The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China

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Authors: Keith Laidler
Tags: nonfiction, History, 19th century, china, Royalty, Asian Culture
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about to enter was dangerous in the extreme, one of the most debauched, capricious and cruel courts ever recorded in the history of Occident or Orient.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE GREAT WITHIN
    The Forbidden City, the royal palace of the Celestial Prince, ruler of All Under Heaven, was built by Yung Le, the fourth son of the first Ming Emperor Chu Yuan-chang, a one-time Buddhist priest whose successful rebellion against the Mongol Yuan Dynasty had placed the Ming on the throne of the Middle Kingdom in1368. It was Yung Le who in1422 transferred the seat of government from Nanking (the southern capital) to Beijing. 1
    The main buildings of the Forbidden City were constructed between 1410 and 1420, and are laid out along a central north–south axis. The site contains more than ten major palaces, nine thousand rooms, three garden parks, and a lamaist temple, and occupies a total area of seven hundred and twenty thousand square metres, around two hundred and fifty acres. 2 The main temples and palaces are impressively ornate structures, built entirely of wood with vermilion-painted walls, and yellow-glazed tile roofs (yellow symbolising the sun and, by extension, the Emperor). Symbolism is everywhere in the Forbidden City: colours, names and shapes all had a meaning. Each palace stands on white marble terracing, beautifully carved with intricate designs, the most prominent being the twin sigils of Imperial Power, the dragon and the phoenix. The three main halls of the outer palace (the Halls of Harmony) stand on a three-tiered terrace of white marble which in plan view forms the Chinese character signifying ‘the land’. Each door has nine horizontal rows of nails embedded in it, and each row has nine nails: nine is the biggest single odd number, and therefore represents the dignity of Emperors. The Chinese science of geomancy, feng shui , ‘wind and water’, was also integral to the construction of the complex. Just as the Emperor was known as Nan Mien, ‘face south’, so too did his capital Beijing. Backed by a semicircle of mountains to the north, to Chinese eyes the city looked south into the agricultural land of the eastern plains. At the very centre of the metropolis, in the Forbidden City, was the throne, around which the whole world was believed to revolve. In this way (in a Chinese version of the Hermetic axiom ‘As above, so below, as below so above’), the organisation of the Middle Kingdom mirrored the celestial symmetry of the heavens, which move in perfect harmony around a central axis, the pole star. As a Chinese saying has it: ‘All the stars in Heaven salute the North’; and ‘All Under Heaven’ paid homage to the Emperor, enthroned in the North.
    The denizens of this city of symbols existed in privileged isolation at the apex of an enormous human pyramid, a land famed for its fecundity, and in Yehonala’s time numbering around four hundred million people. 3 At its base were ‘the stupid people’, the peasants, merchants and artisans. Tradesmen and traders were the lowest class, small in number and treated with contempt (no Manchu would ever consider learning a manual skill, or engaging in trade). China was a largely agrarian society of peasants, using traditional techniques more akin to horticulture than agriculture (even in the last decade of the twentieth century, China was spoken of as being ‘like one giant allotment’). Their task was, quite simply, to produce the food which was the foundation of the society.
    Capping the social pyramid were the elite of Chinese society, the scholar-officials, famous in the west as the mandarins. They possessed every privilege, owned the lion’s share of all land, and enjoyed the greatest influence and prestige, having arrogated to themselves the most vital of tasks in Chinese society–that of governing the vast Celestial Empire. Each of China’s provinces compares in size with a modern European nation state–Sichuan Province is larger than the British Isles and

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