Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (21 page)

The meaning of the old adage ‘Make China Strong’ was expanded to incorporate ‘Make the Chinese Rich’ (
qiu-fu
). It was now the consensus in Cixi’s circle that
‘China’s weakness lies with its long-standing poverty’ and it could only become wealthy through Western-style industrial projects. ‘We must gradually adopt the same things, so we can get out of poverty and become rich as well.’ These projects had been proposed by Hart and Wade a decade earlier – but then the ancient land had not been ready for them. All those journeys to the West had opened eyes and minds. In 1875, Cixi ordered the
installation of the telegraph, first in Fujian province, for communication with Taiwan, the island that Japan coveted and Cixi was determined to keep. The Imperial Telegraph Administration was founded, with one of the country’s pioneering modern businessmen, Sheng Xuanhuai, as its managing director. At first, crowds pulled down the wires and poles. But as people saw how harmless they were, how miraculous communication could be and how many benefits it could bring to their lives, sabotage stopped, and telegraph lines began to extend all over the empire.

Also in 1875, Cixi decreed the beginning of
modern coal-mining, by designating two trial areas. Resistance was strong and the fears numerous – not least that China’s underground treasures were about to be stolen by foreigners. Addressing this concern, Cixi ordered specifically: ‘We must keep decision-making power in our hands when we employ foreign personnel. Don’t let foreigners control everything and make crucial decisions for us.’ One of the two sites was on the island of Taiwan and the other was Kaiping, some 160 kilometres to the east of Beijing. Western technicians soon arrived with machinery, and Cixi appointed another outstanding pioneering businessman, Tong King-sing, as managing director. Tong had acquired his expertise while working for Western firms, and had founded China’s first merchant-shipping company. Tong and Sheng, together with other first-generation industrialists and businessmen, heralded the rise of the middle class, while Kaiping became ‘the cradle of modern Chinese industry’. A giant industrial centre, Tangshan, grew from here. Outside these state projects, individuals were given incentives to look for outcrops and open mines. To solve funding problems and to encourage entrepreneurs, Cixi decreed that private businessmen should be allowed to issue shares.

With coal came
electricity. Cixi led the way by having electric lights installed in the Sea Palace by 1888. Generators were bought from Denmark and operated by the Praetorian Guards. These were the first electric lights outside the Treaty Ports, and stimulated the spread of electricity. In the next few years, seventeen electricity companies for civilian as well as military and commercial use were founded in Beijing and other big cities. By 1889, Beijing had seen its first
tram.

Cixi also set her heart on
replacing the country’s outdated currency, silver ingots, with manufactured coins. These ingots put China at a huge disadvantage in international trade: because their silver content varied, they tended to be valued too low. Only modern minting could solve this problem, as well as make the Chinese currency compatible with the outside world. It was no small undertaking, especially as it required a sizeable initial investment. Facing stubborn resistance, Cixi was adamant and offered to pay the start-up costs out of the royal household allowance. The project took off, with a proviso that it would be reviewed in three years.

The most conspicuous project that Cixi did not launch in 1875, or in subsequent years, was the railway. It touched on something akin to religion. The numerous ancestral tombs dotted across the country, all lovingly built by their families in accordance with
feng-shui
, could not be moved. Nor could they be left where they were, if they were near a railway line: people believed that the dead souls would be disturbed by the roaring trains. Cixi wholeheartedly believed that the tombs were sacrosanct.

There was also the problem of funding. For three years after Cixi returned to power, between 1876 and 1878, nearly half the Chinese provinces and up to 200 million people were hit by floods, drought and swarms of locusts – the biggest succession of natural calamities in more than 200 years and one of the worst in recorded Chinese history. Millions died of famine and disease, especially typhus. Traditional ways of coping with famines included the court praying for good weather, opening the royal purse, exempting affected areas from tax, and providing the Chinese equivalent of ‘soup kitchens’: ‘rice centres’. Now unprecedented sums were spent on importing food from overseas. In such circumstances the building of railways would have had to rely on foreign loans, something Cixi had no experience of. She was cautious.
‘We would have to borrow tens of millions,’ she said. ‘And we could land ourselves in trouble.’

To showcase the railway, British merchants built a 20-kilometre line from Shanghai to its outer port, Wusong, in 1876 – the first to come into service in China. Villagers and officials were aghast. One day, when a train was running, a group of men, women and children stepped onto the track and forced it to a halt. When the train moved off, the group grabbed at the carriages in a futile effort to stop it again. Another day a man was run over by the train, and it looked as though this might spark a riot. Thomas Wade persuaded the British company to stop the service. Cixi’s government bought the railway and had it dismantled, to satisfy both parties. It is often claimed that Cixi stupidly had this – China’s first railway – thrown into the sea. In fact, it was wrapped up and shipped across the straits to Taiwan, with the intention of using it at the coal mine there. The indigenous people of Taiwan did not feel as strongly about their tombs as the mainland Chinese, and because the island was less densely populated, there were fewer tombs anyway. As it happened, the line was unsuitable and had to be shipped back to the mainland, in the hope that it might be used at Kaiping. Here, again, the area that the railway would cross was relatively barren and sparsely populated, with few tombs. It was only because Kaiping’s English chief engineer, Claude W. Kinder, decided, far-sightedly, to adopt the standard gauge that
the Wusong line, with its narrow gauge, was finally left to rust.

After the Kaiping line was laid, 10 kilometres long, some concern was expressed that the few dead souls in the vicinity might be disturbed.So the train was pulled by horses. Then, cautiously, the horses were replaced by a locomotive, built locally under the supervision of Kinder and named ‘The Rocket of China’. Opposition went on and off, and finally died down.

But whether or not to build a more extensive system in China remained the most difficult decision for Cixi. For more than a decade she repeatedly invited debates among the elite. Views were sharply divided, and the usually decisive empress dowager was uncharacteristically hesitant. All the arguments in favour, championed by Earl Li, about how the railway would be good for defence, transportation, travel and communication, were not enough to convince her that a core belief of the population should be violated; or that the country should risk potentially crippling loans from the West.

In the end, Cixi decided to try the train herself. In 1888, she bought a train with six carriages and
a 3.5-kilometre line from a French company, to be installed inside the Sea Palace. The whole thing, including packing and shipping, cost 6,000 taels, a fraction of the real price. Western manufacturers were competing with each other to win Chinese contracts, and years earlier Britain had offered a similar train as a wedding present to her son, a gift that had been declined. Now Earl Li supervised the purchase. He reported to Cixi that while the price was symbolic, everything was beautifully made in Paris, including a most luxurious carriage for her. The railway was laid with the guidance of a court
feng-shui
master, who dictated when the construction could start and in which direction it should proceed. Digging towards the north, he said, was out of the question for that year, and so the northbound section had to wait until the tenth day of the first month of the following year, 1889. On that day, ground was broken between 3 and 5 p.m. When the line was operational, Cixi took a ride and got the feel of a real train, if only for a few brief moments. She tasted the speed and the comfort of travelling, although she also saw the black smoke and heard the clanking engine. The train was stored away, only to be taken out to show visitors; and, on those occasions, eunuchs pulled the carriages, using long yellow silks twisted into ropes.

Around the time of this personal experience, in April 1889, Viceroy Zhang Zhidong put forward a unique and powerful argument that finally made up Cixi’s mind in favour of a railway network. The Viceroy, two years Cixi’s junior at fifty-two, a short man with a long, flowing beard, was a major promoter of modernisation. Western contemporaries called him ‘
a giant in intellect and a hero in achievement’. Cixi had first noticed him years earlier, soon after her coup, during an Imperial Examination. His final essay, on current affairs, was bold and unconventional and had disconcerted the examiners, who slotted him at the bottom of the ‘pass’ grade. But when Cixi read the essay, she recognised a like-minded spirit and upgraded him to No. 3 of the whole empire. Over the years she adopted many of his proposals and promoted him to key posts, now a Viceroy governing two crucial provinces in the Yangtze Valley.

The Viceroy’s clinching argument was that the railway could bolster exports, which, he pointed out, were the key to enriching the population and the country in the era of international trade. At the time, the main exports from China remained tea and silk, while imports were rising steeply, due largely to the modernising projects. The country’s
trade deficit stood at more than thirty-two million taels in 1888; and the future looked worrying, as the quantities of tea exported had begun to fall. In 1867, China had supplied 90 per cent of the Western world’s consumption, but now teas from British India and elsewhere had entered the global market. It was imperative that the range of exports was expanded. With this need in mind,
Viceroy Zhang proposed building a 1,500-kilometre trunk line from Beijing to the south, through inland provinces all the way to Wuhan, a major city connected to the sea by the Yangtze River. All the land-locked provinces in the catchment area would then be linked with the outside world. Local produce could be refined by imported machines, made exportable and then transported to the coast. Potentially this could transform China’s economy and solve its most fundamental and disabling problem: poverty. This visionary proposal struck Cixi: here were the real benefits of the railways, and they would be worth all the sacrifices and the risks.

She kept the Viceroy’s proposal for
deliberation. After soliciting scrutiny from the top echelon, and receiving no objections, on 27 August 1889 Cixi finally issued a decree that heralded China’s railway age with this north–south trunk line. The Beijing–Wuhan railway, subsequently extended south to Canton, became (and remains) the country’s central transport artery, critical to its economy even today. Cixi seems to have foreseen this, for her decree rang like a manifesto:
‘This project has magnificent and far-reaching significance, and is indeed the key component of our blueprint for Making China Strong. As we embark on this ground-breaking project, unavoidably there will be doubts and fears.’ She went on to order the provincial chiefs, through whose territory the line would travel, to explain the enterprise to the local people and prevent them from obstructing it. ‘All in all,’ she said, ‘I hope the court and country will be of one mind, the officials and the merchants will make concerted efforts, to achieve a complete success . . . ’ Viceroy Zhang was put in charge of the construction, together with Earl Li, and set up headquarters in Wuhan. There, associated with the railway, he initiated a host of modern industries, and made Wuhan one of the crucibles of China’s industrialisation.

Cixi did not embrace industrialisation indiscriminately or unreservedly. In 1882, when Earl Li asked for permission to build textile factories, she objected, saying with unmistakable annoyance:
‘Textile making is our basic domestic industry. Machine-produced fabrics take away our women’s work and harm their livelihood. It is bad enough that we can’t ban foreign textiles; we shouldn’t be inflicting further damage on ourselves. This matter must be considered carefully.’ In those days, ‘textile making’ was called
can-sang
, literally meaning ‘silkworms and mulberry leaves’, as silk production had been a major activity of Chinese women for thousands of years. To maintain this tradition, every year in spring, when the silkworms began their labour, Cixi led court ladies to pray in a special shrine in the Forbidden City to the God of the Silkworm, begging his protection for the little worms. She and the ladies would feed the silkworms four or five times a day, gathering leaves from the mulberry trees in the palace grounds. When a silkworm had finished spinning a silk thread and had enclosed itself inside the cocoon it had made with its silk, the cocoon would be boiled and the thread, which averaged many hundreds of metres, would be wound onto a spool, ready for weaving. All her life Cixi kept some of the silk she had woven as a young girl, to see if the new silk was as fine and lustrous as the old. She did not want to see the old ways disappear altogether. While she was determined to drive through change in some areas, in others she either resisted change or accepted it only reluctantly. Under her China’s industrialisation did not move like a bulldozer out to destroy all traditions.

^fn1
The opening up of these new ports was written into the same convention (the Chefoo Convention) as the settlement for the murder in Yunnan of Mr Margary, a member of the British Legation. But the British did not demand it with any threat of force.

12 Defender of the Empire (1875–89)

EVER SINCE HIS
son had been taken away and made emperor in 1875, Prince Chun’s character had been changing. He had, for the first time, begun to fear his sister-in-law. The devastation of losing his only son had opened his eyes to a side of the empress dowager that he had not previously registered: that she possessed a deadly sting, even though she rarely used it. When he had backed the execution of Little An in 1869 and when, against her orders, he had spearheaded riots against missionaries in Tianjin in 1870, he had had no fear of retribution. Now he realised that she had not forgotten, or forgiven, what he had done: five years on, her revenge was served cold. The shock bewildered him. In a letter to Cixi after his son had been snatched away, he described how he had ‘
lost consciousness’ when he heard her announcement, and had gone home ‘trembling all over in the flesh and the heart, as if in a trance or a drunken stupor’. He collapsed, and took to bed ‘in a vegetative state’. His former cockiness gone, he apologised for his past wrongs (without spelling them out), roundly castigating himself and begging her for mercy. ‘You have seen right through me,’ he wrote. ‘Please grant me an undeserved favour’ – to spare his life, ‘the life of a dumb and useless idiot’.