His Majesty's Man in Old China: A fascinating insight into life in early 20th Century China

William Stark Toller was a remarkable man and here he has written a journal about his thirty years in China which gives a vivid, first-hand account of China in the first part of the last century, when the old Empire fell, the country was ravaged by revolts, the Japanese invaded and the Communists made their first appearances.William, born in 1884, came from modest beginnings in Somerset, his father a grocer, his mother a teacher. She died when he was 12 but probably had already inculcated a respect for learning. A bright boy, he excelled at grammar school and got to university, King’s College, London, and then joined the Consular Service. This decision was the key to his later life. He went out to China in 1907. After arriving in Peking, he stayed in one of the Buddhist temples in the Western Hills, where he was able to concentrate on learning the language. And learn it very well indeed. Even when he was eminent as Consul-General in Chongqing, he was called on to interpret at key gatherings, once at the first showing ever of a film in that city, shouting out translations to a hall packed with hundreds of Chinese.Living in the Western Hills among peasants, he acquired something every bit as valuable as knowing how to speak Chinese: a great love of ordinary Chinese people. This infuses his journal: he has deep respect for the ingenuity, loyalty and character of the Chinese people he lived and worked among.A word about the period 1907-1937 when he was in China: these were years when European nations, Great Britain above all, had extraordinary rights in China: rights to send the Royal Navy up China’s long rivers, rights in so-called “treaty ports” when the Chinese had to accept that foreign nations had extraordinary privileges, all the result of the “unequal treaty” system forced on China following its defeat in the First Opium War in the mid-19th century. One of the treaties ceded Hong Kong to the British; there were more than 80 other ports, and cities, such as Shanghai, covered by the treaties, allowing the Europeans and later Americans the freedom to trade. Large, fine, enclaves in which foreigners could live were constructed – by the Chinese. China saw these treaties as humiliating and in China the period of the unequal treaties (1842-1949) is still known as “the century of shame.”William Stark Toller, a man of his period, was a servant of Great Britain, and a loyal one. He describes here episodes in which Royal Navy gunboats would be sent up the Yangtse river to deal with an outbreak of Anglo-phobia by lobbing a few shells into a town; sometimes just threatening to do so would be enough.Yet great respect for the Chinese people infuses this journal, especially some of its leaders with whom he had to negotiate. He did so skilfully. At one point when the whole of the Yangtse river was under the control of a Chinese General whose soldiers had fired on a British steamer, the general disingenuously explained that his men were not firing at the steamer but at some birds on a sandbank. William replied, quoting the Analects: Confucius when shooting, never potted a sitter. “The General then dropped his excuse and promised to take suitable action” the journal relates.His position as a Consul took him to some remarkable places, and the journal has long passages when he travels up steep mountain passes, crosses rivers on frail bamboo bridges over rapid torrents, moves among tribesmen so volatile that he and his companions have escorts of 500 soldiers. Some of the tribesmen are head-hunters. Later chapters describe his experiences in Tengyueh, a remote treaty port (thousands of miles from the sea!) in China’s Yunnan province, and his role in a commission to determine the border between China and Burma, which entailed walking long distances through dense forests and river valleys. Read more