Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

2 Culture clash

2 Culture clash Growing up in an unusual household in remote Shashi seems to have given Yu Keng’s children a sense of perpetually being on stage. Yet while they were encouraged to feel proud of their uniqueness, the sisters and their brothers were also highly protected — in their classroom, in the walled garden, and by their parents, from too close contact with the things and people whose homogeneousness was most apt to point up the children’s differences, those traits that Yu Keng intended to nurture. Yu Keng’s protectiveness included keeping his children apart from the turmoils big and little that ranged across the countryside as famine brought on uprisings, and uprisings official retaliation, and all was kept simmering by the universal Chinese irritation under the “improving” efforts of foreign missionaries and merchants, whose activities were not often distinct from one another. But in summer 1891, the reality of Yu Keng’s heavy responsibilities, and the reality of his determination to carry them out even beyond the call of duty, was brought home to the family’s walled compound, when Methodist missionaries at Wuxi, a river town several days’ journey east down the Yangzi, were attacked and murdered by anti-foreign, anti-Christian rioters. What was worse, 16 Imperial Masquerade in the eyes of horrified foreigners, who suspected the Chinese capable of every demonic torment, was that the rebels took several of the foreign missionaries hostage and refused to give them up or to parley. Hearing of the violence, Sir Robert Hart blamed it on the Ko-lao-hui or “Society of Brothers and Elders,” a secret insurrectionary organization with an anti-missionary (and anti-Manchu) program, which had been armed through the rabble-rousing services of Charles Welsh Mason, a British subject and ex-employee of Customs at Zhenjiang. Hart believed the uprising to be “incipient rebellion rather than hostility to either foreigners or Christianity,” but the fact that those killed and held hostage comprised people answering to both descriptions shows he was not aware of all the facts (or chose to ignore them). For reasons which have never been completely clarified, Mason sought the overthrow of the Qing government and joined the Ko-lao-hui to that end, recruiting Chinese and purchasing arms and ammunition for the organization. The rebellion, which flared not just in Wuxi but also in Wuhu and other Yangzi River towns, was eventually put down by the foreign-friendly GovernorGeneral of Jiangxi, Liu Kunyi; he would later prove his nerve further during the Boxer troubles of 1900 by sealing off southern China from the violent uprisings which, finding no purchase there, moved north to tear Beijing to pieces. Following Liu’s quashing of the Yangzi valley uprising, Mason was arrested later that fall and put on trial. Sir Robert Hart would liken the “thousand hostilities [the uprising and its aftermath] has set in motion” to “Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein,” that creature built up out of the remnants of the dead. Even Frankenstein was vanquished in the end, but Hart obviously had fears that where this uprising had failed, others would rise from more fertile soil in the near future.1 Soon after the Wuxi news broke, the house was filled with visitors who crowded into Yu Keng’s office, all eager to discuss the uprising and trade various strengths of hearsay and condemnation, mostly of the foreign victims — according to Der Ling, Yu Keng’s talent as mediator was known to everyone and his opinion on so critical a situation was valued even by those who disagreed with him. Der Ling remembered how she escaped from Hung-fang’s grip and slipped into her father’s office, with its stiff blackwood chairs and tables, where Yu Keng stood surrounded by chattering Shashi officials. Viceroy Zhang Zhidong, Yu 17 Culture clash Keng’s superior, obviously also held his likin inspector’s mediating abilities in high esteem, because as Der Ling overheard, the viceroy asked her father to go to Wuxi and negotiate with the rioters. Yu Keng’s agreement to do so had raised objections from everyone in town. Der Ling’s account is so vivid that we can envision her head, its pig-tails tied with red yarn, pivoting from robed figure to robed figure, trying to hear everything that was being shouted. Why should Yu Keng risk his own life to save those of some...