CHINA THROUGH WESTERN EYES

Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers, Missionaries and Diplomats, 1792-1942

Part 6: Correspondence and Papers of Sir Ernest Satow (1843-1929) relating to China from Public Record Office Class PRO 30/33

FURTHER READING

The following extracts are taken, by kind permission, from Introduction to the Collected Works of Ernest Mason Satow by Dr Nigel J. Brailey, University of Bristol, England. (Ganesha Publishing, Edition Synapse, 1998)

Minister in China

By now taking on the character of the Foreign Office’s Far Eastern trouble-shooter, Satow’s final responsibilities following the Boxer War were to prevent China’s dismemberment through the 1900-1901 Peking international conference, and to try to mediate the growing Russo-Japanese tension, and when it ended in war, to assist in resolving it by negotiation. Also, he was to help settle other issues which came to a climax in these years such as the fate of Tibet. In the process, he enjoyed diplomatic prominence of a sort that hitherto had not come his way, but after another home-leave, much fêted, in 1903, and an appointment with Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, and his officials at Simla on the return trip, to discuss Tibet, the stint ended in early retirement and beckoning obscurity.

The touchstone of Satow’s China policy in defence of its independence and territorial integrity was the ‘triple alliance’ of Britain, Japan and the United States. Once rapproachement of a sort had been achieved with the Empress Dowager, who Satow never entirely trusted, and she and her court had returned to Peking in early 1901, the situation stabilized. By September of that year, a somewhat punitive peace settlement with the Western Powers had been come to, but for the most part, the prospect of China’s dismemberment seemed to have been eliminated. In particular, the United States was now taking the lead in championing the so-called ‘open door’ in China, and Japan claimed also to support it. Satow’s closest colleagues in these years were W. Rockhill and Edwin Conger for the United States, and the future Japanese Foreign Minister, Uchida Yasuya. Germany and France too seemed to have scaled down their ambitions, but Russia declined to withdraw the troops it had sent to Manchuria during the Boxer crisis, and with the imminent conclusion of the Trans-Siberian railway through to its new base at Port Arthur, it seemed more likely to extend its sway, to Korea, and also to North China proper.

Some Japanese having already envisaged the Sino-Japanese War as a trial run for a decisive contest with Russia, now began to plan for the latter. Extended negotiations in both capitals in no way diminished the apparent threat from what doubtless saw itself, certainly was widely viewed as, the world’s leading power of the time. In a sense, Japan’s temerity was extraordinary. As in 1941, war was undoubtedly a gamble, launched by means of a semi-surprise attack, on Port Arthur, in February 1904. Satow, like many other Britons, had privately urged the Japanese on, and was slower than some to have second thoughts when the America-mediated Treaty of Portsmouth, N.H., brought the bloody conflict to a close eighteen months later, as at least a Japanese moral victory. Russia was humiliated thereby, and reduced to the second rank of powers, while Japan had gone from the ‘small field’ as Satow described it in the 1870s, to the equivalent perhaps of Portugal in the late 1880s, to what some saw as a ‘great power’ in 1905. Regrettably, British opposition to Chinese legal sovereignty over Tibet had been abandoned for fear of adding to Russia’s claims for compensation in Manchuria.

Meanwhile, Satow registered the continuing rise of Japan with a series of perceptive private predictions. Already, in the years after 1898, he repeatedly forecast that by 1903, Japan would be ready for its war with Russia. Following the war, in December 1905, he was asserting surprisingly blithely, perhaps anticipating the notorious Twenty-One Demands of 1915, ‘I give the world ten years of peace in this part of the world. During that time Japan will re-coup her losses, and be ready to begin again.’ By 1909, he was envisaging an attack on Hong Kong by Japan, if both countries continued to go on increasing their fleets. Thus, already by the spring of 1906, thanks to Japanese over-assertiveness in the aftermath of the Russian war, even he seems to have been doubting his previous hopes of Sino-Japanese cooperation. A somewhat unhappy visit to Japan en route home soon after, evidently added to his doubts, while the circumstances of his premature retirement, with the option of transfer back to a Western embassy, preferably the one in Washington, never offered to him, left him generally frustrated. Tout vient à qui sait attendre had long been his motto, and it had finally failed him. He had wanted to leave Peking, but ended up instead retired as a mere Minister, with his career little recognized, and no basis for any significant career at home either. For that matter, American attitudes, fuelled by immigration controversy in California, initially anti-Chinese, were soon to turn fiercely anti-Japanese, and justify attention to Eastern Asia right through to 1941. By contrast, although the region had just helped work a revolution in the affairs of Europe, that continent, including Britain, was virtually to forget East Asia until after the 1914-18 War, and old East Asian ‘hands’ were to become voices crying in the wilderness, whatever their message.

See also

Sir Ernest Satow, Japan and Asia: The Trials of a Diplomat in the Age of High Imperialism, Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. 35, no. 1 (1992), pp.115-50.

Protection or Partition: Ernest Satow and the 1880s Crisis in Britain’s Siam Policy, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 1998), pp.1-23.

Introductions to:

Ernest Satow, A Diplomat in Siam (Gartmore Stirling, 1996).

N. J. Brailey (ed.), The Satow Siam Papers (Bangkok, 1997-).

Forthcoming:

N J. Brailey, Sir Ernest Satow and his book ‘A Diplomat in Japan’ in the Proceedings of the Japan Society, London.

N. J. Brailey, Sir Ernest Mason Satow in The New Dictionary of National Biography.

I. Ruxton ed., Diaries & Letters of Sir E. M. Satow, (E. Mellen Press, Lewiston/Quenston/Lampeter, 1998)

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