Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

15 Lady of the court

15 Lady of the court Though built near and in some cases on the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, destroyed by foreign troops in 1860, and then damaged again by same following the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Cixi’s New Summer Palace was so literally new as to barely have had time for the paint to dry. Situated on over seven hundred acres northwest of Beijing, threequarters of the land being covered by Lake Kunming, the palace Cixi named Yiheyuan or “Garden of Nurtured Harmony” was the dowager’s pet project from the late 1880s onward. She pursued the work with all the fury of a lover of beauty who has seen beautiful things destroyed — things which, even worse, were destroyed by the foreigners with whom she was to have an ambiguous relationship throughout her life. “If the palace had been destroyed by big guns during a battle,” Cixi later told Der Ling, “I would not feel so bitter.” Guns had no eyes, she pointed out. That men could see this beautiful place and still destroy it was a crime she could not forgive. During the Second Opium War and the occupation of Beijing by the British and French, the Old Summer Palace, known as the Yuanmingyuan1 [Garden of Perfect Brilliance] and considered one 144 Imperial Masquerade of the most exquisite royal retreats in the world, was so pilfered of its treasures and so thoroughly put to the torch that all that survived were a pavilion of bronze, dating from the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the Yuanmingyuan’s greatest patron, and a couple of buildings covered in heat-resistant tiles. The carved marble French style palace and fountains built according to the plans of the Jesuit priest Castiglione, in the grounds of which Cixi had known brief happiness as favorite of the Xianfeng Emperor, were shattered into a waste field of fancily carved rubble. Cixi had no reason to love the West, but in reversing the damage Western powers had done to China’s beauty she acted on impulses which did harm to China itself, by making it appear to both Chinese and the world at large that her real concern was not for her empire’s welfare but for the beautification of her private pleasure haunts. She was not the only member of the imperial family to be obsessed with the remains of the Old Summer Palace. Her son, the briefly regnant Emperor Tongzhi, loved the ruins so much he staged lavish parties in their midst, and began to draw on the imperial exchequer to restore them as a country place for the two empresses dowager. Court ministers protested, as did the emperor’s uncle, Prince Gong, but ultimately they raised the money to have the site cleared. Before any real work could be started, however,Tongzhi was dead. To what degree this young man’s tragic demise further contributed to his mother’s attachment to the ruined gardens is not known, but it must have been a factor.2 A classic accusation against the Empress Dowager, and one that continues to appear in modern histories of China and the Qing dynasty, is that she diverted funds meant for the imperial navy to pay for the extensive building and rebuilding projects required to restore the Summer Palace, and specifically to build the marble barge located at the western end of the Long Gallery. The irony of a stationary maritime playhouse being constructed for the pleasure of a wanton female ruler using money meant to be spent on real warships stuck to the popular imagination, much as gossip attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette not only the construction of the Petit Trianon (it dated from the previous reign) but also its walls paved with imagined gemstones. Calumny of this sort has always done females in power far more harm than males.3 145 Lady of the court Prince Chun (Yixuan), father of the Guangxu Emperor, was chairman of the Admiralty Board, and it was he who siphoned off money, which Viceroy Li Hongzhang had borrowed for improvement of the naval academy, and used it for luxurious toys in both Beijing and the Summer Palace as well as modern improvements — according to one source, Chun was responsible for bringing electric light to both Beijing and his own palace there.4 To build a suitable residence at the Summer Palace for Cixi, as a way of...