The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  But Qishan was not there to witness Elliot’s triumph. As this diplomatic and military fiasco took shape, Daoguang did the only thing that he could to make himself feel better: he blamed everything on his commissioner. On 13 March, Qishan had left the city – wreathed in chains, his property confiscated by the state – for the capital, to await trial for treason. He was accompanied by Bao Peng, whose luck had finally run out. Ever the survivor, Qishan would live to make a comeback, and a good one. After weeks of being interrogated about the bribes he was supposed to have taken from Elliot and about his treacherous destruction of Canton’s defences, he was condemned to death. But in time, Daoguang commuted this to banishment; then fully reinstated his old friend in 1842, releasing him to enjoy senior appointments in practically all corners of the empire except (probably to his great relief) for Canton, until his death in 1854. The less well-connected Bao Peng was not so fortunate. In March 1841, he was put on trial alongside his master: although charges of spying for the British could not be made to stick, he was convicted of acting as an unlicensed comprador and condemned to serve out his days as a slave in remote, freezing Xinjiang, the harsh frontier zone to which Lin Zexu was also exiled. The British heard even worse rumours: that Bao had been sentenced to death by 10,000 cuts, his family executed, his village demolished and the countryside up to a twenty-mile radius laid waste.47

  Chapter Nine

  THE SIEGE OF CANTON

  When Yang Fang – one of the emperor’s new appointments of February 1841 – first reached Canton in early March, a well-informed local called Liang Tingnan remembered that ‘he was cheered and cheered, everywhere he went’.1 And in some respects, Yang did not seem a bad choice to take over from the disgraced Qishan. He had an impressive record in quashing rebellions on the empire’s frontiers. Having joined the Qing army aged fifteen, he had made a career out of keeping in check the many domestic threats to the Qing imperium: insurgent minorities in the south, the White Lotus rebels in the north-west, mutinous garrisons. His finest hour had come in 1828, when he had captured Jehangir, the Central Asian chieftain who had declared a jihad against the Qing three years previously, and dispatched him in chains back to Beijing for execution ‘by a thousand cuts’. For this feat, the delighted Daoguang named him the Marquis of Resolute Bravery (third degree), and showered him with decorations and honours: the Purple Whip, the Double-Petalled Flower Feather, coral thumb-rings, the right to ride a horse around the Forbidden City; that kind of thing.2 On the minus side, however, Yang Fang was going to turn seventy-one that year, had retired for reasons of poor health in 1835 and had no experience of dealing with Europeans. He was also so deaf that he had to communicate with his colleagues in writing.

  Yang Fang’s first assessment of the situation after entering Canton gives an idea of his fitness for purpose. ‘The foreigners’ cannon’, he announced, ‘always strike us, but ours cannot strike them back. We live on solid ground, while the foreigners float back and forth on the waves. We are the hosts, they are the guests – why have they been so successful against us? They must be making use of the dark arts.’ Fortunately, he had a counter-attack in mind. Every ten households, Liang Tingnan recalled, ‘was to collect together all the women’s chamber-pots they could find, place them on wooden rafts, and send them out to defend the city.’3 It’s hard to know exactly how Yang Fang judged the military capabilities of chamber-pots, but perhaps, given the low status of women in Confucian society, their toilet-buckets seemed to Yang Fang quite the most potent weapon of destruction available against the supernatural force of the British guns.

  Whatever he intended by it, Yang’s strategy indicates that this was a man who had reached the front line of the war without much of a plan. Liang Tingnan’s tones are too bland to identify irony with much certainty, but another local did not bother restraining his mockery of the city’s new general. ‘All day long,’ he remembered, ‘all Yang Fang did was buy watches and other foreign goods, then at night he bought the services of pretty boys for his entertainment . . . He didn’t have any plan to speak of. His best idea was to buy up the city’s toilet buckets to defend us against the foreigners’ cannon, then to make straw effigies, carry out Daoist rites and supplicate the ghosts and spirits.’4 Soon enough, Yang showed what he had in mind with the chamber-pots, at an assault planned for one of the forts a few miles short of Canton. ‘The idea was’, Liang explained, ‘that when they heard cannon shot, rafts would be lined up in the water, with the chamber-pots blocking the robbers’ way, then soldiers, crouched behind them, would spring out to attack.’ But as soon as he saw the foreigners’ banners, ‘Yang Fang’s deputy fled and everyone else followed suit . . . When Yang Fang saw for himself how fiercely the foreigners were advancing, he drove his soldiers back into the city.’5 Safely back behind Canton’s walls, Yang Fang consoled himself by tying up his weak-kneed deputy; he would have beheaded him, too, if the other senior officers had not persuaded him to be merciful.

  Yang Fang’s secret weapons notwithstanding, through early March the British advanced up the inner waterways of the Pearl River, capturing forts, camps and hundreds of cannon, and destroying dozens of war junks – all with only a handful of warships. The suggestion made by a local official’s messenger to the commander of a British schooner on 9 March, at a fort just five miles shy of Canton, probably sums up the Qing appetite for war at that point. ‘My chin-chin, you no fire plum, my do all same pigeon, that no can do; my can fire six piece gun no plum got, save Emperor’s face then makee walkee.’6 (An approximate translation: Greetings! We can’t just not shoot at each other, even if we’d rather not. Suppose I fire six blanks to save the emperor’s face then run away?) The stalwart British commander dismissed the errand-boy with a kick, calling his master ‘a mighty big coward.’

  On 18 March, once he had rehoisted the British colours above the white factory walls a little to the south-west of Canton, Elliot informed Yang Fang by letter that the British troops would not be withdrawn until trade was resumed, and that a Qing response was required by return. He was given it by 20 March: ‘the merchants of all nations alike are permitted to trade . . . as usual; there shall be no hindrance or obstruction made, nor any trouble created’.7 The river, the Chinese Repository reported, was ‘again crowded with passers to and fro, and the foreign factories showed signs of becoming again what they formerly were.’ Chinese merchants who had fled crept back; shops and warehouses reopened. ‘The high officers of the English nation’, cajoled Elliot in a public notice to the ‘quiet and industrious people of Canton’, have shown that ‘they cherish the people of Canton’. The emperor’s men, for their part, enjoined the locals to go quietly but energetically about their usual business.8 The Canton trade, once resumed, would continue all the way through the worst of the following year’s hostilities along the east coast.

  It was just like old times. It would have been easy to forget that a war was supposed to be occurring. Everything seemed determined to return to normal – including the opium trade. Even while the fighting was still ongoing, soldiers, officials and militiamen were shuttling back and forth, noted Liang Tingnan with interest, often selling the ‘foreign smoke’. The opium made its way into the Canton estuary on steamers (travelling in the lee of warships) which then met, by prearrangement, Cantonese skiffs that would pull up alongside and offload as much opium as they could during the confusion of battle. One commander, Liang claimed, ‘fired blanks. While the sky was dark with smoke and flames, and the guns blazing, a long stream of smugglers rowed quickly off. By the time the smoke had cleared, the opium had been spirited away.’9 Tea was moving out of the city at a great rate, too: by the final third of May, more than half a million pounds a day was passing out of the river.

  It was a strange state of affairs for the emperor’s men to be observing. Around 9 February, Yang Fang had received imperial orders to ‘destroy the foreigners’; and yet here he was, a month later, looking on while they busily bought tea, just as they had done every winter seaso
n since at least 1760.10 Once he had exhausted his military strategies, he fell back on another, more basic technique for persuading the emperor that he was working very hard at destroying the enemy: lying to him.

  He began on 6 March, the day after he arrived in Canton, informing the emperor that nothing more worrying than British ‘patrol-boats’ were drifting about. ‘You put my mind at rest’, wrote the emperor, receiving the memorial on 21 March, a day after Yang Fang had agreed to let the British trade again. Yang wrote again on 12 March, transforming the rout at Wuyong (in which panicked soldiers had stampeded their comrades to death) into a victory in which the British casualties – at four hundred and sixteen – were far higher than the Qing’s, and following which ‘the hearts of the people were much calmed . . . the army and people’s courage grew and we can look to the future without worry.’11 Daoguang now informed his Cabinet that Yang Fang was a military genius: ‘Day and night . . . I await news of your victory . . . Who could be better for the job than my Marquis Yang Fang? My happiness is beyond expression!’12

  By 17 March, though, even Yang Fang seems to have gone too far, when he dressed up a British attempt the day before to offer a ceasefire as a great Qing victory. ‘When two of the large warships, a steamer and a dozen sampans tried to charge up the river . . . a hundred of our unflinching cannon fired in unison.’ Having lost two ships and countless men, the English ‘fled in terror, no longer daring to advance.’ Although the emperor was lavish in his praise (‘How brilliant you are – an astonishing victory’), he was finding it increasingly hard to understand why Yang Fang did not strike a final, decisive blow. ‘Yang Fang’s victory’, he now wrote to the Rebel-Suppressing General Yishan, ‘shows that Canton has nothing to fear . . . you must hurry to find a way to cut off the foreigners’ retreat and ruthlessly exterminate them, to impress upon them how mighty we are.’13

  On 18 March, Yang Fang’s fictions caught up with him, when Charles Elliot actually reached Canton and demanded trade, in exchange for guaranteeing the safety of the city. By this point, however, Yang had no choice but to continue with his fabrications. The British, he reported to the throne on 22 March, had turned up in Canton begging for trade. ‘They no longer dare harbour unruly designs,’ Yang Fang explained, ‘and only hope for the old system to resume.’ Daoguang, unfortunately, was unmollified even by such invented humility: ‘the request to restart trade’, he declared, ‘is an evil plot by the rebels . . . to make us relax our military vigilance . . . Cut off their exit route, round them all up and storm Hong Kong.’14 By 3 April, Yang Fang had admitted to Daoguang that he had effectively authorized trade. Daoguang was furious: ‘If we settle this thing with trade, why are we bothering fighting?’ he demanded.15 Yang Fang now secretly dispatched the Prefect of Canton to tell Elliot that he would be informed when and if the emperor demanded more war, so that the two sides could amicably arrange a half-hearted battle somewhere safely out of the city.16 Too late: on 23 April, the emperor announced that he was dismissing Yang Fang – but that he could stay on in Canton to see if he could redeem himself. The Son of Heaven had realized, perhaps, that he was running out of personnel options.

  Yang Fang was in any case officially subordinate to Yishan, whom the emperor had named ‘Rebel-Suppressing General’ back on 30 January. What, exactly, had his superior been suppressing these past two months?

  In appointing Yishan, Daoguang may have hoped to have found someone desperate to prove himself. He was the great-great-grandson of Yinti, one of the several sons of Kangxi cast aside in 1722 by his fourth son, Yinzhen, in the latter’s campaign to become the Yongzheng emperor. That year, the omnicompetent Kangxi had died, failing to name an heir. By 1723, Yongzheng had pushed and manoeuvred his way onto the throne; three of his brothers died in prison in mysterious circumstances soon afterwards. Although, by simply surviving, Yinti fared better than several of his brothers, he spent much of his adult life effectively under house arrest – keeping a dull, lonely vigil over his dead parents, at the Imperial Tombs. Had the succession struggle worked out differently back in 1722, then, Yishan would not have found himself, as an adult, a jobbing fourth-grade Imperial Clansman but rather a potential emperor. Perhaps irked by the fantasy of what might have been, he seemed less ready than some of his fellow well-born Manchus to loll back on the cushion of Banner privilege. By 1840, he had endured some fifteen years in the wind-swept deserts of the north-west, overseeing the colonization of almost 30,000 acres of mountainous land.17 Although he clambered his way up to a military governorship, it must have felt like exile: both then and now, Xinjiang was the empire’s wild western gulag. As he toiled out on this remote frontier, his mind must (at least occasionally) have wandered back to Beijing and to the comfortable sinecures enjoyed by fellow Manchu aristocrats such as Qishan.

  Perhaps, by 1841, he was weary of dutiful service and felt that his new, grandiloquent appointment was his opportunity to enjoy himself in the more agreeable climates of China proper. A fortnight after his appointment came through, he at last gathered together, with great noise and fanfare, a more than fifty-strong retinue. On 16 February, he slowly set out south. ‘I had the good fortune’, wrote a Russian diplomat resident in the capital at the time, ‘to witness his extraordinary departure.

  The General was being carried, while some of his retinue travelled in carriages, others on horseback . . . some had bows, others arrows, some carried bed mats, pillows and the like. In Russia, if a man has received orders to carry out an expedition, he just gallops off, but this is not how things are here.18

  En route, Yishan seems to have had similar difficulty in drumming up any real sense of urgency. He arrived in the province of Guangdong after forty-six days’ travel (heavy rain, according to him, made the roads difficult) – yet he hung back for another week and a half just inside the province’s border, claiming that he was waiting for the new governor-general to arrive, so they could move onto the city together.19 (Once arrived, this newcomer – one Qi Gong – was at pains to dampen hopes that he might be of much use: ‘Don’t expect too much from me’, he assured Yishan. ‘I haven’t the talent for this job.’20) In the end, Yishan’s journey down to Canton took him fifty-seven days – one day longer than it had Qishan, about four times as long as express couriers would take and roughly the same length of time that a new British plenipotentiary, Henry Pottinger, would spend travelling to China from London that summer.21 If he travelled slowly enough, Yishan seems to have hoped, the whole problem would go away.

  There is an obvious explanation for Yishan’s lack of interest in reaching Canton: he did not know what to do, any better than did Yang Fang or Qi Gong. Daoguang’s orders were clear: Yishan was to ‘single-mindedly exterminate the foreigners . . . If you have the words “reopen trade” still in mind then you are completely betraying the purpose of your mission.’22 Yet by the time he arrived, all the defences south of Canton had fallen, and trade was flourishing. It was fairly clear that ‘extermination’ of the British was impossible. At the very best, Yishan concluded after lengthy consultation with local worthies, Canton could resist through defence: the British could be ‘coaxed out of the river with fine words’ then the (failed) forts rebuilt and remanned.23 But how were the British to be ‘coaxed out’ except by the promise of trade concessions, which the emperor had expressly forbidden? The only truly effective solution to the problem – the construction of a navy that could stand up to British ships – was impossible in the short term. The image of Qishan’s departure back to Beijing in manacles must have haunted Yishan and Yang Fang, as they tried to persuade the emperor to allow trade. Daoguang was having none of it, his vermilion scrawls over his representatives’ memoranda raging at any suggestion of compromise or delay: ‘We only know one word: “Attack!” . . . We are angry in the extreme! . . . It is imperative that not a single rebel sail should escape . . . Tremble! . . . We only await the news of victory with the greatest impatience.’24 The usually parsimonious emperor had decided that now was not the ti
me for half-measures: he was going to throw money and men at the problem. Accordingly, in the first three months of 1841, he had ordered some 17,000 troops from seven different provinces to converge on Canton, and voted three million ounces of silver to finance the recovery of Hong Kong. Surely, he thought, simple force of numbers would triumph. Theoretically, the few thousand British troops off the south coast should be swallowed up by official troops and by patriotic local populations. Daoguang’s expectations were built, however, on a simple misassumption: that his subjects viewed the conflict as a war between the Qing ‘us’ and the British ‘them’ – that they unanimously desired revenge for ‘the great numbers of our soldiers killed by these rebels’.25

  Things did not look so straightforward on the ground, where many of those involved in the defence of Canton eyed each other with suspicion, and often violent hatred. The fight for the city – across the sweltering month of May 1841 – would turn out to be a vicious, even cannibalistic civil rout. The tone was set by the leadership, who seem to have suffered from extreme distaste for the civilians they were ostensibly protecting from British depredations. In their reports, the imperial commissioners were careful to emphasize the unreliability of the locals: partly because they genuinely distrusted them, and partly because it was always useful to have a scapegoat at the ready, in case the emperor accused them of failure. (Disdain for local populations was not restricted to Canton. That March, Yuqian, the sabre-rattling governor who would lead a hopeless defence against the British later in the year on the south-east coast, described local volunteers all the way up and down the south coast as ‘bandits . . . To use them against the foreigners would be to use poison against poison. If they are wounded or killed, there will be no regret; thus there will be no injury to Heavenly prestige and, at the same time, a local evil can be removed.’26)