The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  At first light on Wednesday 26 May, Elliot – stationed to the south of the city, where the attacks of 21 May had started – had a message couriered to the land forces: the British had made their point by trapping the city to north and south, and he did not want the troops to enter Canton. ‘The protection of the people of Canton, and the encouragement of their good will towards us, are perhaps our chief political duties in this country.’60 (If he knew anything about what was raging inside the city, his instructions would have been motivated as much by self-preservation as by paternalism towards the Cantonese. British troops had been vulnerable enough to assassins while crossing the open land north-west of the city on 25 May; the narrow, crooked streets of a city overrun by warring troops and civilians would have been lethal.) Nonetheless, all the way through the heavy rain of 26 May, the British commander on the hill, Major-General Hugh Gough, set up his artillery for an assault the following day – he had little faith in the promise of yet more negotiations.

  Thursday morning dawned: the guns, Gough instructed, would start at seven, and the infantry an hour later. The men ‘were ripe for it’, one lieutenant recalled.61 But just as the show was about to begin, a British officer was spotted blundering his way up towards the command. He would have been there earlier, he breathlessly explained, but had lost his way at ten o’clock the previous evening and ended up sleeping in the rice fields. Elliot and the Chinese commissioners, he revealed, had come to terms: a six-million-dollar ransom was to be extracted for the city, along with the promise that the commissioners and their non-Cantonese troops would be at least sixty miles from Canton within six days – leaving the city without banners or music, Elliot had specified. The Mountain of Transcendent Excellence was promptly renamed ‘Truce Hill’, but the military men’s mood was far from conciliatory. ‘You have placed us in a most critical situation’, Gough wrote privately to Elliot. ‘My men of all arms are dreadfully harassed, my communications with the rear continually threatened and escorts attacked.’62 ‘I protest’, the senior naval officer on the hill put it more pithily.63

  On 29 May some of the men decided to make the best of their unexpected furlough and went off on a ramble through the nearby countryside. And like the inquisitive Victorians that they were, they found much of interest in temples and catacombs in a small hamlet not far from the city wall. On wandering inside, they opened up – purely in the interests of science – a few of the coffins, and noted that the features of the embalmed bodies ‘presented a dried and shrivelled appearance; and there was a strong pungent aromatic smell perceptible on raising the lid’.64 Their exploration at an end, they returned to camp and, it being evening, probably had dinner and fell asleep.

  On the morning of the 30th, the British account continues, Gough’s attention was called to a 5,000-strong line of peasant fighters, armed with spears, shields and swords, gathered behind the British camp on the hill. At 1 p.m., a detachment set out to scatter them before night fell. But after about three miles of pursuit, a spectacular rainstorm broke, unleashing a downpour so torrential that it obscured objects even a few yards away, and in which guns became useless and the path back was lost, with the surrounding paddy fields merging into ‘one vast sheet of water’.65 Seeing that the British muskets had stopped working, the peasant soldiers started jabbing at their enemy with spears. The rearmost soldier was run through and his body quickly dismembered, but otherwise only a major’s coat suffered an injury – frayed by a three-pronged weapon.

  When the detachments reconvened, however, one company was discovered to be missing, and a rescue mission of marines dispatched. Through the darkness and heavy rain, and after a long and tiring trek, the absent company was found, drawn into a square formation in a sodden rice-field, one private dead and fifteen other men wounded, and surrounded by Chinese fighters who were being kept at a distance by the occasional shot produced out of a hastily cleaned and dried musket. Nonetheless, the Chinese scattered in their thousands as the rescue party approached (giving the ‘flying and cowardly enemy a farewell volley’, snorted one lieutenant), and the British survivors were back in camp by 9 p.m.66

  The following day, the locals were out in force again – perhaps 25,000 of them, drawn from maybe eighty or ninety nearby villages, arranged over the conical hills north of the city – but a brisk intervention with Canton’s authorities by Major-General Gough (communicating that if the Chinese forces were not persuaded to retreat, the city would be attacked and every neighbouring village razed) ensured that peace prevailed once more. Eventually, out rushed Canton’s prefect, Yu Baochun, to inform the gathered militia that ‘since peace has been signed . . . you must let the foreigners go.’67 On 1 June, the ransom paid, the British left Truce Hill, in far more comfort than they had arrived, for Canton’s authorities hospitably provided 800 coolies to drag the guns back to the ships.68

  The Chinese and British versions of just about every engagement in the Opium War contain perplexing divergences and discrepancies – but perhaps none quite as striking as accounts of the events of 29–31 May 1841. As sketched out by a British lieutenant above, these events were merely a gentle excursion turned moderately sour, the slightly bothersome tail-end to the British humiliation of Canton – the whole engagement is too trivial even to merit a name. In China, by contrast, every schoolchild still knows these events as ‘The Sanyuanli People’s Anti-British Struggle’, or as Sanyuanli for short – after one of the villages from which the thousands of peasant soldiers were drawn. Most of the British versions were purposefully coy, or even silent about the motivation behind local fury. One important reason, of course, was the desecration of ancestral burial places; the British had also been vigorously ‘foraging’ (looting) for days. Much worse, local women had been raped – a fact obscurely referred to by the Chinese Repository as ‘doings of which it is a shame even to speak’.69 To the demoralized people of Canton, the incident was instantly mythologized as a triumph: as the spontaneous rising of righteous patriots against the invaders, voluminously commemorated in placards, poems and essays. Each retelling of the story added new, eye-widening details: about how the British howls had filled the mountains and valleys, about how they had kowtowed for mercy, about how the ‘tiger-troops marshalled in lines’ had ‘roared like thunder’:

  A thousand, ten thousand, come together in an instant.

  Because of our virtue, we are angry, and anger has produced courage.

  The locals have united their strength to drive the enemy away.

  Every family’s fields and cottages need to be protected.

  Everyone is inflamed; our passions do not need rallying with drums.

  Women are as brave as men,

  Wielding hoes and rakes as weapons.

  Teams of multi-coloured banners

  Line the mountains and valleys all around.

  The foreigners blanch as soon as they see us

  . . .

  With our hearts united, Heaven lends its help

  Sending sudden rain from a clear sky,

  To leave the fierce foreigners’ guns useless.

  They stumble and tumble through the muddy fields.

  . . .

  Their ugly chieftain stands in the middle of them all

  With his elephant skin armour covering his body.

  But one jab of a spear pierces his barbarian throat

  . . .

  They want to flee, but have no wings,

  How easy it is to destroy these villains.70

  Otherwise objective contemporary chroniclers of the war suddenly lost their heads when it came to describing the skirmishes near Sanyuanli at the end of May 1841. Casualty lists soared: to 200, then 300 British dead, creating a total of almost 750 casualties (the British themselves reported five dead and twenty-three wounded). Liang Tingnan and others confidently declared that Gordon Bremer (a British commander who had sailed for India at the end of March to fetch reinforcements) was among the fallen: ‘a fat, swaggering brute’ with ‘a head as big as a bucket
’.71 If only the ordinary people had been allowed to fight, went the subtext to it all, the British (and their terrifying technology) could have been annihilated. The key role played by chance – the sudden downpour disabling the relatively primitive muskets with which the 37th were equipped – was overlooked, or interpreted as a sign of Heaven’s favour for the uprising. Much later, to Marxist historians, it became the perfect prototype of the spontaneous People’s War against Imperialism that justified the Chinese Communists’ rise to power.72 Today, the rice-field in which the missing company of the 37th Regiment was trapped has been long obliterated by Canton’s explosive post-Mao building boom, and the original village of Sanyuanli has become another drab suburb in another drably developing Chinese city, crowded with concrete apartment blocks weeping grubby streaks of air-conditioner fluid. But amid it all, there remains a huge, phallic, pale stone ‘Anti-British Monument’ reminding all passers-by that ‘The Memory of the Martyrs Sacrificed in the Anti-Imperialist British Invasion Struggle Will Live Forever!’.

  But on closer inspection, this episode exposes the fault-lines, and not the patriotic cohesion, of the Chinese empire. The warriors of Sanyuanli and its vicinity might have been fired by fury at the British, but this was a fury that scorned the rest of Chinese society – and especially the government. ‘We do not need official troops, nor the help of the state’, proclaimed one of the notices generated by the militia. ‘We shall hack, we shall kill, we shall destroy all of you. If you ask others to calm us, we shall not heed them. We shall do our best to flay off your skins and eat your flesh. Let it be now known that we shall massacre you with cruel ferocity.’73 Such vitriol would have sent a chill up official spines: if successful, how long would it be before the villagers’ vigilantism was turned on the Qing itself?

  For Cantonese involved in the fighting of late May 1841 would never forget that while the peasant militias gathered hungry for a second day of battle with the British on the hills and rice-fields outside the city, it was a representative of their own government (the prefect of Canton, Yu Baochun) who came to the rescue of the British: ‘We do not understand’, protested one song, ‘why our great net should be opened / And the fish inside, gasping for breath, be allowed to escape? / [Our officials] are like the traitors of antiquity who compromised with the tribes from the north.’74 Why, in other words, was such a good opportunity wasted? Placards celebrating local valour often devoted more space to denouncing the raping and looting carried out by government officials and forces than British wickedness: ‘They’re the worst kind of devils: better to die at the hands of the British than at those of the government soldiers.’75 ‘How loathsome’, exclaimed a traveller crossing central China who heard the story of Yu Baochun’s negotiations, ‘that we failed to drum everyone up to joyfully exterminate this army of villains . . . We made a mess of frontier affairs ourselves. Utterly, utterly odious!’76 When it came actually to handing over the ransom, the official appointed to do it (again, the luckless Yu Baochun) was so afraid of the consequences for his own safety that he met Elliot secretly and in disguise. But he was vilified all the same. Three months after the fighting, as he arrived in a sedan chair to preside over a local session of the provincial examinations, candidates hurled their inkstones at him: ‘We have spent our lives studying the sacred books of the sages. We all know what integrity, righteousness and honour are. We will not sit exams adjudicated by a traitor!’77

  But if Beijing’s officials did not trust the people of Guangdong, and vice versa, neither did the people of Guangdong trust each other. The paranoid obsession that the country was being sold out by ‘Chinese traitors’ increased through the tense first half of 1841: by the time of the Sanyuanli incident, villagers were hunting supposed fifth-columnists in their own ranks more vigorously than they were pursuing British invaders, with more than 1,200 murdered in the area. One of many who regretted the lost opportunity of 29–30 May felt that while the villagers had the British on the back foot, Elliot should have been taken hostage, to be exchanged not for money, or for unconditional evacuation of occupied forts, but for a Chinese traitor.78 Treachery rather than foreign aggression, many thought, was the real cancer eating at the empire. Through the summer of 1841, patriotic resistance became a front for the pursuit of vendettas.

  And although Sanyuanli’s poems and placards officially proclaimed their anti-British passions, if we pare the motives for the mobilization of late May down to their essentials, the villagers of Sanyuanli rallied to very specific local grievances (raping, pillaging, grave-desecration) rather than to abstract patriotism. If things were otherwise, why did the whole of Guangdong province not rise up against the British, rather than only the villages immediately affected by foreign looters and rapists? It’s not surprising that most well-informed, educated Beijingers – thousands of miles from the conflict – remained oblivious to it. More startling, perhaps, is how impossible it is to speak confidently, even, of consistent patriotic, anti-British feeling across the theatre of war – the waterlogged villages and islands of southern China. By the winter of 1841, Daoguang had at last come round to the idea of using Cantonese forces to put pressure on the British in Hong Kong. Yishan was discouraging: they had, he told the emperor, ‘no stomach’ for a new coastal confrontation.79 But an eventful boat-trip made by Charles Elliot only six weeks after Sanyuanli shows even more clearly how unconcerned locals were by foreign invasion.80

  On 20 July, Charles Elliot and General Bremer, newly returned from India with reinforcements, set off from Macao for the British base in Hong Kong. Their timing was bad: by about half-past ten on the following day, a typhoon had washed two of the crew into the sea and blown the ship terrifyingly close to the granite cliff of an unknown island. By the afternoon, the weather had got even worse: the main mast had fallen and surviving crew and passengers found themselves washed up on another (again unidentifiable) island. After they had recovered from their battered ship some food, a tarpaulin and eight much-needed bottles of gin, and spent an appalling night perched on rain-lashed rocks, the whole party – about a dozen of them – set off to find some local assistance. Soon enough, Elliot encountered two Chinese men and recognized one, to his delight, as a boatman from Macao who agreed to take them back there for 1,000 dollars, when the weather improved.

  The members of the party were then forced to march, relieved of their arms and all clothing except for their Victorian underpants, over three hills and spent a nervous twenty-four hours in a shed. By the time the sea had calmed, at 8 a.m. on 23 July, the price for the passage back had gone up to 3,300 dollars. Quickly assenting, Elliot and Bremer lay down in the boat and were covered by mats; and all set off. Just as the two Britons were finishing a lunchtime bowl of rice around 2 p.m., their pilot suddenly pushed them back down to the bottom of the boat, quickly covering them over with mats again – moments before an official boat glided by, asking the Chinese crew if they’d come across any shipwrecks of late. No, no, they chirped; and the official passed on. After another couple of hours, Macao was sighted – and the adventurers flagged down a Portuguese lorcha, which took them safely into port. The travellers were unconventionally dressed: before embarking for Macao, their Chinese boatmen had issued Bremer with a ‘blue worsted sailor’s frock’, and Elliot with a Manila hat and a pair of stripy trousers. But they were back safely, to enjoy a hearty meal and a good night’s rest. There had been bad times, for sure: uncertainty, discomfort and unpleasantness (at one point, one of the Macao boatmen had expressed a strong interest in removing the ear of Bremer’s black servant). But at no point does it seem to have crossed the minds of Elliot and Bremer’s Chinese escorts to hand them over to the government, although they knew perfectly well who their passengers were.81

  Treachery, the Qing might have called it, had they heard about it. But actively to betray a country or cause requires some strength of feeling – a conscious decision (based on calculations of profit or loss, or ideology) to defect to another’s side. In many of the war’s Chin
ese bystanders – including Elliot’s boatmen – it is difficult to diagnose any degree of partisanship. The Qing had tried various methods to get the locals to rally to the empire against these violent aliens. It had demonized opium as a foreign poison; it had organized villagers and fishermen into ad-hoc defence squads; it could allow the ravages of war to speak for themselves. Most importantly of all, it had tried financial incentives: offering 100,000 dollars for the capture of Elliot; 50,000 for Bremer; 20,000 for a cutter; 200 for a white soldier and 50 for an Indian.82 Nothing had worked. Elliot’s boatmen – based at Macao, just seventy miles down the coast from Canton – were too apathetic about the war even to find out how to profit from it: the 3,300 dollars they charged to bring the British crew back was less than a fiftieth of the money they could have made, if they had bothered to pay any attention to the government’s ransom notices.

  With the city secured, there was nothing left for Daoguang’s servants to do but to tell him what had happened – which is exactly what they did not do. Yishan’s first wave of lies (dispatched on 23 May) told stirringly of how the Qing army went on the assault on the night of 21 May, of how its soldiers ‘hid in the water, then made for the enemy’s hulls’. As the fires on board raged (consuming two large warships, four large sampans, several small sampans and a dozen skiffs), ‘the cries of the rebellious foreigners could be heard for miles around . . . Countless rebels were killed by cannonfire, or were drowned.’ According to Yishan, on 22 May (a day on which, according to Captain Hall, the crew of the Nemesis was busily engaged spiking cannon and cutting off – as trophies – the queues of defeated Qing soldiers), the Nemesis was forced into retreat, with hardly any Qing injuries to report. ‘Excellent . . . tremendous . . . wonderful’, scribbled the vermilion brush.83