Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland (miss read books txt) 📕

Kuang Hsu—His Self-Development

The Emperor Kuang Hsu is slight and delicate, almost childish in appearance, of pale olive complexion, and with great, melancholy eyes. There is a gentleness in his expression that speaks rather of dreaming than of the power to turn dreams into acts. It is strange to find a personality so etherial among the descendants of the Mongol hordes; yet the Emperor Kuaug Hsu might sit as a model for some Oriental saint on the threshold of the highest beatitude. —Charles Johnston in “The Crisis in China.”

On the night that the son of the Empress Dowager “ascended upon the dragon to be a guest on high,” two sedan chairs were borne out of the west gate of the Forbidden City, through the Imperial City, and into the western part of the Tartar City, in one of which sat the senior Empress and in the other the Empress-mother. The streets were dimly lighted, but the chairs, each carried by four bearers, were preceded and followed by outriders bearing large silk lanterns in which were tallow-candles, while a heavy cart with relays of bearers brought up the rear. The errand upon which they were bent was an important one—the making of an emperor—for by the death of Tung Chih, the throne, for the first time in the history of the dynasty, was left without an heir. Their destination was the home of the Seventh Prince, the younger brother of their husband, to whom as we have already said the Empress Dowager had succeeded in marrying her younger sister, who was at that time the happy mother of two sons.

She took the elder of these, a not very sturdy boy of three years and more, from his comfortable bed to make him emperor, and one can imagine they hear him whining with a half-sleepy yawn: “I don’t want to be emperor. I want to sleep.” But she bundled little Tsai Tien up in comfortable wraps, took him out of a happy home, from a loving father and mother, and a jolly little baby brother,—out of a big beautiful world, where he would have freedom to go and come at will, toys to play with, children to contend with him in games, and everything in a home of wealth that is dear to the heart of a child. And for what? She folded him in her arms, adopted him as her own son, and carried him into the Forbidden—and no doubt to him forbidding—City, where his world was one mile square, without freedom, without another child within its great bare walls, where he was the one lone, solitary man among thousands of eunuchs and women. The next morning when the imperial clan assembled to condole with her on the death of her son, she bore little Tsai Tien into their midst declaring: “Here is your emperor.”

At that time there were situated on Legation Street, in Peking, two foreign stores that had been opened without the consent of the Chinese government, for in those days the capital had not been opened to foreign trade. As the stores were small, and in such close proximity to the various legations, the most of whose supplies they furnished, they seem to have been too unimportant to attract official attention, though they were destined to have a mighty influence on the future of China. One of them was kept by a Dane, who sold foreign toys, notions, dry-goods and groceries such as might please the Chinese or be of use to the scanty European population of the great capital. By chance some of the eunuchs from the imperial palace, wandering about the city in search of something to please little Tsai Tien, dropped into this store on Legation Street and bought some of these foreign toys for his infant Majesty.

They had already ransacked the city for Chinese toys. They had gone to every fair, visited every toy-shop, called upon every private dealer, and paid high prices for samples of their best work made especially for the royal child. There were crowing cocks and cackling hens; barking dogs and crying infants; music balls and music carts; horns, drums, diabolos and tops; there were gingham dogs and calico cats; camels, elephants and fierce tigers; and a thousand other toys, if only he had had other children to share them with him. But none of them pleased him. They lacked that subtile something which was necessary to minister to the peculiar genius of the child.

Among the foreign toys there were some in which there was concealed a secret spring which seemed to impart life to the otherwise dead plaything. Wind them up and they would move of their own energy. This was what the boy needed,—something to appeal to that machine-loving disposition which nature had given him, and Budge and Toddy were never more curious to know “what made the wheels go round” than was little Tsai Tien. He played with them as toys until overcome by curiosity, when, like many another child, he tore them apart and discovered the secret spring. This was as much of a revelation to the eunuchs as to the child, and they went and bought other toys of a more curious pattern, and a more intricate design, and it was not long until, at the instigation of the enterprising Dane, the toy-shops of Europe were manufacturing playthings specially designed to please the almond-eyed baby Emperor in the yellow-tiled palace in Peking.

As the child grew the business of the Dane shopkeeper increased. His stock became larger and more varied, and Tsai Tien continued to be a profitable customer. There were music boxes and music carts—real music carts, not like those from the Chinese shops,—trains of cars, wheeled boats, striking clocks and Swiss watches which, when the stem was pulled, would strike the hour or half or quarter, and all these were bought in turn by the eunuchs and taken into the palace. As the Emperor grew to boyhood the Danish shopkeeper supplied toys suitable to his years from his inexhaustible shelves, until all the most intricate and wonderful toys of Europe, suitable for a boy, had passed through the hands of Kuang Hsu,—“continued brilliancy,” as his name implied—and he seemed to be making good the meaning of his name.

We would not lead any one to believe that Kuang Hsu was an ideal child. He was not. If we may credit the reports that came from the palace in those days, he had a temper of his own. If he were denied anything he wanted, he would lie down on his baby back on the dirty ground and kick and scream and literally “raise the dust” until he got it. My wife tells me that not infrequently when she called at the Chinese homes, and they set before her a dish of which she was especially fond, and she had eaten of it as much as she thought she ought, the ladies would ask in a good-natured way in reply to some of her remarks about her voracious appetite, “Shall we get down and knock our heads on the floor, and beg you not to eat too much, and make yourself sick, like the eunuchs do to the Emperor?” There is nothing to wonder at that Kuang Hsu, without parental restraint, and fawned upon by cringing eunuchs and serving maids, should have been a spoiled child; the wonder is that he was not worse than he was.

One day in 1901 while the court was absent at Hsian, and the front gate of the Forbidden City was guarded by our “boys in blue,” I obtained a pass and visited the imperial palace. The apartments of the Emperor consisted of a series of one-story Chinese buildings, with paper windows around a large central pane of glass, tile roof and brick floor. The east part of the building appeared to be the living-room, about twenty by twenty-five feet. The window on the south side extended the entire length of the room, and was filled with clocks from end to end. There were clocks of every description from the finest French cloisonne to the most intricate cuckoo clocks from which a bird hopped forth to announce the hour, and each ticking its own time regardless of every other. Tables were placed in various parts of the room, on each of which were one, two or three clocks. Swiss watches of the most curious and unique designs hung about the walls. Two sofas sat back to back in the centre of the room, and a beautiful little gilt desk on which was the most wonderful of all his clocks, with several large foreign chairs upholstered in plush and velvet, completed the furniture. I sat down in one of these chairs to rest, for it was a hot summer day, and immediately there proceeded from beneath me sweet strains of music from a box concealed beneath the cushion. It was not only a surprise, it was soothing and restful; and I was prepared to see an electric fan pop out of somewhere and fan me to sleep. It was really an Oriental fairy tale of an apartment.

As Kuang Hsu grew to boyhood he heard that out in this great wonderful world, which he had never seen except with the eyes of a child, there was a method of sending messages to distant cities and provinces with the rapidity of a flash of lightning. For centuries he and his ancestors had been sending their edicts, and their Peking Gazette or court newspaper—the oldest journal in the world—by runner, or relays of post horses, and the possibility of sending them by a lightning flash appealed to him. He believed in doing things, and, as we shall see later, he wanted to do them as rapidly as they could be done. He therefore ordered that a telegraph outfit be secured for him, which he “played with” as he had done with his most ingenious toys, and the telegraph was soon established for court use throughout the empire.

One day a number of officials came to us at the Peking University and in the course of a conversation they said:

“The Emperor has heard that the foreigners have invented a talk box. Is that true?”

“Quite true,” we replied, “and as we have one in the physical laboratory of the college we will let you see it.”

We had one of the old Edison phonographs which worked with a pedal, and looked very much like a sewing-machine, and we took them to the laboratory, allowed one of them to talk into it, and then set the machine to repeating what had been told it. The officials were delighted and it was not long until they again appeared and insisted on buying it as a present for the Emperor, for in this way better than any other they might hope to obtain official recognition and position.

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