CHAPTER 2

NEUTRALITY

In early May 1858, eighteen hundred miles up the coast from where Hong Rengan was preparing for his departure, the 1,287-ton paddle steamer HMS Furious bobbed and creaked in the cold, muddy waters nine miles off China’s northeastern shore. Pacing the deck was James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, stout of body, ruddy of complexion, and disarmingly gentle of demeanor. The Furious was his flagship, the linchpin in a fleet of twenty-one ships assembled by the governments of Britain and France that sat, ominously, waiting for orders from its joint commanders. They would have been within sight of shore if it hadn’t been for the weather, a thick fog that boiled in spite of the howling winds, made painful by sandlike grit blowing down from the plains of Manchuria. Roughly once a week it cleared enough for the sailors to spot the defenses along the flat strip of shore marking the entrance of the waterway that led, eventually, to the imperial capital, Beijing. This was the mouth of the Peiho, the White River, which spread wide over six miles of shoreline in a bar only a couple of feet deep at low tide, and the defenses were the forts at Taku—five of them arranged along the two banks of the river’s mouth. The Taku forts were the maritime gateway to the capital and the single most strategically important naval fortification on the entire Chinese coast.¹

The French-British alliance was a new and tentative one, dating from the recently ended Crimean War, and France had sent Baron Gros to join Lord Elgin as joint commander of the expedition. A diplomatic party from the United States tagged along in a neutral capacity, as did the old enemy from the Crimea, Russia. The Americans sailed on the Mississippi and the Russians, confusingly enough, on the Amerika. To make the point that this was indeed a joint expedition, the French flagship Audacieuse served as the meeting space for the four countries’ agents as they waited for the weather to clear.

Lord Elgin knew that his home government wanted him to take pains to show that Britain wasn’t after a monopoly on the China trade, so it was vital that the French participate in this expedition as belligerents. For the same reason, he wished the Americans and Russians would abandon their neutral stance as well. The so-called treaty ports in Shanghai and down the coast were open to all, even though it was British guns that had opened them in the Opium War. Hong Kong alone was a true British colony, and that was a source of some small embarrassment. In any case, if this fleet should succeed in its mission, he knew that the neutral Americans and Russians would gain every concession and trading right the British and French sailors planned to risk their lives for, but without lifting a finger. That was a minor annoyance, though it at least helped support Britain’s pretense that her goals in China were unselfish. As long as at least the French also manned their guns, Elgin could honorably claim that any fight with China’s imperial government that might ensue was for the higher principles of trade and international relations, not for the expansion of the British Empire.

The fleet’s presence had nothing to do with the war between the Qing dynasty and the Taiping, at least not that its commanders intended. Foreign governments had uniformly avoided taking sides in the Chinese civil war, preferring a principled stand of neutrality that cloaked a more calculating desire to wait and see which side would emerge victorious. Not that the same could be said for their individual citizens, a number of whom found gainful if short-lived careers as mercenaries for the imperial government, which paid “skipper’s wages” in comparison to the paltry salaries of their own countries’ services.² In 1855, the British governor of Hong Kong tried to stop the flow of opportunists from Hong Kong and Shanghai into the war zones by issuing a formal order that all British subjects in China must maintain “strict neutrality … between the different parties at present contending for dominion in that empire” and promising prison time or a hefty fine for any Crown subjects who violated neutrality.³ The order, which carried the force of law, managed well enough to restrict intervention from the regular military, but it hardly mattered to the “deserters from ships, and unlucky gold-diggers from California” who formed the bulk of the mercenaries, and who avoided the governor’s order by simply renouncing their British citizenship and becoming Americans. “Englishmen as such,” noted one observer to the process, “disappeared from the stage altogether.”⁴

Neutrality, however, could take many forms, and several foreigners with diplomatic clout—especially missionaries who cited Hamberg’s evidence that the rebels were Christian—had gone so far as to advocate recognition of the Taiping as an independent government. Peter Parker, an American missionary who served as the U.S. commissioner in 1856, sent back dispatches to Washington claiming that public opinion in the Qing Empire had shifted decisively in favor of the rebels,⁵ while another American missionary,William Alexander Parsons Martin, published an open letter to the U.S. government in 1857 declaring that the Taiping regime had “achieved its own independence” and that there now were, de facto, two Chinas. The new Christian Chinese state based in Nanjing would rule the rich tea- and silk-producing regions of the Yangtze Valley and to the south, he predicted, while the older China of the Manchus would continue to govern the extreme north from Beijing. He believed that the Manchu government was “too far gone in senility to afford any encouraging prospect of reformation” and therefore suggested that the foreign powers “consider the expediency of recognizing its youthful rival which, catching the spirit of the age, may be prevailed upon to unlock the treasures of the interior and throw open its portals to unrestricted intercourse.”⁶ The latter missionary now served as secretary and interpreter to the U.S. representative in Elgin’s fleet.

Regardless of whether it formally recognized the Taiping, Britain’s neutrality in the civil war did not inhibit it from picking its own separate fight with the Manchus at precisely the same time. Indeed, the fact that the Taiping had already brought the dynasty to its knees made for quite a nice window of opportunity. The rebels were draining off the dynasty’s best resources and disrupting traffic on the Grand Canal, the centuries-old inland waterway that carried grain from the south to supply Beijing. Without grain shipments, Beijing would starve, and the capital’s residents lived a precarious and fearful existence. Into this fragile state of affairs entered Britain with a new war on China—if it really deserved to be called a war—a haphazard and undirected one, entirely one-sided, that had grown from its increasingly forceful attempts to revise the 1842 treaty from the Opium War to give British merchants even greater access to Chinese markets. On the slimmest of pretexts (the 1856 arrest by Qing authorities in Canton of a Chinese smuggling ship named the Arrow, which happened to fly the British flag and whose boarding was thus taken as an insult to the British Crown), the Hong Kong governor demanded action, and back in London Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, dispatched Elgin on a mission to China in 1857, charging him to gain reparations and a new treaty at almost any cost. That meant negotiating with the emperor himself, or at least a commissioner stationed close enough to Beijing to speak on his behalf, which meant Elgin had to take his forces right to the emperor’s doorstep at the Peiho.

There had been several delays along the way. Elgin left England with a respectable force of 1,700 troops in 1857, but as they passed through Ceylon on their way to China, the Sepoy Mutiny broke out in India. The desperate British governor in Calcutta begged Elgin to loan him the men, which he did. Elgin’s troops proved indispensable during the bloody siege of Delhi that summer, and some said they turned the tide of the mutiny in Britain’s favor.⁷ But it derailed his own mission, and he had to stay for a time in India as a guest in the governor-general’s opulent Calcutta mansion. There, in the very quintessence of colonial decadence, Elgin began to confront a certain discomfort that had been growing inside him since he had left on his mission: namely, that he found the conduct of his countrymen in Asia morally repulsive. As he wrote in Calcutta, “It is a terrible business,…this living among inferior races”—terrible, he meant, not because of the treatment of the natives per se but because the ostensibly civilized British degraded themselves when they assumed the position of racial superiors. Under such circumstances, he believed, all notions of Christian benevolence were forgotten, and with British men and women alike, all that remained in their minds was “detestation, contempt, ferocity, vengeance, whether Chinamen or Indians be the object.”⁸

Nevertheless, he found himself drawn partly into their world and acknowledged with a measure of sarcasm that the awkward feeling of being surrounded by native servants “soon wears off, and one moves among them with perfect indifference, treating them, not as dogs, because in that case one would whistle to them and pat them, but as machines with which one can have no communion or sympathy.”⁹ Elgin’s misgivings about Britain’s colonial project in India helped compound his already ambivalent feelings about his country’s past conduct in China, which he had studied on the voyage over. “It is impossible to read the blue-books,” he wrote, “without feeling that we have often acted toward the Chinese in a manner which it is very difficult to justify.” Though as with his musings on India, his line of thinking in this case did not lead to any particular sympathy for the oppressed; “and yet their treachery and cruelty,” he concluded about the Chinese, “come out so strongly at times as to make almost anything appear justifiable.”¹⁰

Leaving India with little more than a borrowed ship and a troubled conscience, Elgin had to wait several months in Hong Kong before new reinforcements arrived to replace the troops he had left behind in Calcutta. By then it was too late in the season to sail up the Peiho, which had frozen over with winter ice; Beijing would be landlocked until the spring. Anxious for some kind of productive action, he rallied with the French to bomb and then occupy the balmier southern city of Canton instead. It wasn’t a perfect substitute for direct contact with the emperor in Beijing, but they hoped their display of firepower in the south would at least get the sovereign’s attention. They didn’t, however, realize the role they had begun to play in the civil war. For when they invaded and took possession of Canton, they also quite unintentionally put an end to the gruesome program of anti-Taiping executions under its governor-general—who happened to be the same official who had ordered the capture of the Arrow. British troops hunted him down for alleged crimes against the British Crown, and captured him as he tried to escape out the back of a colleague’s home. They tied him up and shipped him off to India, where he would die in British captivity.

Now, after the spring thaw, here they finally were at the mouth of the Peiho, waiting patiently for an imperial commissioner to come and give them their new treaty. The weeks passed with a boredom numbing even to those who made their lives on ships. The vessels rocked sickeningly in the muddy swells, the bay so shallow that at nine miles out they sat at anchor in just twenty-five feet of water. By day there were the fog and sometimes the distant thread of shore; by night the black water glowed with a brilliant phosphorescence that served as the only reminder that there was supposed to be some kind of magic in this “celestial kingdom,” as those who had never been there liked to imagine it.¹¹ Stores were running low. Some of the sailors sketched or read to pass the time; others took potshots at seagulls. The marines practiced drills in preparation for a land invasion.

Occasionally a junk-rigged ship with ribbed sails ventured out from shore carrying a handful of Qing officials under a flag of truce. The diplomatic discussions were empty, but the visits at least broke the monotony of the day, and all could sit down to a meal together. The French ambassador, Baron Gros, couldn’t quite read the imperial officials or their motives, and the typical exchange found the Europeans asking to be allowed upriver to negotiate their treaty peacefully, while the Manchus made excuses to put them off. At one point an imperial official mentioned offhand that they weren’t really all that concerned if the Allied fleet should decide to shell the forts, because the soldiers manning them were “merely Chinese.” It was a bluff, perhaps (yet perhaps not), but in any case it was a clear reminder that this was an empire of two races—the ruling Manchus and the subject Chinese—which made the Europeans uncomfortable.¹²

As the weather cleared, the smaller boats made reconnaissance trips near the shore, close enough to see through a spyglass that the giant brass guns were being pushed on wheels to track them and the matches were kept lit and ready to fire the fuses. A boom had been laid across the main channel to block ships from passing. The French interpreter was disappointed by the landscape. “A country more parched, desolate, and miserable, it is impossible to imagine,” he wrote. “Nothing is to be seen but mud, slime, salt-pans and a few sand-hills. Not a trace of vegetation meets the eye.”¹³ Proper intelligence was hard to come by, and they had to rely on the cagey Russians, whose shared border with the Qing Empire meant closer relations. A teacher who had just returned from a Russian college in Beijing reported that the emperor was livid at the demands of the foreigners, and few of his ministers dared to speak to him about anything having to do with diplomatic affairs. As the empire crumbled around him, the rumors said that Xianfeng was spending most of his time on horseback, trotting idly about the wooded parts of the Summer Palace grounds with his concubines.

A commissioner never materialized, and so on May 20, 1858, at eight minutes past ten in the morning, the fleet attacked. A signal flag went up, and the HMS Cormorant, its crew lying flat and hugging the deck, built up to full speed and smashed, shuddering, through the boom blocking the river, opening the route for the rest of the fleet. A trio of gunboats, one British and two French, took up position to attack the two forts on the north bank while three others attacked the south.¹⁴ Pulling up the rear, six of the light gunboats towed launches with a landing party totaling 1,800 British and French marines. The initial response from the forts was more spirited than they expected, and it was hardly a textbook advance. One of the French ships got its screw caught in a fishing net and bobbed, helpless, for fifteen minutes in a hail of shot that killed eleven of her crew. But the Taku gunners had set their aim high, not expecting an attack at low tide, and most of their salvoes whistled harmlessly through the ships’ rigging (Chinese cannons were lashed into place with ropes, so it was no simple matter to adjust their angle of elevation on the fly).¹⁵ It was the erroneous shots, falling short of their mark, that proved most deadly. One French ensign’s head was ripped off by a cannonball. Another shot cut a midshipman on the Dragonne neatly in two, the halves of his body flipping overboard as his sword fell clattering to the deck.¹⁶

As the Allied gunships took up positions, they laid in with broadsides of canister and grapeshot. Congreve rockets guided by long stabilizers hissed in fiery arcs to explode against the walls. The forts had been designed to withstand small-caliber fire from coastal pirates and Chinese rebels, and the gunners inside were largely unprotected from the shells of the British and French cannons. The northern forts, though sturdily built, were arranged obliquely to the channel and open behind, leaving them completely exposed from the flank to the long-range guns of the Cormorant as it steamed upstream beyond them to get a good angle. As the dead piled up behind the fortifications, the landing party hit the muddy flat and slogged forward to the wall of the first fort, muskets in hand. The Qing commanders hadn’t encountered this tactic before, so their gunners all but ignored the landing party, keeping the concentration of their fire on the ships.¹⁷ As the marines and blue-jackets stormed the defenses, shrieking and whooping and firing their muskets, the defenders turned and ran. There were few casualties in the landing party, save a handful of French troops caught near a powder magazine when it exploded. From a safe distance, the American observers watched through their glasses as bodies of Frenchmen were lofted through the air and fell back to earth at a distance from the fort.¹⁸

In the end, the invaders counted five hundred Chinese troops dead while the rest of the roughly three thousand who defended the forts had apparently scattered. It was nothing less than the fleet’s commanders expected. (A New York Times correspondent who sailed on the American ship went so far as to brag that “The Allies must always be victorious where they can bring their floating batteries to bear.”)¹⁹ Elgin was certainly not surprised. Notwithstanding the Royal Navy’s wisdom that “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort,” he had never imagined that the native Chinese defenses would hold out for long against his battle-hardened Crimean War veterans. He was, however, somewhat sniffy toward the French, who in his words had “blundered a good deal with their gunboats, and then contrived to get blown up by setting fire to a powder magazine.”²⁰ The joint forces looted the forts, filling their ships with money, food, and especially the heavy brass cannons that were the real prize, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece for the metal they contained. The inscriptions showed them to be new, cast during Xianfeng’s reign. They also took note that despite the easy victory, the defenders’ weapons weren’t nearly as primitive as they had expected. Some of the guns were even British, salvaged from shipwrecks or purchased secretly in Shanghai, and the sandbag fortifications were professionally laid out. The victory was more one of training than of matériel. Nearby camps held glimpses of Qing military discipline: a soldier’s body, beheaded for running away from his station; and, more disconcerting to European eyes, the body of one fort’s commander, throat slit by his own hand in defeat.²¹

Bidding farewell to the larger ships, which drew too much water to cross the bar, the ambassadors and their entourages crowded onto the boats with shallower draft and entered the channel. The peasants watching from shore seemed terrified, and at one of the first villages they passed, the men all prostrated themselves on the ground by the side of the river, shouting something that Elgin’s interpreter translated (awkwardly) as “Hail, great king! Oh pray be pleased to disembark and reign over us!”²² As Elgin’s secretary saw it, “The villagers were clearly under the impression that we were on our way to upset the dynasty.”²³ It was not an unreasonable assumption. These were the first foreign ships to sail up the Peiho in anyone’s memory, a fact of which captains and crew alike were proudly aware. Not that there hadn’t been British ambassadors here before—Lord Amherst had come in 1816 and Lord Macartney before him in 1793. But those missions had been forced by Xianfeng’s imperial ancestors to fly the distinguishing flag of a tribute mission come to honor the Qing throne. So now, as Elgin’s fleet advanced up the river under their own national colors, they imagined themselves avenging the humiliations of the past—and, more even than that, finally teaching a lesson to an empire whose officials thought of them as barbarians.²⁴

Beneath the pride, however, Elgin mused darkly on the other kind of uncharted territory into which they were embarking. “Whose work are we engaged in,” he asked in a letter home, “when we burst thus with hideous violence and brutal energy into these darkest and most mysterious recesses of the traditions of the past?” But as with his earlier broodings, he did not find the necessary element of romance in his heart that would defend China on its own grounds, and he concluded almost nihilistically, “At the same time, there is certainly not much to regret in the old civilisation which we are thus scattering to the winds.”²⁵

They anchored that first night about twenty miles upriver from the forts. Bonfires blazed on the shore, conjuring demons in the murky shadows and setting the spans of the ships aglow in flickering outline against the blackened sky.²⁶

The slow navigation up the Peiho toward Tianjin continued the next morning. The river meandered so lazily that the distance by water was at least twice that on land, but this was the only way to get the big guns to a place where they could unnerve the emperor. The riverbed was shallow and thick with sediment, so even the light gunships ran aground constantly; one of the French vessels grounded thirty-two times, another forty-two. Yet slowly they made their way, and slowly the river unraveled its mysteries; at one turn a human corpse edged into view, half buried in the mud of the riverbank. If it seemed abandoned by the world of men, not so for the two snarling bulldogs who fought over it, twisting to find an angle on each other’s throat, forepaws pressed against the rotting carcass to stake their claim.²⁷

The hours passed patiently, and the men on the ships saw neither imperial soldiers nor any kind of overt hostility from the crowds of peasants that traced their progression from shore, walking along beside them as the ships puffed their white smoke and pushed upstream against the current. These were not the howling masses of Chinese made famous by missionaries under attack. Nor did they appear as the incensed citizens of a nation invaded. The men on board the ships could find nothing to indicate whether they cared one way or the other about the fate of their emperor. (Indeed, for the mass of Chinese peasants the existence of the emperor was a distant abstraction, a choice made by Heaven in which they had no part.) As the fleet climbed the river without incident, the initial fear of the crowds gave way to a wary curiosity, even an odd sense of cooperation at times. When a ship ran aground in the mud, its crew would throw a rope to the crowd and the men on the shore would pull them free. This happened repeatedly. Some were paid for their efforts in ship’s biscuits (“a great delicacy for them,” the French attaché imagined), while others were paid in looped strings of copper cash looted from the Taku forts. There was more money, in exceedingly small denominations, than the crews knew what to do with; sometimes they simply flung handfuls of it at the crowd on the shore to watch the scramble.²⁸

Upstream, mud gave way to intense cultivation—New World corn, millet, lettuce, radishes.²⁹ Piles of salt mined from the saline flats broke the monotony of the landscape, standing like cairns marking an uncertain path. A distant pagoda broke free from its shroud of mist. As the aggressors slid along into the reach of the walled city of Tianjin, the mud houses that flanked the river give way to denser wooden structures. Here was the junction of the Grand Canal, and mountains of rice and other grains lay along one bank—the tax revenues of the central government, what it had managed to collect from the territories that weren’t cut off by the rebellion. Here the throngs of watchers became denser as well, crowding the rooftops to view the fleet, “an oblique plane of upturned faces and bare heads” that “extended almost from the surface of the water to the eaves of the houses.”³⁰ As the boats in the river parted to give the fleet passage and the dynasty’s soldiers failed to materialize, the European crews finally shattered the tense silence with a loud cheer. “We felt Tianjin was ours,” recalled the captain of the Furious, “and that in it we held … the throat of China!”³¹

They anchored in Tianjin and gave up on the final overland leg to Beijing seventy miles away. The summer heat topped a hundred degrees in the sun, and European soldiers accustomed to cooler climates could barely move, let alone haul their weapons and equipment for miles through the brutal heat to the capital city. But their invasion this far was enough; the emperor capitulated and sent commissioners to negotiate a treaty that would keep them from moving beyond Tianjin. So they took up quarters for the month, Lord Elgin and Baron Gros claiming one of the grandest homes in the city as their headquarters, the British living in one half and the French in the other. The Americans and Russians rented a house across the river, though its owner offered to pay them money to stay away from it (wisely, it would turn out, when imperial officials punished anyone who held willing commerce with the invaders). The imperial commissioners soon arrived and began the negotiations for new treaties—four of them, one for each of the powers that sent a representative. Not that it was in any way an equal exchange, with the gunships bristling with ordnance moored expectantly in the river.

Britain’s resulting Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Commerce, titled without a whit of intended irony, was one to delight the foreign merchants. According to its terms, British ships would now have the right to sail up the Yangtze, China’s main artery reaching from Shanghai deep into central and western China. Beyond the five coastal treaty ports already open to foreign trade, ten others would be opened in the north, on Taiwan, and inland along the great Yangtze. To please the missionaries, who held such sway with the Americans, there were stipulations that foreigners could travel wherever they wanted in the empire and that native Christians would be protected (this was not, of course, understood to apply to the Taiping). Also, Qing officials weren’t to be allowed to call the British “barbarians” anymore, not even in their private communications. The French, Russian, and American ministers all signed their own separate treaties in kind.

But beyond any of those terms, the clause of the treaty that troubled the Xianfeng emperor the most was the one that granted Britain the right to station an ambassador in Beijing, who would be allowed to come and go whenever he pleased. It had not been approved in advance, and as the dynasty depended above all on prestige to sustain its rule, it was potentially the most devastating. The emperor’s stature had already been brought low by the ongoing war with the Taiping, but at least the influence of the rebels was in check and the north of China remained nominally in imperial hands. Nominally, that is, because in the vacuum of power as the Qing concentrated its best forces against Nanjing, bandit rebellions under a group loosely known as the Nian had broken out in the north and ravaged the countryside through which the fleet had just come.

On top of all this, to have foreign ships sailing up and down the main ceremonial waterway to the capital, carrying their ambassadors to and fro with no sign of tribute, no acknowledgment of the emperor’s prestige—in full view of the river-dwelling public—meant that rumors would spread through the empire that the dynasty was not only incapable of keeping order within the country but also unable to command the respect of foreigners anymore. It would sever what slim threads of legitimacy the emperor still enjoyed. As a small reassurance, the commissioner who agreed to the clause suggested to Xianfeng that the treaties were nothing more than slips of paper to make the barbarians leave Tianjin, and the emperor could easily cancel them if he wished.³² And so the foreign envoys were bid farewell to return to their home countries, with an appointment to return in one year with ratified copies of the treaties for exchange in Beijing. Xianfeng hoped very much that that would never happen.

Despite having just established himself for posterity as the figurehead of British gunboat diplomacy in China, Lord Elgin regretted his invasion of Tianjin—and indeed was ashamed of the whole sequence of events that had led up to it. The affair of the smuggling ship Arrow that had sparked Britain’s new China war was, in his words, “a scandal to us.”³³ But he knew that his misgivings put him in a minority. The massive weight of British public opinion came down firmly on the side of war with China (that is to say, war with its imperial masters, the Qing) for rejecting trade and insulting the British Crown. Against this popular sentiment, the majority Liberals in Parliament had in 1857 mounted a conscientious attempt to block Prime Minister Palmerston’s call for war, with the youngWilliam Gladstone giving a fully two-hour-long speech (“the finest delivered in the memory of man in the House of Commons,” according to one excited partisan) in which he charged that “the whole might of England” was about to be unleashed “against the lives of a defenceless people” in China.³⁴ When the vote in the Commons went Gladstone’s way, Lord Palmerston simply dissolved the government and held new elections—dubbed the “Chinese elections” by the British press—which returned Palmerston’s prowar faction to power in a popular landslide. Whatever Elgin’s private misgivings might be, he knew exactly what his countrymen desired. And as he noted in his journal in November, a few months after the invasion of Tianjin, if the tone of the British papers was any indication, the public back home would have preferred that he had used far more force and “plundered the wretched Chinese to a greater extent than is the case.”³⁵

The craving for war with China’s imperial government was abundant even in the United States, where news of the treaty arrived in record time, leading the first substantive news dispatch over the just-completed transatlantic cable.³⁶ A joyful response greeted the news of trade concessions, but the joy was tempered by grumblings of frustration—not because the youthful, righteous United States had been tainted by association with the predatory gunships of Britain and France but because it hadn’t led the way. In an implicit attack on President James Buchanan’s own policy of neutrality, a New York Times editorial declared that “the French and English, in commencing a war which must sooner or later bring the Chinese Government to terms, adopted the wiser and more politic course.”³⁷The new treaty held unprecedented value, the editors maintained, and constituted the “entire abandonment of that seclusive policy which has ruled in China from periods beyond the reach of history.” It ensured that “one-third of the population of the globe … is opened to evangelical enterprise.” Such grand results, they declared, proved beyond doubt “the necessity of maintaining a large military and naval force within striking distance of the capital.”³⁸ In a separate editorial entitled (shortsightedly) “End of the China War,” they even went so far as to declare that this treaty at gunpoint had been necessary because “force was the only argument which the Chinese could be made to recognize.” American neutrality, far from being a point of moral pride, was for them instead a badge of weakness and passivity, for “in a matter of such great interest to us as our trade with China, we have allowed others to do the work and reap the honour, while we are content enough to pocket the profits.”³⁹

As a contrast to the model of aggressive diplomacy in China that so disturbed his conscience, Elgin was relieved to depart from Tianjin at the end of July and sail to China’s smaller neighbor Japan, under instructions to sign a similar trade agreement with the government there. The conditions could hardly have been more different. The ruling Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan held every bit as much disdain for British trade and proselytizing as its counterpart government in China did, but it benefited from Japan’s secondary status in East Asia—which proved an advantage when the vastness of Chinese markets ensured that the British guns aimed there first. Influential samurai in Japan had watched from the sidelines as Britain’s ships broke China open in the Opium War of 1839 to 1842, so when the American commodore Matthew Perry first arrived on Japan’s shore with a fleet of steamships in 1853, they sidestepped China’s fate by willingly signing a trade agreement with him. By the time Elgin arrived in 1858 to open Great Britain’s relations with Japan, the Japanese not only had a precedent in their treaty relations with the United States but also knew exactly what had happened so recently at the Taku forts when the Manchus had tried to block his advance.

With more than sufficient warning, the Japanese government swallowed its pride and welcomed Elgin and his ships without resistance. It agreed to a set of treaties parallel to the Chinese ones, with no exercise of violence.⁴⁰ In contrast to the mounting belligerence between Britain and the Qing dynasty, the Japanese fired a salute in Elgin’s honor. The shogun’s friendly diplomacy had its desired effect, and Elgin remembered the Japanese as “the nicest people possible. None of the stiffness and bigotry of the Chinese.”⁴¹ That same lack of belligerence helped soothe Elgin’s guilt over his country’s broader conduct in Asia. On leaving Japan he wrote that it was “the only place which I have left with any feeling of regret since I reached this abominable East—abominable not so much in itself, as because it is strewed all over with the records of our violence and fraud.”⁴² The return to China, however, filled him with “a sort of terror.”⁴³

By the late autumn of 1858, Elgin’s mission in Asia was complete, but before returning to England he took three weeks to make a voyage with a small fleet of five ships up the Yangtze River—through the Taiping-held territories—to the new treaty port of Hankow. Of all the ports opened by the treaty, Hankow was the one farthest up the river, and it was currently in imperial hands. On record, Elgin wanted to test whether Chinese officials on the river respected the status of the British flag under the new treaty, but it was also a chance to see the realm of the rebels. He had heard vague rumors about the Taiping while in Shanghai but wanted to gauge them for himself firsthand. Though the Tianjin treaty gave British ships the right to sail freely on the Yangtze, it was signed with only one of the two powers that controlled stretches of the river, and Elgin found the situation artificial. “As we have seen fit to affect neutrality between the Emperor of China and the rebels,” he wrote to the foreign secretary, “we could not, of course, without absurdity, require him to give us rights and protection in places actually occupied by a Power which we treat with the same respect as his own.”⁴⁴ In this case the neutrality of Britain in China’s internecine war was, he recognized, an affectation, for no course of action involving the one party in China could be undertaken without benefit or disadvantage to the other.

From what little Elgin could see from the bridge of the Furious and a few short excursions inland, the impact of the civil war was more devastating than anyone in Shanghai had led him to believe. “I never before saw such a scene of desolation,” he reported of the city of Zhenjiang, which stood at the strategic junction where the Grand Canal, which ran north toward the capital, met the Yangtze. Imperial forces had recovered Zhenjiang from the Taiping less than a year earlier, and nothing was left after the fighting but “heaps of ruins, intersected by a few straggling streets.”⁴⁵ As another in his party described it, “[We] might have imagined ourselves in Pompeii. We walked along deserted streets, between roofless houses, and walls overgrown with rank, tangled weeds; heaps of rubbish blocked up the thoroughfares, but they obstructed nobody.”⁴⁶ No more than a few hundred residents remained, scratching out a ghostly existence in a city that had held more than three hundred thousand before the war. The desolation of Zhenjiang was hardly isolated. As Elgin noted grimly in his account, “In order to save repetition I may here observe, once for all, that with certain differences of degree, this was the condition of every city which I visited on my voyage up and down the Yang-tze.”⁴⁷

Elgin’s first direct contact with the rebels came in the form of a cannonball that sailed over the deck of his ship as the fleet worked its way upriver past Nanjing. He hadn’t expected any hostilities, planning somewhat obtusely to slip past the main Taiping shore batteries on his way up to Hankow, sending a gunship ahead with a white flag of truce—which, however, had no particular meaning to the rebels. The defenders took Elgin’s ships for imperial forces (which in fact clustered eagerly to Elgin’s rear, hoping to use his fleet as a wedge to attack the rebel capital) and fired steadily on them as they steamed past, killing one British sailor and wounding two others. Elgin, oddly and perhaps undeservedly charmed, escaped injury, though one ball went right through his cabin and several others cut the rigging just above his head. “I hope the Rebels will make some communication, and enable us to explain that we mean them no harm,” he wrote afterward, “but it is impossible to anticipate what these stupid Chinamen will do.” In response, he sent his gunships back downriver the next morning to hammer on the rebel forts until, as he put it, “we had done enough for our honour.”⁴⁸

Once the Taiping commanders figured out what Elgin’s small fleet represented, they began sending communications—first to apologize for firing on his ships and then to recruit him to help in their war against the Qing dynasty. Shortly after the cannonade at Nanjing, Elgin received a communiqué from a Taiping commander who asked Elgin and the other British captains “with all your heart and might, to assist [me] in annihilating the rebel vessels” (the rebels being, in this case, the imperialists who stood against the Taiping). He promised that they would be rewarded with honorific titles from the Heavenly King.⁴⁹ Elgin demurred. Later that day, a party of Taiping rebels came down to the water and gave him a gift of twelve fowls and some red cloth. A month later, on Christmas Day 1858, as his fleet passed the walled city of Anqing on its way back down to Shanghai, he received a letter from the Heavenly King himself, Hong Xiuquan, inviting him to join the Taiping in their divine mission of destroying the Manchus.

“The Father and the Elder Brother led me to rule the Heavenly Kingdom, to sweep away and exterminate the devilish spirits, bestowing on me great honor,” wrote the Heavenly King to Lord Elgin. “Foreign younger brothers of the western ocean, listen to my words. Join us in doing service to the Father and Elder Brother and extinguishing the stinking reptiles.”⁵⁰ As different as it may have been in language and origin, the intent of the message wasn’t so far removed from the wish of Elgin’s home public in England that he make war on the Manchus.

Some of the communications went to individual commanders, and on the same day Elgin received his letter from Hong Xiuquan, the captain of HMS Retribution received an exceedingly polite note from a local Taiping official, expressing hope for a gift of some foreign rifles and cannons. The British captain replied with equal politeness that the guns were for their own use and that “our country’s law prohibits us from giving aid to either party in a conflict.” Two days later, the Taiping commander wrote again to say that he hadn’t meant to imply that he wanted the large cannons on board the gunship but only “one or two small cannons, some packs of gunpowder, and ten or more gun barrels.” He understood that Great Britain had legal strictures against sharing artillery and other weapons but appealed to their shared Christianity. You and I, he wrote, “are both sons of the Heavenly Father, God, and are both younger brothers of the Heavenly Elder Brother, Jesus. Our feelings towards each other are like those of brothers, and our friendship is as intimate as that of two brothers of the same parentage.”⁵¹

That shared Christianity was the most difficult quandary of the British presence in China. For Britain believed itself to be a Christian country, and the appeals of the Taiping scarcely fell on deaf ears. Furthermore, coming as they did at a time when Britain andFrance had just concluded (they thought) a new war against the Qing dynasty—at a time when the Taiping’s hopes for an alliance with the foreigners contrasted so sharply with the long-standing Manchu efforts to keep them out—it seemed clear that in many ways what the British wanted in China was something they were far more likely to get from the rebels than from the imperial authorities. Certainly no one in the Qing government had ever referred to a Briton as his “brother.”

There were, however, two major obstacles standing in the way. The first was the principle of neutrality—the idea being that to enter into friendly relations with the Taiping might cause further damage to the Qing, damage Elgin already regretted having caused, and that Britain would thus be taking a side in the civil war against its own declared principles. In other words, neutrality effectively dictated that if Great Britain were at war with the Manchus it shouldn’t at the same time be friendly to the Taiping. The other issue was whether the Taiping were really Christian in the same sense as England, and that was something the missionaries were still trying to figure out.

Elgin’s inclination to keep the rebels at arm’s length was reinforced by the advice of his interpreter, Thomas F. Wade. Wade was reputed by some people—by no means all—to have the best language skills of any Englishman in China (in a later career, he would be the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge), and, in an important departure from the missionaries who translated for the Americans, his background was military. He had come to China as a lieutenant in the 98th Regiment and learned the language by brute force: fifteen hours a day of study with teachers in Hong Kong. His teachers had been government employees and, to a lesser extent, military officers, with the result that he possessed a strong command of the language of bureaucratic communications and most of his information and opinion came from government publications. His circle of acquaintances included high-ranking Chinese officials, the elite of Chinese society, in contrast to the poor and downtrodden souls among whom the Protestant missionaries spent most of their time. If the missionaries had gone to China in hopes of empowering the lowest classes, Wade’s respects came to lie instead with the elites. As the rebels were from the poorest classes of Chinese and from the “uncivilized” south near Canton, none of them exhibited the level of culture and refinement he had come to admire in his imperial counterparts. And so he, in contrast to most of the missionaries, was utterly contemptuous of them.⁵²

Wade’s contempt came through clearly in the language of his written reports. One of his first Taiping visits during the Yangtze voyage was to a fort “which was in general very ill-armed and filthy,” where the commander was “a dirty, but not ill-looking man, in a yellow robe, with a handkerchief wrapped around his head.” Wade noted that his guide and the commander were both Cantonese and that “the hall was soon filled with a number of men, speaking the dialect of Canton.” They crowded in, a “dense mob” with “not a semblance of order.” A man who obligingly took down their order for supplies was “a particularly dirty Fujian man” who “wrote an execrable hand, and was evidently of no higher caste than his fellows,” the whole lot of whom appeared to Wade “a gang of opium-smoking pirates.”⁵³ The Taiping at Anqing, which he visited a few days later, likewise spoke Cantonese (he noted six times in a two-page report), and though they were “more healthy-looking, and better dressed” than the previous group, one who dared approach Wade at his boat “looked, what I have no doubt he was, an opium-smoking coolie.”⁵⁴ As for the letter of apology from the Taiping for firing on Elgin’s ships, Wade’s flat judgment was that “As a specimen of Chinese composition the whole thing is much below par.”⁵⁵

As much as Elgin’s combativeness toward the Qing government had delighted his countrymen, his disdain for the Taiping rebels exasperated them.⁵⁶ For the rebels controlled access to some of the richest tea- and silk-producing regions in China, and the British traders in Shanghai were desperate for access to them. The few ships that did manage to sneak upriver to trade with the rebels came back flush with rich cargo, and in the eyes of the foreigners in Shanghai, Elgin had squandered his chance to enter into a trade agreement with them. Rather than opening relations with the rebels, they complained, he preferred to stick to his insufferable principles and look to the day when the Qing would regain control of the river’s full range—a day few desired to wait for, if they even believed it would ever come.

Elgin’s reports had little to tell a curious public about the prospects of the Taiping for winning the war. On the one hand, he suggested that “there is little or nothing of popular sympathy with the rebel movement” in the areas he visited—though he admitted that most of the places he had actually visited were under imperial control. On the other hand, the Chinese he spoke with through Wade seemed to have no particular loyalty to the Manchu government either, and he gained the impression that “the general attitude of the population does not argue much enthusiasm on either side of the dynastic controversy,” viewing as they did the ongoing civil war “with feelings akin to those with which they would have regarded earthquake, or pestilence, or any other providential scourge.”⁵⁷

Even as Elgin’s and Wade’s accounts described the utter ruin of the cities, however, they made clear that there was no way to know which side had caused the devastation. And though they painted the Taiping themselves as despicable and unpopular characters, they also brought evocative news that perhaps life in the Taiping-controlled regions wasn’t as awful as the imperial rumors suggested. The cities may have been empty, but the rural areas held, by Elgin’s observation, an “industrious, frugal, and sober population” that was, “generally speaking, well-doing and contented.”⁵⁸

Ultimately, Elgin came away from his voyage on the Yangtze even more disturbed about the moral implications of Britain’s involvement in China than when he had arrived. He was desperate to return home and put Asia behind him for good, and when in January 1859 a group of British traders at Shanghai wrote a letter to thank him for the new treaties with China and Japan and “the valuable results which have been obtained,”⁵⁹ his response to them was scathing. “Uninvited, and by methods not always of the gentlest,” he shot back, “we have broken down the barriers behind which these ancient nations sought to conceal from the world without the mysteries, perhaps also, in the case of China at least, the rags and rottenness of their waning civilizations.” He admonished the merchants to consider the moral underpinnings of their desire for an open China. “Neither our own consciences nor the judgment of mankind will acquit us,” he concluded, “if, when we are asked to what use we have turned our opportunities, we can only say that we have filled our pockets from among the ruins which we have found or made.”⁶⁰

In the early summer of 1859, exactly one year after the invasion of Tianjin, a new Allied fleet appeared at the mouth of the Peiho. This time Lord Elgin’s role was played by his younger brother, Frederick Bruce, who had come along on the previous mission as a secretary to his older brother. When Elgin stayed on in China to explore the Yangtze, it was Frederick who had taken the treaty back to England to be ratified, and Prime Minister Palmerston had given him the honor of making him the British plenipotentiary and putting him in charge of the voyage back to China to make the exchange with the emperor. Once the ratified copies were exchanged, Frederick Bruce would take up residence in Beijing as Britain’s first minister to China. Bruce was a shy man, still a bachelor at age forty-five, and he had a problem with blushing. He wore long whiskers to cover his face, though the bald top of his head would still turn red when he was embarrassed.⁶¹

Ratified treaty in hand, Frederick Bruce planned this time to sail up to Tianjin and then continue overland all the way to Beijing. There had been rumors that the emperor would try to put them off, but all involved knew from the Allied success at the forts the previous year that there was really nothing the imperial armies could do to stop them. So when a Qing emissary told Frederick Bruce that the emperor would not permit him to come to Beijing by way of the Peiho—but only by a secondary route used for tribute missions, which the British took as an insult—Bruce refused the change of course and insisted on sticking with the original plan. Thus in June 1859 the fleet took up its position once again in the muddy swells off the Taku shore, ready if necessary to force its way up the Peiho a second time.

This fleet was somewhat more fractious than the previous one. The French, having grown uneasy in their short-lived alliance with Britain, had momentarily lost their taste for battle in China and sent even fewer men than the Americans, only 60 Frenchmen out of a total Allied force of more than 1,300.⁶² The commander of the American flagship USS Powhatan, Commodore Josiah Tattnall, was a veteran of the War of 1812 whose dislike of the British was exceeded only by that of his men—who were fresh from a knock-down rumble in the streets of Hong Kong with a crew of British sailors, after which “it got to be the proper thing to thrash an English sailor on sight.”⁶³ When they arrived at the Peiho, they discovered, sure enough, that the crew of the British flagship was the same gang of sailors they had just brawled with in Hong Kong.

In the year since Elgin’s attack on the Taku forts, the emperor had transferred his most trusted and capable general, a Mongol of rich lineage named Senggelinqin, to take charge of coastal defense. Senggelinqin was a relentless and proud commander with rank nearly equivalent to a blooded prince, who had won honor and fame by turning back the Taiping’s northern campaign in 1853. In that campaign, a Taiping expeditionary force had fought its way northward from Nanjing all the way to within eighty miles of Beijing before Senggelinqin’s troops—aided by a bitter winter that had ravaged the southerners, who had never in their lives seen snow—turned them back and forced them to fall inward into a village fortification for an intractable stalemate. When the weather broke that spring, Senggelinqin, in the grand feat that cemented his reputation, ordered his troops to build a dirt-and-stone wall to encircle the entire Taiping army camp from a distance, while a crew of one thousand laborers spent a month digging a series of trenches to connect it, via a dry riverbed, to the Grand Canal, forty miles away. When they opened the breach, the waters of the canal rushed in to fill the containing wall, flooding the Taiping camp to its rooftops and drowning the army of rebels into submission.

Senggelinqin had little but contempt for the foreign military and was reluctant to be called back from the internal wars to deal with coastal defense. A hard-bitten Mongolian cavalryman who preferred the bow and arrow to the musket, he had never encountered European gunships and put little stock in the tales of their invincibility.⁶⁴ Nor did he particularly understand the attention given to confronting a foreign army numbering in the hundreds while Taiping legions in the tens and hundreds of thousands roamed at will elsewhere in the empire. But after the Taku forts fell to Elgin in the summer of 1858, the emperor charged Senggelinqin with rebuilding them to ensure that they couldn’t be stormed so easily again, and he took to the task with ardor.

Xianfeng’s advisers disagreed bitterly about how to handle the scheduled return of the foreign fleet. Some advised accepting it, if not welcoming it. One adviser, a Chinese official named Guo Songtao, argued that it would be in the dynasty’s best interests to grant the foreign powers the trade relations they sought and focus instead on fighting the rebels. Rebellion was internal, he said, a “danger of the stomach and heart,” but the foreigners were external and wanted only trade, so the solution to the foreign problem lay with solving trade issues, not resorting to the military.⁶⁵

Indeed, in the longer span of China’s history, closure to the outside world was typically a sign of a dynasty’s weakness, not its strength. The greatest dynasties of the past had overseen vast trading empires spanning half the globe, and they had commanded tribute from multitudes of vassal states. But the Xianfeng emperor ruled at a very weak time indeed, and he preferred the advice of counselors who promised him strength through closed borders. A small handful of close Manchu advisers fell on this side, as did Senggelinqin. To Senggelinqin’s face, the moderate Guo Songtao argued for a peaceful approach. “We’ve never had any success to speak of with our coastal defenses,” he said. “They are not effective, and we simply must not rely on them.”⁶⁶ But Senggelinqin thought he could teach the Europeans a lesson when they came back, and that was just what the emperor wanted to hear. In spite of Guo Songtao’s opposition, Senggelinqin went ahead with his preparations for war.⁶⁷

To British scouts, the defenses appeared on sight to be somewhat improved—two visible booms across the river rather than one, and a certain amount of new construction on the forts. But there didn’t appear to be many defenders, certainly none of the flags and gongs of an impending battle, and the portholes for the guns were covered with matting. Informers told them that there was just a skeleton crew, enough to keep Taiping junks from gaining access to the Peiho. So as an experiment they cut through the first boom, which appeared somewhat less substantial than the second. They encountered no resistance. On June 25, 1859, a fine, clear morning, the gunboats assembled about eight hundred yards from the forts. The signal flag was run up, and, in a direct repeat of the last round, the British admiral’s ship, Plover, built up a full head of steam and charged forward to break through the second boom and smash open the waterway to the Peiho.⁶⁸

That was when everything went wrong.

The Qing engineers had learned several lessons from the humiliation of 1858, and the new boom—made of full-sized tree trunks slung together lengthwise with heavy chains—stopped the Plover, shuddering, in its course. As the other gunships circled in the river, unable to advance, the mats covering the portholes were cast aside to reveal a full complement of defenders, and a thunderous cavalcade of shot and shell began to pour down from the forts. The first salvo took the head off the Plover’s bow gunner, and three other sailors fell to the deck wounded. For three hours the Plover foundered under heavy fire, until finally the hull burst and the ship sank into the mud; only one of her crew survived the day. The ships that brought up the rear fared no better, as Senggelinqin’s men proved far more capable gunners than their poorly trained counterparts a year earlier. Two of the British gunships ran aground, useless, while two others were cut to splinters and sank outright. Others foundered, taking on water, trying to retreat as the smaller guns of the fort picked off their crews and officers man by man.

Yet the landing party surged ahead as planned, and that was when defeat turned into disaster. When the fort guns went silent in the early evening, the British officers took it to mean that the forces manning them had fled, as they had the previous year. Instead, it turned out to be a ruse to entice the landing party to storm the beach; this time, the defenders were prepared for the kind of attack that had surprised them the last time.⁶⁹ There were now two trenches in front of the walls filled with water and mud, wide and deep, with a vicious abatis of iron spikes immediately behind them.⁷⁰ But those mattered only if the marines could even get to the trenches; the landing had been delayed for so long that by the time their barges approached shore the tide was all the way out, and the thick mud of the exposed banks seized the feet of the attackers or caused them to fall, slipping in their thin-soled shoes, helplessly shot to pieces by the gunners on the fort. Cannons loaded with shreds of iron sprayed their loads over the infantry, mowing down whole rows of them in a blast, while those who made it to the trenches found a mixture of mud and water too thin to stand in and too thick for swimming. Those who avoided drowning in the muck of the trenches or being cut down attempting to remove the abatis huddled at the base of the fort wall with soaked and useless ammunition, praying for rescue as darkness fell and the defenders dangled sizzling fireworks on long poles over the edge of the wall to illuminate their cowering forms to archers above. One boat managed to gather a handful of the wounded, but as it tried to steam its way out of range a well-aimed shot broke it in half and it sank, drowning all on board.⁷¹

In the thick of the fighting, upon hearing news that the British admiral James Hope had been shot, Commodore Josiah Tattnall of the Powhatan decided to cast American neutrality to the wind and enter the battle. Tattnall was from Georgia, a loyal southerner with a strong sense of racial pride (the passing of two years would find him a senior officer in the Confederate Navy), and whatever his complaint against the British, they were fellow white men while the Chinese were not. “Blood is thicker than water!” he shouted (as his lieutenant Stephen Trenchard recorded it for posterity), and “he’d be damned if he’d stand by and see white men butchered before his eyes.… Old Tattnall isn’t that kind, sir. This is the cause of humanity.”⁷² Tattnall’s intervention hardly turned the tide of battle; the primary contribution of the Americans was to tow more British marine reserves forward to their deaths in the disastrous landing. Some of his men operated the British guns, firing at the fort while Tattnall tended to the British admiral. One American died. But what little effect Tattnall’s breach of neutrality had on the course of the catastrophe that day, it gave Americans a taste of blood in China and set a new tone for British-American friendship; as the London Times commented afterward, “Whatever may be the result of the fight, England will never forget the day when the deeds and words of kindly Americans sustained and comforted her stricken warriors on the waters of the Peiho.”⁷³

By sunrise the next morning, more than four hundred British were dead or wounded, a shocking twenty-nine of them officers, and the survivors limped sodden and muddy back to their ships. These veterans of the Crimean War had never known such defeat. It brought to their minds the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade five years earlier at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea; indeed, one of the marines declared he would rather relive that battle three times over than what they’d just suffered at the Taku forts.⁷⁴But whereas Alfred, Lord Tennyson himself had enshrined that earlier defeat in an immortal poem on the blind nobility of war, when the gallant British horsemen had charged heedlessly “Into the jaws of Death/Into the mouth of Hell,” the disaster at the Peiho found its enduring lesson in a somewhat less noble vein, handled by decidedly lesser poets. Tattnall’s words were rewritten into poetry and song as a paean to white unity:

               “Old Man” Tattnall, he who dared at Vera Cruz,—

               Saw here, crippled by the cannon; saw there, throttled by the tide,

               Men of English blood and speech—could he refuse?

I’ll be damned, says he to Trenchard, if old Tattnall’s standing by

Seeing white men butchered by such a foe.

Where’s my barge? No side-arms, mind you! See those English fight and die—

Blood is thicker, sir, than water. Let us go.⁷⁵

Senggelinqin rejoiced in his well-earned victory. Writing to the emperor shortly after the repulse, he acknowledged that the British and French might return with more ships but asserted confidently that with one or two more similar thrashings “the pride and vainglory of the barbarians, already under severe trial, will immediately disappear.” Should that happen, “China can then enjoy some decades of peace.” The emperor might not even need to fight them again, he added, for the victory at the Taku forts had been so decisive that “the barbarians, already somewhat disillusioned and repentant, may lend themselves to persuasion and be brought under control. If they of their own accord should wholeheartedly become obedient, then peace would be secure and permanent.”⁷⁶ The emperor’s response was guarded: he admonished his military officials to watch the coast carefully, as the foreigners “may harbor secret designs and hide themselves around nearby islands, waiting for the arrival of more soldiers and ships for a surprise attack in the night or in a storm.” But ultimately he shared Senggelinqin’s sense of relief and expressed hope that the need of the foreigners for Chinese goods would mean that the Chinese and foreign merchants in Shanghai could sort out their problems between themselves with no need for an ambassador and certainly no need for a new treaty. “The key to the situation,” he concluded, “is now at Shanghai, not Tianjin.”⁷⁷

As the British left, licking their wounds, the American interpreter and missionary Samuel Wells Williams wrote to his brother from on board the Powhatan that it was possibly the worst defeat the British had suffered since the 1842 massacre of Major GeneralWilliam Elphinstone’s army in Afghanistan—though in this case he thought the humiliation was even greater, for in Kabul, “the elements killed ten times more than man,” while at the Peiho it was entirely a failure of arms and tactics. And worst of all, this was China. “It was a new and strange narrative,” wrote Williams, “for English soldiers who had always been victorious over the Chinese.”⁷⁸ The shock of the Taku repulse to the British psyche was deeper than anything Xianfeng’s advisers could know or imagine. Something important had shifted in the course of that day, and the high-spirited swagger of Britain’s previous wars in China—the sense among her military that Asia was little more than a playground for their invincible ships—was broken. Replacing it were the bloody taste of humiliation and a hunger for revenge against the “inferior race” that had beaten them. It was, Williams brooded, “a defeat likely to prove more disastrous to the Chinese than any beating they ever had.”⁷⁹