Chusan
Page 22
Other like-minded men enjoyed the freedom which British rule made possible. One in particular was most methodical, setting out before dawn to make the most of the day and arriving at his chosen hunting ground as the sun rose. His Indian attendants would be sent on to sweep and clean the local temple, to light a fire, and prepare a hot bath for sahib’s arrival. A breakfast service would have been brought along, not forgetting a change of clothes, towels, sponges, and books, pens and paper in case the middle of the day proved too hot to shoot. Once our man had bathed behind a screen brought along to hide his modesty from the watching Buddhas, he might lunch on curried spatchcock fowl. He might stay overnight in a nearby house, paying its owner for the privilege and flirting with his daughter. [8]
In February of 1844, with trade continuing peacefully, a man named Sir John Francis Davis was appointed governor of Hong Kong and Britain’s plenipotentiary and commander-in-chief in China. He brought years of experience to the posts: having arrived in Canton in 1813 as an enthusiastic young employee of the East India Company, he had sailed north with Lord Amherst on the ill-fated embassy of 1816 and had held the superintendency of the Company’s Canton trade. A gifted linguist, he was one of that rare breed — a British government appointee who spoke Chinese and understood China. Soon after his appointment, Sir John embarked on a tour of the northern ports opened under the Treaty of Nanking — Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. He quite naturally took the opportunity to visit Chusan, and arrived in Tinghae in late 1844 to find the city healthy and peaceful:
Nothing could exceed the good humour and contentedness of the native Chinese. It was impossible to traverse the suburb between the sea and the town without observing plain proofs of the good understanding existing between the military and the people…. In fact, the people of Tinghae enjoyed opportunities of enriching themselves by industry during our occupation which may not very soon recur; though Chusan is a point of such importance, political and military, if not commercial, that the course of time and events might again some day make us acquainted with it. [9]
It was to prove a curiously accurate prophesy on many levels. The only fault Davis could find after three years of British rule was that the permitted scale of punishments was if anything too lax. Up before the beak time and again, malefactors had long since learned that Magistrate Bamfield had no authority delegated to him to exceed a tariff of three dozen lashes, a fine of $10 or 25 rupees, or a month in gaol. Under the Chinese law still applicable across Kintang Sound on the mainland, punishment for common criminals often involved the cangue, a kind of portable wooden stocks weighing anything up to 200 lbs. It was a dehumanising affair, sometimes endured for six months at a stretch, the prisoner passing his nights in gaol and being led come daylight to the city gates for public viewing. His neck and both his hands confined, he relied on sympathetic passers-by to feed him. But there was an aversion to such prolonged humiliation amongst the British, and on Chusan the cangue was curtailed in favour of the sharp swish of a cane. Compared to the cangue, though, a good thrashing was a blessing. True, criminals ran the risk of being handed over to the authorities in Ningbo if this proved no deterrent, but for recidivists that risk was worthwhile once their hide had been toughened up. Acting on a request from Bamfield, Davis straight away tripled the maximum penalties available to the court, but the fact remained that only relatively minor cases were being heard by the British — so much at least had been agreed with the mandarins on the mainland. [10]
In the immediate wake of the Treaty of Nanking the troublesome kidnappings on Chusan had ceased almost overnight, and from the perspective of Tinghae the island had become tranquil. Karl Gützlaff had soon written to Pottinger remarking that he had nothing to do, the magistracy unused and the gaol empty. Yet beyond the city walls the violent removal of Chinese governance the previous year had had a profound effect on life for the islanders. The British, unfamiliar with the lie of the land and with society and custom, only crudely filled that power vacuum. They were, for the most part, concerned for those living over the hills north of Tinghae only insofar as they posed a threat. Criminals (many of them indigent soldiers who had fled the rout on October 1st) were roaming the valleys unchallenged, the British unaware of the misery the villagers were enduring. Unless mandarins fully acquainted with the conditions on Chusan were sent to deal with them, a Chinese negotiator had explained to Pottinger as the implications of the treaty had begun to sink in, the islanders would get no respite. The north-coast fishing village of Kanlon, he suggested, was far enough from Tinghae for a mandarin not to inconvenience the British while he exercised authority over the native population. Pottinger himself was in favour of such an arrangement — by allowing a low-ranking functionary to keep a tight rein on the natives order could easily be maintained. The decision though rested with Sir Hugh Gough as commander-in-chief of land forces, and to him the idea of a Ningbo mandarin residing on Chusan in an official capacity was objectionable: their constant undermining of British rule thus far made a clear division of jurisdictions essential if there was to be peace. Arrangements were instead made for a Chinese official named Lin, a former gaoler from the town of Yuyao, to reside on the island of Tygoosan that sat halfway between Tinghae and Zhenhai. [11]
Pottinger told the islanders of the arrangements: though living under British rule, they were at liberty to sail to Tygoosan and approach Magistrate Lin with civil suits and criminal cases. The British for their part undertook to secure, on application from Lin, the attendance of witnesses and defendants. Islanders were told they may, if they wished, bring civil cases before the British magistrate. In criminal cases of any import, suspects would be arrested by the British police but thereafter would face Lin. Only in minor criminal cases would the British pass sentence. Defendants, Lin was assured, could be sure of the impartiality of British law. But it was that very impartiality — to the British an objective proof of the superiority of their legal system — which in practice would alienate the upper stratum of Chusanese society. Christians, Hindus and Muslims cared little if anything for the distinctions of rank which underpinned Confucian China, while the Chinese of the native police force were little better than rogues — poachers turned gamekeepers who had been given a uniform, a royal commission, and authority over their superiors. Just as Peking would condemn as ‘unequal’ any treaty which placed the Son of Heaven on a par with a ruler such as Queen Victoria, treatment thought equitable by a British magistrate could be intensely shaming to a Chinese of standing. On one occasion, a man of some status found himself dragged through the streets of Tinghae, tied by the pigtail to a common man arrested at the same time, while the crowds stared in shocked disbelief. The case against him was dismissed but the damage had been done. Where an Englishman wrongly accused could have left the magistracy with his head held high and a lawyer’s business card in his hand, this Chusanese gentryman had been irremediably humiliated. The misunderstanding worked both ways: with excusable ignorance, wealthy islanders initially approached the British court with the same innate authority they had the Chinese before. Bribery was assumed still to be a legitimate means of buying off one’s punishment. Tales of filial sons accepting a rich man’s capital sentence to raise the money to bury their father in a fitting manner were repeated for their praiseworthiness, and there were plenty of stooges willing to accept another man’s corporal punishment for a fee. A Chinese court for its part might be expected to give its blessing to such an arrangement. One day, though, a merchant appeared before the British magistrate charged with possessing stolen property. He produced a man who swore to having been the genuine thief, and witnesses to corroborate the story. But when sentenced to a lashing and the cutting-off of his queue the scapegoat quickly changed his tune, bleating that the merchant had paid him $100 to take his beating but had said nothing of the far more serious punishment of the loss of his pigtail. [12]
Gentry families and wealthy merchants, it seems, slowly but surely expressed their disapproval of this new order by rem
oving to Ningbo. The Ningbo authorities for their part agreed not to interfere with life on Chusan unless approached. Still, mandarins of the most junior grades would from time to time be discovered on the island, some apparently trying to squeeze taxes, some executing arrest warrants in contravention of the arrangements. One incident was so incompetently timed as to be discovered during Sir John Davis’ tour of inspection. Davis sent two of Magistrate Lin’s men under arrest to Canton with a written remonstration addressed to his opposite number, Commissioner Qiying, the same man who with Yilibu had negotiated at Nanking. Qiying, afraid that the British would seize on the breach as an excuse to renege on his treaty and retain Chusan, angrily demanded his subordinates put an end to such infringements. [13]
But despite British guardedness and Chinese fears, it might sometimes have helped Governor Sir James Schoedde if Magistrate Lin had had a direct hand in Chusan’s affairs. For the same cold waters that brought legions of fish to the islands by winter also enticed fishing junks from all the coastal provinces of the empire. Each was well armed against the pirates who circled the fleet, fully manned to raise the heavy matting sails and haul the nets from the depths. So until the warmth of spring drove the catch away, Chusan’s territorial waters were home each year to tens of thousands of rootless boat-dwellers. Before the arrival of the British, outsiders had been required to register with the island’s mandarins. To distinguish her from an unregistered pirate vessel, each junk would be obliged to have her name and number painted in conspicuous characters on her sails and hull, and her master would be held to account for any untoward behaviour. Before Gützlaff left the island for Hong Kong in late 1843, he was sure always to lodge a body of soldiers to keep the peace at the fishing port of Sinkamoon on the southeast coast (‘the very seat of iniquity,’ he called it); but neither he nor Magistrate Bamfield who succeeded him ever grappled with the enormous challenge of a full-scale registration of the wintertime junks. It was to this end, hearing stories of piracy, that Magistrate Lin that winter sent a pair of secretaries to Sinkamoon. They were asked civilly by Governor Schoedde to return to Tygoosan, whereupon Lin wrote to explain that he merely wished to ensure tranquillity. Only with Gützlaff now in Hong Kong the letter was imperfectly translated. Perhaps because he was not immediately at hand, Robert Thom, one-time interpreter on Chusan and now a resident of Ningbo, was not asked to cast an eye over it to confirm Magistrate Bamfield’s impression that Lin’s language was rude and domineering. Instead, the perceived slight was passed up the chain of command to Hong Kong and the then commander-in-chief of British forces in China, Lord Saltoun, who turned to the plenipotentiary, Sir Henry Pottinger, for instruction. Pottinger wrote to the Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen in London where, it might be assumed, the incident was mentioned to the Prime Minister Robert Peel. Gützlaff’s expert opinion, when eventually shown Lin’s note, was that it was quite as polite as would be hoped, but that Bamfield’s reply was scarcely intelligible. A well-meaning oversight by a mandarin on Tygoosan had become a talking point in the highest circles in the British Empire, and all because Britain had no permanent, professional body of Mandarin translators. [14]
18. In the hospital their hearts are soft
It would be the latter part of the nineteenth century before an English university appointed a chair in Chinese. The first holder of the post at Cambridge, Thomas Wade, had in fact set out to learn the language while a lieutenant in the 98th Foot during Sir Henry Pottinger’s Yangtze campaign of 1842 (Wade had taken part in the bloody fall of Zhenjiang). Governor Davis of Hong Kong, as we have seen, had started out as a clerk at the East India Company factory in Canton. But most of the Britons who arrived in China in the 1840s with a knowledge of Mandarin and its dialects were perforce missionaries like James Legge, who in 1876 would become Oxford’s first Professor of Chinese. A wave of these crusaders washed silently over Chusan in the weeks and months after its capture, following in the wake of a war that had done so much harm but wishing only to share the benefits of modern medicine and to apply the balm of Christian faith. [1]
By 1840, Christians from continental Europe had been living and working in China for centuries, advising the emperor and his court on the astronomy, mathematics and cartography at which Jesuits excelled. These Roman Catholic missionaries had quickly adapted to local custom, had changed their behaviour, their dress, even (so it was alleged by their jealous detractors) their articles of faith to gain acceptance and win souls. Protestant missionaries, by sharp contrast, with their dogmatic emphasis on Scripture and a refusal to accommodate native sensibilities, were long forbidden from evangelising in China and instead toiled with limited success amongst the Chinese diaspora in Indonesia and Malaysia where the Son of Heaven held no sway. The two creeds differed radically in how they approached mission work, the Catholics stressing rites, rituals and spectacle and setting no great store by the written Word, the Protestants preferring intense Bible-study classes and pamphlets. (Such a blunt and wasteful instrument as pamphleteering the semi-literate was scoffed at by the Catholics, who wrote with undisguised glee at how Protestant tracts ended up as cigar papers, as wrappings in the bazaars, as free wallpaper in people’s homes, even as toilet paper!) [2]
Before the first capture of Chusan in 1840, very few Protestant missionaries indeed had ever entered China proper, and even these had only penetrated a few illicit miles inland from Macao to Canton. In the absence of a Damascene conversion in the heart of the Forbidden City, the only conceivable hope for the Protestant version of Christ’s message being heard within the Celestial Empire was the annexation of some or other plot of Chinese soil as a spiritual antechamber. ‘We earnestly hope and pray,’ went just one of many similar editorials in the Missionary Register, ‘that the [outcome] may be, by the over-ruling Hand of God, the suppression of Evil, and the opening of that vast Empire to the benevolent labours of true Christians.’ While most Protestants did not thirst for a war to open up China’s gates, of what ultimate importance was the early arrival of a few heathen souls in the hereafter when the potential prize — a Protestant China — was so great? [3]
News of Tinghae’s fall, and the realisation that Protestant missionaries were free to preach there under the protection of the Crown, struck the London Missionary Society in Macao as nothing short of an act of God. The Almighty, it was clear, had engineered the opium crisis and its violent resolution as a sign of reproof to idolators, and now through men like themselves He would pour upon China ‘the blessings of an enlightened faith, and erect for them the fabric of a liberal and beneficent government’. Such at least was the sincere hope of one Dr William Milne. [4]
Dr Milne more than most felt the burden of time wasted on the fringes of the idolatrous empire. His father, the Reverend William Milne, had first visited Macao and Canton in 1813 and had made a name working amongst the overseas Chinese in Malacca before a tragically early death. Born at sea during his father’s travels, William Milne junior, still only twenty-five, was obsessed with the prospect of breaking into China to spread the Word. Scarcely had the Union Jack been raised upon Tinghae’s south gate than John Morrison (he was an interpreter to the Chusan expedition and himself the son of a pioneering Protestant missionary) wrote to Dr Milne, urging him to establish a station for the London Missionary Society on the island. A month later a meeting of the Society was commended to God, and by the time the meeting closed it had been resolved to send one of those present, one William Lockhart, to Tinghae. [5]
William Lockhart was no ordinary missionary: he was not even ordained. Not yet out of his twenties, he struck people as a serious young man, a teetotal non-conformist who divided his time between chapel, study, and lengthy walks. His perambulations would prove good training for his time on Chusan. Having passed his medical exams at Guy’s Hospital, he had looked set for a career as a surgeon. But his conscience had other plans for him, and after attending a fund-raising lecture for the London Missionary Society Lockhart decided that missionary work was to be his vo
cation. On applying, he was appointed to the newly formed Medical Missionary Society, its avowed aim to supply Protestant missions with doctors in the hope of imparting the practical benefits of Christendom to the benighted sick of China by curing them of disease and easing their pain. [6]
Having sailed from Gravesend in 1838 bound initially for mission work in Macao, Lockhart arrived in Tinghae in September of 1840 to find the city deserted and the garrison dying. Without delay he called on Gützlaff and his wife, an acquaintance from England and a friendly face in a most alien country. Heavy rains and Captain Anstruther’s kidnap delayed the start of his work, but soon he found a house which would serve as a hospital while something better was found. It was small, full of ‘every species of filth and rubbish,’ but here it was that Britain’s first medical mission to China opened its doors. [7]
An initial disinclination on the part of the locals to trust Lockhart can be excused: rumours abounded of how the secret ingredient in the barbarians’ glass mirrors (the Chinese used polished metal) was actually human eyeballs, and everybody knew that Christians founded their churches upon the bodies of sacrificed children. More prosaically, the ruined wharves were a reminder of the foreigners’ propensity for perfidy and violence, and islanders could expect punishment for fraternising with them. Lockhart began attending to those few sick he could induce to come to his surgery. After a fortnight he was delighted to move into a larger house, sharing it with the indolent servants of its absent owner, the Gützlaffs and their nieces Kate and Isabella, some blind girls they had adopted, and a large and affectionate portland dog named Boatswain. It was commodious but dirty, though this was the case for even the richest residences in the city, which did not in the least degree answer British ideas of comfort. There Lockhart began to practise on a permanent footing, tending to his patients in a range of outhouses. His mornings were spent treating cases, his free time devoted to learning Chinese under the guidance of his housemate the interpreter John Morrison and then spreading word of the hospital to passers-by on the street. In scarcely more than a month he had had more than 550 patients apply to him with various ailments. That his cures were successful and offered free of charge — a stark contrast to the local physicians’ expensive quackery — soon swelled his waiting list. [8]