Prince Gong was a man adrift. His bold public move against the Empress Dowager had been a resounding success—General Zuo Zongtang was now in the west, a proper commander tasked with handling the Russian threat. But the victory had left him politically isolated. Cixi's faction now treated him with a cold, hostile correctness, excluding him from key meetings and starving him of information. He felt as though he had won a major battle only to find himself cut off from his own supply lines.
He paced his study, staring at the great map on his wall, a deep frustration gnawing at him. The mysterious faction that had fed him the intelligence about the pearls and the Xinjiang crisis had fallen silent. He had no new messages, no new directives. He had a powerful sword in his hand but no knowledge of where to strike next. He felt like a prized attack dog left waiting for a command that never came.
It was into this state of restless frustration that Weng Tonghe arrived. The disgraced tutor, now a fixture in the dusty Imperial Archives, had requested an urgent, private audience. Prince Gong, desperate for any news from his supposed allies, granted it immediately.
Weng Tonghe entered the study, his demeanor now subtly different. The raw, naked terror of their last meeting had been replaced by a quiet, resigned resolve. He had accepted his new role as a secret messenger. He carried a long, cylindrical scroll case made of sandalwood.
"Your Highness," he said, after a deep bow. "I come bearing a gift for you. From the Emperor."
The Prince raised an eyebrow. A gift? "The boy has been busy with his new, stern tutors. I am surprised he has had time for such pleasantries."
"His Majesty has taken up a new hobby to soothe his 'disharmonious spirit,'" Weng Tonghe explained, his voice carefully neutral. "He has been practicing cartography. He wished for you, as the empire's foremost statesman, to have this humble example of his work."
He opened the case and carefully unrolled a large scroll upon the Prince's desk. It was a map of the eastern coastline of the Great Qing, from the northern ports near Korea down to the southern trading hub of Guangzhou. It was beautifully rendered, the lines clean and precise, the characters labeling the cities and provinces written in a familiar, large, childish script. It was, in reality, a flawless copy of Shen Ke's expert cartography, with the "Emperor's" writing painstakingly added.
Prince Gong looked at the map. It was a fine piece of work for a child, but he was a busy man. He was unimpressed. "The Emperor shows some talent. My thanks to him." He began to roll the scroll back up.
"A moment, Your Highness," Weng Tonghe said quickly. "His Majesty is, of course, still just a child. His work is filled with… childish errors. He asked for my opinion on them."
This caught the Prince's attention. He unrolled the map again. "Errors?"
Weng Tonghe leaned forward and pointed a trembling finger at the beautifully drawn port city of Shanghai. "You see here, Your Highness? His sense of scale is quite off. He has drawn the foreign steamships in the harbor nearly as large as the city's pagoda. A child's perspective, of course. He sees the big ships and they seem like mountains to him."
The Prince stared at the drawing. The ships were indeed disproportionately large, looming over the port like behemoths.
Weng Tonghe then moved his finger down the coast to Guangzhou. "And here, another curious mistake. Next to each of the Imperial Maritime Customs houses, His Majesty has written the character for 'taxes' (shui), as is proper. But the character he has written is a near-homophone, sui (歲). It is the character for an annual 'tribute,' the kind a vassal state would pay to a stronger power." The tutor shook his head with feigned scholarly disapproval. "A simple mistake for a boy learning thousands of characters, but a significant one nonetheless."
Prince Gong said nothing. He stared down at the map, but he was no longer seeing a child's drawing. He was seeing a message, delivered in the same deeply symbolic, utterly deniable language as the story about the pearls. The meaning was as clear as it was insulting.
The oversized ships were not a mistake of scale. They were a political statement: the foreigners and their trade had an outsized, dominant, and monstrous influence over the empire's most vital ports.
And the word "tribute" instead of "taxes" was a shard of ice in his heart. It was a deeply offensive suggestion that the vast revenues being generated by the Maritime Customs Service were not truly serving the Qing. It implied the money was being paid out, like a tribute, to some other power—either to the foreigners who ran the service, or to some other, unseen entity. It was a direct accusation of financial malfeasance on a massive scale.
The message was perfectly designed to wound the pride of a man like Prince Gong, a Manchu noble of the imperial line who saw himself as a guardian of the dynasty's honor. It implied that the very source of the empire's wealth was tainted, managed by outsiders, and its profits squandered.
"The boy's 'mistakes,'" Prince Gong said at last, his voice a low, dangerous growl, "are more insightful than the official reports of my own ministers." He looked up from the map, his eyes boring into Weng Tonghe. He knew the tutor was just a messenger, a conduit. "You may return to the palace, Grand Tutor."
He then added, his voice dropping to a near whisper. "Tell your masters that I have received their message. The coast is bleeding. It is time someone applied a tourniquet."
After Weng Tonghe had departed, Prince Gong stood over the map for a long time. His pride was stung, and his suspicions, already aroused, were now focused on a new target. The pearl shawl incident had been about corruption in military spending. This new message was about something far deeper, an attack on the very financial foundation of the state.
He called for his aide, Batu. "I want a full report on the Imperial Maritime Customs Service," he commanded. "I want to know everything. The revenue streams, the senior foreign staff, and most importantly, I want to know exactly where every tael of silver goes after it is collected in the southern ports. I want to follow the money."
Ying Zheng's gambit had worked. He had successfully used his puppet, his scholars, and his general to plant two seeds in one week: a seed of trivial, misleading information with Cixi to make him seem harmless, and a seed of powerful, provocative truth with Prince Gong to spur him into action against Cixi's secret finances. The board was now set for a major new conflict, a war that would be fought not with armies, but with ledgers and accounting books.