The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  On 13 October, four steamers and four warships under the command of Admiral Parker sailed fifteen miles upriver to the province’s second city, Ningbo. Arriving at 2 p.m., they found the city completely ungarrisoned: its defenders, including Yu Buyun, had long fled. A report Yu wrote a week later was full of grand talk about his gallant struggles with the enemy, in the course of which his right leg had been partly crushed by an enemy shell: ‘he must have fallen and hurt his leg in his anxiety to run away’, one Chinese historian has acidly speculated.29 The British ships anchored against the city walls, the troops hopped out, and by 3 p.m., without a shot being fired, the band of the 18th (Royal Irish) was playing ‘God Save the Queen’ along the walls of the city.

  With yet another city lost, all the emperor could do was find someone to blame. Daoguang’s first instinct on hearing of the fall of Zhenhai on 18 October (the conflict with the British was now considered sufficiently troublesome to justify the expense of top-speed couriers between Beijing and the theatres of war) had been to punish Yuqian. But when news of his suicide reached Beijing a few days later, the emperor decided instead to heap him with posthumous honours (canonization, hereditary ranks for his descendants, a temple erected to his memory in Zhenhai once the war was finally over) and elaborate funereal sacrifices. ‘He did not disgrace himself before his fellows’, Daoguang commented approvingly.30 So Yu Buyun replaced him as scapegoat-in-chief, eventually losing his head on Chinese New Year’s Eve, 1843.

  Still the notion persisted that if only the Qing had not been betrayed from within – again – the battle could have been won. Liang Tingnan saved some of his strongest vitriol for Yu Buyun: ‘He was the first to run away,’ he wrote, ‘from one bolt-hole to another, and led others to follow his bad example. And then he slandered others to deflect blame from himself.’31 ‘The dastardly Yu Buyun’, agreed Wei Yuan, ‘reported to the Emperor that poor Yuqian had been the first to flee, and spread a report that the foreigners had attacked Ningbo in order to avenge the death of the white foreigner, whose head had been stuck on a pole during the summer by Yuqian.’32 And despite thousands more deaths, the emperor still had little more idea about what the British wanted by it all – whether the attacks on Zhoushan and Zhenhai were about trade, vengeance for the execution of their countrymen, or something else altogether.

  Chapter Twelve

  A WINTER IN SUZHOU

  There is no record of the exact whereabouts of Daoguang’s nephew Yijing, or of what he was doing, when he was informed on 18 October 1841 that the emperor had a new assignment for him. Perhaps he was in his study, practising his excellent calligraphy, or dashing off one of the eleventh-century-style ink-blob paintings at which he was so proficient. Or he may have been reviewing, as Commander of the Beijing Constabulary, patrol rosters for the coming winter. Then again, he was possibly considering – like the diligent Director of the Imperial Gardens and Hunting Parks that he was – whether the bonsai needed an extra pruning before the frosts set in. All this he was to abandon straightaway, for he was now the Awe-Inspiring General, under imperial orders to depart immediately for Zhejiang, to direct the counter-assault against British-occupied territories, and bring Zhoushan, Zhenhai and Ningbo back into the embrace of the empire.

  It was a decision that would probably have taken most people by surprise (including Yijing himself), in part for the speed at which it was made. Daoguang had only received news of Yuqian’s death that very day, and for the emperor to bypass his usual working parties, consultations and multiple changes of mind was unusual. But it was unexpected principally because Yijing would have seemed such an unlikely choice. Only fifty years old in 1841, he at least had youth to recommend him, relative to a Guan Tianpei or a Yang Fang. But he did not have much else – and certainly no track record as a competent war-maker. Up to this point in his career, Yijing had lived to the full the closeted, privileged life of the senior Imperial Clansman: advancing quickly and easily through the Special (simplified) Examinations for Sons of Princes, and into a succession of low-risk, high-ranking official posts – of which the Imperial Gardens directorship was probably one of the most comfortable.

  After the war was over, even Daoguang amid his recriminations would recognize the sheer wrong-headedness of giving his nephew the task of exterminating the foreigners. Refraining from executing Yijing for overseeing the disasters of spring 1842, he would – almost unprecedentedly – blame himself for having chosen someone with such flimsy military experience to direct operations against the British.

  Yijing began well enough, managing to leave Beijing less than two weeks after receiving his new appointment, and reaching the rich, picturesque canal-city of Yangzhou a mere eighteen days later. After this prompt start, though, he paused, 200 miles further south-east, in equally lovely Suzhou. And there he stayed for the next two months. Suzhou during the Qing dynasty was a fine place to pass a winter (or spring, summer and autumn): a serene maze of canals, villas and elaborate gardens, peopled by over-educated pleasure-seekers dining, drinking, listening to operas, cultivating their rock gardens and honing their poetry-writing skills. ‘Mangtachwan’, a secret agent working for Henry Pottinger, helpfully summarized in late December 1841 what he felt that the British needed to know about their new adversary: ‘Yijing, imperial nephew and Commandant of Peking . . . Generalissimo and first Imperial High Commissioner for the Affairs of Zhejiang, is a man of pleasure, fond of ease, presents and bribes and a real courtier. He has not made up his mind what course to pursue.’1

  Yijing’s style was a bewildering change from that of Yuqian’s. While Yuqian forced his reluctant underlings to swear solemn vows to resist unto death or face the wrath of the spirits, the Awe-Inspiring General (to begin with at least) could not even make up his mind whether or not to fight the British. ‘Just after the general had left the capital,’ remembered one of his camp aides, ‘he wavered between whether to soothe or to make war. After hearing about how ineffective recent attempts to offer amnesty to the rebels had been, though, he feared they were damaging to the country’s prestige, and pledged to fight.’2

  But how to fight? That was another question altogether, requiring an entirely different, and far more extensive decision-making process. To that end, after arriving in Suzhou, the new general had a wooden box placed outside the camp gates, into which volunteers could drop proposals – a total of some 400 were received and 144 new advisers acquired, who promptly began swaggering about the place calling themselves Junior Commissioners. (When war finally seemed to be drawing close, the box of suggestions disappeared at their orders, in case any uncomfortable comparisons were made between suggestions and actions.) Yijing’s aides were far more eager to enjoy Suzhou than to make war, drinking, whoring, extorting and banqueting their way through the winter. A piece of doggerel doing the rounds gives a sense of popular esteem for the morals of the military machine that had descended upon the south-east. ‘The prostitutes of Hangzhou brag the loudest / Next year, they say they’ll all give birth to little Junior Commissioners. / After them come the prostitutes of Shaoxing. / Next year, they’ll have little soldiers. / Pity the poor weeping whores of Ningbo. / Next year, they’ll all have little foreign devils.’3

  The amiable Yijing offered wonderful profiteering opportunities to the unscrupulous. When accused by one of his subordinates of fecklessness, he frankly admitted that he had not a clue what was being spent on the campaign.4 His filing system was extraordinary: communications were passed to his secretaries, who promptly put them in an attic where, in the way of things stashed in attics, they tended to get lost. Any documents that survived were donated at the end of the campaign as scrap paper to an old friend. When it came to putting together the official report on the counter-assault, the extant financial records were found to be so compromisingly fraudulent (the auditor ‘knew full well that the emperor must not get to hear of any of it’) that they were all thrown away, the accounts fabricated from scratch and the silence of those in the know secured with bribes.5 O
ne disreputable character by the name of E Yun (described by fellow officials as ‘an inveterate scoundrel – there was no act of malfeasance below him’) – won himself a slice of the budget by talking the gullible Yijing round. Through 1842, E Yun pocketed at least 12,000 ounces of silver nominally to hire, feed and reward local militia to whom he failed to give any training and who ran away on 1 April.6 The situation begs the question of what kind of political and social community Qing China was, that a bloody struggle against foreign invaders should for so many become an unmissable opportunity to fleece the government and to dispatch ignorant, untrained members of the populace to almost certain deaths. ‘The whole system of Chinese policy’, noted Pottinger in late November 1841, ‘shows that whatever may be the feelings of the emperor towards his subjects, the mandarins and all the government officers are indifferent to their affairs, further than suits their own purposes.’7

  Yijing’s best excuse for not moving was that he was waiting for reinforcements drawn from all over China to make up a 12,000-strong force to be unleashed against the British. By the second week of February, almost all of them had arrived. Whether they were actually worth waiting for seems less certain. Many were exhausted, having travelled hundreds of miles to reach the theatre of war. The journey had taken its toll on discipline, too, and on local populations who – according to Qing convention – were expected to supply the troops as they passed through. ‘The soldiers stole doors as litters,’ remembered one account, ‘and forced the people to porter them, four civilians to one soldier. They entered the camp on their backs.’8 (This comfortable style of military travel was copied, a century later, by Mao and other Communist leaders on their Long March up to the north-west in 1935.)

  And of course this combined force – drafted in from eight different provinces (400 men from Henan, 600 from Nanyang, 1,000 from Shaanxi, 1,000 from Gansu, 800 from Ningxia, 800 from Guizhou, and so on) – would again suffer from the regional fragmentation that had ended so badly in Canton. Even senior officers refused to take orders from Yijing’s central command. The new arrivals – drafted in to replace Zhejiang soldiers who had bolted in September and October the previous year – were unfamiliar with the climate and territory in which they would be fighting. ‘They got ill from being in a new place,’ remembered one camp aide, ‘and wanted to go home.’9 The accumulation of so many soldiers – without family or local attachments to restrain them – edged the province towards civil war. ‘Generally speaking,’ observed the captain of the Nemesis, ‘the collecting of any considerable body of troops together in any particular province or locality in China, so far from strengthening the hands of the authorities, is more likely to occasion disturbance among the inhabitants . . . Little confidence being placed in their regular soldiers . . . the people were now called upon by the authorities to collect their brave men from all the villages and hamlets along the coast . . . in most instances, these bodies of uncontrolled patriots became a scourge to their own neighbourhood’.10 A sleep-deprived British officer in Ningbo grouched about the nocturnal clatter of the city’s ad-hoc local police force, who struggled to intimidate would-be robbers by knocking two pieces of bamboo together while out on patrol.11

  In mid-February, a Chinese spy reported to the British, ‘the troops were in a state of mutiny for want of pay and proper provisions . . . the heavy exactions of the Mandarins have driven the people . . . to a revolt, and a considerable force under Manchu officers have been detached to quell this insurrection.’ The army was formidably large, revealed another spy, but its principal strength consisted in ‘bands of robbers who are relentless ruffians and live by open plunder.’12 After getting lost while out on patrol, soldiers from west China were mistaken for Europeans and attacked by another Qing division – three were killed in the clash.

  Theoretically, though, by early February (a mere three and something months after he had left Beijing), Yijing had under his command the best sort of army he could hope for. Truly, he now had no reason for not getting on with the war. The attack had originally been scheduled for 9 February, and all was ready by then: the battle-plan worked out, the troops in place. More importantly, Yijing was aesthetically prepared for triumph. After months of painstaking work, the camp painter had produced a prophetic painting entitled ‘All Goes According to Plan’. Keen also to mobilize the many literary talents among his staff, Yijing had held a competition to solicit the most elegant and stirring announcement of victory. ‘Never had such prose been seen in over a thousand years!’ sighed a camp aide. Nothing, it seemed, had been left to chance; all that was left was to ‘count the days and wait for news of victory’.13

  9 February, however, came and went. A council of war was held, at which the other officers urged him to fix a time for the assault: ‘I shall let you know as soon as I have determined on a day’, Yijing stalled them.14 (The Awe-Inspiring General, another spy told the British a few days later, was willing to bribe them to leave Ningbo and ‘to take the credit of having driven us from that city’.15) Something was clearly troubling Yijing – perhaps the gods were not smiling on the venture. On the following day (New Year’s Day), therefore, he took himself to a nearby temple of the God of War to pray for victory, and check that the spirits were happy with everything. The lot that he drew informed him that

  If men with the heads of tigers do not greet you

  Your security cannot be guaranteed.16

  On 13 February, one of the final units arrived: some 700 Sichuanese aborigines, decked out in their traditional tiger-skin tunics, their heads crowned with tiger-heads and claws, and trailing tails. This, an overjoyed Yijing decided, was the oracle’s sign: he must launch his attack at the Hour of the Tiger (between 3 and 5 a.m.), on the Day of the Tiger in the Month of the Tiger (10 March) in the Year of the Tiger (1842) – a traditionally auspicious date for Chinese warfare. It had worked in 589, for a general fighting to reunite China after centuries of invasion by foreign tribes; it could therefore work in 1842, also. As to who should lead the assault, it did not really matter – as long as, again, he was born in the Year of the Tiger.

  On 6 March, then, Yijing finally began to move out his men, and sent a 4,000-word memorial to the emperor, detailing his confident master-plan for victory: ‘I shall enforce discipline and sweep the rebellious barbarians from the face of the earth. I shall cut off the heads of Pottinger, Gough and Parker and present them to your Majesty that they may be exhibited throughout the empire. Whilst they are still alive, I shall eat their quivering flesh and sleep on their skins. Thus my indignation will be vented, the laws of the country vindicated, and the foreigners taught to look up with awe to the glory of the Celestial Empire.’17 (A little earlier in his warlike preparations, according to counter-intelligence, he dispatched to the British a spy disguised as a merchant ‘to learn on what terms we were disposed to treat’.18 He also tried casting a tiger skull-bone into a Dragon Pool, to persuade the dragon to swim up and attack the British.) ‘Great success is inevitable’, noted Daoguang at the bottom of it all.19

  In the meantime, as they waited for reinforcements to arrive and the cold weather to pass, the British set about passing as healthy a winter as they could, amid the knee-deep snows of eastern China. The day would start early, with a cold bath to get the circulation going (a British habit that Liang Tingnan noted with some perplexity). Under-exercised officers set up racecourses with Chinese ponies, or stalked partridge. One of our military witnesses to the Opium War – Lieutenant J. Elliot Bingham – seems to have had a taste for musical theatre, when army business permitted. As he began his chapters on the manoeuvres of winter 1841 (for a published account that must have proved popular – by 1843, it was appearing in a second edition), he quoted as an epigraph a rousing chorus refrain from an 1825 classic of the London stage, Henry Bishop’s The Fall of Algiers: ‘England conquers but to save / And governs but to bless.’20

  How natural it was that, as Bingham smugly reported, local populations who fell under British rule should be so
‘perfectly contented with their new rulers, every kind of excess or plunder being rigidly prohibited.’ How regrettable it was that the good, peace- and prosperity-loving burghers of Ningbo, Zhoushan and Zhenhai should have been so badly let down by their less virtuous countrymen: ‘from the mandarins having forsaken their posts,’ he observed, ‘all government in the neighbouring districts was upset, and large bands of robbers were formed, by the lower orders of Chinese, who plundered in every direction.’21 The curious thing about the British occupation of parts of eastern China through the winter of 1841–42, though, is how many members of the local population responded by staying peaceably put and by supplying the English not only with goods or services, but with crucial military information about the Qing counter-offensive.

  Soon after the city fell, Karl Gützlaff – that useful clergyman – was installed as magistrate for the occupation regime in Ningbo, single-handedly dealing out summary justice to local petitioners, who knew him by his Chinese name of Guo Shili or, more familiarly, as Daddy Guo. ‘He has no scribes to assist him,’ ran a piece of commemorative doggerel about his legal talents,

  Although he consults no paperwork,

  No one has ever settled court business as quickly as Daddy Guo.

  From the court floor,

  A cry of complaint is heard . . .

  Without a word, Daddy Guo takes up his stick and waddles off.

  In just another moment, he returns, dragging a felon to be tied up before the table of judgement.

  He bares the criminal’s back and gives him fifty lashes.22

  When Gützlaff was not keeping the peace, he was directing an extensive network of Chinese spies – variously identified as ‘Li’, ‘Mangtachwan’, ‘Blundell’, ‘Norris’ – that he had begun cultivating as early as 1832, on his first illegal interpreting missions up the east China coast in the pay of the East India Company and opium-smugglers. The Foreign Office archives of the campaign are stuffed with their invaluable intelligence: frank personality profiles of the Qing leaders (‘void of talents and too old for his situation’, ‘the most arrant coward’), military budgets, grain supply routes, numbers of soldiers in various garrisons, troop morale, divisions in the ranks.23 ‘Yijing’s soldiers are not to be depended upon,’ went one report, ‘and they will likely run away, on the very first onset; nor do the Mandarins at present place much reliance upon their army. When the Tartar General at Hangzhou was requested to draw off his forces to defend the approaches to the city, he planted a hundred-odd guards around his camp and said: “with these, I shall protect myself against friends and foes, and if you (the commissioners) insist upon my moving from this spot, I shall point these guns at the city.” ’24 Other collaborators went further, offering suggestions for strategy, and military help against oppressive local authorities. ‘My ambition’, wrote one fifth-columnist to Gützlaff, ‘is to lead forth an auxiliary Chinese Army when you advance upon Shaoxing and Hangzhou. There are many brave men who will join your forces . . . Yuqian, the commissioner, deceived us. Your success against this cruel man shows the protection of Heaven . . . Yours is the day: and by obtaining such fortune, it is evident that you will be able to end the war [on your own terms].’25 Through his agents, Gützlaff even learnt of the disguise (white quills) to be worn by Chinese agents infiltrating Ningbo and Zhenhai before the counter-attack on the cities began.26