CHAPTER 8
The queen of England, at least, was pleased with the outcome of the war in China. In her speech opening Parliament on February 9, 1861, Victoria expressed her pleasure that Lord Elgin and Baron Gros “were enabled to obtain an honourable and satisfactory settlement of all the matters in dispute” in China and commended the British and French military commanders for having “acted with the most friendly concert.”1 But beyond the small circle of the queen, her prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and his foreign secretary, Lord Russell, Elgin was hard put to find supporters.
The Times editors had been the most sympathetic—their own correspondent Bowlby was the one who had been murdered, after all—and their editorial on Christmas Day 1860 suggested that perhaps Elgin had in fact been too gentle with the Chinese. Financially, at least, they thought he might have quadrupled the indemnity rather than just doubling it. The Chinese should realize they had gotten off cheaply, they said, for Britain had spent far more on the invasion force than it was to be reimbursed by the indemnity (later estimates would actually put Britain’s cost of the war at several times the doubled indemnity). In the spirit of the season, though, they allowed that “peace is pleasant at any mere money sacrifice.” As for the destruction in Beijing, they clearly felt that it was a just reprisal for the kidnapping of Parkes and the murder of Bowlby and the others in his party. “Their graves,” said The Times, “may serve to record the crime of which the blackened ruins of the Summer Palace of the Emperor will long record the punishment.”2
Other papers were less supportive. The Illustrated News of the World, for one, took a more contemplative view, tapping into the ambivalence of those in the British public for whom the news of Beijing’s fall sparked not so much exultation as a kind of indeterminate anxiety. The Allied victory, it allowed, was “one of the most remarkable in the annals of the world,” wherein “the capital city of a nation which numbers one-third of the human race has been captured by a handful of troops from the distant west.” But it noted that the heady aura of triumph was “strangely blended with regret and misgivings … because we see not where it is to end.” The war between China and Britain seemed almost unintentional, growing from a haphazard sequence of accidents, perceived insults, escalations, and petty retributions—yet it had reached the point where “nearly one-half the family of man is at deadly feud with the other.” It agreed that the Chinese government had acted treacherously but also suggested Britain had been tainted by the violence she had brought to bear in return. “Enfield rifles will not teach them to tell the truth,” the editors wrote, “nor soften the innate savagery of their passions.” So instead of trying to ascribe blame, they instead expressed hope that this moment of history might simply pass. “It is now too late [to question] the origin of the war,” they said, “we are in for it, and we must get out of it in the best way we can.”3
Whatever one’s opinion of the war or the treaty that ended it, it was the destruction of the Summer Palace that sent the real shock across the political spectrum. The French writer Victor Hugo, living in exile on an island in the English Channel as an opponent of Napoleon III’s authoritarian rule, condemned the Allied destruction of the palace in a famous letter that cast France and Britain as a pair of bandits, plundering and burning their way through China.4 There was now a legacy of rapacious Lords Elgin, he mused, for the Earl of Elgin who had just eviscerated the Summer Palace was none other than the son of the Lord Elgin who had looted the eponymous marbles from Greece a generation earlier; though if anything the son was worse than his father, said Hugo, because he had left nothing behind.5 The Chinese emperor’s Summer Palace had been one of the greatest wonders of world civilization, he wrote, ranking with the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids of Egypt, the Colosseum in Rome, and Notre Dame in Paris. And now it was gone, thanks to the incendiary pillaging of those who equated Europe with civilization and China with barbarism. “This,” he declared, “is what civilization has done to barbarism.”
Criticism from a gadfly of the French regime was perhaps to be expected, but equally damning judgments came from the halls of Parliament itself. Debate erupted on February 14, 1861, as the two houses considered twin resolutions of thanks for the British commanders and troops who had successfully fought in the China campaign. In the House of Lords, the Marquess of Bath responded to Prime Minister Palmerston’s defense of Elgin’s conduct by stating for the record that “he could not … allow to pass unnoticed an act of vandalism, which, although it had been sanctioned by an English ambassador and defended by an English Minister, might, in his opinion, justly be ranked with such deeds as the burning of the library of Alexandria, or the sacking of Rome by the Constable de Bourbon.”6 Likewise, in the House of Commons, the Irish MP Vincent Scully referred to the burning of the Summer Palace as “that act which certainly in his (Mr. Vincent Scully’s) opinion, and in that of a great many out of that House, was an act of barbarism and vandalism, for which it was difficult to find any precedent in ancient or modern history, and the nearest resemblance to which was the burning of Persepolis under somewhat similar circumstances by Alexander the Great.”7 What, Scully asked, if the Chinese upon conquering London had conducted themselves in a similar manner? “What was the object of burning the Summer Palace?” he demanded. “Was it to conciliate the Chinese, or was it to Christianize them?”
Elgin held fast in the face of his public shaming. In his mind, he had done it for the sake of the very people who now condemned him. Indeed, one of the most consistent threads running through his two voyages to China was the sense of an irresistible force—a collective, imagined will, projected from his country and his people—that guided his hand even against his own frequent and sometimes profound misgivings. In a speech at the Royal Academy soon after his return, he defended his decision to destroy the palace as being, in its context, Hobson’s choice:
[I] assure you that no one regretted more sincerely than I did the destruction of that collection of summer-houses and kiosks, already, and previously to any act of mine, rifled of their contents, which was dignified by the title of Summer Palace of the Chinese Emperor. But when I had satisfied myself that in no other way, except, indeed, by inflicting on this country and on China the calamity of another year of war, could I mark the sense which I entertained, which the British army entertained … and which, moreover, I make bold in the presence of this company to say, the people of this country entertained—of an atrocious crime, which, if it had passed unpunished, would have placed in jeopardy the life of every European in China, I felt that the time had come when I must choose between the indulgence of a not unnatural sensibility and the performance of a painful duty. The alternative is not a pleasant one; but I trust that there is no man serving the Crown in a responsible position who would hesitate when it is presented to him as to the decision at which he should arrive.8
That is, it was a matter of putting his duty to Britain, to its army, and above all to its people above his own aesthetic sensibilities. Destroying the emperor’s palace, he contended, had been the only way to assuage (preemptively) the anger of the British public overSenggelinqin’s kidnapping of Parkes and murdering of the prisoners, without forcing upon them another war with China. It was a terrible loss, he admitted, but he believed that any responsible man would have done the same in his shoes, because it had been that or nothing.
But it was not the effect on China of the palace’s destruction that he regretted; rather, what he regretted was that he had destroyed a beautiful thing. The same might be said of his critics as well, even Victor Hugo; it was not for China that they cried shame, but for art. Any genuine remorse in Elgin’s speech was still colored by his underlying conviction that China was a country that somehow demanded British intervention. As regrettable as the loss of a palace full of imperial treasures might have been for the aesthetes of Europe, he had little sympathy for China itself. Its civilization, he believed, was lost to history. As he went on with his speech at the Royal Academy, he offered that although the Chinese had invented gunpowder, they had done little more with it than to make firecrackers. They had invented the compass but hadn’t gone to sea. They had invented the printing press but had used it to produce nothing more than “stagnant editions of Confucius.” It was Europe, he reckoned, that had made something useful of the Chinese inventions in the past, and in the future it would be no different. His summary judgment on the ancient kingdom he had just blasted open to foreign trade was that only Britain could bring Chinese civilization back to life. “I am disposed to believe,” he concluded, “that under this mass of abortions and rubbish there lie hidden some sparks of a diviner fire, which the genius of my countrymen may gather and nurse into a flame.”9
At the other end of the China war, the Xianfeng emperor’s flight from Beijing in September 1860 ended in a leaking, run-down palace on the old imperial hunting grounds in the mountains a hundred and fifty miles northeast of the capital. In the dynasty’s eighteenth-century heyday, this had been where the high-ranking Manchus went in the summertime to escape the heat and to hunt with the emperor, ranging on horseback through the forests and streams, practicing their archery, and celebrating the outdoorsmanship that they imagined made them so superior to the soft, bookish Chinese. But in more recent generations, the hunting grounds had fallen into disuse. After the fiscal crisis under Xianfeng’s father, the site had been all but abandoned, and its maintenance funds had been diverted to help keep up the Summer Palace outside Beijing. Since then, the old hunting retreat had lapsed into an overgrown, derelict shell of its former glory.
Along with the retinue of servants and palace women who accompanied him, a handful of advisers came along as well. They represented the most adamantly militant of his Manchu cabinet, and most had been with him since he had first sat on the throne at the age of nineteen (he was now twenty-nine). There were Duanhua and Zaiyuan, who, along with the now-disgraced Senggelinqin, had been at the deathbed of the emperor’s father, who had entrusted them to guide his son.10 There was Sushun, the ruthless grand secretary and president of the Board of Revenue, who was Zeng Guofan’s patron at court. These were the war hawks, the strongest voices of opposition to the foreign treaties, and they now effectively controlled who could visit from the capital and which messages would reach the emperor; it was far more power than they had exerted in the capital (though they had always exerted more than they should have). Edicts soon went out explaining that the emperor was on a “hunting voyage” and would remain there until further notice. The emperor’s younger half brother Prince Gong, who had been left in charge of the capital when Xianfeng fled, was not one of the approved visitors; the advisers turned down his petitions to have an audience with his brother on the grounds that the emperor was too weakened by his traumatic escape to see him.
Prince Gong floated between two worlds, isolated from his brother’s refugee court yet suddenly responsible for the capital and the vast kingdom it governed. A slight twenty-seven-year-old with heavy-lidded eyes, a shy manner, and a smooth, boyish face, it fell to him to pick up the pieces after the war with England and France. He had always been smarter than his older brother, though. The throne didn’t automatically fall to the eldest son, and he’d actually been a rumored favorite to become emperor up until 1846, when he was thirteen. As the story went, that was the year when their ailing father, the Daoguang emperor, had called his two favorite sons for an audience and asked them what they would do if they should become emperor. The younger replied with a list of detailed policy initiatives, which he planned to enact as soon as he ascended to the throne. The elder simply threw himself to the ground and wept—for becoming emperor would mean that his father was dead. The father pronounced that the elder son was the filial one, while the younger was merely talented. He made the elder his imperial heir, and the younger became a lifelong prince.11
After the Allied armies withdrew, Prince Gong wrote a series of petitions to his brother, imploring him to come back to Beijing: the war was over, he pleaded, the foreign armies had retreated, and the sovereign was needed in the capital to reassure his people. In an ironic confirmation of Elgin’s belief that the destruction of the Summer Palace would teach the Chinese government to deal honestly, Prince Gong assured Xianfeng that there would be no more fighting with the British and French as long as they followed the treaty. “If in the future we show the foreign barbarians faith and sincerity,” he wrote, “when they return to the capital next spring they will not likely cause difficulties.” To a certain measure, he implied, the court’s duplicity had brought its own ruin, and he cautioned that “if we attempt to deal with them with false words and deceptive behavior, it is something that I … do not dare to risk.”12
But Xianfeng refused to go back to Beijing. The armies may have withdrawn, he wrote in response to Prince Gong’s petitions, but there were still foreigners in the capital. (He was livid that his brother had agreed to allow ambassadors into Beijing.) If he went back, who was to say that the foreign armies wouldn’t come again, forcing him to flee yet again and creating even worse disorder than already existed?13 So the emperor stayed at the hunting retreat with his empress and concubines and his close circle of militant Manchu advisers. And far from making any preparations to return to the capital, he ordered his staff to start making improvements to the long-neglected gardens and opera theater in his new home.14
As the autumn of 1860 gave way to the winter of 1861 and the northern rivers turned to ice, Prince Gong gained a respite. Couriers brought him dire reports from Zeng Guofan on the fighting around Anqing, but that was far away to the south and the imperial capital was safely landlocked for the season. Frederick Bruce was spending the winter at Tianjin and wouldn’t come to Beijing until after the Peiho had thawed in the spring. And so, with no sign of the emperor’s return, Prince Gong and a genial middle-aged grand councillor named Wenxiang who had also stayed behind turned their attention to figuring out a means to accommodate the European ambassadors when the time came, while avoiding the humiliation of granting them an audience with the (absent) emperor.
Their solution, outlined in a proposal in early January 1861, was to establish a separate office to manage foreign affairs. It would be outside the imperial city and thus safely distant from the emperor’s inner sphere, but it would be staffed by top Manchu officials (Prince Gong and Wenxiang chief among them), who could deal directly with the ambassadors and also have access to the highest echelons of the dynastic government. It was designed to please both sides, giving the foreign ambassadors the access they demanded while keeping them at arm’s length from the inner world of the emperor. The emperor approved the proposal from his exile; either he’d resigned himself to the inevitable presence of Europeans in his capital, or he hoped this would at least keep them at a bit of a distance until they could be gotten rid of altogether.
The proposal for this Office of Foreign Affairs was part of a larger plan for juggling the dynasty’s many threats, which Prince Gong also now outlined for his brother. The Taiping rebels, he reasoned, were like a disease of the inner organs; they were the most urgent of the dynasty’s problems. Foreigners like the British, meanwhile, were like afflictions of the limbs: threatening but external, and therefore secondary. He proposed that the dynasty’s first order of business should be to do everything in its power to exterminate the Taiping rebels. Until the Taiping were suppressed, the Qing government should appease the foreign powers and avoid any conflict with them; later, once the rebellion was over, it could bring them under control as well.15 (Chiang Kai-shek would use an almost identical metaphor in the 1930s to justify appeasing the invading Japanese while continuing to fight the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong.)
In the same vein, Prince Gong also began to think seriously about whether the Manchus should avail themselves of outside help against the Taiping. In the wake of the new treaties, while the British in London were fretting over the moral implications of their China policy, Russia—free from the Anglo-American obsession with neutrality—had been angling for favor in Beijing by offering direct military aid to the Qing government. In addition, since the Taiping had cut off the Grand Canal, they offered shipping aid, suggesting that they could coordinate with the U.S. Consulate in Canton to bring southern rice to Tianjin by an ocean route that would steer widely clear of the rebels’ area of control.
Of the four major foreign powers in China, the Russians were in many ways the odd ones out. They still bore a grudge against Britain and France from the Crimean War, for one thing. And whereas the British, French, and Americans all wanted above all to expand waterborne trade in the coastal and river ports (an interest shared by all maritime powers and therefore ripe grounds for cooperation), Russia alone shared a land border with the Qing Empire—one, moreover, that was thousands of miles long. Russian diplomats therefore saw in a compliantly weakened Manchu government the chance to expand their own territory and develop a cross-border trade with China to the exclusion of European and American merchants. The tsar’s representatives had offered Xianfeng rifles as early as 1857, and during the negotiations at Tianjin in 1858 they volunteered military advisers as well—if, in exchange, the dynasty would give Russia control of the territory north of the Amur River in the Manchu homeland.16
Xianfeng rebuffed those overtures, and so in 1860 a talented young Russian diplomat named Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev followed Elgin’s expedition to Beijing in hopes of gaining new leverage. After the Allies invaded Beijing, Ignatiev managed to negotiate a new Sino-Russian treaty with Prince Gong—in secret, after first playing the part of “impartial” mediator between the Europeans and the Manchus. Against the threat of allowing the Europeans to topple the Qing regime, he pressured Prince Gong into granting Russia control of a vast region north of the Amur that measured more than three hundred thousand square miles—several times larger than Korea, which it abutted to the north—as well as a significant tract of borderland along the north of Xinjiang in the Qing Empire’s far west. To defend Russia’s acquisition of this new territory (a land concession to make Hong Kong look like a pinprick) and in the hope of establishing preeminence over the other foreign powers in Beijing, Ignatiev reiterated his country’s desire to help the Manchus put down their internal rebellion.17 As he proposed it to Prince Gong, along with the gift of rifles promised earlier, three or four hundred Russians on steam-powered gunships could coordinate with Qing imperial troops on land and together conquer the rebel capital at Nanjing.
This time, Prince Gong took the offer seriously. With the emperor’s permission, he referred the question to a small handful of high-ranking Chinese officials, a group that included Zeng Guofan. Some who read the proposal supported it. The Chinese superintendent of trade in Shanghai suggested paying the foreigners on the basis of loot: if the Russians captured a Taiping-held city, the spoils could be divided in two, with half going to the depleted imperial coffers and the other half to reward military merit. Of the portion allotted to merit, the Chinese fighters would get two-fifths and the foreigners would get the rest.18 (Putting aside the issue that the “spoils” would be property stolen from his own countrymen, it is worth noting that it was in this official’s jurisdiction thatFrederick Townsend Ward had already been hired under somewhat better terms, without the knowledge of Beijing.) From the other side of the debate, the director general of grain transportation responded that it was preposterous for the Russians to pretend that a few hundred men on a handful of boats could defeat the Taiping rebels—and on the wild chance that they did succeed, they would surely blackmail the government with ever-increasing demands. The plan had no merit, he concluded, and could only endanger the dynasty further.19
From his base in Anhui province, Zeng Guofan struck a more ambivalent pose. Writing in December 1860, he advised against immediately accepting foreign military support but allowed that it might come in handy later. There was no enmity between China and Russia, he wrote, so this wasn’t necessarily an insidious offer, and the dynasty did have a precedent for accepting such aid: the emperor’s great-great-great-grandfather Kangxi had used Dutch ships against rebels on Taiwan in the seventeenth century. But Zeng Guofan’s own naval forces were well in place on the Yangtze River, he wrote, and in Hunan he was having more ships built, so he didn’t need Russian support on the water. The real problem was on land; his army had absolutely no route by which to advance onNanjing, so it would be impossible to coordinate an attack per Ignatiev’s plan. Zeng Guofan advised that the government defer Russia’s offer of help until his land forces had recaptured enough Taiping territory to be able to threaten Nanjing properly.
As for moving grain, he reminded the emperor that there was a long pattern of self-interested foreigners offering China aid in times of crisis. “Since ancient times,” he wrote, “whenever outsiders helped China, as soon as they were done they always came up with unforeseen demands.” Everything had to be hashed out clearly in advance, he warned, and they had to understand the character of the foreigners they were dealing with. Not all of them were the same. He sketched out the differences between the ones at hand (none of whom, for the record, had he ever met). In his opinion, the British were the most cunning, followed by the French. The Russians were more powerful than either the British or French. The Russians often fought with the British, who were therefore afraid of them. Americans, by contrast, had a “pure and honest” nature, and they had always been respectful and submissive toward China. When the British and French had invaded Canton in 1858, Zeng noted, the Americans hadn’t helped them in their treachery. They also hadn’t taken part in the fighting at the mouth of the Peiho (he was unaware of Josiah Tattnall’s supporting role in 1859). Therefore, he wrote, “we can see that the Americans are sincere and obedient in their dealings with China and aren’t part of some unbreakable clique with the British and French.” It was worth considering the aid of the Americans and Russians to move grain to the north. But whatever the outcome at the moment, he felt it was most important for China to improve its own technology so it wouldn’t need outside help in the first place. “If we study how they make their cannons and ships,” Zeng concluded, “it will be of great benefit to us in the long run.”20
The emperor took the advice of caution. He accepted ten thousand rifles and eight cannons from the Russians (which would arrive in a year) but declined the offer of naval assistance.21 For as Prince Gong had written to him on January 24, the real problem was that if he let the Russian gunships sail up to Nanjing without Zeng Guofan’s forces there to meet them, the Russians might just decide to throw in their lot with the rebels.22
By February 1861, reports had begun to surface in the British press that Admiral Hope was planning to lead a Royal Navy squadron up the Yangtze River to open relations with the Chinese rebels. Such had been the substance of Elgin’s parting orders to him, but as with most China policy under Palmerston’s government, the expedition had no prior approval from even the foreign secretary, let alone Parliament. In the House of Lords on February 19, Earl Grey demanded information on the government’s plans to meet with the rebels and used Hope’s planned voyage as an occasion to revisit the origins of Britain’s war in China—a war he had opposed as unjust from the very beginning. In a sweeping speech on the history of British relations with China, he argued that the civil war in China was in fact the fault of his own country.
Earl Grey was as qualified as anyone in Parliament to judge Britain’s foreign policy; he had served as undersecretary for war and the colonies in the early 1830s during the prime ministership of his late father (the previous Earl Grey, namesake of the tea), and he had later served terms as both secretary for war and colonial secretary. At its root, his speech on February 19, 1861, echoed Karl Marx’s writings for the New-York Daily Tribune back in 1853: he argued that Britain’s predatory trade policies dating back to the firstOpium War had, by destabilizing the government of China, brought about the widespread outbreaks of rebellion against its rule that now culminated in the Taiping. Therefore, the misery of the Chinese people over the past two decades and the horrific warfare that now scourged their homeland were Britain’s fault. And this was not, he declared, a new phenomenon. “My Lords,” he intoned, “our experience of India ought to warn us upon this subject. It ought to teach us that it is easy to destroy an Asiatic Government, but not so easy to replace it.”23
Whereas Marx had envisioned a Chinese revolution as a spark to light up the oppressed nations of Europe, Grey saw it instead as a prelude to a new chapter of British colonialism in Asia, one he did not welcome. He argued that Britain’s military interventions in China had now driven the Qing dynasty to the very edge of collapse—and if that collapse should in fact take place, it would become Britain’s humanitarian duty to step in and help the suffering people of the country (as, he offered, they had just done with the state of Oudh in northern India). Should Britain heed its moral obligations in China, warned Grey, “we may be irresistibly led on, until nothing remains for us, but to take its administration into our own hands.” In other words, China would become the new India.
But nobody wanted another India. Since the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, there had been little but exhaustion in Britain over the incredible political and military costs of the colonial enterprise. In the wake of those uprisings, the East India Company had been nationalized, and the government itself now bore direct responsibility for the colony. There were not the funds, the military resources, nor the public will to commit the sheer numbers of British humanity needed to take over the administration of yet another empire—one, moreover, with three times the population of India—just for the sake of keeping access to China’s tea and silk and its markets for textiles and opium. So Grey reminded his fellow lords of the enormous sacrifices Britain had already made for the sake of its colony in India and then, building to the climax of his speech, warned them darkly that “the difficulties of India are nothing compared with those to be expected in China, if you should there also pull down the national institutions and Government. And this, my Lords, is what I fear you are doing.”
Earl Grey saw nothing Britain could do to stave off the collapse of the Qing, so he called for strict neutrality in the Chinese civil war. He commended Frederick Bruce for rebuffing the Qing officials who had asked him to send British troops to reclaim Suzhou from the Taiping the previous summer and for restraining the French in that instance. But he also criticized him for “most unadvisedly” attacking the Taiping when they had arrived at Shanghai in August. As the Manchu imperial government grew weaker, Grey predicted, and as the rebels increased their control over the silk-producing regions of China, there would be further calls for Britain to help the tottering dynasty. But in China, he argued (drawing from Thomas Taylor Meadows’s influential book on Chinese rebellions), rebellion had long been the people’s “only check on abuse and tyranny.” To those in Britain who might call for intervention to stave off a Qing collapse and avoid the colonization that would follow, he had only the harshest of words: “If, after having so weakened the Chinese Government that it cannot protect itself against rebellion, you interfere … you will remove the only efficient check on that venality and corruption of the mandarins which is so much complained of, and thus bring on the people the evils of misgovernment.” The choices he saw facing Britain were bleak: to abandon China to collapse; to intervene and force the Chinese to endure their enslavement by the discredited Manchu government; or to take control of the empire itself. None was welcome, and the vaunted Elgin treaty, Earl Grey concluded, contained in it little more than the seeds of future war.
In response to the liberal Earl Grey’s speech, a Tory voice did him one better. The most stunning judgment of all that day came from Edward Law, the Earl of Ellenborough, a controversial former governor-general of India. He accepted Lord Grey’s premise that the British were morally responsible for the misery of the Chinese but turned his colleague’s conclusions on their head. “Opening trade,” he argued bluntly, “means opening fire.” He reminded the Lords what Elgin’s first experience with the Taiping had been when he had steamed past Nanjing in the Furious in 1858—namely, that they had shot at him. Ellenborough reasoned that if Britain were now to send Admiral Hope up the Yangtze, it would surely provoke a new round of fighting with “these banditti—for banditti they are.”24
But in fact, he thought a new round of fighting might be a good thing. For if Hope’s expedition to Nanjing should result in a war with the Taiping rebels, Britain could then make good for the damage it had caused in its wars against the Manchus in China. Fighting the Taiping, Ellenborough offered, was “the only way in which we can … put an end to the horrid combinations of those miscreants, who to their bloodshed and massacre add the crime of blasphemy; who violate women, who destroy men and all men’s works.” He agreed with Lord Grey that Britain had a humanitarian duty thanks to its past actions in China—but rather than calling for an end to armed intervention, he instead proposed that the best way for Britain to fulfill that duty was to make war on the rebels as well. “It is only in using our arms and our strength in repressing those banditti,” he concluded, “that we can in any manner atone for the great miseries we have brought on the Chinese Empire, and for the injuries we have done to humanity by our conduct in these wars.”
Neither of those critics of Palmerston’s war, it should be noted, imagined the Taiping to be a viable alternative to the Manchus. But there was little reason they would have. After all, it was difficult enough for British subjects in Shanghai to form a coherent impression of what the rebels were up to in Nanjing, just two hundred miles away—and as difficult as it was for them, it was all the more so for British statesmen who lived thousands of miles away, with a two-month lag in communications and with far more business to attend to than just the distant matter of China. Most members of Parliament relied for their knowledge of what was happening in China on the official reports culled and printed by the Foreign Office for their enlightenment: the so-called Blue Books. The Blue Books were, of course, dominated by the voice of Frederick Bruce, who, as the British minister in China, was the official whose opinion was most trusted by his government. Unlike his more open-minded brother Lord Elgin, Frederick Bruce had made up his mind early on—and firmly—that the Qing dynasty was the only power in China that was capable of governing. In consequence, most of the members of Parliament came to believe the same.
Furthermore, Lord Russell’s office in London compiled and printed those Blue Books, and the publication of relevant documents could sometimes be substantially delayed. As a case in point, on the very day Grey and Ellenborough were standing before the House of Lords and lamenting the absence of any power other than Britain that could take the place of the Manchus in China, Thomas Taylor Meadows—Grey’s authority on Chinese rebellions and the British consul who had tried in vain to get Frederick Bruce to read the letters from Li Xiucheng and Hong Rengan—was writing to Lord Russell from Shanghai to state his unequivocal belief that the Taiping were destined to rule China. The Qing government of the Manchus, he wrote, had “received its death-blows” from Elgin’s invasion. As Britain was now searching for a new power, a new government, to replace the Manchus, Meadows reported that “We have such another power in the Tae-pings, and such another Government in the Government which they have established at Nanking.”25
Meadows’s letter was a lengthy and forceful defense of the capacity of the Taiping to govern, but although he expressed his opinions on the same day the debate in London was taking place, his letter did not reach Lord Russell until the following April, and then Russell’s office did not print it for the Blue Books until fully a year after that, in April 1862, when, as it turned out, it no longer mattered. Meadows himself was soon transferred from Shanghai to a remote port in the north. Some saw it as a punitive move, though the appointment had in fact been pending before he wrote his letter. Whichever the case, with his transfer from Shanghai he was effectively removed from the picture.26
Sympathy for the Chinese rebels was far greater outside the halls of government, where a range of voices in the British press begged the public to look beyond the negative images in the Blue Books. The Methodist-affiliated London Review accused Frederick Bruce of ignoring the positive reports of his own country’s missionaries in favor of highlighting a single harshly negative account of Nanjing by an American named Holmes (who reported that he had discovered in the rebel capital “nothing of Christianity, but its name falsely applied—applied to a system of revolting idolatry”).27 The Review charged Holmes with being a completely unreliable source, “a young man, who has been a short time in the country, and who is said to have little or no knowledge of the dialect being spoken.” Holmes, they argued, couldn’t communicate properly with the rebel leaders, and his outrage stemmed mostly from a matter of politesse: he had been deeply offended that the Taiping had asked him to kneel during his visit. By the same reasoning, they suggested scornfully, “a New Zealand Chief at the White House ought to claim that the President should rub noses with him.” The Overland Register in Hong Kong, for its part, contrasted Griffith John’s positive account of Nanjing with Holmes’s negative one by dividing them under two headers: “men of education,” for Griffith John and, for Holmes, “illiterate and blundering bigots.” 28
Though much support for the Taiping came from the missionaries, they were hardly alone. A British businessman named John Scarth, who had just returned from more than a decade of merchant activity in China, published a series of pamphlets in London attacking Britain’s apparent preference for the Manchus. In one entitled “Is Our War with the Tartars or the Chinese?” Scarth argued that the British had apparently aligned themselves with the Tartars (the Qing dynasty) against the Chinese people themselves (the Taiping). His own sympathies were clear enough from the epigraph on the front page of his pamphlet, a quotation from the Athenaeum reading in part, “it may be that, in spite of foreign opposition and the diabolical cruelties of the mandarins, the cause of freedom will triumph [in China], and the Tartars be driven from the land they have scourged for so long.”29
Scarth argued that the Taiping were “not merely a rebellion against the Tartar dynasty, but a revolution in the most extended sense of that word.” But it was difficult for the British public to see them clearly, he said, because the foreign reporters in Shanghai got too much of their information from the Qing sympathizers among whom they lived. They therefore diminished any positive news about the rebellion, he wrote, while regularly “[abusing] the insurgents in set terms.” As for the overseas press, he maintained that the correspondents of the London Times simply parroted the deeply opinionated views of people such as Elgin’s interpreter Thomas Wade (the one who had described the rebels he met as “a gang of opium-smoking pirates”). For comparison, Scarth declared that the Taiping were every bit as justified in their rebellion as the Italians, who were then fighting to unify their country. “Take all the tyranny that was ever perpetrated in Naples,” he wrote, “and all the misgovernment of Rome, they would not show a tithe of the oppression to which the Chinese people have had to submit under their Tartar rulers. Why, then, should not the Chinese rebel? Is it only Italians that are to have our sympathy?”30
In the same nationalist vein, in the spring of 1861 the Dublin University Magazine ran an article on the Chinese rebels (which The Economist deemed “a fair case … in their favor”)31 calling for “an intelligent press, imbued with a strong love of national rights” to sift again through the reports from China. The author of the article followed John Scarth in comparing the Taiping Rebellion to the unification movement in Italy (a movement that Palmerston, by contrast, supported) and questioned the morality of any British policy that would stand in the way of “an imposing portion of China, entitled, as truly as Italy or France, to right its own wrongs.” Echoing the critics in Parliament who sensed in Bruce’s actions at Shanghai a nonchalance toward intervention, the author threw the British government’s own words back at it. “Shall we hold up a Government which Lord Elgin admits is the worst in the world,” he asked, “by putting down, if possible, men who proclaim to friends and foes their wish to make China a Christian nation?”32
The issue, as these writers framed it, was less a matter of religion than of national self-determination: the Taiping were a rebellion of the Chinese people against Manchu tyranny, and to stand in their way was to side with the tyrants. This argument was deeply interwoven with the religious one, but it could also stand alone, for the rebels’ brand of Christianity might be imperfect or even unpalatable, but they nevertheless had the right to national freedom. And that was an exceedingly powerful argument in Britain because it was the Liberals who held elected power in the government. Palmerston, for all of his foreign aggressions, was a Liberal, and the members of his party tended to view foreign affairs through a moral lens. Lord Russell insisted repeatedly to Parliament that Britain was holding to a strictly neutral path in the Chinese civil war, and he had to do so precisely because the others in his party kept expressing their doubts that this was in fact the truth. But there was more than one moral lens through which to view China, and one man’s national liberation was another man’s humanitarian disaster. Palmerston and Russell, via Bruce, mistrusted the Taiping, and so their side of the argument would hold consistently to the message that the Taiping were a force of anarchy and rapine, and if Britain had any moral calling at all in China, it was to prevent them from brutalizing the Chinese within Britain’s own small sphere of influence at Shanghai.
Though none in Parliament spoke in actual support of the reigning government of the Qing dynasty (whatever anyone’s misgivings about the destruction of the Summer Palace, there wasn’t a man there who didn’t despise the Manchus for the events that had provoked it), the rebels did have an enthusiastic and extremely partisan supporter in the House of Commons—and he was in many respects the very last person one would expect to have played this role. He was a seventy-one-year-old former chairman of the EastIndia Company named William Henry Sykes, a Scotsman who had begun his career at age thirteen as a cadet in the East India Company’s military arm. Over the following five decades he had worked his way up to the rank of colonel, gained a seat on the company’s board of trustees, and finally assumed its chairmanship. As chairman of the board, Colonel Sykes had seen the East India Company through its nationalization in 1858, when the British government took over control of India from the joint-stock trading company that had originally conquered and founded it.
In retirement, Colonel Sykes had been elected to Parliament in one of the seats for Aberdeen, Scotland. He was a formidable presence in the House of Commons, not just for his vast experience in India but also as a past president of the Royal Asiatic Society who had read everything he could get his hands on about China.33 He had a passion for statistics and was one of the founders of the Statistical Society of London—later to be the Royal Society for Statistics—which put him in the company of Thomas Malthus andFlorence Nightingale. He was also, despite (or perhaps because of) his life’s service to the British Empire in India, intensely moralistic about his country’s policies in Asia.
On March 12, Sykes demanded of Lord Russell what policy Britain intended to follow with the Taiping—whom he termed China’s “national party” because he, like Scarth, believed them to represent the Chinese people against Manchu tyranny. Did Britain intend to keep its forces in China? If so, he charged, it might well find itself reprising the role played in 1644 by the Manchus, who had been called in to help the Ming dynasty against an internal rebellion, “and they had put down the rebellion and the Emperor also.”34 (He was almost accurate in that statement; the last Ming emperor was already dead when the Manchus entered China, though they had indeed been invited to help put down a domestic rebellion, and they did indeed take the throne for themselves.)
Sykes went on to describe how the Manchus had refused to assimilate to Chinese society and how even after two hundred years they still lived in their separate garrison cities, a ruling elite kept apart from the mass of the subject population. He described the course of the rebellion up to the fall of the siege camps the past spring and attributed that military victory to Hong Rengan finally joining them at Nanjing. Hong Rengan, he went on, was “the real cause of the renewed vigour of the rebels.” He was “an able man who had been educated by missionaries at Hong Kong, and had become a convert and preacher of Christianity.” Later in the speech he marveled at Hong’s treatise on government and the future that it portended for China. “In one chapter,” announced Sykes, “he advocates the introduction of railroads, steamers, life and fire insurances, newspapers, and other western inventions.… Who knows but that ere many decades shall have passed over our heads, this noble country—vast in its extent, and exhaustless in its resources, will be penetrated and intersected by railroads, and startled into life by the rattling of the fire-carriage, and the flashing of the electric stream?”
Sykes channeled the voices of the Shanghai missionaries but added the weight of his own military and commercial experience. He spoke of the rebels at Suzhou “courteously receiving visits from Europeans of all nations, mercantile men, missionaries, and others” and writing letters to state their intention to take Shanghai peacefully “for the national party.” He repeated the story from The North-China Herald about Frederick Bruce refusing to acknowledge the letter from Li Xiucheng and the violence that had ensued—how the rebels had been treated as target practice when they had arrived in peace at Shanghai and how they had never fired a single shot in return. This, charged Sykes, showed that Britain’s representatives had all but ignored Lord Russell’s instructions to remain neutral. British troops had acted as, in a word, “mercenaries.” It was “a proceeding which left an almost indelible stain upon our honour.”
Sykes suggested that the “strange anomaly of fighting for our enemies and killing our would-be friends” at Shanghai derived entirely from Bruce’s bigotry toward the Taiping. To put all blame on one side in a civil war was to become a partisan, and in so many words he charged Bruce with partisanry. “Mr. Bruce states the rebels create a desert wherever they go,” said Sykes, but he himself believed the truth to be quite different: he had collected statistics showing that the export of tea and silk through Shanghai had in factincreased in the years since the rebellion had conquered China’s most productive provinces. It was now more than ten times as great as it had been before the Taiping existed. He quoted Griffith John’s report that Nanjing was coming back to life and being rebuilt, and he described the edict of religious toleration that John had received from the Heavenly King. Foreign travelers, Sykes claimed, regularly reported being robbed by imperial forces but were usually treated kindly by the rebels. He quoted Issachar Roberts as saying that the Taiping wanted peaceful trade with Britain and that the Loyal King “wishes to maintain the greatest friendship and cordiality, both in commerce and religion.”
The Taiping, he concluded, were nothing less than “an insurgent national party, holding one third of China, pledged to the expulsion of the Tartars, the extinction of idolatry, and the introduction of the Christian religion.” Everything, that is, that Britain should champion. Against them stood “a feeble, foreign Tartar despotism, which has proved faithless to treaties with European nations, and is inimical to Christians.” What was there to choose between? Yet Britain had, in its actions at Shanghai the previous summer, sided with the latter. How much longer, he asked Lord Russell, would this policy continue?
Russell, in a blustering response, charged Sykes with willful naiveté and declared that “there does not appear to be a word of truth” to the belief that the Taiping represented the Chinese people against the Manchus, nor that they were Christian. He repeated Frederick Bruce’s reports that the rebels were rapacious criminals who made a mockery of the Christian religion and that they had come to Shanghai with only the most violent of intentions. Neutrality allowed for self-defense, Russell contended, and he swore that he would not “[allow] the towns where our merchants are congregated to be destroyed, simply because some persons in this country have a false notion that they are a national party and that we ought to support them.”35
Sykes kept at him, though. On April 12, he got the floor again and brandished a sheaf of articles from Shanghai’s North-China Herald that, he said, gave direct support to his previous arguments. He asked Lord Russell if any of them had been made available to the members of Parliament. Russell all but ignored him, veering instead into a lengthy discourse (nearly three thousand words in the official transcript) in response to a previous question about affairs in Germany and Denmark before finally concluding with a dismissive comment that “my honorable and gallant Friend the Member for Aberdeen (Colonel Sykes) is, I think, the only person in the House who takes an interest in the Taepings.”36 The printers at the Foreign Office, he stated, were too busy to make anything else available.
But even as the debates were gearing up in London, Admiral Hope was already on his way to Nanjing. In early February 1861, he left the foreign settlements at Shanghai and steamed up the Yangtze in his dispatch vessel Coromandel, pushing hard through a cold, muddy current swollen by several days of heavy rain.37 Hope was a lanky, aristocratic-looking man with large ears, a clean-shaven face, and a plucky heedlessness that had earned him the nickname “Fighting Jimmy” from his adoring men.38 His fifty-one-gun flagship was far too large to maneuver nimbly on the river, so he left it behind in Shanghai as he shepherded a small squadron of gunboats reclaimed from the British fleet that had so recently invaded the north. They sailed in three parallel lines through the rain, the smaller vessels going ahead to take soundings and signal the depth of the opaque river to the following ships with deeper draft. Still, despite Hope’s care the ships ran aground with numbing regularity, and it took them more than two weeks to complete the voyage of two hundred miles. A jaunty delegation of officials, missionaries, and businessmen rode along in small luxury on a river steamer nicknamed the “floating hotel” (until it too ran aground, after which they called it the “shoregoing craft”). This made for the largest foreign party yet to visit Nanjing.
The lead negotiator of the expedition was none other than Harry Parkes, fresh from escaping death at the hands of Senggelinqin in Beijing. Sailing separately, he reached Nanjing on February 24, and the rest of the expedition joined him four days later, after stopping at the ruined city of Zhenjiang along the way to drop off a lonely consul (who now waited patiently for business to commence, his Union Jack flapping forlornly on its pole). They found Issachar Roberts resident in Nanjing and also William Muirhead, who had stayed on for a couple of weeks after Hong Rengan’s departure in early February. In contrast to Lord Ellenborough’s predictions of cannon fire, the party was made to feel welcome and took up quarters in the palace of the absent Loyal King.
On March 1, Harry Parkes explained Britain’s plans for trade on the Yangtze River to a pair of lesser Taiping kings who had been left in charge when the others departed for the campaign in Anqing. He told them that Britain’s treaty with the Manchu government gave British ships the right to trade in the city of Hankow in Hubei province—part of a three-city nexus with Hanyang and the provincial capital, Wuchang—which lay upriver beyond Anqing and was for the moment under imperial control. As the rebels controlled most of the territory in between, Parkes informed them that regardless of who held power along the banks, Britain claimed the right for its ships to sail the full length of the river freely. Furthermore, he told them, Admiral Hope intended to leave the six-gun paddle frigate Centaur at Nanjing to protect any British subjects who might happen to stop there.
The kings relayed Parkes’s message to Hong Xiuquan in his palace, seven miles away on the other end of the overgrown city from where the British fleet bobbed mischievously at anchor. Several hours later they brought back word that the Heavenly King had received a vision that warned him not to allow the foreigners to leave their gunboat, so they couldn’t grant that request. But after some extremely heated negotiation (during which Parkes reportedly shouted at them, “He must have another vision!”) they finally relented and conceded to Parkes’s terms.39 As regarded any plans the rebels might have to attack cities with British interests, Parkes warned them that if they should attack Zhenjiang (where they had just dropped off the consul) or Jiujiang (upriver beyond Anqing), both of which were still under imperial control and only just opened by the treaty, they had better not harm any British subjects or their property. In return, he promised that British forces would not oppose a Taiping attack on those cities as they had done at Shanghai.40 Parkes himself didn’t feel any particular affection for the rebels, who reminded him of “a pack of robbers who have just looted a city,”41 but as long as British traders could go about their business unmolested by them, he thought that they would be perfectly acceptable. As he wrote in one report, “we found these ‘princes,’ of whom we saw two, reasonable enough, and if they will keep their hands off our ships as they pass up and down, our principal object will be attained.”42
Parkes had unflagging faith in the positive effects of foreign trade on the Yangtze, which he thought of as “a warm stream of commerce passing through the main artery of this sickly country.”43 But his faith in this instance was tested by the fact that the two commodities the rebels seemed to want more than anything else were guns and opium. The latter might have sparked the interest of Shanghai’s opium merchants (who worried, apparently in vain, that their trade would be shut down by the Taiping), but Parkes couldn’t escape the literally explosive potential of unrestricted private British commerce through the heart of China’s civil war zone. And the open-door welcome to arms dealers wasn’t just on the side of the rebels, either. “It is the same … on the side of the Imperialists,” he wrote; “opium and arms, opium and arms, is the one cry we hear from mandarins, soldiers, and people, at every place we have yet come to.” Delighted as he was to see the major cities of the Yangtze River opening to foreign trade, he nevertheless worried that “much harm as well as good may result from the intercourse.”44
Between the rebels and the imperials, Parkes saw little for the British to prefer. In spite of his harsh treatment at the hands of the Manchus, he remained disinterested in the civil contest, and his opinion on the relative merits of the two sides was shaped, he claimed, by the words of a peasant he had met along the river, who, “seeing that for a few moments he was out of the hearing of other people, told me a piteous tale of his own sufferings, and of the desolation of the country round.” Parkes recounted the peasant’s view, one that was echoed innumerable times in the course of the war: “He drew little distinction between Imperial troops and rebels—he had suffered alike at the hands of both.”45
In contrast to Parkes’s pragmatism, Admiral Hope followed Frederick Bruce in viewing the rebels as a force of destruction that should be kept at arm’s length from British interests—though to a far greater degree than Bruce, he believed Britain should use force to achieve that end. Privately, Hope envisioned the future of the treaty ports as oases of stability, protected by British arms and providing security for native merchants through what he foresaw as “a period of anarchy, indefinite in duration” in China, “in which the commercial towns of the empire will be destroyed, and its most productive provinces laid waste.”46 To that end, Hope believed, the British should establish a radius around Shanghai of two days’ march (one hundred Chinese li, roughly thirty English miles) and prevent the Taiping from entering within it.
Such a radius would be a truly extreme interpretation of neutrality—a projected defense of British interests, as it were—and it fell directly afoul of Britain’s stated policy, at least as Lord Russell was then defending it to Parliament. But the lanky James Hope was, in the words of one of his contemporaries, a man for whom “the exigencies of the situation were everything, the official balance very little, the fear of responsibility nothing.”47 Russell and Bruce might cling to their high-minded theories and their moral principles of neutrality, but the navy had its own responsibilities, and Hope considered himself a man of the moment, a man of action. By the time he returned down the Yangtze from Hankow a month later, stopping off at Nanjing again on his way back to Shanghai, he had already made up his mind that a rebel-free radius of thirty miles around the treaty port was exactly what Parkes should demand from the Taiping leaders.
And so, on Hope’s instructions, at the end of March Parkes entered a new round of negotiations with the two lesser kings, from whom he requested, first, a promise from the rebels not to approach within two days’ march of Shanghai and then—once they seemed likely to agree to the first—not to approach within two days’ march of any of the treaty ports. This would be in the Taiping’s own interest, he told them with no small measure of chutzpah, for it ensured that when they did finally conquer the empire, those important trading cities would be undamaged by the war. The negotiations, predictably, bogged down. Parkes began to grow suspicious that the kings didn’t have any power (it was unfortunate for all concerned that Hong Rengan was gone from the capital at this point). So he left them and marched all the way across Nanjing to see the Heavenly King for himself. But when he got there, the guards wouldn’t let him into the palace. Parkes’s impatience grew as the hours passed and he sat, fuming, in an outer courtyard. There was little to do but stare angrily at the wall—where, much to his offense, hung a map of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in which Britain and France appeared merely as tiny islands huddled in the upper-left-hand corner. But finally, through a succession of messages carried in and out by the palace women (Parkes’s on paper, Hong Xiuquan’s on yellow silk), they came to an agreement: Hong Xiuquan would notify his commanders near Shanghai to stay thirty miles from the city for the rest of the year.48 The other cities he could not speak for; his armies in the field might need provisions from them. Parkes left Nanjing wondering just how much control the Heavenly King actually had over his agents in the field.
The same, of course, might be wondered of Lord Russell.
Admiral Hope did make a few concessions to his country’s neutral policy. For one thing, he ordered the authorities at Shanghai to begin rounding up British subjects who had enlisted as mercenaries in the Chinese civil war—though this was as much to punish desertion from his own force as to uphold the long-standing neutrality ordinance. The foreign mercenaries on the rebel side were thought to be based in Nanjing, so a consular official named Robert Forrest left Shanghai in March 1861 to make a journey overland through Taiping territory to the rebel capital. His plan was to reconnoiter with Hope on his way back down from Hankow and to try to scout out renegade Englishmen along the way.
Forrest was the first British agent to explore anything of the rebel kingdom beyond the immediate edge of the waterways, and his account gave the readers of the Blue Books their first glimpse of the world on the other side of the Chinese war. It began predictably enough as he confirmed the utter desolation of the countryside for a mile or so on either side of the Yangtze and the Grand Canal, but then he went on to report that life under the rebels farther inland was actually far better than had been thought.49 He discovered a vibrant underground trade between imperial Shanghai and rebel Suzhou, with constant traffic by a fleet of several thousand small boats whose owners had managed to buy into a scheme that got them past both imperial and rebel pickets. He spoke to a number of rebel soldiers along his journey, many of them conscripts (some, even, with the name of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom tattooed onto their cheeks to keep them from escaping), but they nevertheless seemed to him happy and well fed. They got plenty of rice each day, they told him, and said they were unconcerned about the future. What pain their faces might have masked, however, is unknowable; the most outwardly joyful persons he encountered, full of “swagger and airs,” were the boy soldiers, kidnapped from their families, who chased after him and called him a foreign devil.
Leaving the bone-whitened banks of the Grand Canal, Forrest set off inland and entered an entirely different world.50 The people there “were not alarmed at the sight of strangers as were the few wretched people along the canal,” he wrote. In comparison to the ghostly emptiness of the riverbanks, life inland seemed to exude “confidence and safety.” People were back at work in the fields. He noted the many proclamations of laws, which gave order to daily life. The people he met told him of the miserable destruction when the rebels had first come, of the kidnappings and looting and flights of refugees, but he reported that the period of chaos appeared to be over and “they are now, I am glad to say, fast returning to their homes.” The picture he painted of the world under the Taiping in the countryside matches a number of accounts left by Chinese gentry who lived through the period—that for the most part, after the conquest the people were left alone. In larger towns there was a Taiping xiangguan (“in whom the people seem to have confidence,” Forrest believed), but in the more rural areas the only tangible presence of the rebel authorities, other than the lack of shaved heads, was that every month or so, someone would come to collect taxes in grain or cash. Which is to say, it wasn’t much different from rural life under the Qing. Barring the return of warfare to the region, Forrest predicted, “the villages around will soon become peopled, and the land resume its wonted fertile appearance.”51
Forrest saw only one man with blue eyes along his route but gathered what information he could of the foreigners in rebel service. In Nanjing he discovered more than a hundred of them, Europeans and Americans, fighting for the Taiping. Their full extent hadn’t been known earlier, since whenever a foreign ship came to dock, they would all hide. Forrest prevailed on the rebel kings to hand over those who were British subjects, twenty-six of them as far as he could tell. Only a handful admitted to having joined the Taiping ranks voluntarily (for a salary of 60 taels per month, on par with that of a battalion commander in Zeng Guofan’s army).52 Others claimed, now that they were faced with arrest, that they had been crimped, or “Shanghaied,” as later slang would put it: out drinking in a Shanghai watering hole, someone had slipped them a sedative, and they woke up on a boat halfway to Nanjing staring into the barrel of a gun. Or so they said. The men were in “a most miserable condition,” he reported, “getting no pay, but plenty of rice and spirits. They were allowed to plunder wherever they went, but seem to have had little success.” In that, they were in remarkably similar straits to their counterparts under Frederick Townsend Ward on the imperial side, against whom they had fought at Qingpu andSongjiang until their leader, Savage, was killed.
It was a rough life to be sure. One of the men was ridden with dysentery and died a few days after Forrest’s arrival. Another told Forrest that an Italian in their number had recently murdered an Irishman and threw him into the moat, with no apparent consequences. Native troops had no monopoly on atrocity, Forrest learned, for his own countrymen “made no secret of such crimes as rape and robbery, and even hinted at darker deeds.” By the time he got to Nanjing, they were on their way to attack Hangzhou in Zhejiang province and their former leader, Savage, had been replaced by an American known only as Peacock, of whom the men were in awe. “He is of high rank among the Taepings,” they told Forrest, “and has the power of life and death.” With no jurisdiction over the citizens of other countries, Forrest had to leave the bulk of the mercenary force behind as he escorted the twenty-six confirmed British subjects onto the Centaur under armed guard and transferred them down to Shanghai to be tried en masse for violating the neutrality ordinance.53
For consistency, Admiral Hope tried to shut down the foreign mercenaries on the imperial side as well. A British consul was pleased to report on May 2 that Her Majesty’s forces had caught thirteen members of Frederick Townsend Ward’s militia at Songjiang, one of whom testified that there were now only eighty-two foreigners left fighting on the imperial side (fewer than in the Taiping’s foreign militia). Twenty-nine of them were deserters from the Royal Navy. The informer also painted Ward as something of a tyrant, who would rather lock a man up or let him disappear into the hands of imperial thugs than allow him to quit the force and return to Shanghai.54
They finally arrested Ward himself on May 19, as he was trying to recruit new blood for his militia in Shanghai. Since he was from Massachusetts, the only person in the international city who had jurisdiction over him was the U.S. consul, but things got complicated when Ward, his speech slurred by the scarred mass in his cheek left over from his bullet wound the previous fall, claimed that he was no longer a U.S. citizen and had become a subject of the Qing emperor. He was engaged to marry a Chinese woman (though the timing would suggest a hastily arranged union, insofar as a surviving letter of congratulations from the father of the would-be bride to Ward’s father is dated ten days after his arrest).55 To back him up, the provincial governor in Shanghai, who happened to be one of his patrons, produced papers proving Ward’s Chinese citizenship. The papers were fake; the imperial government would, in fact, make him a citizen, but not until the following February.56 Yet they were convincing enough that the U.S. consul refused to prosecute him.57 The British didn’t want to set Ward free to keep luring their men into China’s imperial service, but there seemed to be no legal basis for a trial, so Admiral Hope simply locked him up in a room on his flagship while they tried to figure out how to dispose of him. Ward jumped ship through an open window late one night, a waiting sampan picked him up out of the harbor, and he disappeared back into his world of shadows.58