The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (16 page)

The chief interpreter, Harry Parkes, and Henry Loch, Lord Elgin’s private secretary, were the first to return. After Seng Guo Lin Sen had ordered them bound and transported to Beijing they had been cast into an unsprung cart with two other captives (a Frenchman and an old Sikh comrade, Nal Sing) and had suffered terribly, thrown about in the back of the cart as it crashed over the rutted road to the capital: ‘I believe if it had lasted much longer we would have died’ Loch said of this dreadful journey. It was late dusk when they entered the city by the western gate, and black night when eventually they stopped before a large building, shadowed and shapeless in the gloom. Three men came forward with lanterns. Loch felt Parkes stiffen, then shudder as he whispered, ‘This is indeed worse than I expected, we are in the worst prison in China; we are in the hands of the torturers; this is the Board of Punishments’. Swiftly they were dragged inside, and foreseeing their imminent torture Loch tried to comfort his friends, telling them not to fear. The old Sikh drew himself up.‘‘‘Fear’?’ replied he in Hindustani, ‘I do not fear; if I do not die today I may tomorrow, and I am past 60 and am I not with you? I do not fear’.

Their rope bonds were exchanged for chains in a fearsome room hung with various implements ‘the use of which it was unpleasant too closely to investigate’.
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The chains were fastened around the neck and across the ankles, with just three inches allowed between the feet, which prevented all but a slow shuffling gait. Another chain was attached between the neck and ankles, and they were half-pushed, half-carried to separate communal cells, pestilential rooms filled to bursting with Chinese prisoners in various states of emaciation. Loch was particularly badly treated by his jailers. They fastened his neck chain to a beam, giving him just enough room to recline awkwardly on his back. The Westerners must have expected the worst from the swarms of condemned men that surrounded them, but the Chinese were surprisingly solicitous. When Loch awoke shivering after a few hours’ sleep, he found himself squashed between two Chinese convicts. One of them ‘feeling me shaking with cold, drew his tattered, vermin-eaten rug over me–and I was thankful’.

This was not the only kindness these unfortunates showed the foreign captives. Each day the Chinese prisoners carefully cleaned the wounds on the Britons’ wrists and ankles, wiping them with a cloth to prevent fly larvae entering the cuts and infecting the flesh. As the experiences of the other allied captives rapidly showed, this was more than a simple act of kindness. Keeping the fly maggots at bay quite literally saved their lives.

Harsh though Parkes’ and Loch’s captivity had been, it was positively gentle compared to the treatment meted out to other members of their party. The Chinese had treated their own countrymen brutally: the captured coolies had been buried to their necks in the ground, and left there for the pye-dogs to eat their heads. The foreigners had been given different torments. One Frenchman reported:

When we had all been tied up, they poured water on the ropes that bound us, to tighten them. Then they carried us off and threw us down in a courtyard, where we lay exposed to the cold by night and to the sun during the day. At the end of the second day they gave us two small pieces of bread and a little water. In the daytime anyone who liked might come and torment us. At night they placed an official by the side of each of us. If we spoke a word, they stamped on us and gave us blows on the head. If we asked for food or drink, they filled our mouths with filth. The rest cannot be told.

Filth and blows could be borne, but the hand-binding was a death sentence. As practised by the Chinese, it all but cut the circulation to the fingers, which turned black and swelled to an obscene size. The bonds cut into the wrist, and eventually the pressure exerted on the dying cells became too much and the skin split, exposing the flesh to the attentions of the myriad flies that were an integral part of every Chinese habitation. These were the same flies that Chinese captives in Loch’s and Parkes’ prison had taken such pains to guard against. With good reason. The flies laid their eggs on living flesh. Javalla Sing, a duffadar, 1st troop Fane’s Horse, reported the horrifying consequences:

...Lieut. Anderson became delirious, and remained so, with a few lucid intervals, until his death, which occurred on the ninth day of his imprisonment. Before his death his nails and fingers burst from the tightness of the cords, and mortification set in, and the bones of the wrist were exposed, whilst he was alive, worms were generated in his wounds, and ate into and crawled over his body...five days after this a sowar (trooper) named Ramden died in the same state–his body was taken away immediately [Lieut. Anderson’s corpse was left lying with the prisoners for three days].

Another Sikh member of Fane’s Horse, sowar Bughel Sing, was taken captive with Thomas Bowlby (
The Times
correspondent), an unnamed French officer and Phipps, a British dragoon:

Mr. Bowlby died the second day after we arrived; he died from maggots forming in his wrists...His body remained there nearly three days, and the next day it was tied to a cross beam and thrown over the wall to be eaten by dogs and pigs. The next day the Frenchman died; he was wounded slightly on the head and hand. Maggots got into his ears, nose and mouth, and he became insensible. Two days after this the first Sikh died; his hands burst from his rope wounds, maggots got into them, and he died. Four days afterwards, Phipps, King’s Dragoon Guards, died; for ten days he encouraged us in every way he could, but one day his hands became swollen like Mr. Anderson’s, and maggots were generated the next–one maggot increased a thousandfold in a day. Mahomed Bux, duffadar, died ten days ago; maggots formed on him four days before his death, and his hands were completely eaten away. I should have died had not my chains been taken off.

The Chinese jailers were unconcerned by the prisoners’ plight. Indeed, they seemed intent on watching the prisoners succumb in this barbaric manner. Javalla Sing reported that ‘When Lieut. Anderson and our comrades called on us to help by biting [their] cords the Chinamen kicked us away’.

The Chinese tried to use their prisoners to extract concessions, but Elgin would not negotiate, telling Prince Kung bluntly that if the allied captives were not returned he would destroy Beijing.
⁴
This brinkmanship had its effect: Prince Kung ordered Parkes and Loch removed from their cells in the Board of Punishments and held in more comfortable conditions under the careful eye of a mandarin, Hang Ki, until he finally agreed to to their release on Monday 8th October. Just fifteen minutes after they had walked free, a vermilion warrant arrived from the Imperial court in Jehol authorising their deaths. Over the next week, under the threat of severe reprisals, the rest of the prisoners were returned, along with those who had succumbed to the torments of their captivity.

The first bodies were brought out at night, four coffins carried on Chinese carts. When the corpses of those tortured and killed were examined, they were so thoroughly burned with quick-lime that it proved almost impossible to identify the remains. A body-count revealed that of the thirty-nine allies taken captive, no less than a third had been ‘barbarously murdered’.
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As news of these atrocities spread through the allied camp a murderous mood took hold and the desire for vengeance became almost palpable among the soldiery. Had Elgin or Gros given the word, there is no doubt that the French and British guardsmen would cheerfully have razed Beijing to the ground and happily slaughtered every one of its inhabitants.

Thankfully, both allied commanders realised that simple revenge was not enough–it would serve only to confirm the Chinese elite in their prejudices and turn the common people against the ‘barbarian’, and might even help unite Chinese and Manchu against a common enemy, bolstering the Dynasty’s confidence and prolonging the war. At the same time such a barbarous act could not simply be passed over. The question was: what should the allied response be?

The Russians had already suggested that the Board of Punishments should be razed to the ground and a monument to the dead erected in its place. The French tended to agree, and wanted the torturers, those who had physically tormented the prisoners, handed over for execution. Elgin would have none of it. The monument would simply stand as a provocation to all Chinese, and would undoubtedly be destroyed just as soon as the Westerners had vacated the city. And hanging those who had tortured, but not those who had ordered the atrocities, was not justice in his eyes. Besides, the Manchu elite would in all likelihood rustle up a bevy of condemned prisoners and pass them off as those responsible for the maltreatment and death of the barbarians. No, what was needed was an act that would awaken the Chinese from the dream they had dreamed for more than two thousand years–an act that would strike deep into the age-old pride of the ‘Central’ Kingdom, that would drag the Emperor from his golden pedestal and forever destroy the myth of his divinity–an act that would reverberate across the Empire and reveal the Son of Heaven to his subjects as simply another ruler of one country among many others.

Elgin believed he knew the answer–he would destroy the Summer Palace.

The French (having pillaged the area like a swarm of locusts) affected to be horrified by the idea. Baron Gros, with one eye on public opinion in Europe, refused to be involved in what he termed an act of ‘barbarism’. But Elgin was adamant–the Summer Palace was the Emperor’s sacred place, his personal fairyland. Of all things, people and locations in the Middle Kingdom, nothing so personified the power, the exclusiveness, of the Son of Heaven. And nothing would so effectively proclaim his helplessness against the barbarians than its destruction. Baron Gros was not convinced. ‘I fear,’ he wrote, ‘that this act of useless and savage vengeance will so frighten Prince Kung that he will take flight and disappear into Manchuria’. His refusal to deploy French troops for this operation laid all the responsibility on Elgin’s shoulders. It was a doubly heavy burden for him to bear alone–all Europe knew of the ‘Elgin marbles’, and how his father had pillaged Greece, carrying off to Britain the choicest pieces of Hellenic art. Even in 1860 the affair had the whiff of scandal about it, and the dour Scotsman realised this act of retribution against the Emperor would do great harm to his own reputation–‘like father like son’ would be the inevitable conclusion in the drawing-rooms of polite society across Europe. Yet it is a measure of the man that he persisted with his plan, convinced that it was the best and only way both to avenge the allied dead on a prideful Emperor and his underlings, and to drag a reluctant China (for its own good, as he saw it) into the modern world.

On 13th October, Lord Elgin ordered his men to their work. The whole of the Summer Palace was put to the torch, including the Yuan Ming Yuan and the Imperial Hunting Lodge (which led directly to the extermination of the unique
ssu-pu-hsiang
in China).
⁶
Five palaces and more than two hundred buildings were razed to the ground, the smoke of the conflagration was visible from Beijing, leaving no one in any doubt as to the disaster that had overtaken the Emperor. Captain Charles Gordon, soon to be fighting alongside the Manchu against the Tai Ping as ‘Chinese Gordon’, was among the incendiaries. He wrote to his mother: ‘You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army. Everybody was wild for plunder.’
⁷

Despite its undoubted Vandal dimension, Elgin’s strategy worked. Contrary to Baron Gros’ belief, Prince Kung did not flee Beijing when the Summer Palace was fired. ‘On the contrary, it was then, and then only, that he understood the uselessness of further subterfuges. The flames were still mounting upwards when a despatch from the Chinese Plenipotentiary was brought to the French camp; the first despatch that expressed, in clear and unequivocal terms, the formal acceptance of the Allies’ proposals. Baron Gros seized the opportunity with enthusiasm. Lord Elgin did so with considerable
hauteur
.’
⁸

The ruins of the Summer Palace still smouldered when, on 24th October, Lord Elgin, surrounded by outriders, made his way to the Tribunal of Rites on a scarlet-covered palanquin carried by sixteen Chinese bearers, to sign the Anglo-Chinese treaty with Prince Kung. The atmosphere between the parties was icily formal: no smiles, no small talk or conciliatory speeches; the participants bowed to each other on arrival and on completion of the ceremony. It was hardly to be wondered, for more than timber and stone had been destroyed when the Summer Palace had gone up in smoke. With it had gone the myth that for so long had sustained Chinese pride–the belief that their Emperor was the supreme ruler of All Under Heaven, unique and omnipotent, to whom all barbarians must inevitably bow.

The Manchu nobles who clustered around the ailing Emperor at Jehol Palace in the autumn of 1860 were under no illusions concerning his omnipotence: Hsien Feng was dying, and the new Emperor would be a child, Yehonala’s son, Tsai Ch’un. For an ambitious noble this was the opportunity of a lifetime. A boy-Emperor required regents to govern his realm, regents who would ‘Sway the Wide World’ in his name, and hold the power of life and death over friend and foe alike, until the Emperor reached manhood. But who would the moribund Hsien Feng name as temporary rulers of the Middle Kingdom? This was the unspoken question that hovered over the Imperial sick-bed: who would command after he was gone–Yehonala and her faction, or Minister Su Shun, President of the Board of Revenues, supported by the Princes I and Cheng.

At first sight, Su Shun and his allies held all the cards. Their star had been ascending in direct proportion to Yehonala’s fall from grace. Su Shun now applied his formidable powers for decadence and deceit to two vital undertakings: to aiding the Emperor’s desire for oblivion by arranging ever-more-perverted drunken debauches; and to pouring poison in the ailing monarch’s ear concerning his erstwhile favourite, the Yi Concubine. He succeeded brilliantly in both tasks. During the dark, cold Manchurian winter, Hsien Feng, sunk in debauchery, weakened still further with drugs, drink and sensual pleasures, slid ever-closer to the death that would bring Su Shun and the princes the power they craved. The Minister’s black propaganda was no less effective; his claims that Yehonala was acting the coquette with the Emperor’s bannermen bodyguard, and was conducting an affair with their commander Jung Lu, resulted in the Emperor ordering the heir’s removal from his mother’s protection. Henceforth, the heir was to be ‘cared for’ by Su Shun’s wife. Hsien Feng would hear no explanations from Yehonala, and refused to allow the Yi Concubine to enter the Imperial presence. The Emperor did, however, see the Empress Consort Sakota, and gave to her a secret edict which, decades thence, would have far-reaching and fatal consequences for the two cousins.