The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (30 page)

It says much of the power and mystique of Yehonala that the plotters believed the key to the success of their scheme lay in confining, or killing, this diminutive sixty-four-year-old Manchu lady. She was still seen as the powerhouse, the dynamic brain, whose cool calculations and decisive actions were indispensable to the reactionaries. Kill the head and the anti-reformist body would die. Tan would allow Yuan Shi-kai no prevarication. He cut through the military man’s temporising and demanded an instant answer: was Yuan with them or not? In his diary, Yuan Shi-kai records how a bulge in Tan’s waistband indicated that his visitor was carrying a weapon. As it seemed unlikely the plotters would allow him to survive a negative response to their proposal, Yuan replied, ‘In October the Imperial inspection will be held at Tientsin. At that time all troops will be assembled. If his Majesty issues an order, who dare disobey, and what cannot be accomplished?’
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Apparently satisfied with this rather ambiguous response, Tan left to inform his co-conspirators that they had found their man–planning for the coup could now move forward.

The next morning the reform movement’s chosen ‘man of action’ had a third brief audience with the Emperor, and then left by train for Tientsin. Some accounts relate that he had with him a small arrow, given by the Emperor as a symbol of Imperial authority, others that he carried a secret Imperial decree, written in vermilion ink, and confirming in every particular the plan which Tan Ssu-t’ung had laid before him the previous evening. Whatever the truth of this, there is little doubt that the bullet-headed soldier had much to occupy him as his carriage rattled eastwards towards the port city. Joining with Kang Yu-wei would undoubtedly bring forward the reforms which Yuan Shi-kai knew were essential for China’s survival. And, as he had commented to Tang, if the Emperor commanded, it was his duty to obey–his training, his very culture, demanded no less. But it was not so simple. If the Emperor wished to move against his aunt, then the Emperor himself was driving a coach and horses through Chinese traditional values, for it was to Yehonala, as the senior member of the elder generation, that Kuang Hsu owed total respect and complete obedience. Was it right to follow tradition and obey his Emperor unquestioningly, if that same Emperor was intent on committing sacrilege against these same sacred traditions?

At a more practical level, Yuan Shi-kai must have busily calculated the odds for and against failure of the enterprise. That it was risky in the extreme was undeniable: Yuan commanded a mere seven thousand troops (albeit better armed and trained) against Jung Lu’s massive force of a hundred thousand men. Then again, if Jung Lu was removed, his men would be leaderless and might well throw in their lot with the reforming movement. But they could just as easily tear to pieces the man who had shot down their commanding officer. And yet, the successful completion of his mission would, at a stroke, make him the most powerful man in the Empire and win him the undying gratitude of Kuang Hsu: he would drown beneath the honours and wealth the Emperor would rain down upon his head. On the other hand, the conservative faction was strong, and Yehonala’s wrath against traitors terrible to behold. Even so...

By the time his train arrived at Tientsin station (where he was greeted by a band sent to celebrate his recent promotion), Yuan Shi-kai had made up his mind. Steeling himself, he made straight for Jung Lu’s headquarters. Once closeted with the old Manchu warrior, he delayed no longer. The two men had sworn an oath as blood-brothers some years before and Yuan now asked Jung Lu if he believed him faithful to that vow. ‘Of course I do,’ a mystified Jung Lu is reported to have answered. ‘You well may,’ Yuan replied, ‘the Emperor has sent me to kill you, and instead, I now betray his scheme, because of my loyalty to the Empress Dowager and my affection for you’. He then exposed the reformists’ plot in all its detail to an astonished Jung Lu, whose much-vaunted intelligence network had apparently been completely unaware of the conspiracy.

Jung Lu wasted no time. He bundled Yuan out of the office and together they took the train back to the capital, arriving just after 5 p.m. Casting aside all convention, Jung Lu burst into the Forbidden City, scattering bewildered guards, who did not dare impede the progress of so high an official, and pushing through the crowds of frightened eunuchs who, thanks to the Palace rumour-mills, were already aware that events of dire moment were afoot. He quickly ascertained Yehonala’s location and, with Yuan at his side he strode rapidly through the shadow-filled corridors and halls, exiting the Forbidden City by a western gate and making for the ornate Altar of the Silkworms on the north-eastern shore of Bei Hai lake. Here, for once unaware of the danger that threatened, Yehonala had completed the rites of the annual sacrifice to the God of Sericulture. Falling to his knees and begging forgiveness for his presumption as he kowtowed, Yehonala’s staunchest supporter laid bare her nephew’s plot, how he planned to seize total power, how Jung Lu was to be murdered and she imprisoned, perhaps even killed.

It must have been very hard for Yehonala to come to terms with these revelations: not only had Kuang Hsu betrayed her and her followers, he had abandoned all the cultural traditions of filial piety which, or so the conservatives believed, set China apart from the barbarians. She had given Kuang Hsu’s policy free rein as a means of pushing forward reform without risking a conservative backlash against her rule. But the ploy had backfired: now the puppet she believed she controlled was within an ace of taking from her the power and prestige she had fought all her life to retain. With that coolness under fire, the cold calculation, the remorseless will that marked her out from friend or foe alike, Yehonala immediately responded to the perils of the moment and reeled off her orders. In less than two hours she had assembled before her ‘the whole of the Grand Council, several of the Manchu princes and nobles...and the high officials of the boards, including the ministers whom the Emperor had cashiered...’. To a man, they begged on their knees that she should resume command of the Empire. Nor was she in the mood to refuse their request. The countercoup had begun.

Under cover of night, Jung Lu’s loyal Tientsin troops were brought up to replace the regular guards and secure the Forbidden City. Early the next morning the Emperor, apparently unaware of the discovery of the reformer’s plot (if indeed he was ever truly privy to the conspiracy), visited the Chung Ho Hall to rehearse the rites for the autumnal sacrifice the following day. While Kuang Hsu went over the litany he was to recite, eunuchs loyal to Yehonala were silently moved into place. Guards were brought into their position. Moments later, as the Emperor left the hall, he was immediately surrounded by the soldiers and, with eunuchs in attendance, bundled out of the Forbidden City and taken to Nan Hai Hu, the southernmost of the Palace’s trio of lakes. In the very centre of the lake lay a small island, and, nestling among its trees and rocks, a palace and pavilion, the Ocean Terrace, accessible only by a long causeway guarded by a drawbridge. The captive Emperor was marched into the Ocean Terrace and left there, his own familiar eunuch attendants denied him, to await the arrival of his august aunt.

Yehonala left Kuang Hsu to brood and worry over his fate for several hours. When she finally arrived (accompanied only by the Chief Eunuch, Li Lien-ying) she was in vindictive mood. She intended to spare his life, she informed a terrified Kuang Hsu, but he would be held here, at the Ocean Terrace, under the strictest scrutiny–his every action, his every word, noted and reported to her. ‘How dare he forget the great benefits he owed her, his elevation to the throne and her generosity in allowing him to administer the government, he, a poor puppet, who had no right to be Emperor at all, and whom she could unmake at will?
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Princess Te Ling’s story of this meeting has Yehonala confronting the Emperor in his apartments. The dialogue too, is different, but the implacable sentiment behind it is identical in both accounts.

The Pearl Concubine, Kuang Hsu’s favourite consort, pleaded with Yehonala to spare the Emperor further censure. Yehonala’s response to what she must have regarded as unspeakable presumption was to order her to be carried away and imprisoned in another part of the Forbidden City. Years later she still harboured a bitter hatred of this lady, and when the opportunity arose, she was swift to exact an even more severe punishment than incarceration. Having removed his sole female friend, Yehonala now ordered her niece, Lung Yu, the Empress Consort, to attend on the Emperor, so ensuring that her primary information about his activities derived from an unimpeachable source.

With her nephew overthrown and safely locked away to await whatever fate she might consign him to, Yehonala turned her attention to his followers. Kuang Hsu’s eunuchs had been dismissed when the countercoup began; fourteen were now put to death by Yehonala’s express command. The rest were exiled to menial posts in the outer regions of the Empire. Weng Tung-ho, who had recommended the reformist Kang Yu-wei, was dismissed from all his posts, as was the Governor of Hunan, who had actually had the audacity to obey the Emperor and attempt to implement the reforms in his province. Chang Yin-huan, a Cantonese member of the Tsungli Yamen (whom Queen Victoria had created a Grand Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George) was banished to the deserts of the New Western Dominion (Xinjiang), turning down a British offer to rescue him,
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and suffering a horrendous death in exile two years later. Nor did Imperial clansmen escape Yehonala’s ‘Divine Wrath’: Tsai Ch’u whose reformist tendencies had led him to suggest to the Emperor that he put an end to Yehonala’s meddling in government affairs, was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in the ‘Empty Chamber’, the infamous jail of the Imperial clan court. Although she promised no general proscription, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lesser officials were dismissed from their posts, many banished. But none of this sated Yehonala’s craving for revenge.

All the leading reformers’ lives were forfeit as a matter of course, but above all she desired the capture and death of the ringleaders of the plot, Kang Yu-wei and Tan Ssu-t’ung.

Kang led a charmed existence during the perilous days of the countercoup. After trying and failing to find help for the Emperor from the Western Powers, he travelled disconsolately to Tientsin to catch a boat for Shanghai, blissfully ignorant of the price on his head. His friends had advised disguise for the journey, but Kang had refused, believing ‘that death and life were predestined’.
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Somehow, bare-faced, he moved unrecognised through Tientsin, escaping capture at Chefoo only because the arrest order which awaited him there had been sent in code, and no one at the port possessed the key to decipher what was undoubtedly the reformer’s death warrant. On board the steamer to Shanghai he was told of the countercoup by a British official,
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who then aided his escape to British-held Hong Kong, escorted by two ships of the Royal Navy. Kang eventually made his way to Japan, from which safe haven he continued to fulminate against the regime, and against Yehonala, whom he accused of the grossest indecencies.

Tan Ssu-t’ung, like the zealot he was, refused to flee the capital, and paid the ultimate price for his bravado. He was arrested with five others and arraigned before the Board of Punishments. Documents discovered at Kang’s Beijing apartments left no doubt as to their guilt and the Grand Council declared for their immediate execution. Yehonala agreed, and not just for the sake of revenge–there were sound political reasons for the prisoners’ early demise: the reformers were Chinese, not Manchu, and came mainly from the southern provinces. A lengthy trial would only exacerbate the tensions between the southerners and their Manchu overlords and may have precipitated a revolt. The Six Gentlemen of the Reform Movement, as they had come to be known, were taken to the execution ground outside the city where, before a multitude of onlookers they all bravely faced the headsman’s sword. Tan retained his bravado to the end, shouting boldly, ‘I am willing to shed my blood, if thereby my country may be saved. But for everyone that perishes today, a thousand will rise up to carry on the work of reform, and uphold loyalty against usurpation.’
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Kuang Hsu’s great experiment was over. In a series of edicts, Yehonala systematically reversed every one of the Emperor’s revolutionary decrees, to the delight of the reactionaries. The changes effected by the Hundred Days of Reform might have been a dream, so complete was the reversion to the old ways: the literati once more bent over their brush and ink, composing the onerous ‘eight-legged essay’ as the entrée to government service; the memorials of honest men were withheld or censored; the press was controlled; and the ‘stupid people’ continued to work the fields of the Middle Kingdom without benefit of modern agricultural techniques. The Manchu elite, freed from their obligation to foreign travel, returned to their favourite pastimes of intrigue, and growing their fingernails to obscene lengths. China was China once more. And Yehonala, gimlet-eyed and omnipotent, now sat even more securely upon the Dragon Throne.

The reactionaries were everywhere victorious, but China’s difficulties, internal and external, remained. Apart from the congenital self-serving nature of the ruling class, the problem really resolved itself into a single question: should China remain recognisably Chinese, with an age-old ‘superior’ culture that set it apart from the Western barbarians, or should it sweep the ancient law of the ancestors to one side and embrace the Western mercantile philosophy, with its alien systems of government and jurisprudence? Kuang Hsu had counselled change, but his blueprint for a stronger China–to emulate the social, educational and military mores of the West–had been rejected by Yehonala and her allies as totally unacceptable. The West might be superior in industry and weapons, but China’s ascendancy in matters cultural and moral remained, for them, unchallengeable. Although she wanted, and could see, the pressing need for change, Yehonala, like most of the Empire she ruled, lived according to precedent and ancient decree–the mortar that held the Empire together. Without this social cement, or so it appeared to the reactionaries, the ship of state would be rudderless, adrift on a chaotic sea at the mercy of any wind of change, and the country must slide into anarchy. Yehonala could never countenance a society in which the laws of the ancestors were obsolete.