Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

33 China reborn

33 China reborn While the Whites were absent from China in the last two years of the 1920s and the first few of the 1930s, events destructive but in themselves small were beginning to add up to the greater cataclysm of invasion by the Japanese. As the ex-Xuantong Emperor, Puyi, put it in his memoirs, “1928 was for me a year of excitement and shocks.”1 For him, the decision to throw his lot in with the Japanese eager to seize Manchuria from China had its birth in the ransacked chambers of the tombs of the Qianlong Emperor and the nearby one of Cixi, at the hands of soldiers under army commander Sun Tien-ying (Sun Dianying) in July of that year, when the chaos surrounding Chiang Kai-shek’s taking of Beijing gave easy cover. The symbolism of desecrating these last private spaces of two of China’s most enigmatic and luxury-loving monarchs could not have been more obvious, but when the white marble-lined passageways were broken into and the treasures heaped about the deceased monarchs’ coffins were seen flickering in the gloom, sheer greed took over, and in the scramble and, probably, fight to seize the most jade, gold, pearls and countless other priceless funerary objects, the bodies of both the 314 Imperial Masquerade Qianlong Emperor and of Cixi were desecrated as well, disinterred and stripped in the search for valuables. Because so many of the objects stolen were immediately put on the twilit Beijing antiques and jewel market, we will never know exactly what was buried with either ruler; hyperbolic accounts of the grave goods transmitted later to the Times turn out to have a connection with Edmund Backhouse, which does not permit of their being taken very seriously. Puyi claimed to have heard that Cixi was buried with dozens of “pearls, gems, emeralds and diamonds,” the latter a curious adornment for a woman who looked askance at them, with jewelry and other ornaments in the shape of her favorite flower, the chrysanthemum — but a more reasonable account compared to the Ali Baba’s treasure-cave description proffered by Backhouse. The news of the tombs’ robbery struck the entire Aisin-Gioro family with anger and mortification, but none more so than Puyi, for whom the incident “gave me a shock worse than the one I had received when I was expelled from the palace.”2 Between the events of summer 1928 and those of March 1, 1931, when the Japanese-backed Manchukuo was called into being, there was not much of a leap for Puyi to make to go from unemployed ex-emperor dwelling in the cramped quarters of the Japanese concession in Tianjin to chief executive of the new northern nation, particularly as it was a position that paid a hefty salary, with promise of greater things to come. To describe Puyi’s reaction, at his first glimpse of his bleak Manchuokuoan “palace,” as one of disillusionment barely touches how he felt, which comprised a composite of culture shock and dawning realization. After his eviction from the northern palaces of the Forbidden City in 1924, Puyi and his retinue had moved to the gloomy elegance of the Chang Villa in Tianjin, where the little “court” — his principal wife, Empress Wan Rong, secondary wife, brother Pujie and assorted officials and eunuchs from the old court — subsisted in a degree of curtailed splendor. As Puyi describes in his self-denigrating (and questionably authored) memoir, From Emperor to Citizen, “I made the most of the clothes and diamonds of the foreign stores . . . to dress myself up like a foreign gentleman from the pages of Esquire . . . My body would be fragrant with the combined odours of Max Factor lotions, eau-de- 315 China reborn Cologne and mothballs, and I would be accompanied by two or three Alsatian dogs and a strangely dressed wife and concubine.”3 The ex-emperor would later claim, unsuccessfully, that the Japanese had kidnapped him away to Manchuria in 1931, but as Reginald Johnston himself would point out in Twilight in the Forbidden City, Puyi went to the Japanese of his own free will. He was disgusted with Tianjin and, most of all, with his own impotence — the Chang Villa’s owner had begun to ask for rent, which Puyi could not (or would not) pay, resulting in the transference of the ever-shrinking “court” to a house ominously near...