Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (17 page)

Prince Chun was unrepentant about the crisis he had provoked and, sulking about the solution, claimed that he was suffering from ‘sickness of the heart’ and stayed in bed. There he wrote Cixi three long letters, trenchantly criticising her for not encouraging the Tianjin rioters and not getting people all over China to follow their example. She had let down her late husband, he implied. Cixi’s response was all platitudes and avoided engaging with his point. Prince Chun would not let her off the hook: he immediately fired off a fourth letter, reiterating his accusation and alleging that, thanks to her, ‘foreigners are running even more rampant’. He had noticed her evasiveness: ‘What the decree says is not at all what I was talking about. There is not a word about the business of foreign barbarians. This is scary and worrying in the extreme.’ Cixi was forced to address the issue, but she insisted that the expulsion of Westerners was ‘not on the agenda’ and China should still aim for ‘peaceful co-existence with foreign countries’. Thanks to the support of Prince Gong and key officials like Earl Li, she managed to ignore Prince Chun.

The prince’s bitterness continued to fester. At the beginning of the following year, 1871, he wrote again, going on and on complaining about the same thing: that Cixi was not seeking revenge against the West. Stopping short of denouncing her by name, he made Prince Gong and his colleagues the scapegoats and accused them of ‘fawning over foreign barbarians’. The two half-brothers were not on speaking terms, while Cixi had to humour Prince Chun.

Obviously the prince was quite capable of instigating another Tianjin-style riot, which could well drag the empire into a catastrophic war. Yet Cixi was powerless to censure him. His anti-foreign stance was so popular with officials and population alike that to battle with him over this issue would be suicidal for Cixi. Prince Chun was thus a ticking time-bomb for the empire. As leader of the xenophobic faction, he was the main obstacle to Cixi’s open-door policy; and, being the head of the Praetorian Guards, he was in a position to threaten her life. He had not done anything to her so far because, in addition to her being the emperor’s mother and his wife’s sister, it would not be long before her son assumed power and she returned to the harem. He would tolerate her for this short interim. But, for Cixi, the long-term safety of both the empire and herself meant that something had to be done about Prince Chun.

9 Life and Death of Emperor Tongzhi (1861–75)

AT THE AGE
of five Cixi’s son,
Tongzhi, was put on a rigid regime of formal schooling, which prepared Qing emperors and princes. He was moved out of his mother’s quarters and started living in a separate dwelling. Most days he was in his study by 5 a.m., when teaching would begin. When he was carried over in a sedan-chair, the Forbidden City was still asleep, with a few servants moving about and occasionally leaning against pillars, dozing. The hand-held lanterns of his entourage would often be the only flickers of light in the darkness shrouding the alleys of the palace.

His tutors, by common consent, were of the highest repute in scholarship and morality and were approved and appointed by the Two Dowager Empresses. The curriculum focused on Confucian classics, which Tongzhi recited without comprehension. As he grew older, he understood more and learned to write essays and poetry. The syllabus also included calligraphy, the Manchu and Mongolian languages, plus archery and riding. Emperor Tongzhi did not take to the sacred Confucian texts like a duck to water. His main teacher, Grand Tutor Weng, moaned with immense exasperation day after day in the privacy of his diary: the emperor failed to concentrate, to read the texts out loud with any fluency, to write the correct characters – and he was always bored. When writing poetry, he showed little flair with ethereal themes such as ‘Clear spring water flowing over a rock’, although he seemed slightly more comfortable with topics to do with his royal duties, like ‘On employing good people to govern the country well’. Cixi and Empress Zhen often enquired about his studies from the tutors. They were dismayed that the child seemed to ‘get into a panic as soon as he sees a book’, and they cried when this was still the case just before his assumption of power. They told his teachers simply to ensure a basic competence for his impending job, and Grand Tutor Weng reassured them that this would not be impossible, as the reports to His Majesty would not be as difficult as the classics, and his edicts would be drafted by other people. Then
Cixi tested her son’s ability in the context of an audience and discovered that he was unable to speak distinctly or coherently. Anxiously she urged the tutors to give him special coaching so that he was at least able to ask simple questions and give brief instructions.

One thing the emperor was interested in was opera, which his tutors regarded as an unworthy distraction: ‘pleasure only to the senses’. He ignored them, and often even took part in acting. On such occasions he would put on make-up and perform in front of his mother, who did nothing to discourage him. As he was not a good singer, Tongzhi would play the parts that involved martial arts. Once, in the role of a general, he bowed to a eunuch who played the king. The eunuch hurriedly went down on his knees, whereupon he yelled, ‘What are you doing? You can’t do this when you are acting the king!’ This made Cixi laugh. Emperor Tongzhi was also enthusiastic about Manchu dancing and would cheerfully dance for his mother.

He pursued other pleasures. In the emperor’s early teens, Grand Tutor Weng noticed him ‘giggling and fooling about’ with his study companions. Once he seemed unable to control his giggles over a piece of the driest text, which greatly puzzled the tutor. ‘How bizarre!’ he exclaimed in his diary. But these were virtually the only moments when His Majesty seemed to have any energy; otherwise he tended to look exhausted and unable to rouse himself from listlessness. Once he owned up that he had not slept for quite a few nights. But he forbade his teachers to ask him what the matter was, and warned them sternly that no one was to say a word about this to his mother or Empress Zhen. Driven to his wits’ end, Grand Tutor Weng even shouted at his royal pupil, but more often he confined his distress to his diary: ‘What are we going to do! What are we going to do!’

The teenage emperor had tasted the joys of sex. The man who introduced him to this novel fun seems to have been a good-looking young scholar at court,
Wang Qingqi, whom the emperor had taken a fancy to and installed in his study as his companion. Together they sneaked out of the Forbidden City to visit male as well as female prostitutes whenever they could.

While the emperor revelled in a wild boyhood, the court was preparing for his wedding. The process of selecting his consorts lasted nearly three years, interrupted by Little An’s execution and Cixi’s breakdown. By the beginning of 1872, before his sixteenth birthday, his consorts had been chosen – by the Two Dowager Empresses as well as by himself. The wedding was scheduled for later that year. Out of the hundreds of eligible young girls, a
Miss Alute was designated to be empress.

A Mongol, this teenage girl was universally regarded by the elite families as an exemplary lady and peerless candidate. Her father, Chongqi, the only Mongol ever to come top in an empire-wide Imperial Examination, was an absolute devotee of Confucian values, which he instilled in the young mind of his daughter. She obeyed her father unconditionally, and could be depended on to be equally submissive to her husband. Perfectly mannered and very beautiful, she was also fluent in the classical texts, which her father had taught her himself. Empress Zhen set her heart on Miss Alute. So did Emperor Tongzhi himself. He had no wish to sleep with her, and he reckoned that she was someone who would tolerate that without a murmur of complaint.

Cixi had reservations. Miss Alute’s maternal grandfather, Prince Zheng, had been one of the eight members of the Board of Regents formed by her late husband, and had been ordered to commit suicide after her coup, when she had sent him a long white silk scarf with which to hang himself. The man she had had beheaded, Sushun, who had hated her with a vengeance, was Miss Alute’s great-uncle. Miss Alute’s childhood had been marred by this family catastrophe, as her mother’s family house, an elegant mansion famous in Beijing, had been confiscated according to the penal code, and the male members of the family had been barred from office. Underneath Miss Alute’s impeccable conduct, her real feelings eluded Cixi. So she named another candidate, a Miss Fengxiu, saying that she liked the girl’s quick wit. But eventually Cixi yielded to her son’s pleading and accepted his choice: such was her love for him. She was willing to trust Miss Alute, and had faith that her father would not have put any unfit thoughts in her mind. After the matter was settled, Cixi ordered the confiscated mansion to be returned to Miss Alute’s maternal family and restored the title to the male descendants.

The wedding followed the precedent set by Emperor Kangxi 200 years earlier in 1665, the last time that a ruling monarch married a girl chosen to be his empress. (Empress Zhen was not married as the empress; she was promoted to the position after she entered the court.) Although the occasion was called the ‘Grand Wedding’,
da-hun
, there was no nationwide celebration. It was only the business of the court. In the Forbidden City brightly coloured silk billowed around enormous red characters reading ‘double happiness’:
xi
. A similar display of silk was sported in the bride’s mansion, particularly on top of the red pillars flanking the gate. From there to the Forbidden City,
a route of several kilometres was selected for the bride to take: the dusty, rutted streets were made even and sprinkled with yellow soil, as required for a royal procession.

Along this route, every morning for a week before the marriage, porters in red tops with white spots carried the bride’s trousseau to her new home: large cabinets as well as small jade dishes, practical hardwood washbasin stands as well as intricate pieces of art for connoisseurs. The smaller articles were displayed on yellow textile-covered tables, secured by stripes of yellow-and-red silk. To catch a glimpse of this exhibition of imperial house-furnishings, Beijing residents came out in droves at dawn, lining both sides of the route. This was their only involvement in the event. One morning, as the objects being carried were particularly precious, for security’s sake the procession started before daybreak in order to miss the sightseers. After waiting in vain, they dispersed reluctantly, grumbling. Also disappointed were those who hoped to watch the training of the bridal chair-bearers. As the bearers must carry the chair perfectly steadily, and relieve each other quickly and without a jolt, they practised by carrying a vase filled with water inside the chair. But for some reason the chair never came out at the announced time.

The imperial astrologer selected 16 October 1872 to be the wedding day. Some time before midnight, under a full moon, Miss Alute was collected from her home by a large procession. She was dressed in a splendid robe embroidered with the pattern of a dragon (the emperor) and a phoenix (the empress) intertwined. A piece of red brocade of the same pattern was draped over her head. The road was empty. The few dogs that were running up and down, and the guards along the way, were the only ones permitted to gaze at this imperial pageant. The population had been told to stay away, and those who lived by the road were cautioned to stay indoors and not look out. At junctions where the royal route was joined by alleyways, blinds in bamboo frames had been erected to shut out any chance of a view.
Foreign legations were told two days earlier that their nationals must keep within their own houses at this time – a request that generated outbursts of anger and frustration. What was the point of a grand state occasion, they asked, if nobody was going to see it?

Among the few people who did see it surreptitiously was an English painter, William Simpson, who sneaked into a shop on the route with a missionary friend. The shop was full of customers smoking opium, who took no notice of the foreigners, or of the royal to-do. The windows were made of thin paper, pasted over wooden frames, and could easily be poked through. Passing in front of the hole were princes and noblemen on white horses, preceded and followed by hoisted banners, canopies and giant fans. They appeared somewhat ghost-like in the dark, deserted Beijing streets, illuminated only by dimly lit paper lanterns, some hung and others hand-held. Even the moon was veiled by clouds, as if obeying the imperial directive. Silence accompanied the slow-moving column.

It was not a cheerful event, and could even be described as desolate. But this was thought to be what solemnity was all about. In this atmosphere, at a few minutes after midnight, Miss Alute, in her heavily gilded sedan-chair borne by sixteen men, crossed the threshold of the southernmost, front gate of the Forbidden City. She was the first woman in 200 years to go through this gate and enter the front section of the Forbidden City, which was off-limits to all women except the empress bride on her wedding day. Neither Cixi nor Empress Zhen had ever been there.

With this rarest honour, Miss Alute sat demurely, holding two apples. Inside the Forbidden City, when she got out of the sedan-chair, a prince’s wife took the apples from her and placed them under two bejewelled saddles outside the door to her wedding chamber. The word for ‘apple’ contains the sound ‘
ping
’, and the word for ‘saddle’ the sound ‘
an
’. Two apples and two saddles, ‘
ping-ping an-an
’, alluded to the ever-present good wish: ‘For safety and peace’. This seems almost too mundane to befit a new empress. And yet Miss Alute would step over those symbol-laden objects and enter her chamber, to find neither.

On that wedding night, when all the rituals were over, encased in a room decorated overwhelmingly in red, facing the giant character that means ‘double happiness’, the bridegroom made the bride recite Tang-dynasty poetry instead of making love. After this obligatory night together, he spent his nights in a separate palace a long way from her and his harem. Miss Alute felt it was her duty to go and offer herself to her husband, but he waved her away, and she – shy and having learned not to contradict him – dutifully left.