7 Love Doomed

(1869)

IN her first years as the ruler of the Chinese empire, Cixi, now a widow in her late twenties and early thirties, living in the harem surrounded by eunuchs, grew attached to a eunuch, An Dehai, known as Little An. In fact she fell in love with him. Eight years younger than she, Little An had come from an area near Beijing, Wanping, which traditionally supplied eunuchs for the court. His story was little different from that of most eunuchs. Poverty drove their parents to have them castrated as young children, hoping they would earn a better living at court. Usually the father would take the boy to a specialist castrator, who operated by the appointment of the court. After a contract was signed, absolving the castrator from any responsibility in case of death or failure (both highly likely outcomes), the unimaginably painful operation was performed. The castrator's fee was huge and had to be paid from future earnings. If the boy's rank stayed low, it could take him years to clear the debt. In order to save money, fathers would sometimes castrate their own sons.

Eunuchs were regarded with visceral disgust by most other men. Emperor Kangxi, who ruled for sixty-one years, called them ‘the lowest and basest, more worms and ants than men'. Qianlong the Magnificent said that ‘no one is smaller or lower than these stupid peasants', and that ‘the court is extravagantly generous to allow them to serve here at all'. They lived like virtual prisoners in the palaces, from which they were rarely allowed out. The punishments to which they were subject did not have to follow the Qing legal procedure: all it needed to have a eunuch beaten to death was the emperor's whim. Ordinary folk sneered at them for the most common problem they suffered: incontinence, the result of castration, which became worse as they grew older and for which they had to wear nappies all the year round. Eunuchs were universally despised for having lost their manhood. Few men showed them compassion or considered that they had been driven to their wretched condition by desperate poverty. Pity and affection were usually felt only by the court women who lived in their company.

Little An, good-looking and sensitive, served Cixi for years and became indispensable to her. It was well known that he was her favourite. But Cixi's feelings towards him went far beyond fondness for a devoted servant. He turned her head. By summer 1869, courtiers had noticed that she was not working as hard as she had been and that there was a languidness about her, an air that pointed to ‘indulgence in seeking pleasures'. She was clearly in love, and love made her do an extremely bold and dangerous thing that violated deeply entrenched dynastic precedent.

That year, Emperor Tongzhi, her son, was thirteen years old. Following tradition, Cixi started preparing for his wedding, which would signal his adulthood. The nationwide selection of his consorts was put in train in the spring. The wedding gowns were to be made by the royal dressmakers in Suzhou, the renowned silk centre near Shanghai. To this place, as famous for its beautiful canals and gardens as for its silk, Cixi dispatched Little An, to ‘supervise the procurement'. This was unnecessary, as there was an established channel for the task. It was also unprecedented. No Qing emperor had ever sent a eunuch out of the capital on an errand. But all Cixi could think of was how excited Little An would be. He would get out of the Forbidden City, out of Beijing, and travel down the Grand Canal that linked north and south China. He could even celebrate his forthcoming birthday on the boat. Cixi would have loved the journey herself. She disliked the Forbidden City intensely, seeing it as a ‘depressing' place with only walled-in courtyards and alleys. Heady winds from across the ocean that had been beating at the gates of the Forbidden City had also stirred up hitherto inconceivable aspirations.

In August, Little An set off in a party that included family members and other eunuchs. When he heard the news, Grand Tutor Weng wrote an alarmed entry in his diary, calling it ‘a most bizarre thing'. Other grandees were similarly shocked, and then appalled, when it became known that Little An, with a sizeable retinue, was having a good time and attracting riveted attention. The public had never seen a eunuch before and were now greatly excited at the spectacle. When his barge appeared on the Grand Canal, crowds turned out to gape at him. The grandees were furious. When he got to Shandong, Governor Ding Baozhen of the province, a stickler for established rules and practices, arrested Little An and the rest of the group. When Ding's report reached the court, Grand Tutor Weng exclaimed: ‘How satisfying! How satisfying!'

All the grandees at the court said Little An must be executed, claiming that he had broken cardinal rules. Actually the young man had not broken any rule. The dynasty stipulated that eunuchs were ‘forbidden to set foot outside the Royal City without authorisation'. But he had authorisation – from Cixi. What both of them had done was to break a tradition that imprisoned the eunuchs in the palaces. And this was unforgivable to the grandees. The man most insistent on the execution was Prince Chun, Cixi's brother-in-law, a like-minded friend of Grand Tutor Weng. They disapproved of so many things Cixi was doing, and this was the last straw. Even Prince Gong and his usually open-minded colleagues echoed the call for execution. Cixi, being an interested party, could play no part in the decision. Her friend, Empress Zhen, pleaded with the grandees, ‘Can he be spared death on account of having served the Empress Dowager devotedly for so many years?' The grandees responded with a stony silence, which amounted to a resounding No. That settled it. A decree was written there and then, ordering Little An's execution on the spot.

To Cixi, it felt as though her world was collapsing. She managed to hold back the decree for two days, during which time she implored Empress Zhen to plead harder for Little An's life. But all efforts failed. Prince Chun arrived and pressured the women to release the decree instantly, probably warning Cixi that what she ought to do was distance herself from Little An, rather than otherwise. Empress Zhen was forced to allow the decree to be sent out.

Governor Ding was told to carry out the death sentence at once and not seek further confirmation from the court. Prince Chun and others were anxious that Cixi should have no more time to find a way to prevent it. Little An ‘must not be allowed to defend himself with cunning explanations' and ‘must not be interrogated' at all. It appears that the grandees suspected he had been having an affair with Cixi and wanted to cover up a scandal.

So Little An was beheaded. Also executed were six other eunuchs and seven hired bodyguards. Governor Ding reportedly had his corpse exposed on the execution ground for days, so the public could see that he had no male organs. Talk of his being Cixi's lover had been widespread. Back in the Forbidden City, Cixi ordered all Little An's belongings to be handed over to her and, once she got them, she gave them to one of her own brothers so that they were in the hands she trusted.

A close friend of Little An – another eunuch in the Forbidden City – complained to others that it was Cixi who had ‘sent Dehai to his death' by first dispatching him out of Beijing and then failing to take responsibility. This remark hit a very raw nerve. In a fit of fury, she ordered the eunuch to be executed by strangulation. A chief secretary of the Grand Council, Zhu, wrote to a friend that the empress dowager was ‘taking out her anger on the servants around her'. She was ‘exuding bitter regret, brimming over with regret'. And, clearly hinting at her anger against Prince Chun, the chief secretary wrote that she was ‘holding a deep hostility against some close princes and grandees' and ‘refusing to be assuaged'.

Prince Chun and the other grandees not only killed Cixi's lover, but also sent out a warning about some of the startling changes she was introducing. Apart from giving eunuchs social status, she seemed to be allowing women to be seen publicly at a time when convention dictated they must stay in the home. (British diplomats found themselves assaulted with stones if there were ladies in their company, when otherwise they encountered bonhomie.) Little An had taken his sister, niece and some female musicians on the journey, and now they were all exiled to the northernmost wilderness to be slaves of the frontier guards. The grandees did not pursue Cixi herself. There was no wish to be rid of her. Her achievements had been monumental and were appreciated. Governor Ding said to his subordinates that her rule had brought China ‘a boom, which has surpassed even the [glorious] dynasties like the Tang and the Song'. They were only warning her not to go too far. In any case, her retirement was in sight. Her son would take over after his wedding.

After all the executions were carried out, while Prince Chun and others expressed ‘hearty delight', Cixi collapsed and was bedridden for well over a month. Unable to sleep, with ringing noises in her ears and her face badly swollen, she threw up constantly, often vomiting bile. Royal doctors diagnosed the Chinese equivalent of a nervous breakdown – ‘the qi of the liver shooting upwards, in the opposite direction to the normal [downward] channel' – and kept vigil by her door. Among the medicines prescribed was blood of the Mongolian gazelle, which was said to reduce swellings. Towards the end of the year, although she started working again, the vomiting continued. This level of physical reaction was most unusual for her: after all, she was no shrinking violet; she had coolly brought off a coup without the smallest sign of physical or emotional stress, even though she was risking death by a thousand cuts. Now, it seemed, her heart had been wrung. Only love could wreak such havoc.

Her son prayed for her and visited her devotedly. But the child could not console his mother. She was inconsolable. Only music soothed her. For nearly a decade she had not been able to enjoy it as much as she would have liked. First, after her husband's death, in accordance with court rules, all entertainments had been banned for two full years. When that period was up, general pressure compelled Cixi to prolong the ban for another two years, until he was entombed. Even then, operas were only staged in the Forbidden City on a few festive occasions. Now, as if in defiance, Cixi had operas put on daily, and almost non-stop music played in her quarters. In her sick bed, with music to drown her sorrows, a thought churned: how to punish the man who had pressed most fiercely for Little An's execution and who was the leader of the baying pack – her brother-in-law, Prince Chun.

The executions of Little An and his companions were enough to put Cixi off taking a lover ever again. The cost was too high. It seems that her heart was now closed. The modernisation of China also suffered and was largely suspended in the coming years as she picked her way through a minefield.