Part 32

Her Majesty’s custom, in selecting the menus for the day, was to have a list of about one hundred dishes brought in every evening by the eunuch on duty. After the privations of the flight from Peking, the liberal supply of swallows’ nests and _bêche-de-mer_ which came in from the South was very much appreciated, and her rough fare of chickens and eggs gave way to recherché menus; but the Emperor, as usual, limited himself to a diet of vegetables. She gave orders that no more than half a dozen dishes should be served at one meal, and she took personal pains with the supply of milk, of which she always consumed a considerable quantity. Six cows were kept in the immediate vicinity of the Imperial apartments, for the feeding of which Her Majesty was charged two hundred taels a month. Her health was good on the whole, but she suffered from indigestion, which she attributed to the change of climate and the fatigues of her journey. For occasional attacks of insomnia she had recourse to massage, in which several of the eunuchs were well-skilled. After the Court had settled down at Hsi-an fu, Her Majesty was again persuaded to permit the presentation of plays, which she seemed generally to enjoy as much as those in Peking. But her mind was for ever filled with anxiety as to the progress of the negotiations with the foreign Powers at the Capital, and all telegrams received were brought to her at once. The news of the desecration of her Summer Palace had filled her with wrath and distress, especially when, in letters from the eunuch Sun (who had remained in charge at Peking), she learned that her Throne had been thrown into the lake, and that the soldiers had made “lewd and ribald drawings and writings” even on the walls of her bedroom. It was with the greatest relief that she heard of the settlement of the terms of peace, subsequently recorded in the Protocol of 7th of September, and so soon as these terms had been irrevocably arranged, she issued a Decree (June, 1901) fixing the date for the Court’s return in September. This Decree, issued in the name of the Emperor, was as follows:

“Our Sacred Mother’s advanced age renders it necessary that we should take the greatest care of her health, so that she may attain to peaceful longevity; a long journey in the heat being evidently undesirable, we have fixed on the 19th day of the 7th Moon to commence our return journey, and are now preparing to escort Her Majesty, viâ Honan.”

One of the most notorious Boxer leaders, namely, Duke Kung, the younger brother of Prince Chuang, had accompanied the Court, with his family, to Hsi-an. The Old Buddha, realising that his presence would undoubtedly compromise her, now decided to send him away. His family fell from one state of misery to another; no assistance was rendered to them by any officials on the journey, and eventually, after much wandering, the Duke was compelled to earn a bare living by serving as a subordinate in a small Yamên, while his wife, who was young and comely, was sold into slavery. It was clear that the Old Buddha had now realised the error of her ways and the folly that had been committed in encouraging the Boxers. After the executions and suicides of the proscribed leaders of the movement she was heard on one occasion to remark: “These Princes and Ministers were wont to bluster and boast, relying upon their near kinship to ourselves, and we foolishly believed them when they assured us that the foreign devils would never get the better of China. In their folly they came within an ace of overthrowing our Dynasty. The only one whose fate I regret is Chao Shu-ch’iao. For him I am truly sorry.”

The fate of Prince Chuang’s brother showed clearly that both officials and people had realised the genuine change in the Empress Dowager’s feelings towards the Boxers, for there was none so poor to do him honour.

Both on the journey to Hsi-an fu and on the return to the Capital, Her Majesty displayed the greatest interest in the lives of the peasantry and the condition of the people generally. She subscribed liberally to the famine fund in Shansi, professing the greatest sympathy for the stricken people. She told the Emperor that she had never appreciated their sufferings in the seclusion of her Palace.

During the Court’s stay at Hsi-an fu the Emperor came to take more interest in State affairs than he had done at any time since the _coup d’état_, but although the Old Buddha discussed matters with him freely, and took his opinion, he had no real voice in the decision of any important matter. His temper continued to be uncertain and occasionally violent, so that many high officials of the Court preferred always to take their business to the Empress Dowager. One important appointment was made at this time by the Old Buddha at the Emperor’s personal request, viz., that of Sun Chia-nai (ex-Imperial tutor) to the Grand Secretariat. This official had resigned office in January 1900 upon the selection of the Heir Apparent, which he regarded as equivalent to the deposition of the Emperor.[108] Subsequently, throughout the Boxer troubles, he had remained in his house at Peking, which was plundered, and he himself would undoubtedly have been killed, but for the protection given him by Jung Lu. At this time also, Lu Ch’uan-lin joined the Grand Council. When the siege of the Legations began, he had left his post as Governor of Kiangsu, and marched north with some three thousand men to defend Peking against the foreigners. Before he reached the Capital, however, it had fallen, so that, after disbanding his troops, he went for a few weeks to his native place in Chihli, and thence proceeded to join the Court at T’ai-yüan fu, where the Old Buddha received him most cordially. His case is particularly interesting in that he was until his death a member of the Grand Council,[109] and that, like many other high officials at Peking, his ideas of the art of government and the relative position of China in the world, remained exactly as they were before the Boxer movement. His action in proceeding to Peking with his troops from his post in the south is also interesting, as showing the semi-independent position of provincial officials, and the free hand which any man of strong views may claim and enjoy. The Viceroys of Nanking and Wuch’ang might dare to oppose the wishes of the Empress Dowager, and to exercise their own judgment as regards declaring war upon foreigners, but it was equally open to any of their subordinates to differ from them, and to take such steps as they might personally consider proper, even to the movement of troops.

An official, one of the many provincial deputies charged with the carrying of tribute to the Court at Hsi-an, returning thence to his post at Soochow, sent to a friend at Peking a detailed description of the life of the Court in exile, from which the following extracts are taken. The document, being at that time confidential and not intended for publication, throws some light on the Court and its doings which is lacking in official documents:—

“The Empress Dowager is still in sole charge of affairs, and controls everything in and around the Court; those who exercise the most influence with her are Jung Lu and Lu Ch’uan-lin. Governor Ts’en, has fallen into disfavour of late. His Majesty’s advisers are most anxious that she should return to Peking. She looks very young and well; one would not put her age at more than forty, whereas she is really sixty-four. The Emperor appears to be generally depressed, but he has been putting on flesh lately. The Heir Apparent is fifteen years of age; fat, coarse-featured, and of rude manners. He favours military habits of deportment and dress, and to see him when he goes to the play, wearing a felt cap with gold braid, a leather jerkin, and a red military overcoat, one would take him for a prize-fighter. He knows all the young actors and rowdies, and associates generally with the very lowest classes. He is a good rider, however, and a very fair musician. If, at the play-houses, the music goes wrong, he will frequently get up in his place and rebuke the performer, and at times he even jumps on to the stage, possesses himself of the instrument, and plays the piece himself. All this brings the boy into disrepute with respectable people, and some of his pranks have come to the ears of the Old Buddha, who they say has had him severely whipped. His last offence was to commence an intrigue with one of the ladies-in-waiting on Her Majesty, for which he got into serious trouble. He is much in the company of Li Lien-ying (the chief eunuch), who leads him into the wildest dissipation.[110] My friend Kao, speaking of him the other day, wittily said, that ‘from being an expectant Emperor, he would soon become a deposed Heir Apparent’; which is quite true, for he never reads, all his tastes are vicious, and his manners rude and overbearing. To give you an instance of his doings: on the 18th of the 10th Moon, accompanied by his brother and by his uncle, the Boxer Duke Lan, and followed by a crowd of eunuchs, he got mixed up in a fight with some Kansu braves at a theatre in the temple of the City God. The eunuchs got the worst of it, and some minor officials who were in the audience were mauled by the crowd. The trouble arose, in the first instance, because of the eunuchs attempting to claim the best seats in the house, and the sequel shows to what lengths of villainy these fellows will descend, and how great is their influence with the highest officials. The eunuchs were afraid to seek revenge on the Kansu troops direct, but they attained their end by denouncing the manager of the theatre to Governor Ts’en, and by inducing him to close every theatre in Hsi-an. Besides which, the theatre manager was put in a wooden collar, and thus ignominiously paraded through the streets of the city. The Governor was induced to take this action on the ground that Her Majesty, sore distressed at the famine in Shansi and the calamities which have overtaken China, was offended at these exhibitions of unseemly gaiety; and the proclamation which closed the play-houses, ordered also that restaurants and other places of public entertainment should suspend business. Everybody in the city knew that this was the work of the eunuchs. Eventually Chi Lu, Chamberlain of the Household, was able to induce the chief eunuch to ask the Old Buddha to give orders that the theatres be reopened. This was accordingly done, but of course the real reason was not given, and the Proclamation stated that, since the recent fall of snow justified hopes of a prosperous year and good harvests, as a mark of the people’s gratitude to Providence, the theatres would be reopened as usual, ‘but no more disturbances must occur.’

“The chief eunuch does not seem to be abusing his authority as much as usual at Hsi-an, most of his time and attention being given to the collection and safe keeping of tribute. If the quality and quantity received is not up to his expectations, he will decline to accept it, and thus infinite trouble is caused to the officials of the province concerned.

“A few days before the Old Buddha’s sixty-fifth birthday in the 10th Moon, Governor Ts’en proposed that the city should be decorated, and the usual costly gifts should be presented to Her Majesty, but to this proposal Prince P’u Tung took the strongest exception; ‘China is in desperate straits,’ he said, ‘and even the ancestral shrines and birthplaces of the Dynasty are in the hands of foreign troops. How then could the Old Buddha possibly desire to celebrate her birthday? The thing is impossible.’ The matter was therefore allowed to drop. But the Governor is certainly most anxious to make a name for himself, and, in spite of his blustering professions of an independent attitude, he does not disdain to curry favour with the chief eunuch and others who can serve him. They say that he has recently sworn ‘blood brotherhood’ with Hsin, the eunuch whose duty it is to announce officials at audiences. No doubt it is due to this distinguished connection that he has recently been raised to the rank of a Board President, and therefore entitled to ride in a sedan chair within the precincts of the Court, which, no doubt, he considers more dignified than riding in a cart.[111]

“Tung Fu-hsiang has returned to his home in Kansu, but his troops remain still at Hsi-an under the command of General Teng, who so greatly distinguished himself in the Mahomedan rebellion.

“It would seem that the Old Buddha still cherishes hopes of defeating the foreigners, for she is particularly delighted by a Memorial which has been sent in lately by Hsia Chen-wu, in which he recommends a certain aboriginal tribesman (‘Man-tzu’) as a man of remarkable strategic ability. He offers to lose his own head and those of all his family, should this Heaven-sent warrior fail to defeat all the troops of the Allies in one final engagement, and he begs that the Emperor may permit this man to display his powers and thus save the Empire.”

XXI

HOW THE BOXER LEADERS DIED

China’s officials may be said to be a class of individualists, incapable, as a rule, of collective heroism or any sustained effort of organised patriotism; but it is one of the remarkable features and results of her system of philosophy that the mandarins, even those who have been known publicly to display physical cowardice at critical moments, will usually accept sentence of death at the hands of their Sovereign with perfect equanimity, and meet it with calm philosophic resignation. The manner in which the Boxer leaders died, who were proscribed in the course of the negotiations for the peace Protocol at Peking, affords an interesting illustration of this fact; incidentally it throws light also on a trait in the Chinese character, which to some extent explains the solidity and permanence of its system of government, based as it is on the principle of absolute obedience and loyalty to the head of the State as one of the cardinal Confucian virtues.

Despite the repeated and unswerving demands of the foreign Powers that the death penalty should be inflicted upon the chief leaders and supporters of the Boxers, the Empress Dowager was naturally loth to yield, inasmuch as she herself had been in full sympathy with the movement. It was only after many and prolonged meetings with her chief advisers, and when she realised that in this course lay her only hope of obtaining satisfactory terms of peace, that she finally and most reluctantly consented, in February 1901, to the issue of a Decree (drafted by Jung Lu) in which she abandoned to their fate those who, with her full knowledge and approval, had led the rising which was to drive all foreigners into the sea. With the knowledge in our possession as to Her Majesty’s complicity, and in some cases her initiative, in the anti-foreign movement, it is impossible to read this Decree without realising something of the ruthlessness of the woman and her cynical disregard of everything except her own safety and authority. Even so, however, Tzŭ Hsi could not bring herself at first to comply with all the demands of the Powers, evidently hoping by compromise and further negotiations to save the lives of her favourites, Prince Tuan, Duke Lan and Chao Shu-ch’iao. The Decree, issued in the Emperor’s name, was as follows:—

“In the summer of last year, the Boxer Rebellion arose, which brought in its train hostilities with friendly Powers. Prince Ch’ing and Li Hung-chang have now definitely settled the preliminary conditions of the Peace Protocol. Reflecting on the causes of this disaster, we cannot escape the conclusion that it was due to the ignorance and arrogance of certain of our Princes and Ministers of State who, foolishly believing in the alleged supernatural power of the Boxers, were led to disobey the Throne and to disregard our express commands that these rebels should be exterminated. Not only did they not do this, but they encouraged and assisted them to such an extent that the movement gained hosts of followers. The latter committed acts of unprovoked hostility, so that matters reached a pass where a general cataclysm became inevitable. It was by reason of the folly of these men that General Tung, that obstinate braggart, dared to bombard the Legations, thus bringing our Dynasty to the brink of the greatest peril, throwing the State into a general convulsion of disorder, and plunging our people into uttermost misery. The dangers which have been incurred by Her Majesty the Empress Dowager, and myself are simply indescribable, and our hearts are sore, aching with unappeased wrath at the remembrance of our sufferings. Let those who brought about these calamities ask themselves what punishment can suffice to atone for them?

“Our former Decrees on this subject have been far too lenient, and we must therefore now award further punishments to the guilty. Prince Chuang, already cashiered, led the Boxers in their attack upon the French Cathedral and the Legations, besides which, it was he who issued a Proclamation in violation of all our Treaties. (This refers to the rewards offered for the heads of foreigners.) He too it was who, acting as the leader of the savage Boxers, put to death many innocent persons. As a mark of clemency unmerited by these crimes, we grant him permission to commit suicide, and hereby order that Ko Pao-hua shall supervise the execution of these our commands.

“Prince Tuan, already cashiered, was the leader and spokesman of the Imperial Clan, to whom was due the declaration of war against foreigners; he trusted implicitly in Boxer magic, and thus inexcusably brought about hostilities. Duke Lan, who assisted Prince Chuang in drawing up the proclamation which set a price on the head of every foreigner, deserves also that he be stripped of all his dignities and titles. But remembering that both these Princes are our near kinsmen, we mitigate their sentence to exile to Turkestan, where they will be kept in perpetual confinement. The Governor of Shensi, Yü Hsien, already cashiered, believed in the Boxers at the time when he held the Governorship of Shantung; when he subsequently came to Peking, he sang their praises at our Court, with the result that many Princes and Ministers were led astray by his words. As Governor of Shansi he had put to death many missionaries and native converts, proving himself to be an utterly misguided and bloodthirsty man. He was undoubtedly one of the prime causes of all our troubles. We have already decreed his banishment to Turkestan, and by this time he should already have reached Kansu. Orders are now to be transmitted for his immediate decapitation, which will be superintended by the Provincial Treasurer.

“As to the late Grand Secretary, Kang Yi, he also believed in the Boxers, and went so far as to set a price on the lives of foreigners so that, had he lived, he too would have been sentenced to death, but as matters stand, we order that he be posthumously deprived of his rank and summarily cashiered.

“We have already cashiered Tung Fu-hsiang. While permitted to retain his rank as a military official, he cannot escape a certain share of responsibility for the siege of the Legations, although his orders emanated from Princes and Ministers of State; and because of his ignorance of foreign affairs, slack discipline, and general stupidity, he certainly deserves severe punishment. But we cannot overlook the services he has rendered in the Kansu rebellion, and the good name which he bears amongst our Chinese and Mahomedan subjects in that province, so that, as a mark of our favour and leniency, we merely remove him from his post.[112]

“Ying Nien, Vice-President of the Censorate, was opposed to the issue of the proclamation which offered rewards for foreigners’ heads, and for this he deserves lenient treatment, but he failed to insist strongly in his objections, and we are therefore compelled to punish him. He is hereby sentenced to be cashiered and imprisoned pending decapitation.[113]

“As regards the Grand Councillor Chao Shu-ch’iao, he had never, to our knowledge, shown any hostility to foreigners, and when we despatched him on a special mission to confer with the Boxers, the report which he submitted on his return showed no signs of sympathy with their proceedings.[114] Nevertheless, he was undoubtedly careless, and we therefore, acting in leniency, decree that he be cashiered and imprisoned pending decapitation.[115]

“The Grand Secretary Hsü T’ung and Li Ping-heng, our Assistant Commander-in-Chief, have both committed suicide, but as their behaviour has been very severely criticised, we order that they be deprived of their ranks; and all posthumous honours granted to them are hereby cancelled.

“The Ministers of the friendly Powers can no longer fail to recognise that the Boxer Rebellion was indeed the work of these guilty officials, and that it was in no way due to any action or wishes on the part of the Throne. In the punishment of these offenders we have displayed no leniency, from which all our subjects may learn how grave has been the recent crisis.”

As the terms of this Decree still failed to satisfy the foreign Ministers, especially as regards the sentences passed on Prince Tuan and Duke Lan, another Decree, a week later, ordered that both these Manchu leaders should be imprisoned pending decapitation, a sentence which was eventually reduced to one of perpetual banishment to Turkestan. Posthumous decapitation, a grievous disgrace in the eyes of Chinese officials, was decreed as a further punishment upon Kang Yi, while Chao Shu-ch’iao and Ying Nien were ordered to commit suicide. Finally, the Grand Councillor Ch’i Hsiu, and a son of the Grand Secretary Hsü T’ung (who had closely followed in his father’s footsteps as the most violent opponent of everything foreign), were sentenced to decapitation, and were duly executed at Peking.

In compliance with the last demands of the Foreign Ministers, a final Decree, the wording of which points clearly to reluctant action under compulsion, restored the ranks and honours of the five officials who had been executed for advising Her Majesty against the Boxers. To revise this sentence without leaving them under some imputation of blame would have involved most undesirable loss of “face,” and the Decree therefore observes:—

“When we urged these officials, at a general audience of all our Ministers, to state their views definitely, so that we might judge fairly of the issues, they expressed themselves hesitatingly, and our evil-disposed Princes and advisers were thus able to take advantage of their apparent indecision. This was the cause of their undoing. They were impeached on all sides, and were eventually decapitated. We recall to mind the fact that these five officials always showed considerable ability in handling diplomatic questions, and, as a mark of our favour, we therefore restore to them their original rank.”