by Iris Chang
Most lived and died without gaining more than a dim comprehension of the world beyond their own village. If a peasant traveled, it was usually only over dirt roads to a nearby market town to purchase or sell goods. Along the way, he might encounter his countrymen bumping along on horseback, by wheelbarrow, or on foot. A common sight during his journey would be the baggage porter accompanying a wealthier traveler or merchant. With bamboo poles balanced over their shoulders, weighed down on both ends with other people’s luggage, these men served the public as beasts of burden. At night, they stayed in hostels that resembled stables in their crudeness, where they washed themselves with filthy communal rags and collapsed into sleep on an earthen floor.
Few peasants would ever see any member of the class who actually ruled their lives, as they often lived thousands of miles away. In mid-nineteenth-century China, the center of power could be found in the capital city of Beijing—the nerve center of the nation, in the far north of the country—where a handful of bureaucrats and their civil servants could alter the destinies of large parts of the population with the stroke of a pen.
Everywhere in the city stood silent monuments to power. Surrounded by acres of marble, darkened by the shadow of three domes, the Temple of Heaven humbled the visitor who came into its presence. But far more intimidating was the Forbidden City, the ancient home to generations of emperors. Constructed in the fifteenth century, this city within a city has earned its place in the pantheon of the world’s great architectural masterpieces. Within the Forbidden City was a Chinese vision of paradise on earth. A breathtaking array of art—dragons of marble, lions of bronze, gilded gargoyles carved into balustrades—guarded a gigantic maze of palaces and pavilions, gardens and halls. A series of arches stretched from the edges of Beijing to this imperial labyrinth, and everything in the Forbidden City complex, right down to the last courtyard, converged upon the imperial throne, reflecting the belief that the entire world radiated out from the royal seat of China and its emperor: the son of heaven, the core of the universe.
North of Beijing was the Great Wall of China, the longest structure on earth. The Great Wall took many generations to build, and its purpose was simple: to protect the Han, who were the dominant ethnic population, from foreign incursion. For more than a thousand miles, it wound a serpentine path from east to west over mountains and the Mongolian plateau, a concrete expression of the Chinese resolve to repel all outsiders. Han rulers—the Ming dynasty—had controlled the empire for three centuries, during which time the wall had successfully kept out the barbarians from the north. But in 1644, nomads from Manchuria—the Manchus—fought their way past the barrier and conquered the Han people.
The new Manchu rulers might have been seen as barbarians by the Han, but they were swift, effective, and savvy conquerors, and they seized Beijing for their own. Moving into the Forbidden City, they established their own ruling line, the Qing dynasty, and declared their own capital in Beijing. They quickly adopted the habits of the previous Chinese ruling class and exploited its infrastructure, its vast system of laws and bureaucrats, though they added their own refinements to the system. To enforce the subjugation of the Han people, they mandated that all Han men wear long, braided queues as a badge of their humiliation (to shave one’s head was considered a sign of treason). Eager to guard their status as a privileged class, they outlawed intermarriage between Han and the Manchu. They also forbade Han migration to Manchuria, for as a minority population they wanted their own region within China to which they could safely retreat in case they were ever ousted from power.
But the most effective weapon in the Manchu arsenal was the imperial examination system, which used civil service tests as a mechanism of social order, forcing all aspiring officials to write essays on ancient Chinese literature and philosophy. Three tiers of examinations—local, provincial, and national—determined entrance into and promotion through the Chinese civil service bureaucracy. These tests created the illusion of meritocracy, of a system in which power and prestige were achieved not through lineage but through individual hard work and the rigors of learning. The examination process itself as well as its subject matter, converging with the Chinese respect for tradition and the Confucian emphasis on education, contributed to the development and maintenance of the culture’s reverence for education.
Children were told that “ministers and generals are not born in office”—they had to earn their way to the top. Like many motivational stories told to children, however, this one was not entirely true. Only certain groups were allowed to take the tests (women were entirely excluded from the process), and elite families had resources to hire the best tutors to prepare their sons for the examinations, giving wealthy test takers an enormous advantage over the sons of the poor. Most Chinese villages had special schools and tutors for the children of prosperous peasants and landlords.
In addition, as designed, defined, and dictated by the Manchus, the examination system had the nefarious result of creating a society in which the Han constantly competed against each other for favor with their rulers. More significantly, the system suppressed rebellion until the nineteenth century. The memorization and mastery of Chinese classics served as a safe outlet for the nation’s most ambitious, talented young men, encouraging them to direct their youthful energies into scholastic competition rather than openly questioning and challenging the system. The imperial exams soon became more potent than any military force, as the people themselves embraced this instrument of their own oppression.
Further, the system bred a sense of entitlement that turned the most talented sons of the Han Chinese, who should have been their leaders, into agents of the oppressor group. The very purpose of Qing hierarchy was to divorce the most talented from the masses from which they came. Passing the first test transformed a young man into a local magistrate, and even at the lowest level of government, he would enjoy the prerogatives of lifetime job security and exemption from torture, as he ascended to a world that severed him from his people. Once an official was in the system, it was impossible to get him out. The system gave him no incentive to serve the commonweal, because most of his tasks could be relegated to clerks who would interface with the suffering masses. The imperial exam system encouraged officials to think of their current position as merely one step on the ladder to the next, and to spend their days dreaming of passing the next exam.
Meanwhile, such men often ruled their districts like totalitarian despots. Virtually no redress could be taken against any official who broke the law, because he was the law. A Chinese magistrate could, with no threat of retaliation, accuse a peasant of banditry, throw him in jail, take his property, and even execute him if he proved a troublesome prisoner. If he lusted after a girl in the village, he could coerce her father to surrender her to him as one of his concubines. So absolute was his power that a Chinese man once told a Western observer, “I would rather be mayor in China than President of the United States.”
Only a small percentage of Chinese officials lived in the capital. Local officials who passed the first test could be found dispersed in villages throughout the empire, and those who passed the second might ascend to a middle, provincial level, such as the mayoralty of a city. The coveted places in Beijing usually went to a select few who passed the third and final test. There, the Qing regime promptly organized them further into nine grades, easily identified by their garments. Each dignitary wore a flowing silk robe embroidered with the insignia of his office and a cap tipped with a button or globular stone, the color of which indicated his title. Commoners immediately recognized these officials not only by their costume, but also by the luxury of their vehicles and the size of their entourage. Considering themselves too lofty to walk, imperial bureaucrats traveled by carriage or sedan chair and felt compelled to descend to earth only when summoned to court in the Forbidden City, where the rarefied atmosphere made it clear that each individual, even a noble, was utterly insignificant and totally dispensable in the presence of the imp
erial family.
The coastal cities were the only places in China that looked out to the world beyond its borders, across the ocean. Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong, as ports, naturally were built not only near the sea but on or near major rivers that started deep within China’s interior. They served as hubs of international trade and commerce, where products from inland China, such as silks, teas, and porcelains, were shipped out internationally. With the constant arrival of overseas vessels and the interaction with foreign merchants and explorers, the port cities of China, as those elsewhere in the world, were more cosmopolitan, more progressive, and less locked in cultural traditions than the rest of the country. While Beijing emphasized respect for status above all, the Chinese along the coasts were usually more concerned with making money.
The influences of overseas merchants, the conduct of business, and the daily contact of their residents with foreign ideas and foreign people made these cities more difficult for the Chinese state to control than the rest of the country. One place in particular was notorious for its independence: Canton, the capital of Guangdong province and one of the oldest port cities in China. As early as the seventh century, merchants from across the globe—Arabic, Persian, Jewish, and Indonesian—had come there to trade. A millennium later, in the seventeenth century, Canton began a powerful legacy of anti-Manchu subversion: descendants of the founding Ming dynasty emperor, working from strongholds in Canton and other cities along the southern coast, waged furious resistance against their new rulers, a campaign that lasted for years before they were overwhelmed, captured, and executed. The local people, however, bitterly resented their new masters and established secret societies with the goal of one day overthrowing the Qing.
Yet they readily accepted another form of inequality. Money was king on the coast, and the rich lived almost like royalty. In the business districts of Shanghai during that era, the merchants in their prosperous shops with red signs engraved with gold calligraphy operated abacuses as fast as people today handle calculators. The wealthiest owned mansions with inner courtyards and manicured gardens. Stepping inside one of these upper-class homes was like entering a museum: a world of carved mahogany furniture and stained-glass lanterns, of private libraries and art collections, filled with lacquer, gold, and jade. The families of these merchants dined on porcelain dinnerware, with ivory and silver chopsticks. The women, too, served to dazzle—their bodies gleaming in brocade chipao gowns, their hair elaborately coiffed, their crippled feet (bound since childhood to fulfill the demands of fashion) snug in tiny, satin-embroidered shoes—as if to personify their roles as precious objects of art in their homes.
Just outside these mansions lay terrible poverty. Indeed, the social distance between merchant and coolie, or unskilled laborer, in these coastal cities was almost as great as that between official and peasant in inland China. During a famine in Shanghai in the late 1840s, the poor literally died in the streets at the doorsteps of the rich. Many begged piteously for soup-kitchen tickets that entitled them to the ladlefuls of rice gruel that were dispensed as acts of charity by wealthy merchants.
Nonetheless, the areas closer to the sea also supported a working class of small entrepreneurs. In the province of Guangdong, boatmen, peasants, and small merchants mixed in a way that rarely happened inland, sparking an important part of the economy. Along Guangdong’s Pearl River drifted floating villages of junks, whose occupants handled cargo, or fished for a living, and these water-borne communities amassed the experience that comes with constant travel. Some natives of Guangdong worked the land, which was so poor that it bred a certain resourcefulness. Since the province was hilly and cursed with sandy soil, many rural families sought other ways to survive, such as producing handicrafts or working as middlemen merchants. And because Guangdong derived a certain energy from its port cities, such as Canton, many villages supported a thriving professional class, complete with doctors, artisans, real estate speculators, and teachers. It was this class of entrepreneurs who were the most eager to travel abroad.
The Chinese had once been adventurous and robust world travelers, and, at the peak of the Ming dynasty, long before the Manchu invasion, had launched from the coast several voyages of world exploration. Unfortunately, in the mid-fifteenth century, an emperor suspicious of the pressures for change introduced by these returning travelers abruptly shut down the naval expeditions, believing the Chinese people would do better to curb their wanderlust and tend to the graves of their ancestors. This marked the beginning of a long period of self-imposed isolation. During the early years of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu conquerors, fearing that Chinese overseas would ally themselves with rebel forces in the tropical Chinese island of Taiwan to plot the overthrow of the government, kept this anti-emigration policy in place. The penalty was death by beheading. Of course, once they had left the country, émigrés who flouted the law were obviously out of the reach of the government, so the law provided that any magistrates who assisted them were to be executed. Bureaucrats who captured people attempting to leave the country were rewarded with merit points that could lead to promotions.
But the law proved difficult to enforce. Despite the threat of execution, millions of Chinese, mostly from the coastal areas, left the country during the Qing dynasty to seek better lives elsewhere. In fact, the nineteenth century saw perhaps the greatest single exodus from China that the country had ever experienced in its history.
The nineteenth century also saw China’s decline as a world power. Centuries earlier, the Chinese had earned international admiration and respect as the most powerful civilization in the world, wealthier than all other countries, vastly more sophisticated than the societies of medieval Europe. China not only surpassed in area the greatest expanse of the Roman Empire, but lasted longer as well. But by the 1800s the nation had finally fallen prey to its own isolation. The Industrial Revolution vaulted many European countries far ahead of China in technological development. This almost fatal failure to keep pace would soon result in China’s humiliation by Western powers.
The West had received a bewildering array of contradictory reports of the decline. Some nineteenth-century travel writers from Europe or the United States saw the problems but preferred to dwell on the glories of the Chinese past, still extolling China as a land of imperial splendor, steeped in Confucian wisdom, a near-utopian society in which millions of people lived and worked together in peace and harmony. Yet other Western visitors in China began to reach very different conclusions, waking up at last to the filth, violence, and poverty in which so many lived. The truth, of course, reflected aspects of both versions, but the important new element was that the Qing dynasty was about to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. The government was bloated, increasingly inefficient and ineffective at controlling a growing and restless population.
Part of the problem lay with the personal extravagance of the Manchu ruling class. The Qing created an elite welfare state for their own people, for instance granting military stipends to each Manchu boy at birth. The original intent of the policy was to bind these boys to future service as soldiers, but later this stipend grew into an entitlement for all Manchu men, whether they served as soldiers or not. Corrupt rule allowed the Manchus to indulge in dissolute lives that contributed little to the public good, yet were impervious to challenge. In this setting, it was easy for the ruling class to accustom themselves to living beyond their means. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gross mismanagement of state funds almost emptied the coffers of the Qing treasury. In 1735, when Qian Long became emperor of the Qing dynasty, the imperial government owned some 60 million liang of silver; subsequent excessive spending sent China on such a downward spiral that by 1850, 115 years later, the reserves had dropped to only nine million liang.
Meanwhile, the Chinese population had more than doubled. In 1762, only about 200 million people lived in China, but a long period of internal peace caused the number to soar to 421 million by 1846. Inevitably, overcrow
ding caused shortages of arable land, which led to higher rents for tenant farmers, and greater concentrations of wealth among landowners. And what grew on the land wasn’t enough to feed everyone. Even during the best harvests, China had to import extra rice from abroad. In the province of Guangdong, the soil could yield only enough food to feed one-third of its people. Soon, people across China took matters into their own hands. Farmers chopped down entire forests on mountains near major rivers, denuding the land in hopes of growing more crops. The result was soil erosion, causing serious floods, which in turn brought famine and epidemics, killing tens of millions of people.
European imperialist appetite worsened the misery. For years, the West had tried unsuccessfully to break into the enormous Chinese market. Merchants scoured the world for goods such as fur pelts to sell to China, but the Qing scorned most of their products, and treated the foreign merchants with contempt, dictating where they could live and do business. By the early nineteenth century, however, British smugglers had opened the market wide, though not with legitimate trade goods like food or cloth, but by introducing a dangerous and highly addictive drug. Opium, harvested from the British colony of India, cut a wide swath through every class: from socialites seeking release from boredom to coolies who wished to ease the pain of heavy loads. Whether they smoked opium through a pipe or sucked it in tablet form, heavy addicts fell into a near-comatose stupor, gradually decaying into living skeletons. Demand spiraled, and imports of the drug soared from 33,000 chests in 1842 to 46,000 chests in 1848 to 52,929 in 1850, draining the Qing dynasty of its silver. (A chest contained 130 to 160 pounds of opium.) Millions of Chinese were wasting away, slowly dying from the poison.
