by Julia Lovell
On 30 August, Qishan – dressed with restrained good taste in a blue silk robe, white satin boots and a straw cap trailing a fine peacock’s feather – applied himself to soothing Elliot, in a yellow silk-lined marquee thrown up under the shadow of the Tianjin forts. His tactic was reciprocity: to offer the British so many gifts, compliments and professions of friendship that they would feel too guilty to make war; to disarm them with a full-blown charm offensive. He probably did not know that Elliot’s first personal encounter with Chinese officialdom, back in 1834, had taken the form of two heavy blows over the head. But Qishan’s affectionate manner seemed designed to confound the Briton’s low expectations of dealings with the Qing bureaucracy. In his account of the meeting, Elliot – accustomed to being undermined by Palmerston, snarked at by opium-smugglers and lectured by Lin Zexu – almost purred to find such tender understanding in his Qing negotiator. A ‘perfectly unaffected and quiet’ Qishan received him, he remembered, ‘with great courtesy’. Qishan agreed with all the British complaints against Lin Zexu, and occasionally looked ‘obviously powerfully impressed’ by Elliot’s reasoning. He was, Elliot gushed, ‘one of the very foremost men in this country.’48
While Qishan was working on Elliot, the British retinue was being lavishly banqueted in a mass of smaller, surrounding tents: with ‘excellent beef and mutton,’ remembered one lieutenant, ‘birds’-nest soup, sea-slugs, and ragouts of comestibles, whose variety and number gave an air of novelty and curiosity to the entertainment.’49 In later communications, Qishan turned his attentions to Charles’ cousin George, acclaiming him for his ‘eminent and masculine talent, and clear perception of reason’.50 Qishan’s reports back to the emperor, by contrast, were far less complimentary, suggesting that the English ‘seemed to be showing remorse’ at their base actions, and that if they were to attack on land, they would be able to do nothing except ‘fire their guns’.51 (The British visitors to Tianjin took a different view. Their bird’s-nest soup finished, Elliot’s retinue on 30 August began to look around them, at the impromptu defences that had been thrown up in the last few days, and found them ‘extremely paltry . . . quite ludicrous. With two six-pounders and a couple of hundred marines they might have been ours at any moment.’52)
Elliot got very little out of his six-hour conference, beyond flattery and the admission that Lin had misbehaved (an admission that Qishan would have relished, as he seems to have considered Lin an ambitious troublemaker implicated in the Manchu’s 1827 humiliation over the waterworks fiasco in Jiangsu). Despite promising nothing, Qishan allowed Elliot to imagine that a satisfactory settlement was possible. While asserting that for the emperor to pay for the opium was neither ‘reasonable nor just’, he hinted that Daoguang might change his mind. ‘Further time was necessary for deliberation’, Qishan havered. ‘His Imperial Majesty had already resolved to send a commissioner to Canton . . . proof that the dispositions of the Court were gracious and peaceful.’53 Elliot confessed to Palmerston how awkward he would have felt putting uncivilized pressure on Qishan: how could he do so ‘without creating the ill will of the Governor, with whom the Plenipotentiaries expected to have to treat’ in Canton?54 Qishan, in short, stalled him with sweet-talk and sea-slug. And after brief consideration, the two Elliots agreed to return to Canton.
Both the emperor and Qishan were elated at their skill in managing the British. ‘To expend a few words and a little paper’, declared Daoguang, ‘is far better than dispatching 100,000 troops . . . You’ve carried out my orders down to the last detail, through many twists and turns, while keeping to the proper forms. We could not be more delighted.’55 Qishan may have been less elated to hear that his reward was another, even more awkward assignment: to take over from Lin Zexu as special Imperial Commissioner to Canton, and complete the negotiation between two sides who – after a month and a half of talks – had managed to agree on nothing.
On 23 October, Daoguang received a request from the Governor-General of Zhejiang and Fujian for 150,000 ounces of silver, to cover the cost of future military operations on the south-east coast. ‘What for?’ the emperor barked back. ‘When [the foreigners] came to Tianjin to hand over their letter, they struck me as perfectly respectful and submissive. I’ve sent my great minister to Canton to sort the whole matter out. Within a few days, the armies can be demobilized. You say the foreigners are running wild? Where, I ask you, where?’56 ‘Thus to all appearance’, agreed Lord Jocelyn in his journal, ‘does this Chinese war, if so it may be termed, seem drawing to a close.’57
Chapter Eight
QISHAN’S DOWNFALL
It took Qishan almost two months – fifty-six days – to saunter south to Canton. True, this was four days less than his predecessor, Lin Zexu, had taken in the early days of 1839. But back then, the empire had only had a drug problem. This time, the country was – or at least was meant to be – at war. Zhoushan, one of the empire’s richest and most strategically important islands, had been stormed and its garrison routed, and the representatives of the British sovereign had come within easy firing distance of the capital province and demanded talks with the emperor’s representative. But this was no great cause for concern, Qishan reassured Daoguang. ‘Our Emperor has innumerable great problems to consider every day’, he soothed him. ‘Certainly it is not worthwhile to bother His mind with such petty business. Also, to put up coastal defences for years would entail heavy expenses and waste immense power of men . . . I will make them return to Canton willingly to wait for our solution of the question.’1
One of his many pauses took place in the north-eastern province of Shandong, where he made an acquisition he hoped would prove useful: one Bao Peng, a forty-seven-year-old chancer from near Macao, whom Qishan hired as translator and adviser in his upcoming talks with the British. After a varied and lucrative career down in Canton as an unlicensed comprador to the Americans and British, and as an opium-supplier to the well-to-do Cantonese, this Bao Peng had grown ‘frightened of complications’ when a Chinese interpreter employed by the English threatened to denounce him to Lin Zexu. In March 1839, therefore, he had decided to disappear north, taking refuge in the house of a local song-writer.2 Perhaps keen to be rid of this dubious character, Bao Peng’s host recommended his linguistic and diplomatic services to the passing Qishan, who took him on without, it seems, asking any awkward questions about his background, imagining him to be a most useful commodity: an English-speaker uncorrupted by Canton trading society. Bao Peng claimed to have been learning English since childhood; in practice, his competence seems to have gone no further than pidgin. Both British and Chinese observers portray him as a clown: Wei Yuan, a Qing contemporary and sharp commentator on the war, called him ‘the pet boy of the traitor Dent’ (the British merchant who had graced the very top of Lin’s ‘Most Wanted’ list of British opium-smugglers, and whose arrest had been one of the basic demands of the March 1839 crackdown) and the ‘slave’ of Elliot, who sent him out as his ‘eyes and ears’.3 ‘He professed much regard for the English,’ remarked one British lieutenant, ‘but, like all his countrymen, he was a most intolerable liar.’ Former English associates were unable to contain their amusement at seeing their errand boy grandiosely reinvent himself as a government worthy, in his ‘winter cap with a brass button’, robe of ‘rich puce-coloured satin’ and thick-soled black satin boots. ‘You thinkee my one smallo man?’ he spluttered on a visit to his old master Dent in Macao, while being ribbed for his new airs. ‘No! My largo man, my have catchee peace, my have catchee war my hand, suppose I opee he, makee peace, suppose I shuttee he, must make fight.’4 Of course, Bao Peng’s command of English was far superior to the non-existent Chinese-language skills of the English troops, whose inability to communicate verbally with local populations had already been, and would continue to be, the cause of much unnecessary suffering. Through the war, many Qing forces would fight desperately to the end or simply commit suicide rather than submit to the mercies of these aliens, while the British shouted incomprehe
nsibly at them to surrender and live. Nonetheless, it boded ill for the negotiations ahead that this swaggering fugitive from justice should have been promoted to such a position of responsibility. After Bao’s appointment, Wei Yuan commented, Elliot contracted ‘a greater contempt for China’s resources in men than ever.’5
Bao Peng, this opium-smuggler turned imperial diplomat, offered a particularly colourful example of Chinese collaboration with the British, but he was only one of many who betrayed the Qing by helping the empire’s attackers: not out of conscious ideological choice, but simply because they needed to make a living, and the British were employers like any other. According to both English and Chinese sources, locals defected back and forth between the two sides depending on which offered them the most reliable source of income. After the opium trade dried up in the late 1830s, those who had drawn a living from transporting, unpacking, supplying and peddling were recruited (at the wage of six dollars a month) into anti-British defence militias – a strategy that Lin Zexu described as ‘fighting traitors with traitors, poison with poison’.6 When these bands were disbanded in late 1840 as part of the ‘soothing’ process, their members quickly changed sides again. ‘Once they found themselves unemployed,’ recalled one Cantonese observer, ‘they took to wandering up and down the coast. The foreigners relied on two of their dastardly leaders, who incited others to go over too . . . Without this help, the British would not have known anything – this was how Charles Elliot found out how slack the defences leading up to Canton were.’7 When the British fleet returned to the south, seasoned Cantonese boatmen offered their services to the British, with all the importunate matter-of-factness of taxi drivers touting for trade outside a railway station. ‘How four-piece ship no wanchee pilot’, one local navigator shook his head, on being rejected.8 Everywhere the British went, they were dependent on local willingness to provide them with fresh food and water. When the Elliots returned south in late November 1840, and docked their fleet on the eastern side of the mouth of the river up to Canton, a floating Chinese township kept them well supplied with fresh food, even at the risk of persecution by officials.9 When the names of this impromptu comprador community were taken down by a group of police spies, the businessmen besieged and set fire to the police boat. ‘These poor wretches were literally roasted alive, their persecutors preventing their escape with long bamboos’, recalled an English lieutenant. ‘What a most extraordinary nation this is! . . . They will trade with you at one spot, while you are fighting, killing and destroying them at another!’10
Charles Elliot and company reached Macao on 20 November. Qishan arrived perhaps only a couple of days later, but did not announce himself officially until 29 November. For well over a month, they exchanged around ten communications, generally polite but without resolving anything. Qishan, as at Tianjin, was keen to defuse as much minor unpleasantness as he could without addressing any of the major British demands. On 5 August, a young Englishman called Vincent Stanton, who had abandoned a half-finished degree at Cambridge to tutor a family of English children on Macao, had (while out swimming) been seized and imprisoned by Qing soldiers. On 10 December, Qishan had him released from his manacles, taken to his own mansion and fattened up for a day or two, then handed back to the English community. Five million dollars would be paid for the destroyed opium: ‘seeing that the honourable Plenipotentiary has shown in all things respectful and compliant conduct . . . the Minister has constrained himself to devise means for arranging this matter’. Punishment of Lin Zexu was curt and quick: on 13 October, Lin discovered he had lost his job to his second-in-command.11 The old British demand to abandon unequal Chinese usages in diplomatic communications was also easily dealt with: ‘it may be assented to’, Qishan wrote blandly on 11 December. But on anything bigger, agreement was impossible: the ‘request to grant territory’ (Hong Kong) was ‘inconsistent with reason’; or, he later clarified, ‘really opposed to all that is reasonable’.12 In any case, no settlement, no resumption of trade, was possible while the British were still occupying Zhoushan. From the remote safety of frozen Beijing, Daoguang offered little constructive support: ‘Judging from your report,’ he snapped at Qishan, ‘the foreigners are outrageous and not amenable to reason . . . After prolonged negotiation has made them weary and exhausted, we can suddenly attack, and thereby subdue them.’13
The intriguing thing about this correspondence is – particularly given Elliot’s subsequent reputation as arch-imperialist among Chinese historians – how very far and free the plenipotentiary wandered from his foreign secretary’s original instructions. Through the diplomatic tennis of December 1840 (‘no-gotiating’, frustrated opium traders in India called it), Elliot politely dropped almost all of Palmerston’s demands (for the opening of five mainland ports, consular representation, extra-territoriality and so on). True, Elliot was not afraid to menace as well as concede: to remind Qishan of ‘the inexpediency of delay, where such large forces are assembled.’14 But compared to the harsh stipulations of the final 1842 Nanjing Treaty, Elliot’s terms were mild.
Perhaps because he had been so long in China, he seems to have never believed he would get what Palmerston was asking for.15 But even if he could have managed it, Elliot did not think it good for the long term of Sino-British relations that the Qing should be brought so uncompromisingly to their knees: ‘negotiation’, he believed,
supported by the mere appearance of formidable force, would at once place the trade at Canton upon a vastly improved footing, [then] we might probably get permission to trade at one or two other ports . . . if I can secure so much without a blow, it will better become me to incur the responsibility of departing from the letter of my instructions, than to cast upon the country the burden of a distant war for the sake of a balance of concessions pretty surely within our grasp . . . by a quiet improvement of opportunities . . . we shall have avoided the protraction of hostilities, with its certain consequences of deep hatred.16
But even Elliot could get impatient. On Boxing Day – after the regiments had marked the holiday with roast beef and plum pudding – he issued an unseasonal threat to resume hostilities at noon on 28 December, if there had been no decent response to British demands for new trading posts by then. On 7 January, after a few more days’ stalling from Qishan, the British fleet started up the river. This time, the plan was to strike a very ‘definite blow’ to the site of so many British frustrations of the past half-century: the approach to Canton – the Bogue – where the South China Sea began to narrow into the Pearl River.
This is how the Bogue would have looked early on 7 January 1841. Taikoktow and Chuanbi, two rocky, fortified islands some three miles apart, guarded the western and eastern banks of the Pearl River. Just north of them sat a second line of watchposts on the islands of Wangtong and Anunghoy, again solidly defended with mudworks and granite forts full of guns and men. To ensnare aggressors, a double lacing of large, chained wooden rafts blocked the passage between Anunghoy and Wangtong. A third set of defences rested on the green, stony cliffs of Tiger Island, another mile or so to the north-west. Further up, as the channel towards Canton narrowed and wound through low-lying paddy fields, lay yet more forts and guns.
This threefold defensive scheme was the brainchild of Canton’s sextuagenarian admiral (and, according to one source, descendant of the Chinese god of war), Guan Tianpei. After decades of unexceptional army service, Guan had soared to imperial favour in 1826, when he successfully guided 1,254 imperial grain-supply boats along China’s east coast from the mouth of the Yangtze and safely into dock in Tianjin. Still remembering with admiration Guan’s rice-herding talents, the emperor had turned to him in 1834 to tighten Canton’s defences after the Napier fiasco. By 1841, the admiral had had six long years in Canton to reflect on deficiencies in the Qing defences. Any weaknesses (in weaponry, fortifications, discipline) could, he concluded, be solved not by improving their quality, but by increasing their quantity. For six years, then, Guan toiled on building up a network
of granite forts, each with the same drawbacks: their cannon were badly cast and immobile, and supplied by poor-quality powder, while their circular walls exposed the forts’ defenders to bombardment from above. Finally, he gave them all optimistic names: the Forts of Eternal Peace, of Consolidated Security, and of Suppressing, Over-Aweing and Quelling Those From Afar.
The backbone of the Qing strategy was defence – any hope of making in the open sea a successful naval assault on the British ships was long dead. ‘If I were to order the fleet to gather its strength and meet them in battle out in the ocean,’ Lin Zexu warned Daoguang in early 1840, ‘victory would not be guaranteed. The waves are too big, and the wind too changeable.’17 But both Lin and Guan were full of ideas for water-borne guerrilla warfare. One plan was to hire thousands of locals to form teams of desperadoes that would approach on small boats and hurl flaming jars of oil or stink-pots at the British, or leap onto the warships and massacre the crews in hand-to-hand fighting. Another scheme was to build fleets of skiffs, heaped with dry grass and gunpowder. In the heat of battle, fearless irregulars would row them out, link them together with iron chains, nail them to the side of British boats, set fire to them, then escape.
Unfortunately, much of this strategizing was wishful thinking. Even if they had had the nerve to try, these militia teams would have found it practically impossible to get within stinkpot-hurling or nailing distance of Britain’s cannonading fleet; the idea of scrambling up from small fishing junks (that lacked modern, elevated guns) into the towering British warships, meanwhile, was unlikely. For a while, Lin had planned to use masters of Daoist breathing techniques, who claimed to be able to walk on riverbeds for up to ten hours at a time, to dive down and drill holes in British ships. After repeated rehearsals, it was discovered they were good only for bobbing about in the shallows. Yet Lin still kept them on the payroll: ‘every water-brave we keep in our pay’, he reflected, ‘means one less ruffian in the pay of the English.’18