Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

7 Back to China, forward to France

7 Back to China, forward to France Li Muchai did get something for his pains. Despite his treatment of Yu Keng, when it came time for Yu Keng’s ambassadorship to wind down, he offered to recommend Li to the post at Tokyo, and the recommendation resulted in Li’s appointment. In part, it is possible Yu Keng did this to quiet the denouncers at the Board of Censors, who (says Der Ling) in the wake of the elderly Prince Gong’s death in late May of 1898 had again impeached Yu Keng to the throne. Between him and disaster now stood only old Ronglu and the Empress Dowager Cixi. “Father liked excitement,” Der Ling tells us (she did, too), so when news reached Tokyo of the reforms that seemed to tumble off the young Guangxu Emperor’s desk in a cataract of paper and ink, toppling all that most conservative Manchus and Chinese held nearest and dearest, it seemed that China was not such a dreary place to return to after Japan. Yu Keng’s excitement — which may possibly have been activated as much by clandestine involvement in the events leading to the changes as the changes themselves — was felt by many reform-minded Chinese, in and out of the government; the wide-ranging reforms proposed and implemented by the young Guangxu Emperor were like so many rays of 70 Imperial Masquerade hope coming up over the horizon of what had become a dark landscape of discontent. It was not to last, for two significant reasons: the characters of the Emperor and Empress Dowager themselves. Since 1861, first for her son Tongzhi and then for her nephew Guangxu, the Empress Dowager Cixi had ruled from behind the curtain — the only place for a woman in Confucian China, even if she was the Empress Dowager — and though she had given Guangxu nominal use of the reins of his office, shortly after his marriage to a cousin, the future empress dowager Longyu, in 1889, and retired to the magnificence of her Summer Palace on Lake Kunming outside the city, she still had eyes watching, ears listening, and hands taking notes on his activities, and received regular visits from him. There would always be fundamental differences between the two, differences which went deeper than conflicting ideas of government: they were entire opposites, a situation which must form the basis of Cixi’s continued vigilance over the young man’s activities in running the government on his own. Where she was healthy as an ox, he was sickly and temperamental. Where Cixi was strong but cautious, Guangxu was headstrong but weak; where she was willing to coddle distasteful elements of the court, like the eunuchs, who could be of most use to her, Guangxu alienated them with violent punishment and hyper-vigilance. It is often stated that the Empress Dowager worked against her nephew’s reforms, but in fact there is no lack of evidence that she was not only well aware of most of what Guangxu was doing that spring and summer of 1898 but was supportive of reform, as observed by astute foreigners like Yu Keng’s American friend, Colonel Charles Denby.1 Guangxu’s connection with the reformer Kang Youwei who, despite his known feminist sympathies circulated intensely misogynistic writings about the dowager, was far more tenuous than the latter would ever admit (all Kang got out of the meeting was the offer of a low-level flunky position in the Zongli Yamen). It would cast disproportionate shadows as Kang’s exilic reformist reputation and the “discussion groups” he gathered to further its aims waxed on, while the emperor’s influence, cut off by an alarmed and reinstalled Empress Dowager, waned in the isolation to which Cixi’s resumption of power committed him. It was with Cixi’s approval that the young emperor promulgated the first of his reforms to an anxious empire, on June 11, a rambling 71 Back to China, forward to France document in which he pushed the need for all Chinese subjects, be they mandarins or ricksha boys, to open their minds to the sort of practical, self-advancing knowledge needed by the contemporary world, while still maintaining the essential Golden Rules of Confucian teaching. This overoptimistic belief that you could sift China of all that was backward and bad while retaining all that was classic and good...