FIRST YEARS IN CHINA--LIFE AT NINGPO--THE ALLIED COMMISSION AND SIR
HARRY PARKES--RESIGNATION FROM THE CONSULAR SERVICE
The journey out to Chinn in 1854 was not the simple matter that it
is now. No Suez Canal existed then, and the _Candia_ that took Robert
Hart from Southampton left him at Alexandria. Thence he had to travel
up the Mahmudi Canal to the Nile, push on towards Cairo, and finally
spend eighteen cramped and weary hours in an omnibus crossing
the desert to Suez, where he got one steamer as far as Galle, and
another--the _Pottinger_ from Bombay--which called there took him on
to his destination.
He remained three uneventful months in Hongkong as Student Interpreter
at the Superintendency of Trade, awaiting the return of Sir John
Bowring, H.B.M.'s Minister to China, who was away at Taku trying to
open negotiations with the Peking Government. It was this same Sir
John Bowring, by the way, who first aroused Robert Hart's interest
in Chinese life and customs--subjects on which so many foreigners in
China remain pitifully ignorant all their lives. "Study everything
around you," said he to the young man. "Go out and walk in the street
and read the shop signs. Bend over the bookstalls and read titles.
Listen to the talk of the people. If you acquire these habits, you
will not only learn something new every time you leave your door, but
you will always carry with you an antidote for boredom."
When the Minister came back in September, Robert Hart was appointed
to the British Consulate at Ningpo, and started off immediately,
travelling up to Shanghai in a trim little 150-ton opium schooner
called the _Iona_. The voyage should have taken a week; it took three.
At first a calm and then the sudden burst of the north-east monsoon
made progress impossible; the schooner tacked back and forth for a
fortnight, advancing scarcely a mile, and all this time her single
passenger could just manage to take seven steps on her little deck
without wetting his feet. Then, to make matters worse, provisions
gave out, and the ship's company was reduced for twelve days to an
unsavoury diet of water-buffalo and peanuts--all they could get from
a nearby island. Was it any wonder that Hart could never afterwards
endure the taste of peanuts, or that at the mere sight of a passing
water-buffalo his appetite was clean gone for the day?
He found Shanghai in the hands of the Triads (rebels), and a friend,
one of the missionaries, took him to see their famous chief, who was
said to have risen, not from the ranks, but from the stables of an
American merchant. With Mr. (afterwards Sir Rutherford) Alcock he also
went into the other camp to visit the commander of the Imperialist
forces, a Mongol, the Governor of the Province and a man of fine
presence. He was the first specimen of the Mandarin class that Robert
Hart had seen, and consequently the details of the interview remained
in his memory.
In later years he would sometimes describe what interested him most
as, silent and inconspicuous, he observed the doings of his seniors.
It was not the crowd of petty officials standing about, though they
were curious enough to a newcomer in their long official robes and
hats decorated with peacock's feathers; it was not the conversation
going on between Alcock and the Governor; it was simply the way the
latter, by his excessive dignity and dramatic manner, turned a simple
action into a ceremony. What he did was to draw carefully from
his official boot a wad of fine white paper, detach one sheet, and
solemnly blow his nose upon it. The action was nothing, the method
everything. He then proceeded to fold the paper into a cocked hat,
and, calling a servant to him, gave it into his hands with a grand
bow, just as if he were presenting the man with some specially earned
honour. As for the servant, he took his cue excellently well, received
the paper like a sacred relic, and, still as if he were taking part in
some ceremony; opened the flap of the tent and threw it away.
[Illustration: THE CANAL: THE ROUTE BY WHICH SIR ROBERT HART FIRST
CAME TO PEKING.]
Still more adventures awaited Robert Hart on the short trip from
Shanghai to Ningpo; indeed I think the best and the most romantic
adventures took a certain pleasure in following him always. At any
rate, this time he was to have such a one as even Captain Kettle
might have envied; he was to be chased by a pirate junk, a Cantonese
Comanting, with a painted eye in the bow, so that she might find her
prey, with a high stern bristling with rifles and cutlasses, so that
she might destroy it when found, and with stinkpots at her mastheads
and boarding-nets hung round her. Of course he was to escape in the
end, but so narrowly that all possible sail had to be crowded on to
his little ship, and the whole crew set to work the big oar at the
stern, while every soul on board shivered and shook as men should when
pirates are after them.
Ningpo itself in 1854 was the quietest place under the sun. A handful
of merchants lived there, buried without the trouble of dying; one or
two consulates had been built, but roads were non-existent, and the
few houses were separated from one another by a network of paddy
(rice) fields. The new consular assistant shared his house with a man
called Patridge, for whom he had conceived a liking, a jolly fellow
and a capital messmate, yet not without certain peculiarities of his
own. I believe he took a special delight in posing for fearful and
radical ideas like the abolition of the House of Lords, and could
never be made to see why a man should not sit in the presence of his
Sovereign, or wear his hat either if he felt so inclined.
The other youngsters laughed at his notions; one or two even went so
far as to accuse him of being a snob and to twit him on having changed
the spelling of his name and dropped the first "r" for the sake of a
stylishness he pretended to despise. He protested hotly; they stuck
to their assertion. He declared his name was Patridge, always had been
Patridge, and never could be anything else; they disbelieved him, and
so the dispute remained a drawn battle for want of an umpire till
long afterwards, when Robert Hart himself proved the point in a very
curious way.
A word or two about Patridge's early history must be told in order to
show how he did it. Patridge, as a young boy, was on board a vessel
carrying opium along the coasts of China, when in 1842 she and another
engaged in the same trade were wrecked on the island of Formosa, and
both crews--175 Bengalis and 13 white men in all--were captured by
the natives and taken to the capital, Tai-Wan-Foo. The Bengalis were
beheaded immediately. It was touch and go whether the white men
would suffer the same fate, when a brilliant idea struck the ship's
carpenter. Why not seek to soften the hearts of his captors by a
_kotow_ as profound as it was novel; why not stand on his head? He
did, with the happiest results. The Formosans, delighted with this
feat of submission, spared the lives of himself and his companions and
kept them in prison instead of decapitating them.
But for a long time it was doubtful whether they would ever regain
their liberty, and, as a record for friends who might later search for
them in vain, they made a schoolboy's calendar on the walls of their
cramped and dirty prison, ticked off each day, and signed their names
below. It is nice to know that they got away free at last, though
their fate has little to do with my story.
The record remained. More than twenty years afterwards, when Robert
Hart, then Inspector-General of the Chinese Customs, had occasion to
go to Formosa on business, he found it in an old rice hong (shop), and
Patridge's name among the rest, spelled with two "r's" (Partridge),
whereupon he could not resist the temptation of cutting off the list
with his penknife and, on his return to Shanghai, triumphantly handing
it to his old messmate.
In 1855, owing to a dispute with his Portuguese colleague, the British
Consul at Ningpo was suspended from duty, and young Hart put in charge
of affairs for some months. His calm judgment and good sense during
this first period of responsibility gained him favourable notice with
the "powers that be," for a little later at Canton, when the British
General Van Straubenzee remarked, on introducing him to Mr.(afterwards
Sir Frederick) Bruce, "This young man I recommend you to keep your eye
on; some day he will do something," the latter answered, "Oh, I have
already had my attention called to him by the Foreign Office."
The Portuguese were much in evidence in the Ningpo of those days. They
were numerous; they had power, and they abused it: with the result
that retribution came upon them so sure, so swift, so terrible that
not only Ningpo but the whole of China was deeply stirred by the
horror of it.
I am thinking now of that dreadful massacre of June 26th, 1857,
the culmination of years of trouble between the Cantonese and the
Portuguese lorchamen, who with their fast vessels--the fastest and
most easily managed ships in the age before steam--terrorized the
whole coast, exacted tribute, refused to pay duties, and even fell
into downright piracy, burning peaceful villages and killing their
inhabitants.
Rumours of Cantonese revenge began in the winter of 1856, when news
came that all the foreigners in Ningpo would be massacred on a
certain night. Some one thereupon invited the whole community to dine
together; but Robert Hart refused, thinking that men who sat drinking
hot whiskey punch through a long evening would be in no condition to
face a disturbance if it came. Thus, while the others kept up their
courage in company, he slept in a deserted house--the terrified
servants had fled--with a revolver under his pillow, and beside his
bed an open window, through which he intended to drop, if the worst
came to the worst, and try to make his way on foot to Shanghai.
Nothing happened then, however; but the talk of the tea-shops had not
been unfounded--only premature.
The 26th of June saw the vengeance consummated. With great bravery and
determination the Cantonese under Poo Liang Tai swept the Portuguese
lorchas up the entire coast and into Ningpo. The fight began afloat
and ashore. Bullets whistled everywhere; the distracted lorchamen
ran wildly about, hoping to escape the inevitable. Some of the
poor wretches reached the British Consulate, alive or half alive,
clamouring for shelter; but Mr. Meadows, then Consul, refused to let
them in, fearing to turn the riot from an anti-Portuguese disturbance
into an anti-foreign outbreak, and the unfortunate creatures
frantically beat on the closed gates in vain.
Perhaps much of their fate was well deserved--some historians say
so--but it was none the less terrible when it came; and I can imagine
that the predicament of Meadows and young Hart, standing behind the
barred gates of the Consulate, could have been little worse, mentally,
than that of the wretches outside praying to them in the name of
Heaven and the saints for shelter.
All were hunted down at last, dragged out of their hiding-places in
old Chinese graves among the paddy fields, butchered where they stood
defending their lodging-house, or taken prisoners only to be put on
one of their own lorchas, towed a little way up the river and slowly
roasted to death. Then, "last scene of all," the Cantonese stormed the
Portuguese Consulate, pillaged and wrecked the building, and were
just climbing on to the flat roof to haul down the flag when a stately
white cloud appeared far down the river, serenely floating towards the
disturbed city.
It was the French warship _Capricieuse_, under full sail. She had
come straight from South America and put in at Ningpo after her long
voyage, all unconscious of the terrible events passing there. Was
ever an arrival more providential? I greatly doubt it; for had she not
appeared in this miraculous fashion, who knows what would have come to
the handful of white men left in that last outpost of civilization?
Such was Robert Hart's first experience of a fight, but it was by no
means to be his only one. Bugles have sounded in his ears from first
to last, and a wide variety of military experiences--he was present
at the taking of one city and during the siege of another--has come to
him without his seeking it.
From Ningpo he was transferred to Canton in March 1858, and made
Secretary to the Allied Commission governing that city. Life was very
different there from what it had been in Ningpo. Instead of the small
community to which he had been accustomed, he found himself in a town
filled with troops--British and French. Instead of living alone
or with one companion, he occupied quarters in a big yamên full of
officers and men--a change which probably benefited a character too
given to seriousness and introspection.
The work in Canton was exceedingly interesting. He was much more
in the centre of affairs than he had been before, and he had the
opportunity of serving under Sir Harry Parkes. With some of the
erraticness that is said to belong to genius, Parkes enjoyed doing
things at odd hours. He liked to fall asleep after dinner, for
instance, with a big cigar in his mouth, then wake refreshed and
energetic at midnight, and work till morning. But he never expected
his staff to follow his example, and was consideration itself to those
under him--especially to young Hart, whom he liked from the first, and
whom he always took with him on his expeditions around or outside the
city.
There was no lack of these, since he was a man of indomitable energy,
matured his plans with astonishing rapidity, and often had them
carried out before any one suspected they were maturing.
The story of one particular little _coup d'état_ is well worth the
telling. A new Viceroy was expected in Canton, and Parkes heard that
the man who was filling the Acting Appointment was anxious to go out
of the city to meet his successor. At the same time he was told that
if the official left the city, the occasion would be taken to make a
disturbance, so he determined to use a sudden and vigorous stratagem
to keep the Acting Viceroy within the walls, willing or no.
Accordingly one morning he invited all the officials to discuss
matters at the said Viceroy's yamên, and went himself to the
rendezvous with Hart and an escort of military police.
He greeted the assembled officials cordially, and, after some
preliminary remark, went on to say: "I hear that you are all anxious
to go and meet the new Viceroy. Very natural, I'm sure; very natural
and obviously your duty. But we really do not want you to leave Canton
just at this particular moment. Ugly rumours are floating about which
only your presence here keeps in check. Therefore, as we realize that
if you do not go to meet your colleague, you will be accused in Peking
of lack of courtesy towards him, that none of your excuses will be
believed, I have brought a few men with me to keep guard outside
your rooms here. You can consequently say with truth that you were
_prevented from fulfilling_ your duty."
Astonished and angry as they were at the turn of events, the Chinese
were shrewd enough to see they were helpless. The soldiers stayed.
Hart went every day to inquire after the prisoners, and listened to
their complaints about the ceaseless tread of the sentries under their
windows all night. "They never seem to sit down like other people,"
one of the Chinese said pathetically. "They walk all night, all
night, and we cannot sleep." Parkes sent sympathetic messages, but he
remained courteously firm. Perhaps he thought a few wakeful hours were
not too high a price to pay for keeping Canton quiet.
There was one official, however, who had not been caught with the
rest. He was Fantai, or Provincial Treasurer, who remained quietly
hidden in a temple in one of the western suburbs till Parkes ferreted
him out. He and Hart and the mounted police then made a second
expedition. As soon as they reached the outer door of the place,
Parkes jumped off his pony and rushed in with such impetuosity that
the crowds of servants running before him had no time to warn their
master of the intruders' arrival. Parkes continued his rapid career
straight into the inner room, where the Fantai himself sat at a table
strewn with papers, absolutely calm, serene and unmoved. Parkes began
to talk; the Fantai remained silent. No matter, Parkes was very adroit
at carrying on a one-sided interview, and conversation did not flag.
"I've come to pay you a visit," said he; "and though you have not
mentioned your pleasure at meeting a new acquaintance, I am sure it
is none the less deep. Ah," he went on, looking over the paper-strewn
table, "you have even been kind enough to lay aside your work on my
account. Let us see. You were writing letters," and Parkes thereupon
read the finished and unfinished despatches under the Fantai's very
eye, then profusely thanked him for the useful information.
The Chinese sat superbly contemptuous through it all, and finally spat
over his shoulder, putting enough scorn into the action to freeze
the boldest. Yet Parkes had the gift of looking unconscious the whole
time, and babbled on gaily:
"You don't seem very talkative to-day--but of course, sometimes one
feels more in the mood for conversation than others. Besides, there
is no need for you to tell me any of your news. I have found out
everything I wanted to know from these papers here." He had indeed;
they contained the most important revelations as to the prospective
movements of the Chinese troops outside the city, and also showed
exactly how far the officials inside were co-operating with them.
There was no further need to prolong the interview, and Parkes began
to make his adieus. In China, these are not the slight things they are
with us. Host and guest have mutual obligations; the former, unless
he is willing to risk being thought uncivil, must escort a visitor of
rank to the outer gate himself. But the Fantai cared little whether he
was thought civil or not, and he sat stolidly in his chair when Parkes
made a move to go. He reckoned without his--guest, who was not the man
to be slighted.
"I am sorry to take you away from your pressing business," said Parkes
affably, "but if you should neglect to s'ung (literally, bid farewell
in the ceremonial manner) me, people might think that we are not the
good friends we are; people might even suspect that our political
relations are unsatisfactory. Therefore I must with great reluctance
trouble you." The Fantai, helpless, accompanied him grudgingly to the
door of the inner courtyard, whence he was about to beat a retreat
when Parkes said again, insinuatingly and half under his breath, "Oh,
come a little farther, please do; there are not enough people here to
see our good-byes."
The same scene was gone through at each successive courtyard, and in
a big Chinese temple they are neither few nor small. Hart, who was
behind the other two, could scarcely stifle his amusement at the
half-snarling, half-contemptuous face of the Fantai as Parkes in one
phrase insisted _sotto voce_ on his coming farther, and in the next,
spoken a little louder for the benefit of listening servants and
secretaries, thanked him profusely for his great courtesy and
hospitality in seeing a humble guest so far. Only at the outermost
gate, around which a crowd had collected, all, in Chinese fashion,
asking who was within and what he had come about, was the irate Fantai
permitted to return to his interrupted labours--after he had satisfied
every canon of the elaborate courtesy.
Hart left his work under Sir Harry Parkes with real regret in October
1858, when he was promoted and appointed interpreter at the British
Consulate in Canton under Sir Rutherford Alcock; but in May 1859 he
resigned to enter the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. It was the
Viceroy Laou Tsung Kwang who invited him to do so, for he was one of
Hart's special friends, a shrewd judge of men, clever enough himself
and progressive for his day. He had been quick to notice the success
of the new Custom House at Shanghai, and presently asked young Hart if
he could not draw up a set of regulations for the collection of duty
at Canton, and undertake the work of supervision.
To this invitation Hart replied that Mr. H.N. Lay was in charge of the
Customs; that he, Hart, knew nothing about the business, having had
no experience of the sort, and could not therefore agree to the
proposals. But what he did agree to do was to write to Mr. Lay and
see if something could not be done to bring Canton into line with
Shanghai. The result of the correspondence, briefly put, was that
Mr. Lay first offered Robert Hart a position as interpreter, which
he refused, and later the post of Deputy-Commissioner of Customs
at Canton, which he accepted. Of course he had meanwhile asked the
British Government if he might resign from the Consular Service. Their
reply gave the desired permission, but stipulated at the same time
that he must not expect the acceptance of his resignation to imply
that he might return to the British service whenever he pleased.
Neither they nor he guessed then that he was beginning a work from
which he would have no wish to turn back, or that it would be they who
would finally beg him to return to their service, not as Consul, but
as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary.