Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (28 page)

As a widow, Cixi could not wear brilliant colours like bright reds or greens. But even clothes that were considered discreet were colourful by European standards. Around the house she might put on a pale-orange robe with a pale-blue waistcoat, embroidered only along the hems, and for a special occasion one of her favourite outfits was a blue brocade robe embroidered with big white magnolias. Katharine Carl, the American painter who spent eleven months with her, observed:

She is always immaculately neat. She designs her own dresses . . . has excellent taste in the choice of colors, and I never saw her with an unbecoming color on, except the Imperial yellow. This was not becoming, but she was obliged to wear it on all official occasions. She used to modify it, as much as possible, by the trimmings, and would sometimes have it so heavily embroidered that the original color was hardly visible.

Cixi’s jewels were often set to her own designs, among which was a pearl mantle that she would wear over an official jacket. Diamonds were an acquired taste. The Chinese of her time considered their brilliance to be vulgar, and mostly used them as drill tips.

Dressing up was important to Cixi. She would examine herself at length in the mirror – for longer than seemed fitting, given her age, or so thought some of her maids and ladies-in-waiting. Cixi guessed what was in the young women’s minds and one day told the lady-in-waiting, Der Ling, who recorded their exchange:

‘It must seem to you quite funny to see an old lady like me taking so much care and pains in dressing and fixing up. Well! I like to dress myself up and to see pretty young girls dressed nicely; it makes you want to be young again yourself.’ I told her that she looked quite young and was still beautiful, and that although we were young we would never dare compare ourselves with her. This pleased her very much, as she was very fond of compliments . . .

Before she left her dressing room Cixi would stand and take a last look at her shoes, which had a comfortable square-cut toe, quite unlike the sharply pointed ones worn by Han women. Her socks were made of white silk, and were tied at the ankle with a pretty ribbon, and she would look to see if the edges of the socks showing above the shoes were as they should be. Each pair was worn only once, so a constant supply was needed. Apart from a team of seamstresses, her family and other aristocratic households also made socks for her and presented them as gifts.

Her morning toilette completed, Cixi started towards the door to the outer hall, with her ‘erect carriage and light swift walk’. A maid parted the curtains and at this movement, for which the eunuch chiefs outside had been waiting, their eyes fixed on the drapes, all dropped to their knees and cried out: ‘
Old Buddha [
lao-fo-ye
], all joy be with you!’ She had adopted this nickname for herself, which, both illustrious and informal, was how she was addressed now in the court and was popularly known in Beijing.

While giving the eunuch chiefs their instructions for the day, Cixi took her first smoke from a water-pipe, which had an elongated stem and a small rectangular box to be held in the palm. Most of the time she did not hold her own pipe. This was the job of a pipe-maid, standing ‘about two paving bricks’ distance away from the Empress Dowager’, according to one of them. When Cixi glanced at her, the pipe-maid’s right hand that held the pipe would gently extend its tip to within an inch of the corner of Cixi’s mouth, whereupon, with a slight turn of the neck, the firm lips would part to take it. The pipe remained in the hands of the maid while Cixi puffed on it. For this service the maids had been trained for many months, until their right palms could hold a cup of hot water for a long time without twitching.

After two pipes of tobacco, breakfast arrived. First came her tea. The Manchus drank tea with a lot of milk. In her case,
the milk came from the breasts of a nurse. Cixi had been taking human milk since her prolonged illness in the early 1880s, on the recommendation of a renowned doctor. Several wet nurses were employed, and took turns to squeeze milk into a bowl for her. The nurses brought their sucking babies with them, and the woman who served her the longest stayed on in the palace, her son being given education and an office job.

While she sipped her tea, a team of eunuchs carried over her food in lacquered boxes wrapped in yellow silk with the dragon motif. Lianying, the head eunuch, took the boxes at the door and brought them himself to Cixi. She ate sitting cross-legged on a
kang
– a long, rectangular brick structure the height of a bed, which could be heated from underneath and was used all over north China as a bed or a seat. She liked to sit by a window, so that she could look out on the courtyard and enjoy the light and the sky. Her food was placed on a low table on the
kang
and extended to some small tables that would be folded away when the meal was finished. When the food boxes were properly arranged, they were opened in front of Cixi’s eyes, as court rules dictated. They contained a large variety of porridges, rolls and cakes – steamed, baked and fried – and many kinds of drinks, ranging from soya-bean juice to beef-bone consommé. There were also plenty of savoury side-dishes, such as duck’s liver cooked in soya and other spicy sauces.

The empress dowager had a hearty appetite and would go on to have another two sizeable meals and small snacks. The meals were taken wherever she happened to be: she had no fixed dining room. The scale and presentation of the meals followed court stipulations. They would only be reduced if there was a national disaster. As the empress dowager, Cixi was entitled to
a daily allocation of 31 kilos of pork, one chicken and one duck. With these, as well as vegetables and other ingredients, the quantities of which were all specified, dozens of dishes were cooked and, for a main meal, would be set out in more than a hundred plates or bowls. Most of the dishes were never touched and were only there to amplify the presentation.
She seldom drank with her meals, and mostly ate on her own, as anyone invited to join her had to do so standing – except the emperor. Often court ladies in attendance would be asked to eat at her table after she had finished and left, in which case they were permitted to sit down. Usually dishes from her table would be given to courtiers as tokens of imperial favour. The emperor would also receive her dishes if he was staying in the same palace complex. The vast quantities of leftover food from the court enabled a string of food stalls in the neighbourhood to do a brisk business, and at certain times each day ragged beggars were allowed to come to a particular gate to receive the remnants and sift through the rubbish before it was carted away.

Lunch was followed by a careful hand-washing, and then a siesta. Before she dozed off, Cixi would read the classics with her eunuch instructors, who would enliven the texts by weaving in jokes that amused Cixi. When she got up, there was another tremor in the palace, as an eye-witness described:
‘when Her Majesty awakes, the news flashes like an eletric spark through all the Precincts and over the whole inclosure, and everyone is on the “qui vive” in a moment’.

Before she went to bed, at around 11 p.m., she often enjoyed a foot massage. Two masseuses first soaked her feet in a silver-plated wooden bowl, with wide rolled-back ‘arms’ as foot rests. The water in the bowl was boiled with flowers or herbs, as prescribed by her physicians, bearing in mind factors such as the climate and her physical condition. In summer, it might be dried chrysanthemum, and in winter it could be flowering quince. The masseuses pressed the various pressure points, especially on the soles – rather like a reflexology session today. If her toenails needed cutting, the masseuses would gently request permission to use scissors, which the chief maid then brought in. Sharp objects were normally forbidden in Cixi’s quarters. A manicure meant tending to her long fingernails – extraordinarily long on the fourth and fifth fingers, as was common among aristocratic Manchu women. The exceptionally long nails were protected by shields made of openwork
cloisonné
or gold, set with rubies and pearls. As no lady of position would dress herself or comb her own hair, such nails did not present an insurmountable problem.

Her bed was a
kang
built into an alcove in the room, with shelves around the three enclosing sides, on which were placed ornaments such as small jade figures. Her bedside reading amounted to another session of studying the classics with her eunuch instructors, which sent her to sleep. As she slept, a maid sat on the floor of the room, as noiselessly as a piece of furniture. More maids and eunuchs were in the antechamber outside the apartment, and elsewhere in the building. The night-shifts would hear the snoring of a sound sleeper.

Cixi was now in her early fifties and in very good health. She played the game of kick-shuttlecock with more agility than her much younger entourage, and climbed hills fast, without any sign of fatigue. In Beijing’s biting winter she normally declined heating, preferring nothing in her bedroom and only charcoal-burning copper braziers in the large halls. Picturesque though these were, they produced little more than curling blue flames and made little difference to the temperature. The doors of her apartment were left open and draped with padded curtains, which were constantly lifted for the passage of eunuchs and maids, so blasts of cold air swept in at every entry or exit. Everyone else felt frozen to the bone, and yet Cixi seemed impervious. She just wore silk-wool undergarments and a fur coat, at most with a big fur cloak on top.

Her mind was as sharp as ever, and so it was difficult for her to shut herself off completely from politics. What made it possible for her to endure the enforced isolation and leisure, day in, day out, was her wide range of interests. She was curious about all new things, and wanted to try everything. Having added a couple of steamboats to the lake, she asked to be flown in a
hot-air balloon, which had been bought some years earlier for military use. But Earl Li gave her (via Prince Ching, as the earl was no longer permitted to communicate directly with her) the disappointing news that the balloon was not in a fit condition and might explode.

The Summer Palace was a source of endless pleasure for Cixi, and she never tired of walking in its grounds. Strolling in the rain appealed to her the most. The eunuchs always brought an umbrella, but she would only use it in heavy downpours. A large retinue of eunuchs followed her, together with ladies-in-waiting and palace maids, bearing her ‘
clothes, shoes, handkerchiefs, combs, brushes, powder boxes, looking glasses of different sizes, perfumes, pins, black and red ink, yellow paper, cigarettes, water pipes, and the last one carried her yellow satin-covered stool . . .’ – like ‘a lady’s dressing room on legs’, according to one lady-in-waiting. Often Cixi and her ladies were carried in sedan-chairs to a picturesque spot of her choosing, where she would sit on her yellow satin stool, gazing for a long time into the distance. One scenic stop was the top of a high-arched bridge, which undulated in a soft, flowing way and was suitably named the Jade Sash. Another place she liked was a cottage built and furnished entirely of bamboo, where she often had tea. Her teas were the finest – the first leaves from all over the empire – which she drank from a jade cup, into which she would drop a few dried petals of honeysuckle, jasmine or rose. The dried blossoms were brought to her in a jade bowl, with two slender cherry-wood sticks, which she used to pick up the blossoms, drop them into her cup and stir the tea.

A favourite activity was boating on the lake, during which her barge was sometimes followed at a distance by eunuch musicians, playing the bamboo flute or bamboo recorder, or the
yue-qin
, a moon-shaped instrument like the mandolin. All would be silent when Cixi listened,
if entranced’. Sometimes, in moonlight, she would sing softly to the music floating over the water.

Nature was her passion and she adored plants. Chrysanthemums were among her best-loved flowers. During the season for propagation Cixi would lead the court ladies in taking cuttings and setting them out in flower pots, watering them religiously until they began to bud. The buds were then covered with mats so that they would not be damaged by heavy rain. For this she would even forgo her usual nap. Later on, when she returned to power, she broke with the old custom of allowing no plants in places of official duties and filled the audience hall with a profusion of potted flowers, arranging them in tiers. Officials coming for their audiences had to orient themselves before they went down on their knees, as her throne seemed to be hidden behind a ‘
flower mountain’.

She was devoted to her orchard, from which large baskets of fruits would be brought before her daily when they were in season. She would inspect their colour and shape, and would hold up a cluster of grapes against the light, for a long time. Apples, pears and peaches filled the huge porcelain pots in the halls, for their subtle fragrance. When the fragrance was gone, the fruits were divided among the servants. The scentless gourd also commanded her affection, and she would often stroke them on their trellises, sometimes in torrential rain.
Her collection of gourds ran to several hundred, which an artistic eunuch sculpted into musical instruments, dinner sets and a variety of fanciful articles, adding miniature paintings and calligraphy to their surface. Cixi prepared some of the gourds to be carved by using a sharpened piece of bamboo to scrape off the outer skin.

Every few days, she would visit her large vegetable gardens and would be delighted if she could take away some fresh vegetables or other farm produce. Occasionally
she cooked them herself in one of the courtyards and once she taught her ladies-in-waiting how to boil eggs with black tea leaves and spices.

Mosquitoes could be a nuisance in the Summer Palace, especially on summer evenings, but Cixi’s eunuchs devised an ingenious solution. They erected
giant marquees, each big enough to enclose a building and its courtyards completely. Roofed and curtained with reed matting and a system of ropes and pulleys that rolled and unrolled the top and hoisted and lowered the curtains, these works of art served as vast mosquito nets, in addition to shielding the large enclosures from the sun during the day. With lanterns hanging discreetly and candles flickering in the breeze, evenings were a scented pleasure, scarcely troubled by the insects. The same marquees were erected for the foreign legations.