Katharine Carl - With The Empress Dowager

With The Empress Dowager

Katharine Carl's writings of her time in China provide a unique and intimate assessment of the Empress Dowager Cixi. In the book's introduction, Katharine Carl says she wrote the book because "After I returned to America, I was constantly seeing in the newspapers (and hearing of) statements ascribed to me which I never made." These statements were usually at the expense of the Dowager's reputation, and Carl felt strongly enough about it to defend the Empress Dowager in writing and to try to dispel an incorrect image of Cixi that still lingers today.

In her book, Katharine Carl describes the Empress Dowager Cixi as a kind and considerate woman for her station. Dowager Cixi, though shrewd, had great presence, charm, and graceful movements resulting in "an unusually attractive personality." She loved dogs and had a kennel maintained by eunuchs at the Summer Palace where she had "some magnificent specimens of Pekingese pugs and of a sort of Skye terrier." She did not like cats and some of the eunuchs who had cats made sure to keep them "within rigid bounds, on no condition allowing them to come within Her Majesty's ken." Dowager Cixi enjoyed flowers and the staff of the Summer Palace ensured the rooms and courtyards were kept properly dressed with cut flowers.

Katharine Carl described Cixi as a very loyal person, saying of her retinue: "Among these is a Chinese woman who nursed Her Majesty through a long illness, about twenty-five years since, and saved her life by giving her mother's milk to drink. Her Majesty, who never forgets a favor, has always kept this woman in the Palace. Being a Chinese, she had bound feet. Her Majesty, who cannot bear to see them even, had her feet unbound and carefully treated, until now she can walk comfortably. Her Majesty has educated the son, who was an infant at the time of her illness, and whose natural nourishment she partook of. This young man is already a Secretary in a good yamen (government office)."

Carl described Cixi as enjoying boating on the lake at the Summer Palace, walks through the gardens and grounds of the Palace (actually the Imperial family rode in sedan chairs so the eunuchs did the majority of the walking), and presentations of Chinese opera in the Summer Palace Opera house. Dowager Cixi smoked Chinese water pipes as well as European cigarettes through a cigarette holder. At an age of 69, Dowager Cixi was in sufficiently good physical shape that when providing a tour of the Summer Palace Opera House to Katharine Carl, Dowager Cixi "mounted the steep and difficult steps with as much ease and lightness as I did, and I had on comfortable European shoes, while she wears the six-inch-high Manchu sole in the middle of her foot, and must really walk as if on stilts."

Carl's experiences with the Dowager Empress are further detailed by Muriel Jernigan in Forbidden City. Jernigan lived in Peking until the 1912 revolution.