From the Ruins of Empire Read online

  The Chinese, however, underestimated the importance the trade in opium had assumed for the British economy. Nor did they know much about the boost of self-confidence the British had received after defeating Napoleon and becoming the paramount power in India – Lin’s letter to Queen Victoria, for instance, was not even acknowledged.

  In general, growing technological power and commercial success were making Westerners change their opinion of China. Far from being the apogee of enlightenment, as it had appeared to Voltaire and Leibniz, the country was now viewed as a backward place. Even to treat it like an equal, as an American diplomat put it, would be like ‘the treatment of a child as it were an old man’.28 Furthermore, in Britain’s expanding economy of the early nineteenth century, ‘free trade’ seemed as much a universal good, to be enforced through military means, as ‘democracy’ was to appear in modern times.

  A bevy of aggressive private merchants in Canton agitated for more markets in China after the relatively conservative East India Company lost its monopoly over trade in Asia in 1834. These businessmen and their lobbyists raised such an alarm about Chinese actions that the British government felt impelled to dispatch a punitive fleet to China. After arriving in June 1840, the ships blockaded Canton and sailed up China’s north coast, finally threatening the city of Tianjin and beyond it the seat of the emperor himself in Beijing. Aware of their weak military, the Qing sued for peace, ceding Hong Kong to the British and agreeing to pay an indemnity of £6 million and to reopen Canton to British traders.

  This wasn’t enough for the British government. The fantasy of a big China market for British goods had grown unchecked in Britain. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, an aggressive imperialist, raged that his representatives hadn’t exacted more stringent terms from the Chinese after defeating them. He dispatched another fleet in 1841, which, after capturing Shanghai and blocking traffic on the lower Yangtze, threatened to assault the former capital city of Nanjing.

  After suffering more military reverses the Chinese again capitulated and signed the humiliating Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which opened five trade ports, including Shanghai, to foreigners and granted Hong Kong to the British in perpetuity. Writing to his business associates at the British firm Jardine, Matheson & Co. the Indian merchant Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy cautioned that the ‘Chinese had enough from us upon this matter … now keeping distance is far better than showing threat’.29 The Chinese themselves remained perplexed by the apparently unappeasable greed of the British. As one of the emperor’s representatives reasoned in a letter to the British:

  We ponder with veneration upon the Great Emperor’s cherishing tenderness towards foreigners, and utmost justice in all his dealings. He thereby causes the whole world to participate in his favour, and to enjoy his protection, for the promotion of civilization – and the full enjoyment of lasting benefits. But the English foreigners have now for two years … on account of the investigation in the opium traffic, discarded their obedience and been incessantly fighting … what can possibly be their intention and the drift of their actions?30

  The Emperor received a heavily edited account of the tough British negotiating style: ‘Although the demands of the foreigners are indeed rapacious’, his representative wrote, ‘yet they are little more than a desire for ports and the privilege of trade. There are no dark schemes in them.’

  This proved to be optimistic. Demanding compensation for the opium destroyed, the British asked for more indemnities, including ransom for those cities, such as Hangzhou, that they had not occupied. Other Western nations followed suit, notably the United States, which had maintained a presence in Canton since its own liberation from British rule. The Americans insisted that the Chinese allow Protestant missionaries to work in the treaty ports. The French asked for even broader rights for Catholics, completing the identification in Chinese eyes between the West and the proselytizing religion of Christianity.

  The treaties gave Western powers the right to dictate vital aspects of China’s commercial, social and foreign policies for the next century. As it turned out, even such craven surrender of Chinese sovereignty did not satisfy the free traders. The supposedly unlimited China market failed to materialize and the trade in opium, not mentioned in the treaties but implicitly accepted by all sides, remained the main Western commercial activity. By 1900, 10 per cent of the Chinese population smoked the drug; one third of those were addicts.31

  The greater their frustrations around the Chinese market, the louder British businessmen clamoured for the relaxation of remaining restrictions on trade. In 1854, as the Qing faced the growing Taiping rebellion, British, French and American representatives demanded revisions to the Nanjing Treaty facilitating free access to all parts of China, unimpeded navigation of the Yangtze, their diplomatic presence in Beijing, the legalization of opium, and the regulation of Chinese labour emigration (during the lawlessness that prevailed at the end of the Opium War, Chinese men were kidnapped or deceived into travelling to places as far away as California and Cuba to supply local demands for cheap labour).

  The Chinese naturally resisted these demands. However, using an allegedly illegal Qing search of a Hong Kong-registered ship called the Arrow as a pretext the British went to war again, joined this time by the French who, under Napoleon III, were keen to flex their muscles. In 1859, Lord Elgin, the son of the earl who had taken the marble friezes from the Parthenon to England, arrived at the head of a fleet that quickly captured Canton and moved north to Tianjin.

  The hapless Chinese again offered to negotiate through the viceroy of Tianjin. But Elgin was determined to deal with the imperial court itself rather than its provincial governors. The emperor in Beijing yielded and sent his representatives to sign an agreement granting full access to the Yangtze, unimpeded travel inside China for those with passports, six more treaty ports, freedom for missionaries, a diplomatic presence in Beijing, and immunity from Chinese jurisdiction for foreigners. Elgin, with the French in tow, pressed for more. And he found the excuse to move on Beijing when, amid the chaos of war, his negotiators were arrested and executed by the Chinese.

  Arriving first at the city’s north-eastern outskirts as negotiations with the Chinese were under way, the French came upon the Yuan Ming Yuan, the elegant Summer Palace, which Jesuit missionaries had designed for Emperor Qianlong, and promptly plundered it. For three days, French soldiers rampaged across the thirty-seven acres of pavilions, gardens and temples, barely believing their luck: ‘to depict’, one intoxicated looter wrote, ‘all the splendours before our astonished eyes, I should need to dissolve specimens of all known precious stones in liquid gold for ink, and to dip it into a diamond pen tipped with the fantasies of an oriental poet.’32

  When Elgin arrived, the French offered to split the loot, and the earl got the Chinese emperor’s green jade baton. Elgin, who had helped quell the Indian Mutiny before coming to China, was a reluctant imperialist by the standards of his time. He considered the broad thrust of British policy in China to be ‘stupid’. ‘I hate the whole thing so much that I cannot trust myself to write about it’, he wrote in his diary as British warships under his command bombed and killed 200 civilians in Canton.33 But when he received news of European prisoners dying in Chinese custody, Elgin’s remaining scruples vanished.

  The Chinese had to be taught a severe lesson. The French excused themselves from this act of retribution, in which British troops torched the Summer Palace, before Elgin proceeded to sign the treaty that gave the British more indemnities, and another treaty port (in Tianjin) and legations for all Western powers in Beijing. The Summer Palace burnt for two days, covering Beijing with thick black smoke. The ‘crackling and rushing noise’, one English observer wrote, ‘was appalling … the sun shining through the masses of smoke gave a sickly hue to every plant and tree, and the red flame gleaming on the faces of the troops engaged made them appear like demons glorying in the destruction of what they could not replace.’34

  The Chinese were relatively sl
ow to awaken to their perilous position in the world. The innovative steamships of the British had navigated far up the Yangtze, threatening inland Chinese cities, and the British quickly mobilized Indian soldiers against the Chinese. But this evidence of a globally resourced maritime power only prompted the Confucian scholar-official Wei Yuan, obviously deeply immersed in the Middle Kingdom, to remark in the light of these events that ‘India is nearby and must not be considered [a] barren land on the periphery [of the world]’.35As late as 1897, two years after Japan had brutally exposed the military weakness of Qing China, Liang Qichao was arguing that ‘China cannot be compared to India or Turkey’.36 It took the cumulative effect of internal and external political shocks – the Taiping Rebellion, defeat by Japan in Korea, and the subsequent scramble for Chinese territory by European powers – to instil a new sense of the changing global topography among the Chinese elite.

  By late 1898, when the failure of the so-called ‘Hundred-Day’ reforms at the Qing court seemed clear, China had finally begun to look, in Liang’s view, as vulnerable to the West as Turkey and India, its predicament part of a global one caused by Western-style capitalism and imperialism. Soon Liang, forced into exile in Japan, was closely examining the situation in the Philippines, where the United States was fighting a popular insurgency, for parallels with China. The philosopher Yan Fu described an increasingly widespread Chinese view of the Opium War by the late 1890s:

  When the Westerners first came, bringing with them immoral things that did harm to people [i.e., opium], and took up arms against us, this was not only a source of pain to those of us who were informed; it was then and remains today a source of shame to the residents of their capital cities. At the time, China, which had enjoyed the protection of a series of sagacious rulers, and with its vast expanse of territories, was enjoying a regime of unprecedented political and cultural prosperity. And when we looked about the world, we thought there none nobler among the human race than we.37

  Since the 1890s, the Opium War and the destruction of the Summer Palace have been carefully remembered in China as the most egregious of the humiliations the country suffered at the hands of the West in the nineteenth century. In an essay titled ‘The Death Traffic’ written in 1881, a youthful Rabindranath Tagore marvelled at how a ‘whole nation, China, has been forced by Great Britain to accept the opium poison – simply for commercial greed’. Tagore was aware that his own grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore was one of the Indian businessmen who had become rich by shipping opium to China. ‘In her helplessness’, Tagore wrote, ‘China pathetically declared: “I do not require any opium.” But the British shopkeeper answered: “That’s all nonsense. You must take it.”’38

  Explaining Europe’s growing dominance over the world, the conservative Bengali writer Bhudev Mukhopadhyay mourned that ‘this Chinese War remains a good example of the fact that virtue does not always triumph. In fact, victory often lies with the unrighteous.’39 For many Indians this was also true of the Mutiny of 1857, which spelt the end of centuries-long Muslim rule over India.

  Muslims had been the biggest losers as the British East India Company became the major military power in the subcontinent. It was the defeat of two Muslim rulers in central and south India that cleared the Company’s path to unchallenged supremacy over India, and then the British moved quickly, annexing the hinterland piecemeal in open battle or through treaty, finally subduing the great Muslim-majority lands of the Punjab in 1848.

  All through the first half of the nineteenth century, Muslim ruling classes in north India were either scornfully deposed by the British or emasculated by restrictions on their authority. The most egregious of these annexations occurred in 1856 in the province of Awadh, which since the late eighteenth century had been subordinate to British commercial and political interests, and had been seen, as the British governor-general put it, as a ‘cherry which will drop into our mouths some day, it has long been ripening’.40 Successive Shiite Muslim kings had made Lucknow the capital city of Awadh. It was famous for its distinctive architecture, which blended Persian with European forms, and for its culturally rich courts which attracted some of north India’s best poets, artists, musicians and scholars. Wajid Ali Shah, Lucknow’s last king, sang, danced and wrote poetry to a high standard, but to the British these accomplishments were just another sign of his unfitness to rule. Awadh’s landowning aristocracy, which mostly supported Wajid Ali Shah, had long been apprehensive of the British intentions before the Europeans, no longer willing to wait for it to drop, finally plucked the cherry. Exiling the popular king to Calcutta, the British moved quickly to extract the steepest possible land revenues from landlords and peasants.

  The realm of culture, too, was far from insulated from the larger social and economic changes unleashed by the British. In the decades leading up to the Mutiny, Lucknow had replaced Delhi as the premier city of north India. However Delhi had remained an intellectual and cultural centre for north Indian Muslims, its madrasas drawing the most talented men from the provinces. Loss of territory and influence had diminished the Mughal emperors in Delhi into figureheads as early as the mid-eighteenth century, but the British continued to give the Mughals generous pensions and allowed them to hold shows of pomp and ceremony periodically. Despite their infirmity, the emperors retained, in British eyes, the symbolic value of belonging to India’s oldest and most prestigious ruling dynasty. Mushairas, public poetry recitals, attracted huge audiences, and the rivalry of the two greatest poets at the Mughal court, Zauq and Ghalib, fuelled the gossip in the city’s alleys. A young poet called Altaf Husain Hali trekked miles from his province to attend Delhi’s celebrated institutions of education, and to hang out with the poets and intellectuals whose ‘meetings and assemblies’, he later wrote, ‘recalled the days of Akbar and Shah Jahan’, culturally the most assured among Mughal emperors.41

  However, this turned out to be, as Hali wrote, ‘the last brilliant glow of learning in Delhi’. Passing through Delhi in 1838, the English diarist Emily Eden lamented the city’s steady incorporation into a profit-minded empire. ‘Such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away – and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just “gone and done it”, merchandised it, revenued it and spoiled it all.’42 As education and judicial institutions were secularized, the ulema, the Muslim clergy, found it difficult to find a livelihood for itself. The replacement of Persian by English as the official language also undermined the traditional cultural world of Indian Muslims. As Hali recalled:

  I’d been brought up in a society that believed that learning was based only on the knowledge of Arabic and Persian … nobody even thought about English education, and if people had any opinion about it all it was as a means of getting a government job, not of acquiring any kind of knowledge.43

  But here, too, the Muslims’ former subjects – Hindus – seemed to be favoured by the new rulers, and were quick to educate themselves in Western-style institutions and assume the lowly administrative positions assigned to them. The British were beginning to replace their economic and political regime of pure plunder, as had existed in Bengal, with monopoly interests in shipping, banking, insurance and trade, and administrative structures. They enlisted native collaborators, such as the middlemen who expedited the lucrative export of opium grown in India to China, but these tended to be Hindu, Sikh or Parsi rather than Muslim.

  The British indifference to Indian society and culture that Edmund Burke and the Indian historian Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai had noticed in the previous century was replaced by increased cultural and racial aggression. Lord Macaulay dismissed Indian learning as risibly worthless, enjoining the British in India to create ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect’. Convinced of their superiority, the British sought to entrench it with profound social and cultural reforms wherever they could in India. Often run by Christian missionaries, British-style schools, colleges and universities in India w
ere soon churning out faux-Englishmen of the kind Macaulay had hoped for.

  Many Muslims spurned this modern education out of fear of deracination. They mostly watched helplessly as the British set up plantations, dug canals and laid roads, and turned India into a supplier of raw materials to, and exclusive market for, British industries. Artisan communities in north Indian towns, which tended to be Muslim, were pauperized as British manufactured goods flooded Indian bazaars. Gandhi, one of the most prominent defenders of the local artisan, was to later sum up the multifarious damage inflicted on India by British rule in his Declaration of Indian Independence in 1930:

  Village industries, such as hand spinning, have been destroyed … and nothing has been substituted, as in other countries, for the crafts thus destroyed. Customs and currency have been so manipulated as to bring further burdens on the peasantry. British manufactured goods constitute the bulk of our imports. Customs duties betray partiality for British manufacturers, and revenue from them is not used to lessen the burden on the masses but for sustaining a highly extravagant administration. Still more arbitrary has been the manipulation of the exchange which has resulted in millions being drained away from the country … All administrative talent is killed and the masses have to be satisfied with petty village offices and clerkships … the system of education has torn us from our moorings.

  Elsewhere, these wrenching private and social makeovers were proving too traumatic for people accustomed to living by the light of custom and tradition. Unprotected by tariffs, which the British insisted on reducing, the nascent local industries of Egypt, Ottoman Turkey and Iran could not compete with the manufactured products imported from Europe. Not surprisingly, merchants, weavers and artisans in the bazaars of Cairo and Najaf, who perceived a direct threat from European businessmen and free traders, were at the forefront of anti-Western movements in the late nineteenth century.