XV
SOME FOREIGN TYPES IN CHINA, AND THEIR INFLUENCE
The mainstay of Chinese revenue, and the main security as yet for foreign loans, is the National (formerly Imperial) Customs of five per cent. duty ad valorem. The organization was started at Canton in 1859 by Sir Robert Hart, an Armagh Irishman who was transferred from the British consular service. He served as head from that year until his retirement with a fortune of $500,000 in 1910. Sir Robert Hart lived in princely style at Peking and managed the service honestly. He has been criticized for taking so large a reward from straitened China by members of the India civil service, who are satisfied to retire on $1,000 a year after even more arduous service. In 1901 Sir Robert Hart wrote his book, These from the Land of Sinim. He was a brilliant propagandist for things Chinese, the most popular Occidental who ever served China, though he was not so heroic a figure as “Chinese” Gordon. Sir Robert Bredon was next in office, and in 1911 Sir Francis Aglen was put in charge. The son of an English clergyman, a well equipped sinologue, trained under Sir Robert Hart, Mr. Aglen is a thorough leader of this great work, which includes loan departments, lighthouse service, a cadet school, a pension bureau, and an internal revenue organization to a degree. As British commerce is the largest in China, being nearly four times as large as America’s trade, the British name the head of the customs service. Many Americans, Germans and French are also employed, and a thorough knowledge of Chinese and its dialects is insisted upon by Sir Francis Aglen.
In the region about Shanghai and Nanking, the name of “Chinese” Gordon (General Charles) still lives for his victorious leadership of Li Hung Chang’s army, which crushed the Taiping rebellion, and saved the Manchu throne for the time. General Gordon had many bitter quarrels with Li Hung Chang, insisting that assassination and murder must not follow a victory. That the rebels of 1911 in this same region did not forget Gordon’s precepts was shown by their leniency under great provocation, after capturing Nanking from the Manchus. No foreigner who has aided in forming the ten divisions of China’s Northern army has had the personality or exercised the influence that Gordon did, and in the great trial of the revolution and the mutinies of 1911–12 the army showed frequently that no strong personality had inspired the men with a fixed purpose, honor or patriotism.
About 1869 a nephew of President Van Buren, John Sheffield Van Buren, went out to Yokohama as an assistant in the consular office of his uncle. He was soon in Hongkong as agent of the Pacific Mail, Occidental and Oriental, and Toyo Kisen Kaisha trans-Pacific steamship companies, and was in touch with the Chinese of that great crown colony for thirty-three years. He had an intimate knowledge of China, and trained many of its commercial men who have risen high in the commercial and diplomatic affairs of the new republic. In Hongkong he was looked upon as one of the ablest minds that linked the West and the East. He was devoted to Southern China, developed its trade, dry docks and shipping, and formulated China’s first trans-Pacific steamship line, the Chinese Merchants’ Steamship Company of 1903. The famous Chinese guilds of Kwangtung province looked upon him as a sage, and sought his aerie retreat over Robinson Road on the cliff for many a conference under the swaying punkahs. He was a very tall thin man, with a long countenance, great eyes, and a slow, full, round voice. It was impossible to irritate him to heated expression. Like the mills of the gods, he ground slow but exceedingly fine. He used to bemoan the fact that Americans who managed Oriental companies generally do so from America, before being first experienced in the Orient, and he was a strong advocate of the British system of moving partners who would serve their seven-years term in the Orient, seven at home and then back to the Orient again. He was decidedly in an inferior field in commerce. If American diplomacy had been steadier in the East, freed from the spoils system, his mentality and training were perfectly fitted for a great American minister at Peking, or a great consul-general at Canton. He was a deep student of the Filipino, as well as the Chinese, but was altogether in favor of the latter. He was more pessimistic perhaps than was justified regarding what America will be able to do with the Filipino and the Philippines. A thorough student of the Far East, and the representatives of all nations who gathered there, smiling like Buddha in his vast but reserved knowledge, nothing irritated him so much in his official duties as listening to the conversation of the official American globe-trotter, who dropped into Hongkong for a week, and then drove contrary opinions down the throats of such sinologues as he was, and wrote books, most of the prophecies of which remain as a joke when compared with events. There was one American senator and another American official who wrote books of Far East prophecies whose “cocksureness”, like that of the Kanaka surf-rider, used to strike to the core of the resentment of this usually placid Solon of the East, who died in the terrific heat of the Red Sea in 1910, worn out with his long life near the equator, and never having written the books that were within him, and which he really owed the world. His sister married an Austrian nobleman. The family homestead was at Englewood, New Jersey, and on his mother’s side he was connected with the Sheffields and Phelpses, of Yale College memory.
There have been other notable Americans who served in China. Colonel John S. Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla leader, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1878–85, and General E. S. Bragg, of the Wisconsin Iron Brigade of the Civil War, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1902–4. The general had a sharp wit and tongue, and is known world wide for these two phrases which got into domestic and international politics: “We love Cleveland for the enemies he has made;” and, “You can as easily make a citizen of a Cuban as a whistle out of a pig’s tail.” The contretemps can be understood when it is explained that the general was at the time consul at Havana. Like the Arabs of Longfellow, after this incident and the receipt of some mail from Washington, he “folded his tent and silently stole away” for Hongkong! General Bragg, at Antietam, was approached by General Gibbon’s aide, with orders to push the enemy as long as it was safe, and the former’s famous reply was: “It has been d—— unsafe here for the last half hour. Forward again, Wisconsin.” Mr. Rounsevelle Wildman, author of China’s Open Door, and editor of Overland Monthly, consul-general at Hongkong, where he amused the staid Britons by his energetic efforts to sell his worthy book, lost his life aboard the Pacific Mail steamer Rio, which sank with all on board just outside the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Daniel Webster sent his son Fletcher as secretary of the famous Cushing Commission, which visited Hongkong, Canton and Macao. Secretary William H. Seward later passed over the same waters, and I have seen Admiral Greeley, of Polar fame, picking out the great war secretary’s steps at Wanchi, Hongkong. The Tibet traveler and author, A. H. Savage Landor, I knew at Hongkong. Some of us believed his thrilling tales of escape after torture and some of us were cynical. He was a worn man then, grateful for favors that are usually accorded to the traveler, an enthusiast, a student of the Western Chinese, and a courageous fellow.
In 1911, America, Britain, Germany and France arranged to loan China about $100,000,000 for railways and new currency. A neutral financial adviser was found to be necessary, and President Vissering, of the Dutch Java Bank, was agreed upon by the four nations, with Japan favorably impressed. If the loan agreements go through, and when affairs assume their normal course in China, Doctor Vissering will have opportunity to leave his mark in a wider sphere in the Far East. Mr. Hillier has long represented the British financial interests in Peking; Mr. Straight, the American; and Doctor George E. Morrison, of the London Times staff, has been adviser to both imperial and republican governments at Peking.
One of the most remarkable imperialists who ever came to China was Paul Doumer. He was a French newspaper man, and came East as consul, later becoming governor of Indo-China, which he sealed to France with an iron hand. He made Haiphong, Hanoi and Saigon remarkable centers of civilization, sanitation, music, art, architecture, commerce and French imperialism. Cost was nothing to him. He seemed to make or hypnotize money after he had hypnotized governments and financiers with his eloquence and ambition. He formed Legionary troops and held a strong navy in the East. He brought the great Messageries Maritimes steamship line from Marseilles to Saigon. He grasped Kwangchou Bay in Kwangtung province, and made Hongkong tremble for her prestige over Canton and the southwest, her old imperial sphere. Then he dreamed great visions of imperialism, as Rhodes was dreaming in Africa, Curzon in India, A. Colquhoun in Burma, Kitchener in the Soudan, and some Americans like Roosevelt and Taft in Panama and the Philippines. He, “le petit Paul Doumer,” would build a six hundred-mile railway, much of the right of way where men had never been before, from Haiphong to Yunnan, in the heart of Southwest China, turn the British flank at the headwaters of the Yangtze River, and link Yunnan, and some day Chingtu, with Marseilles and Paris. What if fever, one hundred bridges in fifty miles, a cost of $100,000 a mile of road, and a little traffic had to be conquered, he would build to the center of China, dividends or no dividends. By 1910 he and his men had done it. The British, fired by Colquhoun and Curzon, raced him from Burma, but he has beat them by fifteen years. The Chinese do not love the French, and they are building from Yunnan to Nanning to reach Hongkong; but it is largely French for the present at Yunnan. Hongkong and Mandalay have been flanked. The Chinese would have preferred the Americans, or the British, who do not covet Oriental land. The French aim to push that railway up to Chingtu, and cut China in half. Yunnan City, on its high plateau, once the farthest from Peking and civilization, is now a center of remarkable modernity, the Chinese emulating the French in lighted streets, water-works, factories, modern prisons, trade schools, uniformed police, and a provincial army and arsenal of modern type. If you ask how has Paul Doumer influenced China, circumspice at Yunnan City. Before Paul Doumer came East, following the dream of empire, if you had been asked which was the last city of China that would adopt progress, you would have said “inaccessible Yunnan,” whereas it has been almost the first. Doumer’s most notable book on China is L’Indo Chine Française, with the emphasis on the Française!
For two decades the name of Mr. Rumor (I shall call him that for the purposes of this sketch), of Hongkong, was synonymous with the rocket which seemed to have become a fixed star. He was a Canadian, born in the little riverine town of Belleville on the St. Lawrence. Adventure found him in Hongkong, a clerk in the Public Works Department of the Colonial Government, at a child’s salary in a land costly for the foreigner. The Chinese were beginning to use wheat flour in place of rice, which had become valuable for export. Rumor acted as their adviser during lunch hours, when the fervid sun of the Orient burned up the tamarind’s shade and fried the papaw’s thick leaves. In time he himself quietly imported consignments of Oregon flour. His Chinese compradore was honest and divided the profits, though the compradore did all the work. Rumor grew richer, and became an agent for Northern Pacific American mills. As the years passed, the able and honest Chinese compradore brought him orders sufficient to load many full ships that breasted the slow waves of the Pacific. The Chinese compradore lived plainly, and saved enough money to become a financial power in the great imperial colony. Rumor then went into military, naval and diplomatic society, built one of the finest aerie mansions in the Far East on Hongkong’s peak of palaces near the unique tram on Barker Road, where a thousand feet of picturesque cliff fell from its foundation. He imported Kentucky saddle horses and racers, and at great expense put Canadian sheep on the foothills of old China to see if they could conquer the bamboo grass. He owned a steam yacht and a sailing yacht, gave musicales to the military of the garrison station at both his down-town chambers on the Praya and at his mountain château, and entertained an American governor of the East who became a president. He was a handsome man, the mirror of fashion and manners in the cosmopolitan colony. His was the easy bearing of those who associate with princes and know their standing. Like Beau Brummel, of Piccadilly, he could make a griffin’s social fortune by being seen walking with him down the Praya. Stories were told of his recklessness in hours of play. He was a dashing character, altogether. He made annual trips to the great cities that line the equatorial belt of the world and to capitals of the North. He seemed to have tapped the mines of Eldorado.
At last, he would add fame to riches. Hongkong was about to enter the great educational arena in the awakening of the Far East with a splendid university. Hormusjee Mody, the Prince of Parsees, gave the land. Who would give the endowment and thus perhaps secure a knighthood? Why, Rumor, who at last was truly popular and not envied alone, for he was now about to do something for others than himself. In the meantime he had started a Chinese flour mill at Junk Bay, Hongkong. He would startle the whole economic world, as Harbin did, by grinding Chinese grain on the spot, and he would import less Australian and Oregon flour. There seemed to be no end to Rumor’s extension or the glamour which he cast over his compradore and the Chinese bankers, as well as the American mills. Many tried to emulate him and steal his trade, or imitate his “chops” on the flour bags; but the Chinese, “olo custom”, clung to Rumor, who alone expanded, came, saw and conquered. San Francisco was shaken by an earthquake, and New York by a financial panic. The twin waves went round the world, and met in Hongkong harbor one dark night, just as Rumor, purposely unaccompanied by a white man, was returning in his yacht Canada from his flour mill at Junk Bay, all the long miles of the famous harbor to the landing under his mountain palace and the university site. No one knows much about it, except that the crew at last missed him overboard. The tidal financial wave had swamped him. He could ride its crest no more in splendor. The great university will bear many names, but probably not the name of Rumor as its endower when the accounts of the estate are balanced. Three Chinese, of Singapore, stepped forward and endowed the university with nearly $500,000 gold, although they were at the same time holding up the hands of the exhausted Chinese republican revolution.
Sir Matthew Nathan came to Hongkong as governor from hot and feverish Nigeria. Hongkong is a moist hot place, very near the direct sun of the equator, and men who wish to live long go slow in the luxuries of work, liquor, etc. It is a good place to send your victim, as David disposed of Uriah “in the forefront of the hottest battle”. Sir Matthew’s enthusiasm was to be every inch a “knower” (mandarin) of the people, and a governor. He wore his staff out. He was up at unseasonable hours in addition to his regular duties. He worked as hard on the hot Praya as another man would on cool Piccadilly in March. Every emergency and occasion found him at hand, whether an awful fire, a new railway, or the launching of a great ship. The memorable typhoon of September, 1906, struck the unprepared colony which has been visited so often with these circular hurricanes. Sir Matthew seemed to superintend the rescuers at every spot of the long beach and harbor. When the steamboat Hankow holocaust occurred in October he worked, axe and arm, with the firemen. Little wonder that he died, really of exhaustion. He was a typical example of the grand old British civil service in China. He was heroic, unselfish, tireless, sympathetic, a man whose example lives to fire China with zeal and altruism.