by Chang, Jung
The emperor’s optimism came from the men in his inner circle whom he had appointed to ‘handle the barbarians’. They told him: ‘The barbarian Parkes is the one man good at military manoeuvre, and all the barbarians take orders from him. Now that he is captured, the morale of the barbarian troops is bound to collapse, and if we seize the opportunity to carry out our extermination campaign, victory will be ours.’ Three days after this counsel of bizarre self-delusion, on 21 September 1860, the Chinese army was roundly beaten on the outskirts of Beijing. Emperor Xianfeng learned the news in the Old Summer Palace; all he could do was flee. That night, the court was packing amidst chaos and panic. The next morning, when his officials came for their audiences, they found that the emperor had disappeared. Most of the court had to leave later, separately, as the roads were jammed by fleeing crowds, the residents of Beijing, who had heard that the emperor himself had gone.
On 6 October, the French troops burst into the Old Summer Palace. On the 8th, Parkes and some other captives were released. More were returned over the next few days – most only as dead bodies. Of the thirty-nine men seized, twenty-one had been killed by the way they had been bound, as the emperor had ordered. Their comrades saw that their captors had ‘tied their feet and hands together behind their backs as lightly [tightly] as possible, afterwards pouring water on the cords to increase the tension, and they were kept in this terrible position until the condition of their hands and wrists became too horrible for description’. Their deaths had come after days of lacerating agony. Parkes and the other survivors only lived because sensible officials in the Ministry of Punishments had quietly protected them.
Lord Elgin was much affected by what he saw and heard. He wrote to his wife, ‘My dearest, we have dreadful news respecting the fate of some of our captured friends. It is an atrocious crime – and not for vengeance but for future security ought to be seriously dealt with.’ Europeans were now coming to China. In order for them not to be treated in this way, he decided to serve a warning, something that would really hurt the emperor, and he settled on razing the Old Summer Palace. General Grant wrote in his dispatch that, without such a punitive act, ‘the Chinese Government would see that our countrymen can be seized and murdered with impunity. It is necessary to undeceive them on this point.’ Lord Elgin had contemplated other options, but rejected them: ‘I should have preferred crushing the Chinese army which is still in this neighbourhood, but as we go to work we might have followed them round the walls of Peking [Beijing] till doomsday without catching them.’ He was keen to finish his job and leave, rather than get bogged down in China, where the weather was turning cold and Chinese reinforcement armies might be coming. A quick fire was the easiest option.
The Old Summer Palace was in fact a complex of palaces begun in the early eighteenth century and added to over the next 100 years. Covering an area of 350 hectares, it housed grand European edifices, designed by the Jesuits Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist, who had been employed by Qianlong the Magnificent, as well as hundreds of buildings in the Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian styles. Architectural designs from all over China were represented. Landscaped gardens celebrated the diverse sceneries of the empire, among them rice paddies of the Yangtze Valley, noted for the peach flowers and bamboo groves and meandering brooks in their midst. Images from great poems were reproduced. In one, after a poem by the eighth-century poet Li Bai, a waterfall was created, falling into a pond of chiselled stones, making music as the force of the water varied. When the sun was in the right place a rainbow appeared in the waterfall, matching the sharp arch of a bridge that dropped from the top of the waterfall down to the pond. To gaze at the rainbow and listen to the water-music in a dainty pavilion perched on the bridge was a favourite pastime of the court. In this pleasure palace, grandeur was of no concern – beauty was everything. Priceless art and treasures that had been accumulated for more than 100 years filled every cranny.
Before Lord Elgin set fire to this colossal treasure-trove, the palace had been looted by the French, who arrived first. Their commander, General de Montauban, wrote upon seeing the palace: ‘nothing in our Europe can give any idea of such luxury, and it is impossible for me to describe its splendours in these few lines, impressed as I am especially with the bewilderment caused by the sight of such marvels’. His troops fell on their prey with little inhibition. Lieutenant Colonel Wolseley was an eye-witness: ‘Indiscriminate plunder and wanton destruction of all articles too heavy for removal commenced at once . . . Officers and men seemed to have been seized with a temporary insanity; in body and soul they were absorbed in one pursuit, which was plunder, plunder.’ The British troops, arriving later, soon joined in, as ‘the General now made no objection to looting’, wrote Robert Swinhoe, staff interpreter to General Grant. ‘What a terrible scene of destruction presented itself!’ Grant wrote:
One room only in the palace was untouched. General de Montauban informed me he had reserved any valuables it might contain for equal division between the English and the French. The walls of it were covered with jade-stones . . . The French general told me that he had found two . . . staves of office, made of gold and green jade-stone, one of which he would give me as a present to Queen Victoria, the other he intended for the Emperor Napoleon.
Among the presents that Queen Victoria received was a little dog. An elderly imperial concubine, who did not flee with the court, had died of fright when the allies arrived. Her dogs, five Pekinese, were brought to Britain and became the origin of the Pekinese breed outside China. One came back with Captain Hart Dunne of the Wiltshire Regiment, who named it ‘Lootie’ and presented it to Queen Victoria. In his letter presenting the dog, the Captain wrote, ‘It is a most affectionate and intelligent little creature – it has always been accustomed to be treated as a pet and it was with the hope that it might be looked upon as such by Her Majesty and the royal family that I have brought it from China.’ The little dog caused a little frisson at Windsor. The housekeeper, Mrs Henderson, wrote to her superior, ‘It is very dainty about its food and won’t generally take bread and milk – but it will eat boiled rice with a little chicken and gravy mixed up in it and this is considered the best food for it.’ Her superior seemed somewhat annoyed and scribbled on the back of another, similar letter, ‘A Chinese dog that insists on chicken in its dietary!’ Mrs Henderson was instructed: ‘. . . after a little fasting and coaxing he [sic; Lootie was female] will probably come to like the food that is good for him . . .’ In Windsor, Queen Victoria had Lootie painted by the German artist Friedrich Keyl, and she specially requested through her personal secretary, Miss Skettett, that ‘When Mr Keyl sketches the dog he must put something to shew its size it [sic] is remarkably small . . .’ Lootie lived in the kennels at Windsor for another decade.
When Lord Elgin decided to burn the Old Summer Palace, the French refused to take part, calling it an act of vandalism against a ‘site de campagne sans défense’. Nonetheless, the burning was carried out, methodically. General Grant described the scene in his letter to the Secretary of State for War in London:
On 18th October, Sir John Michel’s division, with the greater part of the cavalry brigade, were marched to the palace, and set the whole pile of buildings on fire. It was a magnificent sight. I could not but grieve at the destruction of so much ancient grandeur, and felt that it was an uncivilised proceeding; but I believed it to be necessary as a future warning to the Chinese against the murder of European envoys, and the violation of the laws of nations.
The fire, fuelled by more than 200 opulent and exquisite palaces, pavilions, temples, pagodas and landscaped gardens, raged for days, enveloping west Beijing in black and ashen smoke. Wolseley wrote, ‘When we first entered the gardens they reminded one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them upon the 19th October, leaving them a dreary waste of ruined nothings.’
Lord Elgin achieved his goal to some extent. Future Chinese authorities would treat Westerners with special care, quite
differently from the way they treated their own people. But any thought of comfort for Westerners must be overshadowed by the potent seeds of hate stirring in the ashes of the Old Summer Palace. Charles Gordon, who later acquired the sobriquet ‘Chinese Gordon’, was then a captain in the invading army and took part in the devastation. He wrote home: ‘The people are civil but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did to the Palace. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them . . .’ Victor Hugo wrote a year later: ‘This wonder has disappeared . . . We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to the barbarian.’
The Old Summer Palace was in its full glory when Cixi left it with her husband and son in September 1860. Autumn is Beijing’s best season, when the sun is no longer scorching, the biting cold has yet to descend, and no sandstorms from the northwestern desert are whipping the city, as they habitually do in spring. Just days before the allies landed on the coast, her husband had celebrated his thirtieth birthday,fn6 and tradition had allowed the opera-loving monarch, besieged though he was by troubles, to indulge his passion for four days. The large stage, built on three levels, stood in the open air by a vast lake, and Cixi watched the operas with him in a pavilion across a courtyard. At the climax, crowds of actors – men playing the parts of both sexes and of the gods – sang and danced on all three levels, congratulating the emperor on his birthday. Under a clear autumn sky, the music was borne by the wind into every latticed window on the scented palace grounds. The splendour of the Old Summer Palace was etched in Cixi’s mind and would often return to haunt her. To rebuild it would become her obsession.
Travelling 200 kilometres to the northeast, the court crossed the Great Wall and arrived at the royal Hunting Lodge on the edge of the Mongolian steppes in the hilly region of Chengde. This ‘lodge’ was in fact even larger than the Old Summer Palace, though less lavishly crafted. It had been the major base for hunting expeditions for earlier emperors. Emperor Kangxi, who had first built the Lodge in 1703, had been a master hunter and apparently once killed eight tigers in one week. In the evenings, the emperors and their men had lit bonfires and roasted their kill, drinking and singing and dancing, in all-male company. There had been wrestling bouts and rowing competitions on the long, serpentine lake. One of the buildings was a replica of the Potala Palace in Lhasa and, elsewhere, in a martial-looking Mongolian yurt, Lord Macartney had had a futile audience with Emperor Qianlong in 1793. Cixi had never been here before. Her husband had had to cope with mounting mayhem throughout his reign, and they were only here now as refugees.
During this unprecedented dynastic crisis, Cixi played no political role. She was confined to the harem, where it was dangerous for her even to hint at her views. Her job was to look after her son, then four years old. Half a century later, in 1910, after she had died, an Englishman, Sir Edmund Backhouse, wrote a much-quoted biography of her, China under the Empress Dowager, in which he faked a diary, depicting Cixi as a very hawkish figure who urged her husband not to flee and not to talk peace with the foreigners, but to kill their messengers. This was sheer invention.fn7 As events would show, Cixi was indeed opposed to the foreign policy of her husband and his inner circle – but for very different reasons. Silently observing from close quarters, she in fact regarded their stubborn resistance to opening the door of China as stupid and wrong. Their hate-filled effort to shut out the West had, in her view, achieved the opposite to preserving the empire. It had brought the empire catastrophe, not least the destruction of her beloved Old Summer Palace. She herself would pursue a new route.
* * *
fn1 This is according to Chinese records. Some suggest that Lord Macartney did not perform this ritual. But Emperor Qianlong specifically told his court he would see Lord Macartney ‘now that he has agreed to follow the rules of this Celestial Dynasty’ on this matter. For other arguments suggesting that Lord Macartney did perform the detested ‘three kneelings and nine head knockings’, see Rockhill, p. 31.
fn2 It is not in the Royal Archives at Windsor, and there is no sign of the letter reaching London. It was, however, published in the contemporary English press in Canton, the Canton Press, and the February 1840 issue of the Chinese Repository, a periodical for the Protestant missionaries.
fn3 Demanding an indemnity was not a standard European practice at the time. Later, under fire and defending himself, Palmerston told Parliament that ‘what the late Government demanded was satisfaction for the injured honour of the country, and that one of the ways in which satisfaction was to be given was payment for the opium so extorted . . .’ For China to pay ‘the expenses of the war’ was, conceded Palmerston, ‘certainly unusual in European warfare’, but ‘in order to make the Chinese sensible of the extent of the outrage they had committed, and that they might sufficiently feel the exercise of the power of Britain in vindication of their honour, it was thought expedient and proper to make them pay the expense of the war, in addition to compensating the injured parties.’
fn4 The first, second and third sons had died, and the seventh (Prince Chun, who was to marry Cixi’s sister), eighth and ninth princes were too young. The fifth had been given away by his father to be an adopted son to a (deceased) brother, thus disqualifying him from the succession.
fn5 A common explanation for Emperor Daoguang’s choice of heir is that one day he discovered that the fourth son could not bear to hurt animals in spring in case they were pregnant. This is plainly sentimental tosh.
fn6 By the traditional way of calculating age, according to which newborns start at one year old.
fn7 Backhouse has since been exposed as a literary forger. In this case, what he seems to have done was to fake five passages about Cixi, and insert them into a well-known published diary by a Beijing official named Wu Kedu. As Backhouse published his biography first in English, the five faked passages melt into the English translation of the diary he quoted. When his book was then translated into Chinese, the forged passages, thus laundered, became part of the diary. The fake has puzzled historians, as the editions of the diary that exist in China contain no such references to Cixi. In the faked passages, residents in Beijing were seen to be hanging on Cixi’s every word about the fate of the empire. This may have been the case when Backhouse was in China decades later, but not in 1860, when she, as an imperial concubine, was a non-person to the public.
3 Emperor Xianfeng Dies (1860–61)
JUST BEFORE HE fled to the Hunting Lodge, Emperor Xianfeng ordered his younger half-brother, Prince Gong, to remain in the capital and deal with the invaders. Prince Gong, twenty-seven years old, was the sixth son of their father, the one who had specifically been ruled out as successor to the throne because of his lack of visceral hatred for Westerners and his tendency to accommodate. Now, thanks to these qualities, he quickly settled with the allies – by accepting all their demands, including paying indemnities of eight million taels of silver to each European country. The Treaty of Beijing with Britain was signed on 24 October 1860 and the Treaty with France the following day. The allies left and peace was restored. Western powers began to install their representatives in Beijing, where they dealt with Prince Gong.
The prince, pockmarked like most men of his time who had caught smallpox in childhood, was nonetheless good-looking. John Thomson, the celebrated photographer who later took photos of him, said that Prince Gong ‘had what phrenologists would describe as a splendid head. His eyes were penetrating, and his face, when in repose, wore an expression of sullen resolution.’ When he sat, it was in the posture dictated for Manchu aristocrats: legs slightly apart and feet positioned at ten-past-ten. His robe embroidered with dragons in gold thread, his hat adorned with a plume in a jade holder with a coloured button that denoted his rank, he was the picture of a high prince. Whenever he held up his long-handled pipe, a flame would appear instantly at its tiny bejewelled bowl, struck by an attendant d
ropping on one knee. The prince’s pipe was held in his lined black satin boot, in an inside compartment – the gentleman’s ‘pocket’ in those days. These pockets held a variety of items, from tobacco to state papers, from sweets to pieces of tissue with which the aristocrats wiped their mouths and their ivory chopsticks after dining out. (They usually took their own chopsticks with them.) The prince’s chopstick-case, and a profusion of bejewelled objects including a fan-case, dangled from his girdle. When he travelled in the capital, his sedan-chair would be under a canopy, surrounded by a showy entourage on horseback. All traffic would make way for him. Nearer his destination, a horseman would ride ahead and alert people to his imminent arrival so that they would line up to greet him.
Prince Gong’s half-brother, the emperor, enjoined that, as a great prince, he must not lower himself by receiving the Europeans in person, even though they were the victors. But the prince was practical and knew his brother’s order was unrealistic. He signed the treaties himself with the British and French, even arriving at the venue early to wait for Lord Elgin. When Elgin arrived, with an escort of 400 infantry, 100 cavalry and two bands playing at the head of the procession, Prince Gong advanced to greet him with his hands closed together in front of his chest, a gesture that he would use with an equal. Lord Elgin, according to General Grant, ‘returned him a proud contemptuous look, and merely bowed slightly, which must have made the blood run cold in poor Kung [Gong]’s veins. He was a delicate gentlemanlike-looking man . . .’ Elgin soon toned down his show of hauteur. ‘Both of the national representatives . . . appeared willing to treat each other as equals, but not as superiors.’ Prince Gong’s conciliatoriness won him sympathy from the Europeans. Elgin wrote a friendly letter of farewell when he departed, in which he expressed the wish that future foreign affairs in China be put in the hands of Prince Gong.
