by Julia Lovell
Yijing’s punishment would come in time – in the form of Daoguang’s inability to decide what to do with him. Months after the final peace treaty had been signed, in December 1842, Yijing would be summoned to Beijing to await judgement of his conduct of the war; about two weeks later, he was ordered instead to remain in the south, to prepare a financial report on the campaign; within another couple of days, yet another command hauled him to the capital under arrest, on charges of wasting resources. His hangers-on now vanished – only a few members of his high-living entourage accompanied their disgraced, manacled Awe-Inspiring General on even the first 150 miles of his doleful return to the capital. Back in Beijing, he was first imprisoned to await execution; then saw his death sentence repealed, as Daoguang sank into a post-war crisis of self-doubt and declared himself responsible for the defeats. Eventually, Yijing was sent – like Lin Zexu and Bao Peng before him – to Xinjiang. In 1853, he died of malaria.59
Other survivors of the manoeuvres of spring 1841 were less fortunate. Before the assault on Ningbo, Yijing had made room in the budget to buy nineteen monkeys: the idea was to tie firecrackers to their backs then fling them onto English ships moored nearby. ‘But the fact was,’ a truth-telling observer pointed out, ‘no one dared go near enough to the foreign ships to fling them on board.’60 After the final rout at Ciqi, their keeper fled, leaving the attack-monkeys of Ningbo to starve slowly to death in his front lodge.
Chapter Thirteen
THE FIGHT FOR QING CHINA
As Captain Hall of the Nemesis approached the garrison port of Zhapu in the middle days of May 1842, he seems to have been overcome by pastoral rapture: at its ‘rich, luxuriant, well-watered plain’, its ‘curiously-shaped blue-tiled roofs’ and ‘remarkable hills’. The whole panorama, he rhapsodized in conclusion, reminded him powerfully of ‘the prettiest parts of Devonshire.’1 Although Zhapu lacked the carp-filled lakes, pagodas, gardens and artfully landscaped hills of the provincial capital, Hangzhou, it had grown well-heeled on trade with Japan and Korea. Within the town’s three-mile-long walls some 8,000 Manchu Banner families lived quietly in picturesque rows of whitewashed, bamboo-fenced houses.2
In 1645, the area had seen some of the most appalling massacres of the Manchu conquest. After the Qing armies’ ten-day rampage through the beautiful, fallen city of Yangzhou, its canals and bridges were choked with the dead – more than 800,000 Chinese bodies, tradition told, had been cremated. (Though these pillaging forces also included ethnic Chinese soldiers under Manchu command, and local bandits.3) But with this punitive ‘pacification’ completed, the Manchus had more than made their peace with China’s wealthiest region. As elsewhere in the empire, the new dynasty scattered Banner garrisons along the coast, to establish pockets of Manchu authority over the majority Chinese population. Theoretically, in a town such as Zhapu, the Manchus were divided from the Chinese by an internal wall sectioning the garrison off in a northern corner of the city. In reality, the Bannermen of Zhapu, like all the east-coast garrisons, quickly absorbed the comforts of the region. The first generation to settle there after 1644 had been sons of Nurhaci’s warrior elites: tough, loyal archers of the north-east. By 1689, when the Kangxi emperor noted a peaceful coexistence between Bannermen and locals, this most civilized of Chinese landscapes had tamed its conquerors. Even the climate seemed designed to subdue the Manchus: their homeland’s bitter winters (where temperatures sank to around minus twenty) and cool summers were now replaced with almost frost-free winters and indolent summer heat. The vigorous emperors of the high Qing – especially Kangxi and Qianlong – were themselves seduced by the charms of the east coast. There, they built pavilions from which to admire the moon; they composed odes to the beauty of Hangzhou’s famous West Lake; Qianlong was said to be particularly fond of the haircuts that he received in Yangzhou. And for the times when they were unable to visit the area in person, they set their craftsmen to creating exquisite replicas of east-coast palaces in their summer capital at Chengde.
Soon, the east-coast Bannermen began losing interest in war. The softening process began with their commanders. The Zhejiang garrisons became rest-homes for the over-privileged and well-connected, or for those reaching the end of long, distinguished careers: commissions there were a reward for officers who had overworked themselves for decades in far less congenial parts of the empire (Mongolia, Xinjiang, Yunnan). Further down the hierarchy, there was an economic explanation for the decline of the martial spirit in rank-and-file Manchu Bannermen. As inflation steadily devalued the state’s handouts of silver and rice, Bannermen faced two options: to sink quietly into poverty; or to develop sidelines – tea-houses, noodle-carts, banditry. Whichever option a Bannerman took, military efficiency was badly affected. But the poverty in the south-east – where there were so many pleasurable ways to while away idle hours – was at least genteel. Surrounded by their wives and children, scraping by on state handouts, Bannermen dabbled in local history, poured out poetry and paintings inspired by nearby landscapes, honed their calligraphy, flew kites, grew melons, tended their fish, caged birds, praying mantises and dogs, and gossiped over tea and pastries. Men were not stationed at Zhapu and its neighbouring garrisons, it seemed, to do anything so uncivilized as to fight.
The whole situation was a good deal too pleasant for the emperor’s liking. ‘Local customs have corrupted their manners’, ran one garrison inspector’s verdict, while Qianlong fretted about how the Manchu’s warlike ‘old way’ (fe doro) was being lost in sinicization. ‘These people are useless’, he raged. ‘They disgust me more than I can say.’4 Nineteenth-century emperors like Jiaqing and Daoguang gave up hopes of a martial recovery; they were anxious only to prevent their Manchu brethren from participating too obviously in the black market, opium-smuggling and extortion.5
In July 1840, when the British fleet had tried out a few of its cannon on Zhapu, killing six Bannermen, local commanders had (while, as usual, reassuring the court that ‘our troops advanced, fought bravely, and drove the British out of Zhapu’) reported on alarming holes in Zhapu’s defences – specifically concerning the lack of weapons and forts.6 The sense of anxiety only grew through the autumn and winter of 1841, as Xiamen, Zhoushan, Ningbo, Zhenhai – all the coastal garrisons directly south of Zhapu – had fallen before British ships and guns. By 17 May 1842, when the British fleet (increased to around 10,000 by reinforcements from India) sailed into view, Zhapu’s chance to prove its faithfulness to the fe doro had arrived.7
On 18 May, 820 British troops landed on Zhapu’s beach and launched themselves at the batteries on the hills around the city. As usual, the Qing soldiers were dislodged. But here the similarities to earlier engagements in the war ended. One battle-weary British officer ought to have been prepared for what lay ahead when he encountered an unwounded Bannerman sheltering behind one of the many tombs scattered over the hills and prevented one of his rank-and-file from shooting him. ‘The ungrateful fellow,’ recalled the outraged Briton, ‘instead of being pleased at his escape, deliberately began to cut his throat with a short sword, or knife. I did not interfere with his occupation, but waited to see if he were in earnest; and he was, for he effectually killed himself.’8
As the British pushed on towards the town, the last remaining Manchu defenders outside its walls – almost 300 of them – made a final stand inside the dark maze of shrines, halls and courts that made up the Temple of Heavenly Respect on top of one of the hills only a mile from the city. And this position they held, shooting dead any attackers who attempted to rush the building. Irritated by losing at least a handful of men to Banner gunfire, the British decided to blow the temple up. As monks spilled out of the grounds and into the nearby woods, a bag of powder was attached to the side of the building and set alight, bringing the roof down over its defenders. With the fire spreading through the building, organized resistance collapsed, while those inside tried to remove their padded cotton tunics and powder bags before they caught fire. After the flames subsided, the d
ead and wounded were found grotesquely huddled together: mutilated, charred, disfigured. Only 43 of the original 276 lived long enough to be taken prisoner – the British secured the few survivors by knotting their queues together, as if they were tying bunches of rats by their tails. When one Manchu stood up, as if resurrected, from the pile of dead and drew his rusty sword, he refused to make a dash for it but instead began hacking at his own throat.9
As the gates to the undefended city now fell, there was little left for the rest of the Manchu garrison but to sacrifice itself in exemplary fashion. ‘When they could no longer fight,’ witnessed the captain of the Nemesis, ‘they could die . . . Many . . . were with difficulty prevented from cutting their throats, which they did with apparent indifference.’10 One elderly wounded officer was carried from the fighting by the British: ‘I want no mercy’, he told them. ‘I came here to fight for my emperor . . . if you wish to gain my gratitude, and can be generous, write to my revered sovereign, and say I fell in the front, fighting to the last.’11 But this was not the worst of it. Terrified by the idea of what the British might do to them in captivity, Manchu families destroyed themselves: mothers hanging their children or drowning them in wells; husbands doing the same to their wives, before falling on their own swords. If fathers allowed their children to flee, they were carefully instructed to ‘beg for death’ on encountering a British soldier. If fathers were not there to help, whole families took poison, and were later found dead with distended throats and black lips.
In terms of sheer horror, if not in scale, the scenes rivalled those of the massacre at Yangzhou two centuries previously. ‘Cruel’, ‘revolting’, ‘barbarous’, cried British eyewitnesses on finding yards, alleyways and wells piled with the dead. If only the Qing soldiers had surrendered, they sighed, they would have known the mercy of the British. Contemporary Chinese sources told a revealingly different story: of civilians being shot in cold blood by British soldiers on failing to produce acceptable documentation, of women being cut down by the British, still cursing them as they fell. Inland, women were divided for rape between the invaders (the prettiest reserved for the white British, the rest for the Indians).12
His day’s work over, the captain of the Nemesis returned to appreciating the bucolic delights of the countryside, sighing over ‘one of the richest and most beautifully cultivated spots in the world’, its loveliness only slightly marred by the ‘dead bodies floating along the canals’.13
Around halfway through 1841, Granville Loch, a Royal Navy captain just past his thirtieth birthday, returned to England from a tour in the Mediterranean, swiftly wearied of his furlough and looked about for something to do. At that point, a recklessly adventurous Briton might have aspired to rush into the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan. By late November 1841, the British garrison that had swept all before it two years earlier surrendered to an Afghan uprising and began a dreadful winter retreat that would be survived only by a Scottish doctor with a broken sword. ‘It is impossible’, declared The Times, ‘to view [our contest with China] with the same exciting interest that attaches to the terrible realities of our Affghan [sic] warfare.’14 But the Chinese operation had its own particular glamour. Just imagine, Loch exulted to himself: ‘entering as invaders into the heart of an immense empire, where we are looked upon as “barbarians from beyond the civilised world.” ’15 With this thought, he extracted his commission from the Admiralty and boarded a fast ship east, speeding past the palms, the sago plants and the eighty-foot poison trees of the ‘lazy tropical races’, past the nutmeg, pineapples, tigers, canoe-capsizing alligators, drumming fish and shrieking dugongs of Java, Malaysia and Singapore, to reach south China in early June.16 There, after around ten days scrambling over the peaks of Hong Kong and buying substandard scraps of chinaware from sharp Macao tradesmen, Loch travelled up the east coast to rejoin the expedition for its final advance up the Yangtze: to be united – just after the horrors of Zhapu – with this ‘small but gallant force’ and its ‘glorious spirit of enterprise’.17
The memoir that he left is a useful lens through which to view the closing months of the campaign. Loch tried hard – like the good son of empire that he was – to remain a cheery patriot, and dispassionately scientific Victorian observer of China’s anthropological and biological novelties. Yet still the horrors of war show through. He remarked on country ‘flat as Kent or Essex beside the Thames’, smothered with roses, ‘the tulip, the tallow, the mulberry’, of flushing a pheasant or two out of the wild honeysuckle, moments after passing half-burnt tents hung with smouldering corpses, or wounded men ‘dying without assistance in sight of thousands’.18 Arriving in time to witness the fleet’s acquisition of Shanghai on 19 June, he ambled about the tea-houses, gardens and temples of the town, tut-tutting about the rapacity of Chinese looters, ‘passing, like a string of busy ants, in a continuous line . . . They will bear’, he observed knowledgeably, ‘thumping, kicking, and maltreating in every way, but will most pertinaciously hold to their bundles.’19 Meanwhile, he recounted, the army messed luxuriously in the apartments of the absent well-to-do: swathed in plunder (fur-lined cloaks of the finest silks and satins), stoking cooking-fires with exquisite ornaments and curios, bellowing the flames with embroidered fans.
After Shanghai, the fleet turned a corner west, to begin its journey up the Yangtze towards Nanjing, the ancient capital that controlled the movement of grain ships up to Beijing. Heavy rain slowed the approach to Zhenjiang (the final Qing garrison blocking the way on to Nanjing) and Loch passed the time exploring – like an overgrown character out of Swallows and Amazons – bulrush-tangled creeks, hiking through the soaked countryside and rambling to deserted temples. One of his stomps up a hillside was enlivened by an encounter with a withered, opium-addicted soldier, whom his companion high-spiritedly dragged up the slope ‘by his pigtail’.20
On 17 July, the high, square walls of Zhenjiang finally loomed up out of the river’s rusty granite cliffs. A red-and-yellow flag flew from its gate, but no other sign of life was apparent: to Loch, it already resembled ‘a city of the dead’.21
For days, as rumours of the British approach swirled inland, Zhenjiang had been in a state of civil war analogous to that endured by Canton a year earlier. This time, though, the nature of the conflict was a little more straightforward. Down south, the Cantonese had been pitted against the Hunanese, the countryside against the city, villages against villages. In Zhenjiang, the fight was a simple stand-off between the Manchu authorities and the local population.
The man in command of the garrison was Hai Ling, a Manchu veteran who had won his posting to mild Zhejiang after long tours of service in the north-east, and whom well-informed contemporary observers of the events of 1842 judged ‘an imbecile’.22 By the first week or so of July, a combination of anxiety (at waiting for the British) and frustration (at being denied the men and money he needed to defend the citadel) seems to have unhinged him. Back in 1841, he had set about patching up the crumbling garrison walls, but had been refused funds for extra forces or new cannon. He had then suggested the cheaper expediency of hiring local ‘water braves’ to patrol the mouth of the river on the approach to the city. Zhejiang’s Governor-General, Niu Jian, unfortunately, firmly believed that the British would never attack so deep into the Yangtze because it was too narrow (he was also convinced that the British steamers were powered by oxen) and responded to Hai Ling’s requests by impeaching the Manchu for scaremongering. By July 1842, Niu had a fine pedigree in underestimating the British threat. ‘Though the rebellious foreigners speak of ravaging inland,’ he had written to the emperor a month previously, ‘it’s just empty bluster. I have the situation perfectly under control – they are not going to attack.’23 And even if they did, he concluded, ‘they’ll be hopelessly outnumbered. What difficulty will there be in killing them all?’24 He quickly changed his mind during his first military encounter with the British on 16 June at Wusong, a 175-cannon garrison guarding the mouth of the Yangtze. ‘As soo
n as the foreigners blasted their way into the city,’ Liang Tingnan remembered, ‘Niu Jian turned white and ran away.’25 Deprived of reinforcements, enraged by obstructions from incompetent civilians, Hai Ling deteriorated (a Zhenjiang diarist called Zhu Shiyun recorded) into a ‘very excited state’, and decided to turn his energies to the only measure that lay within his power: persecuting traitors – real or imagined – in the population under his control at Zhenjiang.26