by Chang, Jung
The humane side of Western culture was, to the Chinese, amazingly in tune with their own ideal, ren, or benevolence, which, according to Confucius, was the ultimate goal for all rulers. Prince Gong praised Wade for ‘having the spirit of ren’, although he lamented that this ideal could not be applied in China just yet.
With the end of the Taiping, other rebellions were also put down one after another. Within a few years of seizing power, Cixi had restored peace. This gave her indisputable authority in the eyes of the elite – and minimised opposition to her forthcoming policies to revive the country, which was in a dire state.fn3 The wars had cost more than 300 million taels of silver. The streets of Beijing teemed with beggars; some were women who, normally hidden from public view, accosted passers-by, wearing little more than rags. And yet, with Cixi’s leadership, China would make a stunning recovery in less than a decade and would begin to enjoy a degree of prosperity. One thing that helped crucially was a large new source of income: Customs revenues from the growing trade with the West, as a result of Cixi’s open-door policy.
Cixi had noted the immense potential of international trade, whose centre was now Shanghai, where the Yangtze River, having originated in the Himalayas and having crossed the middle of China, flows into the sea. Within months after her coup, by the beginning of 1862, she had told Prince Gong: ‘Shanghai is but a remote corner, and is imperilled [threatened by the Taiping] like piled-up eggs. And yet, thanks to the congregation of foreign and Chinese merchants, it has been a rich source for maintaining the army. I hear that in the past two months, it has collected 800,000 taels in import duty alone.’ ‘We must do our best to preserve this place,’ she said. Shanghai showed her that opening up to the West presented a tremendous opportunity for her empire, and she seized it. In 1863, more than 6,800 cargo ships visited Shanghai, a giant leap from the annual 1,000 or so under her late husband.
The expansion of foreign trade obliged China to have an efficient – and uncorrupt – Customs service. At Prince Gong’s recommendation, Cixi appointed a twenty-eight-year-old Ulsterman from County Armagh, Robert Hart, to be Inspector General of Chinese Maritime Customs, where Hart had already been working. Within a year of the appointment, she had given Hart an honour.
Born in the same year as she was, 1835, and educated at Queen’s College in Belfast, Hart had come to China first as a bright, earnest and innocent nineteen-year-old interpreter-to-be in the British consular service. An outstanding linguist, he had also come with an armful of prizes in logic, Latin, English literature, history, metaphysics, natural history, jurisprudence and physical geography. His diaries show him to be a devout Christian, concerned with what was moral and just – and that he felt a deep sympathy for the Chinese. One entry shortly after his arrival in Hong Kong described an evening stroll to the waterfront with a Mr Stace: ‘He rather surprised me by the way in wh[ich] he treated the Chinese – pitching their goods into the water and touching them up with his cane because they wd not row out from the Quay when he entered the Boat. Then it was supper time with them; and this Hour being sacred with them, they wd not work until supper was finished.’
A decade of work in China established Hart as a fair and remarkably able man, with a talent to mediate and to find acceptable compromises. He knew his strengths and was self-assured. On the morning that the official dispatch arrived announcing his appointment, he did not open it at once and recorded with more than a hint of self-satisfaction:
I ate my breakfast in my usual way, and then, as usual, read my morning chapter and prayed . . . The despatch opened: first a very cordial letter from Sir F. Bruce begging me to accept the Inspectorateship, and assuring me of the support of the foreign ministers; 2nd a long letter . . .; 3rd a long Chinese letter . . .; 4th. a despatch from the [Chinese Foreign Office], appointing me to be Inspector General, &c. &c. &c . . .
Under Hart, Chinese Customs was transformed from an antiquated set-up, anarchical and prone to corruption, into a well-regulated modern organisation, which contributed enormously to China’s economy. In five years, up to mid-1865, it delivered to Beijing duties of well over 32 million taels. The indemnities to Britain and France were paid out of the Customs revenue and were completely paid off by mid-1866, with minimal pain for the country at large.
With the new wealth, Cixi began to import food on a large scale. China had long been unable to produce enough food to feed its population, and the dynasty had always banned the export of grain. Systematic, duty-free imports were recorded by the Customs from 1867. That year the import of rice, the staple food, was worth 1.1 million taels. Food-sourcing and purchasing became a major job of the Customs under Hart, and the employee assigned to the job was honoured by Cixi.
Employing Hart and a large number of other foreigners caused resentment in the civil service. It was a courageous move.
The motto of Cixi’s government was ‘Make China Strong’ – zi-qiang. Hart wanted to show Beijing how to achieve this through modernisation. His aim, as he put in his diary, was: ‘to open the country to access of whatever Christian civilization has added to the comforts or well being, materially or morally, of man . . .’ He wanted ‘progress’ for China. And progress in those days meant modern mining, telegraph and telephone, and above all the railway. In October 1865, Hart presented a memorandum to Prince Gong, offering his advice.
In his eagerness ‘to get a fresh start out of the old dame’ – China – Hart admonished and threatened. ‘Of all countries in the world, none is weaker than China,’ he asserted, blaming the country’s military defeats on its rulers’ ‘inferior intelligence’. He wrote ominously that if China did not follow his advice, Western powers ‘may have to start a war to force it’. These words reflected a common attitude among Westerners, who felt ‘they know better what China wants, than China does itself’, and they ought to ‘take her by the throat’ and ‘enforce progress’.
Prince Gong did not pass on Hart’s memorandum to Cixi for months. This uncharacteristic delay was most likely because he feared that the empress dowager might be so enraged that she would fire Hart, thus killing the goose that was laying the golden eggs. Although Cixi encouraged sharp criticisms and blunt advice from her officials, no one had shown such arrogance or used blatant threats. Prince Gong could not be sure how she would react. He decided to send Hart out of the country, so that if the empress dowager decided to sack him, at least the order would not be carried out straight away, and there would be time to persuade her to change her mind. It was then that Hart was offered a home leave to Europe, which he had been requesting for some time.
Hart departed at the end of March 1866 and his memorandum was presented to Cixi on 1 April, together with another piece of advice by the British chargé d’affaires Thomas Wade, which raised more or less the same issues, and in more or less the same tone – designed to ‘frighten them’, according to Hart. Having presented these documents, Prince Gong felt apprehensive. When the British attaché Freeman-Mitford came to see him to press ‘Railroad, telegraphs’ and ‘all the old stories that have been trotted out a hundred times’, he noticed that the prince ‘was very nervous and fidgety. He twisted, doubled, and dodged like a hare.’
Prince Gong had underestimated Cixi. She read the memos carefully, and then sent them out to ten top officials who headed foreign affairs, trade and the provinces, inviting their opinions. In her cover letter there was no anger or any ill feeling towards Hart or Wade – unlike Prince Gong’s own report, in which bitterness flared up here and there. She had taken Western arrogance in her stride, declining to allow it to cloud her judgement. Instead she looked for potential benefits in the proposals. Hart ‘makes some good points’, she found, ‘in his evaluation of Chinese government, military, finance, and in his suggestions about adopting Western methods of mining, ship-building, arms production and military training . . . As for the matters to do with foreign relations, such as sending ambassadors to other countries, these are things we should be doing anyway.’ She did not address
the matter of the threatening language and tone, simply evoking her government’s motto: ‘Make China Strong is the only way to ensure that foreign countries will not start a conflict against us . . . or look down on us.’ Perhaps she was also able to put the offence into perspective, knowing only too well that the Chinese talked about foreigners in a no less offensive manner. Nevertheless, Prince Gong warned Western envoys to watch their language. They obliged, and omitted offending expressions from subsequent correspondence.fn4
A few senior mandarins fumed against Hart, but the empress dowager never turned against him. Hart was honest, and ran the Customs efficiently and with great probity, which was a singular achievement in a country where corruption was endemic. That was enough for her. Never small-minded, she would invariably focus on the bigger picture and soon she would award Hart another honour for his service. Hart headed China’s Customs for as long as her life and reign. For a foreigner to be in charge of a major fiscal channel for nearly half a century was an extraordinary phenomenon, and shows an astonishing lack of prejudice or suspicion on Cixi’s part, as well as the shrewdness of her judgement. It was not blind faith. She was in no doubt that Hart’s ultimate loyalty lay with his own country, Britain. A diplomat of hers reported to her that he had quizzed Hart on where his loyalty would lie, if there were a clash between China and Britain, and that Hart had replied: ‘I am British.’ And yet she had faith that Hart would be fair to China – and she strove to avoid presenting him with any conflict of interest. Few of the top echelon objected to Hart, which was also extraordinary. However anti-West some officials might be, they trusted their country’s Customs to a Westerner. Hart did not let them down. He contributed not only significantly to China’s financial well-being, but also to its general relationship with the outside world. He became somebody to whom Prince Gong turned for all sorts of services to do with the West. And the empress dowager learned about Western civilisation through dealing with him, even if the contact was indirect.
The modernisation projects proposed by Hart were, however, rejected by all those Cixi consulted. Even the most reform-minded man, whom Westerners came to regard highly, Earl Li, was vehemently against them, summing up their ‘incalculable damages’ thus: ‘they deface our landscape, invade our fields and villages, spoil our feng-shui [geomancy], and ruin the livelihood of our people.’ No one could think of any good that these expensive engineering projects would do, and Western representatives were unable to produce persuasive arguments in their favour. Prince Gong informed Cixi that Westerners had ‘not said anything specific about how exactly these are going to be good for China’.
Instead, there seemed to be plenty of advantages for the West. China was near to paying off the war indemnities and had a huge trade surplus. It could afford these enterprises. Having set foot in the interior, Westerners found the place to be rich in unexploited natural resources. The British naval officer Henry Noel Shore noted that ‘the coal-fields have been estimated by competent authorities at 419,000 square miles, or more than twenty times greater than those of Europe, while minerals, but especially iron ore of excellent quality, are said to abound in every province’. And mining required telegraphs and railways.
Among the many objections raised was that Westerners would have access to China’s underground treasures and might seek to control them. Railways could carry Western troops into the heartland, if they wished to invade. Millions of people in the travel and communications business – the cart-drivers, goods-bearers, messengers, innkeepers and so on – would lose their jobs. No one seemed to regard a reduction in back-breaking labour as especially desirable, or foresee the creation of new forms of employment. The roaring noise and black smoke produced by machines were seen as a particular horror as they were deemed to interfere with nature – and, worst of all, disturb the dead souls in the numerous private ancestral tombs that defined the landscape of China.
In those days, in China, each extended family had its own burial lot. These grounds were sacred to the population. As Freeman-Mitford observed, ‘in this place, the fairest spots are chosen for burying the dead’. Indeed, people believed that the tombs were their final destination where, after they died, they joined their deceased nearest and dearest. This comforting thought removed the fear of dying. The most deadly blow one could deal to one’s enemy was to destroy his ancestral tomb, so that he and all his family would become homeless ghosts after death, condemned to eternal loneliness and misery.
Like most of her contemporaries, Cixi associated ancestral tombs with profound religious sentiment. Faith was essential in her life, and the only thing that frightened her was the wrath of Heaven – the mystical and formless being that was the equivalent of God to the Chinese of her day. Believing in Heaven was to them not incompatible with having faith in Buddhism or Taoism. Chinese religious feelings were not as well defined as those in the Christian world. To have more than one religious belief was common. Indeed at grand ceremonies, such as an extravagant funeral, which might last well over a month, prayers were said by both Buddhist and Taoist priests as well as the lamas of Tibetan Buddhism, alternating every few days. In this tradition, Cixi was both a devout Buddhist and a devotee to Taoist doctrine. Her most revered Bodhisattva was Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, the only female god in Buddhism, who was a Taoist Immortal as well. She frequently prayed in her personal chapels to a statue of Guanyin, with her palms together in front of her chest. The chapels were also her private sanctuaries where she went to be alone, to clear her mind before making critical decisions. As a Buddhist, she followed the ritual of setting captured creatures free. For her birthday, she would buy many birds – latterly as many as 10,000, according to her court ladies – and on the day, choosing the most auspicious hour, she would climb to the top of a hill and open the cages carried by the eunuchs one after another, watching the birds fly away.
It was mainly on account of the ancestral tombs that Cixi’s government rejected the machine-age projects. The spirits of the dead simply must not be disturbed. Prince Gong told the foreign envoys that if this refusal meant war, then so be it. Cixi treated the threat of war seriously and issued a severely worded edict ordering provincial chiefs to resolve swiftly any outstanding disputes involving Westerners, so that no one had any pretext to start a war. Her government did its best to stick to the treaties. As Hart acknowledged, ‘I do not know of any infraction of treaties.’ After more futile lobbying, Western companies gave up. China’s industrial age was delayed.
However, it was to creep in through another door. Cixi’s court was united in favour of building a modern army and arms industry. Foreign officers were engaged to train troops, and engineers employed to teach the manufacture of weaponry. Technology and equipment were bought. In 1866, the building of a modern fleet started in earnest. Its chief foreign supervisor was a Frenchman, Prosper Giquel, who had first arrived in China serving in the British-French invading forces, and had stayed on. He had helped defeat the Taiping by leading a Franco-Chinese force named the Ever-triumphant Army, echoing the Anglo-Chinese Ever-victorious Army, before working in the Customs under Robert Hart. Cixi had faith in Giquel and authorised whatever money the enterprise required. There were many doubters who mistrusted a former French officer of an invading army, and others who were horrified by the astronomical cost. But Cixi was instinctively unsuspicious. She told her officials that Giquel and other foreigners ‘must be treated extra well’. ‘This fleet-building project is really fundamental to our goal to Make China Strong,’ she declared excitedly.
In the space of just a few years, nine steamships were built, of a quality that apparently could hold its own against Western ships. No bottles of champagne were cracked open when they were launched; only solemn ceremonies offering apologies to the Celestial Queen, and the Gods of Rivers and of Soil, all of whom the steamers were about to distress. When the first ship sailed resplendently into the harbour of Tianjin in 1869, crowds of Chinese and foreign inhabitants gathered to witness the spectacle, and thos
e who were involved in its building wiped away proud tears. For his services Giquel was richly rewarded with, among other things, a mandarin jacket in the royal yellow colour.
By the end of the first decade of her rule, Cixi had not only revived a war-torn country, but had also founded a modern navy and begun building a modern army and arms industry, with state-of-the-art equipment. Although full-scale industrialisation did not take off immediately in this ancient land, which had its own strong and deep-rooted traditions and religious sentiments, modern enterprises were appearing one by one: coal- and iron-ore mining, iron-mills building and machine manufacturing. Modern education was introduced to train the engineers, technicians, officers and crew. Railways and telegraphs were waiting just beyond the horizon. Medieval China had taken its first step towards modernisation under the empress dowager.
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fn1 Wade was a pre-eminent sinologist, who pioneered the romanisation system for the Chinese language, later known as the Wade–Giles, a system that for much of the twentieth century was the tool for a non-native speaker to learn Chinese, and was an invaluable aid for the Chinese themselves to learn their own language. This author’s name, Jung Chang, is spelt according to the Wade–Giles system.
