Chapter 5
0hen the Russian troops were pulled out of China proper, they were soon actively engaged against the Boxers in Manchuria. While the defection of the Russian force from the allied expedition was an international disappointment, especially to the German force which had just reached China, it made good sense from Russia's national viewpoint. The number of Russian residents in China proper was small, probably less than 500, while her trade and interests were correspondingly much smaller than those of many other countries. In Manchuria her investment in the Chinese Eastern railway and its ancillary enterprises was vast; her people were the most numerous foreign community; and it was vital to protect her trade prospects.
Boxer activities in their various manifestations spread to Manchuria later than to the rest of China. Partly this was due to the 60,000 or so workers on the railway, many of whom were strong-bodied immigrants from Shantung. This province had seen anti-Christian movements and Boxer activities in 1899 but had been held effectively in check during the major outbreaks of 1900. It was natural therefore that Boxer ideas should burst out in Manchuria even if the majority of railway workers themselves did not come out in their support.
The position in the three eastern provinces — Fengtien, Kirin and Heilungkiang — differed. Towards the end of June meetings became more frequent and the anti-foreign campaign was launched. The Fengtien military governor, General Tseng-ch'i, ignored the empress dowager's instructions to take up arms against the foreign community and concentrated on keeping the peace. His subordinates, however, took the opposite view and forced him to promulgate the order. Early in July a Catholic church in Mukden was set alight with the murder of five French missionaries. In the Liaotung peninsula where railway building had progressed farthest, large sections were destroyed or damaged, the track being thrown into rivers or disposed of in other ways. Mukden and Liaoyang junction stations were occupied and damaged.
The military governor of Kirin was less affected. He managed to control the Boxers and avoided major trouble with the Russians. The governor of Heilungkiang, General Shou-shan, was less fortunate. This arose from the massacre of Blagovestchensk, a town on the Amur river. The Russians, despite earlier assurances, asked the Chinese population to leave by crossing the Amur river. In the charged atmosphere, they were shot at both by the Chinese from the south bank and the Russians from the north. After this massacre on 14 July the Russians occupied towns on the Chinese side of the river, from which it was expected that new offensives would be launched by China. In doing this, they sustained very substantial losses. The governor resisted and it was only after a month of fighting that the provincial capital of Tsitsihar fell to the Russians. Unlike the other governors, Shou-shan had to commit suicide on 29 August.1
The Russians, civil and military alike, were caught unprepared by these anti-foreign outbreaks. The fact was that there was inadequate financial provision for security for the Chinese Eastern railway in its building phase. There were estimated to be 3,000 troops — what were called 'Matilda's guards' after the name of Witte's wife. When disturbances took place in the summer, they were found to be in the wrong places and lacking in discipline. In order to relieve this inadequate force, it was necessary to get reinforcements urgently. Witte, shattered by accounts of the sheer vandalism to his beloved line, sanctioned the cost of a large force. 'It is better to lose money rather than prestige,' he wrote on 7 July.2 As a first step he opened a credit for each of the three military governors if they could stifle the Boxer activities in their provinces. This had only a limited effect. Thereafter he had to make over the operation to the minister for war, a reversal of his earlier policy. This ended for good the monopolistic control of the finance ministry which he had exercised over this Manchurian railway operation. Since Kuropatkin could not divert troops from Liaotung or from the Peking campaign, he had to undertake a mobilization in the Priamur and Siberian military districts.3
Kuropatkin authorized his troops to invade Manchuria on 9 July. Those in the north were to come under General Grodekov while those in the south would be under Admiral Alekseyev's command. In the north they managed to save Harbin from the siege on 2 August and to complete the recapture of the Eastern railway mainline by the beginning of September — a colossal task covering vast distances and inhospitable countryside. The next points which it was indispensable to seize were the seats of the two military governors, Tsitsihar and Kirin. When these were taken, only the southern spur of the Eastern railway from Harbin to Port Arthur remained to be repossessed.
Because there was a civil war of sorts going on in Fengtien, the military situation there was rather intractable. General Tseng brought off an anti-Boxer coup in August; but late in September he was faced with the return of pro-Boxer groups led by his subordinates. He found it expedient to evacuate Mukden. On 1 October the Russian force under General Subbotich entered the city and the Chinese soldiery fled. With this act, the Russians became masters of the situation. But the fact remained that, militarily, the Boxers and their supporters had not been defeated but had merely gone to ground — a position similar to that obtaining in Chihli province in China. While the troops at the disposal of the Russian commanders were considerable, they still fell far short of the numbers needed to patrol and secure the vast railway network. With this uncertainty, the Russians embarked on their 'occupation' of Manchuria. They would occupy the principal points of strategic value and undertake measures necessary for pacification. But they would seek to work with Chinese officials and Generals Tseng and Chang-shun (of Kirin) continued to hold their posts.4
Even allowing for the fact that Russia was taken by surprise, she had not been shown to advantage in the months of the Boxer crisis. All sorts of shortcomings had been revealed: squandering of military expenditure; the lack of readiness to transport great numbers; defectiveness of provisions; and shortcomings in arms, guncarriages and rolling stock. All these hampered the numbers of Russian troops available in the east.5 In St Petersburg the government departments were thought to be in a state of panic. Most prominently the finance ministry with its immense investment in the railways and its urgent need to recoup the expenditure was anxious but impotent. Clearly the whole project had been set back by about two years and there would have to be considerable retrenchment in all parts of the administration before it could return to normal.
Naturally such a crisis generated recrimination about the past and disagreements about the future. The war ministry accused Witte on several counts: he had been too penny-pinching with the result that there was too little rolling-stock to carry reinforcements and provisions so that they had to be sent by sea; he had relied too much on the so-called 'Matilda's guards' for the protection of the railway line and had neglected the broader security aspects of Manchuria as a whole.6 It was a standard complaint of Kuropatkin that Russia's strategic interests differed from her railway interests. Clearly this brought into the open a fundamental division between the army and the civilian government. Kuropatkin was anxious to exploit the crisis to alter the balance in his favour. He asked Witte for an extraordinary credit for 12 months to cover the expenditure needed for mobilization; but the finance minister only agreed with ill grace to a six-month credit. The truth was that there were divided counsels among the tsar's intimate advisers; and that the peacetime domination of the railway project by Witte had given rise to serious weaknesses which his many enemies were not slow to disclose.7
The Treaty Port of Niuchuang
In the Russian view the events in Manchuria proper had been an aberration — a misunderstanding between Chinese and Russians in which the outside powers had no standing. As a corollary, the Russians did not believe that the outside powers had any role in the resolution of the problem. As an extension, they did not want the outside powers, whose representatives were preparing in the autumn to collaborate in what became known as the Peking Conference to deal comprehensively with the settlement of Chinese affairs, to intervene in any way with the settlement in Manchuria.8
This argument, which was certainly not accepted by Japan, Britain or the United States, broke down over the settlement of Niuchuang. Niuchuang with its own port of Yingkow, a town of some 80,000 inhabitants fifteen miles up the Liao River, had been recognized as a treaty port for four decades. It had a foreign settlement with an array of foreign consuls and a scattering of foreign businessmen. While the Russians claimed at times that the port was a bilateral issue between the Chinese and themselves, it was in law an international issue where the outside powers had treaty rights.9 Niuchuang was the meeting-point between two rail systems — the Chinese Northern Extension through Chinchow approaching from the west and the south Manchurian line of the Chinese Eastern railway which had built a spur from the east. As such it was a natural point of tension.
Niuchuang was sufficiently close to the events of northern China to reflect occurrences there. Boxer outbursts were on the cards from the middle of June onwards. The Russian gunboats, Gremiastchii and Otvajnii, were, therefore, anchored off the Bund for the summer months. The Japanese, for whom this was an important trading port, responded by sending two of their gunboats also, one being the Tatsuta. They were clearly not prepared to regard this port as one to be policed by Russia alone. The Japanese consul, Tanabe, who was head of the consular body, was told to be vigilant about Russia's actions there and reported in detail to his government.10
From the end of June Niuchuang had become a haven for refugees, missionaries and railwaymen from the Three Eastern provinces. The railway line to the west towards Chinchow and east to the Chinese Eastern railway had been attacked and damaged in many places. Russian troops took over the Chinese barracks on 26 July. Early in August about 3,000 further troops arrived in transports. Taking advantage of an attack on the Foreign Settlement, they advanced on the Chinese town and, because of the 'prehistoric' arms being used by the Boxers, had no difficulty in capturing it. Hitherto the Chinese Taotai in Niuchuang had been doing his best to keep the Boxers quiet, despite orders from the Tartar Taotai at Mukden to the contrary. Now he had to flee and the Russian flag was hoisted over the main building in the town, the Imperial Maritime Customs headquarters. It looked as though the Russians were, in retaliation for the destruction of their railway and the murder of their citizens, starting a policy of seizing the whole of Manchuria and adding it to the Russian Empire.11 Admiral E. I. Alekseyev, commander-in-chief of naval and military forces, arrived from Port Arthur to take the surrender of the Boxers.
But Niuchuang, unlike the rest of Manchuria, was not an exclusively Sino-Russian matter. The 'treaty powers' had rights which they, disappointed with Russia's performance at Peking, were determined to insist on. Alekseyev insisted that the customs should come under Russian control pending rendition of the port to China. He insisted that the temporary administration would act in the interest of Russians as well as foreigners and Chinese and would not infringe treaty rights. He appointed Ostroverkhov as administrator and Protassiev as cocommissioner of customs (this being a compromise solution). In September the civil administration asked the consular body to nominate someone for the municipal council; but, after consulting their governments, the consuls declined to put forward any name. On 6 October the Russian flag was hoisted over the buildings of the Shanhaikuan railway but it was on the orders of the Russian military authorities allegedly to prevent the destruction of the terminal by the rebels. The new situation at Niuchuang was disheartening both to Chinese and foreigners who were however impotent.12
Chinese Northern Railways
The third part of Russia's Manchurian problem related to China's Northern railway to the west of the Liao river. It was partly a railway problem over which Britain and Russia had been negotiating since 1898 and partly a political problem because Russia thought that, if she were to maintain a semblance of military influence with the Chinese authorities, she must be strong along the Tientsin-Shanhaikuan route and beyond. But how fare this was a well-constructed strategy and how far a response to a developing military situation is hard to say. Russia had just evacuated her armies from Peking and they were engaged in a long march towards the Great Wall in a mood not particularly friendly to the central government in St Petersburg. They had to hold the passage where the Wall comes down to the sea to prevent further penetration by the Boxers to the north, while attempting to restore the railway to working order.
At the start of the Boxer emergency, the construction of China's Northern Extension railway had reached Niuchuang (Yinkow), while the main line to Hsinmintung was under construction. The line was Chinese, though the actual line to Shanhaikuan was mortgaged to British bondholders and the rolling-stock and earnings of the line to Niuchuang acted as their security. But the Russian engineers found these lines to be in need of repair and protection against further Boxer assaults. At the height of the campaign, Russia took under her wing the section from Taku to Tientsin and Peking, relieving the British engineer, Kinder, and his staff. Britain, the United States and Japan protested but had to be content with Russia's assurances — which they did not believe —that she would return the section to China after the disturbances ended. There followed a battle for Shanhaikuan. Early in September Britain contemplated recovering the town herself but decided not to risk a clash with Russia. As a result, the line from Taku to Shanhaikuan was occupied by Russian troops 'by right of conquest' and they denied Britain's rights over the railway under the Anglo-Russian railway agreement. The high-handedness of the Russian military authorities whose attitude over the return of the lines was markedly different from that of St Petersburg suggested that they thought they were there to stay.
This would have been a difficult enough legal issue in peacetime; but during the mopping up campaign when tempers were frayed it was doubly complicated. A special role had to be played by Field Marshal Waldersee, who arrived as commander-in-chief on 17 October and had to decide the issue on overall strategic considerations. His writ, however, only ran to the Great Wall. He entered into a railway agreement with the Russians whereby Russian military control of the Peking-Shanhaikuan line should be ended when they had completed the bulk of the repair work. On 25 January 1901 Russia eventually handed over to Waldersee the section from Yangtsun to Shanhaikuan but retained the section from there to Niuchuang until she had been recompensed for her expenses for repair of the whole length. It was left to China and Britain to recover the first of these sections from Waldersee; but the latter could not guarantee the section beyond the Great Wall because it went beyond the sphere of control of the allied forces which he commanded.13
Although Japan was not directly affected by this railway diplomacy, she looked on with great vigilance. Waldersee confirmed his order about the Peking—Shanhaikuan line, just two days after the signature of the Anglo-German agreement of 16 October. From the British point of view, this treaty was an attempt to win German support against Russia in an issue of this kind, the Peking—Shanhaikuan line. But the Germans saw it as primarily an agreement about the Yangtse area and would not accept anti-Russian commitments north of the Great Wall. The Japanese adhered to this agreement with alacrity because they saw it as a break in the Dreibund of 1895 whose resurgence they were always expecting. In the event, the agreement collapsed, Billow announcing this in March 1901. It suggested to Japan that there was still an element of collusion between Germany and Russia over the latter's expansionist activities at this time.
Aftermath in Manchuria
The fall of Mukden did not ease the problem of the occupation or the pacification of Manchuria. The Taotai left Mukden and was not available. The Boxers disappeared into thin air; identification and punishment were difficult, if not impossible. According to one estimate, the force which Kuropatkin had built up in Manchuria ran to 4,000 officers and 173,000 troops. Clearly such a force could not be afforded or indeed supplied for long, because the crops had gone unharvested in the wartime conditions. So a scheme for demobilization was drawn up and put into effect to a limited extent.14
That it did not proceed at a faster pace was due to several factors. Firstly, the Boxers may have disappeared; but the bandits (hunghutze or redbeards) took their place, making up for famine conditions by pillaging. The Russian troops were needed over a wide area to protect foreign nationals. Secondly, by the time this problem had subsided, the means of transport for an extensive evacuation were not available. The railway tracks were not yet mended; and steamers could not ply on the Sungari and Amur rivers because they were frozen. The result was that by the end of the year 28 of the 42 infantry battalions were left and stayed on till the spring.15 This was a sizeable force, if it were merely to be applied to police duties. The Russians were glad to keep out of the administration of the occupied territories and concentrated on garrison duties in the major towns. They tried to exercise control over the Taotai by appointing advisers, but this was not an easy task for a serving officer to perform.
As the Blagovestchensk incident has reminded us, one consideration which had to be taken into account in framing Russian policy was that it was difficult to exercise control over the Russian army from St Petersburg. An attempt was made in a letter from the leading British businessman in Niuchuang, H. J. Bush, to The Times of London, to explain the local situation: the Siberian army was composed of the dregs of her population and discipline was an unknown quantity; the trouble was that, when roused, the Cossacks, though fine troops in some ways, could be barbarous and unscrupulous; and their officers were almost as bad.16 It was difficult to get through to these uneducated troops the notion that the purpose of the Russians was to withdraw from Manchuria. It was equally difficult to persuade the Chinese who came into contact with such an army that the Russian purpose was conciliatory. The Russian military authorities on the spot had gone far (over the Blagovestchensk massacre, for example) to convince the Chinese that they were in Manchuria to stay and would be ferocious if resisted.
This factor was readily admitted in St Petersburg, openly in the foreign ministry and tacitly in the war ministry. It was the consequence of the commanders being given carte blanche and more generally of officers on the frontier becoming accustomed during the period of tsarist expansion in Asia to exercise too much latitude and being praised for local initiatives. There was a genuine fear in the capital of the army abroad.
General N. I. Grodekov, commander in the northern region of Manchuria, asked Kuropatkin on 24 August for advice on long-term objectives. He received guidance from the tsar that he was not to annex any portion of Chinese territory, in order to reconstitute the relations of friendship and neighbourliness which had persisted with China.17
As if in confirmation of this, Kuropatkin told the French with whom the Russians shared many of their worries that, once pacification had been accomplished overall, Russia could revert quietly to the original plan, which was to hold the Chinese Eastern railway line by some military posts, assisted by 'gardes-voie' (railway guards). This guard system was the system which was organized militarily along all the Trans-Siberian railway at that time and consisted of a special corps of workers made up of army reservists.18 What was serving Russia's purposes on the main route ought to be well suited to the Eastern railway, even though it passed through foreign territory.
Russia's defence of the railway guards always mentioned the need for 'withdrawal of troops'. But suspicious foreign observers felt that they saw through this railway guard system. Thus, Charles Hardinge, the British charge d'affaires in St Petersburg, commented:
Now it is proposed to very largely increase this force and in order to keep up the fiction of withdrawal of Russian troops from Manchuria they are still to be called railway guards and to be nominally under Witte, but the officers are to be officers of the regular army, and in this way the forces though nominally under the control of the Minister of Finance will be practically under the control of the Minister of War who will be able to place them in strategic positions.19
How far these suspicions were justified is hard to say. It was a natural thing for the Russians to make use of their demobilized and jobless soldiery for this purpose. On the other hand, merely to transform the soldiers into railway guards came close to being a sleight of hand. To that extent, Hardinge has grounds for writing of the 'fiction of withdrawal'.
This is only one aspect of a broader problem — the problem of double talk among the Russian leaders. While they spoke innocently and plausibly about withdrawal and pulling out, this only took place partially and gradually. What was the cause of the delay? Witte in his Vospominaniya makes clear the role of the army in this. So too did Lamsdorf in this conversation with Sir Charles Scott, the British ambassador:
Lamsdorf told me that one of his most serious embarrassments in conducting foreign relations was the entire inability of the military party, particularly in distant parts of the Empire, to understand the necessity of taking the rights or interests of other powers into consideration if they saw their opportunity for laying their hands on anything they wanted, or thought would strengthen the military position. He said I must have observed this in course of our recent difficulties in China ... Kuropatkin was equally unable to understand this necessity, or indifferent to the consequences of ignoring it.
Lamsdorf said that, although it was true that he had had an occasional standup fight with the Minister of War he found in him a loyal and good colleague, always amenable to reason and ready to respect diplomatic considerations when clearly explained to him, but he must warn me that this was not the general case in all military quarters, and that he believed a great deal of his difficulties originated in the fact that military Authorities in distant parts of the Empire often acted under the mistaken impression that they would earn credit with the Minister of War by some spirited action initiated on their own responsibility.20
Tseng-Alekseyev Draft Agreement
It will be recalled that at the end of October, the retiring Japanese minister, Komura, had been in the Crimea to present his greetings to the tsar on giving up his post, and had there found the Chinese minister, Yang Ju, who was in his opinion making a nuisance of himself with Lamsdorf and the other officials. After much persuasion, Yang obtained from them the undertaking that Russia was ready to return to China the Three Eastern provinces provided Russian troops continued to protect the railway. When Li Hung-chang heard this, he took the approval of the court and authorized the generals ofKirinand Fengtien (Mukden) to commence negotiations with the Russians for the return of their respective provinces. The Fengtien general, Tseng-ch'i, had already sent one of his underlings who claimed to have skill in negotiating with Russia to consult I. Ia. Korostovets who represented the Russians in Port Arthur. Things moved slowly and it was not till 19 November that the 'plenipotentiary' returned thence to Hsinmin, bearing the agreement which he had concluded with Korostovets on 10 November. Tseng thought it unwise to report his action officially. He was not anxious to invite an official rebuke for nominating (without authority) a 'plenipotentiary' and choosing one who was in any case discredited and retired. On the other hand, Tseng was desperate to return to his seat of authority in Mukden.
The draft contained clauses which were unacceptable to Tseng. But Alekseyev insisted that it had to be accepted before the general could be permitted by Russian troops to return to Mukden. On the assurance that the terms were provisional and subject to ratification, Tseng signed the agreement with strict reservations, pointing out that he did not have plenipotentiary powers. When the signature had been given on 30 November, Tseng was able to go back and thus obtained greater freedom of movement; but it was not on the scale that he had been led to expect.
The text of the draft agreement gradually leaked out to the court at Peking, which was furious and ordered that Tseng-ch'i should be punished. But, when Giers insisted in Peking that the dismissal of Tseng would prejudice future negotiations with Russia regarding Manchuria, he was reluctantly reinstated as Taotai in March 1901 and served at Mukden till 1905. Alekseyev fared little better. Though he had commanded the Russian far east squadron during the Sino-Japanese war and again during the Boxer expeditionary force, he seems to have lacked political muscle to carry the day with the tsar and his immediate advisers. He had not taken the trouble to refer 'the treaty' to Minister Giers in Peking. The result was that he was not supported by his home government. Thus, while the provisional agreement was a shrewd move from the standpoint of both Alekseyev and Tseng, enabling both to return to normal relations in some respects, their governments, realizing that it was a political hot potato, declined to ratify it. In consequence the 'treaty' lapsed in January 1901.21
The Tseng-Alekseyev agreement was the subject of a journalist scoop by Dr George Ernest Morrison, Peking correspondent of The Times of London. Morrison's scoop lay not in procuring a copy which was in any case available to all the legations in Peking around the end of December. His genius lay in taking the risk of telegraphing the text to London and ensuring that it was carried in the paper. The diplomats had taken the more cautious and financially prudent course of sending the text by sea. The result was that the text appeared in the paper on 3 January and became known to the British, Japanese and possibly other governments from journalistic sources rather than from the diplomats in the first place.22
Morrison's message stated that 'the Agreement will necessarily be followed by similar agreements with respect to the other two provinces [Kirin and Heilungkiang] and then Manchuria will be a de facto Russian protectorate'. Morrison had for some time been sending anti-Russian telegrams from Peking, showing that the Russians had no intention of giving up Manchurian territory. This assessment was based on personal observations he had made duringjourneys to the area; now the situation on the ground was going to be crystallized in a legal form. Despite some exaggeration, this caused a furore. Naturally the thought of a de facto protectorate resulting from the Boxer crisis over such a vast and potentially rich area was objectionable to most of the powers. While the other powers were engaged in the multi national Peking conference, which was giving rise to tensions enough of its own, the idea that the Russians were trying to enter into a separate peace with China behind the backs of their 'allies' was the last straw. It was widely condemned.23
In their first trial the Open Door powers — United States, Britain and Japan — had failed. Russia had moved into Manchuria and, despite honeyed words and unspecific assurances, she evidently intended to stay. Of course, time alone would tell. Other powers also had troops which they intended to keep in China while the emergency lasted. But the Open Door powers were annoyed and frustrated by their own impotence. They were unwilling — and probably unable — to dislodge the Russians by force from Manchuria and were having no success in extracting any definite guarantees of withdrawal from them by diplomatic means.
References and Notes
1. The most detailed accounts are in G. A. Lensen, The Russo-Chinese War, and R. Quested, 'A fresh look at the Sino-Russian conflict of 1900 in Manchuria'.
2. Witte to D. S. Sipiagin, 7 July 1900, in Krasnyi Avkhiv, 18 (1926), p. 32. Hardinge to Francis Bertie, 20 Sept. 1900, Hardinge Papers 3: 'Before the recent disturbances there were 2-3,000 troops (some say 10,000) to guard the line. These were not under the Minister of War but the Minister of Finance and were frivolously nick-named "Matilda's Guards". Matilda being the petit nom of Mme de Witte, a lady of acknowledged notoriety in the past.'
3. A. Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Policy, pp. 136-7.
4. Lensen, op. cit., pp. 160-3.
5. Scott to T. H. Sanderson, 25 July 1900, Scott Papers 52,303.
6. Malozemoff, op. cit., p. 131.
7. Scott to Sanderson, 8 Aug. 1900, Scott Papers 52,303.
8. R. Quested, 'Matey' Imperialists?, ch. 2.
9. Lensen, op. cit., p. 55.
10. A very detailed treatment is in NGB 33 supplements.
11. Bowra Papers 17, pp. 73f.
12. Bowra Papers 17, pp. 83f.
13. BD, vol. 2, pp. 1-2.
14. Quested, op. cit., pp. 53-4.
15. Malozemoff, op. cit., p. 144.
16. Lensen, op. cit., p. 253.
17. Ibid., p. 252.
18. DDF, 1st series, vol. 16 (1900), no. 294.
19. Hardinge to Bertie, 20 Sept. 1900, Hardinge Papers 3.
20. Scott to Lansdowne, 6 Feb. 1902, Scott Papers 52,304. Kuropatkin told Witte that this would give Russia an excuse for seizing Manchuria and turning it into a second Bokhara.
21. R. Quested, 'An introduction to the enigmatic career of Chou Mien'. It was described by Lamsdorf not as a treaty but as 'a modus vivendi' between the Russian military authorities and Chinese civil authorities to prevent further disturbances in Manchuria.
22. The Times, 3 Jan. 1901.
23. Morrison Papers 312/65, diary for 9 Aug. 1905, tells how Morrison met Korostovets at the Portsmouth Conference: 'He said my action in giving such wide publicity to what was an innocent procedure was deplorable for Russia. It was Li Hung Chang who was to blame. He advised the signature of a purely temporary military non-political agreement and then Admiral Alexieff made the mistake of not getting from Li Hung Chang his approval in writing of such a procedure. When Mr K. signed with Chou Mien, Li Hung Chang left him in the lurch.'