Apart from his undoubted charm of manner, however much or however little it might mean, the Prince was a man of undoubted talent and strength of character. He was a very young man in 1860, not more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and utterly inexperienced in affairs, when his brother, the Emperor Hsien Fêng, who was dying by inches, bowed to the storm of foreign invasion and fled to Jêhol, leaving him in Peking as his representative, with full powers to carry on the Government. It was a fateful moment. The Allies were victorious. Yuen Ming Yuen, the summer palace, was in flames; the foreign barbarians were in possession of the Anting Mên, the northern gate of Peking; a number of prisoners, among them Parkes and Loch, were in the hands of the Chinese, by whom they had been shamefully treated; Prince Kung realized the position, and at the risk of his own life handed over the prisoners to their chiefs. He acted in the nick of time. Hardly had he done so than a messenger arrived post haste from Jêhol, ordering the instant execution of the prisoners. Had Prince Kung carried out the Emperor’s edict it is difficult to say what the consequences would have been. Certainly Peking would have been razed to the ground, and the Tartar dynasty would have been exterminated half a century before its knell was finally rung. Prince Kung died in 1898. Had he lived a few years longer I believe that his sage advice and statesmanship, joined to the persistent warnings of Jung Lu, would have saved the Empress from the fatal step which she took of fostering the Boxer outrages, and the further disgrace of disavowing and executing the very men with whom she had conspired, and whom she had egged on to a doom from which she did not feel herself powerful enough to save them. But she listened to the dupes and ruffians who believed in the magic rites of the Boxers, and in spite of all her blandishments to the easily-gulled Legation ladies before and after, did all in her power to urge on the destruction of the besieged ministers, even when she was sending them presents of fruit and sweetmeats! In vain did Jung Lu try to impress upon her that the bombardment “was worse than an outrage, it was a piece of stupidity;”[58] had the Prince been alive he no doubt, with forty more years’ experience of affairs to his credit, would have grasped the situation in 1900 as he did in 1860, and her two most trusted advisers would have saved the old Buddha’s face. No woman, empress or peasant, ever had a more devoted friend than she had in Jung Lu—but single-handed he was no match for the army of scoundrels and eunuchs by whom she was gulled. Prince Kung’s signature was peculiar. I believe that it honestly represented his character. He did not sign his name or his title, but “Wu ssŭ hsin,” “no private heart,” _i.e._ “disinterested.”