‘The events of the week are important and significant,’ Sir Robert Hart, the Inspector General of Customs who had spent his life trying to modernise China in co-operation with the European powers, wrote to George Morrison on 18 June 1898. ‘I am sorry for poor old Weng who had many fine points, but he presumed on his position as tutor to interfere with the Emperor too much they say, or so thought the folk on duty. Pity the Emperor did not go about it more gently!’7
Sun Yat-sen ridiculed Kang Youwei and Liang Chi-chao for collaborating with the reactionary Ching Court. By September, it seemed he had a point. The Board of Rites expressed its outright opposition to the abolition of the ‘eight-legged essay’; the Tsungli Yamen opposed the new administrative bureaus; and most provincial governors either delayed or ignored the Emperor’s edicts.8
Fearing that Tzu Hsi would depose him, the reformers plotted to strike first and exterminate her with the help of Yuan Shi-kai, the 39-year-old commander of the Newly Created Army, originally founded by Li Hung-chang to fight the Taiping and later renamed the Beiyang (or ‘Northern Ocean’) Army. Yuan was known to sympathise with the reform movement and it was hoped he would execute the Manchu commander Jung Lu, viceroy of Chihli (and supposedly Tzu Hsi’s lover), and besiege the Summer Palace. The reformers would then move in and assassinate the Dowager Empress. Furthermore, Kang suggested the Emperor move to Shanghai, an ‘open and untrammelled’ city which would make an ideal capital for the reform movement.9
But the reformers had met their nemesis in Yuan Shi-kai, ‘conceited, extravagant, lecherous, ruthless and treacherous’, according to one of his colleagues. His army numbered only 7000 men, compared with Jung Lu’s 100,000 troops in Tientsin and Peking. Prudence and loyalty to his Manchu masters seemed the wiser course. While pretending to co-operate with the conspirators, he travelled to Tientsin and betrayed them to Jung Lu, who rode to the Summer Palace and warned Tzu Hsi.
At daybreak on 21 September she had the emperor arrested and incarcerated on an island in the lake of the Forbidden City where, in the words of Sir Robert Hart, ‘he was relegated to the nothingness of harem life’.10 That same day, she proclaimed in the Peking Gazette that she had returned to rule China as regent after the Emperor had been struck down by a serious illness. The Gazette also published the first in a series of edicts annulling one by one all of the major reforms initiated by the Emperor until only the national university remained.
Six young reformers, including Tan Sitong and Kang Guangren and known collectively as ‘The Six Gentlemen’, were beheaded for treason. Kang Youwei received a warning from the Emperor that the Board of Punishments had charged him with conspiring against the Dowager Empress. He fled from Peking to Shanghai where the British consul, at the urging of J. O. P. Bland,11 the municipal secretary who acted as Times correspondent, put him on the P&O steamer Ballarat, which took him to Hong Kong under naval escort.12
Before his departure, Kang told Bland that the backlash against the Reform Party was entirely a Manchu, and not a Chinese, affair. The Manchu had acted with the backing of the Russian minister who had pledged to preserve Manchuria as the Ching’s ancestral seat, provided Russia received preferential treatment in future treaty negotiations.
Kang Youwei arrived in Hong Kong on 29 September 1898 and despite the hostility of Manchu officials in Canton was taken in by Tse’s friend Robert Ho Tung, the Jardine Matheson comprador and the richest Chinese in the colony. Three weeks later he sailed for Japan where he denounced Tzu Hsi as a despot and accused Yuan Shi-kai of betraying his Emperor.13
Yuan Shi-kai was well rewarded for his treachery – within a week of the coup, he was named acting viceroy of Shantung and the following year took up the post of governor of that province. Similarly, Jung Lu was appointed to the Grand Council with the rank of generalissimo.
As the year 1898 closed, Morrison noted that the legacy of the ‘Hundred Days’ Reform’ was a return to the most reactionary kind of Chinese conservatism. The six members of the Tsungli Yamen were Prince Ching, a placeman of the Dowager Empress, and ‘five of the most incompetent old fossils that were ever entrusted with the foreign affairs of a country’. Their chief appeal to Tzu Hsi was their complete ignorance of anywhere outside the borders of the Celestial Empire.
The situation in Peking was so unstable that the diplomatic corps ordered troops from Tientsin to guard the legations. It was the first time since the notorious events of 1860 that foreign troops had entered Peking in military formation. Morrison had no doubt that ‘the Old Buddha’, as Tzu Hsi was nicknamed, was ‘plotting schemes for the extermination of the foreigner’.
The failure of the reform movement, coupled with the ‘Scramble of Concessions’ which focused on China’s railways and mining rights, had revitalised many of the country’s secret societies. The sect which most effectively captured the mood of suppressed rage was the I-ho-ch’uan, or the ‘Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists’. Aware that Chinese peasants loathed and feared them above all other foreigners, missionaries watched the sect’s emergence with growing concern. Noting its adherents’ practice of shadow-boxing as part of an elaborate ritual to make themselves bullet-proof, they gave them a nickname: ‘the Boxers’.
The Boxer Uprising of 1900 was initially directed against the Manchu regime but was cleverly diverted by Tzu Hsi and Prince Tuan, the Boxers’ champion among her courtiers, into an insurgence against foreigners. The Boxers’ slogan of ‘Overthrow the Ching, wipe out the foreigners’ was quietly changed to ‘Support the Ching, wipe out the foreigners’.14 The Boxers moved among the peasantry, propagating the belief that Catholics and Protestants ‘have vilified our gods and sages, destroyed Buddhist images and seized our people’s graveyards. This has angered Heaven.’15
The Boxer Uprising was China’s third war against the West. Its express purpose was to end Western privileges – especially the right of extraterritoriality that granted foreigners immunity from Chinese law – and drive them out of the northern capital in defiance of the Treaty of Tientsin and the Convention of Peking. China had reached the unstable condition defined by Mao Tse-tung as ‘semi-feudal and semi-colonial’.
The question that perplexed Western observers was: would she continue to disintegrate and become increasingly subservient to the West, or would she, through self-strengthening, reorganise her administration along modern lines and become increasingly independent? Given the checks and balances in the fabric of Chinese society to prevent change and promote harmony, few were prepared to gamble on the third way: revolution. Yet that is what the failure of the reform movement would achieve – the transference of power from Kang Youwei the moderate reformer to Sun Yat-sen the revolutionary.16
By 1897 – the 50th anniversary of its opening to Western trade – Shanghai had fulfilled Hugh Lindsay’s prophecy of becoming ‘the greatest emporium of commerce in the Far East and the commercial metropolis of China’.17 The number of treaty ports wrested from the Ching Dynasty had increased from five in 1842 to 28 and now included the important cities of Nanking and Hankow on the Yangtze. The Manchu were outraged by the new concessions and privileges demanded by Westerners, yet they seemed powerless to resist. Similarly, the opium menace had spiralled out of control.
‘Assuredly, it is not foreign intercourse that is ruining China,’ the viceroy of Chihli and Hunan, Chang Chi-tung, the most anti-foreign of all China’s viceroys,18 wrote in a memorial, ‘but this dreadful poison. Oh, the grief and desolation it has wrought to our people! Unless something is soon done to arrest this awful scourge in its devastating march, the Chinese people will be transformed into satyrs and devils!’19
Ironically, an interloper from the Indian sub-continent – the House of Sassoon – had descended on Shanghai and using its superior contacts with the opium producers pushed Jardines, Turners, Russells and the other traditional dealers out of the opium trade. Jardines continued to deal in tea, furs, skins, silks and oils and also became
heavily involved in shipping, banking, insurance and even brewing.20
In the autumn of 1899 the North-China Daily News drew attention to the rise of the Boxer movement in Shantung and explained its dangerous aspirations. This and subsequent ‘Cassandra-like’ warnings in the press were laughed off and ignored. ‘The cry of Wolf grew more and more meaningless,’ Sir Robert Hart wrote, ‘so it was not surprising that many supposed the Boxer scare would fizzle out with a minimum of danger to either Chinese Government or foreign interests.’21
On the last day of the century the body of the Reverend Sydney Brooks was found near a church run by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Shantung. The young Anglican missionary had been decapitated. In his last letter, dated 19 November, Brooks reported on the rising of a sect that he called the Large Knife Society (Ta-tao-hui) which was attacking mainly Roman Catholic villages in the province. ‘I glance uneasily round my room to see how much I have to lose,’ he wrote. ‘It is not much, but, naturally, I am not anxious to be deprived of what I have, and pray that the disturbance may pass over with no harm to ourselves.’22
Brooks was returning through flurries of falling snow to his mission station at Pingyin on the Yellow River when he was surrounded by a group of Chinese armed with swords. Instead of quietly handing over his money, Brooks fought back and was slashed on the head and arms. His assailants – who might have been Large Knives or Boxers – stripped him to his underwear, dragged him through the snow to a roadside tavern and tied him to a tree. While they celebrated their victory over the foreign devil inside the tavern, the innkeeper untied Brooks and he got away, although in his weakened state he did not get far. The Chinese caught up with him and cut him to pieces, throwing his head into a gully.23
The Court issued an imperial edict ordering Yuan Shi-kai, the Shantung governor, ‘to arrest and immediately execute the perpetrators of the deed’.24 However, Sydney Brooks had noted in an earlier letter that the Large Knife Society had become ‘very powerful, being supported in an underhand way by the governor of the province’. Indeed, the Court informed Yuan Shi-kai that there were many ‘good and patriotic men’ among anti-foreigner sects like the Large Knives and the Boxers, and ‘to punish them indiscriminately would not be in accordance with the wishes of high heaven’.25 More to the point, it would be contrary to the wishes of the Dowager Empress, who recognised the Boxers as a powerful weapon to be used against the foreign devil. Yuan lined several Boxers up and shot them to prove they weren’t immune to the bullets of his guns and then left them alone.
George Morrison first noted the Boxers in his diary on 17 April 1900:
The danger of the Boxers is increasing. The danger is scarcity of rain which is attributed to the disturbance of the feng shui by foreigners. If rains come, the Boxers will soon disappear.26
But there was no rain and famine gripped the land. Swathed in red bandanas and crimson sashes and slashing the air with their swords, the Boxers continued to reap a murderous harvest as they made their way north through Chihli, killing missionaries, burning down churches and destroying iron-dragon locomotives. One English missionary was reported to have been tied to a tree and skinned alive. His eyes were then gouged out with hot irons.27
By the end of May, Britain, Italy and the United States anchored warships off the Chinese forts at Taku on the Gulf of Chihli, the nearest port to Tientsin and Peking. In early June, a Western army, commanded by Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, left Tientsin for Peking by train but was forced to withdraw when imperial troops, sent by Tzu Hsi to support the Boxers, ripped up the railway track.
When the Boxers severed the telegraph lines, George Morrison had to smuggle his reports by messenger to Tientsin for relaying to Printing House Square. His last dispatch before the Foreign Quarter in Peking was besieged appeared in The Times on 18 June. It described the burning of some of the finest buildings in the eastern part of the city and the massacre of hundreds of Chinese Christians and servants employed by foreigners.
Morrison’s house in the Foreign Quarter was connected to Sir Robert Hart’s Customs Compound by a narrow laneway down which he managed to evacuate most of his precious library. When both buildings were burned down, Morrison and Hart withdrew to the British Legation. In the last telegram that Hart was able to send, he urged Li Hung-chang to use his influence with the Empress Dowager to prevent an attack on the foreign legations. Then he strapped a couple of Colt revolvers to his body and prepared to join the defenders in repulsing the Boxers.28
While barricades were hastily thrown up across Legation Street, Morrison, armed with a revolver, rode out of the Foreign Quarter with a band of volunteers to rescue Chinese converts abandoned to their fate in other parts of the city. In one operation, he admits to killing at least six Boxers himself while saving ‘rice Christians’, who were being used as human sacrifices in a Chinese temple. Hundreds of terrified converts were led to safety in the Fu, a walled palace next to the British Legation. The Sydney Daily Telegraph commented darkly, ‘The whole revolt typifies a rising against Christianity and civilization.’29
Meanwhile, the Boxer Uprising had spread to many parts of the Middle Kingdom. On 9 July, 45 Christians were killed in the governor’s compound at Shanshi. The American consul at Chinkiang, the treaty port at the junction of the Yangtze and the Grand Canal, ordered white people to evacuate by gunboat downstream to Shanghai. One of the refugees was the Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck, then the eight-year-old daughter of American missionaries Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker of the Southern Presbyterian Mission.
Absalom accompanied his family to Shanghai and while his wife and children moved into a boarding house in Bubbling Well Road he returned to Chinkiang in search of martyrdom. Each steamer docking on the Whangpoo brought a fresh load of Westerners from the interior. ‘The white people in Shanghai,’ Pearl Buck recalled, ‘seemed to be clinging to the edge of China, waiting to be shoved off.’30
Absalom refused to be ‘shoved off’. After two of his chapels were burned down, he preached in the street, an unmissable figure in a crumpled white suit and pith helmet. Furious Chinese threw stones at him but he was protected by the Almighty’s presence ‘like a strong light shining, day and night’.31
But in Peking that light was being extinguished as the Boxers hacked Christian converts to pieces in the Chinese City and attacked the barricades in Legation Street. Tzu Hsi’s plan to exterminate the foreign devils was on the brink of success.
George Morrison took an active part in the celebrated defence of the Peking legations until 16 July 1900 when he was shot and badly wounded by a Chinese rifleman from a distance of just 30 metres. That same day a report headlined ‘the massacre in peking’ appeared in later editions of The Times. It stated that Morrison, Sir Robert Hart, the British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, and every other foreigner in the diplomatic quarter, including women and children, had been wiped out. The report was published ‘by the courtesy of the Editor of the Daily Mail’ who had received a telegram to that effect from his correspon- dent in Shanghai.
This telegram, dated 15 July, claimed that the defenders had held out against a frenzied attack by Boxers and imperial troops on the night of 6 July, but at five o’clock on the morning of the 7th the Muslim extremist General Tung Fu-hsiang had pitched his savage, white-turbaned Kansu warriors into the fray. The barricades were battered down and most of the British Legation’s buildings destroyed by Chinese artillery fire.
Readers of the Sydney Morning Herald were horrified to learn that the defenders had bravely formed a hollow square to protect their women and children but had then shot them dead as the Kansu warriors swarmed towards them. ‘The many guns of the Chinese force mowed down the foreigners,’ the SMH claimed, taking its facts from the Daily Mail. ‘The Boxers stabbed some of the victims. Others pursued the survivors into the burning buildings, whose fate they shared.’1
In Morrison’s home town of Ge
elong, where he had been born on 4 February 1862, flags flew at half mast to mourn the loss of its most famous son. The Times printed a glowing two-column obituary paying tribute to his professionalism. But the Daily Mail report was fictitious: Morrison, Sir Robert Hart and all of the other ‘victims’ were still very much alive. The story had been filed by an American conman named Frederick Sutterlee, who was posing as a journalist in Shanghai after trying his hand at gun-running and fraud.2 It took several days for the truth to emerge, by which time Queen Victoria had been ‘greatly distressed’, the Kaiser had vowed to avenge every drop of German blood and President McKinley was said to be hurrying 10,000 American troops to China.3 The Sydney Daily Telegraph reminded its readers, ‘Australia is perilously near to China and would be in a position of great danger if the mighty forces of empire, now dormant, could be awakened.’4
Meanwhile, a combined expeditionary force, commanded by General Sir Alfred Gaselee, had fought its way from Tientsin to the walls of Peking and after 55 days the Siege of the Legations was lifted at 3 am on 14 August. Morrison wrote a 30,000-word account of the siege for The Times in which he paid tribute to the ‘excellent discipline, steadiness under fire, courage and eagerness’ of the defenders and angrily castigated the Dowager Empress and her courtiers for their connivance with the Boxers. He also heaped scorn on some of the Western ministers, notably the highly strung French envoy Stephen Pichon, ‘who, crying “Tout est perdu”, melodramatically burned the French archives in a ditch at the British Legation’.5
Shanghai Fury Page 7
