IT WAS the summer of 1880. In China’s rugged north-west, Russian soldiers were skirmishing with Chinese forces. In the seas to the east, the tsar’s navy was approaching Chinese waters. Thousands of Chinese troops were dispatched to Tianjin, near the capital, Beijing, where an army was mobilising for a war the Qing empire did not wish to fight. Considering that China and Russia had just negotiated a treaty, things were not going terribly well. In Beijing the blame for all of this was falling heavily on the head of one plump, bewhiskered gentleman, Wanyan Chonghou. A wealthy nobleman and formerly a trusted confidant of the imperial family, Chonghou, then 54, was in prison awaiting decapitation. He had been sentenced to death, essentially for the crime of being China’s worst ever diplomat. Sent to Russia to extract concessions from the tsar, he made them instead.

The Qing had negotiated humiliating treaties before, but that had been at the barrel of a gun. This was a different kind of indignity, achieved by way of incompetence and naivety. The empress dowager Cixi (pictured below), who for a second time held power while a young boy sat on the throne, refused to abide by the treaty, and her court condemned Chonghou for treason.

A “war party” agitated for his death. Foreign diplomats, meanwhile, pleaded for his life. Many feared that if Chonghou were executed, Russia would invade, or that a newly bellicose China would also reject its “unequal treaties” with the West, inciting new conflicts. Chonghou had so thoroughly failed as a peacemaker that the only thing keeping him alive was the threat of war.

One man’s life hung in the balance. But should the defendant have been Chonghou or the dynasty that made him? What is strangest about the case of China’s worst diplomat is that he was given this fateful mission at all. For he had bungled things before.

When he managed a river, deadly flooding ensued. He was fired—then given another job. When he oversaw trade with foreigners in Tianjin, an important port, there was a horrific massacre of French clerics. He was fired again—and promptly sent to France as an imperial envoy. Less than three years later he was promoted to the emperor’s side in Beijing, as one of a team of advisers that botched an entanglement with Japan. How did this man keep getting work?

The unorthodox path

Accounts of the fall of empires often focus on the monstrous egos, vanities and excesses of out-of-touch dictators. This is a humbler tale, of the unsung role of an incompetent functionary who helped speed an empire to its demise.

Chonghou chose the right parents in life and a good era to be born. True, the year 1826 was not the best moment to arrive if you wanted glory in the Qing dynasty: that was a century earlier. But it was an excellent time to embark on a life of privilege. The empire was in a state of decay—a highly exploitable condition.

The Qing regime still saw itself as supreme on the planet, because for so long it had evidently been so. But corruption and a costly rebellion had weakened the dynasty. Before Chonghou came of age, the Qing would suffer its first great humiliation at the hands of foreigners, the first Opium War, and be forced to pay a huge indemnity to Britain. From 1850 the country was in the grip of another costly uprising, the Taiping Rebellion, which would nearly bring down the empire.

The dynasty’s weakness was not immediately obvious to young Chonghou, whose family had served the emperor for generations. He wanted to serve, too. He knew he had been born well, that he had been “rewarded heavily” in life and “should return the favour”, as he observes in his family’s authorised biography of his life. “How can I repay my fatherly emperor?”

When, in the 1850s, his time came, the Qing were constantly in need of money, and as corrupt as ever. The Manchu court still ostensibly relied on a Confucian exam system to make appointments. But it also needed officials it could trust, and who could be financially useful.

This all favoured Chonghou. His father was a senior Manchu official, as was his older brother. Both had passed the toughest imperial exam, the metropolitan test held once every three years in Beijing, putting them in a rarefied elite of jinshi degree-holders. For generations before Chonghou’s time, with a few exceptions only jinshi were qualified to become high officials. And only a tiny subset of jinshi were Manchu bannermen, kinsfolk of the emperor. This select club helped rule China for centuries.

The entrance criteria were not well-suited to an empire increasingly engaging with the world. The exams did not test for modern competencies such as awareness of foreign affairs, science and technology (the study of languages was discouraged). They were quizzes of Confucian knowledge and values, requiring familiarity with classical texts. Two centuries earlier an emperor had called them “empty and useless, and irrelevant to government affairs”.

Chonghou tried diligently to acquire this useless knowledge. But he was not the sharpest Confucian scholar, and never attained a jinshi degree. He struggled to pass the provincial exam for the lower juren degree, managing it only on the third attempt.

Fortunately there was by Chonghou’s time another exceedingly popular route to a government job: paying for one. The buying and selling of ranks was common in previous eras—it was known as the “unorthodox path”—but it had mostly been a relatively harmless trade in insignificant titles. In the 1850s the Qing’s growing need for cash fed a great expansion in the office-selling market. The empire sold many more jobs of real responsibility, and slashed prices to boost sales. Chonghou’s father and then (after his father’s death in 1846) Chonghou himself made donations to the emperor to get him started. Later his older brother made a substantial contribution to speed him up the ranks.

A Chinese in Paris

In 1853 the then emperor, Xianfeng, met Chonghou and promoted him further. By 1856, aged just 30, Chonghou had won a plum job managing the Yongding river, which for centuries flowed near Beijing. Two years later the emperor sacked him for his inept response to flooding. But he promptly got a new assignment. The second Opium War had broken out near the port of Tianjin, and Chonghou was sent to assist the general there, in what was to prove a hopeless defence. Once China was defeated—and the imperial summer palace in Beijing trashed and looted by foreign soldiers—the emperor needed someone for an unsavoury task: handling relations with the foreigners.

Emperors were loth to dirty their foyers with the footsteps of foreigners, who were not to be dealt with as equals

China’s emperors were loth to dirty their foyers with the footsteps of foreigners. They were savages, and not to be dealt with as equals. The ablest officials rarely despoiled their reputations by engaging with them. Instead, at a time when foreign powers were intent on carving up the empire, the Qing sent men like Chonghou. This remained true even after the crushing defeats in the Opium Wars made it clear that the Western powers enjoyed military and technological superiority. Qing officials would rather grant trading rights and surrender territory than stomach the indignity of having foreigners near the Forbidden City, let alone meeting the emperor.

So when Chonghou was appointed to the newly created post of superintendent of trade at Tianjin, it was the sort of job no one more dignified would dare touch. Knowledge of the outside world was not a virtue—and Chonghou was not afflicted with it. When, in 1861, a delegation of Prussians came to discuss trade terms, he mistakenly dismissed theirs as an insignificant country. At Tianjin he went on to negotiate unequal treaties with Italy, Spain, Austria and others. He had once complained that British and French demands made his “hairs stand on end in anger”. But his years in Tianjin seem to have softened him, as he later urged sending diplomats abroad: “It can be used as a way to express friendship. China had never done anything like this, which can be interpreted as suspicious.”

He would soon get a chance to represent the dynasty himself, becoming the first imperial official to lead a diplomatic mission for over a century. But it was not a proud assignment. Events in Tianjin had taken a nasty turn.

In the spring of 1870 a cloud of suspicion and rumour enveloped the French-run Catholic church and orphanage in Tianjin. Missionaries, priests and nuns were said to be murdering children, and extracting their hearts and eyes in barbarous Western rituals. The truth was that a Chinese market had developed in kidnapping sick children for the orphanage’s cash rewards.

Chonghou at first resisted the efforts of local Chinese officials to investigate, then persuaded the French consul to settle for a limited inquiry. He underestimated the hostility the foreigners had aroused in many Chinese, who thought they had acted above the law for years. As a Manchu outsider himself, who mingled and negotiated with visitors, he felt in a precarious position among the Han Chinese (many of whom resented Manchu rule), and did nothing to restrain the angry public.

Chonghou’s equivocations were unhelpful. On June 21st 1870 a Chinese mob set upon the French consul, tearing him limb from limb in the street (the consul had unwisely fired his pistol at a Chinese official, wounding one of his retinue). The mob slaughtered about 20 foreigners, mostly French, including two priests and ten nuns, and dozens of Chinese converts to Catholicism. Nearly 20 Chinese (not necessarily the actual killers) were executed by the Qing afterwards to appease the French and avoid another war.

Almost incredibly, Chonghou escaped with nothing worse than a demotion by one rank. In his report to the throne, he apologised for his failure to control the situation and asked to be punished, but he deflected most of the blame onto local officials. He also offered to travel to France to issue the dynasty’s formal apology and, perhaps crucially, to pay for the trip himself.

Off he sailed. But it was, in the end, an awkward and inauspicious mission. Chonghou was forced to wait for months to see the president—the French were busy at war with Prussia, and irritated that Cixi (then in her first spell of imperial baby-sitting) refused to grant their own envoys an audience in Beijing. Chonghou meandered off to Britain and New York, before being summoned back to Paris to convey the apology. In the meantime English-language press accounts did “Chung How”, as they rendered his name, few favours. Some heaped blame on him, a bit unfairly, for the Tianjin massacre (initial reports had him conniving in the killing itself, prompting some foreigners to come to his defence). One newspaper described him, rather less unfairly, as having paid for his place in life.

On June 29th 1873 that place was beside Emperor Tongzhi, escorting foreign diplomats to the first imperial audience of this kind in 80 years. Chonghou had returned a year earlier from his humiliating apology mission and been appointed to the Board of War and the Zongli Yamen, which advised the court on foreign affairs. The Zongli Yamen, a relatively new body, was a good match for Chonghou, as it proved disastrously ineffective. The first audience the emperor gave on that summer day, to an envoy from Japan, was a momentous test for his foreign-policy team. Actually it was more a trap than a test, and the Chinese obligingly fell into it.

The trap concerned a chain of islands between the two countries, the Ryukyu islands, which stretch from Okinawa towards Taiwan. The Ryukyu kingdom paid tribute to both China and Japan but was nominally independent, while Taiwan then belonged to China. What the Zongli Yamen failed to appreciate was just how intent Japan was on changing that status quo.

The Japanese foreign minister came to the court personally to ask that the emperor pay compensation for an attack on sailors from the Ryukyu islands by aborigines on the eastern end of Taiwan. By making this request, Japan was asserting sovereignty over the Ryukyus (and acknowledging Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan). Put off by the damages, China disavowed responsibility and told the Japanese to resolve the matter themselves.

That was all the invitation Japan needed. It dispatched an expeditionary force to Taiwan (including some Americans). China, belatedly realising that Japan might use this as a pretext to stake a claim to Taiwan, sent its own force to the island. Suddenly the situation seemed at risk of spinning out of control. H.B. Morse, a historian, wrote, in a summary with eerie resonance today: “The two countries seemed to be drifting into war, which might at any moment be precipitated by a chance collision between their forces.” The British minister to China, Thomas Francis Wade, appealed to both sides for a settlement. China ultimately paid a ransom to Japan to withdraw from Taiwan. “I certainly did not expect to find China willing to pay for being invaded,” Wade quipped.

It was another low point for Beijing’s foreign relations. The extent of Chonghou’s role is unclear: he was one of ten members of the Zongli Yamen, and the emperor had other advisers. But soon Chonghou pulled off another failure that was indisputably his own, and the capstone of his career.

The man himself By 1878 it was difficult to see how Chonghou had established himself as a man to trust with China’s foreign affairs. His chief quality seems to have been that he had experience dealing with foreigners (also, he was willing). So, like a losing football manager who keeps getting hired because he has managed football teams before, he was called on to negotiate a treaty with Russia. China had just enjoyed a rare series of military successes in Xinjiang, in north-west China, defeating independence forces that had been backed by Russia, which was anxious to keep China from consolidating control of the region. For once the Qing had the upper hand going into the talks. It might have helped if Chonghou knew the geography he was discussing. He was advised to make his way to Russia overland, to familiarise himself with the region. But it was a long trek to St Petersburg, so instead he sailed to Europe and then travelled by train. In Paris he met the first official Chinese ambassador to Britain and France, Guo Songtao, who was stupefied at his lack of preparation and concluded that the mission would fail. (A highly respected official, Guo was hounded mercilessly for agreeing to sully his hands with foreigners; he lasted only three years in the job.) At court in Beijing it became apparent that Chonghou was not entirely sure what he was negotiating, as maps he sent back got some of the placenames wrong. In September 1879 he agreed a treaty that, instead of returning territory to Qing rule, awarded the tsar a number of important parts of Xinjiang and gave Russia valuable long-term trading privileges deep in Qing territory. It was another unequal treaty, by some reckonings the most unequal of all, and certainly the most inexplicable. When colleagues in Beijing registered concerns with the draft, Chonghou responded that the treaty had already been copied out, and it was too late to change it. He signed the document in October and set sail. In Beijing the uproar began before he arrived. Cixi denounced him; the court ordered that he be imprisoned and tried for disobeying the throne, since he had signed the treaty and returned home without permission. Scholars wrote letters to the court waxing on about his “extremely stupid” and “absurd” diplomacy, agitating for his execution and for war. By March he had been convicted and sentenced to death.

Thanks, Queen Victoria

The international reaction was also swift and furious. The notion that the Qing would execute an envoy, and renounce a treaty, was offensive to the Western powers (who had never known the wrong end of an unequal treaty with China). In the British papers, where he had been mocked a decade earlier, Chonghou was now “An Unfortunate Ambassador”. Wade, the British minister, received word that Queen Victoria was “much shocked” at Chonghou’s fate, and pressed for a pardon in her name.

With Chonghou in prison, Zeng Jize, son of a celebrated general, Zeng Guofan, was sent to Russia to renegotiate the treaty. Zeng’s chief qualifications seem to have been arrogance and an unwillingness to compromise. The Russians were reluctant to go to war, and ultimately gave the Chinese much of what they wanted. Zeng returned a hero, and the hardliners learned a lesson of dubious value: never give ground to foreigners.

Chonghou was freed in August 1880. The Western pleas helped win him a temporary reprieve, and the Russians refused to renegotiate should he be executed. To them the initial treaty had been made in good faith, and the recriminations in Beijing were an insult. Thus Chonghou’s final failure served as both his undoing and his eventual salvation.

Still wealthy, he lived a comfortable early retirement in the capital, reading books and tending to his flowers and fish at a mansion with over 100 rooms. He laboured energetically to fill it: in the last 13 years of his life he fathered six more children with a concubine, adding to the nine he already had. He and his family tried tirelessly to rehabilitate his reputation until long after his death in 1893. He made huge donations to the imperial coffers, congratulating Cixi on her 50th birthday, but got little in return.

Chonghou always felt aggrieved. From the moment of his release, he told anyone who would listen that he was a scapegoat; one of his fiercest critics lamented that he would not just “shut up at home and regret his misconduct”. He almost need not have worried: Chinese historians have largely ignored him. An exception to that general disdain, Tang Renze, writes in his biography of Chonghou that, to profit from history, we must learn from its “anti-heroes”. Indeed—and from the corrupt, hidebound system that created China’s worst diplomat, promoting him and indulging his failures, until the last one.