Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (7 page)

The Old Summer Palace was in its full glory when Cixi left it with her husband and son in September 1860. Autumn is Beijing’s best season, when the sun is no longer scorching, the biting cold has yet to descend, and no sandstorms from the northwestern desert are whipping the city, as they habitually do in spring. Just days before the allies landed on the coast, her husband had celebrated his thirtieth birthday,
^fn6
and tradition had allowed the opera-loving monarch, besieged though he was by troubles, to indulge his passion for four days. The large stage, built on three levels, stood in the open air by a vast lake, and Cixi watched the operas with him in a pavilion across a courtyard. At the climax, crowds of actors – men playing the parts of both sexes and of the gods – sang and danced on all three levels, congratulating the emperor on his birthday. Under a clear autumn sky, the music was borne by the wind into every latticed window on the scented palace grounds. The splendour of the Old Summer Palace was etched in Cixi’s mind and would often return to haunt her. To rebuild it would become her obsession.

Travelling 200 kilometres to the northeast, the court crossed the Great Wall and arrived at the royal Hunting Lodge on the edge of the Mongolian steppes in the hilly region of Chengde. This ‘lodge’ was in fact even larger than the Old Summer Palace, though less lavishly crafted. It had been the major base for hunting expeditions for earlier emperors. Emperor Kangxi, who had first built the Lodge in 1703, had been a master hunter and apparently once killed eight tigers in one week. In the evenings, the emperors and their men had lit bonfires and roasted their kill, drinking and singing and dancing, in all-male company. There had been wrestling bouts and rowing competitions on the long, serpentine lake. One of the buildings was a replica of the Potala Palace in Lhasa and, elsewhere, in a martial-looking Mongolian yurt, Lord Macartney had had a futile audience with Emperor Qianlong in 1793. Cixi had never been here before. Her husband had had to cope with mounting mayhem throughout his reign, and they were only here now as refugees.

During this unprecedented dynastic crisis, Cixi played no political role. She was confined to the harem, where it was dangerous for her even to hint at her views. Her job was to look after her son, then four years old. Half a century later, in 1910, after she had died, an Englishman, Sir Edmund
Backhouse, wrote a much-quoted biography of her,
China under the Empress Dowager
, in which he faked a diary, depicting Cixi as a very hawkish figure who urged her husband not to flee and not to talk peace with the foreigners, but to kill their messengers. This was sheer invention.
^fn7
As events would show, Cixi was indeed opposed to the foreign policy of her husband and his inner circle – but for very different reasons. Silently observing from close quarters, she in fact regarded their stubborn resistance to opening the door of China as stupid and wrong. Their hate-filled effort to shut out the West had, in her view, achieved the opposite to preserving the empire. It had brought the empire catastrophe, not least the destruction of her beloved Old Summer Palace. She herself would pursue a new route.

^fn1
This is according to Chinese records. Some suggest that Lord Macartney did not perform this ritual. But Emperor Qianlong specifically told his court he would see Lord Macartney ‘now that he has agreed to follow the rules of this Celestial Dynasty’ on this matter. For other arguments suggesting that Lord Macartney did perform the detested ‘three kneelings and nine head knockings’, see Rockhill, p. 31.

^fn2
It is not in the Royal Archives at Windsor, and there is no sign of the letter reaching London. It was, however, published in the contemporary English press in Canton, the
Canton Press
, and the February 1840 issue of the
Chinese Repository
, a periodical for the Protestant missionaries.

^fn3
Demanding an indemnity was not a standard European practice at the time. Later, under fire and defending himself, Palmerston told Parliament that ‘what the late Government demanded was satisfaction for the injured honour of the country, and that one of the ways in which satisfaction was to be given was payment for the opium so extorted . . .’ For China to pay ‘the expenses of the war’ was, conceded Palmerston, ‘certainly unusual in European warfare’, but ‘in order to make the Chinese sensible of the extent of the outrage they had committed, and that they might sufficiently feel the exercise of the power of Britain in vindication of their honour, it was thought expedient and proper to make them pay the expense of the war, in addition to compensating the injured parties.’

^fn4
The first, second and third sons had died, and the seventh (Prince Chun, who was to marry Cixi’s sister), eighth and ninth princes were too young. The fifth had been given away by his father to be an adopted son to a (deceased) brother, thus disqualifying him from the succession.

^fn5
A common explanation for Emperor Daoguang’s choice of heir is that one day he discovered that the fourth son could not bear to hurt animals in spring in case they were pregnant. This is plainly sentimental tosh.

^fn6
By the traditional way of calculating age, according to which newborns start at one year old.

^fn7
Backhouse has since been exposed as a literary forger. In this case, what he seems to have done was to fake five passages about Cixi, and insert them into a well-known published diary by a Beijing official named Wu Kedu. As Backhouse published his biography first in English, the five faked passages melt into the English translation of the diary he quoted. When his book was then translated into Chinese, the forged passages, thus laundered, became part of the diary. The fake has puzzled historians, as the editions of the diary that exist in China contain no such references to Cixi. In the faked passages, residents in Beijing were seen to be hanging on Cixi’s every word about the fate of the empire. This may have been the case when Backhouse was in China decades later, but not in 1860, when she, as an imperial concubine, was a non-person to the public.

3 Emperor Xianfeng Dies (1860–61)

JUST BEFORE HE
fled to the Hunting Lodge, Emperor Xianfeng ordered his younger half-brother, Prince Gong, to remain in the capital and deal with the invaders. Prince Gong, twenty-seven years old, was the sixth son of their father, the one who had specifically been ruled out as successor to the throne because of his lack of visceral hatred for Westerners and his tendency to accommodate. Now, thanks to these qualities, he quickly settled with the allies – by accepting all their demands, including paying indemnities of eight million taels of silver to each European country. The Treaty of Beijing with Britain was signed on 24 October 1860 and the Treaty with France the following day. The allies left and peace was restored. Western powers began to install their representatives in Beijing, where they dealt with Prince Gong.

The prince, pockmarked like most men of his time who had caught smallpox in childhood, was nonetheless good-looking. John Thomson, the celebrated photographer who later took photos of him, said that Prince Gong ‘had
what phrenologists would describe as a splendid head. His eyes were penetrating, and his face, when in repose, wore an expression of sullen resolution.’ When he sat, it was in the posture dictated for Manchu aristocrats: legs slightly apart and feet positioned at ten-past-ten. His robe embroidered with dragons in gold thread, his hat adorned with a plume in a jade holder with a coloured button that denoted his rank, he was the picture of a high prince. Whenever he held up his long-handled pipe, a flame would appear instantly at its tiny bejewelled bowl, struck by an attendant dropping on one knee. The prince’s pipe was held in his lined black satin boot, in an inside compartment – the gentleman’s ‘pocket’ in those days. These pockets held a variety of items, from tobacco to state papers, from sweets to pieces of tissue with which the aristocrats wiped their mouths and their ivory chopsticks after dining out. (They usually took their own chopsticks with them.) The prince’s chopstick-case, and a profusion of bejewelled objects including a fan-case, dangled from his girdle. When he travelled in the capital, his sedan-chair would be under a canopy, surrounded by a showy entourage on horseback. All traffic would make way for him. Nearer his destination, a horseman would ride ahead and alert people to his imminent arrival so that they would line up to greet him.

Prince Gong’s half-brother, the emperor, enjoined that, as a great prince, he must not lower himself by receiving the Europeans in person, even though they were the victors. But the prince was practical and knew his brother’s order was unrealistic. He signed the treaties himself with the British and French, even arriving at the venue early to wait for Lord Elgin. When Elgin arrived, with an escort of 400 infantry, 100 cavalry and two bands playing at the head of the procession, Prince Gong advanced to greet him with his hands closed together in front of his chest, a gesture that he would use with an equal. Lord Elgin, according to General Grant, ‘
returned him a proud contemptuous look, and merely bowed slightly, which must have made the blood run cold in poor Kung [Gong]’s veins. He was a delicate gentlemanlike-looking man . . .’ Elgin soon toned down his show of hauteur. ‘Both of the national representatives . . . appeared willing to treat each other as equals, but not as superiors.’ Prince Gong’s conciliatoriness won him sympathy from the Europeans. Elgin wrote a friendly letter of farewell when he departed, in which he expressed the wish that future foreign affairs in China be put in the hands of Prince Gong.

Emperor Xianfeng authorised the treaties, telling Prince Gong he had done well. The emperor then had the treaties announced throughout the empire, by sending them to all provinces and having posters put up in Beijing. ‘Those who are thinking of taking advantage of the war to start a revolt will now think twice when they know peace has been restored,’ he said. One diarist saw the notice and wept: the Chinese emperor was listed on an equal footing with the British and French monarchs, which the man regarded as ‘an utterly unheard of thing, ever, and an unbelievable fall in our status’.

The country that gained most from the war was a third party, Russia, China’s neighbour to the north. On 14 November, Prince Gong signed a treaty with the Russian envoy, Nicholas Ignatieff, which ceded to Russia hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of territory north of the Amur River and east of the Ussuri, defining the border to this day. This area, which was commonly held to be ‘a great wilderness’, had been surrendered to Russia back in 1858 by the Manchu garrison chief of the territory, General Yishan, apparently in a moment of panic when the Russians made warlike noises. The General had in fact proven himself a lying and hopeless coward during the Opium War. Consisting of three paragraphs and filling less than a page, the document was never endorsed by Emperor Xianfeng.

But now this highly irregular piece of paper was accredited by Prince Gong, who had its contents incorporated in the Treaty of Beijing with Russia. Nicholas Ignatieff claimed to the prince that it was he who had persuaded the British and French to accept a peaceful settlement and that his country therefore deserved to be rewarded. Prince Gong told the emperor that Ignatieff did nothing of the sort; in fact he had ‘nudged the British and the French to invade’. Now he was only ‘taking advantage of their presence in Beijing to exact what he wants’. But regarding Ignatieff as ‘an exceedingly cunning and immovable character’, the prince was worried that he would ‘make mischief’ and ‘stir up unpredictable troubles’ with the allies, and so he counselled accepting his demands. Emperor Xianfeng cursed Ignatieff, calling him ‘the most loathsome’, but gave his consent – even though it is hard to imagine what trouble could have been stirred up, given that the allies were impatient to go home. And so the Qing dynasty suffered the biggest loss of territory in its history. ‘
With this treaty in his pocket,’ writes Nicholas’s great-grandson, Michael, ‘Ignatieff and his Cossacks saddled up for Petersburg’, and:

having traversed the whole of Asia on horseback in six weeks . . . he was received by the Tsar, decorated with the Order of St Vladimir, promoted to general and shortly thereafter made head of the Asian department of the Foreign Office. Without firing a shot, he had secured for Russia a wild terrain the size of France and Germany combined and the hinterland of Vladivostok, the new empire’s port on the Pacific.

The fact that Prince Gong yielded without a fight indicates a lack of nerve in his character, which his father had foreseen, and which was to manifest itself in other critical circumstances. As for Emperor Xianfeng, his preoccupation at the time was how to avoid an audience with the Western envoys in Beijing, who had been asking to present their credentials to him. He found the prospect of being face-to-face with his enemies unbearable and told Prince Gong to refuse their request, in such a way that the issue would never arise again. Otherwise, the emperor threatened, somewhat petulantly, ‘if I get back to Beijing and they come and ask again, I will hold you responsible and punish you’. Prince Gong argued that the Europeans had no malevolent designs, but the emperor was adamant. Lord Elgin had carried to China on his two trips in 1858 and 1860 handwritten letters from Queen Victoria to Emperor Xianfeng, professing goodwill. These letters were brought back to Britain, undelivered and unopened.

In the north, in the Hunting Lodge beyond the Great Wall, Emperor Xianfeng maintained contact with Prince Gong in Beijing, and continued his administrative routine, dealing with dozens of reports from all over the empire each day. The documents were delivered through an ancient, but efficient system, with messengers riding on horses whose speed was specified, depending on the urgency of the message. The most urgent took two days to arrive from Beijing. At first, the emperor was keen to return to the capital once the British and French had pulled out. The weather at the Lodge was getting very cold and worse with each passing day. Having not been inhabited for decades, the palaces were not equipped to cope with the severe winter. But then he hesitated: several times, after announcing that he was departing, he cancelled the trip. Officials urged him to go, anxiously pointing out that the country risked instability if the emperor was not on the throne in the capital. But the argument did not move the monarch; nor did the thought of his own health. He finally chose to spend the grim winter in the northern wilderness, knowing it was bad for his delicate physique. The emperor, it appears, was determined not to be in the same city as the Western legations. He seems to have been living out the Chinese idea of ultimate hatred: ‘Not under the same sky!’ (
bu-gong-dai-tian
). Or he could not bear being near the ravaged Old Summer Palace. His self-imposed exile was prolonged, and became permanent. Spending the interminable harsh winter in the ill-equipped Hunting Lodge, he fell ill and coughed blood. Eleven months after arriving, on 22 August 1861, he died.