2 From the Opium War to the Burning of the Old Summer Palace
(1839–60)
THE birth of Cixi's son, the emperor's firstborn male, was a monumental event for the court. Emperor Xianfeng had had only one daughter by this time, the Grand Princess, by a concubine who had entered the court with Cixi; but, as a female, the princess was not entitled to carry the dynastic line. With the arrival of Cixi's son, a palace file was opened with the title ‘Imperial Concubine Yi Gave Joyous Birth to a Grand Prince'. It shows that several months earlier, in accordance with a sensible royal household rule, Cixi's mother had been invited into the Forbidden City to look after her daughter. On an auspicious date determined by the court astrologer, a ‘Hole of Joy' had been dug behind Cixi's apartment, in a ceremony during which ‘Songs of Joy' were recited. Into the hole were placed chopsticks wrapped in red silk next to eight treasures, including gold and silver. Chopsticks have the same pronunciation, kuai-zi, as the expression ‘to produce a son quickly'. The hole was to be used for burying the placenta and the umbilical cord.
Silks of all kinds, the finest cotton and muslin, for baby clothes and bedding, were readied. Scores of women with childbirth experiences were interviewed. Together with doctors from the Royal Clinic, these mature women would stay by Cixi's side when her pregnancy entered the seventh month. Actually, court rules specified the eighth month, but an anxious Emperor Xianfeng decreed special treatment. He was kept closely informed about the development of Cixi's condition, and the moment the child was born, the chief eunuch rushed over and reported that ‘Imperial Concubine Yi has just given birth to a prince', and that the royal doctors had found ‘the pulses of the mother and the son are both peaceful'. (The pulse is regarded as a crucial indicator of health.) All cried: ‘Oh great rejoicing to our Master of Ten Thousand Years!'
Overjoyed, Emperor Xianfeng instantly elevated Cixi to a higher rank. The whole court was swept into a frenzy of celebration over the baby, who was named Zaichun. On the third day he was given a thorough wash, in a large bowl of pure gold, with the date, time (noon) and position (facing south) painstakingly calculated by the court astrologer. Soon, to great fanfares, the baby was formally placed in a cradle. More festivities took place when he was one month old, during which he had his first haircut. On his first birthday, a pile of objects was laid out for him to grasp: his choice was supposed to indicate his future disposition. The first item he grabbed was a book – for which he would in fact develop a phobia. On all these and other occasions he received lavish presents. Gift-giving was carried to extraordinary lengths at the time, and no occasion was thought proper without it. At the court, scarcely a day went by without presents being brought in or sent out, or exchanged by those within. By the end of his first year, Cixi's son had received some 900 objects made of gold, silver, jade and other precious stones, as well as more than 500 pieces of clothing and bedding in the finest textiles.
Thanks to her son, Cixi quickly became the undisputed No. 2 consort, second only to Empress Zhen. Her position was made even more secure when the emperor's second son, born two years later to another concubine, lived only a few hours and died before he was given a name. The strength of her position enabled Cixi to persuade her husband to marry her eighteen-year-old sister to one of his younger half-brothers, the nineteen-year-old Prince Chun. Consorts for the princes had to be chosen by the emperor, from the candidates presented for the selection of his own consorts. Cixi had seen quite a lot of the prince at the opera shows. Although on such occasions male and female were separated by a screen, the curious ones always found a way to size up a member of the opposite sex. From the boxes in which they were seated, cross-legged on cushions, the royal women could observe the royal males without being seen. The American missionary physician Mrs Isaac Headland, who (later) treated many aristocratic ladies, including Cixi's mother, noted: ‘these gentle little ladies have their own curiosity, and some means of finding out who's who among that court full of dragon-draped pillars of state; for I have never failed to receive a ready answer when I inquired as to the name of some handsome or distinguished-looking guest whose identity I wished to learn'. Cixi would have made it her business to find out about the character of Prince Chun, and indeed he would be of enormous service to her in the future.
Meanwhile, Cixi devoted herself to her son. Court rules forbade her to breast-feed him, and doctors prescribed herbal medicine to stop her milk. A wet nurse from a lower-class Manchu family who met the court requirements was engaged and, to facilitate her milk, one instruction enjoined her to eat ‘half a duck every day, or pigs' knuckles, or the front part of pigs' lungs'. The royal household also paid for the wet nurse to employ a wet nurse for her own child.
Empress Zhen was the official Mother to the child, and took precedence over Cixi. This did not lead to animosity between the two women, and the child grew up with two doting mothers. When he was older, he had a playmate, his elder sister, the Grand Princess. Court painters captured the two children playing together in the palace gardens, the little boy in an indigo robe tied round the waist with a red sash and the girl in green with a red waistcoat, with flowers in her hair. They are shown fishing from a pavilion under a willow tree open to a lake of blooming lotuses. In another picture, set in early spring, with white magnolias next to an evergreen pine, both the boy and the girl have little caps on, the prince's robe thick with pale-blue lining. They seem to be looking for insects that were perhaps waking from a long hibernation, among the gaunt roots of old trees and rockeries. In the pictures, the younger boy always appeared twice as big as his elder sister.
Behind these peaceful and idyllic scenes of the early childhood of Cixi's son, the empire continued to be convulsed by the Taiping rebellion in the south and by violent unrest elsewhere. In fact it was facing another gigantic problem: foreign powers had invaded.
The origin of the Anglo-French war against China in 1856–60 can be traced back 100 years earlier. In 1757, the then-emperor, Qianlong, who ruled China for sixty years (1736–95) and is often referred to as ‘Qianlong the Magnificent' for his achievements, closed the door of the country, leaving only one port open for trade, Canton. The emperor's paramount concern was the control of the vast empire, and a closed door made control much easier. But Britain was hungry for trade. Its main imports from China were silks and teas, the latter cultivated only in China at that time. Each year, through import duty, teas alone brought more than ￡3 million into the Exchequer, enough to cover half the expenses of the Royal Navy. To persuade Emperor Qianlong to open more ports for trade, a British mission arrived in Beijing in 1793. Its leader, Lord Macartney, did his best to accommodate Chinese demands and accepted that the boats and carts conveying his mission bear banners inscribed with Chinese characters: ‘The English Ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China'. In order to be granted an audience with Qianlong, he even performed the obligatory san-gui-jiu-kou – that is, kneeling three times to the emperor and touching the ground with his forehead nine times. Macartney did so with great reluctance and after much resistance, knowing that otherwise Emperor Qianlong would not see him.1
Emperor Qianlong treated Lord Macartney with what the Englishman called ‘every external mark of favour and regard', but he would absolutely not consider more trade. To show him what Britain could offer, Lord Macartney had brought with him, among other gifts, two mountain-howitzers, complete with carriages, limbers and ammunition. The emperor left them untouched in storage in the Old Summer Palace. In his reply to a letter from King George III, he carefully rejected the British king's requests point by point. To open up more ports for trading was ‘impossible'; Britain acquiring a small island off China's coast for its merchants to stay and store goods was not allowed; and the stationing of an envoy in the capital, Beijing, was ‘absolutely out of the question'. Lord Macartney had also requested that Christian missions be allowed into the country, to which the emperor's answer was: ‘Christianity is the religion of the West, and this Celestial Dynasty has its own beliefs bestowed by our sacred and wise monarchs, which have enabled our 400 million subjects to be led in an orderly fashion. Our people's minds must not be confused by heresy … The Chinese and the foreigners must be strictly separated.'
The emperor claimed that his ‘Celestial Dynasty possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders', and that it therefore had no need for anything from the outside world. He asserted that he only allowed trade at one port out of generous consideration for the foreigners, who could not do without Chinese goods. These swaggering words were neither true, nor what the emperor really thought. Customs duty from Canton contributed substantially to the state coffers – more than 1.1 million taels of silver in 1790, three years before Lord Macartney's mission. A large tranche of the money went to the court, whose annual expenses stood at 600,000 taels. Emperor Qianlong was well aware of this, as he regularly went through the books of transactions. Nor was he ignorant of the advancement of European science and technology. As vital a thing as the Chinese calendar, which guided agricultural production of the empire, had been definitively devised in the seventeenth century by European Jesuits – notably Ferdinand Verbiest – who had been employed by Emperor Kangxi (1661–1722), Qianlong's grandfather. Since then, European Jesuits had been continuously manning the Imperial Observatory in Beijing, using European equipment. Currently they were working for Emperor Qianlong himself. Even the map of China under Qianlong (as well as under Kangxi) was drawn up by missionaries who surveyed the territory of the empire using European methods.
It was in fact his sense of insecurity regarding the control of China that prompted Qianlong's emphatic rejection of the Macartney mission, just like his closing the door of the country. The emperor's control over his vast empire was built on total and unquestioning submission from the population. Any foreign contact that might disturb this blind obedience was dangerous to the throne. From Qianlong's point of view, the empire could well run out of control if it was not sealed off and if foreign elements were near the population – especially when the grass roots were already restive. The Qing dynasty, which had been enjoying considerable prosperity, blessed by good weather for long stretches of time (some fifty years under Emperor Kangxi) was beginning to decline by the late eighteenth century. This was largely due to population explosion, partly the result of the introduction to China of high-productivity foods like potato and corn from the American continent. By the time of Lord Macartney's visit, China's population had more than doubled in half a century and exceeded 300 million. Another fifty years later, it was well over 400 million. The country's traditional economy was unable to sustain this dramatic population growth. Lord Macartney observed: ‘Scarcely a year now passes without an insurrection in some of their provinces. It is true they are soon suppressed, but their frequency is a strong symptom of the fever within. The paroxysm is repelled, but the disease is not cured.'
Virtually throwing out Lord Macartney, Emperor Qianlong wrote aggressively to King George III, threatening to use force to repel British cargo ships, should they come to his coast, ending his letter with: ‘Don't blame me for not serving you proper warnings!' He was behaving like an animal raising its hackles at the smell of danger. Emperor Qianlong's closed-door policy was born of alarm and calculation, not ignorant conceit, as is so often claimed.
His successors, his son and grandson, stuck to this closed-door policy, as the empire grew increasingly weak. Then, half a century after Lord Macartney's failed mission, the closed door was pushed ajar by Britain through the Opium War (1839–42), China's first military clash with the West.
The opium was produced in British India and was smuggled into China by (mainly) British merchants. Beijing had prohibited the import, cultivation and smoking of opium since 1800, as it was well aware that the drug was doing tremendous damage to its economy as well as to the population. A contemporary description of addicts painted a vivid picture: ‘Their shoulders hunched, eyes watering, nose running, and breath short, they look more dead than alive.' There was great fear that if this went on, the country would run out of fit soldiers and labourers, not to mention silver, its currency. In March 1839, Emperor Daoguang, Cixi's future father-in-law, sent a crusading drug fighter, Lin Zexu, as the Imperial Commissioner to Canton, along whose shore foreign ships anchored. Commissioner Lin ordered the merchants to hand over all the opium in their possession and, when his order was resisted, he had the foreign community cordoned off and declared that it would only be released when all the opium in Chinese waters was surrendered. In the end, 20,183 chests of opium, containing more than one million kilos, were delivered to Commissioner Lin, who then lifted the cordon. He had the opium destroyed outside Canton, first melting it and then pouring it into the sea. Before releasing the drug, the Commissioner performed a sacrificial ritual to the God of the Sea, begging him to ‘tell the fishes to swim away for the time being to avoid the poison'.
Commissioner Lin knew that ‘the head of England is a woman, and quite young, but all orders come from her'. He penned a letter to Queen Victoria, who had been on the throne since 1837, asking her for cooperation. ‘I hear that opium-smoking is strictly banned in England,' Lin wrote. ‘And so England knows the harm the drug does. If it does not allow it to poison its own people, it should not allow it to poison the people of other countries.' Emperor Daoguang approved the letter. It is unclear to whom the Commissioner entrusted it, but there is no record of Queen Victoria receiving it.2
Major trading companies and Chambers of Commerce from London to Glasgow were up in arms. Lin's action was said to be ‘injurious' to British property, and there were calls for going to war to seek ‘satisfaction and reparation'. Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, an exponent of ‘gunboat diplomacy', was in favour of war. When the matter was debated in Parliament on 8 April 1840, the then-young Tory MP and future Prime Minister, William Gladstone, spoke passionately against it:
…a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of. The right hon. Gentleman opposite spoke last night in eloquent terms of the British flag waving in glory at Canton … but now, under the auspices of the noble Lord, that flag is hoisted to protect an infamous contraband traffic … No, I am sure that Her Majesty's Government will never upon this motion persuade the House to abet this unjust and iniquitous war.
But a vote of censure moved by the Opposition – the Tories – was defeated by 271 to 262, a majority of nine. During the next two years, scores of British warships and 20,000 men (including 7,000 Indian troops) attacked the Chinese coast in the south and east, occupying Canton and, briefly, Shanghai. Without gunboats and with a poorly equipped army, China was defeated and was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, and to pay an indemnity of US $21 million.3
Thus encouraged, opium-smuggling flourished. Shipments of the drug from Calcutta and Bombay nearly doubled straight away, and more than tripled before the next decade ended – from 15,619 chests in 1840 to 29,631 in 1841, and to 47,681 in 1860. Bowing to the reality that its battle against the drug was futile, China made the opium trade legal in October 1860. At the time called ‘the foreign drug' (yang-yao), it was inextricably associated with the West. The American missionary physician Mrs Headland recalled: ‘When calling at the Chinese homes, I have frequently been offered the opium-pipe, and when I refused it the ladies expressed surprise, saying that they were under the impression that all foreigners used it.'
The Treaty of Nanjing compelled China to open four more ports for trade, in addition to Canton. These ports, known as Treaty Ports, were Western settlements and were subject to Western, rather than Chinese, laws. One of them was Shanghai. A separate item in the Treaty ‘gave' the island of Hong Kong to Britain for its ships and cargo. Sun-scorched and barren, with a few trees tucked amid rugged hills, Hong Kong at the time contained only a scattering of fishermen's huts, while the foreign settlement in Shanghai was little more than a stretch of marshland next to some fields. Two spectacular international metropolises were to rise out of these inconspicuous soils, with Chinese hard work and foreign, mainly British, investment and governance. Later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a leading diplomat under Cixi, Wu Tingfang, wrote of Hong Kong:
the British Government spent large sums of money year after year for its improvement and development, and through the wise administration of the local Government every facility was afforded for free trade. It is now a prosperous British colony … the prosperity of that colony depends upon the Chinese who, it is needless to say, are in possession of all the privileges that are enjoyed by the British residents … I must admit that a great deal of good has been done by the British Government in Hongkong. It has provided the Chinese with an actual working model of a Western system of government which … has succeeded in transforming a barren island into a prosperous town … The impartial administration of law and the humane treatment of criminals cannot but excite admiration and gain the confidence of the natives.
The Opium War forced China to accept Western missionaries. By then, they had been banned for more than 100 years. After the war, the French, who had little trade with China and were only interested in propagating Catholicism, rode on a European victory and lobbied hard for the lifting of the ban. Emperor Daoguang resisted the demand. But then, already bewildered, and as a character prone to dithering, he gave in under the relentless pressure of the French, conveyed by his Commissioner in charge of dealing with Westerners, Qiying, who advised acceptance. A historic edict on 20 February 1846 lifted the ban on Christian missions, although this only applied to the Treaty Ports; the ban remained in force for the rest of China.
But missionaries could not be contained. With footholds thus secured, they at once began to penetrate the vast interior, defying the prohibition. Unlike the early Jesuits, who had been individual court employees and had never sought to disobey the emperor, missionaries were now bold and defiant, backed as they were by gunboats. Throwing themselves into this ancient land with zeal, they spread Western ideas and practice and helped modernise China, bringing down the Qing dynasty along the way, whether or not this was their intention. Their role in the transformation of China was vital, even though they won relatively few converts.
Emperor Daoguang may not have foreseen the future, but he certainly realised that he had unleashed a monumental and ominous force – and this unsettled and weighed on him. His unsuccessful dealings with the British had already caused him intense regret and despair. ‘Hounded by such unspeakable bullying, so much anger and hate bottle up inside me,' he had written. Now he felt: ‘I can only blame myself and feel utterly ashamed of myself' and ‘I just want to strike and strike my chest with clenched fists.' Months after the fateful edict, alarms were raised in the provinces about the arrival of missionaries and the problems this was causing. The emperor's agony intensified, and it was now that he wrote his will and designated his successor. It was imperative to leave the empire in the hands of a son who would be more determined and more able to resist the West. He chose his fourth son, the later Emperor Xianfeng, Cixi's husband. This son had grown up fervently loathing Westerners.
The Qing dynasty did not practise the system of the eldest son automatically inheriting the throne, but rather left the reigning emperor to make a will in secret appointing his successor. Emperor Daoguang made his in a private and yet solemn manner. He wrote it in both Chinese and Manchu, as an official document of such magnitude required. Then he folded it, enfolded it within two layers of the royal yellow paper, and signed and dated the envelope. This he put inside a cardboard folder, which had a white lining and yellow cover. With another piece of yellow paper he wrapped up the cardboard folder, and on top he signed again and wrote in the Manchu language the words ‘Ten Thousand Years', to signal the finality of the will. He then placed the will inside a box made of the most precious wood, nan-mu, with a yellow silk lining and a yellow wool cover. This box had been used by the previous emperors to contain their succession wills. The lock and key of the box were carved in the auspicious pattern of bats flying amidst clouds. (Bats enjoy the same pronunciation as the word for ‘good fortune'.) Emperor Daoguang did not seal the box immediately: he waited for a day, to allow second thoughts, and to be quite sure of his decision. Then, still with his own hands, he locked the box and sealed it with paper strips, signing each of them and adding the date on the front. This box was then carefully placed behind the giant plaque that hung over the entrance to a major hall in the Forbidden City. On the plaque were inscribed four enormous characters – zheng-da-guang-ming – ‘upright, magnanimous, honourable and wise', an imperial motto.
Emperor Daoguang had nine sons from different consorts, but only the fourth and the sixth were of the right age and were qualified to be candidates.4 The sixth son was emphatically ruled out by the emperor, who exceptionally conferred on him the title qin-wang, the highest of all princes. Charming and popular in the court, the sixth son was not viscerally anti-foreign like his half-brother, the designated heir. Their father was worried that he could be pliable in the face of foreign demands and would allow the door of China to be pushed open still wider.5 The father knew his sons well. In the future, they behaved exactly as he had anticipated.
The emperor-to-be, Cixi's future husband, was eight when the Opium War broke out and he saw in the ensuing years how it had broken his father, leaving him tormented. When he succeeded to the throne in 1850, one of his first acts was to write a long edict condemning Qiying, the conciliatory Imperial Commissioner who had signed the Treaty of Nanjing and had persuaded his father to lift the ban on Christian missions. In the edict, Emperor Xianfeng denounced Qiying for ‘always caving in to foreigners at the cost of the country', ‘extreme incompetence' and ‘having not a shred of conscience'. Qiying was demoted, and was later ordered to commit suicide.
Once, the emperor was told that the roof of a church in Shanghai had collapsed in a thunderstorm, and the big wooden cross bearing the figure of Christ had been destroyed. He saw this as Heaven doing the job that he ought to be doing, and wrote on the report: ‘I am so awed and moved, and feel all the more ashamed.' His loathing of Christianity and Westerners was made yet more intense by the fact that the Taiping rebels who were rocking his throne claimed to believe in Christianity, and their leader, Hong Xiuquan, declared that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Emperor Xianfeng would fight tooth and nail, every inch of the way, to keep Westerners out of China.
Meanwhile, the British wanted even more ports to be opened for trade and their representatives to be stationed in Beijing. The man Emperor Xianfeng designated to deal with them, Viceroy Ye Mingchen of Canton, was a kindred spirit of the emperor and turned a deaf ear to all their requests. In the end, the British decided that ‘ships of war are absolutely necessary'. An incident involving a boat called Arrow triggered what is often called ‘the Second Opium War' in 1856 – the year Cixi's son was born. Next year Lord Elgin (son of the 7th Earl, of Elgin Marbles repute) was dispatched to China with a fleet of warships. The French went along as an ally, wanting to gain unlimited access to the interior for their missionaries. The allies occupied Canton and carted Viceroy Ye off to Calcutta, where he soon died. The Europeans sailed north. In May 1858 they seized the Dagu Forts, which lay some 150 kilometres southeast of Beijing, and entered the nearby city of Tianjin. With enemy troops on his doorstep, Emperor Xianfeng still categorically rejected their requests. Eventually, as Lord Elgin threatened to march on Beijing, he was forced to send in negotiators, who accepted all the demands: envoys to station in Beijing, more ports to open for trade and missionaries to be admitted to the interior. After a few agonising days, Emperor Xianfeng succumbed to what the French envoy Baron Gros called a ‘pistol at the throat' and gave his endorsement. The allies were satisfied and left the Dagu Forts in their gunboats.
Emperor Xianfeng hated the new deal that had been forced on him. Racking his brain to find a way out, he even proposed that Britain and France be exempt from all import duties, if they would agree to its annulment. But the two countries said that while they would be glad to be exempt from import duties, they wanted to stick to the agreements. The emperor kept berating his representatives who were in Shanghai talking to the Europeans – but to no avail.
A year passed and, as had been stipulated, it was time for the agreements to be ratified in Beijing. Lord Elgin's younger brother, Frederick Bruce, headed for the city in June 1859 accompanied by British troops and a small French force. (France at this time was busy fighting to colonise Indochina.) Emperor Xianfeng created all sorts of hurdles in an attempt to thwart Bruce and his colleague. He required that the envoys' ships had to dock at a small coastal town; they must then ‘travel to Beijing with an entourage of no more than 10 men, no arms … no sedan-chairs or processions … and leave Beijing the moment the ratification is done'. Sedan-chairs were the prestigious means of transport. The alternative for the envoys was to take the singularly uncomfortable mule-cart on potholed country roads, which was highly humiliating. Bruce refused to oblige the emperor and instead launched an assault on the Dagu Forts. To his great surprise he was repelled: the Chinese had been strengthening the forts for a year. The emperor's confidence was enormously boosted, and he immediately gave orders to back out of the agreements.
But the allies returned a year later, in 1860, with a much larger force, headed by Lord Elgin as the British ambassador-extraordinary and Baron Gros as the French ambassador. The two men first reached Hong Kong, then Shanghai, before pushing north by sea. They had between them 20,000 land forces, including a Cantonese coolie transport corps. This allied force seized the Dagu Forts, with heavy casualties on both sides. Lieutenant Colonel G. J. Wolseley commented: ‘England has never before opened a campaign with such a well-organised or a more efficient force.' In contrast, most Chinese troops were ‘ill-clad, and wretchedly mounted and equipped, some having nothing but bows, others spears, and the rest, rusty-looking, old matchlocks'. Chinese war resolve was equally wanting to the European eye. ‘Had the Chinese adopted the plan of campaign which Wellington did in defence of Portugal in 1809, or of the Russians in 1812 in defence of Moscow, we could not have reached Pekin [Beijing] in 1860. They had only to lay waste the country, burn the standing crops, drive away all cattle and destroy the boats upon the Peiho, to have completely checkmated us …' Wolseley also noted that when he landed, ‘people were most obliging, and seemingly gave every information in their power'. He observed that ‘they seemed to hate all the Tartar troops [the defending army was Mongolian], whom they described as “a horrible race, speaking an unknown tongue, feeding chiefly upon uncooked mutton”; and…“stinking more than you (the English) do”…' The Lieutenant Colonel added good-humouredly: ‘highly complimentary to our national feelings, particularly as John Bull is prone to think himself the cleanest of mankind …'
It is true, indeed, that the war was the business of the throne and not that of the average man. The emperor was infinitely remote from the common people. Even the average official was not particularly concerned. This was not surprising, as the regime's policy was to discourage political participation from even its educated class, the literati. So the allies marched to Beijing with little hindrance. They were now not merely seeking ratification of the agreements signed two years earlier, but had added new demands, including opening up Tianjin as an additional trading port and the payment of war indemnities. Emperor Xianfeng, beside himself with fury, resorted to undignified sarcasms and abuses when counselled to accept the allies' demands so that they would leave. To induce his army to fight, he offered a bounty: ‘50 taels of silver for each black barbarian head' – meaning the Indians in the British force – and ‘100 taels for each white barbarian head …'
Lord Elgin wanted negotiation and sent his forward representative, Harry Parkes, to a town near Beijing under a flag of truce. Parkes and his escorts were seized and thrown into the prison of the Ministry of Punishments. The emperor personally ordered ‘harsh incarceration'. So the captives were bound and cuffed in the most painful possible manner, the kao-niu, which was likely to prove fatal. In Chinese warfare, to harm the enemy's messengers was the ultimate way of sending the message: we will fight you to the death. The Mongolian army commander, knowing that he could not win in a showdown, urgently pleaded for the captives to be treated more gently and provided with comfortable accommodation and good food. He was so anxious that he took it upon himself to write an emollient letter to Lord Elgin, expressing his wish for peace and conciliation. An irate Emperor Xianfeng reprimanded him. The emperor's inner circle, a group of princes and high officials, urged him to be uncompromising. One of them, Jiao, said that ‘Parkes should be put to death in the extreme manner', which meant death by a thousand cuts. Emperor Xianfeng liked the idea; he wrote: ‘You are absolutely right. Only we have to wait for a few days.'
The emperor's optimism came from the men in his inner circle whom he had appointed to ‘handle the barbarians'. They told him: ‘The barbarian Parkes is the one man good at military manoeuvre, and all the barbarians take orders from him. Now that he is captured, the morale of the barbarian troops is bound to collapse, and if we seize the opportunity to carry out our extermination campaign, victory will be ours.' Three days after this counsel of bizarre self-delusion, on 21 September 1860, the Chinese army was roundly beaten on the outskirts of Beijing. Emperor Xianfeng learned the news in the Old Summer Palace; all he could do was flee. That night, the court was packing amidst chaos and panic. The next morning, when his officials came for their audiences, they found that the emperor had disappeared. Most of the court had to leave later, separately, as the roads were jammed by fleeing crowds, the residents of Beijing, who had heard that the emperor himself had gone.
On 6 October, the French troops burst into the Old Summer Palace. On the 8th, Parkes and some other captives were released. More were returned over the next few days – most only as dead bodies. Of the thirty-nine men seized, twenty-one had been killed by the way they had been bound, as the emperor had ordered. Their comrades saw that their captors had ‘tied their feet and hands together behind their backs as lightly [tightly] as possible, afterwards pouring water on the cords to increase the tension, and they were kept in this terrible position until the condition of their hands and wrists became too horrible for description'. Their deaths had come after days of lacerating agony. Parkes and the other survivors only lived because sensible officials in the Ministry of Punishments had quietly protected them.
Lord Elgin was much affected by what he saw and heard. He wrote to his wife, ‘My dearest, we have dreadful news respecting the fate of some of our captured friends. It is an atrocious crime – and not for vengeance but for future security ought to be seriously dealt with.' Europeans were now coming to China. In order for them not to be treated in this way, he decided to serve a warning, something that would really hurt the emperor, and he settled on razing the Old Summer Palace. General Grant wrote in his dispatch that, without such a punitive act, ‘the Chinese Government would see that our countrymen can be seized and murdered with impunity. It is necessary to undeceive them on this point.' Lord Elgin had contemplated other options, but rejected them: ‘I should have preferred crushing the Chinese army which is still in this neighbourhood, but as we go to work we might have followed them round the walls of Peking [Beijing] till doomsday without catching them.' He was keen to finish his job and leave, rather than get bogged down in China, where the weather was turning cold and Chinese reinforcement armies might be coming. A quick fire was the easiest option.
The Old Summer Palace was in fact a complex of palaces begun in the early eighteenth century and added to over the next 100 years. Covering an area of 350 hectares, it housed grand European edifices, designed by the Jesuits Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist, who had been employed by Qianlong the Magnificent, as well as hundreds of buildings in the Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian styles. Architectural designs from all over China were represented. Landscaped gardens celebrated the diverse sceneries of the empire, among them rice paddies of the Yangtze Valley, noted for the peach flowers and bamboo groves and meandering brooks in their midst. Images from great poems were reproduced. In one, after a poem by the eighth-century poet Li Bai, a waterfall was created, falling into a pond of chiselled stones, making music as the force of the water varied. When the sun was in the right place a rainbow appeared in the waterfall, matching the sharp arch of a bridge that dropped from the top of the waterfall down to the pond. To gaze at the rainbow and listen to the water-music in a dainty pavilion perched on the bridge was a favourite pastime of the court. In this pleasure palace, grandeur was of no concern – beauty was everything. Priceless art and treasures that had been accumulated for more than 100 years filled every cranny.
Before Lord Elgin set fire to this colossal treasure-trove, the palace had been looted by the French, who arrived first. Their commander, General de Montauban, wrote upon seeing the palace: ‘nothing in our Europe can give any idea of such luxury, and it is impossible for me to describe its splendours in these few lines, impressed as I am especially with the bewilderment caused by the sight of such marvels'. His troops fell on their prey with little inhibition. Lieutenant Colonel Wolseley was an eye-witness: ‘Indiscriminate plunder and wanton destruction of all articles too heavy for removal commenced at once … Officers and men seemed to have been seized with a temporary insanity; in body and soul they were absorbed in one pursuit, which was plunder, plunder.' The British troops, arriving later, soon joined in, as ‘the General now made no objection to looting', wrote Robert Swinhoe, staff interpreter to General Grant. ‘What a terrible scene of destruction presented itself!' Grant wrote:
One room only in the palace was untouched. General de Montauban informed me he had reserved any valuables it might contain for equal division between the English and the French. The walls of it were covered with jade-stones … The French general told me that he had found two … staves of office, made of gold and green jade-stone, one of which he would give me as a present to Queen Victoria, the other he intended for the Emperor Napoleon.
Among the presents that Queen Victoria received was a little dog. An elderly imperial concubine, who did not flee with the court, had died of fright when the allies arrived. Her dogs, five Pekinese, were brought to Britain and became the origin of the Pekinese breed outside China. One came back with Captain Hart Dunne of the Wiltshire Regiment, who named it ‘Lootie' and presented it to Queen Victoria. In his letter presenting the dog, the Captain wrote, ‘It is a most affectionate and intelligent little creature – it has always been accustomed to be treated as a pet and it was with the hope that it might be looked upon as such by Her Majesty and the royal family that I have brought it from China.' The little dog caused a little frisson at Windsor. The housekeeper, Mrs Henderson, wrote to her superior, ‘It is very dainty about its food and won't generally take bread and milk – but it will eat boiled rice with a little chicken and gravy mixed up in it and this is considered the best food for it.' Her superior seemed somewhat annoyed and scribbled on the back of another, similar letter, ‘A Chinese dog that insists on chicken in its dietary!' Mrs Henderson was instructed: ‘…after a little fasting and coaxing he [sic; Lootie was female] will probably come to like the food that is good for him …' In Windsor, Queen Victoria had Lootie painted by the German artist Friedrich Keyl, and she specially requested through her personal secretary, Miss Skettett, that ‘When Mr Keyl sketches the dog he must put something to shew its size it [sic] is remarkably small …' Lootie lived in the kennels at Windsor for another decade.
When Lord Elgin decided to burn the Old Summer Palace, the French refused to take part, calling it an act of vandalism against a ‘site de campagne sans défense'. Nonetheless, the burning was carried out, methodically. General Grant described the scene in his letter to the Secretary of State for War in London:
On 18th October, Sir John Michel's division, with the greater part of the cavalry brigade, were marched to the palace, and set the whole pile of buildings on fire. It was a magnificent sight. I could not but grieve at the destruction of so much ancient grandeur, and felt that it was an uncivilised proceeding; but I believed it to be necessary as a future warning to the Chinese against the murder of European envoys, and the violation of the laws of nations.
The fire, fuelled by more than 200 opulent and exquisite palaces, pavilions, temples, pagodas and landscaped gardens, raged for days, enveloping west Beijing in black and ashen smoke. Wolseley wrote, ‘When we first entered the gardens they reminded one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them upon the 19th October, leaving them a dreary waste of ruined nothings.'
Lord Elgin achieved his goal to some extent. Future Chinese authorities would treat Westerners with special care, quite differently from the way they treated their own people. But any thought of comfort for Westerners must be overshadowed by the potent seeds of hate stirring in the ashes of the Old Summer Palace. Charles Gordon, who later acquired the sobriquet ‘Chinese Gordon', was then a captain in the invading army and took part in the devastation. He wrote home: ‘The people are civil but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did to the Palace. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them …' Victor Hugo wrote a year later: ‘This wonder has disappeared … We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to the barbarian.'
The Old Summer Palace was in its full glory when Cixi left it with her husband and son in September 1860. Autumn is Beijing's best season, when the sun is no longer scorching, the biting cold has yet to descend, and no sandstorms from the northwestern desert are whipping the city, as they habitually do in spring. Just days before the allies landed on the coast, her husband had celebrated his thirtieth birthday,6 and tradition had allowed the opera-loving monarch, besieged though he was by troubles, to indulge his passion for four days. The large stage, built on three levels, stood in the open air by a vast lake, and Cixi watched the operas with him in a pavilion across a courtyard. At the climax, crowds of actors – men playing the parts of both sexes and of the gods – sang and danced on all three levels, congratulating the emperor on his birthday. Under a clear autumn sky, the music was borne by the wind into every latticed window on the scented palace grounds. The splendour of the Old Summer Palace was etched in Cixi's mind and would often return to haunt her. To rebuild it would become her obsession.
Travelling 200 kilometres to the northeast, the court crossed the Great Wall and arrived at the royal Hunting Lodge on the edge of the Mongolian steppes in the hilly region of Chengde. This ‘lodge' was in fact even larger than the Old Summer Palace, though less lavishly crafted. It had been the major base for hunting expeditions for earlier emperors. Emperor Kangxi, who had first built the Lodge in 1703, had been a master hunter and apparently once killed eight tigers in one week. In the evenings, the emperors and their men had lit bonfires and roasted their kill, drinking and singing and dancing, in all-male company. There had been wrestling bouts and rowing competitions on the long, serpentine lake. One of the buildings was a replica of the Potala Palace in Lhasa and, elsewhere, in a martial-looking Mongolian yurt, Lord Macartney had had a futile audience with Emperor Qianlong in 1793. Cixi had never been here before. Her husband had had to cope with mounting mayhem throughout his reign, and they were only here now as refugees.
During this unprecedented dynastic crisis, Cixi played no political role. She was confined to the harem, where it was dangerous for her even to hint at her views. Her job was to look after her son, then four years old. Half a century later, in 1910, after she had died, an Englishman, Sir Edmund Backhouse, wrote a much-quoted biography of her, China under the Empress Dowager, in which he faked a diary, depicting Cixi as a very hawkish figure who urged her husband not to flee and not to talk peace with the foreigners, but to kill their messengers. This was sheer invention.7 As events would show, Cixi was indeed opposed to the foreign policy of her husband and his inner circle – but for very different reasons. Silently observing from close quarters, she in fact regarded their stubborn resistance to opening the door of China as stupid and wrong. Their hate-filled effort to shut out the West had, in her view, achieved the opposite to preserving the empire. It had brought the empire catastrophe, not least the destruction of her beloved Old Summer Palace. She herself would pursue a new route.
1 This is according to Chinese records. Some suggest that Lord Macartney did not perform this ritual. But Emperor Qianlong specifically told his court he would see Lord Macartney ‘now that he has agreed to follow the rules of this Celestial Dynasty' on this matter. For other arguments suggesting that Lord Macartney did perform the detested ‘three kneelings and nine head knockings', see Rockhill, p. 31.
2 It is not in the Royal Archives at Windsor, and there is no sign of the letter reaching London. It was, however, published in the contemporary English press in Canton, the Canton Press, and the February 1840 issue of the Chinese Repository, a periodical for the Protestant missionaries.
3 Demanding an indemnity was not a standard European practice at the time. Later, under fire and defending himself, Palmerston told Parliament that ‘what the late Government demanded was satisfaction for the injured honour of the country, and that one of the ways in which satisfaction was to be given was payment for the opium so extorted …' For China to pay ‘the expenses of the war' was, conceded Palmerston, ‘certainly unusual in European warfare', but ‘in order to make the Chinese sensible of the extent of the outrage they had committed, and that they might sufficiently feel the exercise of the power of Britain in vindication of their honour, it was thought expedient and proper to make them pay the expense of the war, in addition to compensating the injured parties.'
4 The first, second and third sons had died, and the seventh (Prince Chun, who was to marry Cixi's sister), eighth and ninth princes were too young. The fifth had been given away by his father to be an adopted son to a (deceased) brother, thus disqualifying him from the succession.
5 A common explanation for Emperor Daoguang's choice of heir is that one day he discovered that the fourth son could not bear to hurt animals in spring in case they were pregnant. This is plainly sentimental tosh.
6 By the traditional way of calculating age, according to which newborns start at one year old.
7 Backhouse has since been exposed as a literary forger. In this case, what he seems to have done was to fake five passages about Cixi, and insert them into a well-known published diary by a Beijing official named Wu Kedu. As Backhouse published his biography first in English, the five faked passages melt into the English translation of the diary he quoted. When his book was then translated into Chinese, the forged passages, thus laundered, became part of the diary. The fake has puzzled historians, as the editions of the diary that exist in China contain no such references to Cixi. In the faked passages, residents in Beijing were seen to be hanging on Cixi's every word about the fate of the empire. This may have been the case when Backhouse was in China decades later, but not in 1860, when she, as an imperial concubine, was a non-person to the public.