by Tom Anderson
Now Portillo revived Mateovarón’s policies with a more radical slant to them, using the excuse of suppressing the South Seas slave trade to build up the Meridian Armada once more. The UPSA’s large number of immigrants fleeing the fall of Revolutionary France proved to be of use, with former Admiral Surcouf spearheading the project to equip the UPSA with steamcraft. It was the Meridians (admittedly, bare months before both France and the ENA matched the feat) who first constructed a steam-powered warship capable of making long-distance voyages across the open ocean like its sail rivals: the Pichegru in October 1818, named for the great French-born general who at the time was mistakenly believed to have died on an expedition (he was rather pleased at his memorial when he returned).
It was with this navy that the UPSA was able to make a careful intervention in the Philippine War of 1817-1821. Ever since Spain had been divided during and after the Jacobin Wars, there had always been three potential claimants to any item, institution or possession previously belonging to the unified Spanish Empire. While the Aragonese crown controlled by the Neapolitans did not contest these, not wishing to attempt to project power beyond the Mediterranean, the exiled King-Emperor Charles IV in Veracruz clashed with his nephew Alfonso XII of Castile, or rather his regent Peter IV of Portugal. The biggest colonial question was that which escalated into war: the ownership of the Philippines. When Charles had fled in exile to New Spain and invoked the Arandite Plan, he had folded the Captaincy-General of the Philippines into the Kingdom of Guatemala, while Alfonso continued to appoint a Captain-General from Madrid. The Manila-based peninsulare local administration fumbled on for a decade or so trying to please everyone, but in the end war came when the New Spanish ship Providencia – purchased, like most of the rebuilt New Spanish fleet, from the Dutch – bombarded Manila after an ultimatum to hand over the “false” Captain-General was refused.
The war rambled on in the background for four years, largely at arm’s-length, with the two sides clashing navally and fighting over the islands. There were also a few engagements in the Atlantic, with both sides making an abortive landing; the Castilians and Portuguese briefly took Mérida on the Yucatan Peninsula, and the New Spanish landed in Galicia, which provoked overly optimistic risings in some parts of Castile where people believed in the romantic image of the king returning from over the water. The New Spanish plan had been to try to retrieve the bells of Santiago de Compostela (by now part of Portugal) which had always been a symbol of Spanish legitimacy, and had been stolen by the Moors during the Reconquista and won back at a heavy cost. The first part of the plan was a success, but the New Spanish raiders were intercepted while retreating to the coast and were forced to drop the bells in the Rio Tambre to prevent them being recovered by the Castilians. The bells were not found again until the 20th century, and it is arguable that the New Spanish did partly achieve their aims, as the copies made by the Portuguese were rightly viewed as illegitimate among the Castilian people.
While the New Spanish and Portuguese-Castilians fought mainly in the northern Philippine island of Luzon, the Muslim Moros of Mindanao took the opportunity to revolt against both sets of Spaniards. The Moros swiftly overran much of the south of the island under the auspices of the Sultan of Sulu, who also ruled most of the north of Borneo and the intervening islands, principally Jolo. It should be of no surprise to anyone that the Dutch were quietly supplying the Sultan with weapons to pass on to the rebelling Moros; the Portuguese and Dutch had been fighting in the background for dominance over the East Indies for over a century, and it was a battle that showed no signs of dying down anytime soon.
President-General Portillo was under some pressure to intervene on the side of the Castilians and use the fledgeling new Armada to help reconquer Lower Peru, but he refused, which blackened his name in some political circles. Portillo’s reasoning was that it would draw the UPSA into conflict not only with the New Spanish but also with the Dutch, who remained their undeclared allies for pragmatiste[169] reasons. Furthermore, while Mateovarón had helped improve relations with the Empire of North America, these days no-one could predict what Britain might do, dark and remote under the rule of Churchill. Portillo decided the hard-won prosperity the Meridians had rebuilt since the Third Platinean War was not worth risking, and the only intervention he made was to capture the disputed Columbus Archipelago [Galapagos Islands] off the coast of Lower Peru, denying them to the New Spanish and building the small Fort Libertad there as a minor naval base.
It is interesting to consider whether this move would have significantly affected Portillo’s chances of re-election, but like Mateovarón he chose to step down after his first term, establishing a tradition that would eventually be codified in the Meridian Constitution. The following election of 1819 was won by Alfredo Vallejo, the Amarillo Party’s former candidate who had split the vote with Carriego. Vallejo swiftly proved a competent if not spectacular ruler, and in a similar manner to Mateovarón, Portillo was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain in an attempt to unravel that enigma. Portillo famously recorded this event in his diary as “I am still not entirely certain whether it is intended to be a reward or a punishment…”
Chapter #91: The South Rises Again
From: “The Phoenix Men” by Karl Hofmann, (1948, English translation 1952)—
When Dirk de Waar first met Hao Jicai in 1806, the War of the Three Emperors had not yet begun. The traders in their shared sympathy, regardless of national identification, groaned under the Guangzhong Emperor’s continual hardening of the trade barriers separating Qing China from Europe and the Americas. Yet mere weeks after that first, convivial meeting between the Dutch trader and the quietly Sanhedui-supporting mandarin, the news came to Guangzhou, or Canton as Waar knew it: Guangzhong was dead, assassinated!
The civil war initially benefited the European traders, at least a little, as it meant that the court in Beijing (and then Jiangning after the Chongqian Emperor and his éminence grise Zeng Xiang were driven out to the southern capital) was too distracted to enact even greater proscriptions. Furthermore there was a brief upsurge in interest in buying war supplies from the Europeans, and soon every trading company under the sun was shipping in powder, musket balls and firearms from Europe and the Americas in lieu of their usual cargoes of silver bullion or Appalachian ginseng.
However, barely had this trade begun when, in late 1809 – the pressure briefly taken from his government by Corea’s entry into the war against his brother – the Chongqian Emperor felt able to issue decrees on issues of such low importance as China’s relations with the irrelevant outside world. More specifically, and under the influence of the more conservative mandarins in Jiangning (it is worth noting that Zeng Xiang seemed uncertain on the matter, but began to realise he had lost his position as sole influencer of the inexperienced Emperor), Chongqian declared that it was essential that China strengthen herself by more fully embracing the Confucian ideal. From that righteous harmony would flow the natural success to be expected in the defeat of the vile northern usurper. What this meant when translated into everyday speech was that all European trade would cease.
All of it. Right now.
Men like Hao knew what the results of this would be. For all of Chongqian and his father Guangzhong’s attempts to limit the western trade, Guangzhou had grown enormously thanks to the exchanges with the men who called it Canton. The city’s monopoly on ginseng trade with the Americas, via the British East India Company, meant that Cantonese merchants could set their prices high and the rest of the Celestial Empire, desirous of the potent medicinal herb, would be forced to submit to them. It was inevitable that smuggling had become rife, especially in the other three cities formerly open to European trade under Yongzheng, and the authorities had reacted by instituting and enforcing the death penalty for any caught in the act. Under Chongqian, that was now clarified to death for both the Chinese perpetrators and their European accomplices – and soon it would apply to Company men as well as freelance smugglers.
The announcement provoked outrage around the tables of port and cigars at the Thirteen Hongs, as the traders of the British, French and Dutch East India Companies played cards together with their more minor Spanish, Portuguese and Danish counterparts and pondered what their reaction should be. To be sure, Chinese Emperors’ declarations were often so deeply couched in metaphor that discerning the actual meaning was a task for a scholar, and the question on everyone’s lips was exactly how literally the Son of Heaven meant ‘all’ trade would cease.
They soon found out when a contingent of the Green Standard Army was deployed to Guangzhou in 1812 under General Ji Liangtan…
*
From: “The War of the Three Emperors” by Giacomo Occhialini (1956, English translation 1960)—
…after Corea’s entry into the war in 1808, the Yenzhang Emperor’s position rapidly deteriorated. With the help of his mentor General Yu Wangshan, he had taken Beijing and, though repulsed from Xi’an, had slowly ground his way towards Kaifeng, Zhengzhou and the Yellow River itself, though the war had slowed to a crawl as Chongqian also funnelled his armies into Henan province. But he had kept the offensive and the initiative. Now the Coreans hit him where he was weak, and threatened to undermine his chief support base in Manchuria. Yenzhang was forced to redirect his forces to try to hold back the new enemy, but things went from bad to worse; the Coreans took the border city of Andong in late 1808. The name meant ‘Eastern Pacification’ and originally referred to a Chinese military triumph over the Coreans; now the city was renamed Seoseungri, ‘Western Victory’, in a taunt to Corea’s former masters.[170]
The Chongqian Emperor in the distant south might be too insulated from reality to recognise that this might just possibly suggest that Corea was acting independently rather than serving him, the rightful Son of Heaven, in its proper role as vassal kingdom. His older brother Yenzhang, though, was more of a realist (for all his questionable Manchu romanticism) and knew that Corea had to be quashed quickly. He turned a greater part of his army against the small kingdom and even recalled General Yu to lead it into battle, giving the bloody Henan theatre over to his subordinate General Cao Qichang. With his forces reduced, all Cao could do was hold the White River (Baihe) line against the increasing numbers of Green Standard Army soldiers that Chongqian was able to send against him – and even that, it seemed, would soon be too much.
After his early successes against Chongqian’s forces, Yu was confident of success over the unruly Coreans. The reality was more mixed. As King Gwangjong surged his troops in 1809, with Corea’s southern garrisons being stripped bare, the Manchu city of Girin Ula[171] fell after a pitched battle to the Coreans. Gwangjong then publicly identified Girin Ula with the historical Balhae capital of Kungnaesong (questionable to say the least) and embarked upon another host of renamings for the lesser settlements conquered by his forces. The message was clear: Corea was here to stay.
Even given Yenzhang’s more limited numbers compared to his brother and his need to fight on two fronts, Yu’s army nonetheless outnumbered the Coreans by three to two, and were fighting in friendly country. Furthermore Yu was unquestionably a greater general than his mostly unimaginative Corean counterparts, though the latter were aided by European “advisors” including Russians and Lithuanians from the RLPC, and renegade French traders. Yet all Yu managed was to hold the Coreans back from any more eastern conquests – for the moment. As to the reasons why, we should be careful not to fall into the trap of taking retrospective Corean accounts too seriously; while the Corean soldiers indeed had superior European firearms and training compared to their Chinese counterparts (particularly important when it came to the matter of forming square in the face of Manchu cavalry), the difference was not so great to be decisive alone. With Corea still beset by philosophical divisions over King Gwangjong’s radical course, the armies of Corea were in a similar situation to those of Persia during the Turco-Persian War going on at the same time, half-reformed, half-conservative and often ineffective due to the combination. The fact that they did so well nonetheless says more about the cracks in the Manchu Banner forces of Yenzhang; the Persians lost to the Ottoman Empire, often painted as the backward-looking sick man of Europe, yet still in that period before the Time of Troubles quick to utilise its diverse forces to their maximum, and forever testing them in constant border wars on all sides with Europeans, Africans and Asians. China, on the other hand, had not known a proper war since the Dai Viet intervention of the 1770s, just continuous low-level rebellions against her foreign rulers, and both her armies[172] had fallen into disrepair after two generations of peace.
The Coreans were also aided by their use of war rockets, traditional in the kingdom and now enhanced thanks to knowledge, via Royal French traders, of the recent advances in the weapons in Mysore and latterly the European powers. While the Chinese sometimes used war rockets themselves and thus they were not the unfamiliar, alienistic [psychological] weapon they were against European armies, the Coreans’ tactic of deploying multiple rapid-firing batteries of the enhanced weapons nonetheless took their toll on tight Chinese formations.
Yenzhang could be forgiven for succumbing to despair at this point, as his brother’s armies began to throw General Cao back across the Yellow River and the burnt-out shell of Kaifeng, bloody from constant fighting, was liberated by the enemy General Liang Tianling. But he finally received one piece of good news. Both sides had sent their emissaries to the distant provinces in the first years of the conflict to claim the armies on the frontiers. Most of them had gone to Yenzhang thanks to his brother’s perceived weaknesses as far as maintaining the Middle Kingdom’s newly won borders were concerned. He had thought that all of them had entered the fray, but he had thought wrongly. Sun Yuanchang, the military governor of Shanguo,[173] finally managed to withdraw his forces from the distant frontier and rallied to Yenzhang’s banner. Sun realised that, rather than reporting directly to Beijing and then being fed into the meat grinder of the collapsing Henan front, he would serve his cause better by striking east and attacking the underdefended underbelly of Chongqian’s loyalists, their garrisons depleted by their Green Standard troops being thrown into that same grinder.
To that end, 1810 saw Sun’s army – including cadres of volunteers from the new south-western province – strike through Yunnan into Sichuan and then march up the Yangtze River, with all the ready supplies its river towns could provide for his troops. The Yangtze ultimately led to Jiangning, and Sun hoped he could drive Chongqian from his capital for a second time and fatally undermine his authority. The overall effects of Sun’s campaign would be quite different…
*
From: “The Phoenix Men” by Karl Hofmann, (1948, English translation 1952)—
…the response from the Jiangning regime to General Sun’s Great Eastern March was typically sluggish… even the most able commanders could not hope to disengage a large part of their forces from the engagements in Henan, and that was without considering the fact that their recent success at Jining and the conquest of southern Shandong meant that withdrawing a victorious, advancing army in order to tackle what was possibly a phantom rumour, potentially slowing the main war to a crawl once more, could not seriously be countenanced…
*
…it was not until the fall of Wuchang[174] in the winter of 1810 that Chongqian and his ministers were forced to confront the reality of Sun’s stab in the back. Reluctantly, a portion of the Green Standard troops fresh from their bloody conquest of Jinan – one province away from Beijing, and yet Wuchang was one province away from Jiangning! – were recalled. These troops were sent to close off the Yangtze and form a defensive line centred on Anqing. At the same time, little realising the long-term import of their actions, the mandarins decided to withdraw the remaining garrison troops from the southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong in order to use them to support the defensive army. That meant only the private armies of local mandarins and powerful businessmen remained in those provinces. Th
e capital of Guangdong, of course, was Guangzhou – Canton – and the most powerful businessman in Canton was unquestionably the Hong trader Wu Bingjian, better known to Europeans by the nickname Hu Kwa, which he had chosen as it was easier for the westerners to pronounce.[175]
Hu was friendly with Henry Watt, one of the senior British traders, and though their relationship had begun purely as business, their conversations invariably turned towards other matters. Hu had become fascinated by Watt’s tales of the steam engines that his father and brothers worked with. The part of him possessing the business acumen that had built his vast empire of wealth was shrewd enough to realise that such power sources could revolutionise manufacturing in China and, most importantly, mean he had to pay fewer workers to do the same tasks (it is worth noting that Hu made this realisation before the industrialisation of Britain in the Marleburgensian period). On the other hand, the more romantic part of him had perhaps an even more important role to play in the long run; initially Watt had nothing but his descriptions and crudely drawn diagrams to explain the steam technology to Hu, with the result that the trader seized upon the aspect of steam belching from the boiler like smoke. He thus made the perhaps inevitable comparison to dragons, possessing both great power and associated with water and steam in Chinese mythology. It was by this means that Hu would eventually calm the Chinese resistance to novelty when steam engines arrived on her shores: “The red-haired barbarian has fought a dragon of iron, and has defeated it, and now the dragon is enslaved in his forges and does his will. Do we lack such auspicity in this age that we may not achieve such feats, and more?”
