The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  “Mrs. Ainsworth,” May-ling replied, “I rather enjoy it!”

  Queried after World War II, Dr. Ainsworth remembered May-ling “keeping up with everybody’s business and a finger in everybody’s pie.” According to her history professor, she was “a vivacious child with a most un-usual mind.” She was also willful. “She was a tempestuous student of music,” said one of her teachers. “I do not wish to play this piece,” she would announce before tossing it on top of the piano and replacing it with one she liked better.

  When it came time for Ai-ling to return to China and Ching-ling was still at Wesleyan, May-ling was sent to live with the mother of one of Ai-ling’s schoolmates so she could attend a regular eighth grade. Going to public school in Piedmont, Georgia, was an eye-opening experience for her, since many of her classmates were grown men and women who had worked for years to earn enough money to attend the higher grades of elementary school. “I suppose my contact with these people as a girl influenced my interest in the lot of those who were not born with a silver spoon in their mouths,” Madame Chiang said many years later, “a contact which I may never have experienced otherwise.”

  In 1913, when Ching-ling graduated from Wesleyan, May-ling transferred to Wellesley College in Massachusetts to be near her brother T.V., who was attending Harvard. Considered “rather plain,” she was sixteen years old at the time—short, chubby, round-faced, and childish in appearance, with a short haircut and bangs over her eyes that did nothing for her looks. Although she had to repeat her freshman year, the Soong family was extremely proud that she had been accepted at one of the finest girls’ colleges.

  At Wellesley, the Chinese teenager amused her professors and classmates with her “Scarlett O’Hara accent,” or, as one teacher put it, “she spoke pure Georgia.” Certainly, May-ling herself must have been in a state of culture shock when she arrived in the heart of New England from the depths of the old South. “Ah reckon Ah shan’t stay aroun’ much longer,” she informed the freshman dean. But her English teacher, Miss Tuell, was impressed with her. “She wrote more cultured and idiomatic English than most of the girls in her class,” the teacher said. “She didn’t have to think first in Chinese and then translate, she thought in English. Things came easily to her.” In spite of her quick mind, May-ling did not excel in her studies until late in her college career, when she attained the status of Durant Scholar, the college’s highest academic distinction.

  Perfectionistic and somewhat remote, May-ling started college life wearing navy skirts and middy blouses but grew progressively more Chinese during her four years at Wellesley, wearing traditional Chinese dress when she could and refusing to go out with any but Chinese boys. She kept a large scimitar hanging on the wall of her dormitory room, a weapon so terrifying that one freshman said she could never pass May-ling’s door without starting to run. “She formed her own judgments, never accepting those of others,” one old friend reminisced. “She was a most independent person, whose life might have gone in any direction.” The young Chinese girl may have had her own ideas, but she still came from a country where women were considered inferior to men. When she was given a small part in a school play, her brother T.V. came from Harvard to discuss it with the faculty member involved before she was allowed to appear on stage. “There always seemed to be some nice Chinese boy or other on the doorstep,” said another housemate, who thought that May-ling worried about an arranged marriage being forced on her when she returned to China. According to biographer Laura Tyson Li, there was even a brief engagement to a Chinese boy at Harvard, but whatever plans she had were broken off before she went home.

  It was popular in those days for Wellesley girls to keep what they called “confession books,” autograph books that they traded back and forth, adding “confessions” to their names. “My one extravagance, clothes,” May-ling wrote in hers; “… my favorite motto, don’t eat candy—not one piece… my secret sorrow, being fat.” According to Thomas A. DeLong, an heir to the estate of May-ling’s best friend at Wellesley, Emma DeLong Mills, May-ling suffered from “occasional” bouts of “childlike vanity,” and Emma could always tell when May-ling had been in her room because her hand mirror was not where it belonged.

  May-ling and T.V. spent one summer in Burlington, where they attended summer school at the University of Vermont, and another summer on Martha’s Vineyard. The story is told that she was visiting a friend’s home, a place where it was necessary to take a bike to get the mail. One afternoon, May-ling disappeared and did not come back until close to dinnertime, when she appeared—messy, dirty, and exhausted. When someone asked where she had been, she said that she had thought it was her turn and had gone to get the mail.

  “But you never knew how to ride a bicycle,” her friend said.

  “No, but I do now!” she answered.

  MAY-LING OLIVE SOONG graduated from Wellesley as a member of the Class of 1917. She had majored in English and taken classes in American literature, English composition, philosophy, and Bible studies. Although none of her classmates would have predicted that she would become a twentieth-century icon, she had earned considerable respect for her sense of reality. Miss Tuell, the faculty resident in her dormitory, continued to admire May-ling:

  As things came easily to her, it would have been easy for her to lead an indolent life.… She always had a great loyalty to China. She recognized the problems before her when she would return, and I think she always was a little torn between two worlds so different. But she never considered not returning to her own country. She kept up an awful thinking about everything. She was always questioning, asking the nature of ideas, rushing in one day to ask a definition of literature, the next day for a definition of religion.… She was a stickler for truth, and resented any discovery that she had ever been fed conventional misinformation… there was a fire about her and a genuineness, and always a possibility of interior force.

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  [The] Great Within… had its own ways of life and its own standards. The corruption as well as the beauty of the past had crept into the very stones; the air itself was tainted with the virus of decay. This was no place for innocence; heredity and environment were in league against it.

  —BERNARD LLEWELLYN

  THE DIFFERENCE between May-ling’s education and graduation in 1917 and that of her father in 1885 is indicative of the seismic changes that had occurred in their country in the intervening thirty-two years. In 1885, the Chinese lived in a world ruled by an enigmatic figurehead of godlike status. By 1917, at the end of World War I, they were struggling to learn how to rule themselves. To grasp the magnitude of this progression, we should return for a brief summary of life in imperial China, which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a society in flux, a volcano long dormant, about to erupt.

  For some two thousand years, from 221 B.C. to 1912 A.D., the Chinese lived under the same form of government: an empire ruled by a monarch whose dictates were carried out (and frequently originated) by powerful courtiers and officials. It was a far-flung agricultural economy in which the local landlord skimmed the profits off the labor of the peasants, and the role of the tax collector was a ticket to prosperity. Since these two functions were frequently vested in the same person, a man who had to be able to read, write, and keep accounts in a language so difficult that many believe it was purposefully designed that way, only the sons of the rich could afford the education needed to perform the job. Which, according to one authority,* is why we find prosperity exemplified by “a civilized, sophisticated, and lavish court; families of great wealth and culture scattered over the country— and then, in the course of a few years, an appalling collapse into the wildest confusion marked by savage peasant rebellions. Out of these rebellions arose warriors and adventurers who seized power by the sword.” Once a victorious warrior came to power, however, he had to establish his dynasty and find people who could run his government for him. To do this, he needed the services of the educated class, the so-called ma
ndarins. And so the dynastic roller coaster started all over again.

  Rote and memorization were the essential elements of the education that produced mandarins. In a mandarin household, private tutors were engaged to teach the children to read Chinese characters, to produce beautiful calligraphy, and to memorize the classics of Chinese literature. From fifteen on, education was only for boys, who learned to write poetry and practiced the special technique required to compose the rigidly constructed “eight-legged” essays included in the national civil examinations required to enter the government bureaucracy. The enormous competitiveness of these examinations can be imagined when we consider that out of the approximately 2 million young men who sat for the first of three degrees, only about three hundred survived the final test. To qualify, the student had to compete first in his village, then in the capital city of his province. When and if he got to Peking, he remained for three days and nights writing essays on subjects selected and graded by famous scholars. There were four grades or degrees, the last three corresponding roughly to the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in the United States. This system lasted until 1905, when an imperial edict established an educational model patterned after that of the West.

  The other group responsible for the perpetuation of the imperial system lived in the court itself, where dishonest attendants were the rule rather than the exception. They were the eunuchs—those desexed grotesques of harem life who had served in Chinese courts since at least 1,300 years before Christ. Dressed in long gray robes with navy coats and black trousers, palace eunuchs were the only outsiders trusted to inhabit what was essentially a female community. (The only other males in the palace were the emperor, the crown prince, and princes under fifteen years of ages.) There were many women for the eunuchs to connive with, watch over, and serve: the empress, the ladies of the court—three wives of the first rank, nine of the second, and twenty-seven of the third, fourth, and fifth ranks—plus the imperial concubines, who, in the nineteenth century, usually numbered somewhere between seventy and a hundred.

  Although the original eunuchs had been unfortunate prisoners of war castrated by the victor, a man who underwent this operation in the nineteenth century did so voluntarily in pursuit of a place at court and the attendant riches. To do this, the would-be court attendant presented himself to a specialist, who performed the surgery in a hut just outside the western gate of the Imperial Palace. Seated on a warm, reclining couch and given opium while his sexual organs were washed three times in hot pepper water to numb them, the patient was asked, “will you regret it or not?”* If he showed any indecision, the operation was canceled. Otherwise, the surgeon ordered his attendants to hold down the man’s waist and legs while he cut off the organs with a knife. The procedure cost about $84 and took a hundred days to heal. After a year’s apprenticeship to a master, the new eunuch was qualified to work in the Imperial Palace. As to his pao, or “treasure,” it was carefully preserved in a jar of fluid so that the owner could show the severed parts to the chief eunuch when it came time for him to advance in rank. Those who forgot to take home their pao or had it stolen while they lay unconscious had to pay as much as $700 to buy or rent someone else’s. The pao was often sewed back on before burial so that the eunuch might be restored to his former masculinity in the next world.†

  It says something about the power of eunuchs that a man was willing to subject himself to this ghastly procedure to gain access to the Imperial Palace. But the emperor, who was known as the Son of Heaven, could not, like the unknowable one he represented, reveal himself to ordinary people. Common citizens were not permitted to enter his sanctum, for they would then discover that he was a mere human being, and it was thought that he might lose control over the country. Hence the importance of the eunuchs— deformed, ill-smelling,‡ and eminently bribable. When sufficiently recompensed for their trouble, eunuchs were used to divert a weak monarch with unimaginable luxuries and erotic delights. If the future emperor was a baby or child, due to ascend the throne provided he survived the murderous schemes of his relatives, he was an open invitation to many and varied forms of corruption.

  There were more than two thousand eunuchs in the Imperial Palace during the last half of the nineteenth century. Nicknamed “crows” because of their high voices, they were objects of derision outside the palace and the butt of imperial fury within. The emperor always had within reach a yellow satin bag of birch switches with which to punish them. If a eunuch tried to escape, he was beaten once and then a second time when the scabs from the first beating had started to form. A third attempt was punished with two months in the cangue, a wooden framework fastened about his neck and hands, used as a portable pillory.

  Despite a law that specified decapitation as punishment for stealing, eunuchs were famous for pilfering, and some established homes of their own with the proceeds of their thievery. It is reported that when the last Chinese emperor finally abolished palace eunuchs in 1923, he had all the eunuchs brought together without warning and driven forcibly from the palace. Thereafter, they were permitted to return to collect their belongings, but only one or two at a time. The emperor knew that if he had given them notice, they would have stripped the palace bare.

  ACCORDING TO CONFUCIUS, a good emperor was a benevolent being, a father who guided his people not by force but by example and moral inspiration. Not a pure philosopher and certainly no cleric—“As we do not understand life, how can we understand death?”—Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 B.C., left his followers precepts in many other areas of life—an ideology for government, an ethic for society, an educational outline for scholars, and general rules of conduct for the family and the nation. Although he taught ethical philosophy and a moral code, his primary concern was the development of a proper method for governing the state.

  Unlike Western political philosophies, which usually include civic duties, the Chinese model was “family-minded, and not social-minded.” According to Chinese-American philosopher Lin Yutang, writing as late as 1934, “The word ‘society’ does not exist as an idea in Chinese thought, and in the Confucian social and political philosophy we see a direct transition from the family… to the state… as successive stages of human organization.… ‘Public spirit’ is a new term, and so is ‘civic consciousness’ and so is ‘social service.’ There weren’t any such commodities in China.”

  Based on ancestor worship and filial piety, the Confucian system required everyone, from the Son of Heaven down to the peasant in the rice paddy, to discharge the duties appropriate to his station. There were, he said, only two main social classes in China: officials (including scholars) and all others. This was explained by Mencius (c.372–c.289 B.C.), probably the most famous follower of Confucius: “Without the gentleman there would be no one to rule the common people, and without the common people there would be no one to feed the gentleman.” The common people were subdivided into three classes, the most important being farmers, followed by artisans, and, at the bottom, merchants.

  Confucius was the greatest influence on Chinese education and political ideology for well over two thousand years, setting a standard that formed the basis of many of the country’s laws. He taught that a ruler motivated by wealth and power rather than altruism toward his subjects is no longer able to exercise authority and will eventually lose the “Mandate of Heaven” to rule. Certainly the Manchu Dynasty, the last Chinese ruling house, might well have retained the throne for a longer time had it not been for a fatal combination of weakness and rigidity, which, when confronted by the ambitions of the Western powers, spawned an entirely new and different type of rebellion. As befits the mood of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this upheaval was revolutionary rather than dynastic.

  AT THE TIME Charlie Soong returned to China, the Manchu or Ch’ing (“pure”) Dynasty, which originated in Manchuria, had been in power for approximately 250 years, during which it had doubled the size and tripled the population of the Empire.* To show their subj
ection to the Manchus, Chinese men were required to shave the front of their heads and braid the back into long queues like those of Manchurian tribesmen. Some of these queues hung down as far as the bearer’s knees.

  Like rulers of previous dynasties, Manchu emperors lived in Peking in splendid isolation within the thirty-five-foot-high scarlet walls of the Forbidden City. An enclave of palaces, temples, and pavilions set on terraces with twenty-foot-high double doors, yellow-tiled roofs, and balustrades carved in white marble, it was surrounded by gardens with ancient cypresses, pagodas, statues, and goldfish ponds. Also known as the Great Within, the Forbidden City was situated in the heart of the Imperial City. Nothing in Peking was allowed to be built higher than its walls for fear of offending the feng shui, the spirits of wind and water, who, like Chinese emperors, were easily displeased. Imperial edicts were lowered over a particular section of the wall in a gilded box shaped like a phoenix. These edicts were received by government officials who waited below on their knees.

  No one was allowed to enter the Forbidden City without permission, and only Manchu officials were privileged to inhabit the Imperial City, which surrounded it. Protected by a moat and a wall wide enough to accommodate a man on horseback, the Imperial City was only a part of what was called the Tartar City, the northern two thirds of Peking; in the Tartar City, the houses were painted gray and other dull colors so as not to outshine the yellows, reds, and purples of the Forbidden and Imperial Cities. The southern third of Peking, which was inhabited by native Chinese during the reign of the Manchus, was known as the Chinese City. All of these areas—the Forbidden City, the Imperial City, the Tartar City, the Chinese City, and the entire city of Peking—were, at one time or another, walled enclosures, guarded by the famous Great Wall of China, situated less than one hundred miles to the north. Forty feet high, fifty feet thick, and nearly two thousand miles long, this once-impassable bulwark is said to be the only man-made structure visible today from outer space.