20 A Plot to Kill Cixi
(September 1898)
WILD FOX Kang had been hatching plots to kill Cixi for some time, knowing that she stood between him and supreme power. For this purpose he needed an armed force, and he first thought of a commander named Nie. He asked Clerk Wang Zhao to approach Nie and persuade him to join them, but the clerk declined to go, telling Kang that the mission was a pipe dream. The army was firmly in Cixi's hands. The first thing she had done when she launched the Reforms was to make key military appointments, putting the man who had the most unwavering loyalty to her, Junglu, in charge of all the army in the capital and its surrounding area. Junglu's headquarters were in Tianjin.
Among those reporting to Junglu was General Yuan Shikai – the future first President of China when the country became a republic. Now he was an ambitious and outstanding officer. He noticed that incredibly high posts were being awarded by the emperor on the recommendation of Kang's men, and so made friends with them. Thanks to Kang, Emperor Guangxu gave General Yuan not one but two audiences, immediately after his altercation with Cixi on 14 September. His Majesty conferred on the General a promotion over the heads of his superiors, and practically told Yuan to detach himself from Junglu and to take orders directly from him. The emperor was doing what the Wild Fox had advised – establishing an army of his own.
After the audiences, one of Kang's fellow plotters, Tan Sitong, paid General Yuan a late-night visit on 18 September. Tan, one of the four newly appointed Grand Council secretaries, believed that reform could only be achieved through violence. ‘There has been no reform without bloodshed since ancient times; we must kill all those deadbeats before we can start getting things done.' Known to General Yuan as a ‘newly risen VIP close to the emperor', Tan claimed that he had come to express the emperor's wish. General Yuan was to kill Junglu in Tianjin and take his troops to Beijing; there he was to surround the Summer Palace and capture the empress dowager. After that, said Tan, ‘to slay that rotten old woman will be my job, and need not concern Your Excellency'. Tan promised the General that the emperor himself would give him a crimson-inked edict to this effect in his third audience, in two days' time, on 20 September. Yuan, who thought Tan looked ‘ferocious and semi-deranged', was non-committal, but said that such a big thing would take time to arrange.
Arrangements were actually being made by the Wild Fox, who had devised a way to transfer General Yuan's soldiers, numbering 7,000 and stationed outside Beijing, into the capital and position them next to the Summer Palace. He ghosted a proposal for another fellow plotter, Censor Shenxiu, to present to the emperor, claiming that a haul of gold and silver had been buried in the Old Summer Palace, which might now be dug up to help alleviate the state's financial crisis. The proposal was timed to arrive on the emperor's desk just before Yuan's third audience, so that the emperor could give the job of excavation there and then to the General, who could therefore legitimately move his army onto Cixi's doorstep.
As his diary later revealed, General Yuan was stupefied by Tan's proposal. He was faced with the dilemma of choosing sides between Emperor Guangxu and the empress dowager. As he said to Tan, if the emperor really issued a crimson-inked edict telling him to do away with the empress dowager, ‘who would dare to disobey the slip of paper from the emperor ' And yet that very night he went directly to one of Cixi's trusted princes and denounced the plotters.1
Meanwhile, other events had been happening concerning a visitor in Beijing at the time, Itō Hirobumi, former Prime Minister of Japan, the architect of Japan's war against China four years earlier and of the calamitous Treaty of Shimonoseki. Recently out of office, Itō was making a ‘private' visit to Beijing, and Emperor Guangxu was scheduled to receive him on the same day of General Yuan's third audience.
The mood among some educated Chinese in relation to Japan had swung from one of loathing to admiration and goodwill since the more recent encroachment by European powers in 1897–8. The Japanese actively cultivated influential men along this line: ‘The war between us was a mistake, and we both suffered. Now that white men are bearing down menacingly on us yellow people, China and Japan must unite and resist them together. We must help each other.' Some officials were sympathetic to this argument and were eager for Japan to teach China how to become strong. There were petitions calling for the emperor to invite Itō to stay and be his adviser. The chorus was led by Wild Fox Kang, who ghosted several petitions for others to present. A widely read newspaper in Tianjin, the Guo-wen-bao, owned by a Japanese and with backing from the Japanese government, promoted the idea, claiming it would lead ‘not only to good fortune for China and Japan, but also to the survival of Asia and the Yellow race'.
It was known that Emperor Guangxu intended to employ Itō as his adviser. The emperor had developed an extremely pro-Japanese attitude since falling under Kang's influence. On 7 September, he had written in his own hand a letter to the Japanese emperor, opening with intimate language unique in diplomatic documents: ‘My dearest and nearest friendly neighbour of the same continent', and ending with a wish that the two countries would ‘support each other to defend and secure the Great East'. Itō himself seems to have been expecting to work with the Chinese throne. When he arrived in Tianjin, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am leaving for Beijing tomorrow, where the emperor seems to have been awaiting my arrival for some time … In Tianjin, I am busy with banquets the whole time. Many Chinese have come and asked me to help China, and it is really impossible to say no. I've heard that the emperor seems to be able and bright, and only 27 years old …' Indeed Emperor Guangxu would give an audience to Itō on 20 September and might well announce Itō's engagement immediately afterwards. (Appointments were often announced straight after the audience with the appointee.) To enable the decree of employment to be seen as a response to popular demand, the Wild Fox ghosted two petitions pressing the emperor to engage Itō – one to be on His Majesty's desk hours before Itō's audience, and the other the day after.
Wild Fox Kang so keenly promoted the employment of Itō out of personal calculations. He was not so na ve as to believe that Itō would be working for the interests of China, not Japan, and that China could maintain its independence under his stewardship. Japan had not wavered in its ambition to control China. During Itō's visit, Japanese newspapers were talking about ‘the necessity' of China ‘consulting the Japanese government' on all its policies. When he heard about the emperor's desire to employ Itō as his adviser, Earl Li wrote just one word in a letter: ‘Ludicrous'. Viceroy Zhang, the famed moderniser who had conceived the strategic Beijing–Wuhan railway, was ‘shocked' and ‘rejected the idea outright'. The earl and the Viceroy were both ardent advocates of learning from Japan and employing Japanese advisers. But they knew that if Itō became the ‘adviser' to Emperor Guangxu, there would be no way to prevent this former Japanese Prime Minister from becoming the puppeteer, and China from losing its independence.2
Wild Fox Kang was as shrewd as the two statesmen. And yet he was manoeuvring not only for the engagement of Itō, but also for creating a Sino-Japanese ‘union' (lian-bang) or even a ‘merger' (he-bang). The petitions he ghosted calling for Itō's appointment also urged Emperor Guangxu to opt for one or other course. It is unlikely that he was sincerely trying to deliver China to Japan. More likely, he and the Japanese had struck a deal to advance each other's interests. Indeed, ever since the Reforms began, the Japanese-owned newspaper in Tianjin had devoted much space to reporting Kang's opinions, which had hugely raised his profile and helped create the impression that the Reforms were entirely of his making. This impression was not restricted to readers of that particular paper. As its news items were copied by other papers throughout the Treaty Ports, Kang's name acquired such prominence that people thought he was the leader of the Reforms. The Tianjin paper also promoted the idea of the Advisory Board – while Kang suggested to Emperor Guangxu that the Board should include Itō. But the greatest service the Japanese did for Kang was to link him up with Emperor Guangxu in the first place – through Sir Yinhuan, who was almost certainly their agent and working for their interests.
One of the most Westernised officials, Sir Yinhuan was outstandingly able, and shone in foreign affairs. He was Cixi's flamboyant envoy to a string of countries (in Washington in the 1880s he was ‘the first Chinese Minister to give a ball at the official residence', reported the New York Times), and was knighted in Britain, where he represented China at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. A confidential report to Tokyo by Yano Fumio, Japanese minister to Beijing in 1898, shows that he was the minister's regular source of top-secret information. When Grand Tutor Weng was dismissed, the minister went straight to Sir Yinhuan to find out the real reason, and he told the Japanese everything he knew. At the time some in the top echelon had brought impeachments against him for ‘passing secret state policies to foreigners'. Grand Councillors had denounced him to the throne for ‘acting secretively and suspiciously'. But in those days there was no mechanism to investigate spying charges, and with Emperor Guangxu indignantly defending him, nothing was done. Cixi had wanted to have Sir Yinhuan's house searched for evidence but, largely because of his close relationship with the emperor, her order was not carried out.
It was Sir Yinhuan who engineered Kang's initial entry into the top circle, through covert machinations rather than open recommendation. It was he who acted as the secret middle man between Kang and Emperor Guangxu. And it was he who enabled Kang to gain control over the emperor. He did so much for Kang not because they had a long-standing, close friendship – indeed the evidence suggests the contrary, as he later quite gratuitously ran the Wild Fox down. Sir Yinhuan acted as he did at Tokyo's behest – and he worked for Tokyo not out of a belief that China would benefit from Japanese domination. He knew how brutal the Japanese were, as he dealt with them in negotiations over the indemnity after the war. When China, crushed by crippling rates of foreign loans and struggling to cope with the Yellow River breaking its banks, requested that the three-year payment deadline be extended, Tokyo refused outright. Sir Yinhuan privately lamented that this showed ‘the so-called Japanese desire to form a special relationship with China is only empty words'.
His most likely motive was money. A committed gambler, Sir Yinhuan was a well-known bribe-taker – to an extent that was deemed unacceptable even in this bribe-infested country. Accusations of him taking large kickbacks through foreign contracts that he'd negotiated were legion, and the bribes from Russia were on the record. The Japanese were shrewed and skilful bribers. Sir Yinhuan was also supremely cynical. When dealing with the German seizure of Qingdao, his indifference perplexed his colleague, Grand Tutor Weng, who himself felt as though he was being ‘tortured in boiling water and flaming fire'. In his diary Weng wrote: ‘When I go to his house [to discuss business], he is always lounging about and chatting and laughing as though nothing disastrous is happening. I really can't understand him.'
Cixi did not have a full picture of the skulduggery involving Sir Yinhuan, Wild Fox Kang, the Japanese and her adopted son. She had been informed of Itō's visit, the calls for his engagement and his scheduled audience with Emperor Guangxu. Well aware of the perils of Itō's installation, she had in fact taken action: she made the emperor promise that Itō's advice, which he would invite, would not be given to him in person, but would be passed on to him through the Foreign Office. This way, she believed, no harm could be done.
But on the night of 18 September, an urgent letter was delivered to her and made her apprehensive. Written by a Censor, Chongyi, who was related to Earl Li by marriage, the letter emphatically drew her attention to the danger of Emperor Guangxu engaging Itō, as well as to Wild Fox Kang's extraordinary hidden access to the emperor. ‘If the throne employs Itō,' it warned, ‘it might as well be putting this country of our ancestors on a silver platter and offering it to [Japan]…' The Censor entreated Cixi to take back power at once to prevent disasters from happening.
Cixi was unsettled. What if her adopted son ignored their agreement and installed Itō at his side with an edict written in crimson ink? She decided to go to the Forbidden City the next day, 19 September, in time for Emperor Guangxu's audience with Itō on the 20th, to make sure this would not happen. After that, she planned to return to the Summer Palace. Having made this decision, she went to bed.
She was in her usual sound sleep in the small hours when General Yuan's denunciation of the plot arrived. Cixi was thunderstruck. It was true that her relationship with her adopted son was fraught, but that he should be connected with a plot to kill her was still inconceivable.
Although, from General Yuan's account, the emperor's role in the plot was far from clear, there could be no doubt that he knew something about it. Why else would he make General Yuan his own personal commander, separate from the army – the very general whom the plotters then approached to harm her? And why was he so surreptitious about his association with Wild Fox Kang? That her adopted son knew about Kang's plot, however tenuously, made him complicit and unforgivable – especially in a culture that put filial piety at the top of its ethical code.
In the morning Cixi left the Summer Palace as planned. Outwardly, everything was normal. She stepped onto a boat from the pier in front of her villa and was carried across the lake into the Imperial Canal that led to the city. Ten kilometres long, the canal was lined with willows and peach trees – and Praetorian Guards. At a sluice gate where a change of boat was necessary, she walked into the Buddhist temple on the bank and prayed. Where the canal ended, a sedan-chair bore her into the Sea Palace next to the Forbidden City. During that seemingly peaceful and leisurely journey her mind was in torment.
Emperor Guangxu learned of Cixi's unexpected arrival and hastily rushed to the palace gate to greet her on his knees. Whatever anger erupted inside her at the sight of her adopted son, the empress dowager maintained a calm exterior. She did not want to cause alarm, especially as the audience with Itō was scheduled for the following day: any complication with Japan had to be avoided. She may not have known the full story of Kang's relationship with Japan, but Itō's appearance at this moment seemed too improbable a coincidence.
The following morning, 20 September, it appeared to be business as usual. First Emperor Guangxu had his arranged third audience with General Yuan. He did not produce any crimson-inked edict, as the plotter Tan had promised the General – though this may not mean that he had not intended to. Cixi was within earshot. During the audience the General unmistakably alluded to the plot, saying that His Majesty's new friends were ‘going about things in a careless and ill-thought-out manner', and ‘if there was a slip, Your Majesty would be incriminated'. The emperor gazed silently at Yuan, looking as though something had touched him. That he understood what the General was talking about at all would have confirmed his guilt in Cixi's eyes.
Yuan returned to his troops in Tianjin. Cixi kept her unperturbed exterior when her adopted son, observing ritual, came to bid her good day before entering the grandest hall in the Sea Palace for his meeting with Itō. At the meeting he said nothing that went beyond the agreed text. Itō's counsel was solicited, but was to be given through the Foreign Office. As soon as the audience was over, Cixi placed her adopted son under house arrest, confining him to his villa at Yingtai, the islet in the middle of the lake in the Sea Palace, reachable only by way of a long bridge that could be opened and closed. When she went to the Summer Palace, she would take him with her. He had become her prisoner.
As such, on the following day he wrote in his own hand a decree in crimson ink, announcing that Cixi would be his Guardian. A formal ceremony was subsequently staged. Thereafter, Emperor Guangxu became Cixi's puppet, signing edicts with his crimson-inked brush according to her wishes. He continued to see officials and Grand Councillors, but always with her. The silk screen that had been concealing her was removed: she stepped from behind the throne to the front of the stage.
Cixi quickly formed a clear picture of the Wild Fox's activities vis-à-vis her adopted son. The emperor had scarcely any secrets from his eunuchs, whom Cixi began to interrogate. Thus she established who had been seeing and influencing him. Sir Yinhuan was easily exposed, and became her second bête noire. She methodically rounded up the plotters, giving verbal rather than written orders. Arrests were not all made at once, as she wanted the whole process carried out as quietly as possible.
The first target for arrest was obviously Kang. But Cixi was two days too late. The Wild Fox had known the game was up as soon as he had heard that General Yuan had been non-committal – like another conspirator, who had been specially employed to kill Cixi, a man called Bi. Bi later described visiting Tan to enquire about his mission the following dawn. ‘Mr Tan was combing his hair languidly' and told Bi that the General did not commit himself. Bi asked, ‘Are you sure Yuan is the right man for the job?' Tan clearly did not trust Yuan and replied, ‘I did argue with Mr Kang time and again, but he insists on using Yuan. What can I do?' Bi said, ‘So you revealed the whole plot to Yuan?' Being told that Yuan knew everything, Bi exclaimed, ‘We are done for. We are done for! Don't you know what sort of operation this is? You can't talk about it just like that! I'm afraid you and your families and clans are all going to the execution ground!' Bi promptly departed and abandoned the plotters.
The Wild Fox himself paid visits to two foreigners, the Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard, who was his friend, and Itō himself – the day before Itō's audience with Emperor Guangxu. What Kang sought was safe haven. Richard had set out to cultivate the official class and the literati, and knew many powerful figures, including Earl Li. His dream was not only to ‘establish the Kingdom of God' on Chinese soil, but also to run the country – ‘reforming China, remodelling its institutions, and, in short, carrying on its government,' as Robert Hart noted, finding the idea ‘too delicious!' British diplomats regarded Richard's grandiose plans as ‘nonsense'. (Among his proposals was that ‘two foreign governesses should be engaged for the Empress-Dowager'.) Kang had recommended him to Emperor Guangxu as one of the two foreign advisers on the Advisory Board, the other being Itō. Richard was grateful. He now rushed about to drum up assistance for Kang, but to little avail as the British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, was, according to Richard, ‘already prejudiced' against Kang.
Itō did not offer Kang sanctuary in the Japanese Legation. To use a bunch of amateurs to murder the empress dowager against insurmountable odds was almost certainly not part of their deal. Besides, Itō was going to see Emperor Guangxu the following day. It would be awkward if he were asked to produce Kang. So the Wild Fox had to flee Beijing. He did so swiftly and, by the time the arrest warrant was sent out, he had already reached and left Tianjin, on board a British steamship bound for Shanghai. At the Shanghai wharf, ‘detectives and policemen' were waiting for the ship ‘in a high state of excitement at the prospect of gaining the 2,000 dollars' – the award for Kang's arrest. Because of the newspaper reports promoting Kang as the principal author of the Reforms (and because of the court's secrecy, which concealed Cixi's role) the Acting British Consul-General, Byron Brenan, who recorded the scene, was determined to rescue Kang. As he could not openly do so, being an official representative of Great Britain, Brenan sent the correspondent for The Times, J. O. P. Bland, out to sea on a launch before the ship docked. Kang was intercepted and transported to Hong Kong on board a British gunboat. In the colony he was visited by the local Japanese Consul and invited to go and stay in Japan. Tokyo ‘cherishes the aspiration to build a Great East Asia', to quote Kang. The Wild Fox soon arrived in Japan.
His right-hand man, Liang, sought asylum in the Japanese Legation the day after Itō's audience, and Itō helped him escape to Japan. Under Japanese protection and in disguise, with his queue cut off and wearing European clothes, he boarded a Japanese warship from Tianjin.
Tan, the violence-loving radical, was also offered sanctuary in Japan. But he declined. According to his friends, he again declared his reform-needs-bloodshed theory: ‘Reforms in other countries have been successful all because there was bloodshed. In Chinese reforms, no blood has been shed, and that's why the country is not doing well. Let my blood be the first to be shed.' Indeed, he was beheaded on 28 September, together with five others: Guangren, Kang's brother; Censor Shenxiu, the petitioner for troops to be moved to the Summer Palace, ostensibly to dig for gold but really to kill Cixi; and the three other new secretaries of the Grand Council (in addition to Tan). At the place of execution, according to a newspaper report, Tan acted ‘as if death was something delicious'. Kang's brother, on the other hand, did not seem to relish the prospect: he was seen to be ‘wearing just socks and no shoes, his face the colour of ashes and dust'. The executions shocked the country: they were the first of Cixi's political enemies to die since she began her rule nearly four decades earlier.
Two of the four new secretaries, including Yang Rui, with whom the emperor had entrusted his agonised letter of 14 September, actually had nothing to do with Kang or his plot. In prison they had been light-hearted, certain that their innocence could be easily established at the trial, which Cixi had ordered in accordance with Qing procedure. But no sooner had the trial started than Cixi abruptly halted it and the two innocent men were carted off to the execution ground with the others, as fellow plotters. There they protested furiously. One refused to go down on his knees to listen to the imperial edict sentencing him to death, and the other, Yang Rui, insistently asked the official overseeing the execution what his crime was. Rumour has it that blood from his severed head spouted one metre in the air, such was his vehemence at the injustice. People were appalled by the peremptory executions. On learning the news, one courtier felt ‘shocked and pained as though my heart was being stabbed' and he ‘threw up violently'. Even the grandees who knew about the plot against Cixi's life were greatly upset about the flagrant disregard for the law – which was rare under her rule.
Cixi cancelled the trial when she realised that it would inevitably make public something that she had to conceal at all costs: her adopted son's involvement in the plot. A trial would reveal that Emperor Guangxu wanted her deposed, if not killed. The Wild Fox had started giving interviews to foreign newspapers claiming that the emperor had given him a ‘secret edict', with instructions to raise support to free him and oust Cixi. This claim first appeared in Shanghai in the North China Herald on 27 September, the day before Cixi stopped the trial and ordered the executions. It may well have led to her decision. If Kang's assertion seemed to be confirmed officially through the trial, Cixi would be facing a dire prospect. The Chinese would be divided and forced to take sides, and the country could be thrown into upheaval. Foreign powers might decide to answer Kang's plea and send in troops. In particular, Japan could well try to prop up Emperor Guangxu as its puppet, on the pretext of rescuing him. Cixi could not allow the fatal breach between herself and her adopted son to be exposed.
Thus Cixi herself covered up the plot against her life. The decree about the plot and the executions, issued in the name of the prisoner emperor, was vague and evasive, and falsified the emperor's position. Kang and his accomplices were said to ‘have attempted to surround and attack the Summer Palace, to kidnap the Empress Dowager and myself'. The other key figure, General Yuan, also had reason to suppress the truth: he did not want it known that he had betrayed the emperor. (He kept his diary about the event hidden during his lifetime.) As Cixi remained silent, Kang's was the only voice to be heard. When he adamantly denied there was ever a conspiracy to kill Cixi, claiming indeed that it was Cixi who had concocted a scheme to kill Emperor Guangxu, his version of events was widely accepted. Sir Claude MacDonald believed that ‘the rumoured plot is only an excuse to stop Emperor Guangxu's radical reforms'.
So the story of Wild Fox Kang's attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot. Meanwhile, the six men executed, four of them conspirators, have gone down in history as having died heroically for the Reforms, acquiring the household name of ‘the Six Gentlemen'. Wild Fox Kang entered myth as the hero who lit the beacon of reform and even had a vision to turn China into a parliamentary democracy. Kang largely created the myth himself, by revising and falsifying his writings and petitions – deleting, for instance, his article that specifically rejected parliamentary democracy as a desirable political system for China. He was a first-rate myth-maker and propagandist. While promoting himself, he and his right-hand man, Liang, tirelessly vilified Cixi, inventing many repulsive stories about her in interviews, speeches and writings, some of which were carried in newspapers in the Treaty Ports, while others were produced as pamphlets in Japan and posted into China. In these, they charged Cixi with poisoning Empress Zhen, driving her son Emperor Tongzhi to death, forcing the son's widow to kill herself by swallowing a lump of gold, exhausting the naval funds to the tune of tens of millions of taels to build her Summer Palace, and causing China's defeat in the war with Japan. Almost all the accusations that have since shaped public opinion about Cixi, even today, originated with the Wild Fox.
It was he who first represented Cixi as a debauched despot, alleging that she had many male concubines and nightly orgies with eunuchs. People believed Kang largely because he implied that his source was Emperor Guangxu himself, who had given him the ‘secret edict', smuggled out of the Forbidden City sewn into a belt. The emperor, Kang declared, did not regard Cixi as his mother, but ‘merely as a concubine of a late emperor's' – and ‘a licentious concubine' at that.
While Cixi's most deadly enemy was at large and shaping history's view of her for the next hundred years and more, her second most loathed foe, Sir Yinhuan, was taken off the original list for executions. The British and the Japanese lobbied on his behalf, the British especially persistently because they had given him a knighthood. His punishment was consequently commuted to exile in Xinjiang.3 Cixi hated him with a vengeance because it was he who had turned her weak adopted son into a prey for the Wild Fox – and for the Japanese. Thanks to Sir Yinhuan, the empire came close to landing in Japan's lap.
Sir Yinhuan himself acknowledged that his relationship with Japan was the cause of his downfall. He told the guards escorting him to his place of exile that the empress dowager started to suspect him when she saw that he appeared intimate with Itō on the day of Itō's audience with Emperor Guangxu. Whether or not this was the precise moment, Cixi was certainly convinced that he was working for the Japanese. In fact, it may well have occurred to her that he had been a Japanese agent before 1898 – that he had even played a role in China's spectacular defeat in the 1894–5 war. At that time, Emperor Guangxu relied on Grand Tutor Weng to help make decisions. And the Grand Tutor, out of his depth, relied on Sir Yinhuan, sending him draft documents several times a day for comments. In addition, Sir Yinhuan was in charge of the vital telecommunication system between Beijing and the war front. In this capacity he had been denounced by a number of people for acting suspiciously. The charges included that he ‘hid reports and cables, and changed some of their content'. Staff referred to him as a ‘traitor', suspecting him of passing on military secrets to the Japanese. But like other charges against grandees, this critical one was not investigated. Grand Tutor Weng was his close friend, and would explain his actions away to the emperor. Since then, it has emerged that the Japanese had full knowledge of the telegraphic exchanges and knew ‘like the fingers and palms of their hands' every move made by the Chinese military. Tokyo also knew, crucially, that Emperor Guangxu was willing to pay any price for peace, which allowed it to exact the wildly extortionate indemnity.
No matter how convinced she was of Sir Yinhuan's treachery, no matter how furious she felt, Cixi was, again, unable to expose him through a trial. In this case, she could not afford to offend Japan. As a result, when Sir Yinhuan was sentenced to exile, his ‘crimes' listed in the imperial decree were outlandish: ‘harbouring evil intentions, conducting himself in a secretive way, currying favour with the powerful and being unpredictable and unreliable'. This sounded like a grotesque fabrication and reinforced foreigners' abhorrence of Cixi. They kept pressing for Sir Yinhuan's release. Two years later, on the very day that she appealed for cooperation from Japan and Britain to cope with a foreign invasion, she ordered the execution of Sir Yinhuan in his place of exile, an order that she specified was to be delivered at the fastest speed. Sir Yinhuan had remained in the forefront of her mind and she wanted to pre-empt any demand from Britain and Japan for his release as a condition for agreeing to help.
Cixi ordered other executions, which did not need a trial and were at the discretion of the throne: those of the eunuchs. Four eunuch chiefs who had facilitated communication between Emperor Guangxu and the Wild Fox were put to death by bastinado inside the Forbidden City.4 This was not enough to quell her fury, and Cixi took the trouble to specify ‘no coffins or funerals for them, just throw them into the mass burial pit'. Ten other eunuchs were first beaten and then forced to wear a cangue – a heavy wooden yoke, weighing between 13 and 18 kilograms, which sat on the wretched eunuch's neck and shoulders, in some cases for ever. Such punishments had not been practised for so long that the old cangues had rotted, and the court prison cells had partially collapsed. The court management had to have new cangues made and the cells repaired.
Compared with them, the officials implicated in the Kang case, but not directly involved in the plot to kill Cixi, got off rather lightly. Most were simply dismissed. Only one, Learning Companion Xu, was given life imprisonment. But he was released two years later. At that time Beijing was occupied by foreign invaders and the doors of the prisons were opened. Rather than flee, he stayed on and was officially set free by Cixi. Another official was exiled to Xinjiang, but was allowed to return home after two years.
While dealing with her enemies, Cixi wished the Reforms to continue and issued decrees stressing her wish. She penned a long edict in her own hand, in which she extolled the West's ‘ability to make their countries rich and strong', and vowed that China would ‘learn from their good ways and apply them step by step'. But whilst many evolutionary changes did indeed go on, the Reforms as a movement inevitably stopped. Those decrees concerning Kang and his associates were cancelled; the hastily sacked officials were reinstated; the impracticable orders, such as giving everyone in the empire the right to write to the emperor direct and receive an answer, were rescinded; and the radical shake-up of the Imperial Examinations was put on hold. It did seem that the country was reverting to the old ways. Western observers, who had no idea that the Reforms had been launched and spearheaded by Cixi, and who thought instead that Kang was the leader through Emperor Guangxu, were unanimous in condemning her for killing the movement that had only lasted 100 days.
With Cixi cast as the villain, Kang tried to persuade foreign governments to use military force to overthrow her and reinstate Emperor Guangxu. In Japan, he started talks with the intelligence service the moment he arrived, urging them to help kidnap the emperor and set up a Japan-backed throne, ultimately ‘forging a Great Asia merger'. One active member of these talks was Bi, the man chosen to kill Cixi. One intelligence officer, Kotaro Munakata, revealed Tokyo's official position: ‘The Japanese government will not dispatch armed forces lightly, but if the right time comes, it will of course provide aid without you even asking for it.'
To prevent rescuers, or kidnappers, from reaching Emperor Guangxu, Cixi installed tight security around her prisoner. Large iron locks and bars, ordered from the royal ironsmith in the capital, were fixed onto his villa in the Sea Palace, Yingtai. Brick walls were erected, blocking the villa off from the surrounding lake. The big sluice gate that separated the lake from the waters outside was checked and strengthened, so that no swimmers could move in or out underwater. When winter came and the water froze, orders were given to break the ice, so as to prevent anyone from approaching the emperor on foot across the lake. Cixi even became paranoid that her adopted son's loud percussion instruments – his drums, gongs and cymbals – might be heard outside the palace walls and help his rescuers locate him and make contact. She told the eunuchs who looked after his instruments to inform her before giving him the instruments.
Imperial Concubine Pearl had helped the emperor communicate with Kang, through her eunuch servants. Her villa was on the shore, looking out across the lake to the emperor's islet. Now the lakeside of her villa was blocked off by a brick wall, and she too became a prisoner.
The ugly grey walls even disfigured Cixi's own Summer Palace. Emperor Guangxu's residence there, the Villa of the Jade Balustrade, stood right on the edge of the lake and could potentially be reached by boat or underwater swimmers. The side facing the lake was therefore sealed off by a crudely erected pile of bricks, some of which still stand there today.
1 Historians usually set Yuan's denunciation much later, after he saw the emperor for a third time. This could not have been the case. Any delay by him, on a matter of life and death for Cixi, would have been interpreted by her as hesitation and a lack of loyalty. He would never have been trusted again. The fact was that from this time General Yuan enjoyed unreserved trust from Cixi and a meteoric rise.
2 This simple fact has not been recognised in the average history books, in which the planned employment of Itō is treated as a praiseworthy move that would have benefited China.
3 Before he left, Sir Yinhuan sent a message to the Russians, asking for a further 15,000 taels from the bribes they had offered him. His guards for the journey ruthlessly tormented him, telling him that without the money, ‘we can't change our faces from chilling winter frost to caressing spring breeze'. The Russians obliged, even if he was by then useless to them. They reckoned that future bribe-seekers needed to see that they honoured their deals.
4 Earlier in 1898 a eunuch, Kou Liancai, had been sentenced to death by the Ministry of Punishments and executed publicly. His death had nothing to do with the plot. He had written a petition, and the Qing absolutely prohibited the eunuchs from any form of political participation, with offenders strictly punishable by death.