For the officers and men who remained on Chusan, the truce seemed a bit one-sided. The wily Chinese looked to have duped the Elliots just as they had once palmed off Lord Macartney with blandishments. Gützlaff wrote describing the situation to his good friend and confidante, the trader James Matheson:
It is a queer truce. There is no open market for our troops on the main, no security to anyone on this island, no release of prisoners, in fact nothing at all except the mere word, and that seems to satisfy our great men. Our soldiers are dying in immense numbers, and the returns daily made of the dead are awful…. My heart grieves at this mere show, I can tell you. [8]
Within days the steamer Atalanta was once more circumnavigating the island. Parties were landed along the coast to march from village to village, hunting out suitable places for outposts. There was a flurry of construction work around Tinghae. An observatory built on Harbour Point at the foot of 49th Hill allowed the city’s position to be established with accuracy and the first scientific survey of the harbour to be completed. The Engineers restarted work on the Josshouse Hill fortifications, repaired bridges destroyed by the retreating Chinese back in July, and raised watchtowers and batteries. Gangs of local men were paid to dredge the city canals. Only now that Elliot was preparing to negotiate the return of Chusan, it seemed, did the garrison make the least show of wanting to keep it. [9]
As Tinghae’s population slowly returned it brought not only improved supplies to the markets but also, to Captain Elliot’s mind, ‘the dramatis personae of a thieving, roguish inhabitancy.’ ‘I have never lived amongst any race of people so addicted to thieving and petty larceny,’ complained Gützlaff. Mr Waterhouse, an agent for the trading house of Jardine, Matheson and Co., agreed — all the Chinese did was rob him and pass bad dollars. Having landed his goods, Waterhouse had since been burgled no fewer than five times. Police stations were set up in response to an epidemic of nightly thefts, their patrols regularly arresting thieves who would swiftly be brought before a military court. If found guilty, they would be tied to a wooden frame erected in the city and publicly flogged before having their pigtails cut off close to the head. This last indignity was far worse than the flogging, since the queue, a symbol of Chinese submission to the ruling Manchus, was compulsory for all men and its absence was severely punished by any mandarin who subsequently came across the criminal. ‘We are always able to pick out the bad characters afterwards,’ wrote an officer of the artillery, unaware perhaps that such convicted men were obliged for their own safety to remain skulking about Tinghae until their hair grew back. [10]
It was not only the Chinese who needed to be kept under control: the British and Indian troops, their numbers terribly depleted, still faced the strain of endless rounds of guard duty, and many looked for temporary escape. Though Governor Burrell had outlawed its sale, smuggled samshoo was not hard to come by and courts martial for being drunk on duty were common. Though sentences of 150 lashes were often meted out to the soldiers, their camp followers were quite at liberty to drink themselves insensible if they wished. As the weather worsened, men who had never left the heat of Madras and Bengal felt the cold terribly. Many drank samshoo just to keep warm and pilfered padded-cotton uniforms from the captured arsenals, the Chinese character yong — ‘courageous’ — emblazoned incongruously across their slight chests. But for the Chinese who had smuggled the samshoo into barracks, the punishments were truly harsh: one man who was caught red-handed with clay jars of samshoo hidden inside his voluminous sleeves was given twenty lashes, had his pigtail cut off, and suffered the burning down of his home. The uncomfortable comparison with the British trade in opium must have been quite apparent. [11]
When in late October a fire broke out in a magazine near the beach, the Chinese were blamed, it having been forgotten that drunken British soldiers were quite capable of setting light to the wharves without outside help. Three dozen barrels of ball-cartridge were rolled out by men of the Royal Irish Regiment despite the roof having caved in. Some of the barrels had already been charred, and the Irishmen responded to the fire-drum in the full knowledge that if a single one had exploded they would all have been blown to Kingdom come. Chastened by the near disaster, the regiment moved its powder store to the fort on Josshouse Hill, shrouded it in a heavy tarpaulin, and guarded it around the clock. While no cooking stoves or braziers were allowed anywhere near the magazines, the regulations governing billets were less strict. Almost to a man, the garrison was living in wooden buildings illuminated by candles and warmed, if they were lucky, by coal fires. In early December another blaze burned the Hertfordshires’ hospital to the ground. By then, greater numbers of Chinese had returned to live amongst the garrison than at any point since the invasion and, far from the finger of suspicion being pointed at them, they were praised for turning out to help extinguish the flames. Their reaction though was rooted more in self-interest than in concern for the patients — it seemed the fire had already spread to nearby houses. The sick were all carried to safety, and nobody was harmed. Within the month yet another conflagration had destroyed part of Governor Burrell’s residence. A near disaster so close to home spurred the governor into action: there was a ban on open fires after curfew, an alarm post was established with a commanding view across the city, and an impromptu fire brigade raised. While rank and file huddled around their braziers and sought ways to escape the tedium as the temperature dropped below freezing, a group of senior officers converted a house on the wharves into a branch of London’s fashionable United Service Club. Though it can never have hoped to match the Regency splendour of John Nash’s clubhouse on Pall Mall, soon it was at least decently furnished, with carpets and looted ornaments to make it more homely. Here gentlemen would gather to exchange the latest news and to enjoy a rubber of whist over brandy and a cigar. ‘But we miss ladies’ society very much,’ grumbled one. [12]
November of 1840 marked a turning point for Chusan. The weather had started out rainy, the wind swinging between a mild southerly and a bitter northerly, but the drop in temperature had not put an end to the fever. By the end of November, by contrast, the sickness had peaked and provisions were so abundant that soldiers and sailors were eating fresh meat every day. Officers, who were expected to make their own arrangements without the help of the commissariat, were able to hunt game unmolested in the interior or purchase supplies from a Parsee shop in the main street or from the city’s thriving markets. There, native copper cash bearing the emperor’s name fell out of general use, to be superseded by silver coinage from India and Spain — the Chinese called them the loopee and the tolah. Tinghae was so crowded as to have earned a bit of a reputation for debauchery, and the arrival in town one day of a man requesting a licence to marry his daughter to an Englishman hinted that not all Anglo-Chinese relations were being conducted at arm’s length. Karl Gützlaff was in buoyant mood at the upturn in fortunes, anxious only that calculations were being made far above his head which might yet lead to the evacuation of the island he had for so long been promoting as a colony. He exhorted his close friend in Macao, the influential trader James Matheson, to argue the case for Chusan’s retention when the Elliots reached Canton:
If your opinion is ever asked, do never, on any account, consent to give up our footing in this quarter of the world. How small soever the portion may be, that we are going to possess, you may rely upon it, that a Chinese Singapore will soon make its appearance. [13]
If they decided to surrender such a perfect island, he predicted, the British would ‘rue it to the last’. [14]
10. The celestials wish to measure their strength
With a sizeable part of the British force having sailed south with Captain Elliot to make a show of strength on the Pearl River, the truce gave Commissioner Yilibu an excuse to demobilise some of his troops to save money. By mid-November, the number of men defending the Zhejiang coast had been halved to just 5,400. Still, this was twice the strength of the British regiments now facing them across Kintang
Sound. There on Chusan, it was only now that the men were in somewhat better health that Governor Burrell found it worthwhile to inspect the Royal Irish, who went through their drills on an extemporised parade ground. He praised their appearance and their healthy condition; the disease that had ravaged them for the past four months, he said, was no longer to be dreaded. Next the Bengal Volunteers and the Madras Artillery were inspected, and the Artillery opened fire for the first time since July 5th, causing a mass panic amongst the several hundred Chinese who had turned out to watch the spectacle. The sight of the smart red uniforms and the roar of the guns must have helped to convince the islanders that the British, though weakened, were still more than capable of holding on to Chusan. Across the water in Zhenhai, the fortified town commanding the river approach to Ningbo, Yilibu was bound to hear of the military manoeuvres, but he wrongly concluded that the barbarians were sabre-rattling over the negotiations in Canton. Though months of hardship had left both sides too weak to go on the offensive, neither trusted the other not to break the uneasy truce. On the mainland, newly-cast iron cannon were broken out of their moulds and test-fired. The first proved to be so badly honeycombed that its breech burst, killing its gun-crew and some mandarins who had assembled to watch. Frustrated, Yilibu ordered a conscription of all Zhejiang’s available metalworkers and had them sent to Zhenhai. There they were commissioned to produce sixty guns of some four-and-a-half tons apiece, heavier even than the cannons the Royal Navy had brought to China and, without the technical expertise of the Royal Arsenal at their disposal, sure to fail. From a now bitterly cold Chusan, Gützlaff followed their progress through his network of informants: ‘They are completely puerile,’ he commented acidly, ‘but still the celestials wish to measure their strength.’ [1]
One celestial especially wished to do so. On being sent to Zhejiang as a commissioner, Yilibu had handed over his governor-generalship of the three Yangtze provinces to the care of an erudite Manchu named Yuqian, then the governor of neighbouring Jiangsu. Yuqian, a man high in the emperor’s personal favour, was said by his contemporaries to be proud and overbearing. By forty he had been a provincial judge, famed and feared for his strict application of the law. The archetype in British eyes of a cruel, scheming mandarin, he was thoroughly convinced of China’s cultural superiority and eager to show all barbarians their place. Like Commissioner Yilibu he was unnerved by the military manoeuvres in Tinghae but trusted the British even less. They were to him ‘mere bulrushes’ to be scythed down. Soon, he boasted, they would be like moths to his flame, fish caught in his nets. He disapproved of the conciliatory approach Qishan and Yilibu were taking, and he set about formulating a plan to retake Chusan by force. [2]
Yuqian might have underestimated the difficulties to be faced, but he knew his history. Japanese ‘pirates’ had held the island for over a year against Ming troops, and remnants of the Ming had in turn held out for seven years against the Qing. Key to both those protracted occupations had been the village of Sinkong, sitting in its easily defended valley on the west coast. Yuqian proposed ferrying thousands of crack troops there, hidden in the junks which were a common sight on Kintang Sound. From Sinkong they would wage a guerrilla war, attacking by night only to melt away at dawn. The British, he predicted, would get no rest and within a fortnight would up and leave. Yilibu was no less given to bluster, but five months of getting nowhere had dampened his enthusiasm for such fanciful schemes. Yuqian’s maritime invasion and guerrilla campaign, he knew, were patently unworkable. Yilibu wrote to Peking with an alternative suggestion: by mid-February he expected to have new cannons with enough range to hit the enemy ships and keep them from approaching the Zhejiang coast. ‘But defences can only frustrate an enemy, they cannot break him,’ he admitted, and went on to outline a suitably low-key plan of attack. Boats were being prepared, firewood bought up, and local water braves conscripted to burn the British at anchor. ‘If my plan fails, we shall not have lost much,’ he consoled himself. [3]
It was essential that the British remain totally unaware. Yilibu began giving directions to his underlings face-to-face rather than by the normal system of written orders — he could not risk Governor Burrell getting wind of his incendiary plans. But there were ever Chinese like Blondel de Westa willing to talk for the right price. By late January the whispers in Tinghae were of an imminent fire-attack, and within a week of his committing it to writing in a memorial to Peking Yilibu’s plan had been leaked in its entirety. Soon everybody in Tinghae knew that the attempt to burn the fleet was set for January 27th, that divers had been trained to bore holes in the ships’ hulls, and that junks were being readied to land a force on the north coast. What sounded like the boom of gunnery practice from across the water only added to the sense of threat. The Rattlesnake was sent out to look for signs of the anticipated invasion, and the navy kept its guns shotted in readiness. But the attack never came. Spies reported that press-ganged sailors had run away rather than face the British. The plan had scarcely been more than a way of keeping the emperor happy, and one might doubt whether even Yilibu himself had believed in it. [4]
The arrival of 1841 had been celebrated in rather low-key fashion in Tinghae’s United Service Club, but Chinese New Year was meant to be an altogether more joyous occasion. Only then the rumours of a fire-attack had coincided with the annual New Year migration to the ancestral villages to leave the city as desolate as it had been for months. Shutters were pulled across the shopfronts, homes were locked up. For ten days the markets were bare. Soldiers exchanged anxious glances, fearful that the privations of the autumn might return. Cold and hungry, they set about pulling down empty houses with renewed vigour to provide fuel for their braziers. The Chinese who did remain began the celebrations on the last day of the old Year of the Rat, sending it off in a riot of gongs and firecrackers. The atmosphere must have turned sombre when later that evening each family sat down around the hearth to welcome the spirits of their ancestors to feast with them. How could they apologise enough, when they had suffered their graves to be desecrated? At midnight, while the British slept, doors and windows all over Chusan were flung open to allow the old year out and the new one in. Spring couplets were pasted up, those great strips of red paper proclaiming a new season of hope. Words and deeds on New Year’s Day would set the tone for the rest of the year, and this year more than ever demanded punctilious observance. Perhaps somebody twelve months ago had absent-mindedly uttered the word for ‘four’ and brought its homophone — death — to bear on the household? Had somebody swept the coming year’s good fortune out of the front door? Could the accidental stroke of a knife on the first day of the first month have cut short the family’s luck? Maybe, by an unprecedentedly lavish celebration, the gods of heaven and earth might banish the barbarians in this Year of the Ox. February 6th saw the end of the festivities, when the full moon in the heavens was mimicked on earth with spherical paper lamps. The British paid little heed to the heathen customs. Even the observant Edward Cree managed just a short entry: ‘Chinese feast of lanterns. At night all round the islands hundreds of lanterns and plenty of crackers.’ The very practices of the Chinese New Year in all their superstitious detail showed the yawning cultural chasm between the British and their nominal subjects to be as wide as ever it had been. Though none of the Tinghaenese sitting down before the family hearth that New Year’s Eve yet knew it, it was events in distant Canton rather than their own religious observances that would decide their island’s fate, for Captain Elliot’s patience with Qishan had by that time run out. [5]
In the decades before diplomacy could rely on intercontinental telegraphy to brief its men in the field, and at a time when a fruitful exchange of letters with Whitehall might take seven or eight months, a plenipotentiary acting for Her Majesty was given written instructions and granted the freedom to negotiate within certain parameters. Lord Palmerston’s instructions to Elliot had required compensation — for the destroyed opium, for the cost of the expedition, and for all debts
due from bankrupt Chinese merchants while he was about it — and the throwing open of ports in Eastern China to British trade. As for Chusan, the island was to be kept at least until the compensation had been paid and, if Elliot could manage it, permanently retained just as Gützlaff had recommended. Palmerston had granted Elliot the flexibility, if the Chinese steadfastly refused to give up Chusan, to swap possession of it for a grant of territory on the mainland. Yet when negotiations got underway on the Pearl River below Canton, the opening bid from the Chinese — $5,000,000 in compensation for the opium, official intercourse on an equal footing without the constant implication that the British were inferiors, and improved trading conditions — was far below Palmerston’s bottom line. As the talks progressed, it struck the plenipotentiary that only by a resumption of all-out war might the Chinese be forced to meet Palmerston’s demands in full. It would be better, Elliot was convinced, to take what he could than to restart the conflict and so throw trade with China once more into turmoil. Might not improved trade quietly and with time win for Britain the advantages Palmerston desired? By the start of January 1841 Elliot had resolved to lower his demands for compensation if the Chinese would agree to cede Chusan, yet still the right even to trade there was jealously refused. Nothing seemed to have changed since the days when Allen Catchpoole and the East India Company had been sent away with a flea in their ear. For the Celestial Empire, the evacuation of Chusan was to be a symbol of Britain’s status as an obedient vassal.
On January 5th, tiring of Qishan’s prevarication, Elliot ordered the Royal Navy to flex its muscles by destroying the forts commanding the entrance to the Pearl River. Believing these to be impregnable, the Chinese were stunned when they were effortlessly shelled into rubble and captured by infantry. The next day, as Elliot’s warships moved against a second line of forts, the shocked Chinese called for a ceasefire. Deploring the slaughter, Elliot agreed to restart negotiations. Now that his willingness to use force could not be doubted, it took less than a fortnight for a settlement to be agreed: the sparsely populated island of Hong Kong, strategically placed at the mouth of the Pearl River and long appreciated for its excellent harbour, would be ceded to the Crown as a trading station; a $6,000,000 indemnity would be paid for the opium; official intercourse between the two nations would from now on be carried on as between equals, and trade would restart in Canton on a secure footing. In return, Chusan was to be evacuated, and the steamer Columbine was duly sent north to inform Governor Burrell.
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