With all the moderate voices out of the picture, there are only two ways this conflict can now go.
The Chinese can drive the British from their shores and clamp back down on trade with the outside world,
or the British can bring this great empire to its knees and force them to trade on their terms.
There could be no other resolution.
When the Chinese emperor dismissed Qishan,
he summoned three men to replace him and take over the efforts against the British.
One was his nephew, who would serve as the main commander.
The other two were officials and military men.
Before they left, one of the officials recommended that they accept peace,
and let the British busy themselves with trade while they modernized and strengthened the Chinese army,
but the Emperor would hear of no such thing. They would take back what had been lost.
Chinese forces now massed around Canton.
Elliot was still there; he had been trying with almost no success
to limit the opium that flowed into the now British-controlled port and the same official who had tried to
reason with the Emperor now reached out to him, hoping that the large numbers of
fresh chinese troops he brought in would give him more leverage at the bargaining
table and perhaps get Elliot to agree to an even better deal than he'd already
offered, but this would not be the case.
And so Elliot started concentrating british forces telling the British and
American merchants in canton to withdraw. By the twenty second of May 1841 the
Chinese were shelling the British factories in town. In the night they
launched fire ships across the river at the becalmed british forces. The great
steamship Nemesis fired up its engines powering out of harm's way.
The fire ships missed the rest of the fleet sailing past and slamming into the
port setting the town on fire. A gun battle took place but, by dawn,
the river was firmly in the hands of the British and the fort guns the Chinese
held or silenced.
Now it was the British's turned to go on the offensive, but that offensive was
halted by a Chinese plea for a truce.
Two days later though one of the Chinese commanders decided to break the truce;
desperation had set in. They launched manned fire ships to try to destroy the
British flee,t but even this would not avail them. In the end, the Chinese paid
an indemnity to the British to not sack Canton, but riots by the peasants,
looting by both the British and Chinese armies, and the complete lack of
resolution on the matters of the opium, trade, and Hong Kong issues meant further
conflict was inevitable.
But as the British withdrew to regroup at Hong Kong, a typhoon hit.
The cutter Elliot was on was smashed
leaving him swimming with the flotsam. He began swimming hard for Hong Kong when
over the horizon he saw sail.
It wasn't a British sail, it was the battened sailof a Chinese war junk.
He knew he had to swim for his life. Hong Kong was right in front of him,
all he had to do was make it.
Exhausted he dragged himself onto the shore, only to be greeted by the news
that actually he was fired, he'd been fired four months ago.
It was 1841, getting news halfway around the world still took a while.
And the men who replaced Elliot were far less open to
finding common ground with the Chinese. They were here to expand the rights of
the British Empire by any means necessary.
The war would no longer be interrupted by truces, ceasefires, and talks of peace.
And thus, the British began on their campaign north and east,
capturing fortresses on their way.
Each fortress wasn't just a victory in its own right, but a threat to the
emperor in Beijing. Each fallen citadel was another jumping off point that the
British now held, ever closer to the Chinese capital. And this time there
would be no returning land, there would be no giving back territory unless all
British demands were met. These islands and fortresses the British captured
would be held hostage
not to be relinquished as a sign of good faith or as a part of an agreement to
reach a peace but only in exchange for the ransom the government back in
England demanded. As they took these fortresses though the British found a
strange thing: everywhere they went,
next to the cannon, in the guard towers, they would find opium pipes.
The Chinese resistance was weakened by the very drug they were supposed to
be fighting against. From the officers all the way down to the enlisted men
much of the army was addicted to the drug. The British forces, on the other
hand, were a mixture of discipline and severity, the new British commanders saw
themselves as the civilized force in the conflict, and forbade looting on the pain
of death, and even prevented their soldiers from cutting off captured
prisoners' queues for trophies. But when one of their soldiers was kidnapped and
beaten during a resupply mission
they had no problem burning several of the nearby villages in retaliation, as
if they could train the population through punishment. As the winter of 1841
to 1842 passed into spring, and Chinese attacks became even more desperate, the
retaliation simply became more brutal. But their advance pressed on.
By the middle of June, Shanghai was taken and then, in July, Zhenjiang,
where we get a prelude of what's to come with the Manchu commander turning on
the Chinese populace, illustrating the cultural and racial divides that would
tear China apart over the next 60 years. After securing Zhenjiang, the British
finally moved on to Nanking. Both sides knew this would be the final showdown
the British wouldn't have to seize the capital at Beijing because Nanking stood
at the entrance to the Yangtze, the river which was the heart of China.
It was the superhighway down which all trade to the capital flowed. if Chinese
If Chinese access to the Yangtze could be cut off the capital would starve and much of the
kingdom would be in chaos.
So it all came down to this. It all came down to the capture of Nanking.
But there would be no great showdown,
no final battle, because the Emperor finally began to realize that he was
beaten and that if they lost Nanking there would be no negotiation, only surrender.
So better to negotiate while he still could. He sent an official down to talk
to the British; at first talks went nowhere as the British demanded that the
official be given authority to make binding deals for his government, the
lack of which the court in Beijing had taken advantage of in prior negotiations
to get out of treaties made by other officials. Cultural misunderstandings and
attempts to delay as long as possible by the Chinese officials delayed the
process slightly further but by the middle of August, under imminent threat
of attack on the city, negotiations commenced. In the end though, despite
technically holding Nanking, it was clear who had all the leverage,
whose gunboats could impose their will if negotiations failed, and the Chinese
ended up conceding on nearly every point. The six million that Elliot had asked for
now became 21 million and the amount was granted. A number of new ports for trade
were opened up. The old Cohong monopoly was abolished and tariff rates were to
be agreed upon rather than set by the sovereign Chinese government.
The islandof Hong Kong was ceded in perpetuity to the British and the British subjects
would operate there under British law, completely free from Chinese jurisdiction.
And British consulates were established at the treaty ports.
The only two things that the Chinese didn't concede on were Christian
missionaries, which were such a touchy subject that not even the British
delegation tried to bring them up, and opium, the Chinese government refused to
legalize opium.
Even though the British representatives tried to
lean on them to do so, even though they had no power to prevent its sale,
they steadfastly refused to legalize the drug.
This would eventually lead directly to the Second Opium War, a conflict which
plays out shockingly similarly to the first, at least in the broad strokes, but
this time with most of the major colonial powers involved.
These two wars and the treaties which followed them will go down in Chinese
history as the "unequal treaties" and began what will later be labeled by the
communist government as the "century of humiliation."
While at the time they may have seemed just a part of a larger destabilization
and realignment of the country as a whole, they have since been seared into
the Chinese consciousness, and to this day are conjured whenever dealings with
the West take a turn for the worse. They are used as a milestone, a measuring
marker for how far the country has come in the last a hundred and fifty years and
as propaganda to remind everybody of that fact.
And while these wars have perhaps the lowest casualty count of any of the
conflicts that Extra History has covered to date, they have had a profound impact
on global politics and global understanding all the way to today.
The Opium Wars are long over but their effects linger in significant ways.
See you next time.