In February 1840 the British government decided to launch a military expedition, and Elliot and his cousin, George Elliot, were appointed joint plenipotentiaries to China (though the latter, in poor health, resigned in November). In June, 16 British warships arrived in Hong Kong and sailed northward to the mouth of the Bei River to press China with their demands. Charles Elliot entered into negotiations with the Chinese, and, although an agreement was reached in January 1841, it was not acceptable to either government. In May 1841 the British attacked the walled city of Guangzhou (Canton) and received a ransom of $6 million, which provoked a counterattack on the part of the Cantonese. This was the beginning of a continuing conflict between the British and the Cantonese.

The Qing had no effective tactics against the powerful British navy. They retaliated merely by setting burning rafts on the enemy’s fleet and encouraging people to take the heads of the enemies, for which they offered a prize. The imperial banner troops, although they sometimes fought fiercely, were ill-equipped and lacked training for warfare against the more-modern British forces. The Green Standard battalions were similarly in decay and without much motivation or good leadership. To make up the weakness, local militias were urgently recruited, but they were useless. The British proclaimed that their aim was to fight the government officials and soldiers who abused the people, not to make war against the Chinese population. And indeed there was a deep rift between the government and the people that the British could easily exploit, a weakness in Qing society that became apparent during the crisis of the war.

Elliot’s successor, Henry Pottinger, arrived at Macau in August and campaigned northward, seizing Xiamen (Amoy), Dinghai, and Ningbo. Reinforced from India, he resumed action in May 1842 and took Wusong, Shanghai, and Zhenjiang. Nanjing yielded in August, and peace was restored with the Treaty of Nanjing. According to the main provisions of the treaty, China ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five ports to British trade, abolished the cohong system of trade, agreed to equal official recognition, and paid an indemnity of $21 million. This was the result of the first clash between China, which had regarded foreign trade as a favor given by the heavenly empire to the impoverished foreign powers, and the British, to whom trade and commerce had become “the true herald of civilization.”

The Treaty of Nanjing was followed by two supplementary arrangements with the British in 1843. In addition, in July 1844 China signed the Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia) with the United States and in October the Treaty of Whampoa (Huangpu) with France. These arrangements made up a complex of foreign privileges by virtue of the most-favored-nation clauses (guaranteeing trading equality) conceded to every signatory. All in all, they provided a basis for later inroads such as the loss of tariff autonomy, extraterritoriality (exemption from the application or jurisdiction of local law or tribunals), and the free movement of missionaries.

With the signing of the treaties—which began the so-called treaty-port system—the imperial commissioner Qiying, newly stationed at Guangzhou, was put in charge of foreign affairs. Following a policy of appeasement, his dealings with foreigners started fairly smoothly. But, contrary to the British expectation, the amount of trade dropped after 1846, and, to British dissatisfaction, the question of opium remained unsettled in the postwar arrangements. The core of the Sino-Western tension, however, rested in an anti-foreign movement in Guangdong.

The anti-foreign movement and the second Opium War (Arrow War)

At the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, China and Britain disagreed as to whether foreigners were allowed to enter the walled city of Guangzhou. Though Guangzhou was declared open in July 1843, the British faced Cantonese opposition. After 1847 trouble rapidly grew, and, as a result of an incident at nearby Foshan, a promise was given the British that they would be allowed to enter the city in 1849. Yet troubles continued. As a result of his inability to control the situation, Qiying was recalled in 1848 and replaced with the less-compliant Xu Guangjin. As the promised date neared, the Cantonese demonstrated against British entry. Finally, the British yielded, and the anti-foreigners won a victory despite the fact that the Beijing court conceded a “temporary entrance” into the city.

After the Cantonese resistance in 1841, the gentry in Guangdong began to build a more-organized anti-foreign movement, promoting the militarization of village society. The city of Guangzhou was also a center of diffusion of xenophobia, because the scholars at the city’s great academies were proclaiming the Confucian theory that uncultured foreign powers should be excluded. The inspired anti-foreign mood also contained a strong anti-government sentiment and perhaps a tendency toward provincialism; the Cantonese rose up against the foreign powers to protect their own homeland, without recourse to the government authorities.

In the strained atmosphere in Guangzhou, where the xenophobic governor-general, Ye Mingchen, was inciting the Cantonese to annihilate the British, the Arrow incident occurred in October 1856. Guangzhou police seized the Arrow, a Chinese-owned but British-registered ship flying a British flag, and charged its Chinese crew with piracy and smuggling. The British consul Harry Parkes sent a fleet to fight its way up to Guangzhou. French forces joined the venture on the plea that a French missionary had been officially executed in Guangxi. The British government sent an expedition under Lord Elgin as plenipotentiary. The Russians and the Americans abstained but sent their representatives for diplomatic maneuvering. At the end of 1857 an Anglo-French force occupied Guangzhou, and in May 1858 they took the Dagu forts and marched to Tianjin.

The Qing representatives had no choice but to comply with the demands of the British and French; the Russian and U.S. diplomats also gained the privileges their militant colleagues secured by force. During June four Tianjin treaties were concluded that provided for, among other measures, the residence of foreign diplomats in Beijing and the freedom of Christian missionaries to evangelize their faith.

In 1859, when the signatories arrived off the Dagu forts on their way to ratify the treaties in Beijing, they were told that they could not pass and to take a different route to Beijing. The British-led forces accompanying the signatories, however, decided to push forward past Dagu. They were repulsed, with heavy damage inflicted by the gunfire from the forts. In 1860 an allied force invaded Beijing, driving the Xianfeng emperor (reigned 1850–61) out of the capital to the summer palace at Chengde. A younger brother of the emperor, Gong Qinwang (Prince Gong), was appointed imperial commissioner in charge of negotiation. The famous summer palace was destroyed by the British in October. Following the advice of the Russian negotiator, Prince Gong exchanged ratification of the 1858 treaties; in addition, he signed new conventions with the British and the French. The U.S. and Russian negotiators had already exchanged the ratification in 1859, but the latter’s diplomatic performance in 1860 was remarkable.

Russian interests in the East had been activated in competition with the British effort to open China. A Russian spearhead, directed to Kuldja (Yining) by way of the Irtysh River, resulted in the Sino-Russian Treaty of Kuldja in 1851, which opened Kuldja and Chuguchak (Tacheng) to Russian trade. Another drive was directed to the Amur watershed under the initiative of Nikolay Muravyov, who had been appointed governor-general of eastern Siberia in 1847. By 1857 Muravyov had sponsored four expeditions down the Amur; during the third one, in 1856, the left bank and lower reaches of the river had actually been occupied by the Russians. In May 1858 Muravyov pressed the Qing general Yishan to sign a treaty at Aigun (Aihui), by which the territory on the northern bank of the Amur was ceded to Russia and the land between the Ussuri River and the sea was placed in joint possession by the two countries, pending further disposition. But Beijing refused to ratify the treaty. When the Anglo-French allies attacked northern China in 1860, the Russian negotiator Nikolay Ignatyev acted as China’s friend and mediator in securing the evacuation of the invaders from Beijing. Soon after the allies had left Beijing, Ignatyev secured, as a reward for his mediatory effort, the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, which confirmed the Treaty of Aigun and ceded to Russia the territory between the Ussuri and the sea.

The 1858–60 treaties extended the foreign privileges granted after the first Opium War and confirmed or legalized the developments in the treaty-port system. The worst effects for the Qing authorities were not the utilitarian rights, such as trade, commerce, and tariff, but the privileges that affected the moral and cultural values of China. The right to propagate Christianity threatened Confucian values, the backbone of the imperial system. The permanent residence of foreign representatives in Beijing signified an end to the long-established tributary relationship between China and other countries. The partial collapse of the tribute system meant a loss of the emperor’s virtue, a serious blow to dynastic rule in China.

During the turbulent years 1858–60, the Qing bureaucracy was divided between the war and peace parties. It was the peace party’s leaders—Prince Gong, Gui Liang, and Wen Xiang—who took charge of negotiating with the foreigners, though they did so not as a matter of principle but because the imminent crisis forced them to.

In 1861, in response to the settlement of the foreign representatives in the capital, the Zongli Yamen (office for General Management) was opened to deal with foreign affairs, its main staff filled by the peace party leaders. The Qing officials themselves, however, deemed this as still keeping a faint silhouette of the tribute system.

The delay and difficulty in the Qing adjustment to the Western presence may possibly be ascribed to both external and internal factors. The Chinese must have seen the Westerners who had appeared in China as purveyors of poisonous drugs and as “barbarians” in the full sense of the word, from whom they could learn nothing. But the Chinese staunchly held to their tradition, which also had two aspects—ideological and institutional. The core of the ideological aspect was the Confucian distinction between China and foreign countries. The institutional aspect had recently been much studied, however, and precedents in Chinese history had been found, for example, of treaty ports with foreign settlements, consular jurisdiction, and employment of Westerners as imperial personnel; thus, the Chinese regarded the Western impact as an extension of their tradition rather than a totally new situation that necessitated a new adjustment. And at least until 1860 the Qing leaders remained withdrawn in the shell of tradition, making no effort to cope with the new environment by breaking the yoke of the past.