To prevent the birds from swallowing the catch, a small ring had been placed around each neck, making the cormorant the perfect metaphor for the Chinese people – squeezed by the Manchu on the one hand and strangled by the foreign devils on the other. Roth’s abiding memory of Shanghai was of the vivid contrast between the hard-working Chinese labourer and the European ‘who indulged in all those comforts, pleasures and luxuries which his means deny him in the old country’.
Roth had just returned to Australia when the First Sino-Japanese War, the most traumatic event in Asia of the latter half of the 19th century, erupted on the Korean Peninsula. The conflict would have immense consequences for every nation on the Pacific Rim, including Australia and New Zealand. It provided the first proof that Japan, under the Meiji Emperor and equipped with the most modern army and navy in Asia, had embarked on a ruthless expansionist course, one that would ultimately lead to the loss of millions of lives.36
The war also confirmed what the Confucian literati and a growing number of Chinese merchants and students already knew to be true: that their Manchu rulers, once a proud, warrior race, were now decadent, foolhardy and fallible. China’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese would deal a crushing blow to the nation’s amour propre. It would become one of the main driving forces behind the Chinese Revolution.37
The Hermit Kingdom of Korea had long been a Chinese vassal state but for many years Japan had persistently and deliberately challenged the Ching’s position. Despite the best efforts of Li Hung-chang and his protégé General Yuan Shi-kai to find a compromise, war broke out on 1 August 1894 after Japan sent an expeditionary force of 8000 troops to Korea to support a Japanese-inspired rebellion against the throne.
Viceroy Li was ordered by the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi to gather all of China’s forces together ‘to root the wujen [the ‘dwarves’, as the Manchu called the Japanese] out of their lairs’.1 The very size of the Chinese population – 350 million compared with Japan’s 46 million – should have ensured victory. There was a similar advantage in terms of men at arms: China’s standing army numbered one million, compared with Japan’s 270,000.
The Japanese, however, had invested wisely in the latest Western arms and warships, their army had been styled on the Prussian model and their navy on the Royal Navy, whereas the Chinese war machine was riddled with corruption at the highest levels. Members of Li Hung-chang’s own family had pocketed funds allocated to buying explosives and had packed shell casings with sand, while Tzu Hsi had reputedly spent the naval estimates reconstructing the Summer Palace.2 (With delicious irony, she built a marble houseboat as an entertainment pavilion. It remains there today.)
In the first battle of the war the Japanese routed a Chinese force of 3000 at the northern Korean city of Pyongyang. Two days later the Japanese Navy easily won the Battle of the Yalu on the Korean border with Manchuria. Chinese gunners found that sacks which should have contained gunpowder were full of rice and many of their cannon balls were made of wood and painted black to resemble the real thing. Japanese forces then crossed into Manchuria and attacked Li’s favourite defence project, the strategic warm-water anchorage of Port Arthur, which fell with surprising ease on 21 November.3
Discovering the heads of Japanese prisoners with their noses and ears cut off, the Japanese massacred Chinese troops and some 2000 civilians. ‘The defenceless and unarmed inhabitants were butchered in their houses and their bodies unspeakably mutilated,’ Canadian war correspondent James Creelman reported in the New York World. ‘There was an unrestrained reign of murder which continued for three days. The whole town was plundered with appalling atrocities.’4
Westerners in Peking and Shanghai speculated that China’s crumbling military supremacy might bring down the Ching Dynasty and lead to the creation of a new royal line, the House of Li Hung-chang. Since ‘the Great Li’, as he was called, was too old at 71 to assume the Dragon Throne and his only son was retarded, the most likely candidate for emperor was his nephew, the self-styled ‘Prince Li’.5
Tzu Hsi saw the danger and promptly made ‘The Great Li’ the scapegoat for the catastrophe that had befallen their country. He was stripped of his Yellow Jacket and dismissed from office.6 Nor was he permitted to retire gracefully. When the Japanese crossed the Yellow Sea in February 1895 and seized the important port of Weihaiwei on the Shantung Peninsula, Li was ordered to negotiate an ‘honourable’ settlement with the enemy. Tzu Hsi reasoned that, if necessary, he could be blamed not only for having lost the war but also for having lost the peace.
In the Treaty of Shimonoseki of April 1895 China ceded the island of Formosa, the key port of Kiaochow on the Shantung Peninsula and the even more important Port Arthur in Manchuria to Japan. In addition, she lost control of Korea and agreed to pay an indemnity of 230 million ounces of silver, six times the annual income of the Japanese Government at that time.7 The terms of the settlement would have been even harsher if Li Hung-chang had not been shot in the face by a Japanese fanatic while on his way to sign a draft of the treaty.
Even so, Japan’s triumph was short-lived. In a blatantly racist response, France, Germany and Russia – the Tripartite Powers – forced the Japanese to relinquish most of their gains, including the Shantung Peninsula, which was colonised by Germany to give the Kaiser ‘a place in the sun’, and the great prize of Port Arthur, which the Russian fleet forcibly occupied soon afterwards.
Despite the so-called Triple Intervention, the Japanese had gained the same privileges as Western powers in China, including the right to manufacture products in the treaty ports.8 Japanese immigrants swarmed into Shanghai and the district of Hongkew throbbed with the whirr and clatter of new Japanese-owned textile mills and factories producing goods with cheap Chinese labour. As a sign of the times, Hongkew was nicknamed ‘Little Tokyo’. The Japanese were now a major force in Shanghai life and were soon agitating for representation on the Municipal Council.
The most immediate effect of China’s humiliation in the Sino-Japanese War was the breakdown of law and order in many parts of the Celestial Empire, triggering outbreaks of violence against foreigners. The heaviest blows fell on missionaries who were spreading the Gospel in remote parts of the interior.
Between 1888 and 1900 a total of 81 missionaries – 41 men and 40 women – arrived in China from Australia to join hundreds of evangelists from Britain, the United States and Germany, and Catholics from France, Spain and Italy.9 Two of the Australians were sisters, 24-year-old Nellie and 22-year-old Topsy Saunders, who arrived at the Anglican mission station at Kucheng, south of Shanghai, from Melbourne in December 1893 to join a third Australian, Annie Gordon, from Ipswich, Queensland.
The Saunders sisters made rapid progress in their Chinese language studies and were sent into the field. ‘Your two ladies, Miss Nellie Saunders and Miss Topsy Saunders, are here and again at work,’ the Reverend Robert Stewart, the superintending missionary at Kucheng, wrote to the Church Missionary Association in Melbourne on 18 June 1895.
Miss Nellie is in charge of two classes of charming little boys from 12 to 16 years old, picked out from the whole district as giving special promise of future usefulness. Miss Topsy is located at a place called Sek-Chek-Du, about 12 miles north from here. Miss Elsie Marshall is with her. They are in charge of all the women workers, covering an immense area of about 300 square miles. She has women’s classes, girls’ and boys’ schools, a little dispensary and any amount of visiting; people coming to her and she going to them. They are both very happy, and our only wish is that you will send us some more like-minded.10
Dr Stewart was pleased with the progress of the Kucheng mission, 140 kilometres from the treaty port of Foochow in the eastern province of Fukien. A total of 2212 Chinese had been converted to Christianity and 30 Chinese teachers recruited to provide a Christian education for their children. It was now the height of summer and to escape the punishing heat of the lowlands, Stewart had taken his fam
ily and a number of missionaries connected to the Anglican Church Missionary Society to live in bungalows collectively known as ‘The Sanatorium’ at the hillside village of Huashan.
The Taiping’s successes of the 1850s had forced the Ching Court to grant a certain amount of autonomy to its viceroys in order to raise militia armies to defeat them. This form of regionalisation, coupled with defeat at the hands of the Japanese, had drastically weakened Peking’s hold on the provinces. As its authority waned, even the lowest peasant became vocal about his dislike of the foreigner, who was suspected of casting spells to lure children into their mission schools.
‘The continual spectacle of men and women going about among Chinese people in Chinese costume, and declaiming against the customs of these people, must have an irritating effect,’ the Sydney Morning Herald noted.11 Indeed, women missionaries caught up in anti-Christian riots three years previously in the same province ‘drew much of the trouble upon themselves’, according to the Foochow correspondent of the North-China Daily News. ‘They dressed in native costume against better advice and went to the city [Foochow] to which they had been particularly warned not to go.’ One source claims that the tragic events at Huashan in the summer of 1895 were triggered by ‘the insistence of two Australian women on wearing Chinese dress’.12
Nellie Saunders sensed danger. ‘I do assure you,’ she wrote to two friends in Victoria, ‘that I never in my life knew what it was to feel the force of the devil’s power as I have known it since we came here.
I could not put into words the awfulness of the force of temptations with which the devil assailed my soul after we came to China. It is not imagination – I am not an imaginative person – but real solid fact! and perhaps it is easy to understand after all. This is truly the devil’s own ground; here he reigns pretty well undisturbed, and anyone who dares to come and oppose him is not likely to be left in peace.13
Early on the morning of 1 August 1895 several thousand members of a newly formed sect called the Tsaihui, or Vegetarian Society, consisting of peasants, coolies, charcoal burners, cooks and most of the rabble of Kucheng, headed up the winding path towards ‘The Sanatorium’. The society preached abstinence from opium, tobacco, meat and wine. It also saw the presence of Christians in the Chinese countryside as an affront to Confucianism and an attack on the national cult of ancestor worship.14
Many of the Vegetarians dropped out during the 16-kilometre uphill hike but a hard core of some 80 men arrived at ‘The Sanatorium’ and rounded up the missionaries. Lucy Codrington, a missionary from England, later revealed that the women pleaded with the mob to take their money and property, and leave them in peace. Some of the Vegetarians were inclined to do so and one old man, fearful of the consequences, begged for their lives. But the leader, a fanatical figure waving a red flag, shouted, ‘You know your orders: kill outright.’ The Vegetarians then set about their grisly task with bamboo spears and swords.15 They attacked the Europeans, killing 11 of them, mostly women and children. Twenty minutes later, at the blast of a horn, the mob retreated down the hill, bearing armfuls of plunder.16
The Reverend Hugh Phillips of the English Church Mission Society, who was staying in a house five minutes’ walk from the two main bungalows of ‘The Sanatorium’, overheard the departing Vegetarians say, ‘Now are all the foreigners killed.’ He found a scene of unutterable carnage. ‘I rushed up to the back of the first house,’ he said, ‘and found the bodies of Miss Topsy Saunders, Miss Flora Stewart, Miss Annie Gordon and Miss Elsie Marshall, the latter being awfully cut and her head almost severed, but beyond the wounds given in the struggle the bodies were not mutilated.’17
Lucy Codrington had received a sword cut seven-inches long to the face; one deep cut on the head; one cut across the nose beneath the right eye five-inches long and another three-inches long on the right side of the neck. Her life was saved because she fell down and the mortally wounded Elsie Marshall collapsed on top of her.18
News of the massacre reached Australia on 5 August when the Church Missionary Association received a terse cable from Archdeacon John R. Wolfe at Foochow stating: ‘Gordon, two Saunders, Stewart, wife, son and four others murdered. Inform relatives.’
At Shanghai, European residents held an urgent meeting at which they protested against the inadequate protection afforded to Westerners in the provinces by the Manchu authorities, and the lenient punishments meted out to Chinese found guilty of murdering foreigners. They demanded that Britain and France take action against the perpetrators of the Kucheng massacre.19
Foreign anger increased when it was learned there were 1000 Chinese soldiers at Kucheng at the time of the massacre, but none had been sent to protect the missionaries until it was too late. The Chinese Government ordered the Kucheng magistrate to take immediate steps to punish the Vegetarians.20
At her home, ‘The Willows’ in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, Nellie and Topsy’s widowed mother, Mrs Eliza Saunders, spoke to a reporter from The Age on the night of 7 August. ‘What,’ she asked in a firm voice, ‘have I to regret what God has seen fit to do? They went to death and they went to glory, and all I should say – all I desire to say – is “Hallelujah”. I know that this is the act of God – God who can see the end. He knows the benefits to follow this martyrdom. Believe me, the grand work will go on; ten missionaries will arise for every one now gone, and the Christianising of this people will be expedited.’21
Within weeks, 26 members of the Vegetarian Society had been executed, 19 banished or imprisoned for life, 27 imprisoned for periods of ten to 15 years, and 20 others given minor punish- ments. But if Manchu justice was swift, change in the Celestial Empire was too slow for the gritty little physician-turned-revolutionary named Sun Yat-sen.
The future president of the Chinese Republic had been born Sun Wen at Hsiang-shan, a Cantonese village, on 12 November 1866. Sun’s first political mentor was a Taiping veteran who spoke vividly about the rebels’ revolutionary exploits and their policy of sharing land among the peasants. The impressionable youth grew up not far from the Taiping leader Hung Hsiu-ch’uan’s birthplace and saw himself as his successor in the battle against the Manchu. Indeed, he revelled in the nickname ‘Hung the Second’.22
At 13, Sun went to live with his elder brother Sun Mei in Honolulu, where he was taught English, mathematics and science. After his early exposure to the Taiping credo, he was now drawn towards Christianity. When he expressed an interest in converting, his brother became alarmed and sent him back to China. After a time at school in Canton, he moved to the Central School (later Queen’s College) in Hong Kong, where he learned to play cricket and was baptised in the Christian faith. He was given the baptismal name Yat-sen. In 1884 he graduated as a doctor at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese after studying under its Scottish dean, Dr James Cantlie.23
Sun opened a practice in Macao, a Portuguese colony some 60 kilometres from Hong Kong. Cantlie made several trips from Hong Kong to assist him in major surgical operations. ‘Why did I do this journey to Macao to help this man?’ he later wrote. ‘For the reason that others have fought for and died for him, because I loved and respected him.’24 Meanwhile, Sun’s parents arranged for him to marry a local Cantonese girl. Although frequently away from home, he became the father of three children.
Sun’s views shifted irreversibly towards revolution when Li Hung-chang ignored a letter from him suggesting how China might be strengthened. Sun had only been partly trained in Chinese classicism, so his views were judged unworthy of consideration. From that point on, he campaigned for the violent overthrow of the Manchu. Returning to Honolulu in 1894, he founded the Hsing-Chung hui, or Revive China Society, to propagate his revolutionary ideas. One of his acolytes, Lu Hao-tung, designed the movement’s flag, a white sun and blue sky against a red background.25
In October the following year Sun, then 29 years old, would attempt to launch an uprising in Canton involving command
ers of some of the Chinese gunboats of the Pearl River squadron, high officials in the Canton arsenal and a considerable number of important mandarins.
In 1887 Tse Yet Chong moved his family from New South Wales to Hong Kong. His 17-year-old son Tse Tsan Tai enrolled in Sun Yat-sen’s alma mater to prepare himself for a career as a clerk in the Public Works Department. One of his closest friends was Yang Chu-yun, a shipping clerk and fellow Christian, who had also received a Western education. In 1890 Tse and Yang founded the earliest revolutionary cell in China called the Chinese Patriotic Reform Association, with the motto Ducit Amor Partiae (The love of my country leads me on).26
‘It was extremely difficult to gain recruits or even sympathisers,’ Tse says. ‘We always met the taunts and ridicule of our chicken-hearted “friends” in silence.’ The celestial subversive chanced his luck by consorting with Manchu spies and agents provocateurs – ‘persistently putting my head in the tiger’s jaws’, as he puts it – in order to get information about the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.27
Tse and Yang established their first revolutionary headquarters on 13 March 1892 on the first floor of 1 Pak Tze Lane, Hong Kong. In common with other Chinese clubs, the premises was visited by detectives of the Hong Kong Police Force, but all they found was a group of earnest young men talking excitedly over cups of green tea.
Tse also tried his hand as a propagandist, writing a series of newspaper articles opposing feng shui, foot-binding, opium-smoking and the mui tsai bonded female system.28 His views attracted the ire of Hong Kong’s colonial secretary, George O’Brien, who reprimanded him in May 1894 for ‘dabbling in politics’ while in government service.29
During the latter stages of the Sino-Japanese War in the spring of 1895, when the tremors of China’s humiliating defeat were rippling through the Middle Kingdom, Tse’s Reform Association merged with Sun Yat-sen’s fledgling Hsing-Chung hui to form the Hong Kong branch of the latter society. A new revolutionary headquarters was established at 13 Staunton Street under the cover name ‘the Kuen Hang Club’. The movement did not make an auspicious start. Tse relates that at his first meeting with Sun Yat-sen on 13 March 1895, ‘… his look and speech did not favourably impress me, and I had a strange feeling that it would be wise to keep away from him’.
Shanghai Fury Page 5
