The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China by Keith Laidler Read Free Book Online Page A

wise course of action had always been to maintain this system essentially unchanged, for fear that the whole country might descend into chaos and schism.
    The second problem was just as intractable. The Manchu, like the Ming, believed that Imperial dignity (not to mention biological success) required that the sovereign possess a harem of immense size. The Ming emperors had maintained seraglios of enormous proportions (with as many as three hundred concubines being added en bloc in some years), 17 and their Manchu successors felt they could do no less. But the biological realities of this situation required that any male guardians of the Emperor’s ladies should not be able to surreptitiously sire children on them. The first Manchu Emperor of China, Shun Chih, was said by many to have been the result of a liaison between the Emperor T’ai Tsung’s favourite concubine and a Chinese hunter named Wang Kao, and the history of China is littered with stories of Emperor’s ‘sons’ ascending to the Dragon Throne who were in reality the offspring of servants. The presence of eunuchs in the palace therefore became a necessary adjunct of the harem system, and once accepted in positions of power, these ‘rats and foxes’ could not help but aspire to more. No functioning male except the Emperor was allowed to reside within the Forbidden City. The Son of Heaven was thrown back upon the company of eunuchs, who, as his personal attendants, became also his confidants and friends. Graft and corruption sprouted like weeds, and the process of decline began anew.
    When the European nations arrived in force on their borders, this process of degeneration was all but complete. Like the Ming before them, the Manchu had come to believe that they ruled the very centre of the earth, that China was Chung Guo , the Central Kingdom, surrounded by barbarian vassal states. They were convinced that their Emperor was quite literally a Son of Heaven. They knew that their system of civilisation, their Confucian code of ethics, was superior to all. Even when faced with proof positive of Western technological superiority, they acted towards the European envoys with the same insolent superiority and hauteur that had so enraged their own leader, Nurhachi, in his dealings with the Ming. The proud warriors had become an effete ruling class whose purblind arrogance was leading them to destruction. By a species of perverse alchemy, the Manchu had become the Ming.
    Like the Ming, they were an ‘apple ripe for plucking’. And as foretold in the prophecies of the first Ming Emperor, the final act in this drama was ready to begin. A ‘ten-mouthed’ woman was about to be invited into the very centre of Manchu power.

CHAPTER THREE: CONCUBINE, THIRD CLASS
    The girl who was to become the Empress of the Western Palace, and the greatest female autocrat the world has seen, was born into relative poverty in the southern province of Anhui, a warm, sensuous land of paddy fields and water oxen, and boasting the incomparably beautiful Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountains, sacred to the Lord Buddha. 1 Her father was Captain Hui Cheng, a Manchu officer in the Blue Bordered Banner regiment, who, like all bannermen, had been given a sinecure amongst the provinces of China. Hui Cheng’s first posting, after the birth of his daughter, was to Luhan in Shanxi Province. From there he was transferred to Wuhu in Anhui, on the lower reaches of the Chang Jiang (Yangtse River). Here, close to the innumerable Buddhist temples of Jiuhua, Yehonala was to spend most of her childhood.
    Some accounts relate that Yehonala’s father died when she was three, others that he was cashiered from the army for cowardice when facing the feared Chang Mao insurgents of the Tai Ping rebellion. 2 But for whatever reason, we know that he proved incapable of supporting his family while Yehonala was still a young girl. Under the Chinese extended family system, this duty then devolved upon the eldest male