The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (10 page)

She was also at pains to cultivate those most disparaged and yet most powerful of the court attendants–the eunuchs. Their greed for gain was legendary, but they exercised an even stronger–and at times baleful–influence at the very centre of the Chinese state. Normal Chinese society ridiculed and belittled the eunuch fraternity, but their situation within the Forbidden City was entirely different. The eunuch was an outcast, a pariah, banished to one pole of the societal spectrum, and apparently diametrically opposed to the position of Emperor, who occupied the opposite pole, a solitary figure of reverence and splendour. When the Emperor travelled outside the Forbidden City in his royal sedan chair, bamboo screens were placed along his route to shield his sacred personage from the eyes of the ‘stupid people’. And yet, as revealed in the Daoist Tai Chi symbol, such distinctions were more apparent than real. For all his pomp and majesty the Emperor was still,
au fond
, a human being, full of hidden insecurities, needing above all the companionship of others of his species. But such companionship was denied him by his exalted rank–all must kneel in the presence of the Son of Heaven; no one (with the exception of the Empress Dowager) was permitted to speak unless spoken to, not even members of the Imperial family. During an audience with the Son of Heaven all kept their eyes decorously lowered, for none must gaze directly on the royal countenance. He was the peerless Celestial Prince and perhaps the loneliest man on the planet.

It was just this untouchable nature of the Emperor that made him approachable to the other ‘untouchables’, the eunuchs of the palace. Only half-men, creatures outside normal society, could attend upon the Son of Heaven, dress him, feed him, and see to those natural human functions of the mind and body that gave the lie to the whole Son of Heaven mythos, and betrayed the Emperor as just another member of
Homo sapiens
, whom history and chance had raised to this exalted position. The eunuchs became not merely guardians of the harem, protectors of the Emperor’s honour and guarantors of the purity of the succession, they became his intimates, the counsellors of his darkest moments, those to whom he could show the face behind his Imperial mask. They became his friends. And in this and this alone lay all their power.

The Emperor came to rely upon these intimates, to the most powerful of whom he allowed unheard-of liberties. But this friendship had a darker side, especially for those Emperors who came to the throne as infants or in their early youth. As the eunuchs’ hopes of advancement, power and a pleasurable life lay solely in retaining their sovereign’s favour, most would stop at nothing, and would deny the young monarch nothing, in the hope of personal gain. They were in a unique position to mould the young monarch’s personality, to alter his preferences, and to discover his deepest longings and anxieties and use them for their own advantage. In this they followed age-old custom: Han Fei-tzu, a minister of state in the third century BC wrote, ‘Those who would control rulers first discover their secret fears and wishes.
^’14
Anxious to please, and at the same time to find ways of manipulating their sovereign, time and again in Chinese history the Eunuchs of the Presence introduced their guileless young charges into enfeebling experimentation with perversion and promiscuity. The third son of the previous Emperor, Tao Kwang (and a brother of Yehonala’s Lord, Hsien Feng), was infamous for his penchant for homosexual relationships with eunuch actors, some of whom he kept prisoner in his home to use as he pleased. Nor had the new Emperor, Hsien Feng, escaped the corrupting influence of his own eunuchs; stories of carousing and his bisexual tastes were common knowledge in the streets and alleys of Beijing, especially his infatuation with Zhu Lian-feng, a leading actor and female impersonator.
¹⁵
Given his debauched and dropsied condition when Yehonala first began to figure in his life at the age of twenty-one, there must have been much truth in these rumours.

But while the eunuchs were questionable friends to the Emperor, from Yehonala’s perspective they undoubtedly had their uses. If she were able to cultivate friendships with those castrati close to the Emperor, they could provide her with an entrée to the Son of Heaven’s presence, and hopefully to his bedchamber. The sheer number of concubines meant that, without influence, even the loveliest and most accomplished of the Emperor’s wives might languish unnoticed until her beauty (and chance of power) had faded.

This was not a new problem. Yuan Ti, an Emperor of the Han Dynasty, had such a vast harem that he appointed a painter, Mao Yen-shou, to produce portraits of his wives, so that he could use these paintings to choose a bed-partner. Naturally, many of the concubines were happy to pay the artist ‘fragrant grease’ for the privilege of being painted in the most flattering manner. However, one odalisque, the Lady Chao Chun, refused to advance the painter his accustomed ‘fee’, trusting that her natural beauty would win the Imperial favour. But Mao’s talents for enhancing beauty could also be put to the opposite purpose. He produced a portrait that personified plainness and mediocrity–and so Chao Chun was ignored by the Son of Heaven.

A little later, the Great Khan of the Hsiung Nu (known in the West as the Huns) paid a state visit to the Chinese court. The Hsiung Nu made periodic raids into China and, in the hope of preventing these and increasing the ties of amity with a neighbouring state, it was deemed wise to give the visiting monarch a present most appropriate to the occasion–a lady from Yuan Ti’s own harem. All unknowing the Chinese Emperor chose Chao Chun. When the lady was summoned, Yuan Ti was horrified–he had not realised that his harem contained a woman of such surpassing beauty. But his word had been pledged and, hiding his bitterness, he was forced to hand over the loveliest of his concubines to the Great Khan, and watch her leave his court forever. Almost as soon as the dust from the horses of his departing guests had settled Yuan Ti took his revenge. Mao Yen-shou, and several of the concubines who had paid to have their features enhanced, were dragged to the marketplace and publicly beheaded.
¹⁶

In Yehonala’s day no Mao Yen-shou plied his trade within the walls of the Forbidden City, but access to the Imperial Presence was still circumscribed and dependent upon payment of ‘squeeze’–not to a painter but to the ubiquitous eunuchs. In the five years she spent in obscurity, Yehonala took pains to earn the gratitude and loyalty of the chief eunuch, An Te-hai, and he became her faithful retainer for over fifteen years, until his judicial murder by Yehonala’s rivals in 1869. It was almost certainly by the wiles of An Te-hai that Yehonala came once again to the notice of the Son of Heaven. A story current in the late 1860s has it that Yehonala, now 20 years of age, was sitting forlornly in the Summer Palace, in a pavilion named ‘The Deep Recesses among the Plane Trees’, singing a plaintive southern folk-song from her native Anhui. It chanced that the Emperor too was walking in the garden and, hearing the sweet voice, he peered through the verdure to find its owner and was struck dumb by the beauty of the lovely girl he saw in the pavilion. Quietly, he slipped away and returned to the palace, but that same evening it was the jade plaque bearing Yehonala’s name that he chose to display on the carved ivory table next to his chamber, indicating that its owner was to be his bed-companion for the evening. That night, a naked Yehonala was carried on the back of a eunuch to the Imperial bedchamber where she submitted to the will of the Lord of Ten Thousand Years.

Whether the story of their first meeting is true, or a more prosaic truth prevails (that Yehonala’s cultivation of the chief eunuch resulted in his suggesting her name to the Son of Heaven), one thing is certain. During the passage of this fateful night she can only have pleased the Son of Heaven. From that time on, the Emperor was in thrall to Yehonala. And her inexorable rise to power began.

That the Emperor Hsien Feng should seek solace and oblivion in the arms of his favourite concubine was understandable. His kingdom was at breaking point, his realm beset with both internal and external enemies. There was every reason to believe that the Mandate of Heaven would be revoked, and that the proud Manchu, having reigned for over two hundred years, would soon go the way of the Ming, Han, Tang and all the other numerous ruling houses in China’s long and bloody history–dynasties that had flowered in all their pride and then withered to nothing more than a memory. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
¹

By the year that Yehonala finally found favour with her Lord, 1855, the Manchu were hard-pressed fighting one of the periodic revolts that had convulsed the Empire since the beginning of the dynastic system two thousand years before. The roots of these rebellions were legion: extortionate taxes, corvée labour, religious oppression, drought, famine or simple brigandage that fed upon popular resentment of the regime and snowballed into full-blooded insurrection, as with Li Tzu-cheng’s almost-successful challenge to the Ming Dynasty. But this new revolt was fundamentally different: it was led not by disgruntled minorities, starving peasants or simple brigands, but by a much more dangerous phenomenon–a mystic visionary with the power to convince his followers of his direct contact with the Almighty, and to persuade them to die willingly for their chance of Paradise.

Its fuse was lit by a short, seemingly innocuous book distributed in Canton in 1836 by the Religious Tract Society of China, under the title Good Works to Admonish the Age. Its author was Liang Fa, a Chinese Christian convert, who had been assistant pastor to the British missionary, Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to work in China. There is no doubt that this small book, the size of a modern-day paperback, was printed and distributed with the highest of motivations–to bring the benefits of the ‘true religion’ of Christianity to the Chinese masses. Instead, the tract became a supreme exemplar of the axiom that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Unwittingly, the author of the book had lit a long fuse, priming a time bomb that was to explode fifteen years later, unleashing not the joys of Christian fellowship on the people of China, but the bloodiest civil war the world has known.
²

Good Works to Admonish the Age
is also an instructive example of the evolution of religions and the manner in which the culture and personal inclination of the adherent can colour the portrayal of his chosen path to enlightenment. In the book Liang Fa gives a reasonably tolerable précis of some of the major events in the Old and New Testaments, including Noah, the Exodus, the Sermon on the Mount and the life of St Paul. He enunciates the doctrine of an omniscient and omnipotent God, who had formed the whole of material creation in six days and under whose rule all humanity, regardless of race or nation, are equal. But Liang is also a man of his time and society, and he includes elements of Daoism, Buddhism and Chinese folk-tales in his work. Nor is he averse to simply making bits up, allowing his imagination free rein and having Jesus appear in the sky in broad daylight to produce the conversion of unbelievers. In other parts of the work Jesus and St Paul attend a baptism together, where Jesus relates that ‘from ancient times there has never been anyone who has ascended to Heaven and seen heavenly things; I alone, who descend to the world from Heaven, know celestial matters, and thus I alone can talk about them’. St Paul then puts his hand on the head of the baptised man and the man ‘talks in a strange voice and is able to predict the future’. One curious innovation (presumably taken from the Confucianist past that Liang Fa affects to abhor) is the notion that Jehovah chastises his sons. God whips his son Jesus because, it is explained, this is one way in which the Deity shows his love and corrects faults. Liang’s prose is extremely repetitious and, in addition to these flights of fancy, he manages to give the impression that both God and Jesus commute between Heaven and earth on a regular basis.

Most Chinese recipients of the book, had they read it all, would simply have rejected its theology as that of the religion of the ‘foreign devil’. A few would have embraced the new faith, and been given the disparaging title ‘secondary hairy ones’ by their non-Christian countrymen. But for one man, a schoolmaster of the south China Hakka minority named Hung Hsiu-chuan, the contents of this book became the basis, the seed-atom, of a completely new religion, a seminal text that would eventually result in the deaths of over twenty million souls.
³

Hung first had sight of Good Works when he attended Canton for the official examinations that were the first step in his hoped-for career as a mandarin. He failed. He returned to teaching and the following year he attempted the examination again, but met with no better luck. Bitterly disappointed, he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown, lapsing into delirium in an illness that was said to have lasted a biblically correct forty days. He was vouchsafed numerous visions during this time, in which the God of the Christians appeared and ordered him to repudiate Confucius and all the traditional rites of Chinese society. According to the official account of his followers (who knew Hung by the title ‘The True Lord’), when he was:

...twenty-five years of age [twenty-four by Western reckoning], on the first day of the ting-yu year [5th April1837] between 11pm and 1am, he saw numerous angels come down from Heaven to escort him aloft...On his arrival at the Gates of Heaven he was welcomed by a bevy of lovely maidens standing by the roadside...He was received by a number of people dressed in dragon-robes and wearing three-cornered hats. An order was given to cut open the True Lord’s body and to replace his old bowels with new. Books too were placed at his side for him to read.
⁴

When he recovered from the worst of his delirium, Hung–complete with his new bowels, and the knowledge from the heavenly books–became convinced that he was a second saviour, a son of God, and the younger brother of Jesus Christ.

Hung remained in his home village for the next few years, earning his living as a teacher. But his thoughts were elsewhere. The Middle Kingdom’s disastrous confrontations with the Western powers at this time convinced him that the whole of Qing China was corrupt and required ‘cleansing’. Secure in the knowledge of his position as Son of God, he resolved to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. It must have appeared a hopeless dream to all but Hung Hsiu-chuan–a failed scholar, an impecunious teacher, a member of the despised
Hakka
minority, eking out a precarious living in an insignificant village in a southern province remote from the centres of power, deciding to take on the might of the Manchu and destroy them. The arrogance of his ambition is breathtaking even now. The wonder of it is that he almost succeeded.