The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (28 page)

But while Yehonala may have been pleased at the subtlety of her diplomacy, she remained absolutely infuriated by the Japanese incursion. What really galled was the timing of the Japanese attack. Yehonala had been born in 1834, and, not content with the illicit refurbishment of her Summer Palace, the tenth moon of 1894 had been marked down as a time for the most extravagant celebrations to honour her birthday. The Empress Mother bemoaned this untimely coincidence in an edict replete with the melancholy disappointment of a thwarted egotist:

The auspicious occasion of my sixtieth birthday...was to have been a joyful event, in which the whole nation would unite in paying to me loyal and dutiful homage. It had been intended that His Majesty the Emperor, accompanied by the whole Court, should proceed to offer congratulations to me, and make obeisance at the I Ho Yuan, and officials and people have subscribed funds wherewith to raise triumphal arches [all officials had ‘spontaneously’ offered a birthday gift of twenty-five per cent of their yearly income] and to decorate the Imperial Highway throughout its entire length from Beijing to the Summer Palace; high altars have been erected where Buddhist sutras were to have been recited in my honour. I was not disposed to be unduly obstinate and to insist on refusing these honours...

Who would ever have anticipated that the Dwarf-men would have dared to force us into hostilities, and that since the beginning of the summer they have invaded our tributary state and destroyed our fleet?...Although the date of my birthday is drawing close, how could I have the heart, at such a time, to delight my senses with revelries...? I therefore decree that the ceremonies to be observed on my birthday shall be performed at the Palace in Beijing, and all preparations at the Summer Palace shall be abandoned forthwith.
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It was a bitter blow to Yehonala’s pride. But an even greater pounding to the Empress’s, and China’s, prestige followed hard upon the heels of this humiliation. Li Hung-chang’s negotiations in Japan resulted in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on 17th April 1895. In it China agreed to the ceding of Formosa and the coastal Penghu Islands, and handed over the fortress of Port Arthur, effectively allowing the Japanese an unopposed passage to Tientsin and Beijing whenever they next chose to move against the Middle Kingdom. The southern fortress of Weihaiwei was also yielded to Japanese forces, to remain occupied until payment in full of a two hundred million tael ‘indemnity’.

Li Hung-chang had been shot in the face on his arrival in Japan by a fanatic of the Soshi class, the bullet lodging just below his left eye. But for this, the terms would certainly have been harsher–the Japanese originally had demanded additional land to the north of Port Arthur, and a ‘fine’ of three hundred million taels. Given the constraints he was forced to work under, the bargain Li made with the victorious Japanese was worthy of praise, but the old veteran (he was now seventy-two years old) returned to China in 1896 to find every man’s hand against him. Censors demanded his execution and most of the rest of the country agreed. But Yehonala had come to realise just how invaluable were Li Hung-chang’s experience and knowledge to her purposes. He might be humiliated, shorn of his honours and titles, exiled from court, but his advice on world affairs (about which Yehonala, like the rest of her administration, remained loftily ignorant) was now simply too precious for her ever to exact the ultimate penalty. Lesser men might have been banished to the post roads in Turkestan; Yehonala sent Li to St Petersburg as Chinese representative at the coronation of Czar Nicholas II (a journey on which he was accompanied, bizarrely, by his own magnificently appointed coffin). One result of this was a secret agreement between the two nations, finalised in 1896, in which each agreed to defend the other against any possible aggression from Japan. The treaty allowed Russia to extend her Trans-Siberian railway across Chinese Manchuria to Vladivostok, and to use the railway to transport men and materiel through Chinese territory. It also gave Russia the right (once the ‘dwarf men’ had been expelled from Port Arthur) to harbour her fleet in that ice-free port, a concession that the Chinese would soon learn to rue.

The fabulous ransom exacted by the Japanese, and extensive acquisition of land, both excited the greed of the Western nations, and filled them with anxiety. With possession of Port Arthur, Japan was in danger of becoming the most puissant power in the region. Germany, France and Russia (whose massive eastern fleet was close by) together brought pressure on Japan to return Port Arthur and the Liaotung Peninsula to its original owners. In compensation, China was forced to part with a further thirty million taels for Japanese ‘expenses’.

The easy Japanese victory began a feeding-frenzy among the Europeans over the moribund body of the Middle Kingdom. China did not have the cash to pay the Japanese indemnity, and there was intense rivalry among the Westerners to secure the right to loan the necessary funds. Not content with usury, each of the Powers now desperately cast about for pretexts that would allow them to take an even bigger slice of the Chinese melon. Japan had won land by force of arms; Britain had already extorted Hong Kong; with China in such a weakened condition, the other European powers were determined to take their share. A year after Li Hung-chang’s return, Germany found her excuse in the murder, in Shandong Province, of two German missionaries. In reprisal, the Kaiser’s forces seized the port of Kiaochow, close to Japanese-occupied Weihaiwei, and ‘leased’ the land for a distance of fifty kilometres around the port for a period of ninety-nine years. Anti-missionary disturbances in the southern province of Canton allowed France to force a similar ninety-nine-year ‘lease’ of the port-city of Kwangchowan. In 1897, the Russians took advantage of their secret agreement with the Chinese by sailing their warships into Port Arthur–and then refusing to leave. By the spring of 1898 Russia had ‘leased’ the fortress and a second port, Talienwan, until the year 1923.
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Britain voiced concern that these rental agreements had undermined the balance of power in the region, and on this flimsy basis demanded the southern fortress and port of Weihaiwei–just as soon as the Japanese had been paid in full by the Chinese and had vacated the place. In the treaty ports, the press spoke openly of a division of China, as Africa had been portioned out to the colonial powers a few decades before.

Perhaps the only benefit from this degrading catalogue of national humiliation was the growing conviction among many Chinese intellectuals that the old way of interfacing with the world, the naive insular assumption of the superiority of all things Chinese, simply would not do. While the traditional mandarin scholar-gentleman might claim that excellence in all things violent did not prove Western superiority, others looked beyond the military and saw in the European model of governance many things that the Celestial Kingdom might incorporate to their advantage. Those Chinese who had latterly been sent as ambassadors and emissaries to the West often returned utterly in thrall to all things Western. Yehonala was more circumspect. Hearing one lady holding forth on the evils of foot-binding, she pointedly asked if the European practice of binding women’s waists in whalebone corsets was not similarly barbaric.

If Yehonala was blind to the benefits of ‘barbarian’ technologies, the same could not be said of her nephew the Kuang Hsu Emperor. From his childhood interest in clockwork toys, Kuang Hsu had passed via his miniature train and Palace telephone to an unshakeable conviction that his Empire’s survival depended upon drastic change to a Western model. The recent defeat at the hands of Japan and China’s spineless ‘leasing’ of her territory to the aggressors only served to emphasise the gravity of the threat facing the Middle Kingdom. From around 1895 Kuang Hsu had ordered for his personal study every book on foreign learning that had been translated into Chinese. These he devoured with enormous speed, alone in his study, gradually adding to his knowledge of the outside world and its achievements. We should not make light of this solitary attempt: it was the first time any Manchu Emperor had ever concerned himself with a study of other nations, and it would have set his august and insular ancestors spinning in their ornate tombs.

It is easy to discern, and to sympathise, with Kuang Hsu’s reasoning. The nations of the West were using the self-same technologies to carve ‘spheres of influence’ and (if Africa was a standard to judge them by) perhaps even colonies from his realm. Belief in tradition and the superiority of Chinese culture was no defence against these new invaders, and the time-honoured strategy of ‘using one barbarian against another’ had failed totally. True, each Western nation was jealous of the others and tried its utmost to gain the advantage. But only so far. These new barbarians understood that China was huge, big enough to allow everyone a ‘slice of the melon’. Some slices would be larger, some smaller, but the Westerners realised that far more could be achieved if they did not go to war with each other, but acted in concert to swallow the Empire piecemeal.

Thanks to the influence of the most militant reformers, the Emperor was introduced to the epic struggles of Russia’s Peter the Great, and Japan’s Hideyoshi, men who had achieved undying fame by sweeping away the old and modernising their nations. These tales undoubtedly had the most profound effect on the Emperor, at an almost visceral level. Japan’s story was especially instructive: an Asian, tradition-bound nation, it had effected an almost overnight transformation from feudal state to an industrial society on the Western model. It possessed the most modern Western weapons, and had drilled its men and honed its fighting skills along ‘barbarian’ lines. With these accomplishments Japan, the reviled ‘dwarf nation’, had routed Chinese arms in an endless succession of defeats. Japan, an Asian state, now took its place among the great Western Powers, an accepted and equal partner of the Western barbarians. The solution was obvious. What Japan had achieved, China could also accomplish. To regain its former glory, China must follow the trail Japan had blazed.

There may well have been a further reason for Kuang Hsu’s desire to lead the reform of China and to bring the nation to greatness–his impotence. The Emperor’s inability to produce children of his own was well known and, in family-oriented Confucian society, would inevitably have left him secretly despised by the most of the nation he was set over. Indeed, children (and especially sons) were seen not so much as a natural consequence of biology but as a reward for virtuous behaviour in oneself or in one’s ancestors.
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Men who produced no offspring were known disparagingly as
t’ien yen
, ‘natural eunuchs’.
¹¹
This immense loss of face was undoubtedly a spur to his reformist zeal, if not
the
spur that pushed forward his thoroughgoing (and ultimately naive) purge of China’s dead wood. If Kuang Hsu was sexually impotent, if he could not gain a degree of immortality by bequeathing living descendants to add their lustre to the Imperial line, then he would leave behind a deathless name in the consummation of his sweeping reforms.

Whatever the truth of this, Kuang Hsu was not alone in his assessment that Western learning was the key to regaining China’s prestige, and indeed to its very survival as a sovereign nation. Throughout the empire many of the younger scholars had formed the same conclusion, and to a man they thirsted for information and guidance. When it was discovered which Western books the Emperor himself had begun to read, requests for the publications became so great that literary societies in the European treaty ports could not keep pace with demand. Pirated versions appeared, photographed by resourceful Chinese entrepreneurs, and sold for just a tenth of the cost of the originals. Reform clubs were set up in most of the big cities, where like-minded scholars and officials might meet to hear lectures, and to discuss how best the modernisation of China could be moved forward.

The chief guru of this movement was a charismatic young Cantonese scholar named Kang Yu-wei.
¹²
In his late thirties, Kang had spent his youth in rebellious rejection of the Confucian ways. For a while he had immersed himself in esoteric Buddhism, but after spending many months meditating in the mountains north of Canton, his brilliant and eclectic mind had been drawn towards barbarian knowledge. Kang’s visits to the European enclaves inspired him, and by the age of twenty-two he had begun to imbibe Western learning via the translations to be found in southern Chinese bookshops. He seems to have formed a strange composite vision of himself as a Western-inspired Buddhist Bodhisattva–spiritually advanced human who, having attained enlightenment, forsakes the bliss of nirvana in order to lead other beings along the eight-fold path. But Kang Yu-wei saw himself as a Bodhisattva of a different kidney, one who was destined to redeem China using European learning. In the mid-eighteen-eighties he wrote that: ‘My appearance in this world is solely for the purpose of saving all living beings. It is for this reason that I do not dwell in Heaven but enter into Hell.’

Kang’s vigorous enthusiasm for Westernisation made him many converts, as did his copious literary output and perceptive analysis of China’s predicament. As early as 1888 in a petition to the Emperor he had described how the Westerners had broken through China’s ring of buffer states, and were ‘now coming at the heart of the country. Japan plots in Korea; England is intriguing in Thibet; Russia is building railways in the north, threatening Beijing; and France is nourishing her ambition in the south-western provinces.’ Reform, he asserted, was essential. The traditional view that ancient institutions and traditions were inviolable must be swept away. If China emulated the root and branch reforms seen in Japan ‘she will become strong and prosperous in ten years, and within twenty years she will become a powerful nation, able to recover her lost territories and to avenge her humiliations’.
¹³
The stirring call to arms never reached the Emperor–the petition was interdicted by conservatives and ‘lost’ within China’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. But Kang was persistent. In April 1895 he was busily organising a petition of some thirteen hundred scholars against the proposed treaty with Japan, only to find his plan pre-empted when China signed the offending document early. Nothing daunted, he tried again with another petition in May and this time he was more fortunate. The defeat by Japan, and the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki, had produced a seismic change within some parts of the Chinese establishment. Kang’s aspirations to incorporate the best of European ways, and to use the barbarians’ own skills and weapons to prevent the dismembering of the Empire now found a ready ear among certain members of the Manchu hierarchy. Weng Tung-ho, the Emperor’s tutor, having earlier been unconvinced by Kang’s thesis, now made his approval public.