Treaty of Nanjing

Context

At the end of the seventeenth century, China's contact with Europeans was limited mostly to waterfront trade with British, Dutch, and Portuguese merchants in a few cities on China's southeastern coast. The port cities of Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen) and Zhoushan had been open to foreign trade since 1683 and were fairly independent in the way they conducted their affairs. Foreign trade was managed by a guild of merchant brokerage firms called the Cohong. The individual firms, or Hong, were licensed by the Qing Empire to buy and sell merchandise and worked through an imperial trade supervisor (the Hoppo) to ensure that the court received its revenues. The enforcement of commercial regulations and tariff payments by the Hong was irregular and usually self-serving, frustrating Western traders.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, Great Britain was the dominant European trading power in China, and its merchants became strident in their demands for greater access to Chinese markets and regulation of the arbitrary practices of the Cohong. The British East India Company, which owned the British monopoly on Asian trade, asked repeatedly for standardized tariffs and tried to secure for its employees the right to reside in China and to receive treatment equal to their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government refused such petitions and generally showed little willingness to cooperate with foreigners. In 1741 HMS Centurion, commanded by George Anson, put into Canton after sustaining damage at sea. Anson's efforts to get his ship repaired turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. In 1759 an East India Company trader named James Flint asked the Chinese government to reform corrupt Hong practices and to open additional ports in northern China. In response, Qing officials sentenced Flint to three years in prison and placed even greater constraints on maritime trade. After 1760 the Chinese rigidly enforced the “Canton system,” which restricted all foreign trade to the port of Canton and then allowed it only during the “trading season” between October and March.

As prodigious consumers of Chinese porcelains, silks, and tea—especially tea—and as proponents of the modern ideal of free trade, the British came to consider the Canton system intolerably restrictive. Besides being shackled by managed trade, the British were also being bled by Hong brokers of their precious silver reserves. By 1800 British merchants were paying £3.6 million in silver for Chinese tea. The great imbalance of silver payments represented an enormous burden to a treasury already strapped with the administration of a growing empire.

With the hope of stopping the silver drain and fixing the structural problems of the Canton system, the British government sent Lord George Macartney to China in 1793 to negotiate a comprehensive trade agreement. The British hoped to persuade the Chinese to purchase more British manufactured goods and to open an embassy in Beijing. The Macartney mission turned out to be a colossal failure. Macartney violated protocol by refusing to kowtow (bow down) before Emperor Qianlong, and the Chinese made clear that they had no particular desire for British manufactured goods. In what has become one of the most famous rejections in history, Qianlong refused Macartney all his requests and sent the British delegation home. Nevertheless, the relationship between Great Britain and China would change quickly and dramatically. Fewer than fifty years after Macartney was rebuffed by the Qing court, British ships were attacking Chinese cities at will and dictating the terms of surrender. The opium trade would bring about this radical reversal in power.

Undaunted by Qianlong's refusal, the British decided that if the Chinese did not want British products, they would find a suitable replacement. As an alternative to manufactured goods, the British turned to opium. Because the British East India Company was governing India by 1800, it also controlled India's poppy fields and could produce as much opium as it needed. Opium use had been illegal in China since 1729, but in the 1760s the British began smuggling small amounts of the drug into Canton. After the Macartney mission, the British began to increase their shipments. Between 1760 and 1830 the number of chests sold in China went from fewer than one thousand to more than twenty thousand per year, and it is estimated that by 1838, there were nearly two million Chinese addicts. When the Hong were ordered by Qing officials to ban all opium transactions in Canton, the British simply moved the enterprise offshore to Lintin Island. In time, besides creating a public health crisis, the opium trade created an economic crisis as well. Not only were the British able to redress the imbalance of payments, but they also had forced the Chinese into circumstances in which they were the ones bleeding silver. This situation worsened after 1834, when the British government lifted the East India Company's monopoly and new British “entrepreneurs,” competing with Americans, brought even more opium into China. By 1836 the Daoguang Emperor was desperate for a solution.

In 1838 the emperor appointed an imperial commissioner, Lin Zexu, to “fix” the opium problem. Commissioner Lin employed a number of tactics: moral exhortations, stiff punishments, confiscations of opium and pipes, and even a letter to Queen Victoria asking her to bring moral pressure to bear upon the scourge of opium selling. None of these measures was completely successful. Finally, Lin went after the source of the problem: the British traders in Canton, who were known to have stockpiled opium chests in their waterfront factories. When the British refused to turn over an opium merchant named Lancelot Dent to Commissioner Lin, Lin ordered the confiscation and destruction of three million pounds of opium, shut down the waterfront entirely, and ordered the British out of Canton.

Lin's actions were interpreted by the merchants as an affront to free trade, a theft of private property, and an insult to the British Crown. So incensed were the British that they sent a punitive expedition of sixteen warships to China in the summer of 1840. In a series of one-sided engagements along the Chinese coast between 1840 and 1842, British naval and amphibious forces overwhelmed the Chinese defenses. In 1842, as steam-powered warships anchored in the Chang River threatened to destroy the city of Nanjing, the Qing accepted the British terms of surrender.