The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  By the middle of July, Hai Ling was in sole charge of the city. His bureaucratic tormentor, Niu Jian, had arrived on a whirlwind tour of the place on 13 July, during which he claimed credit for having organized a 150-vessel fireboat attack that British accounts failed to mention. (A contemporary piece of Foreign Office intelligence alleged that Niu’s master-plan was to place potent, poisoned vats of the local liquor, samshoo, in the path of the British army.27) ‘I don’t know what he was doing here’, a candid local remarked of Niu’s visit.28 With the British only twenty miles away, Niu dashed off a quick proclamation, reassuring the city that no British warships were approaching and that there was nothing to worry about: ‘Misleading reports have been spread by a certain captain, who has already been cashiered. The ships in question are merchantmen – it’s impossible they’ll come far upriver. Go to bed and sleep in perfect security.’29 On 14 July, and doubtless little regretted by Hai Ling, Niu rushed on to Nanjing, whose walls were presumably thicker than Zhenjiang’s. By this point, it must have seemed to Hai Ling that only he and a garrison of around 3,300 Bannermen stood between the approaching British. ‘Leave me alone’, he told his associate commanders, ‘to defend the city’.30 ‘A brilliant plan has been made,’ he informed the townspeople, ‘which assures us of complete victory; there is no reason to panic and stampede.’31

  It soon became clear what his ‘brilliant plan’ was. In these last, panic-stricken days, he ‘made no preparations’, Zhu Shiyun recalled, ‘collected no stores for defence and made no attempt to organise a volunteer force.’ For he was far too busy killing civilians. ‘It was only at the four gates that Hai Ling had cannon actually pointing outwards’, remembered Zhu. ‘Inside the city his whole activity consisted in arresting passers-by day and night, on suspicion of their being traitors. Whenever women or children saw Manchu soldiers, they fled in terror; upon which the soldiers ran after them and killed them, announcing to Hai Ling that they had disposed of traitors, for which he rewarded them.’32 ‘False rumours of spies swirled around the city’, remembered Liang Tingnan, ‘and every house was searched; people were killed on the flimsiest of suspicions – everyone was terrified, no one had any idea how the city was to be defended.’33

  On 17 July, when the British started cannonading the town, Hai Ling responded by repeating that Zhenjiang ‘contains nothing but traitors’ and pointing a massive cannon down into the citadel, from a hill just beyond its walls. The commander was little more beloved by his troops. Because by mid-July the city had been sealed off for several days (to prevent the exodus of ‘traitors’), the soldiers detailed to defend it were hungry and restive. On 20 July, on the eve of the storming of the walls, the Qing troops were paraded briefly outside the citadel, in the hope that the British ships – which had anchored nearby – would be intimidated by the sight of them. If they had taken a close enough look, the British would have spotted their adversaries gnawing on uncooked aubergines – the best thing they had had to eat in five days. By that evening, the starving soldiers stationed outside the gates were ‘threatening to open fire, storm the city, capture General Hai Ling and eat him raw’.34

  Given this painful prelude to hostilities, some parts of the population may have actually begun to yearn for liberation by the British. After the assault, the story circulated that the ‘foreigners had originally intended to attack the city on 22 July. But when their commander-in-chief heard the news that Hai Ling was about to slaughter the inhabitants, he ordered an immediate attack forbidding the use of cannon, for fear of inflicting heavy casualties on the townspeople . . . When they entered the city in strength, they did not wantonly kill a single person, and let anyone who wanted to leave the city.’35

  On 21 July, a day so hot that seventeen British sailors and marines would die from sunstroke, Pottinger’s transports landed some 7,000 men on the southern bank of the Yangtze, just north of Zhenjiang.36 The 2,700 Qing soldiers outside the city vanished. The two other commanders whom Hai Ling had told to leave everything to him had taken his words to heart, directing operations on the hills outside the city from sedan chairs set under some nearby palm trees. After the British were undeterred by several rounds of fire, though, they sprang into action, fleeing south for the safety and shade of a nearby town. ‘At which’, observed Zhu Shiyun, ‘all their men broke into a general stampede up hill and down dale, to the great amusement of the foreigners.’37

  After this easy early success, Zhenjiang’s western gate fell quickly, reduced to splinters by British sappers. By midday, British soldiers were on the western rim of the city walls and their greatest problem so far had been heatstroke. Things looked different at the northern gate. By a temple on top of a small wooded hill north of the city, three scaling ladders were propped against the city wall and a mixed English and Indian force began to ascend. But here, the Manchus stood and fought. A moderate Banner force – of around 1,500 – dug in for the next hour and a half: bayoneting, sword-fighting, wrestling the British on the walls to drag their enemies and themselves to their deaths. Chinese civilians outside the city watched while purple flames ‘flounced out as though there were some demon in their midst, plying a bellows’.38

  Securing the walls, then, was a brutal business; taking the city was appalling. As the British reeled from the unexpected resistance, surviving Bannermen hurried back to the Manchu quarter to destroy themselves and their families. The blood of even the doughty captain of the Nemesis ‘ran cold’, as he recalled a Manchu soldier found hacking at his wife’s throat with a rusty sword, having already thrown his children into a well to drown. (The British shot him and recovered the woman and children. When the wife came to from her ordeal, she had only invective for her saviours.39) Groups of fourteen, even twenty bodies were found hanging from rafters in single houses, while most of those taken prisoner later succeeded in starving themselves to death.

  Some of the most shocked responses came from those newest to the China campaign. As Granville Loch toured the walls beneath the gentler afternoon sun, he looked down over ‘old men, women, and children, cutting each other’s throats, and drowning themselves by the dozen; and no one either attempting or apparently showing any inclination to save the poor wretches, nor in fact regarding them with any more notice than they would a dead horse carried through the streets of London to the kennel.’ A wander through the quietened, cooling city at dusk, with the fragrance of flowers hanging over its neatly pretty houses, revealed unforgettable horror.

  We entered an open court strewed with rich stuffs and covered with clotted blood; and upon the steps leading to the ‘hall of ancestors’ there were two bodies of youthful Tartars, cold and stiff, much alike, apparently brothers . . . Stepping over these bodies, we . . . met, face to face, three women seated, a mother and two daughters; and at their feet lay two bodies of elderly men, with their throats cut from ear to ear . . . the hardest heart of the oldest man who ever lived a life of rapine and slaughter could not have gazed on this scene of woe unmoved . . . The expression of cold unutterable despair depicted on the mother’s face changed to the violent workings of scorn and hate, which at last burst forth in a paroxysm of invective, afterwards in floods of tears . . . her gestures spoke of her misery – of her hate, and (I doubt not) her revenge.

  After failing to make clear that her best option was to confide herself to his protection, he did the best he could for her: preventing his men from bayoneting the last man alive. Astounded by the desperate courage of the Manchu soldiers, he offered them – in death – the greatest compliment a British officer in 1842 could offer a non-European: ‘If drilled under English officers, they would prove equal, if not superior, to the Sepoys.’40

  Amid the wreckage of the city, Hai Ling perished. According to one version, when he decided that all was lost he returned home, built a pyre of his official papers, sat himself in the middle of it and burned to death. When the scene was discovered by a British interpreter, only a charred skull and a few leg bones were left. Another account claims that
he hanged himself (after first dispatching his wife and children). Others doubted the suicide story altogether, alleging instead that he was murdered by his own men. Despite vigorous attempts after his death to canonize him as a patriotic war hero, in the style of a Lin Zexu or a Yuqian, popular memory in China has never been comfortable with this hagiography and he is generally commemorated (more accurately) as an unhinged military dictator.

  Loch returned to his ship that evening, after taking one last look at the city from its walls. As the British moved on, Zhenjiang no longer merely resembled a city of the dead: ‘The moon was up, and shone with clear and tranquil light upon the silent town, lying like an amphitheatre at our feet; so still, so smiling . . . in sad mockery of the misery and despair of its concealed and wretched inhabitants.’41 ‘I am sick at heart of war’, wrote General Gough who, only a year before, had railed so at Elliot’s refusal to allow him to set his guns on the civilians of Canton.42

  Just as at Zhapu a month of so earlier, or at Sanyuanli the previous year, the only effective opposition to the British in the Opium War fought not for patriotism or even profit, but for their own women and children. As they died inside the city, the Bannermen may have wondered why no reinforcements from the camps to the west of the city were coming to their aid. These troops from western and central China had fled south at the first exchange of fire with Britain – this was not their fight. The casualty statistics for the day tell the story well enough. 30 per cent of the garrison’s resident Banner troops died on 21 July, while only 1.6 per cent of the Chinese reinforcements from Hubei, Sichuan, Henan and Jiangxi lost their lives.43 The war was, British observers now noted, ‘a Manchu and not a Chinese affair.’44 And once the Manchus were laid low by the British, their persecuted Chinese subjects took vengeful advantage of their disarray. After Zhapu, British intelligence officers observed, ‘the Chinese populace fell upon the helpless families [of Manchu soldiers], committed every enormity and carried off every moveable article worth taking.’45 (Reprisal, perhaps, for the Qing army’s own brutality against civilian Chinese populations in previous decades’ suppressions of religious rebellions – which had left tens of thousands dead.46) In Zhapu, at least two separate accounts claimed, the Manchus had so badly antagonized Chinese soldiers that the latter became fifth-columnists for the British: ‘As the Manchu garrison had been in the habit of calling the Chinese disloyal, the Fujian braves sided with the enemy and set fire to the town. The foreigners then scrambled in over the wall’.47

  Even as desperate struggles went on inside and around the city, many of those removed from the front line carried on with their lives, apparently unconcerned about what might be happening to their compatriots a few hundred yards away. To reach the city, Granville Loch and his column – under and returning fire – had to cross a village in easy sight of Zhenjiang. Far from escaping the theatre of war, its inhabitants were standing, spectating, in the streets, ‘coolly employed eating their bowls of rice . . . although they were viewing a contest between foreigners and their fellow-countrymen, and in danger themselves, from their position, of being shot’.48

  For once, British and Chinese appraisals of the battle for Zhenjiang converged: this was a disastrous defeat for the Qing that left the way to Nanjing wide open to the British. All the same, the British, suffering their greatest losses in a single engagement of the war to date (39 dead, 130 injured and 3 missing), readily admitted the surprising ferocity of the Manchu resistance. Yet both sides still found plenty else to disagree about – and particularly over the question of looting. ‘The strictest orders’, remembered the captain of the Nemesis, ‘were given to prevent the pillage of the town . . . and also to arrest the proceedings of the Chinese rabble, who in this as in other instances, were the worst enemies of their own countrymen.’49 But as soon as it fell, the city became an open-air Aladdin’s cave: a sea of porcelain, bronzes, satins, silks, embroideries and wax-encased balls of opium (the last were found stockpiled in government buildings). Granville Loch fudged British involvement in the universal rape and pillage: ‘Less villainy was perpetrated than could reasonably have been expected.’50 Zhu Shiyun’s diary of the days that followed the city’s fall was less roundabout: ‘The foreign devils are seizing people, cutting off their queues and conscripting them . . . For days on end great numbers of women in the city have been raped or carried off.’51 The town’s occupiers sacrilegiously gouged down into the foundations of an iron pagoda, clumsily trying to uproot it as a souvenir; they viciously beat (dismembered, according to one account) a Chinese who tried to buy stolen goods off them with a counterfeit coin. Black magic was at work, panicked civilians whispered to each other: hundreds of Chinese were being kidnapped by the British, and drugged with a strange and terrible potion that robbed them of the power of speech and turned them into Indian ‘black devil’ soldiers.52

  Their business at Zhenjiang concluded, the British fleet sailed on, satisfied at a point well made. ‘Terrible’ though the business was, concluded Captain Hall from the deck of the Nemesis, the defeat would undoubtedly ‘produce in the mind of the Emperor . . . a conviction that a speedy peace . . . was preferable to a continuance of the war.’53 By the first week of August, he and his comrades had turned a last bend in the Yangtze. The long walls of Nanjing, studded with triangular, Lamaist yak-hair pennants and scarlet-uniformed Manchu guards, snaked before them. ‘The energy of British character’, proclaimed Lieutenant Bingham, ‘under the blessing of the Almighty, had placed, without an accident, a fleet of seventy sail . . . in the heart of the Celestial Empire!’54

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE TREATY OF NANJING

  In April 1842, a seventy-one-year-old Manchu called Yilibu received some terrible news. His distant relative, the emperor, had revoked his sentence of banishment to the Great Wall fortress town of Zhangjiakou and decided to post him to beautiful Zhejiang. In the normal run of things, such a change of fortune – a transfer from the bleak Sino-Mongolian frontier to the balmy south-east – would have been cause for rejoicing. Not in 1842, though. Yilibu was old and ill, weakened by his military exile in the north. He had already suffered enough for this war: in the summer of 1841, he had spent two painful months on trial in Beijing, for his handling of the British occupation of Zhoushan through the winter of 1840.

  On 3 April, he was summoned to the Yuanmingyuan (the Summer Palace) for an audience with the emperor. This was an opportunity for the emperor to interrogate in person someone with first-hand experience of the British about their motives, their ambitions, their strengths and weaknesses. (Every other minister who had served in the war had either not been allowed to return to Beijing, or had done so in disgrace.) Two and a half years after this war was supposed to have started, Daoguang found himself still lacking the most basic information about his antagonists: where in fact, he wondered in a communication of May 1842, is England? Why are the English selling us opium? What are the Indians doing in their army? How is it they have a twenty-two-year-old woman for a queen? Is she married? Has Elliot really gone home?1 Yilibu was ready for Daoguang’s questions: he planned, he told one of his aides that day, to make a detailed report about what he knew of handling the British. But as soon as Yilibu had announced his arrival, for unexplained reasons Daoguang changed his mind – he would not see his elderly kinsman after all. Yilibu was allowed to kowtow to the gate of the Second Palace, then on 15 April permitted to leave for Zhejiang through the Gate of Upright Openness, in the southern stretch of the city wall.

  Daoguang had wasted his best chance to hear a frank account of the British and the war. From here on, it would be business as usual, with his ‘slaves’ obfuscating and lying as hard as they could, at a safe remove from their sovereign, to bring this border disturbance to an end.

  Until 1842, any official servant who implicitly (by ignoring imperial orders to ‘exterminate’ the foreigners) or explicitly (by pointing out the weaknesses of the Qing army and the strengths of the British) acknowledged British military super
iority had risked, at best, dismissal and more likely interrogation and punishment (exile, and possibly death). As a result, Daoguang’s nervous servants had spent the last two years diligently deluding him about the nature of the British threat and demands. But the more misinformed the emperor was, the less likely a solution became. Daoguang’s furious impatience with those who failed to resolve the conflict in accordance with his expectations caused his most experienced, talented officials to view an imperial commission to the front line of the war with dread. Two years after the war had begun, the days when a Lin Zexu or a Qishan – expecting a quick resolution followed by promotion – would step confidently up to the mark were long gone. By 1841 Daoguang had run out of qualified individuals; there can be no other explanation for his appointment of the incompetent Yijing as Awe-Inspiring General. As the British edged towards Nanjing, devastating Zhapu and Zhenjiang en route, neither the emperor nor his representatives in the south-east could even lay their hands on a copy of Lord Palmerston’s original letter outlining the terms for peace. Millions of ounces of silver had been squandered on a war whose cause Qing officials could no longer remember – if indeed they had ever understood it.

  But at least by spring 1842, no one in the theatre of war itself was suggesting any more that the British could be ‘exterminated’. ‘Annihilate them’, the Governor of Zhejiang, Liu Yunke, had cried only a year earlier. But once Zhenhai had fallen, and Yuqian’s moribund body had been rushed out of the citadel, Liu took a different view. The army was crushed by defeat, he now wrote to the emperor, and the costs of war were crippling. The British cannon were too fierce, their soldiers too expert at fighting on land and at sea; the Chinese people – scourged by Qing armies – were easily bribed into collaboration with the enemy.2 ‘I have examined the methods employed since ancient times for controlling and taming distant foreigners,’ Liu analysed, ‘and I have found only fighting, defending and soothing. In the present war, neither fighting nor defending has worked; and we are not allowed to soothe. My own stupidity and lack of talent leaves me without a plan and unable to act.’3 In case, though, the emperor should mistake this diagnosis as an offer of help, Liu swiftly begged for sick leave. Since a recent posting in Sichuan, he complained, his arthritis had been troubling him badly. ‘My tongue gets number by the day, there is an indentation along the right side of my back, my left ear is blocked, and my memory is awful.’4 (Liu’s ailments seem to have cleared up once other unfortunates had been appointed to negotiate the final peace treaty with the British.)