"That will make his imprisonment all the harder to bear," we suggested.
"Quite right," he answered.
"There is general alarm in the city that the Emperor himself will be disposed of; what do you think about it?"
"Who can tell? He has not a friend in the palace except the first concubine, and, I am told, that she like himself is kept in close confinement. The Empress stands by her aunt, the Empress Dowager, while the eunuchs now are all her tools. The officials who go into the palace to audiences are all conservative and hence against him, though I suppose they never see him."
"Do you suppose he ever sees the edicts issued in his name?"
"Not at all. They are made by the conservatives and the Empress Dowager and issued without his knowledge."
"And what do you propose to do?" we inquired.
"I shall leave for Shanghai as soon as I can safely do so," he replied.
Before the year had passed the Empress Dowager had been induced or compelled to select a new Emperor. We cannot believe that she did it of her own free will, and for several reasons. First, the child selected was the son and the grandson of ultra conservative princes, and we cannot but believe that as she had placed herself in the hands of the conservative party, it was their selection rather than hers. Second, it must have been a humiliation to her ever since she discovered that her nephew, whom she had selected and placed upon the throne in order to keep the succession in her own family, being the same generation as her son who had died, could not worship him as his ancestor, and hence could not legally occupy the throne, though as a matter of fact such a condition is not unknown in Chinese history.
But if her humiliation was great, that of our boy-prisoner was still greater, for he was compelled to witness an edict, proclaimed in his own name, which made him say that as there was no hope of his having a child of his own to succeed him, he had requested the Empress Dowager to select a suitable person who should be proclaimed as the successor of Tung Chih, his predecessor, thus turning himself out of the imperial line. That this could not have been her choice is evidenced, further, by the fact that just as soon as she had once more regained her power, she surrounded herself with progressive officials, turned out all the great conservatives except Jung Lu, and dispossessing the son of Prince Tuan, at the time of her death selected her sister's grandchild and proclaimed him successor to her son and heir to the Emperor Kuang Hsu, in the following edict: