China under the Empress Dowager

by J. O. P. Bland; Sir E. Backhouse

To-day Yüan lives in retirement, and under the constant shadow of fear; for the Emperor’s brother, the Regent, has kept his promise. Such are the intricate humanities of the inner circle around and about the Dragon Throne, the never-ending problem of the human equation as a factor in the destinies of peoples.

XV
TZŬ HSI RESUMES THE REGENCY (1898)

Kuang Hsü’s reign was over; there remained to him only the Imperial title. He had had his chance; in the enthusiasm of youth and new ideas he had played a desperate game against the powers of darkness in high places, and he had lost. Once more, as after the death of T’ung-Chih, Tzŭ Hsi could make a virtue of her satisfied ambitions. She had given her nephew a free hand, she had retired from the field, leaving him to steer the ship of State: if he had now steered it into troublous and dangerous seas, if, by common consent, she were again called to take the helm, this was the doing of Heaven and no fault of hers. She could no more be blamed for Kuang Hsü’s folly than for the vicious habits and premature death of her son, which had brought her back to power 23 years before. It was clear (and there were many voices to reassure her of the fact) that the stars in their courses were working for the continuance of her unfettered authority, and that any trifling assistance which she might have given them would not be too closely scrutinised.

Kuang Hsü’s reign was over; but his person (frail, melancholy tenement) remained, and Tzŭ Hsi was never enamoured of half measures or ambiguous positions. From the day when the pitiful monarch entered his pavilion prison on the “Ocean Terrace,” she began to make arrangements for his “mounting the Dragon” and “visiting the Nine Springs” in the orthodox classical manner, and for providing the Throne with another occupant whose youth, connections and docility would enable her to hold the Regency indefinitely. Nevertheless, because of the turbulent temper of the southern provinces and possible manifestations of Europe’s curious sympathy with the Emperor’s Utopian dreams, she realised the necessity for proceeding with caution and decorum. It was commonly reported throughout the city in the beginning of October that the Emperor would die with the end of the Chinese year.

Kuang Hsü was a prisoner in his Palace, doomed, as he well knew; yet must he play the puppet Son of Heaven and perform each season’s appointed posturings. On the 8th day of the 8th Moon he appeared therefore, as ordered by his attendants, and in the presence of his whole Court performed the nine prostrations and other proper acts of obeisance before Her Majesty Tzŭ Hsi, in recognition of his own nonentity and her supreme authority. In the afternoon, escorted by a strong detachment of Jung Lu’s troops, he went from the Lake Palace to sacrifice at the Altar of the Moon. Thus, pending the coup-de-grâce, the wretched Emperor went through the empty ceremonies of State ritual; high priest, that was himself to be the next victim, how bitter must have been his thoughts as he was borne back with Imperial pomp and circumstance to his lonely place of humiliation!

Tzŭ Hsi then settled down to her work of government, returning to it with a zest by no means diminished by the years spent in retreat. And first she must justify the policy of reaction to herself, to her high officials, and the world at large. She must get rid of offenders and surround herself with men after her own heart.

A few days after the Autumn festival and the Emperor’s melancholy excursion, Her Majesty proceeded to remind the Imperial Clansmen that their position would not protect them against the consequences of disloyalty; she was always much exercised (remembering the Tsai Yüan conspiracy) at any sign of intriguing amongst her Manchu kinsmen. In this case her warning took the form of a Decree in which she sentenced the “Beileh” Tsai Ch’u[57] to perpetual confinement in the “Empty Chamber” of the Clan Court. Tsai Ch’u had had the audacity to sympathise with the Emperor’s reform schemes; he had also had the bad luck to marry one of Tzŭ Hsi’s nieces and to be upon the worst of terms with her. When therefore he advised the Emperor, in the beginning of the Hundred Days, to put a stop, once and for all, to the Old Buddha’s interference in State affairs, the “mean one of his inner chamber” did not fail to report the fact to Her Majesty, and thus to enlist her sympathies and activities, from the outset, on the side of the reactionaries.

At the time immediately following the coup d’état, public opinion at the Capital was divided as to the merits of the Emperor’s proposed reforms and the wisdom of their suppression, but the political instincts of the tribute-fed metropolis are, generally speaking, dormant, and what it chiefly respects is the energetic display of power. So that, on the whole, sympathy was with the Old Buddha. She had, moreover, a Bismarckian way of guiding public opinion, of directing undercurrents of information through the eunuchs and tea-house gossip, in a manner calculated to appeal to the instincts of the literati and the bourgeois; in the present instance stress was laid on the Emperor’s lack of filial piety, as proved by his plotting against his aged and august aunt (a thing unpardonable in the eyes of the orthodox Confucianist), and on the fact that he enjoyed the sympathy and support of foreigners—an argument sufficient to damn him in the eyes of even the most progressive Chinese. It came, therefore, to be the generally accepted opinion that His Majesty had shown deplorable want of judgment and self-control, and that the Empress Dowager was fully justified in resuming control of the government. This opinion even came to be accepted and expressed by those Legations which had originally professed to see in the Emperor’s reforms the dawn of a new era for China. So elastic is diplomacy in following the line of the least resistance, so adroit (in the absence of a policy of its own) in accepting and condoning any fait accompli, that it was not long before the official attitude of the Legations—including the British—had come to deprecate the Emperor’s unfortunate haste in introducing reforms, reforms which every foreigner in China had urged for years, and which, accepted in principle by the Empress since 1900, have again been welcomed as proof of China’s impending regeneration. In June 1898, the British Minister had seen in the Emperor’s Reform Edicts proof that “the Court had at last thoroughly recognised a real need for radical reform.”[58] In October, when the Chief Reformer (K’ang Yu-wei) had been saved from Tzŭ Hsi’s vengeance by the British Consul-General at Shanghai and conveyed by a British warship to the protection of a British Colony (under the mistaken impression that England would actively intervene in the cause of progress and on grounds of self-interest if not of humanity), we find the tide of expediency turned to recognition of the fact that “the Empress Dowager and the Manchu party were seriously alarmed for their own safety, and looked upon the Reform movement as inimical to Manchu rule”![58] And two months later, influenced no doubt by the impending season of peace and good will, the Marquess of Salisbury is seriously informed by Sir Claude Macdonald that the wives of the foreign Representatives, seven in all, had been received in audience by the Empress Dowager on the anniversary of her sixty-fourth birthday, and that Her Majesty “made a most favourable impression, both by the personal interest she took in all her guests and by her courteous amiability.”[58] On which occasion the puppet Emperor was exhibited, to comply with the formalities, and was made to shake hands with all the ladies. And so the curtain was rung down, and the Reform play ended, to the satisfaction of all (or nearly all) concerned.

Nevertheless, the British Minister and others, disturbed at the persistent rumours that “the Empress Dowager was about to proceed to extreme steps in regard to the Emperor,”[58] went so far as to warn the Chinese Government against anything so disturbing to the European sense of fitness and decency. Foreign countries, the Yamên was told, would view with displeasure and alarm his sudden demise. When the news of the British Minister’s intervention became known in the tea-houses and recorded in the Press, much indignation was expressed: this was a purely domestic question, for which precedents existed in plenty and in which foreigners’ advice was inadmissible. The Emperor’s acceptance of new-fangled foreign ideas was a crime in the eyes of the Manchus, but his enlistment of foreign sympathy and support was hateful to Manchus and Chinese alike.