Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (43 page)

On 12 April, Sir Claude and his colleagues, whilst deciding ‘not to press further for a special Decree in the Gazette’, gave the Chinese government two months to exterminate the Boxers. Otherwise, they threatened, their forces would enter China to do the job themselves. This threat was backed up by an emphatic parade of gunboats outside the Dagu Forts. Not wishing for a confrontation, Cixi made concessions. Two days later, a memorandum from the Viceroy of Zhili describing how government troops were dispersing the Boxers was published in the
Peking Gazette
, thus announcing to the country that the Boxers were illegal. On the 17th, a decree was carried in the
Gazette
condemning those who ‘make a pretext to oppress converts . . . and involve themselves in crime’. The legations read the translation: ‘the Throne sets no bounds to its principle of regarding all men with equal benevolence’; officials must ‘take every opportunity of making it clearly known to all, that every man must attend to his own business and live continually at peace with his fellow men.’ The decree did not mention the Boxers by name, and the tone was firm without being draconian.

That these items appeared at all in the
Peking Gazette
pleased Sir Claude and his colleagues, but the lack of desired severity in the decree left them far from satisfied. The gunboats remained outside the Dagu Forts, their presence sending a daily reminder that if Cixi did not wipe out the Boxers within two months, there would be an invasion. Western powers did not really want a war. As Mrs Sarah Conger, wife of the American minister, wrote, ‘
none of them wish to get into war with China’. But she also noted that ‘there are many warships at Ta Ku [Dagu]’. These were part of the bluff. But as Britain’s Prime Minister,
Lord Salisbury, later remarked, ‘I have passed some time in trying to persuade my countrymen that bluffing with the Chinese was a dangerous amusement: but I did not anticipate such a very striking confirmation of my views.’ For Cixi, incensed, became more determined to defy the powers.

Ever since China’s disastrous war and ‘peace’ with Japan five years earlier, a pattern had been established: foreign powers would make demands, then threaten force, and Beijing would instantly do as it was told. Cixi had just broken the pattern by calling Italy’s bluff. She was committed to doing the same with the other, stronger powers. But if her challenge did lead to a war, how – and with what – could she fight? The navy had been destroyed and the army was weak. Defeat appeared inevitable. It was at this point, in desperation, that Cixi clutched at a straw: perhaps the Boxers would be able to fight a sort of ‘people’s war’ against the invaders. The Boxers’ hatred for foreigners would make them fierce and courageous soldiers, she thought.

Pragmatic men around Cixi, like Junglu, saw that a collision with the West was imminent and counselled accommodation with the legations in order to avoid it. Cixi turned a deaf ear. Fearing the worst,
Junglu asked for sick leave, and stayed away from the court for sixty days. Her confidant, whose sensible advice she usually heeded, was thus absent when Cixi made her most fateful decision.

The man who had her ear now, Prince Duan, was the father of the newly appointed heir-apparent. Hating Westerners for snubbing his son, he vehemently promoted the idea of using the Boxers as soldiers. He and other like-minded princes and aristocrats tried to convince Cixi that the Boxers were loyal, fearless and
‘disciplined’. They offered to organise the Boxers into a fighting force, prepared for invasion. Cixi’s rational side told her that the Boxers were not remotely suited to such a conflict, but her emotional side desperately wanted to believe otherwise. They were her last resort. She may also have calculated that the Boxers could at least inflict some damage on the invaders, which could give her a chance to negotiate a compromise and so avoid a wholesale capitulation.

As she tilted towards using the Boxers as soldiers, her hand that was striking at them became hesitant. Although the army continued to try to disband the Boxers, Cixi’s half-heartedness and ambivalence were felt by the troops, whose own ardour slackened. The Boxers, emboldened, increased their ranks and spread like wildfire, right in the area around Beijing.

In spring 1900, while Shandong was relieved by rainfall, the region surrounding Beijing was hit by a devastating drought. A contemporary missionary wrote: ‘
For the first time since the great famine in 1878 no winter wheat to speak of had been planted . . . Under the most favourable circumstances the spring rains are almost invariably insufficient, but that year they were almost wholly lacking. The ground was baked so hard that no crops could be put in, and at such times the idle and restless population are ready for any mischief . . .’ Tormented by fear of starvation, the Boxers claimed that the God of Rain was not answering their prayers because he was bewitched by the ‘foreign devils’ – those inhuman creatures who had
blue eyes! As the Chinese have black eyes, the colour of foreigners’ eyes marked them out. There was a widely believed rumour that their multicoloured eyes could see through the surface of the Earth and spot underground treasures, which they proceeded to steal, leaving China poverty-stricken.

In May, the Boxers, mostly peasants hit hard by the bad weather, entered Beijing and crowded the capital’s streets in their many tens of thousands. They wore red head-kerchiefs, red shirts, with a red sash around the waist, and they wielded large carving knives. Moving in gangs, they set up shrines worshipping a variety of deities – very often characters from popular theatre like
The Monkey King
. In the course of a ceremony the chief of the gang would act as though the spirit of a deity had entered him, thus making him and his words sacred. He would jump up and down, howling and dancing wildly as if in a trance: gestures that were also copied from Peking Operas. Members recited meaningless incantations after him and they learned
kung-fu
kicking. They were told that protective spirits had now entered their bodies and had made them immune to bullets and weapons, so foreigners’ firearms could not hurt them.

Among them were some young women, who called themselves the Red Lanterners, and who had to be virgins or widows. Often carrying red lanterns as well as red-tasselled spears, the women wore red tops with short sleeves and tight trousers and paraded themselves in the streets. All this was a breach of tradition. And they went even further by waving to onlookers with their red handkerchiefs. These handkerchiefs were said to possess magical properties: place one on the ground and step on it and a Red Lantern girl would be carried to the sky (as in the theatre), where she could locate a foreign devil’s head and sever it with a knife. She could also dust a tall building (such as a church) with a handkerchief, and the building would be set on fire and reduced to ashes. These women, most of whom led downtrodden lives, were now enjoying their moment of liberation, not least seeing crowds of men prostrating themselves on the ground in homage when they strode by.

On the walls in the Beijing streets, right next to the imperial edicts banning them, the Boxers’ own eye-catching posters were defiantly displayed, calling for the ‘
killing of all foreigners in three months’. On 31 May, as the situation was running out of control, Cixi gave
permission for 400 Western troops to enter Beijing from Tianjin, to protect the foreign legations. The legations did not feel this was sufficient, so on 10 June more than 2,000 troops under Admiral Edward Seymour, Commander-in-Chief of the British navy’s China Station, set off for Beijing from Tianjin, 120 kilometres away, by railway. The expedition was
not authorised by Cixi, who told her diplomats to persuade the legations to turn it back. The head of the Foreign Office, Prince Ching, was sympathetic to the coming of this foreign army, so Cixi in anger replaced him with the hardline Prince Duan. The legations refused to turn back the expedition.

Determined to halt a foreign army entering the capital unauthorised, Cixi endorsed the
mobilisation of some Boxers along the railway line, in an attempt to stop it. The Boxers proved surprisingly effective. They thoroughly sabotaged the line and fought ‘
with the utmost courage’, according to Captain Jellicoe, Admiral Seymour’s Chief of Staff. Lieutenant Fownes Luttrell also remarked on the ‘great bravery’ of the Boxers. Soon joined by the imperial army with modern weapons, they managed to hold back the Seymour Expedition. This success raised Cixi’s hope that the Boxers could indeed help repel invasion.

The fighting heightened tensions in Beijing. On 11 June, soldiers of a largely Muslim army defending the capital killed a chancellor of the Japanese Legation, Sugiyama Akira, while he was out on the street. Cixi publicly expressed ‘
deep regret’ over the atrocity against a foreign diplomat, and promised punishment of the perpetrators. But when she gave the order to the commander of the army, Dong Fuxiang, he replied that if one single soldier from his army were executed for the murder, his forces would mutiny. After a long silence, Cixi said, ‘
Well, what’s done is done . . .’

Supported by the Muslim army, the Boxers began to destroy railways, trains and telegraph lines. Telegraphic communication from Beijing to the provinces was broken, and the Viceroys from the south had to send their cables to Shangdong, to be relayed to Beijing on horseback. In Beijing, the Boxers started to burn churches and foreign properties, cheered on by large crowds. In an act of extreme hatred the mob raided foreign cemeteries, smashing tombstones and monuments, dragging out of their graves the bodies of foreigners, striking them with spears before burning them.

Foreigners were often referred to as ‘Hairies’ –
mao-zi
– because they have more body hair than the Chinese. Chinese Christians were called ‘Secondary Hairies’ –
er-mao-zi
– and they bore the brunt of the Boxers’ ferocity. With their bodies horribly burned and lacerated, they fled into the legations for protection: ‘more than flesh and blood could stand to see,’ wrote a guard.
Rescue parties were sent out in the hope of saving others, and they opened fire on the crowds, killing some 100 Boxers and other Chinese in a couple of days. Hatred overflowed. Frenzied men girt with red sashes and armed with swords, spears and knives crowded outside the Legation Quarter and laid siege to it.

Home to the representatives of eleven countries, the Legation Quarter, an enclave roughly 3 kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide, was situated right next to the southeastern walls of the Royal City, which cradled the Forbidden City. The south of the Quarter was bounded by the crenellated wall that separated the Manchu-inhabited Inner City from the Han-inhabited Outer City. A shallow canal running north and south roughly bisected it. Within the Quarter, 473 foreign civilians and thousands of Chinese Christians took refuge with 400 military guards, who constructed a labyrinth of barricades. The Boxer crowds, numbering tens of thousands, surged against the walls and the defending cordon, shouting ‘Kill the foreign devils! Kill! Kill! Kill!’ Those who listened to the blood-curdling nocturnal yells would
‘never forget the suggestion of a pandemonium, a rehearsal of hell,’ wrote the Rev. Arthur H. Smith.

Cixi sent the pro-Western
Junglu, now back from ‘sick leave’, to lead his troops to protect the Legation Quarter. She issued many
decrees intended to rein in the Boxers, and dispatched grandees whom the Boxers seemed to trust to try and talk them into disbanding and returning to their villages. If they did not stop destroying railways, churches and foreign residences, and stop assaulting – even murdering – foreigners and Chinese Christians, then they would be subject to an extermination campaign by government forces. Meanwhile, Cixi cabled Earl Li to come to Beijing to negotiate with the Western powers. The earl at that time was the Viceroy of Canton, governing two coastal provinces in the south. Considering Cixi’s handling of the Boxers to be ‘inconceivably preposterous’, he had been exchanging cables with
other dignitaries daily to discuss what to do. Burning with impatience to help, he wished he could ‘fly with wings’ to Beijing. But then, before he set off, events overtook all these efforts as Cixi learned that scores of Western warships were gathering on the coast, and many more thousands of troops were on their way. Invasion seemed inevitable.

Going to war meant gambling with the survival of the dynasty, and Cixi felt the need to be endorsed. On 16 June, she convened an unusually large meeting of more than seventy participants: the Grand Councillors and ministers of the government, who were – it was strikingly noticeable – overwhelmingly Manchu and undistinguished.
An eye-witness recorded the scene. In a packed audience hall all attendants were kneeling before Cixi and Emperor Guangxu, who were seated side by side. Prince Duan led a chorus of heated voices calling for the Boxers to be given legitimate status and to be used as a fighting force. But a few spoke against the idea, asking instead for harsher measures to suppress the mob. As one of them was talking, Prince Duan cut him short sarcastically: ‘Yours would be a very good way to lose the support of the people’, at which point he stuck up his right thumb, a (universal) gesture for ‘a very good idea’. When one attendant argued that the Boxers could not be relied on to fight a war, ‘because much of their courage comes from the black arts which claim to shield them from bullets’, Cixi herself replied indignantly, ‘It’s true that such arts cannot be relied upon, but can we not rely on the hearts and minds of the people? China has been weakened to an extreme degree, and all we have is the hearts and minds of the people. If we cast them aside, what do we have to sustain our country?’ She proceeded to look furiously at those who persisted in arguing.

That same day, something ominous occurred. In the busiest shopping district in Beijing, just outside the Inner City and near the legations, the Boxers set fire to a pharmacy selling Western medicine and to other shops with foreign merchandise. As the flames leapt from store to store, devouring the best and rarest of silks, furs, furniture, jewels, antiques, art and other of the empire’s most beautiful artefacts, a spark flew onto the Qianmen Gate tower nearby. Rising more than 30 metres above the ground, and nearly 15 metres above the wall on either side, this was the loftiest of all the city gates in Beijing, due south on a central axis from the Forbidden City. The gate would only be opened for the emperor, when he went to pray at the Temple of Heaven or the Temple to the God of Agriculture. The Boxers did not mean to destroy it and, as it was consumed by the flames, they dropped to their knees to beg the God of Fire to spare this sacred edifice. The gate tower was soon reduced to a huge pile of smouldering charcoal and rubble. The biggest fire in the capital for more than 200 years, it terrified all who learned about the destruction, who regarded it as a deadly omen.