The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (6 page)

With General Wu pursuing the rebel Emperor, the way was open to the Manchu to assume the rights and prerogatives of the Dragon Throne. The Mandate of Heaven had been bestowed upon the Aisin Gioro. Nurhachi’s dream had finally been achieved; the long-dead Manchu warrior had at last taken his revenge on the hated Ming. Fu Lin, the first Manchu Emperor of China, was now given the reign title Shun Chih. He was just five years of age when he attained the Imperial dignity. Dorgun was the effective ruler of China, acting as
primus inter pares
among the Regents.

Dorgun died in 1650, when Shun Chih was twelve, but already the child Emperor was revealing the serious and highly moral aspects of his character that were the marks of his short reign. The Manchu had despised the weakness and indolence of the Ming. And they knew their victory was due as much to their opponent’s bondage to luxury, to the presence of sycophants at court, and to the ascendancy of the eunuch clique within the palace, as to their own skill at arms. They therefore took pains to remove those aspects of Ming rule that had contributed to their downfall. When Shun Chih died in 1661 he had set the foundations of a strong and stable monarchy: he had revised the corrupt system of examinations for the Chinese bureaucracy and instituted regulations governing admission to and training of the priesthood. But by far the greatest innovation, undertaken when he was still in his minority, was the suppression of the eunuchs as a clique in the politics of the Forbidden City. Had his strict regulations been followed by his successors, it is possible that a Manchu Emperor might still reign in the Forbidden City today.

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In Chinese Daoist philosophy, the symbol known as Tai Chi encapsulates the cyclical nature of all material creation.

In this system, opposites are seen as complementary–and they succeed one another in an infinite cycle. The months of life, spring and summer, are followed by autumn and winter, the seasons of decay and death. But winter is once again followed by spring. Day follows night, and night day. The dot in the centre of the opposing colour symbolises the fact that within each day some anticipations of night occur, just as each night contains intimations of the coming day. All things contain the seeds of their own destruction.
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And so it proved with Manchu rule. Despite Shun Chih’s able beginnings, within a few decades the Manchu too had been seduced by the cloying and voluptuous atmosphere of the Forbidden City, by the absolute power that they wielded over the world’s most populous nation. The root of the problem was twofold. The very size of the Middle Kingdom made it seemingly impossible to govern; and yet, for centuries, the country had been held together by its formidable (though thoroughly corrupt) bureaucracy. Throughout its long history, when the Mandate of Heaven was given to a new Emperor, be he native sovereign or foreign conqueror, the wise course of action had always been to maintain this system essentially unchanged, for fear that the whole country might descend into chaos and schism.

The second problem was just as intractable. The Manchu, like the Ming, believed that Imperial dignity (not to mention biological success) required that the sovereign possess a harem of immense size. The Ming emperors had maintained seraglios of enormous proportions (with as many as three hundred concubines being added en bloc in some years),
¹⁷
and their Manchu successors felt they could do no less. But the biological realities of this situation required that any male guardians of the Emperor’s ladies should not be able to surreptitiously sire children on them. The first Manchu Emperor of China, Shun Chih, was said by many to have been the result of a liaison between the Emperor T’ai Tsung’s favourite concubine and a Chinese hunter named Wang Kao, and the history of China is littered with stories of Emperor’s ‘sons’ ascending to the Dragon Throne who were in reality the offspring of servants. The presence of eunuchs in the palace therefore became a necessary adjunct of the harem system, and once accepted in positions of power, these ‘rats and foxes’ could not help but aspire to more. No functioning male except the Emperor was allowed to reside within the Forbidden City. The Son of Heaven was thrown back upon the company of eunuchs, who, as his personal attendants, became also his confidants and friends. Graft and corruption sprouted like weeds, and the process of decline began anew.

When the European nations arrived in force on their borders, this process of degeneration was all but complete. Like the Ming before them, the Manchu had come to believe that they ruled the very centre of the earth, that China was
Chung Guo
, the Central Kingdom, surrounded by barbarian vassal states. They were convinced that their Emperor was quite literally a Son of Heaven. They knew that their system of civilisation, their Confucian code of ethics, was superior to all. Even when faced with proof positive of Western technological superiority, they acted towards the European envoys with the same insolent superiority and hauteur that had so enraged their own leader, Nurhachi, in his dealings with the Ming. The proud warriors had become an effete ruling class whose purblind arrogance was leading them to destruction. By a species of perverse alchemy, the Manchu had become the Ming.

Like the Ming, they were an ‘apple ripe for plucking’. And as foretold in the prophecies of the first Ming Emperor, the final act in this drama was ready to begin. A ‘ten-mouthed’ woman was about to be invited into the very centre of Manchu power.

The girl who was to become the Empress of the Western Palace, and the greatest female autocrat the world has seen, was born into relative poverty in the southern province of Anhui, a warm, sensuous land of paddy fields and water oxen, and boasting the incomparably beautiful Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountains, sacred to the Lord Buddha.
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Her father was Captain Hui Cheng, a Manchu officer in the Blue Bordered Banner regiment, who, like all bannermen, had been given a sinecure amongst the provinces of China. Hui Cheng’s first posting, after the birth of his daughter, was to Luhan in Shanxi Province. From there he was transferred to Wuhu in Anhui, on the lower reaches of the Chang Jiang (Yangtse River). Here, close to the innumerable Buddhist temples of Jiuhua, Yehonala was to spend most of her childhood.

Some accounts relate that Yehonala’s father died when she was three, others that he was cashiered from the army for cowardice when facing the feared
Chang Mao
insurgents of the Tai Ping rebellion.
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But for whatever reason, we know that he proved incapable of supporting his family while Yehonala was still a young girl. Under the Chinese extended family system, this duty then devolved upon the eldest male relative, and Yehonala, her sister, and her mother, the Lady Niuhulu, were subsequently cared for by an uncle, Mu-fan, or Muyanga in his native Manchu language. Muyanga was head of the clan in the capital Beijing and, despite being afflicted with a painful stammer, was a high official at the Imperial Board of Works. It was through his good offices that Yehonala and her mother were transferred permanently from Wuhu to the capital.

They travelled to Beijing by barge via the Grand Canal, a man-made waterway completed in the seventh century AD to facilitate the transport of grain from Hangzhou and the Yangtse valley to the capital. According to one account
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(which may have been devised and circulated by Yehonala’s enemies to embarrass her) Yehonala and her family were very poor at this time, and travelling in the Chinese equivalent of steerage. As they passed through Tsing-kiang, one of the more wealthy travellers was visited by an old friend, the
tao-tai
(head mandarin) of the town. As is usual in Chinese society, even today, the two men spent the night gambling. The
tao-tai
lost heavily, and the next day, before the barge continued its journey northward, he sent a servant on board with cash to cover his debt. For some reason, the package went astray, and was given to Yehonala’s widowed mother, who suddenly found herself possessed of, for her, a small fortune, compliments of the
tao-tai
of Tsing-kiang. When he discovered the mistake, the mandarin’s first impulse was to demand the return of his cash. But his friend dissuaded him, pointing out that the girls were Manchu, and pretty, and might very well find themselves in positions of power, perhaps even in the Emperor’s harem. ‘At present they know you for a kind-hearted man who has befriended them in time of need. Why make enemies by giving them a grievous disappointment?’ The mandarin took the advice, and many years later was said to have received numerous favours from the adult Yehonala, now grown more powerful than even the mandarin’s friend had dared to predict.

Nothing in Yehonala’s youthful experience can have prepared her for the moment when, standing at the prow of the barge, she first came in sight of the capital. Beijing was then the world’s most populous walled city, a blatant display of Manchu power and skill. Standing four-square, the visual impact of the metropolis, with its forty-foot-high crenellated walls running a full four miles in length on each side, and massive roofed towers at each corner, must have been overwhelming. The city rose straight out of the low plain on which it stood, overpoweringly impressive: ‘there was no other sight like it in the world’.
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Apart from the walls, temples and palaces of the Emperor, Beijing lay low on the horizon, the citizens living in one-storeyed
pian-feng
‘bungalows’. Two-storeyed houses had long been prohibited, to prevent the sacrilege of ordinary folk looking down on the Emperor, should he pass in his yellow satin-covered sedan chair. The whole of the city was laid out on a grid pattern, established early in the fifteenth century. In all major towns the Manchu, ever mindful of their precarious minority position as overlords, had built walled ‘Tartar cities’ within the Chinese urban sprawl, as a precaution against rebellion. Beijing also had its Chinese city, straggling and overcrowded, the air of its narrow alleys pungent with a mixture of the wonderful spices of Chinese cuisine and the stench of ordure from open sewers, the walkways unpaved, dusty in the summer heat and ankle-deep with mud in the autumn rain. Lying to the north of this bustling mass of humanity was Beijing’s Tartar city, secure behind crenellated forty-foot-high walls some sixteen miles in circumference, within which lay Manchu-only homes, and palaces. This enormous fortification had been built by the third Ming Emperor, Yung Le, in the fifteenth century, using more than two hundred thousand forced labourers. But here the similarities with other urban centres ended. Like a Chinese puzzle, with its boxes within boxes within boxes, Beijing was a nested set of progressively more sacred sites. At the heart of the Tartar city lay the Imperial City, a fifteen hundred-acre enclave which was the administrative and governmental centre of the nation. But there was more: at the centre of the Imperial City, squat and foursquare, its walls painted the dark purple of the Imperial potency, lay the Forbidden City, the Great Within, the home of the Son of Heaven. And within its sacred precincts, at the supposed centre of the earth, was the throne, the seat of Celestial Power.

The young girl of sixteen cannot but have been overawed by the size of this bustling, sprawling metropolis, and the brooding dignity of the purple-walled and gold-roofed splendour of the Great Within. What thoughts teemed through her mind as she regarded this symbol of apparently unshakeable power? The clan to which both girls belonged traced its descent in direct line to Yangkunu, a Manchu Prince of the Yeho tribe, whose daughter had been given in marriage to the great founder of the dynasty, Nurhachi. The Imperial family still took their principal wives from the clan of Yeho-Nala as a way of cementing the alliance of the two groups and soothing the humiliation of the proud Yeho clan’s defeat at their hands. The eldest daughter of Yehonala’s uncle had previously been chosen as consort of the Emperor, but had died soon after the marriage was consummated. Could Yehonala have dared dream that she too, might one day attain such an honoured and elevated position?

Whatever her possible dreams of grandeur, Yehonala’s new home was far less exalted, but by no means humble. Uncle Muyanga lived in spacious accommodation, as befitted his high position. Protected from prying eyes, by the high windowless walls that faced the street and were normal in all Chinese cities, was a series of pavilions surrounding a central courtyard, green with willow and bamboo. The Chinese abhor grassy spaces, preferring water and rocky groves, and her new home would undoubtedly have possessed a water feature of some size, perhaps with an outcrop of the prized Tai-hu stone from Jiangsu.
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Yehonala was raised in this commodious setting alongside her cousin, Sakota, a girl of the same age, and the two became firm friends.

When in 1850 the old Emperor, Tao Kwang ‘mounted the dragon’, his successor, the late Emperor’s fourth son Hsien Feng, was a young widower of nineteen. His first wife, the elder sister of Sakota, had died soon after becoming his consort, and there had been no children. Following the demise of an Emperor, the Rites demanded that no new marriage be celebrated during the official mourning period of twenty-seven months. Soon after this, in June 1852, a decree was issued commanding Manchu officials throughout the provinces to present to Beijing a list of all eligible Manchu maidens. Such lists were always ready, and regularly updated with meticulous information on the girls’ genealogy, the astrological alignments of their birth, their age, temperament and physical appearance and their education.