Chusan
Page 1
CHUSAN
The Opium Wars & The Forgotten Story of Britain’s First Chinese Island
by Liam D’Arcy-Brown
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Brandram, an imprint of Takeaway (Publishing)
1st edition 1.1 e-book
© Liam D’Arcy-Brown
Liam D’Arcy-Brown has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher
Takeaway (Publishing), 33 New Street, Kenilworth CV8 2EY
E-mail: books@takeawaypublishing.co.uk
Contents
Maps
The China Coast
The Chusan Islands
Tinghae’s Inner Harbour
The Walled City of Tinghae
Tinghae’s Maritime Suburb
List of Recurring Characters
Prologue
Scarce a day free from insults
The Great Emperor and the men with red hair
The slightest spark
A thundering fire
A Pompeii of the living
An idle dream
Go to hell!
We live among the dead
A Chinese Singapore
The celestials wish to measure their strength
Soothing the sores and bruises
We read this with fast-falling tears
You have done us incalculable injury
So ends the Chinese war
How muchie loopee?
Tabula rasa
A sportsman’s paradise
In the hospital their hearts are soft
Apples of Sodom
No news could have given us such joy
Famous for their construction of guns
Epilogue
Sources & Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
The Vale of Tinghae
The South Gate of Tinghae in 1793
A Street in Tinghae
Inside the Zuyin Temple, Tinghae
Josshouse Hill
Mrs Noble on Her Way to Ningbo
A Foraging Party
The Three Generals Memorial Statue
Monks in the Zuyin Temple
Author’s Note
Note on Romanisation and Names
References
for Rachel, sean Liam, Sarah, Corey and Felix
List of Recurring Characters
Aldersey, Mary Ann Missionary and promoter of female education in Zhejiang.
Anstruther, Cpt Philip Officer of the Madras Artillery, kidnapped and imprisoned in Ningbo.
Bu Dingbang Comprador to the 1840 British expedition.
Burrell, George Commander of British land forces in China and governor of Chusan 1840-41.
Campbell, Lt-Col Colin Commanding officer of the 98th Regiment and governor of Chusan 1844-46.
Cree, Edward Assistant-surgeon of HMS Rattlesnake, diarist and watercolourist.
Daoguang Emperor of China 1820-50.
Davis, Sir John Governor of Hong Kong 1844-48.
Elliot, Cpt Charles Britain’s chief superintendent in China before the first invasion of Chusan in 1840. Joint plenipotentiary alongside George Elliot until 1841.
Elliot, Adm George Joint plenipotentiary alongside Charles Elliot until 1841.
Fortune, Robert Plant-hunter sent to China in 1843 to collect botanical samples.
Gough, Sir Hugh Commander of British land forces in China from mid-1841 to the Treaty of Nanking in 1842.
Graham, Sir James British Home Secretary 1841-46.
Gützlaff, Karl Chinese-speaking German missionary who serves with the British expeditions in China.
Kangxi Emperor of China 1661-1722.
Lan Li Brigade general of the Tinghae garrison 1690-1701.
Liang Baochang Governor of Zhejiang province 1844-48.
Liu Yunke Governor of Zhejiang province 1840-43.
Lockhart, William Medical missionary in Tinghae 1840-43.
Martin, Robert Montgomery Journalist and polemicist who agitates for Chusan’s retention as a colony.
Mu Sui Civil magistrate of Tinghae 1695-1715.
Noble, Anne Wife of the captain of the brig Kite, imprisoned in Ningbo after the Kite is wrecked.
Palmerston, Lord Britain’s foreign secretary under prime minister Lord Melbourne.
Parker, Sir William Commander of British naval forces in China from mid-1841 to 1844.
Pottinger, Sir Henry British plenipotentiary in China after Charles Elliot’s recall in 1841.
Qishan (Ch’i-shan, Kishen) Governor-general of Zhili 1831-40. Governor-general of Liangguang 1840-41.
Qiying (Ch’i-ying, Keying) A Manchu of the Imperial clan and Chinese negotiator at Nanking, 1842. Governor-general of Liangguang 1844-48.
Shi Shipiao Brigade general of the Tinghae garrison 1701-8.
Schoedde, Sir James Commanding officer of the 55th Regiment and governor of Chusan 1842-44.
Urgungga (Wu’ergonga) Governor of Zhejiang province 1834-40.
Yijing (Iching) Nephew of the emperor, given the title ‘Awe-Inspiring General’ and tasked with unseating the British in 1842.
Yilibu (Elepoo, Ilipu) Governor-general of the Yangtze river provinces 1840-41. Special commissioner for the Zhejiang coast, 1841. Chinese negotiator at Nanking, 1842.
Yuqian (Yu-ch’ien, Yukien) Yilibu’s successor as governor-general of the Yangtze river provinces and special commissioner for the Zhejiang coast, 1841.
Prologue
The villagers who gathered on the road to Ningbo on the eighteenth day of September 1840 were treated to a thrilling spectacle: barefoot and filthy, and soaked to the skin in just the thin gown she had been wearing when the Kite had been wrecked, a pale-skinned Englishwoman was being paraded in chains across the flat farmland of Zhejiang province. Braving the rain through mile after mile of jeering crowds, soon Mrs Anne Noble found herself confined in a bamboo cage so tiny that her nose touched her knees, and so, without food or dignity, she was to spend the next two days. In the port of Ningbo she would pass five months in a dark cell, let out now and then to relate her tale to local mandarins; she was, they concluded despite her protestations, a sister of Queen Victoria. But Anne was just the wife of a sea-captain from North Shields, cast a prisoner upon the coast of China. In shock and grieving for her husband and infant son, both drowned only days before, she prayed and sang hymns to keep from losing her mind. She was just twenty-six years old, and pregnant.
Imprisoned nearby was a Scot, a man quite the opposite of Anne. Captain Philip Anstruther was a great hulk of a man, a roistering drinker with a full ginger beard, the epitome of the invading barbarians the Chinese had recently come to despise. As for many a son born to a military family in India, a public-school education in London had flowed seamlessly into a career in the Madras Artillery. He now enjoyed the questionable distinction of having been beaten and kidnapped by insurgents. Elsewhere in Ningbo there were others in the same precarious position — Hindu seamen, and soldiers and sailors from every corner of the British Isles, even a Chinese merchant who had fled his home near Hong Kong only to be abducted for collaborating with the enemy. Barely two months had passed since Anne, Philip and the rest had arrived on these shores, but in those few momentous weeks relations between the empires of Great Britain and China had changed for ever, and in ways that still reverberate down to the present day.
In Anne Noble’s day a brig such as the Kite, up from Singapore with the wind in her sails, took three days to clear the Straits of Formosa and with them the tropics; then the Chinese province of Zhejiang would be sighted, and promontories so large they
might hide an English shire. Stretched out now beyond the horizon, the 1,391 islands of the Chusan archipelago speckled the sea so densely that for 100 miles a lookout on a topgallant would never be out of sight of one or other peak. They skittered out into the Pacific as though some giant hand had scooped up the land and flung it far out over the water. In their midst sat the island of Chusan itself, a temperate paradise after the heat of the south. Its walled city, Tinghae, commanded a broad vale mid-way along the island’s south coast, protected from the worst of the weather by the hills at its back. Britons had known about its deep-water harbour for centuries, and they had eyed it with growing envy as their maritime power grew. Comfortably larger than the Isle of Wight, Chusan lay five miles off the Zhejiang mainland with its thriving markets in teas and silks, and was but a short sail from the mouth of the Yangtze and the vast interior of China that beckoned beyond. Its mountain spine receded into a cobalt haze, snow-dusted in winter, bringing to mind the Scottish glens. Merchants dreamed of building villas on its hillsides and wharves on its waterfront, missionaries of founding churches and schools, while colonial visionaries imagined plantations in its cool uplands and fertile valleys sown with wheat. [1]
From the close of the seventeenth century, Chusan had been central to earnest attempts by the men of the British Isles to interact with the Manchu Qing dynasty which then ruled China. Commanding the trade-routes of the East China Sea, this strategically placed island sat squarely on what was fast becoming the new fault-line between East and West. With each new generation, men arrived under the Red Ensign bringing royal charters begging freedom to trade, with gifts for the emperor and letters of friendship from the Court of St James in London. Tinghae was the natural first landfall for diplomats sent by King George III in 1793. China’s emperor, Qianlong, would thank King George for his humility but make it clear that the Celestial Empire had not the slightest need of his country’s broadcloth and trinkets. Undeterred by China’s insularity, the British were tenacious, and time and again during the coming century it seemed they might go so far as to wrest Chusan from China’s hands forever. Under George’s granddaughter Queen Victoria the island was thrice occupied by red-coated troops, but thrice handed back. Before ever the Union Jack flew over Hong Kong, it was raised on Chusan.
At a time when the Enlightenment’s depictions of Cathay as a willow-pattern paradise were giving way to impressions of backwardness, tyranny and heathenism, the island of Chusan is where Britain and China took their first tentative steps at understanding one another. But while for a brief moment it was a household name in Britain, Chusan was swiftly eclipsed by Hong Kong’s subsequent success. In today’s People’s Republic, though, the story of its pivotal role in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century are familiar to every schoolchild. Like Dunkirk for the British, a resounding defeat at an obscure coastal town has become a focus for Chinese patriotism. And Chusan has become more, besides — a call to arms by an ever more nationalistic government. The People’s Republic does not teach its schoolchildren that Britain, the archetypal colonial aggressor, handed back to an impotent dynasty an island known to be the superior of Hong Kong, and for the sake of national honour.
‘We must religiously observe our engagements with China,’ wrote the Home Secretary Sir James Graham with deep regret on the eve of the island’s return to Chinese rule in 1846. ‘But I fear that Hong Kong is a sorry possession and Chusan is a magnificent island admirably placed for our purposes.’ Though the Chinese Communist Party might have it otherwise, the island of Chusan is an opportunity for Britain and China to deepen their friendship, not their enmity. This is its story. [2]
Tinghae and the harbour seen from the hills to the northeast, 1843.
1. Scarce a day free from insults
It is hard to imagine, in an age when staggering quantities of the world’s consumer goods are manufactured in the People’s Republic, that for centuries China suffered only the merest trickle of trade to pass through her gates. When European ships first arrived on her southern shores, China was still ruled by semi-divine emperors who perceived around them ever-widening circles of nations and tribes who grew less cultured and more barbarous the further they lived from the one, true civilization. There were many names for those unfortunate peoples, and it was fortuitous that the character chosen to describe Europeans depicted an archer holding a bow, for the Chinese were to learn that the men of the Great Western Ocean had a fondness for weaponry.
It was the Portuguese with their square-rigged carracks, a design of ship well suited to deep-sea voyages, who first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the late 1400s and established themselves in trading enclaves along the rim of the Indian Ocean. Making their first landfall on Canton’s Pearl River delta in 1513, by the mid-1500s they were trading as far north as the Yangtze. Their buccaneering ways, though, proved unacceptable to the Chinese, who burned their ships and their warehouses and forced them to retreat to the tiny tidal island of Macao, where they settled down to live and trade. The Dutch, for their part, first reached China almost a century later in 1604. Rebuffed at Canton, they sailed to Taiwan, where for decades until their forceful eviction in 1662 they carried on a profitable business. But of the European nations who sought to trade with the Chinese in those early years, it was, surprisingly, the English who fared the worst; no sensible gambler of the sixteenth century would have staked money on them becoming the pre-eminent power on the China coast. In fact, England had grown to enjoy the luxuries of the East without any clear idea of their origins, her merchants unable to compete in the expensive and risky business of Oriental trade and obliged instead to rely on European rivals who closely guarded their knowledge of sea routes and safe harbours. And when the English did finally gain the national self-confidence to challenge the Portuguese and the Dutch, things at first went badly: in 1596, the queen’s favourite Sir Robert Dudley financed a flotilla of ships to sail to China bearing a letter from Elizabeth to the emperor; they were never heard of again. Alarmed by news of vessels laden with luxuries arriving in Amsterdam, London’s merchants agreed that a government-backed company with a monopoly to trade to the East was essential if they were ever to punch at the same weight as their competitors. And so the first day of January, 1601, dawned upon a new contender for the riches of the Orient, the Governor & Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. This, the ‘East India Company’, would transform for ever the nature of China’s relationship with the world. [1]
Yet although they now enjoyed great privileges — they had a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape, and were permitted to carry valuable silver bullion out of the country to pay for it — the merchants of the East India Company still faced the most formidable of obstacles. A voyage to the far side of the globe and back could last years, and to be added to the privations en route, the threat of piracy, and the risk of armed conflict was the very real problem that English manufactures excited but little demand in the East. Still, by a process of trial and error in the matter of cargoes, by their meticulous management of provisioning and capital (and, it must be said, by the judicious use of gunpowder and shot when circumstances dictated), by the time of King Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 the East India Company was a highly profitable venture. Within just a few years the English were carving out a niche for themselves in Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan. Soon valuable ladings of tea, porcelain and, above all, silks were regularly being unloaded in London.
But mainland China herself remained elusive. In 1638 an English ship captained by one John Weddell had successfully made it up the Pearl River to Canton in the face of stiff opposition, fired upon from the shore with rockets and flaming arrows. In return, Weddell had burned junks and villages and carried off thirty head of swine, but his violent escapade had predictably failed to make a mark in the way he had hoped — peaceably and through commerce. Then in 1644 the Great Ming dynasty which for three centuries had ruled China was toppled by Manchu invaders from the northeast, and it was England’s misfort
une that two more vessels, the King Ferdinand and the Richard & Martha, reached Canton in 1658 during the ensuing ban on maritime trade and were obliged to leave without procuring a cargo. In 1664, the ship Surat visited Portuguese Macao but once again weighed anchor empty-handed. Finding it impossible to buy the cargoes it desired by trading directly with the Chinese, by the 1670s the East India Company had turned its attention to finding a backdoor route to their goods, sending ships to probe what cargoes might be loaded at entrepots from Indo-China in the south to Japan in the north. Slowly, persistence and a growing knowledge of the politics and geography of the region began to pay off. In 1684 the Manchus’ Great Qing dynasty, by then fully in control of all the defeated Ming territories and desperate for tax revenue, lifted its trade embargo and opened a handful of coastal ports to foreign shipping. As the 1600s drew to a close, the East India Company’s red-and-white striped flag had become a familiar sight from Canton in the south to Ningbo in the north.
Of all the Chinese ports which the Company frequented, however, Canton was by some measure the most important, due in no small part to its being the first mainland city which vessels reached after navigating the South China Sea. Home even then to more than one million souls, the city was itself no great centre of manufacture, but it had made its name as an emporium for goods transported across a vast hinterland. Foreign merchants quickly learned that the Cantonese, from the provincial inspector of customs down to the humblest lighterman, were raised to be pre-eminently skilled in business: each vessel to sound her way up the Pearl River was obliged to engage in endless rounds of hard-bargaining before filling her holds. An unpredictable labyrinth of cut-throat negotiations and cultural pitfalls, it was clear that the city’s markets, profitable though they may be, would have to be bypassed if the East India Company were to expand its China trade and meet a growing demand back home for tea and silk. Perhaps, the Company’s Court of Directors reasoned, if a man could be sent out with credentials enough to impress the mandarins further to the north, a market more lucrative than Canton might be established?