Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (35 page)

The greater the joys the Summer Palace gave her, the more heartache Cixi felt. If that vast sum had not been given to Japan by those gutless men, how much she could have done to
restore the Old Summer Palace! How much more beauty and splendour she could have created! And how many more modernisation projects could have been realised! As she restrained herself from berating the men, she was consumed by fury. One day, an irrepressible desire to lash out seems to have taken hold of her and she told the Ministry of Revenue, headed by Grand Tutor Weng, that she planned to start restoring the Old Summer Palace, and that she wished them to pass over to her all the tax collected from domestically grown opium. Large tracts of land had been used to grow this drug since its legalisation in 1860, and the revenue derived from it was sizeable.

The demand was insane, not only because it came at a time when the empire was crushed by colossal debts, but also because she was asking for the construction of a pleasure palace to be put on the state budget. She had made no such demand when she built her Summer Palace. In fact she had given a specific public assurance that it would not be funded by the state. Any public money she had used had been effectively stolen. Now, it was as if she were taunting the grandees: ‘You had the money to give to the Japanese; I might as well have some for my use. It is you who have bankrupted the country and you have no right to deny me!’ And, indeed, the grandees had forfeited the moral right to oppose her demand. Grand Tutor Weng sheepishly set out to explore ways to fulfil her wishes.

It took the Grand Tutor a year to arrive at a solution, such was his reluctance. In early summer 1897, he reported that he had consulted Robert Hart, and Hart reckoned that the output of domestically produced opium was substantially under-reported, and that taxation on the opium could be as much as twenty million taels per annum – considerably more than the state was receiving. Weng proposed to collect
opium tax on the basis of Hart’s estimated output, and hand over 30 per cent to Cixi ‘for the building of royal palaces’. This would give her six million taels annually – an incredible sum. Cixi embraced the report with alacrity.

Opposition was immediately voiced: not by any grandee, but by
Li Bingheng, the governor of Shandong, the coastal province southeast of Beijing. He argued that the new estimate of opium output was far too high, and that in the case of Shandong, taxation on that basis would be ten times what it currently was. ‘Even exploitation to the limit may not be enough,’ he wrote. As it was, in order to produce funds to help pay foreign debts, people in the provinces were already carrying an unbearable burden. Anything extra would be impossible, and could drive the people to rebellion. He urged the court to reject the report from the Ministry of Revenue, to ‘abandon the desire to seek pleasure’ and ‘not to ruin our people’.

When she saw the argument, Cixi knew at once that she must forgo her dream. As she withdrew her request, the emperor referred the governor’s petition to the Ministry of Revenue for reconsideration, and the ministry readily revoked what it called ‘
the scheme of the Inspector General’. No one in the government wanted his name to be associated with the scheme, and Robert Hart was thus made a convenient ‘scapegoat’. Governor Bingheng, the plan’s outspoken opponent, was promoted to Viceroy. The ruins of the Old Summer Palace remained ruins.

Cixi’s pleasure-seeking period was in any case brief. Her nightmare scenario, articulated so eloquently by Viceroy Zhang in opposing the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, materialised in late 1897. European powers, contemptuous and aggressive now towards China, began clamouring to grab a piece of the empire. Germany demanded Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong province, with its port
Qingdao, as a naval station, claiming that it deserved this reward for helping force Japan to withdraw from the Liaodong Peninsula. As Beijing repeatedly rebuffed the demand, Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to use ‘a little force’. German warships cruised up and down the coast, seeking what the Kaiser called ‘a desired opportunity and pretext’, which was soon found. On 1 November, two German missionaries were murdered in a village in Shandong. As Governor Bingheng acted at once to hunt down the criminals, the Kaiser was rejoicing: ‘So the Chinese have at last given us the grounds and the “incident” which [the Germans] so long desired.’ A German fleet, already prepared for action, arrived at Qingdao and gave the Chinese garrison forty-eight hours to vacate the port.

As soon as he received the ultimatum, Emperor Guangxu, fearing an invasion, acted like a scared rabbit and fired off a telegram ‘absolutely forbidding’ Governor Bingheng to resist by force, which the outraged governor had proposed to do. In a further telegram, the emperor declared: ‘No matter how thuggishly the enemy behaves, the court will absolutely not resort to war.’ According to Grand Tutor Weng, ‘His Majesty forcefully insisted on two words:
“No fighting [
bu-zhan
].”’ Only
after these exchanges was Cixi informed, when the reports and edicts were carried in person by Prince Gong to the Summer Palace. On his return to the Forbidden City the prince, much relieved, told the Grand Council that she had ‘accepted them’. The German demands were met more or less in full, with Prince Gong counselling ‘yes to all’, in order to get the German soldiers who had occupied the port out of the country. The Germans had made their demands in brutally blunt language: ‘If you don’t concede, we will start a war.’ One of the demands concerned Governor Bingheng: he must ‘be cashiered and dismissed from the public service’. The governor, who had been promoted after speaking out against Cixi’s plan to rebuild the Old Summer Palace, was now forced out of office by the Germans. This personal experience turned him into a dedicated West-hater, and he would soon become a wholehearted promoter of the xenophobic Boxers. When the Boxer movement led to an invasion by Western armies, he volunteered to lead an armed force to fight them, and committed suicide when defeated.

Germany acquired the strategic port of Qingdao
^fn2
and its bay ‘by way of lease, provisionally for ninety-nine years’. The convention was signed in Beijing on 6 March 1898 by Earl Li and Grand Tutor Weng. The earl was by now a professional scapegoat, trotted out to sign anything that would give the signatory a bad name. The Grand Tutor had been appointed to the Foreign Office at the insistence of Prince Gong, who wanted the man full of verbal bravado to have his share of blame for signing treaties that amounted to ‘selling out the country’. The Grand Tutor noted that when the German representative requested the signature of Prince Gong, the prince merely pointed at the tutor. He felt bitterly ashamed for his part in giving away Qingdao to the ‘
stinking beasts’, torturing himself with the thought that he would now ‘go down in history as a criminal’.

Although Cixi had played no part in recent events, but had simply accepted a fait accompli, her behaviour was remarkably consoling. Weng gratefully recorded that when the Grand Council upbraided themselves for doing a poor job,
‘the Empress Dowager comforted us with kind words, and said that she understood completely our difficulties’. She only expressed grief at the fact that China was reduced to such a sorry state.

Things were tumbling from bad to worse. After the Germans came the Russians. Within a week of the German dash for Qingdao, Russian warships arrived at Port Arthur, on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula. Russia had been one of the powers that had forced Japan out of the peninsula – only to demand the port for itself now. ‘If Germany occupies Qingdao, Russia must have Port Arthur,’ said the Russians. Count Witte, Russia’s negotiator of the secret deal with China the year before, regarded his country’s conduct as ‘
the height of treachery and faithlessness’. Still he did what he could to achieve its object. When Beijing resisted the demand and Russia threatened war, Witte advised
bribing the Chinese negotiators, Earl Li and Sir Chang Yinhuan, a suave diplomat. (Sir Yinhuan had been China’s representative to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee the previous year, and was knighted on the occasion, thus becoming the first Chinese official to be given a British knighthood.) According to Russian documents, they were offered half a million taels each, and both accepted. The Russians had also wanted to bribe Grand Tutor Weng, but the traditionalist gentleman refused to attend any secret meetings with them.

The earl received his half-million in person and ‘expressed satisfaction’ the day after he signed away Port Arthur – albeit ‘only’ on a twenty-five-year lease – on 27 March 1898. Actually, whether he took the money or not would not have made the slightest difference. Beijing’s verbal resistance would have collapsed if Russia stepped up its threat of war, a war that Emperor Guangxu wanted to avoid at all costs. At court, the grandees could do nothing but weep together;
‘what a pathetic sight,’ lamented Weng. The earl also knew that he was the designated scapegoat.
In an audience a few days before the signing, the emperor was already putting all the blame on him as he berated the earl: ‘Now we have this trouble with Russia. What happened to that secret treaty of yours last year?’ There was nothing the earl could say or do, except prostrate himself, panting. Eventually, when the emperor motioned for him to leave, he was unable to rise and had to be pulled up, after which he struggled to steady himself to catch his breath, before staggering out. After such treatment, perhaps the earl felt he deserved the money. His general frame of mind can be gleaned from his words to Sir Yinhuan when the latter complained of being made a signatory and having his reputation destroyed:
‘It’s not just you and I who are about to be destroyed. We [the whole empire] are all going down together.’ For the moment Sir Yinhuan took just 10,600 taels, telling the Russians that he was already under a barrage of denunciations for bribe-taking. He had to wait, he said, for the storm to die down.

Cixi was not consulted about signing away Port Arthur. When Earl Li had asked the emperor: ‘Has Your Majesty talked to the Empress Dowager about this?’ he replied that he had not. He also told Grand Tutor Weng that he had not even mentioned the business to Cixi, because she was already ‘despondent with grief’. The Grand Tutor could ‘imagine how much bottled-up anger and bitterness’ the empress dowager was feeling. Clearly, Emperor Guangxu was afraid about being made to feel guilty again, even if only by Cixi’s looks rather than her words. In any case, there would have been no point in telling her: as far as he was concerned, there was no alternative to leasing out Port Arthur.

Emperor Guangxu tried to avoid any act that might trigger Cixi’s suppressed rage for his disastrous handling of the war with Japan, which had led to all these crises.
Censor Weijun, who had made false accusations against her in order to keep her away from decision-making in the war, and who had been sent to the frontier, had served his term and was about to return to Beijing. When this came to the emperor’s notice, Grand Tutor Weng recorded that he ‘thought hard for a long time, and gave orders that the man stay where he was for another couple of years’, adding, ‘His Majesty really has the man’s interests at heart.’ Emperor Guangxu was concerned that if the Censor were to come back, he might well become a lightning conductor for the empress dowager’s fury.

Following in the footsteps of Germany and Russia, Britain and France were keen not to miss out. Britain leased the former headquarters of the Northern Fleet, Weihaiwei, on the easternmost tip of the Shandong Peninsula – on the opposite coast from the Russian-leased Port Arthur. The British lease was to run as long as the Russian one: twenty-five years. The two countries were playing the Great Game, vying for power and influence in the East. Britain also added the Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territory to its Hong Kong colony – for a period of ninety-nine years. For the same length of time France leased Guangzhouwan, a small enclave on the south coast, as an outlier of French Indochina. Fujian province, across the sea from Taiwan, now a Japanese colony, became a Japanese sphere of influence. Thus by mid-1898 the strategic positions on the Chinese coast were more or less all in the hands of foreign powers, who could, if it suited them, do what they wished with China.

^fn1
The only publicly announced objective that had any substance was to persuade Western powers to accept a higher customs tariff. Although the powers generally agreed that this was fair, no action followed and the tariff remained unchanged for the time being.

^fn2
Hence the Qingdao beer of today, first made by German brewers.

PART FIVE
To the Front
of the Stage (1898–1901
)

19 The Reforms of 1898 (1898)

H. B. MORSE,
pre-eminent contemporary historian of China, . remarked, ‘
In the world’s history no country, with so vast an extent of territory and so large a population, under one government, as China – no country with a tithe of its area or population – had ever been subjected to such a series of humiliations, or to so many proofs of the low esteem in which it was held, as China had been subjected to in the six months from November, 1897, to May, 1898 . . .’ The need for reform was obvious. The empire might not otherwise survive for long. One petition after another was delivered to the Forbidden City. Even Emperor Guangxu was shaken out of his passivity and felt an
‘urgent need’ to do something.

Aged twenty-six, and having little knowledge of the real world, the emperor had no idea where to begin. Perhaps, like young people the world over, his instinct was to ditch restrictive forms of etiquette.
In May 1898, Prince Heinrich of Germany paid a visit to his court. The brother of the Kaiser, the prince had in fact come as the admiral of a fleet reinforcing the German assault on Qingdao; but by the time he arrived, ‘friendly relations’ had already been restored, thanks to Beijing succumbing easily. The German minister negotiating his reception by the emperor asked for Prince Heinrich to be permitted to sit during the audience. This was unprecedented, as no one except Cixi sat in his presence. But Emperor Guangxu was more than willing to accommodate him. He even went further and volunteered to stand up while the German prince bowed to him, and to shake the prince’s hand before inviting him to be seated. Grand Tutor Weng found this and some other violations of court protocol undignified and especially painful in light of the recent German outrage. He argued emotionally with His Majesty, but Emperor Guangxu did not share his tutor’s agony and lost his temper with the old man. In the end, Cixi told off her adopted son:
stop fighting over trifles when we have suffered such a disaster! She herself wanted to meet Prince Heinrich – this would be the first time she saw, and was seen by, a Western man – and she was unequivocal that the German prince
had to stand before her. She had her way, and Emperor Guangxu had his. He even went to see the prince himself and personally brought a medal to award him. When the prince announced that he was presenting Emperor Guangxu with a medal on behalf of his royal brother, Guangxu went to extraordinary lengths to have one made for the Kaiser in return.