by Chang, Jung
All the grandees at the court said Little An must be executed, claiming that he had broken cardinal rules. Actually the young man had not broken any rule. The dynasty stipulated that eunuchs were ‘forbidden to set foot outside the Royal City without authorisation’. But he had authorisation – from Cixi. What both of them had done was to break a tradition that imprisoned the eunuchs in the palaces. And this was unforgivable to the grandees. The man most insistent on the execution was Prince Chun, Cixi’s brother-in-law, a like-minded friend of Grand Tutor Weng. They disapproved of so many things Cixi was doing, and this was the last straw. Even Prince Gong and his usually open-minded colleagues echoed the call for execution. Cixi, being an interested party, could play no part in the decision. Her friend, Empress Zhen, pleaded with the grandees, ‘Can he be spared death on account of having served the Empress Dowager devotedly for so many years?’ The grandees responded with a stony silence, which amounted to a resounding No. That settled it. A decree was written there and then, ordering Little An’s execution on the spot.
To Cixi, it felt as though her world was collapsing. She managed to hold back the decree for two days, during which time she implored Empress Zhen to plead harder for Little An’s life. But all efforts failed. Prince Chun arrived and pressured the women to release the decree instantly, probably warning Cixi that what she ought to do was distance herself from Little An, rather than otherwise. Empress Zhen was forced to allow the decree to be sent out.
Governor Ding was told to carry out the death sentence at once and not seek further confirmation from the court. Prince Chun and others were anxious that Cixi should have no more time to find a way to prevent it. Little An ‘must not be allowed to defend himself with cunning explanations’ and ‘must not be interrogated’ at all. It appears that the grandees suspected he had been having an affair with Cixi and wanted to cover up a scandal.
So Little An was beheaded. Also executed were six other eunuchs and seven hired bodyguards. Governor Ding reportedly had his corpse exposed on the execution ground for days, so the public could see that he had no male organs. Talk of his being Cixi’s lover had been widespread. Back in the Forbidden City, Cixi ordered all Little An’s belongings to be handed over to her and, once she got them, she gave them to one of her own brothers so that they were in the hands she trusted.
A close friend of Little An – another eunuch in the Forbidden City – complained to others that it was Cixi who had ‘sent Dehai to his death’ by first dispatching him out of Beijing and then failing to take responsibility. This remark hit a very raw nerve. In a fit of fury, she ordered the eunuch to be executed by strangulation. A chief secretary of the Grand Council, Zhu, wrote to a friend that the empress dowager was ‘taking out her anger on the servants around her’. She was ‘exuding bitter regret, brimming over with regret’. And, clearly hinting at her anger against Prince Chun, the chief secretary wrote that she was ‘holding a deep hostility against some close princes and grandees’ and ‘refusing to be assuaged’.
Prince Chun and the other grandees not only killed Cixi’s lover, but also sent out a warning about some of the startling changes she was introducing. Apart from giving eunuchs social status, she seemed to be allowing women to be seen publicly at a time when convention dictated they must stay in the home. (British diplomats found themselves assaulted with stones if there were ladies in their company, when otherwise they encountered bonhomie.) Little An had taken his sister, niece and some female musicians on the journey, and now they were all exiled to the northernmost wilderness to be slaves of the frontier guards. The grandees did not pursue Cixi herself. There was no wish to be rid of her. Her achievements had been monumental and were appreciated. Governor Ding said to his subordinates that her rule had brought China ‘a boom, which has surpassed even the [glorious] dynasties like the Tang and the Song’. They were only warning her not to go too far. In any case, her retirement was in sight. Her son would take over after his wedding.
After all the executions were carried out, while Prince Chun and others expressed ‘hearty delight’, Cixi collapsed and was bedridden for well over a month. Unable to sleep, with ringing noises in her ears and her face badly swollen, she threw up constantly, often vomiting bile. Royal doctors diagnosed the Chinese equivalent of a nervous breakdown – ‘the qi of the liver shooting upwards, in the opposite direction to the normal [downward] channel’ – and kept vigil by her door. Among the medicines prescribed was blood of the Mongolian gazelle, which was said to reduce swellings. Towards the end of the year, although she started working again, the vomiting continued. This level of physical reaction was most unusual for her: after all, she was no shrinking violet; she had coolly brought off a coup without the smallest sign of physical or emotional stress, even though she was risking death by a thousand cuts. Now, it seemed, her heart had been wrung. Only love could wreak such havoc.
Her son prayed for her and visited her devotedly. But the child could not console his mother. She was inconsolable. Only music soothed her. For nearly a decade she had not been able to enjoy it as much as she would have liked. First, after her husband’s death, in accordance with court rules, all entertainments had been banned for two full years. When that period was up, general pressure compelled Cixi to prolong the ban for another two years, until he was entombed. Even then, operas were only staged in the Forbidden City on a few festive occasions. Now, as if in defiance, Cixi had operas put on daily, and almost non-stop music played in her quarters. In her sick bed, with music to drown her sorrows, a thought churned: how to punish the man who had pressed most fiercely for Little An’s execution and who was the leader of the baying pack – her brother-in-law, Prince Chun.
The executions of Little An and his companions were enough to put Cixi off taking a lover ever again. The cost was too high. It seems that her heart was now closed. The modernisation of China also suffered and was largely suspended in the coming years as she picked her way through a minefield.
8 A Vendetta against the West (1869–71)
PRINCE CHUN HAD been Cixi’s earliest and staunchest ally when she launched the coup nearly a decade earlier. His motive had been to oust a group of incompetent fools whom he blamed for the empire’s defeat and his emperor brother’s death. Unlike Cixi, he had no intention of changing policy, but instead wanted the country to become stronger so that it could one day avenge itself on the Western powers. His support for Cixi in the coup, and his cooperation with her over the years, had been based on the assumption that this was also what she wanted.
But as the 1860s passed, Prince Chun began to see that revenge was not on Cixi’s agenda and that she was actually attracted to Western ways. When, after the internal rebellions were quelled, many called for the expulsion of the Westerners, she had ignored them. At the beginning of 1869, Prince Chun decided he must act and presented Cixi with a memorandum. Reminding her of the burning of the Old Summer Palace and the death of her husband in exile, he wrote that the late emperor had ‘died with an acute grievance in his heart’, a grievance that was still tormenting the prince, making him feel he could not ‘live under the same sky as the enemy’. Brushing aside the compelling fact that trade with the West had enriched the country, he demanded that she expel all Westerners and close China’s door. Six things had to be done, he said. One was to boycott foreign goods, so that Westerners would have no incentive to come to the country; and he asked the court to set an example by publicly destroying all Western products in the palaces. The Foreign Office should compile a list of all the foreigners in Beijing, so that when the time came to break off relations, they could be ‘wiped out’ if need be, a job for which he volunteered his services. The prince wanted Cixi to ‘issue a decree to all provincial chiefs telling them they are to encourage the gentry and the people . . . to burn foreign churches, loot foreign goods, kill foreign merchants and sink foreign ships’, stressing that these actions must take place simultaneously ‘in all provinces’. Ending his long memo, Prince Chun told Cixi bluntly that she
‘must fulfil the dying wish’ of her late husband, and that she ‘must not let a day go by without thinking about revenge, never forget it for a minute’.
Cixi did not want to tie the empire to the chariot of retribution. ‘Even if we do not forget the grievances for a day . . . grievances don’t get addressed by killing people or burning houses,’ she reasoned. She sent Prince Chun’s memo to the grandees for discussion. They were all startled by the violence of his proposal, and told Cixi to keep it as ‘top of all top secrets’, not to be leaked out. To Prince Chun they made emollient noises, praising his sentiment and condoning such measures as shunning Western goods in the Forbidden City (except ‘useful items like clocks and guns’). But they made clear that they opposed the aggressive thrust of his proposal, on the grounds that it could lead to war with the West, which China could not win. Sullenly Prince Chun accepted the grandees’ verdict. But he was far from convinced.
It was soon after this exchange that Prince Chun insisted on the execution of Little An. Cixi was in no doubt that he was striking at her politically as well as personally. While she was waiting for her chance to hit back, Prince Chun plotted his next move.
At the time, the meeting of Western and Chinese cultures had resulted in many clashes. While Westerners branded China as ‘semi-civilised’, the Chinese called Westerners ‘foreign devils’. But the focus of animosity was the Christian missions, which had established themselves in many parts of the country in the past decade. There had been riots against them from time to time, which had acquired a specific term in the language: jiao-an, ‘cases to do with Christian missions’.
These did not spring from religious prejudice. As Freeman-Mitford, the attaché in Beijing, observed, the Chinese did not have strong religious antipathies:
If it were otherwise, how is it that a colony of Jews has dwelt among them unmolested for two thousand years, and still remains . . . at Kai Feng in the province of Ho Nan? How is it that the Mohammedans have flourished exceedingly in certain provinces . . .? On the walls of the Imperial palace at Peking there is a pavilion richly decorated with Arabic inscriptions from the Koran in honour of a Mohammedan lady who was a wife, or favourite, of one of the emperors. This does not look like persecution for religion’s sake. And, more than these . . . Buddhism has been the popular religion . . .
Christianity was regarded as a teaching that ‘persuades people to be kind’: quan-ren-wei-shan. Even anti-Christian rioters were not averse to the doctrine. Their anger was directed at the missions themselves. Being foreign was always a cause for suspicion, but the major problem was that the missions had become a competing authority at the grass-roots level. There, local officials traditionally exercised absolute authority over all disputes and dispensed justice – or injustice – according to their judgement. The English traveller Isabella Bird once sat outside the gate of a county chief’s office, the yamen, and observed its workings:
In the hour I spent at the entrance of the yamen of Ying-san Hsien 407 people came and went – men of all sorts, many in chairs, but most on foot, and nearly all well dressed. All carried papers, and some big dossiers. Within, secretaries, clerks, and writers crossed and recrossed the courtyard rapidly and ceaselessly, and chai-jen, or messengers, bearing papers, were continually despatched. Much business, and that of all kinds, was undoubtedly transacted.
The arrival of missionaries, backed by gunboats, introduced a new form of authority into society. In the numerous disputes, ranging from conflicting claims of ownership of water sources or properties to long-standing clan feuds, those who felt they did not or could not get justice from the local officials often sought protection from the church by becoming converts. In such a situation, a Chinese Christian might go to the priest, as Freeman-Mitford wrote:
swearing that the charge brought against him is a mere pretext, his profession of the Christian faith, in which he is protected by treaty, being the real offence. Full of righteous indignation and confidence in the truth of his convert, who, being a Christian, must necessarily be believed before his heathen accuser, the priest rushes off to the magistrate’s office to plead the cause of his protégé. The magistrate finds the man guilty and punishes him; the priest is stout in his defence; a diplomatic correspondence ensues, and on both sides the vials of wrath are poured out. How can a priest who interferes, and the mandarin who is interfered with, love one another?
Some angry grass-roots officials therefore encouraged hostilities against Christians. The resentment was also fuelled by genuine misunderstandings. A major one concerned missionary orphanages. In the Chinese tradition only abandoned newborn babies were looked after by charitable institutions, registered with local authorities. Orphans and foundlings were the responsibility of their relatives, whose treatment of the children was their own business. It was incomprehensible to the Chinese that strangers should be able to take in boys and girls without the consent of their families and relatives, who were not even allowed to visit them, let alone take them away. This practice roused the darkest suspicions. Rumours abounded that missionaries kidnapped children and used their eyes and hearts as medical ingredients, or in photography – a mysterious phenomenon at the time. Isabella Bird wrote:
Stories of child eating were current, and I am sure that the people believe that it is practised by the missionaries . . . I observed that when we foreigners entered one of the poorer streets many of the people picked up their infants and hurried with them into the houses; also there were children with red crosses on green patches stitched on the back of their clothing, this precaution being taken in the belief that foreigners respect the cross too much to do any harm to children wearing the emblem.
In June 1870, an anti-Christian riot broke out in Tianjin, seemingly triggered by just such a rumour that an orphanage run by the Sisterhood of Mercy, attached to the French Roman Catholic church, was kidnapping children and gouging out their eyes and hearts for photography and medicine. Several local Christians, accused of the actual kidnaps, were beaten up by crowds before being delivered to the magistrate’s office. Although they were all found to be innocent (one was in fact taking a child home from the church school), thousands of men still crowded the streets, and bricks were hurled at local Christians. The French consul in Tianjin, Henri Fontanier, rushed over with guards and fired a shot that wounded one of the magistrate’s servants. The roaring crowd beat the Frenchman to death and then killed between thirty and forty Catholic Chinese, as well as twenty-one foreigners. In three hours of lynching, plunder and arson, orphanages, churches and church schools were burned down. Victims were mutilated and disembowelled, and foreign nuns were stripped naked before they were killed.
Cixi’s policy regarding incidents involving Christians had always been to ‘deal with them fairly’: chi-ping-ban-li. She did not believe the ‘child-eating’ rumour, which had surfaced time and again in other areas and had invariably been proved false. In no uncertain language she condemned the murders and the arson, and ordered Marquis Zeng, then Viceroy of Zhili, whose office was in Tianjin but who was at the time absent and ill, to go and intervene at once and ‘arrest and punish the ring-leaders of the riot, so justice is done’. A decree expressed sympathy for the Christian victims, refuted the rumours and told all provincial chiefs to protect missionaries. Prince Gong set extra sentries to patrol outside Westerners’ houses.
Marquis Zeng quickly established that the rumour in Tianjin was groundless. He found that this riot seemed to be different from the usual story of local officials going along with an anti-Christian mob – something more sinister seemed to lie behind it. During the investigation it emerged that the rumour had started with one Commander Chen Guorui, ‘Big Chief Chen’. Arrested rioters confessed that they had learned about the ‘eyes and hearts’ from the Big Chief, who, they believed, had the organs in his possession. Chen had arrived in Tianjin by boat several days before the riot, at which point the rumour began to spread. Blacksmiths started to sell arms, which was prohibited by Qing laws, and th
ugs and hooligans were in and out of the Big Chief’s dwelling, a temple-inn. On the day of the riot, crowds were assembled from street to street by men beating gongs. When the regional Imperial Commissioner, Chonghou, tried to prevent the mob from reaching the foreign settlement by having the pontoon bridge that led to it dismantled, Big Chief Chen ordered it reattached and, while the crowds were crossing, he called out to them from his boat: ‘Good lads, wipe out the foreigners, burn their houses!’ During the massacre, Chen, who had a foul temper and a habit of whipping underlings, was, by his own account, in the boat ‘seeking pleasure with young boys’.
Big Chief Chen turned out to be a protégé of Prince Chun. After Chen was exposed, the prince wrote repeatedly to Cixi, telling her that ‘I am extremely fond of this man and intend to use him for our cause against foreign barbarians.’ Chen must be well treated, as all men of ideals in the empire would be watching what happened to him and would see whether the throne had any serious desire to ‘avenge the country’. The mob must be ‘encouraged’, not punished, warned the prince. It was obvious that Chen had instigated the riot, and behind him stood Prince Chun.
It also became clear to Cixi that Prince Chun had intended the whole country to do as Tianjin did. During the massacre and its aftermath, unrest rippled throughout the empire, with the same eyes-and-hearts rumour circulating about the missionaries. In some places, posters were put up in the streets announcing that on a specified day all must come out to slaughter foreigners and destroy churches. Riots, though on a smaller scale, broke out in a number of cities. All this was exactly in line with the memorandum Prince Chun had sent Cixi a year earlier, and the conclusion was inescapable that the prince had taken it upon himself to put his scheme into action.
