Chusan
Page 18
In mid-April, with Yijing’s dismissal, a man named Qiying had been appointed the latest in a growing list of imperial commissioners who had so far failed to manage the British. Like Yijing, Qiying was a Manchu of the Imperial clan, descended from a brother of the dynastic founder Nurhaci, and he had held top posts in four of the six ministries of central government. He had been sent to Zhejiang in company with a familiar face — Commissioner Yilibu. Yilibu, his failure to retake Chusan forgiven in light of his invaluable experience in dealing with the British, had spent scarcely a year in the political wilderness. By early May of 1842 he and Qiying were in Hangzhou, and there it was that they got word that the British were sailing in force up the Yangtze. Treading carefully, lest it be thought that they were willing to negotiate on anything approaching equal terms, they made overtures to Pottinger. If he should care to call a halt to the fighting and stop harassing the river traffic, they would be amenable to talks. But falling into the same trap as the disgraced Captain Elliot was the very last thing on Pottinger’s mind. With his counter-demand of immediate face-to-face talks rebuffed, in late July the British attacked Zhenjiang, the Manchu garrison city that guarded the point where the Grand Canal met the Yangtze. It was precisely the tactic that Gützlaff, back in 1835, had predicted would make Peking sit up and pay attention. [11]
One oppressively hot day, the British landed at Zhenjiang in their thousands — nobody was taking any chances by undermanning the attack — while rockets and shells were thrown into the city. The walls were scaled, the gates blown in, but Zhenjiang’s defenders did not flee like they had in every previous encounter with the British. These were no territorial Green Standards but instead hereditary soldiers of the Manchu banners, a courageous breed sworn to defend the dynasty, only they were still no match for the modern weapons and training of a European campaigning army. There was bloody fighting, hand-to-hand and inch-by-inch, as the Manchus were slaughtered. The survivors withdrew into the quarter of the city reserved for their families, and there they systematically murdered them — drowned them, slashed their throats, garrotted them, rather than see them despoiled by the invaders. During the night the city was looted and torched, an unmistakable foretaste of what awaited Nanking if the British were not given what they wanted. By morning the ships at anchor on the river could taste the battle: smoke hung over the city, and corpses bobbed ghoulishly about their moorings. Landing parties hurried to bury the piles of bodies that had started to putrefy in the furnace-like heat. The men of the expedition who went ashore to see the aftermath were sickened by this senseless massacre of the innocents. The Manchus had killed defenceless women, old men, even children and babies. Peking was shaken; but it was not the horror of the massacre that shook the court: such an end was praiseworthy, preferable to capture, and the fault in any case lay with the army whose aggression had precipitated the mass suicide. For all his insistence that he shed tears for his children’s suffering, the emperor seemed to Western sensibilities shockingly adept at ignoring their pain. Until, that was, the source of that pain drew uncomfortably close. The difference now was that a 2,000-strong regular Manchu garrison had fought to the death and lost, giving the enemy control of that vital economic crossroads where China’s greatest river met its longest canal and leaving the way clear to Nanking. Zhenjiang was no boon-dock Tinghae, its professional Manchu troops no irregular Han Chinese forces or ill-equipped conscripts who fled at the first shot, yet still they had been swept aside. And after Nanking, would the British head for the Peiho and take Peking? That would mean the end of the dynasty, and they had shown that they were quite capable of it. [12]
When a fortnight later the fleet anchored beneath Nanking’s ancient, straggling walls, Pottinger was master of the Yangtze. Commissioner Yilibu, rushing to the city, sent his most trusted aide to plead against any attack. Pottinger agreed to wait while credentials were produced, but when dissatisfaction was expressed at the limited scope of Yilibu’s negotiating powers the warships were made ready to pound Nanking into submission. More offers were made — of money and of talks — with Yilibu and Qiying terrified that Nanking would be razed to the ground yet still unwilling to grant the British carte blanche. On August 13th, the two commissioners were informed that Nanking was to be destroyed the next day. The threat was enough to force the Chinese to open full plenipotentiary negotiations, and a fortnight later the Treaty of Nanking (the Chinese preferred to call it rather euphemistically ‘The Yangtze Provinces Treaty for Ten Thousand Years of Peace’) was signed aboard HMS Cornwallis. Lieutenant James Fitzjames of the Cornwallis, who was present at the signing, had been recording the expedition’s progress for his messmates’ amusement. His pithy summing up of the provisions of the treaty was eventually published in the Nautical Magazine of London:
Dollars twenty-one million by China to be paid;
Free permission for all British subjects to trade;
At five ports; videlicet, Canton, Ningbo;
Shanghai, Amoy, Foochowfoo; and to go;
From Amoy and Chusan (where a force now remains);
When the money is paid, and then England retains;
The whole of the island and bay of Hong Kong;
To show the Chinese we were not in the wrong.
A Consul in each of these five ports to live;
‘Native traitors’ the Emperor agrees to forgive. [13]
So Pottinger had got his reparations for the destroyed opium, for the cost of the war, and even for outstanding debts owed to British merchants in Canton. He had opened ports on the eastern seaboard to foreign trade, just as Palmerston had asked, had confirmed Hong Kong’s status, and had even kept his word over an amnesty for Chinese who had fraternised. Nor were his terms as onerous as they might have been: the $21,000,000 was to be paid in instalments before New Year’s Eve of 1845; the opening of ports was an extension of privileges already enjoyed at Canton; and consular representation was not so far removed from the long-standing practice of recognising agents of the East India Company as to be unacceptable to Peking.
But would it really be necessary ‘to go from Chusan when the money was paid’? The Chinese delegation is reputed, when Pottinger had made his demands known, to have asked with a degree of incredulity: ‘Is that all?’ It had been assumed by most observers, and feared by the Chinese, that the permanent cession of what was already a de facto British Chusan would be at the top of the list. Only with Hong Kong now unquestionably sovereign territory and its commercial advantages becoming apparent, it seemed that Pottinger attached less importance to wresting control of a second, even larger island than he did to securing wider access to new markets. Almost straight away, the first downpayment of $6,000,000 was loaded onto HMS Cornwallis and the fleet released its stranglehold on the Grand Canal to sail back to Tinghae. It had taken an unprecedented and permanent cession of territory to achieve it, but the Qing dynasty had finally succeeded in managing the barbarians.
‘So ends the Chinese war,’ wrote Edward Cree with relief. ‘It has cost the lives of many thousands of human beings, and great destruction of property and misery and sorrow to many.’ One of those lives was to be the mild-mannered Commissioner Yilibu’s. Ordered south to Canton to negotiate the details of trade in Pottinger’s treaty ports, in early March of the next year he sickened and died. The tense talks, conducted in the torrid heat of a Yangtze summer under the threat of terrible violence, had in the end proved too much for him.
15. How muchie loopee?
As one by one the men-of-war and transports returning from the Yangtze rounded Bell Island to enter Tinghae’s inner harbour, their crews noticed an unfamiliar vessel lying at anchor amongst the usual press of Chinese bum-boats. The hospital ship HMS Minden had been commissioned by the Admiralty late in 1841, when it had looked likely that the war in China would prove protracted and disease-ridden, and she had slipped quietly into Chusan the day negotiations had begun at Nanking. (She had, incidentally, been Captain Charles Elliot’s first posting as a midshipman
in 1816, though he was no longer in China to greet her.) Her cannons had been unshipped and her decks scrubbed and painted white to create wards. Iron bedsteads had taken the place of hammocks, hygienic water-closets replaced the age-old heads (which were essentially holes in the deck), boilers provided hot water on tap and a laundry clean bedding, the galley stove baked nutritious bread, and Dr Reid’s Ventilation Apparatus worked to replace the malignant air from the lower decks. Especially to be welcomed by the men of the China expedition, she carried large stocks of buchu, a plant which, it had been discovered, the Hottentots of the Cape used to treat dysentery. A decade before Florence Nightingale would open her doors in Scutari, the Minden was the largest and most efficient hospital ever to leave English shores. Whispers soon reached her expectant ward-decks of a terrible strain of malignant cholera gripping the Yangtze fleet. It had taken a man, they said, ‘from full health to Davy Jones’ locker’ in just eight hours. [1]
On Michaelmas Day 1842, the troopship Belleisle became the first of the Yangtze fleet to drop anchor in Tinghae. She had left Plymouth a year earlier to brass bands and bunting, with 862 soldiers of Her Majesty’s 98th Regiment of Foot, 300 sailors, 41 wives and 75 children aboard. Her lower deck alone housed over 700, with families sleeping behind sheets strung between the hulls. Below the waterline in her orlop deck were squeezed 272 men, on hammocks set just a foot apart at their clews. No hint of a breeze reached to those foetid confines, where the mercury was forever in the nineties. Every spare inch was crammed with chests, crates and casks. The cows and horses in their stalls and the sheep, pigs, ducks and chickens that lived below with the passengers rendered the Belleisle a squalid ark. At Zhenjiang the 98th Regiment had been landed in full battledress despite roasting temperatures.4 On that first wretched day of fighting and suicides, thirteen of the regiment had died of heatstroke. Fifty-seven more would swiftly follow, of cholera, malaria and dysentery made fatal by confinement on ship. By the end of July the Belleisle was a floating lazaretto, and when she slunk into Tinghae harbour only seventy men were still fit for duty. On October 1st, the anniversary of Chusan’s recapture and what ought to have been a day of celebration, fifty of the regiment’s worst cases were admitted to the Minden for treatment. [2]
Though the expedition had been buoyed by the successful conclusion of the Treaty of Nanking, the winter of 1842 was gloomy. The hospital lists rose (this was mainly the result of hard drinking over the festive season) and the clouds now and again opened to release truly torrential downpours. It grew cold. A mile away, the island seen through the Minden’s glazed portholes was a strip of white hills sandwiched between a black sky and a brown sea, a most depressing sight. Then a week passed without a single death aboard. Then another. And by the end of March, for the first time since 1840, the whole squadron was in perfect health. Bracing weather, good food, plentiful medical supplies, and an end to the strain of subjugating a restive population had improved life no end. In early May the Minden discharged the last of her patients to a purpose-built military hospital ashore and left Chusan for Hong Kong where tropical diseases were still devastating the British garrison. [3]
By October 1842, the victorious British high command had all safely arrived back in Tinghae. Mandarins came from the mainland, and with much ceremonial handed over soldiers and sailors who had been kidnapped before the treaty. In Hong Kong, the Babao brothers who had kidnapped some of them were set free. Upriver in Canton province, three of the executed comprador Bu Dingbang’s family had perished in gaol. His mother, widow, and daughter, their property and money now forfeit under Chinese law because of his crimes, were obliged to survive on a British charitable handout of $15 each month. The public hangings of July had drawn a line under the kidnappings on Chusan, and the Treaty of Nanking had rendered any more superfluous. But still there occurred one last, singular episode before the two empires could put the unpleasantness of the last few years behind them. [4]
In early October while out walking scarcely half a mile from Tinghae’s north gate, Ensign Lawrence Shadwell of the 98th Regiment and a friend named George Wellesley were ambushed by a gang armed with bamboo poles. Though George managed to escape back to the city, Shadwell was gagged, bound, and dragged away. Despite the blows, he contrived to work a hand free to shoot one assailant with his pistol. The others ran off, and when George returned with an armed sentry they found Shadwell badly beaten but otherwise safe. That the attack came after the promulgation of the treaty was put down to ignorance, but what really caused a stir was the identity of Shadwell’s friend: the kidnappers had come close to capturing the nephew of no less a person than the Duke of Wellington. The youngest son of the Duke’s brother Gerald, George Wellesley had arrived in Chusan in late June as the fighting still raged in the Yangtze. Granted a discharge from his ship, he had landed to await a passage to his next posting. If Captain Elliot had been tactically wrongfooted (and the British public scandalised) by the capture of the otherwise unknown Captain Anstruther, the disappearance of a member of one of England’s highest families can only be imagined. The Duke of Wellington was commander-in-chief, a cabinet minister without office, and leader of the House of Lords to boot. His nephew’s kidnap or death would have demanded a ferocious backlash, but against whom would it usefully have been directed? It is intriguing to ponder whether the sanctity of Pottinger’s hard-won treaty (it had not yet even arrived in England to be signed and ratified) would have withstood the clamour for retaliation had George been beheaded, or whether the Chinese camp might have felt emboldened to sell his release only at the highest diplomatic price rather than hand him back as a token of peace. As Yilibu had rightly surmised, the close friends and relations of barbarian chiefs were the most valuable pieces in games of such high stakes. But George’s quick-thinking that afternoon, and Shadwell’s assuredness with a pistol, left all such questions forever in the realms of supposition. [5]
The greater part of the troops who had fought in the Yangtze campaign now left Chusan for Hong Kong, and a field force dominated by the Westmoreland Regiment was left to garrison the island. Their commanding officer Sir James Schoedde accepted the insignia to become the latest British governor. The ineffable Karl Gützlaff, who had thoroughly enjoyed his time lording it over the Chinese as magistrate of Ningbo, was pleased to take up the reins once more as magistrate of Chusan. As harbour master and marine magistrate, one George H. Skead RN was sworn in to oversee the anchorages for international shipping and to bring some kind of order to the countless skiffs, sampans and junks that plied the waters. Like Hong Kong, Tinghae was for the first time declared a ‘free port’ — so long as Queen Victoria ruled here there would be no customs charges, port duties or taxes levied on ships of any nation. In the coming years, the French tricolour and the Stars and Stripes would be a common sight in harbour. For the time being at least, things had finally turned out as Allen Catchpoole had wished when, 142 years earlier, he had sought from a humble zongbing the right to live and trade freely on those shores. As Cree had said, it had cost the lives of thousands and great destruction to achieve. Would it in the end be worth the price? [6]
Peace between the Chinese Empire and Great Britain had breathed a rare confidence into Tinghae. It was the emperor himself who had permitted the British to live and trade here, and there was no question of the islanders being punished for having dealings with them. Sir Henry Pottinger had reiterated his promise that, if Chusan were ever again to be returned to Chinese rule, it would only be on the stipulation that the emperor grant a signed amnesty to any Chinese who had had dealings with the British. They could, he stressed, live and trade on Chusan assured of their impunity. What the islanders thought of Pottinger’s assurances is unclear: Sir Henry was a mere barbarian officer, while the emperor was the very Son of Heaven. Of what import was the emperor’s signature if it bound him to act in a way dictated by the barbarians? Such insolence was outrageous. Yet they had seen with their own eyes that the emperor’s armies were quite unable to dictate terms to th
e British, and they were a pragmatic and commercial people. [7]
Soon Tinghae was a scene of bustle and activity, all its shops open for business, and the words ‘How muchie loopee?’ were everywhere to be heard. They were neat and clean now and would have done honour to any London grocer. Pastry-cooks were naturally selling mostly Chinese dainties made of ground rice and sweet red beanpaste, ill-suited to Western tastes, but already some had learned how to bake English biscuits for their captive market. Others had memorised the English names for their goods, and one cobbler had begun to make shoes in the European style. A fertile source of confrontation between traders and soldiers would soon be removed by the enforcement of standardised weights and measures. Guttersnipes tailed the officers in the hope of a few rupees’ fleeting employment, squawking away in pidgin English. There was a great number of merchant vessels in harbour, and prices were lower even than Hong Kong. On October 11th they decked themselves out with flags for the Chusan Regatta. As for opium, the drug that had lain at the root of the war, it was, despite the best efforts of the British commanders on Chusan to stem its trade on the China coast, readily available. Determined, as ever, to walk the thin line between condoning and condemning the trade, the British government was most careful not to give the Chinese the mistaken impression that they were able to stop the trade if they wished: that was in the lap of the opium traders themselves. Two years into the second British occupation, in fact, one Charles Hope, captain of HMS Thalia, would even be rapped over the knuckles by the foreign secretary Lord Palmerston for attempting to exercise control over British opium vessels: how could the Chinese, if Hope were to be successful in stopping the opium trade, come to any other conclusion than that the British had been lying all along when they had insisted that they had no authority over private merchants? How ironic, that Captain Hope’s conviction — that the actions of British merchants were bringing both Britain’s flag and her national reputation into disgrace — was outweighed by fears that stopping the opium trade would cast the British as perfidious. And so the trade went on. [8]