The personal character of Yeh tended greatly to complicate every international question. He represented the pride, presumption, and ignorance of a high mandarin, without the restraints which fear of imperial displeasure generally places upon Chinese functionaries. He was the instrument, and for some time the successful instrument, for carrying out the imperial policy as regarded foreign nations. He had a great reputation for learning, had won the most eminent literary grades, was a distinguished member of the highest college (the Hanlin), and the guardian of the heir apparent—indeed, on one occasion he called himself the fourth personage of the empire. Moreover, his despatches were much admired for their perspicuity and purity of language. He was strangely unacquainted with the geography, institutions, and policy of remote nations, and even made his ignorance a ground for self-congratulation. When questions of commercial interest were brought before him, he treated them as altogether below his notice, and on one occasion abruptly terminated a conversation by saying, "You speak to me as if I were a merchant, and not a mandarin." He devoted himself to the study of necromancy, and relied on his "fortunate star;" believing that the city of Canton was impregnable, he made no serious arrangements for its defence.
What Ke-ying preached, Yeh-ming practised; but Ke was a man of a gentle, Yeh of a ferocious nature; and the cautious cunning which often marked the course of the one was wholly wanting to the other. Yeh, armed as he was with powers of life and death, exercised them with a recklessness of which there is no equal example in history. He turned the execution-ground at Canton into a huge lake of blood; hundreds of rebels were beheaded daily. When he was asked whether he had really caused seventy thousand men to be decapitated, he boastingly replied that the number exceeded a hundred thousand; and to an inquiry whether he had inflicted upon women the horrible punishment called the cutting into ten thousand pieces, he answered, "Ay! they were worse than the men."[1]
It was the affair of the Arrow which brought about the inevitable crisis. The question of Sir John Bowring's action on that occasion was entangled with the party politics of the day, and little more need now be said than that the verdict of the country reversed the condemnatory decision of the House of Commons. Certain it is that the very build of a lorcha, so altogether unlike any Chinese junk in its external appearance, ought to have led the local authorities in Canton to be very cautious in their interference with her crew; and that the fact of her papers being in the hands of the British consul, and not of the Chinese custom-house, was primâ facie evidence of her nationality. Since the brutal character of*
- ↑ We give one of Yeh's characteristic proclamations, issued during the siege of Canton:— "Yeh, governor-general of the two Kwang provinces, member of the cabinet, and baron of the empire, hereby proclaims for the general information:— "These are the contumacious English barbarians, who are akin to dogs and hogs, and
