Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling

Preface

Preface While reading Isadora: A Sensational Life, Peter Kurth’s 2001 account of the twentieth century’s most influential dance reformer, I encountered a Chinese woman named Princess Der Ling who as a teenager had studied with Isadora in Paris between 1899 and 1903. Kurth quoted several piquant remarks on Duncan made by this writer, who seemed to admire Duncan’s blithe disregard for wearing the heavy clothes of the era (and her scorn for clothes in general), and who relished her many feminist declarations. For all her youth, and considering she came from a culture to which Western dance and women’s rights were foreign territory, Der Ling seemed remarkably aware of Duncan’s artistic genius and modern outlook. Later on, when I read Dragon Lady, Sterling Seagrave’s 1992 biography of Empress Dowager Cixi, I met Der Ling again. I discovered that while making an effort to rehabilitate the Empress Dowager, Seagrave also addressed the denigration (by many of the same sources) of Der Ling and her contributions to late Qing historiography. Seagrave’s book led me to find and read all of Der Ling’s books, along with her several published articles. Through chance references to her in the memoirs, diaries and xx Preface travel writings contemporary with her time frame of late Qing, early Republic China that I read subsequently, I occasionally found doubts about her facts (or the way in which she related them) and especially about her title, and realized from the beginning that Der Ling was nothing if not a figure of controversy. I saw her as a fascinating human battleground of conflicting identities, a victim of the hallucinogenic effects of too much publicity, much of it prompted by Der Ling herself, and a figure whose life provides a glimpse into one woman’s experience of living not just between two cultures — that of China and the West — but among many different worlds: social, religious, moral, political. In writing about Der Ling I faced two challenges: I do not read Chinese, and thus sources in Chinese have had to be translated for me. And there is the matter of what to believe and what not. I concur with others who have identified the essential challenge of Der Ling’s oeuvre — there is little if any chance of proving everything she describes of the court of the Empress Dowager Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor. What can be corroborated in English-language sources (those well-known, and others I have unearthed) I have used in writing this book; where there has been criticism in Chinese sources, I have used translations of these. Where I feel doubt is warranted, I make my own reservations clear. What I do not want to do, as some commentators have done in the past, is dismiss her out of hand. Der Ling has been called many things. Some of these criticisms are just, some deliberate slander: that she was a fantasist, a self-publicist (a trait that disgusted many of her relatives and friends in China), even an outright liar. She has yet to be proven the latter, but of the two former traits she partook liberal helpings. A cursory reading of her writings conjures a person who was likeable and funny, also a snob and an egoist, and at the same time sensitive and talented, maybe a reliable witness to history and friend of important historical figures, and maybe not. But the legend that was “Princess” Der Ling does not end there, as her detractors may have hoped — it actually just begins. In my research I found that not everything Der Ling wrote was a lie and that much of what she wrote about the court of the Empress Dowager and Beijing society is either provable from other sources or so plausible it is not worth the trouble to unpick all her literary needlework. And I found evidence that xxi Preface some of the detractors who dogged her in her lifetime bent the truth themselves in order to present an image of her that closely matched their version of another controversial woman central to her story, the Empress Dowager Cixi, in order to make their own versions of Cixi and her court more competitive in the marketplace. Through my research and that of others seeking to set the record straight on the Empress Dowager I found that many of these revered “China hands...