Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China Read Online Free PDF

for the princes had to be chosen by the emperor, from the candidates presented for the selection of his own consorts. Cixi had seen quite a lot of the prince at the opera shows. Although on such occasions male and female were separated by a screen, the curious ones always found a way to size up a member of the opposite sex. From the boxes in which they were seated, cross-legged on cushions, the royal women could observe the royal males without being seen.The American missionary physician Mrs Isaac Headland, who (later) treated many aristocratic ladies, including Cixi’s mother, noted: ‘these gentle little ladies have their own curiosity, and some means of finding out who’s who among that court full of dragon-draped pillars of state; for I have never failed to receive a ready answer when I inquired as to the name of some handsome or distinguished-looking guest whose identity I wished to learn’. Cixi would have made it her business to find out about the character of Prince Chun, and indeed he would be of enormous service to her in the future.
    Meanwhile, Cixi devoted herself to her son. Court rules forbade her to breast-feed him, and doctors prescribed herbal medicine to stop her milk. Awet nurse from a lower-class Manchu family who met the court requirements was engaged and, to facilitate her milk, one instruction enjoined her to eat ‘half a duck every day, or pigs’ knuckles, or the front part of pigs’ lungs’. The royal household also paid for the wet nurse to employ a wet nurse for her own child.
    Empress Zhen was the official Mother to the child, and took precedence over Cixi. This did not lead to animosity between the two women, and the child grew up with two doting mothers. When he was older, he had a playmate, his elder sister, the Grand Princess. Court painters captured the two children playing together in the palace gardens, the little boy in an indigo robe tied round the waist with a red sash and the girl in green with a red waistcoat, with flowers in her hair. They are shown fishing from a pavilion under a willow tree open to a lake of blooming lotuses. In another picture, set in early spring, with white magnolias next to an evergreen pine, both the boy and the girl have little caps on, the prince’s robe thick with pale-blue lining. They seem to be looking for insects that were perhaps waking from a long hibernation, among the gaunt roots of old trees and rockeries. In the pictures, the younger boy always appeared twice as big as his elder sister.
    Behind these peaceful and idyllic scenes of the early childhood of Cixi’s son, the empire continued to be convulsed by the Taiping rebellion in the south and by violent unrest elsewhere. In fact it was facing another gigantic problem: foreign powers had invaded.
    The origin of the Anglo-French war against China in 1856–60 can be traced back 100 years earlier. In 1757, the then-emperor, Qianlong, who ruled China for sixty years (1736–95) and is often referred to as ‘Qianlong the Magnificent’ for his achievements, closed the door of the country, leaving only one port open for trade, Canton. The emperor’s paramount concern was the control of the vast empire, and a closed door made control much easier. But Britain was hungry for trade. Its main imports from China were silks and teas, the latter cultivated only in China at that time. Each year, through import duty, teas alone brought more than £3 million into the Exchequer, enough to cover half the expenses of the Royal Navy. To persuade Emperor Qianlong to open more ports for trade, a British mission arrived in Beijing in 1793. Its leader, LordMacartney, did his best to accommodate Chinese demands and accepted that the boats and carts conveying his mission bear banners inscribed with Chinese characters: ‘The English Ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China’. In order to be granted an audience with Qianlong, he even performed the obligatory san-gui-jiu-kou – that is, kneeling three