God's Chinese Son (48 page)

To the Western troops and merchants in Shanghai, on the other hand, the snowstorm, though uncomfortable, is seen as an act of "providence," and the blow to the Taiping forces is accepted as a blessing, even if the patrolling Western vessels along the smaller creeks are hindered in their work by the ice and snow. For those Westerners with experience of travel­ing in the last few years through Taiping terrain, much that once seemed colorful or bold has lost its luster and allure. Taiping clothes appear now not as dramatic and original but as "tawdry harlequin garb," a "burlesque costume."
³
' The newly enfeoffed Taiping kings present "a drowsy dissi­pated appearance," in their "mountebank yellow dresses and tinsel crowns."
³⁸
The streets of Nanjing are crammed with "a wonderful num­ber of good-looking young women" in gorgeous silks, but these are the captured women from Suzhou, prisoners of war who often try to run away; and though huge new palaces are rising in the city they "stand conspicuous among the ruins," each strip of cleared land surrounded by evicted families.
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Similarly, the playful Taiping boys who once seemed charming to the Westerners are seen now as sinister, or as starvelings. The very silence of the city, once a harbinger of peace, seems now heavy with the menace of impending doom.
⁴⁰
And the vaunted Taiping warriors, on closer glance, are "dirty and diseased," displaying, underneath their glit­tering silks, arms jingling with golden bracelets that cannot hide the scabs of running sores.
⁴¹

Even Joseph Edkins, intrigued by his religious arguments with the Heavenly King and eager to be one of those missionaries sought to bring new life to Taiping religion, slowly and reluctantly gives up his dream of settling in the town of Nanjing that once had seemed to him so beautiful. For Edkins has a young wife of twenty-three, and he worries over her safety in the insurgents' city should he be away preaching. He grieves too over the Taiping's practice of forbidding day laborers from entering the city, the low-quality housing offered to him and his wife, and the terrible unhealthiness of the climate and foulness of the water. He notices that even the Chinese who have lived in the city for years still choose to mix large doses of medicinal drugs into their water before they dare to drink it. Ultimately, for the young couple, "duty calls to Nankin, while inclina­tion says the north," and inclination wins.
⁴²

After the departures of Roberts and Edkins, there are no Westerners left in the Heavenly Capital except for a few mercenaries still held to the Taiping cause by love or money. One last Protestant missionary travels there in the late spring of 1863, and he is wary rather than hostile in the brief report he gives to the Hong Kong press. Nanjing seems to him still fairly prosperous; some crops are growing within the walls. He is granted an interview with the Shield King, Hong Rengan, whom he finds baffled by the foreigners' unfriendly behavior, and threatening to wreck all for­eign trade if they send armed forces against Nanjing.
⁴³
As to Hong Ren­gan himself, for several years the courteous mediator with the Westerners, he claims merely that Roberts' flight from Nanjing is due to "some slight misunderstanding."
⁴⁴
But either that misunderstanding or something else unexplained is sufficient for Hong Rengan to forfeit the high office and trust that Hong Xiuquan has given him since he first arrived. Instead of being confirmed in his position as the modernizer of the Heavenly Kingdom, and joint director of the Taiping armies, he is told to supervise the education of the Young Monarch, Tiangui, an assignment that leaves him so "filled with anxiety" that he gives "way to tears."
⁴⁵

The constant fighting in the area around Shanghai and the growing isolation of Nanjing do not mean that trade has fallen off for the foreign­ers. Indeed since the revised commercial and diplomatic treaty settlements of 1860 with the Qing, and the reopening of trade by riverboat and steamer with the inland Yangzi city of Hankou, Shanghai is the booming center of the trade in silk and opium, munitions, food and tea. So many ships are moored along the bund and in the lower reaches of the Huangpu River that a special daily broadsheet—the
Daily Shipping and Commercial News
—is published to supplement the weekly
North China Herald
,
⁴⁶
By September 1862, another supplement begins, published in Chinese to cover Chinese trade, "The Chinese Shipping List and Advertiser," to appear on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
⁴⁷

It is true that the American presence in Shanghai has somewhat fallen off, for the "East India Squadron" of the United States has been dissolved in 1861, as news of the Civil War at home reaches the ships of the China station. Though the commanding officer, Flag Officer Cornelius Stribling, refuses to accept the resignations offered by those of his officers who sup­port the Confederacy until he receives confirmation from the Navy Department, he himself is abruptly relieved of his command on orders from Washington because his native state is South Carolina. The service­able American vessels are ordered to steam or sail at once for home. Thereafter, for three years, the only major sign of the American naval presence comes from the largely imagined threats of Confederate "priva­teers."
⁴⁸
But as if in compensation, in June 1862 the first Japanese ship to dock in Shanghai, the
Zen Sai Maroo
—formerly the British ship
Armistice,
bought by the Japanese government for $34,000—arrives "with a cargo of sundries," and bringing with her to Shanghai "a sort of Commission charged with the duty of acquiring all kinds of information, commercial, statistical, and geographical."
⁴⁹

The foreigners now pouring into Shanghai span the whole range from affluence to desperation, and the city adapts swiftly to receive them. For the wealthiest, there is the Hotel de l'Europe, open now for "tiffin," and the French concession offers fine rooms in the new Hotel des Messageries Imperiales.
⁵⁰
A new luxury hotel, the Clarendon, opens in July 1863, to supplement the old Imperial Hotel, where as a legacy from the departed Americans, there is now a brand-new tenpin bowling alley.
⁵¹
A recently departed visitor is honored in the newly named Elgin Arms, headquarters for the weekly assemblies of the North China Pigeon Club.
⁵²
The Astor has a new billiard room, and it is perhaps a sign of the changing values in the town that the Oriental Billiard Saloon has taken over the former Shanghai library on the corner of Church Street and Mission Road, where it also sells wines and spirits.
⁵³
Miller's Hotel, going everyone else one better, offers both a bowling alley and a billiard room. While for those who want a calmer life, just off the Yang-king-pang Creek that separates the British from the Chinese city, the old brig
Sea Horse
has been con­verted into the Sea Horse Floating Hotel, and offers a "quiet and comfort­able home" for permanent or transient boarders, at decent rates of sixty dollars a month, with one dollar extra for breakfast or dinner, though all board must be paid "invariably in advance."
⁵⁴

The city's amenities expand to respond to these newest needs and tastes. Fogg and Co. is offering for sale six sets of tenpins and bowling balls, and six sets of billiard balls and cues, complete with extra tips and chalk. Two "photographic portrait rooms" are established in the town, which as well as taking pictures of the locals offer "sceneograms" of troops in the recent battles.
⁵⁵
"Professor Risley and the most Numerous and Talented Com­pany of Artistes with Ten unrivalled Horses" performs in the town, while not only has the racecourse been expanded, but a consignment of twenty Arab racehorses arrives from Sydney in Australia, along with mares and geldings to serve as carriage horses.
⁵⁶

From the ships that cram the harbor come, as well, a steady stream of deserters, ne'er-do-wells, and drifters. The police station logbooks are full of the harassments, the delinquencies, and the random violent acts of those they list as "distressed subjects," or as "vagrants." Some of the crimes are often pathetic in their smallness, hinting at the real misery of the offend­ers: at various times Westerners are booked for stealing a loaf of bread, a piece of meat, some peaches, or some pairs of socks, all from Chinese vendors.
⁵⁷
But others show different levels of violence, from drunken assaults and attempted rape of both Chinese and Western women in the town to the abduction of Chinese boys.
⁵⁸
There are stabbings and murders in the run-down rooming houses where the derelicts congregate, such as those run for the "Manilamen" in Bamboo Town, or in Mr. Harvey's Grog Shop in Hong-que, in the "low public house in the French Conces­sion" known as the Liverpool Arms, or in Allen's Mariner's Home, across the river on the Putong side, effectively beyond the range of either West­ern or Chinese law.
⁵⁹

The British consul attempts to control both the pleasures and the vio­lence by issuing annual licenses to the "Houses of Entertainment" in the Hong-que district, but there are constant setbacks and deceptions: Police Sergeant Mason, for example, turns out to be a secret partner in a hotel in Hong-que where many of the crimes occur, and Police Constable Hayden has for months been "receiving money from keepers of gambling houses without authority."
⁶⁰
Indeed around a quarter of the cases prosecuted in Shanghai during 1863 concern the police constables themselves, charged with being absent from duty, asleep at their posts, drunk and incapable, disorderly, or with committing assault and battery on the populace they are meant to be protecting. In many cases the constables are repeat offend­ers: there is a seventh arrest for drunkenness for Police Constable 4, a ninth for PC 118, and a fourteenth for PC 32.
⁶¹
As the chief inspector of police points out plaintively to the Shanghai Municipal Council in early 1863, he has only enough reliable men to patrol the north-south streets effectively. Fully aware of this, the local rowdies and criminals concentrate their robberies on the streets that run from east to west.
⁶²

Most difficult to control are the cases of those who deal in weapons with the Taiping. The numbers of cases grow steadily in 1863: "P. Lodie, aged 31, Scotland, resident Shanghai, selling arms to rebels." "W. Hardy and others, having charge of a cargo boat with arms and rebel passes." "H. Stokes, alias Beechy, and others, Breach of Neutrality."
⁶³
The materials of war are everywhere in the city, and there is apparently no way to contain them. Some of the arms travel huge distances, from Hong Kong and even from Singapore, where at least three thousand cannon a year enter the international arms market, and the marine stores all sell both artillery and small arms.
⁶⁴
The municipal council itself contributes to some of the spread, despite its protestations, by selling off all its old muskets and per­cussion caps to raise money when a new batch of Enfield rifles is shipped in for the volunteer forces.
⁶⁵
The British army also contributes through General Staveley, who sells off the "arms and accoutrements" of the Twenty-second Punjab Native Infantry and the Fifth Bengal Native Infantry to ease the logistics of their passage when they are posted home to India.
⁶⁶

The Westerners in Shanghai carry arms as a matter of course; the inventories of their possessions often show shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, along with the brandy and cigars, the furniture, crockery, dogs, and bed­ding.
⁶⁷
The British interpreter Thomas Taylor Meadows, an adventurous but pacific soul who remains one of the Taiping's most forceful backers long after most other Westerners have turned against them, casually describes the personal armory he takes on his trips upriver as consisting of "a Jacob's single-barrelled 32 gauge rifle; two long single-barrelled shoulder wild-fowl guns (Colonel Hawker's kind); two double-barrelled shot guns with longish barrels; two double-barrelled shot guns of the usual kngth; and, lastly, a pair of holster and a pair of belt revolvers of the London Armory Company (Adam's patent)."
⁶⁸

Gunrunners and arms dealers operate on an ever-larger scale, as shown by the register of arms sold to the Taiping in April 1862 by an American firm "well known for their dealings with the rebels": 2,783 muskets, 66 carbines, 4 rifles, 895 field pieces of artillery, 484 powder kegs, 10,947 pounds of gunpowder, 18,000 cartridges, and 3,113,500 percussion caps. The dealers—in this case four Americans, their linguist, and eleven coo­lies, operating two boats—carry passports valid "by land or water" any­where in Taiping territory, signed by an officer of the Loyal King, Li Xiucheng, and dated "12th year of 4th moon, and 2nd day, of the King­dom of Universal Peace of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Heavenly King."
⁶⁹
Less than two months later, in a double raid, British police seize a boat, manned partly by Europeans, that is conveying an additional 1,550,000 percussion caps and forty-eight cases of muskets to the Taiping, while the French stop another boat that has around 5,000 "stands of arms." Significantly, the French also impound "the implements for manufacturing them," and a Shanghai newspaper notes that many of these arms are manufactured "under our very eyes, on the opposite bank of the Wong-poo River.'""

Such sales of equipment are important to the Taiping. A Western observer in Nanjing in the summer of 1862 notes that "the city possesses some men of ingenuity," and the guns made there—including heavy cannon—are far better than those manufactured by the Qing.
⁷¹
Boxes of per­cussion caps are used instead of currency by foreign traders dealing with the Taiping
⁷²
Other arms shipments intercepted include 300 pounds of gunpowder marked as "kegs of salted butter," while percussion caps are shipped as "screws" or even as "religious tracts," and rifles as "umbrel­las."
⁷³
The bulk of these foreign gunrunners and illicit traders are British or American, but some are Belgian, Swedish, Prussian, or Italian.
⁷⁴
The Taiping also capture Western arms in combat, including gunpowder, muskets, and even a 12-pounder howitzer, and add these windfalls to their own stockpiles at Nanjing and elsewhere.
⁷⁵