Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

13 Empress Dowager Cixi

13 Empress Dowager Cixi It was the beginning of January 1903, and the frigid weather echoed everything Der Ling was feeling as she got into the launch and steadied herself against the choppy waters. The last Der Ling had seen, and so heartily loathed, of the China to which she was now returning were the churning yellow waters of her siltladen rivers. Compared to these, the bright Mediterranean and even the limpid grey Seine seemed dazzlingly beautiful, full of a magic never to be recovered. (As the West-loving ex-emperor, Puyi, would confide to his memoirs, “A stick of Spearmint chewing-gum or a Bayer aspirin would be enough to make me sigh at the utter doltishness of the Chinese,” a perspective with which Der Ling would have found much reason to sympathize.)1 Gone was the orderly life they had known in Paris. As when they had left for Japan years before, the family was faced with assistants and servants who could not be depended on, who lost the keys to the luggage, who had to be told what to do next every step of the way and then did not fulfill their tasks as ordered. And as before, Louisa, fresh from playing the grand diplomat’s wife in the Avenue Hoche, had to roll up 124 Imperial Masquerade her sleeves and sort out all the messes before putting a foot on shore. Der Ling and Rong Ling were morose, their mother was frantic, Yu Keng was ill, and the Daotai (intendant of circuit) of Shanghai offered the family the hospitality of the same damp temple compound they had rejected on their previous Shanghai sojourn prior to leaving for Japan. Once again, Yu Keng had to mollify these same unhappy officials while booking more comfortable rooms in the Hôtel des Colonies, in the French Concession. Telegrams began to arrive from Beijing, ordering Yu Keng to return to the capital.The river route to Tianjin, Beijing’s port, was frozen solid, and the only other route to Beijing, over land, was long and arduous. Doctors advising Yu Keng vetoed any notion of his roughing it to get to Beijing, which probably made a few officials at court mutter in their beards. At least, for the duration of the family’s stay in Shanghai, Yu Keng had access to the foreign doctors he preferred. By the third week in February the family was ready to be on the move again. On their arrival in Tianjin, Yuan Shikai, the Viceroy of Zhili province who had his offices in the city, accompanied Yu Keng in full court regalia to worship at the city’s Wan Shou Gong or Ten Thousand Years Palace, where obeisance was made to the Emperor of Peace, in form of imperial tablets dedicated to the Guangxu Emperor and the Empress Dowager Cixi. Der Ling describes how her ill father had to kneel painfully before the tablets and say, “Your servant gives you greeting,” followed by a formal enquiry of Viceroy Yuan as to the rulers’ state of health. It took three days in Tianjin for Yu Keng to recover enough to set forth on the bumpy road to Beijing. Then his first action on arriving in the city was to request from the Empress Dowager four months’ leave of absence from his duties, so that he could recover in peace. Cixi, who knew enough about poor health to sympathize, granted his request immediately.2 The Beijing Yu Keng and family returned to at the end of February was almost a different city from the one they had left four years earlier. Most of the Legation Quarter was still in ruins from the Boxer mayhem; the few Christian churches and missions that remained were battered almost beyond recognition. Yu Keng’s house north of Lantern Market Street was little more than rubble. “The loss sustained by having this house burned,” noted Der Ling, “we never recovered, as my father, being 125 Empress Dowager Cixi an official in the Government, it would have been very bad form to have tried to recover this money.” Property losses totaled some 100,000 taels (about $150,000 at the time). The loss of the family’s heirlooms to theft and fire was, of course, incalculable.3 Knowing his house was in ruins, Yu Keng had arranged while still in Shanghai for a place to...