24 Flight
(1900–1)
HER hair twisted into a bun, and in an informal blue cotton gown that she often wore at home, Cixi began her flight in a mule-cart. It was the height of summer and the clothes she wore stuck to her wet body. The sweating animals and their load attracted swarms of flies and insects. Soon it began to rain, and although she was not soaked like her unprotected entourage of about 1,000 people, who rode and trudged through the mud, the cart jerked violently, throwing her this way and that. Later someone found a chair borne by two mules, one in front and one at the back, and she had a little more comfort, but the chair still swung around on the bumpy roads. Crossing a flooded river with no bridge, her guards lifted the bottom of her chair. The floods were swift, and she was nearly swept away.
She was fleeing to the west, into the interior. In front of her lay a wasteland of smouldering villages and towns, pillaged by the Boxers and by the shattered imperial army. Hardly a door or a window was intact and the walls were scarred by bullets. Not an inhabitant was in sight. She was desperately thirsty, but when eunuchs went to draw water from a well, they found human heads floating in it. So she had to chew plant stems for their moisture. No matter how hungry she felt, there was no food. And there was no bed, either. She and the emperor sat throughout the first night on a bench with their backs against each other, staring at the roof. Near dawn, a chill rose from the ground and seemed to penetrate her bones. Famously immune to the cold, the sixty-four-year-old now found it hard to bear – as she would later describe. On the second night, the emperor slept in a mosque, on a prayer mat, with a rattan dustpan and a handleless broom wrapped in a grey chair-cover as his pillow. In the morning, His Majesty rolled up his precious bedding into a bundle, which he clutched to his chest, not trusting it to the eunuchs. Many eunuchs lagged behind and sneaked away: they were unused to long-distance walking on stone-strewn country roads in their cotton-soled shoes, which, soaked in mud, made every step agony for them.
The emperor, also holding on tight to his pure-gold water pipe, was dressed in a thin silk gown and shivered uncontrollably once the sun set and the temperature plummeted. Lianying, the head eunuch, offered His Majesty his own padded jacket, which he presented on his knees, with tears streaming down his cheeks. Later the emperor would often say that without Lianying he would not have survived the journey, and that he was forever grateful. Thereafter he treated the eunuch as his friend.
After two nightmarish days and nights, Cixi arrived at a town where the local chief was still in place to greet her. County Chief Woo Yong had received notification of their arrival on a piece of dirty, crumpled paper without an envelope. It gave a long list of the court that he was ordered to provide for – and provide for in style. In keeping with imperial pomp, a Full Banquet of Manchu and Han Dishes (man-han-quan-xi) was to be laid out for the empress dowager and the emperor. After that, a Grade One Feast was to be served to each of the dozen princes and grandees. The note said that the number of officials and servants was unknown, and that he should prepare as much food and horse-feed as possible. This was a tall order in a county town that had been emptied by the Boxers and soldiers. County Chief Woo's staff had advised him to ignore the piece of paper and to pretend not to have received it – or just to get out of the place, like other officials on the royal route. But Woo was a loyal and kind-hearted subject, so rather than dismissing the demands as ludicrous, he fretted about how best to fulfil them.
County Chief Woo's best was pitiful. His cook had gathered some food, but was robbed on his way to the kitchen by soldiers from the retreating army, who simply grabbed the donkey that carried the provisions. When the cook resisted, he was slashed on the right arm. He eventually succeeded in making three woks of mung-bean and millet gruel, but two were wolfed down by starving soldiers, who reluctantly left one for the royals. Woo placed sentries around the remaining wok, ready to open fire on anyone who came close.
He then tidied up a room in a deserted inn for the empress dowager to rest in, managing to put cushions on the chairs and curtains on the doors, even paintings on the walls and some ornaments on the tables. When she arrived and set eyes on this luxury and on the County Chief prostrating himself on the floor, Cixi burst into tears. Between loud sobs she told Woo that she had never thought things would become as bad as this. After describing the misery of the journey, she brightened up at the news of the mung-bean and millet gruel, and was about to order it brought in when she suddenly remembered the emperor, and told Lianying to take the County Chief to greet His Majesty. Woo saw a shabby man, unshaven and unwashed, wearing an old padded jacket, which hung loosely about him. Emperor Guangxu did not say a word and Woo withdrew to fetch the gruel. It then emerged that he had forgotten chopsticks, so Cixi told the servants to bring some sorghum stems. As Woo retreated outside the room, he heard Their Majesties sucking eagerly at the gruel. After a while Lianying came out and gave an approving thumbs up, saying how pleased the empress dowager was. He also said that ‘the Old Buddha' longed for an egg. Thereupon Woo searched the town, at last finding five eggs in an empty drawer inside an abandoned store. Having lit a fire and boiled the eggs himself, he served them in a coarse bowl with a few pinches of salt. Lianying carried them in to Cixi and, on his return a few minutes later, smiled to Woo: ‘The Old Buddha loved them. She ate three, and left two to the Master of Ten Thousand Years. No one else got to touch any. This is good news. But now the Old Buddha would love to have a puff of her water pipe. Do you think you could find some spills?' Woo improvised by rolling up some rough paper on the windowsill. Shortly afterwards, the empress dowager stepped out of the room onto the terrace, parting the curtain on the door herself (a job always done by servants). Lighting the pipe herself as well, she puffed at it and seemed the picture of perfect contentment.
Looking around her, she caught sight of Woo and began to speak to him, which obliged the County Chief to go down on his knees in the muddy yard. She asked him if he could find some clothes for her. Woo said that his wife had died and her clothes were all in Beijing, but he had some clothes that his late mother had left behind, and ‘if the Empress Dowager did not mind their coarseness … ' At this Cixi said, ‘Anything that can keep me warm. By the way, it would be just wonderful if you could also find some clothes for the emperor and the princesses, who brought no changes either.' Woo went home and opened his late mother's trunk. He found a wool coat for the empress dowager, a long waistcoat for the emperor and a few robes for the princesses. From his sister-in-law he took a dressing-table set, which had a mirror, a comb and face powder. Wrapping everything into a large bundle, he delivered it to a eunuch. Later on, when the royals came out of their quarters, they were all dressed in his family's clothes. This was the first time Cixi was seen wearing Han Chinese attire.
The imperial party stayed in County Chief Woo's town for two nights. Cixi learned from him that the Boxers had not only wrecked his county, but also came close to killing him during the time they occupied the town. On one occasion, they had seized him and told him they wanted to satisfy themselves that he was not a ‘Secondary Hairy'. The verdict, fortunately in his favour, hinged on whether the ashes from a piece of paper they burned went up or down. On another occasion, a letter from him to a good friend in which he complained about the Boxers had been intercepted, and he only escaped retribution after vehemently denying it was his handwriting. On the most recent occasion, when he was actually trying to get out of the town in order to greet the royal company, the Boxers refused to open the gate, but snorted: ‘They are fleeing and don't deserve to be on the throne!' But the mob feared the approaching Praetorian Guards after all, and took to their heels.
Disapproving though he was of her backing for the Boxers, County Chief Woo loyally found the empress dowager a sedan-chair and another for Emperor Guangxu. Cixi took Woo along with them, making him a manager for the onward journey. She told him: ‘You have done a very good job, and I am deeply grateful. I will not forget your loyalty, and will show my gratitude. The emperor and I appreciate how difficult it will be for you to manage the logistics … We would not dream of being difficult or demanding. Please be at ease, and don't have any misgivings.' These words brought tears to Woo's eyes, and he took off his hat and touched his forehead on the floor. Then Cixi enquired gently, ‘That cook of yours, Zhou Fu, is really good. The noodles he just served are quite delicious, and the stir-fried shredded pork is very tasty. I am thinking of taking him with me on the journey, but I wonder whether he would be willing?' To this delicately put command Woo naturally answered affirmatively on the cook's behalf, adding that it was his honour too. Having lost his cook, he had to eat at a friend's house that evening. The cook was promoted to the Royal Kitchen and was given an impressive title.
Cixi had fled the capital and Western Allies had occupied it. The Chinese defences had disintegrated, and yet Cixi's rule did not collapse, as most had anticipated. In flight, and in a sorry state, she showed that she was still the supreme leader. Eye-witnesses seeing her climbing onto the mule-cart said that she did so as if it were the imperial throne. From then on, wherever she was became the nerve centre of the empire. The orders she sent to the provinces, using the same language and tone as always, conveyed absolute authority. Reports from all over China found their way to her. She asked for troops to escort the royal group, and troops rushed over as fast as their horses or legs could carry them. She asked for money, food and transport, and these poured in quickly and abundantly. She was well provided for during the rest of her journey, which covered more than 1,000 kilometres and lasted for more than two months. In late October, in western China, as she settled in the ancient city of Xian, capital of more than a dozen Chinese dynasties from 1100 BC, she received more than six million taels from all over the empire. When the court returned to Beijing a year later, 2,000 carts were loaded with tributes as well as paperwork. This miraculous display of loyalty in an unprecedented crisis spoke volumes for the general stability of the empire, rooted in a deep faith in the empress dowager by the population, the grass-roots leaders and the provincial chiefs – a deep faith that overrode their recent disenchantment.
That she was still alive and very much in command stopped in their tracks those who had thought of jumping ship. One straw in the wind concerned the fate of her bête noire, Sir Yinhuan. When she had ordered the governor of Xinjiang, where Sir Yinhuan was in exile, to execute him, the governor chose not to do so. He was hedging his bets: the invaders were marching on Beijing and Sir Yinhuan was their friend. The order was only carried out fifty days later, on 20 August, when the governor learned that Cixi had left the capital and was safe.
That she was evidently still at the helm and her government had not collapsed changed the mind of Viceroy Zhang, who abandoned his plan to set up a separate regime in Nanjing. The people he had envisaged joining him in his new government – who in fact had not been told about his plan – had affirmed their allegiance to Cixi. Earl Li left Shanghai for Beijing to act as her negotiator. And when the British approached Viceroy Liu Kunyi, his closest colleague, telling him that London looked to him and Viceroy Zhang to take control and negotiate with the Allies, Liu was horrified. He cabled Viceroy Zhang and asked him whether he had received the same bizarre message. He also reminded Zhang that the man the British should be dealing with was Earl Li, who took instructions from the empress dowager. So, when Tokyo was still talking about ‘setting up a new government', implying that there would be a key role for him, Viceroy Zhang flew into a panic and fired off a cable marked with an unusual ‘thousand times urgent' to his representative in Japan, telling him to ‘stop this at once at all costs'. He sent a follow-up the next day, explaining that any such move now ‘would most definitely ignite internal strife and throw the whole of China into warring chaos'.
Zhang proceeded to lobby Western powers to protect Cixi. Indeed, her safety had always been one of his priorities, even when he contemplated forming a new government. He and Viceroy Liu had told the British Acting Consul-General in Shanghai, Peiham L. Warren, who reported to Lord Salisbury, that ‘unless it is guaranteed that her person shall be protected they will be unable to carry out the agreement of neutrality' (which the Viceroys had signed with the powers, promising to maintain peace and protect foreigners in their provinces). When he heard that Allied troops had entered Beijing, Viceroy Zhang repeated his request that Cixi must not suffer ‘the slightest alarm'. And when he learned that Cixi had fled, he cabled the Chinese minister in London, asking him to see Lord Salisbury and request ‘the same assurance once more'.
The unequivocal support for Cixi by the Viceroys dashed Westerners' hopes of pursuing and toppling her. Many had advocated replacing her with Emperor Guangxu. Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister, was one of them. But he was warned off by Lord Salisbury: ‘There is great danger of a long and costly expedition which, at the end, would not succeed.' The Prime Minister rejected the idea of a joint occupation of conquered territory: ‘The attempt to undertake the maintenance of order in Northern China would be hopeless even if we stood alone. But as it would certainly produce a collision between ourselves and our allies, it could only end disastrously.' No occupation would work without a high-ranking Chinese collaborator. But the powers realised that all the most senior Chinese ‘ranged themselves solidly' on the side of the empress dowager. They had thought that ‘the empire was in the hands of the Viceroys', who were furiously opposed to Cixi; but now, when the crunch came, they found that these men were still in thrall to her. Not one of them was willing to step forward to challenge her. It was all too clear that Cixi was the only person who could hold the empire together. Her demise would result in civil war, which for Westerners would mean especially the collapse of trade, the default of loans and the emergence of more Boxers. And so, for these overwhelming reasons, the Allies decided not to pursue the empress dowager. On 26 October 1900, confident of her safety, Cixi took up residence in Xian. Her representatives, Prince Ching and Earl Li, opened negotiations with the powers.
Meanwhile, Viceroy Zhang, the only man in the regime who had contemplated replacing her and who had enlisted foreign powers' assistance, was anxious to explain himself to her. From the shots she had fired across his bows, he knew Cixi was conscious of his machinations, which could be deemed treason by many a monarch. Although she did not punish him, he reckoned she could not have been pleased. He wanted to explain to her in person that his had only been a contingency plan in the case of her government's demise, and he had never wanted to overthrow her. He wrote and asked for an audience, saying that he had not seen Her Majesty for well over a decade and, filled with regret and a sense of guilt, he longed to come to a place on her route ahead of her, to ‘welcome Your Majesty on my knees'. Cixi's reply was a curt ‘No need to come'. Her displeasure was transparent. The Viceroy then asked a close associate to intercede on his behalf when the man had an audience with Cixi. The Viceroy had ‘not seen Your Majesty for eighteen years,' said the man, ‘and since Your Majesty's journey to the west, he has been so concerned and worried about Your Majesty, and missed Your Majesty so much that he has been unable to eat or sleep properly. Dare I ask why Your Majesty declines to receive him?' Cixi gave an excuse: ‘he can't leave his post at the moment as things have not quite settled down', and she promised to ‘ask him to Beijing once we are back'. But when eventually she returned to the capital at the beginning of 1902, she found another pretext and postponed the audience again. Another year later, the Viceroy could not wait any longer and wrote to announce that he was coming to Beijing in the spring of 1903 anyway as he would be free of duties then, and he just had to see Her Majesty, whom he had been ‘missing for twenty years'. This time, he received a positive one-liner: ‘You may come for an audience.'
In May that year, Viceroy Zhang arrived in Beijing and at last had his meeting. According to the Grand Council secretary who escorted him in the Summer Palace, and the eunuchs outside the audience hall, he and Cixi said virtually nothing to each other. The moment he went in, she burst into tears, at which he too began to cry. She went on sobbing and did not ask him any questions, so Zhang was unable to talk. The audience protocol was for the official to speak only when the monarch addressed him. And Cixi gave Viceroy Zhang no chance to open his mouth. They sobbed for a while, before Cixi told him to go and ‘have a rest', upon which he withdrew. The silence was by design. For Cixi, what the Viceroy had done was best left unsaid. Spelling it out and trying to explain would only upset and alienate her – she had already decided to accept his action, which she judged to be of decent motive. She further demonstrated to Zhang that she held nothing against him by having delivered to him the next day a painting by her own hand – of a pine tree, symbol of uprightness, next to a plant, zi-zhi, to which a man of integrity and wisdom was often compared. The meaning was eloquent and the Viceroy was relieved and overjoyed. Immediately putting pen to paper, he wrote: ‘Like a withered old tree touched by the most gracious winds / Overnight, the colour of black returned to the greyed hair on my temples.'
Viceroy Zhang composed fifteen similar Poems of Gratitude. They described his time with the empress dowager, and noted all her little tokens: dishes from her own table, fruits from her orchards, ravishing silks, brocades and a long coral necklace to wear on official occasions, and so on. One day, in her presence, some sweet melons grown in the palace grounds were brought for him. She pronounced that they were not beautiful enough, and servants were dispatched to town to search for better-looking melons. Another day, he heard from an official that the empress dowager had compared him to a great historical figure who had been the pillar of his dynasty. These ‘Celestial words', as he wrote, sent the Viceroy into a grateful frenzy and made him more humbly devoted than ever. When he left Beijing, Cixi gave him various farewell presents, including 5,000 taels of silver, which he used to start a modern school. When he reached home, three lots of gifts from her were already awaiting him. The Viceroy was overcome and wrote another of his poems of gratitude.
Thus Cixi conquered the hearts of her subjects and earned herself phenomenal loyalty. When she was fleeing Beijing in 1900, Junglu, another devotee, took it upon himself to lead an army in a different direction, aiming to lure away potential pursuers. Among the voluntary decoys was Chongqi, the father of Cixi's late daughter-in-law. When the pursuers did not materialise, and in despair that he was not able to do more to help, Chongqi hanged himself with the sash of his robe, leaving behind a few poignant lines: ‘I fear that I am powerless to be of any service to the throne. I only have my life to offer, and I hereby offer it.' When the Allies entered the capital, his wife had two huge pits dug in their house and conducted the whole family, children included, to sit in them in an orderly manner, before she told the servants to fill the pits with earth and bury them alive. When the servants refused and fled in horror, her son set the house on fire, killing all thirteen of them. This was not an exceptional case. Scores of families committed suicide by setting their houses on fire, in addition to individuals drowning or hanging themselves.1
Cixi also had determined enemies – who saw their chance in 1900. Wild Fox Kang set about raising an army and occupying a number of major cities, with arms supplied from Japan. Many Japanese took part in his venture, while he himself stayed overseas. An assassination squad was formed, comprising more than thirty sea pirates. Recruited from the south coast around Hong Kong, it was led by a Japanese, and was ready to go north with the twin objectives of assassinating Cixi and restoring Emperor Guangxu. Hoping to persuade Britain and other powers to help them achieve their goal, the Wild Fox's men wrote to Acting Consul-General Peiham L. Warren in Shanghai, stating, as Warren cabled to Lord Salisbury, ‘that, unless the Emperor was restored to the Throne, they were prepared to stir up the Secret Societies throughout the country with the object of compelling foreign powers to intervene. It was pointed out in this communication that grave injuries would be inflicted on foreign trade by popular risings, which they regarded as inevitable, and … destruction of missionary property was to be anticipated.' Clearly, this line of argument was unlikely to be persuasive. It merely confirmed to the British that Kang's force was no better than the Boxers. Not surprisingly, Britain lent them no support. The Wild Fox had been dreaming of being collected, protected and conveyed to Beijing by a British gunboat. The dream was dashed. Instead, the powers fully backed Viceroy Zhang as he rounded up Kang's men who gathered in his territory, Wuhan, the moment their uprising began. Britain supported the Viceroy's execution of the main rebels, as the British representative there reported to Warren (who forwarded the cable to Lord Salisbury):
Peace of Yang-tsze [sic], otherwise secure, is imperilled by Reform party [Kang's group], which is actively fomenting a rebellion; they [ give – sic in original] out that they have our support … Arms and ammunition have been smuggled from Japan, and incendiary Proclamations have been posted up everywhere. It is no longer a question of reform, but of anarchy and pillage. There are many Japanese among confederates of Kang. Viceroy [Zhang] requests that you will confer secretly with the Japanese Consul-General [to stop Japanese participation].
Tokyo reined in the Japanese in Kang's camp. The demise of the empress dowager and internal strife across China were not in Japan's interest at this time, when there were the armies of other powers on Chinese soil, all with territorial ambitions of their own. The Japanese leader of the assassination squad pulled out, claiming illness, and was replaced by a Chinese, Shen Jin. But before it set off, Kang's rebellion had collapsed.
Also hoping to take advantage of Cixi's troubles was one Sun Yat-sen, an early proponent of Republicanism. A dark-moustachioed Cantonese, who had long shed his queue and Chinese costume in favour of a European-style haircut and clothes, he was dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty by force. In 1895, in the aftermath of the disastrous war with Japan, he launched an armed uprising in Canton. It failed, but made his name known to the court. He fled overseas, eventually to London, where he was seized by the Chinese and detained in their legation in Portland Place. The British government, which had refused to extradite him, intervened and secured his release. Later on, in Japan, he sought a collaboration with Wild Fox Kang, but Kang refused to have anything to do with him. Undeterred, Sun worked doggedly for his Republican ideal through armed insurrections, and acquired a Japanese following as well. In 1900, according to one of his Japanese comrades who reported to Tokyo, Sun's plan was to carve away six provinces on the south coast and ‘found a Republic, before gradually expanding to all eighteen provinces of China, toppling the Aisin-Gioros, and finally establishing a Great East Asia Republic'. In spite of his flirtation with Japan, the Japanese gave him only limited and intermittent support. Sun also got nowhere.
The empress dowager, exiled in Xian, remained the unshakable ruler of China. And she was adept at turning her plight to her advantage. She would sometimes burst into tears when she received her officials. A picture of vulnerability, she made the men feel protective and forgiving, happy to rise to the occasion and help a woman in need. But anyone stepping over a line would see a very different person, as County Chief Woo witnessed. As he had given her crucial service at her most difficult time and she never forgot a favour, he had been treated with intimacy, so much so that he felt bold enough to offer her some advice. One day he told her she should not have executed the officials before her flight, especially the former minister to Berlin, Jingcheng, the man who, unbeknownst to the County Chief, had given the Germans critical advice that had done China untold harm. ‘In the middle of a sentence, the Empress Dowager's face suddenly fell, her eyes were like shooting daggers, her jaws set tightly, the veins in her forehead bulged, and she gnashed her teeth, hissing in the sternest voice …' She told Woo that his criticism was unfair and born of ignorance of what had really happened. ‘I had never seen the Empress Dowager in anger, and all of a sudden her wrath crashed down on me and scared the soul out of me.' Woo felt ‘sweat trickling down my back'. He kowtowed and apologised, and ‘the Empress Dowager calmed down, and in an instant all her angry expressions vanished, and her face was relaxed and unclouded again …' The shift was like ‘the mightiest storm of thunder and lightning changing into a clear blue sky in a blink without leaving any trace'. The County Chief remarked that he had not imagined that ‘the Empress Dowager's wrath had such force. People said that great figures like Marquis Zeng and Earl Li were so awed by the Empress Dowager that they lost their composure in her presence. I now believe it.' Cixi had a gift of simultaneously inspiring protectiveness and fear – although not hate.
In exile and a less rigid environment, more people had access to Cixi and Emperor Guangxu. They never failed to be struck by the contrast between the two. The hardship of the long journey left her unmarked by any sign of fatigue or fragility, while her adopted son looked permanently on the verge of collapse. At audiences, sitting side by side, the emperor always kept his mouth shut, no matter how long and awkward the silence, until Cixi turned to him: ‘Your Majesty, do ask some questions.' Even then, he rarely asked more than two or three: ‘Is everything all right outside?' ‘Is the harvest good?' County Chief Woo, who saw him many times, remembered that he only asked two identical questions. ‘His voice was extremely tiny, like the buzz of a fly or a mosquito. You could hardly make out what he was saying.' In contrast, Woo observed, ‘the Empress Dowager talked most eloquently, quoting classical stories with ease, while at the same time being totally down to earth, familiar with the ways of people and society. She could read your mind after a few words, so the grandees were afraid of her. With an Empress Dowager so smart and strong, and the emperor so odd and weak, no wonder he was under her thumb …' Eventually, the officials who noted down their audiences often simply referred to Cixi as ‘Shang (the Monarch)' – a designation usually reserved for the emperor. Cixi herself was well aware of the shift of status. In Xian, for formal audiences, she had a throne set up for herself, behind and above the emperor's, thus presenting herself quite literally as superior to the emperor. When they returned to Beijing, Cixi would sit on a centrally placed throne during an audience, while Emperor Guangxu was seated lower down on the dais to her left.
The ordeal of the invasion, rather than damaging Cixi's authority, had enhanced it and brought her a new sense of security and confidence.
1 In one case, while the family waited for the fire to devour them, at the last moment they allowed their two young children to escape the burning building.