Part 19

Yüan reached Tientsin before noon, and proceeded at once to Jung Lu’s Yamên. He asked Jung Lu whether he regarded him as a faithful blood brother. (The two men had taken the oath of brotherhood several years before.) “Of course I do,” replied the Viceroy. “You well may, for the Emperor has sent me to kill you, and instead, I now betray his scheme, because of my loyalty to the Empress Dowager and of my affection for you.” Jung Lu, apparently unaffected by the message, merely expressed surprise that the Old Buddha could have been kept in ignorance of all these things, and added that he would go at once to the capital and see the Empress Dowager that same evening. Yüan handed him the Emperor’s Decree, and Jung Lu, travelling by special train, reached Peking soon after 5 P.M.

He went directly to the Lake Palace, and entered the Empress’s residence, boldly disregarding the strict etiquette which forbids any provincial official from visiting the capital without a special summons by Edict, and the still stricter rules that guard the _entrée_, of the Palace. Un-ushered he entered the Empress’s presence, and kowtowing thrice, exclaimed, “Sanctuary, your Majesty!” “What sanctuary do you require in the Forbidden precincts, where no harm can come to you, and where you have no right to be?” replied the Old Buddha. Jung Lu proceeded to lay before her all the details of the plot. Grasping the situation and rising immediately to its necessities with the courage and masculine intelligence that enabled her to overcome all obstacles, she directed him to send word secretly to the leaders of the Conservative party, summoning them to immediate audience in the Palace by the Lake. (The Emperor was still in the Forbidden City.) In less than two hours the whole of the Grand Council, several of the Manchu princes and nobles (Prince Ch’ing, with his usual fine “flair” for a crisis, had applied for sick leave and was therefore absent) and the high officials of the Boards, including the two Ministers whom the Emperor had cashiered (Hsü Ying-ku’ei and Huai Ta Pu) were assembled in the presence of the Empress. On their knees, the assembled officials besought her to resume the reins of government and to save their ancient Empire from the evils of a barbarian civilisation. It was speedily arranged that the guards in the Forbidden City should be replaced by men from Jung Lu’s own corps, and that, in the meantime, he should return to his post in Tientsin and await further orders. The conference broke up at about midnight. The Emperor was due to enter the Chung Ho Hall of the Palace at 5.30 the next morning to peruse the litany drawn up by the Board of Rites, which he was to recite next day at the autumnal sacrifice to the Tutelary Deities. After leaving that hall, he was seized by the guards and eunuchs, conveyed to the Palace on the small island in the middle of the lake (the “Ocean Terrace”) and informed that the Empress Dowager would visit him later. The following Decree was thereupon issued by the Empress Dowager in the Emperor’s name:—

“The nation is now passing through a crisis, and wise guidance is needed in all branches of the public service. WE ourselves have laboured diligently, night and day, to perform OUR innumerable duties, but in spite of all OUR anxious energy and care WE are in constant fear lest delay should be the undoing of the country. WE now respectfully recall the fact that Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Dowager has on two occasions since the beginning of the reign of H. M. T’ung-Chih, performed the functions of Regent, and that in her administrations of the Government she displayed complete and admirable qualities of perfection which enabled her successfully to cope with every difficulty that arose. Recollecting the serious burden of the responsibility WE owe to OUR ancestors and to the nation, WE have repeatedly besought Her Majesty to condescend once more to administer the Government. Now she has graciously honoured US by granting OUR prayer, a blessing indeed for all OUR subjects. From this day forth Her Majesty will transact the business of Government in the side hall of the Palace, and on the day after to-morrow WE ourselves at the head of OUR Princes and Ministers shall perform obeisance before Her in the Hall of Diligent Government. The Yamêns concerned shall respectfully make the arrangements necessary for this ceremonial. The words of the Emperor.”

Another Decree followed close upon the above, cashiering the Censor Sung Po-lu, on the ground of his generally evil reputation and recommendation of bad characters (_i.e._, the reformer Liang Ch’i-ch’ao). The Empress had a special grudge against this Censor because he had ventured to impeach her morals in a recent memorial, but as he had taken no part in the conspiracy against her person she spared his life.

Tzŭ Hsi in due course proceeded to the “Ocean Terrace,” accompanied only by Li Lien-ying, who had been ordered to replace the Emperor’s eunuchs by creatures of his own. (Kuang Hsü’s former attendants were either put to death or banished to the post roads.) A Manchu who heard an account of the interview from Duke Kuei Hsiang, Tz’u Hsi’s younger brother, is our authority for what occurred at this dramatic meeting. The Empress Dowager bluntly informed Kuang Hsü that she had decided to spare his life and, for the present at any rate, to allow him to retain the throne. He would, however, be kept henceforward under strict surveillance, and every word of his would be reported to her. As to his schemes of reform, which at first she had encouraged, little dreaming to what depths of folly his infatuate presumption would lead him, they would all be repealed. How dared he forget what great benefits he owed her, his elevation to the throne and her generosity in allowing him to administer the government, he a poor puppet, who had no right to be Emperor at all, and whom she could unmake at will? There was not, she said, a single Manchu in high place but wished his removal, and urged her to resume the Regency. True, he had sympathisers among the Chinese, traitors all; with them she would deal in due course. Kuang Hsü’s secondary consort (the Chen Fei or Pearl Concubine, the only one of his wives with whom he seems to have been on affectionate terms) knelt then before Tzŭ Hsi, imploring her to spare the Emperor further reproaches. She actually dared to suggest that he was, after all, the lawful Sovereign and that not even the Empress Dowager could set aside the mandate of Heaven. Tzŭ Hsi angrily dismissed her from the Presence, ordering her to be confined in another part of the Palace, where she remained until, in 1900, there came an opportunity in which the vindictive Empress took summary revenge on the presumptuous concubine.[56]

The Empress Consort, with whom Kuang Hsü was hardly on speaking terms, was commanded to remain with him. She, as Tzŭ Hsi’s niece, could be trusted to spy upon the Emperor and report all his doings. He was allowed to see no one but her and the eunuchs in attendance, except in the presence of the Empress Dowager.

To the end of his life Kuang Hsü blamed Yüan Shih-k’ai, and him alone, for having betrayed him. To Yüan he owed his humiliation, the end of all his cherished plans of government and the twenty-three months of solitary confinement which he had to endure on the “Ocean Terrace.” Almost his last words, as he lay dying, were to bid his brothers remember his long agony and promise to be revenged upon the author of his undoing. Of Jung Lu he said that it was but natural that he should consider first his duty to the Empress Dowager and seek to warn her; and, after all, as he had planned Jung Lu’s death, he could hardly expect from him either devotion or loyalty. The Old Buddha’s resentment was also natural; he had plotted against her and failed. But Yüan Shih-k’ai had solemnly sworn loyalty and obedience. The Emperor never willingly spoke to him again, even when, as Viceroy of Chihli, Yüan came to the height of his power.

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.

Matters soon settled down, however, into the old well-worn grooves, the people satisfied and even glad in the knowledge that the Old Buddha was once more at the helm. In the capital the news had been sedulously spread—in order to prepare the way for the impending drama of expiation—that Kuang Hsü had planned to murder Her Majesty, and his present punishment was therefore regarded as mild beyond his deserts.[59] Scholars, composing essays appropriate to the occasion, freely compared His Majesty to that Emperor of the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 762) who had instigated the murdering of the Empress Dowager of his day. Kuang Hsü’s death was therefore freely predicted and its effects discounted; there is no doubt that it would have caused little or no comment in the north of China, however serious its consequences might have been in the south. The public mind having been duly prepared, the Empress Dowager, in the name of the prospective victim, issued a Decree stating that the Son of Heaven was seriously ill; no surprise or apprehension was expressed, and the sending of competent physicians from the provinces to attend His Majesty was recognised as a necessary concession to formalities. “Ever since the 4th Moon,” said this Decree (_i.e._, since the beginning of the hundred days of reform), “I have been grievously ill; nor can I find any alleviation of my sickness.” It was the _pro formâ_ announcement of his impending despatch, and as such it was received by the Chinese people.

Amongst the doctors summoned to attend His Majesty was Ch’en Lien-fang, for many years the most celebrated physician in China. The following account of his experiences at the capital and the nature of his duties, was supplied by himself at the time, to one of the writers, for publication in _The Times_.

“When the Edict was issued calling upon the provincial Viceroys and Governors to send native doctors of distinction to Peking to advise in regard to the Emperor’s illness, Chen Lien-fang received orders from the Governor at Soochow to leave for the north without delay. This in itself, apart from the uncongenial and unremunerative nature of the duty (of which Ch’en was well aware), was no light undertaking for a man of delicate physique whose age was over three score years and ten; but there was no possibility of evading the task. He according left his large practice in the charge of two confidential assistants, or pupils, and, having received from the Governor a sum of 6,000 taels for travelling expenses and remuneration in advance, made his way to Peking and reported for duty to the Grand Council. When he arrived there, he found three other native physicians of considerable repute already in attendance, summoned in obedience to the Imperial commands. Dr. Déthève, of the French Legation, had already paid his historical visit to the Emperor, and his remarkable diagnosis of the Son of Heaven’s symptoms was still affording amusement to the Legations. The aged native physician spoke in undisguised contempt both of the French doctor’s comments on the case and of his suggestions for its treatment. His own description of the Emperor’s malady was couched in language not unlike that which writers of historical novels attribute to the physicians of Europe in the Middle Ages; he spoke reverently of influence and vapours at work in the august person of his Sovereign, learnedly of heat-flushings and their occult causes, and plainly of things which are more suited to Chinese than to British readers. Nevertheless, his description pointed clearly to disease of the respiratory organs—which he said had existed for over twelve years—to general debility, and to a feverish condition which he ascribed to mental anxiety combined with physical weakness. Before he left Peking (about the middle of November) the fever had abated and the patient’s symptoms had decidedly improved; the case was, however, in his opinion, of so serious a nature that he decided to leave it, if possible, in the hands of his younger _confrères_—an object which by dint of bribing certain Court officials he eventually achieved. Asked if he considered the Emperor’s condition critical, he replied oracularly that if he lived to see the Chinese New Year his strength would thereafter return gradually with the spring, and the complete restoration of his health might be expected.