The Opium Wars

Opium was known in China by the Tang dynasty (618–907), brought by Arab traders, and for centuries it was used mainly as a medicine. Smoking it is a later habit. In the seventeenth century opium mixed with tobacco was smoked in Taiwan and along the south-east coast, and the smoking of pure opium spread during the eighteenth.

The Qing tried early to stop it. In 1729 the Yongzheng Emperor banned the sale of opium for smoking and the keeping of opium dens, and later edicts banned its import and its cultivation in China. The trade grew regardless.

From 1757 the Qing allowed Western ships to trade only at Canton (Guangzhou), and only through a licensed group of Chinese merchants, the Cohong. Europeans bought tea above all, along with silk and porcelain, but China wanted little that Europe made. When Lord Macartney's embassy reached the court in 1793, the Qianlong Emperor replied that China had no need of British manufactures. The difference was paid in silver.

Porcelain travelled in the same ships, packed low in the holds beneath the tea chests, where it kept the tea clear of the bilge and served as ballast. Much of the enamelled ware was decorated in Canton itself, in workshops that painted plain porcelain sent down from Jingdezhen to suit Western orders.

Britain found its answer to the drain of silver in opium. The East India Company controlled opium production in Bengal and sold the drug in Calcutta to private merchants, who carried it to the China coast and sold it to Chinese smugglers. By the 1830s imports ran to tens of thousands of chests a year, silver was flowing out of China, and addiction had spread through every level of society.

The Daoguang Emperor (r. 1820–1850) rejected proposals to legalise the trade and resolved to end it. In 1839 his special commissioner, Lin Zexu, arrived in Canton, confined the foreign merchants to their factories and forced them to surrender more than 20,000 chests of opium, which were destroyed at Humen that summer. Lin also wrote to Queen Victoria asking her to stop the trade; he received no reply.

Britain answered with an expedition drawn largely from India, which arrived in 1840. Its steam warships, among them the iron-hulled Nemesis, and its modern guns far outmatched the Chinese coastal defences. British forces took Chusan (Zhoushan) in 1840, attacked Canton and took the coastal cities of Amoy and Ningbo in 1841, and in 1842 sailed up the Yangtze to Zhenjiang, cutting the Grand Canal, the route by which grain reached Beijing. With Nanjing under threat, the Qing sued for peace.

The Treaty of Nanking, signed in August 1842 aboard a British warship off Nanjing, was the first of what Chinese writers came to call the unequal treaties. China paid an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars, ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain and opened five ports to British trade and residence: Canton, Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo) and Shanghai. The Cohong monopoly was abolished and tariffs were fixed by agreement.

Further agreements in 1843 gave British subjects the right to be tried by their own consuls and promised Britain any privilege later granted to another power. The United States and France secured treaties of their own in 1844. None of these agreements mentioned opium, and the trade went on as before.

In October 1856 Chinese officials in Canton boarded the Arrow, a Chinese-owned ship registered in Hong Kong and flying the British flag, and arrested its crew on suspicion of piracy. The registration had in fact expired. The governor-general, Ye Mingchen, released the crew but refused to apologise, and the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, authorised a bombardment of Canton. The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, backed him; censured by the House of Commons, he won the general election that followed. France joined the war, citing the execution of a French missionary, Auguste Chapdelaine, in Guangxi.

The Indian rebellion of 1857 delayed the campaign, but at the end of that year an Anglo-French force took Canton, and Ye Mingchen was captured early in January 1858. In 1858 the allies seized the Taku (Dagu) forts guarding the approach to Tianjin, and China agreed to the Treaties of Tientsin, which opened more ports, allowed foreign ships on the Yangtze and foreign envoys in Beijing, and admitted missionaries to the interior. A tariff agreed later that year made the import of opium legal.

When the envoys returned in 1859 to exchange ratifications, they were driven back at the Taku forts. In 1860 a much larger force under Lord Elgin and Baron Gros took the forts and marched on Beijing, and the Xianfeng Emperor fled north to Rehe (Chengde). British and French envoys seized while negotiating under a flag of truce were mistreated, and many died. In reprisal Elgin ordered the burning of the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace, which both armies had already looted.

The emperor's brother, Prince Gong, negotiated the Convention of Peking in October 1860. It confirmed the Tientsin treaties, opened Tianjin, raised the indemnities to Britain and France and ceded the southern tip of the Kowloon peninsula to Britain. Russia, acting as mediator, gained the lands east of the Ussuri River in a treaty of its own.

The wars exposed the weakness of the Qing at the worst possible moment. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was raging in the Yangtze valley throughout the second war, and the court faced other risings in the north and the south-west. The Xianfeng Emperor died at Rehe in 1861 without returning to Beijing, and a coup brought the two empresses dowager, Ci'an and Cixi, to power as regents for his young son, with Prince Gong at their side.

The new government adapted. In 1861 it created the Zongli Yamen, China's first office for foreign affairs, and the foreign-staffed Imperial Maritime Customs, led from 1863 by Robert Hart, became a dependable source of revenue. The Self-Strengthening Movement of the following decades built arsenals, shipyards and schools on Western lines. But the treaty system remained, with foreign concessions in the treaty ports, consular courts for foreigners and foreign gunboats on Chinese rivers. In Chinese historical writing the First Opium War marks the start of a “century of humiliation” that ended only in the mid-twentieth century. The story of the dynasty to its fall in 1912 is told on our Qing dynasty page.

With the trade legal, opium poppies were grown on a large scale inside China, particularly in the south-west, and by the end of the nineteenth century domestic production far exceeded imports. In 1906 the Qing court issued an edict to suppress opium within ten years, and in 1907 Britain agreed to reduce exports from India year by year. The campaign made real progress, but after the fall of the Qing in 1912 warlords revived cultivation to pay their armies. Opium smoking largely disappeared from China only in the 1950s, after the government of the People's Republic suppressed cultivation and trafficking in a nationwide campaign.

The porcelain trade had been changing before the first shot was fired. The East India Company stopped importing porcelain in bulk in 1791, as European factories supplied more of the home market. The Canton workshops nonetheless went on enamelling Jingdezhen porcelain for Western buyers through the treaty-port era, in crowded famille rose patterns such as Rose Medallion and Rose Mandarin.

The burning of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 had a lasting effect on collecting. Porcelain, jade, enamels and other works of art from the palace were carried off by soldiers or divided as prize by the British army, and many are now in Western collections. Part of the French share went to the Empress Eugénie, who displayed it in a Chinese Museum at Fontainebleau that can still be visited.

Inside China the heavier damage to porcelain making came from the Taiping war. Jingdezhen was fought over in the 1850s and its imperial works destroyed, one reason why imperial porcelain of the Xianfeng reign is scarce, and the factory was rebuilt only in the 1860s under the Tongzhi Emperor. Our guide to late Qing and Republic porcelain traces the recovery. A set of four enamelled cups in our collection, printed and hand painted and dated to about 1870 to 1920, belongs to those later decades, and more can be seen among our Qing dynasty porcelain.