Ch 19 - The Western Foothold in Asia

The Second Opium War

Great Britain, France, the United States and Russia converged on China to impose a new series of treaties known collectively as the Treaties of Tianjin, agreements which confirmed or legalized the status of Westerners in China and set the tone of China's future international relations.

The British Expeditionary Force to China departed London in the spring of 1857, becoming one of the first large groups to travel on the new railway linking Alexandria and Cairo across part of the Isthmus of Suez. Lord Elgin's command arrived in Hong Kong on July 2, where they received news of rioting among native Indian troops in the Sepoy Army of Bengal that been underway since early May of that year. After diverting a large contingent of British troops to India to help put down the rebellion, Lord Elgin's command rode at anchor off Hong Kong for two long months during the height of summer. In September, Lord Elgin received authorization from Lord Clarendon to take Canton by force and spent the next few months working with French Ambassador Baron Jean Baptiste Louis Gros and the French command on the details of their joint operation.

With the arrival of an awaited detachment of British Marines in early December 1857, the British-French Expeditionary Force was in position and ready for action against Canton. On December 12, Lord Elgin and Baron Gros issued High Commissioner Yeh Mingchen a joint ultimatum which deplored the "attitude of hostility and dislike which the people and authorities of Canton have maintained in their dealings with foreigners," and demanded compensation for losses sustained by British subjects within twelve days. Lord Elgin warned Commissioner Yeh the Allies would commence shelling Canton on December 26 if he still refused to agree to the demands.

Yeh Mingchen was an obstinant, calculating politician with a large streak of insecurity who had become trapped in a real dilemma. He knew that China could not hope to defend itself against the British. If he tried to use force against the Westerners, he would likely end up in exile like Commissioner Lin Zexu. If he appeased them, he would incur the wrath of the emperor, public condemnation, disgrace, even exile, as happened to both Qishan and Qiying before him. Commissioner Yeh tried unsuccessfully to walk the fine line of indecision, all the while projecting a face of indifferent arrogance and contempt for foreigners. He remained defiant to the very end and rejected the ultimatum.

British forces entered the Bogue and sailed up the Pearl River to Whampoa, scattering flotillas of Chinese boat dwellers before them on their way toward Canton. British warships sailed past numerous villages that dotted the river banks, some of them utterly destroyed and depopulated either by rebels or previous British attacks. The local villagers seemed generally unconcerned by the British arrival at Whampoa or by the serious threat they posed. To give Canton authorities one last chance to yield and to permit the local population to move to safety, the British held their fire for two more days. Yeh Mingchen stubbornly refused to yield and lost his last chance for a peaceable settlement. Acting in accordance with the Daoist belief that everything works itself out in time, Yeh devoted his time to painting landscape scrolls and refused to even discuss the situation with his military advisors.

Shortly after daybreak on December 28, 1857, British men-of-war opened fire on Canton, beginning a naval bombardment that continued for the next twenty-seven hours. British and French troops went ashore and encountered little resistance from Chinese troops during their march across hilly rice paddy country enroute to Commissioner Yeh Mingchen's residence. What small danger there was came from the throngs of curious spectators in the surrounding hills that watched the advance toward Canton. The following day, British and French troops stormed Canton, took control of the city and captured Yeh Mingchen. Yeh dressed himself with great dignity in his official blue brocade gown embroidered with peacock feathers and his Mandarin cap set with a coral button. In a final act tinged with irony, the High Commissioner was taken aboard the British warship H.M.S. Inflexible along with with his military attaché, two servants and his hairdresser and shipped off to Calcutta, India. Yeh Mingchen's years of struggle with the British, his xenophobia and his many misjudgments resulted in captivity and exile in a foreign land. He continued to paint and write poetry in the finest calligraphy during his exile. Two years later, Yeh Mingchen died in "The Hall Where the Sea is Pacified," and his body was returned to China to be buried with full honors.

The Cantonese gradually adjusted to the presence of foreign occupiers. People returned to their homes and small shops and street vendors reopened for business. Looters, both Chinese and European, had a grand time in the aftermath of the Allied victory at Canton. Laurence Oliphant, Lord Elgin's personal secretary, noted that Canton's population had "a larger proportion of trained thieves and vagabonds than any in the world." Taking Canton was one thing, ruling it was a different matter. Although nearly 5,000 Anglo-French troops were available to control and administer Canton, only two men could speak Chinese. Nevertheless, the Allies established a joint commission to govern Canton with British Consul Harry Parkes as the presiding officer. Ironically, once the British finally entered the city behind Canton's walls, they found the narrow, tortuous streets and crowded living conditions so squalid they voluntarily left the city proper and founded their own communities outside the city walls. The Allies quickly gave up the idea of trying to run Canton themselves and decided to let the Chinese continue to run it themselves under the management of the Manchu governor Bo Gui.

Lord Elgin, Baron Gros and representatives of the United States and Russia, sent a joint communique to the Imperial Court in Beijing demanding that an official representative be sent to Shanghai to negotiate. In February 1858, after the Chinese refused to comply, Lord Elgin decided the only solution was to exercise "a moral pressure of a military description" in the immediate vicinity of the capital itself. Allied forces left Canton and sailed northeast along the China coast, stopping first at Xiamen, then Shanghai near the mouth of the Yangtze River. Since the highest ranking Chinese official in Shanghai was absent on their arrival, the Allies decided to force themselves on the most senior Chinese representative in the area, the Governor of Jiangsu Province, who lived in Suzhou, fifty miles west of Shanghai. No European had ever visited Suzhou and only a few disguised as Chinese or concealed in boats had ever seen the city.

On February 24, an advance party of seventeen boats left Shanghai for Suzhou, winding their way through a maze of shallow lakes, rivers and canals among the reedy marshes of the low-lying Yangtze River delta. The last leg of the journey was made along the Grand Canal, parts of which had been unused for years due to flooding and the Taiping Rebellion which raged back and forth around Suzhou. Enormous imperial grain junks lined the banks of the canal, looking like "so many stranded arks going to decay." The Allied party passed gaudily painted mandarin junks topped with huge umbrellas, large passenger junks, small boats carrying one or two passengers that deftly cut in and out of traffic and lumbering heavy cargo boats that got in everyone's way.

Ignoring a message from Provincial Governor Chaou asking them to remain outside the city walls, the Allies pressed ahead, threading their way in line along the crowded canal into the walled city of Suzhou. Ignoring the frantic yelling and hand signals meant to turn them back, the Allies entered Suzhou to find a city not unlike Venice, Italy, with numerous narrow water lanes diverging in all directions. Crowds of eager spectators lined the waterway, unaccustomed to seeing British, French and American flags waving beneath their very windows. Almost immediately after the boats tied up at a spot under the city walls, a huge crowd collected along both sides of the canal, calmly intrigued by the sight of the Westerners in their midst. The Chinese showed no signs of hostility and behaved with far more respect than an English mob would have under similar circumstances.

A small detail of Chinese troops escorted the Allied representatives to the governor's residence, where Governor Chaou politely greeted them at the door of his audience room. Mr. Horatio Nelson Lay, the twenty-five-year-old Inspector of Imperial Customs at Shanghai, and the only one who could speak Chinese, informed Governor Zhao the senior representatives carried messages from the four allies for the Chinese Prime Minister and hoped he would immediately convey them to Beijing. As the governor opened and read the cover letter, his staff crowded around him trying to read the contents over his shoulders. The attendant publicity surrounding this brief visit was just what the Allies had desired. With the audience over, the Allied party returned to Shanghai.

The impressive fleet of Allied gunboats sailed north from Shanghai on April 10, 1858, crossed the Yellow Sea, rounded the promontory of the Shandong Peninsula and entered the Gulf of Bo Hai. The plan was to sail up the Hai River towards Beijing and intimidate the Chinese into accepting British, French and American treaty terms.

While the Allied naval force sat quietly at anchor in the shallow brown waters off the mouth of the Hai River for nearly a month waiting for reinforcements , the Chinese busily reinforced the Dagu Forts on either side of the river mouth. On May 20, the Allies attacked the two forts and took them without much effort, while small British gunboats steamed at full speed through the boom of spars, chains and rope hawsers that "protected" the river entrance, clearing the way for heavily armed warships to proceed to Tianjin. It was a classic example of gunboat diplomacy that dramatically impressed the local Chinese. Towards evening, crowds of Chinese villagers gathered along the river banks to watch in "awestruck wonderment" as the lead gunboat steamed upriver against wind and tide, "a slight commotion under her stern being the only external evidence to the Celestial eye of the demon that was propelling her." The villagers had the clear impression that the first foreign ships to enter the river were on their way to Beijing to overthrow the Manchus and establish a new dynasty.

The Allied Expeditionary Force landed unopposed in the suburbs of Tianjin, where local Chinese officials provided living quarters at the Temple of Supreme Felicity on the river bank. The British and French missions were accommodated in the temple and other buildings enclosed within the outer wall. The American and Russian envoys occupied rented quarters nearby on the river bank. The countryside around Tianjin was filled with well-tended kitchen-gardens, vineyards and plenty of green vegetation, but the Allies discovered this northern Chinese trading post only slightly less obnoxious than the cities of southern China. Even though locals displayed respectful behavior towards their foreign visitors, the westerners found Tianjin to be perhaps "the most squalid, impoverished-looking place we had ever been in." As Lord Elgin's personal secretary described the city;

"In contemplating the population of Tianjin with a practically commercial eye, the problem is not whether they want clothes, but whether they have money enough to buy them. ... In no part of the world have I ever witnessed a more squalid, diseased population than that which seemed rather to infest than inhabit the suburbs of the city. Filth, nakedness and itch were the prevailing characteristics. The banks of the river swarmed with men who lived entirely on the garbage and offal that were flung from the ships, or were swept up by the tide from the city. ...Cutaneous diseases of the most loathsome character met the eye in the course of the shortest walk, and objects so frightful that their vitality seemed a mockery of existence shocked the coarsest sensibilities. ...As if in ironical allusion to the misery which the living seemed to endure, almost the only pretty spots near Tianjin were the burial places.

Shocked by the rapid advance of the Anglo-French force, Emperor Wenzong hurriedly sent word the Imperial Court would dispatch special representatives to Tianjin to meet with Lord Elgin and Baron Gros. On June 3, China's seventy-three-year-old Grand Secretary Guiliang, and Huashana, the fifty-two-year-old president of the Board of Civil Office arrived in Tianjin and announced they would meet with Allied representatives. A spellbound crowd of Chinese watched the grandiose, colorful parade consisting of twelve sedan chairs, a 150-man Marine honor guard and the British band from the man-of-war H.M.S. Calcutta wind its way through the narrow streets of Tianjin toward the Temple of Oceanic Influences, about two miles outside Tianjin. After greeting the foreign envoys in the temple courtyard, the Chinese led them to a meeting room where the men got down to the serious business at hand.

Lord Elgin announced that he had come with full powers of negotiation from his Sovereign and asked whether Grand Secretary Guiliang held a similar authorization. Guiliang produced an imperial document that conferred him with sweeping powers, but Lord Elgin quickly realized the Grand Secretary had not been provided with the necessary Great Seal of Office. The issue of negotiating authority had always been a sticking point in Chinese relations with the West and to show his displeasure, Elgin immediately stood up and left the meeting. Thoroughly alarmed, Chinese commissioners hurriedly chased after him and requested Horatio Lay to help them reach an acceptable compromise.

High Imperial Commissioner Qiying, whose reputation for "clever diplomacy" and his ability to "manage the unfathomable foreigners," arrived in Tianjin just six days later. From his appointment in 1843 to his retirement in 1848, Qiying operated under a policy of friendship, appeasement and personal diplomacy designed to disarm the suspicions of foreigners, win their confidence and trust, and subject them to a psychological obligation to him personally. Qiying's presence in Tianjin raised an intuitive concern among the British and French that a subterfuge was in the making. Elgin's personal secretary, Laurence Oliphant, once described the inscrutable nature of a Chinese official as a man possessing the most wonderful command of his expression. He can look delighted at the very time he has every reason not to be, all the while maintaining an "expression of imperturbable politeness and amiability when he is secretly regretting devoutly that he can not bastinado [Spanish - to torture someone by caning them on the soles of their feet] you to death." Based on documents taken from Yeh Mingchen's headquarters in Canton, Lord Elgin concluded that Qiying intended to delay and postpone the treaty talks.

Lord Elgin sent Horatio Lay and Thomas Wade to meet with Qiying to prevent him from sabotaging the talks. Although his health had seriously declined during his years in obscurity, the elderly Manchu statesman still retained some of his old sense of style. As soon as Qiying began playing his old game of personal charm, gentle restraint and endless praise, Horatio Lay dramatically interrupted the talks. He presented Huashana with a copy of Qiying's famous memorial of November 1844 and made him read it aloud. This was the document in which Qiying attempted to justify his actions against the British to the more conservative anti-foreign officials in the royal court. Half blind from old age, humiliated and embarrassed in the extreme, Qiying could only respond with tears of shame. Lay and Wade laughed jubilantly, intoxicated with their "victory." Once a strutting peacock who bathed in the limelight of praise during the 1840s for his talent to deal with the foreigners, Qiying lost all sense of honor. No longer able to charm his wary adversaries, he found himself unacceptable to the British. Qiying, one of nineteenth century China's most colorful diplomats, quietly left Tianjin without imperial permission. He was later arrested for his unauthorized leave and returned to Beijing in chains, where he was quickly tried and compelled to commit suicide.

With Qiying out of the way, Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States took full advantage of China's internal conflicts and its preoccupation with the Taiping Rebellion to extract their concessions. The Allies presented their demands to Beijing almost simultaneously and, in an atmosphere of almost certain diplomatic victory, began negotiations with China in earnest. The determined British negotiators focused on four major issues:  a resident minister in Beijing, the opening of new treaty ports along the Yangtze River, foreign travel in China's interior and indemnities. Lord Elgin was convinced that no peaceful solution could be found without abolishing the status of Canton's Imperial Commissioner as China's "foreign minister" and creating a direct diplomatic link in Beijing. Horatio Lay, Lord Elgin's assistant, carried on the majority of the negotiations and steadfastly insisted on this very point. On June 11, 1858, Lay warned the Chinese that unless British terms were accepted that very day, Anglo-French forces would march against Beijing. He threatened, bullied and insulted the Chinese negotiators with regularity, practically overwhelming Guiliang and Huashana with the savageness of his manners. The Chinese negotiators were left no choice but to accede to Britain's desire for diplomatic representation in the Qing capital.

Russia, the only nominal neutral foreign state in China, quietly conducted its own talks with the Chinese. Russian interest in East Asia accelerated in direct competition with British efforts to open China. The 1851 Sino-Russian Treaty of Kuldja (modern Yining), opened Kuldja and Chuguchak (modern Tacheng) to Russian trade. By 1857, Siberia's Governor-General Nikolai Muravyov had sent four major expeditions of tsarist troops into the Amur River watershed in Manchuria to occupy land from which their countrymen had been ejected under the Treaty of Nerchinsk. The Russians used the superior knowledge of China they had acquired through their century-long residence in Beijing to further their aims. By June 13, 1858, Governor-General Muravyov managed to conclude the Treaty of Aigun with Manchu General Yishan, in which China surrendered all Manchurian territory it held north of the Amur River and placed all lands between the Ussuri River and the East Sea in joint possession by the two nations pending further disposition. Russia profited more than the British, the French, or the United States;  it got land.

The 1844 U.S.-China Treaty of Wangxia came up for renewal in 1856 and, accordingly, America's envoy to China, William B. Reed, arrived in 1857 to negotiate such concerns as extending trade, gaining permission for a diplomatic residence in Beijing and extending religious freedom to Christians. Although the United States, a true neutral, had formally refused to participate in exploiting China's internal difficulties, its sympathies were clearly with Britain and France. America eagerly accepted equality of treatment in the wake of the many concessions forced by the territorial aggression of the Anglo-French expeditionary forces.

In a letter addressed to the Imperial Court in early 1858, William Reed detailed the issues he expected to be addressed during the treaty talks. He recounted that Chinese officials had hindered American trade activities in China on numerous occassions and Americans living in the treaty ports had been targets of robbery, assault, even murder, conditions that left the American population both apprehensive and alarmed. Chinese commissioners in the treaty ports repeatedly insulted, put off and refused interviews with American consuls and declined to answer state papers. A letter from the United States Government to the Qing Imperial Court offering to mediate the dispute between China and England in 1857, was suddenly and discourteously returned unanswered with the seals broken. Reed had sent two or three communications to Governor-General Yeh Mingchen asking for an interview with him to discuss mutual interests, but Yeh refused all contact. While Reed emphasized the United States had no wish to go to war with China, he made it clear there were a number of grievances that needed attention. The negotiations were eventually concluded and resulted in the U.S.-China Treaty of Tianjin on June 18, 1858 .

The Allied mission sweated through the sticky summer heat in Tianjin for nearly a month as the talks dragged on. Toward the end of June, as if to mimic the foreign encroachment on China, a locust plague descended on the area. Finally, on June 26, 1858, as locusts swarmed around the city and Britain's patience strained at the breaking point, Lord Elgin's brother, Frederick Bruce, warned the Chinese that if the treaty were not signed by that night, it would have to be signed in Beijing. Sitting with a "cocked pistol" at their heads, the two elderly Chinese statesmen finally concluded a treaty with England and with France the day after. The British Treaty of Tianjin was subject to ratification by the Emperor of China a year from the date of signing .

Taken collectively, the British, French, Russian, and American agreements are known as the Treaties of Tianjin, documents which extended the foreign privileges granted after the first Opium War and confirmed or legalized the status of Westerners in China. The opening of ten new treaty ports from Manchuria to Taiwan and Hainan Island made it possible to penetrate China more extensively than had been allowed under the earlier separate treaties of 1842 and 1844. For the first time in China's long history, foreign shipping was granted passage up the Yangtze River, putting vast new sections of China in direct contact with Westerners. Under the protection of extraterritoriality, foreigners carrying proper passports could travel throughout China from their protected residential enclaves in the treaty ports.

The Allied powers' common goal was to compel China to accept and conform to Western protocols for trade and diplomacy. France, Russia and the United States were granted the right to occasional visits of their diplomats to the Imperial Court at Beijing. The British, who placed great emphasis on compelling the Imperial Court to handle China's foreign relations, acquired the right to establish a diplomatic residence in Beijing, a change that signified an end to the historic tributary relationship between China and other nations. All foreign ministers or ambassadors were to be received as representatives of independent sovereign nations on an equal footing with China.

For the British however, opium remained a principal consideration. Although it was a minor item on the British negotiation agenda, Lord Elgin demanded that China legally permit future imports of opium on payment of a duty. The Chinese, anxious to demonstrate there had been no change in China's objection to the drug on moral grounds, argued for a high import duty to reduce demand. The British, who were determined to keep the price of opium competitive, cut the Chinese rate proposal in half, thereby keeping the new selling price about the same as before. Even though the British Government later argued that China had voluntarily abandoned the prohibition of opium, few who understood China's attitude were deceived. The chief beneficiaries of opening China's treaty ports fell not to Britain's manufacturers, but to the East India Company and the opium merchants. The importance attached to opium's status by the British was demonstrated when they persuaded the American plenipotentiary William B. Reed to repudiate his instructions to accept China's right to maintain prohibition. Thomas Wade wrote ten years later;  "the concessions made to us have been from the first to the last extorted against the conscience of the nation - in defiance, that is to say, of the moral convictions of its educated men."

The greatest impact on China was not the granting of utilitarian rights such as trade, commerce and tariffs, but the granting of new privileges that affected Chinese moral and cultural values. Among the other items settled by treaty was the toleration of the Christian religion and the right to bring missionaries into China. The "toleration clauses" made it possible for Christianity to spread throughout the Celestial Kingdom, thereby setting in motion the further disintegration of existing Chinese institutions and threatening the backbone of China's Imperial system. The Treaties of Tianjin marked the end of China's tributary system and fixed the character of Chinese international relations for the next forty years.