Chapter 2: The Kowtow Question and the Opium War
1 The story of Qing expansion in “inner Asia” under
a series of exceptionally able Emperors is related in rich detail
in Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing
Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
2005).
2 See J. L. Cranmer-Byng, ed., An Embassy to China: Being the journal kept by Lord
Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung,
1793–1794 (London: Longmans, Green, 1962), Introduction, 7–9
(citing the Collected Statutes of the
Qing dynasty).
3 “Lord Macartney’s Commission from Henry Dundas”
(September 8, 1792), in Pei-kai Cheng, Michael Lestz, and Jonathan
Spence, eds., The Search for Modern China: A
Documentary Collection (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999),
93–96.
4 Ibid., 95.
5 Macartney’s Journal, in An
Embassy to China, 87–88.
6 Ibid., 84–85.
7 Alain Peyrefitte, The
Immobile Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992),
508.
8 Macartney’s Journal, in An
Embassy to China, 105.
9 Ibid., 90.
10 Ibid., 123.
11 Ibid.
12 See Chapter 1, “The Singularity of China,” page
21.
13 Macartney’s Journal, in An
Embassy to China, 137.
14 Qianlong’s First Edict to King George III
(September 1793), in Cheng, Lestz, and Spence, eds., The Search for Modern China: A Documentary
Collection, 104–6.
15 Qianlong’s Second Edict to King George III
(September 1793), in Cheng, Lestz, and Spence, eds., The Search for Modern China: A Documentary
Collection, 109.
16 Macartney’s Journal, in An
Embassy to China, 170.
17 Angus Maddison, The World
Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development, 2006), Appendix B, 261, Table
B–18, “World GDP, 20 Countries and Regional Totals, 0–1998
A.D.”
18 See Jonathan Spence, The
Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999),
149–50 ; Peyrefitte, The Immobile
Empire, 509–11; Dennis Bloodworth and Ching Ping Bloodworth,
The Chinese Machiavelli: 3000 Years of Chinese
Statecraft (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976),
280.
19 Peter Ward Fay, The Opium
War, 1840–1842 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1975), 68.
20 Peyrefitte, The Immobile
Empire, xxii.
21 “Lin Tse-hsü’s Moral Advice to Queen Victoria,
1839,” in Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey,
1839–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979),
26.
22 Ibid., 26–27.
23 Ibid., 25–26.
24 “Lord Palmerston to the Minister of the Emperor
of China” (London, February 20, 1840), as reprinted in Hosea Ballou
Morse, The International Relations of the
Chinese Empire, vol. 1, The Period of
Conflict, 1834–1860, part 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1910),
621–24.
25 Ibid., 625.
26 Memorial to the Emperor, as translated and
excerpted in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell, eds., Imperial China: The Decline of the Last Dynasty and the
Origins of Modern China, the 18th and 19th Centuries (New
York: Vintage, 1967), 146–47.
27 E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 396.
28 Tsiang Ting-fu, Chung-kuo
chin tai shih [China’s Modern
History] (Hong Kong: Li-ta Publishers, 1955), as translated
and excerpted in Schurmann and Schell, eds., Imperial China, 139.
29 Ibid., 139–40.
30 Maurice Collis, Foreign
Mud: Being an Account of the Opium Imbroglio at Canton in the 1830s
and the Anglo-Chinese War That Followed (New York: New
Directions, 1946), 297.
31 See Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West, 27–29.
32 Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, The
Rise of Modern China, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 187–88.
33 Spence, The Search for
Modern China, 158.
34 John King Fairbank, Trade
and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports,
1842–1854 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969),
109–12.
35 “Ch’i-ying’s Method for Handling the Barbarians,
1844,” as translated in Teng and Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West, 38–39.
36 Ibid., 38. See also Hsü, The Rise of Modern China, 208–9. A copy of this
memorial was discovered years later in the British capture of an
official residence in Guangzhou. Disgraced by its revelation during
an 1858 negotiation with British representatives, Qiying fled. For
fleeing an official negotiation without authorization, Qiying was
sentenced to death. Deference to his elite stature was made, and he
was “permitted” to perform the deed himself with a silken
bowstring.
37 Meadows, Desultory Notes on
the Government and People of China, in Schurmann and Schell,
eds., Imperial China,
148–49.
38 See Morse, The
International Relations of the Chinese Empire, vol. 1, part
2, 632–36.
39 See ibid., part 1, 309–10 ; Qianlong’s Second
Edict to King George III, in Cheng, Lestz, and Spence, The Search for Modern China: A Documentary
Collection, 109.