Empress and Mrs. Conger, The: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds

13 - Loot

13 Loot The topography that made Beijing prone to miserable dust storms in the spring also left the city vulnerable to biting north winds in the winter.The afternoon of January 7, 1902 was no exception. But chilled air glittering with Gobi Desert grit did little to detract from an occasion that, despite the ravages of weather and war, was nothing less than splendid—the formal return to Beijing of the Guangxu emperor and the Empress Dowager Cixi, after a year and a half of self-imposed exile. While the state coffers had run dry long ago, what remained of imperial officialdom in Beijing was pulling out all the stops—a total of US$9.1 million was spent smoothing the imperial court’s way from Xian to Beijing. On January 7, Sarah was met at the American legation at 11:30 a.m. by officials from the Chinese government, who arranged for a Chinese bodyguard to accompany her to a grandstand on Qianmen Street (which still runs on a north–south axis straight toward the Forbidden City), constructed especially for the comfort of foreign observers. For added security, Yuan Shikai’s troops, trained to foreign-style perfection, lined the broad boulevard. The comfort of the emperor and dowager had been considered as well. Over the burnt ruins of the Majiapu train station to 182 The Empress and Mrs. Conger the south, where the dowager’s private car had been torched by Boxers two years before, a false front had been erected, with awnings of yellow silk and tents for the emperor and dowager to rest in before starting for the city. And just as in the old times, the streets of Beijing were scattered with yellow sand, so that the imperial son and mother need not travel over ordinary brown earth.1 Besides the foreign diplomats, invitations were also sent to customs and banking officials. It was a good thing, too, as Sarah wrote to Laura a week later, because most of the diplomatic corps did not show up— British, French, and Russian all stayed away. Edwin was invited but had found some other pressing business, the nature of which Sarah does not explain, to prevent his attending. “[The return] was a brave act on the part of China,” she wrote. If others in the foreign community chose to give such an event the brush off, Sarah quickly showed she would not be among them. Given prime seating on the second storey of the building, on the east side of the thoroughfare, right in the front row, Sarah had “plenty of blankets keeping the wind from our feet,” she assured Laura. Behind her, should she need it, was a room warmed by a fire, and refreshments were served throughout the event. This lent the highly anticipated imperial parade the flavor of a cross between a country fair and a circus (the New York Times characterized it as “a glorified Lord Mayor’s show”), in which the dowager, though not swinging down from a trapeze in tights or cradled in an elephant’s trunk, was the star attraction.2 Sitting on the edge of her balcony and looking down at the golden street below, Sarah would have had much to review from the past year and a half. When allied British and French troops had marched on Beijing in 1860, the focus of anger and vengeance was centered almost totally on the Xianfeng emperor, whose minions had kidnapped, tortured, or killed foreign nationals in abrogation of military etiquette and international diplomatic law. The Yuanmingyuan had been ransacked and burned in part to teach the emperor a lesson, to shake him out of his isolationist somnolence and wake him to the exigencies of foreign trade and foreign hegemony. The people of Beijing, and of China in general, were not thought responsible for one ruler’s infirm grasp on the new reality. The aftermath of August 14, 1900 had offered a different set of lessons to be taught, not just to the emperor per se but also to the people 183 Loot of Beijing, the surrounding towns and villages, and the entire province of Zhili. There was much for the world outside China to be angry about. Armed militants, professional soldiers, and hoodlums eager to vent their anger on foreigners and on Chinese who had accepted the foreign god and foreign ways, had tortured and murdered hundreds in the months...