Green Phoenix

by Poon, Alice;

  She recalled the secret that Sumalagu had previously divulged to her, how Dorgon had been injured in the Battle of Songshan, three years after Shunzhi’s birth an injury that had made him permanently sterile. It was that revelation which had removed her hesitation about marrying Dorgon. Being the mother of the Emperor, she could not and would not bring shame on Fulin by bearing Dorgon’s child. She couldn’t help feeling ashamed of her calculating approach, though. But this was one secret that she didn’t think prudent to share with Little Jade.

  Little Jade was taken aback by Bumbutai’s words. She had always imagined Bumbutai to be the most fortunate woman on earth, possessed of the all-consuming love of the two most valiant Manchu Princes in history.

  “I just don’t understand why Dorgon keeps collecting more women when he already has a slew of exquisite beauties pining to serve him at home,” Little Jade said in a low voice, afraid of being overheard criticizing her husband. “I’m sure I’m not the only one that he never deigns to touch.”

  “Perhaps that’s a way of creating a semblance of virility,” Bumbutai suggested. “He probably believes that virility is equal to power. But the irony is that the obsession with power has drained him mentally, and his body in turn has weakened due to too much stress. As a man’s health deteriorates, he can become paranoid and feel even more compelled to prove his potency. So amassing women has become Dorgon’s way of combating his own fear. He just can’t help himself.”

  Lately he had not been near her bed chamber either.

  “That may be true too, Bumbutai. But I think the main reason for his disinterest in his women is that he doesn’t feel any love for any of them. I believe that in his heart, there has always been just one single woman.”

  “In my view, Little Jade, you deserve Dorgon’s love more than anyone else.” Bumbutai tried to divert Little Jade’s focus, “You give of yourself to him so selflessly that it puts me to shame. But my destiny was written at birth. Mongolian Princesses have only one purpose in life, and that is to serve the interests of their clan and their tribe. Little Jade, I’m so looking forward to the next life, because I believe only there can couples share pure love, like Blue Grey Wolf and Beautiful Red Doe do.”

  Bumbutai sighed. She had bared her soul to her innocent half-sister, who appeared baffled by what she heard.

  “But aren’t you and Dorgon already like Blue Grey Wolf and Beautiful Red Doe now?”

  “I wish we were. What I owe him, I can only repay in my next life.”

  “If you were to choose to save either one of Fulin and Dorgon from death, whom would you choose?”

  Bumbutai was stumped by this piquant question coming from one apparently so naïve. Her brow wrinkled into a frown and after a short pause, she gave an answer of which she herself seemed unconvinced:

  “I think I would be left with no choice but to save Fulin, for the Borjigits’ and Khorchin Mongols’ sake.”

  As they talked, they were making their way slowly through the verdant valley. All varieties of trees abounded – elms, maples, oaks, magnolias, birches, pines, poplars and mulberry trees. In the shady depths of these sprawling lowlands, azure-winged magpies sang with abandon and iridescent butterflies danced in ethereal grace. The serene silence was otherwise only disturbed by the curious chirps of cicadas and the sleepy croaks of frogs. These little creatures liked the shades and had a habit of hiding in the marshes where the sun could not cleave through the thick foliage.

  As they threaded their way through drier patches, the sun’s gentle rays traversed the swaying boughs and threw a soft filtered light on their complexions, making both of them look radiant and young. The refreshing scent of pine mixed with subtle flowery fragrances was as inebriating as a draft of fine wine. The younger woman’s face, however, was clouded by a sickly tinge that not even the mellow light could gloss over.

  A sudden gust of cool wind caught Little Jade off guard and she started coughing. Bumbutai untied the cord of her cape and put it over Little Jade’s shoulders. When her cough had eased somewhat, Little Jade stretched out her hand to hold Bumbutai’s firmly. They strolled slowly back upstream along the riverbank and chose a smooth rock on which to sit. Gazing at the river, they caught sight of a school of grey carp slithering along with the current. On the opposite bank, two forest wardens were throwing fishing lines into the water.

  “I think I am not far from my end,” Little Jade said wistfully as she stared at the vibrant shoal. “I’m not afraid of dying. Humans or fish, we all come to our own end somehow, sooner or later. But I worry about Dorgon. He’s such a poor solitary soul.”

  “Oh Little Jade, don’t say that. You only have to take better care of your health, that’s all, and everything is going to be fine. As for Dorgon, you know that together we shall keep him in good shape.”

  “Of course we shall, Bumbutai. I’m so silly. Please don’t mind me.”

  The two sisters sat in silence for a while longer, watching the wardens catching their dinner.

  “We should be riding back before it gets dark. You need to rest up,” Bumbutai said soothingly.

  The landscape was now washed in the oblique rays of the sinking orange globe which spread a golden gauze on the water. Astride their mounts, the two sisters cantered back to their separate homes in the Imperial City.

  A couple of months later, Little Jade passed away from a bout of smallpox. As much as Dorgon had kept a cool distance from his first wife, he had been far more affected than he let on by her unalloyed devotion to him. On her death, he fell into another prolonged fit of depression, having barely recovered from the loss of Dodo.

  Bumbutai’s heart ached when she saw his face knotted in pain. It reminded her of the young angry lad in the Throne Hall in Mukden when he had heard of his mother’s forced suicide. He was now in such a sorry state that she was really worried and she took it upon herself to take personal care of him, nursing him day and night at his bedside for three months.

  One day during his recuperation, Dorgon motioned for her to sit on his bed and he clasped her hand tightly in his.

  “I always knew you were right,” he said. “You can conquer on horseback, but can never rule on horseback. I was only trying to finish what we had started. As soon as the south is under our control, that will be the day for us to put away our weapons and let peace and order take hold.” He paused. “You know that there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, right? You are my sweet green phoenix.”

  She scanned his stolid pale face for a long while. The contours still outlined a proud visage, although weariness had scored his brow. When she peered deeper into his brooding eyes, she seemed to perceive the young lad in him anew, a glimpse of unguarded tenderness. She leaned over and kissed him passionately on the lips, saying repeatedly: “I love you, Dorgon, so much.”

  She prayed hard that it was not too late to mend the damages already inflicted on the Hans.

  Dorgon felt he owed Little Jade a debt of gratitude. As soon as he was well enough to go back to his duties, he issued an edict granting her a posthumous title of “First Consort” with a prefix of four bestowed characters, in the same way Hong Taiji had honored Harjol. As his health improved, he resumed his old habit of going on regular hunting trips, now always taking with him the gyrfalcon that Little Jade had personally trained.

  In the summer of the seventh year of Shunzhi’s reign, a Korean foreign minister came to pay obeisance to the Prince Regent and submitted a request for financial assistance for the purpose of building an extensive wall of defense on Korea’s borders. Dorgon seized the opportunity to strike a bargain. In exchange for granting loans to the Korean vassal king, he demanded that his daughter Princess Yi Ae-suk be given to him in marriage. He was thinking that the Princess could be held as hostage against any possible disloyalty on the part of the new tributary state.

  On top of that, he imposed an additional condition that Korea should h
old a beauty contest to select a couple of the most beautiful virgins and offer them to him as concubines. The condition was meant as a test of the Korean court’s loyalty to the Qing. He was aware that Korean society had long held Manchu culture in contempt, regarding it as barbaric and inferior to the Han Chinese culture. But the Korea foreign minister felt he could not return home empty-handed and he finally agreed to Dorgon’s terms.

  It was arranged for Dorgon and his hunting entourage to meet Princess Yi and the two newly-selected Korean beauties in the autumn at the Mukden Imperial Palaces, which now served as an Imperial Retreat for the Aisin Gioro clan. Dorgon sent orders for the Emperor’s Residence, Yongfu Palace and some of the service buildings to be made ready for temporary use.

  King Injo, who had been humiliated in public by Hong Taiji, was a Ming loyalist and was a fervent believer in Confucian thinking and values. When the Korean Crown Prince dared to contradict him by expressing his love of European culture and support for the Manchu’s Qing Dynasty, King Injo was so incensed that he picked up an ink slab from his writing table and smashed his son’s skull with it, killing him instantly. He then disposed of the body by burying it in the imperial garden. The Crown Prince’s wife harbored suspicions about her husband’s disappearance. When she started to ask questions around Court, King Injo became paranoid and ordered for her to be executed.

  The tyrannical King then fell seriously ill and died in 1649. He was succeeded by King Hyojong who was prudent enough to start extending a friendly hand to the Qing Empire, at least in gesture.

  When King Hyojong learned about Dorgon’s terms for granting the building loan, an idea dawned on him. He thought that if Princess Yi could be impregnated by a Korean prince’s seed before she was sent to the Qing Prince Regent, then any male heir thus “produced” would carry Korean royal blood. There was a chance that Dorgon’s heir might accede to the Qing throne. If that happened, Korea would be able to rule the Qing Empire without shedding one drop of blood. It was a bet that seemed worth taking. What King Hyojong could never have guessed was that Dorgon was sterile and any child that the Korean Princess might carry after bedding him would expose the ploy.

  King Hyojong talked his idea over with his ministers and they applauded their King’s clever idea as they were supposed to. As planned, a young and robust royal prince deflowered Princess Yi a couple of months before her departure for Mukden. After a Court physician verified that she was with child, she was sent forth with emissaries and the two Korean beauty contest winners.

  Seventeen

  Upon arrival at the Imperial Palaces at Mukden, Dorgon took a tour around the Complex in a nostalgic mood. The empty and cobweb-infested Dazheng Hall looked dreary and maudlin. Trees in the square were shedding big teardrops of dead leaves, which echoed the gloominess. The forlorn surroundings plunged him into the abyss of his painful past.

  He had been the golden boy of Nurhaci and Lady Abahai, destined for the throne, and he had won the innocent love of a sparkling Mongolian Princess. But Hong Taiji had brutally murdered his mother and had schemed to snatch the throne and the love of his life from him. True, his mother’s death had been avenged. But what about the Qing throne? What about Bumbutai? The Empire should have belonged to him and his descendants! He had sweated in battle more than anyone else in the clan. He and Bumbutai should have had a blissful union and the joy of breeding and raising an heir – his heir. A spasm of agony surged through him and he stomped away from the ghostly hall.

  His wandering legs took him to a stop at the garden gate of the Yongfu Palace, and he went inside and sat on the stone bench underneath one of the two weeping willows. He fell into a trance and went down memory lane to the time when he had first laid eyes on the girl Bumbutai. Fumbling in the pockets of his surcoat, he took out a pink package, untied the purple ribbon knot and unfolded a letter with fraying edges, exposing a lock of hair. He held the hair in one hand and the letter in the other, reading it hungrily as if he wanted to devour every word in it. Then he carefully folded it up, putting the lock of hair back inside, wrapped it up in the pink silk kerchief and tied the package neatly again. Unaware of what he was doing, he fingered the blue swallow embroidery, and his eyes turned misty.

  Then his thoughts leapt to the time Bumbutai had danced a butterfly dance for him right inside this Palace. His pulse raced as he vicariously relived that night of torrid passion. Every fiber in her had yearned for him. How he had hungered for her too.

  In a flash, the image of Fulin appeared to him, twisting and twirling like a vicious tsunami, and tore to shreds the raft of daydreams to which was tied his very existence. His face wrenched itself into a scowl. Fraught with despair, he silently moaned as he fumbled his way out of the garden.

  The following day, Princess Yi and her entourage arrived at the Imperial Palaces. The noblewoman and the other two Korean beauties settled in the Yongfu Palace, as previously arranged. The wedding was to be held the next day at the Emperor’s Residence main hall. Dorgon had deliberately chosen the Mukden Palaces to hold this wedding, as he felt that he could really feel and act like an emperor here, away from the Qing Court in Beijing and all its cumbersome protocol. Also, he would not be under Bumbutai’s watchful scrutiny.

  He had heard of Korean women’s submissiveness to men and was intent on them pandering to his whims. At the wedding feast, he bade his servants serve jug after jug of mare’s milk wine to all his guards and soldiers and the Korean male guests, and a slew of the most sumptuous dishes. Half way through the drinking and eating, on his clap of hands, a group of scantily clad dancers including the Korean women came into the hall to perform a ribbon dance.

  When the dancing was over, the half-nude dancers were made to sit with the male guests and feed them like infants. The sodden men became more and more rowdy and abandoned themselves to debauchery.

  It was well past midnight when the feast finally came to an end. Struck by an onslaught of ennui, Dorgon had earlier left the scene, his initial interest in the Korean girls gone. Before leaving, he had whispered to a young Border White bannerman that he could enjoy Princess Yi for the night.

  The Princess and the two other Korean women were escorted back to Yongfu Palace by two of Dorgon’s bodyguards, who were rewarded with a night with the two courtesans.

  Princess Yi had never expected to be treated with such degradation, although she was not proud of what her countrymen had done to her either. The next morning, exhausted from crying, she sat alone on her bed after the bannerman had left. However, she did feel a bit relieved now, because even when her pregnancy became known, her hosts would only believe the child to be by the bannerman and would never suspect it to have a Korean father. She was only glad that she didn’t have to bed Dorgon, who she now came to suspect was impotent. But if her child turned out to be a boy, she would still have some difficult explaining to do to her Korean king. She was thus praying with all her heart that the child she was carrying was a girl. Then no one would care to ask any questions.

  When Dorgon got tired of Mukden, he took Princess Yi and the two Korean courtesans back to his Mansion in Beijng. He bestowed the title of primary spouse on Princess Yi and made the other two his concubines. Then he never set eyes on them again.

  Around this time, in Guangdong Province far to the south, another Ming defector and self-seeker called Shang Kexi committed the same odious crime as Li Chengdong against his fellow Hans. Shang led a Han Chinese Border Blue Banner army to lay siege to the city of Guangzhou in order to enforce the shaved-head order. Historically, the southerners in the coastal regions had always been obstinate opponents of despotic rule, perhaps due to their long contact with the outside world through trade. The siege lasted for ten months before the town’s defense finally began to crumble.

  In the eleventh month, the Qing army used a combination of Dutch cannons and an escalade invasion technique to breach Guangzhou’s fortress towers and ramparts. Once the incursion
started, Shang gave his soldiers explicit permission to mass rape the women as a reward for their ten-month hardship during the siege. He also encouraged them to loot the houses and keep whatever valuables they could find. Lastly, he ordered them to “cleanse” the town by killing as many males as they could, including children.

  The bedlam of blood-curdling shrieks grated the air like the tortured wail of ghosts in every corner of the town. The soldiers raped and killed until utter exhaustion blunted their beastly instincts. Corpses piled up in columns as high as the houses and the streets were flooded in a crimson red. The massacre lasted eleven days and resulted in the deaths of as many as a hundred thousand.

  After Guangzhou’s defeat, only small groups of loyal Ming scholars survived and these went underground to live as hermits. For his atrocious treatment of his fellow Hans, turncoat Shang gained a fiefdom in Guangdong and was installed as provincial governor.

  By this time, the Manchu conquest of China was almost complete except for sporadic small-scale uprisings here and there. Bumbutai’s unceasing pleas at last convinced Dorgon to send Hong Chengchou, the favorite Han general of Hong Taiji, as the Regent’s envoy to pacify the residents of southern China. Hong brought relief funds to help them rebuild their lives, and clamped down on the abuses of power by self-seekers like Li Chengdong and Shang Kexi. He was empowered to execute plunderers and rapists on the spot. This eventually brought back order of some sort, but such peace would prove to be short-lived. Shang Kexi’s son would later attempt to rebel in concert with Wu Sangui against the Manchu’s Qing Empire during the next Emperor’s reign.

  Following the death of Little Jade, Bumbutai had for several months wallowed in melancholy. She missed Fulin terribly, as Dorgon had forbidden her from visiting the boy. He had sent a middle-aged palace maid named Ah Lan to keep a watchful eye on her And Bumbutai now had no one to talk to except Siu Mui. She greatly regretted having given Siu Fa to Hong Taiji, because under the Inner Court rules, as a childless widowed Consort, Siu Fa had to live in seclusion in the Imperial retreat house until death. She only hoped one day she would be in a position to rescue Siu Fa from that ghastly place, where its inhabitants were treated like lepers.