Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  One of the most Westernised officials, Sir Yinhuan was outstandingly able, and shone in foreign affairs. He was Cixi’s flamboyant envoy to a string of countries (in Washington in the 1880s he was ‘the first Chinese Minister to give a ball at the official residence’, reported the New York Times), and was knighted in Britain, where he represented China at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. A confidential report to Tokyo by Yano Fumio, Japanese minister to Beijing in 1898, shows that he was the minister’s regular source of top-secret information. When Grand Tutor Weng was dismissed, the minister went straight to Sir Yinhuan to find out the real reason, and he told the Japanese everything he knew. At the time some in the top echelon had brought impeachments against him for ‘passing secret state policies to foreigners’. Grand Councillors had denounced him to the throne for ‘acting secretively and suspiciously’. But in those days there was no mechanism to investigate spying charges, and with Emperor Guangxu indignantly defending him, nothing was done. Cixi had wanted to have Sir Yinhuan’s house searched for evidence but, largely because of his close relationship with the emperor, her order was not carried out.

  It was Sir Yinhuan who engineered Kang’s initial entry into the top circle, through covert machinations rather than open recommendation. It was he who acted as the secret middle man between Kang and Emperor Guangxu. And it was he who enabled Kang to gain control over the emperor. He did so much for Kang not because they had a long-standing, close friendship – indeed the evidence suggests the contrary, as he later quite gratuitously ran the Wild Fox down. Sir Yinhuan acted as he did at Tokyo’s behest – and he worked for Tokyo not out of a belief that China would benefit from Japanese domination. He knew how brutal the Japanese were, as he dealt with them in negotiations over the indemnity after the war. When China, crushed by crippling rates of foreign loans and struggling to cope with the Yellow River breaking its banks, requested that the three-year payment deadline be extended, Tokyo refused outright. Sir Yinhuan privately lamented that this showed ‘the so-called Japanese desire to form a special relationship with China is only empty words’.

  His most likely motive was money. A committed gambler, Sir Yinhuan was a well-known bribe-taker – to an extent that was deemed unacceptable even in this bribe-infested country. Accusations of him taking large kickbacks through foreign contracts that he’d negotiated were legion, and the bribes from Russia were on the record. The Japanese were shrewed and skilful bribers. Sir Yinhuan was also supremely cynical. When dealing with the German seizure of Qingdao, his indifference perplexed his colleague, Grand Tutor Weng, who himself felt as though he was being ‘tortured in boiling water and flaming fire’. In his diary Weng wrote: ‘When I go to his house [to discuss business], he is always lounging about and chatting and laughing as though nothing disastrous is happening. I really can’t understand him.’

  Cixi did not have a full picture of the skulduggery involving Sir Yinhuan, Wild Fox Kang, the Japanese and her adopted son. She had been informed of Itō’s visit, the calls for his engagement and his scheduled audience with Emperor Guangxu. Well aware of the perils of Itō’s installation, she had in fact taken action: she made the emperor promise that Itō’s advice, which he would invite, would not be given to him in person, but would be passed on to him through the Foreign Office. This way, she believed, no harm could be done.

  But on the night of 18 September, an urgent letter was delivered to her and made her apprehensive. Written by a Censor, Chongyi, who was related to Earl Li by marriage, the letter emphatically drew her attention to the danger of Emperor Guangxu engaging Itō, as well as to Wild Fox Kang’s extraordinary hidden access to the emperor. ‘If the throne employs Itō,’ it warned, ‘it might as well be putting this country of our ancestors on a silver platter and offering it to [Japan] . . .’ The Censor entreated Cixi to take back power at once to prevent disasters from happening.

  Cixi was unsettled. What if her adopted son ignored their agreement and installed Itō at his side with an edict written in crimson ink? She decided to go to the Forbidden City the next day, 19 September, in time for Emperor Guangxu’s audience with Itō on the 20th, to make sure this would not happen. After that, she planned to return to the Summer Palace. Having made this decision, she went to bed.

  She was in her usual sound sleep in the small hours when General Yuan’s denunciation of the plot arrived. Cixi was thunderstruck. It was true that her relationship with her adopted son was fraught, but that he should be connected with a plot to kill her was still inconceivable.

  Although, from General Yuan’s account, the emperor’s role in the plot was far from clear, there could be no doubt that he knew something about it. Why else would he make General Yuan his own personal commander, separate from the army – the very general whom the plotters then approached to harm her? And why was he so surreptitious about his association with Wild Fox Kang? That her adopted son knew about Kang’s plot, however tenuously, made him complicit and unforgivable – especially in a culture that put filial piety at the top of its ethical code.

  In the morning Cixi left the Summer Palace as planned. Outwardly, everything was normal. She stepped onto a boat from the pier in front of her villa and was carried across the lake into the Imperial Canal that led to the city. Ten kilometres long, the canal was lined with willows and peach trees – and Praetorian Guards. At a sluice gate where a change of boat was necessary, she walked into the Buddhist temple on the bank and prayed. Where the canal ended, a sedan-chair bore her into the Sea Palace next to the Forbidden City. During that seemingly peaceful and leisurely journey her mind was in torment.

  Emperor Guangxu learned of Cixi’s unexpected arrival and hastily rushed to the palace gate to greet her on his knees. Whatever anger erupted inside her at the sight of her adopted son, the empress dowager maintained a calm exterior. She did not want to cause alarm, especially as the audience with Itō was scheduled for the following day: any complication with Japan had to be avoided. She may not have known the full story of Kang’s relationship with Japan, but Itō’s appearance at this moment seemed too improbable a coincidence.

  The following morning, 20 September, it appeared to be business as usual. First Emperor Guangxu had his arranged third audience with General Yuan. He did not produce any crimson-inked edict, as the plotter Tan had promised the General – though this may not mean that he had not intended to. Cixi was within earshot. During the audience the General unmistakably alluded to the plot, saying that His Majesty’s new friends were ‘going about things in a careless and ill-thought-out manner’, and ‘if there was a slip, Your Majesty would be incriminated’. The emperor gazed silently at Yuan, looking as though something had touched him. That he understood what the General was talking about at all would have confirmed his guilt in Cixi’s eyes.

  Yuan returned to his troops in Tianjin. Cixi kept her unperturbed exterior when her adopted son, observing ritual, came to bid her good day before entering the grandest hall in the Sea Palace for his meeting with Itō. At the meeting he said nothing that went beyond the agreed text. Itō’s counsel was solicited, but was to be given through the Foreign Office. As soon as the audience was over, Cixi placed her adopted son under house arrest, confining him to his villa at Yingtai, the islet in the middle of the lake in the Sea Palace, reachable only by way of a long bridge that could be opened and closed. When she went to the Summer Palace, she would take him with her. He had become her prisoner.

  As such, on the following day he wrote in his own hand a decree in crimson ink, announcing that Cixi would be his Guardian. A formal ceremony was subsequently staged. Thereafter, Emperor Guangxu became Cixi’s puppet, signing edicts with his crimson-inked brush according to her wishes. He continued to see officials and Grand Councillors, but always with her. The silk screen that had been concealing her was removed: she stepped from behind the throne to the front of the stage.

  Cixi quickly formed a clear picture of the Wild Fox’s activities vis-à-vis her adopted son. The emperor had scarcely any s
ecrets from his eunuchs, whom Cixi began to interrogate. Thus she established who had been seeing and influencing him. Sir Yinhuan was easily exposed, and became her second bête noire. She methodically rounded up the plotters, giving verbal rather than written orders. Arrests were not all made at once, as she wanted the whole process carried out as quietly as possible.

  The first target for arrest was obviously Kang. But Cixi was two days too late. The Wild Fox had known the game was up as soon as he had heard that General Yuan had been non-committal – like another conspirator, who had been specially employed to kill Cixi, a man called Bi. Bi later described visiting Tan to enquire about his mission the following dawn. ‘Mr Tan was combing his hair languidly’ and told Bi that the General did not commit himself. Bi asked, ‘Are you sure Yuan is the right man for the job?’ Tan clearly did not trust Yuan and replied, ‘I did argue with Mr Kang time and again, but he insists on using Yuan. What can I do?’ Bi said, ‘So you revealed the whole plot to Yuan?’ Being told that Yuan knew everything, Bi exclaimed, ‘We are done for. We are done for! Don’t you know what sort of operation this is? You can’t talk about it just like that! I’m afraid you and your families and clans are all going to the execution ground!’ Bi promptly departed and abandoned the plotters.

  The Wild Fox himself paid visits to two foreigners, the Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard, who was his friend, and Itō himself – the day before Itō’s audience with Emperor Guangxu. What Kang sought was safe haven. Richard had set out to cultivate the official class and the literati, and knew many powerful figures, including Earl Li. His dream was not only to ‘establish the Kingdom of God’ on Chinese soil, but also to run the country – ‘reforming China, remodelling its institutions, and, in short, carrying on its government,’ as Robert Hart noted, finding the idea ‘too delicious!’ British diplomats regarded Richard’s grandiose plans as ‘nonsense’. (Among his proposals was that ‘two foreign governesses should be engaged for the Empress-Dowager’.) Kang had recommended him to Emperor Guangxu as one of the two foreign advisers on the Advisory Board, the other being Itō. Richard was grateful. He now rushed about to drum up assistance for Kang, but to little avail as the British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, was, according to Richard, ‘already prejudiced’ against Kang.

  Itō did not offer Kang sanctuary in the Japanese Legation. To use a bunch of amateurs to murder the empress dowager against insurmountable odds was almost certainly not part of their deal. Besides, Itō was going to see Emperor Guangxu the following day. It would be awkward if he were asked to produce Kang. So the Wild Fox had to flee Beijing. He did so swiftly and, by the time the arrest warrant was sent out, he had already reached and left Tianjin, on board a British steamship bound for Shanghai. At the Shanghai wharf, ‘detectives and policemen’ were waiting for the ship ‘in a high state of excitement at the prospect of gaining the 2,000 dollars’ – the award for Kang’s arrest. Because of the newspaper reports promoting Kang as the principal author of the Reforms (and because of the court’s secrecy, which concealed Cixi’s role) the Acting British Consul-General, Byron Brenan, who recorded the scene, was determined to rescue Kang. As he could not openly do so, being an official representative of Great Britain, Brenan sent the correspondent for The Times, J. O. P. Bland, out to sea on a launch before the ship docked. Kang was intercepted and transported to Hong Kong on board a British gunboat. In the colony he was visited by the local Japanese Consul and invited to go and stay in Japan. Tokyo ‘cherishes the aspiration to build a Great East Asia’, to quote Kang. The Wild Fox soon arrived in Japan.

  His right-hand man, Liang, sought asylum in the Japanese Legation the day after Itō’s audience, and Itō helped him escape to Japan. Under Japanese protection and in disguise, with his queue cut off and wearing European clothes, he boarded a Japanese warship from Tianjin.

  Tan, the violence-loving radical, was also offered sanctuary in Japan. But he declined. According to his friends, he again declared his reform-needs-bloodshed theory: ‘Reforms in other countries have been successful all because there was bloodshed. In Chinese reforms, no blood has been shed, and that’s why the country is not doing well. Let my blood be the first to be shed.’ Indeed, he was beheaded on 28 September, together with five others: Guangren, Kang’s brother; Censor Shenxiu, the petitioner for troops to be moved to the Summer Palace, ostensibly to dig for gold but really to kill Cixi; and the three other new secretaries of the Grand Council (in addition to Tan). At the place of execution, according to a newspaper report, Tan acted ‘as if death was something delicious’. Kang’s brother, on the other hand, did not seem to relish the prospect: he was seen to be ‘wearing just socks and no shoes, his face the colour of ashes and dust’. The executions shocked the country: they were the first of Cixi’s political enemies to die since she began her rule nearly four decades earlier.

  Two of the four new secretaries, including Yang Rui, with whom the emperor had entrusted his agonised letter of 14 September, actually had nothing to do with Kang or his plot. In prison they had been light-hearted, certain that their innocence could be easily established at the trial, which Cixi had ordered in accordance with Qing procedure. But no sooner had the trial started than Cixi abruptly halted it and the two innocent men were carted off to the execution ground with the others, as fellow plotters. There they protested furiously. One refused to go down on his knees to listen to the imperial edict sentencing him to death, and the other, Yang Rui, insistently asked the official overseeing the execution what his crime was. Rumour has it that blood from his severed head spouted one metre in the air, such was his vehemence at the injustice. People were appalled by the peremptory executions. On learning the news, one courtier felt ‘shocked and pained as though my heart was being stabbed’ and he ‘threw up violently’. Even the grandees who knew about the plot against Cixi’s life were greatly upset about the flagrant disregard for the law – which was rare under her rule.

  Cixi cancelled the trial when she realised that it would inevitably make public something that she had to conceal at all costs: her adopted son’s involvement in the plot. A trial would reveal that Emperor Guangxu wanted her deposed, if not killed. The Wild Fox had started giving interviews to foreign newspapers claiming that the emperor had given him a ‘secret edict’, with instructions to raise support to free him and oust Cixi. This claim first appeared in Shanghai in the North China Herald on 27 September, the day before Cixi stopped the trial and ordered the executions. It may well have led to her decision. If Kang’s assertion seemed to be confirmed officially through the trial, Cixi would be facing a dire prospect. The Chinese would be divided and forced to take sides, and the country could be thrown into upheaval. Foreign powers might decide to answer Kang’s plea and send in troops. In particular, Japan could well try to prop up Emperor Guangxu as its puppet, on the pretext of rescuing him. Cixi could not allow the fatal breach between herself and her adopted son to be exposed.

  Thus Cixi herself covered up the plot against her life. The decree about the plot and the executions, issued in the name of the prisoner emperor, was vague and evasive, and falsified the emperor’s position. Kang and his accomplices were said to ‘have attempted to surround and attack the Summer Palace, to kidnap the Empress Dowager and myself’. The other key figure, General Yuan, also had reason to suppress the truth: he did not want it known that he had betrayed the emperor. (He kept his diary about the event hidden during his lifetime.) As Cixi remained silent, Kang’s was the only voice to be heard. When he adamantly denied there was ever a conspiracy to kill Cixi, claiming indeed that it was Cixi who had concocted a scheme to kill Emperor Guangxu, his version of events was widely accepted. Sir Claude MacDonald believed that ‘the rumoured plot is only an excuse to stop Emperor Guangxu’s radical reforms’.

  So the story of Wild Fox Kang’s attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer,
Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot. Meanwhile, the six men executed, four of them conspirators, have gone down in history as having died heroically for the Reforms, acquiring the household name of ‘the Six Gentlemen’. Wild Fox Kang entered myth as the hero who lit the beacon of reform and even had a vision to turn China into a parliamentary democracy. Kang largely created the myth himself, by revising and falsifying his writings and petitions – deleting, for instance, his article that specifically rejected parliamentary democracy as a desirable political system for China. He was a first-rate myth-maker and propagandist. While promoting himself, he and his right-hand man, Liang, tirelessly vilified Cixi, inventing many repulsive stories about her in interviews, speeches and writings, some of which were carried in newspapers in the Treaty Ports, while others were produced as pamphlets in Japan and posted into China. In these, they charged Cixi with poisoning Empress Zhen, driving her son Emperor Tongzhi to death, forcing the son’s widow to kill herself by swallowing a lump of gold, exhausting the naval funds to the tune of tens of millions of taels to build her Summer Palace, and causing China’s defeat in the war with Japan. Almost all the accusations that have since shaped public opinion about Cixi, even today, originated with the Wild Fox.