by Julia Lovell
Military discipline was another problem for the Qing. British accounts of Opium War engagements were scattered with admissions that forts were adequately planned, placed and supplied, and would have cost the invaders many lives to capture – if only the Qing troops had fought, and not fled. The conquest of the empire had been achieved by creating a hereditary military: an elite minority of Manchu, Mongolian and Chinese Bannermen at the top, with the professional Chinese Green Standard Army (about three times the size) taking on basic garrison duties through the country. For the Bannermen, the state provided a stipend of rice, cash and land, in return for army service. But by the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the Banners were suffering from price rises just like everyone else in the empire – the level of stipends had been set in the early years of the conquest, long before the inflation of the Qianlong period set in. When handouts failed to keep up with inflation, or even shrank, soldiers protested, went on strike, ran away or took civilian jobs. As the nineteenth century approached, the system was rotten with corruption: superiors squeezed inferiors in exchange for the promise of promotion, while families concealed deaths (and invented births) to maintain stipends.
Equipment budgets and military esprit de corps were the principal casualties of the fiscal deficit. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, musketry and artillery practice were phased out across many garrisons, because ammunition was too dear. One of the east-coast garrisons in 1795 requested permission from the Board of War to cancel the spring artillery practice, for fear that the noise would disturb the well-being of profitable silk worms; so much grazing land had been sold or rented out that the number of horses dwindled to almost nothing. In the Canton garrison, half-naked Manchus on drill practice were observed dragging rusty swords and elderly bows about.17 ‘The life of the Bannermen,’ recalled the twentieth-century novelist Lao She (son of a Manchu soldier killed in the Allied Powers’ 1900 war on the Boxer Rebellion),
apart from consuming the grain and spending the silver supplied by the Chinese, was completely immersed, day to day, in the life of the arts . . . everybody knew how to sing arias from the classical opera, play the one-stringed accompaniment, perform drum-songs, and chant the popular tunes of the day. They raised fish, birds, dogs, plants and flowers, and held cricket fights . . . No longer capable of defending the empire’s frontiers . . . they became obsessed with their pets . . . My father never fought or argued with anyone in his life: he was the gentlest soul you ever met.18
Repeatedly during the war, Qing armies of thousands would be routed by a few hundred, or even a few dozen well-disciplined British troops with functioning artillery and battle-plans.19
During the Opium War, Qing politicians of the pro- and anti-war faction could agree on only one thing: that their army was hopeless. Travelling east from Canton to Zhejiang in 1841, Lin Zexu bluntly analysed the reasons for the army’s lack of interest in fighting the British. ‘The most coveted positions in the Guangdong garrisons were in the naval fleet, where one per cent of salaries was drawn from the grain and silver stipend, and the rest from opium-smugglers’ bribes. Once we banned opium, ninety-nine per cent of the navy’s income went up in smoke. How could we expect them to resist the English rebels?’20 ‘Our soldiers cheat everyone’, echoed Qiying, the emperor’s chief negotiator at the close of the war. ‘They refuse to pay full prices, gather in brothels and gambling dens, corrupt the sons of good families and handle stolen goods.’21
Beyond these technical military difficulties, though, lay a more severe flaw in the Qing war effort: a lack of interest in admitting that any kind of serious incident – let alone a war – with the British was happening at all.
At pains to show themselves to be civilized, the British tried hard to inform their adversaries of their demands before they pulverized them in battle. Through July, the fleet made several unsuccessful attempts to deliver Lord Palmerston’s letter to the Chinese emperor at various points along the eastern coast. The first took place on 2 July, two days before the fleet reduced Zhoushan’s defences to rubble, when one of the fleet’s translators (a clerk in the pay of Jardine-Matheson), Robert Thom, was ordered to make for the island of Xiamen and find someone in authority to receive the document. Greeted successively by threatening noises, furious howls of ‘No!’, an arrow that he dodged by hurling himself to the deck, bullets and cannonfire, he eventually gave up on the idea.22 (As usual, English and Chinese accounts of the encounter diverged. Jocelyn reported that the Chinese were given, in return for their welcome, a ‘severe chastisement’ (two and a half hours of broadsides); the local governor-general Deng Tingzhen claimed that, under his leadership, a large British warship was sunk.23 As the war developed, the practice of fictionalizing battle reports – begun with Lin Zexu’s version of the skirmish of November 1839 – would introduce serious cracks into the Qing chain of command. By 1841, the emperor had lost, with a good deal of justification, all trust in provincial dispatches, requesting independent verifications from a veteran official that he, in turn, threatened to check ‘in other places’.24)
Eight days later, with business at Dinghai concluded, Charles Elliot, accompanied by the expedition’s admiral, his cousin George, tried the same thing at the port of Zhenhai, opposite Zhoushan on the mainland. The morning after accepting the letter, the local official returned it, reporting that he did not dare forward it to Beijing.25 Charles Elliot now opted for direct communication with the Qing government and headed for Tianjin, a couple of hours south of the capital.
Neither of the first military engagements left the Qing government any better informed about what was going on. Deng Tingzhen, who had had ample experience of the British in Canton as Lin’s second-in-command through the collisions of 1839, remained insistent that these were crafty but unthreatening opium vessels, until he heard, on 18 July, that these ‘smugglers’ had occupied Zhoushan.26 And even if Daoguang’s representatives in Canton – where the British fleet had first appeared – had instantly realized what was going on, the slowness of the imperial mail would have taken the immediacy out of their reports. It took thirty to thirty-five days for communications to travel from Canton to Beijing; a more urgent, express service promised a delivery time of sixteen to twenty days.27 On the one hand, officials’ memorials to the centre were saturated in self-abasing rhetoric: ‘I’ was translated into ‘Your slave’; civil servants did not ‘report’, but rather ‘submitted, respectfully kneeling’. On the other, distance and pressure of work enabled far-flung, overworked officials to stall or even actively mislead their overworked sovereign.
In the middle of July, Daoguang received a reassuring report from Lin Zexu in Canton, dispatched in June – a few days after the British fleet of some twenty warships had sailed into Macao. Lin’s letter informed him that although some new ships had arrived, they were probably just opium ships: ‘there is really nothing they can do’.28 With a few cheering reports of how secret operatives had burnt thirty-six vessels and killed countless English (uncorroborated in British accounts), Lin signed off. ‘I couldn’t be more delighted’, the emperor noted in vermilion.29
Three days later, on 20 July, a surprising, and less encouraging piece of news came in from the east coast: 3–4,000 English had taken Zhoushan. The furious emperor now sacked the officials supposedly in charge of the island, and replaced them with Yu Buyun (a veteran of the Central Asian jihad of the 1820s, whose main contribution to the war effort would be to run, fast, from the British in October 1841). Two days later Daoguang ordered the coastal provinces to strengthen their defences against these ‘profit-seeking opium-smugglers’.30 But by 26 July, after ordering several thousand reinforcements to the coast, he was starting to feel more relaxed: ‘What does it matter that these rebellious foreigners have caused trouble in [Zhoushan]? Our troops have gathered to exterminate them – their annihilation is imminent.’31 On 3 August, Daoguang received a memorial of 3 July from Lin Zexu in Canton (who had seemingly not thought it urgent enough to merit the expense
of express delivery) telling him that more English ships had arrived; and that he had heard the fleet might be headed north, to Zhoushan then Tianjin. The emperor now gave Qishan, the governor-general of the province that included Beijing and Tianjin, basic instructions: ‘If the English get to Tianjin and are reverently obedient in behaviour and speech, tell them that trade, according to imperial regulations, takes place only at Canton’ – neither commerce nor communications was permitted in the north. If, by contrast, they seemed unruly, Qishan should exterminate them in battle.32 Daoguang still assumed that, even though this particular flavour of foreigners had more firepower than average opium-smugglers, their ambitions were mercantile, and that promises of trade would keep them quiet.
Over the next few days, as the British fleet sailed towards the soupy waters of the Beihe River (leading westwards from the north-east coast, towards Tianjin and the capital), perplexing reports continued to drift towards Beijing: Deng Tingzhen’s account of the encounter at Xiamen was followed by a report of the British attempt at Zhenhai to deliver a letter from some bogus-sounding English ‘minister’. (Meantime, Lin was still dashing off confident reports from Canton. ‘These foreign ships’, he wrote in late July, ‘only have confidence when they are in open waters on the high seas, where they can manoeuvre at will. Once inside a river-mouth, they are like fish in a cauldron; they can at once be captured and destroyed.’33) By 9 August, Daoguang was so confused about what these mysterious foreigners wanted that he was prepared to correspond directly with them. ‘If they want to hand over a letter,’ he told Qishan down at Tianjin, ‘just send it on to me, whether it’s in Chinese or in a foreign language.’34
11 August 1840 dawned quietly over the arid flats of Tanggu, the port nearest to Tianjin. So quietly, in fact, that as Charles Elliot and his fleet approached, he may have wondered if he had taken a wrong turning. Finally, though, some human activity was detected: an official boat about a mile ahead. As Elliot approached and moored, some satin-booted bureaucrats squelched through the yellow mud (to ensure the British came no further), took possession of Palmerston’s letter and promised to hand it up the imperial hierarchy to Qishan, the province’s governor-general, who would decide whether or not to pass it on to the emperor.
Qishan had responded to Daoguang’s order to exterminate the British in three ways: by deputing a military subordinate to strengthen defences to the north of Tianjin; by personally inspecting the Tianjin garrison and ordering local officials to check that their cannon were working; and by arming local militia. His orders seem to have been so discreetly dispatched that they did not reach the garrisons in question until the British sailed up. ‘On each side of the entrance to the river,’ noted one lieutenant, ‘there was an old and dilapidated fort, fast falling to decay . . . Numerous workmen were seen busy repairing these forts and throwing up entrenchments in all directions’.35 When they arrived, the British had the strong sense they were unexpected guests.
But guests they were – and not, Qishan and his establishment were at pains to imply, intruders, invaders or conquerors. On 13 August, as Qishan pondered whether or not to pass Palmerston’s letter on, he hospitably dispatched to them ‘a liberal supply of bullocks, sheep and poultry’ – of which the crews, long starved of fresh food, could not help being glad.36 On 15 August, he had another bulletin for them, delivered by a captain of the imperial guards: he would be sending the letter on to the court. But a reply would take time – ten days. Amuse yourselves until the 25th, he advised.37
In the Chinese narrative of the Opium War, you might expect the line between heroes and villains to be a clear one: honourably resisting servants of the Chinese empire on the one hand, wicked British on the other. The curious thing, though, is how much of the venom in the Chinese version of these events has been reserved for characters on their own side: and in particular, for the perceived corruption, indecision and incompetence of the Qing court. For much of the past century and a half, the Chinese have been more inclined to blame their then-rulers than the British for what went wrong. In this they have been helped, of course, by the fact that the Qing were a foreign dynasty. And few representatives of the government have been demonized quite as thoroughly as Qishan. Like the leaders of the British war effort, he is accused of harbouring a long-range conspiracy against China: of scheming to undermine Lin Zexu’s anti-opium campaign; of selling the country out to British bribes; of dismantling defences and disbanding reinforcements to sabotage resistance. Qishan’s crime, in China’s historical imagination, is many times more heinous than that of any of the British, for he betrayed his own country. After his arrest in spring 1841, while Canton’s defences fell to Britain’s gunboats, he would be condemned as a ‘treacherous minister’. In Maoist school textbooks, Qishan was not just Qishan: he was ‘Shameless Capitulationist-Robber Qishan’.38
An improbable traitor, he was born a Manchu marquis in 1790: the seventh-generation descendant of Enggeder, one of Nurhaci’s own trusted lieutenants (who in turn claimed to be descended from Genghis Khan). After winning in 1808 a coveted appointment to the Board of Punishments ‘in recognition of his ancestors’ services’, Qishan spent the next thirty-odd years moving from one choice assignment to another. He achieved his first governorship in 1819, his second in 1821. In 1831, he became Governor-General of Zhili, the wealthy and almost always quiet capital region. Admittedly, this brief curriculum vitae leaves out less auspicious aspects of his career. In 1820, he lost his first governorship for failing to control the flooding Yellow River. In 1827, he was sacked from Jiangsu after making an extraordinary hash of repairing grain transport routes up to the capital. Again and again, though, he was saved by the emperor’s personal intervention. Unlike Lin Zexu, he was a man who had by 1840 made many mistakes, but had somehow swaggered through them (accumulating, in the process, a spectacular personal fortune), thanks to imperial favour. He was someone with experience and connections, happy to volunteer for large tasks, fully expecting that (if and when things went wrong), Banner immunity would get him out of trouble.
This was a man too profitably embedded in the system that had made him to betray it. In 1841, when the emperor finally turned against him after the winter’s negotiations broke down, his confiscated estate was rumoured to be spectacular: ten million silver dollars, three hundred and forty houses, and so on. What, practical historians have asked, could the British have offered to motivate him to betray the Qing?39 Qishan failed to foil the British not because he had been bought by them, but because he was deeply puzzled by them. ‘I have humbly investigated the hundred cunning tricks of the English’, he told the emperor in autumn 1840, when asked what they were doing so far north. ‘If all they want is to trade, then why do these rebellious foreigners not know that for our sacred emperor, the empire is like one family? All they need to do is beg for trade in Guangdong – why have they come so far, to Tianjin? If they wish earnestly to beg for imperial favours, why have they brazenly occupied a town in the south-east?’40
On 19 August, the emperor finally found time to read Palmerston’s letter. It proved a typically busy Wednesday for him, with critical decisions to be made on repairing defences in the north-east (some 1,500 miles from Canton, the focus of conflict with the British) and pension allocations for Banner widows.41 And although he claimed to have given the missive a ‘particularly careful reading’, he seems to have skipped the inconvenient details of British demands for money, land and consuls, and focused on the letter’s complaints against Lin Zexu: their quarrel, he concluded, was with an impolitic imperial servant, not with the system as a whole.42 Make a public example of Lin, he quickly concluded, and the problem would go away.
The next day, he gave instructions to Qishan on how to ‘tame the foreigners’.43 Their grievances against Lin were to be investigated; every other demand was ignored or dismissed.44 The details would be worked out face to face in a meeting with his representative, Qishan. ‘The great emperor oversees the earth and seas – there is no place that he
does not regard with equal benevolence. If foreigners should have the slightest grievance about their trade with us, we will immediately investigate and punish those at fault accordingly . . . The British admiral should return south, and wait patiently for the matter to be dealt with.’45
Imperial tradition gave the emperor two options for handling rebels against the Qing imperium (and ‘rebels’ (ni) is how the English were identified in almost every contemporary Chinese source on the conflict): extermination (jiao), or soothing (fu). (In China’s First National Archives, just inside the western gate to the Forbidden City, Daoguang’s military memorials from the Opium War are filed inside the ‘Archive for Seizure and Extermination’.46) By choosing, in 1840, to ‘tame’ or ‘soothe’ the British, Daoguang was consciously following a policy that, since the Han dynasty, had been known as the ‘loose rein’ – controlling wayward foreigners with benevolence, to avoid the unnecessary and expensive unpleasantness of a war. But to the emperor, soothing was not an admission of weakness or surrender. It was another form of control, albeit a paternalistic one. ‘The English’, he later analysed, ‘are like whales and crocodiles in the sea, they have no fixed abode. Even if we stiffened our defences all along the coast, we would not annihilate them. What would be the good in exhausting our state coffers in such a hopeless cause? Luckily, they only want to trade and to have their grievances addressed – which gives me an opportunity to deal with them.’47