Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

by Chang, Jung

  Cixi had been reluctant to make the invitation, most likely because a visit by the Dalai Lama posed potentially explosive protocol problems. The biggest dilemma was whether the Dalai Lama should kneel to her and the emperor. As a spiritual leader, people knelt before him. But he was also a political leader, and as such he would be expected to kneel to the throne. If the Dalai Lama was not required to kneel, given that only foreigners were exempt, this would imply that Beijing did not regard Tibet as part of China. The problem would be particularly acute on the occasion of the state banquet in his honour, when political leaders from Mongolia, for instance, would go down on their knees as Emperor Guangxu arrived and departed. The banquet was a ‘public’ affair, and Cixi was well aware that it would be the focus of attention: while Western powers would be watching for signs that Tibet was not treated as part of her empire, the Tibetans needed to be reassured that their God was not humiliated. The protocol office asked Cixi what to do, and she pondered the problem for several days. Finally she decided that the Dalai Lama would kneel, like all others at the banquet, except that he would do so at his seat – a low throne on which he sat cross-legged – rather than at the entrance to the hall like everybody else. This way, his kneeling would be inconspicuous, especially with his ample robe. The Dalai Lama did not object, clearly regarding this as a worthwhile price to pay for Tibet to maintain its self-governing status, which both he and the empress dowager wanted.

  For Cixi, it was vital to keep Tibet in the empire, in a mutually acceptable and amicable way. She deliberated over the most appropriate symbol-laden gifts and, when conferring a new title on the Dalai Lama, made a point of adding words to the effect that he was ‘sincerely loyal’ to the empire. But she would not use a heavy hand to assert her authority. Earlier that year she had appointed a new Imperial Commissioner to Tibet, Zhao Erfeng, but Lhasa rejected him, disliking his record as the administrator of a neighbouring region inhabited by Tibetans. Rather than send Zhao in by force, Cixi held him back, which was an unprecedented concession in Qing history. This was ‘in order not to lose the goodwill of the Tibetans’, as she spelt out in her decree. The imperial troops were further told not to engage in clashes with the Tibetan army. In Beijing, she and the Dalai Lama agreed that he would return to Lhasa as soon as possible and continue to run Tibet as before.

  During the whole of the Dalai Lama’s stay, Cixi was struggling to cope. Their first meeting after his arrival had had to be cancelled as she had felt too ill to go ahead. She had sobbed with frustration when she gave the order. It was not possible to set another date in advance, as her condition fluctuated daily. They only managed to meet when she got up one morning and felt strong enough.

  The Dalai Lama’s visit coincided with Cixi’s seventy-third birthday, the tenth day of the tenth lunar month – or 3 November 1908. She very much wanted to entertain the Tibetan Holy Man, and so felt she really must sit through the endless performances and rituals, even though she had constant diarrhoea and a high fever. Her doctors recorded that she was ‘exceptionally exhausted’.

  Four days after her birthday she sensed that death was breathing down on her, and sent Prince Ching to the Eastern Mausoleums to check out her burial ground, near her late husband’s and son’s. This last resting place was of paramount importance to her, and she had had it constructed in splendour. During her burial a large quantity of jewels would be placed in the tomb with her, as befitted an empress dowager.

  Meanwhile, she started to put the empire’s affairs in order. The moment had come to deal with Emperor Guangxu. Bedridden and seemingly on the verge of death, he refused to die and could pull back, as he had done before. If he survived and she was gone, the empire would fall into the hands of the waiting Japanese. It was in these circumstances that Cixi ordered the murder of her adopted son, by poisoning. That Emperor Guangxu died from consuming large quantities of arsenic was definitively established in 2008, after forensic examination of his remains. His murder would have been easy to arrange: Cixi routinely sent him dishes as tokens of a mother’s affection for her son. At 6.33 p.m. on 14 November, Emperor Guangxu was pronounced dead by the royal physicians.

  His empress, Longyu, had been with him at the end. They had apparently wept in each other’s arms – embracing as they had so rarely done in nearly twenty years of marriage. During those last hours Empress Longyu was seen rushing between her dying husband and her dying mother-in-law with swollen eyes. After Emperor Guangxu died, she dressed his body. According to court tradition, the finest pearl available must be placed in the emperor’s mouth to accompany him to the next world. Empress Longyu wanted to pluck the pearl from the emperor’s crown, but a eunuch stopped her, saying that they did not have the empress dowager’s permission. So Empress Longyu removed the pearl from her own crown and put it in her dead husband’s mouth.

  Emperor Guangxu died in a bed that was ‘unadorned like an average folk’s’, observed one of the provincial doctors. There was no outer curtain to encircle it, and the footstool on which he stepped to get into it was covered only with a blanket, rather than silk brocade. Doctors and court officials were with him in his final hours, but none of the Grand Councillors was present. His last words were not officially recorded. The Grand Council gathered at Cixi’s bedside while he lay dying, and again after they learned of his death, to hear Cixi make arrangements for the succession. Zaifeng, whom Cixi had been training for years, was designated Regent, and his two-year-old son, Puyi, Cixi’s great-nephew, was named as the successor to the throne. The appointment of the child emperor ensured that the father would take charge as Regent – and furthermore Cixi was able to remain in control for as long as she was alive. Her decree made clear that ‘all key policies are to be decided by myself’. She was determined to hold on to the reins of the empire until her last breath.

  Zaifeng was not the ideal choice, but Cixi regarded him as the best there was. She trusted that he would not deliver China to Japan, and that he could deal with Westerners in a friendly and dignified manner. There were serious limitations about him, of which she was well aware. Once, at a dinner party at the American Legation, he was asked, ‘What does Your Highness think of the relative characteristics of the Germans and the French?’ and he replied, ‘The people in Berlin get up early in the morning and go to their business, while the people in Paris get up in the evening and go to the theatre.’ Clearly he was recycling a cliché.

  Cixi was fading; but she still managed to oversee the myriad things to be done after the passing away of a monarch, including the writing of Emperor Guangxu’s official will, to be announced to the empire. The will referred to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in nine years’ time. This, it declared, was the emperor’s ‘unfulfilled aspiration’, and this, once accomplished, would give him untold joy in the other world.

  A night passed while Cixi dealt with one matter after another, conscious all the time that she had just murdered her adopted son. She was forced to stop working at about eleven o’clock in the morning, as death was imminent. She died less than three hours later.

  A Grand Council secretary drafted Cixi’s own official will according to her wishes, ‘with my hand and heart trembling, everything seeming unreal’, he recorded in his diary. This will recalled her involvement in China’s state affairs for nearly fifty years and her efforts to do what she regarded as her best. It reiterated her determination to transform China into a constitutional monarchy, which, the will stated with much regret, she was now unable to see to completion. The two wills made unmistakably clear that it was Cixi’s dying wish that the Chinese should have their parliament and their vote.

  During the last three hours of her life Cixi’s mind was still restless. She now dictated her very last political decree, one that would seem bizarre to any observer. ‘I am critically ill, and I am afraid I am about to pass away,’ she said, in direct and personal language. ‘In the future, the affairs of the empire will be decided by the Regent. However, if he comes across exceptionally
critical matters, he must obey the dowager empress.’ The ‘dowager empress’ referred to here was Empress Longyu, who had just been given the title on her husband’s death and the appointment of the heir. To stress that the Empress Longyu’s wishes were final, Cixi unusually used the word must in her decree – an apparently redundant term. It was with this added emphasis that Cixi made the fate of the empire ultimately the responsibility of Empress Longyu.

  The empress was by all accounts a pitiable figure. Foreigners who had met her described her as having ‘a sad, gentle face. She is rather stooped, extremely thin, her face long and sallow, and her teeth very much decayed.’ From the day of her wedding, her husband treated her at best with disdain. Kinder-hearted observers found her full of pathos, and the less generous despised her. Rarely venturing a remark on her own initiative, she was accustomed to (and meekly accepted) being denigrated. Mrs Headland, the American physician who frequented the court, remembered, when hearing about her new role:

  At the audiences given to the [foreign] ladies she was always present, but never in the immediate vicinity of either the Empress Dowager or the Emperor . . . she always stood in some inconspicuous place in the rear, with her waiting women about her, and as soon as she could do so without attracting attention, she would withdraw . . . In the summer-time we sometimes saw her with her servants wandering aimlessly about the court. She had the appearance of a gentle, quiet, kindly person who was always afraid of intruding and had no place or part in anything. And now she is the Empress Dowager! It seems a travesty on the English language to call this kindly, gentle soul by the same title that we have been accustomed to use in speaking of the woman who has just passed away.

  The grandees held Empress Longyu in such disregard that no one troubled to inform her of her new title as dowager empress. Fearful of being overlooked, she tentatively asked the Grand Councillors about her status as they gathered in the bedchamber of the now-deceased Cixi, whom she had just been dressing. One Grand Councillor ignored her, pretending he was too deaf to hear what she was saying. When she learned about her new title, Empress Longyu was overjoyed. Although it was her due, she had not dared to expect it. In spite of the fact that it was Cixi who had chosen her as empress, and that she had been attending to Cixi all those years, Cixi had rarely addressed a comment to her and never sought her opinion. And yet Cixi’s last political act was to place the burden of the empire’s destiny on her narrow and bowed shoulders.

  Earlier that year, Cixi was strolling round in the garden of the Forbidden City, contemplating the many Buddhist statues there. Somehow, she felt the statues were not ideally placed and ordered the eunuchs to rearrange them. As the statues were being moved, a large pile of soil was exposed. With a frown, Cixi ordered the soil to be swept away. Head eunuch Lianying went down on his knees and implored her to leave it untouched. The soil had been there for as long as anyone could remember, and the strange thing about it was that it had remained a neat and tidy pile, with not a speck of earth out of place. Birds, it seemed, had never perched on it and the rats and foxes that prowled the palace grounds had evidently avoided it. Word had been handed down for generations that this was a mound of ‘magic earth’, there to protect the great dynasty. Cixi was famously superstitious, but she seemed to be annoyed by this explanation and snapped, ‘What magic earth? Sweep it away.’ As the pile of soil was being levelled, she repeatedly murmured to herself, ‘What about this great dynasty? What about this great dynasty?!’ Listening to her, one eunuch said he and his fellow attendants felt sad: it seemed the empress dowager was expecting that the Qing dynasty was nearing its end.

  Indeed, Empress Dowager Cixi had foreseen that her reforms, drastically changing China, could in the end bury her own dynasty. As long as she lived, the Manchu throne would be secure. But once she was gone, her successor might not have the same strength, and the constitutional monarchy she had tried to create might come to nothing. Chinese and Western observers were already predicting anti-Manchu uprisings after her death. The fate of the Manchu, her own people, preoccupied the empress dowager in her last hours. If Republican uprisings did inundate the empire, the only option for the vastly outnumbered Manchu would have to be surrender, if a bloodbath was to be avoided. Only surrender could save her people – as well as spare the country civil war. She was quite certain that, faced with Republican uprisings, the men at court would choose to defend the dynasty and fight to the death. No man would counsel surrender, even if he wanted to. This is why Cixi gave the decision-making power in such an ‘exceptionally critical’ crisis to Empress Longyu. Cixi could depend on the empress to surrender the dynasty in order to ensure her own survival, as well as that of the Manchu people. Empress Longyu had lived in surrender all her life. She did not care about humiliation and was the ultimate survivor. As a woman, she was also not required to demonstrate macho bravado.

  Cixi’s far sight was borne out exactly three years later, when long-anticipated uprisings and mutinies broke out in 1911. Triggered by a disturbance over the ownership of a railway in Sichuan, and followed by a major mutiny in Wuhan, upheaval spread to a succession of provinces, many of which declared independence from the Qing government. Although these events had no unified leadership, most shared a common goal: to overthrow the Qing dynasty and form a Republic.fn1 Manchu blood began to flow: the reformist Viceroy Duanfang was murdered, and in Xian, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing and other cities Manchu men and women were being slaughtered. The idea of surrender, in the form of abdication by the emperor, was mooted. As Cixi had foreseen, Manchu grandees vehemently resisted, vowing to defend the dynasty to the last man. Again as she had foreseen, the Regent himself also spoke publicly against abdication, even though privately he was in favour. He knew that it was futile to fight (in spite of the substantial support the court still enjoyed), but he did not want to be the person responsible for his dynasty’s downfall. Cixi’s deathbed decree solved this excruciating dilemma. On 6 December, Zaifeng resigned his position as Regent and referred all decisions to Empress Longyu. The empress, gathering the grandees around her,fn2 declared through her tears that she was prepared to take responsibility for ending the dynasty through the abdication of the five-year-old Puyi. ‘All I desire is peace under Heaven,’ she said.

  Thus, on 12 February 1912, Empress Longyu put her name to the Decree of Abdication, which brought the Great Qing, which had ruled for 268 years, to its end, along with more than 2,000 years of absolute monarchy in China. It was Empress Longyu who decreed: ‘On behalf of the emperor, I transfer the right to rule to the whole country, which will now be a constitutional Republic.’ This ‘Great Republic of China will comprise the entire territory of the Qing empire as inhabited by the five ethnic groups, the Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui and Tibetan’. She was placed in this historic role by Cixi. Republicanism was not what Empress Dowager Cixi had hoped for, but it was what she would accept, as it shared the same goal as her wished-for parliamentary monarchy: that the future of China belong to the Chinese people.

  * * *

  fn1 Sun Yat-sen, travelling overseas, was not the leader of the uprisings. But he had been the earliest and most persistent promoter of Republicanism and is rightly seen as the ‘father’ of Republican China.

  fn2 Viceroy Zhang Zhidong was not among them; he had died in 1909.

  Epilogue: China after Empress Dowager Cixi

  Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering. Most importantly, she brought medieval China into the modern age. Under her leadership the country began to acquire virtually all the attributes of a modern state: railways, electricity, telegraph, telephones, Western medicine, a modern-style army and navy, and modern ways of conducting foreign trade and diplomacy. The restrictive millennium-old educational system was discarded and replaced by Western-style schools and universities. The press blossomed, enjoying a freedom that was unprecedented and arguably unsurpassed since. She unlocked the door to political participation: for the first time in China’s long history, people were to becom
e ‘citizens’. It was Cixi who championed women’s liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on its female population – a practice to which she put an end. The fact that her last enterprise before an untimely death was to introduce the vote testifies to her courage and vision. Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval. Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless. A consensus-seeker, always willing to work with people of different views, she led by standing on the right side of history.

  She was a giant, but not a saint. Being the absolute ruler of one-third of the world’s population and the product of medieval China, she was capable of immense ruthlessness. Her military campaigns to regain Xinjiang and to quell armed rebellions were brutal. Her attempts to use the Boxers to fight invaders resulted in large-scale atrocities by the Boxers.

  For all her faults, she was no despot. Compared to that of her predecessors, or successors, Cixi’s rule was benign. In some four decades of absolute power, her political killings – whether just or unjust – which are recorded in this book, were no more than a few dozen, many of them in response to plots to kill her. She was not cruel by nature. As her life was ending, her thoughts were about how best to prevent bloody civil war and massacres of the Manchu people, whose survival she ensured by sacrificing her dynasty.