On 26 August 1842 the emperor’s representatives signed the Treaty of Nanking on board HMS Cornwallis to end the First Opium War. HMS Vindictive, a 74-gun ship of the line, rushed the news to Australia in copies of a special edition of the Hong Kong Gazette.13 Under the terms of the treaty, China ceded Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity, opened five ‘treaty ports’ (Shanghai, Canton, Foochow, Amoy and Ningpo[2]) to British trading houses and agreed to pay 300 million taels (or ounces of silver) in reparations, including compensation to the foreign traders whose opium stocks had been destroyed in Commissioner Lin’s purge.14
‘In settling the barbarian affairs this time,’ the emperor’s chief negotiator wrote, ‘we are governed at every hand by the inevitable and we concede that the policy is the least commendable. What we have been doing is to choose between danger and safety, not between right and wrong.’
The First Opium War was China’s most ignominious defeat since the Manchu ‘Tartars’ crossed the Great Wall from Manchuria in 1644 and swept away the Ming Dynasty. As the treaty settlement made no mention of opium, it was still classified as contraband. ‘The only object now to be desired is the legalisation of the drug trade,’ Alexander Matheson, one of the partners in Jardine Matheson, wrote on 31 July 1843, ‘and of that there is no hope during the life time of the present Emperor.’15
Nevertheless, the opium traders were handed the perfect cover for their illicit operations. Britain demanded – and was granted – the right of extraterritoriality (‘extrality’ for short) under which foreigners could only be tried under the laws of their mother country.16 They were therefore immune from Chinese justice for crimes committed on Chinese soil. Even more than Christianity and commercialism, extrality would incense the Chinese people as the ultimate abuse of the national polity.
Pottinger sent Captain George Balfour, an officer in the Madras Artillery who had proved himself an efficient administrator during the war, to Shanghai as British consul with the task of negotiating a set of Land Regulations to establish a British Concession on the banks of the Whangpoo River.17 Balfour agreed with Pottinger’s choice of a river frontage a little way upstream from the Chinese fortifications at Woosung. ‘By our ships our power can be seen,’ he said, referring to Palmerston’s famous gunboat diplomacy, ‘and if necessary, felt.’18
Shanghai was opened to foreign trade on 17 November 1843. Jardine Matheson, one of the instigators of the Opium War, was the first trading house to grab a piece of real estate on the waterfront. Its representative, Alexander Dallas, sailed up the Whangpoo in the fast clipper Eliza Stewart and registered Lot No. 1, a three-acre block next to the British Consulate on The Bund (named after the Hindustani word for embankment).19
Although other British companies soon followed, Balfour’s bargaining with the Shanghai taotai Kung Mu-chiu, the Manchu’s local administrator, had only just begun.20 It was another two years before 138 acres of malarial mudflats crossed by a single wheelbarrow track were leased to Britain in perpetuity. ‘The British occupation of 1842 was conducted with such tact that it left no resentment behind,’ historian Arnold Wright wrote in 1908. ‘Moreover, the inhabitants were naturally of a more peaceful type than the turbulent Cantonese.’21
The Jardine Matheson hong – known as the Ewo Building (meaning ‘happy harmony’) – didn’t open for business until 1851.22 By then, William Jardine, known to the Chinese as ‘the iron-headed old rat’, was well and truly dead – he passed away on 27 February 1843, three days after his 59th birthday.
The French and Americans swiftly followed the British lead with their own treaty arrangements for pieces of Shanghai. The French were ceded 164 acres between the British Concession and the walled Chinese city (then known as Nantao and now, minus the wall, as Nanshi) and the Americans 138 acres north of Soochow Creek (as the British called the Woosung River) in what became known as Hongkew. As all of these concessions were leaseholds, China theoretically retained sovereignty. However, the foreigners administered their concessions as though they were extensions of their own countries. Civilian volunteers were recruited to defend their borders.
The French treaty legalised Christianity, placing it on the same plane as Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. One seemingly innocuous clause granted missionaries permission to travel in the Chinese interior. The American treaty gave foreigners the right to buy land, build houses and factories and learn Chinese. The Manchu had hoped to play the European powers off against each other, but the introduction of the ‘most-favoured nation’ concept automatically entitled one signatory to any new privilege granted to another.
One by one the safeguards that had protected the Middle Kingdom from outside influence were violated, and with each act of surrender the Dragon Throne lost face with its Chinese subjects.23
George Balfour stayed in Shanghai until 1846 during which time he co-operated with Chinese officials in a vain attempt to stamp out the opium trade, even using British sailors to board a British merchant vessel and throw the bales into the Whangpoo.24 But there was no stopping the trading houses, which were making huge fortunes delivering opium and then filling the holds of their ships with Chinese silk or tea for the return journey. By the time the first Henley-style regatta was held on the Whangpoo in 1849, the oarsmen rowed past half a dozen British and American hongs which had joined Jardines on The Bund. Many of the names have since disappeared but they included Turner & Company, Dent Beale, Thomas Ridley, Dirom Gray, Holliday Wise and Gibb Livingston.25
During these frontier years Jardines and Dents operated a duopoly which effectively controlled the supply and price of all opium sold on the Shanghai market. The illegal trade flourished as never before, rising to almost 53,000 chests of imported opium in 1850. To the Confucian literati and members of the landed gentry, the opium pipe was, at least initially, a source of relaxation, a stimulus to the imagination and an aid to social intercourse. To the wharf labourer and farm worker, it was one of the few releases from a life of ceaseless toil and hunger. Inevitably, millions became enslaved by drug addiction.
The trade in misery extended to the people themselves. The least valued human life in China was the female child of a peasant family who would either be killed at birth, sold into the mui tsai bonded labour system to work as a servant in a Chinese household or as a prostitute in one of the ‘singing houses’, or at best married off for a small dowry.
After slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, a lucrative traffic developed in Chinese coolies who were recruited (or when necessary ‘shanghai’ed’) by coolie-brokers and unscrupulous sea captains to work as indentured labour in Australia, California, Chile and Peru. Farmers in New South Wales who had access to a diminishing supply of convict labour after transportation ceased in 1840 welcomed the first shipment of coolies from Amoy to Sydney in October 1848.
Over the next six years Chinese numbers in the Australian colonies increased to 2500, with a coolie being paid £12 a year on a five-year contract, approximately half a white man’s wage. During the gold rushes, the total jumped to 40,000 and by 1900 it had reached 100,000. As it was feared the Chinese would provide a pool of cheap labour which would put white men on the breadline, the importation of ‘coloured’ labour became a burning issue in Australian politics.26
On 3 August 1850 Shanghai’s first newspaper made its appearance when the settlement’s auctioneer Henry Shearman launched the weekly North-China Herald. ‘It is the destiny of Shanghai to become the permanent emporium of trade between it and all the nations of the world,’ Shearman observed in his first leading article. And he pledged, ‘To aid by his humble efforts in effecting this grand object will be the one great aim of the editor’s most strenuous exertions.’
The Herald was a four-page broadsheet printed on a little flat-bed press in a back street; it contained shipping movements, the names of all 157 full-time foreign residents and profiles of local Chinese officials, as well as some news items, mostly from
‘the mother country’. It would soon have a very big story on its own doorstep.
The vast majority of China’s 350 million people worked on the land and were vulnerable to the recurring natural calamities of flood and famine. Up to 90 per cent of the peasants owned no land at all and were prey to harsh landlords, unscrupulous rice merchants and loan sharks.
During the previous year the Yangtze had flooded in four provinces, Hupeh, Anhwei, Kiangsu and Chekiang, washing away whole villages and inundating thousands of farms. Most of the relief aid doled out by the Peking government disappeared into the pockets of Chinese officials. Millions were starving but the Manchu tax collectors still made their rounds and the usurers still demanded payment. Life for the peasants, always harsh, had become intolerable.
The pseudo-Christian Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1851 as a direct result of rural hardship. It would kill more people than any armed conflict except the Second World War – an estimated 20 million, although some modern scholars place the toll at twice that figure. With incredible ferocity, the Taiping Revolutionary Army headed north from Kwangsi province to the Yangtze, seizing the three Wuhan cities and the imperial southern capital of Nanking and putting thousands of mandarins, landowners, usurers and imperial troops to the sword.
War came to Shanghai on 7 September 1853 when the red-turbaned Small Sword rebels swept aside imperial troops and stormed into Nantao. The Small Swords were a branch of the Triad (san he huior), the Heaven, Earth and Man Society dedicated to destroying the Ching Dynasty and replacing it with Chinese rule. As such, they were blood brothers of the Taiping.
It was fortunate for Shanghai’s foreign settlers that Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, the Taiping’s Hakka leader,[3] refused a plea from his allies to drive the foreigners out of their riverside settlements. Instead, half a million terrified Chinese refugees fled from the countryside into the foreign concessions, sending land prices sky-high and triggering a building boom to provide accommodation for the new arrivals.
The Taiping were genuine revolutionaries whose blood-soaked legacy culminated in the Communist Revolution of 1949. Communism, Sun Yat-sen would claim in one of his 1924 lectures on the Three Principles, ‘was applied in China in the time of Hung Hsiu-ch’uan. His economic system was the real thing in Communism and not mere theory.’27
In their manifesto, the Taiping rejected everything the Manchu had introduced to China and declared war on ‘grasping officials and corrupt subordinates [who] strip the people of their flesh until men and women weep by the roadside’.
Taiping men eschewed the mandatory shaven head and woven queue or pigtail, and wore their hair in long tresses. They also practised a form of equality in which Taiping women had the right to sit for civil service examinations and thus become state officials. Foot-binding, opium-smoking, prostitution and slavery were strictly forbidden; land was confiscated and shared among the masses.28
The Taiping leader Hung Hsiu-ch’uan founded a state within the Celestial Empire, which he called ‘the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’. Hung had been introduced to the Gospel by a proselytising American named Issachar Roberts. He adopted the title of ‘Heavenly King’ and saw himself as one-third of the Holy Trinity with God and his elder brother, Jesus Christ.
Hung believed so totally in the resurrection of the soul that the word ‘death’ was banned from the Taiping vocabulary; people no longer died but rather ‘ascended to Heaven’.29 Some Europeans supported the Taiping on the grounds that they were semi-Christian until Roberts visited Nanking and – despite being offered a place in the Taiping hierarchy and three wives – denounced Hung’s religious opinions as being ‘in the main abominable in the sight of God’.30
Britain’s aim in the Yangtze Valley was to extend trade 1000 kilometres from Shanghai to Nanking and Hankow, which would mean doing a deal with the Taiping. With their vast experience on the Indian sub-continent (and to a less successful extent in Afghanistan), no one was more adept at the game of divide and rule than Britain’s colonial administrators. Sir George Bonham, the governor of Hong Kong, visited the Heavenly Capital and assured the Taiping leaders that Britain would remain strictly neutral in the Chinese civil war (and sell arms to both sides). He made it clear, however, that her armed forces would protect the lives and property of her subjects in Shanghai.31
Ironically, the first target of the British and American gunboats that appeared on the Whangpoo soon afterwards was not the Small Swords who were terrorising the Chinese inhabitants of the walled city, but a force of imperial troops who had camped on the muddy flats at the western extremity of the foreign concessions in defiance of an order from the British consul to keep a safe distance from the settlement.
On 4 April 1854 British and American naval forces, supported by the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, attacked the imperial encampment. Seeing a battle in progress, the Small Swords joined in – on the side of the foreigners. In the Battle of Muddy Flat, the imperial force was routed, with serious loss of face. It took another 17 months for local and foreign mercenaries hired by Shanghai merchants to expel the rebels from Nantao. The mercenaries then looted and burned down the northern and eastern districts of the Chinese city and murdered many innocent citizens, with British and French troops joining in the killing and looting.32
With mayhem taking place next door, British, French and American communities called a meeting at the British Consulate on 11 July 1854 to adopt a new set of Land Regulations governing the security and development of the foreign enclaves. Members were elected to the Shanghai Municipal Council, which assumed responsibility for running the concessions and maintaining law and order.
By 1857, considerable progress had been made. Many British merchants had abandoned Canton in favour of Shanghai where they felt safer than among the radical elements of South China.33 The Bund – pronounced as it is spelled (boond is a later affectation34) – was described in that year by Wingrove Cooke, a visiting correspondent of the London Times, as ‘a broad embankment, having on one side the wide river, with 70 square-rigged vessels lying at easy anchor in its noble reach; and on the other side the “compounds”, or ornamental grounds each containing the hongs and the godowns of one of the principal European commercial houses’.35
Walking along The Bund one morning, Cooke noticed a curious meeting taking place between East and West at the Custom House, a traditional Chinese building in the yamen style with elaborate curved eaves. Twenty Chinese men, some with enormous plumes of pheasant feathers on their heads, had gathered outside the building. ‘There are two executioners, conspicuous by their black conical caps, their dark costume, and their chains worn like a sword belt,’ Cooke wrote. ‘The larger one is said to be of wonderful skill in taking off heads; the smaller one excels in producing exquisite torture with the bamboo.’36
The Times man followed the taotai, Wu Chien-chang, into the Custom House. Incense was burning and priests chanted incantations, while mandarins in silk robes with white or red buttons on their caps knocked their heads on the ground in front of a little altar. The building had been turned into a josshouse in honour of the God of Wealth to ensure a good harvest of import and export duties.
While British officials in Shanghai smiled tolerantly at such pagan rituals, Palmerston ordered Lord Elgin, the corpulent son of the acquirer of the Greek marbles, to take another expedition to China to force the new Xianfeng Emperor, just 19 when he came to the throne, to accept the opium trade and permit Western ministers to live in Peking. In the Second Opium War, Elgin defeated the Chinese armies in the field and in 1858 concluded the Treaty of Tientsin.
Writing to his chum the Earl of Malmesbury on his return to Shanghai, he opined, ‘The doctrine that every Chinaman is a knave, and manageable only by bullying and bravado, is, I venture to think, sometimes pushed a little too far in our dealings with this people.’ Elgin changed his mind when an attempt to land Anglo-French envoys at Tientsin, the port east of Peking, was forcib
ly blocked by a brave Mongolian general, with considerable loss of European life. In retaliation, a combined force under the flags of Queen Victoria and the Emperor Louis Napoleon fought its way towards the Chinese capital in the summer of 1860.37
A mixed party consisting of the British interpreter Harry Parkes, the Times war correspondent Thomas Bowlby, five other Englishmen and 19 Sikh troopers rode ahead of the main column under a flag of truce to make arrangements for peace talks. On 18 September, they were seized by the Chinese and taken to the Forbidden City.38 ‘You instigate all the evil that your people commit,’ one of his captors told Harry Parkes, who was known to the Ching Court as a hot-headed consul in Canton. ‘It is time that foreigners should be taught respect for Chinese nobles and ministers.’
The 32-year-old Englishman was dragged before the Board of Inquisitors in heavy chains and interrogated, while four torturers pulled his hair, ears and whiskers. Parkes protested that he and his comrades should be treated as prisoners of war but were thrown into a filthy prison among common felons (who shared their meagre rations with them).39
By 6 October, the French advance had brought their forces to the gates of the Yuan ming yuan, the Garden of Perfection and Light a few kilometres east of the emperor’s Summer Palace in the Western Hills outside Peking. Jesuit priests had laid out the exquisite villas, pavilions and colonnades as a showpiece of Italian baroque during the reign of the Emperor Chien Lung in the previous century.
In the absence of any resistance, troops began looting the Garden of Perfection and Light of its gold and jade and works of art.40 When the British turned up, they joined in. ‘The chief share of the plunder,’ the Hong Kong-based China Mail reported, ‘appears to have fallen to the French, who had the first ransacking of the rich ornaments, jewels, clocks and watches, the rich robes and embroidered silks, of the Son of Heaven.’41
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