Imperial Woman (40 page)

“If you value your place, you will do nothing. You will rise from your bed and be as usual. For it is true that the Chief Eunuch was a man of surpassing evil, and you did favor him. And it is true also that you broke law and tradition when you gave permission for him to leave the capital.”

She heard his voice of judgment and she said nothing for a while. Then she spoke, pleading for his mercy:

“You know why I bribe these eunuchs. I am alone in this place—a lonely woman.”

To this he said but one word. “Majesty—”

She waited but there was no more. He was gone. She rose at last and let herself be bathed and attired, and she took some food. All her ladies were silent, none dared to speak, but she seemed not to notice whether they spoke or did not. She went to her library with slow and weary steps and for many hours she read the memorials laid there on the table for her. When the day was done she sent for Li Lien-ying and she said to him,

“From this day on you are Chief Eunuch. But your life depends upon your loyalty to me and to me alone.”

He was overcome with joy and lifting his head from the floor, where he knelt in obeisance, he swore his loyalty.

From this day on, the Empress Mother allowed herself to hate Prince Kung. She continued to accept his service, but she hated him, and waited for the time when she could subdue his pride forever.

In all this trouble the Empress Mother had not forgotten Jung Lu’s advice to betroth the young Emperor soon, and the longer she pondered the counsel which her kinsman had given to her the more she found it to her liking, and this for a certain reason that none but herself knew. Her son, so much hers in his good looks and proud heart, had one way to wound her, and so deeply that she could not speak of it openly even to him, but must prevent him in every small way that she could, lest by speaking she confirm him in what she feared to say in words. Since his childhood he had preferred the palace of Sakota, the Empress Dowager, to his mother’s. Often when he was but a child and she went to find him, he was not in his own palace and when she asked where he was, a eunuch told her that he was with the Empress Dowager and now still more often when she sent for him or went to find him, he was there.

Too proud to show hurt, the Empress Mother never reproached him, but she pondered in her heart why it was that her son preferred this other to herself. She loved him with fierce possession, and she dared not put the question to him, lest she hear him say what she feared, nor would she humble herself to speak even to Prince Kung or to Jung Lu of the wound that lay so deep within her. Indeed, she needed not to ask. She knew why her son went often to the other palace and stayed long, whereas to her he came when called and left her soon. The cruelty of a child! She, his mother, must often cross his will, for she must teach and train him for his future. She must create Emperor and man from his raw youth, and he resisted shaping. But his foster mother, her co-Regent, that mild Sakota, felt no duty to reprove him or to teach him and with her he could be what he was, a merry child, a lounging boy, a teasing lad, and she only smiled. When he was willful she could always yield, for she bore no burden for him.

Here a jealous anger raged through the Empress Mother. It might even be that Sakota had bought that toy for him, the foreign train, and hid it in her rooms, where he could play with it in secret. Was it so indeed? Doubtless, for this morning after audience her son had been all eagerness to leave her, in haste to have done with his duties, but she had compelled him to be with her here a while in her own library, that she might search his mind and see if he had listened to the memorials that day presented. He had not listened and to her reproachful questions he had cried in a naughty voice:

“Must I remember every day what some old man mumbles at me through his beard?”

She had been so angered by his insolence to her, who was his mother, that, though he was Emperor, she put out her hand and slapped his cheek. He did not speak or move but fixed his great eyes on her in a rage, and she saw his cheek stained red where she had struck him. Then, still without a word, he had bowed stiffly to her and turned and left her. Doubtless he had gone straight to his foster-mother. Doubtless Sakota had soothed and comforted him and told him how she, his mother, had always a temper, and how often she, the gentler one, had been struck when they were children under one roof.

At this the proud Empress Mother sobbed suddenly. If she had not her son’s heart, then she had nothing. Alas, how little comfort is a child! And she had given up all for him, had spent her life for him, had saved a nation for him, had held the Throne for him.

Thus grieving, she wept awhile, then dried her tears upon the kerchief fastened to the jeweled button of her robe and then fell to thinking how to get her way, even with her son. Sakota must be supplanted by another woman, someone young and lovely, a wife who would enchant the man already budding in him. Yes, Jung Lu’s counsel was wise and good. She would betroth her son, not against the eunuchs, for they were only half-men, but against that soft silent woman who gave mild motherhood to a child not her own.

I will not have Sakota mothering my son, she told herself. Sakota, who could give birth to nothing but a feebleminded girl!

And, strengthened as always by her anger, she clapped her hands and summoned her eunuch and sent him for Li Lien-ying, the Chief Eunuch, and within an hour she had given commands for the parade of maidens, what day it was to be, where it must take place, and what the tests were for admittance. No maid outside the Imperial Manchu clans could be considered, and no plain-faced maiden and none older than the Emperor by more than two years. A year or so, yes, that was wise, for the wife then could lead and guide, but not so old that any bloom was lost.

The Chief Eunuch listened and said yes, yes, he knew what the young Emperor liked, and begged six months or so to do his best in. But the Empress Mother refused so long a time, and gave him three, and dismissed him from her presence.

When she had thus decided for her son, she set her mind again to those affairs of the realm from which she had no peace. They were both small and great, and now the most troublesome was the continuing stubbornness of the Western invaders who demanded the right to send emissaries to the Dragon Throne, yet refused to obey the laws of courtesy and submission, whereby they must prostrate themselves in the presence of the Emperor. She had lost patience again and again when such demands were presented to her as Regent.

“And how,” she had inquired, “can we receive emissaries who will not kneel? Shall we degrade the Dragon Throne by allowing our inferiors to stand before us?”

As usual she had ignored what she could not solve, and when a certain member of the Board of Censors, Wu K’o-tu by name, begged to memorialize the Throne in favor of the foreign envoys, she refused to accept his memorial, saying that this matter of the foreign envoys was no new one, and could not be solved in a moment. She observed from her reading of history that two hundred years earlier an envoy from Russia had demanded the right to stand instead of kneel before the Dragon Throne and this demand had been refused and the envoy had returned to Russia without seeing, face to face, the Emperor, then ruling. True, an envoy from Holland had once submitted to the imperial custom and had knelt while he addressed the Throne, but other Western envoys did still refuse to follow this precedent. True again, the English mission under an English lord, McCartney, was allowed to come into the presence of the Ancestor Ch’ien Lung, with deep bows instead of kneeling head to earth, but this meeting had taken place in a tent in the imperial park at Jehol, and not in the palace proper. And only twenty-three years later another English lord, Amherst, failed in his mission because the Emperor Chia Ch’ing, then ruling, had insisted upon the proper obeisance to the Throne. For the same reason, the Empress Mother herself pointed out, in answer to the Censor Wu, the Emperor T’ao Kuang and the late Emperor Hsien Feng had never received a Western emissary, and how could she, therefore, dare to do what they had not thought right to do? A bare fifteen years ago, she further reminded this Censor, who was always too ready to allow privileges to foreigners, Prince Kung’s own father-in-law, the honored nobleman Kwei Liang, had argued with the American minister Ward that he himself, were he an emissary from China to the United States, would be entirely ready to burn incense before the President of the United States, since any ruler of a great people must be given the same respect that one gives to the gods themselves. But the American would not agree, and therefore was not received.

“I will allow no one to approach the Dragon Throne who will not show due respect,” she steadfastly declared, “since to do so would be to encourage rebels.”

In her heart she determined never to allow a foreigner to cross the threshold of the Forbidden City, for indeed these foreigners were becoming daily more troublesome in the realm. She recalled that her great general, Tseng Kuo-fan, now dead, had told her how the people of the city of Yangchow, on the Yangtse River, had risen against the foreign priests in that city, destroying their houses and temples and driving them from the city because they taught that the young should not obey their parents or the gods but should only obey the one foreign god whom they preached. And she recalled how deeply offended were the people of Tientsin when French emissaries made a temple into a consulate, removing the gods and casting them upon a dung heap as though they were refuse.

These matters, which at the time the Empress Mother had considered small affairs and scarcely worth more than a day’s attention, she now knew were but a sign of the greatest danger in her realm, which was the invasion by the Christians, those men who went where they willed, teaching and preaching and proclaiming their god the one true god. And the Christian women were scarcely less dangerous than the men, for they did not stay within the gates of their homes, but walked freely abroad, even into the presence of men, and behaved as only women of ill repute behave. Never before had there been such persons as these who declared their religion the only one. For hundreds of years the followers of Confucius and Buddha and Lao Tse had lived together in peace and courtesy, each honoring the other’s gods and teachings. Not so these Christians, who would cast out all gods except their own. And by now all knew that where the Christians first went, then traders and warships soon would follow.

To Prince Kung, when such rumors came to the Throne, the Empress Mother one day declared herself in these words:

“Sooner or later, we shall have to rid ourselves of foreigners, and first of all we must be rid of these Christians.”

But Prince Kung, always easily alarmed when she spoke of ridding the realm of foreigners, again cautioned her, saying, “Majesty, remember, if you please, that they possess weapons of which we know nothing. Let me, with your permission, draw up a set of rules to govern the behavior of the Christians, so that our people may not be troubled.”

She gave him that permission, and he presented a memorial soon after, containing eight rules. They met in her private audience hall, she upon her throne, and after receiving his obeisance and hearing what he brought, she said:

“Today my head aches. Tell me what you have written and spare my eyes.”

So saying, she closed her eyes to listen, and he began:

“Majesty, since the rising of the Tientsin Chinese against the French nuns, I say that Christians may not take into their orphanages any save the children of their own converts.” She nodded in approval, her eyes still closed.

“I also ask,” Prince Kung went on, his head bowed before the Empress Mother, “that Chinese women shall not be allowed to sit in the foreign temples in the presence of men. This is against our custom and tradition.”

“It is propriety,” the Empress Mother observed.

“Moreover,” Prince Kung went on, “I have asked that foreign missionaries shall not go beyond the bounds of their calling—that is, they shall not protect their converts from the laws of our land if these converts commit a crime. That is, foreign priests shall not interfere, as they do now, in the affairs of their converts when these are brought before magistrates.”

“Entirely reasonable,” the Empress Mother said, approving.

“I have asked,” Prince Kung continued, “that missionaries do not assume the privileges of officials and emissaries from their nations.”

“Certainly not,” the Empress Mother agreed.

“And evil characters,” Prince Kung went on, “must not be received into their churches as a means of escape from just punishment.”

“Justice must be free to work,” the Empress Mother declared.

“These requests I have made to the foreign emissaries resident here in our capital,” Prince Kung then said.

“Surely these are mild requests,” the Empress observed.

“Majesty,” Prince Kung replied, his grave face more grave, “I grieve to say that the foreign envoys do not accept them. They insist that all foreigners here shall remain entirely free to roam where they wish and do what they like, without censure or arrest. Worse than this, they refuse so much as to read my document, though sent to their legation with due courtesy. There is one exception. The minister from the United States alone has replied, not with agreement but at least with courtesy.”

The Empress Mother could not restrain her feelings at such monstrous offense. She opened wide her eyes, she struck her hands together, and rising from her throne she paced the floor, muttering and murmuring angry words.

Suddenly she paused and looked back at Prince Kung. “Have you told them that they build a foreign state within our state? Nay, they build many states, for each sect of their various religions makes its own laws on our land, without regard to our state and our laws.”

Prince Kung said with mournful patience. “Majesty, I have so spoken to the ministers of all nations here resident.”

“And have you asked them,” the Empress Mother cried, “what they would do to us were we to go to their countries and so conduct ourselves, refusing to obey their laws and insisting upon our own freedom as though all belonged to us?”