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Self-Strengthening, episode 3

Tianjin, 1870

Treaties made at gunpoint have let missionaries into the interior, and across China placards say they steal children; in June 1870 a crowd in Tianjin kills the French consul, ten nuns and dozens of Chinese Christians. The episode follows Zeng Guofan, now viceroy of the capital province, as he is sent to settle it with French warships in the harbour and comes out of it called a traitor, and Li Hongzhang, who takes his place and holds it for twenty five years, and asks whether the massacre was a crowd's panic or a sign of what the treaties had done. It leans on foreign observers and scholars, with a Hunanese placard as the one Chinese public voice and Zeng's side heard a little.

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Transcript

Anson Burlingame
Anson Burlingame. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, we watched the Qing court start, carefully, to learn from the people who had just beaten it. In 1862, on Prince Gong's direct order, a school of languages opened in Beijing, so that the court would have interpreters of its own. In Shanghai, Li Hongzhang had a fifth of the port's yearly customs returns set aside for a new arsenal, and by late 1867 the Jiangnan Arsenal was making weapons and steamships. On the northern plain, Li took over the war against the Nian horsemen, boxed them in, and ended a fifteen year rebellion in three. And when the throne asked its great officials, in secret, what to do about the foreigners, Li answered that for the present the foreigners were powerful and the Chinese feeble, and that China had better learn why. So that was the mood in the late eighteen sixties: buy time, learn the tricks, keep the foreigners calm. This episode is about what happens to that plan when it meets the street. It is the story of a hope sent around the world, of a treaty that almost worked, and of a terrible day in a northern port city. And it is the story of the men sent to clean up after it: Zeng Guofan, who goes into that city as a hero and comes out of it called a traitor, and Li Hongzhang, who walks in behind him and stays. But we start with an American. Anson Burlingame was a former congressman from Massachusetts whom Abraham Lincoln had named American minister to China in 1861. He had spent his years there arguing that the Western powers should deal fairly with the Qing and stop pushing them around, and the men who ran China's foreign affairs had come to like and trust him. Those men sat in the Zongli Yamen, the office for foreign affairs that Prince Gong had set up after the war of 1860, the first time the court had a ministry for dealing with the West at all. Prince Gong was the emperor's uncle, a brother of the late Xianfeng Emperor, and in these years he was the court's face to the foreigners. He was a young man still, in his middle thirties, and he had learned his diplomacy the hard way, left behind in 1860 to make peace with the British and French while their armies sat outside Beijing and his brother the emperor fled north. At his side stood Wenxiang, a Manchu minister who did much of the daily work of the Yamen and one of the ablest men in the government. In 1867 Burlingame was preparing to go home, and he told the Chinese ministers he would gladly speak up for China in the capitals of the West. Wenxiang asked him a simple question. Why would he not represent China officially? Burlingame went to Robert Hart for advice, and Hart urged him to accept. Hart was the young Irishman from Ulster who ran the Imperial Maritime Customs, the service that collected the duties on China's foreign trade, and he worked for the Qing, not for Britain. At the end of November 1867, the diplomats in Beijing were startled to hear that the Chinese emperor had commissioned Anson Burlingame as his Ambassador Extraordinary to the courts of the world. Think about how strange that was. A dynasty that had agreed only a few years before, and only at gunpoint, to let foreign envoys live in its capital was now sending an American, on its own account, to speak for it abroad. Two Chinese officials, Zhigang and Sun Jiagu, went with him as fellow envoys, so that the mission was not only an American's. What did the Yamen actually want from him? Later Wenxiang put it plainly: the only instruction they gave their envoy was to keep the West from forcing railways and telegraphs on China, things they wanted only when China chose them for itself. In other words, the mission was about time. Time to put down the last rebellions, time to build the arsenals, time to train the interpreters. The treaties signed with Britain and France in 1858 were coming up for revision, and the court wanted the powers to slow down, stop pressing, and let China change at its own pace. The mission left Shanghai on the twenty fifth of February 1868, and sailed for San Francisco. And Burlingame turned out to be a spectacular salesman. He was a big, warm, florid speaker of the old American school, and in city after city the crowds and the newspapers loved him. In America he told his audiences that when the oldest nation in the world, holding a third of the human race, sought for the first time to come into relations with the West, and asked the youngest nation to carry its message, the mission was not one to be solicited or rejected. He told them China was ready to welcome missionaries, to "plant the shining cross on every hill and in every valley". Back in Beijing, the men who had sent him might have been surprised to hear it. The court had not, in fact, decided to welcome the cross on every hill, and nobody in the Zongli Yamen thought China was about to throw itself open. Wenxiang, for one, had often warned the foreigners about all this eagerness. "You are all too anxious to awake us and start us on a new road, and you will do it", he said, "but you will all regret it". In Washington, Burlingame sat down with the secretary of state, William H. Seward, and the two of them agreed a treaty, signed on the twenty eighth of July 1868. It promised that America would not meddle in China's own lands and waters, and it opened America freely to Chinese who wished to come and work, which suited the men building the railroads across the American West very well. When the text reached Beijing, the Chinese ministers were dismayed. Their envoy had negotiated it without their authority and on his own initiative, and they were brought to ratify it only with difficulty. Then Burlingame crossed to London, and there he got the thing the court had really sent him for. He arrived just as a new Liberal government took office at the end of 1868, and its foreign secretary was willing to listen. The Earl of Clarendon, Britain's foreign secretary, declared that Britain would not apply unfriendly pressure inconsistent with the independence and safety of China. Britain would deal with the court in Beijing rather than with every provincial governor, and it would not use force to push the pace of change. From London the mission went on through Europe, and in Berlin, Burlingame wired home the news he wanted: negotiations concluded with Prussia, a strong declaration by Bismarck in favour of China. The telegram ended with three words: now to Russia. He reached Saint Petersburg in the dead of winter, caught pneumonia, and died there in February 1870. The man who had been watching all this most closely was Robert Hart. Hart had urged Burlingame to go, and by the autumn of 1869 he was unhappy with the result. He wrote to a friend that he had come to see Burlingame's speeches as "a rhetorical use of the present tense for the future", a style that works wonders when you want an audience to picture things vividly. And his verdict was blunt: "the result of the mission as a whole has been misunderstanding at both ends of the line." Abroad, the mission did China real good, because it changed how Western governments talked about pressing her. At home it did something less helpful: its success gave the men at court a confidence in their own judgment that the facts did not warrant, and for some years it slowed them down. That was the court the Western public had been told was ready to plant the cross on every hill. They gave way only when they were told the powers would take it as an insult that Austria could not let drop. What they had held out against, for ten days after the other negotiations were finished, was letting the Emperor of Austria be styled Da Huangdi, great emperor. Hart saw the trouble in the small things too. The Western public had been told that China was ready to change. And the court in Beijing had been told, in effect, that the West would leave it alone. Hold on to that gap, because the rest of this episode falls into it.

Zeng Guofan
Zeng Guofan. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here is the other side of the treaties. The treaties of 1858 and 1860 had given foreign missionaries the right to travel, preach and own property in the interior of China, far beyond the treaty ports on the coast. A treaty port was a city opened to foreign trade and residence by treaty, where foreigners lived under their own consuls' law. And the Catholic missions had a special protector. France had made itself the guardian of the Catholic missions in China, whatever the nationality of the priests, and French consuls and French gunboats stood behind them. The French convention of 1860 had also promised to give back church property seized in earlier persecutions, and its Chinese text, though not its French one, let missionaries rent and buy land in every province. So a mission compound could rise on a site a local family had owned for generations, on the strength of a clause that most Chinese officials had never agreed to. By the late eighteen sixties, Catholic and Protestant missions were spreading into towns that had never had a foreign resident, protected not by local goodwill but by the treaties and the gunboats behind them. In the summer of 1868, a small British Protestant mission had settled in Yangzhou, an old and wealthy city on the Grand Canal, just north of the Yangtze. The Grand Canal was the great inland waterway that had carried grain from the south to Beijing for centuries. Placards went up in the city accusing the missionaries of the worst things people could imagine: scooping out the eyes of the dying, opening orphanages to eat the children, cutting open pregnant women to make medicine of the unborn. On the twenty second of August, a rumour went round that more foreigners had come and that twenty four children were missing. The crowd that gathered was put at not less than ten thousand people. They attacked the mission house. The foreigners inside, four men, five women and four children, barely escaped with their lives to a neighbouring house, and they were badly hurt. Now, the case went up to the viceroy at Nanjing, and the viceroy at Nanjing was Zeng Guofan. Zeng was the man who had saved the dynasty. A scholar official from Hunan with no military training, he had raised the Hunan Army in the eighteen fifties and spent a decade fighting the Taiping, and in 1864 his forces had taken Nanjing, the rebels' Heavenly Capital. A viceroy was a governor general, the court's top official over two or three provinces, with their armies and revenues in his hands. The court had already named him to a new post, as viceroy of Zhili. The answer from the British came by water. Medhurst, the British consul at Shanghai, went to Nanjing escorted by four ships of war. He handed Zeng an ultimatum, written as a polite but peremptory note, and at the same time he seized a new steamer that had just arrived for the viceroy, as a guarantee. Imagine that from Zeng's side. The man who had beaten the Taiping, sitting in the city he had won back for the throne, and a consul with warships on the river takes his new steamship as a pledge of good behaviour. The Zongli Yamen told Zeng he was not to leave Nanjing for his new post in Zhili until he had settled the Yangzhou affair to the foreigners' satisfaction. He settled it. The prefect and the magistrate of Yangzhou were dismissed from office, the full value of the property destroyed was paid, and a stone tablet was set up in the mission's buildings. A prefect governed a prefecture, a cluster of counties, and a magistrate governed a single county, the lowest official who answered to the throne. So the lesson of Yangzhou, for anyone watching, was clear. Look at what had happened in the space of a few weeks. A crowd had moved on a rumour about missing children, a mission had nearly been burned with its families inside it, and the answer had come not from a Chinese court but from a foreign consul's warships. When a crowd attacked a mission, a gunboat came, and Chinese officials paid. Some foreigners took it as proof that firmness worked, and in London the government thought Medhurst had gone too far. But in China, the people who hated the missions took a lesson from it too.

In September 1869, a placard appeared in Hunan, and copies of it spread across the whole empire. Hunan, which was also Zeng Guofan's home province, had a name as the most conservative province in China, proud of its scholars and fiercely hostile to foreigners; no foreign missionary could live openly there. The placard began by warning that a poisonous doctrine was gaining ground every day. It pointed out that Christ had been born under the Han dynasty, less than two thousand years ago, and asked whether the world before that had really had no divine ruler. Then it listed ten charges against the Christians. The first charge was that converts did not honour their ancestors, and had to prove their sincerity by destroying the tablets on which their ancestors' names were kept. Those tablets were the heart of family religion in China, the place where the living fed and honoured the dead, so to break them was to cut a family off from its past. From there the charges got wilder. Baptism, the placard said, used an ointment made from the corpses of priests, and after it converts went mad, smashing their ancestral tablets and tearing down temples. And then this, which I will read as it was put into English: "When an adherent of this religion is on his deathbed, his co-religionists require his relatives to leave the room, while they read prayers for his soul. In reality, however, while the body is still breathing, they take out the eyes and tear out the heart, to be used in making counterfeit money." Money came next. "To make converts, they count much on the power of money", the placard said, and it called the converts poor silly fools who sold their souls for a little money. And the missionaries, it said, hired smooth talkers to lure men and women away and sell them to depraved foreigners abroad. Sometimes, it said, their bodies were even "used as ground-bait for the fisheries of the Southern Seas." It called the missionaries "the spies of these trading bandits", meaning the foreign merchants. And it ended with a call: "Let each of us draw the sword for vengeance." Now, it is easy to laugh at the eyes and the hearts. But look at what is mixed in with them. The tablets were real: converts really were told to give up the rites to their ancestors. The link between the missionaries and the gunboats was real: Yangzhou had just shown it. The money was real, in its way, because converts did get help from the missions, and in a lawsuit a Chinese Christian could sometimes count on a missionary to lean on the magistrate. Robert Hart got hold of a pamphlet of the same kind the next year, and his reaction is telling. He wrote that it "is very clever and is a queer mixture of truth and error." It was plainly the work of a well read man, he thought, and he had no doubt that the scholar gentry kept it, and many more like it, on their shelves. The gentry were the local elite of degree holders, men who had passed at least the first rung of the civil service examinations, and they led opinion in every county in China. So these were not just the ravings of the street. The opposition to Christianity, Hart thought, came mainly from stories of what the priests did with women converts. Think about how a mission looked from inside a Chinese town. Men and women who were not related prayed together behind closed doors, foreign priests heard women's confessions in private, and strangers gathered up children no one else wanted. To a society that kept respectable women out of sight of strange men and organised its whole moral life around the family, each of those things looked sinister, and together they looked monstrous. The feeling against the missions ran from the educated man in his study to the crowd in the market, and in it fear and rage fed each other. And the story it told, of foreigners who took children and cut out their eyes and hearts, was about to find a city ready to believe it.

But first, one more turn of the hope. The British treaty of 1858 said that after ten years either side could demand a revision of its commercial terms. That made 1868 the year of revision, and both sides got ready. On the twelfth of October 1867, the Zongli Yamen sent a circular to the viceroys and governors of the provinces asking what China should concede and what it should refuse. Zeng Guofan's answer was careful and stubborn. Let in foreign salt, he wrote, and the state's salt monopoly would be destroyed; let foreigners trade in the interior and Chinese traders would be ruined. Salt was a state monopoly in China, and its sale brought the government one of its largest revenues. Steamers on the inland waters, he went on, would drive out the junks and beggar their sailors, and railways would bring carters, muleteers and porters to destitution. Only the opening of mines seemed to him worth a trial; the rest should be strenuously resisted, even, if it came to it, by war in a just cause. Notice who Zeng is worried about there: not the court's dignity, but carters and sailors, the people who would lose their living. He also took on the hardest question of all, the audience. Every foreign envoy wanted to be received by the emperor face to face, as an equal, without the kowtow. Zeng proposed a course that would best befit the equality admitted, and at the same time show the court's own courtesy and dignity. The kowtow was the full ritual prostration before the emperor, kneeling and touching the forehead to the ground, and to the court it was the outward sign that all the world stood below the Son of Heaven. The emperor, the Tongzhi Emperor, was still a boy, so the question could wait, but everyone knew it was coming. On the missionaries, though, he leaned toward conciliation, and he set out a hope that is worth hearing in full, in view of what was coming. "Although foreign nations are crooked and deceitful, they yet know that reason and right cannot be gainsaid, and that the wrath of a people cannot be resisted. By being entirely frank we may perhaps move them to hear reason." Li Hongzhang, answering the same question, was more open to the new things, as we heard last time: telegraphs, railways, steamers and machinery, he said, could also be adopted by China. He also turned the usual complaint on its head. It was often said, he wrote, that foreigners were crafty and malign; but was it not the fact that the outrageous craft and malignity of the Chinese exceeded even that of the foreigners? A government was strong, he argued, if it fed its people, armed its troops and gained the confidence of the people, and that, not some foreign trick, was the secret of the West. On the missions he was blunter than Zeng: their work was spreading and doing harm, and care must be taken that converts were not taken out of the officials' jurisdiction and that nobody was forced to convert. But he added that until the rebellions in Shandong and the northwest were put down, China was too weak to take a strong line with anyone. On the British side, the man who had to do the negotiating was Sir Rutherford Alcock, Britain's minister in Beijing. Alcock was a former army surgeon who had served for years as a consul in the Chinese treaty ports and then as Britain's first minister to Japan, so he knew the treaty ports from the inside. He invited the chambers of commerce in China, the British merchants, to tell him what they wanted. They told him. The merchants of Hong Kong demanded privileges for Protestant missionaries, freedom of travel, and steam navigation on the inland waters. In short, they wanted everything that Zeng had just told the throne to resist. And Alcock, to his credit, pushed back. He admitted that his own policy would not satisfy the merchants, and he warned that their tone of superiority and dictation was itself one of the greatest obstacles to progress. He told his own government that the true policy of the foreign powers would be to wait, because the Chinese would go faster and better if they were left alone. "If foreign powers would guide and not coerce this people," he wrote, "they must begin by convincing and persuading them." A joint committee, with Hart and two senior clerks working for Prince Gong, studied the questions, and the work finally produced a convention, signed on the twenty third of October 1869. It gave a little on each side. The duty on opium went up from thirty to fifty taels a picul, and in return foreign merchants won new trading rights. A tael was a Chinese ounce of silver, the unit in which the government reckoned money, and a picul was a load of about sixty kilograms, what a man could carry on a shoulder pole. And China won the right to appoint its own consuls in any British port, Hong Kong above all, where it hoped a consul could curb its own subjects' smuggling. This time, the Qing had sat down with Britain and bargained over the terms, instead of having them dictated at the end of a gun. Then the British merchants read it. Their opposition was directed against every one of the convention's provisions, without exception. The merchants lobbied London, and the hostile opinion was too unanimous to be resisted. The British government refused to ratify the Alcock Convention. Alcock himself put the lesson as bluntly as anyone ever has: "our position in China has been created by force — naked, physical force". He did not mean it as a boast. He meant that a position built that way could only be kept the same way, and that the Chinese knew it. So, by the spring of the next year, here is where things stood. Burlingame was dead in Saint Petersburg. The convention China had agreed with Alcock had been thrown out by London. In the provinces, placards called for the sword. And in the northern port city of Tianjin, sickness was coming to a Catholic orphanage.

Ruined Sisters of Charity chapel after the Tianjin Massacre, photograph by John Thomson, 1871
Ruined Sisters of Charity chapel after the Tianjin Massacre, photograph by John Thomson, 1871. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tianjin sits on the Hai River, a little over a hundred kilometres from Beijing, and it is the capital's door to the sea. It had been opened as a treaty port in 1860, and it had a French consulate, a new Catholic cathedral, and an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity, a French order of nuns. The Catholic missions in China took in abandoned and orphaned children, as they did around the world, and baptised them. And the sisters at Tianjin offered a small payment for each child brought in to them. You can see how that looked from the street. It was generally believed in the city that the payment was an incentive for Chinese to kidnap children and sell them to the nuns. Then, early in June 1870, an epidemic swept the orphanage, and between thirty and forty children died. They were buried in the mission's cemetery, and crowds of hundreds of Chinese came every day to dig up the bodies. The story ran through the city: children had disappeared, kidnapped by people in the missionaries' pay, and the sisters had killed them and torn out their eyes and hearts to make charms and remedies. You will remember the Hunan placard. In June a man accused of kidnapping named a Chinese man who served at the cathedral as the one who had paid him for the children. The officials took the witness to the cathedral, and there, on the spot, the details of his testimony were disproved one after another. It made no difference. At the inquest the mob took charge, rumour took the place of evidence, and the facts were declared proved. On the morning of the twenty first of June 1870, a crowd was gathering outside the cathedral. And now we meet the man who lit the match. There is no hero in this part of the story, and I want to tell it plainly. Fontanier was the French consul at Tianjin. The general view of him was of a man of quick and choleric temper, soured, and overexcited by a danger he had neither foreseen nor tried to avert. Fontanier went to the office of Chonghou, the high official responsible for the city's foreign affairs. Chonghou was a Manchu, the superintendent of trade for the northern treaty ports, and the court's man for foreigners at Tianjin. The consul arrived in a fury, with two pistols in his belt. He demanded that Chonghou send troops to break up the crowd at the cathedral. Chonghou tried to calm him, and told him that he had already sent men to keep order. And then, as Chonghou himself reported, the consul "drew a pistol from his belt, and fired it in my presence". The shot missed, and Fontanier was seized. Pause on that for a second. Think about how that would look to the crowd outside. Chonghou warned him that the crowd outside looked threatening, and advised him not to go out. But, reckless of his life, he rushed out of the yamen anyway. A yamen was the office and residence of a Chinese official, his courtroom and his headquarters in one. On his way back toward the cathedral, Fontanier met the county magistrate, who was trying to control the crowd, and the magistrate tried to stop him going on. Fontanier would not be stopped, and his conduct there, in front of the crowd, finished it. The mob, enraged, pursued him, surrounded him and killed him. Afterwards everyone who looked into it agreed on the indiscretion of his provocative bearing. But by then nobody could take it back.

Chonghou
Chonghou. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What followed lasted about three hours. It was three hours of murder, arson and plunder. The crowd burned the French consulate, the cathedral and the orphanage, and it went looking for foreigners and for the Chinese who worked for them. The Sisters of Charity were caught at the orphanage. Ten of them were killed. Two priests were killed, and Fontanier, and the man who worked with him at the consulate, Simon, and four other French men and women. Two Russian men and the wife of one of them were killed too, though they had nothing to do with the orphanage, amid shouts of "Kill the French first, then the other foreigners". And between thirty and forty Chinese who worked in the mission or the orphanage were killed with them. Remember them, because they are the easiest to forget: the Chinese Christians, the servants and the orphanage staff. They died for working where they worked, and for believing what they believed, in a city that had decided their employers were murderers. Where was the government while this happened? Chonghou had the court's authority and its prestige, but he had no control over the city's police. The local force answered to the city's own officials, the prefect and the magistrate, and they had not stopped the crowd. He could invoke the emperor, but he could not move a policeman. Later, when the orphanage was investigated, it was cleared completely of every charge of kidnapping and of taking eyes and hearts. So was this a crowd's panic, or a sign of what the treaties had done? It is the question at the heart of this episode. The honest answer is that it was both, and they fed each other. Nobody in that crowd had read a treaty. But everybody in it knew that the foreigners in their city answered to no Chinese court, that their priests could not be touched, and that when the foreigners were angry, warships came. At Tianjin, that fear and that rage had found a target. The rumour was false. But the rumour landed in a city where a mission really did pay a premium for children, and where a consul could fire a pistol in an imperial official's office. Alcock had said that the foreign position in China rested on naked physical force, and at Tianjin, for three hours, the force ran the other way. France sent troops and gunboats into the corridor between Tianjin and Beijing, and the court feared that France would declare war. Panicked officials ordered Li Hongzhang to march north with the strongest units of his Huai Army and prepare to fight the French. The Huai Army was Li's own force, raised in his home province of Anhui to fight the Taiping and armed with foreign rifles and guns. French warships began to arrive off Tianjin, and by the twenty second of August there were nine foreign warships there: five French, one American and three British. And the court ordered the viceroy of Zhili to go to Tianjin, investigate, and punish the guilty. The viceroy of Zhili, of course, was Zeng Guofan.

Zeng was in poor shape that summer. He was nearly sixty, worn out by the long war, and sick, nearly blind in one eye and troubled by dizzy spells. Before he set out for Tianjin, he wrote to his sons in the tone of a man who did not expect to come back. The crowd that had killed the French was a crowd of his own people, and the scholars of the capital were already hailing it as patriotic. Zeng arrived at Tianjin early in July, and found a city that was proud of what it had done. And on the other side was France, with warships off the coast and a man in Beijing who wanted blood. That man was the Comte de Rochechouart, who was running the French legation in Beijing as chargé d'affaires. A chargé d'affaires was the diplomat in charge of a legation when there was no minister, and Rochechouart was very much in charge. The other legations were surprised to learn that he had demanded the punishment by decapitation of the city's prefect and magistrate, and of a general, all suspected of a part in the riot. If he did not get satisfaction, he said, he would feel himself at liberty to withdraw his legation and the French subjects from Beijing, and leave the matter to the French admiral. Everyone understood what leaving it to the admiral meant. It meant guns turned on Tianjin, and perhaps another march on Beijing, ten years after the last one had ended with the emperor in flight and the Summer Palace in flames. The government told the other foreign ministers about the demand, and let them know it would not be met. It had already stripped the two officials of their rank and handed them over to the Board of Punishments, the court's ministry of justice. Prince Gong explained why it could go no further: by Chinese law, the execution of the prefect and the magistrate would be almost impossible. Neither had killed anyone, and the crowd had not acted on their orders. Under Qing law an official could be punished, harshly, for failing to keep order, but the penalty was dismissal or exile, not death without proof that he had planned the killings himself. And to behead an official of the empire because a foreign diplomat demanded it would tell every Chinese official in the land whose anger he had to fear most. This is the dilemma Zeng walked into. To refuse France anything risked war, and Li Hongzhang's troops were already on the march. To give France what it wanted meant beheading Chinese officials, and Chinese subjects, to answer for foreigners, in a city where everyone believed the foreigners had been murdering children. In the end, Zeng chose to give. His investigation found, as the orphanage inquiry did, that the rumours were false, and he said so in his report to the throne. Then he set about finding men to punish. His investigators rounded up suspects from the crowd, and the confessions began to come in. The number of heads China offered rose in time to twenty. Robert Hart, watching from Beijing, was merciless about it. Zeng's general inaction, Hart wrote that September, his fear of the people and his want of decision had led people very generally to wonder how he had won his former laurels. Then the war Zeng was trying to avoid arrived somewhere else. In July 1870 France went to war with Prussia, and at the beginning of September its army was crushed at Sedan and the emperor Napoleon the Third was taken prisoner. France had no more ships to spare for China. The French government had no attention to spare for Tianjin, and its naval officers in the East would not act without explicit orders. But none of that undid the pressure of the summer, and the court still had to give France something it could call satisfaction. Rochechouart later denied explicitly that he had ever presented an ultimatum with categoric demands.

Prince Gong
Prince Gong. John Thomson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The settlement came in imperial decrees that October. For proved murder, twenty Chinese were condemned to death by beheading. For robbery and wounding, six were banished for ten years and twenty five for three. The prefect and the magistrate of Tianjin, whose heads France had demanded, were banished for life to the penal settlements on the Amur, the river on the empire's far northern frontier. And China paid an indemnity of two hundred and fifty thousand taels. The confessions behind the death sentences had, invariably, been obtained by torture. And whether the men who died were the men who had killed was very much in doubt. China, in effect, gave France a score of labourers' heads, and refused the heads of the two officials. Sixteen of the condemned were beheaded at Tianjin on the nineteenth of October, and to the people watching they looked like heroes. That was France's redress for the Tianjin massacre: sixteen heads, and the cathedral rebuilt on its old site. Chonghou was sent to Paris to apologise in person, and arrived to find France defeated by Prussia, and waited months before anyone would receive him. An Austrian visitor who later toured the scene concluded that Prince Gong and the Chinese ministers had struck a fair balance. The man who had to strike that balance, day after day, was Prince Gong. From the Zongli Yamen he had to keep France from war, keep the other powers from joining in, and keep the scholars of the capital from deciding that the court itself had sold out. And he tried to stop it happening again. In 1871 the Yamen sent the foreign powers a set of proposed rules for the missions: orphanages to be watched or closed, men and women not to worship together, missionaries to stay out of Chinese lawsuits, and converts to remain under Chinese law like anyone else. The powers turned it down. So the treaties stayed exactly as they were, and the next riot was only a matter of time. A fair balance between France and China, maybe. For Zeng Guofan, there was no balance at all. In Beijing the scholar officials, many of them the same men who had praised him as the saviour of the dynasty, now called him a traitor who had sold Chinese lives to the foreigners. Even his fellow Hunanese in the capital turned against him. Zeng wrote afterwards that he felt ashamed before the opinion of the world and guilty before his own conscience. Think about where that leaves the man. He had spent the whole of his career doing his duty as a Confucian official understood it, and the one time he did what the moment required, the scholars he most respected turned on him. And the foreigners, for their part, thought he had simply been weak. So much for the hope that frankness might move the foreigners to hear reason.

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

The court moved Zeng back to his old post as viceroy at Nanjing, and he went south. He would be dead within two years, in March 1872. Li had begun his career on Zeng's staff, and it was Zeng who had first sent him out to raise an army of his own. And his place in Zhili went to Li Hongzhang. Li was forty seven that year, unusually tall for a Chinese of his day, a man who had spent the last decade in the field and was now about to trade it for a desk, receiving foreigners. In 1870 Li came to the viceroyalty of Zhili, and took over Zeng's troops there, bringing his own Huai Army units with him. With the viceroyalty came a second title, Superintendent of Northern Trade, and Li took over the talks with the French from Chonghou and Zeng. And here is the thing that matters for the rest of this season. Zhili was the most important province in the empire, and its viceroy was the throne's diplomatic outpost. Every foreign envoy with business in Beijing came by way of Tianjin, so the man who sat there met the foreigners before the court did. Li had been preparing for this job for years. And this was the man who had told the throne, in his memorial of 1867, that the foreigners, whatever else they were, dealt straight. He had watched foreigners fight at close quarters. In the same memorial, he told how he had seen the Englishman Gordon personally leading in advance of his troops at the capture of Suzhou, with a courage and coolness worthy of all praise. Gordon was the British officer who had commanded the foreign trained force called the Ever Victorious Army alongside Li's troops against the Taiping. And Li had told the throne something else in that memorial, which matters for the rest of this season. If China ever meant to take revenge on the foreign powers, he wrote, it would have to wait until it had large armies and abundant supplies, with no rebel or Muslim risings in the provinces and no trouble in the capital. Until then, China could not afford a rash conflict. In October a British consul went to see him, and came away reassured. Li, he wrote, was "fairly impressed with the idea that further troubles with foreigners must be avoided." That sentence could stand over Li's whole career. From 1870 until his death, his life was given over to dealing with the foreigners on China's behalf. And he stayed at Tianjin, firmly established, for a quarter of a century. No official was supposed to hold one post that long; it went against every rule of Qing government. But the Empress Dowager Cixi made her own rules. Cixi had been a junior consort of the Xianfeng Emperor, and since his death in 1861 she had ruled, with his widowed empress and Prince Gong, as regent for her small son, the Tongzhi Emperor. She found, again and again, that none of Li's critics at court could talk to the foreigners at the gate the way he could, and so she kept him there. Li would spend those years reproached by jealous critics at court for his soft line with the foreigners, while doing, at Tianjin, the work that none of them could do. Tianjin had broken one great official. It was about to make another. Li Hongzhang would turn that same city into the seat of his power, and from there he would build the fleets, the arsenals and the companies that this season is about. But not all the empire's troubles came by sea. Remember Li's warning: no reckoning with the foreigners while rebels and Muslim risings still burned in the provinces. Those risings were not a figure of speech. While the court was watching Tianjin, a vast stretch of the empire, out in the far west, had already been lost. Next time, we go to the deserts of Xinjiang, where a soldier of fortune named Yaqub Beg has made himself ruler of a kingdom at Kashgar, and we ask whether the empire could, or should, win back its far west.

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