Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

21 A portrait for the Empress

21 A portrait for the Empress For all her plain appearance and sober ways, Sarah Pike Conger was a woman of warm and appreciative affections, who said of herself “I am a seeker in China, and am interested in Chinese [things]. I recognize their beauty, then I wish to know something of the people who produced them.”1 This pleasant combination of kindness and open-mindedness no doubt helped endear her to Cixi, who was curious enough about the American woman to find out from Louisa that she had become a grandmother in June 1903. Sarah was almost as overjoyed at receiving the dowager’s congratulations on the birth of little Sarah Buchan as she was at the telegram announcing it. This was the turning point — she began to think in earnest of ways to make it clear to the world at large that far from being a cruel termagant, the Empress Dowager was actually a sensitive woman and a thoughtful ruler. Sarah was convinced that world opinion would not change until the “horrible, unjust caricatures of Her Majesty in the illustrated papers” were supplanted, literally, by a true portrait — in paint rather than words — of the dowager. She now proposed to convince Cixi to have such a portrait painted. 194 Imperial Masquerade “I had written to the artist, Miss Carl,” Sarah wrote her daughter Laura, “and found that she was willing to cooperate with me.”2 As was written in Wang Kai’s seventeenth-century manual of painting, “It is better to be audacious than commonplace,” a painterly admonition that Sarah clearly took to heart in all matters.3 Sarah wrote to Katherine Carl, an American-born painter living in Shanghai, as early as April; such was her enthusiasm for the project, and her certainty that Cixi would assent to it, that she made it sound almost as if the negotiations were a done deal when they were not yet even off the ground.4 Sarah saw herself as an ambassador for her entire sex. “With intense love for womankind, and in justice to this Imperial woman,” Sarah intoned, “I presented my subject without doubt or fear . . . As the result of this conversation, the Empress Dowager gave consent to allow her Imperial portrait to be painted by an American lady artist for the St. Louis Exposition.”5 Agreeing to the portrait had not been as easy as Cixi led Sarah to believe. As the dowager greeted Sarah, Der Ling took note: “[I] saw that she was very nice and amiable, with such a pleasant smile — so different from her everyday manner.” (So was Cixi pleasant to be with or not? Did she habitually pull a frown until a foreigner hove into view? Der Ling drops this hint without further explanation.)6 In Sarah’s presence, Cixi was in very different form from the whiteknuckle discussions she had had with Der Ling when the request for the audience had first been broached. Der Ling endeavored to calm her about what the audience might be about by saying that she knew Sarah had a very good grasp of court etiquette and would never approach her with an over-reaching request (little did she know), but there remained many other difficulties to thrash out, the most pressing of which was that visiting foreigners should never see just what Cixi’s living quarters really looked like.This meant that furniture and décor in the dowager’s bedroom, including curtains and upholstery, had to be changed. Der Ling got to see just what this entailed a few days before the audience. Cixi’s favorite pink silk curtains were replaced by blue (which, per Der Ling, was her least favorite color), and all her jade Buddhas were replaced with foreignmade timepieces, of which armies seemed to exist at both the Summer and Winter Palaces. Even the bed had to be covered up, as its component 195 A portrait for the Empress parts had been sanctified in temples and foreign eyes were not fit to see it. In a moment of prescience (and perhaps because Der Ling had shared her interest in writing about her experiences?), the dowager said to Der Ling: “You must tell [about the preparations for the visit] some day, otherwise no one will know it at all, and the trouble would not be worthwhile.”7 After they had finished moving the furniture, the dowager harangued her...