Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (59 page)

In 1903–4, a British military expedition, led by Major Francis Younghusband, invaded Tibet from British India. The Tibetans fought the invaders and suffered heavy casualties. The Dalai Lama fled, and Younghusband pressed on to Lhasa. There he signed a treaty with the remaining Tibetan administration before withdrawing. The treaty imposed a war indemnity of £500,000, and required Tibet to open more centres for trade. It went on: ‘
As security for the payment of the above-mentioned indemnity and for the fulfilment of the provisions relative to trade marts . . . the British Government shall continue to occupy the Chumbi Valley . . .’ It told the Tibetans to ‘raze all forts and fortifications and remove all armaments which might impede the course of free communication between the British frontier and the towns of Gyangtse and Lhasa’. Tibet could not make any foreign-policy decision ‘without the previous consent of the British Government’.

When the Qing Imperial Commissioner cabled her the terms of the treaty, Cixi saw that her empire’s ‘sovereignty’ over Tibet was in jeopardy. In an edict on 3 October 1904, she announced: ‘
Tibet has belonged to our dynasty for 200 years. This is a vast area rich in resources, which has always been coveted by foreigners. Recently, British troops entered it and coerced the Tibetans to sign a treaty. This is a most sinister development, and . . . we must prevent further damage and salvage the present situation.’ She dispatched representatives to India to negotiate with the British and to establish the principle that Britain had to deal with Beijing over Tibet. ‘
No concession over sovereignty,’ Cixi instructed her negotiators.

Britain agreed to renegotiate with Cixi’s representatives. It signed a treaty with Beijing in April 1906, which basically (though not unambiguously) recognised Tibet as part of the Chinese empire.

Cixi held a strong card: the fleeing thirteenth
Dalai Lama. A good-looking man in his late twenties, wearing a monk’s habit, he travelled northeast, finally arriving at Urga, now Ulan Bator, capital of Outer Mongolia and, at that time, part of the Qing empire. The Dalai Lama was the spiritual leader of the Mongols as well as the Tibetans.
Cixi immediately dispatched officials to attend him and ordered local officials to look after him. She also cabled her sympathies for his arduous journey. She urged him to return to Lhasa as soon as the British were gone and to run Tibet as before.

The thirteenth Dalai Lama did not return for some time, but asked to go to Beijing and meet the empress dowager. During his absence a Han official, Chang Yintang, was running Tibet (though not as Imperial Commissioner – a post traditionally specified not to be given to a Han). Yintang attempted to implement ‘reforms’, with the intention of making Tibet more like a Han province. Having been in India negotiating with the British, and having seen how they ran things there, he advised Beijing to adopt the British method: to send in a sizeable army, make the Imperial Commissioner a ‘governor-general’, appoint the administration and treat the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama like the Indian maharajas, taking away their political power and paying them off handsomely. Cixi did not endorse Yintang. After receiving reports that his plans were hugely unpopular among the Tibetans, she transferred him to another post, effectively
aborting his programme. It seems she understood that the Tibetans’ desire to be left alone was non-negotiable, and came to the conclusion that only by respecting it could she keep Tibet in the empire. Her approach was registered by the Dalai Lama, who regarded it as his best option, and so repeatedly asked to see her – in order to nail down an agreement. Eventually Cixi issued the invitation, and on 28 September 1908 the thirteenth Dalai Lama arrived in the capital.

Cixi had been reluctant to make the invitation, most likely because a visit by the Dalai Lama posed potentially explosive protocol problems. The biggest
dilemma was whether the Dalai Lama should kneel to her and the emperor. As a spiritual leader, people knelt before him. But he was also a political leader, and as such he would be expected to kneel to the throne. If the Dalai Lama was not required to kneel, given that only foreigners were exempt, this would imply that Beijing did not regard Tibet as part of China. The problem would be particularly acute on the occasion of the state banquet in his honour, when political leaders from Mongolia, for instance, would go down on their knees as Emperor Guangxu arrived and departed. The banquet was a ‘public’ affair, and Cixi was well aware that it would be the focus of attention: while Western powers would be watching for signs that Tibet was not treated as part of her empire, the Tibetans needed to be reassured that their God was not humiliated. The protocol office asked Cixi what to do, and she pondered the problem for several days. Finally she decided that the Dalai Lama would kneel, like all others at the banquet, except that he would do so at his seat – a low throne on which he sat cross-legged – rather than at the entrance to the hall like everybody else. This way, his kneeling would be inconspicuous, especially with his ample robe. The Dalai Lama did not object, clearly regarding this as a worthwhile price to pay for Tibet to maintain its self-governing status, which both he and the empress dowager wanted.

For Cixi, it was vital to keep Tibet in the empire, in a mutually acceptable and amicable way. She deliberated over the most appropriate symbol-laden gifts and, when conferring a new title on the Dalai Lama, made a point of adding words to the effect that he was ‘
sincerely loyal’ to the empire. But she would not use a heavy hand to assert her authority. Earlier that year she had appointed a new Imperial Commissioner to Tibet, Zhao Erfeng, but Lhasa rejected him, disliking his record as the administrator of a neighbouring region inhabited by Tibetans. Rather than send Zhao in by force, Cixi held him back, which was an unprecedented concession in Qing history. This was ‘
in order not to lose the goodwill of the Tibetans’, as she spelt out in her decree. The imperial troops were further told not to engage in clashes with the Tibetan army. In Beijing,
she and the Dalai Lama agreed that he would return to Lhasa as soon as possible and continue to run Tibet as before.

During the whole of the Dalai Lama’s stay, Cixi was struggling to cope.
Their first meeting after his arrival had had to be cancelled as she had felt too ill to go ahead. She had sobbed with frustration when she gave the order. It was not possible to set another date in advance, as her condition fluctuated daily. They only managed to meet when she got up one morning and felt strong enough.

The Dalai Lama’s visit
coincided with Cixi’s seventy-third birthday, the tenth day of the tenth lunar month – or 3 November 1908. She very much wanted to entertain the Tibetan Holy Man, and so felt she really must sit through the endless performances and rituals, even though she had constant diarrhoea and a high fever. Her doctors recorded that she was ‘exceptionally exhausted’.

Four days after her birthday she sensed that death was breathing down on her, and sent
Prince Ching to the Eastern Mausoleums to check out her burial ground, near her late husband’s and son’s. This last resting place was of paramount importance to her, and she had had it constructed in splendour. During her burial a large quantity of jewels would be placed in the tomb with her, as befitted an empress dowager.

Meanwhile, she started to put the empire’s affairs in order. The moment had come to deal with Emperor Guangxu. Bedridden and seemingly on the verge of death, he refused to die and could pull back, as he had done before. If he survived and she was gone, the empire would fall into the hands of the waiting Japanese. It was in these circumstances that Cixi ordered the murder of her adopted son, by
poisoning. That Emperor Guangxu died from consuming large quantities of arsenic was definitively established in 2008, after forensic examination of his remains. His murder would have been easy to arrange: Cixi routinely sent him dishes as tokens of a mother’s affection for her son. At 6.33 p.m. on 14 November, Emperor Guangxu was pronounced dead by the royal physicians.

His
empress, Longyu, had been with him at the end. They had apparently wept in each other’s arms – embracing as they had so rarely done in nearly twenty years of marriage. During those last hours Empress Longyu was seen rushing between her dying husband and her dying mother-in-law with swollen eyes. After Emperor Guangxu died, she dressed his body. According to court tradition, the finest pearl available must be placed in the emperor’s mouth to accompany him to the next world. Empress Longyu wanted to pluck the pearl from the emperor’s crown, but a eunuch stopped her, saying that they did not have the empress dowager’s permission. So Empress Longyu removed the pearl from her own crown and put it in her dead husband’s mouth.

Emperor Guangxu died in a bed that was ‘
unadorned like an average folk’s’, observed one of the provincial doctors. There was no outer curtain to encircle it, and the footstool on which he stepped to get into it was covered only with a blanket, rather than silk brocade. Doctors and court officials were with him in his final hours, but none of the
Grand Councillors was present. His last words were not officially recorded. The Grand Council gathered at Cixi’s bedside while he lay dying, and again after they learned of his death, to hear Cixi make arrangements for the succession.
Zaifeng, whom Cixi had been training for years, was designated Regent, and his two-year-old son, Puyi, Cixi’s great-nephew, was named as the successor to the throne. The appointment of the child emperor ensured that the father would take charge as Regent – and furthermore Cixi was able to remain in control for as long as she was alive. Her decree made clear that ‘
all key policies are to be decided by myself’. She was determined to hold on to the reins of the empire until her last breath.

Zaifeng was not the ideal choice, but Cixi regarded him as the best there was. She trusted that he would not deliver China to Japan, and that he could deal with Westerners in a friendly and dignified manner. There were serious limitations about him, of which she was well aware. Once, at a dinner party at the American Legation, he was asked, ‘
What does Your Highness think of the relative characteristics of the Germans and the French?’ and he replied, ‘The people in Berlin get up early in the morning and go to their business, while the people in Paris get up in the evening and go to the theatre.’ Clearly he was recycling a cliché.

Cixi was fading; but she still managed to oversee the myriad things to be done after the passing away of a monarch, including the writing of Emperor
Guangxu’s official will, to be announced to the empire. The will referred to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in nine years’ time. This, it declared, was the emperor’s ‘unfulfilled aspiration’, and this, once accomplished, would give him untold joy in the other world.

A night passed while Cixi dealt with one matter after another, conscious all the time that she had just murdered her adopted son. She was forced to stop working at about eleven o’clock in the morning, as death was imminent. She died less than three hours later.

A Grand Council secretary drafted Cixi’s own official will according to her wishes, ‘
with my hand and heart trembling, everything seeming unreal’, he recorded in his diary. This
will recalled her involvement in China’s state affairs for nearly fifty years and her efforts to do what she regarded as her best. It reiterated her determination to transform China into a constitutional monarchy, which, the will stated with much regret, she was now unable to see to completion. The two wills made unmistakably clear that it was Cixi’s dying wish that the Chinese should have their parliament and their vote.

During the last three hours of her life Cixi’s mind was still restless. She now dictated her very last political decree, one that would seem bizarre to any observer. ‘
I am critically ill, and I am afraid I am about to pass away,’ she said, in direct and personal language. ‘In the future, the affairs of the empire will be decided by the Regent. However, if he comes across exceptionally critical matters, he must obey the
dowager empress.’ The ‘dowager empress’ referred to here was Empress Longyu, who had just been given the title on her husband’s death and the appointment of the heir. To stress that the Empress Longyu’s wishes were final, Cixi unusually used the word
must
in her decree – an apparently redundant term. It was with this added emphasis that Cixi made the fate of the empire ultimately the responsibility of Empress Longyu.

The empress was by all accounts a pitiable figure. Foreigners who had met her described her as having ‘
a sad, gentle face. She is rather stooped, extremely thin, her face long and sallow, and her teeth very much decayed.’ From the day of her wedding, her husband treated her at best with disdain. Kinder-hearted observers found her full of pathos, and the less generous despised her. Rarely venturing a remark on her own initiative, she was accustomed to (and meekly accepted) being denigrated. Mrs Headland, the American physician who frequented the court, remembered, when hearing about her new role:

At the audiences given to the [foreign] ladies she was always present, but never in the immediate vicinity of either the Empress Dowager or the Emperor . . . she always stood in some inconspicuous place in the rear, with her waiting women about her, and as soon as she could do so without attracting attention, she would withdraw . . . In the summer-time we sometimes saw her with her servants wandering aimlessly about the court. She had the appearance of a gentle, quiet, kindly person who was always afraid of intruding and had no place or part in anything. And now she is the Empress Dowager! It seems a travesty on the English language to call this kindly, gentle soul by the same title that we have been accustomed to use in speaking of the woman who has just passed away.

The grandees held Empress Longyu in such disregard that no one troubled to inform her of her new title as dowager empress. Fearful of being overlooked, she tentatively asked the Grand Councillors about her status as they gathered in the bedchamber of the now-deceased Cixi, whom she had just been dressing.
One Grand Councillor ignored her, pretending he was too deaf to hear what she was saying. When she learned about her new title, Empress Longyu was overjoyed. Although it was her due, she had not dared to expect it. In spite of the fact that it was Cixi who had chosen her as empress, and that she had been attending to Cixi all those years, Cixi had rarely addressed a comment to her and never sought her opinion. And yet Cixi’s last political act was to place the burden of the empire’s destiny on her narrow and bowed shoulders.