminent. Zhigang lamented,
‘Unexpectedly, the situation changed. Alas! There is nothing I can do but wring my hands.’

^fn1
Hsü’s words about Washington are engraved on a Memorial Stone in the Washington Memorial Monument, in Washington DC.

^fn2
Article V: ‘The United States of America and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from the one country to the other, for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents. The high contracting parties, therefore, join in reprobating any other than an entirely voluntary emigration for these purposes. They consequently agree to pass laws making it a penal offence for a citizen of the United States or Chinese subjects to take Chinese subjects either to the United States or to any other foreign country, or for a Chinese subject or citizen of the United States to take citizens of the United States to China or to any other foreign country, without their free and voluntary consent respectively.’

7 Love Doomed (1869)

IN HER FIRST
years as the ruler of the Chinese empire, Cixi, now a widow in her late twenties and early thirties, living in the harem surrounded by
eunuchs, grew attached to a eunuch, An Dehai, known as Little An. In fact she fell in love with him. Eight years younger than she, Little An had come from an area near Beijing, Wanping, which traditionally supplied eunuchs for the court. His story was little different from that of most eunuchs. Poverty drove their parents to have them castrated as young children, hoping they would earn a better living at court. Usually the father would take the boy to a specialist castrator, who operated by the appointment of the court. After a contract was signed, absolving the castrator from any responsibility in case of death or failure (both highly likely outcomes), the unimaginably painful operation was performed. The castrator’s fee was huge and had to be paid from future earnings. If the boy’s rank stayed low, it could take him years to clear the debt. In order to save money, fathers would sometimes castrate their own sons.