The Porcelain Thief

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How Heshen attained such power and the favor of Qianlong, a man forty years his senior, was an enduring mystery. According to one legend, probably created by Qianlong’s critics, the pale, feminine Heshen reminded the emperor of his first lover, a concubine of his father, Yongzheng. In some tellings, Qianlong and Heshen also became lovers. In others, the old emperor, already mentally insolvent with age, was inexplicably taken with Heshen and showered him with affection and confidence, especially when Heshen’s son married one of Qianlong’s favorite daughters.

Whatever the case, Heshen took full advantage of his lofty perch. He filled the bureaucracy with family members and henchmen, and they stole and extorted public funds on a grand scale for more than two decades. Although Heshen’s clique was not the only corrupt one, it was one of the most powerful and, because of his most-favored status with the emperor, could act with impunity. Even when Qianlong abdicated his throne so as not to serve longer than his revered grandfather, Kangxi, Heshen remained the de facto ruler, and his rivals—even Qianlong’s son, Emperor Jiaqing—were powerless to stop him. It wasn’t until Qianlong died that Jiaqing, a progressive ruler facing the unenviable task of reforming a nearly bankrupt country wracked with rebellion, could finally prosecute Heshen and his cronies, and Heshen was forced to commit suicide.

So the Opium War wasn’t the sole event that precipitated the collapse of the Qing empire, but it was the most prominent in the narrative that the Chinese had of their country, containing all the ingredients—a foreign incursion overpowering righteous Chinese martyrs—to deflect attention from the self-inflicted wounds, discourage self-examination, and stoke nationalism at the same time.

The Qing court also had to contend with threats outside the palace walls. After the Opium War, a failed imperial examination candidate in southern China happened to read a Christian missionary tract. After digesting the ideas of divine creation and salvation, spiritual warfare, and the apocalypse, he claimed to have received a vision from God anointing him as “the true ordained son of Heaven,” arming him with a “golden seal and sword,” and instructing him to descend to the world to enlighten and save its people. This man, Hong Xiuquan, baptized himself one night in his courtyard and set out to preach his homegrown, warped version of charismatic Christianity. Hong traveled the countryside, attracting the disaffected and disillusioned and sowing the seeds for revolt.

By 1850 Hong had accumulated enough followers to earn the attention of the Qing court. The attempts to suppress him and his sect—which he dubbed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom—grew into a conflagration that lasted fourteen years, claimed thirty million lives, and required a multinational force to extinguish. At its height, the Taiping had more than one million followers and conquered much of central and southern China, including the Ming capital of Nanjing, where they dynamited its famed porcelain tower and slaughtered forty thousand Manchu “demons” within the city walls.

Meanwhile the Qing had backslid on concessions from the Opium War. Foreign powers—foremost the British—sought even more expansive trade opportunities in China and responded to China’s diplomatic missteps with gunboats, sparking a second Opium War in 1856. The Qing court, preoccupied with fighting the Taiping, could muster little defense and made further concessions, opening more treaty ports, including one in Taiwan, allowing for foreign embassies in Beijing, and permitting unrestricted travel on the Yangtze River and in the Chinese interior. In the war’s final act, the Imperial Gardens were destroyed as reprisals for the imprisonment, torture, and execution of a British envoy and his entourage. Over three days, French and British troops burned and looted the grounds, which contained countless masterpieces of Chinese art and antiquities dating back to the very first Chinese dynasties, as well as literary works and records. A royal engineer who was part of the British forces wrote:

We went out, and, after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a vandal-like manner most valuable property which [could] not be replaced for four millions. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.

Only the stone structures of Castiglione’s Western-style villas survived. This complex of palaces had been five times the size of the Forbidden City and is regarded as one of the most magnificent lost treasures in history. A full accounting of the destroyed and stolen artifacts was never completed, as many of the records burned with the buildings; but many of the imperial objects—especially porcelains, which the foreign armies targeted—in Western museums and collections and circulating on the auction market today originated from those sackings, a cultural disaster that still resonates with the Chinese.

As the Qing tried to restore its empire, complicated by other rebellions, plagues, and disease, some progressive statesmen sought to modernize China. These “self-strengtheners” advanced frameworks for the country to adopt Western weaponry and military technology, incorporate modern science, and develop diplomatic strategies. The vision for a reformed China—boasting a healthy mix of traditional Chinese elements with Western ideas and technology—was there. Now it just needed the support of a strong central government to make it a reality.

But inside the Forbidden City, palace intrigues continued. This time it was a concubine—with whom all Chinese rulers consorted except for one, the Ming emperor Hongzhi—at the center, an exceptionally ambitious one who managed to attain real power. Cixi was the mother of all dragon ladies, born to an official family in Anhui, and who journeyed to Beijing as a teenager where she was selected as a concubine for Qianlong’s great-grandson, Xianfeng. Concubines were segmented into ranks, which determined the allotments of food, clothing, jewelry, cash stipends, and handmaidens they received. Cixi entered the palace as a low-rank concubine but ascended quickly after giving birth to Xianfeng’s only son, and when the child reached his first birthday, she was elevated to the second rank, with only the empress above her.

Xianfeng died shortly after the Second Opium War. Eight ministers were appointed to advise his heir, five-year-old Tongzhi, and Cixi was elevated to empress dowager with the expectation that she and the empress would cooperatively help the young emperor as he matured. But Cixi had by then gained a firm grasp of court machinations and quickly maneuvered to consolidate power. Following the coup, and after executing “only” three of the appointed ministers, Cixi issued an imperial edict affirming her as the sole decision maker.

Tongzhi remained the nominal emperor, but Cixi ruled from “behind the curtain,” as she would for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. Tongzhi was an unhappy, stifled young man who died at age nineteen, officially of smallpox, possibly of syphilis. His consort died a few months later, either by committing suicide or because Cixi had starved her to death. She was rumored to have been pregnant with Tongzhi’s son at the time. With no heir apparent, Cixi installed her nephew, Guangxu, as the new emperor.

For many Chinese, Cixi’s legacy, beyond her overprotectiveness, vindictiveness, xenophobia, and paranoia, was excess. Instead of imposing austerity while the government battled the Taiping and other existential crises, she oversaw the production of vast amounts of brightly colored porcelain from the imperial kilns for personal use. To commemorate each of her fiftieth, sixtieth, and seventieth birthdays, she commissioned dinnerware sets and matching boxes. Unsatisfied with her tomb, she ordered it reconstructed from scratch during the First Sino-Japanese War. She was said to have diverted funds designated for modernizing China’s outdated navy—which had been embarrassed again and again in engagements with foreign forces—to pay for the renovation and expansion of the Summer Palace, which became her personal retreat.

FAR REMOVED FROM BEIJING, Liu built the finest residence in Xingang, a sprawling complex of stone buildings arranged around a courtyard and encircled by a brick wall. The estate fronted the dirt road to Jiujiang and featured three pine trees, traditional symbols of longevity, friendship, and steadfastness, under which Liu often set out a bucket of cool water and jars of herbal medicine for travelers resting in the shade during the sweltering summers.

He married the daughter of a rich peasant family that had made its money selling Yangtze River fish. The Yangtze was full of fish back then, shad and herring and Chinese sturgeon, an ancient species that grew to more than ten feet long and a thousand pounds and is now nearly extinct. Each spring fish migrated up the river past Jiangxi to lay their eggs. The fertilized eggs hatched as they floated back down the river. By the time the fry reached Jiujiang, they were transparent needles, and the patriarch of the Yao clan went out around the fifth day of the fifth lunar month and collected these fry, which he sold to buyers from all over the country. His business grew until it became an area industry, but the man remained so thrifty that he would eat three bites of rice for every piece of salted black bean.