The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (24 page)

In 1873, after the accession of the Tung Chih Emperor, the Chinese had finally acquiesced to the combined vociferous and insistent demands of the Westerners for an audience with the new Emperor, and had even dropped their centuries-old insistence that foreign ambassadors kowtow before the Son of Heaven. The historic meeting was choreographed down to the last detail by the etiquette-obsessed Manchu (who were greatly put out by the jokes and sniggers of the assembled dignitaries during the numerous rehearsals). They got their own back by staging the audience at the Tzu Kuang Ko, the Pavilion of Violet Light, which, unknown to the Westerners, was a building normally used for the reception of tribute bearers from Chinese satellite states such as Tibet or Korea. The pretence of superiority was continued at the meeting itself. The ambassadors convened at the Tzu Kuang Ko just before dawn on 19th June, and were kept waiting for several hours, imbibing endless bowls of tea with Prince Kung, until they were finally conveyed to the Presence around 9 a.m. The epoch-making audience, over which so much effort, prevarication and mendacity, and so much blood and suffering, had been squandered, lasted a bare thirty minutes. The representatives of France, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States of America and Great Britain, each in turn made obeisance to the Celestial Prince, not the normal kowtow required of every Chinese, but by a simple bow of the head. The Emperor spoke quietly in Manchu and Prince Kung translated into Chinese. Very little of moment was said, but then, that was not the reason for the audience. The Western ambassadors, the emissaries of the Western barbarians, had finally been received by the Emperor, and they had not kowtowed. For the representatives of the West the principle of parity between all sovereign states had at last been formally acknowledged.

The Chinese, of course, saw it differently. Or pretended to. While acknowledging that the ministers had not kowtowed before their Emperor, the
Peking Gazette
nevertheless informed its readers that the foreigners had been cowed into quivering silence by the majestic aura of the Celestial Prince. They had ‘...admitted that divine virtue certainly emanated from the Emperor, hence the fear and trembling they felt even when they did not look upon his Majesty’.
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With the near-complete separation of Occident and Orient, the two competing versions of reality were never in any serious danger of meeting or being compared, and so honour was satisfied on both sides.

With the Tung Chih Emperor’s death in 1875, and the beginning of Yehonala’s second Regency with her cousin Sakota, this state of relatively peaceful coexistence, this hard-won, precarious equilibrium, was once again disturbed. In their imperialist greed, the Western nations sought either to conquer Chinese territory or to divide the Empire into ‘spheres of influence’, a de facto conquest where Chinese interests in a particular region would be subordinate to whichever colonialist power happened to hold sway. The Chinese called this process of carving up their nation ‘slicing the melon’.

Under the pretext of friendship, in 1871 Russia invaded the Ili region in the predominantly Muslim province of Xinjiang. An Islamic rebellion was then in full flower with the majority Muslims threatening to set up an independent Islamic state, and the Russian bear’s incursion was portrayed by the Westerners as help for the Dragon Throne until the revolt was suppressed. Eight years later, Russian troops still guarded all of Ili’s strategic points and refused to be dislodged. The danger from the Czar’s Empire was great–it was the only Western nation with lands bordering the Middle Kingdom. To the north of their sacred soil, the Russian bear ambled ever eastwards, annexing territory and casting hungry glances on China’s frontier provinces.

From their position in India, the British were more interested in trade and influence than in the physical acquisition of territory. They saw south-west China as the natural entry point to the Middle Kingdom, and sent parties on exploratory trips through Burma towards the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan to survey possible trade routes between the two countries. Unfortunately, a surveyor named Margary was murdered in Yunnan in 1875, and, following the sad precedents of the previous decade, the British immediately used his death as an excuse to squeeze China anew. The negotiations were conducted by the brusque Sir Thomas Wade, who as plain Thomas Wade had made his name in China during the 1860 Franco-British march on Beijing. Sir Thomas forced China to the Convention of Chefoo, which opened even more Chinese cities to the foreign trader. The Chinese representative was Li Hung-chang, hero of the Tai Ping rebellion and now, as Viceroy of the important province of Chihli, fast becoming a power in the land. Li’s greed was legendary; over a long career, through ‘squeeze’, and fraud, and bribery, he amassed a fortune that made him certainly the richest man in China, if not the world.
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But running in parallel with Li’s boundless cupidity was an equally prodigious intelligence. He was farsighted enough to realise China’s present weakness before its foes, and he was a near-constant advocate of appeasement (at least until the Empire should strengthen itself sufficiently to throw off the hated foreigner), much to the anger of the literati and the more hot-headed members of Yehonala’s council. Although she hated his advice, more often than not the Western Empress was sufficiently discriminating to realise its worth.

It was Li Hung-chang who again controlled the final negotiations with the French in their attempt to annex the Kingdom of Annam, a Chinese tributary state. Having supplanted Spain in1862 as rulers of Cochin China (roughly the southern half of Vietnam), they, like the British, were seeking trade routes into China’s soft underbelly via ‘South of the Clouds’, the province of Yunnan. Under sustained pressure, the King of Annam accepted French overlordship in 1874, but tried to appease his former Manchu masters by continuing to send the customary tribute to Beijing. For years Annam remained a battleground, with French
condottieri
and the Black Flags (led by a former Tai Ping rebel, Liu Yung-fu, who had fled China when the rebellion collapsed) fighting proxy battles for the two great powers. Each side accused the other of duplicity and aggression, while not at any time declaring war upon the other. Li Hung-chang realised the hopelessness of the Chinese position, and agreed to cede Annam. But Yehonala and other anti-foreign elements delayed compliance. When French troops, trusting to Li Hung-chang’s concessions, moved to occupy the area, they were unexpectedly attacked and cut to pieces. In retaliation, the French navy occupied the port of Foochow, and on 22nd August 1864, suddenly fired on Chinese shipping and land bases, sinking numerous junks and destroying the Foochow arsenal, symbol of China’s resurgence. Incensed, but out-gunned, the Chinese fought on for seven months, suffering numerous reverses. It was an unequal struggle: not only were China’s troops handicapped with outmoded weapons, the Middle Kingdom was fighting on two fronts, for at the opposite end of the country the Japanese had begun to stir. Li Hung-chang was sufficiently perspicacious to identify the main threat to the Dynasty, and he summarised the position succinctly in a memorial to Yehonala: ‘Although the various powers are strong, they are still seventy thousand li away from us, whereas Japan is as near as in the courtyard...’. In Li’s opinion, the Empire could not fight two enemies at once–circumstance dictated that the ‘lesser evil’ should be appeased.

Fuming with suppressed indignation, Yehonala let go her southern tributary the better to fight the eastern barbarians. In March 1885, China ceded Annam to France on the basis of Li Hung-chang’s original agreement made more than six months before.

But despite the concentration of Chinese forces against the ‘eastern dwarf men’, the Japanese easily succeeded in humiliating the still-slumbering Chinese giant. Unlike the disdainful Middle Kingdom, by the 1860s Japan had consciously acknowledged the technical superiority of the European states, and had come to understand the power inherent in the new technology–and the desirability of acquiring this foreign expertise. Under the leadership of the Meiji Emperor, Mutsohito, who ascended the throne in February 1867, the tradition-bound state undertook a metamorphosis unparalleled in history, casting off many of its ancient customs and transforming itself almost overnight into a modern industrial society.
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Feudalism was abolished; universal education was made mandatory; newspapers were published; and the Western Gregorian calendar was introduced. Not all Japanese agreed with the opening of the country. In 1877 the Satsuma rebellion set an army of samurai against the government. They were protesting at the formation of a modern military corps composed of commoners, which threatened their privileged positions as purveyors of the Bushido code. The revolt was swiftly suppressed, the traditional sword-wielding samurai cut to pieces by the same army of commoners (wielding modern firearms) they affected to despise. Industrialisation continued apace–the first railroad was opened in the early 1870s–and within a very short space of time Japan had mastered the intricacies of Western science and technology and had marked out for itself a prominent place among the world’s ‘powers’.

Japan’s astounding transmutation should have served as a beacon to Yehonala and China’s ruling elite, lighting the way to the Middle Kingdom’s own revival. But Yehonala, aided and supported by China’s corrupt, hidebound bureaucracy, ignored the lesson and hid their collective heads ever more deeply in the sands of tradition. Soon, a more forceful instruction was given: over the 1870s, Japan began to flex its newly acquired muscles, and Yehonala could only sit back helplessly and watch as the despised ‘dwarf men’, by now far too powerful to confront militarily, took control of the Okinawan archipelago and eclipsed Chinese influence on the strategically important island of Taiwan. Worse was to follow. Flushed with their own success, in 1876 the Japanese sent a naval force to Korea, China’s most important tributary state, and extracted a treaty which opened the Hermit Kingdom to Japanese trade. The Chinese did not even issue a diplomatic protest. Other countries took advantage of the obvious weakness of the Middle Kingdom: the United States concluded a similar treaty in 1882 which took no cognisance of China’s claims on the Kingdom and which implicitly recognised Korea as a sovereign and independent nation. Inside the country, pro-China and pro-Japanese factions emerged, each bent on seizing control.

Grudgingly, Yehonala and her advisers came to understand that at least some degree of Westernisation was inevitable, if they wished to prevent further slices being taken from the Chinese melon. ‘Self-strengthening’ measures were instituted, culminating in 1885 with the setting up of a Board of Admiralty, with responsibility for constructing a modern navy to face down the foreign gunboats and the ships of Japan’s rapidly expanding sea forces. Slowly, it appeared that the Middle Kingdom was shedding its ancient isolated persona and preparing to enter the modern world.

But in China nothing was ever as it seemed. Within the Forbidden City, surrounded by fawning sycophants and flattering eunuchs, it was easy for the nobility to believe the ancient ingrained fiction of Imperial omnipotence, that nothing would, or needed, to change. In the face of this modernising threat to age-old privilege, reactionary forces had begun to stir.

In 1879, at the time of Tung Chih’s funeral, Yehonala’s decision to further her own interests at the expense of her son’s departed soul came back to haunt her. The Manchu Emperors had built two tomb complexes to contain their earthly remains, one to the east and the other to the west of Beijing. These were used alternately by the Dynasty. Each necropolis nestled in the mountains, surrounded by pine trees (symbols of longevity) and approached by a wide marble-paved ceremonial highway flanked by enormous carved stone figures of griffin, camels, elephant, horse and fighting men. Every tomb was fronted by an elaborate wooden-built pavilion, in which the Imperial regalia, gold-satin thrones and Imperial yellow dragon-robes of the departed Lord were kept. These were displayed for the edification of the deceased’s soul on the yearly day of sacrifice. Each mausoleum had its attendants, and its troop of guardian warriors, and the necropolis as a whole was under the authority of a governor, who took great care to restrict access and maintain the holy seclusion of the site.

The burial rites of a Celestial Prince were long and intricate, but a full forty-eight months after Tung Chih’s death his body was ready to be laid in its final resting-place. What scandalised the literati was that, after all this time, Yehonala still had not fulfilled her vow to provide Tung Chih’s spirit with an heir, who alone could perform the rites to placate his unquiet soul. But, although this blasphemous omission was one of the main topics of gossip among the scholar-gentlemen who governed the Empire, all knew that to formally complain about this lack was to incur the wrath of the Empress of the Western Palace and risk instant decapitation.

Some few chanced their lives and penned memorials to the ‘Venerable Mother’. Thankfully, none were executed, but all complaints were treated with contempt, and a petulant anger that betrays that Yehonala’s own conscience in this matter was perhaps secretly eating away at her accustomed confidence. It was probably not remorse that consumed her, but fear for her own future. She was painfully superstitious, and leaving her son’s soul untended after death could not help but invite the ill-fortune she dreaded, and she hated to be reminded of her misconduct. ‘We have already issued an absolutely clear Decree...providing for an heir to the late Emperor,’ she told one memorialist, ‘and the Decree has been published all over the Empire. The memorialist’s present request gives evidence of unspeakable audacity, and an inveterate habit of fault-finding, which has greatly enraged us, so that we hereby convey to him a stern rebuke’. No doubt the memorialist was thankful that it was a ‘stern rebuke’, and not a silken cord, that was conveyed to him. Like all the rest of the court Censors, he let the matter lie, perhaps contenting himself that, at the risk of his own life, he had done his duty by drawing Her Majesty’s attention to the situation.