by Tom Anderson
For the moment, though, Hu’s chief role was in the private army he had built around a core of guards for his convoys and caravans. His dominant position among the traders of Canton and his close relationship with Governor Wen Mingxia meant that he possessed an enormous authority, which came into play in 1811 and 1812 when General Sun’s army was repulsed by the combined Green Standard troops at Anqing. Sun realised that his riverine attack on Jiangning had failed, and therefore decided to withdraw to the southern provinces and raid them in such a way as to cut off their supplies to Jiangning. This would hopefully force Chongqian to split his forces once more, chasing down Sun and giving Yenzhang more time to throw back Chongqian’s stalled armies in Shandong.
To that end, Sun ordered his army to begin a deliberate reign of terror, reminiscent of the French maraude from European warfare, upon the underdefended provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Stripped of their Green Standard troops, the provinces had nothing to defend themselves with but the private armies of the mandarins and traders, and that was rarely enough. Sun burnt Jianning[176] in the winter of 1811 and sent splinter forces out to attack the coastal cities, Fuzhou being the first to feel his bite a month later. The so-called Black Flag Army (Heiqi Jun)[177] became feared in particular for Sun’s deliberate use of his Mon and Shan ‘barbarian’ troops in the vanguard; they had known warfare at the hands of brutal Avan oppressors and had learned to return the same treatment in kind. Fear and terror spread throughout the south of China, yet they were matched by anger – anger that Chongqian was allowing this to happen. And indeed the Emperor had called Sun’s bluff, leaving part of the defensive force to hold the line at Anqing and returning the rest to the Shandong front to resume pushing back Yenzhang’s army. From a cold-blooded point of view it may have been the right strategic decision to make, for the time Sun had bought Yenzhang meant that he had been able to stabilise the Corean front and retrieve Yu for Shandong. Jinan was retaken by Yu in the early months of 1812; if Chongqian had not sent his troops to meet Yu’s advance, the Jiangning court might have lost all the gains they had made in Shandong thanks to the Corean attack.
Yet in the longer run it was a terrible decision, one that would change the fate of China forever.
For even as the anger spread throughout the southern provinces, something remarkable happened in Guangzhou. Sun, as usual, sent his side force to raid the city as he retreated south and eastwards towards Yunnan. But this small army, led by the Mon bannerman Dham Shoung, fell upon Guangzhou only to be bloodily repulsed by a ramshackle army consisting of Hu Kwa’s private army, the local forces of Governor Wen, the Marines belonging to all the local East India Companies, and any of the young men of the city who didn’t want their families to be burnt out or starved by the notorious Black Flag Army. Furthermore they were armed with modern European firearms, a legacy of the fact that the EICs had ordered large numbers of weapons and ammunition when the war trade had begun, only for them then to sit around taking up space in the factory warehouses when Chongqian’s decree against trade had come down. Now they were put to use killing Mon warriors.
Dham Shouang retreated from the city and returned to a furious Sun fresh from the conquest of Shaoguan. Sun rebuked his lieutenant and knew that if his strategy was to bear fruit, if he was to force Chongqian to blink and split his forces, he could not afford the embarrassment of a defeat. He publicly proclaimed to his army and locals that the ancient city of Guangzhou would be rewarded for its arrogance by nothing less than total destruction, the ground would be sowed with salt, and no city would ever grow there again. A story circulated, though its veracity is uncertain and it may be nothing more than Sanhedui propaganda, that the Emperor Chongqian clapped his hands with delight upon hearing this and told Zeng Xiang that “the fool thinks he hurts me, when all he does is solve the cursed barbarian problem once and for all! Surely Heaven shall smile upon us when all contagion with them is irrevocably removed.”
It was summer 1812 and the whole Black Flag Army converged on Guangzhou, burning the towns and villages enroute. The opposing ramshackle “Hong Army” was outnumbered, for all their weapons. The EICs’ East Indiamen trade ships had been stripped of their crews, who were now armed with muskets and rifles and helping to hold the line against the enemy. And it still wasn’t enough.
It was Michel Ouais who saved them, at the end of it all, when the Black Flag Army was about to break through. Aping his idol Napoleon Bonaparte, the Royal Frenchman had spent the last two weeks feverishly removing as many guns as possible from the East Indiamen and incessantly training their gunners to fight on land as they did at sea. Most of the guns were sub-par cannonades, as they were taken from trade ships never intended to fire more than the occasional warning shot, but there were a few frigates out in the Pearl River estuary with real weapons: long-range bow chasers, British carronades, even mortars from a rotting old Danish bomb-ship whose origins no-one could remember.
Of course, the Chinese were familiar with artillery (though the Mon and Shan mostly were not); gunpowder was after all one of the Four Great Chinese Inventions.[178] But Chinese artillery had lagged behind its European counterpart for more than two hundred years – ever since the Qing conquest had stifled technological progress, in fact. Some Emperors, like Yongzheng, had recognised the fact and tried to procure more advanced European weapons from Sweden or Russia, but to no avail; and later, in a time when the Russians and Lithuanians seemed to be handing out military technologies in exchange for anything, China had been ruled by the inward-looking Guangzhong, missing its chance.
The result of this was that the Black Flag Army was blasted back from the gates of Canton by Michel Ouais’ men. The carronades’ huge thirty-eight-pounder balls blew apart entire siege towers in one shot, the British hail shot [shrapnel shell] tore bloody holes six feet across in Sun’s formation, even the light carronades made the Chinese front line vanish in a red mist when Ouais waited until the last moment before giving them ‘a whiff of grapeshot’.
But the most famous shot in the battle was undoubtedly that of a single Dutch chain shot, fired from a chaser in the midst of the action. The two balls, linked together by a chain, were designed to zip through the air in a naval battle and slice apart ropes and sails by the red-hot chain. But in a million-to-one chance, that chain instead removed two heads: those of Sun Yuanchang and Dham Shouang.
Deprived of its leaders, the Black Army disintegrated. It was the mandarin Hao Jicai who suggested that the bedraggled Hongmen spare some of their forces to at least make a token effort to chase its remnants as they rampaged across Guangdong in their retreat; it was more than Emperor Chongqian had ever done. Hao was a member of the Sanhedui, and his actions were probably not made without political calculation.
Chongqian was allegedly half-disappointed by the survival of Guangzhou, but glad that Sun’s army had been destroyed, allowing him to focus on Shandong; Jinan was about to fall once more to General Liang, and Yu and Cao were falling back. Soon his brother’s usurpation would end and Beijing would be his once more. So soon! All he had to do to satisfy his moral requirements was send a few token troops down to Guangzhou to remind them pointedly of his decree and have all the Europeans – and anyone who had been illegally trading with them – exiled or executed.
It should be no surprise that the people of Guangdong were outraged at this action, sending troops long after they could have done any good against Sun, not to protect the cities or help them rebuild but to tell them off for consorting with Europeans – the very contact that had allowed them to survive. Even in Guangzhou there were many who remained suspicious and sceptical of the red-haired barbarians from beyond the seas, but that was secondary. For his unforgivable hypocrisy, the Emperor Chongqian had unquestionably lost the Mandate of Heaven.
The Green Standard troops he sent were allowed to march into the town square. Governor Wen heard Chongqian’s emissary give his ultimatum. And then he gave a single nod.
Michel Ouais’ cannon barked, once, and t
hose neatly regimented soldiers were cut to bloody rags. Hu’s soldiers, now wearing some semblance of standardised uniforms, went out to bayonet any who still lived. Wen had rejected his Emperor, rebelled against him, and few in Guangdong or Fujian would criticise him for that.
The question arose, though, as to what would happen now. Henry Watt asked the Governor: would he instead rally to Yenzhang’s cause?
Wen looked to Hu and both men answered in a negative, though in that flowery Chinese court language that meant it was hard for even an experienced individual like de Waar to pick through and find the meaning. Yenzhang no more deserved their loyalty than Chongqian, for his absurd Manchu supremacist beliefs and the fact that he had been supported by the monster Sun.
Confused, Watt asked: “Then who is your Emperor?”
Hao Jicai came forth with Michel Ouais and Dirk de Waar, and they explained. Sanhedui sympathies had always been strong in the south. Even Governor Wen had some low-level connections with the secret society. He even knew that his fellow Governor of Fuzhou, who had escaped the rape of that city by Sun and had now won respect from his people for tirelessly helping to rebuild and survive the winter, was a distant relative of the Southern Ming claimant Emperor Longwu from the seventeenth century. Very distant; the Qing had been careful to weed out all possible direct descendants of the old dynasty, and Governor Zheng Kejing had only survived thanks to his political connections. Whether he still thought of himself as a member of that old house was unknown, but they could but ask…
And so it was in 1812, at what seemed to be Chongqian’s moment of triumph, as he threw Yenzhang’s armies across the White River and marched on Beijing, as the Coreans built up for another breakthrough in the north… in that moment, the south of China, bruised and bleeding, rose up in favour of neither he nor his brother. No Qing Emperor. No foreign Tartar warlord.
Hao Jicai, Chancellor to the Son of Heaven the Dansheng Emperor (born Zheng Kejing), explained that once more Huaxia, the true China, the Han China, would be born into the world. And it would be ruled by the dynasty that at first was known as the Houming – the Later Ming – but, in an irony, just as the Manchus’ Later Jin had become the more neutral Qing, it was decided that an all-new name was required.
Thus was born the Feng Dynasty, from the Chinese word for ‘phoenix’. And a civil war between two brothers, with an upstart king on the sidelines, suddenly became in truth the War of the Three Emperors…
Chapter #92: Watching the Watchers
“When one looks upon the great march of popular discontent that threatens to overcome your government like a great wave crashing down to sweep away all traces of civilisation… do not stand in useless defiance as a Canutine figure… but rather use that wind to steer your ship of state to its destination, and let that fire burn itself out impotently…”
- a celebrated passage from In Hindsight, the memoirs of Ernest Lewis II, Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt (1840), often held up as a glorious example of mixed metaphors
*
From: “From Enervation to Electrification: Europe in the Nineteenth Century”, by Jacques Demoivre (1970, English translation 1972)—
The two decades separating the Jacobin Wars from the Popular Wars are generally known as the Watchful Peace, and it is an apt name. Not only in the manner originally meant – that is of the great powers looking suspiciously at France lest she show any sign of her former madness – but also a subtler meaning; countries watched each other, and they watched themselves, to see how that same madness had affected them. Choices were made, decisions were taken, and it can certainly be argued that what came to pass in those years of general peace had an even greater impact upon the destinies of nations than the turmoil of the war that preceded them.
Historiography tends to regard political reactions to the Jacobin period as breaking down into two wide paths, a gross and black-and-white view which is of course an oversimplification. On the one hand we have the conservative powers whose response was essentially to screw up their eyes and wish themselves into forgetting the Jacobin Wars had ever happened, in the hope that their people would do the same and go back to being well-behaved eighteenth-century peasants and bourgeoisie. This view is often ridiculed in retrospect, perhaps with good reason, yet some countries managed to attempt such a response without concomitantly trying to ignore or erase any useful developments to come from the war. Castile and the Neapolitan Dominions can be argued to be among such nations; even Saxony, though she is normally placed in the other column. That other path regards countries which experimented with radical thought and embraced those same developments shunned by conservative powers such as Austria and the Mittelbund, both of them half-hoping the old Holy Roman Empire could be brought back if one wished fervently enough. Radical thought should not be taken to mean progressivism, or cleaving to Jacobin ideas – save perhaps nationalism, that genie which could break an old empire… or build a new one.
In any case, Great Britain (perhaps inevitably) breaks all patterns by embracing both a political path more conservative (or perhaps reactionary is a better term) than anything she had known for decades, and also an industrialisation programme that could have come straight out of Lisieux’s 25 Year Plan. When Optel semaphore towers went up across the island, following the same paths of roads widened and taggertised[179] to allow their use by steam carriages, they were directed by men who would be happy to see the voting franchise restricted and the rights of the old Constitution of 1689 stamped into dust. This example illustrates how one needed not be a bloody-flag Jacobin to recognise the usefulness of Jacobin innovations such as the proliferation of steam power and the use of a national optelegraph network.[180]
In Continental Europe things tended to be less complex. Archduke, “Emperor”, Francis II of Austria was the poster boy for mindless conservatism, denying and abjuring the use of steam engines or Optel towers, regarding them as necessarily leading to the radicalisation of political thought. This should not necessarily be automatically dismissed, for while Francis was unquestionably a poor monarch his views were shared by many of the more intelligent Hapsburg aristocrats who made up his government. Even the Graf von Warthausen, the man who had masterminded the Congress of Copenhagen and went on to serve as Chancellor, believed there to be some truth to them. After all, many argued that the printing press had ultimately triggered the Reformation and all the chaos and war that came from it, and the situation was similar. Optel would allow rapid communication between dissident groups, and steam engines required detailed technical knowledge that could potentially place the security of the empire in the hands of rude artisans who might well sympathise with revolutionaries. There were vaguer and more esoteric criticisms of steam power, primarily the effects of the soot produced in the context of Joseph Priestley’s Aerial Economy theory,[181] but politics was at the core of these arguments.
The opposition of the leaders of the Mittelbund was less ideologically coherent, as indeed was the Mittelbund itself. Hesse-Darmstadt and Nassau had leaders of similar cast to Francis II, with wistful appreciation for the old Empire, resentment of their fellows within the Mittelbund, and even more so the way they had been shut out of the European diplomatic system by the Congress, forced into the Concert of Germany with powers like Saxony and Flanders – the very same powers they had originally formed alliances to oppose! Hesse-Kassel was slightly more rational while Duke William I still ruled, a pragmatist and Anglophile who pursued links with Hanover and allowed some among the famous Hessian mercenaries to experiment with steam tractors and tortues. But William died in 1816 and his son Charles II proved to be of like mind to the other Mittelbund rulers. He issued proclamations against such technology, forcing his mercenary bands to either abandon its use – potentially making them very vulnerable if they were deployed against armies who did use it in the future – or to leave the duchy. Many chose the latter, mostly going to the Alliance of Hildesheim, which was more amenable to such experimentation.
Flanders one might e
xpect to be among the rejectionists, having suffered under French invasion in the latter parts of the war and having beaten the French back without such weapons of her own. However she soon became the heart of innovation and industrialisation in Europe, not so much through deliberate policy on the part of Charles Theodore II but through simple economics. The use of steam engines elsewhere naturally drove up the price of coal, and the Greater Flanders that had resulted from the Jacobin Wars now covered several large coalfields in the Ruhr Valley area. Saxony and the Mittelbund also benefited from this, but in the Mittelbund’s case ideological opposition delayed matters and the usual result was that “foreign” companies (some from the other German states) usually ended up dominating the mineworks, provoking resentment from the locals against their rulers. Austria’s own great coalfields remained restricted to the old methods, even pre-Jacobin steam engines usually smashed up by the Pferdschaft Bund, a group of bullyboys convinced that steam would steal their jobs (and given tacit support by the government). Many of the Austrian coalfields were in Bohemia and Silesia, meaning Pferdschafter violence against miners suspected of breaking Francis’ laws took on an unpleasant feel of regional persecution, particularly on the back of the arrest and execution of Bohemian hero Count Radetzky by the Hapsburg government.
