CHAPTER II
FIRST YEARS IN CHINA—LIFE AT NINGPO—THE ALLIED COMMISSION AND SIR HARRY PARKES—RESIGNATION FROM THE CONSULAR SERVICE
The journey out to Chinn in 1854 was not the simple matter that it is now. No Suez Canal existed then, and the Candia that took Robert Hart from Southampton left him at Alexandria. Thence he had to travel up the Mahmudi Canal to the Nile, push on towards Cairo, and finally spend eighteen cramped and weary hours in an omnibus crossing the desert to Suez, where he got one steamer as far as Galle, and another—the Pottinger from Bombay—which called there took him on to his destination.
He remained three uneventful months in Hongkong as Student Interpreter at the Superintendency of Trade, awaiting the return of Sir John Bowring, H.B.M.'s Minister to China, who was away at Taku trying to open negotiations with the Peking Government. It was this same Sir John Bowring, by the way, who first aroused Robert Hart's interest in Chinese life and customs—subjects on which so many foreigners in China remain pitifully ignorant all their lives. "Study everything around you," said he to the young man. "Go out and walk in the street and read the shop signs. Bend over the bookstalls and read titles. Listen to the talk of the people. If you acquire these habits, you will not only learn something new every time you leave your door, but you will always carry with you an antidote for boredom."
When the Minister came back in September, Robert Hart was appointed to the British Consulate at Ningpo, and started off immediately, travelling up to Shanghai in a trim little 150-ton opium schooner called the Iona. The voyage should have taken a week; it took three. At first a calm and then the sudden burst of the north-east monsoon made progress impossible; the schooner tacked back and forth for a fortnight, advancing scarcely a mile, and all this time her single passenger could just manage to take seven steps on her little deck without wetting his feet. Then, to make matters worse, provisions gave out, and the ship's company was reduced for twelve days to an unsavoury diet of water-buffalo and peanuts—all they could get from a nearby island. Was it any wonder that Hart could never afterwards endure the taste of peanuts, or that at the mere sight of a passing water-buffalo his appetite was clean gone for the day?
He found Shanghai in the hands of the Triads (rebels), and a friend, one of the missionaries, took him to see their famous chief, who was said to have risen, not from the ranks, but from the stables of an American merchant. With Mr. (afterwards Sir Rutherford) Alcock he also went into the other camp to visit the commander of the Imperialist forces, a Mongol, the Governor of the Province and a man of fine presence. He was the first specimen of the Mandarin class that Robert Hart had seen, and consequently the details of the interview remained in his memory.
In later years he would sometimes describe what interested him most as, silent and inconspicuous, he observed the doings of his seniors. It was not the crowd of petty officials standing about, though they were curious enough to a newcomer in their long official robes and hats decorated with peacock's feathers; it was not the conversation going on between Alcock and the Governor; it was simply the way the latter, by his excessive dignity and dramatic manner, turned a simple action into a ceremony. What he did was to draw carefully from his official boot a wad of fine white paper, detach one sheet, and solemnly blow his nose upon it. The action was nothing, the method everything. He then proceeded to fold the paper into a cocked hat, and, calling a servant to him, gave it into his hands with a grand bow, just as if he were presenting the man with some specially earned honour. As for the servant, he took his cue excellently well, received the paper like a sacred relic, and, still as if he were taking part in some ceremony; opened the flap of the tent and threw it away.
[Illustration: THE CANAL: THE ROUTE BY WHICH SIR ROBERT HART FIRST
CAME TO PEKING.]
Still more adventures awaited Robert Hart on the short trip from Shanghai to Ningpo; indeed I think the best and the most romantic adventures took a certain pleasure in following him always. At any rate, this time he was to have such a one as even Captain Kettle might have envied; he was to be chased by a pirate junk, a Cantonese Comanting, with a painted eye in the bow, so that she might find her prey, with a high stern bristling with rifles and cutlasses, so that she might destroy it when found, and with stinkpots at her mastheads and boarding-nets hung round her. Of course he was to escape in the end, but so narrowly that all possible sail had to be crowded on to his little ship, and the whole crew set to work the big oar at the stern, while every soul on board shivered and shook as men should when pirates are after them.
Ningpo itself in 1854 was the quietest place under the sun. A handful of merchants lived there, buried without the trouble of dying; one or two consulates had been built, but roads were non-existent, and the few houses were separated from one another by a network of paddy (rice) fields. The new consular assistant shared his house with a man called Patridge, for whom he had conceived a liking, a jolly fellow and a capital messmate, yet not without certain peculiarities of his own. I believe he took a special delight in posing for fearful and radical ideas like the abolition of the House of Lords, and could never be made to see why a man should not sit in the presence of his Sovereign, or wear his hat either if he felt so inclined.
The other youngsters laughed at his notions; one or two even went so far as to accuse him of being a snob and to twit him on having changed the spelling of his name and dropped the first "r" for the sake of a stylishness he pretended to despise. He protested hotly; they stuck to their assertion. He declared his name was Patridge, always had been Patridge, and never could be anything else; they disbelieved him, and so the dispute remained a drawn battle for want of an umpire till long afterwards, when Robert Hart himself proved the point in a very curious way.
A word or two about Patridge's early history must be told in order to show how he did it. Patridge, as a young boy, was on board a vessel carrying opium along the coasts of China, when in 1842 she and another engaged in the same trade were wrecked on the island of Formosa, and both crews—175 Bengalis and 13 white men in all—were captured by the natives and taken to the capital, Tai-Wan-Foo. The Bengalis were beheaded immediately. It was touch and go whether the white men would suffer the same fate, when a brilliant idea struck the ship's carpenter. Why not seek to soften the hearts of his captors by a kotow as profound as it was novel; why not stand on his head? He did, with the happiest results. The Formosans, delighted with this feat of submission, spared the lives of himself and his companions and kept them in prison instead of decapitating them.
But for a long time it was doubtful whether they would ever regain their liberty, and, as a record for friends who might later search for them in vain, they made a schoolboy's calendar on the walls of their cramped and dirty prison, ticked off each day, and signed their names below. It is nice to know that they got away free at last, though their fate has little to do with my story.
The record remained. More than twenty years afterwards, when Robert Hart, then Inspector-General of the Chinese Customs, had occasion to go to Formosa on business, he found it in an old rice hong (shop), and Patridge's name among the rest, spelled with two "r's" (Partridge), whereupon he could not resist the temptation of cutting off the list with his penknife and, on his return to Shanghai, triumphantly handing it to his old messmate.
In 1855, owing to a dispute with his Portuguese colleague, the British Consul at Ningpo was suspended from duty, and young Hart put in charge of affairs for some months. His calm judgment and good sense during this first period of responsibility gained him favourable notice with the "powers that be," for a little later at Canton, when the British General Van Straubenzee remarked, on introducing him to Mr.(afterwards Sir Frederick) Bruce, "This young man I recommend you to keep your eye on; some day he will do something," the latter answered, "Oh, I have already had my attention called to him by the Foreign Office."
The Portuguese were much in evidence in the Ningpo of those days. They were numerous; they had power, and they abused it: with the result that retribution came upon them so sure, so swift, so terrible that not only Ningpo but the whole of China was deeply stirred by the horror of it.
I am thinking now of that dreadful massacre of June 26th, 1857, the culmination of years of trouble between the Cantonese and the Portuguese lorchamen, who with their fast vessels—the fastest and most easily managed ships in the age before steam—terrorized the whole coast, exacted tribute, refused to pay duties, and even fell into downright piracy, burning peaceful villages and killing their inhabitants.
Rumours of Cantonese revenge began in the winter of 1856, when news came that all the foreigners in Ningpo would be massacred on a certain night. Some one thereupon invited the whole community to dine together; but Robert Hart refused, thinking that men who sat drinking hot whiskey punch through a long evening would be in no condition to face a disturbance if it came. Thus, while the others kept up their courage in company, he slept in a deserted house—the terrified servants had fled—with a revolver under his pillow, and beside his bed an open window, through which he intended to drop, if the worst came to the worst, and try to make his way on foot to Shanghai. Nothing happened then, however; but the talk of the tea-shops had not been unfounded—only premature.
The 26th of June saw the vengeance consummated. With great bravery and determination the Cantonese under Poo Liang Tai swept the Portuguese lorchas up the entire coast and into Ningpo. The fight began afloat and ashore. Bullets whistled everywhere; the distracted lorchamen ran wildly about, hoping to escape the inevitable. Some of the poor wretches reached the British Consulate, alive or half alive, clamouring for shelter; but Mr. Meadows, then Consul, refused to let them in, fearing to turn the riot from an anti-Portuguese disturbance into an anti-foreign outbreak, and the unfortunate creatures frantically beat on the closed gates in vain.
Perhaps much of their fate was well deserved—some historians say so—but it was none the less terrible when it came; and I can imagine that the predicament of Meadows and young Hart, standing behind the barred gates of the Consulate, could have been little worse, mentally, than that of the wretches outside praying to them in the name of Heaven and the saints for shelter.
All were hunted down at last, dragged out of their hiding-places in old Chinese graves among the paddy fields, butchered where they stood defending their lodging-house, or taken prisoners only to be put on one of their own lorchas, towed a little way up the river and slowly roasted to death. Then, "last scene of all," the Cantonese stormed the Portuguese Consulate, pillaged and wrecked the building, and were just climbing on to the flat roof to haul down the flag when a stately white cloud appeared far down the river, serenely floating towards the disturbed city.
It was the French warship Capricieuse, under full sail. She had come straight from South America and put in at Ningpo after her long voyage, all unconscious of the terrible events passing there. Was ever an arrival more providential? I greatly doubt it; for had she not appeared in this miraculous fashion, who knows what would have come to the handful of white men left in that last outpost of civilization?
Such was Robert Hart's first experience of a fight, but it was by no means to be his only one. Bugles have sounded in his ears from first to last, and a wide variety of military experiences—he was present at the taking of one city and during the siege of another—has come to him without his seeking it.
From Ningpo he was transferred to Canton in March 1858, and made Secretary to the Allied Commission governing that city. Life was very different there from what it had been in Ningpo. Instead of the small community to which he had been accustomed, he found himself in a town filled with troops—British and French. Instead of living alone or with one companion, he occupied quarters in a big yamên full of officers and men—a change which probably benefited a character too given to seriousness and introspection.
The work in Canton was exceedingly interesting. He was much more in the centre of affairs than he had been before, and he had the opportunity of serving under Sir Harry Parkes. With some of the erraticness that is said to belong to genius, Parkes enjoyed doing things at odd hours. He liked to fall asleep after dinner, for instance, with a big cigar in his mouth, then wake refreshed and energetic at midnight, and work till morning. But he never expected his staff to follow his example, and was consideration itself to those under him—especially to young Hart, whom he liked from the first, and whom he always took with him on his expeditions around or outside the city.
There was no lack of these, since he was a man of indomitable energy, matured his plans with astonishing rapidity, and often had them carried out before any one suspected they were maturing.
The story of one particular little coup d'état is well worth the telling. A new Viceroy was expected in Canton, and Parkes heard that the man who was filling the Acting Appointment was anxious to go out of the city to meet his successor. At the same time he was told that if the official left the city, the occasion would be taken to make a disturbance, so he determined to use a sudden and vigorous stratagem to keep the Acting Viceroy within the walls, willing or no. Accordingly one morning he invited all the officials to discuss matters at the said Viceroy's yamên, and went himself to the rendezvous with Hart and an escort of military police.
He greeted the assembled officials cordially, and, after some preliminary remark, went on to say: "I hear that you are all anxious to go and meet the new Viceroy. Very natural, I'm sure; very natural and obviously your duty. But we really do not want you to leave Canton just at this particular moment. Ugly rumours are floating about which only your presence here keeps in check. Therefore, as we realize that if you do not go to meet your colleague, you will be accused in Peking of lack of courtesy towards him, that none of your excuses will be believed, I have brought a few men with me to keep guard outside your rooms here. You can consequently say with truth that you were prevented from fulfilling your duty."
Astonished and angry as they were at the turn of events, the Chinese were shrewd enough to see they were helpless. The soldiers stayed. Hart went every day to inquire after the prisoners, and listened to their complaints about the ceaseless tread of the sentries under their windows all night. "They never seem to sit down like other people," one of the Chinese said pathetically. "They walk all night, all night, and we cannot sleep." Parkes sent sympathetic messages, but he remained courteously firm. Perhaps he thought a few wakeful hours were not too high a price to pay for keeping Canton quiet.
There was one official, however, who had not been caught with the rest. He was Fantai, or Provincial Treasurer, who remained quietly hidden in a temple in one of the western suburbs till Parkes ferreted him out. He and Hart and the mounted police then made a second expedition. As soon as they reached the outer door of the place, Parkes jumped off his pony and rushed in with such impetuosity that the crowds of servants running before him had no time to warn their master of the intruders' arrival. Parkes continued his rapid career straight into the inner room, where the Fantai himself sat at a table strewn with papers, absolutely calm, serene and unmoved. Parkes began to talk; the Fantai remained silent. No matter, Parkes was very adroit at carrying on a one-sided interview, and conversation did not flag.
"I've come to pay you a visit," said he; "and though you have not mentioned your pleasure at meeting a new acquaintance, I am sure it is none the less deep. Ah," he went on, looking over the paper-strewn table, "you have even been kind enough to lay aside your work on my account. Let us see. You were writing letters," and Parkes thereupon read the finished and unfinished despatches under the Fantai's very eye, then profusely thanked him for the useful information.
The Chinese sat superbly contemptuous through it all, and finally spat over his shoulder, putting enough scorn into the action to freeze the boldest. Yet Parkes had the gift of looking unconscious the whole time, and babbled on gaily:
"You don't seem very talkative to-day—but of course, sometimes one feels more in the mood for conversation than others. Besides, there is no need for you to tell me any of your news. I have found out everything I wanted to know from these papers here." He had indeed; they contained the most important revelations as to the prospective movements of the Chinese troops outside the city, and also showed exactly how far the officials inside were co-operating with them.
There was no further need to prolong the interview, and Parkes began to make his adieus. In China, these are not the slight things they are with us. Host and guest have mutual obligations; the former, unless he is willing to risk being thought uncivil, must escort a visitor of rank to the outer gate himself. But the Fantai cared little whether he was thought civil or not, and he sat stolidly in his chair when Parkes made a move to go. He reckoned without his—guest, who was not the man to be slighted.
"I am sorry to take you away from your pressing business," said Parkes affably, "but if you should neglect to s'ung (literally, bid farewell in the ceremonial manner) me, people might think that we are not the good friends we are; people might even suspect that our political relations are unsatisfactory. Therefore I must with great reluctance trouble you." The Fantai, helpless, accompanied him grudgingly to the door of the inner courtyard, whence he was about to beat a retreat when Parkes said again, insinuatingly and half under his breath, "Oh, come a little farther, please do; there are not enough people here to see our good-byes."
The same scene was gone through at each successive courtyard, and in a big Chinese temple they are neither few nor small. Hart, who was behind the other two, could scarcely stifle his amusement at the half-snarling, half-contemptuous face of the Fantai as Parkes in one phrase insisted sotto voce on his coming farther, and in the next, spoken a little louder for the benefit of listening servants and secretaries, thanked him profusely for his great courtesy and hospitality in seeing a humble guest so far. Only at the outermost gate, around which a crowd had collected, all, in Chinese fashion, asking who was within and what he had come about, was the irate Fantai permitted to return to his interrupted labours—after he had satisfied every canon of the elaborate courtesy.
Hart left his work under Sir Harry Parkes with real regret in October 1858, when he was promoted and appointed interpreter at the British Consulate in Canton under Sir Rutherford Alcock; but in May 1859 he resigned to enter the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. It was the Viceroy Laou Tsung Kwang who invited him to do so, for he was one of Hart's special friends, a shrewd judge of men, clever enough himself and progressive for his day. He had been quick to notice the success of the new Custom House at Shanghai, and presently asked young Hart if he could not draw up a set of regulations for the collection of duty at Canton, and undertake the work of supervision.
To this invitation Hart replied that Mr. H.N. Lay was in charge of the Customs; that he, Hart, knew nothing about the business, having had no experience of the sort, and could not therefore agree to the proposals. But what he did agree to do was to write to Mr. Lay and see if something could not be done to bring Canton into line with Shanghai. The result of the correspondence, briefly put, was that Mr. Lay first offered Robert Hart a position as interpreter, which he refused, and later the post of Deputy-Commissioner of Customs at Canton, which he accepted. Of course he had meanwhile asked the British Government if he might resign from the Consular Service. Their reply gave the desired permission, but stipulated at the same time that he must not expect the acceptance of his resignation to imply that he might return to the British service whenever he pleased. Neither they nor he guessed then that he was beginning a work from which he would have no wish to turn back, or that it would be they who would finally beg him to return to their service, not as Consul, but as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary.