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CHAPTER TWO

FROM SHANGHAI TO NAGASAKI

The Shanghai where Tom landed in 1857 was far removed from the tranquillity of Aberdeen’s Bridge of Don. There were stops on his voyage out to acclimatise him gradually – West Africa, South Africa, India, Singapore, Hong Kong almost certainly – but Shanghai was an entirely new world for him, even if, as is likely, his Glover connections had written to him beforehand. Shanghai, literally ‘On the Sea’, was a city, a port, and the major commercial centre of China. Lying as it does between the Yangzi river to the north and Yupan Bay to the south, it was base for many of the hundreds of Western traders in the Far East at the time. Tom’s employers, Jardine, Matheson & Co., had a major branch of their business there although the head office of the company remained in Hong Kong. Tom’s first view of Shanghai was the seven-mile-long stretch of waterfront known as the Bund, behind which clustered the foreign settlement. Most likely Tom was met on his arrival by his Glover connections and shown round the bustling city where he would work and learn for the next couple of years.

Shanghai had been one of the first Chinese ports opened to Western trade and to this day it dominates mainland Chinese commerce. Following the humiliating defeat of the Chinese by the British in the Opium War of 1842, Shanghai had been subjected to unrestricted foreign trade, with the British, French and Americans holding designated areas of the city. Resident in the British sector, Tom would have learned of the then threatening Taiping Rebellion. This peasant revolt against the Manchu rulers of China, in which millions died, was led by a Chinese who believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The fanatical rebel army was in control of much of the country and the Western residents of Shanghai were afraid of an attack on the city.

In Shanghai he picked up the rudiments of Far Eastern trading, gaining experience the hard way – copying letters, making out Bills of Lading and learning the other routine duties of a major trading organisation. Jardine, Matheson’s office and warehouse complex occupied the prime riverside site of Shanghai, close to the Bund. Major firms – and none was bigger than Jardine, Matheson & Co. – operated in Shanghai with two or three partners, assisted by about ten European clerks – of whom Tom was one – and fifty or sixty Chinese staff. The Westerners were comfortably housed in a compound but the overpowering smell of sewage and seaweed from the Whangpoo river would be the thing most remembered at that time by many of the foreign residents. Glover’s company dealt mainly in silk, tea and opium. The early summer months were the busiest for the firm and during this season the traders worked night and day buying, transporting, packing and shipping tea and silk. At other times the pace was more leisurely, long lunches breaking the few hours spent sweating over paperwork at a desk.

During his first year, Tom would have wakened in the mornings to the sound of sentries patrolling the walls high above the settlement – British and French troops had been stationed in the city to protect the foreign residents. The yelling of their commands would have mixed with the heat, noise, dust and smells of Shanghai – a whirlwind of alien sounds and faces. The most notorious area was Blood Alley, where the price of a seaman’s beer included a twelve-year-old prostitute behind a dirty curtain. Shanghai at the time was beginning to earn its later title of the ‘Whore of the Orient’.

Tom persevered. He was there almost a year later, in April 1858, when HMS Furious anchored in the river. Aboard was the British delegation of Lord Elgin en route to Beijing to negotiate further rights for British traders in China. Elgin’s mission found the traders in Shanghai, presumably including Glover, very angry at what they saw as leniency towards the Chinese by the British government. They felt that their wishes – even more liberal trade agreements, including an expansion of the lucrative business in opium – were not being pursued in a vigorous enough fashion. The British delegation was also under orders to secure a trading agreement with the Japanese, whose islands, for so long closed, had recently and reluctantly been opened to the West. Among Lord Elgin’s mission was another young Scot – Laurence Oliphant – with whom Glover would become involved over the years.

To the north-east of Shanghai, a week’s sail across the Yellow Sea, lay the mysterious islands of Japan. Japan at the time was the last Eastern civilisation untouched by the West and its imminent opening to foreign trade would have been the main topic of conversation in the offices and clubs of the China-based expatriates. The image of Japan held by many of the Europeans of Tom’s day was that of a very dangerous place – but there was also a romantic, almost magnetic fascination for the country as well as the assumption in the trading world that fortunes were there to be made once the door was open. The hereditary military ruler of Japan was the shogun, in Glover’s time better known as the tycoon. The Tokugawa family had held the office of shogun for more than 200 years. The Japanese emperor, or Mikado, was little more than a powerless figurehead virtually held in austere custody in Kyoto.

Japan had been all but sealed off from the world since 1638. At that time the then shogun, fearing the spread of Western influence, had expelled all Europeans from Japan and executed all the Japanese he could find who had become Christians. A severe exclusion policy, called sakoku, or ‘chained country’, had been strictly enforced for over 200 years and was even then being maintained by the fourteenth Tokugawa shogun. A Japanese fisherman blown by bad weather on to the shores of mainland Asia could not return to Japan – the penalty for breaking the exclusion order was death. Any foreign seamen shipwrecked on Japan were imprisoned or killed. A small Dutch colony had been allowed on the man-made island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay. Here some limited trade and exchanges of information were allowed but the Dutch contingent were closely guarded and controlled.

Despite the apparently settled state of Japan there was in some quarters deep and serious resentment against the shogun’s rule. The daimyo were the feudal lords of Japan, each ruling his clan and domain as he saw fit but still under the overall command of the shogun. There were more than 250 of these clans, or han, and their domains were spread throughout the Japanese islands. To enforce his authority the shogun made the clan lords in turn spend part of every year in his stronghold of Edo (modern Tokyo). When the lords returned to their domains, their families remained in Edo, virtual hostages of the shogun. The most powerful and resentful of the lords were located in the south-west domains, principally the clans of Satsuma and Choshu. These clans did not have the family ties that bound many of the other daimyo to the shogun. But even in and between these potentially rebellious clans there was distrust.

As the nineteenth century had progressed, the great naval powers had become more than a little restless with the attitude of the Japanese governments of successive shoguns. They wanted coaling, watering and trading facilities for their ships and guarantees for shipwrecked seamen. The Japanese found it hard to argue, their country had stagnated technically and militarily during its long seclusion. All of the shoguns had forbidden any ship to be built larger than that required for inshore fishing. Most of the technical advances of the West had completely bypassed Japan.

In the early 1850s, the push by the Great Powers could no longer be resisted by the Japanese. Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy and his ‘black ship’ squadron visited Japan in July 1853 and returned in February 1854. Anchored in Edo Bay, the size and armoury of the American ships quite clearly shocked many of the Japanese. The message from the West was clear – open up the country voluntarily or have it opened by force.

The first reaction of the majority of the Japanese clan lords was that, despite the obvious might of the West, Japan’s total exclusion policy had to be maintained at all costs. But as the 1850s progressed the Japanese became more and more aware of the powerful navies beginning to clamour at their doorstep, particularly that of the British, now with a free hand because of the ending of the Crimean War. The majority view now swung in favour generally of the shogun’s policy – allowing limited trade with the ‘barbarians’, though only as a means of preventing war with them – at least until Japan could fight on equal terms. There were active minorities, in about ten clans out of the more than 250 in Japan, who disagreed entirely with this policy. They began to criticise the shogun and his advisers for allowing the foreigners access to Japan at all. Old and deep resentments against the shogunate now had an opportunity to resurface.

The shogun was in a quandary, wanting rid of the foreigners but not knowing quite how to go about it. All the indications were that the Japanese emperor, still powerless in Kyoto, did not want the foreigners either.

The shogun now came under severe pressure and eventually gave way to further foreign demands. Basically, the Japanese were playing for time. Trading treaties with the Western Powers were signed. The Westerners, in general, were unaware of the explosive and complicated political situation in Japan or of the unrest in some of the clans. In the beginning some even thought that the shogun was, in fact, the emperor. To complicate matters even more the shogun did not have the dictatorial powers that many of the Westerners assumed him to have. Over the years the once all-powerful shogun had become in many cases simply a figurehead. The real power in Japan for a long time had been in the hands of the roju — a group of four or five leading councillors of the bakufu, the central administration of the shogun. Later the Westerners assumed that, like a European monarch, the Japanese Mikado reigned from Kyoto and that his prime minister or perhaps generalissimo, the shogun, ruled the country from Edo.

In any case, agreement was finally reached on the opening up of, initially, three Japanese ports. There foreign traders could be based and, within certain agreed limits, protected. The ports were Nagasaki, Kanagawa (later to become Yokohama) and Hakodate, and these three ports would come to be known as the Treaty ports.

Lying on the west coast of Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu, Nagasaki was the country’s nearest port to mainland Asia and had been the centre of Japanese Christianity before the Europeans had been expelled two and a half centuries before.

The deep, natural and protected harbour of Nagasaki with its narrow entrance was the port’s main asset. Thick woods of lush greenery pushed down the steep hillsides and surrounded the town which crouched round the harbour’s edge. Nagasaki’s disadvantages to the West were its size – a population of only around 50,000 – and its distance from the seat of government and the heavily populated areas of Japan far away to the north-east in central Honshu. Many of the incoming Westerners thought that they could establish themselves in Nagasaki until the really rich pickings – in Osaka and Kobe and Edo itself – were available. The treaties signed with the British, Americans, Russians and Dutch in 1858 contained agreements to open several more ports in the coming years.

But the disadvantages of Nagasaki to the traders were seen as major pluses by the shogun – this was a place where the ‘barbarians’ could be kept at bay, remote from his capital and stronghold of Edo. Of course, Yokohama, too, was opening and this swampy fishing village was close to Edo, but it was hoped that this new settlement could be cut off as effectively as Nagasaki. The third port, Hakodate in the northern island of Hokkaido, was naturally isolated by weather and surroundings. It was then of little importance to the shogun. He was attempting to buy time.

At one time an entirely Christian town where no Buddhist temple was even allowed to be built, Nagasaki had long since been under the direct control of the shogun. A daimyo could not be trusted apparently to hold this still strategic port which was close to the lands of the powerful Satsuma and Hizen clans. It was the natural melting pot for agents of the various factions then beginning to form in Japan, pro- and anti-foreign.

Young Tom Glover had been in China for just over a year when the first Western traders began to leave for Japan, to the Chinese the land of the ‘Rising Sun’.