190 Reviews of Books

affirms that the role of Black Flag mercenaries in Tonkin from 1874 to 1885 profoundly
influences the present reaction of Peking to America's role in Vietnam. The book
is based on French accounts, some of them highly partisan, and on recent Chinese
Communist writings, but the mingling is too indiscriminate and the documentation
too scanty to generate confidence in the interpretation. The listed bibliography and the
scattered footnotes simply do not correspond. Seven works listed in the footnotes do not
appear in the bibliography, and fewer than half of the twenty-seven works listed in the
bibliography are cited in the footnotes. The preface explains that the work is not
intended for academic specialists and that reference notes have been inserted only
where the author might otherwise be suspected of exaggeration.
One gathers that Chinese Communist historians praise the allegedly patriotic role
of the Black Flag leader, Liu Yung-fu, formerly a Taiping rebel under Hue's

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desultory employ, and condemn the mandarin Li Hung-chang as a saboteur of
China's national interests. Chinese accounts also apparently attack the allegedly ne-
farious role of Halliday Macartney, British adviser to Marquis Tseng, who was present
in Europe during the early 1880'S negotiating border problems. In this connection,
Kiernan's basic work on British Diplomacy in China, 1880-1885 (1939), is listed in
the bibliography, but apparently was not consulted by the author. The first third of
the book covering historical background contains a plethora of dubious ex parte
assertions. A particularly serious deficiency is the author's failure to assess in realistic
fashion the significance of Vietnam's traditional vassal relationship with China. Colorful
words abound, along with the author's periodic efforts to add salacious spice to the
fare.
China's ambivalent role with respect to the French intrusion in Tonkin was
conditioned by Peking's lack of any effective control over adjacent border provinces of
Yunnan and Kweichow. China responded to Hue's belated appeal for assistance by
vainly attempting to coordinate faltering official efforts with those of the Black Flag
mercenaries. Marquis Tseng, while still in Europe, counseled opposition to French
claims to Tonkin partly because he became aware of the precarious political status
of the belligerent Jules Ferry ministry in France, while Li Hung-chang thought that
China's claims to Tonkin were so tenuous and the border military situation so weak
that it was folly to risk the loss of China's Foochow fleet and coastal shipping by going
to war. The French on their part encountered as many disasters as victories. Their
final expulsion from the China border town of Langsan in 1885 brought down
the Ferry government in Paris, but not before both Hue and Li had accepted the
French presence in Tonkin as a fait accompli. Li was happy to end the confrontation
without having to pay the customary monetary indemnity. Presumably the Chinese
historians are welcome to whatever aid and comfort they can derive from the dismal
episode, but McAleavy's disappointing historical performance does little to clarify his
initial affirmation. Scholarly history is more than a literary exercise.
Ohio University JOHN F. CADY

RIZAL: PHILIPPINE NATIONALIST AND MARTYR. By Austin Coates. (New

York: Oxford University Press. 1968. Pp, xxxii, 378. $9.25.)
THIS latest biography of Rizal, the Philippine hero and martyr, is the ninth to be
written about his life since W. E. Retana's was published in Madrid in 1907. During
that time the body of published Rizaliana has notably increased. In addition to the
poems, novels, and political and scientific essays printed before his execution in 1896,
 Asia and the East 191

the Epistolario Rizalino has appeared in five volumes under the imprint of the
Biblioteca Nacional de Filipinas (1931-38). Other letters, diaries, and memoirs have
been gathered in assorted volumes by the Philippine National Historical Society
(1959), the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission (1961), and the National
Heroes Commission (1963)' Mr. Coates has evidently made wide use of these sources
but for the most part without footnote acknowledgment. He has written a sensitive
and personalized biography that strives to place Rizal high among those-no less than
Gandhi, Tagore, and Sun Yat-sen-who worked for the liberation of Asia from the
European.
The thrust of the biography is toward the martyr's death and the high moral purpose
guiding him, as he sought relief for his countrymen, which inevitably brought it
about. Coates argues that Rizal's attack on the friars of the islands, which unleashed

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the polemics familiar to every reader of Philippine history, was the motivation for his
death. The author's elaborate moralizing and his effort to demonstrate a pattern of
consistency in Rizal's thought and action make difficult reading. He does distinguish,
however, between the myth and the man. Rizal thought of himself first and last as a
Spaniard. He consistently rejected the proposals for violent separation from Spain, or
even separation at all, and he dissociated himself from the Katipunan. For years he
chose Madrid as the base for his activities to help his people. In fact he was a European
associated intellectually with men of science and learning in England, France, Germany,
and Austria; his deep and abiding friendship with Blumentritt underlines this fact.
The forces of change that had swept across Europe in his day, and the liberal thought
that motivated them, seem to have provided him with the prescriptions for his own
country. Coates's formula that Rizal was (following Unamuno) a Tagalog Christ
whose sacred mission in life and death was the salvation of his people from the
European seems, therefore, quite contrived.
Loyola University PAUL S. LIETZ

THE SHADOW OF THE LAND: A STUDY OF BRITISH POLICY AND

RACIAL CONFLICT IN NEW ZEALAND, 1832-1852. By Ian Wards. [His-
torical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs.] (Wellington: A. R.
Shearer, Government Printer. 1968.Pp. xix, 422. $NZ6.00.)
THIS long and meticulously documented account of relations over thirty years be-
tween British settlers and Maori aborigines contains a vast amount of new material,
especially on the armed conflicts, which cannot fail to be of great service to future
historians. It has excellent maps and what seems to be a fair-minded treatment of
individual Maori chiefs as well as of British governors and soldiers. Wards is too hard,
perhaps, on Governor Grey, but that is the fashion these days.
It is in his treatment of British policy that Wards seems to have too many bees in
his bonnet and to be overly anxious to show that all previous writers--especially per-
haps Professor Keith Sinclair whose History of New Zealand and Origins of the
Maori Wars have been regarded as authoritative-have been misled in one way or
another. Wards tells us that by 1840 "a definite pattern of imperial expansion had been
evolved," based on the superior authority of the white race, and that it is an aberration
for historians to treat New Zealand as a "quixotic, and erratic, experiment in practical
idealism" in which Maori and British were supposed to live together in a new Eden.
This version of British expansion may exist in New Zealand, but the one more
commonly accepted is that the British government was avoiding territorial expansion