An Emperor’s Death and A Thousand Nightly Weddings
How did the death of an emperor affect life in Beijing?
On November 11, 1908, a rumour spread throughout Beijing that the Guangxu emperor had died. That night, multiple wedding celebrations suddenly took place. The Qing dynasty official Hu Si Jing wrote in his diary that the sound of wedding trumpets could be heard in every corner of the city. The reason for this wedding craze was that Beijing residents knew exactly what the death of an emperor meant. When the death was officially proclaimed in the morning, all of Beijing would immediately enter a state of mourning. For a hundred days people would not be allowed to cut their hair, entertainment of any kind - like opera and acrobatics - was prohibited, and wedding ceremonies could not take place. So, families in the middle of finalizing wedding plans had to act quickly. In this way we can see that even though the Forbidden City was closed off to the public, what happened inside the Imperial chambers had an immediate effect on common people’s lives..
In feudal China, mourning the death of your seniors was taken very seriously. If the parents of a government official died, he would have to retire from official duty for the next two years in order to mourn properly. An emperor’s death went beyond this and did not merely concern one family - it was the whole country that had to submit to mourning.
However, by the time Hu Si Jing was writing down his observations in 1908, the grip of these traditional Imperial customs on society had already started to loosen, not least because of the increasing number of foreigners in Beijing. Like Hu, Briton Robert Hart - The China hand of all China hands - worked for the Qing government as an official. As early as 1881, he wrote regarding a wedding that: “In consequence of the Empress Dowager Hsiao Chen’s death there is national mourning, and as marriages are prohibited to all classes for one hundred days, I am forced to say formally I cannot allow a wedding in or from my house during that period...but Frida and Kierullf turn on me and tell me Chinese ceremonial does not bind them: so here again all I can do is to shut my eyes”.