Chusan
Page 4
But if Sir George’s guesswork as to the origins of the Chinese flying eave was wide of the mark, his description of Tinghae as a bustling commercial centre rings true. The town that sultry July 5th smelt of the incense that wafted from shops and temples into its busy streets. He was impressed by the rich displays of silks and cottons, of furniture, brightly painted coffins and animals fated for the pot — eels, fish, poultry, and even dogs. He noted the curious hairstyle all men adopted, their heads shaved leaving just a long pigtail (it was a legal requirement, and a sign of submission, for Chinese men to wear their hair in this style characteristic of their Manchu rulers) and the attractive way the women coiled their plaits into a topknot. Their tiny bound feet, though, he considered a bad affair. [8]
Staunton’s curiosity was in turn more than matched by that of the townsfolk: though opium clippers were to be seen in Chusan’s outer anchorages, no foreigner had set foot in Tinghae in recent memory, and the sight of aristocratic Britons swathed in dress-coats, stockings and breeches, buckled shoes and pomaded wigs had an electrifying effect. People crowded around the shore party, ignoring the efforts of Chinese soldiers to hold them back. The atmosphere was muggy, the visitors bound in layers of tight clothing and stifled by onlookers. Before nightfall, a sky which all day had glowered with the threat of rain suddenly turned black, and there arose a terrific thunderstorm. Suffering from the heat, the party slipped into the City God’s Temple to catch their breath, emerging in sedans to be carried back to the harbour. The crowd, which had waited outside for them to reappear, followed them all the way back to the old Red Hair Hall, inquisitive heads pushed every now and again through the drapes. That muggy summer’s day, it was later remembered, the only words to be heard on the townsfolk’s lips were dahuangdi and hongmao: ‘the great emperor’ and ‘the men with red hair’. [9]
When it came to finding sailors who had been all the way north to the Peiho River, a number of miserable wretches were sniffed out but none were capable of piloting a ship. It was a most unexpected turn of events, since Chusan was known to be a centre of seafaring. Eventually, two former merchants were found who in their youth had made the voyage many times. Despite their protestations that it would be ruinous to their businesses and their settled lives, they were commanded in the name of the emperor to prepare to leave. By dark, the Clarence was once more anchored off Lowang, and the next day she sighted the rest of the squadron. But the merchants turned out to be worse than useless as pilots, understandably frightened by the strange surroundings of a European warship and incapable of navigating out of sight of the shore. [10]
‘It was in vain to make them endeavour to comprehend the difference in the draft of water between their ships and ours,’ complained John Barrow, the overseer of the embassy’s scientific instruments, ‘although they were shown by a piece of rope the depth required. Indeed, their skill in navigation was held very cheap by the lowest seaman on board.’ Still, taking on proper pilots in Shandong, the embassy safely reached the mouth of the Peiho. There its ships, drawing too great a depth of water to proceed, turned back for Chusan, while Lord Macartney’s vast store of gifts for the emperor was meticulously trans-shipped into shallow-draughted junks.
On the slow and winding river passage to the capital, the question of ceremonial was raised. (Lord Macartney by now suspected that the Chinese understood his embassy in starkly different terms to himself, for lining the banks were banners announcing that he was bringing with him not gifts for the emperor but gongwu, the term reserved for items of tribute from a vassal nation. He objected, but his objections were ignored: he was, after all, a mere envoy from such a vassal nation and could be excused his ignorance of Qing practice). Macartney was informed that he would, of course, be performing the full kowtow before Qianlong — three genuflections and nine prostrations, touching the forehead each time on the floor — to demonstrate King George III’s acceptance of his vassal status. But Macartney could not — would not — kowtow to anybody. The argument soured the atmosphere.
The emperor’s birthday celebrations — the occasion on which Macartney was to meet him — were to be held in the imperial retreat at Chengde, a hundred miles beyond Peking. When the British finally arrived in the town, the only men to witness their entry were idle street people of the lowest order. The Chinese seemed to be making a point. They were handed a letter which Macartney had been jealously guarding since London. It came from King George III himself, and outlined the reasons for his embassy. King George concluded by declaring Qianlong to be his good brother and friend. To a demigod who counted the sun, moon and stars within his extended family, this claim to his fraternity was outrageous, a terrible diplomatic faux pas. The row over the kowtow simmered on, and at length Qianlong agreed that a single bending of the knee, as the form of respect Macartney might show to his own monarch, would suffice. But what to Macartney appeared a victory over protocol only served to affirm the British in Chinese eyes as the most unreconstructed of barbarians.
The long-awaited meeting with Qianlong, when it came, was not the focus of festivities that Macartney had hoped it would be. He found himself just one of three ambassadors presented to the emperor that day, the others Kalmuks from Central Asia and representatives of a Burmese prince who went barefoot and chewed betel-nuts like savages. When Macartney’s turn came he knelt before Qianlong, handed a few of King George’s presents to the waiting courtiers, and was ushered away in the same way as the Kalmuks and the Burmese. In an official reply to his letter, King George was praised for his humility and obedience, and for his willingness to incline his heart toward civilisation. But his requests for more equitable trading conditions — and this after all was the very point of the embassy — were dismissed with all the condescension of a stern parent toward a greedy and deluded child. There was no possibility of Britons being allowed to live and trade on Chusan. Worse, and despite every intention to the contrary, King George III had added his name to China’s long list of vassal rulers. When a generation later frustration finally flared into violence, the Chinese could rightly rank the British as ‘perfidious rebels’.
The situation went from bad to worse when sickness broke out aboard the embassy’s ships as they sailed back from the Peiho to drop anchor off Chusan. A patch of rice-paddy north of the old Red Hair Hall was granted to the squadron’s five dozen invalids, and near a large building given over as a hospital for them there sprang up a village of white canvas tents. Guards were posted to prevent any contact between the British and the islanders, though the contamination feared was as much cultural as it was corporal. The weather in early autumn was still hot, and it was a struggle to find any clean water. On Chusan itself, and on the smaller islands of Tinghae’s harbour, watering parties found the village wells to be reservoirs for surface run-off rather than bore holes. On some days they might visit thirty or more without gathering enough. Worse, as villagers began to equate the appearance of British boats with the theft of their irrigation water they would drain their wells of what little they contained and toss filth in to spoil what was left. That, at least, was what the British suspected after the indignities they had endured elsewhere in China. But time ashore, even on the mosquito-ridden paddy, cured most of the dysentery cases (many had contracted malaria in its place, but at least this was curable with cinchona bark). Those who died were buried on Chusan. On the last day of November the Hindostan weighed anchor to leave Tinghae harbour. But there, as she struck a submerged rock, she gave a dreadful heel and water came close to flooding her gundecks. After fully half a minute, just when it seemed her keel would split under her weight, she floated free. The embassy had so nearly ended in disaster as well as humiliation. [11]
And so, a costly trade mission having been utterly rebuffed, Britain’s commercial grievances festered, yet China paid them no heed. The British were, after all, being correctly managed by long-established protocols of the Great Qing dynasty, and they had willingly shown themselves to be vassals. When in 1816 a second embassy arrived in Peking i
n filthy weather in the dead of night, its ambassador was whisked bedraggled and tired to the Forbidden City and forced to kowtow to the emperor. There seems to have been a refusal, a scuffle, and Lord Amherst was ordered to leave in disgrace. If China would not of its own volition grant Great Britain the respect and the trading rights she expected, then only force, it seemed, remained, and Great Britain was growing certain enough of her military superiority to resort to it.
3. The slightest spark
The coming to the throne in 1820 of a new emperor — Daoguang was a grandson of the Qianlong Emperor who had confined foreign trade to Canton — made no difference to the arduous nature of living and working in China for British merchants. If anything it got worse, but the frugally minded Daoguang, his shoulders bearing the weight of an empire which was under threat from internal uprisings and natural disasters, had little time for, and, besides, no real understanding of British grievances. By the time Daoguang ascended the throne, nearly five thousand chests of Indian opium were reaching China each year. The British government continued to tiptoe the narrow path between supporting and condemning the opium trade, Britain’s superintendent in Canton being reminded that he should neither encourage opium traders in their activity nor lose sight of the fact that he had no authority to interfere with them, for they were not beholden to act according to government diktat. From a Chinese perspective, of course, such fence-sitting was utterly incomprehensible: these were merchants from the land of Yingjili — how could it not be within the power of their chieftains to restrain them? [1]
But while the merchants at the coalface of the China trade were prepared — if far from happy — to allow things to continue as they always had for the sake of predictability and profits, others were growing increasingly impatient with China’s refusal to engage in anything approaching meaningful negotiations on trade. Besides, for the Court of St James far away on the northern edge of the Great Western Ocean, China’s haughty assertion that the monarch of Yingjili was a mere barbarian prince was growing more unacceptable with every year that passed. And for the Treasury, the worrying tendency of the Chinese to unilaterally suspend the Canton trade at a whim, and so cut off vast sums in tax revenue, was beginning to threaten Britain’s fiscal base.
In 1835, an essay was forwarded to Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, from a rather unexpected quarter. Its author was a German missionary named Karl Gützlaff. Gützlaff, a Lutheran evangelist who spoke several oriental languages, had over the course of the previous few years formed strong opinions on the political situation on the China coast. He was candid in his observations:
The Mandarins are taught from their childhood to look with contempt upon Barbarians. Under this denomination all foreigners are included, however civilized they may be, if they are not transformed by the laws of the Celestial Empire, they remain Barbarians and ought to be treated as such. [2]
China, Gützlaff went on, ‘looks… with the utmost contempt upon the British Empire, and upon its Sovereign as a Barbarian King who has to tender obedience and homage to the Celestial Empire.’ All that two embassies to Peking had achieved was to confirm the Chinese in their belief that Great Britain was merely a tributary vassal wholly undeserving of diplomatic recognition. ‘We can demand everything from the fears of the Chinese government,’ Gützlaff wrote, ‘but nothing from their goodwill.’ If the British desired the right to free trade in China, they must provoke a reaction in Peking, something their ambassadors had signally failed to do so far by pussyfooting around Chinese sensibilities:
This haughty government must be lowered in the dust by distress, and come to offer terms instead of being permitted to reject ours. Once we have got the trading conditions we require, the government should be made to compensate us for our military forces.
As a first step, Gützlaff recommended to Lord Palmerston that any future stoppage of the Canton trade be met with the least bloody response — a naval blockade. Just a handful of British men-of-war would need to be stationed along the coast, off the great cities of the Yangtze, at the mouth of the Peiho, and on the ancient Grand Canal that linked Hangzhou to Peking. Gützlaff’s reasoning was simple: such a move would stem the supply of rice to the capital. The Chinese government could
sacrifice the lives of myriads without a groan, for the country teems with people… but it cannot do without its large supplies of grain, for it has to satisfy a host of hungry Tartars who are quite dependent on the coast.’
Next, a jumping-off point was needed, a fulcrum for all subsequent military action, and this role Gützlaff alloted to Chusan. The British occupation of that island, he concluded, would defy response and cause a sensation in Peking. The Chinese, finding a dagger pointed at their heart, would be forced to negotiate, but the British should remain aloof until presented with an offer too good to refuse. The man chosen to lead this expedition must have full plenipotentiary power to act, Gützlaff insisted, and must be a man of the utmost firmness. He needed to be equipped with enough firepower to make his point unambiguously. He should establish his HQ on Chusan and not leave until his demands were met.
‘The Chinese will attempt to cut off our supplies,’ Gützlaff predicted, ‘and unless we have treated the people well, they might do us severe harm on this score. A paltry effort will be made to dislodge us.’ The events of the coming years would prove Gützlaff to be a man of considerable prescience.
‘To try by conciliatory measures to bring matters to a happy conclusion has been proven delusive,’ he impressed upon Palmerston, ‘and our whole diplomatic intercourse has been very justly compared to pouring water into a sieve, and wondering at its remaining always empty.’ Force was now unavoidable if the doors of the China market were to be opened. ‘The combustible materials are there, and the slightest spark will produce a flame.’
Who, then, was this Karl Gützlaff, this intriguing German who felt entitled to refer to himself and the British as ‘we’, as if he were little short of being a personal aide to Britain’s foreign secretary? How had he come to know so much about the Chusan archipelago, when for more than a lifetime foreigners had been banned from trading there?
Born in the Prussian province of Pomerania, Karl Gützlaff had grown up to be an eccentric Lutheran preacher, an incorrigible self-publicist and fund-raiser exuding missionary zeal, and a rough-and-tumble, baptise-’em-or-hang-’em worker for God with a sound knowledge of Chinese culture. Though some thought him a man of specious manner and commented on his intolerable assumption of omniscience, most agreed that he was kind-hearted, if a little prickly and thick-skinned. With great drollery he would dole out insights from his fund of anecdotes on China, keeping those about him in constant laughter. Gützlaff looked and sounded the part, too — short and well-built, with a good-humoured face, a heavy German accent, and clothes that looked to have been cut in some remote Pomeranian village where the fashions of the town had yet to reach. Yet he was almost unique among the men setting forth their suggestions for Britain’s China policy in the mid-1830s in having actually spent time ashore in the Chusan archipelago. He well understood that his knowledge of Chinese — he could read and write it, as well as speak more than one coastal dialect — made him a most useful asset to the British government at a time when there was no professional body of interpreters to speak of. He knew, too, that the firepower of the Royal Navy was the best hope he had of getting unrestricted access to the tens of thousands of heathen souls who lived on Chusan. Little wonder, then, that he was so eager to direct that firepower as best he could. [3]
He had first travelled east in 1826 aged just twenty-three, living first in Jakarta, then amongst the overseas Chinese community in Bangkok, then in a mission station at Malacca on the Malay peninsula where he married an Englishwoman, a teacher at a girls’ school. He returned with Maria to Bangkok, and there they lived until in 1831 she died in childbirth. Time spent in Siam mixing with the overseas Chinese had opened Gützlaff’s eyes to the boundless possibilities for mission work in
China itself, and four months after his wife’s passing he boarded a cramped and unhealthy junk bound for Chusan, her captain and crew alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) too stoned on opium even to sail her. Gützlaff had arrived in the archipelago only to be refused permission to go ashore: the prohibition on foreigners landing there was as valid as when the last East Indiaman had been forced to leave in 1759, and the Chinese did not differentiate between merchants and missionaries. But something about the islands’ potential as a field for mission left its mark, and within the year Gützlaff was back as interpreter to the trading barque Lord Amherst to test the waters once more. Refused permission to enter Tinghae’s inner harbour to drum up interest in her woven cloth (she intentionally held no opium, the better to approach the island with clean hands), the Lord Amherst instead made do with an anchorage off nearby Kintang Island, and Gützlaff set foot on Chusanese soil for the first time. The island impressed Gützlaff — it was fertile, and its people friendly. He set about distributing religious tracts and medicinal ointments, browbeating the Buddhist priests who lived in Kintang’s temples on the spuriousness of their faith. Islanders rowed out to the Lord Amherst to be cured of their ailments and rowed back clutching a treatise on Christ to boot. [4]
‘The word of God,’ Gützlaff predicted, ‘will doubtless find some serious readers among the intelligent natives of Kintang, and when I revisit the island, there will be some individuals who know that Jesus Christ is coming into the world to save sinners. This joyful hope animates me under all discouragements.’ There would indeed be both animation and discouragement, for when next Gützlaff visited the archipelago it was aboard an opium clipper in the January of 1833, a winter so bitter that some of the lascars crewing the Sylph died of hypothermia. Once more his request to the city’s magistrate to enter Tinghae itself was turned down (that honour would have to wait until he had the British army at his side to make his request all the more forcefully) but again he made up for his disappointment with zealous distribution of tracts wherever he could contrive to land unnoticed by Chusan’s mandarins. On Kintang, he claimed, the locals recognised him and came to receive the scriptures once more, bringing their sick to be treated with his famed sulphur and mercurial ointment. On the Buddhist holy island of Putuoshan, he declared, priests swam out from the shore to meet his boat as it landed, exclaiming ‘Praise be to Buddha!’ and carrying every volume off in triumph. At the fishing village of Sinkamoon on Chusan’s east coast, crowds of locals begged not to be sent away empty-handed, even going so far as to steal his tracts. But Gützlaff was a shrewd operator and understood the Chinese mindset. Despite the grandiloquence of the reports he sent home to raise funds, he must have known that any apparent appetite for the Word of God owed more to curiosity and raw greed than to any thirst for Salvation. Still, to a prosperous readership eager to believe any reports of success, no matter how far they stretched the truth, Gützlaff could enthuse over the potential for spreading the Word among the people of Zhejiang.