Expansion, the second phase of the American encounter with the Asian Pacific, coincided with the global scramble for empire in the nineteenth century. By 1900, most of the world’s peoples and habitable lands were under the dominion of barely a dozen countries. The United States joined the scramble, even as its leaders professed their superior political morality. Yet in the American case, it was less trade following the flag than the other way around. Thus in 1851, it was the Pacific mercantile lobby that pressed the otherwise flaccid President Millard Fillmore to boldly send an entire naval flotilla to Japan, where few Westerners had been before. Not everybody applauded. Among Fillmore’s critics were the editors of The New York Times, who warned against attempts to “knock open a passageway with ball, bullet, and bomb” simply to market “a few annual cargoes of cotton cloth.” Congress and much of the country felt otherwise. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry’s naval squadron set sail, and his “black ships” succeeded in prying open the passage to feudal Japan.
Few could have foreseen the sequel. Within fifteen years, rebellious Japanese modernizers swept away the hermetic old order, and during the Mejii Restoration the sun rose on an outgoing, efficient, and centralized government symbolically headed by an infallible monarch. From that point on, both the United States and Japan vied with Europe for mastery of a decadent China beset by famine, rebellions, corruption, and (in Peking’s eyes) missionaries. In 1898, following the triumph in Manila Bay by Admiral Dewey’s Pacific Squadron, the United States took possession of the Philippines (President William McKinley reported that after a prayerful vigil, he was prompted by Providence to place the islands “on the map of the United States”).
The expansionist mood in 1898 permeated the debate in the U.S. Congress over the proposed annexation of Hawaii. In addressing doubters in the House, Representative William Sulzer of New York waxed rhapsodic: “Let me say to the business men of America: Look to the land of the setting sun, look to the Pacific!” There lay teeming millions who needed to be fed. There beckoned great markets that Continental rivals were already trying to dominate. “We must not be distanced in the race for the commerce of the world,” declared Sulzer, adding, more prophetically than he could have guessed, that in a hundred years the greater volume of American trade “will not be across the Atlantic, but across the broad Pacific.”
These were the prevailing sentiments and the consequential deeds that announced America’s debut as a regional power in the Asian Pacific. A telling portent of Washington’s early-day pivot to the Far East was the prompt emergence of a new caste of diplomats, missionaries, traders, and financiers—and their families—who resided in China. For the first time, there was an expanding American community in Peking and in the treaty-port cities, with a rapidly growing missionary presence in outlying regions. Books about East Asia became a staple in publishing catalogues, and for the first time young Foreign Service officers began studying basic Mandarin. In this chapter, we deal with a neglected aspect of this change: the distaff dimension. Wives of Americans living in China often had a different agenda from that of their husbands’. They not only befriended Chinese women but also became fascinated by Chinese customs, clothing, daily life, and servant psychology. As a result, North American museums today have vintage collections of Chinese robes. How this came about is our focus in this and the following chapter (with a side excursion to Tibet). We begin with the forgotten role of the St. Louis Exposition, which opened a very different door to China.
Perhaps nothing was as expressive of the new American flexing of its formidable expansionist muscles as the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, the centennial celebration of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which had added parts of fifteen states and two Canadian provinces in what remains the largest territorial gain in U.S. history. The exposition’s official journal exuberantly celebrated America’s westward progress: “The heroes of Homer’s Iliad were engaged in petty achievements when compared with the work of men who wrestled a vast wilderness from savages and wild beasts and made it the seat of twenty great commonwealths in a single century.”
Before it opened, 30,000 men worked all day and through Friday night adding last-minute touches to the grounds, removing scaffolding, and arranging exhibits. At 9 a.m. on April 30, dignitaries converged from three directions on the Plaza of St. Louis at the center of the exposition grounds: local grandees, led by a band, met representatives of foreign governments who arrived from the opposite direction; state and territorial bigwigs, including members of Congress brought by special train from Washington, joined them. Two warships, the gunboat Nashville and the torpedo boat destroyer Lawrence, steamed into the harbor, greeted by a chorus of whistles and shouts from the crowds on excursion boats, adding a touch of martial braggadocio to the occasion.
The weather was fair and pleasant. An estimated 187,000 persons bowed their heads as prayers were invoked, speeches given, and a welcoming offering sung by five hundred voices, “The Hymn of the West,” fashioned by the then-famous American poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, concluding with the Kiplingesque flourish, “Land of the new and Lordlier race!” Secretary of War William Howard Taft, attended by a military guard, gave the final speech; a signal was telegraphed to President Theodore Roosevelt, who was standing by in the East Room of the White House. At 1:14:30, he pressed the golden telegraph key, the Morse clicks sped over a distance of seven hundred miles, cascades sent down their floods, thousands of banners were unfurled, and the Great Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, the largest international fair the world had yet seen, opened.
Never mind that eight persons were killed that day when an open switch caused the derailing of six cars on the Iron Mountain Express, a fast morning train from Hot Springs to St. Louis operating as a World’s Fair special, or that the bandmaster was badly hurt when his carriage hit a trolley, or that a thirty-gallon coffee machine at the inn exploded, killing one person and injuring three others, or that in celebrating the 1803 purchase, the fair had opened one year late. The expo lasted seven months and boasted exhibits from sixty-two nations and colonies as well as all forty-three states and all the territorial possessions save Hawaii. Visitors gawked at five hundred buildings on 1,200 acres of park transformed by the fair’s designers from thickets and swamps. Highlights included replicas of several grand “palaces”—France’s Grand Trianon and Germany’s Charlottenburg Castle—as well as homier items like Robert Burns’s cottage and Abraham Lincoln’s cabin.
Although the Chinese had participated modestly at Chicago in 1893 and at Paris in 1900, the St. Louis Fair would mark China’s first official presence at a world’s fair, complete with an imperial delegation led by a Manchu prince of the blood, Pu Lun, commissioner general for the Celestial Empire. Dowager Empress Cixi underwrote the Chinese exhibits and pavilions, donating 750,000 taels of silver (about $500,000 at the time). A portion of Pu Lun’s summer palace was replicated, serving as the Imperial Chinese Pavilion, described by The New York Times as “an elegant structure of the sumptuous type—highly decorated, colorful and airy in appearance.” A featured attraction was the lotus pond, complete with gold and silver fish, imported from China. Cixi’s funds seemed to have been well spent, since it was deemed “the most picturesque of all the foreign structures,” its popularity affirmed by the crowds that thronged its precincts. On May 6, 1904, High Commissioner Prince Pu Lun, with the aid of Wong Kai Kah, a Yale graduate (Class of 1883), acting as interpreter and co–vice commissioner, formally dedicated the Chinese Pavilion and then hosted a levee and reception for three thousand guests that evening before leaving on a tour of the principal American cities.
The main Chinese exhibits were located at the Palace of Liberal Arts that featured, amid its furniture, industrial, and agricultural exhibits, “dummy figures of Chinese men and women in their native garb, some richly embroidered, showing the costumes worn in the various provinces of China.” But the exhibits seemed “decidedly crowded” to visitors, who complained of “topsy-turvydom.” Merchants tailored their wares to what they anticipated was foreign taste—Qianlong and Kangxi porcelains; Han pottery; Ming jars and vases; newer ware from the revived Jingdezhen kilns (destroyed by the Taiping rebels), including copies of “tribute porcelain” made for the imperial court; ancient bronzes; jades; ivories; and myriad bolts of silk.
Chinese art at this time was classified as “applied” rather than “fine art,” and only one work, the portrait in oils of Dowager Empress Cixi, by an American, Katharine Carl, was exhibited in the Palace of Fine Arts. Katharine’s brother, Francis A. Carl, was then serving in China as a senior official reporting to Inspector General Sir Robert Hart of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. As vice commissioner at the fair, Carl was charged with collecting and installing the Chinese exhibits, and one suspects that he lobbied for the inclusion of his sister’s portrait in the Palace of Fine Arts rather than among the other Chinese exhibits in the Palace of Liberal Arts.
For more than forty-five years, the most interesting foreigner in China was Sir Robert Hart, Francis Carl’s chief. Sir Robert was in charge of collecting taxes and of monitoring the ports, frontiers, lighthouses, and 2,500 post offices, as well as serving as an intermediary in negotiations between the Europeans and Chinese; he was rumored to be the most powerful person in the Middle Kingdom after the emperor. A friend claimed that if he had not extended the bounds of Britain, “he has done more than any other man to avert the destruction of another empire.” He championed international exhibitions and headed the commission charged with preparing for the St. Louis Exposition. Charles Addis, a banker with the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank and later a director of the Bank of England, left this description of Sir Robert in the 1890s:
A marvellous man and yet such an insignificant shy man and of bald conversation. Fond of the ladies (pretty ones) in a rather a fawning sort of way . . . He never goes out, lives surrounded by files . . . Lives by rule; rises early; 10 minutes to the classics; 10 minutes to the cello etc. etc. Sleeps every afternoon for an hour. Begins a book and will tell you to the minute when he will finish it . . . a dreamer of dreams . . . a marvelous organizer and the machinery of the enormous service is almost perfect . . . an undoubted egoist; Hart must be everything. . . . Will nourish an injury for years . . . No friends, no confidants. Never takes exercise . . . He is one of the first men in China, but it is too late and he finds himself unable to mix freely with the men now his equals. And so he lives on in solitude.
Although his incorruptibility was often cited, it is noteworthy that Hart, an Ulsterman, retired in 1908 with half a million pounds, the equivalent then of two and a half million dollars. He was also guilty of nepotism. Although his wife, Hester, decamped for home in 1882, her relatives, the Bredons, stayed on. (Hart had noted, on their first anniversary in 1867, that he “could not have a better wife . . . at the same time, matrimony does interfere with a man’s work.”)
While Lady Hart was in Britain, Hart fathered three children by his Chinese mistress. With his well-known eye for the ladies, it is not surprising that he took notice of his blond houseguest, a Bredon relation of Lady Hart, Kate Carl: “Miss Carl left the Congers and moved in here today,” Sir Robert wrote. “She is very breezy—quite a Tornado in fact, and I fear the solitude which suited both my health and my work will now be interfered with to anything but the advantage of either.” Kate Carl had arrived in October 1902 with her mother from Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway to visit her brother Francis in the treaty port of Chefoo (Yantai). Trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, the favored atelier of Americans like John Singer Sargent, Kate was short, stocky, freckled, and self-assured, and she boasted a winsome smile. After Cixi chose Kate, at the suggestion of Sarah Conger, the American minister’s wife, as her official portraitist, Sir Robert was happy to assist his guest in her artistic endeavors by ordering express eight yards of canvas and some oils from Europe.
Mme. Yukeng, Princess Der Ling, the Dowager Empress Cixi, and Rong Ling.
The court astrologers picked an auspicious date (eleven o’clock on August 5, 1903) for Kate’s first audience with the dowager empress. She arrived after a three-hour trip from the American Legation, accompanied by Sarah Conger and the interpreter, Louisa Yukeng, née Louisa Pierson, the daughter of a Chinese mother and a Boston-born Shanghai businessman, and now the wife of a government official. Once the preliminaries were over and Carl’s sketches approved, she found that her artistic vision would be sublimated to court convention, as she recounts:
Her Majesty was dressed in one of her official winter gowns. Its fur lining rendered the already heavily embroidered satin stiffer than ever, and any stray folds that might perchance have appeared, were pulled out by a heavy fringe of pearls around the hem. . . . She had on her famous pearl mantle over an official jacket. In her coiffure she wore her long tassel of pearls, and many curious ceremonial jewels. She had on fur-lined under-sleeves, which hid half her beautiful hands. The effect of her tiny finger-tips, with their long curving nails and jeweled shields, the palms not being visible, was most unfortunate.
There followed a discussion with Mme. Yukeng as to the pose, but Her Imperial Highness was unyielding. Finally the pose and, eventually, the garment of yellow silk patterned with narcissus and “double long life” characters were approved. Next, they decided on the size of the portrait—a gargantuan six by ten feet. As the palace carpenters were not up to stretching a canvas, the task fell to the artist and an army of palace eunuchs: “I used the iron pincers and pulled the canvas, myself,” Carl wrote. “It was held at the corners by eunuchs, also on stools; one eunuch held the tacks, another the hammer, etc. Each order I gave was repeated in a loud voice by the head eunuch, and at every failure to comprehend my directions, the working eunuchs were rebuked and threatened with the ‘bamboo.’ Finally I accomplished the difficult task, and the great canvas was stretched.”
Originally, the number of agreed-upon sittings was limited to two, but Cixi had become enthralled by the venture, and the process dragged on for nine months, with Carl living as an inmate in Prince Chun’s palace until the astrologers declared that the portrait must be finished at four o’clock on April 19, 1904. There were problems: Cixi became bored and restless, and Yukeng’s daughter, Der Ling, had to pose instead; the dowager objected to Western artistic conventions such as shading: “I don’t want people over there to imagine that half of my face is white and half black.” She thought jewelry was as easily removed from the picture as it was from the person. The anodyne result was not entirely the artist’s fault, as Carl wrote with an Orientalist flourish:
I had dreamed of painting Her Majesty in one of her Buddha-like poses, sitting erect upon an antique Throne of the Dynasty, with one beautifully rounded arm and exquisitely shaped hand resting on its high side, contrasting in their grace with its severe lines. . . . Her wonderfully magnetic personality alone should have dominated. At the left of the Throne I should have placed one of those huge Palace braziers, its blue flames leaping into the air, their glow hinting here and there upon her jewels and the rich folds of her drapery; the whole enveloped in the soft azure smoke of incense, rising from splendid antique bronze censers. Across the base of the picture, under her feet, should have writhed and sprawled the rampant double dragon. The Eternal Feminine, with its eternal enigma shining from her inscrutable eyes, should have pierced, with almost cruel penetration, the mystery of her surroundings. Her face should have shone out of this dim interior, as her personality does above her real environment. I should have tried to show all the force and strength of her nature in that characteristic face, exaggerating every feature of it, rather than toning down one line.
Katherine Carl, the breezy American who charmed the Dowager Empress, wearing an outfit given her by Cixi.
Nevertheless, the empress was pleased with the result, and she urged Carl to remain and continue producing more portraits. This imperial request was politely denied, but for her efforts, Carl received the Order of the Double Dragon, Third Class of the Second Division, conferred on her by Cixi, as well as a Pekinese named Golden Amber and some 1,500 guineas for three portraits. The dowager also thoughtfully provided Carl with two fur-lined dresses upon the occasion of the Chinese New Year, effecting a compromise between European and Chinese clothing: pleated skirts with an embroidered panel down the center of the front, topped by a jacket. Once outfitted, Carl had her picture taken, wearing the sable hat designed by Cixi, which she copied from old prints.
With the portrait finished, the dowager designed a camphor-wood frame and commissioned an enormous matching stand. From then on the St. Louis portrait was treated as if it were a living goddess. At the outset of its imperial progress, the ladies of the legations were invited for a private viewing. They were received first by Her Majesty in the throne room, then they were carried in covered palace chairs to Kate’s large studio, which was equipped with proper lighting. There they viewed it while attended by the female members of the court. The next day, the princes and other nobles were invited, but since they were not allowed into the female quarters, the painting had to be carried outside. Scaffolding was erected so that it could be lowered onto its stand and Lady Yu Keng’s son, Xunling, could photograph it.
An especially built railway conveyed the portrait to the station, “for it was not considered fitting that ordinary bearers transport the picture of her Majesty.” Another special train conveyed the “Sacred Picture” to the port of Tientsin, where it was met by the provincial viceroy and his staff, placed on a steamer for Shanghai, and transshipped to San Francisco, then to St. Louis in a special railway car accompanied by the official entourage. At four o’clock on June 19 (we assume the exact time and date was not coincidental), His Imperial Highness Pu Lun met the “Sacred Picture” at the St. Louis Fair’s Art Gallery, where it was opened in the presence of the assistant director and several members of the board of fine arts. The yellow silks and satins were removed and the portrait toasted with champagne.
After the fair closed, the portrait traveled to Washington, where the Chinese minister presented it to President Theodore Roosevelt, who accepted it on behalf of the nation. It was later passed on to the Smithsonian, which lent it to the History Museum in Taipei, where it languished until it was discovered in the 1960s and returned to Washington for conservation. Now boasting a new purpose-built frame, it is the property of the Sackler Gallery. As for Kate Carl, she returned to live in New York City, where she died in 1938 of burns suffered when she was taking a bath. Her book With the Empress Dowager (1905), dedicated to Sir Robert Hart, survives as a reprint (2012).
The peregrinating St. Louis portrait of Cixi by Katherine Carl.
McKinley’s choice for the American minister to China was a law school chum and former Iowa congressman, Edwin H. Conger. He arrived as minister plenipotentiary in July 1898, just as the first attacks on Christians occurred that would spark the Boxer Rebellion. (It would later be his lot to read press accounts of his death at the hands of Chinese zealots.) From today’s vantage, his choice as minister was curious. His previous posting had been to Brazil and he had no knowledge of the Far East. Not only did Conger not speak Chinese, but he knew no French, the language in which the Boxer indemnity negotiations would be conducted. Fortunately, he was to be assisted by William Woodville Rockhill, McKinley’s special envoy, who by contrast was fluent in French as well as Chinese and was a close friend of Secretary of State John Hay. An awkward situation ensued when it appeared that only ministers would be allowed to attend the formal meetings. Hence Rockhill would have to rely on leaks from the other ministers, but, as he wrote Hay regarding Conger, “We have hit it off admirably, nothing could have exceeded the cordiality of his reception and the gratefulness of his accepting me as a cooperator.”
Peking lay in ruins when Rockhill arrived in September 1900, a witness to the horrors still being perpetrated on the northern Chinese. In his own words:
From Taku to Peking, the whole country is in a beautiful state of anarchy, thanks to the presence of foreign troops sent there to restore order. The “disciplined armies of Europe” are everywhere conducting operations much as the Mongols must have done in the 13th century. Hardly a house remains from the seacoast to Peking which has not been looted of every moveable object it contained, and in half the cases the houses have been burned. Peking has been pillaged in the most approved manner, and from the General down to the lowest camp follower, from the Ministers of the Powers to the last attaché, from the Bishops to the smallest missionary, everyone has stolen, sacked, pillaged, blackmailed and generally disgraced themselves—and it is still going on. Yesterday, my wife and I walked to the Observatory on the wall. The magnificent bronze instruments, some dating probably from the 13th century, were being taken to pieces by French and German soldiers to be sent to Paris and Berlin. These instruments had been left unharmed, untouched for seven centuries but they could not escape the civilized westerners.
“French and Germans could bury the hatchet for once and rob in the most fraternal matter,” he complained, but the Americans also earned their share of his scorn: “This expedition will go down in history as the most disgraceful one of this century—and what breaks my heart is that we should be associated with it.”
During the rising, the German minister and the Japanese chancellor had been killed, as well as more than thirty thousand Chinese Christians and numerous missionaries; foreign and Chinese Christian property had also been damaged or destroyed. America’s foremost anti-imperialist, Mark Twain, responded to missionary calls for blood money to be “used for the propagation of the gospel” in a famous essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” Twain targeted President McKinley, the British secretary of state for the colonies Joseph Chamberlain, the German kaiser, and the Russian tsar as “The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust” intent on “Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness.” One stinging citation suffices: the kaiser “lost a couple of missionaries in a riot in Shantung” and “China had to pay a hundred thousand dollars apiece for them, in money; twelve miles of territory, containing several millions of inhabitants and worth twenty million dollars; and to build a monument, and also a Christian church; whereas the people of China could have been depended upon to remember the missionaries without the help of these expensive memorials.”
Months of negotiations ensued, and an indemnity of $333 million, to be divided among the powers according to their losses, was agreed upon. In retrospect, Rockhill was the hero of the moment: he earmarked indemnity funds for scholarships to American universities for worthy Chinese male and female recipients, among them a future president of China, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and many distinguished educators and public servants. The protocol was signed on September 7, 1901, and the exiled court, which had fled to Xi’an, prepared to return to the Imperial City in January’s freezing weather. As The New York Times reported, two companies of Chinese cavalry on white horses and two mounted companies from Australia waited at the station for the special train bearing the emperor, the empress dowager, the young empress, the imperial concubine, and the ladies-in-waiting to arrive:
Two thousand officials, Princes, viceroys and Taotais—a kaleidoscopic field of silks and furs, in which gleamed an occasional yellow jacket were massed on the platform. When the emperor appeared the entire assemblage prostrated itself and remained kneeling until his Majesty had taken his place in his chair. . . . The entire cavalcade moved off with the Chinese cavalry in the lead. Then followed the great body of officials, riding shaggy Mongolian ponies, the Manchu bannermen, the umbrella bearers, the spearmen, Viceroy Yuan-Shi-Kai in his newly bestowed yellow jacket, and the emperor, with eight bearers carrying his chair, and a guard of infantrymen marching on either side. Then came the Empress Dowager with an equally conspicuous entourage. . . . While their Majesties passed the soldiers lining the route of the procession knelt, holding their guns at present arms, and the buglers sounded their instruments continuously. Although the streets were kept empty, thousands of Chinese crowded the elevations along the line of march, a thing never permitted before.
Mrs. Conger with the Dowager Empress showing the controversial hand-holding.
A series of receptions followed, and Sarah Conger led the way in smoothing relations between the foreign community and the court. On February 1, 1902, twenty-nine green sedan chairs with bearers and a Chinese cavalry escort made their way to the Forbidden City, where they were replaced by red imperial chairs carried by black-robed eunuchs to the court gate of the palace. There the women and children of the diplomatic corps were presented to Cixi and her nephew, Emperor Guangxu. Sarah, the only member of the group who had been presented earlier, became the spokesperson for the women. She congratulated the royals upon their return and expressed the wish that “the sting of the sad experience may be eliminated” and hoped that future relations would be franker, more trustful, and friendlier. Following the presentations, Her Celestial Majesty took Sarah’s hands in both of hers. As Conger wrote, “[H]er feelings overcame her. When she was able to control her voice, she said, ‘I regret, and grieve over the late troubles. It was a grave mistake, and China will hereafter be a friend to foreigners . . . and we hope to be friends in the future.’” At the end of the speeches she turned to Sarah and extended her hands, and taking from her own fingers “a heavy, carved gold ring set with an elegant pearl,” she placed it upon Sarah’s finger and from her wrists she removed bracelets and placed them on Sarah’s wrists.
Sarah’s handholding and her acceptance of the Old Buddha’s personal jewelry opened the minister’s wife to sharp criticism. John Otway Percy Bland, the journalist who had for thirteen years been private secretary to Sir Robert Hart, called her “simple-minded” in his scurrilous account of the last days of the Qing Empire, China Under the Empress Dowager (coauthored with the equally infamous Sir Edmund Backhouse). His own dissenting view of the meeting of the women was conveyed in a letter he wrote to The Times correspondent George Morrison:
The address which Mrs. Conger incongruously read strikes on the mind like a cold douche of imbecile fatuity. There was no reason why the women should not go to the reception, but there was every reason why they should have there comported themselves as the representatives of that civilization which the Chinese Court and Govt. so lately flouted and bombarded!
Morrison judged the encounter as “the most revolutionary event which has occurred since the Court’s return.”
Sarah became a friend of the dowager, and as a practicing Christian Scientist, a religion then enjoying a vogue among American matrons, and a correspondent with its leader and founder, Mary Baker Eddy, she was inclined to be more tolerant of the Chinese and their empress than were her missionary acquaintances. She became famous for the tiffins (midday meals) she hosted for the court ladies, but her “considerable intimacy with the infernal old harridan the Empress Dowager whose portrait is now being painted by an American lady Miss Carl,” continued to outrage The Times’s Morrison.
It was in fact Sarah who conceived the idea of having the dowager painted because, as she wrote her daughter Laura, “For many months I had been indignant over the horrible, unjust caricatures of Her Imperial Majesty in illustrated papers” and she had “a growing desire that the world might see her more as she really is.” A woman who has continued to fascinate a series of biographers, Cixi witnessed successive humiliations by foreigners as her various attempts at modernization in the face of Western and Japanese encroachments failed. Viewed by the foreign missionaries as backward and tyrannical and by journalists as incompetent, greedy, and perverted, the dowager’s portrait certainly needed retouching.
A bevy of Court visitors to Mrs. Conger.
Sarah was at heart a collector—of people, furniture, and Chinese art. Of herself she said, “I am a seeker in China, and am interested in Chinese [things]. I recognize their beauty, then I wish to know something of the people who produced them.” Birthdays and special celebrations were marked by gift giving, but Sarah writes that after press criticisms of the bracelets and rings she had received from the dowager empress, “the foreign ministers requested that no presents be given to the ladies of the Court.” Seemingly immune to this criticism, Sarah noted that Cixi was not above taking her aside at their next encounter and pressing on her a small jade baby boy with the pantomimed admonition, “Don’t tell.” Other imperial gifts included two palace-bred dogs, a Shih Tzu named Sherza, and a Pekingese named Tiger, along with presents for her granddaughter.
Compared to American missions in European capitals, Peking in 1898 was not a sought-after posting. “The Eastern Lane of the Mingling of Peoples” (Dongjiaominxiang), as the Legation Quarter was known to the Chinese, lay southeast of the Forbidden City and was bisected by the Jade Canal, disparaged by the foreigners as “the imperial sewer drain.” There, according to an account by Eliza Scidmore, who often visited her brother then in the foreign service, “the fine flowers of diplomacy have been content to wallow along the filthy Legation Street, breathing its dust, sickened with its mud and stenches, the highway before the doors a general sewer and dumping ground for offensive refuse of all kinds.” Behind the walls of the legations, however, foreign diplomats occupied a different world:
Official European residences are maintained on a scale of considerable splendor, and the sudden transfers from noisome streets to the beautiful parks and garden compounds, the drawing-rooms and ball rooms, with their brilliant companies living and amusing themselves exactly as in Europe, are among the greatest contrasts and surprises of Peking.
Before becoming a diplomat, Conger had been a banker, but he was not independently wealthy, and the couple’s income was not up to diplomatic standards. In those years, American ministerial positions were deemed an honor that you were expected to subsidize with your independent income. According to one account, in contrast to the trained professionals of Europe, who were “sustained by the certainty of promotions and rewards after a useful term,” the American minister lived “crowded in small rented premises, is paid about a fourth as much as the other envoys, and, coming untrained to his career, has the cheerful certainty of being put out of office as soon as he has learned his business and another President is elected.”
The American minister had suffered when the Legation was damaged in the Boxer Rebellion, and many of the Congers’ personal belongings were destroyed or looted. Very likely the furnishing of their new quarters in a rented temple, the Sanguanmiao or the Temple of Three Officials, was decorated on Conger’s dime. But even on her husband’s meager $13,000 annual salary, Sarah accumulated a collection that would become controversial in the wake of the looting of Peking’s palaces. (The reader will remember that Herbert Squiers, the American first secretary, and his elegant wife, Harriet, availed themselves of enough booty, according to The New York Times, to fill several railway cars.)
“It is not quantity that I strive to collect,” Sarah wrote, “but good specimens of the different lines of China’s best productions.” She was smitten by the colorful clothing worn by the Chinese, and her published letters contain innumerable descriptions of her meetings with Manchu court ladies and what they and the dowager were wearing. She was an early collector of court robes, although she does not seem to have succumbed to the temptation of wearing them. In 1903, Sarah wrote her daughter, “Of late, I have been able to get some very choice things. I have been wanting them for some time, but how to secure them I did not know. The Princesses and Chinese ladies help me to obtain their beautiful robes and other articles not on public sale. Friends—seekers after treasures—bring many things to me from their delving into the unexplored regions, and kindly take me into byways where time, unmolested, has deeply buried things of rare value.”
The siege of the legations had taken a toll on Minister Conger’s health, and, plagued by dysentery, he submitted his resignation to President Roosevelt. In April 1905, Edwin and Sarah steamed home on the S.S. Siberia and settled in Pasadena. He died in 1907, but she lived on, her last few years tinged with scandal over her purchases in China, as detailed by her biographer Grant Hayter-Menzies. First there was the rug bought in Peking for $90 and sold for $6,910. Had she made a “Big Profit on a Fine Rug,” as The New York Times alleged? Was it cheap because it was looted? Did she pay duty on the $90 or $7,000? Times readers wanted to know. In February 1908, 987 pieces were offered at a four-day auction at the American Art Galleries in New York City. Sarah totaled up the proceeds at $36,207.50. Among them were several items with an imperial provenance from palaces and temples. “United States Branded as ‘Fence’ for Permitting Sale of Goods Stolen from Peking by the Allies and Brought Here by an American Minister,” headlined New York’s Evening World. “True, the American envoy and his young army aide, who afterward became his son-in-law, did not steal the imperial jade, ivory and bronze pieces, or the silks and embroideries”; however, its report accusingly added, “the thieves who did steal them found a market for them under the flag of the United States.” Another account claimed that the Congers had struck a deal to bring in their “Chinese loot” duty-free. A customs official explained, “We admit free of charge all the goods that our own or foreign ministers or ambassadors wish to bring.”
But the controversy persisted, with newspapers citing which museums and collectors purchased the “loot.” On the sale’s second day, the Metropolitan Museum purchased an elaborate yellow banner from a temple and a roll of purple satin with swastika scrolls; Salem’s Peabody bought two Korean pillow covers; the highest bidder was J. W. Hoven, who paid $825 for a blue satin mandarin robe. The U.S. Congress was then holding hearings on diplomatic expenses, and Representative James Luther Slayden, a Texas Democrat, denounced Sarah and asked that a newspaper article be read into the record: “‘How,’ said a prominent foreigner in a New York club on Saturday, ‘would you Americans feel if, ten years after a Chinese raid on Washington, you heard of a Peking auction sale at which were offered many of the treasures of the White House and the finest residences of your capital?’” Congressman Slayden cited The New York Sun’s statement that her collection “is not the slow aggregation of years of indulgence in the collector’s hobby, but represents the timely purchases of a practical woman with a taste for the beautiful, who found herself at an unlooked for emergency in an exceptionally favorable position to obtain objects in which the whole world is interested.” As the wife of the minister with imperial connections, she had an advantage: “She was able to bring her carefully selected loot into this country free of duty.”
Faced with the public outcry, Sarah tried to sell privately the items that remained. “I have much of old, rich Chinese embroideries. They are elegant,” she wrote to Charles Lang Freer, hoping to close a sale. “They range in coloring from the most pronounced in strong colors to the dainty of the daintiest. There are imperial coats, spreads, throws, table covers, cushions, covers, banners most beautifully embroidered—all hand work and wonderfully wrought.” She was not above invoking imperial provenance: a pair of vases “the late Empress Dowager of China presented me . . . I own many valuable gifts given to me by Her Majesty. Many of the choice gifts, with the sentiments they bear, are very dear to me.” And the rarest of the rare: “three Banners [scrolls] painted by the late Empress Dowager of China. Two she gave me. One she had made and painted herself for Mr. Conger on his departure from China. The Empress Dowager would give a subject to a Chinese Scholar, and he would write a poem, then Her Majesty would illustrate the poem in a picture on the Banner. The poem and the seal of the writer appear on the Banner. Her Majesty’s imperial Seal is at the top of the Banner in large size. Her private seals appear upon the Banner. These are rare treasures and should not be packed out of sight. I will part with one of mine.” Freer very probably didn’t answer; at the time he was terminally ill.
William Rockhill, diplomat and sometime Foreign Legionnaire, cattle rancher, scholar, and collector, in Tibetan dress.
Sarah spent her final years in Christian Science retirement homes in Boston and Concord, New Hampshire. She “passed on” in 1932, and her granddaughter, Mrs. T. Edson Jewell, donated the hundreds of remaining objects, some of them personal gifts from the dowager empress, to the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum in 1991.
Conger’s successor, William Rockhill, was undoubtedly the most qualified of the early American envoys and probably the greatest scholar-diplomat of his generation. He was also an important collector of clothing and accessories, ornaments and ritual objects, weapons, musical instruments, and thousands of books and manuscripts, many of which were purchased by the Smithsonian Institution or given to it after his death by Rockhill’s second wife, Edith. They came with commentaries illustrated by the collector. In one example, he drew six different types of boots worn by Khalka Mongols, lay Tibetans, and lamas.
Born in Philadelphia to a lawyer and a Baltimore belle, schooled in France at the preeminent military academy of Saint-Cyr, Rockhill served as an officer in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria, a rancher in New Mexico, and a translator of Tibetan sutras, during a life that was the stuff of a John Buchan novel. His teenage Asian studies were inspired by the lectures he attended by Ernest Renan, the Collège de France’s renowned biblical scholar, and by reading the French missionary Abbé Huc’s account of his 1846 trip to Lhasa. Rockhill would claim that it was Huc’s accounts that ignited his lifetime ambition to explore Tibet. In 1881, Rockhill sold his ranch, moved to Switzerland, and spent the next three years studying Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese. His marriage in 1873 to another Philadelphian, Caroline Tyson, now enabled him (when her cousin died and left her a tidy bequest of $70,000) to take what was initially an unpaid position as second secretary of the American Legation in Peking. By 1886, he had advanced from a (now) paid position of first secretary at the American Legation to acting chargé d’affaires in Korea.
Throughout his life, Rockhill continued to have friends in high places but did not tolerate fools. Aloof, brusque, short-tempered, and given to depression, he struck fear into the hearts of his younger associates. “We stood in holy terror of Rockhill,” said Nelson Johnson, a future ambassador to China, who recalled the horror of the “Big Chief’s” presence while sitting for a Mandarin language exam. “He was always very pleasant and affable, but he never recognized us on the street as being part of his entourage. . . . He went along in a kind of thought-world of his own.” A modest man, Rockhill denied having sought a life of derring-do. As he explained to a questioning reporter, “Some men can have adventures going from New York to Brooklyn, but I am not one of them. I have never had an adventure in my life. . . . [A]dventures come to those who look for them. If a man minds his own business, he doesn’t have them.”
Not wanting to court adventure, Rockhill personified the Boy Scout motto—“Be Prepared.” During his Far Eastern stay, with the help of a lama, he polished his Tibetan until he achieved proficiency in preparation for a trip to China’s remotest province with the hope of reaching its capital, Lhasa. There were problems from the start. Tibet, with the support of China, had closed its borders to foreigners. Any Chinese or Tibetan who helped a foreign traveler risked punishment or imprisonment. Sarat Chandra Das, the formidable Indian “pundit,” had reached the Tibetan capital from Sikkim in 1882 in the guise of a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, but no Westerner since two French priests, Abbé Huc and his companion Joseph Gabet, had traveled to Lhasa in 1846 and viewed the Potala. Rockhill met Das in 1885 when the Indian explorer accompanied the finance secretary of Bengal, Colman Macauley, to Peking. According to Rockhill’s biographer, Kenneth Wimmel, they discussed joining forces on a Tibetan trip, but when this failed, Rockhill decided on the northern route through China followed by the Frenchmen rather than that taken by Das—over the Himalayan passes from India.
Armed with a letter of introduction from the Smithsonian, Rockhill set off for Lhasa from Peking’s western gate with a single Chinese servant, Liu Chung-San. “My outfit was simple and inexpensive,” Rockhill explains in Land of the Lamas (1891), “for dressing and living like a Chinaman, I was encumbered neither with clothes nor foreign stores, bedding, tubs, medicines, nor any of the other impedimenta which so many travelers consider absolute necessities.” Passing through bandit-infested provinces by mappa, a two-wheeled cart pulled by a mule, he arrived at Xining (Sining) on the Tibetan plateau. But the six-foot-four redhead could scarcely have failed to attract attention. Suspicious police ordered him to appear before the local magistrate. Instead, having shaved his head and face of his telltale red hair, and having exchanged his Chinese clothing for a Mongol del (a large coat worn crossed in front and attached to the shoulder and sides with buttons) and a fur cap, he departed at dawn with a Mongolian camel caravan making its way toward Tibet. He describes his companions as “clothed in sheepskin gowns and big fur caps, or else in yellow or red lama robes—the women hardly distinguishable from the men, save those who, from coquetry, had put on their green satin gowns and silver head and neck ornaments to produce a sensation on entering Lusar or Kumbum.” The caravan reached Lusar on the eve of the Dragon Festival. There he “strolled through streets crowded with puppet theaters, gaming tables, snack bars, wagons laden with sweets, meats, baked goods, trinkets, pelts, souvenirs, and despite frequent sweeps by censorious lamas flourishing whips) peep shows featuring titillating pictures of European origin.” A few days later, at Kumbum Lamasery, he witnessed large figures twenty feet long by ten feet high, sculpted out of butter and lit by hundreds of tiny butter lamps. Taking up to three months to complete, the display melted after only one night. Rockhill stayed six weeks at Lusar, filling notebooks with material for eight articles for Century Magazine and for his subsequent book. But his hopes of continuing to Lhasa were dashed when, even with the help of the Bu Lama, Rockhill’s former Tibetan tutor now living in a nearby lamasery, his fearful guides vanished. He therefore set out on his own, accompanied only by a Tibetan mastiff. When he ran out of money, he turned back four hundred miles short of his goal.
A second journey to Tibet followed in 1891, this time with a stipend from the Smithsonian. His $50 monthly salary was sufficient for his scientific apparatus, but he was short of cash: “How to travel on an empty money bag (and an empty stomach, as it turned out in my case) in a strange land, is a more difficult problem than the quadrature of the circle.” His route would lead him through present-day Qinghai, formerly Kokonor Province on the Tibetan plateau. This time his preparations included a special passport from the Chinese Department of Foreign Affairs that allowed him to travel to Mongolian and Tibetan areas under the control of the Xining Amban. But he was unprepared for the summer snowstorms, and his baggage animals perished. However, it was food or the lack of it that proved his undoing. There was not enough of it, and what there was proved inedible. He recalled a saying: a Mongol eats three pounds of wool with his food yearly, a Tibetan three pounds of gravel, and a Chinese three pounds of dirt. “I swallowed with my miserable food the dirt, the wool, and the grit, portioned by a harsh destiny to these peoples, and I verily believe that I found enough wool in my tea, my tsamba [ground barley flour and salty butter tea], my meat, and my bread while in Mongolia and Tibet to stuff a pillow. The dirt and the sand could be easily swallowed, but the wool—nothing could be done with it, no amount of mastication could dispose of it.” Night temperatures fell to fifteen degrees below zero. When they arrived at Kumbum, in addition to a team of five Chinese, Rockhill hired two Mongol guides who agreed to lead them to Shigatse, a large town in western Tibet, bypassing Lhasa. He had bought clothing and supplies for the long trek northeast to southwest across Tibet to British India, but then he received a letter from a Chinese official in Kanze, in eastern Tibet, which said that a price had been put on his head since the locals suspected him of being a spy for Lhasa. (Internecine relations among Tibetans were fractious at the time, and there was intense distrust of Lhasa.) Eastern Tibet was too dangerous; three Chinese employees pleaded illness and left for home; and although he struggled on, Rockhill was eventually forced to halt 110 miles from his goal. As he sorrowfully reported: “I am ten days from Shigatse and not more than twenty-five from British India and six or seven weeks from home, but it will be four or five months before I reach there now by the long route I shall have to travel, T’ien ming, ‘it is heaven’s decree.’” Halted in his southward progress by the Tibetans, who supplied him with food and a pony that allowed him to travel eastward by the unexplored Chamdo trade route instead of retracing his steps northward, Rockhill reached Shanghai in October. He had traveled eight thousand miles, crossed sixty-nine mountain passes over 14,500 feet, brought home photographs, sketches, and hampers full of Tibetan clothing, jewelry, and copper-gilt and brass figures to the Smithsonian.
In 1894, the Smithsonian published a full account of his travels titled Diary of a Journey through Mongolia and Tibet. (After reading the diary, Henry Adams, usually frugal with his praise, wrote Rockhill, who was his friend, “I am lost in astonishment that anyone should in pure gaiety of heart undertake and carry through such an adventure, and then relate it as if it were a number on Pennsylvania Avenue. . . . I feel quite a new spring of self-esteem that I should be able to treat you with familiarity. It is as though I had lived on intimate terms with Marco Polo, and had Genghis Khan for dinner.”)
London’s Royal Geographical Society awarded Rockhill its much-coveted Patron’s Gold Medal. In Washington, the Five of Hearts, a coterie of government insiders including Henry Adams, John Hay, and Theodore Roosevelt, saluted him. With their help in 1889, Rockhill resumed his State Department career, first as chief clerk and then as assistant secretary of state. An unfortunate posting as minister to Athens followed, where his forty-two-year-old wife, Caroline, died of typhoid fever. But in that same year, Hay came to his rescue. Rockhill was transferred to Washington, where he became chief architect of the secretary of state’s Far Eastern policy. His outstanding achievement was to mentor Secretary Hay’s “Open Door” policy, through which the United States and five major European powers acknowledged spheres of influence in China but agreed that within China, all countries should trade on an equal basis.
Rockhill returned to China to broker the Boxer settlement, receiving an enthusiastic send-off from Roosevelt: “I feel as if a load were off my mind when it was announced that you were to go to China.” When Roosevelt’s second term began in 1905, he appointed his friend as minister to China. At his post, Rockhill and his new wife, Edith, played host to Roosevelt’s exuberant daughter, “Princess Alice,” during her stay in Peking, where she was received, accompanied by the minister, by the dowager empress and emperor. Alice sketched Rockhill in her diary: “Though he was very tall and of an almost washed-out fairness, he had somehow grown to look curiously Chinese; one felt that China had gotten into his blood; that if he let his mustache grow and pulled it down at the corners in a long thin twist, and wore Chinese clothes, he could have passed for a serene expounder, whether of the precepts of Lao-tze or Confucius, I don’t know.”
Although he had never reached Lhasa, Rockhill now became an advisor to Thubten Gyatso, the Precious Protector, the All-Knowing Presence, the incumbent Thirteenth Dalai Lama, describing his role as “the most unique experience I have ever had.” The Dalai Lama had fled Lhasa in the wake of its occupation by a British expedition led by Sir Francis Younghusband in 1903–4. Lord Curzon, then viceroy of India, feared that the Russians were advancing on Tibet and convinced Whitehall that such a move on Lhasa was essential to protect India. Younghusband readily defeated the poorly armed Tibetans and marched on Lhasa, only to find there were no Russians present. Now living in exile in Mongolia, the Dalai Lama learned of the American scholar and diplomat who spoke Tibetan and was in Peking, and he looked to Rockhill to intercede on his behalf during difficult negotiations with the Chinese.
Several events occurred that increased His Holiness’s isolation. In 1906, a new Liberal government in Britain signed a pact recognizing China’s suzerainty over Tibet. The Celestial Empire’s authority was further increased with the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, in which both signatories agreed to deal with Lhasa only through Chinese mediation. (Although the Chinese acknowledged the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader, they did not recognize his temporal authority.) The British were still occupying a part of Tibet when friction developed between His Holiness and his Mongolian hosts, resulting in his departure from Urga. He eventually found sanctuary at Wutai Shan, a Buddhist monastery in Shanxi Province. Realizing a lifetime goal, Rockhill hiked as much as twenty miles a day for five days to meet him in 1908.
In a twelve-page letter to Roosevelt, Rockhill described his encounter with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama: “I had imagined a rather ascetic looking youth, bent by constantly sitting bow-legged on cushions, with a sallow complexion and a far-away meditative look. On the contrary I found a man of thirty-three, with a very bright face, rather dark brown, a moustache and a small tuft of hair under his lower lip. . . . His ears were large but well-shaped, his hands good and thin. . . .” According to Rockhill, the Dalai Lama was dressed in dark red with a vermilion silk shawl over his left shoulder; his yellow boots were bound with blue braiding. The meeting—the first official contact between Tibet and the United States—proved a success.
As Rockhill recalled in a monograph written years later: “He is quick tempered and impulsive, but cheerful and kindly. At all times I found him a most thoughtful host, an agreeable talker and extremely courteous. He speaks rapidly and smoothly, but in a very low voice.” An elated Roosevelt fired back, “I think that this is one of the most interesting and extraordinary experiences that any man of our generation has had. There has been nothing like it, so far as I know. Really, it is difficult to believe it occurred! I congratulate the United States upon having the one diplomatic representative in the world to whom such an incident could happen.” During a second meeting, at which they discussed Tibet’s relations with India and a possible visit to Peking, the Dalai Lama presented Rockhill with gifts, three of them including a Tangka, a painting of the scholar saint Tsongkhapa, now in the collection of the Library of Congress.
William Howard Taft succeeded Roosevelt as president, and, as was the custom, Rockhill submitted his resignation. (On his last day in Peking, he wrote in his diary, “Can my work in China be at an end? I pray it be not terminated entirely.”) During his travels and residence in China, he had collected hundreds of mostly Tibetan objects, as well as rare books in Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, and Chinese in both printed and manuscript form that are now impossible to obtain. Eleven hundred volumes now reside in the Freer Gallery of Art; six thousand items are now in the Library of Congress, making it a leading center for Tibetan studies.
Rockhill was posted to St. Petersburg, having earned his promotion to ambassador, and in 1911 he moved on to Constantinople as ambassador to the Sublime Porte. When Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in March 1913, Rockhill tendered his resignation and returned home to Litchfield, Connecticut. As he wrote to a friend, he hoped to “raise poultry and flowers and live exclusively in an oriental atmosphere of the Southern Sung and Yuan periods.” Yet eight months later, the sixty-year-old diplomat took part in an expedition overland through Mongolia to China in order to evaluate conditions in the former empire, now turned republic. While on this mission, China’s provisional president, Yuan Shikai, offered him a post as foreign advisor to the Chinese government, but he died on December 8, 1914, in Honolulu, while on his way back to Peking. Berthold Laufer, Rockhill’s only American peer as a Sinologist, wrote his obituary: “Mr. Rockhill was a man of extreme modesty and seldom talked about himself or his achievements. He received no honors from this country, but, indeed, he craved none. . . . It is painful to think that at the end of his life, his diplomatic services were valued more highly by China than by his own government.”
China’s diplomatic community witnessed three salient events in 1908. On April 13, 1908, Peking’s railway station overflowed with crowds as Sir Robert Hart departed for the last time, leaving his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Edward Bredon, as acting inspector. A military band and Cameron Highlanders piped the crowds while uniforms stretched as far as the eye could see. Sir Robert’s guard of honor was composed of American and Dutch marines, Italian sailors, Japanese soldiers, and three detachments of Chinese soldiers newly clad in smart khaki. Hart’s personal brass band struck up “Auld Lang Syne” and “Home Sweet Home” while he bowed to the cheering crowds. Although his hoped-for peerage never came, Hart was rewarded with a papal decoration, and the Chinese retroactively appointed three generations of his forebears to “The Ancestral Rank of the First Class of the First Order.”
On November 15, 1908, the seventy-three-year-old dowager empress died. Theories abound as to the cause, the most entertaining (if doubtful) being that she succumbed after eating too many crab apples at a picnic given for the Dalai Lama, then briefly quartered in Peking. (The Russians and the British as well as Rockhill had advised him to return to Lhasa, but he chose to accept the emperor’s invitation to the capital, where he was demoted and given a new title. “The Most Excellent, Self-Existent Buddha of the West” now became “The Sincerely Obedient, Reincarnation-helping Most Excellent Buddha of the West.”) Just before the funeral cortege departed from Peking, paper effigies of the dowager’s favorite possessions, including a 180-foot paper barge staffed with paper attendants and floating on paper waves and an entire paper army dressed in modern European uniforms, were burned in order to attend the Old Buddha in her afterlife. Eighty-four bearers carried the enormous catafalque containing her coffin over an especially made road strewn with yellow sand to her mausoleum. There the Old Buddha rested until the summer of 1928, when her tomb was dynamited and robbed by Chinese Nationalist soldiers. Jewelry was taken from her body—gold, pearls, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. Some of it ended up in General Chiang Kai-shek’s possession—one pearl taken from Cixi’s mouth was used, according to a widely believed rumor, to decorate Madame Chiang’s shoe. The Manchus who reburied her reported a scene of desolation. Her empty coffin was upended on a wall in a room bare of its usual ritual furniture. Stripped of her robes, the “Jade Body” was lying on her face, naked to the waist, her silken trousers pulled down and her hair disheveled. Sunk into her pale face were her eyes like two black caverns. The body was cleaned, wrapped in rolls of silk, and returned to her coffin, the lid resealed.
The day before Cixi’s death, the royal physicians affirmed that her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, had ascended a dragon to be a guest on high. In 2008, forensic examinations confirmed that he had died from arsenic poisoning, most likely ordered by his aunt. Cixi had already taken the precaution of designating another nephew, Zaifeng, as regent for his two-year-old son, the Xuantong Emperor Puyi.