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All boxed in: Allied troops after the rebellion
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'THE WELL of the Pearl Concubine" read the official notice
in English. We peered at the small opening sealed by stone slabs. We
were in the Forbidden City, once home to the Emperors of China.
Not far away, on the other side of the thick, pink walls,
Beijing's traffic was pounding by and the Chinese version of yuppies
hurried along the top of Tiananmen Square to their next appointment,
mobile telephones clamped to their ears.
But in this quiet courtyard it was not hard to conjure
another world: one in which eunuchs in silk shoes served banquets of a
thousand courses and Manchu girls in jewelled, tasselled headdresses
groomed empresses whose hair was considered so precious that the strands
were plucked from the jade combs and stored in porcelain pagodas.
I was in Beijing to research a book about a pivotal event
plotted and controlled from within these precincts a century ago. In the
summer of 1900, an obscure peasant sect - nicknamed "Boxers" because of
the martial arts they practised - rose up. With the encouragement of
the elderly Empress Dowager of China, Cixi, on June 20, 1900, they began
a siege of the foreign community in Beijing's diplomatic quarter which
lasted 55 days.
An international army, led by Britain's General Gaselee,
finally marched to Beijing. As this foreign force battered at the
southern gates of the Forbidden City, Cixi cut her nine-inch-long
fingernails and disguised herself as a peasant woman. She summoned her
nephew, the Emperor, to the courtyard in which we were standing and
ordered him to prepare to flee with her.
The Emperor's favourite, the Pearl Concubine, begged to be
allowed to accompany him but an irritated and anxious Cixi, who had long
resented the girl's influence, ordered the palace eunuchs to throw her
down the well. It looks too small to accommodate any but the tiniest
body, but our guide swore that the story is true, an example of the
immorality of the decadent Manchu Court.
The 9,000-room Forbidden City has witnessed many violent
scenes. The Ming Emperors began its construction in the 15th century,
but it was seized by the Manchus who swept across the Great Wall in 1644
to establish the Qing Dynasty. The last Ming Emperor hanged himself in
shame and despair from a tree which still clings to life in an adjoining
park where today families picnic.
The Qing embellished their new possession, building with
magnificent symmetry and symbolism. Five white marble bridges in the
form of writhing dragons span the courtyard leading to the Supreme
Harmony Gate, once designated solely for the Emperor's use. Beyond lies a
vast space where 100,000 subjects could prostrate themselves before
him. A series of grand ceremonial palaces, with names such as the Hall
of Supreme Harmony and the Palace of Heavenly Purity, runs northward.
The crowds of Chinese visitors who sweep daily into the
Forbidden City cluster in these halls to photograph each other in Manchu
robes hired from nearby stalls. Many peer excitedly through the
windows, pointing out the dusty, jewel-encrusted imperial thrones
within.
I found the imperial living quarters, hidden away down
labyrinthine passageways, more intriguing and atmospheric. Away from the
tourist crowds, you can stroll around airy, vermilion-pillared
pavilions furnished with low, brocade-covered couches, carved wooden
screens and jade and cloisonn* ornaments. The dragon motif, symbol of
the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, is everywhere, even embossed on the
yellow-glazed roof tiles - a reminder that, apart from the eunuchs, he
was the only man allowed, on pain of death, to spend the night here.
These more intimate areas evoked strongly for me the
enigmatic Cixi, a woman rumoured to have had a voracious sexual appetite
and whose enemies met untimely ends. She effectively ruled China for 40
years, dominating successive emperors.
She particularly loved plays and Chinese opera. The
authorities have restored her brilliantly decorated theatre, with its
cunningly contrived trap doors and concealed entrances through which
elaborately and garishly painted demons would burst onto the stage. It
has been done so well that I could easily imagine that she had just been
applauding a performance from her balcony.
In her nearby apartments stands the yellow silk screen
behind which she sat to take decisions of state since, as a woman, it
would have been improper to reveal herself to her councillors. Her
phoenix couch is in an adjacent chamber where, the foreign community
gossiped, she received lovers smuggled into the palace.
Her portrait of Queen Victoria has gone, however. Cixi was
fascinated by Victoria, another woman ruling in a man's world. She was
eager to learn more about her and was particularly intrigued by her
relationship with her Scots gillie, John Brown, wanting to know whether
he was "cut off from the family way" - that is, a eunuch.
Nevertheless, her interest in the British queen did not
prevent Cixi from loathing foreigners and encouraging the Boxers to wipe
them out. The quarter where the foreigners fought for their lives,
surviving on a diet of pony meat and rice, lies a few hundred yards to
the south-east of the Forbidden City.
In 1900, it was surrounded by makeshift barricades and the
humid summer air was sweet with the stench of decaying corpses.
Traumatised survivors recalled how, at the height of the attacks, they
saw Cixi standing on the Forbidden City walls and observing their
bombardment with interest.
I still caught a strong sense of what the old foreign
quarter must have been like, although the Hotel de Pekin and the shops
that once sold Monopole Champagne to epicurean Manchu princes and suave
diplomats are long gone. The walkway beneath the dual carriageway
running into Tiananmen Square leads to the heart of the quarter. Walk
along the avenue once known as Legation Street (now Dong jiao min xiang)
and over the grey walls you glimpse shaded grounds and spacious
European-style houses now put to other uses.
The former British legation compound, which formed the
kernel of the foreigners' defences, still stands on what was once Canal
Street (now Tai ji chang), running due south from the Forbidden City. It
now houses the Ministries of State and Public Security. The stone royal
coat of arms above the old gatehouse, from behind which British marines
picked off Chinese snipers, has gone and the gatehouse itself has been
turned into a shop selling security equipment. When, in 1959, the
Chinese insisted that the British quit the compound, the British took
relics of the siege to their new premises.
In the Ambassador's garden at the new embassy in the east of
the city, I saw memorials to those who died and the battered,
shot-marked bell cast for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee which was
used to sound the alarm at the most dangerous moments of the siege.
The brass eagle lectern presented to the British by grateful
Americans after the relief now stands in the entrance to the
Ambassador's house. It shows little sign of the damage it suffered when
British diplomats used it to barricade a door against Red Guards who
attacked the embassy during the the Cultural Revolution.
Many of Beijing's important landmarks have some association
with the Boxer Rebellion. The Catholic Peitang Cathedral, where a force
of French and Italian marines successfully defended 3,000 Chinese
Christians against Boxers occupying the narrow lanes around it, lies
just north of the Forbidden City, its fa?ade still pock-marked with shot
and shell.
Today, taxi drivers offer tours around these timeless alleys
where worm-eaten wooden doors lead into miniature courtyards filled
with plants and raucous with caged songbirds. The smell of garlic
mingles with frangipani and occasionally a whiff of sewage, a reminder
that the foreigners of a century ago called the city Pekin-les-Odeurs.
South of the Forbidden City lies another building
intimately, albeit ingloriously, connected with the Rebellion. The
Temple of Heaven, completed under the Ming Emperors in 1420 and with an
exquisite blue-tiled, domed hall, was regarded as the meeting place of
heaven and earth. Every year the Emperor made sacrifices here to the
gods. His annual pilgrimage to the temple was so sacred that the people
of Beijing were forbidden to watch.
In 1900, monocled British officers feasted in the shrine
where the Emperor had spent the night in fasting and prayer. They also
staged amateur theatricals, causing a British magazine to rail: "This
combination of vulgarity and indecency is one of the things which makes
the English so much detested by other races."
Today, the temple precincts have recovered their dignity. People shadow-box and old men sit under the trees playing chess.
North-west of Beijing is Cixi's adored Summer Palace where
she paused in her flight in 1900. This lakeside complex of pleasure
gardens and pavilions has been rebuilt and restored many times; the
current palace dates back to the 19th century.
The charming half-mile walkway, painted with Chinese birds,
flowers and scenes from mythology, where Cixi and her ladies once
strolled along the shores of Kunming Lake, is still there. So is the
superb, two-tiered white marble boat which she built with money that was
supposed to have been spent on the navy.
The Summer Palace was sacked by the Russians in 1900.
Foreigners brought picnic hampers to the marble boat and rode their
bicycles around the walkway, but the fabric has survived. Today, Chinese
families go boating on the lake and fly kites in Cixi's pleasure
gardens and the tourists mingle with them.
Cixi's attempt to get rid of the foreigners failed. Back in
Beijing's new diplomatic quarter, I passed stalls hawking export surplus
Calvin Klein underwear, copies of designer clothes and a few last
Beanie Babies to enthusiastic foreigners. It reminded me how in 1900,
before the Boxer storm, Chinese merchants happily sold silks, furs and
pearls to eager foreign diplomats' wives. However many spasms have
gripped this city since, some things remain the same. I wondered what
Cixi would make of her capital today.
From: Besieged in Peking' (Constable) by Diana Preston
