The Dowager Empress

 

“As to Su Shun, his treasonable guilt far exceeds that of his accomplices and he fully deserves the punishment of dismemberment and the slicing process. But we cannot make up our mind to impose this extreme penalty and therefore, in our clemency, we sentence him to immediate decapitation.”

-Tzü Hsi, from an Imperial Edict, 1860

The Dowager Empress was a strange mixture of cruelty, opportunism and naïveté. She arrived at the Purple Forbidden City as part of the Emperor’s harem and, from there, fought her way to become the most powerful person in China. There are a multitude of small mysteries about her, none of them ground-shaking but enough to make her an interesting character for Keepers in a Call of Cthulhu campaign.

Firstly, no-one knows her real name. She arrived at the Emperor’s court with the name ‘Yehonala’ (or ‘Yehenara’ – sources vary) but there is evidence to suggest that she adopted this name to celebrate the fact that she was chosen as a consort of the Emperor – a new name was a common way of celebrating this promotion among the chosen women. Before being chosen for this role, she was intended to be married to the general Jong lu, with whom she had had a whirlwind romance; she could have turned down the option of becoming the Emperor’s concubine but her ambition got the better of her and she went to the harem.

The second mystery is that of her son: was he really the child of the Emperor? Yehonala’s subsequent actions show that she was quick to sum up the political landscape and take swift action where necessary; the only way to gain promotion within the harem was to produce a son (girls were irrelevant) and she accomplished this in short order. Before his death, the Emperor selected a group of eight Regents to act on his son’s behalf until he reached the age of maturity; Tzü Hsi invaded the Emperor’s bed chamber and demanded that she and the Emperor’s first wife (Tzü Hsi’s cousin Tzü-an) be added to this ‘Gang of Eight’ as co-Regents. The Emperor agreed. After the Emperor’s death, Tzü Hsi conspired with her brother-in-law, Prince Gong and her old lover Jong lu to have the ‘Gang of Eight’ imprisoned and executed for treason. Thereafter, while acting as co-Regent, she encouraged her child in a life of excess that swiftly brought about his demise. By this time she had changed her name to ‘Tzü Hsi’ meaning ‘auspicious and motherly’; however, her actions showed her to be anything but: after convincing her son’s distressed wife Alute to commit suicide, she then arranged for his favourite concubine – whom she’d just discovered was pregnant – to be poisoned.

Her next step required some delicate manoeuvring: with the help of Li Hung-chang she arranged for the previous Emperor’s nephew to take the throne (in despite of other more deserving candidates). The third mystery is: how she managed this, with the aid of one of the most clear-sighted and just political manipulators of the time? To be sure, Li certainly worked in the background to hinder the designs of the Manchus from this point on. The new Emperor was young enough that Tzü Hsi enjoyed many years of personal power. When he came to maturity however, he began to agitate for reform in the country, advocating a plan called the ‘100 days of Innovation’ wherein schools and railroads would be built and a host of other types of infrastructure and bureaucratic re-organisation would take place. Horrified at this proposal, Tzü Hsi enacted a palace coup and had the Emperor imprisoned on an island in the lakes of one of her gardens.

Tzü Hsi lived a life rarefied within the walls of the Forbidden City; she developed strange habits and adopted ideas peculiar to herself alone. She enjoyed boat picnics, grand banquets of up to 100 courses upon floating palaces in the lakes of the sumptuous gardens, accompanied by the consorts of the previous Emperor; she cultivated an interest in pug dogs; she developed a notion that she and Queen Victoria were on a parallel course through history and venerated images of the English queen. At one point she used the funds allotted to buying armaments for the Imperial Army to re-build a huge, boat-shaped pavilion in a lake of the gardens in the Summer Palace in which to have lunch. She hardly ever slept, claiming to not wish to miss a moment of her time in power: her bed chamber was filled with loudly ticking clocks.

During a short period of illness, Tzü Hsi was forced to step aside and let her co-Regent, Tzü-an, take the reins of power. It transpired that Tzü-an rather enjoyed this taste of authority and came to Tzü Hsi afterwards with a bombshell: before her husband had died, he had given Tzü-an a document calling for Tzü Hsi’s imprisonment and execution if she ever began to agitate for power. It seems that the Xianfeng Emperor had taken an exact measure of his favourite concubine’s nature. Tzü-an had kept this document secret for twenty years but now she felt was the time to bring it into play. Her bid for power came too late though and she completely miscalculated Tzü Hsi’s response to such a threat: in short order she was poisoned and Tzü Hsi became the absolute ruler, in all but name, of China.

Tzü Hsi’s vanity was part of her undoing; she considered herself as one of the most intelligent people in the world, simply due to the fact that she held the lives and deaths of other individuals in her hands. She enjoyed playing games with the sentencing of criminals, as the above quote shows. Her sadistic streak showed itself strongly in her treatment of her servants: she often instructed maids to slap each others’ faces repeatedly, as she watched, for her amusement. She grew her fingernails into long talons and was not shy about using them to slash and tear her subordinates. Those minions who sorely tested her temper were often said to be thrown down the nearest well by her ever-faithful eunuchs

 

 

“I have often thought that I am the most clever woman that ever lived and others cannot compare with me…I have 400 million people dependent upon my judgement...”

-Tzü Hsi

Her other weakness was superstition: as she grew older she began to lend greater credence to the words of magicians and less to her political advisors. At one point, Tzü Hsi was privileged to witness a Boxer volunteer stand in front of a cannon as it was fired; he walked away from the report with no damage, apart from the blackening of gunpowder and the fumes of the discharge. While it is highly likely that no projectile was included in the loading of the gun for this particular demonstration, nevertheless it impressed the Dowager Empress mightily and, from this point on, she lent her full support to the magic of the Boxer cause.

Tzü Hsi played the Boxers’ cats-paw to the hilt: she used her considerable charisma to subvert Sir Robert Hart and convince him that the Manchus had no desire to break their accord with the Foreign Legations; at the same time she courted Tung Fu-hsiang as the instrument who would ignite the Rebellion at her command. It was she who officially declared war on the Foreign Legations in the mad belief that the t’ai p’ing t’ao of the Boxers would ensure victory. The previous day, she had had all of the wives of the American Legation over for tea and smilingly told them that continued accord with the foreign powers was her sincerest desire. It is noteworthy that, but for the intervention of Jong lu who denied the Imperial Troops and their Boxer confederates access to stockpiles of weaponry that would have allowed them to overrun the legation Defenders, the Boxers would have won the day in Peking.

With the breaking of the Siege of Peking, the Imperial household was forced to flee the Purple Forbidden City and seek refuge in the Western Provinces. Here is another mystery: commonly, it is said that Tzü Hsi threw the Emperor’s favourite concubine down a well rather than take her with them in their escape. Certainly this ‘Pearl Concubine’ disappeared but some commentators say that this tale of her demise is a fiction developed to malign the Dowager Empress and that no human remains have been found in the wells of the Purple Forbidden City to support the story; no-one however, doubts that it was an act of which she was entirely capable.

After a period of exile in which Li Hung-chang campaigned feverishly on the Imperial family’s behalf, the Manchus returned to the Purple Forbidden City. Peking was still in the hands of foreign troops and the full horror of what had been done within its walls was slowly being revealed on almost a daily basis. Nonetheless, when the Imperial family returned, Tzü Hsi took the time to stand on the walls of the city and salute the forces who had wrested it from her; such was her force of personality, they all saluted her back. Nameless and unknown, she had entered Peking; infamous and nevertheless respected, she reclaimed what was hers.

“Never again allow a woman to hold the supreme power in the State. It is against the house-laws of our dynasty and should be forbidden.”

-Tzü Hsi

The quote above is said to be the last statement that Tzü Hsi uttered before her death from complications due to liver illness in 1908. Many commentators claim that the exile which she endured after the Siege opened her eyes to the plight of the peasants and other folk who starved and went without to ensure her life and that of the rest of the Manchu court, with daily luxuries. Other writers feel that the true intention of the order was that Tzü Hsi wanted no-one to surpass her efforts if she could possibly arrange it, even on her death bed.

*****

Any or all of the Dowager Empress’ crimes listed above may be complete fiction, designed to malign her; certainly no bodies have been found in the wells of the Forbidden City. Still, most commentators agree that she was capable of any one, or more, of them (or that the image she projected instilled this impression). Through the distorting lens of the Cthulhu Mythos, The Dowager Empress can be viewed in many ways: is she a dupe of Mythos or other forces, provided with enough mind-controlling spells to engineer her way through the political framework of the time (ultimately to fail)? Or is she Nyarlathotep itself, seeking to damn the Thousand-Year Empire through this mask as a personal joke? Individual Keepers will weigh the tragic humanity of Tzü Hsi against the ascribed horrors of her record and make their own decision.