One Billion Customers - James McGregor [18]
But from 1860 until the turn of the century, Li was the most important man in China’s dealings with the outside world. While accepting that China had fallen behind in science and commerce, Li believed that China’s governing system based on morality and the Confucian “superior man” was the best in the world. China could survive by learning science and technology from the West and grafting those elements onto Chinese culture and the country’s Confucian governing systems: modernizing while retaining the “essence” of China.
Li was a child when China underwent its first military humiliation. Eager to recoup some of the massive amounts of silver its traders were paying for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, the British began shipping opium from India to China. The drug found instant appeal. So strong was the taste among Chinese for the “foreign mud” that by 1830, opium amounted to half the total trade that Britain did with China. Britain’s success prompted other nations to jump into the opium trade, as well, including Americans who brought opium from Turkey. Although repeated imperial edicts banned opium smuggling and imposed death by strangulation for violators, foreign traders found Chinese officials more than eager to facilitate the illegal trade in exchange for generous bribes.
In 1839, the Qing court sent Commissioner Lin Zexu to Canton to eradicate the opium trade. He burned twenty thousand chests of opium and threatened to behead anyone who smuggled the drug. The British government demanded compensation for the destroyed opium and deployed warships along China’s southern coast. The First Opium War started when armed Chinese junks skirmished with the warships, giving British commanders an excuse to shell coastal cities. When British ships sailed up the Yangtze River into the heart of China, the Qing court realized that the Western barbarians with their superior weaponry were positioned to take over the country’s most prosperous southern provinces.
Chinese efforts to preserve its isolation formally ended in August 1842 when China signed the first of what became known in China as the “unequal treaties.” The Treaty of Nanjing allowed Western traders to begin carving out their first pieces of China. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain. Five Chinese ports—Canton (now Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), and Shanghai—were opened to foreign residents and trade. A year later, Britain forced China to sign another treaty promising “most favored nation” status so that if any other country got better trade concessions from China, Britain would automatically receive the same treatment. A year after that, the Americans forced China to grant American residents (and eventually all foreigners) extrater-ritoriality, giving them immunity from prosecution in Chinese courts.
Tensions in the treaty ports, the murder of a French missionary, and more attempts to stop the opium trade led to the Second Opium War. It ended when twenty-thousand French and British troops captured Beijing and then torched and looted the emperor’s opulent two hundred-building Summer Palace. Treaties to end the Second Opium War, signed in Tianjin in 1858 and Beijing in 1860, granted further concessions. The opium trade was legalized and foreign embassies were established in Beijing.
Along with the merchants who invaded the coastal cities came missionaries who headed into the countryside to bring salvation. While the missionaries built churches, hospitals, schools, and orphanages, they also brought close behind terrifying technology and machinery that the peasants blamed for upsetting the rhythm of life and causing widespread drought and famine. Railroads steamed along like angry dragons, telegraph lines whistled in the wind like spirits, and deep mines dug into the earth upset the buried bones of their ancestors from which the Chinese peasant’s fate and fortune had always emanated.