Then and There Coming next Search

Self-Strengthening, episode 6

Taiwan and the Throne

In 1874 Japan, only six years into its own modernization, lands troops on Taiwan to punish villagers who killed shipwrecked sailors, and the Qing find they have nothing that can make them leave. The episode follows Li Hongzhang, who argues that the empire's danger now comes from the sea, and the empress dowager Cixi, who in January 1875 loses her son, the Tongzhi Emperor, and puts her three year old nephew on the throne so she can rule again, and asks where the empire's defence should look. It hears the court in its own edicts on the succession, alongside foreign observers and scholars.

Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify

Taiwan Island Beijing China
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

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

Last time, we watched Li Hongzhang try to win back China's trade, starting with ships. His China Merchants Steam Navigation Company opened for business in January 1873, kept alive by a guaranteed cargo of the tribute rice that fed the capital. In the spring of 1877 it bought out its biggest American rival, the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company, and added sixteen ships to its fleet at a stroke. We followed Rong Hong, too, a Yale graduate of 1854, as the first thirty boys of his Educational Mission set out for New England, and we watched the court call them all home in 1881, afraid they were losing their Chinese character. And in June 1873 we watched the young Tongzhi Emperor receive the foreign envoys without the kowtow, in a pavilion the court used for envoys from its vassal states. The first envoy he received that day, first and alone, was the ambassador of Japan. I told you to keep an eye on him. Because while he was in Beijing, Japan had raised a question about an island, and in the spring of 1874 it came back with an answer of its own. This is the episode where China discovers that its nearest neighbour across the sea has learned the West's lessons faster than it has. And it ends with a death in the palace, and a mother who would not let go of power. To understand what happened, we need to go back to December 1871, and to a shipwreck. Some sailors from the Ryukyu islands were shipwrecked on the unreclaimed part of Taiwan. The Ryukyu islands are the chain that runs south from Japan toward Taiwan, and in the 1870s they were a small kingdom of their own, with a king at Shuri, on the island of Okinawa. For centuries that kingdom had sent tribute to the Chinese emperor. In 1609 the Japanese domain of Satsuma had invaded the islands, and ever since, the king of Ryukyu had quietly paid Satsuma as well, while his envoys went on to Beijing as if nothing had changed, so that it belonged, in a sense, to both. The Qing either did not know or chose not to look. The sailors who came ashore on Taiwan were killed by the aboriginal tribes who lived there. Most of the crew died; the few survivors were taken in by Chinese settlers and sent home by way of Fuzhou, through the Qing officials, the way a tributary's shipwrecked sailors always had been. Taiwan was then part of Fujian province, ruled from the Chinese towns on its western plains, while the mountains of the east and the far south belonged to aboriginal peoples the Qing had never really governed. It was, as far as Beijing was concerned, a tragedy on the edge of the empire, and nothing more. Japan saw it differently. Japan had been through its own revolution only a few years before, when a group of young samurai overthrew the shogun in 1868 and set out to rebuild their country on Western lines, around a restored emperor. That new government wanted to show it could act like a modern power, and it wanted Ryukyu, and here was a way to claim the islanders as its own subjects. In a few short years it had abolished the old feudal domains, started a conscript army on Western lines, laid its first railway and telegraph lines, and sent half its leaders on a long tour of America and Europe to see how the West worked. It had also sent an envoy to Tianjin in 1871 to sign Japan's first treaty with the Qing, and the man who negotiated it on the Chinese side was Li Hongzhang. It was a treaty between equals, which was itself something new, because the Qing had never had formal relations with Japan at all, and had long thought of it as a minor island kingdom on the edge of the Chinese world. Now that distant island was building steamships and drilling its soldiers in Western uniforms. And it had picked up Western ideas about international law along with the uniforms: that a state either governs its territory or it does not, and that land nobody governs is open to whoever can take it. When Japan's envoys came to Beijing in 1873, they raised the killings with the court's foreign office. And they came away saying that China claimed no control over the tribes of the mountainous eastern half of Taiwan. In their reading, a people China did not govern was a people anyone could punish. And the Japanese government had another reason to want a war somewhere. Its ministers were glad to have an expedition to Taiwan to offer the old warrior gentry, men who were eager for a war, and who had been demanding one against Korea. The samurai had lost their old privileges in the reforms, and a foreign adventure was a way to give some of them something to do. An American adviser, a former consul at Xiamen who knew southern Taiwan, helped the Japanese plan the expedition. When the British and American ministers in Japan protested, the Japanese government wavered, and then the expedition sailed anyway. So in April 1874, an expedition sailed from Japan: three thousand troops, and as many transport coolies, under the command of Japanese generals, Saigō among them. On the seventh of May, they landed in a bay near the southern end of Taiwan. Within weeks they had fought their way into the hills and burned the villages of the tribes they blamed for the killings. The hardest fight came late in May, at a narrow gorge the Japanese called the Stone Gate, where they broke the tribesmen's resistance and killed one of their chiefs. After that the Japanese built a camp on the coast, with roads and huts, and settled in as if they meant to stay. The viceroy at Fuzhou, whose province included Taiwan, wrote to Saigō that the island was Chinese territory, and that it was for China alone to punish the tribes. And in Beijing, Prince Gong protested against Japan's denial of China's jurisdiction over the whole of Taiwan. Prince Gong was the emperor's uncle, and he had run the court's dealings with foreigners since 1861. Li Hongzhang, at Tianjin, had seen the wiser course a year before. In talks in April 1873 he had accepted the responsibility, and undertaken to get orders from Beijing to punish the offending tribes and keep them in order in future. It was a little late for that. Some years earlier, Li had assured the throne that, with the exception of Russia, the foreign countries were all too far away from China to want its territory. At the present moment, he had written then, the foreigners were powerful and the Chinese feeble. Japan was not far away at all, and the second half of that sentence was still true. The Qing had a problem: they had no navy that could stop a Japanese expedition, or drive one off. When the company was founded, an official had warned that if there were ever an incident on the maritime frontiers, the foreigners would withdraw their steamships. Now there was an incident on the maritime frontiers. What they did have was the steamships of Li's merchant company. The court sent Shen Baozhen, the official who ran the Fuzhou Navy Yard, across to Taiwan as its commissioner, with orders to defend the island. Shen found that he could not even get word across the strait in good time, and he complained that the Westerners had their telegraph cables running from Tianjin to Shanghai to Guangdong, and China had none. Troops had to come from far away; when the alarm came, Li's Huai Army was at Yangzhou. But by relying on the China Merchants company's ships, as one official put it, all the soldiers had crossed over to Taiwan in a few months. In the end, a total of ten thousand nine hundred and seventy Chinese troops were landed in the south of the island. So the rice ships we met last time turned out to be troop ships too. That was exactly what the men who founded the company had promised: that China could move its own people and its own grain without asking a foreigner for a ship. Shen Baozhen did not just wait for the Japanese to leave. He strengthened the forts on the coast facing the Japanese camp, and he began planning roads into the mountains of the east, so that the Qing could govern the parts of Taiwan it had always left alone. The next year the court lifted the old ban on Chinese settlers crossing to Taiwan, which it had kept in place for most of two centuries. Taiwan had suddenly become worth governing properly, because someone else had wanted it. Now there were two armies on the same end of the same island, and neither wanted to back down. The Japanese were suffering, though not from the Qing. Malaria and fever swept through their camps through the summer, and disease killed far more of their soldiers than the fighting ever did. Japan sent its most powerful minister, Ōkubo Toshimichi, to Beijing to settle the matter. Ōkubo was one of the men who had made Japan's revolution, the hard headed minister who ran its home affairs, and his coming showed how much the Taiwan affair mattered to Tokyo. He arrived in Beijing in September 1874 and sat down with Prince Gong and the ministers of the foreign office for weeks of talks. The Japanese argued that the tribes were outside Chinese rule, so Japan had a right to punish them; the Qing answered that Taiwan was Chinese, and that what happened there was China's business. He proposed that China pay Japan an indemnity of three million dollars. The Qing refused, and the talks dragged on. Ōkubo gave an ultimatum: the matter must be settled before the nineteenth of October, or Japan would carry on with the task it had started. As the talks stalled, Ōkubo let it be known that he was ready to leave Beijing without a settlement. Behind the talks lay a hard fact. The Qing had more men on Taiwan than the Japanese did, but if it came to war, Japanese warships could reach the Chinese coast, and the Qing had nothing at sea to stop them. For a few weeks in the autumn of 1874, the two countries seemed to be drifting into war. And it was in 1874, more than at any time before, that China first had serious cause to realise the growing power and the ambitions of Japan.

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

War did not come. The British envoy in Beijing, Wade, stepped in to broker a deal. Wade had good reasons of his own to want a settlement, because a war on the China coast would have been very bad for British trade, and Britain's merchants dominated that trade. He carried messages between the two sides and helped find a form of words both could sign. The question for Prince Gong and his colleagues was what they were willing to give up to make the Japanese go home. The answer turned out to be: money, and a principle. The agreement was signed at the end of October 1874. Japan agreed to withdraw its forces from Taiwan, and China agreed to pay Japan half a million taels of silver. A tael was the Chinese ounce of silver, the unit in which large sums were reckoned. One hundred thousand taels, it was stipulated, was compensation for the families of the murdered sailors. The other four hundred thousand covered the roads and buildings the Japanese had put up on Taiwan, which they were to leave behind for the Chinese government. That sounds like a modest bill, and it was. But the wording mattered more than the money. In the agreement, Japan's previous action was recognised as justified. And the compensation paid to the families of the Ryukyu sailors was paid to Japan. Think about what that meant. If Japan had been justified in avenging the Ryukyu sailors, then the Ryukyu sailors were Japan's people. Ryukyu had paid tribute to China for five centuries, and the Qing had just let it go with remarkable ease. Within a few years Japan would finish the job: in 1879 it abolished the kingdom of Ryukyu, sent its king to Tokyo, and made the islands a Japanese prefecture. It was the first of the Qing's tributary states to be taken, and it would not be the last. Wade was praised from all sides for the settlement. Peace had been kept, and the Japanese had sailed away. But a harsher judgement was waiting. The deal advertised to the world that here was a rich empire that was ready to pay, but not ready to fight. Maybe that is too harsh. The Qing had, after all, put an army of their own onto the island, carried there in their own company's ships. But they had no warships that could meet Japan's at sea, and everyone involved knew it. And the lesson Japan took from Taiwan was that China could be pushed. Prince Gong had kept the peace; he had also set a price. In Tokyo, Ōkubo came home in triumph. His government had shown its own angry samurai that it could fight abroad, and it had shown everyone else that the Qing would pay rather than fight. And it had put a claim on Ryukyu into a signed agreement with China.

Guo Songtao
Guo Songtao. Walter Goodman Uploaded by Swedensm at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Taiwan crisis set off one of the great arguments of the Qing court. Where should the empire's defence look? In the autumn of 1874, while the Japanese were still on Taiwan, the court asked its leading officials for their advice on how to defend the coast. The answers turned into a debate over two frontiers at once, and over money, because there was not enough of it for both. On one side stood Li Hongzhang. Li argued that the real danger now came from the sea, from Japan above all, and from the Western powers whose steamers could reach Tianjin and the capital in days. He warned that Japan in particular, close at China's elbow, would be a danger to China for a long time to come. He said that the empire should stop pouring money into the far west, accept the loss of the distant parts of Xinjiang if it had to, and spend what it saved on ships, guns and coastal forts. And he went further than ships. He urged the court to build telegraphs, open mines, and in time allow railways, and he proposed that the examinations open a new path for men who knew foreign affairs and Western learning. That last idea touched the heart of the scholar official world, and the court did not take it up. On the other side stood Zuo Zongtang, the general who had spent six years crushing the Muslim risings of the northwest, and who now stood at the edge of the desert in Gansu, waiting for money to cross it. Zuo argued that Xinjiang protected Mongolia, and Mongolia protected Beijing, so that to lose the far west was to open the whole northwest, and in the end the capital itself, to Russia. Each man had his own army and his own reputation tied to his side of the argument. Zuo had good reason to fear what would happen if the empire let the far west go. Russia had marched into the Ili valley in 1871, and promised Beijing that it would hand the valley back once the Qing were in a position to keep order there. But a Russian general had also proclaimed the territory annexed in perpetuity. And in Kashgar, Yaqub Beg had signed treaties with both Russia and Britain, and had declared himself a vassal of the Ottoman sultan, issuing coins with the sultan's head on them. To Zuo, a state like that on the empire's border, with Russia behind it, was not a far away problem. And Britain, looking north from India, liked Yaqub Beg as a buffer against Russia, which made his kingdom harder still to dislodge. Yaqub Beg had told the British envoys plainly that he particularly desired their friendship, and that it was essential to him. Zuo had learned in the Taiping war what happened when a rebellion was left half beaten. His reasoning was blunt: if he did not destroy the rebels, if he left root or branch, they might destroy him. Li's side had its own logic. Xinjiang was thousands of miles from the sea and from the empire's taxpayers, and every soldier sent there had to be fed by grain hauled across the desert at enormous cost. The coast was where the empire's money was, and the capital was a few days' sail from any enemy fleet. And each was, in his way, right. The court, in the end, decided to pay for both. In 1875 the court gave Zuo command of the campaign to retake Xinjiang, and that same year it set aside four million taels a year from the customs for a new navy, money that was rarely paid in full. The deciding voice for the west was Wenxiang, the senior Manchu minister of the foreign office, who backed Zuo and the reconquest. That is what happens when an empire has two frontiers and one treasury. And all along the coast, the officials who would have to fight the next war got to work on the land as well. After the Japanese threat of 1874, the government decided to strengthen its garrisons at the strategic points along the lower Yangtze, at Wusongkou, at Jiangyin, at Zhenjiang and at Nanjing. Wusongkou is the place where the Huangpu River, the river of Shanghai, meets the Yangtze, and it was the door to the richest region in the empire. Between 1874 and 1877 the governor of the province built a set of twelve gun emplacements there, where the Huangpu meets the Yangtze. Upriver, at Zhenjiang, the narrowest point on the lower river, the governor general Li Zongxi began work on gun emplacements of his own in 1874 and 1875, and by the late 1890s twenty one artillery pieces stood there. In the north, the officials around the capital were thinking the same way. Zhili's Dagu, Beitang and Shanhaiguan, one official wrote, were the strategic gateway to the capital. Dagu was the fort at the mouth of the river leading up to Tianjin, the place where the British and French had forced their way inland in the last war. Shanhaiguan was the pass where the Great Wall comes down to the sea. One man watched all this with a sharper eye than most. His name was Guo Songtao. Guo was a Hunanese scholar, an old friend of Zeng Guofan, who had served as acting governor of Guangdong and had seen the foreigners at close quarters. He had come to believe that the West's strength did not come from its guns alone, but from its trade, its industry and its way of governing, and that China could not buy one without the others. Looking at Jiangsu, the rich province around Shanghai and the lower Yangtze, he put it in a phrase: Jiangsu "can be enriched but not strengthened." Money it had; strength was another matter. When the court asked for advice in 1875, Guo urged it to look beyond warships, to merchants, to mines and to the kind of trade that made Western governments rich enough to build their fleets. It was not a popular kind of thing to say at the Qing court. And Guo is about to be given a chance to see the West for himself, a chance that will cost him dearly.

For Li Hongzhang, the Taiwan crisis was the moment his navy began. The Qing had built steamships before. Zuo Zongtang had founded the Fuzhou Navy Yard in 1866, and the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai had been turning out steamers since the late 1860s. But the court had built them slowly, and mostly as gunboats for chasing pirates and patrolling rivers. It was only after the Japanese threatened Taiwan in 1874 that the authorities launched an ambitious program of naval expansion. Even Zuo, the champion of the inland frontier, argued in 1875 that since the Western steam warships could sail straight to Tianjin, China must build steamships of its own, and that its naval forces had to be reformed. Spending on shipbuilding from the customs rose from four hundred thousand taels a year in 1867 to one point three four million in 1875. It was the customs revenue that paid for it, the duties collected on foreign trade at the treaty ports. The Customs was run for the Qing by a staff of foreign officers under an Irishman, Robert Hart, and it was the one branch of the empire's finances that brought in a steady flow of silver. That is where the money for the new navy came from: a tax on the very foreign trade the navy was meant to stand up to. In 1875 the court divided the coast into two zones, a northern and a southern, with separate commands. Li Hongzhang took charge of the northern coast, from Manchuria down past Tianjin and the capital to Shandong. The southern coast, from Shanghai down to Guangdong, went to the viceroy at Nanjing, and Shen Baozhen, the man who had defended Taiwan, soon held that post himself. It made sense on a map. It also meant that China would never quite have one navy, but several fleets, each belonging to the official who paid for it. The shipyards at Fuzhou and Jiangnan were set to building more ships, and the authorities began buying ironclads and other warships from British and German yards. An ironclad was a steam warship armoured with iron plate, the kind of ship that had made the old wooden navies of the world obsolete in the space of a decade. The arsenals in China could build wooden gunboats and small steamers, but not yet ships like that, so the biggest ones had to be bought abroad. The first purchases were small gunboats from Britain, ordered through Hart's Customs, each carrying a single heavy gun. In the 1880s Li's northern fleet added two battleships of seven thousand three hundred and thirty five tons, and several light cruisers. By 1889, twenty two steam powered vessels were patrolling the northern coastal waters. And officers had to be trained to run those ships. In 1877 the Fuzhou Navy Yard sent its best graduates to Britain and France, to study at naval colleges and serve aboard European warships. Some of the boys of Rong Hong's mission, called home from America, would end up in Li's navy too. And in 1885 the court created a Board of Admiralty, a navy office in the capital, as the result of Li's own urging. Japan was building too. Within a few years of the Taiwan expedition it ordered its own ironclads from British yards, and the race at sea between the two countries had quietly begun. We will come back to that fleet, and to that board, and to where the navy's money went, later in this season. For now, notice where it started. It did not start with a plan in Beijing. It started with a few thousand Japanese soldiers on a beach in southern Taiwan, and a Qing government that found it had nothing to send against them. For the next twenty years, the navy would be Li Hongzhang's great project, and in the end it would be judged against the same enemy that had started it.

While the Japanese and the Qing were bargaining over Taiwan, something else was going wrong in Beijing. The Tongzhi Emperor was eighteen, and he had been ruling in his own name for less than two years. His mother was the woman known to history as Cixi. She had come into the palace as a low ranking concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor, and she had given him the thing that mattered most, his only son. When Xianfeng died in 1861, she and his empress, with the help of Prince Gong, had seized power from the regents he had named, and for twelve years the two widows had ruled for the boy from behind a screen. Cixi was clever, tireless and very good at the politics of the palace, and she did not enjoy giving power up. When she and her fellow widow had overthrown the regents in 1861, it was Prince Gong who stood up in an audience and read out the edict, in the child emperor's name, charging the chief regent with treason. They had planned it for weeks, in secret meetings with Prince Gong's younger brother. From then on, the empress dowager ruled from behind a screen. She and Prince Gong worked together, at first almost as equals, and later, once the prince had learned his place, as mistress and minister. Her son's personal rule had not gone smoothly. He had quarrelled with his uncle, Prince Gong, over plans to rebuild the old Summer Palace that the British and French had burned in 1860. In September 1874, in a rage, the young emperor stripped Prince Gong of his titles, and it took the two empresses dowager themselves to restore them the next day. So the emperor who had just received the envoys had already fallen out with the man who arranged it. And the court never found out what kind of ruler he would make. In December 1874, the young emperor was attacked by smallpox. As he lay ill, the business of government passed back to his mother and the senior empress dowager, who took up the state papers again in his name. Smallpox was the disease the Manchu court had feared since the conquest; it had already killed an emperor of the dynasty, two centuries before. On the twelfth of January 1875, an imperial decree, addressed by the empresses dowager, announced that the emperor had died. In the court's own words, he had "ascended upon the dragon to be a guest on high." The court went into mourning, and for a hundred days the men of the empire were forbidden to shave their heads. He left no son. His wife, the young empress, was pregnant. The rules of the dynasty were clear on what should come next, or at least clear enough. A new emperor ought to come from the generation below the dead one, so that he could perform the sacrifices to Tongzhi as his son. Prince Gong proposed the obvious course: that the throne be left empty until the empress's child was born, and if it was a son, that child would succeed by right. Cixi had other ideas. On the very night of the death, she called the princes and the high officials together in the palace. Someone put forward Prince Gong's own son, and she brushed the nomination aside without giving any reason. Then she proposed a candidate of her own, Zaitian. Zaitian was three years old. He was the son of Prince Chun, Tongzhi's uncle, and his mother was Cixi's own sister. And he was of the same generation as the dead emperor, not the one below, which meant that, as a boy on the throne, he would need a regent for many years. The princes and officials voted. Of the princes and clansmen, seven voted for a young prince named Pulun, of the generation below, the one the rules pointed to. Three voted for Prince Gong's son, Zaicheng. And Zaitian received fifteen votes, including those of every one of the councillors and ministers, Manchu and Chinese. So the boy was chosen. Cixi did not leave the outcome to chance. She put the palace and its gates under the control of her faithful commander of the bodyguard, Ronglu. That night the three year old was taken from his father's house and carried to the palace. The decree that announced him said that he was adopted as the son of the Xianfeng Emperor, Cixi's husband, and would enter upon the inheritance of the great dynastic line as emperor by succession. He would reign as the Guangxu Emperor. Prince Chun, the boy's father, was said to have collapsed weeping when he heard his son named, because he knew what it meant for his son, and for himself. It was awkward for the father of an emperor to serve at court as his son's subject, and Prince Chun soon asked to give up all his offices. Notice whose son he was made. Not Tongzhi's son, but Xianfeng's: so Cixi was once again the mother of the reigning emperor, and once again entitled to rule for him. The two empresses dowager took their seats behind the screen again. With an infant on the throne once more, the foreign envoys who had won their audience in 1873 would not see an emperor again for fifteen years. And Tongzhi was left, for the moment, with no son to make his sacrifices. A few months later, in March 1875, the young widowed empress died too, and with her went any chance of a child of Tongzhi's. How she died, the court never explained, and Beijing believed the worst. The decision did not go unchallenged. Thousands of memorials poured in from the censors and the provinces, protesting strongly against the choice as a violation of the dynasty's ancestral custom. The censors were the court's licensed critics, officials whose duty was to warn the throne when it went wrong. One of them, a few years later, wrote out his protest and presented it at Tongzhi's grave, and beside the grave he killed himself. The court answered him by repeating the promise it had made from the start, that Guangxu's own son would one day be made Tongzhi's heir, and the matter was closed. Cixi had broken the rules and kept the throne, and the cost was one honest man and a great deal of grumbling. There was one powerful man who had no complaint at all. Li Hongzhang had everything to gain from Cixi's regency going on, and from a baby on the throne. A long regency meant a court that needed him, a ruler who knew him, and no young emperor with ideas of his own. And after the events of 1875, Li's influence with the empress dowager was more firmly established than ever. So by the spring of 1875 the pattern of the next fourteen years was set. A woman behind the screen in Beijing, a little boy on the throne, and in Tianjin the viceroy she trusted, building a navy against the enemy that had just landed on Taiwan. Where the empire's defence should look had been answered with a compromise: everywhere, and on credit. That compromise would hold for the next ten years, and it would be tested on every frontier at once. And Cixi, who had ruled for her son through his childhood, now had a second child to rule for. Guangxu would not come of age for well over a decade, and by the time he did, she had been the real power in the empire for nearly thirty years. Whatever the empire built in those years, its arsenals, its fleet and its companies, it built with her approval or not at all. But the next blow did not come from the sea, or from the desert. It came from the hills on the border of Burma, a few weeks after the little emperor was carried into the palace, when a young British interpreter named Augustus Margary was killed in a border town in Yunnan. Next time, Britain's minister turns that one death into a demand for everything Britain has wanted from China, and Robert Hart, Li Hongzhang and an envoy named Guo Songtao all have to find a way out.

Sources