Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

4 Beijing to Tokyo

4 Beijing to Tokyo As it turned out, Yu Keng’s mansion was not to be the place where the family would live during their stay in the city. What Der Ling describes as a half-European, half-Chinese compound of 175 rooms had been lent to a friend of the family’s, who despite a half year’s forewarning was still not ready to leave it. So the family was lent the house of another acquaintance (possibly Li Hongzhang, who owned many such properties in Beijing), “a magnificent place,”Der Ling remembered, but a lonely one for her. After her father departed next morning for an unexplained and urgent meeting with Prince Gong, brother-in-law of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Der Ling wandered the house’s gardens, with its high walls shutting out the noise from the streets, its rockeries and fish pools overhung by willows that seemed to the out of sorts Der Ling like women suffering in tears. She did not like the walls surrounding the garden — “I always resented . . . seclusion, always desired to try my wings,” she insisted. Even at nine, Der Ling was questioning the old Chinese tradition by which a man’s home was his palace and a woman’s her prison.1 Prince Gong’s summoning of Yu Keng was not merely to pass the time of day with an old friend and colleague returned to the capital. 36 Imperial Masquerade Beijing had been the forcing ground for Gong’s political education as far back as the 1860 Opium War, when allied troops threatened the city, sending the Xianfeng Emperor fleeing with his Empress Cian, secondary wife Cixi, and toddler heir Tongzhi into the wastes of northern China and leaving Gong behind in abandoned Beijing to negotiate out of the mess what he could. A sturdily handsome man with long nails as sharp as his disapproving gaze — even his personal seal gave back a hard stare, with its motto “No Private Heart”2 — Gong had been something of a playboy prince before circumstances swooped down to transform him into a statesman at only twenty-seven years of age. For the past thirty years he had been involved in one way or another with securing Beijing against foreign invasion, via military or, given the Chinese army’s typically poor showing, diplomatic means. With the emperor and court in flight to the imperial hunting lodge of Jehol (Chengde), that ultimate getaway resort, with its miniature Potala palace in the backyard and pavilions scattered about the arid valley bearing names like “Hall of Refreshing Waves and Mists,” Prince Gong faced the allied invaders alone, sometimes playing along with the foreigners and sometimes upbraiding them for their lack of manners. Unfortunately, seeking short-term safety and sanity, he developed a Realpolitik style which tended to accede to the invaders whatever they asked, particularly when these requests seemed the easily granted ones of cash indemnities and the opening to trade of more Chinese ports. Expedient these concessions may have been, but they would create long-term headaches both for the Qing empire and the Chinese republic that followed it. By the end of his long life, in 1898, Prince Gong had seen too many upheavals and retreated to the “private heart” he had earlier claimed not to possess. As Fang Chao-ying wrote of Gong, in his old age “[he] was filled with resentment against the entire Court . . . and spent most of his last days in his garden, Lang-jun Yüan.”3 As Der Ling discovered later, what Prince Gong wanted to discuss with her father was the prospect of becoming his second-in-command in a newly created Department of Military Affairs, which the Empress Dowager had commanded to be formed soon after the outbreak of fighting between the Qing and Meiji regimes. The department’s purpose was to develop defense plans for China. While Yu Keng was all for keeping China safe, he had no illusions about the outcome of battle 37 Beijing to Tokyo between China and Japan — in fact, it was probably his sober view on the matter that moved Prince Gong to ask Yu Keng to be part of the department. “We are a peaceful nation, knowing nothing whatever about war, while Japan knows much,” Der Ling recalled her father saying. “That we will go down to defeat [against the Japanese] is a foregone conclusion.” Yu...