It was an open expression of the threat to trade that Westerners had always feared was inherent in the Taiping movement, and in its wake the door to cooperation between the rebels and the foreigners began to close from the Western side. Frederick Bruce—the man who had so strongly advocated a neutral course in China, and whose brother Lord Elgin saw British and French troops storm the imperial forts at Taku on the very day that their comrades to the south repulsed the first Taiping advance on Shanghai—now openly expressed both contempt for the rebel movement and an unprecedented respect for local imperial officials in a letter to the British foreign minister, Lord John Russell:
Every day shows more strongly that no principles or ideas of policy animate [the rebellion’s] leaders. Even the extermination of the Tartars, the only principle put forward, seems rather a pretext for upsetting all government and authority, and enabling the stronger to pillage the weaker, than an object necessary in itself, as a step towards establishing a mere national government. The framework of society is entirely broken up in the districts occupied by them, by the flight of the educated and respectable classes, to whom the common people look up with respect as their natural leaders, and who are at once their bulwark against oppression, and the guardians of order and public tranquility.… [The rebels’] system differs in nothing, as far as I can learn, from the proceedings of a band of brigands organized under one head.
The remarkable contradiction not only of his own earlier statements but of his government’s previous position with regard to both the Chinese imperialists and the Taipings contained in Bruce’s letter was apparent. The attempt to identify the interests of British trade with the welfare of Chinese peasants was a bit of self-service that stood in gross and (as ever) unexplained contrast to Britain’s own aggressive posture in the north, as well as to the British community’s continued condemnation of Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps. One unusually honest letter to the North China Herald from a resident of the British settlement put it this way:
The conduct of Ward has been justly censured in the columns of your paper. But in what does our policy differ? The circumstances are somewhat dissimilar, but the principle is precisely the same. His theatre of action was Sung-chiang; ours is Shanghai. His work was to drive the Insurgents out of the city; ours is to keep them out. He was paid for his service; our men, we are informed, are paid likewise for their service. Ward, we believe, is an old servant of the Taotai, and as such, he only continues his service when acting in opposition to the Insurgents; we have no such plea for our conduct.
On August 24 the Chung Wang left Shanghai and was soon taking the main body of his army out of Kiangsu altogether, to participate in the Taiping western campaign. Following his departure, the British indicated that they were at least beginning to perceive some commonality of interest between themselves and Ward when no less a figure than Frederick Bruce sent a secret communication to the Foreign Arms Corps’s commander (or so Ward later claimed), thanking him for his assistance in the defense of Shanghai. It would be many months, however, before the British would be willing to admit publicly any indebtedness to Ward or to sanction his actions. For the moment, they chose to rely on their own resources in attempting to bring about a satisfactory arrangement of China’s internal distress.
The withdrawal of the Chung Wang from Kiangsu left most of that province in the hands of Taiping units capable of defending what they had taken but not of besting British and French regulars in a major assault on Shanghai. This and other factors—the disaster at Ch’ing-p’u, the unwillingness of Ward and Burgevine to place themselves under the supervision of local imperial officials at Sung-chiang, the pronounced strains placed on Chinese dealings with the Western governments by the existence of the corps, and finally the exorbitant cost of the unit’s maintenance—all influenced Wu Hsü to decide in mid-September that the time had come for the disbandment of Ward’s force. There was nothing in his attitude to suggest that Wu felt any animosity toward Ward, but, like most Chinese officials, the taotai was jealously concerned with maintaining his sphere of authority, and in the Foreign Arms Corps he had seen a unit with uncomfortably autonomous tendencies. In addition, Ward’s wounds continued, during September, to preclude his active leadership of the force, and Ward was the sole officer of the corps whom Wu came even close to trusting. The thought of Burgevine and the other Western “rowdies” roaming the Sung-chiang area unchecked caused the taotai much concern.
On September 26 Wu expressed this anxiety in a letter to Thomas Meadows. Stating that he had been instructed to write by Hsüeh Huan, Wu informed Meadows
that the foreigners who were engaged by the local authorities to apprehend pirates, and to assist in fighting against the rebels, have all been discharged.… Further these discharged foreigners, of whom there are several tens in number, and who all carry pistols on their persons are roving about the settlements and country without proper employment and are without doubt creating disturbances and troubling the orderly and well conducted people, nothing in fact being too bad that they will not do.
Wu’s suggested remedy to this situation could not have been more galling to Consul Meadows: “I have therefore to request that you will send a dispatch on this subject to the chief [British] military officer, requesting him to appoint soldiers to apprehend the foreigners in question so that the country may be tranquilized.”
In forwarding this request to Frederick Bruce, Meadows took full advantage of the opportunity to vindicate his earlier statements on the Foreign Arms Corps:
That foreign ruffianism, which the Imperial Authorities were, in their unpatriotic pusillanimity, calling in to their aid, would prove a scourge to the peaceable people whom they are placed here to protect was perfectly clear to me from the first.… The Imperial Authorities have only themselves to blame for this mischief.… And now, by way of climax, these same Authorities ask for British troops to be sent out into the surrounding country to hunt for the criminals they themselves have made such in total disregard of the opinions and warnings of the resident British Consul.
Meadows tersely informed Wu Hsü that “the Chinese people have the right to seize and send to Shanghai any lawless and disorderly foreigners of whatever nation, with a view to their punishment by the Consuls of their respective countries,” but that in this endeavor they would receive no British military aid.
Despite Wu Hsü’s attempt to disband the Foreign Arms Corps, Ward was not yet willing to see the project come to an end; nor, apparently, was the banker Yang Fang. Paying for many of the corps’s expenses with the bonus he had earned at Sung-chiang and relying on Yang to take care of the rest, Ward attempted to keep the force together, with an eye toward eventually trying Ch’ing-p’u again and redeeming himself. But Ward’s most pressing order of business was his wounds, particularly his jaw, which had begun to heal incorrectly. Thus a troubling vacuum of leadership was created: Burgevine was not an inventive enough spirit to instill any sense of purpose into the men during the largely quiet autumn of 1860, and the corps—particularly its officers—fell into an idleness that was at best mischievous. On October 27 the North China Herald reported an assault and robbery along the Bund in Shanghai and in examining its details came
reluctantly to the conclusion that our old friends the fillibusters [sic] must have had something to do with this robbery.… We have seen a good deal of these heroes while in the pay of H.E. the Taotai, and from their own lips have heard that it is part of the duty they owe to themselves not to allow the Chinese to encumber themselves with worldly goods, seeing that the fillibusters had come from far distant homes to root out the rebellion from among them at the risk of their lives.… On their return to Shanghai [following Ch’ing-p’u] they fell under the ban of the foreign ministers, and the Taotai was compelled to disband them. Since then we have heard but little of the fillibusters; some are still living at Taki’s [Yang Fang’s], and may be seen on the doorstep, when the weather permits, all forlorn, and smoking very strong pipes.… [E]ither T
aki is keeping these men for purposes of his own against the Taotai’s orders, or they are keeping themselves in a way that can’t altogether be called by the sweat of their brow.
Events in northern China soon drew all remaining attention away from the Foreign Arms Corps, which entered a shadowy period during which the whereabouts of Ward himself became a mystery that has never been solved. Quite probably he took ship for Paris to receive expert medical treatment for his face. Certainly, when he reappeared in China early in 1861, his jaw had been repaired in a fashion that did not suggest Shanghai (although he would ever afterward speak with a slight impediment). And among the few of Ward’s personal belongings that have survived is a photograph of a young Chinese man—quite possibly an assistant or a servant—taken in a Paris studio. Exactly when Ward might have made such a trip is uncertain, but the fact that neither his absence nor his return was noted by either the British or the American consulate or the North China Herald is a measure of how much the shocking spectacle that had unfolded in the north had monopolized foreign interest in Shanghai.
After the fall of the Taku forts in late August, the Emperor Hsien-feng, his favorite concubine, Yehonala, and the Princes I, Cheng, and Su-shun sent emissaries to negotiate with the Western powers whose armies had begun a determined march toward Peking. The Mongol general Seng-ko-lin-ch’in had withdrawn to Peking after his initial encounter at Taku with the foreign troops, who were equipped with the most up-to-date small arms and artillery. Yet despite these hard battlefield realities, the war party in Peking sent negotiators more as a means of stalling for time than out of any reasoned desire to salvage what they could from a disastrous situation. Upon entering preliminary talks, the Chinese negotiators were informed by the British and French envoys that indemnities and apologies for the previous year’s action at Taku were now required, in addition to compliance with all the conditions of the Tientsin treaty. The hapless Chinese representatives, recognizing the predicament for what it was, gave in, but Hsien-feng disavowed their actions and released a typical decree concerning “these treacherous barbarians”:
Any further forbearance on our part would be a dereliction of duty to the Empire, so that we have now commanded our armies to attack them with all possible energy.… Hereby we make offer of the following rewards: for the head of a black barbarian [Britain’s Sikh troops], 50 taels, and for the head of a white barbarian, 100 taels. Subjects of other submissive states are not to be molested, and whensoever the British and French repent them of their evil ways and return to their allegiance, we shall be pleased to permit them to trade again, as of old. May they repent while there is yet time.
Increasingly, such statements were the work of the proud Yehonala and the three hawkish princes, I, Cheng, and Su-shun, for Hsien-feng himself was growing ever more ill and, in his weakness, fearful of the possible results of his arrogance. His principal desire was to flee Peking and seek refuge in his hunting palace at Jehol, north of the capital. But the bitter remonstrances of Manchu officials—“Will you cast away the inheritance of your ancestors like a damaged shoe?” wrote one group—kept him in Peking for the moment, and in mid-September he capitulated altogether to the angry harangues of Yehonala. Seng-ko-lin-ch’in was ordered to take the field again and stop the Westerners’ advance. Even more fatally, several dozen French and British negotiators and journalists were seized under a flag of truce, trussed up with their arms behind their backs—the Chinese indication that the prisoners were “rebels”—and held captive in such deplorable conditions that thirteen of them, including the correspondent for the London Times, died.
It was the most foolish in a series of foolish moves on the part of the Chinese war party, and in its wake the Westerners became predictably outraged. Their armies pushed on toward Peking with a new sense of purpose, the French and British soldiers racing each other toward the heart of the Chinese empire in order to be the first to mete out stern punishments. On September 22 Hsien-feng fled to Jehol, confounding his subjects in Peking. But, fortunately for those terrified thousands as well as for the rest of China’s millions, affairs in the capital now came under the management of Hsien-feng’s half brother, Prince Kung. A scowling and, by all accounts, unattractive man who certainly shared Hsien-feng and Yehonala’s distaste for barbarians, Prince Kung was nonetheless a realist who understood that “the British are merely a threat to our limbs,” while the Taiping rebels “menace our heart.” In Kung’s opinion, his half brother had been dealing with Chinese affairs according to a badly confused set of priorities. Some kind of a peace had to be made with the Westerners, and quickly, so that the threat of a Taiping takeover could be eliminated.
Eventually, Kung accepted the Western terms for a settlement—including a firm commitment to allow foreign ministers to reside in Peking—but not before the British and the French had indulged in a particularly barbaric demonstration of their anger with China generally and over the horrendous treatment of their captured representatives in particular. One of Hsien-feng and Yehonala’s favorite resort spots was the famous Summer Palace, a series of fantastically ornate gardens and residences outside Peking whose construction had been the pet project of emperors and their inner circles for generations. Early in October, French and British troops stumbled onto this invaluable display of the unreal splendor in which Chinese rulers lived, and the French, typically and immediately, began to sack the place. The British tried to restrain themselves at first, but then Lord Elgin decided that the destruction of the Summer Palace would be a suitable punishment for Chinese perfidy, since some of the Allied prisoners had been interred there. British soldiers subsequently joined in the looting, while British engineers methodically set about burning the palaces to the ground.
Whatever Hsien-feng and Yehonala’s crimes, the destruction of the Summer Palace was no less criminal. It was so noted by one of the Royal Engineers who participated in the operation, a young, blue-eyed captain with a complex mind, an intense manner, and a tremendous aptitude for both conventional and unconventional warfare: Charles George Gordon. Shortly to journey to Shanghai and become a careful student of Frederick Townsend Ward’s operations in Kiangsu, Gordon was destined to become one of Victorian England’s greatest and most controversial heroes; and in October 1860 he demonstrated the insight that would eventually make him a man of renown on several continents by writing home:
Owing to the ill-treatment the [European] prisoners experienced at the Summer Palace, the General ordered it to be destroyed, and stuck up proclamations to say why it was so ordered. It appears that the victims were tied so tight by the wrists that the flesh mortified, and they died in the greatest torture. We accordingly went out, and, after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a Vandal-like manner most valuable property which would not be replaced for four millions. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces. It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these palaces were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army. Everybody was wild for plunder. The French have smashed everything in the most wanton way. It was a scene of utter destruction which passes my description. The people are civil, but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did to the Palace.
The conclusion of hostilities in the north did little to resolve either the tension between the West and China or the power struggle that was taking shape within the Manchu elite between the Princes I, Cheng, and Su-shun on the one side, Prince Kung on the other, and Yehonala somewhere in between. The clever young mother of Hsien-feng’s heir was beginning to see that dealing with the barbarians was a much more complicated affair than she had supposed, and in Prince Kung she perceived a man whose mind, unlike those of the three hawkish princes, might be equal to the task. At the hunting retreat in Jehol, meanwhile, Hsien-feng’s illnesses worsened, and it became apparent that the question of who would rule China with what policy in the immediate future was a long way from sett
led. The British and the French therefore decided to retain a significant number of troops in China after the conclusion of the autumn campaign, as a hedge against even greater Chinese instability. (Of the 21,000 British troops in China at the time of the march on Peking, for example, only 10,000 were withdrawn.)
A great many of these soldiers, however, had little to keep them occupied in the north once Seng-ko-lin-ch’in had been defeated. Tales of the wide-open war being waged in the Yangtze valley were widely circulated, and many British and French officers made efforts to be transferred to what looked, in light of the Anglo-French defense of Shanghai, to be the next important theater of military operations in China. One such officer was Captain Adrien Tardif de Moidrey of the French army, whose arrival in Shanghai in late 1860 (or possibly early 1861) was of critical importance to the future operations of Ward, Burgevine, and the Foreign Arms Corps.
His thoughtful features aptly bedecked by a wide, carefully trimmed mustache and goatee, Tardif de Moidrey was a creative soldier who had taken a detailed interest in Chinese weapons and tactics during the Allied march to Peking. On arriving in Shanghai he had augmented this study with an investigation of Ward and Burgevine’s operations, which at the close of 1860 had reached their nadir: On December 11 Burgevine had decided to have another try at Ch’ing-p’u but had been unable to cover even half the distance from Sung-chiang to his objective before being checked and then repulsed by the Taipings. Tardif de Moidrey met Burgevine in Shanghai at this dismal time and encountered Ward soon after the latter’s return to China.