The roots of the Sino-British clashes went back for over two centuries to the beginnings of Sino-West European trade. Direct maritime exchanges between Europe and China began with the Portuguese in the 16th century and Chinese permission to build a permanent foreign trading post at Macao in 1557¹. Other visitors soon followed; and from 1565 growing amounts of silver came into the Asian trade network, brought by the annual “Manila Galleon” from Spanish mines in the Americas. Much of it was used meet European demands for Chinese ceramics, silks, and, not least, the increasing English demand for tea. Together with the silver, the Spanish empire also sold maize, tobacco, opium and other products to the Chinese. British ships started to appear in China around the 1630s and, though there were no formal relations with China, were at first allowed to trade at Xiamen, Zoushan and Canton². They quickly began to dominate China’s non-coastal maritime trade.

Official English trade in the East was conducted through the East India Company (EIC), which was based in London and Calcutta, and granted a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth Ist in December 1599. That gave the Company a monopoly of all English trade in the East Indies³; indeed, it became a state within a state, governing India as a kind of colony of the Company. But the Chinese, in part with traditional Confucian disdain for trade,⁴ set up a tight control and Customs system that turned out to encourage the purchasing of monopolies and allowing various forms of corruption, in the process enriching the administering officials.⁵ Foreigners were given, or retained, the status of tributaries, their activities limited at the will of the Chinese authorities. So the imbalances between England and China, whether in trade or mutual understanding, went on growing. On the one hand, throughout the 17th century and beyond there was a growing European admiration and demand for Chinese art and products, especially silks and porcelain. Many grand country houses in England and elsewhere decorated special rooms in “Chinese style”. The Empress Catherine of Russia even had a “Chinese” village built for her. And Chinese rulers like the emperor Kangxi showed great interest in Western science, especially mathematics and astronomy. Commercially even more important, at least for Britain and British India, was of course tea. By the late 18th and early 19th centuries that had become a staple drink in England, requiring large and increasing purchases from a China which was the only supplier. Indeed, by 1800 or so the EIC was investing some four million pounds Sterling per annum in the China trade and tea and the practice had become a major source of revenue not only for the Company but for the government in London. On the other hand, and perhaps especially in England, not all the information about China was favourable. To be sure, the first English expedition, under Captain John Weddell, reached Canton as early as 1637⁶ and in 1685 the emperor granted permission for foreign commerce, including EIC vessels, to call at Southern Chinese ports. But sixty years later, in 1742–44 came the visit to Macao of Commodore George Anson,⁷ whom the Chinese at first suspected of being just another pirate. On his return to England he gave a scathing account of the way he and his ship had been treated by the Chinese in general and their merchants in particular.

By 1756 the Chinese authorities restricted foreign trade to a single port, Canton (now Guangzhou), where the proper collection of duties was supervised by the imperial appointment of a Guangdong customs supervisor and guaranteed by the Cohong group of local merchants who were charged with supervising the foreigners. So that from 1760 to 1833 (and the end of the EIC monopoly) foreign trade took place solely at Canton. By the late 18th century the foreign traders were confined to their “factories” – sets of buildings outside Canton proper that served as both residences and places of business – and forbidden to bring wives or dependents closer than Macao. They were not even allowed to communicate directly with imperial officials, but could only communicate through the Cohong, and by way of humble “petitions” that these merchants could, but need not, forward to the Canton mandarins.

There were other and even more important difficulties. The tea and ceramics that the traders wanted had to be paid for in silver (and even more of it was needed later on for British civil and military spending in China). But where and how could British sales earn enough silver to pay for so much of these precious goods and meet other Far Eastern needs? In London it seemed irritatingly self-evident that the Chinese empire was huge and wealthy; and if only foreign traders could be allowed to trade with all of it, instead of being confined to a single port in China’s South, trade and earnings could be vastly increased. Everybody would benefit, the Chinese as much as the British (and, for that matter, the Americans). In this period, which was perhaps the high point of free trade enthusiasm following the work of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham in England, moral convictions were in play as much as economic ones. So, of course were political and balance-of-power considerations. British interests in the decades that followed the 1815 Congress of Vienna that was inevitably centred on Europe and its new balance of power, in which France was no longer the central player. But the British Empire as a whole grew quickly to become the largest and most successful trading bloc in history, with a cycle of commerce that linked the other continents not just to Britain but to each other. Not that trade was the sole issue. Finance was of at least equal interest and London quite quickly became a central hub for global finance. What had begun as lively financial dealings between London, India and Canton, developed by the early years of the 19th century into exchanges that strongly involved the newly independent United States. Indeed, financial dominance became a key objective of Britain’s foreign policy, though moral considerations were never far below the surface. As Sir John Bowring, a friend of Bentham and a Governor of Hong Kong in the 1850s rather grandiloquently put it: “Free Trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is Free Trade.”⁸

Fortunately or unfortunately, it turned out that almost the only thing the Chinese public really wanted to buy from the British, and in steadily increasing quantities, was Indian opium. There was not much demand even for foreign tobacco, and it quickly emerged that English woollens and cottons could not compete with China’s own cloth manufactures. Of course, opium was an entirely legal product both in the British Isles⁹ and in India, where growing it quite quickly became a matter of great economic importance. It could be grown, sold and shipped quite legally to various markets, including the Netherlands East Indies and England itself, although China remained much the largest market. In fact, over time opium probably became the most valuable commercial crop in the world. In China it had been known for many centuries for its medicinal qualities but in time the Chinese emperors, understandably worried about the financial, social and medical consequences of the traffic, banned the sale and smoking of opium in 1729, reinstated and strengthened the ban in 1799 and more strongly still in 1810¹⁰. Yet in this period Chinese consumption grew by leaps and bounds, as hundreds of local people, gangs and even officials took to smuggling it in, a process that the Chinese authorities proved neither able nor willing to stop. Jonathan Spence has suggested that between 1800 and 1832 the supply of East India Company chests of opium to China grew from 4570 to 23,570, rising to 40,000 by 1838.¹¹

The causes of this rapid growth have never been entirely established. But some suggestions seem plausible. For one thing, China’s population roughly tripled, from 150 millions to 450 millions, from the time of the emperor Kangxi around 1760 to the mid-1800s. Since land was normally divided among the land-holder’s sons, individual land-holdings became smaller, causing one among many reasons for growing social discontent. Another was that the corps of mandarins that provided the empire’s most senior officialdom did not increase in proportion to the total population. The result was that the quality and grip of the central administration declined as that mandarinate tried to cope with the increasing population numbers. That, in turn, helped to produce growing social unrest, multiple local or provincial rebellions and an effective drain of local authority from that imperial mandarinate to the local gentry. In addition, during the previous decades the fundamental distrust between the Chinese (Han) population and their essentially foreign Manchu rulers did not decrease. The unrest caused by these and other social difficulties seems very likely to have contributed not just to increased opium imports by way of smuggling, but to increased opium growing within China itself.

There is also the point that, during the opening decades of the 19th century, there were significant changes in the way in which opium was used. As part of its long history as an accepted medication and pain killer – and an entirely proper and comforting personal and social relaxant, especially among the higher social classes – opium had been smoked in a tobacco pipe, with shredded leaves dipped in opium solution. But by 1800 smokers had begun to put small balls of pure opium into a pipe, inhaling a heated water and opium vapour over it. That change in consumption gave the smoker not just 0.2 % but perhaps up to 9–10 % morphine. At the same time, and in spite of the social condemnations of opium heard then and later, from missionaries in China and Members of Parliament in England, it is not at all clear that its use had solely harmful effects. Moderate use was often beneficial and the offer of an opium pipe was often, and remained, a sign of social hospitality in many sectors of Chinese society.

It was, however, creating serious fiscal and taxation problems. Not many decades earlier China had earned large quantities of silver from its exports of ceramics, silks and tea etc to Europeans. But now China needed increasing quantities of silver to buy opium and, as silver became scarce, its price rose in relation to copper. But since peasants had to use copper cash for their day-to-day purchases while paying their taxes in silver, that increase in the domestic price of silver meant effectively higher taxes¹². That kind of tax increase was bound to cause unrest, and underlined the empire’s attempts to rein in opium imports.¹³

But the outflow of silver to pay for opium was not easily stopped. It has been estimated that in the decade of the 1830s China had to pay 34 million silver dollars not only in bribery to officialdom but in effectively servicing EIC debts and forming one sixth of the revenue of the government in London.¹⁴ Matters were not helped by the deep misunderstandings of the Chinese and the English of one another. China was and very largely remains – as a senior scholar remarked as late as the 1960s – “an empire of theatre and presumption. It is a construct both of domestic repression and international aspiration. Its arsenal of weapons includes secrecy, deception and a sense of history that enables it to take a long view of China’s interests and ambitions”.¹⁵ Its driving force has almost always come from above and not from its people below. It continues, even now, to see itself as the guardian of truth; with all compromises with other powers being ultimately only tactical. In principle, barbarians who had their own values were guilty of “resisting heaven’s way” but were judged “sincere” if they followed the emperor’s way. Altogether, 19th century China was a country of complacency, ignorance and rigidity and total absence of curiosity about lands far away from China, not to mention profound public ignorance about China’s history of invasion and slaughter among its neighbours.

To be sure, the senior mandarins in charge at Canton or, later, at Shanghai or other places, were invariably men of high intelligence and had little difficulty in understanding the motives and intentions of English or other foreign traders in their regions. They could also use advice from Chinese merchants, western newssheets etc. But as members of the court at Beijing, and the emperor’s senior advisers showed, there was virtually no interest in the government or political structure of Britain or of its empire. Their advice often suffered accordingly. It is, for instance, significant that China had no overseas embassy whatever until sometime after the 1860 conflict and under personal pressure from Prince Gong, the brother of the then emperor and chief Chinese negotiator with the British.

Matters were very different on the British side. Senior British merchants from Canton had a ready hearing in London, not just from the directors of the East India Company but from members of Parliament and even of the Government. Indeed, several such merchants, after becoming wealthy in China and returning to England, themselves found seats in the House of Commons. In 1793 London sent a high-powered mission (financed by the East India Company) to Beijing. It was headed by Lord George Macartney, a highly intelligent and experienced diplomat. He was given two particular tasks. Firstly, to secure for British trade the opening of more Chinese ports, and therefore commercial access to larger segments of the empire. Secondly, to secure permission to station at the imperial capital an ambassador who could circumvent provincial officials and talk directly, on equal terms, to the highest authorities of the empire. Both requests were flatly rejected.¹⁶ The emperor indicated that China was self-sufficient and had no need to obtain what he saw as Western trinkets. The second request was even more unacceptable implying, as it did, nothing less than a wholly improper idea of equality between the foreigners and the imperial court.¹⁷ Beyond that, though, there was also the issue of Chinese Court ceremonial. In fact, most of the discussions between Macartney and the imperial officialdom concentrated on protocol. In particular, there was the kow-tow,¹⁸ the ceremonial obeisance to the emperor from which no-one, including royal princes, was exempt but which Macartney refused to accept as being too humiliating and far beyond the bent knee he would accord to his own king. That caused great offence to the Chinese and while the emperor was willing to see Macartney in private at his summer residence, the English envoy was refused a formal presentation. The whole thing was a major disappointment for the English mission.

What none of that could do, however, was to prevent Macartney from keeping a detailed diary and from letting both him and his colleagues take careful note of the country – they had weeks of travelling overland from Canton to Beijing and return – its people, their social arrangements, and the life of villages and towns. That included detailed observations of the Chinese government on one side and the utter poverty, misery and wretchedness of much of the peasantry on the other.¹⁹ There were, of course, other problems for the observers, for example those stemming from the insistence of the Chinese, then and later, that discussions be held in their own language. That fact alone almost mandated misunderstandings,²⁰ as Macartney saw clearly enough. He confided to his journal: “We…almost entirely depend on the good faith and good nature of the few Chinese whom we employ, and by whom we can be but imperfectly understood in the broken gibberish we talk to them.”²¹

Even so, Macartney was much impressed by the relations between the Chinese and their rulers, the Manchus. “…They are both subject to the most absolute authority that can be vested in a prince, but with this distinction, that to the Chinese it is a foreign tyranny; to the Tartars (Manchus and Mongols) a domestic despotism.” or again “…Although the Emperor, as the father of his people, affects and professes impartiality, and wishes to have it understood that he makes no distinction between Tartars and Chinese, neither Tartars nor Chinese are imposed upon by the pretence…”. He then comments on the enormous difficulties for any single ruler in governing so vast and varied an empire. There must be endless “…vigilance and toil; and yet it is a task that has hitherto been performed with wonderful ability and unparalleled success…. through a succession of four princes for upwards of a century and a half. Imperial successions have (so far) been unexceptionably fortunate. Kangxi proved as great a prince as his father; Yung-cheng (Yongzheng) was inferior to neither, and Qianlong surpasses the glory of all his predecessors.” On the other hand, “… it cannot be concealed that the nation in general is far from being easy or contented. The frequent insurrections in the distant provinces are unambiguous oracles of the real sentiments and temper of the people.” Macartney also noted the presence in every province of secret societies “… who are known to be disaffected, …brood over recent injuries, and meditate revenge”. He added that he would not be surprised by revolution and summed up his views in a quotation that became quite famous:

The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance. But whenever an insufficient man happens to have the command on deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may, perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.²²

Whatever London may have made of his report, its conclusions seemed confirmed by a second official mission to Beijing, headed by Lord Amherst, which was rejected even more ignominiously in 1815. So matters rested for the best part of four decades, as England fought its land and naval wars against Napoleon and, after his defeat in 1815, took a leading part in the rearrangement of Europe produced by the Congress of Vienna and its aftermath.

By the late 1820s and especially the early ‘30s things had changed in both Britain and China. The victors of Trafalgar and Waterloo were even less inclined than before to be patient with foreign difficulties and obstacles, especially from this rich but obviously rather ramshackle empire at the end of the world. Moreover, European-style diplomacy saw the formal equality of legitimate states as axiomatic. For all major European powers, including Russia, and even the brand-new United States, equality of status among modern states was natural. (Monarchs even addressed each other as “cousin” and often were.) The rulers of China, on the other hand, saw their empire in principle as they had always done: the centre of Civilization, a unique and incomparable polity, whose civilisation was inherently superior to everyone else. To accept diplomatic – and therefore also political – “equality” with others remained inconceivable.

Matters began to come to a head in 1834. Before that, the group of foreign merchants at Canton had been headed by a senior trader who found no excessive difficulty in accepting the restrictions and formalities imposed by the Chinese. Still, traders accused the Chinese government of violating the law of nations as well as natural law. They harped on the principle that “All men ought to find on earth the things they stand in need of…The introduction of dominion and property could not deprive men of so essential a right”.²³ Another comment lamented that the traders were finding themselves merely insulted “when they come…with the most friendly and most beneficent intentions”.²⁴

These various difficulties looked, and were, cumbersome but had not seriously hampered fruitful trade. Many people, in London and elsewhere, maintained that it would be improper to engage in a “show of force” in China. But in 1834 the authorities in London ended the Canton trading monopoly of the East India Company and placed the Canton traders under the superintendence of a British government official. That changed things decisively. A superintendent who was himself a merchant might have no difficulty in accepting Chinese assertions of superiority, but a British official with a royal appointment was another matter entirely. Especially in the case of the first of these officials, Lord Napier, who was not just, as a naval Captain, a senior officer in the world’s greatest navy, but a former shipmate and friend of his own king, William IVth. He was much less likely to accept procedures under which he was not just prevented from directly contacting the senior mandarinate at Beijing but compelled to address even local officials by writing humble “petitions”. His difficulties were accentuated by small but significant differences between his written orders from London and the procedures laid down by Beijing.²⁵ In addition, there were divisions within the British merchant community. Napier’s resistance to Chinese constraints solved nothing, and in the end he was forced to withdraw to Macao in humiliating circumstances and died there.

British opinion was understandably alarmed. As one contributor to the “Canton Register” put it: “Considering all the nations of the earth as one family, we see no reason why one of them, because it has remained for ages, occupying so large a portion of common soil, in a state of moral and political idiocy, shall not only deny to the surrounding members all the advantages that may be derived from an interchange of its various productions, but also to insult them when they come with the most friendly and the most beneficent intentions. We think that we have made out a strong case, showing that no delicacy should be used towards the celestials; and if it be expedient to use power to compel them to our and their own goods, we ought not for a moment hesitate to use it….But the Chinese are too wise ever to give us the pretence; if w...