#322 - Opium War 7: The Throat of the Empire

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The situation now is like riding a tiger. It is difficult to dismount. Former Imperial Commissioner Lin Zeshu quoting an old Chinese proverb from exile in Yili,

1842. How could matters have come to this? The Dao Guang Emperor, 1842. Last time, we left Charles Elliott where many a disgraced man has ultimately found himself

waiting for the mail to arrive. He'd known since the summer of 1841 that London had decided that his services were no longer required. Heck, even the Queen herself had weighed in on the matter, and the Foreign Secretary

Palmerston was rather less regal about it. The man had been handed a war, and somehow managed to barter it down to a glorified real estate transaction, trading the strategic paradise of Jo-Shan for some rocky, a Millarial outcropping near Canton.

His replacement was to be Sir Henry Pottinger, veteran of the Anglo-Afghan campaigns, and a man whose entire career could be summarized as almost Alexandrian.

There is no problem so complicated or intractable that the simple application of overwhelming force could not solve it. Where Elliot had been conflicted

and perpetually searching for some off-ramp to the crisis, Conniger had received his instructions with crystal clarity. The war was on, and wars were meant to be prosecuted to their conclusion. Not managed, not wound down, prosecuted, and won.

A better man you could not have, wrote one correspondent to a colleague in Macau when news of his appointment arrived. He was, quote, up to all the tricks and chicanery of the native courts, end quote, one would not, the letter promised, allow himself to be humbugged.

Eliot departed by steamer in August of 1841, reportedly in good spirits, more relieved than humiliated, which tells you a little something about the kind of war it had been to manage thus far. He would eventually be reassigned as the British representative to the Republic of

Texas, a posting that suggests either a very specific bureaucratic sense of humor in Whitehall, or a punishment so baroque that it looped all the way back around to being interesting. But that's the story for a completely different podcast. In any event, it was at the height of August's withering heat that Pottinger at last arrived,

and with him, the Humbug Era was officially over. The strategy, if you care to dignify it with any such word, was remarkably simple. go north, blow things up, keep going north." No brilliant military finesse, nothing really to write home about, just the application

of modern arms to obsolete fortifications, and the same basic operation repeated time and again up the Chinese coast with only the names of the cities changing. As British satirist Hilaire Belock put it with skewering precision half a century quote, whatever happens we have got the maximum gun and they have not from the

moment he stepped ashore potter had made it crystal clear that from here on out the war was going to be fought differently no more dilly dallying no more half measures they were in it to win it the English wrote the missionary Bridgeman, quite approvingly, quote, now make war. And quote. And war they made. On August

21st, 1841, the fleet departed Macau, numbering at 15 transports, a pair of 74 gunships of the line, half a dozen lesser warships, and four ironclad steamers, including the nemesis. The army aboard numbered about 4,000 men. They carried with them 32 pound shot by the because percussion muskets by the hundreds, powder by the ton, and among the medical

supplies because it was of course a medical necessity, a hefty quantity of opium. Amoy, we already know, we covered it last time. Pottinger had barely gotten his feet under the desk when the fleet swept in, spent an hour or two battering the mile-long stone battery defenders had spent a year building

up and then walked around the back of it and marched in through and opened up the gate. The garrison had packed up and left before anyone had even reached them. It was as these things go, almost insultingly easy.

Which meant the real Northern Campaign started at Zhou Shan. Zhou Shan, you may recall, had already been taken once, seized in the opening moves of the war, and then handed back as part of Elliot's negotiated settlement. Then immediately, an enthusiastically re-fortified by the Qing, who had apparently decided that

a second battery would fix the problems that only having one hadn't solved. General Gauzben arrived on a fine October afternoon, climbed the adjacent hill, took it in a brisk exchange, and came down into the town. The 18th Regiment, searching for billets, found their own company numbers still chalked on

the doors of many of the houses from their previous times occupation. One soldier discovered the gravestone of a comrade buried during the first posting, name being Oglander, which had now been set decoratively into a local's doorstep. The house was subsequently raised to the ground.

Of all these early targets, Junhai would prove the toughest nut of the three. The city sat on a narrow peninsula commanded by a great rock over 200 feet high with a citadel on top, and the raking Mandarin defending it was one Yuqian, described by as, quote, determined and even ferocious. A man who had already demonstrated his seriousness

by having a prisoner decapitated and his head hung in a cage by way of greeting the English arrival. With Yu-Chen in command, everyone expected a real fight. And a fight they got, but a short one. Gao landed 1500 men at dawn, sent one column to threaten the front while another swung around behind. A class of sharp fighting followed, then the Chinese lines

broke and fled toward the river. The navy then towed two ships to within 1,300 yards of the citadel, anchored them carefully in the mud at high tide, and allowed them to methodically pound it into rubble. Marine Scaledorock chased the garrison down the backside and took the town. A habit

that had apparently caught on somewhere along the coast was the British soldiers cutting