The Clash of Two World Orders: The Opium War
The ascendant Western
industrial powers would clearly not abide for long a diplomatic
mechanism that referred to them as “barbarians” presenting
“tribute” or a tightly regulated seasonal trade at a single Chinese
port city. For their part, the Chinese were willing to make limited
concessions to Western merchants’ appetite for “profit” (a vaguely
immoral concept in Confucian thought); but they were appalled by
the Western envoys’ suggestions that China might be simply one
state among many, or that it should have to live with permanent
daily contact with barbarian envoys in the Chinese
capital.
To the modern eye,
none of the Western envoys’ initial proposals were particularly
outrageous by the standards of the West: the goals of free trade,
regular diplomatic contacts, and resident embassies offend few
contemporary sensibilities and are treated as a standard way to
conduct diplomacy. But the ultimate showdown occurred over one of
the more shameful aspects of Western intrusion: the insistence on
the unrestricted importation of opium into China.
In the mid-nineteenth
century, opium was tolerated in Britain and banned in China, though
consumed by an increasing number of Chinese. British India was the
center of much of the world’s opium poppy growth, and British and
American merchants, working in concert with Chinese smugglers, did
a brisk business. Opium was, in fact, one of the few foreign
products that made any headway in the Chinese market; Britain’s
famed manufactures were dismissed as novelties or inferior to
Chinese products. Polite Western opinion viewed the opium trade as
an embarrassment. However, merchants were reluctant to forfeit the
lucrative trade.
The Qing court
debated legalizing opium and managing its sale; it ultimately
decided to crack down and eradicate the trade altogether. In 1839,
Beijing dispatched Lin Zexu, an official of considerable
demonstrated skill, to shut down the trade in Guangzhou and force
Western merchants to comply with the official ban. A traditional
Confucian mandarin, Lin dealt with the problem as he would with any
particularly stubborn barbarian issue: through a mixture of force
and moral suasion. Upon arriving in Guangzhou, he demanded that the
Western trade missions forfeit all of their opium chests for
destruction. When that failed, he blockaded all of the
foreigners—including those having nothing to do with the opium
trade—in their factories, announcing that they would be released
only on the surrender of their contraband.
Lin next dispatched a
letter to Queen Victoria, praising, with what deference the
traditional protocol allowed, the “politeness and submissiveness”
of her predecessors in sending “tribute” to China. The crux of his
missive was the demand that Queen Victoria take charge of the
eradication of opium in Britain’s Indian territories:
[I]n several places of India under your control such as Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Patna, Benares and Malwa . . . opium [has] been planted from hill to hill, and ponds have been opened for its manufacture. . . . The obnoxious odor ascends, irritating heaven and frightening the spirits. Indeed you, O King, can eradicate the opium plant in these places, hoe over the fields entirely, and sow in its stead the five grains. Anyone who dares again attempt to plant and manufacture opium should be severely punished.21
The request was
reasonable, even when couched in the traditional assumption of
Chinese overlordship:
Suppose a man of another country comes to England to trade, he still has to obey the English laws; how much more should he obey in China the laws of the Celestial Dynasty? . . . The barbarian merchants of your country, if they wish to do business for a prolonged period, are required to obey our statutes respectfully and to cut off permanently the source of opium. . . .May you, O King, check your wicked and sift your vicious people before they come to China, in order to guarantee the peace of your nation, to show further the sincerity of your politeness and submissiveness, and to let the two countries enjoy together the blessings of peace. How fortunate, how fortunate indeed! After receiving this dispatch will you immediately give us a prompt reply regarding the details and circumstances of your cutting off the opium traffic. Be sure not to put this off.22
Overestimating
Chinese leverage, Lin’s ultimatum threatened to cut off the export
of Chinese products, which he supposed were existential necessities
for the Western barbarians: “If China cuts off these benefits with
no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the
barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive?” China had nothing
to fear from retaliation: “[A]rticles coming from the outside to
China can only be used as toys. We can take them or get along
without them.”23
Lin’s letter seems
never to have reached Victoria. In the meantime, British opinion
treated Lin’s siege of the British community in Guangzhou as an
unacceptable affront. Lobbyists for the “China trade” petitioned
Parliament for a declaration of war. Palmerston dispatched a letter
to Beijing demanding “satisfaction and redress for injuries
inflicted by Chinese Authorities upon British Subjects resident in
China, and for insults offered by those same Authorities to the
British Crown,” as well as the permanent cession of “one or more
sufficiently large and properly situated Islands on the Coast of
China” as a depot for British trade.24
In his letter
Palmerston acknowledged that opium was “contraband” under Chinese
law, but he stooped to a legalistic defense of the trade, arguing
that the Chinese ban had, under Western legal principles, lapsed
due to the connivance of corrupt officials. This casuistry was
unlikely to convince anybody and Palmerston did not allow it to
delay his fixed determination to bring matters to a head: in light
of the “urgent importance” of the matter and the great distance
separating England from China, the British government was ordering
a fleet immediately to “blockade the principal Chinese ports,”
seize “all Chinese Vessels which [it] may meet with,” and seize
“some convenient part of Chinese territory” until London obtained
satisfaction.25 The Opium War had begun.
Initial Chinese
reactions rated the prospect of a British offensive as a baseless
threat. One official argued to the Emperor that the vast distance
between China and England would render the English impotent: “The
English barbarians are an insignificant and detestable race,
trusting entirely to their strong ships and large guns; but the
immense distance they have traversed will render the arrival of
seasonable supplies impossible, and their soldiers, after a single
defeat, being deprived of provisions, will become dispirited and
lost.”26 Even after the British blockaded the Pearl
River and seized several islands opposite the port city of Ningbo
as a show of force, Lin wrote indignantly to Queen Victoria: “You
savages of the further seas have waxed so bold, it seems, as to
defy and insult our mighty Empire. Of a truth it is high time for
you to ‘flay the face and cleanse the heart,’ and to amend your
ways. If you submit humbly to the Celestial dynasty and tender your
allegiance, it may give you a chance to purge yourselves of your
past sins.”27
Centuries of
predominance had warped the Celestial Court’s sense of reality.
Pretension of superiority only accentuated the inevitable
humiliation. British ships swiftly bypassed the Chinese coastal
defenses and blockaded the main Chinese ports. The cannons once
dismissed by Macartney’s mandarin handlers operated with brutal
effect.
One Chinese official,
Qishan, the Viceroy of Zhili (the administrative division then
encompassing Beijing and the surrounding provinces), came to
understand China’s vulnerability when he was sent to make
preliminary contact with a British fleet that had sailed north to
Tianjin. He recognized that the Chinese could not counter British
seaborne firepower: “Without any wind, or even a favorable tide,
they [steam vessels] glide along against the current and are
capable of fantastic speed. . . . Their carriages are mounted on
swivels, enabling the guns to be turned and aimed in any
direction.” By contrast, Qishan assessed that China’s guns were
left over from the Ming Dynasty, and that “[t]hose who are in
charge of military affairs are all literary officials . . . they
have no knowledge of armaments.”28
Concluding that the
city was defenseless before British naval power, Qishan opted to
soothe and divert the British by assuring them that the imbroglio
in Guangzhou had been a misunderstanding, and did not reflect the
“temperate and just intentions of the Emperor.” Chinese officials
would “investigate and handle the matter fairly,” but first it was
“imperative that [the British fleet] set sail for the South” and
await Chinese inspectors there. Somewhat remarkably, this maneuver
worked. The British force sailed back to the southern ports,
leaving China’s exposed northern cities undamaged.29
Based on this
success, Qishan was now sent to Guangzhou to replace Lin Zexu and
to manage the barbarians once again. The Emperor, who seems not to
have grasped the extent of the British technological advantage,
instructed Qishan to engage the British representatives in
drawn-out discussions while China gathered its forces: “After
prolonged negotiation has made the Barbarians weary and exhausted,”
he noted in the vermilion imperial pen, “we can suddenly attack
them and thereby subdue them.”30 Lin Zexu was dismissed in disgrace for
having provoked a barbarian attack. He set off for internal exile
in far western China, reflecting on the superiority of Western
weaponry and drafting secret memorials advising that China develop
its own.31
Once at his post in
southern China, however, Qishan confronted a more challenging
situation. The British demanded territorial concessions and an
indemnity. They had come south to obtain satisfaction; they would
no longer be deferred by procrastinating tactics. After British
forces opened fire on several sites on the coast, Qishan and his
British counterpart, Captain Charles Elliot, negotiated a draft
agreement, the Chuan-pi Convention, which granted the British
special rights on Hong Kong, promised an indemnity of $6 million,
and allowed that future dealings between Chinese and British
officials would take place on equal terms (that is, the British
would be spared the protocol normally reserved for barbarian
supplicants).
This deal was
rejected by both the Chinese and the British governments, each of
whom saw its terms as a humiliation. For having exceeded his
instructions and conceded too much to the barbarians, the Emperor
had Qishan recalled in chains and then sentenced to death (later
commuted to exile). The British negotiator, Charles Elliot, faced a
somewhat gentler fate, although Palmerston rebuked him in the
harshest terms for having gained far too little: “Throughout the
whole course of your proceedings,” Palmerston complained, “you
seemed to have considered that my instructions were waste paper.”
Hong Kong was “a barren island with hardly a house upon it”; Elliot
had been far too conciliatory in not holding on to more valuable
territory or pressing for harsher terms.32
Palmerston appointed
a new envoy, Sir Henry Pottinger, whom he instructed to take a
harder line, for “Her Majesty’s Government cannot allow that, in a
transaction between Great Britain and China, the unreasonable
practice of the Chinese should supersede the reasonable practice of
all the rest of mankind.”33 Arriving in China, Pottinger pressed
Britain’s military advantage, blockading further ports and cutting
traffic along the Grand Canal and lower Yangtze River. With the
British poised to attack the ancient capital Nanjing, the Chinese
sued for peace.