Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang Read Free Book Online Page B

so anxious that he took it upon himself to write an emollient letter to Lord Elgin, expressing his wish for peace and conciliation. An irate Emperor Xianfeng reprimanded him. The emperor’s inner circle, a group of princes and high officials, urged him to be uncompromising. One of them, Jiao, said that ‘Parkes should be put to death in the extreme manner’, which meant death by a thousand cuts. Emperor Xianfeng liked the idea; he wrote: ‘You are absolutely right. Only we have to wait for a few days.’
    The emperor’s optimism came from the men in his inner circle whom he had appointed to ‘handle the barbarians’. They told him: ‘The barbarian Parkes is the one man good at military manoeuvre, and all the barbarians take orders from him. Now that he is captured, the morale of the barbarian troops is bound to collapse, and if we seize the opportunity to carry out our extermination campaign, victory will be ours.’ Three days after this counsel of bizarre self-delusion, on 21 September 1860, the Chinese army was roundly beaten on the outskirts of Beijing. Emperor Xianfeng learned the news in the Old Summer Palace; all he could do was flee. That night, the court was packing amidst chaos and panic. The next morning, when his officials came for their audiences, they found that the emperor had disappeared. Most of the court had to leave later, separately, as the roads were jammed by fleeing crowds, the residents of Beijing, who had heard that the emperor himself had gone.
    On 6 October, the French troops burst into the Old Summer Palace. On the 8th, Parkes and some other captives were released. More were returned over the next few days – most only as dead bodies. Of the thirty-nine men seized, twenty-one had been killed by the way they had been bound, as the emperor had ordered. Their comrades saw that their captors had ‘tied their feet and hands together behind their backs as lightly [tightly] as possible, afterwards pouring water on the cords to increase the tension, and they were kept in this terrible position until the condition of their hands and wrists became too horrible for description’. Their deaths had come after days of lacerating agony. Parkes and the other survivors only lived because sensible officials in the Ministry of Punishments had quietly protected them.
    Lord Elgin was much affected by what he saw and heard. He wrote to his wife,‘My dearest, we have dreadful news respecting the fate of some of our captured friends. It is an atrocious crime – and not for vengeance but for future security ought to be seriously dealt with.’ Europeans were now coming to China. In order for them not to be treated in this way, he decided to serve a warning, something that would really hurt the emperor, and he settled on razing the Old Summer Palace.General Grant wrote in his dispatch that, without such a punitive act, ‘the Chinese Government would see that our countrymen can be seized and murdered with impunity. It is necessary to undeceive them on this point.’ Lord Elgin had contemplated other options, but rejected them: ‘I should have preferred crushing the Chinese army which is still in this neighbourhood, but as we go to work we might have followed them round the walls of Peking [Beijing] till doomsday without catching them.’ He was keen to finish his job and leave, rather than get bogged down in China, where the weather was turning cold and Chinese reinforcement armies might be coming. A quick fire was the easiest option.
    The Old Summer Palace was in fact a complex of palaces begun in the early eighteenth century and added to over the next 100 years. Covering an area of 350 hectares, it housed grand European edifices, designed by the Jesuits Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist, who had been employed by Qianlong the Magnificent, as well as hundreds of buildings in the Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian styles. Architectural designs from all over China were represented. Landscaped gardens celebrated