3. THE SECOND OPIUM WAR OF 1856-60.
The East India Company imported opium from India to China, until in the 1830s there were five million addicts. The Qing Government issued a decree banning opium, and British imports were confiscated. So, Britain went to war in the First Opium War of 1839-42. Britain won, confiscated Hong Kong, because the Chinese would not allow us to make them opium addicts, and insisted on the opium trade in exchange for Chinese goods like “china”. The principle was of unfettered colonial trade access; Britain sold cheap goods to India, picked up opium to sell on to China and brought back quality Chinese goods, now our “antiques” to sell to the British.
In the 1850s Britain wanted more unfettered access and went to war around a ship wrongly displaying the British flag between 1856 and 1860. It won, with a bit of help from the French who also wanted colonial pickings, and from then on opium was legalised for sale throughout China. The British and French troops entered Peking and looted the old Summer palaces of the Emperors. Lord Elgin, yes, the son of that Lord Elgin, then ordered the old Summer Palaces to be burned down in a final act of vandalism. The Treaty of Tientsin which sealed the victory ceded Kowloon to the British, made the Chinese pay 4 million taels of silver compensation, banned the Chinese from calling us “barbarians”, opened Peking and other ports fully to British trade and allowed our warships in the Yangtze river. It was total humiliation.
As a result of that settlement opium became so common that it was grown domestically and took over much of the economy. Possibly half of all Chinese men became addicts. It was called “the Century of Humiliation” by the Chinese, and if opium reduced the economic input of Chinese men by a fifth, we can guess its effect on the Chinese economy during that century.
But it is worse than that. At the same time 1850-64 the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty was also underway. It was led by Hong Xiuquan, influenced by a mixture of western and Christian culture. He believed he was the brother of Jesus. It is undoubtedly true that the western colonial attack on the Qing Dynasty helped the conditions for the “Taiping heavenly Kingdom” to carry out its civil war, and the Second Opium War, of course, weakened the resistance to this barbaric rebellion. It was one of the most destructive wars ever, killing some 20-30 million Chinese, and we indirectly contributed to its occurrence.
So, we remember them. A few dozen British soldiers and sailors were killed in the Second Opium War attacking the Chinese. But we also remember the tens of millions who became opium addicts and the tens of millions who died in the Taiping rebellion aided by our foreign policy. Gladstone was a statesman who railed against the evil we were doing in China, but Palmerston and others were happy to proceed with our barbaric imperial mission and we have never really acknowledged or apologised for the damage we did to China throughout the 19th century through our military dominance. We will remember them.