Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  BY THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, China was running out of time to make changes in its approach to the world. In 1793, just at the outset of the wars that would engulf Europe over the next twenty years, the British government had sent its first formal representative to China to ask for trade and diplomatic relations. George Macartney was an Irishman who had been ennobled by the British after serving in the Caribbean and India (he was later governor in South Africa), and he and his adjutants were admitted to the imperial summer residence in Rehe on the assumption that they were there to present tribute on the occasion of the emperor’s eightieth birthday. Qianlong and his advisers were curious about the newcomers and allowed them to circumvent regular Court ritual and be admitted to an audience with the emperor himself. But the mission misfired badly when Lord Macartney tried to impress the Court by showing off his astronomical instruments—impudent, thought the Chinese. It turned toward disaster when the British tried to obtain further concessions on ritual, including an unprecedented second meeting with the emperor himself. This was all before the delegation had got to the point of presenting their proposals to the Chinese. When Maccartney asked Qing officials for a general reduction in trade restrictions as well as a permanent British presence both in Beijing and at a depot along the coast, Qianlong’s patience had run out. The group was returned home empty-handed.

  The Macartney mission was a portent of things to come. In 1816, when the Napoleonic Wars were over, the British envoys returned. A new embassy headed by Lord Amherst in 1816 was even more of a fiasco than the previous one, but led to some concern among the advisers of the Jiaqing emperor about Britain’s intentions in South China. They worried about unfettered commerce involving foreigners spreading from the coast to the interior. They also worried about foreign missionaries coming to China in increasing numbers. By the time of the Jiaqing emperor’s death in 1820, they had become concerned about possible British attacks along the coast. One reason for the immediate concern with security was that the British-American War of 1812 had spilled over to Chinese waters with the British boarding US vessels off the Chinese coast. The emperor observed that “when two small countries have petty quarrels overseas, the Celestial Empire is not concerned with them.” But if they brought their wars to China, “then not only shall we destroy their warships, but we shall also suspend their trade.”5

  In spite of increased concerns about the links between foreign trade and foreign power in the early nineteenth century, China wanted to keep some form of trading system in place. It was simply too profitable to give up on. In 1818 the Jiaqing emperor had decreed that “to the barbarians who obey our regulations, we offer kindness; to those who violate our regulations, we demonstrate our power. . . . We should not venture to start a war. [But] nor should we show cowardice which will encourage them to act lawlessly.”6 Those who advised his successor, Daoguang, followed the same strategy. But while commerce increased in the 1820s and 1830s, the Chinese state did not develop a foreign service to deal with the new circumstances, and the old institutions, the Huitong siyiguan or Common Residence for Tributary Envoys, superintended by a Board of Rites senior secretary, and the Lifanyuan or Court of Colonial Affairs, a special agency under the Grand Council, were not up to the task. As the Court most needed it, access to accurate intelligence on foreign powers became worse, if anything, because of the constant factional struggles during the Daoguang reign. At the same time, taking a tough line on all things foreign became a way of gaining influence with a narrow-minded emperor, especially since many advisers were increasingly concerned with certain products the foreigners were importing into China.

  Opium was a primary concern to Daoguang and his advisers. Different forms of narcotic drugs had been consumed in China, as elsewhere, from time immemorial, and from the early Ming period opium, mainly arriving from Southeast Asia as trade or tribute, had become the drug of choice for much of the elite as a calmative or a painkiller. As use of the drug grew in the early nineteenth century—probably resulting from a combination of availability, fashion, and affluence—the authorities became increasingly concerned with its effects. Officials charged that drug users became lazy and effeminate and claimed that the spread of opium was a threat to the well-being of the state. The Jiaqing emperor complained in 1813 that “before only city rascals had opium and smoked it in private. But today, attendants, guards and officials, they all take it. This is truly sickening.”7

  By the latter half of the 1810s, Beijing began looking for more effective methods for upholding the emperor’s 1796 total ban on opium import.8 But the imperial administration’s new concerns about the effects of opium came just as smuggling of the drug was becoming central to the British East India Company’s China strategy. After almost two generations of a negative trade balance with China, the company had finally chanced upon a product that was not only popular there but also widely available from British India. For Britain, the China trade had suddenly turned both profitable and important in size. India had been a colonial enterprise whose cost-effectiveness many in Britain doubted, but now it began generating income through a government monopoly on opium production. Meanwhile, private investors profited from selling the drug in China, especially after the EIC’s monopoly on trade was abolished in 1833. In the 1820s, the import of opium more than tripled. Beijing noted that large amounts of silver were flowing out of China as payment for opium and feared that inflation and state impoverishment would result.

  Daoguang, who had taken over in 1820 after his father had been electrically discharged, believed strongly in opium prohibition, possibly because he had experimented with it and other drugs during his younger years. By his second decade in power, his war on drugs was becoming central to the emperor’s rather indeterminate policies against decay, corruption, and disloyalty. While a few of his advisers proposed legalization—declare victory in the struggle against drugs and then tax importers, producers, and consumers—the emperor and the majority at Court would have nothing of it. They were afraid that opium import was part of a foreign plan to weaken China and dominate it. Like Christianity, drugs helped move people’s attention from where it properly belonged: on service to the Qing state and loyalty to the emperor and his representatives.

  After years of hesitation on the opium question, Daoguang decided to strike at the point of entry. In 1838 he sent an imperial commissioner to Guangzhou with vague orders to eliminate opium smuggling. But in the man they chose the Court may have got more than they bargained for: Lin Zexu, the former governor-general of Hunan and Hubei and one of China’s top officials, had worried deeply about the impact of opium in the territories he had administered. When he arrived at Guangzhou in March 1839, Lin immediately began rolling up the domestic part of the operation by arresting 1,700 known Chinese opium smugglers. He then attempted to get the foreigners, mostly British and Americans, to trade their vast stores of drugs for tea at a fixed price. When they refused, Lin moved his troops into the Western enclave, confiscated all the opium he could find, and destroyed it outside the city walls. More than 1,200 tons were mixed with lime and salt and thrown into the Pearl river. Lin also demanded that foreigners who had injured or killed Chinese police during the upheaval be handed over and that all foreigners sign a promise never to smuggle opium again. The British authorities refused and ordered all foreign merchants to leave Guangzhou. They hoped that an embargo would hurt the Chinese more than it would hurt their own empire.

  Lin was in no mood to cave in to an embargo, and neither was the Court in Beijing. The commissioner tried to appeal to reason by sending a letter to Queen Victoria. “Suppose the subject of another country were to come to England to trade,” Lin wrote. “He would certainly be required to comply with the laws of England, then how much more does this apply to us of the celestial empire! Now it is a fixed statute of this empire, that any native Chinese who sells opium is punishable with death. . . . Pause and reflect for a moment: if you foreigners did not bring the opium hither, where should our Chi
nese people get it to resell?”9 The British responded by changing the subject. For them, the conflict could not be presented as centering on the undignified subject of drug smuggling. It was, as the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston put it, about the country’s honor, trade access, and, ultimately, which empire’s rules should reign supreme.

  The Sino-British war, often called the Opium War, broke out in March 1839, not because of Chinese attacks on foreign shipping, but because the Qing authorities attempted to protect vessels from abroad that were willing to break the British embargo. When Commissioner Lin evicted merchants who obeyed the embargo from Guangzhou, they found refuge in the Portuguese-held port of Macao at the mouth of the Pearl river. But the authorities there dared not shelter them for long, and most of the merchants and their families ended up on the nearby island of Xianggang, which the foreigners called Hong Kong. The merchants were furious about what seemed to be a financially disastrous strategy by the British government and demanded that strict measures be taken against those who continued to trade with the Chinese. In November 1839 British warships attempted to stop one of their own barks called The Royal Saxon (no less), which was carrying rice from Java to Guangzhou on the first leg of its return journey after taking convicts to Australia. The Chinese navy moved in to protect the ship and the British opened fire, sinking four Chinese vessels. It was the grim beginning of a conflict that was to change China’s foreign affairs forever.

  Neither China nor Britain wanted full-scale war. But London was convinced it needed to protect British principles and interests, and Beijing was certain that Britain had to be contained. The British government, under attack from the opposition in the House of Commons, needed to come up with a response that supported free trade and protected commerce without being seen as a direct supporter of the opium business. Palmerston made military enforcement of the embargo the centerpiece of his policy. He and his colleagues were convinced that Britain was now a global power strong enough to impose progress on backward peoples. With naval bases in Aden, Singapore, India, and Sri Lanka, the British could send their warships into East Asia and have them supplied and re-equipped on the way. While uncertain about the prospects of engaging the imperial armies on land, Palmerston had no doubt about the superiority of the British fleet, even when fighting far away and without support on shore.

  The negotiations that went on intermittently in early 1840 proved to be a dialogue of the deaf. When they failed, the British in the summer laid siege to Guangzhou and occupied key cities in the coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, heading north. Within twelve months, the foreign ships controlled the mouth of the Yangzi river and the southern entrance to the Grand Canal, as well as several small towns in the delta, among them what was to become Shanghai. Fighting in central China grew fiercer as Emperor Daoguang, fearing for the safety of his capital, threw in the Qing’s best Manchu troops. But they could not prevent the British from using their fleet to take control of the economic lifelines at the core of the empire, while the chaos in the south increased by the day. In 1842 the emperor sued for peace, mostly out of dread for the domestic consequences of further war, including his dynasty’s own survival.

  The Qing empire lost a war for the first time because of its opponent’s superior naval firepower, maneuverability, and organization. Chinese troops could hold their own in some engagements on land, in part because of their numerical superiority. But shallow-draught British iron steamers like the Nemesis, with accurate artillery, crushed all resistance on sea and on shore. The main Qing troops fought bravely and, mostly, with great discipline. Local forces, however, were less inclined to fight for a regime they felt was in trouble.10 The technological superiority of the British fleet was obvious. And it was a form of warfare the Chinese had never seen before. But in spite of their obvious fighting abilities, most Qing observers thought of the British ships more as pirate vessels or, as we might say today, terrorists, than as an alternative to imperial rule. They were powerful, the Court believed, but unlikely to stay for long.

  At least in the short run, Daoguang’s Court was right about the future of the British fleet in Chinese waters. Britain had never intended to conquer large parts of China, and the Whig government in London was happy to accept peace as soon as Beijing had backed down on the principles that had precipitated the war in the first place. Britain and China signed the Treaty of Nanjing in August 1842. According to its terms, the Qing accepted opening Guangzhou and four other ports north to Shanghai for direct trade between foreigners and Chinese. The island of Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in perpetuity, and China agreed to pay 21 million silver dollars in reparations to the British merchants who had been driven out of Guangzhou. A treaty signed the following year gave Britain full extraterritoriality—that is, full exemption from local laws—for all its subjects in China.

  These treaties with Britain presented the Qing with a chance to regroup and rethink its approach both to imperial defense and to its own population. Many officials in the north and in the capital, who had not yet witnessed British warfare, preferred to close their eyes to the implications of what had happened. That was a luxury unavailable to people in the south, whether they supported the Qing or its increasing number of enemies.

  EIGHTEEN FORTY-TWO WAS NOT ONLY THE FIRST TIME in 200 years that a Chinese regime had lost a war, it was also the first time for more than 150 years that south China had seen major warfare. Among a population that was socially and ethnically mixed, and where a residue of resistance to Qing legitimacy remained, trouble soon broke out. Parts of south China, particularly the edges of Guangdong province and Guangxi, had something of a frontier feel to them—a rough-and-tumble society with many groups and lots of conflict, rivalries, and resentments. The emperor had always been far away. Now, in the wake of the Opium War, he was not only distant but defeated. And stories, images, and rumors about the overwhelming might of the foreigners and the flaws of the empire abounded.

  The changing attitudes among people in south China were to have a particular impact on the fate of the empire. But the first Qing defeat had consequences all over the country. Officials and intellectuals began questioning their belief in the Qing as authoritative and awe-inspiring. From the very first moment when it became clear to those in the know that the empire was losing the war against the foreigners—in spite of Beijing’s very sophisticated and continuous public relations campaign to deny any losses at all—many Chinese took a step away from the Qing project. When losing, the Manchus were suddenly remembered to be a people apart who had usurped the Chinese throne. In many parts of the country, stories spread about how ordinary people had resisted the British, while the Manchus had fled (which is about the exact opposite of what foreign sources tell us happened). As they went from one loss to another during the war, the Manchus became the scapegoats for the decline of the empire they had put together, while many Chinese suddenly discovered that they disagreed with most things the Qing had ever attempted to do.

  After the 1842 defeat, Chinese cities had to deal with an increasing foreign presence. Some members of the elite who came into contact with Westerners believed that their sheer presence was shameful and humiliating. Lin Changyi, a Fuzhou scholar and official—and a clansman of Commissioner Lin of Opium War fame—found himself living across from the British representatives in his home town in the late 1840s. He wrote in his diary:

  There is a pavilion to the northeast of my study. It faces the Jicui Temple on the Back Rock Hill which is now the hiding place of a flock of hungry eagles. They have built their nests and reside in them since. Whenever I rest my eyes upon the spot, the sight of it disgusts and embitters me. My first impulse is to snatch my strongbow, and shoot a deadly arrow at them. But, alas. My dart will not be fatal, and I relinquish my purpose in despair. To console myself I have sketched a painting to which I have given the name Shoot the Eagles and Chase the Wolves. Hence I named my study the Pavilion of Eagle Shooting.11

  The display of British power along t
he Chinese coast gave rise not only to a will to resist. It also created a sudden blossoming of interest in the West. Drawing on firsthand information from participants on both sides in the war, a number of Chinese publications from the 1840s dealt with Europe more deeply than ever before. In 1844, Wei Yuan, who had worked closely with Commissioner Lin Zexu in Guangzhou, published some of Lin’s materials on the foreigners in the book Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms. (Lin himself had little use for them in the Xinjiang exile into which the Qing sent him after 1842 as punishment for his supposed failures in getting the war started.) Wei also became one of the first Chinese to urge the empire to equip itself with modern Western military technology to defend its coast. In the 1850s, the first translations of scientific texts began to appear, mostly in Shanghai and Hong Kong, often published by missionaries and their collaborators.

  While the impact of missionaries on China’s relations with and knowledge of the West had always been great, the number of Christian converts had been small. As the Qing perceived a rising threat from foreigners in the early 1800s, it attempted to crack down on missionary activities. But their efforts were largely in vain. The Protestant religious awakenings in Britain and the United States in the 1820s and 1830s, combined with the increase in trade, meant that many Christian missionaries were able to operate on the edges of the empire. The first complete Bible in Chinese was published in British India in 1822, and other versions appeared over the next thirty years. While the number of converts remained tiny, even after missionary activities expanded in the wake of the Opium War, it was large enough to irritate Chinese officials. With some reason one mandarin remarked that “most of these ignorant and deluded people attend these chapels out of necessity. They were driven to it by poverty and the need to relieve their distress.”12