The Turning of the Tables,
1796–1860
When two small countries have petty quarrels overseas, [we] are not concerned with them; and whether or not barbarian ships have attacked each other is their own affair. However, when their ships enter territorial waters of the Interior, they must obey and respect [Chinese] prohibitions. . . . How can [the British] expect to obtain revenge on the Americans here? The warships of their countries [should] anchor outside the inner sea and wait there until they escort their commercial ships back. If [they] disobey us, not only shall we destroy their warships but we shall also suspend their trade. . . . [China] is impartial toward all nations, but will not tolerate any nation which dares to disobey its statutes.1
The Jiaqing Emperor, 1796–1820
In the early nineteenth century an upsurge of piracy in Asian waters, combined with the international ramifications of the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), provided Europeans with a useful pretext for bending China’s rules prohibiting the presence of armed foreign vessels in its territorial waters. Qing authorities could not object provided European warships kept their distance from Chinese waters; the very real threat posed by enemy and pirate vessels furnished ample justification for European men-of-war to escort merchant vessels involved in the China trade. But China took the greatest exception to British moves to land troops on Macao, undertaken, so they claimed, to protect the Portuguese from the enemy French (but in actuality more concerned about possible French efforts to disrupt Britain’s own Canton trade). After the first such landing attempt, China insisted the Portuguese sign a bond agreeing to prevent the troops of any other nation from landing on Macao for whatever reason. When a few years later British warships actually did land several thousand soldiers in Macao, the Qing registered strenuous objections to this clear infringement of sovereignty, at the same time criticizing the Portuguese for not fending the British off.
Meanwhile the Portuguese, who were theoretically allied with the British—France had occupied Portugal and expelled the king—felt considerable alarm at the possibility that the British would try to usurp their trading privileges or even oust them from their offshore China base altogether. In communications with the Qing authorities, the Portuguese lost no opportunity to undermine the British, making insinuations about their territorial ambitions and generally aggressive character. The British, for their part, also hastened to fill in the Chinese on the details of the Napoleonic Wars, which they naturally described in the most partial way, all the while pleading their own benevolent intentions.
Anglo-American hostilities around 1812 also impinged upon China because of the presence of both British and American merchant shipping in Chinese waters. At least twice in 1814, for example, Her Britannic Majesty’s Ship Doris chased American ships into Whampoa, the inner harbor area of Canton. Doris captured the American ship Hunter of Boston in Chinese waters and impressed a number of its seamen, whose release and repatriation the U.S. consul at Canton then had to arrange. In the meantime these former prisoners of war hung around Canton with time on their hands, offering the locals a glimpse of one tiny tranche of American society.
When the ramifications of the war began to affect the China trade directly, the parties tried to draw in the Chinese. The British, for instance, were furious that American ships not only captured British vessels on the high seas but sold the booty—opium and other cargo—in Canton, eating into British markets and profits. Obliquely threatening to halt trading in China altogether, they tried to convince the Chinese to ban the Americans. But much as the Qing government authorities deplored the blatant disregard by both sets of Westerners of imperial regulations against sailing into Chinese harbors, they were loftily but unambiguously discouraging, as we can see from the quotation (a composite of several pronouncements) with which this chapter opens.
In these ways, then, Qing authorities in Beijing and Canton gained a distinct sense of the Westerners’ ready resort to military force and their near obsession with trade and profits, as well as not a few of the intricacies of international politics. By this time they had also received pleas for help against the British from the Gurkhas in Nepal. Although the more urgent demands of suppressing domestic rebellion made it impossible for them to provide any assistance to the Gurkhas, this was one more piece of information about European bellicosity of which they carefully took notice.
The Qing were also keeping a sharp watch on Russian activities. Although Sino-Russian trade was limited by treaty to Kiakhta, in reality the Russians were gradually opening up new commercial routes by way of Xinjiang and Tibet, about which the Qing periodically raised objections. But the Qing were not absolutely inflexible; in 1806, for example, they reluctantly permitted a convoy of Russian military vessels carrying a cargo of furs to dock and trade in Canton, after some debate about why the Russians had not simply gone overland by way of Kiakhta in the usual way. Russia was motivated by both commercial and political considerations; it wished for more trade with China, and it wished to gain a competitive edge over Britain in China more generally. Exactly how much of this the Qing grasped is unclear, although they were rightly suspicious of Russian intentions; the point is that while China at this juncture showed an understandable reluctance to get caught up in other people’s wars, it was neither ignorant nor heedless of world affairs.
This chapter describes the adverse impact of China’s close involvement with the world economy in the early nineteenth century and how this eventually led to war with Britain. It demonstrates that China’s reaction to the war—its almost immediate construction of new ships and weapons, its use of treaty provisions as a shield as well as a sword, and its acceleration of learning about the West in order to fend it off—was both dynamic and built on earlier foundations for reform. Startling as the Opium War defeat was, in other words, Chinese were capable of deriving the best from a bad situation. Nonetheless, the six decades from the death of the Qianlong Emperor to the Convention of Beijing, covered by this chapter, marked a transition from confident autonomy to an only rather precarious independence. Perhaps more than anything, the events of this period show China’s remarkable capacity to resist bullying on the part of Westerners who could not imagine a better way of doing things than their own.
CHINA IN THE EARLY
NINETEENTH CENTURY
In retrospect we can see that an era came to an end when Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736–1795) died in 1799. The eighteenth century had seen Qing China reach its zenith. In 1759 the annexation of Xinjiang in Chinese Central Asia had increased the territorial extent of the empire by millions of square miles. During most of the century the empire was largely at peace. The doubling of the population within a hundred years, in part the long-term result of the introduction of such New World crops as maize, sweet potatoes, and the peanut, seemed a mark of prosperity. Cities blossomed, cultural life thrived, and the flourishing commercial interchange that had marked the late sixteenth century had by now thoroughly rebounded from the interruptions of the dynastic transition.
Among other things, this commercialization meant that more farmers began to grow cash crops, instead of food, which made them dependent on a range of outside forces beyond their control. Indeed, demographic growth was a mixed blessing, as many Chinese were aware at the time. Among the less desirable consequences were increased pressure on the land, compounded by such environmental problems as deforestation and the silting up of rivers; spreading lawlessness; the growing ineffectiveness of existing institutions; and sharply intensified competition for existing resources.
One consequence of acute competition at the level of subsistence was large-scale internal migration, in particular to areas, such as Xinjiang, newly available for settlement. It also fueled the steady migration of Chinese overseas. Many went no farther than existing settlements in Southeast Asia, while others moved on to new locations within the region, such as the East India Company’s trading base of Singapore, established in 1824. By no later than the early nineteenth century Chinese emigrants were beginning to go much farther. Some found their way to the ports of the Americas on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. In 1810, a group of several hundred Chinese tea growers journeyed under Portuguese auspices to work in Brazil, where they formed one of the first substantial Asian communities in the New World.
While state revenues remained steady and the economy expanded, costs rose. The mid-eighteenth-century surpluses had created a false sense of financial security, prompting tax remissions to stricken areas and an ostensibly filial reluctance to increase certain assessments from the rate fixed by the Kangxi Emperor in 1713. A series of military campaigns along the imperial periphery, while they redounded to imperial glory, imposed an extremely heavy financial burden on the treasury, to which had to be added the considerable costs of postwar reconstruction and new frontier administration. The silting up of rivers blocked important transportation networks, putting many people out of work. It also, with increasing frequency, caused floods that displaced rural populations and brought famine in their wake. Mass protests became more common; between 1795 and 1840 there were at least fifteen major uprisings. The increased incidence of armed unrest, and a decline in the effectiveness of Qing armies, pushed up the costs of suppression campaigns. The White Lotus rebellion (1796–1803), for example, was said to have cost about 30 percent more than the central government’s entire annual income, even though much of the regional defense was organized by local notables dismayed at the government’s apparent ineptitude.
Until the early nineteenth century the balance of international trade was decisively in China’s favor. Along the coast Europeans and, latterly, Americans vied to buy Chinese tea, porcelains, and textiles. The Russian demand for tea and other Chinese products continued unabated. Trade within Asia similarly continued to thrive, unaffected by restrictions placed on Western traders.
But problems caused China by rising expenditures were compounded by events around the world, underscoring the fatal significance of China’s close involvement with the world economy. First, emancipation movements in Latin America, the source of the greater part of China’s money supply, dramatically reduced the world’s silver and gold supply. This reduction had a number of important consequences. It cut the supply of silver in China just when population growth and commercialization increased demand. It caused a worldwide depression that, among other things, reduced demand and hence prices for Chinese tea. It also spurred Westerners to export more opium to China, because for them it was the most effective alternative to silver.
The opium trade flourished despite China’s prohibition of opium in 1800 and repeated attempts to block imports. Average imports of opium increased tenfold from the first to the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, providing the chiefly British importers with more than enough money to pay for their tea. They took the surplus in silver. By 1828 the balance had shifted: more silver left China than came in, further limiting supplies.
At the same time that China was suffering these economic dislocations, it also encountered stiff international competition in the production of both ceramics and textiles. Chinese silk and porcelain both now faced serious competitors in Europe and Japan, so that demand on international markets declined, although it did not disappear altogether. Demand for Chinese goods was also adversely affected by the waning of the European craze for chinoiserie from its mid-eighteenth-century peak.
Moreover, a worldwide shift in the cotton market undermined the economy of Shanghai and the surrounding cotton-growing regions. In the early nineteenth century American purchases of Chinese cotton declined, partly as the result of international sanctions against the slave trade—because much of what Americans had bought had gone to the Caribbean and Africa, where they now had less occasion to go—and partly because of revolutionary changes in the cotton industry elsewhere. In 1793, the very year of the Macartney embassy, Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin. In wide use by the 1830s, the gin made the processing of cotton far more efficient, with the result that prices of raw cotton decreased on world markets. At much the same time industrial advances in Britain and America improved the quality of machine-made cotton fabric, which dropped in price and made Chinese cotton fabric less attractive. These developments affected a huge range of people in China, from spinners and weavers to manufacturers and shippers.
Internal factors further exacerbated those derived from abroad. Diminished production of copper coinage, a reduction of government quality control, and a resultant rise in copper counterfeiting pushed up demand for silver and made it even scarcer. By somewhat counteracting the shrinking of the copper supply, counterfeiting did help steady the prices of goods dealt with exclusively in copper currency. But the consequent deterioration of the copper-silver ratio reduced grain prices and increased the cost of taxes payable in silver. The effect on the economy and on morale, especially in the more commercialized south, was devastating.
Then, in 1834, the British government abolished the East India Company’s monopoly on the China trade, in deference to the demands of free traders avid to share in potential profits. The immediate effect was to bring far more foreign traders to participate in the China trade, pushing up opium sales still further and providing greater commercial competition both among foreigners and with Chinese.
To sum up, in the first third of the nineteenth century China experienced a complete reversal of the economic prosperity of the eighteenth century. This reversal was attributable partly to demographic increase and environmental pressure on land resources in the interior and partly to China’s tight integration into the world economy. An overall reduction in the silver supply resulted in a general recession, while worldwide shifts in markets for raw and finished cotton worked further to China’s detriment. Opium sales increased sharply, contributing to China’s economic problems, but opium was far from the sole culprit. In short, China’s economic health was faltering even before the cripplingly expensive series of domestic rebellions, foreign wars, and treaty indemnities of the later nineteenth century.
In the early nineteenth century foreign trade was still limited to Canton, where the Western population was beginning to expand and diversify. Sojourning seamen were not the only white men in town. The presence of Western traders in Canton, predominantly British but also French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, American, and a few German and Spanish, meant that Cantonese, at least, were gradually becoming accustomed to dealing with Westerners and had some idea about the ways in which they operated. The numbers were still minuscule: perhaps two hundred by the mid-1830s. Most were either traders or missionaries.
Outside Canton, in Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou, and Quanzhou in Fujian province, Chaozhou, Shantou, and Hainan Island of Guangdong province, and Shanghai (Jiangsu), Ningbo (Zhejiang), and Tianjin (Zhili), Siamese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Malaccans, among others, came to and fro in the course of the ever-thriving junk trade, which to Europeans’ chagrin continued to dominate the trade in “Straits produce” from Southeast Asia and was not subject to the restrictions imposed on Westerners by the Canton system.
In 1807 the first Protestant missionaries, cresting the wave of a major evangelical revival that swept Britain and the United States around the turn of the century, arrived in Canton. Since Christianity was still on the list of proscribed religions—where the Yongzheng Emperor had placed it in 1724—the new arrivals mostly directed their exertions to laying the foundations for future mission work, by translating religious and other texts into Chinese, more than to proselytizing actively. Some Protestant missionaries worked as medical doctors, creating a considerable fund of goodwill on which they hoped to be able to draw in the future. Others helped smooth the passage of commerce, by interpreting or negotiating for Western traders and other visitors. But most remained in and around Canton. They also published a periodical, the Chinese Repository, which, while purporting to offer objective descriptions of China and its culture, in fact presented them in somewhat negative terms. They did so as a corrective to what they saw as the excessive enthusiasm of the Jesuits, their leading Christian competitors for the China soul market.
In 1816, immediately after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the British sent a second embassy to China under Lord Amherst, for whom the Canton-based Protestant missionary Robert Morrison served as interpreter. This unsuccessful embassy foundered officially on the issue of the kowtow, but the truth of the matter seems to have been mutual bungling, miscommunication, and high-handedness. The Jiaqing Emperor, who a few years earlier had declined to deal with Russians unwilling to kowtow, sent the Britons away without seeing them. He could not yield to one nation on a point he had recently stood firm on with another. Too late he learned that the envoys’ apparent complete lack of cooperation was at least partly due to the fact that they were unwell and to the fact that his own officials, in their nervousness, had been less than gracious in their desire to hurry things along. He decided he had acted too hastily and sent propitiatory gifts and messages to Britain by way of Canton. Some of these must have been what a Chinese ambassador in London was shown some seventy years later. They had been sitting unread for all that time in a storage room at the Foreign Office. The mutual standing on dignity of the Amherst embassy and the Jiaqing Emperor thus seems to have represented one of history’s great missed opportunities.
Despite the ban on missionary activity, pockets of illicit proselytizing continued in the interior. This became abundantly clear to Qing authorities after the discovery of a map prepared for the pope that showed the distribution of Catholic converts in China. Punishment in this case was widespread and severe, and not long afterward China briefly introduced the Japanese practice of compelling suspected Christians to apostatize by trampling on a crucifix.
Questions of Chinese jurisdiction over foreigners continued to rankle. The intensity and complexity of the Canton trade inevitably led to disputes, but Qing laws prevented Chinese from pursuing foreigners through the courts. This prohibition mainly dated from the Qianlong Emperor’s strong conviction that mistreatment of foreigners had been a major cause of the overthrow of several earlier dynasties. He did not intend that he or his successors should make the same mistake.
Western and Chinese merchants usually found other ways of settling their disagreements and their debts. For example, the hong merchants collectively guaranteed the debts of individual merchants, although, as we have seen, the combination of overambitious trading and the extortion of Chinese officialdom drove many of the merchants to bankruptcy. In criminal cases, the question of Chinese jurisdiction over foreigners was a continuing challenge for Qing authorities. They now began to find themselves caught between the Europeans and Americans, who objected to Chinese law because they regarded it as arbitrary and excessively harsh, and the local populace, who saw no reason for foreigners to receive preferential treatment. In 1806, for instance, Cantonese vociferously objected to a compromise reached by Chinese and British representatives in a case involving the killing of a Chinese by British sailors. They demonstrated in the streets with “foreign devil” placards, actions that vividly belied their later characterization by Westerners as passive and politically disengaged.
While such protests were of course strongly antiforeign, they displayed as much a sense of injustice as purely jingoistic prejudice. Some such sense prompted Chinese hong merchant Pan Chang’yao, known to the Europeans as Conseequa, an accomplished entrepreneur who dealt on a large scale with all the different branches of international trade in Canton, to litigate his claims against American merchants in the American courts. Pan made a great deal of money in foreign trade. He learned to speak French from French sailors—his English was more rudimentary—and he lived at one time in a mansion adorned with French decorative objects he had received as gifts. He was known for the extraordinary amount of credit he extended to foreign traders, which attracted many of them, particularly Americans, but he also had the reputation of mixing teas of different grades and passing off the resulting blend as a top-quality product.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century Pan/Conseequa fell heavily into debt, owing vast sums to the British East India Company, which commonly advanced money to the hong merchants to keep them solvent and to enable them to buy up the tea crops to sell to the Company. He tried to call in his debts from the Americans. With the help of influential friends to whom he granted power of attorney, he launched a series of lawsuits in Philadelphia, which by a legal fiction constituted itself Canton for jurisdictional purposes. Pan recovered some money, but some of his debtors counterclaimed for poor-quality goods and attached some of his property lying at harbor, while others became genuinely bankrupt as a consequence of President Jefferson’s fifteen-month embargo (December 1807–March 1809) on American shipping leaving port. In the end many of Pan’s American debts remained unpaid, and at his death in 1823 this once-prosperous merchant was bankrupt.
In 1814 he had directly petitioned President Madison of the United States for redress. The petition was sent to Washington in the original Chinese, in an English approximation and in a Portuguese version. The president is thought to have seen the letter, but there is no evidence of any action being taken as a consequence. The English version reads as follows:
The Petition of Conseequa, a Hong Merchant of the City of Canton in China
Showeth:
That your Petitioner has for many years had intensive dealings in Commerce with the subjects of the United States.
That whilst Trade was flourishing he heard no Complaints from them, and many returned to China and made good their engagements, and others remitted his property to him, and his losses were no greater than he could well bear.
Of late years, however, he has been able to obtain returns in a very trifling proportion to the extent of the Capital which he has thus confided to American Trading.
Some have applied the large Sums of his property in their hands to other Branches of Commercial Speculation, in which they have been unsuccessful, and are utterly unable to pay him.
Many who do not labour under the inability to pay their debts, or who do not acknowledge that they are unable, object to pay them, as he thinks, upon frivolous grounds, and involve the Claims upon them in tedious litigation.
When such Debtors come to, or reside in China, he cannot claim the aid of the Laws of the Imperial Dynasty in his behalf. They prohibit such confidence, as he has placed in Subjects of the United States, and he would not presume to avow to the Chief of a great Nation that he has infringed the Laws of his own Empire, but in the full consciousness that he has been guilty of nothing disloyal, or injurious in act or intention towards it, while to honorable minds, he thinks his claims would be strengthened by the Circumstances.
Some resist payment of their Debts contending inferior quality of the Goods which he has supplied. He always admitted and desired inspection of his Goods before purchases, and his Debtors being professed Merchants in the articles, ought to have possessed and exercised their skill and knowledge respecting them.
He does not presume to solicit your Excellency’s protection and consideration, but in so far as may accord with Justice, and the Laws of the United States, they being so far, and as greatly celebrated for their equal protection of the Rich, and of the Poor, and for their dealing equal measure to their own Citizens, and to the Alien.
Your Petitioner is a Stranger of a far distant Country; he knows not what observances are enacted by the American Laws, and is too distant to be able to afford an explanation, and proofs where they are wanted, and many years must elapse before he can be heard for himself through very imperfect Channels. . . .2
The petition goes on to claim that without restitution, Pan will be ruined both financially and in commercial reputation and suggests that such an eventuality will also damage the Americans’ reputation as honest traders. The sophisticated understanding of American legal practice shown in this letter, even if, as seems likely, it represented the joint effort of the Chinese merchant and his foreign friends, offers an indication that at least some Chinese who came into contact with foreigners were altogether ready to adopt foreign ways and indeed saw such a move as a way to beat the foreigner at his own game. But such attitudes often fell victim to intricate political wrangling of one kind or another.
THE FIRST OPIUM WAR,
1839–1842
Pan Chang’yao’s petition represented one individual’s effort to cope with events beyond his control. Similarly, intellectuals and policy-makers attempted to arrive at a consensus on the causes of and possible solutions to the fiscal crisis and its social ramifications.
The detrimental impact of opium importation extended far beyond the economy. Opium addiction reached into virtually every segment of Chinese society, although the Indian imports were too expensive for many ordinary people, who more often used the milder native opium. Long known in China for its medicinal and aphrodisiac attributes as well as in its narcotic capacity, opium had been in use in overseas Chinese communities connected with the Dutch in Batavia and Taiwan since the seventeenth century. The first ban on opium sales that were not for strictly medical purposes came under the Yongzheng Emperor in 1729 and was not rigorously enforced. A century later opium was so pervasive as to make enforcement of the ban virtually impossible. At court bored eunuchs and imperial family members indulged in it. Soldiers took opium to blunt their fears and perhaps as a way to avoid active service, as became apparent in 1832, after six thousand troops had proved unable to suppress a local uprising because of widespread addiction. Scholars took opium to alleviate the stresses and frustrations of life; students took it to sharpen their wits at examination time; merchants took it to hone their business acumen; women took it as a release from the tension and limitations of family life. In leisured circles it became socially acceptable; Chinese served opium to their friends after dinner in the same way that Europeans might offer a liqueur.
The more expensive imported variety, being stronger, was also more effective and more addictive. But those engaged in hard physical labor, such as the haulers who dragged shipping upriver, and farmers, particularly opium growers, used domestic opium, which worked well enough to kill pain and enhance their strength temporarily. Such impoverished addicts were exposed to double jeopardy because they imperiled their health not only through drug addiction as such but because they often spent what little money they had on opium rather than on food and became as a result severely undernourished. Opium use, then, had already spread to the Chinese lower classes by the early nineteenth century. But it became widespread only later.
By the mid-1830s growing apprehension about the ramifications of widespread drug addiction compounded anxieties among Chinese scholars and officials about the drain of silver out of the country; many identified a connection. A protracted debate, strangely familiar in the late twentieth century, ensued among Qing officials and scholars. What was the best way to deal with the drug question? Should opium be legalized? Should it be banned altogether? How aggressive a stance should the Qing take against the British? And so on. Effective prohibition would without doubt be extraordinarily difficult, not only because of British military strength but because the chain of distribution in China involved so many different vested interests. Moreover, it was not at all clear that the Qing military was capable of enforcing a complete ban or, even if it could do so, that a ban would bring about peace.
Here policy-makers drew on the rather compelling precedent of Kokand, an expansionist-minded Central Asian state bordering Xinjiang, with which China had concluded a treaty in 1835. Kokand had for some time been trying to dominate Xinjiang’s foreign trade, to the detriment of the much remoter Qing. A complete Qing trade ban, intended to bring the Kokandis to heel, had proved entirely ineffective. Partly concession and partly formal recognition of existing reality, the 1835 treaty brought peace to the region more quickly and more effectively than the trade cutoff had done. The treaty gave foreigners the right to live, trade, and levy taxes within the Chinese empire; they could appoint consuls, who had jurisdiction over their fellow countrymen when in China; and China paid Kokand an indemnity. Kokandis and other foreigners were allowed to rent property and hire local servants, assistants, and interpreters. It was possible to draw a loose parallel to the much earlier Treaty of Kiakhta, in accordance with which Russians had been living and trading on the Sino-Russian border since 1732. The Kokand treaty, as it turned out, brought a peace under which the influx of opium into China overland began to intensify, and so the Qing extended their prohibition of opium and its importation to Xinjiang as well as to the coast.
In 1838 the emperor decided that the opium trade must be stopped. He canvassed opinion from a broad range of people, consulting both officials on the job and influential scholars. Many of these latter were knowledgeable but for various reasons unemployed. Typically such men came together in literary clubs, established their reputations as scholars, formed a network of connections, and then, in keeping with the revived intellectual leaning toward practical statecraft, turned their attention to matters of state and to gaining political power. In some respects these networks resembled political parties, although such an institution was unthinkable under imperial rule.
The question the Qing confronted was whether to seek an accommodation with the British or to take a firm stand and risk war. There were two main camps. One faction, primarily made up of central government bureaucrats, favored provisional accommodation with the British. They held this view for a number of reasons. First, they applied the logic of the Central Asian experience to the coastal problem. Several of these proponents of accommodation were Manchus fresh from a term of service in Xinjiang, where for security reasons few Han Chinese held senior appointments. Drawing on the recent Kokand experience, they knew there was no guarantee that a trade ban would solve either the drug problem, which they correctly assessed would simply go underground, or the monetary emergency. Second, these officials probably recognized that superior British military strength meant war would almost certainly bring humiliation.
The other main faction was made up of intellectuals of the literati coalition, who collectively exerted considerable influence. These men proposed a trade embargo against the British. They wished not only to block opium imports but also to promote their faction’s involvement in governance. Backing Lin Zexu (1785–1850), whom the emperor sent to Canton with a special mandate to solve the opium problem, they were insouciant of the risk of war or at least miscalculated it, seeking only to enhance Lin’s political prestige and by association their own power. In short, this literati group’s support for a trade embargo, which they favored as a way to further their own political agenda, played a major part in pushing China into war with Britain in 1839. After war broke out, these men’s influence continued to be powerful enough to hamper the effectiveness of central government. They did so both tactically, by failing to cooperate with or criticizing official forces, and strategically, by continuing to apply pressure to fight rather than appease the British. This political dispute colored the whole war effort.
Lin Zexu launched a comprehensive attack on opium. He targeted users as well as providers of the drug, confiscating opium, creating mutual surveillance groups to help stamp out smoking, and calling on different groups of people—students, community leaders, military forces—to turn in distributors and to come up with proposals for halting the opium trade altogether. He then turned his attention to the British suppliers. Unaware that they had been stockpiling opium in mistaken anticipation of legalization—for they had followed the internal debates—he compelled them to hand over their vast opium stores, amounting to perhaps three million pounds, offering no compensation. He had the opium destroyed as thoroughly as possible by dissolving the raw drug and flushing it out to sea along huge trenches dug for the purpose by hundreds of laborers supervised by sixty officials. He ordered the British out of Canton, so they removed to Portuguese Macao. When they refused to pledge to stop trafficking in opium, which was still prohibited by Chinese law, he had them driven out of Macao. British traders then occupied the small nearby island of Hong Kong, despite the energetic resistance of the approximately four thousand inhabitants, who poisoned wells and refused to cooperate with the British in any way. Lin encouraged this local resistance, but the British showed no inclination to abandon Hong Kong’s fine deepwater harbor, which made it an ideal commercial base for them, along the lines of Macao.
Against this background, the British Parliament’s abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with Asia was of enormous consequence. It meant that the chief representative of British interests in China now spoke for his country rather than only for the company. An insult to the British trade superintendent was now a matter of state. But the Qing did not clearly grasp this distinction.
In 1839 war broke out between Britain and China ostensibly because of Qing efforts to put an end to opium smuggling once and for all and because of accumulated British resentment of the restrictions placed on them. British ships blockaded Canton and Ningbo, farther up the coast, and seized control of Zhoushan (Chusan) Island, at the entrance to the Yangzi delta, one of the main inland waterways. They then sailed north, unopposed, and by late summer of 1840 were threatening Tianjin, the nearest port to Beijing. Subsequent negotiations achieved British withdrawal to Canton, but the agreement reached on the spot was rejected as inadequate by both sides. After further fighting around Canton, the British bombarded and then occupied parts of the city in the spring of 1841. Popular feeling ran high, stimulated by reports of British atrocities, including rapes and the desecration of local graves and temples.
Chinese popular stereotypes about foreigners, up to now relatively neutral, began to become more extreme. In an episode that later took on epic proportions as an example of the power of an aroused populace, several thousand quickly mobilized militiamen, gentry-organized self-defense units of the villages surrounding Canton, set upon British and Indian forces at nearby Sanyuanli. With the foreigners’ guns suddenly disabled by a torrential downpour, the attackers were able to wound several of the foreigners and even killed one of them. Local authorities soon called off the attack to ensure that negotiations for British withdrawal not be broken off, but the participants, convinced they could have driven off the British, strongly resented this official interference, which they regarded as akin to treachery. As had happened in 1806, when local inhabitants objected to a compromise reached by Qing authorities and British representatives over a criminal case, placards appeared in Canton warning the foreign forces not to return to the site of the engagement. Some of these placards, crudely expressed, really did represent the voice of the people, but others were phrased in more elegant language, suggesting that members of the scholars’ faction backing Lin, who were chafing at continued Qing appeasement efforts, might have had a hand in them.
One such manifesto read as follows: “Proclamation Addressed to the English Barbarians . . . from the People of the Countryside Residing in Canton: . . . In our passion for revenge, all of us are alike aroused; what need have we, then, to trouble our high officials to ‘raise their spears’ [in our defense]? Waving our arms and giving a great shout, we certainly have the power to crush the [English] beasts without anyone else’s aid.”3 It was a relatively small episode, but in blaming the government for not standing up to the enemy, it set a far-reaching precedent. It also showed that despite all the restrictions on freedom of speech and the lack of an organized opposition of the type familiar in Western democracies, there were nonetheless effective ways in which to express and mobilize public opinion.
Some accounts of looting and vandalism depicted the British as just another set of the fearsome bandits and pirates who periodically made a nuisance of themselves. This attitude is clear, for example, from an account left by a Shanghai resident who was one of the few not to flee when the British captured the city. Our informant was a literate local community leader but not a member of the upper elite. He recalled:
Before dawn a group of British broke down the door of my house with weapons. I tried to stop them, but they grabbed me and put a knife to my throat. They ransacked the house, looking for silver, jewelry and money, taking everything, even the tiniest piece of cash. With a knife at [my] throat, they questioned me, using gestures, and wanted to know where [I] had hidden anything. [I] tried to convince them we were very poor. They went to my nephew’s house [nearby] but finding only books there, they left. Then they went to my uncle’s house, and then to my brother’s house, but everyone there had fled.4
It is worth noting that this informant was not particularly xenophobic, nor did he refer to the British derogatorily as barbarians; here, at least, was no suggestion of an inveterate attitude of superiority toward foreigners.
Although political maneuvering bore some responsibility for China’s defeat in the war and certainly influenced subsequent ways in which people thought about the war, the main reason the Qing lost the First Opium War was simply that they were overcome by superior military force. But the Chinese were no simpletons in military technology, nineteenth-century British accounts to the contrary notwithstanding. They had for centuries been fortifying entire towns with massive walls and were familiar with the concept and techniques of siege warfare. Canton itself was so well fortified that, as an astonished British eyewitness noted, a two-hour pounding administered by a seventy-four-gun British warship, including some thirty-two-pounders, had virtually no effect.
Qing officials hastened to imitate British technological power. They copied British double-decked men-of-war, complete with guns, and built armed replicas of the British paddle-wheel steamers that had so effectively operated in Canton’s shallow waters; they experimented with a form of the percussion cap; they devised an iron mold for casting ordnance (in place of the old sand mold) that was at least as sophisticated as those found in the West, and they steadily cast ships’ guns that exactly resembled British models. All this bore out the imperial prince’s comment made sixty years earlier, to the effect that the Qing were willing to try anything when it came to warfare.5 We shall return in more detail to the issue of military modernization in the next chapter.
Chinese ability to draw on their experience in the First Opium War went beyond adopting new technology. They observed weaknesses in the British forces that they thought might well be possible to exploit. In late 1841, for example, after two shiploads of British troops, including several hundred Indian sepoys, had been shipwrecked on Taiwan, some Chinese began to develop ideas about fissures in British imperial armor. Most of the shipwrecked sepoys were abandoned to drown by their companions, but the surviving almost 150 were captured and jailed in Taiwan along with the handful of white officers taken with them. This entire episode came to the attention of Qing authorities on Taiwan, including in particular a leading member of the literati statecraft faction, Yao Ying (1785–1853). Yao noticed racial friction among the foreign prisoners awaiting execution. He questioned one of the officers at some length about the British empire in India. Whatever he learned from his interrogations combined with his observations to persuade him that colonial overextension and racial tension might well prove to be Britain’s fatal weakness.
Rumors about a looming revolt against the British in Nepal in 1841 fueled his conviction, and although he was for a time in political disgrace over the mass execution of these prisoners of war, over the next few years Yao devoted considerable effort to making his views known to other influential scholars. The goal of exploiting that vulnerability became a mantra of the statecraft party. They were not the only ones to perceive the possibility of using racial issues against the British. When hostile Cantonese attacked foreign “factories” (warehouses) after the war, in late 1842, for instance, Qing officials responded to outraged British demands for compensation by claiming that the destruction was provoked by Indian sailors’ causing trouble.
Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu and some of his statecraft associates came to the conclusion that study of the foreign countries would help overcome the threat they posed to China. Lin set up his own bureau of translation in Canton to collect and translate as much information about the West as possible. By that time, as the result of foreign trade and, to a lesser extent, the presence of missionaries, there were a number of Chinese who knew English whom Lin was able to hire to help him. In this way he gained access to histories and geographies translated by Protestant missionaries and to other Western works. Among the most famous works he acquired from Westerners in Canton was Emmerich de Vattel’s International Law, sections of which he had translated into Chinese. Lin acquired maps and diagrams of ships and weapons and arranged for translations of numerous sections from the Protestant missionary publication Chinese Repository. He brought all this information together in a work he entitled Sizhou Zhi (“Chronicle of the Four Continents”), and later turned over his source materials to his associate Wei Yuan (1794–1856), a scholar long interested in frontier policy, so Wei could continue his project.
Wei’s earlier research into the military history of the dynasty, begun in the 1820s and finally written up in 1842, had convinced him it was essential to refocus attention on the military in order to deal with rising domestic rebellion, including piracy. He proposed improvements in military training, in the organization of local militia—newly prominent since the White Lotus debacle of 1796–1803—and maritime defense. Wei was also coeditor of an influential collection of essays, Huangchao Jingshi Wenbian (“Collected Writings on Statecraft of this August Dynasty”), begun in 1825, on government and policy recommendations; this prominently featured work on inner and coastal frontier defense and on military affairs. The point here is simply that just as opium was an important but not the sole reason for China’s social and economic problems in the early nineteenth century, so the First Opium War accelerated existing trends toward reform but did not single-handedly initiate the surging ideas for which Westerners later claimed all the credit.
After the war Wei and others began to write about world geography, politics, and the technological strength of foreign nations in ways that harked back to the tradition of the high Tang. The difference was that the nineteenth-century scholars had a much greater fund of foreign sources to draw on and an immediate motivation for acquiring information in the form of the Western presence. Citing the example of Singapore, Wei perceived a dual-pronged approach to Asia on the part of the Western nations. On the one hand, they were making inroads by way of colonialism in Southeast Asia. On the other, they were advancing by way of the Chinese coast. In both cases they would stop at nothing to achieve their presumed goals. He urged making maritime defense a top priority because he visualized the British launching attacks on China from a chain of defensive outposts stretching across Southeast Asia. Britain’s seizure of Hong Kong formed part of this pattern and gave it a base uncomfortably close to China.
Wei made a number of recommendations that in the decades to come carried considerable weight. He proposed, following the argument of his friend Yao Ying, first, that China link up with Britain’s enemies in Southeast Asia to exploit weaknesses in Britain’s far-flung empire; second, that it consolidate its hold on all its frontiers, along the coast as well as inland; and third, that it not hesitate to adopt Western technology, particularly ships and weaponry. In this way China could suppress domestic rebellion, keep the Western powers at bay on all fronts, and begin to reassert its position at the pinnacle of maritime East Asia’s traditional political order, an order that largely excluded Westerners. But by this time China had signed the Treaty of Nanjing.
The main provisions of the Treaty of Nanjing that concluded the First Opium War in 1842 were as follows. China must open to foreign residence four coastal cities in addition to Canton: Shanghai, located where the Yangzi River empties into the sea; Xiamen (Amoy) and Fuzhou, in Fujian province, and Ningbo, in Zhejiang. It must permit British subjects and their families to live and conduct trade in these five “treaty ports” without let or hindrance. This included allowing Royal Navy warships access to Chinese ports to protect trade, as well as the establishment of consulates. It must establish a fair and fixed customs duty at the five ports and limit transit dues paid on goods transported inland. British prisoners must be released, and Chinese collaborators pardoned. Derogatory terms denoting British inferiority must be banished from official Qing communications, which henceforth must be conducted on a basis of equality. Under the treaty, China abolished the Canton system and contributed several million dollars to settling outstanding hong merchant debts. It formally ceded already occupied Hong Kong Island. It agreed to pay a huge indemnity, some of which was to compensate the British merchants for their confiscated opium. For its part, Britain agreed that its troops would forthwith leave China, except for Zhoushan Island, near Ningbo, where it would remain until all the treaty ports had been opened and the indemnity fully paid. Opium was not mentioned.
The Treaty of Nanjing was followed in short order by additional treaties concluded with the United States and France and by supplemental treaties with the British stipulating that whatever concessions one country won from China would apply to all foreign nations. These treaties particularly covered matters of religion and matters of law. They abrogated China’s anti-Christian laws and granted foreigners the right to rent land in the five treaty ports on which to build churches, hospitals, and cemeteries. They sanctioned existing practice by formally permitting Westerners to learn Chinese. They established the principle of extraterritoriality—immunity for foreigners from Chinese law on Chinese soil—a right Britain demanded on the basis of its experience trading in Ottoman Turkey and other Muslim countries, where this was standard practice. Except in matters of opium smuggling, foreigners in China now had the right to be judged by their own national law. The treaties provided for review in twelve years.
In the long term these concessions, about which the Qing did not have much choice, profoundly affected Chinese life as well as the Qing hold on political power. But at the time the Qing did not regard them as of major significance, not least because many of the treaty provisions so much resembled those granted seven years earlier to Kokand in Central Asia, even though the Kokandis had not insisted on the principle of equality between nations. Thus the provisions of the Treaty of Nanjing, although in many ways humiliating, followed existing precedents, simply extending them from the inland northwest frontier on to the maritime frontier. The Qing saw the opening of the treaty ports as a way not to enlarge the scope of Western trade but to dilute it by spreading it more thinly along the coast. It was only after 1860 that treaty concessions carried into the heart of China’s interior.
The path of treaty implementation did not always run smoothly. Both sides repeatedly took refuge in the specific terms of the treaties, concerning which there were sometimes disputes arising from discrepancies between the English and Chinese versions. The Chinese, for example, wanted to be sure that having claimed the right to live in the five treaty ports, Westerners actually vacated the few tiny settlements they had established outside the treaty areas. Then it took some time to abrogate effective domestic monopolies on certain commodities, because Chinese involved in the commercial chain from production to distribution to export were slow to comply with treaty provisions, out of either recalcitrance or ignorance.
Foreign behavior also caused problems. As the foreigners searched for appropriate spots on which to build or establish cemeteries, for instance, they sometimes inadvertently interfered with traditional Chinese ideas of fengshui, which governed the placement of structures and the plotting of land, or they disturbed existing Chinese graves. Heedlessness of this kind, while not malevolent, occasionally provoked violence. Westerners also sometimes caused incidents when they ventured inland, to explore or to hunt. The Qing objected that such sorties contravened the terms of the treaty, which allowed a foreign presence only in the actual treaty ports. They claimed that the sight of foreigners upset the local inhabitants, “especially women,” and that they could not, or would not, guarantee the foreigners’ safety. The British routinely threatened to see to their own security if Chinese measures proved inadequate, a threat that implied disrespect for the Qing’s right to police their own territory and hence for Qing sovereignty.
Legal issues were a constant source of dispute. One point of contention was the question of how to deal with Chinese in Hong Kong. Unlike Macao, which was leased by the Portuguese but remained Chinese property, Hong Kong became Britain’s “in perpetuity” by the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing.* Britain did not want any competition from Chinese officials to undermine their authority in their new colony. But China wanted jurisdiction over Chinese residents of Hong Kong. Eventually it was agreed that a Qing official who would be stationed on Kowloon Peninsula, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong, would have jurisdiction in cases solely involving Chinese. For some time, however, Chinese constables continued to carry out investigations and even arrests on Hong Kong itself, in contravention of the agreement and much to the annoyance of the colonial authorities. The problems took some time to subside, partly on account of a postwar resurgence of piracy that often affected both Qing and British jurisdictions.
At first such matters were dealt with case by case through diplomatic exchange. The record shows that efforts to cooperate in such cases did not always work. In 1844, for instance, one pirate was captured by the British and then “lent” to the Qing government to help capture his confederates, apparently on the understanding he would be returned to Hong Kong for trial. But he remained on the mainland, where eventually he was executed. After a few years mutual extradition arrangements were made; in 1849, for example, the Qing agreed in principle to a British request that if they captured another pirate, wanted on murder charges in Hong Kong, they would return him for trial to Hong Kong. But if they did catch him, they do not appear to have let the British know.6
Cases involving foreign-born Chinese also raised complicated issues. Chen Qingzhen, for instance, was a Singapore-born Chinese working as a scribe in the British consulate in the treaty port of Xiamen. He was arrested and tortured by Qing authorities on suspicion of trying to start an offshoot of the Small Sword Society, a group of Cantonese and Fujianese rebels that for seventeen months occupied part of Shanghai, causing considerable anxiety to Qing and British alike. Chen died from his injuries. The British objected, claiming that he was under British protection because he had been born in Singapore. The Qing proposed that “hairstyle and dress” should determine whether one was a Chinese “citizen” or not, posing the question “[I]f place of birth decides one’s citizenship, are all British babies born in China to be regarded as Chinese?” In Chen’s case, it appeared that he was in fact a native of Xiamen, but there were some sixty other Singapore Chinese living there who claimed British protection. There was plenty of scope for disagreement.7
Finally, the terminology issue sometimes caused difficulties. When British representatives thought that the language of Qing communications was derogatory, they objected. Qing officials sometimes blamed these episodes on ignorant scribes or interpreters or claimed that they were simply employing standard usage. However, for the most part they had little choice but to rephrase because otherwise the British simply returned the offending document unanswered.
The British selected the ports opened by the Treaty of Nanjing because they all were existing commercial entrepôts, but results were slow. In Canton overt residual hostility to the British, combined with a resurgence of lawlessness stemming from the general disorder occasioned by the war, made it for the time being virtually impossible for Westerners to establish residences or conduct business within the city. The rose-colored memory of popular victory against the foreigners at Sanyuanli aroused patriotic defiance, while the wartime British occupation of Canton rankled so much that for years public sentiment against them remained at boiling point. The British endlessly lodged formal complaints that China was violating the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing by refusing to let them enter the walled city of Canton. In response the Qing imperial commissioner noted that entrance to the city was not a material term of the treaty, that Europeans and Americans had always conducted business outside the walled city and could continue to do so.
He displayed in fact a firm grasp of the ways in which even a humiliating unequal treaty could be used as a shield with which to protect China’s rights as well as a sword with which to demolish them. Asserting that feelings in Canton against the British were running out of control, the commissioner cited as persuasive evidence the ripping up of official proclamations calling for calm, and the burning down of the prefectural offices on the basis of suspicions that the Qing prefect was fraternizing with the British. He implied, in other words, that the local populace was so aroused that Qing authorities could do little about it even had they wished to. The commissioner requested his British counterparts to restrain their nationals from trying to force an entry and suggested they refrain from further inflaming local opinion by stationing warships close in to the harbor. Threats would only make things worse; only a demonstration of British goodwill and cooperative spirit stood a chance of bringing about calm. To that end Britons should stop brawling with Chinese, and they should not roam the Canton countryside, an activity that in any case contravened their treaty rights. The issue of opening Canton city remained a major bone of contention for several years and reached its height when Cantonese proposed erecting a commemorative arch celebrating resistance to the British, a proposal from which the Qing commissioner loftily dissociated himself, claiming “gentry instigation.”
By 1850 Ningbo, Xiamen, and Fuzhou still had very few European residents, not least because it took some time for all three of these ports, which were much more attuned to the requirements of Southeast Asian trade, to adjust to the demands of Europeans and Americans. But precisely because of the modest Western presence, antiforeign incidents were comparatively rare in these ports.
Only Shanghai came close to meeting British expectations about the commercial potential on the newly opened China coast. Already a leading conduit for commercial exchange as the result of its strategic location where the great Yangzi River empties into the sea, Shanghai’s economy had suffered from wartime trade stoppages, from the collapse of the cotton market, and from a series of famines in its hinterland caused by Yellow River flooding. But after the war Shanghai gained from the postwar obstruction of trade in Canton, for many Cantonese, frustrated by local conditions and attracted by the promise of new wealth, moved there to do business with the foreigners. Within a few years Shanghai became a boom town, and by the end of the century it had become one of the leading commercial ports of the world.
Shanghai offers a particularly good example of the contrast foreigners often experienced between their formal relations with the Qing, on the one hand, and their dealings with ordinary Chinese people, on the other. As was clear from the case of Canton, many Chinese deeply resented the foreigners. Yet a substantial number, with an eye to self-interest, found it possible to overcome their scruples. At least some of the general populace in Shanghai were much less inclined to resist the foreigners than were the Qing authorities. Thus, although Qing officials in Shanghai were not terribly helpful when the first Britons arrived to open up the treaty port and establish a consulate, it was a different story with Shanghai merchants and entrepreneurs. They were absolutely ready to rent premises and furniture to the British, with whom they probably hoped to grab a monopoly along prewar Canton lines, and they were poised to make money in any way they could, including selling tickets to local inhabitants interested in seeing the “white devils eat, drink, write, wash, rest and sleep.”8
None of the foreigners could speak the local dialect, so their contact with ordinary Shanghainese was limited. They depended on interpreters and Chinese middlemen, whom they often imported from Canton or Hong Kong, to help them conduct business and on Chinese servants and local supplies to help them survive. Not everything was rosy, of course; there were plenty of misunderstandings, and pockets of ill feeling certainly survived aplenty.
Shanghai, which for some time remained the only treaty port with a substantial Western population, became a unique example of joint Sino-Western administration. Most conspicuous was the administrative division of the city into three main sections: the International Settlement, dominated by the British but open to all nations; the French Concession; and the Chinese city. Each operated under different administrations and different laws. At first the foreign settlements, located outside the city walls, generally excluded Chinese residents other than domestic servants and others servicing the foreign community, but during the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) countless refugees, rich and poor, flooded into every section of Shanghai. By 1854, within a year of the rebels’ capture of Nanjing, upriver from Shanghai, there were some 8,000 Chinese households in the International Settlement in addition to the 150 foreign ones, and the numbers rose steadily.
The foreign settlements in Shanghai were in effect cities within the city; they were independent municipalities under the joint jurisdiction of the foreign consuls. Among other things this meant that they adjudicated cases involving Chinese living within the settlements; over time it also meant that Chinese fled into the foreign settlements to escape Qing and later republican authorities. Within the settlements, also, Chinese and Western merchants and businessmen soon began to cooperate in joint or mutually dependent ventures.
In Shanghai too began the institution of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, run by Europeans, operated by Europeans and Chinese together, and ultimately answerable to the emperor. In 1853 and 1854, during the Taiping Rebellion, when the Small Sword Society occupied parts of the city, Shanghai’s customshouse had stopped functioning, depriving the Qing government of the lucrative revenues from the booming trade and prompting the resurgence of irregular levies on goods inland. Neither the Qing nor the foreigners stood to gain from such a situation. Efforts on both sides to remedy matters were unsuccessful, threatening the smooth operation of the entire treaty port system. Eventually a compromise was reached, whereby a foreign-run inspectorate of customs was established in 1854 to collect customs duties from the foreign traders and turn them over to the Qing government. The institution became known for its incorruptibility and efficiency and played a significant part in the economic life of the late Qing and early republic.
Another new feature of Shanghai life was the rise of a new class of Chinese known as compradors. These served as the middlemen in foreigners’ dealings with Chinese, often working as managers of foreign firms. In a number of ways they provided an essential link between the old way of doing things and the new. They provided the foreigners with access to traditional Chinese economic institutions from which they might well otherwise have been excluded, such as the Chinese banks, in which compradors often were partners. Some became extremely wealthy and, as the result of their exposure to Western enterprise, in many cases readier than more traditional-minded members of the Chinese elite to invest in new industries, which they were often well equipped to manage as well. Some compradors became powerful players in Shanghai’s increasingly hybrid society.
Compradors derived their influence from their wealth and their cosmopolitanism rather than from such traditional channels as examination success. They differed from traditional merchants in an important way. In the past there had been a symbiotic relationship between the educated elite and the commercial classes despite the theoretical disdain of the Confucian scholar for trade. A scholar might well send one of his sons to engage in commerce as a means of family support while the other sons studied for the examinations; a successful merchant might well try to raise his social status by providing his son with the best education money could buy, in the hope that he would pass the official examinations and become politically powerful. But the compradors were not particularly interested in political power as a means of moving up in the social scale. In their case money alone could do the trick.
In practice, at least within the treaty ports, compradors came to constitute an important part of the local elite, and they often undertook such traditional elite functions as contributing to maintaining order and providing relief to the stricken during crises. But they were really something new, a product of treaty port culture. Although their wealth and expertise were to prove a critical component in China’s recovery from Western and Japanese imperialism, as a class the compradors suffered from the taint of too close a connection with the foreigners.
Under Qing law it was still technically illegal to leave the country permanently. But in practice many Qing officials valued emigration as a safety valve for their heavily populated provinces. From their point of view, it was clearly preferable for impoverished people to leave altogether than that such people should become vagabonds, bandits, or state dependents. Furthermore, emigrants often made good and sent home infusions of money that helped the overburdened local and national economies. So the emigration prohibitions went largely ignored, and at least from 1823 an established “credit ticket” system advanced passage money to those bound for Southeast Asia and beyond.
Right after the First Opium War, a concatenation of circumstances, closely related to one another, brought about the beginning of emigration from China on a much larger scale and over much greater distances than previously. The dislocations caused by the war itself and the continuing disorder of the Canton area; the economic shifts brought on by the expansion of foreign trade; the opening of the treaty ports; the spread of colonialism around the world, combined with the unquenchable thirst of industrializing countries for manpower to extract the raw materials they needed; the dramatic demand for fresh supplies of labor following the abolition of the African slave trade (colonial employers considered Chinese harder-working and less encumbered by the requirements of religious beliefs than Indians); the new involvement of European vessels in conveying emigrants; the relative ease of slipping into Portuguese Macao or British Hong Kong, away from Qing jurisdiction; and the rumors of gold in America and Australia, known in China respectively as the Old Gold Mountain and the New Gold Mountain—all these factors combined to draw Chinese overseas, despite the continued existence of a formal prohibition under Qing law.
Some Chinese emigrants were upwardly mobile people who left home voluntarily in search of opportunity. But others, destitute and simply looking for a way to survive, provided a rich resource for employers in need of cheap labor. The first contracted shipload of Chinese laborers went from Xiamen to the French colony of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, in 1845; it was soon followed by ships full of Chinese bound for the gold mines and sheep farms of Australia, the sugar plantations of Cuba and other European colonies in the Caribbean; the railroads, plantations, and guano fields of Peru and Chile; and the gold mines and railroads of North America. Many more went to work in the European colonies by now distributed all across Southeast Asia.
Chinese emigration was closely connected with the rise of Hong Kong as a major commercial center. Many Chinese moved there in search of new opportunities; many more passed through on their way overseas. By 1844 Hong Kong’s Chinese population had swelled to about nineteen thousand, almost five times its size five years earlier, because many people seized the opportunity to pursue work in the colony. By the 1850s Hong Kong had become a major center for the coolie traffic, which contributed to the colony’s commercial growth by providing work for labor recruiters, shippers, and brokers. In the four years from 1855 to 1859 alone, more than eighty thousand Chinese embarked from Hong Kong for points around the world. More often than not, those who managed to return passed through Hong Kong on their way home.
Some Chinese emigrants were press-ganged or otherwise persuaded to leave under false pretenses, as the following account shows:
We were induced to proceed to Macao by offers of employment abroad at high wages, and through being told that the eight foreign years specified in the contracts were equivalent to only four Chinese years, and that at the termination of the latter period we would be free. We observed also on the signboards of the foreign buildings the words “agencies for the engagement of labourers” and believed that they truthfully described the nature of the establishments, little expecting that having once entered the latter, exit would be denied us; and when on arrival at Havana, we were exposed for sale and subjected to appraisement in a most ruthless manner, it became evident that we were not to be engaged as labourers but to be sold as slaves.
The numbers quickly mounted: from 1847 to 1862 American coolie traders shipped six thousand Chinese to Cuba annually.9 Qing authorities tried to enlist the help of Western consuls to prevent the rising kidnappings of young Chinese men and women for sale overseas, with mixed success. Among emigrant communities around the world, conditions were often appalling, and as frequently they were ill-treated by the local populations in their host countries. Many emigrants intended to get rich and return, although few did so; some remitted funds back either to their families or, in the course of time, to support the massive projects that formed part of China’s recovery effort. As we shall see, by the later nineteenth century the plight of overseas Chinese and the possibility of using them as a resource to fund industrial and other projects were leading issues galvanizing Qing diplomatic activism.
One reason so many Chinese began to emigrate in the mid-nineteenth century was the massive civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864). In part the consequence of the social and economic dislocations brought about by the First Opium War in south China, the uprising demonstrates a remarkable willingness among ordinary Chinese to adopt foreign ideas.
The Taiping movement was led by Hong Xiuquan (1813–1864), a member of the despised Hakka minority who had tried unsuccessfully to pass the civil service examinations. During an illness Hong experienced several visions in which he was called to action against “demons,” first by an old man and later by a middle-aged man who described himself as “elder brother.” When a few years later Hong read some Christian tracts a missionary had given him, he claimed to have found in them the explanation of his visions: the old man was God, the middle-aged man was Jesus Christ, and he, Hong, was Christ’s younger brother. Hong eventually came to believe that the demons he was to extirpate were none other than the ruling Manchus and that he was destined to lead a revolution infused with Christian religious fervor, as modified by his own new, God-given interpretation.
Over the next few years Hong gathered around him a core of devoted followers whom he formed into the Society of God-Worshippers, based in the southwestern province of Guangxi. Although he himself was, for unclear reasons, denied baptism, Hong baptized thousands of people. Most of his converts were Hakka peasants and aboriginal Miao, non-Han whose social position was near the bottom of the impoverished circles they moved in; they had little stake in supporting the status quo. Their numbers were swelled by refugees from the severe famines of the late 1840s and by the ubiquitous bandits, in both cases kindred spirits who similarly had little to lose.
In 1851 Hong and his followers launched an uprising with the goal of overthrowing the Qing and establishing a puritanical, egalitarian community based on Hong’s quasi-Christian beliefs. They called their new society the Heavenly Kingdom of Eternal Peace (Taiping Tianguo). It was to be a specially favored nation under God. The Taiping philosophy of sharing everything equally from a common treasury attracted thousands more adherents from the poorest segments of society. After a series of astonishing military successes the Taiping, by now hundreds of thousands strong, occupied the former Ming capital of Nanjing in 1853. They remained ensconced in their “Heavenly Capital” for eleven years.
Westerners in the treaty ports were at first excited about this apparently Christian group which had attracted so much popular backing, and wondered whether to throw their support behind the rebels. Certainly it was true that the Taiping had been far more successful than the Western missionaries in spreading news of Christianity to the Chinese masses. But Westerners soon came to the conclusion that Hong’s particular brand of Christianity reached beyond mere fundamentalism and veered away from true Christianity altogether.
Many Westerners were attracted to the Taiping more for adventure and profit than for religious reasons; by now there were enough Westerners in China that they no longer acted in concert, as the Canton merchants had usually tried to do before the Opium War. As early as 1844, right after the Opium War, Europeans arms traders had begun plying their wares on the China coast, prompting Qing objections that weapons sales were not included in the provisions of any treaty. During the Taiping Rebellion European and American entrepreneurs vied with one another to sell weapons and powder to the rebels, sailing up the Yangzi to Nanjing for the purpose, despite efforts on the part of Qing and foreign authorities alike to prevent them. The foreigners’ claims that they were trying to stop their nationals from offering arms in China were unconvincing. Before long the beleaguered Qing joined the list of customers. They began buying the latest in foreign ships and weaponry, but these often fell into Taiping hands as the rebels defeated army after army sent after them. Outside Hong Xiuquan’s palace, for instance, were “two handsome brass twelve pounder shell guns, marked Massachusetts 1855, with American oak carriages,” recent models that almost certainly came into the category of spoils of war.10 In other words, the Taiping military leaders were not at all averse to making use of the most up-to-date and lethal technology they could get their hands on.
Gunrunning was not the only way in which foreigners helped the Taiping cause. A sizable number of deserters from Western armies offered their services to the Taiping cause, along with other unreliable hangers-on, left over from the war or newly arrived to seek their fortune. At the official level, all foreign nations in China endeavored to convince both sides of their neutrality, hedging their bets until it became clear who would win in the end. Their principal concern was to protect their trade interests in China, by now estimated to be worth millions in Shanghai alone.
That being so, the mistrust Qing and Taiping authorities each felt for the foreigners was perhaps justified. The Qing were greatly afraid that the foreigners’ purported neutrality concealed secret backing for the rebels, that the Taipings’ Christianity indicated an inclination to adopt foreign values wholesale, and that the Westerners, with their formidable military strength, would eventually form an alliance with the rebels. The Taiping, on the other hand, failed to grasp the decisive advantage Western support might have given them against the faltering Qing, who had barely had time to recover from the First Opium War. They made little effort to enlist foreign aid. In 1853, for example, when the British sent a ship upriver to find out more about the Taiping and to warn them against interfering in any way with foreign trade in China, Taiping leaders astonished and alienated them by sending a communication couched in highly condescending language. It made clear the Taiping position that the subjects of Queen Victoria, although enlightened as to their religious beliefs, owed allegiance to Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King of the Taiping. But the British were hardly likely to retreat from their insistence on the principle of equality between nations, a principle that they had so recently fought a war against China to establish.
French and American ships soon undertook similar exploratory missions. The Americans found the rebels’ uncompromising version of Christianity, which asserted the superiority of the Taiping kingdom to all comers and rested on their special relationship with God and Christ, hopelessly deviant. French overtures to the rebels also foundered after they stiffly reminded their Taiping interlocutors of their obligations under the treaties agreed on with the emperor, for the rebels took the view that anyone who could make an agreement with the chief demon was by definition an enemy.
The Qing’s inability to suppress the rebellion made them open to any fresh means of support. For already by the mid-1850s not only were substantial portions of south and southwest China in the hands of the Taiping, but a second major rebellion, the Nian, was raging in east China in parts of Shandong, Honan, Jiangsu, and Anhui provinces north of the Huai River. Less ideological than the Taiping, the Nian, whose rebellion lasted from 1851 to 1868, nonetheless fought tenaciously enough to pose a threat to Qing control in the region. Meanwhile Muslim rebels were on the march in southwestern Yunnan province, in protest against heavy taxes and over control of the gold and silver mined in the region.
From a cosmological point of view, these multiple outbreaks of rebellion did not bode at all well for the Qing. Traditional belief held that outbreaks of rebellion were an indicator of popular dissatisfaction with the ruler; the Qing could not but be aware that these massive uprisings might well begin to be interpreted as signs of their loss of mandate to rule. Suppression of the rebellions thus was imperative, for it was intimately linked to dynastic survival. At the same time, of course, internal chaos made China all the more vulnerable to external predation.
THE RUSSIANS, THE BRITISH, AND
THE FRENCH, 1856–1860
With the end of the Crimean War in 1856, Russia, Britain, and France all turned their attention back to China. Russia had been following events in China closely and was aware that now might be the moment to strike. During the eighteenth century the Russian empire had expanded eastward into Siberia and was now more eager than ever to expand trade with China and to investigate the possibility of extending its political and commercial influence in the northeastern parts of Manchuria that bordered its own territory. Qing policies excluding Han Chinese settlement in the area—out of a vague intent to keep Manchuria for the Manchus—had left the area sparsely populated. Russia was also anxious to take advantage of any opportunity that would strengthen its position in relation to Britain. While the Qing were distracted from frontier affairs by the Taiping and other uprisings, with many of their Manchurian military forces diverted to the interior, Russian exploratory expeditions pushed southward, and Russian settlement in northeastern Manchuria began to spread. China was in no position to resist Russian demands. A combination of aggression and skillful diplomacy enabled Russia to achieve its aim of effectively taking over control of the region from China, by the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing (1860). This vastly expanded trade, allowed a Russian consular presence in strategic spots in Mongolia and Xinjiang, immunity from Chinese law for Russian nationals, and much broader channels of communication than previously.
At the same time the slow pace of progress in the treaty ports other than Shanghai, together with disillusion with the Taiping, stoked the impatience of the British and other foreigners whose area of concentration was the China coast. Their main goals were the expansion of trade, the installation of ambassadors in Beijing so as to bypass Canton altogether, and the reduction of customs duties. The Westerners were particularly annoyed by the continuing refusal or inability of Qing authorities to bring Canton to heel with regard to the issue of admitting them. China was bound to apply to Britain the provisions for treaty revision inserted into an 1844 treaty with the United States, which Britain, somewhat disingenuously, interpreted as meaning that the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing was due for revision in 1854. But in 1854 Qing officials had evaded renegotiation, not least because their main attention was focused on the state of civil war prevailing in much of the country.
In 1856 the British and French found pretexts to go to war with China again. The British claimed an insult to their flag after Chinese police, alleging piracy, had lowered a British flag on a vessel, owned by a Chinese resident in Hong Kong, that had a British captain and Chinese crew. The French claimed the judicial execution of a missionary in the interior as the ground for opening hostilities. After an initial stalemate marked by a display of Chinese truculence and Western firepower—now better equipped to bombard Canton than fifteen years earlier—followed by a delay while the British dealt with the Indian Mutiny, the Second Opium War began in earnest in late 1857. By the summer of the following year the Anglo-French forces had captured Canton and Tianjin, the port of Beijing, where they negotiated a new treaty. It contained the following provisions: the opening of ten new treaty ports, including four inland along the Yangzi River as far as Hankou (subject to the defeat of the Taiping); the establishment of permanent Western diplomatic establishments in Beijing; permission for foreigners, including missionaries, to travel throughout China, by road or by steamship; the limitation of customs duties to 5 percent and of the likin tax to 2.5 percent ad valorem, and another indemnity.* In addition, although it was still illegal to sell or take opium, the treaty imposed an import duty on the drug and required that it be transported to and sold in the interior only by Chinese.
The clause allowing the establishment of foreign legations in Beijing met with strong opposition in the capital, and after the withdrawal of Western troops from the Dagu forts near Tianjin, the Qing showed little sign of compliance. They reinforced their fortifications and beat off returning Western troops, who nonetheless headed for Beijing. But skirmishing on the way there, combined with unusual brutality shown Western prisoners, prompted the Anglo-French force to burn down the Yuan Ming Yuan, the summer palace on the northwest outskirts of the capital, part of which the Jesuits had constructed for Qianlong not much more than a century earlier. Much of the Yuan Ming Yuan’s contents later found its way into affluent homes in Europe and onto the European art market, as well as into the possession of Chinese entrepreneurs from the south who had helped provision the European war effort.
The burning of the summer palace passed into Chinese folklore as a benchmark of European imperialist atrocity, and it is still invoked to fuel nationalist fervor. In 1860 it led in short order to the Convention of Beijing. This provided for the opening of Tianjin as a treaty port, further indemnity, the cession of Kowloon Peninsula, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong, and the effective legalization of the transportation overseas of Chinese laborers on foreign ships. The age of European imperialism in China was well under way, but its underside was the resurgence of determination among Chinese of many different backgrounds to restore China to a position of national strength. Only then would it be possible to deal on terms of real equality with the Westerners who claimed equality by force of arms.
* Britain took Hong Kong Island under the Treaty of Nanjing; it took Kowloon Peninsula, on the Chinese mainland, in the Convention of Beijing (1860). In 1898 Britain insisted on extending Hong Kong’s boundaries to include the New Territories north of Kowloon, on a ninety-nine-year lease, expiring in 1997.
* Likin was a mercantile tax levied on goods in stock or in transit and sometimes at the place of manufacture. Previously it had varied considerably in different regions.