Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  He was in turn succeeded by his son Hongshi as the Daguo Emperor, as former favourite Hongli had drowned under circumstances some consider to be suspicious.[116] The Daguo Emperor, concurring with his father’s judgement, chose to take a defensive approach against the Dzungars and took advantage of the rich treasury he had inherited by building a vast array of fortifications across Xinjiang, nicknamed the Xin Chengchang, the “New Great Wall”. Daguo’s major achievement was the expansion of Chinese power to the south. The kingdom of Burma, under the Konbaung dynasty of King Naungdawgyi, had successfully conquered Pegu and the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, extending Burmese power alarmingly close to China.

  The rogue Burmese general Myat Htun then overthrew Naungdawgyi and declared a new Toungoo dynasty, but Naungdawgyi threw him out of the capital Ava with help from the British East India Company in the 1760s. Myat Htun fled north and, backed by a Qing army, once more took Ava from Naungdawgyi, who was killed in the battle. His brother Hsinbyushin fled with his remaining loyalists and conquered Arakan, running it as a Burmese state in exile with backing from the BEIC. Myat Htun’s puppet king Mahadammayaza restored the Toungoo dynasty, yet the new kingdom was undoubtedly a Chinese vassal and lost control over much of its territory. Ayutthaya became a Chinese ally while the fragmented Burmese states of Pegu and Tougou submitted to vassalage.

  Building upon this success, Daguo then sent another army to assist the embattled emperor of Dai Viet, Le Cung Tong. Dai Viet was plagued by a civil war; the northern emperors had reigned in name only for centuries, power in practice in the hands of the powerful Trinh lords. Now, though, the Nguyen rulers of the south had taken Hanoi in an attempt to reunite the country. With Daguo’s assistance, Le Cung Tong’s forces defeated the Nguyens at Than Hoa in 1778.[117] Thus the Nguyens were pushed back into the south of Dai Viet (known in Europe as Cochinchina) and the northern remnant of Dai Viet (known as Tongking) became once more a Chinese vassal. Le Cung Tong’s son, Le Quy Tong, proved to be a man of ambition when in the 1780s he successfully played the Qing resident and the Trinh lords off one another and recouped some of the power the Dai Viet emperors had lost over the years.

  Daguo’s reign came to an end with his death in 1787 and he was succeeded by his third son Yongli, who became the Guangzhong Emperor. Historians debate whether this was the point at which the rot set in. Much like his grandfather, Yongli’s naming as heir has been questioned. By this point an attempt had been made to prevent succession disputes by having the Emperor write his choice down and seal it in the Forbidden City behind a tablet, only to be revealed upon his death, rather than being able to make deathbed changes as before.[118] In fact this may have counted against Daguo’s choice. Some speculate that Yongli had been a more promising candidate in his youth, and Daguo had hesitated to change the contents of the tablet lest he invalidate his own system and raise questions about tampering with the succession. Regardless, Yongli came to the Dragon Throne as Guangzhong and proceeded with standard Qing practice in order to prevent disputes, either placing his brothers under house arrest or consigning them to minor constitutional roles.

  Guangzhong, “Bright Centre”, was aptly named. Whereas his father Daguo “Great Nation” had indeed presided over an expansion of the Chinese Empire, all Guangzhong was concerned about was the splendid nature of his court, which grew once more towards decadence and insularism. Yet the governance of China did not collapse. The reforms of his grandfather Yongzheng still operated, and the sanitised Keju examination system produced qualified men of the state to quietly run it regardless of a strong central imperial policy. But deprived of new direction, the Empire rested on its laurels and concerned itself solely with internal affairs. This was also the start of what was euphemistically known among European traders as the Difficult Period. Formerly, thanks to agreements signed under the relatively outward-looking Kangxi Emperor, trade had taken place between China and Europe at four open cities. Guangzhong restricted trade to just one, Guangzhou (Canton), and his officials then proceeded to slowly increase bureaucratic red tape to discourage trade even there.[119] The trade agreements with the Russians signed under Kangxi were also wound down, prompting anger in Peter III’s court and helping boost the fortunes of what would become the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company. Though the Russian court still feared China’s military might and would not be the first to formally revoke the Treaty of Nerchinsk, it nonetheless decided that such revocations could be diplomatically met with some quiet treaty violations of its own. The Russians would send more than minor outposts into the Amur valley – claimed but never settled by China – and give men like Lebedev and Benyovsky free rein in their schemes to open up the East. At a time when Neo-Confucianism elsewhere sought reforms, such as the Silhak school revolutionising Corea, China reverted to stodgy conservatism and the same attitude that had killed Zheng He’s exploratory missions a quarter-millennium earlier: what lay outside the Middle Kingdom was by definition unworthy of its notice.

  A political crisis was precipitated when the general Yu Wangshan (who insisted on going by his Manchu name of Fiyanggu) successfully defeated an invasion of the Burmese vassal states by revanchist Burmese-Arakan in 1789. Hsinbyushin had been succeeded by his son Avataya Min, who had hoped that with assistance and arms from his BEIC allies, the Konbaung dynasty could retake its old lands. He might well have been right, save for the fact that Yu Wangshan pulled off a brilliant defence of Ava using a small number of outnumbered Qing troops, with particular reliance on cavalry. Following relief from Chinese-allied Ayutthaya, the Konbaung forces were forced to retreat to Arakan.

  Though the fashion under Guangzhong was not to care too greatly about affairs around the imperial periphery, the battle shot to public prominence as Yu was a major political figure, a Manchu traditionalist who argued against the cultural assimilation the once-conquerors had endured since Kangxi’s policies had been enacted. He also suggested that a return to the old vigorous Manchu ways was not only desirable but vital if China was not to slip back into decay as the old dynasties had.

  Alone, Yu might be silenceable, but he was merely the tip of the iceberg for a powerful political faction at court. This faction drew on not only Manchus but any number of discontents objecting to current policy, including great families who had lost some influence after Yongzheng’s crusade against government corruption. Weighing his options, knowing he dared not make this war hero a martyr to his political cause and stir up trouble, Guangzhong decided to exile him to the western frontier to hold the Xin Chengchang defences against the Dzungars. It was an obvious ploy, as the Dzungars were in decline and had not tried to raid Xinjiang or Tibet for over a decade. Yu was forced to withdraw from the court, allowing his influence there to fade away, and take up command in the city of Tulufan abutting the ‘New Wall’ fortresses.

  Predictably, though, the greatest issue of Guangzhong’s reign was – once again – succession. Idolising the Kangxi Emperor as so many did, Guangzhong wished to emulate his great-grandfather and thus adopted his methods at the worst possible times. The Empress Xiao Fu Zheng gave him three sons and two daughters, and was pregnant with another child when Guangzhong grew dissatisfied with his eldest son Baoyu, then the heir by default and aged nineteen. Baoyu had become infamous for his immoral and boisterous lifestyle, embarrassing the upper classes of Beijing, and Guangzhong knew he must impress upon his son the importance of the imperial dignity. Guangzhong’s prime minister[120] Zeng Xiang counselled that the boy be dispatched to the frontier to serve under a reliable general and thus have the carefree attitude beaten out of him; Guangzhong, however, rejected this for two reasons. Firstly, he would automatically dismiss any solution involving the frontier, for he did not believe an emperor should concern himself with it; and secondly, it was not what Kangxi had done.

  To that end, just as Kangxi had to his errant son Yinreng decades earlier, Guangzhong had Baoyu formally stripped of his succession and confined. Further inspired by his grandfather Yongzheng’s ruthless treat
ment of his brothers after acceding to the throne, he had Baoyu expelled from the Aisin Gioro clan and dropped hints that he might have him made a eunuch to serve in the imperial records. Guangzhong intended this to shock his son back to sensibility and then restore him to his position a week later. Unfortunately, Baoyu was found to have hanged himself on the second day, succumbing to despair upon these pronouncements.

  It is debatable whether the death of Baoyu himself would have been enough to precipitate the later events which came to pass. It does not appear Guangzhong had been particularly close to his firstborn son. But he had enjoyed considerable love for the Empress Xiao Fu Zheng, and news of her son’s suicide led the Empress to suffer a miscarriage and lose her life in the process. This had a terrible effect upon Guangzhong, and from 1791 the Emperor withdrew into seclusion. Only his most trusted ministers were allowed to consult with him, and then only barely. Guangzhong would take no other wife, and it took years even to convince him to use concubines to ensure more imperial heirs. Even then they gave birth to girls only. Rumours of a curse were whispered.

  The Emperor’s two remaining sons were named Baoli and Baoyi. They were as different as night and day. Baoli was an adventurous soul who did not take readily to his lessons and had a vigorous, boisterous nature; speculation abounded that he might turn out like his older brother as he grew to the age when he became aware of women. Baoyi, on the other hand, was a quieter and more bookish boy who delighted scholars with his early interest in Confucian philsophy, even if one takes court obsequiousness in the records into account. Nonetheless, he was somewhat devoid of dynamism and there were concerns he could be manipulated by court factions if he became Emperor. Thus the question of which would be named heir by Guangzhong – for it seemed he would have no more sons – was of paramount importance.

  In 1793 Baoli was twenty and had indeed fallen into the same kind of lifestyle as his dead brother. This time Guangzhong took Zeng Xiang’s advice, and had the boy assigned to Mongolia under General Tang Zhoushou. Little did the Emperor dream that mere months later Tang would be called to Xingjiang and would die from a stomach ulcer soon afterwards, placing the combined armies under the command of the politically dangerous Yu Wangshan. The Dzungars were finally collapsing, not thanks to the Chinese or their Khalkha allies, but by invasion from the west by the Kazakhs. Jangir Khan had reunited his people and sought to finish the job that Ablai Khan had started a generation before: driving the Dzungars to the east. The Dzungar hordes broke and shattered against the “New Great Wall”, and with nowhere to go, their nation disintegrated. Dzungar lands were now open to encroachment from all directions, and Yu was adamant that the Kazakhs not gain all the booty. Qing armies therefore moved westward, taking the settlements of Beshbalik and Kucha. Yu clashed with the Kazakhs a few times before seeking a truce with Jangir Khan, who had possessed limited contact with the Chinese state prior to the conflict.[121] A treaty border was established on relatively amiable grounds, and Yu proclaimed that the Kazakhs’ vigour in prosecuting the conflict was yet more proof of the essential purity of the horse nomads’ way of life, something the Manchu had lost.

  That would be worrying enough for Guangzhong’s government, that the plan to exile Yu beyond influence had backfired, but it was nothing compared to the corollary. Baoli returned to Beijing in 1797 as a hero-worshipper of Yu and a true believer in his ideas about Manchu reversion to the old ways, even dressing in traditional costume in the Beijing streets to the shock of the noble classes. He also gave himself the Manchu name of Giocangga after the grandfather of Nurhaci. This scandalised Beijing society, yet Guangzhong hesitated to act. It seemed as though everything he did to curb his sons’ excesses had the opposite effect, and he was terrified of losing another son if he be too strict. Only two heirs remained and he had certainly ensured that none of his own brothers lived long enough to produce any. There was always the possibility of simply naming Baoyi as heir instead, yet the boy continued to be more of a scholar and lacked the will needed to sit the Dragon Throne. Zeng Xiang is rumoured to have remarked that, would some divine agency have combined the two boys in one, a suitable heir might be had. In whispers, others went further and suggested that Baoyu would had been such an heir, had his father reacted less severely to curb his behaviour.

  In this awkward political climate it is scarcely surprising that it took over a decade for the activity of the Russians and Lithuanians up in the Amur valley to come to the attention of the Qing leadership. Yet reports by occasional traders led to spies being deployed and finally in 1805 reports reached Beijing that, indeed, the Russians had been constructing forts and settlements in the valley in violation of the Treaty of Nerchinsk. (One border governor added in his missive, darkly, that one might have expected Corea, as a loyal vassal very close to the activity, to have alerted China before now).

  These violations were nothing new, though they had rarely reached this scale – the Treaty of Nerchinsk’s Russian and Chinese translations had always been inconsistently ambiguous on the precise ownership of some of the northern regions. In the past, the Chinese response had been simply to send overwhelming troops, force the Russians to surrender, and then bring them south and force them to settle in China, forbidding them to leave. Guangzhong once more looked to the past and, seeking to rid himself of the annoying general a second time, sent Yu Wangshan north.

  Once more, Yu performed well and took most of the Russian forts in the Amur valley after a three-month siege, only unable to breach the coastal ones that could be resupplied by sea. Nonetheless he captured more than 30,000 of the Company’s men and the soldiers with them, and marched them back to Beijing towards the end of 1806. Among them was Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin, founder of the Company. A native of Yakutsk, he had always known the risks of settling the Amur valley, and now in his sixties, he marched fatalistically with the rest of the factors and guards who had been taken. Moritz Benyovsky, with his usual devil’s luck, had been in Japan at the time and escaped capture.

  The Emperor reviewed the forced march of the captives through Beijing with some alarm, not having truly appreciated the extent of the Russian incursion. Because of this, although most of the captives were given the usual treatment of being made to settle in China and being forbidden to leave its borders, he put Lebedev himself – as the ringleader – on trial. He also had the Chinese Orthodox Church in Beijing, permitted nearly a century before by the treaties with Peter the Great, closed down. Actual war with Russia was unthinkable (in Guangzhong’s eyes, that would only acknowledge a barbarian people as possessing claims to civilisation) but it was obvious that this was more serious than previous violations of the treaties.

  Lebedev was sentenced to execution, and Guangzhong further ordered that the act be performed by a member of his own Imperial Guards Brigade. This was the group responsible for protecting the Emperor and defending the Forbidden City, set up as a Manchu Banner[122] early in the Qing dynasty. Originally it had been composed solely of Manchus, which had made sense when the Qing had still been thought of primarily as a foreign dynasty and Han Chinese could never truly be trusted. However, Daguo had begun opening it up to others, and Guangzhong had even gone further by actively trying to exclude Manchus – the traditionalist movement men such as Yu followed made him paranoid about their loyalties. However, reasoning that most Han Chinese could also never truly be independent of any of the court factions, Guangzhong appointed as many ethnic minority groups as he could to the Guard. Among them were Huihui Muslims from the south, Uighurs from the west, Coreans from the north… like many emperors throughout history, such as the Byzantines before him with their Varangian Guard, Guangzhong knew that the safest option was to use guards who would enjoy no support from, and be unable to blend into, the general populace if they betrayed him. It gave them an incentive to keep him alive and his government stable. For the execution, he ordered that one of his biggest, strongest guardsmen perform the task. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, but that scarcely mattered; it w
as probably unpronounceable anyway, such a red-haired barbarian.

  In hindsight many modern scholars find it inconceivable that Guangzhong could possibly have forgotten that many of his Imperial Guard were drawn from Russians who had previously been captured in the Amur Valley as long ago as 1750, or their descendants. Yet even conceding the Emperor’s general lack of interest about affairs on the periphery of his Empire, it is also worth pointing out that merely because two men share a homeland does not necessarily mean they will share any sympathy.