Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (15 page)

Eunuchs were regarded with visceral disgust by most other men. Emperor Kangxi, who ruled for sixty-one years, called them ‘the lowest and basest, more worms and ants than men’. Qianlong the Magnificent said that ‘no one is smaller or lower than these stupid peasants’, and that ‘the court is extravagantly generous to allow them to serve here at all’. They lived like virtual prisoners in the palaces, from which they were rarely allowed out. The punishments to which they were subject did not have to follow the Qing legal procedure: all it needed to have a eunuch beaten to death was the emperor’s whim. Ordinary folk sneered at them for the most common problem they suffered: incontinence, the result of castration, which became worse as they grew older and for which they had to wear nappies all the year round. Eunuchs were universally despised for having lost their manhood. Few men showed them compassion or considered that they had been driven to their wretched condition by desperate poverty. Pity and affection were usually felt only by the court women who lived in their company.

Little An, good-looking and sensitive, served Cixi for years and became indispensable to her. It was well known that he was her favourite. But Cixi’s feelings towards him went far beyond fondness for a devoted servant. He turned her head. By summer 1869, courtiers had noticed that she was not working as hard as she had been and that there was a languidness about her, an air that pointed to ‘
indulgence in seeking pleasures’. She was clearly in love, and love made her do an extremely bold and dangerous thing that violated deeply entrenched dynastic precedent.

That year, Emperor Tongzhi, her son, was thirteen years old. Following tradition, Cixi started preparing for his wedding, which would signal his adulthood. The nationwide selection of his consorts was put in train in the spring. The wedding gowns were to be made by the royal dressmakers in Suzhou, the renowned silk centre near Shanghai. To this place, as famous for its beautiful canals and gardens as for its silk, Cixi dispatched Little An, to ‘supervise the procurement’. This was unnecessary, as there was an established channel for the task. It was also unprecedented. No Qing emperor had ever sent a eunuch out of the capital on an errand. But all Cixi could think of was how excited Little An would be. He would get out of the Forbidden City, out of Beijing, and travel down the Grand Canal that linked north and south China. He could even celebrate his forthcoming birthday on the boat. Cixi would have loved the journey herself. She disliked the Forbidden City intensely, seeing it as a
‘depressing’ place with only walled-in courtyards and alleys. Heady winds from across the ocean that had been beating at the gates of the Forbidden City had also stirred up hitherto inconceivable aspirations.

In August, Little An set off in a party that included family members and other eunuchs. When he heard the news, Grand Tutor Weng wrote an alarmed entry in his diary,
calling it ‘a most bizarre thing’. Other grandees were similarly shocked, and then appalled, when it became known that Little An, with a sizeable retinue, was having a good time and attracting riveted attention. The public had never seen a eunuch before and were now greatly excited at the spectacle. When his barge appeared on the Grand Canal, crowds turned out to gape at him. The grandees were furious. When he got to Shandong, Governor Ding Baozhen of the province, a stickler for established rules and practices, arrested Little An and the rest of the group. When Ding’s report reached the court, Grand Tutor Weng exclaimed: ‘How satisfying! How satisfying!’

All the grandees at the court said Little An must be executed, claiming that he had broken cardinal rules. Actually the young man had not broken any rule. The dynasty stipulated that eunuchs were ‘forbidden to set foot outside the Royal City without authorisation’. But he had authorisation – from Cixi. What both of them had done was to break a tradition that imprisoned the eunuchs in the palaces. And this was unforgivable to the grandees. The man most
insistent on the execution was Prince Chun, Cixi’s brother-in-law, a like-minded friend of Grand Tutor Weng. They disapproved of so many things Cixi was doing, and this was the last straw. Even Prince Gong and his usually open-minded colleagues echoed the call for execution. Cixi, being an interested party, could play no part in the decision. Her friend, Empress Zhen, pleaded with the grandees,
‘Can he be spared death on account of having served the Empress Dowager devotedly for so many years?’ The grandees responded with a stony silence, which amounted to a resounding No. That settled it. A decree was written there and then, ordering Little An’s execution on the spot.

To Cixi, it felt as though her world was collapsing. She managed to hold back the decree for two days, during which time she implored Empress Zhen to plead harder for Little An’s life. But all efforts failed. Prince Chun arrived and pressured the women to release the decree instantly, probably warning Cixi that what she ought to do was distance herself from Little An, rather than otherwise. Empress Zhen was forced to allow the decree to be sent out.

Governor Ding was told to carry out the death sentence at once and not seek further confirmation from the court. Prince Chun and others were anxious that Cixi should have no more time to find a way to prevent it. Little An
‘must not be allowed to defend himself with cunning explanations’ and ‘must not be interrogated’ at all. It appears that the grandees suspected he had been having an affair with Cixi and wanted to cover up a scandal.

So Little An was beheaded. Also executed were six other eunuchs and seven hired bodyguards. Governor Ding reportedly had his
corpse exposed on the execution ground for days, so the public could see that he had no male organs. Talk of his being Cixi’s lover had been widespread. Back in the Forbidden City, Cixi ordered all Little
An’s belongings to be handed over to her and, once she got them, she gave them to one of her own brothers so that they were in the hands she trusted.

A close
friend of Little An – another eunuch in the Forbidden City – complained to others that it was Cixi who had ‘sent Dehai to his death’ by first dispatching him out of Beijing and then failing to take responsibility. This remark hit a very raw nerve. In a fit of fury, she ordered the eunuch to be executed by strangulation. A chief secretary of the Grand Council, Zhu, wrote to a friend that the empress dowager was
‘taking out her anger on the servants around her’. She was ‘exuding bitter regret, brimming over with regret’. And, clearly hinting at her anger against Prince Chun, the chief secretary wrote that she was ‘holding a deep hostility against some close princes and grandees’ and ‘refusing to be assuaged’.

Prince Chun and the other grandees not only killed Cixi’s lover, but also sent out a warning about some of the startling changes she was introducing. Apart from giving eunuchs social status, she seemed to be
allowing women to be seen publicly at a time when convention dictated they must stay in the home. (British diplomats found themselves assaulted with stones if there were ladies in their company, when otherwise they encountered bonhomie.) Little An had taken his sister, niece and some female musicians on the journey, and now they were all exiled to the northernmost wilderness to be slaves of the frontier guards. The grandees did not pursue Cixi herself. There was no wish to be rid of her. Her achievements had been monumental and were appreciated. Governor Ding said to his subordinates that her rule had brought China
‘a boom, which has surpassed even the [glorious] dynasties like the Tang and the Song’. They were only warning her not to go too far. In any case, her retirement was in sight. Her son would take over after his wedding.

After all the executions were carried out, while Prince Chun and others expressed ‘hearty delight’,
Cixi collapsed and was bedridden for well over a month. Unable to sleep, with ringing noises in her ears and her face badly swollen, she threw up constantly, often vomiting bile. Royal doctors diagnosed the Chinese equivalent of a nervous breakdown – ‘the
qi
of the liver shooting upwards, in the opposite direction to the normal [downward] channel’ – and kept vigil by her door. Among the medicines prescribed was blood of the Mongolian gazelle, which was said to reduce swellings. Towards the end of the year, although she started working again, the vomiting continued. This level of physical reaction was most unusual for her: after all, she was no shrinking violet; she had coolly brought off a coup without the smallest sign of physical or emotional stress, even though she was risking death by a thousand cuts. Now, it seemed, her heart had been wrung. Only love could wreak such havoc.

Her son prayed for her and visited her devotedly. But the child could not console his mother. She was inconsolable. Only music soothed her. For nearly a decade she had not been able to enjoy it as much as she would have liked. First, after her husband’s death, in accordance with court rules, all entertainments had been banned for two full years. When that period was up, general pressure compelled Cixi to prolong the ban for another two years, until he was entombed. Even then, operas were only staged in the Forbidden City on a few festive occasions. Now, as if in defiance, Cixi had
operas put on daily, and almost non-stop music played in her quarters. In her sick bed, with music to drown her sorrows, a thought churned: how to punish the man who had pressed most fiercely for Little An’s execution and who was the leader of the baying pack – her brother-in-law, Prince Chun.

The executions of Little An and his companions were enough to put Cixi off taking a lover ever again. The cost was too high. It seems that her heart was now closed. The modernisation of China also suffered and was largely suspended in the coming years as she picked her way through a minefield.

8 A Vendetta against the West (1869–71)

PRINCE CHUN HAD
been Cixi’s earliest and staunchest ally when she launched the coup nearly a decade earlier. His motive had been to oust a group of incompetent fools whom he blamed for the empire’s defeat and his emperor brother’s death. Unlike Cixi, he had no intention of changing policy, but instead wanted the country to become stronger so that it could one day avenge itself on the Western powers. His support for Cixi in the coup, and his cooperation with her over the years, had been based on the assumption that this was also what she wanted.

But as the 1860s passed, Prince Chun began to see that revenge was not on Cixi’s agenda and that she was actually attracted to Western ways. When, after the internal rebellions were quelled, many called for the expulsion of the Westerners, she had ignored them. At the beginning of 1869, Prince Chun decided he must act and presented Cixi with a
memorandum. Reminding her of the burning of the Old Summer Palace and the death of her husband in exile, he wrote that the late emperor had ‘died with an acute grievance in his heart’, a grievance that was still tormenting the prince, making him feel he could not ‘live under the same sky as the enemy’. Brushing aside the compelling fact that trade with the West had enriched the country, he demanded that she expel all Westerners and close China’s door. Six things had to be done, he said. One was to boycott foreign goods, so that Westerners would have no incentive to come to the country; and he asked the court to set an example by publicly destroying all Western products in the palaces. The Foreign Office should compile a list of all the foreigners in Beijing, so that when the time came to break off relations, they could be ‘wiped out’ if need be, a job for which he volunteered his services. The prince wanted Cixi to ‘issue a decree to all provincial chiefs telling them they are to encourage the gentry and the people . . . to burn foreign churches, loot foreign goods, kill foreign merchants and sink foreign ships’, stressing that these actions must take place simultaneously ‘in all provinces’. Ending his long memo, Prince Chun told Cixi bluntly that she ‘must fulfil the dying wish’ of her late husband, and that she ‘must not let a day go by without thinking about revenge, never forget it for a minute’.

Cixi did not want to tie the empire to the chariot of retribution. ‘
Even if we do not forget the grievances for a day . . . grievances don’t get addressed by killing people or burning houses,’ she reasoned. She sent Prince Chun’s memo to the grandees for discussion.
They were all startled by the violence of his proposal, and told Cixi to keep it as ‘top of all top secrets’, not to be leaked out. To Prince Chun they made emollient noises, praising his sentiment and condoning such measures as shunning Western goods in the Forbidden City (except ‘useful items like clocks and guns’). But they made clear that they opposed the aggressive thrust of his proposal, on the grounds that it could lead to war with the West, which China could not win. Sullenly Prince Chun accepted the grandees’ verdict. But he was far from convinced.

It was soon after this exchange that Prince Chun insisted on the execution of Little An. Cixi was in no doubt that he was striking at her politically as well as personally. While she was waiting for her chance to hit back, Prince Chun plotted
his
next move.

At the time, the meeting of Western and Chinese cultures had resulted in many clashes. While Westerners branded China as ‘semi-civilised’, the Chinese called Westerners ‘foreign devils’. But the focus of animosity was the Christian missions, which had established themselves in many parts of the country in the past decade. There had been riots against them from time to time, which had acquired a specific term in the language:
jiao-an
, ‘cases to do with Christian missions’.

These did not spring from religious prejudice. As Freeman-Mitford, the attaché in Beijing, observed, the Chinese did not have strong religious antipathies:

If it were otherwise, how is it that a colony of Jews has dwelt among them unmolested for two thousand years, and still remains . . . at Kai Feng in the province of Ho Nan? How is it that the Mohammedans have flourished exceedingly in certain provinces . . .? On the walls of the Imperial palace at Peking there is a pavilion richly decorated with Arabic inscriptions from the Koran in honour of a Mohammedan lady who was a wife, or favourite, of one of the emperors. This does not look like persecution for religion’s sake. And, more than these . . . Buddhism has been the popular religion . . .