In 1688 the empire of the Great Qing was at peace. People in the know heard about the continuing uncertainties of relations with the Russians, the rise of Galdan of the Dzungars, and the flight of the Khalkhas toward the Great Wall, but all that seemed far away. At the Wuhan cities in the middle Yangtze Valley there was a mutiny of troops threatened with demobilization, but it was quickly put down.
Older people remembered very different times. Fifty years before, the northern China plain had been ravaged by huge bands of mounted rebels, pursued by Ming imperial troops who were almost as much out of control. A bloodthirsty rebel had paused briefly in his rise to power over the riches of the Sichuan basin. In the rich rice lands of the lower Yangtze Valley, a general loss of control and incursions by the northern rebels had set off violent uprisings by tenants and bondservants. The south coast was in the hands of sea lords who supported the dynasty largely on their own terms. And on the northeast frontier of the empire a people who had long been tributaries to the Ming court, the Jurchen, had reorganized themselves and given themselves a new name, Manchu, and were taking and holding Chinese cities.
In 1644 the northern rebels had taken Beijing, only to be expelled ten weeks later by the Manchus, who proclaimed that they had come to restore order, to avenge the martyred last emperor of the Ming, and to establish their own Great Qing Dynasty. The violence of the Qing conquest was immense but brief; the Qing was in control of most of the empire by 1650. In the 1670s a rebellion of some of the senior Chinese generals allied to the Qing threw several provinces into turmoil but ultimately failed. The last opponents of Qing rule, descendants of the late Ming sea lords holding out on Taiwan, surrendered in 1683.
Confucians, with a few exceptions like Wang Fuzhi, thought of the moral teachings of their master as something that anyone could learn, even if he was not Chinese. They knew that a number of surrounding smaller states—Korea, Vietnam, and the Ryukyu Islands—were deeply influenced by Confucian culture. They knew that Japan had been so influenced in the past, and although they knew little of the Japan of the 1680s, they would not have been at all surprised by the spectacle of the reigning shogun earnestly studying the Yi Jing and trying to impress a less violent code of conduct on his warrior ruling class. The Manchus drew on a Central Asian heritage of statecraft not altogether different from that of the Mughals and the Ottomans, but from before 1644 they also had sought to present themselves as heirs, though not uncritical ones, of the Chinese political tradition.
In 1688 the ruling Qing emperor was in the twenty-seventh year of his Kangxi reign period; although this is actually a “year period” used to count the years in a reign, even contemporaries sometimes used it to refer to the emperor himself, and so do we. Manchu was Kangxi’s first language but he had a good Chinese education and took his Chinese learning seriously. We have extensive records of his daily deliberations with his ministers, and it is no surprise at all to find in them such hoary Confucian clichés as “Governing is a matter of men, not of laws.” Thus we find the emperor and his ministers taking a great deal of time to consider various candidates for appointments and their relative strengths and trying to find the appropriate way of disciplining an errant bureaucrat without destroying his future usefulness.
The imperial examinations, key to the channeling of elite energy and ambition into the service of the imperial center since about 1000 C.E., also received a good deal of attention. In April 1688 hundreds of scholars gathered from all over the empire for the metropolitan examinations in the capital. They already had passed through the narrowest gates in the system. Examined by local education officials, they had been awarded a local designation of “official student,” which gave them social standing and some tax exemptions but no qualification for office and was not permanent; they had to keep studying and were periodically reexamined. The next step was the most difficult, as many hundreds of scholars gathered every three years in each provincial capital to be locked in long rows of examination cubicles and to write for several days on topics of classical learning and contemporary statecraft. The gathering of the candidates in a provincial capital was a time of great excitement. The candidates exchanged views on scholarship and politics. The common people watched for the lists of successful graduates and bet on which names would be on it. The ratio passing this examination at any sitting might be as low as two or three in a hundred. Those who passed were qualified for low-level office and for the metropolitan examination. Not all of them were from wealthy families; often someone would contribute to the travel expenses to Beijing of a poor graduate, esteeming his scholarship and hoping to be remembered if he became a high official.
The metropolitan examination was held at the imperial Confucian temple, east of the palace compound. Again the scholars were locked in cubicles for a series of essay assignments. After a certain number had been selected to receive the degree of jin shi, “presented scholar,” there was a final step called the palace examination, for which the emperor approved the questions and participated in the evaluation. It determined the ranking of the successful candidates. Those who received the top ranks would be instantly famous, eligible for immediate appointment to high academic posts in the capital, and were expected to have brilliant careers ahead of them.
On April 28, 1688, the examiners presented the Kangxi emperor with a list of the 176 men who had passed the metropolitan examination and ten of the papers they ranked highest. The emperor was well prepared. He asked about the character of each of the leading candidates, sometimes directing the question to a councillor who was from the same area. He recognized the paper of one Zha Sihan even before the seals were broken to reveal the name; he said he had seen samples of Zha’s calligraphy. Zha was a member of an eminent family from Zhejiang, in the southeast, a family with some taints of Ming Loyalism but a great deal of prestige. After the emperor had examined several of the papers and discussed their merits with his councillors, he raised Zha from fourth place to second. But that left the first three places all going to men from Zhejiang, and he thought that not suitable, so he juggled the rankings a bit more. The next day the new jin shi were ushered into the huge court before the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and performed their ketous (old spelling kowtow; three kneelings and nine prostrations) before the emperor, almost invisible on his throne in the shadows of the hall.
But despite the Confucian clichés there was more to governing than judging men and encouraging their scholarship and natural goodness. People lived on the land and drew their livings from it. Their rulers had to draw enough revenue from them to be able to keep order, defend them against bandits and invaders, teach the teachable, build up reserve stocks of grain for famine years, and maintain transport canals, irrigation works, and flood control systems. They also had to keep the burdens of tax and labor service light and equitable. When Chinese statesmen discussed these problems, they found it altogether natural to refer to the strengths and weaknesses of the various systems Chinese rulers had tried out since the founding of the Han around 200 B.C.E.
One set of policy challenges had an even longer lineage. Before 2000 B.C.E. the great statesman Yu was supposed to have rescued the world from a great flood by digging channels so that the water could run off into the ocean. Then he had been chosen as the best man to succeed as ruler and had regularized the kinds of goods each region should present as tribute. When a grand secretary mentioned the classical text Tribute of Yu in a debate in 1688, the emperor remarked that such an allusion to ancient times was what you would expect from someone who didn’t really know anything about the subject at hand. But in fact Yu’s wisdom in digging channels so that the waters could drain away, his assembling masses of workers, and his own doggedness in the struggle against the waters still were relevant to those who were trying to deal with the problems of the Yellow River and the Grand Canal.
The Yellow River flows down out of plateaus covered with fine loess soil. Untamed, it changes course frequently as it deposits its huge burden of silt on the North China plain. Since before Confucius’s time China’s rulers have sought first to drain parts of that plain for cultivation, then to channel the Yellow River. The result has been that its silt is deposited mostly between the dikes, and its bed eventually has risen above the surrounding plain. In Ming and Qing times the situation was compounded by the importance of the Grand Canal, which brought the rich rice surplus of the lower Yangtze to the capital, interacting in complicated ways with the Yellow River, the Huai River a bit farther south, and a series of shallow lakes on the floodplain. The whole system requires constant monitoring and centralized management. These were less and less available in the last decades of Ming. The mouths by which the Huai emptied into the ocean silted up. Lower channels were not kept dredged, so that river and lake beds built up and floods became more frequent. A major effort to get the system under control was inaugurated in 1677 with the appointment of Jin Fu as director general of the Yellow River. Jin superintended a major effort to dredge channels and build new dikes. But still there were floods, and some of his policies aroused controversy.
Thus it was that on April 8 and 9, 1688, determined to get to the bottom of the whole situation, the Kangxi emperor assembled in his presence all the major officials involved in Yellow River policy. Yu Chenglong, governor of the metropolitan province, was the most vigorous critic of Jin Fu. He accused Jin of failing to dredge the key river mouths, allowing floodwaters to ravage rich areas between the Huai and the Yangtze. Levies of labor had been excessive. Jin had converted land that was in private hands but not properly listed on the tax rolls into garrison fields, normally used to finance military establishments but here to support the water projects. The common people wanted to kill and eat Jin Fu, Yu said. Jin replied that all he had done was to crack down on abuses of power by the local landed elites. The emperor was very much in control of the debate, asking detailed questions, exposing his ministers’ ignorance, reminding them that he had walked on some of the key dikes on his southern tour. He drove home over and over the need for a comprehensive view, for not just going along with the local people, who didn’t mind releasing water that would flood fields in the next county. When he caught an official in a major error or contradiction, the official fell onto his face in a ketou. Finally it was clear that Jin Fu would have to take the blame for his adoption of the unpopular garrison field system and for his failure to clear the key river mouths and would be dismissed. But the emperor suspended the further punishments that had been proposed for him; we shall wait six or seven years, he said, to see if anyone else can do a better job.
On his second tour of the south in 1689 the emperor reexamined the river system, saw how much Jin Fu had accomplished and how enormous the challenge was, and restored Jin to his office, which he held until his death in 1692. Jin had been vulnerable in 1688 because he was associated with the grand secretary Mingju, who had just fallen from power. The emperor knew when he had to let the political winds blow, but he also valued competence and hard facts, especially in dealing with the great intractable river.
All early modern rulers understood the importance of ceremony in communicating favor and disfavor and projecting their own majesty; in this, Kangxi was very much the contemporary of Aurangzeb and Louis XIV. But in China the centrality of ceremony in Confucian thought added extra layers of care and self-consciousness. Kangxi, steeped from childhood in Chinese values as well as in those of his Manchu ancestors, presented himself as the gracious rewarder of a good minister and a filial grandson.
On August 9, 1688, the Kangxi emperor received in audience the sea-pacifying count, sea-pacifying general, commandant of water forces of Fujian Province Shi Lang. In 1683 Shi Lang had led the forces that conquered Taiwan, extinguishing the last organized center of organized resistance to Qing rule throughout China and incorporating Taiwan into the Chinese Empire for the first time. At the audience the emperor removed his own collar, lined with the special imperial dragon satin, and had it placed around Shi’s neck. On August 10 the emperor received Shi again, at the Qianqing Gate, a great verandalike structure, often used for informal and working audiences, behind the formal audience halls of the Beijing palaces, and gave him some dishes to eat from his own dinner.
These already were gestures of very special favor, carefully recorded. The emperor never missed a chance to show his ministers how well he treated those who served him well and to remind them how often his judgment of men and political situations had been better than theirs. The emphasis on the ruler’s evaluation and employment of ministers was one of the fundamentals of Confucian statecraft, but the touches of personal recollection and self-congratulation were highly individual and characteristic of Kangxi’s style as a ruler. So was his way of reminding an official that he knew that man’s weaknesses and remembered his mistakes but was allowing him to continue in office nonetheless. A loose imperial rein, a proper sense of gratitude on the part of the official, and a keen sense of being always on probation, always watched were the lot of the bureaucrat or general under Kangxi. After the second audience the emperor bestowed on his aged general the signal honor of a summons into the private areas of the residential Qianqing Palace, usually off limits to all except the emperor, his ladies, and the court eunuchs. The following conversation was recorded:
Emperor: Do you have anything to memorialize?
Shi: Your minister has served as commander of water forces for Fujian. It was only by means of the Awesome Majesty and Immense Blessings of Your Imperial Majesty that the maritime frontier was pacified. I have nothing with which to trouble Your Majesty.
Emperor: Previously you served as an Inner Court High Minister for thirteen years. At that time, because you are a Fujian man, there were those who belittled you; it was only We who knew you and treated you generously. Thereafter the Three Feudatories rebelled and oppressed our people, but one by one they were pacified, and only the sea bandits remained like wandering spirits, sneaking away to take Taiwan and to afflict Fujian. If We wanted to do away with these bandits, no one but you would do. Thus We made a decision, based on Our own convictions, to give you a special promotion and appointment. As it turned out, you were able to exert your strength and exhaust your mind, determined not to fail in your duties, zealous and unmindful of yourself, so that bandits who had been impossible to put down for sixty years were wiped out without any remaining resistance; this really is your accomplishment. More recently, there have been those who said you were presuming on your merit and becoming proud, and We heard something of this. Now you have come to the capital, and there have been people who have said We should keep you here and not allow you to go back. But We have considered that when the bandit disorders were at their height We used you and did not mistrust you; now that All Under Heaven is at peace, should We mistrust you and not allow you to go back? Now you are commanded to return to your post; henceforth you must be more careful, in order to preserve your meritorious name. In the past, when officials of high merit sometimes have not been able to continue without blemish to the ends of their careers, it has been because they were not careful; you must exert yourself in this way. You also must maintain harmony between soldiers and people, and keep your region at peace, in order to fulfill Our intention to love the soldiers and give solace to the people, and in order to preserve the ideal image of a meritorious minister.
Shi: The pacification of the sea bandits relied entirely on Your Majesty’s uncanny strategy and penetrating calculations. It was the plans that were transmitted to your minister, that made success possible; how could your minister have had the strength? Your Imperial Majesty has set up troops to protect that people; how would your minister dare not to imitate the Sage Compassion and keep harmony between troops and people? Moreover, since Fujian is my native place, your minister will be sure to devote himself to pacifying it. Your minister has received the Heavenly Grace of the Emperor in great abundance, being named an Inner Court High Minister, then granted the rank of Count with right of inheritance. All Under Heaven will be ruled by the Imperial Dynasty for ten thousand, one hundred thousand years, and your minister’s descendants will enjoy good fortune without end. Also I have received the favor of Your Imperial Majesty removing an item of Your Majesty’s clothing and putting it on your minister, giving Your Majesty’s own food to your minister to eat; these are special favors without precedent since ancient times. But your minister is just a solitary individual, simple of mind and hasty of speech, so that I offend many people; for completing my career safely I depend entirely on Your Imperial Majesty. Your minister is old and his strength is spent. The affairs of the border region are weighty; I fear that my spiritual energy will not be sufficient to manage them.
Emperor: In generals, wisdom is to be esteemed, not strength. We employ you for your wisdom; how could it be a question of strength of hands and feet? You must exert yourself in your charge.
Shi Lang lived until 1696. In 1688 his influence still counted for something in coastal Fujian and even supported new ventures like the envoys to Madras that same year whom we shall meet later in this book, but he was spending more of his time in retirement at his country estate and had to share power in the ports with representatives of the new system of maritime customs collectors and other branches of Kangxi’s bureaucracy.
At the end of their interview, according to the imperial diarists, the emperor took note of Shi Lang’s age and gave a special order to an imperial guardsman to take his arm and support him as he departed.
A far longer and more serious drama of ceremony and politics already had begun at the beginning of 1688, with the illness of the grand dowager empress. At dawn on January 3, 1688, the Kangxi emperor led an immense procession of princes, dukes, lesser nobles, and high military and civil officials from the inner residential palace through all the gates and courtyards of the Forbidden City of Beijing, then more than a mile south through the streets of the city to the immense park of the Altars of Heaven. All went on foot, including, in a rare gesture of humility, the emperor himself.
The Round Hill Altar of the Altars of Heaven is an elevated marble terrace, devoid of structure or ornament except for the marble railing that encircles it; it is surrounded in turn by two more railings on lower terraces. Only fourteen days before, the emperor had come there in person at dawn to perform the great winter solstice sacrifice to High Heaven, which was the most awesome moment in the annual ceremonial round of the imperial system. Since about 1000 B.C.E. Chinese rulers had called themselves Sons of Heaven and had claimed to rule by the Mandate of Heaven. Heaven’s mandate, its favor to a particular ruling house, was not immutable; it would be lost, and the dynasty would fall, if its rulers failed to provide effective government and to set good moral examples in their own conduct. It was such a “change of mandate,” in Chinese eyes, that had led to the fall of the Ming and placed Kangxi’s father on the throne in the Beijing palaces in 1644. The emperor thus appeared at the Round Hill Altar beneath the cold dawn sky as a dependent, almost a supplicant, not in control, acknowledging the ultimate moral precariousness of his position. Perhaps as old, though not as clearly visible to us in the early stages of its history, was a sense that when the Son of Heaven paid homage to Heaven, he became the sole and essential pivot among the realms of Heaven, Earth, and Man. The proper succession of the seasons, timely rain for the crops, timely planting by the farmers all depended on the maintenance by imperial officials of a correct calendar and on the proper performance by the emperor or his delegates of a regular round of ceremonies marking turning points in the cycle of the year. I doubt that many of Kangxi’s subjects were seriously worried that the days would not get longer if the winter solstice ceremony were not properly performed, but here too there were echoes of hazard, of responsibility, of things that could go wrong.
Both in the winter solstice ceremony and in the special ceremony on January 3, details of rank—the insignia, badges, and sashes of rank, the proper places to stand, and the proper sequences of motion—surrounded a simple basic act. The emperor was alone on the top terrace of the altar, all others well behind him or on lower levels. He performed a full ketou—three kneelings, each followed by three prostrations to the pavement—before a tablet bearing in gold letters, Chinese and Manchu, on a deep blue ground, the words “Sovereign Heaven, Lord on High.” A ceremonial usher read out the text of the imperial prayer, and the emperor performed another ketou.
But the purposes of the two ceremonies were quite different. On December 25, 1687, the emperor’s beloved grandmother the grand dowager empress Xiaozhuang had fallen seriousl
ill. Immediately the emperor began to spend almost all his time in her sickroom, never undressing, sleeping near her bed, preparing her medicines himself. On December 31 he sought to remove baleful influences and propitiate the cosmic powers by ordering a reduction of the sentences of most criminals in the empire. Now he had come, on foot, to plead with Sovereign Heaven to grant additional life to his grandmother. This was the prayer that was read out:
Ah! In the twenty-sixth year of Kangxi, the cyclical year ding mao, the first day of the twelfth month, the cyclical date yi si, I, your Minister, the successor Son of Heaven, dare to proclaim to Sovereign Heaven, the Lord on High, saying: Your Minister has received the assistance of Heaven, and has served his Grandmother, the Grand Dowager Empress, received her protection for long years, and relying on her was able to find peace and tranquility. But now suddenly she has fallen gravely ill, and within the space of ten days it has been seen that it is very grave, and that might become critical at any time. Your Minister took no rest day and night, putting aside thoughts of bed or of food, mixing her medicines myself, seeking doctors and prescriptions everywhere, but nothing had any effect. In the Palaces all were sorely afflicted, and no one knew what to do. This humble one considered that the Heart of Heaven is compassionate and loving, that there is no place not covered by its canopy. All the more should your Minister, this insignificant person, devote himself to her. Moreover, your Minister, this insignificant person, in the past was blessed with her kindly care. I recall that at any early age I lost my parents, and took refuge at the knee of my grandmother. For more than thirty years she has nurtured me, taught and admonished me, so that I have come to maturity. If it were not for my grandmother, the Grand Dowager Empress, your Minister certainly never would have been able to become what he is today. Such has been her boundless mercy to me, that in my whole life it would be hard to repay it. Now that matters have come to this dangerous point, I have dared to cleanse myself and choose a day, and respectfully lead all my ministers, calling out and imploring to the Vast Arch of Heaven, humbly beseeching it to consider with pity and sincerity, to look down in calm reflection, so that this grievous illness may quickly pass away and she may live to a ripe old age. If perhaps her Great Portion is exhausted, this Minister wishes that his years may be reduced, some of his years transferred to add to the long line of the Grand Dowager Empress. For this I prostrate myself here below on the Altar, imploring your Vast Assistance, overcome with prayerful beseeching.
The echoes of this ceremony were as long and as deep as those of the winter solstice rite. All traditional cultures respected family hierarchy, but nowhere was filial piety so central a social value as in China. Every classically educated Chinese would have recognized the echo of the story of the great duke of Zhou, about 1000 B.C.E., when his nephew the king was mortally ill, imploring Heaven to take him instead.
But the Kangxi emperor was Manchu, not Chinese. Although by 1688 he had acquired a quite respectable Chinese classical education, presented himself as a patron of the Chinese tradition, and shown a genuine personal interest in parts of the classical heritage, the first language of his court was Manchu, and the text of his prayer was prepared in both Chinese and Manchu. Also, the grand dowager empress was Mongol, a member of the imperial Borjigit clan, descendants of the world-conquering Genghis Khan and his brothers. She and her aunt had been married to HungTaiji, the preconquest second emperor of the Manchu ruling house, who had played a key role in building its power and finding places in it for powerful Chinese and Mongol allies before the beginning of the conquest of China. In those distant days visits to the Manchu court had been occasions for vast gatherings at the imperial yellow tents set up far out on the grasslands, with much feasting, hunting, and horse racing.
Even if the emperor had wanted to abandon his Manchu heritage and become a purely Chinese emperor—and clearly he did not—he could not have done so without alienating the Manchu grandees of his court and its Mongol vassals. At the beginning of 1688 important Mongol princes were on the brink of rebellion against Manchu suzerainty, and the prospect that they might ally with the Russians was especially frightening to the Qing. But filial piety was not just a Chinese ideal. As the emperor remarked to his officials a few weeks later, “Who does not have family ties?” Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese might have somewhat different ideas of blood ties, but demonstrative love of an elder would appeal to all of them. In this particular case the Chinese could see the emperor setting a good example of a key traditional virtue, the Manchus would note his special reverence for a symbol of the glorious continuity of the Great Qing from preconquest days on, and the Mongols would appreciate that it was one of their own whom he was attending so anxiously.
There also was a more immediate political agenda. Since about 1679 the court had been dominated by officials allied with the Manchu grand secretary Mingju. In these years many officials seemed blatantly interested in making fortunes for themselves, there were frequent stories of bribery in connection with appointments, and the emperor sometimes found his selection of officials constrained by the choices Mingju and the others put before him. One possible counterweight to the power of Mingju was an increasing reliance on the Chinese scholar-officials who already were submitting memorials criticizing the corruption and mismanagement of Mingju’s associates; but their protests were rooted in a purely Chinese tradition with no place in it for Manchus and Mongols, and their criticisms frequently were idealistic and impractical, uncomfortably close to targeting the emperor himself. Moreover, the emperor did not like the scholars’ intricate politics of cultural attainment and personal connection. Another possible counterweight to Mingju was the power of Songgotu, Manchu chamberlain of the imperial bodyguard, uncle of the empress, an extremely capable man who had been an early supporter of the emperor in the 1660s but had been deprived of most of his power in 1679. Still, Songgotu’s relation to the empress gave him an especially close relation to the emperor’s thirteen-year-old heir apparent. It would not be wise to allow the court to be completely dominated by a grandee whose power reached so close to the throne, especially if the boy already was showing signs of the willfulness and instability that eventually led to his deposition and imprisonment. The emperor’s extraordinary demonstrations of anxiety over his grandmother’s illness would raise his own prestige in the eyes of all important elements in his court, increasing his own power rather than shift his dependence from one group to another. It would also give the heir apparent and anyone who might be tempted to support him against his father a lesson in filial piety.
This is not to say that the emperor’s anxiety and grief were playacting. His father had died when he was seven, and his mother when he was nine, and his grandmother had taught him, nurtured him, and supported him when at the age of fifteen he decided to take power for himself and dismiss his regents. He loved her, and I think he really believed that he never could have become the capable and powerful ruler he was without her.
On January 12 and 14 the high ministers knelt outside the gate of the grand dowager empress’s palace and urged the emperor to take a little more rest. He refused. Court business had almost come to a halt; the emperor held only one work audience with his ministers in these weeks. The grand dowager empress died at about midnight, January 26–27. The emperor “beat his breast, stamped his feet, and wailed, calling out to Heaven and challenging Earth, crying ceaselessly, eating and drinking nothing.” By midmorning the grandees and ministers had assembled and urged him to moderate his grief; the classics counseled that mourning should not be carried to such excess as to harm the health of the mourner, and this was all the more important for the Son of Heaven, on whose person the minister and people depended for so much. The emperor replied by noting that ruling emperors had almost never observed the canonical twenty-seven months of mourning but had “converted months into days,” remaining in full mourning for only twenty-seven days. In his reading of history the emperor had found only one exception, in the late fifth century C.E. But because his father and mother had died when he was young, he could not even remember them clearly, and he never had had a chance fully to demonstrate his filial piety. He intended to stay in mourning for the full twenty-seven months.
The ministers immediately protested that this was impossible. There does not seem to have been any insuperable barrier to the emperor’s carrying out his political functions, answering memorials, making appointments, approving sentences, and so on, while he was in mourning, as long as he moderated his demonstrations of grief and preserved his health. The real difficulty was with his ceremonial responsibilities. Among the ceremonies the emperor normally performed in person were many “of good omen,” including the winter solstice ceremony and the regular rites of homage in the Imperial Ancestral Temple, which the emperor could not perform in mourning dress, which was of ill omen. If these ceremonies were not properly carried out, said the ministers, “then certainly the spirit of the grand dowager empress will not be at peace in Heaven.” The emperor continued his weeping and wailing night and day; his ministers saw that he was weak, his face drawn. Moreover, they were expected to attend and assist him in his ceaseless mourning. February 2 was the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, ordinarily the year’s most festive day. But now there were no festivities, and the emperor only grudgingly gave himself and his officials a day of rest from mourning before the coffin. Then the mourning began again, and the argument about “converting months into days” continued. “How can I eat my words?” asked the emperor at one point, but finally on February 6 he had to give in and abandon his plans for twenty-seven months of mourning.
On February 12 a huge procession accompanied the coffin of the grand dowager empress out of the Forbidden City to a temporary resting place in the northeast part of Beijing. In the deep cold the emperor followed the coffin on foot, mourning bitterly, and in the crowds of officials who knelt and mourned as the procession passed by, many feared that he was endangering his health. He wanted to find temporary quarters near his grandmother’s coffin. His ministers persuaded him that dynastic precedent required that he return to the Forbidden City; he agreed but decided to spend his nights not in his usual comfortable quarters but in a tent set up by one of the inner gates, perhaps a bit out of the north winds off the steppes but still very cold.
The emperor normally had a working audience with his high ministers almost every day, but since his long walk to the Round Hill Altar on January 3 he had had only one in a month and a half. On February 24 he went back to work, turning at once to the intractable problems of flood control along the lower Yellow River. Then on March 9 he pronounced a long diatribe against self-serving officials who formed cliques and lower officials who kept quiet and did not speak out against faction and corruption. He ended by dismissing Mingju and his closest associates from their offices. The change was so sudden and came so soon after the emperor had resumed political activity that it may reflect a realignment of political forces at court. It seems likely that some important part of Mingju’s power must have been based on a relation with the grand dowager empress or her household, so that her death left him vulnerable. The emperor continued to sort out the new political situation, dismissing some Mingju allies and pardoning others and placing Songgotu in charge of extremely important negotiations with the Russians. The appointment conferred considerable power on Songgotu and kept him thoroughly occupied and often far from Beijing for the next year and a half, while the emperor continued to strengthen his own position.
In May the emperor accompanied the coffin of the grand dowager empress to the Eastern Tombs, about sixty miles east of Beijing; his ministers called this an unprecedented demonstration of filial devotion. He was away from the palace for twenty days. In June he went again, his ministers protesting that he should not exert himself in the summer heat. In November he went yet again, to accompany the tablets bearing all the titles of the grand dowager empress. The Chinese monarchy was sustained by a rhetoric of conscientious and paternal care for the welfare of the common people but was in fact so isolated from them that it comes as a bit of a shock when a direct encounter with them is recorded in the Diaries of Imperial Activities. As he left Beijing in November, the emperor observed that there were corpses lying in the ditches. It is not stated whether they were evidence of violence, disease, or famine. The great horror, to common people thoroughly imbued with the patterns of filial conduct the emperor was so ostentatiously following, was that the corpses lay without proper burial. The emperor ordered that five ounces of silver from his private treasury be given to the local headmen for the purchase of coffins and the proper burial of the corpses. The headmen gave thanks: “The Sage Ruler loves the common people, and his mercy extends even to corpses by the roadside; truly this is a benevolent government not equalled even in ancient times.” The people crowded to the road, calling out, chanting, weeping as the emperor passed by.