Treaty of Nanjing

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Treaty of Nanjing was signed on August 29, 1842. It opens with a standard diplomatic preamble from the dominant signatory, Queen Victoria, who, along with her “Good Brother the Emperor of China,” presented this treaty to posterity. This verbiage, while fairly common according to the standards of the day, is remarkable considering that fewer than fifty years earlier, Victoria's predecessor, King George III, had been dismissed as a minor “barbarian” king by Daoguang's predecessor, Qianlong. That the signing took place aboard HMS Cornwallis, a British warship anchored in the Chang River, only added to the ponderous symbolism of the dramatic reversal in power between the British and Chinese empires in the previous half century. The preamble names the Chinese plenipotentiaries Qiying and Yilibu (called Keying and Elepoo in the document and spelled a variety of ways in historical writings) of the Qing court and Pottinger of Great Britain. An additional participant in the treaty was England's Queen Victoria, who signed the treaty and added above her signature and seal a passage in which she pledged that Great Britain would “sincerely and faithfully perform and observe all and singular the things which are contained and expressed in the Treaty.”

Article I

Article I presents the formulaic pledges of peace and friendship between the rival nations that are standard in modern treaties but that strike the contemporary reader as ironic if not hypocritical, knowing that the British would have razed Nanjing had their friends, the Chinese, not accepted the terms. It is important to realize that the British, operating from their own standpoint of Enlightenment rationalism, did not insist on “peace and friendship” with any sense of irony. It was an accepted truth that no society remaining in a “barbarous” state could hope to attain any long-term historical satisfaction, and the British believed that they were bringing enlightenment to a backward civilization.

Article II

Article II names the five treaty ports—Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow-fu (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), and Shanghai—and it provided for the establishment of foreign quarters and consulates in each city. This article is significant because it ended, for the British, one of the more irksome practices of the Canton system. It allowed foreign citizens and their families to live in China legally for the first time in history. It also demanded that British royal trade representatives serve as intermediaries between the merchants and Chinese trade officials. This situation had been a source of confusion after the British East India Company lost its monopoly. When the customary lines of communication between British company men and Hong merchants became unavailable, the Qing court experienced unwelcome pressure to deal equally with British officials.

Article III

Article III provided for the cession of Hong Kong to the British Crown. By 1842 Hong Kong had already been occupied by the British for several years. With the closing of Canton and Lintin Island by Commissioner Lin, British traders established a haven on the sparsely populated island. During an abortive peace attempt made in 1841 by the British trade superintendent Charles Elliot and the Qing official Qishan, Hong Kong had been offered as part of the settlement. That agreement was vetoed by both the Qing emperor, who thought it too generous, and Lord Palmerston, who thought it insufficient. Palmerston was especially dismayed that Elliot had agreed to accept such a worthless island. In retrospect, the acquisition of Hong Kong was one of the greatest triumphs in British imperial history. Within several decades the island was transformed into a bustling entrepôt, and in the twentieth century it became an international center for manufacturing, transportation, finance, and culture. Although the treaty gave Hong Kong to Britain “in perpetuity,” the legal status of the Crown colony would change over the years. In 1860 the British acquired additional territory in neighboring Kowloon and in 1898 even more land; these lands became designated as the “New Territories.” In 1898 the New Territories were leased to Great Britain for ninety-nine years. All of this territory, including Hong Kong itself, was returned to China in 1997.

Article IV

Article IV called for China to reimburse Britain for opium that had been confiscated and destroyed in 1839 by Commissioner Lin. Aside from this article, there are no other direct references to opium anywhere in the treaty, which is unusual considering the fact that the treaty ended an “opium” war. The problem was that opium trade was not legal before or after the war, and the war did not end the trade. Neither the British nor the Chinese were willing to treat opium as legitimate commerce, and contraband opium trafficking would continue until the Chinese Communist Party put an end to it in the early 1950s. This article reiterates that what was really at stake in this war was commercial and diplomatic power. It also indicates that the British possessed the extraordinary leverage to demand reimbursement for a product that was not legal in China or Great Britain. The reimbursement was assessed at $6 million, payment of which was rendered in Mexican dollars, a silver coin of reliable quality that was recognized as world currency in the 1800s.

Article V

Article V ended the traditional Hong system that had vexed the British for so many years. The Cohong, or merchant guild, was now powerless to interfere with free trade in the treaty ports. British merchants operating in these cities claimed the right to do business with anybody they chose. The article also required the Chinese government to pay an additional $3 million to cover the debts of Hong merchants who were in arrears to British merchants. The reason for this stipulation was that while the Canton system was in practice, the Qing court often used Cohong assets as an imperial cash reserve. When the Hong were required to make “contributions” to the court, they were often unable to purchase the commodities that the British had contracted to export. It was not uncommon for the British merchants themselves to cover the Hong on their wholesale purchases so that they could leave with their cargoes.

Article VI

Article VI demanded indemnities for the costs Britain had incurred fighting the Opium War. From the perspective of the post–World War II warfare, in which the victor generally pays for the reconstruction of defeated nations, it seems difficult to imagine a day in which the conquering nation “sent the bill” to the conquered. Nevertheless, this practice was usual in nineteenth-century diplomacy. With thinking rooted firmly in the old mercantilist imperialism of the eighteenth century, it seemed prudent to keep a vanquished people poor; saddling them with war costs and punitive indemnities made it possible to retain them as captive markets. The ultimate folly of burdening the defeated nation with the costs for the war seems to have been one of the great lessons of the World War I, when a global depression made it impossible for nations to make their monetary reparations without causing hyperinflation or when forcing them to do so inadvertently triggered international lawlessness. The present-day practice of having nations rebuild conquered enemies for the purpose of drawing them back into an allied economic bloc may also be an ultimately self-serving strategy, but it is undeniably more humane.

Articles VII–IX

Article VII established the repayment schedule and interest for the $21 million total in indemnities and reimbursements that China had to pay. Article VIII demanded the release of all British prisoners. This clause refers not only to British and Indian military personnel who may have been captured during the war but also to those traders who were incarcerated in the Canton factories during Commissioner Lin's initial shutdown of the contraband trade. Article IX required amnesty for all Chinese who may have collaborated or done business with the British during the Opium War. The British factories employed large numbers of Chinese subjects, many of whom were persecuted as contraband traders during the seizure.

Article X

Article X provided for the publication of fixed tariffs (“duties” or “customs” fees) on imports and exports. The control of tariffs was a vital element of nineteenth-century diplomacy; what made these treaties unequal was the fact that they ensured that tariffs favored the winner. For states that measured their national power in terms of balances of trade, the motive behind imperialism was to secure markets for their domestic manufactured products while reducing the costs of goods purchased abroad. Under the Canton system, it was impossible to predict how Hong brokers might have manipulated customs duties on imports (British goods) or inflated the price of products intended for export (Chinese goods). Requiring the Chinese to adhere to published tariff rates (and in the decades to come, dictating those tariff rates) was the signal achievement of the unequal treaties. It guaranteed the British easy and predictable access to foreign markets.

On the matter of transit duties, which were the fees paid by secondary merchants to bring goods from the port city into the interior, the British demanded here that the Chinese set an upper limit on these fees to keep British goods competitive outside the port cities. The final sentence of Article X contains the words “which shall not exceed.” To make sense, this passage has to be supplemented with the “Declaration respecting Transit Duties,” which is added near the end of the document, after the signature of the Chinese officials. The declaration states that British merchants are obligated to pay “fair and regular tariff of export and import customs and other dues.” It goes on to say that after those customs and dues have been paid, goods could be transferred to Chinese merchants, who again have to pay transit duties to transport the goods. Article X left open the amount of those duties. The added declaration simply concludes that duties “shall not exceed the present rates, which are upon a moderate scale.”

Article XI

Article XI required that British and Chinese officials communicate as equals, avoiding derogatory terms and according due respect to each other's offices. Under the Canton system, British East India officers had had no access to Chinese officials, and as the diplomatic exchanges between Britain and China from the Macartney mission forward show, British officials were treated as tributary barbarians. The historical irony of the insistence on “equality” is that the treaty was manifestly unequal. The lesson of power is vividly clear: As long as one possesses the firepower to destroy an enemy, one can claim as much respect as one demands, suggesting that equality is the last thing a nation employing superior force is actually seeking.

Articles XII and XIII

Article XII states that once Great Britain received its first installment of indemnities, it would withdraw forces from Nanjing but would leave a token force until all payments were made and the treaty ports were operational. Article XIII activated the treaty immediately on the authority of the signing plenipotentiaries, recognizing that it would take time for each nation's sovereign to ratify the treaty personally.