Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  It was he who first represented Cixi as a debauched despot, alleging that she had many male concubines and nightly orgies with eunuchs. People believed Kang largely because he implied that his source was Emperor Guangxu himself, who had given him the ‘secret edict’, smuggled out of the Forbidden City sewn into a belt. The emperor, Kang declared, did not regard Cixi as his mother, but ‘merely as a concubine of a late emperor’s’ – and ‘a licentious concubine’ at that.

  While Cixi’s most deadly enemy was at large and shaping history’s view of her for the next hundred years and more, her second most loathed foe, Sir Yinhuan, was taken off the original list for executions. The British and the Japanese lobbied on his behalf, the British especially persistently because they had given him a knighthood. His punishment was consequently commuted to exile in Xinjiang.fn3 Cixi hated him with a vengeance because it was he who had turned her weak adopted son into a prey for the Wild Fox – and for the Japanese. Thanks to Sir Yinhuan, the empire came close to landing in Japan’s lap.

  Sir Yinhuan himself acknowledged that his relationship with Japan was the cause of his downfall. He told the guards escorting him to his place of exile that the empress dowager started to suspect him when she saw that he appeared intimate with Itō on the day of Itō’s audience with Emperor Guangxu. Whether or not this was the precise moment, Cixi was certainly convinced that he was working for the Japanese. In fact, it may well have occurred to her that he had been a Japanese agent before 1898 – that he had even played a role in China’s spectacular defeat in the 1894–5 war. At that time, Emperor Guangxu relied on Grand Tutor Weng to help make decisions. And the Grand Tutor, out of his depth, relied on Sir Yinhuan, sending him draft documents several times a day for comments. In addition, Sir Yinhuan was in charge of the vital telecommunication system between Beijing and the war front. In this capacity he had been denounced by a number of people for acting suspiciously. The charges included that he ‘hid reports and cables, and changed some of their content’. Staff referred to him as a ‘traitor’, suspecting him of passing on military secrets to the Japanese. But like other charges against grandees, this critical one was not investigated. Grand Tutor Weng was his close friend, and would explain his actions away to the emperor. Since then, it has emerged that the Japanese had full knowledge of the telegraphic exchanges and knew ‘like the fingers and palms of their hands’ every move made by the Chinese military. Tokyo also knew, crucially, that Emperor Guangxu was willing to pay any price for peace, which allowed it to exact the wildly extortionate indemnity.

  No matter how convinced she was of Sir Yinhuan’s treachery, no matter how furious she felt, Cixi was, again, unable to expose him through a trial. In this case, she could not afford to offend Japan. As a result, when Sir Yinhuan was sentenced to exile, his ‘crimes’ listed in the imperial decree were outlandish: ‘harbouring evil intentions, conducting himself in a secretive way, currying favour with the powerful and being unpredictable and unreliable’. This sounded like a grotesque fabrication and reinforced foreigners’ abhorrence of Cixi. They kept pressing for Sir Yinhuan’s release. Two years later, on the very day that she appealed for cooperation from Japan and Britain to cope with a foreign invasion, she ordered the execution of Sir Yinhuan in his place of exile, an order that she specified was to be delivered at the fastest speed. Sir Yinhuan had remained in the forefront of her mind and she wanted to pre-empt any demand from Britain and Japan for his release as a condition for agreeing to help.

  Cixi ordered other executions, which did not need a trial and were at the discretion of the throne: those of the eunuchs. Four eunuch chiefs who had facilitated communication between Emperor Guangxu and the Wild Fox were put to death by bastinado inside the Forbidden City.fn4 This was not enough to quell her fury, and Cixi took the trouble to specify ‘no coffins or funerals for them, just throw them into the mass burial pit’. Ten other eunuchs were first beaten and then forced to wear a cangue – a heavy wooden yoke, weighing between 13 and 18 kilograms, which sat on the wretched eunuch’s neck and shoulders, in some cases for ever. Such punishments had not been practised for so long that the old cangues had rotted, and the court prison cells had partially collapsed. The court management had to have new cangues made and the cells repaired.

  Compared with them, the officials implicated in the Kang case, but not directly involved in the plot to kill Cixi, got off rather lightly. Most were simply dismissed. Only one, Learning Companion Xu, was given life imprisonment. But he was released two years later. At that time Beijing was occupied by foreign invaders and the doors of the prisons were opened. Rather than flee, he stayed on and was officially set free by Cixi. Another official was exiled to Xinjiang, but was allowed to return home after two years.

  While dealing with her enemies, Cixi wished the Reforms to continue and issued decrees stressing her wish. She penned a long edict in her own hand, in which she extolled the West’s ‘ability to make their countries rich and strong’, and vowed that China would ‘learn from their good ways and apply them step by step’. But whilst many evolutionary changes did indeed go on, the Reforms as a movement inevitably stopped. Those decrees concerning Kang and his associates were cancelled; the hastily sacked officials were reinstated; the impracticable orders, such as giving everyone in the empire the right to write to the emperor direct and receive an answer, were rescinded; and the radical shake-up of the Imperial Examinations was put on hold. It did seem that the country was reverting to the old ways. Western observers, who had no idea that the Reforms had been launched and spearheaded by Cixi, and who thought instead that Kang was the leader through Emperor Guangxu, were unanimous in condemning her for killing the movement that had only lasted 100 days.

  With Cixi cast as the villain, Kang tried to persuade foreign governments to use military force to overthrow her and reinstate Emperor Guangxu. In Japan, he started talks with the intelligence service the moment he arrived, urging them to help kidnap the emperor and set up a Japan-backed throne, ultimately ‘forging a Great Asia merger’. One active member of these talks was Bi, the man chosen to kill Cixi. One intelligence officer, Kotaro Munakata, revealed Tokyo’s official position: ‘The Japanese government will not dispatch armed forces lightly, but if the right time comes, it will of course provide aid without you even asking for it.’

  To prevent rescuers, or kidnappers, from reaching Emperor Guangxu, Cixi installed tight security around her prisoner. Large iron locks and bars, ordered from the royal ironsmith in the capital, were fixed onto his villa in the Sea Palace, Yingtai. Brick walls were erected, blocking the villa off from the surrounding lake. The big sluice gate that separated the lake from the waters outside was checked and strengthened, so that no swimmers could move in or out underwater. When winter came and the water froze, orders were given to break the ice, so as to prevent anyone from approaching the emperor on foot across the lake. Cixi even became paranoid that her adopted son’s loud percussion instruments – his drums, gongs and cymbals – might be heard outside the palace walls and help his rescuers locate him and make contact. She told the eunuchs who looked after his instruments to inform her before giving him the instruments.

  Imperial Concubine Pearl had helped the emperor communicate with Kang, through her eunuch servants. Her villa was on the shore, looking out across the lake to the emperor’s islet. Now the lakeside of her villa was blocked off by a brick wall, and she too became a prisoner.

  The ugly grey walls even disfigured Cixi’s own Summer Palace. Emperor Guangxu’s residence there, the Villa of the Jade Balustrade, stood right on the edge of the lake and could potentially be reached by boat or underwater swimmers. The side facing the lake was therefore sealed off by a crudely erected pile of bricks, some of which still stand there today.

  * * *

  fn1 Historians usually set Yuan’s denunciation much later, after he saw the emperor for a third time. This could not have been the case. Any delay by him, on a matter of life and death for Cixi, would have been interpreted by
her as hesitation and a lack of loyalty. He would never have been trusted again. The fact was that from this time General Yuan enjoyed unreserved trust from Cixi and a meteoric rise.

  fn2 This simple fact has not been recognised in the average history books, in which the planned employment of Itō is treated as a praiseworthy move that would have benefited China.

  fn3 Before he left, Sir Yinhuan sent a message to the Russians, asking for a further 15,000 taels from the bribes they had offered him. His guards for the journey ruthlessly tormented him, telling him that without the money, ‘we can’t change our faces from chilling winter frost to caressing spring breeze’. The Russians obliged, even if he was by then useless to them. They reckoned that future bribe-seekers needed to see that they honoured their deals.

  fn4 Earlier in 1898 a eunuch, Kou Liancai, had been sentenced to death by the Ministry of Punishments and executed publicly. His death had nothing to do with the plot. He had written a petition, and the Qing absolutely prohibited the eunuchs from any form of political participation, with offenders strictly punishable by death.

  21 Desperate to Dethrone Her Adopted Son (1898–1900)

  CIXI HAD COME to detest her adopted son: he had been involved in a plot to kill her and yet she was unable to expose him. He was widely regarded as a tragic reformist hero and she as a reactionary and vicious villain – and yet she was unable to defend herself. Her feelings of bitterness and frustration were only relieved when she watched an opera about a heartless adopted son, who drove his foster parents to death and then received his just deserts when he was struck dead by terrible lightning unleashed by the God of Thunderbolts. Cixi became very fond of this opera and watched it many times. She had the adopted son made up as a most despicable scoundrel and ordered the number of thunderbolts and shafts of lightning strikes to be increased fivefold. She also added the frightening Gods of Winds and Storms to the scene, so that the retribution looked and sounded even more horrendous. Unable to punish her adopted son sufficiently herself, Cixi wished the gods to punish him one day.

  It may well have crossed her mind to kill Emperor Guangxu, but she did not seriously contemplate the idea. Apart from her fear of Heaven, she could not risk the national and international consequences. Indeed, she had to fight rumours that he was being murdered, or had already been murdered. The emperor, in poor health generally, had fallen seriously ill after his world turned upside down. As was traditional, the royal doctors’ reports were circulated to top officials, and a public edict required the provinces to send their best doctors. These actions were seen as Cixi’s moves to prepare the world for the announcement of his death. She had to dispatch Prince Ching, the head of the Foreign Office, to Sir Claude MacDonald to ask for the British minister’s help to ‘clear the air’, and when Sir Claude suggested that a legation doctor be allowed to examine the emperor, Prince Ching agreed at once.

  Dr Dethève from the French Legation entered the Forbidden City on 18 October 1898 to examine Emperor Guangxu. The doctor’s report confirmed that the emperor was indeed very ill. His symptoms included nausea and vomiting, shortness of breath, buzzing noises in his ears and dizziness. His legs and knees appeared unstable, his fingers felt numb, his hearing was bad, his eyesight was failing and there was pain in the area of the kidneys. His urination pattern was abnormal. The doctor concluded that the twenty-seven-year-old was suffering from chronic nephritis – that his kidneys were damaged and could not properly filter waste and fluids from his blood. This helped quell the rumour of murder, but nobody felt Emperor Guangxu was too ill to rule the empire.

  Cixi desperately wanted her adopted son to be off the throne. The daily routine of receiving his greetings and going to the morning audiences with him was a constant reminder of the conspiracy and his role in it, and left her no emotional peace. The routine began as soon as she got up, mostly between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. The emperor, having washed and dressed and had his queue plaited, and having had a smoke and a quick breakfast, would soon arrive in his sedan-chair under a yellow canopy, carried by eight men. (His entourage brought everything he needed, including a chamber pot.) When his chair was set down in the courtyard outside Cixi’s apartment and his arrival was announced, Cixi would sit erect and a eunuch would place a yellow brocade cushion on the floor. Emperor Guangxu would enter, kneel on the cushion, and perform the formal greetings from an emperor to a dowager empress, after which Cixi would say, ‘Please get up, Your Majesty.’ He stood up, stepped forward and enquired as a son to a parent, ‘Did the Royal Father sleep well? And did he have a good dinner yesterday?’ Affirmative answers from her were followed by her enquiries about him, until finally she could say, ‘Your Majesty may go and have a rest.’ At this, Emperor Guangxu went to another room, where he dealt with the reports that had been left for him by Cixi with her instructions. In the audience hall they sat side by side, flanked by special Praetorian Guards, authorised to be near the throne, one of them being Cixi’s brother, Duke Guixiang. During the audiences the emperor seldom spoke, and when he did, he would only murmur a few bland, often inaudible questions.

  This routine was repeated day after day. The sight of him elsewhere in the court would also annoy her. Famously fond of wearing much-patched cotton tunics as underwear, the emperor liked to don plain, modest, dark outer robes, which made him an incongruous figure among the brilliantly dressed court ladies and the bejewelled Cixi. Once he was spotted from a distance in the Sea Palace performing the Ploughing Rite – in which the emperor personally handled the buffalo and ploughed the first furrow of the year – in his instantly recognisable drab clothes, standing among his officials in their colourful formal court costumes. His living quarters were also known for their austerity. The lack of opulence was perhaps not entirely his own choice: the eunuchs may have neglected his comforts. Later, when Westerners frequented the court, they noticed that he was not treated like the Son of Heaven: ‘no obsequious eunuchs knelt when coming into his presence . . . Never when in the palace have I seen a knee bend to the Emperor, except that of the foreigner when greeting him or bidding him farewell. This was the more noticeable as statesmen and eunuchs alike fell upon their knees every time they spoke to the Empress Dowager.’fn1

  Emperor Guangxu never showed a trace of resentment – not even when eunuchs poked fun at him during parlour games, which he often played with them. This behaviour led many to believe that he was pretending to be an idiot and was biding his time. Others, like the American painter Katharine Carl, observed that the slender and delicate monarch had ‘a Sphinx-like quality to his smile . . . Over his whole face there is a look of self-repression, which has almost reached a state of passivity.’ Even Cixi with her sharp eye could not figure out what lay behind the passive, expressionless mask. In his prison villa, the emperor read translations of Western books as well as Chinese classics, practised calligraphy and played musical instruments. (He said he did not like sad tunes.) He continued to dismantle and reassemble clocks. Once he tackled a broken music box, and apparently not only brought it back to life, but also added a Chinese tune to it. What he was most fond of doing was drawing devil-like figures on pieces of paper, on the back of which he would always write the name of General Yuan, the man who had informed on the plotters and caused his imprisonment. He would then paste the drawings on the wall, shoot at them with bamboo arrows and afterwards cut the tattered drawings to shreds.

  Who knew the truth? Emperor Guangxu might indeed be waiting for the arrival of a rescue team – gathered by Wild Fox Kang and sponsored by the Japanese. This prospect made Cixi panic. In 1899, she even resorted to a ruse designed to neutralise the Japanese, by trying to give them the impression that she was as keen as her adopted son to form a close relationship. Two officials were dispatched to Japan, where they gave newspaper interviews and made public speeches, declaring that they were sent by the empress dowager to enter an alliance with Japan. They saw the Japanese emperor, and former Prime Minister Itō, who thought that his chance had come again and offered to
go to China at once to be an adviser to the throne. To prevent the illusion from developing further, her messengers did their best to undermine their own credibility, so much so that the Japanese press found them ‘weird’. The Europeans thought Cixi had ‘made a mistake in the selection of her men, for these commissioners, unlike what we usually find [sic] the yellow man, revealed too much of the important mission . . .’ A perplexed Tokyo did not respond to their proposal, although it seemed to think that Cixi did entertain the intentions. While these machinations seem to have confused the Japanese, they alarmed Russia, as well as public opinion, which reckoned that the government was doing some dirty deals with Japan. It was a clumsy manoeuvre far below Cixi’s usual well-crafted standard, and the man who conceived it and talked Cixi into it, Censor Chongyi, offered to be publicly dismissed as a scapegoat. The whole enterprise suggests that Cixi was at her wits’ end.

  She feared all the time that her prisoner might flee and she would not allow him out of the palaces without accompanying him herself. There was, however, a place outside the Forbidden City where the emperor had to go, but which was forbidden to her as a woman: the Temple of Heaven. (Many considered it ‘the most beautiful piece of architecture in China’.) The emperor had to go there regularly to pray to Heaven for good weather for the harvests, on which the nation’s livelihood depended. The trip involved staying on the site overnight. All Qing emperors treated the ritual with the utmost seriousness. Emperor Kangxi, for example, attributed the five decades of relative good weather that had led to his successful reign to the sincerity of his praying at the Temple. Cixi believed in this wholeheartedly. But as she could not make the journey herself, and could not be sure that Emperor Guangxu would not flee when he was beyond her reach, she sent princes in his place. Although the proxies were easy to arrange, praying by them was not the same as by the emperor himself. Cixi was permanently fearful that Heaven would interpret the sovereign’s absence as irreverence and as a result would unleash catastrophe on the empire. It was with anguish and desperation that she yearned for a new emperor.