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

18 - Letters to China

18 Letters to China Through 1905 and into 1906, Edwin had still planned to fulfill his ambassadorial obligations to Mexico—there was even talk of his running for governor of Iowa. Edwin’s brother, Universalist minister Dr. E. L. Conger, lived in Pasadena, California, which is where the Congers themselves moved shortly after returning from China. It was there their new troubles began, starting with a rug. In 1906, Sarah sold to a private Chicago dealer a Chinese carpet she had bought in Beijing for $90. For this silk carpet, purchased after the Boxer Uprising (and apparently not at one of the military auctions), she received the considerable sum of $6,910. This was a windfall large enough to purchase a lot on El Molino Avenue in Pasadena and have built on it the shingled Craftsman-style house later described as “a beautiful vine-covered bungalow,” and “a veritable treasure-house of Chinese wonders.” Sarah’s sale could be seen as simply collector’s luck, but with it came Sarah’s first taste of the scandal that was to surround her entire Chinese collection.1 “Mrs. Conger bought the rug against the protest of her husband,” ran a New York Times piece published on June 13, 1906, with tongue in cheek. 264 The Empress and Mrs. Conger “Mr. Conger declared his wife would get cheated, but Mrs. Conger had her way.” Sarah’s judgment had been on the mark, though this discerning taste was to be held against her as proof of her sophistication and of her complicity in some sort of “racket”—readers were invited to ponder how could she not have known the carpet’s value.The sale was pungent enough to attract the press. Later that month, the New York Times’ catty “Topic of the Times” editor questioned Sarah’s “Big Profit on a Fine Rug”: “We are a little disquieted, or alarmed, or something, by the news—which may be only a report—that while in China Mrs. Conger bought for $90 a rug which has just been sold for $7,000. The bargain was good, as bargains go, but it was not exactly such a bargain as we would all like to have made too often by the wives of too many American Ministers.” Given the sharpness of most Chinese antiques dealers, the writer speculates, surely Mrs. Conger must have wondered why she was getting such a good deal. Of course, perhaps she did not care, for it was “a morbidly tender conscience that recoils from palace loot after it has passed through several hands, or even one.” An anonymous letter writer from Brooklyn raised an issue that would haunt Sarah more seriously later on, that of import duty. “Was the rug appraised at $90 or at $7,000, or is the duty as yet to be levied?”asked “One Who Is Curious.” The editor of “Topics of the Times” could not help following up with this same question, one “that could hardly be more trying and painful than that asked by one of our correspondents yesterday in regard to Mrs. Conger’s now famous rug . . . Our own interest still centers in the disproportion between cost and price, but the tariff feature does have certain merits as a topic for purely academic debate”—making it clear that only an official investigation could clear up the controversy.2 While this scandal swirled, Edwin’s health began to fail rapidly. As he continued to deteriorate, he was confined to his bed, where Sarah and Laura kept a vigil. On May 18, 1907, at the age of sixty-four, Edwin died in the house he and Sarah had just completed.3 Though during the Boxer siege there had been criticism of Edwin’s decisions and of his diplomatic abilities in general, the eulogies now poured in from papers as diverse as the New York Times and the Oakland Tribune, while the San Francisco Call dubbed him “the bulwark of the doomed foreigners in the Chinese capital.” General Adna R. Chaffee lauded Edwin’s effort to sort out the 265 Letters to China jumble of the post-Boxer Chinese landscape as “one of the largest and best of his works . . . In government and diplomatic circles,” Chaffee added, “Minister Conger was very highly thought of. Government officials in China and Japan had the highest regard for his worth.”4 In his will, which appointed no administrator (Sarah was...