OPIUM WARS

The Opium Wars is the name given to two nineteenth-century wars between China and Western countries. The military confrontations that occurred between China and Britain from 1839 to 1842 are known as the first Opium War. Historians refer to the war that transpired from 1856 to 1860 between China and joint Anglo-French forces as the second Opium War.

first opium war (1839–1842)

Britain had established the East India Company in 1600 in part to gain access to the Chinese market. Thereafter the company enjoyed a monopoly over Britain's trade with China. Given Britain's growing demand for tea, porcelain, and silk from China, trade between China and Britain remained in China's favor down to the early nineteenth century. In order to find money to pay for these goods and cover the trade deficit, the company started to import opium to China in large quantities starting in the mid-eighteenth century. The size of these imports increased tenfold between 1800 and 1840 and provided the British with the means to pay for the tea and other goods imported from China. By the 1820s the trade balance had shifted in Britain's favor, and opium became a major commercial and diplomatic issue between China and Britain.

The opium trade was illegal in China. The Qing state had banned opium sales that were not strictly for medical purposes as early as 1729. But the law was not rigorously enforced. A century later more Chinese people had become opium smokers, which made enforcement of the ban more difficult. By the mid-1830s growing drug addiction had created such serious economic, social, financial, and political problems in China that many Chinese scholars and officials were becoming concerned about the resulting currency drain, moral decay, and diminishment of the military forces' fighting capacity. They argued that China had to ban the opium trade once and for all.

The emperor agreed and in 1838 decided that the opium trade must be stopped. He sent an official named Lin Zexu (1785–1850) to Guangzhou with a special mandate to solve the opium problem. Lin launched a comprehensive attack on the opium trade, targeting users as well as providers of the drug. In his dealing with British opium traders, he used a combination of reason, moral suasion, and coercion. He even sent a letter to Queen Victoria to argue his case. In his carefully phrased letter, Lin tried to appeal to the British queen's sense of moral responsibility and legality. When reason and moral suasion did not work, Lin blockaded the residence compound of the foreign opium traders, including the British superintendent in Guangzhou, to force them to give up more than twenty thousand chests of opium.

The goods from China carried away by your country not only supply your own consumption and use, but also can be divided up and sold to other countries, producing a triple profit. Even if you do not sell opium, you still have this threefold profit. How can you bear to go further, selling products injurious to others in order to fulfill your insatiable desire?…Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused.

Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria, 1839. In China's Responses to the West, edited by Ssu-yü Teng and John King Fairbanks. (Cambridge, 1954), p. 26.

For the Chinese, Lin's actions were about opium. For the British, however, the drug was a key component in their trade with China. Without the profits from opium, British merchants would not be able to pay for Chinese tea and silk, and Britain was prepared even to risk war to continue the opium trade. Because the opium trade was illegal in China, Britain could not officially argue for a war to protect the opium trade. Instead, it claimed that Lin's strong action on opium insulted British national honor. In 1834 the British government abolished the East India Company's monopoly on China trade. This had serious consequences for Anglo-Chinese relations because the chief representative of British interests in China now represented his country rather than the company, so that an insult to the British trade superintendent was now a matter of state. Britain also claimed that it went to war with China to promote free trade.

On these grounds, the full British fleet under Admiral George Elliot, consisting of sixteen warships and four newly designed steamships, arrived in Guangzhou in June 1840. They blockaded Guangzhou and Ningbo and fought their way farther up the north coast, and in 1840 threatened Tianjin, a port city close to Beijing. The Qing court agreed to negotiate, and in 1842 the Treaty of Nanjing concluded the first Opium War. As a result Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, and China was forced to abolish the Guangzhou system on which Chinese trade relations had been based for over a century and agreed to allow the British to trade and reside in four coastal cities in addition to Guangzhou: Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Ningbo. China in addition agreed to pay an indemnity of $21 million to cover the losses claimed by the British opium traders and Britain's war expenses. A supplement to the treaty signed in 1843 extended most-favored-nation treatment (a guarantee of trading equality) to Britain, and the Qing state later granted most-favored-nation treatment to all the Great Powers. The treaty therefore symbolized the beginning of the so-called century of shame for China. Other powers immediately followed suit and forced China to sign a series of unequal treaties. The foreign powers' unequal rights in China lasted until 1943. With the Treaty of Nanjing and the unequal treaties that followed, China lost its judicial and tariff autonomy and other crucial parts of its national sovereignty. Although the nineteenth century was a century of rivalries among major European powers, because of the most-favored-nation clause they continued to be allied against China.

second opium war (1856–1860)

Despite the importance of opium in the war, the drug was not legalized by the Treaty of Nanjing. Although the British negotiators pushed the issue hard at the time, the Chinese authorities simply would not agree. British policy makers realized that as long as opium was illegal in China, their positions could be weakened. Wanting to gain more privileges in China, the British therefore looked for another pretext for war and found one in an 1856 incident involving a ship named the Arrow.

The Arrow was formerly registered in British-controlled Hong Kong but built in China and owned by a Chinese. In October 1856 the Chinese authorities arrested the Arrow's Chinese crew, who were reported to have engaged in illegal activities when the ship was anchored in Guangzhou. But Britain claimed that its national flag had been insulted when the Chinese authorities boarded the ship. Although there was overwhelming evidence suggesting the British flag was unlikely to have been flying, given the British practice that no ship fly its flags while at anchor, the British government decided to use the Arrow incident as a pretext for military action against China. Even before the Arrow incident occurred, the British government had actively sought support from France and the United States for a prospective war on China. The French joined the British on the pretext of the judicial execution of a French missionary in February 1856 in the interior province of Guangxi, which was not yet opened to the West. The Anglo-French forces soon captured Guangzhou and Tianjin, where they—along with the Americans and Russians—reached a series of treaties with the Chinese in 1858. The Treaties of Tianjin contained the following provisions: the opening of ten new treaty ports, including four inland along the Chang (Yangtze) River; the establishment of permanent Western diplomatic missions in Beijing; permission for foreigners, including missionaries, to travel throughout China; the reduction of customs duties to 5 percent and of the likin tax (the internal customs dues that were levied on commodities as they moved from one locality to another) to 2.5 percent ad valorem; and the transfer of the Kowloon Peninsula, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong, from Chinese to British control. China also had to pay both Britain and France an indemnity of eight million taels (about US$ 11 million), and the treaty, by implication, legalized opium.

The Qing court, however, was strongly opposed to the idea of a permanent foreign diplomatic presence in Beijing and refused to approve the treaty. The Anglo-French troops therefore marched to Beijing and looted many Chinese treasures and burned down the Yuan Ming Yuan (the summer palace). Much of the Yuan Ming Yuan's collections later found their way into affluent homes in Europe and onto the European art market. With their troops in Beijing, Britain and France in 1860 secured the Convention of Beijing through which they were able to obtain everything they wanted and more from the Treaties of Tianjin. Tianjin became a treaty port, and France secured the right for Catholic missionaries to own properties in the interior of China.

See alsoBoxer Rebellion; China; Imperialism.

bibliography

Fay, Peter Ward. The Opium War, 1840–1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates Ajar. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975. Reprint, 1997.

Melancon, Glenn. Britain's China Policy and the Opium War: Balancing Drugs, Violence, and National Honour, 1833–1840. Aldershot, U.K., 2003.

Polachek, James M. The Inner Opium War. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

Wong, J. Y. Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.

Xu Guoqi