The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (34 page)

The diplomats’ last escape route had been closed. Come what may (and they can only have looked on the future with trepidation), they were now confined to the capital, trapped within the legation perimeter while outside, chanting and brandishing their swords, halberds and rifles, the mass of Boxers swirled through the streets of Beijing, crying vengeance (see Map 2). At the exact hour the Chinese ultimatum to leave Beijing expired, at 4 p.m. on 20th June, the first fusillade of shots crashed into the legation buildings, wounding an Austrian soldier and killing a French marine. The siege had begun.

In the Forbidden City the mood was grim but resolute. No one really knew where the road Yehonala had chosen would lead. But the atmosphere lightened the next day when a memorial from Yu Lu, the Chihli Viceroy, arrived detailing a series of victories against the Powers: two foreign warships had been damaged by fire from the Taku forts; the allied troops had been repulsed in Tientsin; and the Boxers were cooperating well with the Imperial Chinese regular troops in withstanding the allied attacks. Once again, mention that the Taku forts had fallen was conspicuous by its absence from the memorandum, and the viceroy forebore to inform the court of any of the other reverses he had suffered. Buoyed up with this good news, elated by the ‘victories’ and filled once more with the ancient hauteur of her caste, on 21st June Yehonala issued an Imperial edict declaring war on an astonishing nine of the most powerful countries on the globe: Great Britain, France, the United States of America, Germany, Japan, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Belgium and Holland. The next day the Boxers were formally organised as adjuncts to the government troops. Prince Chuang and Kang I were given overall command of the Boxers, and vast quantities of rice were released from government stores and distributed to the hungry auxiliaries. Two days later, one hundred thousand taels were dispensed among the Boxers and other military personnel in the capital.

The game plan that Yehonala and the reactionaries had devised seems to have been coloured from the start by a primitive urge for revenge. Militarily, the diplomats in Beijing posed no threat at all to China. So small a number of ill-armed foreigners could easily have been cooped up indefinitely within the legations by a small detachment of Chinese troops. They were certainly in no position to mount an incursion or in any way materially affect the outcome of the war that Yehonala had declared on the Powers. The real danger, the true threat to Yehonala and her reactionary allies, lay at Tientsin, in the form of modern, highly-drilled and battle-hardened allied troops, who were already preparing for a second assault on Beijing. If they could have been dislodged from Chinese soil before they were ready to begin their advance on the capital, the Chinese would have been in a much stronger position to face any further threat. Yet for some reason, Chinese troops who could have helped mount such an attack were held back in Beijing, for the express purpose of exterminating the strategically irrelevant legations. Though (purposely) vaguely worded, an Imperial decree issued on 23rd June makes the Chinese policy plain:

The work now undertaken by Tung Fu-hsiang should be completed as soon as possible, so that troops can be spared and sent to Tientsin for defence.
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The motive behind this ‘legation first, Tientsin after’ strategy can only have been Yehonala’s revenge, a desire to vent the pent-up anger and frustration and humiliation that had festered in her breast since Lord Elgin and Baron Gros had marched on Beijing, burnt the Summer Palace and forced the Hsien Feng Emperor and herself on their ignoble flight to Jehol forty years before.

Not everyone was overjoyed with the high-risk strategy China was following. The southern viceroys and governors, perhaps because they were further from the scene of the crisis, came to a much more realistic appraisal of their country’s chances in a fight against all the major world powers.

They at first requested Li Hung-chang to memorialise against hostilities and the Boxers, but, canny politician that he was, Li declined to put his head so obviously above the parapet. He did, however, agree with the other officials that China south of the Yangtse should try, if possible, to dissociate itself from events in the north. Fortunately, an edict issued on 20th June commanded that the viceroys ‘should be united together to protect their territories’,
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a phrase which the southerners decided to interpret, not as a call to arms against foreign aggression, but as requiring them to use their own initiative to protect their areas. Such protection, they decided, was best achieved by guarding the foreigners from harm and by crushing the Boxers. They also agreed, quite illegally, to suppress the Imperial edicts declaring war on the Powers, and commanding the organisation of the Boxers into quasi-official militias. The foreign consuls in Shanghai were approached, and it was agreed with them that the foreign concession there should be protected by foreign troops, while the Yangtse valley would be controlled by the respective viceroys in the area. These actions did much to prevent the conflagration spreading and also, by the obvious differences in policy between north and south, later allowed the Throne to claim that the Boxer insurgency and the ensuing atrocities were the result of a ‘rebellion’ beyond the control of the Imperial power.

The foreigners and the Chinese converts were now firmly shut up in the legation quarter; at the beginning of the siege they numbered 473 allied civilians, 409 military, 400 Chinese servants and around 2,750 Chinese Christians. A second far more exposed group, consisting of Bishop Favier, twenty-two nuns and around three and a half thousand Chinese Christians, including eight hundred children, were surrounded by Yehonala’s troops at Peitang Cathedral. They were defended by a small crew of sailors, just forty-three men, that the prescient clergyman had requested before the storm broke. Ranged against them were thousands of Boxer recruits, ill-equipped and in disciplined red-sashed troops, together with general Tung Fu-hsiang’s white-turbaned, veteran Muslim warriors, and men of Jung Lu’s Headquarters Army, Western-drilled and equipped with modern foreign rifles, most of whom had been deployed around the legations. ‘There were jackets and tunics of every colour; trouserings of blood red with black dragons; great two-handed swords in some hands, men armed with bows and arrows mixing with Tung Fu-hsiang’s Kansu horsemen, who had the most modern carbines slung across their backs. There were blue banners, yellow banners embroidered with black, white flags and red...Men from all the Peking banners seemed to be there, with their plain and bordered jackets showing their divisions.’
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The allied defensive position was extremely poor. As soon as firing started the Austro-Hungarian legation had been relinquished by its garrison, which had in turn put those defending the customs building at risk and so it too was given up to the enemy. George Morrison regarded the Austro-Hungarian withdrawal as a very poor show indeed: ‘No sufficient reason has been given for its abandonment,’ he wrote later. At first, the foreigners attempted to hold on to every square yard of the legation quarter, but it soon became clear that the perimeter was too large for their limited firepower (four pieces of light artillery, together with rifles and carbines and less than three hundred rounds per man), so they were forced to yield both the French and the Italian legations to their Chinese attackers. On the 23rd June their most prized vantage point, a bastion on the high walls of the Tartar City was carried by a Chinese assault and, amid a sandstorm that blew loess from the Ordos desert into every house in Beijing, they were forced to fall back upon the last strong defensive position they had–the three-acre compound of the British legation.

That day’s storm persuaded the Chinese to commit an act of sacrilege against their own nation that has rightly gone down in history as a crime against all humanity. Adjoining the British legation to the north, and separated in places by just a few feet, was a building which, if fired (and given the prevailing wind), would almost certainly carry the blaze into the foreigners’ final defensive position. The building was the famed centre of academic brilliance, the Hanlin Yuan, the Forest of Ten Thousand Pencils, the omphalos of all Chinese learning.
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That it housed the oldest library in the world, containing priceless, unique manuscripts dating back over a thousand years, seemed to bother the Chinese not at all. Firebrands were thrown into the broken windows and through the open doors, and the Forest of Ten Thousand Pencils went up like matchwood. But no sooner had the flames taken hold than the north-west wind suddenly dropped, leaving the fire centred in the library, while the efforts of a bucket-chain of volunteers at the legation prevented the conflagration spreading to the British building. The destruction of this matchless store of knowledge (an act of vandalism comparable with the loss of the library of Alexandria in AD 391 or the burning of the two hundred thousand volumes in the library of Pergamum) achieved nothing and served only to forever diminish Chinese cultural heritage.

Paradoxically, it was the foreigners who made an effort to rescue the surviving treasures of the Hanlin Academy. Even before the flames from the library had died away, Sir Claude had sent a note to the Tsungli Yamen informing them that certain manuscripts had been saved and requesting that Chinese officials supervise the salvage. There was no reply. ‘Other great libraries...had been destroyed by the victorious invader, but what can we think of a nation that sacrifices its most sacred edifice, the pride and glory of its country and learned men for hundreds of years, in order to be revenged upon foreigners?’
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The Chinese renewed their efforts to storm the legation, and both rifle and artillery fire were more or less continuous over the first few days. There were some lucky escapes: as Mrs. Bredon and her daughter lay asleep, a four-pounder cannonball crashed through the window of the bedroom and dropped harmlessly between them; a shot meant for one of the defenders missed and instead smashed off the neck of a liquor bottle he was holding; a musket-ball grazed Captain Strout’s neck; an army sergeant had his razor shot from his hand as he made ready to shave. But not every bullet was so obliging, and every day brought reports of men wounded, or dead. As the weeks wore on the defenders drew more closely together as casualties steadily reduced their ranks. But national rivalries continued to rankle. When the siege finally ended, Morrison recorded the following summation of national characteristics: ‘I sent my servant on a message. He was robbed by a Russian, buggered by a Frenchman, killed by a German. In my dismay, I made complaint to a British officer. He looked at me, put his eye-glass into his eye, and said, ‘Was he really? What a bore!’’

The sarcasm, the bravado, the black humour, all acted as a defence against the intolerable strain of living under the constant threat of death. Early in the siege, news had come in of the fate of kindly Professor James. He had been captured by Tung Fu-hsiang’s Muslim braves on the day of von Ketteler’s murder, and taken to Prince Chuang’s palace, his captors goading him forward with their bayonets. The Prince had held him in chains for three days, and according to some had tortured the old man, before ordering his decapitation. The severed head was displayed to the populace, one Chinese diarist recording:

his head is now exhibited in a cage, hanging from the main beam of the Tung An Gate. It had to be put in a cage, as there was no queue to hang it by. The face has a most horrible expression, but it is a fine thing, all the same, to see a foreigner’s head hung up at our palace gates.
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That a similar fate might befall each foreigner within the legations must have been a source of constant anxiety to everyone caught up in the siege. On 22nd June, Yehonala directed Professor James’s murderer, Prince Chuang, to issue a proclamation offering fifty taels for the head of every male barbarian, forty taels for a foreign woman, and incredibly, thirty taels for the head of a child. In that lay the strength of her hatred against the foreign devils, or perhaps her fear that they might depose her. She wanted them dead. All of them.

By 16th July it appeared Yehonala had obtained her desire. The
Daily Mail
reported ‘The Peking Massacre’ of 7th July in heroic and distressing detail. After suffering a sustained artillery barrage, the story detailed how the Chinese had attacked in human waves, and how, ‘...standing together as the sun rose fully, the little remaining band, all Europeans, met death stubbornly...and finally, overcome by overwhelming odds, every one of the Europeans remaining was put to the sword in the most atrocious manner’. The tale was repeated in the House of Commons, a memorial service was organised for 28th July at St Paul’s Cathedral, and
The Times
joined in the universal grief writing, ‘The time has now come when hope must be abandoned. It would be foolish and unmanly to affect to doubt the awful truth.’ Pages of obituaries were printed, including that of Sir Claude McDonald, Sir Robert Hart, and
The Times’
own ‘devoted correspondent’, George Morrison. Rising to the occasion with true journalistic passion, the ‘Thunderer’ described how ‘The Europeans fought with calm courage to the end against overwhelming hordes of fanatical barbarians thirsting for their blood... When the last cartridge was gone their hour had come. They met it like men...’ and so on in similar vein, making the account curiously reminiscent of the accepted version of Custer’s Last Stand.

And just as accurate. The whole story was bunkum from first to last, thought up by an anonymous ‘special correspondent’ and datelined Shanghai. On such stories were the myths of Empire maintained. To be fair, there was nothing intrinsically impossible about the tale. If the Chinese had succeeded in breaking through the defence perimeter there is no doubt that a general massacre would have taken place, and it is more than likely that the defenders would have fought to the last round and beyond, and even, as some of the later stories claimed, would have shot their women and children rather than leave them to the mercies of the Boxers. But the plain fact was that, on 16th July, the legation perimeter was holding, just, though the defenders were under severe pressure from their Chinese attackers. However, for at least one European, the day of the ‘massacre’ did bring death. At about seven o’clock in the morning of the 16th, George Morrison, Captain Strouts of the Royal Marines Light Infantry and the Japanese Colonel Shiba were making a round of inspection, which entailed their crossing an area of The Fu notorious for its exposure to fire. As they doubled across, Strouts was hit in the thigh, severing the femoral artery. Morrison was also hit in the leg and Colonel Shiba took a bullet through his coat which fortunately left him untouched. They carried Strouts to the hospital but he died of shock and blood loss soon after. Morrison was laid up by his wound and remained bedridden for almost a month.