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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 17

Blood Is Thicker Than Water

In June 1859 Frederick Bruce, Elgin's younger brother and Britain's new minister, sails north to have the Treaty of Tianjin ratified in Beijing, and insists on the route past the Dagu forts the Mongol general Sengge Rinchen has rebuilt. The episode follows Bruce and Sengge Rinchen to the worst British defeat of the century in China, a neutral American who joins the fight, and London's decision to send Elgin back with an army, and asks who chose this war. It leans on British officials and scholars, with the court heard in its own reports of victory.

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Transcript

Last time, Lord Elgin took a little fleet six hundred miles up the Yangtze, an unknown and uncharted river to British sailors, to see the waterway his new treaty had opened. On the way, the guns of Nanjing fired on his ships, and his gunboats went back next morning to hammer the forts until, as he put it, "we had done enough for our honour." And behind him, travelling the other way, the Heavenly King's cousin Hong Rengan left the Hong Kong home of the missionary James Legge, crossed Qing China dressed as a peddler, and little more than two weeks after reaching Nanjing was made a king. The Shield King, as he was now called, set down a plan for a new China, with railways in a country that did not have a mile of track, newspapers of every kind, and friendship with the Western powers on terms of equality. Hold on to him. We'll come back to the Shield King in Nanjing soon enough, and he is going to need every bit of that confidence. But this time we go north, to the sea gate of Beijing, because the treaty Elgin had wrung out of the court at Tianjin still had one more step to take before it was real. A word on where we are, for anyone just joining. Britain was in its second war with China in twenty years. The first, the Opium War, had ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanjing. The second had begun at Canton in 1856, and this time France had joined Britain, while Russia and the United States stood by and made treaties of their own. That treaty carried a clause that decided everything in this episode: the ratifications were to be exchanged at Beijing within one year. Ratification is the last step in making a treaty. Each side's ruler formally approves the text, the signed copies are swapped, and only then does it bind anyone. And this treaty asked a great deal. British ships could sail up the Yangtze, foreigners could travel wherever they wanted in the empire, and native Christians would be protected. Beyond the five coastal ports already open to foreign trade, ten more would open, in the north, on Taiwan, and along the Yangtze. Worst of all, from the court's point of view, the British envoy might live permanently in Beijing. And since the dynasty depended above all on prestige to sustain its rule, that clause was potentially the most devastating of them all. The Son of Heaven was the emperor's oldest title: the ruler who held Heaven's mandate over everything under Heaven, with no equal anywhere on earth. At Tianjin the court's negotiators had said the emperor would rather go to war than accept a resident envoy. The British interpreter across the table had told them they had better try war then, but that the emperor would have to yield in the end. That exchange is worth keeping in mind, because the court is about to try it. The same interpreter had threatened them, in Lord Elgin's name, with the immediate renewal of hostilities and an advance on Beijing. And the emperor had warned his own negotiators that if they gave way on the points he cared about most, they would be not merely degraded but beheaded. The Xianfeng Emperor had been told by his own commissioner that the treaties were nothing more than slips of paper to make the barbarians leave Tianjin, and that he could easily cancel them if he wished. And the planned exchange of copies in Beijing was something Xianfeng hoped very much would never happen. Xianfeng was still a young man, not yet thirty, and he had come to the throne in 1850, just as the Taiping rebellion was breaking out in the south. His whole reign had been one emergency after another. A rebel kingdom held Nanjing, the old southern capital, and now foreign ships kept turning up at the door of the northern one. Elgin, for his part, had made one concession before he left. If Britain's envoy was properly received in Beijing for the exchange, he would recommend that Britain's minister live somewhere other than the capital. He did not pretend the treaty had been freely given. He wrote of it as "imposed, a pistol at the throat". In another letter he wrote that its concessions had been extorted from the court's fears, and that in the eyes of the Chinese government they amounted to a revolution. So everything hung on a single journey. A British envoy had to go to Beijing, and he had to be received there. How he would go, and by which road, is where this story turns. The envoy was Frederick Bruce, Lord Elgin's younger brother. At Tianjin, on the morning the treaty was signed, it was he who warned the Qing negotiators that any further attempt to reopen discussion would be treated as a breach of good faith. He had then carried the signed treaty home to London, and he came back out in 1859 as Britain's minister to China. He was no stranger to China. In the 1840s he had served as colonial secretary of Hong Kong, and since then he had been a diplomat in South America and in Egypt. A minister, in the diplomacy of the day, was a resident envoy: the man who lived in a foreign capital and spoke there for his own sovereign. That was exactly the kind of envoy the court in Beijing had never accepted. Bruce reached Shanghai on 6 June 1859, and his French colleague, the minister de Bourboulon, arrived the next day. De Bourboulon had been France's man in China for most of the decade, and Paris had told him to keep step with the British. The American minister, Ward, was already there, and he will matter later in this story. Shanghai was where the court hoped to settle things, far from the capital, and Bruce would not talk there. Shanghai had been open to foreign trade since the first war, and its foreign settlements beside the old walled city had become the busiest foreign community on the coast. It was a long way from Beijing, and that was the point. Talks there kept the foreigners at the edge of the empire, where the court had always wanted them. Bruce's resolution to go to Beijing for the exchange without delay, he declared, was "inflexible". The Chinese side then begged the envoys, at the very least, to "anchor their vessels of war outside the bar", and to come up to the capital "without much baggage, and with a moderate retinue". A bar is the bank of sand and silt that builds up across a river's mouth. Big ships wait outside it, and only shallow boats cross. Remember that phrase about a moderate retinue. It is going to come back to this story more than once. Bruce was not travelling light. The naval force gathered under Admiral James Hope came in the end to a ship of the line, two frigates and thirteen gunboats. Hope was a tough, experienced officer. Years before, in South America, he had led the boats that cut the chains the Argentines had stretched across the Parana River, under fire. If any man in the navy knew how to break a barrier across a river, it was him. A ship of the line was a great battleship. The gunboats were the important part here: small, shallow steamers, built to work close inshore and up rivers, exactly where the big ships could not go. The three ministers, British, French and American, left Shanghai together and arrived off Dagu on 20 June. The Dagu forts stood on both banks where the river to Tianjin runs out into the Gulf of Bohai. Past them, the river leads up to Tianjin, and from Tianjin it is a short road to Beijing. Those forts had been taken before. The year before, a British gunboat had smashed through the boom blocking this same river, and when the marines and sailors stormed the defences, the defenders turned and ran. The defenders that day had set their aim high, not expecting an attack at low tide, and most of their shots had missed. The invaders had counted 500 Chinese dead, while the rest of the roughly 3,000 defenders scattered. One fort commander was found with his throat cut by his own hand. That was the memory the British brought back to Dagu. And the viceroy responsible for the forts had been degraded for losing them. Worse, the old statesman Qiying, sent to Tianjin to talk the foreigners round, failed, was condemned, and was told it was the emperor's will that he put an end to himself. So the court knew exactly what failure at Dagu cost.

This year, though, the river was held by a different kind of commander. His name was Sengge Rinchen, a Mongol prince, and a few years earlier he had walled in the Taiping army that marched on Beijing and flooded its camp to the rooftops with water from the Grand Canal. The Mongols had been allies of the Manchu conquerors from the very beginning, and Mongol horsemen were still among the dynasty's best soldiers. That Taiping army had come up from Nanjing in 1853, a small force of about 7,000 men, and by late October it had reached the Grand Canal, close enough to Tianjin to frighten the capital. To finish it, a crew of 1,000 labourers had spent a month digging trenches to bring the Grand Canal's water forty miles across country to the rebel camp. The Grand Canal was the great man made waterway that carried grain from the rich south up to the north, and Tianjin stood where it met the river to the sea. So Tianjin was where the capital's grain and the road from the sea came together. Sengge Rinchen was not a man who expected to lose. Across the river mouth now lay a new boom, made of full sized tree trunks slung together lengthwise with heavy chains. Behind it, the forts' gun ports were hidden under mats. From the sea, it all looked quiet. Before a shot was fired, the court made Bruce an offer. A Qing emissary came out with another route: land at Beitang, a smaller river mouth up the coast, and go on to the capital by a route used for tribute missions. Beitang lay a short way north of Dagu, on the same flat shore. The tribute system was the court's old way of dealing with foreign rulers. Their envoys came as vassals bearing gifts, by roads the court chose, to be received as inferiors. Bruce refused the change of course and insisted on sticking with the original plan: up the river, past the forts, to Tianjin. There was a calculation behind that, and it was not only pride. The British believed the court was split, with a war party on one side and men who wanted peace on the other. They were right about that much. Around the emperor stood a circle of hard line Manchu princes and ministers who wanted the treaties undone, and other officials who feared another lost war more than they feared the treaties. If the Mongol prince was beaten in his attempt to keep them out of the river, the reasoning went, "pacific counsels will prevail." On 21 June, Bruce instructed James Hope, the admiral, that the matter was now in his hands. In other words, the diplomat had finished. It was the sailors' turn. At nine in the morning on 25 June, a last request to go round by Beitang reached Bruce. An hour later the attack began. At first, while the sailors cleared the outer barrier of iron stakes, the forts seemed deserted. The lead gunboat, the Plover, steamed at the barrier, and the new boom stopped her, shuddering, in her course. Hope had chosen to lead from the Plover himself. Then the mats over the gun ports were thrown aside, and behind them stood a full complement of defenders. Shot began to pour from the forts. At close range, against boats held still by a boom, even old smoothbore cannon could hardly miss. For three hours the Plover was hammered under heavy fire, until her hull burst and she sank into the mud. Only one of her crew survived the day. Hope himself was among the badly wounded. One gunboat after another was put out of the fight. By the end, six of them had been made incapable of action, and four were on the bottom. Then the guns of the forts went silent. To the British it looked like the moment the defenders had been beaten. It was a ruse, meant to tempt the landing party into storming the beach. The landing party was 600 marines and men of a company of engineers, the very men who had been meant to serve as Bruce's escort to Beijing. Marines were soldiers who served aboard warships, the troops a navy sent ashore. By the time their boats came near the shore, the tide was all the way out. Between the water's edge and the walls lay a wide flat of soft mud. The mud seized their feet, and they were shot to pieces as they struggled toward the forts. The landing failed. Think about who those men were. They had been brought along to walk beside the minister into Beijing, as his escort. When it was all counted, 25 sailors and 64 marines were dead, and 93 sailors and 252 marines wounded. That made 434 British casualties in a single afternoon at the mouth of a river. Defenders the British had watched run the year before had beaten them badly. Sengge Rinchen predicted that one or two more thrashings like this one would finish the foreigners' arrogance for good, and bring decades of peace. In his words, "the pride and vainglory of the barbarians, already under severe trial, will immediately disappear." In Beijing, the war party had been given its chance, and the court had reopened hostilities at Dagu and won. On the British side, the swagger of the year before was gone. In its place came the bloody taste of humiliation, and a hunger for revenge against the "inferior race" that had beaten them. So who started it? Was this an ambush, or a country defending its own front door? Here the sources disagree. On one side was the charge of treachery, so often brought against the Chinese for that day: forts that seemed deserted, no flags, no soldiers in sight, and then guns behind the mats. Against that, the boom and the forts stood in plain sight for anyone to see, the court had offered another road, and to the British minister's critics, it was he who chose his own path and then tried to force it at the cannon's mouth when the Chinese resisted. Whichever way you weigh it, this much is clear: Bruce was offered a way in that did not go past the guns, and he turned it down. Bruce took what was left of the fleet back south to Shanghai. The envoy who was meant to live in Beijing had not even got past the mouth of the river. In London the new government stood by him. And it promised him a considerable military force, to sail with the change of the monsoon in the spring.

Josiah Tattnall
Josiah Tattnall. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now, there was one more ship off Dagu that day, and it had no business in the fight at all. The United States was neutral. It was at war with no one in China, and it had signed its own treaty at Tianjin the year before. The American minister, John Ward, had come up the coast in the steam frigate Powhatan, and the commodore of the American squadron was aboard. His name was Josiah Tattnall, a Georgian in his sixties, a sailor since the war with Britain in 1812. A commodore commanded a squadron of ships. The American navy of the day had no admirals at all, so a commodore was as high as an American sea officer could go. So here was a man who had fought the British as a young officer, now watching them die in the mud at Dagu. And Britain and America were hardly close friends in the 1850s. They had quarrelled over Central America, and in the Crimean War Britain's attempts to recruit soldiers on American soil had got its minister in Washington sent home. Officially, then, the Americans off Dagu were spectators, and not especially friendly ones. When word came that the British admiral, James Hope, had been shot, Tattnall decided to throw American neutrality to the wind and go in. He set out in his boat to visit the wounded admiral, and on the way his coxswain was killed at his side. A coxswain was the sailor who steered an officer's boat, the man who sat closest to him. Tattnall went on anyway, and he towed boats full of British reserves up toward the fighting. "Blood is thicker than water!" he shouted. It was an old English proverb, meaning that family comes first. Here the family was the English speaking world. One American died. In London, the Times told its readers that England would never forget the day "when the deeds and words of kindly Americans sustained and comforted her stricken warriors". Tattnall had broken his country's neutrality without orders, and back home he was cheered for it. Within a few years he would be fighting again, this time for the South in America's own civil war. And the line he shouted off Dagu became one of the best known sayings in American naval history. It is a striking moment, and you can see why it became a legend. But notice what it shows. When the shooting started, a neutral had picked a side. And the American minister had a very different problem to solve. He still had a treaty to ratify too.

John Elliott Ward
John Elliott Ward. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ward was a lawyer and politician from Savannah in Georgia, once the city's mayor, and new to China. Unlike Bruce, he had neither the authority nor the force to fight his way past Dagu. So he did what Bruce had refused to do. He took the road the court offered. Ward left Beitang on 20 July with the members of his legation, and reached Beijing on the 28th. A legation was a minister's whole mission: his secretaries, interpreters and guards. For part of the way the Americans rode in closed carts, the springless two wheeled carts of north China. They were going to the capital at last, but on the court's terms. Beijing was really two walled cities joined together: the Inner City, where the Manchu garrison lived around the walls of the Forbidden City, and the Outer City to the south, full of shops and markets. In Beijing, Ward and his suite were, in fact, prisoners at large. One of the legation's interpreters, Martin, summed it up in a line: "we were guarded like criminals". They were kept apart, above all, from the Russians, who already had a presence in the city. Russia had kept a small church mission in Beijing for well over a century, and its envoys had their own channels to the court. The Russians, as it happened, had done very well out of the year before. By a treaty signed at Aigun in 1858, the whole north bank of the Amur River, from the Argun to the sea, had been recognised as Russian. The Amur is the great river that runs along what is now the border between Russia and northeast China. A Russian note to Beijing had argued that all the troubles of the past might have been avoided if the foreign powers could have communicated directly with the high authorities in the capital. Then came the question that had wrecked British embassies before. The kowtow was the full ritual of submission before the emperor: kneeling three times, and each time knocking the forehead on the ground three times. It was what a subject did, or the envoy of a vassal king. An envoy who did it was saying that his own ruler stood beneath the Son of Heaven. The first British embassy, under Lord Macartney in 1793, had refused it too, and gone down on one knee only, as he would before his own king. Ward had told the court that he respected the Great Emperor as much as he respected his own President. To the Xianfeng Emperor this was an insult, nothing less, as he put it, than "to class the Middle Kingdom with barbarous tribes." And of Ward's sense of his own importance, the emperor wrote: "Such wild exaltation of himself can only be relegated to subjects which make one laugh". Then, at the last moment, as Ward was about to start for the palace, he was told the kowtow was essential. It was what had happened to Lord Amherst forty odd years before, and Ward did what Amherst had done. He gave up the audience. Amherst's embassy had been sent away from the emperor's summer palace outside Beijing in 1816 without ever seeing the emperor. So the treaty would be ratified, but without the emperor ever setting eyes on the American who brought it. That was not a small thing to either side. For the Americans, a minister who kowtowed would be telling the world that his republic was a vassal. For the court, an envoy received standing up, as an equal, would be telling the empire that the Son of Heaven had equals after all. Neither side could give way without giving up the whole argument, so neither did. The emperor's notes on Ward tell you something about the man on the throne, too. His dynasty was at war with a rebel in Nanjing who called himself the younger brother of Jesus. And here was the emperor, finding time to mock an American's manners in his written comments on a report. But from where he sat, the ceremony was not a side issue. It stood for the whole order of the world. Ward left Beijing on 12 August, and the ratifications were exchanged, not in the capital at all, but at Beitang, on the 16th. The American treaty had thirty articles, and among them was a most favoured nation clause. That meant anything China granted to any other power, the United States would get as well. So the Americans could afford to be patient. Whatever the British won by fighting, they would share without firing a shot. Ward had taken the road Bruce refused, and he had got his ratification. But he had paid for it in exactly the coin the British had refused to pay: he had come as the court wanted, been kept as the court wanted, and left when the court wanted. Think about what the court got from that summer. From Beijing's side, the old order looked as if it still worked.

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

News of Dagu took most of the summer to reach Europe, and it landed in a London that had just changed its government. Palmerston, the old champion of gunboat diplomacy, had lost office early in 1858 and had come back as prime minister in June 1859. Palmerston wanted blood, and the French emperor, Napoleon the Third, readily agreed to a new joint expedition. Napoleon the Third was the nephew of the great Napoleon, and he was keen to show French power around the world. France had its own grievances in China, above all the killing of a French missionary in the south, and French ships had fought beside the British since 1857. Palmerston had fought over China before. Back in 1857, when the House of Commons voted against his war over the Arrow, he had simply dissolved Parliament and called new elections, the so called Chinese elections, which returned his war party in a landslide. He came back from that election with a majority of 85. The Arrow was the small Hong Kong registered ship whose seizure at Canton in 1856 had started the second war in the first place. To lead it, Palmerston turned to the man who had made the treaty in the first place. James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, was a Scottish nobleman in his late forties, a former governor general of Canada, sent to China in 1857 to settle the Arrow quarrel. His first mission had been knocked sideways before it began. Rebellion broke out in India in 1857, and Elgin sent troops meant for China to help put it down instead. From Singapore alone he sent two regiments, about 1,700 bayonets. Those troops proved indispensable at the bloody siege of Delhi that summer, and his own mission in China was derailed. Lord Elgin had come home in 1859 and taken a seat in Palmerston's cabinet as Postmaster General. Elgin was an odd man for the job. He had come to China, as he saw it, to make a treaty of peace, and he had wanted to leave behind conditions that would last. At Tianjin he had written: "Though I have been forced to act almost brutally, I am China's friend in all this." Now he was sent back to China, and his orders were simple. He was to sail once more up the river to Tianjin, ratify the treaty, and force the emperor to apologize for the attack on the British fleet at the Dagu forts. Beside him, for France, went his partner of 1858, the French envoy Gros. This time, though, the envoys would not be travelling with a few gunboats. The invasion force would come to some 24,000 British, French and Indian troops. There were 41 men of war in all, trailing 143 transports. More than 4,000 of the soldiers came from India, the largest number of colonial troops, Sikh cavalry among them. The Sikhs came from the Punjab in India's north west, and after the great Indian rebellion of 1857 the British had recruited them in large numbers, because they had stood by Britain in that war. While the troops gathered, Britain took a lease on the Kowloon peninsula, across the harbour from Hong Kong, as a camp for them. And in April 1860 the allies occupied the island of Zhoushan, off the coast near Ningbo, as a base for the campaign. And there were others, who were not soldiers at all. About 3,000 Chinese men from Canton, most of them Hakkas, were hired to carry supplies for the army, at nine dollars a month. Men like them had already proved their worth to the British. At Canton in 1857, hired carriers had brought the ammunition close up behind the attacking columns on the day of the assault. The Hakka were a Chinese people of the south, a community of old migrants with their own speech, often at odds with their neighbours. In these same years, the Hakka villages around Canton were fighting a long and bloody feud with their Cantonese speaking neighbours. The Heavenly King himself, Hong Xiuquan, was a Hakka. So the army going north to force the emperor's hand would march on the backs of men from the same people as the rebel who wanted the emperor's throne. The voyage out had its own troubles. Elgin and Gros were wrecked together in the harbour of Point de Galle, and lost all their belongings, even their letters of credence. Galle was a port on the great island off the southern tip of India, the regular stop for steamers on the long route between Suez and the East. Letters of credence are the formal letters a sovereign gives an envoy, to prove to the other government that he speaks for his sovereign. Elgin, then, would be arriving to demand that the Chinese recognise his standing, having just lost the papers that proved it. On the long passage he was reading Charles Darwin's new book, the Origin of Species, and he thought it audacious. The Origin of Species had come out in London in November 1859, and it was the book everyone was arguing about. I'll leave you to decide whether a book about struggle and survival was quite the right reading for a man on his way to settle a quarrel with gunboats.

Before Elgin arrived, though, the envoys already in China gave the court a last chance. On 8 March 1860, Bruce and the French minister wrote to the senior secretary of state and the Grand Council in Beijing. The Grand Council was the emperor's inner circle of advisers, the small body through which the most important business of the empire passed. So the man who had been beaten at Dagu was the man who now wrote the demand. The envoys demanded an apology for Dagu, money for what it had cost, and the exchange of ratifications at Beijing, with the envoys going up to Tianjin in their own countries' warships to do it. So the envoys would come by the river, past the forts, just as Bruce had insisted on doing the summer before. An ultimatum is a final demand, with the threat of force if it is refused. And the money was about to grow. The treaty had already promised 4 million taels to Britain and 2 million to France, and in 1860 those sums would be raised to 8 million each. A tael was a Chinese ounce of silver, the unit the empire kept its accounts in. The reply came on 5 April, passed on from the Grand Council by a provincial viceroy. A viceroy, or governor general, ruled two or three provinces at once, and was one of the most powerful officials in the empire. It amounted to an absolute rejection of the ultimatum. And it carried a suggestion. The envoys should come north, as Ward had done, without ships of war, and with a moderate retinue. There it is again: the moderate retinue. The court was asking the envoys, with an army on its way, to come up to Beijing on its terms, the way the American had. Think how that read in British eyes. A minister's escort had been cut down in the mud, an admiral wounded, four gunboats sunk, and the answer was an invitation to come back without warships. And think how the British demand read in Beijing. The foreigners had been beaten at the door, and now they wanted an apology for it, and money, and to come back through the same door with their warships. From the court's side, it is easy to see why it answered that way. Its own general had beaten the British at Dagu, the American had come by the court's road and gone away again, and the war party's credit was now fully established. And its victorious general was telling it that the barbarians' pride was about to disappear. There was another reason the court was not frightened, and it lay to the south. Censors in Beijing wrote in 1860 that when the rebels from the south had swept north in 1853, the alarm in the capital had been many times worse than anything the foreigners were causing now. A censor was an official whose job was to watch the government and criticise it to the emperor, even, in principle, the emperor himself. To the court, the Taiping were the war for the dynasty's life. The British and French were a quarrel over ceremony and trade. The British, for their part, had been trying to stay out of that other war. Elgin himself had written that Britain had seen fit to affect neutrality between the Emperor of China and the rebels, and he knew that neutrality was only an affectation. Now Britain and France were going to war with the emperor, while the rebels the emperor was fighting held the Yangtze. So, who chose this war? It is tempting to give a single answer, and plenty of people at the time did. From one side, the court chose it, by ambushing an envoy on his way to keep a treaty. From the other, the British chose it, by refusing every road but the one through the forts. Bruce believed that if the Mongol prince were beaten, pacific counsels would prevail at court. Sengge Rinchen believed the beaten barbarians might now be brought under control. Bruce chose the river over the road. The court chose to defend the river with guns behind mats. Palmerston and Napoleon chose to answer with an army. And now, in the spring of 1860, the court chose to refuse. That army is on its way, and the next time the British come to the sea gate of Beijing, they will come in force. But before it gets there, we go back south to Nanjing, where Qing armies had been camped outside the walls for years. In Nanjing, the Shield King, the man with the plan for railways and newspapers, is about to show that he can plan a campaign too. And the general who carries it out is going to change the whole shape of the war. Next time, the Eastern Campaign.

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