The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (8 page)

A Chinese princess, Der Ling, wrote an account of the years she spent with Yehonala in her old age. She relates that Yehonala claimed that, from that first meeting, the Emperor showed great interest in her and ignored the rest of the new arrivals.
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Although unable formally to express a preference, he used this assembly to indicate his interest in the bannerman’s daughter.

Yehonala was invited to sit at the Emperor’s table, and to converse with the Imperial family. Although education was not a prerequisite for the position of Imperial concubine, Yehonala was already well versed in the Chinese Classics and may have used this occasion to impress the young monarch with her intelligence as well as her beauty.

If true, it seems that the Emperor’s admiration did not count for much in the eyes of the Empress Dowager. The Imperial concubines were separated into four classes of decreasing importance. The Empress Dowager’s standards were high–of the sixty girls interviewed, none received the first rank of
Kuei fei
. Yehonala was one of twenty-eight aspirants chosen for the harem, but she was given a quite lowly grade (
Kuei Jen
). She was placed in the third rank, while Sakota her cousin (who by all accounts was both less attractive and less intelligent), was given the second rank (
P’in
). Yehonala and Sakota can only have been overjoyed that they would be entering the harem together. Life in the Forbidden City meant almost total isolation from normal family life. From the day the walls of the Meridian Gate closed behind them, each harem member was fated to live out her days within the Forbidden City, seeing friends and family but rarely. The two cousins now had each other to lean on and there was no doubt they would have need of each other.

The world they were about to enter was dangerous in the extreme, one of the most debauched, capricious and cruel courts ever recorded in the history of Occident or Orient.

The Forbidden City, the royal palace of the Celestial Prince, ruler of All Under Heaven, was built by Yung Le, the fourth son of the first Ming Emperor Chu Yuan-chang, a one-time Buddhist priest whose successful rebellion against the Mongol Yuan Dynasty had placed the Ming on the throne of the Middle Kingdom in1368. It was Yung Le who in1422 transferred the seat of government from Nanking (the southern capital) to Beijing.
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The main buildings of the Forbidden City were constructed between 1410 and 1420, and are laid out along a central north–south axis. The site contains more than ten major palaces, nine thousand rooms, three garden parks, and a lamaist temple, and occupies a total area of seven hundred and twenty thousand square metres, around two hundred and fifty acres.
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The main temples and palaces are impressively ornate structures, built entirely of wood with vermilion-painted walls, and yellow-glazed tile roofs (yellow symbolising the sun and, by extension, the Emperor). Symbolism is everywhere in the Forbidden City: colours, names and shapes all had a meaning. Each palace stands on white marble terracing, beautifully carved with intricate designs, the most prominent being the twin sigils of Imperial Power, the dragon and the phoenix. The three main halls of the outer palace (the Halls of Harmony) stand on a three-tiered terrace of white marble which in plan view forms the Chinese character signifying ‘the land’. Each door has nine horizontal rows of nails embedded in it, and each row has nine nails: nine is the biggest single odd number, and therefore represents the dignity of Emperors. The Chinese science of geomancy,
feng shui
, ‘wind and water’, was also integral to the construction of the complex. Just as the Emperor was known as Nan Mien, ‘face south’, so too did his capital Beijing. Backed by a semicircle of mountains to the north, to Chinese eyes the city looked south into the agricultural land of the eastern plains. At the very centre of the metropolis, in the Forbidden City, was the throne, around which the whole world was believed to revolve. In this way (in a Chinese version of the Hermetic axiom ‘As above, so below, as below so above’), the organisation of the Middle Kingdom mirrored the celestial symmetry of the heavens, which move in perfect harmony around a central axis, the pole star. As a Chinese saying has it: ‘All the stars in Heaven salute the North’; and ‘All Under Heaven’ paid homage to the Emperor, enthroned in the North.

The denizens of this city of symbols existed in privileged isolation at the apex of an enormous human pyramid, a land famed for its fecundity, and in Yehonala’s time numbering around four hundred million people.
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At its base were ‘the stupid people’, the peasants, merchants and artisans. Tradesmen and traders were the lowest class, small in number and treated with contempt (no Manchu would ever consider learning a manual skill, or engaging in trade). China was a largely agrarian society of peasants, using traditional techniques more akin to horticulture than agriculture (even in the last decade of the twentieth century, China was spoken of as being ‘like one giant allotment’). Their task was, quite simply, to produce the food which was the foundation of the society.

Capping the social pyramid were the elite of Chinese society, the scholar-officials, famous in the west as the mandarins. They possessed every privilege, owned the lion’s share of all land, and enjoyed the greatest influence and prestige, having arrogated to themselves the most vital of tasks in Chinese society–that of governing the vast Celestial Empire. Each of China’s provinces compares in size with a modern European nation state–Sichuan Province is larger than the British Isles and has a similar population, sixty million souls, and each province boasts its own dialect, each largely incomprehensible to its neighbours. In the 1800s, with communication and transport difficult, the Empire, this vast mass of disparate humanity, could easily have fallen into anarchy and schism. That it did not (and that it had, by and large, held together since its inception in 221 BC) was due in large part to the mandarinate.

Although unproductive themselves, they performed the socially indispensable function of supervising and coordinating the work of others. They ‘prepared the calendar, they organised transport and exchange, they supervised the construction of roads, canals, dykes and dams; they were in charge of all public works, especially those aimed at forestalling droughts and floods; they built up reserves against famine, and encouraged every kind of irrigation project. Their social role was at one and the same time that of architect, engineer, teacher, administrator and ruler.
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Mencius (Meng-tse), arguably the ablest of Confucius’ disciples, made their position plain:

Great men have their proper business and little men have their proper business...Some labour with their minds and some labour with their strength. Those who labour with their minds govern others; those who labour with their strength are governed by others. Those who are governed by others support them; those who govern others are supported by them.
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In contrast to Western ideas of specialisation, the mandarins recognised just one vocation: that of governing. They rejected careful study of agriculture, astronomy, architecture or any of the other myriad specialisations, believing that an education in the Classics and an appreciation of music, poetry and calligraphy would produce a more well-rounded and perceptive ‘manager’, one able to cope with the many and varied demands that their administrative duties demanded of them. In many ways this uniquely Chinese system was a palpable success: it can hardly have survived relatively unchanged for over two thousand years had it not possessed some merit. The Confucian ideals cherished honesty, reverence for the past and respect for parents and the Imperial line. It set out a stable net of societal relationships that should, in theory, have produced a well-ordered, well-fed and harmonious population of contented individuals.

In practice, a rather less admirable society evolved, a form of hereditary bureaucracy, in which everyone knew (or was told) his or her place. Upward mobility was theoretically possible via the examination system, where scholars were tested on their knowledge of the Confucian Classics, their calligraphy and their ability to create an essay (the ‘eight-legged work’) which showcased all aspects of their education. Those gaining the highest marks found the door to high appointment in government service open wide, irrespective of the student’s purse or parentage. The mandarins made much of the populist/meritocratic nature of the examination system, but the truth was that such democratic levelling operated solely within their own class. Preparation for the examinations required years and sometimes decades of patient study with a mentor or tutor willing to instruct his pupils in the hidden depths of the Classics or the intricacies of a literary style. Peasants, merchants and artisans could not afford the onerous charges such an education demanded–only a well-placed mandarin could generate the required income. For all their high-flown rhetoric on truth and honesty, the mandarinate was, in effect, a self-perpetuating oligarchy. And like all oligarchies, when threatened it had no compunction in using the sternest measures to protect its vested interests.

Justice in nineteenth-century China was arbitrary, tyrannical and biased towards the ruling class The state’s wrath fell not just on the individual, but on all his kin. The extended family or clan system–where each member of a clan was responsible for the well-being of any clan member–was turned on its head and used to instill terror–a family member’s crime brought retribution on all his clan: whole families might be summarily executed, or exiled for life to the desert regions, solely on the basis of a single individual’s misfeasance. Any accused person was presumed guilty, unless they could prove themselves otherwise, unfortunate at a time when judicial decisions were, for the most part, bought and sold like any other commodity. Torture was commonplace: an individual might be suffocated with weights, submerged to the point of asphyxiation or have slivers of bamboo driven beneath fingernails or toenails, in order to extract the ‘truth’. And punishment for those found ‘guilty’ was swift and (even in the context of the harsh treatment meted out to criminals in Victoria’s Britain) barbarous and horrible and specific.

Beheading was the most common form of capital punishment, but a highwayman might well be crucified instead near the scene of his crime; grave robbers were placed in a wooden cage and left until they died of starvation or heatstroke; captured brigands were forced to ‘stand in the tub’–balancing on bricks in a vat filled with lime from which, each day, a number of the bricks were removed, the lime gradually eating through flesh and bone from the feet up; the cangue was a type of portable stocks, with the victim’s head fastened into a wooden board so large he could not bring his hands to his mouth and so could neither feed nor drink for himself. The cangue was worn for a few days for minor offences; for more serious crimes the cangue was left in place until the offender died of thirst or starvation. Treason was regarded with horror (as a transgression against the Celestial Ruler, it offended the fundamental basis of Confucianism) and the most terrible punishment was reserved for rebels and traitors–slow dismemberment, the victim’s body being disarticulated a joint at a time until death ensued.
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What makes such mandarin-inspired atrocities particularly frightful is the fact that the mandarinate itself was amongst the most corrupt and venal of all China’s institutions. The same huge educational expenses that precluded participation by the ‘lower orders’ was also an enormous financial burden for many of the less prosperous mandarin families. A substantial proportion were forced to take out loans to complete their studies. In addition, the golden road to a government appointment would also require lubrication with ‘fragrant grease’ at several stages along the route, with ‘squeeze’ extracted by those in a position to help or hinder the appointment. Once secure in his new post, all such ‘helpers’ would demand repayment for their kindness, with interest, while at the same time the new official’s extended family would look to him for financial support. Confucian doctrine taught that the interests of the family superseded those of the state, giving a rationale for and green light to nepotism.
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On the basis of family ties, incompetents were raised to positions of power all over the Empire. Capping all these problems, the pay of a ‘servant of the state’ was proverbially low, and the required Confucian deference to superiors made it impossible to request any increase in salary.

Given the circumstances, there was only one alternative source of income available to the mandarin–extorting money and services from those he had been set over to govern. Bribes would be taken to turn a blind eye to illegal practices such as opium smoking or smuggling; and ‘squeeze’ would be exacted on legitimate businesses under threat of victimisation. Over time, sanctioned by custom, such practices became the norm and extended to every aspect of Chinese life. Such toleration allowed some officials to amass stupendous fortunes. When the infamous minister Ho Shen was finally brought to book in 1799, after twenty years in power, the property confiscated from him included nine thousand sceptres of solid gold, 288 large rubies, 4,070 sapphires and a solid gold table service of 4,288 pieces. Following his enforced suicide, Ho Shen’s total wealth was estimated at over eight hundred million taels, a sum equivalent to almost sixty per cent of the total Imperial revenue for the same period. But his downfall did nothing to stop mandarin cupidity: in 1841, just nine years before Yehonala entered the Forbidden City, the Board of Revenue discovered that nine million taels of silver had been stolen, purloined by the same officials whose job it was to guard the treasure.
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China’s social structure, its castes and classes, its customs and ceremony, and its system of rewards and punishments, had been set into the stone of Confucian mores for more than two thousand years. But since the victory of Nurhachi’s descendants in 1644 a further stratum, a superstructure of Manchu privilege, had been layered over this ancient Confucian pyramid. The Manchu guarded their racial purity jealously: after the conquest they were forbidden to marry Chinese women (though this rule was often flouted as time went on); they were to dwell apart from the native population, in fortified areas, and be ever on their guard against rebellion; land was set aside throughout China for these descendants of the bannermen, and the choicest areas were reserved for the Manchu nobility, those lords that had supported Nurhachi’s descendants in their attempt on the Dragon Throne. Their domains were vast and they were allowed a voice in the running of the Empire through various committees such as the Grand Council, where in time-honoured fashion the aristocracy intrigued and betrayed their way into the Emperor’s favour and to the power and status that alone made life worth living.