Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (20 page)

The prince was to suffer yet
more personal tragedy. Cixi’s sister gave birth to two more sons, but one lived for only a day and a half, and the other died after a few years, the victim of too much anxious love, according to the servants. The couple were perpetually worried that he might overeat – a major problem for children in rich families – and as a result the child suffered malnutrition.

To the prince’s surprise, Cixi did not actually want to destroy him. Having demonstrated that she could have finished him off, she bestowed
favours on Chun. She gave him concubines, and the prince was able to have three more sons; the eldest, born in 1883, was given his name – Zaifeng – by Cixi. She also made the prince the supervisor of the child emperor’s education, to give him access to his son. The prince’s wife, Cixi’s sister, was invited to stay in the palace from time to time, so that she too could see him. Neither parent felt fully able to relax with the child, now that he was the emperor and had been adopted by Cixi. But her treatment of him was beyond Prince Chun’s expectations and he was overwhelmed with gratitude.

Cixi won over the prince’s friends as well, by showing them that she bore no grudge, and by skilfully buying them off. She made Grand Tutor Weng the chief tutor for the new child emperor, for which the tutor felt eternally grateful. And she gave Governor Ding, the man who actually had Little An executed, the promotions and honours due to him as if nothing untoward had happened. When the governor was promoted to Viceroy, he followed the Qing practice and went to Beijing for an audience. Before his arrival, through Junglu, the Lord Chamberlain, Cixi gave him 10,000 taels to help him with his expenses in the capital, where there was much obligatory entertaining and present-giving. Ding was short of money: as an uncorrupt man, he had not taken advantage of his official positions to make money for himself. Junglu presented the gift as coming from himself, but Ding, who was not a particular friend of his, understood where it had come from. He not only accepted it, but wrote and asked to ‘borrow’ another
10,000 taels – which Junglu readily delivered. This was the old man’s somewhat mischievous way of sending the message that he knew Cixi was the donor (he would not have asked another official for more) and that he was striking a deal with her. Although both Ding and Grand Tutor Weng retained their conservative views, they never again made trouble for the empress dowager.

And so Cixi removed all obstacles and steered the empire back on the course that she had first charted. This time, she would speed up the pace of progress. During her forced seclusion in the harem, her mind had not been idle, and she had learned much about the outside world from the reports and diaries of the travellers she had sent on those early journeys. Western-style
newspapers in Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports had grown in number and were available to the court, where they had become an indispensable source of information. Compared with a decade ago, when she first came to power, Cixi now had a much better understanding not only of the West, but also of modernity. She was convinced that modernisation was the answer to the empire’s problems – and she also knew that much time had been lost. Since the deadly warning conveyed by the execution of Little An, through the whole reign of her son, the country had stood still for five years. She was determined to make up for lost time.

11 Modernisation Accelerates (1875–89)

IN EARLY 1875,
Cixi lost a son, but regained power. The year became an extraordinary milestone, packed with ground-breaking events. The first thing she did was to summon
Earl Li to discuss an overall strategy for modernisation. The earl, who was based in Tianjin, had requested such a meeting in 1872, but at the time, feeling vulnerable and about to retire, she had turned him down. Now she saw him the day after he arrived, then the following day, and then for a third time a few days later. Her eagerness to resume her course and to regenerate the country was palpable.

The earl had by now emerged as the foremost moderniser of the country. He had surrounded himself with Westerners and made friends with many of them. Among their number was former
US president Ulysses S. Grant, and the two men saw a great deal of each other in Tianjin in 1879. The missionary Timothy Richard described the earl thus:
‘Physically he was taller than most, intellectually he towered above them all, and could see over their heads to the far beyond.’ The earl became the key man in Cixi’s modernisation drive. He and Prince Gong, who headed the Grand Council, and whose name was to Westerners
‘synonymous with Progress in China’, were now the empress dowager’s right-hand men. With their assistance, Cixi steadily, yet radically, pushed the empire towards modernity. As Earl Li wrote to Cixi, expressing their shared aspiration,
‘From now on all sorts of things will be introduced into China, and people’s minds will gradually open up.’ They did not exclude the conservatives. Cixi’s style was to work with people like Grand Tutor Weng as well as the reformists, always using persuasion rather than brute force, and being prepared to let time and reason change people’s minds.

Cixi had wanted to send diplomatic representatives abroad a decade earlier. Now they were dispatched. On 31 August 1875, she announced her first appointment:
Guo Songtao as the minister to London. Guo was an exceptionally forward-looking man who advocated learning from the West and adopting projects such as railways and telegraphs. He was furiously assailed by the conservatives. Grand Tutor Weng, in his diary, dismissed him as
‘perverse’, and the literati from his province who were in Beijing taking Imperial Examinations talked heatedly at their gatherings about going and tearing down his house. Cixi comforted him,
seeing him three times with Empress Zhen before his departure. The two women repeatedly told him not to be deterred by ridicule and slander: ‘everyone working in the Foreign Office is a target of abuse,’ they said. ‘But the throne knows and appreciates you . . . you must take on this difficult job for the country.’

While Guo was abroad, his diary recording his impressions was published by the Foreign Office. In it he described the British adoringly: their legal system was ‘fair’; the prisons were ‘exquisitely clean, with polished floors, without foul air . . . one forgets this is a prison’; and their manners were ‘courteous’, which alone, he asserted, ‘shows that it is not by accident that this country is so rich and powerful’. He even suggested that China’s 2,000-year-old monarchical system was not as desirable as British parliamentary monarchy. Although some of his remarks – for example, that Chinese manners ‘fall far short, far, far short’ – were deleted for publication, the first instalment of the diary excited teeth-gnashing hatred from literati-officials, who accused Guo of trying to ‘turn China into a British subordinate’ and called on the throne to penalise him. Publication of the diary was forced to halt. But Guo was not rebuked. Instead, Cixi made him minister to France as well as to Britain, disregarding conservative officials’ protestations. When Guo conducted a very public row with his traditionalist deputy in London, she transferred the deputy to Germany. Eventually, unable to get on with other mandarins, Guo asked to resign, and she accepted. She told his successor, Marquis Zeng Jr, son of the late Marquis Zeng Zuofan, that she knew that Guo was
‘a good man, and did a remarkable job’.

Cixi may not have agreed with all of Guo’s views, but she appreciated his independent mind. And her style was to work with people of different persuasions. Her minister to Berlin,
Hung Jun, was quite the opposite of Guo. He disliked European customs, especially those to do with male–female association. Outside official duties, he preferred to shut himself in his residence, carrying on with his research on Chinese history, going out only for walks in the Tiergarten. The consort he brought to Berlin, a concubine who had been a high-class call-girl by the professional name of ‘Prettier Than Golden Flower’, yearned for parties, but was not allowed to attend, even when Hung gave receptions at home. She would dress up exquisitely, sashay demurely downstairs to greet her guests and then retire upstairs for the rest of the evening. When on rare occasions she stayed at a party, she was unable to dance – not only on account of her husband, but also because of her crushed and bound feet, which made it painful for her to walk or even stand. She remembered bowing to the Kaiser and the empress, and being paid compliments about her beauty by a glowing-faced, silver-bearded, piercing-eyed and courteous but distant Chancellor Bismarck – and that was all. She had also lost most of her servants, who had refused to cross the ocean with them, except for two who gritted their teeth for what they were certain would be a ‘journey of no return’, and who were paid fifty taels a month each – far more than the monthly income of an average official in Beijing, and ten taels more than the German maids she hired in Berlin. She remarked that the German maids were ‘extremely considerate and very good at looking after people. They were more loyal and far more obedient than Chinese servants.’

But even Hung Jun could not remain entirely resistant to his new surroundings. At first, he indignantly refused to wear European socks. Then, the realisation that they were immeasurably more comfortable than the rough cotton ones he had brought from home dissolved his resolution. By the time he left Berlin, he had bought an ice-sledge as a gift for the empress dowager.

By the mid-1880s, with Cixi constantly urging
‘no foot-dragging’, Beijing had geared up to dispatch groups of
officials to travel round the globe and study Western institutions and cultures with a view to reforming their own system. And when applicants had been sought from the ministries, many scores had eagerly put their names forward – a far cry from a decade earlier. Dealing with the West was no longer regarded as a hardship or as shameful. Jobs that involved associating with foreigners were now coveted. Contemporary diaries and newspapers exclaimed how much society had changed. Even the sacred Imperial Examinations that had underpinned the political and social structures for well over 1,000 years were experiencing their first signs of modernisation. The applicants for the trips were told to write essays for their exams on such subjects as ‘the railway’, ‘defence’, ‘trading ports’ and ‘the history of China’s interaction with Western countries since the Ming dynasty’. These were mind-expanding subjects that spurred people on to learn new things and think new thoughts. Some candidates found the transformation unsettling and struggled to square the new with the old. One claimed that the essence of chemistry and steam engines could be traced to the teachings of Mozi, one of the Confucian sages in fourth- to fifth-century
BC
.

One group of people enjoyed immediate benefit from the regime’s active diplomacy: the victims of the slave-labour trade, which had started from the late 1840s. Mainly in Cuba and Peru, they numbered hundreds of thousands. In 1873–4, the Qing government had dispatched commissions to investigate their conditions. The
commission to Cuba reported:

8/10ths of the entire number declared that they had been kidnapped or decoyed; . . . on arrival at Havana they were sold into slavery, . . . the large majority became the property of sugar planters; . . . the cruelty displayed . . . is great, and . . . unendurable. The labour, too, on the plantations is shown to be excessively severe, and the food to be insufficient; the hours of labour are too long, and the chastisements by rods, whips, chains, stocks, etc., etc., productive of suffering and injury. During the past years a large number have been killed by blows, have died from the effects of wounds and have hanged themselves, cut their throats, poisoned themselves with opium, and thrown themselves into wells and sugar caldrons [cauldrons].

In Peru, they were found to be treated equally appallingly. Beijing was in negotiation with the two countries in an attempt to protect the labourers when Cixi resumed power in 1875. She stressed to her negotiators, headed by Earl Li:
‘You must find ways to make absolutely sure that such abuse of the Chinese is strictly prohibited and discontinued.’ The subsequent conventions freed the slave labourers and
banned the trade. Cixi appointed one of her best diplomats,
Chen Lanbin, who had been the chief investigator in Cuba, to be the minister to America, Cuba and Peru, with the major responsibility for looking after the emigrants.

In 1875, efforts redoubled to build a world-class navy – mainly because China’s neighbour, Japan, was becoming increasingly aggressive and had just tried to take the island of Taiwan. Cixi and her inner circle had registered the rise of Japan before her retirement in early 1873, as they watched it learning from the West, buying machines and gunboats, building railways and making weapons. Her court now discussed how best to deal with this ‘
biggest permanent threat’, and Cixi approved four million taels of silver a year – a huge budget – to
build up the navy. It was the time when ironclad warships had just been invented in Europe, and her edict on 30 May authorised Earl Li to ‘purchase one or two’, given that they were ‘astronomically expensive’. In the years following the edict, two ironclads and a group of other warships were purchased. Young men were sent to France to learn how to manufacture them and to Britain to train as naval officers. Germany was the destination for army cadets.

Finally, in 1888, Cixi approved the Western-style Navy Regulations. It was in
endorsing these Regulations that she effectively unveiled China’s first national flag. The country had had no national ensign, until its engagement with the West at the beginning of her reign necessitated a triangular-shaped golden yellow flag for the nascent navy. Now she endorsed its change into the internationally standard quadrangular shape. On the flag, named the Yellow Dragon, was a vividly blue, animated dragon, raising its head towards a bright-red globe, the sun. With the birth of this national flag, remarked contemporary Western commentators,
‘China proudly took her proper place among the nations.’

In the autumn of the momentous year of 1875, Robert Hart, the Ulsterman and Inspector General of Customs, was commissioned to write a memorandum aimed at a wholesale expansion of foreign trade. He did so, following the explicit instruction that
‘he must bear in mind how all-important it is that his proposals should be advantageous and not harmful to China’. Soon, more ports, mainly along the Yangtze River into the heartland, all the way up to Chongqing, were opened to international trade. These doors were not wrenched open by force. Cixi’s government opened them willingly, in response to a request from Thomas Wade.
^fn1
In Philadelphia, USA, a Chinese official participated in the world Expo for the first time, with the brief to record and report back on all his experiences. Among the modern institutions introduced by Hart was the Chinese Post Office, which issued the country’s first set of stamps, ‘
Great Dragons’, in 1878.