The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (38 page)

From Kaifeng the procession turned north towards Beijing, some four hundred miles distant. The departure ceremony followed that of Xian ‘except that high officials had come from various provinces...and so the crowd was larger. The procession was more uniform. It was especially delightful that the weather was good. The sun was shining and the wind was soft. It was not dusty. Banners flew in the air. Everyone was silent, the only sounds were the steps of the horses and the grinding of the wheels of the carts in the sand. A city of silk stretched for miles along the riverbank and the accoutrements of a thousand soldiers flashed like fire. It was like ten thousand peach trees in full bloom in the springtime’.

A story current at that time had Jung Lu asking Yehonala what she would do if the legation siege failed and the barbarians took Beijing. She is said to have quoted the Machiavellian advice of a classic of the Han Dynasty: ‘If the Emperor wishes to gain the allegiance of other countries, he can only do so by convincing their rulers that he possesses the three cardinal virtues...to simulate affection, to express honeyed sentiments, and to treat one’s inferiors as equals.’12 From the time of her return, it became obvious that Yehonala intended to put this ancient admonition to good use.

Breaking with precedent, and perhaps as a first gesture to placate foreign opinion and symbolise her new acceptance of things Western, Yehonala made the last stage of her journey by train, travelling with her retinue in a carriage newly upholstered in Imperial yellow, complete with throne. At a time and date calculated as auspicious by the court astrologers, 7th January 1902, the Sacred Chariot arrived at a newly constructed terminus, complete with a gorgeous pavilion and stocked with gold-lacquer thrones, cloisonné jars and enormous vases of fine porcelain. Here Yehonala and the rest of the royal party transferred to traditional sedan chairs for their approach to the Great Within, along roads scattered with Imperial yellow sand and lined with troops, all of whom fell to their knees in homage as the Two Palaces passed by. In compliance with the terms of the peace agreement, all foreign soldiers (with the exception of the new legation guard) had long since vacated the capital. Beijing belonged once more to Yehonala.

The foreign ministers remaining in Beijing had issued directives against any Westerner’s obvious attendance at this exclusively Chinese ceremony. But such was the interest, and the infamy, that attached to Yehonala’s name, most of the foreign residents of the capital made their way onto the wall of the Tartar City, above the Chien Men Gate. It was here, according to ancient custom, that the returning Emperor and his suite must leave their sedan chairs to worship at a small temple built against the wall, containing a shrine to the tutelary deities of the Manchu race. An Italian sailor, Don Rodolfo Borghese, has left us a description of the Sacred Chariot’s arrival, and of Yehonala’s genius at public relations:

We could not have chosen a better place to watch from. First to arrive were the Manchu bannermen on their fiery little horses. Next came a group of Chinese officials in gala robes, and finally the imperial palanquins, which advanced at an almost incredible speed between the two lines of kneeling soldiers... When they reached the enclosure between the wall and the outer lunette the chairs halted and the Emperor and Empress stepped down...As she got out of her chair the Empress glanced up and saw us: a row of foreigners, watching her arrival from behind the ramparts. The eunuchs appeared to be trying to get her to move on, as it was not seemly that she should remain there in full view of everybody. But the Empress was not to be hurried...At last she condescended to move, but before entering the temple, where the bonzes were all ready to begin the ceremony, she stopped once more and, looking up at us, lifted her closed hands under her chin, and made a series of little bows.

The effect of the gesture was astonishing. We had all gone up on the wall, in the hopes of catching a glimpse, as she passed, of the terrible Empress, whom the West considered almost an enemy of the human race. But we had been impressed by the magnificence of the swiftly moving pageant, and in our breathless interest we forgot our resentment against the woman who was responsible for so much evil. That little bow made to us who were watching her, and the graceful gesture of the closed hands, took us by surprise. From all along the wall there came an answering, spontaneous burst of applause. The Empress appeared pleased. She remained there for a few moments longer, looking up and smiling. Then she disappeared within the Temple.

Yehonala had judged the mood of the barbarians to a nicety. She had ‘simulated affection’ and treated her inferiors as equals, and they had loved it. From that moment, and for no better reason than a few simple bows given at just the right moment, the declaration of war, the legation siege, the price for the heads of ‘barbarian’ children, all memory of past sins was flushed from the collective psyche of the foreigners. Yehonala was forgiven.

Over the next few months Yehonala’s charm offensive went into overdrive. Just eight days after returning to the capital, the August Mother received the foreign ministers at audience. Within two weeks, the ladies of the diplomatic community had been invited to a similar audience, a formal but nevertheless unprecedented reception–where the Empress sat aloof on the Dragon Throne, whispering her comments to Prince Ch’ing who acted as her spokesman. This was just the beginning. The meetings with the ladies became far more intimate, Yehonala walking among them, smiling at the once-hated foreign devils (for whose heads, the year before, she would cheerfully have paid forty taels apiece), holding their hands and announcing with every sign of sincerity that they were ‘all one family, all one family’. Many times, to the shock and surprise of her strait-laced, Victorian guests, the Old Buddha would weep when speaking of the legations siege: ‘I deeply regret all that occurred during those troublous times.

The Boxers for a time overpowered the government, and even brought their guns in and placed them on the walls of the palace. Such a thing shall never occur again.’
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Facing Yehonala in tears, at once an Empress and a sad old lady, it was surprisingly easy for the ladies to believe that she had never intended harm to any foreign visitor, the bloodthirsty edicts and rewards for barbarian heads notwithstanding. Possibly because the diplomatic community knew how indispensable Yehonala was to China’s stability, her version of events came to be accepted as the party line in both Occident and Orient. The Western histories to this day speak of the Boxer ‘rebellion’, despite the fact that the event was an uprising against foreign domination not Manchu rule, and the Boxers were officially seconded as auxiliaries in the Manchu’s attempt to kill all foreigners, or drive them into the sea.

Nor did the August Mother shrink from stealing the Emperor’s reform clothes. Edict after edict now appeared (some issued as early as her stay in Xian), in which Kuang Hsu’s reforms, which Yehonala had so violently and comprehensively destroyed in1898, were reinstated with the Empress Dowager’s explicit imprimatur. Succeeding where several Emperor’s had failed, she now organised the suppression of the opium trade, though she allowed those over sixty to smoke a pipe in moderation. She even dispatched a commission of eminent Chinese abroad, to study the possibility of giving China a constitutional government. And yet even here there was deception. Many of the reform decrees were pure window-dressing; no attempt was made to implement them, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were, like much else in Yehonala’s last years, designed to ingratiate herself with the foreign community, to ensure their high regard and, in consequence, Yehonala’s continued hold on power.

But no amount of artifice could hide the simple, obvious fact that Yehonala and her confidants were growing old. Early in 1903 Jung Lu, her friend and counsellor, and love-of-her-life, crushed by the death of his only son, was seized with a bout of his old affliction, asthma, from which he never recovered. The Russians continued to hold Manchuria and in despite an agreed Sino-Russian deadline for Russian withdrawal from the region, that date came and went without any sign that the homeland of the Manchu would be returned to the Middle Kingdom. Katherine Carl was an American artist at the Chinese court during the twilight of Yehonala’s reign. She had been commissioned to produce a portrait of the Empress, and spent many hours with Yehonala, labouring under horrendous artistic constraints owing to the wide divergences between Chinese and Western artistic conventions. She was able to observe Yehonala at first hand over several months and, to some degree at least, to see the private woman behind the Imperial mask. Though her finished portrait of Yehonala is stilted and, to Western eyes, dissatisfying, the word-picture she paints of the Empress in her late sixties reveals a tired, lonely, and perhaps disillusioned old lady, fated now to ride her own personal tiger until she could ride no more: ‘Her Majesty was looking tired and anxious these days. She would often go to the gardens immediately after the [morning] Audience, for solitary walks unattended by the ladies, and when she went for a walk, accompanied by the Empress and the Princesses, she would sit distraught and abstracted before the finest views and those she loved most. She seemed absent-minded...Her strong face looked tired and worn. Her arms hung listlessly by her side, and she seemed almost to have given up. I saw her furtively brush away a tear.’
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But despite this, much of the old iron-willed Yehonala remained. Notwithstanding her many disappointments, her loss, and the cares of old age, still she could not bring herself to hand on the sceptre to the Emperor. While she lived, she was adamant, Kuang Hsu would never hold power.

For his part, the Emperor seems to have been playing a waiting game. He was just thirty-two, and despite several ailments, it was in the way of things that he should eventually survive his ageing, formidable aunt. Katherine Carl appraised him with an artist’s eye and found him a

slight and elegant figure, not more than five feet four in height. He has a well-shaped head, with the intellectual qualities well developed, a high brow, with large brown eyes and rather drooping eyelids, not at all Chinese in form and setting. His nose is high and, like most members of the Imperial Family, is of the so-called ‘noble type’. A rather large mouth, with thin lips, the upper short with a proud curve, the lower slightly protruding, a strong chin a little beyond the line of the forehead, with not an ounce of superfluous flesh on the whole face, give him an aesthetic air and, in spite of his rather delicate physique, an appearance of great reserve strength.

Carl also sensed the quiet brooding nature of Kuang Hsu, and was perceptive enough to divine the reason that lay behind this ‘sphinx-like quality’.

The Emperor dresses with extreme neatness and great simplicity, wearing few ornaments and no jewels except on state occasions. His face is kindly in expression, but the glance from his rather heavy-lidded eyes is shrewd and intelligent...Does he dream of future greatness for his Empire? Does he feel that though his first efforts at governing have failed, he can bide his time–that all things come to him who waits? It almost seems so! He appears to fully realise, now, that he made a mistake in the choice of his instruments and time, in his efforts for progress. But the look of eternal patience in those large eyes seems to show that he will yet try to accomplish China’s salvation–that he is but waiting his opportunity.
³

The Japanese victory over the Russians in 1904 was a defining moment between the Eastern and Western nations of the world. Foreshadowing the events of Pearl Harbour thirty-seven years later, Japan attacked the Russian Fleet in Port Arthur without warning, and destroyed it. On land, the Japanese annihilated the eighty-three thousand poorly led Russian troops in Manchuria, losing over a hundred and thirty thousand men in the process. It had been a costly victory, but Japan had conquered. For the first time in over two hundred years, an oriental country had comprehensively vanquished an occidental power. The Russo-Japanese War taught the Chinese elite an important lesson–it emphasised the fact that Western technology was essential to save China from its enemies. What Japan could do today, China might achieve tomorrow. It was now plain to all that Kuang Hsu’s 1898 strategy had been essentially correct. These events boosted the Emperor’s status at court, and it became obvious that, with youth on his side, he and the reformers must eventually win out in the long battle against Yehonala and the reactionary old guard.

There were many at court who had come to the same conclusion, and were terrified at the prospect. They foresaw personal disaster if Kuang Hsu succeeded the Old Buddha. As the Chinese say, ‘When the tree falls, the shade is gone’, and should Yehonala ‘mount the dragon’ before Kuang Hsu, the protective shade she spread over those who had betrayed the Emperor, and made Kuang Hsu’s life a living hell for so many years would be removed. As Emperor, he could deal with them as he wished. Chief among these was Yuan Shi-kai, now the rich and powerful Viceroy of Chihli, who had informed Jung Lu and the Empress of the reformist plot and sent Kuang Hsu to his Ocean Terrace prison, and Li Lien-ying, the Grand Eunuch, who had delighted in humiliating the Celestial Prince, keeping him ill-clad, cold and hungry throughout the period of his confinement. Neither could expect mercy if Yehonala should predecease the Son of Heaven. For both, it was essential that Kuang Hsu should die young. Nor would his aunt, determined that he should never rule without her, shed many tears.

With so many powerful foes–Yehonala, Yuan Shi-kai and Li Lien-ying–ranged against him, it came as no surprise that, when Yehonala was taken ill in 1908, Kuang Hsu should also suddenly sicken, becoming so ill that he was forced to take to his bed. Somehow, Yehonala knew the Emperor’s malady was fatal. On 13th November–though Kuang Hsu still lived–she was well enough to preside over a council to appoint a new Emperor. Yuan Shi-kai upheld the candidature of Prince Pu Lun, Prince Ch’ing’s son, who had already reached the age of majority. Yehonala would have none of it. She rejected the nomination out of hand, and named as her choice Pu Yi, the son of Prince Ch’un and grandson of Jung Lu. Perhaps Pu Yi’s nomination was a final act of affection towards her faithful friend and lost love. Perhaps more important, PuYi was a child of tender years, not yet three. Yehonala had lost none of her old cunning: Pu Lun as Son of Heaven would have meant her immediate retirement; with a child Emperor, she could continue as before. As ever, she carried all before her at the council and Pu Yi was designated the new Emperor. It seems that, despite her illness, Yehonala was planning on yet another long regency. But it was not to be.