Flashman And The Dragon

APPENDIX II: The Orchid

Yehonala, later Empress Tzu-hsi (1834-1908), known variously as the Orchid, Imperial Yi Concubine, Empress of the Western Palace, and latterly, Old Buddha, was the effective ruler of China for half a century. The daughter of a Manchu captain of the 8th Banner Corps, she was seventeen when she and her cousin, Sakota, were chosen with 26 other Manchu beauties as concubines for the young Emperor Hsien Feng, and although Sakota became Empress Consort, Yehonala quickly established herself as the Imperial favourite. When she bore the Emperor's only son in 1856 her hold over the ailing, weakly monarch, and on political power, became greatly strengthened, with fateful results for China. For the young concubine, although well educated by Manchu standards, was ignorant of the world outside; she was also an extreme reactionary, inflexibly autocratic, and highly aggressive in diplomacy. She appears to have been a prime mover in China's resistance policy during the Arrow War and Elgin expedition, forbidding trade, putting prices on British heads, sending suicide orders to unlucky commanders, inspiring the death warrants, and urging opposition to the barbarians at all costs. ("My anger is about to strike and exterminate them without mercy," Daniel Varè quotes her. "I command all my subjects to hunt them down like wild beasts.") At the same time, with the Emperor's health failing, she was entering on a political struggle to ensure her son's succession and her own survival.

Flashman's account of her scheming in September 1860 is uncorroborated, but there is no doubt that she was already deep in palace plotting, and in the year that followed her courage, ruthlessness, and genius for intrigue were tested by events which resemble sensational fiction rather than sober fact. For the Emperor did not die quickly, as expected; he lingered for a year at Jehol, and in that time Yehonala suffered an almost fatal setback. Reports of her affair with Jung Lu, who was said to be her lover, reached the Emperor, and she was forbidden the royal presence; worse still, when a council of regency was appointed by the Emperor's decree on the day before his death in August 1861, its leaders were her bitterest enemies, Prince I, Sushun, and Prince Cheng;*(* But not Sang-kol-in-sen, who had been stripped of his title and command after the fall of Pekin in October, 1860) Yehonala herself was excluded.

That should have been the end of her, but her enemies had overlooked one small but vital point. The edict of regency, signed by the Emperor, had not been sealed with the dynastic seal—Yehonala had purloined it. And at a time when it was essential for the reins of power to be seized in Pekin, Prince I and the other regents were bound by court protocol to remain with the royal corpse at Jehol, and then accompany it, in slow ceremonial procession, to the capital. Not so Yehonala and the Empress Sakota, whose duty it was to go ahead to Pekin and meet the coffin on its arrival.

Prince I and Sushun, well aware of Yehonala's popularity with the troops, and fearing what might happen if she reached Pekin first, arranged to have her and Sakota ambushed and murdered on the journey. But the faithful Jung Lu learned of the plot and set off from Jehol by night, overtook the royal ladies on the road, escaped the ambush, and brought them safely to the capital, where Yehonala lost no time in raising support; Sakota, as usual, was content to stay in the background. Thus when Prince I and the regents finally arrived with the cortege they were welcomed by an urbane Yi Concubine who thanked them graciously, dismissed them from the regency, and had them arrested in the name of the new Emperor (whose decrees proved to be properly sealed).

The regents, charged with responsibility for the recent war and (a fine effrontery on her part) with treacherously capturing Loch and Parkes, were sentenced to be tortured to death, but this was commuted to suicide by the silk cord for Princes I and Cheng, and beheading for Sushun. Jung Lu was rewarded with the viceroyalty of a province and control of the army; Yehonala and Sakota assumed the titles of Empress of the Western and Eastern Palace respectively,*(Flashman is plainly mistaken in assigning this title to Yehonala in 1860.) and from that moment the former concubine never relaxed her grip on imperial power. When her son, the new Emperor, died in 1873, she engineered the succession for her infant nephew, but when he reached manhood and showed reformist tendencies she had him interned and wielded supreme authority until her death.

Yehonala Tzu-hsi was the world's last great absolute queen, and may be compared to Catherine the Great and the first Elizabeth. For the ills her country suffered through her resistance policy and refusal to accept change, she may fairly be blamed; against that, she kept the world at bay from China until the end of the century, when economic decline, war with Japan, and the Boxer Rising (which she exploited against the foreign powers) completed the undermining of imperial rule. Soon after her death China was a republic; whether it would have profited from earlier revolution, earlier reform, and earlier acceptance of the outside world, no one can say.

In its details, Flashman's portrait of Yehonala is a faithful one; her beauty and charm were legendary, as were her less admirable qualities, and his account of her lifestyle is confirmed elsewhere, even to such trivia as her favourite food, clothes, jewellery, and board-games. How just he is in his sweeping assessment of her character is a matter for conjecture; as her biographer Sergeant observes, contemporary writers, depending on their viewpoint, show her almost as two different women, "one a monster of iniquity, the other a lovable genius". There is ample evidence that she was vain, greedy, cruel, and autocratic, but less that she was as callous, ruthless, and promiscuous as Flashman suggests. Opinions differ sharply about her private morals; she was for years concubine to a depraved monarch, and rumours of her immorality were persistent (but she did not lack malicious enemies); apart from Jung Lu, her lovers were said to include a later Chief Eunuch, Li Lien Ying ("Cobbler's Wax"), her confirmed favourite, who may not have been a eunuch at all—the American artist, Katherine Carl, described him as tall, thin, and "Savonarola-like", with elegant manners and a pleasant voice. There is virtually no personal evidence for her early life; most of the memoirs refer to her later years, when the picture is of a sprightly, domineering old lady of unshakeable will, immense vanity, high intelligence, and winning charm when she chose to exert it; obviously a once great beauty, and retaining to the end her silvery voice and flashing smile. (See Philip W. Sergeant, The Great Empress Dowager of China, 1910; Daniel Varè, The Last of the Empresses, 1936; E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, China Under the Empress Dowager, 1910, and Annals of the Court of Pekin; Princess Der Ling (Te Ling), afterwards Mrs T. C. White, lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress, Two Years in the Forbidden City, 1924, and Old Buddha; Charlotte Haldane, The Last Great Empress of China, 1965; J. and M. Porteous, "An Explanatory Account of the Chinese Ladies," pamphlet, Dublin, 1888. For the political intrigues of 1861, see Morse, International Relations.)