The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (18 page)

The cortège was to arrive at the North-West Gate of Beijing, and here a large marquee was erected to greet the Regents and receive from them the catafalque bearing the dead Emperor’s remains. Once the golden-domed litter had been safely lowered to the ground within the city precincts, the Regents, led by a sullen-faced Prince I, made their way to their appointed stations. Their feelings as they entered the tented reception area, facing almost certain death, can only be guessed at. Yet even at this late stage, the same grim courtliness prevailed. As custom demanded, they prostrated themselves before the boy-Emperor to report the successful completion of their task. Behind the new Son of Heaven stood his aunt Sakota, the brothers of the dead sovereign, and Yehonala, savouring her moment of victory.

It was characteristic of Yehonala that she seized the initiative, and took command of the situation from the start. Calmly assuming her primacy over all the assembled nobles, she stood forward and with grave formality thanked Prince I and the other Regents for their efforts, before summarily relieving them of their offices. Prince I would have none of it. He and the other Regents were the legally appointed custodians of the Empire, he blustered, and he reminded Yehonala that no one, including herself, would be allowed to see the new Emperor during his minority without the Regents’ permission. It was a bold, but ultimately futile move. All knew that the Regents’ edicts lacked the vital Seal of Legally Transmitted Authority. By contrast, Yehonala had in her hand a conflicting edict, giving herself and Sakota the self-same powers that Prince I and his fellow Regents had arrogated to themselves. And, thanks to the wiles of the eunuch Li Lien-ying, this document possessed the requisite imprint of the Seal of Legally Transmitted Authority. Just as important, perhaps more so, the Regents’ military resources were few, while ranged around Yehonala and her allies, and scattered in large numbers about the city, were a large force of highly trained, well-equipped and well-motivated men, the Beijing Field Force. And as is true everywhere, and at all times, ‘God is on the side of the big battalions’.

According to one account, Su Shun had not accompanied the rest of the Regents, and was surprised in his quarters, in bed with his favourite concubine in direct violation of the funeral rites. Another version places him at the audience with the young Emperor and Yehonala, claiming that it was at this critical moment that the swaggering braggart, the least self-controlled of the conspirators, finally let the mask of formality slip. Fury overwhelmed him and he turned on his fellow Regents hissing, ‘Had you listened to me when I first proposed to do away with this woman, we should not have come to such a pass!’ The others heard him in stoical, Confucian silence. There was nothing to say. He was right.

The conspirators were arrested, and conveniently blamed (though not without reason) for the debacle with the red barbarians, for the capture and torture of the allied emissaries, the burning of the Summer Palace, and much else besides. In time-honoured fashion, Yehonala had found a scapegoat, upon which the sins of the past could be heaped, allowing her son a propitious accession to the throne, blame-free and guiltless. Su Shun, Prince I, and the rest of their faction, flanked by guards, were conveyed to the ‘Empty Chamber’, the place of confinement for members of the Imperial clan. Yehonala issued a decree in her own name and that of her cousin, Sakota, stripping the three principal conspirators Prince I, Prince Cheng and Su Shun of all their titles and ranks, and appointing her ally, Prince Kung, to preside over the Imperial Clan Court that would try the Regents. The result was a foregone conclusion. Everyone knew that Yehonala would never allow these men to threaten her or her son again. The edict concluded: ‘Their audacity...shows a degree of wickedness inconceivable, and convicts them of the darkest designs. The punishment so far meted out to them is totally inadequate to the depth of their guilt.’
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It was the young girl from Anhui’s first experience of absolute power, and she found it tasted sweet–and addictive.

Yehonala had conceived a particular hatred for Su Shun, because of his arrogant behaviour towards her and the insults she had received at the hands of Su Shun’s wife while she had been out of favour in Jehol. The morning after the arrests she issued another decree, singling out Su Shun for especial obloquy, and–before Prince Kung’s commission had delivered a verdict–confiscating the whole of his property, both at Beijing and Jehol. Su Shun’s wealth was legendary, the fruit of years of corruption and graft, an immense fortune amounting to many millions of taels. With this one stroke, Yehonala had become a wealthy woman, influential and powerful in her own right.

Several days later, after a perfunctory enquiry, the Clan Court duly announced its judgement, finding Prince I, Prince Cheng and the arch-villain Su Shun, guilty of treason and subversion of the state–capital crimes carrying the severest of penalties: execution by the lingering death, slow dismemberment. However, with her enemies at her feet, and Su Shun’s enormous wealth safely in her pocket, Yehonala could afford to be magnanimous. She commuted the sentences: in deference to Prince I’s and Prince Cheng’s high rank, they each received a silken cord, the time-honoured invitation to hang themselves, which they duly did, from a beam in the Empty Chamber. Su Shun too, was granted clemency, but of a different kind. ‘As to Su Shun...he fully deserves the punishment of dismemberment and the slicing process, if only that the law may be vindicated and public indignation satisfied. But we cannot make up our mind to impose this extreme penalty and therefore...we sentence him to immediate decapitation...’
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Su Shun, once the most powerful minister in the Middle Kingdom, was dragged to the public execution ground and beheaded. But even here Yehonala’s vengeance followed the ex-Minister. It was customary for the headsman to sew the victim’s head back onto the corpse immediately, so that the dead person’s spirit might travel to next world complete. This was expressly forbidden by Yehonala. Su Shun’s head was displayed in a cage, and the town dogs were left to lap up the blood from his headless trunk.

‘There is nothing so sweet in life as to vanquish your enemy’, and with Su Shun and the Princes I and Cheng all safely consigned to the Nine Springs (a Chinese euphemism for death), Yehonala could begin to enjoy the fruits of her triumph. Her first task was to blot out all memory of the usurping Regents, and for this it was necessary to change the young Emperor’s reign-title. The conspirators had given her son the characters Chi Hsiang (Well-Omened Happiness), a singularly unapt title as far as their own personal fortunes were concerned. Yehonala chose T’ung Chih (All-Pervading Tranquillity), no doubt a reference to the hoped-for suppression of the Tai Ping revolt. Two edicts were issued, one proclaiming the formal beginning of the Emperor’s reign, the other a disingenuous statement of Yehonala’s (and Sakota’s) reluctance to assume the Regency, which in its cynical hypocrisy set the pattern for numerous similar decrees throughout Yehonala’s long years of power:

Our assumption of the Regency was utterly contrary to our wishes, but we have complied with the urgent request of our Princes and Ministers...So soon as ever the Emperor shall have completed his education, we shall take no further part in the Government, which will then naturally revert to the system prescribed by all Dynastic tradition. Our sincere reluctance in assuming the direction of affairs must be manifest to all...
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Once secure, Yehonala was magnanimous in victory and there was no general proscription of the conspirators’ allies and cronies. She satisfied herself with simply removing from their official positions many who were strongly implicated in the conspiracy and, had matters gone differently, would certainly have gloried in her own humiliation and death. The Chinese are ever-mindful of obligation, and such merciful treatment undoubtedly gained her a host of supporters from among her erstwhile enemies. She was, moreover, at the height of her physical beauty: dark almond eyes, long blue-black hair, a tiny nose, and a winning smile. She knew her power and it was a strong man who could not be swayed by her charms:

she was so kindly in manner and so suave of disposition that she won every heart, persuaded every hearer, disarmed envy and hatred...Her language abounded with witty sallies, quaint notions clothed in racy words, embellished with poetic images, bright with bursts of musical laughter. People loved to listen to her, were proud of her notice, and captivated by her smile. While she spoke, an intense force lighted her eyes, kindled her mobile tongue, and as one of her own countrymen puts it ‘made her lips drip honey’...clever statesmen were swayed by her, despite their intelligence. A magnetic force seemed to go out of her, hypnotising her environment and making instruments of all who came within the radius of its operation.
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But not everyone was captivated by Yehonala’s undoubted charms. While she garnered allies among her former foes, Yehonala’s relationship with her staunchest allies soon began to unravel. Her collaboration with Prince Kung had been very much a matter of necessity on both sides. One of the Empresses’ first official actions was to bestow upon their ally the title ‘I Cheng Wang’, Prince Adviser, and to issue a special decree which granted hereditary status to one of his more important titles ‘Ch’in Wang’, Prince of the Blood. Surprisingly, Prince Kung declined the latter honour–for he was interested in far more than titles. As the younger brother of the Celestial Prince, he no doubt deemed himself Emperor-material, and it is possible that his acquiescence to the elevation of Yehonala and Sakota to the Regency owed more to his belief that they could be easily manipulated to his own ends, than in any conviction of the intrinsic worth of the two Empresses Dowager. The Prince saw himself as a father-figure to both Yehonala and Sakota, an elder statesman before whose vast experience the two women should gratefully bow. The Empress of the Eastern Palace, Sakota, was quite happy to oblige. For her, submission was easy: she was not a political animal, and her lack of education (she could not speak or write Chinese, and her written Manchu was weak) was an additional handicap. Sakota was the icon of Confucian femininity: wanting pleasure and prestige without responsibility and posing no threat to male supremacy. By contrast, the Western Empress’s life priorities were diametrically opposed to those of her cousin. Alert, nimble-witted and sufficiently skilled in calligraphy, poetry and painting to hold her own with any man, she could see no reason to adopt the supine, tractable demeanour that Prince Kung seemed to expect of her. Her aspirations blossomed with the successful campaign against Su Shun’s machinations, and grew in line with her expanding political awareness. Her ambition fed upon each successful intrigue. She flowered under the constant flattery of the eunuch attendants and the sycophantic admiration of her subordinates until nothing would suffice but total and absolute control of the Empire:
aut Caesar aut nullus
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Such an attitude could not but jar with Prince Kung’s own dreams of greatness. At first, aware that she was a tiro in governing, and still feeling her way towards ultimate power, she was grateful enough for his advice, but maturing rapidly, as the months went by she increasingly listened to his guidance attentively and then failed to act upon it. The Prince was as proud and as jealous of his position as Yehonala (in many ways the two characters were remarkably similar), and he increasingly saw this behaviour as insulting. Friction escalated rapidly, and in response to Yehonala’s increasingly autocratic tone, the Prince began a deliberate policy of cultivating Sakota’s friendship, and persuading her to take his part whenever disagreements arose in council. Given Yehonala’s temperament, this could only inflame an already tense situation, and lead to a deterioration in relations between the two Empresses. Time and again in Chinese history, real or imagined slights have resulted in acts of revenge which twisted the course of the nation and bred unimaginable suffering and horror for the general populace. The consequences of conflict between the two Empress cousins would, within a few years, provide the motive for a fatal clash.

But all this was in the future. For the present, there were far more pressing demands to attend to. In 1861 the Tai Ping rebellion still raged below the Yangtse, with Hung Hsiu-chuan’s followers in command of four provinces, Chejiang, Kiangsi, Jiangsu and Anhui, while the rebel Heavenly King continued to hold state in Imperial splendour at Nanking, the traditional southern capital of the Emperor. During the previous year a remarkable general, Li Hsiu-cheng had revived the fortunes of the Tai Ping cause with a series of well-fought victories. A former charcoal-maker, he had risen through the ranks and reached the upper echelons of the Tai Ping hierarchy on merit alone. Unlike the rest of the elite, success did not appear to corrupt him or inflame his ambition (he was dubbed the Chung Wang, or Loyal Prince). General Li was intelligent, a master strategist, and humane, at least by the standards of the day. He remained convinced of the importance of the Tai Ping mission to bring a Christian society (as he envisaged it) of equality and justice to China. Many authorities believe that had he, and not the visionary Hung Hsiu-chuan, enjoyed supreme command of the Tai Ping forces, their success would have been assured. Li himself eventually blamed the Heavenly King for Tai Ping reverses, writing in his ‘confession’ that ‘If one tried to petition about affairs of the Kingdom for the sake of preserving the state, whatever one said, the Heavenly King would only talk of Heaven and Earth’.
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But in 1861 such criticisms were far from the mind of the Loyal Prince. Li had driven westward and produced panic in both the Western Powers and the Chinese merchants by advancing on Shanghai. It was a bold move. The Tai Ping movement was landlocked, hamstrung by the lack of a major international port, through which it could treat and trade with the world. The taking of Shanghai would, at a stroke, have given the rebellion a tremendous, and perhaps vital, advantage.