Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  While giving the eunuch chiefs their instructions for the day, Cixi took her first smoke from a water-pipe, which had an elongated stem and a small rectangular box to be held in the palm. Most of the time she did not hold her own pipe. This was the job of a pipe-maid, standing ‘about two paving bricks’ distance away from the Empress Dowager’, according to one of them. When Cixi glanced at her, the pipe-maid’s right hand that held the pipe would gently extend its tip to within an inch of the corner of Cixi’s mouth, whereupon, with a slight turn of the neck, the firm lips would part to take it. The pipe remained in the hands of the maid while Cixi puffed on it. For this service the maids had been trained for many months, until their right palms could hold a cup of hot water for a long time without twitching.

  After two pipes of tobacco, breakfast arrived. First came her tea. The Manchus drank tea with a lot of milk. In her case, the milk came from the breasts of a nurse. Cixi had been taking human milk since her prolonged illness in the early 1880s, on the recommendation of a renowned doctor. Several wet nurses were employed, and took turns to squeeze milk into a bowl for her. The nurses brought their sucking babies with them, and the woman who served her the longest stayed on in the palace, her son being given education and an office job.

  While she sipped her tea, a team of eunuchs carried over her food in lacquered boxes wrapped in yellow silk with the dragon motif. Lianying, the head eunuch, took the boxes at the door and brought them himself to Cixi. She ate sitting cross-legged on a kang – a long, rectangular brick structure the height of a bed, which could be heated from underneath and was used all over north China as a bed or a seat. She liked to sit by a window, so that she could look out on the courtyard and enjoy the light and the sky. Her food was placed on a low table on the kang and extended to some small tables that would be folded away when the meal was finished. When the food boxes were properly arranged, they were opened in front of Cixi’s eyes, as court rules dictated. They contained a large variety of porridges, rolls and cakes – steamed, baked and fried – and many kinds of drinks, ranging from soya-bean juice to beef-bone consommé. There were also plenty of savoury side-dishes, such as duck’s liver cooked in soya and other spicy sauces.

  The empress dowager had a hearty appetite and would go on to have another two sizeable meals and small snacks. The meals were taken wherever she happened to be: she had no fixed dining room. The scale and presentation of the meals followed court stipulations. They would only be reduced if there was a national disaster. As the empress dowager, Cixi was entitled to a daily allocation of 31 kilos of pork, one chicken and one duck. With these, as well as vegetables and other ingredients, the quantities of which were all specified, dozens of dishes were cooked and, for a main meal, would be set out in more than a hundred plates or bowls. Most of the dishes were never touched and were only there to amplify the presentation. She seldom drank with her meals, and mostly ate on her own, as anyone invited to join her had to do so standing – except the emperor. Often court ladies in attendance would be asked to eat at her table after she had finished and left, in which case they were permitted to sit down. Usually dishes from her table would be given to courtiers as tokens of imperial favour. The emperor would also receive her dishes if he was staying in the same palace complex. The vast quantities of leftover food from the court enabled a string of food stalls in the neighbourhood to do a brisk business, and at certain times each day ragged beggars were allowed to come to a particular gate to receive the remnants and sift through the rubbish before it was carted away.

  Lunch was followed by a careful hand-washing, and then a siesta. Before she dozed off, Cixi would read the classics with her eunuch instructors, who would enliven the texts by weaving in jokes that amused Cixi. When she got up, there was another tremor in the palace, as an eye-witness described: ‘when Her Majesty awakes, the news flashes like an eletric spark through all the Precincts and over the whole inclosure, and everyone is on the “qui vive” in a moment’.

  Before she went to bed, at around 11 p.m., she often enjoyed a foot massage. Two masseuses first soaked her feet in a silver-plated wooden bowl, with wide rolled-back ‘arms’ as foot rests. The water in the bowl was boiled with flowers or herbs, as prescribed by her physicians, bearing in mind factors such as the climate and her physical condition. In summer, it might be dried chrysanthemum, and in winter it could be flowering quince. The masseuses pressed the various pressure points, especially on the soles – rather like a reflexology session today. If her toenails needed cutting, the masseuses would gently request permission to use scissors, which the chief maid then brought in. Sharp objects were normally forbidden in Cixi’s quarters. A manicure meant tending to her long fingernails – extraordinarily long on the fourth and fifth fingers, as was common among aristocratic Manchu women. The exceptionally long nails were protected by shields made of openwork cloisonné or gold, set with rubies and pearls. As no lady of position would dress herself or comb her own hair, such nails did not present an insurmountable problem.

  Her bed was a kang built into an alcove in the room, with shelves around the three enclosing sides, on which were placed ornaments such as small jade figures. Her bedside reading amounted to another session of studying the classics with her eunuch instructors, which sent her to sleep. As she slept, a maid sat on the floor of the room, as noiselessly as a piece of furniture. More maids and eunuchs were in the antechamber outside the apartment, and elsewhere in the building. The night-shifts would hear the snoring of a sound sleeper.

  Cixi was now in her early fifties and in very good health. She played the game of kick-shuttlecock with more agility than her much younger entourage, and climbed hills fast, without any sign of fatigue. In Beijing’s biting winter she normally declined heating, preferring nothing in her bedroom and only charcoal-burning copper braziers in the large halls. Picturesque though these were, they produced little more than curling blue flames and made little difference to the temperature. The doors of her apartment were left open and draped with padded curtains, which were constantly lifted for the passage of eunuchs and maids, so blasts of cold air swept in at every entry or exit. Everyone else felt frozen to the bone, and yet Cixi seemed impervious. She just wore silk-wool undergarments and a fur coat, at most with a big fur cloak on top.

  Her mind was as sharp as ever, and so it was difficult for her to shut herself off completely from politics. What made it possible for her to endure the enforced isolation and leisure, day in, day out, was her wide range of interests. She was curious about all new things, and wanted to try everything. Having added a couple of steamboats to the lake, she asked to be flown in a hot-air balloon, which had been bought some years earlier for military use. But Earl Li gave her (via Prince Ching, as the earl was no longer permitted to communicate directly with her) the disappointing news that the balloon was not in a fit condition and might explode.

  The Summer Palace was a source of endless pleasure for Cixi, and she never tired of walking in its grounds. Strolling in the rain appealed to her the most. The eunuchs always brought an umbrella, but she would only use it in heavy downpours. A large retinue of eunuchs followed her, together with ladies-in-waiting and palace maids, bearing her ‘clothes, shoes, handkerchiefs, combs, brushes, powder boxes, looking glasses of different sizes, perfumes, pins, black and red ink, yellow paper, cigarettes, water pipes, and the last one carried her yellow satin-covered stool . . .’ – like ‘a lady’s dressing room on legs’, according to one lady-in-waiting. Often Cixi and her ladies were carried in sedan-chairs to a picturesque spot of her choosing, where she would sit on her yellow satin stool, gazing for a long time into the distance. One scenic stop was the top of a high-arched bridge, which undulated in a soft, flowing way and was suitably named the Jade Sash. Another place she liked was a cottage built and furnished entirely of bamboo, where she often had tea. Her teas were the finest – the first leaves from all over the empire – which she drank from a jade cup, into which she would drop a few dried petals of honeysuckle
, jasmine or rose. The dried blossoms were brought to her in a jade bowl, with two slender cherry-wood sticks, which she used to pick up the blossoms, drop them into her cup and stir the tea.

  A favourite activity was boating on the lake, during which her barge was sometimes followed at a distance by eunuch musicians, playing the bamboo flute or bamboo recorder, or the yue-qin, a moon-shaped instrument like the mandolin. All would be silent when Cixi listened, if entranced’. Sometimes, in moonlight, she would sing softly to the music floating over the water.

  Nature was her passion and she adored plants. Chrysanthemums were among her best-loved flowers. During the season for propagation Cixi would lead the court ladies in taking cuttings and setting them out in flower pots, watering them religiously until they began to bud. The buds were then covered with mats so that they would not be damaged by heavy rain. For this she would even forgo her usual nap. Later on, when she returned to power, she broke with the old custom of allowing no plants in places of official duties and filled the audience hall with a profusion of potted flowers, arranging them in tiers. Officials coming for their audiences had to orient themselves before they went down on their knees, as her throne seemed to be hidden behind a ‘flower mountain’.

  She was devoted to her orchard, from which large baskets of fruits would be brought before her daily when they were in season. She would inspect their colour and shape, and would hold up a cluster of grapes against the light, for a long time. Apples, pears and peaches filled the huge porcelain pots in the halls, for their subtle fragrance. When the fragrance was gone, the fruits were divided among the servants. The scentless gourd also commanded her affection, and she would often stroke them on their trellises, sometimes in torrential rain. Her collection of gourds ran to several hundred, which an artistic eunuch sculpted into musical instruments, dinner sets and a variety of fanciful articles, adding miniature paintings and calligraphy to their surface. Cixi prepared some of the gourds to be carved by using a sharpened piece of bamboo to scrape off the outer skin.

  Every few days, she would visit her large vegetable gardens and would be delighted if she could take away some fresh vegetables or other farm produce. Occasionally she cooked them herself in one of the courtyards and once she taught her ladies-in-waiting how to boil eggs with black tea leaves and spices.

  Mosquitoes could be a nuisance in the Summer Palace, especially on summer evenings, but Cixi’s eunuchs devised an ingenious solution. They erected giant marquees, each big enough to enclose a building and its courtyards completely. Roofed and curtained with reed matting and a system of ropes and pulleys that rolled and unrolled the top and hoisted and lowered the curtains, these works of art served as vast mosquito nets, in addition to shielding the large enclosures from the sun during the day. With lanterns hanging discreetly and candles flickering in the breeze, evenings were a scented pleasure, scarcely troubled by the insects. The same marquees were erected for the foreign legations.

  Cixi loved birds and animals. She learned how to rear and breed them and engaged a eunuch who was a great expert to teach her. Birds in his care were not always confined, although there were hundreds of cages hanging in rows of bamboo frames in one of the large courtyards. Some flew freely, having made their home in the Summer Palace. To protect these rare species, young men with knowledge of birds were recruited into the Praetorian Guards to patrol the grounds with crossbows, ready to shoot down any natural predators or unwanted wild birds that had the temerity to gatecrash. The demand for foods for Cixi’s birds created a flourishing trade outside the Summer Palace, selling all sorts of caterpillars, grasshoppers, crickets and ant nests, each said to benefit a different avian attribute.

  Some birds were trained to fly towards a high-pitched trill in order to receive their favoured foods. Wherever Cixi was whether climbing a hill or boating in the lake, eunuchs near her would sound the trill so that the birds would fly around her. Cixi herself was skilled at imitating birdsong and could entice birds to her outstretched fingertips. Her bird-taming ability later mesmerised Western visitors. One, her American portraitist Katharine Carl, wrote:

  She had a long, wand-like stick, which had been cut from a sapling and freshly stripped of its bark. She loved the faint forest odor of these freshly cut sticks . . . she held the wand she carried aloft and made a low, bird-like sound with her lips, never taking her eyes off the bird . . . He fluttered and began to descend from bough to bough until he lighted upon the crook of her wand, when she gently moved her other hand up nearer and nearer, until it finally rested on her finger!

  Miss Carl was ‘watching with breathless attention, and so tense and absorbed had I become that the sudden cessation, when the bird finally came upon her finger, caused me a throb of almost pain.’

  Even fish were induced to jump onto her open palms – to her own childlike shrieks. It took buckets of a special kind of earthworm, red and about 3 centimetres long, to entice the fish to leap up towards a human hand at a quay where Cixi often disembarked for lunch.

  She bred dozens of dogs. They lived in a pavilion furnished with silk cushions to sleep on and a large wardrobe of jackets, in brocades embroidered with chrysanthemums, crab-apple blossoms and other gorgeous patterns. To avoid undesirable couplings, only her dogs were allowed in the palace grounds. The hundreds of pet dogs belonging to the court ladies and eunuchs had to be kept in their owners’ own courtyards. Some dog breeders considered that Cixi ‘did more for the Pekingese than any other fancier since the origin of the breed’. One type of Pekinese whose breeding she discontinued was the ‘sleeve-dog’, a miniature that could be carried in the courtiers’ ample sleeves that were used as pockets. The growth of the sleeve-dogs was said to be stunted by feeding them only on sweets and wine and making them wear tight-fitting wire-mesh waistcoats. Cixi told Katharine Carl that she detested such unnatural methods, and that she could not understand why animals should be deformed for man’s pleasure.

  The pets she was particularly fond of were a Pekinese pug and a Skye terrier. The latter could perform tricks and would lie completely still at Cixi’s command, moving only when she told him to, no matter how many others spoke to him. The Pekinese pug had long and silky fawn-coloured hair and large, pale-brown, liquid eyes. He was not easily taught and was affectionately called Little Fool (sha-zi) by Cixi. Later she had their portraits painted by Katharine Carl, sitting behind the painter herself and taking ‘the liveliest interest’.

  In Beijing there was a large collection of birds and animals built up by the French missionary zoologist and botanist Armand David, who, since coming to China in the early years of Cixi’s reign, had identified many hundreds of new species unknown in Europe, among them the giant panda. When Cixi heard about the collection she was intrigued and eager to see it. It so happened that the collection was attached to a Catholic cathedral, which overlooked the Sea Palace. After negotiations with the Vatican (through an English intermediary), her government paid 400,000 taels for another cathedral to be built elsewhere, and bought the old church along with the collection. Cixi visited it, but only once. She had scant interest in the dead creatures.

  The only competitive games that tradition permitted her were parlour games. Cixi did not enjoy cards, or mah-jong, which she refused to allow at court. Dice-throwing was a popular pastime, and Cixi occasionally played. She invented a dice game not unlike ‘Snakes and Ladders’, except that the board was a map of the Chinese empire, with all the provinces marked in different colours. Eight carved ivory deities, representing the legendary eight Taoist Immortals, travelled round the empire attempting to reach the capital. In the process, they might be diverted to beauty spots like Hangzhou, or sent into exile, in which case they would have to drop out – all depending on the throw of the dice. The one who reached Beijing first was the winner and would receive sweets and cakes, while the losers had to sing a song or tell a joke. Gambling was not involved. In fact it was officially banned, with offenders being fined and caned.

  Painting was a s
erious hobby, for which Cixi engaged a Lady Miao, a young widow, to be her teacher. Lady Miao was Han and was conspicuous in the court from her hair to her toes. Instead of the complicated and much-decorated Manchu headdress, she combed her hair in a neat coil on the back of her head and encircled the coil with strings of pearls. Rather than a full-length Manchu robe, she wore a loose upper garment that came down to just below her knees, over a long plaited skirt, which revealed a pair of ‘three-inch golden lilies’ – bound feet on which she teetered and swayed along in agony. Cixi, who as a Manchu had escaped foot-binding, would cringe at the sight of the deformed feet. Once before, when she had set eyes on the bare feet of one of the nurses who provided milk for her, she had said that she could not bear to see them, and had had them unbound. Now she asked Lady Miao to unbind her feet, an order that the painting teacher was only too happy to obey.

  Under Lady Miao’s tutorship, Cixi became a proficient amateur painter, wielding her brush ‘with power and precision’, according to her teacher. She achieved something much valued in calligraphy: to write in just one brush stroke a giant character that was as big as a human figure. These characters, denoting ‘longevity’ and ‘happiness’, were ritually given to top officials as gifts. Lady Miao’s reputation as the empress dowager’s tutor enabled her to sell her own paintings for high prices, to buy a large house and support her family.

  Near the Summer Palace were many Buddhist and Taoist temples, which organised regular festivals, which women, if chaperoned, could attend, dressed in the most gorgeous colours. Folk artists came from far and wide, walking on stilts, bouncing in lion-dances, waving dragon-lanterns and performing acrobatic and magic tricks. As they passed by the Summer Palace, Cixi often watched from a tower above the walls. Knowing the empress dowager was there, the performers would show off their skills, and she would cheer and give generous tips. One bearded man, who gyrated in the disguise of a village woman, was for a while the recipient of the largest rewards: Cixi was a great fan of popular entertainments and never regarded them as beneath her.