21 Desperate to Dethrone Her Adopted Son

(1898–1900)

CIXI had come to detest her adopted son: he had been involved in a plot to kill her and yet she was unable to expose him. He was widely regarded as a tragic reformist hero and she as a reactionary and vicious villain – and yet she was unable to defend herself. Her feelings of bitterness and frustration were only relieved when she watched an opera about a heartless adopted son, who drove his foster parents to death and then received his just deserts when he was struck dead by terrible lightning unleashed by the God of Thunderbolts. Cixi became very fond of this opera and watched it many times. She had the adopted son made up as a most despicable scoundrel and ordered the number of thunderbolts and shafts of lightning strikes to be increased fivefold. She also added the frightening Gods of Winds and Storms to the scene, so that the retribution looked and sounded even more horrendous. Unable to punish her adopted son sufficiently herself, Cixi wished the gods to punish him one day.

It may well have crossed her mind to kill Emperor Guangxu, but she did not seriously contemplate the idea. Apart from her fear of Heaven, she could not risk the national and international consequences. Indeed, she had to fight rumours that he was being murdered, or had already been murdered. The emperor, in poor health generally, had fallen seriously ill after his world turned upside down. As was traditional, the royal doctors' reports were circulated to top officials, and a public edict required the provinces to send their best doctors. These actions were seen as Cixi's moves to prepare the world for the announcement of his death. She had to dispatch Prince Ching, the head of the Foreign Office, to Sir Claude MacDonald to ask for the British minister's help to ‘clear the air', and when Sir Claude suggested that a legation doctor be allowed to examine the emperor, Prince Ching agreed at once.

Dr Dethève from the French Legation entered the Forbidden City on 18 October 1898 to examine Emperor Guangxu. The doctor's report confirmed that the emperor was indeed very ill. His symptoms included nausea and vomiting, shortness of breath, buzzing noises in his ears and dizziness. His legs and knees appeared unstable, his fingers felt numb, his hearing was bad, his eyesight was failing and there was pain in the area of the kidneys. His urination pattern was abnormal. The doctor concluded that the twenty-seven-year-old was suffering from chronic nephritis – that his kidneys were damaged and could not properly filter waste and fluids from his blood. This helped quell the rumour of murder, but nobody felt Emperor Guangxu was too ill to rule the empire.

Cixi desperately wanted her adopted son to be off the throne. The daily routine of receiving his greetings and going to the morning audiences with him was a constant reminder of the conspiracy and his role in it, and left her no emotional peace. The routine began as soon as she got up, mostly between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. The emperor, having washed and dressed and had his queue plaited, and having had a smoke and a quick breakfast, would soon arrive in his sedan-chair under a yellow canopy, carried by eight men. (His entourage brought everything he needed, including a chamber pot.) When his chair was set down in the courtyard outside Cixi's apartment and his arrival was announced, Cixi would sit erect and a eunuch would place a yellow brocade cushion on the floor. Emperor Guangxu would enter, kneel on the cushion, and perform the formal greetings from an emperor to a dowager empress, after which Cixi would say, ‘Please get up, Your Majesty.' He stood up, stepped forward and enquired as a son to a parent, ‘Did the Royal Father sleep well? And did he have a good dinner yesterday?' Affirmative answers from her were followed by her enquiries about him, until finally she could say, ‘Your Majesty may go and have a rest.' At this, Emperor Guangxu went to another room, where he dealt with the reports that had been left for him by Cixi with her instructions. In the audience hall they sat side by side, flanked by special Praetorian Guards, authorised to be near the throne, one of them being Cixi's brother, Duke Guixiang. During the audiences the emperor seldom spoke, and when he did, he would only murmur a few bland, often inaudible questions.

This routine was repeated day after day. The sight of him elsewhere in the court would also annoy her. Famously fond of wearing much-patched cotton tunics as underwear, the emperor liked to don plain, modest, dark outer robes, which made him an incongruous figure among the brilliantly dressed court ladies and the bejewelled Cixi. Once he was spotted from a distance in the Sea Palace performing the Ploughing Rite – in which the emperor personally handled the buffalo and ploughed the first furrow of the year – in his instantly recognisable drab clothes, standing among his officials in their colourful formal court costumes. His living quarters were also known for their austerity. The lack of opulence was perhaps not entirely his own choice: the eunuchs may have neglected his comforts. Later, when Westerners frequented the court, they noticed that he was not treated like the Son of Heaven: ‘no obsequious eunuchs knelt when coming into his presence … Never when in the palace have I seen a knee bend to the Emperor, except that of the foreigner when greeting him or bidding him farewell. This was the more noticeable as statesmen and eunuchs alike fell upon their knees every time they spoke to the Empress Dowager.'¹

Emperor Guangxu never showed a trace of resentment – not even when eunuchs poked fun at him during parlour games, which he often played with them. This behaviour led many to believe that he was pretending to be an idiot and was biding his time. Others, like the American painter Katharine Carl, observed that the slender and delicate monarch had ‘a Sphinx-like quality to his smile … Over his whole face there is a look of self-repression, which has almost reached a state of passivity.' Even Cixi with her sharp eye could not figure out what lay behind the passive, expressionless mask. In his prison villa, the emperor read translations of Western books as well as Chinese classics, practised calligraphy and played musical instruments. (He said he did not like sad tunes.) He continued to dismantle and reassemble clocks. Once he tackled a broken music box, and apparently not only brought it back to life, but also added a Chinese tune to it. What he was most fond of doing was drawing devil-like figures on pieces of paper, on the back of which he would always write the name of General Yuan, the man who had informed on the plotters and caused his imprisonment. He would then paste the drawings on the wall, shoot at them with bamboo arrows and afterwards cut the tattered drawings to shreds.

Who knew the truth? Emperor Guangxu might indeed be waiting for the arrival of a rescue team – gathered by Wild Fox Kang and sponsored by the Japanese. This prospect made Cixi panic. In 1899, she even resorted to a ruse designed to neutralise the Japanese, by trying to give them the impression that she was as keen as her adopted son to form a close relationship. Two officials were dispatched to Japan, where they gave newspaper interviews and made public speeches, declaring that they were sent by the empress dowager to enter an alliance with Japan. They saw the Japanese emperor, and former Prime Minister Itō, who thought that his chance had come again and offered to go to China at once to be an adviser to the throne. To prevent the illusion from developing further, her messengers did their best to undermine their own credibility, so much so that the Japanese press found them ‘weird'. The Europeans thought Cixi had ‘made a mistake in the selection of her men, for these commissioners, unlike what we usually find [sic] the yellow man, revealed too much of the important mission …' A perplexed Tokyo did not respond to their proposal, although it seemed to think that Cixi did entertain the intentions. While these machinations seem to have confused the Japanese, they alarmed Russia, as well as public opinion, which reckoned that the government was doing some dirty deals with Japan. It was a clumsy manoeuvre far below Cixi's usual well-crafted standard, and the man who conceived it and talked Cixi into it, Censor Chongyi, offered to be publicly dismissed as a scapegoat. The whole enterprise suggests that Cixi was at her wits' end.

She feared all the time that her prisoner might flee and she would not allow him out of the palaces without accompanying him herself. There was, however, a place outside the Forbidden City where the emperor had to go, but which was forbidden to her as a woman: the Temple of Heaven. (Many considered it ‘the most beautiful piece of architecture in China'.) The emperor had to go there regularly to pray to Heaven for good weather for the harvests, on which the nation's livelihood depended. The trip involved staying on the site overnight. All Qing emperors treated the ritual with the utmost seriousness. Emperor Kangxi, for example, attributed the five decades of relative good weather that had led to his successful reign to the sincerity of his praying at the Temple. Cixi believed in this wholeheartedly. But as she could not make the journey herself, and could not be sure that Emperor Guangxu would not flee when he was beyond her reach, she sent princes in his place. Although the proxies were easy to arrange, praying by them was not the same as by the emperor himself. Cixi was permanently fearful that Heaven would interpret the sovereign's absence as irreverence and as a result would unleash catastrophe on the empire. It was with anguish and desperation that she yearned for a new emperor.

However, to dethrone Guangxu was unthinkable for the Chinese – even though public opinion on the whole welcomed Cixi taking charge. The plot against her life was leaked and was doing the rounds of the teahouses, and the emperor's involvement, blamed on Wild Fox Kang, was felt to be inexcusable. Many thought that ‘His Majesty had shown deplorable judgment, and that the Empress Dowager was justified in resuming control'. But still, they wanted him to remain the emperor. He was deemed a sacred personage ‘from Heaven', who was not even to be seen by his subjects (hence the screens that shielded his processions). People preferred to talk about Wild Fox Kang ‘deceiving the emperor' and ‘setting Their Majesties against each other'. Viceroys from the provinces, while supporting Cixi's takeover, wanted her to work with her adopted son. Earl Li, who had privately scorned the emperor, saying that he did ‘not even look like a monarch', and wished Cixi were in charge, was uncompromisingly opposed to his removal from the throne. When Junglu, Cixi's closest confidant, sounded him out, the earl leapt to his feet before Junglu had finished talking and raised his voice: ‘How can you possibly entertain the idea! This is treason! It would be disastrous! Western diplomats would protest, viceroys and governors would be up in arms, and there would be civil war in the empire. It would be a total calamity!' Junglu agreed with Earl Li. In fact he himself had privately been trying to dissuade Cixi from any attempt to dethrone her adopted son.

The legations had made it clear that their sympathy was entirely with Emperor Guangxu. Cixi knew that they regarded her adopted son as the reformer, and her as the anti-reform tyrant. In an attempt to correct this impression and to show that she was friendly towards the West, she invited the ladies of the diplomatic corps to a tea party in the Sea Palace on the occasion of her birthday in 1898. This would be the first time foreign women would enter the court. (The first Western man Cixi had met was Prince Heinrich of Germany earlier that year.)

Before they went, the foreign ladies reacted like girls playing ‘hard to get'. Robert Hart wrote: ‘first they were not ready the day H.M. wanted them to appear – then when the second appointed day came round they could not go because they could not decide on one interpreter … then another difficulty came up … so the visit is postponed sine die…'

The party eventually took place on 13 December, many days after her birthday. If Cixi felt put out, which she was bound to, she did not let her feelings mar the occasion. Sarah Conger, wife of the American minister, left a detailed description. At ten o'clock that morning, sedan-chairs were sent over for the ladies:

We formed quite a procession with our twelve chairs and sixty bearers … When we reached the first gate of the Winter Palace [Sea Palace] we had to leave our chairs, bearers, mafoos, escorts – all. Inside the gate were seven red-upholstered court chairs in a line, with six eunuch chair-bearers each, and many escorts. We were taken to another gate inside of which was standing a fine railroad coach presented to China by France. We entered this car, and eunuchs dressed in black pushed and hauled it to another stopping place, where we were received by many officials and served with tea … After a little rest and tea-sipping, we were escorted by high officials to the throne-room. Our heavy garments were taken at the door, and we were ushered into the presence of the Emperor and Empress Dowager. We stood according to rank (longest time in Peking) and bowed. Our first interpreter presented each lady to Prince Ch'ing [Ching] and he in turn presented us to Their Majesties. Then Lady MacDonald read a short address in English on behalf of the ladies. The Empress Dowager responded through Prince Ch'ing. Another low bow on our part, then each lady was escorted to the throne where she bowed and courtesied [sic] to the Emperor, who extended his hand to each.

To Lady MacDonald, it was ‘a pleasant surprise to us all to find [Guangxu] taking part in the Audience … A sad-eyed delicate-looking youth showing but little character in his face, he hardly raised his eyes during our reception.' After greeting the emperor, Mrs Conger went on: ‘We then stepped before Her Majesty and bowed with a low courtesy [sic]. She offered both her hands and we stepped forward to her. With a few words of greeting, Her Majesty clasped our hands in hers, and placed on the finger of each lady a heavy, chased gold ring, set with a large pearl.'

The gift of rings, and the manner in which they were given, was common among women. This was an attempt by the empress dowager to claim sisterhood with the Western wives. Then the ladies were treated to a feast, hosted by Princess Ching and other princesses, wearing ‘most exquisite embroideries, rich satins and silks, with pearl decorations', their fingernails ‘protected by jewelled gold finger shields'. After the feast and tea, they were conducted back to Cixi. Sarah Conger recorded the scene:

To our surprise, there on a yellow throne-chair, sat Her Majesty, the Empress Dowager, and we gathered about her as before. She was bright and happy and her face glowed with goodwill. There was no trace of cruelty to be seen. In simple expressions she welcomed us, and her actions were full of freedom and warmth. Her Majesty arose and wished us well. She extended both hands toward each lady, then, touching herself, said with much enthusiastic earnestness, ‘One family; all one family.'

Next came a Peking Opera performance, after which Cixi bade them goodbye with a theatrical gesture: ‘she was seated in her throne-chair and was very cordial. When tea was passed to us she stepped forward and tipped each cup of tea to her own lips and took a sip, then lifted the cup, on the other side, to our lips and said again, “One family, all one family.” She then presented more beautiful gifts; alike to each lady.' Mrs Conger, who looks severe in the photographs, gushed after meeting Cixi:

After this wonderful dream-day, so very, very unreal to us all, we reached home, intoxicated with novelty and beauty … Only think! China, after centuries and centuries of locked doors, has now set them ajar! No foreign lady ever saw the Rulers of China before, and no Chinese ruler ever before saw a foreign lady. We returned to the British Legation and in happy mood grouped ourselves for a picture that would fix in thought a most unusual day – a day, in fact, of historic import. December 13, 1898, is a great day for China and for the world.

Lady MacDonald took with her as translator Henry Cockburn, Chinese Secretary at the British Legation, ‘a gentleman of over twenty years' experience of China … and is possessed of great ability and sound judgment'. She wrote, 'Previous to our visit, his opinion of the Dowager-Empress was what I may call the generally accepted one … On his return he reported that all his previously conceived notions had been upset by what he had seen and heard, and he summed up her character in four words, ‘amiability verging on weakness!' Sir Claude reported to London: ‘the Empress Dowager made a most favourable impression by her courtesy and affability. Those who went to the palace under the idea that they would meet a cold and haughty person of strong imperious manners, were agreeably surprised to find Her Majesty a kind and courteous hostess, who displayed both the tact and softness of a womanly disposition.' Others in the legations shared these views.

Cixi's image had improved. But the legation men only thought better of her because they had discovered that she had an unexpected ‘womanly disposition'. It was far from the case that they would now favour her over Emperor Guangxu as the ruler of China. Over the following year she was weighed down by the strain of being a permanent prison warden. And the pressure became intolerable when she fearfully contemplated the potential consequence of the monarch persistently failing to pray at the Temple of Heaven. She leapt at a suggestion that an heir-apparent be adopted. The heir-apparent could fulfil the emperor's duties, and could, in due course, replace the emperor, who would then retire. The adoption had sufficient justification: Emperor Guangxu was in his late twenties and still had no children. It could be argued that he needed to adopt a son to continue the dynastic line. So the prisoner wrote in his own hand in crimson ink a humble edict announcing that his illness was preventing him from having a natural heir, and so, at his repeated entreaty, the empress dowager had kindly consented to designate an heir-apparent, for the sake of the dynasty.

The heir-apparent was a fourteen-year-old boy called Pujun. His father, Prince Duan, was the son of a half-brother of Emperor Xianfeng, Cixi's late husband, which provided the legitimacy.

This arrangement immediately set off speculation that Emperor Guangxu was unlikely to remain on the throne for much longer. Those who were dead-set against Cixi insisted that she would now murder him. ‘The foreign ministers began again to look grave. They spoke openly of their fear that Kuang Hsu [Guangxu]'s days were numbered,' one eye-witness recorded. When Cixi announced the designation of the heir-apparent on 24 January 1900, the foreign legations pressed for an audience with Emperor Guangxu – unmistakably signalling their support for the imprisoned emperor and their snub for the heir-apparent. They were told that the emperor was in poor health and could not see them. When the diplomatic ladies asked for a repetition of that happy party a year earlier, they were turned down: the empress dowager was ‘too busy with affairs of state'.

¹ Emperor Guangxu did not have a taste for luxury. Katharine Carl observed that ‘His Majesty was not much of an epicure. He ate fast, and apparently did not care what it was. When he finished, he would stand up near Her Majesty, or walk around the Throne-room until she had finished.'