Katharine Carl’s visit to Peking in 1903 was for business as much as for pleasure. She had been hired to paint a portrait of the Dowager Empress Cixi, to be displayed at the world fair the following year in St Louis, Missouri. Carl’s first taste of the life of the Chinese imperial court came not in the Forbidden City, but in the Summer Palace, a few miles to the west:
After readjusting ourselves in the waiting-room, we were met, when we came out, by the Chief Eunuch of the palace, who conducted us to the red-covered Palace chairs, each carried by six men. They bore us past the Imperial Gateway (used only for their Majesties), through a door of entrance at the left, when we were within one of the sacred precincts of one of the residences of the Son of Heaven and within the walls of the favorite palace of the Empress Dowager! Before we could take in our surroundings, we had been rapidly carried through various courts and gardens, and had come at last to a larger quadrangular court, filled with pots of rare blooming plants and many beautiful growing shrubs. Here the bearers put down our chairs; we descended and walked through the court, preceded and followed by a number of eunuchs. The great plate-glass doors of the Palace in front of us, blazing with the huge red character ‘Sho’ (longevity) were swung noiselessly back, and we were at last within the Throne-room of Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Dowager of China!4
After an initial interview, during which the Empress dictated the terms on which her portrait was to be painted, Cixi retired to change, returning ‘in a gown of Imperial yellow, brocaded in the wistaria vine in realistic colors and richly embroidered with pearls’. Her nails were worn long, as was the fashion, with a nail protector made of jade on one hand and one of gold, set with rubies and pearls, on the other. ‘My heart trembled!’ confided Carl, ‘the inscrutable eyes of the wonderful woman I was about to paint, fixed piercingly upon me, were also disconcerting’. Just then, the clocks in the throne-room, all eighty-five of them, began to strike eleven: ‘the auspicious moment had come! I raised my charcoal and put the first stroke upon the canvas of the first portrait that had ever been painted of the Empress Dowager of Great China’.5
Carl had good reason to tremble. The Dowager Empress Cixi was a formidable force. She had ruled China, in effect, for forty years. In the 1860s and 1870s she ruled as regent for her son Emperor Tongzhi. When he died, Cixi broke with Manchu tradition and engineered the appointment of her three-year-old nephew Guangxu as Emperor, allowing her to keep the reins of power firmly in her own hands until he reached his majority. When he did, and attempted to break from Cixi through a slew of Western reforms introduced in 1898, the wily Dowager Empress simply had him sidelined, reasserting her power from behind the throne once again.
But it was not just that Cixi had a reputation as a ruthless Machiavellian operator. She also had a reputation for hating foreigners, the result of the so-called Boxer Rebellion of 1900. When Katharine Carl began her portrait in 1903, the massacres of foreigners which the Boxer Rebellion had brought about – and the disastrous consequences for China – were fresh in Western and Chinese memories. Even ten years later, in 1913, the events of that rebellion and its aftermath would be no more distant than the events of 9/11 are today, a vivid and inescapable backdrop to mutual perceptions and misperceptions.
The origins of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 were hazy, starting with peasant desperation at a succession of floods and droughts in Shandong province, but steadily growing into a wider rebellion against all things foreign. The rebellion was led loosely by the Society of Righteous Harmony, a cultish, rag-tag bunch of desperadoes who promoted a belief in their own invincibility and who provided an anti-foreign focus for all sorts of unconnected grievances. In the West this group came to be known as the Boxers, in reference to their fondness for martial arts. In the first months of 1900 word trickled in to Peking from missionaries in rural China, reporting ugly attacks against all manifestations of the West, particularly Chinese converts to Christianity, who the Boxers viewed as having disturbed the natural order of the Chinese countryside by adopting Western religious practices. Bishop Favier, the man whose book on Peking included delicate renditions of the finer things in Chinese civilisation – exquisite porcelain, musical instruments, fine lanterns, elaborate silks – was under no illusions as to the cruelty and crudeness of Chinese mob violence, or the possible consequences should the Boxers reach Peking.6 Most foreigners were more sanguine – surely Cixi would quell the violence if it were ever to approach the capital?
In the event, the Dowager Empress did exactly the opposite. She was relieved that the Boxers had focused their anger on foreigners rather than on the Qing dynasty and she was angered that Western forces had seen fit to capture a major Qing fortress at Dagu in order, they claimed, to be better able to protect foreign interests in uncertain times. When the Boxers arrived in Peking in June 1900, rather than attempting to disarm them or dissuade them from attacking Western interests, Cixi issued an ultimatum to the foreign legations to leave by 4 p.m. the next day – or face the consequences. A peasant revolt had become an imperially sanctioned national uprising. The telegraph lines with the outside world cut, foreign legations now faced a dreadful choice: either to take their chances in the open countryside, attempting to reach the coast by God only knows what means, and quite possibly against a swarm of Boxer rebels, or to try their luck in defending the legation quarter itself, with limited weapons – pistols, a few machine guns, a single artillery piece – against the Boxers, and perhaps against the army of the Dowager Empress herself.
After the whole thing was over, it was easy to dismiss the first course of action, and to present the second choice above all in moral terms. ‘Picture to yourself what this convoy would be crawling out of giant Peking [had they chosen the first option]’, wrote Bertram Lenox Simpson, a Briton working for the Customs Office in China:
… we would be a thousand white people with a vast trail of native Christians following us and calling on us not to abandon them and their children. Do you think we could run ahead, while a cowardly massacre by Boxers and savage soldiery was hourly thinning out the stragglers and defenceless people in the rear? Never!7
In reality, the calculation was as much one of self-preservation as any desire to protect Chinese Christians. Inside the legation, the foreigners at least had the hope that relief troops – called for before the telegraph wires were cut – would shortly arrive. Outside the legation, who knew what awaited them?
And so, against the initial advice of the diplomatic heads of the foreign legations themselves, the die was cast. As in any conflict, the months that followed saw both heroics – those of Japanese Colonel Shiba were particularly remarked upon – and abject fear in the face of the ever-present threat that the foreign quarter would be overrun, with torture and slow death the likely result.8 In London the newspapers prepared, and prematurely published, the obituaries of the leading figures of the foreign quarter. As it was, the siege saw the eleven nationalities of the quarter pull together remarkably well, demonstrating ingenuity and resilience. Anything suitable was melted down to make bullets, an ancient cannon found in an antique shop was dusted off and made serviceable, the foreign quarter’s mules and horses were swiftly sacrificed for human consumption – a bounty in which the Chinese Christians in the foreign quarter did not share – and the latest fashions were torn apart to make sandbags, or dressings for wounds.
At one point in mid July an informal ceasefire seemed to be taking hold, largely because different factions around the Dowager Empress were beginning to question the wisdom of taking on, in effect, the whole world in microcosm. By the end of July, however, any semblance of a ceasefire had broken down. Fighting resumed, with potshots taken on both sides; no one in the foreign quarter knew when or where there might be another assault, perhaps one which they would be unable to repel.
However, the lull in fighting in the middle of the month had allowed a few messages to reach the besieged Westerners: they now knew that a relief force was being organised. By early August that
force, 20,000 strong, was on its way to Peking. Under the ultimate command of a Prussian Field-Marshal, in honour of the fact that the first European killed in Peking during the rebellion had been the German legate Baron von Ketteler, the international force was made up of Japanese, German, American, Italian, French, Russian and British contingents. Much to the annoyance of the other nationalities it was the British-officered troops from the Indian Raj who made it first into Peking, turbaned Sikhs greeted wildly by the remaining foreign population. Simpson recalled the moment he realised what was happening, clambering over a wall and being met with ‘the smell of another world … the smell of India!’9 Victory had been snatched from the jaws of defeat, Western fortitude had triumphed in the face of adversity; no wonder the Boxer Rebellion made for such good headlines in European and American newspapers, encouraging books, memoirs and even the odd film.
The siege was broken, and the carnage around it revealed. Walking through Peking a few days later, British writer Henry Savage Landor came across a sobbing mother caressing the face of her son, most likely killed by a Western artillery shell, imploring him to answer her. Landor saw a naked eunuch hanging from a beam, the body covered with the marks of torture. In a courtyard he came across a collection of severed heads. Further on, in an alleyway, he found three adults and three children strung up against a wall, strangled. ‘The light was not propitious for a snapshot, as the bodies were in shadow’, he wrote coldly.10 But he took a picture all the same. ‘Owing to the state of decomposition of the corpses’, he continued, ‘I did not give it a very long exposure’.
The situation was similar in other parts of China, where Boxers had killed Chinese Christians, and where columns of foreign troops had inflicted their own reprisals – the Russians around Manchuria, the British and Germans around Tianjin. ‘Wield your weapons so that for a thousand years hereafter no Chinese will dare look askance at a German’, Kaiser Wilhelm had exhorted German soldiers as they embarked for China earlier that year.11 They took him at his word. The recently signed Hague Convention, which established the laws of war, was not considered applicable. As far as most Westerners were concerned, it was a case of putting down a semi-colonial revolt, rather than a war between civilised nations.
Taking on the persona of ‘John Chinaman’, the British pacifist philosopher Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson put the Chinese case in the pages of the Saturday Review. The Boxers might be ‘barbarous and cruel’, he wrote, but what of the troops of the West, the troops of Christendom?
Ask the once fertile land from Peking to the coast; ask the corpses of murdered men and outraged women and children; ask the innocent mingled indiscriminately with the guilty; ask the Christ the lover of men, whom you profess to serve, to judge between us who rose in mad despair to save our country and you who, avenging crime with crime, did not pause to reflect that the crime you avenged was the fruit of your own inequity.12
It was an appeal unlikely to touch many hearts in London, or San Francisco, or Berlin. There, tales of Boxer barbarity reached Western audiences who were already accustomed to the notion of race war – a book on the subject was written in 1887 by the founder of the Australian Labour Federation – and who associated their own Chinatowns with disease, drugs and crime, dominated by opium dens, triads and fallen white women.13 (As early as the 1880s the alleged threat to the United States posed by the mores and habits of the domestic Chinese population led to the exclusion of Chinese from US citizenship.) As always, it was easier to have one’s prejudices confirmed than to have them challenged.
US Marines in Peking after the international intervention against the Boxer Rebellion, 1901.
After the violence in Peking, humiliation followed. The Dowager Empress Cixi had fled to Xian. Foreign troops set themselves up in the Chinese capital. The Forbidden City – which foreign troops had left alone in 1860 at the end of the Second Opium War – became a tourist attraction. As with the bedroom of the Sultan at Yildiz palace in Constantinople a few years later, the bedchambers of the Emperor were of particular interest. The ubiquitous Pierre Loti, who swept into Peking with the French marines, noted a piano which the Emperor was said to be learning to play, a music box playing Chinese tunes, and a silk mattress of imperial yellow, still impressed with the shape of the imperial body. ‘What disarray there must have been in his unfathomable little mind’, Loti pondered:
… the triple-walled palace violated even unto its innermost secrets; himself, the son of Heaven, torn from the home where twenty generations of his ancestors lived inaccessible; him, forced to flee and, in flight, to allow himself to be seen [by commoners] … even to implore, and to have to wait! …14
As Loti left, he heard a cheerful French voice behind him in the thick accent of rural Gascony: ‘Well, I’m telling you mate, now we can say we’ve had a roll in the bed of the Emperor of China!’ Looting was common, with treasures stuffed into the greatcoats and knapsacks of individual soldiers – or carted off as the spoils of war to museums in Paris and Berlin.
Despite an injunction against the presence of journalists, Henry Savage Landor managed to talk his way into attending the allied victory parade in the Forbidden City itself, in the company of the Russian General Linievitch. (As it turned out, he discovered that he was not the only journalist to have slipped through: the long-time Australian correspondent for The Times of London, George Ernest Morrison, was already there.) The British artillery fired a twenty-one gun salute and, in Landor Savage’s words: ‘the spell was broken. The deed was done. What Celestials had kept sacred for 500 years, foreign devils desecrated in two seconds’. As he left he noted the demeanour of the Chinese: ‘although apparently submissive, even servile, any observant person could note on their stolid faces an expression of hatred and contempt’. This was not a slight which would easily be forgotten. A year or so later, when the Forbidden City was turned over to the Dowager Empress again, the final terms of China’s humiliation were set out in the Boxer Convention: a punishing indemnity which was expected to be paid off in 1940, the erection of monuments to the Western dead, permission for the foreign quarter in Peking to have a permanent international force of soldiers guarding it, and a ban on the import of arms to China. In 1903, a memorial arch to Baron von Ketteler was inaugurated in Peking with a march-past by German soldiers.
No wonder, Katharine Carl reflected, that the Empress Dowager had put off coming back to the Forbidden Palace in Peking until the last possible moment, waiting until even the permanently stoked furnaces under the Summer Palace could no longer keep it warm enough to live in: if the Forbidden City was the most hallowed ground in China, and the formal seat of the Manchus, it was now also a tarnished symbol of a tarnished dynasty.
How to overcome China’s weakness, so painfully revealed in decades of foreign depredations and now with foreign soldiers having breached the Forbidden City itself?
In the same year that Carl was in Peking, Liang Qichao, who had been an adviser to Emperor Guangxu during his ill-fated reform drive of 1898, was in North America. Like an increasing number of reform-minded Chinese, Qichao travelled abroad – and drew inspiration from what he saw and read there. Yan Fu, the man who translated the works of Thomas Huxley into Chinese – and who had also translated Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and works by John Stuart Mill – had spent time in England as a young man at the Greenwich naval college in London. Sun Yat-Sen, who was one of the leading figures in the opposition to the Qing dynasty and was the Provisional President of the Chinese Republic in 1912, had grown up in Hawaii, was trained as a doctor in Hong Kong and travelled frequently to Japan, the United States and Canada as well as Europe (where he liked to spend time in the British Library, much as Karl Marx had done a few decades previously).
Like Yan Fu and Sun Yat-Sen, Liang Qichao believed that in order to understand China’s weaknesses and to prepare the ground for Chinese renovation it was imperative to look beyond the borders of China itself. In New York he wangled a brief appointment with John Pierpont Morgan, who offe
red him the following piece of sterling advice: ‘the outcome of any venture depends on preparations made ahead of time’. At the University of Chicago, he marvelled at the effectiveness of the honour system in operation at the university’s library.
Even relatively minor comparisons between China and the West might carry wider meanings. Qichao noted that though Chinese shops were open almost constantly and American shops were closed on a Sunday, American shop-owners were richer.15 He concluded the importance of resting every seventh day. Whereas any gathering of more than a hundred Chinese was accompanied by noise – ‘the most frequent is coughing, next comes yawning, sneezing, and blowing the nose’ – American theatre or concert audiences were silent. Whereas Chinese spoke loudly, and interrupted each other constantly, Americans adjusted their speech to their surroundings and interrupted rarely. Qichao’s observations even went as far as to note the differences between Western and Chinese ways of walking:
When Westerners walk, their bodies are erect and their heads up. We Chinese bow at one command, stoop at a second, and prostrate ourselves at a third. The comparison should make us ashamed. When Westerns walk their steps are always hurried, one look and you know that the city is full of people with business to do, as though they cannot get everything done. The Chinese on the other hand walk leisurely and elegantly, full of pomp and ritual – they are truly ridiculous … Westerns walk together like a formation of geese; Chinese are like scattered ducks.16
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