The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  As he built his forts, Guan overlooked one more dangerous possibility: that the British would allow themselves to be distracted from thoughts of their ultimate destination – Canton – and directly attack the forts themselves. Guan was convinced that the British would be too fixated on reaching the prize of Canton to concentrate their guns on his beloved granite fortifications, and that as the fleet hurried towards the city they would trip over the defensive chains of rafts and be annihilated by nearby Qing cannon. The exact opposite occurred: as the British set about systematically destroying each of the forts they passed, Guan’s structures were exposed as poorly designed, isolated, exposed units, from which his terrified soldiers ran as fast as they could.19

  Early on the morning of 7 January, three British steamers set off towards the Bogue, planning to land some 1,400 marines, infantry and artillery on Taikoktow and Chuanbi. While the marines set up artillery to storm the rear of the forts, they were covered by steamer fire. Twenty-five minutes after the fleet had begun to shell the highest fort on Chuanbi (on the eastern bank of the estuary), the British flag fluttered over its walls, the Qing guns stopped and the forts’ defenders scattered in panic. It was a more brutal affair on the island’s next promontory, where a pincer movement by the British trapped the Qing garrison inside the fort. Expecting a fight to the death, the Qing soldiers were mowed down by gunfire, threw themselves off the fort’s cliff and into the water below, or attempted futile resistance. The fort’s commander, one Chen Liansheng, fought until ‘every part of his skin was perforated with the gunfire that rained down on him’, while his son, maddened with grief, fell soon afterwards.20 The scenes inside the forts – their brain-spattered walls, their ‘blent, blackened, smouldering, stinking’ human remains – struck the conquering British as terrible. ‘A frightful scene of slaughter ensued’, recalled one lieutenant’s memoir, in a section triumphantly entitled ‘Small Loss of the British’: in one spot, the bodies of ‘the slain were found literally three and four deep’.21 ‘The sea was quite blackened with corpses’, described an army doctor.22 Many wounded Qing soldiers were burned alive when, falling to the ground with their matchlock guns, their matches set fire to the packages of gunpowder that they carried strapped to the chests and waists of their cotton-padded uniforms.

  The decisive weapon of destruction on 7 January was the brand new, 184-by-29-foot iron steamer named the Nemesis, secretly commissioned for the war with China. Her journey east had begun badly: in early 1840, she had almost failed to make it past Land’s End, when, ‘the weather being hazy and the night dark, she struck heavily on a rock’, springing a leak that, without judicious application of the hand pump, might well have sunk her.23 For some eight months after this inauspicious start and despite constant anxiety about fuel (she guzzled eleven tons of coal a day), she had been piloted towards China (past slavers, hippopotamuses, cannibals and plagues of locusts) by her veteran captain, William Hall. Eventually, in the last week of November, she had made it to Macao, still in time to take part in what Hall hopefully described as the ‘brilliant operations’ to come in the Gulf of Canton. And once her difficult journey was complete, her resilient iron sides, her accuracy of fire and her shallow draught proved indispensable to the British war effort as she weaved through the densely fortified waterways of the Canton basin. Her impact was psychological as well as military: in her first engagement at Chuanbi her captain proudly observed ‘the astonishment of the Chinese . . . unacquainted with this engine of destruction.’24 As the Qing’s plans were confounded, again and again, by this extraordinary new machine of war – able to tow warships upriver on frustratingly still days, to barge into improbably shallow waters – the apparently supernatural powers of the Nemesis spread panic and bewilderment.

  With the forts on the western side of the Bogue similarly secured and reduced to ruins, the Nemesis – watched by the marines in possession of Chuanbi – set about annihilating Guan Tianpei’s fleet of war junks, which had hung back just north of Chuanbi in waters that, their commanders judged, were not deep enough to allow the British hulls to approach. While one of the wooden British sloops, the Larne, cut off any escape route around the back of the island, the Nemesis brought its Congreve rockets into range. Almost the instant after the first shot, Captain Hall remembered, one of the junks ‘blew up with a terrific explosion, launching into eternity every soul on board, and pouring forth its blaze like a mighty rush of fire from a volcano . . . The smoke, and flame, and thunder of the explosion, with . . . portions of dissevered bodies scattering as they fell, were enough to strike with awe . . . the stoutest heart that looked upon it.’25 Both sides momentarily paused at the shock of it – the rocket must, presumably, have struck the ship’s powder stores. The crews of the other junks then fled onland, leaving the vessels to drift towards shore, where they were destroyed, in time for lunch, by British cannon.

  The day’s accountancy was as follows. On the Qing side, an hour and a half’s fighting had left some 280 dead and 462 wounded. The English suffered thirty-eight wounded, but no deaths. A hundred and seventy-three Qing guns were removed or spiked; eleven war junks were destroyed. The Nemesis had received a little damage on her paddle-box.26

  The British fleet drew breath and fell to a fitful sleep, anticipating further exercise the following day. But as 8 January dawned calm and bright and the fleet sailed up to Guan’s next layer of defences – Anunghoy and Wangtong – a small boat, skiffed by an elderly woman, approached. ‘Let us resume talks,’ went Admiral Guan’s message.

  From the fact that the Qing had waved the white flag, and from the horrific carnage that their guns had wrought, Charles Elliot may have assumed that his violence had – in the rough pedagogic language of Victorian imperialism – instructed his Qing interlocutors about the true nature of their British adversary, informing them that the empire’s forts were helpless before British firepower and discipline. He would have been wrong. Over the coming months, years and decades, explanations for the early failure of Canton’s defence focused not on British strength, but on domestic conspiracy theories. The forts had fallen, it was quickly decided, because of a fifth column in the Qing ranks – led by Qishan. And the source of most of the rumours was his old antagonist, Lin Zexu.

  Hearing back in October 1840 of his dismissal, Lin had responded mildly enough: ‘the Emperor’s will must be done.’27 On the face of it, he had passed the following months in Canton tranquilly: banqueting civil-service examiners, decorating pillars with couplets, rearranging his book collection. But it could not have been an easy time, as this former paragon of the imperial government waited for a hostile rival to complete an investigation into his conduct of the ‘border disturbance’ with the British. Qishan’s report – finished around early December – was predictably critical, rounding particularly on Lin’s failure to make good his original promise to give the British proper compensation for their opium.28

  But as the negotiations started to go as badly for Qishan as they had for Lin, Lin turned on his vulnerable successor. In a series of persuasive letters to well-placed sympathizers, Lin fought back against Qishan’s accusations that it was his mishandling of the British in 1839 that had caused all the trouble. On the contrary, it was Qishan who had deliberately wrecked everything. Lin was convinced that the British fleet, on arriving in June 1840, had been so intimidated by his own infallible defences of Canton – the fireboats ready to be nailed to British warships, the martial-arts divers ready to drill holes in hulls – that they had sailed off to make trouble at Zhoushan; he refused to accept that the British plan had been, from the start, to bypass Canton and put pressure on Beijing at the Yangtze and at Tianjin. ‘These rebellious foreigners did not dare before [now] to venture an attack because our defences were then tight, and our unity of spirit made us as impregnable as a rampart’, Lin wrote. ‘But Qishan turned our arrangements upside down, broke our morale, sabotaged our soldiers’ spirit, stiffened the [enemy’s] resolve, and brought insult to our military prestige.�
��29 Qishan was, in sum, a treacherous appeaser, accused of demobilizing militia, of refusing Guan Tianpei much-needed reinforcements and funds, and of spreading fear-mongering rumours about the hopeless condition of Qing defences.

  Lin’s campaign struck home: around the middle of February 1841, an intemperate fellow official called Yuqian (who later that year would oversee the complete collapse of Qing defences in the south-east) impeached Qishan to the emperor. After the shock of early defeat against the British, Lin’s efforts to shift the blame away from himself and the empire’s military inadequacy, and towards Qishan, were wonderfully consoling to his peers. If only we had stood and fought properly without traitors in our midst, they repeated to anyone who would listen, the foreigners would not have stood a chance. As Canton’s defences crumbled through January, then February, March, April and May, a conspiracy theory was the perfect salve for the Chinese empire’s amour-propre. By blaming everything on Qishan and his diplomatic approach to the British, the empire’s uncompromising Confucians pushed damagingly for more war. All that was needed against flintlock guns and the Nemesis, their analysis implied, was Lin Zexu’s heroic spirit of resistance.

  It is true that Qishan had few illusions about the possibility of victory against the British, and made no secret of the fact. In late January, he dispatched to the emperor his own views of the military situation, expressing extreme contempt for ‘the utter uselessness of our marines.’30 The Qing weapons were badly cast, he argued; the forts were vulnerable to blockade; the naval crews were so prone to seasickness that they needed bribing even to stay at their posts. Worst of all, the loyalty of the local population was highly questionable: ‘I have found, through careful examination, the main characteristics of the people of Canton to be falsehood, ingratitude and greed . . . [They] are used to mixing daily with the foreigners, and regard them like brothers.’31

  But for all his pessimism, he knew that there was no way he could refuse to back up the forts if it came to a fight, and to this end he diverted some 8,000 reinforcements into them between late December and early January. Forts designed to be manned by sixty soldiers now contained, on average, around 320. Qishan himself reported to the throne on the eve of war that ‘the forts are full up.’32 His congestion of the fortifications probably made the panic and slaughter on 7 January even worse than it would otherwise have been. Qishan set aside, moreover, 11,000 dollars to bribe the men to stay and fight. His enemies also rumoured that he had demobilized Lin’s fearless militia, who then immediately went over to the British and led the attack on the Canton forts. ‘After the guns of the fleet bombarded the forts from the front,’ analysed Wei Yuan, ‘about 2,000 Chinese traitors scaled the hills and attacked them in the rear . . . far outnumbering the garrison of 600 men.’33 ‘I heard that after Qishan arrived in Guangdong’, agreed his impeacher, Yuqian, ‘he disbanded the braves . . . They were then used by traitors . . . that’s why [the forts] fell.’34 Although the British received help with piloting and supplies from entrepreneurial locals, English accounts make no mention of a whole army of turncoats, and it is hard to imagine that they would not have done, if it had occurred. Since Napier, the British had liked to describe war as liberating the grateful Chinese people from the yoke of Tartar tyranny. The defection of 2,000 locals in one of the key early engagements, therefore, would have been an extraordinary public-relations victory to be advertised wherever possible. Canton’s forts fell because they were no match for British firepower; the rumours about Qishan were most likely rumours – nothing more.

  By 21 January, Qishan had two intriguing documents lying before him. The first was Elliot’s new draft treaty, demanding Hong Kong, six million dollars, equal diplomatic communications and the reopening of the Canton trade just after the Chinese New Year; the Qing empire would have Zhoushan back in exchange. The second was Daoguang’s response to Qishan’s late-December memorials describing the British terms. Now the emperor seemed actually to be paying attention to what the British were asking for. Even though the draft treaty was still many times milder than the final 1842 version would turn out to be, Daoguang found ‘the demands of the rebellious foreigners totally excessive . . . it’s time to dispatch a punitive mission to suppress them . . . If they try to hand over any more communications, you are not permitted to receive them . . . My mind is made up, there will be no wavering at all.’35 Qishan’s position was now impossible. Elliot had demonstrated that he could ask for exactly what he wanted; the emperor had emphasized that he would not give it. Beyond tut-tutting at Elliot for his ‘precipitation’, there was nothing much Qishan could do, except play for time (while Guan Tianpei tried to patch the Bogue’s defences back together) and lie to the emperor.

  Not only did he disregard the emperor’s orders to refuse British letters, on 27 January Qishan invited Elliot to an enormous placatory banquet on the bank of the Pearl River – their first face-to-face meeting in almost five months. As befitted a man in dire diplomatic straits, Qishan did not cut corners. At around nine o’clock in the morning, Elliot arrived (on board the Nemesis), accompanied by around twenty-five officers, fifty-six soldiers and sixteen drumming and piccolo-tooting musicians. The atmosphere was more village fete than parley: the riverways were crammed with brightly coloured official boats, the path up to the conference marquee strewn with bunting. While Elliot’s party fell upon a ‘sumptuous and tedious, though not unpalatable’ buffet breakfast of shark’s-fin and birds’-nest soup, mutton and wine, what Elliot called a ‘complimentary and friendly conversation’ with Qishan took place in an inner chamber draped with yellow silk.36 (According to another British account, far too much cherry brandy was consumed for any sensible business to be done.) Later, to Daoguang, Qishan almost denied the meeting had happened at all. He had happened to bump into Elliot, he explained, while checking on the city’s defences, and offered his retinue some ‘light refreshments’, as they had missed their breakfast.37

  Although the situation was hopeless, Qishan still had to try to muddle through: fussing over expressions in Elliot’s draft treaty, waiting to hear if the British had left Zhoushan, rallying the Qing forces (through early February, the second tier of Canton’s defensive forts were strengthened with new cannon).38 On 13 February, another couple of communications awaited Qishan in Canton. The first was an imperial edict informing him that he had been replaced by the emperor’s cousin, Yishan (newly invested as the ‘Rebel-Suppressing General’), and a veteran of the 1830s Xinjiang wars called Yang Fang, both of whom would shortly arrive to ‘annihilate the foreigners’. The second was yet another nagging request from Charles Elliot to sign his draft treaty of 21 January – a document they had been discussing for the past six months.39 On 20 February, after a week’s silence from Qishan, Elliot sent a back-up copy for his urgent consideration. When Qishan asked for another ten days to consider it, war was declared once more.

  On 25 February, the British began battering Canton’s remaining two lines of defence. The Qing did their best to maintain a good show: on the fortress island of Anunghoy, a single band of soldiers was set to marching around the same hill, changing their clothes after each circuit to give the impression of infinite forces. But by half-past one the following day, undaunted British troops were spilling out of the Nemesis onto the islands of Wangtung and Anunghoy, and the Qing forts were haemorrhaging their defenders. Although around 1,000 men surrendered to be taken prisoner alive, many died fleeing in panic down the hillsides, or along the beaches below the forts. By the evening, the Nemesis could be spared for more humanitarian tasks, such as fishing escaped Chinese soldiers out of the water. (Several of these terrified individuals, sure that the Nemesis wanted them only to carry out further torture or mutilation, drowned by holding themselves under the water.40)

  But in all, the resistance was less desperate and more pragmatic than it had been six weeks before. The tone was set early on by the officers directing operations on Wangtong, who locked their rank and file inside the forts to prevent them from runnin
g away, then fled in small boats as soon as the firing began. As a result, their abandoned subordinates fired their cannon at their departing superiors, rather than at the British.41 In another fort, the local Cantonese soldiers were the first to flee, swiftly followed by reinforcements from Hunan. When the stampede bottlenecked at a bridge, panic forced those lining the bank into the water, while those behind used their comrades’ heads as stepping stones – none of those forced under the water survived.42

  By 27 February, the forts of Eternal Peace, of Consolidated Security, of Suppressing, of Over-Aweing and of Quelling Those From Afar had all fallen – as had Guan Tianpei, the man who had spent the last six years building them up. Before the assault began, he had made valiant efforts to hold his subordinates’ nerve, pawning his own clothes to bribe them with a couple of dollars apiece. But they began to run as soon as the firing began. As Guan drew his sword to prevent their exit, a bullet hit him in the chest.43 Besides Guan, the British claimed six hundred Chinese lives, and the capture of some 460 cannon. Five British were wounded. As with 7 January, officials blamed the defeats on fifth-columnists: on turncoat opium-smugglers hired by Elliot, on Chinese traitors who explained the secret waterways of the Canton River to the British. The truth was, most likely, less elaborate: the Qing guns could not swivel to direct their fire at the British ships or infantry; and the gunners ran away.

  Over the next three weeks, the British forces pushed up the riverlets and waterways that led to the city, splashing through paddy fields, burning forts, observed and sometimes assisted by locals, who stepped forward willingly to remove obstructions such as wooden piles driven into the river or to offer their services as pilots.44 In the engagements of January to March, the Chinese Repository estimated, the Qing had lost more than 2,000 men; the British had suffered one dead of his wounds, and three killed by their own weapons.45 By 18 March, Elliot was back where the conflict had started – at the factories on the southern edge of Canton. Almost two years previously, he had left the city a beleaguered, unpopular civil servant; now he glided magisterially in to dock on the deck of the Nemesis. ‘In a few moments’, recalled the steamer’s captain, ‘the British flag was displayed with three cheers, and . . . Canton lay completely at our mercy’.46