Read Online The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China by Keith Laidler - Free Book Online

carts or sedan chairs of Imperial yellow (the colour symbolised the Sun, and the Emperor’s unique status as Son of Heaven). Notwithstanding the girl’s own feeling on the matter, the arrival of Imperial messengers gave great ‘face’ to her family, and produced an immediate rise in social status. The messengers were welcomed with every sign of humility, the elder of the household kowtowing (from kau-tau –to knock head) as if the Emperor himself were present. While customary, this ritual symbolised the absolute power of the monarch over his subjects–the summons had arrived and there was no possibility of refusal.
    There is little doubt that Yehonala would have much preferred to decline the ‘honour’ given her. Prior to the Imperial summons she had been all but betrothed to another of her cousins, the tall and handsome Jung Lu. According to many accounts, the young couple were deeply in love, and would have married in due course. This affection was to last all their lives and, if the rumours current in Beijing were to be believed, it was to cast the ill-starred pair as an oriental Lancelot and Guinevere to the Emperor’s King Arthur. Whatever the truth of this, Jung Lu was to play a vital and continuing role in his lost love’s rise to absolute power.
    The call to the Palace would have rocked Yehonala’s world and her dreams of the future. It changed everything: there could be no marriage to Jung Lu if she were selected as a consort of the Son of Heaven. This shattering of her youthful dreams must have had a profound effect on Yehonala. She was sixteen, in love with a handsome military cadet who returned her affection and whom she knew she would marry. And then suddenly it was all taken from her, the vision shattered while it was still new and before time and experience had had a chance to sully the perfection of her emotions. It would have been less than human of her if she had not blamed the Emperor for this disaster. It is more than probable that this seismic shift in her fate left an indelible hatred in her heart, and (together with the tribal frictions and rivalry between the Yeho-Nala and the Aisin Gioro clans) does much to explain her subsequent indifference to and callous disregard of the fate of the Dynasty and the Imperial line.
    Even to be successful in the selection process was no guarantee of Imperial favour. The harem was so vast that it was perfectly possible to be elevated to the rank of concubine and yet never be taken to the Imperial bed. As the Emperor’s wives never left the Forbidden City, and the seraglio was staffed only with eunuchs, this amounted to a sentence of perpetual virginity. And should an Emperor die, custom forbade any of his wives to remarry, or to leave the precincts of the Great Within (consummation of the marriage was not required). They were imprisoned for life within its purple walls. When the remnants of the Manchu court were finally expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924, three old women, forgotten wives of long-dead Emperors, were discovered still living in obscurity in the warren of dilapidated apartments. 13
    On the day appointed, the sixty aspirants prepared their toilet with the greatest care. Like her rivals, Yehonala would have had her face caked with white-lead powder into a pale geisha-style mask, her cheeks daubed with twin spots of rouge and, as custom demanded, her lower lip reddened to resemble a rose or cherry. Dressed in the most sumptuous robes and jewellery their families could afford, the potential concubines were carried in sedan chairs towards the high walls of the Great Within. Cocooned in the musty, humid air of the enclosed palanquin, screened from all prying eyes, hearing nothing but the creaking of the wooden poles, the grunts of the bearers and the dull slap of their feet on the dusty road, Yehonala, like the others in her situation, can only have been in a high state of agitation. None knew what to expect, or what changes the next few hours