The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  On 29 December 1857, Canton was shelled into submission while its wooden and thatched roofs crackled into flames – an occurrence that The Times reported (with ‘great satisfaction’) as being ‘singularly well planned and wholly successful’, while sighing at the ‘obstinate determination’ of the Chinese, which had left the Allied commanders only the ‘painful alternative of attacking Canton.’72 The Chinese suffered around 450 casualties, to some 130 British and French.73 Resistance was severely hobbled by domestic uprisings in nearby Guangxi province, where government forces were battling for survival (back in autumn 1856, rebels had shattered seventy Qing warships). Governor Ye did not dare transfer reinforcements to Canton, for fear of jeopardizing Qing prospects in the ongoing civil war.74 On 5 January 1858, British redcoats and French bluejackets entered ‘the virgin city’ (Cooke’s vulgar phrase) along the Avenue of Benevolence and Love, and occupied all government buildings (including a Tartar palace carpeted with bat dung).75 Harry Parkes took personal pleasure in hunting down his old enemy, the governor, through the narrow streets of the city: ‘Ye was my game’.76 Eventually, his prey was sniffed out: ‘a very fat man contemplating the achievement of getting over the wall at the extreme rear of the yamun’, Cooke reported. A captain on hand ‘took the fat gentleman round the waist, and the coxswain twisted the august tail of the imperial commissioner round his fist.’77 In breach of diplomatic protocol, within a month Ye was shipped off to exile in India (where he died, of sickness and ennui, a year later). Perhaps his worst punishment was to be forced to travel in the company of Cooke, who delighted readers back home with his mocking descriptions of the fallen governor (of his scrawny queue, inferior to the tail of ‘the smallest porker in China’, of his ‘simial expression’, of his tar-black teeth). Worse still, Cooke went on, ‘he spits, he smokes, he eructates, and he blows his nose with his fingers.’78 With Canton’s top official in British captivity, the city quickly subsided into anarchy (the British protested throughout that the French were much worse plunderers than they were, with the Chinese the worst of all). At the end of it all, Parkes (a man who fervently wished to be ‘free at least of Chinese, language and people, of both of which I am heartily sick’) was left warlord governor of the place.79

  That May, the Anglo-French fleet sailed north, destroyed the forts that controlled access to Beijing and humiliated the Qing negotiators into agreeing to the Treaty of Tianjin, securing Palmerston’s demands for treaty revision. But when Lord Elgin’s brother, Frederick Bruce, returned in June 1859 to ratify the document at Beijing, the Qing government tried to prevent his entry to the capital by blocking the riverway up from Tianjin. Bruce responded by opening fire on the forts south of Beijing. To the obvious shock of the British and French, the Qing fired back with focused accuracy (proving their willingness to study Western battle tactics): 519 British sailors and soldiers died, 456 were wounded. The carnage was particularly bad among the infantry landing parties, who sank clumsily into pits dug into the riverbank that fronted the forts, then were easily picked off (‘potted like crows’) by Qing snipers. ‘I never saw nor could have dreamt of such a smash’, one participant wrote, describing survivors missing arms and legs, while corpses left strewn over the bank were beheaded by Qing soldiers. ‘Our loss is awful.’80 ‘We must strike a signal blow,’ a letter to The Times dictated, ‘and amply revenge our slaughtered countrymen, who have fallen by one of the most deliberate acts of treachery that history affords. Let us by all means, and without loss of time, prepare and despatch an expedition . . . to recover our dimmed prestige and teach these vain barbarians that they have grievously misapprehended the power of the [British] nation . . . the name of European will hereafter be a passport of fear, if it cannot be of love, throughout their land.’81 It was time to send Elgin back to complete the job.

  The China station was a posting that Elgin had not relished from the start. Britain’s policy as a whole he pronounced ‘stupid’; the pretext of the seizure of the Arrow ‘wretched . . . embarrassing . . . a scandal.’82 ‘Can I do anything’, he wondered, on reading of the Indian Mutiny, ‘to prevent England from calling down on herself God’s curse for brutalities committed on another feeble Oriental race? Or are all my exertions to result only in the extension of the area over which Englishmen are to exhibit how hollow and superficial are both their civilisation and their Christianity?’83 In 1858, he was unable to ‘reconcile to my sense of right’ Palmerston’s orders to legalize opium. ‘Though I have been forced to act almost brutally I am China’s friend in almost all this’, he told his diary.84 ‘Lord Elgin’, Harry Parkes revealingly concluded, ‘I do not consider a great man’.85 And now Elgin found himself wrested from the quiet job of Postmaster-General that he had been given in 1859 and sent back to China, with Palmerston urging him to attack and occupy Beijing. ‘The general notion’, Elgin disagreed, ‘is that if we use the bludgeon freely enough we can do anything in China. I hold the opposite view.’86 Within another year, however, the China war had desensitized him into committing what would become, in late-twentieth-century China’s public-history industry, one of the flagship acts of imperialist aggression against China.

  The war – in its closing months – was one of the first to be recorded in photographs, by an Italian photographer of fortune, Felix Beato, fresh from capturing on film the killing fields of the Indian Mutiny. His extraordinary visual account begins in spring 1860 with the fleet massing off Hong Kong, its coastline fringed with pompous neo-classical government buildings and the palaces of opium princes.87 After a slow journey north, on 14 August, a vengeful assault on the Tianjin forts commenced, in which Anglo-French guns pounded Qing soldiers until the ground outside was strewn with Qing dead and wounded. ‘Every man had done the duty expected of him by his country’, vindicating ‘the tarnished honour of our arms’, commented one of the expedition’s translators, Robert Swinhoe.88 An expert natural historian, Swinhoe would distinguish (before his death aged forty-one) new species of petrel and pheasant (both of which would be named after him). Surveying the corpses of fallen Qing soldiers at the end of the day’s work, however, he found ‘all were alike ugly, with thick yellow skins; all alike dirty and odiferous.’89 As the dying groaned in agony, an ecstatic Beato fussed about the carnage, pronouncing it ‘beautiful’ and insisting none of the corpses should be moved until he had captured them for posterity: strewn about the siege ladders and wooden posts of the forts, their heads lolling from dislocated necks.90 ‘I am very cheerful and with good reason’, rejoiced Harry Parkes in a letter home (for Elgin had taken him along too, for his China expertise). ‘We lost 201 men in killed and wounded . . . The enemy must have lost 1200 or probably 1500.’91

  Felix Beato’s 1860 photographs of the Anglo-French fleet at Hong Kong and of dead Qing soldiers in the forts near Beijing.

  In the month that it took to arrange talks, the Qing decided to fight back with short-sighted duplicity: by kidnapping the thirty-strong negotiating party led by Parkes, then interrogating them (under torture) in Beijing’s Board of Punishments. This provided yet more evidence of ‘notorious Chinese treachery’, of ‘passive and mulish obstructiveness’, of ‘obstinate pride’.92 The reluctant Elgin now had no reason to hold back from appropriately instructive punishment: ‘the moral influence of our nation’, observed one member of the expedition, ‘is the mainstay upon which individuals ever must depend for protection.’93 Winter was closing in; the Chinese empire had to be taught a short, sharp, painful lesson. Between late September and early October, British and French fought their way, through sand-dusted fields, cabbage gardens, woods, villages, imperial tombs and two garrisoned citadels, to the northern rim of Beijing. By this point, the armies were properly heartless: on their approach, they encountered a funeral procession led by a filial son taking his father’s body back to the ancestral village. The coffin was thrown into a ditch, the mules confiscated.94 As Beijing – its thick, high walls periodically interrupted by tiered gatehouses or overshadowed by the minarets of p
alaces – rose into view, British officers would have been portentously aware that they were the first Britons to reach the capital of the empire since the last, failed British embassy of 1816–17 (when the British ambassador had been expelled for refusing to kowtow to the emperor); and how circumstances had changed since then.

  On 7 October, French forces (with the British only a little way behind) reached the emperor’s beloved European-inspired Summer Palace (the Yuanmingyuan): some thirty-seven acres of pavilions, bridges, gardens and temples extending across the north-west of the city. There, after a brief engagement with twenty badly armed eunuchs, the gates were flung open, ‘disclosing the sacred precincts of his Majesty’s residence, to what a Chinaman would call the sacrilegious gaze of the barbarians.’95 A treasure-house lay before the French army: ‘a mine of wealth and of everything curious’.96 The men of war, English observers remarked indulgently, behaved like ‘grown-up schoolboys’, ‘suddenly told to take what they like in a pastry-cook’s shop.’97 Soldiers began running around in a temporary delirium of indiscriminate looting; objects too heavy to be removed were simply destroyed. The camp was a sea of the empire’s best silks, with army cross-dressers dancing around in the gorgeous embroidered gowns of the emperor’s concubines. Officers struggled in vain to rein in their rank and file; not even a dozen from each company responded to orders to ‘fall in’.98 ‘My loot,’ remembered one typically destructive colonel,

  and I really thought I was in for a good thing, was a large silver stork, quite six feet high, and beautifully modelled. Having cut off his long neck and legs, and doubled up his wings by blows from a big stone, I and the men carried the mutilated body with much fatigue and difficulty down to my cart . . . On arriving at camp, I sent it at once to the regimental gunsmith, who was also a goldsmith, that he might give me an idea of how much I might expect for my booty. His report was that the stork I had taken so much trouble over was not pure silver and therefore valueless . . . As an experiment I cut a lump off one of the legs weighing a couple of pounds and threw it into the road. If it were of any value I knew it would have disappeared by morning. But when I went to look, although it had been moved, it was still lying in the road, so my hopes went down to zero . . . After this the legs were thrown out in the road, then the head and neck, and finally the whole body that I had brought with so much care to camp, but no one would take even a little bit of the feast as a gift.99

  Three days later, the soldiers forgot their madness and recovered their ranks, as they rearranged themselves into tidy lines before Beijing. But in the eyes of the pillagers, the sovereignty of the Qing would never quite recover from this desecration, as the imperial family’s most beloved treasures slipped, with deliberate, humiliating carelessness, through the hands of soldiers and officers and into private and public collections across Europe, after briefly resurfacing in auction catalogues as ‘curious altar ornaments’, ‘the Great Seal of State’, ‘a magnificent Incense Burner . . . used as a stove in the Emperor’s library’. Where they were put on public display, such as in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, they were proudly identified as originating ‘from the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China’.100 Revelling in the sacrilege of their actions, French and British soldiers had stood defiantly before the imperial throne, where ‘so many princes and ambassadors . . . had humbly prostrated themselves, according to the slave-like obeisance customary at the Chinese court’.101 Many eye-witnesses to the looting admitted the treasures were dazzling: ‘to depict all the splendours before our astonished eyes,’ wrote one Frenchman, ‘I should need to dissolve specimens of all known precious stones in liquid gold for ink, and to dip into it a diamond pen tipped with the fantasies of an oriental poet.’102 Others, however, tried their best to continue humiliating the Qing in writing: ‘there was nothing imposing in the tout ensemble’, recalled one Briton. ‘The artists and architects of China have failed to produce any great work’.103 (He still scooped up a throne cushion as a souvenir.)

  There was no more fight in the Qing – principally because they were simultaneously facing off a full-scale civil war triggered by widespread rural revolts. By the close of the 1850s, the Taiping Rebellion (from the deep south) and the Nian Rebellion (based in the east-central province of Anhui) had more or less taken control of the southern half of the empire and were threatening a northward push on the capital. Under pressure from both foreign invasion and domestic insurgents, the Xianfeng emperor had fled north of the Great Wall a full fortnight earlier and his brother, Prince Gong, had been left behind to tidy up the crisis. On 8 October, the prince had written to the British promising the return of the prisoners. Over the next few days, Parkes and nineteen European and sepoy soldiers were delivered back alive. The remaining hostages came back in coffins – they had been tortured to death, or had died from infected wounds in, one British officer observed, ‘the most flagrant disregard to all international law. There is truly no term in our language which so essentially describes the Chinese rulers as the word barbarian . . . The gloomiest page of history does not disclose any more melancholy tale than that told by one and all of those who returned.’104 All that was left now for the Anglo-French forces to do was to decide on what Parkes termed ‘exemplary punishment’ for the Qing dynasty.105

  On 18 October, ‘as expiation of the foul crime of which the Chinese government had been guilty’, what remained of the Summer Palace was burnt, ‘to mark by a solemn act of retribution the horror and indignation with which we were inspired by the perpetration of a great crime.’106 ‘The world around looked dark with shadow’, remembered one of the 5,000-odd British soldiers involved in the work. ‘When we first entered the gardens they reminded one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them upon the 19th October, leaving them a dreary waste of ruined nothings.’107 The ‘crackling and rushing noise’, remembered the naturalist Swinhoe, ‘was appalling . . . the sun shining through the masses of smoke gave a sickly hue to every plant and tree, and the red flame gleaming on the faces of the troops engaged made them appear like demons glorying in the destruction of what they could not replace.’108 But plenty of those in the Allied camp considered this reprisal gentle. ‘There are people’, the French plenipotentiary noted, ‘who would like to burn Peking and to torture every Chinese mandarin.’109

  The only photographic record of the Summer Palace was made by Felix Beato, who captured the Pavilion of the Spirit of Literature a handful of days before the palace’s precincts were burnt, its curlicued gables towering over the gardens in melancholy sepia. By the time the flames had subsided, only blackened gables and charred pine trunks remained. ‘It betokened to our minds a sad portent of this antiquated empire,’ recalled Swinhoe, ‘but . . . there is time yet for China to regenerate herself, and by cultivating friendly relations with foreign empires, learn [to] keep pace with the march of progress.’110 ‘A good work has been done’, concluded a British army chaplain.111 Two days later, that reluctant imperialist Lord Elgin – by this point, irascible with depression – was carried in a sedan chair borne ‘by sixteen Chinamen dressed in royal crimson liveries’ and accompanied by an army band playing ‘God Save the Queen’, to a treaty ratification ceremony. The new Treaty of Beijing quadrupled the indemnities agreed in 1858, as well as yielding everything for which politicians, merchants and missionaries had agitated between 1842 and 1856 – the right to establish an embassy in Beijing, freedom to travel, trade and work beyond the treaty ports, and the legalization of opium. To conclude the European triumph, Felix Beato strode forward to capture the agreement on film, while Prince Gong viewed the camera ‘in a state of terror, pale as death’.112

  Amid the smoke and triumph, it was easy to forget that this was a war – a world war, pitting Britain, France, and at times the United States and Russia against the Chinese empire – that was provoked (in contravention of international law) by a young British alpha male, exploited by a cantankerous monomaniac and waged by a melancholy plenipotentiary who thought i
t ‘wretched’.

  Not everyone lost sight of the murky background to these dazzling triumphs, though. And it was the guilt of those with longer historical memories that ushered in the next, strange phase of the Opium War’s afterlife.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE YELLOW PERIL

  In 1860, it still took a couple of months to reach Britain from China: time enough to think about what a person had seen and done there. For one such traveller, Henry Loch – former Bengal cavalryman, veteran of the Crimea, Cheshire Yeoman and private secretary to Lord Elgin – sailing into Dover on 27 December 1860, it was a triumphal progress. That September, Loch, alongside Harry Parkes, had been kidnapped, imprisoned and threatened with death by representatives of the Qing government – his experiences seemed to vindicate fully the need for force against the Chinese. As he travelled back, he was preceded and overtaken by dispatches that worked the country into a frenzy of anti-Chinese patriotism. According to the press, the fate of the hostages was ‘anxiously discussed in every circle’: the country was ‘agonised’ about this ‘sensitive and thrilling topic’, to read of Loch’s ‘ill usage at the hands of a cruel enemy who has not even the excuse of barbarism’.1 By the time Loch docked, carrying with him the ratified treaty – an event celebrated by a cannon salute in London – he was a national hero, welcomed back onto British soil by hearty cheers and the mayor, who told him that ‘the recital of his sufferings had excited the utmost sympathy and commiseration of his countrymen [but] that these sufferings had induced the vigorous measures that had resulted in a glorious peace.’