PART THREE Ruling Through an Adopted Son

(1875–1889)

10 A Three-year-old is Made Emperor

(1875)

CIXI was by her son's side when he died on that January evening in 1875. Just before his death, the grandees had rushed in, having been informed by doctors of the emperor's impending demise, and they had found him barely breathing and Cixi too choked with tears to speak. After staying for a while, they left the room, leaving the last moments to the mother and son. Shortly after the emperor's death was announced, while they were all still crying, they were summoned by the empress dowager, who wanted to make arrangements for the future.

The instinctive reaction of the ever-prudent Prince Gong was to stay away. Knowing Cixi, perhaps he sensed that her arrangements would be irregular, and he hesitated to be involved. But he nevertheless went in with the rest of the grandees. Cixi frankly asked them whether they thought it was a good idea for her and Empress Zhen to continue at the helm ‘behind the screen'. One man immediately answered ‘Yes': could the empress dowager please, for the sake of the empire, name a new emperor and continue to rule as before At this Cixi declared, on behalf of Empress Zhen as well: ‘The two of us have made our decisions and we are in complete agreement. We are now giving you our definitive word, which may not be altered or modified. Listen, and obey.' This tremendously forceful language came from a position of strength. Emperor Tongzhi had left no heir, nor had he left a will dictating who should succeed him. And, just before he died, he had asked the Two Dowager Empresses to run the empire. It was now up to them to designate the next monarch.

Cixi announced that the two of them would adopt a son for their late husband – and themselves – a child who would be raised by them. It was obvious that Cixi intended to rule the empire again as the dowager empress and to do so for as long as possible. The normal and correct thing to do would have been to adopt an heir for her late son. But if that were to happen, it would be hard for Cixi, the grandmother, to justify her rule. Emperor Tongzhi's widow, Miss Alute, was still alive at that time and she would have become the dowager empress. And yet Cixi's irregular arrangement roused no objection. Most welcomed her return to power. She had done an outstanding job prior to her son's accession. In contrast, her son's brief reign promised only disaster. Indeed, nearly all of them had been wilfully rebuked, and quite a few dismissed, by the late emperor, and who knew what would have happened if Cixi had not been around to bring him to heel. That she would be holding the reins again came as a huge relief – especially for the reformers, who had been frustrated by the stagnation of the last few years.

Then Cixi named the new emperor: Zaitian, the three-year-old son of her sister and Prince Chun.

Prince Chun was in the room, and the announcement, far from delighting him, sent him into a terrified frenzy. Kneeling in front of the throne, he fell into convulsions, howling and knocking his head on the ground until he passed out – a heap of court gown and underclothing. The boy was his only son at the time, and was treasured by him and his wife almost with desperation, not least because their previous son had died. It seemed that he was losing his only son for ever. Cixi, looking utterly unmoved, ordered that the prince be taken out of the hall. According to an eye-witness, ‘he lay in a corner, with no one paying him any attention. It was a wretched and desolate scene.'

The Grand Councillors withdrew to draw up the imperial decree proclaiming the new emperor. Shaking with tension, the man designated to write it out could not hold the brush steady. Watching this, Junglu, the then Lord Chamberlain, a man who was fiercely devoted to Cixi, became so anxious that an objection might be raised before the job was done that he grabbed the brush and started to write the decree himself – which was absolutely improper, as he was not a Grand Councillor. Junglu, apparently, had helped Cixi make up her mind to name the new emperor immediately after her son's death, so as to give no one the opportunity to speak or act against her decision.

Nothing went wrong for Cixi. In no time the formalities of establishing a monarch were completed and a procession was dispatched to fetch the new emperor. Before the first rays of dawn, the three-year-old had been woken up, separated from his mother, wrapped in a heavy court gown, put into a sedan-chair with an official by his side, carried into the Forbidden City amidst lanterns and candles and made to kowtow to Cixi and Empress Zhen in a dark hall. He was then taken to the bed where the dead Emperor Tongzhi was lying, to perform the obligatory wailing, which he did quite naturally as his sleep had been disturbed. Thus began the new life of Emperor Guangxu, Emperor of ‘the Glorious Succession'.

This was Cixi's moment of revenge on Prince Chun. For the anguish she had suffered over Little An's execution, she now twisted a knife into the prince's heart by taking away his only son. And she did it in such a way that Prince Chun could hardly complain: after all, his son was being elevated to emperor.

Making the son the emperor removed Prince Chun's political role. As the emperor's biological father, but not the official Regent, the prince was compelled to resign all his posts to avoid any potential accusation that he was using his influence to meddle in state affairs – a crime tantamount to treason. The prince offered his resignation at once, couching it in extremely humble language. Cixi told the grandees to discuss it, and Prince Gong forcefully recommended its acceptance. Among the reasons he gave was a protocol conflict. As an official, Prince Chun had to prostrate himself in front of the emperor, but as a father to his son this was out of the question. Grand Tutor Weng, a conservative ally of Prince Chun, saw that with the prince gone there would be no one to resist the reformers, and argued for the prince to retain one key post, that of head of the Praetorian Guards. Cixi rejected the suggestion and accepted Prince Chun's wholesale resignation. She did keep one job for him, one that did not have any real power: he was to look after the mausoleums of the Qing emperors. And, of course, she showered him with honours.

By depriving Prince Chun of any serious position, Cixi effectively silenced him. Any protest from him against her policies would now be deemed interfering in state affairs and would invite condemnation. Prince Chun was clearly alive to Cixi's intentions. Fearing she might go even further and find an excuse to charge him with high treason, he wrote her an abject letter, assuring her that he had no intention of meddling. Prince Chun was finished as the champion of the xenophobic camp. The ticking time-bomb for the empire was thus defused.

The prince was to suffer yet more personal tragedy. Cixi's sister gave birth to two more sons, but one lived for only a day and a half, and the other died after a few years, the victim of too much anxious love, according to the servants. The couple were perpetually worried that he might overeat – a major problem for children in rich families – and as a result the child suffered malnutrition.

To the prince's surprise, Cixi did not actually want to destroy him. Having demonstrated that she could have finished him off, she bestowed favours on Chun. She gave him concubines, and the prince was able to have three more sons; the eldest, born in 1883, was given his name – Zaifeng – by Cixi. She also made the prince the supervisor of the child emperor's education, to give him access to his son. The prince's wife, Cixi's sister, was invited to stay in the palace from time to time, so that she too could see him. Neither parent felt fully able to relax with the child, now that he was the emperor and had been adopted by Cixi. But her treatment of him was beyond Prince Chun's expectations and he was overwhelmed with gratitude.

Cixi won over the prince's friends as well, by showing them that she bore no grudge, and by skilfully buying them off. She made Grand Tutor Weng the chief tutor for the new child emperor, for which the tutor felt eternally grateful. And she gave Governor Ding, the man who actually had Little An executed, the promotions and honours due to him as if nothing untoward had happened. When the governor was promoted to Viceroy, he followed the Qing practice and went to Beijing for an audience. Before his arrival, through Junglu, the Lord Chamberlain, Cixi gave him 10,000 taels to help him with his expenses in the capital, where there was much obligatory entertaining and present-giving. Ding was short of money: as an uncorrupt man, he had not taken advantage of his official positions to make money for himself. Junglu presented the gift as coming from himself, but Ding, who was not a particular friend of his, understood where it had come from. He not only accepted it, but wrote and asked to ‘borrow' another 10,000 taels – which Junglu readily delivered. This was the old man's somewhat mischievous way of sending the message that he knew Cixi was the donor (he would not have asked another official for more) and that he was striking a deal with her. Although both Ding and Grand Tutor Weng retained their conservative views, they never again made trouble for the empress dowager.

And so Cixi removed all obstacles and steered the empire back on the course that she had first charted. This time, she would speed up the pace of progress. During her forced seclusion in the harem, her mind had not been idle, and she had learned much about the outside world from the reports and diaries of the travellers she had sent on those early journeys. Western-style newspapers in Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports had grown in number and were available to the court, where they had become an indispensable source of information. Compared with a decade ago, when she first came to power, Cixi now had a much better understanding not only of the West, but also of modernity. She was convinced that modernisation was the answer to the empire's problems – and she also knew that much time had been lost. Since the deadly warning conveyed by the execution of Little An, through the whole reign of her son, the country had stood still for five years. She was determined to make up for lost time.