Keown-Boyd Henry - The fists of righteous harmony: a history of the Boxer uprising in China in the year 1900

No one has ever arrived at
understanding them [the Chinese]
thoroughly and no one ever will.

Captain A. A. S. Barnes,
1st Chinese Regiment

The Chinese, Europeans have told themselves for centuries, are inscrutable. However, the most cursory glance at the history of the relations between China and what were known in the 19th century as the Powers reveals that the inscrutability was mutual. They fenced blindfolded in a dark room, fearing one another yet regarding each other with contempt and incomprehension. The Chinese were, and still are, great xenophobes although todays foreign tourist in China is regarded as comic rather than dangerous and mirth has replaced anger. To them, and here one is generalizing as there were many exceptions, the foreigner was a coarse, smelly, greedy barbarian. Even their close genetic kinsmen, the Japanese, were referred to as the ugly dwarfs.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the Chinese view of the foreigner should have been somewhat jaundiced. Postponing for a moment serious political, commercial and military issues, it must be said that few countries have attracted a more remarkable and generally distasteful array of adventurers, confidence tricksters, soldiers of fortune, crackpots and other assorted undesirables as did China in the 19th and early 20th centuries. To mention but a few of the more spectacular examples, we have General Charles Gordon, sword in one hand, Bible in the other, leading his Ever Victorious Army of European, American and Chinese desperadoes against the Taiping the English pirate known, no doubt aptly, as Fuckie Tom, plundering the China coast in his fleet of junks. Later there appeared Two-Gun Cohen, gangster confidant of Sun Yat Sen and a brace of the worlds most bare-faced conmen, Sir Edmund Backhouse, Bart., brilliant sinologue, forger, fantasist and obscene diarist, and Trebitsch Lincoln, Hungarian-Jewish Member of Parliament for Doncaster, spy, swindler and Buddhist monk.

And let us not forget the ladies. The bordellos of the Treaty Ports catered for all tastes and pockets. Voluptuous poules de luxe, often Russian and, after the Revolution, invariably of self-proclaimed blue blood, entertained in well-appointed apartments while the water-front bars swarmed with tarts of every race, colour and proclivity. There was much to be learnt and, we are told, among the most successful amateur pupils of these skilled professionals was a certain Wallis Spencer, then the wife of an American naval officer, who later used her knowledge of the arts of love to seduce to her bed and from his throne the King and Emperor of the greatest empire in the world.

But to return to more serious matters, to the Powers China was both a milch cow for raw materials and a great profitable maw into which the products of Manchester, Dusseldorf, Lyons, Milan, Osaka and Milwaukee could be stuffed. It was also a chess-board upon which the diplomats accredited to the Imperial Court at Peking, the Consuls-General in the other great cities of China and their political masters at home could manoeuvre and posture in the great game of scoring points over one another and acquiring Concessions.

In the prosecution of these aims, they bullied, harassed and bribed the atrophied and degenerate Imperial Government remorselessly and from all directions. Their velvet gloves were thread-bare and through them distracted Manchu and Chinese officials glimpsed the iron fists of the Royal Navy and the Tsarist, Prussian and Japanese military machines. But to concede to the British was to excite the jealousy of the French and to give in to the Italians was to enrage the Germans and so on. It was a vicious circle. The demands of all had to be satisfied, at least up to a point, or the consequences from one quarter or another might be dire.

To an extent, the Chinese managed to prevaricate behind their creaking, ponderous bureaucracy, immemorial protocol and all-pervading corruption. The squeeze or bribe, reigned supreme across the entire political and social spectrum. To move a mule-cart from A to B required a tiny payment to some petty official or policeman; for a provincial viceroy to obtain entry to the Forbidden City called for the distribution of largesse to every kow-towing eunuch who managed politely but firmly to impede his path to the steps of the throne. The squeeze was not simply part of the system, it was the system itself. High mandarins and foreign officials like Sir Robert Hart, the long-serving Inspector-General of the Imperial Customs Service, amassed huge fortunes from peculation and what would today be described as insider dealing. The British industrialist, Lord Rendel, who, from time to time, played a delicate role as an honest broker on behalf of China, put it bluntly. [Manchu] government, he wrote, meant chiefly a system by which eighteen separate administrations bled eighteen provinces on the terms of furnishing each their quota to the principal blood-sucker at Peking.