The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (25 page)

But one man found he could live the lie no longer. Wu K’o-tu, a scholar noted chiefly for his self-righteous, intolerant, xenophobic memorials to the throne, now revealed an altogether more admirable aspect of his personality. He had waited four years, hoping against hope that the slow but steady flow of memorials demanding ‘an unbreakable and unchangeable pledge as to the succession to the Throne’,
¹
but saw only pious platitudes and vague bromides issuing from ‘behind the curtain’. With the calm objectivity that was one of the treasures of the Confucian philosophy, Wu K’o-tu decided that only his own death would suffice to draw attention to the gravity of the situation, that suicide was the correct, the only, course open to him to impeach Yehonala for her failures and to indict her for usurpation of the Dragon Throne.

Wu K’o-tu left nothing to chance. He chose the minor Daoist temple of Ma-shen ch’iao for his death, as close to the mausoleum of Tung Chih as a man of his rank could venture. Instructions were left, apologising to the priest of the temple for the inconvenience his suicide would cause him, and of astonishing mundane detail considering that they were written by a man about to end his own life:

Priest Chou, be not afraid. I have no desire to bring evil upon you. I was compelled to borrow the use of your hallowed ground, as a spot appropriate for the death of an honest man. Inform now the Magistrate at once, and see to it that the memorial enclosed in my despatch box is forwarded without delay.

Buy for me a cheap coffin and have it painted black inside. My clothes are all in order, only the leather soles of my boots require to be cut off [having touched the soil, they were regarded as impure] before you lay me in your coffin. I should not think that the Magistrate will need to hold an inquest. Please have a coating of lacquer put on the coffin, to fill up any cracks in the joints, and have it nailed down, pending the Empresses’ decision as to my remains. Then, buy a few feet of ground...and have me buried quickly. There is no need for me to be buried in my ancestral cemetery; any spot is a good enough resting place for a loyal and honest man.

...You can cut my body down tomorrow morning, and then have it placed in some cool and shady spot. Fearing that possibly you might come in by accident and find me hanging, I have taken a dose of opium, so as to make certain of death...All I ask of you is that you notify the Magistrate and that you do not allow women and children to come in and gaze upon my remains. There is nothing strange or abnormal here; death had become an unavoidable duty. Those who understand will pity. That is all.

The last earnest instructions of Wu K’o-tu.
²

With these instructions written, and a letter composed to his eldest son, this worthy successor of Confucius calmly and resolutely hanged himself from a temple beam. Close by him was his swan song, his memorial to Yehonala, a document that was to shake the soul of that fierce and indomitable personality to its foundation. Considering the depths of circumlocution normal in court circles, the memorial is shockingly blunt. Wu K’o-tu informs the Empresses that

the Empresses Dowager have doubly erred in appointing an heir to the Emperor Hsien Feng and not to his late Majesty. The new Emperor [i.e. Kuang Hsu] being heir to his Majesty Hsien Feng, the future succession must revert to the heir of the new Emperor...this Decree [of Yehonala] expressly ordains that this shall be so; it follows that a precedent will be established, whereby the Great Inheritance may pass by adoption...But for more than two centuries, the ancestral tradition of our House-law has been observed that the Throne shall pass from father to son...

We should therefore seek if perchance we may find some way out of this double error, whereby we may return to the right way. I therefore beg that the Empresses may be pleased to issue a second decree explicitly stating that the Great Inheritance shall hereafter revert to the adopted son of his late Majesty Tung Chih, even though the new Emperor be blessed with a hundred sons. Thus, to the late Emperor, now childless, an heir will be provided...And, for all time the orderly maintenance of the succession will be ascribed to the Empresses, whose fame will be changeless and unending...

Humbly, I offer up these years of life...humbly I lay them down in propitiation of the Empresses Dowager, to implore from them a brief Decree on behalf of the late Emperor...‘When a bird is dying its song is sad. When a man is dying his words are good’...These are my last words, my last prayer, the end and crown of my life.

The death sent shock waves through the Empire (as Wu K’o-tu had intended it should). Wu K’o-tu’s sacrifice was headline news, and it put the subject for which he had died back at the top of everyone’s agenda. Yehonala could no longer rely on vague promises and the hope that, once the Tung Chih Emperor was buried, his memory would fade and with it concerns over the succession. Both sides of her nature counselled submission: the consummate politician in her realised the strength of public support and approval for the Censor’s protest; and her superstitious psyche, knowing his protest was justifiable, was afraid of the ill-luck that his angry spirit might bring upon her, should he (and the spirit of Tung Chih) remain unplacated. She acted at once, promulgating a decree (in the name of herself and Sakota) which acceded to the demands of the dead scholar. But despite her capitulation, the ghost of Wu K’o-tu continued to haunt her. To the end of her life, Yehonala was wont to divine in every future misfortune the unseen hand of the hanged man.

But we should not lose sight of fact that, without the suicide of Wu K’o-tu, Yehonala would have continued to have given vague promises on obtaining an adopted heir for her son, and to have in fact carried out the central thrust of her first decree, which would have made Kuang Hsu’s posterity holders of the Great Inheritance. But as Kuang Hsu was incapable of siring children, upon his death, and without any clear precedents to follow for a successor, civil strife was almost certain–and with it the possibility that the Aisin Gioro, the Imperial clan, would be entirely swept from power, if not eliminated. There seems to be no other reason for Yehonala’s insistence on Kuang Hsu as new Emperor, and her attempt to establish a new precedent on succession to the Dragon Throne. The dying command, two hundred years before, of the head of the Yeho-Nala clan to destroy their conquerors was still potent. Yehonala’s every action reveals that she was intent on wreaking vengeance on the Aisin Gioro. The ancient prophecy of the Ming Emperor had been made flesh in the small implacable figure of the Western Empress.

If Yehonala’s capitulation to Wu K’o-tu’s ghost had served to placate the mass of literati, relations with her ‘co-Regent’ Sakota, continued to deteriorate. The temperaments of the two cousins were as different as the opposing halves of the Daoist Tai Chi: Yehonala all a-bustle, soaking up information like a sponge, ever-watchful, always planning; Sakota placid, conciliatory, unconcerned with world affairs, ready always to compromise. As the Kuang Hsu Emperor grew, it was this quiet charm that attracted him to Sakota, and away from his more demanding aunt. The Empress of the Eastern Palace let him play, and sympathised with his aversion to schoolwork. Yehonala demanded excellence in everything. This can only have been a further source of friction between the two cousins, for the cultivation of Kuang Hsu’s favour was no light thing. Despite half-hearted reforms, China remained an oriental despotism. And when the Emperor grew to manhood and took over responsibility for the Empire, his word would be law. Those he held in high esteem would prosper. The fate of those he despised did not bear contemplation.

Just as worrying for Yehonala was the fact that, despite her apparent easy-going attitude, Sakota could rule. When Yehonala fell seriously ill of a liver complaint in 1880, she was surprised to discover that her cousin was more than competent in overseeing the workings of the Empire. The Islamic rebellion that had erupted in China’s north-west nine years before (prompting the Russians to ‘help’ China by taking over the Ili region) had finally been suppressed in 1878. But when the mandarin Ch’ung-hou was sent to arrange Ili’s return to the Middle Kingdom, the Russians stubbornly refused to remove their troops. Ch’ung’s negotiations in St Petersburg were a disaster: under intense pressure he granted Russia half the Ili region, allowed them control of several important lines of communication, and even agreed to pay their ‘expenses’ of five million roubles. Yehonala ordered his immediate beheading, and Ch’ung-hou escaped the headsman’s sword only when several foreign dignitaries (including Queen Victoria) implored the Throne to spare his life. Renegotiations on the ‘Ili problem’ were conducted by Tseng Chi-tse (son of the Tai Ping hero Tseng Guo-feng) while Sakota was at the helm and resulted in the Russians vacating the whole of Ili, but only for a payment nearly double the original expenses, nine million roubles. As none of the sacred soil of the Middle Kingdom had been lost, the court’s all-important ‘face’ had been saved, and Tseng’s mission was counted a great success. Sakota, of course, gained great prestige from this ‘victory’ and was accounted an able administrator in her own right.

It must have been galling for Yehonala to discover that she was not indispensable; and worse, that everyone at court and throughout the country knew it. It was perhaps at this time that she began to see in her quiet cousin a serious rival to her authority.

An incident in 1880 can only have confirmed her worst fears. Since ancient times, the court had made an annual progress to the Eastern and Western Tombs, where obeisance was made and sacrifices offered up to the departed shades of Emperors long dead. At state ceremonies in the Forbidden City, Yehonala invariably took the lead, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, Sakota actually ranked higher in the complicated scaffold of status that made up the court. The Empress of the Eastern Palace never forced the issue, but on this occasion, apparently prompted by her ally Prince Kung and others of the Imperial clan, she demanded precedence in all the proceedings, in the ancestral sacrifices and the obeisances that are made to each of the ‘Jewelled Cities’, the tumuli covering the royal tombs. Yehonala refused, and a heated argument took place in front of the assembled court, Sakota reminding Yehonala that her original rank had been concubine and that she, Sakota, had been Hsien Feng’s consort and therefore indisputably of higher rank. She endeavoured to embarrass her cousin further by demanding that she stand slightly behind her during the ceremonies, and on her right side, the place of honour on Sakota’s left being held vacant for the departed spirit of Hsien Feng’s first wife, whose early death had brought Sakota to prominence. True to form, Yehonala brushed all these arguments and demands aside and assumed the central position for the remainder of the rites. But she knew that the incident had been designed to embarrass her, and to diminish her authority. That Sakota had acted in conjunction with members of the Imperial clan was doubly worrying: was this the beginning of a conspiracy against her? One that would sweep away the power of the Yeho-Nala clan and perhaps co-opt Sakota as puppet-Regent?

Worse, in personal terms, was to follow. Jung Lu, her cousin and former fiancé (and if the rumours were true, her long-time lover) had been given the right to enter the Forbidden City at any time of the day or night. He had used this privilege to begin a liaison with a certain lady of the Great Within, a former concubine of Yehonala’s dead husband, the Emperor Hsien Feng.

As Jung Lu should have known, the affair soon became common knowledge, and the young Emperor’s tutor, Weng Tung-ho, carried the story to Yehonala. One account relates that Yehonala refused to believe the tale until she had seen evidence of Jung Lu’s guilt with her own eyes. Informed that he was visiting the lady, she discovered him, if not in
flagrante delicto
, at least within the woman’s quarters, a grave offence punishable by death. Faced with the indisputable fact of Jung Lu’s betrayal, Yehonala must have felt horribly isolated and alone. Jung Lu had been her strong support, probably the only person she could rely on in the shifting alliances and duplicities of the Forbidden City. It was perhaps naive of her to expect chaste abstinence from a virile man in his forties, especially if she herself had begun to hold him at arm’s length. Possibly she was merely angered that his chosen paramour lived within her own personal domain, and that public knowledge of the affair had caused her intense embarrassment and loss of face.

Whatever the reason, Jung Lu was lucky to escape with his life. He was summarily stripped of his official posts at court, and given a military appointment in Xian, where he was to languish, in de facto exile, for seven years. The eunuchs whispered to Yehonala that the Empress of the Eastern Palace had known of the liaison, and had turned a blind eye, or even helped to ease the passage of the affair. It must have occurred to Yehonala that there could well have been a deeper, more deadly motive behind Sakota’s involvement. By helping the illicit love affair, knowing it would come to light, Sakota (and her Imperial clan allies) would have counted on a violent, angry counterblast from Yehonala, that she would respond either with the death or banishment of her only true friend at court. And Yehonala had not disappointed them. Jung Lu was now in Xian; and her pride prevented his recall. Yehonala was thus more isolated and friendless than she had ever been since arriving at the Great Within. Only the eunuchs remained as trusted associates.

Given the court milieu, and her own suspicious nature, she must have sensed the wolf-pack circling.

Whether the danger was imagined or real is hard to determine. But Sakota seems to have had a change of heart and to have attempted a genuine reconciliation with her cousin. She still possessed her trump card, the secret document which Hsien Feng had entrusted to her in 1860 as he lay dying in Jehol. It was this document she now showed to Yehonala at a private meeting. Its contents must have sent shards of ice shafting through Yehonala’s stomach. The document was an Imperial decree, a command from the dead sovereign which still, twenty years after his death, carried the force of law. It ordered that, should the Concubine Yi presume to meddle in the rule of the country, the Grand Council was to be convened, the decree shown to them, and by its authority she was to be ‘assisted to commit suicide’. The document Sakota held before Yehonala’s eyes was her death warrant. For a woman of Yehonala’s undoubted arrogance, whose desire for total power was limitless, it must have been galling in the extreme to realise that throughout all her days of victory and triumph she had been in fact been at the mercy of someone whose abilities and political skills she disdained. Sakota could have had her put to death at any point since the dangerous days at Jehol when they had triumphed over Su Shun and his co-conspirators. The damage to Yehonala’s self-image, the internal humiliation this disclosure engendered must have been intolerable to such a proud spirit.