16 War with Japan
(1894)
JAPAN set about its miraculous transformation into a modern power during the reign of Emperor Meiji, who ascended the throne in 1867. With a population of forty million, it aspired to build a global empire. In the 1870s, it seized one of the China's vassal states, the Liuqiu Islands, and attempted to invade Taiwan, part of the Chinese Empire. Cixi's general policy was to keep the empire intact at all costs, while releasing the vassal states if she had to. She washed her hands of Liuqiu, by deeds if not by words, but made a determined effort to defend Taiwan, linking the island more closely to the mainland.
Japan also cast its eyes on Korea, another vassal state of China. In this case Cixi tried to prevent the Japanese from annexing the country as it shared a border with Manchuria, which was close to Beijing. As China was not strong enough to stop Japan by itself, Cixi sought to involve the West as a deterrent. She instructed Earl Li to persuade Korea to open up trade with the Western powers, so that they would have a stake in the country. In 1882, an internal strife broke out in Korea and the Japanese Legation was assaulted. Tokyo sent a gunboat to Korea to protect its nationals. As soon as she heard the news, Cixi told Earl Li her anxiety that Japan ‘might exploit the situation to pursue its designs'. She immediately dispatched troops by both land and sea to the capital of Korea, today's Seoul, with Earl Li in overall command based in Tianjin. While the Chinese army helped end the riot, the Japanese refrained from getting involved in the fighting; they obtained some compensations – but, most importantly, their soldiers stayed on. In response, Cixi ordered some of her troops to be stationed in Korea for as long as there was a Japanese military presence.1 Writing to Earl Li in her own hand in crimson ink, to stress the importance of her words, she said: ‘Though a small country, Japan harbours big ambitions. It has already swallowed Liuqiu, and is now eyeing Korea. We have to prepare ourselves quietly. You must be extremely cautious about Japan, and do not lower your guard for a moment.' It was principally for this reason that she decided to spend enormous sums to build up the navy.
At the end of 1884, while China was at war with France on its border with Vietnam, a pro-Japanese coup broke out in Korea. From the information she gathered, Cixi was convinced that ‘the Japanese were behind the coup', ‘taking advantage of China's preoccupation' elsewhere. She sent over troops to help suppress the coup, but told them not to give the Japanese any excuse to start a war. As it turned out, when Chinese troops did clash with the Japanese in the Korean king's palace, the Chinese were victorious. On Cixi's instructions, Earl Li opened talks with Count Itō Hirobumi, soon to become Japan's first Prime Minister, and both sides agreed to withdraw troops from Korea. Cixi was pleased with the ‘speedy and satisfactory conclusion'. So was Robert Hart, Inspector General of Customs, who wrote in a letter: ‘The Japs were to sign yesterday at T'tsin [Tianjin]: so we win all round.'
Over the next decade, Japan accelerated the modernisation of its military, especially the navy. In China, Cixi laid down her guideline for naval development just before she retired at the beginning of 1889: ‘Keep expanding and updating, gradually, but never slacken.'
But after Cixi's retirement, China stopped buying advanced warships. Emperor Guangxu was guided by Grand Tutor Weng, who was also in charge of the country's finance as the head of the Ministry of Revenue. Weng could not comprehend why huge sums of money should be spent on gunboats when there was no war. He did not see Japan as a threat. All his concerns were domestic. In 1890, natural disasters ravaged the country and millions were made homeless by floods. Hart wrote: ‘We have had lakes in the city – a sea round it – rivers in the streets – swimming baths in the courtyard – shower baths in the rooms – and destruction for roofs, ceilings …' Famine-stricken men and women depended on rice centres, to which Cixi as the empress dowager made donations. The government spent more than eleven million taels to buy rice from overseas that year.
When the disaster was over and rice imports halved, naval updating did not resume. On the contrary, in 1891, when Cixi moved into the Summer Palace and severed her ties with the government altogether, Emperor Guangxu decreed that all naval and army be discontinued, on the advice of Grand Tutor Weng (‘there is no war on the coast'). This decision may have caused the rows at this time between Emperor Guangxu and Cixi, who was deeply concerned that Japan would now outstrip China in military material. Indeed, as Earl Li observed, Japan ‘is concentrating the resources of the entire country to build its navy,' and ‘is buying a gunboat every year … including first-class, latest ironclads from Britain'. As a result, in the ensuing years, the Japanese navy overtook the Chinese in its overall capacity, especially in faster and more up-to-date warships. The Japanese army also became better equipped.
At this time Earl Li was in charge of coastal defence. Emperor Guangxu had inherited and retained Cixi's old team after his takeover. Whatever resentment he felt for his Papa Dearest, he was not engaged in a power struggle with her. The emperor also had no interest in defence matters – in fact he preferred not to have to think about them and left everything in this field to Earl Li. But although the earl had this enormous responsibility, he had lost the unreserved trust that he had enjoyed with Cixi. At the emperor's side was his bitter foe, Grand Tutor Weng. The animosity of the arch-conservative royal tutor towards the major reformer went back a long way. The tutor had always suspected that some of the money allocated to the earl for building the navy had ended up in the earl's own pockets and those of his associates. This sneaking suspicion was behind his advice to the emperor to stop all purchases of gunboats. As soon as Cixi retired, the Grand Tutor started to check the earl's accounts, year by year, going back to 1884, when a major update of the navy began. The earl was required to present the financial records in detail, to answer endless queries and to justify himself – and to beg for such essentials as maintenance costs for the ships. The Grand Tutor remained suspicious, and the emperor appointed Prince Ching as the overlord of the navy, in a signal of distrust towards the earl.
The earl felt that the throne ‘chooses to believe in groundless rumours and seems to want to take power away' from him. Under this pressure, he made it his priority to please the emperor and keep his job. After Emperor Guangxu halted the purchases for the navy, and knowing that His Majesty did not want to spend money on defence, the earl presented him with a glowing report about an impregnable coast. There was no mention of any problems, although the earl knew there were many. He wrote privately, ‘Our ships are not up to date, and the training is not quite right. It would be hard to succeed in a sea battle.' Later he even said that he had known all along that the Chinese military was a ‘paper tiger'. But to Emperor Guangxu he only said what His Majesty wanted to hear. Indeed, the emperor was pleased and praised him fulsomely for doing a brilliant job.
Naval chiefs repeatedly asked for new warships, but the earl did not pass on their requests to the throne. He was fearful that Grand Tutor Weng might accuse him of crying wolf in order to line his own pockets, and that the emperor might fire him.
The earl was in denial about Japan's ambitions. He did not seem to have any sense of unease, even though he could see that Japan's naval expansion was aimed at China: Japan was ‘seeking to be one-up on us in everything: if our gunboat speed is 15 knots, they want theirs to be 16 knots …' ‘That country will go far,' he remarked to a colleague. But he shut his mind to the inevitable fact that Japan could only ‘go far' at the cost of the Chinese Empire.
If Cixi had been in charge, she would never have allowed Japan to become superior in military hardware. She knew that this was the only way to deter Japan. Before she retired, she had built up a navy that was the most powerful in Asia, far better equipped than that of Japan. And to keep that edge was by no means impossible, given that Japan had less total wealth at the time and could ill afford a gunboat race.
But Cixi in retirement had neither adequate information nor any say in international affairs. And the young emperor was not a strategic thinker. He simply left the whole business of defending the country to Earl Li, whose calculations were based on self-interest.
On 29 May 1894, after inspecting the coast, Earl Li presented the monarch with another optimistic report. This time, traces of apprehension crept in: he mentioned that Japan had been buying gunboats every year and that China was lagging behind. But he stopped short of spelling out the implications, which were consequently lost on Emperor Guangxu. His Majesty asked no questions, and once again praised the earl for doing a good job.
Just at this moment, Japan struck. In spring that year there had been a peasant uprising in Korea. On 3 June, the Korean king asked China to send in troops, and Beijing agreed. In keeping with Earl Li's agreement with Count Itō, China informed Japan. Tokyo claimed it needed its own soldiers in Korea to protect its diplomats and civilians, and dispatched a force. The uprising ended before the troops of either country could intervene, and the Koreans requested both countries to withdraw. The Chinese were prepared to do so. But the Japanese declined to leave.
The Prime Minister of Japan was now Count Itō, Earl Li's counterpart in the negotiations ten years earlier. An outstanding statesman, Itō had since that time helped draft the Meiji constitution (1889) and establish a bicameral national Diet (1890), which had laid the foundations of modern Japan. At the very time when he dispatched troops to Korea, his intention was that they should stay there – as a first step towards a very much more ambitious goal: to initiate a military contest with China, beat the massive empire and become the leader and master of East Asia. So, instead of withdrawing, he sent in more troops. His pretext for this act of invasion was that the Korean government must be forced to carry out modernising ‘reforms'. The Chinese were told that they were welcome to join in this ‘reformist' enterprise but, if they chose not to take part, Japan would carry it out alone. Prime Minister Itō's scheme put Japan in a win–win situation. If the Chinese troops left, Japan would occupy Korea – and challenge China at a time that suited Japan. If the Chinese stayed on, there would be numerous opportunities to create conflict between the two armies and spark off a war, again at a time of Japan's choosing. In fact Prime Minister Itō had made up his mind to take on China now.
No one in the Chinese government grasped Japan's intentions, not even Earl Li. While the Japanese military build-up in Korea gathered pace, it was business as usual in Beijing. Emperor Guangxu continued his classics lessons and planned banquets to mark his birthday at the end of July. Grand Tutor Weng wrote calligraphy on fans, a common scholarly pastime, and appraised his treasured stone-rubbing collections with visiting connoisseurs. Earl Li delayed reinforcing the Chinese troops in Korea, for fear of triggering a war. It does not seem to have occurred to him that Japan's goal was not confined to Korea – that it was actually seeking war with China. Thinking peace could be preserved, the earl busily lobbied European powers, especially Russia, which had its own designs on Korea (of which the earl was well aware), hoping that they would intervene and restrain the Japanese – a hope that proved futile. Robert Hart observed that the earl ‘is calculating with too much confidence on foreign intervention and infers too much from Japan's willingness to discuss'. ‘The Powers are at work trying to induce Japan to withdraw and discuss, for they don't want war, but Japan is very bumptious and cock-a-hoop'; Japan ‘thanks them for their kind advice, goes on her way, and would probably rather fight them all than give in!'
At the end of June, it finally dawned on Earl Li that Japan was ‘not just threatening Korea', but wanted a decisive war ‘with China, using everything it has'. This recognition came from news supplied by Robert Hart. ‘Japan is mobilizing 50,000 troops, has ordered two up-to-date iron-clad gunboats from Britain and bought and hired many English commercial vehicles for transferring troops and arms.' When he reported this to the emperor, the earl's emphasis was now on the problems that beset his country's defence. This time he made clear that China was ‘probably unable to win on the sea' and, moreover, that there were only 20,000 land troops defending the entire northern coast, from Manchuria to Shandong.
The emperor noticed the discrepancy between this and the earl's recent upbeat report, but he was not alarmed. He said that war between China and Japan over Korea was ‘within our expectations', and he was sanguine. Grandly he talked about ‘launching a punitive military action on a massive scale'. His Majesty's condescension towards Japan was shared by the vast majority of his subjects. Hart observed: ‘999 out of every 1000 Chinese are sure big China can thrash little Japan …'
On 15 July, while Japan moved ‘in a really masterful way' (Hart's words), the Chinese emperor appointed his classics tutor as his key war adviser. The Grand Council could not have a meeting without Weng's presence. Teacher and pupil were blithely ignorant about just how bad the condition of their country's defence was. Hart wrote at the time that China would find that ‘her army and navy are not what she expected them to be', and that if there was a war, ‘Japan will dash gallantly and perhaps successfully, while China, with her old tactics, will have many a defeat to put up with …' Indeed, the Chinese military had slipped back into their old ill-disciplined and corrupt ways. Gunboats had been used for smuggling, and gun barrels, uncleaned, as laundry hangers. Nepotism had swelled the ranks with incompetent officers. No one was in the mood for war – while the Japanese military had been drilled into a superb war machine, primed for action.
Belatedly Earl Li started to transport troops to Korea by sea, for which three British ships were chartered. While the ferrying was under way, on 23 July, Japanese troops entered Seoul, seized the Korean king and set up a puppet government, which granted the Japanese army the right to expel Chinese troops. On the 25th, the Japanese navy launched a surprise attack on the ferries transporting Chinese soldiers and sank one ship, the Kow-shing. More than 1,000 men, including five British naval officers, died. News of the first military clash with Japan was withheld from Emperor Guangxu for two days by Earl Li. The earl was afraid that the poorly informed emperor might declare war at once, which he regarded as unwise. He was trying to use the sinking of a British ship to avert the war. ‘Britain cannot allow this,' the earl reckoned; it would do something to check Japan. He clutched at his hopes like a handful of straws.
It quickly emerged that neither Britain nor the other powers wished to become entangled. China and Japan declared war on each other on 1 August. The burden of conducting China's first modern war – and its biggest war in more than 200 years – thus fell on the shoulders of a twenty-three-year-old who had led a totally secluded life. He had little knowledge of the world, only haphazard information about his own armed forces and none about his enemy, and relied almost exclusively for guidance on his backward-looking classics tutor. His military commander, Earl Li, laid all his bets on peace efforts and failed to prepare proper defences. Worse, the earl felt unable to share strategic planning with Guangxu – and often concealed the truth from him.
Facing this shambles was Japan's modern army and outstanding leadership. The outcome of the war was not hard to predict. The Chinese suffered one catastrophic defeat after another, on land in Korea as well as on the sea. By late September, the Japansese had captured the main city in northern Korea, Pyongyang, and had advanced to the Yalu River – the border with China.
During all this time, Emperor Guangxu did not involve Cixi beyond informing her when war looked inevitable, just before 16 July. She was living in her Summer Palace, cut off from the nerve-centre of policy decisions, with only a vague picture of the conflict. He had come to her for her confirmation that war must be fought, and she gave her full support. She also stressed that China ‘must not do anything that gives the impression of weakness'. The way Earl Li conducted himself in pursuit of peace was an admission of weakness – even desperation. And yet there was no sign that the message was conveyed to the earl. Emperor Guangxu only mentioned it en passant to Grand Tutor Weng in his private study. Cixi herself had no contact with the earl and no way to give him, or anyone else, direct instructions.
After this brief consultation, Emperor Guangxu sought Cixi's views no more. Her role was purely symbolic. In her name an award was given to an army unit that was reported to have won China's first victory – which turned out to be phoney. There can be no doubt that Cixi was extremely anxious. She appears to have tried to get a couple of Grand Councillors to pass on information to her, through Prince Ching, but Emperor Guangxu learned about it and reprimanded the Councillors. At the urging of a group of friends close to him, the emperor kept Cixi out of the policy loop. Reports about the war were presented only to the emperor in sealed envelopes, and he only allowed her to glimpse their headings.
From the outbreak of war at the beginning of August until the eve of the fall of Pyongyang at the end of September, it seems that Emperor Guangxu only consulted Cixi once – when he wanted to sack Admiral Ting, head of the Northern Fleet that was fighting the war. He was bound by the Statutes drawn up governing his assumption of power to obtain Cixi's approval for major personnel changes. Presenting his case, the emperor accused the Admiral of being ‘cowardly and incompetent', because he did not send his fleet out to the open sea. In fact the Admiral was adopting a defensive strategy, based on the fact that the Japanese had better and faster ships and their superiority would have been decisive on the open sea. By staying in its base, the fleet was afforded the protection of the forts. But the emperor heeded the advice of a cousin of Imperial Concubine Pearl, Zhirui, who insisted that as ‘Japan was merely a tiny and poor country, our ships must parade on the open sea … and attack and destroy its gunboats. Our canons must fire first, the moment we encounter an enemy ship.' When Cixi saw the draft edict sacking the Admiral, she was incensed and said with palpable outrage: ‘The Admiral has not been found to have committed any crime!' She refused to allow the edict to be issued. In a gesture of defiance, Emperor Guangxu gave a particularly harsh order condemning the Admiral and telling Earl Li to find a replacement. The earl wrote at length entreating the emperor to reconsider, explaining the defensive strategy, pointing out that there was no one to replace the Admiral, and arguing that sacking him would cause an upheaval in the navy. At last, the emperor grudgingly suspended the dismissal, but he continued to scold and berate the Admiral.
It was against this background that the Admiral conducted a major sea battle on 17 September 1894, in which four out of eleven of his warships were sunk. This event, together with the imminent fall of Pyongyang, forced Emperor Guangxu to involve Cixi, who had also just found an opportunity to leave the Summer Palace and go and stay in the Sea Palace adjacent to the Forbidden City. So, on the day of the devastating sea battle, and after two full months of disastrous warfare, Cixi saw the Grand Council for the first time in years. She still did not have a mandate to conduct the war. Her stay was initially supposed to be short, only ten days, after which she was scheduled to return to the Summer Palace on 26 September. But because of her status and her track record, she assumed a certain authority – especially in the eyes of those who had worshipped her. To brief her about the development of the war, Earl Li presented detailed reports attaching past telegrams that he had received. As a bleak picture began to emerge, Cixi announced that she was donating three million taels for the upkeep of the army. Then she extended her stay in the Sea Palace for another ten days, to 6 October – ‘provisionally' – meaning it could be longer. Simultaneously she cancelled all celebrations for her sixtieth birthday,2 which fell on 7 November.
The preparations for this birthday had started three years earlier, overseen by Grand Tutor Weng, amongst others. The sixtieth birthday was a milestone for the Chinese, and that of the empress dowager required glorious celebrations. One of the central responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites, a major government ministry, was to issue programmes for such occasions. The programme this time followed the precedent set by Qianlong the Magnificent for his own and his mother's sixtieth birthdays, and filled two booklets bound with red satin. The files of imperial decrees were thick with lists of honours to be bestowed, promotions to be made, criminals to be amnestied, and a thousand and one other things to be done. Along the route from the Forbidden City to the Summer Palace, sixty sites had been selected, where richly decorated arches, pavilions, marquees and stages for operas and dances were being constructed. These were now scrapped. Cixi would only receive congratulations in the Forbidden City, in a much-reduced ceremony.
For several days Cixi studied the history of the war, and she concluded that Earl Li had bungled China's position through a series of miscalculations – and misconduct, such as misleading the emperor. Given that the army had a personal allegiance to him, she felt that he could not be dismissed. To calls for his blood, she replied: ‘Hold it for now. There is no one to replace him.' Prince Gong was reinstated and made the chief Grand Councillor. But the prince could conjure up no miracles. There were more defeats – and heroism. In one sea battle a captain called Deng Shichang sailed straight at a Japanese ship to try and ram it, and when that failed and his own ship was sunk, he refused to be rescued and drowned himself (apparently together with his pet dog).
By the end of September, all the Chinese troops had been driven out of Korea to their side of the Yalu River. Beijing knew, in the words of Robert Hart, that ‘further fighting is unreliable and an early settlement the best step to be taken'. Two Grand Councillors approached Hart to ask Britain to broker a peace. The British suggested two terms as the basis for stopping the war: that Korea become a protectorate of the international powers, and that China pay a war indemnity to Japan. Under the circumstances, these terms were not at all bad. But they sent Grand Tutor Weng into a fury. Condemning the British minister who presented the proposal as ‘vicious', he demanded that the Grand Councillors reject the terms. Cixi spent a long time trying to persuade him to agree to the British proposal, letting him know this was her wish. The courtier bowed to the will of the empress dowager with great reluctance, and the British put the proposal to the Japanese.
This episode showed Cixi that her current position was very different from what it had been in her pre-retirement days. She was now only a ‘consultant', albeit one with clout. Indeed, she was not adequately informed, as the emperor only gave her access to some of the reports he received, which meant that her picture of the war was patchy. As a result, she entertained the illusion that, with the mediation of the British and the payment of an indemnity, settlement could be reached. She underestimated Japan's appetite, believing that at this stage it would be satisfied with gobbling up Korea. While waiting for Japan's response to the British proposal, she did something that was out of character with her as a statesman, but in character with another side of her, that of a woman avid for beautiful things. Earl Li had just sent her a list of his gifts for her birthday, and they consisted of nine sets of treasures:3 ‘Nine jade inlaid ru-yi, nine pure gold statues of the Buddha of Longevity, nine gold watches studded with diamonds, nine pairs of gold cups of “good fortune” and “longevity”, nine diamond headdress flowers, nine bolts of pure yellow velvet, nine bolts of floral yellow brocade, nine gold incense burners inlaid with seven jewels, and nine gold vases inlaid with seven jewels.'
It was a magnificent list – even for the empress dowager of China. And it was particularly tempting for Cixi, who took much pleasure in art and luxury. The earl, who did not have fabulous wealth, was really desperate to ingratiate himself with Cixi, clearly in the hope that she would save his skin. He presented the gifts knowing that Cixi had actually issued a decree two years before announcing ‘No presents, please' for her sixtieth birthday.
The earl's present-giving confirmed that he was an expert at pleasing his bosses through their weak spots. Indeed, Cixi found it hard to turn down this haul. And if she accepted the earl's gifts, she had to accept other people's. Birthdays celebrating a new decade were the chief gift-giving occasions, but her fiftieth birthday had been hit by the war with France, and she had had to veto all presents. Must she really forgo this opportunity again The temptation proved too strong. After a few days' agonising, Cixi persuaded herself that accepting birthday presents was not incompatible with fighting the war. This was similar to her self-delusion in the past when she thought that taking a relatively small sum of money each year from the naval funds made no difference to the navy. Now she effectively rescinded her own decree, and sent eunuchs to announce that officials above a certain high rank could present gifts if they wished to do so.
Her words immediately caused disquiet among top officials in the court. Some, like Grand Tutor Weng, said that they had not prepared anything because they had been following the empress dowager's own decree, and their admiration for her could not be measured by material things anyway (as per a Confucian dictum). But the general flow was set: everyone began to rack their brains about what to give, and Weng and a few others employed an agent to scout for them. Realising she had made a mistake, Cixi quickly issued an edict attempting to explain herself, saying that she thought it would be wrong of her to spurn people's good will. But the damage had been done. The fighting spirit, which was already lacking in the court, was dissipating. Robert Hart wrote in a letter: ‘Things look bad here. The officials have no fight in them and despair is generally settling down on all: it is a very bad lookout indeed, and if Japan will not accept “the olive leaf”, I don't know how we'll get out of it …'
The Japanese did not accept ‘the olive leaf'. Without replying to the British, they launched assaults on the Chinese border defences, which collapsed like a pack of cards. The Japanese were inside China itself by 27 October. Cixi belatedly tried to make amends. She offered to donate another two million taels to the war effort. But this gesture could not salvage either the war or her image. Her much-reduced birthday rituals were performed to the beat of a marching Japanese army. The ceremonies were a fa ade she simply had to preserve: cancelling them would have amounted to announcing a national catastrophe and would have caused bewilderment in the empire. But even the prescribed pomp could not dispel a bleak and dreary atmosphere.
Western powers were scandalised and contemptuous that the empire seemed incapable of one decent fight, and only capable of a birthday fanfare. Cixi's reputation plummeted. Robert Hart wrote ironically, his former reverence for the empress dowager now gone: ‘we shall probably have the Emp. Dow.'s birthday (7 Nov.) celebrated by the capture of Liao Yang – I don't think [the Japanese] can march to Moukden by that date!' Liao Yang was right in the middle of the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria, close to Korea, and Moukden was the old capital of the Manchus, further north.
On 21 November, the Japanese seized the strategic fortress harbour of Port Arthur on the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula – the gateway to Manchuria by land, and to Tianjin and Beijing across a short stretch of water. This catastrophic development made Cixi see the full scale of Japan's ambitions and capabilities. She bitterly regretted the birthday-gifts fiasco, and the ceremony, however reduced in scale. Later on, she would declare no celebrations or gifts for any of her birthdays. Her seventieth birthday, a major occasion, would be no exception. On that occasion, calls for her to accept tributes echoed across the provinces, but she stood firm.
Back in November 1894, Cixi also blamed her misjudgement on her restricted access to information. She acted to break her adopted son's embargo on sharing with her the reports addressed to him. As his refusal had very much been on the advice of friends who had gained his ear through Pearl, Emperor Guangxu's favourite concubine, Cixi tackled her first.
Pearl was officially under her charge, as a member of the harem, and Cixi had shown no ill feelings towards her. In fact she had tried to be nice to Pearl, often inviting her and her sister, Jade, to stay in the Summer Palace. When Pearl expressed a wish to learn to paint, Cixi had made Lady Miao available to her. At the beginning of that year, as part of the celebrations for her sixtieth birthday, Cixi had promoted Pearl one rung up the royal consort ladder. Pearl, now eighteen years old, craved money. One not inconsiderable expense as an imperial concubine was tipping the eunuchs, in order to be served well, and Pearl was a lavish tipper. To make money, she sold official posts to the highest bidders. One post was Mayor of Shanghai, and she pleaded with the emperor to give the post to a certain Lu. When Emperor Guangxu ordered the Grand Council to appoint Lu – without telling the Councillors that the nomination had come from Pearl – they queried the appointment as they had not heard of Lu. The emperor was compelled to have Lu assessed by the Ministry of Officials. Lu was found undeserving of the job in Shanghai and was put on a reserve list, waiting for a far more junior assignment to become vacant. Word leaked out that Lu was illiterate and had bribed Pearl with a huge sum. There were other similar cases.
For an imperial consort to take advantage of her relationship with the monarch to sell official jobs was an offence punishable by death in the Qing court. The emperor would become a laughing stock and would be deemed stupid and unworthy if the scandal was exposed. Cixi knew about Pearl's misdeeds and Guangxu's involvement, and she decided to use them to force her adopted son to agree to her demands. She obtained confessions from Pearl and the eunuchs serving her – by having the eunuchs thrashed on their backsides with long flat bamboo bats, and by forcing Pearl to watch as their skins split and their screams weakened from howls to whimpers. Pearl herself was slapped across the face. In great pain, humiliated and terrified, she collapsed. A royal doctor found her ‘unconscious, her teeth clenched, and her whole body twitching and shaking'. Blood trickled from her mouth and nose. She slipped in and out of consciousness for a fortnight.
Some years earlier, when Pearl had just been chosen as an imperial concubine, her mother had sensed an unhappy fate for the girl. Mrs Headland, the American doctor, had been called to see Pearl's mother and recalled that the aristocratic lady:
was suffering from a nervous breakdown due to worry and sleeplessness. On inquiry I discovered that her two daughters had been taken into the palace as concubines of the Emperor Kuang Hsu [Guangxu]…She took me by the hand, pulled me down on the brick bed beside her, and told me in a pathetic way how both of her daughters had been taken from her in a single day. ‘But they have been taken into the palace,' I urged, to try to comfort her, ‘and I have heard that the Emperor is very fond of your eldest daughter …' ‘Quite right,' she replied, ‘but what consolation is there in that …I am afraid of the court intrigues, and they are only children and cannot understand the duplicity of court life – I fear for them, I fear for them,' and she swayed back and forth on her brick bed.
With Pearl's confession, Cixi compelled her adopted son to accept her ‘deal'. She would allow his role in the scandal to be covered up, and in return Guangxu would give her full access to all the war reports. On 26 November, the emperor absented himself when Cixi told the Grand Council what Pearl had done, and then had a decree issued in her capacity as empress dowager overseeing the harem, announcing the transgressions committed by Pearl and her sister Jade and demoting them both. The decree portrayed the emperor as a monarch of impecable integrity. It said the two imperial concubines had ‘begged the emperor' to give jobs to people they had recommended, but that he had felt ‘deeply troubled by this behaviour' and had brought the case to the empress dowager, asking for his two consorts to be censured. When Grand Tutor Weng saw Emperor Guangxu the following day, His Majesty calmly raised the subject as if he had indeed been totally innocent. On that day, the 27th, Emperor Guangxu issued an edict ordering that all the reports addressed to him be presented to the empress dowager – and in their original form. It was only from this day on that Cixi had full access to information about the war.
Meanwhile, as a reminder of the gravity of the scandal, a severely worded reprimand was framed and hung in Pearl's apartment. A eunuch chief involved was executed. Cixi had wanted the execution to be in public, but was persuaded by Grand Tutor Weng that this would do damage to the dynasty; the death sentence was carried out inside the Forbidden City by the court's Judicious Punishment Department – using bastinado, namely, beating the eunuch to death with long wooden bats.
Cixi now resolved to separate Emperor Guangxu from his friends who had been urging him to exclude her from the decision-making process. She most wanted to shut out of the court Pearl's cousin, Zhirui, the man who had also tried to get the emperor to sack Admiral Ting and have him thrown into prison – even executed – all for no reason other than that the Admiral had taken up a (sensible) defensive position. In another petition Zhirui had advised the emperor to cut the pay of the troops defending Manchuria by 80 per cent – to save money, so he said. Why should he single out Manchuria, which borders on Korea, for cuts, when the Japanese were on the doorstep Cixi could not but regard Cousin Zhirui's advice as toxic and of benefit to the Japanese. Deeply suspicious of him, she sent him to a post in the far north of the empire, well away from the court.
She also planned to eliminate the influence of Wen Tingshi, a family friend of Pearl. Wen had written to the emperor saying that Cixi had to be barred entirely from politics, because a woman playing a role in state affairs was like ‘a hen crowing in the morning, which is bound to herald a disastrous day'. In addition, Wen had got a Censor, Weijun, to petition the throne and accuse Cixi of meddling, alleging that she was the puppet of her head eunuch, Lianying. Cixi was distraught by this allegation, which even some top officials tended to believe. One voiced his concern to her in an audience, and her anger was palpable as she interrupted him and told him to ‘rest assured' that the allegations were untrue. Rumours began to circulate that she was an appeaser and had been ‘putting pressure on the emperor not to fight Japan'. ‘Historians are going to write it in this way. How am I to face the country And what will the future generations think of me?' she cried. Emperor Guangxu felt compelled to punish the slanderous Censor and banished him to the frontier for several years. Such a harsh punishment for criticising Cixi was unheard of during her reign, and it caused a sensation. Many believed the accusations (it was – and still is – easy for women to be cast as scapegoats for failures), and feted the Censor as a hero. Much of the sympathy for him was stirred up by Wen, whose closeness to Emperor Guangxu gave him credibility. Wen collected tens of thousands of taels as a morale-boosting gift for the Censor as he went into exile. For all that Wen had done to her, Cixi's treatment of him was restrained. During the war she left him alone, and afterwards she made her adopted son send Wen out of the court and the capital. Two other friends of the emperor who had been whispering to him words such as ‘Don't let the Empress Dowager butt in' were also sacked after the war, charged with ‘setting the Two Majesties against each other'.
The major step Cixi took for now was to try and close the emperor's study, which was the one place where his friends could come and talk to him without arousing suspicion. This was also where the monarch continued to study the classics and the Manchu language – and even English – in the middle of a disastrous war. Cixi was entitled to close the study since, as a parent, she had overall responsibility for his education. Shutting down the study would also put a stop to the emperor's tête-à-têtes with Grand Tutor Weng, during which they framed war policy. Cixi wanted policies to be made with the Grand Council, and in her presence. She made Weng a Grand Councillor, so that he would have no reason to impart his advice in private.
Cixi's move to close the study was unsuccessful. Emperor Guangxu was very annoyed about losing his private world, and asked Prince Gong, now heading the Grand Council, to intervene. Weng was upset, too. So Cixi had to allow his classics lessons to continue, stopping only the language sessions. She had to reassure Weng that she regarded him as ‘loyal and trustworthy', and shutting the study had not been aimed at him, but only at the likes of Zhirui. She apologised for her order being ‘too blunt'.
Only as a result of this immense struggle did Cixi break into the decision-making process. This was near the end of 1894, months after the war had started, and when China was already doomed to defeat.
1 The troops staying behind in Korea were under a Commander Wu Changqing, who seems to have succeeded in keeping his men strictly disciplined, which earned some goodwill from the Koreans. In 1884, he fell ill and returned to China. When it looked as though nothing could cure him, his despairing teenage son cut two slices of flesh from his own left chest, at a place near his heart, and cooked them with the medicine, in a desperate, but vain, hope that the love and sacrifice would move Heaven and revive his father. The son's idea had come from Confucian morality stories.
2 According to the Chinese method of calculation.
3Nine was considered the most auspicious figure, because it is the highest single-digit number and has the same pronunciation as the word for ‘long-lasting', jiu.