The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (11 page)

But Hung’s powers of persuasion and oratory were phenomenal. With his cousin, Hung Jen-kan, and classmate, Feng Yun-shan, Hung established a group known as the
Pai Shang Ti Hui
(Society for the Worship of God). People were impressed by their sincerity and by the moral transformation of those joining the Society, and many converts were made, especially among the peasantry. Over the next six or seven years Hung’s triumvirate travelled widely in the south, establishing groups of
Pai Shang Ti Hui
. Despite his punishing schedule, Hung felt that the real work of his life had not yet begun. He wrote: ‘At the moment I am idle like a fish leaping in a deep pool as I bide my time for men to congregate.’

By the beginning of 1851, he felt he was ready. Ten thousand members of the
Pai Shang Ti Hui
were ordered to gather at Chin-tien village in the foothills of Tzuchingshan in Guanxi Province. They pooled all their resources, money, clothing and food, and trained together as a fighting unit. In defiance of Manchu edicts, which required that all their Chinese subjects shave the front of their heads and wear the remaining hair in a queue or pigtail, the rebels grew their hair and wore it unbraided, glorying in their soubriquet
Chang Mao
, the ‘longhaired warriors’. On 11th January, Hung solemnly announced the uprising of the
Chang Mao
against the Manchu and proclaimed the establishment of the
Tai Ping Tien Guo
, the ‘The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’. The great Tai Ping rebellion had begun.

Alarmed by these events, the Qing government transferred troops from Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan and other provinces in an attempt to encircle and crush the insurgents. But the imperial troops, the descendants of Nurhachi’s ‘Romans of the East’, had been softened by years of comfortable existence in their sinecures. The Tai Ping’s disciplined army, hardened by the rigours of their previous peasant existence, and strengthened by faith in their leader’s divine origin, destroyed all that were sent against them.

While the Dynasty’s prospects were shaken by these reverses, in the Forbidden City Yehonala’s personal fortune was in the ascendant. Thanks to her abilities in the bedchamber, she had already begun her rise to prominence: soon after spending their first night together Hsien Feng had promoted her one grade to the rank of
P’in
concubine. But even better fortune was to follow, for by September 1855 Yehonala knew she was pregnant by Hsien Feng. The news could only have inflamed her ambitions. Although several of the Emperor’s ancestors had sired male heirs by the time they were fifteen years old, Hsien Feng, now in his mid-twenties, had still not produced the longed-for son that would guarantee his tottering Dynasty some measure of stability. Were Yehonala to present the Emperor with a son, her position in court would be assured, unassailable. To the mother of the heir many previously closed doors would fly open. The months of her confinement must have dragged by in an unbearable mélange of elation and fear. Nothing was said openly, but everyone knew that miscarriage, or a female child, would disappoint the Emperor, shame Yehonala before the whole palace, and return her to the obscurity she loathed. The climax of this quiet drama came in the spring of 1856, on 27th April, when all her dreams were realised–Yehonala gave birth to a healthy man-child, a baby boy who was destined to become the eighth Emperor of the Manchu Dynasty under his reign-title Tung Chih. The Emperor was delighted beyond words. Yehonala was now further advanced in the hierarchy of the seraglio–she was immediately elevated to the rank of Kuei Fei, and given the title of Empress Hsiao Ch’in. So pleased was the Emperor that his favourite had produced the long-sought heir, he took the new Empress completely into his confidence, and taught her to classify his memorials, so that there was good reason for her to be constantly at his side. And so the young concubine obtained her first inside view of the workings of the Manchu regime, and took her first taste of power. Such a position made her privy to most state documents, a position she was not slow to exploit. She read avidly, devouring everything that came within reach and was soon acting as an unofficial adviser to the Emperor.

During 1856, as Yehonala began her work of classifying the memorials sent to the Emperor, she would have quickly realised just how great a threat the Tai Ping rebels had become. The insurgents were now well ensconced in Canton, Guanxi and Guelin Provinces and had held the southern capital of Nanking against all-comers for the past three years. During this time the nature of the rebellion had changed out of all recognition. Once again, as in all China’s rebellions, the ‘imperial infection’ had blighted the revolutionary purity of the Tai Ping revolt. Hung Hsiu-chuan and his close confederates, the defenders of women’s rights, the champions of equality and the scourge of privilege, had been seduced by power and had begun to reap the personal rewards of victory:

Hung had taken to wearing yellow dragon-robes in imitation of the Emperor, calling himself The Heavenly King. His allies had given themselves equally grandiose titles, styling themselves, The King of the East, or The Loyal Prince, and they had all begun building elaborate palaces and pleasure parks where they each held state like the Emperor himself. All had procured for themselves harems of fabulous proportions: Hung’s own stable of beauties numbered three hundred ‘wives’, and on certain of his birthdays he graciously increased the number of odalisques each of his allies was allowed to possess. At the same time, the Tai Ping rank and file were subject to draconian discipline: all goods were held in common, and men and women were strictly separated, with sexual relations even between married couples punished by beheading.
⁵
Despite the obvious discrepancies between rhetoric and practice, many of Hung’s followers retained a Messiah-like belief in their leader, and were willing to fight and die for him on a scale not seen among the Manchu forces, who laboured under the weight of centuries-old corruption. The vigour of the revolutionaries brought them more victories than defeats and slowly, but inexorably, their sphere of influence expanded. At the Beijing court it was whispered that if the Tai Ping successes continued, Hung Hsiu-chuan might bid fair to be the next occupant of the Dragon Throne.

Yehonala, true to her pugnacious temperament, counselle
d
the Emperor and stiffened his resolve in the face of these setbacks. She was said to be responsible for the appointment of a capable general, Tseng Guo-feng, as commander-in-chief against the rebels. Tseng travelled south, provided with adequate funds to reorganise the Imperial troops, and to raise additional forces in Hunan Province. In the same year that Yehonala gave birth to the Emperor’s son, Tseng Guo-feng’s reforms began to bear fruit when he won a number of minor victories against the
Chang Mao
. These successes made Yehonala’s stock rise even higher at court, much to the chagrin of those Manchu nobles who had heretofore been the bosom friends of the Celestial Prince.

These worthies, along with his eunuch servants, had encouraged and accompanied Hsien Feng on ‘secret’ visits outside the Forbidden City where, like Nero in Rome, a disguised Emperor had for several years indulged in the life of a libertine, visiting peep-shows, opium houses and brothels with their store of ‘lily-footed’ Chinese females, forbidden fruit to any Manchu, much less the Emperor. If rumour was to be believed, transvestite actors (men played almost all female roles in Chinese theatre) were also an important part of Hsien Feng’s nocturnal adventures. As a result of these excesses, Hsien Feng had lost much of his former health (he had been a gymnast in his youth). European emissaries generally described him as an unprepossessing individual with a wispy moustache worn above his small mouth, though some remark on his stately, dignified bearing during their audience. By the time of his infatuation with Yehonala he was decidedly unwell, suffering from dropsy and the effects of his previous debaucheries. His illnesses (and his rumoured over-indulgence in the sensual charms of Yehonala) had left him exhausted, and it had been easy to persuade the Emperor to transfer control of the affairs of state to four Grand Councillors and four adjutant-generals.

The most powerful member of the Council was an Imperial clansman of the blue-bordered banner, Su Shun, who derived much influence from being a half-brother of Prince I. Su Shun was greatly feared within and without the Forbidden City. As Assistant Grand Secretary he had contrived the murder of his chief, persuading the Emperor to order the beheading of the honest and uncompromising Grand Secretary, Po Sui, who had thwarted the schemes of his confederates. Yehonala had intervened in a vain attempt to save the condemned man, a move which signalled the beginning of a deadly feud between herself and Su Shun. As he rose in power Su Shun engineered the arrest of all the Secretaries of the Board of Revenue, holding them prisoner himself and extorting from each of them an enormous ransom for their release.
⁶
This fortune formed the basis of his power at court and made Su Shun a dangerous man to cross.

As effective rulers of the Empire, the Grand Councillors, and Su Shun in particular, were an enormous obstacle to Yehonala’s own ambitions. They, in turn, were resentful of Yehonala’s power over the Emperor, and the weight Hsien Feng gave to her opinions on matters of state (the Emperor’s agreement was still required on all major decisions taken by the Council). Yehonala found a natural ally in her cousin, Sakota, the Emperor’s consort, and she joined forces with Prince Kung, sworn enemy of Su Shun and his faction. While the silk-robed courtiers enacted their ceremonious rites within the ornate palaces of the Forbidden City, a silent manoeuvring for power began between the competing cliques, all the more urgent when it became clear that the Emperor’s illnesses were more serious than previously believed, and that the Lord of Ten Thousand Years was unlikely to survive even the next ten months. The question of who would rule the Middle Kingdom during the minority of the heir, Yehonala’s son, loomed large on the political horizon of China. It was no longer a matter of ‘face’ between the factions, of currying favour with the Celestial Prince, and jockeying for position at court. The scene was set for an internal power struggle that would lead to the disgrace, and perhaps death, of one of the factions. That the growing power of the Tai Ping revolutionaries might mean that there would soon be no dynasty to fight over seemed to worry neither camp.

If the outlook for the dynasty within China was bleak, the view from without was, if anything, worse.

For millennia China had prided herself on being
Chung
, ‘Central’, the Middle Kingdom, with the Emperor at its heart, who swayed All Under Heaven, and around whom the whole world revolved. Successive dynasties had nurtured this Sino-centric view of the world, and even the Manchu could not withstand its seductive power. As outsiders the Manchu ridiculed the egocentric pomposity of the Ming; as possessors of the Dragon Throne themselves they were soon persuaded of the truth of the previous dynasty’s position.

And in terms of the Chinese
umwelt
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such an elevated opinion of themselves was entirely justified. All nations and states surrounding China did acknowledge their suzerainty–and Chinese architecture, literature, technology and ethics were all arguably superior to that of their smaller neighbours. Knowledge of the West and its civilisation was limited and distorted through the lens of China’s confidence in its own superiority. Even in the mid-1800s there were maps extant showing China as a nation of enormous proportions, with other states such as Britain and the United States represented as tiny islands at the very edges and the African continent rating no mention whatsoever (present-day maps of the world in the People’s Republic continue the tradition by placing China centre-stage). One commentary names Great Britain the ‘Red-Hair Nation’, and allows it second place after China, owing to the people’s ‘sharp practice’ and shrewdness: ‘Its people are mostly clever, proud by nature and unwilling to be subordinate.’
⁷

The Chinese had known of the existence of nations and empires far to the west of their borders for more than two thousand years. News of the Roman Empire (or at least its eastern segment), known to the Chinese as Ta-tsin and, later, Fu-lin, was carried via Parthia to the Middle Kingdom around the time of Christ.
⁸
Nestorian Christians later brought their version of the faith to China via the Silk Route, followed by merchants and priests like Marco Polo, Michel Roger and Matteo Ricci.
⁹
But these were all individual travellers, welcome for the curiosities of Western culture that they carried with them, and as curiosities themselves. Later arrivals, such as the Jesuits, proved the superiority of Western mathematics and astronomy, and their knowledge was avidly incorporated into the Chinese corpus. When the sea-borne nations of Europe, Portugal, Britain and France arrived to trade in larger numbers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were at first disdainful.

For the scholar-officials, merchants were beneath contempt, and trading not an activity from which status or even wealth were to be drawn. As a kindness to the Western barbarians, and like the Indian and Arab traders who had preceded them, they allowed the Europeans access to Chinese markets via the port of Canton, but only under very restrictive ordinances. They were not allowed to enter Canton proper, but as traders, or factors, were confined to ‘factories’ in a small compound set aside for them outside the city walls. No official contact was permitted: the Westerners were forced to use ‘compradors’, specially assigned Chinese merchants who acted as go-betweens, doing business in China proper on behalf of the barbarians. In this way, what little benefit the Chinese could obtain from the Westerners was extracted while they themselves were kept at arm’s length. By such means the mandarins insulated their nation from outside influences.

China remained essentially unchanged and unchanging, self-sufficient, and secure in its ignorant self-confidence. Even as late as 1816, during Lord Amherst’s embassy to the Forbidden City, the Emperor could still be shocked and surprised at the bickering that resulted from the Englishman’s refusal to perform the kowtow (kneeling and ‘knocking head’ nine times in token of respectful submission). Presents brought by the British as symbols of friendship between one monarch and another were viewed by the Chinese as tribute from a vassal state. The edict issued by Emperor Chia Ch’ing at the end of the embassy is a wonderful example of this surpassing arrogance: