The Xenophile Historian

1644 to 1911

	Kangxi
	Qianlong
	The Opium War
	The Taiping Rebellion and the Arrow War
	The Paper Dragon
	The Boxer Rebellion
	Go to Page Navigator

Like many people in other times and places, Coxinga was defeated by a human weakness. In 1659 his army approached Nanjing; expecting to capture the original Ming capital, Coxinga lavishly celebrated his birthday with the soldiers all night. The troops became so careless with sleep and wine that they were surprised by a Manchu counterattack and driven toward the sea in confusion.

Despite this demoralizing reverse, Coxinga still held the offshore islands of Xiamen and Jinmen. The Manchus attempted to starve him into submission by evacuating a long strip of China's coast, but all that did was cause great suffering for thousands of displaced Chinese. In 1661 Coxinga invaded Taiwan, overwhelmed the Dutch outposts, and made that large island his base of operations. He died one year later, and control of the pirate kingdom passed to his son.⁽¹⁾

The Manchu conquest of China was not a total calamity in the sense that earlier barbarian invasions were. Before they got past the Great Wall, the Manchus adopted for themselves a government modeled after the Ming system; after they took over the Chinese administration was left untouched except for the highest positions, half of which were reserved for the Manchus. In fact, soon the Manchus found themselves running the risk of total assimilation with their Chinese subjects. To delay this for as long as possible, laws were passed that separated the two ethnic groups. Both the Manchu and Chinese languages were used by the government. Manchus were barred from commerce and common labor, and were forbidden to marry Chinese. Chinese and Manchu citizens were required to wear different styles of dress; the traditional pigtail or queue worn by Chinese men first appeared at this time as a symbol of submission. Most of Manchuria was reserved as a hunting ground for the emperors, and thereby closed to Chinese settlement.⁽²⁾

Shunzhi died of smallpox in 1661, at the age of twenty-two. His third son, seven-year-old Kangxi, was given the crown because he had survived a previous attack of smallpox and thus was immune to the disease; he also was the only one of the late emperor's sons who felt up to doing the job. He was an excellent choice; Kangxi ruled for sixty-one years and was the greatest emperor China had seen since the days of Taizong, more than 1,000 years before.

Because the new emperor was only a child, a Manchu nobleman named Oboi became the regent of the empire. Under him, Shunzhi's policy of fairness toward the Chinese majority was abruptly thrown out. Chinese officials were also forbidden to criticize the government; those suspected of anti-Manchu sentiments were arrested and tortured. Because of Oboi's harsh rule, Kangxi decided to assume power in 1667, even though he was only thirteen. After taking charge he still could not control the ex-regent, so Kangxi arranged for his death two years later. How he did it is uncertain, but according to one story, Oboi was seized and killed by a group of boys playing hide-and-seek in the palace courtyard. They were really youths trained in the martial arts, acting under orders from the emperor.

Kangxi possessed amazing curiosity, energy, and intellect. He rose well before dawn to study the Confucian classics; imperial audiences began as early as 5:00 A.M., although officials who lived far from the palace were permitted to attend a little later. He discussed government issues during this time, paying attention to the smallest problem or detail. Toward the end of the morning, household officials, important visitors from the provinces, and finally foreign diplomats were received. The rest of the day was devoted to family matters and to his own hobbies (usually writing poems or calligraphy). Because he had Jesuit tutors, Kangxi was also interested in Western knowledge: science, mathematics, cartography, medicine, music--and chiming clocks, which he always found fascinating. It was said that Kangxi rarely got to bed before midnight.

Kangxi also spent a great deal of time away from the capital. Part of this was vacation time, which he devoted to practicing his skills in archery and horsemanship (those skills had been neglected by most of his Ming predecessors). For military training, he brought his soldiers to Manchuria, and they took part in enormous hunting expeditions that resembled military campaigns. Like the Mongols had done previously, they hunted by spreading out to form a circle many miles wide; then they closed in, capturing any beast unlucky enough to get surrounded. Kangxi led as many as 100,000 cavalry and 60,000 infantry on one such expedition. He really enjoyed these excursions, and once wrote: "It is when one is beyond the Great Wall that the air and soil refresh the spirit."

Other trips were tours of the realm. Kangxi in effect revived the archaic practice of personally visiting as much of his domain as possible, inspecting public works, pardoning criminals, listening to grievances, helping those who had fallen on hard times, and sometimes reading the examination papers of aspiring state officials. Occasionally he left his retinue and went by himself, dressing as a commoner to disguise his identity. According to one astonished Jesuit, at times like this he permitted "even the meanest workman or peasant to approach his person," speaking to them "with so much affability and sweetness, as charms them to the heart."

Because he was always a man of action, Kangxi scorned officials who were not willing to dirty their hands to get a job done. When a fire broke out in the Chinese quarter of Beijing, he was furious to observe Manchu officials standing by with their hands in their sleeves. "We'd be better off with less talk of moral principles and more practice of them," he wrote.

Throughout the first half of his long reign, Kangxi often had to fight to keep his empire. The first military challenge came from the three generals who had crushed the Sichuan rebellion; one of them was Wu Sangui, the same general who had let the Manchus through the Great Wall originally. But now they refused to relinquish authority to Beijing, and ruled the territory they had captured like three independent states. When Kangxi moved against one of them, the warlord of Guangdong Province, in 1674, all of the "Three Feudatories" rose up in revolt; the son of Coxinga sent an army from Taiwan to help the rebels. The rebellion nearly brought a premature end to the Qing dynasty, but with the aid of loyal Chinese generals, Kangxi prevailed by 1681. In 1683 he invaded Taiwan, defeated Coxinga's grandson, and made that island part of China for the first time.

Meanwhile to the north, a different sort of trouble was brewing. For a century now the Russians, led by Cossack adventurers, had been exploring and settling Siberia. On the Amur River they built a fortress named Albazin in 1655. This was too close to the Manchu homeland to ignore, and Cossack atrocities led the locals to call upon the Manchus for help. Kangxi responded by setting up roads, bases, river fleets, granaries, a postal service, and military garrisons, making sure that he had more control over the disputed area than the Russians did. Then he attacked the Cossack outposts, destroying them one by one until only Albazin was left. Now Kangxi felt ready to negotiate; he arrived on the scene with a fleet of ninety ships to strengthen the Manchu bargaining position. The result was the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, China's first formal agreement with a Western government. The Chinese got what they wanted--all territory drained by the Amur River--and in return they permitted the Russians to trade in Beijing, a concession no other Europeans enjoyed.

An invasion from the Mongols came in the 1690s, when the Khalkha tribes united under a leader named Galdan and advanced to Jehol, just 200 miles north of Beijing. Kangxi personally led the counterattack, and considered the defeat of this elusive invader the greatest achievement of his career. In a sense he was right; after Galdan committed suicide in 1697, China was secure from all enemies for a century and a half. Outer Mongolia now became part of the Chinese empire.⁽³⁾

While China was growing to unprecedented size, it was also enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Industries such as textiles, ceramics, salt and mining grew to surpass Ming levels of production. The introduction of American crops like corn, sweet potatoes and peanuts brought yields from lands that could not grow rice. Cultivation of cash crops like tobacco, cotton and tea was also widespread; before long foreigners, especially the British, couldn't get enough of the tea. The scholars were put to work creating a dictionary that defined the meanings of 80,000 Chinese characters.

Kangxi could not govern his family as well as he did the empire. Of his twenty sons who survived into adulthood, the emperor gave the most attention to the second, Yinreng, expecting him to become his heir. The young man, however, repaid his father's devotion with extravagance and disobedience; he was also a homosexual. Kangxi did not know what to do with him. He dismissed Yinreng as his heir, reinstated him, and dismissed him again. Growing paranoid, he executed some of Yinreng's associates, and even arrested three of his other sons. The domestic turmoil left the emperor so embittered that he refused to name a successor. When he died in 1722, the throne passed to his fourth son, Yongzheng, who was at his bedside during his last days.

Qianlong

At home, Qianlong surpassed all other Qing emperors in his sponsorship of culture. Some 15,000 calligraphers were employed making handwritten copies of 10,000 books for the nation's six largest libraries. The most famous of these was The Complete Works of Four Treasuries, where 300 scholars edited/summarized some 3,500 works on the Chinese classics, a total of 36,000 volumes. The most useful of the Western sciences, astronomy and mathematics, were also given favorable treatment. Hundreds of poets and painters were subsidized to exalt Chinese achievements. No books or art that criticized the Manchus was permitted, however, and with good reason. As in Yuan dynasty days, Chinese scholars were becoming nostalgic for the times when the Chinese ruled themselves. Secret societies, especially the White Lotus movement which had founded the Ming dynasty, were also enjoying a comeback. Qianlong managed to keep a lid on dissent for his entire reign, but the emperors of the nineteenth century would see their troubles grow exponentially on account of it.

The Manchus inherited the Confucian disdain for merchants and commerce. Most of the permitted foreign trade was done under the tribute system, which was used as a means of expressing China's cultural and political supremacy over everyone else. Ambassadors would come to the imperial court in Beijing, and show their submission by kowtowing (bowing on hands and knees and knocking one's head on the ground) three times. Then the ambassadors would deliver the wares of their lands, calling them gifts; the emperor would respond by letting them return home with a sizeable quantity of Chinese products. During the Qianlong era Burma, Siam, Laos, Vietnam, Central Asia, Nepal, Korea and the Ryukyu islands all sent tribute. Russia traded in a similar fashion, by putting ambassadors in charge of their commercial missions. And while other Europeans were eager to trade, the Chinese continued to treat them like lepers. English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and American merchants were only permitted outside of Macao during the months when there was tea for them to buy (April to September), and even then they could only go to Canton. In addition they were forbidden to bring their wives with them; they were not allowed to learn Cantonese, the local Chinese dialect; they could not travel "in droves of more than ten at a time," and they always had to be accompanied by a Chinese interpreter, who was held responsible for their good behavior.

Naturally the Europeans resented all these restrictions, but there was little they could do about it as long as the Chinese did not really want their business. To sell anything to the Chinese, period, they had to offer merchandise that was worth far more than what they got in return. And they had to pay for Chinese products with silver--usually Spanish coins that came from Mexico via the Philippines.

In 1793 the British tried to loosen the restrictions placed upon them by sending a diplomatic mission, led by Lord George Macartney. Like the tribute-bearers of other nations, Lord Macartney brought numerous gifts to help his cause, all of them the most modern products of Western technology. There were modern firearms and saddles, chiming clocks and Derby porcelain, crystal chandeliers, telescopes, and a working mechanical model of the solar system. There was even a hot-air balloon, complete with pilot. The emperor received the mission in an informal setting, the Garden of Ten Thousand Trees at Jehol, to limit any breaches of protocol Western ignorance might cause.

But Qianlong, now a shrewd octogenarian, was unimpressed by what he saw. He was not about to sign a trade agreement on account of some fancy foreign souvenirs. Indeed, he was not even sure where Britain was, nor did he greatly care. He treated the visitors with every courtesy, but never discussed with them the reason why they had come. After several weeks of frustration, Macartney and his retinue left, with only a letter from Qianlong to England's King George III to show for their efforts. And even the letter was not worth the trouble Lord Macartney went to; in it the emperor conceded nothing. "Our ways have no resemblance to yours," Qianlong said. "As your ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures."

While Macartney was there, it went noticed that he had refused to kowtow to the emperor; most Westerners had too much pride to perform such a humiliating act.⁽⁴⁾ But the court archivists, fearful that a bad precedent might be set, recorded that he had kowtowed; thus Britain supposedly acknowledged the supremacy of China, in fiction if not in fact. In the next century this blindness would cost the Middle Kingdom dearly.

The social and economic transformations that occurred in European civilization over the last five hundred years had brought it to a level of development that compared favorably with China in many areas. Though the Chinese empire was larger and far more populous than the tiny nation-states that made up most of Europe, European kingdoms had grown more efficient at mobilizing their more limited resources. Rivalries between the states of a fragmented Europe had also made for a greater aggressiveness and sense of competition on the part of the Europeans than the rulers of the Chinese monolith could even imagine. China's armies were far larger than those of any of the European kingdoms, but European soldiers were on the whole better led, armed, and disciplined. Chinese wet-rice agriculture was both more productive and less damaging to the environment than European dryland farming, and the Chinese rulers had a far larger population to cultivate their fields, build their dikes and bridges, work their mines, and manufacture tools, clothing, and weapons. But the inventions of the medieval period had given the Europeans a decided advantage over the Chinese in the animal and machine power they could generate--a capacity that did much to make up for their manpower deficiencies. Europe had been technologically behind China for two millennia, but while the Chinese weren't watching, the Europeans caught up with and surpassed them. And as Qianlong had noted, their ways were very different.

The Opium War

Even though the balance of trade was heavily in China's favor, Western merchants continued to come to Canton. This was because the demand for Chinese products never let up at home; ever since Marco Polo's travel guide was published, the Europeans couldn't get enough of anything that came from the Far East. In fact, after England discovered tea, it became a political necessity to keep buying tea, no matter what the Chinese charged for it. But as the industrial, technological and military might of the West increased, Westerners became less willing to trade on China's terms. Before long the same Europeans who once admired China would scorn it for being stagnant and backward.

As noted previously, the problem was that the West produced nothing that China wanted. That changed when the Chinese discovered opium. The custom of smoking that terrible drug, long practiced in Indonesia, was first introduced by Dutch traders in the seventeenth century. Demand for opium, which the Chinese called "foreign mud," was insignificant for a while, but more Chinese got addicted to it every year. By 1800 about 2,000 chests of opium (140 tons, one chest was worth about $300 to the trader who brought it in) entered China every year. Most of the opium came from India, where the British East India Company now had large plantations set aside for cultivation of the opium poppy.

Officially the Chinese government had long opposed the opium trade. As early as 1729 the sale and use of the drug had been outlawed. But there were plenty of corrupt mandarins (the Western term for all Chinese officials), who were willing to look the other way in return for bribes. Furthermore, the East India Company and smaller entrepreneurs had more ships than any fleet the Chinese could put in the water, so the traders were able to smuggle the opium in with little fear of getting caught.

The drug traffic snowballed in the early nineteenth century. 3,000 chests were imported in 1816; in 1820, 5,000; in 1825, 10,000; and in 1833, 30,000. The trade situation was now dramatically reversed; millions of dollars in silver now flowed out of China every year. An estimated 12 million Chinese were addicted, including even members of the imperial bodyguard. Opium dens proliferated, ranging from primitive to luxurious in quality. The upper-class dens offered upholstered couches, courteous servants, women, gambling, and anything else one might find in a fancy private club. At the other end of the scale were places like the one seen by an appalled American observer: "Never, perhaps, was there a nearer approach to Hell than within the precincts of these vile hovels."

Matters came to a head in the mid-1830s. At this time Britain's interests in Canton were represented by a trade superintendent named Lord William Napier. Unlike his predecessors, Napier saw upholding the honor of his nation as more important than making a profit. To the Chinese he was a perfect example of a foreign "barbarian": he was tall, rawboned, and red-haired; he seemed to have no manners whatsoever; he ignored all established rules regarding foreigners in Canton. His Chinese counterpart, the imperial viceroy, showed what he thought of Napier by translating his name into Chinese characters that could also be read as "Laboriously Vile." In 1835 he decided he didn't want Napier around anymore and issued an edict ordering him to leave China. Napier refused. The viceroy announced that all trade with the British would be stopped; Napier brought two warships from Macao to Canton. War looked like a real possibility, since the honor of both Britain and China was at stake. But nature provided a perfect face-saving solution. Napier came down with a raging fever, and he agreed to remove the frigates in return for safe passage to Macao. The warships left, and Laboriously Vile was taken away in a Chinese junk, while the Chinese celebrated with drums, gongs, and firecrackers. To the relief of everybody, he died in Macao a few days later.

Soon after that the emperor appointed a new imperial commissioner, Lin Zexu. Unlike other mandarins, Lin was so honest that he had the nickname of Lin-the-Clear-Sky. As governor general of Hubei and Hunan, he had ruthlessly suppressed drug trafficking within those two provinces, and he had every intention of doing the same thing for all of China. In 1839 he personally went to Canton with two demands for the foreigners. First, they must immediately hand over all the opium they had ("There must not be the smallest item concealed or withheld."). Second, the barbarians must promise never to smuggle opium again, and he promised to behead anyone caught breaking that pledge. The foreigners did not take him seriously at first, until they realized that this mandarin could not be bought. Lin waited two weeks for his demands to be met, then surrounded the foreigners' compound with soldiers, not letting them out until they gave in. When they did, 20,000 chests of opium were confiscated and promptly burned.

The British government demanded that the traders be compensated for their loss. China refused and the Opium War (1839-42) began. At first the Chinese were as confident as ever, expecting that the only possible outcome would be an easy victory for them. They had the advantage of numbers, and a story was spread around that the trousers worn by Western soldiers would impede their movements, preventing them from running. But the Chinese weapons were obsolete matchlock guns and bows. The Chinese navy was entirely sail-driven, while a fourth of the British ships had steam engines, making them faster and capable of moving in any direction, regardless of winds and currents. The result was that the British won every battle, and the Royal Navy could sail up and down the coast at will, bombarding anything that got in the way.

In August 1840 the emperor replaced Lin Zexu with a more conciliatory commissioner, Qishan. He immediately started negotiations with the British in Canton, but the war continued, improving the strength of the British bargaining position daily. In 1841 they blocked the mouth of the Pearl River, and Qishan tried to buy them off by giving them a small fishing island named Hong Kong as a trading enclave, as well as paying the $6 million indemnity the British demanded for the lost opium. In 1842 the British fleet took Shanghai and advanced up the Yangtze River; when it reached the outskirts of Nanjing the Chinese were willing to accept peace at any price.

The treaty that ended the war made Hong Kong a British colony, declared five ports (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai) open to foreign trade, and increased the indemnity China was forced to pay to $21 million. One year later, Britain called for, and got, "most-favored nation" status, meaning that any economic agreement China signed with another nation would apply to Britain too. The issue that started the war, opium, was never mentioned in the treaty, so the opium trade continued to increase every year.

The Taiping Rebellion and the Arrow War

Born in 1814 to a farming community near Canton, Hong Xiuquan suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of 23 after repeatedly failing the civil service exams which would have insured him a prosperous career. In his delirium, he saw himself in a palace where he met an old man with a golden beard. The old man gave him a sword and told him to kill demons with it; a middle-aged man who called himself Elder Brother promised to help. Hong could not explain his vision at first, but six years later (1843) he read a Baptist missionary's tract and the meaning became clear. The palace was Heaven, the old man was God, and Elder Brother was Jesus. This made Hong the second son of God, and the younger brother of Jesus. By placing a sword in Hong's hand, God had given him the assignment of wiping out the enemies of God, namely the Qing dynasty.

Hong started by founding his own church, the Society of Godworshipers. On the surface it resembled Protestant Christianity, but Hong made himself the third member of the Holy Trinity, replacing the Holy Spirit. In 1851 he turned words into action, by having his followers capture the mountain town of Yongan in Guangxi province. From there he proclaimed a new dynasty, which he called the Taiping Tianguo, or "Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace." Donning yellow robes, the symbol of emperors, he announced he would exterminate all idolaters, and take command of the empire as its true ruler.

Hong's regime attracted those oppressed by Manchu taxation, as well as scholars and students who were sickened by official corruption and incompetence. In the area under his rule he created a puritanical society where everybody was equal and all goods were common property. Alcohol, tobacco and prostitution were outlawed; rape, adultery, and opium-smoking were crimes punishable by death. Also proscribed was foot-binding, an ancient and painful practice done to keep the feet of girls from growing to full size; now women could be the equals of men. Women even served in the Taiping army, though they were segregated into separate units from their male colleagues.

The Manchus tried to nip this rebellion in the bud, but they failed to capture the Taiping stronghold. Then Hong and 10,000 followers broke out of Yongan into open country. Gathering recruits along the way, they marched 750 miles north to Nanjing, and took the old Ming capital in March 1853. The whole Manchu garrison and their families--about 25,000 men, women, and children--were slaughtered and thrown into the Yangtze River.

The Taipings were now 500,000 strong, with a fearsome reputation for battlefield discipline that the Manchus could not match. Troops who showed any inclination to retreat or desert were immediately killed by their officers. And as if the Taipings were not enough to overthrow the dynasty, a second war broke out with the West. It started over mutual recriminations; Britain accused China of not fulfilling all its obligations under the 1842 treaty; China accused the British of smuggling in opium, which was still illegal. In 1856 the Canton police seized the Arrow, a Chinese-owned but British-registered ship, and charged the crew with piracy and smuggling. Although the prisoners were eventually released, the tough-minded imperial commissioner in Canton, Ye Mingchen, refused to apologize. Britain responded by bombarding Canton and dispatching troops.

Before long they were joined by troops from France, who wanted to avenge the recent murder of a French missionary in Guangdong province. They captured Canton in December 1857, advanced up the coast, and took Dagu, a port less than 100 miles from Beijing, in June 1858. The emperor, Xianfeng, abruptly capitulated to all the demands of the West. In the Treaty of Tianjin, he agreed to open ten more ports to foreign trade, and gave foreign merchants and missionaries the right to travel anywhere in the country; he also promised to pay a $4 million indemnity and legalize the opium trade. Before the Westerners departed, Russia used the occasion to impose its own treaty, forcing the Chinese to move the Manchurian-Siberian border to the Amur River.

When British and French diplomats returned from Beijing in June 1859, they were fired on by imperial troops at Dagu. The troops of the Allies were driven out of China with heavy losses, but in July 1860 another Anglo-French force arrived at the mouth of the Hai River. Dagu was occupied again, and Xianfeng agreed to negotiate, but at the peace talks the Allied negotiators were arrested and jailed as hostages. New fighting broke out, and this time the Anglo-French troops pushed all the way to Beijing. They captured the Yuanming Yuan, the summer palace of the Qing emperors and the storehouse of paintings, jewels, jade, royal garments, court treasures, bales of silk, and countless priceless heirlooms that had been accumulating there for centuries. There had never existed a more fabulous collection of wealth and art anywhere on earth.

Nor would it ever be seen again. It took three days for the British and French soldiers to ransack the 200 glittering buildings of the compound and carry the treasures away, though they were aided by hordes of Chinese peasants who broke in and helped themselves to a share of the loot. When it was learned that twenty of the thirty-nine Allied hostages had been brutally tortured and murdered, the British man on the spot, Lord Elgin, ordered that the Summer Palace be burned in retribution. Before this was carried out, the busy arsonists went through the buildings one more time for any loot that may have been overlooked previously. In one outbuilding they found some English-made items: two riding carriages, a double-barreled shotgun, and two cannon. All were in mint condition despite being more than 70 years old. Emperor Qianlong was right when he said he had no use for Lord Macartney's gifts.

The torching of the Summer Palace ended all resistance. Lord Elgin was carried into Beijing on a large sedan chair by eight Chinese porters (the emperor's privilege!), and there he had the Treaty of Tianjin put into effect, along with some new concessions: Tianjin was opened to trade, Kowloon was ceded to Britain as part of the Hong Kong colony, and the indemnity was increased to $16 million. Emperor Xianfeng, who had fled to Jehol, died in shame ten months later without ever returning to Beijing.

The Arrow War (also called the Second Opium War) was over, but China's troubles weren't. In the northeast, the Russians used guile to wrest away another huge tract of Manchurian real estate. They claimed that the British & French were planning to occupy Beijing permanently, and only their opposition to the plan had persuaded them to leave. The Chinese thanked them and agreed to Russia's next demand, which was all of the territory east of the Ussuri River. China's northeastern frontier reached its present-day limits, and the Russians promptly built a Pacific port in their new acquisition, which was appropriately named Vladivostok ("farthest east").

Meanwhile, millions of Chinese subjects were still in revolt. Most of the Yangtze valley and southern China was under Taiping rule. At first the West was sympathetic to the Taiping cause, thinking that a Christian emperor would be friendlier than the Manchus. But by now the Taipings had lost their previous idealism. There was venomous rivalry among the Taiping leaders, and they tended to massacre the population of any town that offered resistance. The West changed its opinion because, as the British ambassador put it, there was little hope of "any good coming out of the rebel movement. They do nothing but burn, murder and destroy."

To protect their newly won concessions, the Europeans now found themselves supporting the Manchus against the Taipings. Western arms and money went to the imperial forces. A young British officer of exceptional ability, Major Charles George Gordon, put together Western mercenaries and Chinese soldiers to form a modern army. By 1864, "Chinese" Gordon's so-called Ever-Victorious Army had driven the rebels back to Nanjing. On July 16, after a six-week siege, the Heavenly Capital fell. The Heavenly King, according to one report, went out of this life in style by swallowing a lethal quantity of gold leaf; several of his concubines hanged themselves in the trees above his grave. 100,000 other inhabitants of Nanjing also died, either at their own hands or at those of the conquerors. A thirteen-year rebellion that had claimed more than 20 million lives was finally over.

The Paper Dragon

It took an eleven-year campaign, led by a brilliant general named Qe Qongtang, to regain control of the northwest. Qe started by taking back Shaanxi in 1868. Then he marched westward, beyond the ability of the government to keep him supplied. For whole seasons he would keep his army in one place while they planted and harvested crops to feed themselves on the next leg of their journey. Replacements were recruited and trained from the non-Chinese tribes they met along the way. Yakub Beg died in 1877, possibly from unnatural causes, but Qe could not go home yet, because the Russians had occupied the area around Lake Balkhash and the Ili River, supposedly to preserve Chinese sovereignty there. The Qing government ordered Qe to negotiate with the Russians. The result was a treaty in 1878 that handed more than three quarters of the disputed territory to Russia and called upon China to compensate the Russians for "occupation costs." Beijing refused to ratify it, but neither side was in the mood for war. A new treaty in 1881 gave much of the disputed land back to China, in return for more money and trading concessions in Xinjiang Province.

Qe Qongtang's exploits had saved the empire's western territories and suggested to some that China might triumph over its foreign adversaries after all. But in every other way the late nineteenth century was a disaster for the Chinese. The Middle Kingdom's economy was firmly controlled by the West. In 1880, the amount of opium brought in peaked at 150,000 chests. In the same year China bought 448 million yards of British cotton. The number of Christian missionaries in China increased fivefold and their converts tenfold. The number of treaty ports--many of them hundreds of miles inland--increased to nearly 100; here foreigners could live, own property, and do business without being subject to Chinese law. Railroads, telegraph lines, churches and other examples of "barbarian architecture" sprouted up, especially around Shanghai and Canton.

The number of potential customers suggested by China's enormous population inspired grand ideas among British merchants. One exclaimed that if every person in China would buy a cotton nightcap every year, the British mills would be kept busy. Another shipped a boatload of pianos in the mistaken belief that Chinese ladies would want to imitate their Western sisters and learn to play; a cutlery firm sent thousands of knives and forks, thinking that the Chinese could be lured away from chopsticks. None of these entrepreneurs took Chinese xenophobia into account and they ended up paying for storage space instead of raking in profits.

The Chinese were robbed not only of their wealth and pride, but also of their land. The Ryukyu islands were annexed by Japan in 1881. Britain gobbled up Burma piece by piece, because it was next to India, and only luck spared Tibet from the same fate. China fought the French for two years in Vietnam (1884-85), winning some land battles there, but France captured Taiwan, and the Chinese had to give up Vietnam to get Taiwan back. Germany took Kiaochow (modern Qingdao) in Shandong for a naval base; for the same reason the Russians set themselves up at Port Arthur, on the southern tip of Manchuria, and the French got Guangzhouwan near the Vietnamese border. An 1898 treaty guaranteed British rule over Hong Kong for another 99 years, and gave them a naval base at Weihaiwei, right between the Russian and German bases so the British could keep an eye on both rivals. Even Italy expressed an interest in having a Chinese outpost.

In the last years of the century Europeans thought about carving up China into outright colonies of Europe, the way they had already done in most of the Third World. They were appalled at the lack of human rights in China, as well as the squalor and continuing practice of customs that were seen as pagan or simply degenerate. Surely, many idealists reasoned, it was their moral responsibility to take charge, at least for a while, until they could teach the Chinese a more proper way to live. Then they started drawing lines on the map of China to show who got what, usually following already established "spheres of influence." Russia, for example, would get the areas where it already dominated the local economy: Xinjiang, Mongolia, and two-thirds of Manchuria. Britain would get the lion's share, like it did in so many other places: Tibet, Guangdong, and all of the provinces in the Yangtze valley. France would get Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guizhou, since they were on the border of Vietnam. Germany would get the Shandong peninsula, and Japan would get the areas nearest to their Taiwanese and Korean colonies, namely Fujian and southern Manchuria. That left the original Chinese homeland, the north China plain, for the great powers to haggle over.

Fortunately for the Chinese, the United States stepped in at this point and proclaimed the so-called Open Door Policy.⁽⁵⁾ China was thus saved from an African-style partition, but the privileges enjoyed by Westerners were not at all decreased. Now foreign customs officers collected duties for the Chinese government and foreign gunboats patrolled the Yangtze River.

Exploitation by the West was bad enough; exploitation by the Japanese was even worse, from the Chinese point of view. Japan, long scorned by the Chinese as a nation of "Dwarf Pirates," was one of China's vassal states, and until now had never amounted to much on the international scene. When Japan's independence was threatened by the West, the Japanese modernized their nation with amazing speed. In 1894 Japan attacked China with its small but modern army, and won an easy victory that astonished the world. Taiwan and Korea now became colonies of the new Japanese empire.⁽⁶⁾

The Boxer Rebellion

All this was too much for the emperor's ruthless and reactionary aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi. Her chief general, Yuan Shikai, imprisoned Guangxu, and all of the reforms were promptly undone; the money set aside to build a new navy was used to build a new palace instead!

This reactionary backlash caused an upswing in xenophobia all over China. Secret societies formed to plot against the Manchus, the "foreign devils," or both. The most famous of these was a group of anti-Western fanatics that called themselves the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, loosely translated as Boxers. The Boxers wore red scarves on their heads bearing the Chinese word for happiness, a red coat of arms on their chests, and red bands on their wrists and ankles; they practiced magic in the belief that it would make them bulletproof.

An American prank goaded the Boxers into action. One day four newspaper reporters in Denver with nothing better to do cooked up an elaborate hoax to get national attention; they published a story that claimed some American engineers were going over to China with plans to tear down the Great Wall, as a symbol of China's willingness to turn its back on its heritage and become a modern nation. When the enraged Boxers heard the news in June 1900, they stormed the foreign legations in Beijing, plundered foreign shops, tore up railroad tracks, and murdered both foreigners and Chinese Christians. All this was done with Cixi's blessing.

The armies of the United States, Japan, and six European nations moved in to protect their citizens; two months later, the rebellion was over. Afterwards they saddled China with an indemnity of $333 million, far in excess of all costs and damages. Weak, in debt, and exploited by outsiders, China fell into worse chaos than before. When the land battles of the Russo-Japanese War were fought a few years later, China had to watch the ravaging of her territory as a helpless bystander.

However distasteful the thought was to her, the failure of the Boxer Rebellion convinced even Cixi that modernization was imperative; she spent her last years (both she and Guangxu died in 1908) carrying out the same reforms the emperor had attempted previously. But it was too little, too late. By this time a generation of Chinese educated in America, Europe and Japan had come of age; many of them wanted to transform China into a Western-style democracy. The most important of these revolutionary figures was Dr. Sun Zhongshan, better known by his Cantonese name, Sun Yat-sen. In 1905 he went to Tokyo and founded a political party based on what he called the "Three People's Principles": nationalism, constitutional democracy, and land reform. With the financial support of Chinese living abroad, Sun Yat-sen established revolutionary groups all over the country, with the intention of overthrowing the alien and evil dynasty that had brought China to ruin. The growing anti-Manchu sentiment everywhere supported his plans; the next time an uprising against the Manchus took place it would completely sweep away the old order in only a few months.

2. It is not that way today. Because so many Chinese settlers have moved into Manchuria since 1911, the Manchus have all but disappeared as a distinct ethnic group. There are only a few hundred native speakers of the Manchu language left, and all of them are over 50 years old. The official Chinese name for modern Manchuria is Dongbei, meaning simply "northeast."

3. Because the Mongols practiced Lamaism, the Tibetan form of Buddhism, Tibet was incorporated into the Chinese empire in 1720 to keep the Mongols quiet. In 1723 the Manchus annexed the Koko Nor region (modern Qinghai province), to shorten communications between Mongolia and Tibet.

4. An Englishman knelt on one knee when addressing his king, and two knees when praying in church; nowhere did he submit by touching his head to the ground.

5. Ironically, the US played the smallest role in 19th century imperialism and saved China from territorial partition, but Chinese Communists would later regard America as their worst enemy; in the 20th century they would accuse it of reviving imperialism and attempting to suppress popular revolutions. More about that in Chapter 8.

6. The First Sino-Japanese War is covered in more detail in my paper on Korean History.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball