The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (13 page)

In Beijing, this news was heard with mounting apprehension. The Chinese had wanted the
Arrow
incident treated as a provincial matter, but the Europeans had blown it up into an event of international importance. Despite this, the Manchu still chose to see the whole affair as the intransigent behaviour of far-off vassal states who were unwilling to bow to the lawful will of the Son of Heaven. Yehonala was foremost among the ranks of the war party, counselling the Emperor to show no mercy to the barbarian ‘rebels’. By contrast, Prince Kung, the Emperor’s brother, felt that the
Arrow
affair was of no real moment. He was more concerned with the Tai Ping ‘bandits’, referring to the still-blazing rebellion as a possible fatal disease of China’s body. The Russians, greedy for land and threatening the Middle Kingdom from the north, he considered a threat to the bosom; while the sea-borne nations, and especially Britain, he regarded as merely ‘an affliction of the limbs’, an annoyance and an irritation, but nothing more. ‘Therefore we should suppress the...bandits first, get the Russians under control next, and attend to the British last.’
⁷
The Manchu elite continued to cling to their dreams of barbarian inferiority–they still had no real conception of what they were facing in the eastward push of Western imperialism.

In May 1858 the combined British and French fleet, numbering twenty-six gunboats (and with the Americans in tow ostensibly as disinterested ‘observers’) dropped anchor before the Taku forts, four squat crenellated bastions sited athwart the mouth of the Baihe River, guarding the principal waterway to the Chinese capital. In Beijing, Yehonala and the war party were pushing for the mounting of a strong defence against the European powers, whom they still affected to regard as presumptuous tributaries. On 20th May the allies stormed the forts and to general surprise, both Chinese and European, the defences immediately collapsed. There was consternation in Beijing. Yehonala still called for war to the knife against the barbarian, but Hsien Feng heeded wiser counsels and immediately sent two high-ranking mandarins, Kuei Liang and Hua Sha-na to Tientsin to negotiate. Their brief was ostensibly to come to a ‘reasonably and mutually advantageous peace’ and ‘to agree nothing detrimental to China’, but in reality they were there to stonewall and delay and to do everything in their power to prevent the arrival in Beijing of the French and English ‘ambassadors’. The Manchu knew that the Western emissaries would refuse to kowtow to the Son of Heaven, and that they would demand the right of residence in Beijing. Both were anathema to the Chinese: nothing would so irretrievably destroy the myth of Imperial omnipotence upon which the whole of Chinese society (and their own oligarchical privileges) depended.

After days of negotiation, while Lord Elgin worried and chafed, and Baron Gros affected an air of unconcern, the Chinese grudgingly conceded all the demands of the Powers save two, which the Dynasty regarded as non-negotiable: the right of residence in Beijing and permission for foreign merchants to trade freely on the Yangtse River and in the interior. But the British were unmoved by the numerous concessions and continued to press for total capitulation on all points. So desperate did the two mandarin negotiators become, they showed the American and Russian emissaries their death warrants, claiming the documents would be enforced immediately should they grant any further British demands. Baron Gros was later approached and asked to intercede on their behalf. Elgin’s reply, on 26th June, was to declare that he was ready to march on the capital and install the ambassadors at gun-point. The Chinese begged more time while they sent desperate messages to Beijing informing them of the ultimatum. Despite the continuing resistance of Yehonala and other die-hards at court, the more realistic ministers realised that, with their modern equipment and training, the British were quite capable of carrying out their threat. Negotiations were over. It was concede or fight.

Wisely, the Chinese conceded. The Treaty of Tientsin was signed on 26th June and now, it seemed, everyone agreed that the red barbarians were coming to the Forbidden City where they would be received in audience by the Son of Heaven without the obligatory kowtow. For the Manchu elite, this one disastrous fact overrode all other considerations. It struck at the heart of their self-esteem, and they twisted like snakes to avoid the destruction of their carefully orchestrated charade of world hegemony–the myth of earth-encircling supremacy that had awed the ‘stupid people’ of the Middle Kingdom and maintained their power, and that of former dynasties, for millennia. After further delays the two sides met again and the Chinese played their final card. It was suggested that the ambassadors waive their right of residence and in return the Chinese would annul all trade duties on foreign goods. This was an enormous concession–trade duties contributed much to the Chinese exchequer–and bore witness to the overriding importance the Manchu Dynasty attached to the ritual aspects of their rule. To general relief and not a little surprise, Lord Elgin agreed, stipulating only that the
theoretical
right of residence be upheld. In private, this was a great relief to the British–now that it finally looked as if they would get everything they wanted, they had suddenly realised how dangerous was the position of a British resident in Beijing: ‘Peking would be a rat trap for the envoy if the Chinese meant mischief’.
⁸

For their part, the Chinese were elated and relieved. From the Manchu vantage point, victory had been snatched from the jaws of defeat. True, they had agreed to a Beijing ambassadorial visit the following year to ratify the new treaty, when the question of the Imperial kowtow would again arise. But the Chinese ruling class were masters of prevarication, and like all good politicians, knew that nothing was certain in this world, and much might happen in the space of twelve months to alter or even cancel the planned visit. The Emperor and his ministers breathed easier, and the disconsolate spirit of the court revived to wallow in its accustomed vainglorious and insolent ignorance. Once again, Chinese wisdom had kept the barbarian from the gates of the Middle Kingdom.

And so, the Manchu courtiers were granted another brief respite from the unwelcome attentions of the foreign devils. They must have realised that time was not on their side, that there was a very good chance that the
Ying-guo-ren
and the
Fa-guo-ren
would return in their huge ships with their modern guns and weaponry. Yet like the Ming nobles before them, as soon as the threat had receded, the Manchu returned to their traditional pursuits, following the rites and traditions of their ancient culture, acting out the charade of world hegemony and, seemingly, in some way still believing it. Slowly, the year turned, and while the Tai Ping rebellion flamed across much of southern China, no great international drama erupted to turn the attention of the Western Powers elsewhere. As 1858 passed into 1859 word arrived that the British and French were again on the South China Sea, and preparing to sail north to ratify the previous year’s treaty in Beijing. The Chinese were running out of time. Their demands that ratification take place in Shanghai were ignored. Towards the middle of the year, on 18th June 1859, the British and French fleets, led by Frederick Bruce (Lord Elgin’s younger brother) and Emperor Napoleon III’s minister, M. de Bourbulon, hove into view at the mouth of the Baihe River. American gunboats, again ostensibly neutral, accompanied the fleet under Commodore Josiah Tattnall.

Nothing went according to plan. Instead of striking their colours when faced with superior Western technology, the Chinese batteries in the forts brought a heavy fire to bear on the allied gunboats. Four ships were sunk, and one, the Plover, suffered terrible casualties, with thirty men and her commander killed out of a crew of forty. Despite the carnage around them, the remaining nine seamen refused to give up, and continued to fire their guns against overwhelming odds. Commodore Tattnall, supposedly neutral, felt that he could not watch the slaughter of such brave men and sailed in under fire to offer his help and take off the British wounded. Later that day he discovered several of his own sailors black with powder smoke. ‘What have you been doing, you rascals?’ he demanded. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ was the reply, ‘but they were a bit short-handed with the bow gun.’ Tattnall was equally direct when stating his reasons for committing this diplomatic gaffe: ‘Blood,’ he said bluntly, ‘is thicker than water.’
⁹

This Chinese victory over the Western barbarian ‘rebels’ was greeted with jubilation in Beijing. At long last the big-nosed curs had been sent packing, scurrying homewards with their tails between their legs. It was just the fillip that Yehonala and the ‘war party’ of hardline Manchu councillors needed. The civil war against the Tai Ping rebels had been going badly, but now the Dragon Throne had struck back against its enemies with a vengeance. The barbarians would think twice before again confronting the might of the Middle Kingdom.

For a while it appeared that the Chinese reading of the situation was correct, and that this defeat truly had left the British and French with little stomach for further Chinese adventures. The less bellicose Americans had fared much better at Chinese hands during the fracas, at least in the beginning. They had landed, as requested by the Chinese, at Pei-t’ang and been received with the polite dignity that custom demanded. But from there matters went rapidly downhill. The Americans had been required to suffer the humiliation of travelling the hundred and fifteen miles to Beijing in rude, springless carts. It was an opportunity to show the populace how humble and servile were these emissaries from the ‘flowery state’ and the mandarins played this card for all they were worth. But the American’s journey, while less bloody than the European’s ill-starred attempt to see the Son of Heaven, proved just as fruitless. The Chinese, puffed up with pride, demanded that the visitors kowtow before the Celestial Prince. The republican US envoys were incensed: they had fought a revolution to avoid bending the knee to an English king; they were in no mind to prostrate themselves and ‘knock head’ to a Chinese monarch. Nothing daunted, when the Americans finally left their shores, the Middle Kingdom chroniclers recorded the event as the departure of ‘tribute bearer Ward’.

Nothing, it seemed, had changed.

But in the empire-building British, the denizens of the Middle Kingdom had found a nation which was perhaps even more sure of their God-given superiority than the Chinese themselves. For three-quarters of a year there was a welcome silence from the red barbarians. Then, in July 1860, they returned in force, landing a combined British/French army of eighteen thousand men at Pei-t’ang, just to the north of the redoubtable Taku forts. In charge were the two old China-hands, Baron Gros and Lord Elgin, come to repair the loss to European prestige, to demand even greater reparations from the Middle Kingdom (sixteen million taels, more than five million pounds), and determined this time to force ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin in Beijing, before the Son of Heaven himself.

The Europeans had learned from the fiasco of their defeat the year before. The main armaments of the Taku forts faced the river, but the landward side was far less well protected. It was here, against the most vulnerable sector of the two bastions on the northern bank of the Baihe, that the British and French forces mounted their attack. The assault was preceded by an artillery barrage that lasted two-and-a-half hours. ‘The marines had the honour of forming part of the assaulting party...The French attacked at a different point and the emulation among the troops to see who, French or English, should be first on the wall was very great. It is difficult to say who was first. Our flag was the first
hoisted
, but a Frenchman had waved a minute or two previously a French flag as he got on the wall, but was shot down...At 2 or 3 minutes past 8, that is after a stiff engagement that lasted just 3 hours, the fort was won.’ Harry Parkes and the rest of the allied command were ‘...full of admiration for the way in which the Chinese fought their guns. At 6.30 their magazine blew up with a dreadful explosion that for some time hid the whole fort from view and caused a lull in the battle; and yet for an hour after they remained steadily at their guns.’ Once inside the forts, they discovered the reason for this suicidal courage. ‘The horrors of the scene defy description. No one had been suffered to run from the fort by the Chinese–men being told off to cut down any who attempted to run: indeed all escape was prevented by the fort being barricaded; so they fell where they fought.
^’10
At the end of the battle almost fifteen hundred Chinese combatants had lost their lives, for the loss of just thirty-four allied soldiers. The southern forts raised the white flag without a fight, and the Taku forts were once again in the hands of the foreign devils.

At first, the mandarins tried to keep knowledge of this disaster from Beijing’s population, but like all ‘secrets’ in the city, news of the defeat leaked out and was passed by word of mouth through the numerous inns and tea-houses of the capital. One Beijing mandarin, Wu K’o-tu, a member of the prestigious Hanlin Academy, kept a diary during this time of turmoil;
¹¹
it details the personal tragedy of his mother’s imminent demise, interspersed with a priceless account of the Chinese view of the conflict and of the rumours sweeping the capital. Especially noticeable is the manner in which Yehonala’s ascendancy is taken for granted by Wu K’o-tu, indicating that, by this time, her dominance in the Emperor’s counsels was well established and a matter of common knowledge.

In August 1860 Wu noted that ‘His Majesty was seriously ill, and it was known that he wished to leave for the north, but the Imperial concubine Yi [one of Yehonala’s titles] and Prince Seng dissuaded him from this and assured him that the barbarians would never enter the city...During the next few days, people began to leave Beijing, for the report was spread that our troops had been defeated at Taku, and that a brigadier-general was among the slain; the garrison had fled from Pei-t’ang and the forts were in the hands of the barbarians...Nothing was known as to the real cause of our defeat, and the people, being kept in ignorance, gradually got over their first alarm.’