The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (17 page)

The depth of the breach between Emperor and his former favourite became even more apparent when he refused Yehonala permission to attend the celebratory audience for his thirtieth birthday. She had become, in the Chinese phrase, ‘an autumn fan’, a reference to a two-thousand-year-old poem by the Lady Pan Chieh Yu, who likened herself to a favourite fan that was put away after the autumn heat, when another fickle Emperor tired of her charms:

O fair white silk, fresh from the weaver’s loom,

Clear as the frost, bright as the winter snow,

See! Friendship fashions out of thee a fan.

At home, abroad, a close companion thou,

Stirring at every move the grateful gale;

And yet I fear, ah me! that autumn chills

Cooling the dying summer’s torrid rage,

Will see thee laid neglected on the shelf,

All thought of bygone days, like them, bygone.

The portents were grim indeed. To all intents, Yehonala was powerless before her enemies. And in such a contest, death was inevitably the loser’s lot.

There remained, apart from Jung Lu’s warriors and her own unshakeable courage, one additional asset–the eunuchs. Yehonala had long been careful to placate and sweeten these castrati, treating them with unaccustomed kindness and being careful not to neglect the occasional donation of gifts and silver taels to the fraternity. And now this far-sighted strategy bore fruit. While she took pains not to precipitate an open conflict with the conspirators planning her demise, she ‘hid a dagger behind a smile’ and using her favourite eunuch, An Te-hai, as go-between, she secretly sent information on court happenings to Jung Lu, who transmitted the details to her ally, the Emperor’s brother Prince Kung, who was simultaneously attempting to negotiate with the impatient and truculent Westerners in Beijing.

Following his thirtieth birthday audience, Hsien Feng never appeared again in public. His health deteriorated alarmingly after this time. He suffered from excruciating cramps and used another of Yehonala’s covert allies, a young eunuch masseur named Li Lien-ying to obtain a measure of relief from his agony. But Li’s massage could only alleviate, not cure, the Emperor’s malady, and he was not expected to survive a return to the capital. Forty days after his birthday celebrations his condition was judged so dire that the conspirators, fearful that the Son of Heaven might die too soon, summoned to the Emperor’s bedchamber all the Grand Councillors and Ministers of the Presence who had accompanied the royal party to Jehol. All were of Su Shun and the Princes’ faction. Yehonala, the Empress Consort Sakota, and anyone who might thwart their plans was specifically excluded from this deathbed council. What was said has not been recorded, but the conspirators so worked upon the dying monarch’s enfeebled mind that, when the conference concluded, Su Shun left the death chamber with an edict that named himself, the two Princes, I and Cheng, and several others as Regents for the duration of the heir’s minority, and which explicitly excluded Yehonala from responsibility in the boy-Emperor’s upbringing.

The next day (and with convenient timing, it was pointed out by those of suspicious temperament) Emperor Hsien Feng was dead. The Son of Heaven’s ‘deathbed wishes’ were published, and the newly appointed Regents quickly made much show of raising the late Emperor’s Consort to the title of Empress Dowager, as custom demanded. Curiously, they also conferred this same title upon Yehonala. It was a charade; both sides knew that these were empty honours. The long silent battle for power between the Su Shun and Yehonala factions appeared to be finally, definitively, over. The game had been played; Su Shun had emerged as
victor ludorum
. And ‘woe to the vanquished’.

However, all was not as it seemed. The conspirator’s coup, apparently a fait accompli, contained a vital weakness. The edicts they brandished so confidently were, in reality, a gigantic bluff. Over long ages, it had been acknowledged that for an Emperor’s valedictory decree to be recognised as licit, the Son of Heaven’s signature was not enough. The edict must be finalised with a unique seal, or ‘chop’ (which the Emperor himself held), bearing the ideograms ‘Lawfully Transmitted Authority’. Without this stamp of legality, the proclamations were worthless. Strangely, the seal had gone missing a few days before the Emperor’s death, and despite frantic efforts by the conspirators to discover its hiding place in the Emperor’s bedchamber, its whereabouts remained a mystery. Lacking the seal’s imprint, the edicts upon which Su Shun and his allies pinned their hopes were legally meaningless, if only an effective challenge could be mounted.

When the contents of the Emperor’s deathbed edict became public, there was a stream of memorials sent from Beijing to Jehol, rejecting the Su Shun Regency, and calling upon the boy-Emperor to command the two Empresses Dowager to take up the task of governing the Empire, to ‘administer the Government with suspended curtain’. This was a reference to the custom that female regents should be shielded by a silken curtain, from which they whispered their administrative decisions to the boy-Emperor, who then voiced them as if they were his own considered answers to the problem in hand. Such demands seem to have unsettled the conspirators, for they quickly published a decree conferring the title ‘Chien Kuo’ on the Chief Regent, giving him virtually dictatorial powers. This was a mark of their desperation: to take on such powers was a clear breach of protocol for which there was no precedent; previously, the title Chien Kuo had been used only by brothers or uncles of the Emperor.

But by now the plotters were riding a tiger. Given the humiliation heaped on Yehonala during the last weeks of Hsien Feng’s life, the affronts and loss of face that were due almost entirely to the malign influence of the conspirators with the Emperor, it was now impossible for them to throw in their hand and to pass over the reins of power to the two Empresses Dowager. Such a retreat could lead only one way–to the execution ground and the headsman’s sword. Su Shun was the boldest of the plotters–he advised assassinating Yehonala there and then, in Jehol, and taking their chances with the reaction of Jung Lu and the Yeho-Nala bannermen. But the two Princes were averse to such risk-taking. They had their bodyguard of picked troops, but it was far outnumbered by the enemy force led by the Yi Concubine’s rumoured paramour.

They too desired Yehonala’s death, but faced with the prospect of imminent physical violence and death, persuaded themselves that this expedient could wait. Their formidable opponent could be done away with at a more appropriate time, on the road from Jehol to Beijing. And so, while the incense floated around the body of the dead Emperor and the bonzes droned his praises to heaven, they let the moment pass. It was a fatal mistake. The Princes were to find their adversary a reverse-image of their own vacillating timidity. They had backed away from the one deed that would have assured their success and at the same time offered Yehonala the breathing space she so vitally needed.

Ironically, it was the Regents’ assumption of supreme power that gave Yehonala, with the threat of immediate assassination behind her, the opportunity she sought to finesse her enemies. The funeral rites of Chinese Emperors laid an obligation upon the Regents to be in constant, close attendance on the corpse during its carriage from Jehol to Beijing, a journey of some hundred and fifty miles. And the passage was likely to be a slow one. Following the preliminary ceremonies at the Jehol Palace, the rites demanded that Hsien Feng’s earthly remains should be placed on an enormous catafalque, a

domed pavilion, curtained with yellow satin, embroidered in gold. It was borne shoulder high, on a network of poles, lacquered in crimson and gold. The secondary poles crossed and recrossed each other as the weight was divided up among the [one hundred and sixty] bearers.

Unless the transport was effected with infinite precautions, the oscillations might have tossed the coffin in the air. The bearers, keeping time under orders from their chief, had to advance three steps, then stop during three beats (struck on a musical wooden gong), then advance three steps, and again stop during three beats without moving–and so on, for a hundred and fifty miles. At each halt the bearers were changed, and at each resting place (every fifteen miles) temporary pavilions had been erected, to shelter the dead Emperor and his suite. These pavilions were made of poles and matting, and were called the ‘mat-shed palaces’.
¹

No deviation from these rites could be countenanced, and the Regents were required to be in attendance every step of the way. Even assuming good weather, the cortège could not hope to reach Beijing for ten days.

Such an obligation of attendance was not incumbent upon the wives and concubines of the dead Emperor. The two Empresses Dowager, Yehonala and Sakota, were free to return to Beijing as soon as they might. Indeed, it was their specific obligation to be in Beijing before the cortège arrived, so as to organise its proper reception according to the rites. But both sides knew that this was not all that would be set in motion when the Empresses reached the capital. Yehonala had powerful allies in Beijing and would undoubtedly organise resistance to the conspirators, whose only protection lay in the edicts they had wrung from the dying Emperor, seal-less and legally suspect. In the space of just a few short days the prospects of the protagonists had reversed. The omens for Su Shun and his party were decidedly unpropitious. Their only hope of success lay in effecting Yehonala’s death before she reached the Great Within.

It was decided that the Empresses should be accompanied to Beijing by an escort of Su Shun’s men, and that they would both be assassinated at Kou Pei K’ou, at a pass leading down from the mountains into the Chinese plains. That the two Empresses were aware of the fatal nature of their journey is certain–the brooding presence of Su Shun’s escort was too obvious a threat for them to ignore. But again, nothing was said. When they left for the capital, both sides acted their part, exchanging formal wishes for a safe journey. Su Shun and his colleagues must have believed that this was the last time they would see the troublesome Yi Concubine alive, but as ever they underestimated Yehonala’s courage and resourcefulness. Behind the careful phrases, the mock acquiescence and the dance of etiquette, her precise and calculating mind worked unceasingly for the downfall of her enemies. She was to prove herself a master in this deadly game of plot and counterplot. For the conspirators were in more danger than they realised: unknown to them (though they may, perhaps, have suspected the truth) Yehonala carried with her the ‘missing’ seal of the Emperor, without whose imprint all edicts and proclamations concerning the succession were rendered null and void.

Once again Yehonala’s alliance with the eunuchs of the Imperial Presence had saved her. Li LienYing, the eunuch masseur who had attended to Hsien Feng in the last days of his life, was secretly of the Yehonala faction. Allowed almost unfettered access to the royal bedchamber during his long periods of treating the Emperor, he had been able to discover the hiding place of the Imperial Seal, and to somehow smuggle it from the Imperial quarters undetected, before carrying it to his mistress.
²
This one act undoubtedly saved Yehonala’s life, and that of her ally and cousin, Sakota. Possession of the ‘chop’ by the Regents would have been disastrous for the two women and would quite literally have sealed their fate. But with the seal safe in her possession, the possibilities were infinite. For while decrees without the vital imprint were worthless, the converse was also true (and absolutely vital in this context): any document carrying the seal must, perforce, be regarded as legitimate.

The Regents were anxious to reduce to a minimum the time Yehonala’s Beijing allies might have to regroup once the assassination of the Empresses became known, and orders were given for the main party to quit Jehol immediately the two women and their entourage had left the Palace. But fate was against them. The heavens opened almost as soon as the cortège began its long march from Jehol to the capital. The highway quickly turned to mud and made transport of the catafalque impossible. Yehonala and Sakota, by now some ten miles ahead of the main procession, were likewise travel-bound, though they were sure to make more progress in the coming days than the lumbering juggernaut that followed them.

Despite the cramped quarters she was forced to occupy and the tremendous strain of travelling with men who might at any time put her and her companion to the sword, Yehonala maintained an outward show of
sang froid
, and sent messengers and letters to the Regents enquiring as to the disposition of her late Lord’s coffin.

Her courage may have had less to do with oriental fatalism than careful planning with her supporters. One story relates that Jung Lu and his Yeho-Nala bannermen had been ordered by the Regents to accompany the cortège to Beijing, a ruse to keep Yehonala’s clansmen occupied until the fatal blow had been struck against their mistress. They appeared to comply, but as the catafalque neared its first mat-shed palace, Jung Lu barked a command and he and his men took horse and sped off into the night. Riding hard, they quickly caught up with Yehonala’s caravan, taking Su Shun’s men completely by surprise and swiftly drawing a protective screen of swords and armour around the palanquins of the two Empresses.
³

With their assassination plot thwarted and Yehonala safely surrounded by a bodyguard of loyal troops, the Regents must have known that they were ‘fey’ men, doomed to death. But it does not seem to have occurred to any of them either to flee to foreign lands or perhaps to turn their coats and attempt to come to some accommodation with the Tai Ping rebels who still held Nanking and most of South China. They kept their places in the cortège and answered Yehonala’s formal letters praising their care of the Emperor’s body with equally polite missives of their own. Shackled by custom, they continued to escort the coffin of Hsien Feng to the capital, and the cortège they commanded became their own funeral procession. In many ways there is no better symbol of the difference between Yehonala and those ranged against her. Like her enemies, Yehonala was punctilious in the performance of the rites, assiduous in the exercise of etiquette and proper form. In this they and she were no different from the mass of scholars and nobles for whom
Li
(the conventions governing Chinese social life) was all. But while most Chinese unthinkingly allowed tradition to order their lives, Yehonala used these same traditions to order others. She was adept at putting forward the relevant precedent that sanctioned whatever action she wished accomplished. And, perhaps her greatest strength, where this could not be achieved she was quite prepared–almost invariably with exquisite timing–to set the hallowed traditions to one side and to act in whatever way appeared to her the most expedient to achieve her aims. Once these were achieved, she would then take up the rites once more and unblushingly enforce them with religious zeal–until circumstances once again demanded she discard them.