Ch 19 - The Western Foothold in AsiaA Great HumiliationIn the summer of 1859, British forces suffered a military defeat attempting to breach the Hai River and march on Beijing to exchange treaty ratifications. The following year, a combined Allied Expeditionary Force captured the Dagu Forts and marched on Tianjin in a determined effort to redeem English honor and prestige. Shortly after signing the Tianjin treaties with China in the summer of 1858, the Allied forces departed North China. Frederick Bruce, Lord Elgin's brother, returned to London as courier of the British treaty for the Queen's ratification. Lord Elgin sailed to Nagasaki to negotiate a treaty with Japan, promising to return to Shanghai within a few months for the Shanghai Tariff Conference, as stipulated by the Treaty of Tianjin. The formal exchange of treaty ratification documents was scheduled for June 1859, but almost immediately after signing the treaties, Emperor Wenzong began having second thoughts about what had been accomplished, particularly with the British treaty. He had no intention of exchanging ratifications in Beijing and made it plain he had no intention of carrying out the treaty stipulations. He had Confucian tradition to fall back upon. It was said that after being captured by rebels, Confucius was released on the promise he would not travel to the State of Wei. After agreeing to the stipulation, Confucius departed and continued his journey. When asked by a disciple if it was right to violate his oath, Confucius replied, "This was a forced oath; the spirits do not hear such." Emperor Wenzong devised a secret plan which would exempt the British from all customs duties in exchange for the abrogation of the Treaty of Tianjin, or at least its four most objectionable provisions: diplomatic representation in Beijing, trade along the Yangtze River, inland travel by foreigners and the indemnity. The emperor directed Guiliang and Nanjing's Governor Bo Guiqing to submit the proposal to Lord Elgin at the Shanghai Tariff Conference. Stunned by the idea of abrogating the Treaty of Tianjin, the two men pleaded with the emperor to reconsider his plan. They emphasized that foreign traders and foreign government officials were two distinctly different entities. They argued that exempting the British merchants from customs duties would win their gratitude, but the British Crown would still insist on the complete execution of all treaty provisions. Furthermore, a tax exemption would give the British an unfair economic advantage and, in all likelihood, drive Chinese merchants into bankruptcy. Guiliang and Bo Guiqing convinced the emperor to drop his secret strategy and accept the idea of exchanging documents at Beijing. Shanghai sat over 800 miles from the imperial capital, which eliminated any Chinese sense of urgency from a foreign threat ( On March 1, 1859, Prime Minister Edward Geoffrey Stanley appointed Frederick Bruce as British Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to China. Bruce, whose able assistance helped conclude the British Treaty of Tianjin, was instructed to establish his residence in Shanghai, but to exchange treaty ratifications in Beijing. On his arrival in Shanghai in May, the Chinese tried to convince him to make the exchange there, in the city of his residence, but Bruce became irritated by the Chinese gambit and insisted that his trip to Beijing was a "matter of right, not of favor." Determined to enter Beijing as a representative of the British Crown, Bruce directed the fleet of British warships and troops assembled at Shanghai under the command of Admiral James Hope to proceed north to Tianjin. The British combined fleet, which included a a battleship, two frigates and thirteen gunboats, reached the mouth of the Hai River on June 18, 1859. Frederick Bruce did not move a large fleet against 's back door solely on his own responsibility. He was acting on secret instructions received from London. Just as they had in the past, and this time just before the scheduled exchange of treaty ratifications, the British were looking to "pick a quarrel" with the Chinese. On March 2, just one day after Frederick Bruce's appointment to China, Lord Elgin sent a dispatch to Rear Admiral Sir Michael Seymour. Acting on instructions from Lord Palmerston, Elgin expressed his hope that China would welcome the British representative when he arrived to establish a permanent diplomatic residence at Beijing. In anticipation of a Chinese refusal to permit such a residence, Lord Elgin wrote that, "Her Majesty's Government will desire that the Ambassador, when he proceeds to Tianjin, be accompanied by an imposing force." He suggested to Admiral Seymour that in the interest of expediency, he "concentrate at Shanghai at the earliest convenient period, a sufficient fleet of gunboats for this service, as Mr. Bruce's arrival in China cannot be long delayed." On May 2, 1859, Foreign Secretary James Harris sent a dispatch to Lord Elgin that approved his letter to Admiral Seymour and his announcement to "...the Imperial Commissioners that her Majesty's Government would not insist upon the residence of her Majesty's Minister being permanently fixed at Beijing." Harris added, "Her Majesty's Government also approve of your having suggested to Rear Admiral Seymour that a fleet of gunboats should be collected at Shanghai in order to accompany Mr. Bruce up the Peiho [Hai River]." Foreign Secretary Harris had allowed himself to be intimidated by the uproar in the London Times and other influential papers over the election of a Conservative Cabinet that was likely to thwart Lord Elgin's brilliant success in China under Lord Palmerston's instructions merely to justify its earlier vote of censure on Lord Palmerston's Canton bombardment. As a consequence, Secretary Harris relinquished all control of the initiative into Lord Elgin's hands. When Lord Elgin stated that since the Chinese had not yet ratified the treaty, British ships had no right to enter any Chinese river, Secretary Harris agreed. When Elgin thought they ought to show forbearance towards the Chinese with regard to establishing a British Embassy in Beijing, Secretary Harris agreed. Finally, after Elgin contradicted himself by claiming the right to enforce passage up the Hai River by an "imposing fleet of gunboats," once again, Harris agreed. An impending third war with China did not sit well with the British mercantile classes. They rode the British lion into battle once in 1857, because they expected to make significant commercial profits from the forced opening of the China market. In mid-1859, they were angry after seeing the benefits of the earlier treaty snatched from their grasp. They already knew that events in India and Europe looked menacing enough without the added complication of a wide-scale war in China. They had also not forgotten that tea imports fell off by nearly £24,000,000 in 1857, most of it lost from Canton. British merchants worried that a similar trade interruption would extend toward Shanghai and the other treaty ports. England fought the First Opium War in the interest of opium smuggling and ignited the Second Opium War over the Arrow Incident
The Chinese Government resigned itself to the fact that Frederick Bruce was going to push toward Beijing. They offered to escort the Anglo-French mission to the capital over the back route by way of the river city of Beidang, about seven miles north of the Dagu forts, if they consented to leave their vessels and troops. Frederick Bruce insisted that his stature demanded he take the route from Tianjin to Beijing along the main road. The Chinese warned him the local militia had blocked the entrance to the Hai River with sunken rafts, spikes, iron chains and bamboo booms as a defense against Taiping rebels and would not dismantle them. Furthermore, troops manning the north and south Dagu forts would not permit the British to enter the Hai River. Bruce brusquely dismissed the warning and issued an ultimatum; remove the obstacles within the week or British naval forces would enter the Hai River and force their way to Beijing. The Russian Treaty of Tianjin had already been ratified by this time and Emperor Wenzong had instructed his senior statesmen to receive and escort the American Embassy to the capital for the exchange of ratified copies of the American treaty. Despite Frederick Bruce's protestations, the Treaty of Tianjin contained no clause granting navigation rights on the Hai River to a squadron of Anglo-French warships. On June 25, just one hour before the ultimatum expired, a local Chinese governor invited the British to sail toward Beijing along the Bedang River, whose entrance was just ten miles north of Dagu. Frederick Bruce had no intention of "sneaking into " through the back door. He refused the invitation and insisted on taking his armed fleet up the Hai River. As soon as the ultimatum had expired, Bruce ordered Admiral James Hope to breach the blockade and open the way to Tianjin. A small contingent from the United States Navy was anchored near the mouth of the Hai River under orders to remain strictly neutral and stay out of trouble, even if a conflict developed between Chinese and British forces. From his flagship, American Commodore Josiah Tatnall III closely watched a small force comprised of 600 British marines and a company of engineers sail into the Hai River under orders to break the blockade. The guns of the Dagu Forts remained silent as the British cleared the outer barrier of iron stakes without incident. The landing boats carrying the British Marines arrived near the inner barrier at low tide and the troops became mired in the deep soft mud along the riverbank trying vainly to get ashore. Without warning, the Dagu forts opened fire and began raining shells on to the beach with surprising accuracy. Unable to sail further upriver, the British began a hasty retreat from the beach under heavy gunfire. Commodore Tatnall ignored his neutral status moved his frigate into the Hai River to aid the British. Turning his guns against the Dagu Forts, Tatnall ordered his men to assist the British evacuation from the deadly beach. Before the British managed to withdraw their force beyond artillery range from the Dagu Forts, Chinese gunners succeeded in sinking four gunboats, badly damaging two others and killing or wounding 434 men. Chinese losses during the engagement were minimal. The Chinese dealt the vaunted British a humiliating military defeat at the Dagu forts, tarnished their prestige and provided no small degree of encouragement to anti-foreign elements in China. The British and French ministers returned to Shanghai with their wounded pride. Less than one month later, John E. Ward, who replaced William Reed as America's envoy to China, accepted the Chinese invitation for an escort to Beijing. The embassy mission of twenty Americans and ten Chinese arrived in the river city of Beidang on July 20, 1859, where they were taken aboard large junks for the trip up the Hai River to Dongzhou. After an overland trek over stony roads, the Americans reached Beijing on July 27 and were housed in large, well-appointed, comfortable houses. Restricted from moving about the city, the Americans were also prohibited from visiting Russian envoy Nikolai Ignatiev, who had already established a residence in the capital. The treaty ratification documents were exchanged later at Beidang with Guiliang and the governor of Zhili. The American mission was treated with "high consideration and respect, with unceasing attention and courtesy" throughout their visit and the United States Government deemed the entire affair quite satisfactory. The British however, described the American reception a dishonorable affair. The Chinese attack on the British in the Hai River did not go unavenged. In October 1859, the British press, led by the London Times, began to intimate that the Dagu Forts wreaked havoc among the British marines because they were using Russian-built guns and that Russian officers had directed the highly accurate shelling. One paper went so far as to write, "We now perceive how closely the policy of Russia is interwoven with that of ; we detect great movements on the Amur; we discern large Cossack armies manoeuvring far beyond Lake Baikal, in the frozen dreamland on the twilight borders of the Old World; we trace the course of innumerable caravans; we espy a special Russian envoy [General Nikolai Muravyov, Governor-General of Eastern Siberia] making his way, with secret designs, from the remoteness of Eastern Siberia to the secluded Chinese metropolis; and well may public opinion in this country burn at the thought that foreign influences have had a share in procuring our disgrace and the slaughter of our soldiers and sailors." The insinuation bears the hallmark of Lord Palmerston and his invariable and constant talent for turning conflicts with weak Asiatic states into matters of English honor and prestige. An enraged Palmerston was quoted as saying, "We shall teach such a lesson to these perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport of fear." British Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell formally reprimanded Frederick Bruce on November 10, 1859, for his precipitant use of military force against the Chinese. Bruce acknowledged his poor judgment and admitted he really had no authority to go to Beijing under existing treaty rights. Although he did have the right of passage under the new Treaty of Tianjin, the document had not yet been ratified. Not only did the new treaty not specify the route to be taken to Beijing, but under accepted international agreements, inland rivers were not open to foreign warships in time of peace. For his part, Commodore Tatnall justified his role in the naval action in the Hai River by remarking that, "Blood is thicker than water," an expression that has always been associated with his name. The British Crown, having recognized its blunder at the Dagu Forts, remained determined to enforce the exchange of treaty ratifications in Beijing. Having lost confidence in Frederick Bruce, London reassigned Lord Elgin to lead a second China mission. In a document dated April 17, 1860, Foreign Secretary Lord Russell gave Elgin the freedom to make decisions on the spot: "It is the opinion of Her Majesty's Government that ... the Plenipotentiaries should be sole judges of all matters pertaining to negotiations - when they should commence, when break off, what terms be accepted, what refused." Approximately thirteen thousand British troops gathered at Hong Kong under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Hope Grant, a veteran of the First Opium War in China. Among the units pulled from England, South Africa and India were eight English infantry regiments, including the Royal Scots, the 2nd Queen's Regiment, the Buffs, the 60th Royal Rifles, the 44th Essex, and the 67th South Hampshire; three Indian units, including the 20th and 22nd Punjab Regiments; two regiments of irregular cavalry including the 1st Sikh Cavalry, half of the King's Dragoon Guards, and elements of the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers and Madras Sappers. A French force of 6,700 troops under French commander General de Montaubon arrived from France. Skirting the South China coast, the combined allied expeditionary force of 41 warships, 143 transport ships and nearly 20,000 men, including about 2,500 Chinese coolies, sailed into the Gulf of Bo Hai. The French force established a forward base of operations at Yantai on the north coast of the Shandong Peninsula, while the British set up their staging area at Dalian (Port Arthur) on the western end of the Liaodong Peninsula. From their blocking positions on either side of entrance to the Gulf of Bo Hai, the expeditionary force sailed toward the North China coast on July 24. Instead of assaulting the Dagu forts directly, the fleet closed on the city of Beidang, seven miles north of the Dagu Forts guarding the mouth of the Hai River. Moving to within ten miles of the China coast in unsettled weather on July 31, the fleet commanders decided to wait until the following day to proceed. On August 1, General Sutton's 1st Brigade climbed aboard landing boats with their weapons and stores and were towed toward the beach by two small gunboats. The troop carriers anchored unopposed in a heavy rain on the edge of a wide muddy tidal flat about a mile south of the two forts overlooking the mouth of the Bedang River. After struggling for nearly a mile through knee-deep mud and securing their beachhead, General Sutton's men reached the raised causeway leading south from Beidang to the village of Sinhe. That night, Harry Parkes, Lord Elgin's interpreter and the former British consul at Canton, entered the town of Beidang and learned that both forts on the Bedang River were deserted. The following morning, British and French troops occupied the "noisome, smelly" town surrounded on all sides by thick mud, and made preparations for the march south to attack the Dagu Forts from the rear. Virtually the entire population evacuated the area and moved south toward Dagu.
After capturing Sinhe, the 1st and 2nd divisions assaulted and cleared the walled village of Danggu on the north bank of the Hai River, about two miles north of Dagu. Thirty-six French and British guns, including two batteries of new 7-inch rifled breech-loading Armstrong field guns, pounded Danggu as companies of the Royal Scots and the 60th Rifles maneuvered into position to breach the village walls. The Chinese fled the village, leaving some forty-five cannon and few casualties. The Allies lost not a man and suffered only about fifteen wounded in the attack. Royal Engineers spent much of the next seven days bridging the numerous canals and ditches along the route to the Dagu Forts, while supplies of ammunition, food, guns and animals were moved south from Beidang. The three Dagu Forts, located 100 miles southeast of Beijing in the coastal swamp and salt marshes at the entrance to the Hai River, presented a formidable obstacle. Thirty-foot-high castellated walls and a pair of broad water-filled moats, 45 ft wide and 15 ft deep, surrounded each fort. Thousands of upright bamboo spikes and entanglements of tree limbs and brush barricades protected the ground between the walls and the moats. In addition, each fort had a single narrow ramp leading to a high central platform from which guns could be aimed and fired in all directions. The Allies stood ready to subdue the well-entrenched Chinese with a combined force of 3,500 British and French troops backed by heavy artillery and a rocket battery. On August 20, Lieutenant-General Sir Hope Grant sent Captain Graham and Harry Parkes under a flag of truce to demand a surrender of the forts. The Chinese refused to yield. This time there would be no frontal attack on the forts from the seaward. The assault would come by land from the rear, an action Manchu soldiers generally regarded as "most unsportsmanlike." Early on the morning of August 21, British artillery began a heavy barrage against the northernmost, and smallest, of the Dagu Forts. When the barrage lifted just after 7 a.m., men from the 2nd Division, including the 67th and 44th regiments, charged across the open ground toward the outer defenses. Chinese 6 and 12 pound guns returned fire as the allied troops pushed forward, swimming the outer moats, quickly building makeshift bridges, and smashing through the bamboo stakes and tangled debris in a determined effort to reach the base of the fort's outer walls. Soldiers from the 44th and 67th regiments pushed theri way into the fortress through small holes opened in the outer walls by the morning's barrage. As the Queen's Colors were raised atop the parapet, Allied troops fought hand-to-hand with the Chinese, pushing them along the ramp and ultimately crowding them into a narrow space near the top of the fortress grounds. The Chinese defiantly resisted defeat and fought almost to the last man. A brief period of "mopping up" put the first of the three Dagu Forts totally in British hands. After watching the defeat of the first fort, the other two soon hoisted their white flags and surrendered. Despite the formidable defenses and the stubborn resistance of the Chinese, allied casualties were relatively light. The British 67th regiment lost only 10 men killed and 67 wounded. Allied gunboats began shelling the northern fort near the mouth of the Hai River. One of the eight-inch shells detonated the fort's powder magazine, triggering a massive explosion that rocked the entire area. By this time, Prince Sange Linsin, referred to by the British troops as "Sam Collinson," had fled the area and retreated upriver toward Tianjin. Within twenty-four hours, Hangfu, the Governor-General of Zhili Province, signed the surrender of the Dagu forts and all forts along both sides of the Hai River, including Tianjin. The guns that had rained such heavy destruction on Admiral Hope's ships and men in June 1859 were silenced, and the formidable stakes, chains and bamboo booms blocking the Hai River were finally cleared, thus opening the river to Tianjin and Beijing. In a letter to his mother, written after the surrender of the Dagu Forts, Lieutenant Colonel Garnet J. Wolesley, a staff officer serving under Lieutenant General Grant, wrote, "My Dearest Mother, the Third China War is over." He was quite wrong. It had only just begun.
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- North China Coast
Eleven days after landing on Chinese soil, British and French troops began their march south along the causeway to the small village of Sinhe. The British got their first exposure to Chinese horsemen skilled at shooting from the saddle on August 12, when a large troop of Manchu cavalry led by the Manchu Prince Sange Linsin, a highly regarded general fresh from an earlier victory over Taiping rebels, attacked Sir Robert Napier's 2nd Division as it approached Sinhe from the northwest along a well-worn cart track. British rifle and artillery fire and a fierce charge by the King's Dragoon Guards drove the Manchus from the field. Meanwhile, Sir John Michels led his 1st Division down the causeway accompanied by 1,000 French troops. After fighting a series of minor engagements with strong Manchu cavalry outposts protecting the village perimeter, the Allies finally occupied Sinhe. The well-kept kitchen-gardens full of vegetables and enough grain and hay to last the Allies for six weeks provided ample evidence that a large Manchu force of perhaps 20,000 men had been stationed in the area.