The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (27 page)

Kuang Hsu’s estrangement from his aunt and most of his class began in a seemingly innocuous boyhood interest in toys. As a god on earth, the young Kuang Hsu was molly-coddled and pampered unmercifully–the response to the boy-Emperor’s frequent overeating was not to curtail his diet, but to fall before him and kowtow incessantly, at the same time pleading for better behaviour.
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Nothing was too good for the Son of Heaven, nothing in the Chinese world was denied him, with the inevitable result that the spoilt mini-Emperor was soon unconscionably bored with everything and everyone. As he was the future ruler of the Middle Kingdom his eunuch attendants counted the infant worth humouring, and would spend hours trawling through the streets of Beijing in an effort to find some object that might bring a fleeting smile to the already-jaded lips of the Celestial Prince. It was on one of these expeditions that, hidden away close to the German Legation buildings, the eunuchs came upon a ‘foreign devil’ shop, a general store owned by a Dane named Kierulf and containing among its myriad articles for sale some German clockwork toys. Hoping that these might amuse, the eunuchs bought several and carried them back to the Great Within.

Kuang Hsu was entranced by these foreign wonders and soon regular orders were being placed for anything that Mr. Kierulf could obtain from Europe and America. As he grew, Kuang Hsu procured more and more barbarian playthings of ever-increasing sophistication. Soon, toys were left behind and adult technological wonders demanded: a telephone was installed, and a small-gauge railway built in the grounds of the Summer Palace, on which, when not engaged in his increasingly time-consuming duties as ruler of the Middle Kingdom, the Emperor liked to travel with the ladies of the court.

For her part, Yehonala seems to have genuinely enjoyed her (semi-) retirement. Now long past the bloom of youth, and unable to rely on the power of her womanly charms, she seems consciously to have taken upon herself a more venerable persona, exacting compliance by virtue of the Chinese deep-seated reverence for the elder generation. She was now, as one of her titles proclaimed, the August Mother, sombre and dignified. But despite her age and new-found leisure, Yehonala kept to her lifelong routine, rising early, at six in the morning, to breakfast on millet porridge and milk. It was said, perhaps maliciously, that this first drink of the day was human milk, extracted from a Manchu woman Yehonala kept at the Great Within
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. She was a great believer in potions and simples (every ten days she would take a potion of crushed pearls, which she believed would enhance her longevity) so the story may well be true. After her meal she was dressed by her ladies, her toilette taking over an hour to complete. Then she might be carried in her palanquin, surrounded by maids and eunuchs, and with a troupe of a dozen musicians leading the way, to the three artificial lakes lying to the west of the Forbidden City, where she would wander for hours in the ersatz wilderness, eating sweetmeats, and admiring the view from the many halls and pavilions that dotted the landscape. This was her favourite part of the day, and she lavished much time and thought on the maintenance of her gardens, especially after 1880, when she had managed to inveigle funds from the submissive Prince Ch’un for the construction of her pet project, the Summer Palace.

At any time during these walks, Yehonala might call for lunch and her entourage would fall to swiftly to provide the hundred or so dishes that the Empress Dowager demanded at each meal, though she herself rarely partook of more than six or seven. In the afternoon, after an hour’s siesta, she might paint, or practise her calligraphy (of which she was justly proud). Sometimes she would play dice with her ladies, or the Chinese obsession, ‘mah jong’, or ‘Eight Fairies Travel across the Sea’, a board game of her own devising. Or she might wish to go boating on one of the lakes. Often, she would take a second walk in her beloved gardens, especially if there was a downpour. Punctuating the pleasant monotony of these times, and giving a certain rhythm to the days, were the ceremonial duties still required of the Empress Dowager, and her own favourite pastime, the theatre. At least once a fortnight, on the first and fifteenth of each month, plays were performed in the Forbidden City, or later (when the Summer Palace was completed) at a newly appointed theatre by the shores of the Kun Ming Lake. Yehonala delighted in the old classics, though she was not averse to previewing the work of modern Chinese playwrights. In between the visits of the players, she passed many happy hours performing herself, accompanied by her eunuch attendants. When, in 1903, she allowed herself to be photographed, she insisted on a picture of one of these masques, with herself dressed as the Chinese Goddess of Mercy, Kuan Yin (a favourite character), with the Grand Eunuch and others posed as attendant deities.

Her relations with her nephew also appear to have been cordial during this time. She was content to let him perform such duties as she had left to him, and seemed pleased with his progress in ruling the nation. As he moved into his middle twenties, she allowed him more and more leeway in decision-making, her unsurpassed intelligence network, and reports from her niece, Kuang Hsu’s wife, ensuring that she would be instantly aware were the Emperor to overstep the bounds she herself had set. As the year 1894 drew near, Yehonala was engrossed in the pleasant prospect of the splendid pomp and ceremony that was to attend her sixtieth birthday. The celebration was to be of unsurpassed majesty, out-topping the jubilees of previous Emperors, a high point of Yehonala’s long reign, conferring dignity and legitimacy upon her usurpation of power.

It was not to be. Japan’s modernisation along Western lines had left it economically and militarily resurgent and this, together with the imperialist adventures of its Western exemplars in China, and its own endogenous warrior culture, persuaded the Japanese that the road to greatness was via the conquest of its gigantic neighbour. Three centuries earlier the Japanese had attempted their first subjugation of the Middle Kingdom. In 1592, the dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi had set his samurai legions against Korea, intending to use that country as a bridge-head from which to launch his attempt on China’s Dragon Throne. The Japanese army of the 1890s, better equipped but still imbued with the same Bushido fighting spirit, planned to use the same strategy.

The United States had played, unwittingly, an important role in the drama that now unfolded. In 1882, the
Mei-guo Ren
(Americans) had first prised open the Hermit Kingdom to Western trade, all but ignoring China’s claims to suzerainty and concluding a treaty which effectively recognised Korea as an independent state.
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Japan claimed similar rights and, in order to avoid hostilities, as far back as 1885 China and Japan had agreed that neither should send troops into the area without the agreement of the other. Nine years later, following year-long disturbances and serious rioting, the King of Korea requested Chinese help in quelling an incipient rebellion. China sent in her troops, and informed Japan, whose own forces were soon heading across the Korea strait to the Hermit Kingdom. The stage was set for a serious confrontation, which flared into life when the Japanese took captive the King of Korea’s wife and their children. The King’s eighty-year-old father was installed as ruler.

The Chinese now sent in more troops, carried on the
Kowshing
, a British-registered ship. This was stopped by a Japanese gun-boat, torpedoed and quickly sunk. Foreshadowing the infamous atrocities they were to commit in eastern Asia during the first half of the twentieth century, the Japanese forces shot most of the survivors as they floundered in the sea. Forty-eight hours later (at the behest of the Japanese) Korea’s octogenarian puppet-monarch unilaterally declared war on China and begged his allies in Japan for help, which was punctually supplied. The Sino-Japanese War had begun.

Japan should have had the worst of it. An island nation, it had no option but to transport all its men and munitions to continental Asia by boat. Control of sea routes was therefore vital to victory, and here the Middle Kingdom apparently held the whip hand. In naval matters at least, China seemed to have learned from the West and had bought the best and most modern ships available. Li Hung-chang, hero of the Tai Ping rebellion, saviour of Yehonala during the crisis of Kuang Hsu’s succession and now the powerful Viceroy of Chihli Province, had been given responsibility for the northern fleet and, in addition to his modern procurement programme, had also engaged Captain Lang, an English naval officer, to train ‘his’ navy. On paper, their forces were vastly superior to the Japanese, in terms of both tonnage and numbers of ships: the Chinese fleet possessed armoured cruisers, light cruisers, torpedo boats and, their crowning glory, two 7,000-ton modern battleships with 10-inch guns. By contrast, the best the Japanese fleet could muster was a 4,000-ton cruiser. Any naval battle should have been an easy victory for China. And with the seas won, a blockade of Japan would have ensured a peace on favourable terms to the Middle Kingdom.

It did not work out that way. From the start matters went badly awry for the Chinese. Time and again the Imperial fleet shied away from contact with the enemy. When it was finally brought to battle by Japan’s smaller flotillas, the result was a disaster. In two separate engagements in the Yellow Sea separating Korea and China, on 17th September 1894 and again on 12th February 1895, the much-vaunted northern fleet was utterly destroyed.
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The problem lay not with Chinese courage, but with appalling organisation and the endemic corruption that had sucked the heart out of its forces leaving only an impressive shell. Sometime before the confrontation, Captain Lang had resigned following a typical Chinese argument over ‘face’. The Admiral of the Fleet was Ting Ju-chang, a cavalry officer who ‘made no pretence of knowing anything about a ship’;
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Lang had been given a similar rank, but using a different ideogram that was open to a number of interpretations. Matters came to a head when Admiral Ting was commanded to appear in Beijing. In his absence, ‘Admiral’ Lang tried to assume command. But the senior Commodore of the Fleet, Liu Poo-chin, claimed Lang was merely an ‘adviser’ with the rank of admiral, and insisted on taking control of the armada.

A violent argument arose and the upshot was that Lang resigned. A new co-Admiral was appointed, the German von Henniken, who was not a sailor, but a soldier-engineer. According to one eyewitness, who seemed to view the whole tragic episode as a scene from a comic opera, this did not really matter; the barbarian ‘admiral’ was needed primarily as a scapegoat to save the Chinese Admiral from a death sentence should victory elude him.
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During the sea battles the Chinese battleships hardly fired a shot, for the very good reason that they had few shells to throw at the enemy ships. Without ammunition, the much-vaunted battle fleet was a toothless tiger, and quite unable to stem the advance of the Japanese. ‘A schoolboy would at once have thought of ammunition; yet that elementary need was unattended to’–perhaps not unattended to, but certainly considered unimportant against the possibility of self-aggrandisement. Both Li Hung-chang and Yehonala played their part in this tragic fiasco, for both had siphoned off the funds earmarked to buy shells for the warships. Yehonala’s ‘cut’ was used to finance the renovation of her Summer Palace, where she continued to amuse herself with amateur theatricals and boat-trips, even as her country’s warships were sunk and her sailors destroyed. The disaster hardly caused a ripple in the turbid lake that was the Manchu court. A short time afterwards a court eunuch, asked about the embezzlement, replied brazenly, ‘Even if the money had been spent on the navy, the Japanese would have beaten us all the same. As it is, at least we have the Summer Palace.’

Their sea passage unopposed, the Japanese reinforced their battalions in Korea and pushed north, crossing the border to the west of the Changbai Mountains. They swung southwards to invest Port Arthur, the model fortress (built with Western help) at the tip of the strategic Liaotung Peninsula, which hung like a defending arm deep into the Yellow Sea. Together with its sister fortress at Weihaiwei on the northern shore of the Shandong peninsula, Port Arthur protected the approaches to the port of Tientsin, the eastern gateway to Beijing. By 21st November 1894, Port Arthur had fallen. Three months later, on 12th February 1895, the cavalry officer-turned-Admiral, Ting Ju-chang, surrendered Weihaiwei and then committed suicide, along with several of his officers. The Japanese victory was total: their forces now stood poised to take Tientsin and advance upon the Chinese capital itself.

In Beijing, the Manchu elite finally awoke to the danger. Yehonala hurriedly recalled the disgraced Prince Kung to advise her in the crisis, and finally allowed her old love, Jung Lu, to return to the capital. Unwilling to bear her share of responsibility for the debacle in Korea, Yehonala threw her faithful retainer Li Hung-chang to the wolves. The Viceroy of Chihli and ‘Warden of the Northern Seas’ was stripped of his rank and honours, though the silken cord was withheld and Li kept his life (and his immense fortune).
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This helped to mollify public indignation. There were many, from noble to peasant, who rejoiced to see so great a fall: stories abounded of Li’s peculation, how his massive investments in Japan had subverted him to the enemy’s cause. And of course, Li’s very public disgrace served to keep Yehonala’s own sins firmly in the background.

Envoys were now dispatched to Japan to negotiate a peace, but made little headway against Japanese intransigence. The victors had scores to settle. For centuries the Chinese had derided the ‘dwarf men’ as ignorant savages, brain-pickers of Chinese culture, content only to ape the more advanced manners and customs of the Middle Kingdom. Determined to humble its giant neighbour before the world, Japan sent the Chinese representatives home, demanding a more prestigious ambassador for the negotiations. There were few volunteers among the Manchu nobility for this humiliating role, but as ever, Yehonala had an answer. The disgraced Li Hung-chang was reinstated as Ambassador and commanded by Imperial edict to complete the negotiations with the Japanese (who the Chinese, in their overweening pride, still referred to as ‘dwarf men’). Yehonala knew that Li was already universally loathed for his part in the Chinese defeat–if he managed to placate the Japanese without bankrupting the Middle Kingdom, well and good; if he failed, his stock could not fall much further, and the silken cord was still an option.