Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 6

The Ransom of Canton

In May 1841 the emperor's nephew Yishan arrives at Canton with an army from other provinces to drive the British into the sea, and within a week the city is under British guns and paying to be spared. The episode follows Charles Elliot through his last campaign and the Sanyuanli villagers who trap a British detachment in a rainstorm, and asks whether Sanyuanli was a people's rising or the work of the local gentry, giving that debate real time because China later made it a founding story. It leans on British officials and scholars; the villagers' own voice is real but comes from a single source.

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Transcript

Last time, the Qing minister Qishan and the British envoy Charles Elliot tried to end the war with a bargain: Hong Kong for Britain, six million dollars, and dealings between the two governments as equals. Both their governments threw it out. The emperor blamed his commissioner, and Qishan left Canton in chains to await trial for treason, while in London the cabinet refused to sanction the deal and Palmerston wrote Elliot a private letter saying it was impossible for him to stay on in China. In between, the British had stormed the forts at Chuanbi, where some two hundred and eighty Qing soldiers died in an hour and a half, and then the forts of the Bogue, where the old admiral Guan Tianpei was shot down at his post. Qishan's man Bao Peng went down with him, condemned to end his days as a slave in Xinjiang. And every official in the empire had learned the lesson of Qishan's fall: a man who makes a deal with the barbarians leaves for the capital in chains. Palmerston's letter is still on its way, across half the world, and Elliot does not know he has been dismissed. And coming the other way, from the north, is the emperor's new general, Yishan, with soldiers ordered in from the inland provinces to drive the British into the sea. This is an episode about a city that was taken without being taken, a ransom that was reported as a victory, and a rainstorm in a rice field that China would one day make into a legend. It is also Charles Elliot's last campaign. He just does not know it yet. Canton was the great port of the south, for some eighty years the only Chinese city where Western ships were allowed to trade, and this war had begun in its waters. So it is fitting, in a way, that Charles Elliot's part in it should end there too. By the spring of 1841 the Qing had poured men into Canton. One foreign estimate in April reckoned that some fifty thousand soldiers were gathered in and around the city, and that not one in four of them was fit to bear arms. The forts below the city were rebuilt, and some thirty six thousand local militia were recruited. Militia were part time fighters raised locally, farmers and townsmen armed and paid for by their own communities, as opposed to the regular soldiers of the state. Many of the regular soldiers had marched in from other provinces, strangers in a city whose people spoke a language they could barely understand. The emperor had ordered two thousand soldiers each from Hubei, Sichuan and Guizhou to hurry south, and they had marched a very long way to get there. At their head was Yishan. Yishan was a member of the imperial clan, of the same generation as the emperor's own sons, and he had come with orders to win. Yishan reached Canton in the middle of April 1841. And he knew what the emperor wanted, because the emperor had said it in writing: his mind was made up, and there would be no wavering at all. Alongside him was an old general named Yang Fang, a veteran of the empire's wars in the north west, who had reached Canton a little ahead of him. Yang Fang was past seventy by then, one of the most decorated soldiers the dynasty had. It was a strange moment to be planning an attack, because a truce was in place, and trade had started up again. After the British had fought their way up to Canton in March, Elliot had agreed a truce that let the season's trade go ahead, and the merchants were back in their factories on the waterfront. The factories were the row of buildings outside the city wall, on the riverbank, where the foreign merchants lived and kept their offices and warehouses, the only part of Canton they were allowed to live in. So as the soldiers kept arriving and the forts went back up along the river, Elliot drew the obvious conclusion. On the morning before the attack, he urged all the British and American merchants to leave the factories for their own safety. So in the middle of a truce, with trade going on around them, the foreign merchants were being told to get out of their own homes. The Americans were not at war with China, but they lived and traded in the same factories as the British. That night, the twenty first of May 1841, Yishan made his move. It came by water, and by fire. A fireboat was an old weapon of river war: a boat loaded with straw, oil and powder, set alight and sent drifting down on the enemy's ships in the dark. There were fifty odd of them, and from batteries hidden among the houses of the city, Qing guns opened fire on the British warships in the river. And for a few minutes, it might have worked. Then the Nemesis came. The Nemesis was a flat bottomed iron steamer of the East India Company, able to go where the wooden warships could not and to move against wind and current, and the British had brought her up the river. In nine minutes she chugged to the rescue to answer the fire from the city, just before the fireboats could come close enough to set the warships ablaze. There is a small moment from that night worth keeping. A lit rocket jammed in its tube on board, and the steamer's captain, Hall, calmly reached down and pulled it free, badly burning his hand. The British used rockets of the kind invented by William Congreve, iron tubes of powder fixed to long sticks, wildly inaccurate but terrifying against wooden boats. The crews of the fireboats panicked. Many jumped overboard, and many drowned. Yang Fang, it is said, had stamped and sworn when he learned of the plan, telling the others they were bound to lose. He had been right. The great counterattack of the emperor's general was over in a single night. And in the confusion afterward, on the twenty third, Chinese soldiers and a mob from the city broke into the nearly deserted factories and plundered them. Which is a reminder that Elliot's warning to the merchants had not been an overreaction. So the first round went to the British, and it was not close. And Yishan, as we will see, had his own way of keeping score.

Now it was Elliot's turn, and the British turned their guns on the city itself. The British army in China was commanded by Sir Hugh Gough, an Irish major general who had fought in the wars against Napoleon. Gough would command the British army in China for the rest of this war. First the fleet cleared the river south of the city of every working fort. Seventy one war junks were destroyed, and shore batteries mounting more than sixty guns were captured and dismantled. Then, by dawn on the twenty fifth of May, the British force, two thousand three hundred and ninety three strong, had landed about two miles north west of the city. That is the key move of this whole battle. Canton faced the river, and its defences faced the river. The British came round behind it. Canton was a walled city, and a formidable one, with six miles of walls, twenty five feet high and twenty feet thick. In fact it was two walled cities joined together, an old city and a newer one to its south along the river, with crowded suburbs spilling out beyond both. Inside lived the governor general and the other great officials of the south, and the city's Manchu garrison in its own quarter. But behind the city, to the north, the ground rose into hills, and from those hills a gun could see straight down over the walls into the streets. The Qing had built forts on the heights, and given them hopeful names. By ten in the morning on the twenty fifth of May, the hill and all its forts were in British hands. So now Canton lay under British guns, its walls between the British and nothing. Think about what that meant for the people inside. A huge city, packed behind its walls, with enemy guns looking down into its streets, and an army of its own that could not get them off the hill. It cost the British fifteen dead and a hundred and twelve wounded, the heaviest losses they had yet suffered in this war. The force that paid that price was a mix of British regiments, Royal Marines and sailors, and sepoy regiments from India. Those losses were not nothing, and the Qing had numbers: the reinforcements brought in from other provinces alone came to seventeen thousand. But the outcome was never really in doubt. One British dispatch boasted that a city of one million two hundred and three thousand and four people, defended by forty thousand soldiers, had fallen in three days to no more than three and a half thousand effective men. That oddly precise population figure tells you something about the man who wrote it. He was not counting. He was crowing. And the British general and his officers were ready to finish the job. They meant to storm the city.

And then Charles Elliot stopped them. It is worth stopping on this moment, because it is the purest Charles Elliot of the whole war. On the twenty sixth of May, Elliot ordered that the troops were not to enter Canton. He gave his reasons in a sentence that sums up everything he had tried to do in China: "The protection of the people of Canton, and the encouragement of their good will towards us, are perhaps our chief political duties in this country." Notice the word good will. Elliot was thinking about the day after the war, about the merchants who would have to live and trade in this city for years to come. He knew what storming a city meant. If the British went in, he predicted, the result would be "the disappearance of the municipal authorities and the police, the flight of the respectable inhabitants, the sacking of the town by the rabble", and fire. Elliot was sure, too, that if the city were taken, any money to be had from it would melt away, because, as he put it, "The Chinese rabble are expert looters." So instead of taking the city, Elliot let Canton buy itself off. A ransom of six million dollars was to be paid for the city, and the imperial commissioners and all the troops from outside the province were to withdraw to at least sixty miles away within six days. Think about that. The emperor's general and his army were to march away from the city they had come to defend. Elliot even specified that the Qing troops should leave the city without banners or music. Which, if you think about it, is a strangely gentle humiliation. They could go. They just could not march out as if they had won. For Elliot it was the perfect solution. Britain got its money, the people of Canton kept their homes, and nobody had to storm anything. For his generals, it was a victory thrown away. The money was to be paid within a week, and one of Canton's licensed merchants alone contributed a million dollars toward it. The money was paid, and it went straight to the empire that had sent the fleet: four million dollars of the ransom were shipped to Kolkata, and two million to London. Kolkata was the seat of the British government of India, which had supplied many of the soldiers and ships for this war. Elliot's own commanders were furious. General Gough wrote to him privately, "You have placed us in a most critical situation". And there were plenty who thought it was simply not a junior navy captain's place to halt an army under a major general, whatever commission the Queen had given him. Elliot was only a captain in the Royal Navy, but as plenipotentiary he spoke for the Queen on questions of war and peace, and the generals had to obey him. Twice now Elliot had done the thing London liked least. He had held back the guns, and he had settled for money. Six million dollars. The same sum Qishan had agreed to pay at Chuanbi, before he was taken to the capital in chains. Hold on to that, because we are about to find out what happened to the man who paid it this time. But there is another half to this story, and it was being written in Yishan's tent. On the twenty third of May, two days after his fireboats had failed, Yishan reported to the emperor that the Nemesis had been forced to retreat, with hardly a Qing soldier hurt. The emperor's red brush wrote across the report: excellent, tremendous, wonderful. Think about what the emperor was being given. A night in which his fireboats failed, his batteries fell silent and his crews drowned, written up as the enemy's retreat. And he had almost no way of knowing otherwise. Nearly everything he knew about Canton came to him through the men whose careers depended on what he read. And when the ransom had to be explained, Yishan explained it away. He presented the money as the old debts that bankrupt hong merchants owed to the British, a commercial matter, nothing to do with defeat. The hong merchants were the licensed Chinese firms that handled all foreign trade at Canton, and several of them had in fact gone bankrupt owing the British large sums. So the provincial officials could report that the barbarians had been driven back from the walls of Canton, and Beijing was kept from seeing how weak China really was. The rewards followed. The emperor stood down the extra troops, and Yishan was honoured, with promotions or rewards for five hundred and fifty four of his subordinates. On the eighteenth of June, the emperor sighed in writing that the nature of these foreigners was like that of dogs and sheep, and said he forgave Yishan. Dogs and sheep. That was the emperor's verdict on the people who had just held his greatest southern city to ransom. Remember what happened to Qishan, last time, for making a bargain with the British. Yishan made a bargain with the British and called it a victory. Qishan had gone to the capital in chains. Yishan got his rewards. Every official in the empire was watching, and every one of them could do that sum.

But while Elliot and Yishan were settling Canton's fate between them, something else was happening in the villages to the north of the city. Sanyuanli was a farming village just north of Canton's walls, below the hills where the British had camped. The British troops were camped in those hills behind Canton, and they did not behave well. On the twenty ninth of May, some of them went into a hamlet near the city wall and opened up a few coffins holding embalmed bodies. To the people of that countryside, a family's dead were not just buried. They were honoured every year at the graves, and the ancestors were thought to watch over the living. Opening a coffin was about the worst insult that could be offered to a Chinese family. It was an attack on the ancestors themselves. And the anger in those villages had more than one cause. There was the desecration of ancestral graves, there was looting, and there was the rape of local women by the foreign troops. The British army in China included many sepoys, Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company, under British officers. Arming villagers was not new around Canton. Two years earlier Lin Zexu had encouraged the people of the coast to organise and arm themselves against the British. The next day, the thirtieth of May, a line of some five thousand peasant fighters gathered behind the British camp. They came from Sanyuanli, and from the villages around it. In the village's own memory, the fighters swore an oath at Sanyuanli's old temple and marched under a banner taken from it. British troops went out to drive them off, and then the weather changed everything. A rainstorm broke over the fields, and it soaked the British muskets until they would not fire. It was the end of May, the start of the summer rains in southern China, when a clear sky can turn to a downpour within the hour. A musket of the time was fired by a spark falling into a pan of loose gunpowder, and once that powder was wet, the gun was useless. Seeing that the British guns had stopped working, the peasant fighters closed in and started jabbing at their enemy with spears. They killed the rearmost soldier. A spear, it turns out, does not care about the rain. One company went missing in the downpour. When it was finally found, it was in a rice field, its men formed up in a square, with one private dead and fifteen others wounded. A square was the standard infantry formation against a crowd or cavalry, the men facing outward on every side so that no one could get behind them. The British reported five dead and twenty three wounded in the whole affair. The next day, the villagers came back in far greater numbers, perhaps twenty five thousand of them, drawn from maybe eighty or ninety nearby villages, and they gathered on the hills around the British. These were not soldiers. They were farmers from the villages, and they had a British force hemmed in on its hill. And for one day, on their own ground, they had the better of a modern army. And it was at that point that the Qing state stepped in, on the side of the British. The prefect of Canton, Yu Baochun, went out to the militia and told them that peace had been signed, and that "you must let the foreigners go." A prefect was the official in charge of a prefecture, a district of several counties, and the prefect of Canton was the man the provincial government used to deal with the British. Yu Baochun had been one of the officials who carried the ransom terms back and forth between Yishan and the British. The villagers obeyed, and they dispersed. On the first of June the British left, and the authorities at Canton even provided eight hundred labourers to drag their guns back to the ships. Imagine being one of those villagers. You have the invaders surrounded, your own government tells you to let them go, and then it lends them men to carry their guns. So that is what happened. Or at least, that is the bare outline of it. The villagers had their own version, and they put it into words almost at once. One militia poem said that heaven had stepped in, "Sending sudden rain from a clear sky" to leave the foreigners' guns useless. A song protested that the villagers did not understand "why our great net should be opened", and the fish inside allowed to escape. And a militia notice declared, "We do not need official troops, nor the help of the state", and threatened to flay and eat anyone who asked the villagers to calm down. The tally of British dead grew in the Chinese telling, to two hundred, and then to three hundred, and nearly seven hundred and fifty casualties in all. That is how a legend grows. A skirmish in a rice field was becoming a great victory. And the people of Canton did not forgive Yu Baochun. Three months later, when he came to oversee the examinations, the candidates hurled their inkstones at him and refused to sit an examination judged by a traitor. The civil service examinations were the great ladder of Qing life. Passing them made a man a member of the gentry, eligible for office, and the candidates who threw their inkstones were the educated sons of the very families who led local society. The gentry were the educated, landowning families of the countryside, men who had passed at least the lowest level of the examinations, and in any village crisis they were the natural leaders. Around Canton they ran local associations that looked after schools, temples and defence, and those associations could gather and arm the men of many villages at once. There is a darker side to that same summer, too. By the time of Sanyuanli, villagers in the area had murdered more than twelve hundred people they suspected of being traitors. Fear of traitors, of Chinese who served or sold to the British, ran through that whole countryside, and the anger that sent villagers against a British camp could turn on their own neighbours just as fast. So what was Sanyuanli? This matters, because later, in the twentieth century, Sanyuanli became one of the founding stories of modern China. In that story it is the first time the ordinary Chinese people rose up against foreign imperialism, betrayed by their own government, and a monument to the villagers still stands at Sanyuanli. For generations of Chinese schoolchildren, Sanyuanli was the moment the people stood up while the dynasty bowed down. The answer shapes what Sanyuanli means. If the people rose on their own, it is the story of a nation finding its voice. If the local elite raised them, it is the story of a ruling class beginning to act without its rulers. Here the sources disagree. On one side, it was a true rising of the people, farmers driven to fury by the opening of their family graves, the looting, and the rape of their women, who said themselves that they needed no help from the state. On the other side, it was the work of the local gentry, the degree holders and landlords who ran the villages' defence associations, and who raised, organised and led the militia much as the state's own officials might have. What both sides agree on is that the anger was real, and that it did not end when the villagers went home. Either way, the people of Canton had learned something that summer that their officials had not wanted them to learn. The British could be beaten in a rice field, in the rain. And their own government would stop them doing it. For years after the war, the people of Canton would refuse to let foreigners inside their city walls, and that long quarrel would help bring on the next war.

At almost the same moment, on the other side of the world, Palmerston was writing the orders that would end Charles Elliot's war. On the thirty first of May 1841, he gave Sir Henry Pottinger his final instructions as he was about to set out for China. Pottinger had served long in India, and had been the British resident at the court of the ruler of Sindh. He was an Irishman who had gone out to India as a boy, and had once travelled through the deserts between India and Persia in disguise. A resident was Britain's political agent at the court of an Indian ruler, part ambassador and part overseer. The first thing Palmerston wanted Pottinger to understand was that the negotiation was his alone. Pottinger, "in your capacity of Plenipotentiary", was to decide where the talks were held, how long they lasted, and when they were broken off. And once he judged that talking was useless and force was needed, he was to hand the matter to the naval commander, and stand aside. It would then rest with the naval commander, Palmerston wrote, "to determine, when, where, and how, the Forces at his disposal shall be employed". That is a remarkable instruction. It took away from the envoy the one power Elliot had used over and over: the power to call off the guns. Palmerston had given Elliot room to use his judgement, and Elliot had used it to make peace. That room was now gone. He was not to stop the fighting, Palmerston wrote, unless an officer duly authorised by the Chinese government came to him with "a full and unconditional compliance on the part of The Emperor, with all the demands which you may have made in the Name of the Government of Great Britain." Nor was Pottinger to arrive on the China coast, or begin any talks, until the Governor General of India judged that there was a force in the China seas strong enough for the work. He was to go by way of Kolkata, and if the force had not yet sailed for China when he got there, he was to sail with it. Compare that with the man he was replacing. Elliot, for his part, had written home that any treaty with China "should contain no more than two Articles": Hong Kong, and equal treatment with any other power. Elliot thought that the more a treaty demanded, the more likely a new war would be. Elliot believed that once Britain was strong on the coast and trade was flowing, the Chinese themselves would come to seek a full treaty, and only then could one be made safely. A treaty forced on them now, he thought, was out of the question. The things that really mattered, in Elliot's view, were more money, to relieve his own government of the war's costs, and a firm British foothold at the place where the trade of the future would be done. Palmerston saw it the other way round. Before any talking, the first operation was to be the retaking of Zhoushan. The government, Palmerston wrote, had seen no reason to modify or abandon any part of the demands originally made on China. He reckoned that less than three million pounds would not cover them. And Hong Kong was not to be given up, unless Pottinger could trade it for a better island near Canton. And on the eve of his departure, Pottinger learned that the emperor had rejected Elliot's convention, and his orders were sharpened. Hong Kong was to be kept, the point of Kowloon across its harbour occupied or neutralised, and the emperor made to ratify the treaty formally. Several of those orders undid what Elliot had done, from his halt to the fighting at Chuanbi to his giving up of Zhoushan. Then there was the matter that had started it all. On opium, Pottinger was to press the Chinese to put the trade on some regular and legal footing. But, the instructions went on, "Her Majesty's Government make no demand in regard to this matter, for they have no right to do so." The Chinese government, the same instructions said, "is fully entitled to prohibit the importation of opium, if it pleases" and British subjects who smuggled it must take the consequences. Pottinger was to point out that a ban would always be a source of friction, and that Britain could not be expected to do China's work in enforcing it. Hold on to that, because it is a strange thing to read in the orders for a war that most people, then and now, call the Opium War. So was this a war for opium? In its own orders, London said that China had every right to ban the drug. And London also wanted that ban gone, and had sent a fleet to win payment for the opium China had destroyed. Both of those things are true at once, and the war lived in the space between them. And one more line, because it goes back to the very beginning of this season. The British plenipotentiary was to be treated by the emperor's plenipotentiary "upon a footing of perfect equality". Back in 1834, Lord Napier had sent the viceroy at Canton a letter as between equals, and official after official had refused even to take it, because it was styled a letter and not a petition. And Pottinger was to resist what the instructions called the Chinese negotiators' "tone of affected superiority". No more talking down to British envoys. No more bargaining in tents. This time, Britain would set the terms, and the guns would wait for nothing else.

Meanwhile, back in China, Charles Elliot was still in charge, and still did not know it was over. On the twentieth of July 1841, Elliot and Commodore Sir Gordon Bremer, just back from India with reinforcements, set off from Macau for the British base at Hong Kong. Bremer had commanded the British ships at the taking of the forts of the Bogue that winter. Macau was the small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, a short sail across the water from Hong Kong. The South China Sea in summer is typhoon country, and a typhoon is the great tropical storm of those waters, with winds strong enough to sink ships and flatten towns. On the way, they were caught in a typhoon and wrecked. What followed is one of the stranger episodes of this war, and it belongs entirely to Charles Elliot. They had been sailing in a small cutter, the Louisa, and the storm drove her onto the coast and wrecked her. A cutter was a small, fast, single masted boat, used for carrying officers and messages between the ships of a fleet. They came ashore on the Chinese coast, and for the British envoy that was an extremely dangerous place to be. Because the Qing had put a price on every British head, and the prices were very specific. A hundred thousand dollars for the capture of Elliot. Fifty thousand for Bremer. Twenty thousand for a cutter, two hundred for a white soldier, and fifty for an Indian. Even the bounties had a ranking: an Indian soldier was worth a quarter of a white one. So here were the two most valuable men on the list, stranded among the people offering the reward. They found a local boatman who agreed to take them back for a thousand dollars. At one point an official boat came alongside and asked whether there had been any shipwrecks. Their pilot pushed the two Britons back down into the bottom of the boat and covered them over with mats, and the crew said no. By the twenty third of July, the price for the passage back had gone up to three thousand three hundred dollars. Yet the bounties on Elliot and Bremer alone added up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, more than forty times the fare. Whether or not the boatmen knew whom they were carrying, they took the smaller sum, and the British envoy and his commodore got back alive. Elliot had come within one boatman's change of heart of becoming the most valuable prisoner in China. I find it hard to think of a better picture of the Canton coast in this war. The emperor offers a fortune for the barbarian chief, and the people of the coast quietly sell him a ride home. And the bounty on Elliot's head came from the same side that, a few weeks earlier, had paid him six million dollars to go away.

When Elliot got back to Macau, the news was waiting for him. He had been recalled, and his successor, Sir Henry Pottinger, was expected any day. It was what Palmerston had told him in a private letter: it was impossible for him to continue to hold his appointment in China. The government, Palmerston's official letter said, did not approve of the way Elliot had departed from his instructions in his dealings with the Chinese commissioner. By then Palmerston himself was on his way out of office. His party lost power in London that summer, and the Earl of Aberdeen took over the Foreign Office. But the new government kept Pottinger, and kept his orders, and the war went on much as Palmerston had planned it. Elliot had his own account of what his restraint had achieved. By his reckoning, it had kept alive a trade worth more than ten million pounds, while the expedition itself had cost a mere half a million. On a merchant's ledger, ten million pounds of trade kept alive for half a million spent looks like a bargain. But Palmerston had not sent a fleet to China to protect a ledger. He had sent it to change the terms on which Britain and China dealt with each other. And the island he had taken, the one his own government thought close to worthless, would turn out to be the part of his work that lasted longest. Pottinger arrived at Macau on the tenth of August, and he made it clear at once that things had changed. His first step was to tell the British merchants that the days of putting trade ahead of the nation's interest were over. On the twelfth of August he gave notice that it was his intention "to devote his undivided energies and thoughts to the primary object of securing a speedy and satisfactory close of the war". And he went on that "he therefore can allow no consideration connected with mercantile pursuits, and other interests, to interfere with the strong measures which he may find it necessary to authorise and adopt" against the government and subjects of China. He warned that the Canton authorities might well break the truce, of their own accord or on orders from Beijing, and that any British subject or other foreigner who put himself or his property in their power did so at his own risk and peril. In other words: the merchants who had wanted this war were about to find out that it was no longer being run for them. When the Canton authorities sent their prefect to Macau on the eighteenth of August to pay his respects, Pottinger refused to receive an official of such inferior rank, and sent him to his secretary instead. That prefect was Yu Baochun, the same man who had sent the villagers home from Sanyuanli. Where Elliot had spent years trying to get a meeting with any official of rank, Pottinger was turning them away at the door. It was a small thing, a question of who received whom. But on this coast, as Lord Napier had found out, things of that kind were never small. On the twenty fourth of August, Charles Elliot and Commodore Bremer left for Mumbai, and Elliot was back in England by the November. He left just as the new man was getting started. Elliot went home in disgrace, and the man who would have settled this war with an island and a handshake left the stage. His career was not over. Within a year he was Britain's envoy to the Republic of Texas, and he went on to govern Bermuda, Trinidad and Saint Helena. From the Pearl River to the Republic of Texas. It is hard to imagine a stranger second act. His dismissal was perhaps the true turning point of the war. From now on, gunboats would count for more than diplomacy. Elliot had tried to win the war without breaking China. His successor had orders to win it, and nothing else. And now the new man had the whole coast in front of him, and no one left to hold him back. By the autumn he would be fighting his way up the coast, city by city, and this time no envoy would be calling off the guns. His orders said that before any talking, Zhoushan was to be taken again. The cities of the central coast had no idea what was about to come up the coast toward them. Neither, quite, did the emperor. Next time, the war comes to the cities of the central coast, and the emperor goes looking for a new general to throw the British back.

Sources

• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), pp. 85-86, 120-122, 122-123, 124-126, 269-271, 271-272, 272-274, 277-278, 281-282, 282-284, 284-285, 285-286, 286-288, 288-289, 289-290, 640-641, 642-644, 654-655, 655-656, 656-657, 658-659, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)