Large and Yet Weak: The Second Opium War and Self-Strengthening

Act I: The Arrow War and the Burning (Review Question 7)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Second Opium War," pp. 321–322. Reading-guide sentence (p. 321): "Russia, seeing China's weakness, penetrated the Amur River valley, violating the borders agreed to in 1689."

Russia on the Amur

Ebrey begins the war with Russia, not Britain, and the deck follows her (slide D). The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) had kept Russia out of the Amur basin. In the 1850s the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Nikolai Muravyov, moved settlers and soldiers down the river. The Treaty of Aigun (1858) gave Russia the north bank of the Amur, and the Treaty of Peking (14 November 1860), negotiated by Nikolai Ignatiev while Beijing was under allied occupation, gave it the coast east of the Ussuri down to the new port of Vladivostok. Russia gained more territory from the crisis than Britain and France together, without fighting.

A pretext at Guangzhou

Britain wanted the 1842 treaties revised: more ports, access to the Yangzi, and an envoy in Beijing. In October 1856 Qing officers boarded the Arrow, a Chinese-owned lorcha whose British Hong Kong registration had in fact expired, and arrested its crew as suspected pirates (slide E). The British consul Harry Parkes and the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, treated it as an insult to the flag. The French joined, citing the execution of the missionary Auguste Chapdelaine in Guangxi in early 1856. In London the House of Commons censured the government; Palmerston called an election and won it. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 delayed the expedition. At the end of 1857 the allies took Guangzhou and captured its governor-general, Ye Mingchen, who died in captivity in Calcutta in 1859 (slide F).¹

Tianjin, 1858, and the Dagu repulse, 1859

In May 1858 allied gunboats took the Dagu forts at the mouth of the Beihe, and Qing envoys signed the Treaties of Tianjin with Britain, France, Russia and the United States (slide G). They provided for resident ministers in Beijing, ten new ports (including Yangzi river ports as far as Hankou), travel in the interior with passports, protection for missionaries and Chinese Christians, and indemnities of four million taels to Britain and two million to France. One British article banned the character yi ("barbarian") from official Chinese documents about Britons. A tariff agreement negotiated at Shanghai in November 1858 also did something the treaties' text did not: it legalized the import of opium, at a duty of thirty taels a chest. Opium, the cause of the first war, became a lawful import as a result of the second.²

The court never meant to keep the Beijing clause. When the British envoy Frederick Bruce arrived to exchange ratifications in June 1859 and insisted on going up the Beihe, the rebuilt Dagu forts under Sengge Rinchen opened fire. Four British gunboats were lost and several hundred men killed or wounded (slide H). It was the Qing's one clear victory over a Western force in these wars, and it guaranteed a bigger expedition.

The march on Beijing, 1860

In 1860 Lord Elgin returned as British plenipotentiary, with Baron Gros for France. Their armies, about 11,000 British and Indian troops under Lieutenant-General Sir James Hope Grant and about 6,700 French under General Cousin-Montauban, landed at Beitang in August, took the Dagu forts from the land side, and advanced on Tianjin and Beijing (slide I). In September the Qing seized Parkes, Elgin's secretary Henry Loch, and a group of British and French officers, journalists and Indian cavalrymen who had come to negotiate under a flag of truce. After the allied victory at Baliqiao on 21 September, the Xianfeng emperor fled to his summer retreat at Rehe (Chengde), leaving his brother Prince Gong to negotiate.

The French reached the Yuanmingyuan on 6 October, and the British soon after; both armies looted it for days. Then the captives' fate became known: about half of the 39 prisoners had died from mistreatment. Elgin wanted a punishment that would fall on the emperor rather than the people of Beijing. Ebrey reports that the Russian envoy talked the British out of burning the palace in the city, the Forbidden City (p. 322). On 18 and 19 October British troops set fire to the Yuanmingyuan and its neighboring imperial gardens (slides B and J). Elgin was the envoy who gave the order; the army's commander was Hope Grant.³

Ebrey calls the burned site "the entire 10-square-mile complex" (p. 322). The Yuanmingyuan proper, its three linked gardens, covered about 3.5 square kilometers, roughly 1.3 square miles. The larger figure fits only if one includes the neighboring imperial gardens in the western hills that were also burned. Its buildings, libraries and collections had been assembled over 150 years.⁴

The Conventions of Peking and their meaning

Prince Gong signed the Conventions of Peking with Britain (24 October) and France (25 October) (slide K). They ratified the Tianjin treaties, raised the indemnity to sixteen million taels (Ebrey's "16 million ounces of silver"), opened Tianjin itself, ceded the Kowloon peninsula to Britain, and allowed Chinese laborers to emigrate on foreign ships, legalizing the "coolie" trade. The French convention promised the return of confiscated Catholic property; its Chinese text, but not the authoritative French text, added a right for missionaries to rent and buy land in the provinces.

Ebrey's conclusion is that "after 1860 they increasingly saw propping up the faltering Qing Dynasty as in their interest" (p. 322; slide L). The treaties were only worth as much as the government that had signed them. That is why British and French forces helped defend Shanghai against the Taipings in 1862 (Lecture 2). Foreign management of customs had begun at Shanghai in 1854; after 1860 it spread to every treaty port (Pierian Spring, below). In sum, the war took more of China's sovereignty: its ability to set tariffs, exclude envoys and missionaries, keep foreign warships off its rivers and judge foreigners on its soil (slide M).

Act II: Large and Yet Weak (Review Question 8)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Self-Strengthening," pp. 322–323. Reading-guide sentence (p. 322): "He called for hiring a few 'barbarians' to help set up shipyards and arsenals in each major port."

A new court, 1861

The Xianfeng emperor died at Rehe in August 1861, leaving a five-year-old son, the Tongzhi emperor (slide O). Ebrey says that "The child's uncle, Prince Gong, and his mother, Empress Dowager Cixi, served as regents" (p. 322). The real arrangement was more complicated. Xianfeng had named eight regents, led by the Manchu grandee Sushun. In November 1861, as the court returned to Beijing, Cixi, the senior empress dowager Ci'an (Xianfeng's empress) and Prince Gong overthrew them in what is called the Xinyou coup. Sushun was beheaded and two princes were ordered to take their own lives. The two empresses dowager then "listened to government from behind the curtain" as joint regents until 1873, and Ci'an remained Cixi's partner until her death in 1881. Prince Gong became prince-counselor, the leading minister, not formally a regent.⁵ The change of rulers mattered, as Ebrey notes: it let a new group of ministers try new policies.

Feng Guifen's question

Feng Guifen (1809–1874), a Suzhou scholar who had placed second in the palace examination of 1840, fled to Shanghai when the Taipings took Suzhou in 1860 (slide P). There he watched foreign troops defend the city, and in 1861 he wrote the essays later published as Protests from the Jiaobin Studio. China, he noted, was a hundred times larger than France and two hundred times larger than Britain: "Why are Western nations small and yet strong? Why are we large and yet weak?" (p. 322; slide Q).

His answers were practical (slides R–S). Hire a few "barbarians" to set up shipyards and arsenals in each major port. Reward the Chinese managers with examination degrees if their ships and guns matched the foreigners'. Translate Western books on mathematics and science. Ebrey also notes his proposal that officials nominate their superiors by a vote that would actually be counted, a striking idea of accountability within the bureaucracy rather than democracy. The formula later associated with self-strengthening, "Chinese learning as the essence, Western learning for practical use" (zhongti xiyong), was popularized by Zhang Zhidong in 1898, but it captures Feng's position well (slide T).

Institutions: the Zongli Yamen and the schools

In January 1861 the court created the Zongli Yamen, an office for foreign affairs under Prince Gong (slide U). It was supposed to be temporary, and it stayed a committee of officials who held other posts. In 1862 it opened the Tongwen Guan, a school for interpreters in Beijing, which later added mathematics, astronomy and international law. Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law was translated by the missionary W. A. P. Martin and published in 1864. Ebrey notes that by 1880 China had embassies in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Washington, Tokyo and St. Petersburg (p. 323).

Arsenals, shipyards and students

Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang founded the Jiangnan Arsenal at Shanghai in 1865 (slide V). It produced its first steamship in 1868 and housed a translation bureau where John Fryer and Chinese collaborators such as Xu Shou and Hua Hengfang translated more than a hundred scientific and technical works. In 1866 Zuo Zongtang founded the Fuzhou Navy Yard, run by Shen Baozhen with French advisers led by Prosper Giquel, with a naval school attached. Fuzhou's ships and graduates matter for Lecture 4, because the French destroyed the Fujian fleet in front of the yard in 1884.⁶

In 1872 the first of 120 boys of the Chinese Educational Mission, organized by the Yale graduate Yung Wing, sailed for the United States (slide W). They lived with families in New England and studied in American schools. In 1881, alarmed that the boys were becoming too American, and angered by American refusal to admit them to the military academies, the court recalled them. Many later served as engineers, naval officers and diplomats.⁷

Li Hongzhang's projects

Ebrey's table of Li's projects, 1862–1893 (p. 323; slide X), runs from gun factories at Shanghai through the China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company (1872), the Kaiping coal mines, telegraphs, a cotton mill, a naval academy at Tianjin, and the Beiyang (Northern) Fleet, formally established in 1888. Li governed from Tianjin as governor-general of Zhili from 1870 to 1895, and again in 1900–1901. Many of the enterprises were organized as guandu shangban, "official supervision and merchant management." Merchants supplied capital and managers; officials supplied protection, monopolies and political risk. Albert Feuerwerker's study shows how that mix bred both growth and corruption.⁸

Li and others came to see that guns and ships required schools, mines, railways and revenue, and that these required changes in how officials were trained and how the state raised money (slide Y). That recognition is the bridge to Lecture 4's question of why the reforms fell short. Benjamin Elman warns against judging self-strengthening only by the defeat of 1894–1895: by the measure of science, translation and industry, the achievements were substantial.⁹

Pierian Spring: Foreigners in China

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Foreigners in China," pp. 324–326.

The European palaces

The ruins students recognize from photographs of the Yuanmingyuan are the Xiyanglou, the "Western Mansions," built in a European baroque style from the 1740s to the 1760s by the Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione, with fountains engineered by Michel Benoist (slide CC). The most famous fountain had twelve bronze animal heads of the Chinese zodiac; each spouted water for its own two-hour period of the day, and all twelve together at noon. Several heads were looted in 1860, and their return became a political issue in the 2000s. Geremie Barmé's essay on the ruins traces how they became a site of national memory.¹⁰

Treaty ports and concessions

In the larger treaty ports, foreign powers held concessions or settlements with their own municipal councils, police and courts (slide DD). Shanghai's International Settlement, formed in 1863 from the British and American settlements, governed itself through a council elected by foreign ratepayers; Chinese residents, the great majority, had no vote. Ebrey writes that "By 1900 there were one hundred treaty ports" (p. 325). The figure is too high for 1900. The Maritime Customs listed about thirty treaty ports open at the end of 1899; the number passed ninety only by the late 1910s, counting ports China opened on its own initiative.¹¹

The Imperial Maritime Customs

During the Small Swords' occupation of Shanghai's Chinese city in 1853–1855, the British, American and French consuls arranged for foreign inspectors to collect customs duties for the Qing. After 1860 the system was extended to every treaty port. Under Robert Hart, inspector-general from 1863 to 1911, the Customs was a Qing agency staffed at the top by foreigners. It was honest, efficient and a major source of Qing revenue, and its revenue was later pledged as security for foreign loans and indemnities (slide EE).¹²

Missionaries and the Tianjin massacre

After 1860 missionaries could live and buy property in the interior, and the treaties protected Chinese converts (slide FF). Ebrey counts 886 Catholic and about 3,000 Protestant missionaries by 1900, more than half of them women (p. 326). Missionaries ran schools, hospitals and orphanages, and some intervened in lawsuits on behalf of converts, which local gentry deeply resented. Paul Cohen's study of gentry anti-Christian writing remains the starting point.¹³

In June 1870 rumors spread in Tianjin that French Sisters of Charity were kidnapping children for their orphanage and using their eyes and hearts for medicine. On 21 June the French consul, Henri Fontanier, confronted the magistrate, fired a pistol and was killed by the crowd. The mob then killed priests, nuns and other foreigners and dozens of Chinese Christians, and burned the cathedral and other churches (slide GG). Zeng Guofan, sent to settle the case, executed Chinese rioters and paid an indemnity, and was condemned for it by many fellow officials. The episode set the pattern that would explode in 1900: rumor, local fear of converts' privileges, foreign gunboat pressure, and a court caught between them.

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), argues that the protection of the Indian opium revenue was the underlying British motive. ↩

2. The 1858 treaties and the Shanghai tariff rules are in Treaties, Conventions, etc., between China and Foreign States, 2nd ed. (Shanghai: Inspector General of Customs, 1917). On the opium clause and its negotiation, see Wong, Deadly Dreams. ↩

3. James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), analyzes the looting, the burning and the afterlife of the loot in Britain. Erik Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), is a short study of why "civilized" commanders chose destruction. ↩

4. Young-tsu Wong, A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001). ↩

5. Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943–1944), entries for Su-shun, I-hsin (Prince Gong) and Hsiao-ch'in (Cixi). ↩

6. Thomas L. Kennedy, The Arms of Kiangnan: Modernization in the Chinese Ordnance Industry, 1860–1895 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1978); David Pong, Shen Pao-chen and China's Modernization in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ↩

7. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872–81 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011). ↩

8. Albert Feuerwerker, China's Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958); Ting-yee Kuo and Kwang-Ching Liu, "Self-strengthening: The Pursuit of Western Technology," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pp. 491–542. ↩

9. Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), and "Naval Warfare and the Refraction of China's Self-Strengthening Reforms into Scientific and Technological Failure, 1865–1895," Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2004): 283–326. ↩

10. Geremie R. Barmé, "The Garden of Perfect Brightness, a Life in Ruins," East Asian History 11 (1996): 111–158. ↩

11. Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011); Albert Feuerwerker, "The Foreign Presence in China," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 128–207. ↩

12. Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). ↩

13. Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams (1998). The fullest study of the Arrow War, from British and Chinese sources, with the case for opium as its motive.

James L. Hevia, English Lessons (2003). The burning of the Yuanmingyuan and the culture of looting and punishment.

Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (1957). The classic, still stimulating account of the Tongzhi Restoration and the limits of reform within Confucian assumptions.

Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, China's Response to the West (1954). Translated documents from Lin Zexu to Feng Guifen, Woren and Li Hongzhang; good for primary-source slides.

Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms (2005). A revisionist view of self-strengthening science and technology.

Edward J. M. Rhoads, Stepping Forth into the World (2011). The students in New England and their later careers.

Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China (2011). The foreign presence in the treaty ports, told with color and balance.

Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past (2014). The Customs service as a Qing institution.