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The general poverty among peasants, which formed the bulk of the population, was being aggravated by population increases. They had progressively to feed more mouths on existing plots. There had been little new infrastructure development to open up new land for cultivation or to provide alternative employment for the growing labour pool. River channels, dykes and irrigation systems had not been properly maintained, leading to droughts, floods, landslides and other natural disasters. As a result, famines, diseases and deaths became common features of life.

  Desperate for funds to cope with such deteriorating conditions, the central authorities, like other empires in decline, resorted to selling public offices. In China, that led to an increase in corruption, official abuses and outlandish demands for taxes. There were reported cases of peasants being dunned for taxes 30 years in advance!

  The economy naturally spluttered and stagnated. Rebellions flared and, if it had not been for a certain inbred streak of fatalism in the Chinese character, there would have been many more of them.

  For thousands of years, the Chinese have been schooled in the concept of dynastic cycles, that is, on how an emperor was supposed to derive his right to rule through a “Mandate of Heaven”. Underlying the concept was an implied compact between the ruler and the ruled. The emperor was supposed to guide the nation wisely and virtuously, like the good father of a family, and thereby earn the loyalty, obedience and support of his subjects or children.

  Should the emperor and his officials neglect their duties, such as the maintenance of public order and fair taxes, then disasters in the form of floods, droughts, pestilences and earthquakes would occur—supposedly inflicted by Heaven for misgovernment. If such calamities happened with uncommon frequency, that would signal a ruler’s loss of his mandate. It would then be legitimate to rebel and to choose a new emperor. Such a socio-political framework still colours many Chinese attitudes today.

  Up till the nineteenth century, Western intrusions into Chinese society had been limited. Though Westerners had long sought to develop trading relationships, Chinese Confucian traditions disdained money-grubbing activities. Officials therefore looked upon foreigners so engaged as “barbarians”, to be kept at arm’s length or at least under some form of tributary arrangement.

  Many countries seeking trade with China were at first not averse to paying tributes, for they realised it could be materially advantageous. Because of an oriental obsession with “face”, Chinese emperors usually handed out “gifts” far exceeding the value of any tribute received. Hence foreigners for a time accepted the Chinese rules of the game. They also put up with being restricted to designated locations for trading purposes. Europeans were confined to Macau and Canton.

  As the West prospered, national pride and military muscle caused hubris and appetites to grow. European societies sought silks, tea, porcelain, lacquerware and other exotic goods. The Chinese, in keeping with their usual smugness, showed little interest in receiving “barbarian” products in exchange.

  Britain was particularly affected by that lopsided trade. Since goods had to be paid for, vast amounts of silver began flowing eastwards, to the consternation of the British Treasury. Merchants in the East India Company soon hit upon an idea for redressing that imbalance—by increasing the sale of opium to China. The very high profit margins attending the trade were not lost on anyone.

  Opium had been known to the Chinese for centuries. Small quantities had been imported since ancient times for medicinal purposes. A succession of emperors, empresses and royal concubines also experimented with its recreational possibilities. As with our current celebrity culture, the indulgences of royalty were soon aped by those lower down the pecking order. Courtiers, eunuchs, mandarins and wealthy merchants took to the opium pipe as well. The habit spread.

  The Chinese Court was not unaware of this looming danger. As early as 1729, when only a few hundred chests were being imported—a chest being the equivalent of 140 pounds—an imperial edict had been issued banning the sale of opium and the opening of new opium dens. But the edict was more often ignored than enforced. By 1790, annual imports had reached 4,000 chests. They soon catapulted into the tens of thousands. Increased supplies brought the price of a pipe dream within the reach of the poorest. The drug became referred to as “foreign mud”.

  By December of 1838, the Ching emperor became sufficiently exercised by the problem to appoint a Confucian scholar by the name of Lin Tse-Hsu as a Commissioner to curb the trade. Lin lost no time in carrying out his task. He intercepted some British ships bringing in opium and ordered their cargoes to be handed over. Their British owners refused and a six-week stalemate ensued.

  To end the impasse, Captain Charles Elliot, the British Superintendent of Trade in China, persuaded the merchants to comply by promising compensation from the British government for any loss. A total of 2.7 million pounds, or well in excess of 19,000 chests of opium, was duly surrendered. Lin ceremoniously destroyed the lot.

  It soon became apparent, however, that the British government was in no position to honour the promised compensation. The British narrative took a subtle shift, linking the surrender of the drugs to issues like free trade, legal jurisdiction, the sanctity of private property, the right to fair compensation, and so forth.

  When Britain demanded payment, the Chinese government, unsurprisingly, refused. British naval forces then shelled a number of Chinese coastal cities, acts which would probably amount in today’s jurisprudence to “state terrorism” or “crimes against humanity”. Thus the First Opium War started.

  To justify the hostilities, Lord Palmerston, the then Foreign Secretary, asserted that Britain was defending the principle of free trade. However, William Gladstone, then a young Member of Parliament, declared that it was “a war more unjust in its origins, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace,” than he ever knew.

  The war was ended in 1842 with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. Under its terms, China ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain, agreed to open five Chinese ports to foreign trade, pay an indemnity of US$21 million, and conceded extraterritorial rights. The last had the effect of removing foreigners on Chinese soil from the jurisdiction of Chinese law. Britain also sought the legalisation of opium but China refused.

  The dust of that war had hardly settled before the wheels of the old fabled dynastic cycle started another turn. Rural hardships led to the outbreak in 1850 of a civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion, affecting mainly areas south of the Yangtse River.

  That rebellion was led by a failed Confucian scholar named Hung Hsiu-Chuan who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus. He touted a quixotic programme that included a new pseudo-religion, the suppression of opium smoking, gambling and prostitution, equality for women and segregation of the sexes. Some elements of the programme apparently did not apply to the leaders, for most of them enjoyed the favours of several wives. They called their regime the “Heavenly Kingdom of Peace” and chose Nanking as their capital.

  The movement was peasant-based and it enjoyed some initial successes. The rebels, for instance, allowed the formation and deployment of a totally female fighting unit, which comprehensively bested in close-combat the male military forces sent against them. Latter-day feminists in Western countries, struggling for equal opportunities to serve in their military establishments, seemed to have made little play of their Chinese sisters’ achievement more than one and a half centuries earlier.

  The rebellion continued till 1864, before it was ended with the aid of British and French military officers. Some remnants, nonetheless, remained active in border regions till 1871.

  Some historians have considered the Taiping Rebellion the deadliest uprising in human history based on the number of lives lost, variously estimated at between 20 and 25 million. The high death rates stemmed from both sides wanting to deprive the other of human resources to continue the fight. So prisoners and residents of captured cities were routinely put to the sword.

  Meanwhile, two
other rebellions also flared—the Nien Rebellion in 1853 and the Panthay Rebellion in 1855. The former was not ended till 1868 and the latter till 1873.

  While those various bloodbaths were in progress, another war erupted in 1856 between Britain and China. The origins were as muddled and ridiculous as those of the First Opium War.

  The Treaty of Nanking had left the drug trade in a twilight zone. Though China had refused to legalise the trade, the conscientious Commissioner Lin nonetheless lost his job. Later generations, however, were to honour him as a national hero by erecting monuments to his memory. The British government and the opium traders, for their part, felt their trade had been vindicated by military victory.

  In such an unclear situation, most Western entrepreneurs sought to expand their trade, aiming for growth, market penetration, economies of scale, enhanced bottom lines and all those other goals normally desired by businessmen. Their rough-and-ready practices were later refined into those nuggets of commercial wisdom dispensed at expensive Western business schools. Only the Quakers refrained from the opium trade as a matter of principle. They even refused to carry the drug on their ships.

  From the point of view of Chinese officialdom, opium was still a proscribed product, though blind eyes might be turned if palms were sufficiently greased. Intellectuals and patriots, on the other hand, continued to fume over their government’s inability to curb the importation and distribution of “foreign mud”.

  British merchants danced around the shifting line separating the legal from the illegal by resorting to technical subterfuges. While not soiling their own hands, they engaged Chinese smugglers, pirates and underworld types to get their drugs through the Chinese embargo. Since extraterritorial rights provided loopholes, traffickers registered as British the vessels carrying the contraband.

  A cat-and-mouse game ensued between opium smugglers and enforcement officials. In 1856, some officials chanced upon a vessel operated by a gang of Chinese pirates. The vessel was called the Arrow and it was flying a British flag. It was boarded, the flag was pulled down and three of the gang leaders were promptly executed.

  The British Consul in Canton at the time went by the name of Harry Parkes. He demanded an apology and the release of the ship and crew. The Chinese refused, though at one point they did consider the possibility of releasing the crew to mollify the British. The rub was that three of them had already been dispatched! One Chinese official came up with the idea of substituting three other Chinese, on the basis that foreigners often claimed that all Chinese looked alike!

  A closer examination of the facts suggested the Chinese had acted within their rights. Although the Arrow had once been registered as a British ship, that registration had expired weeks earlier. Hence the ship had no legal claim to being British nor to fly the British ensign. Moreover, since the vessel was not British, no extraterritorial rights were involved. The crew members were clearly engaged in activities considered illegal under Chinese law.

  When those facts became known to Parkes, he refused to back down. Personal and national amour-propre had become involved. When a Chinese apology was not forthcoming, he directed the British Navy to bombard Canton, then a city of a million people. A considerable number of civilians were killed and injured as a consequence. The Chinese, now also agitated, maintained their refusal to apologise.

  When the matter came before the British Cabinet, many ministers, including the Attorney General, thought the actions of Parkes both legally and morally wrong. But Lord Palmerston, now the Prime Minister, supported the Consul. In a parliamentary debate, he even dismissed the Chinese as “a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians”.

  It was in such a tragic-comic fashion the fuse to the Second Opium War was lit.

  Western naval forces began shelling cities and fortifications up and down the China coast as they did during the First Opium War. A land invasion was then mounted. When the invaders entered Peking, British and French troops looted and set fire to the Summer Palace. The Palace complex was so large and so full of treasures that it took three days to loot and to burn down. Looted items made steady appearances in European auction sales for decades afterwards.

  The war was ended in 1860, with the Treaty of Tientsin. Under its terms, China was required to accept, among other things, the ceding of the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain, the opening of more Chinese ports to foreign trade, the extension of extraterritorial jurisdiction to more locations in China, and—at last—the legalisation of the opium trade.

  The two Opium Wars had profound effects on China. For a start, they exposed the country’s utter weakness and inability to defend itself. Other foreign powers quickly took the cue.

  Russia was quick off the mark. It took advantage of China’s entanglement in the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion to impose the Treaty of Aigun in 1858, under which it gained some 231,000 square miles of Chinese territory north of the Amur River.

  The French followed up by getting a part of Shameen as a concession in 1859 and then another concession in Tientsin in 1860. It also occupied in 1862 significant parts of what is today known as northern Vietnam, then part of the Chinese vassal state of Annam.

  That same year, Portugal confirmed its occupation of Macau and Britain annexed Lower Burma, another Chinese vassal state.

  Another unsettling effect was caused by the exposure of ordinary peasants to the presence of Westerners. Previously, the few entering the country tended to be Christian missionaries, like the Nestorians during the Tang Dynasty and the Jesuits during the Ming Dynasty. They confined themselves to urban centres and couched their messages in terms familiar to the Confucian elites. In that way, they gained acceptance and later, after they had demonstrated their scientific knowledge, also imperial patronage.

  But the arrivals during the Ching Dynasty involved more than just missionaries. The large numbers of arrivals included diplomats, soldiers, businessmen, ideologues, rogues, hustlers and assorted gentlefolk. They all came enjoying immunity from Chinese law conferred by extraterritorial rights. Many dreamt largely of riches and adventures they could recount to dining companions back home. They knew little or nothing about China and most were not keen to know. Some assumed the attitudes of freshly-installed lords, selflessly taking up what they conceived as the white man’s burden. They were the forerunners of Colonel Blimps.

  Among those prone to put on airs were some missionaries, especially those from the Catholic Church. France had secured for them, through a dubious rendering of certain treaty provisions, the right to live outside treaty ports. Missionaries of other denominations soon jumped on the bandwagon to demand the same right.

  Subsequently, France also gained for the Catholic clergy recognition of the ranks they had simply arrogated to themselves. A bishop, for example, would hold himself as on a par with the governor of a Chinese province, and so forth down the scales of both hierarchies. Armed with such ranks, Catholic clergymen began intervening on behalf of their flocks in family and clan feuds. They also tried to convert disused temples into churches. When meeting opposition, they would pull rank over village elders and local officials, much to the chagrin of the latter.

  Even the building of a new church presented problems not always appreciated by foreigners. Crosses and spires clashed with traditional concerns over feng shui or geomancy, aimed at promoting environmental harmony. Sentiments back then would be akin to those in Western communities today when a mosque is about to be erected in their neighbourhood.

  Similar feng shui objections attended the erection of telegraph poles and the excavations in mining. In an ancient and heavily populated land, it would be virtually impossible for railway tracks to be laid without removing or desecrating ancestral tombs. The worship of ancestors had been ingrained in the Chinese since time immemorial. Disturbing ancestral tombs and preaching against worshipping them merely added to the resentments against foreigners in rural communities.

  A measure of the general distrust might be gauged from some of
the rumours surrounding orphanages opened to care for baby girls, frequently abandoned or sold by impoverished countryfolk. The rites of baptism and extreme unction administered by missionaries to dying infants soon became misrepresented as arcane foreign rituals carried out for diabolical purposes. Sadly, such rumours were often believed and they detracted from the positive contributions made to Chinese life, like the establishment of schools and colleges to accord free or affordable education to the masses.

  Many generations of my own family, including myself and my children, have benefitted from such missionary-sponsored education. I consider such education a crucial stepping-stone towards speeding China along the road to modernisation.

  Other positive contributions were not free from criticisms either. Take the case of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. In 1854, China was beset by foreign wars and internal uprisings so that it was unable to collect trade taxes. The Western consuls in Shanghai formed an organisation to carry out that function. The job was so effectively done that, over time, the service was given additional duties like running the postal system, administering harbours and waterways, providing weather reports, masterminding currency reforms and conducting anti-smuggling operations.

  Notwithstanding its wide-ranging work, the Maritime Customs attracted resentments from the intelligentsia. Since its inception, it had been controlled and managed entirely by foreigners, largely British, almost like a colonial administration instead of a Chinese organ of state. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had a staff of approximately 5,500, of whom the top 20 per cent were foreigners. That establishment grew steadily into tens of thousands, to operate 40 Custom Houses across the country. But not a single Chinese was admitted into its senior management till 1929, the year of my birth.

  My British godfather worked for years at the Canton station of the service and, for a time, so did my mother and one of my maternal uncles.