At the top rank stood Empress Zhen, a year younger than Cixi and nicknamed the Fragile Phoenix: she had ten maids, a private cow, plentiful meat and many eunuchs. At the bottom of the ranks, Cixi had four maids and no cow. But it was not enough for Limping Dragon to enjoy his Manchu concubines in the Forbidden City; he also smuggled into the more relaxed Summer Palace prostitutes with bound feet, a delicacy that he relished. When he wanted sex he marked a concubine’s name on a bamboo tablet which he gave to his chief eunuch; the concubine was then brought to one of his two bedrooms naked in the arms of a eunuch. After sex, she returned to the harem. Cixi was summoned and became pregnant. In 1854, she was raised to rank five. When she gave advice to the emperor, he was unnerved, complaining to his wife Zhen that she was ‘cunning’. Zhen formed an alliance with the pregnant Cixi. When, as her palace file read, ‘Concubine Yi gave joyous birth to a grand prince,’ the emperor was thrilled, promoting her to Noble Consort Yi, number two after the empress, and marrying his brother Prince Chun to her sister.
Xianfeng needed good news. Soon after his accession, ten years after the defeat by Britain, a peasant revolt started in the south, led by a charismatic peasant, Hong Xiuquan, who called himself ‘the Sun’ and ‘brother of Jesus Christ’. His mystical God Worshipping Society, the Taiping, overran the south, where he founded a Heavenly Kingdom, based in Nanjing. When he heard of the revolt, Xianfeng wept. But worse was to come.
His father had chosen him, his fourth son of nine, as successor (sealing his name in a lacquered box with the words ‘Ten Thousand Years’) because of Xianfeng’s hatred of the British, French and Americans. The foreigners had more than tripled opium deliveries in a decade, building new ports at Hong Kong and Shanghai as their missionaries were penetrating the country. Xianfeng appointed officials to crack down on his father’s concessions and restrict the missionaries. In October 1856, as Cixi’s son was born and trouble started in India, a Chinese attack on a British ship, the
Fresh from his joint victory with Britain in Crimea, Napoleon, using the murder of a French missionary in China as his pretext, joined the attack on China.
Xianfeng strengthened his defences around Beijing, but the Anglo-French forces, under the command of James Bruce, earl of Elgin, and Charles Cousin-Montauban, landed troops and advanced to the Dagu fortresses. The emperor agreed to British demands but then reneged. When the British tried to storm the Dagu Forts, they were repulsed. In August 1860, Elgin and Montauban successfully stormed the fortresses. In revenge Xianfeng had British envoys arrested and tortured, fettered with their hands and feet tied tightly behind them: twenty-one of the thirty-nine died in agony. But at Ba-li-qiao (Palikoa) on 21 September the Manchu cavalry was annihilated, and the Europeans took Beijing. Xianfeng and his court, including Zhen and Cixi, moved northwards, releasing the surviving captives to such western outrage that Elgin and Montauban ordered the looting then burning of the beautiful Summer Palace, built by Qianlong. The troops engaged in ‘indiscriminate plunder and wanton destruction’, wrote a young British officer, as they became ‘seized with a temporary insanity’ fixated on ‘plunder, plunder’. Elgin and Montauban – now comte de Palikoa – looted gold and jade staves for Victoria and Napoleon, while an old courtesan who died during the attack left five Pekinese dogs that were taken back to Britain; the queen was given one, crassly named Lootie, who lived in Windsor for ten years. The peace treaties signed by the emperor’s brother ceded Kowloon to Britain, promised indemnities and granted Russia a section of coast, where an eastern port, Vladivostok, was soon built.
