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 11 Hundred Days of Reform, 1898 We have heard of Chinese ideas being employed to convert barbarians, but have never heard of China being converted by barbarians. — official in the manchu court who feared the emperor’s reform movement, 1898 No one escapes history, but the Chinese seem more aware of this than most other people. The Ronnings, like the Chinese, began dating events in their lives by historical episodes. The year my father was born, 1894, was the “Year of the Sino-Japanese War,” and 1898 was the “Year of the Reform.” July 2, 1898. Dear Nils: We have great hopes for reform at last. The Old Buddha who has been ruling from a curtain behind the throne for 37 years has retired to the Summer Palace. The enlightened Emperor Guangxu has finally taken the reins of power and already demonstrated that he is far more concerned about the fate of China than the Empress Dowager. He has summoned progressive Chinese scholars such as K’ang Yu Wei, a Cantonese visionary who is popularly known as “K’ang the Modern Sage and Reformer” and even missionaries like Timothy Richard, to come to Peking to begin work on the Reform Decrees that could turn China into a modern state. China is now on the edge of a social revolution and I pray that reforms will make it a peaceful one. Everything has happened so fast we don’t know what will happen next. Let us pray the Emperor will be able to hold power. The Japanese victory and the infringement of the Western powers on its territories had jarred the Chinese empire from its insular illusions. The Imperial Court was forced to recognize the realities of the present and acknowledge that Western civilization was not necessarily inferior, at least in the art of war and perhaps in other ways as well. It was obvious that the lumbering Chinese war junks, dependent on the winds and tides, were, in fact, virtually defenseless against the steam-engine battleships of Japan and the Western powers. Chinese defense officials aspired to a modern navy and an army with up-to-date weapons, while scholars and court officials began to recognize the usefulness of Western science and technology as well as the need for Western learning. 94  arriving in the middle kingdom The “enlightened Emperor Guangxu” to whom Halvor referred in his letter was the eleventh emperor of the Qing Dynasty. He was not the son of the preceding Emperor Tongzhi, who had died without an heir, but the son of the empress dowager’s sister, Ci’an (Eastern Mistress), who had also been a concubine of the Emperor Tongzhi. The Dowager Cixi had adopted her underage nephew when her own son died so that she could retain the power of the regent. She bestowed the title “Holy Mother Empress Dowager” on herself and placed Guangxu on the Dragon Throne at the age of four. At official meetings she sat behind a gold brocade curtain hung behind the throne and told the child what to say. This continued until the boy reached his majority, at age eighteen, when he was expected to take full power. Concubine Orchid Empress Dowager Cixi was born in 1835, a branch of the Yehenara clan of the Manchus, and named Orchid, following the tradition of naming girls after flowers . Her parents had arranged her marriage to her cousin Ronglu (who would later play a major role in her life), but when the Emperor Daoguang died in 1850, his nineteen-year-old successor, Emperor Xianfeng, issued an edict requiring young girls eligible as concubines to come to the Forbidden City. Orchid and her sister Sakota were chosen as concubines. Sakota became empress, and Orchid became the Noble Consort Yi. In 1855, they both became pregnant. Sakota’s child was a girl, and Orchid was fortunate enough to give birth to a boy, who became the only male heir to the Dragon Throne. His mother, now Consort Yi, was both brilliant and beautiful, and she soon became the most influential person in the emperor’s court. In 1858, the Chinese were forced by the British to sign the Treaty of Tientsin, which opened up additional treaty ports on the Yangtze River, formally allowed Christian missionary activity, and gave the British and other Allied treaty powers the right to establish permanent resident legations in the capital. In September 1860, during the last stages of the Second Opium War and...

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