Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (44 page)

Although she believed in omens, there was no retreat now for Cixi. On that very night, a joint force of eight countries – Russia, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, America, Italy and Austria-Hungary – attacked the Dagu Forts that guarded the sea entry to Tianjin and Beijing. After a fierce six-hour battle, the Forts fell. To Cixi, the fall of the Forts was associated with an enduring heartache: four decades earlier they had been seized by another allied, Anglo-French army, which had led to her fleeing with her husband, who died a bitter death outside the Great Wall. The invaders had then burned down the Old Summer Palace, leaving a vast ruin – and a gaping hole in her heart. Ever since then, it had been her dream to restore even a small part of the Old Palace, for which she had stolen from the navy and disobeyed Heaven – and attracted denunciation. At the fall of the Forts this time, nothing could stop her from fighting it out.

War was anticipated on all sides. In Britain, on that day,
Queen Victoria wrote to Lord Salisbury: ‘Should be glad to hear your views on the state of affairs in China which seem to me most serious: also please say what you propose to do . . .’ From that day on,
‘China Telegrams’, in massive numbers, were typed out and presented to the queen, who sent out many messages, one of which read:
‘Feel anxious for personal safety of Sir C. MacDonald. Have you considered possibility of removal of foreign Ministers from Peking. If one of them were killed war would be inevitable.’

All the reformers who mattered to Cixi – Junglu, Earl Li, Viceroy Zhang, among others – were opposed to the war and to her policy. In the previous conflict with Japan, there had been numerous impassioned petitions urging fighting. But now they were missing. Many felt that the foreigners had reason to send in troops to protect their own people, who were not being properly protected by the Chinese government. ‘
We are in the wrong’,
li-qu
, Cixi was told.
Grass-roots officials wanted the mob suppressed, as they were harassed and terrorised by the Boxers, who demanded food and shelter and exacted revenge for past grievances. But Cixi had made up her mind. At another top-level meeting she raised her voice and declared to the assembled dignitaries:
‘Our choice is whether to put our country on a platter to hand over to the invaders, or to fight to the end. I cannot face our ancestors if we do not put up a fight. I would rather fight to the end . . . If the end comes, you gentlemen here are my witnesses and can testify that I have done my best.’ Her passionate words and unusual agitation made a great impact on all present: they banged their heads on the floor, vowing to follow her.

On 20 June, soldiers of the Muslim army shot dead the German minister, Baron von Ketteler, when he stepped out of the barricades to go to the Foreign Office.
^fn3
Her bridge was now burnt – for Cixi knew, as
Queen Victoria had spelt out, if one of the ministers ‘were killed war would be inevitable’. The next day, 21 June, Cixi declared war on all eight invading countries.

^fn1
This was at a time when Italy was asserting itself as a major sea power, and emphatically claimed that it had invented the compass, which had by common consent been invented in China. A statue of the supposed inventor, Flavio Gioja (who did not exist, as Italian historians have concluded), was erected in Amalfi in 1900.

^fn2
The federal law was signed in 1882, thus revising the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. This law was repealed in 1943. On 18 June 2012, the US Congress formally passed a statement of ‘regret’ for this discriminatory law against the Chinese.

^fn3
According to his biographer, Andrew Roberts, Lord Salisbury told Betty Balfour that von Ketteler’s death was ‘poetical justice’. Salisbury said, ‘It’s all the fault of Germany. They began all this trouble.’

23 Fighting to a Bitter End (1900)

AFTER CIXI DECLARED
war, the Boxers were given legal status and organised under the command of princes who were sympathetic to them. In the capital they numbered a quarter of a million, with Prince Duan in overall charge. They were formed into some
1,400 leagues, each with roughly 200 members. More than 100,000 of them defended the road to Beijing alongside the regular army, against an international force of more than 20,000. The regular army had received Western training and was armed with modern weapons. In their Western-style uniforms, its officers and men had been called ‘Secondary Hairies’ by the Boxers, who were now their comrades. Sarah Conger, wife of the American minister, recorded:
‘The Boxers and soldiers combined made a strong army . . . The foreigners who have known the Chinese longest and best say that they have never before seen anything like it in their character . . . The battles at Tientsin [Tianjin] were terrific. The Chinese showed courage beyond the imagination of those who know them best. They were determined, fought bravely, and put the foreign armies to a bitter test.’ The Rev. Arthur H. Smith wrote:
‘There is no doubt that the Chinese armies . . . fought with a desperation for which nothing in the war with Japan afforded any parallel.’

Cixi announced her gratitude to the Boxers and
rewarded them with silver from the court. She
opened warehouses where old weapons from the now-updated regular army were stored, and had them distributed among the Boxers. Armed with these, which were rather primitive, and with their own even more primitive knives and spears, the Boxers threw themselves against modern technology with fanatical abandon. One of their adversaries wrote:
‘Slowly they came on, shouting, with their swords and pikes flashing in the sun, merely to be mowed down, whole ranks at a time by rifle and machine-gun fire.’ Boxer leaders who believed in their own supernatural prowess died first. One British soldier described a scene: ‘
a well-dressed Boxer leader came impressively down alone towards the bridge of boats in front of the Russian infantry . . . He waved his sash and went through his ceremony, but of course he was a corpse in a few seconds.’

Seeing their leaders’ magic overcome, some Boxers reckoned that foreigners must have mysterious powers and sought to block them by fouling, which was an ancient strategy. They
laid out night-stools and binding cloth from women’s feet – the two items that were considered the smelliest – on the battlements of the city walls, hoping vainly that the foreigners would be repelled by their stink. Cixi too was reduced to wild irrationality. She dictated two edicts
asking a Buddhist monk who was said to be able to perform miracles through prayer to go to the front and help ward off gunboats. As Allied soldiers continued to pour in, it became plain that no magic, reek or divine intervention would work against them.

As they became crucial to the war effort, the Boxers ran wild. They did what they did most naturally: looting and pillaging cities and towns that were at their mercy. The losses in just one affluent street in Tianjin were estimated at tens of millions of taels, before the city fell to the invaders. Mobs ransacked people’s homes, including those of some grandees. In Beijing, the
mansion of the Imperial Princess, daughter of the late Prince Gong whom Cixi had adopted as her own, was plundered.

Not even the Forbidden City was immune. There, middle-aged princes took to wearing Boxer clothes – a short top and a red sash around the waist – as they strode around aggressively, ‘jumping and yelling, behaving totally differently from their normal selves, as though they were crazy or drunk’, Cixi later reminisced. One of them ‘even quarrelled with me! Nearly overturning the imperial altar!’ Even members of the Praetorian Guards (of which one branch was commanded by Prince Duan) joined the Boxers. Word went round that the Boxers intended to enter the Forbidden City and kill pro-Western grandees like Prince Ching and Junglu. One day,
a request was put to Cixi that the servants in the Forbidden City should be sent out to be examined, to see if they were ‘Secondary Hairies’. Cixi asked how this might be done, and received the answer that, after reciting certain incantations, the Boxers were able to see a cross on the forehead of anyone who had been baptised. Terrified eunuchs and maids begged Cixi to shield them, but she was forced to tell them to go and be examined – for fear that the Boxers might use this as an excuse to raid the Forbidden City. In the event, the Boxers did not make any accusations: they seemed sufficiently gratified by the fact that the empress dowager herself had had to oblige them. Cixi felt like a ‘paper tiger’. As she explained to the Viceroys who opposed her handling of events, ‘
Suddenly in a matter of months there were more than a hundred thousand Boxers in the capital, from ordinary people to soldiers to princes and grandees . . . The capital would be plunged into unthinkable peril if I tried to use the army to crush them. I have to go along with them, to be treated as their leader, and manage to control them and salvage the situation somehow . . .’

Indeed, Cixi’s control was less forceful than usual. Right under her nose, tens of thousands of Boxers, together with the Muslim army, were laying siege to the Legation Quarter. When the war started, they began to attack the Quarter. Cixi knew that it would be suicidal to harm more diplomats, and handed out no arms to the Boxers there. The fiercely anti-Western Muslim army was placed in just one section of the Quarter, and the rest faced the pro-Western Junglu. Junglu’s assaults were full of sound and fury, but signified very little.
Sarah Conger, within the legations, wrote about the attacks: ‘The blowing of their horns, their yells, and the firing of their guns, are the most frightful noises I ever heard.’ And yet, ‘The Chinese often fire high, for which we give thanks.’

The booming cannon send their shells right at us; they sometimes burst over our heads, sometimes they go beyond, but not a fragment touches us. When the enemy, after many attempts, gets the range to harm us, and a few shells would injure our buildings, then the hands of these Chinese seem to be stayed. Not once have they continued firing to the entire destruction of one of these buildings or walls. How could this be true if God did not protect us? His loving arm is round about us.

The truth was that Cixi had specifically given the
cannon to Junglu, who then had the targeting gauge raised by many centimetres. Later Cixi would say: ‘
If I had really wanted to destroy the legations, they could not possibly still exist.’
^fn1

After the siege had ground on for a month, Cixi became worried that those inside might die from a lack of fresh food and
told Junglu to have fruit and vegetables delivered to the legations.

The siege lasted fifty-five days, from 20 June to 14 August, when the Allied force captured Beijing. Of the Westerners in the Legation Quarter, sixty-eight were killed and 159 wounded; the number of Chinese Christians killed or wounded was not counted. The Boxers, who charged with practically bare hands, suffered
thousands of casualties – far more than the foreign enemies who were seemingly in their clutches.

Also under siege was the Catholic cathedral in Beijing, the Beitang, where nearly 4,000 foreign and Chinese Christians had taken refuge. Here Cixi
ordered Prince Duan, the leader of the siege, ‘not to use guns or other firearms’. Thus, when the Boxers launched attacks with their primitive weapons, against a solid edifice defended with superior arms, they fell in droves. As stocks of food in the cathedral dwindled, raiding parties would sporadically race out to seek new provisions. When Cixi learned of this, she at first gave a verbal order for ‘the troops to put them down’; but she changed her mind and her edict read: ‘If Christian converts fly out, do not harm them, but send troops to protect them.’ As it happened, many Christians chose death by starvation inside the cathedral, rather than fall into the hands of the Boxers. This accounted for the majority of the 400 deaths among the besieged.

Cixi’s ambivalent policies towards the Boxers sent many of them to certain death, while ensuring the survival of most foreigners trapped in China, often among murderous crowds.

In some other parts of China there were cases of missionaries and converts being murdered by officials. The worst atrocities took place in Shanxi province. Its governor, Yuxian, had been moved there from Shandong province because Cixi regarded him as too pro-Boxer – and there were no Boxers in Shanxi. Relations between the missions, the Shanxi authorities and the population at large had been amicable. But Yuxian brought his hatred for the West with him. Using mainly soldiers, he
massacred 178 missionaries and thousands of Chinese converts, often in gruesome ways. One priest,
Mgr Hamer, was taken ‘for three days through the streets of To To, everybody being at liberty to torture him. All his hair was pulled out, and his fingers, nose, and ears cut off. After this they wrapped him in stuff soaked in oil, and, hanging him head downwards, set fire to his feet. His heart was eaten by two Beggars.’

Belatedly,
Cixi put a stop to Yuxian’s atrocities. She also
vetoed a nationwide massacre, proposed by some grandees, including the father of her late daughter-in-law, Chongqi – the man who had almost certainly told his daughter to starve herself to death after her husband died, and who himself would soon commit suicide (as would the rest of his family) when Beijing fell into foreign hands. He and a few others petitioned Cixi for ‘a decree to tell the whole country that every ordinary person is permitted to slay foreigners wherever he set eyes on them’. In this way, they advised:

people will feel they can avenge their grievances which they have long bottled-up . . . For decades they have been poisoned by foreigners [with opium], bullied by Christian converts and repressed by officials, big and small, who made biased judgements against them – and they had nowhere to turn . . . Once the decree is known, people will feel so overjoyed and grateful to the throne that they will all rise up in arms to fight the invaders . . . The land of China will finally be purged of aliens and our people will be free from grief . . .