Selected as one of twenty-eight concubines out of the sixty candidates brought to the palace, Cixi was assigned the position of concubine of the fifth (lowest) rank. This did not mean that she would necessarily ever even meet the emperor. Once accepted into his household, however, she would be forced to remain in the Forbidden City for the rest of her life, whether or not she was ever called to the emperor’s bed. Meanwhile, as one writer put it, she “tried, just as keenly as any pretty shop-girl in a Los Angeles drugstore, to attract the attention of the man who could make her a star.” Even if selected, she would be put there only to arouse him in preparation for the appearance of a consort or concubine of higher rank. Nevertheless, for the rest of her life she would live in an apartment of her own, where she would be waited on by two eunuchs and two maidservants and supplied with court robes, shoes, and jewels. As payment for his daughter, Cixi’s worthless father received one or two horses with elegant saddles and bridles, gold, silver, silks, and a tea set.
It took a long time for Hsien-feng to notice Cixi. Meanwhile, she took advantage of her new surroundings by improving her calligraphy and studying the classics, the history of the Ch’ing Dynasty, and the objets d’art in the palace. Her interest and perception did not go unnoticed, and within three years, she was raised in rank to imperial concubine, a grade that carried with it the right to be addressed as “Lady” and to be served by twice the number of maids and eunuchs. That same year, the chief eunuch turned over the jade tablet on which the emperor wrote his choice of companion for the night and read her name. As tradition dictated, the eunuch went to her apartment to inform her of the honor, undressed her, wrapped her in scarlet, and carried her on his back to Hsien-feng’s bed, where he laid her naked. Tradition also required that she crawl on her hands and knees from the foot of the bed to the emperor, who waited behind crepe curtains on three yellow brocade mattresses covered by silk sheets and a yellow satin coverlet. In spite of the fact that the entire procedure was observed by eunuchs posted around the room, their coupling was successful. Too successful. According to the rules of the imperial court, the emperor was supposed to ejaculate only seven times a year—three times in the spring, twice each in summer and fall—and on those days only an important concubine, a consort, or the empress was allowed to share his bed. Nevertheless, at dawn the chief eunuch recorded the date of sexual relations and carried Cixi, just impregnated by the emperor’s seed, back to her apartment. Nine months later, she gave birth to a son—the emperor’s first male child—and was raised to concubine, second rank.
Cixi soon gained extraordinary influence over Hsien-feng, whose problems with a depleted treasury and ongoing incursions from the West had seemingly overwhelmed him. During the five years following the birth of her son, she became a major figure in the court, eventually convincing Hsien-feng to name their son, age six at the time of his father’s death, as his successor. After Hsien-feng’s death, Cixi allied herself with his nondescript widowed empress, who had no sons, and Prince Kong, Hsien-feng’s energetic younger brother, who convinced his other brothers to name Cixi and the emperor’s widow coregents and himself prince adviser to the empresses. (As women, they had to hide themselves behind a yellow curtain in back of the miniature Dragon Throne built for the child emperor, although strategically placed mirrors allowed them to see everything taking place in front of the curtain.) The widowed empress, who could not read or write, was content to let others manage affairs of state, but Cixi kept a hand in everything concerning the court and the empire. To exhibit her newfound status, she wore yellow satin robes, an elaborate headdress, triple jadeite earrings, a 108-bead court necklace, and “a transparent cape of 3,500 pearls the size of canary bird eggs,” from which were hung forty drops of imperial green jade. She is said to have floated a foreign loan for “naval construction,” which she used to build a fabulous pleasure boat in her lily pond, and had a private theater built over the water “to soften the voices of the actors.”
If Cixi was concerned with the luxurious trappings of her status, Prince Kong was a born reformer. Under his influence, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and an Institute for Foreign Languages were established. Westerners were given the job of collecting customs duties for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, thus avoiding the traditional “squeeze” (skimming off the top) by the collectors. The new service was run by an extraordinary Englishman, Robert Hart, called “the most influential Westerner in China” and known by both Prince Kong and Cixi as “Our Hart.”
Prince Kong also believed that it was wiser to cooperate with the Westerners, seemingly an immovable force, than to fight them. He advocated strengthening the Chinese army and arranged for the international community to help him subdue the Taiping Rebellion, a fourteen-year-long revolt against the Manchus in the middle of the nineteenth century that eventually cost 20 million people their lives. Led by a village schoolteacher who believed he was Jesus’s younger brother and a coal worker who conceived the idea of digging tunnels to undermine the walls of cities they wanted to conquer, the Taipings attracted hundreds of thousands of adherents, who helped them butcher their enemies—Manchus, opium addicts, and prostitutes. They were eventually suppressed by a combination of two fighting forces— one Chinese and the other, known as the Ever-Victorious Army, sponsored and financed by the West and led by the well-known Charles G. “Chinese” Gordon.
While Prince Kong dealt with the outside world, Cixi faced problems within the court. Her son* reacted against his mother’s domination by turning to the palace servants, who were only too happy to indulge his tastes for rampant luxury and homosexuality. Said to be “always fooling around with eunuchs,” he was married off at sixteen but died three years later of syphilis, smallpox, or regicide. When his pregnant empress committed suicide by swallowing gold dust two months after his death, palace gossip pointed to Cixi. These suspicions were increased when that lady, now known as the dowager empress, designated her four-year-old nephew, the son of her sister and Hsien-feng’s brother, heir to the throne. This child, who took the name Kuang-hsu (Guangxu) when he became emperor, lived from 1871 to 1908. A slight boy with large, sad eyes and a chronic lung condition, he was intelligent, well educated, and, like Prince Kong, aware of China’s need for reform and modernization.
As can be seen, it had taken quite a few years for the accumulating forces of history to gather sufficient momentum to overtake China. During the middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the Manchus were temporarily bolstered by their defeat of the Taipings, but as the century drew to a close, a conflict with Japan over Korea escalated into a war, which was won by the Japanese in 1895. Previously in a tributary relationship with China, Korea was given autonomy after the war, and China was forced to sign a treaty in which it gave up Taiwan, the Pescadore Islands, part of Manchuria, and four treaty ports to Japan. Along with these territorial losses, there was general unease in the countryside, based on the harsh living conditions of the peasants as compared with the privileges of the foreigners, both traders and missionaries. These and other issues helped to bring on another rebellion, started by the Boxers in 1898.
The Boxers, or Righteous and Harmonious Fists* began as a mystical, antidynastic society, but rallied behind the dowager empress when she welcomed them as a ready-made army to rid China of the hated foreigners and a ready-made cause to divert public discontent from the court. The Boxers, who attacked both Chinese and foreign Christians, also declared war on the treaty powers in June 1900, killing two hundred Americans and Europeans and laying siege to the legation quarter in Peking, where nearly five hundred foreigners and three thousand Chinese Christians had taken sanctuary. Two months later, a long-awaited international force descended on China, looting and killing everything and everyone in its path and routing the Boxers. The imperial court, having bet on the wrong side, was forced to flee the capital.
After their victory, the treaty powers imposed even harsher terms on the Chinese than they had after the Opium Wars: an indemnity of 2
00 million ounces of silver, punishment of the officials who had supported the Boxers, and the right to billet troops between Peking and the sea. Russia used the opportunity to occupy Manchuria, building a naval base at Port Arthur, where it remained until its defeat by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, while Britain, France, and Germany established naval bases elsewhere. The victorious treaty powers also demanded long-term leases of Chinese territory to develop mines and railways and arranged to loan the Chinese money to build the railroads at enormous rates of interest. In September of 1898, the American secretary of state, John Hay, sent notes to Britain, France, and Russia, recommending that each nation refrain from interfering with the other nations’ “spheres of influence” and avoid levying excessive tariffs on the others’ goods. Known as the Open-Door Policy, it kept peace among thieves under the guise of protecting China. These and other degradations of the dynasty forced the Manchu court to take stock of itself and embark on a period of reform and reorganization, called “self-strengthening,” aimed at improving both function and image.
Two types of Chinese reformers had already appeared on the scene by the end of the nineteenth century. First, there were those who wanted to return China to its original glory by helping the Manchus rebuild their defeated army and regenerate national life morally and economically. The most famous example of this type of reformer was Kang You-wei, the oldest surviving son in a well-to-do family, who grew up believing that he “stood, towering and lofty, above the common people” and that he had been endowed by Heaven “with the intelligence and ability to save them.” He drafted a long “memorial”—a written document in which citizens were allowed to recommend policy changes to the emperor or an appropriate surrogate—which he sent to the twenty-eight-year-old Emperor Guangxu and the sixty-year-old dowager empress, advocating reform in six areas of national life: taxes on the rich, a countrywide network of railroads, Western-style mechanization of industry, domestic exploitation of mineral resources, unification and stabilization of currency, and a national postal system.
The emperor was impressed by Kang’s memorial. But Kang ran into trouble with the emperor’s aunt, the dowager empress. As a young woman, she had been embarrassed by her father’s cowardice, and, once having won a place at court, had thrown herself into upholding tradition and orthodoxy as exemplified by her new (imperial) family. Now old—a “painted, brocaded despot amid her eunuchs”—she had become an archconservative. As soon as the emperor began to promulgate reforms based on Kang’s suggestions, she sent troops to Peking to arrest Guangxu. Confined to an island on the grounds of the palace, “relegated to the nothingness of harem life,” Guangxu and his progressive ideas were suppressed. Warned of the clampdown by friends, Kang fled. In his place, the soldiers took his younger brother along with four other young reformers and beheaded them for treason.*
The next reformer to come on the scene, however, was not so easy to silence. Sun Yat-sen, who would one day be known as the Father of China, unseated the Manchus and changed the Chinese Empire into a republic, and he did this with the help of Charlie Soong.
PART TWO
1894–1927
5
China cannot borrow our learning, our science, and our material forms of industry without importing with them the virus of political rebellion.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1881
AT THE age of twelve, Sun Yat-sen, who had been born into a poor family, was sent to a prosperous older brother who lived in Hawaii. Enrolled in the very British Bishop’s School, obliged to speak English, and required to attend daily prayers, the boy was subjected to “every reasonable persuasion” to convert to Christianity. When he announced at the age of sixteen that he wanted to be baptized, his brother sent him back to China.
After being ousted from his village for breaking wooden idols in the temple, Sun went to Hong Kong, where he managed to get himself baptized and studied at the Diocesan School of the Church of England. He attended Queen’s College for two years, during which his family married him off to a village girl, possibly to counteract the ill effects of his professed Christianity. She moved into his family’s home, but since Sun continued his studies for eight years more, they rarely saw each other. In 1886, his older brother summoned him back to Hawaii and tried to force him to give up Christianity. Sun refused. Stranded and penniless, he finally raised enough money from fellow Christians to return to China. Coincidentally, it was the same year that Charlie Soong arrived in Shanghai, but while Charlie was struggling with missionary prejudice, Sun got the chance that Charlie had longed for— to study medicine—and he graduated from the new College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong in 1892. From there he went to Macao to practice surgery. James Cantlie, the English doctor who established the College of Medicine, said that Sun “performed important operations, requiring skill, coolness of judgement, and dexterity.” But due to the enforcement of a law requiring medical practitioners to hold Portuguese diplomas, he did not stay long in Macao.
In 1894, Sun returned to Canton, where he became involved in the reform movement and was introduced by an old friend, Lu Hao-dong, to Charlie Soong. Sun told Charlie that he was writing a memorial that he intended to send to the grand secretary to the emperor, a patron of the College of Medicine. He showed Charlie the memorial, in which he spelled out his qualifications for joining the bureaucracy: his degree in English medicine, his studies abroad, his interest in laws “for reforming the people,” and his belief in Western “methods of achieving a prosperous country and a powerful army.”
“What China needs is a man like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, not written memorials,” Charlie told Sun.
“You’re right,” Sun answered. “But who could be the Washington or Lincoln of China?” “You,” Charlie answered. Educated by the British, Sun knew little more than the name of Abraham Lincoln until Charlie recited for him the end of the Gettysburg Address: “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Before the evening was over, Charlie had invited Sun to visit his publishing house, where Sun discovered that his own book, The Uses of Agriculture, was being printed. “I wrote this book!” he told Charlie.
“But I thought it was an article from a book by Cheng Kuan-ying.* How could you have written it?”
“I wrote it,” Sun repeated, going through the pages one sentence at a time. “There are some changes, but it has been edited for the better,” he said, explaining that he had shown the article to Zheng and that Zheng had revised it and included it in his book.
“Zheng should have given you credit,” Charlie said.
“I don’t mind,” said Sun, who was clearly happy to see his article in print.
“In that case, why don’t you show Zheng the memorial you’re planning on sending to Li? Maybe he can give you some good ideas.”
The next day, on their way to see Zheng, Sun and Charlie ran into Wang Tao, a well-known journalist and Western scholar. Charlie introduced Sun to Wang, who looked at his article and agreed to edit it. Charlie disagreed with Sun’s contention that agriculture and commerce could revitalize China. Only industry and the development of machinery, Charlie contended, would modernize their country. His arguments convinced Sun, who added the importance of these areas of growth to his memorial. But after Wang returned the edited version, Sun tore it in two. “It’s no use,” he said, contemplating the effect of his recommendations on the powers in Peking. “It would be like asking a tiger to give away his hide.”†
Charlie encouraged Sun to submit it anyway, and Sun agreed to try. But the doctor’s timing proved to be unfortunate. The emperor’s secretary was too involved with the deteriorating situation between China and Japan* to pay attention to the memorial. In any case, Sun told Charlie, “Reform can’t start until the Ch’ing Dynasty is overthrown. There’s no reason to support the Manchus, only to overthrow them.” Charlie cautioned Sun against premature revolution. He claimed that only the Western powers could determine the outcome of an uprising, particularly
in Shanghai, and suggested that Sun go west to determine what position they would take.
“Just give me 100 people and I’ll go after the yamen† now,” Sun responded.
In spite of such blatant impracticality, Charlie admired his friend’s courage. He took a sword off the wall of his home, which he had meant to give one of his children, and offered it to Sun.
“I’ll be back to accept this sword when I overthrow the Ch’ing Dynasty,” Sun responded.
“I’ll support you,” Charlie promised. “… I’m a minister and can’t fight as a soldier, but I’ll support you behind the lines. You will need enormous sums of money. Let me raise that money for you.”
At Charlie’s instigation, the three of them—Charlie Soong, Sun Yat-sen, and Lu Hao-dong—took an oath on the Bible to drive out the Manchus, establish a republican government, and revitalize China. From then on, Charlie Soong’s publishing house served as a meeting place for revolutionaries. Although they gave their group a name, the “Revive China Society,” they decided not to set up an organization until they numbered more than ten.
Over the next few months, Charlie Soong and Sun Yat-sen became extremely close friends, and Charlie began publishing revolutionary material for Sun in his publishing house, safely located in the international section of Shanghai, outside the jurisdiction of the Ch’ing police. Sun also became an intimate of the Soong family, spending most of his time at their home when he was in Shanghai. The two men certainly had a great deal in common. Born within a year or so of each other, both were poor boys who had left China at a young age. Converted to Christianity, they had served or wanted to serve in the ministry. Both had been educated at least partly in the West and spoke fluent English. And they were both keenly aware that China was no longer the center of the world, that unless it did something to bring itself up to date, the Celestial Empire was at risk of being dismembered by other nations. Both Sun Yat-sen and Charlie Soong were convinced that the ruling Manchus had failed the Chinese and lost the Mandate of Heaven.
The Last Empress Page 7