“Is there an obvious and able candidate to take the helm, my lord?”
“Not that is known to Captain Hawkins, my lady. There are any number of able men, but the emergence of one will cause all other contenders to unite against him and pull him down. None is outstanding and powerful enough to survive on his own. The death of Cixi will be followed by chaos - nothing will change in China. Nothing, I fear, can change in China.”
“Unless these Boxers can destroy the Empire and leave it for a new force to rebuild from the ruins, my lord.”
“Possibly, but that would not suit our masters in London. They would destroy the railways and the hongs and their profits in process. In fact, thinking on it, they would target the foreigners first, for supplying the opium that has done so much harm to the country. We will quite certainly be required to use all our forces against the Boxers.”
“Yet we have almost no forces to hand in China, my lord.”
“We have not, my dear. We do have the Navy, and that has developed a mystique of indefatigability in the last century. The Navy believes that it can do anything, given only a gunboat and a dozen Jolly Jacks with cutlasses. We may well have to deliver on that belief, defeating a million Boxers with a handful of Marines and seamen. I doubt it will be an easy task.”
“I cannot imagine it will be a possible task!”
“Hush! Do not say so. You may be overheard, and nothing is worse than to be known to be right when your seniors, my seniors that is, are found to be wrong. You remember the story of the emperor’s clothes? The little boy who pointed out that the emperor was naked? Had he been a sailor then he would have had his backside well kicked for daring first to see the reality and then to mention it. As a commander, I am no more than a very little boy and the Admiralty would have no hesitation in making me their scapegoat when things go wrong. My reports will say that there is no reason to expect the Boxers to be a menace to the foreigners in China, other than to missionaries deep in the provinces. I shall point out that the Imperial Army has been ordered to protect the foreigners and their property. We shall not be affected in Peking, in all probabilities, so the sole meaningful losses will occur among the traders inland. There will be a few missionaries killed, no doubt, but martyrdom is part of their stock in trade.”
Ellen came from the Blantyre hong, knew that they had almost no people inland and doubted that any of the other British majors had either. As for missionaries – her husband’s lack of belief seemed to be rubbing off on her, she was far less convinced of the nobility of the evangelical process.
“And Britain is far more involved in commerce, in banking and insurance and such, than in direct trade, almost all of our people being in Shanghai and Canton and Hong Kong. Those of us who buy goods for export use Chinese compradors to do the actual purchasing. So the losses will be greater among the Germans and French and Americans than for our people, particularly in the north and west of China, which are not really our areas.”
Magnus agreed with her wisdom. She knew more of trade than he did as yet.
“Exactly so, my dear. We are passing the naval dock, now. What progress have they made in creating berths for their new destroyers?”
The answer seemed to be ‘very little’. It was likely that the destroyers would be expected to tie up in pairs at the existing and short wharf.
“A small drydock would make sense. Barracks for their crews in port are really a necessity – they are small ships and have no comforts on board. No sign of any facilities at all. They are coal-fired ships, but I see no coaling berth. They will have to take their coal aboard in sacks, by hand. No forethought; no money spent. I see no separate ammunitioning berth – and that is positively dangerous. There will be destroyers lying at wharfside with their magazines unlocked and shells and charges being carried by hand from the warehouse. One mistake and the whole installation and all four ships could be lost. They should know better!”
“No doubt they do know better, sir,” Captain Roberts suggested. “Probably their admirals – who must include some competent seamen – demanded the money for all of these things and it was stolen at the Empress’ court and used for luxury and waste.”
It seemed very likely – it would be typical of the China they knew.
“A pity that these Boxers are so ignorant, Captain Roberts. If they only knew just how corrupt their leaders are, they would destroy them rather than the foreigners and China would have a chance of growing strong again.”
Ellen raised an eyebrow.
“Do we, the British, want a strong China, gentlemen?”
“Shush, my lady! Do not ask the unanswerable!”
Mountjoy tied up at the wharf in Tong-Ku nearest to the railway station and offloaded passengers and their luggage and escorted them to the platform for Tientsin and Peking. The station was timber made under a corrugated iron roof and somehow already seemed ancient, though less than five years old. There was a train waiting, with an engine attached with steam up and they hurried to board, the sailors emptying two first-class compartments full of Chinese for them and their servants and placing their bags and trunks in the luggage wagon, under escort of four sailors with rifles and fixed bayonets. An interpreter from the Chinese labourers unofficially aboard Mountjoy tracked down a station official and discovered when the train was due to depart.
“An hour ago, lord.”
“Why is it still here?”
“It is waiting, lord.”
“Why?”
“They are not ready to depart yet, lord.”
The interpreter scurried away and discovered a more senior official. The new man announced that the train would certainly leave within five minutes.
Half an hour later, he said that they had had to wait.
Magnus stepped down to the platform and surveyed the scene. The river, slow and perhaps as wide as the Thames, was busy with junks and sampans, mostly being poled along, very few under sail. One or two were under tow against the current, being pulled by gangs of coolies on the muddy banks. The line leading out of the station was double track but seemed poorly laid, the permanent way shallow and the sleepers set down on a thin layer of stones dropped onto the mud. The rails themselves seemed less substantial than those he had seen in England, designed to take lighter weights, perhaps. He thought that it might be easy to disrupt traffic – a few men with crowbars could break the track. He glanced at the engine, saw it to be older than the station, probably second-hand, too inefficient for further service in India or Australia and sold on to China perhaps. He saw an engine shed, wondered what sort of mechanics might be found there, just how effective a maintenance was provided.
It was likely to be better than walking, if only just.
An hour after that and the train slowly pulled out of the station, to the sound of doors being thrown shut as it started to move without warning.
“Why, Magnus?”
“Did you not see, my love? A wagon arrived and loaded a few small boxes aboard one of the goods trucks at the rear. The train could not leave without them – possibly a consignment from a local merchant, or from a triad, probably both in one. The stationmaster, or whoever it might be, was not willing to allow the train to go without that little load. Possibly he would not have survived doing so; the triads do not tolerate disobedience. If I am right, then the train will make good speed to the destination of the boxes. Let us hope they are going to Peking.”
Good speed was twenty miles an hour, it transpired, and a stop of barely thirty minutes at Tientsin, a fortified and garrisoned city on the route, next to the river. It was a small town, Magnus had been told, yet he would have thought there was a population of many hundreds of thousands in the Chinese Town, crammed inside crenelated mud walls and watched over by an ancient fortalice. There were red brick barracks close to the fort, much newer in construction.
The foreigners’ enclave was smaller and less well protected, was said to have a population of five hundred, perhaps half of them missionaries. They lived
in large, brick-built houses, interspersed with warehouses and a very few of public buildings. It seemed to Magnus that the settlement had been to some extent planned, that the houses clustered together and that it might be easy to join them together with barricades.
The countryside was flat, heavily farmed cereal growing land. It should have been green and wet, Magnus thought, but there were clear signs of a long drought, the ground hard and dusty and the crops low and wilting. Only the fields immediately next to the river showed green. The river remained in sight of the line, joined by frequent creeks, all of which were swampy, full of reeds and mud, but showing little open water. There were hundreds of burial mounds, graves built above ground level as much as ten feet tall. Magnus saw scores of villages and a round dozen of important towns and four at least of large red-brick forts easily visible from the line and possibly placed to interdict it. There were other substantial buildings in the distance – possibly walled towns but maybe other forts. It seemed that the area around Peking was heavily garrisoned, although it was likely that some of the forts were empty or thinly manned, some of them showing the smokes of cooking fires, others dead. Everywhere could be seen a large population of coolies, whole families down to the smallest children working in the fields, carrying pails of water from the river, hopefully, and bent over their hoeing and weeding and ignoring the train as it passed.
“Too many people, my love. They are as poor as the Highlands of Scotland, yet the land is rich, or would be in normal weather. They swarm in their hundreds where one might expect to see a very few dozens. The land cannot possibly feed them all and I see no factories, no industry to employ them. The people must be desperate even in good times. Small wonder we hear of bandits in the countryside and thieves in town – so many can have no alternative.”
Ellen could not accept that – theft was a crime and could never be excused. The starving certainly existed, but they must use their God-given talents to make an honest living for themselves.
Magnus listened and agreed politely. The alternative was to dismiss her comments out of hand, creating a degree of offence that would upset him as much as her. He tried to turn the conversation to a different tack.
“Trains are for foreigners, it would seem, and not of interest to well-behaved peasants. I presume they are so obedient because of fear of the consequences – step out of line and the man with the whip will see you. They are more interested in their failing crops I suspect – for their lords will demand their taxes irrespective of drought or flood.”
“It is no way to live, Magnus.”
He would not disagree, but doubted it was any worse than the bulk of English people experienced in their factories and mills. There was no gain to an argument though; he nodded and said no more.
The Legation had sent porters to watch every train as it came in, knowing the day that Magnus was expected. Timetables were meaningless and they could do no more than wait hopefully for the passengers to arrive. They converged on the two compartments seen to contain gwailos and a party descended on the baggage wagon; they quickly organised the newcomers into a little convoy of small carriages and wagons that was waiting outside the small station.
“Highly efficient, my dear! Twenty minutes from the train pulling to us being on the road.”
The station was outside the walls of the city and the carriages took the lanes to the nearest gate. There was a slum of tiny shacks and huts outside the wall and a massive population in the streets, people apparently busy, most of them running in various directions. Magnus wondered what they were doing, but the Chinese were a mystery – no doubt they knew. He stared at the walls as they passed through the gate, saw them to be old and in poor repair, but still between twenty and thirty feet tall and equally thick, made of multiple layers of brickwork.
A besieging army would need big guns to break the walls down after many days of siege. There was no siege train to hand in China. If the gates were closed then entry to the city would have to be by storm, ladders and ropes over the walls or explosive charges to blast through the gates – not an easy task if there was an active garrison armed with modern rifles. It would be impossible, he mused, if there were machine guns or light artillery protecting the walls.
From the gates there was a journey of two miles and the better part of an hour through the crowded, noisy streets, similar in most ways to Shanghai or Hong Kong. Older perhaps than those two cities, more like Hanshan on a much greater scale. The streets were dirty, more so than Magnus had seen elsewhere, except in Amoy, which was a poor, dying town. Possibly the drift of coolies into the great city had led to an over-population of the hungry and the unemployed.
Ellen was fascinated by the heterogenous crowds.
“Little changes in China, it seems, Magnus. The people live in the street. But, so many different sorts of them!”
Peking was a true capital city in that it had attracted people from the whole of the country – different faces and clothing clustered together in great dissimilar shoals. Shanghai showed some foreigners in its midst, but in Peking it was hardly possible to distinguish the native from the incomer, certainly not by simple numbers. She suspected that she could pick out faces from every part of Eastern Asia and Siberia, probably from a hundred different language speakers.
“How can so many be controlled, Magnus?”
He had no answer. Imperial China was a disciplined state in which there was a place for every man, and every man was in his place. Peking seemed not to be a part of that particular Empire yet was its very heart.
“They cannot; they obviously are not. The Empire exists by controlling every person within it. Such being the case, there is no Empire – it is dead. The sooner it is replaced – by anything at all, Chinese or foreign – the better for all of the people. There are hundreds of millions of Chinese, probably; I have heard the figure of four hundred and fifty millions given as an educated guess by men who said they might be under-estimating. They must be subjected to government of some sort. What sort matters less than that discipline must be restored. I had not realised that the core of the Empire was so hopelessly rotten – but we may observe that it is. Coolies from all of China have ended up here, permitted to wander from their villages and, or so I presume, settled into uncontrolled slums - worse than one might see in London, though not to a great degree. There can be no law and no prosperity – for one cannot exist in the absence of the other – and no prospect of China growing again into a strong country while this anarchy continues. The Empress must go, must be replaced, and the sooner the better.”
Ellen wondered if that was truly the case.
“Can the British not prosper more from Chinese weakness, Magnus? Would not a strong Empire wish to expel us?”
“Riches derive from trade. Commerce needs a stable country if it is to thrive. The government of China, whatever it may be, must open its doors to foreigners if it is to make its country wealthy. China is part of the world, my lady – best it should be a strong part of the globe in which Britain is the pre-eminent trader.”
She knew that trade meant wealth, jobs for all of those employed in making the goods that were to be transferred from one country to another. She had to agree, knowing that she would not have disagreed even without that knowledge. She firmly believed that her husband knew better than her in every aspect of worldly understanding; she had been very well brought up in the clear and absolute knowledge that the man was superior. She was grateful to Magnus that he explained all to her in so kindly a fashion.
“You implied that China might benefit from being ruled by a foreign country, Magnus?”
He smiled ruefully.
“Not Britain, my love. We have our hands full with India, could not possibly take on another and even larger nation. We would not wish Germany to take power here, and the French are incapable of mustering the strength. Russia might have the men to conquer China, but it is a poor country and unable to govern itself from all we hear of riots and risings across the land. The U
nited States may attain the power, one day, but it has not got it now. No, if any country is to govern China, it must be Japan, which may have the strength, though they are but little yellow men themselves, and is located conveniently close. That, of course, is fortunate, because relations between Britain and Japan are increasingly cordial. We must ensure that we continue on the best of good terms with Tokyo and encourage them in their efforts to expand in China. I believe they intend to take Korea first, from all that Captain Hawkins told me.”
That alliance, she thought, presented a number of difficulties.
“But, husband, the Japanese are not Christian, and as such can hardly be trustworthy allies of our nation. Add to that, my love, they are no less yellow in the skin than the Chinese themselves. Are they not as such inferior to the Anglo-Saxon?”
That was a very difficult question, Magnus appreciated. He doubted that he could find a convincing answer, particularly inasmuch that he agreed with her…
“They have a growing military might, my love. Such being the case, we might have to accept them as our equals while we need them.”
He was interrupted by the carriage turning into the Legation Quarter, created inside the Tartar City and home to all of the foreign diplomats. He was forced to break off their personal, private conversation, to put on their public face.
“We must make our appearance, my love. Best foot forward and most condescending smile – we outrank every other here in the British Legation and must show absolutely willing to be unaware of the fact, while ensuring that they remember it!”
She grinned, knowing that as a merchant’s daughter the bulk of the staff of the Legation would have brushed her aside; as wife to the heir to an earldom, her husband carrying a courtesy title, they would kowtow to her, their ladies hanging on her lips and hurrahing her every word. She would value their flattery at its worth, while still enjoying the place in society they granted her.
Chinese Whispers Page 4
