But in honouring Chusan’s history, the Party is ignoring the reasons behind it: the autistic inability of the Qing to comprehend a changed world; the xenophobia of a culture that considered itself superior and all others barbarian; the concentration of power in the hands of men who could not be held to account by the people they ruled. The sanctioned version of the Opium War does not stop to question how a few thousand men, women and children could sail halfway around the globe to demand terms from a nation of 400 million. Visitors to the Opium War Memorial Hall are not told that the British steadfastly refused for the most honourable of reasons to renege on their promise to hand back Chusan, nor are they told that Chinese soldiers died because the ignorance and embezzlement of their commanders had left them woefully ill-equipped. For it was Chinese corruption, as Karl Gützlaff saw all too clearly, that resulted in ‘the miserable fortifications that were thrown up, the half-starved soldiers, the wretched matchlocks, the useless powder, the honeycombed guns, the miserable display of the whole Imperial army.’ Perhaps visitors are not told this because they would be canny enough to draw obvious and unwelcome parallels with the present day. The Communist Party wants to cast itself as the saviour of China, but if an impresario were tasked with casting the Party in the most fitting of the roles demanded by the First Opium War, it would not be as the relatively few brave individuals who opposed the British out of a sense of patriotism and loyalty; instead he would cast it as the venal mandarins whose fabricated memorials misrepresented the truth and condemned China to defeat after defeat. [10]
On the plaque explaining the kidnap of Captain Anstruther there is no mention of his knees being clubbed until he could no longer walk, or of how his elderly servant was beaten to death with rocks. And there is certainly no mention of the dozens of men, some of them just teenagers and many of them guilty only of serving as camp followers, who were abducted, tortured and beheaded in exchange for silver dollars. As the humane and thoughtful Edward Cree noted in his journal, the war cost the lives of many thousands of human beings, and great destruction of property and misery and sorrow to many. But a great many of those lives were British and Indian, and not all of the misery and sorrow was borne by the Chinese. Life for the barbarian invaders was brutal and short, whether men, women or children: of the 591 men of the Westmoreland Regiment who left England for foreign service in 1821, just nine were still alive when the regiment returned home in 1844; four out of every five were to die serving in China. It is terribly sad that China and Britain cannot join together in mourning the violence done on both sides while being thankful that it started them out on paths that are converging in peace. For without the horror of that war, Hong Kong would likely be just one more island in the Gulf of Canton, Shanghai a town of no great consequence, and China would be poorer for their absence. Chusan ought to celebrate itself not as a symbol of victimhood but as a place where China and Britain began to explore one another. Perhaps, once the Communist Party has made way for a democratic government which feels no pressing need to trumpet its patriotic credentials, this will become possible. My own hope — a lot to wish for so long as the Communist Party insists on seeing China forever portrayed as the only victim of war — is for a joint Anglo-Chinese excavation of the British burials on Grave Island in Dinghai harbour, and for a memorial to the men interred there, with an inscription mutually agreed upon by the Chinese and British governments. It would be a step toward healing. [11]
Hong Kong’s prosperity can with hindsight seem preordained, and Palmerston’s disparagement of it as ‘a barren rock’ quaintly amusing. The handover of Chusan in 1846 might then be seen as a reasoned gambit, as though the path we look back on proves wrong anybody who had argued for a different policy. But Hong Kong started out as a blank canvas, and in retrospect there were no insurmountable impediments to making a successful colony of it. Just two thousand souls had been living at Chekchu at the raising of the Union Jack, and anybody who chose to live in Victoria was placing himself voluntarily under British rule. Governor Pottinger and his successors had no entrenched gentry to contend with as did Stephens and Schoedde on Chusan. Both Hong Kong and Chusan were occupied by the Japanese during World War II — Japan’s treatment of the Chusanese proved to be incomparably more brutal than Britain’s — and come August of 1945 Hong Kong might easily have returned to the rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China as so many of the foreign concessions already had; President Roosevelt had suggested as much. In the end the Japanese surrender was formally accepted by the first allied force to arrive, a British fleet under Rear-admiral Harcourt. Post-war reconstruction was carried on under the Union Jack, with Hong Kong absorbing hundreds of thousands of Chinese fleeing the civil war raging over the border. A once-British Chusan might also have returned to British rule in 1945, or it might equally have been reclaimed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic only to be invaded by the Red Army a few years later. We can only speculate. Either way, just four years passed before Mao shut China’s door to wipe away at a stroke both the economic disadvantages Chusan had faced from her unwelcome proximity to Shanghai and the advantages Hong Kong had drawn from nearby Canton. For thirty years the New Territories might as well have bordered France, yet the Chinese flair for business thrived under the impartial stability of British law; the same would have been true of a British-administered Chusan. During the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, it seemed for a few months as though political agitation might fatally undermine British rule in Hong Kong; in the face of such a threat, insular Chusan, had it remained a British possession and military base, would have been more resilient.
The twentieth century saw China split into four most uneven jurisdictions. The largest, the People’s Republic, still regularly rattles its sabre across the Taiwan Strait at the second-largest of them, for Taiwan is a snub to the Communist Party’s avowed aim of national unity. There was never any need to chivvy along the return of Portuguese Macao, that tiny spit of land which made its fortune from the Chinese addiction to gambling. And once it had decided that ‘to get rich is glorious’ and that to recover capitalist Hong Kong would be no bad thing, Beijing had only to watch and wait for 1997 to arrive; once the expiry of the lease on the New Territories brought the People’s Republic flush with Kowloon, the remainder of the colony would have been unviable. Sir Daniel Brooke Robertson’s advice to the Foreign Office in 1860 was proved accurate: Hong Kong, entirely dependent on the mainland, ultimately proved unfit as a permanent possession. Better that London negotiate an amicable return than see it wither. But the much larger and self-sustaining Chusan might have been — if London could keep its nerve in the face of inevitable pressure from an ever more self-confident People’s Republic — impervious to anything but an overwhelming invasion. Just as Beijing and Taipei have reached a pragmatic impasse over the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, only three miles from the Communist mainland, so Beijing and London might have learned to live with a quirk of history whose usefulness to China’s economic growth — like Hong Kong — outweighed its anachronism. More likely, though, the British Crown Colony of Chusan would have become a festering point of disagreement — a barbarian arrow eternally pointed at China’s heart.
Buddhist monks processing into the Zuyin Temple, Dinghai.
Sources & Bibliography
A. Contemporary sources in Western languages.
(i) Printed books.
Alexander, W. The Costume of China. 1805; Picturesque Representations… of the Chinese. 1814.
Anderson, A. Narrative of the British Embassy to China. 1796.
Baker, C.W. An Artillery Officer in China, 1840-42 (in Blackwood’s Magazine, July-Dec., 1964).
Barrow, J. Travels in China. 1806.
Bernard, W.D. A Narrative of the Voyages & Services of the Nemesis. 1844; The Nemesis in China. 1847.
Bingham, J.E., RN. Narrative of the Expedition to China. 1843.
Burrows, M. Memoir of Admiral Sir Henry Ducie Chads, GCB. 1869.
Cantor, Dr T. General Features of
Chusan (in Annals & Magazine of Natural History, ix. 1842).
Cranmer-Byng, J.L., ed. An Embassy to China, being the journal kept by Lord Macartney. 1962.
Cunningham, Dr J. Observations and Remarks made during his residence on the island of Chusan (in Harris’ Navigantium. 1748).
Cunynghame, Cpt. A. An Aide-de-Camp’s Recollections of Service in China. 1853.
Davis, Sir J.F. China, During the War and Since the Peace. 1852; Chinese Miscellanies. 1865.
Denham, Cpt. Journals Kept by Mr Gully & Captain Denham During a Captivity in China. 1844.
Dunne, J.H. From Calcutta to Peking; being notes taken from the journal of an officer between those places. 1861.
Ellis, Lady (ed). Memoirs & Services of the Late Lt-Gen. Sir SB Ellis, KCB, Royal Marines, from his own Memoranda. 1866.
‘A Field Officer.’ The Last Year in China, to the Peace of Nanking. 1843.
Forbes, Lt. F.E., RN. Five Years in China. 1848.
Fortune, R. Three Years’ Wanderings in China. 1847; A Journey to the Tea Countries of China. 1852.
Grant, A. A Diary of Chinese Husbandry, from Observations made in 1843-44.
Gützlaff, K. Missionary Travels to China to Distribute Bibles. 1839.
Gützlaff, K. Gaïhan’s Chinesische Berichte. 1850.
Halloran, A.L. Wae Yang Jin. 1856.
Harris, Cpt. R. Remarks on Heaving Down a 72-Gun Ship. 1850.
Hüttner, J.C. Voyage à la Chine. 1799.
Jocelyn, Lord R. Six Months with the Chinese Expedition; or Leaves from a Soldier’s Notebook. 1841.
Knollys, H. The China War of 1860. 1875.
Lindsay, H.H. Is the War with China a Just One? 1840.
Little, A. Gleanings from Fifty Years in China. 1910.
Lockhart, W. The Medical Missionary in China. 1861.
MacKenzie, K.S. Narrative of the Second Campaign in China. 1842.
MacPherson, D. Two Years in China, a Narrative of the Chinese Expedition. 1843.
Martin, R.M. Report on the Island of Chusan. 1844 (published by order of the House of Commons, 1857); China Political, Cultural & Commercial. 1847.
Masefield, P., ed. The Land of Green Tea. Letters & Adventures of Colonel Baker of the Madras Artillery. 1995.
Matheson, J. The Present Position & Prospects of the British Trade with China. 1836.
Milne, W.C. Life in China. 1858.
Mountain, A. Memoirs & Letters of the Late Col. Mountain. 1858.
Murray, Lt. A. Doings in China. 1843.
Noble, A. Narrative of the Shipwreck of the ‘Kite’. 1841.
Ouchterlony, J. A Statistical Sketch of the Island of Chusan. 1841; The Chinese War. 1844.
Power, W.T. Recollections of Three Years’ Residence in China. 1853.
Scott, J.L. Narrative of a Recent Imprisonment in China, after the Wreck of the Kite. 1841.
Smith, G. A Narrative of an Exploratory Visit to each of the Consular Cities of China and to the Islands of Hong Kong and Chusan. 1847.
Staunton, Sir G. An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. 1798.
Swinhoe, R. Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860. 1861.
Urmston, Sir J.B. Chusan & Hong Kong. 1847.
Vickers, T.H. The Events of the War in China in 1841. 1881.
Walrond, T. Letters & Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin. 1872.
White, W., ed. ‘John’ of the Highflyer. A Sailor-Boy’s Log-book from Portsmouth to the Peiho. 1862.
Wilson, Dr. J. Medical Notes on China. 1846.
Wolseley, G.J. Narrative of the War with China in 1860. 1862.
In addition, HM Government’s British Parliamentary Papers series (BPP), under Accounts & Papers, contains the text of treaties and official proclamations.
(ii) Periodicals and newspapers.
Les Annales de la Propagation de la Foi (APF)
The Chinese Repository (CR)
The Englishman & Military Chronicle, Calcutta (EMC)
The India Journal of Medical & Physical Science (IJMPS)
The Journal of the Horticultural Society of London (JHS)
The Missionary Register (MR)
The Nautical Magazine (NM)
The Times, London (Times)
The United Service Journal and Naval & Military Magazine (USJ)
(iii) Manuscripts.
(a) British Library (©The British Library, cited and quoted with kind permission) (BL):
‘Materials for a History of a series of attempts first by the English and afterwards by the United East India Company to acquire and establish a trade at the port of Chusan in China, from the year 1699 to 1759’ India Office Records (BL IOR G/12/14).
‘Portion of a Diary kept in the attempt to form a settlement at Chusan for the New Company, 1701-02’ India Office Records (BL IOR G/12/16).
‘Journal of John Tarver, chief mate of the Stringer galley’ (BL IOR L/MAR/B/688A).
‘Journal of Cpt Henry Duffield of the Trumball’ (BL IOR L/MAR/A/CXXXVIII).
‘China Materials’ (BL IOR G/12/6) contains letters and a diary with details on the provision of accommodation for the East India Company from 1700.
William Alexander’s ‘Journal’ (BL Mss Add 35174) (BL Alexander) and Sir Erasmus Gower’s ‘Log of the Lion, 1792-94’ (BL Mss Add 21106) (BL Gower) have details of the visits to Chusan by the ships of the 1793 embassy.
‘Up the Gulph - the letters of Hugh Henry Monk, assistant surgeon, RN, 1840-1843, during the first opium war’ (BL Mss Eur C575/3) (BL Monk) has first-hand accounts of the 1840/41 invasions and life on the island.
‘Journals of Two Expeditions to China, 1840-41’ by Major Thomas T. Pears (BL Mss Eur B368) (BL Pears) provides a wealth of detail on the invasions and subsequent occupations of Chusan.
‘Travels of Thomas Machell to China, the South Seas, India, Arabia and Egypt, from 1840-1848’ (BL IOR Mss Eur B369/1) (BL Machell) has eyewitness accounts by a young midshipman on the Worcester.
‘Letter from Chusan’ written by Lt. Lawrence Shadwell of the 98th Regiment to the Rev. Stuart A. Pears of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (BL Mss Eur C644) (BL Shadwell) contains opinions on missionary work and of Sir Henry Pottinger.
‘Letters of Lt. Wm Edward Prescott Cotton… to his wife’ (BL Mss Eur Photo Eur 207) (BL Cotton) contain observations of life upon Chusan from June to September 1842 from this soldier of the 41st Madras Native Infantry.
Official letters in BL Mss Eur D643 (BL Nicolls) to and from Sir J. Nicolls, c-in-c of HM forces in India, cover the occupation in 1840.
The correspondence of Robert Peel, Lord Aberdeen, William Gladstone, Sir James Graham and others holds the discussions which took place in the last years of British rule on Chusan, and which led ultimately to the decision to hand the island back: Aberdeen Papers (BL Aberdeen); Peel Correspondence and Peel Papers (BL Peel). The Correspondence of Sir Robert Peel, 3rd Series, B. General Correspondence, Add. MS 40554 (BL Peel-RMM) holds the letters which passed between Peel and Robert Montgomery Martin in 1845.
(b) The National Archives, Kew (TNA):
TNA file FO17 holds the Foreign Office records on China. ‘Diary of a Residence on board the ship Scotland in Chusan harbour’ is at FO17/49(182). FO682 contains original copies of Chinese-language diplomatic correspondence between the British in Zhejiang and their Chinese counterparts. FO931 has translations of Chinese documents received by the British. T1 holds the files of the Commissariat. The logs and muster books of the warships involved are to be found by name in the Admiralty files (ADM), while the pay and muster books of the British Army regiments, containing detailed records of regimental life, are in the War Office records by regiment (WO). WO28 holds a wealth of military documents on the China Expeditions from 1840-44, including WO28/300, which contains the very detailed General Orders for the British army, where all manner of transient facts are recorded. The 1860 occupation is reported in ADM1/5735. The Army and Navy Lists are useful sources on names, ranks and regiments
. A revealing map of Tinghae’s British cemetery dating from 1890 is at MFQ1/1243/1, and a painstaking 1840s survey of the whole island by Lt. Havilland of the 55th and Lt. Sargent of the 18th is at MR1/151/3.
(c) Other holdings:
The School of Oriental and African Studies archives of the Council for World Mission (CWM) (© Council for World Mission, by kind permission) hold the correspondence of the London Missionary Society in South China. Their List of Missionaries is extensive and detailed. Of great help are Alan Hughes’ ‘Lockhart Correspondence’ (MS380645/1) and ‘Biography of Dr William Lockhart’ (MS380645/2) (both ©Alan P. Hughes), and the LMS microfiched correspondence, ‘Missionary Archives. South China, including letters, 1832/33-1857, CWM 2’ (LMSMA).
The Hong Kong Public Record Office holds letters between Robert Montgomery Martin and Sir James Urmston in ‘Papers referring to the failure to annex Chusan Island by the British, at the time of the Treaty of Nanking’ (HK PRO Papers) (©Hong Kong Public Record Office).
Cornell University’s Rare & Manuscript Collection in the Carl A. Kroch Library holds the Augustus Ward Loomis Papers (CUL Loomis), which include a number of letters describing life on Chusan in 1849 (©Cornell University).
The Museum of the Staffordshire Regiment in Lichfield (MSR) holds ‘An Account of the voyage of HM 98th Regiment aboard the Belleisle, 1842-42’ by Captain Edie of the 98th.
Birmingham University Library holds the Karl Gützlaff Collection (BUL KGC) and Church Missionary Society Archives (BUL CMSA). The latter contains details of the Church of England’s first mission to China at C.CH.L1 and C.CH.M1.
The National Army Museum in London holds many works which are difficult to track down elsewhere, including a fascinating collection of early photographs of Chusan from the Second Opium War. The museum’s unpublished manuscripts from the period include a letter from Color Serjeant J. Henderson to his father, 19/10/1840, Acc. no. 9006-219-2-1 (NAM Henderson) (©National Army Museum, by kind permission).
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