Edward Cree for one was thankful to swap the miasmas of the Yangtze for the sea breezes of Chusan. His arduous caseload during the river campaign was forgotten now the Rattlesnake was once more surrounded by sampans full of babbling farmers eager to sell their produce. Word of the treaty had reached Trumball Island, where during the first occupation Cree had often visited the pipe-smoking duck farmer. This man, Cree found to his delight, had not after all been beheaded for fraternisation. True, he had been in trouble for selling food to the barbarians, but it was nothing the old rogue could not worm his way out of. His name, he was now prepared to tell Cree, was A-Tin, and he began to take in ship’s laundry to wash, helped by a youngest son whose English was becoming quite passable. His take on that summer’s denouement was that the British ‘were beaten away from Hong Kong, so went up to Nanking, where the mandarin said “What do you want?”’ The British had answered ‘Six million dollars’, and the mandarin had given it to them to keep them quiet. Already, the indemnity was being referred to by the Chinese as fuyikuan — ‘the sum paid to soothe the barbarians’. From the rarefied confines of the Forbidden City to the islands of Tinghae harbour the understanding of the war was the same — only by the grace of eternal China, the one civilisation around which All Under Heaven revolved, had the British been suffered to carry on their grubby trade. There had been no admission of Chinese inferiority. Far from it, the peaceful withdrawal of the Yangtze fleet could only be construed as a Chinese victory. [9]
As the damp Zhejiang winter drew in, Cree resumed his butchery of the local wildfowl. His Rattlesnake became more roomy with the departure of the Royal Irish for Amoy, and he spent Christmas of 1842 dining with the remaining officers while the ship’s crew drank themselves into a disgraceful state. On New Year’s Eve, Cree and his army friends played whist and celebrated the coming of 1843 with anchovy toast, whisky punch and cigars. For the first time since 1839, it looked likely that the coming year would bring nothing but peace.
16. Tabula rasa
Under the Treaty of Nanking the Chinese had agreed to open ports other than Canton to foreigners, but it was only after the details of tariffs and trade had been hammered out that merchants could begin to live and work in them. It would be almost two years, the summer of 1844, before goods were freely flowing through Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai alike. Even then, for security and companionship foreigners found themselves confined in the main to enclaves outside the walls, their travel officially restricted to the distance of a day’s journey. In Amoy and Fuzhou they lived upon the islands of Gulangyu and Nantai, in Ningbo upon a spit of land at the confluence of two rivers, and at Shanghai in a concession bounded by water. On a still sparsely populated Hong Kong, Britons restricted themselves to the community that was fast growing up at Victoria, where the Chinese population was dominated by shady individuals eager to avoid the attentions of the authorities across the bay in Kowloon. (As the missionary George Smith put it, Hong Kong with its theft and violence had become ‘a receptacle for the most abandoned desperadoes of the continent.’) Only on Chusan did Britons find themselves living squarely among a large and thoroughly indigenous community. Never before had so many men and women from every class and calling found themselves free to roam towns and villages in complete safety, without the mandarins forever looking jealously over their shoulders, deciding what they saw, insisting they turn back. Through their writings, published in the newspapers, magazines and books of the day, detailed information on every aspect of life became available to readers back home, and Chusan became for a number of years the most familiar of Chinese place-names. [1]
Britain’s understanding of China was set to change beyond recognition in the years after the Union Jack was raised over Tinghae. Until that point, what the West thought it knew of distant Cathay had still owed as much to the social agenda of the Enlightenment as it did to reality. Even the most easily reached province, Canton, was for most Europeans an unimaginably long journey, and almost all knowledge had arrived through the distorting prism of those missionaries who since Matteo Ricci in the 1580s had penetrated the emperor’s court. Even the eighteenth-century Jesuit Père Du Halde, compiler of the authoritative Description de la Chine which had been essential reading matter for visitors such as Lord Macartney, had never in fact visited the country in person. The philosophes of the Enlightenment especially became enchanted with the Jesuits’ stories. These thinkers, who like the Jesuits were themselves a product of the religious chaos of the Reformation, insisted that reason was superior to the irrationality of revealed faith. Seeking to replace Christianity with humanism (or even with thoroughgoing atheism), they saw in Confucianism a model to emulate. Working at best from second- or third-hand accounts, they thought they had found in China an ideal example of morality without religion. Men like Voltaire, an outspoken propagandist for China (though of course he too had never ventured within 6,000 miles of the Forbidden City), lauded it as the perfect example of enlightened government. The Chinese, though, would not have recognised his description of their world.
By the end of the eighteenth century a more realistic view of China had begun to oust the idealisations of the Enlightenment, and it had been mercantile Britons rather than continental theoreticians who had led the way. Fruitless attempts to reason with its Manchu ruling class over trade and diplomatic ties — the failed embassies of lords Macartney and Amherst were a perfect case — had made it clear that these were a people in thrall not to rationalism but instead to a conservative and inward-looking despotism. Yet old stereotypes are slow to change, and publicly available accounts of even the Macartney embassy had persisted in painting a willow-pattern scene of Tinghae as though it were a smaller version of Venice. What little remained of that myth of a beautiful and orderly Celestial Empire began to dissipate along with the smoke of battle on July 5th, 1840. If familiarity did not quite breed contempt, eye-witness reports of the reality of China were disdainful of its once-vaunted culture and tinged with disappointment that the Chinese had fallen short of the high ideals that had been ascribed to them. ‘Some writer has compared Tinghae with Venice,’ one scornful observer wrote of Sir George Staunton’s description. ‘If that’s true, then the straw hovels of Mongha near Macao are like the Tuileries, for both are the habitations of men.’ [2]
On closer inspection it struck one that the nation once lauded by Voltaire and his kind was technologically backward and politically bankrupt, that its supposedly comfortable peasantry lived for the most part exploited by landlords in abject poverty, and that a supposedly utopian system of farming was nothing but a myth. As for Chinese towns being kept clean by refuse collectors, as the philosophes insisted was the case, the British invaders of 1840 had been almost overcome by the filth. Gradually the mirage of an oriental Arcadia began to be replaced by a more businesslike view of China and its people. The process was inevitable, and no bad thing: Britain’s projection of the Enlightenment onto this distant canvas had led to centuries of trying to reason with the Chinese as with an idealised self, and that profound misunderstanding had ended in war.
In the hiatus between mirage and reality came a great deal of exasperation and prejudice. The breathtaking bluntness of one Henry Monk, who like Edward Cree had arrived in Chusan as a naval surgeon, was typical. He would one day write a note to accompany some ladies’ dresses he had sent back to his wife in Guernsey:
The thing I fear is that some of you will be taking up the cudgels and cracking my pate when I get home for having dared to enter and violate the sanctity of the boudoir of a Chinese she to get possession of the same; I made a mistake above when I called them ladies, they all smell very strong; and they appear to me to find greater favour in the eyes of their lords as this peculiar quality predominates, they choose their spouses as our epicures do game, the more they stink the better. [3]
Captain Pears, the same man who had quarried away the graves on Josshouse Hill with little thought for the relatives of the dead, was even less circumspect: ‘The C
hinese are a mean, dirty, stinking, low, cunning, villainous, abominable, never-too-much-to-be-hated set of bêtes,’ he wrote, having at least the decency to add: ‘(oh dear! I am better after that!)’. [4]
Amongst the educated elite there was a great deal of frustration with a reputedly civilised people the British had hoped might be more, well — British. Doctor Duncan MacPherson, who had arrived on Chusan to look after the health of the Madras troops, held similarly one-sided views:
Haughty, cruel and hypocritical, they despise all other nations but their own; they regard themselves as faultless…. They style all foreigners barbarians, and they tell them, “We can do without you, but you cannot do without us; if your country is so good, why do you come here for tea and rhubarb?” No argument will induce a Chinaman to adopt a different style of reasoning. [5]
MacPherson and the rest seem not to have reflected that the islanders had every reason to despise a nation that had bombarded its city and slaughtered its people just to force the Cantonese to open their markets. Even Sir John Davis, who would soon take over from Sir Henry Pottinger as governor of Hong Kong and who might have been expected to temper his views, admitted that he thought the women of Chusan unattractive (they went bald early, he said) and their men faithless thieves. A correspondent of the Protestant missionary magazine the Chinese Repository did manage a modicum of faint praise: he found the islanders ‘talkative, thievish, troublesome, but tame — wanting little to hold them in subjection — and inquisitive.’ [6]
As to their eating habits, correspondents on Chusan confirmed to readers back home many of what even today are enduring stereotypes. One wrote to the Englishman magazine with his first experience of Chinese food:
Picture to yourself one of our men bringing me the hind quarter of an evidently well-fed rat, all ready for a Chinaman’s breakfast, and you may imagine our horror at a Chinaman showing us the same a quarter of an hour afterwards, and very civilly asking us to allow him to dress it for us. [7]
Another reported that dogs, cats, rats and frogs were all being brought to market: ‘tabby cutlets and bow-wow sausages are I understand rather delicacies.’ One lieutenant let his imagination roam freely:
They don’t use the milk from the cows for butter or to drink, but they use that what comes from the pigs, a very curious set of people, and they consider an ass’s head with frog’s sauce or young puppies with rats, mice or cat soup the greatest dainties they can have — what next will they eat? [8]
The islanders, needless to say, did not drink pigs’ milk nor eat ass’s head with frog — or any other — sauce. But they did indeed eat dog (they hung puppies for sale in cages in the markets), and a preference for black, white or light brown ones was noticed, as was the upper classes’ predilection for animals having a black palate and tongue, and which had been raised on a vegetarian diet. Many British officers employed Chinese cooks. They probably ate a lot of dog without knowing it, it was wrongly surmised: it is far more likely that any man willing to try the delicacy would have been palmed off with a less costly substitute than vice versa. [9]
Yet other, more thoughtful, men did reflect seriously on their new home. For a start, Tinghae, though it had its seamy side, was a far remove from the claustrophobic environment of Canton, to which port British merchants had been restricted for almost a century. One Lieutenant Forbes of the Royal Navy put that place into context:
No-one could think of searching the back streets of Chatham, or the purlieus of Wapping, for a fair criterion of British society, or specimens of the yeomanry of merry England; yet from such data as these we have hitherto drawn our ideas of Chinese morality and civilization, but, as the country opens, and we become better acquainted, I trust that both parties will find that they are not the barbarians they have hitherto mutually believed each other to be.
His trust was to be well-founded. In October of 1842, as peace settled on the Zhejiang coast in the wake of the Treaty of Nanking, the Times published a letter which cast Chusan in a positive light:
The people of this island, and those in the other parts of China which have come under my observation, are a fine class of men, well-formed, intelligent, and in many points highly civilized; the lower orders muscular, healthy, and to all appearances happy under their government, which is not certainly so oppressive as is generally supposed in Europe. In agriculture and in native manufactures they are far advanced, and in most of the mechanical sciences they possess great genius. [10]
The reason many looked down on this conquered race, the letter’s author Dr Alexander Grant of the Bengal Medical Service argued, was that they were measuring its worth by the wrong yardstick — that of military power. Pottinger’s great successes on the Yangtze were unequal, dishonourable, akin to buccaneering:
Of the art of war, as practised among Europeans, they know nothing, and they are at once appalled with the effective power of the mighty engines of death which we bring against them. There has, indeed, been nothing like fighting upon this expedition, and those who have mingled in the various actions would scarce recognise them in the flaming despatches in which they are described.
The Times printed another long letter, written six months later in May of 1843. Prolonged peace had transformed the Zhejiang coast, and there had not been a single case of robbery or assault on Chusan since the kidnap attempt on Lieutenant Wellesley. Peace, so much was evident, was now doing more for British interests than conflict. ‘Physical force,’ the Times’ correspondent was certain, ‘is the worst instrument for destroying the prejudices of the Asiatic. That there is something innate in mankind to resist force, all history and experience prove.’ British opinions of the Chinese too had mellowed with exposure to their everyday lives. Their harshest critics now, in fact, were said to be Western missionaries:
These men of God, carried away by their enthusiasm, can see nothing fair in God’s people, because it is their lot to be heathens. Hence one cause of our despising the Asiatic, of our treating him as possessed of no feeling — as indeed an inferior being, fit only to be governed. I have seen no reason to change my former opinions — on the contrary, I now lean more to the favourable side of the Chinese character. Their worst features are perhaps inattention to personal cleanliness, a universal addiction to the filthy habit of tobacco smoking, and the cruel practice of compressing the female foot. Still these are not crying sins, and are only hurtful to our prejudices…. I do not include opium smoking, for that vice they owe to Europeans. [11]
Other Britons examined Chusan with all the taxonomical exactness of the Victorian age, for the garrison consisted of educated officers and men who were well qualified to make scientific observations. ‘The Government,’ observed the Englishman, ‘ought to encourage those gentlemen to avail themselves of every opportunity to contribute to the extension of knowledge, and the result of their observations ought to be entrusted to the Learned Societies of Great Britain for criticism and publication.’ In the fields of language, literature, astronomy, meteorology, botany, mineralogy, zoology, philology and statistics, the Englishman was sure, even given what the British had learned from the Jesuits, China was a ‘tabula rasa’. [12]
Perhaps the most famous, in subsequent years, of all the gentlemen who turned an educated eye to Chusan was a botanist, Robert Fortune.
‘When the news of the peace with China first reached England in the autumn of 1842,’ recalled Fortune, superintendent of the Horticultural Society’s Chiswick gardens, ‘I obtained the appointment of Botanical Collector… and proceeded to China in that capacity in the spring of the following year.’ He had been provided by the committee of the Horticultural Society with ‘a fowling piece and pistols, and a Chinese vocabulary.’ And so Robert Fortune embarked upon Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, (stepping into the shoes of one Mr Douglas who had accidentally perished in the Sandwich Islands at the bottom of a pit dug to catch wild boar). Born on the banks of the Tweed, Fortune had by his twenties made a name for himself in Edinbur
gh as a gardener of prodigious talent. His reputation placed him squarely in line for the job when China’s opening up convinced the Horticultural Society that it ought to despatch somebody to bring back hardy plants (and flowers, but only ‘exceptionally beautiful’ ones, it was specified) for propagation. Yet after a four-month passage Fortune was disappointed by his first view of China. After the lush forests of Java, the outlying islands of the Gulf of Canton were all barren, sun-scorched granite dotted with stunted pines, and not at all like the glowing descriptions of a land of camellias, azaleas and roses he had read. Although this first impression of Hong Kong stayed with him, he did grow to find much of merit there. It had a fine natural harbour, and he expected that the settlement at Victoria would make a pretty enough place, given time. The lush vegetation of the Chusan archipelago, on the other hand, was a perfect delight, its hills and glens reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands. Its inland valleys were beautiful, watered by clear mountain streams, and some of them were as yet untouched. ‘Did our island of Hong Kong possess the natural advantages and beauties of Chusan,’ Fortune mused, ‘what a splendid place it might have been made by our enterprising English merchants in a very few years.’ [13]
Governor Schoedde provided Fortune with a house in Tinghae and an introduction to Dr Maxwell of the Madras Army, a keen botanist who had already catalogued and sketched the more striking of Chusan’s flora, saving Fortune months of work. Fortune became familiar with the island over two years of meanderings in every season of the year, watching and making notes as the inhabitants flooded their fields, transplanted their rice, hoed their hillside rows of sweet potatoes. He admired the elegant simplicity of their ancient waterwheels; recorded the planting of wheat, barley, beans, peas and sweetcorn; watched as the farmers sowed the spent paddy with clover to use as manure. Spring on Chusan would see fields of wild mustard come into blossom throughout the island:
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