On China (8 page)

The request was reasonable, even when couched in the traditional assumption of Chinese overlordship:

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

Pottinger now faced yet another Chinese negotiator, the third to be sent on this supremely unpromising assignment by a court still fancying itself supreme in the universe, the Manchu prince Qiying. Qiying’s method for handling the British was a traditional Chinese strategy when confronted with defeat. Having tried defiance and diplomacy, China would seek to wear the barbarians down by seeming compliance. Negotiating under the shadow of the British fleet, Qiying judged that it befell the court’s ministers to repeat what the Middle Kingdom’s elites had done so often before: through a combination of delay, circumlocution, and carefully apportioned favors, they would soothe and tame the barbarians while buying time for China to outlast their assault.

Qiying fixed his focus on establishing a personal relationship with the “barbarian headman” Pottinger. He showered Pottinger with gifts and took to addressing him as his cherished friend and “intimate” (a word specially transliterated into Chinese for this express purpose). As an expression of the deep friendship between them, Qiying went so far as to propose exchanging portraits of their wives and even proclaimed his wish to adopt Pottinger’s son (who remained in England, but was henceforth known as “Frederick Keying Pottinger”).
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In one remarkable dispatch, Qiying explained the approach to a Celestial Court that found the seduction process difficult to comprehend. He described the ways he had aspired to appease the British barbarians: “With this type of people from outside the bounds of civilization, who are blind and unawakened in styles of address and forms of ceremony . . . even though our tongues were dry and our throats parched (from urging them to follow our way), still they could not avoid closing their ears and acting as if deaf.”
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Therefore, Qiying’s banquets and his extravagant warmth toward Pottinger and his family had served an essentially strategic design, in which Chinese conduct was calculated in specific doses and in which such qualities as trust and sincerity were weapons; whether they reflected convictions or not was secondary. He continued:

The results of this interplay between Western overwhelming force and Chinese psychological management were two treaties negotiated by Qiying and Pottinger, the Treaty of Nanjing and the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue. The settlement conceded more than the Chuan-pi Convention. It was essentially humiliating, though the terms were less harsh than the military situation would have allowed Britain to impose. It provided for payment of a $6 million indemnity by China, the cession of Hong Kong, and the opening of five coastal “treaty ports” in which Western residence and trade would be permitted. This effectively dismantled the “Canton System” by which the Chinese court had regulated trade with the West and confined it to licensed merchants. Ningbo, Shanghai, Xiamen, and Fuzhou were added to the list of treaty ports. The British secured the right to maintain permanent missions in the port cities and to negotiate directly with local officials, bypassing the court in Beijing.

The British also obtained the right to exercise jurisdiction over their nationals residing in the Chinese treaty ports. Operationally, this meant that foreign opium traders would be subject to their own countries’ laws and regulations, not China’s. This principle of “extraterritoriality,” among the less controversial provisions of the treaty at the time, would eventually come to be treated as a major infringement of Chinese sovereignty. Since the European concept of sovereignty was unknown, however, in China extraterritoriality came to be a symbol at the time, not so much of the violation of a legal norm as of declining imperial power. The resulting diminution of the Mandate of Heaven led to the eruption of a flurry of domestic rebellion.

The nineteenth-century English translator Thomas Meadows observed that most Chinese did not at first appreciate the lasting repercussions of the Opium War. They treated the concessions as an application of the traditional method of absorbing the barbarians and wearing them down. “[T]he great body of the nation,” he surmised, “can only look on the late war as a rebellious irruption of a tribe of barbarians, who, secure in their strong ships, attacked and took some places along the coast, and even managed to get into their possession an important point of the grand canal, whereby they forced the Emperor to make certain concessions.”
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But the Western powers were not so easily soothed. Every Chinese concession tended to generate additional Western demands. The treaties, conceived at first as a temporary concession, instead inaugurated a process by which the Qing court lost control of much of China’s commercial and foreign policy. Following the British treaty, U.S. President John Tyler promptly sent a mission to China to gain similar concessions for the Americans, the forerunner of the later “Open Door” policy. The French negotiated their own treaty with analogous terms. Each of these countries in turn included a “Most Favored Nation” clause that stipulated that any concession offered by China to other countries must also be given to the signatory. (Chinese diplomacy later used this clause to limit exactions by stimulating competition between the various claimants for special privilege.)