Tag Archives: Chinese History

Charles Lennox Richardson and The Namamugi Incident

Hey everyone just a quick foreword. The blog and podcast are going to slightly different places over the next month, as, in an effort to buy myself a little free time to work on polishing the podcast up a little I am running shows on Altamont and Spring Heeled Jack – two topics I have blogged about earlier. For the next few weeks I am going to blog a few short tales which interest me but are mostly too short to make into a podcast episode.

Today’s tale owes a huge debt of gratitude to New Zealand singer songwriter Emma G. Back in August she posted a meme to her personal Facebook profile along the lines of some text “So in the middle of the Civil War someone was like “You know what this country needs? A delicious steak sauce” followed by a close up on a bottle of A1 steak sauce, est. 1862. This did catch my imagination for a second, for what little I did know about this – and I started to wonder, like seriously.

I knew that pre Civil war, America’s favourite meat was pork, post war it became steak. Much of this did come down to the very land that the union and confederate states were arguing over in the lead up to the war. To simplify, many confederates felt they should have the option to settle in the land the union had acquired through land purchases, war and genocide… and bring their slaves with them. The union wanted these states not to be slave states. After the war of course much of the land got seized at way more than the 160 acres per person guaranteed by Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead act… coincidentally also of 1862… by the ‘Beef Barons’.
Please note I am glossing over something here with way more moving parts than I make it out to have… But I wondered was there some underlying political motive? Some social phenomenon I had not come across before? Some eminent historian I had not even heard of before with a book about how the war was fought over cattle, not slavery?

Well…. Before too long I found that was the wrong question. A1 Sauce was invented in Britain. What was happening in Britain in 1862 you might ask? I did. Quite a bit, but today I want to look at the story I had never heard of before. Thanks Emma for leading me towards it – That of Charles Lennox Richardson and the Namamugi Incident.

When in Rome…
“When in Rome do as the Romans do”. If anyone has ever wondered where the old proverb comes from, it came from the pen of 4th Century AD ‘Doctor of the Catholic church’ St Augustine, recalling the advice of the older priest St Ambrose- probably some time around 387AD. It’s origins are nothing earth shattering.
He arrived at a new job, teaching rhetoric to the wealthy kids of Milan. When he observed to Ambrose how odd it was in Rome they fasted on a Saturday, but in Milan they didn’t Ambrose uttered something similar to the proverb. It changed wording slightly over hundreds of years, till, in 1777 a book of letters by Pope Clement XIV were published with the exact phrase ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’. I think we all understand what it means right? If you’re holidaying in Amsterdam it is OK to partake in a little weed at a cafe. If in Tehran, say, sorry women, headscarves and cover those pins out in public. Be like the locals, for their joyous excesses or for their bronze age prudishness. Be a respectful guest. I think most travellers do their best on this count… but then we also get our share of Westerners- these days often social media influencers are the ones we hear of – who fail at this in a major way. The first thing I should say is if Charles Lennox Richardson was around in 2019 I think he may well have been a Logan Paul type character.

So… who was Charles Lennox Richardson?

I really couldn’t find much on our protagonist, but all sources say Charles Lennox Richardson was born in London, England on 16th April 1834. He came from enough money to launch a career for himself as a merchant in his late teens, and in 1853 he moved to Shanghai, China. His product of choice was Chinese export ceramics. The Chinese had been exporting their porcelain for hundreds of years, largely with Central Asia and the Near East, before Europeans discovered their intricate – extraordinarily difficult to imitate pottery – the first pieces to reach Europe having first come to Europe via Istanbul in the 15th Century. In the 17th century it was in hot demand in Europe – the Dutch East India Company – the VOC- brought in an estimated 35 million pieces between 1600 and 1685. In Richardson’s time it was still crazy popular and in 1862, a 28 year old Richardson announced he had made his fortune, was retiring and would be headed back to England with his takings. On the way back he planned to stop in Yokohama, Japan.

Now it should be pointed out that Yokohama was a ‘Treaty Port’ in 1862. One way of describing a treaty port is to say they were cities who were open to trade with the ‘Occidental’ nations of the west. Another way of putting it is to say they were bullied into ‘unequal treaties’ with occidental powers; the victims of ‘gunboat diplomacy’. In other words the Chinese and Japanese had seen it in their best interests to let European powers establish little enclaves on their land and trade largely by their terms because option B would have been a hiding from the better armed Europeans. Treaty ports had sizeable enclaves for the Occidentals too, little slices of European life for them too – European looking buildings, clubs, churches, restaurants… race courses even. The occidentals had an easy life in these ports in many respects…Even people who would have been doing modestly in Europe could afford comfy lodgings, and servants to look after their every need. Inside the treaty port ‘When in Rome…” did not apply. You were governed by European rules, and no expectation existed to not treat the locals like garbage. Rules outside the treaty port? Well we’ll come to that. Japan did finally shake off the burden of treaty ports in 1899, after an incredibly fast modernization process meant they no longer had to put up with them.

So… when outside Yokohama?

Well, let’s say Charles Lennox Richardson did not get much of a chance to reflect on the words of St Ambrose.
On 14th September 1862, Richardson, alongside three other British subjects; Woodthorpe Charles Clark, William Marshall and Margaret Borradaile, rented some horses and went sightseeing. Their intended destination was the temple of Kawasaki Daishi. While picking up the horses the party was instructed that things were different outside the treaty port, and to ‘do as the Romans do’. In 1862, at the tail end of the Tokugawa Shogunate (please check out my blog on Yasuke the African samurai for more on earlier in the shogunate here), local warlords – Daimyo – ruled, in a feudal system with similarities to medieval Europe. The local daimyo was one Shimazu Hisamitsu. It was made very clear to the party, should you meet the Daimyo, you get off your horse and bow to the man.

The party were travelling along the Tokaido road, through the village of Namamugi, when they met the Daimyo coming the other way – carried on a palanquin (a litter carried by several men) and surrounded by a bodyguard of samurai. At this point Richardson could have been like St Augustine among the people of Milan… of he could have been like Czech fitness models Soloina Dolezalova and Zdenk Slouka- who disrespected a Hindu temple in Ubud, Indonesia in 2019 after ‘frolicking’ in the holy water. Dolezalova and Slouka did get away with a public apology, and having to attend and pray at the purification ceremony. Richardson wasn’t so lucky. In spite of repeated warnings he rode towards the palanquin, some reports stated boasting he had lived for years among the Chinese and he ‘knew how to deal with these people’ He was cut to shreds by the bodyguards. Marshall and Clark were also seriously injured in the incident.

So…. What happened next?

Well… his body was recovered, and brought back to Yokohama to be buried. In spite of word having preceded his arrival among the enclave of his arrogance, and mistreatment of the Chinese in Shanghai, and word his own uncle allegedly (I could only find this statement in Wikipedia, not other sources and well… Wikipedia… take it with a grain of salt) laying the blame for the incident squarely on Richardson’s foolhardiness and arrogance, the British needed to demand restitution. If you have bullied your way into ports all around the region you cannot be seen to do nothing over a challenge to your authority. The traders got this, they had been bastards to the locals, and the locals have yet to revolt because Britain carried a big stick. Not to act put their lives in danger.

Britain demanded a huge settlement (of which £25,000 would eventually be paid) and the arrest and prosecution of the killers (which never did). The daimyo stalled, so Britain, in August 1863, sent in a squadron of warships, to Kagoshima, the Daimyo’s capital, and proceeded to bomb the living daylights out of the place. Now if you were looking at casualties, the death count in what they called the Kagoshima bombardment, and the Japanese called the Anglo- Satsuma war, they were small. The Japanese had time to move the civilians out, leaving several men to fire back at them from their boats, equipped with around 80 cannons. All up 3 British warships were damaged, 3 Japanese ships sunk. British casualties ran to 20 with a further 53 wounded, while the Daimyo lost 5 men with 20 more injured. The British inflicted heavy property damage to the capital however, destroying 500 buildings. So much destruction arose out of the arrogance of one young English merchant.

And…. there we have it. Probably safe to file this one under ‘Tales of History and Imagination are all around us’ one of those odd tales you come upon by happenstance. Please feel free to drop a comment, maybe a like? What do you think? – should we ‘do as the Romans’? Would Charles Lennox Richardson have been a star of Instagram if he were around in 2019? Were some Japanese right to be angry over the ‘Treaty ports’ they had forced upon them since Commodore Perry’s famed arrival and Convention of Kanagawa in 1854?

I’ll be back next week, this time looking at something which happened in Central Asia several centuries earlier. Keep an eye out for new posts and stuff on our Facebook page.
Simone.

The Nature Boys, Part One… A Supermarket in California

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“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon”
Allen Ginsberg – A Supermarket in California.

Hi folks welcome back to this week’s Tale of History and Imagination. Since completing the piece on Altamont (if you haven’t read yet please scroll down the page a little – it was a 4 parter) I have been a little curious about something I know, or suspect I know, only the outlines of. Being a little time poor for a few weeks I haven’t done all the spade work on this yet, but I figured this week I’d share my thought process, and next week look at a chunk of it. I had a question:

If you take it that the fallout from The Altamont free concert was the beginning of the end for the hippy, peace and love mass movement (and let’s face it there was quite a bit going on in 1969 that contributed) – then where does the hippy movement begin? Who were the first hippies?

Now, on a page in a notebook I keep on my bedside table I have a brainstorm, a mind map. It contains the outlines of my current knowledge on this question. In the middle, encircled “who was Hippy patient zero?” In a circle close to this are a handful of names. One of these ‘Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters’. Now Kesey, an author whose best known work “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” became a major film in 1975, starring Jack Nicholson and featuring a cast which included Taxi’s Danny Devito and Christopher Lloyd, was definitely an early hippy. He had come from the Beat Generation, and thus was a bridge between the two movements. He was an early adopter of LSD. With his entourage of non-conformists which included the Grateful Dead (then called The Warlocks) ,he, and his ‘merry pranksters’ hopped aboard a psychedelic patterned bus in 1964 and travelled the USA spreading peace, love… and acid. The Red Dog Saloon, a bar in the largely abandoned former gold mining town of Virginia City, Nevada is also in this circle. All the cool people hung out there. There was a sense of commune about the place. People did a lot of peyote there, and many of the jam bands which became associated with the summer of love got their starts playing there.

In an outer circle I have a handful of philosophers. Now Diogenes of Sinope has to be considered right? Living in Greece in the 4th century BC, he had come from a well off family, but very publicly walked away from materialism when he ‘defaced the money’ then hit the road, leaving all he owned behind. Diogenes lived in a turned up barrel, or tub. He hung out with the animals – having all but joined with a pack of stray dogs. He did outrageous things like walking through the streets in the middle of the day with a lantern proclaiming he is looking for an honest man, but cannot find one. He was a fierce critic of society, feuded with Plato for a while, and challenged authority wherever he could. Legend has it Alexander The Great just had to meet Diogenes when travelling through Corinth on his way to conquer the world, so he made his way out to the barrel. Spotting him sunbathing and staring intently at a human bone he came rushing up asking the philosopher if there was anything he could do for him.

“Yes” Diogenes replied “Stand out of my sunlight” A little taken aback Alexander replies “If I were not Alexander I should wish to be Diogenes”. Unimpressed Diogenes replies “If I were not Diogenes, I would still wish to be Diogenes” and went back to staring at his bone. I think at least in terms of anti-authoritarianism Diogenes would have found kinship with the hippies?

In this circle I have several other philosophical names- Epicurus, who lived in a commune and believed in a lot of the same peace, love and nature messages of the hippies. The Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama who pondered on the meaning of existence while sitting under the Bodhi tree, who gave up a life of comfort for something more meaningful, and whose philosophies filter down to the hippies. Ditto Lao Tse, who dropped some seriously laid back wisdom in the Tao Te Ching for the Chinese people in the 6th Century BC, before jumping on the back of an oxen and riding off into the sunset.

Much closer to the centre I have the Mazdakian movement written down. I currently do not know a lot about Mazdak, here’s what I can tell you, off the top of my head. Mazdak was a Zoroastrian priest with a commune in Persia around the early 6th century. Though Zoroastrianism was still the religion of choice in the empire, his brand was quite heretical. He preached peace, love, communal living, free love, and a vegetarian diet. More down to politics than anything else Mazdak fell foul of the authorities and the Mazdakians were rounded up. Mazdak himself hung upside down and used for target practice by the archers some time around 528 AD.

Closer again, the Merrymount colony of Quincy, Massachusetts. The Merrymount colony turned on, tuned in and dropped out. They found free love, eschewed much of their clothes, fell in love with nature and grew their hair long… till the Puritans showed up in the 1620s and told them to get a haircut and a real job. I have a little question mark next to Henry David Thoreau , author of the transcendentalist novel Walden (and last weeks opening quote). A bigger question mark next to St Francis of Assisi. A big circle around their precursor, The Beat Generation. Both movements were similar, and a number of beatniks, maybe most notably the poet Allen Ginsberg, who struck up a close friendship with Bob Dylan and was heavily involved in the anti-war movement.

The Nature Boys, however – a group who largely centred round a raw foods supermarket in Laurel Canyon, Southern California are the group which most interests me at the moment. In my opinion they are absolutely fascinating, and on occasion pop up in some odd cultural places…. And no I don’t mean
styling and profiling, jet plane riding, rolex wearing, womanizing professional wrestlers.

Next week, the Southern California Nature Boys, and the story of eden ahbez – the non-capitalization is very deliberate, he thought only God and Infinity were important enough to have capital letters.

This Tale is part one of a two part series. To read the rest of this story click here.

Women’s History month 4: Hell hath no fury, like the Trung Sisters

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“Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d,
Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d”

William Congreve. The Mounring Bride. 1697.

Hi folks welcome to this week’s Tales of History and Imagination. I am taking a bit of liberty with the opening quote a little this week – which if you are wondering is the actual quote we generally get “Hell hath no fury…” from. Congreve, if we have any bibliophiles out there makes great reading, though to date I haven’t read or seen The Mouning Bride …yet (he was a playwright) – but Love for Love, and The Way of the World are entertaining. Today’s blog is not so much about a scorned lover as a vengeful widow… and no, I’m not doing Olga of Kiev…. everyone does Olga. Today I want to look at the tale of the Trung sisters – who briefly saved Vietnam from the yoke of a cruel dictatorship.

If you were to view a map of the world in the second century BC you would see all kinds of borders, and countries which have long since faded into obscurity. If you were casting your eye over a map of South East Asia you would notice a sizeable land known as the Nanyue Kingdom. Made up of most of modern day Vietnam, and the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, the Nanyue kingdom was a prosperous land, with it’s own language, culture and traditions. It drew a great deal of wealth from the Red River Delta, and it’s goods sold as far away as markets barely understood in the East at the time like Rome. To the north of the Nanyue there was a rising empire, hungry to expand, and make the most of their neighbours’ spoils – The Han Dynasty in China, at the time most of the way through their second decade – having taken over from the Qin. For decades tensions simmered between the two kingdoms till, in 111BC Emperor Han Wudi ordered six of his armies down the Xi River to assimilate or destroy the Nanyue Kingdom. Under the leadership of Generals Lu Bode and Yang Pu the Han crushed the Nanyue Kingdom, over time extending out past their main centres into the remote villages. They set up 9 commanderies to administer the land, 3 of those established in what is now Vietnam. The Chinese records paint a picture of a liberating army, bringing civilisation to the kingdom. The Vietnamese saw them as cruel, violent overlords with a message of assimilate or die.

In 40 AD, while far spread, there were still enclaves of Vietnamese culture in remote villages. In one such village lived a soldier referred to in the writings as General Lac. The general had two daughters, Trung Trac, and Trung Nhi. The older sister, Trac had fallen in love with the son of the General’s closest friend, the village doctor – the son an up and coming leader called Thi Sach. With both families blessings the two married. While the tales of the Trung sisters do mention both sisters had grown up around a dad who had taught them how to fight, and to lead an army, there is nothing in the tales that states they were engaged in any resistance against the Han before 40 AD. This was the year things changed however, the Han were at the village, they would say to bring, language, and laws, and irrigation. The Vietnamese would say to bring death and slavery. Thi Sach would do his best to raise an army to resist them, but was caught and executed. This was when a mourning bride, Trung Trac, would avenge her husband, and start a revolution in the process.

in 40 AD, still in mounring for her husband, Trac and her sister Nhi would gather a small army, and using all the lessons learned from General Lac, decisevly crush the soldiers sent in to run the village. Women left similarly bareft in four other neighbouring villages soon joined their army. A highly competent army went from town to town, village to village, deposing the Han invaders. The army, composed mainly of women – many widowed by the Han invasions- picked up in number as it went. At it’s height the army was said to be 80,000 strong, led by 36 female generals. In 65 major battles they reclaimed 65 fortresses from the Han, sending what was left of the occupiers scattering back over the border to China. The speed of this must have been remarkable as Vietnamese records state this took not years, but months. After 71 years of occupation the Nanyue Kingdom was again free, united for a time under Queen Trung (Trac). The kingdom would only last for three years.

In the complete annals of Dai Viet, in a section not written till 1479, a chronicler wrote

“Queen Trung reigned for three years. The queen was strong and intelligent… and established a kin gdom…. but as a female ruler could not rebuild the state.” It was clear that the sisters were in the process of rebuilding, they had set up a new capital at Me Linh, now a rural district of Hanoi. There is precious little to make my way through from numerous write ups on the net, apparently very scant detail in the primary sources for that matter, but it does seem that – after the ladies had proven just how formiddable they were in liberating the kingdom, they found misogyny a much harder foe to defeat….. well that, and the Han were not done yet. in 42 AD they sent another army, headed by General Ma Yuan, to recapture the kingdom. In 43 they reached Me Linh, and the Trung sisters, looking to their now, mostly male army for support, found themselves largely deserted. They fell back to the Jin River to regroup, but were soon decisively defeated by the Han. Why did the men scatter, leaving them to the mercy of the Han? Despite past evidence to the contrary, they believed the Trung sisters did not stand a chance.

There are many conflicting tales as to what specifically happened to the sisters. Some accounts have them perishing in battle, others state they were captured, then beheaded. A third, more fanciful claim is they jumped into the river and drowned, their bodies washing up down river where they had mysteriously turned to statues. These same statues are now said to reside in Hanoi’s Hai Ba Trung Temple.

Though there is so very little primary source material in this tale, there is so much could be taken from the tale of the Trung sisters. Hell hath no fury really is the least of it, this is a tale of the potent power of a combination of passion, expertise and diversity, and the deadly risks of letting outmoded ways creep back in. It is also proof positive of the slogan on posters all across New Zealand schools in the 1980s when I was still in primary schools “Girls Can Do Anything” Vietnam would not see any significant self determination till the 12th century.

Thanks folks for tuning in for my weekly ‘Women’s History Month’ blogs.