Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  In the early spring of 1804, Eldemboo traveled back to Beijing, where he returned his carved seal of authority to the Jiaqing emperor, signifying that the war was over. It would be the last victory in his long career, however—the grizzled general died the next year at the age of fifty-seven, and with him passed a generation. The Manchu general had served his emperor well, though, and by 1805, for the first time, Jiaqing could address the future of his empire without the ongoing drain of resources to the gigantic White Lotus war.24

  It was a bitter victory. Going just by the official reports of casualties, a Chinese historian writing a few decades later estimated that several hundred thousand rebels had been killed in the course of suppressing the White Lotus. As for the numbers of government soldiers and militiamen killed—let alone the masses of civilians who died of violence, starvation, or suicide—he admitted there was no way to know for sure.25 There is also no way to know just how many of the “rebels” killed by government forces were actually believers in the White Lotus religion, as opposed to innocent bystanders, forced conscripts, or followers of other secretive religions who were caught up in the suppression. But Jiaqing could at least take solace in the fact that the rebellion had been brought under control and there was peace again in the central provinces (as much, at least, as there had been before the war).

  Order more widely in the empire, however, was still elusive. During the years when the dynasty was concentrating all of its military and financial resources on the White Lotus suppression in the central provinces, vacuums of power had opened up elsewhere in the country—which created openings for other disturbances of different kinds, far from the central war zone. The largest of these ancillary rebellions, which in 1805 still lay in the way of Jiaqing’s path to restoring order and security to China, had emerged not in the mountains of the interior but at the edge of the sea where the westerners were.

  For many people in south China, the line between the land and water was blurred from birth. In cramped urban areas like Canton there were “floating cities” of tens of thousands of boat people, poor families who could not afford land or rent, who were born, died, and lived their entire lives on narrow boats lashed together seven or eight deep at the riverbanks, rarely setting foot on dry land. Unlike those who lived on land, the boat families did not bind their daughters’ feet, and much of the labor—steering, hawking, collecting laundry from foreign ships to wash—was done by the women. Poor as it was, in this transitional world between the hard land and the boundless sea there was far greater equality to be found between women and men.

  It was from this floating world in Canton that a young woman named Shi Yang first emerged in the early nineteenth century. Her early years are murky, but it is known that she worked as a prostitute in one of the floating brothels for which Canton was famous throughout China—“flower-boats,” by their more poetic names, where the wealthy could squander their riches on wine and singsong girls. No accurate image of her has ever been found, but she was rumored (predictably, given what came later) to have been gorgeous. In 1801, Shi Yang married one of her clients, a successful pirate captain named Zheng Yi. In the years that followed, Shi Yang would bear him two sons and adopt a third who was older. More important, she would help Zheng Yi to unite six rival pirate fleets into a large confederation that by 1805 totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy thousand sailors on four hundred ships in an organized body of pirates more than twice the size of the Spanish Armada. When Zheng Yi died in a storm at sea in 1807, Shi Yang installed her adopted son (who would later become her second husband) as commander of the largest fleet in the confederation, the red banner fleet, which operated on the southern coast around Canton. Then she assumed the supreme command of the confederation herself.26

  It was easy for a fisherman to become a pirate in those days. One didn’t need to be a hardened desperado to start out, just to have encountered difficult times and be willing to rob from another family or village in order to improve things for one’s own. A band of pirates could be born from nothing more than a handful of fishermen with shared hard luck, possessing little more than a cluster of rowboats and a few knives. But with those boats and knives they could capture a small trading junk and take command of it. Often some of the crew would stay on to join them. As they repeated the process (if they managed to avoid capture), their ranks would grow. Their ships would increase in size and number as they traded up and took on larger risks. They would buy cannons for the ships. With success, they would attract more followers—especially in a time of widespread difficulty like the early 1800s with its overpopulation, when so many of the poor chafed at the oppressions of government officials and despaired of making a living on land. Eventually the most talented and charismatic of the leaders commanded large fleets with major ships carrying fifteen or more guns. One flagship seen by a foreign witness mounted thirty-eight guns on deck, two of them long twenty-four-pounders.27

  The core of Shi Yang’s fleets had taken form as Chinese mercenary navies in a Vietnamese rebellion in the 1780s. Those predatory fleets were let go after the rebellion failed in 1799, after which they returned to China with their battle-hardened organizations and began assimilating smaller bodies of pirates. It was a welcome coincidence that their return overlapped with the Qing dynasty’s efforts to put down the White Lotus rebellion in the interior, for not only was the empire’s military attention directed inland at the time, but the dynasty also borrowed heavily from its coastal forces to help shore up the beleaguered armies in the White Lotus region. Just as the transfer of dynastic forces to Hunan to fight the Miao Rebellion had preceded the White Lotus, tens of thousands of soldiers from the Chinese coast were transferred inland to fight the White Lotus in the years leading up to the major pirate campaigns. Meanwhile, millions of taels of silver were collected from the Hong merchants in Canton to help pay for the White Lotus campaigns—funds that would have served those merchants far better had they been invested instead in local maritime defense.28

  Even if the dynasty hadn’t been so heavily bogged down with the White Lotus, it had little immediate capacity to respond to the rise of piracy. This was not because China’s government was inherently unable to counter enemies along the coast, but simply because the country had not faced a serious coastal threat for more than a hundred years, since the time of Qianlong’s grandfather Kangxi. Kangxi’s response to that previous threat, however, showed what the regime was capable of if the emperor so chose. Back then, in the 1660s, the young Qing dynasty was just twenty years past its conquest of Beijing and still only partially in control of the empire. It faced a pirate navy of more than a thousand ships and 150,000 sailors that had declared open rebellion against the Manchus and called for the restoration of the Ming dynasty. Kangxi had just come to the throne, a mere boy at the time, and he and his advisers recognized that the dynasty’s Manchu forces, which were mounted on horseback, could not possibly hope to master such a large force of pirates on water. So rather than fighting them head-on, Kangxi instead ordered the evacuation of China’s entire southeastern coast.

  Nearly a thousand miles of shoreline, from Zhejiang province in the east all the way down to Canton in the south and beyond, was emptied of its inhabitants so the Ming-loyalist pirate fleet would have nowhere to find supplies or conscripts. The evacuation began in 1661 with a zone three miles wide, increasing to ten miles the following year. Lines were drawn (soldiers stretched ropes to mark them), and the population living between the boundary lines and the shore were forced at spearpoint to abandon their homes and villages and move inland, carrying whatever of their possessions they could manage. Behind them, the farms were dug up and the fishing boats and villages burned, leaving nothing for the pirates to find on land except military camps.

  The evacuation in the 1660s was horrific from a humanitarian standpoint: a forced relocation of millions of people, leading their farm animals on a slow exodus, carrying the elderly on their backs, into cities and inland regions where they had no
land rights and no clear way to make a living. “There was wailing everywhere,” wrote an observer at the time. “The sight was too painful to watch.”29 But as a military strategy it succeeded. The pirate fleet, unable to obtain supplies on the Chinese coast, abandoned mainland China and sailed across the Taiwan Strait to conquer the Dutch colony that then existed on Formosa (modern-day Taiwan). The coastal evacuation order would be enforced in most areas for more than twenty years, which was how long it took for the Qing dynasty to build a navy sufficient to cross the strait and destroy the pirates on their new base. Once the pirate armada was defeated, the dynasty incorporated Taiwan into its empire and the millions of people who had been removed from the coast were finally allowed to return home.

  That victory was so decisive and complete that China’s coast would enjoy a long era of peace afterward. Through the eighteenth century, the only real security issues China’s coastal communities faced were small-scale amateur pirates—poor fishermen, typically, who sailed up the coast to make trouble in the off-season when the winds wouldn’t allow them to go to sea. They hardly merited a centralized military response. In times of need, coastal communities raised their own funds to build watchtowers and guardhouses, and hired local police forces to protect their markets against the predations of bandits—local measures that, up to the early 1800s, were fully sufficient.30 By the time the new pirate confederation rebelled against the government, the dynasty had not needed an oceangoing navy for more than a hundred years and the ships it had built to conquer Taiwan had long ago rotted away.

  The Qing military was thus completely unprepared to confront the rise of Shi Yang’s armada, which nearly rivaled the scale of the great Ming-loyalist fleet of old. The empire’s coastal forces in the early 1800s depended mainly on lumbering “rice-carrier” junks, which were originally used for shipping and could only sail close to shore. They were far inferior to the swift, well-handled seagoing vessels of Shi Yang’s pirates, and poorly armed by comparison. While the imperial boats were typically manned by forty to eighty sailors with a handful of mismatched cannons, the larger pirate vessels carried hundreds of crewmen and sometimes dozens of large guns.

  Further, in reflection of the Qing navy’s long-standing irrelevance, its forces had little funding and morale was low. Commanders could not coordinate with one another, the skills of the sailors and captains were amateurish, and payrolls were usually in default. Ships that were lost in battle or wrecked in storms generally couldn’t be replaced, and (in reflection of the corruption of the time) even basic repairs could go unmade due to dockside embezzlement, so only a portion of the fleet was ever seaworthy. Indeed, when the pirate fleets first rose up, the Qing forces were so scant and weak that officials in charge of coastal defense were reduced to hiring local fishermen and other civilians with nonmilitary craft to supplement their fleets.31

  The results were disastrous. Qing naval patrols feared contact with Shi Yang’s pirates, even to the point of sabotaging their own ships to avoid going to sea. Others hid from the pirate vessels in secret harbors and filed false reports with their superiors reporting grand victories. On the rare occasions on which they did engage the pirates in battle, they almost always lost.32 It wasn’t until 1805—after the White Lotus rebels were finally suppressed—that the Jiaqing emperor was finally able to concentrate his attention on the pirates, but even then it took time for the government to find its footing.

  By 1808, when the conflict with Admiral Drury broke out at Macao, Shi Yang’s pirate network controlled virtually the entire eastern and southern coastlines of China. Aside from the more familiar predations of raiding ships, stealing their cargoes, and holding their crews for ransom, they developed an institutional side as well: collecting tribute (effectively, taxes) from seagoing communities along the coast, which were paid at a series of offices the pirates maintained on land. They also worked a huge protection racket, selling passes to guarantee safe passage to fishermen and cargo shippers, who should they fail to purchase a pass were almost certain to be boarded. They were professional to the point that if a body of pirates accidentally plundered a vessel carrying a pass from another fleet, their chief would make them return all of the stolen goods along with money for damages.33

  Senior officials in Canton tried to expand their local naval forces, with unimpressive results. In 1808, the pirates killed a new provincial commander in chief who had been sent to Canton to suppress them. By the end of that year Shi Yang’s pirates had destroyed nearly half the ships in the provincial navy. In 1809, in a major effort by newly built Qing forces, forty imperial junks rigged with extra weapons were launched to attack one of the pirate fleets, but in their very first encounter, twenty-eight of the government ships were captured, while the rest turned tail and fled to safety. By August of that year, the pirates were bold enough to post public notices on land threatening to attack Canton itself.34

  Unlike in central China where the dynasty battled alone against the White Lotus rebels, however, there was another force at work off the China coast: namely, the Western traders—especially the gigantic East India Company ships with their Royal Navy escorts and modern gunnery. And whereas the White Lotus were so far inland as to be invisible to the British and Americans who plied the waters between Canton and Macao, the pirates struck them where they lived. Shi Yang’s pirates were just as willing to attack foreign ships as Chinese ones, provided the situation worked to their advantage (an isolated ship, preferably undermanned or crippled by a storm)—and on approach they were indistinguishable from any of the other junks that crowded the Canton waterways, so it was impossible to keep them at a distance. Just like the captains of Chinese ships, then, foreign merchants also had to pay protection fees to the pirates at their offices in Macao and Canton to ensure safe passage, fees that they rationalized as a form of insurance.35

  The pirates also occasionally took foreign hostages, who left some of the most vivid accounts we have of life in their ranks. An Englishman named John Turner, first officer on a ship from Bombay, was captured near Macao in December 1806 and held for nearly six months. He described the spartan day-to-day existence of the pirates—their cramped and filthy boats where he, like the pirates themselves, had a space only eighteen inches wide and four feet long in which to sleep. His diet consisted mostly of rice and dried fish. The Qing authorities were notoriously brutal to captured pirates (one practice was to nail their hands together instead of using rope to bind them), and Turner witnessed firsthand how readily the pirates returned the favor. One official from a captured government boat, he wrote, was nailed to the deck by his feet and beaten by the pirates, then taken on shore and cut into pieces. “The others,” he wrote, “I believe, were treated in a similar manner.”36 Hostages who weren’t officials were treated better, and many stayed on for service with the pirates afterward if their ransoms weren’t paid. Those who tried to escape generally met with gruesome ends.

  As for Turner himself, the pirates made it clear that if he couldn’t get his employers to pay a $30,000 ransom he would have to join their crew as a gunner or they would kill him too. After five and a half months of captivity he managed to negotiate the ransom down to $2,500, which an Englishman in Canton (Beale, the Prussian consul and Cantonese speaker) paid to secure his release. During his captivity, Turner tried to understand why the pirates did what they did, and the only answer they ever gave him echoed the answers that the White Lotus rebels gave their own questioners, namely that officials in their home districts were so corrupt and abusive that they had left to go to sea and find safety with the pirates.37 It was the same refrain: the corruption and cruelty of low-level Qing officials had forced them to become outlaws, just as they forced the White Lotus to become rebels. The officials oppressed, and the people rebelled.

  Another Englishman, named Richard Glasspoole, was captured in 1809 and concurred in the cruel violence of the pirates—who, he wrote, were “so savage in their resentments and manners that they frequently take the hearts of the
ir enemies and eat them with rice.”38 The Canton governor-general instituted a coastal embargo to try to block supplies from getting to the pirate ships, which succeeded only in driving the pirates inland along the complex riverways of Guangdong province. Glasspoole was witness as his ship took him upriver inland far beyond the range of the boats associated with the foreign trade, through a landscape of ruined towns and villages. The river valleys were outlaw territory, he noted, where entire villages paid tribute to the pirates, their populations singing songs to the fleet from shore as its hundreds of ships passed them on the river. The pirates attacked other towns with impunity, rowing in and landing under cover of night, then burning down the government buildings and demanding promises of annual tribute from the locals, threatening otherwise to destroy the entire town. Tribute was paid in silver dollars and in kind: rice, roasted pigs, sugar. When the pirates encountered government soldiers, they made Glasspoole and the other foreign hostages join the fighting with their European muskets—“which,” he noted sardonically, “did great execution” against Qing soldiers armed mainly with bows and arrows and ancient matchlock guns.39

  Because the problem of coastal piracy affected foreign as well as Chinese shipping, it offered grounds for international cooperation between the naval forces present in south China. Both the Chinese and Europeans, after all, had a shared interest in freeing the coast from the scourge of piracy, and the Western ships—especially the British naval vessels, finely tuned from their ongoing war with France—had the potential to be far more devastating against the pirate fleets than the slipshod and jury-rigged Qing naval forces.