Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 15

Canton and Tianjin

Ye Mingchen is sure the foreigners will go away as they did before; instead Lord Elgin takes Canton, ships Ye to India, and sails north to force a treaty at Tianjin. The episode follows Elgin to the treaties that opened the Yangtze and the interior, and Qiying, the man who made peace in 1842, called back from disgrace to charm the British once more and destroyed by his own secret memorials, and asks what the treaties of 1858 took from the Qing. It is told almost entirely through British and American officials and scholars; no Chinese voice on these events is in the sources yet.

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Transcript

Last time we watched a quarrel over a small boat turn into a war. The envoys of Britain, France and the United States had asked Canton's governor general, Ye Mingchen, to talk about revising their treaties, and he had replied that he unfortunately could not find time to meet them. Then, in October 1856, Qing soldiers boarded a Chinese owned boat called the Arrow, which flew a British flag, hauled the flag down and carried off her crew. Harry Parkes, the young British consul at Canton, demanded a public apology for an insult to the flag, and within weeks British guns were firing on the city and Britain was at war with the Qing empire once again. In London the House of Commons voted the war unjust, by two hundred and sixty three votes to two hundred and forty seven, and the prime minister, Palmerston, answered by calling an election on China and winning it in a landslide. So the government sent out Lord Elgin, with orders to demand reparation and, among other things, the right of the British envoy to live in Beijing and write directly to the high officers there. And then, before Elgin could fire a shot, his troops were taken away from him. A great rising had broken out against British rule in India, and the regiments meant for China were sent there instead, where they proved indispensable in the bloody siege of Delhi. Elgin himself sailed to Calcutta to help, leaving his own war on hold, and wondering in his letters home whether anyone would think him mad. That is where we left him. Now he comes back. By the autumn of 1857 Elgin was at Hong Kong again, and his French partner had arrived to join him: the envoy Jean-Baptiste Gros, a baron and a career diplomat, with a French squadron and French instructions. France had its own grievance: a French missionary had been murdered, and the French envoy was told to lay special stress on getting reparation for it. So this is the story of how two envoys who had spent a year waiting finally moved, and how fast everything happened once they did. It runs from the walls of Canton, stormed by British and French troops, to a temple outside Tianjin, and it ends with the man who negotiated the Treaty of Nanjing being told it was the emperor's will that he put an end to himself. Let's start with the man on the other side of the table, who did not believe there would be a table at all. Ye Mingchen had been the governor at Canton in 1849, when the British last demanded entry to the city and then let the matter drop, and the emperor had rewarded him for standing firm. As far as Ye could see, the lesson of the last ten years was simple. The foreigners shouted, they threatened, and in the end they went away. On 12 December 1857 Elgin and Gros sent Ye their notes at the same moment, one British, one French. Elgin's note declared that the governments of England and France were united in their determination to seek, by vigorous and decisive action, reparation for past wrongs and security against future ones. Elgin demanded the entry to the city that the old treaty had promised, and compensation for British losses. An answer accepting the terms had to be sent within ten days. Gros added his own demand, a payment in money for the family of the murdered missionary. And so that nobody inside the walls could say they had not been told, the two ambassadors issued a joint proclamation warning the people of Canton that their city would be attacked if satisfaction was not given within ten days. Think about how this looked from Ye's yamen, the walled compound that was both an official's office and his home. A yamen was the seat of any Chinese official, from a county magistrate to a governor general, with courtrooms, offices, clerks' quarters and the family's living rooms all inside the same walls. Ye had been told for years that the barbarians at Canton were a nuisance to be managed, not an army to be feared. He had won before by simply refusing to move. So he did nothing, or almost nothing. He wrote back to Elgin, and the reply contested absolutely the right of the British to enter the city of Canton. The treaties of 1842 and 1843, he wrote, must remain as ratified by the late emperor, which was a polite way of saying that he had nothing new to give. Elgin, anchored in the river, was not impressed by the letters, and he was even less impressed by what he heard about how Ye was making his decisions. He wrote home that Ye's second letter was even more twaddling than the first, and that people said the governor general spent all day sacrificing to an idol of the God of Physic, which held a stick that traced figures in sand, figures in which Ye read his fate. This was a kind of spirit writing, an old Chinese practice in which a stick or stylus moving over sand was believed to write messages from a god. Whether Ye's god told him the foreigners would leave, nobody recorded. But he behaved exactly as if it had. The ten days passed.

Before we get to the guns, it is worth asking why Elgin was at Canton at all, because Canton was not where his instructions pointed him. The war Elgin had been sent to win would be decided in the north, near Beijing, where the emperor could actually feel it. But it was winter, and the river leading up toward Tianjin was frozen. So, anxious for some kind of productive action, Elgin joined the French in bombarding and then occupying the warmer southern city of Canton instead, to show the court what his ships could do. That is the cold arithmetic of it. Canton was where the quarrel had started, and it was also simply the city he could reach. Elgin did not like it. In letters home over these weeks he wrote things that a British envoy was not supposed to write. He noticed how poor the people around his ships were. The French admiral sent some casks of damaged biscuit ashore at Whampoa, and there was such a rush for it that some people, he believed, were drowned. The ships, he wrote, were surrounded by boats filled chiefly by women, who picked up orange peel and offal and everything else thrown overboard. One of the British gunboats ran aground within a stone's throw of Canton itself, and the officer in charge had the nerve to call on a crowd of Chinese standing on the quays to pull her off, which they at once did. Elgin's comment on that was short: "Fancy having to fight such people!" Read that line twice. It is a joke, but it is not a cheerful one. He meant that these were not enemies; they were people who would help a stranded foreign gunboat off the mud on the eve of being shelled by it. On Christmas Day he wrote that he was anchored within two miles of a great city, "doomed, I fear, to destruction, from the folly of its own rulers and the vanity and levity of ours." He was homesick, too, and he said so. He remembered the cold snowy Christmas of the year before at home in England, and wrote that this one found him separated from his family by almost as great a distance as is possible on the surface of the globe. Even the ship would not leave him in peace. That morning they had moved farther up the river and dropped anchor from the stern, and he complained that for hours the clanking of a ponderous chain cable over his head had nearly shaken his brains out of their place. Hold on to that phrase, the folly of its own rulers and the vanity and levity of ours, because it is about as honest a summary of this whole war as anyone wrote at the time, and it came from the man running it. And then, having written it, he gave the order anyway. The allies sent a final summons giving notice that the city would be attacked after forty eight hours. Early on Monday, 28 December 1857, the ships of the two fleets opened their bombardment of Canton. Elgin was woken at six in the morning by a cannon shot, the start of a bombardment that went on for twenty seven hours. At noon that first day he wrote: "We have been throwing shells, etc., into Canton since 6 A.M., without almost any reply from the town. I hate the whole thing so much, that I cannot trust myself to write about it." Without almost any reply. That is the detail that troubled him. The city's guns were barely firing back. A city that does not shoot back is not a fortress. It is a target, and Elgin knew the difference. While the ships fired, troops went ashore. The landing force numbered five thousand six hundred and seventy nine men: on the British side eight hundred infantry, two thousand one hundred marines and one thousand eight hundred and twenty nine sailors, and nine hundred and fifty French sailors. And one more group went with them that is easy to forget. Chinese porters hired by the British carried the ammunition, on the day of the assault, right up behind the attacking columns, under fire. Think about that for a moment. Chinese men carried the powder and shot that British troops fired into a Chinese city, because they had been paid to. On the twenty ninth the troops attacked the wall on the northern part of its east front, and by two in the afternoon the northern part of the city was firmly held. Elgin wrote that day that the horrid bombardment had ceased, and that the allies were in occupation of Magazine Hill, at the upper part of the city, within the walls. On 2 January, looking back over the week, he found he had been wrong about one thing. Much less damage had been done to the town than he expected, because the fire had been confined to certain spots. The cost, set down later, was around four hundred and fifty Chinese casualties against some one hundred and thirty British and French. For a city of Canton's size, that was a small toll, and Elgin took some comfort from it. But the allies now sat on a hill inside the walls of a city of perhaps a million people. And they had no clear idea what to do next. Then came a strange pause. Ye, still the head of the government, proposed no terms, either for peace or for the safety of his city, and its people gave no sign that they knew anything was expected of them. The allies held the northern part of the city, but, as a year before, no one offered submission. On 5 January 1858 British redcoats and French bluejackets marched down into the city to finish the job. And the first thing on their list was to find Ye Mingchen.

The allies had decided that to bring matters to a settlement, hands had to be laid on the responsible head of the government. That meant Ye. Nobody wanted the job more than Harry Parkes, the consul whose demands over the Arrow had started all of this. Ye was his old enemy, and Parkes took a personal pleasure in hunting him down through the narrow streets of the city. In his own words, "Ye was my game". So a detachment of British troops, guided by Parkes, went looking for the man who headed the government. They found him hiding in the yamen of the city's Tartar General. The Tartar General was the commander of Canton's Manchu garrison, the hereditary soldiers of the banners who guarded every great city of the empire for the dynasty. A British correspondent who was there reported finding "a very fat man contemplating the achievement of getting over the wall at the extreme rear of the yamun". He did not get over it. The prey had been sniffed out, and Parkes had his game. It was Ye. After six years of refusing to meet foreign envoys, Ye was in a position where he could no longer avoid them. Now the allies had to decide what to do with him. Keeping him in Canton was dangerous; as long as he was there he was a rallying point. After a conference with Gros and the admirals, it was decided to send him to Calcutta. The British put the decision politely. There were, they said, strong motives of policy in keeping him, during his temporary exile, in some place where he could be treated with the consideration due to his rank. Temporary exile. It was not temporary. A governor general, one of the highest officials in the empire, was now a prisoner of foreigners, to be shipped wherever they chose. Ye was taken aboard a British warship and carried across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta, the capital of British India, where he was kept in a house under guard. He lived there just over a year. On 10 April 1859 he died in exile. His body was sent back to Canton on a steamer called the Fiery Cross, and was received by the people with no apparent mark of interest. In Canton people had already made up their minds about him. A mocking rhyme went round the city that he would not fight, would not make peace, would not defend; would not die, would not surrender, and would not run. Ye saw himself differently. In Calcutta, it was said, he compared himself to Su Wu, the loyal envoy of the ancient Han dynasty who was held captive for years among the nomads of the steppe and never bowed to them. I find that last detail almost unbearably sad, and very revealing. Here was the man Palmerston had accused of executing seventy thousand of his own people in a single year, and his city barely noticed his coffin come home. Part of the reason may be that Canton had its own memories of Ye, and they were not fond ones. In the years before the war he had run a gruesome program of executions of suspected rebels in the city, and the allied occupation, quite unintentionally, put an end to it. So the governor general the foreigners carried off left behind a city that was, in at least one grim way, safer without him.

With Ye gone, the allies held a great Chinese city and had no idea how to run it. None of them could read its documents. Almost none of them could speak to its people. And they could not stay forever. Their answer was clever, and it was new. They kept the governor of Guangdong province, Bogui, and decided to restore him to the government of his province and of the city, but tethered by a string, one end of which was in the hands of a commission representing the allies. A commission of three members was appointed to hold that string: a British colonel, Thomas Holloway, a French naval captain, Martineau des Chenez, and, last but not least, Harry Parkes. In practice only one of the three mattered. Parkes alone knew the Chinese language and the Chinese way of doing business, and so he was practically governor of Canton. Pause on that for a second. A British consul not yet thirty years old was running one of the largest cities in Asia, through a Qing governor who signed what he was told to sign. And Canton would stay under foreign control for nearly four years. It was not a comfortable rule. To keep order in the streets, the commission had a patrolling force of one hundred English and thirty French soldiers. And the governor they had restored did not stay tethered for long. Parkes complained that Bogui was playing off the braves and villagers against the allies as of old, and that the consequence was that no one was safe a mile from the city. The braves were local militia, bands of armed men raised and paid by the gentry of the villages around Canton, and they had been fighting foreigners on and off since the first war. So the allies held the walls, and the countryside held the allies, and Parkes sat in the middle trying to make it work. Still, for those who lived inside the walls, something strange had happened. The proclamations still went up in the governor's name, the courts still sat, the taxes were still collected, and behind all of it, reading every document, sat a young Englishman. It was a model foreigners would come back to: let the Chinese officials keep their seals and their robes, and let the foreigners hold the string. But Canton was never the real prize. Everyone involved knew that the decision would come in the north.

While Parkes took over Canton, Elgin turned his attention to Beijing. And here something interesting happened. He was not alone anymore. Britain and France were at war with the Qing. The United States and Russia were not; both had sent envoys to China who were officially neutral, but who wanted new treaties just as much as the British did. The American envoy was William Reed, a lawyer from Philadelphia. The Russian envoy was Count Putyatin, an admiral who had already spent years trying to open Japan. Putyatin had already tried the polite way. He had asked to go to Beijing by land, and been refused; then he sailed to the mouth of the river below Tianjin, and was told he could not pass. That refusal, he said, gave him just cause to join the others. So the four envoys, British, French, American and Russian, agreed to send their notes to Beijing at the same moment. The notes were drawn up and signed on 11 February 1858. Elgin's note declared that the envoys intended to go north to Shanghai and were ready to negotiate there, if Chinese plenipotentiaries presented themselves before the end of March. And if no one came, Elgin reserved the right to have recourse to further measures. Nobody in Beijing could have missed what that meant. Notice the timing. By the end of March the ice would be gone from the northern rivers, and the gunboats could go north. The Russian note made the case in a different way. All the troubles of the past, it said, might have been avoided if the foreign powers could have communicated directly with the high authorities at Beijing. That was the heart of it. For a hundred years Western trade had been confined to Canton, and the court in Beijing had left the foreigners to its officials there. Even the neutral American made it plain that if the Chinese delayed, he would go on, either alone or with the other envoys, nearer to Beijing. The envoys sailed to Shanghai and waited. The answer that came back from Beijing told them to go back to Canton and deal with the new governor general appointed there to replace Ye. It was the same answer the court had given foreigners for a century. Go back to Canton. It is easy to laugh at that answer, and many British officers did. But think of it from the court's side. Every concession that let foreigners talk directly to Beijing would put them inside the walls of the emperor's own world, and the court was not ready to imagine that. But Canton was now under Harry Parkes. The court was sending the envoys back to a city the envoys themselves were running. So instead of going south, they went north, to the Gulf of Bohai, the shallow sea off the coast closest to Beijing, and in April 1858 their ships gathered off the mouth of the river that led up to Tianjin.

The river's mouth was guarded by the Dagu forts, a line of earth and stone batteries on both banks, the gate to Tianjin and, beyond it, to Beijing itself. For weeks the allied ships waited off the bar while letters went back and forth and the court sent officials who had no power to agree to anything. On 17 May Count Putyatin reported that the court still would not admit the envoys, and remarked that it seemed not to understand the perilous position in which it had now placed itself. A commissioner with full powers never came. At eight in the morning on 20 May 1858, a joint ultimatum was sent ashore demanding the surrender of the forts within two hours. Nobody surrendered. At eight minutes past ten, the fleet attacked. The forts had been built to withstand small calibre fire from coastal pirates and Chinese rebels, and the gunners inside were largely unprotected from British and French shells. Here is the first scene of this war in the north, and it is a fast one. A boom had been laid across the channel to block it. The British gunboat Cormorant, her crew lying flat and hugging the deck, built up to full speed and smashed, shuddering, through the boom. But the gunners in the forts had set their aim high, not expecting an attack at low tide, and most of their shots whistled harmlessly through the ships' rigging. Then the landing parties went in. As the marines and bluejackets stormed the defences, shrieking and whooping and firing their muskets, the defenders turned and ran. By noon the forts on both banks of the river were in allied hands. The forts that were supposed to keep the foreigners away from the capital had not held out for even two hours. Afterward the invaders counted five hundred Chinese troops dead, while the rest of the roughly three thousand men who had defended the forts had scattered. In one fort they found the body of its commander. He had cut his own throat in defeat. That was not madness. A Qing officer who lost the post he was given to hold faced disgrace and punishment, and for some, death by their own hand was the honourable way out. Elgin was not impressed by everyone on his own side. He judged that the French had blundered a good deal with their gunboats, and then contrived to get blown up by setting fire to a powder magazine. And then the victors did what victors in this war always did. They looted. The joint forces stripped the forts, filling their ships with money, with food, and above all with the heavy brass cannons cast in the reign of the present emperor, which were the real prize. The governor general, Tan, was degraded for the loss of the forts. The road to Tianjin was open. The gunboats steamed up the river, and within days the allied envoys were in the city, a few days' march from the capital.

Before we follow the envoys into Tianjin, I want to take you a very long way north, because something happened there in these same weeks that would shape the map of Asia for good. Far beyond Beijing, beyond Manchuria, runs the Amur, a great river that winds for thousands of kilometres through forest and steppe to the Pacific. For nearly two centuries the Qing and Russia had agreed that the lands on both sides of it, north to the mountains, belonged to China. That agreement was the Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed in 1689, when the Kangxi emperor was at the height of his power and the Russians were far from home. In the 1850s the man who decided to change it was Nikolay Muravyov, the governor general of Eastern Siberia. He had spent years sending Russian settlers, soldiers and boats down the Amur, building posts on land that was legally Chinese, and daring the Qing to stop him. And that spring the Qing were in no position to stop anyone. With British and French guns at Dagu, the court was not in a position to deny Muravyov anything he might ask. So Muravyov met the Qing general for the region at the little town of Aigun, on the Amur, and the treaty of Aigun was signed at the end of May 1858. The man who signed for the Qing was Yishan, the same imperial kinsman who had failed to drive the British from Canton back in 1841. By its terms the whole territory on the north bank of the Amur, from where the Argun river joins it all the way to the Amur's mouth on the sea, was recognised as Russian. That was a vast belt of land, forest and river and mountain, taken without a battle. And the treaty went further. The land between the Ussuri river and the sea, the coast running south toward Korea, was to be held in common by the two empires until the frontier was settled. Held in common did not last. By 1860 that coast had become a Russian province too. On it the Russians built a port they named Vladivostok, Ruler of the East. For this Muravyov was made a count and given a new name, Amursky, the man of the Amur. That year the post he had built on the north bank, where the Zeya meets the Amur, was renamed Blagoveshchensk, the town of the Annunciation, a name that announced exactly what had happened. Notice how quietly this happened. There was no fleet, no bombardment, no letters home about how much the envoy hated it. While the British and the French fought for ports and an envoy in Beijing, Russia simply took a country's worth of land, and its own envoy sat with the others at Tianjin asking for a treaty as a friend.

Now back to Tianjin, and to the man I think of as the saddest figure in this episode. His name was Qiying. If you have listened from the start of this season you know him. He was the imperial kinsman, a member of the ruling Manchu clan, who was appointed in August 1842 to negotiate the Treaty of Nanjing that ended the first war. He was the man who made that peace work: he drank cherry brandy with the British aboard their flagship, negotiated the treaties that followed with Britain, the United States and France, and promised the British entry to Canton. He paid for it. To keep the peace with the foreigners he had Chinese villagers executed for killing six Englishmen, and the hostility of the people of Canton toward him only grew. And when the old emperor died and the young Xianfeng emperor came to the throne in 1850, within months he stripped Qiying of his posts as a man who had been too soft on the barbarians. Xianfeng was the emperor through all of this second war. He was only in his twenties, and determined not to give the foreigners an inch more than his father had. So for eight years Qiying had been in disgrace. Now he was past seventy. And in the crisis of 1858, the court remembered him. The thinking at court was simple. The British had liked Qiying once. Perhaps he could make them like the empire again. He was sent to Tianjin, and he arrived there on 8 June 1858. His first move was the old one. He sent word to the two ambassadors that he had arrived. They severally replied that they were then too busy to see him. Instead, it was Elgin's two interpreters, Wade and Lay, who called on him, as a courtesy to a man who had once been so close to the foreigners. Qiying's one suggestion for a peaceful solution was the old one too: that all the foreign ships be withdrawn from the river first, and then everyone could talk. He talked of the friendship of the past, and the good relations he had kept with the British, and his long goodwill. And then Lay abruptly produced a document. It was a copy of a memorial. A memorial was a written report to the emperor, and it was meant to be read by the emperor and his ministers and no one else. It had been found at Canton among Ye's papers when he was arrested. And here, in his own memorial to the throne, was Qiying explaining to the emperor how he had handled the British all those years. His method, he wrote, had been to deceive the barbarians and hold them at a distance. The banquets, the toasts, the friendship that the British had taken so seriously: by his own account it had been a performance, put on to manage them. Lay put it in front of him. And it quite dumbfounded the aged Qiying. He withdrew from the conference, and then he withdrew from Tianjin. Think of the old man in that room. He had come out of eight years of disgrace on the strength of one asset, his name with the British. And the British had just shown him, in his own handwriting as it were, that they knew exactly what that name had been worth. It is hard to know how to feel about this scene. Qiying had done exactly what his job required. He had kept a dangerous enemy quiet with flattery and small concessions, and reported to his master that he had kept it quiet. Every diplomat in history has done some version of that. But to the British it was proof that the friendship had been a lie, and that nothing a Qing official said could be trusted. And to Qiying it was the end of the only thing he had left, which was the claim that the foreigners trusted him. I want you to hold on to Qiying, because his story is not quite finished.

With Qiying gone, the real talks fell to two other men. The court's two imperial commissioners at Tianjin were Guiliang, a grand secretary and one of the most senior officials in the empire, and Huashana, the president of one of the great ministries in Beijing. Guiliang was past seventy, courtly and careful, and both men had been sent with almost no power to give anything away. Elgin's first meeting with them was a piece of theatre, and he knew it. A dense crowd of Chinese men lined the route to the temple where the meeting was held, mostly curious, some frightened; at the entrance two blind musicians played something like squeaking bagpipes, which he took to be the Chinese band. He was received with every courtesy and given a seat at a small table covered in little plates of sweetmeats, with one of the commissioners on either side of him. The chief commissioner rose and raised the paper reverently over his head before unfolding it. Elgin began, as he put it, by asking after their health and that of the emperor, since his neighbours showed no disposition to talk. Then he laid his own full powers on the table, with a translation, and asked to see theirs. They said they had no powers of the same kind, only a decree of the emperor appointing them, wrapped in a sheet of yellow paper. Yellow was the emperor's colour, reserved for him and his family, and anything touched by his hand was treated with the same reverence as the emperor himself. Elgin decided that the decree was not good enough. He also, as he admitted, wanted to produce a certain effect. So he rose, refused to do business, ordered his escort to move and his chair to be brought, and walked out. This, he wrote, put the poor people into a terrible fluster. They made great efforts to get him to sit down again, but, in his words, "I acted the part of the 'uncontrollably fierce' to perfection". He had hardly got back to his lodgings when two cards arrived from the commissioners, thanking him for having come so far to meet them. It was a performance on both sides. The commissioners were acting courteous and helpless; Elgin was acting furious. And he was very good at it. That set the tone. And the man who carried that tone into every session afterward was Lay. Horatio Nelson Lay was in his mid twenties, the son of a British consul, and already the inspector of customs at Shanghai, where he collected duties on foreign trade on the emperor's behalf. He spoke fluent Chinese, and he was serving Elgin as an interpreter. Lay and a second interpreter, Wade, carried Elgin's demands to the commissioners day after day. Lay's manner with the old commissioners was brusque, even brutal. He took a domineering tone, designed to beat down their opposition by force of vehemence rather than argument. When they hesitated, he threatened them in Lord Elgin's name with the immediate renewal of hostilities and an advance on Beijing. On one evening he and Wade told the commissioners they would wait in the yamen until the document they wanted was signed and sealed, and they did, and it was not until ten at night that they finally took their leave with the precious paper in their hands. Elgin wrote the whole thing up in a letter home with a bleak kind of honesty. "We went on fighting and bullying, and getting the poor Commissioners to concede one point after another, till Friday the 25th, when we had reason to believe all was settled". He also wrote, a little earlier, that he had seen more to disgust him with his fellow countrymen than in the whole of his previous life, because he had found them in the East "among populations too timid to resist and too ignorant to complain." And to make sense of his own part in it, he told himself something else: "Though I have been forced to act almost brutally, I am China's friend in all this." Not everyone at Tianjin was so sure. Count Putyatin told Gros privately that it would be impossible for him to take part in negotiations so threatening, especially when the threats came from an officer of low rank against the highest dignitaries of the empire. William Reed, the American, passed the commissioners' complaint about Lay on to Elgin officially, and was duly snubbed for it.

The neutral envoys, meanwhile, were collecting their own treaties, and they did not have to bully anyone to get them. Russia signed first, on 13 June 1858. The American talks began only after the Russian treaty was signed, and ran for four days. The American treaty had thirty articles and a most favoured nation clause, and it said that if any other power ever won the right to keep an envoy in Beijing, the Americans would have it at once. That clause was the quiet genius of the neutrals' position. They let Britain and France do the fighting, and then they collected the same terms. The treaty also guaranteed toleration for Christianity, and the credit for that article belonged to Reed's interpreter, Wells Williams, a missionary who had come to China in 1833. The Chinese side resisted it, and it was only by a slight change in the wording, made at the last moment, that they were brought to accept it. Reed, for some reason, was firmly bent on signing his treaty on 18 June, the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, and declared that he would sign it with or without the toleration article. In the end he got both. The American treaty was signed on 18 June 1858, five days after the Russian one. And Reed made one more choice, which will matter a great deal next time. The American treaty of 1844 had included articles against the opium trade. At Tianjin, Reed deliberately left them out.

That left the British, who wanted the most, and who had brought the guns. By 24 June the terms of the British treaty had been agreed. Then, at the last moment, the Chinese threatened to break off over two points they had resisted from the start. The two points were a British envoy living permanently in Beijing, and the right to travel to all parts of the interior to trade. On the first point the Chinese deputies were blunt. The emperor, they said, would prefer war to having a foreign envoy living in his capital. Lay's answer was just as blunt. They had better try war then, he told them, but they could be sure that in the end the emperor would have to yield. The commissioners were not being stubborn for the sake of it. They were frightened, and with good reason. A decree arrived from Beijing warning that not merely degradation but decapitation would be inflicted on Guiliang and Huashana if they conceded those two points. So the two commissioners were caught between Lay, who threatened to march on Beijing if they did not give way, and their own emperor, who threatened to cut off their heads if they did. It is hard to overstate how trapped they were. Whatever they signed, someone was going to punish them for it. And then the pressure came from an unexpected side. On Friday afternoon, 25 June, Gros came to Elgin with a message from the Russian and American envoys, urging him to give up two of his demands. The other envoys thought the Chinese resistance on these points was now insurmountable. But Lord Elgin persisted. On the morning of 26 June his brother, Frederick Bruce, the secretary of the embassy, warned the commissioners that any further attempt to reopen discussion would be treated as a breach of good faith. Remember Frederick Bruce. We will meet him again. On 26 June 1858 the Chinese yielded, and the British treaty was signed that evening. The ratified copies were to be exchanged at Beijing within one year. The French signed theirs the next day. Into the British treaty Elgin had written the clause the Chinese fought hardest and longest: the British envoy might reside permanently at Beijing. Elgin was not under any illusion about what had happened. He wrote that the concessions had been extorted from the Chinese government's fears, and that in the eyes of that government they amounted to a revolution. A revolution. That is not an exaggeration, and to see why, we need to look at what was actually in these treaties. So what had the Qing actually lost? Let's go through it, because the list explains most of what happens in the rest of this season.

There were four Treaties of Tianjin, one for each power, but the British one went furthest, so let's go through that. First, the ports. Beyond the five coastal ports already open since the first war, ten more would be opened, in the north, on Taiwan, and inland along the Yangtze. Second, the river itself. British ships would now have the right to sail up the Yangtze, the great river that runs through the heart of China, deep into the interior. Remember what was happening on the Yangtze that year. The Taiping held Nanjing and much of the river. The treaty gave foreigners the right to sail through the middle of a civil war. For the Taiping, as one English friend of theirs wrote a few years later, the treaty proved nearly a death warrant. Third, foreigners could travel wherever they wanted in the empire, and Chinese Christians would be protected in their faith. For missionaries, that was the door they had been pushing on since the first war, and now it was thrown open. Fourth, a foreigner accused of a crime against a Chinese would be tried and punished by his own country's officials and under his own country's laws. Fifth, money. The Qing were to pay an indemnity of four million taels of silver to Britain and two million to France, sums that would later grow to eight million taels for each. A tael was the Chinese unit for weighing silver, a little over an ounce, and the silver currency of the empire. And then there was opium, whose sale the Tianjin settlement would end up making legal. But none of these was the clause the court feared most. The clause that troubled the emperor most was the one that let Britain station an ambassador in Beijing. To us that might sound like the least of it. An ambassador in a capital city is the most ordinary thing in the world. But for the Qing it was the opposite of ordinary. In the emperor's world, foreign rulers did not send equals to his capital; they sent tribute missions, which came, kowtowed, delivered their gifts and left. The kowtow was the full ritual of kneeling and knocking the head to the ground before the emperor, and every visitor to the throne was expected to perform it. Foreign envoys sailing up to the capital with no sign of tribute, in full view of the people along the river, would spread rumours through the empire that the dynasty could no longer command the respect of foreigners. And since the dynasty depended above all on prestige to sustain its rule, that clause was potentially the most devastating of them all. So let me put it plainly, since this is the question the episode set out to answer. What did these treaties take from the Qing? They took the coast, which had already been half lost. They took the great river, which ran through the heart of the empire. They took the right to decide who could walk its roads and preach in its villages, and the right to judge foreigners who broke its laws. But above all they took the idea on which the whole court rested: that the emperor stood above every other ruler on earth, and that foreigners came to him on their knees or not at all. That is why the court would fight hardest over the clause that cost it the least silver. The commissioner who agreed to the clause tried to soften it for the emperor. He suggested to Xianfeng that the treaties were nothing more than slips of paper to make the barbarians leave Tianjin, and that he could easily cancel them if he wished. And Xianfeng held on to that. The treaties said the ratified copies would be exchanged in Beijing within a year, and Xianfeng hoped very much that that would never happen. So the British went away believing they had won a revolution on paper, and the emperor stayed behind believing the paper could be torn up. Both of those beliefs were going to be tested, and soon.

Which brings us back to Qiying. Qiying could not stay in Tianjin. Two days after he had been exposed, he left suddenly for Beijing, without the emperor's permission. For an imperial commissioner to abandon his post was a crime. For a disgraced man already on his last chance, it was fatal. He was arrested, tried, and condemned to summary decapitation. Then the emperor showed what passed for mercy. By an edict of 1 July 1858 his body was spared from mutilation, and his punishment was commuted to having the silken bowstring sent to him. The silken cord was a privilege of rank. It meant the emperor allowed a great man to die by his own hand, in private, rather than at the hands of the executioner in the marketplace. The decree was delivered to him with the words that it was the emperor's will that he put an end to himself. That is how his life ended, by his own hand, on his emperor's order. Qiying had negotiated the Treaty of Nanjing sixteen years before. He had been among the first of China's rulers to see that the old order had passed, that the foreigners could not simply be wished away, and he had tried to manage them as best he could. His reward was to be humiliated by the British and killed by his own emperor, in the same summer. He was not the last man in this story to be destroyed for dealing with foreigners. The court would go on needing such men, and it would go on blaming them. I think there is something in his fate that tells us about the whole Qing position that summer. The court wanted men who could make the foreigners go away, and it punished them when the foreigners did not. Meanwhile the envoys took their leave with their treaties, and the emperor went on hoping they would never come back. But Elgin was not done. The treaties had left the most awkward question of all, opium, to be settled later, in tariff talks at Shanghai. And once that was settled, he meant to take his ships up the Yangtze, to see for himself the river his treaty had opened, straight into the middle of the Taiping war. Next time: the drug the first war was fought over finally becomes legal, Elgin's ships come under fire from the walls of the Heavenly Capital, and a cousin of the Heavenly King slips across Qing China in disguise to reach Nanjing.

Sources

• Augustus F. Lindley, Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh: The History of the Ti-Ping Revolution (1866), p. 219-220, https://archive.org/download/tipingtienkwohh03lindgoog/tipingtienkwohh03lindgoog_text.pdf
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), pp. 297-299, 387-389, 389-390, 390-391, 414-1864, 422-1856, 426-428, 476-478, 478-480, 486-488, 496-498, 498, 500-501, 501-502, 502-503, 503-505, 505-506, 506-508, 516-517, 517-519, 519-520, 520-521, 522-523, 523-524, 524-526, 526-527, 527-528, 528-530, 553-555, 558-560, 560-561, 564-566, 570-572, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, ed. Theodore Walrond, Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin (1872), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10610
• John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces (1844), p. 443-446, https://archive.org/details/chinesewaraccoun00ouchrich
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)
• Stephen R. Halsey, Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft (2015)
• Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012)