Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (27 page)

15 In Retirement and in Leisure (1889–94)

BECAUSE THE SUMMER
Palace was still under construction when Cixi retired in 1889, she lived first in the Sea Palace, adjacent to the Forbidden City. There her adopted son had a villa, Yingtai, in the middle of the lake, where he often stayed. Seeing her almost daily for the routine greetings, Guangxu was totally silent about state business. He had long yearned to be in charge of his own affairs and wanted even less of Cixi’s interference after she imposed a detested marriage on him.

Before her retirement, a set of rules,
the Statutes, had been drawn up by Prince Chun and the grandees concerning her future political role, which she had accepted. The Statutes did not require Emperor Guangxu to consult her over policy, nor did they give her any say over the emperor’s decisions – with the single exception of the appointment of senior officials, for which her approval had to be obtained before an announcement could be made. In addition, Emperor Guangxu was obliged to send her the titles of the reports he received, from which she could get a vague idea of what was going on in the empire, but no details. These copies were for information only. However much Prince Chun wanted Cixi to continue at the helm, and however much she wanted to be, this was as far as they could go. When, just before her retirement,
an official petitioned for all reports that were destined for the emperor to be presented to her as well, she had no alternative but to reject the idea out of hand.

Emperor Guangxu followed the Statutes to the letter, and the
first list was sent to Cixi on the very day after he assumed power. Simultaneously her contacts with the Grand Council and other officials were severed, including with Earl Li. At first, it seems, the woman who had been at the centre of historical action for nearly three decades found it hard to stay away. That summer she
stepped in and announced the launch of the Beijing–Wuhan Railway in a decree that said specifically: ‘His Majesty on the order of Her Majesty the Empress Dowager Cixi . . .’ She was able to do this probably because Grand Tutor Weng was away attending to his family tombs, and the emperor bowed to her forceful intervention.
But when the tutor was back and disapproved of the project,
Guangxu shelved it. Early the following year, 1890, she seized the opportunity presented by a trip to pay homage at the Eastern Mausoleums, for which senior officials gathered, to
meet with the Grand Council and Earl Li. They discussed railway projects and the latest situation in Korea, a vassal state of China’s, where a crisis involving rivalrous foreign powers was looming.
The meeting created such bad odour with the emperor that, it seems, he had it out with her, which in turn made Cixi furious. When she handed out fruits as a goodwill gesture to officials, she excluded the emperor’s attendants. Similar moments of tension continued into 1891.

Cixi’s formal
move into the Summer Palace on 4 June 1891 put an end to this struggle, as she was now physically removed from the decision-making centre. Any further effort would involve nothing short of conspiracy. Emperor Guangxu made a point of marking her departure with an imperial decree and an elaborate ceremony attended by a large contingent of officials. That morning he led them all in formal garb to kneel outside the gate of the Sea Palace to see her on her way. After her sedan-chair set off, he went ahead, in order to greet her, again on his knees, upon her arrival at the Summer Palace. They had dinner together, after which he returned to the Forbidden City. Thereafter he visited the Summer Palace regularly, but only to bid her good health. These shows of etiquette kept her firmly away from politics. As Cixi later told a Viceroy,
‘After my retirement, I no longer had anything to do with state affairs.’

Her royal duties were symbolic and prescribed. When harvests failed on a large scale, she would issue a public announcement, donating money from the court. When Prince Chun died in 1891, it was her responsibility to oversee all the requisite arrangements, from the interment to the construction of a temple dedicated to the prince. Otherwise, she spent her days with eunuchs and ladies of the court.

The person who looked after her and made sure things ran smoothly was her head eunuch, Lee Lianying – the man who had been taken by Prince Chun on his tour to inspect the navy. The trip had been Cixi’s gift to the key figure in her daily life, as well as the prince’s way of making amends to her. The American painter Katharine Carl, who met him some years later, described Lianying:

In person he is tall and thin. His head is, in type, like Savonarola’s. He has a Roman nose, a massive lean jaw, a protruding lower lip, and very shrewd eyes, full of intelligence, that shine out of sunken orbits. His face is much wrinkled and his skin like old parchment . . . He has elegant, insinuating manners, speaks excellent Chinese – having a fine enunciation, a good choice of words, and a low, pleasant voice.

Lianying’s future as a eunuch was sealed when he was six by his poverty-stricken father, who took the child to a professional castrator. When he first entered the court, the boy preferred play to work and was considered ‘lazy’. But strict training and severe punishments for ‘dereliction’ changed him and made him assiduous in serving his masters and obeying court rules. Exceptionally cautious and sensitive, he looked after Cixi to perfection. He was her taster – and also her best friend. Cixi was lonely. Some of her eunuchs recalled:

Although the Empress Dowager had many matters to deal with, it appeared that her life was rather empty. When she was not working, she painted and watched operas, and so on, but she was often restless. The only person who could relieve her restlessness was the eunuch Lee Lianying. He knew how to look after her and became her indispensable companion. We could see that they were very, very close.

The eunuchs remembered that Cixi often dropped into Lianying’s room and called out: ‘Lianying, let’s go for a stroll.’ They ‘would then walk together, and we would follow them from a distance. The empress dowager sometimes even called Lee Lianying to her bedchamber . . . and they would chat deep into the night.’ When Lianying was ill – or pretended to be ill in order to stay in bed, according to the eunuchs – ‘the Empress Dowager would worry and would summon the court doctors at once. She would stay with him until he took the medicine.’ (Herbs and other ingredients took time to dole out, mix and brew.) In the court medical records Lianying had his own file, unique for a member of staff, who shared files. This medical privilege was unavailable even to lower-rank royal concubines. Cixi showered him with expensive gifts and promoted him to a high rank that was unprecedented for a eunuch in Qing history.

In the court Lianying’s privileged position generated little malicious jealousy, as by consensus he was ‘always respectful to his superiors, and always generous to his inferiors’. But in the country at large, because of his closeness to Cixi, and because he was a eunuch, officials were constantly accusing him of meddling in state affairs, although no one ever produced any proof. As a matter of fact Cixi never involved him in politics, following the Qing rules meticulously. But the accusations refused to die down. When he was taken on the navy inspection tour by Prince Chun, the news generated such a tempest that it almost overshadowed the inspection itself. One
Censor wrote to reprimand Cixi, alleging that sending Lianying on the trip had caused floods that had ruined the crops in several provinces. Cixi broke her own rule of not punishing critics and accused the Censor of slander, on which basis she publicly and emphatically rejected his petitions (‘threw them back at him’), and demoted the hapless man. When another official wrote to say that eunuchs should not be let out of the capital at all, she ignored the petition. Still there was widespread gossip that Lianying had attained his privileged position through his exceptional skill in dressing Cixi’s hair – a baseless rumour that was charged with sexual innuendo. Even a later defeat by Japan during Cixi’s retirement was blamed on her relationship with Lianying.

Lianying would get even in his own way. Often offered expensive gifts by officials hoping for a sinecure, he would accept them, but then do nothing. Cixi was well aware this was happening and acquiesced.

Trying all sorts of ways to reward Lianying, Cixi invited his sister to stay in the court. But her stay was short. As the relative of a eunuch she was in an awkward position. When other ladies rode in sedan-chairs, tired after a long walk, she had to trot, like her brother, alongside the chairs, which was excruciating for her bound feet. A palace maid observed that the empress dowager would have allowed her a sedan-chair for herself, but the prudent Lianying would never have accepted the favour. His sister’s station was considered so low that the servants would not even take tips from her. ‘We wouldn’t accept her tips even if we were dying of poverty,’ one of the maids snorted. Before long, the sister stopped appearing at court.

The court ladies around Cixi were mostly young widows. They had all had their marriages arranged by the empress dowager, which was considered the greatest of privileges, and all were prohibited by the traditional code of honour from marrying again after their husbands had died. Among them was a daughter of Prince Ching, Si Gege, who was clever and vivacious, fun-loving and popular, and who made Cixi laugh. Cixi said the girl reminded her of her younger self, and missed her whenever she was away. Another teenage widow was a Lady Yuan, who was not actually married in the normal sense: the man to whom she had been engaged, a nephew of Cixi, had died before the wedding. But before the funeral Lady Yuan dressed herself in a widow’s garb, and in a sedan-chair draped with white sackcloth, a sign of mourning, went to his coffin and performed the ritual that established her position as his widow. This highly regarded act of spousal loyalty set her on a lifetime of chastity and loneliness. To an observer she was wooden and lifeless, and Cixi did not have much to say to her. But she took pity on Lady Yuan and always included her in the invitations.

Empress
Longyu was a perennial fixture in Cixi’s retinue. The emperor completely ignored her, even when they bumped into each other and she went down on her knees to greet him. People regarded her as ‘sweet’, ‘charming’ and ‘lovable’, ‘but there is sometimes a look in her eyes of patient resignation that is almost pathetic’. Her life was empty and she was very bored. Some said she took out her frustration and bitterness on servants and pets, and that her cats always ran away after a few months. All the ladies would try to be cheerful when they were around Cixi, but there was little real happiness.

Cixi led a well-ordered life. In the morning she took her time getting up, no longer forcing herself to rise at five or six, but lingering sometimes until after eight. When she was ready for the day, signalled by the windows in her quarters being opened, the whole palace began to buzz. Eunuch messengers raced around to announce the ‘news’ and chief eunuchs congregated outside her apartment to await instructions.

In her room she put on a silk dressing gown, while a maid rushed to the kitchen to fetch hot water, which was poured into a silver bowl held aloft by a junior eunuch on his knees, with maids standing holding soap dishes and hand towels. Cixi attended to her face by covering it with a hot towel for a few minutes before patting it dry. Then she wrapped her hands in another towel and soaked them in the hot water for a rather long time – long enough for the water to be changed two or three times – which was said to be her secret for keeping her hands soft like a young girl’s.

After rinsing her teeth, she sat on a chair facing south and a eunuch came in to dress her hair. According to the eunuchs, Cixi had begun to lose hair from the age of forty, and a jet-black toupee was placed over the thinned patch. It required considerable skill to keep the wig in position while combing her hair and fixing it in the complicated Manchu style, with jewelled pins. Her hairdresser would also supply her with the gossip of the previous day and she would slowly take her daily jelly of ‘silver fungus’ (
yin-er
), which was supposed to be good for one’s health and looks. When the hairdressing was over, she placed ornaments in her hair. No Manchu lady’s coiffure was considered complete without flowers, and Cixi preferred fresh flowers to jewels. She would deftly make flower arrangements on her hair, sometimes weaving the snowy blooms of jasmine into a diadem. (Her palace maids also wore flowers in their hair, and when they stood beside her, those on her right would have flowers on their right side and those on her left their left.)

There was not much she could do to her face: as a widow, she was not supposed to wear make-up. Otherwise, Manchu ladies painted their faces excessively white and pink, and had a vivid patch of red on their lower lip, to produce a ‘cherry’-like small mouth, considered beautiful in those days when wide lips were deemed ugly. Longing to use a little make-up, Cixi would discreetly apply a touch of rouge on her cheeks and on the centre of her palms, even a little on her lips. The rouge used in the court was made with roses that grew in the hills west of Beijing. The petals of a certain red rose were put in a stone mortar and crushed with a white marble pestle. A little alum was added and the dark-red liquid thus produced was poured into a ‘rouge jug’ through fine white gauze. Silk wool was cut into small square or round pads and placed in the jug for days, to soak up the liquid. The silk pads were then dried, inside a room with a glass window to avoid catching dust, before ending up on the royal dressing table. Cixi would dab the pad with lukewarm water before applying it. For her lips she would roll up a pad, or twist one around a jade hairpin, to form a kind of lipstick, and daub the rouge in the centre of her lips – more on the lower lip than the upper. For perfume she mixed the oils of different flowers herself. (The Palace also made its own soap, under Cixi’s direction. The maids would show her the paste that would eventually solidify into soap, and she would vigorously stir it herself.)