The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State. Jonathan Wright

fifty-five days in the summer of 1900 the foreign legations of Peking, crammed into the southern quarter of the city, lay under siege. Resentment of the Western powers had been simmering in China for decades. They had brought newfangled railways that tarnished the harmony of the natural landscape; they had encouraged hordes of zealous Christian missionaries to chip away at the empire’s ancient belief systems; and they had demonstrated an unwavering ambition to dominate China’s political and economic life.

      China had been slow to recognize the extraordinary technological advancements of eighteenth-century Europe. The Chinese simply did not realize how mighty and wealthy the West had suddenly become until they tried to snuff out the illegal opium trade in the late 1830s. China was crushed by British force of arms. In the wake of the First Opium War (1839–42), Britain opened up seaports to foreign trade that were entirely removed from Chinese jurisdiction and also annexed Hong Kong. Further crises and humiliations followed. The Russians encroached upon the empire’s northern territories, internal rebellions scarred the middle years of the century, and in 1860 the French and British even temporarily occupied Peking. But in spite of all their successes, the Western powers were still impatient to carve out spheres of even greater influence and profit within the Celestial Empire.

      In 1897 the murder of two Protestant missionaries gave Germany the ideal justification for seizing the bustling port of Jiaozhou. For several years, this same Shandong province had also seen a blossoming of enthusiasm for the so-called Boxer movement. Secretive, illegal martial-arts societies, the Boxers had abandoned their traditional anti-dynastic sentiment in favour of virulent anti-Western rhetoric. With their magical rituals and incantations, and their belief that they were immune from bullets, the Boxers offered an irresistible outlet for decades’ worth of resentment. Their influence spread out across northern China during the late 1890s.

      The population was in dire need of a rallying cry. A recent war with Japan had ended in humiliating defeat, the Yellow River had burst its banks in 1898, and two years later the northern reaches of the empire had been ravaged by drought. In Peking, power resided with a reactionary empress dowager, whose counsellors urged her to stop demonizing the Boxers as lawless bandits and instead use them to reassert China’s independence. Early in 1900 they were summoned to the capital.

      The diplomatic community in Peking was understandably nervous. Ominous news began to rush in from all sides. The British summer legation outside the city was burned down, the Boxers severed the railway lines between Peking and the coast, and on 11 June the chancellor of the Japanese embassy was set upon by an angry crowd, dragged from his coach and hacked to pieces. His battered corpse was thrown in the gutter and his heart presented to a popular general. By the 13th of the month, Boxers were flooding into the city, attacking churches and the homes of foreigners, and digging up Christian graves. When the German ambassador Clemens von Ketteler set out for urgent talks with the government on 20 June he too was murdered in the street. An officially sanctioned siege of the legation quarter by imperial troops now seemed inevitable.

      Outlying embassies were abandoned, and a total of 475 civilians, 450 guards and 2,300 Chinese Christians, stranded in the diplomatic quarter, began their agonizing wait for the arrival of Western troops. Mercifully, they had a good supply of fresh water and rice, as well as ample stocks of pony-meat and champagne. There was also a wealth of tobacco; as one witness remembered it, ‘even some of the women, principally Italians and Russians, found relief in the constant smoking of cigarettes.’ Conditions were terribly crowded, however, and the Dutch minister was obliged to sleep in a cupboard belonging to the Russian ambassador. Morale was bruised when a Norwegian missionary went mad, and the French ambassador infuriated everyone by wandering around the compound, announcing, ‘We are all going to die tonight, we are all lost.’²

      The siege provided its edifying sights: professors turning their hand to butchery, Catholic and Protestant missionaries filling defensive sandbags together. And for the most part, the imperial troops showed restraint, although during a single day they did manage to discharge 20,000 rounds of ammunition in the direction of the legations. Finally, on 14 August, relief came with the arrival of Western forces: 8,000 Japanese, 4,800 Russian, 3,000 British, 2,100 American, 800 French, 58 Austrian, and 53 Italian soldiers. ‘We heard the playing of machine guns on the outside of the city,’ someone recalled; ‘never was music so sweet.’³

      It was an invincible force, and with the lifting of the siege the Western powers set about exacting their revenge. By the terms of the Boxer Protocol of September 1901, China was to offer an abject apology, pay a huge indemnity for its outrageous behaviour, and desist from importing arms for two years. It was a burden that the tottering Manchu dynasty could hardly withstand. By 1911 imperial China had ceased to exist, and in 1912 a republic was set up in its place. As for the Western powers, they seized every opportunity to expand their political and economic stranglehold on the country. Kaiser Wilhelm offered an especially bullish assessment of the changed situation: ‘Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation by virtue of which they still live in historical tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.’⁴

      If the West still cherishes an image of Chinese insularity and xenophobia, one need look no further than the siege of the Peking embassies in 1900 for part of the explanation. The terror and privations suffered by ambassadors, their families and retinues would not quickly be forgotten. In truth, the Boxer Rebellion was the culmination of decades of growing alienation. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, Europe had fallen out of love with China. Heady stories of the majestic Chinese court, revered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the most cultured and opulent place that might be imagined, were suddenly replaced by the niggardly accounts of ill-humoured diplomats – as ever, the vessels for their cultures’ prejudices.

      When a Dutch ambassador travelled to Peking in 1796, there was precious little talk of silk, jade or chinoiserie. Instead, he reported back on mandarins with ‘shrill voices’ who rudely awakened visitors at three in the morning, and of ‘low and dirty’ reception rooms stocked with ‘coarse rugs…a few common chairs [and] a piece of wood with an iron spike as a candlestick’. The elaborate order and ritual of the court had apparently descended into chaos, and palaces were now ‘full of people, great and small, rich and poor intermingled, pressing and pushing without any distinction, so that we were stuck by a scene of confusion’.

      The emperor’s horses were ‘shaggy and rather dirty’, and the food served at state banquets was an utter disgrace; pieces of game, ‘looking as if they were remnants of gnawed off bones’, had been unceremoniously ‘dumped on the table’. Here, the ambassador suggested, was the ‘most conclusive proof of coarseness and lack of civilization…However incredible this may seem in Europe, it is too remarkable to pass over in silence. From the reports with which the missionaries have deluded the world for a number of years, I had imagined a very civilized and enlightened people. These ideas were deeply rooted and a kind of violence was necessary to eradicate them, but this reception, joined to all our previous experiences, was a radical cure.’⁵

      In fact, the Jesuits who had been tending the mission fields of China for the past two centuries had not been deluding anyone. China was in a dozen sorts of decline, but it had not suddenly become an uncivilized backwater. Europe had simply experienced a shift in fashion, a cultural backlash. The Enlightenment adoration of Confucian philosophy, ceramics and Chinese political genius had given way to talk of Chinese despotism, cruelty and backwardness. The West had decided it was superior, the cradle and guardian of authentic civilization, and China was now a place to be feared, mocked or exploited.

      It was to prove a resilient perspective: one that still infects the European world-view, and one that a tragedy such as the Boxer Rebellion only served to reinforce. Millennia of Chinese history were reduced to a stereotype. China was – and always had been – odd, unwelcoming and self-satisfied. But as other stories from the history of the ambassadors reveal, the image is at best a simplistic half-truth.