Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (52 page)

Cixi behaved to Miss Carl like a girlfriend. They had a lot in common. No one appreciated Cixi’s gardens as keenly as the American painter: ‘The exquisite pleasure the contemplation of this glorious view gave me made me tremble with delight.’ They laughed together. One day Cixi went to see her chrysanthemums, which were in full bloom, while Carl remained at her work. When she returned, the empress dowager brought Carl a new variety and said, ‘I will give you something nice if you guess what I have named this flower.’ Carl thought the curious bloom, with hair-like petals and compact centre, resembled the bald head of an old man, at which a delighted Cixi exclaimed, ‘You have guessed. I have just given it the name of the Old Man of the Mountain!’ There was a casual intimacy between them. At one of her garden parties, Cixi scanned Carl’s grey dress, and took a pink peony from a vase and pinned it on her, saying that a little colour would be nice. They chatted about clothes. Cixi praised European fashions for their ‘pretty colors’, but said that while ‘the foreign costume was very becoming to well-made and well-proportioned people’, ‘it was unfortunate for any one who was not so blessed’. The Manchu costume, on the other hand, ‘falling in straight lines from the shoulder, was more becoming to stout people, for it hid many defects’. (The empress dowager refrained from criticising Western corsets to the American painter. She apparently responded to a court lady, who had lived abroad and told her about this fashion item with some exaggeration, ‘It is truly pathetic what foreign women have to endure. They are bound up with steel bars until they can scarcely breathe.
Pitiable! Pitiable!’)

Staying with Cixi for almost a year, seeing her virtually daily in her own milieu, Katharine Carl felt that she ‘had come to really love’ Cixi. The feeling was mutual. Cixi invited Carl to stay on for as long as she wanted and suggested that she paint other ladies in the court – and maybe even spend the rest of her life in Beijing. Carl gently declined, feeling that ‘The world beyond the Palace gates called me.’

Her painting of Cixi was an unremarkable one. Western portraits have shadows on the face, but in the Chinese tradition a face with black shadows was a ‘Yin-Yang Face’, which pointed to a dubious character – a double-crosser. Heavy pressure, however tactfully exerted, was put on Miss Carl to iron out the face. ‘When I saw I must represent Her Majesty in such a conventional way as to make her unusually attractive personality banal, I was no longer filled with the ardent enthusiasm for my work with which I had begun it, and I had many a heartache and much inward rebellion before I settled down to the inevitable.’ However, she wrote a book about her unique experience,
With the Empress Dowager
, published in 1906, which painted a memorable picture of Cixi. The empress dowager had made another loyal Western friend.

Meanwhile, Carl’s portrait was presented to the US government after the St Louis Exposition. In the
Blue Room of the White House on 18 February 1905, the Chinese minister to Washington told President Theodore Roosevelt and the assembled company that the empress dowager’s gift was intended to show her appreciation of America’s friendship for China and ‘her abiding interest in the welfare and prosperity of the American people’. In accepting the portrait ‘in the name of the Government and people of the United States’, President Roosevelt said, ‘It is fitting this mutual friendship should exist and be maintained and strengthened in all practicable ways, whether in the larger field of international relations or by pleasing incidents like that which brings us together today.’ The portrait, he said, ‘will be placed in the National Museum as a lasting memorial of the good-will that unites the two countries and the strong interest each feels in the other’s well-being and advancement.’

A third woman, similarly involved with Cixi’s efforts to build ties with the West, became close to her from 1903. This was
Louisa Pierson, the daughter of a Boston-born American merchant in Shanghai and his local Chinese wife. At the time, the 1870s, there were many Eurasian liaisons, and their children were invariably looked down on as half-casts. Robert Hart had ‘
a Chinese girl kept by me’, he wrote. He lived with her for years, until he discarded her to marry a British girl. Their
three children were sent to England to be raised by the wife of a bookkeeper, and neither parent set eyes on them again. His behaviour was deemed ‘generous in the extreme, almost quixotic’, by the standards of the day, as other foreigners tended simply to desert their mixed-race children. How Louisa Pierson was treated by her American father, who died in Shanghai, is unknown, but she was married as a proper wife by an unusual Chinese official, Yu Keng, who did not take her as a concubine or treat her as a kept woman. Their liaison was not an easy one. The Chinese called Louisa ‘quasi foreign devil’ (
gui-zi-liu
), and the foreign community shunned them. But the pair lived happily together with their children, completely unashamed and unapologetic about their union. Somewhat grudgingly Hart acknowledged that ‘the marriage, I believe, was a
love
affair’, while remarking, ‘The
Yu Keng
family are not well thought of anywhere, but the old man himself has powerful backing – I don’t know why.’

The backing came from unprejudiced sponsors, not least Cixi herself. Yu Keng had been working under Viceroy Zhang, who put him in charge of dealing with clashes between the local population and Christian missions in his provinces. The bilingual Louisa Pierson was able to talk to both sides, helping to smooth out misunderstandings and resolve disputes. Viceroy Zhang thought highly of the couple and recommended them to Beijing. There Yu received rapid
promotion, first as minister to Japan, then as minister to France. While Hart grumbled (‘I don’t like the appointment!’), Yu Keng and Louisa Pierson went to the hub of Europe with their ‘noisy family of English speaking children’.

In Paris, they led a cosmopolitan life. According to the Western press, who were fascinated by the couple, Louisa Pierson ‘
speaks French and English perfectly, with a slight accent, which recalls the Bostonian twang, together with something indefinable which is doubtless purely Chinese. She is a most wonderful artist, drawing on silk in the fashion of the old Chinese masters with a skill and a certainty of metier which makes French painters open their mouths wide with astonishment.’ She ‘
presides over the embassy receptions with exceeding charm and refinement’. At a
fancy-dress ball the couple gave to celebrate the Chinese New Year in 1901, one of their sons, Hsingling, dressed up as a convincing Napoleon. A Catholic, he went on to marry a French piano teacher in a church in Paris. The
wedding, for which the bridegroom wore a Manchu sky-blue robe with red coral buttons, was attended by the American Ambassador to France, General Horace Porter, and was widely reported in the press, described as ‘the most picturesque and interesting marriage recently seen here’ and ‘a Novel Event’. (The marriage did not survive their subsequent return to China.) The
two daughters, Der Ling and Rongling, wrote the
New York Times
, ‘are adorably pretty, and they dress in the European style with a finish and skill to which something of Oriental charm is added which makes them the cynosure of all eyes when they enter a drawingroom [
sic
]’. Louisa and her husband gave their daughters unheard-of freedom to enjoy Paris to the full. They socialised, frequented the theatre (where they were mesmerised by Sarah Bernhardt) and took dancing lessons with the famed Isadora Duncan. They performed at their parents’ parties and danced European-style ballroom dancing with close body contact with foreign men. The family’s lifestyle, including Louisa letting a Frenchman kiss her hand, raised not only eyebrows but also rancour: the family was denounced to the throne by outraged mission officials.

But Cixi liked what they were doing and waited impatiently for their return. After Yu Keng’s term ended, and after a whirlwind tour of major European cities, the family arrived back in Beijing in early 1903. At once, Cixi invited Louisa Pierson and her daughters to the palace to be her ladies-in-waiting, and placed them ahead of most other court ladies. The two daughters, both speaking English and French, interpreted for Cixi in her increasingly frequent contacts with Westerners. When she heard that the younger daughter, Rongling, had studied music and dance in Paris, Cixi was enthusiastic. She said that she had always felt it a tremendous pity that Chinese dancing had almost disappeared, and that she had tried unsuccessfully to find someone to research court records and revive it. ‘
Now Rongling can do it,’ said the empress dowager. So Rongling began a career that established her reputation as ‘the First Lady of modern dancing in China’. Urged on by Cixi, she studied court and folk dances and, combining them with ballet and other types of Western dancing, choreographed a series of dances, which she performed in front of a greatly delighted Cixi. Accompanying her was a Western-style orchestra set up by General Yuan, as well as the court ensemble.

Louisa Pierson was Cixi’s most-valued general consultant about the outside world. At last having someone close to her who had first-hand knowledge of Europe and Japan, and whose views she respected, Cixi sought her advice daily. One early interpreter, a girl who had been to Germany with her father, an attaché in the Chinese Mission, had told Cixi that the German court was ‘
very simple’. Trying to gauge how extravagant her own court was by international standards, Cixi asked Louisa, who said that although she had not been to any German palaces, she understood that they were in fact quite grand. Cixi was reassured. Intelligent and competent, Louisa Pierson was far more than a source of information or adviser on diplomatic etiquette. Even international politics fell within her orbit. When Japan and Russia looked set to go to war in Manchuria in late 1903, Cixi often talked to her about Japan, where Louisa had been stationed with her husband. One day the wife of the Japanese minister,
Uchida Kōsai, requested a visit. Cixi was very fond of the lady and had given her a Pekinese puppy, as she had to Mrs Conger. Such friendly gestures were of course also for the benefit of Tokyo. Cixi knew the lady’s visit at this moment had a political agenda, and that Tokyo wanted to sound out her real thoughts about Japan, which she had no wish to divulge. Louisa Pierson helped Cixi decide to have Rongling as the interpreter, who, on her mother’s instruction, mistranslated the Japanese lady’s probing and politically charged questions, turning them into harmless chatting. Louisa was so indispensable to Cixi that when she occasionally went away to see her sick husband, Cixi would urge her, however tactfully, to hurry back. It was with reluctance and resignation that Cixi let Louisa leave the court altogether when her husband was extremely ill – indeed dying – in 1907.

^fn1
A view she later revised. ‘Looking back, I often regret them and wish I had them now. They were the cleanest people imaginable, and the quietest in their service. They never gave the slightest trouble and never wanted an evening off!’

28 Cixi’s Revolution (1902–8)

CIXI CARRIED OUT
her revolution over seven momentous years: from her return to Beijing at the beginning of 1902 until her death in late 1908. Milestone changes defined the era, during which China decidedly crossed the threshold of modernity. Modernisation enabled the country’s annual revenue to more than double in this period, from just over
100 million taels to 235 million. And as revenues grew, so it became possible to fund further rounds of modernisation. The reforms in these years were radical, progressive and humane, designed to improve people’s lives and to eradicate medieval savagery. Under her measured stewardship, Chinese society was fundamentally transformed, thoughtfully and bloodlessly, for the better, while its roots were carefully preserved and suffered minimum trauma.

One of Cixi’s
first revolutionary decrees, proclaimed on 1 February 1902, was to lift the ban on Han–Manchu intermarriage, a ban as old as the Qing dynasty itself. In a family-oriented society the ban had meant that there was little social intercourse between the two ethnic groups. Even if officials were close colleagues, their families hardly ever met. The American physician Mrs Headland described one occasion when two Manchu princesses and the granddaughter of a Han Grand Councillor encountered each other in her house. For a while, getting them to converse was ‘
like trying to mix oil and water’. Now the Manchu–Han segregation was to be dismantled.

The same decree required the Han Chinese to abandon their tradition of foot-binding, stressing that the practice ‘harms creatures and violates Nature’s intentions’ – an argument that appealed to a deeply held belief: respect Nature’s creation. Aware of the tenacity of the custom that had been in place for a thousand years, and anticipating resistance that could lead to violent collisions, Cixi approached the implementation of her injunction with characteristic caution. She bid grass-roots leaders make all households aware of her message and use example and persuasion to convince the families, explicitly and emphatically forbidding the use of brutal coercion. Cixi’s style was not to force through drastic change, but to bring it about gradually through perseverance. When her American friend Sarah Conger asked her if her edict would have an immediate effect in the empire, she replied, ‘
No; the Chinese move slowly. Our customs are so fixed that it takes much time to change them.’ Cixi was prepared to wait. Her emphasis on gradual change contributed to the fact that many young girls (including this author’s grandmother) still had their feet broken a decade later. But they were the last generation to be subjected to this suffering.

Again using persuasion and promotion rather than force, Cixi began to release women from their homes and from male–female segregation, breaking a fundamental Confucian tradition. Women started to appear in public, and to go to theatres and cinemas, enjoying undreamed-of pleasures. She particularly
espoused modern education for women, repeatedly urging Viceroys, high officials and aristocrats to lead the way and set up and fund girls’ schools. She herself set an example by personally founding a School for Aristocratic Women, to which she appointed her adopted daughter, the Imperial Princess, as headmistress. Another of her plans was to open an institute of higher education for women and, as an incentive for applicants, it was announced that each graduate would have the honour of being referred to as a Personal Pupil of the Empress Dowager. In 1905, a female sponsor of a girls’ school, Madame Huixing, used self-immolation (a traditional and not uncommon way to draw attention to a cause) to appeal for regular funding for the school. The flourishing press of the time made her a national heroine. Men and women gathered for her memorial services, and a Peking Opera was written to tell her story. Cixi gave her full support by publicly selecting a star-studded cast to perform the opera in the Summer Palace. She also chose another new play to be performed on the same occasion:
Women Can Be Patriots
– aimed at awakening women’s political consciousness. In spring 1907, a Regulation for Women’s Education was decreed, which made it official that women should receive education.