Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (16 page)

Christianity was regarded as a teaching that ‘persuades people to be kind’:
quan-ren-wei-shan
. Even anti-Christian rioters were not averse to the doctrine. Their anger was directed at the missions themselves. Being foreign was always a cause for suspicion, but the major problem was that the missions had become a competing authority at the grass-roots level. There, local officials traditionally exercised absolute authority over all disputes and dispensed justice – or injustice – according to their judgement. The English traveller
Isabella Bird once sat outside the gate of a county chief’s office, the
yamen
, and observed its workings:

In the hour I spent at the entrance of the
yamen
of Ying-san Hsien 407 people came and went – men of all sorts, many in chairs, but most on foot, and nearly all well dressed. All carried papers, and some big
dossiers
. Within, secretaries, clerks, and writers crossed and recrossed the courtyard rapidly and ceaselessly, and
chai-jen
, or messengers, bearing papers, were continually despatched. Much business, and that of all kinds, was undoubtedly transacted.

The arrival of missionaries, backed by gunboats, introduced a new form of authority into society. In the numerous disputes, ranging from conflicting claims of ownership of water sources or properties to long-standing clan feuds, those who felt they did not or could not get justice from the local officials often sought protection from the church by becoming converts. In such a situation, a Chinese Christian might go to the priest, as Freeman-Mitford wrote:

swearing that the charge brought against him is a mere pretext, his profession of the Christian faith, in which he is protected by treaty, being the real offence. Full of righteous indignation and confidence in the truth of his convert, who, being a Christian, must necessarily be believed before his heathen accuser, the priest rushes off to the magistrate’s office to plead the cause of his protégé. The magistrate finds the man guilty and punishes him; the priest is stout in his defence; a diplomatic correspondence ensues, and on both sides the vials of wrath are poured out. How can a priest who interferes, and the mandarin who is interfered with, love one another?

Some angry grass-roots officials therefore encouraged hostilities against Christians. The resentment was also fuelled by genuine misunderstandings. A major one concerned missionary orphanages. In the Chinese tradition only abandoned newborn babies were looked after by charitable institutions, registered with local authorities. Orphans and foundlings were the responsibility of their relatives, whose treatment of the children was their own business. It was incomprehensible to the Chinese that strangers should be able to take in boys and girls without the consent of their families and relatives, who were not even allowed to visit them, let alone take them away. This practice roused the darkest suspicions. Rumours abounded that missionaries kidnapped children and used their eyes and hearts as medical ingredients, or in photography – a mysterious phenomenon at the time. Isabella Bird wrote:

Stories of child eating were current, and I am sure that the people believe that it is practised by the missionaries . . . I observed that when we foreigners entered one of the poorer streets many of the people picked up their infants and hurried with them into the houses; also there were children with red crosses on green patches stitched on the back of their clothing, this precaution being taken in the belief that foreigners respect the cross too much to do any harm to children wearing the emblem.

In June 1870, an anti-Christian riot broke out in Tianjin, seemingly triggered by just such a rumour that an orphanage run by the Sisterhood of Mercy, attached to the French Roman Catholic church, was kidnapping children and gouging out their eyes and hearts for photography and medicine. Several local Christians, accused of the actual kidnaps, were beaten up by crowds before being delivered to the magistrate’s office. Although they were all found to be innocent (one was in fact taking a child home from the church school), thousands of men still crowded the streets, and bricks were hurled at local Christians. The French consul in Tianjin, Henri Fontanier, rushed over with guards and fired a shot that wounded one of the magistrate’s servants. The roaring crowd beat the Frenchman to death and then killed between thirty and forty Catholic Chinese, as well as twenty-one foreigners. In three hours of lynching, plunder and arson, orphanages, churches and church schools were burned down. Victims were mutilated and disembowelled, and foreign nuns were stripped naked before they were killed.

Cixi’s policy regarding incidents involving Christians had always been to ‘
deal with them fairly’:
chi-ping-ban-li
. She did not believe the ‘child-eating’ rumour, which had surfaced time and again in other areas and had invariably been proved false. In no uncertain language she condemned the murders and the arson, and ordered Marquis Zeng, then Viceroy of Zhili, whose office was in Tianjin but who was at the time absent and ill, to go and intervene at once and ‘arrest and punish the ring-leaders of the riot, so justice is done’. A decree expressed sympathy for the Christian victims, refuted the rumours and told all provincial chiefs to protect missionaries. Prince Gong set extra sentries to patrol outside Westerners’ houses.

Marquis Zeng quickly established that the rumour in Tianjin was groundless. He found that this riot seemed to be different from the usual story of local officials going along with an anti-Christian mob – something more sinister seemed to lie behind it. During the investigation it emerged that the rumour had started with one Commander Chen Guorui, ‘Big Chief Chen’. Arrested rioters confessed that they had learned about the ‘eyes and hearts’ from the Big Chief, who, they believed, had the organs in his possession. Chen had arrived in Tianjin by boat several days before the riot, at which point the rumour began to spread. Blacksmiths started to sell arms, which was prohibited by Qing laws, and thugs and hooligans were in and out of the Big Chief’s dwelling, a temple-inn. On the day of the riot, crowds were assembled from street to street by men beating gongs. When the regional Imperial Commissioner, Chonghou, tried to prevent the mob from reaching the foreign settlement by having the pontoon bridge that led to it dismantled, Big Chief Chen ordered it reattached and, while the crowds were crossing, he called out to them from his boat: ‘Good lads, wipe out the foreigners, burn their houses!’ During the massacre, Chen, who had a foul temper and a habit of whipping underlings, was, by his own account, in the boat ‘seeking pleasure with young boys’.

Big Chief Chen turned out to be a protégé of Prince Chun. After Chen was exposed, the prince wrote repeatedly to Cixi, telling her that ‘I am extremely fond of this man and intend to use him for our cause against foreign barbarians.’ Chen must be well treated, as all men of ideals in the empire would be watching what happened to him and would see whether the throne had any serious desire to ‘avenge the country’. The mob must be ‘encouraged’, not punished, warned the prince. It was obvious that Chen had instigated the riot, and behind him stood Prince Chun.

It also became clear to Cixi that Prince Chun had intended the whole country to do as Tianjin did. During the massacre and its aftermath, unrest rippled throughout the empire, with the same eyes-and-hearts rumour circulating about the missionaries. In some places, posters were put up in the streets announcing that on a specified day all must come out to slaughter foreigners and destroy churches. Riots, though on a smaller scale, broke out in a number of cities. All this was exactly in line with the memorandum Prince Chun had sent Cixi a year earlier, and the conclusion was inescapable that the prince had taken it upon himself to put his scheme into action.

Realising Prince Chun’s role, knowing how powerful he was and how popular his ideas were, Cixi became cautious. She had to refuse the demand to bring Big Chief Chen to justice from the French minister, who had learned about Chen’s role from local Christians. To concede to the French demands would arouse unmanageable fury against her government and herself. There were already petitions calling for her to ride the wave of the Tianjin riot and ban Christian missions, destroy churches and drive out all Westerners. Grandees fumed against any punishment of the rioters, who were held up as heroes, admired by people like Grand Tutor Weng. Scenes of murder and arson were drawn on elegant fans and appraised by the literati as works of art. Marquis Zeng incurred much wrath for ‘taking the side of the foreign devils’ and was made to feel like an outcast. In front of the throne, in discussions about the riot, Prince
Chun held sway, and no one dared to suggest that Big Chief Chen be punished. Arrogantly the prince denounced Cixi’s government for having done nothing in the past ten years towards the goal of exacting retribution.

Cixi’s position had already been drastically weakened by the Little An episode. Now she felt she had to ingratiate herself with Prince Chun by pretending to go along with him. She told him and the other grandees that she, too, regarded foreign barbarians as sworn enemies, but her problem was that her son was not of age and all she could do was keep things ticking over until he reached his majority. Perhaps feeling that she must use all her powers to charm and arouse sympathy, Cixi had the yellow silk
screen removed and faced the grandees, quite possibly for the first time. Appearing appealingly helpless, she begged them to tell her and Empress Zhen what to do, as ‘we don’t have a clue’.

At this juncture, on 25 July 1870, Cixi’s mother died. During her illness she had consulted not only Chinese doctors, but also the American physician Mrs Headland, who had become a trusted friend of many aristocratic families. Cixi sent people to her mother’s house to pay last respects on her behalf, and prayed for her at a shrine that she had set up in her apartment. She arranged for her mother’s coffin to be placed in a Taoist temple for a hundred days, during which time an abbot led a daily service. But she herself did not leave the Forbidden City. Security was much harder to guarantee in the Beijing streets. Perhaps some ominous instinct warned her. Around this time the court astrologer, who watched the stars and made interpretations in the European-equipped Imperial Observatory set up by the Jesuits, predicted that a major official would be assassinated. This was an extraordinary prediction, as assassinations were virtually unheard-of in Qing history. A month later, Viceroy
Ma Xinyi was assassinated in Nanjing. He had exposed some rumour-mongers spreading false accusations against missionaries and had punished them. As a result he had prevented a Tianjin-like massacre in Nanjing.

Meanwhile, as the main victims of the Tianjin riot were French, including the consul, Henri Fontanier, French gunboats arrived and fired warning shots outside the Dagu Forts. War seemed to be inevitable. Cixi had to move troops and make preparations. Marquis Zeng, who had been sick, collapsed in a series of nervous fits and took to his bed. He wrote to Cixi: ‘China absolutely cannot afford a war.’ No one in the court, not even those who called most loudly for revenge, had any answer to the French show of force.

At this critical moment the man who gave Cixi most useful support was Earl Li, then the Viceroy of another region. (China was divided into nine viceroyalties.) He set off at once with his army to defend the coast, and produced practical advice on how to solve the crisis diplomatically. Convicted murderers must be executed, he counselled, but the number should be kept to a minimum in order not to inflame the population. The Foreign Office should explain to the legations who were pressing for the rioters to be punished that
‘excessive executions would only create more determined enemies and would not be in Westerners’ long-term interest’. Another argument he proposed for Beijing to say was that it understood that Westerners ‘cherish the intention of treating ordinary Chinese with generosity and hold sacred the
principle of not killing lightly’; it knew that missionaries preached kindness. ‘All these sentiments ran counter to large-scale executions.’ Appreciating his understanding of the West, Cixi made the earl the Viceroy of Zhili, which, being the region surrounding Beijing, was the most important viceroyalty. As the viceroyalty’s capital was Tianjin, a Treaty Port inhabited by Westerners, the earl could deal directly with them. He was also, of course, close to Beijing. The earl succeeded Marquis Zeng who, after a long illness, died in 1872.

With advice from Earl Li, Prince Gong hashed out a conciliatory solution designed to satisfy the French while not further enraging the xenophobic Chinese. Twenty ‘criminals’ were sentenced to death and twenty-five were banished to the frontiers. Many of the men had no proper name – an indicator of the wretched lives they led. They were merely called ‘Liu the Second Son’, ‘Deng the Old’, and so on; the man heading the execution list was identified as ‘Lame Man Feng’. On the day of the execution these men were feted like heroes by officials and bystanders alike, enjoying their only moment of glory. Two local officials who had been involved in the riots were punished, but only for dereliction (‘not forceful enough in suppressing the mob’) and were sentenced to exile to the northern frontiers. Their stay was short, as ‘the whole empire is watching their fate’, warned Marquis Zeng. As for Commander Chen, he was found to be ‘totally innocent’. The mildest language was used in court correspondence about him, in case he should be riled.

Compensation was paid to the victims and to the churches for repairs. Chonghou, the official who had tried to protect the Westerners by having the pontoon bridge dismantled, was dispatched to France to declare Beijing’s condemnation of the riot and to express its wish ‘for conciliation and friendship’. This trip was (and is still) misrepresented as Cixi sending Chonghou to grovel. Prince Chun furiously denounced it.

France accepted this solution. It was at war with Prussia in Europe and could not embark on another in the East. The Chinese empire narrowly escaped a war.