Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (13 page)

Her working relationship with Prince Gong remained close. In fact, they grew closer as they were thrown together as ‘comrades’ facing conservative opposition to their efforts to bring the empire into the modern age.

One major episode concerned the first modern educational institution, Tongwen College, the School of Combined Learning. It was set up in 1862, soon after Cixi’s reign began, to train interpreters. At the time, it met with relatively little resistance – after all, China had to deal with foreigners. The school was housed in a picturesque mansion where, amidst date trees and groves of lilac and winter jasmine, a little bell tower announced class hours. Then in 1865, when, on Prince Gong’s advice, Cixi decided to turn it into a fully fledged college teaching sciences, the opposition became frenzied. For two thousand years only the classics had been regarded as a fit subject for education. Cixi defended her decision by saying that the College only intended
‘to borrow Western methods to verify Chinese ideas’, and would ‘not replace the teachings of our sacred sages’. But this did not assuage the officials who had risen to their present positions through imbibing Confucian classics, and they attacked the Foreign Office and Prince Gong as
‘stooges of foreign devils’. Graffiti abusing the prince were pasted on city walls.

One source of outrage was that, in this college, foreigners would be made ‘teachers’. By tradition, a teacher was a most revered figure, a mentor for life, who imparted wisdom as well as knowledge, and who must be respected like a parent. (The murder of a teacher was classified as parricide, which, like treason, was punishable by death of a thousand cuts.) Emperors and princes set up shrines in their homes to honour their deceased tutors. The most vocal opponent on this issue was a highly esteemed Mongol scholar, Woren, a tutor of Cixi’s child, Emperor Tongzhi. He wrote to Cixi arguing that Westerners must not be accorded this exalted status, as they were enemies who had ‘invaded our country, threatened our dynasty, burned our palaces, and killed our people’. And he reasoned: ‘Today we are learning their secrets in order to fight them in future wars, and how can we trust them not to play evil tricks through fake teaching?’

While rebuking the abusive dissenters with strong words,
Cixi was gentle with Woren, merely bidding him to find
Chinese
teachers to teach sciences. This put the Mongol tutor on the spot, and he had to concede that he had no one to nominate. Cixi told him to keep trying and come up with a solution to the country’s problems. The tutor, who had been selected to teach the emperor on account of his deep-rooted Confucian principles, was convinced of his own arguments, but felt helpless and distraught in the face of reality. One day he burst into sobs while giving a lesson to the nine-year-old child emperor, who, having never seen the elderly teacher cry, was frightened and disconcerted. A few days later, the old man passed out while trying to mount a horse. He was ill and asked to resign. Cixi declined to accept his resignation, but gave him permanent sick leave. Woren left behind many sympathisers at the court, including his fellow tutor,
Grand Tutor Weng, also a hater of the West. Weng had wept when the Old Summer Palace was burned down and called the Westerners in Beijing ‘dirty animals’ and ‘wolves and jackals’.

Cixi pushed ahead in spite of tenacious opposition, and appointed a senior official, Hsü Chi-she, to head the college,
announcing that Hsü had ‘high prestige’ and was ‘a good model’ for the students. Hsü’s distinction, in the empress dowager’s eyes, came from his book, the first comprehensive description of the world by a Chinese. Although he had never been abroad, Hsü had accomplished this major work with the help of an American missionary, David Abeel, with whom he had made friends while working on the southern coast in the 1840s. In the book, he placed China as just one country among many on Earth, contradicting the notion that China was the Middle Kingdom and the centre of the world. America seems to be the country he admired most, and he said of George Washington, ‘Ah, what a hero!’ Hsü wrote that after Washington fought victorious wars over a vast territory and people wanted to make him king, he ‘did not ascend the throne, nor pass his position to his descendants. Instead, he created the system by which a person became the head of the country through election.’ ‘Washington was an extraordinary man!’ he exclaimed.
^fn1
Hsü was most impressed by the fact that America ‘has no royalty or nobles . . . In this brand new state, public affairs are decided by the people. What a wonder!’ To Hsü, America came closest to the Confucian ideal that ‘everything under Heaven is for the people’ (
tian-xia-wei-gong
), and was the place most similar to China’s Three Great Ancient Dynasties, under the emperors Shun, Yao and Yu more than 4,000 years earlier. Under these dynasties, the Chinese believed, their country was a flourishing and kind place, where the emperors were voted into office on merit, and lived like everyone else. These dynasties were in fact mythical. But people imagined they were real, and quite a few Chinese who came into contact with the West expressed astonishment that China’s legendary ancient practice appeared to be alive beyond the ocean. The British justice system was ‘
just like the one in our Three Great Ancient Dynasties,’ one observed.

When Hsü’s book was published back in 1848 under Cixi’s late father-in-law, Emperor Daoguang, officials had been scandalised. They had accused him of
‘inflating the status of foreign barbarians’ and heaped invective on him. He had been dismissed from his job. Now, in 1865, his book reached Cixi, and she plucked him out of disgraced semi-retirement at his home on the Yellow River and
promoted him to a key post in the Foreign Office. Hsü’s appointment was seen by Westerners in Beijing as yet another sign of ‘the beginning of a new era’.

In the next few years Hsü suffered continuous insults from other officials. He begged to retire, citing poor health, and eventually Cixi had to let him go. (He died in 1873.) After Hsü’s retirement,
Cixi appointed an American missionary, W. A. P. Martin, to head Tongwen College, at the recommendation of Robert Hart. As a foreigner, Martin was spared peer-group ostracism. But for Cixi, to put a Westerner at the helm of a Chinese educational institution was ground-breaking and extremely bold. The American was chosen because he had introduced Western legal concepts to China through his translation of Henry Wheaton’s
Elements of International Law
, which was published with a subvention of 500 taels of silver from the Foreign Office, authorised by Cixi. He stayed in this post for decades, and trained many diplomats and other major figures. This Western-style college became a model for a new educational system in the empire.

To open people’s eyes to the outside world, Cixi began to send travellers overseas. In spring 1866, when Hart was going on home leave, Prince Gong selected several students from Tongwen College to travel with him and tour Europe. A sixty-three-year-old Manchu named Binchun was assigned to lead the small group of young men. Sporting a scholarly goatee, he became, as he proudly wrote of himself, ‘the first person to be sent to the West from China’.

Binchun was a clerk in the Customs office. For such a path-blazing mission, his rank was incredibly low, and his age far too advanced. The problem was that all who had been approached (whose rank could be no higher than Hart’s, in order to be in his entourage) declined to accept the job. Binchun was the only man who volunteered. Many alarmists warned him that going to a foreign land would be like offering himself as prey ‘to tigers and wolves in human form’, and that he could be kept a hostage or possibly chopped into pieces. But Binchun had a strong sense of curiosity and was remarkably free of prejudice. He had learned enough about the outside world from his Western friends, one of whom was W. A. P. Martin, to know that the scary tales were baseless. In a poem he described how books from his foreign friends had broadened his horizon, so that he was no longer like the infamous frog that sat at the bottom of a well declaring that the sky was as big as the patch it could see.

Binchun travelled to eleven countries, visiting cities and palaces, museums and operas, factories and shipyards, hospitals and zoos, and met people from monarchs to the average man and woman.
Queen Victoria noted down her audience with him in her diary on 6 June 1866: ‘Received the Chinese Envoys, who are here without credentials. The head man is a Mandarin of 1st Class. They looked just like the wooden and painted figures one sees.’ Binchun, whose status had been vastly inflated for this meeting, wrote in his own diary that Queen Victoria asked him what he thought of Britain and that he replied, ‘The buildings and appliances are ingeniously constructed and made, and better than those in China. As for the way state affairs are run, there are very many advantages here.’ To which Queen Victoria said she hoped that his tour would enhance the amicable relations between the two countries.

At a ball given by the Prince of Wales, Binchun was dazzled by the dancing, which, being non-existent in China, he described in some detail with obvious yearning. When the Prince of Wales asked for his impression of London, he said frankly that as the very first Chinese envoy abroad, he had the good fortune to be the first to know there was such splendour across the ocean.

He marvelled at the illuminated cities at night, and was amazed by the trains, which he rode on forty-two times. ‘The sensation is like flying through the air,’ he wrote, and he brought back home a working model of a train. He registered that machines could improve people’s lives. In Holland, the use of water pumps to create fertile fields made him reflect: ‘if these are used on peasants’ land in China, we don’t have to worry about drought or water-logging any more’. He liked European political systems and recorded with admiration his visit to the Houses of Parliament in London. ‘I went to the great chamber of the parliament, which has a high vault and is grand and awe-inspiring. There, 600 people who have been elected from all parts of the country gather to discuss public affairs. (Different views are freely debated, and only when a consensus is reached will a decision be taken and implemented. Neither the monarch nor the prime minister can impose his will on decisions.)’

This inquisitive man was bowled over by everything he saw – even the fireworks, which had been invented in his own country. But while in China they remained firecrackers on the ground, here they were fired into the sky and produced ravishing explosions. Even his reservations were prefaced by praise: ‘Westerners love being clean, and their bathrooms and toilets are immaculately washed. The only thing is that they throw newspapers and magazines into the faeces after they read them, and sometimes they use these to wipe the dirt. They don’t seem to respect and treasure things that have writings on them.’ Respecting the written word was a Confucian teaching.

Not least was
Binchun smitten by European women and the fact that they could mingle with men, and dance with men, wearing gorgeous clothes. This kind of male–female relationship seemed to appeal to him. The way Western men treated their women particularly impressed him. On board a steamer, he noticed that ‘the women walked arm-in-arm with men upon the deck, or rested on rattan couches while their husbands waited upon them like servants’ – which was quite the opposite of how things were done in China, but which showed a kind of domestic intimacy that was attractive to him. He made a point of saying that in Europe women could be crowned monarchs just like men, one great example being Queen Victoria. About the queen, Binchun wrote admiringly: ‘She was 18 when she succeeded to the throne, and everybody in her country sings in praise of her wisdom.’

Binchun’s diaries, with their rhapsodic superlatives about the West, were delivered to Prince Gong upon his return to China, and the prince had them copied and presented to Cixi. This was the first eye-witness account that Cixi read of the outside world by one of her own officials, and it was bound to affect her deeply. In particular, the treatment of women in the West could not fail to attract her. While Western women could be monarchs in their own right, Cixi had to rule from behind her son’s throne. She could not see her officials without a screen, and even with the screen she was still unable to receive foreign envoys, who had been requesting an audience to present their credentials. When she sought opinions from the grandees on this matter, their response had been cast-iron and uniform: the audience could not be granted while the emperor was a child; the envoys would have to wait until he formally assumed power. That
she
might receive the envoys was out of the question, so unthinkable that most officials did not address that possibility. It was impossible for Cixi not to be favourably disposed towards Western ways.

So her response after reading
Binchun’s diary was to promote him to a post in the Foreign Office and make him ‘Director of Western Studies’ at Tongwen College in early 1867, when Hsü, the admirer of Washington, was head of the college. The two men had been kindred spirits, and Hsü had given Binchun a copy of his world geography to take on his journey, during which Binchun had confirmed that Hsü was indeed right that China was not the centre of the world! Hsü wrote a preface to Binchun’s diary when it was published, with Cixi’s endorsement.

Just like Hsü, Binchun was attacked by the conservative grandees.
Grand Tutor Weng mentioned him in his diary with loathing and contempt, calling him a ‘volunteer to be a slave to the devils’, aghast that he should ‘refer to barbarian chieftains as monarchs’. It is unclear whether the pain Binchun endured for his broad-mindedness played any role in the deterioration of his health, which led to his death in 1871.

Sending ambassadors to Western countries had always been Cixi’s intention. But no suitable men could be found to fill the posts, as no official spoke a foreign language or knew anything about foreign lands. In 1867, Anson Burlingame, US minister to Beijing, was leaving his post for home, and Prince Gong suggested that Burlingame be appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to Europe and America.
In his recommendation, Prince Gong told Cixi that Burlingame was a ‘fair and conciliatory’ man, who had ‘the interests of China at heart’, and that he was ‘always willing to help China solve its problems’. He could be trusted, just like the Briton, Robert Hart, with whom ‘we have no barriers of communication’. America, the prince added, was also ‘the most peaceful and unaggressive’ country among the powers as far as China was concerned. Showing considerable imagination, Cixi approved the suggestion immediately and made Burlingame China’s first ambassador to the West, providing him with official credentials and seals. Burlingame’s brief was to present the new China to the world and explain its new foreign policy, to ‘argue against and stop anything that is damaging to China’s interests, and agree to anything that is beneficial’. He would have two young Chinese deputies, Zhigang and Sun Jiagu, and they should be consulted on all issues. Important decisions must be referred back to Beijing. In order that Britain and France would not feel put out, one diplomat from each country was invited to be a secretary to the mission.