9 Life and Death of Emperor Tongzhi

(1861–75)

AT the age of five Cixi's son, Tongzhi, was put on a rigid regime of formal schooling, which prepared Qing emperors and princes. He was moved out of his mother's quarters and started living in a separate dwelling. Most days he was in his study by 5 a.m., when teaching would begin. When he was carried over in a sedan-chair, the Forbidden City was still asleep, with a few servants moving about and occasionally leaning against pillars, dozing. The hand-held lanterns of his entourage would often be the only flickers of light in the darkness shrouding the alleys of the palace.

His tutors, by common consent, were of the highest repute in scholarship and morality and were approved and appointed by the Two Dowager Empresses. The curriculum focused on Confucian classics, which Tongzhi recited without comprehension. As he grew older, he understood more and learned to write essays and poetry. The syllabus also included calligraphy, the Manchu and Mongolian languages, plus archery and riding. Emperor Tongzhi did not take to the sacred Confucian texts like a duck to water. His main teacher, Grand Tutor Weng, moaned with immense exasperation day after day in the privacy of his diary: the emperor failed to concentrate, to read the texts out loud with any fluency, to write the correct characters – and he was always bored. When writing poetry, he showed little flair with ethereal themes such as ‘Clear spring water flowing over a rock', although he seemed slightly more comfortable with topics to do with his royal duties, like ‘On employing good people to govern the country well'. Cixi and Empress Zhen often enquired about his studies from the tutors. They were dismayed that the child seemed to ‘get into a panic as soon as he sees a book', and they cried when this was still the case just before his assumption of power. They told his teachers simply to ensure a basic competence for his impending job, and Grand Tutor Weng reassured them that this would not be impossible, as the reports to His Majesty would not be as difficult as the classics, and his edicts would be drafted by other people. Then Cixi tested her son's ability in the context of an audience and discovered that he was unable to speak distinctly or coherently. Anxiously she urged the tutors to give him special coaching so that he was at least able to ask simple questions and give brief instructions.

One thing the emperor was interested in was opera, which his tutors regarded as an unworthy distraction: ‘pleasure only to the senses'. He ignored them, and often even took part in acting. On such occasions he would put on make-up and perform in front of his mother, who did nothing to discourage him. As he was not a good singer, Tongzhi would play the parts that involved martial arts. Once, in the role of a general, he bowed to a eunuch who played the king. The eunuch hurriedly went down on his knees, whereupon he yelled, ‘What are you doing You can't do this when you are acting the king!' This made Cixi laugh. Emperor Tongzhi was also enthusiastic about Manchu dancing and would cheerfully dance for his mother.

He pursued other pleasures. In the emperor's early teens, Grand Tutor Weng noticed him ‘giggling and fooling about' with his study companions. Once he seemed unable to control his giggles over a piece of the driest text, which greatly puzzled the tutor. ‘How bizarre!' he exclaimed in his diary. But these were virtually the only moments when His Majesty seemed to have any energy; otherwise he tended to look exhausted and unable to rouse himself from listlessness. Once he owned up that he had not slept for quite a few nights. But he forbade his teachers to ask him what the matter was, and warned them sternly that no one was to say a word about this to his mother or Empress Zhen. Driven to his wits' end, Grand Tutor Weng even shouted at his royal pupil, but more often he confined his distress to his diary: ‘What are we going to do! What are we going to do!'

The teenage emperor had tasted the joys of sex. The man who introduced him to this novel fun seems to have been a good-looking young scholar at court, Wang Qingqi, whom the emperor had taken a fancy to and installed in his study as his companion. Together they sneaked out of the Forbidden City to visit male as well as female prostitutes whenever they could.

While the emperor revelled in a wild boyhood, the court was preparing for his wedding. The process of selecting his consorts lasted nearly three years, interrupted by Little An's execution and Cixi's breakdown. By the beginning of 1872, before his sixteenth birthday, his consorts had been chosen – by the Two Dowager Empresses as well as by himself. The wedding was scheduled for later that year. Out of the hundreds of eligible young girls, a Miss Alute was designated to be empress.

A Mongol, this teenage girl was universally regarded by the elite families as an exemplary lady and peerless candidate. Her father, Chongqi, the only Mongol ever to come top in an empire-wide Imperial Examination, was an absolute devotee of Confucian values, which he instilled in the young mind of his daughter. She obeyed her father unconditionally, and could be depended on to be equally submissive to her husband. Perfectly mannered and very beautiful, she was also fluent in the classical texts, which her father had taught her himself. Empress Zhen set her heart on Miss Alute. So did Emperor Tongzhi himself. He had no wish to sleep with her, and he reckoned that she was someone who would tolerate that without a murmur of complaint.

Cixi had reservations. Miss Alute's maternal grandfather, Prince Zheng, had been one of the eight members of the Board of Regents formed by her late husband, and had been ordered to commit suicide after her coup, when she had sent him a long white silk scarf with which to hang himself. The man she had had beheaded, Sushun, who had hated her with a vengeance, was Miss Alute's great-uncle. Miss Alute's childhood had been marred by this family catastrophe, as her mother's family house, an elegant mansion famous in Beijing, had been confiscated according to the penal code, and the male members of the family had been barred from office. Underneath Miss Alute's impeccable conduct, her real feelings eluded Cixi. So she named another candidate, a Miss Fengxiu, saying that she liked the girl's quick wit. But eventually Cixi yielded to her son's pleading and accepted his choice: such was her love for him. She was willing to trust Miss Alute, and had faith that her father would not have put any unfit thoughts in her mind. After the matter was settled, Cixi ordered the confiscated mansion to be returned to Miss Alute's maternal family and restored the title to the male descendants.

The wedding followed the precedent set by Emperor Kangxi 200 years earlier in 1665, the last time that a ruling monarch married a girl chosen to be his empress. (Empress Zhen was not married as the empress; she was promoted to the position after she entered the court.) Although the occasion was called the ‘Grand Wedding', da-hun, there was no nationwide celebration. It was only the business of the court. In the Forbidden City brightly coloured silk billowed around enormous red characters reading ‘double happiness': xi. A similar display of silk was sported in the bride's mansion, particularly on top of the red pillars flanking the gate. From there to the Forbidden City, a route of several kilometres was selected for the bride to take: the dusty, rutted streets were made even and sprinkled with yellow soil, as required for a royal procession.

Along this route, every morning for a week before the marriage, porters in red tops with white spots carried the bride's trousseau to her new home: large cabinets as well as small jade dishes, practical hardwood washbasin stands as well as intricate pieces of art for connoisseurs. The smaller articles were displayed on yellow textile-covered tables, secured by stripes of yellow-and-red silk. To catch a glimpse of this exhibition of imperial house-furnishings, Beijing residents came out in droves at dawn, lining both sides of the route. This was their only involvement in the event. One morning, as the objects being carried were particularly precious, for security's sake the procession started before daybreak in order to miss the sightseers. After waiting in vain, they dispersed reluctantly, grumbling. Also disappointed were those who hoped to watch the training of the bridal chair-bearers. As the bearers must carry the chair perfectly steadily, and relieve each other quickly and without a jolt, they practised by carrying a vase filled with water inside the chair. But for some reason the chair never came out at the announced time.

The imperial astrologer selected 16 October 1872 to be the wedding day. Some time before midnight, under a full moon, Miss Alute was collected from her home by a large procession. She was dressed in a splendid robe embroidered with the pattern of a dragon (the emperor) and a phoenix (the empress) intertwined. A piece of red brocade of the same pattern was draped over her head. The road was empty. The few dogs that were running up and down, and the guards along the way, were the only ones permitted to gaze at this imperial pageant. The population had been told to stay away, and those who lived by the road were cautioned to stay indoors and not look out. At junctions where the royal route was joined by alleyways, blinds in bamboo frames had been erected to shut out any chance of a view. Foreign legations were told two days earlier that their nationals must keep within their own houses at this time – a request that generated outbursts of anger and frustration. What was the point of a grand state occasion, they asked, if nobody was going to see it?

Among the few people who did see it surreptitiously was an English painter, William Simpson, who sneaked into a shop on the route with a missionary friend. The shop was full of customers smoking opium, who took no notice of the foreigners, or of the royal to-do. The windows were made of thin paper, pasted over wooden frames, and could easily be poked through. Passing in front of the hole were princes and noblemen on white horses, preceded and followed by hoisted banners, canopies and giant fans. They appeared somewhat ghost-like in the dark, deserted Beijing streets, illuminated only by dimly lit paper lanterns, some hung and others hand-held. Even the moon was veiled by clouds, as if obeying the imperial directive. Silence accompanied the slow-moving column.

It was not a cheerful event, and could even be described as desolate. But this was thought to be what solemnity was all about. In this atmosphere, at a few minutes after midnight, Miss Alute, in her heavily gilded sedan-chair borne by sixteen men, crossed the threshold of the southernmost, front gate of the Forbidden City. She was the first woman in 200 years to go through this gate and enter the front section of the Forbidden City, which was off-limits to all women except the empress bride on her wedding day. Neither Cixi nor Empress Zhen had ever been there.

With this rarest honour, Miss Alute sat demurely, holding two apples. Inside the Forbidden City, when she got out of the sedan-chair, a prince's wife took the apples from her and placed them under two bejewelled saddles outside the door to her wedding chamber. The word for ‘apple' contains the sound ‘ping', and the word for ‘saddle' the sound ‘an'. Two apples and two saddles, ‘ping-ping an-an', alluded to the ever-present good wish: ‘For safety and peace'. This seems almost too mundane to befit a new empress. And yet Miss Alute would step over those symbol-laden objects and enter her chamber, to find neither.

On that wedding night, when all the rituals were over, encased in a room decorated overwhelmingly in red, facing the giant character that means ‘double happiness', the bridegroom made the bride recite Tang-dynasty poetry instead of making love. After this obligatory night together, he spent his nights in a separate palace a long way from her and his harem. Miss Alute felt it was her duty to go and offer herself to her husband, but he waved her away, and she – shy and having learned not to contradict him – dutifully left.

Miss Fengxiu, Cixi's preferred choice, was made the No. 2 consort. Just before the wedding day she was carried into the Forbidden City through the back gate, in a small sedan-chair borne by just four men with a tiny procession. The almost shabby ceremony had been prescribed for a concubine. She and another three imperial concubines fared no better than the empress, so far as their husband's affection was concerned. All five women were condemned to a life of loneliness.

After the wedding, in a ceremony on 23 February 1873, Emperor Tongzhi formally assumed office. He was sixteen. To be an absolute monarch so young was not unusual. Bizarre as it might seem, the first two emperors of the Qing dynasty, Shunzhi and Kangxi, took over the running of the empire at the age of thirteen. Emperor Tongzhi's assumption of power was also a court affair, like his wedding. The people at large learned about it from the imperial declaration, in a scroll lowered from the Tiananmen Gate, copied and distributed throughout the empire, in the same manner as the emperor's earlier coronation. From now on this teenager, and he alone, would make all decisions relating to the empire. As he would now write with his crimson-inked brush, the seals that had been stamped on decrees by the Two Dowager Empresses were no longer used. The yellow silk screen behind which Cixi and Empress Zhen had been sitting was folded away and they retired into the harem.

The emperor was determined to be worthy, and vowed to Grand Tutor Weng that he would ‘not be lazy or negligent' and would ‘not let my ancestors down'. The tutor was overjoyed. For about a year the young man was as good as his word, reading reports, authorising edicts and giving audiences. But he had none of his mother's initiative. His crimson-inked instructions were brief and routine. Cixi stuck to the rules and did not intervene in her son's work. There were no further projects, or attempts to modernise the empire.

There was one exception. Western legations had been requesting an audience with the throne to present their credentials ever since they entered Beijing. Hitherto, they had been told it was out of the question: the emperor was a child, and the Two Dowager Empresses, being female, could not be seen. The day after he took control, the legations sent a collective note applying for an audience. Furthermore, they insisted on seeing the emperor without going down on their knees and kowtowing. While Lord Macartney had reluctantly done so in 1793, for the sake of his trade mission, the second British envoy, Lord Amherst in 1816, had refused to go. Now the legations pooled their weight and demanded a kowtow-free audience. Most court officials were equally uncompromising, insisting that the kowtow had to be done.

Cixi had already made her decision on this issue: the envoys did not have to kowtow. A few years earlier she had discussed the matter with a small circle of open-minded officials like Prince Gong, Marquis Zeng and Earl Li, and they had all agreed that they could, and should, compromise. Emperor Tongzhi did what his mother told him to do. On 29 June 1873, he received the legation ministers without them kneeling, let alone touching their heads on the ground. This was a historic moment. The ministers stood, took off their hats and bowed at each stage as they advanced towards the throne. The dean of the diplomatic corps delivered a speech offering congratulations, and Emperor Tongzhi's response of goodwill was spoken by Prince Gong. The whole thing was over in half an hour. The court made no public announcement, not wanting to draw attention to the absence of the kowtow. Among those who heard about it, Grand Tutor Weng was troubled. Some, angered that the emperor had apparently succumbed to Western pressure, vowed to avenge this slight in the future.

Apart from this one tricky matter, the bureaucracy ran automatically. Traditional Chinese administration was a well-oiled machine, which, barring a crisis, would keep ticking over. Initiatives were not required and rarely offered. State policies depended almost entirely on the dynamism of the throne. While Cixi was full of innovative ideas, her son was entirely lacking in them. Nor was there any particular impetus for change. Cixi had brought peace, stability and a degree of prosperity to the empire. There was no peasant rebellion, or foreign invasion.

Nevertheless, even as a purely bureaucratic emperor, Tongzhi had at least to be hands-on, in order for the machine to run smoothly. Yet he grew tired of it. The tall, good-looking and fun-loving teenager stayed in bed later and later. The number of audiences decreased, until he saw just one or two people a day, and each time asked only a few stock questions. The ever-flowing reports often went unread and he would simply write on them the standard ‘Do as you propose', whether there was actually a ‘proposal' or not. Realising this, the ministries did as they saw fit, and the administration became lax.

This state of affairs had already disquieted the grandees when the emperor decided to rebuild part of the Old Summer Palace. He had visited the ruins with his mother and had been dejected by the sight of the remains of the formerly glorious buildings covered in weeds. In autumn 1873, he wrote an edict by hand, announcing his intention to restore the place, at least partially. The reason he gave was that the Two Dowager Empresses needed a home for their retirement. Some felt this was reasonable: Prince Gong donated 20,000 taels of silver towards the cost. Cixi gave enthusiastic support. The restoration was her dream. She longed to live there again. With her characteristic energy and attention to detail, she threw herself into the project, interviewing managers and architects, approving designs and mock-ups, even drawing some interiors herself.

The construction began the following spring, and the emperor inspected the site often, urging the builders to speed up, especially with his own quarters, so that he could move in, even before the dowager empresses. In fact, what the young monarch wanted most was a place where he would be free to pursue his sexual adventures. While he grew negligent with his royal duties, it was widely known that he spent his time ‘revelling and frolicking with eunuchs'. He continued to sneak out of the Forbidden City in disguise to visit disreputable establishments. The Forbidden City was extremely inconvenient to him, as its gates had to be closed at sunset, after which not even the emperor was allowed out without a proper reason. At closing time, the duty eunuchs would cry out the ‘sunset call' in their high-pitched voices, at which the heavy gates would be pushed shut one by one and locked with a loud clank. The immense compound would then fall into total silence, with only the occasional faint sound of the tap-tap-tap of the night watchmen's bamboo blocks as they did their rounds in the Beijing streets. Noiselessly, a club was passed from hand to hand by the sentries along the walls of the Forbidden City, to make sure that no guard was asleep or missing and that there were no gaps in the patrols. Emperor Tongzhi dreaded those sunset calls and tightly shut gates. The numerous immutable rules governing the emperor's life – from being woken up at the prescribed time to being shadowed by note-takers recording his every move – were a permanent irritation. He wanted the Old Summer Palace as a refuge. Vast, with no solid wall encircling it, this was the place where he could lead the life he wanted.

Very soon, however, a chorus of opposition burst out. This followed a tradition of reprimanding the monarch if he was seen to be indulging in excessive pleasure-seeking or embarking on an inordinately expensive undertaking. Petitioners pointed out that the country was not prosperous enough, and the Ministry of Revenue presented the emperor with a balance sheet which showed that the project was beyond the state's means. The emperor's uncle, Prince Chun, told him that the Old Summer Palace must only be a reminder of his father's death and of his duty to avenge him. But Emperor Tongzhi was set on fun, rather than revenge. He ignored his uncle, and threw the report from the Ministry of Revenue back at the prostrating minister. This was not a monarch who listened to his critics, and he wrote in crimson ink denouncing the petitioners, charging them with trying to prevent him from fulfilling his filial duties – a serious sin, according to Confucian ethics. Adopting the air of holding the moral high ground, the emperor fired one official ‘as a warning' and told the rest ‘there will be punishment for those who bring up the matter again …' Eventually Prince Gong, who had come to recognise that the project was not feasible, put his name to a petition entreating his royal nephew to change his mind. The young man snapped at him: ‘Perhaps you want me to give up my throne to you!' One Grand Councillor, prostrating himself on the floor, was so shocked by the emperor's reaction and wept so hard that he passed out and had to be helped away.

Amidst the confrontation over the rebuilding of the Old Summer Palace, His Majesty's general lifestyle was raised disapprovingly, including his obsessive love of opera, his neglect of state duties and, in particular, his nights out in disguise. Tongzhi demanded to know from his two uncles who had been telling tales. Prince Chun cited the specific places of ill repute, and Prince Gong named his eldest son, who was a friend of the emperor, as a source of the information. In a fury, the emperor charged them with ‘bullying' him, along with other accusations that amounted to high treason. The two princes kept knocking their heads on the floor, but it did nothing to reduce the emperor's wrath, and he penned a crimson-ink edict, stripping Prince Gong and his son of their titles, sacking Prince Gong from all his posts and placing him under guard in the Department of the Nobles. Another edict fired Prince Chun.

Luckily for the grandees, the emperor's mother was on hand. The grandees wrote to Cixi, imploring her to intervene. She came to her son's office with Empress Zhen and told her son to heed the majority. Tearfully she reprimanded him for his treatment of Prince Gong. While she talked, the young emperor stood and listened, and went down on his knees when his mother's rebuke became emotional. The emperor was obliged to show submission to his mother, according to the traditional code. He also loved her. All the sacking orders were rescinded – and Cixi had to abandon her dream of moving into the Old Summer Palace.

Emperor Tongzhi was unwilling to give up his sexual pursuits outside the Forbidden City and set his heart on the Sea Palace next door. Dominated by a vast man-made lake, this large estate housed no grand palaces, but quite a few temples and buildings of architectural distinction, screened off only by symbolic walls. The living quarters had fallen into disrepair as Emperor Tongzhi's father and grandfather had been hard up. The grandees agreed to the refurbishment, and work started straight away. The emperor became very attached to the place, and continued to visit it as summer turned into winter, until one day when he was out on the lake and caught a cold.

The emperor also caught something much more serious. His medical records from the Royal Clinic show that, on 8 December 1874, rashes appeared on his skin. The next day, doctors diagnosed smallpox. The diagnosis and the prescriptions were circulated among the Grand Councillors. Herbs and other ingredients were mixed and brewed, into which were added special items such as earthworms, which were considered useful in extracting poison. The doctors tasted the brew first, then eunuch chiefs did the same. The court began to observe all the rituals associated with smallpox. The way the Chinese dealt with a deadly force was – and in some ways still is – to appease it, even to put it on a pedestal, in the hope that it would be mollified and would leave them alone. So smallpox was ingratiatingly called ‘heavenly flowers', tian-hua, and the emperor was said to be ‘enjoying the heavenly flowery happiness'. Courtiers put on floral gowns, wore red (the colour of joy) silk scarves, and set up shrines to worship the Goddess of Blisters, the lady supposedly responsible for the pus-filled spots. On the ninth day of the illness, the blisters showed signs of maturity and release. The inner circle was invited in to see His Majesty.

By the side of the royal bed stood Cixi and Empress Zhen, with candles in their hands. They asked the grandees, on their knees some distance away, to come closer. The sick teenager lay with his face towards them and raised an arm for them to inspect. They saw, as Grand Tutor Weng described, that ‘the flowers are extremely dense, from which his eyes are barely visible'. After a while they retreated from the chamber and were then summoned to the audience hall, where Cixi spoke to them at length. She was distraught and burst into sobs as she spoke. She said that her son might need some relaxation during his recovery, and if ‘occasionally' he wanted music performed, she ‘trusted' the grandees ‘would not object'. With these words of obvious reproach, the grandees repeatedly banged their foreheads on the floor.

Cixi then discussed state affairs with them. Because he had been unable to work, she said, the emperor had grown anxious during recent days. He wished the grandees to find a solution. They proposed that the Two Dowager Empresses take charge, while the emperor was ‘enjoying the happy event'. They then left to draft a petition to that effect. But Cixi had second thoughts; she recalled the grandees and told them to stop writing. It had occurred to her that a ‘petition' might give the impression that the emperor was being asked to relinquish power. She decided that the request should come from her son, who, after she spoke to him, said that he was only too happy for her to step in. The following day, he summoned the grandees and, appearing to have more energy than the day before, told Prince Gong in a firm voice: ‘I just have a few words to say. There mustn't be a day when state affairs are not taken care of. I plan to beg the Two Dowager Empresses to deal with all the reports on my behalf, and I myself will do my duty as before after this happy event …' Cixi then told him that the grandees had already ‘requested' the same plan the previous day: everyone was of the same mind, so the emperor should stop worrying. The grandees left, feeling relieved and delighted that the reins of power were once again in Cixi's hands.

On the sixteenth day of the illness, the scabs on the young man's body began to flake off, and it seemed that he would be all right. The big shrine for the Goddess of Blisters that had been set up in one of the grand halls was lifted in an elaborate ceremony and, accompanied by a large brigade of guards of honour, was carried out of the Forbidden City.

But Emperor Tongzhi did not recover. His sores grew big and burst, suppurating unstoppably. On 12 January 1875, he died, not yet nineteen years of age. He had ruled for less than two years. There is an allegation that Cixi poisoned him. This is groundless. Many suspect that he died of syphilis; as this disease has very similar symptoms to smallpox (it is sometimes called the ‘big pox'), and as modern methods of diagnosis did not exist, nothing definitive can be established. It seems that the court itself was not sure, and did suspect that the emperor's lifestyle had something to do with his illness. Wang Qingqi, his companion, was banished from the court and was banned permanently from official employment. Punishments were meted out to eunuchs close to the emperor – from caning to exile to the frontiers.

Smallpox remained the most likely cause. It was endemic in the capital at that time, and Emperor Tongzhi's only sibling, the Grand Princess, died of it soon afterwards, on 5 February. When she was delirious, she murmured that her late father had called on her to accompany her brother.

The person who chose to accompany the emperor in death was his wife, Miss Alute. For a woman to take her own life upon her husband's death was deemed a most illustrious virtue. In towns and villages, triumphal arches celebrated them.¹ Miss Alute, who had been selected for her virtues, lived up to those expectations. According to some eunuchs, when her husband expired, her father had a food box delivered to her, and when she opened it and found it empty, she knew that he was telling her to starve herself to death. She did as told, and was hugely admired for being a worthy daughter to her father. She died seventy days after her husband, on 27 March.

Miss Alute's death has been widely blamed on Cixi. The Chinese have accused her of ill-treating her daughter-in-law and driving Miss Alute to suicide. Westerners have asserted that she was pregnant with an heir to the throne and that Cixi murdered her to secure power. Neither charge is based on any evidence (although Cixi may have been severe to Miss Alute). In fact, Miss Alute had come from a family who seem to have embraced suicide as the supreme demonstration of honour. Later on, when Western troops invaded Beijing in 1900 and forced Cixi to flee, the entire family of fourteen people took their own lives to show their loyalty.

For a hundred days from Emperor Tongzhi's death, weddings and entertainments were banned in the capital. Throughout the empire, men were forbidden to shave or to have their hair cut. (In earlier days, Emperor Qianlong had imprisoned officials who had infringed the prohibition during the period of mourning for his wife.) All the bells in Beijing temples both big and small tolled 30,000 times. Minutely detailed guidance was issued on who was to wear what style of mourning clothes. The Chinese in those days were arguably the most ceremonious people on Earth. A book containing 3,000 rules of etiquette was required reading for the literati. One of the cardinal rules was that until the late emperor was buried, no music was allowed at court. So the Forbidden City was hushed again, with subdued figures moving silently about, trailed only by echoes.

The ban on music at court lasted four years, during which time Emperor Tongzhi's mausoleum was constructed. The emperor had not built a tomb for himself: he had not been on the throne long enough to begin such a project. After his death, his mother dispatched Prince Chun and Grand Tutor Weng, together with a team of feng-shui masters, to choose an ideal burial spot for him. Meanwhile, his giant coffin stayed in a hall in the Royal City, for senior officials to file past to pay their respects. The coffin was made of a precious wood, painted forty-nine times in a golden colour, adorned with Buddhist symbols and lined with thirteen layers of brocade decorated with countless dragons.

On the outskirts of Beijing there were two compounds of mausoleums for the Qing emperors, one to the west of the city and one to the east. There had been a rule that an emperor's mausoleum must be in the same compound as that of his grandfather, not that of his father. As Tongzhi's late father lay in the Eastern Mausoleums, he should be buried in the Western. But Cixi, who was destined to be buried with her husband in the Eastern Mausoleums, wanted to be near her son, so she buried him there. The grandees expressed understanding of her feelings and raised no objection to this deviation from tradition.

Both mausoleum compounds were enormous, and were places of serene natural beauty, in the embrace of hills, streams and woods. Each mausoleum had an underground chamber and an above-ground edifice that was a replica of a palace in the Forbidden City. At the front were carved white marble pillars, with lofty, wing-shaped crowns. The most awe-inspiring feature of a mausoleum was its approach: a long, straight avenue lined with giant stone statues of elephants, lions, horses and other big beasts on a vast area of open land. But there was no such avenue leading to Emperor Tongzhi's mausoleum. The budget would not stretch to it. Cixi had to choose between spending money on the avenue or on importing hardwood for the coffin and the burial buildings. China was short of top-quality wood, and her late husband's mausoleum had had to make do with wood left over from his father's tomb. Cixi, who believed in life after death, wanted the best material for her son in the next world, so she decided to sacrifice the glory of the approach. She bought from overseas the most expensive hardwood, a special kind of nan-mu, which was said to be so dense that it would sink rather than float in water.

More than four years after Tongzhi's death his mausoleum was finally ready, and on a day in 1879, picked by the court astrologer as the most auspicious, he and his empress, Miss Alute, were laid side by side in the underground chamber. Their coffins were weighed down with hundreds of pieces of gold, silver, jade and assorted precious jewels. Under Cixi's meticulous care, the entombment ceremony was as grand as it had ever been, involving the entire upper echelon of the Beijing bureaucracy trekking 120 kilometres from the capital; 7,920 men took turns to carry the coffin, each shift comprising 120 men. They had been professionally drilled, and had bathed carefully, before donning purple jackets made of sackcloth, the prescribed material for serious mourning. All officials working within 50 kilometres of the route went to specially constructed memorial halls to greet the coffin, in prostration, when it passed by. Each memorial hall was illuminated by thousands of large white candles.

Although all this was following established precedent, Cixi painstakingly attended to every detail. She really loved her son. Many years later, on an anniversary of his death, the American painter Katharine Carl, who was in the court painting Cixi's portrait, wore black. She wrote that Cixi realised she was wearing the mourning colour of the West and ‘seemed much touched'. She ‘took my hand in both hers, and said, “You have a good heart to think of my grief and to have wished to sympathize,” and tears fell from her eyes on my hand, which she held in hers.'

¹ One concubine of this author's maternal grandfather took her own life by swallowing opium upon his death in the early 1930s, when this was still considered the height of conjugal loyalty, and a plaque was put up in her honour.