The Burning of the British Office in Beijing
The Burning of the British Office in Beijing, 22 August 1967
Occasional Paper No. 19
Introduction
On the evening of 22 August 1967, Donald Hopson, British chargé d’affaires in Beijing (Peking), found himself besieged inside his office. Two days earlier, Hopson had been summoned to the foreign ministry to receive an ultimatum demanding the release of Chinese journalists detained in Hong Kong within 48 hours. As the deadline approached, huge crowds gathered outside the British compound. Inside staff ate a dinner of tinned sausages and peas, biscuits and cheese, and began to watch a Peter Sellers film, The Wrong Arm of the Law 1 At 10.30 p m a roar went up and Hopson rushed to the window only to see his worst fears realised. Thousands of protestors had broken through the thin cordon of soldiers protecting the gate and were heading for the office.
The swiftness of the attack forced Hopson and his staff to move quickly to a prepared secure room. Barricaded inside, they sat in darkness as the mob outside broke windows and smashed furniture. When the building was set alight the room began to fill with smoke. Fearing for their lives, Hopson gave the order to open the emergency exit so they could escape. Once outside they were kicked and beaten by the howling mob until eventuallyrescuedby soldiers from thePeople’s LiberationArmy (PLA).Theofficewent up in flames and the chargé’s residence was ransacked. UK-China relations had reached a new low.
The British government had accorded diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), founded on 1 October 1949 by Mao Zedong’s Communists, on 6 January 1950. However, it was not until the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina that Britain and China agreed to establish diplomatic relations at the level of chargé d’affaires. British interests in China had contracted sharply as consulates closed, companies were driven out and most of the British community left. The two countries then continued to have, in the words of Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai, ‘semi-diplomatic relations’.
The immediate cause of this new low in relations was the Cultural Revolution, unleashed by Mao in the summer of 1966, which saw the country descend into social and political turmoil. In 1967 the ideals of the Revolution spilled over into the British colony of Hong Kong, where they mixed with existing discontent over societal inequality, and led to violent disturbances. The Hong Kong government cracked down by arresting and imprisoning Communist agitators, banning newspapers and closing schools.
The staff and their families of the mission in Beijing subsequently became hostages for British policy in Hong Kong. As well as the attack on the mission, they were denied exit visas and had their movements restricted. This tense period also saw the detention of British subjects in China, such as the Reuters journalist Anthony Grey. He was under house arrest for over two years, his only contact with the outside world being three short visits from British diplomats.
Over fifty years on, this publication hears from two people who were present on that fateful evening: Elizabeth Blishen, then wife of the Third Secretary, Len Appleyard, and
Anthony Blishen, the First Secretary and Consul. Elizabeth gives a vivid first-hand account of events from the perspective of the British wives and families, and the assistance provided by foreign diplomatic missions. Anthony examines the British mission’s own views and judgements of events that night and assesses how they fare in light of subsequent reporting of proceedings These accounts are accompanied by reproductions of original documents from the period
Tensions eased from 1970 onwards and negotiations eventually began to restore full diplomatic relations. In 1971 Zhou Enlai apologised for the burning of the mission and offered to pay for its repair. On 13 March 1972 a Joint UK-China Communiqué on the Agreement of the Exchange of Ambassadors was signed.
For a fuller treatment of events during this period see Documents on British Policy Overseas: Series III, Volume XIII: Britain and China, 1967-72 (London: FCDO, 2023).
Richard Smith
FCDO Historians
March 2024
An account of what happened to the women and children and those in the compound on 22nd August 1967
Because of the situation in Hong Kong we knew that something was going to happen on the 22nd of August. An ultimatum had been given that there would be some sort of retribution by 10.30 that night.
During the year there had been a gradual build-up of tension and there had already been three serious incidents at other embassies. People had tried to get exit visas, but most had been refused, though some wives and older children did manage to leave. We were therefore prepared for something: we thought probably a siege as at the other embassies. We packed suitcases which were left in the office and were planning as families to sit it out there.
But as the day wore on, we saw that would be impossible as groups of Red Guards built up outside the office and the families could not get in. This meant in effect that there were three groups of people: The main group who were already in the office, most of the men, secretaries, and administrative staff and one wife. One in the larger blocks in Waijiao Dalou, the residential compound, including the boarding school children. And a group in the British blocks in the compound, mainly wives and children, who gathered in the Hunters’ flat and were looked after by Alastair Hunter who had been sent back to the compound by Donald Hopson to look after the wives and families.
I wrote home describing what happened and will read this now as it probably gives a better picture of the events that night from my point of view:
I wasn’t going to tell you anything of what happened on the night of the fire but Len has told his parents everything (I’m very cross with him) so I better give you a rough account in case you get a garbled version. This mustn’t go any further by the way – not a sniff of it to anyone connected with the press.
We heard two nights before, after the trial of the journalists in H.K. that we will be given 48 hrs to retract the verdict or bear all the serious consequences. There were small demonstrations the following day and the men were not allowed to leave the office. Lorry loads of police outside. I couldn’t go to bed that night obviously (deadline 10.30 p m ) so went to have a drink with Alastair and Jill (Alastair O.C. compound, all rest of men except for 2 guards in office). Also there Birthe Cradock, Arne Belling (Danish), Jars and Anneliese Tangeraase (Norwegian), and Magnus and Christina Vahlquist (Swedish), all chargés in compound for obvious reason. Also in compound elsewhere Douwe and Margot Fokkema and others, French ambassador etc.
We were all joking but looking at our watches every five minutes. I had rung Len at 8.30. Said all was well. Vast numbers outside but he was having a good game of bridge. Alistair tried to ring 9:30 – couldn’t get through. Birthe had left at 9.00 to get some things together – came back at 10.35 – said she thought they were burning effigies. We smelt smoke – all thought it was effigies – 10.30 deadline – we all said – looks as though nothing has
happened – no one entirely convinced – 10.35-40 – voices outside the flat. Gill went to see who it was – some Ceylonese friends and Anne Destenay – said the embassy is on fire – awful moment – we looked out – could see could see great pillars of flame in the sky. The Scandinavians said we must all leave the compound and take refuge in another embassy. We rushed out and woke everyone in each block. Packed a suitcase and made Rebecca’s bottles. Noleen took Rebecca down and I took Caroline. A mob was coming to the block as we came down. Noleen had gone ahead and I didn’t know until 2 days later had to rush up to the top of the next block with Rebecca and hide there with all the lights out while the mob was persuaded to leave – delayed until the PLA arrived by Douwe Fokkema and Frank Tregilgas (one of our guards) – incredibly brave of them – Douwe shouted Lin Biao [actually probably Mao] slogans at them.
I thought Rebecca had left already for Swedish embassy. I was hiding behind the door trying to stop Caroline from singing nursery rhymes. She thought it was all great fun. French ambassador grabbed Caroline and suitcase and rushed us to a car. We went on a very roundabout route – got lost on the way – but eventually reached San Li Tun – we went to the Swedish embassy. To my horror – no Rebecca – but message to say she was safe. She arrived about ½ hr later.
It took hours to get children back to sleep but eventually they did. We obviously couldn’t sleep. A telephone message about 1 15 to say that 3 men and 1 woman battered but safe in Finnish embassy. Tony, Richard and Ray and Anne (Sarah and Lucy with me at Swedish embassy). Not Len or Theo. By this time I really thought Len was dead. 2.15 another telephone call to say – all safe in Wai Jiao Da Lou – such relief. Len telephoned – said he was a bit sore but otherwise fine. Spent the next day at the Swedish Emb. Magnus and Christine marvellous.
Came back to the flats following evening – such a relief to see Len. We packed frantically after that thinking we’d be leaving pretty soon – now we’re unpacked. As I said it was pretty awful at the time but now it seems very far away and this certainly won’t happen again as the Chinese were very shocked by what happened. Apparently seen on poster –Chou en Lai sent strong criticism to Red Guards – this was a little bit too much!
This was my personal experience but others were different. There were really two groups of women: those in the office and those in the compound. The women in the office suffered badly. They were both physically and sexually assaulted by the Red Guards, some severely. Sally Weston was particularly badly treated, as was May Quirie, who was frog-marched into the compound with one of the Chancery guards and another of the men by about 30 Red Guards. This group of Red Guards was prepared to ransack the flats in the compound. They were confronted, very bravely, by Douwe Fokkema of the Dutch embassy who quoted passages from Chairman Mao which suggested that they should not be doing this.
Alastair and Frank Tregilgas had taken up a position at the top of the steps. Jack Seaby (a survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp) had been marched into the compound with May Quirie and had collapsed into the hedge but Alastair was prevented from going to him. They waited for an age while the Red Guards debated whether to ransack the flats or not (it was at this stage that Caroline started singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ as we were hiding behind the door).
Eventually, after word came from on high (we were not quite sure who from some said Zhou Enlai, some Jiang Qing) they decided not to attack, formed up, turned round, raised their flag, and marched off to the immense relief of the PLA men who had accompanied them. We then left with the French ambassador.
Other people had gone to various embassies, mainly the Swedish and Norwegian and I think some to the French. Gill and Natalie Hunter have memories of sleeping in the Norwegian Ambassador’s bed. As far as I can remember most wives seemed to have been at the Swedish embassy and we camped out on the floor. But everyone was so kind.
The timescale of this was short, at the most five or six hours but it seemed like an age and time seemed to stop. I remember racing up the stairs to our flat when we knew we had to go and suddenly it was as if I came out of myself and was watching events as if from a distance.
After what had happened, we expected that we would leave and packed everything up. This was a vain hope. I think we ended up packing and unpacking three times. Some people left earlier. One security guard and the five boarding school children left soon after, the children on 11 September to go back to school. Tony was ill and needed to get home and mercifully the Blishens were given exit permits in December. But most of us hung on waiting for exit visas which were given at roughly monthly intervals. Sometimes they were promised and then taken back. It was about a year before we were able to leave and the Hunters (the last to leave) left after us. This had quite a profound but perhaps delayed psychological effect the not knowing and waiting.
But we constructed a life which had many compensations a bit like living on a ship. We were a tight-knit group (a family rather than a group of colleagues). We tidied up the burnt office and cleared the swimming pool and planted the area round it. After a while we were allowed out to go shopping and to restaurants, albeit followed by a guard. Other embassies were tremendously supportive and helpful, and we made a life.
But I think it took its toll in different ways and some people suffered more than others. We were young and possibly more resilient, but it was hard on the older ones. And we must not forget the other sufferers in this scenario, the boarding school children who had been sent home soon after the fire back to school in England and not knowing whether they would ever see their parents again. They were forgotten.
This is my impression of what happened but it is only one and though I have tried to draw on the memories of others, sadly there are few of us left to remember.
Anthony Blishen
I think the function of a witness of events at this distance in time (as distant from the event as jet-age 1956 was from the Boxer Rising) is to add to what is already known and try and relate experience to reality. We can now see what evidence exists, over 50 years later, to support (or otherwise) the mission’s own views and judgements.
Therearethreedocumentsreproducedbelowthatare relevant:Donald Hopson’sdespatch of 31 August, Percy Cradock’s letter of 29 August to John Denson, and Ray Whitney’s letter to David Wilson of 15 September. The despatch is a blow-by-blowpersonal account that also takes in the experiences of all members of the mission as far as he knew at the time of writing. It includes the sentence: ‘My own guess is that the attack was planned by members of the cultural revolution group with the connivance of the security authorities . . .’. Percy Cradock’s letter makes the point that, ‘this was not an irrational outburst of mob violence but a carefully planned and controlled operation.’ Ray Whitney’s letter starts from the premise that the attack was ‘sanctioned at the highest level’ and seeks to establish ‘who in the Chinese hierarchy was responsible’. It would be useful therefore to read a Chinese description of the attack to see what light it could shed on these conclusions.
It was not until the establishment of the internet and the emergence of social media in China over the last decade or so that it became possible to gain swift access to Chinese accounts andreminiscencesof theevent.An internetsearchundertheslogan-likeChinese term ‘huoshao Yingguo daibanchu’ ‘burn down the Office of the British Charge d'Affaires’ produced some remarkable results, not the least being a Chinese translation of John Weston’s own account.
There were other references too, a number suggesting personal involvement in the attack but similarities of phraseology all pointed towards a common source that was fully described and quoted in the memoirs of Huang Hua, the Chinese ambassador to the UN 1971-76. The memoir entitled The Ridiculous Fantasy of Diplomacy at the Time of the Cultural Revolution was posted on 24 March 2020, though other references date back to 2012.
The irony of this is that the common source is in English and appeared in the July-August 1972 issue of the American Independent Socialist Magazine Monthly Review under the title ‘Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University’ by William Hinton It seems to have lain hidden in plain sight for half a century though visited by historians more interested in its other narratives.
Huang Hua describes it thus:
‘With the support of Zhou Enlai, William Hinton, the American friend of China, visited Tsinghua University over the summer of 1971 and personally met many cadres, lecturers and students. On the basis of a considerable number of records of interview hecompiled afactual account.It includestherecollectionsofsomeof those “Rebellion is Justified” group members from the university who took part in the “Burn down the Office of the British Charge d’Affaires” incident.’
William Hinton, an American Marxist who had known Zhou Enlai for over 20 years obviously produced an authorised version designed to put the record straight and to lay the blame for the incident whereZhouEnlai thoughtit shouldlie.Its timeline and description march pretty closely with Donald Hopson’s despatch, though it contains a number of highly disingenuous claims.
Itmakesitcrystalclear thatthe attack was premeditated and planned and describes the detailed briefing given to the attack party tasked with the penetration of the strongroom. The human instrument of the attack was the 414 faction of Red Guards, a particularly vicious group with a murderous career that was born of a violent incident at Tsinghua University on 14 April (hence 414) 1967 when it had split away from another faction.
For the purposes of the attack on the mission it took its orders from an ultra-left group within in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs known as the Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Revisionist Liaison Station, with allegiance to Wang Li and opposed to Zhou Enlai. It had side-lined Chen Yi, the appointed foreign minister, and installed Yao Dengshan, the rabid leftist returned military attaché from Djakarta, in his place. It was Yao who had ordered the ultimatum to the British. It has also been claimed that in the process of seizing power in the MFA in early August Yao had drummed up support in a number of places including the Central Investigation Department, then the Chinese Communist Party’s principal intelligence gathering organisation.
The Hinton account describes the briefing given to the 414 group on the morning of 22 August by a cadre from the Liaison Station. In the words of the translation of the account back into Chinese the cadre said:
‘During the Cultural Revolution the British illegally stole a great deal of intelligence.
If they don’t respond in time we will exert all our strength in revenge and retaliation. Take screwdrivers and pliers and we’ll go there and break open their archival cupboards. Everybody should wear dark clothing, they may open fire on us and we don’t want to give them an obvious target. All English speakers should come to the fore. Bring torches.’
They were then shown a map of the location of the building indicating the position of fuse boxes, water pipes and water tanks. According to one of the participants, a young man named Gao, the briefing was received enthusiastically.
Well, firearms and torches. Strangely, there had been a firearm in the mission. When days earlier I helped clear out the accumulated rubbish in front of the emergency exit I had discovered an ancient Martini-Henry rifle (in service 1871-1918), probably a relic of the Boxer siege of the mission 70 years previously. Mindful of the so-called mortar plot of 1951 in which Colin Crowe’s (in 1967 the Chief Clerk in the FCO) Italian brother-in-law had been framed and shot for allegedly plotting to assassinate Mao, I got rid of it in the next bag home. It would have provided perfect ‘evidence’ of a convenient crime.
When the assault on our emergency exit (a Cambridge steel door set in the outer wall adjacent to the cipher room) began I was, as it were, the man who happened to be standing at the window when the brick came through the glass. I watched the brickwork at the point between door and wall spalling away under repeated blows from a battering ram (an item of equipment not mentioned in the Chinese account) until a hole appeared sufficiently large to allow the ingress of a hand. The hand was holding a torch, its light reflected off the smoke and dust within. I refrained from shaking it.
Elsewhere the Chinese account describes the spread of fire ‘first the oil barrels in the garage burned’. It omits the fact that the Red Guards brought their own barrels and the mention of water pipes and water tanks at the briefing suggests that arson may well have been the intention of the planners early on. The account in English also says that ‘fire engines came but armed people stopped the firemen’ the Chinese account omitted ‘armed’. The 414 group was certainly later involved in armed clashes and had access to facilities to manufacture weapons.
Donald Hopson’s despatch reports the fact of the sexual assaults on the women who had been in the building, though as a matter of policy they were not raised with the Chinese at the time or later. The Chinese version of this part of the account glosses over these assaults and reads:
‘At 11 p.m. we saw a fire had started, in the beginning from a barrel of oil in the garage of the Mission, then the main gate opened and people burst in, vehicles were burning and three cars had caught fire. A fire engine arrived but people wouldn’t let them in and they had to turn back. The fire spread and spread and the fire brigade returned. A large number of firemen burst through the heaving mass of people and got close to the building. At the point in time when the fire started Premier Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing had issued an order that there should be a complete cessation of the attack. But this directive was never broadcast, we never knew until afterwards and the moment we knew, we immediately withdrew from the location. But it was too late, by then we had already created serious consequences.’
‘The PLA defensive line opened a path for the British who had rushed to the basement and locked themselves in. But they had been winkled out by people who had broken through the door. The police stepped in and took the British across the road to the Albanian embassy opposite but as they crossed the road some of our people tore at their clothing’.
The English version was more specific ‘some of our people tried to tear their clothes off’.
Neither of these self-serving statements fully reflects grim reality but the use of ‘some of our people’ places the responsibility with the 414 group.
Reviewing all this half a century later one reads the mission’s contemporary accounts and analysis with respect. It seems to me that the judgements of Donald Hopson, Percy Cradock and Ray Whitney were in their essence, spot-on, though the picture that emerges from the Hinton account is rather more complex and one might quibble with Ray’s use of ‘hierarchy’ to describe the ever-shifting political alliances of the time. If there was a hierarchy, it was a hierarchy headed by chaos and supported by violence and disorder. What sane and sensible man would choose the most vicious of hyped-up Red Guard groups to carry out such an act of wanton and obscene violence purely for purposes of personal aggrandisement? Both Len Appleyard and Ray Whitney heard shouts of ‘Kill! Kill!’ from Red Guards on the roof. I heard totally ineffectual pleas of ‘Don’t hit them’ before I was struck (what the Metropolitan Police would describe as ‘a blow to the head’) and I have often wondered why it was that nobody was killed.
There is this to say on the sexual assaults. A Chinese victory is only complete when the enemy has also been demonstrably humiliated. Sexual assault is a humiliation and there were attempts to humiliate the men as well. I arrived home that night clad in the overly capacious trousers of the Finnish ambassador, my own had been torn away and the act photographed as we reached his embassy.
Finally, a piece of speculation. There is a throw-away line tucked into the Hinton version: ‘Actually the break-in had long been planned by people who hoped to overthrow the Premier.’ Thus, the demonstration was the unwitting vehicle for the break-in. Those of a suspicious turn of mind might wonder if Yao Dengshan struck a deal with the Investigation Department. In return for its support of his leadership aspirations he would provide the manpower for a break-in. Thus, the well-informed cadre who delivered the briefing becomes a member of the Investigation Department and the 414 group his enthusiastic tools. The losses from the cipher-room support this idea. Last of all, what was the purpose of publishing the account in English?
The account appeared a few months after the exchange of ambassadors in March 1972 and it would be tempting to regard it as an indirect signal of mea non culpa from Zhou Enlai intended for the sensitive antennae of HMG. If it was such a signal it remained, like a message from outer space, undetected during the life-time of the intended recipients.
