by Julia Lovell
As Palmerston’s secret instructions for war made their way towards India, things continued to get worse for the government. Between 3 and 4 November 1839, a 7,000-strong army of Welsh miners and labourers (carrying pikes, pistols, guns and heavy bludgeons, and led by a local magistrate) attacked a town prison. The twenty-five-minute battle with the authorities left twenty dead, and another fifty wounded. Five days later, the prime minister’s attempt to give a toast at the Lord Mayor’s annual feast was lost in a ‘volley of hisses, hootings and groaning, never before dealt out to any political character, even the most reckless.’ After repeated failures to quiet their audience, Melbourne and Palmerston returned to their seats ‘to the tune of the Rogues’ March’.35
Through this trouble, the government responded to questions about China – were they really going to fight? – with impressive coolness. On 24 January, the opposition requested that the Foreign Office produce the Blue Book of Elliot’s Correspondence Relating to China, and would repeat their demand every few days through February and early March. Every few days, Palmerston would fend them off with ‘just a few more days’ or ‘early next week’. On 6 February, in the House of Lords, a Tory peer stood up and asked the prime minister if he had anything to say about China; not a thing, he airily replied. Later in that session, a disquisition on the state of the navy alluded directly to the four-ship squadron ‘now said to be being fitted out for active service in China.’36
On 11 March, the papers from Paris picked up on a story from a Brittany broadsheet, L’Armoricain, that a French frigate was on its way to the Chinese seas to observe the prospective British expedition. The next day, the news erupted from the good ship Volcano that mild Lord Auckland had ‘DECLARED WAR AGAINST CHINA’, with 40,000 tons of shipping and 16,000 men.37 The Times immediately foresaw a scramble by Britain’s many enemies (Russia, Persia, France, the United States, Afghanistan, Burma, Nepal) to profit from Britannia’s inevitable troubles in the China war. ‘There is not an enemy to England on earth who will not seize the moment when she seems to be embroiled inextricably with any one foe, to wring from her some injurious or humiliating concession . . . the victory most essential to [Britain] is an early triumph over her internal enemy’ – namely, Melbourne and his feckless government.38 That same day, the future prime minister, Robert Peel, asked Palmerston when he might be kind enough to ‘bring down any message to Parliament announcing the intention of her Majesty to resort to “hostilities” ’ in China. Through repeated questions, Palmerston insisted that ‘the proposed operations’ were ‘communications’, not hostilities. ‘We suppose’, concluded The Times, ‘if the town of Canton were blown to atoms, the noble lord would call it an explanatory declaration.’39
As Palmerston (variously described by The Times as ‘shifty’, ‘shuffling’, ‘slippery’, ‘brazen’, ‘offensive’, ‘cheating’, ‘the reverse of great’) continued to wriggle out of questions through March and the start of April, the newspapers intensified their attacks. ‘The reckless negligence and gross incapacity of the Queen’s Ministers in their management of the relations of this country with foreign Powers have darkened the face of the whole world, as regards the British empire . . . It is the case of a lawless and accursed traffick, to be bolstered up by a flagitious and murderous war . . . [hurl] these execrable Ministers . . . from their places.’40 The Charter (the mouthpiece of the Chartists) accused ‘Mr. Opium Elliot’ of behaving ‘like [a thief and bully] gloating over the prospects of . . . bloodshed, famine . . . and multiform distress and misery.’41
On 7 April 1840, the Tories brought a vote of no-confidence (already the second of the year) against the government’s handling of the China question in the House of Commons. The 115,922-word debate (not counting the heckles and cheers) meandered across three spring nights. The Tory side made many lengthy points about Palmerston’s diplomatic errors: notably, his failure to give proper instructions or useful powers to Charles Elliot, or to control the illegal opium trade. Macaulay fought back with his ‘unaccustomed to defeat, to submission or to shame’ speech. It took the honourable members a whole day to move on to the question of moral culpability, but the young William Gladstone attacked ‘this infamous and atrocious traffic’ as soon as his chance arose:
a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of . . . under the auspices of the noble Lord, [our] flag is hoisted to protect an infamous contraband traffic, and if it were never to be hoisted except as it is now hoisted on the coast of China, we should recoil from its sight with horror, and should never again feel our hearts thrill, as they now thrill with emotion, when it floats proudly and magnificently on the breeze.
But eventually the opposition were perhaps brought low by verbal fatigue. Palmerston’s speech on the final day, the famously crotchety Earl Grey allowed, was ‘much to my surprise . . . most admirable.’ The oratorical virtues on 9 April that served him best were probably relative brevity – his speech weighed in at just over 8,000 words, little more than half the length of the Tory opener – and pragmatism. How could he have given Elliot more powers, he asked the House, without opening this remote posting up to abuses? No, the key task was to protect ‘the honour of the British flag and the dignity of the British Crown’ and to secure the long-term prospects of trade with China. ‘If the same indignities’, he summarized, ‘which had been heaped upon British subjects in China, from the time of Lord Napier’s expedition down to the present period, were to be persevered in, unresisted and unredressed, it would be impossible to suppose that . . . any British merchant could, with any regard to his safety or his self-respect, continue his commercial operations in these parts.’ Just as it had done six months earlier in Windsor, a mix of exhaustion, crude economics and patriotic vanity somehow saw the Whigs through one of their most serious crises.
The mood of the chamber at the end of the three days’ debate is probably best captured by the final sentence of the final speech – an attempted response by the Tory James Graham to Palmerston.
If the House would permit him, he should like to follow the noble Lord through the various parts of his speech. The hon. Baronet was interrupted by loud cries of ‘Divide, divide’ . . . The right hon. Baronet again attempted to address the House, but his voice was completely drowned in the shouts of ‘Divide, divide, divide,’ and he at length gave way, and resumed his seat.
Ayes 262; Noes 271: Majority 9.42
Twelve more votes had leached away from the Whigs’ twenty-one majority of two months previously. But it was enough to keep Lord Auckland’s gunboats on their original course.
In the interests of historical completeness, we should probably record also the explanation for the final British decision offered in a couple of near-contemporary Chinese accounts. While Parliament and the Queen apparently both wanted to set off a ‘border disturbance . . . the merchants were against it, as it would increase taxes – so for several days Parliament was undecided . . . In the end, an order was given to decide the matter by drawing lots at the shrine of the God of the Earth – three lots were in favour of war, and so they determined to call in the soldiers.’43
Chapter Seven
SWEET-TALK AND SEA-SLUG
On 4 July 1840, mandarins strolling about the cliffs of the boat-shaped island of Zhoushan saw a fleet of foreign vessels approach. Though they were puzzled at first, the island’s sub-prefect remembered, ‘the explanation soon occurred to them and they guffawed with joy. Obviously, the ships had assembled here because of the cessation of trade at Canton. “Dinghai [the island’s main town] will become a great trading centre,” they said, “and we shall all make more and more money out of them day by day.” ’1
Zhoushan lay off the empire’s most prosperous, south-eastern coastline: a few hundred miles east of the wealthy cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou. Since the Macartney embassy had visited the island in 1793, England’s travelling painters had sketched Zhousha
n as a land of orientalist fantasy – steep limestone cliffs, mist-shawled green vales, ornamental temples embellished with curlicued dragons, all dotted with decorous, parasol-clutching mandarins. The source of its wealth in the mid-nineteenth century was an open secret: illicit foreign trade – in all likelihood, opium. ‘Before the hostilities,’ Zhoushan’s sub-prefect frankly confided in a court report, ‘whenever a foreign ship arrived everyone from the Commandant, the Prefect and sub-Prefect down to chair-carriers and office lackeys all took bribes from the foreigners . . . the greater the number of ships, the greater the amount taken in bribes . . . their only fear was that numbers should decline.’2
But this was no merchant fleet: it was the force dispatched by Palmerston to punish ‘the outrages which have been committed by the Chinese upon British subjects, and upon the Queen’s officer’ and to bring Britain’s relations with the Qing empire onto ‘a definite and secure footing’.3 The campaign strategy was to bypass Canton and make instead for the empire’s centre of food distribution on the south-east coast: the point at which the capital’s grain supply set off from Nanjing, via the Grand Canal, up to Beijing. Back in September 1839, the foreign secretary had listened closely to Jardine’s advice on how to subdue the Qing. Occupy Zhoushan and blockade the eastern seaboard, the opium baron had recommended, then press on to the capital to make Britain’s demands.
There was no firing on 4 July. The British fleet (consisting of twenty-two warships and twenty-seven transports, carrying 3,600 Scottish, Irish and Indian infantry) came in to a harbour where a dozen brightly painted war junks, each with a crew of around fifty, were already anchored.4 A Captain Fletcher and Lord Jocelyn – Elliot’s military secretary – were dispatched onto the Qing commander’s vessel (identifiable by the three tigers’ heads painted onto its stern) to state English terms: the island should surrender within six hours, or face the consequences. The admiral’s crew complained of the unfairness of being made to suffer for a quarrel manufactured by the Cantonese. ‘Those are the people you should make war on, and not upon us who never injured you; we see your strength, and know that opposition will be madness, but we must perform our duty if we fall in so doing.’5
It was a sleepless night for the locals. As the British forces gazed out from their ships over the island, its slopes bobbed with lanterns slung over carrying poles – lighting the work of building and arming makeshift embankments. By eight the next morning, all was as ready as it was ever going to be and fifteen British ships lined up opposite a file of Qing war junks. The British held their fire until 2.30, hoping the Chinese would reconsider the offer of unconditional surrender – but then, Jocelyn recalled, the broadsides began: ‘the crashing of timber, falling houses, and groans of men resounded from the shore . . . When the smoke cleared away a mass of ruin presented itself to the eye . . . crowds were visible in the distance flying in all directions.’6 The British had fired for nine whole minutes.
When the British disembarked onto the empty shoreline, they were greeted only by ‘a few dead bodies, bows and arrows, broken spears and guns’.7 (The admiral’s leg had been carried off by a round shot; he died a few days later, in the nearby port city of Ningbo.) Within two hours a Madras artillery regiment had trained four guns on Dinghai; by ten o’clock that evening, its inhabitants had run away; the Governor had drowned himself in a small pool. The following morning, the British flag fluttered over the city walls. The signs of flight (nearly a million people had deserted the island) were all over the city: half-smoked pipes, cups of untasted tea, abandoned pots of make-up.8 In time, though, the island would quietly take its revenge. As they sweated out their makeshift occupation, British troops would be struck down in their thousands by malaria and dysentery. Zhoushan would become a great British graveyard: 5,329 soldiers were admitted to the military hospital, resulting in 448 deaths.9
Nine minutes. This grotesque discrepancy in military strength between the British and the Qing would be replayed again and again through the two years of the war. Although it would later become a source of complacency to the British, at the time it provoked surprise as well as self-satisfaction. Back in the autumn of 1839, even Palmerston had initially doubted that the Qing forces would be as easily defeated as Jardine and others predicted. Sir John Barrow, second secretary at the Admiralty, veteran of the failed 1793 embassy to China, and certainly no sinophile, thought Jardine’s contempt for Qing capacities ‘extraordinary’.10 Qing China was after all no tribal power but one of the world’s great conquest empires.
How, exactly, could its armies have atrophied so drastically by 1840? The problems with the Qing military can be broken down into three main categories: materiel and defences; organization; and individual quality of troops.11
In all areas of equipment – weaponry, forts and most critically ships – the Qing equipment lagged behind that of the British. The most fundamental distinction between Qing and British armaments was that by 1840, the British had long moved into the era of firepower, while parts of the Qing army hung on to the bows, swords, spears and rattan shields that had served them well through the expansion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 In 1840, those Qing soldiers lucky enough to be issued a firearm found themselves still saddled with one of the musket’s earliest incarnations, the matchlock: a muzzle-loading weapon developed in the mid-fifteenth century, with a chamber (the ‘serpentine’) near the flashpan into which a slow, smouldering match was dropped. Its main drawbacks were obvious: it was very hard to keep the match alight over extended periods of fighting, the match easily betrayed a soldier’s location and the smoke generated by the musket obscured the target after a couple of shots. British regiments, by contrast, were supplied with more advanced models: either the flintlock (in which the smouldering match of the matchlock was replaced by a hammer-held flint) or, better still, the breech-loading percussion-lock.
Qing cannon also suffered from basic deficiencies, often lacking, for example, sighting devices and installations that enabled them to swivel in pursuit of a mobile enemy. Elderly cannon were rarely retired in a timely fashion, but rather left out – over centuries, perhaps – in all weathers to rust from neglect. (In 1836, a scornful Western observer of the guns at Canton called them ‘old and honeycombed’.13) The quality of gunpowder was low, too, with industrial standards lagging some way behind those of nineteenth-century Britain. ‘They opened their wretched wall-pieces,’ sniffed Jocelyn of the short battle for Dinghai, ‘which, from their construction, can neither traverse nor be depressed, and which, being charged with a bad description of powder, did no damage to the force.’14
Perhaps the Qing’s greatest weakness was its warships. When, in early 1841, the hostilities shifted south, to Canton, Qing ships and forts would be crushed by the world’s very first all-iron war steamer: the Nemesis. But the Qing navy could not compete with Britain’s older, copper-plate-hulled wooden warships either, whose design had been perfected over two centuries’ crisscrossing the globe on merchant voyages and in naval wars with France, Spain and Holland. Due to the situations in which they often found themselves – ranging far from any land-based back-up – such ships had to be self-contained fighting units, carrying as many as 120 guns. Qing war junks, by contrast, had a more cautious role to play. They were patrol vessels, carrying around ten guns, with no independent capacity for war-making. They were merely auxiliaries to the coast’s primary defences – the granite forts that guarded the river that led up to Canton. These ships were, the same scornful observer of 1836 declared, ‘large, unwieldy looking masses of timber . . . painted red and black, with large goggle eyes in the bows . . . useless, save in the smoothest water . . . To convey to the mind of a stranger the ridiculous excess of the inutility of the naval establishment of China would . . . be impossible.’15 The Qing’s inability to mount a naval attack robbed them of any kind of offensive advantage against the British; all they could do was man their forts and wait, nervously, for the enemy to pick its own time and place.
What of the forts themselves? A popular Chinese saying likened the bases guarding the riverways up to Canton to ‘locks of gold and passes of steel. It’s hard to pass through them – harder still to get out again’. These stone forts were among the largest in the empire, protected by walls some 230 yards wide and 5 yards high, and studded with up to sixty cannon. But their flaws were obvious. First, they were roofless – any well-directed shell could easily wreak havoc. And strategically, the forts were designed to cope only with attacks from the sea (preferably from pirates with no ambitions for territorial conquest and inferior firing power); little provision had been made for assaults from the land. As for their general state of repair near Canton, our observer from 1836 pronounced it ‘the very worst imaginable’.16
But why did the Qing fail to capitalize on their numerical superiority over the British? Theoretically, the dynasty commanded the largest standing army (800,000-strong) in the world at the time – 114 times more numerous than the 7,000-strong British force dispatched to China. In reality, however, most of these 800,000 soldiers were scattered through the empire, far too busy with domestic peace-keeping duties (suppressing bandits or rebels; carrying out disaster relief; guarding prisons; policing smugglers) to be spared for the quarrel with the British. In August 1840, when the British fleet glided up to Tianjin, to hand Palmerston’s official letter of complaint to the emperor, the imperial representative reported that a mere 600 of the 2,400 soldiers theoretically on the rolls could be mustered for immediate service. Almost every province of the empire had to contribute reinforcements to boost local forces: in the course of the war, some 51,000 soldiers found themselves in transit around the country, headed for the southern or eastern coasts. But they moved too slowly to be useful: troops from a neighbouring province took thirty to forty days to reach the front line (about the same amount of time it took the British to fetch reinforcements from India); those further away took ninety or more. In June 1840, the British fleet took only thirty-five days to sail up and capture Dinghai; the following year, the Qing took five months to rally a counter-offensive against the island – five months in which the British rested and reorganized, while reinforcements straggled in from distant corners of the empire. (By the time the last batches arrived, the Treaty of Nanjing was already being toasted in cherry brandy.)
