Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang Page B

English and French’ for shelling Taiping troops. The French envoy complained, pointing out that only the French were involved, not the English. Cixi told her diplomats: ‘You may say this is foreigners being petty-minded, but you must also see that they are being exact. In the future when you make a report, do not deviate an iota from the facts.’ She had put her finger on a superannuated Chinese tendency to be imprecise.
    One piece of information that made an impression on her was that individual Chinese lives mattered to the Westerners. This was often reported by Li Hongzhang, who was the commander of Ward and Gordon. With his manicured goatee and narrowed eyes that had seen a great deal, Li, who was an earl, was the classic Confucian gentleman, but he was to evolve into the most renowned of all China’s reformers. At this early stage, through daily dealings with Westerners, he was already learning from them, when most of his colleagues still regarded them as aliens. Towards the end of 1863, Earl Li and Gordon laid siege to the city of Suzhou, famed for its silks and gardens and canals (some called it China’s Venice), and strategically situated near Nanjing, capital of the Taiping. They persuaded eight defending Taiping chiefs to surrender the city, promising them safety and high office in return. In his camp outside the city gate, Earl Li gave a banquet for the chiefs, to which Gordon was not invited. Halfway through the drinking, eight officers came in, each carrying a mandarin’s hat of honour, with a red button on top and a peacock feather sticking up. The officers moved on their knees to the chiefs and offered the hats to them. All at the banquet got to their feet and watched. The chiefs stood up, untied the yellow headscarves they were wearing and were about to take the hats and put them on when, in a split second, eight swords were drawn, and the eight heads were held by their hair in the grip of the officers. Earl Li, who had absented himself from the banquet just before the officers entered, in order not to be present at the killing, had the chiefs killed to prevent potential treachery, as had happened before. Afterwards, his army raced into Suzhou and massacred tens of thousands of Taiping troops who thought they were safe.
    Gordon, who had given the murdered chiefs his word and personally guaranteed their lives, was filled with a righteous wrath and resigned his command of the Ever-victorious Army. Though he could, reluctantly, see Earl Li’s point of view, he felt that as an English officer and Christian gentleman he had to disassociate his name from this act of ‘Asiatic barbarity’.
    Earl Li reported the strong reaction of Gordon to Cixi, as well as the outcry against the killings from the Western diplomats and merchants. Cixi did not comment on the matter, but she could not have failed to view the Westerners with a certain admiration. Confucian ideals also abhorred the killing of the innocent and of those who surrendered. And yet here were the imperial forces committing massacres and behaving no better than the despised Taiping – with the striking exception of the Ever-victorious Army. (Earl Li wrote to a colleague that Gordon’s men ‘can defeat the bandits but will not kill as many as possible, so my army has to be around to assist them’.) Cixi and her circle of officials were shedding the notion that Westerners were ‘barbarians’. In fact, from this time on she seems to have developed a little defensiveness about her own country and its customs.
    Gordon started to work with Earl Li to disband the Ever-victorious Army. This came as a relief to Cixi. She had been thinking about what to do with the Army once the war was over, as this invincible fighting force only followed Gordon and did not take orders from Beijing. In her letter to Prince Gong, Cixi said: ‘If Gordon makes proper arrangements to disband the Army, and send the foreign officers home, then it proves that he is truly being