Chusan
Page 30
Captain Anstruther rose through the ranks of the Madras Artillery. His spell in gaol in Ningbo took nothing from his zeal for life, and by the time of the Chusan handover he was a major and a Companion of the Order of the Bath to boot. He reached the rank of major-general in India, the country where he spent most of his life, but toward the end returned to his ancestral homeland of Fife where in 1884 he died unmarried. As for Edward Cree, he bade farewell to his fellow Rattlesnakes in 1843, promoted to full naval surgeon aboard a modern steam sloop. He saw a young Singapore, waltzed all night at Mrs Wallace’s ladies’ finishing school in Penang, helped bring to book a piratical prince in Brunei, and watched as the final crates of the opium indemnity were hauled aboard his ship the Vixen in Victoria harbour. He thought Hong Kong’s capital handsome, a great improvement on the fishermen’s huts he had seen three years before, and it was there that he crossed paths again with Robert Fortune. In his first book, Three Years’ Wanderings, Fortune had printed engravings of sketches which Cree had been so kind as to give to him when last they had met. Fortune, Cree noted, had not had the decency to acknowledge that contribution to his growing fame. Returning to Portsmouth, Cree fell in love with a girl named Eliza. By the time he left for the Baltic in 1854 she had borne him the first of eight children. As the war with Russia dragged on, Edward served on a steam frigate towing mortar-boats through the Dardanelles to lay siege to Sebastopol. As the Congress of Paris was being agreed, the chronic dysentery which had plagued him ever since drinking Chusan’s contaminated water forced Cree to retire. In 1856 he arrived back at his home near Plymouth Hoe, from where in 1860 he no doubt followed accounts of the final occupation of Chusan. He did not begin the work of editing his sketches and journals until well into his seventies. As his writing deteriorated, his family bought him a typewriter. He died in 1901, aged 87, and was buried in Highgate. Robert Fortune meanwhile returned again to China as the Taiping rebels were violently carving out their heavenly kingdom in the Yangtze valley. He spent three years this time searching for plants, introducing to Britain the fragrant trumpets of Rhododendron fortunei. On behalf of the US government, who wished to establish a tea industry of its own, he went back once more in the late 1850s. He visited Japan, from where he introduced the variegated bamboo and the Japanese yew. His years of collecting in the east beautified Britain: he sent back peonies, wisteria, magnolia, dogwood, forsythia, viburnum, the Chusan palm and more. Without his passion there would be no Weigela florida in our urban gardens, no winter-flowering jasmine to brighten up the dark months.
William Lockhart left Chusan after burying his daughter Lizzie, and in 1843 he opened a mission hospital in Shanghai which proved to be exceedingly successful (in fact, it survives to this day as part of Jiaotong University Medical School). His wife Kate kissed him goodbye eight years later to be invalided back to England, and the two did not meet again until William returned home in 1858. Three years later he was back in China. He opened a hospital in Peking, travelled up the Yangtze to the new treaty port of Hankou, and even tested the waters in Japan. He died at his home in Lewisham in 1896. Kate herself outlived William by two decades, witnessing the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty and passing away in Blackheath as the Great War drew to a close. Lizzie, if her tiny bones were not disturbed unnoticed in some building site, must still lie buried on Chusan.
The seemingly indefatigable Karl Gützlaff remained Chinese secretary in Hong Kong for only a few years. In 1844 he founded the Chinese Union to finance the dissemination of Protestant tracts in the interior, but five years later his wife and companion Mary died. She, like his late first wife, had lost a child soon after birth, and had left China taking with her some of their blind Chinese children. In the wake of this second bereavement Gützlaff spent time in Europe raising money for his Union, though as an undertaking it proved to be riddled with corrupt Chinese operators. During that time he married for the third time in twenty-one years. This last marriage proved to be even more fleeting: soon after returning to Hong Kong in 1851 Gützlaff sickened and died and was buried in Happy Valley.
Mary Ann Aldersey, so praised for her zeal and faith by the late magistrate of Dinghai, began to suffer in the heat of Ningbo where she had founded her girls’ school. In 1852, well into her sixth decade, she sailed to Chusan to take the sea air. She retraced the old route to the Kin family home. The widow had died three years earlier, and her son, whom Mary remembered only as a useless opium addict, had given up the drug to administer the estate he had inherited. His sister, once such a bright spark, had retreated into herself and was uninterested by the reappearance of their old lodger. Mary sailed to Putuoshan, where for the benefit of the monks she spent her time holding impromptu Christian services in scarcely serviceable Ningbo dialect. In 1860, a by then frail Mary accepted an offer from a Presbyterian mission to take charge of her boarding school. She left for the colony of South Australia, where in McLaren Vale she settled down to retirement with some of the same nieces who three decades earlier had been her reason for staying in London. She died there in 1868, in a house she had named Tsong Giaou after a village in Zhejiang. Less than a year after she left her school it was overrun as the Taiping rebels swept through Ningbo. When the British relieved the city it was resurrected. It survived the fall of the Qing but not the Japanese occupation and Communist revolution.
The war orphan Afah travelled to England on the Nemesis, the steamer on which he had witnessed the Yangtze campaign of 1842, and was placed in the care of one Dr James Pope of Marylebone. He learned to write English, a language he already spoke competently, and was baptised with the Christian names Lëang William. Captain Hall of the Nemesis arranged for him to be educated at a boarding school at Hanwell, where he was said to have become popular with the teachers and pupils. This little boy, rescued from Dinghai, was one day aboard the royal yacht introduced to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, but then he slips from the historical record. As for Anne Noble, soon after her release from gaol in Ningbo she sailed for home, taking with her a pair of blind girls from Mary Gützlaff’s school and an $8,000 subscription raised by the gentlemen of the British garrison. In England she was reunited with a three-year-old daughter, Annie, who had stayed behind when Anne and her husband had left on the Kite. In 1842 she was living in the Northumbrian village of Ovington, but in the late 1840s she and Annie emigrated to Brooklyn, New York. There Annie grew up, and in 1868 married Charles E. Walbridge, a Civil War veteran. The family moved to Buffalo, Charles’ hometown, where Annie bore him three daughters. Anne Noble herself died in Buffalo in 1877 and is buried there. We do not know what became of the child she was carrying during her imprisonment. HMS Wellesley, whose guns had opened the First Opium War, saw out her days moored on the Thames as a training ship. She was sunk during the Blitz by a German bomb, the only wooden ship of the line to be destroyed from the air. Her enemy that day was as far in advance of her gunpowder broadside as General Zhang’s gingals had lagged behind it. Eight years later, her mighty timbers of Indian teak were salvaged and reused in the post-war restoration of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. Her figurehead now stands in the gateway to Chatham Dockyard. [4]
But the stories of most of the people who lived upon Chusan during those years of British rule have been forgotten. Many of them were Indian, whether sepoys, lascars, or simply servants, and their names, if even they were written down, were long since prey to mould and bookworm. Then there were the women and children, all but invisible during their lifetimes, grudgingly acknowledged in regimental records if they were given nursing duties or laundry, or if they were an inconvenience to be accommodated in some outpost like Sinkamoon. Mrs Bull, wife to the bosun of Edward Cree’s Rattlesnake, lives on in his journals: she wanders the islands of Tinghae harbour with Chinese women clucking and fussing about her, examining her clothes, her large feet and her brown hair and asking if she is the Queen of England come to visit them. Just occasionally, in a personal diary or upon a list of the dead, army wives who had b
een lucky enough to draw lots to travel on the strength of a regiment have names. Elizabeth Dunbar, a twenty-eight-year-old wife of the Royal Irish, died two days after bearing her husband’s stillborn son. Jane Howes died aged just seven, two years before her four-month-old brother, Robert; a few weeks later their mother Ann followed them to the same plot. Elizabeth Meredith, a sergeant’s wife, died at twenty-two. Eliza Wood was buried in the same grave as her young William, alongside another child who had not even been christened. Mary Peel gave birth to a child who did not live out the day; she herself passed away a fortnight later. Jane Maria Gregory, wife of a lieutenant colonel, was thirty-one when she died, just six months before Chusan was handed back. We will never know how many more there were. [5]
In the tense years following the suppression of the demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party made a decision to revisit the lessons of the Opium Wars. It was an unexpected revival, for by that time the ardour with which first Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and later the Communists themselves had placed the Opium Wars centre stage in China’s modern history had rather faded. But then in 1990 the 150th anniversary of the British capture of Chusan fortuitously coincided with a pressing need to find a way of repositioning the Communist Party as the saviour of China rather than its oppressor. In the years since then, China’s rulers have extolled the patriotic and revolutionary credentials of the men and women who stood up to the British. They have been portrayed as proto-communists, the forerunners and antecedents of the People’s Liberation Army who liberated China in 1949. They were, in truth, mostly opportunists whose kidnappings and murders were motivated by little more than the promise of silver dollars; but the truth, it has been said, should not get in the way of a good story. Just as the myth of the bereaved son who burned the British fleet in Tinghae was once preferred to the unpalatable truth of China’s weakness, so the belief that the Chinese fought valiantly against their nineteenth-century invaders has found fertile ground with citizens who, understandably, long to see China respected as a strong nation. [6]
By 1990, high-schools in China had stopped teaching the defeats of the 1840s. Today, though, that has all changed, and sites associated with the war have been designated as Patriotic Education Bases (Aiguozhuyi Jiaoyu Jidi). Vast sums have been spent turning once-neglected battlefields into tourist sights, and ‘red tourism’ (hongse lüyou) has become a major part of China’s domestic travel industry. One such Patriotic Education Base is on 49th Hill, the heights overlooking Dinghai harbour where the British routed Zheng Guohong’s soldiers on October 1st, 1841. Just six years after Tian’anmen, as part of China’s enforced resurgence in interest in the Opium War, the Opium War Relics Park was opened on the hill’s eastern slopes. At its entrance there now stands a granite monument with a carved inscription:
The Opium War erupted in 1840. On July 5th, the British bombarded Dinghai. The heroic defenders counterattacked, but General Zhang Chaofa was seriously wounded and soldiers and officials such as Magistrate Yao Huaixiang laid down their lives. On September 26th 1841, the British attacked again. Generals Ge Yunfei, Wang Xipeng and Zheng Guohong led 5,800 officers and men in a bloody battle lasting six days and nights, as one after another they died a brave and noble death for their country. This battle proved to be the most intense resistance to a British military invasion in China’s modern history. To honour these martyrs, to make their deeds clear to future generations, and to propagate the spirit of patriotism, in 1995 the Zhoushan People’s Government decided to found on that very battlefield a park to be both a memorial and a place to stroll. [7]
A year later, the park was listed as a Patriotic Education Base for the schoolchildren of Zhejiang province. It is no coincidence that the inscription was dedicated in June 1997 — the very month that marked the end of British rule in Hong Kong and brought to a close a humiliating chapter that had begun with a single cannon-shot in Dinghai harbour. A stinging defeat on this otherwise obscure Zhejiang hillside has been reinterpreted as a rallying cry for Chinese nationalism.
Steps lead visitors to the Inscribed Tablets of the Hundred Officers, where a pathway meanders amongst tiers of polished black marble. On each of the tablets is carved an epigram, composed by a high-ranking officer of the People’s Liberation Army and chased in gold. ‘Do not forget this national humiliation,’ reads one, ‘but rouse yourself in pursuit of strength!’ ‘Wipe this national humiliation clean away and love this China of ours!’ encourages another. ‘May the noble spirit of these martyrs who defied the British never perish!’ Others are more disquieting, and undeniably anti-British:
Chusan was lit by the flames of war; but the people’s determination to fight the British was resolute; together they spilled their blood in defence of their soil; yet vainly they suffered the injustice of Nanjing; a century of singular shame this morning has been washed away; their noble ambitions rewarded, our hearts are at peace; Hong Kong has returned to one rule; how can we ever again suffer those barbarian thieves to encroach on our borders?
The steps mount the saddle of the hill. Where the Westmoreland Regiment once clambered over naked rocks greasy from the morning drizzle, a woodland floor is now carpeted with moss, ferns and creeping ivy. Patches of flowers are beautifully spotlit, and there is the sound of birdsong. Scattered amongst the undergrowth are the hummocks of grave mounds, some lying in clutches, others alone. Headstones declare them to be the resting places of Chinese soldiers. They are still tended by the islanders: handfuls of joss-sticks bristle beside them. A little farther on, a stone tablet has been erected: ‘Here fell General Zheng Guohong of the Chuzhou brigade, a national hero.’ On the hill’s ridge an essay has been carved in marble. It drips with symbolism:
Today China has taken wing like the mythic peng, and Hong Kong has returned like a faithful magpie to its partner. The dragons are dancing in the Yangtze and rising from the Eastern Sea. And so we repair these shrines and temples, and continue a century of struggle. The parks and pavilions are extended, the lofty and majestic peaks of these thousand islands are made strong.
Where the killing was at its worst that October morning, the Three Generals Memorial Square has been laid out. Its centrepiece is a colossal, rough-hewn megalith standing yards tall, from whose mass three faces stare defiantly in the direction of the British assault, as though the very rock of the island has been brought to life to defend Chusan. A trio of steel blades soars skyward like swords held aloft. A frieze depicts the fighting in a style that weaves surging socialist realism with the organic abstraction of an ancient bronze, anchoring the present, through the Opium War, to a distant cultural bedrock. A three-legged raven and a three-legged toad — ancient symbols of the sun and the moon — are testament to Yuqian’s claim that the battle here lasted for six days and nights. His lie, that the Chinese stood firm and killed countless British soldiers, has attained the status of historic fact.
The path leads on to a museum built on the heights of the hill. A model of HMS Wellesley towers over the war junk cowering in her lee, and a Chinese gingal rusts away beside six feet of hefty British cannon. A statue of Captain Anstruther kneels pathetically, his hands tied behind his back, head bowed. Bao Zucai and his brother stand triumphantly behind their captive, their muscular arms gripping his neck and shoulders, bronze chests swollen with patriotic pride.
After the handover of Dinghai in 1846, a side-chapel in the temple of the god of war was devoted to the three generals who had died defending the city. Decades of neglect left what had been a miserable little temple to start with practically derelict. Its bronzes and stone tablets were missing, and every rainstorm would cause new leaks until its paintwork was black with damp. Then in 1884, with foreign ships again sniffing around Zhejiang, a brand new shrine was dedicated. When the next spring foreign ships threatened the Ningbo river, a rumour spread that ghostly lights had been seen along the coast. The people were calm, it was said, content that the souls of the generals were watching over them. Shortly before the H
ong Kong handover in 1997, the shrine was moved to the crest of 49th Hill. In the cool of its great hall, life-sized models of the generals now sit swathed in silks and satins. Long necklaces of sandalwood mark them out as demigods. Above them, a plaque declares their faithfulness to be a worthy example. Inscribed pillars offer the schoolchildren who visit this place values to cherish: ‘Maintain dignity with your heart, treat others with sincerity.’ ‘In performance of duty there is only loyalty, in times of crisis, courage.’
In 1994, a book entitled The Complete Edited and Revised Annals of Zhoushan City was published in Zhejiang. Its editorial line was fully in tune with the Communist Party’s new emphasis on the people’s heroic resistance:
During the Opium War, the British several times occupied Chusan, bringing terrible hardship to bear on the islanders. At a time of national crisis, the people of Chusan held high the flag of patriotism, struggling indomitably with the British invaders, displaying a heroic spirit that moves one to song and to tears, and writing a glorious chapter in the annals of China’s recent history…. You could say that the Opium War, started by the capitalist bourgeoisie-class government of Britain, forced China on to the humiliating developmental route of being a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society, and that the occupation of Chusan was the start of China’s suffering in its recent history. [8]
The islanders’ terrified, piecemeal reactions to the invasion have been portrayed as precisely the kind of guerrilla tactics which Mao used to defeat the Nationalists and the Japanese: everywhere the British went, they are said to have met with ‘powerful attacks by the iron fists of popular justice.’ Even their slogans were much the same, anachronistic proof of their revolutionary credentials: ‘Ploughs, hoes, sticks and staffs, all can serve as weapons. Even women, girls and boys know to kill the rebels.’ [9]