The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (26 page)

Sakota believed that her suppression of the edict proved that she was motivated only by feelings of love and amity for the Empress of the Western Palace. And as a pledge of her good faith and friendship, she burned the fatal document to ashes in Yehonala’s presence.

If she expected gratitude she was soon to be disappointed. Hiding her true feelings, Yehonala left her cousin with all the normal expressions of courtesy and goodwill. A few days later, it is said, a eunuch arrived at Sakota’s quarters with a present of cakes from her loving cousin, the Western Empress. Sakota sampled the cakes, and suddenly fell sick. The mysterious illness proved impervious to all medical arts, and realising her end was near, Sakota drafted the traditional ‘last words’, in which she speaks of how her expectation ‘to attain a good old age’ had been thwarted by a ‘slight illness’ which had been followed ‘most unexpectedly’ by ‘a most dangerous relapse...and now all hope of recovery appears to be in vain’. Along with the traditional platitudes, the valedictory decree contains oblique criticism of her more audacious cousin. Sakota claimed that she had ‘set a good example of thrift and sobriety in the Palace, and to have steadily discountenanced all pomp and vain display...’. The implication that Yehonala was guilty of all these vices (she had been accused of many more by her Censors) was plain, and would not have been lost on the literati, well-versed in the subtle phraseology of the court.

Yehonala’s childhood playmate, ally of her youth and co-Regent of China for so many years, lingered for a few more hours. Before the day was out Sakota was dead. For Yehonala it may have been a wonderful release from the charade she had lived so long. There need be no more pretence of sharing power with anyone–she was, finally, the undisputed ruler of the Middle Kingdom.

For six years after the death of Sakota, Yehonala enjoyed unfettered freedom as sole Regent. She consolidated her position in 1884 with what can only be described as a purge of any official of influence, leaving herself even more securely anchored to the pinnacle of power. In addition, and in line with her long-term strategy of clan vengeance, she attempted to contrive the final eclipse of the Aisin Gioro.

Prince Kung was the first to go. Yehonala had conceived a life-long hatred for him since, with Sakota, he had engineered the death of her favourite, the eunuch An Te-hai. She also suspected him of intriguing with the Emperor to engineer her own removal. He was removed from office, accused in an Imperial decree of being ‘unduly inflated with his pride of place, displaying nepotism and slothful inefficiency’, charges which, given the corrupt milieu of the court, could have been made to stick to anyone. ‘As a mark of our Imperial clemency,’ the decree continued, ‘we have decided to permit Prince Kung to retain his hereditary Princedom, together with all the emoluments thereof, but he is hereby deprived of all his offices, and the double salary which he has hitherto enjoyed is withdrawn. He is permitted to retire into private life and to attend to the care of his health.’
¹

At the same time, other grandees, all suspected allies of the Prince were removed from the Grand Council: the venerable Grand Secretary, Pao Yun, was retired from public life; Li Hung-tsao (who in 1861 had drafted Emperor Hsien Feng’s valedictory decree at Su Shun’s behest) likewise lost his post but not, as he must have feared, his life; the President of the Board of War, Ching Lien, was removed with the insulting comment that he ‘seems to think that his duties are satisfactorily performed by adherence to a routine of procrastination, the man being devoid of the first elements of knowledge’. Weng T’ung-ho (who earlier had informed Yehonala of Jung Lu’s liaison with one of her husband’s former concubines) was also removed, but as a mark of Imperial favour was permitted to keep his posts on the Board of Works and as tutor to the young Emperor Kuang Hsu.

Despite his reproductive shortcomings, in all other respects Yehonala’s nephew, the Emperor Kuang Hsu, continued to develop normally. By 1887 he had grown into a short, slim energetic young man of seventeen, and had attained the right to govern on his own. Nevertheless, thanks to his quisling father, Prince Ch’un, Yehonala was able to retain the sceptre for a further two years. Prince Ch’un ‘spontaneously’ pleaded with Yehonala to continue her rule, not once, but many times, for Confucian etiquette demanded that the Dowager Empress modestly refuse his entreaties the required number of times before ‘reluctantly’ accepting. Which eventually she did.

In an Imperial edict (undoubtedly dictated at Yehonala’s request), Kuang Hsu declared that when he heard the decree confirming his assumption of power ‘I trembled as though I was in mid-ocean, not knowing where the land might be. But her Imperial Majesty will continue to advise me for a few years in important matters of state...’
²

This brief respite gave Yehonala two additional years of the power she craved. But by 1889, even for so brazen and audacious a spirit, it was simply too embarrassing to continue to openly deny the Emperor his legitimate right to rule and Yehonala announced that she would pass on the reins of power to Kuang Hsu, and retire. The impression was given, especially to Western observers, that Yehonala’s day was done, that the venerable Empress Dowager, now fifty-five, would withdraw from the world and take no more interest in affairs of state. This was emphatically not the case. Her position as elder representative of the Imperial family gave her, in Confucian society, an unassailable dominance: ‘She would have taken precedence of the emperor Kuang-hsu, not merely because she was the mother of his predecessor, but also because she belonged to the senior generation.’
³

Kuang Hsu was required to visit the Empress Mother at least once every five days, and to perform the customary kowtow at each meeting. Often, because of the malice of the eunuch Li Lien-ying (whom Kuang Hsu had ordered beaten years before), the Emperor was kept waiting on his knees for over an hour, at the threshold of his aunt’s palace. But it was not simply symbolical obeisance that was demanded of Kuang Hsu. Yehonala insisted on retaining a controlling interest in most of the important facets of government. She remained privy to all key state documents and memorials, and with characteristic thoroughness she read them all. She may have ceased to concern herself with the day-to-day minutiae of administrative affairs, but no major appointment or decision was ever made without her express approval. With one notable exception, whenever Kuang Hsu eventually decided to dispense with the ‘advice’ of his august aunt, Yehonala was swiftly aware of his plans through her network of spies and eunuchs.

What she did lose by her retirement was some of the outward trappings of power. During her sole Regency, Yehonala had come as close as any woman in Chinese history to ascending to the Dragon Throne. Despite her sex, she had been, in all but name, the Celestial Prince. It was this ceremonial position, rather than any real reduction in power, that she reluctantly relinquished.

But she would not go empty-handed. The Empress Dowager exacted from the nation a fitting retirement present, a reward commensurate with her own opinion of her worth. She required nothing less than the reconstruction of a new Summer Palace where, like the Empress Mother of the renowned Emperor K’ang Hsi, she could pass her leisure hours amid a fairyland of pavilions and verdure. In 1888 a decree, promulgated in the name of the Emperor but in fact authored by Yehonala, had Kuang Hsu apparently stating that he had:

remembered that in the neighbourhood of the Western Park there was a palace...that...only required some restoration to make them fit for use as a place of solace and delight... We conceived the idea of restoring the Ch’ing I Yuan, and conferring upon it the new name of I Ho Yuan (from a sentence in the book of rites meaning ‘to give rest and peace to Heaven-sent old age’).

After the traditional refusals, Yehonala continued the farcical correspondence with herself, finally giving her reluctant acquiescence to the suggestion. Her decree was classical Yehonala, saccharine sincerity, the Western Empress at her most cynical. She knew, she wrote, that:

...the Emperor’s desire to restore the palace in the west springs from a laudable concern for my welfare, and for that reason I cannot bear to meet his well-meaning petition with a blunt refusal. Moreover, the costs of the construction have been provided for out of surplus funds accumulated as a result of rigid economies in the past. The funds under the control of the board of revenue will not be touched, and no harm will be done the national finances.
⁴

It was all pure eyewash. There was no money available to fund the reconstruction of Yehonala’s pleasure garden. Undismayed, with the help of the Grand Eunuch Li Lien-ying, and the acquiescence of the poodle-like Prince Ch’un, Yehonala proceeded to defraud the nation. She mulcted the national purse of around thirty thousand taels, taken principally from the Board of Admiralty, where Prince Ch’un ruled as president. Funds that ought to have been spent on arms and ammunition, on renovating China’s run-down navy, were diverted to refurbish the I Ho Yuan. Marble boats preceded real boats in Yehonala’s priorities.

None of this was particularly unusual in the looking-glass world of the Forbidden City where bribery and peculation constituted normality. All would have gone well had China been, as the Chinese elite still endeavoured to persuade themselves, the centre of the world, secure in its Heaven-bestowed superiority. This was, unfortunately, far from true. To many Chinese, and especially the younger generation, the humiliation of China before the Western Powers was obvious and intolerable. It was whispered that the Emperor, Kuang Hsu was very much enamoured of Western science and institutions, a fact calculated to fill the arch-conservative in Yehonala with both anger and angst.

Her last major act before relinquishing power to her nephew was to organise Kuang Hsu’s marriage. In 1889 a decree announcing the wedding was promulgated. The bride chosen for Kuang Hsu, known at court as Lung Yu (Honorific Abundance), was a twenty-two-year old homely maiden not renowned for her beauty. Kuang Hsu had preferred another, but his choice had been overruled by his imperious aunt. The marriage took place on 26th February 1889, a date deemed auspicious by the court astrologers. It was a sumptuous affair, paid for by ‘voluntary’ donations from the provinces, a goodly proportion of which found its way into the coffers of the Chief Eunuch, Li Lien-ying. The bride was carried from her family home to the Forbidden City in a cunningly wrought litter, carried by sixteen bearers and hung with Imperial yellow silk, on which was embroidered the
fu
ideogram, signifying happiness. The
fu
character was joined and doubled, symbolising to the Chinese ‘conjugal fidelity’. A gaggle of yellow-robed eunuchs surrounded the palanquin, flanked on each side by mounted troops of the Imperial Guard. Those responsible for negotiating the marriage (with the exception of Yehonala herself) walked at the head of the gorgeous procession, the route of which had been strewn with yellow sand. They were followed by musicians and scores of attendants dressed in magnificent blood-red robes, the huge Chinese lanterns or magnificent embroidered umbrellas they carried swaying like multi-coloured clouds above the procession. The Book and the Seal of the bride-Empress followed, carried with all due pomp and ceremony, then line upon line of attendants bearing costly gifts. More attendants brought up the rear, each holding aloft multi-coloured standards and pennants, many showing the Dragon and the Phoenix (symbols of Emperor and Empress) entwined in a loving embrace.

This gorgeous procession was seen by none of the inhabitants of Beijing. Troops of the eight Manchu banner regiments lined the processional course; they had enforced the closure of all houses, the shuttering of all windows, and the entire route had been screened with blue cloth to prevent the procession’s violation by the gaze of the ‘stupid people’. Despite dire penalties, many ordinary folk peered through cracks, or poked holes through the screens, and counted themselves blessed to catch a glimpse of this fabled event–which was, of course, a major reason for staging the ceremony. The Manchu were experts in public relations, past masters at maintaining and enhancing the fragile mystique of royalty.

As with most things contrived by his aunt during Kuang Hsu’s sombre existence, this magnificent ceremony, and the marriage itself, had less to do with the Emperor’s happiness than with keeping a close watch on his activities and ensuring his aunt’s continued survival at the pinnacle of power. His bride had been chosen years before by Kuang Hsu’s shrewd and calculating aunt; she was the daughter of Yehonala’s brother, the Duke of Chow (brother also to the mother of Kuang Hsu), and this union of first cousins served to consolidate the power of the Yeho-Nala clan at court. It also answered another purpose. Yehonala knew that the ‘happy couple’ had nothing in common. They grew to dislike each other intensely; they had frequent quarrels after their marriage, in which Kuang Hsu was often bested by his wife, who evidently inherited some of Yehonala’s iron will and would never give way even when arguing with the Son of Heaven himself. This sorted well with Yehonala’s plans. She remembered how formidable had been the alliance of Tung Chih and his bride A-lu-te, and wanted at all costs to avoid history repeating itself. With Kuang Hsu and Lung Yu at daggers drawn, it was easy to persuade the Emperor’s wife to keep a close watch on the Emperor.

It was an astute move. The young Emperor was becoming more and more convinced that China’s only hope of salvation lay in learning from and emulating the science and technology of those same Western Powers that were squeezing the Middle Kingdom from all sides. This, he knew, meant overturning the old order within the Middle Kingdom, meant sweeping away reactionary forces who could not bring themselves to acknowledge ‘barbarian’ superiority in any field. If these anti-progressive elements included his redoubtable aunt, then Kuang Hsu had determined that she too would have to go. The disastrous events of the coming decade would serve only to confirm Kuang Hsu in this judgement and to set him on a course that was ultimately to prove disastrous both for himself and for China.