The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  Despite Yishan’s valiant attempts to stifle all embarrassing intelligence, when the British fleet was sighted advancing up the east coast, the man in charge of Fujian province, Yan Botao, did not panic. For months, like most Qing officials involved in the fighting with Britain, he had been largely disregarding his emperor’s orders – and especially those directing him to dismantle defences in Xiamen.

  Before the trouble with the British had blown up, the island’s defences had been negligible. To the south, the ‘Big Fort’ had been manned by a grand total of twenty-five regulars. Another thirty kept an eye on the north-west, from the ‘Fort of the Lofty Peak’. Service on the ‘Yellow Burial Place Fort’ – from which a single soldier surveyed the south-east approach to the island – was presumably reserved for misanthropes. But in the early stages of the war, almost 3,000 extra soldiers and militia had been drafted in. When Yan Botao reached the island in early 1841, he added a mile-long granite wall along the south coast and sank into it 100 cannon. New forts were built to east and west, and filled with extra soldiers and cannon. By the end of the process (which consumed one and a half million ounces of Qing silver) the cliffs of Xiamen swarmed with some 15,000 men under arms, and more than 400 new cannon. ‘If the foreigners are determined to die,’ Yan boasted to the emperor, ‘we will be left with no choice but to attack them all the more fiercely. We won’t let a single one of their ships or men survive; we will express Heaven’s condemnation and rejoice the hearts of all men.’9

  Around 1.30 p.m. on 26 August, the British artillery assault began. A couple of hours later, the Nemesis approached the beach and disgorged its infantry, who scrambled up Yan Botao’s famous wall on each other’s shoulders. Once the attackers were on the wall (the first act, naturally, being to fly the flag), most of its defenders (some of them dressed as tigers, in yellow uniforms with black spots and stripes, and tiger-head helmets) fired a couple of shots then exited. One cliff-face fort was taken by a single officer rushing up the hill and through its open gate, discharging every firearm he had on him at the forty or fifty soldiers he found there, ‘lolling and smoking [opium, presumably] between their guns.’10 Without hanging around long enough to notice his lack of reinforcements, the fort’s defenders rushed out of the opposite gate and back down the hill.

  That evening, the British troops camped out on the cliffs; the next day they simply entered the island’s abandoned city (one of the country’s richest ports), with little to do except resist the temptation of abandoned vats of rice liquor and to tut-tut at the rapacity of Chinese robbers, who had already thoroughly looted it (its bullion had been ingeniously smuggled out inside hollowed logs). How extraordinary, the captain of the Nemesis exclaimed, that the massive bombardment and occupation of the island should lead to a general collapse in law and order. The only protection that locals had to look for ‘from the violence and plundering of their own rabble,’ Captain Hall remarked, ‘was from the presence of our own troops’.11

  In other words, it was an Opium War battle like any other. Inside the walled city, watching the disaster unfold on 26 August, Yan did the only thing that a man in that situation could reasonably have done. He burst into tears and ran away.

  But for Pottinger, Xiamen was just a diversion – it was not even part of Palmerston’s instructions. Zhoushan was the island he was supposed to be retaking.

  This time, though, Daoguang was confident he had the man to keep things in hand: Yuqian, a fiery Mongol whom he had appointed in February 1841 his third Imperial Commissioner against the British. Yuqian had a good deal in common with an earlier, ill-fated incumbent of the job, Lin Zexu – indeed, the two men were firm friends. Both had worked their way up the examination system then landed, through reputations for strict, impartial application of the empire’s laws, a series of senior posts: Yuqian had been appointed governor-general along the rich east-coast provinces of Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Anhui in 1840. But while Lin – a man of humble beginnings made good – exemplified the workings of the Qing imperial meritocracy, Yuqian was a member of the steppe aristocracy, born into Genghis Khan’s very own clan, the Borjigit (and therefore descended originally from the coupling of a Blue Wolf and Fallow Deer). Yuqian personified the cosmopolitan ideal desired by the great Qing emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong: a pure-blooded descendant of nomadic warriors who excelled also in Confucian culture. But there was a flaw in the Qing’s grand ambition to create omnicompetent scholar-soldiers. It was supposed that just because Yuqian possessed an exceptional military pedigree (both great-grandfather and grandfather had fought valiantly for the conquest of Xinjiang in the Mongol Bordered Yellow Banner – the former committing suicide after suffering defeat), this expertise would flow naturally into him, even though his own life had been spent mastering China’s elaborate literary traditions. In practice, against the British, it turned out that his ancestors’ skill-set would prove harder to tap into.

  Like Lin, Yuqian was full of self-confidence. Within a few weeks of his receiving his Imperial Commission, he had impeached two fellow officials for advocating compromise with Britain (Qishan and a genial, elderly imperial relative called Yilibu). Both wound up on trial in Beijing: the former sentenced to beheading, the latter to banishment. Yuqian had only hatred for the importunate British and contempt for anyone who dared to suggest that they could not be ‘utterly exterminated’. All this, of course, was exactly what Daoguang wanted to hear: he wanted certainty – and this was a particularly trouble-free form of it. For Yuqian blamed all the defeats and failures of the war so far not on inconveniently large, long-term causes that would take years to remedy, but on something far simpler: on a failure of nerve. The problem with a traitor like Qishan was that he had ‘panicked’ and ‘fallen into the traps of the rebellious robbers’: as a result of his ‘soothing’, the rebellious robbers had been feasted and gifted like honoured guests, and had their every whim and request attended to. ‘These days’, Yuqian pronounced, ‘our ministers are all mediocre and cowardly . . . The English are simply treacherous merchants . . . There was no need for Qishan to talk them up as he did, enabling them to bend the country to their will.’12

  Thus Yuqian’s medicine for the ills of Qing China was simply for the people in charge to stiffen their upper lips and get on with vanquishing the British. He was unable to forget the chastening statistic that in the fall of Zhoushan the previous year, only twenty-six Qing soldiers had perished; the rest had run away before they could come to any harm. ‘The nations of the West’, he wrote, with wonderful élan (given that he had never set eyes on the British army or navy), ‘know nothing but material profit. They have no other skill than trade . . . no culture, law or education. Nor does England have enough power to capture cities or seize territory in other countries.’ Inconveniently, he admitted, they did have very large, powerful ships that made victory against them at sea impossible. Therefore, he concluded with assurance, the Qing must fight them on land, for the enemy ‘cannot use fists or swords. Moreover, their waist is stiff and their legs are straight. The latter, further bound with cloth, can scarcely stretch at will. Once fallen down, they cannot stand up again.’13 After he was appointed to defend the east coast in February 1841, Yuqian would get an opportunity to test this strategy.

  The six months he spent in Jiangsu preparing for the British only strengthened his assumptions. Three days before he arrived on 27 February, the British had voluntarily evacuated Zhoushan, under Charles Elliot’s orders, to fulfil the January treaty with Qishan. Joyfully concluding that the British were terrified of him, Yuqian proceeded by executing four locals accused of working for the British occupiers the previous year (as compradors or informants), sending their severed heads on a public tour of the island, to educate the rest of the population in the perils of treachery. He dug up a hundred of the English who had died of fever or dysentery, chopped up their bodies then threw them into the sea. And in March 1841, he captured an English captain who had mistakenly landed on Zhoushan with supplies for the alr
eady departed forces. The man, Stead, was tied up and publicly sliced to death, his head displayed to the masses. A few months later, an English captain and Indian sailor from an opium boat were taken prisoner. The captain, while still alive, had his arms and back flayed (Yuqian had the skin fashioned into reins for his horse), then was sliced to death. The Indian was treated more mercifully, his head being flayed (and, again, displayed to the masses) only after it had been removed from his body.14 In the mood to be militant, Daoguang approvingly waved these decisions through: ‘You did the right thing’, he scribbled on the memorial recounting Stead’s death. ‘Admirable fixity of purpose’, he wrote of the business with the reins.15

  There was little new about the way Yuqian prepared for a British assault: three miles of thick mud walls, up to sixty feet wide and thirteen feet high, were built along the exposed southern coast of the island. And once the hard work of construction had been done, and 5,600 soldiers and militia stationed there, Yuqian could indulge in the traditional pastime of giving hopeful names to his fortifications. Two gates set into the wall were dubbed ‘Stable Governance’ and ‘Long-term Peace’; a fort on top of a hill in the middle of the earthworks became ‘The Fort That Terrifies Those From Afar’.

  Yuqian was even more pleased with himself than usual. ‘The British threat is now completely under control’, he crowed to Daoguang. ‘If the foreigners were to dare approach the coast, or try to get on land, to exterminate the lot of them would be an easy matter – not one of the robbers’ ships would return home.’16 As he still believed that the British could not fight on land, most of the island’s troops were concentrated around the south coast; the British, he was sure, would never make their way past his defences. The island’s much larger, mountainous interior was merely scattered with a few barracks and look-out posts. Neither did he have a realistic sense of the power of the British ships and artillery. ‘Our cannon can hit the British,’ he groundlessly reassured the emperor, ‘but their cannon cannot hit us!’17 Well-informed Chinese historians, by contrast, were sceptical about Yuqian’s military talents: ‘He was hot-headed’, sniffed Wei Yuan, ‘and totally ignorant of warfare . . . nothing was done at all, let alone anything sensible.’18 The biographer of the Nemesis saved a strong Victorian insult for Yuqian’s earthworks, finding them ‘unscientifically constructed’.19

  In Yuqian’s reports, the struggle for Zhoushan in October 1841 was an epic six-day battle, in which a 5,000-strong Chinese army, despite bravely damaging and repulsing the English ships and ‘killing countless foreign bandits’, was eventually defeated by massively superior English forces – of 10,000, 20,000, perhaps even 30,000 soldiers.20 In English accounts, the whole affair is far less effortful and far more clinical: after five days of reconnaissance (involving the odd skirmish, the odd exchange of fire), a fleet of seven warships and four steamers began to pound the Chinese coast in the time-honoured fashion at dawn on 1 October. Obstructed by nothing other than some unhelpful tides, the Nemesis landed the infantry, who – protected by the steamer’s fire – clambered up the hills behind the earthworks and, after some fairly energetic hand-to-hand fighting, occupied the forts there. Once the coastal defences had been cleared, the troops climbed up the hill that overlooked the city of Dinghai, admired the view, set up their guns and began firing on the city. Then the Chinese scattered out of the north gate and into the island’s interior. By 2 p.m., with ‘three British cheers . . . the British flag at last proudly floated over the fallen city.’21 The English reported two dead, and twenty-seven, or perhaps twenty-eight wounded; they estimated that ‘many’ of the 5,000-odd Qing forces perished. ‘The inhabitants of [Dinghai]’, observed one British lieutenant complacently, ‘quickly recognised their old friends, and appeared very happy at seeing them return. Before three days had elapsed a good market was established, and everything went on as quietly as if we had never abandoned the place.’22

  For the time being, Yuqian was too busy to brood over this catastrophe. For Pottinger was already moving on to his next target, before the winter closed in: to Zhenhai, Yuqian’s own headquarters and the citadel that guarded the river approach to the final British objective of 1841, the large port city of Ningbo. Yuqian had not taken nearly as much trouble defending Zhenhai as he had Dinghai, for he thought its natural position made it impregnable. On either bank perched a fort; across the mouth of the river stretched about a mile of muddy shallows – the very thing for snaring deep-bottomed British gunboats, Yuqian had thought to himself on his arrival earlier that year. And if the invaders were forced to attack in smaller boats, or to land, they could easily be picked off by the fort’s batteries. Just to cover himself, though, in June Yuqian had added a smattering of new forts around the crags guarding the entrance to the river. ‘No need to panic’, he wrote to Daoguang.23

  Yuqian’s main concern remained the courage of his men – if he could secure that, he thought, all would be well. As the start of hostilities approached, he considered only a quarter of his 4,000-strong garrison to be trustworthy. On hearing that the British were gathering to attack Zhenhai, therefore, he summoned his officials to a pre-battle sacrifice and libation. ‘The rebellious caitiffs are running counter to the Covenants of Heaven’, he swore before them. ‘They won out in Guangdong and Fujian because we were not prepared . . . You must fight to the death . . . Our orders are to punish . . . if anyone dares take a foreigner’s letter to Zhenhai, they will be executed according to earthly laws, then killed again by the spirits in the darkness of the afterlife.’24 Yuqian’s rousing speech, unfortunately, failed to stir one key member of his staff: his chief commander, Yu Buyun, another old warhorse who had fought alongside Yang Fang against Jehangir’s jihad. Refusing to kneel to take this solemn, warlike vow, Yu now told his superior that he was not, on reflection, in favour of fighting, supporting his point of view with a personal list of mitigating circumstances: his wife was unwell, he had no son, his foot hurt. ‘We should put the British on a loose rein’, he argued – in other words, negotiate and offer concessions. Yuqian was having none of it. ‘If you want to retreat to Ningbo,’ he hissed at Yu, ‘you can make your own explanations to the emperor. If Zhenhai falls, I fall with it!’25

  While the Qing struggled to contain their disarray, the British advanced on a carefully arranged battle-plan. At daylight on 10 October, two battleships, a frigate and three sloops moved into position near the north and south banks of the river-mouth, and began pounding all the forts in sight. Such was the power of the British guns, the ships could halt safely out of range of Qing cannon along the shoreline and still obliterate the forts over the city. By a quarter past eleven, landing parties protected by this fire had scrambled onto the bank and up to the fort on the hills overlooking the city of Zhenhai, and the Union flag was flapping over its walls. Nothing now stood between British guns and the city itself, beyond a set of enclosing walls twenty-six feet high. A few volleys scattered the last of the defenders and the walls were scaled to the east, while Chinese civilians and soldiers fled out of the western gate. Yu Buyun (who had been entrusted with holding the heights on the northern bank) ordered his men not to fire their guns, hung out a white flag of surrender, then bolted down the hill, his men following not far behind. When Yuqian spotted this – from his vantage point on the eastern edge of the city walls – he let loose some of the city’s cannon on his fleeing subordinates (who are said to have responded by detouring out of range round the far side of the mountain).

  Meanwhile, Major-General Gough was seeing off – with clinical brutality – a 5,000-strong force on the southern bank. Gough divided his army of 2,000 into three parts: the left and right flanks advanced, unseen, under cover of rising ground, leaving only the central third visible. Once the Qing soldiers had been lured out into range to meet this reduced force, a tremendous fire from the concealed left and right wings erupted. After a few moments of utter confusion ‘at what appeared to them a most wonderful increase of force’, reported a British lieutenant, ‘they gazed
around in stupid and motionless amazement’ then tried to flee, tripping over the bodies of the dead and dying. Many tried to escape upriver but the rifle fire was too good for them. Soon, the water was running red.26 One and a half thousand Qing soldiers perished, ran one estimate; at most, sixteen British were killed and a few wounded. Civilians, inevitably, suffered too. The lieutenant also noticed a family of four children struck down by a single shot, their grief-stricken father torn between embracing their bodies and trying to drown himself. ‘The unavoidable miseries of war’, he laconically observed.27 By 2 p.m., the battle was at an end.

  Yuqian now came down from the city walls, kowtowed towards Beijing in the far north-west and tried to kill himself. Even this, though, he did not manage successfully, choosing to drown himself in a small stone-edged pond. He was easily fished out by his retinue, resuscitated and rushed west out of the city. At some point along the way, he seems to have taken poison (probably opium); he died the following day. In death, as in life, Yuqian was the ideal Confucian warrior super-hero: killing himself rather than submit to his enemies. But his suicide made the final collapse of Qing resistance inevitable, as chaos now spread through the ranks. As Yuqian was rushed inland towards Ningbo, his retinue swelled with hundreds of bodyguards, soldiers and other hangers-on looking for an excuse – any excuse – to escape the carnage at Zhenhai. The roads out of the city were choked also with civilians. ‘As they trampled one another,’ recalled Yu Buyun, ‘the sounds of weeping were everywhere, while evil bandits took the opportunity to rally their gangs and go out on plundering missions.’28