by Chang, Jung
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jung Chang
List of Illustrations
About the Sources
Author’s Note
Map of China under Cixi
Dedication
Title Page
PART ONE – The Imperial Concubine in Stormy Times (1835–1861)
1. Concubine to an Emperor (1835–56)
2. From the Opium War to the Burning of the Old Summer Palace (1839–60)
3. Emperor Xianfeng Dies (1860–61)
4. The Coup that Changed China (1861)
PART TWO – Reigning Behind Her Son’s Throne (1861–1875)
5. First Step on the Long Road to Modernity (1861–9)
6. Virgin Journeys to the West (1861–71)
7. Love Doomed (1869)
8. A Vendetta against the West (1869–71)
9. Life and Death of Emperor Tongzhi (1861–75)
PART THREE – Ruling Through an Adopted Son (1875–1889)
10. A Three-year-old is Made Emperor (1875)
11. Modernisation Accelerates (1875–89)
12. Defender of the Empire (1875–89)
PART FOUR – Emperor Guangxu Takes Over (1889–1898)
13. Guangxu Alienated from Cixi (1875–94)
14. The Summer Palace (1886–94)
15. In Retirement and in Leisure (1889–94)
16. War with Japan (1894)
17. A Peace that Ruined China (1895)
18. The Scramble for China (1895–8)
PART FIVE – To the Front of the Stage (1898–1901)
19. The Reforms of 1898 (1898)
20. A Plot to Kill Cixi (September 1898)
21. Desperate to Dethrone Her Adopted Son (1898–1900)
22. To War against the World Powers – with the Boxers (1899–1900)
23. Fighting to a Bitter End (1900)
24. Flight (1900–1)
25. Remorse (1900–1)
PART SIX – The Real Revolution of Modern China (1901–1908)
26. Return to Beijing (1901–2)
27. Making Friends with Westerners (1902–7)
28. Cixi’s Revolution (1902–8)
29. The Vote! (1905–8)
30. Coping with Insurgents, Assassins and the Japanese (1902–8)
31. Deaths (1908)
Epilogue: China after Empress Dowager Cixi
Picture Section
Notes
Archives Consulted
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) is the most important woman in Chinese history. She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age.
At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the Emperor’s numerous concubines and sexual partners. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China – behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.
In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, telegraph, and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and put an end to foot-binding. She inaugurated women’s liberation, and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.
Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, wars with France and Japan – and the invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs – with one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Jung Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.
Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eye-witness accounts, this biography will revolutionise historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s – and the world’s – history. Packed with drama, fast-paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.
About the Author
Jung Chang is the bestselling author of Wild Swans (1991, which the Asian Wall Street Journal called the most read book about China), and Mao: The Unknown Story (2005, with Jon Halliday), which was described by Time magazine as ‘an atom bomb of a book’. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies outside mainland China where they are both banned. She was born in China in 1952, and came to Britain in 1978. She lives in London.
Also by Jung Chang
WILD SWANS: THREE DAUGHTERS OF CHINA
MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY
(with Jon Halliday)
List of Illustrations
Cixi dressed as Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy.
Old Beijing Streets.
A caravan of camels passing in front of a Beijing city gate.
Cixi carried by eunuchs.
Prince Chun, who was married to Cixi’s sister.
Prince Gong, Cixi’s right-hand man.
Viceroy Zhang Zhidong.
Li Hongzhang (Earl Li) with Lord Salisbury and Lord Curzon.
General Yuan Shikai, later first President of the Republic of China.
Junglu entertaining Western visitors.
Anson Burlingame heads the first Chinese delegation to the West.
Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon.
Sarah Conger with Cixi and other ladies of the American Legation.
Sir Robert Hart with his Western band of Chinese musicians.
Painting by Cixi.
Panel showing Cixi’s calligraphy.
Painting and calligraphy by Emperor Xianfeng.
Cixi playing Go with a eunuch.
Airbrushed photograph of Cixi.
Portrait of Emperor Xianfeng.
‘Lootie’, a Pekinese given to Queen Victoria.
Emperor Tongzhi as a child, playing with his half-sister.
Portrait of Emperor Guangxu.
Portrait of Empress Zhen.
The harem at the rear of the Forbidden City.
The front and main part of the Forbidden City on the occasion of Emperor Guangxu’s wedding.
The audience room in the Forbidden City.
The Summer Palace.
Portrait of Cixi by Katharine Carl.
Katharine Carl in Chinese costume.
Cixi in the snow with Louisa Pierson, Der Ling and Rongling.
Yu Keng, Louisa Pierson and family with Prince Zaizhen in Paris.
Rongling, ‘the First Lady of modern dancing in China’.
Hsingling dressed as Napoleon.
A Chinese courtesan.
Chinese children sent to America for education.
Pearl, Emperor Guangxu’s favourite concubine.
Grand Tutor Weng.
Cixi in a temple with Empress Longyu.
Sir Yinhuan Chang.
Kang Youwei.
Liang Qichao.
Japanese banknote showing Itō Hirobumi.
The Boxers in 1900.
Allied forces entering the Forbidden City.
Cixi waving to a foreign photographer.
Postcard of the imperial locomotive.
Girls with bound feet.
Convicts in cangues.
Cixi putting a flower in her hair.
Cixi smiling.
Cixi on a barge on the lake of the Sea Palace.
On a barge in opera costume.
Court ladies at the American Legation.
Sarah Conger’s courtyard.
Cixi in the snow with eunuchs and Der Ling.
Regent Zaifeng with the child Emperor Puyi.
Sun Yat-sen with soldiers.
Cixi’s funeral parade.
The Eastern Mausoleums of the Qing monarchs where Cixi was buried.
About the Sources
This book is based on historical documents, chiefly Chinese. They include imperial decrees, court records, official communications, personal correspondence, diaries and eye-witness accounts. Most of them have only come to light since the death of Mao in 1976, when historians were able to resume working on the archives. Thanks to their dedicated efforts, huge numbers of files have been sorted, studied, published, some even digitalised. Earlier publications of archive materials and scholarly works have been reissued. Thus I have had the good fortune to be able to utilise a colossal documentary pool, as well as consulting the First Historical Archives of China, the main keeper of the records to do with Empress Dowager Cixi, which holds twelve million documents. The vast majority of the sources cited have never been seen or used outside the Chinese-speaking world.
The Empress Dowager’s Western contemporaries left valuable diaries, letters and memoirs. Queen Victoria’s diary, Hansard and the copious international diplomatic exchanges are all rich mines of information. The Archives of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, in Washington DC, is the only place that possesses the original negatives of the photographs of Cixi.
Author’s Note
The ‘tael’ was the currency of China at the time. One tael weighed about 38 grams and was valued at roughly a third of a pound sterling (£1 = Tls. 3).
Chinese (and Japanese) personal names are given surname first, except for those who chose to render their names differently.
The pinyin system is used where transliteration is needed. Thus there are non-pinyin Chinese names, e.g. Canton, Tsinghua (University).
The dates and ages of people are given according to the Western system (which is used in China today). The exceptions are stated.
In the Bibliography, the publication dates are of the editions which this author consulted. Many very old books may therefore give the appearance of having been published quite recently.
To Jon
Empress Dowager Cixi
The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
Jung Chang
PART ONE
The Imperial Concubine in Stormy Times (1835–1861)
1 Concubine to an Emperor (1835–56)
IN SPRING 1852, in one of the periodic nationwide selections for imperial consorts, a sixteen-year-old girl caught the eye of the emperor and was chosen as a concubine. A Chinese emperor was entitled to one empress and as many concubines as he pleased. In the court registry she was entered simply as ‘the woman of the Nala family’, with no name of her own. Female names were deemed too insignificant to be recorded. In fewer than ten years, however, this girl, whose name may have been lost for ever,fn1 had fought her way to become the ruler of China, and for decades – until her death in 1908 – would hold in her hands the fate of nearly one-third of the world’s population. She was the Empress Dowager Cixi (also spelt Tzu Hsi). This was her honorific name and means ‘kindly and joyous’.
She came from one of the oldest and most illustrious Manchu families. The Manchus were a people who originally lived in Manchuria, beyond the Great Wall to the northeast. In 1644, the Ming dynasty in China was overthrown by a peasant rebellion, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself from a tree in the back garden of his palace. The Manchus seized the opportunity to smash across the Great Wall. They defeated the peasant rebels, occupied the whole of China and set up a new dynasty called the Great Qing – ‘Great Purity’. Taking over the Ming capital, Beijing, as their own, the victorious Manchus went on to build an empire three times the size of the Ming empire, at its peak occupying a territory of 13 million square kilometres – compared to 9.6 million today.
The Manchu conquerors, outnumbered by the indigenous Chinese, the Han, by approximately 100:1, imposed their domination initially by brutal means. They forced the Han males to wear the Manchu men’s hairstyle as the most visible badge of submission. The Han men traditionally grew their hair long and put it up in a bun, but the Manchu men shaved off an outer ring of hairs, leaving the centre part to grow and plaiting it into a trailing queue. Anyone who refused to wear the queue was summarily beheaded. In the capital, the conquerors pushed the Han out of the Inner City, to the Outer City, and separated the two ethnic groups by walls and gates.fn2 The repression lessened over the years, and the Han generally came to live a life no worse than that of the Manchus. The ethnic animosity diminished – even though top jobs remained in the hands of the Manchus. Intermarriage was prohibited, which in a family-oriented society meant there was little social intercourse between the two groups. And yet the Manchus adopted much of the Han culture and political system, and their empire’s administration, extending to all corners of the country like a colossal octopus, was overwhelmingly manned by Han officials, who were selected from the literati by the traditional Imperial Examinations that focused on Confucian classics. Indeed, Manchu emperors themselves were educated in the Confucian way, and some became greater Confucian scholars than the best of the Han. Thus the Manchus regarded themselves as Chinese, and referred to their empire as the ‘Chinese’ empire, or ‘China’, as well as the ‘Qing’.
The ruling family, the Aisin-Gioros, produced a succession of able and hard-working emperors, who were absolute monarchs and made all important decisions personally. There was not even a Prime Minister, but only an office of assistants, the Grand Council. The emperors would rise at the crack of dawn to read reports, hold meetings, receive officials and issue decrees. The reports from all over China were dealt with as soon as they arrived, and rarely was any business left undone for more than a few days. The seat of the throne was the Forbidden City. Perhaps the largest imperial palace complex in the world, this rectangular compound covered an area of 720,000 square metres, with a moat of proportional size. It was surrounded by a majestic wall some 10 metres high and nearly 9 metres thick at the base, with a magnificent gate set into each side, and a splendid watchtower above each corner. Almost all the buildings in the compound displayed glazed tiles in a shade of yellow reserved for the court. In sunshine, the sweeping roofs were a blaze of gold.
A district west of the Forbidden City formed a hub for the transportation of coal, bound for the capital. Brought from the mines west of Beijing, it was carried by caravans of camels and mules, wearing tinkling bells. It was said that some 5,000 camels came into Beijing every day. The caravans paused here, and the porters did their shopping from stores whose names were embroidered on colourful banners or gilded on lacquered plaques. The streets were unpaved, and the soft, powdery dust that lay on top in dry weather would turn into a river of mud after a downpour. There was a pervasive reek from a sewage system that was as antiquated as the city itself. Refuse was simply dumped on the side of the roads, left to the scavenging dogs and birds. After their meals, large numbers of vultures and carrion crows would flock into th
e Forbidden City, perching on its golden roofs and blackening them.
Away from the hubbub lay a network of quiet, narrow alleys known as hu-tong. This is where, on the tenth day of the tenth lunar month in 1835, the future Empress Dowager of China, Cixi, was born. The houses here were spacious, with neatly arranged courtyards, scrupulously tidy and clean, in sharp contrast to the dirty and chaotic streets. The main rooms had doors and windows open to the south to take in the sun, while the north was walled up to fend off the sandy storms that frequently swept the city. The roofs were covered with grey tiles. The colours of roof tiles were strictly stipulated: yellow for the royal palaces, green for the princes, and grey for all others.
Cixi’s family had been government employees for generations. Her father, Huizheng, worked as a secretary and then a section chief for the Ministry of Officials. The family was well-off; her childhood was carefree. As a Manchu, she was spared foot-binding, a Han practice that tortured their women for a millennium by crushing a baby girl’s feet and wrapping them tightly to restrict their growth. Most other customs, such as male–female segregation, the Manchus shared with the Han. As a girl of an educated family, Cixi learned to read and write a little Chinese, to draw, to play chess, to embroider and to make dresses – all deemed desirable accomplishments for a young lady. She was a quick and energetic learner and developed a wide range of interests. In the future, when it was the ceremonial duty of the empress dowager, on a certain auspicious day, to cut the pattern for a dress of her own – as a symbol of womanhood – she would perform the task with tremendous competence.
Her education did not include learning the Manchu language, which she neither spoke nor wrote. (When she became the ruler of China, she had to issue an order for reports written in Manchu to be translated into Chinese before she was shown them.) Having been immersed in Chinese culture for 200 years, most Manchus did not speak their own original tongue, even though it was the official language of the dynasty and various emperors had made efforts to preserve it. Cixi’s knowledge of written Chinese was rudimentary, and she may be considered ‘semi-literate’. This does not mean that she lacked intelligence. The Chinese language is extremely hard to learn. It is the only major linguistic system in the world that does not have an alphabet; and it is composed of numerous complicated characters – ideograms – which have to be memorised one by one and, moreover, are totally unrelated to sounds. At Cixi’s time, written texts were completely divorced from the spoken form, so one could not simply write down what one spoke or thought. To qualify as ‘educated’, therefore, learners had to spend about a decade in their formative years imbibing Confucian classics, which were severely limited in range and stimulation. Fewer than 1 per cent of the population were able to read or write the bare minimum.