Day 212: Empress Dowager Cixi

IN SPRING 1852, in one of the periodic nationwide selections for imperial consorts, a sixteen-year-old girl caught the eye of the emperor and was chosen as a concubine. A Chinese emperor was entitled to one empress and as many concubines as he pleased. In the court registry she was entered simply as ‘the woman of the Nala family’, with no name of her own. Female names were deemed too insignificant to be recorded. In fewer than ten years, however, this girl, whose name may have been lost for ever,fn1 had fought her way to become the ruler of China, and for decades – until her death in 1908 – would hold in her hands the fate of nearly one-third of the world’s population. She was the Empress Dowager Cixi (also spelt Tzu Hsi). This was her honorific name and means ‘kindly and joyous’.

She came from one of the oldest and most illustrious Manchu families. The Manchus were a people who originally lived in Manchuria, beyond the Great Wall to the northeast. In 1644, the Ming dynasty in China was overthrown by a peasant rebellion, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself from a tree in the back garden of his palace. The Manchus seized the opportunity to smash across the Great Wall. They defeated the peasant rebels, occupied the whole of China and set up a new dynasty called the Great Qing – ‘Great Purity’. Taking over the Ming capital, Beijing, as their own, the victorious Manchus went on to build an empire three times the size of the Ming empire, at its peak occupying a territory of 13 million square kilometres – compared to 9.6 million today.

The Manchu conquerors, outnumbered by the indigenous Chinese, the Han, by approximately 100:1, imposed their domination initially by brutal means. They forced the Han males to wear the Manchu men’s hairstyle as the most visible badge of submission. The Han men traditionally grew their hair long and put it up in a bun, but the Manchu men shaved off an outer ring of hairs, leaving the centre part to grow and plaiting it into a trailing queue. Anyone who refused to wear the queue was summarily beheaded. In the capital, the conquerors pushed the Han out of the Inner City, to the Outer City, and separated the two ethnic groups by walls and gates.fn2 The repression lessened over the years, and the Han generally came to live a life no worse than that of the Manchus. The ethnic animosity diminished – even though top jobs remained in the hands of the Manchus. Intermarriage was prohibited, which in a family-oriented society meant there was little social intercourse between the two groups. And yet the Manchus adopted much of the Han culture and political system, and their empire’s administration, extending to all corners of the country like a colossal octopus, was overwhelmingly manned by Han officials, who were selected from the literati by the traditional Imperial Examinations that focused on Confucian classics. Indeed, Manchu emperors themselves were educated in the Confucian way, and some became greater Confucian scholars than the best of the Han. Thus the Manchus regarded themselves as Chinese, and referred to their empire as the ‘Chinese’ empire, or ‘China’, as well as the ‘Qing’.

The ruling family, the Aisin-Gioros, produced a succession of able and hard-working emperors, who were absolute monarchs and made all important decisions personally. There was not even a Prime Minister, but only an office of assistants, the Grand Council. The emperors would rise at the crack of dawn to read reports, hold meetings, receive officials and issue decrees. The reports from all over China were dealt with as soon as they arrived, and rarely was any business left undone for more than a few days. The seat of the throne was the Forbidden City. Perhaps the largest imperial palace complex in the world, this rectangular compound covered an area of 720,000 square metres, with a moat of proportional size. It was surrounded by a majestic wall some 10 metres high and nearly 9 metres thick at the base, with a magnificent gate set into each side, and a splendid watchtower above each corner. Almost all the buildings in the compound displayed glazed tiles in a shade of yellow reserved for the court. In sunshine, the sweeping roofs were a blaze of gold.

A district west of the Forbidden City formed a hub for the transportation of coal, bound for the capital. Brought from the mines west of Beijing, it was carried by caravans of camels and mules, wearing tinkling bells. It was said that some 5,000 camels came into Beijing every day. The caravans paused here, and the porters did their shopping from stores whose names were embroidered on colourful banners or gilded on lacquered plaques. The streets were unpaved, and the soft, powdery dust that lay on top in dry weather would turn into a river of mud after a downpour. There was a pervasive reek from a sewage system that was as antiquated as the city itself. Refuse was simply dumped on the side of the roads, left to the scavenging dogs and birds. After their meals, large numbers of vultures and carrion crows would flock into the Forbidden City, perching on its golden roofs and blackening them.

Away from the hubbub lay a network of quiet, narrow alleys known as hu-tong. This is where, on the tenth day of the tenth lunar month in 1835, the future Empress Dowager of China, Cixi, was born. The houses here were spacious, with neatly arranged courtyards, scrupulously tidy and clean, in sharp contrast to the dirty and chaotic streets. The main rooms had doors and windows open to the south to take in the sun, while the north was walled up to fend off the sandy storms that frequently swept the city. The roofs were covered with grey tiles. The colours of roof tiles were strictly stipulated: yellow for the royal palaces, green for the princes, and grey for all others.

~~Empress Dowager Cixi -by- Jung Chang

Day 191: Ace of Spies

If Reilly did marry bigamously after the Russo-Japanese War, the question arises as to how he managed to conceal his second wife’s existence for so long. The most likely explanation is that she was found secreted away in ‘backwater’ locations where he had contacts and connections who would ensure she was well taken care of. Odessa and Port Arthur are two such possibilities. After Russia’s defeat in the war of 1904/05, the Liaotung peninsula became a Japanese possession, eventually becoming part of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Whatever the reality of Reilly’s connections with the Japanese during the war, it is evident that he had, and continued to have, very close business connections with a number of businesses in Japan and her occupied territories. As someone known to the Japanese authorities, Reilly would have had no trouble in accommodating his new spouse in Port Arthur, which after the war was rebuilt and restored by the Japanese. His representative and principal agent in Japan was William Gill, in Narunouchi, Tokyo. Again, Gill would have been well placed to act as conduit and to ensure that Reilly’s wife was well provided for.

Likewise, Alexandre Weinstein became a trusted lieutenant of Reilly’s before the Russo-Japanese War, and remained such for over a quarter of a century. If Reilly did take a second wife, then Weinstein above all would not only have been aware of her, but would more than likely have played a pivotal role in liaising between ‘husband and wife’. When a decade later Reilly joined the Royal Flying Corps, he named his next of kin as his wife, ‘Mrs A. Reilly’, who in the event of his death could be contacted at 120 Broadway, New York City, a business address being run on his behalf at the time by Alexandre Weinstein. Further evidence concerning a possible second marriage is examined in later chapters.

In contrast to the comings and goings of wives, ex-wives and mistresses, one female relationship that survived the test of time was that with his first cousin Felitsia. Born in the Grodno gubernia of Russian Poland, she later moved to Vienna during the closing years of the 1890s. The city’s large Jewish population lived principally in the old quarter, and it was here that Reilly visited Felitsia whenever he could. She was the only member of his immediate family that he kept in touch with after leaving Odessa in 1893, and her existence was kept a closely guarded secret from all who knew him. It was through these visits to Vienna that he made the brief acquaintance of an influential businessman whose precise role in Reilly’s story has since become a source of some controversy.

Josef Mendrochowitz, an Austrian Jew, was born in 1863 and came to St Petersburg in 1904. In partnership with Count Thaddaeus Lubiensky he founded a firm of brokers, Mendrochowitz and Lubiensky, who successfully secured the right to represent Blohm & Voss shortly thereafter. Under the representation contract, Blohm & Voss undertook to pay Mendrochowitz and Lubiensky a commission of 5% on each successful business deal. In Ace of Spies, Robin Bruce Lockhart argues that ‘Mendrochovitch and Lubensky’ were awarded the rights of representation in relation to Blohm & Voss in 1911, as a result of Reilly’s chicanery with the Russian Admiralty. Blohm & Voss archives and Mendrochowitz and Lubiensky’s own business records demonstrate quite clearly that this was not the case. At the time the contract was awarded, Reilly was not even in Russia. According to the St Petersburg Police Department, Reilly first arrived in the city en route from Brussels on 28 January 1905, where he seems to have stayed for a comparatively short period of time before moving on to Vienna. By the summer of 1905 he was back in St Petersburg, this time with the intention of staying on a more or less permanent basis.

Thanks to a chance meeting with George Walford, a British born lawyer, whom he accompanied to St Petersburg’s Warsaw Railway Station on 10 September 1905, an account of his activities at this time have found their way into Ochrana records. Walford was under Ochrana surveillance, and Reilly was watched and followed from 11–29 September as a result of his being seen with him. Why Walford was under surveillance is unclear, although it was routine practice for the Ochrana to keep a watchful eye on foreign citizens, a task they took even more seriously in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War. The surveillance on Reilly yielded nothing of value for the Ochrana, although it is most helpful to us in confirming that on arrival in St Petersburg, Reilly made contact with Mendrochowitz and Lubiensky, and actually lived in their apartment building at 2 Kazanskaya. According to the surveillance report, Reilly also visited the offices of the China Eastern Railway and introduced himself as a telephone supplier. Whether or not he succeeded in making a sale is unknown. Bearing in mind that Ochrana ‘tailers’ often gave their targets nicknames in written reports, Reilly was appropriately referred to as ‘The Broker’.

If Reilly had nothing to do with Mendrochowitz and Lubiensky securing the right to represent Blohm & Voss, did he have any connection or dealings at all with the firm? Details of the firm’s dealings are contained in six volumes of files containing over 1,000 pages of correspondence and records now held by the Hamburg State Archive. In addition to the two partners, there appear to have been four other employees, including deputy manager Jachimowitz, who ran the office in the absence of the partners and was particularly well connected with influential Russian politicians. Reilly’s name is not among those employed by the firm, but is mentioned in letters and invoices concerning his work on behalf of Blohm & Voss, as a freelance broker during the winter of 1908 and the spring of 1909. During this time he was working with Mendrochowitz and Lubiensky, assisting them in marketing a new Blohm & Voss boiler system. Company records show that agents or brokers like Reilly were often used to ‘influence’ people in favour of the company.

~~Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly -by- Andrew Cook

Day 150: Book Excerpt: The War That Ended Peace

Finally, and this is true of our own times as well, we should never underestimate the part played in human affairs by mistakes, muddle, or simply poor timing. The complex and inefficient nature of both the German and the Russian governments meant that the civilian leaders were not fully informed about military plans even when these had political implications. Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian archduke who was assassinated in Sarajevo, had long stood out against those who wanted war to solve Austria-Hungary’s problems. His death, ironically, removed the one man who might have been able to prevent his country from declaring war on Serbia and thus setting the whole chain reaction in motion. The assassination came at the start of the summer holiday period. As the crisis mounted, many statesmen, diplomats and military leaders had already left their capitals. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was bird watching; the French President and Prime Minister were on an extended trip to Russia and the Baltic for the last two weeks of July and frequently out of contact with Paris.
Yet there is a danger in so concentrating on the factors pushing Europe towards war that we may neglect those pulling the other way, towards peace. The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of societies and associations for the outlawing of war and for the promotion of such alternatives as arbitration for settling disputes between nations. Rich men such as Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Nobel donated fortunes to promote international understanding. The world’s labour movements and socialist parties organised themselves into the Second International, which repeatedly passed motions against war and threatened to call a general strike should one break out.
The nineteenth century was an extraordinary time of progress, in science, industry, and education, much of it centred on an increasingly prosperous and powerful Europe. Its peoples were linked to each other and to the world through speedier communications, trade, investment, migration, and the spread of official and unofficial empires. The globalisation of the world before 1914 has been matched only by our own times since the end of the Cold War. Surely, it was widely believed, this new interdependent world would build new international institutions and see the growing acceptance of universal standards of behaviour for nations. International relations were no longer seen, as they had been in the eighteenth century, as a game where if someone won someone else had to lose. Instead, all could win when peace was maintained. The increasing use of arbitration to settle disputes among nations, the frequent occasions when the great powers in Europe worked together to deal with, for example, crises in the decaying Ottoman Empire, the establishment of an international court of arbitration, all seemed to show that, step by step, the foundations were being laid for a new and more efficient way of managing the world’s affairs. War, it was hoped, would become obsolete. It was an inefficient way of settling disputes. Moreover, war was becoming too costly, both in terms of the drain on the resources of the combatants and the scale of the damage that new weapons and technology could inflict. Bankers warned that even if a general war were to start, it would grind to a halt after a few weeks simply because there would be no way of financing it.
Most of the copious literature on the events of 1914 understandably asks why the Great War broke out. Perhaps we need to ask another sort of question: why did the long peace not continue? Why did the forces pushing towards peace – and they were strong ones – not prevail? They had done so before, after all. Why did the system fail this time? One way of getting at an answer is to see how Europe’s options had narrowed down in the decades before 1914.
Imagine our walkers again. They start out, like Europe, on a broad and sunlit plain but they reach forks where they have to choose one way or another. Though they may not realise the implications at the time, they find themselves passing through a valley which gets narrower and may not lead to where they want to go. It might be possible to try to find a better route, but that would require considerable effort – and it is not clear what lies on the other side of the hills hemming in the valley. Or it is still possible to reverse one’s steps, but that can be expensive, time consuming and possibly humiliating. Could the German government, for example, have admitted to itself and the German people that its naval race with Britain had been not only misguided but a colossal waste of money?
This book traces Europe’s path to 1914 and picks out those turning points when its options narrowed. France’s decision to seek a defensive alliance with Russia as a counterbalance to Germany was one, Germany’s decision in the late 1890s to start a naval race with Great Britain another. Britain cautiously mended fences with France and then, in time, with Russia. Yet another key moment came in 1905–6, when Germany tried to break up the new Entente Cordiale in the first crisis over Morocco. The attempt backfired and the two new friends drew closer together and started to hold secret military talks which added another strand to the ties linking Britain to France. Europe’s subsequent serious crises – the Bosnian crisis of 1908, the second Morocco one in 1911, and the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 – added to the layers of resentments, suspicions, and memories which shaped the relations among the great powers. That is the context in which decisions were taken in 1914.

~~The War That Ended Peace -by- Margaret Macmillan