The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  What kind of men were they, to betray the great Qing empire to a Pomeranian preacher? Some were desperate rebels, clearly doing it for the money alone: making up stories where necessary, serving happily as double agents to maximize their profits. Others again were more respectable. One of Gützlaff’s first collaborators was a frustrated examination candidate who swore to serve Gützlaff ‘like a horse or dog’ if only he would pay for him to travel to Beijing to take the civil-service examinations.27 Another was a physician who sat in teahouses picking up scraps of information for which he got paid a dollar or two apiece – one of which choice titbits turned out to be the correct date of Yijing’s counter-offensive. Another was apparently well-connected enough (being excellent friends with the lieutenant-governor of Zhejiang) to escape punishment on being exposed as a spy.28

  Clearly troubled by the epidemic of espionage that had broken out, the Qing authorities tried hard to woo back local populations. By the winter of 1841, the problem was seen as so severe that simple cash rewards would no longer work. Anyone who distinguished himself in guerrilla attacks against the English, ran one edict, ‘will be reported to the Emperor and ennobled . . . Traitors who betray our martial preparations shall be seized, decapitated and their heads exposed . . . do not allow yourselves to be beguiled by [the foreigners’] wiles, but meet stratagem with stratagem . . . Come the spring, and our great army will have assembled with refreshed vigour and destructive guns, and we shall then with the rapidity of lightning, sweep them away from the face of the Earth. In the meanwhile, return to your homes and keep our plans secret.’29 (Naturally, this confidential edict was obtained, translated and lovingly archived by Gützlaff.) On 5 February, Gützlaff noted that ‘authentic information was received that a chosen band of Robbers had left Hangzhou for Ningbo with the object of taking away the lives of Pottinger, Parker and Gough, in which case they are to be promoted to the ranks of officers, to receive a donation of 10,000 taels of silver, and to have the choice of the greatest beauties in the empire.’30

  But the British still felt constantly under menace from local populations who – given the slightest opportunity – would kidnap, mutilate and murder foreigners who wandered more than a safe distance from camp. Of the garrison stationed at Ningbo, perhaps forty-two were carried off during the winter, several of them killed, with others kept as hostages until the following summer of negotiations. A captured private was found tied up in a bag: ‘a large walnut, with hair wound round it, had been forced into his mouth, the sides of which were cut to admit it. He was quite dead.’31 The business was ‘repugnant to the feelings of civilized nations’, commented one British lieutenant.32 As the occupation went on, relations deteriorated to the extent that it became unsafe for soldiers to walk alone through the narrow streets of occupied Ningbo.

  None of this was particularly surprising, given that the British occupiers seem to have viewed local Chinese principally as sources of raw material (labour, food, clothing), their sole test of worth being how readily, cheaply and efficiently they produced these things. And if goods were not voluntarily surrendered for ready money, recalled one matter-of-fact lieutenant, ‘we were obliged to have recourse to the plan of taking a few respectable inhabitants and detaining them as hostages . . . till a fresh supply of bullocks was brought in.’33

  For all the pragmatism of some collaborators, there could be little affection between the two sides, with British aggression and Chinese humiliation begetting resentment and hostility. A field officer’s account of his wanderings through the streets of Ningbo nicely expresses the spiral of contempt. ‘While in one of the shops in the suburbs one of the crowd that followed us threw some orange peel, which struck my cap . . . Another day I was insulted again . . . I avenged myself by a few blows with the flat of the sword.’ Because of his adversary’s padded winter clothes, he regretted, ‘I might as well have beaten a pillow. I have always carried a good stick since then, to break the noddle of the next Chinaman who shall trespass on my dignity. They are a most insolent race.’34 If the Chinese, he later mused, ‘look grave, we say, “See the sulky villain.” If, on the other hand, they smile, we exclaim, “Oh, the hypocrites” . . . In addition to this, some of the soldiers . . . if no officer is by, purchase things at their own prices, and beat and ill-treat [them]. Is it wonderful they do not exactly love us?’35

  And in spite of the success of the British military manoeuvres in the autumn of 1841, Pottinger was making no diplomatic progress towards bringing the war to an end. Without enough troops to press on with the campaign, and without any official response to their demands to treat with a plenipotentiary, the British were stuck in their occupied cities, their 3,000 men fragmented into penny-packet garrisons. Through the winter of 1841–42, Pottinger sent two official letters to his Qing counterparts – neither was acknowledged as received because the Qing camp had failed to procure a qualified translator to mediate. The Awe-Inspiring General’s Cantonese interpreter turned out only to understand spoken, not written English.36

  Yijing’s plan in early March was to storm simultaneously all three of the territories occupied by the British in Zhejiang: Ningbo, Zhenhai and Zhoushan. Some 36,000 men were to hurl themselves at the western and southern gates of Ningbo; 15,000 were to rush Zhenhai, a dozen miles downriver; another 10,000 were to cross the sea to Zhoushan. (To back up the 12,000-strong professional army, Yijing had supposedly hired around 90,000 peasant militia.) The true numbers available looked very different. Many of the soldiers officially on the campaign’s registers were simply not ready to take part in the attack. A quarter of the 12,000 sent to Zhejiang were immediately diverted into garrison and defence duties on arrival: Yijing judged half the 2,000 troops from nearby Jiangxi to be unfit for battle, for example, and set them to guarding granaries instead. When it came to positioning troops for the assault, Yijing moved out a total of only around 8,000 for the attacks on Ningbo and Zhenhai.37

  However historically auspicious the Tiger Day of the Tiger Month may have been, it was a terrible time to make war in south-east China. The early days of March are when the knee-deep snow and ice of winter turn into slush. And as bad luck would have it, 10 March 1842 had been preceded by days of rain. ‘The roads and paths were deep in mud’, remembered one of Yijing’s subordinates, as men, carts and cannon slogged into their positions. ‘More than half our porters deserted before their job was done.’38 The army advanced through an eerily emptied countryside: alienated locals had run away with all their provisions, leaving the under-supplied troops without access to food. Cold, wet and hungry, they waited for the attack.

  Astonishingly, Yijing’s chronic indecisiveness almost worked in his favour. By 9 March, the British had received so many intelligence reports about the imminent start of the counter-attack that they had ceased to believe any of them. A successful surprise assault on Ningbo, therefore, was still possible. The three-mile-long walls around the city were too long to maintain a tight sentry patrol – particularly at the dead of night. But in the dark hours of the morning of 10 March 1842, just enough mistakes were committed by Qing forces to bring the British into a state of tolerable readiness.

  After a couple of gunshots along the river at 12.30 a.m., and a botched attempt to launch fire-rafts at the ships moored on the river outside the city, the British garrison was under arms. At 4 a.m., a solitary Chinese figure approached the west gate, holding in his raised hand a lit torch. The British sentry told him, in some version of the local dialect, to go away; he carried on his way towards the gate. With a single musket shot, the Chinese man was dead, but the south and west gates were now rushed from within and without. The attackers to the south pushed swiftly up towards the city’s central marketplace, where they were driven back by British gunfire. The battle was more prolonged at the west gate, where a force of around 140 British troops faced off the greater portion of the Ningbo assault squad – probably at least 3,000 Chinese soldiers. For hours, the fighting was hand-to-hand, with desperate British soldiers hacki
ng lumps of stone out of the city walls to hurl down at their attackers. As dawn arrived, though, a single howitzer – set up twenty yards from the Qing force – saved the occupiers. Squeezed into a narrow, straight street, the mass of attacking divisions provided a continuing supply of new targets for the new gun. The effect was ‘terrific’, observed one campaign-hardened officer of the awful scene. ‘The enemy’s rear, not aware of the miserable fate which was being dealt out to their comrades in the front, continued to press the mass forward, so as to force fresh victims upon the mound of dead and dying’. By the time the howitzer fell silent – after only three rounds – there was a ‘writhing and shrieking hecatomb’ closely packed for ‘fully fifteen yards’.39

  At the front of this pile lay the bodies of the Sichuanese aboriginal fighters. Although they were dead-shots at 100 paces, they had brought only long knives on the assault. Yijing had ordered that muskets and cannon should be used as little as possible, to reduce civilian casualties; the non-Chinese-speaking aborigines had misunderstood this as an order to bring no guns at all. As British looters picked over their bodies, small purses containing six dollars were found on each – Yijing’s reward to them for having arrived with their tiger-skin caps on 13 February to fulfil the prophecy. ‘Bad luck to ye!’ one Irish private cursed a corpse with a crushed skull, ‘ye’ve bin an’ spint one of ’em; here’s only five.’40 Five or six hundred Chinese troops were lost; no British deaths were reported.

  The Qing were convinced that treachery had again brought them low. The English, reported Liang Tingnan, had ‘enticed the Qing army into the city with the help of a Chinese traitor, while they exited by another gate.’41 There was probably some truth in this. Yijing had placed extravagant amounts of trust in an equivocal individual called Lu Xinlan, a former canal-maintenance official and resident of Ningbo who had gone over to the British for (according to one estimate) half a silver dollar. During the winter of 1841–42, though, he had secretly written to Yijing, pledging that the people of Ningbo could be organized into dare-to-die ambush teams at the cost of 5,000 ounces of silver, and convincing the general that retaking the city would be ‘as easy as turning over your hand’. ‘Though only half of what he said had any basis in reality,’ remarked one exasperated onlooker, ‘Yijing reported it all to the emperor as if it were all reliable.’42 None of Lu’s guerrilla fighters materialized in the confused early hours of 10 March. (To be fair to him, he short-changed the British as ruthlessly as he did the Qing. Just before the attack on Ningbo, he convinced Gützlaff to give him 60,000 strings of copper cash to convert to silver in the nearby countryside. He was never seen again.)43 A simultaneous attack on Zhenhai that morning was repulsed after a small boy slipped the British interpreter in the city a note warning the garrison to prepare for an attack.44

  But incompetence was to blame as well as premeditated treason. Reinforcements from deep south China for the attack on Zhenhai got lost in the dark, and did not come within even seven miles of the city until lunchtime on the day after the attack had failed. (It was very windy and rainy, went the excuse.45) A messenger entrusted with top-secret information for Yijing about organizing Chinese resistance within Ningbo similarly lost his way. When he asked a passing postman for directions, he was misdirected north; the battle for Ningbo was long over by the time he at last straggled into camp.

  It never seems to have occurred to the leadership to do anything but panic once things started to go wrong. As thousands ran from British guns in Ningbo and Zhenhai, Yijing’s chief-of-staff fell asleep over his opium pipe and had to be carried off, catatonic, on a litter. Around 13 March, rumours spread of a second-wave attack on Ningbo. By the time the British had rallied for it, the Qing commander in question (Yu Buyun again) had reconsidered and was leading his troops in full retreat west. Yijing – who had, in any case, according to some estimates retained some 60 per cent of the best troops as a personal bodyguard – soon followed, running inland to Hangzhou, presumably pausing only to scoop up four tubs of rare orchids that he had received as a gift during the campaign, and that he had sworn always to take with him in his personal baggage. (He would later explain this flight to Daoguang as ‘going to check on the defences of the hinterland’.46) By 6 April, Gützlaff’s spies were telling him, ‘the population have changed the title of Yijing to the “Retreating” instead of the Terror-Inspiring General’, and 3,000 disgusted Qing troops were offering to go over to the British. ‘Do not delay offensive operations’, they advised the invaders. ‘We are acquainted with all the roads, and shall be able to render you effective service. Being discontented with the Manchus, we make this offer from the heartfelt desire of serving your cause and not from a wish to acquire riches.’47

  But at least some kind of attempt was made to retake Zhenhai and Ningbo. The same could not be said for Zhoushan. The soldiers that Yijing had selected to cross the sea to seize the island were from landlocked north China, and suffered too badly from seasickness to be of much use in a naval manoeuvre. Seaworthier fishermen from the coastline a little further north were drafted in at the last moment to navigate, but turned out to be timidly unfamiliar with the rocky outline of Zhoushan. The expedition was planned to commence at 4 a.m., but the tide was against the fleet; by the time it had turned, news of the debacles at Ningbo and Zhenhai had leaked out, and the crews apparently ‘lost heart’, and spent the next month ‘cruising aimlessly up and down the coast, unable to muster the nerve for an attack’.48

  The forces that survived the massacre at Ningbo – 8,000 Qing perhaps (many of them sumptuously dressed in the black and purple velvet of the imperial guard’s uniform) – made a final stand just eighteen miles north of the city, amid a fluttering mass of tents and pennants in the hills that enveloped the small walled town of Ciqi. Despite the Qing army’s advantages of height, the British – about 1,200 of them, supported as usual by field artillery – swarmed across rice-fields, and up and around the slopes on which the Qing soldiers were positioned. Surrounded on all sides by ‘bayoneting and hewing’ British forces, the hills and nearby fields were soon ‘thickly covered with the bodies of the slain’.49 Refusing to surrender, 500 Qing soldiers – the elite of the army – were said to have died on the battlefield alone. Including those cut down in the retreat (most of the fugitives were picked off by musket-fire, or by the Nemesis, waiting its moment in a nearby creek) the total probably rose to around 1,000; three Britons were killed and around twenty wounded. Perhaps 80 per cent of the Qing wounded died in agony: although one of the regional commanders had a ‘metal-wound drug’, there was no wine in the camp to mix it into an application. ‘We sat by helpless, watching our comrades die’, remembered one observer. ‘Even now, the thought of it tortures me.’50 (British observers claimed that many of the wounded who later died did so because they had taken too much opium to steady their nerves.51) By the end of all this carnage, the British rank-and-file were fully battle-drunk. In one paddy-field near Ciqi, two sailors and a soldier stood in an equilateral triangle whose sides were around fifty yards long, picking off helpless, barely armed or entirely disarmed Chinese soldiers with musket-fire. ‘If we don’t kill them now, Sir,’ a fourth man told an appalled observer, ‘they will fight us again, and we shall never finish the war.’52

  As he ran, Yijing would have had plenty of time to decide how he was going to explain to the emperor what he had done with all his silver (by this point, the war had cost the empire around 30 million ounces of bullion) and his tens of thousands of men. Exaggeration and fabrication seemed the best option. Four or five hundred British soldiers had been killed, including their chief Palmerston, he triumphantly told his sovereign. But the British had fielded 17,000 (rather than their actual 2–3,000) men and Chinese saboteurs had burnt to the ground Qing camps (that had in reality been abandoned by fleeing officers).53 The best tale of all was told of the battle for Zhoushan that never was. Yijing might have overlooked the fact that the flotilla had spent much of March and half of April floating up and down the
coast trying to avoid attacking anything at all, had the fleet’s commander, Zheng Tingchen, not been given 220,000 dollars of the campaign budget to cover his costs. This was a large sum of money for which to have nothing – not even a humiliating defeat – to show. Under threat of court martial from Yijing, therefore, Zheng obediently reported on 13 April a stunning naval victory over the English in which one large man-of-war and twenty-one smaller ships had been burnt by fire-rafts, and 200 English drowned and countless more burnt to death. (In later accounts of the engagement, these figures swelled to five men-of-war and to 600 drowned foreign sailors.) The alleged triumph (unsubstantiated in British accounts) was so welcome to Daoguang that it quickly won Yijing the coveted award of a double peacock’s feather.54 It was also so improbable that – embarrassingly for Yijing – Zhejiang’s governor, Liu Yunke, openly challenged its veracity.55 Pushed to defend the truth of it himself, Yijing lamely argued that ‘so much time had passed, and so much water had gone under the bridge. If we were to prevent courageous men of action from getting timely rewards, I fear it would inevitably dampen morale . . . No further investigation required.’56 To Yijing’s relief, on 7 May the British voluntarily evacuated Ningbo to push on towards the Yangtze, an act that enabled Yijing to boast to his uncle that his forces had ‘forced the British troops – terrified at the advance of the great Qing army – to retire.’57 Finally, Gützlaff learnt from his secret agents, Yijing completed a report to the emperor ‘in which he spoke in high praise of the victories obtained by the Imperial Troops at Ningbo, Zhenhai and Ciqi. Liu Yunke alone refused to sign such a tissue of falsehoods, but the joint commissioners and Yijing put their seals to it and it was dispatched.’58