1A ROYAL WEDDINGThe Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City
‘The palace has been surrounded with dense crowds since early yesterday, thousands anxious to pay honor to their former emperor. Troops and police of the republic co-operated in paying the honor due the emperor.’
Thomas Meloy, International News Service Correspondent, Peking, December 1922
‘As late November winds blew chilly nights and frosty mornings into Peking, gales from off the Gobi Desert raised swirling clouds of gritty dust in the narrow hutongs of the city … and looming protectively in the dark skies, the high gate towers on the massive city walls, the golden roofs, white marble bridges and purplish-red walls of the vast Forbidden City palace.’
Frank Dorn, autobiography, Frank Dorn Papers, Hoover Institution Library & Archives
TO BECOME AN EMPEROR
The Chinese government watched the Forbidden City’s preparations for the royal wedding with trepidation. The new Chinese Republic feared a possible popular restoration movement with anti-or pro-monarchist protests taking to the streets. Barely a decade old, the Chinese Republic was troubled. China was politically unstable, riven by factionalism between north and south, Left and Right. There were violent labour disputes, droughts, floods, famine, outbreaks of typhoid and cholera. Piracy was largely unchecked along the coast and banditry rampant inland; foreign powers (Britain, France, Japan) were eyeing ever more territory; the Treasury was financially stretched to breaking point. The country was split with competing capitals: in the south in Canton under Dr Sun Yat-sen and in Peking in the north under a seemingly endlessly revolving series of self-appointed warlords of dubious loyalty. And always there was the potential prospect of a monarchist restoration of the Qing dynasty.
In 1922, China’s last dynasty had been obliterated and replaced by China’s first republic, the wedding of the boy-emperor would be a display of imperial pomp and ceremony such as had not been seen on the ancient capital’s streets since the funeral cortège of the Empress Dowager Cixi in 1909. Her procession had comprised 120 bier bearers and a funereal escort of 7,000 people including nobles, her former ladies-in-waiting, the palace eunuchs and former servants, as well as journalists and the foreign diplomatic corps all paying their respects. Tens of thousands of Pekingers had lined the streets, kneeling as her coffin passed.* A decade later, crowds exceeding 100,000 had stood along the roads around the Forbidden City to watch the Allied Victory Parade in November 1918 marking the end of the First World War, a conflict that had seen other monarchies – the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman – topple.
The president of the Republic of China, Xu Shichang, who was something of a closet monarchist, granted permission for a full imperial wedding procession to pass through the streets of Peking.* By the time the wedding took place, President Xu, who had been in power since 1918, would be gone, pressured to resign by the warlord Cao Kun and replaced by Li Yuanhong, a politician favoured by Cao as a ‘unifying candidate’. Li was decidedly not a monarchist sympathiser. He had been a leader of the Wuchang Uprising in 1911 that ignited the Xinhai Revolution and afterwards had fought the Qing-loyalist warlord Zhang Xun. But by that time it was too late to alter the plans agreed by Xu, so Li generously announced that, despite the severely straitened times, the Republican government would contribute 100,000 Chinese dollars from tax revenues to finance the nuptials while the city of Peking would pick up the bill for the police and soldiers who would line the route. Still the Imperial Household Department argued for more – the cost of pomp, circumstance, food and drink for the wedding just about bankrupted the royal family.†,1
Since 1911, the cost of the royal family and their continued occupation of the Forbidden City had remained a contentious issue. They had stayed in the Forbidden City although it was intended that at a later date (never exactly stipulated) they would eventually move to the Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), just outside Peking.‡ They were allowed to keep their temples and mausoleums, and granted funding for the completion of the construction of a mausoleum for the Guangxu Emperor (the Chongling Mausoleum in the Western Tombs). Puyi could retain all his servants and approximately 600 palace eunuchs (down from 1,500 and with the proviso that no new eunuchs be employed, which effectively put a stop to the castration of young boys).
The Little Court retained a comparatively large staff for a deposed royal family. The household was awarded an annual stipend of 4 million taels per year.2,* Not a bad deal by all accounts (and certainly a better deal than either Louis XVI or the Romanovs got), though there were constant disputes about late and delayed payment.
Whatever the cost, on 1 December 1922 China’s final royal wedding took place. Troops and police were placed on duty for the five-day-long grand nuptials as the city came to a halt for one last, massive dose of Qing imperial pomp. An anachronism perhaps, but one that clearly intrigued not only the population of Peking, indicated by the packed streets, but the world’s press too:
PEKING IN BLAZE OF GLORY AT BOY EMPEROR’S NUPTIALS
The Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer (Connecticut)
EMPEROR WITH NO EMPIRE, NOW HAS WIFE AS EMPRESS
The Courier (Iowa)
CHINA’S ‘BOY-EMPEROR’ WEDS PRINCESS – FORBIDDEN CITY IS AGLOW OVER NUPTIALS
The Oakland Post Enquirer (California)
DEPOSED EMPEROR OF CHINA MARRIED
The Victoria Daily Times (Canada)
EX-EMPEROR MARRIED – LARGE CROWDS OF FOREIGNERS & CHINESE PRESENT TO SEE PROCESSION
Liverpool Daily Times (UK)
THE GRAND NUPTIALS
Manchu wedding ceremonies were traditionally nocturnal. At midnight Puyi officially despatched palace eunuchs with the Phoenix Chair, so called as it was decorated with golden and blue phoenixes, to collect Wanrong. It had been brought by bearers from the Forbidden City’s Palace of Heavenly Purity (Qianqinggong) where it had resided, unused for years, awaiting a suitable royal ceremony.* The last grand wedding ceremony had been that of Zaitian, the previous emperor, in 1889.†
Wanrong was barely sixteen years old, nervous and unsure of what the future held. She was considered an ethereal Manchu beauty, yet she was also a young woman who had been educated and knew significantly more of the modern world than the emperor. She had travelled some months earlier from her family’s main residence in Tianjin to their Peking home on Mao’er Hutong (Hat Makers Lane) near the Drum Tower (Gulou), there to be trained in court etiquette and partake in the various pre-wedding ceremonies. ‘She was very sweet about it,’ wrote Mrs Ingram to her eldest daughter Miriam, whom Isabel had succeeded as tutor to Wanrong the previous month, ‘and in no way acted superior … She was darling through it all and her mother [Aisin-Gioro Hengxiang, Wanrong’s stepmother] was just as queenly as could be.’ The wedding preparations had not put a stop to Wanrong’s English lessons: ‘Isabel was going to the Empress’ every day including the wedding day. Isn’t that the most unusual thing? … they did not study but just talked.’3
At 3 a.m. the bride was seated upon the Phoenix Chair. She wore a crimson satin dragon-and-phoenix-embroidered wedding robe, her face covered by a veil. Her hair was coiled in two buns. She was held aloft by sixteen eunuch bearers and carried from her family’s courtyard for the procession through the streets. It was just as well her face was covered; her younger brother Runqi (aged ten at the time) later recalled that when the greeters arrived to collect Wanrong, ‘she and her mother shed tears while I jumped up and down outside her dressing room door’.4 It was bitterly cold in the early morning and Wanrong wore a cape of fur and carried a shoulu, a small pumpkin-shaped copper vessel filled with coals that acted as a handwarmer.
Wanrong’s father, Rongyuan, who had been a senior official with the Qing until 1911, knelt on a red cushion at the family compound’s outer gateway to wish his daughter bon voyage. Her mother, Hengxin, a member of the Aisin-Gioro clan (i.e. Puyi’s clan), had died when Wanrong was just two years old. Rongyuan watched his oldest child being carried away. He would not see his daughter again until she was Empress of China.
Announced by the bray and boom of lama trumpets across the city, the wedding procession began its measured journey through the still, moonlit streets of Peking to the Forbidden City.
Myrtle Ingram, Isabel’s mother, wrote:
We first thought we would go to the movies and then wait up for the wedding but our tickets admitted us at three am so we decided we would go to bed early and get up for it. I think we were in better condition for it than those who stayed up all night. We set our alarm for 2.30 and made our way to the Shen Wu Men [the Gate of Divine Prowess], the back gate of the Forbidden City, just opposite Coal Hill [Jingshan].5
Old Qing loyalists performed the traditional three kneelings and nine prostrations as the procession passed; former Manchu bannermen dusted off their old robes; the foreign dignitaries of the city’s Legation Quarter, who were largely sympathetic to the monarchy, turned out attired in their top hats and tails, their wives in outmoded Edwardian dresses.
A wandering American traveller, Richard Halliburton, arrived in Peking on the day of the wedding unaware that any nuptials were taking place or even that China still had anyone who claimed to be an emperor. Curious, Halliburton joined the early-morning throng and noted:
Richly dressed mandarins in embroidered robes and feather trimmed hats led the cortège. A forest of pennants blazed and fluttered past … gold dragons on black silk, blue dragons on gold silk; and swaying lanterns, and gilded kiosques [sic] containing the bride’s ceremonial robes, and princes on horseback surrounded by their colorful retinues. There was more than enough music. Last of all came the bride’s sedan hung with yellow brocade [the traditional colour of the Dragon Throne hereditary monarchy] roofed with a great gold dragon, and borne along by sixteen noblemen.6,*
Halliburton was not sufficiently au fait with Chinese culture to recognise the pennants as symbols of the Manchu Eight Banners or that the bride’s sedan chair was in fact the ceremonial Phoenix Chair, in imperial yellow with yellow silk cushions. There were in total seventy Qing flags on display and four ‘yellow pavilions’, large umbrella/parasols, sporting the imperial patent for the new empress. Prince Qing of the First Rank, the Imperial Commissioner, carried the Imperial Symbol, an azure dragon on a plain yellow field with the red flaming pearl in the upper-left corner. Behind him the Assistant Imperial Commissioner, Prince Cheng, carried the Imperial Rescript, a document solemnifying the marriage.
The following entourage of 3,000 people included an empty sedan chair of imperial yellow satin intended to represent the emperor himself. After them came bearers with incense burners wafting a fragrant smoke over Peking’s inner Tartar City, and then the Phoenix Chair itself with its bearers surrounded and protected by palace eunuchs. Behind the chair came a long line of ministers of the imperial household, chamberlains and various officers of the palace guard on horseback.
Peking had little street lighting and the procession was lit up for the public with large palace lanterns. The entire route was strewn with yellow sand. Curious lao baixing (the ‘old hundred surnames’ – a traditional Chinese term for the ordinary people of Peking) gathered in masses. Despite the early hour it seemed as if the entire population of Peking had awoken and poured out onto the streets to throng the route from the bride’s family residence to the outer gates of the Forbidden City.
The wedding procession through the streets of central Peking was a potentially tricky moment for the Chinese Republic. Crowds around Tiananmen (the Gate of Heavenly Peace, not then as large an open square as it is now, being only a quarter of the size) and the Forbidden City were dense and far larger than expected. The Peking constabulary had not policed such a large procession for many years. They lined the route holding leather straps which, if necessary, they could use as whips to clear the crowds from the path of the procession. Due to security concerns, the numerous wedding presents – a lot of cash and bullion, as well as some priceless antiquities – had already been transferred by armed guard from the bride’s family home to the Forbidden City.
However, Reginald Johnston observed the crowd to be ‘patiently silent’ and respectful behind the rows of Republican soldiers and police.7 It seems the people allowed themselves to be seduced by the pomp and circumstance, awed into an odd sort of silence. For the majority of them this was probably the first large-scale royal procession they had ever seen or would ever see.
The American sojourner Halliburton followed the procession right up to the Meridian Gate (Wumen), the southern entrance to the Forbidden City. He saw it swing wide open to admit Wanrong into the so-called Great Within. Halliburton, along with the thousands of Pekingers on Tiananmen silently watching, could go no further; all but trusted servants and invited guests were absolutely forbidden from entering the royal citadel. As the 125-foot-high gates swung shut they could only contemplate what the young Wanrong’s life would now be like.
The Ingrams had also ‘walked along with the chair’ until they came to the Gate of Divine Prowess at the rear of the Forbidden City.
There were already so many autos and carriages we could scarcely get into the gate. We had to walk nearly a mile inside until we came to the place where the procession would go into the private quarters of the emperor. There was a big peng [marquee] erected for us and a meal served. It was heated and very comfortable. It was filled with Legation people and dignitaries. When the inner gate of the private imperial quarters opened and she went thru and we were all left on the outside.8
Reginald Johnston wrote to Isabel Ingram the following day pointing out the extraordinary fact that ‘he was the only foreigner in the palace that night’. He described watching the empress ‘step down from her sedan chair and walk to the side of the emperor. It was just four o’clock when the gate was closed behind her. The moon had dropped behind a cloud so that the beautiful lantern display was appreciated.’9 In his memoir Johnston recalled the ‘bright moonlight, the sky serene and cloudless, the moon nearly full’.10
* * *
As the expectant crowds lining the streets of Peking watched the procession they caught glimpses of Wanrong concealed inside her shrouded palanquin. There was one major aspect of this royal wedding of which they could not be cognisant. Only the true insiders of the deposed court – the emperor’s father (and until that day regent) Prince Chun, the other Manchu princes, the high consorts and remaining ladies-in-waiting who had once served the now-dead, but once all-powerful, Empress Dowager Cixi – were aware of the long and bitter struggle that had been fought over whom Puyi should marry, who should become China’s last empress – a position that was seen by some as a great honour and others as a poisoned chalice.
Since the matchmaking discussions had started in early 1920, the court factions had been divided between the two most powerful of the high consorts – the Dowager Imperial Noble Consort Duankang, better known as the Lady Tatara, and the Dowager Imperial Noble Consort Yu, or Lady Heseri. The two women had been locked in battle championing their respective candidates for over a year. Both women were from once-lauded and privileged Eight Banner families (Tatara the Manchu Bordered Red Banner and Heseri the Manchu Bordered Blue Banner). Each had naturally wanted their own favourite as empress, a candidate who would protect them and their clan’s position within the court. Cixi herself had been aligned with the Bordered Blue Banner, one of the dominant banners of Manchu society throughout the Qing dynasty. Both were also among the five ‘adoptive mothers’ selected to raise Puyi within the Forbidden City, replacing his biological mother Youlan, who had been deemed unreliable for the task.
Lady Heseri, now in her seventies, had once been regarded as among the most beautiful women in China. She’d been a consort of Zaichun, the Tongzhi Emperor, who ruled from 1861 to 1875. She had been by his side from the early 1870s and, crucially for wielding influence after Zaichun’s death, had become a favourite of Cixi. Lady Heseri had been closely involved in raising Puyi and felt very close to the boy-emperor.
By contrast, Lady Tatara was younger, in her forties, and had been a consort of Zaitian, the Guangxu Emperor, who had ruled from 1875 to 1908 until his death under suspicious circumstances. Lady Tatara was anything but a favourite of Cixi’s. Indeed she was a sworn enemy of the empress dowager, believing her to have persecuted her clan, of being responsible for the death of her sister (whom Cixi considered to have too much influence over the Guangxu Emperor) and guilty of sidelining the weak Zaitian in order to become the de facto ruler of China. Still, upon the Guangxu Empress Longyu’s death in 1913, Lady Tatara had become the highest-ranking woman in the Forbidden City. Despite their personal enmity, she saw Cixi and her manipulative ways as something of a role model for how to get things done at court, and she was reputedly the harshest of Puyi’s ‘adoptive mothers’.
There was also a particular incident involving Lady Tatara that impacted her relationship with Puyi. In September 1921 she had very publicly reprimanded Puyi’s mother Youlan for her son’s apparent bad behaviour. Youlan’s mental state was fragile – her marriage was troubled, her husband, Prince Chun, had taken another ‘wife’ (who bore him four children), her son had effectively been stolen from her, ‘adopted’ into the imperial line and told he was a boy with many mothers, and cloistered in the Forbidden City under their control. She had been sidelined and excluded by elite clan politics. Youlan was allowed to see Puyi on rare occasions, for short periods of time, and then only under the guidance of the palace eunuchs. It had all, unsurprisingly, taken a toll.
After the scolding by Lady Tatara, Youlan had returned to her chambers in Prince Chun’s residence and killed herself by swallowing a copious amount of opium mixed with wine. It was 30 September 1921; she was thirty-seven. When Puyi left the Forbidden City for his mother’s funeral at his family’s Northern Mansion, it was the first time in thirteen years he had stepped outside the Great Within into the Great Without. He was allowed to stay with her coffin for less than half a day. Both the Republican government and the Imperial Household Department had been nervous over the trip. However, ‘while crowds gathered to see his retinue of cars pass through the streets, they were sympathetic and respectful’.11 Over a year later, when it was announced that his marriage celebrations would begin, Puyi had only just finished officially mourning his mother’s death.
Copyright © 2026 by Paul French
