The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (39 page)

This was a highly specialised form of warfare in which every use was made of up-to-date technology. The two Hazara forces used the field telegraph for communication between commanders and columns, and were armed with Gatling machine-guns, breech-loading rifles with a range of up to 1,000 yards, and small, collapsible mountain guns (the ‘screw guns’ of Kipling’s poem) which were carried by mules. Despite the weight of firepower, charging tribesmen armed with swords and knives sometimes careered into British lines and caused havoc. This occurred during a skirmish during the 1890 Hazara campaign, when, according to the official report, a British officer ‘engaged in combat with two fanatics, one of whom he killed, but was wounded by a second, a big powerful man, who almost overpowered him’.
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In 1895, seasoned frontier fighters were perturbed by the allegations that the new .303 rifle bullet lacked the stopping power of the old .457. Secret forensic tests were therefore carried out on the corpses of Pathan mullahs, who had been executed by firing squads using the two types of ammunition, to discover their relative merits.
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Grisly details like this were deliberately kept from the public in Britain, who were also kept in the dark about the full extent of the systematic burning of villages, crops and granaries, and the slaughter of livestock which marked every frontier operation. Instead, newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts like Winston Churchill’s popular
Malakand Field Force
(1897) presented the wars as tales of derring-do and adventure. When justification was offered it was in familiar terms of quite literally pushing back the frontiers of civilisation. The North-West Frontier wars (there were nearly twenty between 1863 and 1901) were a glamorous and headline-catching feature of a grander, often more mundane business, the government and regeneration of India.

5

They Little Know Our Strength: The Far East and the Pacific

Claydon House in Buckinghamshire contains a Chinese room embellished in a style which brings together Chinese and rococo motifs. It was created in the 1760s when men of discrimination looked on China with awe and wonderment. It was an ancient, orderly civilisation whose artefacts, particularly porcelain, were prized by collectors and imitated by craftsmen like those employed at Claydon. China tea, imported by the East India Company, was well on the way to becoming a daily palliative for all classes. Within eighty years attitudes to China had changed radically. A popular encyclopaedia published in 1842 said little on Chinese civilisation, but instead described China as ‘an unbounded mart’ with a population clamouring for British goods. These were denied them by their rulers, who refused to recognise the benefits of free trade and had gone as far as to exclude British commerce.
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Opium rather than manufactured goods was what the Chinese people demanded. The felicitous combination of the British taste for tea and the Chinese for opium had been exploited by the East India Company which, since 1773, had enjoyed a monopoly over the drug’s production. The rise of the opium trade coincided with a period of Chinese decline. By 1800 China had become a static, introverted society governed by an intensely conservative and ossified bureaucracy. The Ching dynasty of emperors were Manchus, outsiders who found it hard to rally their Chinese subjects at moments of crisis. But rulers and ruled were united by a common mistrust of all foreigners, whom they designated ‘barbarians’ and treated with condescension. This had been amply demonstrated in 1793 and 1816 when two British missions, headed by Lords Macartney and Amherst, had travelled to Peking in an attempt to establish formal diplomatic relations between Britain and China. Both embassies were politely cold-shouldered, and departed in no doubt that they had been regarded as representatives of some distant, tributary state.

Given Chinese insularity and apprehension of all things alien, it was inevitable that a clash would occur with Britain, which believed it had a right to conduct unrestricted trade throughout the world. The first collision occurred in the spring of 1839 at Canton, the main port open to foreign commerce. The Chinese imperial government, disturbed by the harmful social and economic consequences of opium addiction, decided to curtail the trade and instructed Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü to cut it off at its source, Canton. His measures provoked an angry response from Captain Charles Elliot, the Superintendent of Trade, and when news of them reached London, the government came under pressure from companies with Chinese interests. Lin’s behaviour was represented as another example of Chinese obstructiveness and a direct challenge to the principles of free trade. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, therefore authorised the despatch of a seaborne expeditionary force to the mouth of the Canton River.

Today the First Opium War (1839–42) is commonly portrayed as a shameful act of aggression contrived to promote a trade which was immoral, and to which the Chinese government had rightly taken exception. Contemporaries regarded the war and its successors as highly praiseworthy enterprises undertaken as a final resort. The fault lay with the Chinese who had formerly connived at the trade at the same time as treating Britain and its merchants in a high-handed manner. The war was therefore seen as a showdown in which Britain, its patience exhausted, revealed its muscle in the hope that, thereafter, a chastened Chinese government would prove more amenable to perfectly reasonable demands.

The war was a severe shock to the Chinese who knew nothing of the technology of their adversaries. In every engagement the Chinese were, in the words of an eyewitness, ‘unable to contend against the fearful weapons of their determined foe’. He had been astonished when, during the early fighting, a Congreve war rocket struck a junk which then caught fire and exploded, killing all its crew.
2
When the British landed at Amoy in September 1841 they suffered no losses, but their musket volleys killed at least a hundred Chinese who were armed with matchlocks and bladed weapons.
3

At the start of the war operations were confined to the Canton River. Hong Kong island was seized and annexed as a future naval base and commercial centre. There followed a sustained demonstration of firepower on the Yangtze River, devised to show the imperial government the hopelessness of further resistance. During June and July 1842 Woosung, Shanghai and Chinkiang were shelled and taken by landing forces. It was a tough campaign, fought in the hot season, and there were heavy British losses from sunstroke, malaria, dysentery and cholera. Of the thirty-four men killed during the capture of Chinkiang, sixteen died from heat exhaustion.
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The Yangtze campaign paid off politically. A stunned Chinese government signed the Treaty of Nanking which confirmed British possession of Hong Kong and opened Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Shanghai and Ningpo to British commerce. The apparatus of unofficial empire was soon in place: consulates were established; British subjects were allowed exemption from Chinese jurisdiction; a naval base with coaling facilities was set up at Shanghai; and British men-o’-war were permitted to patrol Chinese rivers and coastal waters. France and the United States quickly followed Britain’s example and were granted similar privileges.

The Opium War had far-reaching consequences for the history of the Far East. China’s technical backwardness and vulnerability had been exposed and Britain had made itself the major commercial and military power in the region. In 1853, when the American Admiral Perry visited Japan to persuade its rulers to open their country to Western trade, he warned them if they did not, then the British would appear and treat Japan as they had China. The Japanese wisely conceded, and within a few years had made commercial agreements with the Western powers, including Britain.

Having dragged China into the informal empire, Britain turned its attention to making it safe for trade by the suppression of riverine and coastal piracy. This was exciting and rewarding work; in 1849 one squadron of warships earned £42,000 in head-money which was calculated at £20 for each dead or captured pirate and £5 for each of those who escaped. Actions were brief and brisk and their flavour is captured in an official report of an engagement between the steamer HMS
Hermes
and five junks near Hong Kong in March 1853. Proceeding under sail, the
Hermes
lured the pirates towards her until, realising their mistake, they scattered and three got away. The remaining two:

Finding they could not escape, closed and lashed themselves together, prepared to fight, and sent men aloft to throw stink pots [primitive hand-grenades which emitted a noisome smoke] as we ranged up alongside them, firing musketry; as we closed they put their helms hard over and got under our bows, and commenced throwing stink pots most furiously, when we backed off and opened fire on them … offering to cease if they would yield, but they would not. Finally, having driven them below with Grape, Canister and Musketry, Lieutenant Burton boarded and got possession.

Twenty-eight pirates had been shot or drowned and a further fifty-seven, all in red turbans and red-trimmed robes, were taken prisoner. Forty-five pirates were estimated to have escaped and so, in all, the
Hermes’s
crew were entitled to £1,755. Save for a few sailors scalded by the stink pots, there were no British casualties.
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This incident in the war against piracy occurred at a time when Sino-British relations were deteriorating. The flashpoint came in 1856 when Cantonese soldiers, searching for a pirate, boarded the British-registered
Arrow
and hauled down its flag. The legal grounds for claiming the
Arrow
as British were flimsy, but this did not deter John Bowring, the consul in Canton, from using the affair to provoke a trial of strength with the local Chinese commissioner, Yeh Ming-chin. Yeh had never hidden his disdain for all foreigners, and for some time had done everything in his power to exclude them and their goods from Canton. Bowring was equally stiff-necked and summoned a flotilla which shelled the city to show Yeh and its inhabitants the folly of interrupting trade.

Like its predecessor, the Second Opium War of 1856–8 was an exercise in intimidation. This time, however, the French collaborated, using as their excuse the murder of a missionary, a ploy they adopted to justify simultaneous aggression in Annam and Cambodia. While Anglo-French forces battered ports along the Canton River, Lord Elgin was ordered to China with powers to settle outstanding differences between Britain and its government. The result was the Treaty of Tientsin of 1858 which granted fresh concessions to foreign business interests and legalised the opium trade.

What the British and French interpreted as Chinese stone-walling and prevarication over enforcing various clauses in this treaty led to a final application
of force majeure
in 1859–60. An Anglo-Indian and French army landed in north China and marched on Peking. Again modern weaponry triumphed over mediaeval: Robert Swinhoe, an interpreter, was impressed by the unflinching fortitude of the Tartar cavalry who refused to retire under close-range shellfire. ‘Poor heathens!’ he wrote later. ‘They little know our strength although they have shown themselves brave fellows.’ Another ‘brave fellow’, Private Moyes of the Buffs, won undying fame after he had been beheaded for refusing to kow-tow to the Mongol general, Prince Seng-ko-lin-chin. Moyes’s defiant courage made him an ideal model for imperial manhood and was celebrated in Sir Francis Doyle’s stirring poem, ‘A Private of the Buffs’:

Last night among his fellow roughs

He jested, quaffed and swore,

A drunken private of the Buffs

Who never looked before.

Today beneath the foeman’s frown

He stands in Elgin’s place,

Ambassador from England’s crown,

And type for all her race.
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Other, less worthy examples of soldierly conduct marked the advance on Peking. Looting became endemic and Swinhoe was amused to see provost-sergeants joining in. The big prizes lay inside the imperial palaces in Peking which were precipitately abandoned by the Emperor Hsien-feng and his court in October 1860. According to Swinhoe, the French were first off the mark in what soon became a general free-for-all. On entering the Emperor’s throne room he found ‘the floor covered with the choicest curios’ which were being sifted through by General de Montauban, who was making piles of presents for Queen Victoria and Napoleon III.
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Shortly after, the summer palace was burned down at the instructions of Elgin as a reprisal for the torture and murder of several emissaries and their escort.

The plundering of Peking and the destruction of the summer palace symbolised the prostration of China. She had been hammered in three wars and driven to submit to forces which few of her people or rulers could comprehend. As the country with most to gain from a pliant China, Britain had taken the lead in this process of humiliation, although by 1860 she had been joined by France, which was already infiltrating Indo-China, and Russia, which had its eyes on Korea and territory along China’s northern boundaries. Britain had no interest in annexation, save for Hong Kong and the adjacent Kowloon peninsula; all she had ever wanted was unrestricted access to China’s trade.