The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  July the British occupy the archipelago of Zhoushan and its principal town, Dinghai, on the east coast.

  August the British force reaches the mouth of the Beihe, near Beijing, and hands over a letter from Lord Palmerston.

  September to October Lin Zexu’s replacement, Qishan, persuades the British to return to Canton for talks.

  1841

  January talks break down; the forts guarding the river approach to Canton collapse under British attack. Elliot and Qishan agree the Treaty of Chuanbi, which cedes Hong Kong and six million dollars to the British. The treaty is rejected by both Qing and British governments.

  February British troops withdraw from Zhoushan, as part of the terms of the unratified Treaty of Chuanbi. Fighting resumes south of Canton.

  March the British expedition reaches the foreign factories on the southern outskirts of Canton. Sino-Western trade resumes. Qishan is arrested and transported to Beijing in chains, to await trial for agreeing to cede Hong Kong to the British. His place in Canton is taken by the emperor’s cousin, Yishan, and by a general, Yang Fang.

  May Yishan launches a counter-assault against the British, which fails. The British retaliate and hold Canton to ransom. After skirmishes between the British and local villagers (the ‘Sanyuanli incident’), Canton’s authorities pay the ransom to rescue the city and order local militias to be disbanded. Palmerston dismisses Elliot as plenipotentiary and replaces him with Sir Henry Pottinger.

  August Pottinger reaches Hong Kong. The expedition sails back up the east coast and takes Xiamen.

  October Dinghai falls once more to the British, followed by Zhenhai and Ningbo, where the British force spends the winter.

  1842

  March the Qing counter-assault (directed by the emperor’s nephew Yijing) against the British on the east coast fails.

  May to August the British force embarks upon the final, Yangtze campaign. Manchu garrisons at Zhapu and Zhenjiang fall, with great loss of life.

  July to August the Daoguang emperor authorizes two imperial kinsmen, Qiying and Yilibu, to act as plenipotentiaries, and to negotiate for peace at Nanjing. On 29 August, the Treaty of Nanjing is agreed on board HMS Cornwallis. Its principal terms include: the payment of twenty-one million dollars as indemnity; the opening of five ports (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai); equal diplomatic intercourse; the British right to install consuls at each of the five ports; Hong Kong to be ceded to the British.

  1842–56

  tension between the British and the Chinese escalates, over the Cantonese refusal to accept British entry into the city.

  1850–64

  the Taiping Rebellion leaves tens of millions of Chinese dead.

  1856

  Ye Mingchen, Governor of Canton, arrests the crew of the Arrow lorcha on suspicion of piracy. Acting-consul Harry Parkes seizes the pretext to call up a naval fleet from Hong Kong and bombard Canton.

  1857

  the government under Palmerston is dissolved after losing a parliamentary debate over going to war with China. After the ‘Chinese Election’, Palmerston is swept back into power and a joint Anglo-French force, under the plenipotentiary Lord Elgin, is sent out to make war with China. The campaign is delayed by the need to divert troops to India to suppress the Mutiny.

  1858

  the Anglo-French force captures Canton and Ye Mingchen. Lord Elgin signs the Treaty of Tianjin with Qing negotiators.

  1859

  hostilities resume, when Qing forces fire on the British fleet sailing to Beijing to ratify the new treaty.

  1860

  Lord Elgin leads a second expedition to north China. After a negotiating party is kidnapped and tortured, he orders the burning of the Yuanmingyuan (Summer Palace) north-west of Beijing. A new Treaty of Beijing is ratified, extracting from the Qing a large indemnity, opening the Chinese interior to Western trading and missionary activity and legalizing opium.

  1882

  the United States imposes the Chinese Exclusion Act, to bring a halt to Chinese immigration into the country.

  1860s–90s

  as part of the ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’, China attempts to modernize its armies and navies with Western science and technology.

  1894–95

  after the first Sino-Japanese War, China cedes Taiwan to Japan.

  1898

  the ‘Hundred Days’ Reforms’ (advocated by pro-Western intellectuals such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao) are bloodily suppressed by Qing conservatives.

  1900

  Boxer rebels occupy Beijing and lay siege to the embassies. The siege is broken by the arrival of an Eight-Nation Allied Force, after which a vast indemnity is extracted by these nations from the Qing government.

  1901–11

  the Qing embark upon a range of modernizing, Westernizing reforms of government, army and education.

  1906

  the Qing government issues a new opium suppression edict.

  1908

  Great Britain agrees the Anglo-Chinese Ten-Year Opium Suppression Agreement, pledging to cut opium imports into China by 10 per cent per year, if China cuts back equally on domestic growth of the drug.

  1911

  a republican revolution brings down the Qing dynasty.

  1912

  Sun Yat-sen briefly becomes first President of the new Republic, before resigning his position to former Qing general Yuan Shikai.

  1914

  Yuan Shikai dissolves parliament.

  1915

  the Japanese issue their ‘Twenty-one Demands’ to Yuan Shikai, asserting sovereignty over parts of Manchuria and Mongolia.

  1916

  Yuan Shikai declares himself emperor. After China’s provinces declare independence from Beijing in protest, Yuan dies and the country begins to fragment into enclaves of warlord power.

  1919

  the Treaty of Versailles grants Germany’s former possessions in China to Japan. The May Fourth protest movement erupts in response.

  1921

  founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. Sun Yat-sen forms a Nationalist Party government in Canton.

  1923

  after winning the promise of support from the Soviet Union, the Nationalist Party enters into a United Front with the Chinese Communist Party.

  1925

  death of Sun Yat-sen.

  1926

  launch of the Northern Expedition against warlords, to reunify the country.

  1927

  Chiang Kai-shek begins a nationwide purge of the Communists (‘the White Terror’).

  1928

  official founding of the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing. A National Opium Prohibition Committee is created, to implement the government’s Opium Suppression Act.

  1932

  the Japanese establish an independent state (Manchukuo) in Manchuria.

  1934

  Communist troops break out of Chiang’s encirclement of their Soviet base area in Jiangxi, and begin the Long March to Shaanxi. The Nationalist government starts to shoot relapsed users of opiates.

  1935

  Mao Zedong is established as leader of the Communist Party.

  1937

  war between China and Japan formally declared. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians are massacred in the Rape of Nanjing. Chiang’s Nationalist government is forced to retreat to an emergency capital at Chongqing, in west China. The Japanese control north and east China.

  1945

  Japanese defeat in the Second World War.

  1949

  Communist victory in the civil war. The Nationalist government flees to Taiwan. Mao Zedong proclaims the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

  1956–57

  brief period of political openness during the Hundred Flowers Movement.

  1957

  the Anti-Rightist Campaign cracks down on criticism of the government.

  1957–58

  the Great Leap Forward
– Mao’s utopian plan for China to catch up with the industrial West within a few years and achieve Communism.

  1959–61

  famine, resulting in large part from the policies and brutality of the Great Leap Forward, causes the death of at least 30 million Chinese.

  1966

  Mao launches the Cultural Revolution.

  1975

  death of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan.

  1976

  Mao’s death brings Cultural Revolution policies to a formal end.

  1978

  Deng Xiaoping is established as Mao’s successor.

  1983

  the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign targets corrupting influences from the West.

  1989

  pro-democracy demonstrations are violently suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army. Jiang Zemin takes over presidency of the People’s Republic of China but Deng Xiaoping continues to hold supreme power.

  1992

  while on his ‘Southern Tour’, Deng Xiaoping calls for faster market reforms in the Chinese economy.

  1994

  China’s first Internet network is set up.

  1997

  Deng Xiaoping dies and Jiang Zemin succeeds to position of supreme power. Hong Kong returns to Mainland China.

  1999

  major anti-American protests follow the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The Chinese government bans Falun Gong.

  2001

  the collision between an American spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter in China’s airspace generates a serious diplomatic incident between China and the US, and national outrage in China.

  2002–3

  Jiang Zemin begins handing over power to his successor, Hu Jintao.

  2005

  Anti-Japanese demonstrations break out in cities across China.

  2008

  violent protests erupt in Tibet. The Olympic-torch relay is disrupted by pro-Tibetan independence demonstrators; urban Chinese respond angrily to perceived Western bias in reports of the Tibetan unrest and the torch relay. Around 12,000 people die in the Sichuan earthquake. Beijing hosts the Olympic Games.

  2009

  violent protests break out in Xinjiang. Friction between Chinese and Western governments openly develops over the failure of the Copenhagen climate change summit. The Chinese government condemns the dissident Liu Xiaobo to eleven years in prison, for co-authoring the pro-democracy Charter 08. A convicted drug smuggler, Akmal Shaikh, is executed in Urumqi.

  2010

  Google withdraws its offices from mainland China. Liu Xiaobo is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. China overtakes Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, after the US.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Glenn Melancon, Britain’s China Policy and the Opium Crisis: Balancing Drugs, Violence and National Honour, 1833–1840 (London: Ashgate, 2003), 34.

  2 Frederic Wakeman Jr, ‘The Canton Trade and the Opium War’, in Fairbank, Cambridge History of China: Volume 10, Late Ch’ing 1800–1911, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 166–7.

  3 See tables and figures in Man-houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society and Ideologies 1808–1856 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 89 and 95 and Hsin-pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 223. These two volumes offer very useful, detailed economic surveys of the opium–silver trade in late imperial China.

  4 Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, Report of Proceedings on a Voyage to the Northern Ports of China (London: B. Fellowes, 1834), 86.

  5 Quoted in P. P. Thoms, The Emperor of China v. The Queen of England (London: P. P. Thoms, 1853), 3.

  6 Eliza Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, D.D. (London: Longman, 1839) Volume 1, 136.

  7 ‘Introduction by the Reverend W. Ellis’, in Karl Gützlaff, A Journal of Three Voyages Along the Coast of China in 1831, 1832 and 1833 (facsimile reprint) (Westcliff on Sea: Desert Island Books, 2002), 54.

  8 Ibid., 237.

  9 See Parliamentary Papers – Papers Relating to the Affairs of the East India Company 1831–32, 4–14.

  10 Melancon, Britain’s China Policy, 35.

  11 Ibid., 36.

  12 Ibid., 37.

  13 Priscilla Napier, Barbarian Eye: Lord Napier in China (London: Brassey’s, 2003), 88.

  14 Ibid., 101–2.

  15 Correspondence Relating to China (1840), 13.

  16 Napier, Barbarian Eye, 132.

  17 Ibid., 159, 166.

  18 Melancon, Britain’s China Policy, 40.

  19 Correspondence Relating to China (1840), 12.

  20 It is with us still today, in recurrently edgy media discussions of how China’s rise will threaten the West. Because of this old assumption of intrinsic Chinese hatred of the West, China’s resurgence – the logic goes – will inevitably demand retribution for past humiliations.

  21 Chinese Repository 5 (1836–1837), 177.

  22 Chinese Repository 9 (1840), 106.

  23 See a neat summary of this viewpoint in Frank Dikötter et al., Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (London: Hurst & Company, 2004), 1. For a thorough discussion of historical interpretations of the second Opium War, see J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  24 The secondary literature – in English alone – on modern and contemporary Chinese nationalism is vast. Helpful primers on the historical and contemporary phenomenon include: Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jonathan Unger ed., Chinese Nationalism (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1996) – see in particular essays by James Townsend, John Fitzgerald and Geremie Barmé; Henrietta Harrison, China (London: Arnold, 2001); Lowell Ditmer ed., China’s Quest for National Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Christopher Hughes, Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era (London: Routledge, 2006); Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Nationalism in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  25 Zhongguo jin, xiandaishi gangyao (An Outline of Modern Chinese History) (Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 2007), 1.

  26 See Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction and ‘Conclusion’ above for further details on ‘patriotic education’.

  27 It should also be remembered that one of the aspects of the 1989 protests that deeply unnerved the Communist authorities was the student demonstrators’ attempts to challenge the state’s monopoly on defining nationalism by asserting their protests as independently patriotic – for example, by organizing a rally on 4 May, a key anniversary for modern Chinese nationalism.

  28 People’s Daily, 3 June 1990, 1.

  29 ‘History Textbooks in China’, at http://www.zonaeuropa.com/ 20060126_1.htm (accessed 3 March 2009).

  30 See, for example, Liang Tingnan, Yifen wenji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), 82.

  31 I owe this insight to Wakeman, ‘The Canton Trade’.

  32 Blackie Lau, ‘Mistakes of the West’, at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-04/27/content_326595.htm, 27 April 2004 (accessed 20 March 2009).

  33 Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 125.

  34 See, for example, James Hevia’s enlightening English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

  35 On the subject of ‘national humiliation’ and China’s modern uses of history, two of the key anglophone specialists are Paul Cohen in, for example, History in Three Keys (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-century China (California: University of California Press, 2008); and William Callahan in, for example, China: The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  One: OPIUM AND CHINA

  1 See Keith McMahon’s acute and detailed The Fall of the God of Money:
Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-Century China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 193–201.

  2 Ibid., 97.

  3 Virginia Berridge, Opium and the People: Opiate Use and Drug Control Policy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (London: Free Association Books, 1999), 40. This is a highly informative cultural, social and political history of modern English opium use.

  4 H. P. Rang et al., Pharmacology (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 2000), 595.

  5 McMahon, The Fall of the God of Money, 79, 75.

  6 Sascha Auerbach, Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2009), 146.

  7 Quoted in Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China (London: Putnam, 1964), 78.

  8 Paul Howard, ‘Opium Suppression in Qing China: Responses to a Social Problem, 1729–1906’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 30.

  9 Zheng Yangwen, The Social Life of Opium in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11.

  10 For these and other extraordinary details of imperial China’s opium use, see ibid., 10–24.

  11 Howard, ‘Opium Suppression’, 70–71.

  12 See Dikötter et al., Narcotic Culture for an eye-opening account of drug use in late imperial and republican China. This is a subject that has undergone a recent resurgence of interest; for a selection of notable contributions to the field, see works by Zhang Yangwen, David Bello, Alan Baumler, Joyce Madancy, Edward Slack, Jonathan Spence, Richard Newman, and Timothy Brook and Bob Wakabayashi, listed in notes below and in the bibliography.

  13 W. Somerset Maugham, On a Chinese Screen (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 60–61.

  14 Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–42 (London: Routledge, 2000), 105.

  15 Ibid., 106–7.

  16 For biographical sketches of the two men, see (for example) Alain le Pichon ed., China, Trade and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); A. R. Williamson, Eastern Traders: Some Men and Ships of Jardine, Matheson & Company and Their Contemporaries in the East India Company’s Maritime Service; a Collection of Articles (Jardine, Matheson and Company, 1975); Robert Blake, Jardine Matheson: Traders of the Far East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999).