Read Ebook: Beleaguered in Pekin: The Boxer's War Against the Foreigner by Coltman Robert

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Ebook has 672 lines and 47222 words, and 14 pages

As it was rapidly growing darker, however, and we had not yet seen the wounded men, Hu cut short our budding conversation by requesting General Chang to show them to me.

He curtly declared, "They are in camp half a mile away, and he can go and see them if he wants to."

"Will you go?" inquired Hu.

"Yes, if you will go with me," I replied, not caring to venture alone into the hostile camp, especially after what I had seen of the temper of their leaders; but I added, "I think it would be much better to have them brought here."

"Yes, yes, that is better," said Hu; but General Chang interrupted him by saying:

"Impossible! they are too ill to be moved, and on this cold day would surely take cold and die."

"Have them well wrapped up and brought quickly," said Hu, without paying attention to the interruption, "for it is getting late, and although I have ordered the city gates not to close until our return to Peking, I am anxious to avoid keeping them open any later than necessary."

General Chang then strode across the room to the door opening into the court, where upwards of three hundred of his men were standing packed like sardines, listening to everything we had been saying, as Chinese custom is, and shouted out:

"Bring the two wounded men in here."

Now all of the men had seen Governor Hu snubbed, had heard Colonel Chao revile him and his railroads, and had heard their general say the men would die if brought out in the cold; so, supposing they were to act in a similar way, they, upon receiving this order, held a confab, and a very noisy confab, too, among themselves for a few moments before replying.

As I watched Governor Hu's face grow pale as the commotion increased, I felt that we were in real danger right in the midst of the officers, and that my previous view that I could insure my own safety by threatening Hu's life would avail nothing, as they hated him as much if not more than myself. I could plainly see that I must change my man, and make the general my target if the necessity arose.

Then a voice shouted out from the soldiers almost the exact words of the general.

"They cannot be brought here; the exposure would kill them."

Chang looked at Hu to see what effect this had upon him, but Hu was no coward, and calmly replied:

"They must be brought if it kills them; by Her Majesty's commission, I demand it."

The general was bluffing; he sullenly gave in.

"Bring those men at once, dead or alive, you scoundrels," he shouted stentoriously, "and in a hurry, too!"

"Aye, aye," responded a hundred throats, and a number of men left the courtyard at once.

The camp must have been some distance away, for it was over half an hour and nearly candle-lighting time before the two men, each carried on a litter on the shoulders of six men, were brought in.

The first man was covered up in blankets, and pretended to be unconscious; but he proved to have no fever, had a slow pulse, and absolutely no wound but a scratch at the lower end of his right shoulder-blade, which might have been made by a finger-nail, or possibly by a pistol-ball grazing the skin.

The hypocrite Chang bent over me as I was examining, and asked in a voice of pretended sympathy:

"Is he badly hurt? Can he recover? And how long will he be ill?" to which I replied:

"Not badly hurt; he will recover; and I will guarantee he is all right day after to-morrow if you will send him at once to my railroad hospital at Fengtai."

I said this, thinking that the British minister in Peking, Sir Claude MacDonald, might be glad to get hold of these men for proper punishment, and that if they were in the hospital at Fengtai they could easily be obtained; otherwise I would have ordered this man to be dismissed at once as shamming.

The second man also pretended to be much worse off than he really was, but he did in fact have a small bullet-wound in his shoulder, from which I extracted with forceps a fragment of blue cotton cloth, and then sent him also to the hospital, predicting his recovery within ten days.

General Chang thanked me for my interest, and promised to reward me for my services when the men recovered; then, nodding coolly to Governor Hu, he and his staff marched out of the inn and left us, and allowed a subordinate to escort us to the special train that brought us down, which was as great a lack of courtesy and positive insult as he could give to the Empress Dowager's high commissioner.

Our return journey was without incident. The city gates were open awaiting us, and were closed immediately upon our entrance. Governor Hu immediately memorialized the throne, stating the result of his inquiries, reported the impudence of Colonel Chao, and made the request that he be turned over to the Board of Punishments for a penalty.

The Empress acknowledged the memorial, and she decided to deprive Colonel Chao of one step in rank, degrading him to a major. This appeared in an edict at once; at the same time she commended Hu for his promptness and general ability.

But, alas for Governor Hu! General Tung Fu Hsiang, the man who was to prove the curse of China, was unacquainted with all these circumstances, and had yet to be heard from. This man had obtained his reputation first as a brigand, and afterward as a leader of Her Majesty's army in putting down a rather formidable rebellion of the Mohammedans in his own province of Kansu. Bold, cruel, and unscrupulous, he had murdered his own provincials, who were but poorly armed and without military discipline, in a most ruthless manner, and had not only suppressed the uprising, but nearly exterminated the rebels.

His fame spread far and wide as a wonderful general, so that when the Empress again assumed power by forcibly seizing the throne from the weak but good-intentioned Kuang Hsu, she decided at once to bring this man Tung and his Kansu ruffians to Peking to assist her in maintaining her authority against all comers. It was en route to Peking that his advance corps, under General Chang, had the trouble at Lukouch'iao.

As soon as Tung Fu Hsiang learned of Colonel Chao's degradation, he was wild with rage, taking the view at once that the insult was not only upon Chao but also upon himself.

Knowing the Empress was in a precarious condition without troops she could depend upon, this courageous adventurer, at his first audience upon his arrival in Peking, promptly told Her Majesty that unless Chao were restored to his rank immediately, and Governor Hu were removed from his offices as Governor of Peking and Director-General of Railways, as well as prevented from taking his seat in the tsung-li-yamen, or foreign office, to which he had just been appointed, he, Tung, would disband his army and return to Kansu at once.

The Empress remonstrated with him in vain, alleging that Hu had only done his duty, and that with his knowledge of foreigners he would be a valuable official in the tsung-li-yamen. But Tung remained obdurate, and the Empress reluctantly yielded and dismissed Hu to private life, where he has ever since remained.

As Governor Hu was alone responsible, by his firm friendship for the English, for obtaining for the Hong Kong and Shanghai banking corporation, an English company, the loan for extending the Peking-Tientsin railway, and had signed the contract which gave the real control of the railway to the English stockholders, his dismissal from office should have been prevented by diplomatic action. As it was, only a mild remonstrance by the diplomatic representative of Great Britain was made, and the tsung-li-yamen passed it, as usual, unheeded. Governor Hu remarked to me a few days after his dismissal, very bitterly, "If I had been the friend to Russia I have been to England I should not now be in disgrace."

He was replaced in the office of Governor of Peking by Ho Yun Nai, and in the office of Director-General of Railways by Hsu Ching Ch'eng, ex-minister to Germany and Russia. The first of these officials was a well-known hater of foreigners, who was suggested by General Tung. The latter was a corrupt opium-eater, already in the pay of Russia, as Chinese president of the Manchurian railway, and was suggested by a high palace eunuch, himself in the pay of Russia.

Tung's influence in Peking now became all-powerful; his soldiers swaggered about the streets in their fancy red and black uniforms, growing daily more menacing to the foreigners they passed, until finally several incipient riots occurred which resulted in one foreigner having several ribs broken and others being assaulted, so that a few of the foreign ministers united and requested that his army corps be removed some distance from the capital. The Empress agreed reluctantly to this, but only sent them a little over a hundred li away.

Tung, early after his arrival, made the acquaintance of Prince Tuan, a stupid, ignorant Manchu, who soon became his complete tool. The question of a successor to the sickly Emperor, Kuang Hsu, had been discussed for several years, as he had as yet no issue, and seemed likely at any time to die childless. The sons of Tuan, of Duke Lan, and of Prince Lien were all considered eligible, and from amongst them must be chosen the future Emperor of China.

Tung saw that Tuan would become his tool much more completely than either of the others, and proposed an alliance between Tuan's son and a daughter of his own, agreeing to support the younger Tuan's candidacy for the throne, with his whole army, if necessary, to accomplish the purpose. Tuan agreed to this, but stated the succession must be made without its being known that he was under obligations to favor Tung's daughter, but that when an apparently open competition for selection of an empress was made, and the various eligible damsels appeared at the court, Tung's daughter should arrive from Kansu in time and be the favored recipient.

On this understanding everything became smooth sailing, and the consummation of their plans, as far as Tuan's interest was concerned, occurred, when in solemn conclave of all the princes of the blood and great ministers of state, on January 24, 1900, Pu Chun, son of Prince Tuan, was solemnly named as successor to the previous emperor, Tung Chih; and poor sickly little Kuang Hsu was succeeded without a successor to himself, but a successor to his uncle being appointed, which, by imperial edict, makes him an interloper.

This was a nice piece of vengeance the Empress Dowager worked out, partly to avenge herself on her nephew for his unsuccessful attempt to shelve her and run his government himself. Tung's intensely anti-foreign sentiments soon made him many friends at court, among the oldest and most conservative Manchus, as well as some of the Chinese. But it was among the former that his influence was greatest.

Many of these men, stupid in the extreme, and too cowardly themselves ever to have originated any of the designs that have since been worked out, joyfully fell in with the plans inspired by his ambition for his own success, but always put forward as for the salvation of his country.

Kang Yi was sent on a mission southward through all the provinces to extort money to raise more armies, as well as to feel the pulse of the people in regard to, and encourage them in, their anti-foreign tendencies. Li Ping Heng was sent to examine and report on all the defenses of the Yangtze valley, as well as to denounce any official of progressive tendencies. Yu Hsien was to succeed the latter as Governor of Shantung, and to sow in that province the seeds of disorder and riot that yielded such a bitter crop when they ripened; just as only a poorly-organized, semi-patriotic, but fully looting society could do--an organization that was to be called the I Ho Ch'uan or Boxer organization.

This programme has been fully carried out, and what the result has been will be described in part only in the following chapters.

The foreign residents of Shantung, who had hoped the new government would be an improvement over the old, soon found they were worse off than before. The native Christians were persecuted most bitterly by their heathen neighbors, and their complaints at the yamens treated with disdain.

Yu Hsien did his work thoroughly and rapidly, knowing the foreign power which had compelled the removal of Li Ping Heng would also cause his removal. But as he was only placed in Shantung for the deliberate purpose of making trouble, his removal would mean for him a better post as the reward of his success.

This came when the "Boxers" of Chianfu prefecture attacked and murdered a young missionary of the Church of England named Brookes, who was traveling from Chianfu city to his station of P'ingyin.

The British government demanded his removal from office, and the Chinese government acquiesced; but their treatment of him upon his arrival in Peking alone would have sufficed for an intelligent observer to make clear the policy of the Empress without any other confirmatory evidence, abundance of which, however, was not lacking.

Instead of being reprimanded, we find him granted immediate audience with the Empress, and the next day's Court Gazette informed an astonished world that the Empress had written with her own brush the character "Fu," happiness, and conferred it upon him publicly. Then followed his appointment as Governor of Shansi, a rich mineral province in which the "Peking Syndicate," an Anglo-Italian company promoted by Lord Rothschild, held valuable concessions. In this province, too, were the long-worked missionary establishments of the American Board and the China Inland Missions.

The Chinese all understood this as an appreciative approval from the Empress, and so, too, did all the older foreign residents; but the diplomatic corps, beyond a feeble remonstrance from the British and United States ministers, did nothing. So, to-day Yu Hsien is pursuing in Shansi the same policy he did in Shantung, the results of which must turn out similarly.

The Empress appointed as successor to Yu Hsien the man who had turned traitor to the unfortunate young Emperor, Kuang Hsu, Yuanshih Kai. This man is well known to foreigners. He was formerly Chinese resident at Seoul, and it was largely due to him that the China-Japan war occurred. After the war he was made commanding-general of a force of foreign-drilled troops stationed at Hsiao Chan, south of Tientsin.

Yuan is one of the shrewdest and most unscrupulous men of China, and the Empress, in rewarding him by this appointment for his service to her in making known the Emperor's purpose to send her into captivity, gave power to a man who would desert her, when it suited him, as quickly as he had the weak, but well-meaning, Emperor.

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