Chusan
Page 29
On April 14th, 1860, naval representatives of Britain and France met in Shanghai and decided to occupy Chusan straight away as a preliminary to a military expedition to the north. Soon after daylight on the 21st, the British and French flagships and the P&O steamer Grenada dropped anchor in Tinghae harbour and a flag of truce was sent ashore to ask as politely as possible for the island’s surrender. The task fell to a man named Harry Parkes. Harry had been to Chusan before — he was the younger brother to Kate Parkes, wife of the medical missionary William Lockhart and cousin to Karl Gützlaff’s wife Mary, and as a fourteen-year-old he had studied Chinese under Gützlaff in Tinghae. For a year he had remained there, toiling away at his studies in a little shed attached to the magistracy, familiarising himself with the dense language of courtly memoranda. Now fluent in Mandarin, Harry had been appointed as Her Majesty’s consul in Shanghai, a diplomatic role in China second only to the consul in Canton. [9]
At noon Harry landed with a delegation from the combined navies, but was perplexed to find that nobody had been sent out to meet them. Their unannounced arrival, surely, called for some feigned resistance at the very least? Instead a throng gathered about them to offer supplies and their services as factotums. Chusan’s general and civil magistrate were sent for and by mid-afternoon were sitting comfortably aboard the Grenada (as a P&O vessel, she was the closest the British and French could agree to a neutral venue) sipping maraschino and discussing their island’s fate. The general (despite his liking for maraschino Yuan Junrong was in fact a Muslim, ‘a tall, gentlemen-like fellow, with a quick, intelligent eye, and good countenance.’) and what was by all accounts a short, vulgar-looking magistrate named Gan Bing took little persuading to hand over control of Chusan: on the adjoining mainland, the rebel armies of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were locked in a brutal struggle with the emperor’s forces and this remote corner of the province was of little concern any more to Peking. There was clearly no point in dying for a vain cause. [10]
And so, after becoming hopelessly lost for hours in the densest of sea-fogs, a landing party climbed to the top of Josshouse Hill and raised flags of conquest there, vying to see which could be set the higher, the Union Jack or the Tricolore. Early the next day, amidst refreshing spring showers, the allied commanders surveyed their new home. The Vale of Tinghae was a mosaic of flooded paddy fields, where the emerald green of seedlings had begun to break the surface. Yellow swathes of mustard perfumed the wet morning air. Scattered grave-mounds rose from the flatness; temples nestled amongst stands of cedars. The few soldiers, now middle-aged men, who remembered the wharves before the handover of 1846 struggled to find the barracks they had laboured so hard to make comfortable. Once again the troops made their billets in the city temples, removing the gods from their plinths and putting them into storage. In the Chinese arsenals, weapons procured at great expense by Governor Liang had lain unused for fourteen years. The Royal Engineers found piles of obsolete cannon that looked sure to explode if ever they were fired. The walls were lined with racks of swords, spears and pikes, all rusted beyond use. The same old muskets that had failed to hold back two invasions were piled alongside silk uniforms and padded trousers. Shields bore grotesque painted faces obscured by years of mildew. The Tinghae brigade was found to be at barely half strength. The strict requirement that it observe an annual muster and exercises had last been observed in 1852, once time had dimmed the memory of war. The shopkeepers reacted to the reoccupation as they always had; some, indeed, had only recently arrived, renting premises on the rumour that Chusan was once again to be occupied. Signboards stashed away in 1846 were dusted down and proudly displayed once more. Here was the familiar Stultz, No.1 London Tailor. Over there were E. Moses & Son, ostensibly an outfitter from Aldgate Pump, and Jim Crow, the fashionable tailor. In a barber’s shop frequented by the allies, pictures cut from the Illustrated London News and the Pictorial Times soon hung on the walls. But again a large proportion of the wealthy population had fled the city with their possessions. The people who stayed behind were the same poor who had offered their services to Elliot and Pottinger. They were dressed in what looked like cast-offs from some other, richer town. And there were so many beggars. They lay motionless by the roadside under rags, filthy and covered in sores. It was tempting to consider how two decades under a social reformer like Karl Gützlaff might have left the city a better place. [11]
The men had a quiet time of it while their officers organised hunting expeditions in the hills (one islander ran deer-shoots with a guarantee that ‘no show deer, no catchee dollar’). General Yuan spent the evenings entertaining the allied officers, his dinner receptions famously consisting of twenty-seven courses, preceded by sherry and cheroots, accompanied by French champagne and rounded off with a pipe of Bengali opium. He tried to make his guests feel at home with roast geese and shoulders of mutton. He sat to be photographed, a technology then in its infancy, and an image of him survives. He sits stock still in his robes and cap of office, staring into the lens. In the corner of his mouth he holds a pipe, as if to remind the viewer of the drug habit to which the arrival of Europeans ultimately condemned him and his countrymen. [12]
The vanguard of the allied forces spent just two uneventful months in Tinghae before the bulk of the expedition picked them up on their way to the Peiho River. In August the allies landed unopposed at Dagu and, just like in Chusan years before, took the forward-facing forts with ease by turning their flank. On the plains beyond, the great city of Tianjin surrendered rather than face destruction. An armistice was arranged to avoid an assault on Peking, but the British delegation was ambushed and kidnapped. A month later, Harry Parkes and the surviving hostages were finally freed in a terrible state, half their original number having died by design or neglect. China paid the price for this treachery: the Summer Palace, a vast and splendid collection of buildings and lakes, was looted and reduced to rubble while the allied command looked on with approbation. In Peking, under threat of annihilation, the emperor ratified the Treaty of Tianjin. With this, the Western powers forced China to grant them freedom to trade in a dozen more ports, the right to open legations in the capital and to travel freely in the interior, and to sail the Yangtze at will. Protestant missionaries, the successors to the men and women who had used Chusan as an ante-chamber to China, were from now on the absolute equals of Roman Catholics. In October, the last Western soldiers left Chusan for a third and final time, despite a brief but heartfelt insistence from the French commander Montauban that he would not simply hand back such a valuable possession. Diplomatically, his political superiors overruled him: they had wrested everything they desired from the faltering Qing dynasty, and the Davis Convention with Victoria’s sign-manual upon it remained sacrosanct. Chusan, so long as no other foreign power expressed an interest in it, was of more value to the British in Chinese hands than it was as an addition to their now extensive portfolio of rights and concessions in China. Just as had been the case in 1846, Britain’s faith was still worth fifty Chusans. The desirability of a British Chusan had passed. [13]
The year 1751 saw the printing of a book entitled Illustrations of Tributaries to the Qing. In one woodcut, the ‘English Barbarian’ is depicted in the knee-length breeches, frock coat and hat of an East India Company merchant. A ringletted wig cascades down to his shoulders, and he holds a walking cane. In one hand he holds a china jar which he examines with an eye to buying. His wife has the look of a Nell Gwynn, with ample curly hair, a full skirt, and sleeves gathered below her elbows. The explanatory notes below read:
England is a vassal state of Holland, and the dress and ornament of these barbarians is similar. The kingdom is quite rich. The men mostly wear woollen broadcloths and take pleasure in alcoholic drink. Their unmarried women bind their waists tightly, desiring to make themselves slender. Their hair falls down onto their shoulders. They wear short jackets but heavy skirts, and when they go out of doors they wear an extra coat on top. They always have snuff at hand. [14]
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A century later, in April of 1860, a party of Britons sailed one day for the holy island of Putuoshan to see about requisitioning a temple as a temporary hospital. In a shop in the island’s one small settlement, they came across a book. On it, each of the world’s races was depicted with a woodcut sketch and a pithy description. In one country, it was said, the people never died, but the country was thirty years’ journey from Peking. Below this, the artist had encapsulated the people of Britain no longer as a merchant and his wife but as a pair of jovial soldiers carrying a large cannon. There was no mention of their achievements in the sciences, of their medicine, their steamships, their God…. The British were, the legend simply told the reader, ‘famous for their construction of guns.’ [15]
Epilogue
In October of 1911, seventy years almost to the day after Sir Henry Pottinger captured Chusan, an uprising broke out in the Yangtze port of Wuchang. By the end of the year, the Qing dynasty had collapsed. The two events were by no means unrelated. Britain’s victories in the Opium Wars, and the relative ease with which she forced the Qing to cede trading rights and territory, had given the lie to the myth of an exalted Middle Kingdom surrounded by deferential barbarians. In the coming decades, the Qing would suffer one defeat after another, until its coastline and major rivers were pockmarked with foreign concessions and spheres of influence. The revolutionary ideology of men like Dr Sun Yat-sen — it is no coincidence that the founder of modern China was a Christian convert educated at a church school in Hawaii and baptised in Hong Kong — had arrived in China in the wake of the war, carried in Western writings on political and economic theory and in the minds of students who travelled widely for the first time beyond China’s borders and who saw the reality of Western democracy. Marxism, a competing Western ideology, was later to enter China by similar means, and it was troops of the Communist Third Field Army who in May of 1950 finally dislodged Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists — and the few Western missionaries still living and working there — from Chusan. [1]
In the pinyin romanisation adopted under Chairman Mao, Chusan is now known as Zhoushan, its capital Tinghae as Dinghai. More than one million people live on the 103 inhabited islands of the archipelago, which range in length from a few hundred yards to tens of miles. Dinghai has blossomed into a pleasant and wealthy city of tree-lined streets and tranquil parks. After four decades of disengagement from the outside world — and in this regard Mao’s China was even more insular than the Qing — the waters of the archipelago were re-opened to foreign-registered shipping. In 2006, the ports of Ningbo and Zhoushan merged their interests to become one of the largest seaports on earth. This Ningbo-Zhoushan Port has plans to leapfrog into a global third place with the completion of five gargantuan container-ship berths on the same Kintang Island where Karl Gützlaff distributed his tracts and his mercurial ointment.
Where in the 1840s even a Western ship took days to sail from Dinghai harbour to the Shanghai bund, today it is possible to drive there non-stop in just four hours, first hopping from island to island by way of the five Zhoushan Cross-Sea Bridges before crossing Hangzhou Bay upon a 22-mile causeway that is second only in length to the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana. No longer a half-day’s march but instead just a short drive away on Route 329, Shenjiamen (the fishing community of ‘Sinkamoon’ that Gützlaff had considered ‘the very seat of iniquity’) has grown into China’s most important centre for seafood processing — 10% of its seafood is landed here — with worldwide exports worth some US$50,000,000 each year. But the village of Sinkong on the west coast, with its long, sheltered harbour and deep anchorages, like a ‘young Bosphorus’, never developed into the great port that Lieutenant Ouchterlony of the Madras Engineers had envisaged. Now known as Cengang, it is home to just 16,000 souls, but the construction of the Zhoushan Cross-Sea Bridges has linked it to the mainland and in recent years has brought something of an economic boom. Robert Montgomery Martin’s grand dreams of a British city there never got beyond a barracks that housed two dozen men of the Royal Irish Regiment and their families, and a rented building that served as their hospital. The few issues of the Singkong Gazette that were printed on a simple press never grew to rival Hong Kong’s China Mail. Edward Cree’s treatment of ophthalmia cases in exchange for poultry was the farthest that Western medicine penetrated. Today, run-down warehouses stare out over Sinkong Passage to the bare slopes of what the British knew as Poplar Island. It would require the same mastery of imagination to paint the neon skyline of a Hong Kong upon that blank canvas as it would to look out from today’s Kowloon toward the skyscrapers of Victoria and see in their place the barren peak of 1840. [2]
The navigation in this corner of the Pacific Ocean is still as treacherous as it was when the first East Indiamen arrived. In the shelter of Kintang Island the channel becomes a patchwork of spitting races and millpond calms as its depths are hurled to the surface by undersea contours. The wind gathers strength beyond Blackwall Island, then dies in the lee of Bell Island, where ships’ wakes are smothered by a powerful riptide. The ferries’ engines drop in pitch as they round Guardhouse Island, and the pattering of water on their hulls is echoed by the dozens of freighters that ride at anchor. Rather fittingly, the temple fort on Josshouse Hill, the first building in China to be forcibly occupied by a Western power, is now occupied by the People’s Liberation Army. An observation tower overlooks the neatly laid out Harbour Square and the passenger wharves that line the waterfront. A little way off, Grave Island is untouched but for a navigation beacon. Too small to have attracted the attention of developers, it is quite possible that dozens of Royal Navy burials survive there.
But apart from the ghost of its old street-plan, not a trace remains ashore of the maritime suburb the East India Company knew, of the Red Hair Hall where Allen Catchpoole was held under house-arrest, of the handsome residence where Sir George Staunton was entertained, and where the ground had run with samshoo and warehouses had crackled as they burned. Even the stone-built Chusan Hospital for Europeans has vanished, where the plant-hunter Robert Fortune slept alongside an opium-addicted mandarin. The old British cemetery, which occupied a triangular half-acre at the foot of Josshouse Hill, has been entombed beneath homes and workshops. With the British occupation just a distant memory it had anyhow become ‘a melancholy spectacle of neglect and disrepair’, with squatter families living amongst the dead and using their gravestones as tables and beds. A single memorial to the 431 men of the Westmoreland Regiment who died on Chusan has been rescued and moved a little way up the slope. It is the only British funerary monument to have survived the upheavals of the People’s Republic. [3]
On the vale below Josshouse Hill, Yuqian’s earth rampart was carried away spadeful by spadeful in the 1950s leaving only the curve of Harbour Road to trace its line. The city walls too survived just a few years of Communist rule. Come Liberation in 1950 they had anyhow fallen derelict, and the tiled roofs and elegant carvings of the watchtowers had all gone. Then in 1955 their stone facing was removed, the tamped earth was carted away into the fields, and the solid wall became the broad expanse of Liberation Road. The paddy fields where the British pitched camp have disappeared under homes and shops as Dinghai has spilled out unbounded. The Cameronians’ makeshift hospital at least has survived, in a building whose use wavered between pawnbroker’s shop and temple, where hundreds of young Scotsmen were laid out on straw mattresses to die. In 2012 it was renovated, and rank upon rank of tiny golden buddhas now glint upon its walls. Beyond its courtyards, only patches remain of the Dinghai that the British would have known. Even though it was listed by the provincial government as a Famous Historic and Cultural City in 1991, before the decade was out swathes of the beautiful old town had been demolished, their centuries-old buildings sacrificed to property developers despite protests from the residents. On the site of the south gate, from where the Union Jack flew for six years, there now sits a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken. But the very heart of Dinghai at leas
t has been preserved, and the clock turned back to how it was under the Qing dynasty. It is being promoted as a living museum, a tiny corner of old China that is growing ever scarcer. There the great flagstones that pave Edward Cree’s watercolours have survived, beside the shop fronts with their sliding wooden shutters and jutting balconies. The lofty fire-walls that divide one neighbourhood from the next have been replastered and painted in bright white. In the midst of those dog-leg alleyways, the great Zuyin Temple that once housed British soldiers has been splendidly restored.
Despite the best efforts of a few and the preferences of many, Chusan never became a Crown Colony. Still, for a few years, Victorian society had been on show here in all its complexity. There were its knights and aristocrats, artists and scientists, doctors and evangelists, and the wives and children of officers, privates, missionaries and merchants. Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Campbell, who handed Chusan back to the Qing, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey as Baron Clyde after winning laurels in the Crimea and commanding Britain’s forces in India; Irish labourers and Bengali farmers who had signed up to escape poverty were buried in unmarked graves. Hundreds went to their deaths lamentably young in a country they never understood. Their relatives read months or years later, if at all, of their passing. Some of them no doubt arrived in Chusan with the intention of doing harm, but many more only wished the islanders well, and genuinely believed that by bringing Christ, medicine and English law to China they were helping to improve the lives of a quarter of humanity.