Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  For a hundred days from Emperor Tongzhi’s death, weddings and entertainments were banned in the capital. Throughout the empire, men were forbidden to shave or to have their hair cut. (In earlier days, Emperor Qianlong had imprisoned officials who had infringed the prohibition during the period of mourning for his wife.) All the bells in Beijing temples both big and small tolled 30,000 times. Minutely detailed guidance was issued on who was to wear what style of mourning clothes. The Chinese in those days were arguably the most ceremonious people on Earth. A book containing 3,000 rules of etiquette was required reading for the literati. One of the cardinal rules was that until the late emperor was buried, no music was allowed at court. So the Forbidden City was hushed again, with subdued figures moving silently about, trailed only by echoes.

  The ban on music at court lasted four years, during which time Emperor Tongzhi’s mausoleum was constructed. The emperor had not built a tomb for himself: he had not been on the throne long enough to begin such a project. After his death, his mother dispatched Prince Chun and Grand Tutor Weng, together with a team of feng-shui masters, to choose an ideal burial spot for him. Meanwhile, his giant coffin stayed in a hall in the Royal City, for senior officials to file past to pay their respects. The coffin was made of a precious wood, painted forty-nine times in a golden colour, adorned with Buddhist symbols and lined with thirteen layers of brocade decorated with countless dragons.

  On the outskirts of Beijing there were two compounds of mausoleums for the Qing emperors, one to the west of the city and one to the east. There had been a rule that an emperor’s mausoleum must be in the same compound as that of his grandfather, not that of his father. As Tongzhi’s late father lay in the Eastern Mausoleums, he should be buried in the Western. But Cixi, who was destined to be buried with her husband in the Eastern Mausoleums, wanted to be near her son, so she buried him there. The grandees expressed understanding of her feelings and raised no objection to this deviation from tradition.

  Both mausoleum compounds were enormous, and were places of serene natural beauty, in the embrace of hills, streams and woods. Each mausoleum had an underground chamber and an above-ground edifice that was a replica of a palace in the Forbidden City. At the front were carved white marble pillars, with lofty, wing-shaped crowns. The most awe-inspiring feature of a mausoleum was its approach: a long, straight avenue lined with giant stone statues of elephants, lions, horses and other big beasts on a vast area of open land. But there was no such avenue leading to Emperor Tongzhi’s mausoleum. The budget would not stretch to it. Cixi had to choose between spending money on the avenue or on importing hardwood for the coffin and the burial buildings. China was short of top-quality wood, and her late husband’s mausoleum had had to make do with wood left over from his father’s tomb. Cixi, who believed in life after death, wanted the best material for her son in the next world, so she decided to sacrifice the glory of the approach. She bought from overseas the most expensive hardwood, a special kind of nan-mu, which was said to be so dense that it would sink rather than float in water.

  More than four years after Tongzhi’s death his mausoleum was finally ready, and on a day in 1879, picked by the court astrologer as the most auspicious, he and his empress, Miss Alute, were laid side by side in the underground chamber. Their coffins were weighed down with hundreds of pieces of gold, silver, jade and assorted precious jewels. Under Cixi’s meticulous care, the entombment ceremony was as grand as it had ever been, involving the entire upper echelon of the Beijing bureaucracy trekking 120 kilometres from the capital; 7,920 men took turns to carry the coffin, each shift comprising 120 men. They had been professionally drilled, and had bathed carefully, before donning purple jackets made of sackcloth, the prescribed material for serious mourning. All officials working within 50 kilometres of the route went to specially constructed memorial halls to greet the coffin, in prostration, when it passed by. Each memorial hall was illuminated by thousands of large white candles.

  Although all this was following established precedent, Cixi painstakingly attended to every detail. She really loved her son. Many years later, on an anniversary of his death, the American painter Katharine Carl, who was in the court painting Cixi’s portrait, wore black. She wrote that Cixi realised she was wearing the mourning colour of the West and ‘seemed much touched’. She ‘took my hand in both hers, and said, “You have a good heart to think of my grief and to have wished to sympathize,” and tears fell from her eyes on my hand, which she held in hers.’

  * * *

  fn1 One concubine of this author’s maternal grandfather took her own life by swallowing opium upon his death in the early 1930s, when this was still considered the height of conjugal loyalty, and a plaque was put up in her honour.

  PART THREE

  Ruling Through an Adopted Son (1875–1889)

  10 A Three-year-old is Made Emperor (1875)

  CIXI WAS BY her son’s side when he died on that January evening in 1875. Just before his death, the grandees had rushed in, having been informed by doctors of the emperor’s impending demise, and they had found him barely breathing and Cixi too choked with tears to speak. After staying for a while, they left the room, leaving the last moments to the mother and son. Shortly after the emperor’s death was announced, while they were all still crying, they were summoned by the empress dowager, who wanted to make arrangements for the future.

  The instinctive reaction of the ever-prudent Prince Gong was to stay away. Knowing Cixi, perhaps he sensed that her arrangements would be irregular, and he hesitated to be involved. But he nevertheless went in with the rest of the grandees. Cixi frankly asked them whether they thought it was a good idea for her and Empress Zhen to continue at the helm ‘behind the screen’. One man immediately answered ‘Yes’: could the empress dowager please, for the sake of the empire, name a new emperor and continue to rule as before? At this Cixi declared, on behalf of Empress Zhen as well: ‘The two of us have made our decisions and we are in complete agreement. We are now giving you our definitive word, which may not be altered or modified. Listen, and obey.’ This tremendously forceful language came from a position of strength. Emperor Tongzhi had left no heir, nor had he left a will dictating who should succeed him. And, just before he died, he had asked the Two Dowager Empresses to run the empire. It was now up to them to designate the next monarch.

  Cixi announced that the two of them would adopt a son for their late husband – and themselves – a child who would be raised by them. It was obvious that Cixi intended to rule the empire again as the dowager empress and to do so for as long as possible. The normal and correct thing to do would have been to adopt an heir for her late son. But if that were to happen, it would be hard for Cixi, the grandmother, to justify her rule. Emperor Tongzhi’s widow, Miss Alute, was still alive at that time and she would have become the dowager empress. And yet Cixi’s irregular arrangement roused no objection. Most welcomed her return to power. She had done an outstanding job prior to her son’s accession. In contrast, her son’s brief reign promised only disaster. Indeed, nearly all of them had been wilfully rebuked, and quite a few dismissed, by the late emperor, and who knew what would have happened if Cixi had not been around to bring him to heel. That she would be holding the reins again came as a huge relief – especially for the reformers, who had been frustrated by the stagnation of the last few years.

  Then Cixi named the new emperor: Zaitian, the three-year-old son of her sister and Prince Chun.

  Prince Chun was in the room, and the announcement, far from delighting him, sent him into a terrified frenzy. Kneeling in front of the throne, he fell into convulsions, howling and knocking his head on the ground until he passed out – a heap of court gown and underclothing. The boy was his only son at the time, and was treasured by him and his wife almost with desperation, not least because their previous son had died. It seemed that he was losing his only son for ever. Cixi, looking utterly unmoved, ordered that the prince be taken out of the hall. According to an eye-witness, �
�he lay in a corner, with no one paying him any attention. It was a wretched and desolate scene.’

  The Grand Councillors withdrew to draw up the imperial decree proclaiming the new emperor. Shaking with tension, the man designated to write it out could not hold the brush steady. Watching this, Junglu, the then Lord Chamberlain, a man who was fiercely devoted to Cixi, became so anxious that an objection might be raised before the job was done that he grabbed the brush and started to write the decree himself – which was absolutely improper, as he was not a Grand Councillor. Junglu, apparently, had helped Cixi make up her mind to name the new emperor immediately after her son’s death, so as to give no one the opportunity to speak or act against her decision.

  Nothing went wrong for Cixi. In no time the formalities of establishing a monarch were completed and a procession was dispatched to fetch the new emperor. Before the first rays of dawn, the three-year-old had been woken up, separated from his mother, wrapped in a heavy court gown, put into a sedan-chair with an official by his side, carried into the Forbidden City amidst lanterns and candles and made to kowtow to Cixi and Empress Zhen in a dark hall. He was then taken to the bed where the dead Emperor Tongzhi was lying, to perform the obligatory wailing, which he did quite naturally as his sleep had been disturbed. Thus began the new life of Emperor Guangxu, Emperor of ‘the Glorious Succession’.

  This was Cixi’s moment of revenge on Prince Chun. For the anguish she had suffered over Little An’s execution, she now twisted a knife into the prince’s heart by taking away his only son. And she did it in such a way that Prince Chun could hardly complain: after all, his son was being elevated to emperor.

  Making the son the emperor removed Prince Chun’s political role. As the emperor’s biological father, but not the official Regent, the prince was compelled to resign all his posts to avoid any potential accusation that he was using his influence to meddle in state affairs – a crime tantamount to treason. The prince offered his resignation at once, couching it in extremely humble language. Cixi told the grandees to discuss it, and Prince Gong forcefully recommended its acceptance. Among the reasons he gave was a protocol conflict. As an official, Prince Chun had to prostrate himself in front of the emperor, but as a father to his son this was out of the question. Grand Tutor Weng, a conservative ally of Prince Chun, saw that with the prince gone there would be no one to resist the reformers, and argued for the prince to retain one key post, that of head of the Praetorian Guards. Cixi rejected the suggestion and accepted Prince Chun’s wholesale resignation. She did keep one job for him, one that did not have any real power: he was to look after the mausoleums of the Qing emperors. And, of course, she showered him with honours.

  By depriving Prince Chun of any serious position, Cixi effectively silenced him. Any protest from him against her policies would now be deemed interfering in state affairs and would invite condemnation. Prince Chun was clearly alive to Cixi’s intentions. Fearing she might go even further and find an excuse to charge him with high treason, he wrote her an abject letter, assuring her that he had no intention of meddling. Prince Chun was finished as the champion of the xenophobic camp. The ticking time-bomb for the empire was thus defused.

  The prince was to suffer yet more personal tragedy. Cixi’s sister gave birth to two more sons, but one lived for only a day and a half, and the other died after a few years, the victim of too much anxious love, according to the servants. The couple were perpetually worried that he might overeat – a major problem for children in rich families – and as a result the child suffered malnutrition.

  To the prince’s surprise, Cixi did not actually want to destroy him. Having demonstrated that she could have finished him off, she bestowed favours on Chun. She gave him concubines, and the prince was able to have three more sons; the eldest, born in 1883, was given his name – Zaifeng – by Cixi. She also made the prince the supervisor of the child emperor’s education, to give him access to his son. The prince’s wife, Cixi’s sister, was invited to stay in the palace from time to time, so that she too could see him. Neither parent felt fully able to relax with the child, now that he was the emperor and had been adopted by Cixi. But her treatment of him was beyond Prince Chun’s expectations and he was overwhelmed with gratitude.

  Cixi won over the prince’s friends as well, by showing them that she bore no grudge, and by skilfully buying them off. She made Grand Tutor Weng the chief tutor for the new child emperor, for which the tutor felt eternally grateful. And she gave Governor Ding, the man who actually had Little An executed, the promotions and honours due to him as if nothing untoward had happened. When the governor was promoted to Viceroy, he followed the Qing practice and went to Beijing for an audience. Before his arrival, through Junglu, the Lord Chamberlain, Cixi gave him 10,000 taels to help him with his expenses in the capital, where there was much obligatory entertaining and present-giving. Ding was short of money: as an uncorrupt man, he had not taken advantage of his official positions to make money for himself. Junglu presented the gift as coming from himself, but Ding, who was not a particular friend of his, understood where it had come from. He not only accepted it, but wrote and asked to ‘borrow’ another 10,000 taels – which Junglu readily delivered. This was the old man’s somewhat mischievous way of sending the message that he knew Cixi was the donor (he would not have asked another official for more) and that he was striking a deal with her. Although both Ding and Grand Tutor Weng retained their conservative views, they never again made trouble for the empress dowager.

  And so Cixi removed all obstacles and steered the empire back on the course that she had first charted. This time, she would speed up the pace of progress. During her forced seclusion in the harem, her mind had not been idle, and she had learned much about the outside world from the reports and diaries of the travellers she had sent on those early journeys. Western-style newspapers in Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports had grown in number and were available to the court, where they had become an indispensable source of information. Compared with a decade ago, when she first came to power, Cixi now had a much better understanding not only of the West, but also of modernity. She was convinced that modernisation was the answer to the empire’s problems – and she also knew that much time had been lost. Since the deadly warning conveyed by the execution of Little An, through the whole reign of her son, the country had stood still for five years. She was determined to make up for lost time.

  11 Modernisation Accelerates (1875–89)

  IN EARLY 1875, Cixi lost a son, but regained power. The year became an extraordinary milestone, packed with ground-breaking events. The first thing she did was to summon Earl Li to discuss an overall strategy for modernisation. The earl, who was based in Tianjin, had requested such a meeting in 1872, but at the time, feeling vulnerable and about to retire, she had turned him down. Now she saw him the day after he arrived, then the following day, and then for a third time a few days later. Her eagerness to resume her course and to regenerate the country was palpable.

  The earl had by now emerged as the foremost moderniser of the country. He had surrounded himself with Westerners and made friends with many of them. Among their number was former US president Ulysses S. Grant, and the two men saw a great deal of each other in Tianjin in 1879. The missionary Timothy Richard described the earl thus: ‘Physically he was taller than most, intellectually he towered above them all, and could see over their heads to the far beyond.’ The earl became the key man in Cixi’s modernisation drive. He and Prince Gong, who headed the Grand Council, and whose name was to Westerners ‘synonymous with Progress in China’, were now the empress dowager’s right-hand men. With their assistance, Cixi steadily, yet radically, pushed the empire towards modernity. As Earl Li wrote to Cixi, expressing their shared aspiration, ‘From now on all sorts of things will be introduced into China, and people’s minds will gradually open up.’ They did not exclude the conservatives. Cixi’s style was to work with people like Grand Tutor Weng as well as the reformists, always using persuasion rath
er than brute force, and being prepared to let time and reason change people’s minds.

  Cixi had wanted to send diplomatic representatives abroad a decade earlier. Now they were dispatched. On 31 August 1875, she announced her first appointment: Guo Songtao as the minister to London. Guo was an exceptionally forward-looking man who advocated learning from the West and adopting projects such as railways and telegraphs. He was furiously assailed by the conservatives. Grand Tutor Weng, in his diary, dismissed him as ‘perverse’, and the literati from his province who were in Beijing taking Imperial Examinations talked heatedly at their gatherings about going and tearing down his house. Cixi comforted him, seeing him three times with Empress Zhen before his departure. The two women repeatedly told him not to be deterred by ridicule and slander: ‘everyone working in the Foreign Office is a target of abuse,’ they said. ‘But the throne knows and appreciates you . . . you must take on this difficult job for the country.’

  While Guo was abroad, his diary recording his impressions was published by the Foreign Office. In it he described the British adoringly: their legal system was ‘fair’; the prisons were ‘exquisitely clean, with polished floors, without foul air . . . one forgets this is a prison’; and their manners were ‘courteous’, which alone, he asserted, ‘shows that it is not by accident that this country is so rich and powerful’. He even suggested that China’s 2,000-year-old monarchical system was not as desirable as British parliamentary monarchy. Although some of his remarks – for example, that Chinese manners ‘fall far short, far, far short’ – were deleted for publication, the first instalment of the diary excited teeth-gnashing hatred from literati-officials, who accused Guo of trying to ‘turn China into a British subordinate’ and called on the throne to penalise him. Publication of the diary was forced to halt. But Guo was not rebuked. Instead, Cixi made him minister to France as well as to Britain, disregarding conservative officials’ protestations. When Guo conducted a very public row with his traditionalist deputy in London, she transferred the deputy to Germany. Eventually, unable to get on with other mandarins, Guo asked to resign, and she accepted. She told his successor, Marquis Zeng Jr, son of the late Marquis Zeng Zuofan, that she knew that Guo was ‘a good man, and did a remarkable job’.