Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (3 page)

This was the back entrance to the Forbidden City. The front, south gate, was prohibited to women. In fact, the entire front – and main – section was for men only. Constructed for official ceremonies, it consisted of grand halls and vast, empty, stone-paved grounds, with a most noticeable absence: plants. There was virtually no vegetation. This was by design, as plants were thought to convey a feeling of softness, which would diminish the sense of awe: awe for the emperor, the Son of Heaven – ‘Heaven’ being the mystic and formless ultimate god that the Chinese worshipped. Women had to stay well within the rear part of the Forbidden City, the
hou-gong
, or harem, where no men were permitted except the emperor, and the eunuchs, who numbered many hundreds.

The potential entrants for the harem now stopped outside the back entrance for the night. Under the towering gate, the carts parked on an enormous paved ground as darkness descended, each lantern casting its own dim circle of light. The candidates would spend the night cooped up in their carts, waiting for the gate to open at dawn. They would then alight and, directed by eunuchs, walk to the hall, where they would be scrutinised by the emperor. Standing before His Majesty, several in a row, they were specifically exempted from performing the obligatory kowtow: going down on their knees and putting their foreheads on the ground. The emperor needed to see them clearly.

Apart from the family name, ‘character’ was a key criterion. The candidates must demonstrate dignity as well as courteousness, graciousness as well as gentleness and modesty – and they must know how to behave in the court. Looks were secondary, but needed to be pleasing. In order for them to show their pure selves, the candidates were not allowed to wear richly coloured clothes: the gowns they wore had to be simple, with just a little embroidery along the hems. Manchu dresses were usually highly decorative. They hung from the shoulders to the floor and were best carried with a straight back. Manchu women’s shoes, daintily embroidered, had the elevation at the centre of the soles, which could be as high as 14 centimetres and compelled them to stand erect. Over their hair, they wore a headdress that was shaped like a cross between a crown and a gate tower, decorated with jewels and flowers when the occasion demanded. On such occasions, a stiff neck was needed to support it.

Cixi was not a great beauty; but she had poise. Though she was short, at just over 1.5 metres, she looked much taller, thanks to the gown, the shoes and the headdress. She sat erect and moved gracefully, even when she was walking fast, on what some described as ‘stilts’. She was blessed with very fine skin and a pair of delicate hands, which, even in old age, remained as soft as a young girl’s. The American artist who later painted her, Katharine Carl, described her features thus: ‘
a high nose . . . an upper lip of great firmness, a rather large but beautiful mouth with mobile, red lips, which, when parted over her firm white teeth, gave her smile a rare charm; a strong chin, but not of exaggerated firmness and with no marks of obstinacy’. Her most arresting feature was her brilliant and expressive eyes, as many observed. In the coming years during audiences she would give officials the most coaxing look, when suddenly her eyes would flash with fearsome authority. The future – and first – President of China, General Yuan Shikai, who had served under her and had a reputation for being fierce, confessed that her gaze was the only thing that unnerved him: ‘
I don’t know why but the sweat just poured out. I just became so nervous.’

Now her eyes conveyed all the right messages, and Emperor Xianfeng took notice. He indicated his liking, and the court officials retained her identification card. Thus being shortlisted, she was subjected to further checks and stayed one night in the Forbidden City. Finally she was chosen, together with several other girls, out of hundreds of candidates. There can be no doubt that this was the future she wanted. Cixi was interested in politics and she had no knight in shining armour awaiting her return. Segregation between male and female precluded any romantic liaison, and the threat of severe punishment for any family who betrothed their daughter without her first having been rejected by the emperor meant that her family could not have made any marital arrangement for her. Although, once admitted to the court, Cixi would rarely see her family, it was officially stipulated that elderly parents of royal consorts could obtain special permission to visit their daughters, even staying for months in guest houses in a corner of the Forbidden City.

A date was set for Cixi to take up her new home: 26 June 1852. This followed the formal ending of the mandatory two-year mourning for the deceased Emperor Daoguang, signalled by the new emperor visiting his late father’s mausoleum west of Beijing. During that mourning period he had been required to abstain from sex. Upon entering the palace, Cixi was given the name
Lan
, which seems to have derived from her surname Nala, which was sometimes written as Nalan.
Lan
was also the name for magnolia or orchid. To name a girl after a flower was a common practice. Cixi did not like the name, and as soon as she was in a position to ask the emperor for a favour, she had it changed.

The harem she entered on that summer day was a world of walled-in courtyards and long, narrow alleyways. Unlike the all-male front section, this quarter had little sense of grandeur, but quite a lot of trees, flowers and rockeries. Here the empress occupied a palace, and each of the concubines had a mini-suite. The rooms were decorated with embroidered silk, carved furniture and bejewelled ornaments, but little display of individual personality was permitted. The harem, like the whole of the Forbidden City, was governed by rigid rules. Exactly what objects the girls could have in their rooms, the quantity and quality of the textiles for their clothes, and the types of food for each day’s consumption were meticulously determined in accordance with their rank.
For food, an empress had a daily allowance of 13 kilos of meat, one chicken, one duck, ten packages of teas, twelve jars of special water from the Jade Spring Hills, as well as specified amounts of different kinds of vegetables, cereals, spices and other ingredients.
^fn3
Her daily allowance also included the milk produced by no fewer than twenty-five cows. (Unlike most of the Han, the Manchus drank milk and ate dairy products.)

Cixi was not made the empress. She was a concubine, and a low-rank one at that. There were eight rungs on the ladder of imperial consorts, and Cixi was on the sixth, which put her in the lowest group (the sixth to the eighth). At her rank, Cixi had no private cow and was only entitled to 3 kilos of meat a day. She had four personal maids, while the empress had ten, in addition to numerous eunuchs.

The new empress, a girl named Zhen, meaning ‘chastity’, had entered the court with Cixi. She had also started as a concubine, but of a higher rank, the fifth. Within four months and before the end of the year, however, she had been promoted to the first rank: the empress. It was not on account of her beauty, for Empress Zhen was quite plain. She was also of poor physique, and the gossip that had dubbed her husband ‘the Limping Dragon’ named her ‘the Fragile Phoenix’ (phoenix being the symbol of the empress). But she possessed the quality most valued in an empress: she had the personality and skill to get on with the other consorts, and manage them, as well as the servants. An empress’s primary role was to be the manageress of the harem, and Empress Zhen fulfilled this role perfectly. Under her, the harem was remarkably free of the backbiting and malice that were endemic in such places.

There is no evidence that Cixi was favoured as a concubine by her husband.
In the Forbidden City the emperor’s sex life was diligently recorded. He picked his sexual partner for the night by marking her name on a bamboo tablet presented to him by the chief eunuch over dinner, which he mostly ate alone. He had two bedrooms, one with mirrors on all sides, and the other with silk screens. The beds were draped with silk curtains, inside which hung scent bags. The bed-curtains in both rooms were lowered when the emperor went into one of them. This was apparently for reasons of security, so that even intimate servants did not know for certain which bed he went to. Court rules forbade the emperor to sleep in his women’s beds. They came to his, and if legend were to be believed, the chosen one was carried over by a eunuch, naked and wrapped in silk. After sex, the woman went away; she was not permitted to stay overnight.

The Limping Dragon loved sex. There are more stories about his sexual activities than about any other Qing emperor. His consorts soon increased to nineteen, some of whom had been elevated from among the palace maids, who were also chosen from all over China, mostly from low-class Manchu families. In addition, women were brought to his bed from outside the court. Rumour had it that most of them were well-known Han prostitutes, who had bound feet – for which he apparently had a penchant. As the Forbidden City had strict rules, they were said to have been smuggled into the Old Summer Palace – the
Yuan-ming-yuan
, Gardens of Perfect Brightness – a gigantic landscaped complex some 8 kilometres to the west of Beijing. There, the rules were more relaxed, and the emperor could indulge in sexual ventures more freely.

For nearly two years, a sexually active – even frenetic – emperor showed no particular fondness for Cixi. He left her at Rank 6, while elevating those lower in status to her rank. Something put him off her. And it seems that the teenage Cixi, in her eagerness to please her husband, made the mistake of trying to share his worries.

Emperor Xianfeng faced monumental problems. As soon as he ascended the throne, in 1850, the biggest peasant rebellion in Chinese history, the Taiping, broke out in the southern coastal province of Guangxi. There, famine drove tens of thousands of peasants into a desperate last resort – armed rebellion – though they risked the most horrific consequences. For their leaders, the mandatory punishment was
ling-chi
, ‘death by a thousand cuts’, during which the condemned was sliced piece by piece in public. Even this was not enough to deter the peasants who faced the slow death of hunger, and the Taiping rebel army quickly grew into hundreds of thousands. By the end of March 1853, it had swept into the old southern capital, Nanjing, and set up an opposing state, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The day he received the report, Emperor
Xianfeng wept in front of his officials.

And this was not the emperor’s only woe. Most of the eighteen provinces inside the Great Wall were thrown into turmoil by numerous other uprisings. Countless villages, towns and cities were devastated. The empire was in such a mess that the emperor felt obliged to issue an
Imperial Apology, in 1852. This was the ultimate form of contrition from a monarch to the nation.

It was just after this that Cixi entered the court. Her husband’s problems could be felt even in the depths of the Forbidden City.
The empire’s state silver reserve fell to an all-time low of 290,000 taels. To help pay for his soldiers’ upkeep, Emperor Xianfeng opened the purse of the royal household, in which, eventually, only 41,000 taels remained, barely enough to cover daily expenditure. Treasures in the Forbidden City were melted down, including three giant bells made of pure gold. To his consorts he wrote stern
admonitions like these in his own hand:

No big ear clips or jade earrings.

No more than two jewelled flowers for the hair, and anyone who wears three will be punished.

No more than one
cun
[roughly 2.5 cm] for the elevation of the shoes, and anyone whose shoes are more than one and a half
cun
high will be punished.

The disasters of the empire also directly affected Cixi’s family, with whom she maintained contact. Prior to her entry into the court,
her father had been transferred to the east-central province near Shanghai, Anhui, to be the governor of a region that administered twenty-eight counties, with its seat in Wuhu, a prosperous city on the Yangtze. But this was close to the Taiping battleground, and a year later her father was forced to flee when the rebels attacked his city. Terrified of the emperor’s wrath – some officials who fled their office had been decapitated – and exhausted by the flight, Huizheng fell ill and died in summer 1853.

The death of her father, to whom she was very close, made Cixi feel she really must do something to help the empire – and her husband. It appears that she tried to offer him some suggestions as to how he might deal with the upheavals. Coming from a background in which her advice was sought and acted on by her own family, it seems that she assumed that Xianfeng too would appreciate her counsel. But it only annoyed him. The Qing court, following ancient Chinese tradition, strictly forbade royal consorts from having anything to do with state affairs. Emperor Xianfeng told Empress Zhen to do something about Cixi, using derogatory words to describe her advice – ‘
crafty and cunning’. Cixi had violated a basic rule and risked deadly punishment.
^fn4
A well-known story has it that Emperor Xianfeng later gave a private edict to Empress Zhen, saying that he worried Cixi would try to interfere in state affairs after he died and, if she ever did so, Empress Zhen was to show the edict to the princes and have her
‘exterminated’. As it happened, or so the story goes, Empress Zhen showed the lethal piece of paper to Cixi after the death of their husband, and then burned it.

Empress Zhen was a brave woman, and her contemporaries also praised her for her kindness. When the emperor was angry with a concubine, she always
mediated. Now, it seems, she put in a good word for Cixi. And her argument might well have been that Cixi was only trying – perhaps trying too hard – to express her love and concern for His Majesty. At this most vulnerable time for Cixi, Empress Zhen protected her. This helped lay the foundation of Cixi’s lifelong devotion to the empress. The feelings were mutual. Cixi had never been underhand in her dealings with Empress Zhen. Although she must have been dissatisfied with her position at the bottom of the consort ladder, while Zhen rose to be empress, Cixi never did anything to undermine Zhen. Even her worst enemies did not accuse her of such scheming. If there was any jealousy, which in Cixi’s position would seem to have been unavoidable, Cixi kept it well under control and never let it poison their relationship. Cixi was not petty – and she was wise. So, instead of being rivalrous, the two women became good friends, with the empress addressing Cixi intimately as
‘Younger Sister’. She was actually a year younger than Cixi, but this indicated her seniority as the empress.