8 A Vendetta against the West

(1869–71)

PRINCE Chun had been Cixi's earliest and staunchest ally when she launched the coup nearly a decade earlier. His motive had been to oust a group of incompetent fools whom he blamed for the empire's defeat and his emperor brother's death. Unlike Cixi, he had no intention of changing policy, but instead wanted the country to become stronger so that it could one day avenge itself on the Western powers. His support for Cixi in the coup, and his cooperation with her over the years, had been based on the assumption that this was also what she wanted.

But as the 1860s passed, Prince Chun began to see that revenge was not on Cixi's agenda and that she was actually attracted to Western ways. When, after the internal rebellions were quelled, many called for the expulsion of the Westerners, she had ignored them. At the beginning of 1869, Prince Chun decided he must act and presented Cixi with a memorandum. Reminding her of the burning of the Old Summer Palace and the death of her husband in exile, he wrote that the late emperor had ‘died with an acute grievance in his heart', a grievance that was still tormenting the prince, making him feel he could not ‘live under the same sky as the enemy'. Brushing aside the compelling fact that trade with the West had enriched the country, he demanded that she expel all Westerners and close China's door. Six things had to be done, he said. One was to boycott foreign goods, so that Westerners would have no incentive to come to the country; and he asked the court to set an example by publicly destroying all Western products in the palaces. The Foreign Office should compile a list of all the foreigners in Beijing, so that when the time came to break off relations, they could be ‘wiped out' if need be, a job for which he volunteered his services. The prince wanted Cixi to ‘issue a decree to all provincial chiefs telling them they are to encourage the gentry and the people … to burn foreign churches, loot foreign goods, kill foreign merchants and sink foreign ships', stressing that these actions must take place simultaneously ‘in all provinces'. Ending his long memo, Prince Chun told Cixi bluntly that she ‘must fulfil the dying wish' of her late husband, and that she ‘must not let a day go by without thinking about revenge, never forget it for a minute'.

Cixi did not want to tie the empire to the chariot of retribution. ‘Even if we do not forget the grievances for a day … grievances don't get addressed by killing people or burning houses,' she reasoned. She sent Prince Chun's memo to the grandees for discussion. They were all startled by the violence of his proposal, and told Cixi to keep it as ‘top of all top secrets', not to be leaked out. To Prince Chun they made emollient noises, praising his sentiment and condoning such measures as shunning Western goods in the Forbidden City (except ‘useful items like clocks and guns'). But they made clear that they opposed the aggressive thrust of his proposal, on the grounds that it could lead to war with the West, which China could not win. Sullenly Prince Chun accepted the grandees' verdict. But he was far from convinced.

It was soon after this exchange that Prince Chun insisted on the execution of Little An. Cixi was in no doubt that he was striking at her politically as well as personally. While she was waiting for her chance to hit back, Prince Chun plotted his next move.

At the time, the meeting of Western and Chinese cultures had resulted in many clashes. While Westerners branded China as ‘semi-civilised', the Chinese called Westerners ‘foreign devils'. But the focus of animosity was the Christian missions, which had established themselves in many parts of the country in the past decade. There had been riots against them from time to time, which had acquired a specific term in the language: jiao-an, ‘cases to do with Christian missions'.

These did not spring from religious prejudice. As Freeman-Mitford, the attaché in Beijing, observed, the Chinese did not have strong religious antipathies:

If it were otherwise, how is it that a colony of Jews has dwelt among them unmolested for two thousand years, and still remains … at Kai Feng in the province of Ho Nan How is it that the Mohammedans have flourished exceedingly in certain provinces … On the walls of the Imperial palace at Peking there is a pavilion richly decorated with Arabic inscriptions from the Koran in honour of a Mohammedan lady who was a wife, or favourite, of one of the emperors. This does not look like persecution for religion's sake. And, more than these…Buddhism has been the popular religion…

Christianity was regarded as a teaching that ‘persuades people to be kind': quan-ren-wei-shan. Even anti-Christian rioters were not averse to the doctrine. Their anger was directed at the missions themselves. Being foreign was always a cause for suspicion, but the major problem was that the missions had become a competing authority at the grass-roots level. There, local officials traditionally exercised absolute authority over all disputes and dispensed justice – or injustice – according to their judgement. The English traveller Isabella Bird once sat outside the gate of a county chief's office, the yamen, and observed its workings:

In the hour I spent at the entrance of the yamen of Ying-san Hsien 407 people came and went – men of all sorts, many in chairs, but most on foot, and nearly all well dressed. All carried papers, and some big dossiers. Within, secretaries, clerks, and writers crossed and recrossed the courtyard rapidly and ceaselessly, and chai-jen, or messengers, bearing papers, were continually despatched. Much business, and that of all kinds, was undoubtedly transacted.

The arrival of missionaries, backed by gunboats, introduced a new form of authority into society. In the numerous disputes, ranging from conflicting claims of ownership of water sources or properties to long-standing clan feuds, those who felt they did not or could not get justice from the local officials often sought protection from the church by becoming converts. In such a situation, a Chinese Christian might go to the priest, as Freeman-Mitford wrote:

swearing that the charge brought against him is a mere pretext, his profession of the Christian faith, in which he is protected by treaty, being the real offence. Full of righteous indignation and confidence in the truth of his convert, who, being a Christian, must necessarily be believed before his heathen accuser, the priest rushes off to the magistrate's office to plead the cause of his protégé. The magistrate finds the man guilty and punishes him; the priest is stout in his defence; a diplomatic correspondence ensues, and on both sides the vials of wrath are poured out. How can a priest who interferes, and the mandarin who is interfered with, love one another

Some angry grass-roots officials therefore encouraged hostilities against Christians. The resentment was also fuelled by genuine misunderstandings. A major one concerned missionary orphanages. In the Chinese tradition only abandoned newborn babies were looked after by charitable institutions, registered with local authorities. Orphans and foundlings were the responsibility of their relatives, whose treatment of the children was their own business. It was incomprehensible to the Chinese that strangers should be able to take in boys and girls without the consent of their families and relatives, who were not even allowed to visit them, let alone take them away. This practice roused the darkest suspicions. Rumours abounded that missionaries kidnapped children and used their eyes and hearts as medical ingredients, or in photography – a mysterious phenomenon at the time. Isabella Bird wrote:

Stories of child eating were current, and I am sure that the people believe that it is practised by the missionaries … I observed that when we foreigners entered one of the poorer streets many of the people picked up their infants and hurried with them into the houses; also there were children with red crosses on green patches stitched on the back of their clothing, this precaution being taken in the belief that foreigners respect the cross too much to do any harm to children wearing the emblem.

In June 1870, an anti-Christian riot broke out in Tianjin, seemingly triggered by just such a rumour that an orphanage run by the Sisterhood of Mercy, attached to the French Roman Catholic church, was kidnapping children and gouging out their eyes and hearts for photography and medicine. Several local Christians, accused of the actual kidnaps, were beaten up by crowds before being delivered to the magistrate's office. Although they were all found to be innocent (one was in fact taking a child home from the church school), thousands of men still crowded the streets, and bricks were hurled at local Christians. The French consul in Tianjin, Henri Fontanier, rushed over with guards and fired a shot that wounded one of the magistrate's servants. The roaring crowd beat the Frenchman to death and then killed between thirty and forty Catholic Chinese, as well as twenty-one foreigners. In three hours of lynching, plunder and arson, orphanages, churches and church schools were burned down. Victims were mutilated and disembowelled, and foreign nuns were stripped naked before they were killed.

Cixi's policy regarding incidents involving Christians had always been to ‘deal with them fairly': chi-ping-ban-li. She did not believe the ‘child-eating' rumour, which had surfaced time and again in other areas and had invariably been proved false. In no uncertain language she condemned the murders and the arson, and ordered Marquis Zeng, then Viceroy of Zhili, whose office was in Tianjin but who was at the time absent and ill, to go and intervene at once and ‘arrest and punish the ring-leaders of the riot, so justice is done'. A decree expressed sympathy for the Christian victims, refuted the rumours and told all provincial chiefs to protect missionaries. Prince Gong set extra sentries to patrol outside Westerners' houses.

Marquis Zeng quickly established that the rumour in Tianjin was groundless. He found that this riot seemed to be different from the usual story of local officials going along with an anti-Christian mob – something more sinister seemed to lie behind it. During the investigation it emerged that the rumour had started with one Commander Chen Guorui, ‘Big Chief Chen'. Arrested rioters confessed that they had learned about the ‘eyes and hearts' from the Big Chief, who, they believed, had the organs in his possession. Chen had arrived in Tianjin by boat several days before the riot, at which point the rumour began to spread. Blacksmiths started to sell arms, which was prohibited by Qing laws, and thugs and hooligans were in and out of the Big Chief's dwelling, a temple-inn. On the day of the riot, crowds were assembled from street to street by men beating gongs. When the regional Imperial Commissioner, Chonghou, tried to prevent the mob from reaching the foreign settlement by having the pontoon bridge that led to it dismantled, Big Chief Chen ordered it reattached and, while the crowds were crossing, he called out to them from his boat: ‘Good lads, wipe out the foreigners, burn their houses!' During the massacre, Chen, who had a foul temper and a habit of whipping underlings, was, by his own account, in the boat ‘seeking pleasure with young boys'.

Big Chief Chen turned out to be a protégé of Prince Chun. After Chen was exposed, the prince wrote repeatedly to Cixi, telling her that ‘I am extremely fond of this man and intend to use him for our cause against foreign barbarians.' Chen must be well treated, as all men of ideals in the empire would be watching what happened to him and would see whether the throne had any serious desire to ‘avenge the country'. The mob must be ‘encouraged', not punished, warned the prince. It was obvious that Chen had instigated the riot, and behind him stood Prince Chun.

It also became clear to Cixi that Prince Chun had intended the whole country to do as Tianjin did. During the massacre and its aftermath, unrest rippled throughout the empire, with the same eyes-and-hearts rumour circulating about the missionaries. In some places, posters were put up in the streets announcing that on a specified day all must come out to slaughter foreigners and destroy churches. Riots, though on a smaller scale, broke out in a number of cities. All this was exactly in line with the memorandum Prince Chun had sent Cixi a year earlier, and the conclusion was inescapable that the prince had taken it upon himself to put his scheme into action.

Realising Prince Chun's role, knowing how powerful he was and how popular his ideas were, Cixi became cautious. She had to refuse the demand to bring Big Chief Chen to justice from the French minister, who had learned about Chen's role from local Christians. To concede to the French demands would arouse unmanageable fury against her government and herself. There were already petitions calling for her to ride the wave of the Tianjin riot and ban Christian missions, destroy churches and drive out all Westerners. Grandees fumed against any punishment of the rioters, who were held up as heroes, admired by people like Grand Tutor Weng. Scenes of murder and arson were drawn on elegant fans and appraised by the literati as works of art. Marquis Zeng incurred much wrath for ‘taking the side of the foreign devils' and was made to feel like an outcast. In front of the throne, in discussions about the riot, Prince Chun held sway, and no one dared to suggest that Big Chief Chen be punished. Arrogantly the prince denounced Cixi's government for having done nothing in the past ten years towards the goal of exacting retribution.

Cixi's position had already been drastically weakened by the Little An episode. Now she felt she had to ingratiate herself with Prince Chun by pretending to go along with him. She told him and the other grandees that she, too, regarded foreign barbarians as sworn enemies, but her problem was that her son was not of age and all she could do was keep things ticking over until he reached his majority. Perhaps feeling that she must use all her powers to charm and arouse sympathy, Cixi had the yellow silk screen removed and faced the grandees, quite possibly for the first time. Appearing appealingly helpless, she begged them to tell her and Empress Zhen what to do, as ‘we don't have a clue'.

At this juncture, on 25 July 1870, Cixi's mother died. During her illness she had consulted not only Chinese doctors, but also the American physician Mrs Headland, who had become a trusted friend of many aristocratic families. Cixi sent people to her mother's house to pay last respects on her behalf, and prayed for her at a shrine that she had set up in her apartment. She arranged for her mother's coffin to be placed in a Taoist temple for a hundred days, during which time an abbot led a daily service. But she herself did not leave the Forbidden City. Security was much harder to guarantee in the Beijing streets. Perhaps some ominous instinct warned her. Around this time the court astrologer, who watched the stars and made interpretations in the European-equipped Imperial Observatory set up by the Jesuits, predicted that a major official would be assassinated. This was an extraordinary prediction, as assassinations were virtually unheard-of in Qing history. A month later, Viceroy Ma Xinyi was assassinated in Nanjing. He had exposed some rumour-mongers spreading false accusations against missionaries and had punished them. As a result he had prevented a Tianjin-like massacre in Nanjing.

Meanwhile, as the main victims of the Tianjin riot were French, including the consul, Henri Fontanier, French gunboats arrived and fired warning shots outside the Dagu Forts. War seemed to be inevitable. Cixi had to move troops and make preparations. Marquis Zeng, who had been sick, collapsed in a series of nervous fits and took to his bed. He wrote to Cixi: ‘China absolutely cannot afford a war.' No one in the court, not even those who called most loudly for revenge, had any answer to the French show of force.

At this critical moment the man who gave Cixi most useful support was Earl Li, then the Viceroy of another region. (China was divided into nine viceroyalties.) He set off at once with his army to defend the coast, and produced practical advice on how to solve the crisis diplomatically. Convicted murderers must be executed, he counselled, but the number should be kept to a minimum in order not to inflame the population. The Foreign Office should explain to the legations who were pressing for the rioters to be punished that ‘excessive executions would only create more determined enemies and would not be in Westerners' long-term interest'. Another argument he proposed for Beijing to say was that it understood that Westerners ‘cherish the intention of treating ordinary Chinese with generosity and hold sacred the principle of not killing lightly'; it knew that missionaries preached kindness. ‘All these sentiments ran counter to large-scale executions.' Appreciating his understanding of the West, Cixi made the earl the Viceroy of Zhili, which, being the region surrounding Beijing, was the most important viceroyalty. As the viceroyalty's capital was Tianjin, a Treaty Port inhabited by Westerners, the earl could deal directly with them. He was also, of course, close to Beijing. The earl succeeded Marquis Zeng who, after a long illness, died in 1872.

With advice from Earl Li, Prince Gong hashed out a conciliatory solution designed to satisfy the French while not further enraging the xenophobic Chinese. Twenty ‘criminals' were sentenced to death and twenty-five were banished to the frontiers. Many of the men had no proper name – an indicator of the wretched lives they led. They were merely called ‘Liu the Second Son', ‘Deng the Old', and so on; the man heading the execution list was identified as ‘Lame Man Feng'. On the day of the execution these men were feted like heroes by officials and bystanders alike, enjoying their only moment of glory. Two local officials who had been involved in the riots were punished, but only for dereliction (‘not forceful enough in suppressing the mob') and were sentenced to exile to the northern frontiers. Their stay was short, as ‘the whole empire is watching their fate', warned Marquis Zeng. As for Commander Chen, he was found to be ‘totally innocent'. The mildest language was used in court correspondence about him, in case he should be riled.

Compensation was paid to the victims and to the churches for repairs. Chonghou, the official who had tried to protect the Westerners by having the pontoon bridge dismantled, was dispatched to France to declare Beijing's condemnation of the riot and to express its wish ‘for conciliation and friendship'. This trip was (and is still) misrepresented as Cixi sending Chonghou to grovel. Prince Chun furiously denounced it.

France accepted this solution. It was at war with Prussia in Europe and could not embark on another in the East. The Chinese empire narrowly escaped a war.

Prince Chun was unrepentant about the crisis he had provoked and, sulking about the solution, claimed that he was suffering from ‘sickness of the heart' and stayed in bed. There he wrote Cixi three long letters, trenchantly criticising her for not encouraging the Tianjin rioters and not getting people all over China to follow their example. She had let down her late husband, he implied. Cixi's response was all platitudes and avoided engaging with his point. Prince Chun would not let her off the hook: he immediately fired off a fourth letter, reiterating his accusation and alleging that, thanks to her, ‘foreigners are running even more rampant'. He had noticed her evasiveness: ‘What the decree says is not at all what I was talking about. There is not a word about the business of foreign barbarians. This is scary and worrying in the extreme.' Cixi was forced to address the issue, but she insisted that the expulsion of Westerners was ‘not on the agenda' and China should still aim for ‘peaceful co-existence with foreign countries'. Thanks to the support of Prince Gong and key officials like Earl Li, she managed to ignore Prince Chun.

The prince's bitterness continued to fester. At the beginning of the following year, 1871, he wrote again, going on and on complaining about the same thing: that Cixi was not seeking revenge against the West. Stopping short of denouncing her by name, he made Prince Gong and his colleagues the scapegoats and accused them of ‘fawning over foreign barbarians'. The two half-brothers were not on speaking terms, while Cixi had to humour Prince Chun.

Obviously the prince was quite capable of instigating another Tianjin-style riot, which could well drag the empire into a catastrophic war. Yet Cixi was powerless to censure him. His anti-foreign stance was so popular with officials and population alike that to battle with him over this issue would be suicidal for Cixi. Prince Chun was thus a ticking time-bomb for the empire. As leader of the xenophobic faction, he was the main obstacle to Cixi's open-door policy; and, being the head of the Praetorian Guards, he was in a position to threaten her life. He had not done anything to her so far because, in addition to her being the emperor's mother and his wife's sister, it would not be long before her son assumed power and she returned to the harem. He would tolerate her for this short interim. But, for Cixi, the long-term safety of both the empire and herself meant that something had to be done about Prince Chun.