Jack & The Boxers
Jack's Recollections
Robert Lockhart Jack (1878-1964) was an Australian geologist whose career saw him undertake fieldwork across much of the world. From 1963-1964 he wrote his unpublished memoirs originally titled “Recollections: Based on Incidents, Travels, Work and Play in Australasia, Asia, Africa and Europe”.
Supplemented by an extensive collection of newspaper clippings Jack kept, Jack’s Recollections offers a first-hand account of a quintessentially British experience of the world, travel, and adventure. In few places is this more evident than Jack’s journey through China to Burma in order to escape the Boxer Rebellion.
The Jack Expedition
In 1899, shortly after graduating university, Mr Robert Jack was part of a much-publicised expedition to determine mineral wealth in China led by his father, Dr Robert Logan Jack. The elder Jack, born in Scotland before raising a family in Townsville, was purported to be “one of the greatest authorities on mineralogy in the world” and no stranger to hardship: according to Jack’s Recollections he was a frontiersman in Queensland, at one point gravely wounded by an indigenous Australian’s spear.
Jack’s Recollections are lamentably unconcerned with such trifles as accurate dating (and punctuation), but at some point in 1900 while travelling in Chentu the Jack Expedition received word of mass murders of foreigners and outbreaks of violence in Northern China, and the siege of foreign embassies in Peking. Nevertheless, the party were initially determined to continue their mission in the confidence that the armed escorts that local magistrates were required to provide would deter Boxers from attacking them. However, upon reaching the Maha mining region, the party belatedly received telegrams ordering all British subjects to flee the country and advising the party that they should travel to Chungking in order to join other Europeans on a boat down the Yangtse river that would take them to safety. These telegrams were delivered by runner, and arrived twelve days after dispatch; telegraph lines had been cut, and the party had undoubtedly missed their safest route out of China.
Their original objective now clearly unattainable, the Jack Expedition sought a new goal; to escape the country by travelling west in the hopes of reaching safety in Burma. Fortunately their journey, though difficult, was mostly through provinces governed by politically moderate Magistrates. The official protection they enjoyed was largely unchallenged, and the party was able to travel much of the way through highlands inhabited by the Lolo people, an ethnic minority that were largely indifferent to the concerns of the Chinese majority.
Passage across the border into Burma was notoriously dangerous; while Jack gives no mention to their plight, he is led to believe by a French missionary that the Wa people that populate the area are thoroughly opposed to external interference and had a reputation for ambushing foreign travellers. The Wa’s reputation was clearly not undeserved; Jack includes in his newspaper clippings an article from less than a year later that describes a Wa attack on a group of British and Chinese travellers that left several dead and led to violent reprisal. As they crossed this frontier area the party came into contact with men armed with crossbows, but were fortunate enough to remain unmolested on their journey, eventually reaching safety at the British Embassy in Mandalay.
A Nation in Turmoil
Jack’s Recollections are a memoir, not a political analysis, but even so it offers valuable insight into the political turmoil besetting China at the time. His expedition was initially conceived by Australian Minister Mr Pritchard-Morgan with the aid of the Dowager Empress Cixi, who would eventually offer full support to the Boxer’s efforts to purge all foreign influence and, in Jack’s words, hoped the Boxers would “exterminate all the foreigners in China”; Cixi’s struggle to protect Chinese sovereignty was characterised by this tension between trying to restrict foreign influence and concurrently modernize the empire in order to remain a world power.
Jack’s encounters with the instruments of Chinese governance depict an administrative system caught in a paradox between overbearing bureaucracy and the idiosyncrasies of local authorities. In order to navigate local administrations, the party were granted an honorific rank in the Chinese bureaucratic system, but were largely ignorant of what this rank meant or the authority they possessed. The armed escort Magistrates were required by order of the Dowager Empress to provide would range anywhere from 212 men with palanquins and rifles to a single man carrying a sword, fan and opium pipe.
During their escape the party bore witness to two vastly different legal trials and diverse concepts of law. The first, while among the Lolo ethnic minority, was judged by a local chieftain who among other things appears to have directed missions of banditry against the lowland ethnic Chinese when the need struck. Jack describes the trial as “most orderly”; there was a prosecutor and defender, witnesses were heard at length, and the accused were allowed to provide testimony free of shackles- though one did so under duress by what was at least coercion, if not torture (Jack’s account on this matter is regrettably brief and curiously benign). Found guilty, the judge decided to send the prisoners for trial by the Chinese Magistracy, although apparently it was within his power to sentence them himself. The second trial was judged by a council of five elders, and sentencing (a fine, or death if it was not forthcoming) was not left to any higher authority. It would appear that localised notions of justice superseded any form of national law.
The economic situation Jack alludes to, if only in passing, is clearly unstable. Jack refers to numerous areas as “poverty-stricken”, and systems of currency exchange appear impenetrably overcomplicated; for British subjects, possessing locally accepted coin typically involved several exchanges of currencies prone to wild and unpredictable fluctuation in value, or relying on barter for goods in pure silver. Jack is certainly no economist, but accounts of widespread poverty and unstable currencies (and of course, nationalistic rebellion) indicate an era of economic hardship.
Jack travels through an empire with vastly different methods of governance that range from cumbersome bureaucracies to bandit fiefdoms. Legality and authority are locally legitimised. A lot of people are terribly poor, and many identify more strongly with localised ethnicities than a concept of Chinese nationality. Jack’s journey takes him through not one China, but many.