The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (7 page)

Of these, a girl’s education was considered the least important. There was, quite simply, no need for it. Li, the precise description of social etiquette which governed the behaviour of the elite in both Manchu and Chinese society, demanded that the female sex follow the ‘three obediences’: to father, to husband and to eldest son. When she married, a woman was expected to conform to the wishes of her parents-in-law also.

The four greatest virtues of womanhood were first set down in the second century AD by a woman writer, Pan Chao. She cautioned all females:

To guard carefully her chastity; to control circumspectly her behaviour; in every motion to exhibit modesty; and to model each act on the best usage. This is
Womanly Virtue
.

To choose appropriate words with care; to avoid vulgar language; to speak at appropriate times; and not to weary others [with much conversation]. These may be called the characteristics of
Womanly Words
.

To wash and scrub filth away; to keep clothes and ornaments fresh and clean; to wash the head and bathe the body regularly...These may be called the characteristics of
Womanly Bearing.

With wholehearted devotion to sew and to weave; to love not gossip and silly laughter; in cleanliness and order [to prepare] the wine and food for serving guests. These may be called the characteristics of
Womanly Work
.

These four qualifications characterise the greatest virtue of a woman. No woman can afford to be without them.
⁶

In a word, Chinese women were to conform, to be passive. Man was
yang
, the active principle, woman
yin
, quiet and receptive.

This attitude reached its apogee in the practice of footbinding. The cruel and painful process of curtailing and distorting the growth of young girls’ feet had a long history, beginning in the Sung Dynasty (AD 960–1126). It was widespread in the upper classes and in some provinces even peasant girls were subject to the implacable force of this barbaric custom.
⁷
At around the age of five or six the feet would be bandaged tightly, restricting normal growth and development and gradually forcing the foot into a bow shape, until heel and toes were touching. The resulting three or four inch deformities could barely support the weight of the owner’s body. Walking became an ordeal, resulting in the ‘lily walk’ which Chinese gentlemen found so erotic. It also served to demonstrate the female’s absolute vulnerability and dependence on the male for the necessities of life. In a grotesque parody of the Cinderella story, matchmakers would carry not a picture of a young girl, but the footwear into which her bound foot could fit. A mother seeking a wife for her son would often choose a prospective daughter-in-law solely on the basis of the tiny embroidered slippers that so aesthetically covered the deformities within. The smaller the slipper, the more desirable the girl.
⁸
As with the growing of the fingernails to prodigious lengths, footbinding also came to be regarded as a status symbol–only those who did not need to work could consider deforming their feet in this way–self-crippling thus became a statement of social caste.

Certain members of the Chinese intelligentsia rebelled against this restrictive view of womanhood and took a more enlightened position. The writer Li Ju-chen used his talent as a novelist to satirise society’s contempt for female rights. His novel
Ching Hun Yuan
was enormously popular in its day and has strong resonances with Swift’s satire
Gulliver’s Travels
. Like Gulliver, the hero of Li’s novel, Merchant Lin, undertakes a voyage to various realms. In one of these, the ‘Country of Women’, the sexual roles of men and women in Chinese society are reversed. Merchant Lin is chosen as a concubine for the Queen on account of his handsome features. But while Lin’s beauty is admired, he is regarded as a rough diamond, uncouth and in need of training, a device by which the author distils into a few days the years of suffering endured by Chinese girls. ‘He was made to wear feminine garments, his face was caked with make-up, his ears were pierced with great pain’. The final indignity is described in excruciating detail, the binding of Lin’s rather large feet. ‘Lin was in constant pain, walked with difficulty, and found it hard to eat or sleep...he was no longer the master of his own fate. [Like countless girls throughout China] he was given no choice in the matter; he was selected to be a concubine and the decision announced to him...Lin was reduced from a man to an object to be adorned but not consulted, all for the pleasure of another. Escape was impossible, and suicide ruled out by constant supervision, so that Lin’s spirit was soon broken.
⁹
Thankfully, footbinding was one of the few Chinese customs that the Manchu refused to copy.

At an even earlier date, the Ming philosopher Li Chih (1527–1602) had declared that the husband and wife relationship was complementary and equal, and had made the then-revolutionary statement: ‘It is quite possible that a person could be a woman, but that intellectually she could be as good as any man.’ Unfortunately, this surprisingly modern attitude to gender politics took an individualistic approach to the problem, and failed to challenge the essence of the Confucian system. As a result, it made little impact on Chinese society as a whole. ‘Chinese women were circumscribed in their behaviour and activity because they were seen as different than men by nature, more acted upon than acting.
^’10

What Yehonala made of all this in her teens is not recorded, but her subsequent behaviour revealed that, while obedience, passivity, conformity and other such pious platitudes might hold for the majority of women, she did not believe that those same restrictions should confine her own freedom of action. Her favourite character in Chinese literature was Mu Lan, the young girl who usurped the male role of warrior, and proved herself as adept as any male in battle.

Among those eligible for the Imperial ‘honour’ of concubinage, any with obvious mental or physical impairments were winnowed out during a preliminary selection at provincial level. There were five million Manchu spread throughout the subject Chinese population of around four hundred million souls. Despite this, the shortlist that was forwarded to Beijing contained only sixty girls who were thought suitable for the Imperial attention. Sixty out of a possible female population of one and a half million, even allowing for the small age range considered nubile, would seem a minuscule proportion. No doubt the endemic corruption of the Middle Kingdom left some eligible maidens out of the list, but the answer may lie in the harsh vagaries of life in China at that time, which produced a multitude of minor and major disfigurements, even among the Manchu nobility. E. H. Parker, a former British Consul in the far east, reminiscing about his time in China during the 1860s, commented that in his experience all of China’s elite, be they Manchu or native Chinese:

...seem to have a ‘monstrosity’ of some sort: either a fearful goitre; or one side of the face totally different from the other; or a strange squint or four or five teeth run together in one piece, like a bone; or a big dinge in the forehead; or a beard consisting of six long, stout bristles; or a set of eagle’s claws instead of nails. In those days everyone was deeply pock-marked.
¹¹

Physical beauty was therefore at a premium, owing to its rarity. And there was no denying that the young Yehonala was beautiful. Although she was short for a Manchu, standing no more than five feet tall, her face, her winning smile and the perfect symmetry of her figure made her a worthy rival to the ‘Round-Faced Beauty’ of legend, a woman men could not look upon without desire, and that the ladies of court could not choose but envy. Add to this a quick intelligent mind, a mischievous sense of humour and a silvery, sensuous voice (‘velvet’ according to Sir Robert Hart, whose writings reveal him to have been another of Yehonala’s ‘conquests’) and her presence in a room was guaranteed not to go unnoticed. And she knew it: ‘A lot of people were jealous of me,’ she was quoted as saying in her later years, ‘because I was considered to be a beautiful woman at that time’.
¹²
Other, less praiseworthy aspects of her character–her unpredictable explosive temper and vindictive nature later became legendary–were no doubt carefully screened from her examiners during her first visit to the Forbidden City.

The fortunate sixty females received the summons to the Palace via the Emperor’s own couriers. These heralds arrived with much pomp at each of the girl’s homes in carts or sedan chairs of Imperial yellow (the colour symbolised the Sun, and the Emperor’s unique status as Son of Heaven). Notwithstanding the girl’s own feeling on the matter, the arrival of Imperial messengers gave great ‘face’ to her family, and produced an immediate rise in social status. The messengers were welcomed with every sign of humility, the elder of the household kowtowing (from
kau-tau
–to knock head) as if the Emperor himself were present. While customary, this ritual symbolised the absolute power of the monarch over his subjects–the summons had arrived and there was no possibility of refusal.

There is little doubt that Yehonala would have much preferred to decline the ‘honour’ given her. Prior to the Imperial summons she had been all but betrothed to another of her cousins, the tall and handsome Jung Lu. According to many accounts, the young couple were deeply in love, and would have married in due course. This affection was to last all their lives and, if the rumours current in Beijing were to be believed, it was to cast the ill-starred pair as an oriental Lancelot and Guinevere to the Emperor’s King Arthur. Whatever the truth of this, Jung Lu was to play a vital and continuing role in his lost love’s rise to absolute power.

The call to the Palace would have rocked Yehonala’s world and her dreams of the future. It changed everything: there could be no marriage to Jung Lu if she were selected as a consort of the Son of Heaven. This shattering of her youthful dreams must have had a profound effect on Yehonala. She was sixteen, in love with a handsome military cadet who returned her affection and whom she knew she would marry. And then suddenly it was all taken from her, the vision shattered while it was still new and before time and experience had had a chance to sully the perfection of her emotions. It would have been less than human of her if she had not blamed the Emperor for this disaster. It is more than probable that this seismic shift in her fate left an indelible hatred in her heart, and (together with the tribal frictions and rivalry between the Yeho-Nala and the Aisin Gioro clans) does much to explain her subsequent indifference to and callous disregard of the fate of the Dynasty and the Imperial line.

Even to be successful in the selection process was no guarantee of Imperial favour. The harem was so vast that it was perfectly possible to be elevated to the rank of concubine and yet never be taken to the Imperial bed. As the Emperor’s wives never left the Forbidden City, and the seraglio was staffed only with eunuchs, this amounted to a sentence of perpetual virginity. And should an Emperor die, custom forbade any of his wives to remarry, or to leave the precincts of the Great Within (consummation of the marriage was not required). They were imprisoned for life within its purple walls. When the remnants of the Manchu court were finally expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924, three old women, forgotten wives of long-dead Emperors, were discovered still living in obscurity in the warren of dilapidated apartments.
¹³

On the day appointed, the sixty aspirants prepared their toilet with the greatest care. Like her rivals, Yehonala would have had her face caked with white-lead powder into a pale geisha-style mask, her cheeks daubed with twin spots of rouge and, as custom demanded, her lower lip reddened to resemble a rose or cherry. Dressed in the most sumptuous robes and jewellery their families could afford, the potential concubines were carried in sedan chairs towards the high walls of the Great Within. Cocooned in the musty, humid air of the enclosed palanquin, screened from all prying eyes, hearing nothing but the creaking of the wooden poles, the grunts of the bearers and the dull slap of their feet on the dusty road, Yehonala, like the others in her situation, can only have been in a high state of agitation. None knew what to expect, or what changes the next few hours might bring. Beyond the heavily embroidered silk hangings the sounds of the capital’s street-life were muted, the cries of street vendors, the barber’s rattling
huan tou
, the clack-clack-clack of hollow bamboo announcing the passage of a foot doctor, the charcoal seller’s drum. As the procession approached the Tien An Men, the street noises slowly died away, and suddenly the comforting roll of the palanquin ceased as the sedan chair was deposited on the ground. The covers were drawn back, and Yehonala found herself in the shadow-filled outer precincts of the Forbidden City.

Here, her own servants were dismissed and, now on foot, she and the other girls followed eunuch guides deeper and deeper into the maze of yellow- and blue-tiled pavilions, palaces and apartments that formed the inner precincts of the Great Within. They were led finally to the Nei Wu Fu, a pavilion of the Imperial household, to await the arrival of the Empress Dowager, the wife of the late Emperor Tao Kwang and mother of the new Son of Heaven, who, according to the Confucian traditions of filial piety, outranked the Emperor. It was she, with advice from the Chief Eunuch An Te-hai, who decided which of the girls were suitable consorts for her son, the Celestial Prince. The reception room was hung with banners and multi-hued lanterns, and crowded with courtiers in their formal robes of vari-coloured silk, strewn with pearls and jade ornaments, and all anxious for a first look at the new potential additions to the harem. Although the Emperor was also present during the proceedings, sitting pale and weakened from years of dissipation next to the Empress Dowager, the monarch was allowed no part in the business of the day. Nor was he asked for his opinion.

Once assembled, each of the girls was called in turn to be presented to the Empress Dowager. The approach of each prospective consort allowed the matriarch of the royal family ample time to study her features and deportment. Once each had done obeisance before their majesties, tea was served, and the court could view and pass judgement on the grace or otherwise with which the girls performed this most basic ritual of Chinese society.