Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

26 East is West, West is East

26 East is West, West is East China and Russia, those massive cultures precariously balanced at either end of a massive continent, have always shared certain intriguing similarities. Not only have both Chinese and Russian cultures had a legacy of hiding away their women, in an effort to preserve chastity — in Russia’s case, a practice of the royal court, whereas in China any woman above the fieldlaboring peasant class, where women perforce had to show themselves, was to be concealed from the sight of men, within separate female quarters in the family compound. They shared a similar style of bed, built over a furnace to heat the sleeper through cold northern winter nights — the kang, in China, seen in imperial bedrooms in the Forbidden City, and the homely Russian version, which doubled as a cooking stove in many peasant cottages. China and Russia share legends about magical birds (the Chinese phoenix, the Russian firebird), even a reverence for the color red, which in Russian also means “beautiful,” and to a Chinese is the color of happiness and good luck (and the hue worn by a bride for her wedding gown). And they had versions of the same folk saying: “Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away.” 254 Imperial Masquerade These nations — one European with Asian undertones, the other Asian with European veneer — also shared something else very similar: two revolutionary leaders, one a dyed in the wool Communist, the other more than just open-minded on the subject, who took credit for revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century which, on closer examination, prove activated more by accident than action, and in fact took place when either leader was out of the country undergoing the upheavals each professed to have created. These men, Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Vladimir Lenin, lived short lives — they died a year apart, in 1924 and 1925 — but survived long enough to witness the parlous state in which their revolutions had left their respective nations. Lenin himself had once pegged Dr. Sun as a personality of “inimitable — one might say virginal — naiveté,” one of the few but significant areas where the two men were not cut from the same cloth. Both, perhaps not surprisingly, were accorded similar funerary rites and temple-like entombments, and are revered today, with various strengths of patriotism and Realpolitik, as the fathers of their nations. Der Ling’s father was one of many men courageous, scheming or a combination of both, who, according to Der Ling, had literally helped save the life of Sun Yat-sen, a well-meaning reformer who but for constant assistance might well have ended up suffering the traitor’s death of a thousand cuts in a market square in Beijing. When Dr. Sun had come to see Yu Keng at the Chinese legation in Paris, he was putting Yu Keng in danger, not a situation likely to earn Yu Keng’s friendship; and he was also trusting that Yu Keng was a man of his word and not just a conniving opportunist, who would entrap the fugitive revolutionary and ship him off to Beijing to earn points with the dowager. As we have seen, according to Der Ling Yu Keng was up to the challenge. Like Lenin, who would arrive at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station from exile abroad only after the March 1917 revolution, Dr. Sun was also abroad, in Denver, Colorado, on a trip through America to drum up financial support, when an act more accidental than intended toppled Qing rule and laid the way clear for the founding of the Chinese republic. In early October 1911, in a garrison at Wuhan on the Yangzi River, a homemade bomb stored by a group of dissenting army officers exploded, literally blowing the cover for their anti-Qing plot. When arriving 255 East is West, West is East authorities discovered evidence to that effect, including the location of the dissenters’ headquarters, they put the conspirators under arrest. This event might well have ended as most anti-Manchu conspiracies had done over the past couple of generations, had it not been that the shock discovery galvanized the conspirators into courage: the officers mutinied, and before long Wuhan was theirs. In the days that followed, the imperial army and navy fought a losing battle against the revolt. Yuan Shikai was called out of retirement, and though...