The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (2 page)

60.
Wu San-kuei
(Wu Sangui)–Ming general who turned his coat and fought for the Manchu invaders against the Ming Dynasty. Later a satrap of the Manchu in south-western China until he rose in revolt.

61.
Yeh Ming-Ch’en
(Ye Mingchen)–Imperial Commissioner at Canton. Taken prisoner by British during the
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war, held captive in India, where he later died.

62.
Yuan Shi-kai
(Yuan Shikai)–Chinese army commander, betrayed reformist coup. Promoted by Yehonala and became Viceroy of Chihli. After fall of the Manchu in 1912 he tried unsuccessfully to establish a new dynasty with himself as Emperor.

63.
Yulu
(Youlu)–Viceroy of Chihli Province during siege of the foreign legations. Committed suicide 6th August 1900 after Seymour Relief Force defeated Chinese forces en route to Beijing.

Map 1. Beijing, 1900.

Map 2. Defence of the foreign legations, Beijing, 1900. (See also area 3, Map 1).

Map 3. The route of the Imperial journey, 1900–1901.

In the early 1980s I had the good fortune to be the first documentary film-maker invited to visit the People’s Republic of China to research a television series on the wildlife of China. In the course of six weeks’ intensive travel I journeyed across the length and breadth of that vast nation, from Tibet to Shanghai and from the snowy wastes of Manchuria to the southern rainforests of Yunnan.

This journey led to several programmes on China’s wild places, to a lifelong fascination with Chinese history, and a continuing engagement with the Middle Kingdom that has lasted, in a series of yearly visits, up to the present. Much has changed since that time: China today is, in parts a least, a very modern country, one of a fortunate few with a strongly expanding economy, this century’s coming superpower. But twenty years ago it was still the land of a million bicycles, of ‘fashion’ that offered a choice between grey or blue Mao suits (three sizes), of shrill loudspeakers on every street corner and in every railway carriage, stridently exhorting the masses to follow Maoist thought and the edicts of the Party. It was most definitely a ‘less developed country’ still reeling from the Great Leap Forward (or as some of my more forthright Chinese friends delighted in naming it, the ‘Great Leap Backward’). And ‘backward’ would be a more apposite term for the state of the nation at that juncture. I spent time in remote villages and towns–off-limits to other Westerners–that reminded me irresistibly of Medieval Europe: unpaved roads that turned instantly to mud at the first downpour; non-existent sanitation, with rubbish and ordure piled up in the streets; gangs of navvies man-hauling huge logs on flimsy barrows, their faces blank with exhaustion; hawkers, tinkers, shoemakers all noisily calling out their wares; street dentists extracting reluctant molars from groaning patients; and over and through it all a swirling, seething mass of humanity, numbers past counting, all hell-bent on their own personal goals but stopping briefly to gawp at the Da Bizi, the first Western ‘big nose’ they had seen in the flesh.

After four weeks of continuous travel and alien meals of snake, dog and camel-web, my companion and fellow film-maker, Mike Rosenburg, had had enough and flew back to the UK. The last two weeks were one of the hardest and yet most rewarding periods of my life. I was totally immersed in things Chinese, a lone Westerner in a deeply alien culture. But being alone forced me to look at this, to me, strange society with new eyes. Whereas China today has assimilated much of Western culture and mind-set, in those days, despite its veneer of Communist thought, it was still very much a Confucian society, its behaviour tied to the self-same traditions that have governed Chinese life for millennia. I was there to make wildlife programmes, but I learned much more about China than its zoology. I found that I got on very well with my Chinese hosts, they opened up to me and showed me aspects of themselves and their culture that, I believe, have helped me to understand and explain the seemingly irrational happenings in the lifetime of the Last Empress. In addition, my dealings with officials gave me insights into the sometimes Alice-in-Wonderland world of Chinese bureaucracy. There was in China (and to a lesser extent there still is) a general proclivity among officialdom for denying the obvious, for flying in the face of common sense and, with apparent conviction and sincerity, brazenly naming black ‘white’. This was brought home to me most strongly in an interview with a Chinese forestry official in Sichuan. Outside the office trucks passed noisily down the track at a rate of one or two a minute, packed to the gunwales with huge tree trunks, cut from the forests near the Tibetan border and destined for some construction site in the provincial capital, Chengdu. Their passage shook the thin walls of the small office we sat in.

‘Where exactly do these lorries deposit their timber?’ I asked.

The official stared back, his eyes puzzled, ‘What lorries?’

It became obvious later in the interview that Party policy said no timber should be cut from this region. Therefore, for the official, the lorries simply could not exist. Everyone knew the problem was not to be discussed, so everyone pretended it was not there. That way, in a typically Chinese solution, the business could go ahead, Chengdu could get its timber, and at the same time Party policy was adhered to because nothing was happening! To me it seemed like madness.

At the end of a heated discussion I was given a very important piece of advice, a key of sorts to understanding much of the Middle Kingdom’s history. ‘You must understand,’ the official told me earnestly, and with every indication of sincerity, ‘facts are different in China.’

In 1618 the warrior hordes of the Manchu warlord Nurhachi swarmed through the northern passes into the plains of Ming China. By 1644 the power of the Ming Dynasty was utterly broken and Nurhachi’s descendants soon established Manchu rule across the whole of the vast Celestial Empire, ruling as the Qing (Pure) Dynasty. Shortly thereafter an ancient marble stele was said to have been discovered in the northern forests of the Manchu heartland. Written upon it was a prophecy, a warning against a future Manchu female of the Yeho-Nala clan–were she to establish dominion over the Manchu, she would most certainly bring the nation to ruin and destruction.

It was only in 1912 that the prophecy was recalled. In that year, two hundred and sixty-seven years after its inception, the Manchu dynasty collapsed in chaos and violent revolution. The author of its destruction was Ci Xi (pronounced ‘Sir Shee’), the Empress Dowager of China, nicknamed the Old Buddha. In her youth she had been known as the Orchid Lady, and later the Empress of the Western Palace. But the name she had carried with her when, in1851, she had first entered the Emperor’s harem should perhaps have been seen as a warning. For she was known then as Yehonala.

Yehonala’s life covers an almost incredible swathe of history, for she reigned over the Middle Kingdom for almost fifty years. When she first joined the Imperial household as a ‘concubine, third class’ in1851, the Emperor ruled supreme over a medieval–feudal society, secure in the knowledge that China was the very centre of the world, and that he alone, the Celestial Prince, swayed ‘All Under Heaven’. All foreigners were ‘barbarians’, be they the
Xi Yang Guizi
, the ‘Western foreign devils’ of Europe, or the ‘dwarf men’ (Japanese) of the eastern seas. The ruling elite refused to acknowledge that any nation could engage with the Middle Kingdom on terms of equality. They would allow no permanent alien presence in the Imperial City: the Chinese language contained no word for ‘ambassador’–the representatives of all foreign governments were referred to demeaningly as ‘tribute bearers’. The Chinese literati recognised no civilisation but their own: outside the Celestial Realm was only ignorance and squalor–the outer barbarians could have nothing to teach the rulers of the Middle Kingdom.

Just fifty years later, when as Empress Dowager all power lay in her own hands, Yehonala presided over a very different China, one in which ‘treaty ports’ allowed for the settlement of ‘foreign devils’ on Chinese soil, where trade and missionary work penetrated deep into the Chinese heartland, and where foreign soldiers guarded the legations of the Western Powers within the Chinese capital itself. In between, Yehonala had been at the centre of power throughout a multitude of historic events: the
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war with Britain, France’s annexation of Indo-China, the Tai Ping and Muslim rebellions, the Anglo-French march on Beijing, war with Japan, the Boxer rebellion and the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. Her personal odyssey through the twisted corridors of Chinese power reads like a history of Rome under the Caesars: intrigue, forbidden liaisons, betrayal, torture, summary executions and poisonings. Yehonala survived them all and triumphed, vanquishing her male opponents, proving her worth against the background of a culture that despised the feminine and held most women in contempt.

Strangely, there are substantial resonances between these momentous events and those close to our own time. In the 1860s China and the West faced each other in mutual incomprehension. China valued stability, respect for family and a reverence for ancient traditions that was religious in its devotional intensity. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam and the West stared at each other with a hostility born of the same inability to recognise the other’s point of view, much less its validity: Islam with its immoveable, time-honoured traditions versus the protean cultural values of the West and its obsession with the new.