China and the Chinese

by Edmond Plauchut

From nine in the morning to five in the afternoon of the terrible day the killing went on, the French being hunted through the streets and struck down, often on the very thresholds of their houses. After the murder of the French consul, his interpreter, M. Thomassin, and his young wife were attacked; and in a futile attempt to save the latter Thomassin was terribly wounded. He managed to fling himself into the canal, which flows near the Consulate, but the literati were determined that he should not escape, and he was dispatched in the water. Meanwhile, as a shepherd calls his flock together when the wolves are threatening, the Abbé Chevrier had collected around him the orphan children to the number of one hundred then under the care of the missionaries; but they were all massacred, the good priest dying amongst them. A French merchant and his wife, with three Russians who were mistaken for Frenchmen, were also murdered.

The Sisters in the orphanage and hospital were, strange to say, the last to hear of the awful scenes being enacted in the streets. Secure in their belief that they had done no evil, and that, therefore, no one could wish to harm them, they quietly went on with their work, and did not even demand the protection of the Chinese authorities. This would, however, probably have been powerless to save them; for it was the mandarins who had been most active in circulating slanders against them, saying that they used the eyes of children for making some of their medicines, and spreading all manner of other silly reports. The simple-minded Sisters had only laughed when told of these slanders, but they would have been wiser to try and refute them, for they were believed by the common people as readily as stories about witches were in Europe not so very long ago.

MURDER OF THE SISTERS

The sun was already setting, lighting up the streets reddened with the blood of the innocent, when the murderers, their rage increased by the ease with which they had killed their victims, seem suddenly to have remembered that there were defenceless women at the orphanage still to be destroyed, and with one accord they rushed to the doors clamouring for admittance. Their shouts being unheeded, they lost no time in breaking down the door, and found the Superior of the Sisterhood calmly waiting to receive them. Alas! her fortitude availed her nothing; she was brutally seized, dragged to a post not far off and bound to it. Then ensued a scene too horrible for description; the fiends in human shape danced round their helpless victim, and inflicted on her all the tortures in which the Chinese are so terribly skilled, finally cutting her body into small pieces. The terrified nuns kneeling on the steps of their little chapel in agonized prayer were one and all first outraged and then murdered, their home and church were set fire to, and their mangled bodies flung into the flames. One poor young girl had had the sense to disguise herself as a Chinese, and was hastening towards the English Consulate to take refuge there, when unfortunately she was recognized and murdered by some Chinese soldiers. Not one French man or woman escaped, and the indignation throughout France when the terrible news arrived can be imagined.

As usual, the Imperial Government was profuse in apologies and excuses, for well did the Emperor and his advisers know how terrible might be the vengeance exacted by France for the blood of her children. A few Chinese heads were cut off—in China heads are of little account,—and it was determined at Pekin that a very high official should be sent to Paris to make due apology, and promise that nothing of the kind should occur again. It was of course difficult to decide who should be entrusted with this delicate mission, and the choice actually fell on Chung-Ho, the Governor of Tien-tsin, the very man, as has been seen, to whose culpable neglect the tragedy was due. But for the fact that the unfortunate country of France was then in the throes of her most awful experience of modern times, the probability is that the blood-stained Tartar would have met with a reception in its capital very little to his taste. As things were, however, no one in France suspected who he really was, public attention was concentrated on the war. The death of the French missionaries in remote Tien-tsin was already forgotten in the anguish of defeat, and the necessity for organizing the defence against the ruthless invaders. The Empire had fallen; the Emperor was a prisoner in the hands of the Germans—safer there than he would have been amongst his own disillusioned subjects. The interview with M. Thiers was put off again and again, until at last a comparatively leisure time was secured. Then, alas! that I should have to write it, the Chinese traitor was presented to the Chief of the State with all the ceremonial due to foreign ambassadors. He was escorted to the Elysée in a state-carriage by a guard of cuirassiers, and received with all the usual honours.

TWO PRIESTS BURNT ALIVE

No good result ensued for French interests in China from this interview, and soon after the return of the envoy to his native country, yet another missionary, M. Hué, was assassinated in the province of Se-Tchuen; whilst not far from the scene of the murder of Margary, related in a previous chapter, two priests were burnt alive, and four of their proselytes cut to pieces.

But enough of these horrors, I must dwell on them no more, for I have no wish to intensify race hatred, or to raise French feeling against a nation with which we have a treaty of peace. I must, however, add just one word to show how indomitable is the missionary spirit in the religious orders of France. In 1876, when the country was beginning to settle down after the awful events of the preceding years, that is to say, six years after the massacre at Tien-tsin, another party of Sisters went to that very town to begin again the work of charity so tragically interrupted, although it was well known that there was no abatement in the bitterness of the feeling against foreigners, and that the mandarins were especially averse to female missionaries. The unselfish devotion, seeking for no earthly reward, of the saintly nuns is well illustrated by the reply made to me when I went to the head-quarters of the Sisterhood in the Rue de Bac, Paris, and asked the Lady Superior to give me the names of the martyrs of 1870 that I might render to them the honour so justly due. Those names were refused, "for," said the austere head of the order, "our nuns have won the greatest of all rewards already, and that is enough."

The new-comers to the site watered by the blood of the innocent, have proceeded exactly on the same lines as their predecessors; they opened a hospital and some schools, apparently in total ignorance of the dangers surrounding them. A tri-colour flag floats once more from the buildings under their control. The "Cyclamens," as lovers of flowers call the caps worn by the devoted Sisters, are once more familiar objects in the streets of Tien-tsin. May their labour of love be rewarded as it deserves, and may God temper the wind to them as He does to the lambs shorn of their fleece, for truly they sorely need the protection of Heaven in their defenceless condition! Fortunately, however, they are no longer so isolated as were the pioneers of missionary effort in 1870. In 1881 the port of Tien-tsin became connected by telegraph with Shanghai, where there is a large foreign population, and the Chinese have of late years had so many proofs that foreigners are not to be massacred or in any way injured with impunity, that there is some hope of the avoidance for the future of such tragedies as that we have recorded here.