Dowager Empress Cixi, Part I: Sex, Drugs, and Empire

Picture the Scene: It is the year 1850. China’s young Xianfeng Emperor (age 20) needs a bride. Sixty young women are brought to Beijing’s Forbidden City as potential candidates. Among them, the well-educated and ambitious 15-year-old Lady Yehenara. These 60 candidates are carefully examined. The Emperor’s mother will choose one to be his bride, and the rest will be his concubines. (Mother knows best, after all.) Much to Yehenara’s disappointment, she is not chosen as Empress, and is relegated to the status of low-class concubine. Having been passed over as Empress, Yehenara knew that her only hope of raising her status in the imperial harem was to give birth to the Emperor’s son. Not satisfied to languish and wait for the emperor to summon her to his bed, Yehenara takes matters into her own hands.

 What. A. Babe.

Official Portrait of the Xiangfeng Emperor. Who couldn't love that face?

            This is the story of how a concubine became the behind-the-scenes ruler of China for almost half a century, and possibly the last true imperial power in China. Unlike some of the other women who have appeared (or will appear) in this blog, Cixi (pronounce "sue-she", as Yehenara is later known) does appear in the history books – it would be absurd if she didn’t, considering she was the de facto ruler of China during some of the most pivotal moments of the 19^th century – but the books tend to leave out the best parts of her biography, and focus on her as the Machiavellian Dragon Lady who refused to reform China at its peril, leading to its ultimate collapse. To my mind, the story is a bit more complicated than that. Cixi was fiercely conservative and her unwillingness to allow reform may not have been stubbornness or stupidity, as is usually depicted. She knew she needed to protect China from Western incursion and she tried to do so in the best way she knew how. She worried that reform would only deepen the European toehold on China. Let’s examine this, shall we?

            Yehenara, as a concubine, had limited access to the Xianfeng Emperor. During her first two years in the Forbidden City, she only saw him once: on his wedding day. There was no way for Yehenara to catch his eye or impress him. Daily life in the palace was run by an army of eunuchs, who had greater access to the emperor than nearly anyone else. Yehenara’s luck began to change when she enlisted the aid of her equally ambitious eunuch servant to catch the Emperor’s eye.

How? Easy. Her servant helped her curry favor with the Chief Eunuch, by presenting him with the “engagement gift” that Yehenara had received from the “emperor” upon her arrival to the Forbidden City. One of the Chief Eunuch’s daily duties was to present the Emperor with a “menu” of his concubines so that the Son of Heaven could make his evening selection. After Yehenara and her servant greased the wheels of the machine, the Chief Eunuch started to talk up Yehenara’s beauty to the Emperor until the Emperor finally summoned her.

              In theory, concubines were not supposed to get pregnant, BUT Yehenara sufficiently impressed the emperor in one night to become his exclusive lover for three months. (Dayum!) Some historians speculate that since the eunuchs were always on hand during the Emperor’s nightly romps, they may have given Yehenara special instruction on the Emperor’s preferences in order to give her an edge.

            As often happens during these sorts of situations, Yehenara became pregnant, and gave birth to the Emperor’s first son in 1856 – drawing the ire of the childless Empress and the other women at court. (The Xianfeng Emperor had a lot of sex, but not many children to show for it.) Yehenara got her wish, and became the most powerful woman at court, second only to the Empress, but it came with some costs: such as the fact that she was not allowed to raise her own son, and was once more cloistered in the harem.

            But this did not keep Yehenara down for long!

            Outside of the harem, the sickly Xianfeng Emperor was dealing with a fraught international situation. To make a long story short (and given how much I love diplomatic history, I could make this a very loooong story), the Chinese and British governments were acting like toddlers. That is to say, China did not want to share its toys (wealth) and so the British tried to distract China with a “better toy” (Opium). China broke Britain’s toy (Opium), so Britain hit China, hard (with gunboats), and made China promise to share its toys.

            Historical theories abound about why Anglo-Chinese relations broke down in such a bad way, but I think the most logical and compelling argument is that the two governments simply did not understand each other and could not see the situation from each other’s point of view. From the British perspective, their sovereign was every bit as great as China’s and the British government deserved to be treated as equals, rather than inferiors, and China’s refusal to allow for a British embassy was arrogance and foolishness. From China’s perspective, they were the greatest Empire on the planet and had been for pretty much ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY and they conducted their international business by acquiring tribute kingdoms, not embassies and ambassadors. The European style of international relations was completely unheard of in China. Besides, Britain didn’t have any trade goods that the Chinese wanted, so why should China increase trade with them?  

            The poor, tired Xianfeng Emperor had to deal with increasing demands from Europeans to increase access to trade in China, a large rebellion (Taiping Rebellion) in Southern China, and continuing problems with Opium addiction (courtesy of Britain) throughout the country. As he grew sicker, and his problems more complicated, he relied more and more heavily on his educated consort, Yehenara, for advice, even requesting her to stay by his side when important court visitors came to call – a very large gesture in a government where women were typically neither seen nor heard.

            In 1861, eleven years after Yehenara had first come to the Forbidden City, she and her six-year-old son were summoned to the side of the dying Xianfeng Emperor. The Emperor named his son as his successor, giving him the name Tong Zu Emperor: ruling together. He named Yehenara as the boy Emperor’s regent.

            From this point forward known as Empress Dowager Cixi, our heroine inherits a China still very much in crisis.

Sources:

I will post a more detailed list of sources after my second post on Cixi, but most of my information comes from Episode 2 of the Smithsonian special on the Forbidden City. It's on Netflix!

Teenage Jewish Paratroopers: Hannah Szenes

When I took Jewish History in college, I decided to do my final project on the contributions of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian Mandate to World War II. (Sexy, right?) My research brought me to a group of paratroopers who dropped behind enemy lines in Europe, among them, a young Hungarian woman named Hannah Szenes.

It took a lot of nagging on the part of the proto-Israeli community in Palestine (the Yishuv from here on out) to get this team of Teenage Jewish Paratroopers assembled. On the surface, Jewish settlers would seem like the perfect weapon for the British to use against Hitler – who had more reason to hate Hitler? The problem for the British was that prior to the war (and presumably once the war was over) Jewish settlers in Israel were avowedly anti-British and it would be “acutely embarrassing” if the British trained Jews to fight against Nazis and then those same Jews turned around to fight the British once the war was over. (Isn’t history charming?)

The British had every reason to believe that the Yishuv hated their guts. Because the Yishuv did  - overwhelmingly – hate their guts. If you recall from the post on Gertrude Bell, the mandate of Palestine was created after World War I to be administered by the British, which turned out to be a governmental nightmare because both Zionists and Arab nationalists felt that the land rightfully belonged to them, and neither group wanted the British to be there. In order to sooth the violence between the communities, the British clamped down a series of limitations on Jewish immigration (“White Papers”) – at a time when Jewish refugees were pouring out of Europe only to be turned away from Britain, the U.S., and Palestine. In one particularly inflammatory incident, a boatful of refugees was turned away from Palestine: the boat sank and the refugees died. (Any of this ringing a bell?)

So, even though the Yishuv hated the Nazis more, they still felt that the British were complicit in the murder of millions of European Jews.

In 1940, at the age of nineteen, Hannah Szenes reflected on the Yishuv’s predicament as “a tiny country between two formidable adversaries: one the representative of anti-Semitism, the other the author of the White Paper. Needless to say, we have but one road: to side with the British against Germany.” A year earlier, young Hannah had migrated from Hungary to Palestine alone, leaving behind her mother and brother in Europe. She had lived a fairly privileged, sheltered, and assimilated life in Hungary, but like many young, middle class Jews of her generation, was drawn to the Zionist project. She was a prolific diarist and poet and so she left behind her passionate frustrations that the British would not assemble a Jewish team to send back to Europe.

Why did the British change their minds and start deploying Jewish troops? Desperation – the same thing that had dropped them in the boiling pot of Palestine stew in the first place. In 1941, the British faced dire circumstances. France was under occupation and its colonies in the Middle East and Africa had come under Vichy rule. Rommel was advancing. The Soviet Union and United States wouldn’t join the war until later in the year and a pro-Nazi coup had taken control of Iraq, threatening to cut off access to Britain’s oil supply. The British timidly accepted Jewish help on covert missions in the neighborhood (mainly Vichy Syria) but remained reluctant to send Jews to Europe until assembling their team of paratroopers in 1942.

The British rationale behind the mission, to me, remains enigmatic. Ostensibly, the team was to sabotage Nazi anti-aircraft artillery and aid Yugoslavian partisans for the British – while also assisting Zionist cells and rescuing Jews behind their British commanders’ backs. The risks of the mission were high, and the chances of success, extremely low – but Hannah Szenes volunteered anyway and was duly accepted.

Szenes’ comrades – all of similar background and age – describe the twenty-three-year-old as fearless, feisty, and passionate, often impatient with British delays on the mission. Shortly after the team dropped in Yugoslavia, the Nazis invaded Hungary – Szenes’ homeland. For her, this was the last straw.

Scenes, in uniform, with her brother.

The night of May 12, 1944 Yoel Palgi, another Hungarian-born paratrooper, recalls sitting around the fire with his comrades. Szenes rose abruptly, apparently agitated and asked Palgi to walk with her. As they walked, Szenes unburdened herself, revealing that she could no longer rest easy awaiting British orders in Yugoslavia, knowing that millions of Jews – her mother among them – were in peril across the border. She disclosed her plans to defy her British military orders, and proceed on a Jewish rescue mission. He recalls her saying, “It’s better to die and free our conscience than to return with the knowledge that we didn’t even try.”  Palgi agreed to defy orders as well, and they arranged to meet in Budapest. The next day, May 13, 1944, they crossed separately into occupied Hungary. Nazi authorities captured them both shortly thereafter.

In captivity, when Szenes refused to reveal the code for her British radio, the Gestapo arrested her mother, Catherine Szenes. Hannah’s convictions did not waver. Unexpectedly – albeit tragically – reunited, the mother and daughter caught glimpses of each other and exchanged snatches of conversation during their time detained in the same prison. In November of 1944, the Nazis executed Hannah by firing squad.

She allegedly refused a blindfold.

No matter how you slice it, there is something remarkable about a person (male or female, old or young) sacrificing themselves in this way – but what I find particularly fascinating as a historian is the way that Szenes was canonized in Israeli national memory soon after her death.

On the surface, the relationship between Israel and the Holocaust looks simple. In the history of the modern world, perhaps, even, the whole history of Judaism, no single menace threatened the Jews as much as the Third Reich, which nearly destroyed European Jewry. This catastrophe seemed to prove the Zionist theory right: Europe was no home for the Jews. The guilt of the Western world became the midwife of the State of Israel, established in 1948. As the Jewish state, it is Israel’s responsibility to memorialize the Holocaust, maybe even boasting the heritage of survival.

One of many examples of the Zionist narrative of strength.

The narrative accompanying the Holocaust and the war, however, is not so simple, because the reality was far more complicated. The Yishuv’s involvement in the war was marked by frustration and impotence. Unable to rescue European Jews under official auspices, the Yishuv had to satisfy itself with illegal immigration operations. From this, developed a narrative of blame. The British were to blame for imposing the White Paper, which kept endangered Jews out of Palestine. The Allies in general were to blame for appeasing Germany for so long, and for allowing the genocide to continue by not bombing Auschwitz or the train tracks leading to it. Even survivors, to some extent, were to blame for not standing up against the Germans, thereby giving into stereotypes of the weak, impotent European Jew in direct conflict to the cult of strength idealized by Jewish settlers. Blame went hand in hand with tragedy: millions of Jews suffered and died. In some Israeli narratives the face of tragedy became Hannah Szenes: the vivacious, Zionist girl who willingly sacrificed her life to save her fellow Jews.

Szenes is the perfect hero for Israel. Her voice reaches from beyond the grave, revealing not only her dedication to the Zionist cause, but also her ambiguous feelings towards the British. In her diaries, the Nazis were an implicit enemy, and the British, explicit and she died in defiance of both: standing up to the Nazis while disobeying her British orders.

The participation of Szenes and two other women in the mission also offered a valuable narrative for the fledgling state. The three female participants, all of whom perished, represented Zionist strength and determination. They also served as role models for Israeli women, who faced mandatory active duty before women in much of the rest of the world were permitted to do so.

The fallen parachutists became iconic, offering a shared narrative space for Holocaust survivors and pre-Holocaust settlers. Israelis chose militants as their national World War Two heroes, rather than Holocaust survivors, perhaps because the willingness of citizens to fight and die was immediately essential to the state’s survival in hostile territory. The voluntary sacrifice of the parachutists is compatible with the Israeli narrative of military strength and resistance, resonating with citizens who still live with mandatory military service, some feeling as if they live under constant threat of annihilation.

Sources:

Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. Perfect Heroes : the World War II Parachutists and the

            Making of Israeli Collective Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

            2010.

Palgi, Yoel. Into the Inferno: the Memoir of a Jewish Paratrooper Behind Nazi Lines.

 New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Szenes, Hannah. Her Life and Diary. Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2004.

War Cabinet of Great Britain. Report by the Right Hon. Oliver Lyttelton, M.P., On His

 Period of Office as Minister of State, 1942. London: The National Archives.

War Cabinet of Great Britain. Reports for the Month of June 1941 for the Dominions,

 India, Burma, and the Colonies, Protectorates, and Mandated Territories, 1941.

War Cabinet of Great Britain. Formation of a Jewish Force to Participate in Operations

 in Europe, 1944. London: The National Archives.

Boadicea

I have always loved female heroes – so much, that as a child I became inadvertently sexist in my choice of reading materials. If there was not an immediately obvious strong female lead, I quickly lost interest in the book. This means I was slow on the uptake for Harry Potter and did not appreciate Lord of the Rings until I was seventeen. But warrior queens, girls who played with swords and did archery, girls who disguised as boys to go fight – I couldn’t get enough. To be real, I still eat that stuff up. Given my prejudices and my adolescent pride in my Celtic heritage, it should be no surprise that I loved Boadicea – the leader of the Iceni tribe, who led a revolt against the Romans. (Oh, those pesky Romans.)

A statue of Boadicea in London - a town she is famous for burning down.

Like anyone whose claim to fame is resisting a foreign invader (see last week’s post on Nzinga), there is quite a lot of mythologizing about her. So, let’s start with the backdrop.

Between 55 and 54 BCE, Julius Caesar had begun incursions into Britain, kicking off centuries of Roman attempts to control the Isle of Britain. The Britain that Rome encountered was not a unified state – or even a couple of unified states. It was home to numerous Celtic tribes that often warred with each other, and seldom united in the face of a common enemy (such as Rome).

Although Boadicea is usually portrayed as a heroic defender of Britishness or Celticness from the pesky Romans, her beef with them started as a property dispute – that escalated quickly. Her husband, King of the Iceni Tribe, had left his kingdom to his daughters, ceremonially also naming the Roman Emperor as one of his heirs. The Romans misinterpreted this gesture as permission to annex the kingdom, which they duly did.

When Boadicea protested the (probably willful) misinterpretation of her husband’s will, the Roman’s responded by flogging her and raping her daughters. (Like I said, it escalated quickly.) Boadicea was not the only Celt who had a bone to pick with the Romans, so she conspired with some of the neighboring tribes and in 60 CE started a revolt against the Romans. It was especially successful or long-lasting – but it caused a lot of damage. In the words of historian Peter Salway, “She swept through southern Britain, burning Colchester, London, and Verulamium (near St. Albans), torturing every Roman or Roman sympathizer she could catch, and inflicting devastating defeats on the few Roman units that had been left in that part of the country.” (And people call women the “gentle” sex.)

It is not exactly clear how Boadicea died, because Roman historians who reported on the revolt disagree. Tacitus – who clearly admired Boadicea – claimed that she poisoned herself when it became clear that the Romans were closing in while Dio claims that she conveniently got sick and died.

Although Boadicea is a subject of fascination for many - and has been the subject of numerous poems, songs, stories, paintings, statues, even a videogame character in Civilization II, Civilization IV, and Civilization V – there is very little reliable information about her. I could easily spend a full blog post pontificating about this fascination and the myths that surround her, but I will let you look into that yourself. For now, enjoy this charming pop song about her exploits.

The Oxford History of Britain, 2010. Edited by Kenneth O. Morgan. The relevant chapter on Roman Britain was written by Peter Salway

Historic UK

Wikipedia