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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 14

The Arrow

By 1856 Britain, France and the United States want more than the old treaties gave them, and Canton's governor general Ye Mingchen will not even meet their envoys. The episode follows Harry Parkes, the young British consul at Canton, and Ye from the boarding of a small boat called the Arrow to a second war, a government falling in London, and a new envoy, Lord Elgin, sent out to win it, and asks whether the Arrow was a real grievance or a pretext. It leans on British officials and scholars; Ye and the court are heard here only through others.

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Transcript

Ye Mingchen
Ye Mingchen. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the Heavenly Kingdom of the Taiping tore itself apart. In 1856, just after its armies smashed the imperial lines around Nanjing, the Eastern King was cut down, his head hung on a wall across from the Heavenly King's palace, and six thousand of his followers were massacred. The Northern King, who had been sent to put him down, was assassinated in his turn, and the Wing King, the great fighting leader who stood next to the Heavenly King in the army, led his army away for good. And in Hong Kong, the Heavenly King's cousin Hong Rengan, an amiable catechist working beside the Scottish missionary James Legge, was making up his mind to go to him. We will follow him soon. But first we go back a little in time, and a hundred miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, to Canton. This episode also draws on the letters and journals of Lord Elgin, edited by Theodore Walrond. Tonight's story is about a small boat, and how a quarrel over it became a war. To understand it, we have to understand two men who could hardly have been more different. The first was Ye Mingchen, governor general at Canton, the man who answered rebellion in his province with a dragnet that caught an estimated seventy five thousand accused Taiping supporters, and an execution ground that ran with blood. A governor general ruled two provinces at once, here Guangdong and Guangxi, and at Canton the post also carried the emperor's commission to deal with the foreigners. Ye was a busy man. He was responsible for fighting the fires of the Taiping war across China's lawless southern provinces, and through the eighteen fifties he executed tens of thousands of local rebels. For two years, rebels held every waterway in his province, and the emperor's authority was exercised only in the city of Canton itself. The second man was Harry Parkes, and in 1856 he was twenty eight years old. He had been in China since 1842, when he was a boy of fourteen, and had entered official life and begun studying Chinese at that age. In 1856 he was newly appointed acting consul at Canton, the British official who looked after British subjects and British ships there. Parkes was a man of tremendous energy. On a whirlwind tour of Europe in 1850, he tramped across the Alps for six days at a rate of twenty six miles a day. And Canton bored him to distraction. There was nothing for him to do except draft reports on the emigration of Chinese labourers, marry off romancing expatriates, and take walks in the hills to work up an appetite for heavy colonial dinners. Long before he got the post, Parkes had been convinced that entry to the city of Canton was at the centre of everything wrong between Britain and China, and on a brief trip home in 1850 he had told Palmerston, the future prime minister, as much. On another visit to Britain in 1856, he had a second private interview with the prime minister, and he may well have been encouraged then to find a pretext to force the question. To men like Parkes, Canton was the "headquarters of fanaticism, arrogance, and duplicity", the focus of anti foreign feeling in all China. In 1852 the British officials at Canton concluded that the only aim of the Chinese authorities was "to impede and resist the access of foreigners" and to "inflame the people of Canton against us." The lesson they drew from the first war was that China simply had to be forced. The Treaty of Nanjing, as the argument went, was a wise foundation, but "a Treaty, unsupported by guns, is waste paper." Remember that the British had pressed their claim to enter the city of Canton twice before, in 1847 and in 1849, and both times they had been kept out. Year after year the British had demanded the right to live in the city, and Cantonese resistance, cursing, stoning, robbery, chasing, mutilation and murder, had filled a series of British parliamentary papers called Insults in China. Above Parkes stood the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, a learned, quarrelsome Englishman with a fine command of Latin and very little patience with China. The Hong Kong governorship had rescued Bowring from a string of business failures, and since arriving in 1852 he had been desperate for one great diplomatic success. He was convinced that getting into Canton was his ticket into the history books, so convinced that the House of Lords would dismiss him as a monomaniac. And behind them both was a bigger worry about money. Britain had expected its sales to China to soar once new ports opened in 1842, but by 1848 its official exports to China were actually lower than in 1843, while British consumers bought ever more Chinese tea and silk. By 1854 Britain's balance of payments with China was more than eight million pounds in the red. The only thing that sold well was opium. As Palmerston himself admitted, Britain could pay for its Chinese purchases only partly in goods, and the rest it had to pay in opium and in silver. Opium underwrote much of the British empire. By 1856 opium revenue made up almost twenty two per cent of British India's entire revenue. It kept a whole circle of trade turning: British bills bought American cotton, American traders used those bills to buy tea at Canton, and the Cantonese swapped them for Indian opium. Ever since the first war had ended without legalising the drug, British politicians had worried about another campaign like the one of 1839, and pestered the Qing, without result, to lift the ban. By 1855 Palmerston was prime minister, and he had decided that the problem lay in the limits of the Treaty of Nanjing, and that the interior of China, not just a few ports on the coast, had to be opened. He told Britain's consuls in China that he could see clearly "that the time is fast coming when we shall be obliged to strike another blow in China." Behind him stood an old Palmerston conviction. He had once remarked that "These half-civilised Governments" would "all require a Dressing every eight or ten years to keep them in order." So in 1854 the foreign powers tried to change the treaties. Under the American and French treaties, the agreements were open to revision after twelve years, in 1856, and Britain claimed the same right through a clause that gave it whatever other nations got. Britain, France and the United States agreed that their relations with China needed changing on many points, and their three envoys were told to act together. They had a long list: access to the whole interior of the empire, or at least free navigation of the Yangtze, the legalisation of the opium trade, the end of inland transit taxes, and foreign envoys living in Beijing. But all three were warned not to commit their governments to the use of armed force: the British and French because they were fighting Russia in the Crimea, and the Americans because only Congress could declare war. Their first approach was to Ye Mingchen at Canton. Ye told them he unfortunately could not find time for a personal interview. Neither then nor later did he find an auspicious day to meet them. He sent two deputies instead, who said that he had power to make only inconsiderable changes to the treaties, and that no great changes seemed called for anyway. So the envoys sailed north to Shanghai, where in October 1854 the governor of Jiangsu received them courteously at an imperial army camp, and they talked frankly. But the governor told them he had no power to deal with foreign affairs, and that the emperor's will was to send them back to the governor general at Canton. The American envoy, McLane, had had enough. He said he was persuaded that peace could not be kept unless the treaty was changed, and then he gave a warning. His words were, "If I am refused I give full warning that the peace will not be kept with my people." When the envoys talked of sailing north toward Beijing, the governor reminded them that he had done nothing to frighten them, and said they should not now try to frighten him with talk of their ships. Then he announced lunch, and thanked the British governor for a present of wine, which he hoped Sir John would now help him drink. The envoys went north anyway, and reached the mouth of the river that leads to Tianjin and Beijing on 15 October 1854. They waited for days, and were then received in a way later described as a shameful disregard of the usual Chinese courtesies, a studied affront to unwelcome guests. The officials sent to meet them were men of no high rank, who said they had no power to negotiate and had come only to hear what the envoys had to say. The envoys sailed south again, and told their governments that no revision of the treaties could be had unless it was backed by a show of armed force. At Canton, at Shanghai and at the river mouth, they had found no one both able and willing to talk about revision. In 1856, the year the American and French treaties came up for revision, the powers tried again, thinking a court that seemed powerless before the rebels might now be readier to bargain. The new American commissioner was Peter Parker, a doctor and missionary turned diplomat, who held extreme views on treaty revision, some sound and some visionary. Parker even hinted that the emperor might welcome foreign help against his rebels. Bowring warned him at once that his own orders demanded absolute neutrality in China's internal quarrels, and that he could promise no such thing. Some foreigners were by now ready to give up on the dynasty altogether. In 1857 an American missionary published an open letter declaring that the Taiping had "achieved its own independence", and that there were now, in effect, two Chinas. A Christian China based at Nanjing, he predicted, would rule the rich tea and silk country of the Yangtze and the south, while the Manchu court kept the far north.

Auguste Chapdelaine
Auguste Chapdelaine. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While the envoys knocked on closed doors, France found a grievance of its own, far inland. In 1853 a French Catholic missionary named Auguste Chapdelaine was sent to Guangxi, a province still overrun by rebel bands. He settled at a town called Xilin, in the far north western corner of the province, as far from the centre of government as it was possible to be, and at first the local magistrate welcomed him and even encouraged him. Under the treaties, foreigners were allowed to live and work only in the five open ports. Chapdelaine was preaching illegally, deep in the interior. Then a new magistrate came. On 24 February 1856 Chapdelaine was arrested and put in chains. The next day he was brought out for trial and beaten, in the way that confessions were usually forced from Chinese criminals. On the 27th he was made to kneel on chains. On the 28th he was put in the cage used for strangling criminals, and on the 29th, because he was still alive, he was beheaded, and his body, horribly mutilated, was thrown to the dogs. His death came after a persecution of the town's Chinese Christians: houses plundered, twenty five converts imprisoned and tortured, and two put to death. It took five months for precise news to reach Canton. In July 1856 the French envoy wrote to Ye, calling the killing a flagrant violation of the treaty, which required that a Frenchman arrested in the interior be handed to the nearest consul unharmed, and he asked for a personal interview. Ye replied that mission work was restricted by treaty to the five ports, and that many who called themselves Christians in Guangxi had joined the revolt and had to be dealt with severely. As for an interview, he wrote that his duties with the armies in Guangxi and Jiangxi "do really not permit me to receive you, but when order is restored I shall be able to settle the place and time for the interview." The French demanded that the magistrate be degraded and exiled. Having no force on hand to back the demand, the envoy referred it to Paris and waited. In Paris, the chance to step in on behalf of the Catholic missions in China, and to keep acting alongside Britain, was not unwelcome. Whatever the dangers Chapdelaine had walked into, his killing had been the official act of the emperor's own magistrate. France had its cause. A few months later, Britain had a case of its own. A Briton named William Burns had travelled overland from Shanghai in Chinese dress and been arrested, and, as the treaty required, he was sent to the consul at Canton, and Bowring ordered him not to go back. The difference was that he came home alive.

And now, the boat. A lorcha was a hybrid vessel common on the China coast, with a European style hull and Chinese sails, fast enough to outrun pirates, or to work as one. To keep trade moving through waters the Qing could no longer police, the Hong Kong government had let vessels owned by Chinese residents of the colony register as British ships and fly the British flag. On 8 October 1856, one of these Hong Kong lorchas, the Arrow, lay off the city of Canton with the British ensign flying and a signal flag at her foremast to show that she was ready to sail. Between eight and half past eight that morning, four Chinese officers and about sixty soldiers came aboard. They hauled down the British flag, and all twelve of the crew, every one of them Chinese, were tied up and taken off into the government's guard boats. The master, a twenty one year old Irishman named Thomas Kennedy, was visiting another lorcha nearby. He came back before the soldiers left, put the British flag back up, and protested. Harry Parkes hurried to the scene himself. He went aboard the guard boat while the prisoners were still on it and demanded that they be brought to the consulate for examination, and he was refused. In the scuffle, Parkes was struck. That same day, his cheek and his pride still stinging, he wrote to Ye Mingchen that "an insult so publicly committed must be equally publicly atoned." He demanded the crew be returned to the Arrow in his presence, and promised that if any of them were charged with a crime, he would examine the case at the consulate alongside Ye's officers. He wrote to Bowring that the seizure was "a declaration on Ye's part that he will respect neither British flag nor British register." Ye's answer was simple. He had sent men aboard to arrest a notorious pirate, and that man, and probably the rest of the crew, had been involved in an act of piracy a month before. The British flag, he said, had not been flying, so it could not have been hauled down; and the boat was owned by a Chinese subject, so it had no right to a British register or a British flag at all. And there was one more thing Ye might have said, but did not yet know. The Arrow's certificate of registry was renewable every year, and it had expired eleven days before. So was it a real insult, or not? Here the sources disagree, on both of the facts that matter. On the flag: the Arrow's master, and the master of another lorcha lying only fifty yards away, both swore that it was flying and was hauled down. But Chinese witnesses said it had not been flying, and so did the only independent witness, a Portuguese sailor. On the register: one side holds that a Hong Kong ship at sea stayed under British protection until she could get home to renew it, and the Arrow was on her way home. The other holds that Parkes and Bowring both knew the register had expired, so that even if the boat flew the British flag, she had no legal right to it. Bowring himself wrote that after the licence expired, "protection could not be legally granted." And the testimony Parkes gathered over the next three days was not of the best: Kennedy, it slowly emerged, had been letting the boat serve as a floating warehouse for stolen goods. Bowring had even warned, when the Hong Kong rules were passed, how easily they could be abused. Parkes's real legal ground was different. Under the treaty, the British argued, Chinese officers who wanted someone taken off a British ship had to ask the British consul, and seizing the crew without his warrant was a breach of the treaty and an act of aggression. The Americans had made exactly that argument two years earlier at Shanghai, when Chinese officials hauled down the American flag on a pilot boat. On that occasion an American frigate came alongside the Chinese warship with loaded guns, and at noon the next day the American flag was raised on the Chinese ship and saluted with twenty one guns. On Bowring's instructions, Parkes demanded a written apology, an assurance that the British flag would be respected in future, and the return of the men to the Arrow in his presence, all within forty eight hours. On 14 October Ye sent back nine of the twelve, and kept three for further and stricter examination. He promised that Chinese officers would not in future seize men from foreign lorchas without reason, but added that foreigners should stop selling registers to Chinese owned boats. Parkes refused to receive the nine men returned in so off hand a way. And Bowring, in Hong Kong, saw something bigger. "Cannot we use the opportunity and carry the City question?" he wrote secretly to Parkes. "If so, I will come up with the whole fleet." In the middle of the crisis, Parkes himself wrote that "want of personal access" was what had caused the trouble. The boat, he more or less admitted, was a smokescreen. So what was the Arrow, a grievance or a pretext? I think the honest answer is that it was both. There was a real question underneath it, about who had the right to arrest whom aboard a ship flying a foreign flag. But the men who pressed it wanted more than an apology: they wanted the gates of Canton opened, and the greater questions settled. A boat of doubtful papers, crewed by suspected pirates, was simply the first opening they were given.

On Parkes's orders, a government war junk lying off Canton was seized, to show Ye what further delay would cost. Ye paid no attention. On 21 October Parkes gave him twenty four hours to comply, or British naval officers would use force. Ye answered the same day. He held to his account of the Arrow, said the junk the British had seized was a peaceful trader, and offered to send back ten of the crew. The next day he sent back all twelve. But he did not send them in the manner Parkes had demanded, and he asked for two of them back at once. Parkes refused to receive them, and since no apology had been offered, he handed the matter to the navy. Admiral Seymour moved fast. On 23 October he took the Barrier forts, about four miles below the city of Canton. On the 24th his men occupied the forts along the Macau passage, and on the 25th the fort on a little island in front of the city that foreigners called the Dutch Folly and the Chinese, more poetically, the Pearl of the Sea. The 26th was a Sunday, and the British rested. On the 27th a single gun opened fire on Ye's yamen, one shot every ten minutes. A yamen was an official's walled compound, where he lived, held court and governed. On the 28th the guns breached the city wall in front of the yamen. And on the 29th, the admiral inflicted on Ye the humiliation of marching in and through his yamen. Through it all Ye had sent a note of protest every day, saying he had already given everything that was demanded. But when his yamen was bombarded, he answered with a proclamation that was a declaration of war. He called on soldiers and people to "unite in exterminating these troublesome English villains, killing them whenever you meet them", and promised thirty dollars for each of their lives, if they brought the heads to his yamen. He also warned the American and other consuls that the English had started a war, and that he could no longer protect neutrals. In one note Ye wrote that he scented a plan to repeat what the British governor had done in the spring of 1847, when his expedition came away with a promise of entry to the city two years later. He had hit on the truth. At the very start of the operations, Bowring had told the admiral that if the moment seemed right for demanding the treaty rights at the city of Canton, he would gladly come up himself to meet the commissioner inside the walls. An older hand might have settled it quietly. Had Manchu grandees like Qishan or Qiying, who had dealt with the British in the first war, been in charge, they would probably have seen the larger danger and granted the small redress at once. Ye did not. He refused to recognize the foreign representatives or concede anything to them, and could see no further than the question of the boat itself. The admiral now told Ye's messenger that he would keep fighting until all foreign representatives were given free personal access to every authority at Canton. Ye replied that the exclusion of foreigners from the city was the unanimous will of the whole population of his province. A boat had become a demand to enter the city. And a demand to enter the city had become a war. By 3 November British forces were shelling the old southern city, and Britain was once again at war with the Qing empire. On 6 November they took another fort near the city and destroyed twenty three war junks moored beside it. Through December and January the regular bombardment turned the southern stretches of Canton into "one mass of smoke", with Chinese firefighters working frantically under the shot and shell. "We are so strong and so right," Bowring rejoiced. "We must write a bright page in our history." The people of Canton fought back the way they could. A committee at Canton raised the bounty: a hundred taels of silver for an English barbarian taken alive, and a hundred dollars to anyone who cut off a barbarian's head and delivered it. On 5 December a British marine was killed and his head carried off by the people of a nearby village, and the British burned the village as a warning. Rebel commanders around Canton wrote to offer their help against the common enemy, and asked to buy junks and supplies in Hong Kong. The British turned them down. The British were also running up a bill. British goods held in Chinese warehouses, which Ye forbade anyone to release, were certified to be worth more than one and a half million dollars, and the American claims were later settled for over seven hundred thousand. Then, at eleven at night on 14 December, fires were started in the ruined Chinese houses behind the foreign factories. By five the next afternoon, every building of the factories was a mass of smoking ruins, all but one house in the old English company's factory. In Beijing the emperor issued edicts saying Ye had long experience of foreign affairs and could be trusted with the crisis, and told the governors up the coast to guard against any English advance north. Elsewhere on the coast, the war hardly seemed to exist. One British consul reported in March that his relations with the officials were as friendly as ever, and that the people took little heed of what was happening at Canton. When Bowring sent his complaints to the governors general at Fuzhou and Nanjing, asking them to pass them to the throne, both replied politely and told him to take it up with Ye at Canton, who alone was authorised to deal with foreign affairs. To Chinese eyes, it seemed absurd that a small irregularity in the arrest of pirates could bring on a great war. To the English, it was just as absurd that Ye should refuse satisfaction for a flagrant insult to the flag. And the war came at a convenient moment for Britain. The Taiping had already brought the dynasty to its knees, draining its best resources and disrupting the Grand Canal that carried grain to Beijing. On the slimmest of pretexts, the arrest of a Chinese smuggling ship that happened to fly the British flag, the Hong Kong governor demanded action.

Richard Cobden
Richard Cobden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

News of the fighting reached Britain, and Britain split. When they heard of the storming of Canton and the loss of civilian life, the people of Manchester wrote to the Queen of their "feelings of shame and indignation". One London newspaper declared that a more rash and tyrannical use of power had rarely been recorded. Another answered that there seemed no way of reaching the heart of China but by the sword. The paper that called for the sword saw opportunity too. Forcing China open, it argued, would bring her the seeds of civil advancement: steam, gas, printing presses, schools, churches, railways, even the House of Commons. "Right or wrong," that paper concluded, "we are in the quarrel, and there is nothing but to go on with it". The comic magazine Punch rewrote Bowring's letters to Parkes as a confession "that we haven't a legal leg to stand upon", so he had ordered up the admiral and "the big guns." In February 1857 the government's conduct came before Parliament, with motions of censure in both houses. The government had one thing on its side. Its Foreign Secretary had already written to Bowring that the demands Parkes made seemed to him "very moderate" in the circumstances, and had approved reprisals. In the House of Lords, peers called Parkes's behaviour "grotesque", but on 26 February the Lords upheld the government by a hundred and forty six votes to a hundred and ten. They found Bowring's conduct "unworthy" of a great and civilised country, and warned that the war "will cast disgrace upon our name and our flag, and will bring ruin upon our trade". The Commons was another matter. The motion there was moved by Richard Cobden, a Liberal champion of free trade and peace, and it charged that Britain's men at Canton had used violence against China without cause. "The Government of England", Cobden told the House, are "bullies to the weak and cowards to the strong." The Conservative Edward Bulwer-Lytton agreed: "In dealing with nations less civilized than ourselves", he said, "it is by lofty truth and forbearing humanity that the genius of commerce contrasts the ambition of conquerors." Even the government's own people were appalled. The under secretary for the colonies called the business "one of the great iniquities of our time", and Bowring "a fool". On the very first day of debate, a former chief justice from British India rose to say that opium, which members were told to shut their eyes to, had everything to do with the question, because it had bred deep hostility on both sides. The young Gladstone spoke for a full two hours, charging that "the whole might of England" was about to be unleashed "against the lives of a defenceless people". One excited supporter called it "the finest delivered in the memory of man in the House of Commons". Palmerston, by now in his seventies and suffering from gout, tried to stir patriotic blood by calling Ye an "inhuman monster" who had executed seventy thousand Chinese in the last year alone. It made little impression. The diarist Charles Greville found the speech "Very dull in the first part" and "very bow-wow in the second". After four long days of debate, on 3 March 1857, the government was defeated, by two hundred and sixty three votes to two hundred and forty seven. Gladstone said the vote did more honour to the House of Commons than any he could remember. The House had decided that the government meant "by force to increase our commercial relations with the East", and that this was not acceptable. Among the rebels was Sir Francis Baring, who seventeen years earlier, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had paid for the first Opium War. Back in 1840, the confused motives for war with China had come within a whisker of bringing down a government. In 1857, they actually did.

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Palmerston did not resign and go quietly. He dissolved Parliament and took the question to the country. The British press called it the Chinese election. His supporters ran a scare campaign, filling the illustrated papers with images of Chinese tortures and executions. The merchants rallied to him for upholding the honour of Britain, and many Protestant missionaries joined them, because they too wanted the interior of China thrown open to them. One missionary appeal put it plainly: "nothing but the strong arm of foreign power can soon open the field for the entrance of the Gospel." Palmerston spoke everywhere: at the Lord Mayor's dinners, to his constituents, and in print. It was the first election in British history in which a prime minister addressed the whole nation in print. He claimed, falsely, that the heads of "respectable British merchants" had been displayed "on the walls of Canton". He called Ye "an insolent barbarian" who had violated the British flag and broken the treaties. The debate had been about a fine point of international law. Palmerston turned it into a question of patriotism, and the public liked it. The Times called his actions "spirited", "wise" and "British". When the votes were counted after 7 April 1857, Cobden and the other leading members of the peace party were out, rejected by the voters as un English, and Palmerston was back with a majority of eighty five. Less than a month after Parliament had denounced the war, Palmerston was free to fight it. The politically informed sneered at his electioneering claptrap. But Palmerston had read the country better than they had. One peer mourned in the Lords that, almost for the first time in British history, the country was in a war that had never been formally announced to Parliament by the Crown.

James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin
James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin. Felice Beato (1832–1909); Henry Hering (1814–1893), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In fact, the government had not even waited for Parliament. Since September 1856 it had been in secret talks with France, the United States and Russia about joint action in China, and by early February 1857, weeks before Parliament debated the war, the cabinet had already sent orders east. On 10 March, seven days after it lost the vote, the government announced its choice of envoy to finish the war: Lord Elgin, a former governor of Jamaica and governor general of Canada. James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, was the son of the Lord Elgin who had carried off the marbles of the Parthenon. He was in his forties, an experienced colonial governor, and a Scot. France named its own envoy, a baron, to act alongside him. Bowring's haste, and the admiral's reprisals with too few men to finish the job, had persuaded both governments to put the negotiations in the hands of special ambassadors over the heads of the men on the spot. Elgin's instructions were sweeping. He was to demand reparation for injuries to British and French subjects, full execution of the treaties at Canton and elsewhere, and compensation for losses. He was to win the right for the British envoy to live in Beijing, and to write directly to the high officials there. He was to get the treaties revised to open more ports, and to give foreigners access to the great cities of the interior, especially those on the Yangtze. And a separate dispatch, stamped secret and confidential, ordered that opium was to be legalised. In practice, all this meant dealing with the emperor himself, or at least with a commissioner close enough to Beijing to speak for him. And that meant Elgin would have to take his forces right to the emperor's doorstep, the river mouth where the envoys had been snubbed in 1854. The French envoy's orders were much the same, with special stress on reparation for the killing of Chapdelaine and better security for missionaries. The Americans held back. Washington told its man in China that it had not decided to go to war, and that if war came, the president would need Congress's authority first. Even Parkes, the man who had set it all in motion, admitted that "Our position is certainly an embarrassing one". But it was one, he went on, "from which we cannot recede". Punch, once again putting words in Bowring's mouth, had him say "we have gone too far to recede", tell the admiral "to blaze away", and sigh, "My heart bleeds for these infatuated Chinese."

Elgin sailed from England in 1857 with a respectable force of seventeen hundred troops. It was a bad moment to start a war on the far side of the world. The British people were exhausted and the treasury drained by the war in the Crimea, and the government of India was still busy with a war against Persia, whose troops came home only that June. Then, on 13 May 1857, the great rising against British rule in India broke out. The first word of it reached Elgin on the voyage out, and when he arrived at Singapore on 3 June, letters were waiting from Lord Canning, the governor general of India, asking him to send some of his China troops to Calcutta. Elgin answered promptly, and sent two regiments, about seventeen hundred bayonets, from Singapore. Other regiments on their way to China were diverted to India as they passed. On 2 July Elgin reached Hong Kong, with an expedition to command and almost no army to command it with. He stayed less than three weeks. On 19 July, aboard the warship Shannon, he wrote home: "Here I am actually on my way to Calcutta! To Calcutta! you will exclaim in surprise." At Hong Kong, he explained, he had found himself without troops and without the representatives of his allies to act with. He could either approach the imperial court alone, with no power to act if he was rebuffed, or spend three months at Hong Kong doing nothing, telling the whole world that he was waiting for the Frenchman, and that England could do nothing without France. So, with the admiral's warm approval, he decided to use the time by running up to Calcutta with whatever help he could gather, and come back in time to meet his French colleague, who was not expected until the middle of September. It had occurred to him on Tuesday evening, he wrote, and by Thursday he was under way. Peace or war, he believed, would be far easier to win when the European forces were acting together than when Britain acted alone. It did not go smoothly. The monsoon was against him, and the Shannon could carry coal for only five days of steaming, so she was beating against the wind and making little progress. He fretted that a good merchant steamer would be doing ten miles an hour in a straight line, while his ship was making six in a crooked one. And he worried that while he was away, the Russians would be whispering to the emperor that the British were in a bad way in India. His reasons were not all selfish. Canning, he wrote, wanted to see him, and he was told that his arrival with what Indians would take for the first of a great force would have a powerful moral effect. "I ought to be there at least two months before he can receive a man from England." The next day was his birthday, and he wrote, "Would that I were at home to-day!" At home they teased him that he did not care for anniversaries. It was only, he wrote, that they were so sad once they could no longer be kept as they used to be. "Do not anniversaries stir this great fountain of sadness?" His help mattered in India. Elgin sent the Shannon and another warship to Calcutta with three hundred marines, and from them came a naval brigade with heavy guns. The Shannon's captain later sent him a message: "Tell Lord Elgin that it was the Chinese expedition that relieved Lucknow, relieved Cawnpore, and fought the battle of the 6th December." Meanwhile the Hong Kong garrison of eleven hundred and fifty men stayed where it was, and fifteen hundred more marines were ordered out to China, though they would not arrive until November. His troops proved indispensable in the bloody siege of Delhi that summer, and some said they turned the tide of the rising. But the diversion wrecked his own mission. He had to stay a while as a guest in the governor general's grand mansion in Calcutta. And there, a discomfort that had been growing in him since he set out began to come to the surface. He found the conduct of his countrymen in Asia morally repulsive. "It is a terrible business," he wrote in Calcutta, living among what he called inferior races; terrible, he meant, because the British degraded themselves when they set themselves up as racial masters. Later he would call the affair of the Arrow, the incident that had started his war, "a scandal to us." That is where we leave him: a reluctant conqueror, his army scattered across India, waiting for the troops that would let him fight a war whose beginning he would come to call a scandal. Next time, British and French guns turn on Canton itself, and Parkes goes hunting for Ye Mingchen.

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