by Chang, Jung
It was in this spirit that she helped turn the genre of Peking Opera into the national opera of China. This genre had traditionally been for the ‘average folk of the alleys and villages’, as its music, stories and humour were easy to follow and enjoy. Considered ‘vulgar’, it had been shunned by the court, where only orthodox opera, with its restricted tunes and story lines, was staged. Cixi’s husband, Emperor Xianfeng, began to patronise Peking Opera, but it fell to Cixi to mould it into a sophisticated art form, while retaining its playfulness. She extended royal approval by bringing in artists from outside the court to perform for her and to instruct the eunuchs in the Music Department. She demanded professionalism. Historically, Peking Opera was rather casual, with unpunctual opening times, slapdash make-up and costumes; actors would often hail friends from the stage or make impromptu jokes. Cixi addressed all these details with a series of specific orders. She made punctuality mandatory, threatening to cane repeated offenders. On one occasion a principal actor, Tan Xinpei, was late, and she, being a huge fan and feeling unable to have him caned, made him play a clownish pig in The Monkey King. Professional acting was handsomely rewarded. While previous emperors tipped the leading players one tael of silver each at most, Cixi habitually lavished dozens of taels on them – as much as sixty to a lead actor, for instance to Tan, who was also given presents as part of the dowry for his daughter’s wedding. (In comparison, the chief of the Music Department at the court earned seven taels a month.) In one year her tips to all involved in the opera shows totalled 33,000 taels.
Being so well treated, Peking Opera actors became celebrities – like the film stars of a later age. The public could see how prestigious they were: in one case, 218 artists travelled in the royal procession from the Summer Palace to the Forbidden City, all on horseback, with twelve carts carrying their costumes and paraphernalia. A career in the opera became highly sought-after.
Cixi’s opera houses were constructed with carefully designed artistry. In the Sea Palace, a pavilion-style theatre was built in the middle of the lake, where there were lotuses all around so that summer shows took place among their blooms. In the Forbidden City, a heated glass conservatory was erected, as a cosy warm theatre in the midst of winds and snows. In the Summer Palace, she restored a two-storey theatre in an area that attracted orioles: their call was said to go well with the arias. Then she built another, more magnificent three-storey opera house, with a stage 21 metres high, 17 metres wide and 16 metres deep, and a backstage large enough to hold complicated sets. This was the grandest theatre in China. Both the ceiling and the floor could be opened during the performance, to allow gods to descend from Heaven and the Buddha to rise from the depths of the Earth sitting on an enormous lotus flower; snowflakes (white confetti) could shower from the sky, and water could spout upwards from the mouth of a giant turtle. A pool of water under the stage enhanced the acoustics. The theatre was situated next to the vast lake, so that the melody could travel unimpeded over its surface.
The Peking Opera repertoire was enormously expanded under Cixi. She revived a number of obsolete dramatic pieces by having their libretti dug up from the court archives and adapted to the tunes of Peking Opera. In the process of adaptation, and trying to accommodate Cixi’s own lines, one actor-composer, Wang Yaoqing, enlarged the Opera’s musical range. With Cixi’s rewards and encouragement, the actor-composer revolutionised Peking Opera by giving female characters (played by men, including him) proper acting roles. They had traditionally been confined to minor parts and could only sing stiffly, not act. Now, for the first time, Peking Opera had lead female roles.
In this undertaking, Cixi became intimately involved in the writing of a 105-episode work, The Warriors of the Yang Family, about a tenth- to eleventh-century family who took up arms defending China against invaders. In recorded history, the warriors were all men. But in folk legends the women of the family were the heroes, and this was reflected in a script in Kunqu, a disappearing drama form. Cixi knew the story and took it upon herself to make it a part of the Peking Opera repertoire. She summoned the literary men of the court, mainly doctors and painters, and read out to them her translation of the Kunqu script. The men were divided into groups, each being given some episodes to write for Peking Opera. Supervising them was a woman – a widow and a poetess – who had been sought out by Cixi at the same time as Lady Miao. Cixi herself remained the chief editor of the whole drama. Since then, episodes of The Female Warriors of the Yang Family have become some of the most-performed and best-loved Peking Opera numbers, and have been much adapted into other art forms. The names of the female warriors have entered everyday language as synonyms for brave and bright women who outshine men.
Cixi detested age-old prejudices against women. During one opera performance, when a singer sang the oft-repeated line ‘the most vicious of all is the heart of a woman’, she flew into a rage and ordered the singer off the stage. Her rejection of the traditional attitude was undoubtedly shaped by her own experience. No matter how successful her rule on behalf of her son and adopted son, she would always be denied the mandate to rule in her own right. Once the boys entered adulthood, she was obliged to give way and could no longer participate in politics. She could not even voice her opinions. Watching Emperor Guangxu shelving the modernisation projects she had initiated, Cixi could not fail to despair. And yet there was nothing she could do. Any attempt at changing the status quo would have to involve violent and extreme means, such as launching a palace coup – which she was not prepared to contemplate. Only one woman in Chinese history – Wu Zetian – had declared herself emperor and run the country as such. But she had had to do so in the face of mighty opposition, which she had quelled using hair-raisingly cruel means. On the long list of alleged bloody murders was that of her own son, the crown prince. Cixi was a different character and preferred to rule through consensus: winning over the opposition rather than killing them. As a result, she chose to observe the conditions of her retirement. But clearly she admired the female emperor, and would have liked to stake a similar claim – if the cost were not so high. Her feelings were known to Lady Miao, her painting teacher. The painter once presented her with a scroll that depicted Wu Zetian conducting state affairs as a legitimate sovereign. Cixi’s acceptance of the painting says much about her aspirations and frustrations.
16 War with Japan (1894)
JAPAN SET ABOUT its miraculous transformation into a modern power during the reign of Emperor Meiji, who ascended the throne in 1867. With a population of forty million, it aspired to build a global empire. In the 1870s, it seized one of the China’s vassal states, the Liuqiu Islands, and attempted to invade Taiwan, part of the Chinese Empire. Cixi’s general policy was to keep the empire intact at all costs, while releasing the vassal states if she had to. She washed her hands of Liuqiu, by deeds if not by words, but made a determined effort to defend Taiwan, linking the island more closely to the mainland.
Japan also cast its eyes on Korea, another vassal state of China. In this case Cixi tried to prevent the Japanese from annexing the country as it shared a border with Manchuria, which was close to Beijing. As China was not strong enough to stop Japan by itself, Cixi sought to involve the West as a deterrent. She instructed Earl Li to persuade Korea to open up trade with the Western powers, so that they would have a stake in the country. In 1882, an internal strife broke out in Korea and the Japanese Legation was assaulted. Tokyo sent a gunboat to Korea to protect its nationals. As soon as she heard the news, Cixi told Earl Li her anxiety that Japan ‘might exploit the situation to pursue its designs’. She immediately dispatched troops by both land and sea to the capital of Korea, today’s Seoul, with Earl Li in overall command based in Tianjin. While the Chinese army helped end the riot, the Japanese refrained from getting involved in the fighting; they obtained some compensations – but, most importantly, their soldiers stayed on. In response, Cixi ordered some of her troops to be stationed in Korea for as long as there was a Japanese military presence.fn
1 Writing to Earl Li in her own hand in crimson ink, to stress the importance of her words, she said: ‘Though a small country, Japan harbours big ambitions. It has already swallowed Liuqiu, and is now eyeing Korea. We have to prepare ourselves quietly. You must be extremely cautious about Japan, and do not lower your guard for a moment.’ It was principally for this reason that she decided to spend enormous sums to build up the navy.
At the end of 1884, while China was at war with France on its border with Vietnam, a pro-Japanese coup broke out in Korea. From the information she gathered, Cixi was convinced that ‘the Japanese were behind the coup’, ‘taking advantage of China’s preoccupation’ elsewhere. She sent over troops to help suppress the coup, but told them not to give the Japanese any excuse to start a war. As it turned out, when Chinese troops did clash with the Japanese in the Korean king’s palace, the Chinese were victorious. On Cixi’s instructions, Earl Li opened talks with Count Itō Hirobumi, soon to become Japan’s first Prime Minister, and both sides agreed to withdraw troops from Korea. Cixi was pleased with the ‘speedy and satisfactory conclusion’. So was Robert Hart, Inspector General of Customs, who wrote in a letter: ‘The Japs were to sign yesterday at T’tsin [Tianjin]: so we win all round.’
Over the next decade, Japan accelerated the modernisation of its military, especially the navy. In China, Cixi laid down her guideline for naval development just before she retired at the beginning of 1889: ‘Keep expanding and updating, gradually, but never slacken.’
But after Cixi’s retirement, China stopped buying advanced warships. Emperor Guangxu was guided by Grand Tutor Weng, who was also in charge of the country’s finance as the head of the Ministry of Revenue. Weng could not comprehend why huge sums of money should be spent on gunboats when there was no war. He did not see Japan as a threat. All his concerns were domestic. In 1890, natural disasters ravaged the country and millions were made homeless by floods. Hart wrote: ‘We have had lakes in the city – a sea round it – rivers in the streets – swimming baths in the courtyard – shower baths in the rooms – and destruction for roofs, ceilings . . .’ Famine-stricken men and women depended on rice centres, to which Cixi as the empress dowager made donations. The government spent more than eleven million taels to buy rice from overseas that year.
When the disaster was over and rice imports halved, naval updating did not resume. On the contrary, in 1891, when Cixi moved into the Summer Palace and severed her ties with the government altogether, Emperor Guangxu decreed that all naval and army be discontinued, on the advice of Grand Tutor Weng (‘there is no war on the coast’). This decision may have caused the rows at this time between Emperor Guangxu and Cixi, who was deeply concerned that Japan would now outstrip China in military material. Indeed, as Earl Li observed, Japan ‘is concentrating the resources of the entire country to build its navy,’ and ‘is buying a gunboat every year . . . including first-class, latest ironclads from Britain’. As a result, in the ensuing years, the Japanese navy overtook the Chinese in its overall capacity, especially in faster and more up-to-date warships. The Japanese army also became better equipped.
At this time Earl Li was in charge of coastal defence. Emperor Guangxu had inherited and retained Cixi’s old team after his takeover. Whatever resentment he felt for his Papa Dearest, he was not engaged in a power struggle with her. The emperor also had no interest in defence matters – in fact he preferred not to have to think about them and left everything in this field to Earl Li. But although the earl had this enormous responsibility, he had lost the unreserved trust that he had enjoyed with Cixi. At the emperor’s side was his bitter foe, Grand Tutor Weng. The animosity of the arch-conservative royal tutor towards the major reformer went back a long way. The tutor had always suspected that some of the money allocated to the earl for building the navy had ended up in the earl’s own pockets and those of his associates. This sneaking suspicion was behind his advice to the emperor to stop all purchases of gunboats. As soon as Cixi retired, the Grand Tutor started to check the earl’s accounts, year by year, going back to 1884, when a major update of the navy began. The earl was required to present the financial records in detail, to answer endless queries and to justify himself – and to beg for such essentials as maintenance costs for the ships. The Grand Tutor remained suspicious, and the emperor appointed Prince Ching as the overlord of the navy, in a signal of distrust towards the earl.
The earl felt that the throne ‘chooses to believe in groundless rumours and seems to want to take power away’ from him. Under this pressure, he made it his priority to please the emperor and keep his job. After Emperor Guangxu halted the purchases for the navy, and knowing that His Majesty did not want to spend money on defence, the earl presented him with a glowing report about an impregnable coast. There was no mention of any problems, although the earl knew there were many. He wrote privately, ‘Our ships are not up to date, and the training is not quite right. It would be hard to succeed in a sea battle.’ Later he even said that he had known all along that the Chinese military was a ‘paper tiger’. But to Emperor Guangxu he only said what His Majesty wanted to hear. Indeed, the emperor was pleased and praised him fulsomely for doing a brilliant job.
Naval chiefs repeatedly asked for new warships, but the earl did not pass on their requests to the throne. He was fearful that Grand Tutor Weng might accuse him of crying wolf in order to line his own pockets, and that the emperor might fire him.
The earl was in denial about Japan’s ambitions. He did not seem to have any sense of unease, even though he could see that Japan’s naval expansion was aimed at China: Japan was ‘seeking to be one-up on us in everything: if our gunboat speed is 15 knots, they want theirs to be 16 knots . . .’ ‘That country will go far,’ he remarked to a colleague. But he shut his mind to the inevitable fact that Japan could only ‘go far’ at the cost of the Chinese Empire.
If Cixi had been in charge, she would never have allowed Japan to become superior in military hardware. She knew that this was the only way to deter Japan. Before she retired, she had built up a navy that was the most powerful in Asia, far better equipped than that of Japan. And to keep that edge was by no means impossible, given that Japan had less total wealth at the time and could ill afford a gunboat race.
But Cixi in retirement had neither adequate information nor any say in international affairs. And the young emperor was not a strategic thinker. He simply left the whole business of defending the country to Earl Li, whose calculations were based on self-interest.
On 29 May 1894, after inspecting the coast, Earl Li presented the monarch with another optimistic report. This time, traces of apprehension crept in: he mentioned that Japan had been buying gunboats every year and that China was lagging behind. But he stopped short of spelling out the implications, which were consequently lost on Emperor Guangxu. His Majesty asked no questions, and once again praised the earl for doing a good job.
Just at this moment, Japan struck. In spring that year there had been a peasant uprising in Korea. On 3 June, the Korean king asked China to send in troops, and Beijing agreed. In keeping with Earl Li’s agreement with Count Itō, China informed Japan. Tokyo claimed it needed its own soldiers in Korea to protect its diplomats and civilians, and dispatched a force. The uprising ended before the troops of either country could intervene, and the Koreans requested both countries to withdraw. The Chinese were prepared to do so. But the Japanese declined to leave.
The Prime Minister of Japan was now Count Itō, Earl Li’s counterpart in the negotiations ten years earlier. An outstanding statesman, Itō had since that time helped draft the Meiji constitution (1889) and establish a bicameral national Diet (1890), which had laid the foundations of modern Japan. At the very time when he dispatched troops to Korea, his intention was that they should stay there – as a first step towards a very much more ambitious goal: to initiate a military contest with China, beat the massive empire and become the leader and master of East Asia. So, instead of withdrawing, he sent in more troops. His pre
text for this act of invasion was that the Korean government must be forced to carry out modernising ‘reforms’. The Chinese were told that they were welcome to join in this ‘reformist’ enterprise but, if they chose not to take part, Japan would carry it out alone. Prime Minister Itō’s scheme put Japan in a win–win situation. If the Chinese troops left, Japan would occupy Korea – and challenge China at a time that suited Japan. If the Chinese stayed on, there would be numerous opportunities to create conflict between the two armies and spark off a war, again at a time of Japan’s choosing. In fact Prime Minister Itō had made up his mind to take on China now.
No one in the Chinese government grasped Japan’s intentions, not even Earl Li. While the Japanese military build-up in Korea gathered pace, it was business as usual in Beijing. Emperor Guangxu continued his classics lessons and planned banquets to mark his birthday at the end of July. Grand Tutor Weng wrote calligraphy on fans, a common scholarly pastime, and appraised his treasured stone-rubbing collections with visiting connoisseurs. Earl Li delayed reinforcing the Chinese troops in Korea, for fear of triggering a war. It does not seem to have occurred to him that Japan’s goal was not confined to Korea – that it was actually seeking war with China. Thinking peace could be preserved, the earl busily lobbied European powers, especially Russia, which had its own designs on Korea (of which the earl was well aware), hoping that they would intervene and restrain the Japanese – a hope that proved futile. Robert Hart observed that the earl ‘is calculating with too much confidence on foreign intervention and infers too much from Japan’s willingness to discuss’. ‘The Powers are at work trying to induce Japan to withdraw and discuss, for they don’t want war, but Japan is very bumptious and cock-a-hoop’; Japan ‘thanks them for their kind advice, goes on her way, and would probably rather fight them all than give in!’