Again there was no time for sorrow. Within the palace, the capital and the nation, there was a strong party that wished to displace the two Manchu Empresses and set a Chinese upon the throne. Once more the Empress Dowager had to act quickly. She sent for her great general, Li Hung-chang, then in the city of Tientsin eighty miles away, and ordered him to bring to The Forbidden City four thousand of his best men on horseback, with artillery. In thirty-six hours, exactly at the planned moment, they arrived without any one outside knowing yet that the Emperor was dead. The men had wooden bits in their mouths to prevent their talking and the metal strappings of the horses were wrapped in cloth for silence.
As soon as she knew she had this military support, the Empress Dowager stole out of the palace to the house of her sister and lifted from his bed her eldest nephew, a little boy of three, and took him, asleep, back to the palace with her. When dawn came she proclaimed him her heir, the throne had an Emperor again, and the little boy became the Emperor Kwang-hsü.
All this was only story to me, for it had happened before I was born. What I knew actually was the trouble that Kwang-hsü made now when he had become the Emperor. I suppose the Empress Dowager was already dreaming of something like retirement and enjoying herself, for she had many interests and amusements. She liked to paint, and had she been free to devote herself to art she could have become notable. She was a fine calligrapher, she loved flowers, she had a magnetic and enchanting way with birds and animals, so that she could coax wild birds to come to her at call, and cicadas to sit upon her wrist while she stroked them with her forefinger. She had a profound love of nature and was fond of certain vistas about the palaces, especially about the rebuilt Summer Palace, and she would have been glad, I think, to leave the affairs of state to her adopted son. But she did not deceive herself. He, too, was impetuous and weak, and though she had provided the finest of teachers for him, he was unable to think and plan as a statesman. Moreover, and this really terrified her, he seemed bewitched by the ways of the West. It had begun in his early childhood, in a manner which had seemed innocent enough. The eunuchs who were his servants had been hard put to it to amuse the lonely little boy, torn from his home and family, and they had searched the city for toys. But he grew tired of kites and clay dolls and paper lanterns and whistles, and at last one of the eunuchs remembered that there was a foreign toyshop in the capital, kept by a Dane, who stocked a few Western toys for the children of the foreign legation families. Thither the Imperial eunuchs went and they bought a toy train for the little Emperor, a magical toy which could be wound up to run. He was delighted with it, and they, poor souls, pleased and relieved to find something that could amuse their tiny sovereign, hurried to the shop again and again until the astonished Dane found himself on the way to riches. Every imaginable trinket and toy was bought and at last he searched the European countries to find something new for the baby Emperor.
Thus from early years Kwang-hsü believed that from the West came strange and wonderful objects which his own country did not know how to make. As he grew older he read of machines and railroads and he wanted to study science and he began to dream of reforming his nation and making China as modern as were the Western nations. Nor was he the only one. There were men who had the same dreams, and two of them were the Emperor’s own tutors. Unknown to the Empress, they encouraged their young ruler to imagine himself as the head of a vast modern people, a new China, and they tried to persuade him to the first dreadful step toward his complete power. It was to murder the Empress Dowager, his adoptive mother.
Here was the stuff of Shakespearean drama. The young Emperor was torn between loyalty to the great woman who had brought him in her own arms to the Imperial Palace and his sincere belief that China must be changed. He loved and admired the Empress with the force of all the tradition which had trained him to obedience to her not only as his sovereign but also as his adopted mother, and filial piety made his conscience tender. Yet he saw clearly enough what she would not, that China was in peril if she did not modernize to defend herself. Hungry Western powers were nibbling at her coasts and inland rivers, and she had no ships of war, no armies with which to beat them off. It was the age of empire, and any country not strong enough to defend itself was considered fair prey for Western empire builders. But China had never built an army or a navy, for she had not needed such defenses. The strength of her superior civilization until now had conquered every invader.
“We are being carved into pieces like a melon,” the old Empress groaned, and indeed they were, and yet she could not trust the impetuous young Emperor. She was partly justified for in a burst of reforming energy as soon as he became Emperor, within a hundred days, he had sent tens of edicts flying over the country, announcing new schools to be set up in temples, new railways, new laws and customs. Everything was to be changed and at once.
The people were confused and inside the palace immediately there was deep division. The old princes told the Empress Dowager that order must be restored. The modern advisors of the Emperor and his reformers must be routed and killed. The Emperor, they said, must be restrained.
When the Empress Dowager had to act, she acted quickly. Though I was a child and far away in another province, I can remember the consternation of my parents and our liberal Chinese friends and the satisfaction of our conservative Chinese friends, including my tutor, Mr. Kung, when we heard the news one early morning that by a coup d’etat the young Emperor had been taken prisoner and locked up on an island, that Yuan Shih-k’ai, the Commander of the new Western-trained Chinese army, had deserted the Emperor to take his side with the Empress Dowager, that six of the reformers had been killed and only two of the leaders, K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, had escaped. A strange silence pervaded our region that day and doubtless it spread over the whole country. What now was to happen? The foreign governments, it became evident during the next few weeks, would do nothing. Opinion was divided but on the whole it sided with the Empress Dowager and with the conservative party. The foreign governments did not welcome reforms which might rouse the people of China to knowledge of what had been going on.
The first edict we next received was signed by the Emperor, but every one knew that the Empress had written it and sent it out over his name and the imperial seal. It was moderate enough, mildly saying that the reforms were going too fast and the people were becoming confused.
“Our real desire,” the edict announced reasonably, “was to make away with superfluous posts for the sake of economy; whereas, on the contrary, we find rumors flying abroad that we intend to change wholesale the customs of the Empire, and, in consequence, innumerable suggestions of reform have come to be presented to us. If we allowed this to go on, none of us would know to what pass matters would come. Hence, unless we hasten to express our present wishes clearly before all, we greatly fear that petty officials and their underlings will place their own construction on what commands have gone before, and create a ferment in the midst of the usual calm of the people. This will indeed be contrary to our desire, and put our reforms for strengthening and enriching our empire to naught.”