Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 19

The Road to Beijing

Lord Elgin returns in 1860 with an army to force the court to honour the treaties, and this time the allies land where the forts cannot stop them. The episode follows Elgin and Harry Parkes, his interpreter and negotiator, from the beaches of Beitang to the talks at Tongzhou, where Parkes and his party are seized under a flag of truce, and on to the flight of the Xianfeng Emperor from his capital, and asks how a negotiation ended in a hostage crisis. It leans on scholars and British officials; the court's side is heard only once.

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Transcript

Last time, in August 1860, the Loyal King's army came to the edge of Shanghai, after he had written that the Taiping had no quarrel with their foreign brethren, and met British and French guns instead. Many of his men did not even shoot back. French troops burned the crowded Chinese suburbs outside the city walls to clear their field of fire, and left tens of thousands of people homeless. Two days later, Li Xiucheng wrote to the foreign consuls that he had come to Shanghai to make a treaty and open trade, not to fight. Then he withdrew, and Shanghai was left alone for the rest of the year. Now, here is the strange part. The same British and French soldiers who were defending a Qing city in the south were, at that very moment, at war with the Qing in the north. And keep in mind what that meant for the dynasty. By that autumn, the Taiping held every county around Shanghai except the ones the foreigners protected. A loyal official, watching the rich cities of the east fall one after another, wrote that a ruling house of two hundred years had been endangered in an instant. So the Qing were fighting for their lives on two fronts at once, against rebels in the south and against the two strongest powers in Europe in the north. To see why, we have to go back a year, to the mouth of the river that leads up to Tianjin. There, in June 1859, the guns of the Dagu forts had sunk four British gunboats and cut down a landing party in the mud, and Britain had counted 434 men lost. Sengge Rinchen, whose victory it was, wrote to the emperor that with one or two more thrashings like that, the pride of the barbarians would disappear, and China could enjoy some decades of peace. In Britain, the defeat had swept away a good deal of swagger, and left behind the bloody taste of humiliation and a hunger for revenge. This episode draws on two men who went north with the army that came for that revenge: Garnet Wolseley, a British soldier who wrote a narrative of the war, and Henry Loch, private secretary to Lord Elgin. Lord Elgin, a Scottish earl, was the British envoy who had forced the Treaty of Tianjin on the court in 1858. I'm going to call this episode a negotiation that turned into a hostage crisis. It is the story of an army that finally gets where it wants to go, of a pair of diplomats who think the shooting is over, and of an emperor who cannot decide whether to make peace or to set a trap. And at its center is a man who spoke Chinese, rode between the two armies, and found out exactly what his words were worth. Let's start in the spring, with the bill. In March, Britain and France sent the court an ultimatum: an apology for the attack at Dagu, ratification of the treaties in Beijing, and money. They wrote on the eighth of March to the senior secretary of state and the Grand Council, demanding that the ratifications be exchanged in Beijing, with the envoys going up to Tianjin in their own warships to do it. The Grand Council was the small body of senior ministers who met the emperor every morning, before dawn, and drafted his orders. The reply that came back in April was an absolute rejection of the ultimatum. It suggested that the envoys come north the way the American minister had done: without warships, and with a moderate retinue. That American had reached Beijing, been treated like a prisoner, and left without ever seeing the emperor. Nobody in London was going to take that road. To understand why the court fought so hard over something as small as which road to take, you have to know what the treaties actually said. The Treaty of Tianjin, signed in 1858, opened new ports to foreign trade, among them river ports up the Yangtze, let foreigners travel in the interior with passports, and protected missionaries and their converts. It also gave Britain the right to keep a minister living in Beijing, and it said the ratifications would be exchanged in Beijing within a year. For the court, the minister in Beijing was the hardest thing in the whole treaty to swallow. In the Qing view of the world, the emperor was the Son of Heaven, and foreign envoys came to his capital bearing tribute, performed their bows, and went home. An envoy who lived in the capital and dealt with the throne as an equal would turn that order upside down. So the route mattered. Coming up the river in warships, as the allies demanded, said one thing. Coming overland by the road set aside for tribute missions, with a modest party, said quite another. In London, the Prime Minister, Palmerston, wanted blood, and the French emperor, Napoleon the Third, readily agreed to a new joint expedition. France had its own reasons. Napoleon the Third wanted prestige abroad, and he had taken up the cause of a French Catholic missionary, Auguste Chapdelaine, put to death by local officials in Guangxi in 1856. Palmerston was the old champion of gunboats in British politics, and he had come back to office in June 1859, only days before the defeat at Dagu. So Lord Elgin was sent back to China, and with him came the French envoy, Gros, who had signed France's own treaty at Tianjin two years before. The two envoys had a rough start. On the way out, they were wrecked together in the harbor of Point de Galle, on the way across the Indian Ocean, and lost all their effects, even their letters of credence, the documents that proved who they were. So two of the most powerful men in Asia arrived to make war on China having lost the paper that said they were allowed to make peace. Elgin's 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 the year before. This time, he would not be relying on gunboats alone. The invasion force would come to some twenty four thousand British, French and Indian troops. There were forty one warships in all, trailing a hundred and forty three transports. The largest group of colonial troops came from India, more than four thousand of them, among them Sikh cavalry. Three years before, in 1857, troops on their way to China had been turned around to put down the great rising against British rule in India. Now some of the regiments raised to fight that rising were sailing to China themselves. And there were about three thousand Chinese men from Canton, most of them Hakkas, hired at nine dollars a month to carry supplies for the army. The Hakkas were a people of the south, settlers who had come late to the land and were often at odds with their neighbors. Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King of the Taiping, was one of them. So the army that came to punish the emperor marched on the backs of his own subjects. And somewhere in the middle of all that, during the campaign, Lord Elgin was reading a book that had just come out: Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. He found it audacious. A book about how the strong replace the weak, read on the way to a war. I'll let that sit there without comment. Through the early summer the two fleets gathered on either side of the gulf that leads to Tianjin, the British at Dalian Bay, at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula, and the French at Yantai, on the Shandong coast. On the twenty sixth of July they sailed again, met at sea, and on the thirtieth they arrived off Beitang. Now came the question of where to land, and this time the allies had learned something from the year before.

Beitang was a small town at the mouth of a smaller river, a few miles up the coast from the Dagu forts. The whole coast there is a flat land of mudflats and salt marsh, where the rivers come down to the sea, and an army that lands has to wade before it can march. You might expect the allies to come straight back at the Dagu forts, and try to wipe out last year's shame on the same ground. They didn't. The imperial forces under Sengge Rinchen knew they were coming, and they were waiting for them at Dagu, where the forts were heavily manned. He was a Mongol prince close to the imperial family, and the general who in 1855 had destroyed the Taiping army sent north to take Beijing. After that, and after Dagu, he looked to the court like the man who did not lose. Beitang had small forts of its own, and Sengge Rinchen had prepared a surprise for anyone who took them. His men had set several large traps inside those forts: false floors that would give way into pits holding huge devices, like mousetraps, wired to barrels of gunpowder. At half past three on the afternoon of the first of August 1860, with two hundred British and French ships riding at anchor offshore, an advance force of four hundred allied troops landed just below the Beitang River. Nobody stopped them. The allied forces landed at Beitang on the first of August without opposition. The advance party worked its way through the mud to a raised causeway that led toward the town, and took it without a shot being fired. The defenders had simply left their posts. Then, that night, near midnight, the moon went dark in an eclipse. I'll leave it to you to decide what the soldiers on either side made of that omen. The next problem was the traps. A local man came to the allies and told them where the traps were, and French sappers took them apart before anyone fell in. Sappers were military engineers, the men who dug, mined, built bridges and cleared the way for everyone else. The same informant had more to tell. At least fifteen thousand imperial troops under Sengge Rinchen were guarding the Dagu forts, he thought, and six thousand of them were Mongol cavalry. That was the shape of the problem now. The allies were ashore, but between them and the river stood the forts, and around the forts stood the best horsemen the dynasty had. At daybreak the soldiers occupied the town and began turning its thirty thousand inhabitants out of their homes of mud and straw. A whole town of families was put out of its homes, and the soldiers went through the emptied houses looking for loot.

The Dagu forts were built to stop ships coming up the river. They faced the sea. From Beitang, the allies could come at them from the land side, from behind, where nobody had expected an army to appear. They marched out of Beitang toward Tanggu, and on the way the Qing troops suffered severe defeats at Xinhe and at Tanggu. The forts themselves were thick walls of packed mud, behind wet ditches and rows of sharpened bamboo stakes, with guns along their tops. An attacker on foot had to cross all of that under fire before he could even put a ladder to the wall. On the twentieth of August, the allied forces set up six artillery batteries within half a mile of the northernmost of the Dagu forts, and the next morning they attacked. It was one day after the French, down at Shanghai, had burned the suburbs to drive out the Taiping. The guns pounded the fort, and its powder magazine blew up. Then the infantry went in with scaling ladders, the French and British side by side. The soldier among our two witnesses watched the French go up their ladders. "Up, rung after rung of French crept warily, until at length, with a bound, the first man jumped upon the parapet and waved the tricolor of his nation, whilst every one joined in his maddening cheer". And then the man on the parapet fell, shot through the heart. Almost at the same moment, a young ensign of the 67th Regiment reached the top of the wall, pushed up by the men around him, and let the Queen's colour of his regiment float out into the breeze. An ensign was the most junior officer in a British infantry regiment, and one of his jobs was to carry the flag. That ensign, and several of the other men who were first over the wall that morning, were given the Victoria Cross, the medal for gallantry that Britain had created only a few years before. Even inside, the fight was not over. The Chinese still fought within the works, he wrote, and it took the bayonets of both the French and the English to end the resistance. The fort's commander, a general of the highest military rank, refused to submit and fought to the last, until an officer of the marines shot him. The officer thought the garrison had resolved to die in the ruins. The general who commanded all the northern forts had happened to be there on an inspection when the firing began, and his men had fought on with him among them. There was a plainer reason they kept fighting. The fort had been barricaded from the outside, so that no one inside could escape. More than a thousand of the defenders were killed, and among them was Sengge Rinchen's second in command. Inside the fort lay heaps of rubble from the magazine, overturned cannon, broken gun carriages, and the dead and wounded of the garrison. A photographer was traveling with the army, and he was ecstatic. He fussed over the carnage, found it beautiful, and would not let the bodies be moved until he had his pictures. Those photographs survive. They are among the first pictures ever made of the dead of a battle in China. Now our negotiator comes into the story. Harry Parkes had come out to China as a boy, learned the language, and grown up in the consular service. In 1856, as acting consul at Canton, he was the man whose quarrel over a small ship called the Arrow set off this war. Now, at thirty two, he was Lord Elgin's interpreter and his chief negotiator. As a boy of fourteen, he had been on board the British flagship when the Treaty of Nanjing was signed in 1842. He had watched this whole relationship being made, and he had spent his life since learning to push it. He was usually out in front with the advance, and on the twentieth of August, at great danger to himself, he and a British major had summoned the inner fort on the north bank to surrender. After the northern forts fell, the larger, more formidable forts on the south bank surrendered without firing a shot, together with their garrison of two thousand men. Upward of five hundred guns were taken, and more than a hundred of them were brass. The Dagu forts were in allied hands, at a cost of just over three hundred and fifty allied casualties. Remember what this place had cost the British a year before. Now they held it, and the road up the river lay open.

Tianjin lay upriver, a great trading city and the port for Beijing itself, where the river met the Grand Canal that carried the grain of the south up to the capital. It was also where the treaty at the heart of all this had been signed two years before. The British admiral, James Hope, the same man who had been badly wounded at Dagu the year before, went up to Tianjin. He found that the garrison and its guns had been withdrawn, and he took military occupation of the city. Lord Elgin left the forts on the morning of the twenty fifth of August and met no resistance at all on the way. By the twenty seventh, the allies were camped outside Tianjin. The city's civil officials were left in their posts, as had been done at Canton, so that the place would go on running under foreign guns. Canton had been held that way since the allies took it at the end of 1857, with its own governor still in office and a committee of foreigners behind him. Harry Parkes had sat on that committee. If any foreigner knew how to run a Chinese city from behind its own officials, it was him. Elgin was pleased with how Parkes had handled it. In his report, Elgin wrote that Mr. Parkes had shown in these proceedings "his usual zeal" along with ability and tact. Remember that phrase. Over the next few weeks, Parkes's zeal is going to be the thing everybody talks about, on both sides of the line.

At Tianjin, the court tried talking. On the twenty eighth of August, word came that Guiliang, one of the emperor's secretaries of state, was on his way from Beijing to open negotiations and to talk Lord Elgin out of going any further. Guiliang was no stranger. He was one of the commissioners who had signed the Treaty of Tianjin two years before. He was an elderly Manchu grandee, and his daughter was married to the emperor's younger brother, Prince Gong, a man who will matter a great deal before this episode is over. On the thirty first, he announced that he had arrived, and he asked for an early meeting. He said he had authority to negotiate on whatever terms Lord Elgin thought it right to put to him and his fellow commissioners. Elgin sent Parkes and a second interpreter to tell the commissioners his conditions. There were three. An apology for the attack on the allied forces at the river. Ratification and execution of the Treaty of Tianjin. And an indemnity to the allies for the cost of their naval and military preparations. An indemnity was a payment one state made to another to cover its costs, and in practice it was the price a defeated side paid for peace. And it was Parkes who named the price. He demanded a war indemnity of eight million taels of silver for each of the two powers. The Treaty of Tianjin had set the indemnities at four million taels for the British and two million for the French. So the price had doubled for one ally and quadrupled for the other. A tael was the Chinese ounce of silver, a little more than an English ounce, and it was the unit in which the empire counted its money. The allies also wanted something they could hold while they waited to be paid. As a material guarantee, they demanded that Tianjin be opened to foreign trade at once. The very next day, the commissioners wrote to Lord Elgin accepting the conditions, all of them. It looked like the war was over. Parkes was sure of it. He wrote, "I do not now expect to hear another gun fired". The plan was drawn up in a convention. Part of the allied army would move up close to Tongzhou, a city just outside Beijing, and from there the ambassadors would ride into the capital with the members of their embassies and a large military escort, to present their letters of credence to the emperor. The talks went on, conducted in person by the two interpreters with Guiliang and a second commissioner, Hengqi. On the fourth of September, the commissioners started to argue about the size of the escort. The signing was fixed for the seventh. Then, on the evening of the fifth, Elgin learned that the commissioners had no authority to conclude any convention at all without first sending it to Beijing for approval. They had misrepresented their status. They had no power to sign on behalf of the emperor. It helps to see this from both sides. In European diplomacy, an envoy carried full powers, a document from his sovereign that let him sign a treaty that bound his country. In the Qing system, no official could bind the emperor. Everything was sent back to the throne for approval, and the emperor could reject what his own commissioners had agreed. So when the commissioners said yes, they may have meant yes, subject to Beijing. To Elgin, it looked like a trick. Elgin's private secretary was in no doubt about what that meant. "The only motive the Commissioners could have had in assuming powers they did not possess, was to delay our advance by holding out delusive hopes that peace would be established on the terms demanded by the Allies". He added that Elgin had seen through the deception from the first. The ambassadors broke off the talks. Elgin did not want to give the Chinese any time to build new defenses, bring up new troops, or recover from the beating they had taken at the forts. He asked the British commander, General Sir Hope Grant, to advance on Beijing at once. Hope Grant was a cavalryman who had fought through the great rising in India. And so, on the seventh of September, the day they should have been signing, Lord Elgin and Gros made the fateful decision to push on toward Beijing.

The army moved slowly up the road toward the capital, and the court sent new negotiators to meet it. When the new round of talks began, on the fourteenth of September, Lord Elgin was still about twenty five miles away on the road from Tianjin. So the man who sat across the table from the emperor's commissioners, at Tongzhou, just outside Beijing, was Harry Parkes. Tongzhou was a walled city at the northern end of the Grand Canal, a dozen miles or so east of Beijing, where the grain barges from the south unloaded for the capital. The court had sent new men to talk there. One was Prince Yi, a senior prince of the imperial clan, and the other was Muyin, a member of the Grand Council. On the very first day at Tongzhou, after eight hours of discussion, the commissioners accepted all of Parkes's terms. The draft convention was accepted in its entirety. The other interpreter with him said afterward that most of the work of discussion and persuasion had fallen to Parkes. Elgin meant to come to Tongzhou to sign with an armed escort of a thousand men, and Gros with the same, and then go on to Beijing. The diplomats were hopeful that a settlement was close. The soldiers were skeptical, and impatient with anything that might hold up their advance. Then the talks ran into the question that had sat under every meeting between Britain and the Qing since the very first one. The discussion got hung up on whether Lord Elgin would kowtow before the Xianfeng Emperor. Parkes refused. The kowtow was the full ritual prostration before the emperor: kneeling three times, and each time touching the forehead to the ground three times. For the court, it was simply how anyone behaved before the Son of Heaven. For the British, it was the gesture of a vassal, and their envoys had refused it ever since the first British embassy, in 1793. The commissioners pressed. Parkes's answer was short. "We are not Chinese ministers," replied Parkes, "so why should we kneel?" What Parkes did not know was that the decision had already been made somewhere else. The emperor had already given secret instructions to Sengge Rinchen to destroy Elgin's party when it arrived to sign the treaty. So while one set of officials argued at Tongzhou about kneeling, the plan in the palace was to let the ambassador walk into the army and never walk out. Xianfeng was not a man taking the news calmly. He was twenty nine years old and had been on the throne for ten years, all of them years of rebellion. When he was told of officials who had fled before the allied advance, his order was two words. "Behead them." A year before, Sengge Rinchen had written to him that one or two more thrashings would break the barbarians' pride. Now they were marching on his capital. Even inside the palace, bad news struggled to reach him. One of his negotiators, Muyin, found a palace eunuch afraid to disturb the emperor. "The power of the empire is lost," Muyin told him, "and yet you fear disturbing the emperor?"

On the morning of the eighteenth of September, the deal still looked done. Parkes, Elgin's secretary and a small party rode out from Tongzhou to mark the ground where the allied army would camp while the ambassadors went into Beijing. What they found there was the Chinese army. The ground was full of troops, many of them in what were plainly prepared ambushes, along with hidden batteries of guns. Parkes went back to the commissioners to protest the breach of faith. When he had brought them Elgin's letter, they had already turned less friendly, objecting to three points in the arrangements, the audience with the emperor above all. And they told him, "until peace is settled our troops cannot retire." Parkes and his companions turned back toward the allied lines, under a flag of truce, and under the safe conduct of a Chinese officer. Elgin's private secretary remembered passing a man riding with the party who had often said he wanted to see how the Chinese could really fight, and telling him he would soon have his wish. The party turned off the road to the left, among fields of millet still standing tall enough to hide the country around them. They had gone half a mile. Then, coming at a gallop around the corner of a millet field, they were in the middle of a large body of infantry before they could check their horses. The soldiers seized their bridles and pressed their matchlocks against their bodies. A matchlock was an old kind of musket, fired by touching a slow burning cord to the powder, and most of the Qing infantry still carried them. The Chinese officer guarding them rushed in between, calling out to the soldiers not to fire and striking right and left, and that gave them room to spur their horses about fifty yards through the troops to the bank of a small stream. There, the soldiers raised a cry, and down to the far bank galloped Sengge Rinchen himself, the commander in chief, surrounded by a large staff. Parkes spoke to the prince at once, pointing to the flag of truce and asking for a free pass through the Chinese army. "His only reply was a derisive laugh, and a torrent of abuse". Sengge Rinchen accused Parkes of being the cause of all the trouble. Not content with trying to force terms that insulted the dignity of the emperor, he said, Parkes had now brought the allied armies down to attack the imperial forces. The man under the flag of truce was, after all, the same man who had refused the kowtow and demanded the indemnity. Parkes turned to the secretary and said, "I fear we are prisoners." The infantry closed in around them with their muzzles against their bodies, waiting for the order to fire. One glance told them resistance was hopeless, and when they tried to push forward they were half pulled, half knocked off their horses. They had pulled up and looked around for any way out, and there was none. An old Sikh trooper riding with them had kept his eyes on the secretary the whole time, and the secretary told him to stop struggling. Their flag of truce was disregarded, and they were made prisoners. Their arms were twisted behind their backs, and they were shoved across a couple of flat bottomed boats laid over the stream, and thrown on their knees before Sengge Rinchen. He threatened them and raged at them, while the men behind them cuffed them about the head and face, and one soldier took the secretary by the back of the neck and rubbed his face in the dirt. Behind them, the fighting between the two armies had already begun. Then the prince gave Parkes an order: write to your people and tell them to stop the advance. Parkes laughed. He said the request was absurd, and that even if he were willing, he had no power to give such an order, much less have it obeyed. He was only an interpreter. The prince told him he lied, and that he would teach them what it meant to speak to high officers of the empire the way they had been spoken to the day before. It was the afternoon of the eighteenth of September. Sengge Rinchen's forces had taken Harry Parkes, along with twenty five other foreigners who had crossed the lines to Tongzhou with him. The real prize had been Lord Elgin himself, whom the Chinese had made a special point of trying to seize, and failing that, they hoped that holding Parkes would win them a settlement. Parkes and Elgin's secretary were carried to Beijing, shackled, and locked in the prison of the Board of Punishments to wait for their execution. The Board of Punishments was the ministry in Beijing that handled the empire's most serious criminal cases, and it had its own prison. Lord Elgin did not hear until late that night that his chief negotiator had been taken. In a single afternoon, the negotiation had turned into a hostage crisis, and the man who knew best how to talk to the court was now its prisoner. How did it come to this? Look at it from each side and you can see it. The allied view had been put plainly by the Times correspondent riding with them: "An ambassador must negotiate with an army by his side, ready to act at a moment's notice." To the court, that army was the threat, and the men who rode ahead of it under a white flag were not neutral messengers. They were the most valuable thing the enemy had put within reach.

Now the armies settled it. In fact the fighting had begun on the very afternoon Parkes was taken. The allied army found the Qing troops drawn up across its path at Zhangjiawan, south of Tongzhou, attacked, and drove them back. But Sengge Rinchen still had the bulk of his army, and his cavalry, between the allies and Beijing. The allies fought their way forward, and on the twenty first of September a small allied force met the bulk of Sengge Rinchen's army head on, just outside Tongzhou. The fighting came to a head at a stone bridge called Baliqiao, the Eight Li Bridge, on the canal between Tongzhou and Beijing. A li was a Chinese measure of distance, about a third of a mile. On the Qing side were Mongol and Manchu horsemen with lances and bows, and infantry with matchlocks, swords and spears. On the allied side were rifles, and a new kind of artillery. His army far outnumbered the allies, and among his men were thousands of swift Mongol horsemen. He sent them at the allied lines. Then the Armstrong guns did their work, pouring salvo after salvo deep into the ranks of the charging cavalry, and the horsemen pulled up in confusion. The Armstrong was a new British gun, loaded from the breech and with a rifled barrel, and it fired shells that burst among the enemy with an accuracy no older cannon could match. The China campaign of 1860 was the first war in which it was ever used. A British officer wrote of every Armstrong shell bursting among the horsemen, "and bringing down the enemy in clumps." A Chinese account saw it from the other side. The Mongol horsemen had never seen battle, it said, and "As soon as they heard the sounds of the foreign cannons, they turned back." After some obstinate fighting, Sengge Rinchen's troops were driven back once again, and the way to Beijing lay open. But the allies could not use it yet. Their ammunition was running low, and the army halted at Tongzhou until the fifth of October to wait for more. There is a footnote to Baliqiao that I can't resist. For this action at the bridge, Napoleon the Third gave General Montauban the title of Count of Palikao. So for the rest of his life, a French general carried the name of a Chinese bridge as his title.

In Beijing, the news from the bridge went off like a bomb. Beijing was a city of walls inside walls: the Chinese city to the south, the Manchu city to the north, and inside that the Imperial City, and at its heart the Forbidden City, where the emperor lived. Now the enemy was a day's march from those walls, with nothing much left in between. The capital's officials panicked. Order was breaking down, and any resident who caught a looter was authorized to beat him or her to death on the spot. The emperor had a decision to make. He could stay in his capital, or he could go. Before he went, he appointed his younger brother, Prince Gong, as his commissioner with full powers to settle with the foreigners, and the next day he and the court fled north. Prince Gong was Xianfeng's younger half brother, the sixth son of the old emperor, only twenty seven years old. The two brothers had once been rivals for the throne, and when their father chose Xianfeng, the younger brother was kept at arm's length. Now the brother he had sidelined was the one left to save the capital. The court fled from Beijing on the twenty second of September 1860. The emperor slipped out the back gate and abandoned the capital altogether, fleeing for the safety of the northern mountains, while the opera was still playing. Officially, the emperor was not fleeing at all. The court called it a hunting tour in the north. It is quite a hunting tour that sets out the day after you appoint someone to bargain for your capital. He went north of the Great Wall, leaving his brother behind. His destination was Rehe, the summer retreat in the mountains, about a hundred and fifty miles northeast of the capital. Rehe was the great mountain resort and hunting park that the Kangxi Emperor had built beyond the Wall, where Qing emperors went to hunt and to escape the summer heat. The court reached Rehe on the second of October. And the emperor was ill. While the court was still on the road, on the twenty fifth, his concubine Cixi received the Grand Council in audience on his behalf. She had given Xianfeng the only son he had, a little boy of four, the heir to the throne. Remember her. We will be hearing a great deal more about that young woman. Around him at Rehe were the war hawks of the court. They now controlled who could come up from the capital to see him, and which messages would reach him. For the dynasty, the flight was a danger that had long been foreseen. An emperor who ran from his capital put both his throne and any peace at risk. A Chinese dynasty ruled by the Mandate of Heaven, the belief that Heaven granted the throne to a ruler fit to hold it and took it away from one who failed. An emperor who abandoned his capital to the barbarians was handing his critics an argument. And with no emperor in Beijing, there was no one there who could sign anything the allies would trust. He left behind a city with a foreign army at its gates, the foreigners' envoys in his prisons, and a young prince with no army, facing the foreigners in front of him and his brother's hawks behind. So that's where we leave it. The emperor is in the mountains. The army is coming. And the hostages are in chains. Next time, Prince Gong has to bargain for the capital with the allies at its gates and their captured envoys in his prisons, and the allies find the emperor's great garden palace outside the walls. And Lord Elgin has to decide what price to make the emperor pay for what happened under the flag of truce.

Sources

• Garnet Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (1862), p. 136-138, https://archive.org/details/narrativeofwarwi00wols
• Henry Brougham Loch, Personal Narrative of Occurrences during Lord Elgin's Second Embassy to China, 1860 (1869), pp. 122-126, 154-157, https://archive.org/details/personalnarrativ00lochrich
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), pp. 578-579, 579-580, 585-586, 586, 592-593, 593-594, 594-596, 596-597, 597-599, 599-600, 600-602, 602, 604-605, 609-610, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume II: The Period of Submission, 1861-1893 (1918), p. 51-52, https://archive.org/details/internationalre02mors
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)
• Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012)