Court Life in China | Page 9

to the flag. This angered the consul and he returned them to the viceroy, who promptly cut off their heads without so much as the semblance of a trial, and Britain, anxious, as she was, to have every door of the Chinese empire opened to foreign trade, found in this another pretext for war. We do not pretend to argue that this was not the best thing for China and for the world, but it can only be considered so from the bitter medicine, and corporal punishment point of view, neither of which are agreeable to either the patient or the pupil.
Britain went to war. The viceroy was taken a prisoner to India, whence he never returned. As though ashamed to enter upon a second unprovoked and unjust war alone, she invited France, Russia, and America to join her. France was quite ready to do so in the hope of strengthening her position in Indo-China, and with nothing more than the murder of a missionary in Kuangsi as a pretext she put a body of troops in the field large enough to enable her to checkmate England, or humiliate China as the exigencies of the occasion, and her own interests, might demand. America and Russia having no cause for war, no wrongs to redress, and no desire for territory, refused to join her in sending troops, but gave her such sympathy and support as would enable her to bring about a more satisfactory arrangement of China's foreign relations--that is more satisfactory to themselves regardless of the wishes, though not perhaps the interests, of China.
We know how the British and French marched upon Peking in 1860; how the summer palace was left a heap of ruins as a punishment for the murder of a company of men under a flag of truce; and how the Emperor Hsien Feng, with his wife, and the mother of his only son, our Empress Dowager, were compelled to flee for the first time before a foreign invader. Their refuge was Jehol, a fortified town, in a wild and rugged mountain pass, on the borders of China and Tartary, a hundred miles northeast of Peking. At this place the Emperor died, whether of disease, chagrin, or of a broken heart--or of all combined, it is impossible to say, and the Empress-mother was left AN EXILE AND A WIDOW, with the capital and the throne for the first time at the mercy of the Western barbarian.
This was the beginning of two important phases of the Empress Dowager's life--her affliction and her power, and her greatness is exhibited as well by the way in which she bore the one as by the way in which she wielded the other. In most cases a woman would have been so overcome by sorrow at the loss of her husband, as to have forgotten the affairs of state, or to have placed them for the time in the hands of others. Not so with this great woman. Prince Kung the brother of Hsien Feng, had been left in Peking to arrange a treaty with the Europeans, which he succeeded in doing to the satisfaction of both the Chinese and the foreigners.
On the death of the Emperor, a regency was organized by two of the princes, which did not include Prince Kung, and disregarded both of the dowagers, and it seemed as though Prince Kung was doomed. His father-in-law, however, the old statesman who had signed the treaties, urged him to be the first to get the ear of the two women on their return to the capital. This he did, and as it seemed evident that the regency and the council had been organized for the express purpose of tyrannizing over the Empresses and the child, they were at once arrested, the leader beheaded, and the others condemned to exile or to suicide. The child had been placed upon the throne as "good-luck," but now a new regency was formed, consisting of the two dowagers, with Prince Kung as joint regent, and the title of the reign was changed to Tung Chih or "joint government." Thus ended the Empress Dowager's years of training.

III
The Empress Dowager--As a Ruler
That a Manchu woman who had had such narrow opportunities of obtaining a knowledge of things as they really are, in distinction from the tissue of shams which constitute the warp and the woof of an Oriental Palace, should have been able to hold her own in every situation, and never be crushed by the opposing forces about her, is a phenomenon in itself only to be explained by due recognition of the influence of individual qualities in a ruler even in the semi-absolutism of China. --Arthur H. Smith in "China in Convulsion."

III
THE EMPRESS DOWAGER--AS A RULER
In considering the policy pursued by the Empress-mother after