Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (24 page)

Furthermore, Cixi’s reign was the most tolerant in Qing history; people were no longer killed for what they said or wrote, as they had been under previous emperors. To alleviate poverty, she initiated large-scale food import and each year spent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of taels to buy food to feed the population. As Denby observed, ‘To her own people, up to this period in her career, she was kind and merciful, and to foreigners she was just.’ Foreign relations were fundamentally improved, and the relationship between China and the US stayed ‘tranquil and satisfactory’. Most importantly, the American minister pointed out: ‘It may be said with emphasis that the empress dowager has been the first of her race to apprehend the problem of the relation of China to the outside world, and to make use of this relation to strengthen her dynasty and to promote material progress.’ Indeed, Cixi had ended China’s self-imposed isolation and had brought it into the international community – and she had done so in order to benefit her country. ‘At that time,’ Denby summed up, ‘she was universally esteemed by foreigners, and revered by her own people, and was regarded as being one of the greatest characters in history . . . Under her rule for a quarter of a century China made immense progress.’

The embryo of a modern China had taken shape. Its creator was Cixi. As Denby stressed, ‘It will not be denied by any one that the improvement and progress above sketched are mainly due to the will and power of the empress regent.’ With this impressive legacy, Cixi handed over the reins of the empire to her adopted son, Emperor Guangxu.

^fn1
China paid Russia for keeping Ili out of rebel hands and allowing trade to continue. This payment was not a war indemnity, although Chinese history books use the same term,
pei-kuan
, and treat them as though they were the same.

^fn2
According to the Chinese system.

^fn3
Cixi is still criticised by some today for ending the Sino-French War after China won these battles. Her critics seem to suggest that China should have held on to Vietnam, a sovereign country.

PART FOUR
Emperor Guangxu Takes Over (1889–1898)

13 Guangxu Alienated from Cixi (1875–94)

BORN ON THE
twenty-eighth day of the sixth lunar month of 1871, Emperor Guangxu succeeded to the throne at the age of three, when Cixi’s own son, Emperor Tongzhi, had died without an heir. She adopted him and made him the next emperor, partly to elevate a member of her own family – her sister’s son – and partly to punish his father, Prince Chun. She had no real love for the child, at least not of the kind she had felt for her own late son. Taken from his home and carried into the bitterly cold and impersonal Forbidden City in the depths of a wintry night, the child lost his parents – and his wet nurse, who was not allowed to join him. Instead, he was placed in the charge of eunuchs. Cixi told him to call her ‘Papa Dearest’ (
qin-ba-ba
) and, when he was older, he called her ‘My Royal Father’ (
huang-ba-ba
). It was a man’s role that Cixi aspired to fill. As a mother, she was dutiful rather than warm. She had no instinctive fondness for children anyway. Once, at a party in the court for aristocratic ladies, a young girl started bawling and would not stop. An irate Cixi ordered the child’s mother to take her away, telling her, as she fell to her knees in tears, ‘
I send you out of the Palace to teach you a lesson, which you must teach your child. I do not blame her; I blame you and pity her; but she must suffer as well as yourself.’ The family was not invited again for some time.

Empress Zhen was more of a mother figure to the child emperor than Cixi. But she died when he was nine, on 8 April 1881, aged forty-three. He could not stop crying at her bier. It has been alleged that Empress Zhen was poisoned by Cixi, although no one has produced any evidence. In fact, she almost certainly died of a massive brain haemorrhage, as doctors who studied her medical records have concluded. She had a history of what appeared to be strokes, of which Grand Tutor Weng’s diary recorded at least three. The first happened as early as 1863, when she suddenly fainted and lost the ability to speak for nearly a month. Her reputation for ‘speaking slowly and with difficulty’ during audiences may have been a consequence. On the last occasion, she fell into unconsciousness and died within a couple of days.

Cixi mourned
Empress Zhen’s death as that of an intimate and superior family member – by wrapping her own head in a white silk scarf. This went beyond the prescribed mourning etiquette for the empress dowager and earned her ‘immense admiration’ from the traditionalists like Grand Tutor Weng. Although dynastic rules only required the period of mourning to be twenty-seven days, Cixi extended it to 100 days, during which time all joyful activities, like weddings, were prohibited. What was more, she decreed a twenty-seven-month
ban on music in the court. This, just over a year after the four-year ban following the death of her son, and in the middle of an illness during which she craved music, was a real sacrifice. So starved of music was she that, months before the end of the ban, she started planning performances and selecting singers from outside the court. Within days after the ban was lifted, in summer 1883, she watched opera non-stop for ten hours. Thereafter there were continuous performances for days, one lasting twelve hours.

The death of Empress Zhen deprived Emperor Guangxu of a mother figure. It also left a vacuum as there was no one to act as conciliator between him and Cixi. When the child grew up and was increasingly alienated from his Papa Dearest, there was no one to bring them back together. No one was in a position to, and no one had the clout. Empress Zhen, senior to Cixi in rank, a friend from her teenage years and a comrade in launching their coup, for which both of them had risked death by a thousand cuts, had been the only person to whom Cixi displayed humility. Cixi had respected the empress’s judgement in a working partnership that spanned two decades, and had deferred to her in domestic affairs – even in a matter as crucial as the choice of a wife for her son. Without Empress Zhen’s help, Cixi was unable to halt the gradual worsening of her relationship with Emperor Guangxu, a deterioration that would result in disasters for the empire, as well as for themselves.

At this stage Cixi behaved like an ‘absentee parent,’ who, apart from receiving the child’s daily ritual greetings, confined her involvement with him to his education. She engaged Grand Tutor Weng, who had taught her late son, to be the chief teacher. The fact that she and the conservative Weng had disagreed on so many issues did not prevent her from appointing him to the post. Weng was by consensus the most upright and acclaimed of scholars, and could be trusted to instil in the child all the qualities that a good emperor should possess. Cixi was firmly committed to Chinese culture, even though she was open to Western ideas. It was taken for granted that a Chinese monarch had to be brought up in the Chinese way. It does not seem to have occurred to her that this emperor should be educated differently, but, even if it did, no other way would have been approved by the grandees, who had a voice in how their emperor was educated. As a result, Emperor Guangxu was moulded like his ancestors: no part of his education would equip him to handle the modern world.

The child emperor began his lessons when he was four. On a sunny early spring day, he was taken into his study to meet his tutors. Sitting behind a low desk, facing south, he spread a large piece of paper on the desk and asked for a brush. He had already learned to write a little. Grand Tutor Weng dipped a brush into a well of ink and handed it to the child, who proceeded to write two phrases, each with four characters, in what his tutor called ‘extremely symmetrical and pleasing’ calligraphy. One phrase meant ‘peace and stability under Heaven’, and the other ‘upright, magnanimous, honourable and wise’. Both were Confucian ideals to which a good monarch should aspire. With this delightful start, Grand Tutor Weng showed the child the word ‘the Morality of the Emperor’,
di-de
, which he repeated after the tutor four times. Next Weng opened a picture book,
Lessons for an Emperor
, in which the famously good and notoriously bad emperors were portrayed. As he explained to the child why they were good or bad, the boy’s finger, following that of his teacher, paused over the portraits of the mythical Emperors Yao and Shun of the Three Great Ancient Dynasties, who were worshipped as exemplary monarchs. The four-year-old seemed to be attracted to them. After lingering over their images, he asked Grand Tutor Weng if he would again write down the word ‘the Morality of the Emperor’, which the Grand Tutor did. The child gazed at the word for some time before the
first lesson ended.

This first session, recorded in Grand Tutor Weng’s diary, provides a glimpse of Emperor Guangxu’s education and the sort of pupil he would become. Quite the opposite of his cousin and immediate predecessor, Emperor Tongzhi, who dreaded the lessons, Guangxu seemed to take to them. At the age of five, to Cixi’s amazement, he was reciting at all times – ‘
sitting, standing, walking or lying down’ – what must have been to him incomprehensible classics. Such dedication may well have had something to do with the strong attachment he formed to his teacher, Weng. The boy wanted to please the old man. When he was six, Weng was away for some time, tending to the repairs of his family tombs. During his absence the child played like a normal boy, and did not do the homework the tutor had left him. Weng had asked him to recite some classical texts twenty times each, in order to learn them by heart, but Guangxu only read them once. The day Weng came back, the child threw himself into the old man’s arms and cried:
‘I have been missing you for such a long time!’ Then he went to his desk and started reciting the texts, twenty times each. A eunuch in attendance commented: ‘We haven’t heard this sound for ages!’

With this powerful motivation to imbibe, and a good memory, Emperor Guangxu rapidly excelled. Grand Tutor Weng’s diaries, which had been littered with exasperated outbursts about his former pupil, were now peppered with satisfied exclamations such as ‘good’, ‘very good’, ‘extremely good’ and ‘brilliant!’ By nine, the emperor was able to decorate fans with calligraphy that ‘has a really artistic feel’, said the delighted tutor, a renowned calligrapher himself. Barely into his teens, the boy could write ‘utterly fluent’ poetry and essays at speed, as if mature thoughts flew out of his young head ‘with wings’.

The child’s whole life was given over to his studies, which included the Manchu language, as well as some Mongolian, though Chinese classics remained the core subject. From the age of nine he began to practise reading reports and writing instructions on them in crimson ink. For this purpose, a copy was made of some reports for him to practise on. As the Chinese language had no punctuation marks in those days, the child first had to divide the sometimes very long texts into sentences by marking each pause with a crimson dot. The instructions he gave were sensible, though understandably limited to generalities. Sometimes, Cixi would sit with him while he practised, like a parent watching her child doing his homework today.
One report came from a governor requesting a piece of calligraphy from the emperor, which would be carved on a plaque and mounted on the entrance of a temple to the God of Thunder. Apparently the god had been seen to make an appearance, which was interpreted by frightened locals to mean that there would be storms coming to destroy their crops. Royal reverence to the god could placate its wrath. The nine-year-old granted the request, in a reply that he had clearly absorbed from his readings. Cixi then showed him what he might say of a more specific kind, by writing an additional instruction to the effect that the official must not just count on the royal inscription for good harvests, and that the gods would be better pleased if he performed his duties conscientiously.

On another report, from Marquis Zeng Jr, suggesting allowing junior diplomats abroad to come home for vacation and paying for their extra costs, the then ten-year-old duly gave his consent. Cixi added the principle: ‘The most important thing is to choose the right people. Once you have them,
don’t begrudge them expenses.’

So Emperor Guangxu was groomed, by the empress dowager as well as his Grand Tutors, to be a wise ruler. By the age of ten he was giving occasional audiences. When Cixi was ill, he stepped in and was able to talk to officials in this way: ‘What are the crops like in Henan? Is there still a lack of rain? We in the capital are also suffering from drought. How we long for the rain!’ These were the standard lines expected of a good emperor. And Grand Tutor Weng felt ‘much rewarded and contented’.

Indeed Emperor Guangxu grew up to be a model Confucian monarch. From the Grand Tutor he learned to despise ‘personal wealth’,
cai
, and declared that he preferred ‘thriftiness’,
jian
– at which the old man exclaimed: ‘What great fortune for all under Heaven!’
His essays and poems, in their hundreds and well kept in envelopes of yellow silk in the Forbidden City archives, mostly expressed his thoughts on how to be a worthy emperor. ‘Care for the people’ (
ai-min
) was a constant theme. Writing about the moonlight over a palace lake, the emperor would think about far-away starving villagers, who shared the same moon, but not his luxury. In summer, on cooling himself in an open pavilion, nibbling ice-chilled fruits, his poems were about feeling pity for peasants toiling under a scorching sun. And in winter, on cradling a gilded charcoal burner in the heated palace while listening to howling winds, he imagined how the wind would be lashing at ‘tens of thousands of families in inadequate homes’.

His sentiments and the language he used to express them conformed exactly to precedent, established over centuries, for a good Confucian emperor. And yet, for all the concerns he displayed for his subjects, the emperor had nothing to say about how to improve their lives through modern means. Nowhere in his writings did he mention industries, foreign trade or diplomacy. The emperor’s young mind was frozen in the past.