The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (3 page)

Layered over this is a further compelling parallel. When the Europeans came to China it was to buy and sell. Britain and many another Western nation went to war to establish their right to ‘free trade’, the unrestricted ability to engage in commerce with anyone, anywhere in the world, provided a profit could be turned. These merchants and entrepreneurs were the forerunners, the advance guard, of late twentieth-century globalisation. ‘Trade plus Christianity equals civilisation’ epitomised their beliefs, and like them the prophets of globalization preach a gospel of unrestricted trade as a panacea to all the world’s ills–whether the world wants it or not. Nineteenth-century China revealed in no uncertain terms her dislike for this alien ‘medicine’, but was forced, at the point of a gun, to swallow the bitter pill. The World Trade Organisation spearheads globalisation with an almost religious fervour, and is not deterred even by the destruction of its headquarters and the death of nearly three thousand souls. Aid and economic assistance is made conditional upon the taking up of the standards and mores of the West. The trading
must
go on.

Whether globalisation will (or needs to) emerge as the sole, pre-eminent system in the world, or whether it will learn to coexist with other, less ‘democratic’ cultures, remains an open question. In the nineteenth century the Western push for free trade unleashed forces that produced the death of millions and destroyed Old China utterly. The story of Yehonala and the Middle Kingdom she ruled for over fifty years counsels caution.

When the Emperor Hsien Feng turned over a jade plaque on the ivory table next to his chamber the fate of the last Dynasty to rule the Middle Kingdom was changed irrecoverably in a single action. The plaque bore the name of a young concubine from his harem and indicated that she was to be his bed-companion for the evening. That night, as was the custom, covered only by a red silk sheet, the girl was carried on the back of a eunuch to the Emperor’s stone-flagged room and laid naked at the foot of his bed, up which she had to crawl to the Lord of Ten Thousand Years, so symbolising her complete subjection to the will of the Celestial Prince.

The girl who was to become the Last Empress of China, was known to the Manchu as Yehonala, from her clan name, the Yeho-Nala. She was just sixteen when she was chosen as a concubine for the Emperor Hsien Feng’s harem, and forced to leave her family home and her betrothed forever. But entrance to the Emperor’s seraglio did not guarantee time with the Celestial Prince–his harem was well-stocked with beautiful women chosen from across the Empire and Yehonala was to languish there for five long years before she was summoned to the Imperial bedchamber. But once she had been brought to the Emperor’s couch, she stayed and no one could usurp her place as the Imperial bed-partner. The Emperor was utterly besotted with his ‘new’ concubine and remained so almost until his death. He simply could not do without her.

No one can be certain of what passed between the Emperor Hsien Feng and Yehonala during that first night they spent together. But whatever occurred it can only have pleased the Emperor, for it left an indelible impression upon him and set a seed that would finally bear fruit fifty years later in the collapse of a system that had governed China for over two millennia. Perhaps the essence of that meeting is best summed up in the words of the Chinese poet, Chang Heng, who almost two thousand years before had written of a wife’s desire:

(So that)...we can practise all the variegated postures,

Those that an ordinary husband has but rarely seen,

Such as taught by T’ien lao to the Yellow Emperor,

No joy shall be equal to the delights of this first night,

These shall never be forgotten, however old we may grow.

Chang Heng (AD 78–139)
¹

While Yehonala was undoubtedly beautiful, she was not exceptionally so, and (except for dynastic alliances) all the women of the harem were chosen for their good looks. It was in her sexual prowess that Yehonala’s power over the Emperor lay and it was this that brought her within reach of ultimate power. For a woman in China, and especially one confined within the sacred precincts of the Forbidden City, the bedroom was often the only route to influence and authority. It was also the means to obtain personal freedom. Deeply enmeshed in a system that used women purely as pleasure-objects and child-producers, Yehonala may have come to see sexual prowess as a means of empowering herself, of taking control of an otherwise dull, preordained future and as offering her a chance to be mistress of her own fate.

Like all the Imperial line, the Emperor Hsien Feng had been schooled in pleasure from a very early age. His tastes were said to be many and varied and, according to some, perverted. While he may not have been an Emperor Yang Ti (who when he travelled took with him a caravan of ten chariots, padded with red satin, on each of which lay a naked beauty, awaiting his attentions), it is certainly true that Hsien Feng was already a dissipated roué long before he encountered Yehonala. What sexual magic could this inexperienced girl of twenty-one have to offer that made her superior to all the other beauties of his harem?

When she was inducted into the harem, stringent and intimate examinations ensured that Yehonala, like the rest of the new intake of concubines, had had no previous sexual contact with men. For the security and legitimacy of the Imperial line, all the Emperor’s ladies had to be certified virgins. Once within the vermilion walls of the Forbidden City, with its 3,000 handmaidens and 3,000 eunuchs, the Emperor was the only intact male (other men were forbidden to spend the night within the Palace on pain of summary beheading). There therefore appeared to be very little chance of gaining the sexual experience necessary to hold an Emperor in thrall. How then, did Yehonala become proficient in these arts? It seems likely that it was what she did, and what she learned, in the five years
before
the Emperor was even aware of her existence in the Forbidden City, that set her apart from the other beauties of the harem.

What Yehonala’s later life reveals is that nothing was left to chance in her bid to achieve and maintain power–and that whatever she needed to do was performed with dedication and application and energy. No doubt she would naturally have brought all these attributes to the Imperial bedchamber. But given her later lust for power, and the only route available for achieving such power, it seems likely that she would have dedicated much of the first five years of her time in the harem to practising every means at her disposal to please a lover: it is clear that, when the opportunity presented itself, it was mastery in the arts of love that was to single her out in the mind of the Emperor as exceptional.

Yin Daoism arose in the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25–220). Its adherents believed firmly in the importance of human sexual expression as an adjunct to mental and physical well-being. This branch of Daoism was responsible for numerous sex manuals, such as the
Yu Fang Mi Chueh
(Secret Codes of the Jade Room), the
Yu Fang Chih Ya
(Important Guidelines of the Jade Room) and the
Su Nu Ching
(Manual of Lady Purity). Anatomical details were hidden behind a code of poetical nomenclature. More than thirty love-making positions were documented, equally well camouflaged with elegant phraseology which included ‘Approaching the Fragrant Bamboo’, ‘The Fish Interlock Their Scales’ and ‘The Leaping White Tiger’.
²

Yin Daoism adopted a deeply aesthetic attitude towards sex; the emphasis was on the beauty and poetry of love-making, and its importance to health and longevity. The adherents believed that they could use sexual passion as a furnace in which to refine and concentrate their life energy, known as ‘
qi’
. Properly controlled, in a species of sexual alchemy, the accumulated ‘
qi’
could be directed from the generative organs along the meridians of the spine to the brain, achieving higher states of consciousness and, as a by-product, increased longevity, even immortality.
³
The philosophy was therefore no simple excuse for licentiousness–while the joys of lovemaking were there to be enjoyed, there was also a higher purpose and control was essential:

The arts of the bedroom constitute the climax of human emotions and encompass the totality of the Dao. Therefore the ancient sages regulated man’s external pleasures in order to control his inner passions, and they made detailed rules and terms governing sexual intercourse. If a man regulates his sexual pleasure, he will feel at peace and attain longevity. If, however, a man abandons himself to sexual pleasure without regard for the rules set forth in the ancient texts, he will soon fall ill and gravely injure himself.
⁴

Certain techniques of feminine allure were closely guarded secrets, and at first taught only to those who were to become either the Empress or concubines of the Celestial Prince. A variety of tools were also used by young women, with the assistance of the palace eunuchs, to acquire sexual skills. A very ancient practice (at least two thousand years old) was the use of polished stone eggs to exercise the vaginal and pelvic floor muscles. Placed inside the body, the stones acted as a point of resistance against which these muscles could be stimulated in a series of complicated exercises. Recent excavations in the old Chinese capital of Xian have also brought to light skilfully crafted bronze prostheses of male organs dating from the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BC to AD 25).5 Chinese authorities have concluded that the skilful and lifelike nature of these artefacts could only have been achieved by artisans dedicated to this craft. Other finds, from the 1800s back to the earliest discoveries of the Warring States period6 have also been uncovered in female quarters of Imperial palaces or the houses of the nobility. Here then, would seem to be a possible source for Yehonala’s skills.

Wherever Yehonala learned her skills, the events of her first night with the Emperor gave her the recognition she craved, and set in motion a train of events that would lead, ultimately, to the collapse of a Dynasty, to the fall of the mighty Manchu who, over two hundred years before, had ridden out from their dark northern forests to conquer the Chinese and to claim the throne of All Under Heaven.

The last Imperial Dynasty to rule over China was not Chinese, nor were they regarded as such by the Han people of the Middle Kingdom. They were foreign conquerors from the northern forests, whose original homeland lay between forested slopes of
Chang Bai Shan
, the Long White Mountain, and the featureless marshland of the Amur River. In China, this region is known as Dong Bei, but we in the West know it as Manchuria, after the tribal name of these doughty fighters, the Manchu.

The Manchu were known to the Chinese from a very early period, and their ancestors are recorded as bringing tribute of bows and arrows to the Emperor Shun as early as 2230 BC. Following the conquest in 1644, when the native Ming Dynasty was destroyed, the Chinese were pleased to portray the Manchu as rough, uncouth barbarians. No doubt this helped to assuage their feelings of hurt pride and to maintain their illusion of superiority over all other races–after all, a mugger is rarely regarded as morally or intellectually superior by his victim, merely more violent and brutal. This image of the Manchu as warlike ruffians has been taken up even by modern Western writers, but the truth is that the seventeenth-century Manchu were already at a high level of civilisation. Manchu monarchs gave themselves reign-titles, and ordered their courts in imitation of the Middle Kingdom’s Celestial Prince, and their conversations and correspondence are peppered with quotations from the Sages and the Classics of China. Thanks to the influence of their vast southern neighbour, they had become almost completely sinicised.
¹

Not that they were for a moment considered so by the Ming Court. As non-Chinese they were, for the most part, beneath contempt. We have letters from the founder of the Manchu Dynasty complaining of the arrogant refusal of the Chinese Emperor to receive their ambassadors sent to negotiate peace: ‘I desire peace, but only on a footing of absolute equality...There must be no question of ‘central’ and ‘outside’ nations...You Mings ignore my communications, and your Sovereign, in the fond belief that he is the Son of Heaven, displays contemptuous arrogance towards his equals...’ A later letter repeats the criticism, ‘You persist in asserting these exaggerated ideas of your own importance, and refuse to meet my envoys face to face, as if they were unworthy to enter your sacred presence’.
²
Given the Manchu Dynasty’s almost identical attitude towards receiving representatives of the Western Powers some two and a half centuries later, there is no little irony in these words.

The Manchu would almost certainly have been content to maintain peaceful coexistence with the Ming Emperor, and would never have considered conquest, had it not been for the duplicity of a Chinese noble charged with administering the border region between the two nations. This official treacherously slew the father and grandfather of a young boy, Nurhachi. The Ming Court apologised for the murders, sent horses and silks in compensation, but steadfastly refused to hand over the miscreant to Manchu justice. Secure in their overweening pride, they felt that they had nothing to fear. But it was this one act, together with the boy Nurhachi’s drive and intelligence, that was to set the seal on the Ming’s destruction some forty years later. Incensed at the injustice, Nurhachi concentrated all his energies on gaining power to achieve his revenge. By the time he was twenty-seven years old he was acknowledged overlord of the five Manchu clans.

Nurhachi’s army was organised under four banners, white, red, blue, and yellow, which were later expanded with the addition of striped banners of the same colours, to form a total of eight. Eight, to the Chinese and to the sinicised Manchu, symbolised good fortune. Later still, the Manchu’s Mongol vassals, and disaffected Chinese who had rallied to the Manchu standard, each formed a further eight banner regiments. Nurhachi’s warriors were the Romans of the East: the men were organised into well-drilled and disciplined units. Individual heroism and initiative was frowned upon, and the emphasis was solely on teamwork, each man a cog in a well-oiled, well-maintained military machine. It worked. In 1586, the same year he took command of the Manchu clans, the puissance of Nurhachi’s army was so highly regarded that the Chinese court paid protection money (the Ming’s face-saving term was ‘subsidy’) of fifteen dragon-robes and eight hundred ounces of silver, to guarantee Manchu quiescence. Nurhachi took the treasure, but continued to nurse his grievance and his plans to extinguish the Ming bloodline. Over the final decade of the sixteenth century, he ignored China and focused his considerable talents on subjugating the remaining Manchu tribes. By 1616, only the Yeho clan still defied his rule, but within a year this tribe too had fallen before the combined might of his armies. With the tribes united, Nurhachi formally took the title of Heaven Appointed (
Tien Ming
) and the name ‘Manchu’ for his new Dynasty.