The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  I must assume that my speaking so frankly does not shock you. I cannot know when you will receive this letter but, as I have said, I hope that it will be in a more enlightened age than that of my own. It is my fervent desire that you should understand me, and if that proves impossible, at least to forgive me.

  But fond memories of the lash are neither here nor there. As the great Ming novelists were wont to say when running into a narrative cul-de-sac, or when an unspooling thread of a tangential story threatened to unravel the weave of plot, “Of this we shall speak no more.”

  I would prefer not to tarry here, in this place and this life, any longer than is necessary to convey this, my true and secret history, to you. Of course, one cannot time one’s departure from life as though one were an actor on a stage. These decisions are in the hands of a merciful God, whose consolations I have sought of late. My memories span continents and eras, and they are infused with incense and osmanthus. (Oh, Cassia Flower! His perfect beauty was itself a most intoxicating perfume.) They are also pricked through with the slings and arrows I have been forced to endure. Without wanting to rehearse all of them – for that should take another lifetime – I would like to clear the air on some of the more outstanding calumnies that have attached to my name, for fear that you may have been misled by tattle.

  Whilst still at Merton College, for example, I was frightfully embarrassed when the actress Ellen Terry, whom I adored, took it upon herself to return my heartfelt gift of a diamond-studded tiara (that in truth had not half her own dazzle!) after various creditors of mine claimed they had lent me the money to buy it and now needed to be repaid.

  I confess that I have never taken to accounting as to language. For all my efforts at honest business, I share with many members of my class that cheerful disposition towards money that can, alas, so easily lead one into debt or – as has been so often the case with me – a genteel poverty. In later years, my natural generosity led me to bestow many gifts of rare manuscripts and precious books to the Bodleian. Had I sold them, I could easily have lifted my fortunes. And yet so-called scholars question their authenticity and petty men use past debts and present doubts to sully my good name. To quote one of the Chinese language’s many expressive sayings, t’iao chin huang ho ye hsi bu ch’ing , it is like jumping into the Yellow River – one can never come out clean. But I have never set out purposefully to be a misdemeanant.

  Without going into unnecessary detail, I shall not deny that thanks to my naturally trusting soul and scholarly naivety (for what, after all, is a man of books to know of the treacherous world of commerce?), I have often been vulnerable to misuse by rapacious middlemen and so-called “partners”. Lady Luck, capricious creature that she is, has not always been on my side either. And so I have left a regrettable trail of bad debts, infamy and misunderstanding wherever I’ve travelled in this wide world, and I have travelled widely and lived fully. I assure you that in my intentions I have ever been honourable.

  I am also, I concede, something of a coward. When in trouble, I find myself beset by illness and humours that mandate a retreat from the world. Whilst even I suspect that some of these might be psychosomatic in origin (I admit to some hypochondriac tendencies), I assure you that the suffering is avowedly most real. On the other hand, for the record, I didn’t run away to America after Oxford to escape my creditors, including those who claimed they had helped me in my donation to Oscar Wilde’s defence fund (dear Oscar, who once praised my “charming tool”!), and much less was I “sent away” to America due to “madness”. No.

  I travelled there voluntarily in the company of Lord Montagu, who insisted on my presence, and paid for our first-class passage across the Atlantic. Lord Montagu was a man of violent and powerful carnality, whom I loved passionately at the time and who loved me as well. It was not politic to speak of it then, of course, and so rumours naturally filled the seemingly unaccountable void. As I have written in my memoirs, one cannot live a quiet, hidden life without making enemies.

  But one must learn to view these things lightly. As Yehonala, the All-Nourishing, Perfect, Worshipful and Exalted Empress Dowager Cixi once remarked to me in the silken languor that followed our lovemaking, life is but “a mirage and a sensual delusion like the morning dew or the evening glow”. My Empress lover, she who allowed me to slip behind those forbidden walls and taste the true exotic, has been gone for nigh forty years, and yet I only need close my eyes to see her face, as lovely as any maiden’s. I see in my mind’s eye, as though they were before me now, the great lacquered wings of her hair as glossy as the imperial brocades that so readily slipped from her slim shoulders. Even at her great age, her skin was as lustrous and smooth as the pearls adorning her neck, and her eyes as luminous as the skies over Peking in autumn. I can hear her, teasing me in that high imperious voice: “Foolish boy. My very own devil-man.”

  Her Majesty had the most delicate musk you can imagine, enhanced by daily applications of sandalwood oil and jasmine. That musk remains in my nostrils still from those hundreds of sensual encounters for which Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying, knowing my natural inclinations lay elsewhere, amply prepared me with aphrodisiac philtres and the promise, fulfilled like cups overflowing, of more naturally amenable pleasures afterwards.

  It is true that she was nearly seventy and I in my early thirties (though already tormented by lumbago and poor eyesight) when she first summoned me to the imperial boudoir. Yet I shall never forget those lust-soaked hours, for the Old Buddha was more than my match in perversity. You should also know, however, of her refinement. She loved the opera. Sometimes she’d invite me to watch a command performance of one of her favourite operas at a theatre in the Summer Palace, the Yi Ho Yuan, where we would recline on embroidered pillows of Soochow silk on the woven mats of the ta .

  Other days, she commanded me to enact plays with her, at the Temple of the Azure Clouds, to which we’d repaired to view the autumn foliage of the Western Hills perhaps, or on a retreat to the Summer Palace, wherever and whenever it took her fancy. I sang lao sheng , the part of the elderly male, though I was still in my vital years. In some moods, she took on the role of the hua tan , the flirtatious maiden, and in others the ch’ing yi , the virtuous woman. She liked to play the drunken concubine Yang Kui-fei in Hundred Flowers Pavilion, but when we essayed the tragedy of Farewell My Concubine, it was she who insisted on playing the tyrant, making me the concubine, dancing unto death.

  During these idylls, our every need was looked after by the eunuch bawd Li Lien-ying. Palace maids with their lips painted, like hers, into rosy little buds, brought us fragrant tea in lidded, yellow-glazed bowls fired at Ching Te Chen for her ancestor Yung Cheng. (I liked them so much she later made gifts of them to me.) The tea was brewed from the first delicate leaves of the Hangchow crop, picked by the untainted sweet hands of young virgins. Palace maids rowed on low skiffs into Kunming Lake at dusk, singing, to insert parcels of tea into the closing petals of lotus flowers. If I awoke early enough, I would amble down to the edge of the lake to listen to their sweet song and watch how, with infinite grace, they would recover the parcels when the flowers opened the following morning. The pretty apple-green, blush-pink and peacock-feather-blue of their silk garments glowed in the rosy dawn that fell upon the palace like a shower of pink and gold, their slender oars lapping like tongues at the lake’s surface.

  Sometimes, while the Old Buddha enjoyed her customary pipe of opium, she would send me to feast on the nests of swallows and dishes of meats so divinely prepared that, it was said, “Buddha would have jumped the fence” for them. I rarely indulged in the vice of opium myself, for my imagination has always been opiate enough – it had propelled me, after all, from the dreary, plain earnestness of my Quaker home into the very heart of a universe of beauty, now – alas – vanished forever. As I have written in the volume of my memoirs I call Décadence Mandchoue, “As at the end of my life, I recall those garish days, the phantom and the delusion of power, those Gods dethroned and empire
s of the past, I bow before the Buddha’s precept: ‘Learn happiness by abolishing desire.’”

  I am aware that when the manuscripts, my Ricordo Dei Felici Tempi, memories of happy times, are made public, there will be those who accuse me of lying and fabrication. That they will also accuse me of obscenity is certain, for I reveal in full my penchant ignoble. I should perhaps be used to such denouncements by now, but I have never managed to grow an elephant’s hide; had I been blessed with one of half the thickness, I should have been spared much in the way of both choler and melancholy, those yellow and black bilious humours that ravage the body as much as the soul.

  I shall address the accusation that I am but a common fabulator squarely and assure you: there has never been anything common about my fabulations.

  The Chinese have a saying, yuan che shang ko , those who are willing take the bait. You see, my dear, it is easy to seduce people into one’s bed when one knows of what they dream. The dreams of my victims (if one must call those who have profited from my petty deceptions “victims”) have ever been simple, material, even vulgar.

  To wit: wealth, power, a brush with fame or the famous. Present them a simulacrum of what they desire and voilà!, they lie down like whores and present their posteriors as readily as any catamite in the Hall of Chaste Joys. Whenever I have promised people access to direct profit from enterprises most fanciful, they show no scruples, but snuggle eagerly under my patchwork quilt of lies, stretch out luxuriously upon the mattress of insubstantiality, and lay their puffed-up and stupidly happy little heads upon the pillow of my dissimulation, displaying their fondements et parties sexuelles and waiting for la gamme réciproque to commence. Yet, as the Chinese would say, yo hsiang tang piaotze, yo hsiang li p’ai-fang , they want to act the harlot but also wish to have a monument erected to their chastity.

  And so the very ones who once praised to the skies Bland’s and my work on Her Excellency (I refer of course to China Under the Empress Dowager) – calling it an “indispensable guide through the bewildering maze of Chinese politics” and “the most informing book in Chinese affairs that has appeared within a decade” etcetera etcetera – later turned around with their Janus faces to accuse me of being a plagiarist. Plagiarism! They wound me still with their words. Plagiarism is an offence committed by incompetents. Forgery, as everyone knows, is, par contraste, a crime of genius.

  There is palpable joy in the discovery that, almost to a man, those who ought to know better, or are convinced that they already do, have proven most willing to loll supine in my bed of enchantment. As Plato said, “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”

  I don’t write this in order to gloat, even if I have taken something of a smug tone, despite myself. I should not presume, nor am I that cruel, for all my admitted fondness for la discipline et les verges. It is important for you to understand that whereas I well know that I have perhaps, from time to time, shaded the borders between truth and fiction a little too heavily, what I am about to reveal to you is, beyond any suspicion, the truth.

  There was once ample proof to back my story – letters and documents and photographs. These I kept in a small camphor box, affixed with a Chinese puzzle lock that opened only when one aligned the characters to spell out an erotic poem from the Ch’in P’ing Mei . The box was a gift from my dear Cassia Flower. The Japanese threw it into the fire! O Tempus edax rerum! Time, devourer of everything!

  Forgive the ramblings of an old man, and I fear I do ramble. Ch’ang hua tuan shuo , to make a long story short, the only proof of what I am about to tell you lies in two carved jade bracelets of inestimable value, gifts from the Old Buddha herself. It will ultimately be by these that my friend H will know that you are the intended – and you will know that what I say is true. But allow me a necessary digression.

  It was with mille coquetteries of an intellectual and practical nature that the Jesuits ingratiated themselves with the Ming and early Ch’ing emperors. Coming from Italy, Spain, France and other corners of the Catholic empire, they were fluent in Mandarin and later Manchu as well. They beguiled the emperors with their discourses on philosophy and foreign lands, impressed them with their skills at cartography, medicine and mathematics, and taught them and their eunuchs how to play the harpsichord. Matteo Ricci even gave us the English name of this great city when he invented the first system for transcription of the Chinese language into roman letters and called it Pequim. (I was deeply moved when the Old Buddha made a gift to me of some Louis d’or that a Jesuit had presented to the K’ang Hsi emperor; the gold coins had been minted in 1702 during the reign of Louis XIV.)

  Their other contribution, seemingly trivial, was to tend to the vast imperial collection of Western clocks, keeping them wound and in good repair. The empire has long been conceived of as encompassing both time and space, the former symbolised by the sundial in front of the Hall of Supreme Tranquillity and the urgency with which each dynasty approached the task of writing the history of the one it had vanquished. The notion that one can control time by marking it, and history by writing it, is a profound one.

  I sometimes think that it was, obscurely, an act of winding back the clock that caused the Old Buddha to take me into her literal embrace. When the Allied Forces arrived in Peking to relieve the Boxer siege of the Legation Quarter she was forced to shed her jewels and abandon her treasures, fleeing in the rough indigo guise of the peasant woman and transported in the bone-jolting litters of the common people. It was only thus that she could be sure of escaping the wrathful barbarian legions of England, France, America, Russia and the rest, who, confronted with the superior civilisation of the Celestials, only understood how to burn and plunder, pillage and rape. They tramped through the vacated palace in their filthy boots, shameless as Visigoths, heaping their pockets with the priceless treasures of her ancestors and setting an example for the vengeful and covetous foreign residents of the city.

  The actions of my so-called compatriots shamed me so much that when some trusty Manchu friends asked me to join with them in rescuing and secreting some of the palace’s greatest treasures until the court was once more in a position to receive them, I had no hesitation in agreeing, despite the apparent danger of our mission, which necessarily was of a clandestine nature.

  Later, I had the opportunity to return these, which I did through these same contacts, and was most gratified and surprised to receive, in return, an invitation to an audience in the Forbidden City with the Empress Dowager herself. I relate the story in detail in my memoirs, but without knowing whether or not you have yet had a chance to read them, I must tell you that of course I had had no contact with her before that. I was an unimportant foreigner, teaching and translating, discreetly disporting myself in the Hall of Chaste Joys, going about my business, which took me only as close to the palace as its high walls and moats and guards would permit. She asked me many intelligent questions that revealed the liveliness of her mind. In me, if you will permit me a moment of immodest candour, she discovered a conversationalist of an intellectual breadth and depth that was lacking in her other confidants in the court. I sensed she also felt free to discuss with me events of political import without fear that it would later become the stuff and fodder of machination and intrigue within the court.

  Not long after that I was summoned back to the palace for an audience of a rather different sort, and so began my lustful and long affair with this remarkable and unusually erotic woman, ruler of China, and nearly four decades my senior. Her demands were simple and reasonable: I could indulge to my heart’s content in coition with princes, eunuchs, male courtesans, actors in the Peking Opera, or any other males I amorously desired. But no other woman, foreign or Manchu, would ever share my bed. I gladly gave my promise, for I had never thought to sleep with a woman before her, nor indeed after. And so began an affair that, whilst well-known among the denizens of the court itself and I dare say a subject of some fascination among the nobility generally, was, perforce, discreet.

 
; It was thus that, following her death in 1908, I wrote far more harshly than I felt, and although with great detail, far less than I knew, about the Old Buddha in the biography I wrote with that hack Bland. Even in Décadence Mandchoue, the ultimate fate of which I cannot know, I have obscured the most astonishing aspect of our relationship (astonishing both to her and myself): the child.

  Shivering, I once read, is a bodily reflex designed to preserve or achieve homeostasis, the internal stability of such properties as body temperature. So if your core temperature drops, the muscle groups around your vital organs will begin to quiver, expending energy to create warmth and ward off hypothermia. When you shiver because of fever, it’s because, despite your elevated body temperature, you feel cold.

  There are other reasons why we shiver. When shocked or scared or very nervous, adrenaline makes the heart beat faster. It also speeds up your breathing and diverts blood from the digestive system to your muscles so they get an extra dose of oxygen. It’s part of the body’s fight-or-flight response and, like extreme cold, it can leave you shaking too.

  The space in Fei Chang Dao where I sat was close to a heater and toasty warm. Yet my shivering caused my bracelets to chime: Qiangqiang, chengcheng, dingding, lingling, langlang, shanshan.

  Had I possessed a womb inside my trou fignon, I dare say I should have been made pregnant a thousand times by a thousand men, not to mention one woman whose ejaculations, as I have recorded in my memoirs, were as formidable as those of any sailor or duke. But Nature, munificent in its perversity, arranged otherwise.

  It is perhaps not surprising that when there are hundreds of acts of heterosexual copulation of all possible manners and positions between two devout bawds, such as she and I, that at least one would bear fruit. I do believe I can name the exact moment of conception, incidentally, for I recall having the most tremendous orgasm and she too that day had been possessed of an extraordinary concupiscence. Some six months later, in the late spring of 1908, we decided to pay a visit to the White Cloud Temple, for in that time of many whims and urges, she had a sudden compulsion to consult the T’aoist soothsayers there. Her condition was becoming more than obvious, though she had it put about that she had simply indulged too much in the black sesame-paste dumplings and other delicacies for which she had in recent times developed a great appetite. The passage to the temple was, of course, completely private, and no one outside her intimate circle of eunuchs and handmaidens was ever permitted to cast eyes upon her. She had always ruled, as was the custom for regents, from behind a decorative barrier, in the situation described both literally and metaphorically as ch’ui lien t’ing cheng , guiding politics from behind the screen. The monks received her into the temple, and after much bowing and chanting and burning of incense, a séance of sorts began, and at the end of it they told her that a new era was dawning, and a successor to the throne was assured, yet were she to continue with her “indulgence” then it would spell disaster for her and the empire. She paled then, as did I, not that we ever had any illusions that this new life we had quite thoughtlessly and rather miraculously created would be welcomed as had her first-born, the T’ung Chih emperor, when he came into the world half a century earlier, in 1856, as the son and heir of the Hsien-feng emperor.