Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (9 page)

Cixi had engineered a major offence by the Regents – that they dared to shout and behave disrespectfully in front of the emperor and had frightened him. Citing this event, she drafted by hand an edict in her son’s name condemning the Regents. Her writing betrayed her lack of formal education. The text was littered with solecisms and inelegant sentences and was dotted with the wrong characters – errors that were all too easy to commit. Cixi knew her own shortcomings and wrote at the end of her draft edict: ‘
Please could the 7th brother revise it for me.’

The seventh brother was Prince Chun, the man who had married Cixi’s younger sister, thanks to her manoeuvring. Now twenty years old, he had been through a rigorous classical education since the age of five and was able to write ‘magnificent compositions and beautiful sentences’, according to Grand Tutor Weng, who would become a tutor to two emperors and whose own scholarship was indisputable.
A diligent pupil, the prince had imbibed the classics deep into the night and had, by his own account, clung to his teachers’ words as if ‘to sunshine in winter’, and had followed their teaching in the same manner as ‘sticking to an established path on the edge of a precipice, not daring to deviate by half a step’. This was a man who needed a guide, and Cixi was fulfilling the role.

Prince Chun had been devastated by the empire’s defeat at the hands of the Westerners, the burning of the Old Summer Palace and the death of his half-brother. Before the court’s flight from Beijing, he had
pleaded with the emperor not to abandon the capital, and begged to be allowed to lead troops against the invaders. His entreaties had been refused by his half-brother, who did not want to send him to a certain death. Frustrated, the hot-blooded prince blamed his half-brother’s advisers for mishandling events and longed to get rid of them. He was the first person after Empress Zhen whom Cixi took into her confidence about the coup.

Cixi’s draft edict was delivered to Prince Chun by a eunuch she trusted. The next day he
replied with a revised text, which ended by announcing the dismissal of the Regents. His wife, Cixi’s sister, carried the revised edict to Cixi, and it was then stitched into the lining of Empress Zhen’s robe. In his covering letter, Prince Chun pledged total support for Cixi. That she was about to act, he said, was ‘indeed the good fortune of our country’, and he would stand by her, ‘come what may’.

Prince Chun’s words reflected the prevailing sentiment among the princes, generals and officials. Cixi knew her action would be popular. With this conviction and the two seals representing the monarchical authority, she felt she could secure Prince Gong’s commitment. As he was in the capital, Cixi’s plan was to join him there ahead of the Regents, to coordinate with him and capture the men when they arrived. So Prince Chun steered the Regents into agreeing that the child emperor should take a shortcut back to Beijing and not go with the late emperor’s enormous coffin, which would have to follow the main roads and move slowly, as it was carried by dozens of men and accompanied by the whole court. All accepted that the child must be spared this long and exhausting journey.

On an auspicious date two months after Emperor Xianfeng’s death, the grand procession bearing his coffin set off from the Hunting Lodge. For the course of their journey, bridges had been repaired, roads levelled and broadened and covered with yellow soil as was required for all royal routes. Before the coffin was lifted, the child emperor knelt by its side in an act of farewell. He was scheduled to perform the same ritual to greet its arrival at a gate in the Forbidden City ten days later. Half the Regents travelled with the coffin, watched over by Prince Chun. The other half went with the child emperor, who, in strict accordance with court rules, sat with Empress Zhen in a sedan-chair with black curtains as a sign of mourning. Cixi was in another black-curtained sedan-chair. Travelling with all speed, they covered the distance to Beijing in six days, four days ahead of the coffin. As soon as she arrived at the outskirts of the capital, Cixi asked for Prince Gong and presented him with the
coup edict, stamped with the two seals, one at the beginning and the other at the end. Prince Gong was now convinced, and felt able to convince others, that ousting the Regents was on the order of the new emperor.

He proposed a few changes to the coup edict, deleting his own name, which had been singled out for praise for bringing peace to the empire. The word referring to foreigners as ‘foreign barbarians’ was replaced with a neutral word meaning ‘foreign countries’ –
wai-guo
. The prince then set about getting ready the force needed for the coup.

On the last day of the ninth lunar month of 1861, while the coffin of Emperor Xianfeng was progressing towards the capital at a stately pace, Cixi ignited the fuse of her coup. She told Prince Gong to bring his associates to her and Empress Zhen, and when they arrived she had the coup edict declared to them. In a winsome show of grief, the Two Dowager Empresses denounced the Regents for bullying them and the child emperor. All present showed great indignation. In the middle of the denunciation, the Regents who had been travelling with Cixi rushed into the palace and shouted outside the hall that the women had broken a cardinal rule by calling the male officials into the harem. Cixi, looking mightily incensed, ordered a second edict written and stamped there and then: for the arrest of the Regents, on the grounds that they were trying to prevent the emperor from seeing his officials, which was a major crime.

The original edict had only ordered the Regents’ dismissal from their positions. Now Prince Gong took the new decree and went to arrest the Regents who had been shouting. They bellowed: ‘We are the ones who write decrees! Yours can’t be proper since we did not write them!’ But the two magic seals silenced them. Guards brought by the prince dragged them away.

Armed with yet another stamped decree, Prince Chun arrested those Regents who had been travelling with the coffin. He went in person for Sushun, their de facto leader. When the prince broke into the house where Sushun was staying the night, he found Sushun, a large man, in bed with two concubines. Sushun roared ‘like a leopard’, refusing to accept the ‘arrest warrant’. This display of defiance to an imperial decree, and the fact that he had apparently indulged in sex when escorting the late emperor’s coffin, gave Cixi grounds to have him executed. Sushun had been the only man on the Board who had had some idea of Cixi’s intelligence, and he had wanted her killed. But having no inkling of her ambition and ability, he had allowed the others to persuade him to abandon his plan. On the way to the execution ground he howled with regret that he had underestimated ‘this mere woman’.

The meting out of punishments followed a prescribed procedure. First Prince Gong headed a panel of princes and officials to ascribe precise crimes to each of the Regents and to propose appropriate punishments, in accordance with the penal codes. In order to topple the Regents, they had to be guilty of treason. But the offences that had been cited did not justify this charge. On the fifth day, as the deliberations ground to a halt, the two women intervened with a smoking gun: the eight men, they claimed, had forged their late husband’s will. So grave was this new charge – and so improbable – that the men on the panel were hesitant to cite it, in case they were thought to be fabricating evidence. The two women then took full responsibility by allowing the panel to announce that the information had come from them. This enabled Prince Gong and the panel to condemn the eight Regents for treason. The three main offenders were sentenced to death by a thousand cuts. In a calculated demonstration of magnanimity, Cixi greatly reduced the sentences, executing only Sushun, and by the much less painful decapitation.

Sushun’s execution was greeted with cheering by the many who hated him. As the chief examiner for the Imperial Examinations, which selected officials, he had been extremely hard-hearted towards the literati candidates who had travelled to the capital, through considerable hardship, from every corner of the empire. He had treated them ‘like slaves’, commented Grand Tutor Weng, a fellow examiner. A sort of ‘anti-corruption’ zealot, Sushun had dished out disproportional punishments for minor offences, while he himself was more corrupt than most. He accused a subordinate of his, Junglu, of ‘embezzling’ and nearly had him beheaded. But according to Junglu,
Sushun persecuted him because he had declined to give him his collection of choice snuff bottles and a first-rate horse. On the morning of Sushun’s execution, Junglu rose early to be at the front of the crowds to see his enemy’s head roll. Afterwards he went straight to a bar and got drunk. Junglu became a lifelong devotee of Cixi – a devotion that later gave rise to a rumour that they had been lovers.

Cixi ordered the other two main figures among the Regents, Prince Zheng and Prince Yee, to take their own lives, sending each a long white silk scarf with which to hang himself. This not-infrequently-used imperial order was called, rather poetically,
ci-bo
, ‘bestowing silk’. It was considered a favour, as far as a death sentence was concerned: it would be suicide, not execution, and it could be carried out in private. The rest of the disgraced Regents were simply dismissed (one being sent to the frontier). Prompt edicts announced that
no one else would be incriminated, and the papers confiscated from Sushun’s house were swiftly burned, unread, in front of the Grand Council.

So, two months after her husband died, the twenty-five-year-old Cixi completed her coup with just three deaths, no bloodshed otherwise and no upheaval. The British envoy in Beijing, Frederick Bruce, was amazed: ‘It is certainly singular that men, long in power, disposing of the funds of the state and of its patronage, should have fallen without a shot of resistance, and without a voice or hand raised in their defence.’ This showed just how popular Cixi’s coup was. As
Bruce wrote to London, ‘As far as I am able to ascertain, public opinion seems unanimous in condemning Su-shun [Sushun] and his colleagues, and in approving the punishments awarded to them.’ Not only did the coup reflect people’s wishes, but it had ‘certainly been managed with great ability’, causing no more ‘confusion’ than ‘a change of ministry’. Word got out that it was Cixi who had brought off the coup, and she gained tremendous esteem. The Viceroy in Canton, ‘in great spirits’, praised her to the British consul, who reported his words to London: ‘
the Empress Mother is a woman of mind [
sic
] and strong will’, the coup was ‘well done’ and ‘there will be hopes now’. The famed military chief and later major reformer, Zeng Guofan, wrote in his diary when he learned the details of the coup from friends:
‘I am bowled over by the Empress Dowager’s wise, decisive action, which even great monarchs in the past were not able to achieve. I am much stirred by admiration and awe.’

Prince Gong was no less impressed. His camp called for her, not the prince, to take charge of the country – an idea that undoubtedly originated with him. Even though this was unprecedented in the Qing dynasty, these senior officials argued, precedents could be found in other dynasties going back more than 1,700 years. They produced a list of dowager empresses who had supervised their young sons. Omitted from the list, though, was Wu Zetian (
AD
624–705), the only woman in Chinese history who had explicitly declared herself the ‘Emperor’ and ran the country in her own right – for which she had been much condemned. The support for Cixi was based on the understanding that her political role was transitional, pending her son’s coming of age.

Cixi had considered making Prince Gong the Regent, but now she had a change of heart. She herself had pulled off the coup, with the prince very much the subordinate, and her self-confidence had soared. In the end, she gave him the
title of Grand Adviser –
yi-zheng-wang
– which made clear that she was the boss. Prince Gong was showered with rare honours, which he insisted on declining, even bursting into tears. He may have sincerely felt undeserving. He would continue to serve Cixi and their common cause faithfully.

On the ninth day of the tenth moon 1861, the eve of Cixi’s twenty-sixth birthday, it was proclaimed to the whole empire, in the name of the new emperor, that
‘from now on, all state matters will be decided personally by the Two Dowager Empresses, who will give orders to the Grand Adviser and the Grand Councillors for them to carry out. The decrees will still be issued in the name of the emperor.’ Cixi had become the real ruler of China. At the same time, she felt
obliged to declare that it was not her wish, nor that of Empress Zhen, to rule. They were only bowing to the entreaties of the princes and ministers, who had implored them to do their duty in these difficult times. She begged the population to appreciate their dilemma, and promised that the young emperor would take over as soon as he entered adulthood.

The day before her birthday, overcast and with a drizzle hanging in the air, was the coronation day of her son, Zaichun, who was now crowned Emperor Tongzhi. This regnal name meant ‘Order and prosperity’, the Confucian ideal of what a good government should bring to society’.
^fn3
At seven o’clock in the morning, the child was taken to the biggest hall in the Forbidden City, the Hall of Supreme Harmony,
Tai-he
. In a yellow brocade robe embroidered with golden dragons riding on colourful clouds, he was placed on a golden lacquered throne, which was adorned with nine splendidly gilded dragons. More dragons were carved on the screen behind, the pillars around and on the ceiling, where a coiled dragon at the centre had a large silver ball suspended from between its teeth. The idea was that the ball would fall on anyone who sat on the throne, if he did not have the mandate to be monarch. Everybody believed it. Cixi herself never sat on the throne.
^fn4

In front of the throne was a rectangular table, gilded and draped with yellow brocades of the auspicious-cloud pattern, standing on a yellow rug. On the table lay a rolled-up scroll, one that bore the imperial proclamation for the new reign. Written bilingually in Chinese and Manchu, the yellow scroll was several metres long and stamped with the new emperor’s large official seal. To shroud it with mystery and solemnity, clouds of incense spread from four bronze burners, each on a tall stand. The hall was dark and mysterious, in contrast to the shiny white marble terraces outside, which, in three stately tiers, were made more magnificent by carved balustrades and sweeping stairs. Down below, in front, was a paved expanse of more than 30,000 square metres, now filled with senior officials and officers, who had gathered before dawn, lining up in orderly and hierarchical fashion. Under brilliantly coloured banners and canopies, accompanied by the solemn music of bells and drums, they repeatedly went down on their knees and prostrated themselves before the new emperor.