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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 9

Five Ports

The Treaty of Nanjing opened five ports, and Qiying is left to make it work: two more treaties, an American and a French one, and a Canton crowd that will not let foreigners through its gates. The episode follows Qiying through the 1840s as he trades concessions for peace, from the clauses that put foreigners under their own consuls' law to the toleration of Christianity, while Shanghai grows from a county town into a foreign settlement and opium runs openly along the coast, and asks what the treaties really changed. It leans on British officials, foreign observers and scholars, with the court heard only a little.

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  1. Guangzhou
  2. Shanghai
  3. Humen Strait
  4. Macau
  5. Whampoa anchorage
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Transcript

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

Last time, on the twenty ninth of August 1842, on board the British warship Cornwallis lying off Nanjing, the emperor's commissioners signed the treaty that ended the war, on terms London had written out thirty months before. The man who carried that peace through for the Qing was Qiying, a Manchu and an imperial kinsman, appointed that August to make the treaty. He had also misled the emperor with fraudulent reports about how grateful and submissive the foreigners were. He had paid visits aboard the British flagship, where the emperor's men were received with every mark of respect, with many fine speeches and a great deal of cherry brandy. And yet when the British ships fired their salute at the signing, he was convinced for a moment that they meant to seize him and carry him off. That mix of nerves and charm is how Qiying will handle the foreigners for the rest of this decade. The Qing were the dynasty that ruled China, a ruling house from Manchuria, north of the Great Wall, which had conquered the country two centuries earlier; the Manchu people were a small minority among the Han Chinese they ruled. The treaty handed Hong Kong to Britain, ordered China to pay twenty one million dollars, and opened five ports to British trade: Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. It put a British consul in each of those ports, it abolished the old monopoly of the licensed Hong merchants at Canton, and it promised that the two countries' officials would deal with each other as equals. And the drug the war had started over was not in it at all, because Qiying and his colleague refused point blank to write opium into the treaty. There were other things the treaty did not say. It did not say whose law a foreigner who committed a crime in China would answer to, and it did not promise Britain anything that China might later grant to someone else. Those two silences are where this episode lives. Because the settlement of 1842 hurt Chinese pride, the court and the men who governed the empire never really accepted it, and the people of Canton rejected it outright, and what followed was fourteen years of friction. So the shooting has stopped. The hard part, making a peace that nobody in China wanted actually work, falls to Qiying, and it will take most of the decade. And it starts going wrong almost at once, at Canton. I should say that this is an episode with a lot of treaties in it. Stay with me, because every one of them turns out to matter, some of them for a century. Canton, the great southern port on the Pearl River, had for generations been the only place where Western merchants were allowed to trade, and they lived and worked in a row of buildings called the factories, strung along the riverbank outside the city walls. A factory here meant a trading house, offices and warehouses and living quarters together, not a place where anything was made. That December, just over three months after the signing, about a hundred and seventy lascars came ashore on leave from the ships anchored at Whampoa, with no one to keep them in hand. Lascars were sailors from India and the Indian Ocean who crewed many of the British ships in Asian waters; Whampoa was the anchorage downriver from Canton where the big foreign ships had to lie. One of the Indians got into an argument with a fruit seller. It ended in a stabbing, and then a Cantonese crowd came for the factories. By midnight the Creek factory, the Dutch factory and the English factory had all been destroyed by fire. The British merchants at Canton were sure they knew what had happened: the riot, they said, had been planned in advance, and the quarrel with the lascars was only the spark that set it off. Sir Henry Pottinger, the British plenipotentiary, was not having it, and he threw the blame back on the merchants themselves. He told the merchants that whatever had made the Chinese so angry must have been, in his words, "brought about by ourselves — that is, partly by mismanagement and partly by ill-treatment". That is a remarkable thing for the man who had just won the war to say about his own side. And it did not make him popular with the merchants. The Chinese side paid two hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars in compensation for the property destroyed, and ten of the ringleaders were beheaded. And it was not a one off. That night in December 1842 was the first of a long series of riots that would mark Canton through all the years that followed. Hold on to that, because the city of Canton is going to be the problem that no treaty can solve.

But the treaty did not only open Canton. It opened four new ports along the coast, and one of them was going to matter more than all the others put together. In 1843 Shanghai was a busy walled county town on the Huangpu river a little way above where it runs into the mouth of the Yangtze. A county town was the seat of a county magistrate, the lowest rung of the emperor's own officials, the man who collected the taxes, judged the cases and kept the peace for a whole county. Shanghai's walls had been built three centuries earlier against pirates, and its wealth came from the junks that carried cotton, silk and rice along the coast and up the great river into the richest country in China. The Yangtze is China's longest river, running from the far west right across the middle of the country to the sea, and the lands around its lower reaches, around Shanghai, Suzhou and Nanjing, were the empire's wealthiest. Shanghai was opened to foreign trade in November 1843, by nothing grander than a notice put out by the newly arrived British consul. A treaty port was a city opened by treaty to foreign merchants, where they could rent land, build houses and warehouses, keep a consul, and trade with any Chinese merchant they liked at a fixed and published tariff. A consul was an official his government posted in a foreign port to look after its merchants and their trade, and here, as we will see, a good deal more than that. The consul also settled how far the foreigners might wander from the port, and he chose a sensible measure: as far as a traveller could go and get back in a day, in that flat country criss crossed by canals. A year after the port opened there were eleven firms at Shanghai, English and American, represented by twenty three men. In that first year, 1844, forty four foreign ships entered the river, with eight thousand five hundred and eighty four tons of cargo space between them. In 1845 the British consul and the local Chinese authorities agreed on a set of land rules that set aside a strip of muddy riverbank north of the walled town where foreigners could lease ground and build. That strip of riverbank is where the foreign settlement at Shanghai began, and it is where, in time, the waterfront the world knows as the Bund would rise. In 1847 the foreign residents numbered a hundred and eight, and eighty seven of them were English. Now watch what happens over the next few years. In 1846 Shanghai sent out about a seventh of all the tea China exported to the world; by 1851, it was sending out a third. By 1855, four hundred and thirty seven foreign ships were coming in each year, with a hundred and fifty seven thousand one hundred and ninety one tons between them. And by then there were two hundred and forty three foreign residents, thirty of them Protestant missionaries, nine British and twenty one American. Why Shanghai? Because it sat at the mouth of the Yangtze, the road into the heart of the empire, and close to the country where the silk was spun and much of the tea was grown, so goods could reach it by water from much of China. Those missionaries found Shanghai a very different place from Canton. At Canton a man who tried to explain his faith to a Chinese listener had taken his life in his hands; at Shanghai, he no longer did. So here is the first thing the treaty really changed, and nobody at Nanjing quite saw it coming. The war had been about Canton, and the peace was supposed to be about Canton too, but within a decade the future of foreign trade with China was being decided far up the coast, on a stretch of riverbank outside a small walled town.

Back in the south, though, the Treaty of Nanjing was not finished. A treaty that big needed rules underneath it, and Qiying was the man sent to write them with Pottinger. The Hong merchants had been the dozen or so Chinese firms licensed to handle all foreign trade at Canton, standing surety for every foreign ship and speaking to the officials on the foreigners' behalf; with their monopoly gone, someone had to say how trade would now be run. So a set of trade regulations was drawn up, with a new tariff of duties, and once both plenipotentiaries had signed them, they were published on the twenty second of July 1843. A plenipotentiary was an envoy given full powers to sign for his government, and the word mattered here, because for years the Qing had refused to admit that any foreigner could deal with the emperor's officers as an equal. Under the agreements that followed, foreign merchants could now, through their consul, put their complaints directly to the Chinese authorities, a right formerly denied them. And in these regulations, and the treaty that soon followed them, Britain settled the question the Treaty of Nanjing had left open: when a British subject broke the law in China, it would be British officials, under British law, who dealt with him, not a Chinese magistrate. Lawyers call that extraterritoriality: foreigners carrying their own country's law with them, beyond the reach of the courts of the land they live in. You may remember the summer of 1839, when a villager named Lin Weixi died the day after a brawl with drunken foreign sailors at Kowloon. The question of whose law should judge those sailors had helped drag the two empires into war. Now it had an answer, in writing, and the answer was: not China's. Then, on the eighth of October 1843, Qiying and Pottinger signed a second treaty at the Bogue, where the sea narrows into the Pearl River on the approach to Canton. The Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, as it was called, was full of practical arrangements. A British warship was to be stationed at each of the five ports. Its job was to give the consul the means to keep British sailors in that port under control. Chinese junks trading to Hong Kong had to get a permit from the Chinese customs for every single trip. And the islands Britain still held as security, Gulangyu off Xiamen and Zhoushan further up the coast, would be handed back the moment all the money owed under the Treaty of Nanjing had been paid. But tucked among those practical clauses was one that would outlive everything else in it. It is called the most favoured nation clause. Any privilege China granted to any other foreign power in the future would automatically be granted to Britain as well. It had not been in the Treaty of Nanjing. But once it appeared at the Bogue, it went into every treaty China signed with the West after it. Think about what that means. From now on, every concession anyone squeezes out of China is a concession to everyone. Every door one power pushes open, they all walk through. There was a smaller clause too, about lawsuits between Chinese and foreigners: the consul was to try to settle them, and if he could not, he would sit with a Chinese official to decide them together. That rule remained the letter of the law right up until the treaties of 1858. Nobody, on either side, yet saw how those clauses would grow.

Caleb Cushing
Caleb Cushing. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Britain was not the only power that had been watching the war. Americans had been trading at Canton since the 1780s, they had sold opium there alongside the British, and they had no intention of being left with a worse deal than the country they had fought a revolution to get away from. So the United States sent out its own envoy, Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts lawyer and congressman, to get a treaty of its own. Cushing arrived at Macau on the twenty fourth of February 1844, with a frigate and a sloop of war. Macau was the small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, where foreign families had long lived because they were not allowed to live at Canton. He carried a letter from the American president to the emperor, and it set out the aim simply enough: "Our minister is authorised to make a treaty to regulate trade. Let it be just. Let there be no unfair advantage on either side." The secretary of state, Daniel Webster, gave him a sharper message to pass on: he was to make it clear that he was no tribute bearer, and that his government "pays tribute to none, and expects tribute from none". Tribute here meant the old Qing way of seeing the world: foreign rulers sent envoys bearing gifts to the emperor, who received them as lesser kings paying their respects to the Son of Heaven, and those envoys were expected to kowtow, kneeling and touching their heads to the floor. The governor general at Canton, the province's highest official, told Cushing that an envoy who wanted to go to Beijing must first wait while his request was respectfully put before the throne and the emperor's sanction obtained. Cushing replied that he considered himself bound by his instructions to continue his journey north, to the capital. That was the threat, and everyone understood it. Because two years earlier the British had sailed north, and the emperor had lost his war. A few days later the governor general protested that the American frigate Brandywine had sailed past the Bogue and up the river to Whampoa, and Cushing answered that no law could require a nation's warship to stay outside the river. Then Cushing sent him a short protest: "I can only assure your Excellency that this is not the way for China to cultivate good will and maintain peace." The United States, he went on, would sincerely regret it if China chose war with the great Western powers, and it had "no desire whatever to dismember the territory" of the empire. The governor general would not budge either. He was not authorised, he said, to receive a visit from the envoy, or to have any dealings with him at all. Cushing found himself baffled, and in much the position Lord Napier had once been in, though he was spared the same indignities. Lord Napier was the British envoy who had come out in 1834 under orders to deal with Canton's governor general as an equal, and had been refused, blockaded and finally driven out. And when the Chinese suggested he simply do as the English envoy had done, and negotiate quietly at Canton, Cushing had an answer ready. To make Pottinger's way of doing things fully apply to the United States, he wrote, "it would be necessary for my government, in the first instance, to subject the people of China to all the calamities of war, and especially to take possession of some island on the coast of China, as a place of residence for its minister." In other words: Britain got its treaty by war and took Hong Kong while it was at it. Would you prefer we did the same? Ten days later the governor general wrote again, with news: Qiying had been commissioned to negotiate a treaty and could be expected at Canton within a month. Qiying, for his part, made it plain that if Cushing went on to Beijing at this time, he could not carry on with any talks at all. So Cushing decided to stay put. He would wait for Qiying, he said, and negotiate the terms of a treaty with him in the south. And he handed Qiying the president's letter, to be sent on to the emperor. Cushing never did reach Beijing, or see the emperor. He took a treaty instead of the honour of an audience.

The talks began on the twenty first of June 1844, at Wangxia, a village just outside the walls of Macau. They were held in a Buddhist temple there, the temple of the goddess of mercy, and that is why this is remembered as the Treaty of Wangxia. Even before the talking started, there was a quarrel about forms. Qiying sent Cushing a despatch in a form Cushing would not accept, and Cushing sent it straight back. He returned it, he told Qiying, in the belief that his Excellency would see "the evident propriety of adhering to the forms of national equality". Cushing laid a draft treaty on the table, and from there the talks went along amicably. But something had happened in Canton that summer that hung over all of it. In a clash between Americans and a crowd near the factories, an American had shot and killed a Chinese man named Xu Aman. The Chinese wanted the killer handed over. Cushing refused outright, saying he would turn down at once every demand to surrender the man who had killed Xu Aman. Now, there was a history here. Back in 1821 an American ship's crew at Canton had handed over one of their sailors, Francis Terranova, accused of killing a Chinese woman who had come alongside in a boat, and the Chinese authorities had strangled him. Cushing set out to make sure that could never happen again, and in the treaty he signed, he reversed the Terranova precedent for good. Under the Treaty of Wangxia, Americans accused of a crime in China were to be tried by their own country's officials, under their own country's law. What the British had settled in a set of trade regulations, the Americans now wrote into a treaty in black and white, and set out at length. Qiying's talks with Cushing did not take long, and the Treaty of Wangxia was signed on the third of July 1844. And the treaty contained one more clause that would cause trouble: it could be revised once twelve years had passed. That sounds harmless. But when those twelve years came round, the foreign powers would ask for revision, and the Chinese would ignore them, and that refusal became one of the main causes of the second war. Cushing's treaty also said that Americans who went in for contraband trade would get no protection from their own government. It was a fine principle, and a somewhat disingenuous one, because American merchants had been in the opium trade for years, and they stayed in it for a dozen years more. And here is where the most favoured nation clause shows what it can do. And under the most favoured nation clause, even that right to revise the treaty after twelve years became Britain's right too. Think of it as a ratchet: whatever one power won, they all kept. So by the summer of 1844 an American envoy had negotiated face to face with a Manchu imperial kinsman, sent back a letter that did not treat him as an equal, and come away with a treaty.

The French embassy posing with the Manchu statesman Qiying, 1844
The French embassy posing with the Manchu statesman Qiying, 1844. Jules Itier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Americans were not the last. France sent its own envoy, a diplomat named Lagrené, who arrived at Macau on the fourteenth of August 1844. France had very little trade with China to protect, and Lagrené's mission was as much about French prestige, and about the Catholic missions France saw itself as guarding, as about commerce. He found everything prepared, and on the twenty fourth of October 1844 he signed the Treaty of Whampoa, on board a French warship. In most things it followed the American treaty. And like the Americans, the French wrote down the principle that a Frenchman in China would always be governed by French law. There was one delicate point. France was then ruled by a king, Louis Philippe, and China by an emperor, and to have the treaty name one as a mere king beside the other's emperor would have raised exactly the question of rank everyone was trying to avoid. So the drafters found a form for the French king, in the French text and the Chinese alike, that stepped neatly around any question of emperor against king. It is a small thing, the title of a king. But this whole decade is full of small things like that, because underneath every one of them was the same question: was the Qing emperor the ruler of all under heaven, or one sovereign among many? And since the most favoured nation clause now went into every treaty, a privilege granted to any one power was secured for all of them. So within about two years of the war, China had signed four treaties: two with Britain, one with the United States and one with France.

But Lagrené had something more in mind than trade. Christianity had been banned in China for more than a century. In 1724 the Yongzheng Emperor had decreed the expulsion of all Catholic priests from the empire. Catholic missionaries, mostly Jesuits, had first won a foothold at the Qing court in the seventeenth century, and the Kangxi Emperor had even allowed them to preach, before a long quarrel with the Pope over Chinese rites turned the court against them. Since then Chinese converts could be punished as members of a heterodox sect, and missionaries who slipped into the interior did so at the risk of their lives. Even so, Chinese Catholic communities had survived quietly in many provinces, served by priests who came in secretly through Macau, and their old churches had been taken over for other uses. At French urging, Qiying took up the cause. He wrote a memorial to the throne, a formal written report to the emperor, arguing that Christianity should be tolerated. The old ban, Qiying argued, "was directed against evil-doing under the covert of religion, and not against the religion professed by western foreign nations." So he asked that from now on, natives and foreigners alike who practised the religion of the Lord of Heaven, and did no harm, should no longer be treated as criminals. The Lord of Heaven was the Chinese name for the Catholic God, and the religion of the Lord of Heaven was how Chinese officials spoke of Catholicism. But Qiying wrote in some careful limits. Anyone who used the faith as cover for seducing wives and daughters, or who would "deceitfully take the pupils from the eyes of the sick," was still to be dealt with under the old laws. That line is worth hearing, because those charges were already on the government's record against Chinese who practised the religion. And the foreigners themselves were to be fenced in. Those of France and the other nations who practised the religion, Qiying wrote, should "only be permitted to build Churches at the five ports opened for commercial intercourse." They were not to go into the interior to preach. Anyone caught doing so was to be seized and handed over to his own consul for correction. On the twenty eighth of December 1844, the memorial came back with the emperor's answer, written in vermilion: "Let it be according to the counsel". So the toleration Christianity had lost in 1724 was restored with that one line from the Daoguang Emperor, granted on Qiying's memorial. There was a wrinkle. The toleration covered the religion of the Lord of Heaven, and soon the claims of the other branches of the Christian faith were brought to Qiying. In a proclamation of December 1845 he admitted that "originally I did not know that there were, among the nations, these differences in their religious practices". In the end the toleration was quietly stretched to cover the Protestants too. Then, in 1846, a further imperial decree went further, ordering that the old churches built in the reign of the Kangxi Emperor and confiscated since, wherever they could be proved to be Christian property, be given back. Between them, the edicts of 1844 and 1846 granted toleration to Christianity throughout the empire, and ordered the return of church property seized more than a century before. On paper the missionaries were confined to the five ports. In practice, a door had been opened, and they would push through it. And remember that, because Christianity is about to turn up in this story somewhere no missionary ever intended.

Now, what about the thing the whole war had begun over? Opium was still against the law in China, and the British treaties passed it over in silence. Opium is the dried sap of the poppy, smoked in China in this period, and the drug that reached China came overwhelmingly from British India, shipped in wooden chests that each held well over a hundredweight of the drug. Before the war, from 1836 to 1839, at least thirty thousand chests a year had been coming in. In 1839 the opium trade had been driven out of the port of Canton. What it did was turn every port on the coast into a place where the drug was sold, and every official along the coast into a man ready to grant permission to sell and land it. The trade now ran from receiving ships, old hulks anchored for good off the ports, where opium was stored and sold straight over the side into Chinese smuggling boats. At Shanghai, the receiving ships lay at Wusong, and up to the spring of 1854 there were ten of them. Wusong is where the Huangpu river meets the Yangtze, downriver from Shanghai. Four held opium for English firms, four for Jewish or Parsee firms, and two for American firms. The Parsees were a community of Zoroastrians from western India, many of them great merchant houses, and they were among the biggest players in the opium trade. From the receiving ships the drug went ashore in fast Chinese boats, and the Chinese dealers paid for it in silver, the same silver whose flight out of the country had so alarmed the court before the war. In 1849, twenty two thousand nine hundred and eighty one chests were delivered into the store ships at Wusong alone. And this was not a secret trade hidden in coves. By 1855 the names of the opium receiving ships were printed in the directories of the treaty ports, as openly as any of the firms and residents. Between the smugglers and the officials who were supposed to stop them, the only real quarrel was over how much the bribe for each breach of the empire's law should be: fifteen dollars a chest, or twenty. Britain's own colony did not help. London had told Hong Kong not to become a market for the smuggler, but the prohibition became ineffective, and once the treaty of 1843 was fully in force there was never a time when Hong Kong was not a free depot for opium, as for everything else. So how much was China now taking? The best estimates put China's consumption at thirty eight thousand chests in 1848, rising steadily to forty eight thousand six hundred in 1852. Then, as rebellion tore across the south of China, it leapt: to fifty four thousand five hundred and seventy four chests in 1853, sixty one thousand five hundred and twenty three in 1854, and sixty five thousand three hundred and fifty four in 1855. Think about where we started. A war was fought to decide whether opium would come into China. China lost that war, and opium was never mentioned in the peace. And by 1855 China was taking far more chests a year than in the years just before the war, when Lin Zexu set out to destroy the drug. That is the second thing the treaties really changed, and it is the one nobody wrote down.

Now back to Canton, and the problem that was not going away. Pottinger had gone home in 1844. Qiying stayed, now governor general at Canton and the emperor's commissioner for dealing with the foreigners, and the British had a new governor at Hong Kong. At the other four ports, foreigners lived and traded inside or beside the walled cities without any great trouble. At Canton, they were still kept outside the gates. The British read the Treaty of Nanjing as giving them the right to go into the city. The trouble was that it did not quite say so, in the same words, in both languages. The English text of the treaty's second article promised British subjects and their families permanent residence in the new treaty ports; the Chinese text allowed foreigners in only on a temporary footing. So the question of whether a British merchant could walk through the gates of Canton became a matter of national honour on both sides. In the spring of 1847, after a run of insults and assaults on Englishmen at Canton, the new governor at Hong Kong lost patience. Without any warning, his troops went aboard their ships before midnight on the first of April. It was a tiny force, nine hundred soldiers, three steamers and a single brig. And once more British gunboats stormed the forts guarding the river up to Canton. The British commander, Major General D'Aguilar, went through the forts and spiked eight hundred and twenty seven pieces of heavy cannon, driving iron spikes into their touchholes so they could not be fired. Within days his men were at the factories, with the city of Canton under their guns. This was gunboat diplomacy: nine hundred soldiers, three steamers and a brig, and in thirty six hours every main fort on the river up to Canton was in British hands. And Qiying, who had built his whole career on keeping the British calm, had to deal with them again. There was a meeting on the fourth of April, a British ultimatum on the fifth, and on the sixth a settlement was agreed, written up as a despatch from Qiying himself. In it Qiying promised that two years from that day, British officers and people would have free entrance into the city of Canton. Among the other terms, the riverfront in front of the factories was to be kept clear of boats. Qiying had bought time. But the price was high. The raid did not make Canton any friendlier. It made its people even angrier, and it undermined Qiying, the official who had to answer to them. He had promised the British something that he could not give, and that the people of Canton would not give him.

Then, late that same year, came the worst killing of the decade. In early December six young Englishmen went by boat to Huangzhuqi, a village near Canton, meaning to take a walk in the country. They were not seen alive again. What happened to them was pieced together afterwards. As soon as they landed, they were surrounded and jostled by the villagers, and two of them were killed. The other four ran. They were caught, and killed the next morning. The last of them, it emerged, was killed only after a formal debate among the villagers, who decided that he could not be spared, because a survivor would bring retribution down on them. Their bodies, badly mutilated, were brought back to Canton on the ninth and tenth of December. Everyone understood that the British would answer this one with guns if Qiying did not answer it first. So Qiying moved fast. He put the village under military occupation at once, in itself a heavy punishment. By the eleventh he had arrested six men, and by the fifteenth nine more. He also had a calculation. Six Englishmen had been killed, and two Chinese had been killed or wounded in the fighting, and so, he argued, the demands of justice would be met by four heads. On the twenty first of December four of the villagers were beheaded on the spot, with English officers there to watch. To the British, it was a prompt and proper act of justice. To the people of Canton, it was the emperor's own commissioner cutting off Chinese heads, in front of foreigners, to please the foreigners. Qiying had kept the peace again. And he had made himself, in Canton, a hated man.

Canton's hatred of the British, and of the officials who dealt with them, had been building for years. Back in 1846, Qiying had put out a proclamation telling the people of Canton that the English were entering the cities at the other ports without causing any trouble, and urging the gentry and the people to lay aside their suspicions and drop their opposition. The gentry were the local elite of degree holders, men who had passed at least the lowest of the state examinations and who led their communities, ran the local militias and spoke for them to the officials. The answer came in placards posted across the city, vowing that on the day the foreigners entered, the people would first behead and wipe out that hateful race and then burn their houses down. The placards denounced the weakness of the officials, and the perfidy and brutality of the English barbarians. The next day a crowd attacked the city's prefect in the street, followed him to his official residence, and gutted it and set it on fire, though plundering was strictly held in check. Qiying tried to explain it to the British. The trouble, he told them, was that the people of Guangdong were simply not of the same temper as the people of the provinces further up the coast. And he and the provincial governor made a startling admission in writing. Unable to make the foreigners give way, and unable to win the trust of their own people, they wrote: "We are ashamed and covered with sweat in thinking of our inability". That is Qiying's whole position in one line: caught between British guns and a city that would not obey him. In 1848 the court called Qiying back to Beijing, and two new men took charge at Canton, a governor general and a governor who had no intention of letting the British in. Under the settlement of 1847, entry to the city had been put off until April 1849. As the day came near, Canton armed itself. The militia marched through the streets in procession every night, quiet and good humoured, but grim in what they meant. A typical placard promised that if the barbarians made a single move, "at one beat of the drum we will take them, and absolutely kill every one of the barbarian rebels, and not leave a blade of grass an inch high, nor allow the creepers to spread." The militia were local defence bands raised by the gentry, village men and townsmen with spears and old matchlocks, drilled and paid by the gentry themselves, and around Canton they had been forming ever since the war. Faced with a whole city ready to fight, the British governor at Hong Kong decided that entry to Canton was not worth a war, at least not yet, and he let the matter drop. Then word came from Beijing. The emperor declared that he could not oppose the unanimous opinion of the people of Canton, and could not force open the gates of their city. The Chinese were jubilant. They had shut the barbarian out again. An imperial edict rewarded the governor general and the governor for their services in calming the people and managing the barbarians. And the two officials dedicated inscriptions at the principal temples of the city, crediting the victory to the merit and the patriotism of the people. Notice what that means. Not so long before, Lin Zexu had been sent to Canton to bring the foreigners to heel. Now the court was honouring a crowd for doing what the emperor's armies could not. And it was a lesson both sides took away. The Cantonese believed they had beaten the British where the empire had failed. The British believed they had been cheated of a promise, and they waited for the next quarrel. In 1850 a new emperor, the young Xianfeng Emperor, came to the throne, and within the year he had stripped Qiying of his posts for having been too soft on the barbarians. So what did the treaties really change? They put foreigners beyond China's law, they made every concession to one power a gift to all of them, they let missionaries in at the edges, and they turned a lone foreign quarter at Canton into a string of ports up the coast, with Shanghai at its head. And they left opium flowing more freely than ever, and Canton's gates shut, and a city's pride waiting for a pretext. But the real threat to the Qing in these years was not coming from the sea at all. Back in 1837, a young village schoolteacher near Canton had failed the state examinations for the third time, fallen ill, and seen visions. In them an old man had handed him a sword for killing demons. Next time, he finds out what the dream meant.

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