"What would happen if the Empress Dowager should die?"
"In that case the Emperor, of course, would again resume the throne," I always replied without hesitation. But during those ten years, not one of my friends ever thought to propound the question, nor did I have the wit to ask myself:
"What would happen if the Emperor and the Empress Dowager should both suddenly snap the frail cord of life at or about the same time?"
Had such a question come to me, I confess I should not have known how to answer it. It is a problem that probably never presented itself to any one outside of that mysterious Forbidden City, or the equally mysterious spectres that come and go through its half-open gates in the darkness of the early morning. There are three parties to whom it may have come again and again, and to whom we may perhaps be indebted both for the problem and the solution.
When the deaths of both of their Imperial Majesties were announced at the same time, the news also came that the Japanese suspected that there had been foul play. With them, however, it was only suspicion; none of them, so far as I know, ever undertook to analyze the matter or unravel the mystery. There is no doubt a reasonable explanation, but we must go for it to the Forbidden City, the most mysterious royal dwelling in the world, where white men have never gone except by invitation from the throne, save on one occasion.
In 1901, while the court was in hiding at Hsianfu, the city to which they fled when the allies entered Peking, the western half of the Forbidden City was thrown open to the public, the only condition being that said public have a certificate which would serve as a pass to the American boys in blue who guarded the Wu men, or front gate. I was fortunate enough to have that pass.
My first move was to get a Chinese photographer—the best I could find in the city—to go with me and take pictures of everything I wanted as well as anything else that suited his fancy.
The city of Peking is regularly laid out. Towards the south is the Chinese city, fifteen miles in circumference. To the north is a square, four miles on each side, and containing sixteen square miles. In the centre of this square, enclosed by a beautifully crenelated wall thirty feet thick at the bottom, twenty feet thick at the top and twenty-five feet high, surrounded by a moat one hundred feet wide, is the Forbidden City, occupying less than one-half a square mile. In this city there dwells but one male human being, the Emperor, who is called the "solitary man."
There is a gate in the centre of each of the four sides, that on the south, the Wu men, being the front gate, through which the Emperor alone is allowed to pass. The back gate, guarded by the Japanese during the occupation, is for the Empress Dowager, the Empress and the women of the court, while the side gates are for the officials, merchants or others who may have business in the palace.
Through the centre of this city, from south to north, is a passageway about three hundred feet wide, across which, at intervals of two hundred yards, they have erected large buildings, such as the imperial examination hall, the hall in which the Emperor receives his bride, the imperial library, the imperial kitchen, and others of a like nature, all covered with yellow titles, and known to tourists, who see them from the Tartar City wall, as the palace buildings. These, however, are not the buildings in which the royal family live. They are the places where for the past five hundred years all those great diplomatic measures—and dark deeds—of the Chinese emperors and their great officials have been transacted between midnight and daylight.