Imperial Woman (64 page)

And who, she asked herself, would take her place when she died? Never would she leave the realm to the weak young Emperor who was her eternal prisoner. No, strong young hands must be raised up, but where was the child? And who, indeed, was strong enough for the centuries ahead? She felt the magic of the future. Mankind, she told her princes, might yet increase to the stature of the gods. And she grew curious about the West whence new power streamed and she said often that, were she younger, she might herself travel westward and see the sights beyond.

“Alas,” she said with plaintive grace, “I am very old. My end is near.”

When she spoke thus her ladies protested much, saying that she was more beautiful than any woman, her skin still fresh and fair, her long eyes black and bright, her lips unwithered. All this was true, she granted with a modesty enlivened by the ghost of her old gaiety, and yet she, even she, could not live forever.

“Ten thousand thousand years, Old Buddha,” they replied. “Ten thousand thousand years!”

But she was not deceived and her next decree was to send the best of her ministers, in imperial commission, led by the Duke Tsai Tse, to the countries of the West and this was her instruction.

“Go to all countries and see which are the most fortunate, the most prosperous, the people most happy and at peace and content with their rulers. Sift them down to the four best, and stay a year in each. In each study how their rulers govern and what is meant by constitutions and people’s rule, and bring back to Us a full understanding of these matters.”

She had her enemies and they were among her own subjects. They said that she was bowing down before the foreign conquerors, that she had lost her pride, that the nation was humiliated by her humility.

“We Chinese,” a certain Chinese scholar thus memorialized, “are despised like rustics when we are servile to foreigners, but what shall we say when our Empress Herself demeans Herself by Her too-open friendship with the wives of foreign ministers. Her smiles, the waves of Her kerchief when She sees a foreign woman on the street while riding in Her palanquin to worship at the Altar of Heaven? We hear there is even foreign food in the palaces and dining halls furnished with foreign chairs and tables. And this goes on while the Legations rage against us at the Foreign Office!”

And yet another wrote, “At Her age, the Empress cannot change Her habits or Her hatreds. Doubtless the foreigners themselves are asking what deep plans She has against them.”

And still another said, “Doubtless in this strange new mood the Empress seeks only peace for Her old age.”

To all her judges the Empress smiled.

“I know what I do,” she said from her heart possessed. “I know well what I do, and nothing now is strange to me. I heard of such things long ago but only now I heed them. I was told—but only now I believe.”

Those who listened to her did not understand but this, too, she knew, and she did not change.

When the days of mourning for Jung Lu were finished, the Empress sent out edicts of invitation to all foreign envoys and their ladies and their children for a great feast on the first day of the New Year. The envoys themselves were to feast in the great banquet hall, the ladies in her own private banquet hall, and the imperial concubines were to receive the children in their apartments, with such serving women and eunuchs as were needed to care for them.

Never before had the Empress prepared so vast a feast. The Emperor was to remain with the envoys and she would appear after the feast. The dishes were to be both Eastern and Western. Three hundred cooks were employed, the Court musicians were instructed and the Imperial Players prepared a program of four plays, each three hours long.

The Empress herself planned an effort. She commanded the daughter of her plenipotentiary to Europe, a lady both young and beautiful, whose attendance at the Court was compulsory for two years, to teach her to give greetings in English to the foreign envoys. France, the Empress declared after studying maps, was too small a country for her to heed its language. America was too new and uncouth. But England, she declared, was ruled also by a great woman, for whom she had always a fondness. Therefore she chose the language of the English Queen. Indeed, she had commanded a portrait of Queen Victoria to be hung in her own chamber and she studied it and declared that upon the face she discerned the same lines of longevity that were carved upon her own.

How astonished, then, were the foreign envoys when the Empress welcomed them in the English tongue! She was borne into the great hall in her imperial sedan, carried by twelve bearers in yellow uniform, and the Emperor stepped forward to assist her. She came down, her jeweled hand upon his forearm, and, glittering from head to foot in a robe of gold, embroidered with bright blue dragons and wearing her great collar of matched pearls, her headdress set with flowers of rubies and jade, she inclined her head to right and to left as she walked to the Throne with her old youthful grace. What was she saying? One envoy after another, bowing before her but never to the floor, heard words which his ear could not at first recognize, but which repeated again and again became clear.

“Hao ti diu—” she said, “Ha-p’i niu yerh! Te’-rin-ko t’i!”

They comprehended, one after the other, that the Empress asked how they did, she wished them happy new year, she invited them to drink tea. These foreign envoys, tall stiff men in stiff garments, were now so moved that they burst into applause, which at first surprised and even bewildered the Empress, who had not in her life before seen men clapping their hands palm to palm. But gazing at the angular foreign faces, she saw only approval of her effort and she laughed gently, much pleased, and when she had sat on her throne, she remarked left and right to her ministers and princes, in her own tongue:

“You see how easy it is to be friends even with barbarians! It requires only a little effort on the part of civilized persons.”

In such mood the feast day ended, and when gifts had been bestowed upon the foreign ladies and upon their children and money wrapped in red paper distributed to their servants, the Empress retired to her own chamber. As was her habit now, she reviewed her days and years, thinking over her long life and planning for the future of her people. She had done well this day, she mused. She had laid foundations of accord and friendship with foreign powers who could be friends or enemies. And she thought of Victoria, the Western Queen, and she wished that they two could meet and talk together of how to shape their two worlds to one.

All under Heaven are one family, she would tell Victoria—

Alas, before such dreams could grow the news was cried across the seas that Victoria was dead. The Empress was aghast.

“How did my sister die?” she cried.

When she heard that Victoria, though beloved of her own people, had died of old age as any common mortal does, the knowledge struck like a sword into the imperial heart.

“Die we all must,” the Empress murmured, and looked from one face to another.

But they saw that she had not until now felt death near her. And to herself she murmured that she must find an heir, a true heir, for if Victoria was dead, then anyone could die, though she herself was strong, and still able to live for another brace of years, long enough to see a child grow to a youth, or if Heaven’s will was good, to manhood itself, before she descended into her imperial coffin. It was indeed her duty once again to find an heir, a child, for whom she must rule while she trained him to be Emperor. But this time she would let the Heir be taught what the world was. She would summon teachers from the West to teach him. Yes, she would let him have iron trains and ships of war and guns and cannon. He must learn to make Western war and then in his time, when she was gone, even as Victoria was gone, he in his age would do what she had failed to do. He would drive the enemy into the sea.

What child, what child? The question was a torment until suddenly, an hour later, she remembered that a child had been born in Jung Lu’s palace. His daughter, wed to Prince Ch’un, had given birth to a son but a few days before. This child, this boy, was Jung Lu’s grandson. She bent her head to hide her smile from Heaven. This would lift her beloved even to the Dragon Throne! It was her will and Heaven must approve.

Yet she would not announce her choice too soon. She would placate the gods and preserve the child’s life by keeping her plan secret until the Emperor lay upon his deathbed—not far off, surely, for pains and ills consumed his flesh. He had not been well enough to offer the autumn sacrifices in person, complaining that the many times he must kneel, the genuflections he must make, were far beyond his strength, and she had made them in his place. It was an ancient law that the Heir must not be proclaimed until the Emperor’s face was turned toward the Yellow Springs and death near. Or, if not near enough, her eunuch could most delicately poison—

She heard a sound of rushing wind and lifted up her head.

“Hark,” she cried to her ladies, standing at their usual distance from her throne. “Does the wind bring rain?”

For in the last two months the country had been cursed by a dry cold that reached the very roots of trees and winter wheat. No snow fell, and in the last seventeen days a most unseasonable warmth had crept up from the south. Even the peonies, bewildered, had sent up shoots. The people had flocked to temples to reproach the gods, and seven days ago she had commanded the Buddhist priests to take the gods out daily in procession and compel those gods to see for themselves what damage was abroad.

“What wind is this,” she now inquired, “and from what corner of the earth does it arise?”

Her ladies asked the eunuchs who ran into the courts and held up their hands and turned their faces this way and that and they came back crying that the wind was from the eastern seas and that it was full of moisture. Even as they spoke all heard a clap of thunder, unseasonable and unexpected, yet clear enough. A roar came from the streets, the people running out from every house to look at the skies.

The wind rose higher. It shrieked through the palaces, and great gusts tore at the doors and windows. But this wind was clean, a clean wind from the sea, dustless and pure. The Empress rose from her throne and she walked into the court beyond and she too lifted up her face toward the swirling sky and she smelled in the wind. At this same instant the skies opened and rain came down, a cool strong rain, strange in winter but how welcome!

“A good omen,” she murmured.

Her ladies ran out to escort her in but she put them aside for one more moment while the rain fell on her. And while she stood a great voice rose from far beyond the walls, the sound of many people crying out together—

“Old Buddha—Old Buddha—sends the rain!”

Old Buddha—that was she, and her people called her goddess.

She turned and walked the few steps to her private throne room again and stood there inside the doorway, her satin garments dripping rain upon the tiled floor, and while her ladies made themselves busy with their silk kerchiefs to wipe her dry she laughed at their sweet reproaches.

“I have not been so happy since I was a child,” she told them. “I remember now that when I was a child I loved to run into the rain—”

“Old Buddha,” her ladies murmured fondly.

The Empress turned to reprove her ladies with all grace and gentleness.

“Heaven sends the rain,” she said. “How can I, a mortal, command the clouds?”

But they insisted, and she could see that they desired eagerly to praise her.

“It is for your sake, Old Buddha, that the rain comes down, the fortunate rain, blessing us all because of you.”

“Well, well,” she said, and laughed to indulge them. “Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps—”

A Biography of Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel
The Good Earth
(1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel,
East Wind: West Wind
in 1930. The next year she published her second book,
The Good Earth
, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by
Sons
(1933) and
A House Divided
(1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.

Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (
Living Reed
), Burma (
The Promise
), and Japan (
The Big Wave
). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.