by Linda Jaivin
View of Kunming Lake from the roofs of the Yiheyuan (Summer Palace) built on the site of the Qingyiyuan, which was destroyed in 1860 along with the Yuanmingyuan by British and French troops.
By the nineteenth century Britain had discovered there was one thing they could sell into China, albeit illegally: Indian opium. Aided by the French, the British literally blasted their way into the Chinese market with gunships in the Opium Wars of 1842 and 1858, forcing the Qing to cede control over Chinese ports including at Shanghai and Tianjin.
In 1860 the British commander of the Second Opium War, James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (and son of ‘Marbles’ Elgin), dispatched a delegation of over 30 British and French subjects to Beijing to demand even more punishing concessions. Qing officials imprisoned the emissaries in the Yuanmingyuan and bound, beat, caged and tortured them. Half died.
As 17,000 British and French troops marched towards Beijing from Tianjin, the Xianfeng emperor (r. 1850–61), Qianlong’s grandson, fled with his court to a hunting palace in Chengde, hundreds of kilometres away. The French proposed flattening Beijing and the Forbidden City in retribution. Elgin preferred to inflict a symbolic wound. They would burn down the emperor’s beloved Yuanmingyuan. Only a small handful of eunuch guardsmen remained to guard the most beautiful garden palace the world has ever known. Their chief threw himself into Fuhai (Lake of Good Fortune) in despair. After an orgy of looting, in which the foreigners’ southern Chinese camp followers enthusiastically participated, the soldiers set fire to the buildings. They also plundered and burned other imperial pleasances including the Qingyiyuan. For two days Beijing glowed saturnine with flames and cinders rained over the city. Many of the Yuanmingyuan’s exquisite wooden Chinese buildings disappeared in the inferno, leaving only the now emblematic collapsed columns and stonework of the Jesuit piles.
Local Chinese souvenired whatever survived; palace treasures began popping up for sale in the antique shops at Liulichang. Abroad, masterpieces from the Yuanmingyuan were exhibited at the Tuileries in Paris and at the Crystal Palace and British Museum in London. Some went under the hammer at Sotheby’s. A regimental captain presented Queen Victoria with a Pekinese from the garden: ‘Lootie’.
TV crew filming at the ruins of the Yuanmingyuan.
The shame-ridden Xianfeng emperor died in Chengde in 1861, at 30 years of age. Victor Hugo condemned the sacking: ‘We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.’ A participating British captain characterized it as ‘wretchedly demoralising work for an army’. But Elgin always insisted it was an act of ‘justice’, not ‘vengeance’. In the Chinese collective consciousness, the burning of the Yuanmingyuan remains a powerful and emotive symbol of Western imperialist arrogance towards China.
Another ‘unequal treaty’ forced the Qing to allow foreign ambassadors the right of residence in Beijing. A Legation Quarter sprang up at the old Yuan dynasty rice markets, Dongjiangmixiang (East Glutinous Rice Lane), which became Dongjiaominxiang (East Mingling of Peoples Lane). The Americans occupied a former hostelry for representatives of vassal states, the French acquired a decaying mansion with a magnificent garden, and the British leased a house belonging to the imperial clansman Prince Chun, sending the annual rent in silver ingots by mule cart every Chinese New Year. The Chinese Imperial Customs Service, headed by the Irishman Robert Hart from 1864, moved into Jinyu (Goldfish) Hutong.
Xianfeng’s son, the six-year-old Tongzhi emperor (r. 1861–75), took the throne under the supervision of his mother, Empress Dowager Cixi and her co-regent, Xianfeng’s official empress and Cixi’s cousin, Ci’an. Inspector-General Hart, who had unique access to the court, observed that by his early teens Tongzhi appeared ‘to be living awful fast. Women, girls, men and boys – as fast as he could, one after the other.’ By nineteen, Tongzhi was dead, officially of smallpox, though some whispered it was syphilis.
Tongzhi, whose short reign had overseen a partial reconstruction of the Yuanmingyuan, left no heir. Cixi manoeuvred her three-year-old nephew on to the throne as the Guangxu emperor (r. 1875–1908) and continued her regency. A forceful, complex and controversial personality, Cixi dominated the politics of the late Qing, ruling from ‘behind the screen’, at first together with Ci’an, for nearly half a century.
In the 1880s, a ‘self-strengthening’ movement drawing on Western technology saw Beijing linked by telegraph cables with Tianjin and Shanghai. In 1888, intrigued by railways, Cixi had tracks laid for a miniature train pulled by eunuchs to take her from her quarters in the Lake Palaces to the Studio of the Quiet Heart on the north shore of Beihai where she liked to take lunch. It would be 1896 before Beijing got its first proper railway line, a link to Tianjin.
Guangxu turned sixteen in 1887, but Cixi held on to power. When a blaze destroyed several palace structures in 1888 and lightning struck the Temple of Heaven in 1889, burning down its sacred circular hall, Cixi’s critics called the disasters signs of Heaven’s displeasure.
The court decided to rebuild the Qingyiyuan as the Yiheyuan (Garden of Cultivated Harmony, or Summer Palace) in the hope Cixi would retire there and leave the emperor to rule. Because wars, natural disasters and rebellions had strained the treasury, the court diverted monies from the Board of Admiralty to fund the project, while ordering builders to harvest stones, bricks and tiles from the Yuanmingyuan, dismantling the Tongzhi era reconstructions.
On summer evenings Cixi’s ladies-in-waiting rowed into the Summer Palace’s Kunming Lake to insert parcels of tea into the hearts of lotus flowers; they retrieved them, infused with scent, in the morning. In winter, Bannermen skated on the lake in formations for her amusement. In 1860, foreign soldiers had vandalized a marble boat Qianlong had built in Kunming Lake; Cixi had it rebuilt with modern touches such as paddlewheels. She also had a special theatre constructed for her beloved Peking Opera. Amply diverted, Cixi left her nephew to rule.
In 1894–5, following a disastrous naval war with Japan, China was forced to sign yet another punishing treaty. Word that navy funds had been diverted to refurbish Cixi’s marble pleasure boat created a scandal. A group of loyal but forward-looking intellectuals persuaded the 24-year-old emperor to enact political, economic and military reforms along the lines of those that had transformed Japan into a modern power. On 11 June 1898, Guangxu launched the reforms. Wary of sabotage by his aunt and her conservative, eunuch-dominated cabal, he asked a young military commander with a reputation for progressive thinking, Yuan Shikai, to help restrain Cixi. Yuan turned informer. Under Cixi’s orders, he detained the emperor instead.
Cixi’s Marble Boat at the Yiheyuan.
The Summer Palace, a pictorial map from 1888.
Cixi confined Guangxu to a pavilion on Yingtai (Ocean Terrace), an island in the Lake Palaces, where he would pass almost all the rest of his days. On 28 September, imperial guards escorted six of the leading reformists out of the Inner City gate of Xuanwumen to the execution ground at Caishikou (Vegetable Markets). They were beheaded in front of 10,000 spectators on a site occupied today by a Walmart. Cixi assumed the power of regent once more.
Corruption spread. Infrastructure decayed. Relief funds failed to reach victims of natural disasters. A new peasant movement arose seeking to protect court and country from the foreign menace. The Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist – known in English as the Boxers – practised martial arts rituals they believed made them impervious to swords and bullets. After cutting a murderous swathe through isolated missionary communities in the provinces, they began trickling into Beijing in early 1900, conspicuous in red headbands and girdles. Some citizens welcomed the Boxers and even joined them. The Boxers had a strong ally at court in the person of the powerful Prince Duan.
China was now a country of 350 million people, of whom nearly 700,000 lived in Beijing. Less than 900 of Beijing’s residents were foreigners, most of whom lived in the Legation Quarter, which now included churches, tennis courts and so
many other amenities that the British diplomat Clive Bigham remarked that one could pass the summer there ‘and never leave the precincts of civilisation’.
On 8 June the Boxers cut railway tracks and damaged electricity lines in the southern suburbs. They set fire to the Peking Racecourse, primarily patronized by foreigners, just south of the city. Days later, they marched in force through the city gates, saluted by imperial guards. Xenophobic to a fault, the Boxers attacked Chinese shops selling ‘Western goods’ such as paraffin lamps. They destroyed rickshaws, a recent import from Japan. As tensions rose, the violent-tempered German envoy, Baron Clemens von Ketteler, beat and murdered a young Chinese boy. On 20 June imperial troops allied with the Boxers shot the baron dead. They also killed a Japanese envoy, Sugiyama Akira, cutting out his heart.
The Boxers burned down Dong Tang (the Eastern Cathedral, built in the late nineteenth century on the site of Johann Adam Schall von Bell’s house), killing a French priest and untold numbers of Chinese Catholics. Ten thousand Boxers laid siege to Bei Tang (the Northern Cathedral) in which over 3,000 converts were sheltering, attacking it with flaming arrows and explosives. Tens of thousands of Boxers and sympathetic imperial troops laid siege to the Legations, where thousands more Chinese Christians were now also sheltering. During the 55-day siege, nearly 3,000 missiles landed inside the legations; 76 people were killed and 179 were wounded. Among the injured was the correspondent for The Times of London, the Australian G. E. Morrison, shot in the buttocks. The besieged survived on the diplomats’ stores of champagne, the flesh of their horses and donkeys – and rice, flour, watermelon and wine sent round, surreally, by Cixi.
Outside China, the story positions Westerners at the centre of the action – Hollywood’s 55 Days at Peking (1963) even starred Flora Robson as Cixi, dispensing Oriental inscrutabilities such as ‘The voice of the nightingale is still; I hear only the sound of crows’ as Robert Helpmann knelt at her feet, screwing up his eyes to play a scheming Prince Duan. But the Boxers inflicted the most pain on their own compatriots, torturing and killing tens of thousands of Chinese Christians. Their fires destroyed more than 4,000 Chinese shops, temples and homes in Dashila’r alone. An attack on the British Legation sparked a fire that burned down the neighbouring Hanlin Library, repository of China’s most precious and irreplaceable historical manuscripts. Geremie Barmé has written how the Boxers also destroyed the last remaining structure in the Yuanmingyuan, the Porcelain Pavilion. Official Chinese accounts tend to skip over these facts; like Hollywood, the Communists prefer to keep the story simple.
Allied troops entering the city through an opening in the city wall.
On 14 August a motley force of some 17,000 British, American, French, Japanese, German, Russian, Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops, the Eight-Nation Alliance, arrived from Tianjin at the city walls. Japanese artillery pounded the city gate of Chaoyangmen into rubble. The Americans, entering through a breach in the walls, fired on Tiananmen itself. The following day, Cixi, her captive nephew and the court fled the city disguised as peasants.
The Allied forces killed many thousands of imperial troops and Boxers. They also looted the Forbidden City, the imperial treasury and the abandoned mansions of the nobility, and laid waste to Cixi’s Summer Palace and another Qing pleasance on Jade Spring Mountain. Dividing the city into occupation zones, they indulged in an orgy of rape, beatings and murder before the Japanese enforced some semblance of order. Among those killed was the father of one of Beijing’s most beloved authors, Lao She, who has written how a foreign soldier even stabbed his family dog to death. The soldiers destroyed imperial archives, including uniquely detailed, intimate records of palace life.
Foreign residents joined in the plunder. Morrison helped himself to what he considered a modest compensation of treasure from the Forbidden City, noting that Britain’s Sir Claude and Lady MacDonald took away no less than 185 crates of loot. The British stole the imperial ancestral tablets from the Temple of Heaven for the British Museum and Germans carted off the massive, Jesuit-forged astronomical instruments of the city wall’s Observatory Tower (returning them after the First World War).
Ninth U.S. Infantry in the court of the Forbidden City.
Several months after the Allied troops departed, in September 1901, Cixi returned on a train decorated in imperial yellow silk. Beijing began, once more, to rebuild. The foreigners built a train station at Qianmen, convenient to the expanded, fortified and now exclusively foreign Legation Quarter. Like the foreign concessions in Shanghai, the Legation Quarter no longer recognized Chinese legal jurisdiction. New embassies were built in national styles – mock-Gothic, mock-Baroque, mock-Empire; what the American writer and scholar George N. Kates describes in The Years That Were Fat: Peking, 1933–1940 as ‘a most oddly assorted juxtaposition of architectural tranches de gâteau’. Bullet holes still pocked the quarter’s walls. In her intimate portrait of the city, Peking, long-time resident Juliet Bredon claims that ‘at least one garden has Boxers buried under the lawns.’
Map showing the occupation zones, 1900. According to the Chinese text, red represents German-controlled territory, blue for French, yellow for Britain, green or mustard for America and sky blue for Japan, and so on – but this only represents one period of the occupation.
Its former Chinese residents swelled the population of Dashila’r, also busily rebuilding. Artisanal workshops enjoyed boom times as foreign and Chinese alike replaced possessions lost in the violence. Foreign merchants opened shops selling imported goods on Wangfujing; the multi-storey Hotel de Pékin, at Wangfujing’s southern corner, violated a centuries-old ban on buildings overlooking the palace walls.
In mid-November 1908, Cixi and the Guangxu emperor (who was never reinstated to power) died within a day of each other; she is believed to have poisoned him. The new, three-year-old Xuantong emperor (whose Manchu name was Aisin Gioro Puyi) bawled throughout his coronation. Three years later a republican revolution broke out in the south; the child-emperor abdicated and China’s last imperial dynasty came to an end.
5 The Republic, Japanese Occupation and Civil War (1912–1949)
The reformist thinker Liang Qichao, who escaped execution in 1898 by fleeing to Japan, considered Beijing ‘the hotbed of all evils’. In his view, as quoted (and translated) in Geremie Barmé’s The Forbidden City,
Not only has the land lost its pleasing features and the water its sweet taste but a thousand crimes, a myriad of scandals, and all the weird carbuncles and chronic diseases of this sinful world are concentrated there. If the political centre stays in Beijing, China will never see a day of clean government.
The southerners who led the revolution shared the sentiment, removing the capital of the new Republic of China to Nanjing. They left the dethroned child-emperor, now simply known as Puyi, free to occupy the residential sector of the Forbidden City with his rump court, even granting him a modest pension.
As the empire receded, Puyi was left, as Peter Quennell writes in A Superficial Journey Through Tokyo and Peking, ‘the sole surviving coral insect of an enormous reef’. For nearly eight centuries that reef, the court, had been Beijing’s chief employer and the driver of its economy. Its demise left nearly six in ten men in this city of over 700,000 unemployed.
Both the dispossessed and the revolutionary took out their anger and frustration on Manchus; some even lobbed homemade bombs over the walls of the princely mansions. Jittery Manchu Bannermen adopted Chinese surnames and dress. Many sold off their heirlooms and fled to the nearby cities of Tianjin or Qingdao. The turmoil unsettled the silk merchants of Qianmen, who carted their wares to the well-guarded Legation Quarter for safe storage. The shortage of silk on the market meant few in Beijing had new clothes for Chinese New Year. As a result of all these things, Chinese sources record that the 1912 celebrations were the most subdued in memory.
The 3-year-old Puyi with his father, Prince Chun, and younger brother Pujie.
The military man who once arrested an empero
r, Yuan Shikai, had helped the Republican government persuade the Qing court to retire. His price was the presidency. When he also demanded that the capital return to Beijing, a government delegation travelled north to dissuade him. The silk merchants had just reopened for business when soldiers rampaged through the city, looting, murdering, setting fires and damaging the city’s new telephone exchange. The terrified envoys took refuge in the Legation Quarter. Yuan made his point: without him in charge up north, anything could happen. Especially if he wanted it to.
In April the Republican government transferred to the dust-blown north with as little enthusiasm as had the Ming court of Yongle. A wary parliament set up in the city’s southwest, and government agencies, schools and enterprises found quarters in former princely mansions. Yuan established his offices in the Lake Palaces of Zhongnanhai, building himself a two-storey villa and furnishing it à la Louis XIV. (The Forbidden City describes Yuan arriving at a winter meeting with foreign diplomats on a red and gold sled pulled by servants in frockcoats and top hats, a leopard-skin rug over his lap.) He carved out a new gate, Xinhuamen (New China Gate), in the walls of the Imperial Precinct, on the site of the Qianlong era Tower for Delighting in the Moon, for the entrance to Zhongnanhai.
Members of Puyi’s ‘little court’ filed into the north gate of the Forbidden City daily, changing into ceremonial garb once inside. The southern, or ‘business’ half of the palace began its transformation into a museum to safeguard the collections of all the city’s palaces – treasures from which were already appearing in antique shops at Liulichang and overseas. The arrangement also kept the throne halls off-limits to Puyi and any restoration-minded regents.