Chusan
Page 7
For want of a better plan, Governor Burrell decided upon non-compulsion to prove to the islanders that he meant them no harm. But with a population which had already largely fled to the island’s interior or across Kintang Sound to the nearby port of Ningbo, it rapidly became clear that this open-door policy was simply allowing thieves to plunder the city and escape with impunity. Only after a long, sultry day of unchecked looting were sentries placed at the four gates, yet still Burrell gave no orders to prevent the removal of property, preferring instead to make it known that there would be free access and no coercion to remain. It was easier to ignore what the sentries suspected — that the rightful owners of the valuables being removed were not the same as the ragged Chinese removing them. The sentries, who of course had not a single word of Chinese between them, could only look on in exasperation as anything that could be moved — furniture, clothes, cash, food — was carried out before their eyes and with a smiling disregard for their flintlocks. [7]
A flurry of orders emerged from Governor Burrell’s office in the coming days, notice succeeding contradictory notice on the streets until it seemed that only the governor himself understood the regulations in force. It was a full week before a system of bilingual transit permits was settled upon: Chinese were only permitted to enter the city on production of a pass issued by Gützlaff, the intention being to allow only law-abiding citizens to return. When leaving they were restricted to taking with them 3 lbs of fish, 4 lbs of rice, and $2 in cash. Nothing else could leave the city, and soon piles of confiscated goods appeared beside the guardhouses at each of the gates. Honest and dishonest alike, Gützlaff soon found scores of petitioners beating a path to his magistracy to argue the case for the return of some — in fact any — property. In the east of the city, sandwiched between two branches of the canals that watered the rice fields of an otherwise undeveloped corner, sat the Confucius Temple. Here were stored goods that had been confiscated, along with valuables rescued from the city’s pawnshops — clothes, furs, silks, ornaments, polished copper mirrors and dozens of gongs — and grain and property requisitioned from the public buildings. In the weeks and months to come, regular auctions of the booty would be held (they raised some 6,000 rupees for the public purse, some £600 at the time), while gangs of robbers, undeterred by the risk of capture, tried to break in through the temple’s rear walls. [8]
‘The Chinese people are quiet and inoffensive; they like anything better than hard blows; but a more subtle, lying and thievish race it was never my luck to live amongst,’ complained one correspondent of the Chinese Repository, telling of the ruses Britannia’s unwilling subjects were employing to circumvent Gützlaff’s system. One man had arrived at a city gate with a coffin, a huge piece of solidly made joinery in the traditional style, requesting that he be allowed to take his late mother for burial. Thinking him a fine example of filial affection, and presumably not wishing to insult the locals’ religious practices, he was let through. A suspicious number of coffins began to leave the city uninspected until one sentry, less considerate of the dead or perhaps just more suspicious of the living, forced a lid open with his bayonet to discover not a corpse but a cache of silks. Another time, the same observer was approached by a man who claimed that sentries had confiscated his wife’s and mother’s clothes at the north gate and that the poor women would freeze come winter. When the two reached the gate there was indeed a large pile of women’s clothing, from which the man selected a choice number. Only later, when the real owner came to claim the clothes back from the magistrate’s safekeeping, was the trick realised. The next time a Chinese tried to hoodwink our man he had learned his lesson: passing the east gate he saw somebody carrying two large pannierfuls of ashes. Sure enough, under the ashes were the most beautiful silk and fur clothes and a hoard of cash. The goods were returned to their owner and the thief was given twenty-four hours’ confinement. Unavoidably, homeowners returning to rescue their property crossed paths with others trying to steal it. They did not feel obliged to conciliate the likes of these common burglars with such very liberal punishments and dealt out summary justice to those they caught in the act. One thief was found drowned, having been trussed up and tossed into a ditch in the city, another tied to a post with such force that his wounds bled and his eyes started from their sockets. A third, caught stealing from the house of a literary graduate, was brought to the magistracy bound in the most excruciating manner. ‘It was two hours before he recovered the use of his speech,’ a witness recalled with horror:
The learned character seemed much astonished, and could not at all understand why he should be accused of cruelty, having, as he stated, merely executed an act of justice. [9]
It seemed that many islanders were willing to take these risks for the sake of riches. A popular ruse was to drop plunder over the city wall for accomplices to make away with over the moat. One, loaded down with far more than he could carry, sank and died in the mud. Two more lost their lives to the vigilance of a Scot who shouted at them to stop when he saw them descending the walls. One was shot squarely through the heart as he ran off — incredibly bad luck considering the inaccuracy of a flintlock musket. The other, being taken to Gützlaff under arrest, took advantage of a moment’s lack of attention on the part of his guard to throw himself into a canal where he drowned. The guard was court-martialled for not trying to rescue him, and a macabre rumour circulated in camp as to how he had defended his inaction: ‘My orders was that I was not to lose sight of the man,’ the bemused private had apparently explained. ‘I seed him jump in and I seed him stick fast, and I knew he could not get away.’ [10]
But despite the lawlessness, there were indications that, given time, the two sides might be able to get along on a human level. Soon after the landings, the ship’s surgeon of HMS Rattlesnake went ashore to look for food. It is this man, Edward Hodges Cree, that we have to thank for so much of the detail of life on Chusan under British rule.
Edward Cree was twenty-six years old at the outbreak of the Opium War. He had graduated in medicine three years earlier from Edinburgh University and, against his father’s wish that he become a country surgeon in Cornwall, had straight away joined the Royal Navy with a posting as assistant surgeon aboard HMS Royal Adelaide in his native Devonport. He began on his very first day in the Navy to write his Journal, a day-by-day account of his life in prose and watercolour sketches full of vitality and wit, a labour which only stopped in 1861. In 1887, by then in his seventies, he edited and bound his work into the twenty-one volumes which are now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. Less than a week after the invasion, on Friday, July 10th, Cree wrote a typically warm and humane account of the day’s events: [11]
As we were bargaining for some food and eggs, a well dressed Chinaman came up and gave us to understand that he would take us to a place where we could get plenty, and at the same time put some eggs into our basket and took the bundles of fowl we had purchased. We followed him through the city gate, where he turned around and gave the fowls to our boy, thanked us and took his leave and, laughing, pointed to the large paper parcels that he had under his arm and walked away as fast as he could. We had inadvertently passed him out by the sentries but we did not think it worthwhile to betray the poor fellow.
When Cree landed on Trumball, the nearest of the inhabited islands in Tinghae’s inner harbour, he discovered a farmer and his family who had not fled:
They were very civil to us and sold us some ducks for which we paid a dollar for six, for which they appeared well satisfied. In one house we encountered three or four with their tiny little feet and broad flat faces. They were sitting down drinking tea of which we took some, very hot and very weak, no milk or sugar, and of a very fishy flavour, for I find they dry their tea on the same mats on which they dry their fish. [12]
Another officer had a delightfully close encounter. While out walking in the near-deserted town, he spied a pair of eyes peeping at him through a window. Inside a well-to-do house h
e found a young woman who by gestures intimated that she had sneaked back into Tinghae under the cover of darkness to find her family had fled. She had tried to leave the city again but had been terrified by the sentries then being posted at the gates, and had ever since been hiding out alone. She showed the officer around her den, pointed out the dried fruit and cakes she planned to survive on for as long as was necessary, offered him a liqueur from a filigreed goblet, and swore him to secrecy. Elsewhere, a musician was caught stealing instruments from one of the regimental bands. Brought before Gützlaff, he begged to explain himself:
When I listen to the music of your troops, the sound of my own instruments appears to be harsh and grating in my ears. I lose all pleasure in them. How could I then presume to enter any longer into competition with its strains? Besides, to me, it appears you have quite music enough; and as the voice of mirth will be heard no more in this city, of what use is my abode amidst the afflicted? I can carry on my profession only amongst joyous parties. [13]
For this consummate piece of emotional manipulation he was allowed to go free.
Those early days of Chusan’s occupation were the first time in history that so many Britons had roamed freely on Chinese soil without mandarins forever looking over their shoulders. In previous encounters — Allen Catchpoole’s time spent in the Red Hair Hall, Lord Macartney’s progress to Chengde in 1793, and of course the years spent in the cramped Canton factories — watchful eyes had noted the aliens’ every move, had carefully prescribed what they could see and do. Now, by contrast, Britons had the opportunity to observe without hindrance, to survey, analyse and classify a tiny corner of this enigma. It was a pastime the Victorians excelled at.
Encircling Governor Burrell’s little fiefdom were Tinghae’s walls, thirteen feet thick, eight yards tall, and two miles long, built of granite and iron-hard blue bricks to protect against piratical raids and with hulking, square bastions. Great stone gatehouses defended by iron-bossed doors commanded the cardinal points, and a moat provided extra protection. Within the walls, the British found Tinghae’s main streets on the whole admirably well-built, paved with close-fitting granite slabs (many have survived into our own day). Two main thoroughfares ran crooked courses from the south gate to the north, and from the east gate to the west, each six yards wide, but most were less than half that. Awnings stretched out over poles shaded passers-by from the fierce sun. Running the length of the larger streets were covered sewers which discharged into winding canals, crossed by high-arched stone bridges, all eventually meeting to exit the city by a Watergate. From those larger streets descended side streets, and from these branched out alleyways into an unfathomable maze of tiny courtyards and abandoned rooms. Everywhere the British looked they found filth. It was something they had not expected, given the European Enlightenment’s general impression that China was a willow-pattern paradise. Great earthenware jars stood on every corner, receptacles for all kinds of discarded animal and vegetable matter and human waste, rapidly fermenting in the summer heat and writhing with maggots. Before their owners had been scared off, sampans could be seen each morning at dawn leaving the city with these jars of ordure that now stood uncollected and putrefying. The masonry sea-gates that prevented Tinghae’s fields from inundation with saltwater also held the waterways above them in a state of torpor, and besides, the British had arrived at the height of summer when rain was scarce. The level of the canals had dropped markedly, and their inky-black water was all the more offensive for it. The unsanitary conditions that even the late civil magistrate had been prepared to put up with sickened those who saw them; ‘The smell in the rooms,’ as one eye-witness put it, was ‘as bad as that arising from mouldering graves’:
Even the ladies’ apartments, which had only a few hours previously been abandoned, were so uncleanly that a Chinese coolie actually fainted on entering them…. It is difficult to understand how people could live in such damp and infected places, unless they possessed something of the amphibian nature of the toad. [14]
Such hyperbole aside, Tinghae’s houses were — and indeed a few survivors still are — typical of Zhejiang’s vernacular architecture: those fronting the streets were, in that province’s mercantile tradition, predominantly shops, two storeys high, of brick or timber and with a frontage of wooden panels removed by day to reveal the stock. A counter separated the inside from the bustle of the street, and a till sat at one end. A reel of twine would hang from the ceiling, close by wrapping paper cut ready for use. Windows were unglazed, but shutters or lattices of wood and paper kept the cold out tolerably well for Chinese sensibilities. The poorer homes in the back alleys did not display the extravagant curving eaves of public buildings and temples, having just a gently sagging roof covered with a jumble of black tiles. The more opulent homes exuded exclusivity, their public persona a high, whitewashed wall surmounted by a dark strip of tiles, with below a scarlet door in a stone surround. The local name for the style was fenqiang daiwa, ‘powdered walls and tiles like blackened eyebrows’, as though each presented a carefully made-up face to the world. Behind those plain walls were discovered ornate balconies and luxurious woodcarvings — bamboos and birds, red-lacquered bedsteads, tables and gilded chairs. The sheer amount of crockery and reading matter impressed people. Around every door were strips of paper with beautifully drawn Chinese characters, some of them gilt and glittering. They had been pasted there at the start of the Chinese New Year in early February, but the irony of such prayers for wealth and good fortune for this particular Year of the Rat was lost on the British. [15]
Other subtleties similarly escaped Tinghae’s conquerors, who were almost to a man blind to every meaning encoded in characters and landscapes. As the common soldiery worked its way from house to house looking for valuables, soon their floors were strewn with books, poem scrolls, hanging couplets and paintings cast aside as worthless. A stone’s throw from the east gate, the granite crests of Red Sky Hill were crowned by a pagoda and by a strange structure on a plinth that to the unknowing eye resembled a squat flagstaff. Aside from the very few Mandarin speakers amongst the British, nobody seemed much interested in what they were, or noticed, when it rained, that water ran down the slope to collect in Inkstone Pool, or that the curious monument was carved like a writing brush so that the god of literature might take it up, dip it in the pond, and form his mighty characters on the vast canvas of the empty fields beyond. [16]
Tinghae, which like every Chinese city was home to its share of Confucian scholars, was found to have a number of libraries, academies and schools, their walls bearing row after row of pigeonholes crammed with books. Appreciating their value to governance and scholarship, Gützlaff issued orders that all be brought to his magistracy. Before he could be heeded, though, they were stolen as souvenirs. Elsewhere were found the accrued archives of the local administration. The damp maritime air had got to them long before the British, who discovered to their horror that any attempt to move them only created a pall of noxious mould. The only people to show an interest turned out to be a posse of agents from the mainland, sent to steal them back from under Governor Burrell’s nose. One was caught red-handed, and so the archives were burned in great bonfires to preclude their theft. Just a few scraps — a map salvaged by an officer, some pages bearing the emperor’s vermillion script rescued by a doctor — survived an act of vandalism that left a permanent gap in the county’s records. [17]
Worse still, when the Madras Engineers began the vital work of fortifying Josshouse Hill against any Chinese counterattack the rocky eminence was found to be swathed in a centuries-old accretion of burials. Chusan’s geomancers having long since divined its excellent fengshui, each coffin in turn had been placed on the hillside and slowly covered over with soil until it became one with the slope. Finding the ground strewn with bones and funerary clothing weathered out from these graves, the British can be excused for concluding that the Chinese, whatever was said about their punctilious ancestor worship, honoured their duties mor
e in the breach than in the observance. Digging out the caskets proved a distasteful job, and the Engineers turned to conscripting any passing Chinese at bayonet-point. The officer in charge of the work, Captain Pears, simply could not fathom the islanders:
The fellows are an odd set, with their long tails, broad-brimmed hats and straw shoes. They jabber and scramble and resist at first, then take to their work most kindly, and ultimately receive their pay with every demonstration of pleasure and gratitude. [18]
It was not a pleasurable task. As each burial was uncovered it was heaved down the slope, its boards breaking open to scatter human remains. For days, the exposed contents rotting in the summer heat threw a choking miasma over the scene until a great pyre was made of body parts, burial clothes and splintered wood. No more shocking means could possibly have been designed to alienate the islanders. Even the culturally illiterate barbarians could see that. [19]
Josshouse Hill (in the background) in 1843. Dubbed ‘the fortress of terror’ in this engraving, the hill and the fortified temple upon it are much larger than in real life, while the buildings and pagoda in the foreground are imaginary.