do not know where anything is.
You ask an ancient who has lived all of his long life in Zhenjiang, “Where is the old British consulate?” and he will shake his head and wave you away with his hand, professing no clue, having no interest. My questions about the anchor itself produced still more puzzled refusal: “No, never heard of it.
Purple Stone Hero
? Not anywhere here. Doesn't ring a bell with me.”
In the end, my interpreter and I found a man with a car who knew where the local museum was, and this turned out to be, unmistakably, the old consulate itself. No one knew it was; but its architecture—redbrick and of a complexity you find in an Escher painting, with seven linked buildings, lots of outside stairs and archways, and wings and extra windows—was classic Foreign Office Grade One issue. The building looked as though it might have been sent out from London in crates and set up on a spare weekend by the local staff. Consulates like this one existed all over the East, from Kashgar to Korea. They were built during that wave of British expansion and self-confidence that marked the latter half of the last century. Here the walls were still intact, ten feet tall; and I could make out bas-relief crests, with intertwined letters for “Victoria” and “Regina.”
It was just as well the walls were high: Britain had attacked the Manchus here as far back as 1842, and a keen, long-standing bitterness had suffused the local population. It was a bitterness that may well have contributed to the locals' professed ignorance of any British memorial even a century and a half later.
The invaders' triumph back then had been a signal one. Seven thousand British soldiers had stormed over the city's double walls from their flotilla of men-of-war—the
Amethyst
's predecessors, one might say. They had sacked the city within hours. The local governor had locked himself and his family into their house and set it ablaze, all dying on the pyre. From the British point of view, the rout of the city's defenders had been the culminating victory of the first Opium War. Within just one more month, the Chinese had been forced to hand over Hong Kong in perpetuity and pay $21 million in Mexican silver dollars, the currency of the day, in compensation. The Chinese, inevitably, saw it otherwise.
However, it took them many years to become strong enough to say so. Twodecades later, China was still being pummeled and humiliated by foreigners and was forced to allow Chinkiang to be declared a treaty port in 1861, effectively relinquishing sovereignty over parts of the city to foreign administrations. The foreigners had high hopes for the place. A British concession was built, with its own waterworks and generating station—and, as in Shanghai and Nanking and forty-five other places in China, its own British laws and courts.
Britain, Germany, France, and Austro-Hungary set up consulates in the city; great British trading firms like Jardines and Swires kept hulks in midriver for mooring their steamers; and Standard Oil of New York (which was later to become Mobil Oil, a company with formidably strong connections in old China) had a farm of oil storage tanks. Japan toppled most of this comfort and prosperity when it captured the city in 1937; Zhu De's troops—who stormed across the Yangtze in 1949 even while the
Amethyst
was enduring her miseries in mid-stream—managed to finish it off. Few outsiders have lived in Zhenjiang since. The only foreigners I heard about while I was there were a couple of Algerians said to be working in a talc factory.
It was one thing to find the consulate, quite another to find the anchor. No one outside the building would say anything about the delights inside until I paid to get in. So I handed over one yuan to a crone behind the guichet and inquired. No, she said, there is no such thing as an anchor anywhere here. The cadre standing inside the gate said much the same: There were plenty of Sung dynasty pots and
You ask an ancient who has lived all of his long life in Zhenjiang, “Where is the old British consulate?” and he will shake his head and wave you away with his hand, professing no clue, having no interest. My questions about the anchor itself produced still more puzzled refusal: “No, never heard of it.
Purple Stone Hero
? Not anywhere here. Doesn't ring a bell with me.”
In the end, my interpreter and I found a man with a car who knew where the local museum was, and this turned out to be, unmistakably, the old consulate itself. No one knew it was; but its architecture—redbrick and of a complexity you find in an Escher painting, with seven linked buildings, lots of outside stairs and archways, and wings and extra windows—was classic Foreign Office Grade One issue. The building looked as though it might have been sent out from London in crates and set up on a spare weekend by the local staff. Consulates like this one existed all over the East, from Kashgar to Korea. They were built during that wave of British expansion and self-confidence that marked the latter half of the last century. Here the walls were still intact, ten feet tall; and I could make out bas-relief crests, with intertwined letters for “Victoria” and “Regina.”
It was just as well the walls were high: Britain had attacked the Manchus here as far back as 1842, and a keen, long-standing bitterness had suffused the local population. It was a bitterness that may well have contributed to the locals' professed ignorance of any British memorial even a century and a half later.
The invaders' triumph back then had been a signal one. Seven thousand British soldiers had stormed over the city's double walls from their flotilla of men-of-war—the
Amethyst
's predecessors, one might say. They had sacked the city within hours. The local governor had locked himself and his family into their house and set it ablaze, all dying on the pyre. From the British point of view, the rout of the city's defenders had been the culminating victory of the first Opium War. Within just one more month, the Chinese had been forced to hand over Hong Kong in perpetuity and pay $21 million in Mexican silver dollars, the currency of the day, in compensation. The Chinese, inevitably, saw it otherwise.
However, it took them many years to become strong enough to say so. Twodecades later, China was still being pummeled and humiliated by foreigners and was forced to allow Chinkiang to be declared a treaty port in 1861, effectively relinquishing sovereignty over parts of the city to foreign administrations. The foreigners had high hopes for the place. A British concession was built, with its own waterworks and generating station—and, as in Shanghai and Nanking and forty-five other places in China, its own British laws and courts.
Britain, Germany, France, and Austro-Hungary set up consulates in the city; great British trading firms like Jardines and Swires kept hulks in midriver for mooring their steamers; and Standard Oil of New York (which was later to become Mobil Oil, a company with formidably strong connections in old China) had a farm of oil storage tanks. Japan toppled most of this comfort and prosperity when it captured the city in 1937; Zhu De's troops—who stormed across the Yangtze in 1949 even while the
Amethyst
was enduring her miseries in mid-stream—managed to finish it off. Few outsiders have lived in Zhenjiang since. The only foreigners I heard about while I was there were a couple of Algerians said to be working in a talc factory.
It was one thing to find the consulate, quite another to find the anchor. No one outside the building would say anything about the delights inside until I paid to get in. So I handed over one yuan to a crone behind the guichet and inquired. No, she said, there is no such thing as an anchor anywhere here. The cadre standing inside the gate said much the same: There were plenty of Sung dynasty pots and
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