Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 7

The Awe-Inspiring General

Sir Henry Pottinger takes the war up the coast in the autumn of 1841, and the Daoguang Emperor sends his kinsman Yijing as Awe-Inspiring General to win it back. The episode follows Yijing through a winter of preparations, a counterattack timed by the calendar and the false reports that followed it, while Manchu garrisons at Zhapu and Zhenjiang fight to the death and kill their own families, and asks why the Qing armies lost so badly. It hears the court and its commanders in their own memorials and the people of Zhenjiang in a little of their own words, alongside scholars and British officials.

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Transcript

Last time, Canton held three high commissioners sent by the emperor, among them his nephew Yishan, and seventeen thousand reinforcements brought in from other provinces. His first blow was a night attack by some fifty fireboats on the British ships, and it failed, because an iron steamer called the Nemesis chugged up and silenced the city's batteries before the fireboats could get close. By ten in the morning on the twenty fifth of May, British troops held the hill and the forts above Canton, and the whole city lay under their guns. Then the commissioners came to terms with the British: a ransom of six million dollars for the city, and the commissioners and their troops from outside the province to be at least sixty miles from Canton within six days. The dollars in these accounts were silver dollars, Spanish and Mexican coins, the money the whole China trade ran on. Yishan wrote to the emperor that the Nemesis had been driven off with hardly a Qing soldier hurt, and the emperor scrawled his delight across the report in vermilion ink. And then, in a sudden downpour, the villagers of Sanyuanli caught a British company whose muskets would no longer fire, and went at them with spears. The next day perhaps twenty five thousand people from eighty or ninety villages gathered on the hills, until the prefect of Canton, Yu Baochun, told them that since peace had been signed they must let the foreigners go. The man who had come to terms rather than send the troops into the city was Charles Elliot, Britain's plenipotentiary in China, and he would soon lose his post. A plenipotentiary is an envoy given full power to negotiate and sign on his government's behalf. Back at Macau, Elliot was told he had been recalled, and that his successor, Sir Henry Pottinger, was expected any day. He had only just come ashore. On his way from Macau to Hong Kong he had been wrecked in a typhoon, and the boatmen he paid to bring him back hid him under mats as an official boat went by, though there was a bounty of a hundred thousand dollars on his head. Elliot reckoned that his restraint had kept alive a trade worth more than ten million pounds. London did not care. Pottinger reached Macau on the tenth of August 1841, carrying instructions Palmerston had signed on the last day of May. He alone would decide where to negotiate, how long, and when to break it off, and once the guns were turned loose he was not to stop them until an officer of the emperor offered full and unconditional compliance with every British demand. The first operation was to be retaking the island of Zhoushan, on the coast far to the north of Canton, before any talks began. And what Britain wanted was set down plainly. Palmerston reckoned that less than three million pounds would not cover its demands. Pottinger was not to give up Hong Kong, unless he could exchange it for a better island near Canton. And the British envoy was to be treated by the emperor's envoy upon a footing of perfect equality. For a court that had always received foreign envoys as bearers of tribute from lesser rulers, that last demand cut deeper than any sum of money. So that is where we stand. Elliot is gone, the man who replaced him wants no bargains, and the war is about to leave Canton behind. Alongside the sources we have leaned on all season, this episode also draws on the eyewitness account of John Ouchterlony. This is the story of the campaign up the coast, from that late summer to the summer after, and of the man the emperor sent to stop it. But we start with the new British envoy, because this is his war now. Henry Pottinger had served for years in India, and had been the British resident at the court of the rulers of Sindh, a man with long dealings at the courts of Asian princes. Sindh was a region on the lower Indus, in what is now Pakistan, and a British resident was the officer posted at an Indian ruler's court to speak for the East India Company and, very often, to steer its policy. His first act in China was a public notice to the British merchants. He told them that his undivided energies would go to a speedy and satisfactory close of the war, and that he could allow no consideration connected with mercantile pursuits to interfere with the strong measures he might need to take. In other words, the days of Elliot fretting over the trade season were over. He expected the provincial authorities to break any truce, he told them, either of their own accord or on orders from Beijing. So he warned British subjects, and all other foreigners, against putting themselves or their property in the power of the Chinese authorities, and said that anyone who did so did it at their own risk and peril. When the Canton authorities sent a prefect to Macau to pay his respects, Pottinger refused to receive an official of so much lower rank than himself, and handed him off to his secretary. A prefect was the official in charge of a prefecture, a district of several counties, well below a governor in the Qing ranks. It was a small snub, but it was a statement. This was a man who meant to be treated as an equal of the emperor's highest servants, and who had the guns to insist. Remember that, because the question of whether this war was about opium, about trade or about equality between states runs right through this episode, and Pottinger, from his first week, behaved as if it was about the last. On the twenty first of August, the fleet left for Xiamen, a bustling and prosperous port island off the coast of the province of Fujian. Xiamen was the great port of Fujian, home to the junks that traded with the Philippines and the islands of Southeast Asia, and the starting point for generations of emigrants. The land forces were commanded by Sir Hugh Gough, an Irish general who had come from India, and the fleet by Admiral Sir William Parker. Much of the army came from India: sepoy regiments of the East India Company's armies served alongside the British regiments, and the Company's armed steamers sailed with the fleet. The steamers were the new thing in this war. An iron paddle steamer like the Nemesis drew so little water that it could go up rivers no warship could enter, and it could tow the sailing ships against wind and tide. Hold on to that, because this whole campaign is going to be fought from the water, along the coast and then up the great rivers. Xiamen's shore was guarded by Yan Botao's famous wall, and Yan himself was inside the walled city to see it used. A governor-general was the emperor's senior official over a group of provinces, responsible for their troops, their revenue and their order. Around half past one in the afternoon of the twenty sixth of August, the British artillery assault began. One cliff-face fort was taken by a single officer rushing up the hill. And when the defences broke, so did the governor-general. He burst into tears and fled. The next day the British simply walked into the island's abandoned city, and Xiamen had fallen to British guns. The British left a garrison on Gulangyu, the small island just off Xiamen's harbour, and sailed on. Behind them, the bombardment and the occupation brought a general collapse of law and order on the island. That would become a pattern on this coast. And the emperor, the Daoguang Emperor in Beijing, would learn that Xiamen had fallen only on the thirteenth of September, more than two weeks later. News reached the capital by mounted courier along the imperial post roads, and the emperor heard of his war mostly through the written reports of his officials, a delay and a filter that will matter a great deal in this episode.

From Xiamen the fleet went north, to the island the British knew best on this coast. Zhoushan is a cluster of islands off the coast of Zhejiang, near the mouth of the river that leads to the city of Ningbo, and the British had seized its main island in the first summer of the war and later given it back. The British had long wanted a base on this stretch of coast, close to the silk and tea country of the lower Yangtze, and Zhoushan, with its fine harbour, had been their first choice. During that first occupation, disease had ravaged the garrison, and hundreds of British and Indian soldiers had died on the island without a battle. Since they had left, the island's walled town of Dinghai had been strongly fortified. At dawn on the first of October, by the English accounts, a fleet of seven warships and four steamers began to pound the coast. The fortifications did not hold, and the town was taken the same day. The English reported two dead and twenty seven, or perhaps twenty eight, wounded. The Chinese loss was about a thousand. And once the shooting stopped, a British lieutenant wrote, the people of the town quickly recognised their old friends. That is not what the emperor heard. The man the emperor trusted to hold this coast was the imperial commissioner Yuqian, and his reports told of an epic battle lasting six days, in which a Chinese army of five thousand fell only to massively superior English forces. Six days of glory, in place of one morning of disaster. Hold on to that report, because by the end of this episode it will have a great deal of company. An imperial commissioner was an official the emperor sent with special powers for a single task, answering to the throne directly, above the regular officials of the province.

Yuqian's next stand would be on the mainland, at Zhenhai, the fortress town at the mouth of the river below Ningbo. Zhenhai guarded the river mouth, and with it the way upriver to Ningbo, one of the richest trading cities of the coast. Yuqian was a Mongol bannerman. The Banners were the hereditary military order of the Qing, the Manchu, Mongol and Chinese families who had conquered China for the dynasty in the seventeenth century, and their sons were still born into it as soldiers of the state. The Qing emperors were Manchu, a people from the lands north-east of the Great Wall, and they had ruled China since 1644. So Yuqian belonged by birth to the conquering class, and his great-grandfather and grandfather had fought for the dynasty in a Mongol banner. The Qing really had two armies. The Banners, a couple of hundred thousand men, were spread through garrisons across the empire, and the larger Green Standard army, of Han Chinese soldiers, was scattered in small posts that served as much as a police force as an army. Neither had fought an enemy like this one. Their weapons were bows, swords, spears and matchlock muskets, fired by a smouldering cord, and many of their cannon were old and fixed in place, unable to turn toward a ship that moved. Before the battle, he summoned his officials to a sacrifice and a libation, a pouring of wine before the gods, and called on them to swear a solemn vow to hold the town or die there. And one man would not kneel. He was Yu Buyun, the senior military commander of Zhejiang, and he refused to kneel and take the vow. We should put the British on a loose rein, he advised, by which he meant: give them concessions, and do not fight what cannot be beaten. It was a dangerous thing to say aloud. Earlier in the war, the emperor's envoy Qishan had tried to bargain with the British at Canton, and had been stripped of his offices, his property confiscated, and led away to Beijing in chains. Yuqian's answer was short. "If Zhenhai falls, I fall with it!" It was a brave vow, and the men it bound were not all he could have wished. Of the four thousand soldiers in the garrison, by the reckoning in his own camp, only a quarter could be trusted. So on the eve of the battle we have two commanders. One has sworn before the gods to die where he stands. The other has refused to swear, and is already thinking about terms.

At daylight on the tenth of October, two battleships, a frigate and three sloops moved into position and began pounding the forts. A battleship then meant a ship of the line, a great wooden sailing warship with seventy guns or more on two or three decks; frigates and sloops were smaller and faster, with fewer guns. On land, Gough divided his army of two thousand into three parts and sent them round to trap the Qing force between them. The British soldiers' muskets fired faster and more reliably than a matchlock, and they were drilled to fire in volleys and to move under fire, something few Qing units had ever practised. On the hill that Yu Buyun held, the commander ordered his men not to fire their guns, hung out a white flag of surrender, and then bolted down the hill. The town did not hold. And Yuqian kept his word. He kowtowed towards Beijing, far away to the north-west, and tried to kill himself. The kowtow was the full ritual bow before the emperor, kneeling and touching the forehead to the ground, and here he made it to a throne he could not see. He tried first to drown himself in a small stone-edged pond, and was pulled out. Then he seems to have taken poison, most likely opium, and he died the following day. It is hard to miss the bitterness in that. The war over opium, and the commissioner who swore to hold the coast against it dies of the drug. One estimate put the Qing dead at fifteen hundred. At most, sixteen British were killed. And with Yuqian gone, whatever will to resist was left on this part of the coast fell apart. As for Yu Buyun, the man who would not take the vow and then ran, his flight was not forgiven. He was later tried for cowardice and executed, one of very few senior commanders of the war to be put to death. So of the two commanders at Zhenhai, the one who swore to die did so by his own hand, and the one who refused ran, and died by the emperor's. Neither of them saved the town.

Upriver lay the prize. On the thirteenth of October, four steamers and four warships under Admiral Parker sailed fifteen miles up the river to Ningbo. What they found was a city with nobody defending it. By three in the afternoon, without a shot being fired, British troops stood on the walls. Ningbo was an old walled city of merchants and bankers, one of the great ports of the empire long before the Europeans came, and now it was a British base. The British settled into the city to wait out the winter. In under two months, Pottinger's war had taken Xiamen, Zhoushan, Zhenhai and Ningbo. To the court, the loss of Ningbo was worse than the loss of any fort. A great and wealthy city of the empire was now in foreign hands, its people living under foreign soldiers. In Beijing, the emperor decided this could not stand. And he chose, to set it right, the most surprising man he could have chosen.

On the eighteenth of October 1841, a member of the imperial clan named Yijing was informed that the emperor had a new assignment for him. Yijing was only fifty years old in 1841, and he had never commanded troops in a war. He was now the Awe-Inspiring General, under imperial orders to leave immediately for Zhejiang and throw the British back into the sea. Awe-Inspiring General was a title the emperor gave for a single campaign, for the commander of a great expedition, and it put the officials of the war zone under him. Members of the imperial clan, descended from the founders of the dynasty, wore a yellow sash, drew a stipend from the court, and filled many of its most honoured posts, whether or not they had the training for them. The Daoguang Emperor himself had ruled since 1820. He was a careful, frugal, hard-working man who read his memorials himself, and he had backed Lin Zexu's war on opium from the start. And he was about to be lied to on a grand scale. And keep in mind the story Yishan had sent to Beijing about Canton. So this is our second lead for the episode. Not a soldier, not a coward, not a fool exactly, but a courtier sent to do a soldier's work, and surrounded by people who would tell him whatever he wanted to hear. And our first lead, Pottinger, is the opposite: a man who has been told to win and come home, and has the means to do it. Over the next five months, we will watch these two men try to fight each other, without ever meeting.

Yijing, to his credit, moved fast at first. He managed to leave Beijing less than two weeks after receiving his appointment. Then he reached Suzhou, and stopped. Suzhou was one of the richest and most beautiful cities in the empire, a city of canals and gardens and silk in the Yangtze delta, a long way from the fighting. And there he stayed for the next two months. Two months is a long time to wait in a war, but from where Yijing sat, the waiting was full of business. He was not idle, exactly. He set up a box for suggestions on how to beat the British, and some four hundred were received, and a hundred and forty four new advisers acquired. A British agent who reported on him called him a man of pleasure, and put it this way: he "is a man of pleasure, fond of ease, presents and bribes and a real courtier". And while the general waited, he held a competition among his staff for the most elegant and stirring announcement of victory. Yijing was waiting for an army: a twelve thousand strong force to be unleashed against the British. They came from eight provinces, some from very far away: four hundred men from Henan, six hundred from Nanyang, a thousand from Shaanxi. Shaanxi is in the north-west of China, on the Yellow River, and a march from there to the coast of Zhejiang took weeks. On the way, the soldiers stole people's doors to use as litters, and forced the local people to carry them. The money went the same way. Through 1842 one official on the campaign, E Yun, pocketed at least twelve thousand ounces of silver meant for the local militia. The accounts were fabricated from scratch, and silence was bought. Those ounces were taels, the weight of silver the Qing state counted its money in, each a little more than an English ounce, and twelve thousand of them would have paid a great many militiamen for a very long time. This is what the war looked like in the provinces the army passed through: requisitions, stolen doors, and silver vanishing into the wrong pockets. By the second week of February, almost all the reinforcements had arrived. So the army was there. The question was when to use it.

The attack had originally been set for the ninth of February. It did not happen. When a council of war pressed Yijing for a date, he stalled. "I shall let you know as soon as I have determined on a day", he told them. What he did instead was go to a nearby temple of the God of War to pray for victory. The God of War was Guan Yu, a famous general of the third century who had been worshipped for centuries as a god of loyalty and battle, with temples in nearly every town in China. At the temple, he drew a lot, and the verse it gave him spoke of men with the heads of tigers. Drawing lots was a common way to ask the gods a question: you shook a cylinder of numbered sticks until one fell out, and a temple attendant gave you the verse that matched it. Then, on the thirteenth of February, one of the last units arrived: some seven hundred tribesmen from Sichuan, in tiger-skin tunics, crowned with tiger heads and trailing tails. The Qing had long recruited soldiers from the non-Han hill peoples of Sichuan, who were prized for their toughness, and who mostly spoke their own languages rather than Chinese. If you are a man waiting for a sign, that is a sign. The traditional Chinese calendar named its years, months, days and even its two-hour watches of the day in a cycle of twelve animals, and the watch of the tiger fell between three and five in the morning. So Yijing found his date. He would attack at the hour of the tiger, on the day of the tiger, in the month of the tiger, in the year of the tiger: the tenth of March 1842. He was sure that timing would bring him luck. Choosing a lucky day from the almanac was an everyday practice across the empire, for weddings, journeys, funerals and the opening of a shop. So Yijing was not being strange. He was being careful, in the only way he knew, against an enemy that did not care what day it was.

The plan, on paper, was enormous. Some thirty six thousand men were to hurl themselves at the western and southern gates of Ningbo. In fact, Yijing moved out a total of only around eight thousand for the attacks on Ningbo and on Zhenhai. So on the night, the great army was a fraction of itself. And there was a detail in the orders that went wrong. Yijing had told the tribesmen from Sichuan to keep their guns to a minimum, and since they spoke no Chinese, they understood it as an order to bring no guns at all. At four in the morning on the tenth of March, in the hour of the tiger, a solitary Chinese figure walked up to the west gate of Ningbo, holding a lit torch in his raised hand. He was shot. Then the assault came. At the west gate, around a hundred and forty British troops faced the greater part of the Ningbo attack, at least three thousand men. The tribesmen from Sichuan were in that attack, and they had left their guns behind. As dawn came, a single howitzer opened up on the crowd packed into the streets around the gate. A howitzer was a short cannon that fired explosive shells on a high arc, and at close range, into men packed in narrow streets, its effect was terrible. By the time it fell silent, after only three rounds, the attack was over. Picture that from the British side. A small company on a wall, a handful of shells from one gun, and an army in front of them that simply came apart. When the British went among the dead, they found on each of the tribesmen from Sichuan a small purse holding six dollars, Yijing's reward to them for arriving in their tiger-skin caps to fulfil the prophecy. Five or six hundred Chinese troops were lost. No British deaths were reported. The attack on Zhenhai that same morning fared no better. It was beaten off, after a small boy slipped the British interpreter in the town a note warning him of what was coming. The British relied on a handful of interpreters, missionaries and merchants' sons who had learned Chinese at Canton and Macau, and in occupied towns like Zhenhai they acted as the foreigners' eyes, ears and magistrates. Yijing had other weapons planned that never got to the fight. He had even made room in the budget to buy nineteen monkeys, which were to carry firecrackers onto the British ships and set them alight. I want to be careful not to make Yijing a punchline, because a great many men died for his plan. But the monkeys tell you something true about his campaign. It was full of ideas, and empty of anyone who knew what British guns could do.

What remained of the army fell back to Ciqi. Ciqi was a small walled town in the hills, about eighteen miles north of Ningbo. The British came out after them, about twelve hundred strong, with their field artillery. This time the Qing troops fought. They were among the best men Yijing had, and refusing to surrender, five hundred of them were said to have died on the field. Three Britons were killed and around twenty wounded. One of the British rank and file put the logic of it plainly to an appalled observer: if they did not kill them now, "they will fight us again, and we shall never finish the war". It is a hard sentence to read. But it tells you that even the men winning this war had begun to wonder how it would ever end. Yijing himself ran inland to Hangzhou, pausing, it seems, only to pick up four tubs of rare orchids he had been given during the campaign. So the campaign was over. Which left Yijing with a problem: what to tell the emperor.

Every official in the empire reported to the throne by memorial, a formal written report carried by courier to Beijing, and the emperor read them himself and wrote his comments on them in vermilion ink. It was a system that depended on the honesty of the men writing, and the emperor, hundreds of miles away in Beijing, had almost no other way of knowing what had happened. Yijing's memorials told of victory. Four or five hundred British soldiers had been killed, he reported, including their chief, Palmerston. Palmerston, in fact, was at home in England, and had not even been foreign secretary since the autumn of 1841. The British, Yijing reported, had fielded seventeen thousand men. They actually had two or three thousand. His officers outdid him. One commander, Zheng, reported on the thirteenth of April that his fire-rafts had burned one large man-of-war and twenty one smaller ships, and drowned two hundred English. None of it had happened. Zheng was given two hundred and twenty thousand dollars of the campaign budget to cover his costs. And Yijing, for his false victory, received the coveted award of a double peacock feather. The peacock feather, worn hanging from the back of an official's hat, was a mark of the emperor's personal favour, and a feather with two eyes on it was among the highest honours an official could hope for. So the emperor was rewarding a battle that never happened, just as he had rewarded Yishan for the ransom of Canton. The Forbidden City, the walled palace at the heart of Beijing, was where those reports ended up, read by a conscientious emperor who had no way to check them. So picture it. The emperor is reading about burning British warships and a dead Palmerston, and almost none of it happened. I don't think the lesson here is that Qing officials were uniquely dishonest. It is that a system in which bad news could cost you your head, and good news could win you a feather, was always going to produce good news. A commander who admitted a defeat could expect dismissal, exile or worse. And all the while the bill was growing. By this point the war had cost the empire around thirty million ounces of silver. And when it was all over, the emperor did not execute Yijing for overseeing the disasters of that spring. He spared him, and blamed himself.

In May 1842, the British gave up Ningbo and moved north again, along the coast of Hangzhou Bay. The next garrison up that coast was Zhapu, and every garrison to the south of it had already fallen. Hangzhou Bay is the wide, funnel-shaped inlet south of the Yangtze mouth, and Zhapu was one of the ports through which the Qing had long run their trade with Japan. Zhapu was more than a port. It held one of the Banner garrisons, and some eight thousand Manchu Banner families lived quietly within its walls. The Qing kept Banner garrisons in walled quarters inside key cities all over China, where the soldiers lived with their wives and children, apart from the Chinese townspeople, generation after generation. These families were not soldiers who had come for a campaign. They had been born there, and this was their home. In the middle days of May 1842, the captain of the Nemesis approached the garrison port of Zhapu, and thought it looked like "the prettiest parts of Devonshire". The Chinese forces numbered about eight thousand, of whom seventeen hundred were Manchu soldiers of the resident garrison. On the eighteenth of May, eight hundred and twenty British troops landed on the beach. Most of the Chinese troops scattered. The Manchu soldiers did not. Almost three hundred of them shut themselves into a temple, and held it. They held it, shooting dead any attacker who tried to rush the building. In the end, a bag of powder was fixed to the side of the building and set alight, and the roof came down on the men inside. Of the two hundred and seventy six men who had held the temple, only forty three lived long enough to be taken prisoner. Think about what that means. Men who could have run, and whose army had already run, chose to stay in a burning building until it fell on them. A British officer found one unwounded bannerman sheltering behind a tomb, stopped one of his own men from shooting him, and watched him deliberately cut his own throat with a short sword. Another, an elderly officer lying wounded, told his captors, "I want no mercy", and asked only that word be sent that he had fallen fighting. And then the gates of the undefended town fell. What they found there was the Manchu families, dead by their own hands, the mothers hanging their children or drowning them in wells, and then killing themselves. The Qing state had long honoured, with shrines and official praise, women who chose death over dishonour, and officers who died rather than surrender. Chinese sources also told of civilians shot in cold blood by British soldiers for failing to produce acceptable papers. The English loss at Zhapu was nine killed and fifty five wounded. I want to stay with that for a moment. In every battle so far, the Qing armies have melted away. At Zhapu, the men whose homes were behind them fought to the end, and their families died with them. It is a scene the British soldiers who saw it never forgot. And they were about to see it again.

After Zhapu, the fleet took the forts at Wusong, at the mouth of the Huangpu river, in June, where an old general named Chen Huacheng died at his guns, and then the town of Shanghai up the Huangpu, and turned up the Yangtze. Now the British were not raiding the coast any more. They were going for the empire's throat. The Grand Canal was the great man-made waterway that carried the rice of the rich south up to Beijing, and Zhenjiang stood where the canal crossed the Yangtze, so whoever held Zhenjiang could stop the grain that fed the capital. The canal ran more than a thousand miles, from Hangzhou in the south to the edge of Beijing, and every year fleets of barges carried the tax grain north along it to feed the capital, its officials and its Banner garrisons. Cut that, and Beijing would go hungry. It was a blow aimed not at a fort or a city, but at the emperor's own table. And upriver from Zhenjiang lay Nanjing, the great walled city that had been the first capital of the Ming dynasty, and was still the seat of the governor-general who ruled the three provinces of the lower Yangtze. On the seventeenth of July, the high, square walls of Zhenjiang finally loomed up ahead of the fleet. Zhenjiang was a walled city on the south bank of the Yangtze, and like Zhapu it held a Banner garrison, with the Manchu soldiers and their families living in their own quarter of the city. The man commanding the city was Hai Ling, a Manchu general with a garrison of around three thousand three hundred bannermen. The governor-general of the region, Niu Jian, told the city to go to bed and sleep in perfect security. And Hai Ling assured the townspeople that he had a brilliant plan that guaranteed victory, so "there is no reason to panic and stampede". Inside the walls, though, his whole activity consisted of arresting passers-by, day and night, on suspicion of treason. The townspeople of Zhenjiang had the British coming up the river, and their own garrison seizing people in the streets. His soldiers were hungry. On the twentieth of July, starving troops were seen gnawing on raw aubergines. The next day, the twenty first of July, was so hot that seventeen British sailors and marines would die of sunstroke. The British soldiers fought in heavy woollen uniforms made for a European climate, and the lower Yangtze in July is one of the hottest, wettest places in China. That day, Pottinger's transports landed some seven thousand men on the southern bank of the Yangtze, just north of Zhenjiang. The two thousand seven hundred Qing soldiers camped outside the city vanished. That left the bannermen inside, and they did not vanish. A Banner force of around fifteen hundred dug in and fought for the next hour and a half. The walls were stormed and the gates taken. The firing died away, and the British officers began to count their losses and to tell themselves that the day could have gone worse. Then, as one of those officers wrote, they heard a heavy volley, followed by a sharp, steady, rolling fire. It was the last rally of the garrison. The officer who wrote it down called it the knell of many a "brave spirit, well worthy of a better fate". Driven from the ramparts and the gateways, the Manchu soldiers had gathered in their own quarter of the city, among their barracks and their homes, and their commander had spoken to them there. He urged them to make one more effort, and to prefer a brave death to a life saved by running from the invaders, and he ended by telling any who survived to die by their own hands rather than submit. In the officer's telling, the old commander called the British the hated race of barbarian invaders. He put what followed down to the same impulse he and his comrades had already met in the blood-stained streets and houses of Zhapu. And then, this officer believed, many of them went into their houses first. In several houses in the Manchu quarter, the British found the bodies of young women and children, lying as if stabbed in haste. And in most of the better houses, as he put it, "an empty scabbard was found upon the floor near the principal entrance, as if each man, after passing the threshold of his home, had cast it from him in rage and despair." Then the men came out. Two British regiments were marching along the top of the wall beside an open stretch of gardens and fruit trees, when a few shots came from the houses, and then a strong column of soldiers came out of a side street, with two mandarins on horseback at its head. They spread out through the trees with great speed and coolness, and their first volley brought down two officers and many men. The British, as the officer wrote, were astounded at this "apparently insane attack". They halted, traded a few volleys, then charged down the slope of the rampart into the gardens. It was savage, and it was never in doubt. The men who had come out to die were overwhelmed wherever they tried to stand. That afternoon and evening, the British went through the city, where surviving bannermen had hurried back to the Manchu quarter to destroy themselves and their families. Groups of fourteen, even twenty bodies were found hanging from the rafters of single houses. Of the Banner garrison, about thirty per cent died on the twenty first of July. Of the Chinese reinforcements, only one point six per cent. The Chinese troops were the Green Standard regulars, and the gap between those two numbers tells you whose war this was. Several British observers came to call the whole war a Manchu and not a Chinese affair. The Han Chinese were the great majority of the empire's people, ruled for two centuries by a Manchu minority, and the dynasty had always been careful about that line between rulers and ruled. Hold on to that phrase, a Manchu and not a Chinese affair. Within a decade, others would make far more dangerous use of the same idea. And Hai Ling himself? Here the sources disagree. In one account, he built a pyre of his official papers, sat down in the middle of it and burned to death. In another, he hanged himself, after killing his family. And some alleged instead that he was murdered by his own men. Pottinger, for his part, paid the Manchu commander, Hai Ling, a soldier's compliment, saying he was "Worthy of a nobler death." In China he is not remembered that way. He is generally remembered as an unhinged military dictator, the man who had his own townspeople arrested and killed as traitors. It was the costliest day of the war for the British: thirty nine dead, a hundred and thirty injured and three missing. And Gough, who only a year before had railed at Elliot for not letting him turn his guns on Canton, wrote: "I am sick at heart of war". For the people of the town, the fighting was only the start. A man of Zhenjiang named Zhu Shiyun wrote that "great numbers of women in the city have been raped or carried off". One British officer, by contrast, wrote: "Less villainy was perpetrated than could reasonably have been expected." Those two sentences are about the same city, in the same week. So why did the Qing lose so badly? It is the question the court itself would argue over for decades, and the answer is not simply that the British were stronger, though they were. The British had steamers, better guns, drilled troops and a fleet that could go wherever it liked along a coast thousands of miles long, and the Qing had to guard all of it. But you have heard the rest of the answer in this episode too. Commanders who ran or wept, a general who waited for omens, money stolen on the way to the troops, soldiers marched from far provinces who robbed the people they had come to save, and reports to the throne that turned every disaster into a victory. And the men who did stand and fight to the last were the Manchu soldiers defending their own homes, who had nowhere else to go. And over all of it hung the problem we met at Xiamen: an emperor who could see his war only through the reports of the men who were losing it. The British were not invincible. A rainstorm at Sanyuanli, an ambush in a garden at Zhenjiang, could hurt them badly. But they could see their own war clearly, and the Qing court could not. Zhenjiang was taken. The grain route to the capital was cut. And the fleet sailed on up the Yangtze, toward Nanjing, the old southern capital of the empire. Next time, with British guns off the walls of Nanjing, the Daoguang Emperor finally does what he has refused to do for three years. He sends a Manchu kinsman named Qiying to make peace. And the man he sends will try something no one in this war has tried yet: to turn a surrender into a friendship.

Sources

• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), pp. 282-284, 288-289, 289-290, 290-292, 293-295, 295-296, 296-297, 654-655, 655-656, 656-657, 658-659, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces (1844), p. 389-392, https://archive.org/details/chinesewaraccoun00ouchrich
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)