THE PROLOGUE TO THE SIEGE--BARRICADES AND SCALING LADDERS--THE SIEGE
PROPER--A MESSAGE FROM THE YAMÊN AND AN IMPORTANT TELEGRAM--RELIEF AT
LAST--NEW QUARTERS--NEGOTIATIONS--THE CONGRESS OF PEKING--AN IMPERIAL
AUDIENCE
Some three weeks before the beginning of the Siege proper Peking was
in a state of great unrest--how great no one, not even the I.G., could
accurately judge. But as each day brought new alarms and constant
reports of Boxer misdoings all over the city were confirmed by
terrified eye-witnesses, it was thought wise to make some practical
preparations for defence. The Legations were luckily provided with
guards, whose officers, acting in concert, agreed to hold a square
that included the whole quarter and the Customs property as well.
Unfortunately the few troops made a pitifully thin line when they were
spread over the area to be defended, and the Customs Staff, at the
I.G.'s suggestion, organized themselves into a Volunteer corps, kept
regular watches day and night, and prepared to assist generally in
case of emergency.
Indeed they did even more; with his permission they set to and
fortified the Inspectorate compounds, turning his garden into a
trampled wilderness. Barricades were built across what was known as
Inspectorate Street while the I.G. stood by and refreshed the thirsty
workers with beer from his cellar; the big gate was loopholed, the
walls strengthened, and clumsy look-out platforms, reminiscent of
the Siege of Troy, constructed. From these I can guess he must have
watched--and with what feelings!--the progress of the dreadful fires
starting over the city; must have seen, down the long straight street,
native Christians burning like torches, and must have heard the
fiendish shouts of "Kill!" "Kill and burn!" issuing from a thousand
hoarse throats.
The situation was terrifying enough in all conscience--yet nothing to
what it was to be later when the handful of white men, encumbered with
women, children and converts, were to stand against Imperial troops in
addition to these savage hordes of Boxers, whose infinite daring, due
to a belief in their own invulnerability, was somewhat mitigated by
their inferior weapons.
[Illustration: LADY HART.]
From first to last the I.G., though no longer young, showed admirable
coolness and courage in the face of the crisis. He sent frequent
despatches, full of excellent and sane advice, to the Yamên. Alas!
they went unheeded. So did the telegram he got through to Li Hung
Chang on June 12th. This was his final effort to save a desperate
situation, and the message ran: "You have killed missionaries; that
is bad enough. But if you harm the Legations you will violate the most
sacred international obligations and create an impossible situation."
It did no good, unluckily; things had gone so far by this time that
they must go still farther with inevitable motion, and whatever
Li himself thought of the insane idea of attempting to exterminate
foreigners, he could do nothing to stem the tide of mistaken Boxer
patriotism.
On the 13th the telegraph wires were cut; and on the 19th an ultimatum
arrived from the Yamên giving the foreigners twenty-four hours to
leave Peking, and offering to convoy them with Chinese troops as
far as Tientsin. The Ministers held meeting after meeting; they were
somewhat shaken, but, still trustful, determined to accept the Chinese
Government's offer of an escort as far as the sea. Against this
proposal, however, the non-diplomatic community threw the whole weight
of its disapproval, fortunately--as things turned out--overbearing it,
since the Chinese Government, with the best will in the world, was not
at that moment in a position to assure the safety of any one. The very
best proof of this, if further proof were needed, was the murder of
Baron von Ketteler, the German Minister, on the morning of June 20th.
The shock of that news filled the community with horror and
consternation. The suddenness of the tragedy, the treachery of it,
were appalling. Plainly no protection could be hoped for, and the same
afternoon all non-combatants were ordered into the British Legation,
as that was the largest compound in Peking, and the one most suitable
for a last stand should the worst come to the worst. The I.G., of
course, went with the rest. If it cost him anything to calmly walk
out of the house he had occupied for years, leaving all behind him--he
took a last look around the rooms, I remember, as though to impress
their picture on his mind--he gave no sign, just as he showed none
of the natural alarm which, with his responsibility for a large staff
with wives and children, he must have felt.
[Illustration: By the courtesy of "The Pall Mall Magazine"
SIR ROBERT HART IN HIS PRIVATE OFFICE.]
The history of the Siege proper, like the history of the Taiping
Rebellion, has been written a hundred times. Praise and blame have
been variously distributed; flaws picked in one another's behaviour
by a dozen eye-witnesses, but it is not my purpose to attempt to
arbitrate over details which each man naturally sees through his own
glasses. Only so far as the I.G. was personally concerned with the
events of those two unhappy months need they be touched upon here.
At first the wildest confusion prevailed in the Legation.
Misunderstandings about where a final stand should be made, doubts
whether it should be made in Peking at all, had delayed very necessary
preparations. There was not shelter for all the refugees, and some
literally camped under the big _ting-erhs_ (open pavilions with roofs
but no side walls), their hastily collected household goods lying
around them. The Customs, however, fared better than that; they were
given a small house, into which they packed themselves as best they
could. The I.G., who refused to accept any special privileges, slept
in a tiny back room and cheerfully ate the mule, which was hatefully
coarse while it was fat and unutterably tough when it grew lean.
Indeed, his marvellous adaptability to difficult conditions was soon
the talk of that little company.
To a man accustomed during a long life to habits regulated by
clockwork, the jar must have been especially sharp; yet before his
neighbours had fairly begun to wonder how he would take it, he had
made for himself a new routine of living, and he might have been
observed each day doing the same things at the same hours--smoking
his afternoon cigarette as he leaned against a favourite pillar, or
walking to and fro along a particular path--thus setting an example of
regularity in an irregular and stormy existence.
As every one expected, the Yamên soon attempted to communicate with
him. This they did several times, throwing letters over the wall
during the night. One enquired quite tenderly after the besieged;
another asked him to send a message to London saying all was well with
the Legations; a third calmly requested his advice about a ticklish
matter of Customs business. This latter he answered in detail--just
as if he had been in his own office--and then threw the reply over the
wall again. It is interesting to know, by the way, that the "writer"
who assisted him with these letters received £20 for his pains--the
highest pay ever earned by a literary man in China at one sitting.
But the message which the I.G. afterwards laughingly said was the
most important--as far as he personally was concerned--went out of the
Legation instead of coming into it. Addressed to no Foreign Office and
to no Commander-in-Chief, it contained neither diplomatic nor military
secrets. It was a domestic message pure and simple--yet sent neither
to relative nor intimate friend. His tailor was, in fact, the man who
received it. "Send quickly," the wire read, "two autumn office suits
and later two winter ditto with morning and evening dress, warm cape
and four pairs of boots and slippers. I have lost everything but am
well. We have still an anxious fortnight to weather.--HART, Peking, 5
August 1900."
What a startling effect this message from the grave must have had upon
people in England, who, having pictured the I.G. boiled in oil, found
him quietly ordering clothes for a future which was still uncertain!
As it happened his forethought was providential, for the parcel of
warm clothing arrived in Peking on the morning of October 26th, when
the I.G. waked to find autumn changed to winter in a night, and the
ground thickly powdered with snow.
The "anxious fortnight," he spoke of was, after all, safely weathered.
On the night of August 13th, which happened to be fine and clear,
the far-away guns of the relief force outside the city sounded so
distinctly that all those in the Legation were aroused in a moment.
The sleepers sprang to their feet; and the sentries answered the
welcome voices of the pom-poms, careless of their own long-saved
ammunition. Next day the relieving troops were in the city, and
the besieged, in defiance of orders (the Chinese were still firing
heavily), were out to meet them beyond the last barricade, and close
by the historic water gate. No words could adequately picture the
intense excitement of that meeting; emotion touched for a moment the
most unemotional, and I may say, without exaggeration, that there was
not a dry eye, blue or black, nor a voice which could give a cheer
without a break in it.
Soon after the I.G. had the dangerous pleasure of reading his own
obituary notices, and then, very much alive again, he set to work
once more. Not for him was a change of air and scene possible. As he
whimsically remarked to some one who urged him to take a rest after
the discomforts and trials of the Siege, "I have had my holiday
already. Eight weeks of doing nothing,--what more could a man expect?"
The Yamên Secretaries were seeking him out three days after the last
shot was fired--while he still remained in the Legation--eagerly
enquiring what he thought of the possibility of beginning negotiations
with the Powers. How could order be brought out of chaos?
[Illustration: SIR ROBERT HART AND A GROUP OF CUSTOMS PEOPLE.]
As a famous Chinese, Ku Hung Ming, author of the "Papers from a
Viceroy's Yamên," afterwards said, "All great men are optimists,
and Sir Robert Hart was the greatest optimist we had in 1900." His
hopefulness encouraged the officials so much that the heads of the
Yamên soon sent word they also wished to consult him: this business,
if there was any hope of its success, was too big to be entrusted to
deputies. Accordingly he began a search for new offices, since the
Legation was no place to receive such men and his own house had been
burned down.
Alas for the mournful desolation that met his eyes when he made a
melancholy pilgrimage, as it were, to his old quarters! Nothing was
left of the house but a few charred walls. Broken tiles lay scattered
here and there, and he picked up the head of a pretty little Saxe
shepherdess, of all things the most fragile and improbable to survive
such a storm. The rest of his belongings had disappeared utterly--all
the treasures of a lifetime had been burned or looted--priceless
letters from Chinese Gordon and from Gladstone, the wonderful
rainbow-silk scrolls for his Chinese patent of nobility, the
photographs of all the famous men with whom he had been associated in
the past--everything.
He was glad enough to get two rooms behind Kierulff's shop for
temporary living quarters. What matter if his hall door was littered
with packing-cases, or if his sitting-room windows fronted upon waste
ground where a herd of mules scampered? He soon learned to pick his
way among the former; the latter, with characteristic caution, always
respected his panes, and anyway it was not the time for finicking over
trifles.
For an office he hired a tiny little temple nestling under the walls
of the Tartar City. It was but a small _pied-à-terre_, yet all he
required, for the Customs Archives had been burnt, and the Deputy
Inspector General, Sir Robert Bredon, with the Inspectorate Staff,
left immediately for Shanghai to begin the difficult task of picking
up the threads of Customs work there.
Meanwhile the _Tajêns_ (heads of boards) wrote to the I.G. asking for
a safe convoy through the foreign lines, and he sent one of his own
men to bring them down, since, though poor enough in other things,
they were so rich in fears. Five came this first time, but one acted
as spokesman to voice the grief of all over what had occurred, and to
exonerate the Emperor and the Empress-Dowager of blame. No doubt
the two sovereigns _were_ innocent of responsibility for what had
happened--no one would believe it at the time, however--and _were_
captured, as these ministers said, by "officials of another way of
thinking, and made to appear as if approving what they disapproved and
ordering what they really forbade."
Their position is not too difficult to understand when one remembers
that, Oriental fashion, they were shut up in their palaces, where no
breath of impartial advice could possibly reach them, and that they
heard only what courtiers with their own fish to fry permitted them to
hear.
The real culprits then, according to all accounts, were the officials
who deliberately misled the Court. It was characteristic of the I.G.,
always too big for resentment, that he could find some excuse for
them and, though the length of his service entitled him to more
consideration than most of those who cried out bitterly for
"vengeance," could write in his book ("These From the Land of Sinim"),
"In the heat of the conflict, and under the agonizing strain of
anxiety for imperilled loved ones, many hard things have been said and
written about the officials who allied themselves with the Boxers.
But these men were eminent in their own country for their learning
and services, were animated by patriotism, were enraged by foreign
dictation, and had the courage of their convictions. We must do them
the justice of allowing that they were actuated by high motives and
love of country--not that these necessarily mean political ability or
highest wisdom," The truth is--and he realized it thoroughly--that
the real deep feeling of the Chinese people has always been to be left
alone in peace to pursue the even tenor of their way.
So enlightened a man as the great Minister Wen Hsiang--"one of the
most intelligent and broad-minded Chinese I ever knew," as Sir Robert
Hart sometimes said--frankly confessed this when speaking to the I.G.
a few years after the inauguration of the Customs. "We would gladly
pay you all the increased revenue you have brought us," were his exact
words, "if you foreigners would go back to your own country and leave
us in peace as we were before you came."
Of course neither the wishes of the Chinese nor the question of
Imperial responsibility or non-responsibility mattered greatly in
1900. The nations of the world were not in a tolerant mood; they
would, as he pointed out, care little for excuses and less for the
Chinese anxiety about the Palace, "with its ancestral contents," or
the Imperial Tombs. The only thing which might influence them was the
consideration of the welfare of the Chinese people.
Plans for the future must turn upon this as upon an axle. Moreover,
to effect anything some distinguished person of high position and
importance must come forward, and the man whom the I.G. named when he
was asked for his advice was Prince Ching. He was the one person with
whom the Foreign Powers would be most likely to treat, as it was to
his influence, rumour said, that the Legations owed the merciful truce
during the Siege. Li Hung Chang, it is true, had also been given full
powers to negotiate with the Nations, but they looked rather askance
at him because of two telegrams he had sent. One stating that the
Legations had reached Tientsin in safety was a most unfortunate
falsehood and prejudiced the world against him, more's the pity, as he
had hitherto been considered able and powerful abroad. The other was a
foolish request that no foreign troops should pass Tungchow--a town
on the Grand Canal about fifteen miles from the capital. It was quite
right and proper that, being appointed, Li should share Prince Ching's
labours and not allow everything, criticism included, to be thrown on
the latter alone; but the more he was discredited, the more need for
Prince Ching to return to Peking--and quickly.
[Illustration: SIR ROBERT HART AND MISS KATE CARL
In the costume given her by the Empress-Dowager of China when Miss
Carl painted her portrait for the St. Louis Exhibition.]
At last the officials discovered where he was--he had fled with the
Court but stopped _en route_--urged him to come back, and he came. I
believe one of the first things he did was to send for the I.G., whom
he greeted with great cordiality. "This is China's oldest friend,"
he said to the officials standing by, "and I rely on him to help us.
Indeed I can remember, as if it was yesterday, when we worked together
before on the Franco-Chinese negotiations in 1885."
The meeting was a memorable and decisive one. As the Chinese
themselves knew, and as the I.G. agreed, there were but two ways of
solving the difficulty before them. Either it must be fought out--and
the fact that China's military strength could not arrest the steps of
the foreign troops, and that a fort-night sufficed for them to march
victoriously from the sea to Peking, was in itself sufficient to show
that nothing could be hoped from the noble idea of "no surrender"--or
at all costs some peaceful arrangement must be made.
A note was accordingly drawn up requesting the doyen of the Diplomatic
Corps to fix a day to receive the Chinese Plenipotentiaries, who
"were ready to begin negotiations and had prepared a proposal for
discussion," which they enclosed. A bold stroke this, and rather a
surprise to the diplomats, who marvelled that the Chinese--injuring
parties as they were--should have the courage--let us call it so, for
there was truly much admirable bravery in it--to take the first step.
The details of the subsequent negotiations would fill pages.
How anxiously Li Hung Chang was waited for; how memorandum after
memorandum was drawn up, altered, amended, discarded altogether; how
the stricken city was gradually calmed, and traders induced to bring
in supplies again; how the poor ladies, wives of four Emperors, who
had been left behind in the palace almost starved to death when the
international troops guarding the Forbidden City forbade all ingress
and egress through the pink gates, until the I.G. saved them, in the
nick of time, by applying to the Allied Generals, might be told at
length.
But a busy age has little patience with details, however
romantic--suffice it to say that negotiations continued by fits and
starts. What really complicated them was the absence of the Court! The
I.G. frankly wrote as much to the Grand Secretary, Wang Wên Shao, and
in so doing he only voiced the general feeling that "at such a time
of suffering it would be well for the Emperor to be with his people."
Prince Ching willingly testified that. Though he had been back ten
days he had not suffered any personal indignity, and hinted that, were
the Emperor to return, he would, of course, meet with even greater
consideration. But the Court was obstinate. While the Palace was in
the hands of foreign troops they would not come--and so, for the
time, the negotiators had to get on as best they could without their
Imperial masters.
Only for a time, however. Then what persuasion had been unable to
accomplish was brought about by a natural calamity. Famine broke
out in the province of Shênsi, and the Court suffered greatly in the
devastated state of the country and the cramped and uncomfortable
quarters of a Governor's yamên. Soon they were as desirous of
returning to their capital as they had formerly been reluctant to do
so. "Hurry up the negotiations at all costs" were the orders sent
to the Plenipotentiaries, and hurry they did, so that by December a
settlement was within sight, the two most difficult questions--those
dealing with penalties and indemnities--being the last arranged.
The first named long caused embarrassment to the Chinese side and
greatly worried everybody, for there seemed no possible way to
compromise about it. The last ultimately resolved itself into the
simple problem not whether China would or would not pay, but what
she would pay with. Tariff Revision was suggested as one method, the
taxation of native opium as another. Speaking of the latter, the I.G.
one day remarked to Prince Ching, "I lost all my memoranda about it
when the Inspectorate was burned down." "But you have your wonderful
memory," the Prince replied, "and you must carry it through. I count
upon you, remember."
On Christmas Eve (1900) a great meeting was held at the Spanish
Legation--the Spanish Minister was doyen of the Diplomatic Corps at
the time. All the Ministers then assembled to meet Prince Ching and
Li and to hand over the final demands they had formulated. They were
signed in French that same day, and the next telegraphed in Chinese
word for word to the Court at Si-an.
Strange to say the I.G. was not present at the meeting, and therefore
reaped none of the kudos for his hard work. It was not for lack of
invitation, however. The Chinese certainly urged him to come. Li Hung
Chang, for instance, spoke continually of what he had done, and not an
official but was sincerely grateful and would gladly have pushed him
forward. A vainer man, a lighter character, must have yielded to the
temptation to satisfy his vanity, but he had the strength to refuse,
saying, "Being a foreigner, my presence would only complicate
matters."
The Court, however, did not allow his efforts to go unrewarded.
They telegraphed another high if queer-sounding honour from Si-an.
Thenceforth he was to be addressed as _Kung-pao_, or Guardian of the
Heir-Apparent,--who, by the way, does not exist; not that in
China this trifling fact makes his guardians any less important
or honourable. The Empress-Dowager herself was well aware that the
importance of these Peace Negotiations could not be overestimated. She
knew that his promptness in urging the return of Prince Ching probably
saved the dynasty--that had Count Waldersee arrived before any Chinese
officials had taken action, it is impossible to say what might not
have happened; and to further show her Imperial approbation she
summoned him to a private audience on her return to Peking and said
so.
[Illustration: PEKING PEACE PROTOCOL, 1901.
Left to right (seated) Secretary of Japanese Legation Baron
d'Anthouard, Secretary of French Legation Baron (now Count) Komura,
Japanese Minister M. Knotel, Minister for the Netherlands Marquis
Salvago-Raggi, Minister for Italy M de Giers, Minister for Russia M.
de Cologan, Minister for Spain Baron Czikann de Wahlborn. Minister for
Austria M. Joostens, Minister for Belgium Baron Momin, Minister for
Germany Sir Ernest Satow, Minister for Great Britain Mr. Rockhill,
Minister for the United States M. Beau, Minister for France.]
To him she showed her softest side, melted into kindness and
consideration, complimented him in her velvet voice, and went so
far as to say, when some question of the future came up, "We owe the
possibility of a new beginning to the help you have given our faithful
Ministers." Last of all she paid him a greater tribute still. When on
enquiring where he lived, and being told by Prince Kung on his knees
and in deeply apologetic tones, "Since the little accident in
1900, when Sir Robert's house was burned, he has been living behind
Kierulff's shop," her eyes filled with tears, and with real regret in
her voice she said, "How can we look you in the face?"