A Love Story: The China Memoirs of Thomas Rowley

by Dean Barrett

In 1836, an intense, twenty-two-year-old village school teacher named Hung Hsiu-ch’uan traveled to Canton to sit for an Imperial Examination. On a street crowded with anxious students, a foreign missionary approached the young man and handed him a religious pamphlet entitled, "Good Words for Exhorting the Age."

Over the next several years, as China was defeated and humiliated by western powers in the First Opium War, Hung Hsiu-ch’uan abandoned his attempts to study the Chinese classics. In 1843, his attention was again drawn to the pamphlet, and, while under severe mental stress, he experienced a series of visions in which he visited heaven and spoke with the Heavenly Father and his son. Shortly thereafter, he founded The Society of the Worship of God and proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ.

From such an almost insignificant beginning, China's Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), in fact, a revolution, began; and before it was over it would become one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history; somewhere between twenty and forty million people would lose their lives, in battle, or to starvation and disease. With the exception of World War II, more lives were lost in this conflict than in any conflict in history.

The Taiping rebels fought to spread their own bizarre form of evangelical Christianity throughout China, and to overthrow the Manchus who in 1644 had defeated the Chinese and established the Ch'ing Dynasty. The Taipings were opposed not only by Ch'ing forces but by various western adventurers and professional soldiers who formed their own private armies: men such as America's Frederick Townsend Ward and England's Charles George Chinese Gordon.

Among the fiercest and most-feared soldiers of the Taipings were the divisions of women warriors who often fought independently from men. On June 10, 1862, Thomas Rowley, 24 years old, serving as a lieutenant to Ward, was separated from his men in battle outside the walls of Ch’ing P’u, southwest of Shanghai, and captured by Taiping women warriors. Many years later he committed his experiences to paper.

Although no mention is made of Rowley’s manuscript in such excellent modern histories of the Taiping period as Caleb Carr’s Devil Soldier and Jonathan Spence’s ’s Chinese Son, the author’s name is listed several times in 1862 in supplements to the China as one of the foreigners-for-hire fighting the Taipings. There is also a reference to Rowley’s travailsin a 1934 East London Mercantile Society pamphlet printed in Shanghai and a short quotation from his appears in Y. L. Burquardt’s Devils in Old China (Worland Press, 1941, London). Why a London merchants’ society would take an interest in the capture and enslavement of an American adventurer in China is made clear as Rowley describes events that involved the daughter of one of their own.

The badly faded photograph of Rowley in Burquardt’s book is the only one of Rowley known to exist. His handsome face is framed with bushy sideburns and adorned with a well-trimmed mustache but he is not bearded. He stands between two other foreign men, their right boots resting on a cannon, and in front of what appears to be part of a mercantile house. A glimpse of water in the background may well be Shanghai’s Soochow Creek. All three men are dressed in military uniform complete with sabers. Each man displays a confident smile and the jaunty flamboyance of an adventurer-for-hire. Although Ward is not in the photograph, it was most likely taken when Rowley was in training with Ward in Shanghai. Despite the poor quality of the photograph, Rowley’s features are clearly those of a sensitive man; and, although the expression in his deep-set eyes suggests a man eager for adventure, it also hints at a certain fatalistic irony, a quality completely absent in the expressions of his two companions.

Other than what appears in his Memoirs, little is known of Thomas Rowley’s life. Considering the reclusive and solitary nature of his existence after his China experiences, that is natural enough. However, Rowley’s manuscript was apparently circulated privately by a nephew or cousin after his death. It seems to have been lost over the years until it surfaced recently in New York when sold by a Manhattan auction house.

Despite an exhaustive search, no death certificate for Thomas Rowley has been found but many such certificates were lost in 1929 in the Manhattan fire that destroyed the Record and License Bureau containing both birth and death certificates for the previous twenty-six years.

Nevertheless, Rowley’s descriptions of China in 1862 accurately reflect the China of the period: The fierce independence of the Taiping women even to their refusal to indulge in footbinding; the turmoil caused by the Taiping Rebellion; and the attitudes of the women to foreigners. His observations are also invariably those of someone living in that period of history. For example, he describes the merchant’s daughter as well above average in height. The average height of a Victorian Age woman was five feet so it is natural that, through Rowley’s eyes, at 5'4" she is regarded as taller than normal. Rowley was astonished at the eventual change in attitude of the woman toward her Taiping captors; a change of attitude which today we might sum up in the modern phrase, ‘Stockholm Syndrome.’

As to the lesbian activities which Rowley claims to have witnessed among the Taiping women, both foreign and Chinese scholars have made note of the open attitude among the Chinese toward this type of behavior. In Li Yu’s 17th century play, "the Constant Companion," a young wife persuades her husband to take a beautiful concubine so that the two women can be together.

Modern scholars no longer dismiss typical erotic Chinese paintings of maids joining with their mistress and her lover as male fantasies but as accepted behavior during most historical periods. In her study, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century, Susan Mann writes that Hints about homosexual attraction among women...suggest that it was not considered abnormal or unhealthy. In his classic study, Life in Ancient China, the scholar Robert Van Gulik also noted that a very tolerant attitude is taken toward Sapphism...it is also recognized that when a number of women are obliged to live in continuous and close proximity, the occurrence of Sapphism can hardly be avoided. He also mentions that in archaic times woman was considered as sexually superior to man.

And, indeed, the famous fifth century A.D. Hua Mu Lan is part of a long Chinese tradition of female warriors conquering men in battle as are the intrepid female leaders of pirate fleets in the South China Seas. Although the youth of the Taiping women struck Rowley as unusual, in fact, Chinese females of almost every age have taken up arms. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Red Lanterns (some of the many women who fought against westerners) were all between the ages of 12 and 20.

There have been other accounts of those imprisoned in China about this time, one even involving the Taiping capture of Edward Forester, one of Ward’s closest officers. Like Rowley, he too, was stripped naked and placed on public display: ...An iron collar was riveted around my neck and one end of a chain fastened to this collar and the other to the saddle of a packhorse. In this manner, with my arms bound and my person entirely naked, I walked or was dragged for more than thirty days under a broiling sun...During the few days we remained (at Soo-chow-fu) I was kept fastened, in a sort of gorilla fashion, to a stake in one of the streets. Every conceivable indignity, annoyance and torment was heaped upon me, by both soldiers and natives.... (Personal Recollections of the Taiping Rebellion, Cosmopolitan, Vol. 21 (1896).

The British General William Mesny was captured at Fushanchau in November of 1862 and held at the Taiping capital of Nanking until March the following year when, thanks to the efforts of the British consul, he was released. Far from being tortured, he later wrote that he found Taiping women charming and had in fact been offered a wife if he would stay. The year before, the traveler Alexander Michie made a brief visit to Nanking and wrote: There is a wonderful number of good-looking young women (in Nanking), all exceedingly well-dressed in Soo-choo silks....

The most detailed account of enslavement involved the incarceration of a Western woman and was published by John Lee Scott in his Narrative of a Recent Imprisonment in China (London, 1842, W.H. Dalton). When the 281-ton brig, Kite, sank near Chusan, the wife of Captain James Noble was taken captive by the Chinese as was Scott and several others.

Scott and his companions were placed in bamboo cages where motley crowds of adults and children often pulled his hair, spat on him and gave him other abuse. Although Scott does not write of sexual slavery, he is at times circumspect in writing of what was done to him. Once, when tied to a tree, he writes, ...but the most active of my tormentors was neither old nor ugly, being a tall and well-made person; her feet were not so misshapen as the generality of her countrywomen’s; in fact, she was the handsomest woman I saw in China.

The above description would fit a Hakka Chinese woman perfectly. And, while entirely helpless inside his cage, Scott leaves much to the imagination when he writes how sometimes we were visited by a party consisting entirely of women....

Scott’s ordeal ended after five months, whereas Rowley’s lasted just over three, but Rowley is by far the more uninhibited of the two writers, perhaps because he never again attempted to reenter the world he had known previous to his incarceration and therefore had no fear of censure from his peers.

His feelings toward his experiences in China are made clear in the text and, perhaps, especially in his choice of title. Rowley saw the events that changed him forever not as centering on or defined by his sexual slavery but, rather, by the feelings he developed for the woman who had enslaved him. Hence, a love story. The entire manuscript is handwritten in black ink on unlined foolscap but at the beginning in blue ink are four lines from Shakespeare:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend

Nor services to do till you require

The lines are poorly scrawled and less legible than those of the manuscript itself suggesting Rowley may have added them toward the end of his long life. In any case, because of its very private and very erotic content, it should not seem surprising that Rowley’s manuscript has taken so long to surface; rather, it is remarkable that it has surfaced at all.

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Chapter One

Capture

WINE hollows the Chinese called them. Whenever she smiled her dimples would appear like delicately formed tiny moons at each end of the lovely curve of her lips. The jasmine scent of her incredibly fine waist-length black hair, her dark brown apricot eyes, her almost perfectly oval face, her complexion as smooth as polished jade. I have been privileged to have these memories of all that she was with me throughout my life. But even more than her physical beauty I recall her mischievousness, her playfulness, her way of tilting her head and looking at me in mock displeasure as I tried to please her. The pride she took in being a Taiping woman warrior. Her courage in battle. Her poise and confidence as she rode her stallion. The expression on her lovely face when I held her in my arms for the last time. And the poignancy of our final kiss.

Of course, I had no way of knowing when I led my men out from Shanghai to search for local Taiping rebels that I would never see Frederick Ward again; and that my life would change forever; that, in truth, it would no longer be mine and I would lose the life I had known to a higher and far nobler cause than playing soldier: serving a beautiful Chinese woman warrior as her slave.

All of us admired Ward for his bravery and of all the officers I was perhaps closest to him, but he was a rather straight-laced fellow always contemplating the next battle. And, I might add, impatiently looking forward to it. But out of his earshot over a few cups of John Barleycorn I often speculated with his other officers about persistent rumors that Taiping women warriors were mostly young and often incredibly beautiful.

We had yet to meet them in battle but we knew that, whatever the truth of their looks, their fervent devotion to their cause was no fiction: The Taipings practiced a bizarre and fanatical version of Christianity holding allegiance to the Heavenly King himself based in their capital of Nanking. Buddhist and Taoist temples were razed to the ground. Prostitutes reformed or were beheaded as were opium dealers and adulterers. No tobacco, no opium, no alcohol, no wine, no polygamy, no illicit sex. And in the areas of China which they controlled they had banished the foot binding of women. Without doubt, Taiping women were not the type to be at the beck and call of a man.

Still, we had laughed at the time and dismissed rumors of their beauty and physical prowess as fantasy. After all, swathed in uniforms of looted Hangchow and Soochow silk, the Taiping silken armies had been incredibly successful in their early campaigns against the Ch’ing military giving rise to all sorts of nonsensical rumors about their fighting ability. From the bawdy taverns along Hong Kong’s Queen’s Road to the crowded refugee areas of Shanghai, exaggerated accounts of Taiping invincibility were told, retold and embellished. But as I was to experience firsthand, everything I had heard about them was true.

Of course, if it hadn't been for the godrotting bluish-white smokescreen of black powder from our own rifles, I might not have been so confused as to rush headlong in the wrong direction. Battles were confusing enough with enemy arrows falling on us like rain, balls and bullets from matchlock, flintlock and percussion rifles whizzing by, the shouts of the wounded and dying, and combatants constantly shifting ground; but the black powder smoke of our rifles had obscured the fact that my lads had pulled back to regroup while the enemy had taken the field.

And the Chinese had fitted out their arrows with a thingamajig that made them sing as they fell through the air to disorient an enemy; singing arrows they were called, and, while I was blinded by the smoke, they sure as damnation had disoriented me.

My percussion rifle had been damaged at the start of the fighting and I hurriedly snatched up a flintlock from a fallen warrior. I employed the ramrod to tap down the powder, ball and padding into the barrel of the rifle, replaced the ramrod, repositioned the flint, then moved carefully forward without being able to see a damn thing. I called out to Cpl. Chatterton and the rest of my men but heard only the cries of the wounded.

Suddenly, the wind shifted and the smoke cleared and one of the most frightening yet beautiful sights I have even seen met my eyes. Sunlight illuminated dozens of young Chinese women dressed in shimmering silk and satin uniforms, above whom silk banners floated in the breeze. Perhaps two dozen or more looked down at me from on horseback but most were on foot. They wore wide riding jackets over baggy trousers or else were swathed in tighter fitting silk clothes which clearly revealed the contours of their curvaceous young bodies.

Taiping uniforms were assigned color by the four directions and as their uniforms were yellow with green trim I knew these women served the Prince of the East. They had a reputation for being the most fanatical of all the women warriors.

Yellow patches on the front of each uniform read Taiping Great Peace and on the back sheng bing, Holy Warrior. Many had covered their heads with yellow or red scarves formed as turbans and tied sashes at the waist, every color of the rainbow, while a few wore colorful conical helmets made of bamboo. Sunlight reflecting off their swords and spears only served to add a more spectacular splendor to the scene. The bright glitter and vivid color seemed more in keeping with performers in a showy pageant than a military unit engaged in a vicious civil war.

That was the beautiful part. The frightening part was that they stood facing me with the arrows in their bows pointed directly at my chest. One slip of a feminine finger and I would be off to Fiddler's Green well before my time.

It was useless to resist. My flintlock could have taken out only one and by the time I reached for the Colt model 1851 revolver at my waist I would have had a dozen arrows in me. One of the women on horseback who appeared to be the leader said something in Hakka dialect which I didn't quite catch, as, during my training with Ward in Shanghai, I had learned only mandarin. But it was clear she wanted me to drop the rifle and to be damn quick about it. She was the only one whose head was covered by a hood and whose silken uniform was augmented by a cloak. Both the hood and cloak were a deep shade of scarlet which contrasted with the extremely light grey of her horse.

As soon as I'd dropped it, several women came forward and removed my pistol from my belt, and, from my pockets, black powder, Congreve matches, all ammunition and my bone box with flint, steel and tinder. While they continued to point their arrows at me, the woman in the cloak gave orders to a young woman warrior astride a magnificent chestnut stallion. The woman dismounted and removed several strips of bamboo from her saddlebag. As she strode toward me, I saw that she could not have been more than 19 or 20. She grabbed my wrists and tied them tightly together behind me with the strips of bamboo. Chinese used bamboo for nearly everything, including caning, a fact which would before long be brought painfully to my attention.

Another tough bamboo cord several feet long was tied to my wrist bindings and this leash was held by the young woman who apparently had been placed in charge of me. This woman--barely more than a girl, really--had a rose-tinted complexion, fine black hair spilling out from beneath her yellow headscarf, and beautiful dark brown eyes. In front of the others she had the same stern expression on her face, but, as she passed directly before me, I noticed a brief flicker of playfulness and curiosity cross those brown eyes; qualities of youth that would one day cause us both great pain.

Another woman had found a thin branch near the side of the mud-dried road and handed it to her. My lovely young captor stood behind me and gave me a painful flick on the ear. She