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Self-Strengthening, episode 13

The Fleet and the Palace

After the French war Li Hongzhang builds what he has wanted since 1874, a northern fleet of German and British built ironclads at Weihaiwei and Port Arthur, with telegraphs, mines and factories behind it. The episode follows Li and Cixi through the late 1880s as the fleet becomes the strongest in Asia on paper, its British adviser quits, and navy money goes into rebuilding the Summer Palace for Cixi's retirement, and asks whether the court's politics or self strengthening's own limits held it back, giving the palace money real time because it is contested. It leans on scholars, with the court heard a little and foreign observers on the fleet and the riots.

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Transcript

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

Last time, we watched a French squadron that had lain for weeks facing the Chinese fleet at Fuzhou open fire on it in August 1884. Within one minute the Chinese flagship had been torpedoed and sunk, and within seven minutes the fight was practically over. On the French side five men were killed; on the Chinese side four hundred and nineteen. Then, at the end of March 1885, Qing armies retook Lang Son, a success nobody expected, and the French minister who had led the war resigned over it. And on the ninth of June 1885 Li Hongzhang signed the final treaty of peace. China paid no indemnity, France kept its hold on Vietnam, and the new frontier left Lang Son on the French side. So the French war ended in a strange kind of draw. The Qing had won on land and been destroyed at sea. This episode is about what Li Hongzhang did with that lesson. But first, let me take stock of where everyone stands as that war ends. Robert Hart, the Customs chief who had brokered the peace, had been invited to be Britain's representative in China, and decided instead that his duty lay in staying in China's service. Zuo Zongtang, the old general who had won back Xinjiang, had been sent to the coast to direct the war against France, and in September 1885 he died at Fuzhou, at the age of seventy three. Xinjiang, the far west he had reconquered, had just been made a regular province of the empire, and so, a little later, was Taiwan, with Liu Mingchuan, the general who had held it against the French, as its first governor. Prince Gong, who had run the court's foreign affairs for more than twenty years, was out of power, dismissed by the Empress Dowager in 1884. And Li Hongzhang, sixty two years old, was the one great official of the Taiping generation still standing at the centre of things. This episode also draws on the recollections of William Ferdinand Tyler. Let me start not with a ship, but with a wire. Picture the problem the Qing court had lived with for its whole history. An empire the size of China ran on paper. Officials in the provinces wrote memorials, formal reports to the throne, and the throne answered with edicts, and every one of those documents had to be carried by hand. The empire kept a great network of relay stations for its couriers, with fresh horses waiting along the main roads. The most urgent dispatches were rushed through day and night, but even then a message from the far provinces took weeks. Between Beijing and Shanghai, the empire's greatest port, the delay between a question and its answer ran to ten days. In a war, that is a lifetime. The Qing had felt it in the crisis with Russia over the Ili valley, when Russian warships gathered in Chinese waters and every exchange with the envoy abroad crawled. That delay is what finally made ministers see that the empire needed the telegraph. Foreigners had been asking to put up telegraph lines in China for twenty years, and the court had always said no. Part of the reason was fear: a wire run by foreigners was a wire foreigners could read, and a road for their influence into the interior. Part of it was what ordinary people believed about the land itself. When poles and wires were torn down, Li's staff told him the damage had been done by the outraged spirits of feng shui. Feng shui is the old Chinese art of reading the land. It holds that hills, waters, buildings and graves channel good or bad fortune, and that a tall pole or a straight line cut across the country can disturb the dead and bring disaster on the living. Li bluntly refused to accept that explanation, and made his staff go after the damage as the work of human hands. The man who made it happen was Li Hongzhang, viceroy of Zhili, the metropolitan province around Beijing. You have met Li many times by now. He was in his late fifties, the general who had built the Huai Army in the Taiping war, and for more than ten years he had governed from Tianjin, the port that guards the approach to the capital. His headquarters at Tianjin had become the place where foreign diplomats, merchants, engineers and adventurers came to do business with China, often before they ever went on to Beijing. Alongside his province, Li held the title of Commissioner for the Northern Ports. That made him the court's man for dealing with foreigners in the north, and the man in charge of almost everything modern the dynasty was trying to build. Li went about the telegraph the way he went about everything. He would keep it Chinese, but he would get foreign help to build it. For that help he chose a Danish cable company, the same one the court had let build a short line on the Fujian coast back in 1874, only to take the permission back. His reason was blunt. Li explained that "Denmark is a small country" and that "its people can be easily controlled". A Danish company could teach his men and lay his first lines, but it could not bring a navy to collect its debts. He was also training his own people, at a telegraph school he opened at Tianjin. A group of thirty two students graduated in time to operate the first cables in early 1882. And he thought about secrecy from the beginning. In 1881 Li noted that a code had already been created so that important matters could be sent in secret, which meant that even the operators tapping out the message could not read it. Chinese has no alphabet, so Chinese telegraphy worked by numbers. Each character was given a four digit code, and the operator sent the digits, which the receiving office turned back into characters from the same codebook. On the first of December 1881, the line from Shanghai to Tianjin was opened. The wait shrank from days to hours. In 1882 Li set up the Imperial Telegraph Administration to run the new lines, and put it under one of his most trusted men, Sheng Xuanhuai. Sheng was a scholar from Jiangsu who had joined Li's staff as a young man around 1870. He never rose high in the examinations, but he had a gift for business that very few officials possessed, and Li used him for exactly that. The capital itself held out a little longer. The wires reached the outskirts of Beijing, but the court would not have them inside the walls. Then in 1884 Li finally overcame the resistance and won the court's approval to connect the inner city to the telegraph grid. It is worth stopping on what that meant. For the first time in its history, the court could hear from its provinces in hours or days instead of weeks, and send back orders as fast. In the contest for information, the race to know first what a rival was doing, telegraphy made China stronger. The wires spread fast. Within a few years lines ran south from Shanghai to Fuzhou and Guangzhou, up the Yangtze into the interior, and north toward the frontiers. Urgent business between the court and the provinces began to go by wire, in short telegraphed reports and telegraphed edicts, documents the old system had never needed. A governor far away could no longer count on weeks of silence to do things his own way. And a court that could hear about a crisis the same day could also be dragged into it the same day. And the network kept growing. By 1908 the administration had laid more than fourteen thousand miles of cable and built almost four hundred telegraph offices. Of everything self strengthening built, the telegraph may be the part that worked best. But notice who built it. Not a ministry in Beijing. Li Hongzhang, and his man Sheng, out of Tianjin. That pattern runs through this whole episode.

The telegraph was one piece of something bigger. Around Li there had grown up a ring of enterprises, and the same handful of officials and merchants turned up in all of them. At the centre of the ring was the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company. We met it when Li founded it in the early eighteen seventies, a steamship line that would take the coastal trade back from foreign shipping. It was run on a formula the Chinese called official supervision and merchant management. Merchants put up the money and ran the business, and an official appointed by Li stood over them to make sure it served the state. Sheng Xuanhuai, the same man who ran the telegraph, held posts in the steamship company and its sister firms too. In 1879 he called China Merchants China's pioneering business enterprise, and said that once its troubled years were over, broader policies for wealth and power could follow in quick succession. Wealth and power was the slogan of the whole movement. A strong state needed a rich country, and a rich country needed modern industry. The man who managed the steamship line in its first years was Tang Tingshu, a merchant from Guangdong who had spent a decade as the chief Chinese agent of the great British trading house Jardine Matheson. Men like Tang were exactly what Li needed. They knew how foreign business worked, and they had money of their own, and friends with money, to put into it. So the steamship company's money went looking for other work. Steamships need coal, and in the eighteen seventies China bought much of its steamship coal from abroad. Li's answer was the Kaiping coal mines, northeast of Tianjin, founded in 1878 and worked with modern machinery and foreign engineers, which began sending out coal in 1881. To get the coal out, the mine built a short railway, one of the first in China that lasted. Railways were still a fight at court. Their opponents warned that they would disturb the graves of ancestors, throw carters and boatmen out of work, and open the interior to foreign armies. So the line started as a few miles of track to carry coal, and only in 1888 was it carried on to Tianjin. That same year, Li had a little railway laid in the palace gardens beside the Forbidden City, a gift for the Empress Dowager. If you want to understand how anything got done in Qing China in these years, that is not a bad place to start: before you could build a railway for the empire, you built one for the woman who ran it. In the eighteen eighties China Merchants put five hundred thousand silver taels into the Kaiping mines. A tael was a weight of silver, about an ounce and a third, and the unit in which the Qing counted money. The money ran the other way too. Coal from Kaiping fed the company's steamers, the steamers carried the court's tribute rice north, and the profits went into the next venture. Cotton was next. Foreign cloth and foreign yarn were pouring into China through the treaty ports, and Li wanted Chinese mills to answer them. His first attempt, a cotton cloth mill at Shanghai run on the same formula, was planned from the late eighteen seventies and took until 1890 to open. In 1891 Li permitted China Merchants to lend a hundred thousand taels as start up capital to the Huasheng Cotton Mill. And money flowed into the telegraph as well, which by the mid eighteen eighties was raising merchant shares on the same formula as the steamers. By 1909 the steamship company's investments and loans to the other enterprises would come to four point four two million silver taels. Sheng Xuanhuai's career shows how the ring worked. Over the years he would run the telegraphs and the steamship line, and later mines, iron works, a bank and railways, often several at once, and he grew very rich doing it. Nobody could say quite where the company ended and the official began. It is a remarkable web for one man to have spun. It is also a fragile one. Every one of these firms depended on Li's protection. Its managers were his appointees, its privileges came from his memorials, and its profits were never quite safe from the officials who supervised it. A merchant who put his money in was really betting on Li Hongzhang. And when the court needed something, it did not ask the companies. It asked Li, and Li asked the companies. Keep that in mind, because the same thing was true of the weapons.

Self strengthening had begun with guns. Back in 1865, as we saw, Li had turned a foreign machine shop in Shanghai into the Jiangnan Arsenal, the first great modern works in the empire. At first it made what it could: muskets, small cannon, ammunition, and a few steamships. It was more than a factory. It had a translation department, where foreign scholars and Chinese colleagues turned Western books on chemistry, engineering, mathematics and gunnery into Chinese, and for years it was the main door through which Western science reached Chinese readers. The steamships it built cost far more than ships bought abroad, and after the mid eighteen seventies it largely gave up building them. Li knew how far behind that left China. In 1870 he complained that China's military equipment was greatly inferior to that of Westerners. By 1871 the technicians at Jiangnan had begun to make something better, the first of a series of more advanced weapons. It was a copy of the Remington, an American breech loading rifle. A breech loader takes its cartridge in at the back of the barrel, instead of having powder and ball rammed down the muzzle, so a soldier could fire it lying down, behind cover, several times a minute. Against the old muzzle loaders it was a revolution. The workers at Jiangnan learned to make it. By 1875 the arsenal's annual output was more than three thousand five hundred rifles. Over the next decade the main plant turned out at least twenty five thousand of them. That was a real achievement. A generation earlier no one in China could have made a rifle like this at all. But look at it from the other side. That was a small number for an empire that kept hundreds of thousands of men under arms. The Remington was a single shot rifle. Each cartridge had to be loaded by hand, one at a time, and it burned black powder that wrapped the firing line in a cloud of smoke. And the world was already leaving it behind. By the late eighteen eighties the armies of Europe were switching to magazine rifles, which held several rounds at once, firing a new smokeless powder. The arsenals were also dear to run. Every machine and much of the steel came from abroad, foreign technicians had to be hired, and a rifle made in China often cost more than the same rifle bought from a foreign dealer. So the Qing armies ended up armed with a jumble. Some units carried Jiangnan Remingtons, some carried imported rifles of half a dozen patterns, and some still carried spears, swords and matchlocks. Each pattern needed its own ammunition, which is the kind of problem that does not matter in a parade and matters very much in a battle. None of this was a secret to Li. He had complained about it as early as 1870. But the arsenal answered to the governors who paid for it, not to any ministry in Beijing. The southern provinces had their own arsenals, run by their own governors, making their own guns. And in 1889 a new viceroy came to Wuchang, on the middle Yangtze, who meant to build his own. He was Zhang Zhidong, the official who had made his name demanding war with Russia over Ili. Zhang began an iron works and an arsenal at Hanyang, across the river, separate from anything Li had made. It was more self strengthening, and it was good that someone was doing it. But it was another governor's project, with another governor's money, answering to another governor. Self strengthening was not one program. It was a set of separate projects, each one belonging to the governor who started it. And nowhere was that clearer than at sea.

Ding Ruchang
Ding Ruchang. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ever since 1874, when Japan landed troops on Taiwan and the Qing had nothing that could make them leave, Li Hongzhang had argued that China's danger came from the sea. He wanted a modern navy of ironclads, steam warships protected by armour plate, and for ten years he had been piecing one together. Then came the French war. At Fuzhou much of the southern navy had been destroyed, and the loss of the Fuzhou yard handicapped shipbuilding for the southern fleet from then on. The north would be different. In 1885, the year the war ended, the court created a Board of Admiralty to oversee the navy, and it did so on Li's advice. On paper it was the first ministry the empire had ever had for a navy. Its head was Prince Chun, the young emperor's own father, with Li among his deputies. The emperor was Guangxu, the boy whom Cixi had chosen for the throne at the age of three. He was fourteen now, and his aunt still ruled for him. Cixi had been the real power at court for almost a quarter of a century, first as the mother of one boy emperor and then as the aunt and guardian of the next. Li set about building two great bases on the northern coast. He created naval ports at Port Arthur and at Weihaiwei. Together the two harbours face each other across the mouth of the Gulf of Bohai, the sea gate to Tianjin and Beijing. Port Arthur got docks and workshops where a modern warship could be repaired, and Weihaiwei got forts and a fleet headquarters on an island in its bay. The great dry dock at Port Arthur, where a battleship could be lifted out of the water for repairs, took years of work and was only finished around 1890. And then came the ships. The pride of them were two battleships ordered from a German yard at Stettin, near the Baltic. The French war held them in Germany, and they finally steamed into Chinese waters late in 1885. They were the Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan, each of more than seven thousand tons, with armour more than a foot thick and four heavy guns mounted in pairs. Nothing afloat in East Asia could match them. Their names say what they were for. Dingyuan means roughly Settling the Far Away, and Zhenyuan roughly Holding Down the Far Away. Around them came cruisers built in Britain and Germany, and a flotilla of torpedo boats. An Englishman who sailed in a Customs cruiser, and who came to know the fleet a few years later, put it plainly. The other viceroys had fleets too, he wrote, "but their craft were obsolete." Li's was very different. His ships were up to date, two battleships, armoured cruisers, light cruisers and torpedo boats. That is the heart of it. This was not China's navy. It was Li Hongzhang's. The same Englishman saw why. The empire was governed through the viceroys of its provinces, so it was the viceroy of Zhili, the most powerful governor of his time, who owned a fleet. The fleet took its name from Li's title. It was the Beiyang Fleet, the fleet of the northern seas. In 1888 it was formally set up as a standing fleet with its own regulations. In 1888 the court approved large scale naval exercises in the Gulf of Bohai, and the fast boats kept up eighteen knots. Its admiral was Ding Ruchang. Ding was a man from Li's own home province of Anhui, and he was not a sailor. He had been a cavalry commander in the Huai Army, a horseman who had fought the Taiping and the Nian on the plains. Ding Ruchang, whose last days some of you have already seen. Li trusted him, and in Li's world that counted for more than seamanship. Ding had gone to Britain to bring home two new cruisers, and he learned his new trade on the job. The captains under him were a different breed. Many were young men from the naval school at the Fuzhou yard, and several had studied in Britain, in the Royal Navy's own schools and ships. Li also opened a naval academy of his own at Tianjin in 1881, to train officers for the north. One of its teachers had studied at the naval college at Greenwich, in England, and would later become the best known translator of Western thought in China. So the admiral was a soldier from Li's army, and the captains were trained sailors from the south. Hold on to that, because it is going to matter. To train the officers and crews, Li hired an English naval officer, Captain Lang. Under Lang, the squadron of two ironclads, six cruisers and its smaller vessels reached a level of efficiency that made it a force worth serious consideration. On paper, by the end of the eighteen eighties, the Beiyang Fleet was the strongest navy in Asia. And it went out to be seen. In 1886 and again in 1891 the battleships called at Japanese ports. The first visit went badly. In the summer of 1886 the squadron put in at Nagasaki, and Chinese sailors on shore leave fought with the Japanese police in the streets. Over two days men were killed on both sides. The diplomats spent months settling it. But what stayed with the Japanese was the sight of those two great Chinese battleships lying in a Japanese harbour, bigger than anything Japan owned. The second visit, in 1891, was all courtesy. Japanese officers and officials were shown over the Chinese flagship, and they looked at everything. The visit left its mark in Japan. The impression it gave was that large additions to the Japanese navy were promptly put in hand. Japan had nothing to match the two battleships. So it set out to beat them another way, with fast cruisers, some carrying a single enormous gun built to pierce their armour, and quick firing guns that could pour shells into a ship's upperworks. Notice what that means. The Chinese fleet was built around its two great ships and then, more or less, left as it was. The Japanese fleet was built to answer it, and it kept changing. At home, the fleet was Li's glory. When he came out to review it, the guns boomed salutes and myriads of dragon flags greeted his coming and going. The dragon flag was the Qing flag, a blue dragon on a yellow field. Soon afterward the Empress Dowager gave Li the triple eyed peacock's feather, the highest honour of its kind that a Chinese subject could hope for. High officials wore peacock feathers on their hats, and the eyes in the feather marked the rank of the honour. Three eyes was the most a subject could receive. It is worth pausing on what the fleet looked like to the people who saw it. Not that long before, the war junks of the Qing navy had been wooden sailing ships armed with old cannon. Now there were steel and iron ships of seven thousand tons, driven by steam, with searchlights and torpedo tubes, flying the dragon flag off Weihaiwei. To a crowd on the shore, or a visitor rowed out to the flagship, it looked like proof that self strengthening had worked. So by the early eighteen nineties Li Hongzhang had his fleet, his bases and his honours. What he did not have was money.

To understand where the money went, we need to go to a garden outside Beijing. Northwest of the capital lay the great imperial parks, the summer palaces where emperors had escaped the heat and formality of the Forbidden City. In 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted those palaces and then burned them. One of them was the garden around a lake and a hill to the west, built by the Qianlong emperor in the seventeen fifties. From the mid eighteen eighties, the court set about rebuilding it. It was given a new name, the Garden of Nurtured Harmony, and it was meant as the home where Cixi would spend her retirement. Cixi had a retirement to plan. In 1889 the Guangxu emperor married and began to rule in his own name, and the Empress Dowager formally stepped back from government. She moved out to the new palace by the lake. But the officials still came out to see her, the emperor still came to pay his respects, and nothing important was decided without her. This is Cixi, so let me tell you plainly about her. She was born in 1835 into a Manchu family of middling rank and came to the palace as a low ranking consort. She rose because she gave the emperor his only surviving son. When that emperor died in 1861, she joined with his senior widow and his brother, Prince Gong, to overthrow the regents he had named, and from then on she ruled from behind a screen for two boy emperors in turn. She was clever, hard working, ruthless when she had to be, and she loved beautiful things: painting, opera, gardens. And her palace by the lake was going to be beautiful. This was not the first time a palace had come up. Back in 1874 the young Tongzhi emperor, her son, had tried to rebuild the burned palaces for her, and Prince Gong and other senior officials had talked him out of it. But Prince Gong had been thrown out of power in 1884, over the losses in Vietnam. This time there was nobody of his weight left to object. And there was a date ahead. In 1894 the Empress Dowager would turn sixty, an anniversary that counts for a great deal in China, and the court began planning a celebration to match, centred on the new palace. The building ran on for years: halls, pavilions, a long painted gallery beside the water, a great tower on the hillside. On the lake there was a boat made of stone, an old pavilion from the previous century that was rebuilt in these years in the shape of a steamer. It is hard to imagine a better symbol for what happened next. The money for the fleet, and for the forts that guarded its bases, had for a long time been steadily diverted, by order of Her Majesty, for the rebuilding and decoration of the Summer Palace. That, at least, is how the story was told. And it was told very soon. That Englishman had prepared himself for a career in a new Chinese navy. After the war, on reaching Shanghai, he heard the news. Even before then, he admitted, he had never had great faith in that new navy materializing, nor in its being anything specially desirable. It was, as he put it, "the looting of the Naval Fund" by the Empress Dowager "for the purpose of embellishing her palaces". His chance of a career at sea in China, he decided, was finished. It was said, too, that Li himself had told the Empress Dowager in a memorial that the navy was not in the condition it might have been, had she not insisted on diverting Admiralty funds to the rebuilding and furnishing of her Summer Palace. But even that is told cautiously. It was only at an imperial audience in 1896, after the disaster, that Li ventured to remind her that a navy deprived of its maintenance funds was never likely to be efficient or well equipped. Think about that date, and about who he was saying it to. That is the shape of power in the Qing court. Li could build fleets and railways and telegraph lines, sign treaties and run Korea. But he held all of it by the court's favour, and the court was the Empress Dowager. So how much money went, and did it cost the fleet its last ships? Here the sources disagree. One side tells it as the story you have just heard: the navy's money was steadily drained into the palace by the Empress Dowager's order, year after year, and the fleet was starved so that she could have her garden. The other side holds that the sums were smaller and more tangled than the legend. Much of the money was raised in the navy's name from provincial governors and banked so that its interest could go to the palace, a scheme run through the Admiralty, whose head was Prince Chun, the emperor's own father. On that view, the ships stopped coming for a duller reason. The treasury was strained by a great flood of the Yellow River in 1887, and in 1891 the Board of Revenue stopped all purchases of foreign ships and guns for two years. The Board of Revenue was the ministry that controlled the empire's money, and its president in those years was Weng Tonghe, the emperor's tutor, and a rival of Li Hongzhang. It helps to know how tight the money was. The whole Qing state ran on a revenue of very roughly eighty million taels a year, for an empire of around four hundred million people. Out of that came the armies, the rivers, famine relief, the court, the debts from earlier wars, and every project of self strengthening, and each governor had to fight for his share. And Prince Chun, the emperor's father, who had headed the Admiralty from its start, died at the beginning of 1891. Here is what is not in dispute. After 1888 the Beiyang Fleet bought no more warships from abroad. In those same years, Japan was buying and building fast new cruisers, one of them the fastest in the world when she was launched, and in 1893 the Japanese emperor gave money from his own household every year toward building warships, and asked his officials to give part of their salaries. I will let you hold those two pictures side by side. A Japanese emperor giving from his own purse for his navy, and a Chinese court whose navy money is going, in some measure, to a garden. Whatever the garden took, the more important point may be the one Li made himself, long after. A navy is not a set of ships you buy once. It needs coal, shells, repairs, new boilers, new guns, training, and above all the steady money to pay for all of that, year after year. And the Beiyang Fleet's money depended on a court that saw the fleet as Li's, and on rivals at that court who were in no hurry to make Li stronger. The court's politics and self strengthening's own limits were not really two separate answers. They were the same problem. The fleet had been built by one man, in one province, and when the money got tight, the empire treated it as his.

Money was one problem. The other was discipline, and it came to a head over a single question: who was in command? Captain Lang had come out from the Royal Navy to train Li's crews. Admiral Ding Ruchang was in command, and Lang also held the rank of admiral, but in an ambiguous Chinese form. It might mean anything from second in command to an adviser with the rank of admiral. The crews won a name for smartness and discipline, and the squadron reached its highest efficiency in 1890. Then came the day it did matter. Lang believed his title made him second in command, so when Admiral Ding was called away to an audience in the capital, Lang claimed to take his place. An audience was a summons to appear before the throne, and an admiral called to one went. For a while, the fleet would be without its commander, and someone had to fly the flag. Lang had first come out in 1882. When the French war began he had left, because Britain was neutral and a British officer could not serve in it, and he came back in 1886. The senior commodore, Liu Buchan, maintained that Lang was only an adviser and that the command was his. Liu was one of the young captains from the south, trained at the Fuzhou naval school and in Britain, and he commanded the flagship, the Dingyuan. On the surface, it was a quarrel about a word. Underneath, it was a quarrel about whether the fleet would be run by its foreign instructor, or by its own officers, who were the viceroy's men. Liu was one of three officers who, it was said, had set out to push Lang out of his position, and he now insisted on assuming command of the fleet. Beijing supported Liu, and Lang resigned. That was in 1890. Li Hongzhang let his own followers drive Lang out of the navy, and with him went the one disciplined and efficient force at Li's disposal. It was said that when Lang came to renew his agreement and asked for real powers of command as joint admiral, Li had answered him with duplicity. Lang came away from it agreeing with another British naval officer, thirty years before, that no self respecting British officer could ever serve under Li Hongzhang again. Much of the blame, in the end, was laid on Li himself. The young Englishman from the Customs cruiser looked back on that resignation, and I will give you his words. "It did not seem a matter of world importance at the time; but it was." In his view, the decline of the fleet after Lang left was what made the Japanese dare their war with China, and what gave them the victory. That is a big claim to hang on one man's resignation. But listen to what he saw. Shortly after Lang resigned, in 1891, his ship lay at anchor with the Chinese fleet in Kowloon Bay, on the edge of Hong Kong. He went aboard the flagship and made friends with the flag lieutenant, the gunnery officer and a commander, friendships that were still going decades later. He was vastly interested in the battleship and everything they showed him, and he left full of admiration for the Chinese fleet. Two years later he saw it again. In 1893 Li held a review of the fleet in northern waters, and the Englishman happened to be there in his Customs cruiser. He took the keenest interest in all of it, and afterwards he sent a report on what he had seen to Sir Robert Hart. Hart was the Ulsterman who had run the empire's foreign staffed Customs service since 1863, and whose revenue paid for much of what the fleet had bought. He watched the fleet manoeuvre, practise its gunnery and drill its battalions on shore. What he saw, in his words, was the Chinese fleet "doing its little best after a few years of deterioration" since Lang had left. The drill had slackened. The captains from the south kept to a circle of their own, and the admiral, the cavalryman from Anhui, never fully mastered them. After Lang left, there was a chaos of clan intrigue and indiscipline that would in itself have been enough to account for a Japanese victory. Four years were enough to finish the process of disintegration, and the Japanese were thoroughly informed about it. They were watching. During those manoeuvres in 1893, a Japanese warship appeared on the scene. She exchanged salutes, watched what the Chinese were doing, made no communication, and then sailed away. A few months later, the two fleets would fight. Ding Ruchang's ships had been watched in their own waters, on their own exercises, by the navy they would soon meet. Even then, the Englishman did not think the result was obvious. The matter would be settled at sea, he thought, and from what little he knew he concluded that the Chinese stood a reasonable chance. Keep that judgement in mind. It was not a foolish one, from the outside. The ships were big, the guns were heavy, and the flags were flying. Already there were rumours of Japanese aggression in Korea, and he saw that any war there would quite obviously be settled at sea. Korea is a peninsula, and armies went there by ship. Whoever held the sea could carry soldiers in and keep the enemy's out. What he could not see from the deck of a visiting cruiser was the money, the quarrels, and the shells that had not been bought.

Meanwhile the country underneath had its own anger, and in 1891 it broke out along the Yangtze. You will remember the placards from twenty years before, the ones that said the missionaries stole children and used their eyes and hearts for medicine. Those stories had never gone away. In the spring and summer of 1891 they spread again through the towns of the Yangtze valley, in pamphlets and rumours, and crowds gathered at the mission gates. Many of the placards and pamphlets came from Hunan, the province whose scholars and gentry hated Christianity most fiercely and kept it out the longest. The trouble started at Wuhu, a treaty port on the lower Yangtze, in May, after rumours about children at the Catholic mission, and through the summer it moved upriver, to Wuxue, to Jiujiang, and in September as far as Yichang. Some officials suspected that a secret brotherhood, the Elder Brothers Society, was stirring up the riots on purpose, to drag the dynasty into trouble with the powers. The Yangtze is the great river that cuts across the middle of China, and by now steamers carried foreign merchants and missionaries far up it, to treaty ports and mission stations in town after town. In one place after another, the rioters invaded the mission premises and burned them, without much caring whose they were. At one town they entirely destroyed the Roman Catholic mission. And during the riots two British subjects were killed. The diplomats in Beijing moved together. The foreign legations made a strong joint protest to the Zongli Yamen, the court's office for foreign affairs. The powers had gunboats on the Yangtze by now, small steam warships that could run up the river to any treaty port where their people were in danger, and everyone understood what a protest backed by them meant. The Zongli Yamen's answer was the answer of a government that knew it could not control its own streets. Outrages against missionaries, it said, break out suddenly and therefore cannot easily be repressed. It was the same answer, more or less, that the court had given after Tianjin in 1870. In twenty years, the missions had multiplied, the rumours had not changed, and neither had the court's helplessness between its angry subjects and the foreign powers. The American minister thought that the Catholic establishments in the Yangtze valley, away from the great centres, seemed doomed. In the end, the court paid. Between June 1891 and September 1892 it paid the French legation compensation for Catholic mission losses at nine places, amounting to three hundred and seventy one thousand eight hundred and ninety one taels. Reparation was made, order was restored, and the danger of more direct foreign intervention was averted. Think about what that sum means next to the rest of this episode. Set that beside the fleet, and ask what the court was ready to pay for, and when. And the anger in the towns had not gone anywhere. The court could pay for the damage, but it could not change what people believed about the foreigners in their midst. So that is China at the start of the eighteen nineties. A telegraph that could carry the court's orders in hours. Mines, mills and steamers in a web around one great official. An arsenal turning out rifles that were good enough, and slowly falling behind. And a fleet that looked like the strongest in Asia, while its money went to a garden and its discipline went with a British captain. Self strengthening had built a great deal. What it had not built was a state that would stand behind it. Everything in this episode was real. The wires, the mines, the rifles and the battleships existed, and many of them worked. But almost all of it belonged to Li Hongzhang, or to men like him, and lived on the favour of a court that had other things on its mind. And somewhere across the water, in a country Li had long called the greatest danger to China, people had been taking notes. Next time, we go to the place where all of it would be tested: Korea. In December 1884, while the French war was still going on, a young Qing officer named Yuan Shikai broke a coup in Seoul with his own troops. For the next ten years he would run Korea for Li Hongzhang, while Japan watched, and waited.

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