As the regimental band played, the Royal Irish Regiment landed and ascended the temple hill (the only opposition was a man who threw a stone at them and ran off) to find a handful of cowering monks terrified half to death by the bombardment. The first man to reach the top was a sailor from one of the landing boats. He appeared on a wall with an idol he had torn from its pedestal, holding it by the arms in a mockery of a dance before dashing it to pieces upon the floor. Then, taking a Union Jack handed to him by an officer, he shinned up a convenient flagstaff and made the British colours fast while the men of the fleet cheered him on. By ten minutes to three on Sunday, July 5th 1840 the British flag was fluttering over the courtyard of an obscure Buddhist temple, the very first Chinese territory to be forcibly occupied by a Western power. Whatever remained of Mr Allen Catchpoole’s Red Hair Hall lay in ruins below, just like any hope that Great Britain and China might solve their commercial disagreements peacefully. [13]
The men who went ashore on the afternoon of July 5th had been raised from regiments serving in India and were a hotchpotch of nations and races. Beside the Englishmen of Her Majesty’s 49th Regiment of Foot (they were known to all and sundry as the Hertfordshires), there were the Scots of Her Majesty’s 26th Regiment of Foot (the Cameronians) and the Irishmen of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. With them came the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims of the Bengal Volunteers and a regiment each of Artillery and Engineers from Madras. Moving unhindered now among the remains of the wharves, the extent of the carnage became clear. Twenty bodies were removed from the half-sunken war junks, a handful of dead were discovered amongst the shattered houses, and others had died in the fields beyond, trying to reach safety. Those too wounded to flee were taken aboard the Wellesley for surgery. Only one survived, a soldier with a shattered leg that was amputated despite his protestations. As for their weapons, it was discovered with some surprise that of the two dozen cannon which General Zhang had mustered on the foreshore the only decent piece had been cast in London in 1601, a relic perhaps of some forgotten attempt to trade with these islands. It was primed and pointed squarely at HMS Alligator, but its crew had fled before firing it. The contents of Zhang’s arsenals (they better deserved to be called ‘toy-shops upon a large scale’) were no more a match for the British army: hollow-cast iron guns packed with grapeshot, obsolete matchlocks that would have posed as much danger to the firer as to his foe, packets of quicklime, longbows, halberds, even pitchforks…. Carefully stored uniforms of padded cotton with metal studs harked back to the days when the sword was the principal threat. [14]
Climbing to the temple atop what was quickly renamed Josshouse Hill (‘josshouse’ being another name for a temple), one could see the walled city of Tinghae itself, a mile away across the paddy fields. Upon the ramparts, lines of silk banners were still waving in defiance. Throughout the afternoon the Madras Artillery landed howitzers, mortars and cannons, unshipping each with difficulty onto the crowded wharf before heaving them to the top of a low hill within just 400ft of the walls. By nightfall, under sporadic but pointless firing from the city (it served no purpose but to prove that the Chinese ‘were utterly ignorant of gunnery’), a battery had been set up ready to shell Tinghae come first light. At around midnight the Chinese guns fell silent. Exhausted from their exertions, the artillerymen snatched some rest. They spent that first night on Chinese soil surrounded by wet rice fields, feasted upon by mosquitoes that swarmed in their millions, kept awake by the noise of gongs from the city, the hammering of scaling ladders being prepared, and the croaking of frogs. Those young men, for the most part illiterate Bengalis and Irish labourers, must have wondered to themselves what on earth they were doing there. Bivouacked around a large fire, their kit to hand and the guns ready to open up when called upon, they were unaware of the events unfolding half a mile away. [15]
In the century since the last East India Company merchants had traded upon Chusan, it had been forgotten that Tinghae’s wharves existed mainly to store three commodities: one was timber, another dried fish, and the third a potent sorghum spirit called samshoo, produced in vast quantities for export. What precisely made samshoo so helplessly intoxicating was a moot point. Some said it was mixed with tobacco juice, others arsenic. That its name meant ‘thrice distilled’ is probably explanation enough. Thousands of soldiers had been landed by nightfall, and most were still awaiting muster. Sailors from the transports had been given permission to go ashore. In alleys choked with debris, pressed into tiny passageways to allow the artillery to roll by, some of the men forced the doors to the warehouses. With the discovery of stores crammed room after room and floor to ceiling with large earthenware jars of samshoo, rank and file both British and Indian found to their delight that they had captured what amounted to a vast distillery. The meagre ration of watered-down drink doled out daily aboard cramped ships had left them thirsting for the real thing. An eye-witness to the inevitable result, a young artillery officer named Charles Wyndham Baker, wrote to his sister disgusted at the troops’ behaviour:
Its effect on them was of the most dreadful nature and very different from that of the spirits we are used to in England. A man no sooner took a small quantity than he was bereft of his senses, and men were lying about in all directions in a most dreadful state and committing the most dreadful atrocities, which I am sorry to say are but too common in war. [16]
Under cover of darkness, orders to respect private property and treat the Chinese with civility were ignored and discipline utterly broke down; shops and homes were broken into, and women were reported to have been raped. Officers tried to put a stop to the drunkenness by smashing samshoo jars where they found them, until the streets ran in torrents. Wooden houses and timber-yards were soon awash with volatile spirits, while all around lay ammunition tubs from the dismounted Chinese ordnance. At three in the morning the inevitable finally happened. Perhaps an oil lamp or a candle was knocked over, or a lit pipe carelessly dropped from insensible lips. The blaze consumed a third of the wharf district, bathing the temple on the hill and the ships at anchor in an orange glow until sunrise. The next day the Hertfordshires, too drunk to be of any use in attacking Tinghae, re-embarked onto their troopships. If the British had anticipated winning over the Chinese with a display of the civilising arts, this was a most ignominious start. [17]
Before dawn, with the wharves still burning, a party of sappers crept across the fields to Tinghae intending to blow the south gate open. Flags still fluttered dimly on the ramparts, but the gongs and drums had been stilled: the garrison had abandoned the city overnight. A party of officers requisitioned a ladder, scaled the wall (ignoring one brave man who, though unarmed, tried to prevent them) and hauled aside an impromptu barricade of grain sacks. Once a plank bridge had been erected over the city moat (for the Chinese had demolished the bridge) a more-or-less sober company of soldiers filed silently through the gateway to take possession of Tinghae in the name of Queen Victoria, and at dawn hoisted a Union Jack. An entire Chinese city had fallen to British forces for the first time. Captain Elliot seemed satisfied with his fiefdom and wrote to his superior, Lord Auckland, governor-general of India, with some pride:
We are in possession of the Capital and Harbor of our New Kingdom. I have no hesitation in forwarding my opinion that the position is admirable in point of general situation, that the harbor cannot be safer when once in, and that the navigation is perfectly safe with due caution. [18]
As to the means of Dinghai’s capture, though, he pronounced himself less comfortable:
I think we might have achieved our conquest with much less destruction of property, and necessarily with a less serious shock to the confidence of the people in our considerateness and friendly disposition.
Elliot, no military tactician, admitted that he could not understand why his naval commander, Sir Gordon Bremer, had felt obliged to fire an unprovoked shot at the suburb, an act intended to force an impotent response, when there could have been no difficulty in taking Zhang’s ‘half do
zen pop guns’. And did the army really need to land two thousand men to capture an undefended hill? In his inexpert view, violence had overshadowed political considerations when in fact his commanders might have taken the suburb without firing a shot, and certainly without destroying more than ten houses. Reading his letter, the thought must have crossed Auckland’s mind that Lord Palmerston had chosen the wrong man for the job. ‘But it is an ungrateful task to take exception,’ Elliot continued in a more pragmatic tone,
and it is but just to say that the catastrophe which befell the suburb may have indisposed the Mandarins to take a stand behind the walls of the city. In such a contingency its destruction would probably have followed, and that would have been a dismal calamity.
No more a calamity, though, than what was to follow.
A street in Tinghae, 1840.
Inside Tinghae’s Zuyin Temple, 1840.
5. A Pompeii of the living
The arrival of the British flotilla in the East China Sea had unleashed a flurry of dispatches between Zhejiang’s mandarins and their superiors in Peking. Tinghae might have been abandoned, but across the water on the mainland men of the Green Standards were already being gathered up and rushed toward the coast. Still, it was a full three days after the city’s capture before the provincial governor of Zhejiang, a Manchu named Urgungga, knew enough of the situation to file a report: the foreigners who had been prowling around the coast had in fact opened fire on Chusan. His report began in the formulaic language expected of all official contact with Peking:
Your servant on bended knees memorialises on the matter of the English barbarians’ passing a letter to the general of Tinghae, and on their flaunting of their refractory behaviour, which respectful memorial is sent with all dispatch by government courier, beseeching the imperial gaze [1]
Urgungga, wary of admitting the seriousness of the situation in his jurisdiction or perhaps hopeful still that things were not as bad as might be feared, exaggerated the extent of his forces’ resistance. General Zhang’s war junks, far from succumbing with scarcely a fight, were reported to have exchanged fire with the barbarians from sunrise until noon. The barbarians had then left their ships and bombarded the city throughout the night, finally smashing down the gate and swarming in. Chusan’s civil magistrate and chief of police had both crept out of Tinghae under cover of darkness and drowned themselves rather than surrender. The elderly General Zhang himself had been seriously wounded, but with several of his officers had made it back to the mainland. Urgungga concluded his report in rousing fashion:
These barbarian bandits, these vagabonds and rogues, arrived most precipitately, their hearts intent on evil, and we must deal out to them the most painful destruction so as to make manifest the nation’s prestige. The situation is changing day by day, and my heart burns with grief.
Twelve days later — for it took this long for a provincial memorial travelling by horse-back courier to reach the emperor’s eyes — Daoguang himself added his vermilion script at its foot:
The neglectfulness of Zhejiang’s forces is clear to see without enquiring into it. Such trifling little ne’er-do-wells dare run amok, and the great civil and military officials array their troops only to go to pieces [2]
It was the use of such condescending terms that had so consistently maddened the British since the days of Allen Catchpoole. To the emperor, insulated from the reality of a changed world beyond China’s borders, all non-Chinese races were barbarian, and barbarians were by definition inferior, just trifling little ne’er-do-wells. Blindfolded by its own semantics, how could Peking react to something it could not comprehend? Weeks of dispatches from Zhejiang detailing the British flotilla’s every movement had not told the whole truth. The sparse nature of the Chinese characters da yi chuan — ‘big barbarian ship’ — to describe HMS Wellesley could not begin to explain the threat posed by just that single 74-gun man-of-war, honed to lethal perfection through centuries of European conflict. It had been boasted with no exaggeration that one or two British frigates could sink the entire Chinese navy, and the Elliots commanded far more than just one or two frigates. Still, in Chinese eyes there was no excuse for such a humiliating rout. With over a thousand men at arms, a firm hold ought to have been kept on Tinghae. Why then had it fallen so rapidly? General Zhang was stripped of his rank while his fate was considered. Eventually sentenced to death for cowardice, he only escaped punishment by dying of his wounds before he could be beheaded. His senior officers, meanwhile, were given one hundred lashes and banished to China’s remote western deserts. It appeared the only ones to come out of the invasion with honour would be the two suicides: ‘Their dying for their country is admirable,’ Urgungga had gushed. ‘Permit your servant to look into their circumstances so that their families might be offered relief!’ [3]
While the machinery of Qing government ground into action, the British began to explore their new conquest. The first curious individuals to inspect occupied Tinghae found just a few terrified beggars with nowhere to flee to, the elderly and the infirm who could not escape and who simply threw themselves at the feet of the invaders, and gangs of thieves who were busy ransacking the wealthier houses. The soldiers who had feigned a defence from the walls had, it was guessed, cast off their effeminate silk uniforms and melted away. Half-starved dogs skulked about the streets. Shutters had been nailed down across shop fronts and windows, and doors had been secured as best the former occupants could manage. The last of the city’s richer inhabitants were seen dropping chests of valuables over the wall and heaving them away. Stories had circulated during the voyage to Chusan of how much the Han Chinese populace hated their Manchu rulers and longed for freedom, and the British had naïvely expected to be greeted as liberators. But instead of grateful crowds, the sound of prayers wafted from the temples as the few remaining citizens begged Guanyin the goddess of mercy for delivery. Tinghae, as one eye-witness observed, had become overnight ‘a Pompeii of the living — nothing wanting in the picture but inhabitants’. Except for a few dozen, the city’s entire population of more than 25,000 had fled in terror. They had even left their food half-cooked in their kitchens, their china set out ready to eat, so hurried had been their departure when the Wellesley had opened fire. And so, with Chusan’s civil magistrate drowned and General Zhang under arrest on the mainland, it fell to the British to establish the rule of law in their stead. They were singularly unprepared. [4]
Until the events of July 5th, Chusan had been the largest of the many islands governed from the walled city of Tinghae. Technically a xian or ‘county’, the smallest administrative district in which the civil magistrate was invested with all the powers of governance, Tinghae had been subordinate first to Ningbo prefecture forty miles away across the waters of Kintang Sound and then in turn to the provincial capital Hangzhou and then Peking. For the maintenance of public order, every family had been registered under an ancient system of mutual security called the baojia: ten households had formed what was termed a pai, ten pai had constituted a jia, and ten jia had gone to make a bao of 1,000 households whose good order had been the responsibility of an elder who answered to the civil magistrate. But now Yao Huaixiang had taken his own life, and the invaders’ alternative scheme was inevitably somewhat less thorough. Karl Gützlaff, the Chinese-speaking missionary who just seven years earlier had recommended the invasion of Chusan to Lord Palmerston, revelled in his post as the new magistrate of an island he had long yearned to convert to Christianity. Major Thomas Stephens of the Hertfordshires and Captain William Caine of the Cameronians were sworn in as military commissioners to collect and take care of Tinghae’s public property. The top post, that of Governor of Chusan, fell by default to one Brigadier George Burrell, the liverish old commander of the Royal Irish Regiment. But the sixty-four-year-old lieutenant-colonel was a military man, not a colonial administrator, and certainly no diplomat. It was only the unexpected death at sea of the expedition’s senior officer, the respected and well-liked Lieutenant-Colon
el Oglander of the Cameronians, that had propelled George Burrell unwillingly into the post. He was out of his depth, lacked any knowledge of local law and custom, and readily admitted himself far from happy in the role of governor of Queen Victoria’s newest possession; it was, he complained, ‘a situation most harmfully unpleasant.’ Oglander’s untimely death, and the unforeseen appointment of Burrell, would prove to have terrible consequences for the men of the expedition and ultimately for the very conduct of the war. [5]
Governor Burrell (he was suffering from chronic dysentery, which only made an onerous role harder) began by formally addressing what remained of Tinghae’s populace in a proclamation that was translated and pasted up around the city. It vied incongruously for wall-space with the Chinese proclamations denouncing opium as a great evil and threatening severe punishments for sellers and users. The British intended them no harm, he explained; the occupation of the island would simply redress the injustices practised by the Chinese at Canton, and their two nations would recover the peace and harmony which had previously existed between them. Few of the Chinese who now remained were literate. Those who could read must have been struck by the sheer impertinence of these barbarians, for it was no more conceivable that they could demand redress for injustices at the hands of Chinese mandarins than a dog could demand redress over a beating from its master. When a copy was peeled from its wall and found its way to the mainland it was condemned as a usurpation of power. The barbarians, coming from so far away, must understandably have been ignorant of their rightful place. [6]
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