Page:Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China.djvu/75

Rh the important military station of Nanning and occupying a great tract of country about it. Thereafter he proceeded to attack Kweiling, the provincial capital which commands one of the important roads into the interior of China. Frenzied efforts were made by the Imperial Government to cope with the situation, but by this time the Taeping Rebellion, as it was to be known in history, had assumed such proportions as to be almost beyond the powers which could be exercised from Peking. Instead of Tien Wang being suppressed by the forces sent against him he derived confidence from their ill-directed efforts, and in the end conceived the bold design of marching his forces northwards into Hoonan. It is unnecessary for our purpose to follow the course of events so lucidly described in Mr. Demetrius Boulger's great work on China. Suffice it to say that by the month of April, 1853, the rebels, after a triumphal march, had captured and occupied Nanking and firmly established themselves in the valley of the Yangtse-Kiang.

The course of the rebellion had been watched with intense interest by foreigners in China and by none more closely than by the British community. As a rule sympathy was strongly enlisted on the side of the rebels. In them Britons saw a people struggling for freedom against a desolating despotism, and they attributed to them patriotic virtues which it is to be feared they never possessed. After the astounding successes achieved in the valley of the Yangtse the British authorities deemed it advisable to take special measures to discover the true meaning of this wonderful movement which seemed to be on the point of laying the proud Manchu power in the dust. Consequently in April, 1853, Sir George Bonham, who had succeeded Sir John Davis in the supreme charge of British interests in China, proceeded to Nanking in the warship Hermes. The vessel was fired upon by the batteries at Chinkiang and Kwachow, but the compliment was ignored and in due course the party reached Nanking. After a week spent in interviews and negotiations with the Taeping leaders. Sir George Bonham left in the Hermes. His mission, there can be no doubt, was a mistake. While it accomplished nothing practical, it had the effect of instilling the jealous and suspicious minds of the Peking authorities with the belief that Britain was for her own purposes fomenting the rebellion. After Sir George Bonham's visit to Nanking a section of the rebel forces marched northwards with the intention of attacking Peking. The enterprise failed for various reasons, and very few of those who left Nanking ever returned to it. But signal as were the imperial successes they had no decisive result on the course of the rebellion. The flame of revolt continued to blaze with fierce intensity at many and widely separated points, and occasional outbreaks in quite new centres pointed the inevitable results of slackened authority. At the British Treaty ports the continuance of the rebellion was regarded with a feeling almost akin to consternation. The effect upon trade was most disastrous, and the proposal was seriously mooted by the Shanghai mercantile community that the custom duties should no longer be paid. Mr. Rutherford Alcock, however, emphatically declined to entertain any such idea, pointing out that the provisions of the Treaty of Nanking must be upheld, and urging that it behoved British subjects to maintain strict neutrality in the crisis through which China was passing. On another point—the putting of the settlement in a condition of defence—Mr. Alcock was able to enter into hearty co-operation with the mercantile community. Under his auspices an influential meeting of the residents was held in April, 1853, to devise a plan for the protection of the community. The most notable decision arrived at was that the British residents should form a volunteer corps under the direction of Captain Trowson, an officer who had seen service in the Bengal Fusiliers, and that the supreme command and direction of the military preparations should be vested in Captain Fishbourne, the senior officer on the station. At a subsequent meeting the members of the other foreign communities decided to associate themselves with their British confreres in these protective measures. Events soon proved the wisdom of the action taken. After some preliminary threatenings the rebels in September, 1853, descended upon the native city and with the aid of the local disaffected seized the Taoutai's quarters, killed a number of officials, and assumed the government. The occurrences excited great alarm in the settlement, which from its proximity to the scene of the disturbances and its open character, was a bait calculated to attract the lawless mob which had so dramatically obtained the ascendency in the adjacent Chinese district. Every precaution was taken to guard against surprise and to meet an attack. The men-of-war in port trained their guns upon the approaches to the settlement and were ready to land armed parties at a moment's notice. Meanwhile the volunteer force patrolled the European quarter day and night. As time wore on it became evident that the rebels had no intention of provoking an encounter. Apart from the inevitable risks which they would have to face there was the certainty that interference with Europeans would break down the policy of neutrality which had been steadily pursued in regard to them. So what at first had been regarded as a menacing danger assumed the aspect of a somewhat tedious but not entirely uninteresting struggle upon which foreigners could look with an air of detachment. The attempts of the imperial forces to recover possession of the city were ludicrous in their ineffectiveness and provided daily diversion for Shanghai people, who in the intervals of business went out to watch the operations of the contending forces. In the interests of commerce, which was suffering greatly by the civil distractions, attempts were vainly made to induce the rebels to surrender. Short of intervention, however, there seemed no way of bringing the siege to a close. The British authorities steadily declined to entertain all proposals to this end. But the French, whose settlement was nearest the native city and, therefore, most liable to attack, in December, 1854, elected to throw the weight of their influence into the imperial scale with a view of putting an end to the state of war in which the district had been involved for the past three months. The French guns did a good deal of damage to the city walls, and it seemed that the Triads, as the rebels were locally known, were in for a very bad time. When, however, the French with a force of some four hundred sailors and marines attempted to assault the city in co-operation with the imperial forces, they were met with such a determined resistance that they were compelled ultimately to fall back with a loss of four officers and sixty men killed and wounded. This unpleasant reverse had the effect of killing for the time being the idea of foreign intervention. The contending factions were left severely alone and the siege went on in its old desultory way. Before very long the rebels, feeling the pinch of want, made a desperate effort to cut their way out. The bulk of them fell either by the sword of the imperialists or later at the hands of the executioners, who carried out their sanguinary work with a remorseless severity characteristic of Chinese methods. The two leaders, Lew and Chin-ah-lin, escaped, though a heavy price was put upon their heads, and a few of the lesser lights of the rising also got away by taking refuge in the foreign settlement. In other directions at this period the imperial authorities achieved successes over the rebels, and the circumstance undoubtedly tended to stiffen their opposition to demands which shortly afterwards were made upon them by the British Government.