Battle For Beijing 1858 1860 PDF
Battle For Beijing 1858 1860 PDF
Battle For Beijing 1858 1860 PDF
F O R B E I J I N G,
1858–1860
FRANCO-BRITISH
CONFLICT IN CHINA
HARRY
GELBER
Battle for Beijing, 1858–1860
Harry Gelber
BATTLE FOR BEIJING
The rise of China over the last half-century is one of the more remark-
able phenomena of world politics. By general consent, it is changing not
only the balance of power in East Asia but arguably the design of the
entire world order. Nor is the scope of that change entirely unexpected.
As Napoleon Bonaparte famously remarked at the start of the nineteenth
century: ‘Let China sleep, for when she wakes the world will tremble.’
When the change did come, it was quite sudden, for the story of China
from the eighteenth to the twentieth century has been one of almost
unbroken difficulties and decline. At the heart of that decline were four
linked changes: major population increases, popular unrest and rebellion,
foreign demands and the increasing inability of the imperial administra-
tion to cope with all three. Throughout that period, the empire was ruled
by the last of the great imperial dynasties, the Qing. They had come to the
throne in 1644, but their rule was not helped by the fact that they were
not properly Chinese: they were, and remained, Manchus from the North.
The last of their greatest rulers, Qianlong, died in 1799.
Perhaps it was inevitable that, in addition to domestic difficulties, there
would in time be frictions between China and the major foreign powers,
two in particular. First there was Russia, on the other side of the empire’s
long and indistinct northern frontiers, but pushing southwards as well
as eastwards towards what is now Siberia. In China’s southern regions
were groups of foreigners, largely traders from Europe and headed by the
world’s greatest sea power, the British. It was a setting for a true clash of
vii
viii PREFACE
Harry Gelber
Hobart, TAS, Australia
CONTENTS
1 Prologue 1
3 Canton 31
4 Tianjin 49
5 Recovery 71
6 Interlude in Shanghai 95
10 Departures 181
xi
xii CONTENTS
Notes 209
Bibliography 225
Index 237
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Prologue
The roots of the Sino-British clashes went back for over two centuries to
the beginnings of Sino-West European trade. Direct maritime exchanges
between Europe and China began with the Portuguese in the 16th cen-
tury and Chinese permission to build a permanent foreign trading post
at Macao in 15571. Other visitors soon followed; and from 1565 grow-
ing amounts of silver came into the Asian trade network, brought by the
annual “Manila Galleon” from Spanish mines in the Americas. Much of
it was used meet European demands for Chinese ceramics, silks, and, not
least, the increasing English demand for tea. Together with the silver, the
Spanish empire also sold maize, tobacco, opium and other products to the
Chinese. British ships started to appear in China around the 1630s and,
though there were no formal relations with China, were at first allowed to
trade at Xiamen, Zoushan and Canton2. They quickly began to dominate
China’s non-coastal maritime trade.
Official English trade in the East was conducted through the East India
Company (EIC), which was based in London and Calcutta, and granted
a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth Ist in December 1599. That gave the
Company a monopoly of all English trade in the East Indies3; indeed,
it became a state within a state, governing India as a kind of colony of
the Company. But the Chinese, in part with traditional Confucian dis-
dain for trade,4 set up a tight control and Customs system that turned
out to encourage the purchasing of monopolies and allowing various
forms of corruption, in the process enriching the administering officials.5
Foreigners were given, or retained, the status of tributaries, their activities
There were other and even more important difficulties. The tea and
ceramics that the traders wanted had to be paid for in silver (and even
more of it was needed later on for British civil and military spending in
China). But where and how could British sales earn enough silver to pay
for so much of these precious goods and meet other Far Eastern needs?
In London it seemed irritatingly self-evident that the Chinese empire was
huge and wealthy; and if only foreign traders could be allowed to trade
with all of it, instead of being confined to a single port in China’s South,
trade and earnings could be vastly increased. Everybody would benefit,
the Chinese as much as the British (and, for that matter, the Americans).
In this period, which was perhaps the high point of free trade enthusi-
asm following the work of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham in England,
moral convictions were in play as much as economic ones. So, of course
were political and balance-of-power considerations. British interests in the
decades that followed the 1815 Congress of Vienna that was inevitably
centred on Europe and its new balance of power, in which France was no
longer the central player. But the British Empire as a whole grew quickly
to become the largest and most successful trading bloc in history, with a
cycle of commerce that linked the other continents not just to Britain but
to each other. Not that trade was the sole issue. Finance was of at least
equal interest and London quite quickly became a central hub for global
finance. What had begun as lively financial dealings between London,
India and Canton, developed by the early years of the 19th century into
exchanges that strongly involved the newly independent United States.
Indeed, financial dominance became a key objective of Britain’s foreign
policy, though moral considerations were never far below the surface. As
Sir John Bowring, a friend of Bentham and a Governor of Hong Kong in
the 1850s rather grandiloquently put it: “Free Trade is Jesus Christ, and
Jesus Christ is Free Trade.”8
Fortunately or unfortunately, it turned out that almost the only thing
the Chinese public really wanted to buy from the British, and in steadily
increasing quantities, was Indian opium. There was not much demand
even for foreign tobacco, and it quickly emerged that English woollens
and cottons could not compete with China’s own cloth manufactures.
Of course, opium was an entirely legal product both in the British Isles9
and in India, where growing it quite quickly became a matter of great
economic importance. It could be grown, sold and shipped quite legally
to various markets, including the Netherlands East Indies and England
4 H. GELBER
itself, although China remained much the largest market. In fact, over
time opium probably became the most valuable commercial crop in the
world. In China it had been known for many centuries for its medici-
nal qualities but in time the Chinese emperors, understandably worried
about the financial, social and medical consequences of the traffic, banned
the sale and smoking of opium in 1729, reinstated and strengthened the
ban in 1799 and more strongly still in 181010. Yet in this period Chinese
consumption grew by leaps and bounds, as hundreds of local people,
gangs and even officials took to smuggling it in, a process that the Chinese
authorities proved neither able nor willing to stop. Jonathan Spence has
suggested that between 1800 and 1832 the supply of East India Company
chests of opium to China grew from 4570 to 23,570, rising to 40,000 by
1838.11
The causes of this rapid growth have never been entirely established.
But some suggestions seem plausible. For one thing, China’s population
roughly tripled, from 150 millions to 450 millions, from the time of the
emperor Kangxi around 1760 to the mid-1800s. Since land was normally
divided among the land-holder’s sons, individual land-holdings became
smaller, causing one among many reasons for growing social discontent.
Another was that the corps of mandarins that provided the empire’s most
senior officialdom did not increase in proportion to the total popula-
tion. The result was that the quality and grip of the central administration
declined as that mandarinate tried to cope with the increasing population
numbers. That, in turn, helped to produce growing social unrest, mul-
tiple local or provincial rebellions and an effective drain of local authority
from that imperial mandarinate to the local gentry. In addition, during
the previous decades the fundamental distrust between the Chinese (Han)
population and their essentially foreign Manchu rulers did not decrease.
The unrest caused by these and other social difficulties seems very likely
to have contributed not just to increased opium imports by way of smug-
gling, but to increased opium growing within China itself.
There is also the point that, during the opening decades of the 19th
century, there were significant changes in the way in which opium was
used. As part of its long history as an accepted medication and pain
killer – and an entirely proper and comforting personal and social relaxant,
especially among the higher social classes – opium had been smoked in a
tobacco pipe, with shredded leaves dipped in opium solution. But by 1800
smokers had begun to put small balls of pure opium into a pipe, inhaling a
heated water and opium vapour over it. That change in consumption gave
PROLOGUE 5
the smoker not just 0.2 % but perhaps up to 9–10 % morphine. At the same
time, and in spite of the social condemnations of opium heard then and
later, from missionaries in China and Members of Parliament in England,
it is not at all clear that its use had solely harmful effects. Moderate use was
often beneficial and the offer of an opium pipe was often, and remained, a
sign of social hospitality in many sectors of Chinese society.
It was, however, creating serious fiscal and taxation problems. Not
many decades earlier China had earned large quantities of silver from its
exports of ceramics, silks and tea etc to Europeans. But now China needed
increasing quantities of silver to buy opium and, as silver became scarce,
its price rose in relation to copper. But since peasants had to use copper
cash for their day-to-day purchases while paying their taxes in silver, that
increase in the domestic price of silver meant effectively higher taxes12.
That kind of tax increase was bound to cause unrest, and underlined the
empire’s attempts to rein in opium imports.13
But the outflow of silver to pay for opium was not easily stopped. It
has been estimated that in the decade of the 1830s China had to pay 34
million silver dollars not only in bribery to officialdom but in effectively
servicing EIC debts and forming one sixth of the revenue of the govern-
ment in London.14 Matters were not helped by the deep misunderstand-
ings of the Chinese and the English of one another. China was and very
largely remains – as a senior scholar remarked as late as the 1960s – “an
empire of theatre and presumption. It is a construct both of domestic
repression and international aspiration. Its arsenal of weapons includes
secrecy, deception and a sense of history that enables it to take a long view
of China’s interests and ambitions”.15 Its driving force has almost always
come from above and not from its people below. It continues, even now,
to see itself as the guardian of truth; with all compromises with other pow-
ers being ultimately only tactical. In principle, barbarians who had their
own values were guilty of “resisting heaven’s way” but were judged “sin-
cere” if they followed the emperor’s way. Altogether, 19th century China
was a country of complacency, ignorance and rigidity and total absence
of curiosity about lands far away from China, not to mention profound
public ignorance about China’s history of invasion and slaughter among
its neighbours.
To be sure, the senior mandarins in charge at Canton or, later, at
Shanghai or other places, were invariably men of high intelligence and
had little difficulty in understanding the motives and intentions of English
or other foreign traders in their regions. They could also use advice from
6 H. GELBER
the life of villages and towns. That included detailed observations of the
Chinese government on one side and the utter poverty, misery and wretch-
edness of much of the peasantry on the other.19 There were, of course,
other problems for the observers, for example those stemming from the
insistence of the Chinese, then and later, that discussions be held in their
own language. That fact alone almost mandated misunderstandings,20 as
Macartney saw clearly enough. He confided to his journal: “We…almost
entirely depend on the good faith and good nature of the few Chinese
whom we employ, and by whom we can be but imperfectly understood in
the broken gibberish we talk to them.”21
Even so, Macartney was much impressed by the relations between
the Chinese and their rulers, the Manchus. “…They are both subject
to the most absolute authority that can be vested in a prince, but with
this distinction, that to the Chinese it is a foreign tyranny; to the Tartars
(Manchus and Mongols) a domestic despotism.” or again “…Although
the Emperor, as the father of his people, affects and professes impartiality,
and wishes to have it understood that he makes no distinction between
Tartars and Chinese, neither Tartars nor Chinese are imposed upon by the
pretence…”. He then comments on the enormous difficulties for any sin-
gle ruler in governing so vast and varied an empire. There must be endless
“…vigilance and toil; and yet it is a task that has hitherto been performed
with wonderful ability and unparalleled success…. through a succession
of four princes for upwards of a century and a half. Imperial successions
have (so far) been unexceptionably fortunate. Kangxi proved as great a
prince as his father; Yung-cheng (Yongzheng) was inferior to neither, and
Qianlong surpasses the glory of all his predecessors.” On the other hand,
“… it cannot be concealed that the nation in general is far from being
easy or contented. The frequent insurrections in the distant provinces are
unambiguous oracles of the real sentiments and temper of the people.”
Macartney also noted the presence in every province of secret societies “…
who are known to be disaffected, …brood over recent injuries, and medi-
tate revenge”. He added that he would not be surprised by revolution and
summed up his views in a quotation that became quite famous:
The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War, which a for-
tunate succession of vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these
hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her
bulk and appearance. But whenever an insufficient man happens to have the
command on deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may,
8 H. GELBER
perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then
be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old
bottom.22
Whatever London may have made of his report, its conclusions seemed
confirmed by a second official mission to Beijing, headed by Lord Amherst,
which was rejected even more ignominiously in 1815. So matters rested
for the best part of four decades, as England fought its land and naval wars
against Napoleon and, after his defeat in 1815, took a leading part in the
rearrangement of Europe produced by the Congress of Vienna and its
aftermath.
By the late 1820s and especially the early ‘30s things had changed in
both Britain and China. The victors of Trafalgar and Waterloo were even
less inclined than before to be patient with foreign difficulties and obsta-
cles, especially from this rich but obviously rather ramshackle empire at
the end of the world. Moreover, European-style diplomacy saw the formal
equality of legitimate states as axiomatic. For all major European pow-
ers, including Russia, and even the brand-new United States, equality of
status among modern states was natural. (Monarchs even addressed each
other as “cousin” and often were.) The rulers of China, on the other
hand, saw their empire in principle as they had always done: the centre
of Civilization, a unique and incomparable polity, whose civilisation was
inherently superior to everyone else. To accept diplomatic – and therefore
also political – “equality” with others remained inconceivable.
Matters began to come to a head in 1834. Before that, the group of
foreign merchants at Canton had been headed by a senior trader who
found no excessive difficulty in accepting the restrictions and formalities
imposed by the Chinese. Still, traders accused the Chinese government
of violating the law of nations as well as natural law. They harped on the
principle that “All men ought to find on earth the things they stand in
need of…The introduction of dominion and property could not deprive
men of so essential a right”.23 Another comment lamented that the traders
were finding themselves merely insulted “when they come…with the most
friendly and most beneficent intentions”.24
These various difficulties looked, and were, cumbersome but had not
seriously hampered fruitful trade. Many people, in London and elsewhere,
maintained that it would be improper to engage in a “show of force” in
China. But in 1834 the authorities in London ended the Canton trading
monopoly of the East India Company and placed the Canton traders under
PROLOGUE 9
had begun to bite, traders could still buy opium legally in Calcutta, could,
equally legally, ship it in private, non-EIC vessels, to depot ships anchored
at Lintin, on the Pearl River estuary but beyond the effective reach of the
Chinese coastal protection services.30 Private Chinese buyers could easily
purchase and collect it from there, and smuggle it into any inlet or river
they wished. The Chinese authorities, for their part, tried with indifferent
success to discourage opium use and, with no success at all, to stop the
smuggling. The emperor received contradictory advice about how to deal
with the whole business.31 Some officials urged him to stamp out opium
use by increasingly severe anti-opium measures. Others urged him, on
the contrary, to legalise, control and tax the traffic. In the end, he chose
repression, together with pleas to the British to stop a trade which was
not only legal outside China but included those opium sales in the Dutch
East Indies and England’s own, admittedly minor, opium imports. He
appointed a brilliant young official, Lin Zexu, as new Commissioner at
Canton, with the mission of ending the opium trade. Yet it was obvious
that the British, even had they wanted to eliminate the opium trade by
controlling China’s coasts, entirely lacked either the legal authority or the
naval means to do so.
In 1839 there was an even more important clash as matters came to
a head between Lin and the English Superintendent of trade. By now
that was Captain Charles Elliot, another ex-Royal Navy officer acting as
the British Chief Superintendent at Canton. He was a much more careful
and even subtle officer than Napier. Lin stopped all trade, and placed the
foreign residents under virtual siege. He surrounded the “factories” with
Chinese troops and appeared to threaten the safety of the entire British
(and American) trading community. Elliot promised the merchants to
have London reimburse them for the value of their “trading goods” –
which was, after all, what the opium was – if only they agreed to surrender
the opium stock. They did so and Lin destroyed it. But he also demanded
promises about trading in future. The merchants and their families had
to flee to Macao to escape Chinese law; but Lin forced the Portuguese to
expel them. They took refuge on British merchant ships but Lin refused to
let them land and they were unable to buy water or food. Messages reach-
ing London suggested (perhaps wrongly) that the lives of British women
and children were being wantonly endangered by the Chinese.
Matters were made still more acute when a Chinese citizen was killed
ashore in a drunken brawl involving several British sailors. Lin demanded
that the killer be handed over to him. Elliot proved quite unable to iden-
12 H. GELBER
tify the culprit, though he put several sailors on trial by an ad hoc tri-
bunal aboard a British ship (chaired by himself) and gave them prison
sentences.32 London was appalled not only by the danger to British lives
but by Elliot’s promise to reimburse the merchants for their opium, the
cost of which was estimated at around Two Million Sterling. It seemed
more reasonable to expect the Chinese to pay for the “trading goods”
they had chosen to sequestrate and destroy. Royal Navy ships were sent
out to protect British and American lives and there were clashes between
them and the Chinese in which several Chinese ships were sunk.
The matter now came into the hands of the Foreign Secretary, Lord
Palmerston, one of England’s greatest 19th century holders of that
office. He was clever and both personally and officially assertive, while
the fact that his Viscountcy was Irish allowed him to stay in the House of
Commons instead of being obliged to move to the House of Lords. As a
young man he had been conspicuously good-looking and wide-ranging in
his amours. Even at the age of 79 he was to be cited in a divorce case, an
affair that made him more widely popular than ever.33 Yet long before this
he had become allied with Lady Cowper and, when her husband oblig-
ingly died, married her. She was the sister of Lord Melbourne, who was
not just Prime Minister but the closest political and even social confidante
of new, assertive young Queen Victoria. None of that did any harm to
Palmerston’s social or political standing.
He was in any case inclined to share much of the disillusionment with
China that had resulted from the Macartney mission’s reports of its ossi-
fied governmental system and the utter misery of the ordinary peasantry.
He also shared the natural sense of ethnic and cultural superiority of the
England of his day. In addition, he shared the blend of timidity, opportun-
ism and assertiveness of British policy at this period, not to mention the
deep unpopularity of any suggestion that the British government should
pay two million pounds sterling to meet the indemnity promised to Canton
traders by Captain Elliot. As John Darwin has argued34: “Palmerston’s
intervention in 1839 was not the result of matured policy but a hasty
response to the threatened destruction of British trade at Canton.” When
he was challenged in Parliament about this legal, but by no means every-
where reputable, business of opium, his answer was threefold. First, noone
seemed able to stop all smuggling, not even England with its great Navy.
(He did not trouble to point out that even during the Napoleonic wars
French brandy had found its way into England). Second, he asked, did
Parliament seriously propose to replace, from new British taxation, the
PROLOGUE 13
very large income that the wholly legal opium trade was currently bring-
ing to the economy of British India? And thirdly, if the Chinese were
really unable to control their own coasts, should the English tax-payer be
asked to fund the maintenance of a fresh Royal Navy squadron to control
China’s coasts, and prevent its people from buying goods they evidently
wanted? He won his vote in the Commons.
Another issue – one of long standing – proved altogether more difficult.
It concerned the long-established Canton trading arrangements under
which British people were being treated as second-class international citi-
zens by a quaint and, as all reports kept saying, ramshackle empire at the
end of the world. It was simply not good enough to be unable to talk to
senior officials in Beijing, and to be treated like some distant tribe bear-
ing tribute to the emperor. Not to mention being embroiled in a notably
cumbersome and time-wasting procedure that produced endless opportu-
nities for official delay and obstruction.
Chinese pressure and British resistance on these issues led to conflict
and the “First Opium War” of 1840–42. Opinions about its justification
have differed ever since. In the House of Commons the young William
Gladstone said at the time that he had never heard of a more unjust war. In
America, however, John Quincy Adams commented, accurately enough,
that opium was “a mere incident to the dispute…the cause of the war is
the kow-tow – the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China that
she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon
terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of
the relations between lord and vassal.”35
Elliot himself had previously served in Africa and the Caribbean and
so had wide colonial experience. On the matter of opium, he wrote to
Lord Palmerston in 1839: “No man entertains a deeper detestation of the
disgrace and sin of this forced traffic on the coast of China”.36 After the
war with China began, he negotiated terms with Chinese Commissioner
Qishan and managed to conclude the January 1841 Convention of
Chuenpi (Chuenbi). But neither Palmerston nor the Chinese emperor
would accept it. Indeed, Qishan was accused of disobeying his instruc-
tions and sacked. So was Elliot, who was replaced by Henry Pottinger,37
who ended the conflict very much on Britain’s terms, with a Treaty of
Nanjing. That was concluded in August 1842 when Pottinger’s army
was on the brink of bombarding and invading China’s ancient capital of
Nanjing itself. The treaty improved and extended trade to several more
ports. It did so, importantly, through a “Most Favoured Nation” clause,
14 H. GELBER
which meant that any trading advantage gained by anyone (in this case,
the British) would automatically extend to American, French, Russian and
other countries as well. The Treaty also provided for Chinese reparation
payments to the English for wrongs done and debts incurred, and accep-
tance of the stationing of British consuls at trading ports. The consuls
would also have the right to try their own nationals. The treaty did not
mention opium; (though the British, privately and repeatedly, suggested
legalisation leading to control by the Chinese authorities).
In the event, then, the war settled very little for either side. For the
Chinese, the settlement provided formally for foreign consular jurisdiction
over foreign nationals – that old Chinese practice – direct foreign contacts
with the customs collectors, a moderate tariff and most favoured nation
treatment. Overall, its essential provisions could hardly be described oner-
ous, for they tallied comfortably with other arrangements that China had
negotiated a few years earlier, in 1835, at Kokand on the Central Asian
border (now Eastern Uzbekistan).38 In time, the British – and other for-
eigners – found, perhaps inevitably, that some wrinkles in the new arrange-
ments had to be ironed out, but the Chinese flatly refused to tamper in any
way with the agreed texts. Most importantly, while the treaty had accepted
foreign access to Canton proper, the Chinese refused to allow it anyway,
probably so as not to irritate the virulently anti-British local population.
British annoyance about that was compounded by the fact that the denial
of Canton meant having to stay down-river in Hong Kong, which was
notoriously unhealthy. The British had taken that island when it was just
a barren rock, so as to have a base of their own. But by the summer of
1843, for instance, Hong Kong fever killed nearly a quarter of the garri-
son. After the English 59th Regiment had been on Hong Kong garrison
duty for ten years, of the original arrivals the regiment only had ten men
left alive. At the same time, by the 1840s Hong Kong was a stronghold
for murderous pirates, over whom the British had no direct jurisdiction.
In fact, the whole Chinese southern coast was fast becoming a byword fort
Wild West-style criminality. These local facts drew the Royal Navy into
some highly successful anti-pirate actions, for which imperial officials were
sincerely grateful. Indeed, as time went by, some mandarins went on anti-
pirate actions in British warships and kept on doing so even when Britain
and the Chinese empire were officially at war. It was neither the first nor
the last time that the British (and, later, the French) came to the aid of the
imperial cause.
PROLOGUE 15
Chapdelaine, to Silin. But a new mandarin took office there in 1856 and
began a violently anti-Christian campaign. Chapdelaine himself was put
on trial, ordered to confess his crime of preaching Christianity, flogged,
placed in a cangue and apparently had already died by the time his head
was cut off. His remains were reported to have been mutilated.40 It is true
that a number of Western missionaries were working in parts of China
well beyond the bounds set by the 1842–44 treaties. Indeed, Rutherford
Alcock wrote that the only surprise was that of the dozens of Western
missionaries by then working in China, only one had been killed. That idea
was unlikely to satisfy the French. On 25 July the French chargé d’affaires
wrote to Ye saying that the trial of Chapdelaine had been a breach of the
1842 Franco-Chinese Treaty that had followed the “Opium War”. Under
this, a French national accused of a crime had to be tried by his own consul
at the nearest Treaty port. The French demanded reparations. Ye replied
that he was too busy to discuss the matter.
Back in Paris, emperor Napoleon III would not let things rest. He
wished the world to see him as protector of Catholic missionaries and any-
way he wanted to continue the Anglo-French cooperation of the Crimean
war, partly to assuage British suspicions of his expansionism in Italy and
worries that having a Frenchman, de Lesseps, build the Suez canal might
come to endanger the quite critical imperial communications links between
England and India. In September the British Ambassador in Paris warned
London that the French were going to deal with the Chapdelaine issue
energetically. In the following month the French Ambassador in London
discussed matters with the Foreign Secretary, now Lord Clarendon. The
government decided that if the French were going into China, the British
certainly wanted to be there, too, and obtain whatever advantages might
be gained. It was therefore agreed that an Anglo-French expedition should
be sent to secure reparations for Chapdelaine’s death, redress for hostile
actions at Canton and elsewhere, and to secure revisions of the existing
Sino-Western treaties. The Americans, by contrast, showed no interest
whatever in any joint action in, or against, China, whether on trade or
anything else.
Almost immediately, matters were made still more acute by the third
event: an incident on the Pearl River at Canton. Trivial in itself, in an
overcharged atmosphere, and accentuated by the high-handed response
of British officials on the spot, the incident, known as the “Arrow” affair,
promptly led to fresh conflict. The Arrow was a small vessel owned by
a Chinese merchant, with a Chinese crew, but with a British master, a
18 H. GELBER
registration at Hong Kong (which had, in fact, expired. But the Chinese
provincial authorities did not know that at the time) and a British flag.
She anchored in the Pearl River, and on 8 October 1856 was boarded
by Chinese mandarins and several dozen soldiers. Her flags were hauled
down and a dozen crew members arrested with the suggestion that one
of them was a pirate. Her master, Thomas Kennedy, protested but was
ignored.
The raid was immediately reported to the new British Consul, Harry
Parkes. Here was another of those energetic and able young men who so
largely figure in the British role in China at this time – indeed in the entire
construction and maintenance of the British Empire. Parkes had arrived
in China as a 13-year old small, fair-haired orphan at Macao, been given a
post as clerk to the son of a Protestant missionary and set to learn Chinese,
in which he was soon fluent. He quickly became a firm favourite of Sir
Henry Pottinger, who was running the final stages of the 1842 China war
and its concluding negotiations at Nanjing. Parkes went on to be pro-
moted several times and became one of the best-known British officials in
the East, with important personal connections. In 1850 he spent a long
leave back in England during which Palmerston received him for a briefing
on China matters, in which Parkes declared that the central issue in China
was the access of English people to Canton, which was being denied.
From the age of 22 he also reported privately to Edmund Hammond,
the powerful and long-serving Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign
Office. On another occasion, when Parkes was sent to England to pres-
ent a letter from the King of Siam to Queen Victoria, he also took the
opportunity to marry the daughter of a former Master of the Rolls (senior
judge). That provided him not only with a beautiful and agreeable wife,
but with a father-in-law who held a deeply influential position in the legal
and political worlds of London.
By the time of the Arrow affair, Parkes was clearly a man who would not
take lightly what he saw as an insult to the British flag. He went aboard the
war junk that had boarded the Arrow and in fluent mandarin upbraided
the Chinese officers for the “gross violations” they had committed. One of
them (or possibly a boatman) slapped his face. He went ashore to see the
local officials and demanded the return of the Arrow’s crew, arguing that
under existing Treaties the crew should have been examined at the British
Consulate. The mandarins, as Parkes later reported to London “laughed
at me and the treaty, which they said they knew nothing about” – not a
tale likely to persuade Lord Palmerston to moderation.
PROLOGUE 19
December they burned the foreign trading “factories” to the ground, just
outside Canton itself. And at the end of the month disguised Chinese
soldiers seized the postal steamer Thistle, killed all eleven Europeans on
board and carried off their heads, probably to earn Ye’s rising bounty of
$100 per head.
This sort of thing went on for several weeks, presumably confirm-
ing Chinese views of British and European weakness. Bowring wrote to
London that Canton had to be captured before there could be any hope
of treaty revision. It might take 5,000 men to do it.
Not surprisingly, by early 1857 the problems in China had begun to
attract serious political attention in England.
A further, and perhaps equally important point is that China was, and
remains, a collection of several dozen cultural and linguistic groups whose
local languages are often mutually unintelligible. A century later, Mao
Zedong tried hard to unify the whole population on, or around, Mandarin;
but his efforts were, at best, only partially successful. To this day there are
many of tales of groups of, say, Cantonese or men from Qinghai, chatting
happily together in their own language. When “the man from Beijing”
turns up they turn solemnly to Mandarin. The moment he vanishes they
go back to their own language.
CHAPTER 2
For the British government, the China issue was nothing if not com-
plicated. Coming as it did in the wake of the Crimean War, the Indian
Mutiny and a number of previous difficulties in and around Central Asia,
not to mention spats with Chinese authorities, the issues were delicate. Of
course, the China trade had to be maintained and, if possible, expanded.
But the issues went much further. London and Canton had become, as
mentioned earlier, key links in what was nothing less than global trade and
finance. The Chinese populace clearly wanted opium from Bengal – and
in growing quantities. At the same time, the cotton mills of Lancashire
needed the cotton from the (southern) United States, while London – and
much of Europe – badly needed Chinese silks, ceramics and, in Britain’s
case, especially tea. At the same time, the China trade, and London, needed
Mexican silver. And so on. Meanwhile, the payments and exchange sys-
tem on which this increasingly complex system depended had come to
be, almost imperceptibly, centred on London, which had, for a variety
of reasons, by the later 1700s become a major centre – perhaps THE
major centre – of international financial dealings. One recent assessment
argues that ‘London stood at the center of a well-developed network of
international services and these were destined to expand rapidly as world
trade increased…Even before 1850, financial flows from the City were a
major determinant of the rhythm of development in the colonies.’1 One
former governor-general of India, Lord Ellenborough, who knew a great
deal about the China situation, explained matters in London, pointing out
that Canton was not just the centre of the highly important trade between
Britain and China, but a key junction for Britain’s entire global network
of trade and finance2:
The cotton of America, the staple of our greatest manufacture (i.e. cotton
cloth), is paid for by bills upon England. Those bills are taken by Americans
to Canton, where they are paid away for tea. The Chinese give them to the
opium merchants, by whom they are taken to India, there exchanged for
other commodities, and they furnish ultimately the money remittances (i.e.
to London) of private fortunes and the funds for carrying on the Indian
government at home.
fourth and seventh centuries by Arab traders and was duly cultivated for
centuries before the British East India Company (EIC) was even formed.
It was also used to cure diarrhoea, induce sleep or reduce the pain of dis-
eases like dysentery and cholera. It was used for many centuries, too, as an
excellent aphrodisiac.
It also seems to be the case that by the end of the eighteenth century
there were significant changes in the way opium was being used. By then it
had had a long history as an accepted medication and painkiller – or even
as a convenient and painless way of committing suicide – and in any case
an entirely proper and comforting personal and social relaxant, especially
among the higher social classes. Thus, as mentioned earlier, opium was
smoked in tobacco pipes with shredded leaves dipped in opium solution.
The smoke seems to have contained around 0.2 % opium. However, by
1800 or so, smokers began to put small balls of pure opium into their
pipes, inhaling a heated water and opium vapour over it that contained
perhaps 9–10 % morphine. Yet it is not at all clear that its use had solely
harmful effects. Moderate use was often beneficial, and, as was also men-
tioned earlier, the offer of an opium pipe was often, and remained, a sign
of social hospitality in many sectors of Chinese society.4 It is, of course,
also true that opium was not always used with care and in moderation, and
in any case, people who were deprived of the drug often found themselves
driven to use cocaine or heroin by way of substitute. It also became clear
by the later 1820s that, in a period when social unrest and disturbance
were on the rise, drug consumption was affecting not just the general
population and especially the poor and wretched, but the imperial bureau-
cracy, the military and even palace eunuchs in Beijing.
What made opium especially irresistible was its long and welcome asso-
ciation with sex, especially at the higher social levels. It was believed to ‘aid
masculinity, strengthen sperm’ and enhance ‘the art of alchemists, sex and
court ladies’.5 These various uses were, it seems, most welcome to Chinese
literati and officials; and ‘opium smoking accompanied by sex recreation
on leisure boats was well established in Canton by 1793’.6 Indeed, smok-
ing accompanied by sex and poetry appreciation was seen as the acme of
pleasure. Not only was opium indispensable in the sex industry but it took
over the business of general relaxation that had given it a firm hold ‘on
China over the past five hundred years’.7 It was, in fact, ‘the participation
of lower classes (that) made opium smoking visible as a socio-economic
problem in the 1830s’. As Yangwen Zheng has summed up: ‘Opium was
a luxury for the upper and upper middle classes, an aphrodisiac for cour-
26 H. GELBER
tesans and prostitutes, a livelihood for the lower classes and a “pain killer”
for those who chose to end their pains.’8 No wonder demand was great
and suppression difficult to the point of impossibility.
There was, however, a very different and serious kind of problem that
affected the opium traffic and raised major concerns at the imperial court
and in senior official circles. A few decades earlier, China had amassed
large quantities of silver from its exports of ceramics, silks and especially
tea to Europe in general and Great Britain in particular. But from 1820
onwards China began to need increasing quantities of silver to meet the
cost of China’s own growing demands for Indian opium. As the inflow
of silver turned to an outflow, silver became scarcer and its price accord-
ingly increased, especially in relation to the everyday Chinese currency of
copper cash. Worse still, the outflow of silver to pay for opium was not
easily stopped. The estimate for the decade of the 1830s is that China
had to pay no less than some 34 million silver dollars not just in brib-
ery to officialdom but for the purpose of effectively servicing EIC debts
and payments that formed one-sixth of the revenue of the government in
London.9 Furthermore, since Chinese taxpayers were required to pay their
taxes in silver, dearer silver effectively meant higher taxes.10 The result was
that, while 1000 in copper cash had been roughly equivalent to one tael of
silver11 during Qianlong’s reign, by the time Daoguang sat on the throne
around 1830, one tael cost around 2700 copper cash. Such an effective
tax increase was bound to cause unrest and underline the empire’s attempt
to rein in opium imports.12 Attempts at suppression were all too likely
to increase rather than diminish those social disturbances. Two senior
American economists have recently examined the statistical evidence and
concluded that ‘China’s opium prohibition had a minimal impact on
opium consumption’ and ‘China’s legalization of opium in 1858 was not
associated with a perceptible increase in opium consumption’. In any case,
‘…there is little evidence that the Chinese expended substantial resources
enforcing opium prohibition’.13 If those calculations are correct, it seems
clear that opium consumption in China was the result of Chinese demand,
and not due to British or other Western inducements, let alone any ‘forc-
ible’ supply.
The story of ‘British imperialism’ forcing opium on China seems odd for
other reasons. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain itself imported
the drug, and its use, while it was not very widespread, was regular. It
was also used in Royal Navy ships to disinfect foul drinking water. Then
and later, some of India’s toughest troops in British service regularly drank
THE OPIUM ISSUE 27
opium without ill effects. Although there was some social disapproval of the
drug in England by the 1830s and 1840s, there was no major groundswell
of public opinion against it, and even if there had been, it is not clear that
the growers of opium in Bengal or the traders of opium in India or Canton
would have been much moved by that. There were no anti-drug laws of any
kind in Britain, let alone the United States, until the end of the 1860s or
later. Nor did any such laws exist in British India. At the same time, Indian
opium was, as we have seen, one of the few trading goods for which there
was serious demand in China and which could be sold there in exchange
for the silver needed to pay for what Britain wanted in the way of silks and,
above all, the tea for which China was, for the time being, the only source.
To be sure, after the imperial Chinese prohibitions were published, all offi-
cers of the British Crown scrupulously refrained from making arrangements
for it, or giving official encouragement to opium sales in China. The EIC
itself carefully refrained from sending opium to China in its own ships or
formally trying to sell opium on the Chinese market. But there was obvi-
ously no prohibition against growing it in Bengal or on continuing sales or
auctions in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Indeed, the company’s traditional ways
of harvesting and packing the drug in wooden chests continued as before,
all the more so as the company’s chests and lists of contents bearing the
company’s own stamp continued to be accepted everywhere, including at
Canton, as an assurance of quantity and quality. At the same time, it was
clearly no business of any private seller to police the number of Chinese,
including officials, who participated in, or connived at, buying it or smug-
gling it ashore. Least of all was there any vast pressure of public opinion in
England to stop a traffic that brought such welcome income to the coun-
try. As late as 1870 a Sir Wilfred Lawson put a motion in the House of
Commons condemning India’s reliance on opium for income. It was Prime
Minister William Gladstone himself, the very man who, a quarter of a cen-
tury earlier, and as a lively young MP, had launched fierce verbal assaults
against the opium traffic, who now defeated Lawson’s motion by pointing
out that the only viable replacement for India’s opium earnings would be
Britain’s own taxation income.14
British officials were of course aware of the enormous economic impor-
tance of the Canton trade, including large quantities of opium, not just
for India but for Britain’s overall global trading and banking network.
This is no doubt largely why, at various points, some of them advised the
Chinese privately – just as high Chinese officials themselves had advised
the emperor before 1839 – that since the empire was obviously unable or
28 H. GELBER
there any system of British law on Chinese soil that could have hoped to
survive repeated appeals to London by one party or another, over com-
munication systems requiring many months for a single message sent in
either direction to reach its destination. It is true that, as time went by,
the tasks of the British consuls in China expanded, though they never
extended to dealing with Chinese citizens. Furthermore, the British con-
sistently refused to tolerate, and the Chinese were reluctant to accept, the
notion that British persons should be made subject to China’s entirely dif-
ferent systems of criminal jurisdiction, which were in British eyes entirely
unfair, arbitrary and unjust to the individual concerned. As Harry Parkes
explained much later, when foreigners had their own Chinese national
so-called concessions: ‘The Consul acted as police magistrate hearing dis-
putes between masters and seamen, cases of assault and serious crimes
among the foreign community; he dealt as a judge in common law cases;
granted probates; sat as coroner; and generally conducted the legal affairs
of the port.’18
In any case, it would always be much more convenient, politically and
otherwise, for the Chinese to blame foreigners than to do anything effec-
tive – except of course during Commissioner Lin’s period of office at
Canton from 1839 – to contain, let alone reduce, domestic demand in
China. It is a situation strikingly reminiscent of the twenty-first-century
drug problems in the USA, UK and the West generally, which continue
to blame foreign drug suppliers but pay very little effective attention to a
reduction in domestic demand and consumption.
CHAPTER 3
Canton
Whatever the political or opium issues at Canton may have been, the
Cabinet in London could not overlook the special difficulties. Quiet accep-
tance of Chinese rebuffs was out of the question, yet trade with China and
political balances had to be maintained. So the government decided to
send a senior-level official to deal with the situation. It was the Earl of
Elgin who was selected as special plenipotentiary and high commissioner
and to whom Lord Clarendon’s instructions were duly sent.
He was, at this point, a few months short of his 46th birthday, stocky,
with prematurely white hair and sometimes tetchy. When young, he had
taken a First in Greats (Classics) at Oxford and been elected a Fellow of
Merton College. He was also pious in the intense, high Anglican style that
was widespread in his class and station, and he tended to think that politics
should be conducted on Christian rather than business principles. In 1841
he became a Member of Parliament for Southampton, but quickly lost his
seat when he succeeded to his father’s peerage and was therefore confined
to the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons. His father had
almost wrecked the family’s finances in acquiring and bringing home from
Greece the famous sculptures now known as the Elgin Marbles.1 So Elgin
now needed a paid job, and in 1842, at the age of 31, was appointed gov-
ernor of Jamaica, at which post he proved successful.
Five years later, in 1847, he took up the governor-generalship of
Canada, after marrying his second wife, Mary Lambton, daughter of the
first Earl Durham and the niece of Earl Grey. Conveniently, Grey was colo-
nial secretary in the British Cabinet and Durham the author of a famous
report that had shown the way to self-government for Canada and was
to have a profound influence on the whole of British colonial policy. In
Canada, Elgin was once again successful – he even polished his command
of French – and in 1855 returned to private life in Britain.
His rank, connections and achievements overseas might well have led
to a successful political life back home. However, although at Oxford
he had been at Christ Church with men like Lord Canning and William
Gladstone, he had been away too long to maintain the close personal rela-
tions that were at this time normal among senior politicians. Anyway, he
still needed a paying job, and in 1857 the prime minister, by now Lord
Palmerston, offered Elgin the post of plenipotentiary to deal with the con-
fused state of affairs between Britain and China. Elgin accepted.
Immediately he ran into complications. In China, not just senior offi-
cials like Bowring, Parkes and Admiral Seymour but the entire British
merchant community, thought to a man that the key to Britain’s China
problem was Canton. Dealing with Commissioner Ye and occupying the
city was the only thing, they all thought, that would salvage British pres-
tige and concentrate Chinese minds on the need to comply with the exist-
ing treaties, let alone agree to any amendments.
London, though, could see that the underlying issues were vastly more
complex. Senior ministers, and especially the foreign secretary, disagreed
entirely with Bowring’s one-eyed focus on conquering Canton. They
could see that Canton was a secondary issue. What mattered was to keep
the general trade and exchanges going while getting the emperor to rec-
ognise the British government as an equal. That would happen only if and
when a British representative was rightfully established in Beijing, able
to deal directly with the imperial government. All this was embodied in
Elgin’s instructions, laid down in a despatch handed to him shortly before
he left London.2
They were careful and detailed. The high commissioner was told to
sail from the British base at Hong Kong to the mouth of the Haihe River,
which leads from the sea, via Tianjin, to Beijing. There he should open
negotiations with a representative of the emperor. He should ask that
henceforth all existing treaties should be punctiliously observed and repa-
rations paid for the injuries recently suffered by the British. If this was
refused, Elgin could use force.
But in addition – and, by implication, without any necessary use of
force – he should seek Chinese acceptance of a resident British minister
or of visits by such an official to Beijing when necessary; furthermore, he
CANTON 33
Chinese arrogance and, not least, insults to the British flag and crown. By
30 April Palmerston had a huge majority, over all his opponents, of 85
seats in the House of Commons.
So British policy continued to rest on two major pillars: an insistence
on the diplomatic status and equality of sovereign states and an open-
ing of China to foreign people and trade. Even in retrospect, the first
demand has an air of inevitability about it. Given the way in which global
communications and relations between major states were developing by
the mid-nineteenth century, China could not seriously hope to remain
in splendid isolation. If the British had not insisted on more modern
interstate dealings, others would surely have done so before long – and
enforced changes.
The second demand, for increased trading opportunities, was a differ-
ent matter. Modern writers – especially ones who dislike empires on prin-
ciple – often attribute it to simple commercial greed, but that is a mistake.
While it is true that the British merchants in China had powerful friends in
London and that trade had become very important to Britain and British
India, larger issues were at stake. For one thing, the quasi-religious ide-
ology of free trade, derived from Adam Smith and his successors, had
become dominant. Sir John Bowring’s famous remark about Jesus Christ
being, in effect, free trade also makes the point. Moreover, not just Elgin
but the major opium traders at Hong Kong still thought that freer trade
would benefit no one more than the Chinese themselves. So a new treaty
that opened up the potentially vast Chinese market would benefit every-
body. Hence the British insistence at every point from the 1842 Treaty of
Nanjing onwards that what they were seeking was no merely selfish benefit
but greater opportunities for all.
Here was the framework into which Britain had to fit the Canton trade.
There was no serious dispute about the fact that this trade had huge signif-
icance. The Times remarked that, by 1857, Chinese exports of tea and silk
were worth some £15 million. But sales to China included opium at some
£7 million, Indian cottons at £1.5 million and British manufactures at £2
million, so that the rest, some £4.5 million, had to be paid for in silver.
Not only that, but by this time trade at Canton had become a nodal point
in a virtually global network, not just of trade in cottons, cloth, opium,
rice, ceramics, tea, silk and anything else that came to hand, but of asso-
ciated credit and banking patterns of the most far-reaching importance.
For instance, Canton credit arrangements involved cotton from the USA,
which by this time was producing up to three-quarters of the entire world
CANTON 35
supply of cotton cloth. It is not too much to say that this network touched
upon the entire industrialisation process in both Britain and the USA.
At the same time, the government also took some care not to offend
either the Chinese or, for that matter, the Americans, who were the second
largest trading group at Canton. That inevitably involved the opium trade,
which both the Chinese and Americans officially opposed, but unofficially
practiced. The instructions that London gave to its treaty port consuls
were that it was no part of their duties to help opium smugglers, but nei-
ther could they help the Chinese authorities enforce Chinese anti-opium
laws against British subjects. That obviously left the British merchants
with a good deal of leeway. Anyway, as everyone knew, nothing the British
government could do would have much effect. Even Foreign Secretary
Clarendon, in his first instructions to Elgin in April 1857, had remarked
in an aside that legalising the opium trade in China would make very little
practical difference.
In fact, even leaving opium aside, the whole idea of vast and lucrative
trading opportunities that would arise if only the Chinese would open
up more of their empire to trade, was an illusion. As long ago as 1852, a
British official at Canton named Mitchell had written a report pointing out
the awkward realities. British exports to China would grow only slowly,
if at all, simply because British textiles could not compete with Chinese
products in China. In any case, the economies of China’s northern prov-
inces were largely complementary with the economies of the South, so
that the empire as a whole was very largely self-sufficient. The Chinese
would go on buying some goods from Britain just because they wanted
to continue selling their own tea. Mitchell’s conclusions had been so awk-
ward that the report was pigeonholed. Elgin did not even discover its exis-
tence until his arrival in Hong Kong and sent it on to the Foreign Office
with his own approval. But as he prophesied, with trade barriers removed,
‘the machine-manufacturing West will be in presence of a population the
most universally and laboriously manufacturing of any on the earth’.3 A
few years later Lord Elgin himself, after travelling peacefully around large
parts of China, echoed Mitchell: ‘British manufacturers will have to exert
themselves to the utmost if they intend to supplant, to any considerable
extent, in the native market, the fabrics produced in their leisure hours,
and at intervals of rest from agricultural labour, by this industrious, frugal,
and sober population. It is a pleasing but pernicious fallacy to imagine
that the influence of an intriguing mandarin is to be presumed whenever a
buyer shows a preference for native over foreign calico.’4
36 H. GELBER
chants wanted to see US support for the British on the China coast. But
Washington wanted no diplomatic or military imbroglio in China. Indeed,
in the very month that Elgin left for China, the incoming president, James
Buchanan, appointed a new US representative, William B. Reed. He was
told to cooperate with the British and French but to have nothing to do
with the use of force. For one thing, the president told him, commerce
itself would help transform and civilise China, while contact with the rest
of the world would wean China away from isolation. (Exactly 100 years
later a Frenchman, Jean Monnet, would use precisely the same arguments,
about freer commerce inevitably producing political and social integra-
tion, to help found the European Common Market.) In the meantime,
and though the president did not say so, the Americans could happily
pocket any general gains the British had fought and paid for.
In any case, from Palmerston’s point of view, Napoleon III was the
nearest thing to a liberal-minded figure among the rulers of Europe and
a possible ally in promoting that larger international cause. Napoleon’s
reaction to the Chapdelaine affair pointed towards Anglo–French coop-
eration, and that might just be the best way to limit French ambitions,
not just in Europe, but for any expansion from their Indo–Chinese acqui-
sitions into China itself. So Elgin presented himself to Napoleon, who
appointed a highly reluctant Baron Jean Gros as France’s representative in
China and Elgin’s colleague. Elgin met briefly with both Gros and the for-
eign minister, Count Alexander Walewski,7 who hoped that the Western
powers would not push the Chinese too hard.
Elgin and Gros had to travel to China separately since Gros proposed to
sail round Africa, while Elgin could move more quickly and communicate
rather better. The electric telegraph now ran from London to Alexandria
and across India from Bombay (Mumbai) to Rangoon (Yangon). As for
transporting people and goods, by early May Elgin was already in Egypt
and on the first-ever railway train to carry passengers across the desert to
Suez, where he caught a P&O steamer for Singapore. But on board it was
hot. It was boring. There was not even enough champagne. Elgin was
miserable.
When the ship put in at Galle, in Ceylon, on 27 May 1857, they picked
up General Ashburnham, who was coming from Bombay. From him Elgin
heard for the first time that a mutiny had broken out on 10 May among
the Indian army regiments at Meerut. Elgin’s immediate reaction was to
press on and try to complete his China mission, so that troops from there
could be available for India. In the meantime he read some of the official
38 H. GELBER
A further three regiments, still on their way from England to join Elgin,
were similarly diverted by the governor of the Cape Colony, acting on
his own responsibility. All of which left Elgin with just the Shannon and
her crew, together with the inadequate forces already available to Admiral
Seymour and Sir John Bowring at Hong Kong.
Elgin finally arrived there on 2 July to find that local law and order was
an erratic business (which would help to persuade almost half the Chinese
population of the island to move before the end of the year to the gold
rushes of California or Australia). More important, at least for London
politics, was the Hong Kong panic in mid-January, when 400 Europeans
were taken ill after eating bread found to have contained arsenic. No one
died, and no poisoner was discovered, but the moral effect was severe and
the impression of Chinese treachery lasting.
As for negotiating with the Chinese, Elgin found, without surprise, that
no one thought Ye would bend to a British plenipotentiary who did not
have a military force at his disposal or could even say when the diverted
regiments might finally reach China. It was true that Seymour had man-
aged to set up a blockade of Canton and burn quite a few junks and that
there were tiny British garrisons along the Pearl River, but these actions
did little except raise morale in the Royal Navy and engender patriotic
headlines back home. As far as the Chinese could see, all that mattered
was that the barbarians had been driven from the trading ‘factories’, and
nothing was in sight to worry Commissioner Ye.
Bowring and Seymour continued to argue that action at Canton was
essential and the merchants strongly urged ‘the complete humiliation of
the Cantonese…’ When Elgin asked Ashburnham and Seymour what
forces would be needed for an attack on Canton, Seymour again said
5000 and Ashburnham 4000. But the only forces actually available were
less than 1500 at Hong Kong, over 200 of whom were sick, quite apart
from which, Elgin detested the thought of casualties on either side and
remained convinced that any lasting settlement must mean negotiating
with government officials at Beijing.
Yet he could hardly sail north, to Beijing’s approaches, without an
escort force that would make the Chinese take him seriously. In any case,
he had to await the arrival of Baron Gros, who was still making his leisurely
way around the cape of Good Hope. But there was another way out of
the endless arguments with Bowring and a dreary stay in Hong Kong. On
14 July a ship arrived from Calcutta with news that the mutiny was going
from bad to worse. So Elgin decided to sail to Calcutta himself and bring
a naval brigade to Canning’s support. It would be made up partly from
40 H. GELBER
the crews of the Shannon herself and a corvette that Seymour had agreed
to release, plus 300 marines who had just arrived from England. Within a
couple of days, Elgin, Ashburnham and the troops set sail and, after coal-
ing at Singapore, arrived on 8 August at Calcutta, where they had a great
reception, the greater, perhaps, because the locals were badly frightened.
Unfortunately, once the naval brigade had marched out, there was
nothing else for Elgin to do. Calcutta and its society bored him as much
as his harping on Chinese issues bored even the kindest of his hosts, before
whose eyes were the smoke and blood of fighting not far from the city
gates. In any case, he was deeply shocked – as were quite a few people
in London – by the virulent hatreds that the mutiny and its massacres
had unleashed.9 He confided to his diary: ‘Can I do anything to prevent
England from calling down on herself God’s curse for brutalities commit-
ted on another feeble Oriental race?’10 And to his wife he wrote that he
could see no sign of kindness or mercy: ‘I have seldom from man or woman
since I came to the East heard a sentence that was reconcilable with the
hypothesis that Christianity had come into the world. Detestation, con-
tempt, ferocity, vengeance, whether Chinamen or Indians be the object.’
That was surely not unfair. On the British side, the fears and hatreds
aroused by the killings of British people, even women and children, were
greatly enhanced by rage at their betrayal by troops who had sworn loyalty
to their officers and regiments.
In short order, therefore, Elgin, with nothing to do except attend dreary
colonial parties, quite understandably decided to go back to Hong Kong
in a P&O steamer. He arrived in late September and found that there was
nothing much he could do there either, since neither fresh troops nor the
French high commissioner had yet arrived. He still had only 1150 or so
soldiers, 20 % of them sick. Back in Calcutta, he had had a letter promising
that 1500 additional marines would be sent to replace the men he had sent
to India, but it was bound to take, at best, a couple of months before any
of them arrived. It became clearer by the day that if he was to do anything
before the end of the year, it could only be an action at Canton.
A fortnight after his return Elgin received a despatch from London tell-
ing him that, if he had not yet been able to sail north, he could use force
locally to bring Ye to terms. Two days later Baron Gros finally arrived,
was greeted with a 29-gun salute and carried in a palanquin borne by
five Chinese porters to see Sir John Bowring, who subjected him to a
4-hour lecture. Aged 65, Gros was slow, cautious and experienced. A
professional diplomat, he had seen service in Latin America, Greece and
CANTON 41
London, and Elgin learned to value his calm judgment, while his properly
French addiction to comforts and cuisine was another helpfully civilising
influence. He had an artistic side, too, having been one of the first-ever
daguerrotypists – many of his images became famous, including some of
the Acropolis – and he headed the first photographic society in the world,
La Societé Héliographique, founded in France in 1851.
His formal instructions, like Elgin’s, also meant going to the Haihe
River, but he was converted by the now unanimous British view about
concentrating on Canton, and probably exhausted by Bowring’s hector-
ing. In any case, it was now too late in the year to try anything serious in
the North. It was also clear that while for Bowring and Seymour the cap-
ture of Canton was an end in itself, for Elgin and Gros it was only a step
towards a larger settlement with the Chinese.
During November two other foreign ambassadors arrived at Hong
Kong, not to take any active part in the British-led campaign but to give
moral support, keep an eye on things and perhaps to pick up any uncon-
sidered diplomatic or political trifles. One was the American minister,
William Reed, who arrived in the 50-gun steam frigate Minnesota and,
though his instructions said the allied objectives in China were ‘just and
expedient’, was still under instructions to stay neutral while looking after
US interests. He thought the British cause unworthy but agreed that the
Chinese were behaving in ways that kept putting them in the wrong.
Commissioner Ye refused to meet him.
The other envoy was the Russian Vice-Admiral Count Euphemius
V. Poutiatine. A veteran of the Crimean War, he would later become gov-
ernor of Amur province. But now he arrived in a tiny paddle-steamer called
the Amerika. She had been built in the USA and sent to Russia during
the Crimean War in an effort to strengthen the Russian navy. Poutiatine,
who was to prove the subtlest and perhaps most skilled of the four ambas-
sadors, had already been to China’s northern coast and had asked to be
received by the emperor. The reply had been that he could not be received
at present, but if he were to be received at all, the kowtow would be
obligatory. Poutiatine did not persist. He also brought to Hong Kong, as
his interpreter, a priest from the Russian Orthodox mission that had long
been established at the Russian hostel in Beijing and, at the latest by the
1820s, was regarded by both its priests and the Russian government as a
branch of the St Petersburg foreign office.11 It helped the Russians, while
professing friendship to Elgin and Gros, to be able to pretend in Beijing
to be China’s sole friend in its travails with the West. Russia’s rewards were
42 H. GELBER
while Elgin thought Ye seemed to be ‘at his wits’ end’ and was exposing
himself ‘to the worst consequences without making any preparations…for
resistance.’12
In fact, Ye remained complacent. Perhaps he relied on keeping out
the allies by simply using Canton’s six miles of strong walls. These were
twenty feet wide and twenty-five feet high and housed a garrison of some
30,000 men, including Manchu troops, which, on past showing, were
likely to be suicidally brave. The garrison had also fortified several temples
and other points outside the city, and the Chinese had some 20 pieces of
artillery nearby. Also, to be fair, Ye had much more serious issues to think
about than the British and French near Canton. Large parts of his two
provinces remained overrun by rebels, and he was busy having heads cut
off as many prisoners as he could lay his hands on. So he cheered himself
up by beheading another 400 rebel prisoners and displaying their heads on
the city walls. His various replies to Elgin and Gros remained unyielding.
On 15 December the allied fleets moved upriver, and posts were set up
on the bank opposite Canton. Harry Parkes – by now Elgin’s assistant and
translator – busied himself putting up proclamations on Cantons’ river
front, advising the population of the city to leave during the forthcoming
allied bombardment, but none of the citizens seemed to care. The British
brought up four steam sloops, four gunboats and a steam tender. The
French had four gunboats as well. The larger French vessels had to be left
behind, at anchor, though their crews came upriver equipped as infantry.
So the allies had roughly 5700 troops available, some 4000 of them
marines plus a naval brigade. That left them vastly inferior to the Chinese
in numbers, but they had, then and later, three enormous advantages:
in weaponry, in drill and discipline, and in the quality and experience of
their officers and commanders. The allies had two other great advantages.
Almost all operations would be conducted not just with the support of
artillery batteries newly established on some of the islands in the river, but
mostly with the support of the British and French gunboats. And the army
had some properly mobile artillery.
On the 17th Elgin himself moved upriver. Four days later he and Gros
met with the two admirals, Seymour and Rigault, and the British general,
van Straubenzee, and control of the military and naval actions was for-
mally handed over to them.
Although hundreds of Chinese boats and junks hurriedly left the
scene as the naval squadrons moved up, there was no sign of particularly
strengthened defenses, and most of the local Chinese population of Canton
44 H. GELBER
Elgin and Gros quickly decided that they should appoint Bo Gui gover-
nor of the city, assisted by three allied officers who would have to approve
all of his proclamations and try any cases involving foreigners. No one
commented on how odd it was for the governor of Canton to be accept-
ing office at the hands of two barbarian chiefs. The governing body would
include Harry Parkes, who, with his knowledge of China and the Chinese,
became its moving spirit. A joint allied–Chinese police force was duly
organised. It was badly needed: all the riff-raff of Canton used the allied
presence to run riot with robbery and looting. In addition, Pickwick lent
17 war junks, commanded by a mandarin, to Admiral Seymour to help on
the Pearl River, especially by putting down pirates, which was a major and
continuing problem everywhere in Chinese waters. Inside the city all went
well. Reed, the American minister, even sent Elgin a note of congratula-
tions on the great allied success that was mainly due to his, Elgin’s, ‘gentle
and discreet counsels’.15
The Beijing government accepted the unavoidable. At the end of
January came an imperial edict dismissing Ye for ‘inefficiency’,16 appoint-
ing a new viceroy and announcing that Bo Gui would take charge pend-
ing the new man’s arrival. That new man secured the lifting of Admiral
Seymour’s blockade. Which made exporting bulk tea from Canton pos-
sible again, to the great delight of the merchants. But Parkes used his pri-
vate line of communication to the Foreign Office to say that the Chinese
were taking Elgin’s leniency as weakness. In London, Clarendon thought
the same.
None of the leniency stopped secret messages from Beijing reaching
Bo Gui and urging that the people be mobilised to engage in what the
twenty-first century would call harassing or guerilla warfare. A secret
imperial edict of 27 January 1858 was sent telling him to mobilise the sol-
diers and militia to fight the allies. Another edict of 15 February struck the
same note, and yet a third sent secretly to Bo Gui instructed him ‘to con-
sult about arousing the village irregulars…’ Quite soon trouble did indeed
start with people from the villages around Canton. By March, Parkes was
warning everyone: ‘Pih-kuai (Bo Gui) is playing off (the local militias) and
villages against us – no one is safe within one mile of the city.’17
In any case, occupying the city did not solve the problem of what to
do with Ye. His very presence worried those Cantonese who thought that
the viceroy, who boasted of having executed 100,000 rebels, might yet
return to office. If he remained on the spot in the meantime, he might
become a focus of resistance. After all, he was not just a member of the
CANTON 47
Tianjin
Capturing Canton and disposing of Ye was all very well and good, but the
larger and much more important China problems remained unresolved,
especially regarding how to get an embassy installed at Beijing. As Elgin
wrote to London: ‘I am confident that so long as the system of entrusting
(China’s) conduct of foreign affairs to a Provincial Government endures,
there can be no security for the maintenance of pacific relations with this
country.’1 So he would have to go north to Tianjin to put pressure directly
on the court.
He also secured a promise of cooperation not only from his French
colleague Gros, but from both Reed and Poutiatine. Between them they
would create a kind of entente to settle the entire China problem with the
Beijing authorities.2 So the four ambassadors, neutrals as well as belliger-
ents, agreed to write separate letters to the Chinese government propos-
ing that serious negotiations begin at Shanghai, the great trading city at
the mouth of the Yangzi. Elgin’s note proposed the points a new treaty
should cover and asked that Beijing send a negotiator with full powers to
settle matters. But he also reserved the right to take further action if no
proper negotiator turned up by the end of March. Gros wrote in similar
terms. The American and Russian notes, while stressing their neutrality,
said they agreed with the Anglo–French aims. The Russian missive even
pointed out the obvious: that the current troubles could easily have been
avoided if the foreigners had been allowed to communicate directly with
the governing group at Beijing.3
to Canton and there talk with the proper person to handle foreign affairs,
Ye’s successor as viceroy, Huang Zonghan. This kind of thing helped to
convince even the American Reed that the Chinese would only give way
to force. In any case, Elgin refused to accept this reply and set about sail-
ing on northwards to the Haihe River. He merely wrote to Beijing that
he would at once sail northwards ‘in order that he might place himself in
more immediate communication with the High Officers of the Imperial
Government at the capital’. He could not delay anyway, for Poutiatine had
convinced him – wrongly, as it turned out – that summer was an impos-
sible campaigning season in North China. Between 9 and 15 April all four
envoys left Shanghai for the Pechihli Gulf and the Haihe River flowing
into it.
Elgin continued to have difficulties, not only in the North but back
at Canton. However, the arrival of more troops there made it not only
easier to deal with unrest in the areas around the city but possible as well
to detach the 59th British Regiment to go north. Interestingly, given the
recent experience of the Indian mutiny, the new arrivals at Canton were
mainly Punjabis and Sikhs, but there were also some units of Bengalis,
mostly volunteers like the 47th Bengal Native Infantry (of the Bengal
Army), that would shortly be renamed the 7th Bengal Native Infantry.
In view of the new insecurities in the villages and areas outside Canton,
and in spite of the presence of some 3000 regulars plus 1500 British and
French sailors, their commander had allowed them simply to be pinned
down within the city. Clearly, Major-General van Straubenzee, affection-
ately known to his soldiers as Old Strawberry Jam, was not the man to
cope with any kind of guerrilla warfare in the field. Yet uncertainties about
the security of the main British base were obviously worrisome.
Meanwhile, in North China itself, the possibility of armed action obvi-
ously did present itself. However, no British troops had ever campaigned
there, and the local seas, rivers and general topography were unknown and
uncharted. Not even the Admiralty in London had charts of the China
coast, and there was no Royal Navy ‘China Station’ whose experience
could be drawn on. No wonder that the government in London, and
Palmerston himself, relied so heavily on the advice of William Jardine, the
most important and experienced Western merchant on the China coast.
It was, of course, known that the Chinese had built a number of forts at
Dagu, the entrance of the river leading to Tianjin, which was in turn con-
nected to Beijing by water as well as by road. These forts were protected
by a sand bar, some five miles from shore, which only shallow-draught
52 H. GELBER
vessels could cross, as Poutiatine had warned, and which therefore pro-
tected the river mouth from regular Western warships. However, the canal
between Tianjin and Beijing carried considerable amounts of traffic, espe-
cially in spring. It was particularly important as a conduit for rice and corn
since the normal Grand Canal route from the South had been cut off by
the Taiping rebels. The British therefore thought that by threatening to
cut off Beijing’s rice supplies, they might force the imperial government to
come to terms, even without fighting. In fact, that calculation was largely
mistaken. Beijing could not be starved out merely by interrupting its rice
supplies. Though rice was in regular demand by the upper classes, most of
the population lived not on rice but on corn and beans.
On the other hand, Poutiatine’s point about the need for shallow-
draught gunboats was essential, and Elgin absorbed the lesson at once.
As early as the beginning of March he asked Admiral Seymour to collect a
force of shallow-draught gunboats at Shanghai for service in North China.
The admiral promised to act immediately, but when March ended and,
except for one gunboat, neither the admiral nor any other gunboats had
arrived at Shanghai, Elgin kept his temper in public and poured the fury
into his diary.
As it was, he left Shanghai on 10 April and, pending Seymour’s arrival,
took along the senior local naval commander, Captain Sir Frederick
Nicolson. Four days later his ship, the Furious, reached the bar guard-
ing the Dagu forts. Land was not even in sight. Life on board was deadly
dull. The winds were fierce. Elgin found he could do nothing to intercept
the rice boats that continued to sail quietly into the river. On the other
hand, the tiny allied squadron managed to commandeer a few empty junks
to lighten the warships of any surplus load or coal; their Chinese crews
seemed content enough when they were partially paid, in advance, for the
hire of their boats, and put ashore. Needless to say, they tended to come
back at night to try to steal their junks back.
A week later, Baron Gros arrived in the gulf, the last of the four pleni-
potentiaries. They all decided to send separate letters to the court once
more. These were despatched on 24 April and prompted, once again,
prevaricating replies. Seymour also finally arrived on his flagship the
Calcutta but brought along only one other vessel capable of crossing the
bar, though the French also had two shallow-draught gunboats. Elgin
suspected Seymour of incompetence and laziness, but the fact seems to
have been that Seymour understood, as Elgin did not, the difficulties of
getting smaller and more vulnerable ships not only from South China to
TIANJIN 53
the North through stormy seas, but in such a way that they would arrive
in serviceable condition.
Some did arrive by early May, but Elgin’s temper remained sour. It
cannot have been improved by the fact that, shortly before this, the
Palmerston administration in London had fallen and been replaced by the
Conservatives under Lord Derby, who had strongly attacked the whole
business of the China war. For all that Elgin knew, the new foreign secre-
tary, Lord Malmesbury, might already have sent him a letter – which would
now be on the high seas – flatly contradicting everything that he, Elgin,
was attempting to do. It was also reasonably obvious that the Chinese
would not negotiate seriously at Dagu if they had already refused the
Anglo–French demands at Shanghai. Nevertheless, Elgin indicated that
he would negotiate with any Chinese minister who appeared within six
days and was properly authorised by the emperor. The governor general
of Chihli province offered his services, but said he was only authorised to
receive the ambassadors and then report to the throne, which would once
more create the obvious danger that, once any negotiation was started and
everything had to be referred back to Beijing, the talks could be spun out
endlessly. The situation was all the more annoying since Count Poutiatine,
in his tiny steamer, had pushed across the bar and was living on the waters
of the Haihe River, in daily communication with the Chinese. By late April,
Elgin was still sitting outside the sand bar at the Haihe mouth watching
Chinese boats sailing normally in and out and being furious with Seymour
for not getting more gunboats to the scene. Nor was it reassuring that
crowds of Chinese labourers could be seen every day strengthening the
Dagu fortifications, dragging more guns in and getting everything ready
for troop reinforcements.
By early May Elgin and Gros were tired of prevarication and anxious
about the impending hot weather, but their fleet did receive reinforce-
ments. Even then, the admirals said they had too few ships to attack the
Dagu forts. On the Chinese side there were intimations that most of
the envoys’ demands could perhaps be met, but there were two sticking
points. One was the notion that the envoy should be granted an audience
with the emperor but without the entirely normal ceremony, that is, with
the envoy performing the kowtow.6 The other was, once again, the idea
that Western envoys should be allowed to live in Beijing. That was still a
demand, with all its implications for equality of status for states and their
rules, which the emperor flatly refused. As Beijing put it, the whole idea of
a resident minister is ‘incompatible with, or unprecedented in, the funda-
54 H. GELBER
mental principles of the regime’.7 It was once more the basic worry about
how to maintain the prestige of an already weakened dynasty.
Nor was it obvious that the Chinese were much concerned about a
Franco–British use of force. Both before and after this Sino–Western
imbroglio, Western liberal opinion was constantly astonished by the
Chinese indifference to human losses when state interests were at issue.
One French report to Paris said that when Poutiatine urged the court
to give way in order to save innocent lives, the Chinese official merely
smiled and said, ‘They are only Chinese lives.’8 A little over a century
later, in the late 1970s, the Chinese fought a small border war against
Vietnam. Afterwards, when a senior British official tried to commiserate
with a Chinese minister on the loss of some 20,000 young men’s lives,
the minister just laughed: ‘We have a lot more where those came from.’
Similar tales are not rare.
By May, however, even the admirals were ready, and they agreed to
attack the Dagu forts and open the some 200 yards-wide navigable chan-
nel into the Haihe. Almost ninety Chinese guns were now visible, and
there were 50 more further up the river. Several camps of their troops
could be seen, too, and more units were arriving all the time from Beijing.
The allied plan was that taking the Dagu forts would be left to the British
and French, but then all four ambassadors would proceed up the river.
Count Poutiatine had fortunately arranged for a senior man from the
Russian College in Beijing, the Archimandrite Palladius, to come down to
the fleet. The Chinese had allowed him to travel in a closed vehicle, but he
was able to report on what he had glimpsed from the sides. So the admi-
rals had fair intelligence on the thousands of Chinese soldiers barring the
way from Dagu to the capital and the various barrages of the Haihe River
that the Chinese had arranged with junks and booms.
On 2 May the allied gunboats smashed through the booms guarding
the river entrance. The Cormorant and two French boats, the Mitraille
and Fusée, attacked the two northern forts, while the Nimrod, together
with the Avalanche and Dragonne, attacked the south bank ones, and the
Leven and Possum towed French landing parties.
As it happened, these Dagu defences collapsed quite easily. Though
there was an artillery duel for over an hour with the Chinese shore-
batteries, most of the Chinese shots flew high, possibly because the guns
had had their trajectories fixed to deal with allied boats at high tide,
whereas Admirals Rigault and Seymour sent their boats across well before
the tide was at its peak. The Chinese were also discovered to have used
hollow shot and canister copied from British models.
TIANJIN 55
In any case, little damage was done by the time the French and British
landing parties came ashore and started wading through the sticky estuary
mud. Long before they reached the forts, large numbers of Chinese could
be seen fleeing them. By the end of the day, all the forts and Dagu village
were in allied hands, as were large quantities of assorted Chinese artillery
and stores. The only Chinese counter-attack was to send a number of
fire-ships – junks filled with straw – down the river, but they mostly ran
aground before reaching the allied ships and burned out harmlessly. The
commander of the Dagu forts cut his own throat in the Temple of the Sea
God, and the viceroy of Chihli (roughly modern Hebei) was punished by
exile to the northern frontiers. The whole action had cost the British 5
men killed and seventeen wounded and the French 6 killed and sixty-one
wounded. Elgin had already confided acerbically to his diary that ‘twenty-
four determined men with revolvers and a sufficient number of cartridges
might walk through China from one end to another’.9
Three days later the two allied admirals started up the Haihe with eight
gunboats, while the ambassadors stayed at Dagu. Progress was slow. The
river was crowded with junks that had been unable to leave because of the
allied fleet. Furthermore, the uncharted river was so difficult to navigate
that allied boats not infrequently ran aground and had to be towed off.
However, the mud villages along the way were friendly enough. Crowds
of peasants looked on, awestruck, offered provisions and mostly thought
that what they were seeing was just another foreign dynasty coming in
to chase the equally foreign Manchus away. On 26 May the gunboats
reached Tianjin and were welcomed by a deputation of merchants and
gentry – with no officials in sight – also treating the Europeans as new,
incoming rulers, offering more provisions and expecting the gunboats to
be full of trading goods, including, they vainly hoped, opium. Four days
later Elgin himself arrived, and soon afterwards Count Poutiatine and Mr
Reed came in the little Amerika. They immediately issued a proclamation
emphasizing their own entirely peaceful intentions.
Elgin, Gros and their staffs spent four weeks in the Temple of Supreme
Felicity – which had, once upon a time, been a summer palace for the
great emperor Qianlong – that the city authorities handed to them and
was also close to the protecting allied gunboats moored by the shore.
Meat and fresh fruit, even ice, were available to everybody. On 29 May
an imperial decree nominated two very senior officials to negotiate with
the four ambassadors. Guiliang was seventy-four years old, a senior grand
secretary and captain-general of the plain white banner of the Manchu
56 H. GELBER
informed. The first and easiest treaty to conclude was the Russian one,
which Poutiatine and the Chinese signed on 13 June. This treaty had a
certain history. Between 1854 and 1858 the Russian governor of Eastern
Siberia, Count Muraviev, had sent three expeditions down the Amur
River, the Russo–Chinese border, effectively bringing the north bank of
the Amur under Russian control. In 1858 Muraviev led a fourth expedi-
tion down the river as far as the border town of Aigun. There, on 28 May
1858, he and Ishan, the local Chinese military governor, signed the Treaty
of Aigun, under which China ceded to Russia the north bank of the Amur
River and agreed to joint Sino–Russian control of all the land between the
(north–south) Ussuri River and the sea. Beijing accepted the treaty. The
whole affair emphasised Chinese weakness, in the North of the empire as
well as the South. By the Treaty of Aigun they had now recognised the
region on the north bank of the Amur as Russian, while that on the south
bank as far east as the Ussuri River remained Chinese. The large region
between the Ussuri and the sea also was to be held jointly for the time
being. So, barely a fortnight after the signature of the Treaty of Aigun,
Poutiatine and the Chinese signed yet another agreement, the Treaty of
Tianjin, which called for the ratification and confirmation of the Treaty
of Aigun within a year. The two sides had in effect signed a new and very
far-reaching border agreement that gave Russia huge territorial gains in
China’s North. Poutiatine’s treaty also said simply that Christianity should
in future be tolerated in China, that Russians should be free to trade at the
five existing treaty ports as well as at Hainan Island and Formosa, and that
a Russian envoy could be sent to Beijing on special occasions.
Curiously, the first news, not only of these but of the subsequent
Anglo–French successes, seems actually to have reached London, Paris
and Washington via a Russian officer, who carried a copy of his own treaty
to St Petersburg, whence word was sent on by cable. The officer, Colonel
Martynov, left Tianjin on 15 June carrying the Russian treaty document
and reached St Petersburg after an extraordinarily fast journey on 7 August.
From there, word about the Tianjin arrangements was sent on to London
and Paris by cable. In addition, the news was one of the first messages to
be transmitted via the then-brand new transatlantic cable to Washington.
The American treaty was next. Signed on 18 June, it said similar things
about trade, and both the Russians and Americans were careful to include
a most favoured nations clause, which meant that in future they, too,
would benefit from any concessions the British and French might obtain,
including ones resulting from Lay’s bullying tactics. At the same time,
TIANJIN 59
both Poutiatine and Reed were by now conscious of the need to avoid by
excessive demands any possible collapse of the empire and of the entire
Chinese governmental system, and they pressed that conclusion on Elgin
and Gros. After all, if the system collapsed, who might form a government
and with whom could anyone deal about anything? That was, indeed, to
be the central concern of Western and very much of British China policies
for the next several decades. In any event, the treaty was forwarded to
Washington, accepted without difficulty by the US Senate and signed by
President Buchanan a week after John E. Ward of Georgia was appointed
to succeed Reed as minister to China.
The next and most important treaty to be signed, following the
American one, was that with Britain. Its negotiation had been difficult, but
agreement was almost reached by the 24th, though at the last minute the
Chinese balked, once again, over two issues. One was the right of foreign
traders to travel freely beyond the treaty ports. But the other was that old
sticking point: the business of foreign residence in Beijing. From Elgin’s
point of view, it remained an unalterable truth that as long as the Chinese
could deal with foreigners in some provincial city distant from Beijing,
they would continue to see foreigners as inferior. State equality would
only be achieved when an ambassador was, and was seen to be, resident in
Beijing itself with direct access to the highest imperial officials. However,
as things progressed, it became clearer than ever that the very basis of
imperial authority, and therefore of the very cohesion of the empire, was
the moral authority of the emperor and his administrative structure. If
that was undermined, as it might very well be if senior foreign officials
were installed at Beijing, chaos was likely to ensue. However, Elgin was
unyielding and in the end had to threaten to finish negotiating and march
directly on Beijing. The ploy worked. On the evening of 26 June, Elgin
was brought back to the Temple of Oceanic Influences, escorted by 400
men and the military band, to sign the Treaty of Tianjin.
It included the major provisions of the earlier 1842 treaty and pro-
vided that Britain (as well as the other three Western powers) would have
the right to establish diplomatic legations in Beijing. Eleven more ports
would be opened to foreign trade.14 Foreign ships could travel freely on
the Yangzi River. Foreigners would be allowed to travel in China’s inte-
rior, and China would pay the originally agreed compensation to Britain
and to British merchants for Commissioner Lin’s destruction of their trad-
ing goods – that is, opium. There would also be an agreement on rules
of trade, whose details would be settled later. When the British returned
60 H. GELBER
to the river and their headquarters, the French flagship greeted them by
playing ‘God Save the Queen’.
Throughout, Elgin remained convinced that however tough the nego-
tiating tactics might have been, the treaty was incalculably in China’s own
interests as well as those of the West. He confided to his diary: ‘Though I
have been forced to act almost brutally, I am China’s friend in all this.’15
He was sadly mistaken; the Chinese did not forget the Confucian dictum
about forced oaths. In any event, Guiliang wrote to the emperor, making
it clear that ‘At present, the treaties of peace with Britain and France can-
not be taken as real. These few sheets of paper are simply a means to get
(foreign) troops and warships to leave the coast. In future, if Your Majesty
desires to break these agreements and the peace, Your Majesty need only
punish your slave (Guiliang) for mismanagement. [The treaties] can then
be treated as rubbish.’16
On the following day, the 27th, the French signed their own treaty. It
had in fact been ready before the British one, but Gros had felt able to
wait, loyally, for his British ally to get to the wire, even though, at the last
minute, he had to threaten to go it alone if Elgin prolonged the delays.
Both the British and the French treaties provided that some commer-
cial, tariff and other details should be left for later discussion by experts.
This turned out to mean that Elgin himself, Gros and the two senior
Chinese negotiators, Hwashana and Guiliang, would meet in Shanghai
in September 1858 for supplementary talks. In the meantime, Elgin had
time for a pleasant visit to Japan. He had originally wanted to go to Beijing
in person, both for the treaty ratification and in order to deliver to the
emperor, in person, a letter from Queen Victoria that he had carried from
England. But there was now some urgency about withdrawing the British
troops from North China back to Canton, where van Straubenzee had got
himself into an absurd amount of trouble by failing to deal with the guer-
rilla tactics of the villagers around the city. Once the troops had left the
North, it might not be safe for Elgin to go to Beijing, so he abandoned
his original travel plans.
In the meantime, the Chinese played the kind of game to which, by
now, the allies were accustomed. Elgin and Gros wanted official con-
firmation that the emperor had approved the treaties. The Chinese, all
smiles, produced an imperial decree that said the emperor had ‘noted’
the treaties’ contents. That formula, which said nothing about approv-
ing anything, would obviously open the way to endless prevarication, so
Elgin and Gros insisted on formal approval. To reinforce insistence, Elgin
TIANJIN 61
ordered the 59th Regiment (the 2nd Nottinghamshires) who had helped
to occupy Canton, up from Dagu to Tianjin, whereupon the right kind
of imperial decree was promptly forthcoming, and the 59th were, equally
promptly, sent back to Hong Kong. Elgin also paid a private visit to the
Chinese commissioners in which he quietly raised the question whether it
might not also be a good idea to send a Chinese ambassador to London.
In any event, on 6 July, Elgin and Gros left Tianjin, by now laden with
Chinese gifts. The treaty document was handed to Elgin’s younger
brother, Frederick Bruce, for him to take to London. It was, however,
agreed that the treaty should be ratified by both sides, in Beijing, within
twelve months.
In a broader sense the treaty, as now agreed, fulfilled the aims Britain
had pursued for the two decades since 1840. It finally provided for dip-
lomatic representation in Beijing. It opened more ports to trade – some
eleven of them. Foreigners would be allowed to travel to China’s interior
(despite the dangers that might pose for civil peace and social stability in
the empire; on this point the worries of the old emperors, dating back to
the early 1700s, turned out to be only too justified). Christianity could
be promoted and preached by missionaries. China would pay four million
taels of silver as indemnity to cover the costs of the British military expedi-
tion and the losses that British persons had suffered at Canton.17 It was
agreed that British consuls at the treaty ports would have jurisdiction over
British subjects. That had been a ticklish subject for decades. The British,
accustomed to trial by jury and with guilt or innocence determined for an
accused individual, would have nothing to do with a Chinese system liable
to deal summarily with any member of a group – a family, say, or ships’
company – any one of whom might be taken to suffer for the offence.
As to the remaining details on tariffs, Elgin returned to Shanghai in
mid-September. The Chinese commissioners failed to appear. Elgin waited
for some time before writing to suggest pointedly that perhaps he and his
military escort should return to Tianjin to spare them the tedium of the
journey south. The Chinese commissioners promptly turned up, and talks
began in October. On the British side, details this time were handled by
Thomas Wade and Elgin’s secretary, Laurence Oliphant.
In fact, the talks dealt with more important matters than regular trade
tariffs. Those were settled easily enough, at five per cent on both Chinese
imports and exports. But the Chinese also, and finally, settled the matter
of opium. As long ago as 1842 the British had gently suggested to the
Chinese authorities that their existing opium prohibitions appeared to be
62 H. GELBER
with the Chinese empire was to continue and grow. Arguably even more
important was the danger that, if the government collapsed, China might
fall apart politically. In which case the consequences, for instance in fur-
ther Russian expansion in Asia, could be hugely damaging to the whole
East and Central Asian balance of power. Elgin also thought that, since
the Treaty of Tianjin had been exacted by force, it would be as well for the
future of Anglo–Chinese relations if the British behaved with moderation
and civility, even if, quite obviously, Guiliang achieved China’s central dip-
lomatic and reputational gain in preventing so-called foreign ambassadors
from living in Beijing. Paradoxically, the whole reluctant Chinese admis-
sion of deep structural weakness might turn out to be a trump card in the
empire’s negotiations with the Europeans. So Elgin agreed, though many
observers, then and later, criticized him for it.22
On 2 May the foreign secretary duly wrote to say that Britain ‘would
not insist upon the residence of her Majesty’s Minister being permanently
fixed at Beijing’, and on 9 August Malmesbury himself told Elgin that
‘Peking would be a rat trap for the envoy if the Chinese meant mischief’,23
especially once British and allied troops had left North China. Gros, too,
was against permanent residence in the capital.
In any event, Elgin was able to leave Shanghai in early November 1858
and, by agreement with the imperial authorities, to travel up the Yangzi
as far as Hankow before returning once more to Shanghai. On the way
he stopped off at Nanjing, again the capital of the Taiping rebels, and
concluded that the people regarded them ‘with feelings akin to those with
which they would have regarded earthquake or pestilence.’24 He went on
to Hong Kong and left for England in early March 1859.
The London government had originally decided that the new resident
ambassador to Beijing should be a very senior official. The French thought
the same and offered their appointment to Baron Gros. He declined, on
the sensible grounds that the Chinese emperor would hardly wish to
receive in person people who had forced such revolutionary concessions
on him at the point of the bayonet.25 But when it became clear that Elgin
had, in effect, agreed not to exercise the right of permanent residence,
Paris and London decided to appoint persons of lesser rank as ministers,
rather than as full ambassadors. By mid-January 1859, it was decided to
send Frederick Bruce out to China again to exchange those necessary rati-
fication documents for the 1858 treaty and then to assume the post of
non-resident minister plenipotentiary at the Chinese court. However, the
government continued to insist that ratification proper must take place
64 H. GELBER
in Beijing, though Bruce could see the emperor privately rather than in a
public ratification ceremony.
In addition, Bruce was told to relieve Sir John Bowring as superinten-
dent of trade, though Bowring could continue as governor of the Hong
Kong colony. Bruce himself should be established at Shanghai, as the
base both for his Beijing mission and for the superintendency of trade.
Frederick Bruce promptly left London and crossed paths briefly in Ceylon
with his brother Elgin, who was now on his way home.
While he was on his way, there was more trouble at Canton. Ye’s suc-
cessor as viceroy instructed his people to ‘Go forth in your myriads…
and take vengeance on the enemy of your sovereign’. By now, too, the
Russians had promised to supply the Chinese with 10,000 rifles and 50
cannon. Meanwhile, in February 1859, van Straubenzee at Canton had
finally decided to do something about the guerrilla nuisance. He led a
column to destroy a guerrilla fort some seven miles outside the city. Later,
when some Chinese set an ambush for a party of military police doing
their rounds, and killed seven of them, the general retaliated by demolish-
ing the entire street where the ambush had happened. There was no more
trouble. Hope Grant, the general who would command the British force a
year later, said afterwards that his wife and Lady Straubenzee ‘were carried
in sedan chairs through the crowded streets and by-lanes without meeting
with any incivility’.26
Bruce stayed only briefly in Hong Kong before sailing on to Shanghai,
now accompanied by his new and fiery little French colleague, Count
Alphonse de Bourboulon, the new French minister to China. The
Frenchman was a lively professional diplomat, one of whose distinctions
was to have married the tall, slim and statuesque Catherine Fanny McLeod
during a posting in the USA. The social position of the de Bourboulons
was much enhanced by Catherine’s claim that her family was connected
with royalty. In any event, Bruce and de Bourboulon arrived at Shanghai
in early June 1859, just as the political cycle in London was turning again
to bring Palmerston back as prime minister, this time with Lord John
Russell as foreign secretary.
Before leaving Hong Kong to sail north, Bruce learned that the
emperor was so angry about the Tianjin Treaty that no envoy would be
received in any kind of audience. He also heard that military prepara-
tions were going ahead not only at Tianjin and Beijing but also at the
river’s mouth at Dagu, where new cannon were being cast,27 and that the
task of preventing any foreign armies from approaching Beijing had been
TIANJIN 65
and de Bourboulon simply sailed north without seeing them and arrived
at the mouth of the Haihe, but beyond the sand bar, on 18 June. This
time, the allies had 16 warships in place, including one ship of the line, all
commanded by Rear Admiral Sir James Hope, a Scot who had succeeded
Admiral Seymour a couple of months earlier. Hope had joined the navy at
age fifteen and reached the rank of captain by the age of thirty. The French
had only two small ships present since most of the French navy in the East,
and a force of some 4000 under Admiral Rigault de Genouilly, was now
busy in Indo-China, in operations against Annam.29
On arriving at Dagu, it was at once clear that the forts had indeed
been greatly strengthened since the allies had so easily occupied them the
year before. There were many more guns and men in place, and chains
and heavy bamboo trunks had been installed as booms across the river
entrance.
Here was obviously a foretaste of trouble. But, contrary to various later
conspiracy theories, it was not, it turned out, that the Chinese necessarily
wanted to bar all access to Beijing. It was true that the court still hoped to
deal with ratification of the 1858 treaty at Shanghai, but it was willing to
let the negotiators come to Beijing. On the other hand, the Chinese did
want the embassies, if they had to come to the capital, to go to there by
road after landing at Beitang, a small coastal town about ten miles up the
coast from Dagu, not just because they wanted the details of the new Dagu
defence arrangements kept secret, but for overriding reasons of national
politics and morale. (Also, did the very idea of a British fleet of sixteen
warships sailing up the Haihe seem too much like a victory parade?) In
any case, on 18 June the Grand Council ordered that three buildings be
prepared as residences at Beijing for the British, French and American
ministers ‘in conformity with the precedents of various tribute-bearing
barbarians’.30 So the buildings were outside the eastern gate of the capital.
The new American minister, John Ward, did as the Chinese demanded.
He had also arrived at Dagu on his way to the capital for the ratification of
his treaty and was also invited to go, with an escort, via Beitang. He did.
He was left to cool his heels at the small port for some three weeks. Then,
on the first stage of their 160-mile journey to Beijing, the Americans
were taken along the Haihe River in large sampans and then by some
rough carts pulled by mules – a normal mode of transport for subject
peoples and tribute-bearers – over some very stony roads. The carts were
so uncomfortable, having no springs, seats or cushions, that for the last
stretch of the week-long journey the Americans chose to walk. By now, of
TIANJIN 67
course, they were entirely in the hands of the Chinese without any sup-
port or protection of their own. They entered Beijing on 27 July before
a crowd eager to see the vanquished enemy make his submission – after
all, had not the Americans had a hand in the Dagu battle? Ward’s group
was accommodated in large, comfortable houses and given servants and
food. But they were not allowed to fly their own flag and were prevented
from moving around the city or from contacting the Russians (who had
already ratified their own 1858 Treaty of Tianjin with the Chinese; this
had been done on 24 April by the Russian representative and Sushun, the
president of the Board of Revenue). Ward wanted to hand over President
Buchanan’s letter of credence personally to the emperor, in the manner
normal in the West. But that immediately ran into the problem of the
kowtow. The Chinese explained that though the emperor regarded the US
president as quite his equal, the formalities would have to be maintained.
They had to insist on having the envoy at least bow and kneel. And if the
formalities of an imperial reception for the minister had to be omitted,
the normal formalities of handing the president’s letter to the emperor
would have to be omitted as well. The American refused to kneel, so talks
broke off, Buchanan’s letter was handed to Guiliang for transmission to
the emperor and the American delegation returned to Beitang. There, on
16 August, the ratification ceremony was held with Guiliang and the gov-
ernor of the province, and the Americans left to sail home. In effect, the
Chinese had skilfully managed to fit the American approach to Beijing into
the traditional manner in which tributary princes and delegations nor-
mally approached the throne, which was precisely what the British insisted
on avoiding. The minister, deeply conscious that his mission had ended
poorly, submitted to the president a request allowing him to retire.
However, President Buchanan professed himself entirely content with
this outcome. He put it this way to Congress:
The British envoy, Bruce, was, of course, from the start very con-
scious of the overriding political importance of the style and manner of
his approach to Beijing. The foreign secretary had given firm instructions
that he should approach Beijing by travelling via Tianjin ‘in a British ship
of war’.32 Lord Malmesbury had not only told Bruce to beware of pos-
sible Chinese treachery but warned that every detail of his visit to Beijing,
being the first mission of its kind to the Chinese capital, would inevitably
be taken by the Chinese as a precedent for the future.
Admiral Hope therefore requested peaceful passage up the Haihe
River. He asked that the Chinese barriers be removed so that the emissar-
ies could sail through. Nothing happened, so on 21 June Bruce and de
Bourboulon gave formal permission to the admirals to clear the obstacles.
Four days later Bruce received a letter from the local viceroy, Heng Fu,
suggesting that he make his way to Beijing, not via Dagu but through
Beitang. For the usual reasons, the Chinese also wanted the allies to use
a more indirect, modest and quasi-tributary way of getting to the capital.
There were additional reasons for Bruce to find Heng Fu’s note unhelp-
ful. Among other things, in the Chinese note the name of Queen Victoria
had been written at a lower level than that of the emperor – in Chinese
usage a not very subtle assertion of superiority, even dominance. In any
case, Malmesbury had already stipulated that Bruce should go to Tianjin
in a warship. That was not just to make a demonstration. Only if Tianjin
was threatened by the guns of a British warship was a British envoy likely
to be properly treated by, and in, Beijing. Conversely, if Bruce did go
via Beitang and travel overland, with his gunboats still outside Dagu, his
chances of success at Beijing itself would obviously be greatly reduced.
However, by the time Bruce saw Heng Fu’s letter he could in any case
no longer communicate with Admiral Hope, who was on the verge of
launching his attack on the Dagu forts. Hope therefore went ahead. But
his movements were slow and, reflecting a confidence in British superior-
ity, undertaken virtually without proper reconnaissance. Only after 2 p.m.
did one of the British boats, the Opossum, start to cut a passage. Only
when she, followed by three other gunboats, got to the second barrier
TIANJIN 69
Recovery
The news of Hope’s defeat at Dagu did not reach London until mid-
September 1859. By that time, ministers were on holiday at various
country houses and estates, which gave Edmund Hammond, Permanent
Secretary at the Foreign Office, plenty of time and room to sway Cabinet
opinion in bilateral correspondence with the various ministers, who were
at best lukewarm about the whole thing. But Hammond’s strong view
was that the British on the spot must be supported and an expeditionary
force sent out to show the Chinese the error of their ways. The Times said
the Chinese were ‘perfidious hordes’ whose behaviour had been ‘faithless,
barbarous and treacherous’. Indeed, Bruce himself and his advisers, who
had gone back to Shanghai and reflected on what had happened, were
more and more persuaded, or persuaded themselves, that there had simply
been a conspiracy against him that no diplomacy could have foiled.
When the London Cabinet met on 17 September 1859, it agreed to
send a strong expedition, but ministers still shied away from forcible action.
That was hardly a sustainable position, and in the end both Palmerston
and Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell accepted that shilly-shallying
would be interpreted as weakness by all and sundry. That would not only
damage the China trade but have effects on the politics of Europe itself.
The case for strong action was further underlined when details emerged
of how the visit to Beijing of the American envoy, Ward, had been treated,
and news came that the Chinese emperor had formally approved what had
been done in his name at Dagu. As officialdom briefly recorded later: ‘As
soon as the British Government had assured themselves that the repulse
at the Taku [Dagu] fort had been ordered and approved by the Emperor
of China, and that no apology was forthcoming, they decided on sending
out 10,000 troops under Sir Hope Grant…’.1
In the meantime, Palmerston had recruited Elgin, on his return to
England, into the government, where he became postmaster general.2 He
now found himself, to his considerable annoyance, lectured by Hammond,
who suggested that, by giving way on the matter of ambassadorial resi-
dence in Beijing (as distinct from rights of access by visit), he had merely
encouraged the Chinese to look for further concessions. That had actually
helped to produce recent events and the British defeat. The cabinet found
itself so divided that Lord John had to confine himself to oracular obscu-
rity when communicating with Bruce. The government, he wrote on 26
September, could not judge what Bruce should have done on the spot,
but nothing had happened ‘to diminish the confidence which they repose
in you’.3 That attitude would not last.
In any case, the British hand was once again being forced by the French.
The views of the action party in London were reinforced by evidence that
the French emperor was determined to react fiercely to the China defeat
and go it alone if necessary. It became clear that Napoleon, who was in
any case hankering after military glory to emulate his famous uncle, was
collecting troops. No one was quite sure what French plans actually were,
but it was suggested that perhaps some 12,000 French infantry, plus 20
small gunboats, half a dozen artillery batteries and some cavalry might be
sent out. When Napoleon was warned by his ambassador that London
was not keen to be really tough with the Chinese, he put a burr under
British saddles by gently suggesting that if Britain did not want to send an
expedition to match the French one, perhaps they would help by provid-
ing transport. Palmerston and Lord John promptly insisted on sending a
British force at least equal to that of the French.
Elgin was now worried. Back at Shanghai he had given way to Chinese
pleas that the empire might collapse into chaos if he insisted on sending an
ambassador to live in Beijing. That surely set limits on what could usefully
be done. As he explained, rather helplessly, while harping on England’s
direct economic interests: ‘If you humiliate the Emperor beyond measure,
if you seriously impair his influence over his own subjects, you kill the
golden goose that lays the golden eggs, throw the country into confusion
and impair the most lucrative trade you have in the world.’4 All he could
now think of was to write a paper for the Cabinet, arguing that all the
allies needed to do was to seal up the Gulf of Pechili, thereby stopping the
RECOVERY 73
traffic of junks that brought rice to Beijing from the South. Once deprived
of essential food, the Chinese would probably come to terms without a
single allied soldier having to land. Even if a military expedition had to be
sent, it should try to achieve its aims without moving to Beijing but stop
short, possibly at Tianjin. The Secretary of State for War, Sidney Herbert,
was even more explicit about the limitations of British expectations. ‘…
our quarrel is not with the people but with the Government’, he wrote on
26 November in a long and detailed letter to the commander of the allied
army, Sir James Hope Grant.
At the ports where we trade, our peaceful relations have remained unim-
paired. Our object in going to China is to trade; and they trade with us
uninterruptedly, though the central Government fires on our ships, and
arrests the progress of our ambassador. It is important to maintain, if pos-
sible, this good understanding with the Chinese people at the trading ports.
The pressure, therefore, whatever it be, should be as far as possible confined
to the central Government…our object is to get our peace ratified without
being obliged to have recourse to an advance (i.e. on Beijing itself). An early
termination of our Chinese difficulty is therefore most desirable….5
all his army up to this point. Here we are, then, with our base established
in the heart of the country, in a capital climate, with abundance around us,
our army in excellent health and these stupid people give me a snub, which
obliges me to break with them. No one knows whether our progress is to be
a fight or an ovation, for in this country nothing can be foreseen. I think it
better that an olive-branch should advance with the sword…8
that ‘the deplorable mishap at the mouth of the Hai he’ (in other words
the costly repulse the allies had suffered) made retaliation unavoidable.
But it also repeated that
… our quarrel is not with the people, but with the Government. At the
ports where we trade our peaceful relations have remained unimpaired. Our
object in going to China is to trade; and they trade with us uninterruptedly,
though the central Government fires on our ships, and arrests the prog-
ress of our ambassador. It is important to maintain, if possible, this good
understanding with the Chinese people at the trading ports…the pressure…
should as far as possible be confined to the central Government…
Our object is to get our peace [i.e. the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin] ratified
without being obliged to have recourse to an advance on Pekin itself. With
the numbers which the Chinese Government have at their command, the
advance of what…is but a handful of men into an enormous capital is haz-
ardous; and the operation, if successful, might possibly, in the present disor-
ganized state of the Chinese empire, end in upsetting the existing dynasty,
and throwing the whole country into a state of anarchy…
An early termination of our Chinese difficulty is therefore most desirable.
Our allies probably have different views...the stability of the Chinese empire
is not important to them…
Herbert also noted, in the same letter, that ‘I trust you will prove right
in the hopes you entertain of a bloodless termination to all our prepara-
tions, and that the Chinese, who have rejected rather contumeliously the
ultimatum of a distant enemy, will yield to a visible force appearing off Taku
[Dagu]’, though he, Herbert, thought it more likely that the Chinese would
hold out.
Elgin himself was given fresh formal instructions before he left England.
The foreign secretary, Lord Russell, wrote officially to him on 17 April
1860. England’s objective, Elgin was told, was to ‘employ every means
calculated to establish peace’ with China.12 He was told to go to Beijing,
together with his French colleague, and to insist on being received there
with all honour. He should also insist on an apology for the Dagu business
and an indemnity for the losses, and, of course, he should see the 1958
Treaty of Tianjin ratified at last. It was up to him whether he should, after
all that, still insist on having a British minister permanently in Beijing.
He should also, if it could be done without the French making diffi-
culties, annex the Jiulong (Kowloon) peninsula opposite Hong Kong.
Furthermore, he was reminded that, as he himself had pointed out to the
Cabinet, there was some danger that the Chinese empire might dissolve
RECOVERY 77
into chaos, especially if the emperor retired from the capital. Gros received
a similar warning from Paris, which was one reason for him to want to
avoid any direct attack on Beijing.13
Elgin’s first stop was once again Paris, where he went to see Emperor
Napoleon, who said very little. He also saw his old companion Baron
Gros, who was quite as sorry as Elgin himself about having to go to China
again.
It was not that China was the only problem. There was also the matter
of general alliance politics. Alliances, especially in wartime, are rarely free
of tension, and the Anglo–French alliance was no exception. Of course,
it remained basically firm and reliable throughout the campaign. But by
1860 general relations between the allies were not quite as trusting as they
had been. As Sidney Herbert put it in the same letter: ‘Although the two
governments are on perfectly friendly terms, it is impossible to deny that
there exists between the two nations an uneasy feeling’. As both Gros and
Elgin could also see, there was much more here than issues to do with the
East and China. Some of it related, still or again, to French expansionism
in Italy, the Franco–Sardinian war against Austria and problems in North
Africa. Perhaps more important were naval issues. One part of this was
England’s naval scare: the appalled public realisation that, in the dawning
age of steam and ironclads, most of the wooden sailing ships of the Royal
Navy were now entirely obsolete, which meant that not only the entire
naval underpinnings of the empire but the very security of the British Isles
themselves might be in question. Some people even went into hysterics,
wondering whether perhaps the French might take the opportunity to
invade England. Conversely, not much later the French were worrying
about British naval modernisation, and with it the notion that perhaps the
British would effectively wipe out the entire French navy in a quick coup.
Nor did suspicions of that kind fade quickly. Less than 40 years later, at the
time of the so-called Fashoda Incident of 1898, the French worried that
the British might eliminate the entire French navy in an afternoon. (And,
of course, forty years later still – albeit in the totally changed circumstances
of July 1940 – the British did indeed demolish the French fleet at Mers
el Kebir in North Africa, in order to keep it out of the hands of Adolf
Hitler’s Germany.)
Then there was the Suez canal, being built in Egypt by the retired
French diplomat, the Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps. That looked to
London like a threat to England’s communications with, and position in,
India, that jewel in the crown of the entire empire. There were other and
78 H. GELBER
more real imperial rivalries, including ones with a foretaste of the African
rivalries that came to a head forty or fifty years later. Or again, in Paris,
even sensible people had from the start worried that the British might have
ulterior motives in the East, perhaps including unspecified territorial gains
in China; while the British, for their part, wondered whether the French
might not quietly grab Kowloon, next to Hong Kong. Given the worries
about the stability and cohesion of the Chinese empire, some French plan-
ners even worried about what, if the Chinese empire did indeed disinte-
grate, a new Chinese government might look like. Even so sensible a man
as Gros would in due course be worried by a casual remark of Elgin’s to
the effect that, since a new China war was unpopular in England, it might
perhaps be better to help the virtually Protestant Taipings become rulers
of China.
In any event, Elgin’s gloom did not lift very much when he was back at
sea, travelling this time in company with the correspondent of The Times,
Thomas William Bowlby, who was destined to suffer an unpleasant death
at the hands of the Chinese. Passing through Egypt, the two inspected
the Sphinx, and Elgin spent time tearing up old correspondence, reading
Tennyson’s poems and the tracts of Adolphe Thiers, the former French
Prime Minister and historian, and being furious about English brutalities
inflicted on Indians during the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. ‘Can I
do anything’, he asked in a letter, ‘to prevent England from calling down
on herself God’s curse for the brutalities committed on another feeble
oriental race? Or are all my exertions to result only in the extension of the
area over which Englishmen are to exhibit how hollow and superficial are
both their civilization and their Christianity?’14 He also continued to be
worried about the huge – and, in his view, excessive – scope and cost of
the entire China operation.15
Just as Elgin and Gros, travelling onward from Ceylon in the P&O
steamer Malabar, left the island, they struck a rock and nearly went to the
bottom. The captain managed to beach the ship, but most of the luggage
of the two ambassadors, including Elgin’s instructions and other papers,
finished up under water, and many documents became illegible. It took
a couple of weeks for the divers to fish their things out. Seawater had
made Baron Gros’ letters of instructions virtually illegible. But the captain
told Elgin and Gros that their unruffled behaviour while the ship was in
trouble had done much to calm the passengers and crew.
While Elgin and Gros were still on their way, allied forces were
slowly assembling at Hong Kong, where everyone had a most agree-
RECOVERY 79
able springtime stay. The governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, made himself
pleasant to everybody, and Lady Robinson, a charming hostess, was espe-
cially helpful by holding delightful soirées and making other social arrange-
ments for the British, French, American and other officials and officers.
Everyone’s stay was enlivened by watching the Indian irregular cavalry,
in their colourful uniforms of light blue jackets, white pantaloons and red
cummerbunds, plus red or blue turbans depending on the regiment, at
their exercises on Kowloon, especially the ‘tent-pegging’ with bamboo
lances or cutting oranges with sabers, each done at full gallop. Or one
could look over the new Armstrong guns that would play an important
part in the China campaign, while the admirals were hard at work hashing
out its details.
They could plan the deployment of a significant force. The British, hav-
ing undertaken to supply 10,000 men, brought much more. Altogether,
they managed to deploy something like 18,000 men, British and Indian,
in various parts of China, though not all at the same time. That meant
some 10,500 for the advance to Beijing, with the rest deployed variously
at places like Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Zoushan.16 They were
excellently equipped and supplied. Even their medical services were very
good, now that the British army had learnt the hard lessons of gross medi-
cal mismanagement taught by the Crimean campaign.
The French force was smaller. Though Paris had originally hinted at
numbers in the region of 10,000–12,000, only a little over 7,000 turned
up. Of those, the force available for the main advance was a maximum
of 6,300.17 While the British tended to concentrate at Hong Kong, the
French did so at Shanghai.18
Troops apart, both allies once again recruited Chinese coolies for logis-
tic support. The French recruited some 500 from Shanghai, the British
some 2,500 for L1/17/6 per month plus rations and two suits of clothes.
In Hong Kong recruitment proved especially difficult, since the Chinese
persuaded themselves that uniforms and drill meant the coolies were
meant to do the fighting. In the end, though, the terms offered were
attractive enough, especially to the local criminal and underclasses, and
the recruits served punctually and faithfully throughout the campaign.
They were rapacious, cruel and lawless with the Chinese population, espe-
cially the womenfolk; but in Hong Kong people remarked that with the
departure of the army’s coolies, local thefts and robberies had fallen virtu-
ally to zero.19 In any event, British officers found them strong, cheerful
and entirely manageable. So much so that while they were commanded
80 H. GELBER
by British or French officers, the coolies had their own coolie corporals
and sergeants. All of which may also say a good deal about the sense of
national pride and cohesion of Chinese society at this time.
One of the best and most promising officers of the British army, of
whom very much more was to be heard, was Lt Colonel Garnet Wolseley,
who remarked later that any one coolie was worth more than any three
baggage animals. He himself was a man of driving ambition, born near
Dublin. At the age of 18, without the money to buy a commission but
after his mother appealed directly to the Duke of Wellington, Wolseley was
appointed ensign in the army. Nine years later he had served with distinc-
tion in four campaigns, including Burma, where he was severely wounded,
in the Crimea, where he lost at eye, and in the Indian Mutiny. He had also
been mentioned in despatches nine times before rising to the rank of lieu-
tenant colonel. He now served as deputy assistant quartermaster-general
on the staff of the commanding general, Sir James Hope Grant, under
whom he had already served in India and whom he much admired. More
importantly, he was in charge of drawing maps of the so far unknown ter-
ritory through which the army would have to march.
So the expedition was well organised. ‘England has never before opened
a campaign with such a well organized or more efficient force’, as Wolseley
also remarked.20 However, there were some serious problems. Notably,
there was no room for so many men, and their equipment, horses and
other items, on the tiny island of Hong Kong. The answer to the short-
age of land, including training grounds – as well as the need to scotch
any possible French designs on Kowloon – was to have Harry Parkes,
then consul at Canton, talk to the Chinese viceroy there about acquir-
ing Kowloon for the British. After all, it would be ideal as an exercise
and training ground for the assembling force. The upshot was that on 18
March Parkes arranged a lease in perpetuity for a couple of square miles
on Kowloon, and secured the British anchorage as well, for 500 taels of
silver, or some £160 at the time. Colonel McMahon took a detachment
of his 44th Regiment over to take charge. Sidney Herbert thought it was
quite an extraordinary business that senior Chinese officials should cheer-
fully lease a bit of Chinese land to an army that was attacking the emperor
of China. ‘The Chinese are certainly the most extraordinary people on the
face of the earth.’21
The commanders of the British and French armies were both cavalry-
men. The British command had gone to Lieutenant General Sir James
Hope Grant, a tall, thin, weather-beaten Scot with excellent social
RECOVERY 81
connections in England. Among other things, his elder brother was the
famous society portraitist Sir Francis Grant, who became the only Scottish
President of the Royal Academy, and another brother married Lady Lucy
Bruce, Elgin’s sister. The general was certainly no intellectual: his read-
ing was virtually confined to the Bible, for he was a sincere Christian. He
was also distinctly inarticulate, often could not find the words to say what
he wanted, even sometimes saying the wrong thing. His writing was apt
to be unintelligible, and he could not read a map or even tell the points
of the compass. But book learning is not always the highest attainment.
Hope Grant was also pellucidly honourable, personally courageous and an
able campaigner, a clever tactician and an extremely able strategist. Not
least, he cared for and looked after his soldiers, and many officers loved
and respected him. That applied to the Indians as much as to the English
and Scots. At one point Elgin noted: ‘I am particularly struck by the grin
of delight with which the men of a regiment of Sikhs (infantry) who were
with him at Lucknow greet him.’ When Elgin mentioned it, Hope Grant
just said: ‘Oh, we were always good friends, I used to visit them when they
were sick…Their wives used to come in numbers and walk over the house
where Lady Grant and I lived.’22
Hope Grant had begun as cornet in the 9th Lancers and served as
brigade-major to Major-General Lord Saltoun in the 1842 China cam-
paign – selected, it was said, largely because he and his cello could accom-
pany Saltoun, who loved his violin. He fought in several campaigns in
India, becoming especially popular with the Sikhs, with whom he served
for three years at Lucknow. He was advanced to the command of his own
regiment before becoming a brigadier of cavalry and senior commander in
the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. By its end he had been promoted
again and in 1859 was appointed, as lieutenant general, to lead the British
army in China as well as to the overall command of the Franco–British
force. His violoncello went with him. So did his wife. He landed at Hong
Kong in mid-March and the steamer Grenada brought both Hope Grants
on 6 April to Shanghai, where Lady Grant would stay during the forth-
coming northern operations.
Grant’s French colleague, who had arrived in Shanghai a few weeks
before him, on 11 March, was a heavy-set officer of 63, General Charles
Cousin- Montauban. Equipped with the obligatory luxuriant moustache,
he now arrived accompanied by his chief of staff, Lt Col Schmitz and
his artillery commander, Col de Bentzmann. His own military career had
begun in July 1814 as a young volunteer in the Life Guards of Napoleon
82 H. GELBER
as well as other minorities. Nor was that the only unrest. Several Muslim
rebellions in the south-west part of the country began in 1855, all of
them testifying to the internal instabilities of the empire. Xianfeng himself,
though intelligent and well schooled in the classics, was not cut out to be
the empire’s central administrator. He was self-indulgent and not physi-
cally strong, and was ailing well before his later retreat from Beijing to his
summer palace in the North, in the face of the advancing Anglo–French
armies. He was not mentally robust either, as his dithering about deci-
sions shows, not to mention his many uncertainties when faced later with
a likely Anglo–French entry to Beijing. Though he had highly intelligent
and competent senior officials around him, none could replace an uncer-
tain and indecisive emperor. In addition, his Grand Council was composed
of elderly men whose lives had been spent in the closed world of orderly
and senior Chinese officialdom and none of whom had any serious experi-
ence of Western political or military structures or conduct.
As for military preparedness, the empire had not fought a major cam-
paign, let alone one against a modern enemy, for well over a century. True,
it had fought and lost a small campaign against the British in 1840–1842,
but that had posed no serious threat to the imperial structure as a whole.
In any event, neither the Chinese military nor the imperial government
had studied the lessons and deeper implications of that small war in any
depth, though improvements in many kinds of weapons were achieved.
Indeed, the empire had a strong tendency – which was to be demonstrated
again as late as the 1894/95 war with Japan – to handle such conflicts
as mere border wars, to be conducted less by any central and combined
imperial effort than as an affair to be looked after by provincial officials
acting on generalised orders from a distant centre.
True also, though the empire had suffered, and continued to suf-
fer, from the massive and hugely destructive Taiping Rebellion, few
thought that it called for massive reforms in the imperial military or
diplomatic arrangements. The Taiping armies, for all their destructive
power, consisted almost wholly of infantry units of men and women,
fired by zeal, harbouring strongly anti-Manchu resentments and fiercely
disciplined to obey their commanders, but mostly armed with weapons
like bows and arrows, swords, shields and pikes. Only a minority of
soldiers were armed with muskets or perhaps some flintlocks. They had
no artillery, no cavalry and above all no grand strategy worth mention-
ing. When, after their initial conquest of Nanjing, they tried major
advances, the one towards Shanghai was stopped by tiny cohorts of
84 H. GELBER
Western troops and artillery; and when they did try to advance north-
wards, towards Beijing, they were pushed back by Prince Sangkolinsin
and his brave and skilful Manchu and Mongol horsemen, with whom
the Taiping infantry could not cope. For the rest, containment of the
Taiping was managed rather more by local imperial gentry command-
ing their own local militias than by the often feeble imperial infantry
formations commanded, more often than not, by Confucian scholars
rather than experienced soldiers.
Prince Sang himself was quite frank in pointing out that even some
of his special so-called banner forces, and certainly the general army of
the Green Standard, were entirely ineffective against the Taiping, and the
empire therefore had to rely on regional armies. Such depressing advice
did not stop the court from rejecting an allied ultimatum of 8 March
1860. As noted earlier, this demanded a letter of apology for the Dagu
affair of the previous year, assurances that the allied envoys would have
unrestricted massage to Tianjin and Beijing, and assurances that Beijing
was now willing to ratify the 1858 Tianjin Treaty and that China would
pay an indemnity to cover the costs of the expedition. Not only did Beijing
take on board Prince Sang’s advice but, while the allies were sailing north
from Shanghai to the gulf, he was repeatedly warned not to provoke
armed conflict but to seize any opportunity for negotiation.
Altogether, confronted by an Anglo–French enemy who meant busi-
ness, the empire was deficient in most categories of defence. To start with,
it had no reliable diplomatic or information services either for judging
hostile intentions or for influencing foreign decisions. Indeed, no Chinese
ambassador was posted anywhere abroad until a decade or so after the war
ended. Nor were there many Chinese officials who could speak, let alone
write, any European language. That was bound to lead to misunderstand-
ings amid the subtleties of negotiations. The empire was, of course, also
handicapped by its own deep-rooted determination not to have formal
diplomatic (as distinct from tributary) relations with other states. The
fact remained that while channels of information about foreigners were
of course available – reports from provinces and ports, merchants, for-
eign newspapers and so on – throughout the conflict, the French and
British, with access to experienced traders and their local information net-
works, tended to be rather better informed about the Chinese – except
for the internal affairs and shadowy machinations of the court – than the
Chinese were about them and especially about their home governments
and politics.
RECOVERY 85
Nor had China any way of adequately defending its coasts, whether
against pirates or against invasion. The empire had not been a significant
sea power for five centuries, since the early 1430s. Now, as in the ear-
lier war of 1840–1842, China was not short of courageous officers and
sailors. But the junks they commanded were not even a close match for
the corvettes and gunboats of the Royal Navy or the French, whether in
seaworthiness, manoeuvrability or the effectiveness of their gunnery. The
Fatshan Creek affair near Canton had demonstrated that quite early on.
(This was an action on 1 June 1957 in which a small group of British gun-
boats destroyed or dispersed a large squadron of armed Chinese junks.)
Essentially, China had no serious coastal defence.
At first glance, that seems to be contradicted by the Chinese victory in
defending the entrance to the Haihe the previous year, and the forts at
Dagu had certainly been further strengthened in the intervening months.
But appearances can be deceptive. To be sure, the forts were well con-
structed, with powerful artillery and a plentiful supply of mostly coura-
geous infantry to man them, many of whom fought to the death. But
Chinese commanders had forgotten what China’s great military thinkers,
from Sun Tzu onwards, had taught over the previous two and a half mil-
lennia: that relying mainly on siege warfare simply deprives one of the ini-
tiative. Forts are rarely sufficient if the defender does not also command,
or at least can challenge for command, the surrounding area and when he
has no reliable and protected lines of communication and supply. None of
the forts that the Franco–British expeditionary forces would now engage
could deny them freedom of manoeuvre in the surrounding countryside
or in their preparations for an assault.
The land forces that China could deploy had similarly decisive deficien-
cies. China could, and did, deploy huge numbers of men, possibly in the
not unjustified belief, shared by Chinese rulers until at least the end of the
twentieth century, that masses of men and indifference to casualties would
overcome most hostile forces. Many of them, gunners in various forts,
Manchu and Mongol cavalry and so on, were brave, often impressively
so. But the troops, and especially the Chinese infantry, were wretchedly
armed and worse led. Later in the campaign, when one grizzled Indian
cavalryman was asked what he thought of the Chinese troops, he said they
were like birds: difficult to catch and harmless when caught. The bulk of
the Chinese forces had bows, arrows, swords, pikes and shields, even body
armour, some muskets but more often matchlocks and gingalls: heavy
smooth-bore matchlock muskets from six to fourteen feet long, weighing
86 H. GELBER
Then, once Elgin and Gros had also reached Shanghai, the question
was once again what to do next, and on 16 June the two ambassadors and
their military commanders met to decide on their further plans. Since the
Chinese had already, back in April, rejected the allied demands, there was
clearly no point in restarting negotiations with the Chinese, at least until
allied forces were at Tianjin. But how to get there? No one wanted to try
another frontal attack on the Dagu forts. It was therefore decided to seize
the mouth of the Haihe River with a pincer attack. As it happened, one of
Prince Sang’s spies, sent on a reconnaissance mission, had reported quite
accurately to him that the allies would try to land at Beitang (Pehtang) so
as to take the Dagu forts from the rear. The Chinese command tried to
react by turning some of the several hundred Dagu guns to cope with the
expected new direction of attack.
The allies also understood that, as Chinese friends pointed out, there
was usually a good deal of rain at the beginning of August, and it would
be impossible to cross the great mud flats around the Dagu forts and the
Haihe unless the ground had been dried hard by the sun. So it would be
necessary to make a landing before August, with the French – whom the
Russians had supplied with some maps of the proposed invasion coast –
landing south of the Dagu forts and the British landing at Beitang to their
north and east. Either way, the forts could then be outflanked and taken
in the rear. For the final preparations, the allies moved north to the Pechili
Gulf in mid-May. They tried to seal the entrance and exit from the gulf
to the open sea, after which the French set up a forward base at Zhifu
(Chefoo) on the Shandong coast, where they had no difficulty buying
meat and vegetables from the surrounding villages. The Zhifu harbour
was surrounded by mountains enclosing a rich plain and its villages. There
was an abundance of crops, even vines grown in the open. On the other
hand, the French had difficulties. The long journey from France, and the
absence of any base of operations akin to Hong Kong or India, had left
them very short of animals, including draught animals for their artillery.
So they had to send agents to Japan and Manila to try to buy ponies and
mules, not always with great success. Meanwhile, the British, having left a
mixed force of some 2500 men behind to protect Hong Kong and another
3000–3500 at Canton, as well as an Indian regiment at Zoushan, made
their base across the gulf at Talienwan, close to the Korean coast and to
what would soon become Russia’s Port Arthur. When they got there, they
found that the countryside was neat and cared for, with plenty of fruit,
90 H. GELBER
vegetables and grain, though the cavalry found foraging especially dif-
ficult. But the coolies seemed to have no difficulty in finding opium. The
officers managed to console themselves with some delicious oysters from
the shoreline as well as their own champagne reserves, while the French
tried to sort out their transport problems. Those meant, Montauban
insisted, that moving forwards could not start before 15 June.
The relative numbers of Indian and British troops in all three Indian
presidencies after the mutiny speak for themselves. According to the War
Office in London, the troop strengths in January/February 1859 were
as follows: in Bengal, 58,639 British troops, 48,544 locals and 34,143
Punjabis; in Madras, 15,290 British, 67,141 local and no Punjabis; and in
Bombay: 23,161 British, 46,415 local and no Punjabis.27
None of that diminished the British liking for, and admiration of, the
martial tribes of north-western India and the borderlands of Afghanistan
and Persia. Indeed, the Indian regiments chosen for the main drive
towards Tianjin and Beijing were, almost without exception, from regions
unaffected by the mutiny, especially Sikhs and Punjabis from the North.
They included excellent and admirable light cavalry drawn from the north-
west, like Probyn’s Horse, named after Dighton Probyn, who had won a
Victoria Cross fighting with the 2nd Punjab Cavalry during the Indian
Mutiny(28). By 1860 in China, the regiment had become the First Sikh
Irregular Cavalry but shortly afterwards became the 11th Regiment of
Bengal Cavalry. It went through various other name changes but retained
the soubriquet Probyn’s Horse into the twentieth century. Or there was
Fane’s Horse, another regiment of irregular Indian cavalry raised by
Lt Fane of the Madras Native Infantry at Cawnpore (now Kanpur) in
1860 specially to fight in China. It had to be newly raised, as caste rules
tended to disbar many men from travelling across water and many Hindu
castes were anyway not keen on overseas service. The recruits were taken
from regiments being disbanded after the mutiny, primarily from the 3rd
Skinner’s Horse, and the make-up was largely Sikhs, Pathans and Punjabi
Muslims. It was later renamed the 19th (King George’s Own) Lancers in
the Indian army.
Appendix: A Note on the British and French Armies for the March from
Pehtang to Beijing (Excluding garrisons left behind, for example in
Canton, Hong Kong or Zoushan)
The allied armies deployed to China were a surprisingly polyglot group-
ing in which the Indians were brigaded with English units.
British army: the commander in chief was Lt General Sir James Hope
Grant.
The army had a cavalry brigade commanded by acting Brigadier General
Thomas Pattle and comprising a detachment of the 1st Kings Dragoon
Guards (KDG), the 1st Sikh Cavalry (Probyn’s Horse), Fane’s Horse,
92 H. GELBER
and Stirling’s battery of artillery. All three cavalry regiments brought their
horses with them from India, and in good condition. That was fortunate,
given the difficulties in obtaining good horses in China. The 339 heavy
troop horses of the KDG were to be particularly valuable in action.
The 1st Division, under Major General Sir John Michel, was organised
into two brigades. The 1st Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General
Charles Staveley, included the 2/1st Foot (the Royal Scots), the 31st
(Huntingdonshire) Foot (later the East Surrey Regiment), the largest
regiment of the entire British force with 30 officers and 970 other ranks,
and the 15th Ludhiana Sikhs.
The 2nd Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General Sutton, included
the 1/2nd Foot (Queens Royal Regiment), the 2/60th (Kings Royal
Rifles), and the 15th Punjab Native Infantry, plus a company of royal
engineers and Desborough’s battery of artillery.
The 2nd Division, under Major General Sir Robert Napier, was simi-
larly organised.
The 3rd Brigade, under Brigadier General Jephson, was composed of
the 1/3rd Foot (the Buffs), the 44th Foot (East Essex Regiment) and the
8th Punjab Native Infantry.
The 4th Brigade, under Brigadier General Reeves, had the 67th (South
Hampshire) Foot, the 99th (Wiltshire) Foot and the 19th Punjab Native
Infantry.
The French force was under the command of General of Division (i.e.
Major General) Charles Cousin-Montauban. His chief of general staff was
Lt Col Schmitz.23
The force had small detachments of cavalry: some 50 Chasseurs
d’Afrique and some Spahi cavalry from the 2nd Regiment.24
The 1st Infantry Brigade was under the command of Brigadier General
Jamin, who also functioned as General Montauban’s deputy. The brigade
included the second battalion of chasseurs à pied (light infantry), com-
prising eight companies and under the command of Commandant de la
Poterie; the 101st Infantry Regiment under Colonel Pouget, compris-
ing two infantry battalions of six companies each; and two companies of
engineers.
The 2nd Brigade was under the command of Brigadier General Édouard
Collineau, who had joined the army at an early age, fought in Africa and
commanded with distinction a regiment of Zouaves in the Crimea. It
included the 102nd Infantry Regiment under Colonel O’Malley, also com-
prising two battalions of six companies apiece, a regiment of two battalions
RECOVERY 93
of marine infantry under Colonel de Vassoigne, and three field batteries and
one battery of mountain guns under Colonel de Bentzmann and Lt Colonel
Foulon de Grandchamps. There were also some support troops.
In addition, the French were accompanied by a small scientific mission,
much as Napoleon had brought a number of explorers and scientists along
for his Egyptian campaign in 1789. This mission was headed by Pierre
Henri Stanislas Comte d’Escayrac de Lauture, one of France’s best known
explorers.
CHAPTER 6
Interlude in Shanghai
came the first land regulations for an enclave on Chinese soil. Two subse-
quent conventions, in September 1846 and November 1848, were signed
by consul Rutherford Alcock. A month later the peculiar international
status of Shanghai was settled.2 A year after that, in April 1849, an area
for a French settlement was also determined between the taotai and M. de
Montigny. Its area was gradually expanded by a kind of usurpation – partly
having to do with the defence of Shanghai against the Taiping rebels – and
became known as the French concession.
Soon these settlements began to flourish, not least as a consequence
of technical progress, especially in steam communications. In August
1850 mail from London to Shanghai took seventy-eight days, and from
New York ninety-five days. By August 1859 it was taking fifty-nine days
from London and seventy from New York. In 1850 there were 141 (for-
eign) male adult civilians in Shanghai, five years later there were 408.
According to the French, by 1855 Shanghai had 340 Europeans, 68 mer-
chant firms, 35 missionaries and 8 consulates,3 though English numbers
for that year were 111 English trading firms and 23 American ones. By
that time the nature of Western controls in Shanghai had been substan-
tially changed by the establishment, and later expansion, of municipal and
land regulations from July 1854. Agreed between the British, American
and French consuls on one side and the taotai on the other, they created
the basis for the later autonomous government of the Shanghai interna-
tional settlement and, beyond that, delegated China’s sovereign authority
over the persons and properties of the foreigners to the consuls, including
powers of taxation and policing their own communities.
By 1854 Alcock also suggested that these foreign settlements should
run their affairs jointly. The French chose to stand aside, but the British
and American ones created what became known as the International
Settlement. Much later, following the agreements of the later 1880s, and
given the economic importance and commercial dominance of the Yangzi
basin, as well as the efficient administration of the Western enclaves, the
Shanghai trading centres began to flourish quite dramatically.
But the Taiping Rebellion, begun in 1850 in Guangxi province, soon
began to spread northwards to the Yangzi region, an expansion that had
culminated in March 1853 in the establishment of the Taiping capital
at Nanjing, not too far from Shanghai itself. The military organisation,
and especially the morale, of the Taiping army served for a long time
to make them seem invincible. Indeed, the organisational pattern of
squads of 25, companies of 100, battalions of 400, regiments of 1600
INTERLUDE IN SHANGHAI 97
not just of the Manchu garrison – the Taipings regularly slaughtered all
the Manchus they could lay their hands on – but of the civilian population.
By 2 June the Taipings had moved forward – often beheading peasants on
the way just to discourage any resistance – and taken Suzhou. When Elgin
and Gros arrived at Shanghai, they were told that the imperial troops
defending Suzhou, after offering slight resistance, had joined the rebels in
attacking the city and slaughtering the inhabitants. Indeed, in many places
imperial troops who had been raised in the provinces made common cause
with the plundering rebels.
On 23 May the taotai of Shanghai, now Wu Hsü, made an official
request to the British and French to help undertake the defence of
Shanghai. The request was referred to the two envoys who, knowing
about the slaughter that had happened at Hangzhou, issued a proclama-
tion to say they would protect the Chinese city and the foreign settle-
ments against attack.6 In fact, the French also posted a force to protect the
Roman Catholic cathedral. Numbers of Chinese Catholic converts sought
refuge there for themselves and many of their valuables. That, in turn,
obviously created the danger of plunder by any group that might pretend
the cathedral was being attacked by the Taipings. General Montauban
had wanted to go further and send 1500 men to protect Suzhou and its
Christians, provided only that the British would contribute by sending
400 men of their own. Perhaps he was partly moved by the thought that
the rebels seemed to be more or less Protestant and should therefore be
discouraged. However, even then the British insisted on confining them-
selves to defensive actions and would have nothing to do with active cam-
paigning against the Taipings. The local rebel commander, the Chung
Wang (‘Loyal Prince’), naturally encouraged that approach, assuring the
Europeans that, although he was about to attack Shanghai himself, the
foreign settlements would not be touched if they remained neutral.
That was hardly reassuring to the locals. So the foreign volunteer corps,
which had fallen into decay, was reorganised, and a mixed force, later to
be known as the Ever-Victorious Army, was organised by an American
freebooter, Frederick T. Ward.
By 25 May word of a new Taiping offensive reached Shanghai. It had
evidently been timed to coincide with the Anglo–French move to the
North. Shanghai’s fears increased sharply with the fall of Suzhou on 24
May, a mere twenty miles from Shanghai itself. In early June, after the
rebels had captured it with the usual massive bloodshed, the local imperial
viceroy came to Shanghai to confer with Frederick Bruce. He wanted to
INTERLUDE IN SHANGHAI 101
try to settle the general Sino–allied differences that had led to the allied
China campaign in the first place, but also to persuade the allies to use
their forces to pacify the entire region, with its general commercial impor-
tance. However, the French now agreed with Bruce that, while Shanghai
should be defended if there was a Taiping attack – a four and a half mile
radius around the city would be protected, although Suzhou housed some
13,000 Chinese Roman Catholics – beyond that the allies should stick to
policies of neutrality in domestic Chinese quarrels. But to make protec-
tion work, Shanghai repaired its brick walls, ditches around the city were
deepened and Royal Marines posted to command the approaches to the
Chinese city and, especially, the foreign settlements, while the French held
the most exposed city gate. Guns were mounted so as to be able to fire
grapeshot down city streets in case parts of the population should rise in
support of the Tapings. Baskets were hung from the battlements contain-
ing the chopped-off heads of prisoners.
A couple of months later the Taipings advanced further from Suzhou,
and Shanghai’s defenders could see the smoke and flames of burning vil-
lages in the west. Then the Taipings took the Jesuit college and church
at a spot called Zicawei (Sicawei) and made it their local headquarters.
From there they attacked a Manchu fort and moved forwards towards
the west gate of Shanghai itself. Not unnaturally, thousands of Chinese
sought refuge in the foreign settlements, whose Chinese population may
have increased to as much as 300,000. Not only that, but real estate prices
soared: land originally bought for £46–74 per acre was now sold for
£8,000–12,000 per acre.
The imperial troops fled at first contact. The Taipings advanced through
the suburbs and closer to the city proper, managing in the process to
burn down the French quarter. As their advance continued, they found to
their surprise British and French flags flying on the city walls, which were
manned not only by some volunteers but by detachments of allied troops,
the British under Captain Budd of the Royal Marines and the French
under Captain Faure. There was also support from the guns of allied war-
ships on the Yangzi estuary. Rifle fire from the French, British and Indian
soldiers of the garrison, together with some canister discharges, kept
Taiping heads down. At the same time, observation towers inside the city
itself kept a sharp eye on any possible Taiping sympathisers in the streets.
The attackers were eventually driven back by the combination of guns
from the city walls and the allied gunboats. The defenders followed up by
sending parties out at night to set fire to some of the suburbs in which the
102 H. GELBER
attackers sheltered while they were engaging in pillage and massacre. After
that, the Taiping army withdrew back towards Zicawei, leaving behind
many dead, including the bodies of a number of foreign volunteers, mostly
American and British, who had come to fight with the rebels.7
By September, irrespective of events in the North and the progress of
Hope Grant’s army, which by then had almost fought its way to Beijing,
the Chinese authorities once again appealed for the help of allied forces in
the Yangzi basin.
It was an extraordinary situation and a remarkable story. Here were two
European allies actively preparing and conducting a military campaign in
North China and an advance on the emperor’s capital. At the same time,
those allies were engaging themselves in defence of that very ruler’s major
city against domestic rebellion, and even safeguarding his income from
foreign trade. They went further. Once the allied military expedition had
taken the forts at the entrance to the Haihe River, and was on its way
to Tianjin – as discussed later – General Hope Grant detached Brigadier
Jephson of the 2nd Division, with the 44th (East Essex) Regiment, plus
some French mountain guns and two companies of French infantry, and
sent them down the coast to reinforce Shanghai’s defences. By the time
they arrived, the Taiping attack on the city had been repelled, but the
soldiers stayed on.
Not only that, but England sent out a large granite cross in memory
of the British who had lost their lives as captives in Chinese prisons dur-
ing the 1859/1860 campaign.8 There were difficulties with putting the
cross up in Beijing, so it was erected in Shanghai, originally in front of the
British consulate.
Of course, Shanghai was defended by a much greater variety of groups
than the Anglo–French soldiery or even armed Shanghai citizens. In the
confused state of affairs in that part of China, there was certainly a place
for freebooters and mercenaries of every sort.
Probably the most famous of them was the mixed force commanded
by the adventurous Frederick Townsend Ward. Born in 1831 in Salem,
Massachusetts, he had become a mercenary in Mexico by the age of
twenty-two. A year later, in 1854, he enlisted in the French army for the
Crimean War but had to resign a year later for insubordination. He arrived
in Shanghai on an armed river steamer, designed and equipped for sup-
pressing pirates. This was at the very time when the Taiping buildup near
the city was gathering pace. His courageous service on that steamer was
noticed, and he was employed to create and lead a force of foreign mer-
INTERLUDE IN SHANGHAI 103
cenaries to defend the city. Ward scoured the harbour sides and wharves
of Shanghai for every Westerner who could shoot, drunk or sober. It was
the birth of the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps. By June 1860 he had a
hundred men under arms, trained to use handguns. They were defeated
when trying to assault a Taiping-occupied city but went on campaigning,
sometimes with very heavy losses, and finally retreated to Shanghai to
recruit more soldiers and get some artillery. But when the Taipings sent
some 20,000 troops towards Shanghai, the tiny Foreign Arms Corps was
defeated again, and Ward was badly injured.
This was far from the end of Ward’s role in Shanghai.
He recovered enough to work with Chinese troops and to gather the
remnants of the Foreign Arms Corps, training them to follow verbal com-
mands and giving them Western-style uniforms, not to mention better
rations. By January 1862 he had some 1000 Chinese soldiers trained and
ready and used them successfully as a kind of hit-and-run column against
the Taipings. By this time some 30,000 Taipings, with 200 foreigners
in their ranks, began to advance from Woosung towards Shanghai. They
came close to the British consulate but withdrew when they found they
were opposed by Ward’s volunteers and a battalion of Indian troops. In
February a combined force of British and French sailors, led by Admiral
Hope, together with 700 of Ward’s men, attacked the Taipings. By March
1862 Ward had been so successful that his force was officially named the
Ever Victorious Army, while Ward himself was promoted to the rank of
brigadier general in the Chinese army and made a third-rank mandarin.
He continued to be highly successful, both on land and on water, and
by September 1862 his Ever Victorious Army numbered some 5000 men.
But late that September, in an attack on a Taiping-held town, coordinated
with some British and French troops, Ward was severely wounded and
died the next day.
Soon afterwards the remnants of the Ever Victorious Army came
under the command of an even more colourful foreigner, a British officer
named Charles Gordon. A passionate Christian fundamentalist, he had
piercing blue eyes and total self-assurance and became a legend of perfec-
tion to many. The enthusiasm of British merchants made him a hero back
home and gave him the nickname ‘Chinese’ Gordon. Years later, General
Gordon would go on to suffer a legendary martyr’s death at Khartoum in
the Sudan.
In the meantime, in March 1864, Harry Parkes, who had returned
from North China, played a role in dealing with problems at Shanghai. In
104 H. GELBER
particular, Parkes had a plan for dealing with the Chinese population on
the settlement (of Shanghai) with foreigners who were unrepresented by
consuls and were apt to form a rowdy class. For the former he called in the
judicial authority of the Chinese officials, while for the latter he established
a court
for the trial of foreigners who have no consuls and who have hitherto been
allowed to commit iniquity with impunity in consequence. I insist upon the
Chinese authorities proceeding against these men, who are of course ame-
nable to Chinese law as they belong to nations who have not made treaties
with China; but as Chinese procedure is conducted in a manner repugnant
to foreign ideas. I guard against this by requiring the mandarins to sit with
consular officers as assessors. The mandarins decide and pass sentence, but if
the assessors consider that the sentence is unjust or too severe, they protest
and the sentence is not carried out until the case is referred to Peking…8
Two years after Ward’s death the Taiping capital, Nanjing, finally fell to
imperial forces, who had in the meantime been re-equipped with Western
weapons they had bought. No quarter was asked or given, and 100,000
Taipings chose death rather than surrender. One of the greatest of the
imperialist leaders, the Hunanese official Zeng Guofan, wrote in amaze-
ment to the emperor: ‘Not one of the 100,000 rebels in Nanjing sur-
rendered themselves when the city was taken but in many cases gathered
together and burned themselves and passed away without repentance.
Such a formidable band of rebels has been rarely known from ancient
times to the present.’9 What the Taipings did leave behind, though, were
romantic and heroic legends about a movement inspired by egalitarian
dreams.
CHAPTER 7
While the British and French were making preparations, the Russian and
American emissaries also found their way to the gulf and the Haihe and, in
the case of the Russians, Beijing. Both were under instructions from their
governments to keep a watch on what the allies were up to but to remain
neutral in the war. Naturally, that did not prevent them from giving moral
or diplomatic support. The American was now Reed’s successor, John
E. Ward, from Georgia. He had been mayor of Savannah and speaker of
the Georgia House of Representatives before being appointed US minis-
ter to China. However, once the American Civil War began, his portrait
would begin to appear on the Confederate $10 bills. The Russians also
sent a new man, Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev, a shrewd and amiable
fellow who, after service in the Russian Guards, had begun a career as a
professional diplomat by serving as military attaché in London. He had
also led a notable mission to Central Asia.
Ignatiev was perhaps the most interesting – and probably, once again,
the most skilled and subtle – of the four Western ambassadors and minis-
ters. Ever since his arrival at Beijing in June 1859 he had tried to get the
Chinese to revive and confirm the border rectification clauses of the Treaty
of Aigun, under which the Russians had acquired not only the north bank
of the Amur River but also the entire territory between the Ussuri River
and the sea. He now found himself meeting strong Chinese resistance.
So, starting early in 1860, he began to hint gently that in some circum-
stances the Russians might join the forthcoming Anglo–French war in
China. However, if the Chinese met Russian demands, he and his master
would persuade the British and French not to send their military expedi-
tion north towards Bejing at all. Throughout the Anglo–French campaign
he continued to press the Chinese and, in the end, secured for his coun-
try and his czar much the most important gains from the entire China
War by playing the allies off against the Chinese. He was accompanied to
Beijing by the commander of the Russian Pacific naval squadron, Admiral
Likhachev.
Ignatiev also gave the allies his own account of political opinion in
Beijing. In the minds of the Chinese upper classes, England was associated
with all the problems and disturbances that had afflicted the empire for
many years, especially since the end of the 1842 war and the indemnity
then imposed. The ordinary people, on the other hand, felt much more
friendly towards the allies, for instance because of Elgin’s refusal to inter-
rupt the grain shipments on which the people of the capital depended.
In any event, the British and French did formally declare war on China
on 26 June 1860, and shortly afterwards, on 6 July, Elgin and Gros
came up to join the allied army. The British force assembled at Dalian
(Talienwan) Bay, on the northern side of the gulf, while the French
camped at Yantai (Chefoo), on the southern side; three days later Elgin
visited his own army, being welcomed by Hope Grant, to whom he was,
of course, anyway related by marriage. He found the troops in excellent
shape, well supplied by locals with all kinds of fruits and vegetables, not to
mention sheep, goats and bullocks. In mid-July, however, when the allies
received some helpful maps and advice from Ignatiev about landing sites
and terrain, there was a further hold-up. French reconnaissance discov-
ered that the strip of coast on which they had planned to land, south of the
Dagu entrance and from which they would attack its forts, was so water-
logged that troops would have to wade through as much as two miles of
mud to reach solid ground. Not only that, but it would be most risky
for the French, without cavalry of their own, to attempt such a march,
because they might find themselves surrounded by Prince Sang’s Mongol
horsemen. At a last-minute conference, it was agreed that they would land
instead at Beitang, like the British. On 26 July the British force left Dalian,
and on the 31st the fleet carrying the entire force and its supplies sailed
the 180 miles or so to stand in three lines across the small bay leading to
Beitang. It looked, said someone, like a town afloat.
The allies found the entrance of the Beitang River guarded by a strong fort
and some earthworks. But the orders for disembarkation were punctilious
and detailed,1 and on 1 August 1860 the allies landed about 2000 yards
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 107
south of the fort, each ally with a column of some 1000 men. Most of
these men were brought ashore by ships’ boats, towed by gunboats,
with everyone then heading into the sea of mud surrounding Beitang.
There was no opposition of any kind. The French came ashore with
around 750 soldiers of the 2nd Chasseurs and some 250 of the 101st
Infantry Regiment,2 every man with six days’ rations, including, naturally,
a portion of wine or spirits. Montauban himself was the first man ashore,
or rather into knee-high water that immediately filled his boots.
The British landing led with the 1st Division, followed by the cavalry
brigade. (The fact that all three British cavalry regiments had brought
their own horses from India, especially the 339 heavy troop horses of the
KDG,3 was to be of considerable importance on the battlefield.) The first
ashore was Brigadier General Sutton’s brigade, but many of the men were
seasick and every man was carrying, or supposed to be carrying, three
days’ rations and fifty-six rounds of ammunition.
The outcome was hilarious. Sutton and his men had to wade through
mud – over half a kilometre of it. That made nonsense of their orders,
which would have had every man heavily laden with his gear. So the small,
bandy-legged Brigadier General Sutton, at the head of his brigade, simply
ignored orders and waded through the mud having ‘taken off his trousers,
boots and socks, and slung them over his brass scabbarded sword, which
he carried over one shoulder. Picture a somewhat fierce and ugly bandy-
legged little man thus accoutred in a big white helmet, clothed in a dirty
jacket of red serge, below which a very short slate-coloured flannel shirt
extended a few inches, cursing and swearing loudly…at everybody and
everything…’.4 His troops naturally followed his example. Hope Grant
himself, like a good commander, did the same. He ‘took off my boots
and stockings, tucked up my trousers, and pushed forward at the head of
my men towards a raised causeway…’5 Later, after the troops had busied
themselves building piers and jetties, the sailors ‘landed the horses of the
cavalry, brought in by gunboat, with whips and slings on their little fore-
yards. A horse fully accoutred was hoisted up, swung over the jetty, and
dropped ashore on its legs before it knew what was being done to it’.
The first task was to secure the causeway that led inland from Beitang,
which turned out to have no defences. The allies’ opponent, still the
experienced Prince Sang, had made no move to oppose the landing. No
Chinese troops, apart from one or two small cavalry patrols, were in sight,
and there was no attempt to interfere during the inevitably vulnerable
process of disembarkation. Given the relative absence of evidence, it is
108 H. GELBER
not easy to analyse Sang’s strategic plan. In his correspondence with the
emperor, he was predictably optimistic and confident. But beyond promis-
ing victory, his plans are not clear. It seems most likely, though, that since
he had seen at first hand the power of British and French naval gunnery,
he wanted to draw the allies inland, beyond the reach of those terrible
guns, and then use his sizeable superiority in cavalry, and especially his
crack Mongol and Manchu horsemen, to encircle and destroy the enemy
ground forces.
In any event, even the Beitang fort, which should have been in the
French sector but was at first yielded to the British to accommodate their
cavalry,6 was empty, except for some flags and imitation cannon made of
wood, and except for some buried mines – perhaps a kind of early version
of modern improvised explosive devices – meant to catch the invading
troops, until an elderly local pointed out where they were and the British
sappers cleared them. They turned out to be large shells filled with gun-
powder, ten of them in each of two mines. Empty or not, the first French
colonel to enter the fort concocted a tricolour from a red and blue belt to
which he fastened a white handkerchief – which earned him a mention in
despatches. The only serious snag from the French point of view was that,
since the ships had not yet been fully unloaded, the troops ashore found
themselves without food and, worse still, without as much as a single bot-
tle of wine, while having to get up again at 3 a.m. Not that the British
cavalry, in this case Probyn’s Sikh troops, had much joy from the place.
For all their efforts, their fine Arab horses found themselves picketed hoof-
deep in slush. In the end, the Union Jack was set to fly from the fort’s left
“cavalier” (i.e. a raised bastion) and the tricolour from the right-hand one,
each cavalier with embrasures for three guns. The fort’s parapet turned
out to be some sixteen feet high and eleven feet thick.
The allies found that Beitang was indeed a miserable place. It was
densely populated but a sordid, muddy mess, full of dirt and filth of every
kind, including the carcasses of cats and dogs. Its inhabitants claimed to
have suffered a good deal from the Tartar soldiers who, someone kindly
told Harry Parkes, stink ‘even more than you English do’. Its surround-
ings were worse. The land was poor: hard, dry and unfruitful, though the
rain that poured down within a day or two turned the ground into ankle-
deep mud. Most of the houses were mud hovels, though even they were
better than sitting outside in the downpour.
Things went from bad to worse as the allies found it necessary to lodge
the men of both armies in the town by simply expelling the Chinese inhab-
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 109
itants. Yet ‘the occupation of this town was fraught with the most fearful
risks it has ever fallen to my lot to encounter’, wrote Hope Grant.7 When
full, it was crowded with 11,000 English and Indian and 6,700 French,
plus some 4,000 horses, mules and ponies, all in houses along narrow lanes.
The houses were mostly thatched with ‘fires burning, dinners cooking and
men smoking’. If a single spark had reached the thatch, ‘Probably almost
all our fine horses and ponies would have been destroyed’, and many of
the men would not have escaped the narrow lanes.8 Things became almost
worse when the rains came and the streets ‘became almost impassable from
the mud, filth and dead animals’, and with that, the danger of disease.
In any event, once they were in Beitang, the troops, and especially
the coolies, went wild. Hope Grant himself recorded that ‘…the Chinese
coolies….were for the most part atrocious villains…in the first instance,
when they could be comparatively but little controlled, the robberies and
crimes they committed in town were fearful…’.9 There was wholesale rape
and looting. There were pitiful tales of local men fleeing and whole fami-
lies committing suicide including, according to Parkes, some forty to fifty
local women who killed themselves to escape being raped. Hope Grant
recorded that ‘some French soldiers were removing a box out of a house
to increase the available space when on opening it, there were discovered
the bodies of two young girls of about fourteen and fifteen years old, who,
there was reason to suppose, had been strangled by their relations…’.10
Some women drowned themselves in water butts or took opium, others
just cut their own throats to escape the ravages. The death toll included
the two daughters of the old man who had been so helpful in pointing
out the buried mines. There were large-scale lootings, too, despite efforts
of the newly appointed provost marshal, Captain Con of the 3rd Buffs.
According to Swinhoe ‘the very provost-sergeants whose duty it was to
suppress looting were greater plunderers than most others’. The worst,
once again, were the Hong Kong coolies who, as even Hope Grant had
to admit, were indeed ‘for the most part, atrocious villains’. They also
made a point of stealing all the opium they could lay their hands on.
(The allies quickly found that trying to control their coolies’ opium con-
sumption was a lost cause. So much for the earlier imperial prohibitions.)
The Punjabi sepoys were only slightly less bad. One of the more notable
buildings in the village was the local pawnshop, where the 15th Punjabis
were quartered and where they had good pickings among the silks and
fur coats. A number of local women tried to avoid rape by seeking refuge
from the pursuing Indians in the French camp. The soldiers even had to
110 H. GELBER
shoot to protect them, wounding one Indian in the process. And when it
came to looting – also for food – the French soldiers joined in lustily. In
the early stages, the British may have been somewhat more restrained by
their officers and anyway had their hands full building roads and wharves
and landing stores. But the French also remarked, like Swinhoe, that the
English military police were even worse than the soldiers. It took some
days, during steady rain, to restore order in the combined army, and the
allies, especially at regimental levels, continued to be critical and suspi-
cious of each other.
Meanwhile, Montauban, quite apart from problems of army discipline,
found that his people were hampered, especially by a shortage of food that
produced a hunt for every Beitang resource, not just pigs but even dogs
and cats, to make stews and soups. So Montauban insisted that he could
do no more until his stores were unloaded. It was a process that took a
number of days because there was no jetty, they could find few boats and
the French had too few horses and mules. Altogether, the French were
wholly dependent on the British for supply and transport almost through-
out the campaign, not to mention for keeping the roads clear and, in
most cases, leaving garrisons at intermediate stops. As it was, the steady
rain turned roads into still deeper mud and, in the cramped conditions
of Beitang, allied soldiers simply requisitioned local houses, leaving the
unhappy inhabitants to fend for themselves. Locals, even ones who had
tried to be helpful, had to suffer endless brutalities to themselves, their
families and their possessions. Loch writes of one old man who had kindly
given him, and others, some tea, that ‘he too fell a victim, like many oth-
ers, his kindness and confidence in our protection having proved of no
avail’.11 He added that, once more, the people whom the local Chinese
most dreaded were the Canton coolies.
After the landings, the next allied move would have to be a march of
some seven or eight miles to the Haihe River itself, so that the major
Dagu forts could be taken from the flank and rear. The first stop would
be the village of Xinhe (Sinho), very close to the shore of the Haihe
River. The trouble was that much of the ground between Beitang and
Xinhe was once again swampy, and the single elevated and paved stone
causeway could easily be barred. On 3 August the army sent a reconnais-
sance party in force along it. The column was headed by 1000 French,
supported by a party of engineers and two 3-pounder mountain guns,
and commanded by another of those experienced French colonial offi-
cers, the colourful and flamboyantly courageous Brigadier General
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 111
explained that if they did not shoot at the allies, the allies would not shoot
at them, and he handed over some small white flags of truce, with Chinese
characters on them, and explained their use. There was no more trouble.12
A few days after the Chinese had stopped the allies at their redoubt,
Hengfu, the governor of Zhihli province, wrote to Elgin and Gros to
point out that he had heard of the arrival of the ambassadors to exchange
ratifications and that they had already given signs of amicable intentions.
He entirely reciprocated these, since it was obviously ‘ridiculous to sup-
pose that any necessity for hostilities existed’. He, Hengfu, was commis-
sioned to discuss any points at issue with the ambassadors and to settle
them.13 In any case, since they could have no hope of prevailing over
the ‘innumerable’ troops of the empire, discussions were needed. It was
one of many – even daily – missives of that kind. But the allies were well
aware that the Chinese were likely to try to gain time, since within a few
weeks the weather would prevent the allied army from trying to advance
to Beijing. They therefore had already agreed between themselves not to
enter into negotiations until they had reached Tianjin, so Elgin refused
those discussions with the Chinese. In any case, the route of advance had
yet to be reconnoitered. On 9 August, Hope Grant sent out a recon-
naissance party of cavalry, including a hundred from the King’s Dragoon
Guards (KDG) and another hundred from Probyn’s Horse, the whole
under Lt Col Wolseley of the quartermaster general’s staff. To his and the
army’s great relief, he discovered that by veering north of the Beitang–
Xinhe causeway, he could find a passage of more or less hard ground,
even with pools of clear water for men and horses, all quite suitable for
infantry, cavalry and even artillery. Intriguingly, they also discovered a
burial ground in which, given the waterlogged state of the ground, coffins
had been placed on covered mounds above ground level. At a distance, it
looked like a tented encampment.
Three days later the army was ready to move away from the stinks of
Beitang. Although Montauban had wanted more time, Grant forced mat-
ters by threatening to move on 12 August whether or not the French
came along. Thus, on that day the advance resumed. Allied tactics were
not complicated. Reconnaissance had shown that Xinhe was connected to
the next fortified village, Tanggu (Tangku), by another causeway, some
thirty feet at its base and eight feet above the surrounding land, which
would only become passable for artillery once its mud and salt marshes
and small canals had been suitably bridged. In the meantime, a large por-
tion of the Chinese army – possibly 20,000 men – was apparently con-
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 113
was as delightful as Beitang had been miserable, even though many of the
houses had been broken into.
On the day after their arrival, the British discovered a much better
approach from Xinhe to Tanggu, one that would let troops and even guns
move close to the banks of the Haihe river instead of via the existing
three-mile-long Xinhe–Tanggu causeway. A day later again, on the 14th,
the British and French were indeed able to deploy before Tanggu itself,
with its long semicircular wall. The attacking force was stationed with the
British First Division on the right and the French on the left, attacking
straight up the existing causeway. At the same time, the allies had, on the
night before the attack, dug trenches to within 700 yards of the Chinese
wall, so as to give cover to allied riflemen and sharpshooters who were
keeping down the heads of the Chinese defenders. The allied artillery was
in front of the line, six batteries in front of the English and eighteen guns
in front of the French. These guns also silenced some Chinese guns firing
from the further distant southern bank of the river, after which Admiral
Hope’s Flag Captain, Captain Willes, crossed the Haihe River with some
men to spike those guns. As for the Tanggu defences themselves, here,
too, artillery fire from the allied guns knocked the Chinese walls and
entrenchments to pieces. Some companies of the English 1st Royals and
the 60th Rifles then managed to force their way in, with the French under
Colonel Schmitz scaling the walls at about the same time. The Chinese
abandoned their works and fled, except for some of the gunners, appar-
ently belonging to the general from Zhili province19 and who, Swinhoe
maintained, had been tied by the legs to their guns.20 That was almost
certainly a misinterpretation of the habit of Chinese gunners to use rope-
yarn, tied to their wrists, as fuses for firing their guns. The allied generals
thought the Chinese force had numbered somewhere between 2000 and
6000 men and had suffered a number of casualties. The victorious allied
regiments and detachments were allocated houses in the township.
They were now within striking range of the first of the major Chinese
forts on the north bank of the Haihe, and Hope Grant, with keen tactical
sense, could see that, because of its position in relation to the other forts
of the Dagu complex, capturing this one would compel the surrender of
all the rest of the defences. All the forts seemed to be built on the same
principle. They had thick and heavily armed ramparts on their sea front,
with casemated batteries of guns. All the forts had at least one cavalier –
one even had three – rising some thirty feet from the ground and usu-
ally with guns of large calibre. Everywhere there could be found piles of
116 H. GELBER
sergeant of the 44th and a private of the Buffs, together with two Madras
sappers, left Beitang with grog for the troops, carried by sixteen Cantonese
coolies. They lost their way and, after getting some sleep, they ran into
some Tartars, who they initially assumed were Sikhs. When the two groups
clashed, the private and two coolies were killed and one escaped. All the
others were taken to Tianjin as prisoners, one of the Madrassis being killed
en route. The two remaining Europeans and the coolies were also taken
to Tianjin and beaten, before being brought back to Dagu and returned
to the allied army. The story that reached England was different. It was
that an Irish sergeant and a private soldier of the Buffs had led a party of
Chinese coolies who were handling carts carrying the 2nd Division’s rum
rations. The two had too much to drink, lost their way and fell into the
hands of some Manchu cavalry. A week later the sergeant returned to his
unit and told how the captives had been brought before a Chinese man-
darin who had ordered them, on pain of instant execution, to kowtow.
Everyone had done so except the private, a young Kentish lad named
Moyse, whose head was promptly cut off. The story lost nothing in the
telling and caused a considerable patriotic stir back home.22 No one paid
much attention, though, when it turned out that Moyse, far from being a
brave but innocent Kentish lad, was a tough Scot aged thirty-two with a
record of insubordination23 who might just possibly have been too drunk
to obey the Chinese command.
More importantly, for the commanders there was the strategic ques-
tion of what to do next. What came to the surface again were differences
in two dimensions: between the British and the French, and among the
French themselves. With the appointment of Vice-Admiral Charner as
French naval commander in chief in the Far East, Montauban’s position as
overall commander of French forces had become somewhat more delicate.
On the British side, Hope Grant’s authority had, similarly, to cater to the
sensitivities of the naval commander, Admiral Sir James Hope. Running
coalitions is never easy, and here, too, the result, at least according to some
of their subordinates, was much confusion. Collineau offered an acerbic
summary:
of the naval forces; on the English side, General Grant and Admiral Hope.
Even the smallest decision (requires) the concordance of these four wills. It
is grotesque and dispiriting.24
tions with its Government, and at the less cost of life this was achieved the
better for our country’.25 Furthermore, Hope Grant understood, as did
Elgin and the Cabinet in London, that too dramatic a victory might not
just crush the Chinese army but destabilise the Chinese state. Gros him-
self sent Montauban a letter pointing out that the allies did not want to
overthrow the dynasty and did not even want ‘unduly energetic’ military
action that might frighten the Chinese emperor into personally taking
flight into ‘Northern Tartary’.26
Other local and tactical factors pointed in the same direction. One of
the army’s finest commanders, Sir Robert Napier (formerly of the Bengal
Engineers), argued that that he would only need two or three days to
bring the siege guns and mortars to within a few hundred metres of the
nearest north bank fort. More generally, he was as convinced as Grant
himself that this nearest northern bank fort was also the weakest of the
four Chinese Dagu forts, being the least strongly defended. Like the oth-
ers, it had been designed to repel an attack from the sea. It was much less
well defended against an attack from the rear and had deployed only some
twenty guns in that direction. Furthermore, its position, by an error of
Chinese planning, did indeed control all the other Dagu forts. In addi-
tion, he agreed that the allied army needed to use its resources not only
to attack but to ensure the security of the new forward depot at Xinhe
and of the supply lines back to Beitang. The various difficulties would be
compounded if the French plans were followed and lines of communica-
tion had to be extended beyond a Haihe River crossing, and in the pres-
ence of large numbers of swift-moving Mongol and Manchu cavalry. In
the end, Montauban accepted Grant’s plans, though only after a formal
exchange of detailed letters, with the French general insisting on making
a formal written protest about Hope Grant’s strategy. He also wrote to
Hope Grant that ‘the object of my observations is, above all, to free myself
from military responsibility with reference to my own government...’.27
Harry Parkes, though hardly an unprejudiced witness, also gave vent
privately to British frustrations. On 25 July he wrote his wife:
The French require a good deal of keeping in order, and until Baron
Gros arrived, their naval and military commanders ranked above M. de
Bourboulon who…could do little…to restrain their acts and opinions,
which were and are often very ill judged. This dreadful alliance is a very,
very great reason for our devoutly desiring a speedy settlement of the ques-
tion. They do us no good, and act, in fact, in every respect just like a drag
120 H. GELBER
upon our coach. They use our stores, get in our way at all points, and retard
all our movements.28
sunk by the Chinese. Unfortunately for the defenders, many of the guns
again fired too high. In any case, the allied artillery gradually silenced most
of them. Eventually, a lucky shot, probably from an offshore allied gun-
boat, exploded a Chinese powder magazine, followed shortly by a second
explosion. Still, the – much less effective – Chinese musket and gingall fire
continued. After some hours the allies were ready to storm the walls still,
or again, with the 44th and 67th Regiments on the left and the French on
the right. The army’s coolies gave notable support. Many insisted on hold-
ing ladders against the wall for soldiers to climb, and some even joined in
the attack armed with pointed sticks. In the case of the French, coolies
stood in the water up to their necks holding ladders over their shoulders
to make living bridges, able to carry the soldiers over canals and ditches
to launch a bayonet charge. In the end, the British and French troops
found their way in, either over or through the substantial walls. There was,
of course, a certain amount of rivalry between them, sometimes friendly,
about who had been first to get into the fort. The first Britons to enter it
were Lieutenant Burslem of the 67th and Lt Rogers of the 44th, each of
whom received a Victoria Cross, the newly created highest decoration for
valour, then and ever since, in the British forces. It also seems that one of
the British guns had been manhandled close enough to be able to knock
a breach into the wall. Once through, two British officers – Major Anson,
Hope Grant’s aide-de-camp, and Lt Col Mann of the Royal Engineers –
used their swords to cut the ropes holding up the drawbridge so that their
infantry could charge across it, again with fixed bayonets. Furthermore,
the coolies behaved so well that Hope Grant later gave them an extra
month’s wages. According to the British, it was a young officer of the
67th, Chaplin, who planted the British standard ‘on the highest part of
the works’.31 As against that, the French insisted that some of their men
were the first to climb the wall and that it was their drummer, Fachard,
who first planted the French flag. The French, indeed, claimed that it was
their marines, commanded by Major Jaureguiberry, and their battalion of
chasseurs à pied who had carried the walls, with the British following on.32
No doubt the French commanders were displeased when Napier, in his
after-battle report, merely thanked General Collineau’s troops for having
given ‘material assistance’ to the capture of the fort.
About the Chinese, Napier reported: ‘foot by foot the brave garrison
disputed the ground’; partly, perhaps, because there was no exit for them,
except over the rear wall and across their own stakes and ditches, all under
heavy allied fire that caused severe losses. More interesting was the fact
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 123
that a number of the dead Chinese gunners were once more alleged to
have had their legs tied to the guns – which was very likely not true – but
many others also died at their posts. In any case, the fighting did not cease
before the Chinese had suffered heavy casualties.33 That included a gen-
eral who was a red button mandarin decorated with a peacock’s feather
and commander of all northern forts. He refused to surrender and was
shot by Captain Prynne of the Royal Marines. He was probably a brother
of Prince Sang. The last defenders fled, and Hope Grant’s official report
simply stated that ‘the ground outside the fort was literally strewn with the
enemy’s dead and wounded’. But in the opinion of some allied officers,
the Chinese had fought even more bravely than either the British or the
French.34 Elgin himself told London about the ‘heroic bravery’ of the
Chinese.35 And Napier testified later that the Chinese ‘made a noble and
vigorous resistance’ – except that their artillery was not very accurate and
often shot too high.
Each of the allies lost around 200 men killed and wounded, and
the English won no less than six Victoria Crosses. A seventh went to a
15-year-old hospital apprentice of the Indian service troops attached to
the Hampshires. The Chinese may have lost as many as 2000 dead. Of
course, the number of Chinese dead may have been increased by the
very thoroughness of their defensive measures, which, in making it very
difficult for the allies to enter the fort, made it equally difficult for the
defenders to get out. In any case, the allied soldiers, callous after the hard
fighting, often simply dragged the Chinese corpses by their pigtails and
pushed them into craters caused by their own artillery fire and sent dead
cats and dogs to join them.
Shortly after the fight, the allies, in this case the 3rd Buffs and the
8th Punjabis, plus Collineau’s Frenchmen, pressed on to the other north
bank fort, some two kilometres further on. But they found themselves
confronted by white flags and silence. Hope Grant sent Parkes to demand
surrender but got a haughty reply. Then, while Hope Grant placed artil-
lery into position for an attack, some of the French infantry were able to
climb into the fort. Not only was there no resistance, but the allies found
some 2000 or 3000 men who had surrendered to General Collineau and,
on their knees, were pleading for their lives. In China and elsewhere, the
practice of killing the defeated enemy was very old. It was even accepted
by the defeated themselves. One of the most significant and able leaders
of the Taiping Rebellion, after being captured by imperialist troops, was
asked whether, in the interests of history and the completeness of the
124 H. GELBER
records, he would agree to write a history of the Taipings and of his own
campaign. He readily agreed and spent some time writing a coherent and
lucid account before going with apparent good will to have his own head
cut off. So now, at Dagu, the defeated were totally astonished to find that
Collineau simply disarmed them and told them to get lost.
Hope Grant promptly sent Parkes and his secretary, Henry Loch, across
the river under flags of truce to talk to Hengfu and to demand the sur-
render of the two major right bank forts as well, together with their guns
and equipment. Five days earlier, even before the capture of the smaller
Tanggu fort, a despatch from Elgin had reached Hope Grant, urging
speed.36 In it, Elgin said he was being pressed by the Chinese towards
negotiations, but he did not want to begin talks until all the Dagu forts
were in allied hands and the river to Tianjin had been opened. ‘I shall do
what I can to keep things going until you are ready…but it becomes every
day more difficult for me to do so…’. The implications were obvious. So
now, Parkes and Loch reached the official residence of the Chinese gov-
ernor general after a long and wearisome march through a sea of mud,
but they were civilly received. The discussions with Hengfu went on for
four hours, interrupted by Chinese uncertainty about who was now in
command of their forces following the death of the general who had com-
manded the northern forts. But then Parkes asked whether all the inhabit-
ants of Dagu had been evacuated. Hengfu was surprised. ‘What for?’ he
asked. Parkes pointed out that once fighting began again, there would be
such a volume of fire that no one would emerge alive. The allies had no
wish to harm civilian women, children and old people while they were
disposing of soldiers and mandarins. That did the trick: Hengfu agreed to
surrender the south bank forts on condition that the civilian population
would be protected. He had a letter drafted, with his own seal, confirming
the surrender. He also asked that the body of the northern forts com-
mander, whose death had so discouraged the garrisons of the other forts,
should be found and handed over.
So flags of truce appeared on the south bank37 and the allies occu-
pied all these forts without further fighting. The Chinese forces evacuated
them, leaving behind some 600 cannon and vast quantities of equipment.
In addition, some Chinese officers were sent to the forts to offer informa-
tion – remembering the buried explosives that had been found at Beitang –
on powder magazines and any traps or mines they might contain. One of
the other major prizes of the victory was the discovery, in Prince Sang’s
headquarters, of his maps and papers. They included much of interest,
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 125
head of the city, although, just as in Canton, the civil authorities would be
left to run it. Parkes, who took over control of the city for the time being,
found the local officials cooperative and the people quiet.39 Meanwhile,
Elgin again took note of Chinese ‘military weakness and disorganiza-
tion’,40 and Gros also arrived in Tianjin in the gunboat Grenada. Two
British battalions and a battery of guns similarly went up to the city by
boat. The rest marched up along the river bank, while the cavalry moved
up along the opposite northern bank. The 3rd Buffs were left behind to
garrison Dagu, and the 60th Rifles did the same for the Xinhe bridge,
while Jephson, with the 44th, two companies of French infantry and half
a battery of French mountain guns, was, as already mentioned, detached
and sent down to Shanghai to reinforce the several hundred British and
400 French already there. Lord Elgin and the remaining allied forces also
moved up to Tianjin.
Fortunately, here too there was fresh food of all kinds to be had
aplenty – and, no less important, lots of ice! The troops could even dine
on iced grapes, and the sailors were said to have lumps of ice for their
grog.41 The local Chinese, from merchants to peasants, seemed quite
pleased that the non-Chinese Manchus and Mongols of Sangkolinsin’s
army had been defeated. They were therefore mostly friendly, at worst
indifferent and certainly not disposed to refuse supply, the more so since
the allied troops were billeted outside the city and under strict instructions
to behave themselves and to pay for their food and other supplies. People
like Wolseley could also go sightseeing in and around palaces and, espe-
cially, some lovely Chinese gardens.
While Elgin and Gros installed themselves in Tianjin, in a large house
belonging to the Chinese salt commissioner, they found themselves read-
ing a letter from Guiliang saying that he now had full authority to nego-
tiate. So Parkes was sent off once again to confront the senior Chinese
commissioners with the larger allied demands.
Those demands were as follows: an apology for the 1859 Dagu affair,
an indemnity for the losses the allies had suffered and, finally, the ratifica-
tion of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. It was also agreed that the allied army
should move forwards as far as the small town of Tongzhou, not far from
Beijing itself, and acceptance was sought for the idea that the emperor
would receive the ambassadors in audience. Once again there was niggling
about the terms, for instance over the size of the military escort permit-
ted to the ambassadors when they came to Beijing. The Chinese wanted
numbers to be kept as low – and inconspicuous – as possible, while Elgin
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 127
He might have been even more unhappy had he known the kind of thing
that Guiliang had already, long before at the time of the Tianjin treaty
signature, written to the emperor about the treaty being no more than ‘…
these few sheets of paper that could be…treated as rubbish’.48
The allied army, on the other hand, which had always been much more
sceptical about ‘diplomatic naiveté’, could scarcely forbear to laugh and
DAGU AND TIANJIN AGAIN 129
mutter ‘we told you so’. But it also carefully noted that the Chinese tactics
had actually secured a week’s delay in the allied advance, and therefore
more time for Prince Sang to reorganise and prepare his army for the
defence of the capital. As against that, the soldiers were greatly cheered
by the prospect of sampling the wonders of mysterious Beijing: now only
some 70 miles away upriver.
CHAPTER 8
Final Battles
When the army began to move, with the cavalry once again in the van,
Napier’s division was left in Tianjin to guard communications. The advance
was circumspect: it was, after all, a move into unknown territory. There
was, for instance, only one map, a simple one provided by Ambassador
Ignatiev. The terrain, as reconnaissance and the march gradually revealed,
was full of potential hazards and opportunities for a Chinese ambush.1
Elgin himself discovered, during a pleasant early morning ride, that they
were going through ‘a succession of crops of millet; a stiff, reedy stem,
some twelve or fourteen feet high’,2 which meant that the Tartar cavalry
could hardly charge through to get at the allies; but on the other hand,
the place lent itself to ambushes. There were also some suggestions that a
large army was being collected, under the leadership of Prince Sang him-
self, at Tongzhou, where Elgin had already told the Chinese that he would
consider signing a new treaty. As for the flow of the Haihe River, that
might have lent itself to severe disruption of the allies’ critical waterborne
supply line, whether by fire-ships or by floating explosives (though in the
event, the Chinese gave no sign of trying either). The river was flanked
by high embankments to prevent flooding during the rainy season. They
might have been used either to ambush the advancing allied troops or, if
the water levels were right, to flood them. The road itself might have been
mined, as the Beitang fort had been. On the other hand, for the opening
stages of the march, the country was flat and featureless and, not least
important, the army had no difficulty in living off the land with its gardens
and large fields of corn and millet, though the millet obviously grew so tall
that even a man on a horse might not see further than twenty yards. There
were even worse possibilities: where the millet was cut, it left sharp stalks
in the ground that were liable to injure the cavalry mounts.
The allied advance was by various detachments moving in stages out
from the town. Elgin himself, on horseback, accompanied the forward
detachment, and Gros also accompanied the troops. Both ambassadors
wanted, among other things, to keep an eye on the soldiers.
The advance of the English 1st Division began early on 8 September,
followed the next day by the French and – through a street named
Everlasting Prosperity – by Wolseley’s topographical detail mapping the
roads.3 One of the difficulties was to discover the names of rivers, since
in Chinese usage, various portions of a river used to be given their own
names. The next day the advance guard camped on an open plain. But
heavy rain started to fall in the afternoon, and by the morning of the
11th, the column’s Chinese drivers had gone disappeared, most of them
with their ponies and mules. Almost certainly they were following orders
from Tianjin, reinforced by threats against their families if they did not
obey (which implied an uncomfortable measure of continuing Chinese
local authority). Not everybody was affected, of course. There was Garnet
Wolseley, who had his roving mapping and reconnaissance mission, which
made him semi-independent of the main body of the army. He was some-
one who managed to keep all his own mules and drivers. When he asked
his hard-bitten Indian cavalry dafadar (sergeant), the dafadar grinned and
said, ‘You told me, sahib, you would hold me responsible for the mules
and drivers, so at nightfall I collected the drivers in my tent, tied all their
pigtails together and fastened the knot they formed to my tent pole, beside
which I slept.’ When the army started to move again on the 12th, many
of the carts had to be driven by members of the embassy, army officers or
sailors. At the same time, food and supplies mysteriously disappeared from
Tianjin shops. The people left in charge in the city also found difficulties
in dealing with its prefect and chief magistrate. General Napier solved that
problem by ‘inviting’ the man, under strong guard, to come to the British
camp, where he was lodged in a tent next to Napier’s own, with a sentry
at the door. Goods and supplies promptly reappeared. And after a few days
the prefect began to express astonishment, not just at the arms and equip-
ment of the army and the excellence of their horses, but at the discipline
of their soldiers. Even the soldiers guarding him had not stirred from their
posts! How on earth did the allies manage to inculcate such discipline?
FINAL BATTLES 133
The next stage, on the 13th, was a twelve-mile march to Hexiwu, where
the soil became more sandy. Large numbers of its citizens had deserted,
but the remainder found themselves in great danger from gangs of rob-
bers made up of their own countrymen. Hope Grant and the staff were
put up at a brightly painted Confucian temple, but also had the streets
patrolled to keep some sort of order. Meanwhile, the Navy managed to
seize some sixty or seventy junks on the river, on which equipment, bag-
gage and stores could be moved and which proved to be invaluable for
moving the artillery. The arrangement was that each junk was commanded
by a British officer or petty officer, and for the rest, the Chinese crews
served willingly enough. Water transport was a great help, though the
water flow was starting to run low in places. It was particularly useful as it
became obvious that, while the roads were now hard, they might become
impassable mud once the rains came again.
During the entire march it was clearly time for the Chinese to go
back, yet again, to defence by diplomacy. Another series of Chinese let-
ters arrived, asking the allies to turn back. On 11 September a cousin of
the emperor, Prince Zaiyuan, who was a captain general of the Imperial
Guard, and together with the president of the Board of War replaced
Guiliang in the negotiations, wrote that the allied demands had, in fact,
been agreed and would the allied commissioners please wait at Tianjin,
where two Chinese, with complete powers to treat, were on their way to
conclude an agreement. Why would the allies push on, incurring the dan-
ger of fresh fighting instead of a peace agreement? There was speculation
among the allies that this might turn out to be an interesting comment
on the limits of the civilians’ control of Prince Sang and the military. So
this time the two allied ambassadors wrote back to the Chinese accepting
their assurance about powers to treat. However, Elgin, tired of Chinese
manoeuvres, also made it clear that by now he would sign no agreement
until the army had marched to Tongzhou, very close to Beijing itself. In
the meantime, there came another Chinese letter suggesting a modifi-
cation: the army should stop earlier, at Hexiwu, about halfway between
Tianjin and Beijing, while the English and French delegates themselves
should go ahead to Tongzhou.
That was actually quite convenient since Hope Grant, like a good com-
manding general, was worrying about supply lines again. He probably had
not read what has been called the greatest military textbook of the nine-
teenth century, by the Swiss Baron de Jomini, which spoke, among other
things, of staff responsibilities as including ‘the preparation of all material
134 H. GELBER
of Fane’s Horse, who had originally been loaned from his parent regiment,
the 22nd Bengal Native Infantry. The French sent out their own team,
also under a flag of truce. It consisted of Colonel de Grandchamps of the
artillery, Captain Chanoine from the staff, Caïd Osman, Sub-Lieutenant
of Spahis, M. Dubut of the Intendancy, embassy Secretary M. de Bastard,
M. de Meritens, the Comte d’Escayrac, the missionary Abbé de Luc and
two administration officials, Messrs. Ader and Gagey.7
It was a cheerful morning ride through high-standing corn, and though
they saw signs of the recent presence of large bodies of Chinese cavalry, the
parties reached Tongzhou without difficulty. On the way, passing through
Changkiwan, they were even greeted in friendly and soldierly fashion by
a Chinese general who had been demoted following the battle of Xinhe.
After lunch Parkes and Loch called on the Chinese commissioners, headed
by Prince Zaiyuan. It was a difficult eight-hour meeting. The Prince began
by refusing to discuss any of the terms of the convention, which had
already been agreed, until the allies should abandon the demand that the
ambassadors’ letters of credence be delivered personally to the emperor.
The prince also tried once again to raise matters that had previously been
settled. It was evening before there was even any agreement on just where
the allied army should make camp. A proclamation was drafted to tell the
people that peace had now been established between China and the allies.
So the British and French parties spent the night at a house in Tongzhou,
expecting to spend the following day shopping for curios and choosing
residences for Elgin and Gros.
At dawn the next morning, 18 September, Parkes, Loch, Thompson
and Colonel Walker started off early to ride back to the army to report and
point out the now agreed-upon camping area, while intending to return
to Tongzhou to select a building for the ambassadors. The others waited
at Tongzhou itself, expecting them to return that evening, after which
the group would form the whole advance party, getting things ready for
Elgin’s arrival.
But as Parkes’ party moved closer to the allied army, they saw units of
Chinese cavalry and infantry, with gingall parties, marching in the same
direction. There were substantial bodies of troops in the Changkiwan area
itself. There were fields of millet that might have hidden a large force.
In one watercourse alone, Loch found over a thousand dismounted cav-
alry. Everyone was manoeuvring in unexpected and alarming ways. Field
positions were being prepared. There were even massive and masked gun
sites. On the plain where the allied army was supposed to camp were six
FINAL BATTLES 137
batteries. Hope Grant sent out a cavalry squadron to the right and left
flanks to keep watch and stationed a battery of 9-pounders on some higher
ground on the right flank. Clearly, the allies were not just in the process of
being surrounded by enemy cavalry; they were being invited onto ground
commanded by enemy guns. In fact, as the allies learned much later,
Prince Sang had brought at least 20,000 troops to the area, vowing again
that the allies would never return south to Tianjin alive. His preferred tac-
tic of using cavalry to surround an enemy may well have been – especially
for a Mongol general – a tradition harking back to the days of Genghis
Khan’s Mongol empire. It had once been a ferociously effective tactic
copied from hunting practice. Earlier Mongol princes had been given to
throwing a cordon round an area of land and drawing it gradually tighter
to drive game (or enemies) into a small circle where they could be killed
with bow and arrow, quickly, efficiently and without pointless heroics.
Now Hope Grant halted the army and ordered that its baggage be col-
lected at a spot close to the rear, protected by the rearguard against enemy
cavalry. Gros stayed with them. He, too, was disturbed by the numbers of
Chinese troops he could see milling about. He thought there must be at
least 80,000 of them – surely a serious overestimate.
Shortly after the halt, Loch galloped into the allied lines, accompanied
by not two but three sowars (troopers) of Indian cavalry, bringing some
earlier notes from Parkes saying that everything had been arranged with
the Chinese commissioners, but naturally with no information on what
the new Chinese deployments might mean. On their way from Tongzhou,
Loch had certainly seen large bodies of troops and many guns in pre-
pared emplacements. The army concluded, reasonably enough, that it
was indeed faced with a plot to get it to camp on ground controlled by
Chinese artillery and surrounded by Chinese troops.
There was, however, the question of waiting for a couple of hours to
give Parkes time either to show the Chinese the error of their ways and to
report back or else to give Loch time to bring back the rest of the party
waiting in Tungchow. Loch therefore requested, and was given, permis-
sion to ride back to the town through the assembling Chinese soldiery and
bring back everyone who was still there. Captain Luke Brabazon of the
Royal Artillery was allowed to accompany him, to find a place for the allied
cavalry. So were two Indian troopers carrying a flag of truce. Brabazon
would not survive the trip.
These arrangements, by pure chance, probably saved the life of one of
the British army’s brightest soldiers. For the man who apparently should
FINAL BATTLES 139
have gone with Parkes was Garnet Wolseley. But on this occasion Wolseley,
who was still in charge of surveying the army’s route, was not there. He
had stayed further back, surveying and sketching again. So it was Brabazon
who rode off with Loch.
It was only by missing this trip that Wolseley survived to fight in so
many of Britain’s imperial wars, big and small, through the second half of
the nineteenth century. Even so, he was not exactly safe now. Punctiliously
doing his survey of the road that ran between fields of maize and mil-
let – even to the point of pacing out distances – he had fallen some four
miles behind the army. But a Sikh officer came to warn him that a body of
Tartar cavalry was nearby, circling round the army’s position. Tent poles
were quickly packed up and Wolseley’s sketches put away. Wolseley him-
self remained on foot, next to his horse and with sword drawn, ready
and determined that they would not surrender. When his officers raised
eyebrows, he just said, ‘We can’t leave the dismounted men.’ The officers
stayed with him, noting his ‘quiet calculating courage’.9 Luckily, the party
was largely hidden behind the tall corn of the fields, so the Tartars did not
notice them. Soon the Tartars left and Wolseley’s men and their carts were
able, moving at top speed, to rejoin the rear of the army
As for Colonel Walker’s tiny party, the whole army, now halted, could
soon see their red coats as they made their way back through the grey-
clad Chinese soldiery. As they moved, they came upon a wounded French
officer – probably Ader – surrounded by Chinese soldiers. His batman,
the chasseur à pied Ousouf, stood over him defending him with his bayo-
net, with Walker trying to rescue him, without success but at the cost of
receiving a few cuts of his own. Ousouf’s defence allowed Walker to get
away. He and his five men cut their way through the Chinese and, under
a hail of Chinese fire by matchlocks and gingalls, returned to the allied
army, who were duly warned by the noise of firing. None were killed,
though several were wounded (which also says something about the level
of Chinese weapons drill). Walker later told the French that Ousouf, if he
survived, should be given every conceivable medal and deserved a public
memorial.10
In the meantime, Brabazon and Loch, who had asked Hope Grant for
two hours’ grace to give the negotiators a chance, got back to Tongzhou,
after some difficulty in passing through increasingly impressive bodies
of Chinese troops. There they found that Parkes was out but had been
told by the prince that until the business of the letters of credence was
settled, ‘there could be no peace, there must be war’. Once the entire
140 H. GELBER
Prince Sang had a whole army to run, the two men were taken to be
interrogated by another general for a while. But Prince Sang’s orders had
been that they, and their sowar escort, were to be taken to the prince, so
they were dumped into a common country cart, in which they also found
two French soldiers, and driven off. Following an excruciatingly painful
drive, they found themselves at Palikao Bridge, the key point of the entire
Chinese defensive position on the Tianjin–Beijing canal, and in the tent of
Juilin, a different army commander. They were questioned and then left in
a small nearby temple. That was followed by more questioning, and they
were again kicked and cuffed. Both men thought they were about to lose
their heads.
In fact, they were bound and taken in another rough and exquisitely
painful wooden cart to Beijing, where they landed separately in prison at
the much-feared Board of Punishments. Each of them was kept in chains,
and Parkes was interrogated several times. According to his own subse-
quent report, he was made to kneel on the ground, still in chains, and to
kowtow before any official. He was threatened with torture and had his
hair and ears pulled, especially if his interrogators were not pleased with
an answer he gave.
The remainder of the Parkes party and some French hostages were
also seized and distributed to various prisons. Afterwards, some prison-
ers wrote accounts of their experiences, except Brabazon and the French
Abbé de Luc, who had found themselves at Palikao in the hands of the
local Chinese commander, General Bao.12
For Elgin, Gros and their army commanders there was, of course, the
overriding question of what motives could have led to these totally unex-
pected Chinese actions. Lord Elgin’s later report to the government in
London suggested that Prince Sang may have thought the civilian nego-
tiators had ‘compromised his military position by allowing our army to
establish itself so near his lines’ at Changkiwan. The immediate reaction
might have been that ‘in the proceedings of the Chinese Plenipotentiaries
and Commander-in-Chief in this instance, there was that mixture of stu-
pidity, want of straightforwardness, suspicion, and bluster, which charac-
terizes so generally the conduct of affairs in this country…’. Even so, the
Chinese could not possibly have intended to bring on a conflict that they
were quite likely to lose13 That explanation seems rather inadequate. The
emperor had already been urged to remember ‘that the barbarians, who
have come far from across the ocean, have hitherto shown that their object
was merely to trade…[Their aim] was only to besiege the ports and not
142 H. GELBER
to take possession of the country. Nor have they attempted any conquest
of China. Even the point of entry into Pekin [sic] is one which might be
satisfactorily disposed of…’.14 Not only that, but, as Elgin and Gros well
knew, allied policy so far had been strongly constrained by the need not to
unsettle the entire empire and its fruitful trade, a consideration of which
diplomats like Guiliang had already made full use. The chief allied objec-
tive, apart from reparations for the 1859 defeat at Dagu, had been the
ratification of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. Elgin had been quite prepared
to do so at Tianjin itself, provided only that Beijing sent officials with full
powers to do their part. Failing Tianjin, he had been quite prepared to
stop at Tongzhou to make the necessary arrangements and had already
accepted the principle that the allied army would camp outside Beijing and
not occupy the capital. He had even accepted limits on the military escort
for himself and Gros when they ventured into the Chinese capital for the
ratification and signature process. Most if not all of that now seemed set
aside by the way in which Prince Sang and apparently Prince Zaiyuan had
insisted on major battles, not to mention the imprisonment of the allied
‘heralds’.
In fact, the Chinese decision-making process seems likely to have been
far from clear. The emperor was evidently much offended by the allied ulti-
mata. ‘From of old it has been held a disgrace to make a treaty under your
city wall…If Guiliang and his colleagues have so madly lost themselves as
to presume their own authority…they have not only disobeyed our writ-
ten commands, and shown fear of the barbarian, but they have simply
taken up the empire and put it into his hands…we will at once vindicate
the law by the execution of these ministers, and then fight it out with the
barbarians…’.15 Advice came to the emperor in many forms and from dif-
ferent officials. In addition, Prince Sang was obviously furious about, and
personally insulted by, the repeated defeat of his troops by numerically
far inferior allied forces that, not incidentally, flatly contradicted his own
advice and recommendations to the emperor. He was clearly keen to try
again, this time with overwhelming numbers. Nor was he alone. Prince
Zaiyuan was equally furious and seems to have had no time for the kind
of ’management’ of the allies in which Guiliang and others had excelled.
In other words, the combination of Sang’s and Prince Zaiyuan’s com-
bativeness, the emperor’s temper and the sidelining of Guiliang and the
diplomats strongly suggests what the British army would, inelegantly but
succinctly, call a decision-making ‘cock-up’.
FINAL BATTLES 143
alry of their own, Hope Grant had sent over a squadron of Fane’s Horse to
act under French orders. At one point the French guns, under Colonel de
Bentzmann, seemed to be in some danger, but they were rescued by the
British horsemen, which earned Lieutenant Cattley, of Fane’s Horse, the
French Legion of Honour. Montauban augmented that detachment with
a handful of Spahis of his personal escort and ordered the cavalry, now
under the overall command of Colonel Foley, a British officer attached
to the French staff, to sweep round the right flank of the village while
he himself joined the charge with the Spahis and his 2nd Chasseurs de
Vincennes. The Chinese retreated.
This enemy movement backwards led Montauban, at the head of his
escort of some eighty horsemen, to charge the enemy again. He also
brought up one company of the 101st Regiment and one of the 102nd,
as well as some guns, all of which drove back the Chinese who, once clear
of the village, began simply to flee, only to run into the Indian and Spahi
horsemen, together with the Chasseurs d’Afrique. That placed the French
on the left wing of the entire Chinese army. As they occupied the two vil-
lages on their front and captured a large number of Chinese guns – prob-
ably some sixty or seventy – the British infantry finally appeared on their
left. Lieutenant Colonel Dupin, who was there and wrote later under the
name of Paul Varin, put the French view scathingly: the British ‘extrème
lenteur avait permis à notre armée de remplir sa tâche et la leur ([Their]
extreme slowness had allowed our army to add their tasks to our own)’.17
In that view, the French had ‘almost alone’ beaten a Chinese force of some
50,000 men. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Tartar horsemen had amassed
on the allied left flank – the opposite flank to the French deployment – but
found themselves effectively charged by Probyn’s Horse supported by the
KDG.
In the meantime, Hope Grant had placed a battery of 9-pounders
on the British right, supported by a squadron of the KDG. The 99th
(Wiltshire) Regiment, supported by two 9-pounders and together with
the Ludhiana Sikhs, was ordered to take another village, directly to their
front. At the same time, the 2nd (Buffs), with some Armstrong guns and
the cavalry, including some Musbee Sikhs being tried out as irregulars,
were deployed in a flanking movement on the allied left, followed by
some Punjabi infantry. The artillery fire was especially effective, whether
against Prince Sang’s Manchu and Mongolian cavalry or the enemy’s
field works. So while the French on the allied right successfully took the
village and works to their front, Probyn’s Horse cleared the ground to
FINAL BATTLES 145
the far left. They were supported by the 2nd Queen’s Regiment while
Hope Grant came over with the Armstrongs, the Musbee Sikhs and a
squadron of the Dragoon Guards. The Musbees advanced ‘in a steady
line carrying everything before them’, and the British line went forward
to occupy the town of Changkiwan – only to find that it had been aban-
doned – as well as a large Chinese camp a mile beyond.18 Everywhere, as
Wolseley wrote, the big cavalry horses of the KDG and the Sikhs ‘went
through and through them bowling them [the much smaller Tartar
horses] over like ninepins’.19 This was where one grizzled Indian trooper
was heard, as noted earlier, describing the Chinese soldiery as birds, or
fowl, ‘very difficult to overtake and entirely harmless when caught’.20
But once again the Sikhs, whom the Chinese called ‘the dark-coloured
princes’, went around checking on Chinese casualties, and if someone
was still alive, one of the Sikhs would get off his horse and saw the man’s
head off.21 Once again, French and English casualties were astonishingly
slight: the after-battle count suggested that the English suffered only
two killed and twenty-nine wounded, and the French three dead and
seventeen wounded, while Chinese casualties might have been at least
two thousand. So the Chinese suffered severe casualties in this small
battle, while the British and French lost only a handful each – including
the loss of the French colonel commanding their cavalry – yet captured
altogether over eighty Chinese guns.
After the fighting, the tired and hungry army took the little town of
Changkiwan, short of Tongzhou, to rest and, even more importantly, to
replenish the army’s badly depleted ammunition supplies and bring up
reinforcements from Tianjin. That included General Collineau’s brigade,
which, together with a battery of field artillery, arrived on 20 September
to join Collineau himself, who was already at the front. That raised the
total of the French force to 3000 men. At the same time, orders were
sent to Napier to bring up two regiments from Hexiwu, one of them to
be the 60th. At the same time, the flotilla of boats carrying commissariat
stores had been brought up to Hosiwu from Tianjin. It was of course still
necessary to disguise the army’s temporary weaknesses from the enemy,
which was one reason among others for renewing talks with the Chinese.
As Baron Gros explained bluntly to his own Minister for Foreign Affairs,
M. Thouvenel: ‘Nous avons déjà dû colorer plusieurs fois notre impuis-
sance par un semblent de bon vouloir envers le gouvernment chinois…’.22
(‘We have already, several times, had to disguise our lack of power by dis-
playing our apparent good will towards the Chinese government.’) In the
146 H. GELBER
tance enjoyed imperial support. ‘...If [the allies] persevere in their revolt,
let my people make every effort to annihilate them all…’.25 That some of
the men now captured might have been unduly trusting, or even careless,
was also not in serious dispute. But what now ran through the ranks was
real fury and disgust at the unpardonable and barbarous behaviour of the
Chinese and a strong determination to secure the release of the prisoners
whatever the cost. The army had to seek revenge, to punish the guilty and
permit no deviation from the demands for political and diplomatic con-
cessions and for compensation, which were at the heart of the allied war
aims. That fury and that determination to punish Chinese treachery were
a major reason for the sack of Changkiwan now and would be major fac-
tors in the conduct of the entire remainder of the allied campaign.
The same sense of vengefulness ran – and has run virtually ever since –
through questions about just who was guilty. The main divide seems to
have been between those who interpreted what had happened to the men
who were now hostages, as in practice the victory of Beijing’s pro-war
‘faction’ versus those who saw only the whims of Chinese commanders
on the ground. The first seemed supported later by Harry Parkes’ account
of Prince Sang’s behaviour. This confirmed that the prince had indeed
been infuriated by the weakness of the Chinese diplomats in allowing the
allied army to get so close to his own troops and their not yet fully pre-
pared positions, and infuriated even more by the conviction that to seek
any diplomatic accommodation with the allies was in any case futile. The
second seemed to chime, for instance, with a note in Gros’ diary that two
Chinese priests had reported that the arrests had been ordered by Prince
Zaiyuan, who had been deeply angered by Parkes’ proud and discourteous
behaviour in talks with the Chinese and his deliberate upsetting of a table
full of porcelain pieces. As against that, there was also the notion that the
Chinese had from the start set out to ambush the allied parties.
Nor can the position of the emperor himself have improved the coher-
ence of Chinese decision-making. Although neither Elgin nor Parkes, nor
anyone else on the allied side, knew it, for much of the previous month
there had been a heated debate in the Chinese court as to what the emperor
should do about the approach of foreign armies. The essential question
was whether he should remain in Beijing. Prince Sang, no doubt worried
about the dangers of having the sovereign anywhere near the front line,
thought the emperor should remove himself by taking a ‘hunting trip’
to the North, to his gorgeous summer residence at Jehol. It lay north of
the Great Wall, next to the town of Chengde. Like the Summer Palace at
148 H. GELBER
Beijing, this palace was surrounded by a galaxy of temples, each with its
staff of lamas. One of these had been built by the emperor Qianlong, in
some imitation of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, for the visit of the Panchen
Lama of Tibet back in 1779–1780. The palace itself was described by
one visitor as a ‘kingdom of dreams – willow pattern come to life, set in a
semi-circle of little green hills.’ But other advisers worried about the dan-
gers to Chinese public morale if the emperor simply left. He himself sug-
gested a silly compromise: he could announce that he would leave Beijing
to take personal command of his armies, would indeed leave the capital,
ostensibly for the field of action, but actually to travel North. Some senior
officials made it clear what lunacy that would be. ‘Will you’, one of them
wrote sarcastically, ‘cast away the inheritance of your ancestors like a dam-
aged shoe?’26 In any case, the Chinese emperor seemed to have little con-
fidence in any determined defence of Beijing and, as the allied advance
continued, did finally leave for his so-called hunting trip in the North. He
was never to set foot in his own capital again. So perhaps the best explana-
tion is again what the British army inelegantly calls the ‘cock-up theory’:
amid the confusions of the day, perhaps no coherent decisions were taken
by anyone on the Chinese side.
Elgin, however, was determined to hold the ‘captain of the ship’, the
emperor, personally responsible for the actions of his people. What was
in any case clear was that the seizure of the hostages must put an end to
delicate manoeuvrings and diplomatic illusions about the Chinese, and
put matters once more into the hands of the soldiers. Elgin and Gros came
up from Hexiwu to join the army, in which there was an almost palpable
feeling of ‘So now we have to clear up your diplomats’ mess again.’
In the meantime, Hope Grant sent Thomas Wade to Tongzhou, again
under a flag of truce, to demand that all English and French prison-
ers be returned forthwith, and if this demand were not met, the army
would assault and occupy Beijing itself. But the mandarins pretended not
to understand what was being demanded of them. ‘The Europeans left
Tongzhou some time before the battle and we do not know what has
become of them.’ The two allied generals concluded that the march to
Beijing must continue and the first stage would be an attack on Palikao
itself, the chief Chinese camp and key point of their defences of the canal,
and its great stone bridge, and therefore of Beijing itself.
For the moment, it was Tongzhou that became a base and depot for the
allied army and a source of supply, especially of food. The 19th and 20th
were taken up with rest and preparations to move forward.
FINAL BATTLES 149
There was also, of course, some careful reconnaissance. The allies noted
that so far they had dealt almost exclusively with Chinese infantry and
guns. So where was the reputedly ‘invincible’ Tartar cavalry? The larger
picture had further complexities. It quickly became clear that between the
village and Beijing the country was starting to be cut up by deep ditches
and sunken roads with steep banks that could form natural breastworks for
a defender. It turned out also that the nearer the army got to Beijing, the
more it would find wooded areas, walled villages, cemeteries and temples,
all of which might offer opportunities to determined defenders. Not only
that, but the country became more thickly populated, to the point that any
advance might actually come to involve street fighting. Altogether, mov-
ing on from Tongzhou would bring the allies once more into a region of
which they knew nothing and for which they had no maps or topographi-
cal assessments. Yet for Prince Sang, it was home territory. It was also evi-
dent that the allied advance would shortly come to the Tongzhou–Beijing
canal, which was not only the last major obstacle on the way to Beijing,
but from whose far side a paved highway led straight to the capital.
Reconnaissance also made it clear that Prince Sang had made most
careful preparations to give battle in defence of the canal crossings and
apparently assured the emperor that the allies could not escape being
overwhelmed by his Chinese and Manchu forces. Very large Chinese cav-
alry concentrations could be detected on the allied side of the canal, and
in defence of the two bridges across it. One was a more westerly wooden
bridge, closer to Beijing and well suited to crossing by foot or even horse,
but unable to carry guns. Further east, however, was the grand stone and
marble arch of Palikao Bridge itself, with its lovely decorative marble orna-
ments, including statues that looked from a distance like men on the para-
pets. From there, the walls of Beijing itself could be seen in the distance.
It was in front of these bridges that Prince Sang had evidently prepared
himself to give battle, with his perhaps 30,000–50,000 men and some
large-calibre guns in prepared positions, many of them masked. And, in
reserve, some of his finest troops: the Manchu Imperial Guards in their
black-bordered yellow robes.
At 5:30 a.m. on 21 September the allies began to move forward. It was
a clear, fresh morning and a picture-book dawn. It was the French turn to
lead the advance, and Hope Grant had agreed to form up with the French
on the right, to advance directly on the great Palikao Bridge, which had
to be the principal objective of the operation. The British–Indian troops
were formed up to the left of the French, with the infantry to the right of
150 H. GELBER
the Indians, the artillery in the centre and the cavalry in echelon formation
on the left.
The allies found the Chinese and Manchu cavalry deployed on the plain
covering the bridge approaches, in a five-kilometer arc with strength-
ened wings. That made the battle which followed quite largely a cavalry
affair. Immediately in front of the bridge itself was a village offering a
kind of anchor and stronghold to the defenders. Behind it lay massed
infantry with more guns. The allied columns, French and British – with
Elgin ‘always on horseback when the guns were firing’, as the French
respectfully observed – found themselves facing the central segments
of the Chinese line. The larger plan was for the allied cavalry to make a
sweep to the far left flank, so as to partly force the Chinese to concentrate
their men to, and on, the two bridges, making them excellent targets for
the allied artillery. Indeed, one of the lessons that impressed itself on the
minds of some allied officers was the relative ineffectiveness of small-arms
fire, even massed fire, in dealing with opposing troops. The only really
effective weapons, it seemed, was either artillery or cold steel. It was by
no means the only nineteenth-century war in which that lesson had to be
learned, and it helped to influence many kinds of military operations, in
many places, as late as 1915.
In this case it was the British cavalry that spearheaded the attack on
the left wing. According to Grant’s report: ‘The King’s Dragoon Guards
and Fane’s Horse, with Probyn’s regiment in support...advanced to the
charge…and attacking the Tartars with the utmost vigour, instantly made
them give way.’ The KDG in particular, Grant wrote, after crossing a
deep ditch, ‘got well in among the Tartars, riding over ponies and men
and knocking both down together like so many ninepins.’ One member
of the government, Sidney Herbert, wrote a private letter to the Queen
saying the KDG had performed a ‘most remarkable’ feat of horseman-
ship. The Tartars gave way, suffering severely, and the entire enemy cav-
alry retreated, encouraged by some long shots from the Armstrong guns.
The advance also captured a camping ground, perhaps of a Tartar gen-
eral, for it was found to contain two yellow silk banners belonging to the
Imperial Guard. The elite of that guard was drawn up in defence of the
great Palikao Bridge and therefore faced the French. In the main infantry
attack it was the French who headed for the bridge itself, and here was
Montauban’s chance to go for military glory on the battlefield. He moved
forward in battle order, with Jamin’s brigade and two artillery batteries
on his right, and with Collineau and one battery in the centre, heading
FINAL BATTLES 151
straight for the bridge and with some British infantry and artillery meant
to come up on his left. But the French soon found strong enemy cav-
alry forces advancing on them with bows and lances. Their subsequent
accounts suggest two cavalry attacks of 10,000 to 12,000 men each, one
towards Montauban and the other towards Collineau. One was met by the
French advance guard under General Collineau himself, with its half bat-
talion of chasseurs and some horse artillery; but Chinese numbers grew,
especially on the French left, where the British were slow to arrive. So the
French formed squares and positioned their guns. The Tartar horsemen
came on forcefully and in complete silence, coming to within some fifty
metres of the riflemen. It was noted that the Chinese commanded their
units by flag signals, not unlike the Western naval custom of flag signals.
Meanwhile, Jamin was also pressing forward with the remainder of the
chasseurs, the 101st Infantry and a dozen guns; but he and Montauban
also found themselves under heavy cavalry attack. In danger of encircle-
ment, on the French right, Colonel Pouget’s 101st Infantry hastily formed
squares, while de Bentzmann’s artillery took the attackers in the flank.
So the Chinese cavalry was repulsed with rifle and bayonet and forced
to retire, taking their dead and wounded with them. Their commanders,
with exceptional courage, rode up and down ‘almost under the bayonets
of our men’27 trying in vain to get their squadrons to resume the charge.
Finally, the British did come into line on the French and Collineau’s
left – ‘toujours en retard [late as always]’, as some of the French sourly
observed. It was the KDG and Fane’s Horse, again supported by Probyn’s
Horse, who dispersed the Chinese cavalry. Here, too, the Tartar ponies
might have been hardy and quick, but they could not stand up to the
KDG’s great troop horses. As Wolseley wrote later, ‘Our cavalry went
straight at them, Fane’s Horse and King’s Dragoon Guards got well in
amongst the Tartars, riding over ponies and men and knocking both down
together….’.28 Hope Grant followed up with three Armstrong guns, his
Royal Marines and the Wiltshires, advancing over difficult ground and
crossing their own wooden bridge, capturing Chinese encampments and
guns on the way, with less and less Chinese resistance. The English horse-
men, after chasing the Chinese for some miles, returned to their bridge
to rejoin the rest of the 2nd Brigade. The Chinese encampments were
promptly and thoroughly looted by the local Chinese peasantry. In fact,
some of the locals also killed three of the marauding coolies.
In the meantime, while Jamin’s brigade held firm in the face of Chinese
artillery fire as well as assaults by cavalry, the Chinese and Tartar cav-
152 H. GELBER
ideas and inventions, and the determination to use swords and shields
when charging Western troops equipped with rifles and rifled cannon, had
proved to be extraordinarily costly. Prince Sang himself simply withdrew
to Beijing, abandoning his beaten troops in the process.
In none of these engagements did either side show much mercy. The
Sikhs continued their habit of riding across the field after a cavalry clash
and, seeing a man on the ground, pricking him with a lance to see whether
he was still alive; if he groaned or squirmed, the Sikh soldier would dis-
mount and saw the man’s head off. Their opponents were no more
humane. One Sikh trooper, for instance, lost control of his horse and was
captured, only to have the Tartar cavalry gouge his eyes out and cut him
into small pieces.
After the fight, Elgin rode over to give Montauban well-deserved con-
gratulations. Indeed, over these last few days, Montauban himself had
played a colourful and courageous part, and when his emperor advanced
him to the nobility a year or two later, he chose the title of Count of
Palikao (Comte de Palikao). The official report on the campaign, released
in 1862, gave some not insubstantial numbers of casualties. It said the
allied total came to 1200 dead and wounded, while total Chinese losses
were estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000. But the first two of the
Western hostages apparently also died. General Bao, defender of Palikao
Bridge, was mortally wounded in the fighting and, before dying, gave
orders to decapitate Captain Brabazon and Father de Luc. No reliable
traces of them were later found, and it was assumed that their remains had
been thrown into the canal.
After the battle, both allies found themselves with mountains of booty,
not just spears, bows, arrows, cannon and so on, but clothes, food and
equipment of every sort, including piles of matchlocks. They also found
Prince Sang’s imperial banner. They camped by the side of the canal, in
the now abandoned Chinese tents, some of them with food already pre-
pared and set out for the expected return of the Chinese victors. The
bows and arrows served for several days as fuel for allied camp fires. But
the allies also received a culinary reward: when they arrived, the canal was
full of plump ducks. By the morning after the battle, few of the ducks had
escaped English or French cooking pots. Two days later, fresh supplies
came along, including coffee and wine, no doubt especially welcome to
the French.
There was now no further serious barrier between Beijing and the
allies – except, perhaps, the increasing number of banks and ditches as the
154 H. GELBER
army neared the capital. But even the Palikao battle would not necessar-
ily seal Beijing’s fate. For one thing, the two battles and the marches had
exhausted the food and ammunition supplies of the allies. The French
infantry had no cartridges left and the artillery only a relatively few rounds.
Furthermore, though the Chinese army had been defeated, there was no
certainty that its many thousands of men could not be gathered, reor-
ganised and brought into the field with fresh tactics and new determina-
tion. A strong reconnaissance party of Fane’s Horse and Spahis, headed
by Wolseley, rode as far as the walls of the Forbidden City. He discovered
no Chinese cavalry – that seemed to have withdrawn back to the Summer
Palace, the Yuenming Yuen, north-west of the city – but he could see with
his telescope that the armed ‘sentries’ on Beijing’s high city wall were just
dummies. Nevertheless, it was clear that these walls were so massive that
Hope Grant himself thought the light guns, with which he had marched
up from Tianjin, would be quite unable to breach them, especially if there
was a remotely serious defence. Hope Grant and Montauban agreed that
nothing further could be done until reinforcements, ammunition, supplies
and the heavy siege guns had been brought up by river from the Tianjin
base. It was therefore decided to concentrate allied forces at Palikao until
the army had had a rest and been brought up to strength. The halt lasted
until 5 October.
By 29 September the siege guns and twenty-centimetre mortars arrived,
as did the reserve forces. That brought not only General Napier and his
staff but a battalion of the 60th Rifles, the 67th Regiment, the Royals
and parts of the 99th Regiment and the 8th Punjabis. Only on 3 October
did the allies, now some 10,000 strong, think it safe to start to advance
across the canal and towards Beijing. There had also been various other
and minor problems. One was that the troops, living in their bell tents,
were uncomfortable in the hot September sun. Another was the number
of bandits who made a nuisance of themselves along the lines of commu-
nication and supply until a party of the 8th Punjab Infantry was ordered to
burn down one village and a notice was posted warning other individuals
and groups to leave the allied army alone. In addition, one battalion of
marines was left at Tongzhou to secure the town.
CHAPTER 9
Beijing, and Triumph
By now the allied commanders had a new official to face. He was the high-
est mandarin in the empire, the emperor’s younger brother, Prince Gong.
At some point before Gong assumed the leading role in the negotiations,
Emperor Xianfeng had made his choice about whether to flee the capital.
He and his entourage left Beijing for the Northern Palace of Jehol, alleg-
edly to go on the annual imperial hunt. Though his effective authority
inevitably declined, he could and did still issue orders, for example on
how to deal with the allied captives in the capital. But the man who was
now doing the detailed negotiating, Gong, had been born Yixin, the sixth
son of the Daoguang emperor, though he would now became popularly
known as ‘devil number six’ in recognition of his dealings with the ‘for-
eign devils’.1 On 22 September the allies received a note from him, dated
the previous day, announcing that Prince Zaiyuan and his colleague had
been dismissed as a result of their conduct. He, Gong, had himself been
appointed high commissioner with full powers and wanted to come to
terms with the allies. Elgin and Gros replied that there could be no nego-
tiations until the allied captives were returned. Gong replied by asking
for a suspension of hostilities and the resumption of talks.2 The captives
would be sent back only after the Dagu forts had been given back and the
Haihe River evacuated by the allied fleet. Elgin responded that neither a
ship nor a man would leave China until the provisions of the 1858 Treaty
of Tianjin had been carried out. Unless the prisoners were returned to
the allied camp within three days, and a pledge given that the Tianjin
Treaty would be ratified, Beijing would be attacked. If the Chinese chose
to break the law of nations with regard to flags of truce, they must abide
by the consequences. But the prince’s response was that any entry of allied
forces into Beijing would mean immediate execution of the prisoners.3
Exchanges continued, and on the 25th Gros and Elgin, losing patience,
wrote to Gong that unless the Chinese accepted Western terms within
three days, the allies would attack and, by unstated but clear implication,
the dynasty would fall.
In the meantime, the army rested, while Wolseley went on carefully
mapping out Beijing’s surroundings. He even took a reconnaissance
party of Indian cavalry and French Spahis once more to the walls of the
Forbidden City, carefully noting its forty-feet-high walls – with those
dummy soldiers on the battlements. On the 26th Elgin and Grant rode to
Changkiwan to visit General Ignatiev. It turned out that the general had an
excellent map of Beijing, on which every street and house of importance
was shown. Mapping inside Beijing was, of course, officially forbidden,
but the Russians did manage to produce a good map. It had apparently
been drawn after the streets were measured by a cart from whose inte-
rior the street angles had been measured, while indicators were fixed to
the wheels to count the number of revolutions, from which the distance
covered could be calculated. That made it possible to give tangible help
to the allies, since in the event of any attack on the city it would be help-
ful to have some idea of what or who – including the prisoners – was at
what point of the city. Ignatiev allowed Hope Grant to copy that map in
a photograph taken by the Italian freelance photographer, Felice Beato,
who had accompanied the entire allied campaign. It also emerged that the
north wall of Beijing was much less of an obstacle than the other three
sides and was, anyway, only some four miles from the Summer Palace
where some of Prince Sangkolinsin’s troops might be found.
Gong’s response to Elgin naturally made no reference to suggestions
about the fall of the dynasty. He said Beijing would be defended to the
death by its soldiers and there would be other battles. The allied prisoners
had not so far been put to death and would be handed over as soon as
the peace treaty had been ratified. Elgin and Gros thought the persistent
Chinese refusal to hand them back was a good reason to fear the worst. By
3 October the allied army had moved a couple of miles closer to Beijing
and its leaders found themselves lodged in a highly ornamented mosque.
Three days later they left the mosque, and the army, in columns of regi-
ments, advanced to within a mile and a half of the walls of the capital.
Rumour now reached the allied command that the emperor had indeed
left for the North.
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 157
from Palikao towards Beijing, with every man carrying three days’ rations.
At one point Montauban came across three Spahis pillaging a house. He
seized their booty and restored it to the astonished master of the home.
The allies expected to meet Sang’s army again, but no one confronted
them, as the going became more difficult. So they finally arrived at the
fabulous and mysterious city of Beijing itself, sacred to the Son of Heaven,
which had so far figured only in their fairy tales. It was, for many of the
men, an emotional arrival. The armies camped some five kilometres miles
from Beijing’s northeast corner. The two allied generals agreed that the
Chinese army had apparently retreated and therefore the two of them
should make for the imperial Summer Palace, where they would probably
find the emperor or the chief government officials.6
At the same time, by 5 October, Loch and Parkes, still inside the city,
were told that the allied demands would be rejected and they themselves
would be executed that evening. Both were given paper on which to write
their last letters. But in the event, they were simply left alone. In fact, they
managed in another letter to indicate, again in code, the names of the
temple in which they were held and of some of the surrounding streets.
On the 6th, Hope Grant sent a message to Montauban suggest-
ing they separate and meet at the Summer Palace, which lay some six
miles to the north-west of the city. The British therefore started to move
around Beijing to the north-west, to attack ‘Sankolinsin’s army, which
was supposed to be encamped directly to our front’, as Hope Grant
wrote in his report. Since, however, the countryside was evidently not
particularly good for cavalry, and given the number of other difficulties
such as hollow roads or trees, he ‘dispatched the Cavalry Brigade, with
two six pounders with mounted detachments, with orders…’ to advance
towards the Summer Palace ‘and with a view to cutting off the enemy’s
retreat in that direction’. But the main British force was held up by
Manchu cavalry, so they spent the night camped a few miles short of the
palace, which did not make the soldiers kinder to local civilians. Some
men were quite willing to disrupt funeral processions, for instance, con-
fiscate the mules and throw the coffins they were carrying into the near-
est ditch. Hope Grant’s report added that ‘the French, anxious to join us
in our advance, struck off to their right, finished on the Summer Palace
without meeting any opposition, and occupied it till about nightfall. The
[British] Cavalry Brigade had reached the palace about two hours before
this…’. Then ‘General de Montauban offered to show [Brigadier] Pattle
and his officers over the Summer Palace…’.
160 H. GELBER
The story of the next two or three days – culminating in the sack and
burning of the Summer Place – is not easy to piece together in detail,
since French and British accounts differ so widely. And, perhaps not sur-
prisingly, the British and French vigorously blamed each other afterwards
for the looting and destruction of this treasure house of art, architecture,
jewellery and loveliness in all its parts. The fact seems to be that, whatever
the tales told afterwards, for a couple of days or so military discipline in
the British and French armies simply collapsed. But the exact sequence
of events is less clear. French writings7 suggest that by the evening of
the 6th the French crossed a ‘magnificent bridge’, marched along a road
paved with granite and reached an esplanade with trees set in square pat-
terns, at whose far end was the actual entrance to the Summer Palace. It
was guarded by a solid wooden gate with a smaller entrance on each side.
Fearing that a mass of Chinese troops might be hidden beyond the wall,
Montauban sent two officers and a company of marine infantry to open
the gate and reconnoitre.
With them went General Collineau, who disposed of the handful
of ancient eunuchs who tearfully tried to dissuade the foreigners from
invading the emperor’s sacred precincts. He occupied the first court with
part of his brigade and stayed there overnight to avoid the possible dan-
gers of exploring further in darkness. The next morning, 7 September,
Montauban, accompanied by Generals Collineau and Jamin, entered the
palace building proper. (On the same morning of the 7th, Loch, in his
prison, woke to the sound of artillery. He assumed that the assault on
Beijing had started and that he and Parkes were therefore about to be
executed. In fact, English guns were only being fired to tell the French
where the English force had got to.) Montauban also records that, as he
entered the palace, he placed sentinels at various points and appointed two
of his artillery officers to see to security and take charge until the arrival
of the British. ‘The two captains’, wrote d’Herrisson, ‘perform their task
scrupulously. Not a thing is stolen while their surveillance lasts.’
The main British force finally arrived at 11:30 on the morning of the
7th, and Elgin and Hope Grant ‘found that the French had encamped
near the entrance of the Great Audience Hall, and it was pitiful to see the
way in which everything was being robbed’.8 They entered the palace;
the two French captains were relieved, and commissioners appointed to
collect the most precious objects, with an equal share to be given to each
army. The two allied chiefs made that division the same evening in the
throne room. Some of the most remarkable pieces were kept for presenta-
tion to Queen Victoria and Napoleon III.
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 161
treasures of this place. He did not think anything like this destruction had
been seen since the sack of Rome by the barbarians.12 The French, who,
the British thought, had arrived virtually without carts or wagons, are said
to have left the ruined palace on 9 October with some 300 heavily laden
carts crammed with loot. The official French campaign report later spoke,
with somewhat excessive delicacy, of the removal of ‘the collection of curi-
osities of the most precious nature’, the intention of the organised looting
being to have the most impressive objects despatched back to France and
Britain.
On the other hand, some British officers also secured collections of
valuable things. At one point Wolseley, who did not himself engage in
looting, was accosted by a cheerful French soldier laden with loot who,
smiling, said, ‘Here’s a little present for you, comrade’, reached into his
bag and simply handed the astonished colonel a tiny miniature in a gold
setting. It turned out later, when Wolseley’s wife had it sent to Paris for
valuation, to be a present that King Louis XV had once upon a time sent
to the emperor of China. But British troops did not loot much at first,
for the simple reason that ‘our men were carefully prevented from leaving
camp’. However, within a day or so, anyone who could get away from
camp could wander freely into the palace. Many men, of both armies, also
began a wanton destruction of what they could not carry away. A British
officer later commented that ‘soldiers are nothing more than grown-up
schoolboys’ and ‘the love of destruction is certainly inherent in man’.
What was not in dispute was that, as Montauban later wrote in his
report, ‘It is impossible to describe the magnificence of the numerous
buildings that followed each other over a distance of four leagues, and
which are called the Summer Palace; a succession of pagodas containing
all the gods in gold, silver or bronze of gigantic dimensions. For instance,
a single bronze divinity, a Buddha, is about seventy feet high, and all the
rest in proportion – gardens, lakes and curiosities massed for centuries in
buildings of white marble, covered with dazzling tiles – to which may be
added views of an admirable extent of country.’
The whole thing was, in fact, an immense rectangular park, perhaps
some fourteen kilometres in circumference and surrounded by walls.
The throne room itself was some fifty yards long by twenty wide and
fifteen high. In the oratory, the walls, ceilings, tables, seats and much
else were of gold studded with precious stones. The rest was a fairyland
of trees, flowers, ponds and streams, buildings of every kind, including
libraries and pagodas on which Chinese emperors had lavished love and
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 163
The searches continued next day, the 8th, and revealed, among other
things, quantities of gold and silver bullion. Again, stories differ. The
French account says this wealth was divided between the allies, and the
French proportion distributed as prize money to the troops. The British
account says that a room full of treasure, mostly in gold ingots, was dis-
covered and a portion of it – worth possibly £8,000–9,000 – was reserved
for the British state. Hope Grant had army prize agents appointed and
ordered all his officers to send in everything they had taken. Hope Grant
himself and the generals of the division, Michel and Napier, did the same.
The ‘general stock’ of valuables was duly and publicly auctioned within the
army. Items in particular demand included the large numbers of expensive
fur coats that had been found or acquired from French soldiers and that
would protect people from the coming cold weather. The total yield of the
auction was also around £8,000 – surely an absurdly small sum for such
treasure. One third was allocated for distribution among the officers and
two thirds went to the non-commissioned officers and men, which meant
each private soldier received some £4.
Until about this time, on the 8th and according to French accounts,
military discipline had been more or less maintained. But then it was
found that the allies were not alone in their looting. In short order, hun-
dreds of Chinese from the surrounding towns and villages also rushed in
to help themselves to whatever could be carried away. They may have been
reacting, at least in part, to the very desecration of the imperial grounds
that the Europeans had already inflicted. At any rate, they climbed into
the palace and started their own plunder and even set fires. Even at the
entrance gate itself, the crowds of peasants and soldiers proved irresistible.
According to d’Herrison, ‘With all his energy Montauban could no more
prevent his troops from passing through the gate of the Summer Palace
than Napoleon, for all his prestige as a demi-god, could have held his
armies at the moment of sauve-qui-peut of Waterloo…’. He added: ‘The
English stole as the French did, but more methodically.’
Whatever the exact course of events – and, for later generations, espe-
cially for Chinese, responsibility – the palace was sacked and very largely
ruined, a fact that was to become of considerable importance shortly after-
wards. Meanwhile, Loch and Parkes were still waiting in their prison, by
now well fed and comfortable but uncertain whether they might not, at
any moment, be either released or executed. While they were waiting,
Heng Yi had been lowered over the city wall in a basket – the defending
soldiers refused to open the gate – to negotiate with Tom Wade, who
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 165
handed over a paper outlining the conditions for sparing Beijing from
allied attack. The Chinese would have to give up one of the city gates to
the allies. Given recent Chinese behaviour with heralds and flags of truce,
command of a gate was obviously essential for the security of any British
or French ambassador entering the capital. That condition was eventually
accepted, but only with great reluctance.
In the meantime, still on the 8th, Heng Yi sat with Parkes and Loch,
drinking tea and conversing on such fascinating topics as whether the sun
revolved round the earth or the earth around the sun. Around midday
he received a message and told the two prisoners that Prince Gong had
ordered their release. Two hours later they were taken in a cart outside the
city’s northern gate, where they found other carts with four soldiers and
one Sikh, as well as the French explorer Comte l’Escayrac de Lauture.15
The count never recovered from what had been done to him in China,
never went on travels again and died in 1868, at the early age of 42, at
Fontainebleau. Two days after his release, on 10 October, Parkes took
Hengi Yi to what was by then left of the Summer Palace, in the hope of
finding out what had happened to its governor, an old friend of Heng Yi’s
by the name of Weng Fu. But it turned out that Weng, having failed to
protect the royal palace as was his duty, had drowned himself in one of the
ornamental lakes. Heng Yi sat down on the shore and wept. Much later,
he explained that in Beijing he had had a private message to the effect that
the emperor had given way to his tougher advisers and signed the order
for the immediate beheading of Parkes and Loch (in the expectation that
their execution would so frighten the allies that they would desist from an
attack on the capital). He, Heng Yi, had been on tenterhooks during their
tea-time conversation lest the imperial messenger, carrying the execution
order, should reach Prince Gong before the precise time the prince had
already specified for the two men’s release. In fact, the messenger carry-
ing the execution order with the emperor’s seal had arrived a mere fif-
teen minutes or so after Parkes and Loch emerged from Beijing’s walls. If
he had arrived twenty minutes earlier, even Prince Gong would not have
been able to save the two Englishmen.
Four days later, three more Frenchmen and eight Sikhs were sent to
the allied camp, followed shortly afterwards by two more Sikhs. After a
few more days the British camp also received coffins with the bodies of
de Normann, Bowlby, Anderson, Private John Phipps and the remain-
ing Sikhs, while the French also received the bodies of most of their
missing men, including Colonel Grandchamps – whose body could only
166 H. GELBER
an artillery officer’s trousers and the second part of the dress of a French
ecclesiastic. No heads or skulls were ever discovered.
The allies’ coolies suffered, if anything, even worse treatment. Any
caught by the Chinese were buried up to their necks and left to the dogs,
who started by licking the victims’ faces and went on to chew their heads
off. No wonder that British and French troops clamoured for vengeance.
Apart from these horrors, Elgin and Gros were left with two closely
linked problems. One was, of course, the fulfilment of the strategic pur-
poses of the entire campaign, especially the ratification, at a public cer-
emony in Beijing itself, of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. The other was how
to deal with the consequences, including, not least, the longer-term politi-
cal consequences, of the Chinese treatment of those 39 allied prisoners.
On 17 October Elgin wrote to Prince Gong explaining that the previous
allied demands would have to be amended in light of the deceptive and
barbarous treatment of the allied hostages, half of whom had been mur-
dered despite the prince’s own assurances about their safety. The Chinese
may well have been astonished at the fuss the allies made about a handful
of not especially distinguished men.
The allied demands would clearly also have to take account of the mili-
tary situation. The Chinese army might have been defeated and with-
drawn from Beijing, but it was by no means destroyed. Beijing itself and
its walls were very strong. As the allied generals insisted, the army was
much too small for any attempt at a full-scale siege, while its field artil-
lery was by no means certain to make much of an impression on city walls
that were sixty feet thick and forty feet high. The allies also had important
advice from Ignatiev. In a note dated 25 September, the general described
details of the Beijing wall and mentioned that inside it, just north-east of
the mandarin quarter of the city, were the homes of some thousands of the
‘royal Tartar Guard’ with their families. So if allied forces tried to assault
the city, there might be a good deal of street fighting.
Moreover, the allied force was now, as everyone knew, under very great
time pressure. Beijing’s looming winter was sure to be very severe, as
usual. The army, as several of its commanders insisted, could not spend
the winter at Beijing, either outside or even inside the city, for winter and
icy rivers would cut off the flow of supplies from their bases at Tianjin,
let alone from the ships at sea. In fact, the army would have to be back at
Tianjin by the beginning of November, or it might get seriously caught by
the winter snow and ice. Furthermore, fresh strains were arising between
168 H. GELBER
the allies themselves. Elgin even worried privately whether the French and
Russians might start to make common cause against Britain.17
The defenders of Beijing had their own concerns. Nothing much was
heard from the emperor, who remained far away in the North; and even
Prince Sang was distant and seemed to be quite inactive.
Elgin resolved the dilemmas by writing coldly to Prince Gong that he
was still ready to make peace, but China would now have to pay an addi-
tional 300,000 taels of silver by 22 October, to be distributed to the allied
victims of Chinese brutality or their families. In addition, the allied armies
would destroy the remnants of the already ravaged Summer Palace, where
some of the allied hostages had been held. The imperial government would
also have to agree that a portion of the allied army would remain at Tianjin
until the indemnities required by the convention had been paid. In addi-
tion, Elgin reminded Gong that it was, after all, the allies who, although
they were engaged in the military occupation of Canton, continued to pay
its entire customs revenue most honourably into the imperial treasury;
that it had for some time been allied military forces who had been largely
responsible for preventing Shanghai from falling to the Taiping rebels; and
it had been the allied fleets that had afforded unmolested passage through
allied-dominated seas and rivers to the junks carrying corn and tribute to
Beijing. If peace were not promptly concluded, these concessions would
cease. And if the allied demands were rejected, the allies would have to
seek reparations by other means; indeed, only by accepting the allied
demands could the Qing dynasty seriously hope to survive.
It was also formally agreed that the allied army would not take over
Beijing but bivouac outside the walls. That catered, at one and the same
time, to the repeated Chinese worries about domestic political stability,
especially if Beijing was actually occupied, and also given the need to keep
allied soldiers secure in their own camp and not exposed to whims or
resentments of the huge Chinese population of the capital. Montauban
actually composed a proclamation to the population of Beijing explain-
ing that, although the city was now in the power of the allied troops, as
a gesture of goodwill to the inhabitants, they would not occupy the city.
The ultimatum was presented to Prince Gong, ordering him to sur-
render the city’s Anting Gate by noon on 12 October, so as to ensure the
security of allied negotiators or ambassadors. Yet it was clear that if the
walls were as stoutly defended as the Dagu forts and the Palikao Bridge
had been, and if Prince Sang’s Mongol cavalry was still free to harry the
supply lines between Beijing and Tianjin, the army could easily find itself in
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 169
serious trouble. Even now, not everyone was confident that the army had
the wherewithal to batter down the wall and gates if the Chinese refused
to open them. These walls, which not only turned out to be some forty
feet high and sixty-four feet wide at the top, were also sheathed with brick
and contained a filling of earth. ‘I knew too well’, Wolseley wrote later,
‘that with the number of rounds we had with us, no effective breach could
be hoped for’.18 A century later the ancient walls did indeed crumble
under Comrade Mao Zedong’s bulldozers, but for now the British guns
might not be enough. Still, on the day before the ultimatum expired, 12
October, the allies published a proclamation for the benefit of the inhab-
itants of the capital, warning that if peace was not made by midday on
the 13th, an allied attack on Beijing would commence. Apparently, the
merchants of the city went in a body to Prince Gong to urge him to give
up the Anting Gate. The prince seems to have replied that to comply with
their wishes might cost him his life, but he would yield if they declared
their united desire that he should do so. The allies were duly told that if
the treaty were signed and the prisoners returned to the allies, the city
would remain undamaged, and only those allied soldiers detailed to be
escorts to Elgin aand Gros should enter Beijing.
The allies issued an order to their troops that there must be no destruc-
tion of property in Beijing and took care to post notices warning the
people of Beijing of the impending attack on the capital. But Gong,
after wavering, decided to have the northern Anting Gate duly opened
to General Napier a few minutes before the noon deadline on the 13th,
when the British 8-inch guns and lighter French pieces were due to start
firing. The allies immediately sent detachments to take charge of the gate,
as well as the wall of the city, which its inhabitants had always thought to
be impregnable. The French marched in with drums beating and colours
flying and took station to the left of the gate while Napier and the British
67th regiment, together with the 8th Punjabis and Desborough’s artil-
lery battery, did so on the right. Each of them posted a battery to com-
mand the approaches to the gate – from inside the city as well as outside.
Interestingly, the citizens seemed to have no fear of the barbarians, for
almost the first thing they did was to set up a small market to sell chickens,
fruit and other goods to the soldiers.
Some hours after the surrender of the gate, eight more Sikhs and some
Frenchmen were released by the Chinese, and two days later five carts
arrived, each carrying a coffin and each coffin with a piece of paper with
the name of the deceased. During the next two days the remaining coffins
170 H. GELBER
of the coffins and their contents was to write a note to Prince Gong to say he
was too horrified to have further communication with a government guilty
of such treachery until, by some great punishment inflicted on the emperor
and the governing classes, he had made clear to the entire world how the
allies detested such conduct.20 There had also been an imperial edict offer-
ing a monetary reward for the heads of the foreigners. In fact, Elgin con-
sidered privately that it was not just the Chinese who were to blame: he
thought his own army commanders had been much too dilatory in moving
forward against Beijing. But some spectacular act of punishment for the
atrocities was obviously called for. The emperor himself was beyond reach.
Beijing could not reasonably be harmed, and in any case the point was to
punish the emperor and the court, not the people of China, with whom
Elgin did not think he was at war. An outright occupation of Beijing would
simply be treated by the broad mass of Chinese as a final imperial defeat and
the end of the dynasty. There was, of course, the emperor’s major palace
in Beijing itself, but, given its immediate governmental role, its destruc-
tion might deal a severe blow to the entire social and political structure of
the empire. A further financial penalty could certainly be imposed, but the
burden of that would only, in the end, have to be carried by the mass of the
tax-paying people. Nor would it be helpful to ask that the directly guilty
Chinese officials be surrendered: the Chinese would merely hand over a few
helpless scapegoats. But there was the Summer Palace, where many of the
prisoners had actually been held and which was already devastated by loot-
ing – not just by the allied soldiery but by the hordes of Chinese who had
followed in their wake. The destruction of that already ruined palace would
represent a great blow to the person and prestige of the ruler, without dam-
aging the people of China.
The British generals liked Elgin’s idea, but the French were horrified. As
one French officer wrote, it was destruction just for the pleasure of destroy-
ing something. Both Montauban and Gros were shocked by the very idea of
destroying the remnants of that lovely palace. Neither was willing to make
a row about it, but the French refused to join in the work. Ignatiev, too,
disapproved of the idea of destroying the Summer Palace, or even of exact-
ing indemnities for the families of the dead. However, Elgin insisted, and
Ignatiev and Montauban finally agreed that burning the wrecked Summer
Palace might be the least bad option. Gros saw even further. He wrote to
Montauban pointing out that in the eyes not only of the Chinese but of the
peoples of Europe, France would be guiltless of what was being done to the
Summer Palace. In any event, on 18 and 19 October, the British 1st Division
172 H. GELBER
under Sir John Michel, together with some cavalry, moved slowly through
the huge park, setting fire to its 200 or so buildings, which were mostly of
wood and burned easily. He was personally not unaffected: he even spared
one pagoda because of its ‘simple beauty’ as a work of art. Even so, what
remained of the ravaged palace took three days to burn down. Whatever
was left was further looted by the swarms of peasants from the surround-
ing countryside. A pall of smoke and ash drifted over Beijing. ‘When we
entered the gardens’, wrote Garnet Wolseley mournfully, ‘they reminded
one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them
upon the 19th October, leaving them a dreary waste of ruined nothings’.21
When, shortly afterwards, some of China’s highest officials were allowed
to come and see what had been done, they simply sat down and wept. As
against that, Sidney Herbert wrote again to the Queen privately to say that
the peace treaty would never have been secure had the Summer Palace not
been burnt down, and had the Chinese not been frightened by thinking of
what else the allies might do.
One more small alarm was raised when it was discovered that a force of
Tartar cavalry was found at no great distance from the British camp. So on
the 22nd, Probyns and Fane’s regiments were sent to find out what was
going on. The officer in command of the Tartars explained that they were
merely the garrison of the city that had been ordered to camp outside the
walls. Hope Grant took due precautions, but there was no trouble.
Prince Gong, in spite of his many difficulties, accepted the final Elgin/
Gros ultimatum, and the immediate and increased indemnity to the British
was duly paid by 23 October, that to the French two days later.
*
Thus, on 24 October 1860, James Bruce, Eighth Earl of Elgin and
Kincardine, the British plenipotentiary and high commissioner in China,
sat himself in a green sedan chair with streaming tassels and was carried
in procession by sixteen Chinese porters in scarlet livery22 – the style nor-
mally reserved for the emperor of China – through Beijing’s main avenue
to the Hall of Ceremonies. He was escorted by 100 cavalry and 400 infan-
try marching with fixed bayonets. Some detachments headed the parade.
They were followed by the British military commander, Lt General Sir
James Hope Grant. Behind him came Elgin in person, flanked by mem-
bers of his diplomatic staff and followed by his saddled horse. The rear of
the procession was brought up by more British infantry. The processional
route, through Beijing’s main avenue to the Hall of Ceremonies, was lined
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 173
by more British troops: some 2000 soldiers of Sir John Napier’s second
division, who had been sent earlier to guard against any sudden Chinese
assault and now kept back large crowds of curious Chinese. Earlier in the
day, Lt Col Wolseley had personally inspected the hall and its grounds so
as (remembering Beitang) to guard against any possibility of treacher-
ously buried Chinese mines; and a battery of field guns was mounted on
Beijing’s city wall near the Anting Gate, aimed inwards, in case of trou-
ble from the people of the capital. In the event, according to Loch, the
crowds were well behaved and silent and showed neither fear nor hostil-
ity. Progress for the procession was slow, with many stops, partly because
of the cumbersome manoeuvres of a grand total of 6000 to 8000 allied
soldiers in the city, partly because of the crowds that had come to see the
spectacle and partly because of the heavy dust raised by the procession
itself over several miles.
As Elgin’s chair was carried into the Hall of Ceremonies, his escort
deployed to each side. He was received by the emperor’s brother, Prince
Gong, accompanied by a large number of mandarins, many in silk ceremo-
nial robes. As Elgin entered, with the English officers lining up on the left
and the mandarins on the right, a guard of honour presented arms and a
military band played ‘God Save the Queen’. Loch thought that Gong was
duly terrified.
The prince was dressed for the occasion in a purple silk robe embroi-
dered with dragons, yellow trousers and wearing a jade necklace. But he
had already lost face through being kept waiting by Elgin for two and
a half hours, not to mention arriving in a sedan chair carried by merely
six porters. Gros thought it had been bad taste for Elgin to keep Prince
Gong waiting for so long, and the prince had felt very hurt. In the hall,
two tables were set, facing the courtyard, each with a chair. Elgin took his
place on the left and Gong on a lower seat some fifteen feet to the right.
There was another chair, close to Elgin’s, for General Hope Grant and
tables and chairs for other senior officers on the side. Protocol required
that Elgin and Gong sit down simultaneously, a manoeuvre they managed
successfully. They then signed a new Treaty of Beijing, which contained
the provisions of the old Treaty of Tianjin that had been concluded back
in 185823 plus the provisions of the allied ultimatum of March 1860. Two
provisions had been added. In one, China ceded to Britain the peninsula
of Kowloon, which Parkes had originally rented from the governor general
of Canton. The other was to legalise the emigration of coolies. To record
the proceedings, minutes were drawn up in duplicate, one for each side.
174 H. GELBER
Elgin then explained that the terms of the treaty were more in China’s
interests than in Britain’s and that, if Britain deigned to sign it, that was
a demonstration of leniency towards China and a dynasty that, had they
wished, they could have overthrown. The memory of the Chinese govern-
ment’s recent bad faith could only be expunged by China’s paying strict
attention in future to the terms of the new treaty, after which the prince
offered a ceremonial banquet, which was coolly declined (partly for fear
of poison).
All the pomp and circumstance was not just arrogance on the part
of the victor. In fact, as one French diplomat shrewdly noted, Elgin’s
behaviour was meant to make a highly political point – especially after
the reception accorded to Lords Macartney and Amherst (who had tried
a Macartney-style visit in 1815/1816, with even less success) over the
past century – that Britain was not so much signing a treaty of peace as a
treaty of conquest. It was all meant to make a critically important point to
the Chinese empire and its people. To rub it in, Elgin behaved through-
out with studied formality and an air of superiority. Many of the British,
Wolseley included, thought that the display of military power would have
a highly beneficial influence on future Anglo–Chinese relations. Loch, in
fact, noted that the whole affair meant the opening of an entirely new
chapter, not just in the history of the Chinese empire, but for the entry
of 400 million people into the ‘concert of civilized nations’. He himself
was at once sent off to London with a copy of the treaty. When he arrived,
in the midst of continuing stories about the ordeals of the prisoners, he
found himself lionised, even by royalty.
Furthermore, the British lingered in and around Beijing until a Chinese
translation of the British and French treaties, carrying Prince Gong’s sig-
nature, had been prepared and posted in the main streets for citizens to
peruse. The populace did not seem to mind much. The allies had, after all,
been victorious not only over the disliked Manchu mandarins who were,
when all was said and done, themselves foreigners, but over an unworthy
emperor who had already lost the ‘mandate of heaven’ in their eyes.
Matters were somewhat less severe the next day, on 25 October, when
the French came to sign and ratify their own treaties. Fifteen mounted
mandarins in full dress received the ambassador at the city gate and
escorted him to the Tribunal of Rites. Prince Gong was again formally
dressed, and the French commander, General Cousin-Montauban, was in
full dress uniform. But the French plenipotentiary, Baron Jean Gros, had
lost his court uniform in the shipwreck coming out to China, so he arrived
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 175
simply in a dark suit, though topped with a braided cap. Instead of British
red coats and troopers, there were Spahis with scarlet mantles and new
saddle cloths and African chasseurs with sky-blue turbans. There was also
a squadron of mounted artillery, apparently – given the loss and damage
done during transport in the long journey to China – in uniforms made by
Chinese tailors in Shanghai. There were also the drums and bugles of the
French army and the band of the 101st Regiment. Once again, the crowds
did not show the least resentment during the long march of the procession
through the city, which took, the French calculated, over an hour and a
half. The treaty documents were first exchanged, so that the seals could be
verified. Then the French copy was transcribed onto fine parchment and
the Chinese one onto tablets of gilded wood, after which the two prin-
cipals appended their signatures. This time, after the signing ceremony,
Baron Gros gave the prince photos of Emperor Napoleon III and Empress
Eugénie, together with a collection of French coins. This time, too, the
refreshments offered by the Chinese were accepted.
Between them, the British and French documents and their signatories
agreed that peace was now re-established between the three empires. The
Chinese emperor expressed ‘profound regret’ about the clash with the
allies at Dagu in June 1859. China would pay a war indemnity of eight
million taels of silver (instead of the two million provided for in the old
Tianjin Treaty). That was made up of two million for damages and six mil-
lion for the cost to the allies of the war. This was in addition to the open-
ing of many more ports to foreign trade, as had been previously agreed.
The port and city of Tianjin would also become accessible. Those citizens
of the signatory empires who carried consular passports would have free-
dom to travel and trade, and security of their property throughout China.
China’s own customs tariffs would be revised (including the legalisation
and taxation of the opium traffic instead of importing it as contraband
with the cooperation of so many Chinese officials). The allies would have
the right to spend the winter in China and keep garrisons there until such
time as the indemnities had been paid in full. And the ambassadors of
the two allied nations would have the right of residence in Beijing and
would be able to deal directly with the highest officials and ministers of
the emperor.
In addition, not only did the British confirm their possession of
Kowloon, opposite Hong Kong, but the allies agreed to evacuate the
Zoushan islands – much to the disgust of Montauban, who had hoped
they would give to France a China foothold equivalent to Hong Kong.
176 H. GELBER
too, while the visitors were impressed by the beauty of statues and doorways,
they were unimpressed by the dilapidated state of many of the buildings.
Some thought the whole thing fairly ugly and disappointing: the imperial
winter palace was just a ruin. It was all very different from the impressions
that the Western public had derived from the Summer Palace riches.
As for the objects taken from the Summer Palace, in February 1861
many of them were brought back to France and exhibited at the Tuileries
Palace. Some two years later the most precious items completed their trav-
els at the Musée Chinois at Fontainebleau. The 1862 exhibition in London
also had many items from the palace, including ones that had been pre-
sented to Queen Victoria and Emperor Napoleon III; and in March 1865
a private collection of Chinese gems and relics opened in London at the
Crystal Palace. It seems likely that certain items in the Chinese collection
of the modern British Museum may also have originated in the Summer
Palace. China’s own attempts to catalogue the items that the allied army
removed from Beijing suggest that something like 1.5 million items can
currently – in the twenty-first century – be found in some 2000 institu-
tions in 47 countries.
After these Beijing visits, and in short order, an imperial edict was
received confirming everything that Prince Gong had signed; and on 6
November large proclamations were posted all over Beijing informing all
citizens of the terms of peace that had been agreed.
Yet when all is said and done, arguably the greatest triumph in Beijing
was that secured by Ignatiev, who was back in Beijing by mid-October,
still mediating between the allies and the Chinese. He managed to
secure the Additional Treaty of Beijing, signed on 14 November 1860,
that confirmed the agreements of Aigun and finally ceded to Russia the
entire region between the Ussuri River and the Pacific Ocean, as well as
Sakhalin.24 These were, as noted earlier, huge territorial gains. Among
other things, they finally provided Russia with access to warm water on
the Pacific, and they promptly set about building the great port and naval
base of Vladivostok.
‘The first day we stopped at a joss house on the side of the road to Pekin;
we tied our horses up, and went inside. The Chinese then took them away
but brought them back in the morning, and we again mounted. Here two
gentlemen left us; we went through Pekin to the other side, and pulled up
at a serai; here one of the Chinamen went to ask if we should dismount,
and on his return we were taken to some tents. This place had barracks
inside, and we went through a large doorway. We had been there half an
hour when we were ordered out one by one to wash our hands and faces.
They took out the gentlemen first, threw them down in the middle of
the yard, tied our hands and feet behind, and threw us over on our backs.
From this position, if we attempted to rest on our right or left side, they
kicked and beat us. We remained in this position all night during which
time they poured water on our bonds to tighten them. Mr De Normann
spoke to one of the Chinese officers during the night and told him that
we came to treat and not to fight, and they then gave us a little water and
rice. The Hindoos would not eat it until Mr Anderson persuaded them
to do so, when some of them did. The next day a white button mandarin
came to see us. He had many orderlies with him, and took down in writing
some answers to questions put by him to Mr De Normann. About two
hours after he was gone we were loaded with irons; got nothing more to
eat or drink for three days; Mr Anderson’s hands were swollen to three
times their proper size, and black as ink; the whole weight of his body –
chains and all – was thrown on his hands, they looked ready to burst.
As long as he was sensible he encouraged us, and rebuked us for call-
ing out; when he became insensible he constantly called out Major Fane,
Maclean and others; he became delirious when the chains were put on.
On the afternoon of the third day from this, they took four of us away in
carts, travelled all night, gave us no food or water, and beat us when we
asked for any. Mr Bowlby’s hands were not so much swollen; he spoke
no Hindostanee, so we could not understand him; at 10 am next day we
arrived at a fort, with a few buildings near it, there was no town. Another
cart was with us containing duffadar Mahomed Bux, a French officer, very
tall and stout, with a brown beard, and a dragoon named Pisa (Phipps).
We were taken into the fort, and for three days were out in the open air in
the cold. They then pulled us into an old kitchen and kept us there eight
days; they never allowed us to stir for three or four days. Mr Bowlby died
the second day after we arrived; he died from maggots forming in his
wrists; he was dressed in a kind of grey check. His body remained there
nearly three days, and the next day it was tied to a crossbeam and thrown
BEIJING, AND TRIUMPH 179
over the wall to be eaten by dogs and pigs. The next day the Frenchman
died; he was wounded slightly on the head and hand, apparently by a
sword. Maggots got into his ears, nose and mouth, and he became insen-
sible. He had on a black coat, red trousers with black stripe – (Deponent
does not give a clear account of dress); – he was tall as Major Probyn, but
stouter. Two days after this Jawalla Sing (first Sikh) died; his hands burst
from his rope wounds, maggots got into them and he died. Four days
afterwards Phipps, King’s Dragoon Guards, died; for ten days he encour-
aged us in every way he could, but one day his hands became swollen
like Mr Anderson’s, and maggots were generated the next – one maggot
increased a thousandfold in a day. Mahomed Bux, duffadar, died ten days
ago; he remained very well till then, and abused the Chinese for bringing
him pig to eat. Maggots formed on him four days before his death, and his
hands were completely eaten away. I should have died had not my chains
been taken off.
The Chinaman who brought us here was very kind, he dressed our
wounds and gave us what we wanted; when he was absent we got nothing.
The deponent has Mr Bowlby’s stockings.’
CHAPTER 10
Departures
As promised to all concerned, not least the Chinese, once the Beijing
ceremonies were over, the allied troops left the capital. The escort detach-
ments deployed to ensure the safety of the British and French emissaries
left immediately after the major ceremonies. The other troops continued,
also as promised to Prince Gong and Guiliang, to bivouac outside Beijing,
but they departed by early November. Not so in the rest of China. In fact,
the end of the campaign was by no means the end of British or French
military activities in the rest of China, especially those in defence of that
imperial jewel of a trading port, Shanghai. None of these activities resem-
bled an attempt at territorial or political domination. In fact, some of the
units seem to have behaved like inveterate travellers.
The French left Beijing in particular haste, except for the one battalion
that stayed on to protect the diplomats. Montauban and his men left on 1
November and arrived in Tianjin five days later. By then it was already very
cold. They also found that the countryside through which they marched
had been abandoned by its inhabitants. Indeed, it was often ruined by
Chinese marauding gangs. They did not just pillage everywhere but burnt
down several villages. Some places that the French army had left in a flour-
ishing state were now ruined (and the population naturally blamed the
French).
The two British divisions also left promptly, the 2nd on 7 November
and the 1st two days later. There was a pause on 8 November with the
arrival of Frederick Bruce, Elgin’s bother, whom Elgin immediately pre-
sented to Prince Gong as the new British ambassador, while Gros presented
under the command of Brigadier General Staveley, who had moved down
from Tianjin. Casualties were light, but there was a good deal of sickness,
mostly from the typhoid and cholera in the region. In April and May
1862 there were even some minor actions by Franco–British forces in the
Shanghai area against the Taipings, in which one Aide de Camp (ADC) on
the French side was the interesting Prince Wittgenstein of the 1st Prussian
Lancer Guards, while the French Admiral Auguste Protet was killed.
There was also some recruitment of local Chinese auxiliaries, including,
(as mentioned and) in succession to the American adventurer Frederick
Townsend Ward, the British Major Charles Gordon. He was so effective,
and the grateful Shanghai merchants praised his services so loudly, that
he became known to the newspapers as ‘Chinese’ Gordon. His life ended
much later, famously and heroically, when he was ‘martyred’ at Khartoum
in the Sudan by the forces of the local religious leader, the Mahdi.
The 31st Foot did not leave China until the end of June 1863, when
they embarked for England. The 44th, who had arrived in China from
Madras by March 1860 and been detached in September to Shanghai on
anti-Taiping operations, were by November in Hong Kong, which they
left in October 1861 to return to India. The 99th Regiment returned to
Canton and later to Hong Kong, from where a detachment was sent to
Shanghai where they took a nearby rebel camp in April 1862. Not until
the end of February 1865 did the regiment complete its tour in China and
sail for South Africa, with the exception of one company, which had left
for the Dagu forts in October of the previous year and rejoined the regi-
ment in South Africa only seven months later. The 67th and 99th Foot,
who left in 1865, may have been the last English troops to leave China.
Elgin, on his circuitous way back to England, called at Hong Kong,
where he was horrified once more by the brutal behaviour of the British
towards the Chinese. He then returned home to London and to an enthu-
siastic reception, both in the government and in Parliament, where his
contemporaries felt that he had done very well indeed. So did Queen
Victoria. In fact, he found that he, like Loch, had become something of
a national hero. Palmerston noted that no one had behaved better than
Elgin. Sidney Herbert again wrote to him, this time to say that everyone
was very satisfied with the way things had been done. The campaign had
been managed with skill and firmness and been a signal success. No one
seems to have had a word of criticism about the burning of the Summer
Palace. More generally, almost everyone in England, as well as in the army,
was full of admiration for the excellent way in which the campaign had
DEPARTURES 185
been run. Not only the actual fighting but the ancillary activities and ser-
vices had been admirably handled. This time, supply and medical services
had been as well managed as the technologies of the day permitted, and
wounded soldiers were given excellent care on the hospital ships. Hope
Grant and his subordinate commanders had seen carefully to baggage and
supply of all kinds, whose crucial importance they had themselves experi-
enced first hand, whether in the Crimea or in India.
Nor had the campaign been outrageously expensive. According to a
later calculation by the War Office in London, the total number of troops
in China from February to November 1860 had been some 14,000 at a
total cost of £4,680,000. Of the 14,000 approximately three quarters had
been British troops and one quarter Indian. And, the War Office remarked
coolly, ‘A French force of some 7,000 also cooperated.’2
Unsurprisingly, then, Elgin had not been a month at home when Lord
Palmerston offered him the greatest prize he had always hoped for: the
viceroyalty and governor-generalship of India. It had been his earliest and
greatest ambition and meant he would now attain the post in which he
could succeed his old college friend Earl Canning. By the time he reached
India, much had already been done to reorganise the Indian administra-
tion, shattered as it had been by the 1857 mutiny. He carried on, with
dignity and firmness, the sensible policies of his predecessor towards the
British feudatories. He also did his best to check the aggression of the
Dutch in Sumatra, which was contrary to existing treaties, and tried to
deal, as his predecessors had also done with indifferent success, with the
north-west frontier and turbulent locals in Afghanistan (rather as the
American General David Petraeus would try, in the same country and
with equally indifferent success, a century and a half later). Eventually,
Elgin marched a force to the border to punish the tribes who had violated
previous engagements. In the midst of this ‘little war’, and at the lovely
hill station of Dharamsala, ‘the place of piety’, he died of a seizure on 10
November 1863. Neither on the frontier nor in Afghanistan did he leave
any lessons very useful to his successors.
The victorious general Sir James Hope Grant was received by the
Queen and given the gold and jade sceptre that had been taken from
the Summer Palace. He also received the thanks of Parliament for his
performance in China. In 1861 he was confirmed as lieutenant general
and appointed commander-in-chief of the army of Madras. Three years
later he was brought back to London and became Quartermaster General
in the army’s central administration, the Horse Guards. But in 1870 he
186 H. GELBER
took up what may have become his most influential role: commanding
the army depot and camp at Aldershot. After the Franco–Prussian War of
1870 he changed the British army’s manoeuvring system for the exercises
of 1871–1873. He also introduced military lectures and war games and,
not surprisingly given his deep religious faith, warmly supported every
institution for the social and religious welfare of everyone under his com-
mand. He was promoted to full general in 1872 and died three years later.
Wolseley continued to meet Napoleon’s chief criterion when consider-
ing an officer for higher command: he was lucky. But there was more to him
than luck. He continued to have a sharp tongue, deep-rooted prejudices
about Britain’s honour and the glory of the empire and a waspish view of
his seniors. The commander-in-chief of the army was the Queen’s cousin,
the Duke of Cambridge. Yet to Wolseley he was ‘the Royal George, the
Great German Sausage’. Still, Wolseley saw active service in almost every
war the empire fought in the second half of the nineteenth century. His
service in Burma, India and the Crimea had shown him the serious weak-
nesses of the existing army system, and he became a strong supporter of
the Cardwell Reforms of the British army. These were introduced between
1868 and 1874 by Edward Cardwell, the Secretary of State for War and
protégé of William Gladstone. They centred on short-service enlistment,
the creation of a trustworthy army reserve and an end to the selling and
purchasing of officer commissions.
Not only did Wolseley become one of Cardwell’s protégés but, once
he reached senior rank, he enthusiastically supported other reforms.
Everyone in London understood that, when Gilbert and Sullivan wrote
their opera “Pirates of Penzance”, it was Wolseley who was their ‘very
model of a Modern Major-General’ (indeed, Disraeli once called him ‘our
only soldier’). He ended his service life as Field Marshal Lord Wolseley,
Commander-in-Chief of the entire British army, in succession to the Duke
of Cambridge.
As for Harry Parkes, he returned after the war to his post at Canton and
a year later received his knighthood. In 1865 he was appointed minister
to Japan, a post he held for eighteen years. In 1882 he was transferred to
Beijing, where he died three years later of malarial fever.
French attitudes were very different. Napoleon III’s foreign policy
caused much dissatisfaction, especially his intervention in the Americas
in 1861–1867, when he tried and failed to make the Austrian Archduke
Maximilian the emperor of Mexico. The French economy worsened, and
Napoleon’s foreign failures strengthened opposition at home. In January
DEPARTURES 187
Altogether, Paris opinion said that the China War had, after all, been a
fairly obscure business. If anyone had gained from it, it was the British, not
the French. There had been no great, dramatic battles, no massive casual-
ties, not much demonstrated heroism. Worse still, the soldiers had even
become rich. Altogether, it had been an easy and unremarkable victory
and an unimportant war.
About that, at least, Paris was quite wrong.
CHAPTER 11
Hindsight: And Aftermath
PART 1: BRITAIN
For the British, the larger role of this China campaign can be considered
in several contexts. First are the immediate results with respect to domestic
and foreign policies in London politics. Second is the campaign’s role in
the progress of British religious and trading links with China over the next
half-century or more. Third is the campaign’s role in the modernisation
of British forces in the second half of the nineteenth century. Fourth is its
role in setting the scene for the remarkable series of small wars that Britain
fought in that half-century, in Africa, Asia, North America and elsewhere.
That a man named Mao Zedong might, a century later, highlight the
Opium War as a central factor in the ‘imperial oppression’ of China natu-
rally occurred to no one.
For the government and political class in London, the outcome of the
1860/1861 China expedition was, in fact, entirely satisfactory. The man-
ner as much as the fact of the allied victory, culminating in the formal
military ceremonial of Elgin’s and Gros’ processions through Beijing,
confirmed changes that the British had been wrestling with for over half
a century. China was forced to accept Britain, through Elgin, as a kind of
equal partner in political discussions; more generally, it had to move a long
way towards the acceptance of Western principles of national sovereignty
and the legal and diplomatic equality of states. More immediately, this led
to the desired expansion of trade as well as new or revised treaty arrange-
ments whose provisions the Chinese would actually carry out. Not only
had trade been expanded but the arrangements for it were satisfactorily
regulated,1 and the rights of traders expanded, in fact very much in line
with China’s traditional ways of dealing with foreigners. Moreover, while
these achievements were very satisfying, the costs of obtaining them, both
financial and military, had been small. Britain also avoided any need to
acquire territory in China, with the immediate exception of a rock called
Hong Kong that was of little significance to the Chinese empire. The
French and British had also begun the process of acquiring concessions on
Chinese soil that brought obligations Harry Parkes later described as fol-
lows: ‘…The Consul acted as police magistrate hearing disputes between
masters and seamen, cases of assault and serious crimes among the foreign
community; he dealt as a judge in common law cases; granted probates;
sat as a coroner; and generally conducted the legal affairs of the port…At
Shanghai the judicial duties of the Consul became so heavy that it was at
last found necessary to appoint a separate judge…’.2 While Chinese armed
forces had been humiliated in the field, China had not been damaged or
divided, nor had its government been evidently undermined. No wonder
that Elgin himself, as well as the senior military commanders, received
handsome rewards.
Perhaps above all, China was not weakened, let alone fragmented, in a
way that would have increased the reach of Russian power in East Asia and
the Pacific. The weaknesses of Chinese society and the state had been clear
enough since the Macartney mission to Bejing in 1793/1994. Macartney
himself had, as noted earlier, foreseen major weaknesses in his well-known
passage about the Chinese empire being ‘… an old, crazy first-rate Man
of War’ that now ‘… can never be rebuilt on the old bottom’.3 As a con-
sequence of the way in which the Anglo–French campaign had been
conducted, therefore, the immediate balance of power in Central Asia
remained unaffected. The long-term consequences were another matter.
Bowring was not alone in finding that China had violated both natural
law and the law of nations, especially in the matter of economic freedom.
Others, too, relied on the principle that ‘All men ought to find on earth the
things they stand in need of…The introduction of dominion and property
could not deprive men of so essential a right.’4 In pursuit of such ideas,
and as John Darwin has recently pointed out, ‘The spread of British com-
mercial activity was regarded as not only desirable in itself, but as a benefi-
cent, civilizing agency.’5 At the same time, as Bowring wrote to Foreign
Secretary Lord Clarendon: ‘It is no unusual characteristic of the Anglo-
Saxon race that they begin by trading and end in governing.’ London
HINDSIGHT: AND AFTERMATH 191
should beware of retelling ‘the tale of British India over a vaster field…’.
Even so, the Chinese authorities’ most important source of revenue, the
Maritime Customs Inspectorate, was staffed between 1854 and 1950 by
some 5500 British nationals. The Royal Navy even had a fleet of spe-
cially constructed gunboats that, among other police actions, patrolled the
Yangzi even after the ‘leased territory’ of Weihai was returned to Chinese
rule in 1930. Though other states had their own interests in China, the
international settlement was the residence of thousands of Britons, who
were exempted from Chinese law, and was policed by British policemen.
Hundreds of Catholic and Protestant priests and missionaries, many of
them British, lived and worked beyond the cities. The British retained the
greatest share of China’s foreign trade until the First World War, and alto-
gether the British presence in China remained the most prominent foreign
presence until the Japanese invasion of 1931. Furthermore, not only did
London play a critical role in developing the colonies in general, but it was
now going to be the centre of a well-developed network of international
services destined to expand as world trade grew during the second half
of the nineteenth century. In 1860 other developments remained in the
lap of the future, not least the dramatic rise of Japan following the Meiji
Restoration of 1868, and especially the growth of Japanese military and
naval power that would lead to the Anglo–Japanese treaty of 1902.
The China expedition also visibly absorbed the lessons of the Indian
Mutiny and, no less importantly, of the Crimean War, in the excellent
medical and supply arrangements that had supported the China expedi-
tion. At the same time, the strategic dominance of the Royal Navy made
the campaign possible by its dominance of the China coast and Chinese
waters, rendering possible movement at will round China’s coasts, from
Hong Kong to the Haihe River. Not only that, but the army’s march up
the Haihe to Tianjin and beyond, to Beijing, would have been far more
difficult, if not impossible, but for the ability of the navy to seize and
operate a number of junks to transport supplies, and even guns, along the
flanks of the army’s advance. Indeed, the Royal Navy’s role went much
further, both then and later, and not just in China but around the world.
In China itself, the navy was responsible for transporting troops, horses,
supplies and people to and between Hong Kong, the Canton estuary, vari-
ous islands and Shanghai, and up the Haihe to Tianjin, not to mention the
march by the army up to Beijing itself or the transmission of messages to
and from the army and London.
192 H. GELBER
Lord Elgin’s conduct had been wise. He privately condemned both sides
in the China war, sought justice in Sino–British dealings, and thought that
he was acting ‘as China’s friend in all this’. Yet the London government’s
satisfaction with the conduct and eventual outcome of his campaign was
made very clear when he was rewarded with the achievement of his life’s
ambition – his appointment as viceroy of India (though he died shortly
after taking up that post).
What of England’s and London’s reactions to Elgin’s senior command-
ers? Elgin’s success had various consequences of long-term importance.
The conduct of the campaign, and particularly the personal experiences
of its senior officers, like Hope Grant himself, of Napier and, not least, of
Garnet Wolseley, came to play a special role in the fundamental reforms
of the British and Indian services in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Hope Grant himself went on to become full general in charge of the
Aldershot Division from 1870 to 1875 and was then appointed to lead the
reform of education and training systems generally for the forces. Perhaps
no less important was the role of Wolseley in helping to promote the large
reforms of Edward Cardwell, the secretary of state for war in 1870–1874.
The reorganisation of the War Office included making the commander-in-
chief no longer an independent potentate but a senior subordinate to the
secretary of state. Even more importantly, perhaps, army enlistment ‘for
life’ was replaced by enlistment for twelve years, part of it in the reserve.
The purchase of army commissions was abolished, too, and replaced by
promotion on merit. Flogging was abolished in both the army and the
navy, and the breech-loading rifle became the main infantry weapon.
The 1860 China campaign proved to be highly significant for Britain
in other ways, too, and for the longer term. It, and the lessons it brought
and which its officers developed, helped to make possible the remarkable
tally of small campaigns that the British fought in various far-flung parts
of the world during the entire half-century from 1850 to around 1900.
That had in turn been made possible by the growth of the empire, and
of imperial power, especially in the decades that followed the American
War of Independence. Central to it was not just the Royal Navy but the
growth of virtually unchallenged British power in India after 1857, which
gave London command over India’s human and military resources. In
India, and taking British and Indian troops together, the British came to
have one of the world’s largest regular armies to draw on. In the same
period came the growth and collapse of Britain’s major rival, the French
HINDSIGHT: AND AFTERMATH 193
empire, at first through the French Revolution and then with the col-
lapse of Napoleon Bonaparte’s political and strategic edifice. In the same
period came Britain’s decisive naval victory at Trafalgar, in 1805, which
confirmed her naval and commercial command for the time being of the
world’s major shipping routes. That, in turn, allowed the fast, sudden and
often unexpected movement of troops to widely separated points along
the coasts not only of India itself but of Africa, Burma and other regions,
including China itself in the 1850s and 1860s. That gave the British virtu-
ally unchallenged mastery in many places. In the early 1800s it allowed the
Royal Navy to ban most of the slave traffic from Africa to North America.
It was essential in maintaining supplies during the Indian Mutiny and the
Crimean War. It made Wolseley’s own most famous and skilful campaigns
possible, like the Ashanti War of 1873–1874 or the unexpected disem-
barkation at Ismailia that made it possible for him to defeat Arabi Pasha
at Tel-el-Kebir in 1882 and conquer Egypt, or the Nile expedition of
1884 that sought – and failed – to relieve General Gordon who was being
besieged at Khartoum. But it was that combination of command of the
ocean, well-drilled and professional soldiers and officers and experience in
the field, that gave to quite small British forces a remarkable superiority
on many continents for the best part of half a century. It is significant that
by 1900 Britain had no less than four viceroys in India and on the coasts
of Africa: Lord Curzon in India, Lord Cromer in Egypt, Lord Milner in
South Africa and Lord Lugard in West Africa. In 1902 the War Office in
London totted up the cost of no less than fifteen principal British wars in
the half-century to 1899.6
It was only after 1900 that new methods, from the deadly guerilla tac-
tics of the Boer War to the appearance of new weapons, from steel-clad
warships to machine guns, to barbed wire and greater varieties of artillery –
first demonstrated, actually, in the American Civil War of 1861–1865 –
showed how outdated had become the arrangements that Hope Grant
and Wolseley had so successfully used in China and Africa a few decades
earlier.
There were broader and even longer-term results stemming from
Elgin’s China campaign, including the now long-standing Chinese con-
viction that most if not all of China’s ills between 1850 and 1950 were the
fault of the rich Western powers and Japan and that the “Opium Wars”,
colonialism and so forth were mere Western aggression. Of course, treat-
ing the Chinese as mere objects and the Western powers as the sole actors
in these events does scant justice to Chinese views, policies and actions,
194 H. GELBER
let alone to the specifics and personality of Chinese society. The first point
here is the skill of Chinese diplomacy and ‘psychological warfare’ that suc-
ceeded in linking British and, later, American political and strategic inter-
ests with vague, but often powerful, ideas about the moral obligations that
the West ‘owed’ to China. Second, there was – and still is – the general
tendency of the non-conformist conscience to find fault for a variety of
social evils and difficulties in one’s own shortcomings of work and effort.
The fact is that the bulk of the Protestant missionaries in China around
the end of the nineteenth century were non-conformists who were horri-
fied – often all too justifiably – by the wretched condition of the Chinese
masses and conveyed their views passionately to their home audience. It
is hard, once again, not to find parallels in the continuing Western, and
especially Anglo-Saxon, tendency to think that whatever goes wrong any-
where in the world seems to be one’s own fault; and therefore to see
problems of unrest or sickness or poverty in the so-called Third World or
Developing World of the 21st century also as stemming from oppression
or, at best, neglect by richer countries and requiring solutions by Western
action or money. It is much more rarely remarked how largely the con-
sequent demands for governmental and administrative reforms in these
regions, and mechanisms to achieve them, merely echo the ‘imperialist’
motives of earlier periods or the easy latter-day assumptions about Western
exploitation.
A third strand of explanation has to do with the rise of anti-imperialism
and anti-capitalism that accompanied and followed the rise of the British
empire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and beyond. Here
was a trend that not only sympathised with the ‘oppressed’ peoples of the
empire but was apt to link this with the arguably even more urgent needs
of the working classes at home. That had obvious links with other ele-
ments of changing opinions: the growing appeal of socialist and Marxist
ideas to middle-class intellectuals. This was connected, largely simultane-
ously, with the rise of working-class organisations, notably trade unions.
They were destined, by the end of the century and beyond, to produce
not just reformist and even revolutionary fervour but, at a quite different
level, organisations like the British Labour Party. Naturally the Chinese
made excellent use, at home and abroad, of these trends, as did their
admirers and defenders.
But other perspectives from and about the 1860 campaign also deserve
to be remembered. Perhaps the best – if highly old-fashioned – expression
comes from one of the more far-seeing British officers to have served with
HINDSIGHT: AND AFTERMATH 195
Elgin in China and who never went back. It was, once again, Wolseley. He
wrote about it forty years after the 1860 campaign, when he had retired,
full of years and honours, as Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and commander-
in-chief of the whole British army. The Chinese, he said,
‘…are the most remarkable race on earth and I have always thought and still
believe them to be among the great coming rulers of the world. They only
want a Chinese Peter the Great or Napoleon to make them so. They have
every quality required for the good soldier and the good sailor, and in my
idle speculation upon this world’s future I have long selected them as the
combatants on the one side at the great Battle of Armageddon, the people
of the United States of America being their opponents...’.7
Such ideas have had a distinct resonance in the second decade of the
21st century.
PART 2: CHINA
For the Chinese empire the consequences of the 1860 war were natu-
rally much more far-reaching. It was arguably the first serious foreign (as
distinct from domestic rebel) challenge to the 2000-year-old conviction
of China’s centrality in human affairs and its emperor’s unique position
as the link with heaven, and therefore his necessary superiority to any
other ruler. From which it clearly followed that all other states and rul-
ers were, in principle, China’s inferiors and even, in most cases, tributar-
ies. They certainly had no business interfering in China’s domestic affairs
or the arrangements that China might make in relation to foreign trad-
ers and other visitors. The victorious Anglo–French military processions
through Beijing, together with the new treaties with the allies, their texts
published in Beijing’s streets, demonstrated irrefutably that here was the
end of an era. For the average Chinese, watching Elgin and Gros pro-
cessing through the capital, it simply looked like another dynasty com-
ing to replace the worn-out Manchus, whose humiliation meant that they
had lost the mandate of heaven. It all underlined the warnings of the old
emperors two centuries earlier: that China should beware of letting the
foreigners in at all, since they would be sure to disturb the empire’s peace
and stability. Not to mention its complicated internal structure of prov-
inces and peoples.
196 H. GELBER
On the other hand, the empire’s diplomats used their skills with great
success on allied susceptibilities. The threat that certain allied demands,
for instance about the direct military occupation of Beijing, would lead to
a total imperial collapse proved to be very powerful indeed. Imperial col-
lapse, followed by domestic chaos in China, was the last thing the British
and French were willing to contemplate, let alone be responsible for.
There might be no government left with which to conduct negotiations
on anything. Foreign trade would be wrecked and, with it, the highly valu-
able economic and banking links now running through Canton. Worse
still, chaos in China might offer unprecedented opportunities for an even
further expansion of Russian power anywhere from Central Asia to the
Pacific Rim.
Nevertheless, it became increasingly clear to the Chinese governing
classes that not merely the humiliating military defeats of 1842 and
1860 but China’s growing general weaknesses as well stemmed from
comprehensive shortcomings at every level: military, administrative and
diplomatic, not to mention economic and industrial. The most imme-
diately obvious weaknesses were the military ones, whether in weap-
ons, organisation or administration. For all the courage of many of
the imperial troops – especially Manchu and Mongol units – there was
nothing in the army’s organisation or discipline that could match the
equivalent arrangements of the British, Indians or French. The strate-
gies adopted by the Chinese commander in chief, Prince Sangkolinsin,
turned out to have fundamental shortcomings, although the Chinese
leadership was not wrong to think that the threat to the empire posed
by the Taiping rebels was altogether more fundamental than that posed
by the merely trade-seeking Westerners. After all, it could hardly be said
to be a deadly conflict when the empire, facing repeated defeats by the
allies on the Haihe River, was simultaneously being defended by British
and French troops at Shanghai and elsewhere. Prince Sangkolinsin him-
self was demoted after the 1860 defeat, though he was later recalled to
lead the fight against Nian rebels, who finally ambushed and killed him
in 1865.
Behind the Military and Strategic Failings Lay Even Larger Problems.
The first and most obvious was the Taiping Rebellion, which threatened
the entire structure of the Chinese state and the Manchu dynasty. Chinese
official nomenclature made the difference clear by classifying the rebels as an
HINDSIGHT: AND AFTERMATH 197
‘organic disease’ while the Europeans were merely ‘an affliction of the limbs’.
It was entirely rational to appease the Westerners while not only devoting
major resources and energies to dealing with the Taipings, but even enlist-
ing Western help against these rebels. What was much less sensible was to
allow the governing groups to remain in astonishing ignorance about their
Western opponents. The emperor’s advisers dismissed Britain as just ‘a hand-
ful of stones in the Western ocean’. Prince Gong himself made that remark to
Elgin about supposing that, because Britain must be so tiny, half of the British
clearly had to live on ships. It was true that the mandarins had seen some-
thing of British diplomatic habits and military structures some twenty years
earlier, in the campaign leading to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. They could
obviously also learn something from merchants or Chinese servants dealing
with the English, from having translators scan English-language newspapers,
or from overheard conversations. But there was no serious effort at under-
standing contemporary Western military organisations, equipment or tactics,
or to devise ways in which these might be more effectively countered. Still
less was there any attempt to understand the British or French governmental
and political systems, let alone the arcana imperii of Whitehall or, indeed,
the governmental systems of any other Western nation that could have pro-
duced more effective ways of influencing the politics behind Western mili-
tary efforts. What makes this even more odd is that senior Chinese officials
were not short of subtle intelligence. On the contrary, as Wolseley remarked
after looking through the Chinese documentation captured in 1860, some
of these papers were ‘very clever’ and ‘showed an extraordinary amount
of diplomatic ability’ entirely on a par with that of the great fifteenth-cen-
tury European master of politics, Niccolò Machiavelli. But there was little
thought given to influencing the powerful groups in London, mostly on the
liberal side of politics, that were anyway disposed to be sympathetic to China.
So, as we have already noted, it was only after the war, in 1861, that
China, under the guidance of Prince Gong, by then regent for the new
child emperor, established the Zungli Yamen, China’s first-ever embry-
onic foreign office, followed a year later by a foreign language school.
Even then, these organisations were not very influential when it came to
advising the ruling groups. Yet the reliance on China’s weakness, and the
threat that its government might collapse, could hardly serve as a longer-
term basis for effective foreign policy. As it was, there was a short period
of Chinese accommodation with the Western powers. Prince Gong him-
self concluded that ‘if China kept her treaty obligations and treated for-
198 H. GELBER
of the Manchu dynasty. In pursuit of that objective she was clever, entirely
ruthless – murderous when necessary – and in any case deeply ignorant of
the world beyond Beijing. Her firm command of court politics did little
to increase her knowledge and sensitivities about foreign and even most
domestic affairs. When Tongzhi died in 1875, probably of smallpox, the
next in line was Cixi’s nephew, who became Emperor Guangxu. But it
was Cixi who guided all his decisions, undermined his frequently sen-
sible proposals for reform and eventually imprisoned him on a tiny island
in the middle of a lake in Beijing’s Forbidden City. She did allow some
innovations over time, including an overhaul of the bureaucracy (partly
as a result, the imperial army was able to dispose of the Taiping rebels in
1864). But she could also prove to be a major impediment to the intro-
duction of railways and the telegraph and other elements of modernity,
lest they produce job losses or lead to excessive foreign influence. And in
1881 she even stopped a programme for sending children abroad to study,
lest they come back with dangerous new ideas. (That may have become an
even more interesting question in the 21st century, given the very large
number of Chinese students at overseas – largely Western – institutions.)
Yet, overall, she may have done more good than harm. At the end of the
1880s a foreign diplomat remarked that the foundations of modernisation
had probably been laid and that ‘...it will not be denied by any one that
the improvement and progress...are mainly due to the will and power of
the empress regent’.
That is not the whole story. It is true that the deeply ingrained assump-
tions of the entire polity had to do with the Confucian inheritance and
principles that were reflected, fundamentally, in the classic writings that
formed the bedrock of learning for officials and scholars and from whose
established guidance change could only mean decline. The empire had for
long been run by a few thousand civil servants or mandarins who were
intellectually brilliant but who were also often switched from one region
to another to avoid having them become representatives rather than rul-
ers – ‘going native’ in British imperial terminology. Wherever they were
posted, each man – like Commissioner Ye at Canton – was in charge of
everything: administration, law and order, the economy and so on. Yet
this arrangement proved inadequate. For one thing, there were the effects
of China’s eighteenth-century population explosion that increased num-
bers from around 150 millions in 1700 to some 430 millions by 1850.
But there was much more, not only because of the foreign incursions
and demands but because of the domestic political changes caused by the
200 H. GELBER
they may have taken the lead. Others, for instance the Japanese, urged
China to reform. Just before the decisive sea battle of the 1894/1895
Sino–Japanese War, a British launch brought a letter from the Japanese
admiral to his former friend, the Chinese Admiral Ding. It said, among
other things, ‘The present situation of your country results from a sys-
tem under which you [make appointments] solely on the basis of...literary
knowledge. [That] has now become outdated...Your homeland, too, must
adopt this new manner of living...If it does not, it will inevitably perish...
Come to my country, there to await the moment when your homeland
requests your participation in an enterprise of reform.’11 Admiral Ding
declined. When the battle led to a crushing Chinese defeat, Admiral Ding
turned dutifully in the direction of Beijing and respectfully committed
suicide. Or again, at the end of the war and when Li went to negotiate the
Treaty of Shimonoseki with Prince Ito Hirobumi, they had a conversation
that was recorded in English. Among other things, Li said, ‘China and
Japan are the closest neighbors and moreover have the same writing sys-
tem. How can we be enemies?...We ought to establish perpetual peace and
harmony...’. Ito replied: ‘Ten years ago I talked with you about reform.
Why is it...that not a single thing has been changed...?’12
Part of the trouble was that, whatever men like Li thought, popular
resentment of foreigners and missionaries gathered pace. There were a
number of attacks on them, often on the basis of sheer myth. In 1870, for
example, rumours circulated in Tianjin that the foreigners were kidnapping
children for use in witchcraft, perhaps even to eat them. An infuriated mob
stormed a French Catholic orphanage13 and killed twenty-one foreigners,
including the French consul, two priests and ten sisters of charity. At the
same time, the French government’s expansionist policies in South-East
Asia raised the possibility that France might expand, commercially and
perhaps even territorially, into China proper. There was also a decade of
trouble along the China–Tonkin border. It was perhaps not surprising that
there followed a six-month Sino–French war in 1884/1885 that China
lost. Ten years later came the disastrous war with the despised Japanese.
Both conflicts were still largely fought, not under careful and central stra-
tegic command, but as border wars largely directed by local officials. A few
years later again came the largely anti- foreigner Boxer Rebellion centred
on Beijing, in which a popular movement, supported by Chinese national-
ists (and Western liberals), led to a siege of the foreign legations in the cap-
ital. Although the president of the China Society of America declared that
the rebellion was ‘one of the most splendid exhibitions of patriotism wit-
202 H. GELBER
and Manchus had long been notorious within the empire.20 As recently as
around 1900, Manchuria was what George Kennan described as ‘a semi-
developed frontier area’ for both Russia and China,21 where China had
nominal sovereignty but Russia had great strategic interests, confirmed
by the construction, in the 1890s, of a railway from Siberia to the Pacific
Ocean. It was built by the Russians, with Chinese government consent. It
also produced a geostrategic state of affairs that helped the formation of
the Anglo–Japanese alliance of 1902, not to mention the Japanese ascen-
dancy in Korea, which was to have further and large consequences.
Fourth, there was the attempt, intermittently and with indifferent
success, to help China modernise and industrialise, especially with the
development of coal mines and railways. These policies brought disillu-
sionment in various ways. For one thing, the four decades after the 1860
treaty, a period in which a number of foreign concessions were established,
only proved the wisdom of the old 1852 Mitchell memorandum22 about
China’s essential self-sufficiency, that everyone in London had chosen to
ignore. Nothing like the vast expansion of trade that Britain and others
had hoped for actually occurred. Experience also demonstrated, yet again,
the sheer conservatism of the Chinese government and the strong resis-
tance to modernisation, not to mention the poverty of the masses.
In one very important sense, that proved to be a kind of delusion.
For within the Chinese polity itself there began to appear stirrings for
far-reaching change. This manifested itself in an ethnic and cultural pride
deeply offended by the humiliations of 1842 and 1860, as well as by
the casual assumptions of Western missionaries and modernisers about
China’s visible weaknesses. There was even greater resentment at the
contrast between China’s stumbling approach to modernity, as compared
with the dramatic achievements of industrial, financial and military reform
brought to Japan by the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Resentments came in
the form of objections to intrusive and demanding foreigners, including
missionaries, or, more generally, of foreign intrusions into China, and the
associated ‘unequal treaties’. However, resentments are not policy, and
demands for domestic reforms quickly turned out to be incompatible with
inherited social, political and economic systems. So discontent veered,
as it often does, towards revolution. The first major leader of this trend
turned out to be Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Guomindang, the party that
more or less managed the Chinese Revolution of 1911. Himself Western-
educated (beginning with Hawaii, where his brother paid the costs), he
spent much of the earlier part of his life in exile for fear of arrest. But he
HINDSIGHT: AND AFTERMATH 205
offered revolutionary ideas in speeches and writings. Apart from Sun Yat-
sen himself, a growing number of his followers’ revolutionary views were
also influenced by other foreign ideas, most notably those of Marxism-
Leninism, as well as by ideas from Britain and Japan about industrialisa-
tion or politics. On top of that came the spectacle of Japan’s dramatic
post-1868 modernisation drive and the comparison with China’s all-too-
evident weaknesses.
Few things in human affairs are more certain to produce resentment
and hostility than a sense of victimhood. Hence, successful revolutions
often rest, in large part, not only on resentment of domestic opponents
but especially of foreign enemies. The historical record is unambiguous. It
ranges from the defensive campaigns of revolutionary France after 1789
to the character of National Socialism in post-1918 Germany. Resentment
was certainly present in China towards the end of the nineteenth century.
In fact, it is difficult to imagine how a modernising Chinese revolution
could have been carried through at all without the unifying and mobilising
force of a wave of strong resentment of Western influences and, even more
so, of the Western presence. The point is not whether that resentment was
justified. It was real and based on beliefs, in connection with several issues
that harked back, in one way or another, to 1842 and 1860: that foreign
beliefs and ways were undermining the established principles and tradi-
tions of Chinese society; that unfair treaties had been forced on China;
that the large number of foreigners on Chinese soil, and their rights there,
were themselves an insult; and that the stream of opium supposedly forced
on China had obviously been intended to weaken Chinese society in the
interests of foreign profits.
The difficulties created by the intrusion of foreign beliefs and cus-
toms can be illustrated from opposite ends of the Chinese social spec-
trum. A great American scholar has pointed out the dilemmas faced by
some young and inexperienced American missionaries in China. One such
young man might try to express US-style egalitarianism by ‘...becoming
great friends with the houseboy, the cook and the chair-coolie. This attack
on the Chinese social hierarchy would naturally threaten the integrity of
each servant’s role, offend his self-respect, and showed that the American
lacked a cultural sense of propriety, could not be respected, and so was fair
game for deceit and manipulation’.23 At the other end of the social spec-
trum were the views of Chinese mandarins and rural gentry. The educated
foreigners, whether industrial experts or, even more importantly, mission-
aries clearly represented principles and practices fundamentally opposed to
206 H. GELBER
beliefs and customs regarding Chinese life and administration. Not only
that, but both the gentry and imperial officialdom discovered to their real
horror that the missionaries were making converts, and not just among
the illiterate poor. It was obvious that Christian teachings could not help
but undermine the principles of Chinese society. For a senior mandarin, a
colleague who actually succumbed to Christianity had been ‘barbarised’.
The tenets of industrial life were, similarly, incompatible with the main-
tenance of established Chinese social and even family life. Worst of all,
these missionaries and other foreigners immediately formed a social group
equated with, and therefore also challenging, the social position of the
local gentry. One or two such people might be tolerated and treated with
kindness. But there were now far too many of them, especially in the port
cities and major towns.
That was not all. In a brilliant manipulation of both domestic and for-
eign opinion, the Chinese establishment taught the world that the series
of treaties China had signed with foreign powers after 1840 or so had been
unequal treaties (a term not used, or heard, before around 1923). Using it
became doubly helpful. For modern Western people the inevitable impli-
cation of the term was that, being unequal, the arrangements were by
definition unfair and unjust. On the other hand, for the Chinese them-
selves it was also redolent of the old Confucian principle that an agree-
ment forced on a non-consenting, weaker party had no moral validity
to which the weaker party owed obedience. Yet it is difficult to take that
Chinese opinion seriously, given the long history of China imposing its
own will on opponents defeated in war, as the British did, however mod-
erately, in 1842 and 1860. The matter goes further. The British demand,
on both occasions, for trading rights at Chinese ports, together with juris-
diction over their own (foreign) citizens, fitted in with Chinese practices
going back to mediaeval times. The desire of Chinese rulers to have for-
eign ‘head men’ administering and judging ‘their own’ people was regular
practice as far back as the Tang dynasty a thousand years before the British
sailed into Chinese waters. Similarly, details of the new port and border
arrangements had precedents in what the Chinese, as the then dominant
party, had agreed to at Kokand in Central Asia (now eastern Uzbekistan)
as recently as in the mid-1830s. Probably the most widely touted Chinese
complaint, and one of the most unquestioningly accepted in the West,
became the tale of bottomless British iniquity in forcing opium on the
Chinese (like the Americans who, as we have seen, began importing opium
into China from Smyrna, in modern Turkey, as early as 1804).
HINDSIGHT: AND AFTERMATH 207
Other elements of the story may have been even more important than
later Chinese complaints about opium or foreign concessions on Chinese
soil. They have to do with the great importance that geography and demog-
raphy, not to mention intellectual and diplomatic skill, have had in China
over the last century. That has come together with the readiness, by the
United States, Britain and the West generally, to accept mea culpa expla-
nations for China’s past difficulties. From the beguiling label of “Opium
Wars” for the 1842 and 1860 conflicts, to colonialism for the concessions,
the story has been the same: China’s ills between 1850 and 1950 were very
largely the fault of the rich Western powers, including Japan.
It is clear what the effect of the various feelings of resentment were
within China. They contributed to the formation, and inflammation, of
a modern nationalism, all the more powerful for being based on what
were, and are, seen as legitimate grievances. That seems to have decisively
influenced, and continues to influence, both China’s internal affairs and
foreign relations, not least at the opening of the 21st century under the
leadership of President Xi Jinping.
At the same time, it is worth noting how many of the ideas and prac-
tices of the China of 1860 find strong echoes a century and a half later.
At the risk of much oversimplification, one might start by noting the
incomplete but interesting parallels between the structure of many of the
major Chinese dynasties and the history of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) in office. The history of the Qin, Tang, Ming and Qing dynas-
ties, for instance, is in every case one of a dynasty starting with a ruler
of overwhelming personality, power and command, but with a more or
less progressive decline – for a variety of reasons – in the personality and
command of their successors. The story of Communist rulers, from Mao
Zedong onwards, has so far not been entirely dissimilar. Similar, too, has
been the story of the relationship between strong political and govern-
mental centralisation and the freedom of manoeuvre and decision that
successive dynasties gave to strong regional governors – Ye at Canton,
for instance – and that which modern Beijing finds it necessary to give to
what one can call the great ‘satrapies’ that now govern state enterprises,
the banking system and some other areas. Chinese officials often say that
Western democracy is unsuitable for China, which may well be true as
long as Chinese politics are structured as at present. But it is also true that
the Marxism that formed, and forms, the basis of the CCP’s rule is itself
of European origin and development.
208 H. GELBER
China also preserves in 2015–2017, as it did in 1860, and for that mat-
ter in 1794 for Lord Macartney, its governmental secrecy, self-sufficiency
and sense of superiority. Now as then, for most Western governments the
inner workings of China’s government, and now the governing party,
remain largely unfathomable. As one observer has remarked, the cadres of
the Communist Chinese state actually resemble the ‘father and mother of
the people’, officials of the imperial state.24 Debates, in Beijing and else-
where, about how to develop a Chinese theory of foreign policy instead
of staying with the West’s post-Westphalian model have to do with the
rise of the ‘civilisational’ state and a system that would emphasise China’s
continuing moral and political centrality in the world. The development of
‘Confucius institutes’ that, among other things, spread China’s so-called
soft power around the world fits well into such a concept. Chinese external
policies are often subtle, sometimes long-term, but always pragmatic.25 At
the same time, China retains its old diplomatic skills and a style of opaque
courtesy but grows uneasy at any suggestion of external, let alone internal,
instability. This view speaks of China as a ‘nation’ – as in the ‘national
humiliations’ of the past – but retains many of the characteristics of
empire in its domination of Tibet, Xinjiang and parts of Mongolia, as
well, possibly, as other regions, not to mention its excessively wary views
of groupings like Christians or the Falun Gong. Even the partial freeing
of controls on the Chinese yuan means that this currency can now be
used by other countries to pay for exports to China, to be returned in
exchange for imports from China – all of which has unmistakable echoes
of the days when others had to earn silver from China by selling goods
that the Chinese were willing to buy, and use the silver to buy tea and silks
in return. One of the better summaries of these conundrums was written
several decades ago by the American scholar Benjamin Schwartz:
To the extent that the Chinese government must live within the confines
of an ongoing multistate world, it has gradually come to adjust itself on a
day-to-day basis of this world, whatever may be its optimum transnational
hopes. What is more, even these transnational hopes can hardly be identi-
fied with the traditional perception of world order. The government appeals
to international law whenever it finds it to its advantage to do so. It often
employs conventional power politics. It has accepted the whole machinery
of international diplomacy often in a highly literal and extremely formalistic
way….26
CHAPTER 1 PROLOGUE
1. Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Fall of Imperial China, New York, Free Press,
1975, p. 114.
2. Spence, Jonathan D, The Search for Modern China (2nd edn.) New York,
W. W. Norton and Co., 1999, p. 120.
3. Wakeman op.cit., p. 118.
4. Merchants had inferior status because commerce encouraged luxury and
frivolity, distracting the farmer and peasant from his proper task.
5. Spence, ibid., pp. 57–58; also Fairbank, John K, Trade and Diplomacy on
the China coast; the opening of the Treaty ports 1842–53, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press,1953, pp. 27–32.
6. Wakeman, op.cit., p. 129, fn 4.
7. Anson was to become First Lord of the Admiralty, the second time from
1757 to his death in 1762.
8. David Todd, John Bowring and the Global Dissemination of Free Trade,
The Historical Journal, Vol. 51, 2008, p. 385.
9. See Thomas de Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater”, First pub-
lished anonymously in 1821 in the London Magazine, Vol. IV, No xxi,
pp. 293–312, and No xxii, pp. 353–79.
10. In that year the emperor issued a strong philippic against opium trading,
which was obviously continuing in lively fashion and with the connivance
of numbers of officials. Cf Fu Lo-shu (ed.), A Documentary Chronicle of
Sino-Western Relations 1644–1820, Tucson, Az, University of Arizona,
1966, p. 380.
11. Spence, Jonathan, The Search for Modern China, New York/London,
W. W. Norton, 1990, pp. 129 (and fn 6), 149.
12. John K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution 1800–1985, NewYork,
Harper and Row, 1986, pp. 67, 91–92.
13. For opium suppression efforts in the province of Fujian, see Joyce
A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium
Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s,
Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, MA, 2004.
14. Wakeman, op.cit., pp. 126–27.
15. Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire, Basic Books, 2003, p. 26.
16. The response seems to have been not just haughty but pre-determined.
The emperor’s formal response to the British was probably drafted many
weeks, even months, before Macartney even set foot on Chinese soil.
17. After 1949 and in the period of Communist rule of China, young Chinese
began to be relentlessly told that the entire period from 1830 to the advent
of Mao Zedong had been a “century of national humiliation”. Only in
1949 was China’s sovereignty truly restored.
18. The “grand (or maximum) kowtow” involved kneeling from a standing
position three times, and each time knocking one’s forehead on the floor
three times.
19. Lord George Macartney (ed. J.L. Cranmer-Byng), An Embassy to China,
Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during his Embassy to the
Emperor Ch’ien-lung (Quianlong) 1793–1794, London, Longmans,
1962.
20. This problem continued to dog Sino-British exchanges for almost a
century.
21. Macartney, Journal, op.cit., p. 210.
22. Robbins, Helen H. Our First Ambassador to China: An Account of the life
of George, Earl of Macartney – With Extracts from His Letters, and the
Narrative of his Experiences in China, as Told by Himself, London, John
Murray, 1908; Macartney, Journal op.cit.; Spence, op.cit., p. 123;
Cranmer-Byng J.L., Lord Macartney’s Embassy to Peking in 1793, Hong
Kong, Journal of Oriental Studies 1957–58, p. 181.
23. Vattel, quoted in J. Matheson, The Present Position and Prospects of the
British Trade with China; Together with an Outline of some leading
Occurrences in its Past History, 1835 (reprinted by Cambridge University
Press, 2012), p. 34.
24. Canton Register, Vol. 8, No 39, 29/9/1835, p. 156.
25. See, for example, the “Supplement to Asiatic Intelligence” in “The Asiatic
Journal” of March 1836, p. 287, quoting angry correspondence from the
Emperor to Canton, regarding the habit of British merchants to roam
around parts of the China coast without imperial permission.
NOTES 211
18. Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes, Sometime Her Majesty’s
Minister to China and Japan, Vol. 1, Consul in China, London, Macmillan,
1894, pp. 70–71.
CHAPTER 3 CANTON
1. The last family debts were only paid off in 1870, and ever since the end of
World War II Anglo–Greek relations have been roiled from time to time
over whether the Marbles should or should not be returned from the
British Museum to Greece.
2. Elgin’s instructions were dated 20.4.57.
3. Quoted in Nathan A. Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office,
New York, Octagon Books, 1969 [c. 1948], p. 18 from Elgin’s address at
Shanghai, in FO 17/287.
4. Elgin’s despatch of 5 January 1859 to London: Walrond, Letters and
Journals, op. cit., pp. 304–305.
5. Bowring to Foreign Secretary Clarendon 5.11.1855, W.C. Costin, Great
Britain and China, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1937, pp. 19–20.
6. D.F. Rennie, The British Arms in North China and Japan, London,
J. Murray, 1864, p. 184.
7. The result of Napoleon Bonaparte’s informal union with the beautiful
Polish Countess Marie Walewska.
8. Douglas Hurd, The Arrow War, London, Collins, 1967, p. 99. Hurd (now
Lord Hurd) served as British foreign secretary from 1989–95. One is
reminded of America’s experience after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
9. William Dalrymple has written colourfully about the brutalities committed
by both sides in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857,
London, Bloomsbury, 2006.
10. Walrond, Letters and journals, op. cit., p. 199; also quoted in Beeching,
op. cit., p. 241.
11. The Russian ecclesiastical mission was limited to four Orthodox priests and
six language students. It was under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Court
of Dependencies, which managed tributary relations with the frontier
tribes of China’s North and West.
12. Note of 18 December in Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., p. 211.
13. Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., various diary entries for 25, 26 and
29 December and 6 January, pp. 214–217.
14. Elgin to Lord Clarendon 6.1.58 in corr. Rel Elgin mission p. 138.
15. Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., p. 222.
16. On 6 September came another edict that said Ye’s ‘obstinacy’ had been in
some measure a cause of the hostilities.
17. Beeching, op. cit., p. 255.
214 NOTES
CHAPTER 4 TIANJIN
1. Masataka Banno, China and the West 1858–1861, Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press, 1964, p. 251, note 12.
2. Walrond, ibid., pp. 223–24.
3. Cordier, Henri, L’expedition de Chine de 1857–1858, Paris, F. Alcan,
1905, p. 282.
4. Walrond, Letters and Journals, op.cit., p. 236.
5. Walrond, ibid., p. 240.
6. Cordier, l’Expedition 1857–1858, pp. 64–65.
7. IWSM:HF 23:10–13.
8. Quoted in Hurd, The Arrow War, op. cit., p. 147.
9. T. Walrond (ed.), Letters and Journals of James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin
1811–1863, London, John Murray, 1872 (23 May, p. 248).
10. Laurence Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and
Japan (2 vols.), London, William Blackwood 1859, Vol. 1, pp. 345–346.
11. An English translation of Qiying’s document is printed in Oliphant,
Laurence, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan (2
vols.), London, William Blackwood, 1859, pp. 359–366.
12. Gros letter to Elgin in Cordier, L’expedition de China…, op. cit., p. 401.
13. Walrond, ibid., p. 249.
14. Niuzhang, Dengzhou, Tainan, Chaozhao, Qiongzhou, Hankou, Jiujiang,
Nanjing and ZhenJiang.
15. Walrond (ed.), Letters of the 8th Earl of Elgin, op. cit., p. 254.
16. Jia Zhen et al. (eds.), A complete account of the management of barbarian
affairs under the Zianfeng regime, Beijing Zhonghua shujü 1979 3: 966,
cited in Dong Wang, China’s Unequal Treaties, Narrating national history,
Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2005, Ch. 1, fn 37.
17. The tael was a measure of weight, see Prologue, p. 5, fn 13.
18. Hurd, The Arrow War, op. cit., 176.
19. Immanuel C.Y. Hsü, China’s Entrance into the Family of Nations: The
Diplomatic Phase, 1858–1880, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University
Press, 1960, pp. 71–75.
20. Kuei-liang’s note to Elgin of 28.10.58, cited in Banno, China and the
West, op. cit., p. 52 and fn 154.
21. Not that such considerations applied solely to China. The growth and
maintenance of the British empire, for instance, would be hard to explain
without some reference to the small number of officials who governed with
little more than their total and unquestioned self-confidence and belief in
the justice of their cause.
22. P.P. Elgin’s Missions, pp. 411–12; 484–85.
23. Hurd, The Arrow War, op. cit., p. 166.
NOTES 215
24. Lord Elgin to Lord Malmesbury 5.1.59, Corr. Rel. Elgin’s mission, p. 440.
25. Gros to Min. Aff. Étrangères 28.12.58, quoted in Cordier, “
L’Expédition…” op. cit., Vol. ii, p. 35.
26. Grant, Sir James Hope, Incidents in the China War of 1860; comp. from
the private journals of General Sir Hope Grant (ed.) Captain Henry
Knollys, Edinburgh/London, W. Blackwood and Sons, 1975, Ch. I, p. 8.
27. Bruce to Malmesbury 4.5.59 (P.P. 1860, lxix, No. 2).
28. Bruce to Malmesbury 5.7.59, Corr with Mr Bruce, p. 16.
29. Bruce to Malmesbury 1.6.59 (FO 17/312).
30. Cited in Banno, op. cit., p. 258, note 69.
31. Buchanan, State of the Union address, 19 December 1859.
32. Malmesbury to Bruce 1.3.59 (P.P. 1860 lxix, No 1).
33. Russell to Bruce 10.10.59, Corr w. Mr Bruce, p. 41.
34. Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes Sometime Her Majesty’s
Minister to China and Japan, Vol. 1, Consul in China, London, Macmillan,
1894, pp. 312–313.
CHAPTER 5 RECOVERY
1. Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes, op. cit., p. 316.
2. He had an enthusiastic reception back home. Among other things he was
given the freedom of the City of London and the students of Glasgow
elected him Lord Rector of their university.
3. Hurd, The Arrow War, op. cit., p. 197.
4. Hurd, ibid., p. 198.
5. Henry Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, compiled from the
papers of General Sir Hope Grant GCB, London, William Blackwood and
Sons 1875, pp. 139–140.
6. Brian Porter, British Foreign Policy in the Nineteenth Century, London,
Historical Journal, 1980, Vol. 23, No 1, p. 195.
7. Arthur H. Stanmore (ed.) Sidney Herbert, Lord Herbert of Lea: A mem-
oir, Vol. 2, London, John Murray, 1906, p. 304.
8. Elgin letters to Lady Elgin, op. cit., p. 199, 212.
9. Elgin letters to Lady Elgin, op. cit., p. 215.
10. Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, op. cit., Ch. I, p. 26.
11. Knollys, Incidents, op. cit., pp. 138–141.
12. Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., p. 316. Also quoted in Banno,
op. cit., p. 263, note 141.
13. Also the French government letter of 21.4.60 to Gros, Cordier, Henri,
L’expedition de Chine de 1860: histoire diplomatique, notes et docu-
ments, Paris, F. Alcan, 1906, pp. 136–137.
14. Letter of 22.5.60 in Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., p. 325.
216 NOTES
15. See, for instance, his letter of 1 July 1860 in Walrond, ibid., p. 332.
16. That seems to have been the state of affairs as of 11 July 1860, cf. Corr resp
China 1859–1860, p. 83, cited in H.M. Morse, The International Relations
of the Chinese Empire: The Period of Conflict 1834–1860, London/New
York, Longmans Green, 1910, p. 589.
17. Cordier, l’Expedition de Chine 1860, p. 141 cited in Morse, ibid., p. 590.
18. The first French troops, some 1700 infantry, arrived on the l’Interprenante
and the La Garonne, landed on 17 April at Hong Kong and left again
almost immediately for the North.
19. Swinhoe, Robert, Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860,
London, Smith, Elder and Co., 1861, p. 4.
20. Hurd, The Arrow War, op. cit., p. 208.
21. Letter of 10 June 1860 to Hope Grant, printed in Hope Grant, Incidents,
op. cit., pp. 148–149.
22. Walrond, ibid., p. 335.
23. The French order of battle is given in detail by Paul Varin, op. cit.,
pp. 21–25.
24. An exhaustive – and exhausting – list of army and naval units and personnel
is printed in Mutrécy, Vol. II, pp. 261–298.
25. Indian nationalists now tend to refer to it as a War of National Independence,
which seems odd considering that its aims, insofar as it had definable ones,
were both religious and tending to restore the pre-British system of sepa-
rate princely states and that the suppression of the mutiny was effected
largely with the help of Indian troops.
26. The memoirs of the period make it abundantly clear that, in general, British
officers had very little regard for the Bengalis, or even Madras troops, as
compared with regiments drawn from the more martial peoples of the
Punjab and the North.
27. War Office calculation dated 23.12.1902 compiled from Parliamentary
Paper 1864, Accounts and Papers XXXII, 263.
28. He survived to a ripe old age, dying in 1924 as General Sir Dighton
Probyn, notable among other things for a twin-forked long white beard
down to his waist, all surmounted by a tall black top hat.
6. Bruce to Lord John Russell 30.5.60, Corr. resp. China 1859–1860, p. 60.
7. It is hard not to remember that in very recent times British-born subjects
and US-born citizens could be found to be ‘fighting’ their own countries
as members of jihadist groups.
8. Parkes’ letters to his wife, in Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Henry
Parkes, op. cit., pp. 482–483.
9. Franz Michael and Chang Chung-li, The Taiping Rebellion: History and
Documents, Vol. 1, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1966, pp. 168
and 174, cited in Spence, op. cit., p. 178.
42. Knollys, Hope Grant papers, op. cit., pp. 103–104; also the notes in
Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., pp. 103–104.
43. Herbert, letter of 26.11.59 to Hope Grant, in Knollys, Incidents in the
China War of 1860, op. cit., pp. 139–140.
44. Quoted in Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China, op. cit., Vol. II,
p. 55.
45. Baron Gros, Livre Jaune, op. cit., p. 58.
46. Cordier, op. cit., p. 209, 308; Correspondence respect. China 1859–1860,
p. 162, 165.
47. Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., p. 350.
48. Jia Zhen et al. (eds.), A complete account of the management of barbarian
affairs under the Zianfeng regime , op. cit., in Chap. 4, fn 16 (Beijing
Zhonghua shujü 1979 3: 966, cited in Dong Wang, China’s Unequal
Treaties, Narrating National History, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books,
2005, Chap. 1, fn 37); also Hsü, The Rise of Modern China (4th edn.),
New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 210.
244; and Sir Henry Loch, Personal Narrative of Occurrences during Lord
Elgin’s Second Embassy to China, London, Murray, 1869, pp. 131–138.
12. After the events several prisoners wrote accounts of their capture. For the
report of M. Gagey to Montauban, see de Mutrécy, Journal de la cam-
pagne de Chine, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 4–5.
13. Walrond, Letters and Journals, op. cit., p. 357.
14. Memorial of 13 September to the emperor from Isinen King, President of
the Board of Civil Office and 26 others (trans. T.Wade), printed in Hope
Grant, Incidents, op. cit., pp. 182–183. Of course, this was only one of
many different memorials.
15. Extracts from a fragment of a decree in the emperor’s own vermilion pen-
cil, dated 7 September found in the Summer Palace on 8 October (and
probably not despatched), printed in Hope Grant, ibid., p. 174.
16. Varin, l’Expedition de Chine, op. cit., p. 192.
17. Varin, l’Expedition de Chine, op. cit., p. 193.
18. Hope Grant, Incidents op. cit., pp. 113–114. The Musbees, he noted,
were ‘a low caste of Sikh, really the sweeper caste’.
19. Wolseley, Life Vol. 2, pp. 68/69.
20. Swinhoe, p. 237.
21. Swinhoe, China campaign, p. 261.
22. Baron Gros letter of 3 October 1860 to M. Thouvenel, cited in H.B. Morse,
The International Relations of the Chinese Empire; the period of Conflict
1834–1860, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Yokohama, Kelly and
Walsh, 1910, p. 603 fn 56.
23. Swinhoe, p. 243.
24. Wolseley, The War with China, op. cit., p. 196.
25. Quoted in Imbert de Saint Amand, Napoleon III at the Height of his
Powers, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912, pp. 270–271.
26. Quoted in Hurd, op. cit., p. 219.
27. Varin, p. 205.
28. An account of the cavalry charges of 21 September, written by Colonel
H.C. Wylly, appeared in the Cavalry Journal, No. 70, October 1928.
29. This account is taken from de Mutrécy, Journal de la campagne de Chine,
op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 15–17.
CHAPTER 10 DEPARTURES
1. Hope Grant, Incidents, op. cit., p. 163.
2. Compiled from Parliamentary Papers 1864. Accounts and Papers XXXII,
263. The War Office estimate is dated 23.12.1902.
222 NOTES
17. Very similar ideas must have lain behind President Franklin Roosevelt’s
determination to treat Chiang Kai-shek’s government as one of the ‘Four
Great Powers’ during World War II.
18. In 1898 Arthur Balfour referred in the House of Commons to the ‘Open
Door’ doctrine as ‘that famous phrase that has been quoted and requoted
almost ad nauseam’. Hansard 4th series 1898, 10 August.
19. The whole affair of John Hay’s ‘Open Door’ is delightfully discussed by
George Kennan in his American Diplomacy 1900–1950, London, Secker
and Warburg 1952, Chapter 2: ‘Mr. Hippisley and the Open Door.’
20. Lord Macartney’s journal of 1793/1794 had already made special note of
the marked differences between Chinese and Manchus: ‘They are both
subject to the most absolute authority that can be vested in a prince, but
with this distinction, that to the Chinese it is a foreign tyranny; to the
Tartars a domestic despotism.’ He greatly admired the current emperor,
Qianlong, but also noted that ‘a century and a half [of Manchu rule has
not] made Qianlong a Chinese. He remains at this hour, in all his maxims
of policy, as true a Tartar as any of his ancestors.’ Cranmer-Byng, An
Embassy to China, op. cit., esp., pp. 221–242.
21. Kennan, ibid., p. 42.
22. See Chap. 2, p. 5 and footnote 3. Mr. Mitchell, a British agent at Canton,
reported as follows to his superior, Sir George Bonham: ‘Our Commercial
Treaty with this country (China) has now (1852) been nearly ten years in
full work, every presumed impediment has been removed, one thousand
miles of new coast have been opened up to us, and four new marts estab-
lished at the very thresholds of producing districts, and the best possible
points upon the seaboard. And yet, what is the result as far as the promised
increase in the consumption of our manufactures is concerned? Why,
plainly this: That at the end of ten years the tables of the Board of Trade
show us that Sir Henry Pottinger found a larger trade in existence when he
signed the Supplementary Treaty in 1843 than his Treaty itself shows us at
the end of 1850! – that is to say, as far as our home manufactures are con-
cerned, which is the sole question we are now considering.’ No one paid
much attention at the time.
23. John K. Fairbank, America and China 1840–1860, in May and Thomson
(eds.), American-East Asian Relations, op. cit., p. 33.
24. Ross Terrill, op. cit., p. 40.
25. Ibid.
26. Benjamin I. Schwartz, The Chinese Perception of World Order, Past and
Present, in John King Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order: Traditional
China’s Foreign Relations, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
1968, p. 288.
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INDEX
56, 65, 82, 84–7, 97, 100, 101, 155–8, 165, 167–74, 176, 177,
106, 108, 113, 117, 119, 120, 181, 197, 198; Guangxu, 199;
126, 137, 138, 144, 149, 150, Kangxi, 2, 4, 7; Qianlong, vii,
159, 168, 174, 195, 196, 198, 7, 26, 55, 148, 223n20; Qing
199, 202; preparedness, dynasty, 168, 207; Xianfeng,
equipment and command, 44, 15, 82, 83, 155, 198;
83, 124, 132, 153; prisoners, Yongzheng, 7; Yuenming Yuen
43, 101, 141, 143, 147, 148, summer palace, Looting
155–8, 165, 167, 171; tactics treasure, 154; Zedong, Mao,
and strategy, 60, 111, 129, 21, 24, 28, 169, 189, 207
152, 154, 158 governance; boxer Rebellion, ix,
Beijing, 6, 24, 32, 49, 71, 95, 105, 201; Dagu (See Peiho river);
133, 159–79, 189 food supplies, 11, 73, 116,
economy; ceramics, 1, 3, 5, 23, 26, 126, 132, 148, 153, 154, 158,
34; exports, 5, 26, 34, 35, 61, 178; Grand Canal, 52; guerrilla,
99, 208; law and customs, 1, 2, 51, 60, 64; Hong Kong,
10, 14, 28, 35, 56, 99, 168, Kowloon, 76, 78–80, 175;
175, 191, 202, 203, 205, 206; International standing, 13;
officials, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 25, language, diplomacy and
27, 28, 32, 36, 39, 57, 59, 62, treaties Protocol, 71, 133, 194,
70, 80, 83, 84, 97, 104, 126, 208; language, documentation,
127, 136, 140, 142, 148, 157, 197; mandarins, 2, 4, 5, 14, 18,
159, 171, 172, 175, 176, 197, 20, 50, 104, 124, 148, 173,
199–201, 207, 208; opium, 174, 199, 205; national
viii, 5, 10–14, 17, 23–29, 31, modernisation, 189, 204;
34–6, 50, 59, 61, 99, 109, 175, Piracy and theft, 79; politics
176, 205–7; ports, 2, 6, 33, 73, and foreigners, 31, 36, 71, 77,
76, 206; silks, 1, 2, 5, 23, 26, 84, 96, 103, 104, 116, 140,
27, 99, 109, 163, 208; silver, 1, 171, 174, 190, 195, 197,
3, 5, 23, 26, 27, 34, 45, 61, 200–2, 204–8; Population, vii,
80, 162, 164, 168, 175, 208; 4, 21, 25, 35, 36, 39, 43, 50,
Sino-British misunderstandings, 52, 79, 101, 104, 134, 168,
1, 62, 192; tea, 1–3, 5, 23, 24, 199; prisoners (allied), Imperial
26, 27, 34, 35, 46, 50, 99, Maritime Customs Service, 99,
110, 157, 165, 208; trade, vii, 203; silver and fiscal problems,
2, 3, 8, 10–13, 15–17, 23, 24, 5, 26; tributaries, 1, 195
31, 71, 73, 76, 191, 202, 203 Chinese Repository, 9
emperors/empire; Cixi (dowager Christianity, 17, 40, 58, 61, 78, 206
empress), 198–200, 202; Clarendon, Earl of, 212n17
Daoguang, 15, 26, 65, 155, Clarendon, Lord, 17, 28, 31, 35, 38,
198; Gong, Prince, 6, 36, 46, 190
240 INDEX
W X
Wade, Thomas, 20, 42, 56, 61, 69, Xiamen, 1
70, 74, 82, 106, 107, 128, 134,
148, 220n14, 164
Walker, Lt Col. Bauchamp, 135–7, 139 Y
Ward, Frederick Townsend, 100, 102, Yangzi river, 59, 62
103, 184 Ye Mingchen, 16
Ward, John E., 59, 66, 67, 71, 105
Wolseley, Lt. Colonel Garnet (later Field
Marshal), 80, 112, 113, 125, 126, Z
218n17, 218n29, 132, 139, 145, Zaiyuan, Prince, 133–6, 140, 142,
146, 151, 154, 219n3, 156, 158, 147, 155
161, 162, 166, 169, 172–4, 176, Zoushan island, 1, 50, 75, 79, 88–90,
182, 186, 192, 193, 195, 197 175