Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  Cixi made up her mind to dismiss Prince Gong. This was no small undertaking. By now he had been entrenched as the head of the Grand Council for a quarter of a century and was the most powerful person in the empire, after Cixi herself. She had to go about it with the utmost caution. With a suitable pretext, she sent Prince Gong out of Beijing for a few days and, while he was away, she summoned Prince Chun and made preparations, rather as if she was planning a coup. As soon as Prince Gong returned, on 8 April, Cixi threw him the crimson-inked decree that announced his dismissal and that of the entire Grand Council. With this surprise strike, the empress dowager parted with her political partner of more than two decades, the man who had stood by her side almost daily, sharing the challenges of reform with her. Perhaps because of the manner of his dismissal – more suited to a foe than to a close friend who had shown nothing but devotion and comradeship for her for so long – Cixi felt awkward and did not see the prince again for ten years. Prince Gong tried to reassure her that he held no grudge against her and quite understood that she had to take precautions. He begged to see her, even if only as one of the well-wishers on her birthdays, but she refused all entreaties.

  Cixi appointed a new Grand Council and put Prince Chun in charge. As the emperor’s biological father, he could not be the formal head and so he conducted business from home. This transfer of power from one brother to another did not cause friction between the two princes. On the contrary, the brothers, who had formerly been at loggerheads because of their different attitudes towards the West, now became much closer. Prince Chun, who had changed fundamentally, frequently visited his disgraced half-brother. They had a bond: their shared adoration of their sister-in-law. They wrote poems to each other, and a recurring theme in Prince Gong’s was that he found it ‘hard to look back at all those bygone years’. The prince was expressing his nostalgia for the days of his collaboration with Cixi; he was also hoping to convey to her, via Prince Chun, that he cherished the memories and would always remain loyal to her.

  Prince Chun had as little idea as his brother about how to resolve the crisis with France, but he executed Cixi’s orders efficiently and unwaveringly. Westerners thought he was an uncompromising hawk, unlike Prince Gong. The replacement of Prince Gong with Chun was interpreted as an indication of Cixi’s determination to pursue the path of war. Indeed she was resolved to fight a ‘protracted war against the enemy’ (yu-di jiu-chi), until the French, a long way from home, were exhausted and sought to end the conflict themselves.

  Her real goal was peace, for which she was willing to let Vietnam go if necessary, provided its loss secured a commitment from France to respect the border with China. She appointed Earl Li as her chief negotiator. The earl was now her diplomatic ace as well as chief adviser. Vastly superior to Prince Gong, he worked with her in perfect harmony. They often thought alike and enjoyed a tacit understanding. Earl Li was at this time officially ‘in mourning’ for his deceased mother, which required him not to work for twenty-seven months. But Cixi told him to cut the period short, citing ancient sages who had specifically exempted those with military duties. During the negotiations, telegrams shuttled back and forth between them. They knew that France was deeply engaged in the scramble for Africa and had no wish for a prolonged war with China. Peace was achievable, and the earl was able to clinch a deal in Tianjin with Commandant Fournier, whom he already knew as a friend. The Li–Fournier convention embodied the minimum terms that Cixi was willing to settle for: France promised never to cross the southern boundaries of China and guaranteed to prevent anyone else from doing so; in return, China acquiesced to France taking control of Vietnam. Fournier had informed the earl that the French Foreign Ministry had asked for a war indemnity on the grounds that public opinion at home called for it. Cixi told Earl Li that the demand was ‘totally unjust, totally unreasonable, and transparently against international convention’. The earl rejected the demand, and Fournier did not insist. When the draft agreement was sent to Cixi, she cabled back on 9 May 1884: ‘Have read it carefully. None of the items does damage to the fundamental interest of our country. Endorsed.’ The convention was signed on the 11th.

  Cixi began to withdraw troops from Vietnam – cautiously, as she learned that Paris was unhappy about having not extracted any money, and that gunboats were on their way. On 12 July, France produced an ultimatum for a gigantic indemnity of 250 million francs, claiming that China had broken the agreement by starting an armed clash, which, in fact, was an accident and was judged by Western observers to have been ‘an honest misunderstanding’. Cixi was incensed. Eye-witnesses were struck by her unusual severity in the audience, when she spat out her prohibition on anyone speaking in favour of negotiations over the indemnity. At the time, nearly everyone involved in this conflict, including Earl Li, was resigned to giving in to some extent to the French extortion, in order to avoid a war. But Cixi was firm: not a sou to the French. When her diplomats took it upon themselves to make an offer, suggesting a much lower sum, she reprimanded them sharply. Facing the prospect of war, she first sought mediation by America and, when France refused mediation, she gritted her teeth and proclaimed that ‘war is unavoidable’. She told an official, Shi Nianzu, in an audience: ‘When it comes to China’s relationship with foreign countries, it is of course better to have peace. But before we can have real peace China must be ready to fight. If we give in to every demand, then the more we seek peace, the less likely we are going to get it.’

  France initiated the Sino-French War on 5 August 1884, first attacking Taiwan, then annihilating the Chinese fleet at Fuzhou on the southeast coast, and blowing up the Fuzhou Navy Yard – which had been built under the direction of the Frenchman Prosper Giquel. On 26 August, in an outrage-filled treatise, Cixi declared that China was at war with France. A modern touch was added to the ancient warring rhetoric: foreign nationals were to be protected, including French citizens. When she learned that coastal officials were putting up posters calling on the Chinese inhabitants of the South Sea islands to poison the food supplied to stranded French ships, she immediately stopped them with an edict and reprimanded the officials in question, adding that overseas Chinese should stay out of the military conflict.

  In the following months her army scored some victories and suffered many more defeats. But in late March 1885, they won a major battle at the Zhennan Pass on the border and, as a consequence, the French retreated from the strategically important city of Lang Son. Jules Ferry’s government fell; his successor, Charles de Freycinet, promptly settled for peace. A treaty was signed on 9 June in Tianjin by Earl Li and the French minister Jules Patenôtre. This treaty was the same in essence as the Li–Fournier convention a year earlier. The French were back at square one, having failed to extract one single franc out of China. For the Chinese, the cost was heavy, but the fight was a tremendous morale-booster, which, in the words of Grand Tutor Weng, had ‘swept away the country’s meek acceptance that it was weak’.

  Not only did Cixi demonstrate that she was capable of fighting a major war, but she had the acumen to stop it at the right moment. After the border victories, her commanders at the front had been eager to fight on. Even the usually sensible Viceroy Zhang Zhidong advocated keeping Lang Son and some other Vietnamese territory on the border as a buffer zone. Cixi sent them a succession of urgent and non-negotiable orders, telling them emphatically to cease fire and withdraw their troops. She told them that they could ‘not be certain that there were going to be further victories; and even if there were, Vietnam doesn’t belong to us in the end’. She knew that the Vietnamese had a long history of resisting Chinese domination (the Chinese name for the pass on the border, Zhennan, actually means ‘Suppressing Vietnam’) and that this time some Vietnamese were actively helping the French. Meanwhile, the French were blockading Taiwan and looked set to attack it if the war went on, in which case China might lose Taiwan. Her cables were written in the severest possible language, and they chastened the Viceroy and others, who obeyed. Later
on, with hindsight, Prince Chun wrote: ‘If it had not been for the Empress Dowager’s farsightedness and decisiveness to settle for peace with France, we would have been embroiled in endless perilous wars, and would have seen our coffers emptied and our defence enfeebled. It does not bear imagining what might have happened.’fn3

  Cixi’s handling of the conflict won the empire respect. Robert Hart proclaimed, ‘I don’t think any one will say that China comes badly out of the year’s trials . . .’ At the banquet that followed the signing of the peace treaty, the French signatory Patenôtre enthused:

  I have every confidence that the diplomatic agreement we have just signed will do more than just put an end to our past disputes and – I hope – speedily efface them from our memory. By creating new links between France and China . . . the Treaty of 9 June will indubitably help to entrench and develop between the Chinese Empire and foreign countries that community of interests which has always most effectively cemented friendships between peoples.

  Earl Li replied in kind: ‘From now on, the friendship between our two countries will shine as brightly as the morning sun when it emerges from the gloom of night.’

  After the war with France, Cixi focused on rebuilding and updating the navy, writing decrees in crimson ink to stress the significance of the enterprise. (She rarely wrote in crimson ink, the symbol of the authority of the monarch.) More gunboats were bought from Europe and crews trained by Western instructors. In spring 1886, she sent Prince Chun to inspect the newly equipped Northern Fleet off the coast opposite the Dagu Forts. The prince took with him Cixi’s head eunuch, Lee Lianying, who was known to be extremely close to her. Standing by the side of the prince, carrying his water-pipe, Lianying became an eye-catching figure in the prince’s entourage.

  The prince brought him for a purpose. Seventeen years earlier, Little An, Lianying’s predecessor, had been sent by Cixi to Suzhou to buy wedding robes for her son. Little An had been beheaded for leaving the capital, and Prince Chun had been the prime mover. Now the prince was making a gesture of repentance towards Cixi for the horrible wrong he had done. By inviting her current favourite eunuch to journey out of Beijing, to board a modern ship and sail out to sea, the prince was offering Cixi a belated, but sure-to-be-appreciated, apology.

  Prince Chun made this extraordinary gesture because he really wanted to show Cixi his appreciation for her defence of the empire. During this period she completed treaties with European powers and extracted commitments from them to respect China’s borders, which were formally drawn up at this time and largely remain in place to this day. The treaties included one with Russia (1881), with France (about the border with Vietnam, 1885) and with Britain (regarding Burma, 1886, and Sikkim, 1888). It is chiefly thanks to her that during those years, while the European powers were sweeping across the globe, gobbling up ancient kingdoms and carving up old continents, China was left alone.

  At the beginning of 1889, at the height of her achievements, the empress dowager announced that she was going to retire and cede power to her seventeen-year-old adopted son. Under her reign China’s annual revenue had doubled. Before she came to power, it had been around forty million taels, even at the most prosperous times under Qianlong the Magnificent. Now it stood at nearly eighty-eight million, of which as much as one-third came from Customs duties – the result of her open-door policy. Before returning to the harem she issued an honours list, thanking about 100 officials, living and dead, for their services. The second on her list was Robert Hart, Inspector General of Customs, for building up a well-organised and efficient fiscal institution, free of corruption, which had ‘produced very considerable and ever increasing revenues for China’. Customs revenue helped save millions of lives. In the previous year, 1888, when the country was struck by floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters, it could afford to spend ten million taels of silver to buy rice to feed the population. The honour she conferred on Hart was the Ancestral Rank of the First Class of the First Order for Three Generations – the highest distinction because the title was bestowed on his ancestors for three generations, not his descendants. Hart wrote to a friend, ‘from the Chinese, nothing could be more honourable; in any case it is extremely satisfactory to myself that the Empress Dowager should do this before retiring . . .’

  One of Cixi’s decrees thanked all foreign envoys for their help in forging amicable relationships between their own countries and China. She ordered the Foreign Office to select an auspicious day on which to give a grand banquet for the envoys and to present each envoy with a ru-yi, a good-wish sceptre made mostly of jade, as well as silks and brocades, which she personally selected. The banquet, which was held on 7 March 1889 and at which Western diplomats heaped praise on her, marked a high point of her reign.

  One guest who spoke spontaneously that day was Charles Denby, the American minister to Beijing from 1885 to 1898. He later wrote of Cixi’s ‘splendid reputation’ among Westerners at this time, and of her many achievements. Along with ending internal strife and maintaining the integrity of the empire:

  a fine navy was created, and the army was somewhat improved. The electric telegraph covered the land. Arsenals and shipyards were located at Foochow [Fuzhou], Shanghai, Canton, Taku [Dagu], and Port Arthur. Western methods of mining were introduced, and two lines of railway were built. Steamers plied on all the principal rivers. The study of mathematics was revived, and the physical sciences were introduced into the competitive examinations. Absolute tolerance of religious faith existed, and the missionaries could locate anywhere in China . . . During the time covered by the rule of the empress many schools and colleges were established in China by our own countrymen . . .

  Furthermore, Cixi’s reign was the most tolerant in Qing history; people were no longer killed for what they said or wrote, as they had been under previous emperors. To alleviate poverty, she initiated large-scale food import and each year spent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of taels to buy food to feed the population. As Denby observed, ‘To her own people, up to this period in her career, she was kind and merciful, and to foreigners she was just.’ Foreign relations were fundamentally improved, and the relationship between China and the US stayed ‘tranquil and satisfactory’. Most importantly, the American minister pointed out: ‘It may be said with emphasis that the empress dowager has been the first of her race to apprehend the problem of the relation of China to the outside world, and to make use of this relation to strengthen her dynasty and to promote material progress.’ Indeed, Cixi had ended China’s self-imposed isolation and had brought it into the international community – and she had done so in order to benefit her country. ‘At that time,’ Denby summed up, ‘she was universally esteemed by foreigners, and revered by her own people, and was regarded as being one of the greatest characters in history . . . Under her rule for a quarter of a century China made immense progress.’

  The embryo of a modern China had taken shape. Its creator was Cixi. As Denby stressed, ‘It will not be denied by any one that the improvement and progress above sketched are mainly due to the will and power of the empress regent.’ With this impressive legacy, Cixi handed over the reins of the empire to her adopted son, Emperor Guangxu.

  * * *

  fn1 China paid Russia for keeping Ili out of rebel hands and allowing trade to continue. This payment was not a war indemnity, although Chinese history books use the same term, pei-kuan, and treat them as though they were the same.

  fn2 According to the Chinese system.

  fn3 Cixi is still criticised by some today for ending the Sino-French War after China won these battles. Her critics seem to suggest that China should have held on to Vietnam, a sovereign country.

  PART FOUR

  Emperor Guangxu Takes Over (1889–1898)

  13 Guangxu Alienated from Cixi (1875–94)

  BORN ON THE twenty-eighth day of the sixth lunar month of 1871, Emperor Guangxu succeeded to the throne at the age of three, when Cixi’s own son, Emperor Tongzhi, had died withou
t an heir. She adopted him and made him the next emperor, partly to elevate a member of her own family – her sister’s son – and partly to punish his father, Prince Chun. She had no real love for the child, at least not of the kind she had felt for her own late son. Taken from his home and carried into the bitterly cold and impersonal Forbidden City in the depths of a wintry night, the child lost his parents – and his wet nurse, who was not allowed to join him. Instead, he was placed in the charge of eunuchs. Cixi told him to call her ‘Papa Dearest’ (qin-ba-ba) and, when he was older, he called her ‘My Royal Father’ (huang-ba-ba). It was a man’s role that Cixi aspired to fill. As a mother, she was dutiful rather than warm. She had no instinctive fondness for children anyway. Once, at a party in the court for aristocratic ladies, a young girl started bawling and would not stop. An irate Cixi ordered the child’s mother to take her away, telling her, as she fell to her knees in tears, ‘I send you out of the Palace to teach you a lesson, which you must teach your child. I do not blame her; I blame you and pity her; but she must suffer as well as yourself.’ The family was not invited again for some time.

  Empress Zhen was more of a mother figure to the child emperor than Cixi. But she died when he was nine, on 8 April 1881, aged forty-three. He could not stop crying at her bier. It has been alleged that Empress Zhen was poisoned by Cixi, although no one has produced any evidence. In fact, she almost certainly died of a massive brain haemorrhage, as doctors who studied her medical records have concluded. She had a history of what appeared to be strokes, of which Grand Tutor Weng’s diary recorded at least three. The first happened as early as 1863, when she suddenly fainted and lost the ability to speak for nearly a month. Her reputation for ‘speaking slowly and with difficulty’ during audiences may have been a consequence. On the last occasion, she fell into unconsciousness and died within a couple of days.