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September 25, 2014

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Historian sheds new light on foreigners who fought in first Sino-Japanese war

By Ni Tao | September 25, 2014, Thursday | Print Edition

THE tale of the eight foreigners who took part in the great naval battle during the first Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895) has fascinated Ma Jun for 20 years.

Since 1995, the Shanghai-based historian has delved into the life of the first eight foreign mercenaries who fought on the side of China, then Qing Empire.

Although the results of that battle, which broke out on September 17, 1894, are widely known — China lost five ships, Japan none — and often cited as a source of humiliation, the involvement of foreign officers and sailors is a far less-known story.

Shedding light on their contribution and experiences helps to foster a better appreciation of the course of the war and, hopefully, reconstruct a fuller version of history, said Ma at a seminar held on September 17, the 120th anniversary of battle’s start. Ma is a senior researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Modern History.

According to his research, among the eight were three Englishmen, four Germans and an American. Six suffered light or serious injuries, and two were killed in action, including gunner Thomas Nicholls (1852-1894) and engineer Alexander Purvis (1865-1894). Both were English.

The survivors, including American Vice Captain Philo Norton McGiffin (1860-1897) and British Vice Captain William Ferdinand Tyler (1865-1928), went on to recount their experiences in memoirs or commemorative essays that added to a copious amount of literature on the war.

Truer picture

By perusing their accounts, Ma said, it helped to paint a truer picture of what happened on that fateful afternoon of September 17.

For instance, it was believed that the Chinese navy was a poorly trained fleet, far less war-ready than its Japanese counterpart. But according to Tyler’s memoire, “Pulling Strings in China,” the Chinese mechanics working on deck and in engine rooms were first-rate soldiers. The problem lay more with their superior officers, who, with a few exceptions, were inept and bureaucratic, Tyler was quoted as saying.

His words confirmed, in Ma’s view, a widely held opinion that the Chinese fleet was woefully lacking in ammunition due to corruption. Tyler’s accusations were backed up by his American colleague McGiffin, who pointed out in an essay written in 1895 that despite their high morale, the Chinese navy faced a severe shortage of shells, caused entirely by the backstabbing behavior of venal quartermasters in Tianjin. He lamented that there was no redress.

Back in America and suffering from war trauma and injuries, McGiffin took his own life. Under the wishes expressed in his will, he was dressed in the uniform of the Chinese navy, with its flag draped on his casket, suggesting his pride in having fought alongside the Chinese.

Obviously, the foreigners’ narratives can go a long way toward debunking myths that the Chinese fleet was easily vanquished. However, inevitably colored by personal prejudices, their recollections cannot be entirely objective.

A case in point is the vilification of Liu Buchan, a Chinese admiral. Depicted in Tyler’s first-hand observations — thus supposedly authoritative — as a coward and defeatist, Liu had long been regarded as such until historians found evidence of bad blood between the two and eventually rehabilitated him.

Cutting both way

But the curiosities of history cut both ways. To be a coward is the worst soldiers could say of their peers. Tyler’s slurs would come back to haunt him.

His role in persuading the Chinese navy commanders to surrender to the Japanese had earned him notoriety, which is hardly justified, said Ma.

Continuing to fight in a war one is sure to lose is pointless sacrifice in the eyes of Westerners. Tyler was just a victim of some Chinese’ proclivity for blaming others for their own woes, Ma argued.

After 120 years, the case for revisiting a distant war is to do justice to some, if not all, historical figures. It is also to relearn lessons of a war with great implications for China and Japan.

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