The Reporter and the Warlords: An Australian at Large in China's Republican Revolution
The Reporter and the Warlords: An Australian at Large in China's Republican Revolution
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| ISBN-13: | 9781742694702 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
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The Reporter and the Warlords
By Craig Collie
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2013 Craig CollieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-470-2
CHAPTER 1
A different world
May, 1903. Looking out over Hong Hom Bay from the deck of the steamship that brought him here from Melbourne, he has arrived at a different world, his vessel sitting in a floating forest. Tall wooden sail masts, intricately rigged with ropes and crossed with square yards, nod lazily to the blunt masts of steamers and tripod masts on light grey warships. Squat junks with fabric sails bob around the bay among thin sampans loaded with families and their worldly belongings huddled under small awnings. Across the bay, he can see heights draped in green, stately houses here and there on the steep, lush sides almost to the summit. A small city lies prostrate at its base.
He turns his gaze to the shore and takes in what he can with one gulp of a newspaperman's eye. Behind the austere customs offices and warehouses lining Kowloon's waterfront, shanty dwellings cluster and rugged rocky hills rise to a craggy peak. Further behind stretch the blue mountains of Kwangtung, and the vast empire of the Manchus about which Will Donald knows almost nothing.
The rush of berthing SS Changsha completed, a gangway is lowered. Sandy-haired with a prominent nose, of medium build and wiry, Donald disembarks into the swarming dark-haired humanity he was watching from the deck. He knew it would be approaching summer this side of the equator but, in a light suit and tie, has seriously underestimated the humidity and heat that now greets him. He feels oppressed and alien. Carrying his cabin bag down the gangway, he spots the bloated body of a dog floating in the water between the ship and the wharf.
The letter from the China Mail had said he'd be met by a staff member. All around him is a sea of Chinamen with shaved foreheads and long plaited pigtails, wearing ankle-length gowns and soft black shoes as if they are all just out of bed. There are few women. A European is preparing to get into a rickshaw, another is struggling out of one, suited and hatted; in fact, dressed not unlike Donald despite the weather. No Europeans are walking about. They can't move, it seems, except by rickshaw. The wharf area is surprisingly noiseless, some voices and the shuffle of jostling movement, but not the cacophony he would expect from so many people pushing and shoving. An aroma of wood smoke and incense drifts past his nostrils and, when that eases, there is the damp smell that comes off the harbour.
Finally, he spots a Chinese man standing over to the side with a sign held up on a pole: 'MR W. H. DONALD'. Waiting patiently for the new arrival to identify himself, he too has a pigtail and a shaved forehead. The sign is a sheet of paper pinned to a flat board attached to a wooden pole. It looks like a baker's paddle given a new purpose. Donald walks up and points to the sign. 'That's me,' he says chirpily.
The man welcomes Donald enthusiastically in sing-song pidgin English. The Australian can follow parts of it only. He is being asked, he thinks, whether he has luggage still onboard. He answers, yes, he has a large trunk. The man says it will be brought to the China Mail office and says something in another language to a young man standing to one side who then disappears. Donald hadn't noticed him.
A rickshaw boy pulls up alongside them as if already hired. Donald's companion must have hailed him with a wink and a nod, but he didn't notice that either. Things are moving a little faster than he can follow. The subdued sounds on the wharf have been overtaken by the hubbub he was expecting: shouting and clanging and clattering.
'We go ferry.'
The contact picks up the bag Donald has put down and motions for him to climb onboard the rickshaw. Doing so with the intention of making space for a second person, Donald finds there is no room. He assumes a second rickshaw will be called, but before he can claim his bag, the rickshaw takes off with a sudden lurch and bounces along at a slow clip, its iron wheel rims clanking over the stony road. His welcoming committee of one walks alongside, carrying Donald's bag and the pole with his name on it. The Australian, from a culture of aggressive egalitarianism, is uncomfortable, but is too unfamiliar with this culture to do anything about it.
The metal rickshaw doesn't give as smooth a ride as Donald expected. Threading through the clamour of the unending human stream, bumping around obstacles — lumbering wooden handcarts piled high with goods, sellers and buyers fussing over wares displayed on upturned crates, stacked wooden cages of ducks — and dodging past shoulder poles loaded at each end, it arrives noisily at the Star Ferry Company's Kowloon wharf.
The man from the China Mail has kept pace with him all the way. Gesturing with a wave of his open palm, the guide indicates that they should board the ferry that can be seen through the wide entrance of a grandiose pavilion. The rickshaw boy is given a coin which he examines closely. The Australian's companion leads the way into the terminal, still carrying his cabin bag. The Morning Star is ready to leave, a black cloud billowing from its tall smokestack poking through a fabric awning that shelters the upper deck.
Installed under the sloped cover as the ferry pushes across Victoria Harbour, Donald can now feel himself relaxing into these new and unfamiliar surroundings. He starts to take stock of how he got here.
Will Donald had moved to Melbourne from Sydney a few months earlier to work as subeditor on the Argus. Previously with Sydney's Daily Telegraph, he'd become frustrated with so few opportunities for advancement. In any case, the Argus had offered significantly more money.
A country boy from Lithgow, across the Blue Mountains from Sydney, Donald was still feeling his way with his new employer when a telegram came out of the blue. From Hong Kong, the cable offered the Australian a job as subeditor and eventually editor on the colony's afternoon paper, the China Mail. In conclusion, it instructed: 'Apply at China Navigation Company Melbourne for Ticket and Expense Money'.
Something of a jokester himself, Donald thought someone was pulling his leg. He carried the telegram around in his pocket for most of the day before going to the shipping office to confirm his suspicions.
'I think I'm the victim of a leg-pull,' he told the clerk. But he wasn't. The cable order for money and a ticket was waiting for him, as the telegram had said.
'When would you be thinking of going?' asked the clerk.
A flummoxed Donald mumbled that he'd have to get back to him. It was unusual for the convivial journalist to be at a loss for words.
Returning to the Argus office, he mentioned the offer to a reporter working at the next desk. 'It's an adventure,' his colleague said. 'Take it.'
Discussing it that evening with Melbourne's correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, Donald got the opposite advice. 'Look, you've got your foot on the ladder here,' his friend argued. At the time the Argus was a beacon for journalists in Australia and considered a prestigious paper to work for. 'Why throw it away on a paper you know nothing about? In a country you don't know?'
Clearly Donald was going to have to make up his own mind. The next day he went to the editor's desk.
'I'm going to China,' he said and waited.
The editor looked up. In the short time Donald had been there, the editor had already taken note of his new subeditor's blunt manner.
'Isn't it a bit sudden, Mr Donald? You've just started here. I'd hate to lose you. I would have thought the Argus is your sort of paper. Anyway, what do you know about China?'
The answer, of course, was not much. But Will Donald had made up his mind. He had been fascinated by the Orient for some time, although precious little that was current could be found about it in libraries. Coincidentally, a journalist from Japan's Kobe Herald had passed through Sydney a short time before, on a circuitous visit to Britain via Hong Kong, Australia and America. The Scotsman, Petrie Watson, had come into the Telegraph office on Christmas Day. Finding an interested audience in Donald, he had expounded at length about the Chinese and the Japanese.
Watson was highly critical of the Japanese and their turbulent politics, dismissive of their 'so-called culture'.
'Never trust the Japanese,' he had said, 'and don't believe a word they say. They copy Western inventions without getting licences for them.' The visitor predicted the Japanese would soon attack Russia, having already defeated the Chinese six years before and imposed sanctions on them.
As for the Chinese, they were 'a mess', a culture consumed with maintaining 'face'. The Chinese spend so much time acquiring wisdom, he said, they have no time left to use it.
'But there's a power there,' Watson concluded. 'China is a sleeping giant.'
Sleeping giant. Those words would take on immeasurable importance in Will Donald's life, but at the time that conversation was as near as Donald had come to the Chinese. Scattered across market gardens outside Lithgow and in Sydney's markets in Surry Hills, the Chinese were to be ignored or regarded with suspicion. The White Australia policy made sure of that.
In Hong Kong a sort of White China policy is in operation, but it's too soon for Donald to recognise that. What he does see, when he eventually disembarks on the island, are turbaned policemen and pigtailed coolies, everywhere carrying out their duties and plying their harbourside trades.
On the pretext of needing something from it, he takes hold of his cabin bag as a gesture to his own Australian-ness. Otherwise it is the routine as before: a rickshaw journey with his companion walking briskly alongside. Donald is overpowered by the rich stench of smoke, faeces and garlic when he steps onto Icehouse Street Wharf. Everywhere the smells of eating — coriander, dried seafood, anise, fish and soy sauces, barbecued pork — are made richer and more pungent by the hot May day. As Donald moves away from the shoreline, the crowds thin out to reveal the heavy Victorian architecture of colonial rectitude and decorum. Storeys layered like filing drawers, with deep balconies behind repeating patterns of granite arches and columns. What strikes Donald as he travels through the more muted bustle on these boulevards is the lack of horse-drawn traffic. Anything that moves is either human or pulled by humans, always Chinese.
After a couple of blocks they are making their way a short distance up Wyndham Street with flower stalls either side of the roadway, blooming with colour as the street starts to wind its way up the rise towards Victoria Peak. They soon come to a three-storey building which has seen better days. Over the ground-floor colonnaded portico hangs a tailor's wooden sign. Above it, attached to the first-floor balcony is another proclaiming 'China Mail Editorial Offices'. The rickshaw stops and the Chinese man spreads his arms like a ringmaster towards the unprepossessing structure, proud of the honour of being a part of it.
'Master,' he says, apropos of nothing in particular.
Donald climbs a dark staircase and walks into an editorial room on the first floor. As the newcomer enters, a short, squat man gets down from his high chair and approaches him with a broad smile. He is clearly the editor, Thomas H. Reid, who had cabled Donald with the offer of this job.
'You must be Mr Donald,' he says in a distinct Scottish brogue. 'So happy you could join us.' Indicating a desk over to one side, old papers strewn untidily across it, he adds, 'That will be your desk.' It looks like its current occupant has just ducked out for something to eat and will be back any moment.
'How did you come to hire me?' Donald asks.
'In this business, there are too many drunks,' the editor replies. 'I'm sick of them. Too many bad experiences.' He explains that a newspaperman passed through Hong Kong late last year on his way home, via Australia and America, after working in Japan. Reid told him he was looking for a new subeditor and to let him know if he came across a competent journalist who was a teetotaller. 'He found you,' Reid says, shrugging his shoulders. 'Petrie Watson. Do you remember him?'
Donald says he does. After they'd talked for a while, he'd taken Watson to lunch. Unlike most journalists, notoriously heavy drinkers, Donald has never had a drop of alcohol in his 27 years. He'd had a cup of tea with the meal, now that he is reminded of it. Watson had remarked on that, talking about it at some length. Now he understands why.
'I never thought he'd find one, but he did,' continues Reid. 'You don't drink, so you get the job.'
The editor hands his new subeditor a sheaf of telegrams. 'Here are some late telegrams from London, Mr Donald,' he says. 'Caption them for the next edition, if you would.'
In shuffling through them, a couple of sheets slip to the floor. Donald stoops to pick them up, but Reid stops him sharply, calling out, 'Boy!'
A small Chinese man with a grey pigtail sticks his head through the door.
'You want something, Master?'
'Yes, pick up those papers.'
'Yes, Master!'
As the Chinese man hands the papers to an embarrassed Donald, the China Mail proprietor, Murray Bain, comes into the room. Without waiting to be introduced he says to the new recruit, 'You must learn not to exert yourself. The climate here is too hot.'
That a man, old enough to be his father, is made to do such a menial task as pick up a few dropped papers will take the Australian newsman some getting used to.
* * *
So began the extraordinary Chinese adventure of William Henry Donald in a significant and turbulent time in that country's history, in which the Ch'ing dynasty of the Manchus collapses and dies, and the Republic of China grows out of its carcass. Arriving as a local newsman, Donald would become first a foreign correspondent witnessing great events, then a participant in them. But it all began in the editorial office of the China Mail.
Donald found he was expected to do everything on the newspaper, to be, as he described, 'chief cook and bottle-washer', but Reid and Bain gave him the editorial freedom to write about subjects as he saw them. He found the British snooty and wrote editorials about Hong Kong life, often with a satirical take on the colony's social mores. This didn't greatly endear him to the British expats.
The Australian had arrived in Hong Kong with his countrymen's ambivalence towards the English. Although of British stock — or they were then — Australians notoriously had a chip on their shoulder from the belief that the English looked down on them, that they were seen as brash descendants of convicts from Great Britain's working classes, unrefined and uncultured. Hong Kong provided ample opportunity to reinforce that prejudice in Donald's mind. It was a staid British entrepot, serving as a way-station for trade with China, and run by mercantile expatriates from Britain with a puffed-up sense of their own importance.
Europeans and Americans came to Hong Kong to do business. The hongs (foreign businesses) had made huge fortunes out of opium and were now investing in less tainted enterprises. Shipbuilding, maritime insurance and dry docking were the growth industries of the colony. Tea from China was a source of great wealth, with duty providing 10 per cent of the government's income. At this time, it was also the banking centre of China; the daily rate of silver, long used as the standard of monetary exchange, was set in Hong Kong.
Taipans, as the foreign businessmen were called, did most of their business in the morning, dictating letters before going to the Hong Kong Club for gin and tonic. After a nap in long rattan deck chairs on the club's verandah, they might go back to the office to sign their letters. With that onerous duty out of the way, the evening was theirs to enjoy.
A problem for all the Hong Kong papers was that the colony was small and local news was not very interesting. Foreign stories came by cable, but the high cost of this service limited the reporting of foreign news, for the most part, to English cricket and football. Opinion pieces, light satire and news summaries were added to the mix, but Donald's editorialising was not always well-received. In a close-knit community the dominant interests — businesses, clubs and social cliques — could redirect their advertising or block access to news stories in retaliation for an item against their interests. Power in the colony resided in the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the trading conglomerate Jardine Matheson and Co, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. The governor came a distant fourth.
The city of Victoria spread around and extended up Victoria Peak. Hong Kong's most affluent residents lived on 'The Peak', not just for the superior views, but because the breeze gave some relief from the stifling summer heat. Transport to and from the city below was by the Peak Tram, a funicular railway built late in the nineteenth century. Between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., downhill services were reserved each morning solely for first-class passengers. At the lower terminal, liveried chair-bearers would carry passengers to their offices. At the summit, upholstered wicker sedans stood by to carry them home. The Peak Tram's front seat was reserved permanently for the governor, whose summer residence, Mountain Lodge, was up on the slopes. To ensure the protocol was observed, a sign warned: 'This seat is reserved for his Excellency, The Governor'. It was an aspect of Hong Kong life that gave Donald a disdain for the colony's elite.
The China Mail featured a series of 'Intercepted Letters' between 'Betty' and 'Nell', light-hearted dissections of colonial life. The pseudonymous author was in fact WH Donald. One of his intercepted letters described a moonlight picnic to end the bathing season, heading out by launch with the women in the stern exchanging domestic gossip and men in the bow enjoying their cigars. The gossip was about the Chinese servants, how the 'boy' of one of them only lived for 'squeeze' (extortion) and washed his feet in the soup tureen, and how the amah (nanny) of another wore her mistress's stockings and stole her handkerchiefs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Reporter and the Warlords by Craig Collie. Copyright © 2013 Craig Collie. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Map: China in the time of Donald,People featured in this book,
Chapter 1 A different world,
Chapter 2 Hide-and-seek,
Chapter 3 The viceroy,
Chapter 4 Fall of the Manchus,
Chapter 5 How we took Purple Mountain by stealth,
Chapter 6 An unshining Sun,
Chapter 7 21 Demands,
Chapter 8 The day of the warlord,
Chapter 9 The Young Marshal,
Chapter 10 The cure,
Chapter 11 Madame and the generalissimo,
Chapter 12 The Si'an Incident,
Chapter 13 Disillusioned,
Chapter 14 Escape and capture,
Chapter 15 Yesterday's man,
Epilogue,
Author's Note,
Acknowledgements,
Bibliography,
Chapter Notes,