The emperor fled outside the Great Wall to his hunting lodge in Jehol, leaving his brother, Prince Kung, to deal with the foreign devils. Hoping to avoid further pillage, Kung released Harry Parkes and some of his comrades. It was plain to see that the captives had been badly treated and ‘unfavourable accounts’ were received about the fate of the remaining prisoners. Indeed, four Englishmen, including Thomas Bowlby, and eight Sikhs, had been slowly tortured to death or beheaded.42
As ‘a solemn act of retribution’, Lord Elgin ordered the destruction of the Yuan ming yuan and the five surrounding palaces. More than 200 pavilions, halls and temples were systematically pillaged and then destroyed by fire.43 ‘You can scarcely imagine the beauty and the magnificence of the palaces we burnt,’ one of the British officers, Captain Charles Gordon, wrote to his mother. ‘In fact, these palaces were so large and we were so pressed for time that we could not plunder them carefully.’44
In Paris, Victor Hugo observed:
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned ... We Europeans are the civilised ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilisation has done to barbarism.45
At the same time as this special place was going up in flames, a pall of dense smoke from burning villages and farmhouses hung over the countryside around Shanghai. It heralded the approach of the Taiping Army, which had come south to find an outlet to the sea through which to receive fresh supplies of arms and ammunition. Barricades were erected at the extremities of all streets leading into the foreign concessions and the 100-strong Volunteer Corps was mobilised.46
The combined Allied force consisted of 1500 British, French and Sikh troops, and one small British gunboat. It was the policy of the commander-in-chief, Brigadier-General Charles Staveley, to defend Nantao, so despite the dramatic events taking place in Peking the Union flag and the Tricolour fluttered side by side with the blue dragon banners of the imperial troops.
‘Happily for us, the rebels seem to have come with no other object than to get possession of the Chinese city,’ the New York Times correspondent reported from Shanghai. ‘Wherever they met with a foreigner they treated him with marked politeness, and that even at the moment foreign troops were firing upon them from the city walls.’47
The Taiping were beaten back, largely by a mercenary force of foreign nationals consisting of ‘runaway sailors, Manila-men [Filipinos] and foreign vagabonds’, commanded by a 29-year-old American, Frederick Townsend Ward. This soldier of fortune from Salem, Massachusetts, had learned his soldiering with the mercenary leader William Walker in Mexico and the French forces in the Crimea.48
The Taiping, however, returned to Shanghai in strength the following year. Edwin Pickwoad, a journalist who had arrived from Melbourne the previous August to become the first secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Council, was probably the author of several dispatches published in The Argus at that time. ‘We have had warlike and stirring times of it,’ one article began.
The imperialist troops stationed at Shanghai, together with a fleet of war-junks, proceeded up the creeks and river until they came up with the Taiping when several fights ensued, with great massacre on both sides. For a time they were repulsed but a strong band of marauders managed to approach within four or five miles of Shanghai, which roused the foreign residents from their lethargy, so that the naval and military authorities issued a notice to regulate the defence of the settlement in case of attack.49
Edwin Pickwoad originally hailed from St Kitts in the West Indies, where his family were sugar planters. He lived in style at the Astor House Hotel with his wife Janet and their children. In 1860, he had taken over the weekly North-China Herald following the death of Henry Shearman and would soon launch a daily edition, the North-China Daily News, for which he borrowed the Herald’s editorial slogan: ‘Impartial Not Neutral’.
When rent payers complained that the council was too secretive in its deliberations, Pickwoad the municipal secretary agreed to hand reports of the council’s proceedings to Pickwoad the publisher for inclusion in his newspapers. His readers then complained not only about the glaring conflict of interest but also about the brevity of the reports, which told them virtually nothing about the government of the settlement.50
There was unanimity, however, about the seriousness of the Taiping threat. Shanghai’s defences were strengthened by the erection of three-metre-high redoubts placed in zigzag formation around the foreign concessions, while no fewer than eight British warships were anchored off The Bund.51 Russia offered Li Hung-chang, a 39-year-old aide to the Manchu governor of Anhwei province, the services of 10,000 troops. Li declined the offer, evidently thinking the Russians might prove more dangerous than the Taiping.52
Instead, he raised a local militia of 6500 Chinese soldiers and with the help of the ‘Foreign Army Corps’ under the command of ‘the notorious Colonel Ward, so-called’,53 routed the Taiping in January 1862 after the heaviest snowfalls in living memory immobilised their poorly clad soldiers. Ward led his force to several more victories, giving birth to the legend of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’ before being mortally wounded in a battle south of Shanghai in September of that year. He was buried with the full military honours of a Manchu bannerman.
Li Hung-chang’s imperial army fought under the command of a Scottish surgeon, Dr Halliday Macartney, an able soldier who saved Shanghai from another Taiping raid in late 1862.54 But Macartney had no interest in continuing the campaign, claiming he had ‘only taken to military work to fill up my time while I am learning the language’.55 Li Hung-chang asked General Staveley to recommend a British officer to take command of the Ever Victorious Army. He nominated Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon, one of the soldiers who had looted and burned the Summer Palace. Gordon, now a major in the Royal Engineers, knew the Shanghai battlefields well: he had surveyed the hinterland for the Taiping campaign and had been responsible for building the city’s zigzag defences.56
Having taken over the 3900-strong EVA in February 1863, a few days after his 30th birthday, Gordon was appalled at its lack of discipline and immediately banned women and opium- smoking. Hundreds deserted rather than submit to his iron rule. To bring his force up to strength, he enlisted 2000 Taiping who had been taken captive and were willing to swap sides in exchange for their lives.57
Dressing his men in dark green jackets, knickerbockers and turbans, and arming them with American Remington rifles, hand grenades and trench mortars, Gordon led the revitalised EVA into battle carrying only a small cane which came to be known as ‘Gordon’s magic wand of victory’.58 His army successfully fought the Taiping in the myriad creeks and canals around Shanghai, employing pontoons to carry its artillery across the waterways. Altogether, it was credited with 33 victories against the rebels, although Taiping survivors claimed to have defeated them several times.59
By 1864, the Taiping capital of Nanking was besieged by the Manchu’s Grand Battalions running into hundreds of thousands of troops, and the population was suffering from disease and starvation. Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, who had refused to permit the city to be provisioned in advance of the siege, issued an edict that people should eat a pot pourri of weeds and grasses, which he described as ‘manna from Heaven’. After eating a handful of ‘manna’ himself, he fell ill and died on 1 June 1864 at the age of 50.60
In the Forbidden City, an artful concubine named Tzu Hsi had taken power as co-regent on behalf of her infant son Tsai-ch’un following the death of the Xianfeng Emperor in 1861. She awarded Li Hung-chang China’s highest military honour, the Order of the Star, ‘a yellow riding-jacket to be worn on his person, and a peacock’s feather to be carried in his cap’.61 Charles Gordon was also decorated with a Yellow Jacket, whereas Halliday Macartney had to make do with the Precious Star medal and Double Dragon breast badge. With the help of Li Hung-chang, he then began a money-spinning career in the Chinese diplomatic service, just one of
many Europeans who would prop up the decaying Ching Dynasty.
Meanwhile, the French had dropped out of the Shanghai Municipal Council and established their own Conseil d’Administration Municipale to advise the all-powerful French consul-general on matters concerning their concession. Frenchtown (as the Anglo-Saxons called it) was intent on developing its own character, including the beautiful tree-lined boulevards that would give Shanghai its nickname ‘the Paris of the East’. Like its namesake on the Seine, Frenchtown would become a combination of stately public buildings, comfortable villas and mansion apartment blocks, with a red-light district to rival Montmartre. ‘Blood Alley’, as the Rue Chu Pao San was known, became synonymous with nightclubs, prostitution and brawling sailors.
In 1863 the British and American zones were merged into the self-governing International Settlement.62 Land which had sold for an average of £50 an acre in 1852 was now changing hands for £10,000. ‘The present El Dorado of commercial men seems to be China,’ The Times reported. ‘More money has, it is said, been made in China during the last five years than in all the years of the East India Company’s monopoly.’63
There were no barriers separating the concessions, so many British citizens moved into Frenchtown, where they patronised taverns with names like The Crown and Anchor and The Prince of Wales.64 Foreign families also overflowed into the pleasant Chinese pastures west of Tibet Road, where they built mock-Tudor homes and antebellum mansions more often seen in the Home Counties or the Deep South of America.
During the Taiping Rebellion, foreigners armed with shotguns, rifles and revolvers had strengthened their grip on Shanghai through methods which even the notorious Frederick Ward described as ‘lying, swindling and smuggling’.65 The boundaries of the foreign enclaves were redrawn and new treaty arrangements enforced to suit Western requirements.
The ending of the Taiping menace, however, heralded a downturn in Shanghai’s fortunes when many thousands of refugees returned to their homes in the Yangtze Valley. Whole streets of newly-built houses in the northern districts of Chapei and Yangtzepoo suddenly emptied, new office buildings were left half-finished, godowns and wharves in Hongkew stood deserted. Speculators lost their investments and there was a period of financial panic.66
‘In Shanghai, great destitution prevails among the lower classes of foreigners,’ readers of the Hobart Mercury were informed in 1865. ‘There being little or no outlet for rowdyism as formerly, and great stagnation in all branches of commerce, no means of relief are at hand and the distress is widely felt. Even the opportunities for crime are gradually being curtailed, and we can do no more than hope for better days.’67
Crime might have been curtailed but forbidden pleasures of one sort or another proliferated. Sir Harry Parkes, knighted for his bravery at Peking and installed as British consul of Shanghai, informed a meeting of rent payers in 1864 that out of 10,000 Chinese houses in the foreign concessions a total of 668 were brothels, ‘while opium and gambling houses were beyond counting’.
The opium trade had been legalised in the 1860 Convention of Peking, which ended the Second Opium War. Fast opium clippers could now anchor off The Bund with impunity. Jardine Matheson’s books for the financial year 1863–4 show that opium accounted for almost two-thirds of its business – little wonder the Duke of Somerset, following a visit to Shanghai, described the city in the House of Lords in 1869 as ‘a sink of iniquity’.68
Shanghai was also a breeding ground for revolution. One anonymous Taiping survivor had moved into the International Settlement, where he was safe from Manchu agents. He admitted to a visiting journalist that he was afraid to enter the Chinese city for fear of abduction and torture at the hands of the taotai. Dressed in a long blue brocaded garment, he offered his visitor a glass of Bollinger champagne and a cigar. ‘We are the true owners of the land,’ he said.
We are the people of China and the Tartars should be our helots. Such traditions as ours sink deep into the hearts of the people – they are not obliterated or forgotten in a day; they go down from generation to generation. The grinding taxes, the squeezing which people suffer, are inflicted by aliens. The government mandarins are all thieves. No! We Taipings do not love the foreigners much, but we love the government less.69
Other Taiping veterans were scattered throughout South China. Many sought sanctuary in Hong Kong or the Western enclaves in treaty ports. Hung Chun-fui, a prince of the doomed Heavenly Kingdom, fled to the British colony when imperial forces captured Nanking. For almost 40 years, he plotted the downfall of the Ching Dynasty, joining forces with the Australian-born Chinese revolutionary Tse Tsan Tai in an anti-Ching revolt at Canton.70 Known in Australia as James See, Tse was the son of a Grafton storekeeper, just one among the thousands of Chinese who flocked to the Australian goldfields and then returned home to fight the Manchu tyrants.71
The importance of the 14-year Taiping Rebellion in the history of modern China is rarely appreciated but cannot be overemphasised. The farming heartland of the Celestial Empire had been devastated during the civil war; government institutions, marketplaces and private dwellings in six provinces had been destroyed and the lives of their inhabitants shattered. Despite their twisted religious beliefs, the Taiping’s ideas on agrarian reform had sown the seeds of revolution among the teeming peasant population of South China.72
Indeed, the ebb and flow of migration across the Pacific to Hawaii and North America and down to Singapore, the East Indies and Australia had been largely governed by the fortunes of the Taiping Rebellion. And it would be the commitment of these legions of ‘overseas Chinese’ – from tycoons to prospectors to laundry men and noodle makers – who would advance the revolutionary cause in the dangerous years ahead.
[1] The name of China changed with each dynasty. During this period it was known as ‘the Empire of the Ching’. But the common name among the Chinese populace was ‘the Middle Kingdom’ to signify that China was the centre of civilisation. It was also referred to as ‘the Celestial Empire’.
[2] Canton (Guangzhou), Foochow (Fuzhou), Amoy (Xiamen) and Ningpo (Ningbo)
[3] The principal ethnic group of China are the Han Chinese, as distinct from her Manchu, Mongol and other minorities. Hakka people are Han Chinese who speak the Hakka language. Many settled in South China and provided revolutionary, government and military leaders.
The first duty of Chinese immigrants once they reached the bewildering shores of the Australian colonies was to send money back to the homeland to help their families survive the deprivations of civil war, famine, flood and Manchu taxes. Sometimes they returned home for brief visits on the steamships that plied between Chinese and Australian ports.
These were the first tenuous links between two wildly disparate cultures. Long before George ‘Chinese’ Morrison, W. H. Donald, Eleanor Hinder, H. J. Timperley or any of the other white Australians who carved out their careers in China ever reached the Middle Kingdom, Chinese returnees were regaling their families and friends with stories about life among the foreign devils in Sydney and Melbourne, or in one of the many towns and settlements that had sprung up around the goldfields, notably Bathurst, Ballarat, Bendigo and Ararat.
In 1854 more than 10,000 Chinese miners joined the gold rush.1 Indeed, a group of Southern Chinese miners en route from the South Australian port of Robe to the central Victorian goldfields discovered one of the world’s richest shallow alluvial deposits in a spring near Ararat.
By 1858, the Chinese had set up a number of secret societies, or ‘Yee Hings’, the most popular of which was the Hung Men brotherhood, or the Chinese Masonic Society.2 Despite the challenges presented by a strange and hostile land, members of the celestial diaspora were strictly divided into clans and the secret societies kept secrets from each other as much as from the authorities.
The most influential Australian Chinese of the early revolutionary period was Loong Hung Pung
, who was born in Canton around 1831 and who left his wife and two young daughters to join the prospectors in 1858. Arriving on the Western Plains of New South Wales, he opened a store in Howick Street, Bathurst, to buy gold from his compatriots and provide a forum for his anti-Manchu views.
According to Taiwanese sources, he was ‘the head of the secret societies in Australia and advocated opposition to the Manchu and restoration of the Han people while advocating fairness and freedom’.3
Loong would sit on a high stool in his store, ‘a man of fine features, pale as wax, with only a light slanting of the eyes, a high forehead, surmounted by a silk embroidered cap, from which a long pigtail escaped down his back over his embroidered robe, a sparse moustache in which you could count the hairs and a long tuft of beard on the chin’.4
Loong wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘The Reconstruction of China as a Modern State’, which was circulated among anti-Manchu activists. Sun Yat-sen supposedly drew upon this work in drafting his famous Three Principles of the People in 1903. ‘Sun Yat-sen procured a copy of Loong’s great masterpiece,’ Vivian Chow, an Australian-born Chinese journalist, claims, ‘and started to copy and transpose it. He was unlucky to lose his copy in a fire, and could not procure another, though he tried hard.’5
While it is a fact that the library containing Sun’s collection of books and manuscripts burned down around 1924, Chow’s claim seems unlikely. Indeed, Sun indicated that the Three Principles were based on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with its characterisation of democracy as ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. No copy of ‘The Reconstruction of China’ remains in existence, so it is impossible to compare it with Sun’s famous work.
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