The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-03-12
BEHIND THRONE IN CHINA
GHE POWERS THAT RULE THE
 EMPIRE.

The Emperor Nonentity and the Dow
 ager Empress Is the Empires Real
 Boss.
 There is a young man in Pekin who would be trembling just now in his skin if he were able to realize proper Ny the danger that is threatened to him and his empire by some of those very kind friends who have come to him dona ferentes. He is the Emper- or Kuang Hsu, euphemistically known, among other outrageous titles, as the son of heaven and brother of the sun. He is the most secluded monarch on earth. When he appears in public, which is very rarely, mating is hung up in front of all the houses, and strips of cloth are stretched across the alleys and side streets through which the imperial procession must pass. He is Invariably accompanied by vast retinue of soldiers and an army of courtiers, and the man who peeps around the corner or has his eyes fas- tened to a hole in the mating is liable to be blinded by a bullet or an arrow. When he is at home he is carefully hidden away in the center of a big Tartar city (which is in the center of the Chinese city) at Pekin,' and you hQUn tn on fhrpJ1oh throl tc of Ils simply an impossible task for a European visitor-before you approach the building in which he is kept, guarded by eunuchs. First, there are the immense walls of the great Tar tar city, which are 60 feet thick and as tall as a London fiat. These in- close large area filled up with the houses of Tartars and government buildings, which run round space the middle of which is known as the impe- rial city. This has high wall of gray bricks about six miles in circumfer- ence, and it includes the outside pal aces, the pleasure grounds, and the temples of the sacred city. The en- peror is kept inside this, and his ex- elusive quarters are known as the Purple Forbidden city. The walls of this last pen are rigidly guarded. They 1nclose the quarters of the emperors, his family, the ladies of the royal har- em, and the thousands of eunuchs who make up the servants, and in- clude buildings for court ceremonies, which are arranged around the sides of a ridge of palaces from the north to the south. The emperor himself lives in the northwestern part of the pen, and the empress dowager has a palace near by. In another part of the in- closure is the hall of literary abyss, or the imperial library, and in this the cabinet officers (about whom more anon) hold their sessions. Pekin is huge city, credited with 100000 in- l1abitants, but apart from the eunuchs, the toadies, and the women who haunt the Purple Forbidden city, it is doubtful if 5000 Of this vast num- Der have ever set eyes upon the mon- arch, and among Europeans and Americans it is only the ambassadors who are permitted to gaze upon his august countenance.
 Though he is generally credited with < the possession of an ugly temper, which incites him to smash the bric-a- brac of his apartments when he can not have his own way, his efforts at ruling go no further than doing what he is told to do. He is kept in order ancestor worship being strong point in the Celestial moral code-by the old empress dowager, who practically runs the state show, and who is influ- enced sometimes by whim working through thin leaven of diluted statesmanlike feeling, and sometimes by that backstairs palace intrigue which works through the favorable medium of her favorite eunuch, Pit sian-li Kuang Hsu-which means the illustrious succession-has been under the old lady's thumb since he was four years of age, when he was chosen to succeed Tung-chi. She supervised his education. She picked out his wives for him, and she makes the ladies of his harem skip to-day if they don't walk chalk in her presence Of course she took her own friends when she se- lected his wives, and she has him so hemmed about with her officials and girls that if he had a will of his own he wouldn't know how to use it. The empress dowager, who has bossed the fsung-li-yamen for a generation, is now 63 years old. She was the second- ary wife of the emperor Hsen Flung. She was at the head of the empire dur ing a greater part of the Taeping re- bellions She managed it's affairs dur ing it's war with France and she has had more than one taste of Russian diplomacy. She is said to have a mind of her own, and all of the Chi nese respect and fear her. She is a stickler as to form, and insists that all business shall be done through the young emperor, though she really di- rects what he is to do. She is even more secluded than the emperor and when she receives her officials and the cabinet ministers her practice is to sit behind screen while they talk at her through it-unless she has some thing strong to say to them.
 The emperor is 27, lean, undersized and unhealthy. His features are Tar tar as contradistinguished from Chi nese; the reigning family being Gas ev- cry one should know, but probably does not) Tartar. He does all his business at night and he sleeps in the daytime He begins his work about 2 in the morning, after a midnight breakfast when he receives his cabinet ministers