• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1501 0

launched a series of attacks against China to exert what they believed to be their right to foist a dangerous drug onto another country. Using this as a long-awaited excuse to break through China’s closed barriers, British forces invaded one port city after another—Canton, Amoy, Ningpo, Shanghai, Nanjing (Nanking)—until the Chinese finally capitulated. In 1842, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Nanking, which forced the country to open its ports to international trade, pay massive indemnities, and continue to allow the open importation of opium. The British established concessions at Amoy and Shanghai, and turned a rocky island into the colony of Hong Kong. They also joined France and other European nations in creating a system of extraterritorial privilege, whereby certain European powers were given their own jurisdictions within the port cities. Within these “concession” areas, Europeans were above Chinese law, and native Chinese were relegated to second-class citizenship in their own country.

Reports later emerged of white foreigners swaggering through Chinese port cities like petty dictators. A young American bank teller boasted that if a Chinese man failed to make room for him on the street, he would strike him down with his cane: “Should I break his nose or kill him, the worst that can happen would be that he or his people would make complaint to the Consul, who might impose the fine of a dollar for the misdemeanor, but I could always prove that I had just cause to beat him.”

Unfair treaties with the West also wreaked havoc in the countryside, when the Qing government shifted the burden of indemnities to the peasants, forcing them to pay increased taxes. The peasants were already slaves to the land, living a hand-to-mouth existence, owing heavy rents and the cost of supplies to their landlords. They already suffered horrid consequences for every disaster beyond their control (if they endured crop failure from unexpected weather or floods, they were always held personally accountable, while relief money sent by the central government lined the pockets of the local elite). Now, with the burdens of these new treaties put on the already sagging shoulders of the poor, large numbers of peasants found themselves thrown even deeper in debt. Many had no choice but to sell all their possessions—their plows, their oxen, even their own children—to pay down the debt. If they could not pay, rent collectors and local officials had the power to arrest them, beat them, or throw them into jail.

A Chinese prison was the last place anyone wanted to go. Conditions for the incarcerated in China exposed the depths of cruelty of the Qing dynasty. People were caged like animals, left in filth, dying from disease. Men were often left chained to decaying corpses, forgotten by the wardens. A mobile version of jail was the cangue, a cage in which the victim would be paraded before jeering crowds in the streets. A small opening cut into the bars at the top permitted the prisoner’s head to be drawn up for display to the crowds; each rough jostle would throw his neck against the jagged edges.

A desperate citizenry finally turned to violence. Nineteenth-century China roiled with rebellions, unprecedented in scale, and tens of millions of people died in the upheavals. The most serious one, known as the Taiping Rebellion, erupted in 1850 under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan, an ambitious young man from Guangdong province. A rural schoolteacher, Hong had tried repeatedly to pass the district-level imperial examination as his route to gentility. After failing the test several times, he suffered a mental breakdown and came to believe he was the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. An impassioned speaker, he started proselytizing, recruiting tens of thousands of followers, most from the bottom tier of Chinese society: homeless peasants, unemployed fishermen, charcoal burners off the streets. Some, however, were people with formidable military or technical skills, such as bandits, pirates, and former soldiers, as well as miners