| The power behind the throne—Times correspondent guides Chinese diplomacy—The world was waiting for England—Was world’s history changed in China?—“Not any more war, thank you.” |
September 2nd 1901—Approaching China. The ship was in gloom to-day, for a very old man, a second-class passenger, jumped overboard during the night. He left his watch and chain, a few shillings, and a brief note on the hatchway. One of the grooms who shared his cabin said that the old man had been in the tea trade in England, but had been ruined by the trusts and had come out to Manila to go into the timber business. He had very little money and no “pull;” also he found that most of the timber land belonged to the Church; so he gave up the struggle and jumped overboard. His married daughter and her husband were on board. The scrap of a note said: “I have decided not to be a burden on the young people.” This deserves to rank with that other great epitaph: “Here died a very gallant gentleman.”
We steamed into Hong Kong harbour through a sea so crowded with junks that the Australian groom asked me: “What are those Chows holding a regatta for?” The chief engineer said they catch fish in every way known to science—and in a lot of ways of their own.
“Some of they junks are pirates,” he said, “and when ye run over a junk at night, or gather up her nets in the propeller, ye don’t stop, y’unnerstand. Ye don’t want any nosty accidents if they get aboard.”
China is a big place in which to find anybody, but by great good luck I ran against “Chinese” Morrison, The Times correspondent in China, and from him I got what one might call a very acute angle on the Boxer Rebellion. I had a letter to Morrison from our Scotch engineer, who had known Morrison’s father, as well as Morrison himself, in Victoria.
“Ah wuddent say that he’ll be glad to see ye,” said the engineer. “He’s a nosty conceited jockass—a bit of a freak y’unnerstand. But in his own way he’s the cleverest man I ever saw. The conceit of him! He’s the only white man that unnerstands they Chinese. He learnt the language and, when he went to a meeting of mandarins, an’ they all rigged out in jewels an’ peacock feathers, there was a big seat at the top of the table for the boss mandarin. Morrison walks in and takes that seat an’ not a Chow in the lot was game to call his bluff. An’ him the son of a school-teacher in Victoria! Man, it’d cow ye! If they’d ha’ known, they’d ha’ stuck bamboo splinters in him till he wuz like a hedgehog. But he gets away wi’ it, an’ he never tells ’em a lie an’ he has The Times at the back of him. So the Chows run to him to know whut the Japs are goin’ to do, an’ whut’s the Russians’ next move, and the like o’ that. Morrison’s the uncrooned king o’ China; and if he’ll talk to ye, ye’ll know more about China than these mushionaries and poleetical agents can tell ye in a year.”
September 17th 1901—Chefoo. Went off with a guide to visit Morrison. This place is the flowery land all right, for flowers and fruit are everywhere. The Chinese will sell you three pounds of beautiful fruit in a basket for about a shilling, and throw in the basket. Meat here is ten cents a pound, and very fair quality at that. I bought ten silk handkerchiefs for five shillings and sixteen yards of silk material for twelve shillings. My guide (a Russian) talks of the probable war between Japan and Russia. He says:
“De Yappanese dey cannot fight Rooshia. Dey are leedle apes.”
Neither man nor beast in China has anything but hatred for the foreigner. As we pass through the little villages and tumbledown humpies of the cultivators the men scowl at us; the dogs snarl and slink off with every symptom of terror and disgust; the cattle snort and shiver if we pass near them; and the mules will watch us uneasily till we go away. The people hate us with a cold intensity that surpasses any other hate that I ever heard of. A fat Chinese shopkeeper, who speaks English, says:
“Poor Chinaman only good for chow (is only fit to be eaten) What does Chinaman savvy?”
Then he adds something in Chinese which causes a laugh among his slant-eyed brethren and which, no doubt, sums up his opinion of the foreigner. The China pony resembles his owners in that he does everything grudgingly, and has to be hustled and flogged to get him to shift; and in spite of everything he refuses to fall away and get sick as any other horse would do. He keeps fat and vindictive. An owner lending a Chinese pony to a friend says:
“He’s all right. He won’t bite you if you sneak up to him behind the mahfoo (groom) and get hold of the rein over his back.”
Many of them have to be blindfolded to get a white man on them, and the bad ones will kick sideways as well as backwards; will strike with either front foot as quickly as a boxer, and when they get a chance they bite savagely. They are mostly bred and broken in Manchuria; and do not come into contact with a white man till they are ten or twelve years old and well “set” in their ways. They live about as long as a donkey—and nobody ever saw a dead donkey, it is said. Before the Boxer trouble their price in Manchuria and northern China was about three pounds ten. But when the world’s armies looked in on China the price went up like shares that had been sold short on a rising market.
I found Morrison at a watering-place outside Chefoo. I knew his record fairly well; for, as a young man, he had explored New Guinea and northern Australia in the days when the blacks were bad. The blacks put a spear into him. He got his black boy to cut off the shaft of the spear, but never had the head of the spear taken out till he got to Melbourne. A man like that takes some stopping.
In person, he was a tall ungainly man with a dour Scotch face and a curious droop at the corner of his mouth—a characteristic I had noticed in various other freaks, including Olive Schreiner, the gifted authoress of the Story of an African Farm. Morrison had with him a China-coast doctor named Molyneux who acted as a sort of Dr Watson to Morrison’s Sherlock Holmes. At first Morrison talked mainly about women, and if there was any unbalance in his mentality it was probably in that direction. I plied Molyneux with questions and thus got Morrison talking. Any answers that Molyneux gave me were annotated and corrected by Morrison, and by the time we had lunch I had got the uncrowned king of China talking freely.
It was an education to listen to him, for he spoke with the self-confidence of genius. With Morrison it was not a case of “I think”; it was a case of “I know”. Of the three great men of affairs that I had met up to that time—Morrison, Cecil Rhodes, and Winston Churchill—Morrison had perhaps the best record. Cecil Rhodes, with enormous capital at his back had battled with Boers and Basutos; Churchill, with his father’s prestige and his mother’s money to help him, had sailed on life’s voyage with the wind strongly behind him; but Morrison had gone into China on a small salary for The Times and had outclassed the smartest political agents of the world—men with untold money at the back of them.
A triangular conversation between Morrison, Molyneux and myself ran on the following lines:
PATERSON: “What started this Boxer trouble anyhow?”
MOLYNEUX: “Well, you see, the Boxers—”
MORRISON: “No, it wasn’t the Boxers. You’ve got Boxers on the brain. The Boxers were just a rabble, washermen, and rickshaw coolies. Old Napoleon with his whiff of grapeshot would have settled the Boxers before lunch. The trouble was that the Chinese Government couldn’t handle their job and the whole world was waiting for England to declare a protectorate over the Yangtze valley and stand for fair play and open the door for everybody. All the nations trusted England to give them fair play. You know the old song:
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The English, the English, They don’t amount to much; But anything is better Than the God damn Dutch. |
or the God damn Russian or Turk, or Portugee either.”
PATERSON: “Would we have had to fight anybody if we had taken a protectorate?”
MORRISON: “No. Everybody wanted it. You can’t conceive the amount of trade there is here, and everybody wanted to have a go at it. And it’s nothing to what it will be. There’s gold-mines and tin-mines and quicksilver and all sorts of minerals in the interior, and it’s very lightly inhabited. There’s all this wonderful agricultural land on the coast, and there are hills all over blue grass, splendid grazing-land in the interior. I didn’t sit on the sea-coast and write out telegrams. I went in and had a look at it. But nobody’s game to put any money into the trade because there’s really no government in China. The English missed the chance of a lifetime.”
PATERSON: “The English don’t generally miss much. What made them miss this?”
MORRISON: “Kruger made them miss it. De Wet made them miss it. They humbugged about over this Chinese business till they had the Boer War on their hands. Then they found they were getting a lot of men shot and dying of enteric to get better terms for the Johannesburg Jews and the owners of the Kimberley diamond-mines. So they said, ‘Not any more war, thank you. We’ve had some.’ The next thing was that they had to send men-of-war and troops here whether they liked it or not. But instead of running the show themselves and being top dog, they just had to snap and bite along with the rest of the pack.”
“They might have taken the job on only for the missionaries,” he went on. “The missionaries all wrote home and said that if the English tried to govern China the dear little converts would all get their throats cut, and they themselves would be fan kweid 1. But I didn’t suggest that the English should govern China. I said to let the Chinese govern it, nominally, and we could have enough troops here to back them up. Then if any of these Boxers got giving trouble the Chinese would crucify them in the good oldfashioned way and everything would be as quiet as a Sunday-school.”
Here Molyneux chipped in and spoke a piece.
“I have a friend on the staff here,” he said, “and he got the General to write home and say that if we had twenty thousand men we could keep China nice and quiet. He got snubbed by the War office. Then he asked his General to write and say that he refused to accept such an answer from a D.A.A.G. who had never been in China in his life. But the General had to think about his own job. He daren’t go up against the brass hats. So things just muddled along until the Boxers started and besieged the legations in Peking. We thought it was just one of these comic-opera shows until we found that nobody could get out with any news. Such a thing was never known in China before. You could always square a Chinaman to go with a message. So then it was all nations on deck, to hunt the Boxers and to grab what they could by way of indemnity. You ought to have seen the claims for damages! Some of them got civil service catalogues and copied out the lists of furniture and said the Chinese had destroyed the things or carried them away. One man claimed for a mahogany sideboard with fluted columns. He never saw a mahogany sideboard, only in a catalogue.”
MORRISON: “Yes, and who pays the indemnity? Did you ever hear of a policeman arresting a criminal and then the policeman having to pay the fine? Well, that’s what is happening here. The big English firms and the shipping companies, they’ll all have to pay extra taxation. There’s English money in every sugar-factory in the country, and in every ship that runs up the coast. One Chinese company that carries a million passengers a year—there’s English money in that. There’s a Russian line that trades here and their ships are all old English ships, not paid for. Those companies will have to dig into their pockets to pay the Japanese and the Germans for coming here to have a little pantomime and call it a war.”
PATERSON: “What was the fighting like?”
MORRISON: “Ask Molyneux. He knows all about war. Give him a rifle and a tin of bully-beef and he’d drive the Chinese out of China. The first man shot in Peking was the Chinese tailor, and I’ve always suspected Molyneux. He owed that tailor a lot of money.”
According to Molyneux and other (civilian) experts on war, the allies only had to advance over about fourteen miles of contested country, and the advance was up a river with various boggy creeks flowing into it. Most of the forces had sense enough to walk round the top of the creeks, but the Germans put up trestle bridges which promptly sank in the mud as soon as anybody stood on them. The English had orders to win the war without shooting anybody, as the idea in London was to exhibit humanity and forbearance and get all the trade later on.
“Of course, that was all wrong,” said Morrison. “If you want to make an Oriental think well of you you don’t want to soft-sawder him; you want to kick him in the stern. The Japanese did more fighting and killed more men than anybody else because they did not worry their heads as to what the Chinese would think of them.”
“There was some real fighting at the end of the march,” he went on. “The Japanese ran laughing, and cheering, man after man, on to a bridge that was swept with rifle-fire, and where a mouse couldn’t have lived. They ran up to a gate and laid mines against it, and were shot down, man after man, till at last they blew it down. They’ll be tough gentlemen to tackle in a war. They had a field-hospital up and were treating their wounded while the fighting was going on.”
Listening to this tale of woe I recalled the two English ladies of title in the Boer War, and their biting comments on that enterprise. No doubt the British people, especially the Australians, are prolific in what we got to know in after years as “back-seat drivers”. Perhaps Morrison was a “back-seat driver”. But before I left the China coast I got to know what national prestige means in a foreign country. Previously, I had known only Australia and South Africa. In China I saw the coast crowded with steamships of all flags fighting for trade. I saw the local lines—Jardine Matheson and Butterfield and Swire—running up the coast, and the big Empress boats pulling out from Japan. I travelled on a Russian liner (a British steamship unpaid for) and saw the thousands of tons of produce coming into the China ports by river and rail. A British importer in Shanghai showed me one day’s order—windmills, building materials, stoves, brushes, locks, brooms, and every kind of hardware. I met concession-hunters, bankers and political agents of all nations, each hustling for his own hand and his own country. Perhaps Morrison was right. We should have walked in and taken the boss mandarin’s seat at the top of the table.
| 1. Fan-Kweid: Cut to pieces with knives. [back] |