Chusan
Page 28
As always, the emperor was kept in the dark over quite how impotent he truly had been.
Sir John Davis arrived on Chusan one month later, to be welcomed this time not by a British governor but by a Chinese sub-prefectural magistrate. By now, sufficient Chinese soldiers had been ferried to the island to allow an official handover of the city gates. The two hundred Indian troops still billeted within the walls began to board steamers in the harbour. There were several points which Campbell needed to draw to Davis’ attention, not least the fate of the cemetery. Since July 1840, many hundreds of foreign graves had been dug there at the foot of Josshouse Hill, albeit promiscuously intermixed with Chinese burials. It was pitiable, thought Xian Ling, that the bones could not be exhumed and taken back to their ancestral homes, little appreciating that neither Christian, Hindu or Muslim felt the need to sacrifice to the spirits of the dead. Still, he did his best, ordering an inventory of the graveyard and the erection of boundary stones to warn against encroachment. [14]
The living, too, needed protection. Though a clause in the Treaty of Nanking technically prevented the emperor from punishing Chinese who had had dealings with the British, the legality of punishing suspected ‘traitors’ on other trumped-up charges was debatable. It was understood that at least two men handed over in good faith by Captain Bamfield to the Chinese authorities after the treaty had nevertheless been tortured and beaten to death, while British enquiries into the well-being of other marked men had gone unanswered. Simply as a matter of self-interest, it would not do for people to fear associating with the British. [15]
‘It is a matter of apprehension to myself,’ admitted Davis, ‘that on the evacuation of Chusan there will be many innocent persons in the town of Tinghae who will become the victims of rapacity and persecution because they acquired property by dealing with us, or adhered to our rule.’ It was, he felt, a point which materially affected Britain’s credit amongst the common Chinese. The Foreign Office advised Davis to impress upon the Chinese in a friendly manner ‘the extreme improbity and injustice’ of any mandarin pursuing any legal charges against people who had dealt with the British. Short of painting Britain into a diplomatic corner which might oblige them to declare the Chinese in breach of the Treaty of Nanking (a few persecuted collaborators, it seems, were not worth risking a resumption of hostilities), Davis ought to do everything he could to guarantee the safety of the islanders. Consequently, in the run-up to the handover a proclamation jointly agreed upon by Qiying and Davis had begun to appear across the island. Anybody who had lived amongst the British, it said, or who had dealt with or worked for them, had been granted immunity from prosecution by the emperor himself. A few people had since made their way to the magistracy, and Davis now provided each of them with a document that would guarantee them asylum from Her Majesty’s consuls in Shanghai and Ningbo. Ordinary individuals whose names would otherwise have been lost to history were granted freedom from persecution and petty revenge — Wang Keayung who had headed Tinghae’s native police force; constables Choo Tihping, Sew Haepaou and Ke Sungliu; Yaow Syeching who had spied for Gützlaff in Ningbo; Mrs Changchow who had informed on two mandarins sent illegally to arrest her…. And so the emperor took yet another small step on the road to relinquishing his absolute control over every last one of his subjects. [16]
Mr Waterhouse and Mr Davidson, the only two merchants ashore in Tinghae endeavouring to sell anything other than opium, began to remove their stock. The Treaty of Nanking threatened heavy penalties for foreigners who stayed after the handover, and Davis was both powerless and unwilling to come to their aid once they discovered what that might entail. Waterhouse especially must have been disappointed: his long letter the previous year in praise of Chusan had had no practical effect on Whitehall policy beyond pushing Davis for guarantees that the island would never become part of France. As for the military, the final departure of the 98th Regiment was set for July 22nd. In the meantime, work went on to disentangle the British presence. [17]
On an island basking for days on end under a bright-blue summer sky, in Tinghae, Sinkong and Sinkamoon the public buildings were handed back — the handsome stone hospital on Royal Marine Square, the barracks and regimental messes, the official residences and the storehouses of the newly built suburb to the east of Josshouse Hill — all apparently in good condition and without the Chinese being pressed for payment. The United Service Club and the Theatre Royal reverted to house and temple. By July 23rd the last of the men had embarked, though it was not until the 25th that one grounded transport floated free and the Chinese at last fired a friendly salute to speed them on their way. [18]
Father Danicourt had only the day before finished stripping out the interior of his European chapel, had loaded the last of it onto a hired junk, and left for Ningbo to carry on his work. A Chinese priest stayed behind in Tinghae to run the North Chapel and the boys’ school. Acting as translator for Sir John Davis, meanwhile, Karl Gützlaff had been delighted by his first trip to Chusan in three years, busying himself as always with handing out his Christian tracts to villagers who seemed to recognise and welcome him. (Quite unexpectedly, he stumbled across a large chest of New Testaments in Chinese and Manchu — they had been sent years before to a fellow missionary but never opened — and began to hand them out to the islanders.) By the time it came to hand the island back just two Protestant missionaries remained, the Americans Augustus Ward Loomis and his wife Mary Ann, though more were holidaying in houses on the wharves, enjoying the cool sea breezes during what was proving to be a particularly bad ‘sickly’ in Ningbo. [19]
Despite the optimistic insistence in Gützlaff’s fund-raising pamphlets that Buddhism was crumbling in these islands, he could only look on powerless as monks performed ceremonies to end the annual drought. For weeks, temperatures had hovered in the high eighties. Anxious processions wound through the streets to stir the spirit-dragons into sending down rain. There had been prostrations and oblations, fasting, a ban on slaughtering animals. In the heat of August, Xian Ling sent for priests from Putuoshan to bring the wooden deities of heaven and earth. They arrived to the sound of guns, gongs and cymbals to be met by nine mandarins kneeling and bowing in the midst of a rainstorm. The next evening at the dog hour, so the local annals meticulously recorded, ‘the ground shook.’ Earthquakes, as every Chinese knew, were Heaven’s way of ushering in political change. It rained on and off for five days. On August 8th the English trading schooner Lapwing left harbour, and, two days later, after hurriedly burying caulker Henry Avery in the British cemetery, HMS Wolf sailed for Shanghai. The last of the barbarians were gone. At the foot of the final page of that month’s Chinese Repository came a simple announcement: ‘Chusan has been restored to the Emperor, and the British troops withdrawn.’ [20]
A statue to the three generals who died during the 1841 invasion now stands at the top of ‘49th Hill’, in Dinghai’s Opium War Relics Park
21. Famous for their construction of guns
Though he avoided giving offence by saying as much to the British, the new governor of Zhejiang province was shocked by the sorry state of Tinghae. Where Governor Davis on the eve of the handover had seen an orderly and well-defended city where idolatry was giving way to Christ and hygiene, Governor Liang Baochang saw devastation. Parts of the city wall had been torn down. Everywhere there were open patches of earth and weeds, gaping holes in the townscape like bomb-sites in post-war London. Dozens of public buildings and places of worship, and numberless private houses, had been pulled down or burned. Some had vanished in accidental fires, some had been razed in retaliation for kidnappings, others the British had looked at through Western eyes and seen not a vital focus of ritual but instead just a dilapidated room or an overgrown courtyard. As the offices of absent mandarins languished, they had attracted the attention of the commissariat. Many had turned to ash on braziers or had found their way into the fabric of new warehouses. The numerous altars to the gods of soil and grain scattered across the city had
been vandalised, as had so many of the intimate neighbourhood shrines. The prayer halls, side-chapels and dormitories of Tinghae’s great temples had been gutted and remodelled as barracks, mess rooms, wards or stores. Statues of saints and sages had attracted attention in proportion to the grotesqueness of their features — a prominent nose broken off here, a pair of horns smashed away there, the teeth pulled from the mouth of a grinning Buddha. The twice-monthly convocations to invoke the city’s tutelary god needed to be resurrected, and a sufficient apology to him needed to be made. Colleges stripped of their fine book collections needed restocking. But the needs of the islanders were even more pressing. Ever since peace had broken out in 1842, refugees had been making their way back to Chusan in dribs and drabs, but now many more, ordered to leave the overburdened cities of the mainland, were finding they had no home to move back into. Rice was distributed to the poorest families, and cash handed out to help rebuild their demolished houses. Taxes that had gone uncollected during the occupation were written off — Pottinger’s ban on growing rice seems to have been relaxed by the summer of 1843, but it had no doubt harmed the landowners and farmers in the Vale of Tinghae — and a tax reduction was granted for five years. As the long arm of the law was extended once more over the island, officers began to arrest the troublemakers who had been sheltering under Britannia’s lax rule (they included, no doubt, many who had profited from the occupation and who were now ‘squeezed’, quite contrary to the Treaty of Nanking but without the British ever hearing of it). The Chinese authorities worked hard. By the middle of 1847 the refugee problem had been solved and there remained no homeless families to worry about. In all, the year-long reconstruction had cost the provincial treasury 231,000 strings of copper cash. One thing was certain — the emperor would not be sending a fleet to the Thames to demand compensation. Governor Liang visited the island for a final time in the spring of 1848 to find things back to normal:
The farmers are tending their ancestral fields, the gentlemen are nourished by the moral benefaction of old, the merchants are prospering, everybody is settled back into their rightful occupation. Truly, all has taken on a most peaceful appearance. [1]
Once the disagreements over Chusan’s return had been forgotten, the island continued to welcome Europeans escaping the heat of the treaty ports on the mainland. Each summer, with the permission of the magistrate, the wharves became a home from home to missionaries and merchants. With a sickly feared in Ningbo, where the air sat suffocating and immobile over the city, Augustus Ward Loomis and Mary Ann arrived back on Chusan in 1849 to rally their health. On the waterfront beside Josshouse Hill they rented the house lately occupied by Mr Waterhouse the merchant. It was rat-infested now, the roof needed mending, and the high bamboo fence was a reminder of the danger of robbery, but a fresh breeze was blowing in from a bay crowded with junks. As the mainland summer grew fiercer, more joined them: Miss Selmer, the young Swede who was assisting Mary Aldersey in her girls’ school in Ningbo, Mr Lord with his wife and child, Mr Russell of the Church Mission Society, Mr Johnson up from the treaty port of Fuzhou (he and Miss Selmer would scandalise the missionaries by sharing an umbrella — ‘and it’s not more than three weeks since he first saw her!’), Dr Ball the dentist, and an artist named Mr West who had travelled to China to capture its scenes for an American audience. The botanist Robert Fortune, too, in Zhejiang once more to hunt down specimens of the tea bush for transplantation to the Himalayan foothills, arrived in the sweltering heat of 1850 with fond memories of his previous time on the island. [2]
The passing of just four years had seen great changes. The warehouses along the waterfront had burgeoned into a large town, and already it was difficult for Fortune to make out the houses where his friends had lived. The European hospital, still Chusan’s only solid stone building, was yet standing, but it was being used as a customs house. An elderly mandarin, an opium addict, had taken up residence there and offered Fortune a bed. The next day he woke early to find the air still heavy with the smell of opium and the old man insensible. He dressed and walked out into the suburb. The contrast was profound. Asleep in that dim, fuggy room in the echoing building was a pitiable example of what China’s scholar-officials had become, yet outside in the early morning sun the cool air was softly blowing in from the sea. ‘The dew was sparkling on the grass,’ Fortune remembered with delight, ‘and the birds were just beginning their morning song of praise.’ [3]
Augustus Ward Loomis too was moved almost to poetry by the scenery around Tinghae:
At the present time the fields are all clothed in the most beautiful green, and near sunset, when the tops of the hills are gilded by the sun’s last rays, and other hills are sending their lengthened shadows along the plain, the shady groves and cottages of the people altogether afford a most charming landscape. [4]
In the city itself, the outward signs of British occupation had vanished so thoroughly that no-one who did not know its recent history could ever have guessed it. The temples and shrines had been repaired, the burned homes rebuilt. The English names chalked up at the street-corners had washed away. The tailors, the cobblers and all the rest who before the handover had considered an English shop-sign indispensable to trade had merged anonymously back into the Chinese street scene. Everything had returned to how it had been on July 4th, 1840. [5]
Scarcely a decade was to pass after Chusan’s handover before Britain and China were embroiled in a Second Opium War. The spark, as always, was the Canton trade — despite the Treaty of Nanking and the Davis Convention, foreign merchants were still not free to live and work within the city walls. As always, the fighting began in the south, on the Pearl River approaches to Canton. In the spring of 1858, sailing to the north to press his complaints home directly to the Qing government, Britain’s plenipotentiary the Earl of Elgin stopped off at Chusan. Passing through Tinghae — a city that had by now a listless, abandoned air to it, utterly different from Ningbo and Shanghai across the water — the Earl of Elgin was approached by a French Catholic priest, the heir to Father Danicourt’s mission. They walked together into the countryside, to the top of the highest mountain, from where they could look out over the valleys of Chusan and the archipelago spread out beyond. It was as beautiful a sight as ever. ‘This is a most charming island,’ wrote the Earl. ‘How any people, in their senses, could have preferred Hong Kong to it, seems incredible.’ [6]
In the north it was the same old story: an overwhelming show of force, a treaty agreed and signed at the barrel of a gun, and then, a year later, a refusal by an emboldened Manchu government to honour it. Only this time around, at the mouth of the Peiho River, it was the Royal Navy that was trapped and slaughtered by unexpectedly strong Chinese defences. Britain’s pride and standing demanded a devastating response, and, once more, Chusan was to be seized. This time, though, Britain would be joined by the French — suspicions between those two ancient enemies ran deep, and the reasoning of both nations, it seemed, was that left to occupy Chusan on its own the other might not be above laying permanent claim to it.
A new generation of soldiers and diplomats, few of whom had seen action at the start of the 1840s, by now held positions of power in Hong Kong and the treaty ports. Just as the passing of time had lent a glow of nostalgia to Chusan, it had made some people forget those considerations of honour which in 1846 had outweighed all thoughts of gain. But what was there to gain now from placing honour on a pedestal, they argued, when the Chinese were as intractable as ever over their side of the bargain? One voice raised in favour of looking afresh at Chusan was that of Her Majesty’s Consul in Canton, Sir Daniel Brooke Robertson. Robertson was familiar with Chusan, having served as vice-consul in Shanghai during the last two years of British rule. Renewed war with China now presented Britain with a golden opportunity for finally getting hold of the island, he believed. In January of 1860, with another spate of fighting on the horizon, he formalised his ideas in a memo to the Foreign Office. [7]
In The Expediency of
Acquiring the Island of Chusan, Robertson, like Robert Montgomery Martin fifteen years earlier, saw the potential for growing European crops in a rich soil and mild climate, for breeding sheep and cattle to supply a self-sufficient colony. Chusan, he reported, would be a sanatorium for men prostrated by the diseases of the tropical south. On that score, Britain’s possession of Hong Kong would make Chusan all the more desirable — it was no longer a matter of abandoning one for the other. The wider situation on the China coast had changed, besides. Almost twenty years had passed since the Treaty of Nanking and Sir Henry Pottinger’s decision to exchange Chusan for trading rights elsewhere. Shanghai in particular had matured, yet the Yangtze and the Huangpu that had to be navigated to reach it were far from easy. Large vessels, Robertson suggested, might prefer to unload in deep water at Tinghae. The vast increase in Shanghai’s trade ought to have been foreseen, and it was a matter of regret that Chusan had not been annexed alongside it. ‘It is useless now to look back,’ he admitted,
but when the unhealthiness of Hong Kong, the large amount of capital which has been sunk in making it habitable, and above all its utter unfitness for a military station from the fact of being dependent entirely on the mainland of China for daily provisions, is considered, it is impossible not to think that there was a mistake somewhere in the choice of it. [8]
It was also vital that, as British shipping grew in the Western Pacific, Britain had a naval base from which to put to sea at a moment’s notice. If Chusan were British territory, Robertson predicted, echoing just what Karl Gützlaff had said many years before, naval stores and docks could be built, provisions, coal and materiel collected: ‘It is not too much to say that Chusan might become in the China Seas what Malta is in the Mediterranean.’ Technological advances underway in the wider world, too, were set to change the balance of the East China Sea. The US was rapidly expanding its steam commerce across the oceans, and with a transcontinental railroad in the offing a niche might open up for a coaling station on the Zhejiang coast: in 1860, the only options for refuelling were at Hong Kong far to the south or at Shanghai, 120 miles farther up the Yangtze and her winding tributary the Huangpu.