A History of the World (73 page)

The true story is just a little different.

For a start, the Qing empire was not tottering. It had a weak emperor and was facing internal revolts, but that was hardly exceptional in Chinese history. The dynasty had ruled China only since 1644, when Britain herself had been in the throes of revolution. Just as Charles I faced his final defeat, the last Ming emperor Chongzhen had hanged himself in his palace as an upstart rival burned the outskirts of Beijing. The capital soon fell to the Manchu coming in from the steppes, northern nomads originally, whose army contained Mongols proud of their forebear Genghis Khan. The Ming empire, though one of the greatest dynasties in China’s long history, had suffered a debilitating financial crisis. After the failure of the old system of money based on strings of copper coins, and then of printed paper money, it had relied on silver, mostly imported. (Money had been at the root of King Charles’s troubles too.) When silver imports dried up, the Ming court had to turn to ever more oppressive taxes.

Since the most powerful and richest groups in China had won exemption, or otherwise dodged payment of their taxes (shades of Louis XVI’s France), the burden fell on the poorer, particularly in the towns. A run of bad harvests and plague epidemics provoked revolts and some major rebellions. The most serious of these was led by Li Zicheng, who called himself ‘the dashing prince’, destroyed some great cities and ended up ousting the last of the Qing before himself being defeated by the Manchu.

Nobody would have bet bad money, never mind good, on the Manchu successfully ruling China. They were ethnically distinct, from beyond the edges of the empire proper. Their heartland was to the
north-west of Korea, but they had built up such a powerful network of alliances and clients – Mongol, Tibetan and some Han Chinese – that they were able to set up in northern China and declare themselves the northern dynasty. After 1644 they appropriated the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ from the Ming and eventually conquered the south, ruling an area very similar in size and shape to modern China. Yet they remained incomers. The Ming, who had sent the famous fleet of war-junks to India and Africa, and then recalled them, and had been responsible for one of the finest flowerings of Chinese art and culture, had been a native dynasty who had defeated the earlier ‘outsider’ dynasty of the Mongol Yuan. How could a band of semi-barbarians seize and run the greatest empire on the planet?

Yet this is what the Manchu did. They did it first by war, displaying terrifying ruthlessness when they took their first major city, and using cannon and cavalry in battles that would have looked quite like those being fought in Europe at the time. They then imposed Manchu dress codes on the conquered Han, plus shaved foreheads and long queues – the caricature ‘Chinese’ look that would soon become famous in Europe. Han and Ming resistance continued for a long time, as did Muslim and other regional revolts; and the Manchu were never fully accepted. But they did reform and improve the Ming system of administration; and under a series of great emperors – Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong – they successfully ruled an increasingly populous and wealthy empire from the 1660s until the opium crisis, through the age of the French and American revolutions and the coming of industrial capitalism. This was a major achievement.

China’s eighteen provinces were ruled by a hierarchy of officials, selected via the savagely competitive system of learning and reciting classic texts. The millions lured to study them would mostly fail their exams, and though the system hardly promoted original thinking, it did produce accomplished and dedicated bureaucrats. Inside the empire, a complex network of state postal routes kept the capital closely informed about what was happening thousands of miles away. The Chinese military forces had fallen behind those of Europe in technical skill, but not very far behind. They had had cannon for far longer than the Europeans, their junk-warships had long experience of defeating the local pirates; and, having put down numerous revolts, the emperor’s armies were battle-hardened. Manchu China was not, in
short, a basket-case. Had the dynasty not been faced with the effects of that far-off industrial revolution, there is no reason to think it would not have continued to grow stronger. It was only doomed because of what had happened in Manchester and Birmingham.

Immediately before the opium crisis, China had had a long-ruling, tough and diligent emperor, one Daoguang, sixth in the Manchu line. He ruled around four hundred million people, the overwhelming majority of them peasants, but including a number of powerful trading cities sending grain, salt, silk and luxuries up and down the country. It was the world’s richest and most populated country, and conducted its business in five languages. In that respect, it was more like the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs than any other. But China under the Qing had no local rivals. There was just China, centre of the world, and weak, supplicant states somewhere out there on the fringe.

This explains the dismissive attitude to the huge British diplomatic mission to Beijing in 1793, led by Lord George Macartney. Gorgeously attired and bringing British woollens, guns, clocks, paintings and musical instruments, and even a hot-air balloon (with keen balloonist attached), Macartney had arrived on a large warship with ninety-five attendants. His expedition had required 2,495 porters to carry it overland. His lordship was shrewd and had negotiated the difficulties of approaching the emperor, including how to dodge the humiliating ‘kowtow’. But his proposal for a permanent British embassy in Beijing and a Chinese one in London, as a prelude to wider trade, was contemptuously rejected. Qianlong accepted George III’s greeting of ‘humility and obedience’, but explained he did not want the gadgets, ‘nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures’.
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For the Chinese, the British were just another minor tribe over the horizon.

Thus, when Commissioner Lin arrived in 1839 to deal with the serious, but local, difficulty of British merchants flooding southern China with highly addictive drugs, he felt he was in a position of strength. He was well aware that the tea trade was good for Chinese growers and merchants, and he was not trying to close his country off entirely.

His brusque way was well captured in a thoughtful but stern letter he wrote to Queen Victoria. He had no idea that opium was legally available in Britain – what a bizarre thought! – and patiently explained
that ‘this poisonous article is manufactured by certain devilish persons in places subject to your rule. It is not of course either made or sold at your bidding.’ He told her to stop the trade and report back to him, promising that if she did so, ‘you will be acting in accordance with decent feeling, which may also influence the course of nature in your favour’. Queen Victoria never got the letter, though it was later published by
The Times
, leading to much ignorant laughter about ignorant foreigners. In fact, a vigorous argument about the iniquity of the opium trade was going on in London; but the complex trade involving tea, silver and cotton too was just too lucrative to give up.

Lin’s great mistake was to threaten force against the foreign merchants in Canton. He began by intimidating the super-rich Chinese merchants who worked with them. Peremptorily, he ordered the British, the Americans and others to stop trading in opium and to hand over all their stock for destruction. When they refused, he had the doors of the ‘factories’ nailed shut, and barred the supply of food. The foreigners found themselves quickly deserted by their servants, some of whom turned up later as part of an intimidating array of Chinese soldiers, to be drilled in front of the merchants’ windows. Gongs were banged all night to keep them awake. This amounted to something between a siege and a hostage crisis, in the wake of which Lin would enjoy an immediate and total success. The British official in charge eventually promised the merchants that the British government would refund their losses, so long as they handed over all the opium Lin demanded. Faced with ruin and fearing for their lives, they agreed. Lin got his opium and destroyed it publicly, with none of the ‘leakage’ of so many modern drugs busts. And the British departed, many of them gathering on ships off Hong Kong.

The problem for Lin was that by involving the British government official who had promised a British refund, he had made this a political challenge, not simply one concerning traders. This made it very easy for the opium lobby in London to whip up the case for war. It is perfectly clear from newspaper and parliamentary debates of the time that many people understood exactly the nature of the opium trade, and why the trade was almost as addictive as the drug itself. The British were tea addicts; their government was addicted to taxes; drug addicts in China were too far away to count. But this hard, unpalatable and amoral argument was now sugared with synthetic indignation
about the outrageous treatment of British subjects – servants of the Crown, no less – and Lin’s impudent threats. Profits? No, this was a matter of pride. Lin did not help his case by demanding that Britain promise to hand over to the Chinese authorities anyone aboard an opium-smuggling ship, which meant death. Lin was undeniably smug about his success, and aggressive towards what he saw as craven British weakness. The Chinese were famously proud.

But so were the British, and the difference was this. The Chinese had an army which, while brave, still used muskets as well as spears and bows and arrows; plus a navy of wooden junks whose cannon were fixed and thus could not be aimed. The British had disciplined modern troops and a navy based on steam-powered gunboats. In the
Nemesis
, a formidable iron paddle-steamer that was almost unsinkable, they had the latest military vessel too.

The war began with complicated provocations, counter-demands, insults and murders, but once the Royal Navy arrived in force off the Chinese coast, it was a one-way affair. Canton’s Pearl River was blockaded. Key ports up the coast, including Shanghai and Nanking, were bombarded and seized. Chinese troops were mown down. Manchu soldiers, who did not believe in being captured alive, killed their wives and children before committing suicide; and peasant militias were torn to pieces by British muskets. By then Lin had been publicly derided by the emperor as ‘no better than a wooden image’, and sacked. The humiliating Treaty of Nanking that eventually followed included a massive indemnity awarded by China to Britain, the opening of five Chinese ports to international trade, the handing over of Hong Kong as a British colony and – yes – the legal continuation of the opium trade. Within two years, a quarter of the boats arriving in Hong Kong were carrying opium.

This was a disaster for the Manchu dynasty, but it was also a disaster for China. The loss of imperial authority was soon challenged by a bizarre cult led by a southern Chinese man who, unlike Lin, had failed his examinations, and who later announced that he was the younger brother of Jesus, and thus the son of God. Hong Xiuquan’s movement, known as the God Worshippers, was particularly aimed at opium addicts. By now, drug addiction had swept China, and addicts who wanted to come off opium were encouraged to commit themselves to a rigorous regime of abstinence. Part proto-Communists, part religious
fanatics, in 1853 Hong’s followers rose in rebellion and seized Nanking, inflicting immense butchery. Hong established a kind of court there that lasted for more than a decade. The long struggles of the Taiping Rebellion, as the God Worshippers’ revolt was called, ravaged central China and are estimated to have caused the deaths of twenty million people, in the single most devastating civil war in human history.

In the midst of this came a second war between Britain, this time joined by other Western forces, and the Manchu empire.

This ‘Second Opium War’ is remembered particularly for the burning of the emperor’s Summer Palace outside Beijing by British troops, in revenge for the grisly deaths of captives in Chinese hands. The Summer Palace was a lot more than a building. It was a vast area of beautiful palaces, pagodas, pavilions, libraries, temples and gardens containing a storehouse of Chinese art, whose devastation was one of the severest cultural wounds inflicted on China by any outsider. This would be the equivalent of an army destroying all of central London’s churches, cathedrals, palaces and museums, or razing the heart of Paris. Lin, who had thought he was bringing a cleaner, brighter future to the Chinese by tackling the scourge of drug addiction, heard nothing of this. He had been pardoned by the emperor and ordered to take on the Taiping Rebellion, but luckily for him he died before the full horror of what he had unwittingly unleashed was known. Modernization has never looked as foul.

Familiar, and Strange

By the 1880s capitalism had drawn in countries all around the world in a dash for modernisation. The imminent First World War would be not only the war of empires, but the first war between well matched capitalist enemies – which is why it would be so horrific. In many ways, the world at the end of the nineteenth century was a reverse image of today’s. Almost all countries except the US and France were still monarchies, not yet republics, while the European powers dominated and Asia lay prone. There were no international institutions of relevance. Racism was almost universal, and considered natural. But in other ways, there were strong parallels with today: the world was
opening up, with much faster communications, major migrations of people and an explosion of inventiveness, producing a new consumer economy which spread between continents.

The most important new fact, following on from faster travel, the introduction of telegraph cables and mass publishing, was simply that ideas spread almost immediately. There were particular centres of inventiveness. Germany, united under Prussian leadership after winning a short, decisive war against France, had a special reputation for engineers, technical schools and ambitious businessmen, and came up with an astonishing range of inventions in a very short period. Nikolaus Otto, who worked mainly in Frankfurt and Cologne, has a claim to be the most influential individual of the nineteenth century for his invention of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine, but he would be driven close by Karl Friedrich Benz from Karlsruhe, whose gas-powered, three-wheeled car, the Motorwagen, was patented in 1885, and who followed it with a stream of bigger, more powerful vehicles; and by Rudolf Diesel, the Bavarian inventor of the diesel engine.