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| James Ricalton - Boxers Captured at Tientsin, 1900 |
Serendipitous family connections to
the past are not normally the kind of things which most historians expect to
encounter in the course of their research – unless, of course, you happen to be
William Dalrymple and have a host of illustrious ancestors! ... But the past is
essentially a web of connections and networks which link the lives of
individuals to the great events of their day, connecting us and them by the many
threads which make up our shared histories. Archival research is the thing
which most often makes history directly tangible, but it’s the occasional
tangents which one stumbles across in the archive that can spin out into
multiple webs which end up netting us the most unexpected stories. If these
connected stories link directly to our own lives through family ties it adds an
immediacy that certainly makes the past seem much less distant and remote.
Recently I had my second peer
reviewed article published in an academic journal (which can be found here). The article is an
examination of three British diplomatic diaries which were written during the eight
week siege of the foreign legations in Peking in the summer of 1900. One of the
diaries was written by the most senior British diplomat there, Sir Claude MacDonald, and the others were written by two of the most junior members of
staff, the student interpreters William Meyrick Hewlett and Lancelot Giles –
both of whom would later go on to long and successful careers in the China
Consular Service. The article focuses upon the marked contrast in cultural perceptions
these three men, as agents of British colonialism, held with regard to their
Chinese and Japanese contemporaries. Rudyard Kipling famously stated that “East is east, and west is west, and never the
twain shall meet”, but as the siege of the legations demonstrates – notably
through the Western eyes which inform these personal diaries – places such as
Peking, where the East and the West met, were pivotal because it was here that
socio-political forces collided – bringing two opposites together (Britain and
Japan) as simultaneously they pushed two others (Britain and China) apart.
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| Henri Meyer - An illustration from supplement to Le Petit Journal, 16th January 1898 |
The Boxer Uprising was the last
major internal political upheaval within the old Chinese Empire, occurring
shortly before the demise of the Qing Dynasty with the Xinhai Revolution of
1911. In its last few decades the ailing Qing Court was beset with political
difficulties both from within and without. Politically weakened by the Opium
Wars of the mid-late nineteenth century the combined pressure exerted from the
European, American, and Japanese Imperialist nations had forced China into a
diplomatically awkward corner. Many people at the time thought China was poised
on the very cusp of dissolution. It was merely a matter of waiting. Eventually
China would be carved up and colonised by the Imperialist nations who had been
gathering in steadily increasing numbers, circling overhead like waiting
vultures, simply bidding their time until the ruling Qing finally expired from
exhaustion. As such, originally fomented out of extreme social discontent, welling
up from within, the Boxer Uprising began as an anti-Qing rebellion which was cleverly
(but only very narrowly) subverted into a violent campaign which united Boxer
rebels and the Qing military against the foreign communities that were then
residing under ‘extra-territorial’ privileges within China’s sovereign borders.
The eight week assault upon the foreign legations in Peking during the searing
hot summer of 1900 subsequently became the stuff of jingoistic legend. John K.
Fairbank statistically sums up the siege as confining: “about 475 foreign civilians, 450 troops of eight nations, and some
3,000 Chinese Christians, also about 150 racing ponies, who provided fresh
meat. An international army rescued them, not without bickering, after rumours
they had all been killed. The Empress Dowager with the Emperor safely in tow
took off for Sian by cart. The allied forces thoroughly looted Peking. Kaiser
Wilhelm II sent a field marshal, who terrorized the surrounding towns, where
many thousands of Chinese Christians had been slaughtered; 250 foreigners,
mainly missionaries, had been killed across North China. Vengeance was in the
air.” (John K. Fairbank, “The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985” Harper
Perennial, 1987, p. 138).
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| Felice Beato - The Interior of the North Taku Fort near Tientsin (Tianjin) after the battle with the International Relief Force, 1900 |
My interest in this incident was
kindled for two reasons. Firstly, as a historian, my interest in the British
Consular Service in China had already acquainted me in passing with Hewlett and
Giles. Hewlett was the consul who later indignantly refused to officiate the
marriage of my brother-in-law’s grandparents, which had partly been the focus
of my first published peer reviewed paper (see here); and Giles was the son of
the famous sinologist, Herbert Allen Giles. Secondly, perhaps because of my original
academic grounding in anthropology, I’m very interested in cross-cultural
readings of colonialism and cross-cultural relationships in particular – how
the ‘West perceived the rest’ and (more difficultly, in terms of the historical
record) how non-Western peoples perceived the cultural and political incursions
of the Western imperialist Powers. Hence why I chose a module for my MA studies
entitled: “Western Images of China and Japan” –the final essay I wrote for this
course was later adapted and transformed into my recently published article.
The siege of the Legations lasted
from June 20th to August 14th 1900. My writing of this
article spanned much the same period of time during the summer of 2014. There
were a couple of curious happenings during my research for and writing of the
original essay, and also my subsequent preparation of the article for
publication, which are not readily visible from reading the paper itself. I’ve
already mentioned the family connection to Meyrick Hewlett and my
brother-in-law’s grandparents, but there is also a more direct personal
connection between me and the man himself, as the Hewlett family home was at Harrow-on-the-Hill.
Indeed, for over forty years Hewlett’s grandfather, Thomas Hewlett, was the
school surgeon at the famous Harrow School, where Hewlett had once been a pupil
– hence this was how his private diary of the Boxer siege, which he’d
originally written as an extended letter to his family, was later published by
the school. Harrow-on-the-Hill was also were I was born and where I went to
Sixth Form College (a different institution to the famous school, I hasten to
add). But this means I must have walked passed Hewlett’s family home on many
occasions if not every day during my late teens.
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| Rev. Z. Chas. Beals, China and the Boxers: A Short History on the Boxer Outbreak, with Two Chapters on the Sufferings of Missionaries and a closing One on the Outlook (New York: M. E. Munson, 1901) |
A further and all the more uncanny family
connection to the events examined in this essay oddly enough arose whilst I was
browsing the bookstacks of SOAS library in search of books on the Boxers. I
chanced upon a first-hand account of the Boxer Uprising by an American
missionary. When I opened the book two inscriptions inside the cover showed
that this particular copy had originally been gifted by the author to my
brother-in-law’s great grandparents, who in turn had themselves later gifted it
to one of the colleges of my university. I’ve written in greater detail about
this curiously idiosyncratic discovery, with its further tangential links to
spiritualist séances and the sinking of the RMS
Titanic (see here). Personal connections to the past rarely get more
serendipitous than this!
Meyrick Hewlett crops up once again
as a person on the periphery of my current PhD research. He was H.M. Consul-General
at Chengdu in 1922 when he refused to officiate the marriage of Louis King and
Rinchen Lhamo – indignant at the fact that they were a mixed race couple and
moreover scandalised that they had already conceived one child out of wedlock
and were imminently due the birth of another (see here). Hewlett often appears
in the Foreign Office records through which I have trawled – perhaps most unusually
when he wrote to report the curious discovery of a rock formation which he and
a group of companions found in a cave complex somewhere in West China which
resembled a fossilised dragon (very similar in shape and form to those depicted
in Chinese paintings or lavishly embroidered into the Emperor’s silk robes). It
seems the subterranean find had suitably stunned and impressed the party of
Westerners he was with as much as their Chinese friends, and although he
dismisses the formation as a natural geological anomaly rather than an actual fossil
he conjectures that such oddities might have provided the inspiration for these
mythical, serpent-like creatures in the more superstitious mists of the distant
past.
I recently bumped into Hewlett
again in the 1932 issue of the Journal of the West China Border Research Society,
an amateur scientific society run by the missionary scholars of the West China
Union University in Chengdu, where the following photograph of a volume of the Yung Lo Ta Tien (Yongle Dadian), which
he salvaged from the Hanlin Library during the siege in June 1900, was
published. Hewlett donated the volume to the West China Union University
Museum, which is now the Sichuan University Museum – it would be interesting to
know if they still have it in their collection. Two letters relating to this
volume of the Yongle Dadian, one by Herbert Allen Giles (Lancelot Giles’s
father) and one by Hewlett, quoting the relevant passages from his diary of the
siege, were published alongside the photograph (Graham, D. C., 1932, ‘A Volume
from the Hanlin Library in the West China Union University Museum’ in The Journal of the West China Border
Research Society, Vol. 5, pp. 150-152). Another photograph can be viewed here, in the Giles-Pickford Collection at the Australian National University.
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| Pictured on the right: A page from a volume of the Yongle Dadian rescued from the Hanlin Library in Peking which was burnt down during the Boxer Siege of 1900 |
These days amongst historians there
is a lot of discussion about historiographical approaches, with some decrying
the recent vogue for ‘micro-histories’, which tend to focus on individual
persons or small scale, local events in the historical record, and others who
favour a return to the larger canvases and more broad-brush approach of
painting ‘grand narratives’ once again. But personally I think there’s more
than enough room for both, and certainly if we look at the current trend for
‘global histories’ I feel that micro-histories are an excellent ‘way in’ to
examine larger ideas by looking at how such ideas (e.g. – colonialism) affected
and were acted out by individuals and how these compare across vastly different
domains. In many cases the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but
certain systems, such as colonialism, couldn’t exist if it weren’t for the actions
of those individuals making their way in the world of their own time.
Essentially it’s people that make history interesting to me. It’s the people that
I feel I connect to most, and listening to their voices is what brings history
to life. Listening to their stories helps me to try to comprehend what it might
have been like had I shared their worldview and lived in their time, facing the
challenges they faced, trying to understand and negotiate their world just as
they themselves did – for ultimately, in our own lives too, we are all only
ever trying to write our own stories in order to understand ourselves and the
world which is shaping us day by day.
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| E. Flohri - Stepping Stone To China, Judge Magazine, c.1900-1902 |
In this sense, writing history is
also a process of telling stories. To do so without empathy is impossible, but
to empathise isn’t necessarily to automatically agree or condone. I have no
idea how I would have coped with living my life in a colonial world.
Undoubtedly, had I lived then, I’d have had no choice other than to navigate it
as best I could. Whilst the colonialist exploits of the imperialist nations
from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries undoubtedly shaped the
world it would be a disservice to the people of the past not to look for those
within its system who sought to temper it or those who even opposed it
altogether. As empires were built and fell by the actions of individuals, so
too history in its grand narratives is made up of all those micro-histories,
the actions of the individuals which personalise the story and if we care to
listen to them will help us to make the bigger picture all the more clear and
balanced.
Read the full article:
by Tim Chamberlain
Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society China, Vol. 77, No. 1 (2017), pp. 5-28.
And also on Waymarks:
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