The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  In 1845, a harmless wax effigy of the fearsome Lin Zexu was installed in Madame Tussaud’s. Six years later, other Chinese relics – including an entire war junk – were dragged back to England for the curious public to gasp at in the Great Exhibition. In a surely choreographed stunt, at the Exhibition’s opening ceremony a Chinese man – in full mandarin dress – charged out of the crowd and kowtowed to the Queen. One of the visitors to Crystal Palace, Charles Dickens, took the opportunity to sneer at the comic fragility of China (this ‘glory of yellow jaundice’), comparing ‘the greatness of English results’ with ‘the extraordinary littleness of the Chinese . . . Consider the materials employed at the great Teacup Works of Kiang-tiht-Chin (or Tight-Chin) . . . the laboriously carved ivory balls of the flowery Empire, ball within ball and circle within circle, which have made no advance and been of no earthly use for thousands of years.’ The war junk on display struck him as a ‘ridiculous abortion’, a ‘floating toyshop’, a symbol of ‘the waste and desert of time’ represented by millennia of Chinese civilization.5

  Chinese artillery men.

  Despite the ambivalence that the conflict had generated before and during the Opium War, the fact of victory convinced many that Britain had been right: that the war had performed a necessary and relatively bloodless service to world civilization by opening China. And once expectations (of opportunities for trade, conversion and travel) had been inflated by the Treaty of Nanjing, merchants, missionaries and diplomats set about manoeuvring for yet more concessions and advantages – and if necessary, for a second war to achieve them. For others, though, the war remained an embarrassment, generating guilty repentance. The very term ‘Opium War’ – satirically coined through the debates of early 1840 to draw attention to the ‘misdeeds’ in China of the ‘disgraceful’ Whig government – expressed this bad conscience. To Victorian Britain – a nation that prided itself on its sense of Christian superiority over the non-Europeans that it conquered – the name brought discomfort. The British, it announced, had fought a war to push an addictive, illegal narcotic on the Chinese population. It was, one strand of opinion held, ‘the most disgraceful war in our history . . . we lost about 69 men, and killed between 20,000 and 25,000 Chinese. There is no honour to be gained in a war like that.’6 ‘No man’, a speech-maker declared in 1858, ‘with a spark of morality in his composition . . . has dared to justify that war.’7 During the Second World War, both the Nazis and the Japanese government would try to discredit the Allies by reminding their subject populations (including Chinese civilians, whom Japanese soldiers killed in their millions between 1937 and 1945) of Britain’s past aggression against China.8

  But war guilt can also have the opposite effect, leading to ever more militant acts of self-justification. Once blood has been spilt in dubious circumstances, those involved often try to brazen it out: first, through blaming the injured party for forcing them to act thus; and second, through affirming the validity of their violence by persisting with it. Through the nineteenth century, this pattern of response seems to have governed the behaviour of many of the most influential opinion-makers on China in countries like Britain – for the most part traders, diplomats, missionaries; later on, journalists and scholars. These groups rejected the idea of empathizing with the Chinese empire, publicizing instead the insufferable sins of the Chinese that had necessitated the first war (their pride, their xenophobia, their resistance to change, their heathen cruelty and immorality), all of which could only be subdued by yet more punitive violence.

  As sinology became an academic discipline in the course of the nineteenth century, the West’s earliest scholars of China – men, one would imagine, who felt a particular sympathy for Chinese culture – sprang mainly from the impatient ranks of those who believed that China needed to be ‘opened’ by the West. Thomas Wade, first Professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge, had been chief negotiator at the close of the second Opium War. He had complained furiously to the head of the Qing government when he discovered that the characters for ‘Great Britain’ were insufficiently elevated in a Beijing newspaper, and in the early 1890s barged into a debate at the Cambridge Union to spend an hour rebutting a speaker who had suggested that the first Anglo-Chinese War had been anything to do with opium.9 When, consequently, some Chinese politicians and civilians responded to Britain’s strident ‘civilizing’ overtures with growing resentment, the British merely felt all their allegations of Chinese xenophobia had been confirmed, and seized upon this hostility as a rationale for further war.

  If we were to pick just one British individual to illustrate how the expectations, assumptions and bad feeling begun by the first Opium War built up to later conflicts, we should probably settle on Harry Parkes: outstanding sinophone, bullying sinophobe and architect of the second Anglo-Chinese war of 1856–60 – one of the men, his authorized biographer summarized, ‘who made the Indian Empire and planted the colonies of England over the face of the globe.’10

  Harry Parkes makes his first appearance (as a slight fourteen-year-old boy with blonde hair and bright blue eyes) in Sino-Western relations in August 1842, at the negotiations for the Treaty of Nanjing. Parkes had been abandoned to the China trade young. Orphaned at five, he had begun his education conventionally enough, but a twist of fate – a cousin had married Karl Gützlaff – gave his older sisters the idea of dispatching him to China in 1841, at the age of thirteen. On reaching Macao on 8 October, he was promptly apprenticed to John Morrison, one of the most senior British translators. ‘We are sadly in want of interpreters’, observed Morrison, who would die of overwork two years later, just as his father Robert (the first Protestant missionary to China) had done before him in 1834, ‘and the moment he can speak a little Chinese we shall be right glad to have his services.’11

  The following May, Morrison headed for the south-east to help with the negotiations at Nanjing, and took his apprentice with him. It must have been a fine adventure for a high-spirited boy: extracting oxen from local farmers, seizing Chinese junks and fast-talking his way onto Pottinger’s ship to attend the final ceremony (where he gained a taste for shark’s fin soup). The closing engagements of this long, strange war catapulted Harry – son of a Wolverhampton ironmaster – into intimate contact with Britain’s colonial elite. Pottinger quickly took a shine to him, inviting him to drop into dinner ‘just whenever he pleased’. ‘He is my boy and must come’, the plenipotentiary laughed when someone objected to someone so junior being present at key diplomatic encounters.12

  After two more years’ apprenticeship in east and south China, the sixteen-year-old Harry was deemed competent for his first job: interpreter to the British consuls at the new treaty ports in Fujian. For years, he swaggered about these places defending British dignity in tasselled, braided, violet-cushioned sedan chairs of blue silk, all the while denouncing the natives (including, no doubt, the carriers who transported him in his silken thrones) as ‘a most obstreperous race’.13 He was devastated to discover, returning briefly to England in 1850, that he was expected to heave his belongings about with ‘no coolies to help’. By the eve of the outbreak of the second Opium War in 1856, his time in China had given him an excellent knowledge of the Chinese language (and also Tibetan and Manchu), but minimal sympathy for the Chinese themselves. He had ‘taken their measure and knew precisely how and where to plant the blow when blows were needed . . . The only way to gain respect in China is to command it.’14

  While Parkes made his way, fourteen years passed: fourteen eventful but not particularly happy years for relations between the Qing empire and the foreign traders on its coasts. In Hong Kong, brick and stone warehouses replaced the wooden shacks that lined the northern shorefront; opium poured into the new storage space. By January 1842 – even though the China trade had been hit by the interruption of the war – the place bustled with facilities: with roads, barracks, hospitals, hotels, tailors, brothels, cookshops, opium dens, banqueting houses, a newspaper, a casino with a damp Venetian facad
e, theatres and a performing orang-utan called Gertrude, on daily display to the public between midday and one o’clock, ‘taking her dinner, sitting on a chair at a table, using spoons, knives and forks, wiping her mouth with a towel [. . .] she will open a bottle of wine and drink to the health of the spectators, she will after smoke a cigar’.15

  The trading community in Shanghai developed quickly too. Barely two months after the cherry brandy had been drunk over the Treaty of Nanjing, the new British consul had picked a site for a foreign concession amid the swamps surrounding the old Chinese town, to contain eleven traders’ houses, two Protestant missions and a Union Jack. To general rejoicing, the concession’s first sewer was laid down in 1852, by which point the settlement had swollen to 200 commercial ventures: banks, builders, publishers, steamship agents, watchmakers and shopkeepers alongside, naturally, opium trading houses. Shanghailanders were devoted to living well. A typical nineteenth-century dinner, a manual entitled Shanghai Hygiene: Or, Hints for the Preservation of Health in China disapprovingly described, began ‘with rich soup, and a glass of sherry; then one or two side dishes with champagne; then some beef, mutton, or fowls and bacon, with more champagne, or beer; then rice and curry and ham; afterwards game; then pudding, pastry, jelly, custard, or blancmange, and more champagne; then cheese and salad, and bread and butter, and a glass of port wine; then in many cases, oranges, figs, raisins, and walnuts . . . with two or three glasses of claret or some other wine.’ A moderate, health-preserving breakfast, advised the author, should consist merely of ‘a mutton chop, fresh eggs, curry and bread-and-butter, with coffee or tea, or claret and water.’16

  But beyond the dining table, things were going a little less well for those expecting an expansion of trade after 1842. The Treaty of Nanjing had promised much but achieved little. Manchester industrialists fretted that the Chinese seemed uninterested in buying the pianos and knives and forks that British merchants shipped to Hong Kong for the China market. As a commercial centre, the island was still seen as a poor second-best to Canton, the old foreign-trade centre of the empire. And although the Treaty of Nanjing had supposedly authorized foreigners to live in the city, relations between the British and Cantonese remained difficult.

  The cause of the trouble lay in one of the Opium War’s many failures of communication. Despite the precautions that Pottinger had taken to avoid diplomatic trickery over the final Treaty – binding the documents together with ribbons to prevent light-fingered mandarins from pulling out pages they suspected their emperor might find objectionable – a discrepancy between the Chinese and English versions of the agreement somehow remained. Article II in the English version promised permanent residency to the British and their families in the new treaty ports; the Chinese version allowed foreigners into the cities only ‘temporarily’ – for the duration of the trading season.17 Over the following decade and a half, this slip would sour into a casus belli.

  Canton’s aversion to letting the British in was understandable. The city’s half-million population had relatively little enthusiasm for welcoming the same group of foreigners whose guns had held them to a humiliating ransom across the final, sultry week of May 1841; the same group of foreigners who had soon after embarked on a spree of rape and grave-robbery in the surrounding countryside. Treaty or no treaty, they did not want to live among the British – it was enough to have a few hundred of them squeezed into the factory space to the south of the city. The emperor’s men, meanwhile, did not dare force the issue. Since 1842, any official suspected of secret negotiations with the British feared for his personal safety. ‘The moment the entry question is raised,’ the imperial commissioner to Canton wrote in 1849, ‘popular anger soars to the point of wanting to eat the Britons’ flesh and sleep on their skin. Persuasion is useless.’18 If the government buckled to British demands, civil war would result.

  In many parts of south China, civil war was already in progress, with ethnic minorities fighting the opening engagements of the Taiping Rebellion – the fifteen-year revolt that would swallow up much of east China, leave tens of millions dead and almost end the Qing dynasty. The explosion of the Taipings was bound up with the growth of the Western presence in China. On the one hand, their ideology was based on a puritanical, authoritarian reading of Christianity gleaned from contact with Canton missionaries and their tracts. On the other, Taiping leaders reviled another noted Western import: opium. Those caught consuming the stuff were quickly beheaded, if they were lucky; if they were less lucky, they were first ‘savagely beaten with one thousand blows’ and given a final supper of sticky rice. The Taiping hatred of opium was also an expression of their passionate anti-Manchuism – a force in Chinese society that had only grown since the Opium War. The Qing, Taiping rulers believed, had deliberately encouraged addiction in order to enslave the Chinese. ‘[T]he Manchus have poisoned the body and soul of our nation’, one Taiping leader analysed. ‘Each year fifty million taels worth of opium is consumed . . . In every matter they have violated our moral principles and each rule is designed to dominate our people . . . The common people have been trapped and are sinking farther down in great danger.’19 The destructive tensions between Manchus and Chinese present during the first Opium War properly unhinged the empire in the 1850s. To the Xianfeng emperor (1831–61), Daoguang’s harassed successor who took the throne in 1850, the ongoing British trouble was a sideshow, relative to the Taiping Rebellion.

  Some British dimly understood that violence had not, and would not win Chinese hearts and minds – even men like Palmerston and Pottinger were irked by their fellow countrymen’s bad behaviour in China, the former expressing his irritation at those who ‘amuse themselves by kicking over fruit-stalls and by making foot-balls of the Chinese’.20 But such scruples were pushed aside by outrage that the Chinese had not respected the letter of the Nanjing Treaty. Local Cantonese unwillingness to let the British into the city became shorthand for something much larger and more sinister: for the unreasonable xenophobia of the Chinese, and for ‘the invincible repugnance with which the Treaty was held’.21 The result was a vicious circle of antipathy. Every time the British pushed for entry to the city, they provoked a reaction from the population in Canton. Every clash with the Cantonese, in turn, convinced them yet more deeply of the existence of a grand, empire-wide conspiracy against them – though, according to foreign accounts of the time, the Cantonese people in normal circumstances managed to coexist quite peaceably with foreigners. ‘Should a foreigner get into a disturbance in the street,’ observed an American who lived in the foreign quarter of the city between 1825 and 1844, ‘it was generally safe to say that it was through his own fault.’22

  In autumn 1842, the Qing negotiators had come to a vague agreement with Pottinger that, at some point, the British would be allowed into the city. But as time passed, relations did not much improve. Three months after the Treaty of Nanjing, an Indian soldier’s argument with a local fruit-seller escalated into a fatal stabbing and the burning, by a Cantonese mob, of the foreign factories outside the gates. In 1845, the British pushed the issue of entry into the city again, this time forming pistol-waving gangs who attempted to force the gates of the city. When Qiying, unlucky enough to have been appointed (after his handling of matters in Nanjing) Imperial Commissioner to Canton, tried to stick notices around the city urging the Cantonese to rethink their intransigence about the question of British entry to the city, locals responded by ripping them up and announcing on their own placards that the foreigners would be massacred as soon as they passed through the gate: ‘The English are born and grow up in wicked and noxious villages beyond the pale of civilization, have wolfish hearts and brutish faces, the looks of the tiger and the suspicion of the fox.’23 In 1846, another row with another fruit-seller sparked off a melee (in which three Chinese were shot dead). The British responded in the time-honoured fashion, with a gunboat storming of the forts guarding the riverway up to Canton. In December 1847, six Britons hiking a little to the west of Canton
were killed by villagers on whom they had perhaps first opened fire. On it went, with the British demanding right of residence, and Cantonese opposition (cursings, stoning, robberies, chasings, mutilations, murders) padding out a multi-volume series of parliamentary Blue Books entitled Insults in China.

  In the minds of men like Harry Parkes, Canton became the ‘headquarters of fanaticism, arrogance, and duplicity – the focus of the anti-foreign feeling in China.’24 It had to be humiliated and penetrated, warmongers argued: it was futile negotiating with this murderous mob as they had no intention of observing the terms of Nanjing – they had to be beaten out of their superiority complex. The sole aim of the Chinese authorities, concluded the British government’s men in Canton in 1852, was ‘to impede and resist the access of foreigners’ and to ‘inflame the people of Canton against us.’25 ‘If we permit’, concluded Palmerston (who by 1855 would be prime minister), ‘the Chinese to resume, as they will no doubt be always endeavouring to do, their former tone of superiority, we shall very soon be compelled to come to blows with them again.’26 (‘These half-civilised Governments’, he had commented darkly a couple of years earlier, ‘all require a Dressing every eight or ten years to keep them in order.’27) The precedent of the Opium War hung over it all: the idea that the Chinese simply must be forced. Although the Treaty of Nanjing had been ‘a wise and solid foundation . . . a Treaty, unsupported by guns, is waste paper.’28