Nevertheless, Loong is an intriguing figure in the revolutionary pantheon and provides a link with the three most active Australian Chinese revolutionaries, Tse Yet Chong, known in Australia as John See, and two of his sons. Tse Yet Chong was born in Kaiping County, Kwangtung, in 1831 and settled in Sydney with his wife in the 1860s. He worked as a merchant for an import–export company called the Tai Yick (Taiyi) Firm at 39 Sussex Street.6
One of his sons, Tse Tsan Tai, published a memoir, The Chinese Republic: The Secret History of the Revolution, based primarily on extracts from his diaries for the years 1890–1911. The book strongly disputes Sun’s claims to have fathered the revolution and gives much of the credit to the author and his family. He says that Chinese secret societies in Australia were in touch with the Taiping rebels and, following their defeat, joined forces with a variety of revolutionary factions in Hong Kong and Canton. Chesney Duncan, a British newspaper editor who wrote a biography of Tse Tsan Tai, had no doubts about Tse’s place in revolutionary history. He called him ‘the Liberator of the Chinese people’.
Tse Tsan Tai, one of six children, was born in Sydney on 16 May 1872. The family moved to Grafton, where his father opened a general store and joined an anti-Manchu secret society founded by Loong Hung Pung. It was called ‘the Revolutionary and Independence Society of Australian Chinese’.7
Tse Tsan Tai attended Grafton High School and was a member of the Anglican Church. He was baptised James See on 1 November 1879 in Grafton’s Christ Church Cathedral by Bishop Greenway, son of the convict-architect Francis Greenway. The bishop was Tse’s godfather and Tse attributes his ‘strict moral rectitude and conduct in life’ to Greenway’s influence and his Grafton schooling.8
However, the revolutionary beliefs that were to bring him into contact with the exiled Taiping prince Hung Chun-fui and Sun Yat-sen himself were instilled at home. In his memoir, he says he was exposed from an early age to anti-Manchu thinking by his father who vowed to return to China and overthrow the Ching Dynasty.9
The most famous Australian Chinese of the period was another Cantonese, Quong Tart, who was born in 1850 at Hsinning in the Pearl River Delta. His father, a dealer in ornamental wares, had no intention of emigrating to Australia or anywhere else, but Quong was born with an unquenchable wanderlust. Although brought up to believe that every European was a ferocious, red-headed man-eater, he was determined to see the wider world, especially the Australian goldfields.
Quong was only nine years old when he was given permission to accompany his uncle who was taking a band of miners to Australia. The idea was that Quong would be trained as their interpreter. However, the little boy had made up his mind to try his luck as a prospector. In 1859, Percy Simpson leased the great alluvial area on the Braidwood goldfields of New South Wales known as Bell’s Paddock, where he employed hundreds of Chinese miners. Quong Tart accompanied Simpson around the claims as interpreter.10
Friction between Chinese and European miners in New South Wales and Victoria culminated in the riots at Lambing Flat in 1860–61 in which thousands of Chinese were driven off the diggings in the belief that they were guilty of everything from muddying the waterholes to driving down the value of labour to working on the Sabbath.
Both Victoria and New South Wales enacted laws to limit Chinese immigration in defiance of Article 5 of the 1860 Convention of Peking which stipulated that Chinese ‘choosing to take service in the British Colonies or other parts beyond the seas, are to be at perfect liberty to enter into engagements with British subjects for that purpose, and to ship themselves and their families in British vessels at the open ports of China’.11
When Quong Tart was old enough to swing a pick, he started work on the goldfields and found, in the words of his Australian wife Margaret, ‘it was all work and very little gold’. He lived in Thomas Forsyth’s store at Bell’s Creek and was adopted by the family of Percy Simpson whose wife Alice taught him English and converted him to Christianity.12
Quong’s Australian guardians encouraged him to acquire a share in some of the Braidwood gold claims and in 1872 the ‘Mining News’ section of the Sydney Morning Herald reported, ‘We hear that a very rich reef has been discovered at Bell’s Creek by Mr Quong Tart.’13 Two years later, it said with reference to gold seams in the same reef, ‘Some of these leaders, though narrow, are exceedingly rich: large returns have already been obtained from Quong Tart’s claim.’14
Just four months later on 30 July 1874, the revolutionary Loong Hung Pung died in Bathurst at the age of 43. ‘The deceased had been in business for many years,’ the Bathurst Times reported, ‘and, it is said, had accumulated a considerable sum of money. He was one of the most intelligent Chinamen that ever settled in the town and was altogether a man much respected among his brother celestials.’ Sadly, that respect didn’t extend to the town’s larrikin element, which turned up in force at the cemetery to witness ‘the strange ceremonies which prevail among the natives of the “flowery land” when burying their dead’. There followed ‘about as disgraceful a scene as perhaps ever occurred in a Christian community’.
The six Chinese pallbearers had to fight their way through ‘a body of ruffians who call themselves civilised men’ to reach the grave. After the coffin was lowered into the ground, a couple of Loong’s compatriots were almost pushed in after it. ‘The crowd seemed to forget all decency and went forward on to one end of the grave when the Chinamen, evidently disgusted as well as frightened, abandoned all attempts to conclude their service and hurried away from the spot. It was a pitiable spectacle to see the poor Heathens thus prevented by Christians from paying their last tribute of respect to the dead.’15
Such were the conflicting images of Australia that were relayed back to China. While a young man like Quong Tart might make his fortune with the help of an Australian family, it was also a place where the Chinese were badly treated and needed to be on their guard.
Australians and Chinese faced each other across a great cultural and political divide. Many of the images presented to either side were distorted by ignorance and prejudice. In China, the people believed they were racially and culturally superior to their uninvited and unwelcome guests. They were amazed at the barbarians’ sense of entitlement and their strange religious beliefs, which described Jesus Christ as the Son of God when it was known that the Son of Heaven resided in the Forbidden City. In a land of ancestor worship, it also seemed incomprehensible that the deceased could be burning in hellfire simply because they had failed to recognise Christ as their saviour.
The Nobel Prize-winning American novelist Pearl Buck, who was raised in China at the turn of the century, was as confused by the Virgin birth as the Chinese who ‘had no sympathy for Mary, and felt sorry for Joseph’, whom they regarded as a cuckold.
Li Hung-chang, the rising star of the Chinese diplomatic corps, admitted he found the belief in Jesus baffling. ‘Why, that man’s life was a failure, and he was actually crucified at the end of it,’ he told a British army officer. ‘Now, crucifixion is a very painful death, besides being a degrading form of punishment. How can you call yourselves followers of such a man?’16
Li looked up to no one: he was well over six feet tall, with long limbs, a drooping Manchu moustache, ‘very small, bright and scrutinising eyes’, and a brilliant academic mind. Born in 1823 in the province of Anhwei adjacent to Shanghai, he was China’s leading moderniser in everything except politics. His motive was to uphold the Ching Dynasty while getting fabulously wealthy himself.17 Li never hesitated to line his own pockets and the opportunity to do so on a grand scale came in 1870 when he was appointed viceroy of Chihli, the metropolitan or home province around Peking. As commissioner for the northern ports, he negotiated trade agreements with foreigners, particularly the Russians, who rewarded him handsomely.
Within the Confucian elite, Li became the prime mover of the ‘Self-Strengthening’ movement to restore the Ching Dynasty to it
s pre-barbarian glory. His strategy, as outlined in a memorial to the throne, was for China to bide her time, avoid war with the West and, with ‘extreme and continued caution’, build up her own armed forces for the final struggle. His first industrial venture in 1865 was to build the Kiangnan Arsenal upriver from Shanghai to provide the Chinese forces with arms and munitions. Seven years later, he founded the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, which soon had a fleet of 18 steamships with distinctive yellow-and-black funnels flying the Chinese flag out of Shanghai.18
In the Great Famine of 1878, the crops of Chihli, Shansi and Honan failed for the second year running; people stripped bark from the trees and, in extremis, ‘ate grass and one another’.19 Li arranged for grain from the south to be shipped north to the stricken provinces in his steamers.
While fighting the Taiping around Shanghai, Li had bought several blocks of land in Huashan Road, one of the main arteries for transporting soldiers from the Whangpoo to the front and members of his family were soon residing there in Western-style mansions. He also accumulated big interests in mining, banking and the new electric telegraph system. He opened the first cotton cloth mill in Shanghai, and at one time owned all of the city’s big stores and money-brokerage firms.20
Most Chinese, however, were slow to appreciate the gifts that the West was bestowing on them. The ‘fire-wheel carriage’, or railway engine, was the most monstrous of all foreign innovations.21 In 1876, Shen Pao-chen, the viceroy then ruling Shanghai for the Manchu, purchased the first little 20-kilometre railway line opened by British merchants from Shanghai to Woosung and had the rails ripped up after the local people expressed violent opposition to the ‘iron dragon’ playing havoc with the feng shui (or geomancy) and disturbing the spirits of the ancestors. As Shen shrewdly explained to the emperor, if China were to control her own modernisation, the British must not be allowed to own even one Chinese railway line.22
When John Stanley James, a wandering scribe known as ‘The Vagabond’,23 landed at Shanghai after a 73-day voyage from Sydney in the collier brig Woodbine in 1881, he found that the West was indeed challenging traditional China. ‘A foreign settlement has been established at Shanghai; a new order of things has commenced in the Celestial Empire,’ he wrote. ‘The Indian opium-growers and traders have flourished. London and New York have a sure grip on Chinese commerce.’24
The ‘new order of things’ had forced the Chinese to allow foreign imports to flood the country, while the dour Ulsterman Robert Hart had turned the Imperial Maritime Customs Service – the Ching’s main source of revenue – into a powerful instrument of foreign domination.25
John James was an extraordinary character who had exposed social injustice in Australia in a series of articles in The Argus and Sydney Morning Herald after living as an undercover reporter in migrant hostels, visiting the goldfields and even getting a job inside Pentridge Jail.
He had been in Shanghai just a few days and was enjoying the hospitality of the New York-born Dutchman DeWitt Clinton Jansen, mine host of the sprawling Astor House Hotel which occupied an entire block across Garden Bridge in Hongkew, when he noted more pleasing Western influences:
There is nothing ‘shoddy’ here. There have been no such sudden jumps as from bush shanties, from rough-and-ready station life, to Darling Point or St Kilda – from calico dresses, mutton and damper to Government House garden parties, diamonds and fine linen. Shanghai ladies dress most elegantly, and with exquisite taste. As one sees them go rolling by in their close broughams on the Bund, or Bubbling Well Road, of an afternoon, not New York, Paris or London can turn out better-dressed or more refined looking women.
One night James went in search of the kind of Chinese depravity that figured prominently in the minds of Western fiction writers and the sermons of evangelical missionaries. Armed with a revolver and accompanied by a Chinese guide, the intrepid reporter tracked down the opium trade, ‘one of the cornerstones of Shanghai’s prosperity’, to a bazaar in the walled Chinese city where men lounged around in small cubicles smoking the drug, some singly, some in couples, others in parties.
‘“Look, Chinee woman,” said the guide. Well, it is true we did see Chinese women, but not one smoking,’ James writes. ‘They were merely accompanying their husbands, in some cases having their children with them, and partaking of tea and confections, while the lord of their bosom soothed his soul with opium.’26
Upstairs, James went through long galleries where men came ‘to take a smoke as a refresher, the same as we go into a hotel for a brandy and soda’. He reached the conclusion that the majority of smokers ‘did not take opium to an injurious extent, but that it is a habit which may become a vice like drinking’. He came away ‘amused that the text for a moral lesson on Chinese depravity should have so lamentably fizzled out’.27
Manchu justice was an entirely different matter. James discovered that civil and criminal cases among the 300,000 Chinese citizens living or working in the International Settlement were settled with medieval ferocity at what was called ‘the Mixed Court’. This judicial hybrid had been set up in 1864 by a man who had personal experience of Manchu methods – Sir Harry Parkes – and would later become the source of serious trouble between foreigners and their reluctant hosts. Beneath the baking hot tin roof of an unpretentious redbrick building on Chekiang Road, a Chinese magistrate officiated with the assistance of a Chinese-speaking European consular official acting as ‘assessor’.28
The court could impose prison sentences up to 20 years and order up to one thousand strokes with a thin bamboo rod for men and up to 50 blows with a leather strap for women. Prisoners found guilty of capital offences were sent to the city magistrate for sentence, usually decapitation by sword. The most horrendous punishment – not abandoned until 1905 – was ‘death by slicing’, known as lingchi or ‘the death of a thousand cuts’, so precise that it requires no further description.
At the Mixed Court, Chinese policemen, plaintiffs, witnesses and prisoners milled around, while court officials called ‘runners’ served the magistrate with cups of tea, relit his water-pipe, browbeat witnesses and did deals with the prisoners’ families and friends for preferential treatment.29
Some of the accused were caged in wooden pens on either side of a dirty passage, ‘cooped up like fowls’ in John James’s words, with kangs – large square wooden collars – padlocked around their necks like a pillory.30 The weight of the kang depended on how well the runners had been bribed by the prisoner’s family – the wood might be quite light but could also be heavy enough to strangle him unless supported with both hands. Strips of paper were posted across the kang from back to front listing the prisoner’s offence.
Male defendants accused of petty thieving were tied together by their queues, each carrying the article he was alleged to have stolen.31 Throughout the proceedings, they knelt on the bare wooden floor in front of a hostile mob. If found guilty, the prisoner was placed in a kang and forced to walk up and down for several hours every day at the scene of his crime, plagued by flies in summer and icy winds in winter.
At night such prisoners – with the kangs still around their necks – were corralled behind bamboo bars at the city jail, dependent on relatives or friends for food and any extra comforts. Their wild, unkempt appearance as they crouched together for the night in their filthy, foul-smelling cage reminded one visitor of ‘a den of wild animals’.32
The image of the devious, corrupt and barbaric Oriental was further inflamed in the Western mind by stories of infanticide, foot-binding, castration, teeth-filing and the mui tsai enslavement of young girls. The Australian journalist Dr George Ernest Morrison admits in his classic work An Australian in China that he went to China in February 1894 ‘possessed with the strong racial antipathy to the Chinese common to my countrymen’.33
Dressed in Chinese clothes with a pigtail attached to the inside of his hat, Morrison set off from Shanghai on an epic 2
400-kilometre voyage up the Yangtze as far as Chungking on his overland journey to Rangoon. He spoke no Chinese, had no interpreter or companion and was unarmed. His life depended on the good faith of the Chinese people (and the expertise of his Chinese boatmen to run the rapids in the great Yangtze gorges). Morrison’s experiences completely changed his mind: his antipathy towards the Chinese gave way to a feeling of ‘lively sympathy and gratitude’.
China was such a novelty that Australians who visited Shanghai invariably had their experiences recorded in the press back home. Dr Walter Roth, protector of Aboriginals in Queensland and former science master at Brisbane Grammar School, described the twisted paradox of East–West relations after making the obligatory visit to an opium house. On the first floor he found Chinese playing billiards and ten-pin bowling, while the upstairs tiers were devoted to opium-smoking lounges. ‘Here among the chattering crowds of men and women sweltering in the fumes of opium, many engaged in sipping less sensuous tea, were two Europeans, two “foreign devils” allowed to wander or to stay unmolested – two outcasts in the very midst of 500 of the elect,’ he wrote.
On my departure I could hardly refrain from wondering at the decorum exhibited throughout the building, as well as at the courtesy, forbearance and hospitality which these people extended to us: for the moment, reversing the conditions, I changed East for West, two Chinese among half-a-thousand Europeans, and alcohol in the place of opium – alas! the heathen by a long way had the advantage of the Christian.34
Outside the precincts of Shanghai city, Roth took drives to the Tea Gardens and the Bubbling Well (bubbling with marsh gas), and made a trip around the network of rivers, creeks and canals in a houseboat. On a raft in midstream, he watched a fisherman using cormorants to catch fish, ‘speaking to them like so many children, sending them into the water, and after they dive, despoiling them of the fish they have been trained to procure’.35
Shanghai Fury Page 4
