The Opium War

Where shall we go and get polluted tonight?’ mocked Yang Xianyi, one of the country’s most famous literary intellectuals, down the phone to his friends as propaganda chiefs in the People’s Daily railed against contamination by ‘vulgar individualism

Republic of China, which executes somewhere between 1,700 and 10,000 people every year.

remained as hooked on tea and silk as ever (sales of tea more than doubled between 1842 and 1856; silk imports increased more than twentyfold).29 A return to the bad old days of trade deficit resulted: in 1854, Britain found its balance of payments to China more than £8 million in the red (rising to £9 million in 1857). R

second Opium War. He had complained furiously to the head of the Qing government when he discovered that the characters for ‘Great Britain’ were insufficiently elevated in a Beijing newspaper, and in the early 1890s barged into a debate at the Cambridge Union to spend an hour rebutting a speaker who had suggested that the first Anglo-Chinese War had been anything to do with opium.9

As sinology became an academic discipline in the course of the nineteenth century, the West’s earliest scholars of China – men, one would imagine, who felt a particular sympathy for Chinese culture – sprang mainly from the impatient ranks of those who believed that China needed to be ‘opened’ by the West. Thomas Wade, first Professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge, had been chief negotiator at the close of the sec

The British, it announced, had fought a war to push an addictive, illegal narcotic on the Chinese population. It was, one strand of opinion held, ‘the most disgraceful war in our history . . . we lost about 69 men, and killed between 20,000 and 25,000 Chinese.

In 1845, a harmless wax effigy of the fearsome Lin Zexu was installed in Madame Tussaud’s. Six years later, other Chinese relics – including an entire war junk – were dragged back to England for the curious public to gasp at in the Great Exhibition. In a surely choreographed stunt, at the Exhibition’s opening ceremony a Chinese man – in full mandarin dress – charged out of the crowd and kowtowed to the Queen. One of the visitors to Crystal Palace, Charles Dickens, took the opportunity to sneer at the

know nothing but material profit. They have no other skill than trade . . . no culture, law or education. Nor does England have enough power to capture cities or seize territory in other countries.’

On 16 February, he slowly set out south. ‘I had the good fortune’, wrote a Russian diplomat resident in the capital at the time, ‘to witness his extraordinary departure.
The General was being carried, while some of his retinue travelled in carriages, others on horseback . . . some had bows, others arrows, some carried bed mats, pillows and the like. In Russia, if a man has received orders to carry out an expedition, he just gallops off, but this is not how things are here.18

His tactic was reciprocity: to offer the British so many gifts, compliments and professions of friendship that they would feel too guilty to make war; to disarm them with a full-blown charm offensive. He probably did not know that Elliot’s first personal encounter with Chinese officialdom, back in 1834, had taken the form of two heavy blows over the head. But Qishan’s affectionate manner seemed designed to confound the Briton’s low expectations of dealings with the Qing bureaucracy. In his account of the meeting, Elliot – accustomed to being undermined by Palmerston, snarked at by opium-smugglers and lectured by Lin Zexu – almost purred to find such tender understanding in his Qing negotiator. A ‘perfectly unaffected and quiet’ Qishan received him, he remembered, ‘with great courtesy’. Qishan agreed with all the British complaints against Lin Zexu, and occasionally looked ‘obviously powerfully impressed’ by Elliot’s reasoning. He was, Elliot gushed, ‘one of the very foremost men in this country.’48