by Chang, Jung
Emperor Xianfeng faced monumental problems. As soon as he ascended the throne, in 1850, the biggest peasant rebellion in Chinese history, the Taiping, broke out in the southern coastal province of Guangxi. There, famine drove tens of thousands of peasants into a desperate last resort – armed rebellion – though they risked the most horrific consequences. For their leaders, the mandatory punishment was ling-chi, ‘death by a thousand cuts’, during which the condemned was sliced piece by piece in public. Even this was not enough to deter the peasants who faced the slow death of hunger, and the Taiping rebel army quickly grew into hundreds of thousands. By the end of March 1853, it had swept into the old southern capital, Nanjing, and set up an opposing state, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The day he received the report, Emperor Xianfeng wept in front of his officials.
And this was not the emperor’s only woe. Most of the eighteen provinces inside the Great Wall were thrown into turmoil by numerous other uprisings. Countless villages, towns and cities were devastated. The empire was in such a mess that the emperor felt obliged to issue an Imperial Apology, in 1852. This was the ultimate form of contrition from a monarch to the nation.
It was just after this that Cixi entered the court. Her husband’s problems could be felt even in the depths of the Forbidden City. The empire’s state silver reserve fell to an all-time low of 290,000 taels. To help pay for his soldiers’ upkeep, Emperor Xianfeng opened the purse of the royal household, in which, eventually, only 41,000 taels remained, barely enough to cover daily expenditure. Treasures in the Forbidden City were melted down, including three giant bells made of pure gold. To his consorts he wrote stern admonitions like these in his own hand:
No big ear clips or jade earrings.
No more than two jewelled flowers for the hair, and anyone who wears three will be punished.
No more than one cun [roughly 2.5 cm] for the elevation of the shoes, and anyone whose shoes are more than one and a half cun high will be punished.
The disasters of the empire also directly affected Cixi’s family, with whom she maintained contact. Prior to her entry into the court, her father had been transferred to the east-central province near Shanghai, Anhui, to be the governor of a region that administered twenty-eight counties, with its seat in Wuhu, a prosperous city on the Yangtze. But this was close to the Taiping battleground, and a year later her father was forced to flee when the rebels attacked his city. Terrified of the emperor’s wrath – some officials who fled their office had been decapitated – and exhausted by the flight, Huizheng fell ill and died in summer 1853.
The death of her father, to whom she was very close, made Cixi feel she really must do something to help the empire – and her husband. It appears that she tried to offer him some suggestions as to how he might deal with the upheavals. Coming from a background in which her advice was sought and acted on by her own family, it seems that she assumed that Xianfeng too would appreciate her counsel. But it only annoyed him. The Qing court, following ancient Chinese tradition, strictly forbade royal consorts from having anything to do with state affairs. Emperor Xianfeng told Empress Zhen to do something about Cixi, using derogatory words to describe her advice – ‘crafty and cunning’. Cixi had violated a basic rule and risked deadly punishment.fn4 A well-known story has it that Emperor Xianfeng later gave a private edict to Empress Zhen, saying that he worried Cixi would try to interfere in state affairs after he died and, if she ever did so, Empress Zhen was to show the edict to the princes and have her ‘exterminated’. As it happened, or so the story goes, Empress Zhen showed the lethal piece of paper to Cixi after the death of their husband, and then burned it.
Empress Zhen was a brave woman, and her contemporaries also praised her for her kindness. When the emperor was angry with a concubine, she always mediated. Now, it seems, she put in a good word for Cixi. And her argument might well have been that Cixi was only trying – perhaps trying too hard – to express her love and concern for His Majesty. At this most vulnerable time for Cixi, Empress Zhen protected her. This helped lay the foundation of Cixi’s lifelong devotion to the empress. The feelings were mutual. Cixi had never been underhand in her dealings with Empress Zhen. Although she must have been dissatisfied with her position at the bottom of the consort ladder, while Zhen rose to be empress, Cixi never did anything to undermine Zhen. Even her worst enemies did not accuse her of such scheming. If there was any jealousy, which in Cixi’s position would seem to have been unavoidable, Cixi kept it well under control and never let it poison their relationship. Cixi was not petty – and she was wise. So, instead of being rivalrous, the two women became good friends, with the empress addressing Cixi intimately as ‘Younger Sister’. She was actually a year younger than Cixi, but this indicated her seniority as the empress.
Empress Zhen may well have been instrumental in persuading the emperor to promote Cixi in 1854 from Rank 6 to 5, lifting her out of the bottom group. To accompany this elevation, he gave her a new, carefully considered name, Yi, which means ‘exemplary’. A special edict in the emperor’s own hand, in crimson ink that signalled the authority of the monarch, publicly announced Cixi’s new name, together with her promotion. A ceremony was held for her to receive the honour formally, during which eunuchs from the Music Department of the court played congratulatory compositions.
For Cixi, the whole episode taught her that to survive at court she must hold her tongue about state affairs. This was difficult, as she could see that the dynasty was in trouble. The victorious Taiping rebels not only consolidated their bases in southern China, but were sending military expeditions with a view to attacking Beijing. Cixi felt that she had practicable ideas – in fact it was under her rule that the Taiping rebels were later defeated. But she could not say a word, and could only share non-political interests with her husband, such as music and art. Emperor Xianfeng was an artistic man. His paintings from his teenage years (figures, landscapes and horses with endearing eyes) were remarkably accomplished. Cixi too could draw. She designed embroidery when she was a young girl, and her painting and calligraphy would blossom in older age. For now, at least, she could talk about this common interest with her husband. Opera provided a closer bond. Emperor Xianfeng not only loved to watch operas, but also composed tunes, wrote lyrics and directed performances. He even put on make-up and took part in acting. Keen to improve his skills, he got actors to teach eunuchs while he looked on, and learned by watching. His favourite instruments were the flute and drum, which he played well. As for Cixi, her lifelong love affair with the opera would one day help to create a sophisticated art form.
On 27 April 1856, Cixi gave birth to a son. This event was to change her destiny.
* * *
fn1 There has been an assumption that her maiden name was Lan, meaning ‘magnolia’ or ‘orchid’. This was in fact the name assigned to her when she entered the court. Her descendants suggest that her own name was Xing: ‘almond’, which has the same pronunciation as the character for ‘good fortune’.
fn2 The Han people who had been in the Manchu army in Manchuria counted as Manchus.
fn3 The ‘leftovers’ were not wasted. A previous emperor had dictated that they should be given to servants, and their leftovers be fed to cats and dogs. Even the remnants were not to be thrown away: they must be dried and made into bird feed.
fn4 It is sometimes asserted that Cixi helped her husband read official reports and write instructions. There is no evidence of this.
2 From the Opium War to the Burning of the Old Summer Palace (1839–60)
THE BIRTH OF Cixi’s son, the emperor’s firstborn male, was a monumental event for the court. Emperor Xianfeng had had only one daughter by this time, the Grand Princess, by a concubine who had entered the court with Cixi; but, as a female, the princess was not entitled to carry the dynastic line. With the arrival of Cixi’s son, a palace file was opened with the title ‘Imperial Concubine Yi Gave Joyous Birth to a Grand Prince’. It shows that several months earlier, in accordance with a s
ensible royal household rule, Cixi’s mother had been invited into the Forbidden City to look after her daughter. On an auspicious date determined by the court astrologer, a ‘Hole of Joy’ had been dug behind Cixi’s apartment, in a ceremony during which ‘Songs of Joy’ were recited. Into the hole were placed chopsticks wrapped in red silk next to eight treasures, including gold and silver. Chopsticks have the same pronunciation, kuai-zi, as the expression ‘to produce a son quickly’. The hole was to be used for burying the placenta and the umbilical cord.
Silks of all kinds, the finest cotton and muslin, for baby clothes and bedding, were readied. Scores of women with childbirth experiences were interviewed. Together with doctors from the Royal Clinic, these mature women would stay by Cixi’s side when her pregnancy entered the seventh month. Actually, court rules specified the eighth month, but an anxious Emperor Xianfeng decreed special treatment. He was kept closely informed about the development of Cixi’s condition, and the moment the child was born, the chief eunuch rushed over and reported that ‘Imperial Concubine Yi has just given birth to a prince’, and that the royal doctors had found ‘the pulses of the mother and the son are both peaceful’. (The pulse is regarded as a crucial indicator of health.) All cried: ‘Oh great rejoicing to our Master of Ten Thousand Years!’
Overjoyed, Emperor Xianfeng instantly elevated Cixi to a higher rank. The whole court was swept into a frenzy of celebration over the baby, who was named Zaichun. On the third day he was given a thorough wash, in a large bowl of pure gold, with the date, time (noon) and position (facing south) painstakingly calculated by the court astrologer. Soon, to great fanfares, the baby was formally placed in a cradle. More festivities took place when he was one month old, during which he had his first haircut. On his first birthday, a pile of objects was laid out for him to grasp: his choice was supposed to indicate his future disposition. The first item he grabbed was a book – for which he would in fact develop a phobia. On all these and other occasions he received lavish presents. Gift-giving was carried to extraordinary lengths at the time, and no occasion was thought proper without it. At the court, scarcely a day went by without presents being brought in or sent out, or exchanged by those within. By the end of his first year, Cixi’s son had received some 900 objects made of gold, silver, jade and other precious stones, as well as more than 500 pieces of clothing and bedding in the finest textiles.
Thanks to her son, Cixi quickly became the undisputed No. 2 consort, second only to Empress Zhen. Her position was made even more secure when the emperor’s second son, born two years later to another concubine, lived only a few hours and died before he was given a name. The strength of her position enabled Cixi to persuade her husband to marry her eighteen-year-old sister to one of his younger half-brothers, the nineteen-year-old Prince Chun. Consorts for the princes had to be chosen by the emperor, from the candidates presented for the selection of his own consorts. Cixi had seen quite a lot of the prince at the opera shows. Although on such occasions male and female were separated by a screen, the curious ones always found a way to size up a member of the opposite sex. From the boxes in which they were seated, cross-legged on cushions, the royal women could observe the royal males without being seen. The American missionary physician Mrs Isaac Headland, who (later) treated many aristocratic ladies, including Cixi’s mother, noted: ‘these gentle little ladies have their own curiosity, and some means of finding out who’s who among that court full of dragon-draped pillars of state; for I have never failed to receive a ready answer when I inquired as to the name of some handsome or distinguished-looking guest whose identity I wished to learn’. Cixi would have made it her business to find out about the character of Prince Chun, and indeed he would be of enormous service to her in the future.
Meanwhile, Cixi devoted herself to her son. Court rules forbade her to breast-feed him, and doctors prescribed herbal medicine to stop her milk. A wet nurse from a lower-class Manchu family who met the court requirements was engaged and, to facilitate her milk, one instruction enjoined her to eat ‘half a duck every day, or pigs’ knuckles, or the front part of pigs’ lungs’. The royal household also paid for the wet nurse to employ a wet nurse for her own child.
Empress Zhen was the official Mother to the child, and took precedence over Cixi. This did not lead to animosity between the two women, and the child grew up with two doting mothers. When he was older, he had a playmate, his elder sister, the Grand Princess. Court painters captured the two children playing together in the palace gardens, the little boy in an indigo robe tied round the waist with a red sash and the girl in green with a red waistcoat, with flowers in her hair. They are shown fishing from a pavilion under a willow tree open to a lake of blooming lotuses. In another picture, set in early spring, with white magnolias next to an evergreen pine, both the boy and the girl have little caps on, the prince’s robe thick with pale-blue lining. They seem to be looking for insects that were perhaps waking from a long hibernation, among the gaunt roots of old trees and rockeries. In the pictures, the younger boy always appeared twice as big as his elder sister.
Behind these peaceful and idyllic scenes of the early childhood of Cixi’s son, the empire continued to be convulsed by the Taiping rebellion in the south and by violent unrest elsewhere. In fact it was facing another gigantic problem: foreign powers had invaded.
The origin of the Anglo-French war against China in 1856–60 can be traced back 100 years earlier. In 1757, the then-emperor, Qianlong, who ruled China for sixty years (1736–95) and is often referred to as ‘Qianlong the Magnificent’ for his achievements, closed the door of the country, leaving only one port open for trade, Canton. The emperor’s paramount concern was the control of the vast empire, and a closed door made control much easier. But Britain was hungry for trade. Its main imports from China were silks and teas, the latter cultivated only in China at that time. Each year, through import duty, teas alone brought more than £3 million into the Exchequer, enough to cover half the expenses of the Royal Navy. To persuade Emperor Qianlong to open more ports for trade, a British mission arrived in Beijing in 1793. Its leader, Lord Macartney, did his best to accommodate Chinese demands and accepted that the boats and carts conveying his mission bear banners inscribed with Chinese characters: ‘The English Ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China’. In order to be granted an audience with Qianlong, he even performed the obligatory san-gui-jiu-kou – that is, kneeling three times to the emperor and touching the ground with his forehead nine times. Macartney did so with great reluctance and after much resistance, knowing that otherwise Emperor Qianlong would not see him.fn1
Emperor Qianlong treated Lord Macartney with what the Englishman called ‘every external mark of favour and regard’, but he would absolutely not consider more trade. To show him what Britain could offer, Lord Macartney had brought with him, among other gifts, two mountain-howitzers, complete with carriages, limbers and ammunition. The emperor left them untouched in storage in the Old Summer Palace. In his reply to a letter from King George III, he carefully rejected the British king’s requests point by point. To open up more ports for trading was ‘impossible’; Britain acquiring a small island off China’s coast for its merchants to stay and store goods was not allowed; and the stationing of an envoy in the capital, Beijing, was ‘absolutely out of the question’. Lord Macartney had also requested that Christian missions be allowed into the country, to which the emperor’s answer was: ‘Christianity is the religion of the West, and this Celestial Dynasty has its own beliefs bestowed by our sacred and wise monarchs, which have enabled our 400 million subjects to be led in an orderly fashion. Our people’s minds must not be confused by heresy . . . The Chinese and the foreigners must be strictly separated.’
The emperor claimed that his ‘Celestial Dynasty possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders’, and that it therefore had no need for anything from the outside world. He asserted that he only allowed trade at one port out of generous considera
tion for the foreigners, who could not do without Chinese goods. These swaggering words were neither true, nor what the emperor really thought. Customs duty from Canton contributed substantially to the state coffers – more than 1.1 million taels of silver in 1790, three years before Lord Macartney’s mission. A large tranche of the money went to the court, whose annual expenses stood at 600,000 taels. Emperor Qianlong was well aware of this, as he regularly went through the books of transactions. Nor was he ignorant of the advancement of European science and technology. As vital a thing as the Chinese calendar, which guided agricultural production of the empire, had been definitively devised in the seventeenth century by European Jesuits – notably Ferdinand Verbiest – who had been employed by Emperor Kangxi (1661–1722), Qianlong’s grandfather. Since then, European Jesuits had been continuously manning the Imperial Observatory in Beijing, using European equipment. Currently they were working for Emperor Qianlong himself. Even the map of China under Qianlong (as well as under Kangxi) was drawn up by missionaries who surveyed the territory of the empire using European methods.
It was in fact his sense of insecurity regarding the control of China that prompted Qianlong’s emphatic rejection of the Macartney mission, just like his closing the door of the country. The emperor’s control over his vast empire was built on total and unquestioning submission from the population. Any foreign contact that might disturb this blind obedience was dangerous to the throne. From Qianlong’s point of view, the empire could well run out of control if it was not sealed off and if foreign elements were near the population – especially when the grass roots were already restive. The Qing dynasty, which had been enjoying considerable prosperity, blessed by good weather for long stretches of time (some fifty years under Emperor Kangxi) was beginning to decline by the late eighteenth century. This was largely due to population explosion, partly the result of the introduction to China of high-productivity foods like potato and corn from the American continent. By the time of Lord Macartney’s visit, China’s population had more than doubled in half a century and exceeded 300 million. Another fifty years later, it was well over 400 million. The country’s traditional economy was unable to sustain this dramatic population growth. Lord Macartney observed: ‘Scarcely a year now passes without an insurrection in some of their provinces. It is true they are soon suppressed, but their frequency is a strong symptom of the fever within. The paroxysm is repelled, but the disease is not cured.’
