The Last Empress - Anchee Min [91]
For my son, each day brought another decision, another defeat, another humiliation. He had been living in a manure pit. Tung Chih had been lucky: death had helped him to reach peace.
Darkness filled the room after Li Lien-ying retreated. I lay against soft pillows and recalled that once Li Hung-chang had advised me to deposit gold and silver in banks outside China.
"In case Japan..." I remembered that he was afraid to say more, but I got the idea: I might be forced to flee China. The image of Queen Min burned alive was never far from my thoughts.
Li Hung-chang must have assumed that I was a wealthy woman. He had no idea how penniless I was. I was too embarrassed to let anyone know that I had sold my favorite opera troupe. I owned practically nothing but my seven honorary Imperial titles. Li hadn't insisted on having me consult the English bank managers in Hong Kong and Shanghai. But when he left my palace, he was no longer confused—he understood more than ever where I stood in terms of China's survival.
Guang-hsu and I had expected that the Western powers would cease their aggression after the deals were executed, but in May of 1897 Germany found another excuse to attack us. The incident began when Chinese bandits robbed a village in Shantung near the port of Kiaochow, a German settlement. Houses were burned and the inhabitants were murdered, along with two Roman Catholic German missionaries.
Before our government had a chance to investigate, a German squadron proceeded to Kiaochow and seized the port. China was threatened with the severest repression unless it instantly agreed to pay compensation in gold and prosecute the bandits.
The Kaiser made sure that his protest was heard by the world: "I am fully determined to abandon henceforth the overcautious policy which had been regarded by the Chinese as weakness, and to show the Chinese, with full power and, if necessary, with brutal ruthlessness, that the German Emperor cannot be made sport of and that it is bad to have him as an enemy."
Four days later, my son came to me with the news that the Chinese garrison of Kiaochow had been routed. After its capture, Guang-hsu was forced to lease the port and the land around it, in a fifty-kilometer radius, from Germany. The ninety-nine-year lease came with exclusive mining and railway rights in the area.
Guang-hsu had trembled as he listened to Li Hung-chang describe what would happen if he refused to sign.
In the next few months, Li would bring more bad news: Russian warships sailed into fortified Port Arthur, as they were allowed to by the treaty of 1896, and announced that they had come to stay for good. By March of 1898, Port Arthur and the nearby merchant port of Talien-wan were likewise leased to Russia, for twenty-five years, with all mining and railway rights for sixty miles around.
Joining the fray, the British prime minister claimed that "the balance of power in the Gulf of Pechili has now been upset." England demanded that Weihaiwei, which was on the same spur as Kiaochow, controlled by the Germans, "be handed over to the British as soon as the Japanese indemnity had been paid and the town had been evacuated." The British also granted themselves an increase in the area of Kowloon, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong.
Not wanting to be left behind, France demanded a similar ninety-nine-year lease on the port of Kwangchowan, south of Hong Kong.
When the court pleaded for the Emperor to take control of the situation, Guang-hsu handed each minister a copy of what he had received from Li Hung-chang. It was an announcement made by the united Western powers regarding the "spheres of influence" in China. Germany and Russia had agreed that the entire Yangtze basin from Szechuan to the delta at Kiangsu was British. Britain agreed that southern Canton and southern Yunnan were French. A belt from Kausu through Shensi, Shansi, Hunan and Shantung was German. Manchuria and Chihli were Russian. The freedom-loving United States secured equal rights and opportunities for all nations in the leased areas and termed their attitude