Beijing: Boxer rebellion
| All boxed in: Allied troops after the rebellion |
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
