Imperial Woman (36 page)

So Prince Kung returned and ever after did his work with proud dignity and correct humility.

From now on the Empress Mother did not allow the Dragon Throne to be empty before the yellow curtain in the Audience Hall. She set her son there and taught him to hold his head high and to place his hands upon his knees and listen to the ministers when they memorialized the Throne. There the boy must sit, dressed from head to foot in yellow satin robes of state, embroidered with five-toed dragons, a ruby button at his shoulder, and on his head the imperial hat. Early in the winter mornings and before dawn in summer, she caused the boy Emperor to be waked and they two walked together in fair weather, for she liked to walk, or rode in palanquins were the weather foul, and in the Audience Hall they took their places, he on the Throne, and she behind the yellow curtain but so close that her lips were at his ear.

When a windy prince had made his plea, or an ancient minister had droned his way through a long memorial, the little Emperor turned his head to whisper, “What shall I say, Mother?” and she told him what to say and he repeated it after her, word by word.

Thus the hours passed, and he, often weary and apt to twist his button or trace the curling dragons with his forefinger, sometimes forgot where he was. Then his mother’s voice struck sharply across his ears.

“Sit up! Do you forget you are the Emperor? Do not behave as would a common child!

She was so tender to him elsewhere that he was shocked and straightened, frightened by a power in her that he did not know.

“What do I say now, Mother?”

It was his constant question, and as often as he asked it, she answered.

As eagerly as though they were love letters the Empress Mother read the daily memorials which her mighty general, Tseng Kuo-fan, sent her from the south. The greatness in herself, like lodestone, sought and found the greatness in others, and next to Jung Lu she now valued best this general. He was no mere mass of brawn and bombast, as soldiers often are, but a scholar, as his grandfather and father had been, and so to his skill was added wisdom. Yet she felt no warmth toward her general. Her interest was in what he did, in the excitement of battles, in the danger of failure, in the pride of victory.

While these prescribed years of mourning for the dead Emperor came nearer to their end, and that peace might be secure before the great day of his burial, the Empress Mother thus devoted herself wholly to crushing the rebels in the south. Daily her couriers ran between the imperial city and Nanking, in relays so swift that in a single day men’s feet covered four hundred miles. Each night at midnight the Chief Eunuch, An Teh-hai, delivered to her the packet containing the day’s news from Tseng Kuo-fan, and she read the pages alone in her chamber by the light of the great twin candlesticks beside her pillow. Thus throughout the chill winter months she read of his masterful strategy and how with the help of two other generals under his high command, one P’eng Yu-lin and the other his own younger brother, Tseng Kuo-ch’uan, he attacked the rebels by land and water, recovering during that one winter more than a hundred cities in the four provinces of Kiangsu, Kiangsi, Anhui and Chekiang. More than a hundred thousand rebels were slain, and slowly all retreated to their stronghold in Nanking.

Each day before dawn and the hour of audience the Empress Mother walked through the palace corridors to the temple of the Great White Buddha, he of the thousand heads and hands, and before this image of the Unknown Source she knelt and gave thanks and besought help for Tseng Kuo-fan. The priests prostrated themselves while she prayed, and remained motionless while she lit incense in the golden urn. And Buddha heard her prayers so that in the summer of that same year, in the sixth moon month and the seventh solar month, on the sixteenth day, Tseng Kuo-fan, having captured the outer ramparts of Nanking, ordered great bombs filled with gunpowder to be laid beneath the city wall and so made breaches through which his men poured by the thousand into the city. The palace of the Heavenly King was their last goal, but it was surrounded by desperate defenders. Nevertheless, an iron bomb filled with gunpowder was thrown into the center of the buildings to set a fire, and at one hour after noon of that day, flames burst as high as heaven, and the dwellers in the palace rushed out like rats from a burning house. They were all seized and put to death, except for the leader, one Li Wan-ts’ai, who was kept alive. This man, when questioned, confessed that the Heavenly King had killed himself by poison some thirty days before and that his death had been hidden from his followers until his son could be proclaimed king in his place. Now this son, too, was killed.

When the Empress Mother read these memorials from Tseng Kuo-fan she sent out the news in one edict after another so that all the people might know that the rebels were dead, and she proclaimed a month of feasting. Then she commanded that the body of the Heavenly King be dug up from its grave and the head cut off and sent everywhere throughout the provinces so that all her subjects might see it and know the fate of rebels, and those leaders of the rebels who still survived were to be brought to the imperial city and questioned and then put to death by slow slicing of their flesh. As for herself, she declared that she would accompany the young Emperor to all the imperial shrines and temples and give thanks to the gods for their fortunate aid, and to the Imperial Ancestors for their ever-present protection.

When Tseng Kuo-fan himself came to report to the Throne, he told further of strange and pitiful doings of the Heavenly King, reported to him by captives before they were put to death. This Heavenly King, in truth only a common fellow whose mind had gone awry, nevertheless had boasted mightily even when he knew his cause was doomed. He sat upon his throne and he said to his dwindling followers, “The Most High has issued to me his sacred decree. God the Father and my divine Elder Brother, Jesus Christ, commanded me to descend into this world of flesh and to become the one true Lord of all nations and kindreds upon earth. What cause have I then to fear? Remain with me or leave me, as you choose; my inheritance of this empire will be protected by others if you will not protect it, for I have a million angels at my side, a heavenly host. How then can a mere hundred thousand of these cursed imperial soldiers take my city?”

Nevertheless by the middle of the fifth moon month, the Heavenly King knew he was lost and he mixed a deadly poison with wine and drank it in three gulps. Then he cried out, “It is not God the Father who has deceived me, but it is I who have disobeyed God the Father!” So he died, and his body was wrapped in a cover of yellow satin embroidered with dragons and he was buried without a coffin, secretly and by night, in a corner of his own palace grounds. His followers plotted to put his sixteen-year-old son on the throne in his place, but the rebels heard of his death, too, and they lost hope and yielded the city.

All this Tseng Kuo-fan reported in the Imperial Audience Hall, before the Dragon Throne, upon which now sat the young Emperor, and behind the yellow silk curtain the Empress Mother listened to hear every word, while Sakota sat beside her motionless.

“Was not the body of this rebel king already decayed?” the Empress Mother inquired.

“It was strangely clean,” Tseng Kuo-fan replied. “The silk which wrapped the whole body, even the feet, was of fine heavy quality, and protected the flesh.”

“What sort of man was this rebel king in his looks?” the Empress Mother inquired again.

“He was very large and tall,” Tseng Kuo-fan replied. “His head was round, his face massive, and he was bald. He wore a beard, streaked with gray. The head was cut off according to imperial command to be taken from province to province. As for the body, I ordered it to be burned and I myself saw it in ashes. The two elder brothers of the Heavenly King were captured alive, but they had lost their wits, too, and they could only mutter unceasingly, ‘God the Father—God the Father’—and so I ordered them both beheaded.”

Then before this rebel’s head was sent to the provinces for the people to see, the Empress Mother announced that she wanted to look upon it with her own eyes.

“These many years,” she declared, “I have carried on war against the rebel king, and now I am victor. Let me set my eyes upon my enemy who is vanquished.”

The head was brought to her then by a horseman who carried it in a basket slung from his saddle, and Li Lien-ying received it, wrapped in yellow satin, stained and soiled, and he brought it with his own hands into the private throne room of the Empress Mother.

There she sat upon her throne, and she commanded Li Lien-ying to put the head down upon the floor before her and unwrap it. This Li Lien-ying did, the Empress Mother steadfastly gazing while he did so, until the satin fell away, and the ghastly face was revealed. The Empress Mother sat transfixed, her eyes held by the staring eyes of the dead, which none had taken time to close. These dead eyes stared back at her, black and bitter in the bloodless face. The mouth was pale and made more pale by the sparse black beard around it, streaked with gray, and the lips were drawn back from strong white teeth.

The ladies who stood about the throne shielded their eyes with their sleeves from the fearful sight, and one lady, always timid and shy, retched to vomit and cried out that she was faint. Even Li Lien-ying could not forbear a groan.

“A villain,” he muttered, “and villainous even in death.”

But the Empress Mother put up her hand for silence. “A strange wild face,” she observed. “A desperate face, too sad to look upon. But it is not a villain’s face. You have no feeling, you eunuch! This is not a criminal face. It is the face of a poet, gone mad because his faith was vain. Ah me, it is the face of a man who knew himself lost when he was born.”

She sighed and leaned her head down and covered her eyes with her hand for a moment. Then her hands fell and she lifted her head.

“Take away the head of my enemy,” she commanded Li Lien-ying, “and let it be shown everywhere to my people.”

Li Lien-ying took the head away again, the horseman put it into the basket and he began the long journey. In every city of every province the head was set high upon a pole for the people to see, until at last its flesh dried and peeled away, and only the skull was left. And wherever the head was shown peace followed.

So ended the T’ai Ping Rebellion in the solar year 1865. For fifteen years this cruel war had been waged back and forth across nine provinces of the realm and twenty million people died or starved to death. Nowhere had the Heavenly King stayed to build his kingdom, but he went everywhere with his followers, first killing and then looting, and among those followers were also many rootless white men, drifters, lost to their own peoples. But some, a few, believed in the Heavenly King because they were Christians and he used the name of Christ. These, too, were killed.

When this great rebellion was put down, the Imperial Armies, encouraged by what Gordon had taught them concerning warfare, put an end also to two lesser rebellions, one in the southern province of Yünnan, whence came the landscaped marble as tribute to the Dragon Throne, and the other a rebellion of Muslim in the province of Shensi. These were small frays compared to the great rebellion, and were soon ended. The Empress Mother, surveying the realm, saw only peace and in peace and prosperity, and the people praised her for that under her advice all rebels were defeated. Her power rose high, she knew it, and she moved swiftly at last to establish her power inside the Court as well and so make the dynasty secure.

Meanwhile she did not forget the Englishman Gordon. While Tseng Kuo-fan had led the Imperial Army against Nanking, Gordon led the Ever-Victorious Army against the same rebels in the region of the lower Yangtse where Li Hung-chang led the imperial soldiers. Had it not been for Gordon’s victories, Nanking could not have fallen so easily, and Tseng Kuo-fan was great enough to say so before the Throne.

Now the Empress Mother desired exceedingly to see this Englishman, but she could not yield to her personal wish, for never had a foreigner been received at the Imperial Court. She read every report of him, however, and listened to all that was said concerning him by those who had seen him.

“The strength of Gordon,” Li Hung-chang wrote in a memorial, “lies in his rectitude. He declares that he believes it his duty to put down the rebels for the sake of our people. Truly I have never seen a man like Gordon. He spends his own money to give comfort to his men and to the people who have been robbed and wounded by the rebels. Even our enemies call him ‘great soul,’ and declare that they are honored in defeat by such a one.”

When the Empress Mother received this memorial she commanded that the Order of Merit of the First Rank be awarded Gordon, and that he be given a gift of ten thousand taels for his share in the honors of victory. But when the imperial treasure bearers came into his presence bearing the bullion upon their heads in great bowls, Gordon refused the gift and when the bearers, unbelieving, did not retire, he raised his cane and drove them away.

The news of this refusal went over the whole nation and yet not one citizen could believe that a man would refuse such treasure. Then Gordon made known why he would receive no gifts. Here was his reason. Li Hung-chang, in excess of triumph when the great city of Soochow was captured, had ordered the murder of many of the enemy leaders who had already surrendered. Now Gordon had promised these leaders that their lives would be saved if they surrendered, and when he found that he had been betrayed, his promise voided by Li Hung-chang, he fell into such a frenzy of temper that even Li was frightened and withdrew for a while into his own house in Shanghai.

“I will not forgive you so long as I live,” Gordon had howled, and Li, staring at that white set face, indeed saw no forgiveness in the frost-blue eyes.

And Gordon, forever unforgiving, sent this proud letter to the Dragon Throne:

“Major Gordon received the approbation of His Majesty with every gratification, but regrets most sincerely that, owing to the circumstances which occurred after the capture of Soochow, he is unable to accept any mark of His Majesty the Emperor’s recognition, and therefore respectfully begs His Majesty to receive his thanks for the intended kindness and to allow him to decline the same.”