The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (36 page)

But a final crisis was yet to come. At around 9 p.m. the bell in the legation tower rang out in a general call to arms, as a furious rifle and artillery attack was mounted by the Chinese on several sides of the defence line. Every man in the legation was sent to his post (except the Norwegian missionary Nestergaard who had lost his reason early in the siege and had been left firmly bound in the stables). Even the two priests (who had never before been asked to bear arms) were handed revolvers. But the looked-for general assault never materialised and the firing dropped in intensity around midnight.

Just two hours later the crash of allied artillery could be heard echoing across the night sky, and a little after this the defenders heard the unmistakable sound of the tap-tap-tap of Maxim guns, and knew their rescue was imminent–‘whatever happens, we have got / the Maxim gun, and they have not’. The word ran round the lines that the allies were just outside the eastern wall of the capital. As if in response, the Chinese firing intensified anew and to the ringing of the alarm bell, every soldier and volunteer again raced for his appointed position in the defence. Over the din, the besieged could hear the Chinese commanders exhorting their men, but no enemy soldiers appeared willing to expose themselves above the parapet, and gradually, the storm of firing died away to its normal, background intensity, and the volunteers were stood down.

When dawn broke that day everyone in the legation was convinced their day of deliverance had come. But firing continued unabated, and it was not until around two o’clock in the afternoon that the first allied soldiers, from the British Sikh regiments, made their way cautiously across the lawn of the British legation. Pandemonium ensued, everyone rushing forward, ‘cheering, clapping, waving handkerchiefs, shaking hands’. General Gaselee and his staff appeared, surrounded by more Sikhs and Rajputs, and the rejoicing redoubled. ‘We were all dancing for joy, and some could scarcely restrain their tears.’ The tumult roused the Chinese, many of whom still held their posts, and they poured in an angry fusillade of rifle fire, slightly wounding a legation lady, the first and only female in the siege to be shot. A Rajput soldier was less lucky; just after arriving at the legation he peered out through a loophole and was immediately shot in the face and killed.

In their wild joy at being rescued, the inhabitants of the legation somehow forgot their fellow-besieged who were still surrounded by Chinese forces in the Peitang Cathedral. This omission is perhaps understandable in a group of people who had suffered such privations and terrors for fifty-five days. But no such excuse remains for the allied soldiery, whose express purpose was to rescue all foreign personnel from danger. It is doubly inexplicable for the French and Italian contingents, who both had countrymen in dreadful danger just two miles to the north of the legations. Yet the fact remains that for two days nothing was done to help these unfortunates. Instead, as the remnants of the Chinese force fell back, the allied armies turned their attention from conquest to rapine and looting, the different national contingents ‘pressing out to clear the Tartar City, to capture the Imperial City, to guard the palace, in jealous fear lest any other nations should be first to win places of importance.
¹⁵
As the foreigners spread through the city, the few inhabitants who had not already fled the city did whatever they could to ingratiate themselves with the conquerors. Seeing the turbans of the Indian troops, Muslim Chinese began wearing the same headgear; most houses put up notices declaring that the inhabitants were the obedient subjects of whichever foreign power they could write down (Japan–written in Chinese ideograms–was the most common, but USA was seen also, often scrawled upside-down); those with a little English pleaded in that language for mercy: ‘Most noble great man, sir, I hope you will not kill us; we are all good men here.’ One
Beijing-ren
had a placard on his door ‘covered with a lot of unintelligible characters. When asked what they meant, he said he did not know–he had copied them off a Japanese matchbox.’

On many occasions, the capital’s inhabitants pleaded in vain. There was much looting and killing in the first few days by all the foreign contingents, though the time was not without its black humour:

‘That is a fine sable coat! Bring it along.’

‘But there is a Chinaman inside.’

‘Give it a shake. He will fall out.
^’16

‘Russians looting, ravishing the women in a (legation) bandboy’s house, when the Chinese seized a cornet and played the Russian national anthem; and at once the soldiers jumped to their feet, and when the notes were finished, saluted and walked out.
^’17

It was left to the only non-Christian contingent among the allies, the Japanese, to lift the siege at Peitang, which they did on 16th August. But the delay brought about perhaps the most tragic and unnecessary of all the deaths among the besieged. Padre d’Addosio had survived the legation siege unscathed. Now, anxious about his countrymen at the Pei-tang Cathedral, he decided to leave the legation defence line and ride over on his donkey to learn their fate. It was just two short miles, and most of the Chinese army had fled, but the route he chose was guarded by the die-hard Muslim troops of Tung Fu-hsiang. Somewhere between Peitang and the legations, Padre d’Addosio was stopped, dragged from his donkey and carried to Prince Tuan’s palace, where he was savagely put to death.

The priest’s murder was the last violent death among the besieged. All surviving foreigners were safe, the Chinese army was routed, and the Imperial City was in the hands of the allies. The siege of the legations was over. Just one question remained–where was the prime instigator of the attack? Where was Yehonala?

When the legation siege was lifted on the 14th August, Yehonala was still in the Forbidden City. The isolation of the Empress behind the walls of the Great Within was so complete that she was not even aware of the relief force’s advance. Weeks later, she described her rude awakening to a provincial official:

We heard bullets flying, making noises like the cries of cats...I wondered how there could be so many cats. I was dressing my hair at that moment. Another ‘maiow’ was heard and a bullet flew in through the window. It dropped to the floor and bounced and rolled. We examined it closely. Just when I had decided to inquire into the matter, Tsai-lan was seen outside the curtain at the door. He said with a shaking voice, ‘the foreign soldiers have entered the city. Go quickly Old Buddha’...The Emperor was even more frightened than I, and wanted to run away with me at once. I said, ‘Look at your dress; how could you go out this way?’ Then with frantic haste we threw away his dress of pearls and his red tasselled hat and pulled off his official gown. He put on another long coat.

Yehonala had earlier claimed she would commit suicide rather than leave the Imperial City. Now she made the humiliating decision to escape as a commoner. She shed her jewellery and took the green jade nail casings from her hands before cutting the six-inch-long nails of her little and ring fingers, the grotesquely long fingernails that Manchu nobles affected to show themselves a leisured class. Her immaculately coiffured hair was shorn, and what remained was tied up with a scarf. Then, with her court ladies and eunuch attendants bustling and panicking around her she put on the dark blue tunic of a peasant:

I disguised myself as a maidservant. We escaped immediately. We had no time to take any clothing, but went with empty hands. We walked until we reached the north gate of the Forbidden City, where we saw a mule cart, the only cart we had seen since we left the Palace...I entered it with the Emperor and ordered the carter to drive quickly forward. Others with us hired their carts as they walked along. When we got out of the north-west gate of the city, we gathered together; but we dared not stay there, fearing the foreign soldiers might come after us. We travelled day and night...
¹

Yehonala omitted one incident from her account of the flight. And with good reason, for it reflects no glory on her and reveals the Empress Dowager’s high state of agitation, and the power of life and death she still wielded over all her subjects. As the procession made to leave, Kuang Hsu’s favourite consort, the Pearl Concubine, repeatedly begged the Empress Dowager, on her knees, not to flee, not to besmirch the honour of the Dynasty, for to flee was humiliating and would imperil the Empire. Other accounts claim that she begged only to be taken with the Emperor in his flight. Whatever the reason, whether Yehonala saw herself in this young girl when, forty years before, she had demanded defiance, and had counselled so eloquently against the flight of Hsien Feng to Jehol, or whether she was simply incensed by the concubine’s presumption, her response was fatal. She barked a command to the eunuchs and, before the horrified eyes of Kuang Hsu and the rest of the court, the Pearl Concubine was seized by the eunuchs and cast down a nearby well and left to drown. Yehonala commanded the cart to proceed and, terrified and chastened, the broken remnants of the Manchu court scurried from their capital.

Yehonala had left with the ineffective Prince Ch’ing the onerous burden of negotiating with the victorious allies. Long before this, she had ordered Li Hung-chang, the veteran of a score of international conferences, from southern China to Beijing in order to support the Prince in his discussions. But Li had dragged his feet, at first ignoring the summonses, then moving to Shanghai, where he settled for several weeks, brooding on the disaster in the north, before finally, after eleven edicts demanding his presence, landing at Tientsin on 19th September, well after the debacle at the legations and the fall of Beijing. He managed to find excuses to remain in the port city for a further three weeks, before eventually making his way to the capital to take up his duties.
²

Li Hung-chang and Prince Ch’ing were faced with an almost impossible task. Though riven by international jealousies, the Powers were astute enough to know that a united front would be the best way for each of them to extract maximum benefit from the Middle Kingdom. Their initial dreams of partition of China had long since been consigned to oblivion–despite the undoubted advantages of such a situation, it was recognised that China was simply too vast, its population too large (and most importantly, too
coherent
) for partition to work. Likewise, deposing the Manchus and attempting to install a puppet dynasty or republican government was fraught with too many unknowns. The only remaining option, as the canny Irishman, Sir Robert Hart, pointed out, was to treat with Yehonala and the Manchu. But while the Dynasty might be safe from the barbarians, the Powers were determined to exact punishment and reparations from the Chinese nation. There was more than one way to slice a melon.

The Russians had already gone their own route and effected the
de facto
partition of one part of China. They used the pretext of Boxer unrest to seize Manchuria, rapidly defeating the Chinese forces there, and on 1st October marched victoriously into Mukden, the Manchu’s ancient capital. Japan let it be known, through unofficial channels, that if the Chinese fought the Russian occupation, Japan would supply materiel and officers to train the Chinese army. But the Russians were playing a subtle game, wresting land from China while at the same time offering to broker a truce with the Great Powers in Beijing.
³
Li Hung-chang ignored the Japanese proposal: he had already declared that the Russian advance had no permanent territorial designs. To Li’s mind, it was better to have a reasonable peace agreed in Beijing and to negotiate Russian withdrawal at a later date, than to begin yet another war with exhausted, demoralised troops and no real certainty of victory.

The Powers’ proposals were not long in coming. On 4th October 1900, the French put forward a six-point note as a basis of negotiation. It required: punishment of those responsible for the recent attacks on foreigners; the continued prohibition of arms imports; indemnities for nations, societies and individuals harmed during the hostilities; the strengthening of legation fortifications and establishment of a permanent foreign military presence in Beijing; destruction of the Taku forts; and military occupation of two or three points on the Taku–Tientsin road. This constellation of demands effectively left China humiliated, penniless and helpless. Foreigners would decide the punishment of Chinese, even Princes of the Blood. Indemnities (as the Chinese already well knew) would siphon off resources that might otherwise have been used for self-strengthening. And with a permanent bastion within the capital, the Taku forts gone, and the road to Tientsin under barbarian control, foreign troops could be landed at will–the Chinese would be powerless to resist further demands, reasonable or otherwise, by the Powers. Which was, of course, the reason for the demands in the first place.

The remaining Powers were not satisfied with the French proposal and the final eleven-point Joint Note presented to the Chinese included additional impositions, including the erection of ‘expiatory monuments’ apologising for the deaths of Baron von Ketteler and Mr. Sugiyama, military occupation ‘of certain points...to maintain communication between the capital and the sea’, the death penalty for joining an anti-foreign society, changes to commercial treaties to ‘facilitate’ commercial relations, and the modification of ‘Court Ceremonial relative to the reception of foreign Representatives in the manner which the Powers shall indicate’.
⁴
China was on the floor, and the foreign community was intent on giving it a good kicking.

News of the various stages of the negotiations was conveyed to Yehonala and the court as they continued their flight from the vengeful foreign armies. At first the ‘Sacred Chariot’ had travelled north. Additional carts had been commandeered, and in an unspoken symbol of their relative positions, Yehonala rode in a cart alone, while Kuang Hsu, the Emperor, was forced to share his conveyance with others. Two days after leaving the capital, Yehonala and the court arrived in Huai lai, where the district magistrate Wu Yung, beside himself with worry at the visit of the ‘Two Palaces’, could only offer green bean and millet porridge to break their two-day fast. He apologised profusely, but Yehonala, tired, dirty and careworn, was pragmatic: ‘In time of distress this is enough. Can I at this time say what is good and what is not good?’ Wu Yung was taken to greet the Emperor, who was ‘standing by a chair. He was wearing a half-worn black silk wadded coat, wide in the skirt and sleeves, and he had no outside coat or waistcoat, nor had he a sash. His hair, where it should have been shaved, was an inch long, and his pigtail was disordered. His face was covered with dust, through which his skin showed yellow and dry.’ He too was feasted with green bean and millet porridge, and a little later the Two Palaces joyfully shared five eggs which Wu had found in the drawer of an abandoned house.