Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser

(Book Review)

The eighth volume in the Flashman series. (See also: Flashman, Royal Flash, Flash for Freedom, Flashman at the Charge, Flashman and the Great Game, Flashman's Lady , Flashman and the Redskins and the original source material Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes.)

This book follows England’s greatest scoundrel on yet another adventure, and shows him yet again engaging in acts of tremendous cowardice, whining, groveling, backstabbing, and womanizing and somehow managing to come out of it all with a hero’s reputation.

But in addition to Flashman’s usual antics, as always Fraser serves up lots of historical details for the history buff to chew on.

This story takes place entirely inside China　(aside from a brief epilogue in Singapore) but there is more than enough happening in China to keep Flashman busy. During the course of the story Flashman gets mixed up in both the Taiping Rebellion and the Arrow War (Second Opium War.)

I had studied both the Taiping Rebellion and the Opium Wars before, but I had never realized that they had been going on simultaneously. (Interestingly enough, George MacDonald Fraser shows that the British army was involved in both conflicts at once.)

One of the strengths of the Flashman series is the eye for interesting historical details that George MacDonald Fraser has. This is not a bland retelling of impersonal armies meeting each other on some obscure field of battle. Fraser has obviously thoroughly done his research, and he has a talent for picking out the more bizarre episodes of history (the kind of stuff that you think is made up until you check the endnotes in the back and see that it is all documented), and integrating these parts into the book.
For example, there’s a true historical incident where a drunken Scottish private is killed for refusing to kow-tow to his Chinese captors. Flashman is there. A party of British diplomats is ambushed and captured by the Chinese government to use as hostages. Flashman is of their number. A French priest is executed by the Chinese in retaliation for a military defeat. Flashman is the last European to see him alive.
It is this eye for fascinating but forgotten history that always makes the Flashman series so interesting to read.
Granted, as always the plot has to be a bit contrived to get Flashman to all these various events. Especially since Flashman, the incurable coward, never goes into any place remotely dangerous of his own accord, the plot always has to force him into all these situations. (In just about every Flashman book there’s a section where he gets captured and forcibly taken somewhere. In this book, it happens multiple times.) But once you forgive these plot contrivances and just go along with it, it can be a lot of fun.

In addition to the interesting events, Flashman always manages to meet the most interesting historical figures. And the tradition continues in this book. He is on intimate terms with the leading British diplomats and army generals (Grant, Elgin, Parks, Loch) and he meets several of the rising stars of the British army in China (Wolseley and Gordon both of whom would later achieve infamy in the Sudan).
Flashman has several run-ins with American solider Ward, the original founder of the Ever Victorious Army which General Gordon would later lead to victory against the Taipings. Fraser claims that because Ward was later overshadowed by Charles “Chinese” Gordon, today most people have never even heard of him, but Ward plays a major part in this book.
Flashman also meets, and gives detailed descriptions of many of the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion (Loyal Prince Lee, Hung Jen-kan, and the half brother of Jesus Christ himself Hung Hsiu-chuan).
In the Manchu government, Flashman has an audience with the Son of Heaven, Emperor Hsien Feng, ends up on intimate terms with the woman who would later become the Dowager Empress of China, and becomes involved in her power struggles against the other Chinese nobles (Prince I and Sang-kol-in-sen).
Add in an interlude in which Flashman travels with female bandit leader Szu-Zhan, and this small little book is more than packed full with enough interesting historical details to keep any reader interested. I may not agree with all of Fraser’s viewpoints (more on that below), but I can’t deny he writes interesting books.

During the first half of the book Flashman is caught up in the politics of the Taiping Rebellion. The second half of the book concerns the Second Opium War, and Flashman is on the march to Peking.

The Taiping Rebellion was a massive uprising against the Manchu government led by a former Cantonese clerk Hung Hsui-chuan who claimed to be the half brother of Jesus Christ.
This is something that I covered during my college history courses, but at the time the scope of the war didn’t really sink in. When doing a survey course of Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion had seemed like just one more event in a long list of upheavals. But Fraser draws attention to how massive this rebellion really was.
From the endnotes:

“The Taiping Rebellion was the worst civil war in history, and the second bloodiest war of any kind, being exceeded in casualties only by the Second World War, with its estimated 60 million dead. How many died during the fourteen years of the Taiping Rebellion can only be guessed; the lowest estimate is 20 million, but 30 million is considered more probable (three times the total for the First World War). When it is remembered that the Taiping struggle was fought largely with small arms and only primitive artillery, some idea may be gained of the scale of the land fighting, with its attendant horrors of massacre and starvation….The bloodiest battle ever fought on earth was the Third Battle of Nanking in 1864, when in three days the dead exceeded a hundred thousand.” (p.293)

It’s odd to think that in China, the land of Confucianism and Eastern philosophy, the most massive civil war in their history was inspired by a sort of pseudo-Christianity. And from the European perspective, Fraser brings out this awkwardness fully.

Since the Flashman books are from the perspective of the British, Fraser shows the split in the European community. Some of the Europeans favor the Taipings as fellow Christians and democrats. However some of Europeans are anti-Taiping because they regard the movement as a heresy and there are reports of great cruelty from the Taiping army.　　The British government tries to maintain an awkward neutrality, but it is forced into the war when the Taiping Rebels advance on Nanking. (The Taipings, for their part, expect help from the European nations because they are fellow Christians, and are confused when it is refused.)

Although he quotes sources from both sides in the endnotes, Fraser is of the opinion that the Taipings started out as an egalitarian movement, but quickly developed into a movement that was much more cruel and bloodthirsty than the Manchu government they sought to replace.
Flashman, after being taken on a tour through a Taiping controlled city, sees the contrast between the luxury the Taiping leaders live in, and the poverty in which the ordinary people live.
“I made a mental salute to the Taiping Rebellion—like all revolutionary movements (and for that matter all governments) it was plainly designed to ensure the rulers an abundance of fleshpot, while convincing the ruled that austerity was good for the soul. But baring the Papists, I couldn’t think of a regime that had the business so nicely in hand as this one” Flashman says on page 105.

If this wasn’t obvious enough, Fraser draws the comparison between the Taiping revolution and Chinese Communist Party even more clearly in the endnotes.

“One revolution is probably very much like another, and readers of Flashman’s narrative will no doubt detect resemblances between Taipingdom and Communist China a few decades ago. The Taipings were, of course, a socialist movement….The pronouncements of the Heavenly King seem to have been received with the same kind of reverence later accorded to the thoughts of Chairman Mao.” (p.310)

This is a reminder that popular revolutions have a history of turning into brutal dictatorships even before the communist revolutions of the 20th century. For those of us sympathetic to revolutionary politics, this should be a cautionary note.

[There is another perhaps another point that deserves to be made about the Taiping Rebellion. It shows historically how quickly messianic movements can spring up, and how easily people will believe it. Fraser doesn’t make this point explicitly, but it struck me while reading the book. If we credit that Hung Hsui-chaun was not the son of God, and that the millions of Chinese peasants who flocked to his cause were sharing a mass delusion, it seems to me we should apply the same skepticism to the claims of his alleged half-brother Jesus Christ.]

The second half of the book deals with Arrow War (otherwise known as the Second Opium War) and the British and French advance on Peking, culminating in the burning of the Emperor’s Summer Palace.

Today this is considered one of the worst vandalisms in history, and even at it’s time it was controversial. (Karl Marx in “The Civil War in France” said that the French and British bourgeois had no right to be appalled when the Paris Communards burned down the houses of the rich, because the bourgeois armies had done the same thing in China.)

George MacDonald Fraser shows all the events leading up to the burning, and even recreates the debate surrounding the decision. By the end of it all, you can understand why the British army makes the decision, even if you don’t entirely agree with it. It almost seems like a rational decision in light of everything that happened.

…almost, that is, if you overlook the fact that the British and French armies didn’t have any right to be in Peking in the first place. And this is some context which is lacking from Fraser’s book. Somehow with all his many historical notes, he never gets around to talking about the origins of the Arrow War, and the flimsy justification by which British and French armies claimed the right to march on Peking.

And that brings me to the last point. At times this book seems to have an anti-Chinese bias. There are very few sympathetic Chinese characters in the book, and both the Manchus and the Taipings characters are portrayed as being either insane or sadistic, or Machiavellian.
Granted the era Fraser is writing about is not one of the high points in Chinese history. The Taipings were really religious fanatics, and the Manchu government was really incredibly corrupt. But I couldn’t help feeling that a more sympathetic novelist would have tried to humanize what was going on, instead of simply type casting the Chinese in the role of the exotic “other”. Once again Fraser seems to be engaged in Orientalism in which instead of seeking to understand the Chinese, he seeks to exaggerate the differences in order to create a strange and mysterious land for his European characters to have adventures in.

By contrast, all the British leaders are portrayed as honorable gentleman. Grant, Elgin, Parks, Loch, Wolseley et cetera are all portrayed as respecting an honorable code of war that and diplomacy that is completely absent from the Chinese side. Flashman himself is portrayed as a totally reprehensible human being (masquerading as a British war hero), but unfortunately this satire on Victorian imperial culture extends no further than the title character—in this book, at least. (In some of the other books Fraser has been more critical of the British military ruling class.)

I’m no expert, but just reaching for what is already on my bookshelf, there is at least one book which gives a very different view of the war. “The Chinese put up a strong resistance, which was rewarded by corresponding carnage. Women were raped and men were ritually humiliated: their queues (long pigtails) were cut off and they were made to kowtow,” (From “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire” by Piers Brendon (A), p.108)

This is a view of the war completely absent from the Flashman book. In Fraser’s retelling, all the inhumanity is entirely on the Chinese side. The looting of the Summer Palace by British and French soldiers is described, but that’s about it. And even in this case Fraser goes out of his way to quote Wolseley, who suspected that Chinese villagers plundered more than the British and French forces.

[I’m not sure if Fraser’s politics changed as he aged. I felt like I was largely on board with him in the first few Flashman books, but the past few books I’ve been wanting to distance myself from his views more and more.]

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Karl Marx, in his columns for the New York Daily Tribune, wrote extensively on the Arrow War. His writings on China have been collected at this website here [LINK HERE]. Although Marx is today remembered mostly for his economic philosophy, these political writings are fascinating to read. The way he sharply cuts through the official government and newspaper reports to get to the truth reminds one of Noam Chomsky's writings today. (Although Engels actually wrote many of these articles credited to Marx. But still.)

To his credit, Fraser does mention Marx's writings on the Arrow War in his footnotes to this book.

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One final addendum: because this is a period when the British army spanned the globe, some of the characters in this book, General Charles Gordon, Sir Garnet Wolseley, and Sir Henry Loch, also figure prominently in the Scramble for Africa, which is the other book I’m currently reading. But more about that in my next book review (coming soon.)

Link of the Day
There is Much More to Say by Noam Chomsky

Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser: Book Review (Scripted)