Ch 18 - The Penetration of China

The Treaty of Nanjing

Sir Henry Pottinger replaced Charles Elliot as British Plenipotentiary to China and opened the second phase of the First Opium War. The Royal Navy quickly reoccupied Chinese ports before threatening the southern capital at Nanjing. The Qing Government finally capitulated to preserve itself and signed the Treaty of Nanjing.

The Chuanbi Convention pleased no one except the principal signatories;  First Superintendent of Trade Charles Elliot and Chinese Grand Secretary Qishan. Emperor Xuanzong was angered by his belief the convention gave away too much. British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston was angered by the belief that Britain did not get enough;  the indemnity was too small, the evacuation of Ting­hai was too premature, and the cession of Hong Kong, that "barren island with hardly a house upon it," was too incomplete. The fighting in China soon attracted the attention of the British public, who became quite excited over the exploits of its army and navy and wanted as glorious a victory as possible. The Chuanbi Convention did not come close to fulfilling this ambition. In a letter to the King of Belgium about the situation in China, Queen Victoria wrote on April 10, 1841, that Lord Palmerston was "deeply mortified at it." She continued,

"All we wanted might have been got, if it had not been for the unaccountably strange conduct of Charles Elliot ... who completely disobeyed his instructions and tried to get the lowest terms he could."

On April 21, Lord Palmerston wrote a crushing reprimand to Elliot that essentially accused him of ignoring instructions, acting without authority, failing to make full use of the military force under his command and settling for the "lowest" possible terms. In Elliot's defense, it should be noted that for three years he had received such meager instructions from London and had been so accustomed to relying on his own wits in many difficult and delicate situations, that he felt he had a certain amount of discretion in carrying out his instructions. After all, the British Empire had been built on the forceful actions of individual men on the spot who did what seemed most appropriate at the time. Lord Palmerston assured Elliot he had no such discretion. He concluded his letter by stating that, "under these circumstances it is impossible that you should continue to hold your appointment in China." The British Cabinet repudiated the Chuanbi Convention, approved Charles Elliot's recall and appointed Sir Henry Pottinger as the new British Plenipotentiary to China. Because of the distances involved, Elliot knew nothing of these matters until the dispatches and his replacement reached Macao in August.

As the British and Chinese alternated between fighting and negotiating, the lucrative Canton trade maintained its pace. The well-armed coastal opium trade also continued, always well beyond the reach of the Imperial Commissioner. Qishan, the former High Imperial Commissioner, was replaced with the Emperor's own nephew, Yishan, who was given command of a large Chinese force against the British. In late February 1841, following shipment of the season's tea consignment, Elliot noticed Chinese preparations underway to renew hostilities. In anticipation, Elliot seized the initiative by ordering a British expeditionary force under the command of General Sir Hugh Gough to break through the Bogue and move against Canton. General Gough's 2,500 troops, along with 100 sailors, marines and artillery assaulted, destroyed and occupied every strategic point along the Pearl River up to Whampoa by March 2. Finally, with a large Chinese force trapped within the city walls, General Gough placed the city of Canton under siege. Elliot did not allow the occupation of Canton, fearing that if the troops were allowed to enter the city they would be swallowed up in its warren-like streets and alleys.

While the British held their siege against Canton, the Chinese continued their preparations to attack throughout the month of April. On May 10 they unleashed an assault with fire rafts against the British ships at Whampoa and plundered the recently evacuated Thirteen Factories District warehouses. On May 27, 1841, just as Elliot was ready to counter with an assault on Canton itself, the Chinese broke. The Chinese merchants and the Governor of Canton offered the British a "ransom" of $6 million Mexican to lift the siege and save the city from destruction. Captain Elliot accepted, thereby freeing his troops for action in northern China, where he believed they would be better used to pressure the imperial court. The truce terms included the payment within one week of $6 million Mexican to the British, the withdrawal within six days of all Chinese troops from Canton to a distance of sixty miles, the evacuation of all British troops from the Pearl River and the Bogue, the exchange of prisoners of war, and postponement of the Hong Kong issue.

Meanwhile, at the instigation of Chinese officials, a local militia of some 10,000 irate Cantonese mobilized to take on the British. As they began their withdrawal from outside the city walls, General Gough's troops marched into an ambush near the small village of San-yüan-li. One British private was killed, one officer and one enlisted man were wounded in the brief, intense battle that followed. The Chinese later hailed the incident as a great "victory." The British retired to Hong Kong and spent the month of June laying out their new capital city, Victoria, named after the reigning English monarch.

Sir Henry Pottinger arrived in Macao on August 10, 1841, to assume his new post as Chief Superintendent of Trade and the new British Plenipotentiary to China. Only then did Captain Charles Elliot learn London's displeasure with the Chuanbi Convention and that he had been recalled. That same month, his service in China now at an end, Elliot departed Macao for England. He had been England's chief administrator in China for five years and had directed foreign affairs of the first order. Though only thirty-nine-years-old at the time of Britain's war with China, he accomplished what amounted to nothing less than England's forced entry into China, the very heart of East Asia. That intrusion was accompanied by the energies and ideas of the Western world, an intrusion that in the end proved fatal to the Manchu dynasty and which enthroned the dominance of the West as masters of the globe.

Like his counterpart, China's Grand Secretary Qishan, Charles Elliot quietly passed from history, though he did so in much better style. A year later, on August 6, 1842, he arrived at the port of Galveston, Texas, where he took up his duties as British chargé d'affaires to the Republic of Texas. During his four years in the United States, Elliot advocated the abolition of slavery in Texas, worked for the establishment of free trade, and emphasized the importance of securing peace with Mexico. He also became a personal and trusted friend of Sam Houston and Anson Jones. In his remaining years, Charles Elliot served as Governor of Bermuda (1846-1854), Governor of Trinidad (1854-1856), and Governor of St. Helena (1863-1869). He retired in with the rank of Admiral and died at his home in England in September 1875.

Sir Henry Pottinger was a brisk, soft-spoken, but uncompromising Irishman who had formerly served under the British East India Company as a colonel in the in the 5th Bombay Native Infantry. He arrived in China carrying essentially the same instructions given to Charles Elliot;  to bypass Canton altogether and sail north to reoccupy Dinghai on Zhousan Island, seize important strongholds along the Yangtze River and, if necessary, proceed to the Hai River to open direct negotiations with the Chinese. In these negotiations, Pottinger was to demand monetary compensation, an extension of the number of trade ports, security for British subjects in China, and the outright cession of the island of Hong Kong to England. Each of these terms were to be included in a formal treaty approved by the Chinese Emperor before being forwarded to Queen Victoria for ratification.

The second phase of the First Sino-British Opium War commenced shortly after Pottinger's arrival and this time, British offensive operations ranged over a much wider area. After leaving a few ships to guard Hong Kong, Pottinger gathered a British expeditionary force composed of ten warships and four steamers carrying a total of 2,519 men and 336 guns under command of Admiral Sir William Parker and sailed northeastward on August 21 for the coastal city of Xiamen. Pottinger was unrelenting in the execution of his orders. Facing scant opposition, the British quickly reoccupied a number of locations along the Chinese coast;  Xiamen harbor on August 26;  Dinghai, Zhousan Island on October 1;  and Ningbo on October 13.

In the spring of 1842, Pottinger received significant reinforcements from India under the command of Rear Admiral George Elliot;  twenty-five warships carrying 668 guns, fourteen steamers armed with 56 guns, 9 hospital and surveying ships, and enough troops to bring his total strength to nearly 10,000 men. He also received instructions from London not to continue to the Hai River, but to concentrate on China's second capital at Nanjing, just northwest of Dinghai on the Yangtze River.

Freshly armed, Pottinger quickly launched a sustained demonstration of British fire power against the Chinese, winning a decisive battles against Chinese Imperial troops guarding the approaches to Shanghai and Hangzhou. Garrisons of Manchu bannermen fought the British with little more than hopeless courage only to be mowed down by heavily-armed British soldiers. City after city fell into British hands, literally over masses of dead bodies. Wusong fell on June 16, Shanghai on June 19, and Zhenjiang on July 21. In the end the British defeated every form of Qing resistance they encountered. Most British losses were the result of sunstroke, malaria, dysentery and cholera, rather than hostile fire.

The British capture of Zhenjiang, which sat at the critical juncture of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal, cut off the north-south barge traffic that carried tribute grain to Beijing and North China. The loss of the Grand Canal created a near panic among provincial officials, who pleaded with the Emperor to permit peace negotiations. The fast-paced war came as a severe shock to the Chinese, who had no concept of British weapons or tactics. Emperor Xuanzong and his ministers, confronted for the first time with the overwhelming nature of Britain's military might, quickly saw the futility of continued resistance. Adding to their fear was the emerging problem of "secret societies" in China that had ties to both opium smuggling and the British enclave taking root in Hong Kong.

The Manchus in the Chinese Imperial Court, themselves descendants of alien conquerors, were keenly aware of the collaboration among numerous "Chinese traitors" and the invading British. Further defeats by the British would only further weaken the Qing dynasty's hold on China. Fearing the loss of any more face would only encourage a revolt among the Chinese people, the Qing court concluded it would have to make concessions to maintain its rule in China. With the British Royal Navy anchored at the gates of Nanjing, the Qing Government finally consented to a new arrangement in Sino-British relations;  the Manchu dynasty capitulated to preserve itself.

Emperor Xuanzong quickly removed Yishan from his post as Imperial Commissioner and replaced him with Qiying, the Manchu General of Canton. The Imperial Court ordered Qiying, together with Yi Libu, the Deputy Lieutenant General of Zhabu and a former Imperial Commissioner to the coast of Zhejiang, to begin peace negotiations with the British. On August 14, with British warships poised for an assault on China's southern capitol, the Chinese delegates, accompanied by Nanjing's Governor-General Niu Jian, notified the British they were ready to meet their demands. Plenipotentiaries for the two sides met over the next two weeks to work out treaty terms.

Sir Henry Pottinger dictated the terms the Chinese had to accept to prevent further assaults by the British. Shadowed by the dominant presence of the British Royal Navy, the two parties reached an agreement in principle. After several days of working out the details and translating the text into Chinese, Imperial Commissioner Qiying, representing the Manchu Emperor Xuanzong, and British plenipotentiary Sir Henry Pottinger, acting on behalf of Queen Victoria, concluded their negotiations on August 29, 1842, by jointly signing the Treaty of Nanjing on board the British warship H.M.S. Cornwallis.

The treaty prepared the way for a new order in China. It abolished the hong merchants' monopoly of the Canton trade system by promising a "fixed, fair and regular tariff" and opened new ports of entry to British residence and trade at Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. The treaty also ceded the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain in perpetuity. The Chinese text of the treaty euphemistically stated that the emperor graciously "grants a place of rest and storage" to the British after their long voyage to China. In further terms, China agreed to pay Britain an indemnity of $21 million Mexican to cover past merchant debts in Canton, to pay for confiscated opium and to reimburse the British Indian government for the cost of the war.

Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston had been thoroughly briefed on the situation by William Jardine before composing his final instructions to Pottinger and was still anxious to "... make some arrangement with the Chinese Government for the admission of opium to China as an article of lawful commerce." Pottinger had little room to maneuver on this touchy subject however, and was directed not to give the Chinese delegates any reason to suspect that it was "the intention of Her Majesty's Government to use any compulsion" to force legalization. Palmerston knew that if that happened, England's enemies at home and abroad would have a terrible political weapon which would be used to topple Parliament's shaky majority party. While the First Sino-British Opium War was certainly not fought exclusively to protect illegal opium traffic in China, opium was still far and away the most profitable commodity involved in the China Trade. As Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu's biographer, Xinbao Zhang, commented, "Had there been an alternative, say, molasses, or rice, the conflict might have been called the Molasses War, or the Rice War." There was no alternative. Opium was the only British import for which there was any substantial demand in China and the demand had exploded from less than 10,000 chests per year in the late 1820s to nearly 40,000 chests per year by 1838.

The British virtually imposed the Treaty of Nanjing on China at gunpoint and concluded it without the careful deliberations that usually accompany international agreements in Europe and America. Sir Henry Pottinger had instructions from Lord Palmerston not to insist, but to strongly impress on the Chinese how legalizing the opium trade would be in their own interest and gently persuade them to profit from such trade by taxing it. He was to remind them that China could not stop the flow of opium, certainly not among the productive India plantations, and even if they could, "plenty of it would be produced in other countries, and would thence be sent to China." Pottinger dutifully made his case to Commissioner Qiying and General Yi Libu, but was greeted with a blank refusal to even discuss the legalization of opium. They told him that opium was a serious problem in China, growing worse by the day, and even they wanted to, they could not take the proposal seriously. Emperor Xuanzong would certainly repudiate such an idea. Pottinger's instructions allowed him to accept the continuance of the ban on opium smuggling with a warning to the Chinese that British ships suspected of smuggling must not be searched. In such a circumstance, he would have to instruct the shipping owners to conform to the previously existing system, i.e., leave the traffic to the Chinese "scrambling dragons" as before. As a result, the final treaty document never mentioned opium smuggling and neither side ever formally addressed its future status. Emperor Xuanzong painfully approved the treaty on September 15, 1842, and on December 28 Queen Victoria ratified the treaty for Britain.

Great Britain proclaimed Hong Kong a British Crown Colony on June 26, 1843, and appointed Sir Henry Pottinger the island's first governor. A population census undertaken shortly after the British occupied Hong Kong showed there were 5650 inhabitants on the island:  2500 villagers or fishermen, 200 who lived and worked in or around the main market in Victoria, 2000 "boat people" living offshore, and some 300 Chinese laborers from Kowloon. Under the 1843 Charter of Hong Kong, Pottinger established two civilian bodies, the Executive and Legislative Councils. The former army colonel, recently promoted to the rank of Major General, had little tolerance for "civilian advice" and managed to frustrate the concept of a two-council colonial administration by the simple device of appointing the same people to both bodies. The small councils never met for lack of a quorum, leaving Pottinger, who outranked all of his appointees, free to act pretty much as he pleased, often with disastrous results.

Governor Henry Pottinger declared Hong Kong to be a free port "open to all ships without discrimination" in July 1843. Unfettered by the Chinese or the restrictive Canton Trade System, opium imports rose rapidly after the war, largely because British opium traders ignored all Chinese attempts to control them. Governor Pottinger actually encouraged the traders, stating that it was "neither desirable or [sic] necessary to exclude our opium trading ships from Hong Kong harbor." To put the proper veneer on the still contentious opium trade, Pottinger issued a proclamation to curtail smuggling operations and warning that opium ships sailing under the British flag would, if discovered in any of the treaty ports, have their cargoes confiscated. Many traders took him at his word. Even James Matheson sailed his heavily-laden opium clippers under the Danish flag for a time. The subterfuge did not last long however, for the demand for opium and the need for silver were too attractive to pass up. In April 1843, Matheson wrote:

"The Plenipotentiary has published a most fiery proclamation against smuggling, but I believe it is like the Chinese edicts, meaning nothing, and only intended for the Saints in England. Sir Henry never means to act upon it and no doubt privately considers it a good joke."

In the spring of 1843, Jardine Matheson and Company anchored the 866 ton Bomanjee Hormusjee in Hong Kong harbor as a receiving vessel and sold opium directly to Chinese craft. It was only a few months before Hong Kong became a larger version of Lintin Island. Jardine, Matheson & Company built a large granite warehouse in Victoria and maintained eleven receiving ships and six runners to supply opium along the China coast. It kept the ships supplied from India by a fleet of five fast opium clipper ships at an annual coast of $250,000. In 1844, Governor Pottinger reported, "Almost every person possessed of capital who is not connected with the government is employed in the opium trade."

On October 18, Britain and China signed the Treaty of the Bogue, a supplemental agreement that settled some points from the Treaty of Nanjing and added unique features to China's future relations with the West. Under the terms of this agreement, British warships were permitted to anchor at the five treaty ports and to patrol Chinese rivers and coastal waters to protect commerce and control sailors. Residents in the new British communities at each of the five treaty ports would be permitted to live under the legal jurisdiction of an appointed British consul. This protection of British subjects by Western legal procedures was granted to not only British subjects, but to their goods and property as well, sometimes even to their Chinese servants and assistants. In addition, Chinese criminals found in Hong Kong or aboard British vessels would be bound over to Chinese officials for trial and China agreed to return any British subject who fled to Chinese territory to escape British justice. What the British had taken as a de facto right since 1794, they were now guaranteed by treaty;  the right of extraterritoriality.

All treaties are, in a sense, unequal, but some are more unequal than others. The Treaty of the Bogue was unique in this regard because the Chinese and English versions of the treaty text were different. During the translations of the agreement, Imperial Commissioner Qiying allegedly inserted a number of trade regulations into the Chinese copy that were never agreed to in the English version and the resulting disparities caused a good deal of chaos in shipping and trade. Commissioner Qiying's "additions" were made after the final treaty draft had been approved, but Robert Thom, the interpreter who worked with Chinese Secretary J.R. Morrison to prepare the original document, unfairly took the blame for the incident. Pottinger was embarrassed at being deceived in such a manner, but he treated the episode as part of the political game and never made an issue of it. Pottinger had wanted Thom as his Chinese Secretary, but when Thom was sent to the new treaty port of Ningbo, the governor had to make do with the Reverend Karl Gützlaff, the former Pomeranian saddle maker turned missionary who had served as interpreter with Captain Charles Elliot and had become quite rich helping Jardine, Matheson & Company smuggle opium into China. Gützlaff also printed and distributed thousands of religious tracts which the clever Chinese collected and sold back to the printer, who then resold them to Gützlaff, thus frustrating his hopeless grand design "to evangelize en masse a great nation."

Finally, the Treaty of the Bogue introduced the concept of "most-favored-nation" status, a condition that granted to Britain whatever other rights might be given to some other nation in the future. Thus protected, Western enterprise was relatively secure from the former arbitrary exactions and abuses of Chinese officials. The Treaty of Nanjing and Treaty of the Bogue were the two wedges that pried open the Bamboo Curtain. Following the British lead, other Western powers rushed into the gap and created a series of international treaties over the next ninety years that gave the West special privileges in China and led to the destruction of China's ancient tribute system of foreign relations.

Few episodes in modern history could provide more justification for the charge of "imperialist aggression" than the First Sino-British "Opium War" of 1839-1842. Great Britain's rationale for starting the war to punish China for its seizure of British property, for threatening British subjects and insulting the honor of the British flag was, at best, pure nonsense. First, because opium was an illegal, smuggled drug and second, because the flag was being flown by the leading drug smuggler. The Manchu government in Beijing triggered the war through its vain attempts to suppress the damaging contraband trade in opium and the superior firepower and technology of British warships ended it. While the opium was a triggering mechanism for the war, its essential cause centered on the desire of British merchants for favorable treaty guarantees to protect their trade. It must rank as the most disreputable period in Britain's long, imperial history, a period that exemplifies the fact that, when national revenue is at stake, a government can be just as grasping, just as rapacious, just as unscrupulous as any private entrepreneur. When governments thunder and beat their chest denouncing men who cultivate, sell and smuggle opium and heroin to other nations, it must be remembered that it was a government that taught them how.