6. An idle dream
Having steps to secure the harbour against a counterattack, the question arose as to where the British would live. Elsewhere in China this had never before been addressed: they had simply been confined to their factories. The better-informed members of the expedition were aware that even here in Chusan, as in Canton still, English merchants had once lived ashore, and the Red Hair Hall was known to have stood on the waterfront beneath Josshouse Hill. It is possible that somebody even saw the black humour in a residence built to welcome the English having been fired upon by them on July 5th. The decision in Catchpoole’s day had been stark: here or nowhere. Now, for the first time, there were choices to be made. [1]
Governor Burrell himself moved into the late civil magistrate’s residence, a range of low, ramshackle buildings around a courtyard overgrown with grass and provided with tanks of stagnant water against accidental fires. In the innermost rooms a final meal lay uneaten on the table, an opium pipe set out ready for a leisurely postprandial smoke that had been forever postponed by the Wellesley’s broadside. (Had he lived, he might have been downhearted to learn that Burrell without further ado banned the landing and sale of the drug on Chusan under British rule — not that it did anything to stop the trade at anchor.) Magistrate Gützlaff moved into the former magistracy in the very heart of Tinghae, right beside the Pool of the District Granary, a lagoon that festered with mosquito larvae. Alongside him lived the expedition’s other interpreters. One, Robert Thom, was a Glaswegian who as a merchant’s clerk had by 1834 found himself working for the Canton agency house of Jardine, Matheson & Co. (they dealt, amongst other articles, in opium). A self-effacing man with a fascination for China, he had married a Chinese woman, had a sound knowledge of Chinese, and had accepted an official post with the expedition. The other interpreter, John Morrison, had six years earlier succeeded his father in the post of chief interpreter to the superintendent of trade in Canton, and was now always on hand to translate for Captain Elliot. Military Commissioners Stephens and Caine took rooms in a lavishly decorated building nearby. Space was found in the city’s larger houses for commissioned officers, who were not expected to rough it with Tommy Atkins, while the Pay Office was set up (presumably with no humour intended) in the temple of a Buddhist saint sworn to free tormented souls from hell. Finally, with an all-but-deserted city of some 4,500 houses at his disposal, Governor Burrell might have seemed spoilt for choice over where to shelter his 4,000-strong land forces, but a problem arose in his mind: his ongoing policy was to tempt the inhabitants of Tinghae back, a policy that would be exposed as a lie if returnees found a platoon of Irishmen or Indians billeted in their bedroom. He pondered the matter for a while, then ordered that no private residence should be broken into or occupied. Religious buildings, though, abounded. Some Scottish troops had already been billeted in the largest of them, the Buddhist Zuyin Temple in the heart of the city, others in the temple of the city god (where Sir George Staunton had stopped to escape a thunderstorm forty-seven years earlier), while the Royal Irish were billeted in their entirety in the fortified temple on Josshouse Hill. Its walled precincts stretched for most of a furlong along the flat crest, a great ceremonial square strewn here and there with enormous incense burners and stone lanterns. Men who took the time to look around inside this and the Zuyin Temple were in equal measure impressed with the craftsmanship and disgusted by the idolatry. Through successive halls, one met with the pot-bellied, laughing Maitreya Buddha, the twenty-foot-tall heavenly kings of the four directions with their scowls and their bulging eyes, and finally Sakyamuni Gautama, the Buddha himself, backed by golden halos, attended by bodhisattvas, and protected by four dozen statues of saints each standing yards high. Everywhere there was gilt and the brightest of colours. Officers occupied what had been the priests’ quarters, while privates slept in prayer halls under the gaze of the idols. Yet the very first act committed ashore had been the public desecration of just such an idol. Burrell, mindful of giving offence, ordered that no more temple buildings be entered. And so, with shelter denied to them, most of the rank and file remained encamped in their tents on the paddy fields between Tinghae and the harbour, which in places were knee-deep in mud. The 49th Regiment of Foot, the Hertfordshires, landing again after their drunken re-embarkation of the first day, pitched camp on the heights overlooking the harbour a mile west of the wharves (the Chinese called it Dawn Peak Ridge, for it was the point first illuminated by the rays of the sun). Soon the scrub-covered slopes of what became known as 49th Hill were speckled almost from top to bottom with white canvas. The 900-strong Cameronian Regiment pitched their bell-tents on the steep but lightly wooded slopes of the high ground that overlooked Tinghae from the northwest. This ‘Cameronian Hill’ was dry, well ventilated, and enjoyed a marvellous view across the city and the vale of Tinghae to the ships at anchor. The dark-skinned sepoys of the Bengal Volunteers and the two native Madras regiments set up camp amid the paddy and canals outside the city walls. Burrell’s failure to house his men properly would ultimately prove disastrous. [2]
But if the invading armies were finding it hard to get decent shelter, across the waters of Kintang Sound Tinghae’s erstwhile inhabitants were in an even worse situation. Rapidly inundated by refugees from the captured city, the prefect and magistrate of Ningbo together devised a strategy. First, Ningbo’s men of means were invited to contribute to a relief fund (an invitation they could presumably not refuse). Then the refugees were questioned. Those who had money to live on or friends and relatives to lodge with were granted temporary residency until such time as Tinghae was recaptured. The rest were asked if they were willing to travel to neighbouring districts to take their chances. If they agreed, they were given travel expenses and sent on their way. Close on 3,000 refugees were relocated in this way, leaving 2,000 elderly, disabled and destitute to be housed in Ningbo’s temples. As the weeks passed, townsfolk who had at first hidden out in Chusan’s villages began to make the short sea crossing to the safety of the mainland, and many who at first had taken their chances elsewhere drifted back to Ningbo. Thousands were facing starvation in the city, the young and old especially so, and the prospect of hordes of young men resorting to crime was terrifying. Even the provincial governor Urgungga 100 miles away in Hangzhou wrote to Peking admitting that the problem was giving him sleepless nights. An additional headache for the Chinese authorities was how to root out the bogus refugees (‘these treacherous bandits’ the emperor labelled them) who had arrived in droves hoping to claim the meagre daily allowance of thirty copper cash. A system was devised, whereby a Tinghae native would listen out for their local accent to confirm their bona fides before they were placed on a register of genuine refugees. Temporary straw huts were built on waste ground to shelter those whom the temples could not house, door-plaques were nailed up to identify households who had taken islanders under their wing, and food rations were doled out once every five days. As autumn of 1840 drew in, most of Tinghae’s 20,000 displaced citizens were living in internal exile. With growing apprehension it was realised that if the British could not be ousted from Chusan then permanent arrangements would have to be made for people who might never be able to return home. [3]
Despite the eerie stillness in Tinghae in the shocked aftermath of the invasion, there were glimmers of hope in the increasing number of shops opening for business and in the farmers who had started to bring food to sell on the streets. In these small ways at least, Magistrate Gützlaff’s permit system seemed to be working. As the people of the surrounding villages got over much of their initial alarm, there was food to be bought in Tinghae’s markets — meat, fowl, vegetables, eggs, sugar candy and more. The Chinese’ love of money, it appeared, might soon overcome their fears and bring in sufficient supplies for the garrison. But it was not just the British whom the Chinese feared. Even as hopes grew that greed would quickly repopulate Tinghae, they were as quickly dashed, with rumours beginning to circulate of spies from the mainland tightening
the screws on those shopkeepers who had dared to reopen. One by one they were seen to draw the planks across their shop fronts, click the padlocks shut, and leave with their takings. By the middle of July, the few farmers squatting behind cages of scrawny chickens knew it was a seller’s market, and prices were sky-high. For months at sea the garrison had been surviving on salt rations — heavily brined pork or beef boiled until flaccid, along with coarse bread or hard tack, some dried peas, and perhaps flour, raisins and suet for a boiled pudding. Once ashore, it had fallen to an army office called the commissariat to buy the fresh meat that made up the bulk of a soldier’s reliable but monotonous diet, and for a few days before the traders had been warned not to deal with the invaders this had indeed been achieved. Now, with little to eat once more beyond salt rations, an armed foraging party was organized. Two dozen Cameronians passed through the north gate with a band of Bengali camp followers to carry the anticipated haul of food. It was the first time the invaders had dared to venture beyond the city walls into the island’s hinterland, and at each little hamlet they made sure to paste up a proclamation claiming the island for Queen Victoria. The party’s interpreter Robert Thom betrayed a surprising degree of antipathy to the people he encountered:
The ignorant peasantry, the regular clodhoppers of the land, gaped and stared and laughed as Chinamen laugh, and then went to hoe their fields again. The country people didn’t seem to care, or, more likely, they did not understand what we were about. [4]
But while the villagers merely hid their fear behind smiles, the village gentry were patently unhappy:
They offered no opposition, as it would be inconvenient to come to blows, but in spite of my most honied expressions, and of my most persuasive arguments, I could plainly perceive that they were dissatisfied. I do not now hesitate to call the idea that the Chinese are displeased with their own government, and would join us from choice the moment that the British flag was unfurled, an idle dream.
It is a sentiment just as familiar from the conflicts of more recent times. Besides a few chickens and some eggs, that first attempt to find fresh food for the hungry soldiers ended with the Scots spending the huge sum of $50 on one water buffalo, one cow, and her calf — enough meat for a few days. Other foraging parties inevitably followed. Only by arriving in a village in force, heavily armed and unannounced, could they hope to find food, but such tactics succeeded only in alienating and terrifying the population. As time passed and the garrison resigned itself to living on salt rations, hopes came to rest on one man, Bu Dingbang.
Bu Dingbang was a great asset, an English-speaking merchant from Xiangshan near Canton who had worked for the trading company of Jardine, Matheson & Co. in the south and had sailed with the expedition to Chusan as a comprador — a native go-between, as it were. Alone, Bu Dingbang and his Bengali followers had consistently proved capable of returning from a day’s foraging carrying more food than they had set out with, and their success was reason to be optimistic. So it was no surprise that morale amongst the half-starved garrison sank when one day one of Bu’s foraging party, a butcher from Tinghae who was likewise working for the British, arrived out of breath in town with news that Bu had been abducted. A stroke of luck on the part of a group of Chinese Green Standard soldiers who had been hiding out in the interior, this was the last thing that was needed. The butcher, fearing for his own skin having seen a fellow Chinese seized, promptly vanished, leaving the British with no idea where to start looking. [5]
Correctly assuming that Bu would be spirited away to Ningbo as soon as possible, armed search parties set out into the mountains — terrain that had changed overnight from a reservoir of potential allies into a hostile world of possible ambush — in the hope of learning something of his kidnap. As the sun rose higher, the soldiers in their heavy woollen coatees began to wilt. Some, already suffering from fever or dysentery when they left out, turned back sick, and in their stead islanders were pressed at bayonet-point into carrying supplies. But invariably a warning cry would ring out, and the search parties were greeted only by a succession of deserted villages. As one party began to despair, a trick was devised: half of the men went on ahead to the next village, while the rest quietly doubled back to take the occupants of the last by surprise when they had returned to their homes. Surrounding the jubilant villagers, who thought they had outsmarted them, the British at a shout charged into their midst, firing into the air to terrify them. And so, in the summer heat, Celtic soldiers, Indian camp followers and reluctant Chinese coolies slogged from village to empty village by day and slept in commandeered temples by night. When the parties straggled back empty-handed and depleted by sickness to Tinghae, all they had to show for their exertions was a few village elders arrested in the hope that their incarceration might reveal Bu’s whereabouts, and a hostage who had been shot while attempting to flee and who had been carried back on a makeshift stretcher. [6]
Captain Elliot himself, meanwhile, had been brought up the coast by steamer, but had lost his way while trying to retrace his steps to a rendezvous. Late at night, after an age spent wandering the fields, Her Britannic Majesty’s plenipotentiary in China along with a party of officers and men stumbled into a cove where they happened upon the steamer at anchor. Most were rowed over, but, as the tide turned, Elliot was stranded on the rocky shore. To make matters worse, the only bottle of wine had preceded him aboard. Forced to pass the night on the wet rocks, he was heard to comment that the stones were ‘very good stones in their way, but a bad substitute for a feather bed.’ [7]
It had been just three days since Bu Dingbang’s disappearance, but even that short time had made a terrible difference to Tinghae: word had got out that collaborators were being seized, and hardly a shop was left open. Magistrate Gützlaff at least was unsurprised: his essay to Lord Palmerston five years earlier recommending the invasion of Chusan had contained an uncannily prescient warning on just this score: the Chinese, he had predicted, would attempt to cut off supplies of food, and unless the British treated the islanders well and won them over they were in a position to do them severe harm simply by denying them the essentials of life. The British had done anything but, and they were starting to pay the price. Even the persuasive and amiable naval surgeon Edward Cree found there was next to no food to be had without compelling its owners to sell. Assembling a party of sailors hungry enough to risk a foraging trip, and engaging an armed marine in case a kidnap attempt was made, he rowed out one day from HMS Rattlesnake to the islands in the harbour. On the first they visited, the Chinese simply fell on their knees in terror. Landing on a second, Edward and his armed guard found a village a mile or two inland. He recorded in his journal what they found there:
The natives came out to meet us in a crowd and made signs that they had no pigs, goats or poultry and wished to direct us to a village farther on. We tried to make friends with them and went into some of their houses and took tea. We picked up a pig, a goat and some fowl for which we paid them a fair price but they evidently did not wish to have any dealings with us. But hungry men were not to be driven away from food. [8]
Passing on through the island’s hamlets, the band scraped together a few more chickens and pigs while the villagers traipsed a short distance behind them in the forlorn hope of getting their animals back. That very same day, the emperor in distant Peking demanded a complete end even to such unwilling fraternisation. The policy of cutting off all sustenance was given added weight by a suggestion from Lin Zexu, the same imperial commissioner who a year earlier had sparked the war by destroying British opium stocks in Canton:
The barbarians speak and dress differently to us, they have different eyes, noses and hair, and so if we unite we can eradicate the foreign species with no chance of accidentally killing a Chinese. Tinghae has only recently been occupied and, even if all the citizens have fled for their lives, there cannot be fewer than one hundred thousand people in the villages. Everybody should be ordered to eradicate the bandits. Whether soldier or civilian,
anybody able to kill a barbarian should be rewarded according to the number of severed heads they can present to us. Once word gets out we shall need only to wait the blink of an eye and not one will be left. And once they are all dead, their boats and cannons will be all ours. [9]
Word did get out, and soon it was understood amongst the garrison that a severed Indian head commanded $50, a white head $100, and an officer’s even more. [10]
By early August of 1840, life in the few square miles of Chusan over which the British ruled was falling dreadfully short of expectations. On the first of the month, the joint plenipotentiaries Captain Charles Elliot and his cousin, Admiral Sir George Elliot, sailed north for the mouth of the Peiho River to open negotiations as Lord Palmerston’s instructions required (as had been the case for Lord Macartney in 1793, this was the closest they could get to Peking without journeying overland). The sick lists meanwhile were daily increasing: a particularly pernicious form of dysentery was by now affecting fully half of Governor Burrell’s men, and the symptoms of malaria were widespread. Even Burrell himself was suffering from violent attacks that sapped his strength. Tinghae was devoid of all but the most desperate Chinese, and there was no fresh food to be had save 1 lb of fatty pork per man per week. The subalterns of the Royal Irish were forced to choose between milk and goat-meat, and elected to kill their animals one by one rather than starve. There were, they complained bitterly, stores aplenty on the merchant ships in harbour, but prices were so high that it was ruinous. Instead they went hungry. Fowls bought, borrowed or stolen on the occasional foraging trip provided soup for the invalids, but otherwise the British were living on salt rations, the Indians on rice, dhal, ghee and mustard seed. Even the ragged beggars were finding life difficult now their almsgivers had vanished. Some were seen fishing in the canals, only to be pounced upon by soldiers if they caught anything. Cockerels, it was observed, only crowed once. A junk taken prisoner proved to be of scant use to a garrison suffering from bloody fluxes and intermittent agues, its cargo — deer horns, tortoiseshell, ivory and tiger skeletons — beautiful but inedible. The only person to draw a grain of comfort from Tinghae’s emptiness was Gützlaff. As magistrate he had at first been assailed by rival claimants to property, but by late July he had ceded his post to the military commissioner Captain William Caine in order to focus on his translating duties and on writing religious tracts. ‘I had much trooble at first,’ he was heard to joke in his German accent. ‘But now it is vary nice; all de litigious people have left de city!’ [11]
Chusan Page 8
