The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s column in the latter part of Shukan Shincho, released today.
This article, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is essential reading not only for Japanese people but also for people around the world.
How to Make History
Sai Jinhua was born into a poor family in Anhui Province around the time Japan underwent the Meiji Restoration.
Sold to a brothel, she was bought out at thirteen, while still an apprentice courtesan, by Hong Jun, thirty-four years her senior, and became his concubine.
Hong Jun was a leading diplomat of the late Qing dynasty who had passed the imperial examination with the highest ranking.
Two years later, he was appointed minister to Germany, and Sai Jinhua accompanied him as his young wife.
She had bound feet, a practice common among Chinese women at the time, particularly courtesans.
The toes were bent inward in childhood and tightly wrapped in cloth to create artificially small feet.
The feet considered most beautiful were about ten centimeters long.
They were called “three-inch golden lotuses,” but because the practice involved bending healthy feet, scarcely anything could cause more intense pain.
In China’s Three Major Maladies, Shi Ping condemns it as a barbaric custom that trampled women’s human rights to a horrifying degree.
In fact, although their golden lotuses were fondled and admired, these women could not walk properly, and walking caused excruciating pain.
Nevertheless, Sai Jinhua was able to become a minister’s wife in return.
With such feet, however, she could not dance in European society.
While attracting curious stares, she also drew the attention of men.
Indeed, Hong Jun took her to an audience with Emperor Wilhelm II, and she also met Deputy Chief of Staff Waldersee, Moltke’s right-hand man.
Waldersee showed a keen interest and several times savored the pleasures of a woman with bound feet.
It is said that Hong Jun had married a woman considered beneath his station with this intention in mind.
It was a characteristically Chinese way of thinking.
During his four-year posting, Sai Jinhua learned German, and the emperor became distinctly pro-China, which led to the Triple Intervention following the First Sino-Japanese War.
Hong Jun died of illness shortly after returning home at the end of his posting.
The Hong family expelled Sai Jinhua as unworthy of the family’s standing, and she returned to Beijing’s pleasure district, Bada Hutong.
Eventually, the Boxer Rebellion broke out in Shandong Province, fueled by hatred of foreigners and hostility toward Germans as well.
The mob, which had swollen to 200,000, surrounded the foreign legation quarter in Beijing, and Empress Dowager Cixi’s regular troops joined them.
The five hundred guards from the various countries, including Goro Shiba, fought valiantly, and after fifty-five days under siege, the Eight-Nation Alliance finally arrived.
After driving out the Boxers, the German commander-in-chief, Waldersee, first ordered, “Loot for three days for the German emperor.”
When those three days had passed, he authorized “three days of looting for the soldiers themselves.”
American, French, and Russian soldiers joined in, and Beijing descended into chaos amid slaughter and looting.
Residents fled to the “Northern City” district guarded by Japanese troops.
Only there was order maintained.
During this time, Waldersee sought out his old acquaintance Sai Jinhua and reunited with her.
Exercising his privileges as commander-in-chief, he entered the Forbidden City and enjoyed a night with Sai Jinhua in Empress Dowager Cixi’s bed, as though he were an emperor.
It was a typical example of a Westerner indulging in nocturnal pleasures in an occupied city.
Waldersee may seem to symbolize such arrogance, but in the era of Xi Jinping, this story changed completely.
First, in Niehai Hua, Zeng Pu writes that Sai Jinhua “appeared in European society as a minister’s wife and quickly became the belle of society through her conversational skills and graceful dancing.”
With bound feet, she could not even walk properly, let alone dance, but he did not concern himself with such trivial matters.
After her return home, the Boxer Rebellion breaks out.
When a Beijing mob kills the German minister, von Ketteler, she enters the story in Xia Yan’s Sai Jinhua.
Xia Yan’s Sai Jinhua states that she “comforted the distraught minister’s wife in German.”
When the Eight-Nation Alliance enters Beijing, she is said to have “visited her old acquaintance, Commander Waldersee, and asked him not to retaliate. The commander accepted her persuasion, warned the Allied generals against retaliation or looting, and restored order in Beijing.”
Peking University professor Liu Bannong also praised her in Sai Jinhua Benshi, calling her “more admirable than Empress Dowager Cixi.”
Thus, a prostitute with bound feet becomes a heroine who saved the people of Beijing.
The story must be reworked until it can produce the national hero that Mr. Xi desires.
It seems a pitiful national character.