IN the eastern world, concubinage was the handmaiden of marriage, recognized by law and accepted by society. It developed in response to men’s disinclination to accept one sexual partner, and accommodated their desire to vaunt their virility and underscore their wealth through possession of women other than their wives. Such institutionalized infidelity could operate only in thoroughly male-dominated societies. Even then, making it workable on the individual level, as husbands introduced new women into their marriages, required at least minimal accommodation to the needs of both wife and concubine. Specifically, the laws governing concubinage attempted to protect wives from their husband’s emotional defection, and concubines from retaliation by those same insecure wives. The most striking difference between concubinage and mistressdom was that the laws acknowledged the concubine’s children as legitimate.
“How sad it is to be a woman! Nothing on earth is held so cheap,” lamented the 3rd-century Chinese poet Fu Xuan.2
In ancient China, a system of overweening patriarchy dictated the tiniest detail of a woman’s life, discouraging individualism and prohibiting choice. From antiquity to modern times, the subjugation of women remained a constant feature of dynasty after dynasty. The condition of Chinese women underwent drastic changes only when the old order disintegrated in the face of 20th-century revolutionary movements.
Confucianism, the way of life founded by the sage Confucius (551–479 B.C.), dominated the thought and political structure of the Chinese people for over two millennia. In the Han period (206 B.C.– A.D. 220), it was adopted as the official ideology. Confucianism taught that the family was the basis of all society, and it disdained women as intellectually wanting. Confucian-influenced laws decreed that wives should be subject to their husbands, daughters to their fathers, widows to their sons, and women in general to men.
Buddhism, which originated in India in the 6th century B.C., traveled to China, where it struggled against Confucianism. Buddhism did not succeed in replacing the traditional Chinese Confucian way of life but, by the 4th century, it coexisted with and influenced it. Chinese Buddhism, too, denigrated women, characterizing them as lustier and weaker willed than men. The tenets of both Confucianism and Buddhism reinforced a way of life that subjugated women and repressed their wayward natures.
Like the Greeks and Romans, the Chinese greeted the birth of daughters without joy, often with displeasure. A baby girl was another gaping mouth her family would never profit from. She would either become a wife who would labor for her husband or be sold as a concubine or a mui tung, a slave, likely fetching a smaller sum than her parents had spent to rear her. So why should she live, a losing proposition from the instant she slithered out of the birth canal? And if she survived this neonatal triage, why bother giving her a name, when she was only a temporary family member destined for life elsewhere, under another man’s roof? And so, for centuries, many girls were numbered rather than named: Daughter Number 1, Daughter Number 2. We know from psychological studies of prisoners how such a system demoralizes its subjects. In China, this contemptuous disregard for the individuality spilled over onto named women, who in most other ways shared their numbered sisters’ status.
Concubinage in China was integrated into the all-important family structure. Concubines had a clearly defined role and duties. They supplemented wives and had a certain status, lowly but distinct. They were less likely to be despised as whores than were the accomplished Aspasia or the devout Dolorosa or their Greek and Roman counterparts, though Chinese men often recruited their concubines from brothels.
Some lucky concubines were maintained in separate residences, but most shared their master’s household with his wife, children, servants and often other concubines. This provided a certain security, but it also led to complex and difficult relationships between the household’s various inmates. A concubine’s well-being and happiness usually depended on her skill at domestic intrigue and, literally, sexual politics.
Possessing concubines was highly prestigious. The more a man could accumulate, the better. Concubines were given as gifts to officials or bridegrooms. At the same time, everyone knew that a decent woman did not become a concubine, “married off in shame without wedding or ceremony.”3
A concubine accompanied her master on business trips when the wife could not shuck off her domestic responsibilities. More importantly, she provided heirs when a wife could not. Producing a son bestowed limited tenure on even the humblest concubine. If she was a slave, she would not now be at risk of being sold off at the slightest whim of any senior household member.
Though a Chinese concubine had a legal status, she had few rights but many obligations. If she slept with another man, she was adulterous, and if her master caught her in the act, he could kill her and her lover. Other punishments might be seventy-seven and eighty-seven strokes respectively with a bamboo cane, or being drowned together in the sort of basket used to transport pigs to market. In sharp contrast to murdering a wife, murdering a concubine brought a light punishment.
Masters could divest themselves of their concubines in a sort of divorce, and in theory at least, concubines could divest themselves of their masters. The master could invoke seven traditional “outs,” or grounds for his action, including wanton conduct and garrulousness. A concubine could claim only three, including having no home to return to, often a euphemism for her master’s poverty.
Concubines came from backgrounds as various as their masters’. Some had respectable families whose fathers benefited from the arrangement. Many had been mooi-jais, slave girls abandoned or sold by destitute parents and often recruited into brothels or street prostitution before being trained and sold (for handsome, even extortionate, profits) as concubines.4
The criteria for choosing a wife and a concubine were quite different. Unlike a wife, a concubine’s status and behavior did not carry great weight, but she had to have either skills or potential in the erotic arts, and—if a man was making the selection—physical charms. When a jealous or cautious wife or an influential concubine had a say in the matter, she preferred a homely mooi-jai, unlikely ever to threaten her own position.
Mooi-jais sold as concubines were displayed like merchandise, and in accordance with the ritual of shou-ma. This required the girl to parade in front of potential buyers, to speak, to show her face, hands and arms, and above all her unbound feet. In foot-obsessed China, feet mattered greatly, especially their size. The girl’s unique body scent was also explored, first teeth and breath, then armpits, which buyers sniffed, and sometimes vaginal odor. A date might be slipped into the vagina, then removed so clients could smell or lick it.
Fragrance, in fact, made one concubine a legendary heroine. To this day, Xiang Fei, the “fragrant concubine” of the 18th-century Manchu (Qing) dynasty, is the revered heroine of fictional romances and Chinese opera. Xiang Fei’s fabled fragrance emanated from her very essence, and she had no need of perfumes or powders. The Manchu emperor was so intrigued that he had her spirited away from her husband and brought back to him at the royal court. On the journey, he organized daily butter massages and camel’s-milk baths to keep her sweet-smelling.
Xiang Fei did not reciprocate the emperor’s adoration. Instead, she hid tiny daggers in her flowing sleeves and confided to her serving women that she intended to use them to avenge her abduction from her beloved husband and her country.
The empress dowager, fearing for her son’s safety, intervened and granted Xiang Fei “the favor of death” by strangulation. The emperor, in agonies of grief, embraced her lifeless body. Even then, a pure scent enveloped her corpse.
For real (and gamier) women, concubinage was neither tragically romantic nor heroic. Usually, a concubine’s life was tantamount to house arrest, cooped up with rivalrous inmates: a wife, other concubines, even servants, all embroiled in the household’s endless squabbling and intrigue. At issue was security—or rather, the lack of it. Because everything depended on their husband or master, all these women vied for his attention and favor in a grim jockeying for position that forced each one to undermine her competitors. The best way a concubine could achieve this was to bear a boy child.
In a lowlier household, a concubine might spend her days in domestic drudgery, made wretched by a watchful, jealous wife or rival concubines. In a wealthier home, she might find the days interminable, dribbled away in household chores, grooming routines, gossip and marathon games of mahjongg. To stave off boredom, concubines often smoked opium. Their mates encouraged this practice because opium-addicted women were less discontented and more docile.
Centuries of Chinese concubinage spawned millions of concubines, but as is so often the case with ordinary people, very few left any records of their lives. Some, such as the 18th-century’s “fragrant concubine,” live on in legend. Others, from the 19th and early 20th centuries, survive in the memories of their children and grandchildren. Of these, a few have passed on whatever they can document and remember to researchers and writers. Two such remembered concubines are Yu-fang, who lived in China, and May-ying, who began her life as a concubine in China but soon after emigrated to Canada.
Yu-fang was born on the fifth day of the fifth moon in the early summer of 1909, in the turbulence of southwest Manchuria, 250 miles northeast of Peking. She was a beautiful girl with an oval face and glowing skin that set off her rosy cheeks. Her shiny black hair was twisted into a thick braid so long it brushed her waist.
Yu-fang also had bound feet, a sign of gentility, a guarantee of subservience and a mark of beauty. On top of that, she was demure and well behaved. As a concubine, she was worth enough money for her father to fulfill his lifelong ambition of acquiring concubines of his own. He negotiated with General Xue, a warlord and police chief, and soon Yu-fang was transferred to the general’s custody.
Yu-fang was lucky in that General Xue did not move her into the house he shared with his wife and other concubines. Perhaps because she was so young and lovely, he installed her in her own home, with servants and a companionable cat. The general visited and made love to her, and provided an allowance. He urged but did not force her to smoke opium. When she was alone, Yu-fang passed her time reading novels and poetry, tending her roses and her garden, and playing with her cat. General Xue permitted her to attend the opera and, though he did so reluctantly, to visit her parents. When she poured out her litany of fears about her precarious hold on her lover, her father was unsympathetic.
One day Yu-fang’s fears came true: General Xue stopped visiting. For six years, Yu-fang lived alone. Sometimes he wrote, and he always sent money, but Yu-fang was restless and miserable. She mourned his inexplicable withdrawal and continually reviewed their time together, trying to understand. One day he reappeared and, as if he had not absented himself for six years, made love to her.
A month later, Yu-fang was overjoyed to discover she was pregnant. When their daughter was born, the general instructed her to name the child Bao Qin. A year later, he summoned her and Bao Qin to the mansion he shared with his wife and other concubines. Sick at heart, Yu-fang complied.
In her new home, Yu-fang’s worst fears were realized. Upon her arrival, a servant snatched Bao Qin from her arms and handed her over to Madame Xue, who had decided to raise the child as her own daughter. Bao Qin would no longer call Yu-fang “Mama”; she would reserve that endearment for Madame Xue. Furthermore, Yu-fang would kowtow to Bao Qin just as she did to Madame Xue.
Overnight, Yu-fang became a secondary concubine with a status much like a servant’s. Madame Xue resented her bitterly. Even more distressing was the realization that the elderly General Xue was dying. Now Yu-fang understood clearly the reason behind General Xue’s sudden reappearance in her life. Childless and in failing health, he and his wife had decided that Yu-fang’s womb would be the vessel to give life to his last child.
Soon Yu-fang’s fate would be in Madame Xue’s unsympathetic hands. To rid herself of Bao Qin’s natural mother, Madame Xue would likely sell Yu-fang, perhaps to a wealthy man, even to a brothel.
General Xue saved Yu-fang. With his dying breath he implored his wife to free his concubine. Madame Xue honored his request and Yu-fang fled home to her parents, where she entered a minefield. Her mother had lost her power struggle with the two concubines purchased with General Xue’s money, whom her husband vastly preferred to her. The concubines functioned as a team, terrorizing the household, including the newly returned Yu-fang. Yu-fang’s story has an atypically happy ending. A liberal family friend was overwhelmed at her beauty and married her, thus liberating her from her desolate existence.
In 1907, two years before Yu-fang’s birth, Leong May-ying was born in south China, in the province of Kwangtung, and she died nearly sixty years later in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Thanks to her granddaughter Denise Chong, author of the moving and meticulous memoir The Concubine’s Children: The Story of a Chinese Family Living on Two Sides of the Globe, May-ying’s sad story has not been lost.
May-ying’s family was not quite poor enough to drown or otherwise dispose of their unfortunately female infant. At four, she was already so headstrong that she resisted her mother’s efforts to bind her feet, a custom that might have qualified her as a child bride. Instead, she was sold as a servant. At a marriageable seventeen, her owner resold her as a concubine to Chan Sam, a married peasant who wanted a companion in Canada, where he was laboring to earn money to improve his wife and daughter’s lot back in China.
May-ying was horrified. She believed that no decent girl became a concubine, but her only alternative was suicide. May-ying chose life, and first met Chan Sam at the Vancouver wharf. After a welcoming lunch, he told her that she had to wait tables in a teahouse for two years to work off the money he had borrowed for her passage. May-ying was shocked and angry; Chinese culture considered waitresses little better than prostitutes. Her new relationship was off to a bitter start.
But May-ying proved a popular waitress who earned good tips. She was a doll-like woman, well under five feet tall and as slender as a stalk of bamboo, with white-powdered skin, plucked eyebrows, delicate features and thick hair becomingly dressed.
When May-ying was nineteen, she and Chan Sam had a daughter, Ping, followed a year later by Nan, whose gender upset May-ying just as her own had upset her mother. Soon after, the little family returned to China for an extended visit because Chan Sam wanted to reassure his wife, Huangbo, who had just learned that he had a concubine, that they would all live happily together under one roof.
Right away the two women quarreled, with the domineering May-ying bullying the meeker Huangbo and refusing to do her own share of the chores. To keep the peace, Chan Sam sent May-ying to school and decided to take a second concubine to help with the housework. At this news, May-ying and Huangbo united in protest, forcing Chan Sam to cancel his plans. Though he usually slept with Huangbo, he also impregnated May-ying, who persuaded Chan Sam that her first son should be born in Canada to enjoy the benefits of Canadian citizenship. He agreed, but Ping and Nan remained in China with Huangbo. As Chan Sam’s wife, she was considered their mother.
Back in Canada, May-ying was devastated to deliver another daughter, Denise Chong’s mother, Hing, later known as Winnie. The relationship between Hing’s parents quickly deteriorated. The Depression had smashed British Columbia’s economy, and its Chinatowns were even harder hit. While May-ying waitressed to support both the Canadian and the Chinese branches of the family, Chan Sam searched in vain for work. One day, May-ying simply ran away without a word and left him with the baby.
May-ying did not go far. Chan Sam located her at a teahouse and reminded her of her obligations, and May-ying returned home. But she was not reconciled to her concubine status, which demanded much yet rewarded her with so little, and she took to drinking liquor and gambling with appreciative teahouse customers. Partly to free herself of Chan Sam’s vigilance and constant moralizing, May-ying encouraged him to visit China, hoping he would father the son they all longed for. He agreed, and she paid his passage with an advance against her salary.
Back in the village, Chan Sam and Huangbo began to build a house with remittances from May-ying, who met their constant demands by borrowing from her employer and selling lottery tickets on commission. Nobody thanked her—these sacrifices were expected.
But May-ying was not the sacrificing kind, especially not with the tedious Chan Sam safely in China. She began to indulge herself with more borrowed money, buying smart clothes, gambling, taking short trips to Victoria.
Gambling, however, became more than a casual pastime, and soon May-ying was a serious addict, unable to stop herself from wagering future wages, which she often lost. Finally, seriously indebted, she began to trade sex with teahouse clients who paid off a gambling debt for her or gave her money.
Worse was to come. In 1937, Chan Sam decided to return to Canada, leaving Huangbo, Ping, Nan and his new son, Yuen, in China. The family had grieved rather than rejoiced at this long-awaited child’s birth because little Yuen’s feet were grotesquely deformed, pointing directly behind him as if his torso were walking forward and his feet backward. (In Canada, May-ying so longed for a son that she tried to transform Hing into one, dressing her in pants and cropping her hair.)
Despite the financial pressures on her and her descent into the hell of gambling addiction and paid sex, May-ying had greatly enjoyed her personal freedom during Chan Sam’s extended stay in China. Their reunion quickly degenerated into bitterness. He criticized her gambling, smoking, excessive drinking and spendthrift ways, and “held an ever higher regard for his moral authority over her.”
May-ying was contemptuous of his thriftiness (a meal of rice smeared with ketchup or jam, for instance), and enraged by his authoritarianism, the Confucian sayings he spouted and his attempts to control her.
On the day Chan Sam found May-ying in another man’s lodgings, she left him for good, took Hing and moved to Nanaimo, British Columbia. Chan Sam took this calmly: “she was still his concubine; the only difference was that they were living apart.” His heart, joined in love with Huangbo’s, was untouched by May-ying’s defection. Besides, he knew she would continue to hand over money for the family in China.
May-ying served meals, gambled and succumbed to such alcoholic excesses that she constantly vomited. She channeled her rage at what had become of her life into systematically beating Hing and tormenting her in other ways. “Why don’t you just go and die?” she repeatedly taunted her daughter.
Eventually, May-ying found a man she respected. Chow Guen was a clever man, undefeated by the Depression, and they began a relationship that lasted for years. Guen, with a wife and children in China, did not support May-ying, and, indeed, kept meticulous accounts of money he loaned her. But he helped her acquire what she most wanted, a son to care for her in her old age. Adoptable Chinese boys were like rare gems, worth ten times the price of a girl, and May-ying had to pay three hundred dollars for baby Gok-leng, later Leonard.
May-ying’s changed circumstances—lower Depression-era wages, two children, Guen—reinforced both her resentment of Chan Sam and her feeling of independence. If she saw Chan Sam on the street, she cut him dead, and she forbade Hing to call him Baba because “He’s not your father.” She no longer gave him money, and it was Chan Sam who paid Hing’s school fees.
In 1939, May-ying moved to Vancouver, where Guen lived, boarded Gok-leng with an elderly couple and took Hing to live with her in one room. Guen was her lover, but he spelled out the conditions of their relationship: she must rent her own lodgings and pay all her own expenses.
Chan Sam, longing for Huangbo and humiliated by May-ying’s bad reputation in the Chinese community, decided that his self-respect required him to “divorce” her. “I’m the one who brought you from China. And by right, [Chow Guen] should be asking me for permission to have anything to do with you.”
May-ying was furious. “I don’t have a wedding ring on my finger,” she retorted. But Chan Sam did, because unlike his concubine, he was married. Chan Sam was determined to sell his disobedient and disreputable concubine. Chow Guen, he told May-ying, had to pay him three thousand dollars for the right to her.
“I am not for sale,” she spat. Chow Guen would never pay Chan Sam one cent, and she herself would do precisely what she wished with her life. What she did with it was to continue drinking and gambling, pawning then reclaiming her jewelry, mistreating her daughter, whose greatest sin was her despised gender, and loving Guen.
One day Chan Sam brought May-ying the terrible news that their daughter Nan had died. May-ying sent her condolences to Huangbo and also wrote Ping, her oldest daughter: “Do not write to me anymore. I am too heartbroken.” With that she cut off her links to the Chinese family that had bound her and Chan Sam together for so many years.
May-ying’s life established a pattern. She moved from room to room, chasing ever cheaper rents. She boarded out, then took back, the children. Once, she tried to fix up their home. She bought furniture, including a used easy chair for Hing. Later, Chan Sam reappeared in their lives as a casual acquaintance, the passage of time having dissipated the animosity between him and his concubine.
Hing, however, was distressed by her mother’s indebted and unstable life as Guen’s unkept mistress. May-ying cared so much for Guen that she sacrificed Hing to chase after him, sometimes from city to city. Yet late at night, she still had to creep back from his room to hers. Where, Hing asked herself, was her mother’s honor in all this? Finally, to relieve her little family’s perpetual poverty, Hing enrolled in nursing school and endured the relentless slights and discrimination directed against her as an Asian. Every month, she sent May-ying her $105 paycheck. May-ying cashed it and sent Hing five dollars for spending money.
When Hing, who now called herself Winnie, became engaged, May-ying demanded a five-hundred-dollar bride price and Winnie’s promise to raise Gok-leng, now Leonard, in exchange for her parental blessing. She got the bride price, but Winnie’s fiancé refused to take Leonard. May-ying accepted this, and gave Winnie the traditional wedding gift of a down comforter and two pillows, plus a cedar chest she bought in instalments.
May-ying continued to drink, quarrel and neglect herself, her son, her home and even her beloved Guen. She contacted Winnie again only when she was desperate. Guen had abandoned her, saying that even if she were penniless, he would not give her a cent.
May-ying moved in with Winnie, but her insatiable need for alcohol and the money to buy it created impossible tensions. Once, when she urged Winnie to die, Winnie lashed out bitterly, “You almost spanked me to death; why didn’t you just tie me to a telephone pole, whip me until I died? Then I wouldn’t have to live through such misery!”
After May-ying refused to move out, Winnie’s husband carried her to his car and drove her to Chan Sam’s room in Chinatown. In a rare truce, she and Chan Sam united against Winnie. Then they resumed their separate lives; he died of cancer in 1957.
May-ying’s life was a downward spiral of alcohol, loathsome rooming houses and seasonal work picking fruit and vegetables. She and Winnie had brief reconciliations and reunions until 1967, when May-ying was killed in a car accident.
The coroner’s report noted that at the time of her death, May-ying was four feet nine inches tall and weighed about ninety pounds. Her estate was equally tiny: $40.94, a pawnshop receipt for her jade jewelry, bottles of dried herbs and a cashmere sweater Winnie had given her. Guen, dry-eyed, contributed fifty dollars toward the funeral he did not attend. May-ying, doomed from birth by poverty and gender, was buried several rows from Chan Sam, estranged from him in death as in life.
Unlike China, ancient, agrarian Japan valued its women, though not to the extent of according them equality with Japanese men. The goddesses in the pantheon of its animist Shinto religion were revered, and when the sun goddess, Amaterasu O-mikami, the Heaven-Shining-Great Deity, sent her grandson down from heaven to rule Japan, she founded the sanctioned Japanese imperial family.
The Japanese people also worshipped Shinto goddesses whom oral legends portrayed cavorting freely and indulging in serial love affairs.7 These lascivious goddesses were divine proof that sex was a joyous activity and that females could initiate and enjoy it as much as males. The result was that in Shinto-inspired Japan, women as well as men could express their sexuality quite freely. The warrior samurai class alone was sexually reserved. Even today, the Japanese reverence for sex is at the core of the national culture.
Japan’s early woman-friendly culture welcomed female rulers. From legendary, unrecorded times until the 12th century, women held positions of authority and power. The era from A.D. 522 until 784, for instance, is memorable because queens ruled as often as kings. Ironically, it was some of these supremely influential women who introduced foreign belief systems into Japan that would deeply influence and often replace Shintoism. Empress Suiko (592–628) succeeded in implanting Korean Buddhism, initially introduced at least fifty years earlier, into Japan, and she patronized Buddhist arts. Two other notable empresses, Ko-myo (729–49) and her daughter and successor Ko-ken (749–58), were also devout and proselytizing Buddhists.
Over time, the misogyny at Buddhism’s core permeated Japanese society. New double-standard codes of conduct emerged. Women’s rights were eroded in all areas. Empress Jito (687–97) oversaw the codifying of Japan’s fundamental laws into the Taiho Code of 701. The Taiho Code overhauled tax and land laws, and specified that women could receive only two-thirds as much as men when land was distributed. In the 15th century, so-called landowners generated “house laws” that regulated women’s legal and social inferiority. Other legal and social codes of behavior demanded virginity in brides, but sexual experience in grooms.
An influential 17th-century textbook outlining women’s roles urged girls to be virtuous, chaste, obedient and quiet. A woman “must look to her husband as her lord, and must serve him with all worship and reverence, not despising or thinking lightly of him. The great life-long duty of a woman is obedience.”8
Wives were not, however, enjoined to love and adore the husbands their parents had arranged for them to marry. Centuries later, Japanese marriage is still characterized by pragmatic considerations, which make extramarital affairs far more palatable than they would be in societies that expect spouses to love each other.
Docile but emotionally unengaged wives from prosperous households often had to share their homes, or at least their husbands, with one or more concubines. By the 17th century, concubinage modeled on the systems in Buddhist China and Korea was well developed in Japan, and it was governed by comprehensive rules.
Neither wives nor concubines were necessarily antagonistic. Concubinage was common, and many wives had been raised in households that included concubines. Concubines themselves were often concubines’ daughters. Both wife and concubine knew the rules and the consequences of disobeying them.
Concubines had the status of servants and could never attain wifely status. Even widowers or bachelors who wished to marry them could not do so. If the concubine was brought to live in her master’s home, she was subject to his wife’s authority and could never infringe on her position. In theory, wives approved their husbands’ choice of concubine. Wives with personalities strong enough to implement their authority coexisted harmoniously with concubines. Despite the guarantees of their marital status, weaker women often found themselves in internecine struggles with willful or contemptuous concubines.
Men who took concubines did so for myriad reasons: prestige, sex, romantic love and, most importantly, to provide an heir in a hitherto childless marriage. A wife’s failure to conceive a child gave her husband legal grounds to divorce her, but she could be saved from such an extreme measure if her husband’s concubine could do the job. For this reason, many wives gladly welcomed fertile young concubines into their household.
One of the most common words for a concubine, mékaké, means “borrowed womb.” A mékaké’s son by her master would not really be hers. His father’s wife would raise the infant as his official mother, and his father would acknowledge him as an heir. His concubine birth mother would remain their servant, and now also her son’s. The first time she would see her baby after delivering him would be on the thirtieth day after his birth, when she accompanied the other servants on a formal visit to pay her respects to her new little master.
Many men who were the fathers of families took concubines for purely erotic reasons. A man might even fall in love with a lovely young woman and maintain her in separate lodgings to spare her his wife’s stern discipline or to avoid the unpleasantness of rivalries with other previously favored concubines. There was another reason, too. If his wife accused him of placing his concubine above her, her family could intervene and demand the return of her dowry. Separating potential rivals made good economic sense. In most households, however, the master assumed that the rules of concubinage were sufficient to guarantee the sort of harmonious coexistence that would reflect well on his authority and make his life a comfortable one.
As is so often the case, most Japanese concubines lived and died undocumented. But one rather exceptional woman has left copious records of her experience as a Japanese court concubine. Lady Nijo does not speak for millions of her less-favored sisters, but her autobiographical book, The Confessions of Lady Nijo, is compelling because she was so observant and transparent and, at the same time, so self-absorbed that her autobiography has unintended elements of self-satire.
Lady Nijo entered the 13th-century court of ex-emperor GoFukakusa when she was four years old, just after the death of her teenaged mother, Sukedai. GoFukakusa, a frail and timid young man lamed by a deformed hip and overshadowed by his handsome and charismatic younger brother, Kameyama, had at one time adored Sukedai. He transferred his unrequited love onto her pert and pretty little daughter, and in 1271, with her father’s consent, he took the girl as his concubine. Lady Nijo was then twelve or thirteen years old, a typical age for maidens to graduate into the adult world of marriage and concubinage. GoFukakusa was thirteen years her senior.
Lady Nijo expressed little grief at her mother’s death, and no resentment that her childhood was abruptly curtailed. What she truly cared about was clothing—everyone’s, including her own. Despite this obsession, Lady Nijo was cultured, well read, musical, artistic and swaggeringly proud of her (mostly indifferent) poetry.
As GoFukakusa’s concubine, Lady Nijo proved to be a savvy contender in a competitive court devoted to sake, love, music and poetry. She was vivacious and talented, and bore a son whom GoFukakusa formally acknowledged even though he was well aware that she had a string of other lovers. He actually encouraged Lady Nijo to seduce the high priest, Ariake, despite (or perhaps because of) his sworn celibacy.
But the young concubine had several setbacks that counterbalanced her successes. After her father died, leaving her bereft of champion and counselor, GoFukakusa did not bother to establish her as an official concubine.
Lady Nijo also overestimated her irresistibility. Because GoFukakusa tolerated her affairs with other men, she attempted—recklessly—to pawn off as his the three babies she conceived with other men. (One lover had seduced her with “words [that] would have reduced a Korean tiger to tears,” she recalled tenderly.) At the same time, Lady Nijo was visibly uninterested in GoFukakusa. It did not help that their infant son died or that her arrogance incurred the hostility of Higashi-Nijo, GoFukakusa’s empress. Even the self-absorbed Lady Nijo noticed that Higashi-Nijo did not seem as friendly to her as she had formerly been.
Lady Nijo’s final miscalculation was to involve herself romantically with Kameyama, the younger sibling GoFukakusa was so intensely envious of. After twelve years, GoFukakusa abruptly expelled his concubine. During their last, bitter encounter, Lady Nijo wore a delicate and shimmering silk gown with a red hood and blue embroidered designs of arrowroot and pampas grass. After he dismissed her, GoFukakusa went off humming, “How I hate arrowroot.”
Lady Nijo finally acknowledged that she had lost her imperial lover’s affection and respect. “How could he be so unfeeling?” she wondered. Despite her long tenure as his (unfaithful) concubine, GoFukakusa cut his financial support. Lady Nijo avoided destitution—narrowly—by reciting her poetry, advising on interior decor and generally living by her wits. She also became a Buddhist nun, but one of unusual ilk, traveling widely and meeting people of every social level.
After eight years on the road, Lady Nijo unexpectedly encountered GoFukakusa at a shrine. (At this juncture, he, too, had taken holy vows.) She was wearing a soiled nun’s habit, dusty, mossy and disheveled, and her traveling companion was a hunchbacked dwarf. GoFukakusa recognized her anyway, and they spent an entire night in nostalgic reminiscing. “Love affairs have not the charm nowadays that they used to have,” he sighed—or at least that was how Lady Nijo remembered his sentiments.”
Despite the penurious finale to her life story, the never-modest Lady Nijo assumed it was interesting enough to record. It was. Her memoirs are one of the rare testimonials to a concubine’s loves, thoughts and reflections, and to her worlds, at first the 13th-century royal court and, later, the scrambling bustle of ordinary Japan.
Lady Nijo mirrored the Japanese aristocracy’s libertine sexuality, frank materialism, social snobbery and intricate rituals. She shared the conventional view of love as an intimate game in which romance and poetry mattered, and fidelity did not. Whether in the imperial court or in a prosperous merchant’s home, concubines lacked the security and status of wives, but they often commanded intense emotional and erotic love. As for maternal love, Lady Nijo was a typical court concubine mother, detached from the children their father controlled and his servants raised.
But Lady Nijo was unique in other ways, notably in the very fact of her extensive and self-serving memoirs, and in her extraordinary resilience in the face of adversity. Astonishingly, she made the transition from concubine to vagabond cadger without self-pity or despair. This was undoubtedly a function of her admirable coping skills. But perhaps Lady Nijo also felt relief that she had finally escaped the constrictions and artificiality of life as a court concubine, and escaped having to pretend to love the unattractive, even repellent GoFukakusa.
Concubinage and the family structure that supported it were not the only reflections of Japan’s double standard. As in so many other societies, that double standard also flourished in extensive prostitution. Prostitutes were poor girls, usually sold into the trade by their parents. The Kamakura shogunate (1185–1333) undertook supervision of prostitutes, and the Ashikaga shogunate (1338–1573) set up a Harlots’ Bureau to tax them. The Tokugawa shogunate (17th to 19th century) went further and established Japan’s famed Pleasure Quarters, the licensed, zoolike ghettos for prostitutes that so profoundly shocked—and titillated—hordes of foreign visitors.
But many 19th-century Japanese men in sterile arranged marriages wanted much less than the permanent responsibility of a concubine and much more than the fleeting attention of a prostitute. They wanted a Western-type mistress, Japanese style.
One source of mistresses was the teahouse world of the geisha. The first geisha (the word means “people who entertain”) were men, but by 1800, most were women. The appearance of a typical geisha distinguished her from all other women. Her chalk-white face was a startling backdrop to dark-rimmed eyes and rosebud lips, and her whitened neck strained under a heavy, stiff black wig. In her gorgeous and outrageously expensive kimono with an obi girdling her slender waist, the geisha was not so much a woman as an ethereal creature with immense erotic appeal. By the 19th century, geisha defined iki, which translates loosely as “cool chic.”
Geisha were usually drawn from the poorer classes, and they entered the profession as apprentices at about ten or twelve years old. Becoming a geisha was by far the best way a disadvantaged girl could upgrade her social status. She would be educated. She would help her parents, who received a sum of money when they signed the contract binding the new apprentice geisha to a term of service.
The geisha’s training program was rigorous and lengthy. It included singing and music, knowledge of the immensely complicated tea ceremony, and flower arranging. Elegant ritual dancing was the most elevated level of performance and the most essential to acquire a wealthy patron, or danna-san. Inordinate amounts of time and money were spent on makeup and clothing. Painting the whitened geisha face mask and dressing the elaborate oiled (and smelly, dandruffy) hair were daily chores that consumed tedious and self-absorbed hours in front of mirrors.
The geisha was overworked, underfed and undervalued—subjected to, in other words, the typically unsentimental and harsh treatment considered appropriate for girls. At the geisha school, etiquette dictated that newcomers be introduced as “girl of very little talent,” though they were in fact exceptional to have gotten into the school in the first place.
Geisha were also sexually initiated in an ancient ritual, the mizu-age. An older, experienced man would spend seven nights with the virgin geisha, massaging egg whites into her inner thighs, higher each night, until the night he penetrated her genitals with his probing fingers.10
Geisha learned that they had to observe the utmost personal discretion so patrons could be absolutely certain that no matter what a geisha heard or overheard, she would rather cut out her tongue than reveal it. In the 19th century, samurai conspired in teahouses to overthrow the shogun government, and geisha said nothing. Japanese politicians held top-secret meetings in teahouse zashikis (or drawing rooms) staffed by their favorite geisha.
A geisha apprentice became a “Younger Sister” to a more experienced geisha “Older Sister,” who instructed her in everything from the mysteries of makeup ingredients to conversational ploys designed to enchant clients. The payoff for the Older Sister was a share of the geisha fees that a successful Younger Sister would eventually earn. For the Younger Sister, the ultimate geisha goal was to become a rich man’s mistress.
The apprentice became a full-fledged geisha only after she passed an exam presided over by the madam of her teahouse, by her teachers and by officials from the geisha headquarters. For two or three years afterward, she worked for room, board and clothing, the latter a major expense. Later, she pocketed her tips while the teahouse kept the high fees it charged for her services. In fact, the geisha was locked into financial bondage to her teahouse, and only those with a patron, or danna-san, could pay off their crushing debt. Usually, the geisha became her danna-san’s mistress.
A geisha’s potential danna-san would introduce himself to the teahouse owner, who investigated him carefully, particularly his finances, before deciding. If he was accepted, he would contract to help pay off his geisha’s debts, underwrite her living and perhaps medical expenses and still pay her hourly fee whenever he spent time with her. A few leading geisha would have no more than a couple of danna-sans in a lifetime, but all the others could expect a danna-san to tire of them after six months or a year.
A geisha did not expect to love her danna-san, though she was trained to flatter, charm and kowtow to him as if she did. Their relationship was a ritualized and controlled arrangement. She was an expert mistress, he an appreciative client. If, as sometimes happened, they fell in love with each other, it was an unexpected bonus. If, as also sometimes happened, she fell in love with another man, she did so at the peril of losing her danna-san, incurring the wrath of her teahouse owner and ruining her reputation.
There were some advantages to geisha life in Japan, where even today women who complain of sexual harassment are ostracized and only the bravest feminists dare challenge the status quo and demand gender equality. Geisha were usually very pretty little girls discovered in very poor neighborhoods, and their new milieu elevated them to heights unimaginable and unobtainable by those they left behind. Geisha were thoroughly educated and artistically trained. They were exempted from most domestic labor, indeed had no time and little inclination for it. As part of a complex and comfortable world that incorporated traditionalism, elitism and eroticism, they were catapulted to the higher ranks of society.
Like all mistresses, geisha had little security and no tenure. Once danna-sans fulfilled their initial obligations, they were free to dismiss the geisha, and most did so, trading in the old for a newer model. However, the promise of being accepted back into the teahouse took the sting off a danna-san’s dismissal, though it meant the geisha had to resume the daily grind of procuring clients and entertaining them. Some geisha managed to put aside money for such contingencies, but most suffered financially when a danna-san withdrew his support.
On balance, a geisha could be said to have improved her lot in life only because women were otherwise such undervalued members of Japanese society, and poor girls even more so. But the cost of this improvement was high; for every benefit granted the geisha—education, training, introduction to high society, financial reward—a price was exacted. She was contractually bound to her sponsors, and required to incur a huge debt she then spent her lifetime repaying. But the principal price was imprisonment in the rarified and reified exotica of her own body. Without the mask, the hairstyle, the kimono, obi and scores of accoutrements, the geisha was a mere woman, with a mere woman’s worth.
A diminished number of geisha still function today. Unlike 98 percent of Japanese women, geisha never marry, but live in women’s communities called hana-machi. Though unmarried, they often have children, some with a danna-san who does not force them to have an abortion, or with a secret lover who provides this child that brings such joy to the lonely geisha’s life. Tellingly, only in these hana-machi and geisha-run teahouses is the birth of a baby girl celebrated more joyously than a boy’s. In many ways, geisha are profoundly traditional, but in others they display a surprisingly feminist sensibility.
Today, geisha mistresses still have danna-sans who provide a steady source of income and companionship. Even so, most geisha continue working. They live lavishly and need the money. Those who leave their teahouse when a patron sets them up independently are always welcome to return to work should a danna-san drop his geisha or die without providing for her in his will.
Geisha report, however, that the most trying aspect of their jobs is the emotional anguish of knowing that a beloved danna-san— for some geisha truly love their patrons—goes home at night to his wife. (Wives are less likely to worry about geisha, who pose little threat of destroying their marriage by divorce.)
Another grief common to mistresses around the world, is their backroom status—their lovers will seldom openly acknowledge them. One geisha’s danna-san was a high-ranking political figure who kept her hidden from his wife and the public, though not from his secretary and friends. When he died, mere hours after she had spoken to him on the telephone, nobody notified her, and she learned of his death on a newscast. She requested permission to attend his funeral, and his secretary and friends agreed on condition that she wear inconspicuous “civilian” clothes rather than her telltale kimono. “I understand,” the geisha said, and she did. But upon reflection, she changed her mind and wore her kimono to bid farewell to her lover.
Soon after, her monthly allowance was cut off. She believed it was because she had worn her kimono. In fact, it was because her danna-san had made no provisions for her in the event of his death. Fortunately, she was a financially adroit woman who operated her own teahouse, so her danna-san’s death did not ruin her.
Geisha mistresses have recently scandalized Japan after news media abandoned their traditional policy of preserving the privacy of public figures’ personal lives. In 1989, Prime Minister Sosuke “Mister Clean” Uno was one of the first high-level politicians to be exposed, and he resigned in disgrace. In fact, his sins were only retroactively sinful: generations of politicians, including their opponents, were also teahouse politickers who took geisha mistresses, and everyone in Japan knew it. But then a couple of geisha formerly involved with Uno broke with tradition and talked. “You bought my body with 300,000 yen a month,” raged Mitsuko Nakanishi, Uno’s former geisha mistress. The reporters whom the angry women spoke to published rather than ignored their stories.
Subsequently, a female legislator, Manae Kubota, disregarded the parliament’s traditional veil of silence over personal matters. She questioned the prime minister, explaining that she was distressed that he had “treated women like merchandise.” Mitsuko Nakanishi added, “a person like him who treats a weak woman badly should not become prime minister.”
The principal culprit in the Uno debacle was the fundamental inequality between Japanese men and women. In an era when slight chinks appeared in the wall of male privilege, a previously silent witness did the unprecedented if not the unthinkable: she told the world what the world already secretly knew.
Imperial harems conjure up images of sensuous concubines at the mercy of bitter and effeminate eunuchs and of sexually insatiable emperors and princes. The reality of the Ottoman and Chinese imperial harems, however, had less to do with sex and more with power.
The Arabic word haram—“harem” in English—means the condition of living isolated from the outside world, and it describes an oxymoronic sanctuary for women that also imprisons them within its unbreachable walls. The last Turkish harems died out in 1909. Of all the tens of thousands of concubines they swallowed up over the centuries, the most famous—Turks might prefer “infamous”—was the 16th-century woman known as Roxelana, “the Russian woman.”
Roxelana was a clever and ambitious beauty, petite and energetic, with a small upturned nose and flashing eyes. A Polish story identifies her as Alexandra Lisowska, daughter of an impoverished Orthodox priest from Rohatyn, in Ruthenia, in the Carpathian mountains. In this account, raiding Tartars captured her, then sold her to Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha, who gave her to Suleiman, probably the greatest sultan of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Nothing more is known of her origins, her family, her childhood or her education. Roxelana’s life as a historical figure began only in 1526, when she emerged scratched and bloodied from a fistfight with Suleiman’s number one concubine.
Losing that fistfight—on purpose—was one of Roxelana’s most brilliant strategies. She was already the second qadin, or royal concubine, but the Tartar woman Gulbahar, the first qadin and mother of Prince Mustafa, heir to the throne, was an insuperable obstacle blocking her from becoming Suleiman’s principal concubine. During a quarrel, Roxelana provoked Gulbahar to attack. Gulbahar fell into the trap. She yanked Roxelana’s hair and raked her face with her fingernails, temporarily disfiguring the other woman’s lovely face.
But Gulbahar’s victory was Pyrrhic. Though Roxelana had invited an attack, she knew that the harem’s rigid protocol prohibited her from counterattacking, which could lead to her expulsion from the harem. So as her adversary lashed out in rage, Roxelana simply absorbed the blows.
Later, she took her revenge. For days afterward, she rejected Suleiman’s summons on the grounds that she was mutilated. Suleiman was so shocked and angry that he evicted Gulbahar. Almost immediately, Roxelana replaced her as first qadin.
Beautiful though she was, Roxelana’s swift rise to the apex of Suleiman’s harem was astonishing, and underscored her intelligence, zeal and physical presence. His harem was three hundred women strong, so the competition was as ferocious as the stakes were high. The concubines were by no means equal. Most spent dreary lifetimes scrubbing the floors and performing other menial labor. Black women fared the worst; the heaviest, dirtiest work was relegated to them. White women such as Roxelana performed a wide range of other tasks, anything from account-keeping to coffee-making.
The harem, located in the old palace, had a rigid hierarchy and complex protocol. At the very top, reflecting the Turkish view that wives were disposable but mothers were permanent, was the sultan’s mother, Hafsa Hatun, the Valide Sultan (“Queen Mother”). She was second only to her son in imperial power, and in the old palace she ruled supreme. But her relationship with her son’s concubines was neither cozy nor intimate. She communicated with these women, who envied, resented and plotted against her, through the intermediary of her second in command, the Kizlar Agha, meaning “the girls’ general,” chief of the black eunuchs. Between them, the older woman and the emasculated Nubian man governed the women of the harem.
The Kizlar Agha, however, was too involved in imperial administration to spend much time dealing with harem business, which he delegated to other eunuchs. These men worked with the concubines who were the harem’s real supervisors. The controller, the treasurer, the jewel keeper and the Koran reader were usually ambitious older women with little or no chance of attracting the sultan, and they welcomed the chance to exercise their power and to accumulate the wealth their positions entitled them to.
The harem was a complex, dangerous and closed society, isolated from the realities of the outside world and even from the sultan and his entourage, who lived apart in the grand seraglio. The harem’s female and eunuch inmates were of diverse ethnic and racial origins: Russian, Circassian, Tartar, Greek, Serbian, Italian, Nubian and Ethiopian. Many were Christian. None were Muslims, whose enslavement the law forbade. All were powerless, captives of the labyrinth institution designed, at enormous human and monetary cost, to accommodate the sultan’s libido and pride, and they learned quickly the roles they were supposed to play.
But knowing did not reconcile the concubines to their condition. They quarreled bitterly and vied for the attention of the harem’s authorities, the Kizlar Agha, the Valide Sultan and the heads of each department. The concubines had been snatched away from their large families and poor farming villages. There, they would have married and raised children. Here, in the harem, surrounded by women and eunuchs, their only (permissible) sexual outlet was the sultan. But he fancied only the most delectable of them, and so sexual tension was acute and never-ending. The concubines were supposed to suppress or sublimate their longings until the sultan should call for them.
Some of these trapped women did just that. Others turned to each other for sexual gratification, knowingly or otherwise, in the guise of fragrant oily massages, hair brushing and styling, and a host of other grooming and beautification procedures.
Concubines unable to endure the absence of men sometimes risked their lives and, if they could, bribed eunuchs to smuggle unneutered and discreet males into their quarters. It was not unheard of for eunuchs to attempt to service the women themselves. Though castrated, they still felt sexual urges. With these familiar women, who alone in the world would not mock them, a few eunuchs engaged in sex play as best they could, desperate lovers making desperate love.
Besides sexual frustration, one important byproduct of harem life was the concubines’ collective menstrual misery. For one week out of four, their pheromones called out and responded to each others’, establishing a shared cycle. Then the harem groaned with hundreds of women sadder and testier than usual.
But unwanted concubines feared more than celibacy. They repeated stories about the women the Kizlar Agha and his cronies took stealthily to the Bosphorus in the dark of night, thrust into sacks weighted down with stones, then rowed out to sea to be heaved overboard and drowned. In one ghastly version, a diver hoping to salvage treasure from a sunken vessel found instead scores of rhythmically swaying sacks, the funeral shrouds of dead women held down by rocks.
Harem eunuchs could also be dangerous if a concubine crossed, insulted or disobeyed them. Kidnapped in childhood and mutilated before puberty, these men had endured unspeakable trauma, including the brutal surgery that killed over 90 percent of those subjected to it. Though their intense training for harem duty had dulled the eunuchs’ memories of family and culture, they were at best ambivalent about their situation. On the one hand, their prospects for advancement and property were good. On the other, they were embittered by the nature of their mutilation, and by the fact that mainstream society dreaded and shunned them as mujbubs, men without penises, and scorned them because they were black.
For the most alluring and nubile of the concubines, the obvious strategy was to catch the sultan’s eye. Then he would toss the lucky woman a richly embroidered handkerchief, a sign of his favor that could change her life.
When this happened, the lucky woman was separated from the other concubines, moved into her own apartment and assigned personal slaves. Then various harem officers bathed, massaged, anointed, perfumed and shaved her. They dressed her hair and painted her nails. They draped her with exquisite lingerie and gorgeous gowns. Afterward came the waiting. Would the sultan invite her to his chamber? If he did, could she conjure up the magic to captivate him? Melt his heart so she became his favorite? Or, best of all, conceive a son who could, one day, raise her to the highest possible rank, Valide Sultan?
Sometimes the sultan forgot he had ever seen her. Then the forsaken woman would be stripped of her finery, evicted from her private quarters and returned to the crowded cubicle she had so triumphantly left. As she aged and hope withered, she conceived a single new ambition—a transfer to the old seraglio, where she might be permitted to marry and leave the premises.
But a few concubines triumphed: the sultan remembered and desired them. Each experienced a variation on this theme: at night, a black eunuch would escort her to the royal chamber in the woman’s quarters, a room always ready for the sultan’s assignations. Silence prevailed there. Nobody was supposed to know the identity of the chosen woman or when the sultan seduced her (or, if she learned her lessons well, when she seduced him).
The concubine approached the sultan from the foot of his bed, where he lay waiting. With every show of submissiveness, she lifted the foot of the bedspread. Then, according to prescribed custom, she insinuated herself into the bed, crawling slowly up to the sultan, rump upward, sidling forward propelled by soft elbows and knees.
Even then the concubine and the sultan were neither alone nor in darkness; two elderly black women spelled each other guarding the door and fueling two torches. In their presence, the night passed in lovemaking, with the novice concubine doing her utmost to enchant her master. She was usually a virgin, but her harem sisters and their eunuch tutors had coached her in the erotic arts. Above all else, she was primed to please. The morning after, the sultan in effect graded her performance by leaving her his clothes with money secreted in the pockets. Later, he might send additional gifts to express his appreciation.
If a pregnancy resulted, the woman became a sultana, and her future was assured. If the child was a son designated as heir to the throne, she dreamed of the day she would rule as Valide Sultan.
This was the curious and challenging world into which the spritely young Roxelana was sold. Unlike many other concubines, she was not depressed by her fate. Within the seraglio she was known as Hurrem, the laughing woman, whose tinkling laughter rang out even in the sultan’s presence. Swiftly, she sized up the seraglio and harem. From the outset, she dazzled young Suleiman, though not enough to dislodge Gulbahar, his first qadin and mother of the heir apparent, Prince Mustafa.
Suleiman was in his thirtieth year and Roxelana much younger when she emerged victorious from her contest with Gulbahar, whom Suleiman banished from the harem. At the same time, he committed himself exclusively to Roxelana, an unheard-of decision for an emperor with hundreds of women at his personal sexual disposal. He went so far as to arrange marriages for the loveliest women in his harem, to ward off temptation and to allay Roxelana’s jealousy. Years later, a foreign observer marveled that “he bears her such love and keeps such faith to her that all of his subjects … say that she has bewitched him, and they call her … the witch.”12 Indeed, Suleiman’s fidelity to one woman was unique among Ottoman emperors.
Roxelana disregarded the growing resentment toward her. Millions of Turks might hate her, but the only one who mattered, the sultan Suleiman, adored her. Yet Roxelana could not alter one fact: that Mustafa, the son of the disgraced Gulbahar, remained Suleiman’s heir.
What terrified Roxelana was that when Mustafa became sultan, the Code of Laws would require him to kill his three half brothers, her sons. This “fratricide law” stemmed from a skewed interpretation of a Koranic verse—“What is a prince’s death compared to losing a province?”—and was designed to prevent paralyzing royal power struggles. Mustafa’s eventual assumption of power would be a death warrant for Cihangir, Selim and Bayezid, Roxelana’s sons. As Mustafa neared the age of majority, Roxelana grew desperate and persuaded Suleiman to move him to various remote locations. Gulbahar, who had lived with Mustafa since her expulsion, usually followed him to these dreary outposts, another potential threat removed. At the very least, Roxelana had diluted Mustafa’s influence on his father.
Roxelana’s next target was the ostentatious and arrogant grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman’s trusted confidant, administrator and brother-in-law.13 Suleiman and Pasha were inseparable, and even had adjacent bedrooms. Pasha was as loyal to Suleiman as Suleiman was to Roxelana, and he was also protected by Hafsa Hatun, the Valide Sultan. But in 1535, when Hafsa Hatun died, Ibrahim lost his most important ally. Roxelana relentlessly pressed her advantage and poisoned Suleiman against his old friend.
Her success was lethal. On the night of March 14, 1536, the sultan summoned the seraglio goons, mutes who could never betray him, and ordered them to strangle Ibrahim. The grand vizier fought for his life against his silent assassins. The next day, servants discovered his corpse. His clothing was ripped, and the walls of his bedroom were bloodstained. Though Pasha had been a Christian, Suleiman buried him in a dervish monastery, without a marker, like a vagabond rather than the second most powerful man in the Ottoman Empire. Long ago, Roxelana had eliminated her sexual rivals. Now, out of the same blind jealousy, she had eliminated Suleiman’s most trusted, loyal and able confidant.
Several years later, in 1540, a raging fire gutted the old palace, leaving hundreds of concubines, eunuchs and slave attendants homeless. Roxelana immediately convinced Suleiman to lodge her in the grand seraglio, though women never lived there. Here, she lived at the heart of imperial power and politics. A decade later, when the new palace replaced its burned-out predecessor, Roxelana simply stayed where she was. By then, she had become such a forceful presence in government that historians credit her with initiating the Ottoman Empire’s Reign of Women, which ended only in 1687.
Soon after she joined Suleiman in the grand seraglio, Roxelana may have persuaded him to marry her, though this is impossible to confirm. Most Turks denied that Suleiman could ever have married a Christian (albeit a forced convert to Islam), a foreigner and a concubine. But a certain week of public festivities was interpreted by non-Turkish diplomats and visitors as a gala celebration of Suleiman’s nuptials with Roxelana. If so, Roxelana had managed to trade concubinage for wedlock.
As empress or first concubine, Roxelana was Suleiman’s confidante and adviser, but her most important focus was on saving her sons from Prince Mustafa, who would be forced to kill them after his father’s death. In 1553, she used a forged letter to implicate Mustafa in an insurrection against his father. Suleiman, knowing nothing about her nefarious hand in the affair, reportedly agonized over how to respond, and vacillated between mercy and reprisal. But Roxelana urged Suleiman to condemn Mustafa to the traditional execution by strangulation.
At last Suleiman made his decision, and summoned Mustafa to meet him. The prince, forewarned, strode courageously toward his father, declaring proudly that if he had to die, he would gladly do so at the hands of the man who had given him life. Like Grand Vizier Pasha, he was strangled by mute seraglio thugs.
Roxelana had triumphed. Her son Selim would now succeed his father. As for the fratricide law, she believed—correctly, it turned out—that the chosen prince would never do away with his brothers. (She did not foresee, however, that her cruel son Bayezid would plot to overthrow his father, and that Suleiman would execute him.) Roxelana did not live to enjoy her son’s accession to power. Five years after Mustafa’s murder, she died, mourned by Suleiman but by few of his subjects.
Roxelana was one of the most powerful concubines in any imperial harem. She has been criticized for her cruel and self-serving behavior, and demonized for influencing policies that contributed to the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Even if all this were true, what else can one expect from a woman confined to harems crammed with degraded women? By ignoring their basic needs and desires, harem culture gave birth to poisonous politics.
China’s Forbidden City was a vast complex of orange-roofed, rose-walled palaces and of humbler dwellings that housed the entire imperial court, including the imperial concubines. The court was the seat of Chinese imperial power during the Ming and Qing dynasties, from 1368 to 1911. As a physical plant it was a fortified maze—walls within walls within walls. The Great Wall of China kept out foreigners, forty-foot-high and fifty-foot-thick walls protected the city of Peking (now Beijing), and the soaring purple walls around the Forbidden City opened to admit only court associates.
Inside, the Son of Heaven—the name reflecting the emperor’s supposedly divine origins—lived and ruled with his enormous coterie of consorts, up to 3 wives, 9 secondary wives, 27 lesser-ranked wives, 81 concubines: a potential total of 121 women for one single man. In addition, hundreds of children and thousands of relatives, eunuchs, servants, bureaucrats, astrologers and other functionaries cohabited and worked alongside the vast imperial family.
Imperial concubines, like those belonging to lower-ranked men, were tenured members of the emperor’s household. They had to be Manchu or Mongol, have unbound feet and proper clan membership. Once chosen, they were forced into intense competition to attract the favor of the emperor or the empress or, in the case of Emperor Hsien-feng, of the empress dowager, his stepmother. The few who succeeded were rewarded with a luxurious life free of any domestic labor, and the hope of conceiving the emperor’s baby. Bearing an imperial son would even promote a concubine mother to the status of one of the emperor’s full wives.
A millennium earlier, two imperial concubines had achieved enormous power. The exquisite Yang Kuei-fei used Emperor Hsuan Tsung’s passion for her to enrich her relatives, and was strangled to death during a subsequent rebellion. Empress Wu began as a concubine to Emperor Taizong, and after his death so fascinated his son Emperor Gaozong that he made her his chief concubine. After his death, she managed to be named empress, and ruled until she was deposed at eighty years of age.
In the next millennium, the most memorable court concubine was a Manchu girl, Lady Yehenara, born on November 29, 1835, to a minor mandarin family headed by Kuei Hsiang, about whom almost nothing is known. Unlike thousands of other concubines immured in the imperial court, there is a wealth of information about Lady Yehenara, known to history as Tz’u-hsi, Empress of the West, from both Chinese and foreign sources. Unfortunately, much of this information was fabricated by expatriates in China and by the empress dowager’s political enemies. One reliable source is Sir Robert Hart, the foreigner who overcame Tz’u-hsi’s loathing of “foreign devils” and was appointed China’s Inspector General of Customs. (For ten years he also had a concubine, Ayaou, with whom he had three children, whom he acknowledged and supported but never saw after they reached adulthood.) Other sources are foreign women who met and spoke with Tz’u-hsi; physicians who examined her; Chinese courtiers and one lady-in-waiting, Princess Derling; and foreign diplomats interested in reporting accurately to their home countries.
Tz’u-hsi was five feet tall, slender and beautifully built. She had dainty hands and, on her third and little fingers, four-inch fingernails sheathed in jade nail guards. She had wide, lustrous eyes, a high nose and higher cheekbones, shapely lips and a rounded chin. Her smile was enchanting. Like most Manchu girls, she had unbound feet that photos show in tiny slippers.
In keeping with her destiny as either wife or concubine, Tz’u-hsi kept her rather sallow skin soft, pale and fragrant with creams, ointments and oils. She used traditional Manchu makeup: face whitened with leaded powder, cheeks glowing with two red spots of rouge, her lower lip’s paleness broken by a startling red cherry-shaped splotch. Her glossy black hair, never cut, was brushed back and caught up into an elaborate confection of jeweled barrettes, pins in the form of insects and flowers, and pearl tassels. “A lot of people were jealous of me, because I was considered to be a beautiful woman at that time,” she recalled.15
Tz’u-hsi’s character, however, was far from traditional. Acquaintances remarked on how serious and pensive she was, a quiet, brooding girl who kept her thoughts to herself, though later in life she expressed her lifelong resentment that her parents had always favored her siblings. She was close to illiterate, as all girls were, but spoke some Chinese as well as her Manchu mother tongue, and was a skilled painter.
In 1851, when she sixteen, the Chinese emperor Wen Tsung died and Hsien-feng, his nineteen-year-old heir, succeeded him as Son of Heaven. Now, because of her father’s clan membership, Tz’u-hsi and her sisters could audition for the new imperial harem. Many eligible Manchu families were reluctant to expose an eligible daughter to the competition. Once in the harem, their daughter was lost to her family. If the emperor ignored her, even if he died, she was no longer theirs to marry off to a suitable husband. She would remain forever in the bleakness of the Hall of Forgotten Favorites, in a cubicle that looked out onto gnarled pine trees. She might in her loneliness and frustration enter a passionate love affair with another forgotten concubine. Tz’u-hsi’s struggling family, however, had no such qualms, and eagerly prepared Tz’u-hsi and her sister for their ordeal.
The selection process began. Tz’u-hsi, already chaperoned by palace eunuchs, advanced to the second round. It was intense and invasive. The girls were examined for blemishes, illnesses and virginity. Their all-important horoscope was studied. They were also tested for everything from their social graces to their grasp of Manchu and Chinese—Manchu girls like Tz’u-hsi often knew little Chinese. A very few succeeded to round three, tea with the empress dowager, Hsien-feng’s stepmother. Tz’u-hsi acquitted herself well, and was one of the tiny number chosen as concubines-in-training.
While Tz’u-hsi trained for her life as an imperial concubine, Emperor Hsien-feng married his deceased first wife’s sister. The new empress joined his harem along with the novice concubines, including Tz’u-hsi, now a concubine of the fourth rank.
Emperor Hsien-feng’s harem was modest. It included one empress, two consorts and only eleven concubines, a fourteen-woman contingent that reflected revenue issues and not creeping puritanism. (China was plagued by corrupt and incompetent leadership, wars, floods, crop failures and famine.) Theoretically, all fourteen women were sexually available. In fact, some never even met the emperor and were nothing more than servants to the empress dowager. Tz’u-hsi was determined not to fall into their ranks.
Tz’u-hsi’s apartment in the magnificent, marble-floored palace was private though close to the other concubines, and large enough for her eunuchs and maids to properly care for her. The emperor had given her jewelry and gowns, court robes and footwear, and her father had done even better, receiving bolts of costly silk, gold and silver, horses, saddles and bridles, and an elegant tea set.
The serious and observant Tz’u-hsi quickly learned how the palace operated. The eunuchs were the real powermongers. It was wise to befriend them, and dangerous to defy them. They were also the concubines’ only male company, and so their flattery was welcome, their conversation instructive and their gossip enlightening. Tz’u-hsi offered the eunuchs her deep and enduring friendship. She reached out as well to Niuhuru, the empress, developing a complicated relationship with her that lasted over two decades. In her isolation in the harem, Tz’u-hsi also surrounded herself with dogs, Pekinese bred only at—and for—the palace. Tz’u-hsi remained a virginal concubine, and the regal pups were her enfants manqués.
Tz’u-hsi’s lack of contact with the emperor deeply disturbed her. But in his frenzy for sexual experimentation, the Son of Heaven preferred to exhaust his energies in brothels, and ignored his anxious concubines. To rectify this, Hsien-feng’s stepmother and the palace officials pressured him into turning to his harem instead of his favorite bordellos. He did so, and impregnated one of his concubines, the gentle and lovely Li Fei.
Li Fei’s pregnancy gave Tz’u-hsi her big chance. Protocol forced pregnant concubines into total celibacy, and even the Son of Heaven could not countermand this. That was why, driven by lust one day in 1855, Hsien-feng inscribed the chaste Tz’u-hsi’s name on the traditional jade tablet that denoted his nightly wish list, and handed it to the chief eunuch.
Tz’u-hsi had been waiting for this moment. When the chief eunuch arrived at her rooms, he stripped her, swaddled her in a scarlet rug and carried her, on his back, to the emperor’s bedchamber. (This tradition originated in the days of the Ming dynasty, whose concubines had bound feet and could not walk.) There he deposited her at the foot of the bed and removed the rug. Tz’u-hsi, no doubt trembling and fearful, nonetheless knew what to do. Submissively, she crawled up to where the emperor sprawled, watching her. She confided her little body trustingly and hopefully, allowing the exalted but callow young emperor to glimpse only her modesty, and not her dread.
The encounter was successful. Nine months later, in a pavilion called the Library of the Topaz Wu-t’ung Tree, in the majestic Round Bright Garden Summer Palace, Tz’u-hsi delivered Tung Chih, the longed-for imperial son. This was especially gratifying because Li Fei had earlier produced the princess Jung An, a dynastically worthless daughter. Tz’u-hsi had guaranteed the imperial succession, and as the vessel that had carried the seed, she was promoted to concubine of the first rank, or consort, a status only the empress surpassed.
It is difficult to suppose that Tz’u-hsi or Li Fei, or even the empress, felt romantic love for the dissolute and ungainly man they belonged to. On the other hand, they were intimate only with eunuchs, and were seldom alone with other courtiers, such as the emperor’s jealous half brothers. So Tz’u-hsi’s longing for the love of the Son of Heaven was sensible and strategic, and perhaps tinged with pride. In later life she remembered wistfully the brief period when “the late Emperor became very much attached to me and would hardly glance at any of the other ladies.”16
But the emperor had little taste for this concubine whose attempts to emulate Buddha’s tranquil mien earned her the nickname “Little Buddha.” Night after night, he inscribed the name of the delightfully unserious Li Fei on the jade tablet. At the same time, however, Hsien-feng began to respond positively to Tz’u-hsi’s enthusiastic questions and comments about current events, about which she was woefully ignorant, and palace affairs, about which she was well informed and shrewd. As a result, he gave her access to some of his documents, thereby tacitly ushering her into the darkly echoing corridors of power. But she often wept in despair because he did not love her.
Until 1860, this was Tz’u-hsi’s life. She was obsessively attentive to appearances and never deviated from her lengthy ritual of daily ablutions, grooming and hair styling, scenting herself with musk. (Eunuchs helped all concubines with these rituals.) She walked compulsively, even in the rain, to the annoyance of the court ladies who had to accompany her. She ate sparingly, selecting from 150 tiny dishes of delectable foodstuffs, many of them sugared fruits and sweets. She seldom saw her imperial son, who was breast-fed by wet nurses and cared for by eunuchs, though she and the empress often discussed his upbringing.
The mother of the prince whiled away the hours reading and studying, now that palace tutors had taught her how to read and write. She created origami rabbits and birds. She played with her pack of black Pekinese, lodged in their own pavilion. And, because her appetite for flowers was insatiable, she decorated each of her apartments with floral bouquets, wove flowers into her hair, even entwined them in the fur of Shadza, meaning “Fool,” at that time her favorite dog. At night, she slept on a little pillow stuffed with tea leaves, thought to be good for the eyes.
Tz’u-hsi’s life as a respected concubine and mother of the future emperor was as meaningful as her strong will, energy and resources could make it. Yet despite her mastery of palace life, she and most of her circle knew literally nothing about the maddened world outside the Forbidden City. That world, the real China, was in turmoil, maladministered, bled dry by corruption, under attack from dissident citizens and under seige from greedy and manipulative European nations, the “foreign devils” Tz’u-hsi so rightly mistrusted.
The right to dump vast quantities of Indian opium into China—an immoral stance assumed by Britain and its allies—provided the immediate context for a foreign onslaught. Desperate to control addiction, the Manchu government had established a monopoly that taxed the drug so heavily that the rich alone could afford it. British traders, however, smuggled opium into China, fueling widespread enslavement to the drug, a disintegration of family life and widespread impoverishment.
Ten years after the first Opium War, Britain hounded the Son of Heaven with new demands, including legalization of the opium trade. After more bullying, the British invaded Canton (Guangzhou). In 1860, they stormed Peking and, with barbaric ferocity, sacked the Summer Palace. Hsien-feng, the empress, Tz’u-hsi and most of the imperial court, including three thousand eunuchs, had already fled in a ludicrously lavish procession of sedan chairs and mule-drawn carts that extended for five miles.
After a year in luxurious exile in the safety of an imperial hunting lodge 110 miles away from Peking, the twenty-nine-year-old emperor sickened and died, anguished at the chaos and humiliated by defeat. As he grew weaker and weaker, the court officials discovered he had not appointed a successor. Tz’u-hsi was galvanized into action. “As has always been the case in emergencies,” she later recalled, “I was equal to the occasion, and I said to him: ‘Here is your son,’ on hearing which he immediately opened his eyes and said: ‘Of course he will succeed to the throne.’ ”17 Minutes later, Hsien-feng died.
This was Tz’u-hsi’s first political intervention, and it shaped her life and China’s. Just twenty-five, she came into her own. She had no intention of retreating into meek, widowed retirement. Instead, she successfully pressed for recognition as empress dowager and as coregent for her son, Tung Chih, with Niuhuru. She was named Concubine of Feminine Virtue, and would henceforth be known as Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, Empress of the West. (Niuhuru became Tz’u-an, Empress of the East.) Tz’u-hsi immediately allied herself with her brother-in-law, Prince Kung, and the empress dowager, and the trio became China’s true rulers. Their first act was to consolidate their position by eliminating the so-called Gang of Eight, who conspired against them. The Gang’s leader was beheaded, two others permitted to commit suicide and the rest exiled.
Tz’u-hsi enjoyed her power, but she was careful not to demonstrate too much intelligence, and in her biographer Sterling Seagrave’s assessment, she “appreciated that her job at court was to be a mediator and arbiter on all issues… . In the early years she avoided pressing a view of her own… . She provided the stable point on which all state policy was to be weighed.”18
In 1864, the government ended the long-running Taiping Rebellion in the south, in 1868, the Nien Rebellion in the north. In the peaceful aftermath, Tz’u-hsi and Tz’u-an’s government implemented promising reforms and focused on eliminating corruption and attracting capable men into China’s government service.
The two empresses were still in their mid-twenties, inexperienced, ignorant of administrative protocol and only passably literate. They had never seen or been seen by foreigners. They sat behind screens as they consulted with their male advisers. Tz’u-hsi’s subsequent reputation as a vicious and arrogant tyrant could not have been more undeserved.
Unfortunately, the two empresses, the Son of Heaven’s two mothers, fared rather worse at mothering. Tung Chih was a problem child, lazy, cruel and, in adolescence, sex-crazed. He sneaked out of the Forbidden City to forbidden pleasures in brothels, and he also experimented with his eunuchs. “Women, girls, men and boys—as fast as he could, one after the other,” noted Robert Hart in his diary.19 When Tung Chih was fourteen, his doctors were treating him for syphilis.
Tz’u-hsi and Tz’u-an fought back by finding Tung Chih a bride and some concubines as incentive for him to seek his pleasures at home. Six months after his marriage, Tung Chih renewed his sexual forays into Peking. He also neglected his duties, stymied the efforts of his officials, demoted and degraded senior administrators and fired cabinet ministers. The process of government was effectively halted.
The two empresses intervened and restored officials to their positions. Government resumed. China limped on. Three months later, Tung Chih was diagnosed with the smallpox that plagued Peking. From his sickbed, he issued a decree assigning his powers to the empresses until he recovered. In January 1875, Robert Hart confided to his diary that a foreign physician “says it is syphilis and not smallpox that the Emperor is ill of.”20
Whichever it was, it killed Tung Chih on January 12. Tz’u-hsi wept for the son who had made her empress but had himself grown into an ogre, a spectacularly arrogant and vicious boy who many people felt had redeemed himself only by dying before he totally destroyed the government. Many others gossiped about murder.
Tung Chih had not named a successor, so the empresses continued to rule until one was found. The Forbidden City became truly forbidding as the partisans and relatives of the various eligible princes lobbied for their candidates. But the princes were either too impetuous or tainted by sexual forays into brothels, and Tz’u-hsi found a more suitable prince, her three-year-old nephew, her sister’s son, a choice Tz’u-an approved. As she had with Tung Chih’s succession, Tz’u-hsi confronted the court with a surprise announcement. “I’ll adopt a child, the son of the Seventh Prince,” she announced. Soon after she left them, she reappeared with her new “son” and declared, “this is your Emperor!”21
The baby emperor, renamed Kuang Hsu, “Glorious Succession,” was not a happy child. His empress aunt was not merely using him to keep China out of the hands of princes like her dead son, she was also rescuing him from his abusive home. His neurotic mother and drunken father had abused and nearly starved the boy and his siblings, several of whom died.
Two months later, Tung Chih’s pregnant wife, Alute, died. Official reports of her suicide notwithstanding, she was probably murdered to avert the arrival of a rival baby who would be seen as the true heir of Tung Chih. Tz’u-hsi was among those suspected, and her reputation was subsequently tarnished by doubts about Alute’s death.
Sterling Seagrave adduces evidence that exonerates Tz’u-hsi. She had chosen Alute as her daughter-in-law and had never shown signs of regretting it. She had nothing to fear from Alute’s baby, who as her grandchild would guarantee her own position. Lastly, Tz’u-hsi was herself poisoned at the same time Alute died. Tz’u-hsi was so ill with what was diagnosed as liver disease that until 1883 she was chronically ill. She was often absent from court, and several times reportedly on her deathbed.
Robert Hart believed that of the two empresses, Tz’u-hsi was the more influential and clever, Tz’u-an the nicer. Tz’u-hsi, he noted in his diary, “has temper—but she has also ability.”22 That ability was often undermined, however, by her lifelong craving for affection and her susceptibility to flattery. “Our Hart,” Tz’u-hsi’s nickname for her dedicated and capable foreign official, spent the next twenty-three years as the only expatriate who portrayed her “consistently as a woman and not a monster.”23
The emperor of China was now a traumatized and stammering child, and his maternal aunt was too sick herself to assume a leading role in his upbringing. Despite his tormented infancy and the misguidedly severe palace upbringing by eunuchs instructed not to spoil him as Tung Chih had been spoiled, Kuang Hsu developed into a committed emperor, albeit a melancholy and reclusive one.
In 1881, Tz’u-an sickened and died, leaving the ailing Tz’u-hsi China’s true ruler. In 1887, at the behest of several court officials, her regency was extended for an additional two years, though at fifteen Kuang Hsu was supposedly old enough to assume power. The extension gave Tz’u-hsi time to select a wife and two concubines for her adopted son.
The new empress was Tz’u-hsi’s niece, Lung Yu, a slender, bucktoothed girl she was very fond of. The concubines were attractive sisters recommended by an influential eunuch. Tz’u-hsi hoped that Kuang Hsu would produce heirs and assume his full role as emperor. Then she could leave the heat and turmoil of the Forbidden City and retire to the splendor of the rebuilt Summer Palace.
But Kuang Hsu suffered medical conditions that led to involuntary ejaculation and, with women, impotence. To make matters worse, Lung Yu was a reluctant bride whose parents had forced her into the arrangement. Nonetheless, the sullen teenagers married, and Tz’u-hsi, now fifty-four, relaxed into retirement. The foreign legation was optimistic about Kuang Hsu, and Charles Denby, the American diplomat, predicted that “railroads, the electric light, physical science, a new navy, an improved army, a general banking system, a mint, all in the bud now, will soon be in full flower.”24
Instead, the willing but indecisive Kuang Hsu confronted the devastating Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5. Japan, modernized and bellicose, sought to forestall Russian expansion into Korea and northern China. China and Korea both wanted to preserve the relationship in which China protected Korea, its dependent. But Korean public opinion was divided, and in 1894 a rebellion ensued. China sent troops to assist the Korean government while Japan sent soldiers to support the opposition, and they seized the palace. Fierce fighting preceded the official declaration of war on August 1, 1894.
The Sino-Japanese War was in many ways the beginning of the end of dynastic China. The Japanese easily defeated the Chinese on land and sea, and destroyed the Chinese navy. They pushed on into Manchuria, and China was forced to sue for peace. The Treaty of Shimonoseki humiliated and cannibalized China, which lost its control of Korea and had to cede Taiwan and two other territories, open four treaty ports to external trade and pay the enormous sum of two hundred million taels in tribute. Russia, France and Germany intervened and forced Japan to return one territory to China, but China had to pay an additional thirty million taels. (One tael in Chinese currency usually contained forty grams of silver.)
China’s crushing defeat in the Sino-Japanese War was proof incarnate that the Qing dynasty was degenerate and ineffective. Angry reformers, noting how modernization had empowered Japan, intensified their campaign to modernize China, and the countryside pulsated with revolution. Tz’u-hsi’s critics and rivals seized on China’s military disgrace to accuse her of misappropriating funds destined for the navy to beautify the Summer Palace. This charge was false. She did not direct the restoration project, though she appreciated its results, and she would have had no way to funnel money from the navy, something only the Admiralty Board could have done.
The tension and urgency in imperial politics skyrocketed. Tz’u-hsi was galvanized by fear when Japanese agents orchestrated a coup in Korea against the ruling Queen Min, who was stabbed repeatedly then burned alive. Meanwhile, Kuang Hsu decided to fire everyone who had so much as questioned his decisions—his version of reform. Conservatives appalled at his apparent cavalier disregard for Manchu tradition, and at his intended introduction of a Japanese statesman into a senior position in China’s government, urged Tz’u-hsi to come out of retirement. After hearing all the evidence of her nephew’s missteps, she reluctantly agreed. She resumed her previous position as ruler, working with Kuang Hsu at her side.
Some of Kuang Hsu’s reforms were retained. But some reformers deemed traitors were punished or executed. Despite the obvious personal harmony between the emperor and his old aunt, rumors flew that she and co-conspirators had placed him under house arrest in the palace. One man forced to flee China titillated people with his stories about the evil woman at China’s helm. One of his more elaborate fabrications was that the sixty-three-year-old Tz’u-hsi sneaked false eunuchs into the palace and had sex with them. This same expatriate also plotted to assassinate Tz’u-hsi.
In certain ways, Roxelana would have understood the imperial court. For instance, Tz’u-hsi was pressured into granting two princes the Shangfang swords and hence the literal right to decapitate anyone they wished to. Her more moderate colleagues now had reason to watch what they said and did.
In 1898, in an attempt to counter her enemies’ campaign of vilification, Tz’u-hsi broke all tradition and invited foreign diplomats’ wives to the palace for tea. Her guests found her friendly and curious, with no hint of the cruel nature they had heard about. To their surprise, the emperor was also there, though he seemed indifferent to them and sat there chain-smoking cigarettes.
In that same year, the anti-foreign Boxer movement began to spread through China. Harassment of often arrogant Christian missionaries and Chinese converts escalated into outright terrorization. Then, after a young Englishman shot dead a Chinese man who shouted at him, a furious crowd of Chinese burned the Peking Racecourse so popular with foreigners. Churches and foreign residences were also destroyed.
Back in the palace, Tz’u-hsi was torn between supporting and suppressing the Boxers. She later recalled that the government decree ordering all foreigners killed had been issued against her wishes by pro-Boxer ministers. At the time, foreigners accused her of encouraging the Boxers and of sending troops to foil foreign military attempts to defeat them.
From June 13 to 16, 1900, the Boxers and their followers destroyed and looted foreign quarters. They targeted Chinese merchants who sold to foreigners as well. Foreigners and Chinese Christians sought refuge in cathedrals. Chinese servants fled foreign employers. In the countryside, Boxers slaughtered thousands of Chinese Christians.
In this tense situation, the German minister to China, Clemens Freiherr, Baron von Ketteler, provoked German marines to shoot and kill a group of Boxers. Tz’u-hsi and Kuang Hsu issued decrees against the Boxers, against killing foreigners, against inciting people to kill foreigners. Nonetheless, foreigners began to die. In one massacre, forty-five missionaries, including women and children, were beheaded. For days, several heads were displayed in cages atop a wall.
By August 14, 1900, an army of international soldiers reached Peking, rescued the foreigners, looted the city, then began a slow and savage march through the countryside to the Summer Palace, where Tz’u-hsi and the emperor and court had fled. These soldiers killed tens of thousands of Chinese, destroyed and looted thousands of homes and then laid waste the Summer Palace and Buddhist temples and statues.
From a new palatial refuge, Tz’u-hsi ordered that officials and nobles who had instigated the Boxers be punished. Two were executed. Then she, the emperor and their court returned to the Forbidden City. The Europeans demanded reparations and dictated a peace treaty. Tz’u-hsi was restored to power and resumed governing, her emperor-nephew at her side. She also resumed her tea parties with foreign women.
At seventy, Tz’u-hsi suffered a stroke, but still managed to work. On November 14, 1908, the always ailing emperor Kuang Hsu died. The day after, so did Tz’u-hsi, overworked, exhausted and ill with influenza. The Manchu dynasty survived her by only three years.
History has judged Tz’u-hsi harshly, and many of her contemporaries reviled her as a murderous despot. In fact, as an empress, Tz’u-hsi was the victim of her personal inadequacies—her lack of education and her uncertain grasp of administrative protocol and procedure. She was equally the victim of a system that imprisoned her in the Forbidden City, utterly ignorant of the catastrophic conditions outside it. She also had personal qualities that sabotaged her ability to govern effectively and wisely. Her incessant need to be liked put her at the mercy of flatterers. She was sometimes fearful and indecisive.
Yet Tz’u-hsi is noteworthy for impressive achievements. From the perspective of her blinkered life, her determined rise to power was remarkable. In China’s dangerous and corrupt imperial court, she parlayed her intelligence and her focused ambition into a position of enormous power. For an unbeguiling concubine, she was a paragon of success.
Neither Tz’u-hsi nor Roxelana should be evaluated out of their own contexts. A balanced historical perspective about them would recognize how extraordinarily well both these women adapted to their concubinage and mastered harem rules, etiquette and traditions and then established relationships that catapulted them into power and kept them there for decades. They transformed coerced concubinage into supreme power, and even succeeded in dying naturally in their beds.