Empress Orchid

by Anchee Min

  “Yehonala.” Nuharoo put down her cup and wiped her mouth lightly with the tip of her handkerchief. “You have been worrying for the wrong reason. I am not coming to demand Emperor Hsien Feng back.” She got up and took my hands in hers. “I have come for two matters. First, of course, is to congratulate you.”

  A small voice spoke inside my head: Nuharoo, you can’t possibly have come to thank me for taking Hsien Feng away. I don’t believe you are sincere.

  As if reading my mind, Nuharoo nodded. “I am happy for you and for myself.”

  In accordance with etiquette, I thanked her. But my expression betrayed me. I fear it said, I don’t believe you, a sentiment she may have detected but to which she chose not to respond.

  “You see, my sister,” Nuharoo’s voice was gentle and soft, “in my position as the Empress, my concern is broader than you might imagine. I was taught that once I entered the palace, I would not only be married to His Majesty, but also to the entire Imperial society. The dynasty’s welfare is my only concern. It is my duty to see my husband live to meet his obligations. And one such obligation is to produce as many heirs as possible.” She paused, and said with her eyes, Yehonala, can you see now that I have come to thank you?

  I bowed to her. I believed that she was conducting this act out of pain. I should offer her, if nothing else, words of understanding.

  As if knowing what I was going to say, she raised her right hand. “The second matter of my visit is to tell you the news that Lady Yun has given birth.”

  “She has? How … wonderful!”

  “It is a girl.” Nuharoo sighed. “And the court is disappointed. So is the Grand Empress. I have been feeling sorry for Lady Yun, but sorrier for myself. I haven’t been granted fortune by Heaven to conceive a child.” Moisture filled her eyes and she took out her handkerchief and began to dab.

  “Well, there is time.” I comforted her, took her hand. “After all, the Emperor has been married just a year.”

  “That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been offered women since his teens. By Hsien Feng’s age, twenty-two, Emperor Tao Kuang had produced seventeen children. What concerns me”—she looked around and made a gesture to dismiss the eunuchs—“is that His Majesty has been impotent. This is not just my experience, but Lady Li’s, Mei’s and Hui’s as well. I don’t know what you have experienced. Would you tell me?” She looked at me eagerly, and I sensed that she wouldn’t desist until her curiosity was satisfied.

  I didn’t want to share what had happened, so I nodded in silent confirmation of the Emperor’s condition.

  Relieved, Nuharoo leaned back. “If the Emperor remains son-less, it will be my responsibility and misfortune. I can’t imagine the throne being passed on to a different clan because of that. It would be a disaster for both of us.” She let go of my hand and stood up. “I would like to count on you to bear His Majesty an heir, Yehonala.”

  I found myself unwilling to trust her words. On the one hand, she wanted to be who she would like to be—an empress who would go down in history as a woman of virtue. On the other hand, she couldn’t hide her relief when she found out that Emperor Hsien Feng had been impotent when with me. What would have happened if I had told the truth?

  The night after Nuharoo’s visit I had a series of nightmares. In the morning An-te-hai woke me up with terrible news. “Snow, my lady—your cat has disappeared!”

  Eleven

  I TOLD Emperor Hsien Feng about Snow’s disappearance and that I had been unable to solve the mystery. “Get another one” was his response. I revealed the incident to him only after I found myself too anxious to comply with his request that I sing for him.

  “It can’t be Nuharoo,” he said. “She may not be terribly intelligent, but she is not the vicious type.”

  I agreed with him. More than once Nuharoo had surprised me with her remarks or behavior. After an audience the week before, the Emperor told us that a large portion of the country was in the midst of a serious drought. People in the provinces of Hupeh, Hunan and Anhwei were dying of starvation.

  “Four thousand new deaths since winter.” His Majesty paced back and forth between the standing basin and the throne. “Four thousand! What else can I do besides order the beheading of the governors? The peasants have begun looting and robbing. Soon it will be a nationwide uprising.”

  Nuharoo removed her necklace and bracelets and took down her hairpins. “Your Majesty, they are yours from now on. Auction them off so the peasants can eat.” She spoke with a noble glow on her face.

  I could tell that Hsien Feng didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He asked Nuharoo to take back her belongings. Then he turned to me. “What would you do if you were me?”

  I recalled an idea I once heard my father discussing with his friends. “I would raise taxes on the rich landlords, merchants and government officials. I would tell them that this is an emergency and the country needs their support.”

  Although Emperor Hsien Feng didn’t praise my suggestion in front of Nuharoo, he rewarded me later. That night we had a long conversation. He said that he felt blessed by his ancestors to have a concubine who was not only beautiful but intelligent. I was thrilled, although a little shy. I decided that I must work to live up to His Majesty’s praise.

  That night was the first night I didn’t have to perform the fan dance.

  We sat in bed and talked. His Majesty spoke about his mother, and I my father. We shed tears together. He asked what I remembered most about my life as a child in the country. I told him about an experience that changed my view of peasants. When I was eleven, I participated in an event organized by my father, the taotai, to rescue the crops from locust infestation.

  “The summer was hot and damp,” I recalled. “Green stretched as far as the eye could see. The crops were waist high. The rice, wheat and millet were fattening up day by day. The harvest was fingers away. My father was happy, because he knew if everything went smoothly until the crops were harvested, the peasants living in almost five hundred villages would be able to survive the year.”

  Then came the sound of swarming locusts. They descended when the crops began to mature. Overnight the entire region was infested. It was as if they had come from the clouds or from deep within the earth. These brown cousins of crickets had two tiny shell-like drums close to their wings. When the wings flapped against the drums, it sounded like fingers tapping on tin. The pests came in dark clouds that blotted out the sun. They swarmed over the crops and chewed up the leaves with teeth like saws. In a few days fields of green disappeared.

  My father gathered all of his men to help the villagers fight the locusts. People took off their shoes and beat the locusts with them. My father saw the futility of this and switched tactics.

  He declared a state of emergency and told the peasants to dig trenches. He placed people in the path of the locusts as they moved through the crops. When a trench was ready, my father ordered one group of peasants to chase the locusts. “Hold up your clothes and wave,” he said. The idea was to push the locusts toward the trench, while another group lined up behind the trench, which was piled high with dry straw.

  Thousands of people waved and shouted at the top of their lungs, and I was one of them. We chased the locusts into the trench. Once they were in, my father ordered the straw to be lit. The locusts were roasted. I beat at the locusts as fast as I could to prevent them from flying away. We fought for five days and nights and were able to save half our crops. By the time my father pronounced victory, he was covered with locusts and their broken shells. I even picked locusts out of his pockets.

  Emperor Hsien Feng listened to me with fascination. He said that he could imagine my father. He wished that he had known the man.

  The next day I was ordered to move in with His Majesty. I would stay with him for the rest of the year. He put me in a compound connected to the audience hall, and he came to me during breaks and between audiences.

  I dared not wish for my good fortune to last forever. I tried hard
not to expect anything. But deep down I desired to keep what I had sprouted.

  When Emperor Hsien Feng left me for work, I missed him immediately. I became easily bored and was impatient for his return. Walking around the garden, I could think of little to do but reflect on what had happened the night before. I fed on the details of our time together.

  Each day I checked the calendar to remind myself that I had gained another lucky day. May of 1854 was the best time of my life. Everything was too good to be true for a girl of my background. However, I had never allowed the Emperor’s adoration to alter my sense of reality. Whenever I got carried away, I caught myself the moment I saw Nuharoo and the other concubines. I told myself to remember that my luck could end in an instant. I tried to make the best of my time.

  When the season turned, His Majesty moved to Yuan Ming Yuan, the Grand Round Garden, and took me with him. It was the loveliest of his many summer palaces. Generations of emperors had come here to nurture solitude. The place was itself a fable. It was located to the northwest of the Forbidden City, eighteen miles from Peking. There were gardens within gardens, lakes, meadows, misty hollows, exquisite pagodas, temples and of course palaces. One could wander from sunup to sundown without seeing the same view twice. It took me a while to realize that Yuan Ming Yuan stretched for twenty miles!

  The main gardens had been built by Emperor Kang Hsi in 1709. There was a story about how Kang Hsi discovered the site. Out riding one day, he had come across a mysterious ruin. He was enchanted by its wildness and vastness, and certain that it was no common place. And he was right. It was an ancient park that had been buried in sand blown from the Gobi Desert. He found out that it had belonged to a prince of the Ming Dynasty and had been the prince’s hunting park.

  Thrilled by his discovery, the Emperor decided to build a garden palace on the ruins. Later it became his favorite retreat, and he lived there until his death. Since then his successors had continued to adorn and increase its wonders. More and more pavilions, palaces, temples and gardens had been added in the many years since.

  What amazed me was that no single palace resembled another. Yet the whole gave no sense of disharmony. To contrive something so perfect that it looked accidental was the aim of Chinese art and architecture. Yuan Ming Yuan reflected the Taoist love of natural spontaneity and the Confucian belief in man’s ability to improve on nature.

  The more I learned about the architecture and craftsmanship, the more I was drawn to individual works of art. Soon my sitting room became a gallery. It was crowded with beautiful objects ranging from floor vases to grain carvings—sculptures cut from single grains of rice. Also in my room were long-legged basins set with diamonds. Wall cases became my display windows, which were filled with lucky locks of hair, fancy watches, pencil cases and decorative perfume bottles. An-te-hai framed every piece for the pleasure of my eyes. My favorite of all was a tea table inlaid with pearls the size of marbles.

  Emperor Hsien Feng had fallen ill from the strain of rule. After audiences he came to me sad-faced. His mood had swung back to darkness. He hated to rise in the morning, and he wished to avoid the duty of giving audiences. He was especially reluctant when his signature on decrees and edicts was required.

  When the peach flowers began to blossom, His Majesty’s desire for intimacy began to fade. The peasants had started to rebel openly, he informed me. He was ashamed of his inability to reverse the situation. His worst nightmare had become a reality—the peasants had begun to join the Taiping uprising. Reports of looting and destruction came from every corner. On top of this, and perhaps most troubling of all, the foreign powers continued to demand that he open up more ports to trade. China was behind in its reparation payments for the Opium Wars and was threatened with further invasions.

  Soon Emperor Hsien Feng was too depressed even to leave his room. The only time he came to me was to ask me to accompany him to Imperial worship sites. On clear days we took trips to outer Peking. I spent hour after hour inside my palanquin and could eat nothing but a bitter leaf diet—the ceremonies required “an uncontaminated body.” When we arrived at the sites, we begged the Imperial ancestors for help. I followed my husband and threw myself on the ground and bowed until my knees were bruised.

  His Majesty always felt better on the way back to the palace. He believed that his prayers would be heard and he would soon expect good news. But his ancestors failed to help him—the barbarians’ ships were reported to be closing in on the ports of China with weapons capable of wiping out our army in the time it took to eat a meal.

  Fearing for Hsien Feng’s health, the Grand Empress ordered him to slow down. “Leave your office, my son. The sick roots of your being need to rejuvenate.”

  “Would you come to bed with me, Orchid?” His Majesty let fall his heavy dragon robe and took me to bed. But he was no longer his past self. His sense of pleasure had left him. I couldn’t arouse him.

  “There is no more yang element left in me.” He sighed and pointed to himself. “This is a skin bag. Look how pitifully it extends from my neck.”

  I tried everything. I did the fan dance and turned our bed into an erotic stage. Each night I invented a different goddess. I stripped and did bedroom acrobatics. The poses were borrowed from an Imperial pillow book An-te-hai had found for me.

  Nothing I did had any effect. His Majesty gave up. The look on his face broke my heart. “I am a eunuch.” His smiles were worse than his tears.

  After he fell asleep, I went to work with the chefs. I wanted His Majesty to have a more healthful, nutritious diet. I insisted on country-style fresh vegetables and meat instead of deep-fried and preserved foods. I convinced His Majesty that the best way to please me was to pick up his chopsticks. But he had no appetite. He complained that everything inside him hurt. The doctors told him, “Your inner fire is burning so badly that you have blisters growing along your swallowing pipe.”

  His Majesty stayed in bed all day. “I won’t last long, Orchid, I am sure,” he said with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Maybe it is for the best.”

  I remembered that my father had done the same after he had been removed from his post. I wished that I could tell Emperor Hsien Feng how selfish and unmerciful he was to his people. “Dying is cheap and living is noble.” I groaned like a drunken lady.

  Trying to cheer him up, I ordered his favorite operas. Troupes performed in our sitting room. The actors’ swords and sticks and imagi-nary horses were inches away from His Majesty’s nose. It got his attention. For a few days he was pleasantly distracted. But it didn’t last. One day he walked out in the middle of the performance. There would be no more opera.

  The Emperor had been living on ginseng soup. He was spiritless and often fell deeply asleep in his chair. He would wake up in the middle of the night and sit alone in the dark. He no longer looked forward to sleep for fear of nightmares. He was afraid of shutting his eyes. When it became unbearable, he would go to the piles of court documents, which were brought every evening by his eunuchs. He would work until exhausted. Night after night I heard him weeping in utter despair.

  A handsome rooster was brought to his garden to wake him up at dawn. Hsien Feng preferred the singing of a rooster to the chimes of clocks. The rooster had a large red crown, black feathers and emerald green tail feathers. It had the look of a bully, with vicious eyes and a beak like a hook. Its claws were as large as a vulture’s. The Imperial rooster woke us with loud cries, often before dawn. The cry reminded me of someone who was cheering: Ooow, oow, oow … Oh. Ooow, oow, oow. It woke His Majesty, all right, but he didn’t have the energy to get up.

  One night Hsien Feng threw a pile of documents on the bed and asked me to take a look. He pounded his chest and yelled, “Any tree will bear a rope for me. Why should I hesitate?”

  I started to read. My limited schooling didn’t allow me to go much deeper than the meanings of primary words. It was not difficult to understand the problems, though. They were all anyone had talked about since I had
entered the Forbidden City.

  I don’t recall exactly when Emperor Hsien Feng began to regularly ask me to read his documents. I was so driven by the desire to help that I ignored the rule that a concubine was forbidden to learn the court’s business. The Emperor was too tired and sick to care about restrictions.

  “I have just ordered the beheading of a dozen eunuchs who have become opium addicts,” His Majesty told me one evening.

  “What did they do?” I asked.

  “They needed money to buy the drug, so they stole from the treasury. I can’t believe that this disease has invaded my own backyard. Imagine what it’s doing to the nation!”

  He pushed himself out of bed and went to his desk. He flipped the pages of a thick document and said, “I am in the middle of reviewing a treaty that the British forced on us, and I am constantly distracted by things that come up unexpectedly.”

  I gently asked if I could help. He tossed the treaty to me. “You will get sick to death too if you read too much of it.”

  I went through the document without a break. I had always wondered what gave foreigners the power to coerce China to do what they wanted, like the opening of ports or the selling of opium. Why, I had asked myself, couldn’t we flatly say no and chase them away? Now I began to understand. They had no respect for the Emperor of China. It seemed a given to them that Hsien Feng was weak and defenseless. What really didn’t make sense to me, however, was the way our court handled the situation. Those who were supposedly the masterminds of the country simply insisted that China’s five-thousand-year civilization was a power in itself. They believed that China was inviolable. Over and over I heard them cry in their writings, “China cannot lose because it represents Heaven’s morals and principles!”

  Yet the truth was so clear even I could see it: China had been repeatedly assaulted and her Emperor shamed. I wanted to yell at them. Had Emperor Hsien Feng’s decrees the power to stop the foreign invasion or unite the peasants? Hadn’t His Majesty given enough time for the magic plans of his advisors to work?