The Devil Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page B

between journeys. As for soldiers, England had once again gone to war with China in 1856—this time with the assistance of France—in an effort to force further trading privileges out of a Chinese government that had no wish to see foreign barbarians doing extensive business outside the five treaty ports. Although hostilities in this conflict were primarily confined to the extreme north and south of the empire, Shanghai was a common port of call for military units in transit.
    As might be expected, an entire industry devoted to the entertainment and intoxication of such men grew up in the foreign settlements.Brawling and general disorderliness became a very real problem. Because most of the city’s legitimate trade was carried on in the British settlement—and because that settlement had not only a police force but a jail and magistrates willing to put people in it—this problem was considerably worse in the American settlement and especially the French concession, where municipal revenue was raised in large part through the sale of licenses for brothels as well as gambling and opium dens. Many such houses became legendary, as did the whores who worked them. By the spring of 1860 the North China Herald , Shanghai’s outspoken proponent of British views and the official organ of the British consulate, had this to say to soldiers whose “thirst, which seems little short of that of Tantalus” drove them to drunken misconduct:
    As long as all this takes place among ourselves, and not too often, we cannot complain, but unfortunately curiosity carries the soldier among the Chinese, and it is then his peculiarities become dangerous; his martial bearing and winning ways are not appreciated by the ladies of China, as they are by those of his native country, damsels do not find the same attraction here in a red coat as they do elsewhere, his bargaining propensities are viewed with suspicion, and his presence in a Chinese shop is strongly objected to, the rough way in which he meets and overcomes obstacles, (Chinamen included) is repugnant to the Chinese mind, and the natives are beginning to find no amusement in the intoxicated soldier, and heartily to detest all those little eccentricities so common to his cloth.
    An attitude of arrogance toward the Chinese was hardly unique todrunken soldiers. Disdain for their hosts characterized many if not most of the Westerners in the Middle Kingdom. On the other hand, the recent decades of closer contact had done little to improve the opinion that those hosts held of their guests. To the average Chinese the foreigners were coarse “barbarians” intent only on exploitation; to the average Westerner the Chinese were stubborn upholders of a backward order. And no group aroused greater antipathy in the foreigners than the ruling Manchus and their hirelings in the treaty ports. Whether or not theTaiping cause had merit—and there were many foreigners, especially missionaries, who felt that its close approximation of Christianity was worthy of encouragement—the visitors certainly had no trouble understanding how it had grown so strong. As the North China Herald put it:
    The Great Rebellion, like an old fungus full of proud flesh, does not heal up; on the contrary, if popular rumors may be taken as an index of the matter, it continues to go from bad to worse.… The old foundations of this government are thoroughly rotten; its ranks and orders are broken; and its gorgeous decorations are in tatters. It is no mere ghoul that is devouring the body-politic. The evils are legion; year by year they multiply; and no mortal can tell when or what will be the end of these things.
    In the spring of 1860, as Shanghai’s already crowded Chinese city began to fill up and finally overflow with refugees from the west, the foreign community grew increasingly curious about the nature of the army that was headed their way. True, the possibility that the rebellion would adversely affect trade alarmed many