The Last Empress - Anchee Min [84]
Li did not want to come to Peking. He begged to be excused from his duty. Believing that the Emperor and the Ironhats would sooner or later make him a scapegoat, he had no confidence that he would survive. He pointed out that things had changed. We had lost our bargaining chip. There was no way to bring Japan to the negotiating table.
"Any man who represents China and signs the treaty will have to sign away parts of China," Li predicted. "It will be a thankless task, and the nation will blame him no matter what the reason for the outcome."
I pleaded with him to think it over, and sent him a personal invitation to have dinner with me.
Li responded, saying in his message that he was not fit for the honor and his advanced age and ill health made travel difficult.
"I wish that I weren't the Empress of China," I wrote back to Li. "The Japanese are on their way to Peking, and I can't bear to even begin to imagine how they will violate the Imperial ancestral grounds."
Perhaps it was my urgent tone, perhaps it was his sense of noblesse oblige—whatever the reason—Li Hung-chang honored me with his presence, and he was quickly appointed as China's chief negotiator. He arrived at Shimonoseki, Japan, on March 19, 1895. About a month later, the negotiations took a startling turn: while leaving one of the sessions with Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi, Li was shot in the face by a Japanese extremist.
"I was almost glad the incident took place," Li replied when I wrote asking after his condition. "The bullet grazed my left cheek. It gained me what I could never get at the negotiating table—the world's sympathy."
The shooting resulted in an international outcry for Japan to moderate its demands on China.
I felt that I had sent Li to die and he survived only by pure luck.
Also in his message Li Hung-chang prepared Emperor Guang-hsu for the most difficult decision: to agree to the negotiated terms, including the cession to Japan in perpetuity of the island of Taiwan, the Pescadores and the Liaotung Peninsula; the opening of seven Chinese ports to Japanese trade; the payment of two hundred million taels, with permission for Japan to occupy Weihaiwei Harbor until this indemnity was cleared; and recognition of the "full and complete autonomy and independence of Korea," which meant relinquishing it to Japan.
***
Guang-hsu sat on the Dragon Throne and wept. When Li Hung-chang returned to Peking for consultations, he could not get a word out of the Emperor.
It was then that I told Li what I had been thinking: "Give up what China must in the form of money, but not land."
He raised his eyes. "Yes, Your Majesty."
I told him that once we had sanctioned foreign occupation inland, as we had allowed to happen with the Russians in our Ili region, China would forever be lost.
Li understood perfectly and negotiated accordingly.
The image of Li Hung-chang in the audience hall with his forehead touching the ground remained in my mind after he was gone. I sat frozen. The sound of a big clock in the hallway grated on my nerves.
"Korea and Taiwan are gone," Guang-hsu muttered to himself over and over.
He didn't know, of course, that within months we would also lose Nepal, Burma and Indochina.
Another rape. And then another.
Japan had no intention of stopping. Its agents now had spread deep into Manchuria.
***
The dragon carvings on the palace columns again went unpainted this year. The old paint had started to peel and the golden color turned a parched brown. The Board of the Interior had long run out of money. The danger was not only the visible dry rot, it was the invisible termites.
One morning Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying ventured to make a formal plea to the throne: "Please, Your Majesty, do something to save the Forbidden City, for it is built with nothing but wood."
"Burn it down!" was Guang-hsu's response.
The audiences went on. In Li Hung-chang's telegrammed updates the Japanese demanded the right to build factories in