11 Modernisation Accelerates

(1875–89)

IN early 1875, Cixi lost a son, but regained power. The year became an extraordinary milestone, packed with ground-breaking events. The first thing she did was to summon Earl Li to discuss an overall strategy for modernisation. The earl, who was based in Tianjin, had requested such a meeting in 1872, but at the time, feeling vulnerable and about to retire, she had turned him down. Now she saw him the day after he arrived, then the following day, and then for a third time a few days later. Her eagerness to resume her course and to regenerate the country was palpable.

The earl had by now emerged as the foremost moderniser of the country. He had surrounded himself with Westerners and made friends with many of them. Among their number was former US president Ulysses S. Grant, and the two men saw a great deal of each other in Tianjin in 1879. The missionary Timothy Richard described the earl thus: ‘Physically he was taller than most, intellectually he towered above them all, and could see over their heads to the far beyond.' The earl became the key man in Cixi's modernisation drive. He and Prince Gong, who headed the Grand Council, and whose name was to Westerners ‘synonymous with Progress in China', were now the empress dowager's right-hand men. With their assistance, Cixi steadily, yet radically, pushed the empire towards modernity. As Earl Li wrote to Cixi, expressing their shared aspiration, ‘From now on all sorts of things will be introduced into China, and people's minds will gradually open up.' They did not exclude the conservatives. Cixi's style was to work with people like Grand Tutor Weng as well as the reformists, always using persuasion rather than brute force, and being prepared to let time and reason change people's minds.

Cixi had wanted to send diplomatic representatives abroad a decade earlier. Now they were dispatched. On 31 August 1875, she announced her first appointment: Guo Songtao as the minister to London. Guo was an exceptionally forward-looking man who advocated learning from the West and adopting projects such as railways and telegraphs. He was furiously assailed by the conservatives. Grand Tutor Weng, in his diary, dismissed him as ‘perverse', and the literati from his province who were in Beijing taking Imperial Examinations talked heatedly at their gatherings about going and tearing down his house. Cixi comforted him, seeing him three times with Empress Zhen before his departure. The two women repeatedly told him not to be deterred by ridicule and slander: ‘everyone working in the Foreign Office is a target of abuse,' they said. ‘But the throne knows and appreciates you … you must take on this difficult job for the country.'

While Guo was abroad, his diary recording his impressions was published by the Foreign Office. In it he described the British adoringly: their legal system was ‘fair'; the prisons were ‘exquisitely clean, with polished floors, without foul air … one forgets this is a prison'; and their manners were ‘courteous', which alone, he asserted, ‘shows that it is not by accident that this country is so rich and powerful'. He even suggested that China's 2,000-year-old monarchical system was not as desirable as British parliamentary monarchy. Although some of his remarks – for example, that Chinese manners ‘fall far short, far, far short' – were deleted for publication, the first instalment of the diary excited teeth-gnashing hatred from literati-officials, who accused Guo of trying to ‘turn China into a British subordinate' and called on the throne to penalise him. Publication of the diary was forced to halt. But Guo was not rebuked. Instead, Cixi made him minister to France as well as to Britain, disregarding conservative officials' protestations. When Guo conducted a very public row with his traditionalist deputy in London, she transferred the deputy to Germany. Eventually, unable to get on with other mandarins, Guo asked to resign, and she accepted. She told his successor, Marquis Zeng Jr, son of the late Marquis Zeng Zuofan, that she knew that Guo was ‘a good man, and did a remarkable job'.

Cixi may not have agreed with all of Guo's views, but she appreciated his independent mind. And her style was to work with people of different persuasions. Her minister to Berlin, Hung Jun, was quite the opposite of Guo. He disliked European customs, especially those to do with male–female association. Outside official duties, he preferred to shut himself in his residence, carrying on with his research on Chinese history, going out only for walks in the Tiergarten. The consort he brought to Berlin, a concubine who had been a high-class call-girl by the professional name of ‘Prettier Than Golden Flower', yearned for parties, but was not allowed to attend, even when Hung gave receptions at home. She would dress up exquisitely, sashay demurely downstairs to greet her guests and then retire upstairs for the rest of the evening. When on rare occasions she stayed at a party, she was unable to dance – not only on account of her husband, but also because of her crushed and bound feet, which made it painful for her to walk or even stand. She remembered bowing to the Kaiser and the empress, and being paid compliments about her beauty by a glowing-faced, silver-bearded, piercing-eyed and courteous but distant Chancellor Bismarck – and that was all. She had also lost most of her servants, who had refused to cross the ocean with them, except for two who gritted their teeth for what they were certain would be a ‘journey of no return', and who were paid fifty taels a month each – far more than the monthly income of an average official in Beijing, and ten taels more than the German maids she hired in Berlin. She remarked that the German maids were ‘extremely considerate and very good at looking after people. They were more loyal and far more obedient than Chinese servants.'

But even Hung Jun could not remain entirely resistant to his new surroundings. At first, he indignantly refused to wear European socks. Then, the realisation that they were immeasurably more comfortable than the rough cotton ones he had brought from home dissolved his resolution. By the time he left Berlin, he had bought an ice-sledge as a gift for the empress dowager.

By the mid-1880s, with Cixi constantly urging ‘no foot-dragging', Beijing had geared up to dispatch groups of officials to travel round the globe and study Western institutions and cultures with a view to reforming their own system. And when applicants had been sought from the ministries, many scores had eagerly put their names forward – a far cry from a decade earlier. Dealing with the West was no longer regarded as a hardship or as shameful. Jobs that involved associating with foreigners were now coveted. Contemporary diaries and newspapers exclaimed how much society had changed. Even the sacred Imperial Examinations that had underpinned the political and social structures for well over 1,000 years were experiencing their first signs of modernisation. The applicants for the trips were told to write essays for their exams on such subjects as ‘the railway', ‘defence', ‘trading ports' and ‘the history of China's interaction with Western countries since the Ming dynasty'. These were mind-expanding subjects that spurred people on to learn new things and think new thoughts. Some candidates found the transformation unsettling and struggled to square the new with the old. One claimed that the essence of chemistry and steam engines could be traced to the teachings of Mozi, one of the Confucian sages in fourth- to fifth-century BC.

One group of people enjoyed immediate benefit from the regime's active diplomacy: the victims of the slave-labour trade, which had started from the late 1840s. Mainly in Cuba and Peru, they numbered hundreds of thousands. In 1873–4, the Qing government had dispatched commissions to investigate their conditions. The commission to Cuba reported:

8/10ths of the entire number declared that they had been kidnapped or decoyed;…on arrival at Havana they were sold into slavery,…the large majority became the property of sugar planters;…the cruelty displayed … is great, and … unendurable. The labour, too, on the plantations is shown to be excessively severe, and the food to be insufficient; the hours of labour are too long, and the chastisements by rods, whips, chains, stocks, etc., etc., productive of suffering and injury. During the past years a large number have been killed by blows, have died from the effects of wounds and have hanged themselves, cut their throats, poisoned themselves with opium, and thrown themselves into wells and sugar caldrons [cauldrons].

In Peru, they were found to be treated equally appallingly. Beijing was in negotiation with the two countries in an attempt to protect the labourers when Cixi resumed power in 1875. She stressed to her negotiators, headed by Earl Li: ‘You must find ways to make absolutely sure that such abuse of the Chinese is strictly prohibited and discontinued.' The subsequent conventions freed the slave labourers and banned the trade. Cixi appointed one of her best diplomats, Chen Lanbin, who had been the chief investigator in Cuba, to be the minister to America, Cuba and Peru, with the major responsibility for looking after the emigrants.

In 1875, efforts redoubled to build a world-class navy – mainly because China's neighbour, Japan, was becoming increasingly aggressive and had just tried to take the island of Taiwan. Cixi and her inner circle had registered the rise of Japan before her retirement in early 1873, as they watched it learning from the West, buying machines and gunboats, building railways and making weapons. Her court now discussed how best to deal with this ‘biggest permanent threat', and Cixi approved four million taels of silver a year – a huge budget – to build up the navy. It was the time when ironclad warships had just been invented in Europe, and her edict on 30 May authorised Earl Li to ‘purchase one or two', given that they were ‘astronomically expensive'. In the years following the edict, two ironclads and a group of other warships were purchased. Young men were sent to France to learn how to manufacture them and to Britain to train as naval officers. Germany was the destination for army cadets.

Finally, in 1888, Cixi approved the Western-style Navy Regulations. It was in endorsing these Regulations that she effectively unveiled China's first national flag. The country had had no national ensign, until its engagement with the West at the beginning of her reign necessitated a triangular-shaped golden yellow flag for the nascent navy. Now she endorsed its change into the internationally standard quadrangular shape. On the flag, named the Yellow Dragon, was a vividly blue, animated dragon, raising its head towards a bright-red globe, the sun. With the birth of this national flag, remarked contemporary Western commentators, ‘China proudly took her proper place among the nations.'

In the autumn of the momentous year of 1875, Robert Hart, the Ulsterman and Inspector General of Customs, was commissioned to write a memorandum aimed at a wholesale expansion of foreign trade. He did so, following the explicit instruction that ‘he must bear in mind how all-important it is that his proposals should be advantageous and not harmful to China'. Soon, more ports, mainly along the Yangtze River into the heartland, all the way up to Chongqing, were opened to international trade. These doors were not wrenched open by force. Cixi's government opened them willingly, in response to a request from Thomas Wade.¹ In Philadelphia, USA, a Chinese official participated in the world Expo for the first time, with the brief to record and report back on all his experiences. Among the modern institutions introduced by Hart was the Chinese Post Office, which issued the country's first set of stamps, ‘Great Dragons', in 1878.

The meaning of the old adage ‘Make China Strong' was expanded to incorporate ‘Make the Chinese Rich' (qiu-fu). It was now the consensus in Cixi's circle that ‘China's weakness lies with its long-standing poverty' and it could only become wealthy through Western-style industrial projects. ‘We must gradually adopt the same things, so we can get out of poverty and become rich as well.' These projects had been proposed by Hart and Wade a decade earlier – but then the ancient land had not been ready for them. All those journeys to the West had opened eyes and minds. In 1875, Cixi ordered the installation of the telegraph, first in Fujian province, for communication with Taiwan, the island that Japan coveted and Cixi was determined to keep. The Imperial Telegraph Administration was founded, with one of the country's pioneering modern businessmen, Sheng Xuanhuai, as its managing director. At first, crowds pulled down the wires and poles. But as people saw how harmless they were, how miraculous communication could be and how many benefits it could bring to their lives, sabotage stopped, and telegraph lines began to extend all over the empire.

Also in 1875, Cixi decreed the beginning of modern coal-mining, by designating two trial areas. Resistance was strong and the fears numerous – not least that China's underground treasures were about to be stolen by foreigners. Addressing this concern, Cixi ordered specifically: ‘We must keep decision-making power in our hands when we employ foreign personnel. Don't let foreigners control everything and make crucial decisions for us.' One of the two sites was on the island of Taiwan and the other was Kaiping, some 160 kilometres to the east of Beijing. Western technicians soon arrived with machinery, and Cixi appointed another outstanding pioneering businessman, Tong King-sing, as managing director. Tong had acquired his expertise while working for Western firms, and had founded China's first merchant-shipping company. Tong and Sheng, together with other first-generation industrialists and businessmen, heralded the rise of the middle class, while Kaiping became ‘the cradle of modern Chinese industry'. A giant industrial centre, Tangshan, grew from here. Outside these state projects, individuals were given incentives to look for outcrops and open mines. To solve funding problems and to encourage entrepreneurs, Cixi decreed that private businessmen should be allowed to issue shares.

With coal came electricity. Cixi led the way by having electric lights installed in the Sea Palace by 1888. Generators were bought from Denmark and operated by the Praetorian Guards. These were the first electric lights outside the Treaty Ports, and stimulated the spread of electricity. In the next few years, seventeen electricity companies for civilian as well as military and commercial use were founded in Beijing and other big cities. By 1889, Beijing had seen its first tram.

Cixi also set her heart on replacing the country's outdated currency, silver ingots, with manufactured coins. These ingots put China at a huge disadvantage in international trade: because their silver content varied, they tended to be valued too low. Only modern minting could solve this problem, as well as make the Chinese currency compatible with the outside world. It was no small undertaking, especially as it required a sizeable initial investment. Facing stubborn resistance, Cixi was adamant and offered to pay the start-up costs out of the royal household allowance. The project took off, with a proviso that it would be reviewed in three years.

The most conspicuous project that Cixi did not launch in 1875, or in subsequent years, was the railway. It touched on something akin to religion. The numerous ancestral tombs dotted across the country, all lovingly built by their families in accordance with feng-shui, could not be moved. Nor could they be left where they were, if they were near a railway line: people believed that the dead souls would be disturbed by the roaring trains. Cixi wholeheartedly believed that the tombs were sacrosanct.

There was also the problem of funding. For three years after Cixi returned to power, between 1876 and 1878, nearly half the Chinese provinces and up to 200 million people were hit by floods, drought and swarms of locusts – the biggest succession of natural calamities in more than 200 years and one of the worst in recorded Chinese history. Millions died of famine and disease, especially typhus. Traditional ways of coping with famines included the court praying for good weather, opening the royal purse, exempting affected areas from tax, and providing the Chinese equivalent of ‘soup kitchens': ‘rice centres'. Now unprecedented sums were spent on importing food from overseas. In such circumstances the building of railways would have had to rely on foreign loans, something Cixi had no experience of. She was cautious. ‘We would have to borrow tens of millions,' she said. ‘And we could land ourselves in trouble.'

To showcase the railway, British merchants built a 20-kilometre line from Shanghai to its outer port, Wusong, in 1876 – the first to come into service in China. Villagers and officials were aghast. One day, when a train was running, a group of men, women and children stepped onto the track and forced it to a halt. When the train moved off, the group grabbed at the carriages in a futile effort to stop it again. Another day a man was run over by the train, and it looked as though this might spark a riot. Thomas Wade persuaded the British company to stop the service. Cixi's government bought the railway and had it dismantled, to satisfy both parties. It is often claimed that Cixi stupidly had this – China's first railway – thrown into the sea. In fact, it was wrapped up and shipped across the straits to Taiwan, with the intention of using it at the coal mine there. The indigenous people of Taiwan did not feel as strongly about their tombs as the mainland Chinese, and because the island was less densely populated, there were fewer tombs anyway. As it happened, the line was unsuitable and had to be shipped back to the mainland, in the hope that it might be used at Kaiping. Here, again, the area that the railway would cross was relatively barren and sparsely populated, with few tombs. It was only because Kaiping's English chief engineer, Claude W. Kinder, decided, far-sightedly, to adopt the standard gauge that the Wusong line, with its narrow gauge, was finally left to rust.

After the Kaiping line was laid, 10 kilometres long, some concern was expressed that the few dead souls in the vicinity might be disturbed. So the train was pulled by horses. Then, cautiously, the horses were replaced by a locomotive, built locally under the supervision of Kinder and named ‘The Rocket of China'. Opposition went on and off, and finally died down.

But whether or not to build a more extensive system in China remained the most difficult decision for Cixi. For more than a decade she repeatedly invited debates among the elite. Views were sharply divided, and the usually decisive empress dowager was uncharacteristically hesitant. All the arguments in favour, championed by Earl Li, about how the railway would be good for defence, transportation, travel and communication, were not enough to convince her that a core belief of the population should be violated; or that the country should risk potentially crippling loans from the West.

In the end, Cixi decided to try the train herself. In 1888, she bought a train with six carriages and a 3.5-kilometre line from a French company, to be installed inside the Sea Palace. The whole thing, including packing and shipping, cost 6,000 taels, a fraction of the real price. Western manufacturers were competing with each other to win Chinese contracts, and years earlier Britain had offered a similar train as a wedding present to her son, a gift that had been declined. Now Earl Li supervised the purchase. He reported to Cixi that while the price was symbolic, everything was beautifully made in Paris, including a most luxurious carriage for her. The railway was laid with the guidance of a court feng-shui master, who dictated when the construction could start and in which direction it should proceed. Digging towards the north, he said, was out of the question for that year, and so the northbound section had to wait until the tenth day of the first month of the following year, 1889. On that day, ground was broken between 3 and 5 p.m. When the line was operational, Cixi took a ride and got the feel of a real train, if only for a few brief moments. She tasted the speed and the comfort of travelling, although she also saw the black smoke and heard the clanking engine. The train was stored away, only to be taken out to show visitors; and, on those occasions, eunuchs pulled the carriages, using long yellow silks twisted into ropes.

Around the time of this personal experience, in April 1889, Viceroy Zhang Zhidong put forward a unique and powerful argument that finally made up Cixi's mind in favour of a railway network. The Viceroy, two years Cixi's junior at fifty-two, a short man with a long, flowing beard, was a major promoter of modernisation. Western contemporaries called him ‘a giant in intellect and a hero in achievement'. Cixi had first noticed him years earlier, soon after her coup, during an Imperial Examination. His final essay, on current affairs, was bold and unconventional and had disconcerted the examiners, who slotted him at the bottom of the ‘pass' grade. But when Cixi read the essay, she recognised a like-minded spirit and upgraded him to No. 3 of the whole empire. Over the years she adopted many of his proposals and promoted him to key posts, now a Viceroy governing two crucial provinces in the Yangtze Valley.

The Viceroy's clinching argument was that the railway could bolster exports, which, he pointed out, were the key to enriching the population and the country in the era of international trade. At the time, the main exports from China remained tea and silk, while imports were rising steeply, due largely to the modernising projects. The country's trade deficit stood at more than thirty-two million taels in 1888; and the future looked worrying, as the quantities of tea exported had begun to fall. In 1867, China had supplied 90 per cent of the Western world's consumption, but now teas from British India and elsewhere had entered the global market. It was imperative that the range of exports was expanded. With this need in mind, Viceroy Zhang proposed building a 1,500-kilometre trunk line from Beijing to the south, through inland provinces all the way to Wuhan, a major city connected to the sea by the Yangtze River. All the land-locked provinces in the catchment area would then be linked with the outside world. Local produce could be refined by imported machines, made exportable and then transported to the coast. Potentially this could transform China's economy and solve its most fundamental and disabling problem: poverty. This visionary proposal struck Cixi: here were the real benefits of the railways, and they would be worth all the sacrifices and the risks.

She kept the Viceroy's proposal for deliberation. After soliciting scrutiny from the top echelon, and receiving no objections, on 27 August 1889 Cixi finally issued a decree that heralded China's railway age with this north–south trunk line. The Beijing–Wuhan railway, subsequently extended south to Canton, became (and remains) the country's central transport artery, critical to its economy even today. Cixi seems to have foreseen this, for her decree rang like a manifesto: ‘This project has magnificent and far-reaching significance, and is indeed the key component of our blueprint for Making China Strong. As we embark on this ground-breaking project, unavoidably there will be doubts and fears.' She went on to order the provincial chiefs, through whose territory the line would travel, to explain the enterprise to the local people and prevent them from obstructing it. ‘All in all,' she said, ‘I hope the court and country will be of one mind, the officials and the merchants will make concerted efforts, to achieve a complete success …' Viceroy Zhang was put in charge of the construction, together with Earl Li, and set up headquarters in Wuhan. There, associated with the railway, he initiated a host of modern industries, and made Wuhan one of the crucibles of China's industrialisation.

Cixi did not embrace industrialisation indiscriminately or unreservedly. In 1882, when Earl Li asked for permission to build textile factories, she objected, saying with unmistakable annoyance: ‘Textile making is our basic domestic industry. Machine-produced fabrics take away our women's work and harm their livelihood. It is bad enough that we can't ban foreign textiles; we shouldn't be inflicting further damage on ourselves. This matter must be considered carefully.' In those days, ‘textile making' was called can-sang, literally meaning ‘silkworms and mulberry leaves', as silk production had been a major activity of Chinese women for thousands of years. To maintain this tradition, every year in spring, when the silkworms began their labour, Cixi led court ladies to pray in a special shrine in the Forbidden City to the God of the Silkworm, begging his protection for the little worms. She and the ladies would feed the silkworms four or five times a day, gathering leaves from the mulberry trees in the palace grounds. When a silkworm had finished spinning a silk thread and had enclosed itself inside the cocoon it had made with its silk, the cocoon would be boiled and the thread, which averaged many hundreds of metres, would be wound onto a spool, ready for weaving. All her life Cixi kept some of the silk she had woven as a young girl, to see if the new silk was as fine and lustrous as the old. She did not want to see the old ways disappear altogether. While she was determined to drive through change in some areas, in others she either resisted change or accepted it only reluctantly. Under her China's industrialisation did not move like a bulldozer out to destroy all traditions.

¹ The opening up of these new ports was written into the same convention (the Chefoo Convention) as the settlement for the murder in Yunnan of Mr Margary, a member of the British Legation. But the British did not demand it with any threat of force.