Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (39 page)

Yuan returned to his troops in Tianjin. Cixi kept her unperturbed exterior when her adopted son, observing ritual, came to bid her good day before entering the grandest hall in the Sea Palace for his meeting with Itō. At the meeting he said nothing that went beyond the agreed text. Itō’s counsel was solicited, but was to be given through the Foreign Office. As soon as the audience was over, Cixi placed her adopted son under house arrest, confining him to his villa at Yingtai, the islet in the middle of the lake in the Sea Palace, reachable only by way of a long bridge that could be opened and closed. When she went to the Summer Palace, she would take him with her. He had become her prisoner.

As such, on the following day he wrote in his own hand a decree in crimson ink, announcing that Cixi would be his Guardian. A formal ceremony was subsequently staged. Thereafter, Emperor Guangxu became Cixi’s puppet, signing edicts with his crimson-inked brush according to her wishes. He continued to see officials and Grand Councillors, but always with her. The silk screen that had been concealing her was removed: she stepped from behind the throne to the front of the stage.

Cixi quickly formed a clear picture of the Wild Fox’s activities vis-à-vis her adopted son. The emperor had scarcely any secrets from his eunuchs, whom Cixi began to interrogate. Thus she established who had been seeing and influencing him. Sir Yinhuan was easily exposed, and became her second bête noire. She methodically rounded up the plotters, giving verbal rather than written orders. Arrests were not all made at once, as she wanted the whole process carried out as quietly as possible.

The first target for arrest was obviously Kang. But Cixi was two days too late. The Wild Fox had known the game was up as soon as he had heard that General Yuan had been non-committal – like another conspirator, who had been specially employed to kill Cixi, a man called Bi.
Bi later described visiting Tan to enquire about his mission the following dawn. ‘Mr Tan was combing his hair languidly’ and told Bi that the General did not commit himself. Bi asked, ‘Are you sure Yuan is the right man for the job?’ Tan clearly did not trust Yuan and replied, ‘I did argue with Mr Kang time and again, but he insists on using Yuan. What can I do?’ Bi said, ‘So you revealed the whole plot to Yuan?’ Being told that Yuan knew everything, Bi exclaimed, ‘We are done for. We are done for! Don’t you know what sort of operation this is? You can’t talk about it just like that! I’m afraid you and your families and clans are all going to the execution ground!’ Bi promptly departed and abandoned the plotters.

The Wild Fox himself paid visits to two foreigners, the Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard, who was his friend, and Itō himself – the day
before
Itō’s audience with Emperor Guangxu. What Kang sought was safe haven. Richard had set out to cultivate the official class and the literati, and knew many powerful figures, including Earl Li. His dream was not only to
‘establish the Kingdom of God’ on Chinese soil, but also to run the country – ‘reforming China, remodelling its institutions, and, in short, carrying on its government,’ as Robert Hart noted, finding the idea
‘too delicious!’ British diplomats regarded Richard’s grandiose plans as
‘nonsense’. (Among his proposals was that ‘two foreign governesses should be engaged for the Empress-Dowager’.) Kang had recommended him to Emperor Guangxu as one of the two foreign advisers on the Advisory Board, the other being Itō. Richard was grateful. He now rushed about to drum up assistance for Kang, but to little avail as the British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, was, according to Richard, ‘already prejudiced’ against Kang.

Itō did not offer Kang sanctuary in the Japanese Legation. To use a bunch of amateurs to murder the empress dowager against insurmountable odds was almost certainly not part of their deal. Besides, Itō was going to see Emperor Guangxu the following day. It would be awkward if he were asked to produce Kang. So the Wild Fox had to flee Beijing. He did so swiftly and, by the time the arrest warrant was sent out, he had already reached and left Tianjin, on board a British steamship bound for Shanghai. At the Shanghai wharf, ‘
detectives and policemen’ were waiting for the ship ‘in a high state of excitement at the prospect of gaining the 2,000 dollars’ – the award for Kang’s arrest. Because of the newspaper reports promoting Kang as the principal author of the Reforms (and because of the court’s secrecy, which concealed Cixi’s role) the Acting British Consul-General, Byron Brenan, who recorded the scene, was determined to rescue Kang. As he could not openly do so, being an official representative of Great Britain, Brenan sent the correspondent for
The Times
, J. O. P. Bland, out to sea on a launch before the ship docked. Kang was intercepted and transported to Hong Kong on board a British gunboat. In the colony he was visited by the local Japanese Consul and invited to go and stay in Japan. Tokyo
‘cherishes the aspiration to build a Great East Asia’, to quote Kang. The Wild Fox soon arrived in Japan.

His right-hand man, Liang, sought asylum in the Japanese Legation the day after Itō’s audience, and Itō helped him escape to Japan. Under Japanese protection and in disguise, with his queue cut off and wearing European clothes, he boarded a Japanese warship from Tianjin.

Tan, the violence-loving radical, was also offered sanctuary in Japan. But he declined. According to his friends, he again declared his
reform-needs-bloodshed theory: ‘Reforms in other countries have been successful all because there was bloodshed. In Chinese reforms, no blood has been shed, and that’s why the country is not doing well. Let my blood be the first to be shed.’ Indeed, he was beheaded on 28 September, together with five others: Guangren, Kang’s brother; Censor Shenxiu, the petitioner for troops to be moved to the Summer Palace, ostensibly to dig for gold but really to kill Cixi; and the three other new secretaries of the Grand Council (in addition to Tan). At the place of execution, according to a
newspaper report, Tan acted ‘as if death was something delicious’. Kang’s brother, on the other hand, did not seem to relish the prospect: he was seen to be ‘wearing just socks and no shoes, his face the colour of ashes and dust’. The executions shocked the country: they were the first of Cixi’s political enemies to die since she began her rule nearly four decades earlier.

Two of the four new secretaries, including Yang Rui, with whom the emperor had entrusted his agonised letter of 14 September, actually had nothing to do with Kang or his plot. In prison they had been light-hearted, certain that their innocence could be easily established at the trial, which Cixi had ordered in accordance with Qing procedure. But no sooner had the trial started than Cixi abruptly halted it and
the two innocent men were carted off to the execution ground with the others, as fellow plotters. There they protested furiously. One refused to go down on his knees to listen to the imperial edict sentencing him to death, and the other, Yang Rui, insistently asked the official overseeing the execution what his crime was. Rumour has it that blood from his severed head spouted one metre in the air, such was his vehemence at the injustice.
People were appalled by the peremptory executions. On learning the news, one courtier felt ‘shocked and pained as though my heart was being stabbed’ and he ‘threw up violently’. Even the grandees who knew about the plot against Cixi’s life were greatly upset about the flagrant disregard for the law – which was rare under her rule.

Cixi cancelled the trial when she realised that it would inevitably make public something that she had to conceal at all costs: her adopted son’s involvement in the plot. A trial would reveal that Emperor Guangxu wanted her deposed, if not killed. The Wild Fox had started giving interviews to foreign newspapers claiming that the emperor had given him a ‘secret edict’, with instructions to raise support to free him and oust Cixi. This
claim first appeared in Shanghai in the
North China Herald
on 27 September, the day before Cixi stopped the trial and ordered the executions. It may well have led to her decision. If Kang’s assertion seemed to be confirmed officially through the trial, Cixi would be facing a dire prospect. The Chinese would be divided and forced to take sides, and the country could be thrown into upheaval. Foreign powers might decide to answer Kang’s plea and send in troops. In particular, Japan could well try to prop up Emperor Guangxu as its puppet, on the pretext of rescuing him. Cixi could not allow the fatal breach between herself and her adopted son to be exposed.

Thus Cixi herself covered up the plot against her life. The decree about the plot and the executions, issued in the name of the prisoner emperor, was vague and evasive, and falsified the emperor’s position. Kang and his accomplices were said to ‘
have attempted to surround and attack the Summer Palace, to kidnap the Empress Dowager and myself’. The other key figure, General Yuan, also had reason to suppress the truth: he did not want it known that he had betrayed the emperor. (He kept his
diary about the event hidden during his lifetime.) As Cixi remained silent, Kang’s was the only voice to be heard. When he adamantly denied there was ever a conspiracy to kill Cixi, claiming indeed that it was Cixi who had concocted a scheme to kill Emperor Guangxu, his version of events was widely accepted. Sir Claude MacDonald believed that
‘the rumoured plot is only an excuse to stop Emperor Guangxu’s radical reforms’.

So the story of Wild Fox Kang’s attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot. Meanwhile, the six men executed, four of them conspirators, have gone down in history as having died heroically for the Reforms, acquiring the household name of ‘the Six Gentlemen’. Wild Fox Kang entered myth as the hero who lit the beacon of reform and even had a vision to turn China into a parliamentary democracy. Kang largely created the myth himself, by revising and falsifying his writings and petitions – deleting, for instance, his article that specifically rejected parliamentary democracy as a desirable political system for China. He was a first-rate myth-maker and propagandist. While promoting himself, he and his right-hand man, Liang, tirelessly vilified Cixi, inventing many repulsive stories about her in interviews, speeches and writings, some of which were carried in newspapers in the Treaty Ports, while others were produced as pamphlets in Japan and posted into China. In these, they
charged Cixi with poisoning Empress Zhen, driving her son Emperor Tongzhi to death, forcing the son’s widow to kill herself by swallowing a lump of gold, exhausting the naval funds to the tune of tens of millions of taels to build her Summer Palace, and causing China’s defeat in the war with Japan. Almost all the accusations that have since shaped public opinion about Cixi, even today, originated with the Wild Fox.

It was he who first represented Cixi as a debauched despot, alleging that she had many male concubines and nightly orgies with eunuchs. People believed Kang largely because he implied that his source was Emperor Guangxu himself, who had given him the ‘secret edict’, smuggled out of the Forbidden City sewn into a belt. The emperor, Kang declared, did not regard Cixi as his mother, but ‘merely as a concubine of a late emperor’s’ – and ‘a licentious concubine’ at that.

While Cixi’s most deadly enemy was at large and shaping history’s view of her for the next hundred years and more, her second most loathed foe, Sir Yinhuan, was taken off the original list for executions. The British and the Japanese lobbied on his behalf, the British especially persistently because they had given him a knighthood. His punishment was consequently commuted to exile in Xinjiang.
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Cixi hated him with a vengeance because it was he who had turned her weak adopted son into a prey for the Wild Fox – and for the Japanese. Thanks to Sir Yinhuan, the empire came close to landing in Japan’s lap.

Sir Yinhuan himself acknowledged that his relationship with Japan was the cause of his downfall. He told the guards escorting him to his place of exile that the empress dowager started to suspect him when she saw that he appeared intimate with Itō on the day of Itō’s audience with Emperor Guangxu. Whether or not this was the precise moment, Cixi was certainly convinced that he was working for the Japanese. In fact, it may well have occurred to her that he had been a Japanese agent before 1898 – that he had even played a role in China’s spectacular defeat in the 1894–5 war. At that time,
Emperor Guangxu relied on Grand Tutor Weng to help make decisions. And the Grand Tutor, out of his depth, relied on Sir Yinhuan, sending him draft documents several times a day for comments. In addition, Sir Yinhuan was in charge of the vital telecommunication system between Beijing and the war front. In this capacity he had been denounced by a number of people for acting suspiciously. The charges included that he ‘hid reports and cables, and changed some of their content’. Staff referred to him as a
‘traitor’, suspecting him of passing on military secrets to the Japanese. But like other charges against grandees, this critical one was not investigated. Grand Tutor Weng was his close friend, and would explain his actions away to the emperor. Since then, it has emerged that the Japanese had full knowledge of the telegraphic exchanges and knew
‘like the fingers and palms of their hands’ every move made by the Chinese military. Tokyo also knew, crucially, that Emperor Guangxu was willing to pay any price for peace, which allowed it to exact the wildly extortionate indemnity.

No matter how convinced she was of Sir Yinhuan’s treachery, no matter how furious she felt, Cixi was, again, unable to expose him through a trial. In this case, she could not afford to offend Japan. As a result, when Sir Yinhuan was sentenced to exile, his ‘crimes’ listed in the imperial decree were outlandish: ‘
harbouring evil intentions, conducting himself in a secretive way, currying favour with the powerful and being unpredictable and unreliable’. This sounded like a grotesque fabrication and reinforced foreigners’ abhorrence of Cixi. They kept pressing for Sir Yinhuan’s release. Two years later, on the very day that she appealed for cooperation from Japan and Britain to cope with a foreign invasion, she
ordered the execution of Sir Yinhuan in his place of exile, an order that she specified was to be delivered at the fastest speed. Sir Yinhuan had remained in the forefront of her mind and she wanted to pre-empt any demand from Britain and Japan for his release as a condition for agreeing to help.