Chusan

by Liam D'Arcy-Brown

  The second of Yuqian’s three chosen generals was Wang Xipeng. Wang was a northerner, a native of Peking, and an experienced soldier: in 1826 he had been awarded a peacock feather for helping to take the restive Muslim oases of Kashgar, Yengisar, Kargilik and Hotan on the farthest fringes of Chinese Turkestan. By 1832, a campaign to crush rebellious Miao tribespeople in remote Hunan had earned Wang a promotion and the Manchu title of batulu — ‘courageous soldier’. Called upon to put down a rising of the Yao tribespeople, come 1838 he was a fully fledged general with a reputation for pacifying non-Han rebels. The old warhorse must have relished the prospect of teaching the people of upstart Yingjili a lesson in obedience. The third, General Zheng Guohong, had already dealt with the British face to face, as it was he who had formally accepted the surrender of the island back in February. A professional soldier from the inland province of Hunan, he too had made a name for himself fighting the Miao there. His father had been killed by rebellious tribesmen, and Wang was doubtless eager to avenge his death on these seaborne barbarians.

  This trio of generals now set about leading their regiments on manoeuvres across the island until they were intimately familiar with the lie of the land, and were able — so they claimed — to roam the hills from memory in the dark. Their men’s uniforms and weapons had been begged and borrowed from across the province and were still too few, but the local commissariat was rushing to provide more. Where Tinghae’s arsenals had once been filled with rusty old cannon, twenty newly-cast bronze pieces had now arrived, as had a consignment of gingals all the way from Henan province hundreds of miles inland. More were expected to follow. Native fishermen and skilled boatmen up from Fujian province had been given tabards and commissioned as water braves. Fire-rafts were on standby. Soon the village gentry would raise a militia to rival Yuqian’s 6,000 regular troops; the most upright of them would even be entrusted with matchlock muskets. When Yuqian sailed back to the mainland, the irascible old Manchu cast a romantic eye over the scenery:

  I spent the whole of the voyage looking at the sea. The hills and islets were so elegant and beautiful, the merchants and the fishermen contentedly employed. [7]

  Though he admitted himself ashamed at having failed to affix George Burrell’s severed head to a spike, the barbarians had been duly pacified and everything was in order.

  12. We read this with fast-falling tears

  Everything might have been in order from the vantage point of Ningbo or Peking, but 18,000 miles’ sailing away in London there was dismay at the outcome of the Pearl River talks. When Lord Palmerston learned that Captain Elliot had swapped possession of Chusan for Hong Kong (his view of Hong Kong as ‘a barren island with hardly a house upon it’ had of course been formed not from personal experience and would soon change for the better) he was livid: it was not up to the Chinese to decide which island Britain may have — the Royal Navy might take any it wished. Viscount Melbourne’s government had provided a large and costly military force, and Palmerston had made his instructions clear. These had been decided upon not willy-nilly but on expert advice, the intention being to bypass the labyrinth of vested interests that had frustrated British trade in China since the 1600s. Instead, Elliot had allowed the Chinese to wallow in the luxury of their obsolete world view. If British demands had been driven firmly home with gunpowder and shells and had yet failed, then maybe Elliot would have been justified in accepting less. Even then, Palmerston fumed, he ought to have referred home for permission to deviate from his instructions. The army and navy had achieved their aim of taking Chusan without loss, and they were powerful enough to hold on to it as long as they chose. Six million dollars was far short of the value of the opium destroyed, and Elliot had not even bothered, it seemed, to insist the Chinese underwrite the cost of the war. And where was the anticipated treaty, ratified by the emperor himself? Without this, even Hong Kong’s status as sovereign territory was uncertain. Palmerston was scathing:

  Throughout the whole course of your proceedings, you seem to have considered that my instructions were waste paper, which you might treat with entire disregard, and that you were at full liberty to deal with the interests of your country according to your own fancy. [1]

  Hong Kong might, Palmerston admitted, prove its worth with time, but still Elliot had failed to secure that vital opening for trade on the east coast that had been expected of him. By the end of April he had been recalled, and a new broom had swept through the top rank of Britain’s commanders on the China station. There was to be a second military expedition to China, and this time Lord Palmerston did not expect it to return empty-handed.

  Captain Elliot’s replacement as Britain’s plenipotentiary, the man chosen to press Palmerston’s demands once more upon the Chinese, was one Sir Henry Pottinger. And where Elliot was a ‘tender-hearted avoider of casualties’, Sir Henry Pottinger was a blunt Ulsterman of fifty-one with three decades of service in the Bombay army behind him. It would fall now to Pottinger to decide where and for how long talks should proceed, and at what point of deadlock they should be called off and the powder kegs broken open. Chusan, Palmerston offered by way of guidance, was to be retaken before Pottinger sent a communiqué to the Chinese announcing his readiness to negotiate. If negotiations failed and war became necessary, Pottinger had no authority to rein in his military forces until the emperor had acceded to every one of his demands. He could accept nothing less than the permanent cession of an island on the east coast — it was naturally assumed that this would be Chusan — or else its equivalent in the right to live and trade at a handful of ports from Amoy northward. As for Hong Kong, months had passed since Palmerston’s first, angry reaction, and the foreign secretary now conceded that it had the potential to be an important trading station — the island should be retained unless Pottinger could wrest from China another, closer still to Canton. But Palmerston’s flexibility on the equivalence of possessing Chusan and being allowed to trade at coastal ports was not without its critics: George Eden for one, who as governor-general of India had been closely involved in the military preparations for Elliot’s China expedition, was of the opinion that gaining access to northern ports, where the Chinese authorities would doubtless make life difficult, would be scant compensation for missing out on sovereignty of an impregnable island such as Chusan. [2]

  In June of 1841, Sir Henry Pottinger left for the Far East with Sir William Parker, now Britain’s naval commander in China following the retirement through ill-health of Admiral Sir George Elliot. A new commander-in-chief of Britain’s land forces, too, had by then already arrived, despatched when it was learned what a mess the feverish old George Burrell had made of Chusan. Burrell’s replacement was Sir Hugh Gough, a white-haired old veteran of Wellington’s Peninsular War. His appointment was greeted with applause by the British press in India, whose editorials had sniped from the sidelines as the occupation of Tinghae had degenerated into farce. [3]

  Her Majesty’s 55th Regiment of Foot (‘a wildish set of Irish boys but good fighting men’, they were nicknamed the Westmorelands after the county the regiment hailed from in north-west England) had been hoping to sail home from India after two decades spent serving overseas. Though they had already proved their colonial mettle by defeating the Kaffirs on the banks of Africa’s Mtata River and the opulently named Rajah of Coorg in southern India, the widespread sickness on Chusan now meant that their numbers were needed to bolster Sir Henry Pottinger’s China expedition. As Yuqian began work fortifying Tinghae harbour, the Westmorelands exchanged their old flintlock muskets for the latest in percussion-cap technology, waved farewell to their wives and children, and in late May sailed down Calcutta’s Hooghly River bound for the new British possession of Hong Kong. There they joined the Cameronians, the Hertfordshires, the Royal Irish and the Madras Engineers and Artillery (this last regiment under the command of none other than Captain Anstruther, fully recovered now from his incarceration in Ningbo), all of them veterans of the first occupation of Chusan, along with
a body of Madras Native Infantry. On August 21st the fleet sailed from Hong Kong with HMS Wellesley at its head and a swarm of transports and colliers at its heels. It was an enormous show of military strength. In Singapore, the Free Press newspaper observed confidently that ‘Chusan is to be retaken and occupied. Of course the whole archipelago will fall under our rule.’ On the 25th, the most powerful body of China’s imperial government, the Council of State, passed an edict to Yuqian and to Liu Yunke, governor of Zhejiang province. It was the emperor’s opinion, they wrote, that Zhejiang was now sufficiently well defended. His majesty had been assured that there were 15,000 men and 400 officers in Tinghae and the nearby harbours, enough to ensure that the rebels would not dare to come plundering again. [4]

  Northward of the port city of Amoy (where a naval bombardment and a landing by the Royal Irish swept aside the recently strengthened defences) the monsoon faltered, and soon the expedition was struggling its way up the Strait of Formosa, the rain lashing down on the decks and the sails tested to their limits. Creeping up the Zhejiang coast to Kittow Point, landing parties had time to take revenge on the murder of Captain Stead and the unexplained disappearance of the Lyra’s crewmen by burning villages scattered along the coastal valleys and putting one town to the torch. When local braves challenged them, they shot and killed two men. Had they known the grisly fates of the Lyra’s crew they might not have stopped at that. When word of the violence reached Yuqian, the only reason he could see for a landing at such a remote spot was that the approaches to Chusan were clearly visible from its hilltops. Could the rebellious British, so recently pacified by Qishan in Canton, really be thinking of attacking the island again? [5]

  Within a week of announcing its presence with burnings and shootings, the British fleet had once more assembled just fifteen miles from Tinghae. Sailing ahead aboard the iron paddle-steamer Nemesis, Captain Pears of the Madras Engineers caught a glimpse of the fortifications his men had begun on Josshouse Hill. They had evidently been ‘touched up and beautified’ by the Chinese since February. And was that a line of batteries running along the harbour? It grew dark and he could not tell. But no attack could be considered without knowing what awaited the troops, and late the next morning Captain Pears was invited to join Sir Henry Pottinger and the commanders of his sea and land forces, Parker and Gough, to cast an expert eye over Yuqian’s work. [6]

  From the deck of the steamer Phlegethon it took no expert engineer to assess the transformation of the waterfront: on the slopes of 49th Hill two batteries had been built (they were empty but it could only be a matter of time before they were armed), and behind these sat three curious, white, pepperpot-shaped structures — they turned out to be some manner of signalling beacon — and a fortified barracks that might hold 400 men. As Phlegethon and Nemesis played follow-my-leader into the middle of the harbour, the alarm was sounded and the guns on the earth wall opened fire. Parker counted the muzzle flashes: of 267 embrasures, just 95 held a weapon. It being standard practice in the Chinese military to strap cannon horizontally to their carriages, allowing for no possibility of elevation or aiming, every last shot fell short. The British had openly criticised them for such ignorance of gunnery, yet the celestials, it seemed, would not be told. [7]

  The next day was filthy — cold, rainy, and very windy — and the planned recce of the troops said to be encamped at Zhenhai across Kintang Sound was cancelled. The day after that turned out to be even worse, and so the planned razing of the barracks on 49th Hill was postponed, Nemesis contenting herself with dropping a few shells into its courtyard instead by way of target practice. Only on the 29th did the wind drop to leave just the cold and the rain. Sir Hugh Gough, his mind on a long and peaceful occupation and acutely aware that Sir George Burrell had a year earlier captured only an empty city with an army drunk on samshoo, dictated his orders for the coming assault. This time, he hoped, ‘no single instances of misconduct will call for reproof.’ As Tinghae would be held for the present by the British ‘and perhaps permanently retained’, it was essential that the inhabitants be encouraged to remain in their houses and look to his troops for protection. All public property would be secured for the Crown, and all private property was to be respected. The tone of Gough’s pronouncement left the men of the expedition in no doubt that British rule was to be quite unlike the charade they had witnessed the previous year. [8]

  The fleet stood in closer to Tinghae harbour. All that day and throughout the next night the hills echoed to the sound of cannon fire from along the shore, though not one shot struck home. The British commanders had seen all they needed to, and a plan of attack was finalised. Though the islanders’ extraordinary exertions had rendered a frontal assault on the wall too dangerous to consider, they had failed to protect their flanks. Weeks of toil had resulted in an earthwork that was superficially forbidding but militarily useless, just like the cannons strapped immobile to their carriages or the frightening faces painted on the braves’ shields. Gough briefed his men: the first column to land would simply scale 49th Hill, turn east, and take the wall from behind. The weather had cleared somewhat when, come dawn, a battery of howitzers was dug in on the peak of Trumball Island, but by then a mist had risen and the skies had again opened. Orders were issued for a landing the next morning, and the defensive works on 49th Hill were pounded with explosive shells: there was no point in risking the lives of the men who would be fighting their way up the slope the following day. As daylight faded, the Royal Navy took up its positions, and at sunset a large body of Chinese appeared on the heights to fire their obsolete matchlocks. [9]

  Although the sun rose unseen behind low cloud, Friday, October 1st 1841 turned out to be rather warmer than previous days. The morning mist was soon dispersed by a brisk north-easterly, but still showers moistened the granite slopes and the scrub blanketing 49th Hill. At 8am, Nemesis and Phlegethon began to embark troops, and soon their decks were crowded with men in their smart uniforms: black coal-scuttle helmets, red jackets criss-crossed with bright white leather, and blue trousers. Each carried a musket fixed with a glinting bayonet. Behind each of the steamers came a train of twenty or more ship’s boats, each crammed so full with redcoats that their sailors struggled to work the oars. For two hours while the steamers battled against the tide, the Chinese kept up a constant fire from the shore, but still not a single shot struck home — that much is clear from the military reports sent back to London. At last the rowing boats were cast off. On cue, the howitzers on Trumball opened up, sending shells arcing high into the air to explode squarely in the temple fort 700 yards away. [10]

  The Westmorelands were first to land, then the Royal Irish and the Madras Native Infantry, and as they waded ashore and readied themselves to advance a barrage of Congrève rockets from the harbour screeched into the Chinese soldiers gathered above. Viewed from the safety of the harbour, the British soon became just lines of red dots, irresistibly creeping up the slope toward the blue-jacketed Chinese. With the two sides closing, the inaccuracy of the Green Standards’ matchlocks was becoming less of a handicap, and as the vanguard neared the summit the British took their first casualty. Ensign Richard Duell had been promoted from sergeant major only the previous night, toasted and wished a long life, and had been delighted to have the honour of carrying the regiment’s colours into battle. It was rare for a man who had enlisted as a common soldier to become a commissioned officer like this. Sir Hugh Gough too was hit in the shoulder by a spent ball, though he pronounced himself little hurt. [11]

  Just a stone’s throw from the Chinese line now, the Westmorelands prepared to charge with their bayonets. Seeing perhaps that the British standard-bearer had fallen, Ensign Duell’s opposite number stood unflinchingly before the advance. Shouting to his comrades to press forward, he waved a great banner to and fro above his head as musket balls flew past him. Attracting the attention of the ships riding below, he became an easy target for two gun crews who fired within a split second of each other. One shot ploughed up
the earth at the man’s feet, while the other, a 32-lb explosive shell from the Phlegethon, at the same moment sliced him clean in two ‘with the certainty and rapidity with which one cuts a young nettle off with a switch,’ as Captain Pears observed. With their flag officer dead, the men of the Shouchun regiment (they had marched 400 miles from their home in Anhui province to defend Chusan) were swiftly driven from the heights and chased down across the fields to the city. As their matchlocks failed, some resorted to throwing stones. Their battle-standard, a yellow silk pennant beautifully embroidered with an undulating dragon of shimmering blue scales, was snatched up from where it had fallen. It remains to this day at the Westmorelands’ regimental memorial in Kendal parish church. As the Chinese fled, the Westmorelands’ own colours were waved from the peak of 49th Hill for all to see, and cheers broke out on the ships riding at anchor. While Captain Anstruther’s artillery heaved its field-pieces over the now undefended hills and began to bombard the city, the Westmorelands scaled the walls and swarmed over. By 2pm, barely three hours after first landing, their colours were fluttering over the battlements. Tinghae had again fallen. [12]