Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (49 page)

Cixi knew remorse and articulated it many times. The Boxer episode became a watershed event, and life would be referred to in the court as
‘before’ or ‘after’ it. It was with contrition that she vowed to change. On
29 January 1901, still in Xian, she issued a decree that signalled the start of a new phase of her reign. Its essence was ‘learning from the West’: ‘The Empress Dowager enjoins her people that only by adopting what is superior about the foreign countries can we rectify what is wanting in China.’ Similar sentiments had been expressed in the past, but on the agenda for change this time were ‘all the fundamentals that have made the foreign countries rich and strong’, encompassing ‘dynastic rule, national traditions, governing methods, people’s livelihood, educational systems, the military, and financial affairs’. She announced in yet another decree:
‘Making these changes is a matter of life or death for our country, and it gives our people the chance to live a better life. The emperor and I are determined to make the changes for the sake of our dynasty and for the sake of our people. There is no other way.’

Her initiatives enjoyed widespread support – in spite of the Boxer mayhem, or because of it. Foreign occupation of Beijing and Tianjin brought home to the people in the north, as Hong Kong and Shanghai had done to the south, what Western-style governance could achieve, and how it could improve their lives. The impact was even more striking here, as the two southern cities had been fishing villages and swampland when the Europeans took over in the early 1840s after the Opium War. Beijing and Tianjin, on the other hand, were large cities with millions of inhabitants and concentrations of mandarins, all of whom now experienced life under a clean and efficient system. Tianjin in particular benefited, as the occupation lasted two years, and a
provisional government had been set up by the Allies. The city was being transformed from medieval to modern. By the end of its administration, the provisional government had collected from taxation
2,758,651 taels and spent 2,578,627, with every penny of the expenditure counted for and the results on show: for the first time residents enjoyed running water, trams, street lamps and telephones. The city was effectively spring-cleaned and an infrastructure for sanitation was being put in place. Piles of garbage were disappearing from the streets. The novelty of public toilets was introduced. And public order was enforced by Western-style policing.
^fn5
The consensus emerged that the West was a desirable model. Viceroy Zhang, the pre-eminent reformist, remarked:

Unlike 30 years ago, people now admire the wealth of the West and lament the poverty of China; stare awestruck at the power of the Western armies and scorn the cowardice of the imperial troops; enjoy the fairness and ease of the Customs [under Robert Hart] and detest the fault-finding of China’s own tax collectors; praise the orderly governance of the Western-administered cities and resent the harassment of our officials, big and small.

The provincial Viceroys gave Cixi their full backing – as did the reformists who now staffed central government, the xenophobic grandees having been disgraced or marginalised. Although there were still West-haters and reactionaries, they were at least silenced and did not dare sabotage her course. W. A. P. Martin, the American missionary who lived in China for several decades, felt that ‘
the spirit of reform was abroad in the land, and that the heart of the people was with her’.

Western governments recognised Cixi as the indisputable leader, and began to view her as someone who ‘
ranks with Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England, with the Egyptian Queens Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, as one of the great women rulers in history.’ They resolved to cooperate with her. Buoyed up by this wide-ranging support, Cixi embarked on a course of such massive and profound change in the following years that it deserves to be described as the
‘real revolution of modern China’.

^fn1
The Imperial Library, housing numerous invaluable books, was situated next to the British Legation, and had been set on fire by the Boxers during the siege in a bid to burn down the British Legation. But rumour blamed the British for the fire, and a report to Cixi presented this as fact. As the report was published in the
Peking Gazette
, the British minister protested, pointing out that the Westerners under siege in the legation had in fact fought the fire and tried to save the books. The man who made the report apologised – to Cixi as well as publicly – for giving her misleading information.

^fn2
In the 1930s, a play was staged about her. The soon-to-be Mme Mao, Jiang Qing, wanted to play her, but the role went to another actress, Wang Ying. Mme Mao bore a grudge so deep and poisonous that it became one of the factors in her personal vendetta against the actress in the Cultural Revolution three decades later, ending with the death of the actress in prison.

^fn3
The claims by all countries, whether or not part of the Allied force, were as follows (in taels; one tael was calculated at three English shillings or 0.742 American dollars):

(H. B. Morse,
The International Relations of the Chinese Empire
, vol. 3, pp. 352–3)

^fn4
Hart also took over some of the internal customs run by often corrupt officials, who routinely kept some of the taxes they collected. As he described, ‘the former occupants had merely to pay nominal sums to the treasury and pocketed the rest. T’tsin, e.g., collected over
400,000
taels and of this only 90,000 went to the treasury . . .’

^fn5
Modernisation brought heartache as well. Perhaps the greatest for many was the dismantling of the stately walls that encircled the city ‘for military and hygiene purposes’. Tianjin was the first city to see its walls go, and to most people a city was not a city without those lofty corrugated walls – even though convenience and ease of moving around were also appreciated.

PART SIX
The Real Revolution of Modern China (1901–1908)

26 Return to Beijing (1901–2)

THE GREAT, SWEEPING
changes that China underwent in the first decade of the twentieth century began when Cixi was still in exile in Xian. There, in April 1901, she formed a Political Affairs Office to manage the whole programme under her. She left Xian for Beijing on 6 October, after the Boxer Protocol was signed and the occupying armies had withdrawn (though they were still in Tianjin). She did not feel safe with foreign troops in the capital and her anxiety was reciprocated by the Western community. There was ‘
some uneasiness’ in the legations when the date of her return was announced, wrote Robert Hart, and ‘the Legation guards are to be kept ready lest anything should happen . . . I don’t think the Court will be so foolish as to try a
coup
, but . . . if anything does happen we’ll be eaten up, and in that case this may be my last letter!’

At seven o’clock on the morning of the
departure from Xian, local officials gathered outside the gate of the palace where the court had been staying, to say their farewell. After the luggage carts, the mounted guards, the eunuchs and the princes and grandees on horseback had started on their way, there came a brief pause. A eunuch stepped forward and waved a giant whip, 10 metres long. It was made of hard-braided yellow silk soaked in wax, with a golden dragon carved on the handle, and he cracked it three times on the ground. This signalled the descent of the monarch and called for all to be still. Cixi and Emperor Guangxu emerged in yellow sedan-chairs, followed by a large retinue. This colossal column then meandered along Xian’s streets and exited by the city’s South Gate, before heading east and joining the road for Beijing. Actually, it could have gone straight out of the East Gate, but for geomantic reasons the throne had to start all journeys from the South.

Along the way, shops and houses were decorated with colourful silks and lanterns, and as the procession passed by, the residents were on their knees. According to tradition, no one should look at Their Majesties’ faces, so some prostrated themselves, while others lowered their heads and eyes and clasped their hands in front of them in a Buddhist gesture of homage. There was a sincere surge of gratitude. When Cixi arrived in Xian, the area was suffering from the aftermath of a disastrous harvest, and people were starving. With the supplies sent to her from other provinces, she was able to feed the population. Soon the weather turned fine, and this year’s harvest was excellent. The locals credited this to the royal sojourn, and crowds along the streets wept and cried, ‘
Long Live the Old Buddha! Long Live the Emperor!’ At the places where the crowds were densest, in a dramatic departure from tradition, Cixi ordered her sedan-chair curtains to be parted so that people could see her. She had learned from travellers to the West that European monarchs were seen in the streets. Eunuch chiefs handed out silver coins, and the elderly were given silver cards in the shape of the character for ‘longevity’. In the hope of receiving more silver, some locals followed Cixi for days.

The officials who turned out to bid the royals farewell had arrived with their own banners, which added yet more colour to the scene. Some, though, had not wanted to come, but had been informed that failure to turn up could result in their chance of promotion being blocked for two years. Similarly, along the royal route through several provinces, local officials were instructed to come out and greet the throne, in addition to providing food and refreshments, for which they were given generous allowances. However, on the very next stop after leaving Xian, the local chief failed on all counts, even though he had been given 27,000 taels. Apparently he had got himself the job by using his connection with the provincial governor, in order to lay his hands on the handsome royal allowance. But he was really incapable of organising a proper reception for such a huge party, with its complicated royal protocols, and so, instead, he went into hiding, burying his head in the sand. When Cixi learned this, in a villa without candles for the night, she ordered that he should be spared –
not even sacked. Her entourage told each other that the Old Buddha really had mellowed.

En route, Cixi visited sacred mountains and beauty spots, travelling along narrow tracks on valley bottoms under towering cliffs, making up for all the years when she had been yearning to travel, but had been unable to do so. A month into the journey, news came that Earl Li had died, on 7 November 1901, before his eightieth birthday – and a month after signing the Boxer Protocol. His death deprived Cixi of a first-rate diplomat, but made no difference to the unfolding of her revolution. The earl’s reputation as ‘the greatest moderniser of China’ is an overstatement.

The earl’s last letter to Cixi – written with intense feeling – soon arrived by cable. He said he felt immensely grateful that he had been the man ‘
appreciated and trusted the earliest and the deepest’ by her; he had been reading her decrees on the forthcoming reforms and, knowing that this would make China strong, felt he could now ‘die without regret’. On her part, Cixi issued a personal decree in addition to an official one, saying, ‘
Reading the letter by the late Earl, I was overcome with grief.’ The wake for the earl was under way in the capital, with numerous white banners, a large mourning hall shrouded in white, and mourners wearing white coarse sackcloth streaming in and out to the sound of wailing music. The earl’s coffin, a giant catafalque borne by scores of men, was then escorted by his family back to his birthplace more than 1,000 kilometres down south in Anhui province. Cixi ordered the officials along the route to facilitate the arrangements, and shrines and resting pavilions were erected all the way. Sarah Conger said that ‘
in magnitude and splendor’ the procession ‘surpassed all that I could extravagantly imagine’. Cixi made sure that the earl was appropriately honoured, and his family well looked after. Above all, she formally retracted all the censure to which he had been subjected by the throne.

She was then in Kaifeng, one of China’s old capitals, where the accommodation was suitably royal. A month after she received the late earl’s last letter she was still there, and issued another decree,
heaping further honours on him and his family. Clearly, the earl meant a very great deal to her. Their working relationship went back four decades, and for many years he had been her right-hand man – the person who understood her best. Together they had achieved a great deal and had dragged the empire out of its isolation and into the world. And yet they had both made fatal mistakes that cost the country dearly, and which had resulted in their own estrangement. In her heart she could not forgive him for his role in the war with Japan – and in China’s decline; and he was angry at her handling of the Boxers. Now she needed him, not least to protect her from possible humiliation, and even harm, from Westerners (with whom he got on) once she returned to Beijing. Hesitating, she lingered in Kaifeng – until the day a cable arrived from General
Yuan Shikai, who had succeeded the earl as Viceroy of Zhili and Imperial Commissioner for North China. These distinguished appointments had been Cixi’s reward for his denunciation of the plotters against her life in 1898, but his ability also amply matched his loyalty. His cable informed Cixi that the foreign armies would not leave Tianjin, which they were still occupying, unless she returned to Beijing. She set off from Kaifeng at once.