PART SIX The Real Revolution of Modern China

(1901–1908)

26 Return to Beijing

(1901–2)

THE great, sweeping changes that China underwent in the first decade of the twentieth century began when Cixi was still in exile in Xian. There, in April 1901, she formed a Political Affairs Office to manage the whole programme under her. She left Xian for Beijing on 6 October, after the Boxer Protocol was signed and the occupying armies had withdrawn (though they were still in Tianjin). She did not feel safe with foreign troops in the capital and her anxiety was reciprocated by the Western community. There was ‘some uneasiness' in the legations when the date of her return was announced, wrote Robert Hart, and ‘the Legation guards are to be kept ready lest anything should happen … I don't think the Court will be so foolish as to try a coup, but … if anything does happen we'll be eaten up, and in that case this may be my last letter!'

At seven o'clock on the morning of the departure from Xian, local officials gathered outside the gate of the palace where the court had been staying, to say their farewell. After the luggage carts, the mounted guards, the eunuchs and the princes and grandees on horseback had started on their way, there came a brief pause. A eunuch stepped forward and waved a giant whip, 10 metres long. It was made of hard-braided yellow silk soaked in wax, with a golden dragon carved on the handle, and he cracked it three times on the ground. This signalled the descent of the monarch and called for all to be still. Cixi and Emperor Guangxu emerged in yellow sedan-chairs, followed by a large retinue. This colossal column then meandered along Xian's streets and exited by the city's South Gate, before heading east and joining the road for Beijing. Actually, it could have gone straight out of the East Gate, but for geomantic reasons the throne had to start all journeys from the South.

Along the way, shops and houses were decorated with colourful silks and lanterns, and as the procession passed by, the residents were on their knees. According to tradition, no one should look at Their Majesties' faces, so some prostrated themselves, while others lowered their heads and eyes and clasped their hands in front of them in a Buddhist gesture of homage. There was a sincere surge of gratitude. When Cixi arrived in Xian, the area was suffering from the aftermath of a disastrous harvest, and people were starving. With the supplies sent to her from other provinces, she was able to feed the population. Soon the weather turned fine, and this year's harvest was excellent. The locals credited this to the royal sojourn, and crowds along the streets wept and cried, ‘Long Live the Old Buddha! Long Live the Emperor!' At the places where the crowds were densest, in a dramatic departure from tradition, Cixi ordered her sedan-chair curtains to be parted so that people could see her. She had learned from travellers to the West that European monarchs were seen in the streets. Eunuch chiefs handed out silver coins, and the elderly were given silver cards in the shape of the character for ‘longevity'. In the hope of receiving more silver, some locals followed Cixi for days.

The officials who turned out to bid the royals farewell had arrived with their own banners, which added yet more colour to the scene. Some, though, had not wanted to come, but had been informed that failure to turn up could result in their chance of promotion being blocked for two years. Similarly, along the royal route through several provinces, local officials were instructed to come out and greet the throne, in addition to providing food and refreshments, for which they were given generous allowances. However, on the very next stop after leaving Xian, the local chief failed on all counts, even though he had been given 27,000 taels. Apparently he had got himself the job by using his connection with the provincial governor, in order to lay his hands on the handsome royal allowance. But he was really incapable of organising a proper reception for such a huge party, with its complicated royal protocols, and so, instead, he went into hiding, burying his head in the sand. When Cixi learned this, in a villa without candles for the night, she ordered that he should be spared – not even sacked. Her entourage told each other that the Old Buddha really had mellowed.

En route, Cixi visited sacred mountains and beauty spots, travelling along narrow tracks on valley bottoms under towering cliffs, making up for all the years when she had been yearning to travel, but had been unable to do so. A month into the journey, news came that Earl Li had died, on 7 November 1901, before his eightieth birthday – and a month after signing the Boxer Protocol. His death deprived Cixi of a first-rate diplomat, but made no difference to the unfolding of her revolution. The earl's reputation as ‘the greatest moderniser of China' is an overstatement.

The earl's last letter to Cixi – written with intense feeling – soon arrived by cable. He said he felt immensely grateful that he had been the man ‘appreciated and trusted the earliest and the deepest' by her; he had been reading her decrees on the forthcoming reforms and, knowing that this would make China strong, felt he could now ‘die without regret'. On her part, Cixi issued a personal decree in addition to an official one, saying, ‘Reading the letter by the late Earl, I was overcome with grief.' The wake for the earl was under way in the capital, with numerous white banners, a large mourning hall shrouded in white, and mourners wearing white coarse sackcloth streaming in and out to the sound of wailing music. The earl's coffin, a giant catafalque borne by scores of men, was then escorted by his family back to his birthplace more than 1,000 kilometres down south in Anhui province. Cixi ordered the officials along the route to facilitate the arrangements, and shrines and resting pavilions were erected all the way. Sarah Conger said that ‘in magnitude and splendor' the procession ‘surpassed all that I could extravagantly imagine'. Cixi made sure that the earl was appropriately honoured, and his family well looked after. Above all, she formally retracted all the censure to which he had been subjected by the throne.

She was then in Kaifeng, one of China's old capitals, where the accommodation was suitably royal. A month after she received the late earl's last letter she was still there, and issued another decree, heaping further honours on him and his family. Clearly, the earl meant a very great deal to her. Their working relationship went back four decades, and for many years he had been her right-hand man – the person who understood her best. Together they had achieved a great deal and had dragged the empire out of its isolation and into the world. And yet they had both made fatal mistakes that cost the country dearly, and which had resulted in their own estrangement. In her heart she could not forgive him for his role in the war with Japan – and in China's decline; and he was angry at her handling of the Boxers. Now she needed him, not least to protect her from possible humiliation, and even harm, from Westerners (with whom he got on) once she returned to Beijing. Hesitating, she lingered in Kaifeng – until the day a cable arrived from General Yuan Shikai, who had succeeded the earl as Viceroy of Zhili and Imperial Commissioner for North China. These distinguished appointments had been Cixi's reward for his denunciation of the plotters against her life in 1898, but his ability also amply matched his loyalty. His cable informed Cixi that the foreign armies would not leave Tianjin, which they were still occupying, unless she returned to Beijing. She set off from Kaifeng at once.

While still in Kaifeng, in anticipation of returning to the capital, Cixi annulled the title of the heir-apparent and sent him away from the court. The teenager's father, Prince Duan, had been designated the chief culprit responsible for the Boxer atrocities. Cixi knew that everything done by the prince in relation to the Boxers had in fact been approved by her, and that she should bear the ultimate responsibility. Feeling indebted, she had preserved the heir-apparent's position at court – although officials had been urging her to repeal his title. She herself was aware that the heir-apparent could not possibly have made a decent emperor. He showed no aptitude for state affairs and lacked the bearing of a monarch-to-be. His interest lay in caring for his many pets – dogs, rabbits, pigeons and crickets – and he was fond of playing practical jokes. On one occasion he caused Emperor Guangxu, his uncle and the Son of Heaven, to fall sprawling on the ground. His Majesty tearfully complained to Cixi, who ordered twenty (largely symbolic) lashes for the heir-apparent. Eunuchs despised and poked fun at him as he played with them in ways judged to be beneath him. But Cixi waited for a whole year to go by before revoking his title: she did not want to ‘heap frost onto snow', as the old saying went. Now the time had come to act, but her decree mentioned none of his defects. It said that he himself had begged to be relieved, citing his problematic circumstances. The young man left the court as a prince, with his old nanny, to be reunited with his father in exile.

It was also the moment to say farewell to County Chief Woo. Cixi gave him a post in the coastal province of Guangdong, telling him that she was sending him to a prosperous area because she knew he had been out of pocket while serving her. She meant that there would be opportunities for him to make money there. Such corrupt practice was a way of life. The Chinese knew it was a problem and that Westerners despised them for it, but they despaired of ever changing it. Cixi herself, for all her radical reforms past and future, never attempted to tackle it. She went with the flow – and, in doing so, inevitably helped maintain it.

During the audience, repeatedly wiping away tears, Cixi told Woo how grateful she was to him, that he had been a friend in need; she said that she was sad at parting and that she would always miss him. Leaving the audience with the empress dowager's presents, silver taels and scrolls of calligraphy written in her own hand, the County Chief was overwhelmed with gratitude.

Woo then worked non-stop for a day and a night to attend to the details of Cixi's crossing of the Yellow River upon leaving Kaifeng. A snowstorm had swept the ancient capital the day before her scheduled departure, but the weather had cleared by the time she set out and the crossing was perfectly smooth. With her departure attended by officials and local people on their knees, Cixi prayed in a riverside marquee, and paid homage to the God of the River. Then she stepped onto a boat decorated in the shape of a dragon, and the massive flotilla, all colourfully kitted out, rowed to the north in water as still as glass, disturbed only by the oars cutting the surface. Cixi was delighted. She saw this ‘extraordinarily smooth' crossing as a sign of the gods' protection – and approval of the course she had chosen. But she also rewarded the boatmen handsomely for their work.

The last leg of Cixi's three-month journey was by train – travelling on the northern section of the great Beijing–Wuhan Railway, whose history was almost as chequered as Cixi's own. The year before, the tracks outside Beijing had been uprooted by the Boxers and a number of stations torched. The railway was repaired by the foreign invaders, who then handed it over to her government, with a royal carriage for her use. She rode to Beijing in style on 7 January 1902, and entered the city through the southern gates, which had hitherto been reserved for the emperor: first the Qianmen, whose massive gate-tower had caught fire during the Boxer chaos, but had since been rebuilt; then, further north, the Gate of the Great Qing. But she stopped short at the front gate to the Forbidden City itself, and turned to go round and enter the harem through the back gate. For a woman to enter the front section of the Forbidden City would have been seen as such a shocking afront to the sacredness of the monarch that Cixi made sure she did not break this rule.

Inside the Forbidden City, one of her first acts was to pray to the ancestors of the Qing dynasty. And as soon as arrangements were made, she took the court to the Eastern Mausoleums to pay homage to the buried ancestors and to beg their protection. While there, she spotted a little pet monkey that belonged to an official and was hopping on his tent. She expressed affection for the monkey and got herself a ‘tribute'. It was soon leaping about wearing a beautiful yellow silk waistcoat.

But before all else, the day after she returned from exile Cixi honoured Imperial Concubine Pearl, whom she had had drowned in a well just before she fled. This was an act of contrition. It was also an attempt to make amends to her adopted son, who had given her his cooperation over several years, especially during the exile. Above all, perhaps, Cixi was making a gesture to the Western powers, who had been appalled by the murder. She was determined to win their goodwill. It would make an enormous difference to the country, and to the way she herself would be treated. The yearly payment of the Boxer Indemnity could vary considerably, depending on the exchange rates, and, with goodwill, the foreign powers could adopt the method of calculation that was advantageous to China. Besides, her transformation of the empire needed the cooperation of a friendly international community.