Enemy at the gate Chinese style
Englishmen appearing in Fujian, Ningbo and Shanghai, 1832
Dramatis personae
On the Westerners' side:
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Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, supercargo (employee who did buying and selling) of the English East India Company in Guangzhou (old-style romanisation “Canton”)
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Karl Gutzlaff, originally from Stettin (then under Prussian rule), an opportunist flying the banner of Christianity
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Elijah Coleman Bridgman, a missionary from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM), based in Guangzhou
On the Chinese side:
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Provincial officials in Xiamen (old-style romanisation “Amoy”)
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Provincial officials in Fuzhou
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Provincial officials in Ningbo
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Provincial officials in Shanghai
Before I begin the story I must confess that “enemy at the gate” is a term I use to attract present-day readers. It is not an accurate description of how the Chinese felt when the event took place. Broadly speaking, before 1884, Western aggression was a problem only for the provincial officials. The common people looked on, at best with indifference, and often with malicious glee if the concerned government official happened to be someone they disliked.
The historian, with all the English and Chinese primary source material in front of her, can see that China was beseiged by enemies in 1832, the enemies being British merchants and American missionaries. But Emperor Daoguang and his ministers did not see it coming. History had told them that ruling houses had been toppled by ambitous or powerful local leaders, but no Chinese ruling house had ever been toppled by a few hundred foreign merchants. Besides, what benefit would the foreign merchants reap by the demise of the Celestial Empire? They had invested money to trade with China, and a quarrel with China would surely result in the loss of their capital.
What Emperor Daoguang and his ministers did not know was that English merchants were unlike Chinese merchants. For centuries Chinese merchants had been told that the emperor conferred on them a big favour by “allowing” them to trade. No one had ever pondered the logic behind such a line of reasoning, and as a result Chinese merchants were entirely under the thumb of their government. Not in his wildest dream would Emperor Daoguang envisage that in England it was the other way round - that English merchants had the power to pressurize their government into doing something they wanted.
What happened in 1832 was a prelude to the Opium War of 1839. The English East India Company factory in Guangzhou (old-style romanisation “Canton”) sent one of its employees to venture into other Chinese coastal cities, to investigate the prospects of British trade in those ports that had been denied them since 1759. The person chosen for the mission, Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, happened to be a bully. He bullied the provincial officials in Xiamen (old-style romanisation “Amoy”) in April, and did the same in Fuzhou in May. By the time he reached Shanghai in June he had become so bold that he did not hesitate to use brute force. In his own words:
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As we approached, the lictors hastily tried to shut the doors, and we were only just in time to prevent it, and pushing them back, entered the outer court of the office … After waiting a few minutes, and repeatedly knocking at the door, seeing no symptoms of their being open, Mr Simpson and Mr Stephens settled the point by two vigorous charges at the centre gate with their shoulders, which shook them off their hinges, and brought them down with a great clatter …
Such antics Lindsay no doubt learned from his father, who did exactly the same thing in Guangzhou 20 years earlier. Again, in the own words of Mr Lindsay senior:
In 1811 I was commodore of a large and valuable fleet belonging to the East India Company, then lying in the port of Canton … We proceeded on as fast we could go, and after advancing a short distance, we again got sight of the soldier, whom we discovered, with several others, in the act of shutting two very large folding gates … This was a very critical moment, for I instantly imagined it must be the Hoppo’s palace, and if the gates were once closed against us, all our labour was lost. I therefore loudly called out, “Hurrah to the gate!” - We in a body sprang forward and luckily reached it at the instant the gates were shut, but before they had time to get them bolted; with one consent we put our shoulders to them, and the gates flew open before us, throwing all those inside to the right and left. Our whole body immediately rushed in …
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A page from The Costume of China, showing a soldier armed with a matchlock gun. Painting by William Alexander, a member of the Macartney embassy to China in 1793-1794. Alexander added the remark that "the army of China is at present very ill disciplined; its strength consists only in its numbers, which would not compensate in the day of battle for their ignorance of military tactics, and want of personal courage".
The only difference between son and father was that Mr Lindsay senior told his story in a private letter, to his sister Lady Anne Barnard, and the story came down to posterity as a family paper. The son, on the other hand, included his antics in a report he sent to the English East India Company, and the fact that he made no attempt to hide his bullying tactics meant that he was confident no one would criticise him for his high-handed behaviour. His so-called “heated argument” with the Chinese officials on the subject of their calling Englishmen “barbarians” was all for show. The real message he wanted to send his fellow countrymen was that China was rich, its government cowardly and stupid. To all the people in Britain waiting to seek their fortune in China that was sweet music indeed.
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Lindsay did not forget to play the “people” card. He emphasized that wherever he went the common people were very friendly to them. In other words it was only the provincial officials who denied the English entry to their ports, whereas the people welcomed the English with open arms. It would have been more accurate if he had said that wherever he and his comrades went they were surrounded by a large crowd, which was nothing extraordinary, given that no Europeans had made an appearance in Fujian or Ningbo for 75 years. On top of that Gutzlaff, his swashbuckling partner, was giving them free medicine. And it was not exactly true when Lindsay claimed that the common people wanted to trade with the English. All those common people who approached Lindsay wanted opium, not English woollen or cloth.
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For his mission Lindsay had enlisted the help of Karl Gutzlaff, someone originally from Stettin (then under Prussian rule) and purportedly attached to the Netherlands Missionary Society when he arrived in Guangzhou in December 1831. The religious monthly journal Chinese Repository lauded him in 1832 as “having relinguished the most inviting considerations, even royal patronage, to commence the humble labors of a missionary in the East”. But judging from what he did in the decades before and after the Opium War one can see that Gutzlaff was nothing more than a “soldier of fortune”, except that, unlike a mercenary, the service he offered was not military but linguistic. He clearly had a talent for languages. During a stay of three years in Siam (present-day Thailand) he successfully learned the Chinese language from the Chinese people there, who were either living in Siam or were visiting Siam to trade.
The fact that Gutzlaff had been to Tianjin (old-style romanisation “Teen-tsin”), plus the fact that he knew how to strike up a friendship with the native Chinese in the coastal provinces, made him a much welcomed person to the British merchants in Guangzhou. From 1832 onwards he was busily employed in one venture after another. By the time war broke out between Britain and China Gutzlaff could afford to throw away the evangelistic banner, and led the life of an employee of the British colonial government.
Whilst British merchants sought new markets for their opium and woollens American missionaries came to China to convert “heathens” into Christians. One of the pioneers was Elijah Coleman Bridgman, from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He arrived in Guangzhou in February 1830 with fellow missionary David Abeel, the latter with a duty to take care of the spiritual need of the seamen in China.
Like Lindsay, Bridgman was not content with being confined to only one city in China. But unlike Lindsay he dared not force his way into other provinces, because there were no United States warships cruising in Asian waters, ready to pounce on any Chinese officials who did any harm to American citizens. The only thing Bridgman could do was to attack the Chinese government with words, since he had no cannons or guns at his disposal. He started an English monthly journal, the Chinese Repository, in May 1832, and in the subsequent 20 years he did two things, namely to bad-mouth China to the English-speaking world, and to supply intelligence to the British merchants in Guangzhou who were hell-bent on making war with China.
So Bridgman filled the pages of the Chinese Repository with news
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about the Chinese emperor wanting to put one whole race of minority people to the sword;
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about the Guangdong governor’s son taking opium to give away to the court officials in Beijing;
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about poor parents selling their children;
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about local magistrates torturing common people and seizing their property;
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about the plight of Chinese women (citing as an example that Confucius divorced his wife without giving a reason);
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about women’s bound feet;
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about infanticide not considered a crime;
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about parricide in a respectable family;
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about government relief to the poor being a nihility;
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about the treasury department boosting its income by selling offices;
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about the misconduct of members of the imperial clan;
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about provincial governments utterly incapable of curbing banditry or insurrections.
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For the benefit of the foreigners residing in Guangzhou Bridgman collected information about the Chinese military. The Chinese navy was a nihility - he wrote in the Chinese Repository: there is the name of going to sea, but there is no going to sea in reality. He also managed to get hold of the memorials that the Guangdong high officials sent to the emperor, plus the emperor’s responses, and translated them into English. That espionage and language skill combined first came into good use when, in 1834, two British warships, under Lord Napier, made their way to Huangpu (old-style romanisation “Whampoa”) unopposed. The panic and powerlessness of the Guangdong government was exposed for every foreigner to see. In later years the Chinese Repository definitely helped the British win the Opium War.
With such hungry and clever enemies at the gate China stood no chance of remaining aloof. If the historian wants to find fault with Emperor Daoguang then he was guilty of not buying the friendship of the missionaries. Emperor Kangxi gave jobs to a large number of Jesuits, and from the Jesuits he knew what was happening in Europe in the late 17th/early 18th century. But Emperor Jiaqing had sent home most of the Jesuits, with the exception of a few Portuguese who served in the Directorate of Astronomy. The Portuguese had a vested interest in Macao, and they had more to gain by keeping Emperor Daoguang in the dark.
The fault of the Guangdong government was their being too lazy to learn more about the foreign merchants. They wanted an easy life, so they chose to believe that the English could not do without Chinese tea, or that the English could not fight once they were on dry land. Not a single official could read the English newspapers - there were three others apart from the Chinese Repository - that were circulating out of Guangzhou. Their enemies knew their every move, yet they knew absolutely nothing about their enemies. To the historian it seems a certainty that Qing China was bound to be defeated in any conflict with Britain. But then again things always seem obvious with hindsight.
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Finally, for the sake of completeness, I shall give a brief account of what happened to the three protagonists of the present story. Hugh Hamilton Lindsay got his war. After the Treaty of Nanking was signed in 1842 he set up Lindsay & Co in Hong Kong and Shanghai. But Lindsay himself no longer went to China. He stayed in England, and between 1841 and 1847 he was a Tory MP, admitting later that he “entered the House to advocate and support the interests of my brother merchants in China”. Lindsay & Co did well in Hong Kong and Shanghai, but that did not stop the company from going bust in 1865. Lindsay had diversified into the coal business in the new British colony at Labuan, Borneo, and it was the Labuan venture that brought the company down. Here I cannot help thinking of the hong-merchants in Guangzhou in pre-Opium War decades, who went bankrupt one after another. English writers often claim that the hong-merchants were “bled dry” by the Guangdong officials. I would very much like to hear why Lindsay, who did not suffer any “bleeding” from corrupt officials, went bankrupt.
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Karl Gutzlaff had also come out well from the Opium War. He received a nice salary from the Hong Kong government until his death in 1851. He even had a street named after him.​​
Present-day photo showing Gutzlaff Street in Hong Kong
​​​​As regards Elijah Coleman Bridgman, the Chinese Repository ceased to be published after 1850, for unknown reasons. In 1854, when the Taipings had become masters of most cities along the Yangzi River, Bridgman paid his “fellow Christians” a visit, ironically in an American warship, the Susquehanna. I wonder how Bridgman truly felt when he discovered that the Taipings were perfectly capable of using the Bible to their own advantage. Even the word “Taiping”, literally “peace”, was a word frequently used by Bridgman himself. According to Lindesay Brine, an officer in the British Royal Navy, and an eye-witness of that event:
… their claim to universal dominion on earth is put forth in language most unequivocal. As the Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord, is the only one true God, the Father of the souls of all nations under heaven; so their heavenly king is the peaceful and true sovereign of all nations under heaven … from these partly true and partly false premises they draw the conclusion, that as all nations ought to obey and worship the only true God, so ought they to bow submissively and bring tribute to their heavenly king Hung-siu-tsuen.
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Bridgman might not want to admit it, but he could not justifiably claim that he had taken China out of “the delusions of Satan”, which was what he set out to do when he came to China in 1830. After 20 years of hard work he found the heathen despot of China still on the throne, but at the same time another despot had come into existence, though this second despot was flying a Christian flag.
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In the 1860s American missionaries realized that equating the Chinese emperor with Satan was a counter-productive strategy, so they became friendly with the heathen ruling house. Readers interested in Sino-American relations in the 19th century might like to read another story on this same website, in the “China and the West” series, under the title “China and United States historically”.
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