Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

9 Chinese powder keg

9 Chinese powder keg It was miscommunication about the fate of the man who had been a kind of Gallic Cassandra in the Legation Quarter just prior to the Boxer violence that put Yu Keng, his staff and family in danger, in faraway Paris. The French minister in Beijing, Stephen Jean-Marie Pichon was a plump, excitable little man with a snobbish wife, who was given to what the highnosed British scoffed at as typical overwrought “Continental”behavior. But Pichon was a friend of Bishop Favier, who had been frank with the French minister about where things were headed. The bishop had warned Pichon in mid-May that with the recent Boxer-related violence a mere forty miles outside Beijing, he had no doubt that the cult and its followers would be in the capital, where no measures were being taken to defuse or defend against them. The bishop also claimed to have heard that the date for an actual attack on the Beitang or Northern Cathedral had been fixed. The Boxers had in fact set July 1900 for an attack, basing the schedule on auspiciousness of the moon or month and the year; and at least one Chinese servant in legation employ insisted she had known of the Boxer plans fully a year before, “but had dared not tell [her master] for fear of losing [her place].”1 92 Imperial Masquerade No doomsayer is welcome, but admittedly Pichon made himself more annoying than was necessary, with his moanings of “Nous sommes perdus!” accompanied by much wringing of his chubby hands. He envisioned a replay of the horrors of the 1871 Prussian siege of Paris and the Commune which had followed. Soon other legationers would come to see his point, though where a Frenchman would have nightmares about a replay of the Siege of Paris, Britishers felt chills at the thought of another Sepoy Mutiny. In either case, the Chinese outside the walls of the Legation Quarter were assumed capable of unimaginable barbarity. Therein would lie much of the misconception of just what it was that happened next. As would be discovered when the legationers had to start eating everything from horsemeat to sparrows, Pichon was not far off the mark. But his warnings were unnerving and annoying to the other ministers, most of whom subscribed to the approved British stiff upper lip school of disaster response. One of the ministers in particular, the German Baron von Ketteler, made a habit of taking Western aggression to the extreme, picking off “Boxers” (any Chinese would do) like pheasants winging it over an Ostpreussen heath. He had already made himself a target by attacking a Boxer boy he had found idling in the street, afterward taking him captive. American artist Cecile Payen, who had come to Beijing with Sarah Conger, the wife of American minister Edwin Conger, recalled seeing Ketteler follow German soldiers who had taken a pair of alleged Boxers captive, hitting the young Chinese men relentlessly with his cane.2 When on June 19 officials of the Zongli Yamen issued a request to the ministers, sealed in eleven red envelopes, to leave Beijing voluntarily for Tianjin within twenty-four hours, all of the ministers except Ketteler wanted to take the chance to get out. They requested a meeting with the Yamen the following morning to discuss the details, but a response came that infuriated the bellicose Ketteler: the officials were happy to discuss the situation, but in view of the riots and mayhem of the past several days could not guarantee the safety of any foreigner on the way to the Yamen. Unfortunately for Ketteler, he declared prior to this letter’s arrival, with a bang of his fist on the table top, that he would head for the Yamen then and there and wait for the officials to show up for parley. Not only did he enter the street against the advice of all present, but did so in the 93 Chinese powder keg ostentatious green and red sedan chair betokening his rank. He never made it to the Zongli Yamen — in fact, did not make it very far down Hatamen Street, before he was shot point blank in the head and killed by a Boxer brave named Enhai. Now it was obvious even to the most delusional that it was not safe to leave the legations, and the ministers, their families and...