Imperial Woman (51 page)

Near the southeastern region of the lake, she planned and caused to be built her own palaces where she and the Emperor could live apart and yet not too far. There, too, she placed a vast theater where in her old age she could enjoy her favorite pastime, and near the marble gates, roofed with blue tiles, she set the Audience Hall, for even on holidays, she said, the ruler must be ready to hear the voices of the ministers and princes. This Audience Hall was stately and very large, decorated with carved woods and precious ancient lacquered furniture and ornaments, and upon its glass doors were painted huge the character for longevity. Before the hall there stretched a marble terrace, whence wide marble steps led to the lake. On the terrace itself were placed bronze birds and beasts and in summer awnings of silk shaded the deep verandas.

Westward the imperial woman built her home, one hall after another surrounded by the deep pillared verandas where in meditation she loved to walk. When rain fell she paced back and forth to gaze over the misted waters and the dripping cypress trees. In summer she ordered fragrant matting of sweet grass to be stretched over her courtyards, and these were outdoor rooms, filled with rockeries and flowers; and among all her flowers she still loved best the small green orchids for which she had been named as a child. Along the lake she built a marble-pillared corridor, a mile long, and here, too, she walked, to gaze upon a peony mountain, crabapple trees and oleanders, and pomegranates. With increasing passion she loved beauty, for beauty, she told herself, and only beauty, was pure and good and worthy of her love.

Encouraged by her people’s willingness, the Empress grew reckless with magnificence. Her royal bed was hung with imperial-yellow satin whereon she caused to be embroidered, by the finest craftswomen, a cloud of flying phoenixes. From everywhere in the Western world she gathered clocks for her amusement, clocks of gold set with jewels. Some were made with cunning decorations of birds that sang, some with cocks that crowed, some centered upon streams of running water that turned the inner wheels. Yet, in spite of such toys, she made a library for herself that the greatest scholars envied and she never ceased to read her books.

And always, everywhere she looked, she saw in vistas the blue waters of the lake. In its center was the island upon which stood a temple to the Dragon King to which led a marble bridge with seventeen arches. Upon that island, too, was a small sandy beach, and half buried in its sand the bronze cow, placed by Ch’ien Lung, stood stalwart through the centuries to ward off floods. Many bridges the Empress caused to be built so that wherever she might wish to go she went, but one bridge she loved above all others, a hunchbacked bridge that curved into the air for thirty feet. There, so high, she loved to stand and gaze across the water upon the roofs, the pagodas and the terraces of her vast possession.

Lulled by beauty, she let the years slip by, until one day her eunuch, whose duty it was to remind her of what she forgot, begged her to remember that the young Emperor, Kwang Hsü, her nephew, was now near the end of his seventeenth year and therefore she should choose a consort for him. On this day the Empress was watching the completion of a new pagoda which she had designed to carry further the pointed height of a mountain behind the Summer Palace. Nevertheless she perceived at once that Li Lien-ying was right and she must no longer delay the marriage of the Heir. What care she had spent upon the choice of Consort for her true son! She felt no such care now except that she would choose a woman always loyal to herself as Empress, and above all not one like Alute, who had loved her lord too well.

“I desire only peace,” the Empress said to Li Lien-ying. “Name me some maidens you know who will not love my nephew as Alute loved my son. Strife I can no longer bear. I will not be disturbed by love or hate.”

Then seeing that Li Lien-ying, now growing fat, looked ill at ease as he knelt before her, she bade him sit and rest himself while he thought what names to suggest. The huge eunuch gladly obeyed, puffing and sighing and fanning himself, for the season was too warm for spring, and everywhere the trees and shrubs were bursting into early bloom.

“Majesty,” he said after thought, “why not that good plain maiden who is the daughter of your brother, Duke Kwei Hsiang?”

The Empress clapped her hands softly in approval, casting upon the ugly face of her slave a look of affection. “Why did I not think of her?” she replied. “She is the best among my younger ladies of the Court, silent and ready, modest and always devoted to me. She is my favorite—I daresay because I can forget she lives!”

“And for the imperial concubines?” Li Lien-ying inquired.

“Name me some pretty girls,” she said carelessly, her eyes already lifted to the tall spire of the pagoda rising above the pine trees. “Only let them be stupid,” she added.

To which the Eunuch said, “The Viceroy of Canton deserves reward, Majesty, for holding down the rebels always restless in the southern provinces. He has two daughters, one pretty and one fat, both stupid.”

“I will name them,” the Empress said, still carelessly. “Do you prepare the decree,” she added.

Thus directed, Li Lien-ying rose with great heaves and sighs, while she laughed at him, which pleased him, and he mumbled that his Old Buddha must not disturb herself, for he would arrange everything and she need only appear on the day of the wedding.

“You!” she scolded, pointing at him with her outthrust little finger, wearing its ruby-jeweled nail shield. “You dare to call me Old Buddha!”

“Majesty,” he said, puffing and panting, “it is what the people call you everywhere, since you prayed down the rains last summer.”

It was true that in the last winter no snow fell and the skies continued hard as blue sapphire through the spring and even in the summer no rains came down. The Empress then decreed prayers and fasting and she herself prayed and fasted and commanded the whole Court so to do. On the third day Buddha yielded, the skies melted and the rains rushed out. The happy people ran into the streets and drank the blessed rain and bathed their hands and faces and praised their Empress for her power even with the gods and cried out:

“She is our own Old Buddha!”

Since then the Chief Eunuch had always called her Old Buddha. It was gross flattery and she knew it was and yet she liked it. Old Buddha! It was the highest name a people could bestow upon a ruler, for it meant they beheld in him a god. And by now she had forgot that she was ever a woman. At the age of fifty-five, she was a being apart from men and women and beyond them all, as Buddha was.

“Get away with you,” she said, laughing. “What will you be saying next, you monstrous fellow!”

But when he had gone she wandered here and there, lonely among the fabulous gardens she had made, the sun falling on her handsome aging face and on the glittering robes she loved to wear. At the distance which she now demanded, her ladies followed as usual like a flock of hovering butterflies.

The wedding day drew near, an ill-fated day, not blessed by Heaven. The omens were not good. The night before a mighty wind blew down from the north and tore away the matting roofs the eunuchs had built to cover the great entrance courtyard of the Forbidden City, the place the Empress had decreed for the wedding ceremonies. The dawn opened gray and dark, rain fell early and the skies were relentless. The red wedding candles would not light, and the sweetmeats were soft with damp. When the bride entered the vast courtyard and took her place beside the bridegroom he turned his head away to show his dislike and the Empress, seeing him thus offend the one she had chosen, could not hide her rage except by such effort that anger turned inward and boiled through her veins and settled in her heart to a bitter deathless hatred for her nephew because he could defy her. There he sat, a tall, pale reedy boy, a weakling, his face not bearded, his hands too delicate and always trembling, and yet he was stubborn! This was the heir she had chosen for the Throne! His weakness was rebuke to her, his stubborn will an enemy. Thus she raged in secret while tears ran down the young bride’s sallow cheeks.

The rites proceeded, the Empress seemed indifferent, and when the day was ended she left the Forbidden City and returned to her Summer Palace, henceforth to be her home.

From there in the first month of her fifty-sixth year she declared by edict to the nation that once more she had retired from the Regency and that the Emperor now sat alone upon the Dragon Throne. As for herself, she said, she withdrew from the Forbidden City. And so she did, within that same month, moving all her treasures to the Summer Palace, with the intent to live and die there, against the wish of her many princes and her ministers. These besought her to keep one hand at least upon the reins of empire, for the Emperor, they declared, was headstrong and weak-willed, a dangerous combination of waywardness and yielding.

“Too much under the sway of his tutors, K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao,” they said.

“And Majesty, he loves too well those foreign toys,” her Chief Censor said. “To this day the young Emperor, though he is a man now and wed, will sit before his toy trains and wind a key or light a small fire to see them run along toy tracks. We doubt that this is only play. We fear he has his plans to build these foreign railroads upon our own ancient soil.”

She laughed at them, very gay to think that she had shaken off her cares and duties. “It is your business now, my lords and princes,” she declared. “Do what you will with your young sovereign, and let me rest.”

They were troubled to a man, the more because Prince Kung and Jung Lu were banished from the Court. “But may we come to you if our young Emperor will not heed us?” they inquired. “Remember, Majesty, that he fears only you.”

“I am not in another country,” she said, still waggish. “I am but nine miles away. I have my eunuchs, my spies and courtiers. I shall not let the Emperor take away your heads, I daresay, so long as I know you are loyal to me.”

Her great eyes shone and sparkled as she spoke and her lips, still red as youth itself, curved and smiled and teased, and seeing her high humor they were assured again and went away.

She let the years glide by once more, though keeping secret hold upon her power through spies in every palace. Thus she learned that the young Emperor did not love his plain Consort, that they quarreled, and that he turned to his two concubines, the Pearl and the Lustrous.

“But they are stupid,” Li Lien-ying in his daily gossip told her. “We need not fear them.”

“They will debauch him,” she said indifferently. “I have no hope of him or any man.” She seemed not to care, but for a moment her great eyes were bleak and lightless. “Ah well,” she said, and roused herself and turned her head away.

Yet she could be as sharp in her command as any ruler is. When the princes of her own Yehonala Clan desired by memorial to raise the title of Prince Ch’un, the Emperor’s father, and thus give the Emperor the opportunity to show filial piety by placing his father higher than himself in the law of generations, she would not allow it. No, the imperial line was still to be through her, and not through any other. Kwang Hsü was her son by adoption, and she was the Imperial Ancestor. Yet with her old grace, she refused gently so that she did not wound Prince Ch’un, whom she had chosen for her sister’s husband now many years ago. She praised the Prince, she spoke of his unchanging loyalty and then said that he himself would not accept the honor, so modest was he.

“Whenever I have wished to bestow a special honor on this Prince,” she said by royal edict, “he has refused it with tears in his eyes. I have long since granted him My leave to ride in a sedan chair with curtains of apricot yellow silk of the imperial rank, but not once has he ventured so to do. Thus does he prove his loyalty and unselfish modesty, to My people as well as to Myself.”

Alas, in a few short years after this edict was sent forth the worthy prince fell mortally ill. The Empress had grown so deeply into peace and rest that she showed herself indifferent and did not so much as visit him, although he was her imperial brother-in-law. Censors then reminded her of her duty, which angered her so that she bade them to mind their own affairs, for she knew what she would do and would not. Nevertheless, roused by her anger, she did visit Prince Ch’un and often until in the next summer he died. In her
Decree Upon the Death of Prince Ch’un
she praised him for the perfect performance of his duties as the Chamberlain of the Palace, the Head of the Navy and the Commander of the Manchu Field Forces, all duties which she had given him. And she herself examined details for the funeral and she presented the corpse with a sacred coverlet to wear inside the coffin, and upon the coverlet she bade her woman embroider many Buddhist prayers for his soul. When he was in his grave she made one more command concerning this dead Prince. His palace she ordered to be divided into two parts, one to be the ancestral hall for his family clan and the other, where the young emperor had been born and whence she had taken him in secret haste so many years ago, she declared now would be an imperial shrine.

Thus the lingering years drew on to that most honorable dawn when the Empress would celebrate her sixtieth birthday. With matchless vigor she had now completed the Summer Palace, her abode of beauty and of peace for her old age. Under her command, which even the young Emperor dared not refuse, she had taken treasure from all the Government Boards, and at the very last, when all was done, she had the final whim to build a vast white marble boat to stand in the midst of the lake, connected by a marble bridge to the land. Where were the monies to come from for this? The Emperor sighed and shook his troubled head when he received her messages.

This time he dared to send his doubt back to her, couched in most delicate and filial words. But she flew into one of her mighty rages and tore the sheets of silken paper and threw them into the air above her head and when they came fluttering down upon the floor, she bade a eunuch sweep them up and cast them into a kitchen fire.

“My idle nephew knows where the money is,” she shouted, for now in her old age when she was denied or that which she ordered was delayed, she indulged in those shouts and shrieks and tantrums which before she had enjoyed only in her childhood. All were astonished to see her thus, and in such moods only Li Lien-ying could calm her.