The Last Empress - Anchee Min [65]
During the conflict with France, the Ironhats advocated that China go immediately to war. Prince Ch'un was encouraged to claim his authority in his son's government. By the time I became involved, Prince Kung's trouble with the court's majority was out of control. Believing that China should do everything to avoid a war, Kung worked independently with envoys whom he sent to Paris to negotiate. With Robert Hart's assessment of the situation, Prince Kung brought France to a compromise settlement, and Li Hung-chang was dispatched to formalize the agreement.
When Li's settlement turned Indochina into a joint protectorate of China and France, the nation's emotions were stirred. Prince Kung and Li Hung-chang were attacked as traitors. Letters denouncing the two piled up on my desk.
Although I supported Prince Kung, I couldn't ignore the growing dissension in the court. Emperor Guang-hsu was being pushed around by his hot-blooded brother and Ironhat leader Prince Ch'un Junior.
I realized that the only way to get Prince Kung out of trouble was to fire him for relatively benign reasons: arrogance, nepotism and inefficiency. I convinced my brother-in-law that an edict of dismissal would clear him of the charge of treason.
In anger and disappointment, Kung offered his resignation, and it was granted.
Li Hung-chang was left vulnerable. To save his own skin, he switched sides—a move I could not criticize and for which I could offer only sympathy. Then Prince Ch'un replaced Prince Kung as the chief minister.
The nation suffered the consequences of the departure of Prince Kung, a man I had depended on for security for so many years. With both Yung Lu and Prince Kung gone, I became nervous. China was now almost solely in the hands of the Manchu hardliners—a notoriously grasping, villainous and uneducated group that numbered in the thousands.
The Manchu ancestors had set up a system of rotating appointments every two or three years to prevent officials from establishing private interests. The rotation often meant that a new governor would fall into the grip of his clerks and underlings, who knew their area well. I was suspicious of the new governors who came to tell the Emperor of "recent achievements."
According to Li Hung-chang, thirty percent of the nation's annual revenue was siphoned off through extortion, fraud and corruption. Our government was bedeviled by the lack of competent and honest men. And, above all, by a shortage of funds and the means to generate them.
Guang-hsu had been talking about remitting land taxes. I pleaded with him to stay his hand. Past summers had brought ruin to half of China. In the poorest provinces families exchanged their children—parents could not bear to watch their own die and then be forced to eat them. In the meantime, our exports lagged perilously behind imports. Even the tea trade, which we had virtually monopolized in 1876, had been stolen by British-run India. We now supplied only a quarter of the world's consumption of tea.
My room was stuffed with papers. Brushes, paint, ink stones and signature stamps cluttered every surface. My walls were covered with paintings in progress. My subjects continued to be floral studies and landscapes, but my strokes revealed my increasing anxiety.
I sent my painting instructor away because I was driving her crazy. She could not understand why I couldn't paint the way I used to. She was terrified by my mad brushstrokes. Her eyebrows were like two peaks and her mouth gaped with silent shock as she fixed my strokes. She dotted the black ink everywhere until the painting dripped and my rose turned into a zebra.
Li Lien-ying told me that my paintings were not selling because the collectors believed that they were not mine.
"The new pieces lack elegance and calmness," my eunuch said.
I told him that the beauty of the Imperial parks