The Last Empress

by Anchee Min

  But Pearl was determined to have her way.

  Li Lien-ying cursed and threatened. Eunuchs lit fireballs and threw them into the well, trying to smoke the girl out.

  "Leave her to her wishes!" Emperor Guang-hsu cried out from his palanquin.

  With Pearl's suicide on everyone's mind, we began our seven-hundred-mile journey northwestward and along the Great Wall. We pushed our carts and walked. Guang-hsu sobbed and refused my comfort.

  I wondered what would have happened if I had allowed Pearl to have her way. It wouldn't do, I concluded. Once the powers succeeded in "rescuing" Guang-hsu and taking him hostage, we would lose ground in any negotiation. I would be forced to give up everything in exchange for my life, or my son would be forced to order my execution.

  "I wouldn't survive either way," Guang-hsu would tell me later.

  Nonetheless, my thoughts returned to Pearl as I played out what I might have said to her. She and I had shared the same fantasy, that my son and her husband had within him the power to transform himself. I had labored on that transformation since the day I adopted him. I credited myself for exposing Guang-hsu to Western ideas, and his fascination with Western culture had been my pride. But it hadn't been enough, I would have said.

  I would have also let Pearl know that there are truths a mother knows about her child that she can never share with anyone else. The fact that I had been proud of Guang-hsu didn't mean that I didn't know his limitations. I had challenged his potential with all my might. Submitting myself entirely to his call for reform was a personal decision I had made. I had thrown the dice, prepared to lose everything, and I had.

  Believing that my son could outmaneuver a man like Ito Hirobumi had been my weakness. Allowing Guang-hsu to appoint Kang Yu-wei as his chief minister was also a mistake on my part. I had known that Kang was not the man he pretended to be, but I'd said yes to please my son.

  I had been devastated by my son's suffering. He couldn't accept his own failure, which I considered more mine than his. If I had been murdered on my own son's order, I would have considered it my fate, for I knew how much he loved me.

  The most important thing I might have said to Pearl, however, was that my son, her husband, had been up against forces beyond his control: the weight of tradition, the blindness and selfishness of power, history itself. China's great wealth and the glories of its civilization had made it complacent and unfamiliar with change. Resource-poor Japan had been forced to expand, move forward, modernize; the Japanese Emperor had merely led the way for a willing people. China had been surpassed and needed to change, but no Emperor alone could move a nation that was only just wakening to the need for change. No man alone—attempts at such change had already claimed the lives of so many: my husband, my son, Prince Kung, others, and I feared that number would soon include another son.

  For the next few weeks we traveled day and night. If we were lucky enough to reach a town by evening, I would get to sleep on a bed. Most days we settled on camping in the fields and forests, where insects crawled all over me. Although Li Lien-ying made sure that I was covered from head to toe, I was bitten on the neck and face. One bite became so swollen that I looked as if I had an egg growing from my chin.

  I had summoned Li Hung-chang to begin negotiating with the foreigners, but was told that he hadn't yet left Canton.

  There were two reasons Li Hung-chang had been dragging his feet, Yung Lu believed. "First, he considers the negotiation an impossible task. Second, he doesn't want to work with I-kuang."

  I understood his reluctance. I had selected I-kuang because the Manchu Clan Council had insisted on having one of their own to "lead" Li.

  "I-kuang is ineffective and corrupt," Yung Lu said. "When I questioned him, he complained about Li's overbearing ways and blamed others for 'forcing gifts' on him."

  Yung Lu and I were frustrated because all we could do was discuss our misfortune. I told him that Queen Min had visited me in a dream. It began with her rising from a pyre two stories high. "Then she sat by my bed in her burned clothing. She told me how to survive the flames. She didn't seem to realize that she was half flesh and half skeleton. I couldn't understand a word she said because she had no lips."

  Yung Lu promised that he would stay near.

  Days later, Yung Lu found out the real reason Li Hung-chang had been slow in coming. "The Allies have a list of the people they believe are responsible for the destruction of the legations. They are demanding arrests and punishment before negotiations begin."

  "Did Li Hung-chang know about the list?" I asked.

  "Yes. In fact he has it, but is afraid to present it to you himself. Here is a copy."

  I put on my glasses to read it. Though hardly unexpected, I was still shocked: my name was first on the list.

  Yung Lu believed that Li Hung-chang was also reluctant to come to the aid of Guang-hsu yet again. The Emperor had repeatedly been the cause of Li's forced departures, which had resulted in great political and financial losses for Li. His rivals and enemies, mostly the Manchu princes, had gradually taken over his major industrial holdings, including the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the Imperial Telegraph Administration and the Kaiping mines.

  After ignoring several of my summonses, which promised to restore his original post and business properties, Li moved to Shanghai for several weeks, claiming age and illness for slowing him down. Yung Lu hurried him along by saying that an edict of punishment had been drafted listing the names the foreigners had requested.

  After many more summonses demanding his presence, Li Hung-chang arrived in Tientsin on September 19. "Until the publication of the edict, there is little I can do," his message to Yung Lu read.

  Strangely, at this point the prospect of my own death didn't sound so threatening to me. The idea presented itself more as a negotiation point.

  "Do you think Li Hung-chang really expects me to turn myself over to the Allies?" I asked Yung Lu.

  "Of course not. What would Li be without you?"

  "What does he want, then?"

  "He is using this moment to make sure that you don't give in to his enemies, especially to Prince Ts'eng Junior and General Tung."

  Strong northern winds blew through the grasslands, making our palanquins look like little boats floating on green waves. The Boxers had ruined the planting season, and we couldn't get any help because the farmers had fled.

  We kept pushing north and inland, pursued by the foreigners. We had been trudging on rutted dirt roads for over a month. My mirror broke and I could only guess how I looked. Guang-hsu was covered with dust and he no longer bothered to wash his face. His skin was sallow and dry. Our hair smelled rank and our scalps itched. My clothes were infested with lice and other bugs. One morning I opened my vest and saw hundreds of sesame-seed-sized eggs in the lining. The tiny eggs seemed glued to the vest, so Li Lien-ying burned it. I no longer cared how my hair looked. I soaked my head in salt water and vinegar, but the lice returned. When I got up in the morning I would see them fall onto my straw mat. We had been sleeping where we could, one night in an abandoned temple, another in a roofless hut on brick beds.

  Guang-hsu was disgusted when he saw Li Lien-ying combing the flaky lice eggs out of my hair. The Emperor shaved his head and wore a wig during our makeshift audiences. It was hard for us to keep our composure when receiving ministers—the urge to scratch was overwhelming. I had to smile. I saw the absurdity in all this; Guang-hsu did not.

  The rainy season brought its storms. Our palanquins leaked and Guang-hsu and I soon became soaking wet. The journey recalled my first exile, to Jehol with Emperor Hsien Feng. I did not want to think of the future.

  On September 25, the throne's first edict of punishment would be published. I already suffered from remorse. Prince Ts'eng and General Tung had both come to let me know that they understood the reasons for what I must do. I was to turn them over to the Allies, a condition for releasing me from responsibility.

  "I cannot order their beheadin
gs," I said to Yung Lu. "Prince Ts'eng is a blood relation, and General Tung's troops are all that is protecting my court-on-legs." I sighed. "What happened to Queen Min will sooner or later happen to me."

  "Li Hung-chang is getting what he wanted and will find a way to save you," Yung Lu said.

  One morning, my eunuch found a duck egg in the cupboard of an abandoned house. Guang-hsu and I were thrilled. Li Lien-ying boiled the egg, and Guang-hsu and I cracked the shell carefully and ate the egg bit by bit, scraping the shell clean.

  We had been short of food and had been surviving on small portions of millet porridge. It made us hungrier. With the egg we celebrated Li Hung-chang's long-awaited arrival in Peking; he had been in Tientsin for three weeks. I made sure he knew about all the vermin I had encountered.

  Finally the negotiations opened. Our friend Robert Hart served as a go-between. Li Hung-chang made significant progress by convincing the foreign powers that "there is more than one way to slice a melon," and that deposing me and my government would not only prevent the foreigners from extracting the most benefits from China, but would also foment unrest, leading to more uprisings.

  The foreign powers wanted to partition China, but Li made them recognize that China was simply too vast, its population too large and homogeneous for partition to work, and that attempting to install a republican government would be fraught with too many unknowns.

  Guang-hsu was appreciative of Li Hung-chang's effort. When he began to call Li by his former title of Viceroy of Chihli, I wept, because nothing was more comforting than Guang-hsu's merciful gesture toward one of the "old boys." After all, the Western powers and their military forces were on our soil, and he could have called on them to help him declare his independence.

  43

  As my husband's court had done forty years before, we were heading toward the safety of the Manchu homeland. After being on the run for more than six months, we arrived at the ancient capital of Sian. The initial plan had been to cross the Great Wall, but we were forced to alter the route when Russia invaded from the north and began their annexation of Manchuria. We turned southwest, where we hoped a range of mountains would shield us.

  I have few memories of the landscape we passed through or of the beauty of the ancient capital. I was consumed by small but annoying troubles. The palanquins were not made for long-distance travel. Mine started breaking down almost from the beginning. Besides fixing the leaky roof, Li Lien-ying had to make other repairs constantly. The moment he heard a squeak, he knew where the problem lay. Since he had no tools or spare supplies, he had to make do with whatever he could find along the roadside—a piece of bamboo, a length of frayed rope, a rock to hammer a new piece in place.

  When my palanquin eventually fell apart, the bearers carried me in a sedan chair. That didn't last either: I had to walk until the chair was fixed. And our shoes wore out faster than we could replace them. Of course there was nowhere to buy new ones. By the end of the journey most of us were walking barefoot. We got blisters on our feet, which sometimes led to infections—a few of the bearers died as a result.

  Guang-hsu and I took turns riding a pitiful-looking donkey. There were days when Li Lien-ying could find nothing to feed the animal, and it kept collapsing.

  Drinking water became another problem. After a five-hundred-mile journey, we reached the provincial capital of Taiyuan. The wells in the nearby villages had been poisoned by the Boxers, who had made sure to "leave the barbarians nothing but a wasteland."

  The Emperor and I developed fever blisters, and we had run out of medicines. It was silly to hear the doctors advise a balanced diet when we could barely find food. We got used to not having tables or chairs; we ate while squatting on our heels and were no longer bothered by lice.

  When fall set in, the air became frigid at night. Both Guang-hsu and I had caught the hundred-day cough and lost our voices. We were always fed something, but many went without. The Emperor helped to bury some of his most favored eunuchs. For the first time my son developed a sense of compassion for those beneath him. The rough travel had shocked and educated him. Although he had been in poor physical condition, his mental state improved. He took notes on what he saw on the road and kept busy writing in a journal.

  Li Lien-ying became frantic because we had run out of food and water. It was the Shantung governor, Yuan Shih-kai, who came just in time with desperately needed supplies. My son spoke to the man whom he had been calling a traitor since his reform failed. Although he would never forgive Yuan Shih-kai for betraying him, Guang-hsu expressed gratitude. We ate delicious lotus-seed soup and chicken-scallion pancakes until we were so full we had to lie on our backs just to breathe.

  On October 1, we left Taiyuan for Tung-kuan. Turning due west for the final seventy miles, we marched through Shan-hsi province to arrive at Sian, the Moslem state still controlled by General Tung's loyalists. While the court believed that we could hold out indefinitely, the Emperor and I became suspicious of the Imperial Guards—men who recognized no authority but General Tung's.

  My jade comb was missing. Li Lien-ying, who carried the comb, believed that it had been stolen while he slept. He cursed and vowed to catch the thief. I told him I wouldn't mind borrowing another's comb, but Li Lien-ying refused: "I don't want you to end up picking someone else's lice eggs."

  When we reached Tung-kuan I received a telegram from Li Hung-chang reporting that the negotiations had come to a halt. "The Allies demand we show evidence of punishment," Li wrote.

  I was expected to hand over General Tung and Prince Ts'eng. I had never felt so manipulated. No matter how I justified it, I would be betraying my own people.

  It wasn't until the arrival of Yung Lu that General Tung complied with the throne's instructions to reduce his troop strength by five thousand. He withdrew to the distance the Allies had requested, outside of Peking, which meant our further vulnerability.

  Li Hung-chang sent me a transcript of his day's negotiations as a reply to my complaints regarding the foreigners' demands:

  ALLIES: Do not such people as Prince Ts'eng and his Ironhats deserve death?

  LI: They did not accomplish their purpose.

  ALLIES: Sixty people were killed and one hundred sixty wounded in the legations.

  LI: The number of deaths of Ironhats, Boxers and civilians of China were in the thousands.

  ALLIES: What would you think if the Prince of Wales and cousins of the Queen had headed an attack on the Chinese minister in London?

  LI: The Ironhats were foolish people.

  Under pressure from Li Hung-chang, on November 13 I issued an edict announcing punishments. Prince Ts'eng Junior and his brothers were to be imprisoned for life at Mukden, near Manchuria. His cousins were to be either placed under house arrest or degraded in rank and would lose all of their privileges. The punishment of the former governor of Shantung was waived because he had died. Other governors who had failed to protect the foreign missionaries were to be banished for life, exiled to the remote frontier in Turkistan and condemned to hard labor. Master Red Sword and two other ringleaders, who were distant royal relatives, were to be executed.

  The Allies considered the punishments inadequate. They called what had happened "unprecedented in human history, crimes against the laws of nations, against the laws of humanity, and against civilization."

  I had no other choice but to issue another decree assigning stiffer sentences. I failed to please the Allies again, for my words were believed to be worthless—and I would surely find a way to help the criminals evade punishment.

  In order to prove myself, I invited the foreign press to witness a public execution, to be held at the vegetable market on Greengrocer Street in central Peking.

  The locals suffered tremendous humiliation when the tall, high-nosed, blond-haired foreigners showed up with their flashing cameras.

  "It is impossible to know what large fee was paid to the executioner," George Morrison of the Times wrote of the event. "Two mats were laid down.
There was a great crowd, a multitude of correspondents, and photographs by the score were taken. Rarely has an execution been seen by so many nationalities ... One slice in each case was sufficient."

  The journalists cheered when the heads rolled.

  I was deeply ashamed.

  At the Allies' request, I ordered the execution of ten additional Boxer ringleaders. Except for the two beheadings carried out in public, the rest I granted an honorable suicide.

  Family members came begging for the lives of their loved ones. "Your Majesty supported the Boxers," they cried, gathering outside my palace. Their petitions were written in blood.

  I hid behind my gate, peering out like a coward. I sent Li Lien-ying to offer the wives and children a few taels for the winter. It was impossible to forgive myself.

  Li Hung-chang argued back and forth with the Allies over the life of General Tung. They yielded only after an understanding was reached that the general could be useful in ensuring stability in northwestern China. Tung was deprived of his rank, but he would be allowed to remain the warlord of Kansu if he departed the capital immediately and permanently.

  Yung Lu carved out a portion of his army expenses and delivered the taels to General Tung. It would keep him from calling for a rebellion.

  Emperor Guang-hsu and I received the Twelve Articles, as they were called, from the allied nations regarding the final terms. Members of the Clan Council and the court telegraphed Li Hung-chang requesting substantial changes. Li replied that he could do no more. "The attitude of the foreign powers is stern, and the contents are not open to discussion," he said. "The Allies have been threatening to break off negotiations and move their troops forward."