The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  13 August dawned – the day on which Zhang Xi was supposed to give the British a considered answer to their demands. Regrettably, the barely examined list was still with the secretary to whom Qiying and Yilibu had handed it unread and who, on merely glancing at it, had found it ‘very problematic’ then filed it away somewhere.38 That morning, an errand boy sent to recover the piece of paper discovered the secretary had gone out to visit friends and had not yet come back. As the diplomatic deadline drew dangerously close, not only had the plenipotentiaries failed to agree upon, or even read, the British demands; they had also lost them. Zhang Xi worried that the British would not take it well: they were, after all, expecting to see the imperial commissioners’ official investiture and agreement to their draft treaty. He shared his worries with the officers who were to accompany him to the meeting: ‘The city is in peril’, he told them. ‘Its position is as precarious as a mound of eggs.’ His peers were sanguine about how the British would react: ‘Just talk slowly, and stop worrying.’39

  The British arrived at the temple at midday and immediately asked to see the imperial edict confirming Yilibu and Qiying as plenipotentiaries. Zhang Xi’s excuse was passable: his masters, he explained, had sent it off for the Awe-Inspiring Yijing to inspect, and he had not yet returned it. And when would that be? the British translator asked. ‘Maybe today, maybe tomorrow,’ Zhang Xi vaguely replied. ‘Who can tell?’ The British then wanted to know if Qiying had agreed to their document of demands; Zhang Xi admitted that he had come out without this piece of paper also. The British now lost their collective temper (‘they felt unhappy’, observed Zhang Xi) and accused their interlocutors of insincerity, of ‘cheating them in every way’. They said they would start firing at the city at daybreak unless there was a more satisfactory response, and went back to their ships.40

  ‘The three excellencies were amazed,’ Zhang Xi drily recorded on his return to the city, ‘and had no idea what to do.’ (At this painful audience, one of Zhang Xi’s peers whispered to him what he surely already knew: that Qiying had not listened to much of what he had said the day before.) As the city descended into panic, the negotiators began to squabble. Why had Zhang Xi said the edict was with Yijing, Qiying wanted to know. ‘What,’ an exasperated Zhang Xi responded, ‘would you prefer I said? You gave me no instructions.’ (Qiying gave no reply.) Those present considered their options: to stand and fight, or to read the treaty and negotiate. ‘If I die for my country,’ Yilibu pondered aloud, ‘then a special temple will be consecrated to my memory. You will all be honoured with autumn sacrifices for a thousand years to come.’ One of Zhang Xi’s fellow negotiators answered with a full and frank account of the foreigners’ ferocity: ‘If their demands are not complied with,’ he argued, ‘woe and disaster will come at once.’ Qiying maintained an eloquent silence.41 The emperor’s representatives decided to ask the secretary for the document containing the British demands. The scribe looked blank until Zhang Xi reminded him that they were referring to the piece of paper that he had deemed ‘problematic’ the previous day. Eventually, the document was recovered and after a quick conference, all the main items were accepted.

  Around midnight (with about three hours until the promised assault would begin), Zhang Xi rushed out of the city, and by five in the morning – as the sky paled into dawn – had presented the agreed treaty to the foreigners on board their ship. After breakfast, the British processed back to the temple at which the previous day’s unhappy meeting had taken place. While Zhang Xi waited (his five viscera, he remembered, were burning with sorrow), his colleagues urged him to keep a sense of proportion. After all, the Han Dynasty used to send 5,000 pounds of gold to keep the Mongolians from raiding the north – paying unruly foreigners to keep the peace was nothing new. ‘The loss was small, the thing saved was great . . . You should not feel so badly in your heart.’42 Granville Loch mistook the sorrow on Zhang Xi’s face for disappointment at the appearance of the British. Their shirts and breeches were clean enough but had not known an iron for weeks, Loch regretted; their coats were tired and worn. The Qing party, by contrast, ‘rustled in embroidered silks and flowered muslin of a design and beauty of texture worthy even to deck the forms of our own fair dames.’43 The British were ushered courteously into a spacious, high-ceilinged wooden hall, and were begged to make themselves comfortable in vast ebony chairs around a long, rectangular table. Outside, a handful of policemen – distinguished by scarlet conical hats, each topped with a bright rooster feather – kept an inquisitive crowd at a distance with the help of cow-hide whips.

  Both sides’ accreditations were examined, with particular attention paid by the British to the emperor’s edict investing Qiying and Yilibu as plenipotentiaries. The mystical object was ceremoniously produced, remembered Loch, from ‘a little shabby yellow box badly made and worse painted’. An official ‘carried the roll of yellow silk in both his hands and proceeded – his eyes reverentially fixed upon it – with slow and solemn steps towards the table . . . I was greatly amused watching the anxious and horrified faces of the various Chinese when Mr Morrison touched the commission’. Loch assumed this was down to the intense respect that all Chinese had for the Imperial Word, and to disgust at the idea of such a sacred object being polluted by alien hands.44 His diagnosis was probably some way off the mark. For the edict was almost certainly a forgery, cobbled together in panic the previous evening.45 Major Malcolm, the secretary of the British legation, proudly displayed to the Qing representatives his Royal Patent, inscribed on a square of duck-egg-blue card and embellished by Queen Victoria’s Great Seal of the Realm. Perhaps the closest equivalent that Qiying and Yilibu possessed was the emperor’s scratchy 27 July memorandum, admitting that they could ‘Act as circumstances require’. The Qing unease at seeing the British examine their concoction so closely probably sprang not from a horror of lese-majesty, but rather from fear of their deception being discovered and the British storming out of the negotiating room and back to their howitzers. That evening, after it was all over, Zhang Xi vomited (repeatedly) with sunstroke, and perhaps stress.

  But once a skeleton treaty had been agreed that day in the temple’s grounds, pleasantness prevailed. The most senior Chinese officer present at the conference on 14 August ‘laughingly remarked that the conditions were hard, but, after all, were only what they would have demanded under similar circumstances . . . a war between nations might be likened to a game of chance, in which the loser must pay the winner.’46 On 19 August, the plenipotentiaries at last encountered each other in person; in almost three years of violence, the British had only had two meetings with an imperial official of any decisive rank (both between Charles Elliot and Qishan). The band played, the drums beat, the cannon saluted, Zhang Xi’s hand was shaken many times, as Yilibu and Qiying – clumsy in thick Manchu boots more suited to striding over the frozen wastelands of the north than to hopping onto a British steamer in the dog days of a south-eastern summer – boarded Pottinger’s ship (the messes brightened with ‘articles of choice taste [the men] had picked up on their perambulations’), and talked about nothing very much at all. Qiying, Loch guessed, thought it beneath him to show too much interest; Yilibu was unwell, as usual; and Niu Jian was apparently too busy enjoying the cherry brandy to produce anything but the occasional ‘smack of satisfaction’. After bowing deeply to a portrait of Queen Victoria, they left (Loch recalled) ‘highly pleased at their reception.’47 A return visit was paid by the British to the Imperial Commissioners’ apartments on 24 August. Beneath a canopy of decorated lanterns and on floors carpeted with crimson drugget, tables groaned with food, speeches were made, hurdy-gurdies clattered. In the shade of a willow tree to one side of the hall, two mandarins (under instructions from Qiying) tried to engage John Morrison in an intimate chat away from the clamour of penny-trumpets and drums, in the hope of renegotiating one of the treaty’s clauses. Sharply responding that this was no place to talk official business, Morrison stalked off.48

  On 26 Au
gust, Pottinger returned – in a vast sedan chair with green stripes – for another banquet, in which ‘numerous patties of minced meat, pork, arrow root, vermicelli soup, with meat in it, pig’s ear soup, and other strange dishes, were served in succession . . . as a coup de grace, Ke-ying insisted upon Sir Henry opening his mouth while he with great dexterity shot into it several immense sugar-plums. I shall never forget Sir Henry’s face of determined resignation after he found remonstrances were of no avail; nor the figure of Ke-ying, as he stood planted before him, in the attitude of a short-sighted old lady threading a needle, poising the bonne bouche between his finger and thumb preparatory to his successful throw.’49 Only after this force-feeding was completed did the Qing – hoping, perhaps, that the British had been stuffed to the point of insensibility – start to discuss the treaty. The basic demands were quickly cleared: twenty-one million dollars’ indemnity, the opening of five ports to trade, British right of residence and the setting of tariffs there, the abolition of the Hong monopoly. Yet again ignoring Daoguang’s orders (this time to take care ‘to make such arrangements as shall cut off for ever all causes of war, and leave nothing incomplete or liable to doubt’), Qiying and Yilibu wanted to finish the business as quickly as possible.50 ‘The Imperial commissioners’, Pottinger observed, ‘declared their readiness to sign and seal the Treaty at once, and without further explanation.’51 ‘None of the critical examination into phrases or expressions’, Loch recalled, ‘so keenly canvassed and suspiciously viewed by European diplomatists, occupied a moment of their attention. All their anxiety, which was too powerful to be concealed, was centred upon the one main object – our immediate departure’.52

  On this occasion, Pottinger finally raised the question of the ostensible cause of the war: opium. Both Qiying and Yilibu refused point-blank to have the issue written in any official way into the treaty; though they agreed to informal discussion. Why, they wanted to know, did Great Britain so unfairly allow the opium poppy to be cultivated in India, then imported into China? China’s opium problem, Pottinger insisted, had nothing to do with Britain, and everything to do with Chinese weakness for the drug. ‘If your people are virtuous, they will desist from the evil practice; and if your officers are incorruptible, and obey their orders, no opium can enter your country. The discouragement of the growth of the poppy in our territories rests principally with you’. He now had another smooth suggestion. ‘Would it not, therefore, be better at once to legalise its importation, and . . . thereby greatly limit the facilities which now exist for smuggling?’ The emperor, Qiying and Yilibu insisted, would never hear of it.53

  As Pottinger finally came away from this five-hour meeting, he remembered that ‘Qiying cordially embraced me in his arms, according to the Tartar usage, and desired one of the gentlemen interpreters to explain to me that he and his colleagues were satisfied that I was a good and just man. This expression their Excellencies significantly confirmed by pointing to their breasts, and then to Heaven. They stood till I was mounted and rode away.’54

  Meanwhile, Qiying concentrated on spinning the outcome of the negotiations to the emperor. ‘Although the demands of the foreigners are indeed rapacious, yet they are little more than a desire for ports and for the privilege of trade. There are no dark schemes in them’, he comforted Daoguang, while editing out key stipulations, such as the abolition of the Hong monopoly.55 They had become ‘very polite and obedient.’56 ‘How depressed and discontented I was to read your memorial’, the emperor wrote back. ‘I can only hate myself and feel ashamed that things have reached this point.’57 But he might as well have saved his vermilion ink for things he could actually do something about. Weary with it all, over the last days of August, he steadily capitulated to the British demands. His first offer to magnanimously ‘lend’ Hong Kong lapsed into a full cession of the island; he stopped resisting the idea of a war indemnity, only querying how the money was to be raised.58 Daoguang’s final discontented queries reached Nanjing on 7 September – ten days after Qiying, Yilibu and Niu Jian had signed and sealed the treaty in red lead paint and with a great agate stamp drawn from a yellow silk box.

  As 29 August – the day on which the treaty was to be signed – dawned, relations between the two sides were not yet so cordial for every drop of diplomatic mistrust to evaporate. Four copies of the treaty were prepared, in Chinese and English, bound with ribbon to prevent (as Loch explained) any of the sheets being removed by ‘these slippery gentlemen to blind the eyes of their Imperial master.’59 The emperor’s men paled when the British began a twenty-one-gun salute to honour the Queen’s birthday; Qiying was convinced that the British planned to take him prisoner.60

  Yilibu was almost too ill to attend the treaty’s grand closing ceremonies. At the meeting on 26 August, he had accepted a British offer of medicine to treat his ringworm and dispatched Zhang Xi to pick up the prescription. Although Zhang Xi hinted darkly that the medicine itself had made his master ill, the British told a different story: that Zhang Xi (‘a notorious drunkard’, alleged Loch) drank far too much in the British ship’s gunroom, lost the label that went with the medicine, and told Yilibu to swallow at a gulp three days’ supply. (‘The foreigners’, Zhang Xi’s biographer confusingly counters, ‘especially esteemed his great capacity for drinking.’61) As a result, Yilibu had to be carried to and from Pottinger’s ship, the Cornwallis, and spent the whole ceremony reclined on a sofa. With remarkable civility, he thanked the doctor in person for the dose, ‘and trusted that the cure would be as certain as the remedy was violent.’62

  In sum, though, Loch concluded that ‘It was a glorious spectacle for all who saw it . . . under the walls of their ancient capital, in the cabin of a British 74, the first treaty China was ever forced to make was signed by three of her highest nobles under England’s flag.’63 The treaty, Zhang Xi remarked, would ‘serve as an eternal document of confidence and trust . . . After the seals had been stamped, all felt very happy.’64 The gun salutes must have been loud enough to drown out the cries of an infuriated Qing general inside the city who, on hearing that the peace negotiations had been successfully concluded, screamed that Niu Jian was an ‘instigator of calamity’ – his beard is said to have stood on end with fury.65 After all this time, expenditure and slaughter, everything the British had wanted was signed away in a handful of meetings.

  As the British ships weighed anchor and drifted back south through early October, Qiying was jubilant: ‘Everything difficult can become easy . . . To rescue thousands and millions of lives in Jiangsu and Zhejiang is a great saving . . . our offspring must be prosperous and great in the future.’ ‘The root of disaster has probably been planted, and the poison will flow ceaselessly’, Yilibu worried.66 ‘You have let me down, and the empire’, sulked Daoguang at the two of them when a copy of the actual treaty reached him on 6 September – he relieved his feelings by arresting Niu Jian, for failing to strengthen defences along the Yangtze in time.67 Zhang Xi simply rejoiced to return home ‘with his body still intact . . . How enjoyable and fortunate this is!’68

  Chapter Fifteen

  PEACE AND WAR

  What a ‘great and glorious thing’ the China war had been, letters to the editor of The Times reflected as 1842 drew to an end and the news from Nanjing sailed in over the Channel: ‘Perhaps no circumstance in the history of Great Britain ever gave such universal satisfaction to all classes of society in this country.’1 And although, of course, it added ‘increased lustre . . . to the glory of the British empire’, it was (even a French newspaper concurred) ‘equally beneficial to the subjects and interests of both England and China’, opening ‘a new continent to the increasing activity of all Europeans’.2 ‘Was not the fire of London in 1666 a good?’ The Times concluded rhetorically. ‘Did it not lead to immense improvement? . . . The answer must be in the affirmative.’3 The lower-brow pictorial press delighted itself with triumphantly scornful images: of the Nemesis effortlessly smashing Chinese ships into fireballs, of fat, bored Chinese soldie
rs lolling by ancient cannon mounted on tree-stumps. ‘A large family of the human race,’ exulted the Illustrated London News, ‘which for centuries has been isolated from the rest, is now about to enter with them into mutual intercourse. Vast hordes of populations, breaking through the ignorance and superstition which has for ages enveloped them, will now come out into the open day, and enjoy the freedom of a more expanded civilization, and enter upon prospects immeasurably grander.’4