IV. THE FIRST IMPERIAL AUDIENCE—SUCCESSION OF KWANGHSU.
End of the minority of Emperor Tungchih—Audience of the foreign Ministers in 1873—Under derogatory conditions—Death of the young emperor—Empress regent's coup d'état in selecting successor—Her own nephew—Eighteen years' minority of Emperor Kwanghsu.
An event looked forward to for twelve long years with patient expectation, and with hope, lively at the beginning but fading away towards the end of the period, that it would prove the sovereign remedy for the defects of Chinese intercourse with the world, was the assumption of power by the young emperor, who attained his majority in 1873. The diplomatic body busied themselves greatly in preparations for their first audiences with the sovereign to whom they were accredited. The Chinese on their part were no less anxiously engaged in devising means of lightening the blow to their prestige in consenting to receive foreigners at all, while dispensing with the prescribed prostrations. Obliged to yield the main point, the Court officials minimised its significance by imposing sundry derogatory conditions as to the building in which the audience was to be granted, and by the terms in which it was referred to in the imperial decree, which represented the foreign Ministers as "imploring an audience," and by other like devices.
The first to be admitted to the presence was the representative of Japan, who held the rank of ambassador. Next came the resident Ministers of Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Holland, in a body; and lastly, the French Minister separately, in order to convey the reply of his Government to the mission of Chunghou respecting the Tientsin massacre of 1870. The several letters of credence were placed on a table. The emperor "seemed to be speaking" to Prince Kung, though no sound was heard. The prince in his turn addressed a few words to the five Ministers, in Chinese, purporting to be what the emperor had spoken in Manchu, and the audience was at an end, the whole ceremony lasting about five minutes.
By long anticipation a superstitious halo had formed round the abstract question of audience: it grew into a kind of fetish. Mr Lay shrewdly observed that the object of the "resident Minister" clause in the treaties had been misunderstood by foreigners in being regarded by them as an end instead of only a means. Mr Wade, who was British Minister at the time, made no such mistake; for though he consistently laid stress on ceremonial, it was, as he has frequently explained, because with the Chinese form was more than substance, and included it. A proper regulation of official etiquette was in his estimation the principal key to the remedy of material wrongs. From this point of view a five minutes' audience of the Son of Heaven, even in dumb show and once a-year, was a step of real importance. "The empire," wrote Mr Wade, "has for the first time in its history broken with the tradition of isolated supremacy—not, it may be, with a good grace, but still past recall; and while I would anxiously deprecate a too sanguine estimate of its results, I am as little disposed to undervalue the change that has been effected."
But whatever hopes of a practical kind were raised by this ceremonial innovation were doomed to speedy extinction, for the emperor did not survive to grant a second reception. He died within the year, and was succeeded by another infant, involving a second minority much longer than the preceding one. Eighteen years, in fact, elapsed between the first imperial audience and the second.
The Emperor Tungchih, though but eighteen years of age, left a legend behind him. The gossip of the capital assigned to him considerable independence of character, and a certain audacity in breaking bounds without the discreet chaperonage enjoyed by the Prince Siddhârtha in his explorations beyond the palace precincts of King Suddhôdana. He was, if common report belied him not, a true son of his mother in certain respects, though of her masterful statecraft, and the qualities which become a great monarch, he was too young to have given proofs. Leaving no heir, the deficiency was promptly supplied by the resourcefulness of the empress-mother. As the widow of the Emperor Hsienfêng and co-regent, she adopted a posthumous heir to that monarch to replace his own son. Her choice fell on the infant son of Prince Ch'un, the youngest brother of Hsienfêng. The mother of the adopted child was the empress-regent's own sister, and by thus enthroning her nephew the regent assured herself another long lease of power. The proceeding was irregular, there being two older brothers of Prince Ch'un alive and having sons. The nearest heir was the infant grandson of Prince Tun, the fifth son of Tao-kuang, but though Prince Tun himself had thirty years before been given in adoption to an uncle, the claim of his descendants to the imperial inheritance being thereby weakened, he seems never to have renounced his rights. At the time of the decease of Tungchih there was so much apprehension of disturbances in Peking, both on account of the succession and the form of the regency, that the 'Times' (February 4, 1875) wrote, "A battle on this question would seem almost inevitable, and notwithstanding the proverbial slowness of the East in most things, in crises like the present aspirants to Eastern thrones are wont to display both energy and readiness when the moment arrives for a coup d'état."
The next in seniority of the sons of Tao-kuang was Prince Kung, whose title was uncompromised by alienation, and he had a son eligible. Whatever may have been the reasons for setting aside the claims of the two elder brothers to occupy the Dragon throne, they were considered to have been wrongfully set aside, and of this more will doubtless be heard in the fulness of time. Since, for reasons well understood, no natural heir to the present monarch can succeed him, there must be fresh recourse to adoption when or before the necessity arises, and what influences, native or alien, may then be concentrated on the imperial succession is a speculation on which it would be profitless to enter.
The empress-regent's coup d'état of January 1875, when on a bitterly cold night her infant nephew was taken out of his warm bed, conveyed into the palace, and proclaimed emperor the following morning, answered the scheming lady's expectations, for she has ruled the Chinese empire from that day to this. By the same stroke she was enabled to disembarrass herself of her original confederate, Prince Kung, to whose ambition she dealt a crushing blow in ousting his family from the succession. The two had come to hate each other with more than common virulence; and now that Prince Ch'un had been set on an unassailable pedestal as father of the reigning sovereign, the regent placed her trust and confidence in him, and shared with him the sweets of empire. Inasmuch, however, as the regent was a woman, and her imperial brother-in-law neither a man of affairs nor in a position to assume any outward share in the Government, it was necessary to bring in a practical statesman to stand between them and the outer world. This position of confidence was occupied for twenty years by the grand secretary, Li Hung-chang.