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Self-Strengthening, episode 7

The Margary Affair

In February 1875 a young British consular interpreter, Augustus Margary, is killed on the Burma border of Yunnan, and Britain's minister Thomas Wade turns his death into a demand for everything Britain has wanted from China. The episode follows Robert Hart, the Customs chief who tells the court frankly how it must change if it wants to stop being bullied, and Li Hongzhang, who finally settles the crisis at the seaside town of Yantai, and the envoy Guo Songtao, sent to London to apologize, who becomes China's first resident minister abroad, and asks what the empire gave up for one man's death. It leans on foreign observers, with the court heard in its instructions to Hart and its envoys.

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Transcript

Augustus Raymond Margary
Augustus Raymond Margary. with a Portrait ENGRAVED BY JEENS - steht auf dem Titelblatt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Japan landed troops near the southern end of Taiwan to punish the hill tribes who had killed a crew of shipwrecked sailors from the Ryukyu islands. In the end Beijing paid Japan half a million taels to go home, and signed a paper agreeing that Japan had been right to come. A tael is the Chinese ounce of silver, the unit nearly every sum in this story is counted in. The British minister in Beijing, Thomas Francis Wade, brokered that settlement, and was praised from all quarters for it. Remember his name; he is about to become the main character of this episode. Only after that scare did the Qing begin an ambitious program of naval expansion, and officials like Li Hongzhang started buying warships from British and German firms. And then, on the twelfth of January 1875, the young Tongzhi Emperor died, and the court learned of it in the language of the throne: he had ascended upon the dragon to be a guest on high. The empress dowager Cixi set aside the two candidates with the better claim and put forward her own sister's son, who became the Guangxu Emperor, and she took up the regency once more. Thousands of memorials poured in from the censors and the provinces, protesting that the choice broke the custom of the dynasty, and in time one official carried his protest to the dead emperor's grave and killed himself beside it. So that is where we stand: a child emperor, a regent in the palace, and an empire that has just shown the world it will pay rather than fight. This episode is about what the world did with that lesson, and it begins far from Beijing, on a jungle track on the border between China and Burma. It begins with one young Englishman. His name was Augustus Margary, and he was twenty eight years old. Margary was an interpreter in the British consular service, one of the young men Britain trained in Chinese so that its consuls in the treaty ports could talk to the officials they dealt with. A treaty port was a Chinese city opened to foreign trade and residence by treaty, where foreigners lived under their own consuls and their own laws. The treaties signed at Tianjin in 1858, after the second war with Britain and France, let foreign ministers live in Beijing, and let foreigners travel into the interior on passports issued by their consuls and countersigned by Chinese officials. Hold on to that word passport. It is going to matter. Then Margary was taken off his work at the legation in Beijing and given a strange assignment: to serve with an expedition coming into China from the other direction, out of Burma. To understand that expedition, you need to know a little about Burma at this time. Lower Burma, along the coast, had been taken by Britain in wars earlier in the century and was ruled as part of British India. Upper Burma was still an independent kingdom, ruled by its king from his capital at Mandalay. For years, merchants and officials in British India had dreamed of a back door into China, a trade road running up the Irrawaddy River to the town of Bhamo near the frontier, and then over the hills into the Chinese province of Yunnan. Bhamo sat on the upper Irrawaddy, near the head of navigation for river steamers, a short march from the Chinese border. A first British party had gone up from Bhamo in 1868 and reached the Chinese side of the hills before turning back. The government of British India sent a second expedition to try that road in 1874, under the command of Colonel Horace Browne. When it was finally assembled, it numbered one hundred and ninety three people, all told. Its job was to explore the trade routes from Burma into Yunnan, and the legation in Beijing was asked for passports and an interpreter to go with it; the man Wade chose was Margary. Yunnan is China's far southwestern province, high country cut by mountain ranges and deep river gorges, and in those years it was one of the most remote corners of the empire, weeks of hard travel from the coast. So on the twenty second of August 1874, Margary left Shanghai with six Chinese companions. They went up the Yangtze, across the great Dongting Lake, and up the Yuan River into the mountains of Guizhou, and on from there into Yunnan. Yunnan was only just coming out of nearly two decades of war, after the Muslim rising there was finally crushed in 1873. It was a long, hard road, and he was the first Englishman to travel the whole of it, from China through to Burma. From Shanghai to Bhamo, he was on the road for nearly five months. What strikes you about Margary is that he enjoyed it. He found the people charming nearly everywhere, and the mandarins, as he put it in one of his letters, extremely civil. He was met with discourtesies and petty vexations day after day, and he brushed them aside with a firm hand, and without losing his temper. Keep that picture of him in mind, a young man who did not lose his temper, because the man who will speak for him after his death is going to be quite different. All along this route, he reported, he had been received in the most friendly way. Near the frontier he spent several days as the guest of a local commander known as Colonel Li, a man who had attacked the first British expedition and been called a brigand. Margary wrote that he was "an exceedingly courteous, intelligent and straightforward man" who had done everything to help the expedition along, and had treated him with unexpected civility. Hold on to that man Li. We will come back to him. The hills between Bhamo and the Chinese border belonged to the Kachin, hill peoples who farmed their slopes and took tolls, or plunder, from the caravans that crossed them. On the seventeenth of January 1875, Margary crossed the frontier and arrived at Bhamo, where the expedition was waiting. For a few weeks, they waited together for the road to be ready. His last letters from Bhamo are cheerful. He went out with the expedition's doctor on a long tramp across the jungle and into the hills, and they watched a river leave the hills by one of the most lovely gorges he had ever seen. "Excursions like this are of course of daily occurrence," he wrote, "and we live a regular gipsy life." The hill people along the road, he joked, would think twice before attacking Europeans armed with double barrelled guns, especially ones carrying nothing worth stealing. One night the camp woke to a hideous yell. It was only the expedition's own Burmese escort, a few hundred strong, roaring at a wounded buffalo that had charged into the camp with a band of hillmen after it. If their bite were only equal to their bark, he wrote of the escort, the expedition might laugh at any raiders in the hills. The Burmese official in charge took hostages from the hill chiefs to keep the road open, and the camp packed up and moved. On the sixth of February 1875, Colonel Browne's expedition left Bhamo for the frontier. This frontier was wild country, in much the condition of the border between England and Scotland three hundred years before. Margary left with his own Chinese companions to consult Colonel Li, on whose friendliness he relied, and on the twentieth of February he wrote that the ways were safe. On the twenty first, he was killed by a body of armed Chinese, and five of his six Chinese companions with him. The five who died were men from the eastern provinces. The sixth was left alone, because he was a native of Yunnan. The news reached Browne only on the twenty fifth, from a Burmese: Margary and his men had been treacherously killed. So who killed him? Here the sources disagree, and it matters, because the answer decides who should pay. On one side, the killing was the work of a conspiracy that reached right up to the King of Burma and the acting governor general of Yunnan and Guizhou himself, and some held that this was later proved. On the other, the man often named as largely responsible was that same Colonel Li, a borderer with a Burmese mother. And there was a third possibility: the frontier tribes themselves, under China in name but really independent, and easily alarmed by the rumours of an armed force led by Englishmen they did not know. Against the charge on the governor general, it was argued that he would hardly have ignored a safe conduct from the court's own foreign office and dragged the empire into a needless war. Whoever gave the order, an Englishman who mourned him wrote that year that the young man's death "will be avenged amply enough, more amply indeed than he would have desired." The expedition's doctor wrote that Margary had left his countrymen a public duty: to establish in those border lands the right of Englishmen to travel unmolested. His name, the doctor thought, would be best honoured by a party of his countrymen marching that same road between Burma and China, in honour and safety, and keeping it open as his most lasting monument. The mourner who wrote of vengeance saw it a little differently. Whether Englishmen could ever travel that road safely, he wrote, would depend on how faithfully they copied Margary himself: on whether they too could find the people charming, and the officials civil, and keep their tempers. He was right.

Margary's death was only the first half of what happened on that border. Colonel Browne, who crossed the frontier with the main body on the eighteenth of February, had been hearing warnings for days. On the sixteenth of February, the British Resident at the Burmese court in Mandalay had reported a story going round the palace, that a large body of Chinese was ready to stop the mission from entering China. Letters went round among the Burmese attached to the force, warning them not to be with Colonel Browne on the twenty third of February, because that night the foreigners were to be attacked. And a Burmese came to Browne himself and told him that an ambush had been laid to bar his way forward. But Margary's letter said the road was safe, and Margary was the man who had just walked it. So Browne went on. On the twenty second of February, the day after Margary died, the expedition found itself surrounded on three sides by threatening bodies of armed Chinese. Browne had a small guard of Sikh soldiers from the Indian army with him. He ordered the Sikhs to open fire, and under that fire the expedition was able to pull back. By the twenty sixth the whole force was back at Bhamo. The expedition had been sent to prove that the road was open, and it had proved the opposite. And that was the end of the dream of a road from Burma into China, at least for now. Think about what that looked like from the British side. A British officer, travelling on a passport from the Qing government, had been killed on Chinese soil, and an expedition sent by the government of India had been met by armed men and driven back. With warnings like those, the resistance seems to have been planned in advance, and Margary's murder was one episode in it. Whether the men on that border were acting for the Qing or only for themselves, it was the Qing who would be made to answer.

Thomas Francis Wade
Thomas Francis Wade. Unknown engraver, after Eveleen Myers (1856–1937), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

News moved slowly from the Burmese frontier to the capital. Wade, the British minister in Beijing, learned of the attack on the mission and the murder of Margary on the eleventh of March. Wade was no stranger to China. He had first come out as a young army officer during the Opium War, had learned Chinese better than almost any Westerner of his generation, and had been Britain's minister in Beijing since 1871. He was also, by his own admission, a man with a temper. We will come back to that. It took Wade eight days to decide what he wanted. On the nineteenth of March, he set out his demands. Demands like these went to the Zongli Yamen, the court's office for foreign affairs, set up in 1861 and run by the emperor's uncle Prince Gong. The first demand was the obvious one: the Qing government must send a commission to investigate, and the inquiry must be carried out in front of British officers. Think about what that meant: a Qing inquiry into the conduct of Qing officials, in a Qing province, with foreign officers sitting in the room to watch. The third was money: one hundred and fifty thousand taels, to be placed in Wade's own hands, to be used as he saw fit later. And then the demands began to go a long way past Yunnan. This is the moment where a murder case turns into something else. The fourth was that the treaty of 1858 be read so as to give foreign ministers a fitting and satisfactory audience of the emperor. Two years earlier the foreign envoys had at last been received by the Tongzhi Emperor, after a long fight over the kowtow. Now that emperor was dead, and the new one was a child of three. The kowtow was the full prostration before the emperor, kneeling and touching the forehead to the ground, which the foreign powers refused to perform. The treaty of 1858 had said that the British minister would never be asked to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as the representative of a sovereign on an equal footing with the emperor, which in practice meant no kowtow. The sixth demand was that all claims arising out of the action of officials in the provinces be satisfied at once. Do you see what Wade was doing? There was a long list of outstanding questions between Britain and the Qing, and none of them had anything to do with Yunnan. Now he seized the opportunity provided by an attack on a British mission and the murder of a British officer to press for a favourable settlement of all of them at once. Margary's death had become a lever, and Wade meant to use it to move everything. And to be fair to Wade, from where he sat this made perfect sense. A crisis was the only time the Qing ever seemed to move, and he had one in his hands. But try looking at it from the Qing side of the table, where a murder on a far frontier had just become the price of everything else. Not everyone in the foreign community liked that. The ministers of the other powers in Beijing did not generally approve of bringing in those outside matters. The American minister was blunter about it. He was ready to back Wade on the murder, he said, but he was decidedly opposed to complicating the case with other issues. Even London was cautious. The government at home approved the first two of Wade's demands, starting with the inquiry, and suspended judgment on the third, the money. In the end the other envoys offered to support Wade on the murder if he would keep it apart from everything else, and on that voluntary offer, he agreed to divide the issues. So the commission went ahead. In time, an inquiry into the murder and the attack on the mission was held in Yunnan, with a British diplomat named Grosvenor and his staff sitting in to represent England. And the extra demands, the audience and the trade and the claims, seemed to go away. For five months no further reference was made to them. Then, in August, Wade revived them.

By the late summer, Wade had decided that the Qing were stalling. And the Qing ministers he was dealing with had decided that Wade was impossible. One of them was Chonghou, the official who had carried the court's apology to France after the killings at Tianjin five years before. It was impossible, Chonghou complained, to take seriously anything Wade said: now this, now that, today yes, tomorrow no. Wade himself did not entirely disagree. He defended the substance of everything he had asked for, but of the way he had asked for it, he wrote: "For the manner, for my frequent loss of temper in argument, I put forward no excuse." In September, the loss of temper turned into something more serious. Wade presented the Zongli Yamen with an ultimatum. He demanded satisfactory assurances by the twenty ninth of September, or else. The or else was this: he would withdraw the British legation from Beijing, and pull the British communities out of the northern treaty ports. In the language of nineteenth century diplomacy, a minister taking his legation and his merchants out of a country meant that the next people to arrive would be soldiers. Britain had done it before. Just fifteen years earlier, a British and French army had marched on Beijing and burned the emperor's Summer Palace, and Prince Gong had been the man left behind to make the peace. And the Qing had nothing at sea that could stand against the Royal Navy; the ironclads Li Hongzhang wanted were still only plans. So the ministers bargained, and gave a little, and bargained again, and the deadline came closer. Only by a concession in the last hour of the last day was Wade restrained from carrying out his threat. That is how close it came. But a concession at the last hour is not a settlement. On the eleventh of October Wade left Beijing for Shanghai, leaving his fellow foreign ministers in the capital discontented with how he had handled things. A British minister who leaves the capital is a minister no longer talking, and when talk stops, people start counting ships. And while all this was going on, the Qing had turned to someone else for help.

Robert Hart was, in a way, the strangest official in the Qing empire. So here we have two Britons in Beijing at the same moment, both speaking Chinese, both long in the country, and pulling in opposite directions: one threatening the Qing on behalf of Britain, the other advising the Qing on how to stand up to it. He was an Irishman from Ulster, and since 1863 he had been the Inspector General of the Imperial Maritime Customs, the service that collected the duties on China's foreign trade. He had come out to China at nineteen as a student interpreter in the British consular service, the same kind of post Margary held, and had moved into the Qing Customs a few years later. The Customs was a Chinese government office, paid by the Qing and answering to the Zongli Yamen, but its senior staff were foreigners, and Hart ran it from Beijing. Its revenues were paying for the empire's new warships. And Hart was the foreigner the Zongli Yamen most often turned to when it needed to know how the outside world worked. On the twenty second of September 1875, a week before Wade's deadline, the Zongli Yamen called Hart in to talk over how the customs revenue and the likin taxes at the treaty ports might be adjusted. They asked him for a written paper on the better regulation of commercial relations, an instruction he chose to read very broadly. And they told him that in everything he proposed, he must bear in mind "how all-important it is that his proposals should be advantageous and not harmful to China". Hart took that instruction seriously, and he took his time. The paper he wrote is a long one, and it is one of the most remarkable documents in this whole story, because in it a foreigner in the Qing service tells both sides exactly what he thinks of them. Summing up the commercial complaints of both sides, he put it in a way that is hard to improve on. "The foreigner complains that China violates his Treaty rights. China complains that the foreigner abuses his Treaty privileges." Then he went through the complaints, one side at a time. On the foreign side, he wrote, the complaints were that foreigners were not allowed to travel freely, or settle inland, or work mines, or build railways and telegraphs and mints, or bring in the machines they were convinced would do China good. All of which, he said, came down to one charge: that China would not take foreign advice, and so China, in a word, was hostile. But the Chinese side had complaints too, and these were growing. The treaties, Hart wrote, had brought commercial and financial disorder across China, and administrative trouble for the government and officials, and local grievances for the gentry and the people. The country was beginning to feel that the government had agreed to arrangements by which China had lost face. The officials, he wrote, had long known that they were becoming ridiculous in the eyes of their own people, because wherever a foreigner was involved, they could neither enforce a Chinese right nor redress a Chinese grievance, even on Chinese soil. And the government, he wrote, "has to admit that for what it has given up, it has got nothing to show in return", and all of it was blamed on the treaty clauses that put foreigners outside Chinese law. It was quite possible, Hart allowed, that the treaties were not really to blame for everything laid at their door. But whatever handles they offered were eagerly seized on all sides, and the grievances would be felt and complained of more and more, the longer they were left alone. That principle was called extraterritoriality: a foreigner in China who was accused of a crime was tried not by a Chinese magistrate but by his own country's consul, under his own country's law. Now, Hart did not spare the Chinese either. Why, he asked, had China been so unwilling to take foreign advice? He gave four reasons, and the first did not mince words: "the Chinese are a very conceited people". Remember who he was writing for. This was a paper for the Zongli Yamen, the very ministers he was describing. They would hardly allow, he said, that their condition could be improved upon. Second, they were a very contented people, who disliked and feared change, and believed that the way of life that had satisfied their forefathers for two or three thousand years would do well enough for them. Third, officials and people alike had known nothing of foreign things, and had never imagined there was anything better outside China than they already had in it. And fourth, the officials above all were suspicious, and still thought every foreign word had some hidden object and every suggestion some sinister motive. On the Chinese side, he wrote elsewhere, change was not welcome, change was always suspected, and was met by counteracting influences on every side. That sounds harsh, and it was meant to be. But then Hart turned it around on the foreigners. All of these obstacles, he wrote, would weaken by themselves as the Chinese came to know foreigners better. But for now, their power would be "rather increased than removed by any foreign pressure intended for their removal." In other words, every time a Wade threatened war to force China to change, he made change harder. Then came Hart's proposals. What was needed, he wrote, was an effort to persuade the foreigners to accept limits, and China to give enough ground in return. China should open new ports to foreign trade, on the Yangtze and on the coast, among them Chongqing, Yichang, Anqing, Wuhu and Wenzhou. Treaty port courts should be set up at each port, to apply a common code of law to Chinese and foreigners alike, presided over by a Qing official with a foreign judge beside him. The official he had in mind was an expectant daotai, a man qualified and waiting for a post as circuit intendant, the official who stood between the province and the prefectures and often handled foreign affairs at the ports. In these courts, he wrote, there should be no torture in the questioning of witnesses, and no accused man should be required to confess his guilt. Torture to obtain a confession was a normal part of a Qing trial, and it was one of the main reasons foreigners gave for refusing to submit to Chinese law. And the hated word itself could go. The word extraterritoriality, he suggested, could be given up, and of the things it covered, only those kept that were really useful to the one side and really harmless to the other. His conclusion was that both sides needed the treaties changed, not confirmed: "it is change and not confirmation that is called for". He signed the paper in Beijing on the twenty third of January 1876: Robert Hart, Inspector General of Imperial Maritime Customs. And he closed with a warning to anyone who thought he had solved everything: these proposals, he wrote, must not be supposed to be "a panacea for all ills, or a philosopher's stone, to turn all they touch into gold". Look at what he had done. Asked by the Qing how to fend off the foreigners, he had told them that the foreigners had a point, and that they did too, and that the only way out was for both sides to give something up. It was an extraordinary piece of advice. How much of it anyone would take was another matter. What actually settled the Margary affair was not a new system of law. It was a bargain, struck by the one Chinese statesman willing to put his name to it.

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

That statesman was Li Hongzhang. Li had spent his whole career dealing with foreigners, from the fighting around Shanghai at the end of the Taiping war to the settlement after the Tianjin killings, and he had a reputation, at court and among the foreign envoys alike, as the one Qing official who could make a deal stick. By 1876 Li was governor general of Zhili, the capital province, and the court's commissioner for the northern ports, the man who handled most of the empire's business with foreigners from his headquarters at Tianjin. Through the spring and summer of 1876 Wade kept up the pressure, and the court finally sent Li to meet him as its envoy, with full powers to settle. They met at Yantai, a treaty port on the north coast of the Shandong peninsula, where foreign diplomats and naval officers liked to spend the hot months by the sea. Wade still had one demand that went to the heart of the matter. He wanted the Yunnan officials he held responsible put on trial. That demand was rejected. And then, having given up on the trial, Wade asked for, and got, everything else he had been trying to get for the past eighteen months, and more. The agreement was signed on the thirteenth of September 1876, and the Qing ratified it four days later, on the seventeenth. Here is what it said. China would pay an indemnity of two hundred thousand taels, for the families of the men who had been murdered, for the costs of the whole case, and for claims from British merchants. China would open four more cities as treaty ports: Yichang, far up the Yangtze, Wuhu, lower down the river, Wenzhou on the coast, and Beihai in the far south. Yichang sat at the mouth of the great Yangtze gorges, the gateway to Sichuan, and Beihai was a harbour on the Gulf of Tonkin, near the border with Vietnam. At the existing ports, the ground rented by foreigners would be treated as the zone where goods were free of likin. Likin was a tax on goods in transit, collected at barriers along the roads and rivers, which the provinces had invented in the 1850s to pay for the war against the Taiping, and which they had never given up. Cases mixing Chinese and foreigners would be tried under the law of the official trying the case, so a British defendant would be tried under British law, and a Chinese defendant under Chinese law. And finally, an imperial letter expressing regret was to be carried to London by a special mission. So the Qing paid, sent its regrets to London, and opened four more cities. But Li had not come to Yantai only to give. He balanced the usual blood money for a British official's life by winning conditions by which China could expect a considerable addition to the duties on Indian opium, and new likin revenues on foreign imports. Opium was still the biggest single thing Britain sold into China, and the duty on it was money the Qing badly needed. He also proposed that the provinces put out proclamations, so that if a foreigner with a passport came to serious harm because the local officials failed to protect him, the provincial authorities would be held directly responsible. It was, in its way, an answer to the question the Margary killing had raised: who answers when a foreigner dies on the frontier? And there was one more thing about Yantai that set it apart. And Li did something no Chinese minister had done before. He took the responsibility on himself, and braved the hostility of irreconcilable critics, Chinese and Manchu. On the fifth of October 1876 he set out the results of his negotiation and the settlement of the Margary case in a memorial to the throne. A memorial was the formal written report or petition that an official sent to the emperor, the main channel through which the empire was governed. So was it a good deal? The British merchants on the China coast were against it. The chambers of commerce at Shanghai and Hong Kong received the convention with open hostility. And the British government, while it approved the terms in principle, bowed before the storm of criticism. Britain did not ratify the Yantai agreement for nine years, until July 1885. The Qing had ratified in four days. The British took nine years. Make of that what you will.

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

There is one clause of that settlement that matters more than all the others, and it is the apology. To understand why, you have to remember that the Qing had never kept a resident ambassador at any foreign court. In the old order, foreign rulers sent envoys to the emperor, bearing tribute; the emperor did not send envoys to sit at foreign courts as equals. Foreign ministers had lived in Beijing since 1861. But in fifteen years, no Qing minister had ever lived in London, or Paris, or Washington. Some officials had been saying for a while that this had to change. In the six months from December 1874, many memorials from viceroys and governors were presented to the throne, all urging that China send ministers abroad. One of them came from Li Hongzhang. And the mission to London gave the court its chance. An apology mission was nothing new. After the Tianjin killings of 1870, as we heard, Chonghou had been sent to France to make a humble apology. That mission had not gone entirely smoothly. In Paris, after the fall of the Commune, Chonghou was taken on a tour of the city's famous sewers. He went in at one point and came out at another, and found a great crowd waiting for him, and he concluded that being sent underground while thousands of French people walked over his head had been a deliberate humiliation, designed to make him atone for what his countrymen had done. He was told that two Brazilian princes had toured the sewers the very same day. He does not seem to have been convinced. He came home impressed all the same. France, he told an American friend in Beijing, was still "a wounded tiger, not to be trifled with." The mission to England in 1876 had the same origin, to avert war by apologizing for an outrage, the killing of a young Englishman called Margary. But this time there was a step forward. The minister who carried the apology was appointed to stay. The man chosen was Guo Songtao. Guo was a scholar of genial manners and high reputation in the world of letters, a member of the Hanlin Academy, and a former governor of Guangdong. He was nearly sixty, a man from Hunan who had been a friend of Zeng Guofan since their student days and had helped him find the money to raise his army against the Taiping. The Hanlin Academy was the court's academy of the most brilliant graduates of the imperial examinations, the scholars who drafted the throne's documents and taught its princes. And Guo had views of his own on the coast. In the arguments over coastal defence, he had said of the province of Jiangsu, around Shanghai, that it could be enriched, but not strengthened. Shortly after he came to Beijing to wait for an appointment, Guo went to call on that same friend of Chonghou's, the head of the court's college for interpreters. That same day, a brother of the great general Zeng Guofan, himself a former provincial governor, came to call as well. Both men asked the American the same question: what one measure would he recommend as of first importance for China? His answer was the establishment of "permanent legations in the leading countries of the West." When Guo received his appointment, he went back to the American, reminded him of what he had said, and told him he had been much struck by it. And with that, the man sent to apologize became something new, China's first resident minister in a foreign country. He did not go alone. A friend of his, Liu Xihong, was at Guo's own request attached to the mission as his deputy. That arrangement did not last long in peace. Liu was annoyed to find himself treated as a mere secretary, quarrelled with his chief, and denounced him. Liu would soon be given a legation of his own, presenting his credentials in Berlin on the twenty eighth of November 1877. Guo also took with him a Scotsman named Halliday McCartney, a former army doctor who had run an arsenal for Li Hongzhang. McCartney went with Guo to London, and for thirty years, until December 1905, he would be the trusted adviser of every Chinese minister who came after Guo at the London legation. Guo and Liu did not leave Shanghai until December 1876. They reached London on the twenty first of January 1877, and on the eighth of February the queen received them and they presented their credentials and the imperial letter of regret, with Wade himself in the room. The voyage took him by steamer through Hong Kong, Singapore and Sri Lanka, and through the new Suez Canal, some seven weeks at sea. In 1878 the court made him minister to France as well, and on the sixth of May he presented his credentials to the French President. And others followed him out. In October 1878 Chen Lanbin, who had brought the first students across to America in 1872, presented his credentials in Washington. So the empire that had never kept a minister abroad now had ministers in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington. It had all begun with an apology for the murder of one young Englishman. So what did the empire give up for one man's death? Some silver, more open ports, and a little more of its say over what happened on its own soil. But it gained something too, almost by accident: a window on the world, in the form of a scholar sitting in London, writing home about what he saw. And there is a sting at the end of this story. Guo kept a diary of his voyage to England, full of admiration for what he saw of the West, and he sent it home to the Zongli Yamen, which printed it. He wrote that the Western nations had a civilisation of their own, with laws and government worth learning from, and that they were not barbarians in the old sense at all. At home, a censor attacked it, and the court ordered the printing blocks destroyed. The man who went abroad to apologize to the West had come to admire it, and in Beijing, admiring the West could cost a man his name. Next time, we turn our backs on the sea and go west, where Zuo Zongtang's army is about to cross the desert toward Yaqub Beg's kingdom at Kashgar, and where, in the same years, the rains stop falling across the north of China. We will ask what winning back the far west cost, and whom it served.

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