The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (39 page)

The day after she had decided on his successor, Yehonala went to visit Kuang Hsu on what was now, undoubtedly his deathbed. Three days before, he had been visited by a physician, Dr. Chu, who had some time earlier examined the Emperor and diagnosed Bright’s disease. Dr. Chu now found the Emperor sleepless, thrashing about his bed, tormented with agonising stomach cramps: ‘he could not urinate, his heart beat grew faster, his face burned purple, his tongue had turned yellow–symptoms which had no connection with his previous illness.’
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The implication was clear–Kuang Hsu was not dying from the effects of any of his known illnesses. This ‘disease’ was new and sudden. Kuang Hsu was being poisoned.

During a brief respite from his agony Kuang Hsu is said to have asked for paper and written his own uncompromising valedictory message:

We were the second son of the Prince Ch’un when the Empress Dowager selected Us for the throne. She has always hated Us. But for Our misery of the past ten years, Yuan Shi-kai is responsible and one other. When the time comes, I desire that Yuan be summarily beheaded.
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It was a tragic, pathetic, and ultimately vain request. The Son of Heaven had long since ceased to wield any effective power in his kingdom. Nothing was done and the message itself, if it ever existed, has disappeared. But even during his last moments, when he could no longer speak, Kuang Hsu persisted. It was noticed that he was slowly moving the index finger of his right hand in a continuous circle. In Chinese calligraphy, Yuan, the first character of Yuan Shi-kai’s name, means ‘round’ or ‘circle’. At the hour of the cock (sometime between 5 and 7 p.m.) on 14th November 1908, while Yehonala, his wife Lung Yu, and the Lustrous Concubine stood watching at his bedside, the circling finger faltered, then failed to move, and the unhappy and unfortunate spirit Kuang Hsu left on its final journey to the Nine Springs.

Yehonala spent little time in mourning. After a good night’s sleep, next day she was hale enough to resume her normal routine, rising at six o’clock and breakfasting on a bowl of hot milk and
congee
, rice porridge with a little added lotus root. Morning was always devoted to business, and she spent the hours before noon chairing a meeting of the Grand Council which considered the steps that needed to be taken as a result of the late Emperor’s demise, and Pu Yi’s accession. Decrees were prepared, under the new Emperor’s imprimatur, by which Yehonala passed on her honorific of Empress Mother to Kuang Hsu’s widow, and was given a more prestigious new title (and a further hefty stipend) that of Great Empress Mother. Her work over, and confident of a regency that would last until the new Emperor’s majority (at least fourteen years, when she would have reached the grand old age of eighty-seven) Yehonala laid aside the duties of government and retired for lunch. One account has her indulging in a large helping of crab apples and clotted cream, an unlikely and rather irresponsible repast for someone said to be recovering from a bout of dysentery.

But whatever the midday menu, shortly after partaking of the meal, Yehonala felt suddenly ill, and within minutes had fainted away. When she came to, she seemed suddenly convinced that her end was near. Why this should be has never been satisfactorily explained. Any natural illness, especially one with such a sudden onset, always brings with it the possibility of recovery, at least until the disease has progressed somewhat and medical science can come up with a prognosis. Yet Yehonala remained convinced that she would soon die and that no remedy would avail. This conviction has strong echoes of both her cousin Sakota, the Empress of the Eastern Palace, and of the Kuang Hsu Emperor, each of whom was, almost certainly, poisoned.

Twenty years earlier Yehonala had been accused of poisoning her cousin, and in 1908, the capital’s gossips were certainly convinced that the Emperor had been given poison. The rumour-mill ground out at least three versions of Kuang Hsu’s death. In one Yuan Shi-kai, terrified (rightly) that with Yehonala dead a resurgent Kuang Hsu would wreak vengeance upon the man who had so comprehensively betrayed him, had bribed one or several Eunuchs of the Presence to poison the Emperor. Another tale pointed the finger of guilt at Yehonala, who, it was said, could not abide the thought of her hated nephew ruling in her stead and, fearing posthumous reprisals on her name and reputation, had commanded the eunuchs to administer the toxin. Yet another story blamed the eunuchs themselves, especially the Grand Eunuch, Li Lien-ying, who had mistreated the Emperor for years. Knowing of the bad blood between the Emperor and his aunt, Li had been the instigator of the poisoning, confident that the murder would be given a plausible gloss by the Empress.

But now it was the Empress herself who was carried to her room, and dressed in the traditional costume of death, the Robes of Longevity, vestments which less than a day before, in his final act of defiance, Kuang Hsu had refused to wear. Yehonala ordered her valedictory message prepared, to which she added in her own hand a final platitudinous paragraph:

Looking back upon the memories of the past fifty years, I perceive how calamities from within and aggression from without have come upon Us in relentless succession. The new Emperor is an infant, just reaching the age when wide instruction is of the highest importance...His Majesty must devote himself to studying the interests of his country and refrain from giving way to grief. It is my earnest prayer that he diligently pursue his studies and that he may hereafter add fresh lustre to the glorious achievements of his Ancestors.

Mourning to be worn for twenty-seven days only. Hear and obey!
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–this from a woman who had allowed her own son (if son he was) to slowly destroy himself in brothels and opium dens, and who had savagely imprisoned her nephew for ‘studying the interests of his country’ when those interests conflicted with her own. It seemed that, even in death, Yehonala held the mask of deceit firmly before her face.

But as the eunuchs turned her face to the south, the traditional direction in which the sovereign must die, her final words betrayed a knowledge that her constant striving for supreme power had caused irreparable harm to her nation:

‘Do not allow eunuchs to meddle in government matters,’ she whispered, ‘the Ming Dynasty was ruined by eunuchs and its fate should be a warning to my people.’ The rest of her speech was even more telling: ‘Never again allow a woman to hold the supreme power in the State. It is against the house-laws of our Dynasty and should be forbidden.’

Yehonala said no more. Facing south, her breathing slowed, then stopped. ‘Her mouth remained fixedly open, which the Chinese interpret as a sign that the spirit of the deceased is unwilling to leave the body.’
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She was seventy-three years old. The Great Empress Mother of China, the author of so many others’ violent deaths, had finally ‘mounted the dragon’; and left the Dynasty, and China, to chaos–as she, perhaps, had always planned.

Was Yehonala poisoned? Clearly, the death of the Emperor and the Great Empress Mother within the space of twenty-four hours can only be regarded as horribly suspicious, a coincidence of monumental proportions. That Kuang Hsu was deliberately put to death seems incontrovertible. His death was too convenient and, leaving aside the (often well-founded) rumours that unanimously assigned his death to poison, the medical evidence of Dr. Chu is damning. That accepted, it is the indisputable fact that Yehonala’s death followed immediately upon that of Kuang Hsu’s that gives us the best evidence that her own demise was not natural. The pro-Emperor faction would have been credulous in the extreme had they not envisaged an early-death scenario for the Emperor, and planned their response. Yehonala’s own certainty of her imminent dissolution adds strength to this hypothesis–none knew better than Yehonala the symptoms and results of the many poisons available to a clandestine assassin. One would have to be terminally naive to believe that each faction, reformers and conservatives, would fail to take steps to protect itself, should the worst happen. Whether as an act of vengeance, or for their own protection, it seems clear that Yehonala’s death was a direct reprisal by the reformers for the poisoning of the Emperor.

Whatever hatreds simmered below the ornate, ritual-bound surface of the Great Within, they did not debar the Great Empress Mother from a funeral befitting her exalted status. In the September following her death, a special ceremony was performed, ‘a magnificent barge made of paper and over a hundred and fifty feet long was set up outside the Forbidden City on a large empty space adjoining the Coal Hill. It was crowded with [paper] figures of attendant eunuchs and handmaidens, and contained furniture and viands for the use of the illustrious dead in the lower regions. A throne was placed in the bow and around it were kneeling effigies of attendant officials, all wearing their robes of state as if the shade of the Western Empress were holding an audience’. Once everything was in place and the requisite rites had been performed, this unique ‘paper Court’ was consigned to the flames ‘in order that the Old Buddha might enjoy the use of it at the Yellow Springs’.
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The Emperor Kuang Hsu was buried before his aunt, at a cost of half a million taels. Reflecting the true status of the relationship between the Emperor and his ‘august aunt’, Yehonala’s own funeral was a far more sumptuous affair and cost around three times as much. Almost a year after her death, on 5th November 1909, following the long and involved funerary rites that preceded burial, Yehonala’s body was transported in glory from the Great Within to her final resting place, the Eastern Tombs. Her cortège, led by innumerable horsemen and eunuchs uncountable, and officials swathed in white, the mourning colour of the East, ‘offered a gorgeous spectacle: red robes of bearers, yellow robes of Lamaist priests, silver and gold of rich embroideries’. A troop of musicians blew forth mournful dirges as the Grand Eunuch, Li Lien-ying, plodded sorrowfully before the coffin of his mistress, carrying Moo-tan, her favourite Pekingese. The dog was said to have died of grief at the tomb entrance (emulating the tale of T’ao Hua, another faithful canine in the Sung Dynasty, who had similarly given up the ghost for the Emperor T’ai Tsung), and to have been buried alongside Yehonala’s corpse. A more prosaic tale recounted that Moo-tan was spirited away after the ceremony by the eunuchs and sold at a good profit. Whatever the truth of this, on 9th November, at the astrologically propitious time of seven in the morning, the coffin containing the body of the Great Empress Mother was finally shut up within its Jewelled Chamber.

Yehonala’s coffin contained much more than her body. The always-careful Grand Eunuch, Li Lien-ying, meticulously catalogued the fabulous treasures that accompanied his mistress to the grave:

A mattress seven inches thick, embroidered with pearls, lay on the bottom of the coffin, and on top of it was a silk embroidered coverlet strewn with a layer of pearls. The body rested on a lace sheet, with a figure of Buddha woven in pearls.

At the head was placed a jade ornament formed as a lotus, and at the foot a jade ornament carved into leaves. She was dressed in ceremonial clothes done in gold thread, and over that an embroidered jacket with a rope of pearls, while another rope of pearls encircled her body nine times and eighteen pearl images of Buddha were laid in her arms...Her body was covered by a sacred Tolo pall, a chaplet of pearls was placed upon her head, and by her side were laid108 gold, jade and carved-gem Buddhas. On each of the feet were placed one watermelon and two sweet melons of jade, and two hundred gems made in the shape of peaches, pears, apricots and dates. By her left side was placed a jade cut like a lotus-root with leaves and flowers sprouting from the top: on the right hand was a coral tree. The gaps were filled with scattered pearls and gems, until the whole was spread level, and over all was spread a network covering of pearls.

As the lid was being lifted to place in position, a Princess of the Imperial house added a fine jade ornament of eighteen buddhas and another of eight galloping horses.
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The Dynasty did not long outlast the funeral of the Great Empress Mother. Since the death of Yehonala, the Empire had been administered in Pu Yi’s name by his father Prince Ch’un, Kuang Hsu’s younger brother, who had been named Regent. But he possessed none of the authority, the charisma of power, that had animated the small frame of the Empress, and as Lady Townley had presciently asked, after Yehonala who could ‘resist the tide of foreign aggression and stem the torrent of inward revolt’?
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Within two years of her being laid to rest the country was in chaos, with insurrections against the Dynasty breaking out all over the Empire. On the 12th February 1912, the Manchus abdicated power, handing over executive power to Yehonala’s faithful servant Yuan Shi-kai, who, self-interest to the fore as ever, attempted almost immediately to found his own dynasty on the still-warm body of the Manchu. He failed, and China entered a dark night of warlords and lawlessness from which it took decades to recover.
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The ancient prophecy had been fulfilled. After more than two hundred and fifty years a ‘ten-mouthed woman with grass on her head’ had ruled the Middle Kingdom and had wrought vengeance upon the Imperial clan of the Aisin Gioro. A female of the Yeho-Nala tribe had established dominion over the Manchu, and she had brought both the Dynasty, and her nation, to ruin and destruction.

Nineteen years after Yehonala had been laid to rest in her vault with such pomp and ritual, a huge explosion echoed through the pine-clad valley of the Eastern Tombs, shattering the sombre silence of her mausoleum. The gateway to the ‘Jewelled Chambers’ of the Emperors had been dynamited by desperate men intent on plunder, and Chinese grave robbers crawled through the shattered entrance to despoil the sarcophagi of those who had once held the Mandate of Heaven.
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The Emperor Ch’ien Lung’s body was desecrated and dismembered, along with his wives. Yehonala’s tomb was ransacked, the coffin violated, and all its priceless gold, jade and jewelled treasures taken. The sacred Tolo pall was ripped from the corpse and the pearl-encrusted, cloth-of-gold vestments torn away, leaving the pitiful cadaver naked to the waist, her undergarments half-removed. The earthly remains of Yehonala, once the most powerful female ruler on earth, were dumped unceremoniously on the floor of the tomb, face down, her sunken eyes staring sightlessly at the dark earth of the Middle Kingdom.