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Foreigners Within the Gates: The Legations at Peking

By Michael J Moser and Yeone Wei-Chih Moser

Published by Serindia Publications

Available at Asia Books and Kinokuniya Books, Price 2,795.

 

Reviewed by Manote Tripathi

The Nation

 

The world may seem to be scrambling today for pieces of the China market, but

Michael Moser points out that this reached fever pitch in the 19th century. This

coffeetable book chronicles the rise and fall of the old Legation Quarter in

Peking. At the heart of it is the West's struggle with China in the interest of free

trade, the rule of law and Christianity.

 

The impact triggered a chain of events that would shape China's history: the

Nanjing Treaty, the fall of the last dynasty, the loss of Hong Kong to Britain, the

rise of the Chinese republic and the purge of foreigners. The scramble seems far

from over.

 

Moser, a lawyer, lived in the 1980s in the old brick house that had been the

Belgian First Secretary's residence. He gleans much of his information from

primary diplomatic sources from the 1800s, with some attention given to the

Chinese material too. The result is a minutely researched story of a longlost

community.

 

China, with its ports, huge marketplace and abundant tea, silk and other

products, became an obvious target for the imperial, mercantile and religious

interests of the rival powers of Western Europe.

 

The European and American trade envoys were upset with the 1760 Canton

System, which restricted their countries' trade activity to that southern port, and

because of it remained at loggerheads for another century with China's last

dynasty, the Manchu (Qing).

 

While Britain was the foremost military power on the planet, the Manchu

emperors saw China as the centre of the universe - "richer, more powerful and

culturally superior to all of its neighbours". The author asserts that China's sense

of separateness was manifested by "the wall", beyond which were the

barbarians who, in need of the emperor's protection, made annual visits to

Peking bearing tribute.

 

Western envoys fared no better in terms of prestige. The emperors may have

had Western art in their private collections, but the foreigners remained "devils"

in their estimation.

The tribute system afforded the Westerners their only access to the Imperial

Palace, but while they were ready to exchange gifts, they balked at kowtowing -

laying prostrate and making nine knocks of the head on the floor - before

the "Son of Heaven", the Emperor.

 

As a result, Britain's first envoy to the court of Emperor Qian Long, Lord Amherst

in 1793, failed, as did Lord Macartney in 1816. Macartney found the emperor's

claims hard to swallow: "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance, and lacks no products within its own borders. There is therefore no need to import the

manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce."

           

Amherst said he would kowtow if a Chinese mandarin of an equal rank did the

same before a portrait of the British Prince Regent. The Chinese ignored him.

But the kowtow was only a symbol. The real issue was trade, and the Europeans

saw their chances of selling their wares to China diminishing.

As the workshop of the world, Britain saw free trade as more than an absence of

protective tariffs. The implication was that the state should stand aside and let

goods flow. Civilising China might improve its prospects, so rather than coal and

iron, it exported to China Adam Smith's freemarket policies, John Stuart Mill's

laissezfaire notions - and Christianity.

 

The Victorians tended to view even the Asians living in England with suspicion.

Chinese Lascars in London were associated with filth and disease. "Never trust

the Chinese," Henry Courtney Selous seemed to imply in his painting of the

opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851. Seen sneaking into the midst of the

Archbishop of Canterbury and Queen Victoria was an apparent Manchu

representative.

 

If Victorian values gave England its economic and social progress (the plight of

the working class notwithstanding), perhaps China would realise the benefits of

adopting liberalism and an opendoor policy. But when the West pressed its

demands and China resisted, Moser says, the West resorted to force.  

 

The Opium War followed exactly this pattern. When push came to shove the

initial result was the unequal Treaty of Nanjing of 1842, further enraging China

with its offending concessions. Among other things, British nationals were given

extraterritorial rights in China.

It took the Second Opium War - an AngloFrench conflict with China involving 41 warships and 16,000 soldiers - before the idea of Peking hosting a Legation

Quarter was accepted. Eleven Western nations set up shop, and quickly demonstrated that freetrade diplomacy was all about wealth and nothing else. Life was "an endless round of

balls, picnics and theatrics", Moser writes. The British Legation was known for

the best dinner parties, the Italian for the elegance of its architecture. Moser

reveals that a British envoy dressed in a dinner jacket even when dining alone.

 

The quarter was the antithesis of the "vile" local people beyond its boundaries

and the city streets like "public latrines", all "indescribably filthy".

Soon the Imperial Court discouraged citizens from mingling with the foreigners,

and the formidable mass of Chinese xenophobia surfaced. The 1900 Siege of the

Legations by the secret society known as the Boxers revealed its true face.

That summer a series of grisly murders left 78 foreigners dead and 179

wounded. Missionaries were killed in the thousands, ostensibly because the

steeples of their churches cast unwelcome shadows on the shrines below,

disrupting the feng shui and causing misfortune.

 

Moser believes there was more to it than that. The ultraconservative government

of the Empress Dowager, he writes, secretly supported the Boxers in their lethal

effort to root out the foreign element, which was deemed a threat to the Dragon

Throne.

 

Thanks to the moreadvanced firepower of an International Relief Force  - a mix

of mainly Japanese soldiers and Sikhs sent from British India - the quarter

survived and carried on as an even more "exclusive" enclave.

That would finally come to an end when the Red Army took hold of Peking in

1948.

 

This book is an excellent read, with lots of rarely seen photos from the heyday of

the legation community. Images of the shots of suspected Boxers being

beheaded are toned down somewhat by views of a tranquil city that has all but

disappeared under its current name.