Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

14 Garden of Nurtured Harmony

14 Garden of Nurtured Harmony Louisa and her daughters may have thought themselves prepared for anything, but the importance of the occasion seems to have sunk in, per Der Ling, when they passed through the western city gate and were saluted by a contingent of uniformed guards on the way. Beijing’s gates were normally closed at seven o’clock in the evening and not opened until sunup, barring certain special occasions; this was clearly one of those special exceptions. Sitting back carefully in her chair for the ride that lay ahead, Der Ling mused on what the future might bring. “We were told that probably we would be asked to stay at the Court,” she recalled, “and I thought that if that came to pass, I would possibly be able to influence Her Majesty in favor of reform and so be of valuable assistance to China.” These were democratic aspirations for a teenage girl who had recently been fawning over the young king of Spain in Madrid and fancying herself material for marrying him, a spoiled debutante for whom servants were a barely human nuisance.1 Why Der Ling thought she would be any more successful than the Empress Dowager’s own nephew, not to mention numerous other statesmen, in bringing China up to the standards of the Western world 130 Imperial Masquerade remains something of a mystery, if for no other reason than that Der Ling herself is never clear on what reforms she sought to inspire. Reformer Kang Youwei, with whom Der Ling shared many aspirations for China, had a laser eye for what was wrong with his nation, and we can infer exactly what from his memorials, as well as from the Guangxu Emperor’s reforms based on them enacted during the Hundred Days of 1898. China needed to increase domestic revenue, which in the mid-1890s was only at some seventy million silver taels per year, hardly enough to make a dent in the indemnity from the Sino-Japanese War, let alone the indemnities claimed by foreign nations after the Boxer Uprising; devise a national system of railways, which would provide a needed transfusion for domestic and foreign commerce, assist in developing more places for the country’s burgeoning population to live and work, and give a foot up for the woefully backward military. The military and commercial interests were starving for lack of modern technology; the currency was outmoded and unstable; and the postal system, which Der Ling describes as having been Yu Keng’s concern for years, was still not so much in a medieval state as not extant at all. Another of Kang’s radical ideas was women’s rights, a belief to which Der Ling had subscribed, through her father, since girlhood. Kang’s main concern, he claimed, was the plight of the people of China: “Our nation is founded upon people — if we cannot think how to foster those people, then we ourselves destroy our own foundation.”2 Some of these desiderata Der Ling had taken to heart since the nursery, because they were issues important to her father and were simply in the air she breathed. But it is likely that the reform possibilities reeling through her head as she trundled toward the Summer Palace that dark March morning were far more abstract, and probably quite personal, starting with the freeing of young ladies like herself from the strictures of Chinese societal regulations, proto-feminist ideas being explored by very few Chinese women in the China of 1903. Only after she had lived within the Empress Dowager’s close circle would Der Ling see how implausible many of her individualist ideals were. In a misogynistic nation that tolerated a woman on its throne, Der Ling would find that even that supposedly all-powerful woman was as bound up in etiquette and the rules of “a woman’s place” as the feet of Han Chinese ladies, and would hurt just as much to unbind. 131 Garden of Nurtured Harmony As she sat thinking, Der Ling recalled, she noticed for the first time “a faint red line appeared on the horizon heralding the coming of a most perfect day.” Through the crimson early spring light, she could see her surroundings: a “high red wall which zigzagged from hill to hill,” four miles of it in total, along with pagodas and small outbuildings here and there, the tops of...