The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (14 page)

Had they known the full story, the citizens of Beijing might have been more concerned. The Westerners were even then en route to the walled town of Tungchow, where they planned to meet with representatives of the Emperor and conclude the terms of their entrance into Beijing. The Emperor, apparently at Yehonala’s behest, sent a new envoy, Chi Ying, on a forlorn assignment to request the barbarians to withdraw. The mission was foredoomed, and all Chi Ying’s powers of persuasion failed to move the allies. After he had reported his failure, the unfortunate envoy received a silken cord, symbol of Imperial magnanimity: rather than being beheaded like a common criminal for his failure, Chi Ying was allowed to hang himself.

Three new negotiators, all senior mandarins, were now given the task of holding back the barbarians, using the age-old Chinese techniques of bluster and prevarication. This triumvirate also received short shrift from the impatient Western Powers. The advance towards Beijing continued.

An Imperial edict was promulgated soon afterwards which, in its fiery tone and blatant disregard for the truth, again bears the stamp of Yehonala’s influence:

Last year the barbarians endeavoured to force the entrance of the Baihe, but in the twinkling of an eye their ships were sunk and thousands of their bodies floated on the water for a distance of one league from shore. I thought that this lesson would have rendered them more circumspect. But a year after their defeat they have returned, more numerous and more insolent than before. Taking advantage of the low tide, they disembarked at Pei-t’ang and then attacked the Taku forts.

But, like true barbarians, they attacked from the rear.

Our soldiers, being accustomed to meet their enemies face to face, did not expect so much cowardice and perfidy. Proud of a success that ought to make them blush for shame, they have now attacked Tientsin. My anger is about to strike and exterminate them without mercy. I command all my subjects, Chinese and Manchu, to hunt them down like savage beasts. Let the villages be abandoned as these wretches draw near. Let all provisions be destroyed which they might secure. In this manner, their accursed race will perish of hunger, like fish in a dried-up pond.

On 6th September a new edict again excoriated the barbarians for their perfidy, this time putting a price on the head of every rebel: ‘...for the head of a black barbarian, 50 taels [the British had brought Sikh troops with them from India]; for the head of a white barbarian, 100 taels.’ Still labouring under the delusion of omnipotence, the edict ended with a promise of imperial clemency: ‘...and whensoever the British and French repent them of their evil ways and return to their allegiance, we shall be pleased to permit them to trade again, as of old. May they repent while there is yet time.
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The next day, a further pronouncement summarily rejected the additional reparation the allies had demanded. Much of this stiffening of Hsien Feng’s backbone was undoubtedly due to Yehonala’s reproaches. The Emperor still longed to escape the crisis by fleeing over the Great Wall to his palace at Jehol, secure in the heartland of his people. As a conquering race, the Manchu had always felt insecure in China, and had long viewed their old home as a safe haven. Up until the reign of Hsien Feng’s father, regular visits had been made to the region, to worship at the shrines of the dynastic ancestors. Even before the coming of the Westerners, the Manchu had laid plans against a successful uprising against their rule. Priceless treasures of all kinds, furs, silks, jades and gems were all hoarded at Mukden, the old Manchurian capital. Astonishing amounts of silver were stored in the old wells of the palace: the precious metal was melted in a clay furnace built over the top of each well, and poured down in a continuous stream until the massive silver cylinder reached the top of the shaft. Once full to the brim, it was capped with cement and a new well selected to repeat the process. They were known as ‘silver cheeses’, where an ousted Manchu Emperor could nibble away contentedly, paring off his wealth to fund and plan his revenge.
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To Yehonala and the war party such thinking was sacrilege. The barbarians would be defeated, what was needed was time to prepare a proper defence. And so the Chinese negotiators procrastinated and delayed, finding endless excuses to hold the Westerners from Beijing and their planned meeting with the Son of Heaven. Elgin’s chief negotiators in these interminable discussions, Harry Parkes and Thomas Wade, engaged in endless verbal jousting with the Imperial envoys, slowly stripping away the onion skins of deception until they finally extracted from the three mandarins the confession that, in reality, they were not empowered to agree anything of substance with the Westerners. Exasperated beyond endurance, Elgin ordered the march on Beijing to recommence, advancing his forces rapidly to the amazement of the Chinese, whose huge unwieldy armies could take weeks to complete such a manoeuvre. Fear and consternation once again seized the court.

Emperor Hsien Feng vacillated between his duty to his ancestors and his urgent desire to put as much distance as possible between himself and these inconsiderate barbarians who resolutely refused to acknowledge his suzerainty. And yet even Hsien Feng could admit the need for someone to negotiate with the advancing ‘rebels’ and to attempt to bring them back within the fold of Chinese authority; for despite all evidence to the contrary, the Emperor and the court still clung to the comforting illusion of Chinese world supremacy and continued to view the allied army as recalcitrant subjects who had for the moment slipped the yoke of the Manchu. The throne authorised new, higher-ranking envoys, the Emperor’s own cousin Prince I, and Mu Yin, President of the Board of War, to replace the hapless negotiating trio who had been recalled in disgrace, but who, fortunately, in the confusion of the moment were not served with silken cords.

The choice of negotiators signalled a hardening of the Chinese attitude. Prince I was most certainly of the war party, and in firm agreement with Yehonala that no concessions should be made to the Westerners. The allied force was tiny compared to the Manchu army, said to number in total almost half a million men. In addition, the Chinese were led by a capable and aggressive general, Seng Guo Lin Sen (who, anglicised as ‘Sam Collinson’, became something of a mascot to the British squaddies). Moreover, the Westerners were far from their nearest base and with extended supply lines, while the Chinese were fighting for hearth and home. To the Manchu elite and the Chinese literati it appeared inconceivable that the Franco-British forces could prevail. In an attempt to lull the ‘rebel’ commanders, Prince I and Mu Yin sent placating letters to Lord Elgin, insisting that everything could be settled to his satisfaction.

Elgin was having none of it. His forces would continue to advance, to Tungchow, where they might then negotiate the final entry into the city and the audience with the Emperor. This was the last straw for the Chinese: Tungchow was strategically sited, just twelve miles from Beijing, with road and water routes direct to the capital. With Tungchow under their control, nothing could stop the Westerners rolling down to the northern capital and the Great Within. This simply could not be allowed to happen. There was no alternative. It had to be war.

Continuing their strategy of lulling the suspicions of the allies, the Chinese affected to capitulate. Elgin and Baron Gros might ratify the treaty in Beijing they conceded; the Dynasty asked only that they visit the capital with a small honour guard, leaving the bulk of their army where it lay. Elgin shot back with a proposal that his forces halt their advance four miles before Tungchow, at the village of Chang Chia-wan. He and his French counterpart would then travel to Beijing with a one-thousand-man escort, still an impressive number of men, but not sufficient to panic the Chinese population into believing that a conquering army intent on pillage and rapine was advancing on them. Elgin added that, as well as ratifying the treaty, he carried a letter from Queen Victoria to the Chinese Emperor which he intended to hand personally to the Son of Heaven. In most nations in the nineteenth century, such a letter would have been considered a compliment (indeed it was intended as such, to convey the high regard of the British ‘Queen Empress’ for her fellow sovereign). In China ‘facts were different’, and the missive, together with the very personal manner in which it was to be delivered, was construed as the grossest insult. No barbarian, royal or not, could ever be placed on a par with the Celestial Prince. It was unthinkable and intolerable. If the Chinese had entertained second thoughts about the coming conflict, Elgin’s reiteration of his intention to deliver this letter wiped all further doubts from their minds. Had the British been actively seeking a confrontation, they could have done nothing better to steel their opponents’ resolve for war.

Despite their anger, the Chinese continued to ‘hide a dagger in a smile’, the tenth of the Classic Thirty-six Strategies: ‘reassure the enemy to make it slack, work in secret to subdue it; prepare fully before taking action...This is the method of hiding a strong will under a compliant appearance.
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Prince I and Mu Yin affected agreement to everything, but as September progressed the Chinese Dragon began to move, mobilising its immense army: Mongol and Manchu cavalry, tiger soldiers in black and yellow uniforms, musketeers, jingalmen, cannoneers, and warriors from a score of provinces, all determined to stop the barbarian and prevent loss of face and humiliation of the Son of Heaven.

Had the confrontation occurred twenty years earlier, the issue could hardly have been in doubt. In those days, the weaponry of the two sides would have been far more closely matched and superior numbers would certainly have carried the day. Until the late1850s the British army had still been equipped with smooth-bore, muzzle-loading cannon virtually unchanged from the Napoleonic wars. The range and accuracy of these weapons were appalling: the cannon could barely manage to shoot accurately beyond 500–700 metres. The British infantry carried ‘Brown Bess’ muskets of similar vintage. While their effective range was said officially to be two hundred yards, tests showed that a trained infantryman shooting at this range under perfect firing conditions could hit a 1.75-by-3-metre target with only three out of ten shots. The reason was that the spherical musket-ball was made loose-fitting (to increase firing rate) with the result that it bounced its way down the barrel, the final bounce effectively defining its trajectory. Accuracy was quite simply a matter of luck. If Lord Elgin’s embassy had taken place even four years earlier, Chinese numerical superiority would have easily overwhelmed enemy troops equipped with such slow-firing, inaccurate firearms.

But in the few years prior to the 1860 China campaign, something of a revolution had occurred in European weaponry, beginning with the introduction of the Delvigne-Minié bullet, which could be loaded quickly but which, on firing expanded to completely fill the musket barrel, drastically reducing loss of power from the propellant gases and increasing the range of the weapon. There was a second advantage: a missile in contact with the barrel of the gun allowed for ‘rifling’ (the cutting of a spiral groove in the barrel), so that the bullet emerged from the weapon with a spin that held it on target. The result was innovative and deadly.

Against this, the Chinese were equipped with firearms that were hopelessly obsolete. Many of their cannon were of ancient design, and fired stone shot; their muskets were for the most part matchlocks, having a burning taper which ignited the gunpowder when the trigger was pulled–a design which had not been seen in Europe since the early 1500s. Some of their cavalry still boasted plate armour–excellent protection when facing spears and arrows, but of no avail against the high-velocity Enfield rifle or the metal shards of the Armstrong gun’s exploding shells.

On 18th September a joint Franco-British party, headed by Harry Parkes as interpreter and Henry Loch, private secretary to Lord Elgin, rode to Tungchow to settle with Prince I and Mu Yin the final details of the allies’ ‘visit’ to Beijing. All seemed to be going smoothly, until they came to the question of Queen Victoria’s letter to the Emperor. This was a sticking-point with the Chinese and the meeting went rapidly downhill, Prince I screaming, ‘There can be no peace!’ and ‘It must be war!’, all pretence of amicable discussion thrown to the winds. Unsettled, the Europeans left the Chinese camp. But as they returned to report the new Chinese position to Lord Elgin, they suddenly became aware of cannon batteries hidden in the man-high fields of millet surrounding Chang Chia-wan, where the allied army was to make its camp and await the return of Elgin and Baron Gros from their audience with the Emperor. On closer inspection, Manchu bannermen and Chinese infantry were found to have been deployed in great numbers all around the campsite. The Chinese general Seng Guo Lin Sen had made Chang Chia-wan a killing ground.

Incensed by this treachery, Parkes immediately fashioned an improvised flag of truce, fastening a kerchief to the lance of one of his Sikh sowars, and with his escort around him turned once more and pressed forward through the Chinese troops in an attempt to find ‘Sam Collinson’ and defuse the situation. The mood was ugly–the Emperor’s edict offering a reward for every barbarian head had already been promulgated. Seeing the white flag, a Chinese officer intervened and volunteered to escort them to General Seng for an official safe-conduct. Parkes readily agreed, and together with his men rode confidently into the general’s camp. But while the allies saw themselves as under a flag of truce, and as envoys of a foreign power due all the protection of diplomatic convention, to Seng they were simply rebels; and against such men all means were just.

Parkes and his entire entourage were subjected to a torrent of verbal abuse from Seng, before being dragged from their horses and trussed up with their arms behind their backs and their wrists tied to their ankles–the traditional method of binding captured rebels. Seng ordered them thrown on carts and carried off to Beijing. There seems to have been a concerted plan to capture as many ‘barbarians’ as possible. In all, some thirty-nine allied prisoners–twenty-six British and thirteen French–were taken within the space of a few hours, all of them bound and transported in carts to Beijing.