About the Book
‘The Ching Dynasty had been swept away and China’s great republican vision had become a reality. It was a unique situation: two Australians, George Ernest Morrison and William Henry Donald, had helped to topple a 2000-year-old empire and replace it with what would become the world’s biggest and most diverse republic.’
Shanghai Fury, published for the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Chinese Revolution, places Australian voices and Australian characters at the heart of China’s modern history.
No previous volume has covered the thrilling experiences of the many remarkable Australians caught up in the drama. George Morrison orchestrated the abdication of the Last Emperor, and therefore the end of the Ching Dynasty, while the Lithgow-born William Donald wrote the political manifesto of the first President of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-sen. And no group of Australians was closer to the crucible of revolution than the Australian–Chinese family of the Sydney-born revolutionary Tse Tsan Tai.
Spanning the century between the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Shanghai Fury: Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China provides a panoramic view of the revolution from its turbulent origins in the Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu Dynasty to its violent aftermath in the monumental battles between Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) and the Japanese armed forces.
As in the other two books in the ‘Fury Trilogy’, Pacific Fury and Anzac Fury, Peter Thompson combines personal memories with combat action to produce a gripping narrative of extraordinary power and depth.
Cover
About the book
Title
Dedication
Maps
Prologue: The Dragon’s Head
Part I (1842–1905): Chaos
1. Barbarians
2. Distorted Images
3. Mission Massacre
4. Silk and Steel
5. China Force
6. Lithgow Express
7. War and Marriage
Part II (1905–1925): Conflict
8. Mixed Emotions
9. Battle Stations
10. Revolution
11. The Sinking Sun
12. Perfidious Albion
13. Bitter Endings
Part III (1925–1938): Conflagration
14. Shanghai Fury
15. Yangtze Thunder
16. Donald’s Dilemma
17. Japan Strikes
18. Kidnap Crisis
19. Bloody Saturday
Part IV (1938–1949): Chains
20. Celestial Twilight
21. Goodbye Chungking
22. Betraying Australia
23. Behind Barbed Wire
24. Return to Shanghai
25. Mao’s Triumph
Epilogue: Better City, Better Life
Appendix 1: Dramatis Personae
Appendix 2: Chinese place names then and now
Appendix 3: Currency and measures
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Endnotes
Index of searchable terms
About the Author
Picture section
Copyright notice
More at Random House Australia
For Robert Macklin
It’s 6 pm at M on The Bund, Shanghai’s famous Australian restaurant. The heat of the day has passed and dozens of diners have gathered on the rooftop terrace to watch the spectacular riverfront panorama unfold in the soft evening light.
There are few greater architectural contrasts than that between the geometric modernity of Pudong (formerly Pootung) across the river and the classical beauty of The Bund, remnants of a colonial era when the West held sway over the East for 100 years.
There could be no better place to begin a story about Australians in China than here. M’s founder Michelle Garnaut is from Melbourne and its corn-fed beef and the maitre d’ are from Queensland. Yet it’s doubtful if many of the Australians who patronise M are aware of other extraordinary Australian connections surrounding them.
Down below on the banks of the Whangpoo (now the Huangpu) River, George Morrison came ashore in 1894 as a 32-year-old traveller to take his first steps into Chinese history. It was here ten years later that his fellow journalist and friend W. H. Donald landed on his way to the Russo-Japanese War and returned with his wife and daughter in 1911 to take part in the Chinese Revolution later that year. Morrison orchestrated the abdication of the Last Emperor, while Donald wrote the political manifesto of Sun Yat-sen, first president of the Chinese Republic.
And it was from The Bund during the ensuing Chinese civil war that Basil Riley, son of the Archbishop of Perth, set off on his journey up the Yangtze, only to die at the hands of the troops of General Feng Yu-hsiang, the so-called ‘Christian General’.
To the left of the M vantage point is the old Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank building, the Honkers & Shankers, where Gordon Bowden had his office as Australian trade commissioner. Slightly closer to Nanking Road is the rooftop of the North-China Daily News building where Bowden and his six-year-old son Ivor watched the Chinese district of Chapei burning during the Japanese invasion of 1932.
From that same rooftop five years later William Arthur ‘Buzz’ Farmer saw the carnage of Bloody Saturday when a bomb exploded between the Cathay and Palace hotels at the intersection of Nanking Road and The Bund, killing hundreds of people at the start of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), known in China as ‘the War of Resistance’.
To the right of M is Frenchtown and the Chinese district of Nantao where Harold John Timperley helped Father Jacquinot de Besange, a heroic French priest, set up a ‘safety zone’ that rescued thousands of Chinese refugees from the fighting. Just around the corner is the wireless and cable office where Timperley filed his reports on the Rape of Nanking when a similar safety zone failed to save thousands of lives.
And it was in Room 106 of the Palace Hotel that the treacherous trio of collaborators – Alan Willoughby Raymond, Wynette Cecilia McDonald and John Joseph Holland – launched the renegade Independent Australia League in 1942. At the fall of Singapore, when 14,000 members of the 2nd AIF were taken prisoner, Wynette McDonald drove down The Bund in an open-top car with a Japanese officer to celebrate the Japanese victory.
Indeed, Shanghai is a city defined by war. It is the ‘dragon’s head of the Yangtze’, the starting point of a long and dangerous journey from China’s imperial past to its astonishing present, a journey that culminates on 10 October 2011 in the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution.
The Xinhai, or Double Tenth, Revolution of 1911 – hailed by Lenin as the ‘awakening of Asia’ – created the first democratic republic in North Asia and triggered other movements for reform and self-determination in the region. All too quickly, though, the hopes of Sun Yat-sen and his fellow revolution- aries were destroyed by the warlord regime of President Yuan Shi-kai.
Then in 1927 the Nationalists conquered South China, butchered thousands of Communists in Shanghai – birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party – and established a party-republic under the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi). The final phase of the revolutionary movement took place in 1949 when the Communists recaptured Shanghai and unified mainland China in the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong).
Mao’s triumph heralded three decades of disastrous economic and political repression, which effectively sealed China off from the Western world. Only aft
er the Great Helmsman’s death in 1976 and the subsequent fall of the Gang of Four did Deng Xiaoping rise to the party leadership and begin the process of opening up the Chinese economy.
In the mid-1980s, his ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ gave free rein to the commercial and entrepreneurial instincts of his compatriots. The Bamboo Curtain was pushed aside and the sleeping giant awoke with a roar that echoed around the world.
In August 2010, China eclipsed Japan as the world’s second largest economy. At the current rate of growth, she will pass the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2020. The importance to Australia’s continuing prosperity through trade is self-evident.
The Bund, once the symbol of Britain’s dominion over the Yangtze Valley, is a now a multi-lane highway called Zhongshan No. 1 Road East. Along its elegant curves the designer logos of Cartier, Zegna and Dolce & Gabbana have replaced angry Maoist wall posters denouncing American imperialism, while in the chocolate-and-white art deco Palace Hotel time now moves to an Omega beat.
The story of Australia in China is a thrilling one, peopled by many fascinating characters and packed with exciting events. And it begins right here.
Defying nature, the Yangtze flows 6380 kilometres from the mountains of Tibet, through the precipitous Three Gorges and across the rice-growing heartlands of central China to the rich delta plains around the most fabulous city to which it has given birth: Shanghai.
Known to the Chinese as ‘the Chang’, the Yangtze’s watershed covers roughly half of China and includes almost half of her population. By rights, the terrain should take the river south-east to join the Mekong in Vietnam. Instead, it seeks out paths that head from west to east until it reaches the East China Sea.1 To yang guizi (‘foreign devils’ in Mandarin), the river seemed as perverse as the people of the Middle Kingdom.[1]
In his ‘Three Principles of the People’ (nationalism, democracy, socialism),2 Sun Yat-sen – the man revered in China today as ‘the Great Forerunner of the Chinese democratic revolution’ – likened the republican struggle in China in the first part of the 20th century to the twists and turns of the Yangtze, ‘sometimes to the north and sometimes to the south but in the end flows eastward and nothing can stop it. Just so the life of mankind has flowed from theocracy to autocracy and from autocracy now on to democracy and there is no way to stem the current.’
From the beginning, the Yangtze was the source of plenty and the maker of wild destruction as it traversed a dozen Chinese provinces. And in the twilight years of the Ching Dynasty it was the wealth of the Chinese interior that a grasping, colonising Britain sought to plunder in the first half of the 19th century. In August 1842, Sir Henry Pottinger, on the orders of the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston and at the urging of the Scottish opium dealer William Jardine, sailed up the Yangtze with a fleet of Royal Navy warships (including the first steam-driven vessels) on the Victorian version of a trade mission.
Ten years earlier Hugh Lindsay of the East India Company had slipped into Shanghai and counted 400 junks entering the port each week in the middle of summer. ‘The advantages which foreigners would derive from the liberty of trade with this place are incalculable,’ he wrote in his report to the British Government. ‘It is the seaport of the Yangtze River and the principal emporium of eastern Asia.’3
The Industrial Revolution had created huge demand among the newly emergent urban middle class in Britain for Chinese tea, silk, willow-pattern china, porcelain and other examples of chinoiserie. As a result, Britain had led the foreign pack in forcing the Chinese Government to permit the establishment of trading houses, or hongs, at Canton on the Pearl River just north of Hong Kong Island.4 Rather than pay the Chinese in their preferred currency – the Mexican silver dollar – or indeed in any currency at all, the British insisted they exchange their products for Indian opium, the obnoxious ‘foreign mud’, which, although illegal in China, could easily be traded for goods or silver dollars through Chinese compradors (from the Portuguese compradores) acting as intermediaries with Chinese drug syndicates.
Among the opium dealers of the early 1800s was Walter Davidson, a Scots-born Australian colonist, grazier, merchant and banker. This well-connected son of an Aberdeenshire manse arrived in Sydney as a 20-year-old in 1805 to take up a grant of 2000 prime acres (809 hectares) adjacent to John Macarthur’s spread at Cowpastures between the Nepean and Georges rivers. Macarthur, the English-born soldier turned pastoralist, befriended the newcomer and they became involved in various commercial ventures.5
Hearing from his Scottish brethren of the immense fortunes to be made in the China trade, Davidson visited Canton in 1807 and saw the opium bonanza for himself. At that time, the East India Company was the biggest and most powerful of the drug traffickers. ‘The Company’, as it was known – and widely despised in Asia over its abuse of power as the virtual ruler of India – had the right to expel unauthorised British citizens from Canton. Davidson was refused permission to stay more than a few weeks.
He returned to Australia where he conceived a plan with Macarthur. On 26 January the following year, the Rum Rebellion ushered in Australia’s two-year period as a rebel republic. Davidson and Macarthur defied the orders of the deposed Governor William Bligh and sailed for London with the rebel leader Major George Johnston. There, Davidson consulted the trading house of Baring & Company about how he might join the Canton drug cartel.
By coincidence, the governors of the East India Company had just ordered their staff to stop trading in opium. Davidson was invited to go back to Canton and run the narcotics business as a separate entity on behalf of The Company. Money changed hands. When Davidson set sail for the Orient in 1811, he was no longer a British citizen but a naturalised Portuguese.
Armed with his naturalisation certificate, he landed at Canton and worked there as an agent for Barings until 1816 when he established his own trading house, W. S. Davidson & Company. As he liked to say, he was ‘Portuguese in Canton and British everywhere else’.6 Davidson imported opium and cotton from India and exported tea and silver in collusion with another British trader, Thomas Dent, who passed himself off as ‘the Sardinian consul’.7
‘We were agents for all sorts of Indian produce but 90 per cent was cotton and opium,’ Davidson told a House of Lords inquiry into the East India Company’s role in the opium trade. ‘The Company knew that I managed the opium trade. The arrangement was that every dollar I made from opium was mine and every dollar I made from cotton was theirs.’8
Meanwhile, the British Government, embarrassed by the East India Company’s iron grip on India and points east, stripped it of its monopoly of the China trade in 1834. Gleefully, American opium dealers who had been kept on the periphery sought to compete with Jardine Matheson, Dents and the other British hongs for a share of the drug market. Russell & Company of Boston soon became the third largest opium house in China thanks largely to the efforts of Warren Delano II, maternal grandfather of the future president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.9
The chance for Britain to seize Shanghai presented itself in 1839 when the Tao-kuang Emperor attempted to stamp out this insidious trade. ‘Opium poison flowed into China and I instructed the people three times not to use it,’ he wrote in an imperial edict. ‘The foreigners brought it and they traded at Canton, so I gave special orders to Lin Tse-hsu to manage the matter.’
Commissioner Lin arrived in Canton with a mandate to seize all stocks of opium in the foreigners’ 13 fortified ‘factories’ on the Pearl River waterfront. Over the next few months, he destroyed 20,000 chests containing 1.2 million kilograms of the drug, arrested 1700 Chinese opium dealers – and executed 400 of them – and confiscated 70,000 opium pipes.10
When Britain threatened military action, the Dragon Throne was assured by its military advisers there was nothing to fear: the United Kingdom was ‘merely a handful of stones owned by Holland in the Western Ocea
n’, the guns of barbarians’ warships were too elevated to cause much damage to Chinese property, and British soldiers were so tightly uniformed that when they fell over they could not get up again.11
Ancient matchlocks, however, proved no match for the self-firing rifles of British troops, while Britain’s armour-plated ships bombarded Chinese towns and destroyed China’s cumber- some war-junks. British gunners watched in amazement as the suicidal Chinese battle fleet sailed into range to the beating of drums and the clash of cymbals, some of its ships mysteriously propelled by huge wooden paddle-wheels.
Shanghai, an ancient walled city on a mud-coloured tributary 20 kilometres from the Yangtze’s estuary, fell to the British on 19 June 1842. For the next 100 years, the metropolis that would rise piecemeal out of the rich alluvial sludge would witness scenes of great drama and terrible sorrow.
Shanghai’s name means ‘on the sea’; indeed, it was a seaport until billions of tonnes of Yangtze sediment created a great swampy plain that extends eastwards for 16 kilometres to the East China Sea. At the confluence of the Yangtze and the Whangpoo, the island of Ching Ming, 60 kilometres in length, was built entirely by silt flowing through the river’s ‘nine bends of the intestine’.12
Shanghai had traded with Yangtze farmers, potters and weavers for two millennia, while its fishermen reaped a rich harvest from the salty waters of the Woosung and Whangpoo rivers. The Shanghainese lived peacefully, trading with Japanese junks that crossed the typhoon-tossed East China Sea. The city was far enough inland to be sheltered from the worst of the weather, while a high wall and a deep moat protected its citizens from the ravages of Japanese pirates.
Sir Henry Pottinger anchored his ships in the vast network of canals and waterways that fed the ricefields of the Yangtze Delta. The most important artery was the Grand Canal, a marvel of engineering that supplied most of Peking’s rice. By blocking this canal at its crossing point with the Yangtze at Chinkiang, Pottinger had his foot on the Ching Dynasty’s throat. He demanded an indemnity of three million silver dollars from Shanghainese merchants to move on. The money was scraped together and although most of the warships sailed upstream to Nanking, the blockade of the Grand Canal remained in place until the Chinese capitulated.
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