Chusan
Page 26
Fortune had encapsulated the dilemma: Britain had entered into a solemn treaty while holding a gun to China’s head. If Queen Victoria now informed the Daoguang Emperor that she intended to retain Chusan even after the indemnity had been paid, the outcome could only be, in the opinion of the China Mail in Hong Kong, ‘the certain and deserved imputation of bad faith’ by the Chinese, who were ‘a great but jealous people in the beginning of their intercourse with the civilised world.’ It was a choice between ‘inglorious retention’ and ‘national honour’. Chusan was being lauded in certain quarters as a paradise, yet ‘the fruits we should gather there would probably turn out nothing but apples of Sodom, fair outside, but rotten within.’ [13]
There remained however a serious sticking point to any handover — Canton. One provision agreed at Nanking had been that British subjects, along with their families and retainers, must be allowed to reside without restraint at all of the treaty ports. By late 1845 the southernmost of the five, Canton, was still not fully opened, and foreign merchants were prevented from living inside the walled city. But as the Chinese maintained, the treaty’s wording linked the restoration of Chusan to full payment of the $21,000,000 opium indemnity, not to access to the ports, and certainly not to any right to reside within the walls of Canton. The British, after all, were trading as they always had in factories on the riverfront. Anyway, it was not that Governor Huang was refusing to admit foreigners — the problem was the Cantonese themselves, a rabidly xenophobic lot whom not even the emperor himself could compel to accept foreigners living amongst them (though their hatred is not really to be wondered at, given that just a few years back the Royal Navy had massacred the defenders of the Bogue forts while British soldiers had shot dead men of the local militia in the alleyways surrounding the English factory). Governor Davis sought guidance from London, and was told that Britons had as much right to enter Canton as China had to take back Chusan. China’s failure to observe the Nanking treaty in full gave him a point of leverage: could he demand safe access to Canton and meanwhile hold Chusan forfeit? The Chinese Repository, that serious-minded publication serving Canton’s missionary and merchant community, fell short of asking for Chusan’s permanent retention, satisfied that an extra few months’ occupation would demonstrate to China that its treaty obligations must be honoured. Queen Victoria, it felt sure, ought not to renege on her promises. [14]
But others of the newspapers that had sprung up to serve the burgeoning foreign community on the China coast dared to consider a breach of faith. The Friend of China & Hong Kong Gazette published an editorial in the autumn of 1845 noting that the ongoing grievances all related to Canton. There the cramped factories, the insulting locals and the grasping attitude of the mandarins had changed not one iota since the war, and it was precisely such problems which had lain at the root of the conflict. It was an absurd situation. Governor Davis, the Friend of China hoped, had been instructed to tell the Chinese that unless they honour the treaty to the letter then Chusan would be retained. China seemed to place great store by the island, and such a threat would not be unavailing. [15]
One newspaper positively advocated retention, regardless of the Canton question. Earlier in the year, the Calcutta missionary newspaper the Friend of India had trumpeted the opinion that a British Chusan ‘would soon become one of the largest commercial marts in the world.’ ‘Even as a matter of economy,’ it thought, ‘it would in the long run be judicious to sacrifice the money which has been sunk upon [Hong Kong]. It would be cheap to indemnify the merchants… to secure the removal of our commercial establishments to a spot where they will enjoy such pre-eminent advantages.’ Other corners of the English-language press in the East smelled a rat. The Friend of India, so the editor of the China Mail guessed, had been persuaded of Chusan’s importance by a gentleman who had not long before arrived in India from Hong Kong, ‘a gentleman better known as an author than as an authority.’ That gentleman’s name was Robert Montgomery Martin. [16]
One August night in 1844 a ship had beaten up the Sarah Galley Passage and dropped anchor in Tinghae harbour. The next morning, a frail-looking man had been rowed across to the wharves. Robert Montgomery Martin had the previous month left Hong Kong, of which he was Colonial Treasurer, to convalesce after a near-fatal attack of fever. Within weeks he had become the most vociferous evangelist for the retention of Chusan and for the immediate abandonment of Pottinger’s worthless prize. He considered the latter, as initially had Lord Palmerston, ‘a barren rock’ exhaling malarial gases that caused Europeans to die like flies. Chusan, on the other hand, was China’s Montpellier, a veritable health resort, and Martin gushed with unconcealed enthusiasm for the place where he had recovered his strength:
At early morn, the singing of the birds in the groves, the murmuring rivulets through the valleys and the fresh breeze from the mountains enhance the charms of the landscape and renovate the health of the debilitated resident of a tropical climate.
Though little different from many of the eulogies which on the eve of a possible handover were being written about Chusan, Martin’s opinions were to be taken more seriously, and considered in fact at the very highest levels of British government.
Robert Montgomery Martin had been born an Ulster Protestant in 1801, and he was proud of his loyalty to the Crown. He had first travelled to the East while a teenager, putting five years of surgical training into practice as a medical assistant in Sri Lanka. But a further eighteen months as a naval surgeon had left Martin’s health broken and he had headed for the colony of New South Wales. There he had recovered his strength (and, while he was at it, introduced the smallpox vaccine to Australia) before sailing for Calcutta. For two years he had worked as a journalist, jointly publishing the Bengal Herald until in 1830 he had returned to England. It was then that Martin had begun in earnest to make a name as a polemicist. Part activist and agitator, part political dilettante, with a sharp eye for statistical detail but a tendency to ignore the broader canvas, he would write on topics from colonial agriculture and economics to Irish Unionism. Yet despite a recommendation from King William, Martin failed time and again to gain official employment in the civil service. Until, that is, in 1844 the colonial secretary Lord Stanley made him treasurer of a rapidly expanding Hong Kong. Martin stepped ashore in Victoria in May in company with the new governor, Sir John Davis. By June he had made up his mind: Hong Kong was no good for a colony, and abandonment ought not to be ruled out. By July he had fallen seriously ill with fever. Practically a skeleton, after a short sojourn in Macao he was in Tinghae to recuperate. [17]
With Hong Kong’s bare crags fresh in his mind’s eye, it required no feverish imagination for Martin to envisage a bright future for his new home. He set out his thoughts soon after his arrival:
Were Chusan a British colony, its hills and vales would be adorned by charming villas, rich orchards, and luxuriant pasturages. An English town, with all the advantages of modern civilisation, would become an example to the Chinese, and in the improvement of our position we should materially aid in the social advancement of the imitative nation contiguous to our shores.
A healthy military station, he argued, was vital for a British presence on the China coast. Should force again be demanded on the Yangtze, a Chusan regiment would be as fresh as any marching straight out of its English depot. And commercially, Martin calculated, Chusan was excelling most of the treaty ports. To a degree he was right: Amoy, Fuzhou and Ningbo had thus far proved disappointing, but Shanghai was faring much better. There, Chinese tea-and-silk merchants preferred to barter than to hand over precious silver dollars, the result being a glut of bartered Western goods appearing for resale in the surrounding towns at well below the lowest asking price on Chusan. For Western merchants, it made more sense to follow the crowds to Shanghai or even tiny Wenzhou to barter one’s own stock than to sit in Tinghae waiting for silver dollars that never came. Sir Henry Pottinger might have written to Lord Aberdeen in August of 1843 with news that Brit
ain’s trade on Chusan was worth an estimated $600,000 each month, but a year later the most profitable articles in Tinghae were not the cottons or woollens which the British were most interested in finding new markets for, but instead chests of Bengali opium: soon one tenth of the entire China market was passing through the archipelago, some 230 chests being sold in the harbour each month. One had only to sniff the air or stand on Josshouse Hill overlooking the clippers’ anchorages for proof. True, people had been buying other foreign merchandise duty free to slip into China under the noses of the Ningbo customs, but underwriting drug smuggling and tax evasion were no way to endear a British colony to Peking. [18]
Martin spent just a few weeks on Chusan, casting an eye over its landscape and economy. His conclusions were as idiosyncratic as the man: the island’s home-grown tobacco, which most thought coarse, he considered ‘much prized’; the local cotton, which even the islanders thought rough, was ‘excellent’; as to the islanders themselves, whom most considered incorrigible petty thieves, he praised them for their honesty and orderliness. Mistakenly believing he had been sent east on the strength of his colonial expertise (the lack of others willing to die of malaria seems to have held greater weight with Lord Stanley), Martin had quickly come to see himself as a disinterested arbiter reporting his findings to a Whitehall that avidly awaited his opinion. In late summer of 1844 he had recovered his health and was back in Hong Kong, and by October he had forwarded an unsolicited Report on the Island of Chusan to London. Next, he despatched a letter to Prime Minister Robert Peel, thoroughly denigrating the hopes placed on Hong Kong. If a commission were assembled in the colony, he suggested, consisting of Governor Davis, Karl Gützlaff, and others (including the commander of HM land forces who, unbeknown to Martin, thought him ‘quite mad’), then a similar consensus might be reached. Gützlaff for one was known to have a decided preference for Chusan: ‘With a fourth of the money spent on the ungrateful soil of Hong-Kong,’ he had written (never dreaming that Victoria would a century and a half later be one of the modern wonders of the world), ‘Chusan would have exhibited a larger and a more beautiful city than we shall ever behold on the straggling hills of that colony.’ But even the jingoistic Gützlaff was decidedly opposed to the idea of reneging on Nanking: Britain’s political engagements ‘must sacredly be preserved,’ he wrote in a letter to the Foreign Office, ‘and under no circumstances be violated whatever may be the advantages.’ Ignorant of the weakness of his arguments when viewed from a wider perspective, Martin closed his letter to Peel by saying that he was rushing back to England to put his case before it was too late. [19]
The prime minister was unimpressed by Martin’s opinions of Hong Kong, but admitted that the idea of a commission was worth considering and sought the views of Whitehall. It was suggested that Sir Thomas Herbert and Sir Thomas Bourchier, who had both commanded warships at Chusan, along with Sir William Parker and Lord Saltoun, who had been commanders-in-chief during the war, could be consulted informally over the general accuracy of Martin’s Report. The suggestion found favour with the Home Secretary Sir James Graham, who told Peel that the unanimous agreement of those four men was entitled to the utmost weight. Their private opinions, though, were known to be divided, with Bourchier and Herbert preferring Chusan and its strategic position close to the Yangtze. Sir Henry Pottinger could hardly be excluded from any commission, and he was famous for his trenchant views on the value of Hong Kong, his personal acquisition for the Crown. Then again, even Pottinger was on record as having respectfully suggested to the former foreign secretary Lord Palmerston that Chusan be retained. In November of 1841 he had written to Palmerston with high hopes for the island:
I doubt not, but in our hands it would, in a very short time, become a vast mart of commerce…. It seems to me, to become a question for the grave deliberation of Her Majesty’s Government, whether it ought, under any circumstances, to be again restored to the Chinese government, who could not prevent the Merchants, and the Capitalists of the Empire, flocking to it, were it once declared to be a British settlement and a free port for a series of years. [20]
An open disagreement over Chusan’s status would not settle the matter, but only add more uncertainty to the considerable misgivings with which Hong Kong was being occupied. ‘Hong Kong is ours,’ continued the Home Secretary,
for better, for worse: Chusan must be evacuated on the payment of the last instalment from China in the course of the present year. There are grave objections to reopening our Treaty with China. Unless we do so, we must keep Hong Kong, or have no settlement and no anchorage in those seas. Surely Hong Kong is better than none. [21]
Any approach to the Chinese aimed at reopening negotiations would, Sir James knew, be ill met. The next day, Sir Robert Peel received a note from the judge advocate general John Nicholl MP, the highest judicial figure in the British army. There was clearly a hornets’ nest waiting to be stirred up over the Chusan question, but nobody was prepared to take up a cudgel and go about beating it: ‘We cannot obtain Chusan if we desired it, and I agree with Sir James Graham, that being the case, that it would be unwise to disparage Hong Kong.’ Highly desirable real-estate Chusan may be, preferable even to Hong Kong, yet once Queen Victoria’s signature had dried it lay beyond reach and any arguments for its retention were just an unpleasant reminder of a trick missed. Martin’s arguments were not wrong (for many at the highest levels of government agreed Chusan to be the superior of Hong Kong); they were just irrelevant in a changed diplomatic climate. His Report had ended with the blithe statement that there were ‘many cogent arguments of the highest state policy for our continued and permanent occupation of Chusan, and but one reason assigned for its evacuation in December 1845, namely, that we have promised to do so on the fulfilment of the terms of the treaty of Nankin.’ [22]
In sheer exasperation, an unknown Whitehall hand pencilled a note alongside: ‘How can we help it without breaking our faith which is of more value than fifty Chusans?’
But others besides Robert Montgomery Martin were agitating for Chusan’s retention during that final year of its legal occupation. In March of 1845, Sir Robert Peel was handed a note excusing an attached document for troubling him. Remarks on the Advantages of Retaining Possession of the Island of Chusan had been written by Benjamin Waterhouse, an agent for the trading house of Jardine, Matheson & Co. who had lived on Chusan ever since the 1841 invasion. It was his opinion that, ‘if permanently retained by Britain as a free port, nothing could prevent Chusan becoming an emporium of the first magnitude.’ In the course of the year 1844, he admitted, the island had been neglected by British merchants, who considered it not worthwhile cultivating connections in a market soon to be closed. Certain Chinese merchants were bringing silver dollars to pay for British cottons in Tinghae, even though the authorities on the mainland seemed anxious to shoehorn foreign trade into as few ports as possible, but most foreigners were bypassing Chusan for the bounteous bazaars of Shanghai. Just as Governor Burrell had suspected pressure from Ningbo to be behind the departure of Tinghae’s shopkeepers in 1840, so in 1845 it seemed that spies paid to counsel the islanders against trading with the British were the reason why so little tea, silk or crockery were arriving for sale. Few foreigners who had been long in China, Waterhouse reasoned, would question the possibility that its government, despite the Treaty of Nanking, still took a regulatory interest in those of its citizens who traded with the West. His suspicions were justified — the governor of Zhejiang boasted to the emperor of having infiltrators working undercover in Tinghae. By diminishing Chusan’s value as a marketplace, of course, they rendered it less attractive to the British as the handover approached. Yet to Waterhouse, by now one of Chusan’s longest-standing residents, its advantages as a colony were nevertheless ‘so obvious as hardly to require dwelling upon.’ Its future as a place of trade rested on its remaining a free port, an untaxed fallback should the Chinese in Ningbo and Shanghai revert to the old ‘chicanery and extortion’ and so t
hrottle Britain’s trade there. [23]
There was an equally vital political matter to consider. The French, Waterhouse added in a covering letter, had long had a warship in Tinghae harbour, and it was widely supposed that they might find some quarrel with the Chinese to allow them to take the island if the British left. (The French ambassador to China, M. de Lagrené, had laughed at the idea of Britain handing Chusan back and joked that France would like it for herself, but when he was speaking in earnest utterly disavowed any such wish.) This was the one argument which sent cold shivers down Whitehall spines. Martin too was using it. In late April the home secretary Sir James Graham confided his misgivings to the foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen. The allegations were most serious, yet Martin was a most unreliable witness on whose testimony to accuse the French, now a friendly nation, of blackguardly bad faith. By September of 1845, with Martin still stirring up indignation, the Friend of India was fulminating over rumours that France was interested in acquiring Chusan, if not by arms (and it was clear that the French did not have enough men in the theatre to launch an invasion) then by stealth. France might thus ‘quietly take that prominent position in China for which we have fought.’ The Times of London disagreed — it was inconceivable that a jealous China would cede land to France, an absolute stranger whom she neither loved nor feared. In Hong Kong the China Mail too brushed aside such rumours: ‘We have no earthly fear of the bugbear held out in the Indian papers, that the tri-colored flag or the star-spangled banner will float upon the walls of Tinghai as soon as the ensign of England is removed.’ As for Uncle Sam, Governor Davis was sure that ‘the occupation of distant, foreign colonies forms no part of the policy of the United States.’ [24]