by Huan Hsu
Xianfeng died shortly after the Second Opium War. Eight ministers were appointed to advise his heir, five-year-old Tongzhi, and Cixi was elevated to empress dowager with the expectation that she and the empress would cooperatively help the young emperor as he matured. But Cixi had by then gained a firm grasp of court machinations and quickly maneuvered to consolidate power. Following the coup, and after executing “only” three of the appointed ministers, Cixi issued an imperial edict affirming her as the sole decision maker.
Tongzhi remained the nominal emperor, but Cixi ruled from “behind the curtain,” as she would for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. Tongzhi was an unhappy, stifled young man who died at age nineteen, officially of smallpox, possibly of syphilis. His consort died a few months later, either by committing suicide or because Cixi had starved her to death. She was rumored to have been pregnant with Tongzhi’s son at the time. With no heir apparent, Cixi installed her nephew, Guangxu, as the new emperor.
For many Chinese, Cixi’s legacy, beyond her overprotectiveness, vindictiveness, xenophobia, and paranoia, was excess. Instead of imposing austerity while the government battled the Taiping and other existential crises, she oversaw the production of vast amounts of brightly colored porcelain from the imperial kilns for personal use. To commemorate each of her fiftieth, sixtieth, and seventieth birthdays, she commissioned dinnerware sets and matching boxes. Unsatisfied with her tomb, she ordered it reconstructed from scratch during the First Sino-Japanese War. She was said to have diverted funds designated for modernizing China’s outdated navy—which had been embarrassed again and again in engagements with foreign forces—to pay for the renovation and expansion of the Summer Palace, which became her personal retreat.
FAR REMOVED FROM BEIJING, Liu built the finest residence in Xingang, a sprawling complex of stone buildings arranged around a courtyard and encircled by a brick wall. The estate fronted the dirt road to Jiujiang and featured three pine trees, traditional symbols of longevity, friendship, and steadfastness, under which Liu often set out a bucket of cool water and jars of herbal medicine for travelers resting in the shade during the sweltering summers.
He married the daughter of a rich peasant family that had made its money selling Yangtze River fish. The Yangtze was full of fish back then, shad and herring and Chinese sturgeon, an ancient species that grew to more than ten feet long and a thousand pounds and is now nearly extinct. Each spring fish migrated up the river past Jiangxi to lay their eggs. The fertilized eggs hatched as they floated back down the river. By the time the fry reached Jiujiang, they were transparent needles, and the patriarch of the Yao clan went out around the fifth day of the fifth lunar month and collected these fry, which he sold to buyers from all over the country. His business grew until it became an area industry, but the man remained so thrifty that he would eat three bites of rice for every piece of salted black bean.
Liu became the benevolent dictator of Xingang. In addition to his teaching and land holding, he employed villagers, doled out extra bushels when they were hungry, acted as their legal representative, mediated their disputes, wrote correspondences for the illiterate, loaned money, and forgave the debts as often as he collected them. A skilled calligrapher, he wrote scrolls or proclamations for villagers without charge during the Lunar New Year. He was an expert with an abacus and helped merchants and shopkeepers with their accounting. Having trained himself in traditional Chinese medicine, he also served as the village doctor.
Every morning, after he finished his breakfast, Liu paid a visit to the Shi family’s general store to pick up his newspapers or check for mail. Then he might receive an audience of villagers in need of dispensation or adjudication. Or he took a stroll to inspect land for sale. One reason rural families had difficulty preserving their wealth from one generation to the next, aside from the gambling, disease, and drug addiction that stalked the countryside, was the inheritance system that split land evenly among the heirs. Over a few generations, even the largest properties were eventually parceled into insignificance, if they weren’t sold off to feed the heirs’ vices. Liu would then make his way into the village to spend the afternoon chatting with other elders, reading, or leisurely attending to the matters of a man with culture and means. He would return home to rest before dinner. His favorite meal was an oily combination of salted, pickled spinach with meat, steamed all day until it practically melted.
His wife bore him three sons—whom he named Ting Zan, Ting Geng, and Ting Gong; one meaning for the generation name of Ting was “Palace Courtyard”—and three daughters. The birth order of the first two daughters, as well as their birth dates, is lost to history. In those days, women seldom even had names, and Liu’s wife would have gone by her nickname or kinship term with family members or Lady or Madam Liu with others. Through a matchmaker, Liu arranged a marriage for his eldest daughter according to the tenet of men dang hu dui, harmony in social position and economic class. But the matchmaker failed to disclose that the prospective husband was a widower. When Liu’s daughter moved into her new home, she learned that she was the stepmother, which carried a terrible stigma. A widely circulated folk song, often the first one a child would hear, illustrated the disappointment of being or having a stepmother:
O Little Cabbage that withers in the fields,
I lost my mother at the age of three.
Living with father is still an easy time,
But I fear he will marry a stepmother.
Three years after he finds a stepmother,
Stepmother gives birth to a little boy.
Little brother is more fortunate than me,
He eats dumplings but I only drink the soup.
When I hold the bowl I think of mother,
And when I think of mother, I cry.
Stepmother asks why I’m crying,
And I say the soup is too hot.
The daughter fell into a depression and died young. The middle Liu daughter was sent to a family of farmers as a tong yang xi, a child bride who was adopted into a family who either had a son or hoped to have one soon and then raised her as a future daughter-in-law; the arrangement subtracted one less mouth to feed from Liu’s ledger and demonstrated both the value of women at the time and Liu’s thriftiness. Liu’s youngest daughter had the benefit of being born much later, in 1910, just one year before my grandmother, when attitudes toward women had begun to change. She received a name—Ting Yi—and tagged along with Liu to his sishu every day, studying readers for girls while the boys learned Confucian classics.
In the tradition of Chinese scholar-gentry, Liu patronized the arts and collected porcelain by the crate. Jiujiang was the customs port that processed rice, tea grown on nearly Lushan (shan meaning “mountain”), and ceramics from Jingdezhen. Whether imperial pieces destined for the Forbidden City or export ware headed to a Victorian porcelain room, it all moved through small waterways from the kilns to Poyang Lake, then to Jiujiang, the gateway to the Yangtze, and the daily boats from Jingdezhen always seemed to have something for my great-great-grandfather. Flower vases with mottled, running red glaze. Cylindrical hat stands. Fine handmade figurines of countryside characters or Buddhist gods. Painted tiles of Chinese landscapes in different seasons. Blue and white jars for storing pickled vegetables or tofu. Tea sets, vases, decorative plates, and tableware. Visitors heaped gifts of porcelain on my great-great-grandfather. When a boat loaded with Jingdezhen porcelain sank near the docks, he bought up what the locals scavenged out of the river. The relative who worked in Jingdezhen during the tail end of the Qing dynasty brought crates of porcelain home with him to Xingang every Lunar New Year. And his subordinates were only too happy to curry favor with him by slipping him imperial pieces. It was illegal, but by then the Qing court had more pressing matters.
ON THE HEELS of the Opium Wars came the Qing’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, fought from 1894 to 1895 over control of Korea. China had historically dismissed the Japanese as a regional player, but while the Qing
government was too busy stealing and squabbling with itself to devise a coherent and long-term foreign policy, Japan had reacted to its own brush with gunboat diplomacy, courtesy of the Americans, by industrializing and Westernizing at a torrid pace. The war was one-sided, the outmatched Chinese navy was once again decimated, and the Japanese won Taiwan as a concession.
Cixi had since named her nephew, Guangxu, as emperor. Although dominated by Cixi, Guangxu was a bright, curious young man with an open mind about international affairs, perhaps owing to his boyhood fascination with Western technologies like watches, clocks, and bicycles. The revelation that China was far less developed than its perceived subordinate—Japan boasted more railroads and telegraph lines than all of China—compelled Guangxu to make real the reforms that the progressive ministers in the court had been waiting for.
Guangxu issued a series of decrees intended to transform China into a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Meiji Japan, establish a Western university system, invest in infrastructure, and perhaps most controversially, overhaul the imperial civil service exam, by which nearly every official in the Qing court had attained his position. These edicts became known as the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, for the amount of time (technically 104 days) that passed before Cixi, who had ostensibly “retired” but sensed a threat to her kleptocracy, staged a military coup, placed Guangxu under house arrest, and exiled or executed most of his supporters. Guangxu spent the next decade of his life in a small, isolated palace in the Forbidden City tinkering with clocks and watches and waiting for Cixi’s death, after which he hoped to be restored as emperor.
In response to the series of indignities suffered at the hands of foreign powers, an ultranationalist movement sprouted in China, and with the twentieth century came the Boxer Uprising. The Boxers were disenfranchised peasants upset by the same social ills as the Taiping—economic desperation, the scourge of opium, a corrupt and self-interested government—and, like the Taiping, subscribed to a millennial outlook. In the decades since the First Opium War, foreign powers had forced the Chinese into importing opium, accepting unequal treaties, tolerating the dissemination of the alien religion of Christianity, and granting extraterritorial rights to their citizens when on Chinese soil; the country was perilously close to becoming formally colonized. The Boxers blamed the Qing, which skillfully deflected the fury toward Westerners. Boxers subsequently attacked foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians, whom they viewed as traitors, and burned churches and cathedrals. They stormed through the countryside and eventually marched on Beijing, besieging the legation quarter that housed foreign embassies.
The moderates in the Qing court opposed going to war with the foreigners, but Cixi overruled them and backed the Boxers. The fighting in Beijing lasted just one summer, during which the royal family evacuated inland to Xi’an, one of China’s ancient capitals, under the pretense of an “inspection tour.” When the Boxers were finally suppressed by an alliance of military forces from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, the country paid for it. Foreign forces occupied cities in northern China for more than a year, carrying out reprisal killings, raping, and collecting indemnities. Soldiers, diplomats, and even missionaries participated in what one writer called “an orgy of looting”; it was such a gold rush that an American church worker was even arrested by French troops for beating them to the punch in one village. The Imperial Gardens were pillaged and destroyed again. On top of it all, the Qing government was forced to execute some of its own ministers and pay yet another massive indemnity.
When Cixi returned to Beijing, she seemed to realize that the foreigners could neither be ignored nor repelled and finally enacted sweeping political reforms, many of which were more progressive than those suggested by the ministers she had eliminated just a few years before. Guangxu never reclaimed his throne. He died young and heirless, at thirty-seven and under mysterious circumstances. One theory was that Cixi, herself in failing health but still determined to dictate the terms of succession, had him poisoned. Cixi died the following day, just hours after installing Guangxu’s two-year-old nephew, Puyi, as the new—and famously last—emperor. By then it was too late for the Qing. In 1911, the country revolted, and the following year the emperor was forced to abdicate, bringing an end to feudal China.
THOUGH BORN DURING Tongzhi’s reign, Liu had come of age during the struggle between Guangxu’s progressiveness and Cixi’s conservatism, and someone of his intelligence could plainly see that Cixi’s muzzling of Guangxu was only delaying the inevitable. It might have been while he was working in the cosmopolitan Yangtze delta that he took good stock of the direction China was moving. Or perhaps it was living near a port city, where the locals liked to say they resembled the wandering Yangtze, their minds flexible and curious, perpetually moving and reshaping the landscape, bringing in new goods, people, and ideas. When Liu considered the fragility of the Qing regime and the waves of Western education, technology, and infrastructure that appeared to be as endless and unyielding as the tides, he must have concluded that Western educations, not the traditional Chinese schooling he received, would confer the greatest advantages to his three sons.
Likewise, China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War finally forced the Qing to acknowledge the importance of modernization, and railroads in particular. The Chinese had always been skeptical of railways, considering them eyesores that upset feng shui, brought far more nuisances than benefits, threatened the livelihoods of canal porters and ferrymen, and potentially provided access to invaders. The first rail line in China opened in the 1860s, connecting the American concession of Shanghai with Wusong, fourteen miles up the Suzhou River and now a district of the megalopolis; it was promptly closed after a train struck a local Chinese. The railroad reopened briefly in 1877, but the Qing government considered it a blight. At the time of the First Sino-Japanese War, China had only 370 miles of track.
But as Herbert Giles, the British diplomat and sinologist who developed the Wade-Giles romanization system that was the standard for transliteration until the mid-twentieth century, observed, “The Chinese, who are extraordinarily averse to novelties, and can hardly be induced to consider any innovations, when once convinced of their real utility, waste no further time in securing to themselves all the advantages which may accrue.” The Chinese also rejected the telegraph at first, partly because of similar feng shui concerns, but mostly because they didn’t believe such an invention had any real benefits. But once they learned that some wily Cantonese (a persistent regional Chinese stereotype) had enriched themselves by hearing the results of the triennial imperial exam in Beijing via telegraph weeks before everyone else, and then buying all the lottery tickets with the names of the top graduates, opposition to the telegraph crumbled. After that, Giles wrote, “the only question with many of the literati was whether, at some remote date, the Chinese had not invented telegraphy themselves.” And so it was that after rail lines helped move troops to quell the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing realized the utility of railways, and they expanded accordingly. By 1905, when Liu’s eldest son, Ting Zan, my grandmother’s father, was a teenager, China’s rail network had grown to more than three thousand miles of track.
Around the same time the Qing established the first modern institutions of higher learning in China, modeled after American and European universities, staffed with foreign faculty, and intended to close the scientific and technological gap between China and the West. To supply the expanding railways with trained engineers and managers, specialized colleges were created. With all the money flowing into railroads, my great-great-grandfather must have pegged it for a growth industry and had his two eldest sons, Ting Zan and Ting Geng, tested into the railway institute in the provincial capital of Nanchang, where they studied engineering.
Liu sent his youngest boy, Ting Gong, off to St. John’s University in Shanghai, an elite school tucked into a bend of the Suzhou River. St. John’s was registered as an American u
niversity, making it easier for graduates to pursue master’s or doctorate degrees in the United States, which attracted children from China’s most prominent and wealthy families. Upon graduating from the railway college, Ting Zan took a job managing the construction of a new rail line connecting Jiujiang and Nanchang, while Ting Geng went to work as a civil engineer for the provincial transportation ministry. Ting Gong, who majored in English and Latin at St. John’s, accepted a position teaching at the medical school in Nanchang.
Liu’s hunch was proven right in 1905, when the Qing government abolished the imperial civil service exam system for good, a cataclysm that removed one of the pillars of Chinese society and the only surefire, democratic avenue for class mobility. Having an imperial degree was still respected, but those who had studied at Western institutions or overseas became the new elite. The men returning to China with degrees from Harvard or Oxford—these were the ones that Liu’s crowd wanted to marry their girls to, and they weren’t looking for women with bound feet, a barbaric practice that became even more retrograde in this light. They sought educated women who could speak English, whom they could talk to, and who could accompany them abroad.
Liu arranged all the marriages for his sons, pairing them with prominent families in the area according to men dang du hui. The two families would meet with a soothsayer, who considered the birth years, months, days, and hours of the bride and groom and decided on the most auspicious date for the wedding. On the wedding day, the groom arrived at the bride’s house on a sedan carried by eight porters (less wealthy families used four-man sedans). The bride’s family would meet the sedan with her dowry ready. Ten men carried dozens of pairs of shoes for her and her husband (once a girl got engaged, she spent most of her idle time making shoes, and by the time of the wedding, she was practically drowning in them), wooden pans for washing feet, night pots, trunks containing blankets and pillows, and money for the groom’s brothers. The bride’s family cried as the sedan approached, the louder the better. Sometimes the family would pay others to join in the crying. With the sedan in front of the house, the bride was carried on the back of a male relative—she wasn’t allowed to touch the ground lest she walk off with the family’s good luck. After she entered the sedan, the doors locked, and they only unlocked once they reached the groom’s house.