Most valuable information—the topography of the city—had been supplied by General Ignatieff, who accompanied the Allies. A map which he lent to Sir Hope Grant showed every street and house of importance in Peking, laid down by a scientific member of the Russian mission in the city. The data had been obtained by traversing the streets in a cart, from which angles were taken, while an indicator fixed to the wheel marked the distances covered. Without this plan the attack would have been made from the south side, as proposed by General Montauban, which would have involved a march through the commercial or Chinese quarter, and the surmounting first of the Chinese and then of the Tartar wall. The map made it clear that from every point of view the north side offered the most eligible point of attack, where nothing intervened between a great open plain and the wall of the Manchu city.
Passing over the dramatic incidents of the destruction of the Summer Palace, an act of calculated vengeance for the murder and maltreatment of envoys and prisoners, the flight of the emperor on a hunting tour to Jêho, whence he never returned, the release of the prisoners and their account of the captivity, the new treaty was signed at the Hall of Ceremonies on October 22, 1860, by Prince Kung, "a delicate gentlemanlike man, evidently overcome with fear," and his coadjutor, Hangki. The treaties of Tientsin were ratified, and some further indemnities exacted. The special provisions introduced into the French treaty will be referred to in a subsequent chapter.[44]
The closing scene was marked by a degree of haste somewhat recalling Tientsin in 1858. The very slow advance on Peking brought the climax of the campaign unpleasantly close to the season when communication by water would be shut off by ice; "the weather became bitterly cold, some of the hills being covered with snow." And Sir Hope Grant's never-failing counsellor, Ignatieff, with "his usual extreme kindness," furnished him with the most important information that the Peiho would soon become frozen up and it would be unsafe to linger in Peking. Mr Loch's galloping off with the treaty, as shown in the illustration, was rather typical of the whole business. The treaty as such was of little consequence—the fulfilment of its provisions was everything.
MR LOCH DEPARTS FROM PEKING FOR ENGLAND WITH CHINESE TREATY.
Some lessons, nevertheless, had been learned in the school of diplomatic adversity. Peking was not left without a locum tenens of the Minister, Tientsin was not left without a garrison, and the Taku forts were occupied by the Allies for a couple of years after the final conclusion of peace.
"Ring out the old; ring in the new." There seemed a natural fitness in the Hon. Frederick Bruce succeeding the Earl of Elgin as Minister plenipotentiary, and there was a dramatic finish in the farewell ceremonial when the retiring representative of the Queen vacated the seat of honour, placing therein his younger brother, whom he introduced to Prince Kung as the accredited agent of Great Britain. The new era was inaugurated; a real representative of her Britannic Majesty was installed in the capital of the Son of Heaven.
The season was late, and though two palaces had been granted on lease for the residences of the British and the French Ministers, many alterations and repairs were needed to render them fit for occupation, which could not be effected before the closing of the sea communication by ice. The Ministers therefore resolved to withdraw from Peking for the winter, placing their respective legations in charge of a junior consular officer, Mr Thomas Adkins, who volunteered to hold the post until the return of the plenipotentiaries in the following spring.
Mr Adkins was not the only foreign sojourner in the Chinese capital. There was a French Lazarist priest, Mouilli by name, who, having successfully concealed himself among his native Christians during the military advance of the Allies, emerged from his hiding-place on the triumphant entry of the ambassadors, and showed himself in the streets in a sedan chair with four bearers. There was the permanent Russian establishment within the city, with its unbroken record of 173 years. Originally composed of prisoners taken at the siege of Albazin, it had become a seminary of the Orthodox Church and a political vedette of the Russian empire, invaluable to the two masterful diplomatists who appeared suddenly on the scene in the years 1858 and 1860. The mission served as a speculum through which Russia could look into the inner recesses of the Chinese State, while to the Chinese it was a window of bottle-glass through which the external world was refracted for them. The Russian Government selects its agents on the principle on which we select university crews or All-England elevens—namely, the most fit. So important and far-sighted a scheme as the Peking mission was not left to chance or the claims of seniority, but was maintained in the highest efficiency. Its members—six ecclesiastical and four lay—were changed every ten years. All of them, from the Archimandrite downwards, were accomplished linguists, speaking Chinese like the natives, and masters also of the Manchu and Mongol languages. Their relations with the Chinese officials were unostentatious, yet brotherly. Few secrets, either of administration, dynastic politics, or official intrigue, no communications between the Government, provincial or imperial, and any foreigners, escaped record in the archives of the Russian mission. The personnel were protected from outrage or insult by their own tact and their traditional prestige; and as the Daimios of Japan in their anti-foreign manifestos declared that every foreigner could be insulted with impunity except the Russians, so in China the name was a talisman of security. While the Anglo-French expedition was marching towards Peking the Russian Secretary, M. Popoff, had occasion to leave that city and pass the night at a native inn on the road to Tientsin. The place became filled with the retreating Chinese soldiery, and M. Popoff had the pleasure of hearing their excited conversation respecting himself. They were for dragging him out and killing him on the spot, when the landlord interposed. "That foreigner is a Russian," said he; "it will be dangerous to lay a hand on him."