The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  The appointment Napier sought was to oversee this untidy, though broadly profitable modus vivendi. His brief was to maintain a legal tea trade financed by illegal drug imports. Eventually, after asking the king to intervene on his behalf, Napier won Britain’s first official resident posting to China. The new superintendent had a simple solution to the difficulties before him: blast the country into submission. ‘The Empire of China is my own’, he confided excitedly to his diary. ‘What a glorious thing it wd be to have a blockading squadron on the Coast of the Celestial Empire . . . how easily a gun brig wd raise a revolution and cause them to open their ports to the trading world. I should like to be the medium of such a change.’10

  Grey took care to put him right in a private letter of instructions: ‘Nothing must be done to shock [Chinese] prejudices & excite their fears . . . Persuasion & Con-ciliation should be the means employed, rather than anything approaching to the tone of hostile & menacing language’.11 The warning fell on deaf ears. In the course of his six-month sea voyage to China, Napier drew the following conclusions: first, that the key to British interest in China was tea, and second, that ‘every act of violence on our part has been productive of instant redress and other beneficial results’.12 The British ‘must use force, not menace it’, he reminded himself, somewhere past Madeira.13 There will come a time, Napier resolved as his ship crossed the tropic seas, when their folly will ‘bring down upon them the chastisement of Great Britain, when every point may be gained with the greatest ease, and secured for all time to come’.14

  Burnt raw by the south China sun, Napier sailed into Canton at 2 a.m. on 25 July 1834; by daybreak, the Union flag was flying high over the old East India Company factory. Within two days he had succeeded in breaking six long-established rules of Anglo-Chinese trade. Chief among these offences were that he had sailed into Canton without a passport, and without a permit to take up residence there, and that he tried to communicate in writing directly with officials – thereby asserting his diplomatic equality – rather than through the merchants imperially appointed to deal with foreigners.

  Napier’s disregard for the rules did not endear him to the governor-general responsible for Canton, Lu Kun, who began trying to edge him back into line, instructing him to retreat to Macao and not return without a permit. Irritated by all this diplomatic fuss (Napier’s determination to hand a letter of self-introduction directly to the governor-general had embroiled English and Chinese underlings in a three-hour stand-off at the city gate under the midday sun), the Chinese administration allowed itself a little linguistic mischief. In public edicts, Napier’s name appeared in characters that, the British translator awkwardly explained, seemed to mean ‘laboriously vile’. In return, Napier named the governor-general ‘a presumptuous savage’, mutinously distributed Chinese-language broadsheets enumerating the local government’s sins, and swore to punish the insult to the British crown: ‘Three or four frigates and brigs,’ he quickly wrote to his foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, ‘with a few steady British troops . . . would settle the thing in a space of time inconceivably short. Such an undertaking would be worthy the greatness and the power of England . . . the exploit is to be performed with a facility unknown even in the capture of a paltry West India Island’.15

  Given his irascibility towards the Chinese authorities, Napier developed a surprising tenderness for the Chinese people themselves. ‘I never met with more civility,’ he remarked some three weeks into his stay, ‘or so little of a disposition to act with insult or rudeness than I constantly see among these hardworking and industrious people.’16 He became convinced that they looked to him for liberation from China’s oppressive authorities. ‘[S]ay to the Emperor – adopt this or abide the consequences – and it is done . . . I anticipate not the loss of a single soul, and we have justice on our side . . . The Chinese are most anxious to trade with us.’ Provided it was kept sufficiently informed of the British grievance, he reasoned, the populace ‘might look to the arrival of such a force as the happy means of their emancipation from a most arbitrary system of oppression . . . surely it would be an act of Charity to take them into one’s hands altogether, and no difficult job.’17

  By 2 September 1834, Napier’s defiance had driven Lu Kun to stop trade and blockade the British factory. Within another week, it had provoked armed conflict. After dispatching a request to Lord Grey for a British force from India, Napier called the two frigates under his command (stationed along the coast) up river towards Canton, expecting to frighten his adversary into submission. The Chinese were not so easily intimidated, however. The forts at the mouth of the river exchanged fire with the frigates, killing at least two British sailors and injuring others. Lu Kun had, moreover, ordered a series of boats to be sunk behind the frigates, which then (too big to advance further, their way back blocked) found themselves stranded. Now sickening badly from malaria, Napier was forced to abandon the British factory and Canton. On his way back down to the coast, Napier was left floating for a week in the Pearl River by vengeful Cantonese bureaucrats, until the frigates were confirmed as having returned to the ocean. Weakened by the delay on board, after another two weeks he died of fever in Macao.

  Never mind that plenty of British onlookers thought Napier foolishly violent and precipitate, that trade should be won by peace and not war. (The British were, the sinophone MP for Hampshire George Staunton argued, ‘in a national point of view, totally and entirely in the wrong’.18) Never mind, either, that Napier had broken rule upon rule, and ignored the greater part of his official instructions. Or, again, that until Lu Kun threatened to behead him for spreading seditious notices about the Qing government, the Cantonese authorities had resisted him peaceably enough. (‘Suppose a Chinaman’, Napier himself wrote to Palmerston concerning his lack-of-passport controversy, ‘were to land under similar circumstances at Whitehall, your Lordship would not allow him to “loiter” as they have permitted me.’19) Britain had now been offered its first decent pretext for open conflict with China, should it be of a mind to make use of it: the emperor’s man in Canton had menaced the life of the king’s man in Canton; British life, liberty and property had been insulted and lost – insults that British hawks now insisted could only be avenged by an armed response.

  Despite his many diplomatic failures (and death), then, Napier succeeded superbly in two respects: first, in moving Anglo-Chinese relations closer towards the possibility of armed conflict, as relatively peaceful pragmatism was ousted by economic self-interest and pompous national principle; and second, in recasting the British impulse towards war as a moral obligation, an ‘act of Charity’ towards the Chinese that would sow only friendship for British gunboats. Although the advocates of war would not win over Britain’s decision-makers until 1839, their denunciations of insufferable Chinese arrogance were busily working on British public opinion in the interim. Constructed around the time of the Opium War to justify violence against China (the hostile Chinese, the argument went, have forced us to defend ourselves), this stereotype of the obtusely anti-foreign Chinese would haunt Western attitudes to the empire through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.20 China, declared the Chinese Repository in the last days of 1836, was ‘a nation nursing itself in solitary, sulky grandeur, and treating as inferior all other nations, most far superior in civilization, resources, courage, arts and arms . . . It seems indeed strange that the whole fabric of the Chinese Empire does not fall asunder of itself’. One ‘vigorous and well directed blow from a foreign power’, and ‘it will totter to its base’.21

  In 1839, the British government resolved to administer that blow, after the Qing government refused British smugglers food, water and trade until they promised to stop hauling their shipfuls of opium into China, and Canton’s merchant lobby bore down on Foreign Secretary Palmerston to intervene. On 18 October, Palmerston informed his man in China, Captain Charles Elliot, that a fleet would reach China the following year to fight the Qing. ‘All the world must rejoice that such a for
ce is here’, crowed the Chinese Repository from south China, watching the expedition’s ships sail off in late June 1840 into their first war with China.22

  In China today, the Opium War is the traumatic inauguration of the country’s modern history. History books, television documentaries and museums chorus a simple, received wisdom about the conflict, which goes something like this. In the early nineteenth century, unscrupulous British traders began forcing enormous quantities of Indian opium on Chinese consumers. When the Chinese government declared war on opium, in order to avert the moral, physical and financial disaster threatened by the empire’s growing drug habit, British warships bullied China out of tens of millions of dollars, and its economic and political independence. Gunboat diplomacy, opium and the first ‘Unequal Treaty’ of 1842 (followed by a second in 1860, concluding the ‘second Opium War’ begun in 1856) brought China – until the end of the eighteenth century, probably the richest and most powerful civilization in the world – to its knees, leaving its people slavish addicts, incapable of resisting subsequent waves of European, American and Japanese colonizers.23 This account of the Opium War is now one of the founding myths of Chinese nationalism: the first great call to arms against a bullying West; but also the start of China’s ‘century of humiliation’ (a useful pedagogical shorthand for everything that happened in China between 1842 and 1949) at the hands of imperialism.24 It marks the beginning of China’s struggle to free itself from ‘semi-colonial semi-feudalism’ (Mao’s own summary of the century of Chinese experience after 1842), and to ‘stand up’ (Mao again) as a strong modern nation – a battle that ends, naturally, with Communist triumph in 1949. ‘The story of China’s modern history [from the Opium War to the present day]’, summarizes a 2007 history textbook in use in one of China’s elite institutions of higher education, Beijing University,

  is the history of the courageous struggle by the good-hearted masses for national survival and to accomplish the great revival of the Chinese race. It is the history of every nationality in the country, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, undertaking a great and painful struggle to win national independence and liberation through the 1949 Revolution; it is the history of an extremely weak, impoverished and old China gradually growing, thanks to the socialist revolution . . . into a prosperous, flourishing and vital new socialist China . . . What are the aims of studying our modern history? . . . To gain deep insight into how History and the People came to choose Marxism, came to choose the Chinese Communist Party and came to choose socialism.25

  As the rulers of the contemporary People’s Republic swing between self-confidence about its miracle rise and suspicion of a West supposedly determined to contain it, the Opium War is kept at the front of national memory. Particularly since the 1990s, when the Communist Party began rallying anti-foreign nationalism to shore up its own legitimacy after the Tiananmen crackdown, the Opium War has been called into service in successive ‘patriotic education’ campaigns waged on monuments and in textbooks, newspapers and films.26 With the turmoil of the Tiananmen uprising of 1989 blamed on ‘Western bourgeois liberalization’, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first Opium War in 1990 offered a public relations gift to the government, the opportunity to splash stirring editorials across the media about this ‘national tragedy’ inflicted by the gunboats of the West.27 ‘In order to protect its evil opium trade,’ the People’s Daily (the Communist Party’s official news organ) reminded its readers,

  the British government poisoned the Chinese people, stole huge quantities of silver, and openly engaged upon imperialist aggression – as a result of which the Chinese fell into an abyss of suffering. This, as Comrade Mao Zedong pointed out, began the Chinese people’s resistance against imperialism and its running dogs. The Opium War and the acts of aggression that followed it awoke in the Chinese people a desire for development and survival, initiating their struggles for independence and liberation . . . The facts undeniably tell us that the Chinese people have only managed to stand up thanks to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party . . . only socialism can save and develop China . . . Raise ever higher the glorious banner of patriotism, commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Opium War.28

  Unorthodox reappraisals of the Opium Wars can jangle high-level political nerves. In 2006, the government closed down China’s leading liberal weekly, Freezing Point (Bingdian), because it ran an article by a philosophy professor called Yuan Weishi challenging textbook doctrine on (amongst other things) the second Opium War, which ‘viciously attacked the socialist system [and] attempted to vindicate criminal acts by the imperialist powers in invading China. It seriously distorted historical facts; it seriously contradicted news propaganda discipline; it seriously damaged the national feelings of the Chinese people . . . and created bad social influence.’29 (To offer a roughly equivalent anglophone analogue: imagine Prospect being shut down for running a revisionist article on the Scottish Clearances or the Irish Famine.) Around this same moment, the government decided to replace the soporific lectures in Marxism-Leninism compulsory across undergraduate courses with classes in modern Chinese history – beginning, of course, with the Opium War – ensuring that China’s brightest and best emerged from their university careers with a correct understanding of the past, and its relationship to the present.

  At the time that it was fought, by contrast, most of the Chinese empire – including a number of those who were supposed to be directing proceedings – had some difficulty acknowledging an Opium War with the English was happening at all. The emperor had practically no idea he was supposed to be at war until the end of July 1840, almost a year after the British judged that armed hostilities had commenced. He had little clue as to why English guns were pummelling his empire’s east coast until the second week of August that year, when the fleet sailed in to Tianjin, the nearest port to Beijing, to deliver a letter from the British foreign secretary to ‘the Minister of the Emperor’. After the conflict’s existence was at last officially acknowledged, the emperor and his men still had trouble dignifying it with the term ‘war’, preferring to name it a ‘border provocation’ or ‘quarrel’ (bianxin), atomized into a series of local clashes along China’s maritime perimeter. Even while they were routing, with the newest military technology of the day, badly trained and directed Chinese armies, the British were identified in court documents of the time as ‘clowns’, ‘bandits’, ‘pirates’, ‘robbers’, ‘rebels’ (occasionally, the ‘outrageous rebels’)30 – temporary insurgents against a world order still firmly centred in the Qing state.31 This, in the eyes of China’s rulers, was just another aggravation no more worrying than the other domestic and frontier revolts the government was struggling to suppress around the same time.

  Yet somehow, in the century and a half since it was fought, the Opium War has been transformed from a mere ‘border provocation’ into the tragic beginning of China’s modern history, and a key prop for Communist One-Party rule. This contemporary recasting of the conflict conveniently reminds the Chinese people of their country’s victimization by the West, and of everything that was wrong about the ‘old society’ before the Communist Party came along to make things right again. When the West tries to criticize China, most often for its human-rights record, or for its lack of an independent judiciary and press, Chinese voices – both inside and outside the government – can fight back with the Opium War. A 2004 reader’s comment article for the China Daily (the government’s English-language newspaper) denounced the whole business as ‘treachery by the West on a scale never before experienced . . . the use of the drug opium set the standard of the mistakes of the west for the next 150 years . . . The Western bigots and zealots, however, have never ceased to have designs on China and on China’s wealth and prosperity, even today . . . If the West and their running dogs of war now expect mercy from China for all these past invasions and thefts, they are seriously mistaken.’32

  Look beyond current Chinese historical orthodoxy, however, and
a very different picture of China, and of its first declared clash with a Western power, begins to emerge. Nineteenth-century China was not a country instinctively set against all things foreign, but rather a splintered society capable (like most societies) of a broad range of reactions – uncertainty, suspicion, condescension, curiosity – to the outside world. The mere fact that twentieth-century China came to attach so much importance to the Opium War is testament to the country’s openness, rather than hostility, to the West. As it was fought, the war struck Western observers as epochal, but appeared to many of its Chinese observers subsidiary to grander narratives of local disorder and trouble on the empire’s other frontiers. Yet by rechristening, since the 1920s, the Opium War as the start of modern Chinese history, China’s establishment has subscribed to a thoroughly Western-centric view of the country’s past that views antebellum China as a ‘nation in a profound sleep’, waiting to be woken by the West. Read many mid-nineteenth-century anglophone accounts of China and the war, and you might reasonably suppose that China did not possess any history before its encounter with British gunboats. Glance across a moderately detailed chronology of modern China, and it becomes very obvious that internal causes of violence far outnumber external: the rural rebellions of the nineteenth century that left millions dead or displaced; the civil wars of the twentieth century, both before and after 1949. Yet while contemporary China’s media and publishing industries loudly commemorate the British expedition of 1839–42, the self-inflicted disasters of the Communist period – the man-made famine of the early 1960s, the political persecutions that culminated in the extraordinary violence of the Cultural Revolution, the bloodletting of 1989 – go largely ignored.