The Opium Wars: everything you wanted to know

Summary

Summary of "The Opium Wars: Everything You Wanted to Know"

History Extra Podcast
Episode Title: The Opium Wars: Everything You Wanted to Know
Release Date: February 16, 2025
Host: Eleanor Evans
Guest: Professor Steven R. Platt, Author of Imperial Twilight, the Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the History Extra Podcast, host Eleanor Evans engages in an in-depth conversation with Professor Steven R. Platt to unravel the complexities of the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the 19th century. The discussion explores the origins, key events, socio-economic impacts, and the enduring legacy of these conflicts.

Background of Britain-China Trade

Professor Platt opens by contextualizing the Opium Wars within the broader scope of 18th and early 19th-century trade between Great Britain and Qing China. He highlights tea as the centerpiece of this trade, emphasizing its significance to British society and economy. "Tea was not just a beverage; it was seen as a necessity of life for the British," Platt notes ([04:24]).

Rise of the Opium Trade and Its Impact

The conversation delves into the trade imbalance caused by Britain's high demand for Chinese tea and China's limited export options. To rectify this, the British East India Company introduced opium from India into China, creating a surreptitious solution to balance the trade deficit. Platt explains, "The opium trade arose as the East India Company's solution to the problem of balancing trade for tea" ([08:01]).

Socio-Economic Implications

The influx of opium had profound social and economic repercussions in China. Initially consumed by the elite as a luxury, opium use spread across different social strata, exacerbating addiction and draining China's silver reserves. Platt emphasizes, "By the 1830s, the amount of opium going into China far surpasses the amount of tea coming out, tipping the trade wildly in Britain's favor" ([10:52]).

Internal Chinese Response and Commissioner Lin Zexu

Emperor Daoguang's reign marked a turning point as he grappled with the opium crisis. Platt introduces Lin Zexu, a Confucian official dispatched to Canton in 1839 to eradicate the opium trade. Lin's strict measures, including the destruction of opium stocks, ignited tensions leading to war. "Lin Zexu believed in government by virtue and took a moral stand against opium," Platt explains ([16:07]).

Escalation to the First Opium War

The destruction of £2 million worth of opium by Lin Zexu provoked outrage in Britain. Charles Elliot, the British Superintendent of Trade, exacerbated the situation by purchasing and delivering additional opium to China, forcing Lin to destroy it. This act, seen as an affront to British property, catalyzed the declaration of the First Opium War. Platt narrates, "The British government was compelled to act to honor the promissory notes, launching a war fleet to China" ([19:40]).

The First Opium War: Key Events and Battles

Platt describes the war as "absolutely dismal," highlighting the overwhelming naval superiority of Britain. The introduction of the steam-powered ironclad gunship, the Nemesis, rendered Chinese defenses obsolete. One poignant story involves a commander attempting to use trained monkeys with explosives against British ships, symbolizing the desperation and futility of Chinese resistance ([31:16]).

Treaty of Nanjing and Its Consequences

The war concluded with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the first of the "unequal treaties." Key outcomes included the cession of Hong Kong to Britain, the opening of five treaty ports (including Shanghai), and the establishment of extraterritoriality for British citizens in China. Platt underscores the treaty's lasting impact: "The Treaty of Nanjing was negotiated entirely on Britain's terms, fundamentally altering China's sovereignty" ([36:27]).

The Second Opium War

Renewed hostilities emerged in the late 1850s, leading to the Second Opium War. Triggered by incidents like the boarding of the Arrow ship and the murder of a French missionary, Britain and France sought further concessions. The conflict culminated in the legalization of opium and the expansion of treaty ports. Platt notes, "The Second Opium War was just as scandalous and equally non-constructive for the British" ([43:53]).

Legacy and Impact on Modern China

The Opium Wars marked the beginning of the "Century of Humiliation" for China, signaling the decline of the Qing Dynasty and the onset of imperialist encroachments. Platt highlights the enduring influence of these events: "The Opium War is the beginning of modern Chinese history, shaping China's contemporary national identity and perceptions" ([56:05]). He adds, "Appreciating the historical importance of the Opium War is key to understanding China's government today and its view of history" ([59:13]).

Notable Quotes

• Professor Platt, [04:24]:

  "Tea was not just a beverage; it was seen as a necessity of life for the British."

• Professor Platt, [08:01]:

  "The opium trade arose as the East India Company's solution to the problem of balancing trade for tea."

• Professor Platt, [16:07]:

  "Lin Zexu believed in government by virtue and took a moral stand against opium."

• Professor Platt, [31:16]:

  "The Treaty of Nanjing was negotiated entirely on Britain's terms, fundamentally altering China's sovereignty."

• Professor Platt, [59:13]:

  "Appreciating the historical importance of the Opium War is key to understanding China's government today and its view of history."

Conclusion

Professor Steven R. Platt provides a nuanced and critical examination of the Opium Wars, elucidating their origins, progression, and profound consequences on China and international relations. The episode underscores the Opium Wars as pivotal moments that reshaped China's trajectory, leaving an indelible mark on its national consciousness and its interactions with the Western world.

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Additional Resources:

• Professor Steven R. Platt's Book: Imperial Twilight, the Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

• Join History Extra: Unlock full access to HistoryExtra.com for 6 months for just 99p.

Transcript

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[Professor Steven R. Platt]

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[Podcast Host]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Why in the 19th century did Britain go to war with China to protect the interests of drug dealers? Well, in today's episode we're telling you everything you need to know about the Opium Wars. Ellen Evans is joined by Professor Steven R. Platt, author of books including Imperial Twilight, the Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age. Stephen will be answering listener questions on this series of conflicts, including whether the Chinese could have won and and how the impact can still be felt in the country today.

[Eleanor Evans]

Welcome to today's episode. We are talking about the Opium War with Stephen R. Platt. Stephen, can you introduce us to this series of conflicts?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Certainly the first Opium War is one of the most famously unjust wars in the history of imperialism. It was the first war between Great Britain and Qing China. Really the first serious war between China and one of the Western powers. And I mean the capsule version of it, which stands pretty well is that it was the war where Great Britain went to war for the sake of its national drug dealers in order to force China to accept the illegal opium trade. It's obviously much more complex than that, but that is certainly how it's remembered, and I would say fairly so.

[Eleanor Evans]

And so there are several stages to this. You mentioned the first one. There is another that comes afterwards. What sort of time frame are we looking at here?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Oh, well, the first war was 1839 to 1842. And then after that was settled, another one cropped up in the late 1850s until 1860. So the first one is it's the beginning of an era in which the imperial power is primarily Britain, but then France gets involved and the Russians and later the Japanese. It sort of opens an era when the imperial powers realize that they can get what they want from China through violence. They this was sort of tested in the first Opium War, and then it was cemented in the second Opium War.

[Eleanor Evans]

Okay, thank you for that. So if we can begin with a little bit more background to this conflict before we get into the meat of it. So when does trade between Britain and China sort of start or really escalate, and what are the main trading elements we need to understand?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Yeah, I mean, it really gets going in the 18th century, but the peak of it is, as you're reaching the end of the 18th century, the trade between Qing China and Great Britain, the central commodity there is tea. So if you trace the growth of tea as England's national beverage, that is the growth of the China trade. I mean, the whole reason that the East India Company was trading with China was in order to get tea to bring back and sell in Great Britain. I should say that at this point in time and going into the 19th century, that not only was tea the most popular drink in Great Britain, China was the only place in the world they could get it at that point. They hadn't learned how to grow it in India. They didn't have access to markets in Japan. So really, the British government in the late 18th century viewed tea, as some government ministers called it, a necessity of life. The British would die if they did not have their tea. And the East India Company was taxed at times 100% on the price of the tea that they brought back to Great Britain. And there are estimates that at the peak of this trade, roughly 1/6 of Britain's national revenue is coming through this China trade. At the same time, the trade was very limited on China's side. So the British were given access to one single port Canton, down in the very south of China, far from the imperial government, sort of at arm's length, where they would keep the foreigners. And in that one single port where the British were allowed to trade, they were only allowed to trade with a handful of Chinese merchants. They were called the Hong merchants. And they had a monopoly. And I should add to this that of course, at this point, the British had a monopoly company as well. The East India Company, up until the 1830s, had a monopoly in all trade to the Far East. So really, up until the era of the Opium War, or at least up until the early 1830s, you have a sort of a meeting of monopolies that you have the East India Company sending its ships to Canton, and then you have the monopoly Chinese merchants, the Hong merchants. They're meeting them there and selling them the tea that they want, the source of the conflict. Because on the grounds of it, this is a fairly peaceful and plentiful trade. China has plenty of tea to sell. The British want plenty of it. The issue was, what could the British sell to those Hong merchants in return for the tea that they were buying? And that was a perennial problem. They could sell them a certain amount of cotton goods, not much of a market for woolen goods from Britain, because Canton was in the far south of China. So there was a whole range of many different kinds of luxury goods, like fur trapping in the American Pacific Northwest really developed as a way of supplying the China market so that fashionable urban Chinese could have skins that they would use to make their clothing. They had things like sea cucumber from the South Pacific, sandalwood. So they would scour for various commodities that could be traded for tea. But above all, really, what the Hong merchants wanted in return was silver. So from the 18th century into the beginning of the 19th century, the world's silver flowed into China through the trade. The British and then the Americans, once they got in on the trade, they carried silver to Canton, which they exchanged for tea, which the British then brought back to England and sold. And it all goes around in a circle there. So the conflict comes because it becomes harder and harder and harder to get enough silver to pay for all of that tea. And the opium trade arises as the East India Company's solution to that problem, that if they can't get enough silver to buy their tea, here is a commodity. It's illegal, it's addictive, it is easily made in India. And they essentially settled on that as a way of balancing out the trade for tea at Canton.

[Eleanor Evans]

Can you take us into then? What are the social implications and economic implications of Britain's import of this opium.

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

This illegal drug, they were enormous in China. I should preface this by saying that much of the standard image we have of sort of emaciated Chinese opium addicts, that comes from the 20th century, and that's in a very different era, actually. An era when most of the opium was being produced in China. At the time that the East India Company was running its opium from India to China, opium was a very expensive luxury good. So the users in China initially were wealthy elites, wealthy business people who would offer a pipe to their guests at dinner. Think of it like French cognac or something like that. Although it was technically illegal, the officials who were involved in suppressing it had generally been paid off, or they were opium smokers themselves. Themselves. So opium usage began to spread in China, starting with elites, Manchu courtiers up in Beijing, elites in Canton. And it spread from them into the military, because the military units that were tasked with policing smuggling generally wound up opium addicts themselves because they got free samples of the drug, et cetera. So this was all happening very far away from Great Britain, and most British had no idea that this was going on. The British traders themselves, and really, the top of this whole pyramid is the East India Company, which produces opium in its territories in India and then has it shipped to China. And as a side note here, the actual transmission of that opium to China is not done by the East India Company. They managed to find a workaround so that they don't put their own legal trade at jeopardy, and they sort of create this system where they will produce and pack the opium in India, then sell it to middlemen, mostly British and Indian middlemen, who will buy the opium at Calcutta, say, on credit, take it to the coast of China, way beyond Canton, because this is an illegal trade, sell it to Chinese criminals along the coast for silver, which they bring back to Canton and use to pay back the East India Company. So the East India Company has this flood of silver coming into its treasury at Canton through the opium trade, while it gets to keep its own nose clean and its own ships can come into Canton free of any kind of contraband. This is going to become a crisis for China because by the time you get to the 1830s, the amount of opium going into China far surpasses the amount of tea coming out. So this not only balances the trade, it's going to tip wildly in Britain's favor to the point that silver starts flooding out of the country. So all of that silver that had been going into China in the 18th century, stabilizing its economy at a time of a rising population that all starts to leave the country by the 1830s. And on China's side, that's where the real crisis is going to come from.

[Eleanor Evans]

So there are clearly a lot of moving parts to understand in this story, this escalation to conflict. So thank you for taking us through these elements, if we can turn to our first listener question, because I guess this is quite interesting context there. CJ on X has asked, what was the attitude towards these drugs in Britain and did they actively prohibit it while forcing its sale in China?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Well, no, they did not. And this is one of the remarkable things about all of this. It was perfectly legal in Britain. Two of the most famous British opium users of this period were Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose Kublai Khan poem was supposedly written after using opium. So the opium trade of China, most British were unaware that it was even happening, if they knew about it at all. They knew about it through missionaries who were the primary critics of this trade, the merchants who were involved in it. They were just sort of a seedy lot. But as far as grape and is concerned, opium was freely available. You could buy it at the apothecary, you could buy it at barbershops. The difference though is that the opium, as it was used in Britain, and this mostly came from Turkey, actually was used in a liquid form. They ate it, they would take drops of it, and it was used in all kinds of medicinal preparations, you know, laudanum, you know, various, like sedatives, headache medicines. The most disturbing one I've ever seen was it was a medicine for teething infants, opium drops that you could give your crying baby. And these were called Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup, which is just the most perfect name. So it was easily available in Great Britain, it wasn't illegal. But in China they started using it differently, they started smoking it, and this created different effects or euphoric effects, and it was more regularly used and thus more addictive. And it began spreading socially within China for reasons that had nothing to do with the British at all, just for social reasons. Within China, opium caught on. And I think when we say, yes, it was legal in Great Britain, that's only because it didn't catch on in Great Britain to the point where it caused a public health crisis, at which point it probably would have been made illegal. So the addiction was happening far away in China and the British authorities wanted nothing to do with that. That was something for the East India Company to worry about until it became the British government's problem.

[Eleanor Evans]

Right. So, well, we'll come on to this. But for now, it is obviously it's something that's causing social problems and obviously great economic impact, as you've already out. How do certain individuals seek or begin to seek to combat this widespread problem?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Well, it really starts from the top. In China, the Emperor Daoguang was the emperor in this period, incidentally. I mean, he was the emperor who cracked down on opium. And we have evidence that he himself had been an opium smoker when he was young, back when he was prince. So maybe because he was more aware of the seductive aspects of this drug than his predecessors, he took a more active hand in suppressing it. His primary concern, though, was economic. It was the loss of silver. The reason this was an issue is because as silver drained out of the country, the price of silver went up and up and up, and imperial taxes were collected as a quota of silver from each district. And so all of the peasants whose lives went on with a much cheaper copper currency. You may have seen those coins that have a little hole through the middle. Those were the copper currency. They would have to pay their taxes as copper currency in an equivalent to meet the quota of silver, which meant that as silver became more and more expensive, their taxes went up and up and up to the point that by the time of the Opium War, there were areas where the copper currency being taken from the peasants had gone up effectively 60 or 70%. So their taxes had gone up 60 or 70% for reasons nobody really understood. And the reason was because so much silver had left the country to the opium trade and silver had become so skewed. So the Daoguang emperor asks his think tank, his brain bank, his top officials, for advice about what can be done about this problem, the problem of opium and the smuggling in the public health issues and the loss of silver in the economic aspects. You have peasants rioting and burning down buildings and stuff because they don't want to pay their taxes. And this comes to a head, really around 1836 and the big debate at court, the two factions. One is legalization. The legalizers argue that if we regulate the trade in opium at Canton and legalize it, then we can tax it, we can keep a certain amount of control over it, and we can make sure that it's only taken in exchange for Chinese goods like tea. And so the silver won't continue to leave the country. The other faction wanted suppression, shut down the trade, shut down the Addicts and the users just get rid of this blight on China's society once and for all. So that debate comes through the late 1830s, and in the end, Daoguang is going to take the side of the suppressors and send an official named Linze Xu. He's going to be one of the instrumental figures in this war. He's one of the leaders of the suppression faction, a staunch Confucian moralist, and he's the one who's going to be sent by the emperor as an imperial commissioner, meaning he carries all of the powers of the Emperor with him. He's sent to Canton at the beginning of 1839 to put an end to the opium trade. And that's going to really be the beginning of this war that we're talking about.

[Eleanor Evans]

If we can stay on Commissioner Lin, just for a second, you mentioned his strong Confucian moral sense. Can you take listeners into that a little bit closer? What does that mean for him as a character?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

He believed in government by virtue, that the role of a Confucian official, you know, they had to become an official in China. You had to spend the first part of your entire life, 20 or 30 or 40 years, memorizing the Confucian classics, taking examinations based on your understanding of them. And so he was a moralist, and he believed in moral government, that the emperor projected a certain virtue around him. Officials were responsible for projecting that virtue in the areas where they ruled, where they governed. He was a governor general in Central China in Hunan and Hubei provinces, and he undertook his own opium suppression campaign there, like rounding up pipes to break them and rounding up opium and having it burned again. He primarily viewed this as a moral issue, that if the people were smoking opium and they were wasting their money on it and they were good for nothing, that the society would break down as a result of that. So when he comes to Canton, he has real faith in the power of the emperor and the power of the Qing dynasty to really end this trade through moral fiat. He comes to Canton, he orders the British to hand over all of their opium and to sign pledges agreeing that if they ever bring opium to China again, they agree to be executed and views this as the way of any, again, sort of taking the moral stand. Another aspect of his moralism vis a vis the Chinese, and one of the important things about Lin Zishu is that when the Daoguang emperor gave him his charge to go to Canton and end the opium trade, the best evidence we have is that Dao Guang said nothing about the British. He wanted Lin Zishu to shut down the domestic trade, the domestic users, the corrupt officials, and in that sense. So here's a snapshot of his particular form of Confucian benevolence. Lin Zishu proposed that opium should be declared illegal. It already was. But a real law should be passed. Opium would become illegal, and users would be given one year to break their addictions. And during that time, and here is his Confucian benevolence, during that time, the government would set up hospitals and sanitaria and provide medications to help people wean them off of their addictions to opium. So a sort of a gentle, benevolent way of helping the users to get off of this drug. And then comes the ruthlessness, because at the end of that year, he said anyone who is still smoking opium should be executed. Period. So he believed in good citizens, and he believed in giving citizens a chance to be good. But then he had no tolerance for the ones who refused to go along with the plan. So he came down to Canton with orders to shut down the domestic trade, and he rounded up some dealers and punished some officials and whatnot. But he really, of his own volition, then turned his sights on the British and drew them into this. And this is where the real crisis is going to come from. Because, honestly, if he had just continued in his crackdown domestically, I mean, I've read, you know, the diaries and letters of these British opium traders. They were deathly afraid that this was the end of the opium trade to China, that if the Chinese stopped buying it, they wouldn't be able to sell it anymore, and this incredibly lucrative trade they had been in the middle of would just vanish. And at that point, there was nobody who imagined that the British government would intervene on their behalf. They're drug dealers. That's all they are.

[Eleanor Evans]

So we're in late 1839. Lyn has put in these measures to sort of try and tackle this scourge. But as you say, he takes on some ruthless tactics, and this leads to a bit of a tipping point. Can you take us into this moment where he does turn his sights to the British?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Sure. So he issues orders to the British community at Canton. And they're in this little compound that they have. It's about 200 yards by 300 yards. That's the little spot where they are able to live. You know, there are a few hundred people in there. The British, many of them are Indian, they're Americans, and others are in there. But he orders the British to hand over all of their opium to be destroyed. The British merchants actually backtrack for a moment the East India Company, which had been a monopoly up until the 1830s. If they had still been the dominant British force at Canton, they probably would have negotiated something with the government. But their monopoly had been terminated in the 1830s. So by 1834, the East India Company was out of the picture at Canton and any British firm with a ship that it could send to China had tried to get in on the opium trade. So when Lin Zishu was issuing his orders to the British merchants at Canton, there was no unified group. These were all competing merchants, all trying to get their piece of the China market who wouldn't listen to each other, let alone anybody else. So when Lin Zishu issued these orders, they just sort of collectively shrugged because honestly, their opium was not there in Kento. It was on ships off the coast. And one of the first things they did was send orders to those ships to scramble and they headed off to Manila or Singapore or whatever to keep the opium safely out of the reach of the Chinese government. And then they just dug in to wait because they believed that, and they were probably right, that eventually Lin Zishu would give up and things would just sort of resume as normal after he went away. The thing that changes all of this is this one individual named Charles Elliot. He was a very high strung British Superintendent of Trade. And this office of Superintendent of Trade was newly created. The British government had created it after the East India Company was removed from Canton from its China monopoly. They realized they needed some kind of a British official at Canton to sort of manage trade there. So Elliot was there as a representative of the British Crown. He was the Superintendent of Trade, but he had absolutely no power at all. He had no coercive power over the merchants, but he was somehow responsible for their welfare. As I said, he was very high strung. He was given to panic attacks. One of the American merchants referred to these as Elliot's mad freaks. That he would just be consumed with panic and make these rash decisions. And in the middle of this siege that went on for weeks. So Linza Xu put the British under lock and key in their compound, took out all the Chinese servants who had waited on them and just waited for them to hand over their opium. In the middle of all this, Charles Eliot gets it into his mind that Lin Zexu is going to start chopping the heads off the British merchants. This would not have happened. And the Chinese did not punish foreigners in this way. They would kick them out of the country, they would punish Chinese in that way, but not the foreigners. But Eliot, he was certain that if he did not intervene in some way that the British merchants were going to get slaughtered on his watch. He would be blamed for it. His name would be ruined. He would have no life when he went back to Great Britain. So he took it upon himself individually to act in a way that he thought would save these poor merchants. And his plan that he came up with this plan was so bizarre that when he first told a group of British merchants about his plan, they asked him to repeat himself. And then he told it to them again. And then they asked him to repeat himself one more time to make sure that he had actually said what he meant to say. And this was his plan. He offered to buy all of their opium on behalf of Queen Victoria. He would sign promissory notes from the British government, promising them full market value for all of the opium that they could get their hands on. And they were delighted. So here they were, stuck with these shipments of opium. The only real market for it they have is China. And with Lin Zishu's crackdown, it looks like they're going to lose the China market. And here is this sort of unhinged British superintendent of trade telling them, oh, well, your government will pay you every penny for this opium you have. So not only did they bring back all of their opium from all of its far flung places, they bought more from India and wound up signing over to Charles Eliot 20,000 chests of opium, a huge sum. It was worth 2 million pounds sterling. And Charles Eliot handed it all over to Lin Zexu. And Lin Zexu made a big production of destroying it all. That's where the war is going to begin. Because when lin Zishou destroyed £2 million worth of opium, he was destroying the property of Queen Victoria. And the British government was responsible for paying for that. And so after this happened, the British merchants at Canton, their correspondents back in London, started lobbying the government. They said, we have these promissory notes. Pay up. And the bottom line is that the British government in 1839, when this was happening, did not have £2 million to give them. The national budget was about £50 million at the time, and they usually ran about a £2 million deficit. So it came back to the government that they had to somehow come up with £2 million to pay off these despicable drug dealers, because this representative, acting entirely on his own accord at Canton, had signed them notes promising to pay for it. And there was some talk. Should they make the East India Company pay for this because the East India Company was making all of most of the opium in India. You know, maybe they should be responsible. Well, should the British government raise a fund like it did to pay off the slave owners? You know, no, they were still trying to pay that off and they had a huge mountain of debt. And so the solution that Lord Palmerston came up with was let's make China pay for it. And that was what launched a war fleet to China with the goal of forcing the Chinese government to pay for all of the opium that Lin Zishu had destroyed. And that was where the war began.

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[Professor Steven R. Platt]

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[Eleanor Evans]

So we have this fleet on its way to strong arm essentially. I wonder if we can just take a brief step back because we have a listener Question from Armstrong Tracker on X who was asked who were the main people who were lobbying Parliament for this? How much do we know about them? I guess, were they self aware that they're obviously essentially drug dealers? Yeah. Lobbying Parliament on this.

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Cause it's a really delicate issue because when this war begins, as I said previously, most British were unaware of the opium trade and they did not realize this. So anyone with any kind of a moral sense in Great Britain was on the side of the opposition. This was an enormously controversial war. And I should say that this name for it, the Opium War, was not the Chinese name for it. The Chinese didn't start using that name for it until the 20th century. This was an English term for it. It was used by the Times of London, which called this the Unopium War as a way of saying how immoral and disgraceful it was. So the people who were pushing for the war were the Whigs in government because they had already launched it and they were doing it for financial reasons. And the merchants who stood to get paid. There was also support from legitimate British merchants who hoped that the outcome of this war might be an expansion of the trade with China and then they could sell more of the industrially produced goods from Manch investor, et cetera. So merchants were hopeful for a better trade agreement to come out of this. And the government tried to avoid any mention of opium at all. And the way they presented it to the public was actually, in Charles Eliot's terms, they said here this crazy Chinese official, Lin Zishu, came down to Canton and is threatening to kill all of these poor British merchants who were only taking part in a trade that had been sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge, not really illegal for generations. And they said it's a war about protecting British merchants in China. It's a war about teaching the Chinese to respect the British. And I mean, the crazy irony of this all is that they pitch it as a war about free trade. And how can there be any trade that is less free than forcing somebody to trade with you at gunpoint? But so the free traders got behind it as well. But I should say that there was a very strong anti war lobby, especially among the conservatives in Parliament. The Times of London was strongly against it. Gladstone was strongly against it. These impassioned speeches in the House of Commons about how if we go forward with this war, that wherever the Union Jack flies around the world it will fly in shame because of the disgrace we have brought upon ourselves by supporting these dealers in narcotics. The abolitionists in England got on board with this and in the United States as well. They viewed this as being the moral equivalent of Britain trying to enslave the Chinese people's minds with opium. So it all comes to a head in Britain. There's a debate in the House of Commons, One of the biggest debates of the year, goes on for three full nights with a measure that would have, if it had passed, it would have ended the war and it would have recalled the ministers who had launched it. And it failed by nine votes out of more than 500 that were cast, which gives you a sense of just the razor thin margin of support that this war had. And again, the framings were completely different to the opponents. This is the Opium War. It's for drug dealers. For the proponents, it's about British national honor, about respect, about ensuring safety for the British who go and trade in far flung places. Obviously, history does not look well on the proponents of this war, but they won out in the end.

[Eleanor Evans]

It's such an interesting tipping point. What might have been if not for those nine votes? But nevertheless, the nine votes do send them on their way. So we have this fleet heading towards. Towards China. What happens next? What are the key milestones that our listeners need to understand?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

It's a dismal war. It is an absolutely dismal war. It is a war. I mean, the way I usually put it is that it's a war that China could never have won and Britain should never have fought. It pitted Britain's navy, which was the largest and most powerful and most modern navy in the world, against China, which had not needed a seagoing navy in over a century. And so it simply didn't have one. And the battles all took place along the water. They took place at cities that were accessible to ships, and there was absolutely nothing that the Chinese could do in defense. There were battles that ended in 10 minutes as the British hammered them with their weapons. The British sent in their first ironclad gunship, the Nemesis, which it was a steamship, and it could sail wherever it wanted up and down rivers, and it was totally impervious to the Chinese cannons. So in a military sense, it was a walkover victory by the British. But the Chinese government did not want to surrender, and the British had limited stomachs for what it would take to really fully prosecute this war. So the war actually takes about three years. It starts in 1839. It doesn't really end until 1842, but a lot of that is sitting and waiting, and you figure it takes the better part of six months to Get a message from China to London. So basically like they would fight a battle, there would be a victory, and then they would send home for information about what they should do next. And everybody sits around waiting, or they have to wait months while some emissary goes up to Beijing and gets information from there. So there weren't that many battles actually fought. And the ones that were fought were entirely one sided. I mean, just heartbreakingly one sided. There are instances where Manchu commanders locked their Chinese soldiers into the fort forts to keep them from running away from the British guns. And so they were just blasted to pieces by the British naval cannons because they couldn't escape. There was the most heartbreaking image I've seen from this war was in the defense of the city of Ningbo, or midway up the coast of China towards Shanghai. When the British were going to attack, there was a commander there who bought a sort of a troop of trained monkeys, 19 trained monkeys from a market. And the plan was, and this was a legitimate plan, the plan was to strap fireworks to their backs and then somebody would go and fling them on board the British ships where they would run to the back. These like terrorist monkeys would explode and blow up the powder magazines and sink the ships. And of course, when the British ships came in, there was nobody who, you know, I mean, this is a completely feckless plan to begin with, but there was nobody who was brave enough to go and try to fling a monkey onto one of the British ships. And so all the men ran away and they left these poor monkeys who were tied up and they starved to death. And I mean, to me that really is this war in a nutshell. It was just, it was a heartbreaking war that should not have happened. There was absolutely nothing the Chinese could have done to change the outcome. I mean, as long as the battles were being fought on the water, there was nothing that the Chinese could do. There were proposals, they could have dragged the war inland, but the amount of destruction to the general population that would have come from that would have be unthinkable. And I should also say here that to the Emperor, this whole war was something of a mystery. Julia Lovell has this wonderful book on the Opium War, and my favorite quote from that is it's like in the middle of this war, as China is losing cities along the coast, there's this point where the Daoguang Emperor turns to one of his advisors and he says, so where exactly is England anyway? If just this just unknowingness about the enemy that they were engaged with And I should say that going back to that debate about legalism versus suppression with the opium trade, the officials who were on the side of legalization, they lost out in the debate, but they tended to be officials who had served at Canton or had strong connections at Canton, who had seen the British ships, they had seen their cannons. They knew what they were capable of, and they knew that China did not have the power to stand up to a naval force like the British. It was officials like Lin Zixu, who had served in the interior of China, had no foreign experience at all, who really agitated for this war because they were so confident in the military superiority of the Qing. But that was based on their own ignorance. So there were Chinese officials who were perfectly aware that China was not prepared for a war like this, but they weren't listened to at the time. But in the end, though, it's not a huge war. I mean, it goes down in the Qing imperial annals as basically being sort of a foreign issue or a border skirmish or something like that. Compared to the other wars that take place in China in the 19th century, this is a pinprick. Its importance is largely symbolic. And it's important because, again, it opens up a new era where the British and others are going to start coming and taking what they want from China. Whereas in the past they sort of came as supplicants, hoping to have preferential trade treatment or something like that. In the future, they're going to be coming as imperialists.

[Eleanor Evans]

Well, let's turn to this new era, then. So the war has sort of rumbled on with these sort of big moments of waiting for three years or so. How does it come to its first end? And what are the ramifications with this treaty that brings it to an end?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

The treaty that ends it is the Treaty of Nanjing. And the occasion for that is that the British fleet forces its way up the Yangtze river to the city of Nanjing, which is sort of the alternate capital of China, Grand City, and they threatened to destroy the city. Finally, the Qing capitulated this treaty, the Treaty of Nanjing. Oh, they had it on display at the British Museum fairly recently. This is the first of what are going to be known as the unequal treaties in China. It's the first of these treaties, and there will be a whole slew of them which are signed by the Qing government essentially at gunpoint, where they have no power to dictate any of the terms. So the Treaty of Nanjing was negotiated and signed entirely on Britain's terms. The most famous and best known outcome of it is Hong Kong, which was taken as a British colony, is going to be sort of the crown jewel of Britain's presence in East Asia. At the time Hong Kong. Charles Elliot was the one who decided on Hong Kong. It's fairly close to Canton. They could use it as a place where British merchants could have their own warehouses and houses and harbors and things like that out of the reach of the Chinese government. When he took it, Lord Palmerston was just apoplectic at this, like, useless piece of rock off the south of the Chinese coast. I think he called it something like a barren island with barely even a house upon it. You know, of course, it's going to grow into this massive trading center. So the British take Hong Kong, they open up five ports along China's coast to trade. These are going to be called the treaty ports. And again, the most famous of them is Shanghai, which is sort of a sleepy coastal city at this point. And by the 20th century, it's going to be one of the largest cities in the world because of the foreign trade that goes on there. So they open up these five treaty ports. And in these ports, and this is one of the sort of more insidious aspects or one of the more insidious things that's accomplished by the Treaty of Nanjing, the British gain extraterritoriality in the treaty ports. Extraterritoriality, meaning that they are subject only to their own country's laws. Initially, this is true in the treaty port. By the later 19th century, this is going to be true everywhere they go in China. And it's going to be extended from the British to the Americans, to the French to the Russians, Meaning that in the grand scheme of things, foreigners in China will not be subject to Chinese law at all. If they kill a Chinese person in a fight, they can only be tried by their own consular court. So the British gain extraterritoriality in these treaty ports, where they can now start to work with merchants who are not the Hong merchants. They get to break that monopoly at Canton. And now they can trade with whoever they want in China. And there is a huge indemnity that actually the only place where opium shows up in the Treaty of Nanjing is as the commodity that's being paid for with this indemnity and the war. Indemnity is meant to cover the cost of all of the opium, which is the reason for the war, as well as to pay for the costs of Great Britain having to send a naval fleet to fight the war. So they make China pay for Britain's war costs. One thing that the Treaty of Nanjing does not do, however, is legalize opium. You would think that if this was a war fought over opium, that one of the very first things that they would do is legalize the trade. But this is what brings us back to the British government in how it wants to represent this war to the British public and to the rest of the world, which is that it's a war about trade, it's not a war about opium. And to legalize opium would have been to acknowledge all of the criticism that they had gotten that they were fighting on behalf of drug dealers. So they did not legalize opium in the Treaty of Nanjing. And actually, the leading British opium traders didn't want it legalized anyhow, because they had invested so much time and capital in developing connections with Chinese criminal guilds and in developing fast fleets of ships that could sail the coast. They had built up all these advantages in the opium trade. If it were legalized and it could all just be sold freely at Canton, then they would lose their edge. So it doesn't legalize opium, but the opium trade picks right back up and keeps growing.

[Eleanor Evans]

How is the signing of the treaty received in China? What does this mean for the Qing Dynasty there?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

There isn't a huge effect from it, like, from a nationalist viewpoint. This is supposed to be the point where all of the Chinese people, like, rise up in anger at the weakness of their government. And it certainly does diminish the prestige of the Qing government. And keep in mind here that at this point in time, the Qing Dynasty, the rulers are ethnic Manchus who are different from the Han Chinese who are most of the population. And this war actually brings up a lot of tensions between the Manchu elites and the Han. The merchant communities actually are quite happy with the outcome of this, especially in the treaty ports, because these Chinese merchants in places like Shanghai and Ningbo and these cities that are open, they now have access to the foreign trade, which they didn't have before. And this is also one of the sort of heartbreaking outcomes of this war. One of the reasons why Britain had never imagined in the past trying to force open China's ports, and one of the reasons why many people thought it was insane of Great Britain to even launch this war in the first place, sending a few ships and a few thousand soldiers and marines to make war on the largest empire on earth that has hundreds of millions of subjects. The worry in the past had always been that if the British made trouble, then China would just shut them out of its trade completely and refused to trade with them, and then they lose their tea and then they lose everything. So the reason why the Opium War worked, unfortunately, was because the merchants of China actually wanted to break the monopoly as well, to a certain sense. So the British found that even in the midst of the war, even as they were fighting along the coast, it was easy for them to send boats to shore and buy provisions from Chinese merchants there. They could buy food and other things from them. Whereas if there had been this sort of hindsight vision of the Chinese nation, then they all would have been in it together to stop the British. But as it was, this really showed the weakness of the Qing Dynasty and how it had actually very little control over its population. It had very little control over the Han. And certainly the merchants made hay while the sun shone in Shanghai and elsewhere, because now they could take part in the trade with the foreigners. It was a big boost for the opium traders. Little good comes out of this for China in any way. And it's going to become even worse for the Qing government with the Second Opium War, which is going to end in 1860, with the British and French invading Beijing, burning the Imperial Summer palace to the ground, and driving the Emperor into hiding in Manchuria, where he's going to die in exile the following year. So, the First Opium War, again, from the standpoint of Beijing, it was something of a pimprick. It was an injury, but not an existential one, nothing worth fighting an extended inland war over. By the time of the Second Opium War, which is overlapping with a huge rebellion going on within China, by then, the Qing is really teetering on the edge of collapse.

[Eleanor Evans]

I'd like to turn to the second phase. When do hostilities renew after the Treaty of Nanjing is signed?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

They renew in the late 1850s, around 1856. And the occasion for this, and I should also say that the First Opium War was extremely controversial. The Second Opium War was just as controversial. It entailed the dissolution of parliament and the holding of new elections to try to disenfranchise the lawmakers who tried to prevent it. If anything, it's an even more disgraceful pretext for a war. I mean, the reasons it's, again, it's the tail wagging the dog. It's the British merchant in China who are managing to sort of finagle a war by manipulating the government. Back home. The merchants find that they're not getting as rich as they thought they would, that they were very happy about the Treaty of Nanjing, but it just never pays off as they had expected. And they're not selling the goods that they thought they would. Canton was technically open to the British, but the Cantonese wouldn't actually let them in because they hated the British so much. So the second Opium War, I mean it, its roots come from British merchants wanting more treaty ports further to the north where English woolen goods might have a better market up the Yangtze river into the interior of China. And the pretext that they find for this is again, if anything, even more embarrassing to Britain's national dignity than the first Opium War. It's that after the Treaty of Nanjing, the British flagged vessels were immune to search from Chinese authorities. The British could do basically whatever they wanted. And so sometimes they would lease the right to use the Union Jack on a smuggling ship. They would let Chinese smugglers pay to use it. So the occasion of this war was called the Arrow War. It was based on this vessel, the Arrow, which was a Chinese smuggling ship with a Chinese captain and the Chinese crew that was flying the Union Jack. And it was boarded by Qing enforcers who arrested the crew for smuggling opium. And in the course of this, they took down the British flag. The taking down of the British flag was drummed up as such an insult to Britain's national dignity that it was worth sending another war fleet to China to get better terms. So on the grounds of them insulting the British flag, Britain this time teamed up with the French who had similar goals of expanding trade. Their excuse was that a French missionary had been killed and that they were going to avenge him. But they send a joint war fleet to China to force a new round of treaty revisions. This goes slowly as well. They fight their way up to the Tianjin and sort of which is up in North China and it's sort of the gateway to Beijing. Through the water you can get up to Tianjin and then you go overland up to Beijing. So they forced their way through the coastal forts up to Tianjin, forced the Qing to negotiate a new treaty that had all kinds of new treaty ports and indemnity and things like that, but they had to ratify it. So after they agreed, and this was summer of 1858, they had to send a copy of it all the way back to England to be ratified and then bring that all the way back to be exchanged. So in the summer of 1859, when the British and French show up with their ratified copies, this time the Qing forces are prepared for them and they launch a surprise attack at the coastal forts, which turns into one of the worst defeats Britain had suffered in that era. Several vessels sunk and crippled and British marines being killed. And in response to that and the refusal of the Qing to ratify the treaty, they send news home and then the British and French come with an even bigger fleet, sail it all the way back summer of 1860, smash through those forts where they had been turned back before, go plowing on through Tianjin and invade the capital and again force the Qing government to accede to all of the terms that they want. And very quietly in this treaty they insist insert a clause legalizing finally opium, which they do in 1860. The irony of the legalization of opium for the British that the British merchants had profited enormously from the opium trade in China. Jardine and Matheson were the two big ones and James Matheson retired from China, came back as the second largest landowner in the entire United Kingdom. That was the size of his China fortune. So they had profited up through the 1860s or so, but. But after opium became legal, you started getting a lot more production of it in China. And then the trade was largely taken over by Indian and Chinese merchants, Indian producers in India. And by the late 19th century the British get squeezed out of the opium trade. They can't make money in it anymore and it turns into largely a trade between China and India after that. So by legalizing the trade, the British lost their salacious advantage that they had had. So the second Opium War is just as scandalous as the first one and it also is equally non constructive for the British. They get more treaty ports, they're never going to be making the kind of money that they had been promised from this trade. I would say that the end of the second Opium War that becomes a watershed moment of its own. So one of the reasons why the British and French launched the war when they did was because it was right in the middle of the Taiping Rebellion is the largest civil war in human history. This massive uprising in central and southern China. This is a war in which 20 to 30 million people would die. And while the Qing government had been brought to its knees by the Taiping, this was the occasion where the British and French could, you know, fight their way up to Beijing and get their new treaty. So they were really piggybacking on this huge rebellion. But in the aftermath of this, this is why it's going to serve a watershed for the British. In the aftermath of this, they realized that the Qing government is now very likely to collapse and it's going to fall to the Taipings. They've destabilized the government. The British have driven the Emperor into hiding up in Manchuria. And so it's after the signing of the treaty for the Second Opium War that the British government just suddenly reverses its stance on the Qing government and starts helping them against the Taiping and realize that they have a vested interest in keeping them in power, so they actually become an ally. After age 1860, they start providing material aid to the Qing government to keep it from collapsing. For purely cynical reasons, they want the Qing to keep governing China so they can have their special treaties with it and get their privileges. And I should say that absolutely nobody in Great Britain, in the British government, seriously entertained the possibility of colonizing China. However, by the early 1860s, they were deeply worried that if the Qing government collapsed and if Britain did not step in and tried to colonize China like it had done in India, then the French would and the British would be shut out. So that played into their desire to stop fighting against the Qing government and start supporting it instead. And once again, this was just a baffling turnaround to try to sell to the British public that, yeah, here are these horrible, barbaric Qing Manchus that we've been fighting against. Now they're our friends and we're going to help put down their own rebellion. There's a lot of whiplash in this era.

[Eleanor Evans]

Sure. Going from this big sort of shock and awe campaign to lending the resource. I think now is a good time to ask this listener question, because it sounds like the answer might be quite conclusive. Though I'm interested to hear your answer. So Alex Plotkin on Facebook has asked, at any point, did Qing China have any options that would have allowed them to defeat the British?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

That's a really good question. I mean, as you can see from 1859, with the surprise attack at the coastal forts in North China, the Qing were perfectly capable of winning a battle against the British with proper planning. The Opium War. How to put it? As long as a war involved a navy in any capacity, no, there was nothing that the Chinese could have done. They had nothing that could compete with the Royal Navy Navy. However, the Opium wars happened contemporaneously with the total destruction of Elphinstone's army in Afghanistan. That on land, away from their ships, the British did not have the same kinds of advantages that they did when they were fighting naval battles. So looking at it from China's perspective, you know, there were some outlandish proposals during the war. Somebody proposed to the emperor that they should raise an army of 300,000 soldiers and march it across Russia and go sack London. So that probably would not have actually worked. But if the Dao Guang Emperor had viewed this war as being actually an existential crisis to the dynasty, he could have dragged it inland. He could have forced the British to move in from the coast and fight on the land where, just by virtue of numerical superiority, the Chinese would have an enormous advantage. The fact that they didn't pursue those directions was a sign that the Emperor really just wanted this war to go away. Now, I should say the British themselves did not delight in this at all. Charles Elliot described it as a war where there was no room for glory of any kind. You had, you know, commanders of British ships writing home basically begging not to have to attack any more cities because they said, this is not an honorable war. This is simply murder. So I think, like, I mean, the ultimate answer to that question is at the time, no, there's nothing that the Chinese could have done to win this war without a huge civilian cost by dragging the war inland. And it's unclear what they could possibly gain from doing that, because, again, the British could still do whatever they wanted along the coast of China. There wasn't that much political will in Great Britain either. So maybe if it had dragged out long enough. Although I will add one more twist in here, which is that the Whig ministers who launched the war, it was the Conservatives in Parliament who were so savagely against it and so critical of it. Midway through the war, there was a change of government in the Conservatives campaign came to power and they actually had an opportunity to end the war if they had wanted to. But by that point, their view was that Britain had already spent so much blood and treasure on this adventure in China that they had to see it to its end. So the Conservatives actually wound up increasing the size of the naval fleet, sending in more soldiers, sort of a surge after being it. But no, China could not have won this war.

[Eleanor Evans]

So the war was seen through. Obviously, you've painted a picture that's far from glorious. We do have a listener question here from Luisa Sequiera on Instagram, who was asked, what were the number of Catt casualties? Do we know the human cost of this conflict?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Every casualty was tragic in this war. The numbers were not huge, maybe in the very low tens of thousands of Chinese killed, probably mostly civilians and cities that were attacked, a few hundred British, mostly the British casualties were mostly from disease, things like that. These were sort of fierce, very quick battles. The absolute slaughter of, of Chinese troops when they went head to head with the British forces. But the Opium War, I think, because it involves Great Britain has absolutely outsized importance to the Western world. And when people learn about Chinese history in the 19th century, really the big thing they learn at first is the Opium War. From the standpoint of China, the Opium War was nothing compared to the Taiping Rebellion, which, again, was 20 to 30 million dead and starvation across vast swaths of China. Absolute destruction. By comparison, this war was actually quite limited when it happened. It was brutal, it was violent, it was murderous, and it took a long time, but that was bursts of violent activity on the part of the British forces. So not huge casualty numbers, but huge. Just the symbolic aspects of this war are enormous and just sort of the historical tragedy of it is far bigger than individual casualty numbers would suggest.

[Eleanor Evans]

Well, perhaps we can turn towards those outcomes then. You've already talked a fair bit about how the Opium War weakened the Qing Dynasty. I guess we can talk just more broadly about what happened to China in the wake of this loss and what does it mean for the period that follows.

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Yeah. So today, by convention in China, the Opium War is the beginning of modern history. That is the Chinese periodization. And it was sort of made that by, like, 20th century nationalists. Looking back, they see the Opium War as the point where the grandeur of China in the past, you know, China's peak In the late 18th century, when foreigners came to bow at the throne and to hope for favorable trade treatment, the time when China was unrivaled as the preeminent power in Asia. That the Opium War is taken as the turning point where you enter an era of China beginning to suffer from the incursions of imperialists, where you start to have China being bullied by foreigners taking what they want. And so today, this is, remember, is the beginning of what's now called the century of humiliation. And the Opium War really becomes a template for the 19th century writ large, that similar wars keep happening. China keeps having to sign treaties with larger and larger indemnities, with more and more territorial concessions. Remarkably, though, even though the Qing limps along, I think, because none of the foreign powers dared to even imagine what it would mean to try to take over China, they all tried to keep the government going even as they took everything they wanted from us. You can picture, like, the British and the French and the Americans and the Russians and Japanese as sort of these parasites on China sucking its blood out. So the Qing just weakens and weakens and weakens through the 19th century, but it endures all the way into the 20th century, which is really quite amazing. And I think by the Time it was overthrown in 1911, the Han Chinese nationalists who had risen up as revolutionaries to end the rule of the Manchus, you know, they themselves were dumbfounded that that this enormous land empire carved out by Manchu horseback warriors in the 17th century, had somehow managed to survive into the 20th century era of nation states. Qing China made it almost to World War I. You know, at a time when you had British and the French and the Germans, you have all these nationalist movements. And for the Chinese in the early 20th century, for the new revolutionaries, they're always like, why has it taken us this long? And what will China actually look like after it collapses? So I think one of the most remarkable things about all of this is that if you look at the map of China today, it's almost identical to the map of the Qing Dynasty, missing Mongolia and missing Taiwan. But otherwise it's largely that, you know, the modern Chinese state has inherited the territory of this Qing Empire, which for half of its rule was being carved up by foreign imperialists and whatnot, but it still accomplished an enormous amount. So I think the short answer to that is that this is the beginning of the weakening of the Qing and it's going to get worse and worse and worse as you go through the 19th century.

[Eleanor Evans]

Well, perhaps that next journey is for another podcast, but for the purposes of this episode, Stephen, you've taken us through such an interesting hinge moment in terms of this history. Is there any final thought or anything else you'd like to leave listeners with in terms of thinking about this conflict today?

[Professor Steven R. Platt]

Only that, I think think appreciating the historical importance of the Opium War and appreciating the insult that it was to China, the humiliation that it was to China. Appreciating its importance as sort of inaugurating the era where foreigners stopped coming as admirers and supplicants and started coming as invaders and conquerors instead. Understanding that is really the key to understanding China's government today and its own view of history. Xi Jinping still, you know, froze the Opium War into various speeches that the government in China today very much views its job as sort of bringing China back to the glory that it had in the era before the Opium War. So the memory of this lives on very strongly. Every school child in China knows this history very, very, very well.

[Podcast Host]

That was Professor Stephen R. Platt speaking to Eleanor Evans. Stephen's book on this subject is Imperial Twilight, the Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.