Free The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr Page A

valid when applied to relations between Western and Chinese merchants, but U.S. officials in China repeatedly warned their superiors against believing that it had any application to dealings with the Manchu rulers of the empire. As one such official said, “It is quite a mistake to suppose that the rulers of China have any regard for one nation more than another; that they are more friendly, for instance, towards the Americans than towards the English; they may, perhaps, fear the English and Russians more than they do the Americans, but they would be glad if none of them ever came near them.”
    As for the opium trade, it expanded dramatically following the opening of the new treaty ports. And the spread of the drug was now facilitated by unlikely allies: Protestant missionaries. Considering Chinese paganism a worse sin than opium addiction, these Christian soldiers often found themselves transported on smugglers’ ships and protected by smugglers’ guns. At least one prominent missionary, the Dutchman Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff—whose translations of the Bible and Christian tracts into Chinese were to become standard works—actually hired himself out as an interpreter for opium dealers,defiantly declaring that by using their money to finance his missionary labors he was making the devil do the Lord’s work.
    The Chinese were quite alive to the fact that Christianity was the spearhead of foreign commercial and political barbarism, and the ferocity of their published attacks on the Westerners’ faith was not surprising: “Those who enter this religion practise sodomy without restraint,” declaredone Chinese pamphlet. “Every seventh day they perform worship which they call the Mass … [and] when the ceremony is over all give themselves up to indiscriminate sexual intercourse.… They call it the ‘Great Communion.’… They reject and ignore the natural relations, and are in other respects like beasts.” A further appeal was made to Chinese reason: “How is it possible for the Son of God (Shang-ti) to take the form of a man and be born?—When sin has once been committed, how is it possible to atone for it?—Before Jesus was born, in whose hand was the government of the universe?—When his body had ascended to heaven, how could he have a grave for men to worship? Preposterous stories, inconsistent with themselves!”
    Such strident criticism produced results: Of the comparatively few Chinese peasants who heeded the calls of the foreign missionaries, many met a gruesome end.
    But at the same time, foreign had a broad application among Chinese peasants. Two hundred years after the invasion of the Manchus, many citizens still considered their Tartar conquerors to fall within that category. The collapse of the Chinese economy and the humiliation of Manchu soldiers in the Opium War heightened the volatility of the disaffected, who sensed that the dynasty was weakening. That Manchu corruption was at least as responsible for China’s predicament as were the Westerners was obvious even to the poorly educated, and before the 1840s were over, rebellion was in the air. “[N]othing is more likely,” wrote Thomas Taylor Meadows, one of Britain’s most perceptive officials on the scene, “now that the prestige of Manchu power in war has received a severe shock in the late encounters with the English, than that a Chinese Belisarius will arise and extirpate or drive into Tartary the Manchu garrisons … who … have greatly deteriorated in the military virtues; while they still retain enough of the insolence of conquerors, to gain themselves the hatred of the Chinese.”
    That Belisarius was not destined to rise until two years after the American clipper Hamilton sailed out of Hong Kong with a cargo of tea and silk early in 1848. But the Hamilton’s young second mate, Frederick Townsend Ward, would return to China several times over the coming decade, and the opportunities offered by the empire’s sickened