Second Opium War
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| Second Opium War | |||||||||
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| Part of the Opium Wars | |||||||||
 Upper North Taku Fort in 1860. |
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| Combatants | |||||||||
 Qing China |
 United Kingdom French Empire |
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| Commanders | |||||||||
| Unknown | Michael Seymour James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros |
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The Second Opium War or Arrow War was a war of the United Kingdom and France against the Qing Dynasty of China from 1856 to 1860.
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[edit] Background
The 1850s saw the rapid growth of imperialism. Some of the shared goals of the western powers were the expansion of their overseas markets and the establishment of new ports of call. The French Treaty of Huangpu and the American Wangxia Treaty both contained clauses allowing renegotiation of the treaties after twelve years. In an effort to expand their privileges in China, Britain demanded the Qing authorities renegotiate the Treaty of Nanking (signed in 1842), citing their most favoured nation status. The British demands included opening all of China to British merchants, legalizing the opium trade, exempting foreign imports from internal transit duties, suppression of piracy, regulation of the coolie trade, permission for a British ambassador to reside in Beijing and for the English-language version of all treaties to take precedence over the Chinese.
The Qing Dynasty court rejected the revisionary demands from Britain, France, and the US.
[edit] Outbreak
The war may be viewed as a continuation of the First Opium War (1839-1842), thus the title of the Second Opium War.
On 1856-10-08, Qing officials boarded the Arrow, a Chinese-owned ship that had been registered in Hong Kong and was suspected of piracy and smuggling. Twelve Chinese subjects were arrested and imprisoned. This has come to be known as the "Arrow Incident". The British officials in Guangzhou demanded the release of the sailors, claiming that because the ship had recently been British-registered, it was protected under the Treaty of Nanking. Only when this was shown to be a weak argument did the British insist that the Arrow had been flying a British ensign and that the Qing soldiers had insulted the flag. Faced with fighting the Taiping Rebellion, the Qing government was in no position to resist the West militarily.
Although the British were delayed by the Indian Mutiny, they responded to the "Arrow Incident" in 1857 and attacked Guangzhou from the Pearl River. Ye Mingchen, then the governor of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, ordered all Chinese soldiers manning the forts not to resist the British incursion. After taking the fort near Guangzhou with little effort, the British Army attacked Guangzhou.
The British Parliament decided to seek redress from China based on the report about the "Arrow Incident" submitted by Harry Parkes, British Consul to Guangzhou. France, the USA, and Russia received requests from Britain to form an alliance. France joined the British action against China, prompted by the execution of a French missionary, Father August Chapdelaine ("Father Chapdelaine Incident"), by Chinese local authorities in Guangxi province. The USA and Russia sent envoys to Hong Kong to offer help to the British and French, though in the end they sent no military aid.
The British and the French joined forces under Admiral Sir Michael Seymour. The British army led by Lord Elgin, and the French army led by Gros, attacked and occupied Guangzhou in late 1857. Ye Mingchen was captured, and Bo-gui, the governor of Guangdong, surrendered. A joint committee of the Alliance was formed. Bo-gui remained at his original post in order to maintain order on behalf of the aggressors. The British-French Alliance maintained control of Guangzhou for nearly four years. Ye Mingchen was exiled to Calcutta, India, where he starved himself to death.
The coalition then cruised north to briefly capture the Taku Forts near Tianjin in May, 1858.
[edit] Treaty of Tianjin
In June 1858 the first part of the war ended with the Treaties of Tianjin, to which France, Russia, and the United States were party. These treaties opened eleven more ports to Western trade. The Chinese initially refused to ratify the treaties.
The major points of the treaty were:
- Britain, France, Russia, and the United States would have the right to establish diplomatic legations (small embassies) in Peking (a closed city at the time)
- Ten more Chinese ports would be opened for foreign trade, including Niuzhuang, Danshui, Hankou, and Nanjing
- The right of all foreign vessels including commercial ships to navigate freely on the Yangtze River
- The right of foreigners to travel in the internal regions of China, which had been formerly banned
- China was to pay an indemnity to Britain and France in 2 million taels of silver each
- China was to pay compensation to British merchants in 2 million taels of silver for destruction of their property
[edit] Treaty of Aigun
On May 28, 1858, the separate Treaty of Aigun was signed with Russia to revise the Chinese and Russian border as determined by the Nerchinsk Treaty in 1689. Russia gained the left bank of the Amur River, pushing the border back from the Argun River. The treaty gave Russia control over a non-freezing area on the Pacific coast, where Russia founded the city of Vladivostok in 1860.
[edit] Continuation of the war
In 1859, after China refused to allow the establishment of embassies in Beijing as agreed to by the Treaty of Tianjin, a naval force under the command of Admiral Sir James Hope shelled the forts guarding the mouth of the Peiho river. It was damaged and withdrew under the cover of fire from a naval squadron commanded by Commodore Josiah Tattnall.
In 1860, an Anglo-French force (11,000 British, 6,700 French) gathered at Hong Kong and then carried out a landing at Pei Tang on August 3, and a successful assault on the Taku Forts on August 21. On the march to Beijing the Anglo-French forces pushed aside several Manchu military units, but the fighting was limited. Relations between the British and the Qing governments broke down completely when an arrogant British diplomatic envoy, Harry Parkes, was arrested after his abrasive and racist behavior during negotiations on September 18. He and his small entourage were imprisoned and tortured (some were murdered by the Chinese in a fashion that infuriated British leadership upon discovery in October). On September 26 the Anglo-French force arrived at Beijing and captured the city by October 6. Appointing his brother, Prince Gong, to be in charge of negotiations, Emperor Xianfeng first fled to the Summer Palace in Chengde and then to Jehol in Manchuria. [1] British-French troops in Beijing began looting the Summer Palace immediately (it was full of valuable artwork). After Parkes and the surviving diplomatic prisoners were freed, Lord Elgin ordered the Old Summer Palace be destroyed starting on October 18. The destruction was total. However Beijing was not occupied; the Anglo-French army remained outside the city.
The motives for the destruction of the Summer Palace are an interesting subject for debate. The ostensible reason stated by Lord Elgin was to discourage the Chinese from using kidnapping as a bargaining tool, and to exact revenge on the Emperor for his violation of the flag of truce. In this way, his action was successful, seeing as the Manchu did not harm diplomatic envoys until the Boxer Rebellion, 40 years later. Other options, such as executions, the replacement of the Manchu entirely, and the destruction of the Forbidden City were all discussed. The Russian envoy Count Ignatiev and the French diplomat Baron Gros argued against all these, and so Elgin settled on the burning of the Summer Palace, arguing that this was the "least objectionable" as it hurt the government but did not disrupt the daily lives of the innocent Chinese people.
Western historians assert that Elgin's decision was motivated by the torture and murder of almost twenty Western prisoners, including two British envoys and a journalist for The Times.[1] The Manchu of that era raised torture to a cruel art form, including death by a thousand cuts while in a wire jacket and death by mortification, where limbs were tourniqueted off one by one. [2] Chinese historians have argued that the destruction was a cover-up for widespread looting. That the Summer Palace was looted before being destroyed is certain but it is not surprising. Nearly all armies loot what they capture (examples from Chinese history are plentiful), and the Summer Palace was captured. Elgin was acutely sensitive to the charge of looting, as it was his own father, Thomas Bruce (1776-1841), who, from 1799 to 1803, removed from the Acropolis in Greece what are now known as the Elgin Marbles to Britain, where they remain to this day, a subject of rancor between the Greek and British governments.
[edit] Aftermath
After the Xianfeng emperor and his entourage fled Beijing, the June 1858 Treaty of Tianjin was finally ratified by the emperor's brother Prince Gong in the Convention of Beijing on October 18, 1860, bringing The Second Opium War to an end.
The British, French and - thanks to the schemes of Ignatiev - the Russians were all granted a permanent diplomatic presence in Beijing (something the Qing resisted to the very end as it suggested equality between China and the European powers). The Chinese had to pay 8 million taels to Britain and France. Britain acquired Kowloon (next to Hong Kong). The opium trade was legalized and Christians were granted full civil rights, including the right to own property, and the right to evangelize.
The content of the Convention of Beijing included:
- China's recognition of the validity of the Treaty of Tianjin
- Opening Tianjin as a trade port
- Cede No.1 District of Kowloon (south of present day Boundary Street) to Britain
- Freedom of religion established in China
- British ships were allowed to carry indentured Chinese to the Americas
- Indemnity to Britain and France increasing to 8 million taels of silver a piece
- Legalization of the opium trade
Two weeks later, Ignatiev convinced the Manchu to sign a "Supplementary Treaty of Beijing", in which the Manchu signed away some 300,000 to 400,000 square miles of land to the Russians, as Hsu says "without a soldier or a shot" as the Russians had no soldiers on this expedition (Hsu, pg 218).
The defeat of the Imperial army by a small Anglo-French military force (outnumbered at least 10 to 1 by the Manchu army) coupled with the flight (and subsequent death) of the Emperor and the burning of the Summer Palace was a shocking blow to the once powerful Qing Dynasty. "Beyond any doubt, by 1860 the ancient civilization that was China had been thoroughly defeated and humiliated by the West." (Hsu, pg. 219). Even the Chinese mandarins could see that things needed to change, but what should change? And who would lead the change?
[edit] Footnotes and references
- ^ a b The Rise of Modern China, Immanual Hsu, 1985, pg. 215.
- ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ling_chi
[edit] Further reading
- Personal narrative of occurrences during Lord Elgin's second embassy to China, 1860 by Henry Loch, 1869.
- The Rise of Modern China by Immanual Hsu, 1985.
- Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (1975), ISBN 0-15-617094-9
- Erik Ringmar, Fury of the Europeans: Liberal Barbarism and the Destruction of the Emperor's Summer Palace
- W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars (2002), ISBN 0-7607-7638-5
- The Second China War by Bonner-Smith and E. Lumley, 1944.
[edit] The Second Opium War in popular media
- Fraser, George MacDonald (1986). Flashman and the Dragon. New York, NY: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-55357-8. — A portion of the memoirs of the fictional Harry Paget Flashman recounting his adventures during the Anglo-Chinese Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion.
[edit] See also
