Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

23 Imperial birthday

23 Imperial birthday “When [Cixi] was sick she was ill humored,” Der Ling recalled, “and none of us could forget that we lived, breathed and had our being subject to her slightest whim. I am afraid that all of us thought of her then as a grim old ogre threatening our safety.”1 The magistrate Wu Yung, whose portrait of Cixi is flagrantly admiring, once saw her in a rage at an audience. “Her eyes poured out straight rays,” he remembered, “her cheek bones were sharp and the veins on her forehead projected. She showed her teeth as if she were suffering from lockjaw.”2 If this is how the dowager could behave in formal circumstances, Der Ling must have witnessed far worse behavior when the old lady was sick. Despite her many bouts of ill health and considering she was approaching her sixty-eighth birthday (on November 29), Cixi was in what seemed to most people a surprisingly youthful condition. As Der Ling records in a frank description of the dowager’s unclothed body, this youthfulness was no illusion. Early in her court service, Der Ling was deputed to be present for Cixi’s bath, which like her sleeping arrangements seemed to require an army of servants and onlookers. Before she was disrobed, the dowager was seated in a special chair with a 216 Imperial Masquerade removable back and open sides. Eunuchs brought in a silver basin filled with hot water, along with loads of dragon-embroidered towels. “I gasped in amazement when I saw her [naked],” Der Ling recalled. “Knowing her age, I expected to see the body of a wrinkled old woman. But it was not so. Her body was really beautiful, the flesh very white and utterly smooth. It was a body that any young girl might have envied.”3 Oddly, it was the dowager’s face that seemed to most show her age, according to Der Ling (though this was possibly due to the high lead content of the white face paint she had had to wear as a concubine). The dowager had a vast arsenal of facial unguents, starting with simple white of egg and followed up by a complicated astringent lotion she had invented, the primary ingredients of which were glycerin, alcohol and honeysuckle blossom. Of a morning, before putting on her makeup (which, though forbidden to widows, was evidently permitted to an empress dowager of China), the dowager placed a warm cloth saturated with mutton fat against her face, using the same process on her famously white, soft hands. Less efficacious but undoubtedly helpful from a psychological point of view were the doses she took every ten days of ground pearls and the therapeutic qualities of the gold-mounted jade roller she used to smooth her cheeks, a dressing-table tool which she later gave to Der Ling.4 Cixi was still alive and attractive as much due to luck as to any cosmetic reasons. Court life in China had always been dangerous to the health of both emperors and courtiers, and Cixi discovered just how dangerous in the mid-1870s. During the succession crisis following the death of her son Tongzhi, the dowager and her family fell within the sights of some still unknown person or persons intent on removing all of them at once. Her sickness was generally believed to be caused by a liver ailment, the liver being one of the first organs to be affected by toxins or poisoning by heavy metals (gold leaf was a favored method of killing oneself or someone else). Whatever it was that made her sick, Cixi felt the after effects until 1883.5 To have overcome all of this the dowager had to have a strong constitution, but it was fading with age. Soon after Der Ling came to court Cixi experienced a minor but debilitating stroke. “One day, during the eighth moon,” records Der Ling, “Her Majesty was taken slightly ill, 217 Imperial birthday and complained of suffering from severe headaches.” Cixi still managed to get up and attend her morning audience, but the strain was obviously too much for her; she had a relapse at lunch time. “I could, sometimes, soothe her,” Der Ling recalled, “make her forget her worst moods,” and so had been asked to come to the dowager’s side. “I was vain enough to think that I could manage her,” she...