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

relative, and Yehonala, her sister, and her mother, the Lady Niuhulu, were subsequently cared for by an uncle, Mu-fan, or Muyanga in his native Manchu language. Muyanga was head of the clan in the capital Beijing and, despite being afflicted with a painful stammer, was a high official at the Imperial Board of Works. It was through his good offices that Yehonala and her mother were transferred permanently from Wuhu to the capital.
    They travelled to Beijing by barge via the Grand Canal, a man-made waterway completed in the seventh century AD to facilitate the transport of grain from Hangzhou and the Yangtse valley to the capital. According to one account 3 (which may have been devised and circulated by Yehonala’s enemies to embarrass her) Yehonala and her family were very poor at this time, and travelling in the Chinese equivalent of steerage. As they passed through Tsing-kiang, one of the more wealthy travellers was visited by an old friend, the tao-tai (head mandarin) of the town. As is usual in Chinese society, even today, the two men spent the night gambling. The tao-tai lost heavily, and the next day, before the barge continued its journey northward, he sent a servant on board with cash to cover his debt. For some reason, the package went astray, and was given to Yehonala’s widowed mother, who suddenly found herself possessed of, for her, a small fortune, compliments of the tao-tai of Tsing-kiang. When he discovered the mistake, the mandarin’s first impulse was to demand the return of his cash. But his friend dissuaded him, pointing out that the girls were Manchu, and pretty, and might very well find themselves in positions of power, perhaps even in the Emperor’s harem. ‘At present they know you for a kind-hearted man who has befriended them in time of need. Why make enemies by giving them a grievous disappointment?’ The mandarin took the advice, and many years later was said to have received numerous favours from the adult Yehonala, now grown more powerful than even the mandarin’s friend had dared to predict.
    Nothing in Yehonala’s youthful experience can have prepared her for the moment when, standing at the prow of the barge, she first came in sight of the capital. Beijing was then the world’s most populous walled city, a blatant display of Manchu power and skill. Standing four-square, the visual impact of the metropolis, with its forty-foot-high crenellated walls running a full four miles in length on each side, and massive roofed towers at each corner, must have been overwhelming. The city rose straight out of the low plain on which it stood, overpoweringly impressive: ‘there was no other sight like it in the world’. 4 Apart from the walls, temples and palaces of the Emperor, Beijing lay low on the horizon, the citizens living in one-storeyed pian-feng ‘bungalows’. Two-storeyed houses had long been prohibited, to prevent the sacrilege of ordinary folk looking down on the Emperor, should he pass in his yellow satin-covered sedan chair. The whole of the city was laid out on a grid pattern, established early in the fifteenth century. In all major towns the Manchu, ever mindful of their precarious minority position as overlords, had built walled ‘Tartar cities’ within the Chinese urban sprawl, as a precaution against rebellion. Beijing also had its Chinese city, straggling and overcrowded, the air of its narrow alleys pungent with a mixture of the wonderful spices of Chinese cuisine and the stench of ordure from open sewers, the walkways unpaved, dusty in the summer heat and ankle-deep with mud in the autumn rain. Lying to the north of this bustling mass of humanity was Beijing’s Tartar city, secure behind crenellated forty-foot-high walls some sixteen miles in circumference, within which lay Manchu-only homes, and palaces. This enormous fortification had been built by the third Ming Emperor, Yung Le, in the fifteenth century, using more than two hundred thousand forced labourers. But here