← catalogue

Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People

by Isaac Taylor Headland · English · Gutenberg #523 · 424,659 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People

Author: Isaac Taylor Headland


        
Release date: May 1, 1996 [eBook #523]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/523

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURT LIFE IN CHINA: THE CAPITAL, ITS OFFICIALS AND PEOPLE ***




Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.









COURT LIFE IN CHINA

THE CAPITAL

ITS OFFICIALS AND PEOPLE


By

ISAAC TAYLOR HEADLAND

Professor in the Peking University




ISAAC TAYLOR HEADLAND'S THREE BOOKS THAT "LINK EAST AND WEST"

  Court Life in China: The Capital Its Officials and People.
  The Chinese Boy and Girl
  Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes





PREFACE

Until within the past ten years a study of Chinese court life would
have been an impossibility. The Emperor, the Empress Dowager, and the
court ladies were shut up within the Forbidden City, away from a world
they were anxious to see, and which was equally anxious to see them.
Then the Emperor instituted reform, the Empress Dowager came out from
behind the screen, and the court entered into social relations with
Europeans.

For twenty years and more Mrs. Headland has been physician to the
family of the Empress Dowager's mother, the Empress' sister, and many
of the princesses and high official ladies in Peking. She has visited
them in a social as well as a professional way, has taken with her her
friends, to whom the princesses have shown many favours, and they have
themselves been constant callers at our home. It is to my wife,
therefore, that I am indebted for much of the information contained in
this book.

There are many who have thought that the Empress Dowager has been
misrepresented. The world has based its judgment of her character upon
her greatest mistake, her participation in the Boxer movement, which
seems unjust, and has closed its eyes to the tremendous reforms which
only her mind could conceive and her hand carry out. The great Chinese
officials to a man recognized in her a mistress of every situation; the
foreigners who have come into most intimate contact with her, voice her
praise; while her hostile critics are confined for the most part to
those who have never known her. It was for this reason that a more
thorough study of her life was undertaken.

It has also been thought that the Emperor has been misunderstood, being
overestimated by some, and underestimated by others, and this because
of his peculiar type of mind and character. That he was unusual, no one
will deny; that he was the originator of many of China's greatest
reform measures, is equally true; but that he lacked the power to
execute what he conceived, and the ability to select great statesmen to
assist him, seems to have been his chief shortcoming.

To my wife for her help in the preparation of this volume, and to my
father-in-law, Mr. William Sinclair, M. A., for his suggestions, I am
under many obligations.

          I. T. H.



CONTENTS

     I.  THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--HER EARLY LIFE
    II.  THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--HER YEARS OF TRAINING
   III.  THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A RULER
    IV.  THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A REACTIONIST
     V.  THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A REFORMER
    VI.  THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS AN ARTIST
   VII.  THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A WOMAN
  VIII.  KUANG HSU--HIS SELF DEVELOPMENT
    IX.  KUANG HSU--AS EMPEROR AND REFORMER
     X.  KUANG HSU--AS A PRISONER
    XI.  PRINCE CHUN--THE REGENT
   XII.  THE HOME OF THE COURT--THE FORBIDDEN CITY
  XIII.  THE LADIES OF THE COURT
   XIV.  THE PRINCESSES--THEIR SCHOOLS
    XV.  THE CHINESE LADIES OF RANK
   XVI.  THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE CHINESE WOMAN
  XVII.  THE CHINESE LADIES--THEIR ILLS
 XVIII.  THE FUNERAL CEREMONIES OF A DOWAGER PRINCESS
   XIX.  CHINESE PRINCES AND OFFICIALS
    XX.  PEKING--THE CITY OF THE COURT
   XXI.  THE DEATH OF KUANG HSU AND THE EMPRESS DOWAGER
  XXII.  THE COURT AND THE NEW EDUCATION



I

The Empress Dowager--Her Early Life

All the period since 1861 should be rightly recorded as the reign of
Tze Hsi An, a more eventful period than all the two hundred and
forty-four reigns that had preceded her three usurpations. It began
after a conquering army had made terms of peace in her capital, and
with the Tai-ping rebellion in full swing of success....

Those few who have looked upon the countenance of the Dowager describe
her as a tall, erect, fine-looking woman of distinguished and imperious
bearing, with pronounced Tartar features, the eye of an eagle, and the
voice of determined authority and absolute command.--Eliza Ruhamah
Scidmore in "China, The Long-Lived Empire."



I

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--HER EARLY LIFE

One day when one of the princesses was calling at our home in Peking, I
inquired of her where the Empress Dowager was born. She gazed at me for
a moment with a queer expression wreathing her features, as she finally
said with just the faintest shadow of a smile: "We never talk about the
early history of Her Majesty." I smiled in return and continued: "I
have been told that she was born in a small house, in a narrow street
inside of the east gate of the Tartar city--the gate blown up by the
Japanese when they entered Peking in 1900." The princess nodded. "I
have also heard that her father's name was Chao, and that he was a
small military official (she nodded again) who was afterwards beheaded
for some neglect of duty." To this the visitor also nodded assent.

A few days later several well-educated young Chinese ladies, daughters
of one of the most distinguished scholars in Peking, were calling on my
wife, and again I pursued my inquiries. "Do you know anything about the
early life of the Empress Dowager?" I asked of the eldest. She
hesitated a moment, with that same blank expression I had seen on the
face of the princess, and then answered very deliberately,--"Yes,
everybody knows, but nobody talks about it." And this is, no doubt, the
reason why the early life of the greatest woman of the Mongol race,
and, as some who knew her best think, the most remarkable woman of the
nineteenth century, has ever been shrouded in mystery. Whether the
Empress desired thus to efface all knowledge of her childhood by
refusing to allow it to be talked about, I do not know, but I said to
myself: "What everybody knows, I can know," and I proceeded to find out.

I discovered that she was one of a family of several brothers and
sisters and born about 1834; that the financial condition of her
parents was such that when a child she had to help in caring for the
younger children, carrying them on her back, as girls do in China, and
amusing them with such simple toys as are hawked about the streets or
sold in the shops for a cash or two apiece; that she and her brothers
and little sisters amused themselves with such games as blind man's
buff, prisoner's base, kicking marbles and flying kites in company with
the other children of their neighbourhood. During these early years she
was as fond of the puppet plays, trained mice shows, bear shows, and
"Punch and Judy" as she was in later years of the theatrical
performances with which she entertained her visitors at the palace. She
was compelled to run errands for her mother, going to the shops, as
occasion required, for the daily supply of oils, onions, garlic, and
other vegetables that constituted the larger portion of their food. I
found out also that there is not the slightest foundation for the story
that in her childhood she was sold as a slave and taken to the south of
China.

The outdoor life she led, the games she played, and the work she was
forced to do in the absence of household servants, gave to the little
girl a well-developed body, a strong constitution and a fund of
experience and information which can be obtained in no other way. She
was one of the great middle class. She knew the troubles and trials of
the poor. She had felt the pangs of hunger. She could sympathize with
the millions of ambitious girls struggling to be freed from the
trammels of ignorance and the age-old customs of the past--a combat
which was the more real because it must be carried on in silence. And
who can say that it was not the struggles and privations of her own
childhood which led to the wish in her last years that "the girls of my
empire may be educated"?

When little Miss Chao had reached the age of  fourteen or fifteen she
was taken by her parents to an office in the northern part of the
imperial city of Peking where her name, age, personal appearance, and
estimated degree of intelligence and potential ability were registered,
as is done in the case of all the daughters of the Manchu people. The
reason for this singular proceeding is that when the time comes for the
selection of a wife or a concubine for the Emperor, or the choosing of
serving girls for the palace, those in charge of these matters will
know where they can be obtained.

This custom is not considered an unalloyed blessing by the Manchu
people, and many of them would gladly avoid registering their daughters
if only they dared. But the rule is compulsory, and every one belonging
to the eight Banners or companies into which the Manchus are divided
must have their daughters registered. Their aversion to this custom is
well illustrated in the following incident:

In one of the girls' schools in Peking there was a beautiful child, the
daughter of a Manchu woman whose husband was dead. One day this widow
came to the principal of the school and said: "A summons has come from
the court for the girls of our clan to appear before the officials that
a certain number may be chosen and sent into the palace as serving
girls." "When is she to appear?" inquired the teacher. "On the
sixteenth," answered the mother. "I suppose you are anxious that she
should be one of the fortunate ones," said the teacher, "though I
should be sorry to lose her from the school." "On the contrary," said
the mother, "I should be distressed if she were chosen, and have come
to consult with you as to whether we might not hire a substitute." The
teacher expressed surprise and asked her why. "When our daughters are
taken into the palace," answered the mother, "they are dead to us until
they are twenty-five, when they are allowed to return home. If they are
incompetent or dull they are often severely punished. They may contract
disease and die, and their death is not even announced to us; while if
they prove themselves efficient and win the approval of the authorities
they are retained in the palace and we may never see them or hear from
them again."

At first the teacher was inclined to favour the hiring of a substitute,
but on further consideration concluded that it would be contrary to the
law, and advised that the girl be allowed to go. The mother, however,
was so anxious to prevent her being chosen that she sent her with
uncombed hair, soiled clothes and a dirty face, that she might appear
as unattractive as possible.

The prospects for a concubine are even less promising than for a
serving maid, as when she once enters the palace she has little if any
hope of ever leaving it. She is neither mistress nor servant, wife nor
slave, she is but one of a hundred buds in a garden of roses which have
little if any prospect of ever blooming or being plucked for the court
bouquet. When, therefore, the gates of the Forbidden City close behind
the young girls who are taken in as concubines of an emperor they shut
out an attractive, busy, beautiful world, filled with men and women,
boys and girls, homes and children, green fields and rich harvests, and
confine them within the narrow limits of one square mile of brick-paved
earth, surrounded by a wall twenty-five feet high and thirty feet
thick, in which there is but one solitary man who is neither father,
brother, husband nor friend to them, and whom they may never even see.

When therefore the time came for the selection of concubines for the
Emperor Hsien Feng, and our little Miss Chao was taken into the palace,
her parents, like many others, had every reason to consider it a piece
of ill-fortune which had visited their home. The future was veiled from
them. The Forbidden City, surrounded by its great crenelated wall, may
have seemed more like a prison than like a palace. True, they had other
children, and she was "only a girl, but even girls are a small
blessing," as they tell us in their proverbs. She had grown old enough
to be useful in the home, and they no doubt had cherished plans of
betrothing her to the son of some merchant or official who would add
wealth or honour to their family. Neither father nor mother, brother
nor sister, could have conceived of the potential power, honour and
even glory, that were wrapped up in that girl, and that were finally to
come to them as a family, as well as to many of them as individuals.
Their wildest dreams at that time could not have pictured themselves
dukes and princesses, with their daughters as empresses, duchesses, or
ladies-in-waiting in the palace. But such it proved to be.



II

The Empress Dowager--Her Years of Training

  The kindness of the Empress is as boundless as the sea.
  Her person too is holy, she is like a deity.
  With boldness, from seclusion, she ascends the Dragon Throne,
  And saves her suffering country from a fate we dare not own.
        --"Yuan Fan," Translated by I. T. C.



II

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--HER YEARS OF TRAINING

The year our little Miss Chao entered the palace was a memorable one in
the history of China. The Tai-ping rebellion, which had begun in the
south some three years earlier (1850), had established its capital at
Nanking, on the Yangtse River, and had sent its "long-haired" rebels
north on an expedition of conquest, the ultimate aim of which was
Peking. By the end of the year 1853 they had arrived within one hundred
miles of the capital, conquering everything before them, and leaving
devastation and destruction in their wake.

Their success had been extraordinary. Starting in the southwest with an
army of ten thousand men they had eighty thousand when they arrived
before the walls of Nanking. They were an undisciplined horde, without
commissariat, without drilled military leaders, but with such reckless
daring and bravery that the imperial troops were paralyzed with fear
and never dared to meet them in the open field. Thousands of common
thieves and robbers flocked to their standards with every new conquest,
impelled by no higher motive than that of pillage and gain. Rumours
became rife in every village and hamlet, and as they neared the capital
the wildest tales were told in every nook and corner of the city, from
the palace of the young Emperor in the Forbidden City to the mat shed
of the meanest beggar beneath the city wall.

My wife says: "I remember just after going to China, sitting one
evening on a kang, or brick bed, with Yin-ma, an old nurse, our only
light being a wick floating in a dish of oil. Yin-ma was about the age
of the Empress Dowager, but, unlike Her Majesty, her locks were
snow-white. When I entered the dimly lighted room she was sitting in
the midst of a group of women and girls--patients in the hospital--who
listened with bated breath as she told them of the horrors of the
Tai-ping rebellion.

"'Why!' said the old nurse, 'all that the rebels had to do on their way
to Peking, was to cut out as many paper soldiers as they wanted, put
them in boxes, and breathe upon them when they met the imperial troops,
and they were transformed into such fierce warriors that no one was
able to withstand them. Then when the battle was over and they had come
off victors they only needed to breathe upon them again, when they were
changed into paper images and packed in their boxes, requiring neither
food nor clothing. Indeed the spirits of the rebels were everywhere,
and no matter who cut out paper troops they could change them into real
soldiers.'

"'But, Yin-ma, you do not believe those superstitions, do you?'

"'These are not superstitions, doctor, these are facts, which everybody
believed in those days, and it was not safe for a woman to be seen with
scissors and paper, lest her neighbours report that she was cutting out
troops for the rebels. The country was filled with all kinds of
rumours, and every one had to be very careful of all their conduct, and
of everything they said, lest they be arrested for sympathizing with
the enemy.'

"'But, Yin-ma, did you ever see any of these paper images transformed
into soldiers?'

"'No, I never did myself, but there was an old woman lived near our
place, who was said to be in sympathy with the rebels. One night my
father saw soldiers going into her house and when he had followed them
he could find nothing but paper images. You may not have anything of
this kind happen in America, but very many people saw them in those
terrible days of pillage and bloodshed here.'"

Such stories are common in all parts of China during every period of
rebellion, war, riot or disturbance of any kind. The people go about
with fear on their faces, and horror in their voices, telling each
other in undertones of what some one, somewhere, is said to have seen
or heard. Nor are these superstitions confined to the common people.
Many of the better classes believe them and are filled with fear.

As the Tai-ping rebellion broke out when Miss Chao was about fifteen or
sixteen years of age, she would hear these stories for two or three
years before she entered the palace. After she had been taken into the
Forbidden City she would continue to hear them, brought in by the
eunuchs and circulated not only among all the women of the palace, but
among their own associates as well, and here they would take on a more
mysterious and alarming aspect to these people shut away from the
world, as ghost stories become more terrifying when told in the dim
twilight. May this not account in some measure for the attitude assumed
by the Empress Dowager towards the Boxer superstitions of 1900, and
their pretentions to be able at will to call to their aid legions of
spirit-soldiers, while at the same time they were themselves
invulnerable to the bullets of their enemies?

It was when Miss Chao was ten years old that the conflict known as the
Opium War was brought to an end. It has been said that when the Emperor
was asked to sanction the importation of opium, he answered, "I will
never legalize a traffic that will be an injury to my people," but
whether this be true or not, it is admitted by all that the central
government was strongly opposed to the sale and use of the drug within
its domains. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that the first time
the Chinese came into collision with European governments was over a
matter of this kind, and it is to the credit of the Chinese
commissioner when the twenty thousand chests of opium, over which the
dispute arose, were handed over to him, he mixed it with quicklime in
huge vats that it might be utterly destroyed rather than be an injury
to his people. They may have exhibited an ignorance of international
law, they may have manifested an unwise contempt for the foreigner, but
it remains a fact of history that they were ready to suffer great
financial loss rather than get revenue from the ruin of their subjects,
and that England went to war for the purpose of securing indemnity for
the opium destroyed.

The common name for opium among the Chinese is yang yen--foreign
tobacco, and my wife says: "When calling at the Chinese homes, I have
frequently been offered the opium-pipe, and when I refused it the
ladies expressed surprise, saying that they were under the impression
that all foreigners used it."

What now were the results of the Opium War as viewed from the
standpoint of the Chinese people, and what impression would it make
upon them as a whole? Great Britain demanded an indemnity of
$21,000,000, the cession to them of Hongkong, an island on the southern
coast, and the opening of five ports to British trade. China lost her
standing as suzerain among the peoples of the Orient and got her first
glimpse of the White Peril from the West.

Although the Empress Dowager was but a child of ten at this time she
would receive her first impression of the foreigner, which was that he
was a pirate who had come to carry away their wealth, to filch from
them their land, and to overrun their country. He became a veritable
bugaboo to men, women and children alike, and this impression was
crystallized in the expression yang huei, "foreign devil," which is the
only term among a large proportion of the Chinese by which the
foreigner is known. One day when walking on the street in Peking I met
a woman with a child of two years in her arms, and as I passed them,
the child patted its mother on the cheek and said in an
undertone,--"The foreign devil's coming," which led the frightened
mother to cover its eyes with her hand that it might not be injured by
the sight.

On one occasion a friend was travelling through the country when a
Chinese gentleman, dressed in silk and wearing an official hat, called
on him at the inn where he was stopping and with a profound bow
addressed him as "Old Mr. Foreign Devil."

My wife says that: "Not infrequently when I have been called for the
first time to the homes of the better classes I have seen the children
run into the house from the outer court exclaiming,--'The devil
doctor's coming.' Indeed, I have heard the women use this term in
speaking of me to my assistant until I objected, when they asked with
surprise,--'Doesn't she like to be called foreign devil?'" And so the
Empress Dowager's first impression of the foreigner would be that of a
devil.

Colonel Denby tells us that "A Frenchman and his wife were carried off
from Tonquin by bandits who took refuge in China. The Chinese
government was asked to rescue these prisoners and restore them to
liberty. China sent a brigade of troops, who pursued the bandits to
their den and recovered the prisoners. The French government thanked
the Chinese government for its assistance, and bestowed the decoration
of the Legion of Honour on the brigade commander, and then shortly
afterwards demanded the payment of an enormous indemnity for the
outrage on the ground that China had delayed to effect the rescue. The
Chinese were aghast, but they paid the money."

This incident does not stand alone, but is one of a number of similar
experiences which the Chinese government had in her relation with the
powers of Europe, and which have been reported by such writers as
Holcomb, Beresford, Gorst Colquhoun and others in trying to account for
the feelings the Chinese have towards us, all of which was embodied in
the years of training of our little concubine.

It should be remembered that many concubines are selected whom the
Emperor never takes the trouble to see. After being taken in, their
temper and disposition are carefully noted, their faithfulness in the
duties assigned them, their diligence in the performance of their
tasks, their kindness to their inferiors, their treatment of their
equals, and their politeness and obedience to their superiors, and upon
all these things, with many others, as we shall see, their promotion
will finally depend.

When Miss Chao entered the palace, like most girls of her class or
station in life, she was uneducated. She may have studied the small
"Classic for Girls" in which she learned:

"You should rise from bed as early in the morning as the sun, Nor
retire at evening's closing till your work is wholly done."

Or, further, she may have been told,

  When the wheel of life's at fifteen,
  Or when twenty years have passed,
  As a girl with home and kindred these will surely be your last;
  While expert in all employments that compose a woman's life,
  You should study as a daughter all the duties of a wife."

Or she may have read the "Filial Piety Classic for Girls" in which she
learned the importance of the attitude she assumed towards those who
were in authority over her, but certain it is she was not educated.

She had, however, what was better than education--a disposition to
learn. And so when she had the good fortune,--or shall we say
misfortune,--for as we have seen it is variously regarded by Chinese
parents to be taken into the palace, she found there educated eunuchs
who were set aside as teachers of the imperial harem. She was bright,
attractive, and I think I may add without fear of contradiction, very
ambitious, and this in no bad sense. She devoted herself to her studies
with such energy and diligence as not only to attract the attention of
the teacher, but to make herself a fair scholar, a good penman, and an
exceptional painter, and it was not long until, from among all the
concubines, she had gained the attention and won the admiration--and
shall we say affection--not only of the Empress, but of the Emperor
himself, and she was selected as the first concubine or kuei fei, and
from that time until the death of the Empress the two women were the
staunchest of friends.

The new favourite had been a healthy and vigorous girl, with plenty of
outdoor life in childhood, and it was not long before she became the
happy mother of Hsien Feng's only son. She was thenceforward known as
the Empress-mother. In a short time she was raised to the position of
wife, and given the title of Western Empress, as the other was known as
the Eastern, from which time the two women were equal in rank, and, in
the eyes of the world, equal in power.

The first Empress was a pampered daughter of wealth, neither vigorous
of body nor strong of mind, caring nothing for political power if only
she might have ease and comfort, and there is nothing that exhibits the
Empress Dowager's real greatness more convincingly than the fact that
she was able to live for thirty years the more fortunate mother of her
country's ruler, and, in power, the mistress of her superior, without
arousing the latter's envy, jealousy, anger, or enmity. Let any woman
who reads this imagine, if she can, herself placed in the position of
either of these ladies without being inclined to despise the less
fortunate, ease-loving Empress if she be the dowager, or hating the
more powerful dowager if she be the Empress. Such a state of affairs as
these two women lived in for more than a quarter of a century is almost
if not entirely unique in history.

Perhaps the incident which made most impression upon her was one which
happened in 1860 and is recorded in history as the Arrow War. A few
years before a number of Chinese, who owned a boat called the Arrow,
had it registered in Hongkong and hence were allowed to sail under the
British flag. There is no question I think but that these Chinese were
committing acts of piracy, and as this was one of the causes of
disturbance on that southern coast for centuries past, the viceroy
decided to rid the country of this pest. Nine days after the time for
which the boat had been registered, but while it continued unlawfully
to float the British colours, the viceroy seized the boat, imprisoned
all her crew, and dragged down the British flag. This was an insult
which Great Britain could not or would not brook and so the viceroy was
ordered to release the prisoners, all of whom were Chinese subjects, on
penalty of being blown up in his own yamen if he refused.

Frightened at the threat, and remembering the result of the former war,
the viceroy sent the prisoners to the consulate in chains without
proper apologies for his insult to the flag. This angered the consul
and he returned them to the viceroy, who promptly cut off their heads
without so much as the semblance of a trial, and Britain, anxious, as
she was, to have every door of the Chinese empire opened to foreign
trade, found in this another pretext for war. We do not pretend to
argue that this was not the best thing for China and for the world, but
it can only be considered so from the bitter medicine, and corporal
punishment point of view, neither of which are agreeable to either the
patient or the pupil.

Britain went to war. The viceroy was taken a prisoner to India, whence
he never returned. As though ashamed to enter upon a second unprovoked
and unjust war alone, she invited France, Russia, and America to join
her. France was quite ready to do so in the hope of strengthening her
position in Indo-China, and with nothing more than the murder of a
missionary in Kuangsi as a pretext she put a body of troops in the
field large enough to enable her to checkmate England, or humiliate
China as the exigencies of the occasion, and her own interests, might
demand. America and Russia having no cause for war, no wrongs to
redress, and no desire for territory, refused to join her in sending
troops, but gave her such sympathy and support as would enable her to
bring about a more satisfactory arrangement of China's foreign
relations--that is more satisfactory to themselves regardless of the
wishes, though not perhaps the interests, of China.

We know how the British and French marched upon Peking in 1860; how the
summer palace was left a heap of ruins as a punishment for the murder
of a company of men under a flag of truce; and how the Emperor Hsien
Feng, with his wife, and the mother of his only son, our Empress
Dowager, were compelled to flee for the first time before a foreign
invader. Their refuge was Jehol, a fortified town, in a wild and rugged
mountain pass, on the borders of China and Tartary, a hundred miles
northeast of Peking. At this place the Emperor died, whether of
disease, chagrin, or of a broken heart--or of all combined, it is
impossible to say, and the Empress-mother was left AN EXILE AND A
WIDOW, with the capital and the throne for the first time at the mercy
of the Western barbarian.

This was the beginning of two important phases of the Empress Dowager's
life--her affliction and her power, and her greatness is exhibited as
well by the way in which she bore the one as by the way in which she
wielded the other. In most cases a woman would have been so overcome by
sorrow at the loss of her husband, as to have forgotten the affairs of
state, or to have placed them for the time in the hands of others. Not
so with this great woman. Prince Kung the brother of Hsien Feng, had
been left in Peking to arrange a treaty with the Europeans, which he
succeeded in doing to the satisfaction of both the Chinese and the
foreigners.

On the death of the Emperor, a regency was organized by two of the
princes, which did not include Prince Kung, and disregarded both of the
dowagers, and it seemed as though Prince Kung was doomed. His
father-in-law, however, the old statesman who had signed the treaties,
urged him to be the first to get the ear of the two women on their
return to the capital. This he did, and as it seemed evident that the
regency and the council had been organized for the express purpose of
tyrannizing over the Empresses and the child, they were at once
arrested, the leader beheaded, and the others condemned to exile or to
suicide. The child had been placed upon the throne as "good-luck," but
now a new regency was formed, consisting of the two dowagers, with
Prince Kung as joint regent, and the title of the reign was changed to
Tung Chih or "joint government." Thus ended the Empress Dowager's years
of training.



III

The Empress Dowager--As a Ruler

That a Manchu woman who had had such narrow opportunities of obtaining
a knowledge of things as they really are, in distinction from the
tissue of shams which constitute the warp and the woof of an Oriental
Palace, should have been able to hold her own in every situation, and
never be crushed by the opposing forces about her, is a phenomenon in
itself only to be explained by due recognition of the influence of
individual qualities in a ruler even in the semi-absolutism of
China.--Arthur H. Smith in "China in Convulsion."



III

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A RULER

In considering the policy pursued by the Empress-mother after her
accession to the regency, one cannot but feel that she was fully aware
of the fact that she had been the wife of an emperor, and was the
mother of the heir, of a decaying house. Of the 218 years that her
dynasty had been in power, 120 had been occupied by the reigns of two
emperors, and only seven monarchs had sat upon the throne, a smaller
number than ever ruled during the same period in all Chinese history.
These two Emperors, Kang Hsi and Chien Lung, the second and fourth, had
each reigned for sixty years, the most brilliant period of the "Great
Pure Dynasty," unless we except the last six years of the Empress
Dowager's regency. The other ninety-eight years saw five rulers rise
and pass away, each one becoming weaker than his predecessor both in
character and in physique, until with the death of her son, Tung Chih,
the dynasty was left without a direct heir.

The decay of the imperial house, the encroachments of the foreigner,
and the opposition of the native Chinese to the rule of the Manchus,
awoke the Empress Dowager to a realization of the fact that a stronger
hand than that of her husband must be at the helm if the dynasty of her
people were to be preserved. "It may be said with emphasis," says
Colonel Denby, who was for thirteen years minister to China, "that the
Empress Dowager has been the first of her race to apprehend the problem
of the relation of China to the outer world, and to make use of this
relation to strengthen her dynasty and to promote material progress."
She was fortunate in having Prince Kung associated with her in the
regency, a man tall, handsome and dignified, and the greatest statesman
that has come from the royal house since the time of Chien Lung.

Here appears one of the chief characteristics of the Empress Dowager as
a ruler--her ability to choose the greatest statesmen, the wisest
advisers, the safest leaders, and the best guides, from the great mass
of Chinese officials, whether progressive or conservative. Prince Kung
was for forty years the leading figure of the Chinese capital outside
of the Forbidden City. He appeared first, at the age of twenty-six, as
a member of the commission that tried the minister who failed to make
good his promise to induce Lord Elgin and his men-of-war to withdraw
from Tientsin in 1858. The following year he was made a member of the
Colonial Board that controlled the affairs of the "outer Barbarians,"
and a year later was left in Peking, when the court fled, to arrange a
treaty of peace with the victorious British and French after they had
taken the capital. "In these trying circumstances," says Professor
Giles, "the tact and resource of Prince Kung won the admiration of his
opponents," and when the Foreign Office was formed in 1861, it began
with the Prince as its first president, a position which he continued
to hold for many years.

It was he, as we have seen, who succeeded in outwitting and
overthrowing the self-constituted regency on the death of his brother
Hsien Feng, and, with the Empress Dowager, seated her infant son upon
the throne, with the two Empresses and himself as joint regents. This
condition continued for some years, with the senior Empress exercising
no authority, and Prince Kung continually growing in power. The
arrangement seemed satisfactory to all but one--the Empress-mother. To
her it appeared as though he were fast becoming the government, and she
and the Empress were as rapidly receding into the background, while in
reality the design had been to make him "joint regent" with them. In
all the receptions of the officials by the court, Prince Kung alone
could see them face to face, while the ladies were compelled to remain
behind a screen, listening to the deliberations but without taking any
part therein, other than by such suggestions as they might make.

Being the visible head of the government, and the only avenue to
positions of preferment, he would naturally be flattered by the Chinese
officials. This led him to assume an air of importance which
consciously or unconsciously he carried into the presence of their
Majesties, and one morning he awoke to find himself stripped of all his
rank and power, and confined and guarded a prisoner in his palace, by a
joint decree from the two Empresses accusing him of "lack of respect
for their Majesties." The deposed Prince at once begged their
forgiveness, whereupon all his honours were restored with their
accompanying dignities, but none of his former power as joint regent,
and thus the first obstacle to her reestablishment of the dynasty was
eliminated by the Empress-mother. To show Prince Kung, however, that
they bore him no ill will, the Empresses adopted his daughter as their
own, raising her to the rank of an imperial princess, and though the
Prince has long since passed away his daughter still lives, and next to
the Empress Dowager has been the leading figure in court circles during
the past ten years' association with the foreigners.

During her son's minority, after the dismissal of Prince Kung as joint
regent, the Empress-mother year by year took a more active part in the
affairs of state, while the Empress as gradually sank into the
background. She was far-sighted. Having but one son, and knowing the
uncertainty of life, she originated a plan to secure the succession to
her family. To this end she arranged for the marriage of her younger
sister to her husband's younger brother commonly known as the Seventh
Prince, in the hope that from this union there might come a son who
would be a worthy occupant of the dragon throne in case her own son
died without issue. She felt that the country needed a great central
figure capable of inspiring confidence and banishing uncertainty, a
strong, well-balanced, broad-minded, self-abnegating chief executive,
and she proposed to furnish one. Whether she would succeed or not must
be left to the future to reveal, but the one great task set by destiny
for her to accomplish was to prepare the mind of a worthy successor to
meet openly and intelligently the problems which had been too vast, too
new and too complicated for her predecessors, if not for herself, to
solve.

When her son was seventeen years old he was married to Alute, a young
Manchu lady of one of the best families in Peking and was nominally
given the reins of power, though as a matter of fact the supreme
control of affairs was still in the hands of his more powerful mother.
The ministers of the European countries, England, France, Germany,
Russia and the United States, now resident at Peking, thought this a
good time for bringing up the matter of an audience with the new ruler,
and after a long discussion with Prince Kung and the Empress-mother,
the matter was arranged without the ceremony of prostration which all
previous rulers had demanded.

The married life of this young couple was a short one. Three years
after their wedding ceremonies the young monarch contracted smallpox
and died without issue, and was followed shortly afterwards by his
young wife who heeded literally the instruction of one of their female
teachers in her duty to her husband to

  Share his joy as well as sorrow, riches, poverty or guilt,
  And in death be buried with him, as in life you shared his guilt.

That her nearest relatives did not believe, as has often been
suggested, that there was any "foul play" in regard to her death, is
evident from the fact that her father continued to hold office until
the time of the Boxer uprising, at which time he followed the fleeing
court as far as Paotingfu, where having heard that the capital was in
the hands of the hated foreigners, he sent word back to his family that
he would neither eat the foreigners' bread nor drink their water, but
would prefer to die by his own hand. When his family received this
message they commanded their servants to dig a great pit in their own
court in which they all lay and ordered the coolies to bury them. This
they at first refused to do, but they were finally prevailed upon, and
thus perished all the male members of her father's household except one
child that was rescued and carried away by a faithful nurse.

When Tung Chih died there was a formidable party in the palace opposed
to the two dowagers, anxious to oust them and their party and place
upon the throne a dissolute son of Prince Kung. But it would require a
master mind from the outside to learn of the death of her son and
select and proclaim a successor quicker than the Empress Dowager
herself could do so from the inside. She first sent a secret messenger
to Li Hung-chang whom she had appointed viceroy of the metropolitan
province at Tientsin eighty miles away, informing him of the illness of
her son and urging him to come to Peking with his troops post-haste and
be ready to prevent any disturbance in case of his death and the
announcement of a successor.

When Li Hung-chang received her orders, he began at once to put them
into execution. Taking with him four thousand of his most reliable
Anhui men, all well-armed horse, foot and artillery, he made a secret
forced march to Peking. The distance of eighty miles was covered in
thirty-six hours and he planned to arrive at midnight. Exactly on the
hour Li and his picked guard were admitted, and in dead silence they
marched into the Forbidden City. Every man had in his mouth a wooden
bit to prevent talking, while the metal trappings of the horses were
muffled to deaden all sound. When they arrived at the forbidden
precincts, the Manchu Bannermen on guard at the various city gates were
replaced by Li's Anhui braves, and as the Empress Dowager had sent
eunuchs to point out the palace troops which were doubtful or that had
openly declared for the conspirators, these were at once disarmed,
bound and sent to prison. The artillery were ordered to guard the gates
of the Forbidden City, the cavalry to patrol the grounds, and the
foot-soldiers to pick up any stray conspirators that could be found. A
strong detachment was stationed so as to surround the Empress Dowager
and the child whom she had selected as a successor to her son, and when
the morning sun rose bright and clear over the Forbidden City the
surprise of the conspirators who had slept the night away was complete.
Of the disaffected that remained, some were put in prison and others
sent into perpetual exile to the Amoor beyond their native borders, and
when the Empress Dowager announced the death of her son, she proclaimed
the son of her sister, Kuang Hsu, as his successor, with herself and
the Empress as regents during his minority. When everything was
settled, Li folded his tent like the Arab, and stole away as silently
as he had come.

The wisdom and greatness of the Empress Dowager were thus manifested in
binding to the throne the greatest men not only in the capital but in
the provinces. Li Hung-chang had won his title to greatness during the
Tai-ping rebellion, for his part in the final extinction of which he
was ennobled as an Earl. From this time onward she placed him in the
highest positions of honour and power within sufficient proximity to
the capital to have his services within easy reach. For twenty-four
years he was kept as viceroy of the metropolitan province of Chihli,
with the largest and best drilled army at his command that China had
ever had, and yet during all this time he realized that he was watched
with the eyes of an eagle lest he manifest any signs of rebellion,
while his nephew was kept in the capital as a hostage for his good
conduct. Once and again when he had reached the zenith of his power, or
had been feted by foreign potentates enough to turn the head of a
bronze Buddha, his yellow jacket and peacock feather were kindly but
firmly removed to remind him that there was a power in Peking on whom
he was dependent.

Li Hung-chang's greatness made him many enemies. Those whom he
defeated, those whom he would not or could not help, those whom he
punished or put out of office, and those whose enmity was the result of
jealousy. When the war with Japan closed and the Chinese government
sent Chang Yin-huan to negotiate a treaty of peace, the Japanese
refused to accept him, nor were they willing to take up the matter
until "Li Hung-chang was appointed envoy, chiefly because of his great
influence over the government, and the respect in which he was held by
the people." We all know how he went, how he was shot in the face by a
Japanese fanatic, the ball lodging under the left eye, where it
remained a memento which he carried to the grave. We all know how he
recovered from the wound, and how because of his sufferings he was able
to negotiate a better treaty than he could otherwise have done. Then he
returned home, and only "the friendship of the Empress and his own
personal sufferings saved his life," says Colonel Denby, for "the new
treaty was urgently denounced in China" by carping critics who would
not have been recognized as envoys by their Japanese enemies.

In 1896 he was appointed to attend the coronation of the Czar at
Moscow, and thence continued his trip around the world. Never before
nor since has a Chinese statesman or even a prince been feted as he was
in every country through which he passed. When he was about to start,
at his request I had a round fan painted for him, with a map of the
Eastern hemisphere on one side and the Western on the other, on which
all the steamship lines and railroads over which he was to travel were
clearly marked, with all the ports and cities at which he expected to
stop. He was photographed with Gladstone, and hailed as the "Bismarck
of the East," but when he returned to Peking, for no reason but
jealousy, "he was treated as an extinct volcano." The Empress Dowager
invited him to the Summer Palace where he was shown about the place by
the eunuchs, treated to tea and pipes, and led into pavilions where
only Her Majesty was allowed to enter, and then denounced to the Board
of Punishments who were against him to a man. And now this Grand
Secretary whom kings and courts had honoured, whom emperors and
presidents had feted, and our own government had spent thirty thousand
dollars in entertaining, was once more stripped of his yellow jacket
and peacock feather, and fined the half of a year's salary as a member
of the Foreign Office, which was the amusing sum of forty-five taels or
about thirty-five dollars gold, and it was said in Peking at the time
that only the intercession of the Empress Dowager saved him from
imprisonment or further disgrace.

During the whole regency of the Empress Dowager only two men have
occupied the position of President of the Grand Council--Prince Kung
and Prince Ching. While the former was degraded many times and had his
honours all taken from him, the latter "has kept himself on top of a
rolling log for thirty years" without losing any of the honours which
were originally conferred upon him. The same is true of Chang
Chih-tung, Liu Kun-yi and Wang Wen-shao, three great viceroys and Grand
Secretaries whom the Empress Dowager has never allowed to be without an
important office, but whom she has never degraded. Need we ask the
reason why? The answer is not far to seek. They were the most eminent
progressive officials she had in her empire, but none of them were
great enough to be a menace to her dynasty, and hence need not be
reminded that there was a power above them which by a stroke of her pen
could transfer them from stars in the official firmament to dandelions
in the grass. Not so with Yuan Shih-kai--but we will speak of him in
another chapter.

All the great officials thus far mentioned have belonged to the
progressive rather than the conservative party, all of them the
favourites of the Empress Dowager, placed in positions of influence and
kept in office by her, all of them working for progress and reform, and
yet she has been constantly spoken of by European writers as a
reactionary. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as we shall see.
Nevertheless she kept some of the great conservative officials in
office either as viceroys or Grand Secretaries that she might be able
to hear both sides of all important questions.

One of these conservatives was Jung Lu, the father-in-law of the
present Regent. When she placed Yuan Shih-kai in charge of the army of
north China, she also appointed Jung Lu as Governor-General of the
metropolitan province of Chihli. One was a progressive, the other a
conservative. Neither could make any important move without the
knowledge and consent of the other. Whether the Empress Dowager foresaw
the danger that was likely to arise, we do not know, but she provided
against it. We refer to the occasion when in 1898 the Emperor ordered
Yuan Shih-kai to bring his troops to Peking, guard the Empress Dowager
a prisoner in the Summer Palace, and protect him in his efforts at
reform. The story belongs in another chapter, but we refer to it here
to show how the Empress Dowager played one official against another,
and one party against another, to prevent any such calamity or
surprise. It would have been impossible for Yuan Shih-kai to have taken
his troops to Peking for any purpose without first informing his
superior officer Jung Lu unless he put him to death, much less to have
gone on such a mission as that of imprisoning as important a personage
as the Empress Dowager, to whom they were both indebted for their
office.

Another instance of the way in which the Empress Dowager played one
party against another was the appointment of Prince Tuan as a member of
the Foreign Office. After his son had been selected as the
heir-apparent it seemed to the Empress Dowager that for his own
education and development he should be made to come in contact with the
foreigners. Most of the foreigners considered the appointment
objectionable on account of the "Prince's anti-foreign tendencies. But
to my mind," says Sir Robert Hart, "it was a good one; the Empress
Dowager had probably said to the Prince, 'You and your party pull one
way, Prince Ching and his another--what am I to do between you? You,
however, are the father of the future Emperor, and have your son's
interests to take care of; you are also head of the Boxers and chief of
the Peking Field Force, and ought therefore to know what can and what
cannot be done. I therefore appoint you to the yamen; do what you
consider most expedient, and take care that the throne of your
ancestors descends untarnished to your son, and their empire
undiminished! yours is the power,--yours the responsibility--and yours
the chief interests!' I can imagine the Empress Dowager taking this
line with the Prince, and, inasmuch as various ministers who had been
very anti-foreign before entering the yamen had turned round and
behaved very sensibly afterwards, I felt sure that responsibility and
actual personal dealings with foreigners would be a good experience and
a useful education for this Prince, and that he would eventually be one
of the sturdiest supporters of progress and good relations."



IV

The Empress Dowager--As a Reactionist

The most interesting personage in China during the past thirty years
has been and still is without doubt the lady whom we style the Empress
Dowager. The character of the Empress's rule can only be judged by what
it was during the regency, when she was at the head of every movement
that partook of the character of reform. Foreign diplomacy has failed,
for want of a definite centre of volition and sensation to act upon. It
had no fulcrum for its lever. Hence only force has ever succeeded in
China. With a woman like the Empress might it not be possible really to
transact business?--Blackwood's Magazine.



IV

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A REACTIONIST

It was between November 1, 1897, and April 16, 1898, that Germany,
Russia, France and England wrested from the weak hands of the Emperor
Kuang Hsu the four best ports in the Chinese empire, leaving China
without a place to rendezvous a fleet. The whole empire was aroused to
indignation, and even in our Christian schools, every essay, oration,
dialogue or debate was a discussion of some phase of the subject, "How
to reform and strengthen China." The students all thought, the young
reformers all thought, and the foreigners all thought that Kuang Hsu
had struck the right track. The great Chinese officials, however, were
in doubt, and it was because of their doubt--progressives as well as
conservatives--that the Empress Dowager was again called to the throne.

Now may I request the enemies of the Empress Dowager to ask themselves
what they would have done if they had been placed at the head of their
own government when it was thus being filched from them? You say she
was anti-foreign--would you have been very much in love with Germany,
Russia, France and England under those circumstances? That she acted
unwisely in placing herself in the hands of the conservatives and
allying herself with the superstitious Boxers, we must all frankly
admit. But what would you have done? Might you not--I do not say you
would with your intelligence--but might you not have been induced to
have clutched at as great a log as the patriotic Boxers seemed to
present, if you had been as near drowning as she was?

"It is generally supposed," says one of her critics, "that Kang Yu-wei
suggested to the Emperor, that if he would render his own position
secure, he must retire the Empress Dowager, and decapitate Jung Lu." If
that be true, and I think it very reasonable, the condition must have
been desperate, when the reformers had to begin killing the greatest of
their opponents, and imprisoning those who had given them their power,
though neither of these at that time had raised a hand against them.
Have you noticed how ready we are to forgive those on our side for
doing that for which we would bitterly condemn our opponents? The same
people who condemn the Empress Dowager for beheading the six young
reformers stand ready to forgive Kuang Hsu for ordering the
decapitation of Jung Lu, and the imprisonment of his foster-mother.

There were two powerful factions in Peking, the progressives, headed by
Prince Ching; and the conservatives, headed by Jung Lu. Now the Empress
Dowager may have reasoned thus: "The progressives and reformers have
had their day. They have tried their plans and they have failed. The
only result they have secured is peace--but peace always at the expense
of territory. Now I propose to try another plan. I will part with no
more ports, and I will resist to the death every encroachment." She
therefore took up Li Ping-heng, who had been deposed from the
governorship of Shantung at the time of the murder of the German
missionaries, and appointed him Generalissimo of the forces of the
Yangtse, where he no doubt promised to resist to the last all
encroachments of the foreigners in that part of the empire while Jung
Lu was retained in Peking as head of all the forces of the province of
Chihli and the Northern Squadron. She then appointed Kang Yi, another
conservative, equally as anti-foreign as Li Ping-heng, to inspect the
fortifications and garrisons of the empire, and to raise an immense sum
of money for the depleted treasury. In his visits to the southern
provinces, Kang Yi at this time raised not less than two million taels,
which was no doubt spent in the purchase of guns and ammunition and
other preparations for war. Yu Hsien, another equally conservative
Manchu, she appointed Governor of Shantung to succeed Li Ping-heng, and
it is to him the whole Boxer uprising is due. Moreover when he, at the
repeated requests of the foreigners, was removed from Shantung, she
received him in audience at Peking, conferred upon him additional
honours and appointed him Governor of the adjoining province of Shansi,
where, and under whose jurisdiction, almost all the massacres were
committed. Indeed Yu Hsien may be considered the whole Boxer movement,
for this seems to have been his plan for getting rid of the foreigners.

But while thus allying herself with the conservatives, the Empress
Dowager did not cut herself off from the progressives. Li Hung-chang
was appointed Viceroy of Kuangtung, Yuan Shih-kai Governor of Shantung
and Tuan Fang of Shensi while Liu Kun-yi, Chang Chih-tung, and Kuei
Chun were kept at their posts, so that she had all the greatest men of
both parties once more in her service. Then she began sending out
edicts, retracting those issued by Kuang Hsu, and what could be more
considerate of the feelings of the Emperor, or more diplomatic as a
state paper than the following, issued in the name of Kuang Hsu,
September 26, 1898.

"Our real desire was to make away with superfluous posts for the sake
of economy: whereas, on the contrary, we find rumours flying abroad
that we intended to change wholesale the customs of the empire, and, in
consequence, innumerable impossible suggestions of reform have been
presented to us. If we allowed this to go on, none of us would know to
what pass matters would come. Hence, unless we hasten to put our
present wishes clearly before all, we greatly fear that the petty yamen
officials and their underlings will put their own construction on what
commands have gone before, and create a ferment in the midst of the
usual calm of the people. This will indeed be contrary to our desire,
and put our reforms for strengthening and enriching our empire to
naught.

"We therefore hereby command that the Supervisorate of Instruction and
other five minor Courts and Boards, which were recently abolished by us
and their duties amalgamated with other Boards for the sake of economy,
etc., be forthwith restored to their original state and duties, because
we have learned that the process of amalgamation contains many
difficulties and will require too much labour. We think, therefore, it
is best that these offices be not abolished at all, there being no
actual necessity for doing this. As for the provincial bureaus and
official posts ordered to be abolished, the work in this connection can
go on as usual, and the viceroys and governors are exhorted to work
earnestly and diligently in the above duty. Again as to the edict
ordering the establishment of an official newspaper, the Chinese
Progress, and the privilege granted to all scholars and commoners to
memorialize us on reforms, etc., this was issued in order that a way
might be opened by which we could come into touch with our subjects,
high and low. But as we have also given extra liberty to our censors
and high officers to report to us on all matters pertaining to the
people and their government, any reforms necessary, suggested by these
officers, will be attended to at once by us. Hence we consider that our
former edict allowing all persons to report to us is, for obvious
reasons, superfluous, with the present legitimate machinery at hand.
And we now command that the privilege be withdrawn, and only the proper
officers be permitted to report to us as to what is going on in our
empire. As for the newspaper Chinese Progress, it is really of no use
to the government, while, on the other hand, it will excite the masses
to evil; hence we command the said paper to be suppressed.

"With regard to the proposed Peking University and the middle schools
in the provincial capitals, they may go on as usual, as they are a
nursery for the perfection of true ability and talents. But with
reference to the lower schools in the sub-prefectures and districts
there need be no compulsion, full liberty being given to the people
thereof to do what they please in this connection. As for the
unofficial Buddhist, Taoist, and memorial temples which were ordered to
be turned into district schools, etc., so long as these institutions
have not broken the laws by any improper conduct of the inmates, or the
deities worshipped in them are not of the seditious kind, they are
hereby excused from the edict above noted. At the present moment, when
the country is undergoing a crisis of danger and difficulty, we must be
careful of what may be done, or what may not, and select only such
measures as may be really of benefit to the empire."

I submit the above edict to the reader requesting him to study it, and,
if necessary to its understanding, to copy it, and see if the Empress
Dowager has not preserved the best there is in it, viz., "the Peking
University, and the middle schools in the provincial capitals," "full
liberty being given to the people with reference to the lower schools
in the sub-prefectures and districts to do as they please." How much
oil would be cast on how many troubled waters can only be realized by
the unfortunate priests and dismissed officials and people upon whom
"there need be no compulsion"!

Three days after the foregoing, on September 29th, she issued another
edict purporting to come from the Emperor, ordering the punishment of
Kang Yu-wei and others of his confreres. Now, if it is true that Kang
Yu-wei advised the Emperor to behead Jung Lu and imprison the Empress
Dowager, for no cause whatsoever, how would you have been inclined to
treat him supposing you had been in her place? The decree says:

"All know that we try to rule this empire by our filial piety towards
the Empress Dowager; but Kang Yu-wei's doctrines have always been
opposed to the ancient Confucian tenets. Owing, however, to the ability
shown by the said Kang Yu-wei in modern and practical matters, we
sought to take advantage of it by appointing him a secretary of the
Foreign Office, and subsequently ordered him to Shanghai to direct the
management of the official newspaper there. Instead of this, however,
he dared to remain in Peking pursuing his nefarious designs against the
dynasty, and had it not been for the protection given by the spirits of
our ancestors he certainly would have succeeded. Kang Yu-wei is
therefore the arch conspirator, and his chief assistant is Liang
Chi-tsao, M. A., and they are both to be immediately arrested and
punished for the crime of rebellion. The other principal conspirators,
namely, the Censor Yang Shen-hsin, Kang Kuang-jen--the brother of Kang
Yu-wei--and the four secretaries of the Tsungli Yamen, Tan Sze-tung,
Liu Hsin, Yang Jui, and Liu Kuang-ti, we immediately ordered to be
arrested and imprisoned by the Board of Punishments: but fearing that
if any delay ensued in sentencing them they would endeavour to entangle
a number of others, we accordingly commanded yesterday (September 28th)
their immediate execution, so as to close the matter entirely and
prevent further troubles."

This with the execution of one or two other officials is the greatest
crime that can be laid at the door of the Empress Dowager--great enough
in all conscience--yet not to be compared to those of "good Queen Bess."

We now come to what is said to have been a secret edict issued by the
Empress Dowager to her viceroys, governors, Tartar generals and the
commanders-in-chief of the provinces, dated November 21, 1899. And this
I regard as one of the greatest and most daring things that great woman
ever undertook.

After the Empress Dowager had taken the throne, Italy, following the
example set by the other powers, demanded the cession of Sanmen Bay in
the province of Chekiang. But she found a different ruler on the
throne, and to her great surprise, as well as that of every one else,
China returned a stubborn refusal. Moreover, she began to prepare to
resist the demand, and it soon became evident that to obtain it, Italy
must go to war. This she had not the stomach for and so the demand was
withdrawn. This explanation will go far towards helping us to
understand the following secret edict of November 21st, to which I have
already referred.

"Our empire is now labouring under great difficulties which are
becoming daily more and more serious. The various Powers cast upon us
looks of tiger-like voracity, hustling each other in their endeavours
to be the first to seize upon our innermost territories. They think
that China, having neither money nor troops, would never venture to go
to war with them. They fail to understand, however, that there are
certain things that this empire can never consent to, and that, if
hardly pressed upon, we have no alternative but to rely upon the
justice of our cause, the knowledge of which in our breasts strengthens
our resolves and steels us to present a united front against our
aggressors. No one can guarantee, under such circumstances, who will be
the victor and who the vanquished in the end. But there is an evil
habit which has become almost a custom among our viceroys and governors
which, however, must be eradicated at all costs. For instance, whenever
these high officials have had on their hands cases of international
dispute, all their actions seem to be guided by the belief in their
breasts that such cases would eventually be 'amicably arranged.' These
words seem never to be out of their thoughts: hence, when matters do
come to a crisis, they, of course, find themselves utterly unprepared
to resist any hostile aggressions on the part of the foreigner. We,
indeed, consider this the most serious failure in the duty which the
highest provincial authorities owe to the throne, and we now find it
incumbent upon ourselves to censure such conduct in the most severe
terms.

"It is our special command, therefore, that should any high official
find himself so hard pressed by circumstances that nothing short of war
would settle matters, he is expected to set himself resolutely to work
out his duty to this end. Or, perhaps, it would be that war has already
actually been declared; under such circumstances there is no possible
chance of the imperial government consenting to an immediate conference
for the restoration of peace. It behooves, therefore, that our
viceroys, governors, and commanders-in-chief throughout the whole
empire unite forces and act together without distinction or
particularizing of jurisdictions so as to present a combined front to
the enemy, exhorting and encouraging their officers and soldiers in
person to fight for the preservation of their homes and native soil
from the encroaching footsteps of the foreign aggressor. Never should
the word 'Peace' fall from the mouths of our high officials, nor should
they even allow it to rest for a moment within their breasts. With such
a country as ours, with her vast area, stretching out several tens of
thousands of li, her immense natural resources, and her hundreds of
millions of inhabitants, if only each and all of you would prove his
loyalty to his Emperor and love of country, what, indeed, is there to
fear from any invader? Let no one think of making peace, but let each
strive to preserve from destruction and spoliation his ancestral home
and graves from the ruthless hands of the invader."

One of her critics, referring to the last sentence of the above edict,
asks: "Do not these words throw down the gauntlet?" And we answer, yes.
Did not the thirteen colonies throw down the gauntlet to England for
less cause? Did not Japan throw down the gauntlet to Russia for less
cause than the Empress Dowager had for desiring that "each strive TO
PRESERVE FROM DESTRUCTION AND SPOLIATION HIS ANCESTRAL HOME AND
GRAVES"? It was not for conquest but for self-preservation the Empress
Dowager was ready to go to war; not for glory but for home; not against
a taunting neighbour, but against a "ruthless invader." Her unwisdom
did not consist in her being ready to go to war, but in allowing
herself to be allied to, and depend upon, the superstitious rabble of
Boxers, and to believe that her "hundreds of millions" of undisciplined
"inhabitants" could withstand the thousands or tens of thousands of
well-drilled, well-led, intelligent soldiers from the West.

That she was ready to go to war rather than weakly yield to the demands
for territory from the European powers is further evidenced by the
following edict issued by the Tsungli Yamen to the viceroys and
governors:

"This yamen has received the special commands of her Imperial Majesty
the Empress Dowager, and his Imperial Majesty the Emperor, to grant you
full power and liberty to resist by force of arms all aggressions upon
your several jurisdictions, proclaiming a state of war, if necessary,
without first asking instructions from Peking; for this loss of time
may be fatal to your security, and enable the enemy to make good his
footing against your forces."

In order to strengthen her position she appointed two commissioners
whom she sent to Japan in the hope of forming a secret defensive
alliance with that nation against the White Peril from the West. For
once, however, she made a mistake in the selection of her men, for
these commissioners, unlike what we usually find the yellow man,
revealed too much of the important mission on which they were bent, and
were recalled in disgrace, and the treaty came to naught.



V

The Empress Dowager--As a Reformer

Taught by the failure of a reaction on which she had staked her life
and her throne, the Dowager has become a convert to the policy of
progress. She has, in fact, outstripped her nephew. "Long may she
live!" "Late may she rule us!" During her lifetime she may be counted
on to carry forward the cause she has so ardently espoused. She grasps
the reins with a firm hand; and her courage is such that she does not
hesitate to drive the chariot of state over many a new and untried
road. She knows she can rely on the support of her viceroys--men of her
own appointment. She knows too that the spirit of reform is abroad in
the land, and that the heart of the people is with her.--W. A. P.
Martin in "The Awakening of China."



V

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A REFORMER

In June, 1902, soon after the return of the court from Hsian to Peking,
a company of ladies from the various legations in Peking who had
received invitations to an audience and a banquet with the Empress
Dowager were asked to meet at one of the legations for the purpose of
consultation. The meeting was unusual. Many of those who were present
had no higher motive than the ordinary tourist who goes sightseeing.
With the exception of one or two who had been in once before, none of
these ladies had ever been present at an audience. Several of them
however had passed through the Boxer siege of 1900, had witnessed the
guns from the wall of the Imperial City pouring shot and shell into the
British legation, where they were confined during those eight memorable
weeks of June, July and August, and had come out with their hearts
filled with resentment. One of them had received a decoration from her
government for her bravery in standing beside her husband on the
fortifications when buildings were crumbling and walls falling, and her
husband was buried by an exploding mine, and then vomited out unhurt by
a second explosion. Among the number were several recent arrivals in
Peking who had had none of these bitter experiences, but had heard much
of the Empress Dowager, and above all things else they were anxious to
see her whom they called the "She Dragon."

The presiding officer had been longest in Peking, and as doyen of these
diplomatic ladies, she acted as chairman of the meeting. The first
question to be decided was the mode of conveyance to the "Forbidden
City." Without much discussion it was decided to use the sedan chair,
as being the most dignified, and used only by Chinese ladies of rank.
The chairman then called for an expression of opinion as to the method
of procedure in presentation to the throne. One suggested that they
have no ceremony about it, but all go up to the throne together, for in
this way none would take precedence, but all would have an equal
opportunity of satisfying their curiosity and scrutinizing this female
dragon ad libitum. Another said: "It will be broiling hot on that June
day, and it will be better to keep at a safe distance from her, with
plenty of guards to protect us, or we may be broiled in more senses
than one." The chairman looked worried at these suggestions, but still
kept her dignity and her equilibrium. Then a mild voice suggested that
it was customary in all audiences for those presented to courtesy to
the one on the throne. "Courtesy!" broke in an indignant voice, "it
would be more appropriate for her to prostrate herself at our feet and
beg us to forgive her for trying to shoot us, than for us to courtesy
to her." It was finally decided, however, that the same formalities be
observed as were followed by the ministers when received at court. I
give these incidents to show the temper that prevailed among the
members of some of the legations at Peking at the time of this first
audience.

"When a few days later we followed the long line of richly-robed
princesses into the audience-hall, all this was changed. As we looked
at the Empress Dowager seated upon her throne on a raised dais, with
the Emperor to her left and members of the Grand Council kneeling
beside her, and these dignified, stately princesses courtesying until
their knees touched the floor, we forgot the resentful feeling
expressed in the meeting a few days before, and, awed by her majestic
bearing and surroundings, we involuntarily gave the three courtesies
required from those entering the imperial presence. We could not but
feel that this stately woman who sat upon the throne was every inch an
empress. In her hands rested the weal or woe of one-third of the human
race. Her brilliant black eyes seemed to read our thoughts. Indeed she
prides herself upon the fact that at a glance she can read the
character of every one that appears before her."

After the ladies had taken their position in order of their rank, the
doyen presented their good wishes to Her Majesty, which was replied to
by a few gracious words from the throne. Each lady's name was then
announced and as she was formally presented she ascended the dais, and
as she courtesied, the Empress Dowager extended her hand which she
took, and then passed to the left to be introduced in a similar way to
the Emperor.

It was thus she began her reforms in the customs of the court, which up
to this time had kept her ever behind the screen, compelled to wield
the sceptre from her place of concealment, equally shut out from the
eyes of the world and blind to the needs of her people. Up to her time
the people and the nation were the slaves of age-old customs, but
before the power of her personality rites and ceremonies became the
servants of the people. In the words of the poet she seemed to feel that

                           "Rules
           Are well; but never fear to break
           The scaffolding of other souls;
           It was not meant for thee to mount,
           Though it may serve thee."


Without taking away from the Emperor the credit of introducing the
railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the new system of education,
and many other reforms, we must still admit that it was the
personality, power and statesmanship of the Empress Dowager that
brought about the realization of his dreams. The movement towards
female education as described in another chapter must ever be placed to
the credit of this great woman. From the time she came from behind the
screen, and allowed her portrait to be painted, the freedom of woman
was assured.

One day when calling at the American legation I was shown two large
photographs of Her Majesty. One some three feet square was to be sent
to President Roosevelt, the other was a gift to Major Conger. Similar
photographs had been sent to all the ministers and rulers represented
at Peking, and I said to myself: "The Empress Dowager is shrewd. She
knows that false pictures of her have gone forth. She knows that the
painted portrait is not a good likeness, and so she proposes to have
genuine pictures in the possession of all civilized governments." This
shrewdness was not necessarily native on her part, but was engendered
by the arguments that had been used by those who induced her to be the
first Chinese monarch to have her portrait painted by a foreign artist.

A few years ago the Empress Dowager had a dream, which, like every act
of hers, was greater than any of those of her brilliant nephew. This
dream was to give a constitution to China. Of course, if this were done
it would have to be by the Manchus, as the government was theirs, and
any radical changes that were made would have to be made by the people
in power. The Empress Dowager, however, wanted the honour of this move
to reflect upon herself, and hoped to be able to bring it to a
successful issue during her lifetime.

There was strenuous opposition, and this most vigorous in the party in
which she had placed herself when she dethroned Kuang Hsu. The
conservatives regarded this as the wildest venture that had yet been
made, and were ready to use all their influence to prevent it;
nevertheless the Empress Dowager called to her aid the greatest and
most progressive of the Manchus, the Viceroy Tuan Fang, and appointed
him head of a commission which she proposed to send on a tour of the
world to examine carefully the various forms of government, with the
purpose of advising her, on their return, as to the possibility of
giving a constitution to China.

A special train was provided to take the commission from Peking to
Tientsin. It was drawn up at the station just outside the gate in front
of the Emperor's palace. The commission had entered the car, and the
narrow hall or aisle along the side was crowded with those who had come
to see them off, when, BANG, there was an explosion, the side of the
car was blown out, several were injured, including slight wounds to
some of the members of the commission, and the man carrying the bomb
was blown into an unrecognizable mass. For a few days the city was in
an uproar. Guards were placed at all the gates, especially those
leading to the palace, and every possible effort was made to identify
the nihilist. But as all efforts failed, and nothing further transpired
to indicate that he had accomplices, the commission separated and
departing individually without display, reunited at Tientsin and
started on their tour of inspection.

This commission was splendidly entertained wherever it went, given
every possible opportunity to examine the constitutions of the
countries through which it passed, and on its return to Peking the
report of the trip was published in one hundred and twenty volumes, the
most important item of which was that a constitution, modelled after
that of Japan, should be given to China at as early a date as possible.

The leader of this expedition, His Excellency the Viceroy Tuan Fang, is
one of the greatest, if not the greatest living Manchu statesman. Like
Yuan Shih-kai, during the Boxer uprising, he protected all the
foreigners within his domains. That he appreciates the work done by
Americans in the opening up of China is evidenced by a statement made
in his address at the Waldorf Astoria, in February, 1906, in which he
said:

"We take pleasure this evening in bearing testimony to the part taken
by American missionaries in promoting the progress of the Chinese
people. They have borne the light of Western civilization into every
nook and corner of the empire. They have rendered inestimable service
to China by the laborious task of translating into the Chinese language
religious and scientific works of the West. They help us to bring
happiness and comfort to the poor and the suffering, by the
establishment of hospitals and schools. The awakening of China, which
now seems to be at hand, may be traced in no small measure to the
influence of the missionary. For this service you will find China not
ungrateful."

Some may think that this was simply a sentiment expressed on this
particular occasion because he happened to be surrounded by secretaries
and others interested in this cause. That this is not the case is
further indicated by the fact that since that time he has on two
separate occasions attended the commencement exercises of the Nanking
University, on one of which he addressed the students as follows:

"This is the second time I have attended the commencement exercises of
your school. I appreciate the good order I find here. I rejoice at the
evidences I see of your knowledge of the proprieties, the depth of your
learning, and the character of the students of this institution. I am
deeply grateful to the president and faculty for the goodness
manifested to these my people. I have seen evidences of it in every
detail. It is my hope that when these graduates go out into the world,
they will remember the love of their teachers, and will practice that
virtue in their dealing with others. The fundamental principle of all
great teachers whether of the East or the West is love, and it remains
for you, young gentlemen, to practice this virtue. Thus your knowledge
will be practical and your talents useful."

I have given these quotations as evidences of the breadth of the man
whom the Empress Dowager selected as the head of this commission. It is
not generally known, however, that Duke Tse, another important member
of this commission, is married to a sister of the young Empress
Yehonala, and consequently a niece of the Empress Dowager. Such
relations existed between Her Majesty and the viceroy, as ruler and
subject, that it would be impossible for him to give her the intimate
account of their trip that a relative could give. It would be equally
impossible, with all her other duties, to wade through a report such as
they published after their return of one hundred and twenty volumes.
But it would be a delight to call in this nephew-in-law, and have him
sit or kneel, and may we not believe she allowed him to sit? and give
her a full and intimate account of the trip and the countries through
which they passed. She was anxious that this constitution should be
given to the people before she passed away. This, however, could not
be. Whether it will be adopted within the time allotted is a question
which the future alone can answer.

The next great reform undertaken by the Empress Dowager was her crusade
against opium. The importance of this can only be estimated when we
consider the prevalence of the use of the drug throughout the empire.
The Chinese tell us that thirty to forty per cent. of the adult
population are addicted to the use of the drug.

One day while walking along the street in Peking, I passed a gateway
from which there came an odour that was not only offensive but
sickening. I went on a little distance further and entered one of the
best curio shops of the city, and going into the back room, I found the
odour of the street emphasized tenfold, as one of the employees of the
firm had just finished his smoke. I left this shop and went to another
where the proprietor had entirely ruined his business by his use of the
drug, and it was about this time that the Empress Dowager issued the
following edict:

"Since the first prohibition of opium, almost the whole of China has
been flooded with the poison. Smokers of opium have wasted their time,
neglected their employment, ruined their constitutions, and
impoverished their households. For several decades therefore China has
presented a spectacle of increasing poverty and weakness. To merely
mention the matter, arouses our indignation. The court has now
determined to make China powerful, and to this end we urge our people
to reformation in this respect.

"We, therefore, decree that within a limit of ten years this injurious
filth shall be completely swept away. We further order the Council of
State to consider means of prohibition both of growing the poppy and
smoking the opium."

The Council of State at once drew up regulations designed to carry out
this decree. They were among others:

That all opium-smokers be required to report and take out a license.

Officials using the drug were divided into two classes. Young men must
be cured of the habit within six months, while for old men no limit was
fixed. But both classes, while under treatment, must furnish
satisfactory substitutes, at their own expense, to attend to the duties
of their office.

All opium dens must be closed within six months, after which time no
opium-pipes nor lamps may be either made or sold. Though shops for the
sale of the drug may continue for ten years, the limit of the traffic.

The government promises to provide medicine for the cure of the habit,
and encourages the formation of anti-opium societies, but will not
allow these societies to discuss other political matters.

Next to China Great Britain is the party most affected by this movement
towards reform. When this edict was issued Great Britain was shipping
annually fifty thousand chests of opium to the Chinese market, but at
once agreed that if China was sincere in her desire for reform, and cut
off her own domestic productions at the rate of ten per cent. per
annum, she would decrease her trade at a similar rate. It is
unfortunate that the Empress Dowager should have died before this
reform had been carried to a successful culmination, but whatever may
be the result of the movement the fact and the credit of its initiation
will ever belong to her.

Such are some of the special reform measures instituted by the Empress
Dowager, but in addition to these she has seen to it that the Emperor's
efforts to establish a Board of Railroads, a Board of Mines,
educational institutions on the plans of those of the West, should all
be carried out. She has not only done away with the old system of
examinations, but has introduced a new scheme by which all those who
have graduated from American or European colleges may obtain Chinese
degrees and be entitled to hold office under the government, by passing
satisfactory examinations, not a small part of which is the diploma or
diplomas which they hold. Such an examination has already been held and
a large number of Western graduates, most of them Christian, were given
the Chu-jen or Han-lin degrees.



VI

The Empress Dowager--As an Artist

There is no genre that the Chinese artist has not attempted. They have
treated in turn mythological, religious and historical subjects of
every kind; they have painted scenes of daily familiar life, as well as
those inspired by poetry and romance; sketched still life, landscapes
and portraits. Their highest achievements, perhaps, have been in
landscapes, which reveal a passionate love for nature, and show with
how delicate a charm, how sincere and lively a poetic feeling, they
have interpreted its every aspect. They have excelled too at all
periods in the painting of animals and birds, especially of birds and
flying insects in conjunction with flowers.--S. W. Bushell in "Chinese
Art."



VI

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS AN ARTIST

One day the head eunuch from the palace of the Princess Shun called at
our home to ask Mrs. Headland to go and see the Princess. While sitting
in my study and looking at the Chinese paintings hanging on the wall,
two of which were from the brush of Her Majesty, he remarked:

"You are fond of Chinese art?"

"I am indeed fond of it," I answered.

"I notice you have some pictures painted by the Old Buddha," he
continued, referring to the Empress Dowager by a name by which she is
popularly known in Peking.

"Yes, I have seven pictures from her brush," I answered.

"Do you happen to have any from the brush of the Lady Miao, her
painting teacher?" he inquired.

"I am sorry to say I have not," I replied. "I have tried repeatedly to
secure one, but thus far have failed. I have inquired at all the best
stores on Liu Li Chang, the great curio street, but they have none, and
cannot tell me where I can find one."

"No, you cannot get them in the stores; she does not paint for the
trade," he explained.

"I am sorry," I continued, "for I should like very much to get one. I
am told she is a very good artist."

"Oh, yes, she paints very well," he went on in a careless way. "She
lives over near our palace. We have a good many of her paintings. They
are very easily gotten."

"It may be easy for you to get them," I replied, "but it is no small
task for me."

"If you want some," he volunteered, "I'll get some for you."

"That would be very kind of you," I answered, "but how would you
undertake to get them?"

"Oh, I would just steal a few and bring them over to you."

It is hardly necessary to assure my readers as I did him that I could
not approve of this method of obtaining paintings from the Lady Miao's
brush. However he must have told the Princess of my desire, for the
next time Mrs. Headland called at the palace the Princess entertained
her by showing her a number of paintings by the Lady Miao, together
with others from the brush of the Empress Dowager.

"And these are really the work of Her Majesty?" said Mrs. Headland with
a rising inflection.

"Yes, indeed," replied the Princess. "I watched her at work on them.
They are genuine."

It was some weeks thereafter that Mrs. Headland was again invited to
call and see the Princess, and to her surprise she was introduced to
the Lady Miao, with whom and the Princess she spent a very pleasant
social hour or two. When she was about to leave, the Princess, who is
the youngest sister of the Empress Yehonala, brought out a picture of a
cock about to catch a beetle, which she said she had asked Lady Miao to
paint, and which she begged Mrs. Headland to receive as a present from
the artist and herself.

During the conversation Mrs. Headland remarked that the Empress Dowager
must have begun her study of art many years ago.

"Yes," said Lady Miao. "We were both young when she began. Shortly
after she was taken into the palace she began the study of books, and
partly as a diversion, but largely out of her love for art, she took up
the brush. She studied the old masters as they have been reproduced by
woodcuts in books, and from the paintings that have been preserved in
the palace collection, and soon she exhibited rare talent. I was then a
young woman, my brothers were artists, my husband had passed away, and
I was ordered to appear in the palace and work with her."

"You are a Chinese, are you not, Lady Miao?"

"Yes," she replied, "and as it has not been customary for Chinese
ladies to appear at court during the present dynasty, I was allowed to
unbind my feet, comb my hair in the Manchu style, and wear the gowns of
her people."

"And did you go into the palace every day?"

"When I was young I did. Ten Thousand Years"--another method of
speaking of the Empress Dowager--"was very enthusiastic over her art
work in those days, and often we spent a large part of the day either
with our brushes, or studying the history of art, the examples in the
books, or the works of the old masters in the gallery. One of her
favourite presents to her friends, as you probably know, is a picture
from her own brush, decorated with the impress of her great jade seal,
the date, and an appropriate poem by one of the members of the College
of Inscriptions. And no presents that she ever gives are prized more
highly by the recipients than these paintings."

I had seen pictures painted by Her Majesty decorating the walls of the
palaces of several of the princes, as well as the homes of a number of
my official friends. Some of them I thought very attractive, and they
seemed to be well done. They were highly prized by their owners, but I
was anxious to know what the Lady Miao thought of her ability as an
artist, and so I asked:

"Do you consider the Empress Dowager a good painter?"

"The Empress Dowager is a great woman," she answered. "Of course, as an
artist, she is an amateur rather than a professional. Had she devoted
herself wholly to art, hers would have been one of the great names
among our artists. She wields her brush with a power and precision
which only genius added to practice can give. She has a keen
appreciation of art, and it is a pity that the cares of state might not
have been borne by others, leaving her free to develop her instinct for
art."

The Empress Dowager kept eighteen court painters, selected from among
the best artists of the country, and appointed by herself, whose whole
duty it was to paint for her. They were divided into three groups, and
each group of six persons was required to be on duty ten days of each
month. As I was deeply interested in the study of Chinese art I became
intimately acquainted with most of the court painters and knew the
character of their work. The head of this group was Mr. Kuan. I called
on him one day, knowing that he was not well enough to be on duty in
the palace, and I found him hard at work. Like the small boy who told
his mother that he was too sick to go to school but not sick enough to
go to bed, so he assured me that his troubles were not such as to
prevent his working, but only such as make it impossible for him to
appear at court. Incidentally I learned that the drain on his purse
from the squeezes to the eunuchs aggravated his disease.

"When Her Majesty excused me from appearing at the palace," he
explained, "she required that I paint for her a minimum of sixty
pictures a year, to be sent in about the time of the leading feasts.
These she decorates with her seals, and with appropriate sentiments
written by members of the College of Inscriptions, and she gives them,
as she gives her own, as presents during the feasts." Mr. Kuan and I
became intimate friends and he painted three pictures which he
presented to me for my collection.

One day another of the court painters came to call on me and during the
conversation told me that he was painting a picture of the Empress
Dowager as the goddess of mercy. Up to that time I had not been
accustomed to think of her as a goddess of mercy, but he told me that
she not infrequently copied the gospel of that goddess with her own
pen, had her portrait painted in the form of the goddess which she used
as a frontispiece, bound the whole up in yellow silk or satin and gave
it as a present to her favourite officials. Of course I thought at once
of my collection of paintings, and said:

"How much I should like to have a picture of the Empress Dowager as the
goddess of mercy!"

"I'll paint one for you," said he.

All this conversation I soon discovered was only a diplomatic
preliminary to what he had really come to tell me, which was that he
had been eating fish in the palace a few days before, and had swallowed
a fish-bone which had unfortunately stuck in his throat. He said that
the court physicians had given him medicine to dissolve the fish-bone,
but it had not been effective; he therefore wondered whether one of the
physicians of my honourable country could remove it. I took him to my
friend Dr. Hopkins who lived near by, and told him of the dilemma. The
doctor set him down in front of the window, had him open his mouth,
looked into his throat where he saw a small red spot, and with a pair
of tweezers removed the offending fish-bone. And had it not been for
this service on the part of Dr. Hopkins, I am afraid I should never
have received the promised picture, for he hesitated as to the
propriety of him, a court painter, doing pictures of Her Majesty for
his friends. However as he often thereafter found it necessary to call
Mrs. Headland to minister to his wife and children he came to the
conclusion that it was proper for him to do so, and one day he brought
me the picture.

The Empress Dowager not only loved to be painted as the goddess of
mercy, but she clothed herself in the garments suitable to that deity,
dressed certain ladies of the court as her attendants, with the head
eunuch Li Lien-ying as their protector, ordered the court artists to
paint appropriate foreground and background and then called young Yu,
her court photographer, to snap his camera and allow Old Sol the great
artist of the universe with a pencil of his light to paint her as she
was.

One day while visiting a curio store on Liu Li Chang, the great book
street of Peking, my attention was called by the dealer to four small
paintings of peach blossoms in black and white, from the brush of the
Empress Dowager. These pictures had been in the panels of the partition
between two of the rooms of Her Majesty's apartments in the Summer
Palace, and so I considered myself fortunate in securing them.

"You notice," said he, "that each section of these branches must be
drawn by a single stroke of the brush. This is no easy task. She must
be able to ink her brush in such a way as to give a clear outline of
the limb, and at the same time to produce such shading as she may
desire. Should her outline be defective, she dare not retouch it;
should her shading be too heavy or insufficient, she cannot take from
it and she may not add to it, as this would make it defective in the
matter of calligraphy. A stroke once placed upon her paper, for they
are done on paper, is there forever. This style of work is among the
most difficult in Chinese art."

After securing these paintings, I showed them to a number of the best
artists of the present day in Peking, and they all pronounced them good
specimens of plum blossom work in monochrome, and they agreed with Lady
Miao, that if the Empress Dowager had given her whole time to painting
she would have passed into history as one of the great artists of the
present dynasty.

One day when one of her court painters called I showed him these
pictures. He agreed with all the others as to the quality of her brush
work, but called my attention to a diamond shaped twining of the
branches in one of them.

"That," said he, "is proof positive that it is her work."

"Why?" I inquired.

"Because a professional artist would never twine the twigs in that
fashion."

"And why not?"

"They would not do it," he replied. "It is not artistic."

"And why do not her friends call her attention to this fact?" I
inquired.

"Who would do it?" was his counter question.



VII

The Empress Dowager--As a Woman

The first audience given by Her Imperial Majesty to the seven ladies of
the Diplomatic Corps was sought and urged by the foreign ministers.
After the troubles of 1900 and the return of the court, Her Majesty
assumed a different attitude, and, of her own accord, issued many
invitations for audiences, and these invitations were accepted. Then
followed my tiffin to the court princesses and their tiffin in return.
This opened the way for other princesses and wives of high officials to
call, receive calls, to entertain and be entertained. In many cases
arrangements were made through our mutual friend Mrs. Headland, an
accepted physician and beloved friend of many of the higher Chinese
families; and through her innate tact, broad thought, and great love
for the good she may do, I have been able to come into personal touch
with many of these Chinese ladies.--Mrs. E. H. Conger in "Letters from
China".


VII

THE EMPRESS DOWAGER-AS A WOMAN

Although the great Dowager has passed away, it may be interesting to
know something about her life and character as a woman as those saw her
who came in contact with her in public and private audiences. In order
to appreciate how quick she was to adopt foreign customs, let me give
in some detail the difference in her table decorations at the earlier
and later audiences as they have been related by my wife.

"At the close of the formalities of our introduction to the Empress
Dowager and the Emperor at one of the first audiences, we, with the
ladies of the court, repaired to the banqueting hall. After we were
seated, each with a princess beside her, the great Dowager appeared. We
rose and remained standing while she took her place at the head of the
table, with the Emperor standing at her left a little distance behind
her. As she sat down she requested us to be seated, though the
princesses and the Emperor all remained standing, it being improper for
them to sit in the presence of Her Majesty. Long-robed eunuchs then
appeared with an elaborate Chinese banquet, and the one who served the
Empress Dowager always knelt when presenting her with a dish.

"After we had eaten for some little time, the doyen asked if the
princesses might not be seated. The Empress Dowager first turned to the
Emperor, and said, 'Your Majesty, please be seated'; then turning to
the princesses and waving her hand, she told them to sit down. They sat
down in a timid, rather uncomfortable way on the edge of the chair, but
did not presume to touch any of the food.

"The conversation ran upon various topics, and, among others, the Boxer
troubles. One of the ladies wore a badge. The Empress Dowager noticing
it, asked what it meant.

"'Your Majesty,' was the reply, 'this was presented to me by my Emperor
because I was wounded in the Boxer insurrection.'

"The Empress Dowager took the hands of this lady in both her own, and
as the tears stood in her eyes, she said:

"'I deeply regret all that occurred during those troublous times. The
Boxers for a time overpowered the government, and even brought their
guns in and placed them on the walls of the palace. Such a thing shall
never occur again.'

"The table was covered with brilliantly coloured oilcloth, and was
without tablecloth or napkins properly so called, but we used as
napkins square, coloured bits of calico about the size of a large
bandana handkerchief. There were no flowers, the table decorations
consisting of large stands of cakes and fruit. I speak of this because
it was all changed at future audiences, when the table was spread with
snow-white cloths, and smiled with its load of most gorgeous flowers.
Especially was this true after the luncheons given to the princesses
and ladies of the court by Mrs. Conger at the American legation,
showing that the eyes of these ladies were open to receive whatever
suggestions might come to them even in so small a matter as the
spreading and decoration of a table. The banquets thereafter were made
up of alternating courses of Chinese and foreign food.

"With but one exception, the Empress Dowager thereafter never appeared
at table with her guests. But at the close of the formal audiences,
after descending from the throne, and speaking to those whom she had
formerly met, she requested her guests to enter the banquet hall and
enjoy the feast with the princesses, saying that the customs of her
country forbade their being seated or partaking of food if she were
present. After the banquet, however, the Empress Dowager always
appeared and conversed cordially with her guests.

"Her failure to appear at table may have been influenced by the
following incident: One of the leading lady guests, anxious, no doubt,
to obtain a unique curio, requested the Empress Dowager to present her
with the bowl from which Her Majesty was eating--a bowl which was
different from those used by her guests, as the dishes from which her
food was served were never the same as those used by others at the
table!

"After an instant's hesitation she turned to a eunuch and said:

"'We cannot give her one bowl [the Chinese custom being always to give
things in pairs]; go and prepare her two.'

"Then, turning to her guests, she continued apologetically:

"'I should be glad to give bowls to each of you, but the Foreign Office
has requested me not to give presents at this audience.' It had been
her custom to give each of her guests some small gift with her own
hands and afterwards to send presents by her eunuchs to their homes.

"On another occasion the lady referred to above took an ornament from a
cabinet and was carrying it away when the person in charge of these
things requested that it be restored, saying that she was responsible
for everything in the room and would be punished if anything were
missing.

"The above incidents do not stand alone. It was not uncommon for some
of the Continental guests, in the presence of the court ladies, to make
uncomplimentary remarks about the food, which was Chinese, and often
not very palatable to the foreigner. These remarks, of course, were not
supposed to be understood, though the Empress Dowager always had her
own interpreter at table. One often felt that some of these ladies, in
their efforts to see all and get all, forgot what was due their own
country as well as their imperial hostess.

"One can understand the enormity of such an offense in a court the
etiquette of which is so exacting that none of her own subjects ever
dared appear in her presence until they had been properly instructed in
court etiquette in the 'Board of Rites,' a course of instruction which
may extend over a period of from a week to six months. These breaches
of politeness on the part of these foreign ladies may have been
overlooked by Her Majesty and the princesses, but, if so, it was on the
old belief that all outside of China were barbarians.

"All the ladies who attended these audiences, however, were not of this
character. There were those who realized the importance of those
occasions in the opening up of China, and were scrupulous in their
efforts to conform to the most exacting customs of the court. And who
can doubt that the warm friendship which the Empress Dowager conceived
for Mrs. Conger, the wife of our American minister, who did more than
any other person ever did, or ever can do, towards the opening up of
the Chinese court to the people of the West, was because of her
appreciation of the fact that Mrs. Conger was anxious to show the
Empress Dowager the honour due to her position.

"It was in her private audiences that this great woman's tact,
womanliness, fascination and charm as a hostess appeared. Taking her
guest by the hand, she would ask in the most solicitous way whether we
were not tired with our journey to the palace; she would deplore the
heat in summer or the cold in winter; she would express her anxiety
lest the refreshments might not have been to our taste; she would tell
us in the sincerest accents that it was a propitious fate that had made
our paths meet; and she would charm each of her guests, even though
they had been formerly prejudiced against her, with little separate
attentions, which exhibited her complete power as a hostess.

"When opportunity offered, she was always anxious to learn of foreign
ways and institutions. On one occasion while in the theatre, she called
me to her side, and, giving me a chair, inquired at length into the
system of female education in America.

"'I have heard,' she said, 'that in your honourable country all the
girls are taught to read.'

"'Quite so, Your Majesty.'

"'And are they taught the same branches of study as the boys?'

"'In the public schools they are.'

"'I wish very much that the girls in China might also be taught, but
the people have great difficulty in educating their boys.'

"I then explained in a few words our public-school system, to which she
replied:

"'The taxes in China are so heavy at present that it would be
impossible to add another expense such as this would be.'

"It was not long thereafter, however, before an edict was issued
commending female education, and at the present time hundreds of girls'
schools have been established by private persons both in Peking and
throughout the empire.

"On another occasion, while the ladies were having refreshments, the
Empress Dowager requested me to come to her private apartments, and
while we two were alone together, with only a eunuch standing by
fanning with a large peacock-feather fan, she asked me to tell her
about the church. It was apparent from the beginning of her
conversation that she made no distinction between Roman Catholics and
Protestants, calling them all the Chiao. I explained to her that the
object of the church was the intellectual, moral, and spiritual
development of the people, making them both better sons and better
subjects.

"Few women are more superstitious than the Empress Dowager. Her whole
life was influenced by her belief in fate, charms, good and evil
spirits, gods and demons.

"When it was first proposed that she have her portrait painted for the
St. Louis Exposition, she was dumfounded. After a long conversation,
however, in which Mrs. Conger explained that portraits of many of the
rulers of Europe would be there, including a portrait of Queen
Victoria, and that such a painting would in a way counteract the false
pictures of her that had gone abroad, she said that she would consult
with Prince Ching about the matter. This looked very much as though it
had been tabled. Not long thereafter, however, she sent word to Mrs.
Conger, asking that Miss Carl be invited to come to Peking and paint
her portrait.

"We all know how this portrait had to be begun on an auspicious day;
how a railroad had to be built to the Foreign Office rather than have
the portrait carried out on men's shoulders, as though she were dead;
how she celebrated her seventieth birthday when she was sixty-nine, to
defeat the gods and prevent their bringing such a calamity during the
celebration as had occurred when she was sixty, when the Japanese war
disturbed her festivities. On her clothes she wore the ideographs for
'Long Life and 'Happiness,' and most of the presents she gave were
emblematic of some good fortune. Her palace was decorated with great
plates of apples, which by a play on words mean 'Peace,' and with
plates of peaches, which mean 'Longevity.' On her person she wore
charms, one of which she took from her neck and placed on the neck of
Mrs. Conger when she was about to leave China, saying that she hoped it
might protect her during her journey across the ocean, as it had
protected herself during her wanderings in 1900, and she would not
allow any one to appear in her presence who had any semblance of
mourning about her clothing.

"It is a well-known fact that no Manchu woman ever binds her feet, and
the Empress Dowager was as much opposed to foot-binding as any other
living woman. Nevertheless, she would not allow a subject to presume to
suggest to her ways in which she should interfere in the social customs
of the Chinese, as one of her subjects did. This lady was the wife of a
Chinese minister to a foreign country, and had adopted both for herself
and her daughters the most ultra style of European dress. She one day
said to Her Majesty, 'The bound feet of the Chinese woman make us the
laughing-stock of the world.'

"'I have heard,' said the Empress Dowager, 'that the foreigners have a
custom which is not above reproach, and now since there are no
outsiders here, I should like to see what the foreign ladies use in
binding their waist.'

"The lady was very stout, and had the appearance of an hour-glass, and
turning to her daughter, a tall and slender maiden, she said:

"'Daughter, you show Her Majesty.'

"The young lady demurred until finally the Empress Dowager said:

"'Do you not realize that a request coming from me is the same as a
command?'

"After having had her curiosity satisfied, she sent for the Grand
Secretary and ordered that proper Manchu outfits be secured for the
lady's daughters, saying:

"'It is truly pathetic what foreign women have to endure. They are
bound up with steel bars until they can scarcely breathe. Pitiable!
Pitiable!'

"The following day this young lady did not appear at court, and the
Empress Dowager asked her mother the reason of her absence.

"'She is ill to-day,' the mother replied.

"'I am not surprised,' replied Her Majesty, 'for it must require some
time after the bandages have been removed before she can again compress
herself into the same proportions,' indicating that the Empress Dowager
supposed that foreign women slept with their waists bound, just as the
Chinese women do with their feet."

The first winter I spent in China, twenty years ago, was one of great
excitement in Peking. The time of the regency of the Empress Dowager
for the boy-emperor had ended. I have explained how a prince is not
allowed to marry a princess because she is his relative, or even a
commoner his cousin for the same reason. That is the rule. But rules
were made to be broken, and when the time came for Kuang Hsu's
betrothal the Empress Dowager decided to marry this son of her sister
to the daughter of her brother. It mattered not that the young man was
opposed to the match and wanted another for his wife. The Empress
Dowager had set her heart upon this union, and she would not allow her
plans to be frustrated, so an edict was issued that all people should
remain within their homes on a certain night, for the bride was to be
taken in her red chair from her father's home to the palace. So that in
this as in all other things her will was law for all those about her.

She was a bit below the average height, but she wore shoes, in the
centre of whose soles there were--heels, shall we call them?--six
inches high. These, together with her Manchu garments, which hang from
the shoulders, gave her a tall and stately appearance and made her
seem, as she was, every inch an empress. Her figure was perfect, her
carriage quick and graceful, and she lacked nothing physically to make
her a splendid type of womanhood and ruler. Her features were more
vivacious and pleasing than they were really beautiful; her complexion
was of an olive tint, and her face illumined by orbs of jet half hidden
by dark lashes, behind which lurked the smiles of favour or the
lightning flashes of anger.

When seated upon the throne she was majesty itself, but the moment she
stepped down from the august seat, and took ones hand in both of hers,
saying with the most amiable of smiles: "What a kind fate it is that
has allowed you to come and see me again. I hope you are not over-weary
with the long journey," one felt that she was, above all, a woman, a
companion, a friend--yet for all that the mistress of every situation,
whether diplomatic, business, or social.

I wish her mental characteristics could be described as completely as
Japanese and other photographers have given us pictures of her person.
But perhaps if this were possible she would seem less interesting. And
it may be that in the relation of these few incidents of her career
there may have been revealed something of the patriotism, the
statesmanship, the imperious will, and the ambitions that brought about
the reestablishment and the continuation of the dynasty of her people.
We have seen how the enemies of her country fell before her sword.
Dangerous statesmen fell before her pen, and if they were fortunate
enough to rise again with all their honour it was to be divested of all
their former power. Every obstacle in her path was overcome either by
diplomacy or by force.

The Empress Dowager has no double in Chinese history, if indeed in the
history of the world. She not only guided the ship of state during the
last half century, but she guided it well, and put into operation all
the greatest reforms that have ever been thought of by Chinese
statesmen. Compared with her own people, she stands head and shoulders
above any other woman of the Mongol race. And what shall we say of her
compared with the great women of other races? In strength of character
and ability she will certainly not suffer in any comparison that can be
made. We cannot, therefore, help admiring that young girl, who formerly
ran errands for her mother who, being made the concubine of an emperor,
became the mother of an emperor, the wife of an emperor, the maker of
an emperor, the dethroner of an emperor, and the ruler of China for
nearly half a century--all this in a land where woman has no standing
or power. Is it too much to say that she was the greatest woman of the
last half century?



VII

Kuang Hsu--His Self-Development

The Emperor Kuang Hsu is slight and delicate, almost childish in
appearance, of pale olive complexion, and with great, melancholy eyes.
There is a gentleness in his expression that speaks rather of dreaming
than of the power to turn dreams into acts. It is strange to find a
personality so etherial among the descendants of the Mongol hordes; yet
the Emperor Kuaug Hsu might sit as a model for some Oriental saint on
the threshold of the highest beatitude.--Charles Johnston in "The
Crisis in China."



VIII

KUANG HSU--HIS SELF-DEVELOPMENT

On the night that the son of the Empress Dowager "ascended upon the
dragon to be a guest on high," two sedan chairs were borne out of the
west gate of the Forbidden City, through the Imperial City, and into
the western part of the Tartar City, in one of which sat the senior
Empress and in the other the Empress-mother. The streets were dimly
lighted, but the chairs, each carried by four bearers, were preceded
and followed by outriders bearing large silk lanterns in which were
tallow-candles, while a heavy cart with relays of bearers brought up
the rear. The errand upon which they were bent was an important
one--the making of an emperor--for by the death of Tung Chih, the
throne, for the first time in the history of the dynasty, was left
without an heir. Their destination was the home of the Seventh Prince,
the younger brother of their husband, to whom as we have already said
the Empress Dowager had succeeded in marrying her younger sister, who
was at that time the happy mother of two sons.

She took the elder of these, a not very sturdy boy of three years and
more, from his comfortable bed to make him emperor, and one can imagine
they hear him whining with a half-sleepy yawn: "I don't want to be
emperor. I want to sleep." But she bundled little Tsai Tien up in
comfortable wraps, took him out of a happy home, from a loving father
and mother, and a jolly little baby brother,--out of a big beautiful
world, where he would have freedom to go and come at will, toys to play
with, children to contend with him in games, and everything in a home
of wealth that is dear to the heart of a child. And for what? She
folded him in her arms, adopted him as her own son, and carried him
into the Forbidden--and no doubt to him forbidding--City, where his
world was one mile square, without freedom, without another child
within its great bare walls, where he was the one lone, solitary man
among thousands of eunuchs and women. The next morning when the
imperial clan assembled to condole with her on the death of her son,
she bore little Tsai Tien into their midst declaring: "Here is your
emperor."

At that time there were situated on Legation Street, in Peking, two
foreign stores that had been opened without the consent of the Chinese
government, for in those days the capital had not been opened to
foreign trade. As the stores were small, and in such close proximity to
the various legations, the most of whose supplies they furnished, they
seem to have been too unimportant to attract official attention, though
they were destined to have a mighty influence on the future of China.
One of them was kept by a Dane, who sold foreign toys, notions,
dry-goods and groceries such as might please the Chinese or be of use
to the scanty European population of the great capital. By chance some
of the eunuchs from the imperial palace, wandering about the city in
search of something to please little Tsai Tien, dropped into this store
on Legation Street and bought some of these foreign toys for his infant
Majesty.

They had already ransacked the city for Chinese toys. They had gone to
every fair, visited every toy-shop, called upon every private dealer,
and paid high prices for samples of their best work made especially for
the royal child. There were crowing cocks and cackling hens; barking
dogs and crying infants; music balls and music carts; horns, drums,
diabolos and tops; there were gingham dogs and calico cats; camels,
elephants and fierce tigers; and a thousand other toys, if only he had
had other children to share them with him. But none of them pleased
him. They lacked that subtile something which was necessary to minister
to the peculiar genius of the child.

Among the foreign toys there were some in which there was concealed a
secret spring which seemed to impart life to the otherwise dead
plaything. Wind them up and they would move of their own energy. This
was what the boy needed,--something to appeal to that machine-loving
disposition which nature had given him, and Budge and Toddy were never
more curious to know "what made the wheels go round" than was little
Tsai Tien. He played with them as toys until overcome by curiosity,
when, like many another child, he tore them apart and discovered the
secret spring. This was as much of a revelation to the eunuchs as to
the child, and they went and bought other toys of a more curious
pattern, and a more intricate design, and it was not long until, at the
instigation of the enterprising Dane, the toy-shops of Europe were
manufacturing playthings specially designed to please the almond-eyed
baby Emperor in the yellow-tiled palace in Peking.

As the child grew the business of the Dane shopkeeper increased. His
stock became larger and more varied, and Tsai Tien continued to be a
profitable customer. There were music boxes and music carts--real music
carts, not like those from the Chinese shops,--trains of cars, wheeled
boats, striking clocks and Swiss watches which, when the stem was
pulled, would strike the hour or half or quarter, and all these were
bought in turn by the eunuchs and taken into the palace. As the Emperor
grew to boyhood the Danish shopkeeper supplied toys suitable to his
years from his inexhaustible shelves, until all the most intricate and
wonderful toys of Europe, suitable for a boy, had passed through the
hands of Kuang Hsu,--"continued brilliancy," as his name implied--and
he seemed to be making good the meaning of his name.

We would not lead any one to believe that Kuang Hsu was an ideal child.
He was not. If we may credit the reports that came from the palace in
those days, he had a temper of his own. If he were denied anything he
wanted, he would lie down on his baby back on the dirty ground and kick
and scream and literally "raise the dust" until he got it. My wife
tells me that not infrequently when she called at the Chinese homes,
and they set before her a dish of which she was especially fond, and
she had eaten of it as much as she thought she ought, the ladies would
ask in a good-natured way in reply to some of her remarks about her
voracious appetite, "Shall we get down and knock our heads on the
floor, and beg you not to eat too much, and make yourself sick, like
the eunuchs do to the Emperor?" There is nothing to wonder at that
Kuang Hsu, without parental restraint, and fawned upon by cringing
eunuchs and serving maids, should have been a spoiled child; the wonder
is that he was not worse than he was.

One day in 1901 while the court was absent at Hsian, and the front gate
of the Forbidden City was guarded by our "boys in blue," I obtained a
pass and visited the imperial palace. The apartments of the Emperor
consisted of a series of one-story Chinese buildings, with paper
windows around a large central pane of glass, tile roof and brick
floor. The east part of the building appeared to be the living-room,
about twenty by twenty-five feet. The window on the south side extended
the entire length of the room, and was filled with clocks from end to
end. There were clocks of every description from the finest French
cloisonne to the most intricate cuckoo clocks from which a bird hopped
forth to announce the hour, and each ticking its own time regardless of
every other. Tables were placed in various parts of the room, on each
of which were one, two or three clocks. Swiss watches of the most
curious and unique designs hung about the walls. Two sofas sat back to
back in the centre of the room, and a beautiful little gilt desk on
which was the most wonderful of all his clocks, with several large
foreign chairs upholstered in plush and velvet, completed the
furniture. I sat down in one of these chairs to rest, for it was a hot
summer day, and immediately there proceeded from beneath me sweet
strains of music from a box concealed beneath the cushion. It was not
only a surprise, it was soothing and restful; and I was prepared to see
an electric fan pop out of somewhere and fan me to sleep. It was really
an Oriental fairy tale of an apartment.

As Kuang Hsu grew to boyhood he heard that out in this great wonderful
world, which he had never seen except with the eyes of a child, there
was a method of sending messages to distant cities and provinces with
the rapidity of a flash of lightning. For centuries he and his
ancestors had been sending their edicts, and their Peking Gazette or
court newspaper--the oldest journal in the world--by runner, or relays
of post horses, and the possibility of sending them by a lightning
flash appealed to him. He believed in doing things, and, as we shall
see later, he wanted to do them as rapidly as they could be done. He
therefore ordered that a telegraph outfit be secured for him, which he
"played with" as he had done with his most ingenious toys, and the
telegraph was soon established for court use throughout the empire.

One day a number of officials came to us at the Peking University and
in the course of a conversation they said:

"The Emperor has heard that the foreigners have invented a talk box. Is
that true?"

"Quite true," we replied, "and as we have one in the physical
laboratory of the college we will let you see it."

We had one of the old Edison phonographs which worked with a pedal, and
looked very much like a sewing-machine, and we took them to the
laboratory, allowed one of them to talk into it, and then set the
machine to repeating what had been told it. The officials were
delighted and it was not long until they again appeared and insisted on
buying it as a present for the Emperor, for in this way better than any
other they might hope to obtain official recognition and position.

The Emperor then heard that the foreigners had invented a "fire-wheel
cart," but whether he had ever been informed that they had built a
small railroad at Wu-Sung near Shanghai, and that the Chinese had
bought it, and then torn it up and thrown it into the river we cannot
say. There are many things the officials and people do which never
reach the imperial ears. However that may be, when Kuang Hsu heard of
the railroad and the carts that were run by fire, he wanted one, and he
would not be satisfied until they had built a narrow gauge railroad
along the west shore of the lotus lake in the Forbidden City, and the
factories of Europe had made two small cars and an engine on which he
could take the court ladies for a ride on this unusual merry-go-round.
The road and the cars and the engine were still there when I visited
the Forbidden City in 1901, but they were carried away to Europe by
some of the allies as precious bits of loot, before the court returned.

Not long after he had heard of the railroads, he was told that the
foreigners also had "fire-wheel boats." Of course he wanted some, and
as I crossed the beautiful marble bridge that spans the lotus lake, I
saw anchored near by three small steam launches which had evidently
been used a good deal. I saw similar launches in the lake at the Summer
Palace, and was told that in the play days of his boyhood, Kuang Hsu
would have these launches hitched to the imperial barges and take the
ladies of the court for pleasure trips about the lake in the cool of
the summer evenings, as the Empress Dowager did her foreign visitors in
later times.

The Emperor in those days was on the lookout for everything foreign
that was of a mechanical nature. Indeed every invention interested him.
In this respect he was diametrically opposite to the genius of the
whole Chinese people. Their faces had ever been turned backward, and
their highest hopes were that they might approximate the golden ages of
the past, and be equal in virtue to their ancestors. This feeling was
so strong that a hundred years before he mounted the throne, his
forefather, Chien Lung, when he had completed his cycle of sixty years
as a ruler, vacated in favour of his son lest he should reign longer
than his grandfather. Kuang Hsu was therefore the first occupant of the
dragon throne whose face was turned to the future, and whose chief aim
was to possess and to master every method that had enabled the peoples
of the West to humiliate his people.

When he heard that the foreigners had a method of talking to a distance
of ten, twenty, fifty or five hundred miles, he did not say like the
old farmer is reported to have said,--"It caint be trew, because my son
John kin holler as loud as any man in all this country, an' he caint be
heerd mor'n two miles." Kuang Hsu believed it, and at once ordered that
a telephone be secured for him.

In 1894 the Christian women of China decided to present a New Testament
to the Empress Dowager on her sixtieth birthday which occurred the
following year. New type was prepared, the finest foreign paper
secured, and the book was made after the best style of the printer's
art, with gilt borders, gilt edges, and bound in silver of an embossed
bamboo pattern and encased in a silver box. It was then enclosed in a
red plush box,--red being the colour indicating happiness,--which was
in turn encased in a beautifully carved teak-wood box, and this was
enclosed in an ordinary box and taken by the English and American
ministers to the Foreign Office to be sent in to Her Majesty.

The next day the Emperor sent to the American Bible Society for copies
of the Old and New Testaments, such as were being sold to his people. A
few days thereafter a Chinese friend--a horticulturist and gardener who
went daily to the palace with flowers and vegetables--came to me in
confidence as though bearing an important secret, and said:

"Something of unusual importance is taking place in the palace."

"Indeed?" said I; "what makes you think so?"

"Heretofore when I have gone into the palace," said he, "the eunuchs
have treated me with indifference. Yesterday they sat down and talked
in a most familiar and friendly way, asking me all about Christianity.
I told them what I could and they continued their conversation until
long after noon. I finally became so hungry that I arose to come home.
They urged me to stay, bringing in a feast, and inviting me to dine
with them, and they kept me there till evening. One of them told me
that the Emperor is studying the Gospel of Luke."

"How does he know that?" I inquired.

"That is what I asked him," he answered, "and he told me that he is one
of the Emperor's private servants, and that His Majesty has a part of
the Gospel copied in large characters on a sheet of paper each day,
which he spreads out on the table before him, and this eunuch, standing
behind his chair, can read what he is studying."

On further inquiry I discovered that there was no other way that the
eunuch could have learned about the Gospel, except in the way
indicated. This man was invited to dine with the eunuchs day after day
until he had told them all he knew about Christianity, after which they
requested him to bring in the pastor of the church of which he was a
member, and who was one of my former pupils, to dine with them and tell
them more about the Gospel. The pastor hesitated to accept the
invitation, but as it was repeated day after day, he finally
accompanied the horticulturist.

When offered wine at dinner the pastor refused it, at which the eunuch
remarked: "Oh, yes, I have heard that you Christians do not drink
wine," and like a polite host, the wine was put aside and none was
drunk at the dinner. During the afternoon they took their guests to
visit some of the imperial buildings, advanced the sum of three hundred
dollars to the horticulturist to enlarge his plant, and gave various
presents to the pastor.

It must not be inferred from this that the Emperor was becoming a
Christian. Very far from it, though the interest he took in the
Christian doctrine set the people to studying about it, not only in
Peking but throughout many of the provinces, as was indicated at the
time by the number of Christian books sold. As early as 1891 he issued
a strong edict ordering the protection of the missionaries in which he
made the following statement: "The religions of the West have for their
object the inculcation of virtue, and, though our people become
converted, they continue to be Chinese subjects. There is no reason why
there should not be harmony between the people and the adherents of
foreign religions." The Chinese reported that he sometimes examined the
eunuchs, lining them up in classes and catechising them from the books
read.

One day three of the eunuchs called on me with this same
horticulturist, for the purpose no doubt of seeing a foreigner, and to
get a glimpse of the home in which he lived. One of them was younger
than the other two and above the average intelligence of his class. A
few days later the horticulturist told me a story which illustrates a
phase of the Emperor's character which we have already hinted at--his
impulsive nature and ungovernable temper. He had ordered a number of
the eunuchs to appear before him, all of whom except this young man
were unable to come, because engaged in other duties. When the eunuch
got down on his hands and knees to kotow or knock his head to His
Majesty, the latter kicked him in the mouth, cutting his lip and
otherwise injuring him, and my informant added:

"What kind of a man is that to govern a country, a man who punishes
those who obey his orders?" Indeed there was a good deal of feeling
among the Chinese at that time that the Empress Dowager ought to punish
the Emperor as a good mother does a bad child, though in the light of
all the other things he did, he was to be pitied more than blamed for a
disposition thus inherited and developed.

It was about this time he began the study of English. He ordered that
two teachers be appointed, and contrary to all former customs he
allowed them to sit rather than kneel while they taught him. At the
time they were selected I was exchanging lessons in English for Chinese
with the grandson of one of these teachers, and learned a good deal
about the progress the young man was making. He was in such a hurry to
begin that he could not wait to send to England or America for books,
and so the officials visited the various schools and missions in search
of proper primers for a beginner. When they visited us we made a
thorough search and finally Dr. Marcus L. Taft discovered an
attractively illustrated primer which he had taken to China with him
for his little daughter Frances, and this was sent to Kuang Hsu.

One day a eunuch called on me saying that the Emperor had learned that
the various institutions of learning, educational associations, tract
and other societies had published a number of books in Chinese which
they had translated from the European languages. I was at that time the
custodian of two or three of these societies and had a great variety of
Chinese books in my possession. I therefore sent him copies of our
astronomy, geology, zoology, physiology and various other scientific
books which I was at that time teaching in the university.

The next day he called again, accompanied by a coolie who brought me a
present of a ham cooked at the imperial kitchen, together with boxes of
fruit and cakes, which, not being a man of large appetite, I thanked
him for, tipped the coolie, and after he had gone, turned them over to
our servants, who assured me that imperial meat was very palatable. Day
after day for six weeks this eunuch visited me, and would never leave
until I had found some new book for His Majesty. They might be
literary, scientific or religious works, and he made no distinction
between the books of any sect or society, institution or body, but with
an equal zeal he sought them all. I was sometimes reduced to a sheet
tract, and finally I was forced to take my wife's Chinese medical books
out of her private library and send them in to the Emperor. I learned
that other eunuchs were visiting other persons in charge of  other
books, and that at this time Kuang Hsu bought every book that had been
translated from any European language and published in the Chinese.

One day the eunuch saw my wife's bicycle standing on the veranda and
said:

"What kind of a cart is that?"

"That is a self-moving cart," I answered.

"How do you ride it?" he inquired.

I took the bicycle off the veranda, rode about the court a time or two,
while he gazed at me with open mouth, and when I stopped he ejaculated:

"That's queer; why doesn't it fall down?"

"When a thing's moving," I answered, "it can't fall down," which might
apply to other things than bicycles.

The next day when he called he said:

"The Emperor would like that bicycle," and my wife allowed him to take
it in to Kuang Hsu, and it was not long thereafter until it was
reported that the Emperor had been trying to ride the bicycle, that his
queue had become entangled in the rear wheel, and that he had had a not
very royal tumble, and had given it up,--as many another one has done.



IX

Kuang Hsu--As Emperor and Reformer

In 1891 the present Emperor Kuang Hsu issued a very strong edict
commanding good treatment of the missionaries. He therein made the
following statement: "The religions of the West have for their object
the inculcation of virtue, and, though our people become converted,
they continue to be Chinese subjects. There is no reason why there
should not be harmony between the people and the adherents of foreign
religions."--Hon. Charles Denby in "China and Her People."



IX

KUANG HSU--AS EMPEROR AND REFORMER

AS a man, there are few characters in Chinese history that are more
interesting than Kuang Hsu. He had all the caprices of genius with
their corresponding weakness and strength. He could wield a pen with
the vigour of a Caesar, threaten his greatest viceroys, dismiss his
leading conservative officials, introduce the most sweeping and
far-reaching reforms that have ever been thought of by the Chinese
people, and then run from a woman as though the very devil was after
him.

He has been variously rated as a genius, an imbecile and a fool. Let us
grant that he was not brilliant. Let us rate him as an imbecile, and
then let us try to account for his having brought into the palace every
ingenious toy and every wonderful and useful invention and discovery of
the past twenty or thirty years with the exception of the X-rays and
liquid air. Let us try to explain why it was that an imbecile would
purchase every book that had been printed in the Chinese language,
concerning foreign subjects of learning, up to the time when he was
dethroned. Let us tell why it was that an imbecile would study all
those foreign books without help, without an assistant, without a
teacher, for three years, from the time he bought them in 1895 till
1898, before he began issuing the most remarkable series of edicts that
have ever come from the pen of an Oriental monarch in the same length
of time. And let us explain how it was that an imbecile could embody in
his edicts of two or three months all the important principles that
were necessary to launch the great reforms of the past ten years.

I doubt if any Chinese monarch has ever had a more far-reaching
influence over the minds of the young men of the empire than Kuang Hsu
had from 1895 till 1898. The preparation for this influence had been
going on for twenty or thirty years previously in the educational
institutions established by the missions and the government. From these
schools there had gone out a great number of young men who had taken
positions in all departments of business, and many of the state, and
revealed to the officials as well as to many of the people the power of
foreign education. An imperial college had been established by the
customs service for the special education of young men for diplomatic
and other positions, from which there had gone out young men who were
the representatives of the government as consuls or ministers in the
various countries of Europe and America.

The fever for reading the same books that Kuang Hsu had read was so
great as to tax to the utmost the presses of the port cities to supply
the demand, and the leaders of some of the publication societies feared
that a condition had arisen for which they were unprepared. Books
written by such men as Drs. Allen, Mateer, Martin, Williams and Legge
were brought out in pirated photographic reproductions by the bookshops
of Shanghai and sold for one-tenth the cost of the original work.
Authors, to protect themselves, compelled the pirates to deliver over
the stereotype plates they had made on penalty of being brought before
the officials in litigation if they refused. But during the three years
the Emperor had been studying these foreign books, hundreds of
thousands of young scholars all over the empire had been doing the
same, preparing themselves for whatever emergency the studies of the
young Emperor might bring about.

One day during the early spring a young Chinese reformer came to me to
get a list of the best newspapers and periodicals published in both
England and America. I inquired the reason for this strange move, and
he said:

"The young Chinese reformers in Peking have organized a Reform Club.
Some of them read and speak English, others French, others German and
still others Russian, and we are providing ourselves with all the
leading periodicals of these various countries that we may read and
study them. We have rented a building, prepared rooms, and propose to
have a club where we can assemble whenever we have leisure, for
conversation, discussion, reading, lectures or whatever will best
contribute to the ends we have in view."

"And what are those ends?" I inquired.

"The bringing about of a new regime in China," he answered. "Our recent
defeat by the Japanese has shown us that unless some radical changes
are made we must take a second place among the peoples of the Orient."

"This is a new move in Peking, is it not?"

"New in Peking," he answered, "but not new in the empire. Reform clubs
are being organized in all the great cities and capitals. In Hsian,
books have been purchased by all classes from the governor of the
province down to the humblest scholar, and the aristocracy have
organized classes, and are inviting the foreigners to lecture to them.
Every one, except a few of the oldest conservative scholars, are
discarding their Confucian theories and reconstructing their ideas in
view of present day problems. There is an intellectual fermentation now
going on from which a new China is certain to be evolved, and we
propose to be ready for it when it comes."

The leader of this reform party was Kang Yu-wei, a young Cantonese, who
had made a thorough study of the reforms of Peter the Great in Russia,
and the more recent reforms in Japan, the history of which he had
prepared in two volumes which he sent to the Emperor. He had made a
reputation for himself in his native place as a "Modern Sage and
Reformer," was hailed as a "young Confucius," was appointed a
third-class secretary in the Board of Works, and as the Emperor and he
had been studying on the same lines, Kang, through the influence of the
brother of the chief concubine, was introduced to His Majesty. He had a
three hours' conference with the Foreign Office, in which he urged that
China should imitate Japan, and that the old conservative ministers and
viceroys should be replaced by young men imbued with Western ideas, who
might confer with the Emperor daily in regard to all kinds of reform
measures.

This interview was reported to Kuang Hsu by Prince Kung and Jung Lu,
who both being old, and one of them the greatest of the conservatives,
could hardly be expected to approve of his theories. Kang, however, was
asked to embody his suggestions in a memorial, was later given an
audience with the Emperor, and finally called into the palace to assist
him in the reforms he had already undertaken. And if Kang Yu-wei had
been as great a statesman as he was reformer, Kuang Hsu might never
have been deposed.

The crisis came during the summer of 1898. I had taken my family to the
seashore to spend our summer vacation. A young Chinese scholar--a
Hanlin--who had been studying in the university for some years, and
with whom I was translating a work on psychology, had gone with me. He
took the Peking Gazette, which he read daily, and commented upon with
more or less interest, until June 23d, when an edict was issued
abolishing the literary essay of the old regime as a part of the
government examination, and substituting therefor various branches of
the new learning. "We have been compelled to issue this decree," said
the Emperor, "because our examinations have reached the lowest ebb, and
we see no remedy for these matters except to change entirely the old
methods for a new course of competition."

"What do you think of that?" I asked the Hanlin.

"The greatest step that has ever yet been taken," he replied.

This Hanlin was not a radical reformer, but one of a long line of
officials who were deeply interested in the preservation of their
country which had weathered the storms of so many centuries,--storms
which had wrecked Assyria, Babylonia, Media, Egypt, Greece and Rome,
while China, though growing but little, had still lived. He was one of
those progressive statesmen who have always been found among a strong
minority in the Middle Kingdom.

The Peking Gazette continued to come daily bringing with it the
following twenty-seven decrees in a little more than twice that many
days. I will give an epitome of the decrees that the reader at a glance
may see what the Emperor undertook to do. Summarized they are as
follows:

1. The establishment of a university at Peking.

2. The sending of imperial clansmen to foreign countries to study the
forms and conditions of European and American government.

3. The encouragement of the arts, sciences and modern agriculture.

4. The Emperor expressed himself as willing to hear the objections of
the conservatives to progress and reform.

5. Abolished the literary essay as a prominent part of the governmental
examinations.

6. Censured those who attempted to delay the establishment of the
Peking Imperial University.

7. Urged that the Lu-Han railway should be prosecuted with more vigour
and expedition.

8. Advised the adoption of Western arms and drill for all the Tartar
troops.

9. Ordered the establishment of agricultural schools in all the
provinces to teach the farmers improved methods of agriculture.

10. Ordered the introduction of patent and copyright laws.

11. The Board of War and Foreign Office were ordered to report on the
reform of the military examinations.

12. Special rewards were offered to inventors and authors.

13. The officials were ordered to encourage trade and assist merchants.

14. School boards were ordered established in every city in the empire.

15. Bureaus of Mines and Railroads were established.

16. Journalists were encouraged to write on all political subjects.

17. Naval academies and training-ships were ordered.

18. The ministers and provincial authorities were called upon to
assist--nay, were begged to make some effort to understand what he was
trying to do and help him in his efforts at reform.

19. Schools were ordered in connection with all the Chinese legations
in foreign countries for the benefit of the children of Chinese in
those places.

20. Commercial bureaus were ordered in Shanghai for the encouragement
of trade.

21. Six useless Boards in Peking were abolished.

22. The right to memorialize the throne in sealed memorials was granted
to all who desired to do so.

23. Two presidents and four vice-presidents of the Board of Rites were
dismissed for disobeying the Emperor's orders that memorials should be
allowed to come to him unopened.

24. The governorships of Hupeh, Kuangtung, and Yunnan were abolished as
being a useless expense to the country.

25. Schools of instruction in the preparation of tea and silk were
ordered established.

26. The slow courier posts were abolished in favour of the Imperial
Customs Post.

27. A system of budgets as in Western countries was approved.

I have given these decrees in this epitomized form so that all those
who are interested in the character of this reform movement in China
may understand something of the influence the young Emperor's study had
had upon him. Grant that they followed one another in too close
proximity, yet still it must be admitted by every careful student of
them, that there is not one that would not have been of the greatest
possible benefit to the country if they had been put into operation. If
the Emperor had been allowed to proceed, making them all as effective
as he did the Imperial University, and if the ministers and provincial
authorities had responded to his call, and had made "some effort to
understand what he was trying to do," China might have by this time
been close upon the heels of Japan in the adoption of Western ideas.

As the edicts continued to come out in such quick succession my Hanlin
friend became alarmed. He came to me one day after the Emperor had
censured the officials for trying to delay the establishment of the
Imperial University and said:

"I must return to Peking."

"Why return so soon?" I inquired.

"There is going to be trouble if the Emperor continues his reform at
this rate of speed," he answered.

It was when the Emperor had issued the sixth of his twenty-seven
decrees that this young Chinese statesman made this observation. If his
most intimate advisers had had the perspicuity to have foreseen the
final outcome of such precipitance might they not have advised the
Emperor to have proceeded more deliberately? When one remembers how
China had been worsted by Japan, how all her prestige was swept away,
how, from having been the parent of the Oriental family of nations, a
desirable friend or a dangerous enemy, she was stripped of all her
glory, and left a helpless giant with neither strength nor power, one
can easily understand the eagerness of this boy of twenty-seven to
restore her to the pedestal from which she had been ruthlessly torn.

Another reason for his haste may be found in the seizure of his
territory by the European powers. A few months before he began his
reforms two German priests were murdered by an irresponsible mob in the
province of Shantung. With this as an excuse Germany landed a battalion
of marines at Kiaochou, a port of that province, which she took with
fifty miles of the surrounding territory. As though this were not
enough, she demanded the right to build all the railroads and open all
the mines in the entire province, and compelled the Chinese to pay an
indemnity to the families of the murdered priests and rebuild the
church and houses the mob had destroyed. China appealed to Russia who
had promised to protect her against all invaders. Instead of coming to
her aid, however, Russia demanded a similar cession of Port Arthur,
Talienwan and the surrounding territory which she had refused to allow
Japan to retain two years before. Not to be outdone by the others,
France demanded and received a similar strip of territory at
Kuang-chou-wan; and England found that Wei-hai-wei would be
indispensable as a kennel from which she could guard the Russian bear
on the opposite shore, but why she should have found it necessary also
to demand from China four hundred miles of land and water around
Hongkong was no doubt difficult for Kuang Hsu to understand.

When the Empress Dowager turned over the reins of government to her
nephew she did it very much as a father would place the reins in the
hands of a child whom he was teaching to drive an important vehicle on
a dangerous road--she sat behind him still holding the reins. Among the
things reserved were that he should kotow to her once every five days
whether she were in Peking or at the Summer Place, and she reserved
such seals of office as made it necessary for all the highest officials
to come and express their obligations to her at the same time they came
to thank the Emperor. While Kuang Hsu may have been reconciled to the
performance of these duties at eighteen, they became irksome at
twenty-seven and he demanded and received full liberty in the affairs
of state.

We have seen how he used his liberty,--not wisely, perhaps, as a
reformer, and yet the reformation of China can never be written without
giving the credit of its inception to Kuang Hsu. He was very different
from Hsien Feng, the husband of the Empress Dowager, before whose death
we are told "the whole administrative power was vested in the hands of
a council of eight, whilst he himself spent his time in ways that were
by no means consistent with those that ought to have characterized the
ruler of a great and powerful nation." Whatever else may be said of
Kuang Hsu, he cannot be accused of indolence, extravagance, or
indifference to the welfare of his country or his people.

Appreciating the difficulty of securing an expression of opinion from
those opposed to his views, and thus getting both sides of the
question, in his fourth edict he requested the conservatives to send in
their objections to his schemes for progress and reform, and then as if
to get the broadest possible expression of opinion he adopted a
Shanghai journal called Chinese Progress as the official organ of the
government. But lest this be insufficient, in his twenty-second edict
he gave the right to all officials to address the throne in sealed
memorials.

There was at this time a third-class secretary of the Board of Rites
named Wang Chao who sent in a memorial in which he advocated:

1. The abolition of the queue.

2. The changing of the Chinese style of dress to that of the West.

3. The adoption of Christianity as a state religion.

4. A prospective national parliament.

5. A journey to Japan by the Emperor and Empress Dowager.

The Board of Rites opened and read this memorial, and, astounded at its
boldness, they summoned the offender before them, and ordered him to
withdraw his paper. This he refused to do and the two presidents and
four vice-presidents of the Board accompanied it with a counter
memorial denouncing him to the Emperor as a man who was making
narrow-minded and wild suggestions to His Majesty.

Partly because they had opened and read the memorial and partly because
of their effort to prevent freedom of speech, Kuang Hsu issued another
edict explaining why he had invited sealed memorials, and censuring
them for explaining to him what was narrow-minded and wild, as if he
lacked the intelligence to grasp that feature of the paper. He then
turned them all over to the Board of Civil Office ordering that body to
decide upon a suitable punishment for their offense, and assuring them
that if they made it too mild, his righteous wrath would fall upon
them. The latter decided that they be degraded three steps and removed
to posts befitting their lowered rank, but the Emperor revised the
sentence and dismissed them all from office, and this was the beginning
of his downfall.

The Empress Dowager had been spending the hot season at the Summer
Palace, and during the two months and more that the Emperor had been
struggling with his reform measures, she gave no indication, either by
word or deed, that she was opposed to anything that he had done. And I
think that all her acts, from that time till the close of the Boxer
insurrection, can be explained without placing her in opposition to his
theories of progress and reform.

So long as the Emperor devoted himself to the creation of new offices
he found little active opposition on the part of the conservatives,
while the reformers did everything in their power to encourage him. The
extent of the movement it is not easy to estimate. It opened up the
intensely anti-foreign province of Hupeh, and transformed it into a
section where railroads were to be built connecting the north with the
south. It opened up the great mining province of Shansi and the lumber
regions of Manchuria. It started railroads which are now lines of trade
for the whole empire.

When he issued the fifth edict substituting Western science for the
literary essay in the great examinations, letters and telegrams began
to pour in upon us at the Peking University from all parts of the
empire, asking us to reserve room for the senders in the school. Their
tuition was enclosed in their letters, and among those who came were
the grandson of the Emperor's tutor, graduates of various degrees, men
of rank, and the sons of wealthy gentlemen who had not yet obtained
degrees. Numerous requests came to our graduates to teach English in
official families, one being employed to teach the grandson of Li
Hung-chang, and another the sons of a relative of the royal family.

But when his reforms led the Emperor to dispense with useless offices,
as in his twenty-first, twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth edicts, for the
purpose of retrenchment, and to dismiss recalcitrant officials for
disobedience to his commands, a howl arose which was heard throughout
the empire. The six members of the Board of Rites dismissed in edict
twenty-three, with certain sympathizers to give them face, went to the
Empress Dowager at the Summer Palace, represented to her that the boy
whom she had placed upon the throne was steering the ship of state to
certain destruction, and begged that she would come and once more take
the helm. She listened to them with the attention and deference for
which she has always been famed, and then dismissed them without any
intimation as to what her course would be.

When the Emperor heard what they were doing, he sent a courier
post-haste to call Yuan Shih-kai for an interview at the palace. When
Yuan came, he ordered him to return to Tien-tsin, dispose of his
superior officer, the Governor-General Jung Lu, and bring the army
corps of 12,500 troops of which he was in charge to Peking, surround
the Summer Palace, preventing any one from going in or coming out, thus
making the Empress Dowager a prisoner, and allowing him to go on with
his work of reform.

It is just here that we see the difference in the statesmanship of the
Empress Dowager and the Emperor. When she appointed these two
officials, one a liberal in charge of the army, she placed the other, a
conservative, as his superior officer, so that one could not move
without the knowledge and consent of the other, thus forestalling just
such an order as this. To obey this order of the boy Emperor, Yuan must
commit two great crimes, murder and treason, the one on a superior
officer, and the other against her who had appointed him to office and
who had been the ruler of the country for thirty-seven years, either of
which would have been sufficient to have execrated him not only in the
eyes of his own people but of history and of the world. Nay more, had
he obeyed this order, the conservatives would have raised the cry of
rebellion, and an army ten times greater than he could have mustered,
would have crushed Yuan and his little company of 12,500 men, on the
plea that he was about to take the throne.

Yuan then did the only wise thing he could have done. He went to Jung
Lu, without whose consent he had no right to move, showed him the
order, and asked for his commands. Jung Lu told him to leave the order
with him, and as soon as Yuan had departed he took the train for
Peking, called on Prince Ching, and they two went to the Summer Palace
and showed the order to Her Majesty, suggesting to her that it might be
well for her to come into the city and give him a few lessons in
government.

As the Empress Dowager had been behaving herself so circumspectly
during all the summer months, allowing the Emperor to test himself as a
ruler, one can scarcely blame her for not wanting to be bottled up in
the Summer Palace when she had done nothing to deserve it. When
therefore this second delegation of officials, consisting of the two
highest in rank in the empire, came to request her to once more take
charge of the government, she called her sedan chair and started for
the capital. She went without an army, but was accompanied by those of
her palace eunuchs on whom she could implicitly depend, and enough of
them to overcome those of the Emperor in case there should be trouble.
That force was necessary is evident from the fact that she condemned to
death a number of his servants after she had taken the throne.

When the Emperor heard that she was coming he sent a messenger with
letters urging Kang Yu-wei to flee, and to devise some means for saving
the situation, while he attempted to find refuge for himself in the
foreign legations. This however he failed to do, but was taken by the
Empress Dowager, and his career as a ruler ended, and his life as a
prisoner began.



X

Kuang Hsu--As a Prisoner

Kuang Hsu deserves a place in history as the prize iconoclast. He sent
a cold shiver down the spine of the literati by declaring that a man's
fitness for office should not depend upon his ability to write a poem,
or upon the elegance of his penmanship. This was too much. The literati
argued that at the rate at which the Emperor was going, it might be
expected that he would do away with chop-sticks and dispense with the
queue.--Rounsevelle Wildman in "China's Open Door."


X

KUANG HSU--AS A PRISONER

The year that Kuang Hsu ascended the throne a great calamity occurred
in Peking. The Temple of Heaven--the greatest of the imperial temples,
the one at which the Emperor announces his accession, confesses his
sins, prays and gives thanks for an abundant harvest, was struck by
lightning and burned to the ground. When the Emperor worships here it
is as the representative of the people, the high priest of the nation,
and his prayers are offered for his country and not for himself. There
are no idols in this temple, and his prayers go up to Shang-ti the
Supreme Being "by whom kings reign and princes decree justice." When
therefore instead of giving rain Heaven sent down a fiery bolt to
destroy the temple at which the Son of Heaven prays, the people were
struck with dismay.

The pale faces of the women, the apprehensive noddings of the men, and
the hushed voices of our old Confucian teachers as they spoke of the
matter, indicated the concern with which they viewed it. Here was a boy
who had been placed upon the throne by a woman; he was the same
generation as the Emperor who had preceded him, and hence could not
worship him as his ancestor. It augured ill both for the Emperor and
the empire, and so the boy Emperor began his reign in the midst of evil
forebodings.

During the nine years that Kuang Hsu had nominal control of affairs a
series of dire calamities befell the empire. Famines as the result of
drought, floods from the overflow of "China's Sorrow," war with Japan,
filching of territory by the European countries, while editorials
appeared daily in the English papers of the port cities to the effect
that China was to be divided up among the powers. Then too Kuang Hsu
was childless and there was no hope of his giving an heir to the throne.

Times and seasons have their meanings for the Chinese. Anything
inauspicious happening on New Year's day is indicative of calamity. Mr.
Chen, a friend of mine, had become a Christian contrary to his mother's
wishes. When his first child was born it was a girl, born on New Year's
day. His mother shook her head, looked distressed, and said that
nothing but calamity would come to his home. His second child was a
boy, but the old woman shook her head again and sighed saying that it
would take more than one boy to avert the calamity of ones first baby
being a girl born on New Year's day, and it was not until he had five
boys in succession that she was finally convinced.

There was an eclipse of the sun on New Year's day of 1898 which
foreboded calamity to the Emperor. During the summer of this year he
began his great reform, and in September the Empress Dowager took
control of the affairs of state and Kuang Hsu was put in prison, never
again to occupy the throne. His prison was his winter palace, where,
for many months, he was confined in a gilded cage of a house, on a
small island, with the Empress Dowager's eunuchs to guard him. These
were changed daily lest they might sympathize with their unhappy
monarch and devise some means for his liberation. Each day when the
guard was changed, the drawbridge connecting the island with the
mainland was removed, leaving the Emperor to wander about in the court
of his palace-prison, or sit on the southern terrace where it
overlooked the lotus lake, waiting, hoping and perhaps expecting that
his last appeal to Kang Yu-wei in which he said: "My heart is filled
with a great sorrow which pen and ink cannot describe; you must go
abroad at once and without a moment's delay devise some means to save
me," might bring forth some fruit.

Whether this confinement interfered with the health of the Emperor or
not it is impossible to say, but from the first he was made to pose as
an invalid. As his failing health was constantly referred to in the
Peking Gazette, the foreigners began to fear that it was the intention
to dispose of the Emperor, and such pressure was brought to bear on the
government as led them to allow the physician attached to the French
legation to enter the palace and make an examination of His Majesty. He
found nothing that fresh air and exercise would not remedy and assured
the government that there was no cause for alarm, and from that time we
heard nothing more of his precarious condition.

One day not long after the coup d'etat a eunuch came rushing into our
compound, his face scratched and bleeding, and knocking his head on the
ground before me, begged me to save his life.

"What is the matter?" I inquired.

"Oh! let me join the church!" he pleaded.

"What do you want to join the church for?" I asked.

"To save my life," he answered.

"But what is this all about?" I urged, raising him to his feet.

"You know the eunuch who came to you to buy books," he said.

I assured him that I knew him.

"Well," he continued, "I am a friend of his. The Empress Dowager has
banished him, burned all the books he bought for the Emperor, and I am
in danger of losing my head. Let me join the church, and thus save my
life."

All I could do was to inform him that this was not the business of the
church, and after further conversation he left and I never saw him
again.

Day after day as the Emperor received the Peking Gazette on his lonely
island he saw one after another of his coveted reforms vanish like mist
before the pen of his august aunt. Nor was this all, for often the
rescinding edicts appeared under his own name, and by the New Year,
when he was brought forth to receive the foreign ministers accredited
to his court, scarcely anything remained of all his reforms but the
Peking University and the provincial and other schools. It is not to be
wondered at therefore that he was reticent and despondent. What
promises of good behaviour it was necessary for him to make before he
was even allowed this much liberty, it is useless for us to conjecture.

Following this audience the Empress Dowager, who up to this time had
been seen by no foreigner except Prince Henry of Prussia, decided to
receive the wives of the foreign ministers. Her motives for this new
move it is impossible to determine. It may have been to ascertain how
the foreign governments would treat her who had been reported to have
calmly ousted "their great and good friend the Emperor," to whom their
ministers were accredited. Or it may have been that she hoped by this
stroke of diplomacy to gain some measure of recognition as head of the
government. She would at least see how she was regarded.

The audience was an unqualified success. The seven ladies received were
charmed by the gracious manner of their imperial hostess, who assured
them each as she touched her lips to the tea which she presented to
them that "we are all one family," and up to that period of her life
there was nothing to indicate that she did not feel that the sentiment
she expressed was true. Up to the time of the coup d'etat, as Dr.
Martin says, "she herself was noted for progressive ideas." "It will
not be denied by any one," says Colonel Denby, "that the improvement
and progress" described in his first volume, "are mainly due to the
will and power of the Empress Regent. To her own people, up to this
period in her career, she was kind and merciful, and to foreigners she
was just." From the time of her return to the capital after their
flight in 1900 till the time of her death she became one of the
greatest reformers, if not the greatest, that has ever sat upon the
dragon throne. One cannot but wish therefore in the interests of
sentiment that it were possible to overlook many things she did from
1898 to 1900, which in the interests of truth it will be impossible to
disregard. Nevertheless we should remember that she was driven to these
things by the filching of her territory by the foreigners, and by the
false pretentions of the superstitious Boxers and their leaders, and in
the hope of preserving her country.

Her first act after imprisoning Kuang Hsu was to offer a large reward
for his adviser Kang Yu-wei either alive or dead. Failing to get him,
"she seized his younger brother Kang Kuang-jen, and with five other
noble and patriotic young men of ability and high promise, he was
beheaded September 28th, while protesting that though they might easily
be slain, multitudes of others would arise to take their places." One
of my young Chinese friends who watched this procession on its way to
the execution grounds told me that,--

"The scene was impossible to describe. These five young reformers,"
after expressing the sentiments quoted above from Dr. Smith, "reviled
the Empress Dowager and the conservatives in the most blood-curdling
manner."

I have already spoken of Wang Chao the secretary of the Board of Rites
who presented the memorial which caused the dismissal of the six
officials of that body, and, indirectly, the fall of the Emperor. Some
time before writing this petition he called at our home requesting Mrs.
Headland to go and see his mother who was ill. When his mother
recovered he sent her to Shanghai, and at the time of the coup d'etat
he failed to get out of the city and went into hiding. Some days
afterwards a closed cart drove up to our home and to our astonishment
he stepped forth. We expressed our surprise that he was still in
Peking, and asked:

"Has the Empress Dowager ceased prosecuting her search for you
reformers?"

"Not yet," he answered.

"And what is she doing?" we inquired.

"Killing some, banishing others, driving many away from the capital,
while still others are going into self-imposed exile."

"Does the Emperor know anything about this?" we inquired.

"No doubt," he replied. "Everybody knows it, why not he?"

"That will make his imprisonment all the harder to bear," we suggested.

"Quite right," he answered.

"There is general alarm in the city that the Emperor himself will be
disposed of; what do you think about it?"

"Who can tell? He has not a friend in the palace except the first
concubine, and, I am told, that she like himself is kept in close
confinement. The Empress stands by her aunt, the Empress Dowager, while
the eunuchs now are all her tools. The officials who go into the palace
to audiences are all conservative and hence against him, though I
suppose they never see him."

"Do you suppose he ever sees the edicts issued in his name?"

"Not at all. They are made by the conservatives and the Empress Dowager
and issued without his knowledge."

"And what do you propose to do?" we inquired.

"I shall leave for Shanghai as soon as I can safely do so," he replied.

Before the year had passed the Empress Dowager had been induced or
compelled to select a new Emperor. We cannot believe that she did it of
her own free will, and for several reasons. First, the child selected
was the son and the grandson of ultra conservative princes, and we
cannot but believe that as she had placed herself in the hands of the
conservative party, it was their selection rather than hers. Second, it
must have been a humiliation to her ever since she discovered that her
nephew, whom she had selected and placed upon the throne in order to
keep the succession in her own family, being the same generation as her
son who had died, could not worship him as his ancestor, and hence
could not legally occupy the throne, though as a matter of fact such a
condition is not unknown in Chinese history.

But if her humiliation was great, that of our boy-prisoner was still
greater, for he was compelled to witness an edict, proclaimed in his
own name, which made him say that as there was no hope of his having a
child of his own to succeed him, he had requested the Empress Dowager
to select a suitable person who should be proclaimed as the successor
of Tung Chih, his predecessor, thus turning himself out of the imperial
line. That this could not have been her choice is evidenced, further,
by the fact that just as soon as she had once more regained her power,
she surrounded herself with progressive officials, turned out all the
great conservatives except Jung Lu, and dispossessing the son of Prince
Tuan, at the time of her death selected her sister's grandchild and
proclaimed him successor to her son and heir to the Emperor Kuang Hsu,
in the following edict:

"Inasmuch as the Emperor Tung Chih had no issue, on the fifth day of
the twelfth moon of that reign (January 12, 1875) an edict was
promulgated to the effect that if the late Emperor Kuang Hsu should
have a son, the said Prince should carry on the succession as the heir
of Tung Chih. But now the late Emperor has ascended upon the dragon to
be a guest on high, leaving no son, and there is no course open but to
appoint Pu I, the son of Tsai Feng, the Prince Regent, as the successor
to Tung Chih, and also as heir to the Emperor Kuang Hsu," which is
quite in keeping with the conduct and character of the Empress Dowager
all her life except those two bad years.

During the days and weeks following the dispossession of Kuang Hsu of
the throne, in 1899 many decrees appeared which signified that at no
distant date he would be superseded by the son of Prince Tuan. The
foreign ministers began again to look grave. They spoke openly of their
fear that Kuang Hsu's days were numbered. They pressed their desire for
the usual New Year's audience, and once more the imprisoned monarch was
brought forth and made to sit upon the throne and receive them. But
when the ladies asked for an audience they were refused, the Empress
Dowager being too busy with affairs of state. She was at that time
seriously considering whether or not the government should cast in its
lot with the Boxers and drive all the foreigners with all their
productions into the eastern sea.

One of the princesses told Mrs. Headland that before coming to a
decision the Empress Dowager called the hereditary and imperial princes
into the palace to consult with them as to what they would better do.
She met them all face to face, the Emperor and Prince Tuan standing
near the throne. She explained to them the ravages of the foreigners,
how they were gradually taking one piece after another of Chinese
territory.

"And now," she continued, "we have these patriotic braves who claim to
be impervious to swords and bullets; what shall we do? Shall we cast in
our lot with their millions and drive all these foreigners out of China
or not?"

Prince Tuan, as father of the heir-apparent, uneducated, superstitious
and ignorant of all foreign affairs, then spoke. He said:

"I have seen the Boxers drilling, I have heard their incantations, and
I believe that they will be able to effect this much desired end. They
will either kill the foreigners or drive them out of the country and no
more will dare to come, and thus we will be rid of them."

The hereditary princes were then asked for an expression of opinion.
The majority of them knew little of foreigners and foreign countries,
and as Prince Tuan, the father of the future Emperor, had expressed
himself so strongly, they hesitated to offer an adverse opinion. But
when it came to Prince Su, a man of strong character, widely versed in
foreign affairs, and of independent thought, he opposed the measure
most vigorously.

"Who," he asked, "are these Boxers? Who are their leaders? How can
they, a mere rabble, hope to vanquish the armies of foreign nations?"

Prince Tuan answered that "by their incantations they were able to
produce heaven-sent soldiers."

Prince Su denounced such superstition as childish. But when after
further argument between him and Prince Tuan the Empress Dowager
assured him that she had had them in the palace and had witnessed their
prowess, he said no more.

The imperial princes were then consulted, but seeing how Prince Su had
fared they were either in favour of the measure or non-committal.
Finally the Empress Dowager appealed to Prince Ching who, more
diplomatic than the younger princes, answered:

"I consider it a most dangerous undertaking, and I would advise against
it. But if Your Majesty decides to cast in your lot with the Boxers I
will do all in my power to further your wishes."

It is not a matter of wonder therefore that the Empress Dowager should
be led into such a foolish measure as the Boxer movement, when the
Prince who had been president of the Foreign Office for twenty-five
years could so weakly acquiesce in such an undertaking.

"The Emperor," said the Princess, "was not asked for an expression of
his opinion on this occasion, but when he saw that the Boxer leaders
had won the day he burst into tears and left the room."

Similar meetings were held in the palace on two other occasions, when
the Emperor implored that they make no attempt to fight all the foreign
nations, for said he, "the foreigners are stronger than we, both in
money and in arms, while their soldiers are much better drilled and
equipped in every way. If we undertake this and fail as we are sure to
do, it will be impossible to make peace with the foreigners and our
country will be divided up amongst them." His pleadings, however, were
disregarded, and after the meeting was over, he had to return to his
little island, where for eight weeks he was compelled to sit listening
to the rattling guns, booming cannons and bursting firecrackers, for
the Boxers seemed to hope to exterminate the foreigners by noise. He
must have felt from the books he had studied that it could only result
in disaster to his own people.

When the allies reached Peking and the Boxers capitulated the Emperor
was taken out of his prison and compelled to flee with the court.

"What do you think of your bullet-proof Boxers now?" one can imagine
they hear him saying to his august aunt, as he sees her cutting off her
long finger nails, dressing herself in blue cotton garments, and
climbing into a common street cart as an ordinary servant. "Wouldn't it
have been better to have taken my advice and that of Hsu Ching-cheng
and Yuan Chang instead of having put them to death for endeavouring in
their earnestness to save the country? What about your old conservative
friends? Can they be depended upon as pillars of state?" Or some other
"I-told-you-so" language of this kind.

From their exile in Hsian decrees continued to be issued in his name,
and when affairs began to be adjusted, and the allies insisted on
setting aside forever the pretentions of the anti-foreign Prince Tuan
and his son, banishing the former to perpetual exile, our hopes ran
high that the Emperor would be restored to his throne. But to our
disappointment the framers of the Protocol contented themselves with
the clause that: "Rational intercourse shall be permitted with the
Emperor as in Western countries," and with the return of the court in
1902 he was still a prisoner.

Every one who has written about audiences with the Empress Dowager
tells how "the Emperor was seated near, though a little below her," but
they never tell why. The reason is not far to seek. The world must not
know that he was a prisoner in the palace. They must see him near the
throne, but they may not speak to him. The addresses of the ministers
were passed to her by her kneeling statesmen, and it was they who
replied. No notice was taken of the Emperor though he seemed to be in
excellent health. The Empress Dowager however still relieved him of the
burdens of the government, and continued to "teach him how to govern."

"I have seen the Emperor many times," Mrs. Headland tells me, "and have
spent many hours in his presence, and every time we were in the palace
the Emperor accompanied the Empress Dowager--not by her side but a few
steps behind her. When she sat, he always remained standing a few paces
in the rear, and never presumed to sit unless asked by her to do so. He
was a lonely person, with his delicate, well-bred features and his
simple dark robes, and in the midst of these fawning eunuchs, brilliant
court ladies, and bejewelled Empress Dowager he was an inconspicuous
figure. No minister of state touched forehead to floor as he spoke in
hushed and trembling voice to him, no obsequious eunuchs knelt when
coming into his presence; but on the contrary I have again and again
seen him crowded against the wall by these cringing servants of Her
Majesty.

"One day while we were in the palace a pompous eunuch had stepped
before the Emperor quite obliterating him. I saw Kuang Hsu put his
hands on the large man's shoulders, and quietly turn him around, that
he might see before whom he stood. There were no signs of anger on his
face, but rather a gentle, pathetic smile as he looked up at the big
servant. I expected to see him fall upon his knees before the Emperor,
but instead, he only moved a few inches to the left, and remained still
in front of His Majesty. Never when in the palace have I seen a knee
bend to the Emperor, except that of the foreigner when greeting him or
bidding him farewell. This was the more noticeable as statesmen and
eunuchs alike fell upon their knees every time they spoke to the
Empress Dowager.

"The first time I saw him his great, pathetic, wistful eyes followed me
for days. I could not forget them, and I determined that if I ever had
opportunity I would say a few words to him letting him know that the
world was resting in hope of his carrying out the great reforms he had
instituted. But he was so carefully guarded and kept under such strict
surveillance that I never found an opportunity to speak to him. Nor did
he ever speak to the visitors, court ladies, the Empress Dowager, or
attendants during all the hours we remained.

"One of the ministers told me that one day after an audience, when the
Empress Dowager and the Emperor had stepped down from the dais, Her
Majesty was engaged in conversation with one of his colleagues, and as
the Emperor stood near by, he made some remark to him. Immediately the
Empress Dowager turned from the one to whom she had been talking and
made answer for the Emperor.

"On one occasion when there were but four of us in the palace, and we
were all comfortably seated, the Emperor standing a few paces behind
the Empress Dowager, she began discussing the Boxer movement, lamenting
the loss of her long finger nails, and various good-luck gourds of
which she was fond. The Emperor, probably becoming weary of a
conversation in which he had no part, quietly withdrew by a side
entrance to the theatre which was playing at the time. For some moments
the Empress Dowager did not notice his absence, but the instant she
discovered he was gone, a look of anxiety overspread her features, and
she turned to the head eunuch, Li Lien-ying, and in an authoritative
tone asked: 'Where is the Emperor?' There was a scurry among the
eunuchs, and they were sent hither and thither to inquire. After a few
moments they returned, saying that he was in the theatre. The look of
anxiety passed from her face as a cloud passes from before the sun--and
several of the eunuchs remained at the theatre.

"I am told that at times the Empress Dowager invites the Emperor to
dine with her, and on such occasions he is forced to kneel at the table
at which she is seated, eating only what she gives him. It is an honour
which he does not covet, but which he dare not decline for fear of
giving offense."



XI

Prince Chun--The Regent

Prince Chun the Regent of China gave a remarkable luncheon at the
Winter Palace to-day to the foreign envoys who gathered here to attend
the funeral ceremonies of the late Emperor Kuang Hsu. The repast was
served in foreign style. Among the Chinese present were Prince Ching,
former president of the Board of Foreign Affairs and now adviser to the
Naval Department; Prince Tsai Chen, a son of Prince Ching, who was at
one time president of the Board of Commerce; Prince Su, chief of the
Naval Department; and Liaing Tung-yen, president of the Board of
Foreign Affairs. After the entertainment the envoys expressed
themselves as unusually impressed with the personality of the
Regent.--Daily Press.



XI

PRINCE CHUN--THE REGENT

The selection of Prince Chun as Regent for the Chinese empire during
the minority of his son, Pu I, the new Emperor, would seem to be the
wisest choice that could be made at the present time. In the first
place, he is the younger brother of Kuang Hsu, the late Emperor, and
was in sympathy with all the reforms the latter undertook to introduce
in 1898. If Kuang Hsu had chosen his successor, having no son of his
own, there is no reason why he should not have selected Pu I to occupy
the throne, with Prince Chun as Regent, for there is no other prince in
whom he could have reposed greater confidence of having all his reform
measures carried to a successful issue; and a brother with whom he had
always lived in sympathy would be more likely to continue his policy
than any one else.

But, in the second place, as we may suppose, Prince Chun was selected
by the Empress Dowager, whatever the edicts issued, and will thus have
the confidence of the party of which she has been the leader. It is
quite wrong to suppose that this is the conservative party, or even a
conservative party. China has both reform and conservative parties,
but, in addition to these, she has many wise men and great officials
who are neither radical reformers nor ultra-conservatives. It was these
men with whom the Empress Dowager allied herself after the Boxer
troubles of 1900.

These men were Li Hung-chang, Chang Chih-tung, Yuan Shih-kai, Prince
Ching, and others, and it is they who, in ten years, with the Empress
Dowager, put into operation, in a statesmanlike way, all the reforms
that Kuang Hsu, with his hot-headed young radical advisers, attempted
to force upon the country in as many weeks. There is every reason to
believe that Prince Chun, the present Regent, has the support of all
the wiser and better element of the Reform party, as well as those
great men who have been successful in tiding China over the ten most
difficult years of her history, while the ultra-conservatives at this
late date are too few or too weak to deserve serious consideration. We,
therefore, think that the choice of Pu I as Emperor, with Prince Chun
as Regent, whether by the Empress Dowager, the Emperor, or both, was,
all things considered, the best selection that could have been made.

Prince Chun is the son of the Seventh Prince, the nephew of the Emperor
Hsien Feng and the Empress Dowager, and grandson of the Emperor Tao
Kuang. He has a fine face, clear eye, firm mouth, with a tendency to
reticence. He carries himself very straight, and while below the
average in height, is every inch a prince. He is dignified,
intelligent, and, though not loquacious, never at a loss for a topic of
conversation. He is not inclined to small talk, but when among men of
his own rank, he does not hesitate to indulge in bits of humour.

This was rather amusingly illustrated at a dinner given by the late
Major Conger, American minister to China. Major and Mrs. Conger
introduced many innovations into the social life of Peking, and none
more important than the dinners and luncheons given to the princes and
high officials, and also to the princesses and ladies of the court. In
1904, I was invited to dine with Major Conger and help entertain Prince
Chun, Prince Pu Lun, Prince Ching, Governor Hu, Na T'ung, and a number
of other princes and officials of high rank. I sat between Prince Chun
and Governor Hu. Having met them both on several former occasions, I
was not a stranger to either of them, and as they were well acquainted
with each other, though one was a Manchu prince and the other a Chinese
official, conversation was easy and natural.

We talked, of course, in Chinese only, of the improvements and
advantages that railroads bring to a country, for Governor Hu, among
other things, was the superintendent of the Imperial Railways of north
China. This led us to speak of the relative comforts of travel by land
and by sea, for Prince Chun had gone half round the world and back. We
listened to the American minister toasting the young Emperor of China,
his princes, and his subjects; and then to Prince Ching toasting the
young President of the United States, his officials, and his people, in
a most dignified and eloquent manner. And then as the buzz of
conversation went round the table again, and perhaps because of their
having spoken of the YOUNG Emperor and the young President, I turned to
Governor Hu, who had an unusually long, white beard which reached
almost to his waist as he sat at table, and said:

"Your Excellency, what is your honourable age?"

"I was seventy years old my last birthday," he replied.

"And he is still as strong as either of us young men," said I, turning
to Prince Chun.

"Oh, yes," said the Prince; "he is good for ten years yet, and by that
time he can use his beard as an apron."

"It is an ill wind that blows no one good," says the proverb, and this
was never more forcibly illustrated than in the case of the death of
the lamented Baron von Kettler. Had it not been for this unfortunate
occurrence, Prince Chun would not have been sent to Germany to convey
the apologies of the Chinese government to the German Emperor, and he
would thus never have had the opportunity of a trip to Europe; and the
world might once more have beheld a regent on the dragon throne who had
never seen anything a hundred miles from his own capital.

Prince Chun started on this journey with such a retinue as only the
Chinese government can furnish. He had educated foreign physicians and
interpreters, and, like the great Viceroy Li Hung-chang, he had a round
fan with the Eastern hemisphere painted on one side and the Western on
the other, and the route he was to travel distinctly outlined on both,
with all the places he was to pass through, or to stop at on the trip,
plainly marked. He was intelligent enough to observe everything of
importance in the ports through which he passed, and it was interesting
to hear him tell of the things he had seen, and his characterization of
some of the people he had visited.

"What did Your Highness think of the relative characteristics of the
Germans and the French, as you saw them?" I asked him at the same
dinner.

"The people in Berlin," said he, "get up early in the morning and go to
their business, while the people in Paris get up in the evening and go
to the theatre."

This may have been a bit exaggerated, but it indicated that the Prince
did not travel, as many do on their first trip, with his mouth open and
his eyes closed.

After his return to Peking he purchased a brougham, as did most of the
other leading officials and princes at the close of the Boxer troubles,
and driving about in this carriage, he has been a familiar figure from
that time until the present. As straws show the direction of the wind,
these incidents ought to indicate that Prince Chun will not be a
conservative to the detriment of his government, or to the hindrance of
Chinas progress.

It is a well-known fact that the Empress Dowager, in addition to her
other duties, took charge of the arrangement of the marriages of all
her nieces and nephews. One of her favourite Manchu officials, and
indeed one of the greatest Manchus of recent years, though very
conservative, and hence little associated with foreigners, was Jung Lu.
As the affianced bride of Prince Chun had drowned herself in a well
during the Boxer troubles, the Empress Dowager engaged him to the
daughter of the lady who had been Jung Lu's first concubine, but who,
as his consort was dead, was raised to the position of wife.

"This Lady Jung," says Mrs. Headland, "is some forty years of age, very
pretty, talkative, and vivacious, and she told me with a good deal of
pride, on one occasion, of the engagement of her son to the sixth
daughter of Prince Ching. And then with equal enthusiasm she told me
how her daughter had been married to Prince Chun, 'which of course
relates me with the two most powerful families of the empire.'

"I have met the Princess Chun on several occasions at the audiences in
the palace, at luncheons with Mrs. Conger, at a feast with the Imperial
Princess, at a tea with the Princess Tsai Chen, and at the palaces of
many of the princesses. She is a very quiet little woman, and looked
almost infantile as she gazed at one with her big, black eyes. She is
very circumspect in her movements, and with such a mother and father as
she had, I should think may be very brilliant. Naturally she had to be
specially dignified and sedate at these public functions, as she and
the Imperial Princess were the only ones belonging to the old imperial
household, the descendants of Tao Kuang, who were intimately associated
with the Empress Dowager's court. She is small, but pretty, and, as I
have indicated, quiet and reticent. She was fond of her father, and
naturally fond of the Empress Dowager, who selected her as a wife for
her favourite nephew, Prince Chun, to whom she promised the succession
at the time of their marriage. After her father's death, and while she
was in mourning, she was invited into the palace by the Empress
Dowager, where she appeared wearing blue shoes, the colour used in
second mourning.

"'Why do you wear blue shoes?' asked Her Majesty.

"'On account of the death of my father,' replied the Princess.

"'And do you mourn over your dead father more than you rejoice over
being in the presence of your living ruler?' the Empress Dowager
inquired.

"It is unnecessary to add that the Princess 'changed the blue shoes for
red ones while she remained in the palace, so careful has the Empress
Dowager always been of the respect due to her dignity and position."

Having promised the regency to Prince Chun, we may infer that the
Empress Dowager would do all in her power to prepare him to occupy the
position with credit to himself, and in the hope that he would continue
the policy which she has followed during the last ten years. Whenever,
therefore, opportunity offered for a prince to represent the government
at any public function with which foreigners were connected, Prince
Chun was asked or appointed to attend. I have said that it was the
murder of the German minister, Baron von Kettler, that gave Prince Chun
his opportunity to see the world. And just here I might add that an
account of the massacre of Von Kettler, sent from Canton, was published
in a New York paper three days before it occurred. This indicates that
his death had been premeditated and ordered by some high
authorities,--perhaps Prince Tuan or Prince Chuang, Boxer
leaders,--because the Germans had taken the port of Kiaochou, and had
compelled the Chinese government to promise to allow them to open all
the mines and build all the railroads in the province of Shantung.

After the Boxer troubles were settled, the Germans, at the expense of
the Chinese government, erected a large stone memorial arch on the spot
where Von Kettler fell. At its dedication, members of the diplomatic
corps of all the legations in Peking were present, including ladies and
children, together with a large number of Chinese officials
representing the city, the government, and the Foreign Office, and
Prince Chun was selected to pour the sacrificial wine. He did it with
all the dignity of a prince, however much he may or may not have
enjoyed it. On this occasion he used one of the ancient, three-legged,
sacrificial wine-cups, which he held in both hands, while Na Tung,
President of the Foreign Office, poured the wine into the cup from a
tankard of a very beautiful and unique design. It is the only occasion
on which I have seen the Prince when he did not seem to enjoy what he
was doing. I ought to add just here that I have heard the Chinese refer
to this arch as the monument erected by the Chinese government in
memory of the man who murdered Baron von Kettler!

It is a well-known fact that the Boxers destroyed all buildings that
had any indication of a foreign style of architecture, whether they
belonged to Chinese or foreigner, Christian or non-Christian, legation,
merchant, or missionary. In the rebuilding of the Peking legations,
missions, and educational institutions, there were naturally a large
number of dedicatory services. Many of the Chinese officials attended
them, but I shall refer to only one or two at which I remember meeting
Prince Chun. I believe it was the design of the Empress Dowager, as
soon as she had decided upon him as the Regent, to give him as liberal
an education in foreign affairs as the facilities in Peking would allow.

For many years the Methodist mission had tried to secure funds from
America to erect a hospital and medical school in connection with the
mission and the Peking University. This they found to be impossible,
and finally Dr. N. S. Hopkins of Massachusetts, who was in charge of
that work, consulted with his brother and brother-in-law, who
subscribed the funds and built the institution. This act of benevolence
on the part of Dr. Hopkins and his friends appealed to the Chinese
sense of generosity, and when the building was completed, a large
number of Chinese officials, together with Prince Chun and Prince Pu
Lun, were present at its dedication. A number of addresses were made by
such men as Major Conger, the American minister, Bishop Moore, Na Tung,
Governor Hu, General Chiang, and others of the older representatives,
in which they expressed their appreciation of the generosity which
prompted a man like Dr. Hopkins to give not only himself, but his
money, for the education of the Chinese youth and the healing of their
poor. And I might add that Dr. Hopkins is physician to many of the
princes and officials in Peking at the present time.

During this reconstruction, a number of the colleges of north China
united to form a union educational institution. One part of this scheme
was a union medical college, situated on the Ha-ta-men great street not
a hundred yards north of the Von Kettler memorial arch. To the erection
of this building the wealthy officials of Peking subscribed liberally,
and the Empress Dowager sent her ch

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/523