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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 8

The Treaty of Nanjing

With British warships off Nanjing and the empire's grain route cut, the Daoguang Emperor sends Qiying, a Manchu imperial clansman, to make the peace he has refused for three years. The episode follows Qiying from his appointment through the anxious embassies, banquets and bargaining with Sir Henry Pottinger to the signing of the treaty that opened China's coast, and asks what the treaty changed and what it left out, above all opium. It leans heavily on scholars, with the court heard in its own memorials and the British only thinly.

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Beijing Zhejiang Nanjing
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Last time, the British carried the war up the coast, from Xiamen to Zhoushan to Ningbo, and the emperor's nephew Yijing, the Awe-Inspiring General, threw an army at Ningbo on the day of the tiger and lost it in a morning. Yijing told the throne he had won, and was rewarded with a double peacock feather. Then, at the garrison towns of Zhapu and Zhenjiang, the Manchu bannermen fought to the last, and many of them killed their own wives and children rather than be taken. On the twenty first of July, Zhenjiang was lost in a disastrous defeat, and about thirty per cent of its Banner garrison died that day. Its commander, Hai Ling, died with his garrison, and for the British it was the costliest day of the whole war. Zhenjiang stood where the Grand Canal, the waterway that carried the grain of the south to Beijing, crossed the Yangtze, and with the city in British hands, the capital's food supply was cut. And the fleet sailed on up the river, toward Nanjing. Nanjing was the great walled city of the lower Yangtze, once the first capital of the Ming dynasty, and still the seat of the governor-general who ruled the three provinces around it. That is where this episode ends. But it begins a few months earlier, in Beijing, that spring, when the emperor started, very slowly and very unwillingly, to look for a way out. So let's start with the man at the top, the Daoguang Emperor. In 1842 he was sixty years old, and had ruled for more than twenty years. Only the summer before, he had written that the nature of these foreigners was like that of dogs and sheep. The emperor ruled, in Qing thinking, by the Mandate of Heaven, as the one ruler under heaven, and every other monarch on earth was in principle his inferior. So for this emperor, making peace with the British was not just a defeat. It was a contradiction of the order of the world. He had backed Lin Zexu's war on the opium trade, dismissed the officials who tried to bargain, and sent out kinsman after kinsman to drive the foreigners into the sea. Lin Zexu himself, the commissioner whose crackdown at Canton had started it all, had been dismissed and sent into exile on the empire's far north-western frontier. So the men who had wanted to fight were gone or dead, and the men who had wanted to talk had been punished. Nobody in the emperor's service had much reason to tell him the truth. And that March, the news that arrived at his palace was all bad. On the twenty eighth of March, at the Yuanmingyuan, just three days after the emperor had received Yijing's reports of the failure of his spring offensive, a memorial arrived from Zhejiang's governor, Liu Yunke, who had changed his mind. The Yuanmingyuan was the emperor's great garden palace north-west of Beijing, a vast park of lakes, pavilions and halls, where the Qing emperors spent much of the year. Liu had changed his opinion. His memorials now talked of ruinous war costs, untrustworthy civilians, banditry, and the capital's food supply in peril. When a senior official who had argued for war wrote that it could not be won, the emperor could no longer pretend that the problem was only bad luck or bad generals. Slowly, those memorials began to move the emperor toward talking. But he also issued his most confusing order yet: to exterminate the British first, and then to soothe them. To carry it out, he chose two Manchu officials. The first was Qiying. Qiying was a member of the imperial clan, descended from the family of the dynasty's founders, and he had spent decades in high office in Beijing and in the Manchu homeland north-east of the Great Wall. He was no soldier. He was a courtier, and in this story that turns out to matter a great deal. He is the lead of this episode, and of the next, and I think you will find him one of the most interesting people in this whole story. His charm would carry him a long way in the years ahead. Whether it served his emperor is a question we will keep asking. The second was Yilibu, an elderly Manchu official who had dealt with the British once before, at Zhoushan in the first year of the war, and had been disgraced for being too soft on them. So the emperor was sending one man with no experience of the British and one who had already been punished for talking to them. That alone tells you how torn the court was. Qiying and Yilibu reached Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang, on the ninth of May. And on the twenty fifth of May, the emperor wrote to them severely. So, from the very start, our two peacemakers were working for a man who wanted peace and could not bear to be seen asking for it.

Henry Pottinger
Henry Pottinger. Francis Grant, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Yilibu moved first. He wrote to the British, offering to talk. His letter put the case for peace in the simplest terms he knew. "Your honourable country desires trade, the Celestial Empire wishes to receive the duties thereon," he wrote, and neither side was anxious to wear out its soldiers and spend its revenues. The Celestial Empire was the way the Qing court spoke of China itself, the realm under heaven ruled by the Son of Heaven, and a letter that put the foreigners' wishes and the empire's side by side like that was already a long step from the old language of command. To show good faith, Yilibu sent back British prisoners, with money for each of them: fifteen dollars for each Indian soldier, and thirty for each native Briton. The British answer came from Gough, the army's commander. He and his plenipotentiary would discuss nothing but the conditions already laid down in their letters, and only with plenipotentiaries of the emperor. Even Gough, who a year before had railed at Elliot for not letting him turn his guns on Canton, would write after Zhenjiang that he was sick at heart of war. But they were not going to stop for anyone who could not sign. That was the sticking point. Neither Qiying nor Yilibu had the power to make a treaty. Around the twenty sixth of May, the emperor received the full details of what had happened at Zhapu. And he changed course again. He told Qiying to go back to the loose rein: to soothe, to concede, to find a way to make the British leave. The loose rein was an old phrase of Chinese statecraft for managing outsiders by concession and generosity instead of force, keeping them in hand the way a rider keeps a horse with a slack rein. Meanwhile, Qiying was doing something that would become his habit. He sent the emperor reports that the foreigners were submissive, reports that were simply not true. We have met that habit before in this war. But in Qiying's hands, the false report was not a cover for defeat. It was a tool for making peace. Pottinger, for his part, was not interested in Yilibu's letters. His reply was blunt: there would be no stop to the war until a plenipotentiary was nominated. Pottinger had gone out to the East as a teenager, and as a young officer in India he had travelled in disguise through the deserts of Baluchistan and into Persia, a journey that made his name. He was a hard, patient man, and he had been told exactly what to win. From his first days in China, he had told the British merchants that the day of putting their commerce before the nation's interest was over, and that his undivided energies would go to a speedy close of the war. His instructions said that Hong Kong was to be kept, that Kowloon Point, across the harbour from it, was to be occupied or neutralised, and that the emperor must formally ratify whatever treaty was signed. And he was to resist what London called the Chinese negotiators' tone of affected superiority. So Qiying tried to bluff his way through the difficulty. He told the British that he was, indeed, a plenipotentiary. He was not, and the British were not fooled. The fleet went on up the Yangtze, past Zhenjiang, toward Nanjing. The steamers towed the sailing warships against the current, and no foreign fleet had ever come so far into the heart of the empire. The Yangtze is China's longest river, running from the Tibetan plateau to the sea near Shanghai, and it was the great highway of trade for the whole centre of the empire. A fleet that could sail up it at will could reach the heart of the empire. And at last the emperor gave way. "Act as circumstances require", he wrote back to Qiying. In August 1842, Qiying was made plenipotentiary, with the power to negotiate the peace.

Now we need to meet a much smaller man, because for the next few weeks, a great deal is going to rest on him. His name was Zhang Xi, and he was a junior aide to Yilibu. On the thirteenth of July, Zhang Xi left the north for the south-east. His journey was slowed by bandits, refugees and British blockades, and on the fifth of August he at last caught up with the two imperial agents, Qiying and Yilibu, at Wuxi, a few dozen miles from Nanjing. By then the British fleet was already lying off Nanjing, and word came that the British had decided to bombard the city on the seventh of August. Somebody had to go to the British ships and stop it. The commissioners chose Zhang Xi. Nanjing's walls were among the longest of any city in the world, built by the founder of the Ming dynasty and running for more than twenty miles, and inside them lived a large Manchu Banner garrison with its families. After Zhapu and Zhenjiang, everyone on both sides knew what storming a Banner city would mean. There is a strange postscript to that. Within eleven years, this same city would be taken by storm after all, not by the British, but by a rebel army that would make it the capital of its own kingdom. But that is a story for later in this season. When Zhang Xi was asked whether what he reported could be relied on, he answered: "I dare not tell a lie". And on board the Cornwallis, the British flagship, he was given a respectful reception by Pottinger. The Cornwallis was a ship of the line of seventy four guns, a great wooden sailing warship, and she was where the British plenipotentiary lived and worked. So picture this man climbing up the side of a British warship, to talk for an empire. He was one of the millions who had failed the civil service examinations and scraped a living as advisers, and behind him was a city the British had promised to bombard. What the British wanted came down to this: Hong Kong, five ports open to their trade with consuls in each, money for their losses and expenses, the end of the Canton monopoly, a moderate tariff, and equality between officials of the two countries.

The bargaining went on under the guns. At around midnight on the tenth of August, the British promised the attack would begin in the morning. It did not begin. Qiying finally reached the city on the eleventh of August. On the twelfth of August, Zhang Xi had his third meeting with the British, this time at a small temple outside the city. Here the sources disagree. In Zhang Xi's own diary, he fought hard at that table, and bargained the total indemnity down from thirty to twenty one million dollars. No British account of the talks backs it up. What is not in doubt is that he was there, a junior man in a small temple, bargaining with his empire's enemies over a sum nobody in the room could really picture. Either way, the figure was settled at twenty one million dollars. An indemnity is a sum one state pays another as compensation, here for the cost of the war and for the opium Lin Zexu had seized and destroyed at Canton. The final sum was made up of six million dollars for the opium destroyed at Canton, three million for debts the Hong merchants owed to British traders, and twelve million for the cost of the war. And it came on top of the six million dollars Canton had already paid the year before, as a ransom to be spared. The war itself had already cost the empire around thirty million ounces of silver. And the strangest moment of the whole negotiation came between Zhang Xi and his own master. Yilibu told him to promise the British nothing in compensation, and then closed his eyes. He was an old man telling his servant to do the impossible, and then declining to watch. I think that one gesture says more about the Qing side of this peace than any memorial: men who knew exactly what they had to give, and could not bear to be the ones who gave it.

On the nineteenth of August, the plenipotentiaries at last met in person. Up to now, everything had gone through go-betweens, letters and servants. Now the men themselves would sit at a table. The two commissioners came out to the flagship with the governor-general of the province and a retinue of civil and military mandarins, and presented themselves at the gangway of the Cornwallis. The governor-general was Niu Jian, the same man who, a few weeks before, had told the people of Zhenjiang to go to bed and sleep in perfect security. A mandarin was what Europeans called any official of the Qing state, civil or military, a word from Portuguese. One British observer was struck by the contrast with two years earlier, when Qishan, the emperor's envoy at the mouth of the Bei River, had declared it utterly impossible for him to compromise the dignity of the empire by going on board a barbarian ship. Now the emperor's own commissioners were on the deck of one. To him, this was a turning point in the empire's history: the first time its high officials had come to offer friendship and dealings to foreigners whom their ancestors had always held in contempt. "The high officers were of course received with every mark of respect and consideration, and the interview lasted about an hour, during which many fine speeches were made", and, the officer added, much cherry brandy was consumed. It broke up, he wrote, to the satisfaction of all parties. Pottinger was to return the visit on shore two days later, but the day turned stormy, and out of consideration for Yilibu's age and frail health, he put it off until the twenty fourth. The return visit took place at a modest temple outside the city walls, on a day that was intensely hot. Officers of every rank turned out to watch, and the British plenipotentiary, admiral and general went up a wide creek by boat to the temple. It was a show for both sides, and both sides knew it. Every detail, who bowed, who sat where, who fired which salute, was a statement about who stood above whom. They passed between ranks of Qing soldiers drawn up in a crescent, carrying no weapons but the spears that held their banners. There were no Manchu troops among them. The British believed the Manchu soldiers had been spared the humiliation, because they were still dressed in white, the colour of mourning, for the friends and relatives who had died at Zhenjiang. Behind Pottinger marched the grenadier company of a British regiment as his guard of honour, and the Qing soldiers looked at them with undisguised astonishment. Three guns were fired in salute, and a band struck up, whose music, the officer wrote, was not very melodious. And then the commissioners came forward to receive their guests, and led them in to seats of honour and a Chinese meal. This was Qiying's ground, and he knew it. Across a run of visits and banquets, he showered Pottinger with attention. At one dinner he made Pottinger open his mouth, and with great dexterity shot several immense sugar-plums into it. It was the loose rein in its most personal form: if you cannot beat a man, charm him, and then manage him. And Qiying, whatever else he was, was very good at it. At the end of one meeting he embraced Pottinger in his arms, and had an interpreter tell him that he and his colleagues were satisfied he was a good and just man. And it worked better than anyone could have expected. Pottinger reported that the commissioners declared their readiness to sign and seal the treaty at once, and without further explanation. Not everyone on the British side was so easily charmed. When two mandarins tried to take one of the British translators, Morrison, aside to reopen a clause of the treaty, he answered sharply that this was no place to talk official business, and stalked off. Morrison was the son of the first Protestant missionary to China, born at Macau and raised speaking Chinese, and he was the British side's indispensable translator. But Qiying had found the man who mattered, and that friendship, as we will see, is something he would lean on for years. I want to be fair to Qiying here. It is easy to call this flattery, and it was. But he had no army left to bargain with, and a man who has nothing else to offer may as well offer his friendship. And he was not just charming Pottinger for the sake of it. A British envoy who liked him was a British envoy who might accept less, wait longer, and take his word over a hostile governor's. That was the bet.

There was one subject left that nobody had put on the table. It was the subject the whole war had started over. Back in London, Palmerston had told Pottinger that Britain made no demand about opium, because it had no right to; the Chinese government was fully entitled to prohibit the drug if it pleased, and British subjects who smuggled it must take the consequences. But he had also told him to urge the Chinese to put the opium trade on some regular and legalized footing. So Britain's envoy was in the odd position of asking the emperor to make legal a drug that his own government admitted the emperor had every right to ban. So at Nanjing, Pottinger raised it with the commissioners, in a meeting that lasted five hours. They would not have it written into the treaty, but they agreed to talk it over informally. His argument was that the trouble lay in China's own weakness for the drug: if Chinese officers were incorruptible, no opium could enter. Would it not, therefore, be better at once to legalise its importation? The British plan, as an officer with the force understood it, was to allow the trade by barter, under rules so strict and at the same time so liberal that the temptation to smuggle would disappear, and with it much of the corruption the smuggling bred. Barter here meant exchanging opium for Chinese goods such as tea and silk rather than for silver, so that the trade would no longer drain silver out of China, a drain that had worried the court for decades. On the twenty seventh of August, two days before the signing, with the terms of the treaty already settled, Pottinger put the question once more. Qiying and Yilibu refused, point-blank, to have the issue written into the treaty in any official way. It was not expedient at that time, they said, to raise the matter with the throne at all. Think about their position. The emperor had gone to war to stamp out opium. They could sign away an island and twenty one million dollars, and call it soothing the barbarians. They could not write down that the emperor now permitted the drug. And there was something else. To legalise opium would have meant admitting that Lin Zexu's whole campaign, and the war that followed it, had been for nothing. No official who wanted to keep his head was going to put that in front of the emperor. Afterwards he wrote that he would indulge a hope, a very faint one, he admitted, that he might still get the trade in opium, by barter, legalised by the emperor. So opium was left out. The commissioners did give Pottinger one assurance on opium, and London received it with no little satisfaction. The officers of China, they promised, would be told to confine their jurisdiction in that respect to the soldiers and people of their own country. That meant that a British subject who committed a crime in China would be judged by British officials, not Chinese ones. It was not yet in a treaty. It soon would be.

The signing and sealing of the Treaty of Nanking, published in 1846
The signing and sealing of the Treaty of Nanking, published in 1846. Painted by Captain John Platt, Bengal Volunteers. Engraved by John Burnet., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the days before the signing, some British officers went into Nanjing itself. They found narrow streets and mostly humble houses, every shop and home shut up, and the streets blocked by barrier gates and endless crowds of astonished onlookers. What drew the most attention were the Arab horses of the British cavalry escort. The mandarins crowded round them and examined them closely with astonishment and delight. Pottinger also offered the commissioners a gift for the emperor, two teams of white and grey horses from his cavalry escort, and the gift was respectfully refused. On the twenty ninth of August 1842, on board the Cornwallis, the Treaty of Nanjing was signed. The commissioners came in plain dress, but with a large and gorgeous retinue, drawn from the court of the governor-general at Nanjing and from the province's troops. Yilibu was so frail that he had to be helped up the ladder to the deck, and his attendants half carried him, tottering, into the cabin where the ceremony was to take place. Four copies of the treaty had been prepared, in Chinese and English, bound with ribbon. As the last copy was sealed, a royal salute was fired, with the emperor's flag flying from the mainmast and the British ensign at the rearmost mast of every warship. And Qiying, hearing the guns, was convinced for a moment that the British were about to take him prisoner. He was not taken prisoner. The salute was a salute. But it tells you something about the man behind the charm: for all the toasts and speeches, he still did not know what the British would do next. Then the health of the queen was drunk, and as a British officer noted, "singularly enough, not that of the Emperor of China". It was drunk in cherry brandy, "and the august party broke up." So what was in it? There would be lasting peace and friendship between the two nations. China would pay twenty one million dollars, over that year and the three that followed. Five ports would be opened to British merchants: Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. Fuzhou was the capital of Fujian, up the coast from Xiamen, and Shanghai was then a walled county town near the mouth of the Yangtze. The choice of ports was not random. Fuzhou lay near the tea hills of Fujian, Ningbo and Shanghai near the silk and tea country of the lower Yangtze, and Xiamen was the old gateway of the southern junk trade. For more than eighty years, Canton had been the only port where Europeans could trade. Now there were five. In each of those ports, British consuls would live, and fixed and published tariffs of duties on imports and exports would replace whatever the local officials chose to charge. A consul was an official a government posted in a foreign port to look after its merchants and sailors and to deal with the local authorities on their behalf. Transit duties were the charges laid on goods as they moved inland from the ports, and the British wanted them fixed and published, so that a bale of cloth landed at Shanghai could not be taxed into ruin on its way to a buyer. The monopoly of the Hong merchants was abolished. The Hong merchants were the licensed firms at Canton through whom all foreign trade had been forced to pass for generations, and from now on the British could trade with whomever they liked. The island of Hong Kong was ceded to the British queen, her heirs and successors, in perpetuity. Hong Kong was a steep, rocky island off the mouth of the Pearl River, with a few fishing villages and one of the finest deep-water harbours on the coast, and Palmerston himself had once dismissed it as a barren island with hardly a house on it. That was not what the emperor had meant. His offer to lend Hong Kong to the British had lapsed, in the drafting, into a full cession of the island. The British had held Hong Kong since early 1841, when Elliot had first raised the flag there, and now it was theirs for good. Every British subject held prisoner anywhere in the empire, whether from Europe or India, was to be released. Until the money was paid, the British would keep their troops on Zhoushan and on Gulangyu, the little island off Xiamen, and once the first six million dollars arrived, the fleet would leave the Yangtze and the Grand Canal. And the emperor was to publish a full amnesty for every Chinese subject who had served the British, lived under them, or dealt with them during the war. That clause mattered more than it might sound. Around Canton, by the time of Sanyuanli, villagers hunting supposed traitors in their own ranks had murdered more than twelve hundred people. And then there was equality. Officials of corresponding rank in the two countries would deal with each other as equals. Before the war, foreign merchants at Canton could write to the Qing officials only as humble petitioners, through the Hong merchants, and when the British superintendent Napier had insisted on writing to the governor-general directly in 1834, it had started the crisis that led, step by step, to this war. The national equality was asserted by the form of the treaty itself: both countries were equally styled "Great", their sovereigns were given places of equal dignity, and each envoy signed first on his own language's version. For a court that had always received foreigners as bearers of tribute, that was perhaps the hardest change of all to swallow. In practice, these were almost exactly the terms Palmerston had prescribed thirty months earlier. Elliot had once argued that a treaty should hold no more than two articles: the first ceding Hong Kong, and the second granting Britain any privilege later granted to any other power. The first of those made it into the Treaty of Nanjing. The second did not. A British officer wrote that the first treaty China was ever forced to make had been signed by three of her highest nobles. The next day, Pottinger published a sketch of the treaty for his forces, with an assurance of his entire confidence in the sincerity of the imperial government. The emperor ratified the treaty within weeks, and the queen at the end of the year, and the ratified copies were exchanged at Hong Kong in the summer of 1843. Yilibu was sent south to Canton to see the treaty carried out, and died there within months. Pottinger stayed on as the first governor of Hong Kong, the island he had been told to keep. Morrison, the interpreter who would not talk business at a banquet, died of fever at Macau the following summer, still in his twenties. In Britain the news was received with delight. One letter to the newspapers declared: "Perhaps no circumstance in the history of Great Britain ever gave such universal satisfaction". In Beijing, the emperor read Qiying's report of the terms, with key ones edited out, and wrote back: "I can only hate myself and feel ashamed that things have reached this point." It was not the only time he blamed himself. After the war he spared Yijing for the disasters of that spring, and took the fault on his own shoulders. There is something to be said for an emperor who could write that sentence. But writing it did not change what he had signed. In time, the court punished the men who had lost the war. Yishan and Yijing were both condemned to death, and both were spared. Almost nobody, yet, asked whether the empire itself needed to change. That question will come, but not for a long time, and not in this emperor's reign. And this settlement would not last. It hurt Chinese pride, the court and the officials who governed the empire never truly accepted it, and the people of Canton rejected it outright, and fourteen years of friction followed. There were also things the treaty did not settle. It said nothing about whether Britain would share in privileges other countries later won, and nothing about who would judge foreigners in China. Those gaps would be filled, very soon, and not in China's favour. But the biggest thing left out of the Treaty of Nanjing was the one at the start of it all. The war had begun when Lin Zexu seized and destroyed the foreign merchants' opium at Canton. Three years and thousands of lives later, the treaty that ended it did not mention opium once. Opium would stay illegal in China, on paper, for another sixteen years, until a second war settled that question too. And Hong Kong, the island the treaty had just handed over, would become the centre of that trade, its harbour full of the hulks where the drug was stored before it was run up the coast. So the war ended with the drug still banned, the trade still booming, and a British island to run it from. At the start of this season we asked whether this war was fought over opium, over free trade, or over equality between states. Look at what the British got at Nanjing: Hong Kong, five ports open to their trade, a moderate tariff, the end of the Canton monopoly, money for their losses, and equality between officials of the two countries. Look at what they did not put in the treaty: the drug whose seizure had started the war. You can read that two ways. Either opium was never really the point, and the war was about trade and dignity all along. Or opium was so much the point that nobody, on either side, could bear to write it down. I don't think you have to choose. The treaty itself is the evidence for both. And notice who made this peace on the Qing side: a Manchu aristocrat, a sick old imperial clansman in his seventies, and a household aide who told the governors he dared not tell a lie. So what did the treaty change? On paper, a great deal. Hong Kong was ceded, the Canton monopoly abolished, five ports opened, and Britain was taken off the list of tributary nations and placed on a relative equality with China. In the minds of the men who made it, on the Qing side, very little. It was the loose rein, a way of soothing the barbarians until they went home. And between those two readings of the same document lies most of the rest of this season. Next time, Qiying, posted to Canton, is left to make this treaty work, while the Americans and the French come for treaties of their own, and the people of Canton, who never accepted this one, make that very plain. And we will see how much a treaty can really change when the people it is imposed on refuse to accept it.

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