Empress Dowager Cixi Adopts to Stay on the Throne

Part 2 of the Discussion with Lauren Schill about the Empress Dowager

Lauren. You were talking about Prince Gong.

Lauren: Yes. We've gotten to the point in this century where we've attained peace. She was actually starting to pay attention to what was happening inside of her government.

Prince Gong, he had been a commander during one of these battles and had gotten a lot of awards for that. He'd been minister here and secretary here, and he was in this position of great risk for Cixi. He might not have been looking at anything in particular, but Cixi herself definitely suspected Prince Gong of wanting to make a grab for power.

Whether or not that was reality, her perception was that he was going to try and make a move for a regency position where he could be the advisor to the young Emperor, and she really didn't want to have that.

She does this thing again where she makes this very, very strict and harsh show of power. She smacks you and then she'll forgive you.

In 1865, she had one of the scribes write a memorial, which was an official memo stating that Prince Gong had been disrespectful of the Emperor and accusing Gong of corruption in office.

He had, in this time, built up his own support system in court and he thought it was just nothing. He dismissed it because he dismissed it and he didn't treat them with the respect that they thought they deserved.

So, she and Cian officially accused him of displaying improper conduct in front of the Empress's Dowager and that there were, quote unquote, other charges never really defined to combine with that to get him dethroned.

So, he was demoted. He was kicked out of court. He was stripped of all of his titles, including the title of Prince.

Paul: Wow. I hadn't heard about that. Because he, of course, makes a comeback later. This must have been a temporary demotion.

Lauren: It was a very temporary demotion.

So, the court was in an uproar. Two of the other brothers really begged for him to be allowed to return. They called her actions an overreach and begged her to give back some of his dignity. And Gong himself was even said to have stood in front of both of the Empress's Dowager in tears, begging for this position back.

Then, they took pity on him. They reinstated him with the foreign Affairs Ministry, but he was no longer Prince Regent, and he never earned a seat of political importance ever again. He was able to be in court, but he was not ever allowed to be in a position of power again.

Okay, so she is more powerful than ever, and then her son comes of age.

Paul: Tell us about her son.

Lauren: This Tongzhi Emperor. He is 17 and he's an almost grown up.

He's three years overdue to take the throne, and he's ready to choose at the age of 17, from a long list of wives and concubines of his very own.

Cian helps with that. She helps facilitate a lot of the relationships between families in the upper echelons of society. And so, she matched him with certain people, and Cixi also matched him with certain concubines. But the one that ended up being the wife was Cian's pick.

And Cixi was actually a little bit bitter about the fact that her pick wasn't the Empress. Her pick just became a concubine.

Paul: But she did defer to her son about this choice of wife, about this choice of Empress in the end, didn't she?

Lauren: She did, yes, absolutely. And her pick did still become a concubine. So still in his group. It was a slight she never got over.

The child himself is kind of dumb, honestly. At the age of 16, he could barely read. And Cixi had been choosing tutors throughout his life to try and help him learn.

It's important to remember, pressure is on him. From age five, he's going to be the Emperor. He's going to be the most powerful person in the Qing Dynasty. He needs to know all of these things. There's all of this pressure. He knows that he's going to get there, but he also has Cixi as a mom.

I would imagine there's a little bit of sense of rebellion.

So, he had this hatred for learning. He didn't like learning, and so she would try more tutors to try and see if she could fix the problem. And then he didn't like learning even more and went around and around, both feeding into the, my kid is not doing well, so I've got to pile more work on him when the kid just doesn't want any of the work, so it doesn't matter how much you pile up, he's not going to do it.

Paul: Do you think he just wasn't academically inclined, or do you think this was some rebellion against his strong mother?

Lauren: I think to a certain extent it must have been both. I don't think one negates the other.

And certainly with a mother like so, she I can definitely imagine that there was an element of intent in the rebellion, especially with what we're about to talk about next.

But in general, he was dumb. He was just a dumb guy.

He didn't really like to learn. When he gets into power, we'll see he really doesn't have a whole lot of effect it's both.

Paul: Let's stay on the topic of his chosen empress, his chosen wife, Miss Alute. She was from the same Mongolian family as Sushun, who was beheaded during the coup so many years earlier.

Was that one of the reasons why Cixi was a little hesitant about her being the new empress?

Lauren: There was definitely something to do with that. Once she was chosen to be Empress, she was very quick to posture her authority.

I'm the Empress now, I'm in charge. And I think that those family ties really did have a long life.

That must have been a defining moment for their family because it was this act of kindness that her father didn't get punished as well. So, she's already a little bit wary of Cixi and she knows what she's capable of.

Paul: What I've read is that Miss Alute, the Tongzhi Emperor's Empress, her maternal grandfather, Prince Zheng, was one of the Board of Regents who was given the silk scarf as to kill himself. Her great uncle was Sushun, who was the one person beheaded in the coup by Cixi and Cian.

So, her family definitely had suffered during the coup and by Miss Alute becoming Empress, a lot of the family status was restored. Titles or lands or hereditary rights were restored.

Miss Alute's father was very Confucian. He was a very successful student. He had been the national number one in the examinations the year he took it. So, he was the top student in China the year that he took the exams.

And what I've heard is that he was a strict Confucian, strict believer in filial piety. He wanted his daughter to be obedient to the emperor.

Lauren: Honestly, I think the intelligence of that match and the strategy behind it is a lot more thanks to Cian and her ability to build up those relationships and maintain those relationships between people.

Whereas Cixi is like, I'm a mover, I'm a shaker, I got to get stuff done. She's not so much with keeping up with all of the families, whereas Cian is a little bit more in the shadows and she talks to people. She builds and maintains rapport with all of these important families and so she does a lot of mending of relationships, I think, through matchmaking in some ways.

Paul: I'm sure what you're saying is true.

Cian, this is the former Empress Zhen, the wife of Emperor Tongzhi's father, seems to have been gifted with people, was good at maintaining harmony and good relations and she should be credited, I would think, for a good wedding match.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Paul: Now I'm interested in getting your thoughts on the Tongzhi Emperor's sexuality.

What do you know about that?

Lauren: I know that he really liked having sex with his wife and Cixi was not super happy about it.

We talked about he was loathe to learn and especially once he got married, his tutoring still wasn't over. But now he had a wife and he had a harem and he could do all of these things and have all these relations, and he got after it really quickly.

But he actually liked the Empress, and so he started spending all of his time with the Empress to the neglect of the rest of his concubines.

Paul: It's interesting how here we are, maybe 160 years later, going back on a very significant person in history, and each of us has a completely different understanding of this person's sexuality than the other.

Because what I've read, and I've listed the books that I read in the sources part of this podcast website, that author said that he did not sleep with his wife on his wedding night.

That, before he was married. He had gone to brothels and his first sexual experiences were with female and male prostitutes. That he was very close and his favorite companion was the good looking and male Wang Qingqi.

And what he wasn't doing when he was emperor was governing. We're in agreement on that. He wasn't very smart and he wasn't very devoted to his duties as emperor.

But what he really wanted to do is get out at night and scale over the walls. And that was very difficult in the Forbidden City because it had high walls and was very tightly controlled.

And I think the reason why he wanted to leave at night is because he would need to do that to get to brothels.

And he helped restore the Imperial Summer Palace, and when that was delayed and postponed because of financial problems in the Empire, he moved over to his Sea Palace, which was close to the Imperial Palace, but only had decorative walls that were easy enough for him to get over during the night.

So, my understanding is that he wasn't having sex with Miss Alute. That he had preferred her because she was kindly and respectful and wouldn't complain.

And that on their wedding night she read in poetry and that they didn't consummate the marriage and that he was escaping to brothels outside of the palaces at night and then sleeping in the next morning and really not doing much as emperor.

Lauren: Interesting, I do know about the brothels, but the narrative that I understood, and this is again from different sources, so to go back to the first episode, there's going to be two or three versions of all of these things.

My understanding was that he actually liked spending time with his wife and so she sent her away and he got sent to this separate palace to cool off and finish his studies and that he escaped from that palace with some eunuchs, and that was when he started doing the brothels.

But there's every chance that he had done that well before they got married. That's just the first part I hear of it. So that also spins a very different narrative depending on when it comes into his life.

Paul: Yeah, and it's tough for us to know at this point in time what the truth of the matter is, but it's certainly interesting how we've got some pretty different interpretations of things.

Lauren: He was emperor for about two years, so he's finally given that title in 1873, and this is four years later than heirs usually are given their title. And he takes the first opportunity to issue a decree which states that China is going to rebuild the Summer Palace, the one that was destroyed in the last episode.

They're going to try and restore it from what had destroyed his childhood. So, this home that had built memories and it was now going to be the home for his mothers, the Empresses Dowager were going to be able to have a nice retirement home there and leave the Forbidden City and not be regents anymore.

They were going to get out of his life. It was both an effort to try and restore a historical site, but also an effort to separate a little bit from his admittedly controlling parents.

But there's not a lot of money, so he asks his board of finance to just find the funds or scrounge for the money. And then he also asks other nobles and officials to donate their own funds to the cause. So, he checks all of this every month, and he's still going to brothels. He's still spending all of this money, going out and doing all of this.

His uncles are begging him to abandon this project because there's no money in the coffers and it's a very expensive project and in short order strips them of their princely titles, just like his mom. He dethrones them, and he tries to fire everyone who suggests stopping what he's going to do. Won't listen to anyone.

Paul: My understanding then is that the Ground Council asked Cuxi to intervene, because they're, like, the emperor, has just fired Prince Gong, has just fired Prince Chun. And Cixi intervened on behalf of Prince Gong, but not Prince Chun.

And my thinking on this is this relates back to what I talked about in the last episode, that Prince Chun had been involved in these anti-westerner riots and these maneuvers that she wasn't pleased about.

And at the time, she didn't have much power over Prince Chun. But now that the emperor has fired him, she's not going to use what influence she has to restore him to power after what he did to her. Including the execution of her favorite eunuch, who she had sent out of the Imperial City; was on official business and was killed for it. All under Prince Chun's eyes.

Lauren: Yeah. But he's trying to exercise these little muscles of power. He's emperor now, so he's going to do the things that he wants to do, and they are not having it.

So, they stepped in. You're right. They intervened and they reinstated these titles and positions. And Cixi straight up told him that if it weren't for his uncle, Prince Gong, they wouldn't be where the country is today. Cixi's like, we are where we are. We have this peace, we have the tiny bit of savings that we have because of him. And if it weren't for him, we would absolutely not exist.

And this is all in the fall of 1874. In December, Tongzhi fell ill with smallpox. And in January 1875, he died. Leaving his empress in charge of a nation that she had kind of been exiled from during her reign.

Cixi had kind of sent her away and didn't want her around.

And then in March so two months later, she died as well.

And there was actually a rumor for a little while that she was pregnant and that the timing of her death was just very convenient, especially since the court announced that it was a suicide.

Paul: This is one of the cases where there's two versions of history.

I've heard the rumor that Cixi, the evil mother-in-law, had her killed.

That's one way. A version that I've also heard is that Miss Alute, the Empress's father, who was this Confucian scholar, sent her a meal box and it was empty. And Miss Alute took that to mean that her father was instructing her to starve herself, that that was the right thing for her to do, to follow her husband, the Emperor, to the grave.

According to that theory, or that understanding, she committed suicide by starving herself, taking inspiration from her father.

Lauren: Honestly, that sounds way more metal. That's kind of cooler. Honestly.

Not that suicide is cool, but that's very intense.

Paul: It's also very sad because she would have been a very young woman.

Her husband was about 19 years old. She would have been really just blossoming into life right at the very beginning of that.

Lauren: They didn't have any heirs, they didn't have children. So the seat of power went back to the Empresses Dowager.

Paul: I think one thing to add on that is while the Emperor had smallpox, they had actually already assumed duties.

He wasn't really doing anything when he was healthy, let alone when he had smallpox. Right?

The Grand Council was quite happy during his illness and presumably as a temporary measure, to have the Dowagers Empress in charge again during his smallpox. So, they were starting to assume duties again at that point. Then he died.

Lauren: Yeah. According to rules of succession, with the title of Emperor, the title can't go up in generations. It has to be someone that was the same generation as Tongzhi or younger.

And there was a lot of we'll call it, quote unquote discussions. Take of that what you will.

After a lot of discussions, they decided on this four-year-old boy named Zaitian.

Paul:  I just know him by his eventual name, that he's going to be the Emperor Guangxu.

Lauren: Yes, it's Cixi's nephew, and he was separated from his family and put right in the palace.

And Cian was to be called by him, the Emperor's mother. And Cixi was to be dear father, which kind of further established her position as the head of the family.

Again, are both overseeing the care and tutelage of another little boy that they're raising up to be another Emperor.

Paul: And I think what's important to add in this case is that when they picked this young child, their nephew, he was being selected not as adopted son of the Tongzhi Emperor who just died. He was adopted by the Dowagers Empress and the late Emperor, who was the father of Tongzhi Emperor.

So, he was adopted one generation earlier. Why is that important?

So that the dowager's Empress will be Cian and Cixi and not Miss Alute. Otherwise, Miss Alute would have been the one to govern as Dowager Empress.

Lauren: Another interesting point about who this kid is and where he comes from.

He's actually the child of Prince Chun and Cixi's sister.

So, it is another very, very intentional and very strategic matchmaking of, not partners in marriage, but heirs to the throne. So, it's building up that bridge again, letting Prince Chin back into good graces. Basically, by stealing his child.

Paul: You say put him back into good graces. And I think it's clever for the other reason.

Because he's the biological father to the Emperor and because the rules of filial piety, he can't be an important person accord anymore or else he would essentially be Emperor. So, now he has to resign from any roles.

He's pushed aside. And if you talk about Cixi giving revenge cold, this is an interesting example of ice-cold revenge on Prince Chun for having executed her favorite eunuch.

She's now taking his son from him, removing him from any power in the court.

Grand Tutor Weng says, well, let him be head of the Praetorian Guards. Cixi says no, because the Praetorian Guards head would be in charge of personal safety for them, and she wasn't going to have Prince Chun be in charge of her personal safety.

And he's treated nicely, but he's out.

Lauren: But publicly, it looks like this nice little olive branch, it does work on a lot of different levels.

And your son's going to be the next Emperor. What an honor that is.

We're hiding the fact that, yes, he is being removed from any chance that he ever had of power ever again. But his son, what an honor. His son is going to be the next Emperor.

How cool is that? Different levels playing there for sure.

Paul: Yeah. Tough to complain when your son has just been promoted to Emperor.

So, you've sort of got to take what just happened.

Lauren: Exactly.

Cixi and Cian are back in charge again.

Paul: Yes.

Lauren: So I'd like to step back just for a moment and talk about China at large during the 60s.

She's opening up trade, and she's sending children to different countries to learn their ways and to try and build international relations while recovering her own nation.

Not everyone in the government felt that way. And there were a lot of people that ended up advising both Cixi and Guangxu about nationalism and cutting everything else out.

And if we're really going to recover and these people were ones that attacked us, so they don't deserve to have a relationship with us.

There were a lot of different opinions flying, and there was a shift in the where she shifts away from trying to build those relations, and she focuses more on that self strengthening movement, and she's trying to consolidate education in her own country.

She's not sending people overseas as much anymore. Changed her mind about a lot of the things that she had been really gung-ho about a decade earlier.

Paul: That's interesting. I would have said that this was the period of strongest westernization under Cixi. Now that the Tongzhi Emperor has died of smallpox, she's back. And she had pushed Prince Chun aside. He was very anti-westerner. He wanted revenge for the Second Opium War, and he is no longer in a position of power to do anything about it.

People who are conservative and anti-westerner, like Grand Tutor Weng, don't have an important position in court.

He's tutoring, he's teaching the next emperor, Guangxu, but he's just got a role in educating this small child who was three, four years old when he was adopted. So, he's years from power.

I hear what you're saying, and I think that part of the reason why she wanted modernization was she wanted to make China strong,

Not for the benefit of the Western powers, but for the benefit of China.

There were instances of people being sent abroad. She's sending ambassadors abroad now. Some students were still going abroad, and some army trainees and navy trainees were going to Europe to learn.

But she was also buying and building ships to strengthen the Chinese military because she wanted China to be a strong empire.

And there are threatening clouds around.

There is Japan, who is strengthening. There is also France, who has decided that Vietnam is going to be its colony. It’s going to be French Indochina, and that's just on the southern border of China.

So, she's having to deal with international threats in a way that she didn't have to during the first period as regent.

So it is around this time that Japan takes control of the Liuqiu Islands, also known as the Ryukyu Islands. So, the Japanese term is Ryukyu Islands. The Chinese term is Liuqiu Islands. And those are a chain of islands between Taiwan and Japan.

And Cixi was willing to let them go because they weren't actually part of Chinese territory. They were considered a vassal state, similar to Korea, similar to Vietnam.

Cixi didn't consider it a core interest of China.

Lauren: What is a vassal state?

Paul: Excellent question.

A vassal state, as I understand it in the Qing Empire, means that it is adjacent to China.

Every time they have a new ruler, they're like a new king. They would actually have to be authorized by China. They would receive confirmation from China of that new ruler and they would occasionally be some tribute paid or gift exchange paid.

But mostly it's honoring China by saying, before our new ruler takes the throne, “Is that all right with you?” And China would say, “yes”.

Today, Tibet is part of the core territory of China. But at this point in Qing Dynasty, it doesn't seem to have been too much different than Korea.

And of course, we’ll talk soon about what Japan was doing in Korea but she let the Ryukyu Islands go. Similarly, she wasn't going to fight the French for control of Vietnam. Because China, going back 2000 years, had tried to control Vietnam and had found it very difficult to have Vietnam as part of China. There was always resistance by the Vietnamese.

Lauren: Let them deal with the problem. Good riddance.

Love that.

Paul: One of the border cities in China is actually called Suppressing the Vietnamese. The translation of it.

Lauren: Okay, basically, just keep them out.

This is your only job in this whole region. Keep them out.

Paul: But as the French Army was moving north in Vietnam, it was getting close to China. This was a concern.

And she did move the army into Vietnam. And deep down, what she wanted was peace.

But she felt to get a good peace, to get a lasting peace, you had to be strong.

Cixi moved her army into North Vietnam to have a bit of a buffer zone or a piece to trade.

And they were defeated. And there were problems.

But then there was a peace treaty negotiated that she could live where the borders would be recognized. No indemnity was to be paid. And she was fine with that.

And then France backtracked on it. There was a bit of a change in Paris and all of a sudden, they demanded a huge indemnity.

And her diplomats were saying, well, let's just negotiate it down. Instead of that big amount, let's do a bit less. And she's like, no. Not one sou to the French. We will not pay any indemnity to them.

And one of her diplomats had already offered that. And she got very hands on in negotiation. And it did mean that fighting started again.

Lauren: And she wasn't willing to give that.

Paul:  Yeah. So, France had reneged on the treaty, was demanding 250,000,000 francs.

And Cixi refused.

So, they went back into conflict.

The Chinese Navy suffered a defeat.

It was at Fuzhou Navy Yard that the French fleet blew up this shipyard that was Chinese and where they were building ships.

But the Chinese won a battle at Zhennan Pass. This was this border community that means suppressing the Vietnamese.

And that victory, Cixi realized, was the moment to make peace.

Her commanders and grand councillors said, “oh, we've had a victory. We should continue. We should move further into Vietnam.”

And she said “no”.

And she was very insistent that this was the moment for peace.

And she was right. The original treaty was confirmed.

Not a single franc was paid as an indemnity to France, and that peace held.

She was later recognized as having been very strong in defending Chinese interests, in getting an honorable and lasting peace with France with respect to Vietnam.

And she brought Prince Chun in to observe her during this, and he realized that she actually was a nationalist. She was caring about the empire. She was defending it strongly, but just not in a blind way. In an intelligent way.

And similarly, Russia had seized some land in Xinjiang earlier during the period of rebellions. So, this was during the Taiping Rebellion and the Nian rebellion. There was also rebellion in Xinjiang, and she had sent in troops to restore Xinjiang to China.

She dispatched General Zuo, and Zuo traveled with his own coffin to motivate his troops.

He was clear, I'm prepared to give my life to reclaim this territory for China.

So, the Chinese put down the rebellion after some brutal years with massacres on both sides, and the rebel leader was killed, and his sons and grandsons were castrated and made into eunuchs or slaves.

And Xinjiang became a Chinese province. But there was an issue that the Russians had seized part of it: Ili.

So, now there is a question of what to do about that. Cixi first sent Marquis Zeng Jr. to Russia.

Territory was her bottom line.

And she said, if you can get back all of the Russian territory, that's what she wants. If you can't get it back, don't concede the territory to Russia. Just take the status quo and leave it as an outstanding issue where each country would control the territory that they control.

But, she didn't want any treaty that would confirm a Russian land grab.

In the end, he was successful in the negotiations, and China did recover most of Ili and the territory that it had regained in Xinjiang. And foreign diplomats were really impressed with this.

Lord Dufferin of England said, “never before had Russia disgorged territory it had absorbed.”

So, this was Cixi's earliest military

Lauren: First

Paul: and diplomatic successes.

So, we have Russia, we have France, and even against Japan. Cixi had a victory in Korea.

Cixi was aware that Japan had its eyes on Korea. She instructed Earl Li, persuade Korea to open up to foreign trade, both to strengthen Korea, but also because she thought then that the foreign powers would take an interest in Korea because they would be trading with it and making profit with it. And she wanted these Western interests to help deter Japan.

In 1882, there was unrest. She was concerned about Japan's move. Cixi quickly sent troops from China in to restore order, and it was restored.

Japan said that it wanted to leave troops in Korea, Cixi ensured that Chinese troops stayed as well. Then in 1884, when China and France were at war, that's when the pro Japanese coup in Korea broke out that I discussed in one of the episodes about Japan in the 19th century.

Cixi realized that Japan was behind it, and she sent troops to suppress the coup, but instructed them not to give Japan a reason for war. But there was a battle between Japanese and Chinese troops, and the Chinese won. This was in 1884.

So, this is five years before so she retired for the second time, and she was very alive to Japan's expansionist agenda. In 1889, just before so she retired for the second time, she gave clear naval instructions “keep expanding and updating gradually, but never slacken”.

And I don't want to get ahead of myself, but unfortunately, when Guangxu came to power, the people he put in charge did not follow Cixi's advice, and in fact, they cut back the Navy.

Lauren: So just to step back a little bit though, not only is she doing all of this internationally, but for a period of time, she actually falls ill and she has to fade out from this a little bit.

She has Cian step in and help facilitate some of these deals that she's making, some of these communications that she has. And Cian has really picked up on raising Guangxu, and she's really upset that she's not able to be at the height of her power.

She's obviously a very strong, independent woman. Being sick for a very long time, it was really rough on her. But then suddenly in 1881 we're going back a few years, in 1881, Cian dies.

Suddenly her partner in all of this is gone.

Rumors abound as to exactly how she died. There's all sorts of rumors that surrounded her death because it was very sudden. Historians believe that it was a stroke, but obviously poisoning is definitely on the table. Apparently, according to some rumors, that she would have killed Cian.

Paul: I don't believe that.

Lauren: I don't either. I think they were very close.

Paul: You say stroke.

Lauren: They were close.

Paul: They had worked well together for 20 years. Cian was not doing anything to undermine Cixi. I don't believe for a second that there was any reason for Cixi to suddenly kill her in 1881. And in fact, she went mourning after that.

Lauren:  I mean, she's not healthier now. It didn't magically get better for her once. Clearly her best friend, her long-time companion, all of these important roles that she had played in her life, it was all gone. And now she's sick, and now she's a single mother, and she really can't sit in for all these state meetings as she did before. She just doesn't have the energy.

So, at age ten, Guangxu is actually starting to step in and sitting for these state meetings. Cixi is able to communicate in writing. She was able to foster these deals back and forth between different territories because a lot of that is in writing and messaging.

Paul:  I think this sickness could be from the stress of governing. This is not easy.

They are ruling a huge empire with foreign powers that are looking at it like a feast, and there's a lot of modernization to happen. It wasn't an easy job. So, I can believe that some of the sickness might have been stress induced.

I just wanted to also add on the issue of Cian's death. On the former Empress, dynastic rules only required 27 days of mourning. But Cixi extended it to 100 days and also decreed a 27 month ban on music in the court.

And Cixi liked music. So, to deprive herself of music for 27 months because of the late Empress's death strikes me as real mourning.

And when that 27 months was up, what did she do? She watched Peking Opera for 10 hours the first day. Like, she really missed it.

Lauren: Wow. I wonder if that was something that they had gone to together. And that was just very much something that brought them both a lot of joy. And she just that's heartbreaking. I didn't know about that.

Paul: But I think the outcome of Empress Cian's death now is that this mediating force, this harmonious force at court, is gone.

So, you've got this nephew, this adopted son who's going to be the next Emperor, and the relationship between him and so she is not very good. And now Cian isn't there to help. He took it hard. He really mourned his...

Lauren: He was ten.

Paul: Yeah, he mourned her.

Lauren: He's a young kid.

Paul: Her death too.

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely.

Cixi is still sitting in these positions of power. You were going into all of these relations with Japan and the growing tensions there. You can speak to that a little bit more.

Paul: Yeah. I've talked about how Japan was eyeing and took the Ryukyu Islands and was eyeing Korea. And for now, under Cixi, they're not getting their way in Korea.

That will change when Guangxu becomes emperor. But at this point, Guangxu is still a child. And with Cian gone, the person that he's closest to is Grand Tutor Weng.

His Grand Tutor is teaching him every day. And unlike the Tongzhi Emperor, Guangxu Emperor is a good student. He is very talented at calligraphy. He enjoys writing, he enjoys his lessons.

And he is also very close to the Grand Tutor, who is like a father figure to him, because when the Grand Tutor was gone, once the future Guangxu Emperor stopped his lessons, he had homework to do. He was supposed to be reciting something 20 times a day. And it was only when the Grand Tutor came back that he immediately started reciting it again. He hugged the grand tutor. He was like, I missed you, and the eunuchs were like, oh, we haven't heard him do his lessons in a long time. It's great to hear that again.

He was genuinely close to this Grand Tutor, and that will have implications later, because the Grand Tutor was, by all accounts a very good teacher, but not a very good grand councillor. Not a very good judge of the Japanese threat.

So, the Grand Tutor is later placed in charge of finances by the Guangxu Emperor. The Grand Tutor is looking, he's saying, oh, we had a famine this year, so we're going to cut back expenses on the military, and we're going to buy rice for our people.

Okay, understandable.

Then the next year, there's no famine anymore. He doesn't restore funding to the military. His view was, we're not at war, so why are we spending these huge amounts of money on the army and navy? We should cut that back.

Plus, the Grand Tutor thought that Earl Li was pocketing money that was going to the navy. So, he not only cut back expenses, refused to allow any new purchases of naval ships, but he also was auditing all accounts relating to the military and Earl Li, going back at least six years.

Lauren: Wow.

Paul: So, that was the context of the state of the military when Japan did attack in 1894. But I know we're bouncing around a bit. I think we don't want to get ahead of ourselves yet, because Guangxu Emperor hasn't even come to the throne, and I'm talking about something that happened five years into his reign.

Lauren: That's fine. I'm very excited about getting to 1894 because that's a big year. He does finally come of age in 1886.

He's starting to attend these field plowing ceremonies. Very low level state affair things. And in 1887, he was old enough to rule, but Cixi was still very much acting as regent. She was still very active in this international world, so she put it off a little bit. So, he got married, and then he took office, and for the most part Cixi entered into her second retirement, quote unquote, retirement, because he still had a lot of things that he wanted to talk to her about.

Him and his counsel would go to the Summer Palace, where she retired for the second time. It had been fixed up enough, and he would still go and rely on her counsel a lot as he was put into these positions of decision making. So, they would come and visit a lot.

Paul: And that wasn't my understanding. Here's my understanding of things.

Okay, so he was coming of age. He was a good student. Grand Tutor Weng said that he was old enough to assume power, and Cixi wasn't willing to let it go.

Cixi got the emperor to beg her to stay on for a couple of more years. But he resented that. He really didn't want that. But dutiful son, he would do what Papa Dearest wanted.

He got very sullen after that. He stopped his lessons, he got depressed. He started having health issues. He was internalizing a lot of this resentment towards his mother. When she did allow him to get married, to assume the throne, she insisted that the policies remain as is. She wanted westernization and the buildup of the military to continue.

She asked that she continue to receive information on appointments and she wanted to get a copy of all reports. The Grand Council didn't allow that. Cixi could only see the headings, the titles of the reports. She received that.

But my understanding is that in his first five years in power, she may have only been consulted once or twice.

Lauren: Cixi actually got into retirement. Good for her.

Paul: She was into retirement a little bit. I think she was enjoying it, but also because there really was no choice. She had no claim to power once her regency was done.

Lauren: And this emperor was of age and in the office.

And here was an emperor that was both capable and responsible to take up that mantle and actually do something with it.

Paul: Yes, but he was deeply unimaginative.

He never wanted to leave the palace. He never really had any great interest in matters outside of court. He was a good emperor in the sense of praying for good harvest, doing the duties of going to the Temple of Heaven and so on.

He would receive reports. He showed up for work. He wasn't out partying at night. He wasn't climbing over walls and going to brothels. He wasn't that kind of emperor. But he had conservative people around him. And perhaps if this was the 1700s, everything would have been fine. But this was a dangerous time.

Japan was continuing to arm up. It was buying advanced gunboats, and it wanted war with China.

It wasn't just Grand Tutor Weng's fault for stopping military expenses for China and allowing the fleet and the army to deteriorate.

Earl Li also wasn't pushing back on this. He was in charge of it. But he was sending reports that were optimistic, that were downplaying the problems to the emperor.

For example, on May 29, 1894, he sends an optimistic report to the emperor. After inspecting the coast, he did mention that Japan had been buying gun boats and that China was lagging behind. But he made no request for more ships and the emperor praised him for a good job.

Why was this happening? Maybe because of this audit and these suspicions that Grand Tutor Weng had about Earl Li. Maybe to keep his career, to keep him in the good graces of the emperor. He was not prioritizing the military. He was putting his own career ahead of the nation.

Around the same time, there was this peasant uprising in Korea in 1894. The Korean king asked China to send troops. Then, in accordance with the Li- Ito Convention, Earl Li notified Count Ito, who is now Japanese Prime Minister, of the plans to send Chinese troops.

Tokyo claimed it would need its own soldiers there to protect Japanese lives. The uprising ended and Korea then asked both countries to withdraw.

China was willing to withdraw, but Japan was not. Prime Minister Ito had expressed, at least internally, that when he sent troops to Korea, they were not going to leave.

He wanted a military contest with China. He wanted to beat China, and he wanted Japan to be master of East Asia.

While China was withdrawing troops, he doubled down and sent in more troops. He insisted that Korea modernize, and Earl Li failed to grasp what was happening.

It was business as usual in Beijing. The emperor was taking classic lessons and planning banquets for his upcoming birthday in July. Grand Tutor Weng was writing calligraphy.

Earl Li was fearful of triggering war, so he tried to engage the Western powers, especially Russia, which had its own interest in the area. He wanted the west to restrain Japan.

Robert Hart, is the Briton who was in charge of China's customs system, observed that “the Earl was putting too much confidence in foreign intervention and infers too much from Japan's willingness to discuss. But Japan is very bumptuous and cockahoop. It thanks them for their kind advice, goes on her way, and would probably rather fight them all than give in.”

So that's what Hart is saying. But Earl Li isn't seeing that.

And it's only around the end of June 1894, that Earl Li begins to realize that Japan actually wants war with China. Because he learns from Hart that Japan was mobilizing 50,000 troops, had ordered two up to date gunboats from Britain, and hired European commercial vehicles for transporting troops and arms.

Lauren: Holy cow.

Paul: Earl Li reports to the emperor that the Navy probably couldn't win and that there were only 20,000 Chinese troops on the northern coast.

The emperor noted a concern, but thought that a large, punitive expedition would put Japan in its place.

This is just traditional Chinese thinking. China is the big country. Japan's the little country.

Lauren: We'll just be too big for them.

Paul: He missed how long Japan had been planning for this. How many years and how much energy they'd put into preparing themselves for war.

Lauren:  Was this just a long beef with them?

Was it trying to gain the foothold? If we can take over our island, we can take over everything else, because China is obviously very large. If you get your foothold in there, and if you're the ones that are kind of taking control.

why did Japan want that much control?

Paul: I think first and foremost, Japan was thinking about Japan.

It wanted to be strong and it wanted an empire and Korea.

Lauren: Are you saying it had little country syndrome? I'm real little, but I want to be big.

Paul: Yeah.

And it had this military tradition through the samurai culture, and it felt humiliated by the Western powers barging in when they were closed to the west and forcing trade and treaties on them, and they were going to get their comeback and they didn't feel quite ready to go after the west yet.

But they were looking at Korea and China and saying, we can take them.

Lauren: Okay.

Paul: I think that's what's going on here.

And in 1894 and 1895

Lauren: Yeah.

Paul: Japan made war with China and won. They won big time.

And I can't help but notice that Japan does a sneak attack on China in 1894, it does a sneak attack on Russia in 1904, and it does a sneak attack on the USA in 1941.

This point in Japanese Imperial history seems to be the way that the Japanese Imperial Navy starts a war.

Lauren: Yeah.

I hear it.

In the worst way possible.

Paul: Yeah.

Lauren: Man.

Paul: After the sneak attack, a Chinese ship is sunk. About 1000 Chinese die. Five British officers were on board and they die.

Earl Li withholds this news from the Emperor for two days. He didn't want China to declare war.

What he wanted is he wanted Britain to declare war on Japan. He thought that Britain wouldn't allow this.

Lauren: He assumed that they would intervene and wouldn't allow someone to attack China?

Paul: Or to attack British naval officers that are ferrying Chinese troops.

But as I alluded to, two episodes ago, in the episode when I talked about this from the Japanese point of view, what Britain ultimately decided is that this was a mutiny, because the Japanese had actually ordered this ship that was captained by a Brit to come to Japan.

And the Chinese soldiers weren't having that. They weren't going to have their troopship go to Japan. So they tried to take control and sail away and then the Japanese fired on it.

When there was a bit of an investigation after this incident, Britain was able to see that it was a mutiny situation and therefore, arguably, it was China in the wrong and not Japan.

I think it's because Britain didn't want to go to war with Japan.

If they had really wanted to, I'm sure they could have seen things the other way.

But at this point, they didn't. Earl Li was hoping that the west would bail him out from the poor situation China was in, and they didn't. So China did get a war, but it wasn't prepared for it.

To make matters worse, the Admiral of the Northern Fleet was being cautious. He was keeping his fleet in port, where it also had coastal defenses to defend it. But the Emperor was hearing voices saying that they were being cowardly.

So, the Emperor is wanting to sack the admiral for not having a decisive battle with the Japanese.

And he does ask Cixi about this. And Cixi said, no, there's no one to replace the admiral and you can't fire him. He's not committed any crime. And Earl Li said, there's no one to replace him.

So, the Emperor didn't fire him, but kept on berating him. And then the admiral did do what the emperor wanted, which was to sail the Chinese fleet out of port, where they immediately got defeated.

Because to give you a sense of how bad the Chinese fleet was before the war, during these first five years, during Emperor Guangxu's reign, the Chinese fleet was being used for smuggling operations, and naval staff were using cannons for laundry. It wasn't good morale, it wasn't good discipline on these ships.

Cixi had spent all this money building up the navy, and now it was amateur hour in the Chinese Navy.

Lauren: Oh, I believe it.

I go into this a little bit in my episode with Ching Shih, where all of these pirates that she had for all of her ships end up becoming the navy for China.

And so, we're not that many generations passed down from that, but they were the quote unquote, the dregs of society that ended up in the navy.

A lot of these troops really aren't rich. They're not in positions of any sort of power, and we're still looking at a very broke China trying this self strengthening movement.

There's still not a ton of money for training them.

Getting absolutely wiped out is really not that surprising.

Paul: But Japan had a totally different view. They were highly disciplined, highly motivated, well trained. They defeat the fleet at sea.

There's still some ships left. They retreat into the Shandong peninsula. They stay in port.

The Japanese take Dalian, which is on the north side of the bay.

This is the bay before Beijing and Tianjin, and the fleet is on the south side.

Then the Japanese take that.

And the admiral has been ordered by this point. Now that things are going really badly now, Emperor Guangxu has gotten Cixi involved. Cixi is supposed to come for a ten day visit. She's now starting to get some correspondence on it, sees that things are going really badly, cancels her trip back to the Summer Palace, stays on, tries to get a handle of the situation.

One of the things that she said to the admiral is, you cannot lose ships to the Japanese. Do battle, scuttle them, whatever it takes, but you can't give them up.

But instead, the admiral listens to his troops, who say, “oh, no, please, Admiral, we're really going to be punished by the Japanese if we don't give them the ships. So save us. Don't let us be punished by the Japanese.”

So, he surrenders them to the Japanese.

Lauren: Okay.

Paul: The Japanese have lost two important ports. They've lost all of their ships, and now they have to, what, negotiate with the Japanese?

At this point, it ends up being a horrific peace treaty and what it turns out later, and this has all been documented with archives from Japan that came out in the 1980s. There were people in China that were on the Japanese payroll at this point.

Lauren:  Like in the Forbidden City?

Paul: Yes.

Lauren: Wow.

Paul: Sir Yinhuan at this point, it turns out later is sending all sorts of information to the Japanese, including the Emperor's secret internal talks on negotiations. So, he's passing along to the Japanese that the Emperor wants peace at any price.

Japan ends up demanding a huge indemnity. I think it was 250,000,000 taels, and that was 15 times more in reparations than from the first or second Opium War. And there was a lot of territory that ended up going to Japan from this, Japan demands the Penghu Islands, which are by Taiwan, and Taiwan, which it had never captured, and that was generating 2 million taels of silver for the Qing Empire each year.

And also the Liaodong peninsula, which was by Dalian. And that's sort of between Korea and getting pretty close to Beijing.

So, this was just a terrible peace treaty. Cixi is saying, do not sign it. Fight on. One way or another, we need to fight on. And she might have been right, because it was after the Guangxu Emperor signed this that Russia, Germany and France intervened and said, no, China has to keep the Liaodong Peninsula. We can't have Japan get that. And they made Japan give it back to China in exchange for another 30 million taels of silver.

You were talking about being a poor

Lauren: Wait, I'm sorry.

Paul: country

Lauren: China had to buy Taiwan back?

Paul: No, not Taiwan. The Liaodong Peninsula. So, this was southern Manchuria, just west of Korea. This is including the port of Dalian, so that's a peninsula a bit northeast of Beijing. They got back in exchange for paying Japan another 30 million taels of silver.

Japan got Taiwan and islands out of this war and a huge amount of money, and Japan made a huge profit. So, you were talking about how poor China was or how poor Japan was.

Lauren: China

Paul: Japan made a huge profit off this war.

And China was in terrible, terrible financial situation after this war. They weren't in great shape before. Yeah. And now the west is looking at China and saying, you may be big, but you're just full of wind. And now they start taking more territory, more concessions.

So, this is when Britain gets the new territory north of Hong Kong concession. And soon thereafter, Germany takes a port on the Shandong Peninsula at Qingdao, which is where Tsingtao beer comes from. So that's where the German brewers came into this German naval base in the Shandong peninsula and started brewing beer. And to this day, it's very good Chinese beer. Of course, now it's partially owned by the Chinese state and certainly not by Germany anymore. But you might have drunk that beer. I certainly have.

And France was gaining naval ports around there, so there were lots of grabs for good naval real estate in China by Western powers after this war.

Lauren: When you say they took the ports, what do you mean they took it? Did they just show up one day and go, this one's mine, or did they pay China for use of them?

Obviously, there was precedent of China giving away land, so I understand that concept of it, but how did that process of just taking bits and pieces happen?

Paul: So, for the example of Qingdao, this is the good port city on the Shandong Peninsula that the Germans ended up taking.

They showed up with a gunboat and did gunboat diplomacy.

So, they basically had their navy float up and down the coast and demanded that they be given control of this port. And secretly, there was someone in court who was telling the Germans what to do. The Germans actually weren't going to push that hard, and it was a treacherous Chinese who told them, no, you should push harder. The emperor will cave. You should do this.

And the Kaiser is writing notes like, we dumb Germans need advice from these China men on how to get our national interests.

So, there was bad actors in the Guangxu Emperor's court.

I mentioned Sir Yinhuan. He was on the take from Japan. Earl Li took amounts both from Russia and Japan. Around these times, there were people on the take.

Lauren: Wow. Just when you think you can trust a general, I mean, he was kind of a hero. Last episode was early is the guy. So, to hear he's taking money

Paul: He did some good things, he did some bad things. Do we want to get into how this war impacts Cixi?

Lauren: Yeah. Cixi works in tandem with the government and gets the very short end of a peace treaty, but she's angry about it when it gets signed.

Paul: She was the only one in court that was saying, don't sign this treaty. She was overruled by all the Grand Councillors and the Emperor, because what they were worried about is that the Japanese troops that were already in Manchuria, northeast of Beijing, would keep coming for Beijing.

So, the fear of the Court and the Emperor is that the Japanese would march down, take Beijing and overthrow the Qing Dynasty.

Cixi sought a different way, which was that the empire couldn't afford this peace treaty. Better to prepare for war.

Maybe the west would come and help, but they couldn't agree to this treaty, that they would move inland if they needed to, but they had to fight the Japanese and that a protracted war would probably lead to a better peace treaty in the end than signing one at this moment.

And once all these further humiliations happened, like the Qingdao incident, the Emperor came around and realized his Papa Dearest knew something about ruling, and he started to open up to her more, and he started to involve her more.

Cixi was in the late 1890s, even though he was Emperor, she was increasingly being given information from the Emperor and sometimes able to intervene.