by W. G. Sebald
Suppressing the Taiping rebellion would almost certainly have proved impossible had not the British army contingents in China taken the imperial side after the resolution of their own conflict with the Emperor. The armed presence of the British dated back to 1840, to the beginning of the so-called Opium war. In 1837 the Chinese government had taken measures to prevent opium trading, whereupon the East India Company, which grew opium poppies in the fields of Bengal and shipped the drug mainly to Canton, Amoy and Shanghai, felt that one of its most lucrative ventures was in jeopardy. The subsequent declaration of war began the opening-up, by force of arms, of the Chinese Empire, which for two hundred years had remained closed to foreign barbarians. In the name of Christian evangelism and free trade, which was held to be the precondition of all civilized progress, the superiority of western artillery was demonstrated, a number of cities were stormed, and a peace was extorted, the conditions of which included guarantees for British trading posts on the coast, the cession of Hong Kong, and, not least, reparation payments of truly astronomical proportions. In so far as this arrangement, which from the outset the British regarded as purely interim, made no provision for access to trading centres within China itself, the need for further military campaigns could not be ruled out in the longer term, especially in view of the existence of four hundred million Chinese to whom the cotton fabrics produced in the Lancashire mills might have been sold. It was not, however, until 1856 that an adequate pretext for a new punitive expedition presented itself, when Chinese officials in the port of Canton boarded a freighter to arrest some members of the all-Chinese crew who were suspected of piracy. In the course of this operation, the boarding party hauled down the Union Jack, which was flying from the main mast, probably because at that time the British flag was not infrequently flown as cover for illegal trafficking. But since the boarded ship was registered in Hong Kong and was flying the Union Jack rightfully, the incident, laughable in itself, provided the representatives of British interests in Canton with the occasion for a confrontation with the Chinese authorities which was presently and deliberately pushed so far that there was felt to be no alternative but to occupy the port and bombard the official residence of the prefect. At very nearly the same time, as luck would have it, the French press was running reports of the execution, on the orders of officials in Kwangsi province, of a missionary named Chapdelaine. The description of this painful procedure culminated in the claim that the executioner had cut the heart from the breast of the dead abbé, and cooked and eaten it. The cries for retaliation and punishment which promptly filled France chimed perfectly with the endeavours of the warmongers in Westminster, so that, once the necessary preparations had been made, there was witnessed the spectacle of a joint Anglo-French campaign, a rare phenomenon in the age of imperial rivalry. This enterprise, which was dogged by the greatest of logistical difficulties, entered its crucial phase in August 1860 with the landing of eighteen thousand British and French troops in the Bay of Pechili, barely a hundred and fifty miles from Peking. Supported by a Chinese auxiliary force recruited in Canton, they captured the forst of Taku that stood surrounded by deep ditches, immense earthworks and bamboo palisades amidst saltwater marshes at the mouth of the Peiho river. After the fortress garrison had unconditionally surrendered and attempts were being made to put an orderly end, by negotiation, to a campaign that had already been concluded from a military point of view, the allied delegates, despite the fact that they had the upper hand, became ever more lost in a nightmarish maze of diplomatic prevarication dictated partly by the complex requirements of protocol in the dragon empire and partly by the fear and bewilderment of the Emperor. In the end, the negotiations foundered on the mutual incomprehension of emissaries from two fundamentally different worlds, a gap which no interpreter could bridge. While the British and French side viewed the peace they would impose as the first stage in the colonization of a moribund realm untouched by the intellectual and material achievements of civilization, the Emperor's delegates, for their part, endeavoured to make clear to these strangers, who appeared to be unfamiliar with Chinese ways, the immemorial obligations toward the Son of Heaven of envoys from satellite powers bound to pay homage and tribute. In the end, there was nothing for it but to sail up the Peiho in gunboats and advance on Peking overland. Emperor Hsien-feng, who was debilitated despite his youthful years and suffered from dropsy, shirked the impending confrontation, departing on the 22nd of September for his retreat at Jehol beyond the Great Wall amidst a disorderly array of court eunuchs, mules, baggage carts, litters and palanquins. Word was conveyed to the commanders of the enemy forces that his majest the Emperor was obliged by law to go hunting in autumn. In early October the allied troops, themselves now uncertain how to proceed, happened apparently by chance on the magic garden of Yuan Ming Yuan near Peking, with its countless palaces, pavilions, covered walks, fantastic arbours, temples and towers. On the slopes of man-made mountains, between banks and spinneys, deer with fabulous antlers grazed, and the whole incomprehensible glory of Nature and of the wonders placed in it by the hand of man was reflected in dark, unruffled waters. The destruction that was wrought in these legendary landscaped gardens over the next few days, which made a mockery of military discipline or indeed of all reason, can only be understood as resulting from anger at the continued delay in achieving a resolution. yet the true reason why Yuan Ming Yuan was laid waste may well have been that this earthly paradise—which immediately annihilated any notion of the Chinese as an inferior and uncivilized race—was an irresistible provocation in the eyes of soldiers who, a world away from their homeland, knew nothing about the rule of force, privation, and the abnegation of their own desires. Although the accounts of what happened in those October days are not very reliable, the sheer fact that booty was later auctioned off in the British camp suggests that much of the removable ornaments and the jewellery left behind by the fleeing court, everything made of jade or gold, silver or silk, fell into the hands of the looters. When the summerhouses, hunting lodges and sacred places in the extensive gardens and neighbouring palace precincts, more than two hundred in number, were then burnt to the ground, it was on the orders of the commanding officers, ostensibly in reprisal for the mistreatment of the British emissaries Loch and Parkes, but in reality so that the devastation already wrought should no longer be apparent. The temples, palaces and hermitages, mostly built of cedarwood, went up in flames one after another with unbelievable speed, according to Charles George Gordon, a thirty-year-old captain in the Royal Engineers, the fire spreading through the green shrubs and woods, crackling and leaping. Apart from a few stone bridges and marble pagodas, all was destroyed. For a long time, swathes of smoke drifted over the entire area, and a great cloud of ash that obscured the sun was borne to Peking by the west wind, where after a time it settled on the heads and homes of those who, it was surmised, had been visited by the power of divine retribution. At the end of the month, with the example of Yuan Ming Yuan before them, the Emperor's officers felt obliged to sign without further ado the oft-deferred Treaty of Tientsin. The principal clauses, apart from fresh reparation demands that could scarcely be met, related to the rights of free movement and unhindered missionary activity in the interior of China and to negotiation of a customs tariff with a view to legalizing the opium trade. In return, the Western powers declared themselves willing to uphold the dynasty, which meant putting down the Taiping rebellion and crushing the secessionary movements of the Moslem population of the Shensi, Yunnan and Kansu valley regions, in the course of which between six and ten million people were made homeless or killed. Charles George Gordon, by nature shy and Christian-spirited, though also an irascible and profoundly melancholy man, who was later to die a famous death in the siege of Khartoum, took over the command of the demoralized imperial army and within a short period transformed into so powerful a fighting force that when he left the country he was invested with the Chinese Empire's highest decoration in recognition of his services, the yellow jacket.
In August 1861, after months of irresolution, Emperor Hsien-feng lay in his Jehol exile approaching the end of his short and dissipated life. The waters had already risen from his abdomen to his heart, and the cells of his gradually dissolving flesh floated like fish in the sea in the salt fluid that leaked from his bloodstream into every available space in the body tissue. Through his flickering consciousness, Hsien-feng followed the invasion by foreign powers of the provinces of his empire by perfect proxy, as his own limbs died off and his organs flooded with toxins. He himself was now the battlefield on which the downfall of China was being accomplished, till on the 22nd of the month the shades of night settled upon him and he sank away wholly into the delirium of death. Because of the precisely ordained procedures to which the Emperor's body had to be subjected before being placed in its coffin, procedures which were linked to complex astrological calculations, transfer of his corpse to Peking could not be arranged before the 5th of October. It then took three weeks for the cortège, more than a mile long, to make the journey, in evenly falling autumn rain, up hill and down dale, through black valleys and gorges and across bleak mountain passes blurred to sight by icy-grey blizzards. The catafalque, which time and again threatened to topple over, was borne on a huge golden bier on the shoulders of a hundred and twenty-four hand-picked pallbearers. On the morning of the 1st of November, when the cortège reached its destination, the road leading to the gates of the Forbidden City had been strewn with yellow sand and screens of blue Nanking silk were positioned on either side to prevent the common people from looking upon the countenance of the five-year-old child Emperor T'ung-chih, whom Hsien-feng had named as his successor to the dragon throne in the last days of his life and who was now being taken homeward on a padded palanquin behind the mortal remains of his father, together with his mother Tz'u-hsi, who had risen from the ranks of concubines and even now had assumed the illustrious title of Dowager Empress. Following the return to court in Peking, the struggle for the powers of regency during the interregnum which inevitably ensued since the heir to the dragon throne was not yet of age, was soon resolved in favour of the widow, whose craving for power was insatiable. The princes who had acted as Hseien-feng's viceroys during his absence were accused of conspiracy against the legitimate ruler, a crime for which there was no defence, and they were condemned to be dismembered and cut into slices. When this sentence was commuted and the traitors were granted permission, offered to them in the form of a silken rope, to hang themselves, it was seen as a token of merciful clemency in the new regime. Once Princes Cheng, Su-shun and Yi had availed themselves of this prerogative, seemingly without any hesitation, the Dowager Empress was the uncontested locum of the Chinese Empire, at least until the time when her son became old enough to rule himself and began taking measures that ran counter to the plans she had nurtured to extend and perfect her power, plans of which many had already been put into practice. Given this turn of events, it was tantamount to providential, from Tz'u-hsi's point of view, that, a scant year after coming to the throne, T'ung-chih was so weakened—by smallpox or by some other disease he had picked up, as rumour had it, from the dancers and transvestites of Peking's streets of sin—that when the planet Venus crossed before the sun in the autumn of 1874, a grim omen, there were fears for his life at the age of barely nineteen. And indeed T'ung-chih did die, a few weeks later, on the 12th of January 1875. His face was turned to the south and for the journey into the beyond he was enrobed in the vestments of eternal life. The funeral obsequies had scarcely been completed in the prescribed form when the wife of the departed Emperor, seventeen years old and several months pregnant according to various sources, poisoned herself with a massive dose of opium. The official version, that her mysterious death was due to the unassuageable grief that had overwhelmed her, could not entirely dispel the suspicion that the young Empress had been got out of the way in order to prolong the regency of the Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi, who now consolidated her position by having her two-year-old nephew Kung-hsu proclaimed heir to the throne, a manoeuvre which flew in the face of tradition since Kuang-hsu was of the same generation as T'ung-chih in the lineage of descent, and thus, under an incontrovertible Confucian rule, unentitled to proffer the services of reverence and mourning which were owed the dead man that his spirit might be appeased. The way the Dowager Empress, in other respects extremely conservative in her views, contrived to flout the most venerable precepts when it became necessary, was one sign of her craving for absolute power, which grew more ruthless with every year that passed. And like all absolute rulers, she was concerned to display her exalted position to the world at large and to herself by a lavishness beyond comparison. Her private household alone, managed by senior eunuch Li Lien-ying, standing to her right in this picture,
went through a truly appalling annual sum of six million pounds sterling. The more ostentatious the demonstrations of her authority became, however, the more the fear of losing the infinite power she had so insidiously acquired grew within her. Unable to sleep, she roamed the bizarre shadow landscapes of the palace gardens, amidst the artificial crags, the groves of ferns, and the dark arborvitaes and cypresses. In the early morning she swallowed a pearl ground to powder, as an elixir of invulnerability. She took the greatest of pleasure in lifeless things, and by day would sometimes stand for hours at the windows of her apartments, staring out upon the silent lake to the north, which resembled a painting. The tiny figures of the gardeners in the distant lily fields, or those of the courtiers who skated on the blue ice in winter, did not recall to her the natural occupations and feelings of human kind, but were rather, like flies in a jam jar, already in the wanton power of death. Travellers who were in China between 1876 and 1879 report that, in the drought that had continued for years, whole provinces gave the impression of expiring under prisons of glass. Between seven and twenty million people—no precise estimates have ever been calculated—are said to have died of starvation and exhaustion, principally in Shansi, Shensi and Shantung. A Baptist preacher named Timothy Richard, for example, noted that one effect of the catastrophe, which grew more apparent week by week, was that all movement was slowing down. Singly, in groups and in straggling lines, people tottered across the country, and the merest breath of air might suffice to topple them and leave them lying by the wayside forever. Simply raising a hand, closing an eyelid, or exhaling one's last breath might take, it sometimes seemed, half a century. And as time dissolved, so too did all other relations. Parents exchanged children because they could not bear to watch the dying torment of their own. Towns and villages were surrounded by deserts of dust, over which trembling mirages of river valleys and forested lakes often appeared. Sometimes at first light, when the rustling of leaves dry on the branch penetrated their shallow sleep, people imagined, for a fraction of a second in which wishful thinking was stronger than what they knew to be the case, that it had started to rain. Though the capital and its environs were spared the worst consequences of the drought, when the ill tidings arrived from the south, the Dowager Empress had a daily blood sacrifice offered in her temple to the gods of silk, at the hour when the evening star rose, lest the silkworms want for fresh green leaves. Of all living creatures, these curious insects alone aroused a strong affection in her. The silk houses they were raised in were among the finest buildings of the summer palace. Every day that came, Tz'u-hsi walked the airy halls with the ladies of her retinue, clad in white pinafores, to inspect the progress of the work, and when night fell she particularly liked to sit all alone amidst the frames, listening to the low, even, deeply soothing sound of the countless silkworms consuming the new mulberry foliage. These pale, almost transparent creatures, which would presently give their lives for the fine thread they were spinning, she saw as her true loyal followers. To her they seemed the ideal subjects, diligent in service, ready to die, capable of multiplying vastly within a short span of time, and fixed on their one sole preordained aim, wholly unlike human beings, on whom there was basically no
relying, neither on the nameless masses in the empire nor on those who constituted the inmost circle about her and who, she suspected might over at any time to the side of the second child Emperor she had installed. Kung-hsu who was fascinated by the mysteries of modern machines, spent most of his time taking apart the mechanical toys and clocks sold by a Danish tradesman in his Peking shop, and it was still possible to distract his awakening ambition by promising him a real railway train which he would be able to ride across his own country but the day was not long remote when his would be the power which she, the Dowager Empress, was ever less able to relinquish the longer she possessed it. As I imagine it, the little court train with the image of the Chinese dragon that later served the line from Halesworth to Southwold was originally ordered for Kuang-hsu, and the order was subsequently cancelled in the mid-1890s when the young Emperor began to espouse, in opposition to Tz'u-hsi, the causes of the reform movement under whose influence he had fallen, causes that ran counter to her own purposes. What we do have on authority is that Kuang-hsu's attempts to wrest power to himself ultimately led to his being imprisoned in one of the moated palaces in the Forbidden City, where he was forced to abdicate and make over the power of government, without reservation, to the Dowager Empress. For ten years Kuang-hsu languished in exile on his paradisiacal island until in the late summer of 1908, the various ailments that increasingly troubled him since the day of his deposition—chronic headaches and backache, renal cramps, hypersensitivity to light and noise, weak lungs, and severe depression—finally overcame him. One Dr Chu, who was familiar with western medicine and was the last to be consulted, diagnosed Bright's disease but also noted a number of inconsistent symptoms—palpitations of the heart, an empurpled complexion, a yellow tongue—that suggest, as has since been speculated, that Kuang-hsu was gradually poisoned. Visiting the patient in his imperial apartments, Dr Chu noticed moreover that the floors and all the furnishings were thick with dust, as if the house had been long since deserted, an indication that no one had attended to the Emperor's needs for years. On the 14th of November 1908 at dusk, or, as they say, at the hour of the cockerel, Kuang-hsu, racked with pain, departed this life. At the time of his death he was thirty-seven years old. Strangely enough, the seventy-three-year-old Dowager Empress, who had destroyed his body and his spirit with such persistent intent, outlived him by less than a day. On the morning of the 15th of November, still in reasonably good health, she presided over the grand council's deliberations upon the new situation, but after her midday meal, which in defiance of her personal doctors' warnings she had concluded with a double helping of her favourite pudding—crab apples with clotted cream—she was stricken with an attack resembling dysentery, from which she did not recover. She died at about three o'clock. Already draped in her shroud, she dictated her farewell to the Empire which now after the near half century of her regency was in the throes of dissolution. Looking back, she said, she realized that history consists of nothing but misfortune and the troubles that afflict us, so that in all our days on earth we never know one single moment that is genuinely free of fear.