China Seas

by John Harris

  However, Mr Gladstone himself had condemned the trade and, according to what Willie had read in the newspapers, at the time of the Opium Wars had even announced that he could not be a party to exacting by blood opium compensation from the Chinese. Brought up as a good Liberal, what was said by Mr Gladstone, who after all had been Prime Minister and surely knew what he was talking about, had carried a lot of weight and Willie was not easy at the thought of entering the nefarious trade. But what else? Cotton? Silks? Tea? It seemed to call for a little investigation and he felt he couldn’t do that at the mouth of the Peiho River. Born and brought up in London, he had always felt that city to be the centre of the world. And if London was the centre of the European world, surely the centre of the Chinese world was its capital, Peking. That, surely, was where he must go to make his fortune.

  Clutching his rifle, waiting for the next screeching attack by the Chinese, Willie reflected that he had very nearly not made it. On his way to the station, he had been waylaid by a gang of men trying to make up the crew of a clipper heading for Australia and had come very forcibly to realise the meaning of the word ‘Shanghai-ed’. By sheer chance a group of British sailors from a man-o’-war lying in the rivermouth had come past at the crucial moment and rescued him. Treating them all to a drink out of gratitude, he had headed as fast as he could for the railway station.

  At that particular moment, he had thought anything would be better than Tientsin, but he was now beginning to realise that he had stepped out of the frying pan into the fire. He had expected one capital city to look like another and Peking to be like London. In fact, he had found himself stepping back into the Middle Ages.

  Peking did not look at all like London. It was, in fact, a city composed of other cities. Within its bounds were the Tartar City and the Chinese City, whose northern wall, the Tartar Wall, served as the southern rim of the other city. And even the Tartar City was a city containing other cities because within its boundary was the Imperial City, the domain of the royal Manchu dynasty, and, within that, the Forbidden City, which contained the royal palace where lived the Dowager Empress Tzu-Hsi, the instigator of all his present troubles.

  Because in the Orient all trades and crafts were concentrated together, there was the Street of the Tanners, the Street of the Goldsmiths, the Street of the Food Merchants. Foreigners were treated in a similar manner and all the foreign diplomats were housed within a single area, the Legation Quarter, where eleven legations were situated in a space roughly three-quarters of a mile square. Close by were the foreign merchants, the banks, the offices, shops, the Hotel Wagons-Lits and the European Club, together with the officials of the Post Office and Customs and a sprinkling of teachers from the university.

  Willie had arrived, eager to start making his fortune and expecting to be welcomed with open arms. Instead he had found that the foreigners were not even of a single mind and, in fact, fell into two distinct divisions whose relations with each other were always strained. Half the foreigners in Peking were missionaries, working in churches, hospitals, orphanages and schools scattered about inside the Tartar Wall, and even they were divided by their work and their doctrines, their different beliefs bringing nothing but confusion to their would-be converts.

  The other community of foreigners was entirely secular, at their head the Diplomatic Corps, which was insulated not only from the native population, to whom they paid little attention, but also from the traders, the bankers, the shopkeepers. It had been harder than Willie had imagined to find himself accepted. Finally, he had been taken in by an old man called Wishart, who ran a large trading emporium, importing goods from England and India and exporting goods from China, and he had found himself doing exactly the same job as he had in England, just one step higher than the Chinese clerks and with the added discomfort of having no home to go to and having to sleep at night in a small cubby hole in his office.

  It had been with some surprise, nevertheless, that Willie had noticed the speed with which old Wishart had ushered him into his premises and given him his job. At first he had thought it was because old Wishart had a daughter, Emmeline, tall, a few years older than Willie, pale-faced like many of the Europeans in Peking and even from the first moment given to eyeing Willie boldly. She was a plump pretty blonde girl and she had noticed at once that, despite his extreme youth, he was a well-set-up young man with a straight nose, aggressive brown eyes and crisp dark hair. There was not even a suggestion of humility about him – rather the self-assertive cockiness all sailors acquired. I’ve learned about the sea, he seemed to say. What have you done? His head was held high, though she had no idea that that was largely caused by the fact that his collar was old and, under the starch, the edge was rough and was sawing a raw line under his ears. Watching her, he saw that she seemed to be appraising him and decided to tread warily because he had heard old Bohenna’s tales of the voracious Englishwomen of the East.

  ‘Could you start at once?’ Wishart asked as Willie outlined his experience with Wainwright and Halliday. ‘You seem to know what to do.’

  ‘I could start now if you want,’ Willie said smartly.

  ‘Well, we could do with you. The last clerk left a week ago. Suddenly. He wouldn’t say why. I think he was scared of the political situation. Young men aren’t what they used to be. The one before him left, too. Said he preferred to be near the coast. Can you use a gun?’

  ‘A gun?’ Willie’s eyebrows rose. Was the old man taking him on to act as a guard for the premises in his spare time? Being a guard at night after being a clerk during the day wouldn’t give him a lot of time to pursue his own ambitions and make that fortune he was after. ‘What would I want a gun for?’

  Wishart peered at him, a bent old man with fluffy grey hair, spectacles and a blue bulbous nose that indicated a fondness for the bottle.

  ‘Never mind that. Can you use one? Have you ever fired one?’

  It so happened that Willie had. He had an uncle with a farm in Kent, where he had been sent as a boy for holidays in the hopfields, and it was there that he had fallen in with the man who kept down rabbits and other vermin on the farms. He was given a farthing a tail, which he had to produce as evidence, and sold the carcasses to butchers at twopence a time while the skins went to a glove manufacturer in Tunbridge Wells who had discovered that young ladies liked muffs lined with rabbit fur for use in winter. Being also a poacher who helped himself to the pheasants of the local gentry, it was he who had taught Willie how to use a rifle.

  ‘Shotguns is no use,’ he had said. ‘Spoil the fur, see, when you use ’em on rabbits, and make a mess of the flesh when you use ’em on pheasants. At least at the range I use ’em they do. I ain’t no sportsman, waiting to get ’em on the wing, see. I nobble ’em when they’re standing still, and for that rifles is the thing. If you ’it ’em in the ’ead, no damage is done, because no bugger wants to eat the ’ead, does ’e?’

  He had taught Willie well and he answered old Wishart confidently. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can use a gun.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Any sort, I reckon.’

  ‘Right, lad.’ Wishart beamed. ‘I’ll give you the equivalent of seven shillings a week and your keep and you can sleep in the shop.’

  It was hardly the fortune Willie had had his eyes on, but it was a start. The fortune could come later when he’d got settled in.

  The following day he had learned about the Boxers.

  Two

  ‘To the average Chinese,’ old Wishart had said, ‘the rising of the Boxers was inevitable and just.’

  The explanation came during Willie’s second day in Wishart’s employment. They had sent him to a Chinese tailor for a new suit of clothes to replace the grubby salt-stained garments he had worn when he had arrived, given him two shirts and several stiff collars from stock, and shown him his room. It was just big enough to turn round in and the bed was in a sort of box let into the wall, wasn’t a lot deeper than a coffin, and was actually the bottom half of a de
ep cupboard where the ledgers were kept. It was stuffy at night And the bedclothes, which couldn’t be tucked in at the back, invariably ended up on the floor.

  The second evening, he was invited to dinner. The meal consisted of Chinese food with rice and there was wine, but, so that he shouldn’t get ideas above his station, the crockery was the second best. As they finished their lychees and emptied their glasses, old Wishart leaned forward and let Willie know what he was in for.

  ‘The Manchus,’ he said, ‘are a foreign dynasty and they prefer to live in the traditional ways. They prefer to be aloof from outsiders and aren’t concerned that the world is on the move. They let foreign merchants in, and after the Opium Wars they lost the island of Hong Kong and Kowloon, and the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai were opened to foreign trade. That was what started it all, because other foreign powers decided they wanted a share. The Taiping Rebellion fifty years ago wasn’t against us, it was largely against the dynasty, the pigtail which the Manchus forced people to wear, and the corrupt practices of the court and its officials.’

  ‘It was about that time that Yehonala, the Empress Dowager, appeared,’ Emmeline said, one eye on Willie. ‘She was given to the Emperor Hsien-Feng as a concubine.’

  ‘He didn’t know what he was letting himself in for,’ Wishart put in. ‘Because not only was she beautiful, she was also too clever for her own good.’

  ‘She knew how to give herself to the Emperor, though,’ Emmeline said, a trace wistfully, and Willie’s eyes switched to her. To his surprise she was watching him intently across the table and it dawned on him that she was identifying herself with the mythical Yehonala.

  ‘She bore the Emperor a son,’ Wishart went on, unaware of the sudden electrical current passing between the two young people, ‘and her influence grew. With her help the Emperor defeated the Taipings. But Yehonala had made enemies and was soon in a power struggle against the mandarins and princes as the emperor fell ill and began to die.’

  ‘She was a very clever woman,’ Emmeline said, her eyes glowing as she stared at Willie. Emmeline was a great reader of romantic novels, as he’d already discovered, and her mind ran in romantic grooves. ‘Gradually, power passed into her hands.’

  ‘But she was still a Manchu,’ Wishart joined in, ‘and her attitude towards Europeans was a Manchu attitude.’

  Aware of Emmeline’s eyes on him all the time, Willie listened spellbound, conscious that what he was hearing was going to become part of his background. He still had big ideas of founding a fortune, but he was no fool and he was well aware that to make money there he would need to know all there was to know about China.

  The Second China War, which had ended with Britain and France capturing the Taku Forts at the mouth of the Peiho, the taking of Peking and the razing of the Summer Palace, had, it seemed, brought France, Portugal, Russia, Britain and a whole lot of others to China, all grabbing for a foothold in the country. With their imports they began to destroy Chinese trade so that the peasants began to feel the barbarians had to be taught their place in the scheme of things, and new railways built by Europeans were torn up and telegraph wires were pulled down.

  ‘They said they were disturbing the graves of their ancestors,’ Emmeline explained solemnly. ‘Ancestor worship’s important and, as there are graves all over the shop in China, it was impossible to put down a bit of railway track or a length of telegraph wire without disturbing one.’

  Wishart leaned forward. As he did so, he knocked over his empty wine glass. It fell with a clatter that made Willie, occupied with the new fear of the Boxers, jump in his chair.

  ‘But the Europeans continued to hack out great chunks of territory and profit.’ Wishart replaced the wine glass on its base with a thump. ‘And eventually Japan, Italy and America joined in. That’s about the time I arrived.’

  ‘Yehonala was still in power,’ Emmeline interrupted. ‘She had been since the emperor died in 1861. Her son was declared emperor in 1872, but he died three years later, and when he was succeeded by a child, Tzu-Hsi – which was what Yehonala had started to call herself – became regent and the centre for all the objections to foreigners. And it was then that the Boxers were noticed.’

  ‘Boxers?’ Willie had never heard of the Boxers. They sounded like some sort of sports club, but he had an uneasy feeling that they weren’t.

  ‘The I Ho Ch’uan,’ Wishart said.

  ‘The Fists of Harmonious Righteousness,’ Emmeline explained sharply. ‘That’s what they call themselves. A secret society.’

  ‘There’ve always been secret societies in China,’ Wishart went on. ‘They’re a way of life out here. But this one’s different. They don’t have any single leader. Just thousands of ’em. They came from nowhere like a lot of ghosts, but they aren’t like the Taipings because they aren’t against the dynasty.’

  ‘But Boxers?’ Willie said.

  ‘A nickname some American gave them,’ Emmeline said quickly ‘The North China Daily News used the name and it stuck.’

  ‘Who are they? I bet they’re not Robin Hood and his merry men?’

  ‘No. They’re not against authority. Just against us. Foreigners, Christians.’

  The thought seemed to worry Wishart and he reached behind him to a cupboard and fished out a bottle of Plymouth Gin. As he poured himself a stiff measure, Willie noticed that the glass was grubby as if it were often used, and that Wishart didn’t offer any to Emmeline or himself.

  ‘The peasants–’ the old man stopped to take a good swallow from the glass ‘–they think the Boxers have been sent from Heaven and are immortal. They go in for vivid costumes and a lot of ritualistic mumbo-jumbo, and they posture and use their arms. Perhaps that’s why they’re called Boxers.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Kill people.’

  Willie began to wonder what he’d let himself in for. ‘They don’t like the missionaries,’ Emmeline said. ‘Or the Cross of Christ. And they believe they can’t be killed. When one of them is, they simply say he’s not a true believer.’

  ‘Where did they come from?’ Willie was beginning to grow nervous.

  ‘Chiefly Shantung and Chihli,’ Wishart said, emptying the glass and refilling it. ‘Two bad harvests, a plague of locusts, and the flooding of the Yellow River were all blamed on us – foreigners – and they started to murder missionaries.’

  ‘The missionaries ask for it,’ Emmeline snapped. ‘They isolate themselves in the provinces where they can’t be protected and even build their churches with spires, which the Chinese think is bad for evil spirits. It’s getting worse.’

  ‘The outbreaks are coming more often,’ Wishart agreed. ‘There was a riot at Shashih, another in Chihli, more in Szechwan and Kwangsi, and more in Foochow, Yunnan, Paotingfu and Kienming.’

  ‘Widespread murder and looting,’ Emmeline added as if she were trying to chill Willie’s blood.

  ‘They’ve beaten up Americans and British,’ Wishart ended. ‘To say nothing of French and Japanese. There’s a big confrontation building up.’

  Willie swallowed. The Boxers were something he hadn’t expected, something which didn’t seem to fit into his plans to make a fortune.

  ‘Where are they now?’ he asked.

  Emmeline sniffed. ‘Here,’ she said.

  It had seemed to Willie to be a good idea to learn a little more about the mythical Boxers and in the next few days he had begun to make enquiries as he went about his business. But the people who mattered, the big businessmen and the diplomats, hadn’t seemed worried and he had come to the conclusion that the Wisharts were panicking unnecessarily.

  Yet half of North China beyond Peking seemed to be in a state of anarchy. It was because it was the first year of the new century, some said, but either way, when he looked into it he learned that bands of armed men were roaming the countryside and that somehow the Empress Dowager, together with the princes, mandarins and senior officials, was behind them. He began to wonder even if
it would be possible within a short space of time to raise sufficient money to pay for a railway ticket back to the coast. It wasn’t, he told himself, that he was afraid, but he couldn’t see any point in getting killed at that stage in his career. They had just heard of a missionary not far away who had been chopped to pieces and he didn’t really feel it would help his career if he ended up in small cubes of bloody flesh in a drainage ditch.

  Very soon, the dry heat of summer would be over the North China plain and Peking would become a sweltering mass of noisome smells. Some of the diplomats had already sent their families to Weihaiwei or the Western Hills, where they sat out the high temperatures in converted Buddhist temples, but this year it was difficult, it seemed, and some of the European families had found everything so unsettled they had returned to the capital, accepting the heat and the chance of disease that went with it.

  Then, when the Boxers, drawing nearer to Peking, had burned down the railway station at Fengtai, European and Japanese warships had moved to the mouth of the Peiho and Willie couldn’t imagine why the diplomats, who were supposed to know everything, had failed to notice the danger. Even as they had been announcing that everything was quiet, villages were being razed and converts massacred and, as foreigners headed for the capital and safety, detachments of foreign soldiers had begun to appear in Peking to guard the official residents against attack. As more and more people came within their protection, it had finally been decided to request help from the ships at Taku.