With the Empress Dowager of China
By Katharine A. Carl.
Imprint
This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.
This particular ebook is based on a transcription from Project Gutenberg and on digital scans from the Internet Archive.
The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.
To Sir Robert Hart
To whose helpful encouragement I owe so much, I affectionately dedicate this account of my experiences at the Court of the country he has so long and faithfully served.
Introductory
In April, 1903, while I was visiting in Shanghai, I received a letter from Mrs. Conger, wife of the Minister of the United States to Peking, in which she said there was a question of Her Majesty the Empress Dowager’s having her portrait painted, and asking me if such a thing should be arranged would I be willing to come to Peking and undertake it. Mrs. Conger hoped, if the project should materialize, that Her Majesty might later consent to send the portrait to the Exposition at St. Louis. She thought such a portrait would be of great interest to the American people and might prove an attractive feature to the Exposition, in which she and Mr. Conger were, naturally, much interested. She also felt, as she had had an opportunity of seeing a good deal of the Empress Dowager, that if the world could see a true likeness of her, it might modify the generally accepted idea which prevailed as to Her Majesty’s character.
I answered Mrs. Conger’s letter, saying I should be delighted to undertake the work, should it be decided upon, and I awaited further developments. The idea of sitting for her portrait met with Her Majesty’s approval, and she said she would arrange an Audience and set a day for beginning. But the “mills of” Chinese Officialdom “grind slowly,” and not until July did Mrs. Conger receive an official notification from the Wai-Wu-Pu (Chinese Foreign Office) requesting “Her Excellency Mrs. Conger to present the American artist, Miss Carl, to Her Imperial Majesty on the fifth day of August, for the purpose of painting a portrait of Her Majesty.” Mrs. Conger immediately informed me of the reception of this document, and I left Shanghai for Peking on the 29th of July. I was cordially received, on my arrival in Peking, by Mr. and Mrs. Conger at the American Legation, and on the fifth of August was presented by Mrs. Conger to Her Majesty the Empress Dowager at the Summer Palace in private Audience.
As it was a great innovation in Chinese customs and a breaking away from long-established tradition for an Imperial portrait to be painted, there was no precedent to follow and all arrangements were of the vaguest kind; and when I went into the Palace for my first Audience, I did not know whether I would have one sitting or ten, and no one else seemed to have any more definite information. All was uncertainty. Everything depended upon Her Majesty’s inclination, and future developments must be awaited. I felt that I was really
