The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (15 page)

It does not seem that the Emperor had given direct orders to detain any of the Europeans. News of their capture produced panic in the ailing, vacillating monarch and his entourage, and it was only the steadying hand of Yehonala that kept the ship of state afloat. According to the diarist Wu K’o-tu:

...our troops captured the barbarian leader Pa Hsia-li [Sir Harry Parkes] together with eight others, who were imprisoned in the board of punishments. Thereupon the whole city was in an uproar, and it became known that His Majesty was preparing to leave on a tour northwards [i.e. flee the city]. But the Concubine Yi persuaded some of the older officials to memorialise, urging him to remain...All the Manchu and Chinese officials were now sending their families away and their valuables, but the large shops outside the main gate were doing business as usual.

At the time, the extent of the ill-treatment of the allied prisoners was not realised. But the very fact that they had been treacherously taken while under a flag of truce was enough to galvanise the Franco-British forces into action. They moved forward swiftly towards Beijing. Between them and the capital lay Seng’s Chinese army, some thirty to fifty thousand strong, buzzing with hatred for the foreign devils and eager for combat.

The decisive encounter took place at Ba Li Gao (‘Eight Li Bridge’, three ‘Li’ being approximately one English mile). The bridge straddled the main waterway that ran from Tungchow to the capital, and it was here that the Chinese arrayed their forces and awaited the onslaught of the allied army. Seng Guo Lin Sen was a capable commander: his artillery had been deployed in the woodlands and on the heights, and his infantry were drawn up in serried ranks, their multi-hued dragon and tiger banners fluttering above them, barring the way to Ba Li Gao. But the Mongol general’s main hope rested with the mass of veteran Tartar cavalry that he planned to use as a mailed fist to drive through the heart of the allied ranks. When, to the sound of bugles and the skirl of pipes, the British and French had advanced to within two miles of the bridge, Seng launched his phalanx of Tartars at the ‘rebels’.
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The Tartars charged in silence, changing formation skilfully by means of flags and without the use of shouted commands. The allied artillery (which ironically included rockets, first invented by the Chinese) cut swathes in their ranks but they closed and came forward relentlessly, ignoring the massed rifle fire from the lines of infantry.

Had the Tartars been supported with accurate artillery to suppress their opponent’s fire, the outcome may well have been different. But the Chinese gunners fired high, and did not bother to correct their aim. In terrible contrast, the allied artillerymen struck with fatal precision, cutting down the horse soldiers and sweeping away the ranks of infantry behind them. ‘We could see deep furrows opening within the enemy’s dense masses of men and horses. The attack gradually turned into a retreat, and the cavalry fell back towards the bridge.
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General Sheng Pao, the Chinese commander on the bridge, was among the casualties. A shell from an Armstrong gun blew away his jaw. Howling for revenge he had two of the European prisoners, Abbé de Luc and Captain Brabazon of the Royal Artillery, pulled out of their temporary jail, dragged to the parapet of the bridge, and summarily beheaded. The Chinese later gave out that the pair had died from natural causes, but several months later, two headless bodies were discovered in shallow graves. One body retained traces of British army-issue cloth; the other, black silk identical to that worn by the unfortunate French priest.

The Tartars held together for seven hours of desperate fighting before Ba Li Gao. But under the relentless, withering fire of the allied guns they eventually broke and fled northwards over the bridge, following the rest of Seng’s army, which had begun to draw off into the fastness of the Chinese countryside.

But even as the remnants of the Chinese army fell back towards Beijing and the embattled Emperor, a more sinister, silent battle continued to rage around the Dragon Throne. The Manchu Dynasty might not survive the onslaught of the red barbarians (no one at court was sure if their apparent desire only to trade merely masked a desire to conquer the Middle Kingdom). But assuming that the regime did survive, or was forced into exile in its Manchu homeland north of the Great Wall, the question of who would rule after Emperor Hsien Feng was yet to be decided. Would supreme power lie with Yehonala and her allies, or with the cabal of nobles headed by her arch-enemy, Su Shun?

It is possible that Yehonala’s strident anti-foreign rhetoric and her insistence that the Emperor remain in Beijing was motivated far less by patriotic fervour than simple self-interest. While the Emperor remained in the capital, the strict etiquette of the Great Within made it difficult for other males to gain an audience with the Son of Heaven. By contrast, as the Emperor’s favourite and mother of his only male heir, Yehonala enjoyed almost unrestricted access to the Presence. She could use all her feminine wiles to persuade and cajole the ailing monarch into siding with her faction and opposing her rival Su Shun. It followed that Yehonala’s position was immensely strengthened by Hsien Feng’s remaining in the city, while her influence would be greatly weakened, perhaps fatally, should the Emperor move to a less formal residence beyond the Great Wall. At all costs, he must be dissuaded from leaving the capital.

When the allied soldiers reached the outskirts of Beijing there was an engagement outside the Chi Hua gate of the city, which resulted in another defeat for Chinese arms. According to the diarist:

Many were trampled to death...our men fleeing in every direction and the barbarians pressing on to the city walls. Certain Princes and ministers besought the Concubine Yi to induce the Emperor to leave on a tour, but the Concubine Yi persuaded two of the Grand Secretaries to memorialise against his doing so, and in response to this a decree was issued stating that under no circumstances would the Emperor leave his capital. Another decree was put out by the Concubine Yi offering large rewards to any who should slay the barbarians. It was generally thought that the Emperor would now forgo his intended departure.

Early the next morning another battle was fought outside the Chi Hua Gate, and again the Emperor’s troops were bested. This final defeat of the Chinese forces, combined with the astonishingly rapid advance of the ‘rebels’ on Beijing had changed everything. Hsien Feng’s backbone dissolved, and Yehonala’s pleas to defy the barbarians fell on deaf ears. Worse, by identifying herself so strongly with the policy of ‘no surrender’ against the foreigners, a stratagem that had failed so conspicuously and so grievously as far as Hsien Feng was concerned, Yehonala had gravely weakened her influence over the dying monarch. As soon as the news of this second defeat reached the Summer Palace, where Hsien Feng had set up his court, pandemonium ensued: ‘His Sacred Majesty, attended by all his concubines, the Princes, Ministers and Dukes, and all the officers of the Household, left the city in a desperate rout and disorder unspeakable, affording a spectacle that gave the impression that hordes of barbarians were already in close pursuit. As a matter of fact, the foreigners were still at a considerable distance...’ (Wu K’o-tu).

The court’s journey northwards must have filled Yehonala with shame and foreboding. Her careful and increasingly desperate schemes to keep the Emperor in Beijing lay in tatters. Notwithstanding her status as mother of the heir, Yehonala’s once unassailable position as the Emperor’s favourite was now seriously in question. Her influence over Hsien Feng was waning rapidly. She had counselled defiance of the barbarian and disaster had ensued. Hsien Feng’s blatant lack of courage and shameful, ignominious flight reminded everyone of the dishonourable departure of an Emperor of the Chou Dynasty, who fled the capital ‘his head covered with dust’. That the Yi Concubine had been foremost in outspoken condemnation of the flight into Manchuria made many think, as one European diplomat later commented, that Yehonala ‘was the only man in China’. Such sentiments did nothing to endear her to the weak and vacillating Emperor, whose loss of face increased in proportion with her continuing demands for resistance. Nor were her enemies slow to take advantage of her reverses.

Compounding her misery, the court had fled in such haste and disorder that Yehonala suddenly realised that she had lost possession of her most precious asset, her son the heir. As the unwieldy dragon’s tail of covered carts and palanquins lumbered northwards along the highway, turned to mud by the autumn rains, Yehonala’s trusted eunuchs and servants searched desperately for the boy, at the same time her only child, and her surest passport to safety. If Su Shun or any of his faction had managed to secure possession of the heir, Yehonala’s room for manoeuvre would be severely curtailed. After what must have seemed an age, word was brought to her that the boy was safe. His aunt, the Empress of the Eastern Palace, Yehonala’s cousin Sakota, had him safely with her in her royal litter.

With the heir safe, Yehonala could take stock of the situation. There was no doubt that her position became more perilous with every additional mile they marched from Beijing. But she had the heir. And there was one additional asset she could rely on. By chance, in the escort selected to accompany the Son of Heaven on his ‘northern tour’ (as it was euphemistically termed later) was a substantial proportion of bannermen from the Yeho-Nala clan. Their loyalty could be counted on, to the death. So too could the fidelity of their commander. The leader of the escort was a tall young captain: Jung Lu, Yehonala’s betrothed, before her call to the Great Within.

After their victories against the Chinese army, the main allied force circled to the north-east of Beijing, hoping to regain contact with the retreating enemy. For a while, the British advance lagged behind the French forces who, on the night of 6th October, fetched up against the imposing walls of some large enclosure, with the needle-like silhouette of three large pagodas limned faintly against the night sky. It was too dark to see much more but, as they bivouacked close to the wall, the shadowy forms of Chinese peasants were observed using ladders to break into the land behind the wall. Intrigued, the French investigated, following the Chinese and finding themselves unexpectedly in fairyland, in the Yuan Ming Yuan, the ‘Round Bright Garden’, the huge and exclusive pleasure garden of China’s Emperors.

The Summer Palace, as it came to be known, had been begun in 1709, in the time of the famous Emperor K’ang Hsi and added to by successive Sons of Heaven, notably the Ch’ien Lung Emperor. Its grounds covered at least sixty thousand acres, filled with rare and outlandish creatures from around the Empire, including exotic goldfish, pheasants, raptors and the
ssu-pu-hsiang
‘the four aspects that do not mix’, a creature said to possess the tail of a donkey, hooves of a cow, neck of a camel and the antlers of a stag, known today as Père David’s deer. Within the Summer Palace lay thirty palaces and lodges, each with its attached village for the Son of Heaven’s guards, eunuchs and household staff. The Imperial buildings had been constructed in various styles, including, bizarrely, a European Baroque Palace, built by the Jesuit fathers who served at Ch’ien Lung’s court. For all their architectural symmetry, it was not in the beauty of the buildings themselves that the true charm and fascination of the Yuan Ming Yuan lay, but in the location of these structures within the landscape. The whole area had been lovingly designed, meticulously sculptured by thousands of labourers, to resemble the most beauteous and harmonious scenic views that the human mind could conceive–art concealing art on an almost superhuman scale. According to an English visitor in 1793 there was an

abundance of canals, rivers and large sheets of water, whose banks, although artificial, are neither trimmed, nor shorn, nor sloped like the glacis of a fortification, but have been thrown up with immense labour in an irregular and, as it were, fortuitous manner, so as to represent the free hand of nature...The views appear to have been studied; the trees were not only placed according to their magnitude, but the tints of their foliage seem also to have been considered in the composition of the picture...
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The Chinese peasantry appeared oblivious to the charms of this Garden of Wonders. They had already taken advantage of the lack of guards around the pavilions, and were looting the buildings of the Summer Palace with quiet intensity. And once the French troops had seen inside the buildings, and viewed the priceless treasures the pavilions contained, it proved impossible to restrain their own Visigothic tendencies. If these riches were disappearing the French wanted their share, and the
soldats
plunged in enthusiastically, chasing off the native looters and systematically picking off the choicest pieces for themselves. When the British finally caught up with them, they were assured by their Gallic allies that looting had been strictly forbidden, despite the fact that, even as they gave these assurances, the French were pocketing everything in sight. As the English fumed against their own prohibition on looting, ‘Gold objects and watches...were whipped up by these gentlemen with amazing velocity, and as speedily disappeared into their capacious pockets’.
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But by the following day the British had been given their head too: the order against looting was rescinded, and the whole allied army now fell upon the treasures of the Summer Palace, stripping the buildings of all moveable valuables and, in a frenzy of wanton vandalism, destroying whatever they could not carry off.

Two days later the sweet taste of victory turned sour in the allies’ mouths, and their joy to sombre anger. For almost three weeks Lord Elgin had been demanding to know the fate of the allied personnel–British, French, Sikh, and several Chinese coolies–that had been seized, against all diplomatic convention, by the Chinese. On 8th October the first of the prisoners were released, and their comrades could hear at last the full story of their capture and captivity.