Macartney at Kashgar

New Light on British, Chinese and Russian Activities in Sinkiang, 1890-1918

Pamela Nightingale, C.P. Skrine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136576164
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1973. This book describes the career of Sir George Macartney, who spent twenty-eight years at the turn of the nineteenth century as British representative in Sinkiang, China's most westerly province. Macartney was in a unique position to observe political and diplomatic manoeuvres by the key players trying to establish a sphere of influence in China's strategically vital hinterland before and during the Chinese revolution.

ONE

Travellers to Kashgar

In the late summer of 1890 two young Englishmen sat with their hosts to be photographed in Yarkand, an oasis town of Chinese Turkestan. Their impeccable European clothes and sun helmets were in bizarre contrast with the blue silk jackets, pork-pie hats and long robes of their Chinese hosts, and the assorted garb of their Turki attendants. Dominating the group with his military bearing and imperious gaze was Captain Francis Younghusband, then twenty-seven years old, but already a veteran explorer of Central Asia. His was a figure that could have been photographed anywhere in the British empire in that last decade of the nineteenth century; his stiff carriage and stern expression gave an air of supreme self-confidence, even arrogance, which not even his status as a guest of the Manchu empire could subdue.

In contrast, the Amban, or chief magistrate of Yarkand, sat in the group with his hands resting on his knee and looking composedly at the camera. He too had assurance, but of an older Confucian mould. He represented the Manchu imperial power which only thirteen years before had reconquered Eastern Turkestan and named it Sinkiang, the ‘New Dominion’. As one of the élite of Chinese scholar-officials the Amban belonged to a civilization that stretched back for thousands of years and still looked on the world outside China’s borders as barbarian. Despite the humiliations of the past fifty years and their surrenders to foreign powers the Chinese retained a sense of cultural superiority which showed itself in the dignity and firmness behind the Amban’s courteous treatment of his guests.

Younghusband and the Amban typified in their own way the two imperial traditions, the one new and aggressive, the other ancient but tenacious. Although separated by great distances in outlook and origin these two powers had now come to meet along the mountain ranges that divided the Indian from the Chinese empires. It was the expansion of the British-Indian empire that had brought Younghusband to Yarkand on a mission from the Indian government. With him as assistant and Chinese interpreter had come the other Englishman in the photograph, the twenty-three year old George Macartney.

There seemed little at first to distinguish Macartney’s figure from that of Younghusband. He sported the ubiquitous moustache of the period, but faced the photographer with less assurance. His reserve was apparent in the sidelong glance of his eyes, deep-set above high cheekbones. Like the Amban his face had something of the detached and analytical qualities of the scholar, but unlike Younghusband Macartney’s appearance revealed a certain modesty, even diffidence of temperament. No one looking at these three figures would have guessed that in the person of George Macartney the two traditions of China and Great Britain did in fact meet. Only Macartney’s command of the Chinese language gave any hint that he had mixed parentage, a Scottish father and Chinese mother, and that he had been born and brought up for the first ten years of his life in Nanking.

Macartney’s father, Halliday Macartney, was descended from the same branch of the Scottish family that had bred the eighteenth-century diplomat, George Macartney, who was made a peer in 1775, became a governor of Madras, and was then sent on an important mission to the Emperor of China. Despite his ancestry Halliday Macartney did not begin his career in particularly rich or influential circumstances. He studied medicine and went out to the Crimean War as an assistant surgeon. Later, his regiment took him to China where he found he preferred fighting to healing. He resigned his commission to join the Chinese army under General Charles Gordon which was engaged in putting down the Taiping rebellion. He achieved some distinction in this service and in 1864 decided to make his home in China with the ambition of gaining an influential position in the Manchu court. First, though, he married a near relative of Lar Wang, a Taiping prince, who had been one of the leaders of the great rebellion. Macartney had taken part in 1863 in the storming of the last Taiping stronghold, Suchow, when Lar Wang had been killed and Macartney had taken his womenfolk under his protection. He chose one of them as his bride and married her according to the Chinese rite in December 1864. Two years later in January 1867 their eldest son George was born, and subsequently they had two other sons and a daughter. Very little is known of Halliday Macartney’s Chinese wife as she did not mix with his European friends. But she was said to be attractive and intelligent, and the family lived together in Nanking until 1876 when Macartney returned to London as secretary of successive Chinese ministers at the Court of St James. His wife stayed behind and died two years later in Nanking.

The first ten years of George Macartney’s life were thus spent in the society of Nanking where his father was the founder-manager of China’s first arsenal. He grew up speaking English and Chinese and was old enough before he left to have absorbed a good deal of Chinese culture and to have become familiar with most aspects of Chinese life. This part of his education continued informally in London through his father’s position as secretary and interpreter at the Chinese legation. He never lost his fluency in his mother’s tongue and it became apparent that he had a gift for languages. He was sent to Dulwich College but instead of going on to an English university he went to France and took a degree at Caen University in 1886. Two years previously his father had married a Frenchwoman as his second wife. Besides speaking fluent French the young Macartney also learnt some Russian and German, and eventually he was to add Persian, Hindustani and Turki to his repertoire. With his background and linguistic ability it seemed inevitable that he should have a career in the East, and he sought a British consular post in China. But he failed to achieve his ambition; perhaps his background and French university were too unorthodox, or his reserve created a bad impression. Instead he had to sail for the East in the comparatively lowly post of Chinese interpreter in one of the subordinate services of the government of India.

It seems unlikely that George Macartney took with him to India the typical attitudes of the young English recruits of the time. The Indian civil service then and for some time afterwards drew on the cream of the public schools and universities, and its members had not only intellectual ability but an esprit de corps which made the service almost a caste. Young men went to the East imbued with a sense of national superiority and convinced of their ability and therefore of their right to rule. The idea that their Asian subjects might prefer self-government to good government did not cross their minds and had hardly yet occurred to the educated classes amongst those they ruled. Young Englishmen unashamedly went to India to pass on the benefits of a superior civilization compared with which Asian society as they saw it was backward, inefficient, often cruel, and corrupt. They took with them the public school caste loyalties and the public school tradition of noblesse oblige. English society in India reproduced and often distorted these attitudes; beliefs in social and cultural superiority turned into assumptions of racial superiority and of the divine right of the English people to rule over coloured races. In the small world of the club and drawing-room where the women had often only gossip to while away their exile, any stepping over the lines of caste and convention was not treated kindly. Every detail of a man’s career and his antecedents could be discussed and judged at leisure, and little escaped public knowledge.

It was not a world designed to make the young George Macartney feel at home. Throughout his life people who did not know him intimately commented on the depth of his reserve and on his reticence about his personal affairs and achievements. Partly this was a matter of temperament, inherited from his father, but no doubt it was increased by the circumstances of his life. Uprooted at an impressionable age from the Chinese world into which he was born, and separated from his mother, his transfer to an English public school must have come as a cultural and mental shock. The scholarly bent of his mind and his dislike of all forms of sport cannot have made things easier for him. When added to this was the consciousness of mixed parentage in a society where marriage to a non-European usually cut one off from one’s fellows, there might have been the makings of lifelong psychological problems. That these did not arise, or that George Macartney was able to overcome them says much for his father’s upbringing and his own stable character. Fortunately he was blessed with a very even temper which made it easy for him to get on with people. Few could quarrel with so quiet and modest a man.

Nevertheless, when he sailed for the East in 1887 at the age of twenty Macartney must have felt something of an outsider among the usual complement of passengers to India. He had then spent half of his life in China and half in Europe, and it must have seemed that he belonged completely to neither world. The sense of apartness had been there from childhood. His mother had never mixed with his father’s European friends – whether by her preference or his father’s choice is not clear. Halliday Macartney’s own attitude to his Chinese masters was itself ambiguous. A friend said of him that although people dubbed him ‘a Chinaman at heart’ he believed that Halliday Macartney ‘inwardly despised and disliked the natives, though he did not care to see them unjustly attacked, and thus appeared at times as their champion’. What attitude he passed on to his son is nowhere explicit, but George Macartney always showed the greatest respect for the feelings and interests of the Chinese although he saw with clear eyes the weakness and corruption of their government. It seems that this would also be a just description of his father’s attitude. Certainly Halliday Macartney was not a man to give his life in serving a people whom he held in contempt. But he did not bring his Chinese wife with him to London, and his son, no doubt, found it best not to mention her at school. He was to maintain this silence about his mother throughout his life, even to his own children. In London his father’s circle was cosmopolitan rather than English and Macartney’s choice of a French university further emphasized the difference between him and his fellow recruits for service in India.

It was therefore a silent and perhaps disappointed young man who left England to take up an appointment with the Burma Commission. But before he could begin the work assigned to him he was transferred to serve as Chinese interpreter with the Indian military expedition to Sikkim which in 1888 freed that border state from Tibetan control. Macartney’s general ability as well as his proficiency in Chinese earned him a favourable report and led to his appointment a year later as interpreter to accompany Younghusband to Sinkiang.

The two men had set out from Kashmir and trekked eastwards to Leh, the only town of Ladakh, and then northwards over passes 16,000 to 18,000 feet high into Chinese territory and the ancient city of Yarkand. The journey took four months and won for Macartney the friendship and esteem of Younghusband. When they parted a year later the great explorer acknowledged his debt to his companion:

We had been together a year now, and the greater part of the time by ourselves. It does not always follow that two men who have never seen each other in their lives before can get on at a stretch without a break and with scarcely a change of society. I felt myself especially fortunate, therefore, in having for a companion a man who was not only a first-class Chinese scholar and tactful in dealing with the Chinese but who was also willing to give and take, as travellers have to be.

Macartney, on his part, had the greatest admiration for Younghusband and the year he spent in his company was probably the most formative in his life.

Not only was Yarkand the place where happily Macartney was photographed at the very outset of his career, but it was here, too, within a few days of their arrival that he met a Russian officer, Captain Gromchevsky, whom Younghusband had tracked down on the Pamirs the year before. The meeting at Yarkand was symbolic. There on Chinese territory Macartney met for the first time the representative of a power whose expansionist aims he was to try, at times single-handed, to keep from absorbing Sinkiang. In that first meeting, though, with the affable Russian there seemed little threat. Younghusband’s relations with Gromchevsky were friendly. He wrote in one of his books that he found the Russians individually ‘the most charming people in the world. In spite of their reputation for prevarication they are frank and they are kindly and warm-hearted.’ But neither he nor Gromchevsky were under any illusions about each other’s designs in Sinkiang. Each knew that the other would strain every nerve and use every trick to protect and extend his government’s interests in this remote province of Central Asia. For Younghusband this meant popular acclaim for explorations and encounters on the Roof of the World; for George Macartney it was to mean years of patient watching, largely unknown and unrecognized, over the varying fortunes of the contestants in the ‘Great Game’.

Younghusband’s first meeting with Gromchevsky in 1889 was the signal that the contest had begun in earnest between Russia and Britain for the control of the mountain passes into India. From the time of Trafalgar India had been protected by the British navy from all threat of invasion by sea, but Britain’s European enemies had seen opportunities for trouble-making in India’s long northern border with Afghanistan and China. Napoleon had proposed a combined Franco-Russian expedition against this frontier as a way of striking at his enemy in a vulnerable place, and Russian columns had actually started off towards India, but without proper maps and equipment had not got very far. Nevertheless the strategy had not been forgotten by the Russians.

What might have seemed an unlikely adventure or a mere paper exercise at the beginning of the century had to be taken seriously by the 1860s when the great Russian drive into Central Asia and the Far East was well under way. With their ambitions in Europe blocked by Britain the Tsar and his generals turned to the east for compensation. They saw in Central Asian conquests not only prospects of unlimited Russian aggrandizement but a chance to threaten Britain through the back door of her Indian empire. Sabre-rattling near the northern Indian frontier where the British had only thirty soldiers to defend each mile could make the politicians in London more pliable. If the Russian Foreign Office should exercise a restraining hand the War Office could go over the Foreign Minister’s head to the Tsar. And if the War Office should prove faint-hearted there were always generals ambitious for a cheap victory and the loot of a Central Asian town. Once a conquest was made, prestige and the pride of the Romanovs demanded that it be kept.

Once the Russian drive to the east had begun it was not easy to call a halt. Traders and settlers would push farther afield and come into contact with other Central Asian tribes. There would be problems of raiding and disputes which called for Russian intervention, and again the army would move forward. In this way, one after the other, the khanates of Central Asia collapsed like so many cards before the Russian advance; Bokhara in 1868, Khiva in 1873, Kokand in 1875, and Russia then was in contact with India’s turbulent neighbour, Afghanistan. The sabre-rattling began in earnest. During the 1878 crisis in the Near East Russian columns were ordered to march to Wakhan and the Chitral passes, and they were only turned aside by the Congress of Berlin. What would have happened if the Congress had not intervened was a speculation which must have given the Viceroy some anxious thought.

Britain’s first efforts to control Afghan affairs had ended in the disasters of the first Afghan war when a whole British expeditionary force was slaughtered and only one man lived to tell the tale. So fiercely independent and jealous were the Afghans and so turbulent in their domestic politics that their borders offered unlimited scope for intrigue and aggression to a hostile power. British policy swung between two extremes in its efforts to meet the danger. The adherents of the ‘forward policy’ believed in active intervention, with military support where necessary, to give India favourable allies on her frontier, while the protagonists of the ‘close border’ or ‘masterly inactivity’ doctrine believed in a cautious maintenance of the status quo. Diplomacy was their weapon, and in 1870, with Gladstone in power and opposed to military adventures, the British government tried to solve the Central Asian problem by negotiating spheres of interest with the Russians. The British agreed to give Russia a free hand with the Turcomans of Transcarpia in return for recognition of the British ‘special interest’ in Afghanistan and Baluchistan. This would protect the land routes to India from the west. But the problem was to decide the northern boundary of Afghanistan, which would be the dividing line between the two spheres of interest. What followed was a classic example of the folly of border-making by drawing lines on maps.

The natural frontier between Afghanistan and the Russian sphere of interest was the river Oxus, but in the easternmost section of its course, instead of flowing conveniently from east to west, the river described an immense capital Z, of which the upper and lower strokes each ran for 140 miles west by south. To make matters worse the upper parts of the river were fordable at low water and in places bridgeable so that its valley had become the home of isolated mountain people who had settled on both banks. This was especially true of the long northward reach where the principalities of Shignan and Roshan which straddled the river were feudatories of Afghanistan, while that of Darwaz, further north, paid tribute to Russian-controlled Bokhara. The Russians probably knew something of this complicated geography but the British negotiators were entirely ignorant and had to accept whatever maps the Russians chose to show them.

It is not surprising then that after two years of haggling and frustration the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, agreed with his Russian counterpart, Prince Gortchakov, on a delimitation of the frontier which was ‘so ambiguous and contradictory as to be almost incomprehensible’. At the last minute the British had accepted a Russian proposal that this section of the frontier should be simplified by drawing a straight line from the eastern end of Lake Victoria on the Great Pamir to the junction of the Kokcha river with the Oxus. Ten years later this makeshift arrangement gave the Russians plausible grounds for claiming several inhabited valleys on the right bank of the Oxus ruled by the chiefs of Roshan and Shignan who were feudatories of Afghanistan. Most serious of all was the discovery that the straight line that had been drawn on the map did not penetrate far enough to the east to meet the Chinese frontier. It left a gap of 60 miles between Afghanistan and the Chinese province of Sinkiang.

One result of these flaws in the Granville-Gortchakov Agreement of 1873 was that not only did it give to Russia nearly 1000 square miles of territory to which she had neither historic nor ethnic right but it further vexed Anglo-Afghan relations. The Amir refused to surrender his claim to the valleys on the right bank of the Oxus although he was pressed by the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, to do so. His relationship with Britain deteriorated and when in 1878 he received a Russian mission at his capital the second Afghan war with Britain followed. The outcome was that the strongest Afghan of his generation, Abdurrahman Khan, was helped by the British to power in Kabul. The new Amir hated the Russians for the treatment he had received when he had been a prisoner in their hands, but his own and his subjects’ fierce independence made him hostile to anything that looked like an encroachment by the British. Until the flaws of the 1873 Agreement were removed there was a serious possibility that the Amir’s anti-Russian feelings would lead him to clash with the Russians in Shignan and Roshan as he had already clashed with them and lost at Panjdeh. It was certain that the Russians would not lose any chance of provocation and once fighting had broken out there was no knowing what strategic advantages they would gain.

But the most dangerous situation was that created by the gap that had been left between the demarcation line and the Chinese frontier of Sinkiang. For here on the high and inhospitable plateau of the Pamirs, which has been aptly called the Roof of the World, a corridor of unclaimed territory existed which allowed the Russians free access to the south through the passes of the Hindu Kush into the hill states of India. It was here in a climate three months spring and nine months winter, in valley-bottoms 10,000 to 13,000 feet above the sea and empty of settled humanity that the next round of the Great Game was to be played. For this Younghusband and Macartney had come to Sinkiang.

The British government’s interest in the country beyond its mountainous northern frontier had waxed and waned throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. There had always been a trickle of Indian trade from Kashmir and Leh over the cruel Karakoram Pass to Yarkand. The traders had carried opium, cotton, piece-goods, spices and hardware on the backs of pack animals over eleven major passes, only two of them lower than Mont Blanc, and had returned by the same route with charas (marijuana), China tea, silk, carpets, gold and silver. But so long and hazardous was the journey, and so heavy the losses among the an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction by Sir Clarmont Skrine
• 1 Travellers to Kashgar
• 2 Rival Empires
• 3 The Opening Moves
• 4 Assault on the Pamirs
• 5 The Pamir Settlement
• 6 The Struggle to Survive
• 7 The Russian Ascendancy
• 8 The Move into Sarikol
• 9 Diplomatic Adjustments
• 10 Recognition and Reforms
• 11 Revolution in Kashgar
• 12 The Chira Crisis
• 13 The Contest for Sinkiang
• 14 The New Regime
• 15 War and Counter-Intelligence
• Bibliography
• Index