Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  This arranged marriage betrayed Cixi’s striking lack of sensitivity for her adopted son. In the case of her late son, she had allowed him to choose his own bride, even though she had misgivings about his choice, a girl whose grandfather had died at her hands and who might well harbour a hatred for her. But Cixi loved her son enough not to veto the choice. This time, she had chosen the empress for her adopted son without a shred of consideration for his feelings. Emperor Guangxu did not protest explicitly, observing the code of filial obedience – and his Papa Dearest was a formidable character to defy. But he had his own way to retaliate and sprang a surprise immediately after his formal assumption of power on 4 March 1889.

  The day after was his wedding day, on which 5.5 million taels had been spent. The occasion was predictably splendid, enhanced by sunny weather. Empress Longyu, carried in a golden sedan-chair, travelled along the central line in the Forbidden City, the line that only an emperor – and an empress on the single occasion of her wedding – was allowed to tread. Around her was the treeless immensity of the august front section of the Forbidden City, lined with red-uniformed Praetorian Guards carrying multicoloured banners, and officials in blue robes against a backdrop of crimson walls and golden roofs. Her sedan-chair passed through the Gate of Supreme Harmony, which had recently been burned down and was now a temporary paper-and-wood imitation, even though it looked as glorious as the real one. Like this gateway, Empress Longyu’s marriage would be a sham.

  Beyond the gateway stood the most magnificent hall of the Forbidden City, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Tai-he – the location for the most important events of the dynasty. The grand banquet in honour of the bride’s father, Duke Guixiang, was scheduled to be held there the day after the wedding. But that morning, according to Grand Tutor Weng, Emperor Guangxu got up, ‘complained of feeling dizzy’ and ‘threw up water’. Royal physicians could find nothing wrong with him, but the emperor nevertheless declared that he must avoid draughts, and refused to go to the great hall. The banquet had to be cancelled and all the assembled grandees had to disperse. Such a cancellation was unheard of, and rumours started to fly at once throughout the capital. The emperor made sure that this snub to his bride’s family was driven home by having the untouched food distributed to the officials on the invitation list, and specifically ordered that nothing was to be delivered to his father-in-law’s house. It is easy to imagine Cixi’s anger on learning about her brother’s spectacular humiliation. In her Sea Palace, noted Grand Tutor Weng, ‘opera shows did not stop’ at the news that the emperor was unwell.

  Thereafter Emperor Guangxu treated his wife, Empress Longyu, at best with coldness. Under the gaze of the court he would look right through her as if she did not exist. She tried to please him, which only annoyed him. It was widely known that when she ‘came into his presence he not infrequently kicked off his shoes at her’. Cixi’s desire to supervise her adopted son backfired and further strained her own relationship with him. Now that she was obliged to retire, the last thing Emperor Guangxu wanted to do was consult her about anything, least of all matters of state.

  The emperor favoured Imperial Concubine Pearl, a lively young girl who, noticed the eunuchs, did not appear in front of him as a woman. She wore no make-up and sported a man’s hairstyle (with a queue down her back), a man’s hat, a riding waistcoat and flat black satin boots. As he later described to his doctors, including a French doctor, Dr Dethève, Emperor Guangxu had been experiencing involuntary ejaculations at night since early adolescence. He would feel aroused by the sound of percussion instruments in his dreams, which would give him sensual feelings and lead to nocturnal emissions. However, at other times, wrote Dr Dethève in his medical report, such ejaculations did not occur and ‘there is no possibility of having an erection’. This suggests that Emperor Guangxu was unable to have conventional sex. People in China guessed as much at the time – and called it ‘castration by Heaven’. Pearl, dressed like a man, thus put no pressure on him to have sexual intercourse, and he was able to feel relaxed with her. The emperor took up musical instruments such as gongs, drums and cymbals – all the ones that sexually aroused him – and became a rather good percussionist.

  In spite of his physical problems, the emperor carried out his royal duties conscientiously, continuing, at the same time, with his study of the Chinese classics and the Manchu language. His life was spent exclusively in the Forbidden City, with excursions only to the adjacent Sea Palace and occasional trips to temples to pray for good harvests, or to the royal mausoleums to beg for his ancestors’ blessings. He was as close as ever to Grand Tutor Weng, a father figure with whom he had spent all his formative years and whom he still saw virtually daily. There was another tutor, a modern-minded man named Sun Jianai, who urged him to think about reforms. But the young man was not interested. Nor did he have a rapport with this tutor. Only Weng was in a position to shape the policies of Emperor Guangxu’s reign.

  Weng remained disdainful of the West, although he was no longer filled with hatred and had become receptive towards some Western practices. From the descriptions of travellers abroad, as well as his own experience of passing through Shanghai, he recognised the benefits of industries such as ‘iron mills, shipyards, and weaponry manufacturers’. He had his first photo taken in 1887. He even had approving things to say about a Catholic church that he visited. The church orphanage, he noticed, had separate male and female sections, standing on ‘high and damp-free ground’, and was ‘tidy and orderly’. The church school had four classrooms, where children were reading out loud in a most pleasing fashion. His hosts were ‘extremely courteous’ and the servants ‘declined tips’. All in all, the Grand Tutor was impressed. Still, in Shanghai, he felt a ‘strong aversion’ to Western buildings, and preferred to stay indoors alone rather than go out. He continued to oppose railway-building. When fire broke out in the Forbidden City just before the emperor’s wedding, he saw it as Heaven’s warning against having electric lights, motor boats and the little railway in the palaces.

  Cixi was aware of his views and of his influence on her adopted son. But there was little she could do about it, especially as the young emperor had developed such an aversion for her, on top of his emotional attachment to the old man. Before the handover of power, she had had a meeting with the pair, and extracted from them a promise not to change the course she had set. But she could not stop them when, before long, they shelved the great north–south railway which she had decreed, and let the currency reform peter out. When the delegation of officials she had sent to tour the world returned home, both they and the knowledge they had gained were ignored. Anxious to steer her adopted son towards an appreciation of the West, Cixi ‘ordered’ him, noted Grand Tutor Weng, to learn English. As a parent, she had a say in his education, even though he was now an adult and had assumed power as the emperor. The English lessons started, to the Grand Tutor’s dismay. ‘What is this for?’ he asked. In his diary he lamented: ‘Foreign language books are now on the imperial desk. How sad this makes me!’ Guangxu persisted, partly at Cixi’s insistence and partly because he found the language intriguing. But his interest was purely academic and was not transferred into any modernising effort.

  Emperor Guangxu did nothing to follow up Cixi’s reforms, and let them lapse. He returned to the age-old way of running the empire: mere bureaucratic administration, writing brief minutes in crimson ink on the daily dispatches – ‘Report received.’ ‘Do as you propose.’ ‘To the relevant office.’ His audiences were routine and brief. It was widely known that the emperor ‘has a hesitation in his speech . . . he speaks slowly and with difficulty’. Indeed his voice was barely audible, and he had a stammer. To spare him the obvious pain of having to speak, officials advised each other to produce a monologue after the emperor’s first question and thus fill the obligatory minimum ten minutes. The emperor still fretted about the ‘hard life of the people’. Once, when a flood burst a dyke, poured into Beijing and lashed at the walls of the Forbidden C
ity, the distressed emperor worried about the numerous people living in the path of the flood. But he did no more than the traditional opening of the rice centres and praying to Heaven. It does not seem to have entered his mind that modernisation could provide some solutions. Food imports continued, as did foreign trade, but the country went into a ‘period of slumber’, noticed Westerners, ‘in which the foreign traders alone were enterprising’.

  No petitions were filed deploring this lethargy. Traditional watchdogs over the throne would cry out against deviations from precedent, royal extravagance or impropriety, or other offences to the precepts of Confucianism – but not inaction. The debates over policies that had enlivened Cixi’s court were entirely absent, as the elite settled back into the old routine. Prince Gong was not in office, but even if he were, he was not a person to set the agenda or push for change. Prince Chun needed to work under a leader rather than lead himself. In any event, he was plagued by illness and died on the first day of 1891. Earl Li, whom many Westerners regarded as ‘the greatest moderniser of China and a great statesman’, was equally helpless without Cixi. Although he retained his posts, his hands were tied: his arch enemy and political adversary, Grand Tutor Weng, now had the emperor’s ear.

  Emperor Guangxu did not grant an audience to the diplomatic corps to receive their credentials for two years after his assumption of power. When he did, the occasion – his first contact with Westerners – went smoothly. It had been established in 1873, under Cixi’s influence, that Western envoys need not kowtow. Following this precedent, the envoys bowed and Emperor Guangxu nodded in acknowledgement. Prince Ching, who had succeeded Prince Gong as the head of the Foreign Office, took from the ministers their written letters of congratulation and placed them on the yellow dragon altar, before going down on his knees to recite a sort of formal report. He then stood up and read out the royal reply to the envoys. This procedure was repeated each time a minister presented his credentials. ‘Audience went off successfully,’ wrote Robert Hart. The ministers might have been surprised if they had set eyes on the diary entry of Grand Tutor Weng. In the presence of His Majesty, Weng wrote, in language that had not been used in Cixi’s court for decades, ‘the foreign barbarian envoys were frightened and trembling, and so fell into performing proper obeisance’.

  Westerners had had high hopes of the young emperor when he took over. ‘Railroads, the electric light, physical science, a new navy, an important army, a general banking system, a mint, all in the bud now, will soon be in full flower . . . The reign of the young emperor will be the most memorable epoch in Chinese history.’ Many had dreamed this dream; but the buds so assiduously planted and nurtured by Cixi were not allowed to grow, let alone to flower.

  Emperor Guangxu ambled along, a conscientious administrator with a penchant for scholarship, while Grand Tutor Weng indulged in leisurely appraisals of poetry and calligraphy. Both were reaping the benefits of peace and stability created by Cixi. They were to be rudely thrust into a whirlwind that would change everything for them – and the empire – when Japan, taking advantage of Cixi’s absence, pounced in 1894.

  * * *

  fn1 One of Grand Tutor Weng’s heroes was an official who, after his parents died, declined to have treatment for his own illness and died himself.

  fn2 After making her sister’s son emperor, Cixi was now making her brother’s daughter empress. The marriage of first cousins was a common practice.

  14 The Summer Palace (1886–94)

  WHEN HER RETIREMENT was mooted in 1886, Cixi’s dream of restoring part of the Old Summer Palace, razed more than a quarter of a century earlier, came back to haunt her. The old splendour had only increased in allure as the years went by, and it was known in the court that her ultimate ambition was to restore it to some of its former glory. To finance her dream, she had been saving money from the royal household allowances. Eunuchs observed that she was ‘extremely thrifty’, and her ladies-in-waiting remembered her telling them to recycle gift wrappings and string. She decided that as the first step she would restore a palace called Qing-yi-yuan, the Garden of Clear Ripples, a landscaped estate around the enormous Kunming Lake, which she loved. There the buildings were relatively few and less damaged, and could be repaired without incurring enormous costs.

  She knew the project was bound to arouse objections. More than a decade earlier, when her late son, Emperor Tongzhi, planned the project for her first retirement, the opposition had been so strong that she had felt compelled to call a halt. Now there would be the same chorus of disapproval, especially as there was already an official retirement home for her, the Sea Palace, adjacent to the Forbidden City. Even the renovation of that palace had brought criticism and was permanently short of funds. At one point the private contractors, who employed thousands of workers, failed to pay wages on time, and the workers went on strike – the modern word ‘strike’ thus entering court records for the first time in 1886–7.

  Cixi was dissatisfied with the Sea Palace because it was in the middle of Beijing and would not give her the natural surroundings that she craved. Her heart was set on the Old Summer Palace. She tried to justify the building work in an imperial decree in which she, unusually, added a personal plea. Playing down the scale of the project (‘very limited repair work’), she told the country that for a quarter of a century she had exhausted herself doing her duty ‘day and night, fearfully as if standing over a precipice, worrying something might go wrong’, and had brought ‘some peace and stability’ to the empire. In all those years she had never gone on ‘pleasure trips like hunting, which previous monarchs had enjoyed to the full’, because she was mindful of ‘the hard life of the people’. She gave her assurance that the construction would ‘not touch any funds from the Ministry of Revenue, so would not affect the livelihood of the people’, and implored ‘all in the empire to show understanding’.

  Indeed, while Qianlong the Magnificent had often made two or three long trips a year, with his mother and consorts, each costing hundred of thousands of taels, Cixi had never indulged herself in any such journeys, however much she longed to travel. She was a devout Buddhist and yearned to visit the sacred Buddhist mountain of Wutai, to the southwest of Beijing, which had been a favourite destination for earlier emperors. But taking into account the cost of the journey, she had accepted the advice of Prince Gong and his fellow Grand Councillors and abandoned the idea. Now she told the grandees that, in exchange for forgoing expensive excursions, such as visiting the Hunting Lodge like previous emperors, or going to the coast to inspect the newly modernised navy – which she could legitimately do – she would build her dream retirement home. There was no loud protest; and so began the building of Cixi’s own, new Summer Palace, the Yi-he-yuan, the Gardens of Nurturing Harmony.

  Nowadays a major tourist attraction in Beijing, the Summer Palace has been the cause of much condemnation of Cixi. It has been claimed that its restoration cost tens of millions of taels, which Cixi stole from the navy, thus bankrupting it and leading to a devastating defeat by Japan. Visitors to the Summer Palace are more than likely to hear this denunciation from the guides. The truth about the cost and her diversion of funds is rather different. The Summer Palace did not cost tens of millions. The original Garden of Clear Ripples, developed by Emperor Qianlong in the mid-eighteenth century, had cost 4,402,852 taels. When Cixi rebuilt it, she added several buildings and modern comforts, so the expenditure certainly exceeded that sum. The initial costing by the project’s Accounting Office covered fifty-six sites (about half the total) and came to 3,166,700 taels. According to Chinese historians who have since studied the court records extensively, the total cost of the restoration is estimated at a maximum of six million taels. This is slightly more than was spent on Emperor Guangxu’s wedding – 5.5 million taels (an expenditure that came out of the Ministry of Revenue and gave rise to no complaints). Cixi put up three million from her savings from the royal household allowances. And some officials contributed ‘donations’. But still
she needed some government funding.

  Although all state spending was authorised by the empress dowager, she could not simply take what she wanted. As she had promised in her decree that she would not use money from the Ministry of Revenue, Cixi devised a roundabout way of obtaining state funds. The navy was undergoing a process of modernisation, headed by Prince Chun, and was allocated a colossal budget of four million taels a year. Could not a small slice of this sum – perhaps a portion of the interest derived from the money deposited in a (foreign) bank – be used to help build her Summer Palace, a slice that would make no difference to the navy? This appears to be what she thought. She reckoned that the country need not know of her scheme if her devoted servant, Prince Chun, and the others involved covered up for her. Exactly how much she took is unclear. What is known is that in one year she was promised 300,000 taels, which seems to have been the usual annual amount. In just under a decade she may have siphoned off some three million taels – which tallies with the overall cost of the building works. This money did not come from the capital of the naval funds deposited in the bank, and leading Chinese scholars have concluded that the arrangement ‘did not have a significant impact on the navy’.

  While the impact was imperceptible, it was potentially corrosive. If she were to take the path of corruption, others would surely follow. Her strategem was bound to be detrimental to the navy, which was her own baby. It seems that Cixi was troubled by what she was doing. To make her feel better, as well as to mollify the population, who could see the building work and had begun to talk, the faithful Prince Chun suggested that, as Cixi was not going to the coast, the navy could train on Kunming Lake so that she could review their exercises. In this case, buildings could be legitimately repaired. Indeed, she watched some exercises, although they could hardly have been by gunboats. But she feared that Heaven could easily detect the fraud. When the big fire broke out in the Forbidden City at the beginning of 1889, just before Emperor Guangxu’s wedding and her retirement, she started to panic, thinking this might be Heaven’s wrath at her misdemeanour, and issued a decree halting the work. But soon passion for her beloved Summer Palace conquered all other considerations, and Cixi cheated even Heaven. Construction resumed.