To the great mass of her people, who had never seen her, but knew her only by cumulative weight of common report, the Old Buddha stood for the embodiment of courage, liberality and kindness of heart. If, as they knew, she were subject to fierce outbursts of sudden rage, the fact did her no injury in the eyes of a race which believes that wrath-matter undischarged is a virulent poison in the system. The simple Chihli folk made allowance, not without its sense of humour, for their august sovereign’s capacity to generate wrath-matter, as for her feminine mutability: To them she was a great ruler and a bon enfant. In a country where merciless officials and torture are part of the long-accepted order of things, no more stress was laid on her numerous acts of cold blooded tyranny than, shall we say, was laid on the beheading of Earls at the close of the fifteenth century in England.
One of the writers had the good fortune once to see the Empress when proceeding in her palanquin to the Eastern tombs. She had breakfasted early at the Tung Yueh temple outside the Ch’i Hua gate, and was on her way to T’ung chou. As her chair passed along a line of kneeling peasantry, the curtains were open and it was seen that the Old Buddha was asleep. The good country people were delighted. “Look,” they cried, “the Old Buddha is sleeping. Really, she has far too much work to do! A rare woman—what a pleasure to see her thus!”
Tzŭ Hsi was recognised to be above criticism and above the laws which she rigorously enforced on others. For instance, when, a few weeks after the issue of a Decree prohibiting corporal punishment and torture in prisons, she caused the Reformer Shen Chin to be flogged to death (July, 1904), public opinion saw nothing extraordinary in the event. A few days later, when preparations were being made for the celebration of her seventieth birthday, she issued another Decree, declining the honorific title dutifully proffered by the Emperor, together with its emoluments, on the ground that she had no heart for festivities, “being profoundly distressed at the thought of the sufferings of my subjects in Manchuria, owing to the destruction wrought there by the Russian and Japanese armies. My one desire,” she added, “is that my officials may co-operate to introduce more humane methods of Government, so that my people may live to enjoy good old age, resting on couches of comfortable ease. This is the best way to honour the seventieth anniversary of my birth.” No doubt the shade of Shen Chin was duly appeased.
Of her vindictive ferocity on occasions there can be no question. As Ching Shan admits, even her most faithful admirers and servants were aware that at moments of her wrath it was prudent to be out of her reach, or, if unavoidably present, to abstain from thwarting her. They knew that those who dared to question her absolute authority or to criticise the means by which she gained and retained it, need look for no mercy. But they knew also that for faithful service and loyalty she had a royal memory and, like Catherine of Russia, she never forgot her friends.
Her unpopularity in central and southern China, which became marked after the war with Japan and violent at the time of the coup d’état, was in its origin anti-dynastic and political. It was particularly strong in Kuangtung, where for years Her Majesty was denounced by agitators as a monster of unparalleled depravity. The political opinions of the turbulent and quick-witted Cantonese have generally been expressed in a lively and somewhat ribald form, and when we bear in mind the popular tendency (not confined to the Far East) of ascribing gross immorality to crowned heads, we are justified in refusing to attach undue importance to the wild accusations levelled against the Empress Dowager in this quarter. The utterances of the hotspurs and lampooners of southern China are chiefly interesting in that they reveal something of the vast possibilities of cleavage inherent in the Chinese Government system, and prove the Manchu rule to have fallen into something like contempt in that region where the new forces of education and political activity are most conspicuous.
One of the doggerel verses current in 1898 fairly describes the attitude of the Cantonese man in the street towards the Dynasty. Freely translated, it runs thus:—
“There are three questions which men must not ask about our Great Manchu Dynasty:
“At what ancestral grave does His Majesty make filial obeisance?
“To what deity does the Empress Dowager sacrifice?