When the troops struck camp and moved into the empty houses in Tinghae in the autumn of 1840, a degree of normality gradually returned to the city and Lockhart found his skills in even greater demand. He began to treat respectable citizens, and was pleased by how well he was received. Trips to the more settled of the inland valleys became frequent, with Lockhart using the visits of military patrols to administer to the sick in their own homes and to hand out leaflets listing what ailments he could cure. Governor Burrell was supportive, believing such excursions to be useful propaganda in showing the Chinese that their new rulers were mindful of their welfare and not just rampaging invaders; and in attracting people back into the city they proved a great success. As word spread, the sick even travelled from other islands and from as far away as the mainland. Some came involuntarily — more than once, Lockhart was called upon to patch up the victims of the ongoing clashes between troops and islanders. Though moved by the suffering of those innocent casualties, the compassionate young doctor often found himself truly shocked at the callousness of a race that deigned to term the British ‘barbarian’ — a beggar he found lying in the street had to be treated for the gangrene that had eaten into both his feet with not a soul bothering to help him. [9]
Through a medic’s eyes, the health of the native population was scarcely less compromised than the garrison’s. Opium addiction was widespread, and sapped body and spirit. Dysentery affected many of Lockhart’s patients just as it did the soldiers, but there was little he could do to help. More common was the same malaria that was affecting the troops, for which he could at least prescribe quinine in place of the traditional remedy of powdered tiger bones and ginseng. Chronic skin diseases were endemic, a problem Lockhart put down to the Chinese habit of wearing the same unwashed clothes day in, day out for months at a time. Foot-binding was universal amongst the island’s women, and was a source of terrible pain and infection. Eye disease was common, and was seemingly the fault of the street-corner barbers who used ivory scoops to scrape clean the insides of their customers’ eyelids after each haircut. Unsurprisingly, eyes would end up red and irritated, a sign taken to indicate that the barber had not performed well enough. Rather than leave the mucus membranes to heal, the next washing would be done with extra vigour until in many cases the surface became granulated and the lids inverted. In great discomfort, the patient would now visit a Chinese doctor to have strips of bamboo tied onto the lid until the trapped fold of skin sloughed away. The method was agony, and left the sufferer with only partial sight. In one miserable building in Tinghae, close to a stagnant canal, were found living twenty-nine indigent souls, all suffering from ophthalmia and some already blind. Lockhart wrote home to ask for a set of Tyrrell’s best ophthalmic instruments — cataract knives, pointed forceps for the tear ducts, curved ones to treat inverted eyelashes, and syringes and scissors with ivory handles (for ebony quickly spoiled in Chusan’s climate). In the meantime, he urged barbers to leave people’s eyes alone as God intended. [10]
Over the coming months, Lockhart would record each of the conditions to walk through the door of his mission station — elephantiasis, jaundice and hepatitis, rheumatism, psoriasis, paraphymosis, lupus, syphilis and gonorrhoea, trichiosis and cataracts, hernias, fractures and dislocations, burns, vomiting of blood, haemorrhoids, dropsy, attempted suicides from overdoses of saltwater or opium, even a severe bite from a pig. The list of suffering was almost endless, the island’s native medicine men incapable of relieving it. A contemporary of Lockhart’s in China, the American doctor Peter Parker who practised in Canton and Macao, despaired that the Chinese were ‘more ignorant of medicine and surgery than of most other things which confer direct physical benefit on the race.’ Its doctors, he observed, never underwent any systematic training in dissection, and were obsessed with pulse-taking. The result, in his eyes, was ‘knavery and quackery, of the most ingenious and yet of the most absurd character.’ He provided the example of a man he had passed in the street, an infected finger inserted into the abdomen of a live frog, the frog tied fast to stop it hopping off. Perhaps, ruminated another physician, it was an unwholesome diet of vegetables, rice, putrid salt-fish, weak tea, tobacco and the occasional opium pipe, not to mention their cramped, damp and ill-ventilated housing which left the Chinese so unhealthy. [11]
But Lockhart had not made the long journey from Liverpool just to win friends for Queen Victoria with his medicine chest. Such work, he hoped, might provide an honourable counterpoint to the injustices done by the British; but cures for what ailed the islanders physically were just a prelude to a deeper healing. Lockhart’s first forays into evangelism were directed at a wide audience. At home in the hospital, he held a regular Sunday service in faltering Chinese for the benefit of his absentee landlord’s doubtless bemused servants. On long walks into the interior he would hand out religious tracts to anybody who showed an interest, though the curious recipients were almost certainly more interested in the intrinsic value of a printed book than in its potential to save their soul. In the streets of Tinghae and amongst the crowds waiting to board ferries to the outlying islands, the doctor with his pamphlets became a familiar sight. These busy travellers, though, were less receptive than the more focused sick. ‘In the hospital,’ as one missionary publication put it, ‘their hearts are soft.’ Quickly a more targeted approach evolved. The literate would be given tracts to read and, on their discharge, a handful of short works, ‘little messengers of grace’ to take back to their village. As with time the Medical Mission became more established, the spreading of the Christian message became ever more closely entwined with the dispensation of medical relief. New patients would be given a card bearing their patient number and disease, beside a Biblical verse for them to memorise and quote aloud when asked. [12]
The handing back of Chusan to Chinese control in February of 1841 meant the closure of Lockhart’s little hospital and an end to free medical care for the island’s sick. He had treated 3,502 patients and handed out six thousand Christian tracts. But just two years later, with the peace that followed the Treaty of Nanking, the doctor was back in Tinghae with his nineteen-year-old bride Kate — she was a cousin by marriage to none other than Karl Gützlaff — and their infant daughter Lizzie (Kate, then just fifteen, had sailed to Macao in 1838 upon the same vessel as Lockhart, had lived with him and the Gützlaffs in Tinghae, and they had married in May of 1841). The Lockharts spent only five months in Chusan this time around: William was keen to leave Tinghae for the newly opened treaty port of Shanghai, which promised access to ever larger numbers of the physically and spiritually unwell. In the meantime he unbolted the old hospital doors and started to readmit patients. There was little he could do, though, for his own daughter. When he returned home each evening he found Lizzie withdrawn and listless. Plagued by mosquitoes and fleas, she would stretch her bitten hands out for her father to scratch, ignoring the toys and dolls her grandfather had sent from home. The debilitating effects of a long sea voyage from Hong Kong were evident. Kate wrote to her father-in-law soon after she had set up home in Tinghae: Lizzie was
very beautiful in her mother’s eyes in all respects of course… but she is not fat, large, rosy, bouncing etc etc as what are called fine china usually are, but thin and now pale, with clear dark blue eyes and a little wee body of her own, which contains I think a little intelligent spirit. [13]
But Lizzie never rallied. In August she passed away and was laid to rest aged just eighteen months. By November her grieving parents were in Shanghai. Though William made one brief visit to Tinghae, it was in the growing city a couple of days’ sail from his daughter’s grave that he chose to carry on his work. But it had been in Tinghae, the London Missionary Society acknowledged, that something had been attempted ‘to break the fallow ground’ for Protestantism. There ‘some seed had been watered,’ and Lockhart’s time on Chusan might now ‘hasten on that day of days when this “desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose”’. [14]
When
William Lockhart and his young family landed on Chusan in 1843, there had arrived with them a woman named Mary Ann Aldersey, a wealthy spinster described by Karl Gützlaff as ‘one of the most zealous workers ever to sacrifice their life and their fortune in the service of the Lord.’ And that was praise indeed from such a zealous worker. [15]
Born into a nonconformist Congregational family, Mary had grown up fascinated by stories told to her by her nanny, a missionary’s wife who had travelled to India to teach girls. So it was not surprising that as an adult she would gravitate toward the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East, whose aim was ‘to raise the oppressed daughters of the heathen to become estimable upon earth, and to attain the bliss of heaven.’ The Orient being as it was, that task of necessity fell to other women to accomplish: in the patriarchal societies of the East it was difficult enough for male missionaries to interact with potential male converts, near impossible for them to proselytise to females. ‘Who but a woman can understand the heart of a woman?’ asked the compiler of the Society’s correspondence. Others were more damningly judgmental of the Oriental male: ‘Since monkeys and parrots have been taught,’ it was claimed that one Chinese moralist had once asserted, ‘women might no doubt be instructed, if their husbands are disposed to make the experiment.’ Gützlaff, too, was positively scornful of Confucian ideas of morality:
They are the slaves and concubines of their masters, live and die in ignorance, and every effort to raise themselves above the rank assigned them is regarded as impious arrogance…. As long as mothers are not the instructors of their children, and wives are not the companions of their husbands, the regeneration of this great empire will proceed very slowly. [16]
China, such men and women predicted, would soon be prepared for as many female teachers as Christendom could send.
When in 1824 the pioneering China missionary Robert Morrison (and father to John Morrison, besides, who was later the interpreter to Captain Elliot) visited London, Mary had jumped at the opportunity to attend his classes in Mandarin. Such studies, she was warned, were not lightly to be undertaken by women: when the symptoms of hysterical insanity were remarked upon in one of two ladies training to work in the Far East, it was noted that the condition was a consequence of her application to the Chinese language, with its phonetic and graphic complexity. Mary, thankfully still sane despite acquiring a working knowledge of Chinese, invested in Morrison’s new six-volume dictionary and set about teaching the language to other would-be lady missionaries. It was only when a clergyman whom she had approached to sponsor the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East asked her pointedly why she herself did not go that Mary considered herself for the role. Still, her father’s disapproval of such a course of action meant that Mary for several years put all ideas of missionary work from her mind. Only when she had quite forgotten her plans did her father have a change of heart. Her passage to Malacca was booked and Mary ready to sail when her sister-in-law died suddenly leaving eight children, their claims upon her ‘stronger even than that of the heathen,’ she would write. Yet five years as mother to this new household, her free time spent studying Chinese from a gentleman wearing a silk robe and a pigtail, left Mary if anything better qualified for missionary schooling. Aged forty and no longer in the best of health, she finally bought a passage to the East. In the long, dry summer of 1843, she stepped ashore at Tinghae’s wharf and passed through the Gate of Enduring Peace to begin a new life. [17]
Despite her determination (and the authentic-sounding name of Ai Disui which she now adopted) Mary struggled to speak the local language, a variant of the Wu dialect of eastern China. To be fair, she did not hear a word of it until aged forty, and then made do with a single tutor. Her pupils, it was said, understood her even if strangers could not. Through her landlord Mr Kin (a man apparently of some status on the island and a friend of other Christian missionaries) she grew acquainted with the island’s society. Its menfolk did not impress her — they were addicted in the main to opium — but their wives she found superior in body and mind. She was fascinated by the young women, and would watch them as they spun silk from silkworms they had themselves reared and with this wove beautiful summer dresses. Mary found herself drawn especially to widows. Chusan’s women, she discovered, would rarely remarry after a husband’s death, upon which they would lose to their in-laws any authority they had had over even their own children. Bereavement and isolation left many women alone and fearful, all the more ready to listen to Mary’s words of Christian consolation and with nothing to lose by following her. She took on a cook, an assistant, and two nurses, all of them widowed, and with their help she opened a girls’ school in Tinghae, its first pupil an orphaned child entrusted by her late mother to Dr Milne of the London Missionary Society. It was the first of its kind in China. From a surviving illustration of the school Mary would later found in Ningbo, we can picture a class: the girls, some two dozen, sit on benches at long tables, reading from Christian primers. Their schoolroom, rented perhaps from Mary’s landlord Mr Kin, is single-storied, built of wood, with walls of paper screens. At the head of the class sits a Chinese teacher, his desk and high-backed chair of better craftsmanship than the girls’ tables and benches. Before him are a teapot and his writing paraphernalia. The pupils have been bound to the school for set terms, during which time Mary has promised their parents that she will pay for all their needs. They have risen early and their day has started with morning prayers in Chinese at 7am. When after a year she closed the school in Tinghae and sailed for Ningbo, Mary found herself suspected in the prefectural capital of some ulterior motive. What else could explain a woman travelling tens of thousands of li to teach mere girls? Rumours abounded that she had murdered some of her charges and eaten them, that she had plucked out their eyes to make her Western medicines and glass mirrors. This Witch of Ningbo as she came to be known was seen communing with ghosts on her wall-top walks each morning. The Ningbo Chinese, it was whispered, believed that just as the British were ruled by a queen so their trading community in the city was ruled over by this remarkable woman. [18]
But even Mary Aldersey’s little school in Tinghae was not the first attempt to introduce the benefits of a Western education to the island. In early November of 1840, as the political situation on the Zhejiang coast was improving, Karl Gützlaff had greeted the arrival from Macao of his second wife Mary (‘neither young nor beautiful,’ but a blue, scraggy woman in Edward Cree’s opinion) and her young cousin Kate Parkes, who would later become Mrs William Lockhart. Since 1835, Mary Gützlaff had been running a school for Chinese children in the Portuguese colony, her boys and girls a mixture of the blind and the sighted, teaching English and Christianity with funding from the same Society for Promoting Female Education in the East which would in time sponsor Mary Aldersey’s work. Settling in Chusan, Mrs Gützlaff had set about establishing a school offering a similar curriculum. Her husband began to teach a large class of men. Freed from the onerous duties of civil magistrate by Captain Caine’s promotion to the role, Gützlaff spent his time riding out into the villages of the interior, distributing Christian tracts and performing minor cures. It was precisely the life which for a decade he had dreamed of leading.
A year even before the fall of Tinghae, English churchgoers had been made to feel a pang of guilt by the opening lines of Gützlaff’s Missionary Travels to China to Distribute Bibles:
My dear readers, has the thought ever arisen in your hearts, when sitting down, with kind friends and companions, that the tea which contributed so much to your enjoyment and comforts, came from a land of idolaters; and that the hands which had prepared it for your use, had never handled the book of life? If this be the case, you surely have a vast debt of love to pay, and should no longer delay contributing your mite to assist the poor Chinese.
It was just the kind of well-intentioned emotional manipulation at which Gützlaff excelled.
With the Yangtze campaign at an end and the Treaty of Nanking s
igned, come October 1842 Gützlaff was thankful to set foot again on Chusan, now confirmed for some years to come at least as British soil. Soon his health was as strong as ever it had been in Asia. The Good Lord, he informed his sponsors in one of his regular Chinese Reports, had cured him of the agues that had threatened to finish him. Reinvigorated, and for the time being acting as the island’s civil magistrate once more, he lost no time in formulating plans to transform Chusan into a beacon of civilised values. ‘Was it just simple chance that brought the English to Chusan,’ he asked, ‘or will it please the Lord to illuminate the dark parts of the earth from this point with His light?’ As ever, his rhetoric conveniently ignored his own role in sounding a passage for the Royal Navy directly into Tinghae harbour. [19]
With his characteristic self-assurance and an unshakeable conviction that the islanders could not hear enough of the Word, Gützlaff straight away began the task of pamphleteering. House to house, street to street, he handed out Christian tracts. Before the month was out he had held his first open prayer meeting for a Chinese audience, a discussion of the Sermon on the Mount. When not dealing with the duties of the magistracy, the task of translating the Old Testament into Chinese took up much of his time. How extraordinary, he mused in his Reports, that when the islanders badgered him about the continuing delay in publishing it he had no satisfactory answer. If only his backers could send him extra funds…. But if subscribers back home could be pressured into supporting Gützlaff’s ambitious schemes, the same could not be said of the local Chinese. In February 1843 a letter arrived in Hong Kong. A coterie of Chusan’s Confucian gentry had written in exasperation to mandarins on the mainland, who had passed their complaints on to the British. ‘On December 29th last year,’ they wrote,
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