The Opium War
Page 28
Instead, Liu recommended that the emperor dispatch the septuagenarian Yilibu, another imperial clansman, this time of the Red-Girdled Yellow Banner, whose finest hour had come twenty-three years previously when he had captured some Burmese bandits on the south-western edge of the empire. Liu was mistakenly convinced that the British were now fighting not for opium, for trade or for national honour, but to take revenge for Yuqian’s flaying of the English prisoners. As Yuqian’s predecessor managing the British presence on the east coast between 1840 and 1841, Yilibu had distinguished himself as an altogether more mollifying presence than the angry Mongolian. Instructed by the emperor to retake British-occupied Zhoushan by force, he had responded by wining and dining the English prisoners that his army had acquired, and by procrastinating his offensive. He could not possibly attack straight away, one memorial to the emperor said, the reinforcements had not arrived; neither had the cannon, said another. He was waiting for the English ‘to relax fatally out of self-confidence’, reported the next, and so on it went, until (to Yilibu’s relief) the English voluntarily evacuated the island in March 1841 to fulfil the stipulations of Charles Elliot’s stillborn agreement with Qishan.5
Liu’s change of opinion reached the emperor at the Yuanmingyuan on 28 March 1842, just three days after Daoguang had received reports from the Awe-Inspiring Yijing of the failure of the Qing’s spring offensive. (‘My anger and hatred are inexpressible’, commented the vermilion brush.6) Liu’s memorials – with their talk of bankrupting war costs, untrustworthy civilians, banditry, the capital’s food supply in peril – began to move Daoguang towards the idea of negotiating. He made two new appointments to handle matters in the south-east, Yilibu and an old drinking and riding friend, the Manchu aristocrat Qiying (whom he now declared Grand Commissioner for the Frontier), and issued his most confusing order yet: his new commanders must ‘first exterminate, then soothe’ the English.7
Qiying and Yilibu reached Hangzhou on 9 May. Their plans for bringing the war to an end were immediately sabotaged by the hopeless Yijing who – piqued by the arrival of his replacements – fired off a series of false reports of naval victories. ‘Their plans are exhausted, their ingenuity used up’, he informed his emperor.8 Convinced, again, that victory lay within his grasp, on 25 May Daoguang wrote severely to Qiying and Yilibu, denouncing their defeatist memorials and ordering Yilibu to return to the capital, unless he could make himself useful in Zhejiang ‘annihilating the foreigners’.9 But it took twelve days for a dispatch from Beijing to get a response from Hangzhou – quite long enough to give Daoguang’s servants the freedom to start going about things as they saw fit: to sue for peace. On 17 May, as the British evacuated Ningbo to move on to Zhapu, Qiying sent Yilibu on ahead ‘to investigate the situation and find a way to implement the Loose Rein; to disseminate the awesomeness of Heaven and demonstrate great righteousness.’10
Yilibu’s first appeal to the British is worth quoting at length for its demonstration of the gulf in understanding between the two sides. All this war, he wrote, ‘is indeed disturbing the celestial harmony and it is of great importance to put a stop to this business, lest heaven be provoked to wrath and celestial punishments follow. Your honourable country desires trade, the Celestial Empire wishes to receive the duties thereon, and neither of us is anxious to harass soldiers, and spend the revenues.’11 ‘We ponder’, his equally bemused subordinates reasoned,
with veneration upon the Great Emperor’s cherishing tenderness towards foreigners, and utmost justice in all his dealings. He thereby causes the whole world to participate in his favour, and to enjoy his protection, for the promotion of civilisation . . . and the full enjoyment of lasting benefits. But the English foreigners have now for two years . . . on account of the investigation in the opium traffic, discarded their obedience and been incessantly fighting, commencing in Guangdong, and proceeding to Fujian, and from thence to Zhejiang. What can possibly be their intention?
In travelling so far to China, the British ‘all owe their lives . . . to the supreme Heaven, and every one of them has a parent and a wife and a family, whoever is wounded or falls in battle becomes a demon in a foreign land, and causes his father and mother great anxiety and renders his family destitute, at which the Great Ministers feel the deepest concern.’12 Demonstrating his own shaky grasp of British motivations and demands, Yilibu hoped to disarm his foreign adversaries with two concessions. The first was to let them trade again. Trade? Henry Pottinger might have queried in response. The British had been trading since March 1841 at Canton, with full authorization from Yishan. By now, they wanted far more than trade. Yilibu’s second trump card was to offer to return Britons kidnapped during the winter at Ningbo – like Liu Yunke, he was convinced that the British were holding the east coast ransom merely to recover prisoners. As he chased after Pottinger’s fleet, then, he dragged the British captives with him, looking for an opportunity to use them to his advantage.13
Even if all this might have swayed the British, Yilibu was too late to save Zhapu: by the time he had got close enough to the British to hand over this letter, hundreds of the town’s defenders were scorched corpses. And by the time he had actually reached the massacred garrison, the British had moved on yet again, and there was no one to receive the prisoners. When he eventually received Yilibu’s letter, Major-General Gough wrote back that he and his plenipotentiary would discuss only the conditions stipulated in the letters already submitted, with the emperor’s own plenipotentiaries. As soon as he read this reply, Yilibu probably panicked: what conditions, what letters was Gough referring to? Who had them: the emperor? Qishan? And what was a plenipotentiary? The emperor of China was the Son of Heaven – he could not invest his celestial powers in someone else.14 Even sicklier and more exhausted than he had been a month before, Yilibu simply dispatched the prisoners to the base-camp that the British were keeping a little north of Shanghai, along with financial compensation for their ordeal (fifteen dollars for each Indian soldier, thirty for each native British) and the following vague communication: ‘Everything you mention can be easily settled; once we have a protocol for arranging the overall discussions, we will memorialize the emperor and set down some rules.’15 Back in 1839, British politicians and merchants had argued that Qing pomposity and inflexibility had forced them to the battlefield. Two years of war had illuminated the chaotic realities of Qing diplomacy, with the highest-ranking servants of the dynasty scrabbling to offer the British vague, informal quick fixes, as they lied shamelessly to their emperor.
Meanwhile, Qiying misled the emperor with fraudulent reports about how ‘grateful’ and ‘submissive’ the foreigners were: ‘they only want to trade . . . With the flames of rebellion raging,’ he wrote of the fall of Zhapu, ‘we find ourselves between the twin difficulties of attacking and defending and do not dare lightly exterminate them . . . we can only try and maintain calm, and use all our efforts to find an opportunity to handle things.’16 Qiying’s clever attempts at disinformation were, it turned out, futile. Around 26 May, the emperor received full details of what had happened at Zhapu and instructed Qiying to return to the Loose Rein. Daoguang’s shocked bewilderment on hearing about the Banner massacre was obvious: ‘You mentioned’, he asked Qiying, ‘that [one of your officers] reported that the foreigners don’t want war, they only want trade . . . Tell me the truth.’17 To Yijing, he wrote: ‘You reported you were just waiting for an opportunity to exterminate them . . . Have you really got a grip on the situation?’18
In mid-June, the British replied to Yilibu’s request that they withdraw troops with a note congratulating him on his promotion (‘we had understood he was strangled’, a surprised Pottinger mused in a dispatch to the foreign secretary) but reminding him that ‘there will be no stop to the war until a Plenipotentiary is nominated.’19 Qiying tried to bluff his way through the difficulty, claiming that he was, indeed, plenipotentiary. ‘If we do not treat one another with sincerity,’ he added brazenly, ‘we shall certainly meet with the
punishments of Heaven.’20 Pottinger refused to believe him until he produced further credentials. While Yilibu continued with his fuzzy moral reproaches (by acting thus, he scolded the British, they ‘must incur the wrath of supreme heaven, and must range their names with ill odor on the page of history’), Qiying tried to persuade the emperor to invest him and Yilibu with the required authority.21 ‘If the foreigners are willing to withdraw their soldiers, earnestly ask for trade and beg again to meet with Yilibu and myself, I wish to agree to their request.’ ‘Impossible’, scrawled the unreasonable vermilion brush through June and July, having changed its mind yet again about the possibility of military victory. ‘The recipients of this letter must only exterminate, without wavering.’22 ‘The celestial mind’, as Qiying remarked to Yilibu around this time, ‘has a great tendency to change.’23 (To the emperor himself, Qiying wrote that his ‘heart was almost broken’ with the emotion of feeling the emperor’s trust in him.24)
On 27 July, however, the news of the massacre at Zhenjiang reached Daoguang, along with an almost hysterical memorial from Niu Jian, in Nanjing. ‘The emergency is inexpressibly serious, please think of something quickly to save us all!’25 And just like that, Daoguang conceded the whole idea of plenipotentiary power: ‘Act as circumstances require’, he wrote back to Qiying. ‘Sort things out quickly and expediently – do not waver.’26 He at least remembered to put the authorization in the fastest post. It reached Qiying on 1 August – three days before the first British ship anchored just outside Nanjing.
So Qiying and Yilibu could do as they liked – they were ‘act-as-circumstances-require’ plenipotentiaries. And the emperor’s men decided to use their freedom to the full – for, knowing Daoguang as they did, how long would it last?
The first thing they did – without informing the emperor, of course – was to put the negotiations in the hands of someone completely uncommissioned: a household aide of Yilibu’s called Zhang Xi.
This was an individual of such obscurity that we have almost no sources on him beyond an unreliable biography (that claims he was seven feet tall and very handsome) pinned onto the end of the detailed diary that he wrote describing his role in the Nanjing negotiations, and a scattering of comments from British participants and observers (some of which contradict his diary and biography). Zhang Xi, in short, was a stock figure of the late-Qing landscape: one of the millions of Chinese men who had failed to pass the civil-service examinations but who managed to scrape a living as advisers to legitimate employees of the state. While administrative budgets failed to keep up with population rise, those lucky enough to land official postings had no choice but to hire (by using their own salaries, or by creating new taxes) personal secretaries or local enforcers. Zhang Xi’s own career rose and fell with that of his master, Yilibu, whom he had followed faithfully for years – even into exile in Zhangjiakou – while fainter-hearted hangers-on had abandoned him.
Back in Beijing in early April, Yilibu had asked Zhang Xi to come with him to the south-east, to help bring the war to an end. This, however, was a test of loyalty too far, and Zhang Xi pleaded ill health. ‘A sudden fever took hold of me and my old illness broke out again.’ Taking to his bed, he claimed he was unable to get up – and certainly not well enough to face the ‘cold winds’ of Zhejiang’s mild spring and roasting summer.27 But eventually, Yilibu’s urgings became too pressing: ‘You must have long recovered from your illness’, he begged in May. ‘You must not hesitate or delay . . . Don’t disappoint my earnest expectation!’28
On 13 July, Zhang Xi left the north for the south-east. On 5 August, his journey slowed by bandits, refugees and British blockades, he at last caught up with the two imperial agents, Qiying and Yilibu, at Wuxi, a few dozen miles from Nanjing. Yilibu had barely had time to dash off a poem of joy at being reunited with his beloved aide, when bad news came in: ‘a large number of ships containing disobedient foreigners have reached Nanjing and have decided to bombard the city on August 7.’29 Yilibu and Qiying made a quick decision to send the exhausted Zhang Xi ahead through the night, to persuade the British to hold their fire. After pulling on a convincing costume – a robe of silk gauze and a hat of Qing office, crowned by a button that indicated high official rank – Zhang Xi travelled by boat, by horse and, for the last thirty miles, on foot, to arrive just in time: on 7 August.
With a fine display of diplomatic sangfroid, Zhang Xi flipped through a calendar and told the city’s harried governors that they had nothing to worry about: the British would not fire today – it was a Sunday. ‘I dare not tell a lie,’ Zhang Xi replied, when Niu Jian quizzed him as to whether this was reliably correct.30 (It was in fact a Monday.) In reality, the British did not deliver their promised attack that day because they were still waiting for the rest of the fleet to arrive. As they prepared themselves, the British were also skilfully delayed by a time-consuming stream of civil servants: white-buttoned and brass-buttoned officials, bearing letters offering vague promises to negotiate and insultingly small ransoms, sweetmeats, fresh tea and pieces of silk. Although none of this would deflect the British from their intended course of action, receiving and processing these communications at least bought the Qing a little time.
Yilibu – without Qiying – staggered into the city the following day, suffering badly from heatstroke. Almost his first act was to send Zhang Xi onto Pottinger’s ship, the Cornwallis, with another letter. He was given a respectful reception by Pottinger, his omnicompetent Chief of Secret Police, Karl Gützlaff, and two other senior interpreters. It was all very simple, said one of the translators, John Morrison. ‘If you can act according to our public notice and our repeated communications, then the matter may be concluded.’31 Here, the discussion hit an impasse – for Zhang Xi (unsurprisingly, as he had only joined the campaign the previous day, and neither Yilibu nor Qiying had bothered to brief him before they sent him off to the front line) did not actually know what was in these documents. Fortunately, he was willing to admit this and the British, ever-patient, explained again what they wanted: a ransom for the city, indemnities for the opium and the war, the opening of ports, and so on.
At this moment, Zhang Xi’s negotiating style began to verge on the undiplomatic. Hearing for the first time what the British required for peace, he ‘felt a hundred turmoils in his stomach . . . If I were given the seal of a great general,’ he informed his nonplussed interlocutors, ‘I should, first of all, arrest you, cut your bodies into ten thousand pieces, grind your bones, and spread the ashes as revenge for the victims – the soldiers and the people – in order to quench the anger of the whole empire.’32 He then spat (several times) and went red in the face, further re-emphasizing his point by beating the desk, spitting on the deck again and denouncing his interlocutors some more.33 The sepoy bodyguard outside the cabin now barred the door with their swords, blocking Zhang Xi from his escort of four other officials.
As dusk approached, Zhang Xi at last took his leave. The British said they would temporarily delay the bombardment of Nanjing, in exchange for three million dollars (ten times the sum originally offered by Niu Jian). On returning to Yilibu that evening, Zhang Xi seems to have completely forgotten his original brief – to negotiate for peace – and decided instead that more war was in order. ‘We should appease the foreigners with negotiations,’ he argued, ‘while preparing stealth attacks.’ He then outlined a detailed strategy for annihilating the British with fireboats (the same fireboats that had failed in at least half a dozen other key engagements), a strategy that, he revealed, he had also explained in depth to Pottinger (who immediately took extra precautions to guard against such an attack). Finally, he burst into tears.34 Niu Jian was unconvinced: ‘Let’s not play with the tiger’s beard’, he observed.35
The British continued landing their troops; they aimed four howitzers (the weapon that, after three rounds, had done such awful work on the Sichuanese at the battle of Ningbo) at the city walls. Niu Jian went on claiming that Nanjing was far too poor to pay three million
dollars. At around midnight on 10 August, the British promised the attack would begin in the morning. After Qiying finally reached the city on 11 August, Yilibu quickly scrawled a note for Zhang Xi to deliver to the British: ‘All these conditions, about the cost of the opium, the opening of ports and diplomatic equality, can be settled.’36 An oral pledge, moreover, was made to pay the three million; a conference was promised for the following day.
On 12 August, Zhang Xi had his third meeting with the British, this time at a small temple just beyond the north-west corner of the city walls. Again, the British laid out their demands; Yilibu and Qiying were to respond within twenty-four hours, and produce the official documents confirming their status as plenipotentiaries. So as to avoid any further confusion, the British translators carefully wrote down their terms.
When the meeting drew to an end at around seven in the evening, Zhang Xi returned to report back to Qiying, Yilibu and Niu Jian inside the city, who were busy making themselves comfortable inside the Western Flowery Hall of the governor-general’s offices. ‘There’s no hurry,’ Qiying expansively told him, ‘let’s take our time.’ Zhang Xi must have given his superiors an outline of what the British wanted, but both his report and their response suggest a general lack of focus from all four men. Zhang’s diary rejoices over the fact that – through, he claimed, his personal skill and charm – he had succeeded in bargaining the total indemnity down from 30 to 21 million dollars (British sources corroborate no such bargaining process). But the finer points – indeed, all the treaty’s other clauses (Hong Kong, the amnestying of Chinese who collaborated with the British, the setting of regular transit duties, the opening of five treaty ports and consular rights within those ports) – Zhang Xi seems to have largely ignored. In his diary, he gave far more space to describing the brass incense braziers in the temple at which they had met than to inscribing the actual terms of the treaty (which he did not even note down in full). Qiying and Yilibu seemed even less interested in what had transpired: ‘they did not look at the demands,’ Zhang Xi told his diary, ‘but immediately ordered them to be sent to their subordinates, who themselves quickly put them aside.’ With the ceasefire agreed, both the emperor’s representatives had great difficulty in taking the matter at all seriously. Yilibu, Zhang Xi remembered, ‘became very relaxed. He kindly instructed me just to clear up with them the future customs duties and forbid any more merchants’ debts, but definitely not to promise an ounce of silver in compensation, and I should not even discuss with them the issue of examining the imperial edict [authorizing Yilibu and Qiying as plenipotentiaries] or of stamping anything with the imperial seal.’ In other words, Zhang Xi was to fob them off with a couple of minor, unratified concessions. His verdict delivered, Yilibu then closed his eyes.37