Gützlaff issued orders to the scholastic gentry of Tinghae to take upon themselves the offices of the elders, to watch over and soothe the good, to seize and apprehend evil-doers. Day after day he handed out papers, calling upon the people to subscribe to the rebuilding of a college, of a foundling hospital, a poorhouse, a refuge for the old and destitute; for the burial of the dead, to engage teachers of both sexes for the instruction of the young, and to pay for a police force. [20]
Nor was this the first time that a mandarin had had to write to Hong Kong with tales of woe: just a fortnight earlier Sir Henry Pottinger had read that Chusan’s gentry were fed up of harsh treatment. There was talk of people being unfairly fined or flogged, of animals being allowed to roam free to graze the crops, of soldiers forever frightening honest village folk. Such misbehaviour could quite easily be remedied by a strict reining in of the troops, but the matter of Gützlaff’s social programme was more grave. Britain’s civil jurisdiction had been clearly demarcated, and the Chusanese had understood themselves to be free from interference on matters not affecting public order, and on matters of cultural practice. Gützlaff, fluent in Chinese and feeling himself at liberty to do with the island as he — and God — saw fit, had exceeded those bounds with his master plan to improve their lives. By 1843 he had completed a census of Tinghae (he put the population of the island at 270,000, of which one tenth lived in the city), enumerating its men, women and children and dividing the last into boys and girls with a view perhaps to establishing schools. Every family had been visited, allotted a number, and the occupation of the head of the household noted. Gützlaff had divided the island into portions, had nominated a headman for each, and had made him answerable to the magistracy. Through these he had issued edicts dunning the gentry for social funding, and had promulgated a new system of price-fixing for a range of goods and of fines for civil offences. But Chusan, Pottinger was indignantly informed by its gentry, was not short of charity: the foundling hospital might only have been set up seventeen years earlier, supported by a nominal subscription from each household, but the paupers’ refuge beside the north gate had been founded in 1103 under the Song dynasty. The emperor in his mercy had already made money available for the hungry and the homeless. Granted, the island’s public buildings needed repair from time to time, but it was not Gützlaff’s place to extort money from a populace impoverished by war to pay for his foreign institutions. Boys were by ancient practice educated at their parents’ expense; girls were educated at home in embroidery, needlework and cookery. More objectionable than the efforts at female education being practised by Mary Aldersey (after all, who cared if a few widows and girls learned to read?) was Gützlaff’s attempt to make the elders pay the wages of an island-wide police force — this had never been their role. Feelings of confidence were gradually growing up on the Zhejiang coast, where before there had been only rancour. Gützlaff’s colonial zeal, it seemed, might prove enough to disturb this. A popular revolt against British rule might be excited by such policies, Pottinger was warned, and it might not be long before his precious commerce was affected. Pottinger asked for a court of enquiry to be set up. Chusan was held ‘under such peculiar and unprecedented circumstances’ that British rule ought to be ‘even more scrupulous and forbearing (as well as more fostering) towards the people than if they were actually subjects of the Crown of England.’ He bade his Chinese opposite number send agents to Tinghae to look into the islanders’ complaints. [21]
When four months later one Ambassador Wang reported his findings, it became apparent that at the root of the islanders’ dissatisfaction was not so much Gützlaff’s social reforms but Tommy Atkins’ ignorance when it came to matters of culture. Heavy-handed soldiering had allowed the more pugnacious islanders to goad the troops into ill thought-out retaliation. Gützlaff had been endeavouring to adopt an air that hovered uneasily between Christian reformer, impartial magistrate and Confucian patriarch. So long as relations remained strained, and so long as he was the everyday face of British rule and answerable in Chinese eyes for everyday abuses of power, his dreams of moulding Chusan in his image must have seemed unattainable. Governor Schoedde’s timely appreciation of the underlying problem, at least, had made the rules of behaviour clear to his men and led to a crackdown on the troublemakers. And from the Chinese side, the arrival of Ambassador Wang on Chusan had had many of those erstwhile troublemakers scurrying to leave. Back in London, the matter was considered important enough for a Foreign Office memo to be sent to Hong Kong: surprise was expressed that a man of Gützlaff’s experience should interfere in affairs over which the Chinese were known to be peculiarly sensitive, and he was cautioned against forcing his social program down their throats.
Not all of Gützlaff’s policies were unwelcome, though: it was hard even for Confucians to object to a ban on begging. Distinguishing in stark terms between the deserving and undeserving poor, Gützlaff collected together the island’s paupers and distributed alms to just six dozen — the old, the blind and the maimed — who were in genuine need. He had once commented how delighted he would have been to tell the emperor himself that Jesus loved him, and it is hard to envisage him missing the opportunity to explain to these wretched souls the concept of Christian charity. His plans seem to have borne fruit — by the middle of 1843 there were reportedly only two or three beggars to be seen in the city, which, if it is not an exaggeration, was a remarkable achievement for the time. Everything Gützlaff undertook was coloured by his ultimate goal of baptising Chinese. Even when studying the latest works on irrigation and flood control his mind was ever on how that knowledge might be applied to the struggle for converts. His distribution of basic medical care in the villages continued, given ungrudgingly but always with a Christian tract following close behind the mercurial ointment. He called his island the Lord’s Vineyard, and when in March of 1843 a spectacular comet appeared in the night sky above it he was spurred on. ‘We await the coming of the Lord,’ he said of the celestial sign, ‘while the Chinese await nervously great events in the future. It is a beautiful star, so marvellous and comforting, so majestic.’ [22]
A small building in Tinghae served as a chapel for a growing congregation. Still struggling against the pressure of work and a lack of funds to complete a revision of the Chinese New Testament, Gützlaff had his flock read aloud from short works in Mandarin with titles such as God the Creator, God’s Love for Mankind and Who is Jesus? When time allowed he would visit chapel-going families in their homes. One old man in particular would always follow him on his house-calls, elucidating his arguments and railing against the native deities who, taught Gützlaff, had so clearly abandoned the islanders. Gützlaff persisted in taking long treks into the interior to preach, riding out sometimes with the Duke of Wellington’s pious nephew, the same Lieutenant George Wellesley who had narrowly escaped kidnap on those same paths. Still, though the number of islanders who had any real understanding of Christ was tiny, Gützlaff remained incorrigibly optimistic: ‘I have not the least doubt that with perseverance, earnest prayer and constant work, many souls might be saved on this island for the Lord.’ [23]
Yet three months later the strain of toiling for scant reward was showing, and Gützlaff’s writings gradually took on an air of resignation at opposition to his plans. He admitted that his talks on the Nativity and the Passion were arousing little interest; that his house visits were uncovering a deep seam of ignorance and worldliness — what the Chinese might have called disbelief. Not surprisingly, the greatest attention was paid to what he had to say when, in June of 1843, the drought which Dr Alexander Grant noted in his agricultural almanac grasped the island. There was every prospect of real famine. Now, as Gützlaff passed through the parched valleys with their cracked soil, the farmers begged him to pray to his God for rain. ‘The lamentations were truly heart-rending,’ he recounted, ‘the children wailing, the peasant stood grieving at how all his toil looked as though it would be in vain.’ A short distance from Tinghae’
s north gate, a widow kept a landscaped flower garden. Gützlaff made of one of its pavilions a prayer-room where during that long dry spell he would pray for rain. It came at last, torrential downpours turning the island overnight into a paradise of blossoms. Alas, the farmers, Gützlaff observed with a heavy heart, attributed God’s miracle to the processions of Buddhist priests and carved idols that had not long since wound their way through the valleys. Theirs was a well-trodden road; the path Gützlaff taught was long and challenging, baptism exceedingly rare, and apostasy common. For all the time spent toiling in Tinghae just one single member of Gützlaff’s congregation, a zealous man who had persuaded many others to attend chapel, would ask to be baptised. Even then, Gützlaff thought him still far from the Kingdom and in the end turned him down. [24]
It might have been a case of sour grapes, but Gützlaff at least was sure that he had never intended to spend forever on Chusan. Even before his social program ran into difficulties, thoughts of other places — Fuzhou, Japan, Korea, even Samarkand — had entered his mind. When, late in 1843, he heard from Hong Kong that he was to be offered the post of Chinese secretary to the colony, he accepted. The Foreign Office had refused to grant him the post he had hoped for — that of British consul in the treaty port of Fuzhou — as despite his marriages to two Englishwomen he had never adopted British citizenship. Then, shortly before his departure from Tinghae that autumn, he thought he glimpsed what under different circumstances might have become of his mission: ‘Yesterday I had a crowd of my women for an audience, and what most astonished me was that they understood almost every word and took on board some concepts regarding the Saviour of sinners. The common insensitivity with regard to religious ideas and the natural difficulty of communication make this all the more astounding.’ But depart Gützlaff did, leaving British-administered Chusan without a single ordained Protestant minister. [25]
If Protestantism could be accused of underestimating Chusan as a field for mission work, the same could not be said of its rival Rome. At almost the precise moment in 1842 that Karl Gützlaff was readying to set out for the Yangtze campaign, an intelligent young French Catholic had stepped onto the wharf below Josshouse Hill. With Gützlaff’s victorious return to Chusan, Father Francois-Xavier-Timothée Danicourt of the Congrégation de la Mission — the ‘Lazarists’ — would for a time live in Tinghae alongside him. On occasions he would even visit Gützlaff’s home to talk — they remained always on amicable terms — but the two competed all the while in earnest for souls. It was a game at which Catholicism was proving by far the more adept: the three dozen European Catholics working within the empire could already realistically claim some 200,000 converts, a figure that stood in stark comparison with Protestantism’s mere pewful, with plenty of room left to shuffle along. [26]
Father Danicourt’s calling had been foretold even as he lay in his crib, when the angel Gabriel (if we are to believe his biography) had appeared in the room. He certainly had an ear for languages, that most welcome of gifts in a missionary, and spoke English and Italian besides reading Latin and Greek. Just like Mary Aldersey and the gentlewomen of the Society for the Promotion of Female Education, Danicourt had learned elementary Chinese before leaving France for Macao. The peninsula dangled like a tiny polyp from China’s belly, absorbing a steady stream of priests from Europe’s seminaries and pious Chinese from across the empire and secreting them into the interior as fully formed missionaries. There he stayed for seven years, tutoring novices and perfecting his Mandarin, before news of the death of his father spurred him toward the more perilous task of frontline missionary work. A few months later he received the news that his mother too had passed on, and thus was cut the last emotional thread keeping him from devoting his life to China. News of the peace was not long in coming, and Rome, no less than Canterbury, saw in Pottinger’s successes the hand of God shaking the throne of Satan. With new ports now opened to missionary work, Danicourt was sent north to Tinghae.
While Chusan’s mild climate reinvigorated him, he could scarcely express the degree to which its people had fallen from grace. Even the presence at one time of a fellow French Jesuit on the island — a certain Father Jean de Fontaney had been around when Allen Catchpoole had occupied the Red Hair Hall — had left no discernible mark. And for all Gützlaff’s fine words and pamphleteering there was not yet one single indigenous Christian. Danicourt explained the situation to a confidante:
To give you an idea of the empire which the devil rules here, consider that there is not a mountain, nor a hill, a valley, a thicket or a house where there are not one or more pagodas of whatever size…. The people are infatuated with idols; they do nothing without intermixing in some superstition or other, so that this beautiful island, whose fertility all strangers admire, has since time immemorial been stained by the superstitions and abominations of paganism. This is what we must fight to overturn. [27]
How could Danicourt set about such an uneven struggle? For a start, he set up a Catholic chapel and consecrated the entirety of the archipelago to Mary Immaculate. Before the year was out, a Buddhist monk of some standing on the holy island of Putuoshan had been persuaded to convert, and by the start of 1843 was in Macao where his knowledge of canonical literature promised to be of great help to the seminarians’ endeavours. Little wonder, that Gützlaff’s distaste at the ease with which men like that pledged themselves to Pope Gregory XVI was tinged with envy: his conversion was suspected of being little more than a superficial acceptance of the sacraments and a swapping of his Buddhist paraphernalia for the Catholic rosary, a far less demanding change than the heartfelt transformation Protestantism required. [28]
While Mary Aldersey was busy educating young girls, Danicourt expanded his little chapel into an adjoining building which became a school training abandoned boys for the priesthood. Raising a generation of native Catholics from early childhood, the Jesuits knew from experience, was the best way to guarantee the spreading of the faith. Even if no Jesuit ever spoke the words often attributed to them — ‘Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards’ — this was precisely how Danicourt began work. He cared for the spiritual needs of Irish Catholic soldiers in the newly built Chusan Hospital for Europeans (it was a two-storey edifice beside the parade ground, built it seems at a cost of $10,000 with granite blocks robbed out from the city walls, whitewashed in the Anglo-Indian style with a shaded veranda and Venetian shutters on its glazed windows, the first such use of glass on the island). Attendance at daily prayers, mass and confession grew. Monsieur Tcheou, Danicourt’s old Mandarin tutor in Macao, was placed in charge of a second North Chapel, and one by one he diverted islanders from the cult of Guanyin the goddess of mercy to the not-dissimilar cult of the Virgin Mary. In little more than a year Tcheou alone had baptised twenty Chusanese — not a great number, but still twenty more than all of the island’s Protestants had managed since 1840. [29]
On Easter Monday of 1845, exhausted from overseeing a hectic Holy Week for his growing congregation, Danicourt set out on a restorative trip around Mary Immaculate’s fiefdom. At one point, hearing a distant bell he scrambled to the top of a hill from where he spied a crowd flocking toward a temple. Dropping down into the vale in his distinctive cassock and tricorn hat, Old Gu (he had taken the Chinese name Gu Fangji) was immediately recognised. As the Buddhist priests processed in their saffron ranks, he began to address the faces that now turned in curiosity toward him. But what had brought them here, to a temple in a remote valley? The grave-sweeping of Qingming was a week away. Were the idols he now so vehemently cursed the same gods from whom a bereaved family hoped to gain some earthly comfort? It is not hard to imagine the effect on a congregation in Danicourt’s native hamlet of Authie of a Buddhist mounting the pulpit to declaim against the vain worship of Jesus. Only that was not the Buddhist way. The islanders were content in their worldview without needing to confirm it through the proof of evangelistic success. They were happy to leave their t
ombs in desolation for most of the year, so long as they could pay their respects on the correct day. Danicourt, like his Protestant rivals, never really understood the people he sought to reach. For all the earnest desire to save the immortal souls of its people, it is easy to believe that Danicourt and the rest were revolted by China. After a decade in the country he summed up his emotions in a long letter to Paris. The Chinese were morally and spiritually bankrupt, he declared, a fact evinced by the way they treated their dead:
Most anywhere one goes, the tombs present a hideous spectacle. I have seen in the larger districts vast cemeteries covered with ruined sepulchres, with rotten coffins. There is nothing so ghastly as the scattered bones, the bleached skulls, those pigtails and human scalps lying abandoned amongst the grass and scrub. Here is the respect, so highly spoken of, of this people for their dead. China might look beautiful from afar, but how repulsive it is up close. [30]
China’s pantheon, Danicourt grimaced, was full of ‘masters of iniquity’. Buddha had frittered away his inheritance living the life of a tramp and had died in penury; Guanyin had been burned alive by her father; Laozi had strangled himself to death after a life wasted searching for the elixir of immortality. Even the humble Hearth God had hanged himself when subjected to scorn. ‘What should one expect from a people who adore such divinities?’ he railed. ‘What is China if not a great den of thieves, a vast breeding ground of disease?’ His examples, intentionally grotesque misunderstandings of folklore, were shocking to Christians back home but of no use in converting the canny Chinese.
Chusan Page 24
