The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (31 page)

The challenge now was to protect China from the continued depredations of the Western nations and Japan while, at the same time, maintaining the Middle Kingdom’s unique heritage. Just as in the late-twentieth century the Chinese government attempted to maintain its version of socialism while simultaneously preaching the doctrine of the free market. Yehonala and her ministers decided that China would pursue a similar schizophrenic policy: the country would maintain its ancient ways, but would emulate the West in one specific area only–in armaments. This decision was accompanied by a complete volte-face in foreign policy. From that moment on there were to be no more concessions to the foreign powers.

On 28th September, Yehonala brought Jung Lu back from Tientsin to the capital and appointed him, in rapid succession, a member of the Grand Council, President of the Board of War,
¹
and Imperial High Commissioner with command over the four army corps which defended the capital. He moved swiftly to reorganise the northern armies, forming a new Headquarters Army of ten thousand men under his direct orders and expanding and modernising the remainder so that, by 27th June the following year, Jung Lu was the head of a unified command of five armies numbering around sixty thousand men. A member of the Grand Council, the stern traditionalist Kang I, was sent to the Yangtse basin to modernise defences there, and to ensure that the taxes collected in the area found their way to Beijing to aid the rearmament process rather than lining the pockets of provincial governors. So successful was he in this task that Yehonala praised his commitment in a special edict, while the foreign press dubbed Kang ‘The Lord High Extortioner’.
²
With the Russian Bear in mind, General Ch’ang Shun was directed to reorganise military defences in Manchuria, while at the same time commissioner Li Ping-heng was sent to the area on a mission that mirrored Kang I’s Yangtse excursion.

The first indication of the melon’s new determination to resist further slicing came in March 1899, when three Germans were attacked by villagers near the town of Jihchao in Shandong Province, close to their military base of Kiaochow. Characteristically, German troops responded by immediately invading the area, where they burned two villages and seized Jihchao. Uncharacteristically, the Chinese refused to accept this hostile act. Their Minister in Berlin assured the Kaiser’s government that German citizens would be protected, while simultaneously lodging the strongest protest against German aggression. The Governor of Shandong was ordered to send an armed force to the region and not to ‘accede unendingly to the aggressive demands of the Germans’. Thankfully, the Westerners withdrew in time, but the Chinese response made it obvious to all that, while they did not wish to be drawn into a conflict, any new foreign aggression would now be met with force.

With hideously bad timing, the Italian government chose this moment to demand from China the lease of Sanmen Bay in Chekiang Province, together with the usual package of railway and mining rights in the area. There was no real pretext for the Italian claim, nor any pressing economic reason. It was simply that Italy was a Great Power and, as all the other Great Powers had a piece of China, the Italians felt that their national prestige required them to have a concession too. Britain gave the Italians to understand that they would support the demand, leading
The Times
to telegraph its Beijing correspondent, George E. Morrison, with the cryptic message ‘MORRISON PEKING REMEMBER MACARONI FRIENDSHIP TIMES’, which must have caused much scratching of heads in the Chinese Intelligence Service.
³

Unfortunately the Italian end of the negotiations was in the hands of the Italian Minister to Beijing, Signor de Martino, ‘a highly strung, excitable and superstitious man, much dependent upon omens and portents. He had previously represented Italy in Japan and Brazil, where he had refused one day to sign an important convention because, on the way to the Foreign Office, he had encountered a squint-eyed man’.
⁴
Circumstances too conspired to turn the portentous Italian demand into a
commedia dell’arte
plot. Try as they might, the ministers of the Tsungli Yamen could not identify the bay the Italians demanded. Compounding the problem, the Chinese had no real knowledge of who or what the
Itali-ren
were, ‘they had the vague impression that it was a minor state whose troops had been defeated by some black barbarians in Africa’. Not wishing make any decision, and in the misguided belief that it would somehow save Signor de Martino’s ‘face’, they simply sent the Italian demand back to him without comment.

De Martino exploded, but the Chinese were granted an extra day’s grace in the crisis, as the 13th of the month fell during the height of the confrontation, a day when the superstitious Italian minister would conduct no business for fear of the ‘evil eye’ (he would not so much as mention this date, always referring to it as ‘the day of the fox’). Unfortunately, this delay only seemed to further agitate Signor de Martino. On his own authority he ordered Italian gunboats into the Yellow Sea and sent a terse ultimatum to the Chinese authorities requiring their immediate compliance with his demands. Alarmed by this unexpected turn of events, Britain quickly withdrew its promised ‘diplomatic support’. But China refused to be coerced–they ignored the Italian warships and simply pretended the ultimatum had not been sent. Signor de Martino’s wild bluff had been called–it was ‘put up or shut up’ now for the Italians. After several days of tension it was the Westerners who blinked first; de Martino was recalled to Italy in disgrace, and the demand for Sanmen Bay (wherever it might actually have been) was quietly shelved.

This colonial comedy of errors was to have far-reaching consequences. The Chinese success in facing down Italy persuaded Yehonala and many of her court that their new strategy was working, that once Western military superiority was neutralised, there was no reason why the barbarians could not be held in check, and ultimately expelled from the sacred soil of China. Such a day of reckoning could not come soon enough and, with Yehonala’s blessing, the authorities pushed ahead with their military reorganisation and rearmament.

It was simply unfortunate that at this psychologically vulnerable moment, while her hopes ran so high, the fates conspired to bring to her notice a martial group claiming skills and supernatural powers that could sweep the ‘big noses’ into the sea. Playing equally upon her superstitious nature and her xenophobia, they convinced Yehonala that the time of retribution was at hand, and persuaded her to lead the Middle Kingdom into a conflict which, ultimately, destroyed the ancient dynastic system that had governed China for more than two thousand years.

The martial arts have a long and illustrious history in the Middle Kingdom. Sword, axe, staff, fighting iron, halberd, and a myriad other weapons all had their different styles of combat, and different masters, who took in students and instructed them in the intricacies of attack and defence. In this, China was no different from, say, medieval Europe, with its cudgel-play and fencing masters. But China differed from Europe in two respects. There was an equal emphasis on unarmed combat in China, derived according to legend from the Buddhist missionary and master Bodhidharma, founder of the fighting monks of the Shaolin Temple. Striving to survive in a violent land, but denied weapons by their philosophy, the monks under Bodhidharma devised a system of fighting which turned ‘the feet into spears and the fist to a mace’. When Japan took over Okinawa in the 1870s and forbade the inhabitants weapons, Chinese instructors were hired by the Okinawans to instruct them in unarmed combat. This ‘boxing with the feet and hands’ was eventually carried to Japan as
Kara-te
, ‘empty-hand’, fighting, whence it has since spread worldwide.

The Japanese term ‘empty-hand’ carries a nuance which is often lost to Westerners, who see the character for empty referring only to the weaponless hand of the fighter. But ‘empty’ refers also to the spiritual nature of the master’s fighting technique.
¹
Ordinary men go to fight with their minds in a state of agitation, stirred by fear, hatred, and hope of victory. Such emotions cloud the brain and produce possibly fatal errors during battle. But by virtue of the strict physical and mental training he has undergone, the
meijin
undertakes combat in perfect calm, his mind empty of all preconceptions, unconcerned equally with life or death. In this state, called Mushin (no mind) in Japan, the mind perfectly reflects reality just as a still, calm lake mirrors the moon sailing in the heavens. Nothing intervenes between the attack and the response, and victory is inevitable.

This philosophy is itself a reflection of the original Chinese technique derived from Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. Over time, numerous schools of fighting evolved, many of them taking a particular animal totem and attempting to emulate its power or speed: the white crane, the drunken monkey, the eagle claw, the praying mantis and many other animal styles all had their aficionados. Despite the plethora of techniques, all these methods could be divided into two major groupings: the so-called external and internal styles.

External styles emphasised muscular strength and speed. The students trained with weights, and they spent much time striking straw-covered wooden figures to strengthen their knuckles and the balls of their feet for punching and kicking.
²
Some schools favoured nail-pulling, hammering nails into boards and dragging them out with the fingers to produce a vice-like grip. Bizarre practices were indulged in to make the body invulnerable to blows. The ‘stone-hanging technique’ involved pinching and kneading the testicles with increasing severity over a period of weeks and months until these most sensitive areas of the male anatomy became relatively inured to the torturous rites. Once this had been achieved, a string was tied around the scrotum and a small stone hung from it, the size of the stone increasing on a regular basis until skilled practitioners of the art were capable of carrying a twenty-four-pound weight suspended solely from the scrotal sac. The practice apparently made one immune to any attack on the groin (whether it had the spin-off of making one impotent or infertile is not recorded).

The followers of internal styles laughed such practices to scorn. External schools relied on muscle power and the student’s prowess would surely fail as he grew older and his body wasted. The internal student believed that the secret of true mastery lay in the cultivation of the
Qi
, the life force that flowed along the meridians of the human body and which was manipulated in normal humans by such devices as the acupuncturist’s needles. Internal practitioners claimed that by special techniques a master could manipulate his own
Qi
, increasing its power a hundredfold and directing it at will.
Qi
could be concentrated in a particular area of the body to make that region invulnerable to blows from swords and other weapons. It could be projected from the master so that a single, gentle blow proved fatal, sometimes long after the victim had been struck. The practice of
Qi Gong
, now so popular in the West, derives directly from the internal styles of the martial arts such as Ba Gua, Hsing I, or Tai Qi Quan.
³

Such arts were frowned upon by the authorities, especially when, as frequently occurred, they were amalgamated with occult worship of obscure deities. The Qing law code stated clearly: ‘...leaders of heterodox sects who worship concealed images and incite the people shall be sentenced to death by slow strangulation’. Martial arts groups who escaped the ‘heterodox sects’ category were still prohibited: ‘Those who are self-proclaimed teachers of martial arts, practitioners, or students of these arts are all liable to a punishment of one hundred strokes and banishment to a distance of three thousand
li
(one thousand miles).
⁴
Such legislation did little to suppress these groups: many practised their skills in secret, or were so powerful in a given region that the local authorities baulked at implementing the required punishments.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Shandong Province, lying just south of Beijing, was the headquarters of two very powerful groups of magico-religious fighting societies–the Spirit Boxers and the Golden Bell. The former practised incantations and spirit possession:

The Boxer chief offered incense and recited incantations, and afterwards all his men would fall swooning to the ground. Then, getting up stiffly, they claimed to be possessed of gods. Their faces were not as before. They would jump and leap, holding swords and spears in their hands and using them in a theatrical manner. Meaningless sounds would come from their mouths as though they were drunk with wine...They said they could thrust swords into themselves until the tips broke, and yet not be wounded...they named themselves the Righteous Harmony Fists or the Righteous Harmony Society...
⁵

Similar societies had flourished for centuries, and had made equally wild claims of invulnerability. While these groups often had as their avowed intention the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the restoration of the Ming, in the late 1800s, a new, vulnerable, and far more accessible enemy had appeared in their midst–the Christians.

For decades now, thanks to the concessions extorted from the Chinese authorities at the point of a gun, missionaries of the various Christian denominations had been carrying the faith deeper and deeper into China, often vilifying each other in an embarrassing, and distinctly unchristian scramble for souls. They had made some headway amongst segments of the population, and Chinese Christians, and their churches, were now a not-uncommon sight in all but the most remote areas of the Middle Kingdom. Some of these were simply ‘rice Christians’, converts who took on the new faith because of the extra food provided by the missionaries to their flock; but many found solace in the foreign faith and were sincere in their beliefs. Unfortunately, because of the powers and privileges granted by various Sino-European treaties, it was very easy for the missionaries to shield criminal elements who were also members of the church from normal Chinese justice, steadily feeding the resentment of the local population. As late as 15th March 1899 an official decree granted official status to all Roman Catholic priests: missionaries were placed on an equal footing with magistrates, archdeacons and deans with
tao-tai
(local governors), and bishops were ranked with viceroys, and given permission to visit and write to them as equals. The Christians’ privileged position bred resentment in the rest of the population, and when floods and drought visited many parts of the country during 1898 and 1899, discontent swiftly turned to hatred against the new religion.