Like most dynasties, that of the Qing would succumb to internal disturbance, not foreign assault; and like the Tang dynasty after the An Lushan revolt, the Qing would stage a recovery from the great rebellions and foreign encroachments of the mid-nineteenth century to linger on into the twentieth century. But the foreign presence remained, undermining imperial authority, discrediting the Confucian ideology on which it was based, and inciting a tumult of protest. All dynasties were doomed; the Qing would have fallen without foreign intervention; indeed, it lingered as long as it did only because of foreign intervention. But not perhaps the empire. While indigenous causes would topple the dynasty, it was extraneous forces which would cripple the empire.
When in the late 1830s, forty years after Macartney’s mission, the hostilities known as the Opium War broke out, European shipping had been trading on the China coast for more than three hundred years. For most of that time the Portuguese enclave of Macao had afforded the foreigners a sanctuary and an agreeable home on Chinese soil. The volume of trade had steadily increased; and over time the main foreign participants had changed, as had the commodities most in demand. Guangzhou, the port nearest to Macao and that to which the trade had been restricted since the mid-1700s, had grown into a major financial and intellectual centre. Foreign merchants, minus wives, were allowed to reside there only during the trading season and were restricted to Shamian Island, today a leafy river frontage beneath the flyovers but then a mudbank lined with ‘colonial’ buildings flying the flags of their respective nations.
There was nothing inherently destabilising about these commercial contacts between West and East. Geographically and ideologically they were peripheral to a still-agrarian empire beset by the problems of managing an explosive population while distributing and taxing the fruits of its labour. Overseas imports were advantageous to the economy, especially in respect of liquidity (silver) and some raw materials (ores, spices, furs and latterly cotton). The trade provided the state with revenue and the emperor himself with a rich source of ready cash in the form of sweeteners remitted directly to Beijing by Guangzhou’s merchant groupings; and it was of course profitable for all those directly engaged in it, both Chinese and foreigners. As Macartney had stressed, neither they, their respective governments nor the emperor had anything to gain by disrupting intercourse. Disputes had arisen, mostly over unpaid debts and alcohol-fuelled affrays; everyone found much to complain of; but moneymaking good sense generally prevailed. Many nations were involved, including the Spanish in the early days and latterly the French and the Americans. But the Portuguese had enjoyed a near-monopoly for most of the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth the Dutch had been pre-eminent, and as of the early eighteenth it was the English who accounted for by far the most ships.
Chartered in 1600 to compete for the Asia–Europe spice trade, the London (or English) East India Company, after being ousted from Indonesia’s Spice Islands by the Dutch, had found compensation in favourable trading conditions and substantial ‘factory’ bases on the coast of India. With its chartered monopoly of the ‘out-and-back’ trade between London and the East, the company imported from India to Britain mostly finished cotton fabrics, while both it and its servants, acting in a private capacity, competed for freight in the unmonopolised inter-port carrying trade of the East. From the company’s factory-cum-fort of Madras (Chennai) a group of these freelancing company employees led by the brothers Elihu and Thomas Yale (later of Connecticut) had dispatched the first company ship to Guangzhou in 1691. For hospitality at nearby Macao they trusted to the amicable relations that had subsisted between England and Portugal ever since Charles II’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza; and for trading rights at Guangzhou they depended on the Qing authorities not penalising them for earlier contacts with the Taiwan of Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga) and his son. Despite early misunderstandings, they were not disappointed. As of 1699 company ships sailed annually for the place they called ‘Canton’ (a word supposedly derived from ‘Guangdong’ but applied to that province’s capital of Guangzhou).
A mere sideline in 1700, China soon proved a bonanza for the company. By 1770 the Guangzhou trade was the most important and lucrative in its considerable portfolio. This was thanks to massive dealing in a single and much-sought-after sedative – which was not opium but tea. The Englishman’s thirst for the beverage knew no bounds. ‘The 200,000 pounds sold [in London] by the Company in 1720 was up to a million pounds a year by the end of the decade . . . In 1760 it was just under three million and by 1770 nine million.’11 It would double and double again in the nineteenth century. Porcelain, once packed in tea to prevent breakages, was now carried largely as ‘kintledge’, or ballast to stabilise sailing ships too lightly laden just with dried leaf. Taxation levels of over 100 per cent on imports entering Britain did nothing to stem demand. British colonists were equally taken by the brew. Famously it was protests over the re-export from Britain of a commodity that, by the time it reached Boston, was more tax than tea which triggered the war that cost the British their North American territories.
Although a Commutation Act of 1784 reduced the duty on British imports to 12.5 per cent, the taxes soon rose anew. By the 1830s tea was contributing nearly 10 per cent of the British government’s entire revenue receipts. Nor was this the full story; for the Commutation Act (so called because it ‘commuted’ most of the tax on tea into one on windows) had been prompted by the knowledge that similar quantities of tea were reaching Britain’s high streets untaxed. To circumvent both the company’s monopoly and the British exchequer’s demands, private adventurers and interlopers, many of them British, had taken to operating under flags of convenience provided by the rival East India companies of Ostend, Sweden, Denmark and Austria-Hungary. They too purchased in Guangzhou but shipped mainly to the Low Countries, from where the tea was smuggled across the North Sea. Nocturnal flurries and occasional firefights in Britain’s inshore waters in the eighteenth century nicely anticipated similar scenes in China’s inshore waters in the nineteenth century. The British attitude to tea and the Chinese attitude to opium would be radically different; tea enlivened society and was welcome, opium destroyed it and was banned. But in purely economic terms they posed a not dissimilar challenge.
The tea, mostly black bohea not from Guangdong but from farther north, was purchased with silver. Barter would have been preferred by the company, but other British exports enjoyed little demand in China; wool-lens were generally unwelcome in steamy Guangdong, and as the emperor had told Macartney, China had as yet ‘not the slightest need of British manufactures’. The balance of trade throughout the eighteenth century was thus overwhelmingly in China’s favour. The Celestial Empire came to rely on this abundant source of silver, while British manufacturers and economists deplored the disregard of the national interest and what they called the ‘drain of specie’. Indian produce sometimes supplemented silver, notably raw cotton shipped direct from Bombay (Mumbai) to Guangzhou; so did a roundabout trade involving the shipment of Indian textiles to south-east Asian markets, then of south-east Asian spices and culinary exotica to China. It was in this three-way trade, conducted mainly by non-company adventurers and agencies, and involving the mercantile communities of the Malay and Indonesian ports, among whom Chinese emigrants were now prominent, that the potential of Indian-grown opium first became apparent.
In China home-grown opium, mainly for medicinal use, had been consumed, as it had in Europe, for at least a thousand years. But smoking it – rather than infusing or eating it – for the greater ‘hit’ nowadays classed as ‘recreational’ seems to have originated in Taiwan in the seventeenth century. It may have been the result of novices experimenting in tobacco smoking, itself then a novelty. The habit spread to the mainland, where the Qing Yongzheng emperor made opium dens and opium dealing illegal but did not actually proscribe the drug. It also spread to south-east Asia, where Indian-grown opium was already circulating and from where both Chinese and Europeans began shipping some on to China from the 1720s.
When in 1773 the East India Company assumed monopoly control over poppy-growing and opium production in Bengal, about a thousand chests (60,000 kilograms, 60 tons) a year were reaching China. This figure had quadrupled by 1796, the year of the Qianlong emperor’s abdication and from which date, on orders from the Guangzhou authorities, the company stopped exporting its opium to China; ignoring the Chinese ban would have meant risking an embargo of its tea purchases, which was unthinkable. Instead the company’s Indian opium crop was auctioned in Calcutta, purchased by private syndicates organised as ‘agency houses’, and then shipped by them to Guangzhou in still greater quantities. As prices fell, demand increased; so did the profits of shippers and dealers; and so did official concern in Beijing. The Jiaqing emperor (successor of the Qianlong emperor; r. 1796–1821) introduced heftier penalties for smokers. He also banned opium imports altogether, which meant that it was now the turn of Guangzhou’s Co-hong merchants to forgo any overt involvement in the trade. The consequences were much the same as with the company: dealing moved offshore and out of control. Singapore, acquired by the British in 1819 and developed as a free port, had attracted Chinese émigrés and a vast concourse of shipping; the opium trade there found the perfect entrepôt. From Singapore, vessels, not all British, carried the chests to Lintin island at the mouth of the Pearl River, to hulks moored in its vicinity and to fast clippers cruising up the coast. From headlands and inlets, smaller craft, well oared and armed, put out to meet them. They were usually expected, terms and timing having been prearranged at Guangzhou. The chests were trans-shipped, then landed.
Echoing the exponential growth in Britain’s tea imports, China’s imports of Indian opium topped 13,000 chests in 1828 and had doubled again by 1836. By then, ‘total imports came to $18 million, making it the world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century’.12 The syndicates and agency houses that handled the shipments – mainly British but also American – looked to the company’s influence at Guangzhou for protection and made the proceeds of their trade available to the company for its tea purchases; it was the ideal way to convert – or launder – opium profits (and other perks of Eastern empire) into London stocks, country estates and parliamentary seats. As of the late 1820s, therefore, foreign tea purchases no longer required an outlay of bullion; opium credits more than sufficed. Silver no longer flowed into China; it flowed out. By the 1830s it was flowing out at the rate of 9 million taels a year. The balance of trade had reversed. It was now imperial officials in Beijing who worried about the national interest and complained of ‘the drain of specie’. Within China, and especially in the south, the demand for silver pushed up its value against copper cash, causing the same distress as in Ming times among the cash-earning but silver-taxed classes. ‘Reduced growth, unemployment and urban unrest (another of the clusters of problems associated with dynastic decline) are directly attributable . . . to the sudden impact of this dramatic and disastrous shift in the balance of payments.’13
Under the Daoguang emperor (r. 1821–50) official concern about opium and its consequences mounted. Opinion was canvassed, memorials submitted and debates held. Many officials argued for legalisation, for a state monopoly and licensed dealers. As they saw it, prohibition had failed; penal deterrents were hard to enforce, and enforcers were too readily corrupted; both consumption and corruption could be better contained by punitive tariffs; these would also bring in substantial revenues; and state control would make the foreign traders more amenable to regulation.
The last was especially relevant because in 1833 the British government, under pressure from British manufacturers keen for access to China’s markets, had seen fit to end the East India Company’s monopoly of the China–London trade. The out-and-back trade with India had been opened to all twenty years earlier; both deregulations were part of a protracted assault on the company that left it a mere scapegoat for official policy. In China the move meant the replacement of the company’s supervision of Guangzhou’s foreign trading community by that of the British government. His Majesty’s first superintendent arrived at Macao in 1834 in the person of Lord Napier. Representing a sovereign power rather than a trading company, Napier had been instructed to deal only with mandarins of equivalent status, like the Qing governor-general of the southern provinces, not with Co-hong merchants or customs officials. The change had not, though, been notified to Beijing, let alone authorised there, nor was it remotely acceptable. Napier, who had advanced from Macao to Guangzhou, stood his ground. Ordered to depart, he refused and was blockaded; he summoned a couple of warships and sent to India for troops. But trade had been halted, and the merchant community grew restless. On their insistence, after a couple of weeks Napier withdrew in disgust back to Macao and there died of dysentery. Both sides then misread the incident. The British took it to be a national affront that cried out for redress; the Chinese took it as proof that state intervention in the form of blockades and embargoes could bring the foreigners to heel.
Relishing this triumph, in the debates of 1836–38 other senior Qing officials argued against the legalisation of opium and in favour of stronger measures to suppress both the trade and the habit. Lin Zexu, an able scholar and experienced administrator, stressed the moral aspect: opium addiction undermined the social relationships so essential to Confucian society. He accepted that addicts could not simply be executed. They must be encouraged to reform; treatment as well as penalties must be offered. But above all it was imperative to staunch the flow of the ‘poison’ by clamping down on dens, dealers, suppliers and shippers. As governor-general of Hubei and Hunan provinces, Lin had successfully pursued such a policy. ‘Glow[ing] with the confidence of a man who had never made a serious mistake in his life’, in early 1839 he headed for Guangzhou as Imperial Commissioner for Frontier Defence with a special responsibility ‘to sever the trunk from the roots’ in respect of opium smuggling.14
Commissioner Lin wasted no time. As well as propagandising, rounding up dealers and confiscating all opium pipes, he boldly targeted the foreign importers. Ordered to surrender all existing stocks of opium with no offer of compensation, they refused. A contemptuous 1,000 chests were offered, whereupon Commissioner Lin demanded that Lancelot Dent, a leading offender and head of one of the agency houses, must stand trial. If he was not handed over, Lin threatened to execute two Chinese merchants in his stead. Down at Macao Captain Charles Elliot, the new British superintendent, took this as ‘the immediate and inevitable’ prelude to war. Just like Napier, he called for reinforcements, sailed hastily up to Guangzhou, and was there blockaded. Meanwhile Dent had not been surrendered and Lin had therefore embargoed all trade. The commissioner still hoped to avoid war; but to the British it was seeming more desirable by the day.
In early 1839 it failed to materialise. Superintendent Elliot lacked the authority, as well as the means, to prosecute hostilities; and the agency houses, with heavy opium stocks on their hands in anticipation of possible legalisation, badly needed unfettered access to their Guangzhou buyers. After six weeks of being cooped up on Shamian Island, Elliot, like Napier, backed down and was allowed to withdraw to Macao. Lin’s gamble had paid off. Twenty thousand chests (over 1,000 tonnes, 980 tons) were duly surrendered and, under tight security, were destroyed in lime pits, like infected livestock. Lin himself looked on and afterwards apologised to the spirit of the Southern Ocean for defiling her waters with the ‘poisonous’ effluent. He kept the emperor apprised of his triumphs; and more famously, employing a mix of reasoned argument, paternal exhortation, provocative bombast and bureaucratic rectitude, he wrote to Queen Victoria.
There were two letters; one was never sent, the other never arrived; but their tone and content were similar. ‘The Way of Heaven holds good for you as for us,’ Lin told the queen; all peoples are aware of what is good for them and what not; the Celestial Empire shares with others only its good things, such as rhubarb, tea and silk; but ‘a poisonous article is manufactured by certain devilish persons subject to your rule’ who ‘tempt the people of China to buy it’; Your Majesty, though surely in ignorance of your subjects’ involvement, must be aware of the drug’s harmful effects.
Our Heavenly Court’s resounding might . . . could at any moment control their [the opium traders’] fate; but in its compassion and generosity it gives due warning before it strikes. Your Majesty has not before been thus officially notified . . . but I now give my assurance that we mean to cut off this harmful drug forever . . . Do not say that you have not been warned in time. On receiving this, Your Majesty will be so good as to report to me immediately on the steps that have been taken at each of your ports.15
The translation here paraphrased and abbreviated comes from that made by Arthur Waley (1889–1966) in a work based on Commissioner Lin’s writings which is devoted to presenting the Opium War ‘through Chinese Eyes’. The finest translator of his generation, Waley never visited China; and its history interested him less than its literature – either of which may explain a significant difference between his translation of the letter and that offered in most other works of Western scholarship. For Waley, whose knowledge of written Chinese was unrivalled, translated the Chinese character rendered by the Pinyin word yi as ‘foreigner’, not as the pejorative ‘barbarian’. The equation of yi with ‘barbarian’ seems to have originated with a Pomeranian missionary who was serving the British as a translator at the time; it is not evident in earlier works, such as Macartney’s or Ricci’s journals. A small mistake perhaps, it surfaced in the run-up to the Opium War and gained a wide and notorious currency. The Chinese insisted that yihad always signified merely those non-Chinese peoples who were ‘easterners’ (the British frequented the east coast) – just as man did those who were ‘southerners’, rong ‘northerners’ and di ‘westerners’. They were directional, not objectionable, terms. But the British declined to find yias other than highly insulting, indeed indicative of a wider, deeper contempt for themselves and for all the norms of international discourse.
The ramifications of the mistake, if that is what it was, were enormous. More even than opium, this tiny monosyllable poisoned diplomatic exchanges, and would require an article of its own – number 51 – in the 1858 Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tianjin. It infected the translation of other Chinese characters and slewed the interpretation of whole passages, invariably rendering them more reprehensible to foreign readers. It fouled Anglo-Chinese social relations; it permeated racial stereotyping; and it corrupted – and still does – most non-Chinese writing on the entire course of China’s history. A British equivalent would be substituting ‘wog’ for every mention of ‘foreign’ or ‘foreigners’ in the archives of the Public Record Office. ‘Never has a lone word among the myriad languages of humanity made so much history as the Chinese character yi,’ writes Lydia Liu. Indeed, in a fine study of the subject, she does not overstate the case by entitling her book The Clash of Empires.16
Behind the arguments over opium, over trading rights and commercial access, over protocol, diplomatic representation and extraterritorial jurisdiction, there yawned throughout a chasm of linguistic misapprehension and mutual suspicion. Napier and Elliot were decent men, more often perplexed than apoplectic. And the British, of all people, should not have been surprised by another nation’s presumption of moral superiority and international centrality. But in supposing such attitudes to be more contemptuous and adversarial than they were, in making them an excuse for aggression and in reciprocating in kind (the phrase ‘half-civilised governments such as China’ featured in one Palmerstonian pronouncement), they were being woefully provocative.
Commissioner Lin, another honourable and conscientious man, tried to understand his adversaries. When asking an American doctor for information about the treatment of opium addicts, he is known to have requested a translation of a Western work on international law (though what he made of it is not known). The Qing government could be surprisingly pragmatic. In Lin’s first letter to Queen Victoria, it was hinted that the opium issue might be resolved by an offer to replace the drug with British or Indian imports of a less pernicious nature. As for protocol, the problem had already been resolved in respect of the Russians; equal status had been conceded in the treaties of Nerchinsk and Kiakhta, and trading arrangements, including regular Russian commercial missions to Beijing, had since been established. More surprisingly, when in the 1830s Napier and Elliot in Guangzhou were demanding official recognition and the extraterritorial right of administering justice to their own subjects, far away at the other end of the empire in Xinjiang precisely these rights were in fact being extended to nationals of another foreign government.
Xinjiang had been racked by incursions and rebellion throughout the 1820s. The trouble stemmed from neighbouring Kokand, an independent Muslim khanate west of Kashgar and astride the old Silk Roads. There, leading members of the Khoja fraternity, the ex-rulers of Xinjiang, had taken refuge when the Qianlong emperor first conquered Xinjiang. Muslim solidarity and a major interest in Xinjiang’s commerce later led Kokand to support Khoja rebellions in Xinjiang and claim control of its trade. The Qing responded harshly; but the administrative and military costs of holding down the remote oasis-cities proved exorbitant. Instead, in 1835 an agreement – sometimes billed, like Nerchinsk, as ‘China’s first “unequal treaty” settlement’ – was signed in Beijing with a Kokandi ambassador. Kokand got the right to station a ‘resident political representative’ at Kashgar and commercial representatives at five other cities, including Yarkand (Suche), Aksu and Turfan (Turpan). And all these officials enjoyed full consular, judicial and police powers over foreigners in their jurisdiction, plus the right to levy duties on their trade. Napier or Elliot might have settled for less.
Accommodation was possible, then; indeed, following the transfer of several military and administrative officials between Xinjiang and Guangdong, the Qing government would eventually ‘apply the lessons of [Xinjiang] to its difficulties with the British on the China coast’.17 But Kokand, unlike London, was not oversolicitous of its international image; nor were its treaties subject to parliamentary scrutiny. To obtain the treaty, the khan’s representatives had accepted China’s idiosyncratic attitude to foreign relations and conformed to tributary tradition. For the British, this was impossible – as impossible as it was for Commissioner Lin to disavow 2,000 years of managing neighbours, most of them predatory nomads, on the understanding that dialogue signified submission and that trade counted as tribute.
By mid-1839 the die was cast; events now assumed a momentum of their own. In Guangzhou, Commissioner Lin followed up his success in extracting opium from the foreigners by demanding that they sign bonds never again to carry the drug. On Elliot’s advice the British, as usual, refused. Lin then pressured the Portuguese into expelling them from Macao. Now baseless, Elliot and his countrymen sailed across the Pearl River estuary to a high and largely uninhabited island composed of uncultivable rock but with a sheltered anchorage. Its name they understood as ‘Hong Kong’. From there, in late 1839 while requisitioning provisions on the neigh-bouring mainland and in several encounters at sea, gunfire was exchanged. Lin reported victories and fortified the approaches to Guangzhou; the British logged the junks they had sunk and bided their time. In London, Elliot’s request for troops had been rejected by foreign secretary Lord Palmerston. But then, under pressure from opium barons and manufacturing interests, it was granted. A large naval and military force set sail from India in early 1840.
The fleet carried a letter from Palmerston to the Qing court that ‘demand[ed] from the Emperor satisfaction and redress for injuries inflicted by Chinese Authorities upon British subjects . . . and for insults offered by those same authorities to the British Crown’. To this end, there were to be no negotiations. The fleet was to blockade Chinese ports, detain Chinese vessels and take possession ‘of some convenient part of the Chinese territory’ until such time as satisfaction was forthcoming in a signed treaty and an agreed reparation for the expenses incurred.18 Opium was mentioned in the letter; Palmerston conceded that Beijing had every right to ban it; but he contended that, since the ban was not rigorously enforced by Chinese officials, who were often complicit in breaking it, it was unfair to expect foreign suppliers to respect it – a logic from which smugglers the world over may have taken comfort.
The British fleet arrived off the Pearl River in June 1840 but did not test Lin’s new defences by sailing up to Guangzhou. Nor was Palmerston’s letter delivered. Instead the fleet sailed out to sea again, leaving only a token force to blockade the mouth of the river. Lin thought his defences had done the trick. But ten days later the fleet reappeared, this time off Zhoushan in Zhejiang. The city was heavily bombarded, forced to surrender and occupied. The fleet then continued north, round the Shandong peninsula and towards the mouth of the Beihe, the river on which Beijing lies. Palmerston’s letter was now handed over; but it was concern for the capital’s safety which persuaded the Daoguang emperor to dispatch an envoy to treat with the British. Meanwhile Commissioner Lin, who had totally misrepresented the strength of the enemy and had now exposed the capital to attack, was disgraced and sacked pending disposal.
The new Qing envoy and plenipotentiary, a provincial governor general called Qishan, talked the British into sailing back to Guangzhou on the understanding that he would there address their grievances in full. This he did to the extent that, with Guangzhou now at the mercy of Britain’s naval gunnery, an agreement was reached in January 1841: British superintendents at Guangzhou were to have access to Qing officials, Hong Kong was to be handed over, a $6 million indemnity paid, and trade to be reopened. In return the British were to leave Zhoushan. But though the terms were immediately effective, the agreement was swiftly repudiated. The emperor was so horrified by the severity of the concessions, especially the cession of Hong Kong, that he now sacked Qishan, while Palmerston was so appalled by their leniency (no reimbursement for the destroyed opium, no new ports, only ‘a barren island’) that he too suspended his plenipotentiary.
By the time a replacement arrived in August 1841, the war had resumed. The British fleet had twice sailed up to Guangzhou, demolishing shore batteries, sinking junks and landing troops. An iron-built, steam-driven paddle-steamer proved especially effective, defying wind and tide and greatly embarrassing its still pedal-powered Chinese equivalents. In guns as in ships, the technological gap was not that great; Chinese yards and foundries would soon be turning out serviceable copies of anything the British could deploy. But the gulf between what pre-industrial China and post-industrial Europe made of the technology, and the confidence with which it was handled, was painful to contemplate. The only Qing seaborne counter-attack was a disaster; in a matter of days, seventy-one junks were destroyed and Guangzhou’s waterfront razed.
Naval superiority was conceded; but on land the Chinese still supposed that their forces would be more effective. Troops had already been sent to Guangzhou and local militias raised there. Additionally, large bodies of incensed Guangdong villagers and ‘braves’, some under the command of local gentry or popular leaders, had been encouraged to arm themselves and repel the invader. At Sanyuanli, a village north of Guangzhou, in May 1839 these irregulars gathered en masse after some of their women were violated by the invading troops; then, amid heavy rainstorms, they engaged and briefly repelled a force of Indo-British infantry, inflicting minor casualties. Wildly exaggerated – and swiftly disowned by the Guangzhou authorities who had just agreed an armistice – the ‘battle’ of Sanyuanli would assume mythic proportions and come to be seen as the first triumph of popular resistance against the foreigner. ‘A Bunker Hill and an Alamo rolled into one,’ as Frederic Wakeman, an American authority on southern China’s insurgent movements, puts it, Sanyuanli stimulated a bewildering upsurge of other irregular bands and secret societies operating independently of the Qing authorities and often in defiance of them.19 The Qing were seen as incapable of dealing with the foreigners, and even as acting in collusion with them. From this eruption of anti-Manchu sentiment would originate, within no great distance of Sanyuanli, the cataclysmic Taiping Rebellion.
The new British plenipotentiary arrived off Hong Kong in August 1841 along with a vastly increased task force and a heftier list of unnegotiable demands. From there the force proceeded to capture Xiamen (Amoy), recapture Zhoushan (Chusan) and then take nearby Ningbo. After wintering and receiving more reinforcements, in 1842 the fleet proceeded up the Yangzi. Manchu Bannermen offered fierce resistance, the British bombardments were often indiscriminate, and there was much looting by both sides. But Shanghai was found undefended; Zhenjiang’s fall meant that the Grand Canal was severed; and Nanjing was saved only by a last-minute offer of negotiations.
The Daoguang emperor still hoped to buy off the British; but his negotiators found they could do little to avert capitulation. The Nanjing Treaty of 1842, while it left much for further discussion and recrimination, met the British demands and was ratified by both parties. The indemnity, now raised to $21 million and payable (plus interest) in instalments, would be a crippling burden on the empire’s shattered finances. Five ports, including Guangzhou and Shanghai (where a large ‘concession’ area was rapidly developed by, and exclusively for, the foreigners), were to be opened to both British trade and residency under the supervision of British consuls; Hong Kong stayed British; derogatory language as detected by Britain’s interpreters was outlawed; and opium was nowhere mentioned. In that the Chinese ban had been acknowledged by the British, the drug remained contraband; but in that the British had not forsworn the trade, the smuggling continued; indeed, it prospered greatly under the paternal gaze of the British navy.
The Nanjing Treaty of 1842 was swiftly followed by others. With the mistaken idea that only by winning the support of competing nations could China hold the British in check, the Qing government signed treaties with the Americans and the French (and later other nations). Both these treaties included provision for missionary activity in China – Protestant Evangelical in the case of the Americans, Roman Catholic in the case of the French. They also elaborated on the practice of extraterritorial justice and, in the American case, allowed for a revision of the treaty after twelve years. Additionally both contained a ‘most favoured nation’ clause under which any concessions extended to others might also be claimed by the signatory nation. Since the British, in an 1843 supplement to the Nanjing Treaty, obtained an identical provision, the foreign powers, far from quarrelling among themselves, had a vested interest in supporting one another’s ever more outrageous demands.
It was the American provision for treaty ‘modification’ after twelve years which would be invoked by the British in 1854 to ratchet up their requirements, including access to the Chinese interior and an ambassador in Beijing. Another war would back up these demands, and the inevitable concessions would follow. The so-called ‘Treaty System’ was thus a collaborative and progressive exercise in the diminution of China’s sovereignty through the appropriation of large sectors of its economy, its foreign relations, its society (in ‘the Treaty ports’ and concession areas) and its territory (in Hong Kong and later Manchuria and Xinjiang). Nanjing was just stage one.