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Self-Strengthening, episode 12

Fuzhou

In August 1884 French warships anchored peacefully inside the Min River open fire on the Fujian fleet and the Fuzhou Navy Yard, the proudest work of self strengthening, and destroy them in under an hour. The episode follows Liu Mingchuan, the Huai Army general sent to hold Taiwan against the French, and Robert Hart, who brings the war to an end through secret talks run from his office, and asks how the Qing could lose at sea and win on land at Lang Son, and what the peace cost. It leans on foreign observers, with scholars on the battle; the Qing side of the war is heard only through others.

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Transcript

Sébastien Lespès
Sébastien Lespès. Charles-Lucien Huard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, France and China fought in Tonkin, and it ended, or seemed to, with a convention Li Hongzhang signed at Tianjin and his own court would not carry out. A French column sent to occupy Lang Son met Qing troops at Bac Le and was beaten, and France answered with an ultimatum: an indemnity of two hundred and fifty million francs, with the docks and arsenals at Fuzhou and Nanjing in mind as guarantees. The court ordered its troops out of Tonkin, and rejected the indemnity. In Beijing, Prince Gong had been driven from office that April. The whole Grand Council had gone with him, and the empress dowager Cixi now ruled with no one at court to check her. And all the while, Admiral Courbet's ships had been lying in the anchorage at Fuzhou, where the imperial officials had received them in the most friendly way. This time, the talking stops. It did not stop all at once. At the end of July 1884, the French minister and the Qing negotiators opened talks at Shanghai, looking for a number both sides could live with. On the Qing side the talks were led by Zeng Guoquan, the governor general at Nanjing, and the younger brother of the great Zeng Guofan, who had saved the dynasty from the Taiping. An American diplomat in Beijing offered to mediate between the two sides, and nothing came of that either. France offered to reduce the indemnity to eighty million francs. The Qing side offered five hundred thousand taels, about three million three hundred thousand francs, and not as an indemnity at all, but as compensation to the families of the men killed in what it called the misunderstanding at Bac Le. A tael was a Chinese ounce of silver, the unit in which the empire counted money. So the two sides were not far apart in their language. They were a long way apart in their arithmetic. And France had decided that it would not wait for the arithmetic to be settled. It would seize something of China's and hold it until China paid. The first place it chose was not Fuzhou. It was an island. Taiwan lies a hundred miles or so off the coast of Fujian province, across a strait, and in 1884 it was still governed as a part of Fujian. At its northern tip was a harbour called Jilong, and behind Jilong were coal mines, one of the few good sources of steamer coal on the China coast. A French squadron in Chinese waters needed coal, and the colonies of Britain, like Hong Kong, might not always sell it. Jilong would make a fine pledge, and a fine coaling station. The man France sent to take it was Sébastien Lespès, a rear admiral, Courbet's deputy in the east. On 4 August 1884, Lespès arrived off Jilong with four ships and summoned the forts to surrender. No reply came, so the next day he opened fire and silenced them. The forts were soon reduced to a heap of ruins. And then, on 6 August, the French tried to land and occupy the town, and they were driven back with some loss. The man who drove them back is the first of the two people this episode follows. His name was Liu Mingchuan. Liu came from the same district of Anhui province as Li Hongzhang, and in his youth he had been something close to a bandit, a salt smuggler in the hills. He joined Li's Huai Army when it was raised to fight the Taiping rebels, and he rose to be one of its best generals, fighting the Taiping and then the Nian rebels across the north China plain. His face was badly pitted by smallpox, and his soldiers called him Pockmarked Liu. By the 1870s he had retired to his estates, a rich man who seemed to be done with war. In the summer of 1884, with the French at the door, the court called him back, gave him the rank of a governor and sent him to defend Taiwan. He had arrived at Jilong only a few weeks before Lespès. He conducted the defence ably. He was the imperial high commissioner for the island's defence, and the Chinese forces holding Taiwan came to number about fifty thousand men. And he did something, at that first bombardment, that told the French exactly what kind of opponent he was. He ordered the destruction of the machinery at the Jilong coal mines, and of the whole stock of coal, an estimated fifteen thousand tons, a step unusually prompt for a Qing official. If the French had come for coal, they would not find any. It was the first sign of something that would matter all through this war. On land, behind his own defences, Liu Mingchuan was going to be very hard to move. The Qing government protested. It had been attacked while the talks were still going on. The protest said that "military action during negotiations, without previous declaration, is without precedent". It was a fair point, and it changed nothing. Jilong was a sideshow. The real blow was already being prepared, on the mainland, at the place where the French ships had been lying at anchor for a month. And the man who would finally negotiate the peace was not a general or an envoy. He was the head of the empire's customs, in Beijing. We'll come to him. First, the anchorage.

Amédée Courbet
Amédée Courbet. Ernest-Eugène Appert , Photographer, Paris. Upload, stitch and restoration by Jebulon (2013-04-14 18:35:18), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Fuzhou is the capital of Fujian province, on the Min River, some way upstream from the sea. Below the city the river widens into an anchorage, where foreign ships could moor, and on its bank stood the Fuzhou Navy Yard. Foreigners called it Pagoda Anchorage, after a tall old stone pagoda that stood over the water. The Navy Yard had been founded in 1866 by Zuo Zongtang, and built with the help of French engineers and French officers, who had laid out its slips, its foundries and its naval school. It had been building ships for nearly twenty years, and it had trained a generation of Chinese naval officers. It was, more than any other single place, what the phrase self strengthening meant. And the fleet that guarded it was the Fujian fleet, most of it built right there, in those slips. Its ships were not first rate. Most of them were wooden steamers, built to designs that were already out of date. But they were Chinese built, by Chinese workmen, and commanded by Chinese officers. I want you to picture the anchorage that summer, because it is one of the strangest scenes in this whole story. Admiral Courbet had come into the anchorage in the middle of July, and the imperial officials had received him in the most friendly way. Courbet was in his late fifties, an engineer by training, a graduate of the most demanding technical school in France, and a precise commander who left very little to chance. His ships lay at their moorings among the Chinese warships, within easy range of them. British and American warships lay in the anchorage too, as neutrals, and their officers would watch everything that followed from their own decks. On 16 August, every ship in the anchorage, the French ones included, dressed ship, flags flying from every mast, to celebrate the birthday of the emperor of China. Think about that. A week before the battle, the French squadron hung out its flags in honour of the emperor it was about to fight. And nobody on the Chinese side, it seems, found it strange that a foreign squadron which had just bombarded Jilong was still lying peacefully in the middle of their fleet. On the Qing side, there was never a time, right up to 19 August, when any official seems to have realised that his country was on the verge of war. The court's man in charge of naval defence at Fuzhou was a young scholar named Zhang Peilun, one of the loudest voices of the war party at court, sent south to put some fight into the province. He had never commanded so much as a gunboat. He did not attack the French ships while they lay among his own. He did not order them to leave. He had been told not to fire the first shot, and he waited. Meanwhile, the diplomacy ran out. France presented a last ultimatum, and the only thing it demanded now was an indemnity of the reduced sum of eighty million francs. China refused. On 21 August the French chargé d'affaires in Beijing demanded his passports and struck his flag. Courbet received his orders to act on 22 August. Here is what he had. Courbet flew his flag in the Volta, the same small warship on which, back in the spring, a German customs officer had travelled up the river to Guangzhou and talked over Tonkin with her captain, Fournier. On the day of battle, the French had eight ships, two of them armoured, and two torpedo boats, with seventeen hundred and ninety men and seventy seven guns. On the Chinese side there were eleven ships, nine of them wooden, of about six thousand five hundred tons all together, with one thousand and forty men and forty five guns. On the morning of 23 August, Courbet sent word to the foreign consuls and to the Qing authorities in Fuzhou that he would open fire that afternoon. Whatever became of that warning on the Qing side, it did their fleet no good. And the tide mattered. Courbet chose his moment for the turn of the tide, when the moored Chinese ships would swing on their cables and present their sterns, their weakest points, to the French guns. At four minutes to two in the afternoon, the first shot was fired from a French gunboat, the Lynx, and a Chinese ship answered it at once. Within one minute, the Chinese flagship, the Yangwu, had been hit by a torpedo and sunk. The torpedoes used that day were not the self propelled kind. Each was a charge of explosive on the end of a long pole, carried on the bow of a small fast launch and rammed against an enemy hull below the waterline. It took real nerve to use one. Within seven minutes, the action was practically over. On two of the Chinese ships, the officers deserted first, and most of their crews followed them. But not everyone ran. One Chinese ship fought to the last. She was on fire from bow to stern, drifting helplessly downstream and sinking, and still she kept firing her guns, again and again, until a French torpedo boat finished her. Nobody remembers the name of the man who commanded her, at least not in the West. But somebody on that ship kept those guns going. Then the French turned their guns on the Navy Yard, and on the shipyard and the arsenal beside it. Twenty years of work went up in smoke in an afternoon. The French lost five killed and fifteen wounded. The Chinese lost four hundred and nineteen killed, one hundred and twenty eight wounded and fifty one missing. Zhang Peilun, the scholar who had come south to stiffen the province's spine, fled the battle. He was dismissed and sent into exile on the northern frontier. Years later Li Hongzhang, who thought highly of his talents, took him into his household and married him to his daughter. Courbet was not finished. To get back out to sea, his ships had to pass down the river, between forts that were meant to close it. But the forts at the river mouth, and those further up, had been built with their guns set in solid masonry, so that they could fire only toward the sea. Courbet came at them from upriver, from behind. The forts further up fell on 25 and 26 August, and those at the river mouth on 27 August. Paris had sent eight warships and two torpedo boats to East Asian waters, and they had inflicted more than five hundred casualties and destroyed much of the southern navy. And the loss of the Fuzhou shipyards hobbled the building of ships for the southern fleet for years to come. The yard itself was battered rather than razed, and within a few years it was building ships again. But the fleet it had built was at the bottom of the Min River. After Fuzhou, the Qing government declared that China was at war with France. The decree was issued in the name of the empress dowager, and the words were hers to sign. "Rather than go to war with a friendly power," it said, "we chose to abandon one of our vassals". "But the French came upon us with outrageous demands, and, now that they have destroyed our ships, a state of war exists by their act. Confident in the righteousness of our cause, we accept the issue." She wept when she signed it, an American at the court's school in Beijing recorded, but her tears were not those of weakness. That same American was sent for by the Zongli Yamen, the court's foreign office, almost as soon as the news came in. The ministers had a question for him. War having begun, what were the rules of international law for the treatment of the enemy's civilians? An officer stood waiting while he wrote his answer, and pressed him to finish, because the council of state was waiting to draw up a decree on the subject. The decree came out the next day. It promised protection to every Frenchman living in China, so long as he stayed quietly at his work and took no part in the war. And it was kept. Not one of the hundreds of French missionaries scattered through the interior was killed, and none was harmed, apart from a few in a turbulent part of Guangdong who moved for safety to the provincial capital. French merchants kept their shops open. French professors went on lecturing at the court's own college in Beijing. I find that remarkable. Days after its fleet was sunk at anchor, the Qing government treated the enemy's citizens with a correctness that would have done credit to any government of the day.

Liu Mingchuan
Liu Mingchuan. Original uploader was Orion at zh.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The French, for their part, never declared war at all. They had their reasons. In Europe, France was tied up in a crisis over Egypt, and as long as it was not formally at war, both sides could go on using neutral ports, like Hong Kong and Nagasaki, to coal and repair. Paris also held Courbet back from one target. Courbet would have liked to strike at Port Arthur, in the north, but Ferry would not let him, for fear of bringing about the disgrace of Li Hongzhang. So Courbet turned back to Taiwan. The Qing, meanwhile, sent a man of their own to the coast. Zuo Zongtang, the old general who had won back the far west for the dynasty, and who had founded the Fuzhou Navy Yard eighteen years before, was sent to Fujian as imperial commissioner to take charge of the war there. He was past seventy, and ill, and he went anyway. At the start of October 1884, the French came back to Jilong in force, and this time they took it. Liu Mingchuan pulled most of his troops back from Jilong to defend Tamsui, the island's other northern port and the way to the walled city of Taipei. Many at court criticised him for giving up Jilong. Events proved him right. At Tamsui the French ships bombarded the forts, but they had to fire from a long way out, and they did little damage. They could not come closer, because the defenders had blocked the mouth of the river with sunken hulks and mines. Then a force of eight hundred men was landed to assault the forts. After three hours of fighting, the attackers were driven back to their boats. That was the end of any French plan to take northern Taiwan by storm. For the second time in two months, Liu's men had sent a French landing party back to its boats. Instead, Courbet declared a blockade of the coasts of Taiwan, effective from 23 October 1884. The blockade would last almost six months. The French held the town of Jilong and the hills around it with a land force of three thousand men under General Duchesne. Liu's troops dug in on the ridges further inland, between Jilong and Taipei, and waited for the French to come to them. In all those months there was only one serious battle, on 7 March 1885. The French won it, but they gained no ground. Disease killed far more French soldiers on that hillside than the Qing army did. Liu's troops sat in the hills above, the French sat in the town below, and the island held. The blockade choked the island's trade in tea and camphor, but junks slipped across the strait from Fujian with men and silver, and enough of them got through. In February 1885, a squadron of the southern fleet sailed from Shanghai to try to break the blockade. Courbet went to meet it. Off the coast of Zhejiang, French torpedo launches crept in at night and sank the squadron's biggest ship, a frigate, at anchor at Shipu. The rest took shelter at Zhenhai, near Ningbo, where the forts held the French off. It was the same lesson as Fuzhou, on a smaller scale. At sea, the Qing could not match the French. Behind a well defended shore, they could hold. A blockade is not only a matter for the two sides, though. It matters to every neutral ship that wants to trade. Britain let it be known that it would recognise the blockade of Taiwan as a belligerent blockade, and that in its view France and China were at war. But that cut both ways. If France was at war, then Hong Kong was a neutral port, and it was closed to French warships for coal and repairs. Now the French squadron had to bring its coal from further away, and every week of blockade cost more than the last. France, having been treated as a belligerent, now resolved to enforce all the rights of a belligerent. And that is how the war at sea came to reach the empire's food.

To understand the next move, you need to know how Beijing was fed. For centuries, part of the land tax in the rich rice growing provinces of the lower Yangtze had been paid not in silver but in grain, and that grain, the tribute rice, was shipped north every year to feed the capital, its garrisons and its officials. For most of the dynasty it had travelled up the Grand Canal. By the 1880s, much of it went by sea, from Shanghai to Tianjin, on Chinese steamers. Beijing could not feed itself. Without the tribute rice, the capital went hungry. France announced that from 26 February 1885, it would treat rice bound for any port north of Guangzhou as contraband of war. Contraband, in the law of war, means goods a belligerent may seize even from neutral ships, because they help the enemy fight. Guns and powder, obviously. Food, usually not. The point was to intercept the tribute rice carried north from the Shanghai district, and put pressure on the court where it lived. It was a clever idea, and a very unpopular one. The proposal raised a storm of protest from the merchants in China. The British minister in Beijing issued a notice about it that was worded so hastily that it seemed to say the Royal Navy would resist any seizure of food from British ships. It had to be corrected. In Berlin, Bismarck took the French side. If the measure applied to all neutrals alike, he said, it was a justifiable act of war, since its object was the shortening of the war by increasing the difficulties of the enemy. But France was in danger of causing friction with England, which it was already quarrelling with enough over Egypt. In the end, the rice got through. On 23 May 1885, five hundred and two tribute rice junks entered the Shandong section of the Grand Canal, bound north for Tianjin and Beijing. The empire had simply gone back to the old way, the slow way, up the canal and out of reach of the French navy. By the time those junks reached the capital, the war was over. And it had been decided, in the end, not at sea, but on land.

Jules Ferry
Jules Ferry. Léon Bonnat, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While Courbet was blockading Taiwan, the French army in Tonkin had been pushing north. The Qing armies had not left Tonkin after all. The order to withdraw had been overtaken by the war, and through the winter they fought on. Liu Yongfu's Black Flags, with troops from the Yunnan army, spent the winter besieging a French garrison at Tuyen Quang, on the Clear River north of Hanoi. They came close to taking it before a French relief column broke through, early in March. In February 1885 the French army took Lang Son, the walled town on the road to the Chinese border, where so much of this had begun at Bac Le the summer before. A French column under General de Négrier pushed on to the border itself and blew up the gate in the frontier wall that marked the road into Guangxi. So the story goes, the French left a sign in the ruins, saying that what protects a frontier is not a gate but respect for treaties. The Qing soldiers answered with a sign of their own: they would rebuild the gate with French heads. They nearly did. The Qing armies on the Guangxi border were now under an old general named Feng Zicai, a veteran of the wars against the Taiping, almost seventy years old, who had been called out of retirement for the war. In late March 1885 his men met the French at the frontier pass, and with the old man leading the counterattack in person, they threw the French back. Then the Qing advanced on Lang Son. De Négrier was badly wounded, and the officer who took his place ordered a retreat. The retreat was hurried and disorderly. The French pulled out of the town they had taken only six weeks before, leaving guns and stores behind. On 28 March 1885, Qing troops recaptured Lang Son. It was an unexpected Chinese success. The French troops in Tonkin had suffered a severe reverse. And there was a pattern here that nobody in Paris had wanted to see. Qing and Vietnamese troops won a series of battles on land, even as China suffered a decisive naval defeat at the hands of the French. The news of the retreat reached Paris by telegraph, in a panicked report that made it sound much worse than it was, as if the whole French army in Tonkin were in danger. It brought down the government. Ferry bowed to the storm of hostile criticism that followed the defeat at Lang Son, and resigned. He resigned on 30 March 1885. Crowds outside the Chamber of Deputies shouted for his blood, and he left by a side door. For the rest of his life he was known as Ferry the Tonkinese, and he never held the premiership again. It was an odd fate for the man who had done more than anyone to build France's new empire. Under Ferry, France had taken Tunisia, pushed into Madagascar and the Congo, and won Tonkin. And Tonkin stayed French. The government that replaced him did not give it back. The Qing had won the battle and brought down the French prime minister, and France still got what it had come for. So how had it happened? How does an empire lose a whole fleet in seven minutes, and then win a land battle that topples a French government? Part of the answer is the difference between the two kinds of war. At sea, the Qing were fighting a modern European navy, ship against ship, and the gap in ships, guns and training was enormous. On land, near their own border, with their supply lines short and the French supply lines long, through hills and forests, the Qing armies could fight on something nearer to equal terms. And part of the answer is that the war at sea was lost before it began, in an anchorage where nobody gave the order to fight until the enemy had already chosen the hour. But there is a twist, and it is that the victory at Lang Son did not decide the peace. The peace had already been made, in secret, and the man who made it was not a Chinese official at all.

His name was Sir Robert Hart. Hart was an Irishman from Ulster who had come to China at nineteen as a junior interpreter in the British consular service. Since 1863 he had been the inspector general of the Chinese Maritime Customs, the service that collected the duties on China's foreign trade, and by now he had held the post for more than twenty years. His Customs was a Chinese government office staffed at the top by foreigners, and it brought the Qing a steady, honest revenue. He lived in Beijing, he read and spoke Chinese, and the ministers of the Zongli Yamen trusted him more than they trusted any foreign diplomat, perhaps because he was not one. He had done this kind of thing before. Nine years earlier, he had helped talk Britain and China out of the crisis over the murder of a British interpreter, Augustus Margary, on the Burma border. He had a London office for the Customs, run by a Scot named James Duncan Campbell, who bought the lighthouse lamps, hired the staff and handled everything in Europe that the service needed. Campbell was about to become the most important diplomat in this story, without ever holding a diplomatic post. He had run that London office for more than ten years. He was quiet, careful and utterly loyal to Hart, and almost nobody in Paris had heard of him. Hart had tried before. In April 1884 he had taken steps to open negotiations in Paris, but he drew back when Marquis Zeng, China's minister there, was recalled. Li Fengbao took over the legation in Paris, and Zeng went on as China's minister in London. In October, after an informal inquiry from Li Hongzhang, France set out its modified demands, with no word of an indemnity. In December, Marquis Zeng, through the British foreign secretary, raised the matter again with the French ambassador in London, again without result. The French, Hart could see, were tired of the war. What both sides needed was a way to talk that did not involve either of them being seen to ask. The opening came from a small boat. In October the French had seized a Customs cruiser, the Feihoo, off Taiwan, while she was working as a tender to the lighthouses. A Customs ship, seized by the French, was a perfectly good reason for the head of the Customs to send a man to Paris. Hart wanted his ship back. Nobody could object to the Customs asking for its own property. And so in January 1885, Hart began the series of negotiations that would finally restore peace. On 7 January he instructed Campbell to go to Paris. Officially, Campbell was there about the Feihoo. Unofficially, he was there to find out whether Ferry would make peace, and on what terms. Ferry told Campbell that Hart's proposal was the only reasonable one he had yet heard. What followed was one of the strangest negotiations of the century. Campbell sat in Paris. Hart sat in Beijing. Between them ran thousands of miles of telegraph cable, and they talked in cipher, telegram by telegram, at enormous expense. Almost nobody knew. The whole affair was kept secret. And it was kept from Li Hongzhang. Li was shut out of the negotiations of that spring, and Hart was able to work directly on the ministers in Beijing. On 1 March 1885, a secret imperial decree, setting out definite proposals, was communicated to Ferry. Ferry wanted more. Early in March he demanded that China's ratification of the Fournier convention be published in the gazette at Beijing. The gazette was the court's daily bulletin, copied and sold across the empire, in which officials read the emperor's edicts and the memorials sent up to him. Hart's reply was a lesson in how the Qing state worked. An edict, he explained, is a decision or command given by the emperor, and it is formally recorded in the palace archives, whether or not it is printed in the gazette. In other words, take the emperor's word. It is binding whether you read it in the newspaper or not. Ferry accepted that. He had little choice. Every week the war went on, it cost France more men and more money, and the Chamber in Paris was running out of patience. The imperial decree itself later said that Hart, on the ground that the two countries had no real cause of quarrel, had pressed energetically for negotiations to be resumed. Hart wrote afterwards that "no one knows the work and anxiety it has given me". Both sides might have drifted on for ever, had it not been for Hart's ready grasp of the situation, and his timely intervention.

By the end of March, the terms were agreed. They were settled and accepted on both sides on 30 March 1885. That was the day Ferry resigned, and his fall delayed the French side by a few days. So the peace was agreed two days after Lang Son, by a government that was falling, with a man who held no diplomatic office, on behalf of a court that had not told its own chief negotiator. There was one more delay, and this one was Hart's. He warned Campbell not to sign on 1 April, which was hardly an auspicious day for so serious an event. On 4 April 1885, Campbell concluded a protocol with the French Foreign Office for the suspension of hostilities. The terms of the imperial decree were written into it, word for word. Campbell had used the exact words of the emperor's edict. China consented to ratify the convention of Tianjin of 11 May 1884, the very convention Li had signed and his own court would not carry out. The two powers agreed to a general end of hostilities as soon as the orders could be given and received, and France agreed to raise the blockade of Taiwan at once. France would send a minister north, to Tianjin or Beijing, to settle the details of a treaty. Hart telegraphed to Campbell: bravo, well done, "my thanks and congratulations". Two men who were not diplomats, working for a government that was not their own, had ended a war that two great states could not end for themselves. An imperial decree of 13 April ratified the Fournier convention and approved the armistice. The French had occupied the Penghu islands, between Taiwan and the mainland, on 31 March. On 16 April the blockade of Taiwan was lifted, and the French ships withdrew to the Penghu islands. Liu Mingchuan had held the island. Courbet did not live to see the end of it. He died in the Penghu islands that June, his death hastened by his last official act, an order to give up Jilong and the islands under the treaty. The man who had sunk the Fujian fleet died in the islands he had been ordered to hand back.

Li Hongzhang
Li Hongzhang. Russell & Sons, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The treaty itself was signed at Tianjin, and the man who signed it for China was the man who had been shut out of the talks. On 9 June 1885, Li Hongzhang signed the final treaty of peace with the French minister, Patenôtre. Its terms were, in substance, the terms Li had agreed with Fournier a year before. It settled the frontier so as to give France both Lang Son and Lao Cai, surrendered to France China's suzerainty over the Vietnamese kingdom, and arranged for trade across the border. And if China decided to build railways, the French government would help supply the men to build them. China promised not to send its troops into Tonkin again, and France promised to respect China's southern border. The indemnity was gone. France had demanded two hundred and fifty million francs, then eighty million, and in the end it got nothing. Each side could tell itself it had won. France got what it wanted, and China, paying no indemnity, ceding no territory of its own, and able to boast of a military victory as the war's last act, was equally satisfied. Nobody asked the Vietnamese whether they were satisfied. They were not. A month after the treaty was signed, the regent at Hue attacked the French garrison in the capital, failed, and fled into the hills with the boy emperor, calling on the country to rise and aid the king. The French would spend years putting that rising down. But it was a Vietnamese war now. The Qing were out of it. Liu Yongfu and his Black Flags came home across the border after the treaty, and the Qing gave him a military post in Guangdong. The man who had challenged the French to come out and fight, and killed two of their commanders, ended the war as a Qing officer, waiting for the next one. Li's memorial to the throne, forwarding the treaty, struck a note of triumph. After the great victory at Lang Son, he wrote, the prowess of the imperial troops inspired terror in China's enemies. France, he told the throne, had been led to abandon her perfidious intentions of extorting money from China. There is a word for that kind of memorial, and the word is face. Because the other way to tell it is simpler. Peace with France was bought by the cession of Tonkin. After another year of war, a fleet sunk at anchor and a victory at Lang Son, the Qing settled on the very convention Li had signed with Fournier. If the court had let Li's convention with Fournier stand, the Fujian fleet would very likely still have been afloat. That is the bitter arithmetic of the French war. And with Vietnam gone, the Qing had lost their oldest tributary in the south. Of the kingdoms that had once sent missions to Beijing, the most important one left was Korea. Keep that in mind. It is where this season is going. That autumn, the court drew its own lesson from the war. It set up a Navy Board in Beijing, to bring the empire's fleets under a single command, with Prince Chun at its head and Li Hongzhang as one of its chiefs. Zuo Zongtang did not see it. He died at Fuzhou in September 1885, at the age of seventy three, in the city where he had founded the Navy Yard. There was one more change, and it was on Taiwan. The war had shown the court how exposed the island was. In 1885 Taiwan was separated from Fujian and made a province in its own right, and its first governor was Liu Mingchuan. He would spend the next six years there, and he worked as if the French might come back any day. He built new forts and modern coast batteries, laid a telegraph cable across the strait to the mainland, began a railway from Jilong to Taipei, and ordered a survey of the island's land so it could be taxed properly for the first time. Taipei got electric street lamps and a modern post office before most cities on the mainland did. The general who had burned the coal so the French could not have it would try to make the island into a model of self strengthening.

And Hart? London had noticed. The British foreign secretary invited Sir Robert Hart to become the British minister in China, the head of Britain's own legation in Beijing. The treaty was signed on 9 June, and Hart's appointment was announced in the official gazette in London the next day. Queen Victoria herself was pleased. "I am very glad that we shall have for our next minister in China the man who arranged such delicate negotiations as these", she said. It was the summit of a British official's career in the east. The man who had come out as a junior interpreter would now be Her Majesty's minister. On 15 August he issued a farewell address to the Customs, closing with his very real regret, as he put it, that he was severing his connection with the service. Privately, he admitted that leaving felt more like death in life than a promotion to the heavens. Then the question of who would succeed him came up, and everything came apart. Prince Qing, now at the head of the Zongli Yamen, promised that Hart's own brother, James Hart, with a Chinese colleague, would be the next inspector general. And soon it was announced that James Hart had in fact been given the post. But the Customs was too big a prize to be handed down in a family. Li Hongzhang stoutly opposed letting Hart name his own successor. And the other foreign powers did not like the idea of a British minister in Beijing whose brother ran China's revenue service. Hart saw that his first duty now lay in remaining in the service of China. His resignation as British minister was announced at the end of August. The settlement was generally acceptable to everyone involved. And there was one more voice in it, from the palace. Hart learned that the empress dowager had said she would prefer him to continue as inspector general. So he stayed. Sir Robert Hart, whom some of you have already watched endure a siege in Beijing many years on, would serve the Qing for the rest of his working life. He gave up the highest post his own country could offer him in China to go on working for China. His wife and children lived in England. He stayed in Beijing, at his desk, and he would not go home again for more than twenty years. The man who had made the peace went back to collecting the customs, and the empire went back to building. Let me step back for a moment, because this is the place in the season to ask what the French war cost, and what it taught. It cost the Qing their claim to Vietnam, which had been the point of the whole quarrel. It cost them the Fujian fleet, and the prestige of the Navy Yard that had been self strengthening's showpiece. It cost them Prince Gong, thrown out in the middle of it, and the balance at court that he had kept for twenty years. And it taught two lessons at once, which pulled in opposite directions. The first was that the new armies, properly led, could beat a European army on land. Lang Son proved it. The second was that at sea, the empire was still nearly helpless, and a fleet anchored in its own river could be destroyed in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. Li Hongzhang drew the second lesson. He had always thought the danger would come by sea, and that China needed a real navy, under one command, with modern ships and trained crews. The court, with Lang Son ringing in its ears, was more inclined to draw the first. Both lessons would be tested within ten years, by Japan. But that is getting ahead of the story. Next time, Li Hongzhang gets the navy he has wanted for ten years, a northern fleet of German and British ironclads, the strongest in Asia, at least on paper. And we follow the money that was supposed to pay for it, some of which ended up in a palace garden.

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