Sir Robert Hart understood Morrison’s anger. ‘I think his own sufferings,’ he said, ‘have made him take a more revengeful tone than he would otherwise have held.’ To counteract the anti-Chinese hysteria which the siege had inevitably stirred up in the West, Hart published his own views in the Fortnightly Review, a serious magazine which was widely read in Europe and the United States.
In Hart’s eyes the Boxers were embryonic nationalists and freedom fighters, while their movement was ‘patriotic in origin, justifiable in its fundamental idea and in point of fact the outcome of either foreign advice or the study of foreign methods’.6 The Boxers’ primary aim, he said, was ‘to terrify foreigners, frighten them out of the country and thus free China from foreign trespass, contamination and humiliation’.7
Hart, who had fathered several children with his Chinese mistress, blamed ‘missionary propagandism’ for much of the trouble: the Chinese, he said, saw the teaching of the Gospel as ‘the corroding influence of a foreign cult’. In his experience, some Christians were far too high and mighty: for example, missionaries in Shantung insisted on being carried in green sedan chairs and recognised as the equals of governors and viceroys, while they interfered in legal matters on behalf of their Chinese converts to the dismay of local magistrates. Hart urged the occupying powers to reconsider their position in China, strip missionaries and merchants of their privileges and abandon extraterritoriality.8
Prophetically, he warned that the Boxer Uprising was merely ‘the prelude to a century of change, the keynote of the future history of the Far East. The China of the year 2000 will be very different from the China of 1900.’ The West should take note, he said, that ‘twenty million or more of Boxers, armed, drilled, disciplined and animated by patriotic – if mistaken – motives, will make residence in China impossible for foreigners, will take back from foreigners everything foreigners have taken from China, will pay off old grudges with interest, and will carry the Chinese flag and Chinese arms into many a place that even fancy will not suggest today’.
He concluded, ‘In 50 years’ time there will be millions of Boxers in serried ranks and war’s panoply at the call of the Chinese government: there is not the slightest doubt of that!’9
The powers were deaf to Hart’s words. While stopping short of partitioning China, they nevertheless exacted a terrible revenge for the Ching’s duplicity. Thousands of Chinese – some of them Boxers – were rounded up and executed and their villages destroyed in punitive expeditions into the countryside.
The Dowager Empress summoned Li Hung-chang from Shanghai to Peking to negotiate a peace settlement on the emperor’s behalf. The talks ground on through August and the looting and reprisals continued unabated. One Chinese teacher told Morrison that his sister had been raped by Russian soldiers and as a result seven members of his family had committed suicide. ‘This is a common story,’ he noted. On 24 September he cabled The Times: ‘The systematic denudation of the Summer Palace by the Russians has been completed. Every article of value is packed and labelled.’10
The siege had made Morrison an international celebrity, a role he found extremely irksome. Arthur Adams, a 28-year-old New Zealand writer, was staying in Morrison’s new Peking house, the former residence of a Manchu prince, when he read his obituary in a copy of The Times.
‘What do you think of this?’ Morrison asked, handing his guest the newspaper.
‘The only decent thing they can do,’ Adams replied, ‘is double your salary.’11
At the request of Britain’s Colonial Secretary, Joe Chamberlain, a ‘naval brigade’ from New South Wales and Victoria sailed for China in the transport SS Salamis on 8 August 1900 to take part in the first Australian military action in Asia as members of the China Field Force consisting of troops from Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Japan. The Australian contingent numbered 500 men from NSW and Victoria, only 40 per cent of whom had been born in Australia. They had volunteered for service at the start of the siege but did not arrive in northern China until the end of August and early September. By then, there were nearly 75,000 foreign troops there and the Boxers and their imperial allies had been comprehensively defeated. The New South Welshmen were sent to Peking and the Victorians to Tientsin.12
According to Arthur Adams, who was covering the campaign for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian troops made a splendid impression.
In build, they were the finest men out there and they were universally regarded as the handy men of the campaign. Wherever any special British corps was weak, a few Australians were drafted into it. It was somewhat strange to see them – naval men mounted on horseback – but whatever they undertook, they did well.13
The Russian soldiers were big, hulking fellows like the Australians, he said, but the comparison ended there: the Russians were in fact barbarians who committed some of the worst atrocities against the Chinese out of pure savagery. The French excused the brutality of their men with a Gallic shrug. ‘You cannot restrain the gallantry of the French soldier,’ an officer explained to Adams. The Germans and the Indian members of the British Expeditionary Force were also guilty of exploiting the chaos. Many Chinese women committed suicide by throwing themselves down wells rather than submit to the barbarities of the troops, Adams said, and in other cases, women were wantonly bayoneted.14
Adams was most impressed with the Japanese, although they too committed atrocities. ‘The Chinese campaign went to show that Japan has the best soldiers in the world,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot say enough in admiration of them. If we have the Japs with us, we shall do very well.’ Conversely, the American soldier was ‘pampered, useless and absurd’.15
Adams accompanied 150 Victorians on a punitive expedition to the Boxer stronghold of Pao-ting Fu, the former provincial capital of Chihli. On the ten-day march from Tientsin, the heavily armed force of 7500 Australian, French, German and Indian troops were met at every village by peasants who kowtowed and offered them pears, chickens and eggs. Many of them were Boxers who had simply gone home and taken off their red garments.16
The Victorians arrived at Pao-ting Fu to discover the city fathers had already surrendered. Adams described the execution of the provincial treasurer, the military governor and the colonel who had commanded the Chinese cavalry:
The chief executioner bowed low to the victims, then to the audience, after the manner of an acrobat about to perform a difficult feat. Another signal and the first victim was forced on his knees, two assistants held him firmly by the shoulders, a third seized his pigtail and hauled it taut, a fourth handed the axe to the executioner and he balanced it carefully, raised it slowly to the height of his shoulder, lowered it till the thin edge touched the bare neck and left a scarlet mark. Once, twice, thrice, and he swung it with all his might …17
After 25 days in the field, the Victorians arrived back in Tientsin on 7 November. ‘During that time,’ Bob Nicholls writes in Bluejackets and Boxers, ‘they had marched over 200 miles and taken part in innumerable sackings, looting, arson, pillage and executions without coming into contact with the enemy, let alone coming under his fire.’18
On 24 November George Morrison noted in his diary, ‘German expeditions continue to harass the neighbourhood of Peking, mainly in search of loot. Such raids are incorrectly described in German official communications as important military operations.’19
On 31 December he launched a scathing attack in The Times on the Germans and their commanding officer, Field Marshal Count Alfred von Waldersee, who was also commander-in-chief of the entire China Field Force. He accused the Germans of punishing Chinese whether they were guilty or not and of ‘systematically pillaging a people who had already been conquered when they arrived in China’.
‘At present, though nominally at peace,’ he wrote, ‘German parties are harrying the country, sacrificing many innocent lives, levying fines on the quiet towns and villages, destroying the authority of the local
officials, and fast provoking peaceful districts into anarchy.’20 While his troops were out raping and pillaging, Waldersee was living in splendour at the Imperial Palace. Although 68 years of age, he was still virile enough to enjoy the services of a beautiful Chinese concubine.21
The German commander described Morrison as ‘a wretched scamp’ and threatened to have him court-martialled. Although he growled that he was ‘no more impressed by press attacks than by the barking of a dog’, he was clearly rattled. There was a noticeable improvement in the behaviour of German troops.22
Meanwhile, support for the Boxers came from an unexpected quarter. ‘The Europeans, under the command of Field Marshal the Count von Waldersee, in their unprovoked and unpunished acts of murder, arson, robbery and rape, do not shine by contrast with the Boxers,’ the New York Times editorialised. ‘It is rather the Boxers who shine by contrast with them.’23
Such sympathy for the Chinese was anything but universal – it certainly did not apply to the correspondent of the Sydney Daily Telegraph. George Wynne, a thick-set bruiser with a walrus moustache, was embedded in the New South Wales contingent in Peking with the rank of assistant paymaster. Wynne had been born in Ballarat in 1872 and was keenly conscious of European hostility towards the Chinese on the Victorian goldfields. His dispatches to Sydney showed a pathological loathing of the Chinese that fitted the mood of many Australians at that time. ‘The future of the Chinese offers a fearful problem,’ he wrote in December 1900.
Look on the frightful sights one sees in the streets of Peking, the pock-marked, the deformed, the blind, the hideous yellow faces, with their rows of blackened, broken teeth, the sickening blood-red eye-socket, telling of horrible disease. See the filthy tattered rags they wear around them. Smell them as they pass. Hear of their nameless immorality. Witness their shameless indecency, and picture them among your own people – ugh! It makes you shudder.24
The editor of the Daily Telegraph knew full well that the hottest political issue in the run-up to the federation of the Australian states on 1 January 1901 was immigration. He gave Wynne’s xenophobia full rein:
British interests compel some of us to live among them, we are told. British capital demands that some of them should give their pauper labour to our lands. British interests, British capital! Shut the Chinaman up in his own country and let him work out his own destruction. Let his unbridled lust, filth, famine and disease aid him in the world! Leave his country with its paltry trade that calls for human sacrifice to inhuman greed. See to it that he never leaves it. That is the only Chinese policy Australia can afford to entertain. That is the only way to keep back the yellow wave.25
The new Federal Parliament opened in Melbourne on 9 May 1901. The first substantive Act to be passed was the Immigration Restriction Act, which put the White Australia policy into law. ‘The doctrine of the equality of man,’ the Prime Minister, Sir Edmund Barton, supposedly declared, ‘was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.’
Ironically, the exiled scholar-reformer Liang Chi-chao, who was visiting Australia on a lecture tour, was one of the guests at a function at the Sydney Town Hall to celebrate federation in the company of the prime minister. The Act made it virtually impossible for Asians to be admitted to Australia for any purpose. A Chinese man or woman wishing to enter the country was required to write down 50 words dictated by an immigration officer in a European language, preferably one he or she would find unintelligible. ‘It is not desirable that persons should be allowed to pass the test,’ Atlee Hunt, secretary of the Department of External Affairs, wrote to the customs officer at Fremantle, ‘and before putting it to anyone, the Officer should be satisfied that he will fail.’26
In September 1901 Li Hung-chang signed the Boxer Protocol, the last act in his astonishing career. He died two months later aged 78. China agreed to pay reparations of 450 million ounces of silver in varying amounts to Britain, Russia, Germany, France, the United States and Japan over 39 years. Russia would receive the biggest chunk – almost a third of the total.27
Ten days after the signing of the protocol, the author and poet A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson caught up with George Morrison at a hotel near the treaty port of Chefoo on the Shantung coast. ‘In person, he was a tall ungainly man with a dour Scotch face and a curious drop at the corner of his mouth,’ Paterson wrote. ‘It was an education to listen to him, for he spoke with the self-confidence of genius. With Morrison it was not a case of “I think”; it was a case of “I know.”’
Paterson claims Morrison told him the Boxers were ‘just a rabble – washermen, and rickshaw coolies’ and that Napoleon would have settled them before lunch with his whiff of grapeshot. ‘The whole world,’ he said, ‘was waiting for England to declare a protectorate over the Yangtze Valley and stand for fair play and open the door for everybody. All the nations trusted England to give them fair play.’ Morrison then commenced to sing:
The English, the English,
They don’t amount to much;
But anything is better
Than the Goddamn Dutch
or the Goddamn Russian or Turk, or Portugee either.28
Banjo Paterson left China with one abiding impression of the Chinese: ‘Neither man nor beast in China has anything but hatred for the foreigner. The men scowl at us, the dogs snarl, the cattle snort and shiver if we pass near them. The people hate us with a cold intensity that surpasses any other hate that I have ever heard of.’
In time, the Chinese would deal with the Western barbarians, but first they had to free themselves from the Manchu yoke. The slow, painful process was recorded in the letters of Sir Robert Hart (whose diaries recording his extraordinary career had been destroyed by fire during the Boxer Rebellion). By 1894, he was writing, ‘I am afraid we are tinkering with a cracked kettle.’ The following year he had written, ‘I fear that, as far as the dynasty is concerned, it is hopeless. In ten years’ time, revolution will do the trick.’ And then a year later, ‘There must be a dynastic cataclysm before wholesome reform can operate.’29
When that happened, George Morrison would be in the thick of the action. On the second anniversary of the Boxer Uprising, he wrote:
What hope is there for China? None at all. Is there any improvement? None at all. No attempt at reform. The officials in power now are as stiff-necked and reactionary as those that brought about the Boxer convulsion.
According to the historian C. P. FitzGerald, ‘He, almost alone, could see beneath the dry bones of the dying Manchu Empire the stirring of fresh life, of a new, probably unintelligible and almost certainly disconcerting China, but yet a continuation of the life of that great nation into a new period of vigorous activity.’30
Morrison would not be alone – indeed, another adventurous Australian, as extraordinary in his own way as him, would be closer to the Chinese Revolution and its successes and failures than any other Westerner.
At the time of the Boxer Uprising, William Henry Donald took the Zig Zag Railway over the Blue Mountains to join George Wynne’s newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, in King Street, Sydney. Donald had been born at Lithgow, a robust coal-rich town on the western edge of the mountain range. He was the second surviving son of George McGarvie Donald, and his English-born wife, Mary Ann (known as Marion).1
The Donald family reached Australia from Dumfries in Scotland in the early 1800s when George Donald, a God-fearing Presbyterian builder who abhorred liquor, accepted an offer from his fellow Scot, Lachlan Macquarie, to emigrate to New South Wales. The ‘Building Governor’ wanted to develop a free economy in the colony and turn wild, ramshackle Sydney, so recently the scene of the Rum Rebellion, into a prosperous Georgian township.
Francis Greenway, the convict-architect, designed many of the buildings of colonial Sydney with a simple, dignified beauty, while George Donald had a hand in building some of them.2 His son, also George, was born at Paddingto
n in 1846. Six years later the Donald family moved to Yass where George Jr learned his father’s trade as a stone mason and worked on the Great Western Railway from 1867 to 1876, including the massive sandstone viaducts of the Zig Zag Railway.3 During this time he moved to Lithgow where, on 12 January 1870, he married Marion Wiles, daughter of a railway construction foreman. George Jr became a building contractor like his father.
Rich in coal, copper and iron, the town had made sturdy progress during the 1870s but its citizens had strict views on the sort of settlers who should share in its mineral bonanza. On a fine, warm night in May 1881, 200 people filled the local hall to make their voices heard at an anti-Chinese meeting. Resolutions demanding the restriction of Chinese immigration were passed and a committee set up to form an anti-Chinese league. One of the speakers put his objections succinctly, ‘We don’t like them, we don’t want them, and we won’t have them.’4
Indeed, on the very day of William Donald’s birth – 22 June 1875 – debate was raging over the case of Quock Ping, a Chinese doctor who wished to register with the Medical Board in order to practise at Ballarat. The Medical Board turned up its nose at his diploma from the medical college of the district of Chung Low in China. His application was rejected.5
The chairman of the Medical Society of Victoria warned of ‘the forced recognition of quackery and charlatanism’ if Quock Ping were registered, while the editorial writer of the Brisbane Courier opined, ‘How can we expect a learned body of men to admit an outside barbarian to a parity of practice with themselves?’6
William Donald was raised according to the Good Book in an abstemious household, with texts such as ‘Honesty Is the Best Policy’ and ‘The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands’ hanging from the walls. From the age of five when the town’s first library was opened, he was an avid reader. He would have been aware of the anti-Chinese feeling among some of his neighbours and he would also have followed the exploits of George Ernest Morrison, son of the principal of Geelong College, who was making headlines in every Australian newspaper. Even in his wildest daydreams, he could never have conceived how China and Morrison would become entwined in his life.
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