Emperor of China

“ The rulers of China have been of cognate races, more or less imbued with the same generic ideas as the Chinese themselves, and with tastes akin to theirs. How this succession of dynasties, each established by violence, has coexisted with the continuity of the grand national idea of the emperor being the Son of Heaven can only be explained by the very practical character of the race, who accept the usurper as divinely appointed from the moment he has proved himself successful. ”

“ It is greatly to be regretted that when that very amiable, gentle-looking young man, now Czar of Russia, was in China, he and the young Emperor of China did not meet. Both apparently have aspirations, both are weighted by a weight of empire no one man can sustain single-handed, both surrounded by powerful, unscrupulous men, who will not hesitate to wield their well-intentioned and apparently sincere nominal rulers to their own advantage, as also possibly to the destruction of those nominal sovereigns. ”

“ They govern their states according to their own pleasure, none having any right to meddle with their affairs. They acknowledge as sovereign only the Emperor of China. Whenever there arise differences among them, they appeal to Peking. Instead of levelling lances at each other, as used to be done in the middle age of Europe, among its little sovereigns, so warlike and so turbulent, they always submit with respect to the decision of the Court of Peking, whatever it may be. ”

“ Why the whole brittle pomp and majesty of government might falter. Without the pageantry of Imperial functions, the prestige of China, beyond doubt, would shrink—this in addition to the tawdriness of their ornate costumes and uniforms and the tarnished appearance of their jewels and their medals. They shone by the reflected light of the Emperor. Without him, the Court was without brilliance. An Emperor should not weep tears of blood, he should tower like Tai Shan, the Sacred Mountain before which men of many faiths bow in reverence. ”

“ Because the Emperor of China, who reigns over it, does not like travellers to go there.
It is divided by high and snowy mountains from the rest of Tartary. When a traveller has passed over these mountains, he finds on the other side Chinese officers, who inquire what business he has come upon. If he have come only to wander about the country, he is desired to go home again; because the Chinese are afraid lest strangers should send spies, and then ARMIES—to conquer their empire. ”

“ If China has been able to preserve herself in the midst of the flux and reflux of a thousand revolutions, to save herself from her own wrecks, to triumph over her own defects, and to subjugate even her conquerors, she owes it to this virtue which, raising itself from the humblest citizen to the Son of heaven seated upon the imperial throne, animates all the hearts with a sacred fire, of which Nature herself provides the nourishment and eternalizes the duration. The Emperor is the father of the state; two hundred million men, who regard themselves as his children, compose his immense family ”

“ She must, indeed, have been a person of no ordinary character, who could have raised herself, by her talents and her fascinations, to a seat upon the throne of the Emperor of China. Her early history is little recorded, but her influence was secretly known and felt in almost every part of the empire, even before she obtained the short-lived honours of an empress. ”

“ The whole Chinese administrative system is based on the doctrine of filial piety, in its most extended signification of duty to natural parents and also to political parents, as the Emperor's magistrates are to this day familiarly called. China is thus one vast republic of innumerable private families, or petty imperia, within one public family, or general imperium; the organisation consists of a number of self-producing and ever-multiplying independent cells, each maintaining a complete administrative existence apart from the central power. ”

“ It is with the same disregard of truth that it has been said, that the Chinese shut themselves up in their houses when the Emperor goes out, and that those he happens to meet on his road turn their backs with their face to the ground, to escape the penalty of death. ”

“ Turning southwards from the top of the wall you look beyond the Chinese City, which is nothing but a walled suburb, to the gleaming white walls of the Temple of Heaven, half buried in the trees. There each year the emperor comes to offer sacrifices to his ancestors, the crowning expression of China's truest religion, ancestor worship. ”

“ China was at that time under the leadership of a statesman of marked ability, the famous Li Hung Chang, who, from being made viceroy of a province in 1870, had risen to be the prime minister of the empire. At the head of the empire was a woman, the Dowager Empress Tsu Tsi, who had usurped the power of the young emperor and ruled the state. ”

“ Of course in the case of unusually able men, such as the second and fourth rulers of the present dynasty, their influence is more felt than that of less energetic rulers; but the throne of China is so hedged in with ceremonials and so padded with official etiquette that unless its occupant be a man of supreme ability he cannot fail to fall under the guidance of his ministers and favorites. In governing so large a realm, of course it is necessary for the emperor to delegate his authority to numerous officers who are regarded as his agents and representatives in carrying out the imperial will. ”

“ In Marco Polo's time the middle door of the great portal was never opened save to admit the emperor, and that was still true a few months ago, but last winter a day came when the bars rolled back, and there entered no emperor, no ruler, but the representative of the People's Assembly, and then a placard was posted announcing that hereafter the door was open to every one, for all China belonged to the people. For a matter-of-fact man the Chinese has a very dramatic way of doing things. ”

“ We cannot hope that any effort of ours or of the emperor will suffice to change at once the character and habits of a people, or even of the population of a city. But the last war has shown that with us it rests to bring at any time the pretensions of the Chinese rulers down to a nearer level with their military power ”

“ Impartial history and posterity will pronounce him not only a patriot emperor, but also a patriot reformer—as mentally sound and sane as any emperor who ever sat on the throne of China. He may be looked upon as a most remarkable historical character of the Manchu Dynasty from the fact that he was singled out by an all-wise Providence to be the pioneer of the great reform movement in China at the threshold of the twentieth century. ”

“ Moreover, new-Chinese, Chinese- veneered, and half-Chinese states, recognizing their own responsibilities, now interposed themselves as "buffers" or barriers between the Emperor and the unadulterated barbarians; these hybrid states themselves were quite as formidable to the imperial power as the displaced barbarians had formerly been. Hence, as we have seen, the pitiful flight from his metropolis of one Emperor after the other; the rise of great and wealthy persons outside the former limited sacred circle ”

“ The ruler of Tsin conceived the insane idea of establishing a dynasty, which should extend from the beginning to the end of time. With this view, he collected and burnt all the records of previous ages, and buried alive four hundred and sixty learned men, wishing to make posterity believe that the dominion of the world commenced with himself, the first universal emperor of China. The object of obliterating all remembrance of antiquity was, however, defeated by the subsequent discovery of the books of Confucius, in the wainscot of an old house ”

“ Ming Huang found his voice. "Let me die with you, that we need never be separated!"
"No! No!" she cried. "Help me to be brave! You must live, in order that when these tumultuous days are over, China will still be China, as it has ever been, as it will ever be. Your people need you to remold a crumbling Empire. Be brave, My Emperor. Rest in the knowledge that I understand. It will be harder for you to live, than to go with me. But, O My Emperor, wherever you are I shall be near. You will hear my voice in the trees, or in the sweet breeze that drifts into your room from the garden. ”

“ The letters from the emperor of China, to the viceroys, governors, eunuchs, and lieutenants, are conveyed on post-horses, which are distinguished by cut tails, and these are disposed at regular stations, all over the empire, almost like the posts among the Arabs. In China, every man, from the emperor to the meanest of the people, makes water standing [8] ; and for this purpose, persons of dignity have gilded hollow canes, a cubit long, to convey their water to a distance. ”

“ The "sublime" emperor, the supreme head of the great realm of China and its hundreds of millions of people, dwells in a magnificence and seclusion unknown to the monarchs of other lands. His palace enclosure within the city of Peking, the "Purple Forbidden City," as it is called, covers over half a square mile of ground, and is surrounded by a wall forty feet high and more than forty feet thick. Within this sacred enclosure the Chinese ideas of beauty and magnificence have been developed to the fullest extent, and the emperor resides in unapproachable grandeur and state. ”

“ During the past forty years her position with regard to the more advanced nations of the world has been entirely changed. She has entered into treaties with them upon equal terms; but I do not think her ministers and people have yet looked this truth fairly in the face, so as to realize the fact that China is only one of many independent nations in the world, and that the 'beneath the sky,' over which her emperor has rule, is not all beneath the sky, but only a certain portion of it which is defined on the earth's surface and can be pointed out upon the map. ”

“ Such absurdity could not possibly be entertained by Chinese reason. So it is a first article of China’s political creed that the emperor, as well as Heaven, is lord and master of all the gods, and delegates this dignity to his mandarins, each in his jurisdiction. With them then rests the decision which of the gods are entitled to receive the people’s worship, and which are not. It is the imperial government which deifies disembodied souls of men, and also divests them of their divine rank. ”

“ But probably we shall some day know how much the Empress has used for her private pleasures, according to the recent indictment of her by the one great incorruptible Viceroy, Chang-chih-tung, and how much has been absorbed by Li Hung-chang, and all the army of Palace eunuchs and hangers-on.
The Chinese are a people of traders, and patient; they look on, and say mentally, "No belong my pigeon," that is, "Politics are not my business." But they dislike the Empress; they know the young Emperor has been used merely as a puppet ”

“ In every other respect the amusements of the capital of China appear to be of a low and trifling nature, neither suited to the affected gravity of the government nor to the generally supposed state of civilization among the people.
The old Emperor, as he observed to Lord Macartney, seldom partook of such amusements. Considering, indeed, all the circumstances connected with the reign of the present dynasty on the throne, the government of an empire of such vast magnitude, stored with an almost incalculable population, must necessarily be a task of inconceivable vigilance and toil ”

“ The empire became attenuated by external attack and internal division. But, to use tho phrase of the Chinese historians, "after long abiding disunion, union revived." The strong and capable man always appears in one form or another, and the Chinese people, impressed with a belief in both the divine mission of their emperor and also in the value of union, welcome with acclaim the advent of the prince who will restore their favorite and ideal system of one-man government. ”

“ Never in the history of China was the nation more illustrious, nor its power more widely felt, than under his sovereignty. During the first twenty years of his reign Sung kept up a resistance against his Kublai Khan emperior. authority. Their last emperor Ping-ti, seeing his cause lost, drowned himself in the sea. The Sung dynasty, which had ruled southern China 320 years, despite its misfortunes is accounted one of the great dynasties of China. During its sway arts and literature were cultivated and many eminent writers flourished. ”

“ All these struggles raged round the capital, for each of the princes wanted to secure full power and to become emperor. Thus the border regions remained relatively undisturbed. Their population suffered much less from the warfare than the unfortunate people in the neighbourhood of the central government. For this reason there took place a mass migration of Chinese from the centre of the empire to its periphery. This process, together with the shifting of the frontier peoples, is one of the most important events of that epoch. ”

“ The Undersigned has now stated and explained to the Chinese Minister, without reserve, the causes of complaint on the part of Great Britain; the reparation which Great Britain demands, and the nature of the measures which the British officer commanding the Expedition has been instructed in the first instance to take. The British Government fervently hopes that the wisdom and spirit of Justice for which The Emperor is famed in all parts of the World, will lead the Chinese Government to see the equity of the foregoing demands ”