In 1862, dying in Burmese exile at eighty-seven, Zafar was the last of the Tamerlanians. At the same time, another dynasty was born: as the British shelled Delhi, the emperor’s police chief Gangadhar Nehru had escaped with his wife Jeorani and four children, to settle in Agra. Shortly after the death of Gangadhar, Jeorani gave birth to a son, Motilal. When his elder brother qualified as a lawyer, the family moved to Allahabad, where Motilal too became a successful lawyer and married his second wife Swarup Rani Thussu. On 14 November 1889, she gave birth to a son, Jawaharlal. Motilal, a dapper raconteur with waxed moustache and resonant voice, flourished, in 1900 buying a towered mansion where Jawaharlal was educated, until he was sent to the same British boarding school as Palmerston – Harrow.
India was not Pam’s only eastern crisis. Some of the troops that crushed the Indian rebellion had been on their way to attack China, where British merchants, making fortunes selling Indian opium to Chinese addicts, had been assaulted. In April 1856 as the Crimean war ended and the Indian rebellion started, an imperial concubine in Beijing, the twenty-one-year-old Cixi, gave birth to a boy, the only son of the Xianfeng Emperor.
She would bestride Chinese politics into the twentieth century.
LIMPING DRAGON, IRON -HEADED OLD RAT AND LITTLE AN: THE RISE OF CIXI
Cixi was born into a colossal empire on the verge of catastrophe. She grew up in a comfortable household, the strongminded daughter of a Manchu officer and junior duke; unlike Han Chinese, Manchus did not bind female feet. In 1839, when she was seven, the Daoguang Emperor ordered the seizure and destruction of an illegal British commodity. ‘Opium,’ he said, ‘is poison, undermining our good customs and morality.’ For 200 years, the Aisin Gioro family of the Manchus had ruled an ascendant China, allowing Europeans, first the Portuguese then the British, Americans and others, to trade through Guangzhou (Canton). The Qianlong emperor and his successors resisted European demands for ports and had no interest in British mill cloth. When their cotton business was undercut by the American south, Bengal farmers started to grow opium which was sold in Guangzhou. Since the EIC was banned from trading it, the opiate was bought in Calcutta by entrepreneurs, some of them Parsees and some British, led by a tough Scotsman, William Jardine, an EIC ship’s doctor, who had founded the company Jardine Matheson and become the most successful opium trader, nicknamed Iron-Headed Old Rat by the Chinese. Jacob Astor and other Americans joined the trade.
When the Chinese destroyed British opium, Jardine lobbied Palmerston, foreign secretary, who in Parliament mocked Chinese ‘moral habits’ and ordered war to defend British opium. British warships, armed with Congreve rockets, routed the Chinese war junks. ‘There’s no doubt that this event, which will form an epoch in the progress of the civilization of the human races,’ Palmerston wrote to Iron-Headed Old Rat, ‘must be attended with the most important advantages to the commercial interests of England.’ In 1842, China granted Hong Kong and 140 acres north of Shanghai to the British, then ports to France and the USA.* For China, this was the devastating end of a two-century ascendancy.
When the shattered emperor ordered corruption investigations, Cixi’s father was fined but could not find the money. Cixi, a teenaged girl, suggested which assets to sell. ‘This daughter,’ said her father, ‘is more like a son.’
In 1852, Cixi, wearing an embroidered Manchu dress and bejewelled headdress, stood among a group of Manchu (not Chinese) girls in a hall at the back of the Forbidden City for the first selection of concubines for the harem of the new Xianfeng emperor, a lame melancholic nineteen-year-old opera lover known as the Limping Dragon. Tiny, with perfect skin, large lips and radiant eyes, now known as Concubine Yi, Cixi was not the most beautiful but she was chosen as a low-ranking concubine to join the eight ranks of the harem.
