PART FOUR Emperor Guangxu Takes Over
(1889–1898)
13 Guangxu Alienated from Cixi
(1875–94)
BORN on the twenty-eighth day of the sixth lunar month of 1871, Emperor Guangxu succeeded to the throne at the age of three, when Cixi's own son, Emperor Tongzhi, had died without an heir. She adopted him and made him the next emperor, partly to elevate a member of her own family – her sister's son – and partly to punish his father, Prince Chun. She had no real love for the child, at least not of the kind she had felt for her own late son. Taken from his home and carried into the bitterly cold and impersonal Forbidden City in the depths of a wintry night, the child lost his parents – and his wet nurse, who was not allowed to join him. Instead, he was placed in the charge of eunuchs. Cixi told him to call her ‘Papa Dearest' (qin-ba-ba) and, when he was older, he called her ‘My Royal Father' (huang-ba-ba). It was a man's role that Cixi aspired to fill. As a mother, she was dutiful rather than warm. She had no instinctive fondness for children anyway. Once, at a party in the court for aristocratic ladies, a young girl started bawling and would not stop. An irate Cixi ordered the child's mother to take her away, telling her, as she fell to her knees in tears, ‘I send you out of the Palace to teach you a lesson, which you must teach your child. I do not blame her; I blame you and pity her; but she must suffer as well as yourself.' The family was not invited again for some time.
Empress Zhen was more of a mother figure to the child emperor than Cixi. But she died when he was nine, on 8 April 1881, aged forty-three. He could not stop crying at her bier. It has been alleged that Empress Zhen was poisoned by Cixi, although no one has produced any evidence. In fact, she almost certainly died of a massive brain haemorrhage, as doctors who studied her medical records have concluded. She had a history of what appeared to be strokes, of which Grand Tutor Weng's diary recorded at least three. The first happened as early as 1863, when she suddenly fainted and lost the ability to speak for nearly a month. Her reputation for ‘speaking slowly and with difficulty' during audiences may have been a consequence. On the last occasion, she fell into unconsciousness and died within a couple of days.
Cixi mourned Empress Zhen's death as that of an intimate and superior family member – by wrapping her own head in a white silk scarf. This went beyond the prescribed mourning etiquette for the empress dowager and earned her ‘immense admiration' from the traditionalists like Grand Tutor Weng. Although dynastic rules only required the period of mourning to be twenty-seven days, Cixi extended it to 100 days, during which time all joyful activities, like weddings, were prohibited. What was more, she decreed a twenty-seven-month ban on music in the court. This, just over a year after the four-year ban following the death of her son, and in the middle of an illness during which she craved music, was a real sacrifice. So starved of music was she that, months before the end of the ban, she started planning performances and selecting singers from outside the court. Within days after the ban was lifted, in summer 1883, she watched opera non-stop for ten hours. Thereafter there were continuous performances for days, one lasting twelve hours.
The death of Empress Zhen deprived Emperor Guangxu of a mother figure. It also left a vacuum as there was no one to act as conciliator between him and Cixi. When the child grew up and was increasingly alienated from his Papa Dearest, there was no one to bring them back together. No one was in a position to, and no one had the clout. Empress Zhen, senior to Cixi in rank, a friend from her teenage years and a comrade in launching their coup, for which both of them had risked death by a thousand cuts, had been the only person to whom Cixi displayed humility. Cixi had respected the empress's judgement in a working partnership that spanned two decades, and had deferred to her in domestic affairs – even in a matter as crucial as the choice of a wife for her son. Without Empress Zhen's help, Cixi was unable to halt the gradual worsening of her relationship with Emperor Guangxu, a deterioration that would result in disasters for the empire, as well as for themselves.
At this stage Cixi behaved like an ‘absentee parent,' who, apart from receiving the child's daily ritual greetings, confined her involvement with him to his education. She engaged Grand Tutor Weng, who had taught her late son, to be the chief teacher. The fact that she and the conservative Weng had disagreed on so many issues did not prevent her from appointing him to the post. Weng was by consensus the most upright and acclaimed of scholars, and could be trusted to instil in the child all the qualities that a good emperor should possess. Cixi was firmly committed to Chinese culture, even though she was open to Western ideas. It was taken for granted that a Chinese monarch had to be brought up in the Chinese way. It does not seem to have occurred to her that this emperor should be educated differently, but, even if it did, no other way would have been approved by the grandees, who had a voice in how their emperor was educated. As a result, Emperor Guangxu was moulded like his ancestors: no part of his education would equip him to handle the modern world.
The child emperor began his lessons when he was four. On a sunny early spring day, he was taken into his study to meet his tutors. Sitting behind a low desk, facing south, he spread a large piece of paper on the desk and asked for a brush. He had already learned to write a little. Grand Tutor Weng dipped a brush into a well of ink and handed it to the child, who proceeded to write two phrases, each with four characters, in what his tutor called ‘extremely symmetrical and pleasing' calligraphy. One phrase meant ‘peace and stability under Heaven', and the other ‘upright, magnanimous, honourable and wise'. Both were Confucian ideals to which a good monarch should aspire. With this delightful start, Grand Tutor Weng showed the child the word ‘the Morality of the Emperor', di-de, which he repeated after the tutor four times. Next Weng opened a picture book, Lessons for an Emperor, in which the famously good and notoriously bad emperors were portrayed. As he explained to the child why they were good or bad, the boy's finger, following that of his teacher, paused over the portraits of the mythical Emperors Yao and Shun of the Three Great Ancient Dynasties, who were worshipped as exemplary monarchs. The four-year-old seemed to be attracted to them. After lingering over their images, he asked Grand Tutor Weng if he would again write down the word ‘the Morality of the Emperor', which the Grand Tutor did. The child gazed at the word for some time before the first lesson ended.
This first session, recorded in Grand Tutor Weng's diary, provides a glimpse of Emperor Guangxu's education and the sort of pupil he would become. Quite the opposite of his cousin and immediate predecessor, Emperor Tongzhi, who dreaded the lessons, Guangxu seemed to take to them. At the age of five, to Cixi's amazement, he was reciting at all times – ‘sitting, standing, walking or lying down' – what must have been to him incomprehensible classics. Such dedication may well have had something to do with the strong attachment he formed to his teacher, Weng. The boy wanted to please the old man. When he was six, Weng was away for some time, tending to the repairs of his family tombs. During his absence the child played like a normal boy, and did not do the homework the tutor had left him. Weng had asked him to recite some classical texts twenty times each, in order to learn them by heart, but Guangxu only read them once. The day Weng came back, the child threw himself into the old man's arms and cried: ‘I have been missing you for such a long time!' Then he went to his desk and started reciting the texts, twenty times each. A eunuch in attendance commented: ‘We haven't heard this sound for ages!'
With this powerful motivation to imbibe, and a good memory, Emperor Guangxu rapidly excelled. Grand Tutor Weng's diaries, which had been littered with exasperated outbursts about his former pupil, were now peppered with satisfied exclamations such as ‘good', ‘very good', ‘extremely good' and ‘brilliant!' By nine, the emperor was able to decorate fans with calligraphy that ‘has a really artistic feel', said the delighted tutor, a renowned calligrapher himself. Barely into his teens, the boy could write ‘utterly fluent' poetry and essays at speed, as if mature thoughts flew out of his young head ‘with wings'.
The child's whole life was given over to his studies, which included the Manchu language, as well as some Mongolian, though Chinese classics remained the core subject. From the age of nine he began to practise reading reports and writing instructions on them in crimson ink. For this purpose, a copy was made of some reports for him to practise on. As the Chinese language had no punctuation marks in those days, the child first had to divide the sometimes very long texts into sentences by marking each pause with a crimson dot. The instructions he gave were sensible, though understandably limited to generalities. Sometimes, Cixi would sit with him while he practised, like a parent watching her child doing his homework today. One report came from a governor requesting a piece of calligraphy from the emperor, which would be carved on a plaque and mounted on the entrance of a temple to the God of Thunder. Apparently the god had been seen to make an appearance, which was interpreted by frightened locals to mean that there would be storms coming to destroy their crops. Royal reverence to the god could placate its wrath. The nine-year-old granted the request, in a reply that he had clearly absorbed from his readings. Cixi then showed him what he might say of a more specific kind, by writing an additional instruction to the effect that the official must not just count on the royal inscription for good harvests, and that the gods would be better pleased if he performed his duties conscientiously.
On another report, from Marquis Zeng Jr, suggesting allowing junior diplomats abroad to come home for vacation and paying for their extra costs, the then ten-year-old duly gave his consent. Cixi added the principle: ‘The most important thing is to choose the right people. Once you have them, don't begrudge them expenses.'
So Emperor Guangxu was groomed, by the empress dowager as well as his Grand Tutors, to be a wise ruler. By the age of ten he was giving occasional audiences. When Cixi was ill, he stepped in and was able to talk to officials in this way: ‘What are the crops like in Henan? Is there still a lack of rain? We in the capital are also suffering from drought. How we long for the rain!' These were the standard lines expected of a good emperor. And Grand Tutor Weng felt ‘much rewarded and contented'.
Indeed Emperor Guangxu grew up to be a model Confucian monarch. From the Grand Tutor he learned to despise ‘personal wealth', cai, and declared that he preferred ‘thriftiness', jian – at which the old man exclaimed: ‘What great fortune for all under Heaven!' His essays and poems, in their hundreds and well kept in envelopes of yellow silk in the Forbidden City archives, mostly expressed his thoughts on how to be a worthy emperor. ‘Care for the people' (ai-min) was a constant theme. Writing about the moonlight over a palace lake, the emperor would think about far-away starving villagers, who shared the same moon, but not his luxury. In summer, on cooling himself in an open pavilion, nibbling ice-chilled fruits, his poems were about feeling pity for peasants toiling under a scorching sun. And in winter, on cradling a gilded charcoal burner in the heated palace while listening to howling winds, he imagined how the wind would be lashing at ‘tens of thousands of families in inadequate homes'.
His sentiments and the language he used to express them conformed exactly to precedent, established over centuries, for a good Confucian emperor. And yet, for all the concerns he displayed for his subjects, the emperor had nothing to say about how to improve their lives through modern means. Nowhere in his writings did he mention industries, foreign trade or diplomacy. The emperor's young mind was frozen in the past.
Trained as a Confucian purist, he regarded fun as sinful. His holidays were mostly spent in the study, as were his birthdays. On his eighth birthday the court staged operas over several days. Each day he put in a brief appearance before returning to his study. He was a diligent pupil, but he had also been taught by Weng to dislike opera for its melodrama and tuneful melodies, which were deemed to be ‘vulgar'. To the tutor's delight, the child said that he considered it to be something only for his attendants – that he preferred the ‘elegant sounds of bells and drums', ancient music that was stately (if monotonous), designed not for pleasure, but for contemplation and ceremonies, approved of by Confucius.
The child shunned play, or any vigorous physical activity, including riding, which was on the curriculum for a Manchu emperor. To meet his obligation he had a wooden horse installed and sat on it for his lessons. But he did like to exercise his hands, and loved to take apart and reassemble watches and clocks. Eunuchs purchased these European imports from an enterprising Dane, who had a shop in the capital.
Guangxu was physically weak, timid and nervous, with a stutter, and he was easily frightened. The sound of thunder terrified him. When there was a storm, a crowd of eunuchs would gather around him, shouting at the top of their voices so as to drown out the thunder. Unlike his Papa Dearest, or his cousin, Emperor Tongzhi, Guangxu seemed to have no vitality. He expressed no desire to travel, not even to go beyond the Forbidden City: he was content in his isolation from the outside world.
Inside the Forbidden City, intense labour over the classics lasted for a decade – the time needed to produce a scholar. At the end of it, Emperor Guangxu's tutors pronounced that he had completed his studies ‘with distinction'. In summer 1886, when he turned fifteen, he was deemed well qualified to be the ruler of China. Cixi felt obliged to issue an edict, bidding the imperial astrologer to select an auspicious date at the beginning of the following year for the young man to assume power.
The imminent departure of Cixi threw the modernisers into panic. Deprived of her energetic initiative and drive, the reform projects she had started were likely to peter out. For days Earl Li was ‘unable to sleep or eat properly' and was ‘in a constant state of trepidation'. In the end he wrote to Prince Chun, imploring him to think of a way for Cixi to stay on. The prince was well aware that his son could not fill Cixi's shoes, and so conducted a petition campaign pleading for Cixi to act as the emperor's ‘Guardian' for a few more years. He put pressure on his son to go down on his knees and beg the empress dowager not to retire. Cixi encouraged the campaign by having the Grand Council draft petitions for officials. One, singing her praises, proclaimed that she had ‘brought the country into a brand new and glorious phase unprecedented in its long history' – an assessment that Grand Tutor Weng, who was most anxious that his pupil should take his rightful place, found ‘inappropriate'. As always, Cixi considered every angle and anticipated the concern of some petitioners that, by calling for her to delay the handover, they might annoy the emperor: she let it be known that the emperor himself had begged on his knees for her to stay.
Eventually Cixi announced that she would ‘continue to act as the Guardian for a few more years'. Earl Li was overjoyed. Prince Chun wrote: ‘My heart, which has been in my mouth for days, has now returned to its proper place. This is really good fortune for all in the empire.' Earl Li commented: ‘How extremely true.' Grand Tutor Weng was not pleased, but, as a seasoned courtier, he made no protest. When the empress dowager asked him whether his pupil was really ready to take over, he replied that, as the emperor's tutor, he could not boast that His Majesty had left no space for improvement; and that even if he had, ‘the interests of the dynasty override all'.
Emperor Guangxu was disappointed. After being forced to perform the sham ‘begging', he was unwell for days – ‘under the weather, with a cold and a headache', Weng recorded. The emperor suspended the lessons, and when he next saw his tutor, he appeared so depressed that the old man, struggling to cheer him up, burst into tears. The normally placid young man became emotional. His tutor encouraged him to speak his mind to the empress dowager. But he did not. Of all the virtues extolled by Confucius, filial piety was foremost.1 The concept had been drilled into the young man partly through ritual: every day, so long as they were staying in the same place, he never failed to go to his Royal Father to bid her ‘good morning' and ‘goodnight'. He had to remind himself constantly ‘not to be disrespectful', but his heart grew bitter. As his mind was no longer on his studies, the previously joyful tutor now began to lament his pupil's lack of concentration.
An introverted man, Emperor Guangxu brooded. His health deteriorated, and every few days he would take some sort of medicinal stew. He wrote later that it was from this time that he ‘felt permanently cold around his ankles and knees, and would catch cold from the slightest draught' or if he was ‘not tucked in extremely tightly at night'. His voice dropped to the level of a whisper and was unintelligible to officials in the occasional audiences he gave. Even his handwriting evinced signs of feebleness – the brush strokes trailing shakily, the characters dwindling to half their usual size, as if he were too weak to hold his brush.
Cixi was well aware of her adopted son's condition. She asked Grand Tutor Weng to persuade him to settle back into his studies, tearfully defending her delayed handover as doing her ‘duty to the ancestors'. But the only remedy for his malaise was for her to release power, which she was unwilling to do.
Emperor Guangxu turned sixteen in summer 1887. This was the age at which Cixi's own deceased son was married, his wedding preparations having started when he was thirteen. Cixi had delayed her adopted son's marriage because it would signal his coming of age, after which she could hardly remain in charge. But the marriage could not be delayed indefinitely, and the nationwide selection of his consorts had to begin. The process took a long time and, one day in 1888, Emperor Guangxu exploded in frustration. He refused to go to a scheduled lesson and in tremendous agitation smashed the glass on a window. (The emperor was known to have a bad temper, and once, recorded his tutor Weng, ‘in a fury he had three eunuchs from the Tea Department thrashed harshly, one of them to the verge of death, all for trifles'.) Now his anger towards his Papa Dearest could no longer be contained. Cixi was taken aback. Two days after this outburst, she announced that the wedding would take place at the beginning of the following year. Soon there was another decree declaring that she would retire immediately after the wedding – whereupon her adopted son issued his own decree dictating arrangements for her retirement ceremony, leaving no chance for anyone to intervene. Within days of these announcements, Cixi moved out of the Forbidden City into the Sea Palace, which was to be her retirement home. The paint in her new quarters was still wet, and she had to stay in a temporary apartment.
As the empress dowager, Cixi was entitled to help decide who should be her adopted son's wife. She wanted an empress who was totally obedient to her. After going through the obligatory selection process, she made clear her choice: a daughter of her brother, Duke Guixiang.2 She had always liked the girl, and had ‘reserved' her as the empress for some years. Longyu was meek and good-natured, with beautiful manners. But she was very plain – a defect that was not compensated for by wit. And, being three years older than the emperor, she was twenty-one at the time of their marriage, well over the normal age for a royal bride. Even in the average family she would be considered an old maid. When Grand Tutor Weng recorded the choice of consorts, he omitted the new empress's age, mentioning only the ages of the two concubines, Pearl, twelve, and Jade, fourteen.
Emperor Guangxu disliked his empress – and liked her father still less. Duke Guixiang was a figure of scorn. He was an opium smoker, even though his sister, the empress dowager, detested the drug. Considered hopelessly incompetent, he never held any post of substance. As he had squandered much of his wealth, Cixi felt obliged to subsidise his family, not by giving him money, which might well go directly to the opium seller, but by giving him gifts from time to time. When the eunuchs came with a porcelain vase or a cloisonné jewellery box from the empress dowager, they expected handsome tips, which the duke had to raise by pawning some of his belongings. The eunuchs would time their arrival to give the family the opportunity to visit the pawn shop, and meanwhile would hang around the duke's house offering greetings to all members of the household, as well as paying endless compliments over tea to the duchess, who could not resist flattery. After receiving their tips, the eunuchs would lewdly ridicule the duchess among themselves. She and the duke were not the parents-in-law an emperor could feel proud of.
This arranged marriage betrayed Cixi's striking lack of sensitivity for her adopted son. In the case of her late son, she had allowed him to choose his own bride, even though she had misgivings about his choice, a girl whose grandfather had died at her hands and who might well harbour a hatred for her. But Cixi loved her son enough not to veto the choice. This time, she had chosen the empress for her adopted son without a shred of consideration for his feelings. Emperor Guangxu did not protest explicitly, observing the code of filial obedience – and his Papa Dearest was a formidable character to defy. But he had his own way to retaliate and sprang a surprise immediately after his formal assumption of power on 4 March 1889.
The day after was his wedding day, on which 5.5 million taels had been spent. The occasion was predictably splendid, enhanced by sunny weather. Empress Longyu, carried in a golden sedan-chair, travelled along the central line in the Forbidden City, the line that only an emperor – and an empress on the single occasion of her wedding – was allowed to tread. Around her was the treeless immensity of the august front section of the Forbidden City, lined with red-uniformed Praetorian Guards carrying multicoloured banners, and officials in blue robes against a backdrop of crimson walls and golden roofs. Her sedan-chair passed through the Gate of Supreme Harmony, which had recently been burned down and was now a temporary paper-and-wood imitation, even though it looked as glorious as the real one. Like this gateway, Empress Longyu's marriage would be a sham.
Beyond the gateway stood the most magnificent hall of the Forbidden City, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Tai-he – the location for the most important events of the dynasty. The grand banquet in honour of the bride's father, Duke Guixiang, was scheduled to be held there the day after the wedding. But that morning, according to Grand Tutor Weng, Emperor Guangxu got up, ‘complained of feeling dizzy' and ‘threw up water'. Royal physicians could find nothing wrong with him, but the emperor nevertheless declared that he must avoid draughts, and refused to go to the great hall. The banquet had to be cancelled and all the assembled grandees had to disperse. Such a cancellation was unheard of, and rumours started to fly at once throughout the capital. The emperor made sure that this snub to his bride's family was driven home by having the untouched food distributed to the officials on the invitation list, and specifically ordered that nothing was to be delivered to his father-in-law's house. It is easy to imagine Cixi's anger on learning about her brother's spectacular humiliation. In her Sea Palace, noted Grand Tutor Weng, ‘opera shows did not stop' at the news that the emperor was unwell.
Thereafter Emperor Guangxu treated his wife, Empress Longyu, at best with coldness. Under the gaze of the court he would look right through her as if she did not exist. She tried to please him, which only annoyed him. It was widely known that when she ‘came into his presence he not infrequently kicked off his shoes at her'. Cixi's desire to supervise her adopted son backfired and further strained her own relationship with him. Now that she was obliged to retire, the last thing Emperor Guangxu wanted to do was consult her about anything, least of all matters of state.
The emperor favoured Imperial Concubine Pearl, a lively young girl who, noticed the eunuchs, did not appear in front of him as a woman. She wore no make-up and sported a man's hairstyle (with a queue down her back), a man's hat, a riding waistcoat and flat black satin boots. As he later described to his doctors, including a French doctor, Dr Dethève, Emperor Guangxu had been experiencing involuntary ejaculations at night since early adolescence. He would feel aroused by the sound of percussion instruments in his dreams, which would give him sensual feelings and lead to nocturnal emissions. However, at other times, wrote Dr Dethève in his medical report, such ejaculations did not occur and ‘there is no possibility of having an erection'. This suggests that Emperor Guangxu was unable to have conventional sex. People in China guessed as much at the time – and called it ‘castration by Heaven'. Pearl, dressed like a man, thus put no pressure on him to have sexual intercourse, and he was able to feel relaxed with her. The emperor took up musical instruments such as gongs, drums and cymbals – all the ones that sexually aroused him – and became a rather good percussionist.
In spite of his physical problems, the emperor carried out his royal duties conscientiously, continuing, at the same time, with his study of the Chinese classics and the Manchu language. His life was spent exclusively in the Forbidden City, with excursions only to the adjacent Sea Palace and occasional trips to temples to pray for good harvests, or to the royal mausoleums to beg for his ancestors' blessings. He was as close as ever to Grand Tutor Weng, a father figure with whom he had spent all his formative years and whom he still saw virtually daily. There was another tutor, a modern-minded man named Sun Jianai, who urged him to think about reforms. But the young man was not interested. Nor did he have a rapport with this tutor. Only Weng was in a position to shape the policies of Emperor Guangxu's reign.
Weng remained disdainful of the West, although he was no longer filled with hatred and had become receptive towards some Western practices. From the descriptions of travellers abroad, as well as his own experience of passing through Shanghai, he recognised the benefits of industries such as ‘iron mills, shipyards, and weaponry manufacturers'. He had his first photo taken in 1887. He even had approving things to say about a Catholic church that he visited. The church orphanage, he noticed, had separate male and female sections, standing on ‘high and damp-free ground', and was ‘tidy and orderly'. The church school had four classrooms, where children were reading out loud in a most pleasing fashion. His hosts were ‘extremely courteous' and the servants ‘declined tips'. All in all, the Grand Tutor was impressed. Still, in Shanghai, he felt a ‘strong aversion' to Western buildings, and preferred to stay indoors alone rather than go out. He continued to oppose railway-building. When fire broke out in the Forbidden City just before the emperor's wedding, he saw it as Heaven's warning against having electric lights, motor boats and the little railway in the palaces.
Cixi was aware of his views and of his influence on her adopted son. But there was little she could do about it, especially as the young emperor had developed such an aversion for her, on top of his emotional attachment to the old man. Before the handover of power, she had had a meeting with the pair, and extracted from them a promise not to change the course she had set. But she could not stop them when, before long, they shelved the great north–south railway which she had decreed, and let the currency reform peter out. When the delegation of officials she had sent to tour the world returned home, both they and the knowledge they had gained were ignored. Anxious to steer her adopted son towards an appreciation of the West, Cixi ‘ordered' him, noted Grand Tutor Weng, to learn English. As a parent, she had a say in his education, even though he was now an adult and had assumed power as the emperor. The English lessons started, to the Grand Tutor's dismay. ‘What is this for ' he asked. In his diary he lamented: ‘Foreign language books are now on the imperial desk. How sad this makes me!' Guangxu persisted, partly at Cixi's insistence and partly because he found the language intriguing. But his interest was purely academic and was not transferred into any modernising effort.
Emperor Guangxu did nothing to follow up Cixi's reforms, and let them lapse. He returned to the age-old way of running the empire: mere bureaucratic administration, writing brief minutes in crimson ink on the daily dispatches – ‘Report received.' ‘Do as you propose.' ‘To the relevant office.' His audiences were routine and brief. It was widely known that the emperor ‘has a hesitation in his speech … he speaks slowly and with difficulty'. Indeed his voice was barely audible, and he had a stammer. To spare him the obvious pain of having to speak, officials advised each other to produce a monologue after the emperor's first question and thus fill the obligatory minimum ten minutes. The emperor still fretted about the ‘hard life of the people'. Once, when a flood burst a dyke, poured into Beijing and lashed at the walls of the Forbidden City, the distressed emperor worried about the numerous people living in the path of the flood. But he did no more than the traditional opening of the rice centres and praying to Heaven. It does not seem to have entered his mind that modernisation could provide some solutions. Food imports continued, as did foreign trade, but the country went into a ‘period of slumber', noticed Westerners, ‘in which the foreign traders alone were enterprising'.
No petitions were filed deploring this lethargy. Traditional watchdogs over the throne would cry out against deviations from precedent, royal extravagance or impropriety, or other offences to the precepts of Confucianism – but not inaction. The debates over policies that had enlivened Cixi's court were entirely absent, as the elite settled back into the old routine. Prince Gong was not in office, but even if he were, he was not a person to set the agenda or push for change. Prince Chun needed to work under a leader rather than lead himself. In any event, he was plagued by illness and died on the first day of 1891. Earl Li, whom many Westerners regarded as ‘the greatest moderniser of China and a great statesman', was equally helpless without Cixi. Although he retained his posts, his hands were tied: his arch enemy and political adversary, Grand Tutor Weng, now had the emperor's ear.
Emperor Guangxu did not grant an audience to the diplomatic corps to receive their credentials for two years after his assumption of power. When he did, the occasion – his first contact with Westerners – went smoothly. It had been established in 1873, under Cixi's influence, that Western envoys need not kowtow. Following this precedent, the envoys bowed and Emperor Guangxu nodded in acknowledgement. Prince Ching, who had succeeded Prince Gong as the head of the Foreign Office, took from the ministers their written letters of congratulation and placed them on the yellow dragon altar, before going down on his knees to recite a sort of formal report. He then stood up and read out the royal reply to the envoys. This procedure was repeated each time a minister presented his credentials. ‘Audience went off successfully,' wrote Robert Hart. The ministers might have been surprised if they had set eyes on the diary entry of Grand Tutor Weng. In the presence of His Majesty, Weng wrote, in language that had not been used in Cixi's court for decades, ‘the foreign barbarian envoys were frightened and trembling, and so fell into performing proper obeisance'.
Westerners had had high hopes of the young emperor when he took over. ‘Railroads, the electric light, physical science, a new navy, an important army, a general banking system, a mint, all in the bud now, will soon be in full flower … The reign of the young emperor will be the most memorable epoch in Chinese history.' Many had dreamed this dream; but the buds so assiduously planted and nurtured by Cixi were not allowed to grow, let alone to flower.
Emperor Guangxu ambled along, a conscientious administrator with a penchant for scholarship, while Grand Tutor Weng indulged in leisurely appraisals of poetry and calligraphy. Both were reaping the benefits of peace and stability created by Cixi. They were to be rudely thrust into a whirlwind that would change everything for them – and the empire – when Japan, taking advantage of Cixi's absence, pounced in 1894.
1 One of Grand Tutor Weng's heroes was an official who, after his parents died, declined to have treatment for his own illness and died himself.
2 After making her sister's son emperor, Cixi was now making her brother's daughter empress. The marriage of first cousins was a common practice.