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Self-Strengthening, episode 9

The Treaty That Cost a Head

With Xinjiang won back, the court sends the Manchu grandee Chonghou to St Petersburg to ask Russia for the Ili valley, and in 1879 he signs a treaty giving most of it away. The episode follows Chonghou home to a death sentence, the young official Zhang Zhidong who makes his name demanding war, and Zeng Jize, Zeng Guofan's son, who goes to Russia to undo the treaty, and asks whether the court's war party saved Ili or nearly lost everything. It hears the court in its own edicts, alongside foreign observers and scholars; Zhang Zhidong's memorial is told through scholars.

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Transcript

Zuo Zongtang
Zuo Zongtang. Boiarskii, Adolf-Nikolay Erazmovich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Zuo Zongtang's army took Kashgar by surprise on the seventeenth of December 1877, and with it the reconquest of the far west was complete. Yaqub Beg, the soldier of fortune who had ruled there as a king, had already died at Korla that May, and his kingdom had come apart in the months after. The Qing won it with European weapons and Prussian drill, and paid for it in part with borrowed money, a loan secured on the customs revenue. And all through those same years, a famine in the north of China killed something close to ten million people. In the 1870s Beijing put more than a fifth of everything the customs collected into its campaigns in the west. And in the famine years the imperial treasury was bankrupt in cash. It kept its credit only because the ministers steadily refused to pay the government's way with borrowed money. In December 1877, with Kashgar barely taken, another imperial loan went out, five million taels at seven per cent. So the dynasty had its west back, at a terrible price, in the worst of times. Or nearly all of its west. There was one valley it did not have. The Ili valley sits in the far northwest corner of Xinjiang, right up against the Russian frontier, where the Ili River runs west out of the mountains toward the steppe of what is now Kazakhstan. Its main town was Kulja. Around it lay some of the best farmland and grazing in the whole region. Before the Muslim risings, the Qing had governed all of Xinjiang from Ili. The general who commanded the entire frontier had his seat there, with garrisons of bannermen around him. Bannermen were the hereditary soldiers of the dynasty, organised under eight banners, Manchu banners above all but Mongol and Han Chinese ones too, since before the conquest of China in the seventeenth century. In the risings of the 1860s, Ili had broken away under an independent Muslim government of its own. And then, in 1871, Russian troops marched into Kulja and occupied the whole territory of Ili. Some of you will remember why. Yaqub Beg's power was spreading, and the Russians were worried for the safety of their trade road through the valley. The Russian commander there went so far as to proclaim the place annexed, in perpetuity. But to Beijing, Russia said something quite different. The Russians assured the Qing that the occupation was temporary, and that the territory would be restored to China "when the latter was in a position to maintain order in it". In other words: we will give it back when you can hold it. At the time, it seemed very unlikely that the Qing would ever be strong enough out there to hold the Russians to that promise. For the Russians, Ili was one small step in a much larger march. Since the 1860s Russian armies had been swallowing the old khanates of Central Asia one after another: Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873. In 1876 Russia annexed the khanate of Kokand outright, the country Yaqub Beg had come from. Ili, with its farmland and its road into China, fitted that pattern very neatly. And the Russians had good reason to think the Qing might never even try. Back in 1874 and 1875, with Japan's troops on Taiwan, the court had argued over where its money should go: to the coast, or to the far west. Li Hongzhang had argued for the coast. The real threat, he said, came by sea, and the empire could not afford to pour silver into a desert it might never hold. Zuo had answered that if Xinjiang were lost, Mongolia would be exposed, and if Mongolia, then Beijing itself. And the court had backed Zuo. So the dynasty had bet heavily on the west. Ili was the last piece of that bet still on the table. Now the pattern had a problem. Zuo Zongtang was in his sixties, a Hunanese scholar general who had spent the years since the Taiping war marching armies further and further west. By 1880 he had sixty thousand troops in Xinjiang, veterans welded together by ten years of continuous campaigning. The name Xinjiang means the new frontier, or the new dominion; it was what the Qing had called the region since they first conquered it in the eighteenth century. Zuo's army was victorious, it was armed with European weapons, and part of it was camped right on the frontier of Russian held Ili. So the Qing told Russia the obvious thing. China was now ready to take back the administration of Ili, and an envoy would be sent to St Petersburg to arrange it. The condition had been met. The order had been restored. Here was the bill for the promise. This is the story of what happened to that envoy, and to the men who cleaned up after him. It is a story with three Qing officials at its centre. A Manchu noble named Chonghou, who went to Russia and signed away most of what he was sent to get back. A scholar named Zhang Zhidong, who first made his name by demanding that Chonghou be put to death. And Zeng Jize, the son of the famous Zeng Guofan, who had to go to Russia after him and get the treaty reopened. Behind all three of them stand two older men we already know: Zuo Zongtang, with his army in the west, and Li Hongzhang, with his arsenals and his ships in the east, pulling in opposite directions. And at the end of it, the question I want you to hold: did the men who shouted for war save Ili, or did they very nearly lose everything?

Start with the waiting. In July 1878 the Qing told Russia an envoy was coming, and he did not present himself in St Petersburg until January 1879. A Chinese embassy to St Petersburg had been authorised, but it had not yet set out. Meanwhile the Chinese kept hurrying up reinforcements. Word came that twenty thousand fresh troops had reached Manas. And across the line, by one report, there were fewer than five thousand Russians in Kulja. Think about those numbers from the Russian side for a moment. A small garrison, at the far end of a very long road from anywhere Russian, facing an army that had just marched across a desert and broken Yaqub Beg's armies in a single season of fighting. And yet the Russians did not behave as if they were worried. The Russian authorities treated the whole question as a local matter, a problem for their frontier officials, not for the empire. They answered Zuo's demands, as one British observer put it, "in a spirit of levity that must have roused the ire of that general". Zuo was not a man who took levity well. He had spent years, and a fortune of the empire's money, getting this far. On the Russian side, there were people who saw exactly what was at stake. A Russian newspaper warned that handing Kulja back "would be an act of political suicide". The reasoning was simple. Give back what you took, and you raise China's prestige in every bazaar in Central Asia, and you put your own position there in danger. To an empire that ruled Muslim peoples across the steppe by the reputation of its strength, being seen to retreat before a Chinese army was a real danger. And there was an awkward fact underneath all of this, which neither side liked to say aloud. Zuo's army had been fed, in part, by Russia. All through the campaign, Russian caravans had kept moving between Kulja and Manas, and the chief suppliers to the Chinese army were the Russian merchants of Central Asia. And arms flowed across the Gobi to the front. A large arsenal for storing them went up at Lanzhou, and at one point as many as ten thousand rifles of the Berdan pattern were sent in a single convoy. The Berdan was the rifle the Russian army itself carried in those years. So the army now standing at the edge of Ili had been fed by Russian merchants and armed in part with Russia's own rifle. The frontier had always been a place where trade and war ran side by side. So which side had the stronger hand? The same British observer thought the answer was obvious. The Chinese, he wrote, "have the game in their own hands, and can play a waiting game". Russia's only hope of profit, he thought, was that Zuo would lose patience and attack first. If the Chinese simply kept their camps where they were and brought up reinforcements, Russia's hold on Kulja would grow dangerously insecure, and Russia could never rest easy there. That was the advice from outside: wait, and let time do the work. The court in Beijing did not wait. It meant to send a man to St Petersburg and settle the thing by negotiation. Which sounds reasonable enough. Everything depended on who the man was.

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

The man was Chonghou. Some of you will remember him from Tianjin. For years he had been the superintendent of the northern ports, the official at Tianjin who handled foreign trade and foreign consuls for the whole of north China. He was there in June 1870, when a crowd in Tianjin killed the French consul, ten nuns, two priests, and between thirty and forty Chinese who worked for the mission. That day the consul came to him in a fury and fired a pistol in his presence, and missed. Chonghou had rank and dignity, but as one observer put it, he "could bring in the imperial authority, but could not move a policeman". An American who headed the court's school for interpreters called him an amiable official, and laid the disaster mostly at the door of his indecision. And he had been at the centre of the court's dealings with the foreigners for years. In 1873, when the foreign envoys were at last received in audience by the young emperor, it was Chonghou who met them at dawn and led them to the gate of the imperial city. And when Britain's minister was making his angry demands over the Margary affair in 1875, it was Chonghou who complained that it was "impossible to take seriously what Mr. Wade says — now this, now that — to-day yes, to-morrow no." He was a man who liked things done with dignity and with order. He was about to meet a negotiating partner who was very orderly indeed. After the massacre, the court needed a man to go to France and apologise, and it sent Chonghou. His timing was not good. France had just been beaten in its war with Prussia. When he arrived, the French government was still sitting at Bordeaux. Paris itself was in the hands of the Commune, a revolutionary government that held the city for two months in the spring of 1871, until the French army crushed it. When he finally reached Paris, after the Commune had been put down, his hosts showed him the sewers of the city. He went in at one point and came out at another, and found a vast crowd waiting to greet him as he came up. He decided that the whole thing had been a deliberate humiliation. He had been made to walk under the feet of thousands of French people, as a penance for what his countrymen had done. He was told that two Brazilian princes had visited the sewers that same day. It seems he went on believing he had been punished all the same. It is a small story. But it tells you something about the man. He was proud, he was sensitive to his dignity, and he did not always read a room. Still, whatever he made of the sewers, he had been to Europe and seen it for himself. That experience in France was what recommended him for Russia. By 1878 he was a member of the Zongli Yamen, and military governor of Liaoning. The Zongli Yamen was the office the court had set up in 1861 to deal with the foreign powers, the closest thing the Qing had to a foreign ministry. Liaoning, in the northeast, held the old Manchu capital at Shenyang, and its military governor ruled the heart of the dynasty's homeland. He was also connected to the very top. He was a relative of Prince Gong. Prince Gong was the emperor's uncle, and he had run the Zongli Yamen since its founding. So in 1878 Chonghou was sent to Russia to arrange for the return of Ili. The court did everything it could to make him impressive. In the words of that same American, "To give him a further increment of prestige the emperor conferred on him a rank equivalent to that of ambassador." The emperor, in 1878, was a small boy, the Guangxu emperor, and the real power lay with his two regents, the empresses dowager Ci'an and Cixi. And the Russians, in their turn, did everything they could to make him feel impressive. He was treated as an ambassador, "loaded with attentions, and admitted to negotiate directly with the czar." He presented his credentials at St Petersburg in January 1879. The tsar was Alexander the Second, the ruler who had freed Russia's serfs, and whose generals had spent his reign pushing the empire's borders deep into Central Asia. Here is the trouble. Chonghou was a cultivated man, pleasant company, with a fine personal manner. He was not a diplomat. And Ili was a very long way from anything in his experience. The deserts and passes of the far west were not the world of consuls and gunboats that he knew. The Russians, meanwhile, knew exactly what they wanted. They told him plainly that they had never held Kulja on China's behalf. They had occupied it, they said, "not as the servant or the concierge of China." A concierge, if you have never had one, is the doorkeeper who minds a building while the owner is away, and hands back the keys when he returns. Russia was telling him, as politely as it could, that it was not giving back the keys for nothing. And it is worth remembering how new all of this was for the Qing. The empire had only just begun to keep permanent envoys abroad. Its first minister reached London in January 1877, and others presented their credentials at Berlin late that year and in Paris in May 1878. For most of its history the empire had expected foreign rulers to send envoys to the emperor, bearing tribute, rather than keeping envoys of its own at foreign courts. Now a Qing ambassador sat at a table in Russia, carrying the whole weight of a kind of diplomacy his empire had barely begun to practise.

What followed was nine months of negotiation. And the best terms Chonghou could get were set down in a treaty signed at Livadiya, in September 1879. Livadiya was the tsar's summer palace on the coast of the Crimea, on the Black Sea, thousands of miles from the Ili valley. The treaty did give something back. Russia would hand over the town of Kulja and the eastern part of the valley. But look at what it took away. The western part of Ili, the richer and the larger part, was ceded to Russia outright. So were the passes between Ili and Altishahr, the roads south over the mountains that connected the valley to the oasis country of the south. Without those passes, whatever China got back in Ili would be cut off from the oasis country that Zuo had just reconquered. The most important of them was the Muzart pass, a route over a glacier high in the Tianshan, the direct road from Ili south to Aksu and the oases beyond. Whoever held the Muzart could come down on the southern oases whenever he chose. On top of the land, China was to pay Russia five million roubles, for what the treaty called the expenses of the occupation. Russia had occupied Chinese territory without being asked, and China was to pay Russia's bill for doing it. There was more, in the commercial clauses. Russian merchants were to trade free of duty in Mongolia and Xinjiang, Russia could open consulates in seven more towns across the northwest and Mongolia, and Russian ships could sail up the Songhua river deep into Manchuria. The Songhua runs through the heart of Manchuria, the dynasty's own homeland. And the man who had signed all this was the military governor of part of that homeland. Put it all together and you get the verdict that has stuck to this treaty ever since. In his haste, Chonghou had conceded to Russia about as much as it might reasonably have claimed after winning a war. Russia had not fought a war. It had not had to. When the terms reached Beijing at the end of 1879, the court was appalled. Here was the dynasty's own envoy, carrying the emperor's own commission, handing over by signature what Zuo's army had been sent across the desert to protect. Chonghou had been outwitted, and he had yielded every strategic position in the territory he was sent to recover. Think about what that meant for Zuo Zongtang's army. It had just pacified the oasis country of the south. Now, under this treaty, the passes above it, the roads between its new conquests and the valley to the north, would belong to Russia. A rouble, by the way, was the Russian unit of currency, and five million of them was a very large sum for a treasury that had just come through a famine. And then he did something that made it all much worse. He thought his mission was finished. So he set off for home, without waiting for permission from the throne. For a Qing envoy, that was a serious offence in itself. An imperial commission was not a job you resigned; it was a trust you held until the throne released you. The man who had once felt humiliated in a Paris sewer had now handed the passes into Xinjiang to Russia, and he was on his way home believing his work was done.

The court did not wait for him to arrive. On the third of January 1880, an imperial decree stripped him of all his offices, for the crime of coming home without the emperor's command. That same month he reached Beijing. He found himself cashiered, and handed over to the Board of Punishments. The Board of Punishments was one of the six ministries of the Qing government, the one in charge of the empire's laws and its criminal cases. He found his treaty already repudiated. He was thrown into prison before he had even reached his own front door. A commission tried him. And the commission condemned him to death, by beheading. Think about who this was. A Manchu grandee, a relative of Prince Gong, a member of the foreign office, the military governor of the dynasty's homeland. And the throne was going to cut off his head for signing a bad treaty. The fury at court was real. And one of the voices pressing for his death belonged to a scholar named Zhang Zhidong, whom we will meet properly in a moment. He wanted Chonghou dead, and he put it bluntly. He wrote that "our half-witted Envoy has been cajoled and bullied by the Russians". In Beijing, people read the sentence another way too. Many felt that it was a blow struck by the party at court that hated foreigners, against officials who had grown, in its eyes, far too friendly with the foreign powers. Chonghou was a man of the Zongli Yamen. Punishing him was a way of punishing the whole idea of dealing with the West on its terms. In the Qing system, a death sentence was not the end of the matter. Sentences of death were reviewed by the throne, often at the autumn assizes, and only the emperor's own approval sent a man to the executioner. So Chonghou sat in his cell and waited, while the court decided what to do with him, and with his treaty. The foreign diplomats in Beijing were horrified. The foreign envoys resented the very idea of putting a man to death for failing at diplomacy. Led by the British minister, Thomas Francis Wade, the diplomats in Beijing sent protests to the Zongli Yamen. In the words of that American teacher, "He was condemned to death, and all the members of the diplomatic corps interceded for him". And the Russians took it most personally of all. It was their treaty he had signed, at their tsar's palace. Russia did not only protest. Its forces in the region of the disputed territory now numbered upward of ninety thousand men. The quarrel over a valley at the edge of the map had turned into the edge of a war. In the first months of 1880, the throne ordered its princes, grand councillors and high officials to deliberate on the treaty, and memorials on it poured in from the capital and the provinces. Almost all of them said the same thing. The treaty could not stand. Zuo Zongtang's own advice from the frontier was to talk first and fight if talking failed, and he made it plain he was ready to fight. Li Hongzhang, in the east, was almost alone among the great officials in warning that a war with Russia could not be won.

Zhang Zhidong
Zhang Zhidong. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now let's meet the man who wanted Chonghou's head. Zhang Zhidong was in his early forties in 1880. He came from a family of officials, and in 1863 he had passed the highest level of the civil service examinations, finishing third in the whole empire. The examinations were the ladder into government: years of study of the Confucian classics, tested in essays at county, provincial and national level. The top places at the final round made a man's name for life. He had been taken into the Hanlin Academy, the court's college of the best scholars, the men who drafted edicts and tutored princes. He belonged to a loose group of young scholars and censors at court known as the Qingliu, the pure stream. They saw themselves as the conscience of the court. Their weapon was the memorial, and they used it to attack officials they thought were weak, corrupt or too eager to bargain with foreigners. A memorial was a formal written report or petition to the throne. Any official of rank could send one, and the throne read them, answered them and sometimes published them. Censors were officials whose whole job was to watch the government and criticise it, even, in theory, the emperor himself. Their patron at the top was Li Hongzao, a grand councillor who had been tutor to the late emperor. Among the young men around him were Zhang Zhidong and another fierce memorial writer, Zhang Peilun, whose name will come back in this story at a very bad moment. The Qingliu had a point, and it is worth hearing it fairly. Six years earlier, when Japan landed troops on Taiwan, the Qing had settled by paying Japan half a million taels to leave. To one foreign observer, that deal advertised to the world "that here was a rich empire which was ready to pay, but not ready to fight." The Qingliu feared exactly that reputation. Pay once, and every neighbour learns that you pay. Zhang Zhidong's memorial on the treaty of Livadiya, sent to the throne on the first of June 1880, was what first made his name. He advised the throne to repudiate the treaty outright, and to execute Chonghou. And then he turned on the empire's own officials. The dynasty had been buying guns, building arsenals and training armies. What, he asked, had it all been for? In his words: "If, after all this preparation, we cannot fight even one battle, of what use are the officials in whom your Majesty trusts". That sentence was aimed at somebody in particular. The man who had done most of that preparing was Li Hongzhang. Zhang had a plan, of sorts. Under the treaty, China would pay Russia two million eight hundred thousand taels for the return of Ili. Zhang said to keep the money and use it to hire good soldiers from Europe. A tael was the Chinese unit of silver, a little over an ounce by weight, in which the government kept its accounts. He asked the throne to order Zuo Zongtang and Jin Shun, the generals in the far west, to detach officers born in Manchuria and skilled in war, and send them east to wait for orders. Jin Shun was one of the generals who had commanded in the campaign against Yaqub Beg. In other words, Zhang was imagining a war on two fronts, with Zuo's army in the west and Manchuria to defend in the east. It is easy, from here, to hear that memorial as a young man's bravado. At the time, it sounded like the voice of the whole court. His views were echoed by a chorus of censors, almost all of them, who branded Li Hongzhang's policy of graceful concessions as "deliberate and venal treason". Venal means bought. They were saying, in so many words, that Li was being paid to give China away. The memorial made Zhang Zhidong famous almost overnight. Within two years he had been made governor of the province of Shanxi, and he would go on to become one of the great viceroys of the age. Some of you have already met Zhang Zhidong years later, as the great viceroy at Wuchang telling China to keep Chinese learning at the root and take Western learning for use. But that year he was a voice, not yet a governor. And voices do not have to fight the wars they call for.

Charles George Gordon
Charles George Gordon. Geruzet Frères - Belgian (active c. 1870-1889), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Somebody would have to fight it, though. And the Russians were getting ready. In 1880 Russia sent a squadron of warships to the Pacific, to Chinese waters, and there was open talk of a blockade of the Chinese coast. Through that year Russian warships gathered in the harbours of Japan, within easy reach of the coast of north China. The coast that mattered most was the one in front of the capital. Beijing lay only a short march from the sea, and foreign warships had come that way before, in 1858 and again in 1860, when an Anglo French army marched in and burned the old Summer Palace. In the west, Zuo Zongtang prepared for war. In 1880 he moved his headquarters forward to Hami, and the story told of him ever since is that he brought his own coffin with him, to show he meant to win or die there. In the east, Li Hongzhang saw things very differently. Li had been arguing for years that the real danger to the empire came from the sea, and that his coast and his new ships were nowhere near ready for a war with a European power. After Japan's landing on Taiwan in 1874, the court had at last begun to spend serious money on a navy, and in 1875 it divided the coastline into a northern and a southern command. Customs money paid for much of it. But in 1880 Li's northern fleet was still mostly small gunboats bought from Britain. The big German built ironclads he wanted were still only plans. Now the censors were calling him a traitor for saying so. He needed someone the court would listen to, someone who could say what he could not. Li thought of an old comrade. Charles Gordon was a British officer who, back in 1863 and 1864, had commanded the foreign trained force called the Ever Victorious Army, fighting the Taiping alongside Li's own troops around Shanghai. Years before, in a memorial to the throne, Li had held up Gordon as the man who organised that force. The two men had a history, and not all of it was friendly. In December 1863, after the Taiping commanders at Suzhou surrendered to Gordon, Li had them put to death. Gordon felt his word had been broken, and he went looking for Li with a revolver. The two men were reconciled in the end, and Gordon finished the campaign before he went home to Britain. Since then Gordon had become something of a legend in Britain: a devout, stubborn, unpredictable soldier who had governed the Sudan for the khedive of Egypt. In 1880 he had just gone out to India as private secretary to the new viceroy. He hated it. He resigned his post on the second of June. And two days later a telegram arrived inviting him to Beijing. It was Li who had the idea of asking him to hurry to the capital, and he had confided it to Robert Hart to carry out quietly. Hart was the Irishman who ran the Imperial Maritime Customs, the service staffed by foreigners that collected China's duties on foreign trade, and he had the ear of the Zongli Yamen. Gordon came. But his reputation came ahead of him. Before he had even landed, people knew he was going to advise the Chinese government to make peace at any price. They also knew he thought Li's modern armaments were so much money thrown away. He came, and he held a series of breathless interviews with Li, with Prince Gong, and with other ministers. Gordon was never a tactful man, and the story told of these meetings is that he called the talk of war idiocy, and when the interpreter would not translate the word, he found it in a dictionary and put his finger on it himself. Whether every detail of that story is true or not, it catches the tone. He had not come to flatter anyone. What he told them was blunt. If you will make war, he said, then burn the suburbs of the capital, take the archives and the emperor away from it, and put them in the centre of the country. In other words: get the court away from a capital that sat too close to the sea, and fight a long guerrilla war from the interior. And he saw the catch in his own advice. If the emperor left the capital for the centre of China, that would be the end of the dynasty. The Qing were a conquest dynasty, a Manchu court ruling a Han Chinese empire from Beijing. A court that fled the capital might never be allowed back. So the other choice, he said, was peace. If you want peace, give up Ili entirely, and at least escape paying the five million. It was not what Zhang Zhidong wanted to hear, and it was not entirely what Li wanted either. But it was what a soldier famous across the British empire was saying. Gordon soon saw that his presence could do no more good, and on the ninth of August he left the capital for England. But his counsel helped keep the Qing from going to war. I think the point of Gordon's visit was never really the details of his advice. The point was that the hawks at court had now heard from a soldier, a man who had fought in China and won, that the war they wanted would destroy the dynasty.

While Gordon was in Beijing, the question of Chonghou's head was still hanging. The foreign diplomats kept up the pressure. The French and British ministers were glad to go to the Zongli Yamen and urge that the sentence be remitted. The court called on the man whose memoir we have been quoting to draw up a memorandum on what Western nations did in such cases. He wrote that "Christian nations visit diplomatic failures with no heavier penalty than dismissal". And he added that it was the Ottoman Turks who had been known to strangle their failed envoys, leaving the court in no doubt about which company it would be keeping. Then came an appeal from a quarter nobody expected. In June 1880, at the critical moment, Queen Victoria herself addressed a personal appeal for clemency to the empress dowager of China. One woman ruling an empire wrote to another woman ruling an empire, asking for a man's life. Victoria had sat on the British throne for more than forty years by then. That she did so tells you how far the case had travelled. A Manchu envoy's sentence had become a question for the whole diplomatic world. And inside the court, Li Hongzhang was making his own case. He was able to convince the empress dowager, badly informed but shrewd, that the course the war party wanted could only end in disaster. Since the choice of the boy emperor in 1875, Li's influence with the empress dowager had been at its firmest. On the twelfth of August 1880, the decree was issued. Chonghou's life was spared. The decree came in answer to a telegram from Zeng Jize, who was by then in St Petersburg. And the court said why it was showing mercy. It wanted to show that China had no wish to hurt Russia's dignity, and that it wanted friendly relations to continue. And Zeng Jize was allowed to tell the Russian government himself that the death sentence had been lifted. Chonghou was eventually released. But he came out, in that American's words, "shorn of his plumes". From that day on he never held office again. "Even his ancestors to the third generation had been made to share in his degradation." Under the Qing, honours and titles could be granted to the dead ancestors of a deserving official, and taken away from them when he disgraced himself. He had gone to Russia as an ambassador, loaded with honours. He came home to find that even his great grandparents had been demoted. He lived on quietly in Beijing, out of office, until his death in 1893.

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

That brings us to the man who had to clean up. Zeng Jize was the son of Zeng Guofan, the scholar general who had put down the Taiping and been made a marquis for it. His father died in 1872. As the heir, Zeng Jize inherited the title of marquis. So the foreigners knew him as the Marquis Zeng. He was a different kind of official from his father. He had learned English as a grown man, and he was curious about the West in a way few men of his rank were. Since 1878 he had been the Qing minister in London and Paris, following Guo Songtao, the first permanent envoy China ever sent abroad. In early 1880 the court named him its envoy to Russia as well, with orders to reopen the treaty that Chonghou had signed. On paper, it was an impossible job. The Russians held a treaty signed by China's own ambassador, and Zeng had come to tell them it could not be ratified. So the treaty of Livadiya was reopened, and the Marquis Zeng negotiated new terms at St Petersburg. The talks went on through the autumn and the winter of 1880, while Russian warships lay off the Chinese coast and Russian troops stood on the frontier. Zeng had one advantage that is easy to miss. Russia did not want this war either. It had just fought an exhausting war against the Ottoman empire in 1877 and 1878, and at the Congress of Berlin the other great powers had made it give back much of what it won. Its treasury was strained, and at home a revolutionary underground was hunting the tsar himself, with bombs. A war at the far end of Asia, against an army that had just reconquered Xinjiang, was the last thing St Petersburg needed. But Russia could not be seen to back down for nothing either. Zeng's job was to give the Russians a way to retreat that looked like a bargain. Across the table from him sat Nikolai Giers, who was running Russia's foreign ministry in place of its ageing chancellor. Zeng did not accept the treaty of Livadiya as his starting point. He treated it as a draft his government had never approved, and he bargained clause by clause. He had to do it on conflicting instructions from home, as the war party and the peace party in Beijing took turns on top, and he handled it with real skill. It took him about six months. On the twelfth, by the Russian calendar, the twenty fourth by ours, of February 1881, the treaty of St Petersburg was signed. And when the terms came back to Beijing, the news was good. Russia gave back the Tekes valley and all the passes between Ili and Altishahr that Chonghou had signed away. It was not all of Ili. Russia kept a strip of the western land Chonghou had ceded. That strip was meant for the Muslims of Ili who chose to move to Russian rule rather than stay under the Qing, and many thousands did. Many of them were Taranchis, Muslim farmers whose ancestors the Qing themselves had moved into Ili in the eighteenth century to grow grain for the garrisons. Others were Dungans, Chinese speaking Muslims. They had reason to fear the Qing's return. When Manas fell, every able bodied man found in or around the city was massacred, and panic spread across the whole region. The commercial clauses were cut back too. Russian trade would go free of duty only until the cities there recovered from the rebellion, and Russian caravans could no longer travel on through China to Hankou. There was a price, of course. The indemnity China would pay Russia went up, from five million to nine million metallic roubles. So Zeng paid more money and got back more land. If you had to choose which of those two things to give away, there was never much question. Russian troops finally handed the Ili valley back to Qing officials in 1882. Zuo Zongtang did not see that handover from the west. In the autumn of 1880 the court called him back from the frontier, and early in 1881 he took his seat on the Grand Council in Beijing. The Grand Council was the small inner cabinet that met the throne before dawn each day, where the empire's real decisions were made. The war he had prepared for never came. But the land he had marched for stayed Qing. In 1884 the far west was made a regular province of the empire, the province of Xinjiang, and its first governor was Liu Jintang, the general who had led Zuo's army to Kashgar. A great diplomat of the day summed it up: "China has compelled Russia to do what she has never done before, disgorge territory that she had once absorbed." One account of his career judged Zeng the most successful diplomat China had sent abroad in modern times. And Li Hongzhang came out of it well too. China had won a real diplomatic success, and Li came away from the fight with some well earned feathers in his cap. And what of the Marquis Zeng? He stayed in Europe as China's envoy until 1886, the best known Qing diplomat of his generation. In 1887 he published an essay in English arguing that China was not asleep, as Europeans liked to say, but awakening. He died in 1890. As for the tsar who had received Chonghou with such honour, Alexander the Second was killed by a revolutionary's bomb in the streets of St Petersburg on the thirteenth of March 1881, less than three weeks after the new treaty was signed. So, did the war party save Ili? You can tell it their way. Without the censors' fury and the death sentence and Zuo's coffin at Hami, Russia had no reason to give anything back. The threat of war was what made the treaty negotiable. Or you can tell it Li's way. The censors called him a traitor, but it was his quiet work with the empress dowager, and Gordon's counsel, that kept the court from a war he told her could only end in disaster. I think the honest answer is that they needed each other. The hawks gave Zeng something to bargain with, and the doves made sure he got the chance to use it. And there was a third thing at the table that neither party at court liked to give credit to: Zuo's army. Sixty thousand veterans standing in Xinjiang were a big part of why Russia agreed to talk again: its governor of Eastern Siberia had declared he could not cope with Zuo's forces without heavy reinforcements. That was self strengthening paying for itself, in the one place it had been tested hardest. And somewhere in the middle of it, a Manchu nobleman learned what it cost to be the man who signed first. But here is the thing to notice. While the whole court stared west at a valley on the Russian border, something was happening on the other side of the empire, on the sea. In 1879, the same year Chonghou signed at Livadiya, Japan annexed the Ryukyu islands outright, a little island kingdom to the south of Japan. The Ryukyus had paid tribute to the Qing for five centuries, and the Qing had given them up almost without a struggle. And just across the water from Japan lay another kingdom that had sent tribute to the Qing for centuries, and run its own affairs: Korea. Three years before Livadiya, Japan had already forced Korea open by treaty. Next time, Li Hongzhang tries to keep Korea in China's orbit by new means, and a young officer named Yuan Shikai sets foot in Seoul.

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