by Huan Hsu
My POOR GRASP OF MY FAMILY ROOTS AND THE CHINESE language paled in comparison to my cultural illiteracy. I didn’t know the difference between a Mongolian and a Manchurian, ancestries that my father’s side of the family claimed, or between the Ming and Qing dynasties (the last two Chinese dynasties, which ruled from 1368 to 1912), or Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Zemin, whose Chinese pronunciations sounded nothing like their English transliterations. Though my parents often mentioned that I shared a birthday with Sun Yat-sen, I had no idea who he was, or why my parents and their friends from Taiwan always discussed the Kuomintang with such stridency at dinner parties, until I encountered them in a high school history book.
By the time I got to China, I sought to become more informed. But those “five thousand years of history” that modern Chinese loved to boast about remained for me as impenetrable as it was long. I knew that China defied easy explanation, and I had a general idea of its primacy in world history—the Chinese had a claim to several of the most important scientific and technological inventions in recent human existence—but these glories glinted like stars in a constellation I couldn’t decipher. Even the basic primers on Chinese history that I got from a teacher at the SMIC school left me cross-eyed with confusion.
So instead of trying to take the whole of Chinese history in one gulp, I picked at its edges until a thread separated—my family. Then I pinched it between my fingertips and started pulling.
MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER Liu Feng Shu was born in the Yangtze River town of Xingang, in the Jiujiang countryside, in 1867, the Ding—or fourth, according to the Chinese sexagenary cycle—year of the Qing dynasty emperor Tongzhi’s impotent reign. Gone were the days of wealth and territorial expansion. The Opium Wars had bankrupted and humiliated the country, civil order was undermined by a corrupt and antiquated bureaucracy, and the reckless rule of Empress Cixi had alerted the Chinese to the shortcomings of their culture and left them in the mood for rebellion. Despite the turmoil, the imperial examination system remained in place, a thirteen-hundred-year-old tradition that rewarded those who passed the grueling three-day test with positions in the government—possibly even inside the Forbidden City—regardless of family wealth or pedigree. The test was open to all, and even in the Qings’ waning days, becoming a scholar-bureaucrat secured one’s social and financial standing, so Liu’s father, a laborer, put everything he could spare toward his sons’ schooling at a local sishu, or private academy.
The network of sishus, heterogeneous, unregulated, and run by scholarly tutors in rural and urban areas alike, provided the bulk of primary education in China, imparting basic knowledge and Confucian morality. For most, a sishu offered the opportunity to encounter Chinese classics and achieve rudimentary literacy. For the few who could afford to study beyond the basic primers—parents paid tuition in cash or in kind—they were the first step toward possibly passing the imperial civil service examinations.
After ten years of study, Liu traveled to the county seat of Jiujiang for the annual county-level examination, carrying a basket with a water container, a chamber pot, his bedding, food, an inkstone, ink, and writing brushes. Guards patrolled the walled examination compound, in which hundreds of wooden huts—one per test taker—were set out in rows, and they searched each of the hopefuls for hidden papers before allowing them into their cells, furnished only with two boards that could be fashioned into a bed or desk and chair. There were no age or retake limits for prospective candidates, who ranged from precocious teenagers to stubborn elderly men. After the exam was distributed, a cannon sounded, and Liu started writing: eight-part essays on ancient texts, poems in rhymed verse, and opinions on past and present government policies. For three days, the only interruptions came from the proctors stopping in to mark and authenticate his progress with red stamps.
Liu received the second-highest score in the county and earned the title of xiucai, or “cultivated talent.” Those who passed the exam won the right to take the triennial provincial-level exam, after which a certain number would earn a place in the government. But because of Liu’s score, he was immediately offered a minor local post. Mindful of the reputation of Qing bureaucrats, as well as the tenuousness of the government, he declined. “I’m poor now, and if I accept this ‘little official’ position, I’ll remain that way,” he said. “And I won’t participate in corruption—I want to be able to feel the breeze through my sleeves. Just let me go home.”
The bureaucrats urged him to reconsider. He came from a poor family, with just a speck of land to his name. Did he really want to spend the rest of his life plowing with a writing brush? But Liu, a strict Confucian, figured that an overeducated man in the fields was still more virtuous than a cultured one taking bribes. He returned to Xingang and started his own sishu, where he became known for reducing or waiving fees for especially bright students. Just about every male in the village received some kind of training from my great-great-grandfather. “If you don’t go to school, you have no prospects,” he liked to say. “So go to school.”
He was a good teacher, and his sishu was highly recommended. He made a name for himself as a traveling scholar in the Yangtze delta cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou, where wealthy merchants paid him handsomely as a private tutor for their children. His income allowed him to chi chuan bu chou, or not have to worry about his food or clothing, which qualified as an comfortable life back then. He invested the rest of his money in land, accumulating a hundred acres in Xingang, on which sharecroppers raised wheat, barley, millet, sesame, and other grains. He also bought up most of the paddies in the Poyang floodplain, where they alternated rice and vegetable plantings. Between the two harvests, they grew rapeseed, and each autumn the blossoms covered the countryside with a blanket of gold, interrupted occasionally by the whitewashed walls and curved tiled roof of a Buddhist temple. Most families split the harvests fifty-fifty, but Liu kept only four bushels out of every ten, giving the remainder to the farmers, reasoning that they were the ones bearing the expenses and putting in the labor. Besides, his land, in concert with the river, lakes, and orchards of persimmons, sweet-tart loquats, crispy jujubes, yellow plums, and sugary “southern wind” oranges, already provided all the food he could eat, trade, or sell. As word of Liu Da Xian Sheng’s, or “Lord Liu’s,” generosity spread, sharecroppers flocked to work his land. His prosperity grew in a liang xing xun huan, a virtuous cycle.
Meanwhile the country verged on collapse. Much of China’s recorded history consisted of various peoples fighting for, conquering, and—because the territory persistently proved too amorphous and difficult to govern—abdicating control of parts of it or its entirety. Throughout the upheavals, an ambient continuity managed to survive. Cities rose and burned, and their importance waxed and waned, but they remained cities. Sacred places were revered, ignored, and then rediscovered and rehabilitated. Material possessions made of jade, ivory, wood, stone, and porcelain long outlived their makers, and royal collections of art and antiques were often subsumed and added to by newly victorious rulers. The imperial civil service exam, a thread of meritocracy that stitched together half a dozen dynasties, offered a pathway for all qualified men to make generational changes to their socioeconomic standings. The entire country was a palimpsest over which each successive regime had written a different legend, and for almost all of the oft-mentioned five thousand years of China’s recorded history, those former iterations simply receded underground, one stratum at a time, a slow accretion of something that, over the millennia, formed not just Chinese history but also Chinese culture.
Under the Qing, a Manchu people from the north, China reached its zenith of social, cultural, military, and economic power in the eighteenth century. This golden age spanned the reigns of three emperors, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, who, while not above the brutality, depravity, or immorality of their time, continue to be held up as the standard for effectiveness. By Qianlong’s rule, the Qing had consolidated double the territory the Ming had governed, including all of Mo
ngolia and parts of Russia. Despite being foreign occupiers, the Qing became increasingly sinicized, and Qianlong anointed himself the preserver of Chinese culture and history. He was a ravenous collector of objects and penner of poems and was known to travel with paintings so that he could compare them to the actual landscapes. He closely supervised the imperial porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen and compelled artisans to impress him. As a result, the kilns made great leaps in creativity and technology during his reign.
Despite its reputation as insular and xenophobic, China had regular contact with outsiders and accepted foreign trade as an inevitability. Jesuit missionaries from across western Europe were fixtures in Kangxi’s court, serving as translators, scientific advisers, and cartographers. Qianlong also employed them as painters, musicians, and architects—so frequently that some complained of not having time for missionary work. As Qianlong became fascinated with exotic buildings, he commissioned Giuseppe Castiglione, a Jesuit missionary-cum-artist, to the Qing court, to design the Western-style mansions in Beijing’s Yuan Ming Yuan, or “garden of perfect brightness,” made of stone instead of wood, the Chinese building material of choice. The general manager of Beijing’s famed glass factory was a missionary, tasked with producing scientific instruments. The technique of painting on glazed porcelain, or famille rose, developed from European enamel technology.
Chinese porcelain, tea, and silk commanded top prices, paid for by silver, and by the eighteenth century China had become known as the world’s silver repository. But as foreign countries saw their treasuries dwindle in the procurement of these exotic goods, they sought schemes to equalize trade with China. One such scheme was addicting the Chinese to opium. The Qing court allowed for the importation of opium by the British, as it generated tax revenue, but it restricted the trade to the port of Guangzhou (known then as Canton), conducted through Chinese merchants instead of directly with the general population, and only during a certain season—terms that chafed the British, whose belief in their heavenly mandate surpassed even that of the Chinese.
This uneasy accord frayed as the Qing government grew alarmed about more and more of its population falling prey to the drug. The Daoguang emperor, Qianlong’s grandson, appointed Lin Zexu, a principled scholar-bureaucrat, as the governor of Guangzhou with an edict to stem the flow of opium into the country. Lin launched an aggressive campaign against the trade, arresting thousands of Chinese opium dealers and confiscating tens of thousands of opium pipes. When British merchants refused to halt shipments into Guangzhou, he blockaded them in the designated enclave for foreign traders and cut off their food supplies. After a month-long standoff, the British turned over more than two million pounds of opium—approximately a year’s supply—which Lin destroyed and threw into the sea. Lin also led expeditions onto ships at sea to seize crates of opium.
When Britain learned of the situation in Guangzhou, it demanded compensation for the destroyed merchandise and better trade terms. Over the following months, tensions escalated to the point that in 1839 the British foreign secretary finally declared war on China. It was too much to bear for the Qing, which had already begun to decline at the end of Qianlong’s reign. In this First Opium War, British gunboats operating with steam engines and modern firearms decimated the rickety Chinese defenses; China, despite having invented gunpowder, had failed to weaponize it with the same sophistication. The Qing court quickly capitulated and agreed to cede Hong Kong to the British, pay an indemnity, and open five ports to trade of all kinds, through which foreign missionaries flowed along with the goods and currency. Lin Zexu was the scapegoat and exiled to the country’s remote northwest.
Palace intrigue was as constant in Chinese history as change and was often the source of that change. In the latter part of his reign, Qianlong, for all his wisdom, had divested many of his responsibilities and much of his decision-making to a man named Heshen. Heshen was said to have come from a family of some means, though his education did not result in any imperial degrees, and he first went to the Forbidden City to serve as a guardsman. There he encountered Qianlong and within just a few years was promoted up through the most important positions in the imperial government, ultimately being appointed the grand secretary, the highest post in the government and akin to prime minister.
How Heshen attained such power and the favor of Qianlong, a man forty years his senior, was an enduring mystery. According to one legend, probably created by Qianlong’s critics, the pale, feminine Heshen reminded the emperor of his first lover, a concubine of his father, Yongzheng. In some tellings, Qianlong and Heshen also became lovers. In others, the old emperor, already mentally insolvent with age, was inexplicably taken with Heshen and showered him with affection and confidence, especially when Heshen’s son married one of Qianlong’s favorite daughters.
Whatever the case, Heshen took full advantage of his lofty perch. He filled the bureaucracy with family members and henchmen, and they stole and extorted public funds on a grand scale for more than two decades. Although Heshen’s clique was not the only corrupt one, it was one of the most powerful and, because of his most-favored status with the emperor, could act with impunity. Even when Qianlong abdicated his throne so as not to serve longer than his revered grandfather, Kangxi, Heshen remained the de facto ruler, and his rivals—even Qianlong’s son, Emperor Jiaqing—were powerless to stop him. It wasn’t until Qianlong died that Jiaqing, a progressive ruler facing the unenviable task of reforming a nearly bankrupt country wracked with rebellion, could finally prosecute Heshen and his cronies, and Heshen was forced to commit suicide.
So the Opium War wasn’t the sole event that precipitated the collapse of the Qing empire, but it was the most prominent in the narrative that the Chinese had of their country, containing all the ingredients—a foreign incursion overpowering righteous Chinese martyrs—to deflect attention from the self-inflicted wounds, discourage self-examination, and stoke nationalism at the same time.
The Qing court also had to contend with threats outside the palace walls. After the Opium War, a failed imperial examination candidate in southern China happened to read a Christian missionary tract. After digesting the ideas of divine creation and salvation, spiritual warfare, and the apocalypse, he claimed to have received a vision from God anointing him as “the true ordained son of Heaven,” arming him with a “golden seal and sword,” and instructing him to descend to the world to enlighten and save its people. This man, Hong Xiuquan, baptized himself one night in his courtyard and set out to preach his homegrown, warped version of charismatic Christianity. Hong traveled the countryside, attracting the disaffected and disillusioned and sowing the seeds for revolt.
By 1850 Hong had accumulated enough followers to earn the attention of the Qing court. The attempts to suppress him and his sect—which he dubbed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom—grew into a conflagration that lasted fourteen years, claimed thirty million lives, and required a multinational force to extinguish. At its height, the Taiping had more than one million followers and conquered much of central and southern China, including the Ming capital of Nanjing, where they dynamited its famed porcelain tower and slaughtered forty thousand Manchu “demons” within the city walls.
Meanwhile the Qing had backslid on concessions from the Opium War. Foreign powers—foremost the British—sought even more expansive trade opportunities in China and responded to China’s diplomatic missteps with gunboats, sparking a second Opium War in 1856. The Qing court, preoccupied with fighting the Taiping, could muster little defense and made further concessions, opening more treaty ports, including one in Taiwan, allowing for foreign embassies in Beijing, and permitting unrestricted travel on the Yangtze River and in the Chinese interior. In the war’s final act, the Imperial Gardens were destroyed as reprisals for the imprisonment, torture, and execution of a British envoy and his entourage. Over three days, French and British troops burned and looted the grounds, which contained countless masterpieces of Chinese art and antiquities dating back to the very first Chi
nese dynasties, as well as literary works and records. A royal engineer who was part of the British forces wrote:
We went out, and, after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a vandal-like manner most valuable property which [could] not be replaced for four millions. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.
Only the stone structures of Castiglione’s Western-style villas survived. This complex of palaces had been five times the size of the Forbidden City and is regarded as one of the most magnificent lost treasures in history. A full accounting of the destroyed and stolen artifacts was never completed, as many of the records burned with the buildings; but many of the imperial objects—especially porcelains, which the foreign armies targeted—in Western museums and collections and circulating on the auction market today originated from those sackings, a cultural disaster that still resonates with the Chinese.
As the Qing tried to restore its empire, complicated by other rebellions, plagues, and disease, some progressive statesmen sought to modernize China. These “self-strengtheners” advanced frameworks for the country to adopt Western weaponry and military technology, incorporate modern science, and develop diplomatic strategies. The vision for a reformed China—boasting a healthy mix of traditional Chinese elements with Western ideas and technology—was there. Now it just needed the support of a strong central government to make it a reality.
But inside the Forbidden City, palace intrigues continued. This time it was a concubine—with whom all Chinese rulers consorted except for one, the Ming emperor Hongzhi—at the center, an exceptionally ambitious one who managed to attain real power. Cixi was the mother of all dragon ladies, born to an official family in Anhui, and who journeyed to Beijing as a teenager where she was selected as a concubine for Qianlong’s great-grandson, Xianfeng. Concubines were segmented into ranks, which determined the allotments of food, clothing, jewelry, cash stipends, and handmaidens they received. Cixi entered the palace as a low-rank concubine but ascended quickly after giving birth to Xianfeng’s only son, and when the child reached his first birthday, she was elevated to the second rank, with only the empress above her.