Flashman And The Dragon fp-8

by George MacDonald Fraser

  The details of that meeting, while obviously uncorroborated, are by no means inconsistent with other evidence. Hung's time seems to have been devoted entirely to mystical speculation, writing pronouncements and decrees, and his numerous harem. The vision he described to Flashman is the one which he proclaimed after waking from his original trance; the recitation of his concubine tallies closely with an exhortation which is to be found in Taiping literature. (See Appendix I.)

  16. Hung Jen-kan (1822-64), Kan Wang (Shield King), Prime Minister and Generalissimo of the Taipings, is the most interesting and enigmatic of the revolutionary leaders. A cousin of the Heavenly King's, he studied with him at a Baptist mission in Canton (where he, too, failed his civil service exams), and became one of his first disciples, but was thought too young to join the revolution at its outset. In 1854, after working at a Protestant mission in Hong Kong, he tried to reach Nanking, but failed, and spent another four years in the colony with the London Missionary Society. In 1859 he succeeded in reaching Nanking, and within a year had become second only to his cousin in the revolutionary hierarchy. Favouritism aside, this meteoric rise can be attributed only to Jen-kan's native talent, and the advantage which worldly education had given him over the largely uneducated Taiping Wangs. With the deterioration of the Heavenly King, Jen-kan, with Lee, became the real head of the movement, and one can only speculate why they did not combine more effectively. Jen-kan was a strong man of vision and faith, and one of the few Taiping leaders with a real knowledge of affairs and the world outside China; he spoke English fluently, and like Lee wanted to improve Taiping relations with the European powers; he also wished to inculcate orthodox Protestant Christianity. Jen-kan was a stout, genial, outgoing personality, and from all accounts as pleasant as Flashman makes him sound. He seems to have been alone among the Taipings in genuinely detesting war (the quotation about a war of extermination is authentic), had a deep admiration of British education and institutions, and in his personal behaviour and tastes was perhaps closer to the West than the East; he certainly appears to have had a realistic grasp of foreign attitudes to China, particularly where trade was concerned. Flashman and Forrest agree on his manner and lifestyle; unlike the luxurious generals, he enjoyed a simple, rather untidy existence in his cluttered study, kept no harem, often ate European food, and ignored (as did many of the Wangs) the Taiping prejudice against alcohol. (See Blakiston, Forrest, and Appendix I.)

  17. That there was rivalry between Lee and Jen-kan is not only possible but likely, in view of the latter's sudden ascendancy, but only Flashman suggests that it was carried as far as this. There must always be doubt about what was happening behind the scenes at this critical stage in Taiping fortunes, but while Flashman's story is plausible, and not inconsistent with later events, and while some mystery attaches to Jen-kan's role within the movement, it is only right to say that no other writer has suggested that the prime minister was actively plotting the general's downfall.

  18. The expression "the almighty dollar", which now refers to American currency, was applied to the Chinese dollar in the last century.

  19. Flashman does more justice than is usually shown to Frederick Townsend Ward (1831-1862). The American soldier of fortune was unlucky in being succeeded in command of the Ever-Victorious Army of mercenaries by one of the great heroes of the Victorian age, Major-General Charles George ("Chinese") Gordon, who not only crushed the Taiping Rebellion but achieved immortality by his defence of Khartoum two decades later; it was the kind of fame that overshadowed all but his most eminent contemporaries, and Ward's part in the China wars was quite eclipsed. It remains that Ward did found the Ever-Victorious Army, and after initial reverses, won several victories, in the course of which he forged the weapon which Gordon was to wield so brilliantly. No doubt Ward's reputation suffered from his unpopularity with the foreign consulates in China, particularly the British, who resented his recruitment of the soldiers and sailors who were at one time the backbone of his force; it was also feared that his activities might endanger British neutrality. Ward's biographer, Cahill, is reasonably indignant at the scant credit which the American has received in comparison to Gordon, but seems to spoil his case by overstatement; to say that Ward was "a military genius who helped change the history of China" may be defensible, but to call him Gordon's superior as an organiser, strategist, and diplomat, and "unquestionably the greatest foreign soldier who fought in the Taiping Rebellion", is perhaps to exaggerate.

  Flashman's account of Ward seems fairly accurate as far as the facts of his career go. A native of Salem, Mass., he was a mate on merchant ships when he was only 16, and had military experience in Central America, Mexico, and the Crimea with the French forces (he spoke French, but not Chinese). He came to China, apparently with romantic notions of joining the Taipings; there is no record of his ever having run guns or opium, but in the spring of 1860 he was mate of a Yangtse steamship, and fought a successful action against pirates when his vessel grounded. He was later mate of an Imperial gunboat in Gough's flotilla, before forming his own private army to defend Shanghai; for the Manchus; in this he was financed by China merchants including Yang ("Takee") Fang, whose daughter he married. Flashman's account of Ward's initial battles is entirely accurate; after his second defeat at Chingpu, and the loss of Sungkiang which followed, he went to France to recuperate, returning to China and fighting with growing success (but not without controversy) until his death: he was killed leading an attack on Tse-kee, on September 21, 1862. Then came Gordon, to inherit his army, and at least one of his gestures: it is a small thing, but while it is Gordon who is remembered as the general who led his men into battle carrying only a cane, the practice seems to have originated with Ward.

  He was a small man, active and wiry, with intense dark eyes and a mild, pleasant manner. Little is known of his personality except that he was cheerful and amiable, but he must have had a remarkable gift of leadership, if only to hold his little army together through its early reverses, especially the first assault on Sungkiang, when his entire force arrived in action in an advanced state of intoxication. It may well be that he was as genially eccentric as Flashman suggests; by his own account, he did once fall overboard while pursuing a butterfly, and it is a matter of record that he was carried to the second attack on Chingpu, with his five wounds heavily bandaged, in a sedan chair. (See Yankee Adventurer, by Holger Cahill, 1930; The Ever-Victorious Army, by Andrew Wilson, 1868; With Gordon in China, by Thomas Lyster, 1891; History of China, vol iii, by D. C. Boulger, 1884; Gordon in China, by S. Mossman, 1875.)

  The man in the Norfolk jacket, described by Flashman, was probably Henry Burgevine (1836-65), Ward's lieutenant, who briefly commanded the Ever-Victorious Army in the interval between Ward's death and Gordon's appointment. An explosive eccentric from the American South, Burgevine had served in the Crimea, and changed sides several times during the Taiping Rebellion. He lost the command of the E.V.A. after assaulting an official for withholding his troops' pay, went over to the rebels, subsequently deserted and rejoined Gordon (with whom he seems to have been on good terms), tried to change sides again, but was arrested and subsequently met his death by drowning in mysterious circumstances.

  20. French travellers to Soochow, including priests and missionaries, had assured Lee of a warm welcome in Shanghai, and since he set great store by the Christian bond between Taipings and Europeans, he advanced on the city in high hopes of a peaceful occupation, only to be thunderstruck when he was opposed. A rumour later arose that Roman Catholic priests, who detested the Taiping religion, had encouraged his advance in the hope that he and his army would be destroyed.

  21. Admiral Hope's failure to force a passage at the Taku Forts on June 25, 1859, is a forgotten imperial incident; it was also probably the first occasion on which British and American servicemen fought side by side, if unofficially. Hope's gunboats came under heavy bombardment from the Chinese batteries, and one, the Plover, lost thirty-one out of her crew of forty, her comman
der was killed, the admiral was wounded, and the remaining nine seamen were fighting their guns against hopeless odds. It was too much for the elderly Commodore Josiah Tattnall, watching from the neutral deck of his U.S. Navy steamer Toeywhan; as a young midshipman he had fought against the British in the War of 1812; now, disregarding his country's non-belligerent status, he took a boat in under fire and offered Hope his help. Hope accepted, and Tattnall's launch brought out the British wounded; only later did he discover several of his men black with powder smoke. "What have you been doing, you rascals?" he asked, and received the reply: "Beg pardon, sir, but they were a bit short-handed with the bow gun." The old commodore made no excuses, for himself or his men, in reporting the incident to Washington. "Blood," he wrote, "is thicker than water." (See A. Hilliard Armitage, The Storming of the Taku Forts, 1896.)

  Hope's failure at Taku met with less sympathy from the London correspondent of the New York Daily News, Karl Marx. Reporting the subsequent debate in Parliament, he wrote: "The whole debate in both Houses on the China war evaporated in grotesque compliments showered … on the head of Admiral Hope for having so gloriously buried the British forces in the mud." (See Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China, 1964). Marx was a trenchant commentator on Chinese affairs; he it was who likened the dissolution of the Manchu Empire to that of a mummy in a hermetically-sealed coffin brought into contact with the open air.

  22.

  Last night among his fellow roughs,

  He jested, quaff'd and swore;

  A drunken private of the Buffs,

  Who never look'd before.

  Today, beneath his foeman's frown,

  He stands in Elgin's place,

  Ambassador from Britain's crown

  And type of all her race.

  Flashman had witnessed one of the most dramatic moments of the China War, and its most famous heroism, when Moyes, "the drunken private of the Buffs", who had been captured along with an Irish sergeant of the 44th and some coolies (one version says Sikhs), flatly refused to kow-tow to his Chinese captors, and was cut down in cold blood. Yet but for Sir Francis Doyle's poem the incident might hardly have been heard of; today it is largely forgotten, and the facts behind it are difficult to trace. The story rests on the sergeant's authority, and there seems no reason to doubt him, or Flashman—or for that matter, Doyle's poem, which only errs (possibly deliberately) in presenting Moyes as a young Kentish country boy, when in fact he was a fairly disreputable Scot, old enough, it is said, to have been broken from the rank of colour sergeant for insubordination—which seems characteristic. Not much more is known of Moyes, whose presence in the Buffs (the East Kent Regiment) was presumably a matter of chance. A rumour that he died of drink in captivity seems to have no foundation; he was in the hands of the Chinese for barely one day, and the sergeant's account, which Doyle obviously accepted, is consistent with the experience of later prisoners.

  It is just possible that Doyle, who was Matthew Arnold's successor as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, had the Moyes story from a most authoritative source—Lord Elgin himself. They had been contemporaries at Eton and Christ Church, where both took Firsts in Classics in 1832, belonged to the small circle of Gladstone's intimates (Doyle was his best man), and may have met again after Elgin's return to Britain in 1861.

  23. The hoot of the tawny owl, the chat huant, was a recognition signal among the peasant guerrilla fighters of Britanny ("les Chouans") who remained loyal to the crown in the French Revolution. Probably only Flashman, hearing the words at such a critical moment, would have known (or bothered to note) that the speaker was presumably a Breton.

  24. According to British Army custom, the most smartly turned out member of a guard was (and possibly still la) excused guard duty, and given the light task of orderly to the guard. This is known as "taking the stick", possibly because the orderly would carry a cane rather than a weapon. The practice of carrying the guard on to parade was still occasionally seen in India in the editor's time, forty years ago.

  25. It is fairly rare for Flashman to show much regard for "politicals", but the three with whom he was to work on the Pekin expedition seem to have been exceptions. They were, in fact, an impressive trio. James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1811-63) was Britain's most accomplished foreign envoy in the middle years of the century, and served with distinction as governor of Jamaica, governor-general of both Canada and India, and on missions to China and Japan. His great diplomatic service was to prevent annexation of Canada to the U.S., and negotiate the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, which he was accused of floating through the American Senate on "oceans of champagne". Harry Parkes, former Canton commissioner and Elgin's interpreter, was to spend his life in the Orient, and make a name in both China and Japan; small, wiry, tenacious, and a glutton both for work and punishment, he had an adventurous career, distinguished by his ability to survive attempts on his life. He was the first foreigner ever received in private audience by the Mikado. Henry Loch (1827-1900), as Flashman indicates, already had a highly active service career behind him, belied by his gentle disposition and scholarly appearance; he was to write the standard work on the Pekin expedition, and was subsequently governor of the Cape, of Victoria, Australia, and of the Isle of Man, where he had the unusual distinction of having part of the sea-front named after him. (See James Bruce, Extracts from the Letters of James, Earl of Elgin … 1847-62 (1864); G. Wrong, The Earl of Elgin (1905); Theodore Waldron, editor, Letters and Journals of James, 8th Earl of Elgin (1872); Henry (Lord) Loch, Personal Narrative of … Lord Elgin's Second Embassy to China, 1860 (1869); S. Lane-Poole, Sir Harry Parkes in China, (1901); Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People, vol ii, 1972).

  26. An opinion Elgin was to revise before the campaign was over. British opinion of the French was, as usual, highly critical, but on the march Elgin noted that the French soldiers were better improvisers than the British, and adapted well to the conditions. "Our soldiers do little for themselves, and their necessities are so great, that we move but slowly. The French work in all sorts of ways for the army. The contrast is, I must say, very striking." (Elgin, Letters and Journals.)

  27. The fight between Tom Sayers, the Pimlico bricklayer, and John Camel Heenan, U.S.A., for the equivalent of the modern world heavy-weight title, had taken place at Farnborough in April and ended in a draw after 60 rounds, by which time neither man was fit to continue. The exchanges had been so brutal that there was an outcry, and the new Marquess of Queensberry rules were introduced a few years later. This was the last bare-knuckle prize fight in England.

  28. Flashman is right in supposing that the regimental march of the Buffs is attributed to Handel, but almost certainly wrong in saying that it was played on the march to Pekin: the Buffs had been left behind to guard the Taku Forts, while the 60th were left at Sinho, and the 44th sent as reinforcements to Shanghai, thus reducing the army to a more manageable size. As to the Handel attribution, there is no conclusive proof that he wrote the march, although the Buffs' tradition is strong on the point; the suggestion is that the composer had an affection for the regiment, with its distinguished record of Continental service, and perhaps also because it had its origins in the old trained bands of London, his adopted home. (See Fortescue, vol. XIII; Walter Wood, The Romance of Regimental Marches.)

  29. Flashman gives a condensed but accurate account of the march to Pekin, which finally took 44 days to complete. For fuller accounts see Loch; Wolseley; Grant and Knollys; Rev. R. J. L. McGhee, How We Got to Pekin (1862); R. Swinhoe (Hope Grant's interpreter), Narrative of the North China Campaign (1861); D. Bonner-Smith and E. W. R. Lumley (Navy Records Society), The Second China War, 1944; Robert Fortune, Yedo to Pekin (1863).

  30. It is not often that the editor finds it necessary to supplement Flashman's narrative with any important matter, but the present glaring omission has to be filled. Having devoted almost half his narrative to his mission to Nanking, and his efforts to prevent the Taipings taking Shanghai, the author now blandly forg
ets all about the matter; of course, it is quite characteristic that he should no longer have cared whether Shanghai fell or not, since he was safely away from it, but one would have expected at least a line about the outcome, especially since Elgin had just drawn it to his attention. For the Manchu request for British help against the Taipings was prompted by the news from Shanghai, where Loyal Prince Lee's forces had been repulsed by British marines and Sikhs on August 18-21. It was not a major action, although the Taipings suffered some casualties; Lee's reaction appears to have been one of bewildered disappointment at being rejected by fellow-Christians. His failure seemed to do him no harm in the Taiping hierarchy.

  31. Flashman may not have persuaded General Sir John Michel to part immediately with Dr Thorne, the new best-seller by Anthony Trollope, since it is known that Lord Elgin was reading it some months later. It and Darwin's Origin of Species, published the previous year, were his lordship's relaxation during his China mission.

  32. Flashman was remembering the murder in 1841, in similar circumstances, of Sir William McNaghten, British Envoy to Kabul, at the hands of the followers of Akbar Khan. (See Flashman.)

  33. The events of September 18, when the Chinese tried to ambush the allied force at Five-li Point, and took several prisoners in violation of the truce, are corroborated by the authorities cited in Note 29, especially Loch, who with Parkes was captured by Sang-kol-in-sen himself. Loch, like Flashman, paints a most unpleasant picture of the warlord, who worked himself into a fury, storming and yelling abuse at his prisoners while his guards beat them, forced them to kneel, and rubbed Loch's face in the dirt; he called Parkes a liar, accused him of trying to humiliate the Emperor and of preparing a treacherous attack on the Chinese forces, and added "that he would teach us what it was to speak to high officers of the Celestial Empire in the manner in which they had been addressed yesterday" (i.e. at the Tang-chao meeting with Prince I). It was after this that Loch and the others were taken to the Board of Punishments. (See Loch.) Screaming at barbarians seems to have been common among the mandarins when their superiority was in question; Sang flew into a passion at the suggestion that Queen Victoria was the equal of the Emperor. Incidentally, Flashman is the only authority that Sang was responsible for Private Moyes' murder, but it is interesting that the tirade directed at the Tang-ku prisoners is identical with one delivered by Sang on another occasion.