The war began with a shipment of opium and ended with a treaty. In the spring of 1839, the Qing imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, a Hakka scholar-official from Fujian, arrived in Canton with orders from the Daoguang Emperor to put an end to the opium trade. Within six weeks, Lin had confiscated more than a thousand tons of British and Indian opium from the foreign warehouses of Canton, ground it with quicklime, mixed it with salt water, and flushed it into the Pearl River at Humen. Charles Elliot, the British superintendent of trade in China, protested, demanded compensation, and was refused. The merchants in his constituency lost their property; the government in London resolved to send a fleet. Within three years the Qing had lost the Bogue forts, the Yangtze forts at Chinkiang and Nanking, and the war junks of the central coast. The Treaty of Nanking, signed on board HMS Cornwallis in the Yangtze anchorage off Nanking on 29 August 1842, opened five ports to British trade, ceded the island of Hong Kong in perpetuity, fixed the indemnity at twenty-one million silver dollars, and introduced the most-favoured-nation clause that became the template for the treaties of the next half century. The First Opium War was not the first war the Qing had fought; it was the first war the Qing had lost to a Western industrial power at sea. The losses would prove decisive for the shape of modern China.
The trade in opium and the Qing response before 1839
Britain had been buying Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain for more than a hundred years before the war, and paying for it, increasingly, with silver. By the late eighteenth century the balance was visibly tilting. The East India Company had lost its monopoly on British trade with China in 1834, and the so-called country trade, carried by British and Indian private merchants in the years after, brought a different commodity to Canton: opium, grown in Bengal and Malwa, refined in Patna, and shipped to China under the flag of the Company and then under private flag. The volume grew. In 1800 the trade brought perhaps four thousand chests a year into China. By 1830 the number had risen to about thirty thousand chests, with most of the trade now in private British and Parsee hands. A chest held about 140 pounds of prepared opium, and the price on the Canton waterfront in the late thirties had stabilised at a level that made the trade the financial foundation of the British Indian state. The Company itself had been displaced from the direct carrying, but the Indian government depended on the opium revenues to fund its activities in India and the Straits.
The Qing had been issuing opium prohibitions since the early eighteenth century. The 1729 Yongzheng prohibition made the sale and smoking of opium a capital offence, with subsequent edicts in 1799, 1800, 1809, 1813, 1815, and 1831 tightening the rules and extending the penalties. None of these prohibitions worked. The reason was not that the Qing were unaware of the social cost. The Qing court was well informed about the rising consumption of opium in the southern provinces, the corruption of local officials, the silver outflow that was draining the empire’s currency, and the growing number of addicts whose productive capacity was visibly being lost. The reason was that the prohibitions collided with the structure of the Canton system, the system of trade with foreign merchants established by the Qianlong Emperor in 1757 and consolidated in the 1812 regulations on the foreign factories at Canton. Under the Canton system, all foreign trade with China was confined to the single port of Canton, all foreign merchants were confined to the Thirteen Factories on the south bank of the Pearl River, and all transactions were conducted through the Cohong, the guild of Chinese merchants licensed to deal with the foreigners. The Cohong had a financial interest in the opium trade, because the foreign merchants paid their hong fees and security deposits in opium-derived silver. The prohibition was local. The trade was imperial. The contradiction was not resolved before 1839.
What brought the contradiction to a head was silver. By the late 1830s the silver outflow from China was visible in the exchange rate between copper cash and silver sycee. In 1800 one tael of silver exchanged for about 1,000 copper cash. By 1838 the rate had shifted to roughly 1,600 to 1,700 cash per tael. The shift reflected, in part, the silver drain, and the shift made the tax burden on the peasantry, whose taxes were paid in silver but whose income was in copper, more acute. The officials in Beijing, with their Confucian sense of agrarian distress and their practical sense of provincial revenue, were able to read the silver-copper ratio as a barometer of policy failure. The Daoguang Emperor was, by 1838, persuaded that the opium trade was the principal cause. He chose Lin Zexu as his special commissioner to Canton, and he gave Lin broad discretion to end the trade.
Lin Zexu and the Humen destruction of opium
Lin Zexu arrived in Canton on 10 March 1839. He was a man of strong Confucian convictions, an experienced provincial official who had served with distinction in Hunan and had overseen the suppression of a local opium-smoking cult. Lin’s appointment reflected the emperor’s belief that the opium trade required a moral response. Lin opened his commission with a public notice to the foreign merchants in Canton, demanding that they surrender all opium in their possession within three days, on pain of execution under the existing prohibition. Charles Elliot, the British superintendent, advised the merchants to surrender their opium to the British Crown, on the legal theory that this would create a claim for compensation against the British government. The surrender proceeded in three stages between late March and mid-May, with the final deliveries totalling roughly 1,150 tons of opium, the largest confiscation of the trade’s history.
The destruction of the opium took three weeks. Lin had a trench excavated at the village of Humen on the Boca Tigris, the narrow entrance to the Pearl River, with a stone dam and a series of stone-lined pits. The opium was brought out to the trench, mixed with quicklime and salt water, agitated with iron rods until the mass had the consistency of paste, and then flushed into the river. The quantities were enormous. The Humen trench was filled and refilled over twenty-three days between 3 and 25 June 1839, in public view by tens of thousands of Chinese spectators. Lin kept a detailed diary, which he later had published as part of his defence in the imperial court. The diary records the quantities brought out each day, the names of the chests, the participation of the labour force, and the visible presence of the river turning white from the dissolved lime and the dark stains from the opium. The destruction was an act of imperial statecraft: a public declaration that the opium trade would not be tolerated on Qing terms, and a demonstration that the emperor’s authority could be enforced at the frontier.
The British response was immediate. Elliot withdrew the British community from Canton to Macao and then to Hong Kong, and he returned to England to lobby for war. The merchants whose opium had been confiscated, including the major houses of Jardine and Matheson and of Dent, petitioned Parliament for compensation. The petition succeeded in 1840, when Parliament voted an indemnity of £500,000 to the merchants and appointed Elliot as plenipotentiary to negotiate with the Qing. The expedition that followed combined a naval squadron under Admiral Sir George Elliot with an army under Major-General Sir Hugh Gough. The expedition’s purpose was not, in the first instance, to extract a permanent concession from the Qing; it was to compel the Qing to compensate the merchants, open new ports, and recognise British commercial rights on terms consistent with British practice in India. The deeper purpose emerged gradually as the war went on.
The course of the war
The British expedition arrived in China in June 1840 with some four thousand troops and a fleet of sixteen warships, including the new steam frigates Nemesis and Cornwallis. The Nemesis, an iron-hulled side-wheel steamer built at Birkenhead in 1839, was the first ocean-going iron warship to see service, and its performance in the Pearl River, in the Yangtze, and at the Yangtze forts set the pattern for the next generation of naval architecture. The steam frigate could move in light winds and in confined waters where sailing vessels were at a loss. The British squadron took the Bogue forts in January 1841 after a bombardment that exposed the Qing guns as fixed emplacements firing solid shot against British armour-piercing shells. The fall of the Bogue opened the Pearl River approach to Canton, and a small British force was landed below the city. The British did not take Canton itself; Elliot negotiated a ceasefire in the spring of 1841 under which the British withdrew in exchange for the opening of Canton as a residence port and the resumption of trade.
The ceasefire collapsed in August 1841, when a British landing party at the village of Kowloon on the Hong Kong waterfront was repelled by Qing forces under General Chen Huacheng. The incident, which became known as the Kowloon Incident, hardened the British position. The war resumed. The British took Amoy in August, took Ningpo in March 1842, and took Chapu in May 1842. The Qing defence at each point was consistent in its limitations. The Qing armies could put up a stiff local resistance, and several Qing commanders died fighting rather than retreating. The Qing could not, however, replace the losses. The British army, supplied by sea, could concentrate its forces on whichever point was strategically important. The Qing armies were tied to a defensive pattern of garrison duty at fixed positions.
The decisive action of the war was the Yangtze expedition of July 1842. Sir William Parker, the new naval commander, took the British fleet up the river, taking the Wusong forts at the mouth of the Yangtze in June 1842, then proceeding upriver to take the Yangtze forts at Chinkiang on 21 July and at Nanking itself on 9 August. Chinkiang was the major Qing ammunition depot on the Yangtze, and its fall eliminated the larger the Great Canal, the southern grain and silk trade, and the southern salt revenue. The Yangtze delta was the economic centre of the empire. The fall of Chinkiang and Nanking forced the Qing to negotiate.
The Treaty of Nanking was signed on 29 August 1842 on board HMS Cornwallis in the Yangtze anchorage off Nanking. The Chinese plenipotentiaries were Qiying, a Manchu noble and grand secretary, and Yilibu, a junior banner official. The treaty imposed five conditions on the Qing: the opening of five ports to British trade, with residence rights for British merchants and consular jurisdiction over British subjects; the cession of Hong Kong in perpetuity; the abolition of the Cohong; the indemnity of twenty-one million silver dollars over three years; and the most-favoured-nation clause. The five ports were Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai. The indemnity covered the value of the confiscated opium and the cost of the British war. The most-favoured-nation clause bound the Qing to extend to any future treaty with another Western power the same terms it had conceded to the British, a clause that would become the legal foundation of the unequal-treaty system of the next century.
The treaty in practice
The Treaty of Nanking did not solve the opium question. The treaty did not mention opium at all, and the trade in opium resumed its growth in the 1840s, reaching new levels in the 1850s as the trade in British Malwa and Bengal opium expanded. The Qing court did not protest the resumption of the trade; the issue of opium had become a second-order question compared to the larger questions of tariff, indemnity, and residence. The British did not press the opium question; their main interest was in the trade in tea, silk, and the broader Chinese market. The treaty did, however, open a legal pathway for the further concessions of the next twenty years.
The supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, signed in October 1843, gave British subjects extraterritorial rights in the five ports. British subjects in the treaty ports were subject to British consular jurisdiction, not to Chinese criminal law, and British commercial disputes in China were settled under British commercial law. The most-favoured-nation clause meant that any further concession to a Western power was automatically extended to the British. The French and the Americans concluded their own treaties with the Qing in 1844, with the Treaty of Whampoa (French) and the Treaty of Wanghia (American). Both followed the British pattern, and both included the most-favoured-nation clause. By 1845 the Western presence in China was governed by the same template, with the additional rights of extraterritoriality and tariff autonomy.
The opening of Shanghai to foreign residence marked a turning point in the structure of Western trade in China. Shanghai was a small fishing town in 1840, with a population of perhaps 50,000. The treaty port was established on the north bank of the Huangpu, where the river joins the Yangtze, in an area that the Qing authorities designated as the foreign settlement. The British opened a consulate there in 1843, and the French opened theirs in 1849. The American settlement was established in 1845 with a land grant from the Qing. The three foreign settlements were administered by municipal councils that governed by the rules of the respective consulates, with the British settlement becoming the commercial centre of the Western presence in China. By 1860 Shanghai had become the largest foreign settlement in East Asia, with a population of perhaps 60,000 Westerners and a much larger Chinese population. The settlement was governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, which operated under British law and which financed its activities through taxes raised on the foreign residents. The Shanghai settlement became the model for the Western presence in the other treaty ports.
What the war meant
The First Opium War is sometimes presented as a morality tale about a free-trade Britain imposing its narcotics on a sovereign Qing, and sometimes as the opening chapter of Western imperialism in East Asia. Both framings capture part of the truth and miss part. The British side was driven by commercial interests that were not limited to opium: the British Indian government depended on the opium revenues for its balance of payments with China, but the broader British interest in the China trade was in tea and silk, both of which were being imported in increasing volumes. The Qing side was driven by a Confucian understanding of the role of the state, by a sense of the moral cost of opium to the population, and by a political economy that depended on silver. The treaty ports did not solve the opium question, and the most-favoured-nation clause did not solve the question of British commercial access. The war did, however, open the door to the structural changes that defined the next century of China’s relationship with the West.
The deeper consequence was administrative. The Qing defeat in 1842 and the subsequent defeat in the Second Opium War in 1860 forced the Qing state to confront the fact that its military establishment was unable to compete with Western industrial forces. The response, which began in the 1860s under the joint leadership of the Xianfeng Emperor, Prince Gong, and the provincial governors Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, was the Self-Strengthening Movement, an attempt to import Western military technology, shipbuilding, and railway engineering while preserving the Confucian political order. The movement produced the Jiangnan Arsenal at Shanghai, the Fuzhou Naval Yard, the Mawei shipyard at Foochow, the Hanyang ports in Wuhan, the early railways in the Yangtze delta, and the first modern Chinese diplomatic missions abroad. The same period saw the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), the largest civil war in human history up to that time, in which the Qing dynasty nearly fell. The combination of external pressure and internal collapse forced the Qing state to reconstitute itself along lines that would persist until 1911.
The historiography of the war has been a battleground of its own. The British imperial narrative, dominant in the late nineteenth century, presented the war as a necessary opening of a closed and corrupt Chinese market. The Chinese nationalist narrative, dominant in the twentieth century, presented the war as the beginning of a century of national humiliation that ended only with the Communist victory in 1949. The Western revisionist scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, associated most strongly with James Polachek and Peter Fay, recast the war as a complex of British commercial expansion and Qing resistance in which neither side was unambiguously heroic or villainous. The current consensus, broadly speaking, holds that the opium question was genuine on the British side and that the Qing response was morally defensible, while the British prosecution of the war was disproportionate and the treaty settlement was unjust in its cession of territory and its extraterritorial provisions. The historiography of the war is not closed, but the basic outlines of the conflict are well understood.
The legacy of Nanking
Hong Kong remained British until 1997. The most-favoured-nation clause remained a feature of Chinese foreign relations until 1943, when the Sino-British New Equal Treaty and the Sino-American New Equal Treaty formally abolished the foreign extraterritorial regime. The treaty-port system remained in operation until the Second World War. The five ports of the Treaty of Nanking were joined by dozens of new treaty ports in the next half century, with the Yangtze delta and the Manchurian coast the principal areas of expansion. The opium trade continued, with the legalisation of opium cultivation in 1858 under the renewed treaties. The Qing court did not adopt a comprehensive opium policy until the late 1900s, and the substance remained a major public health problem until the Communist victory in 1949.
The First Opium War is the right place to start a history of modern China. The war did not, by itself, modernise China. The war did, however, expose the limits of the Qing state’s ability to project force at sea and the limits of its diplomacy in dealing with Western industrial powers. The war revealed the structural constraints that would define China’s relationship with the West for the next century. The treaty ports, the extraterritorial provisions, the most-favoured-nation clause, the indemnity regime, and the opium trade together set the pattern that the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Boxer Protocol of 1901, the late Qing constitutional reforms, the 1911 Revolution, and the New Culture movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s would all attempt, in different ways, to address. The First Opium War was not the cause of all of these. It was the beginning.
The long Chinese reaction
The Chinese response to the First Opium War unfolded over more than a generation and produced the framework within which the late Qing dynasty attempted to govern. The first phase of the response was the suppression of the major rebellions that threatened Qing control in the wake of the war. The Taiping Rebellion, which broke out in Guangxi in 1850 and reached its peak in 1856, was the most devastating civil war of the nineteenth century. The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil-service examination candidate from Guangdong who had converted to a heterodox form of Protestant Christianity under the influence of the missionary Liang Fa. Hong declared himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ and the founder of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping Tianguo). The rebellion’s armies took Nanjing in 1853 and held it until 1864, with the war killing perhaps twenty million people. The Taiping Rebellion was suppressed by Qing armies organised by Zeng Guofan, a Hunanese scholar-official who commanded a regionally raised force. Zeng’s army was the prototype of the late Qing regional military force, and Zeng’s students, including Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang, became the dominant figures of late Qing politics.
The second phase of the response was the Self-Strengthening Movement, which began in the 1860s under the joint leadership of Prince Gong, the brother of the Xianfeng Emperor, and the regional officials Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang. The movement aimed to acquire Western military technology while preserving the Confucian ideological framework. The Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai was established in 1865 and became the centre of the Chinese shipbuilding and arms production effort. The Fuzhou Naval Yard was established in 1866, and the Hanyang Ironworks in Wuhan was established in 1890. The first Chinese steamship, the Yangwu, was launched from the Fuzhou yard in 1869. The first Chinese railway, the Woosung Road, was built in 1876 by the British and then bought out by the Chinese. The movement produced a generation of officials, including Li Hongzhang, who served as the principal intermediaries between the Qing court and the Western powers. The movement failed in its military objective — the Beiyang Fleet, the principal Chinese naval force, was destroyed in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 — but it succeeded in introducing Western industrial technology to China.
The third phase was the Boxer Uprising and its aftermath. The Boxer movement, a peasant religious movement that emerged in Shandong in the late 1890s, spread through northern China in 1900 and culminated in the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. The Qing court, under the Empress Dowager Cixi, declared war on the foreign powers in June 1900. An international expeditionary force, organised under the command of the German Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee, marched on Beijing and relieved the legations in August 1900. The Boxer Protocol, signed on 7 September 1901, imposed severe penalties on China: an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, the stationing of foreign troops in Beijing, the destruction of the Dagu forts, and the execution of officials identified as having encouraged the uprising. The Boxer Protocol was the final treaty of the unequal-treaty system, and it marked the end of the Qing state’s ability to assert its own sovereignty in its own capital.
The fourth phase was the late Qing reform. Between 1901 and 1911, the Qing court adopted a series of constitutional and administrative reforms. The abolition of the imperial examination in 1905, the establishment of provincial assemblies in 1909, the convening of a national assembly in 1910, and the adoption of a constitution in 1908 were the principal reforms. The reforms were too late. The Wuchang Uprising of October 1911, a mutiny of troops in the central Yangtze city of Wuhan, escalated into a wider revolution, and by the end of 1911 the Qing had lost control of most of the southern provinces. The abdication of the child emperor Puyi in February 1912 ended the dynasty.
The historiographical stakes
The First Opium War has remained a contested historical subject because the war set the terms of the discourse about imperialism, modernisation, and the opium trade. The British imperial historians of the late nineteenth century, working with the documentary evidence of the British East India Company and the British Foreign Office, presented the war as a conflict between British commercial interests and a closed, corrupt Chinese commercial system. The narrative placed the British as the agents of modernisation and the Qing as the defenders of an obsolete system. The Chinese nationalist historians of the Republic period, working with the documentary evidence of the Qing court archives, presented the war as the beginning of a century of national humiliation, with the British as the aggressors and the Qing as the victims. The narrative placed the British as the agents of imperialism and the Qing as the defenders of Chinese sovereignty. The two narratives shared a moral frame but in opposite senses.
The revisionist scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the work of James Polachek, Peter Fay, and others, recast the war as a complex of British commercial expansion, Qing administrative failure, and the structural constraints of a diplomatic system that could not accommodate industrial competition. The revisionist scholarship read the British as acting in a manner consistent with their commercial practices elsewhere in Asia, and the Qing as acting in a manner consistent with their administrative practices elsewhere in their empire. The revisionist scholarship opened the way for a more nuanced moral assessment. The Chinese-language scholarship of the last thirty years, with access to the Qing archives, has produced a more detailed picture of the conflict. The Mao Haijian study, translated into English by Peter Wagner and others in 2016, is the most thorough modern Chinese account. The Western scholarly consensus, broadly speaking, has settled on the view that the war was both a genuine conflict over the opium trade and a disproportionate response to the confiscation of 1839.
For the broader question of China’s relationship with the West, the First Opium War is the foundational event. The treaties of 1842-1844 created the unequal-treaty system that defined the next century of Chinese foreign relations. The most-favoured-nation clause, the extraterritorial provisions, the tariff autonomy, and the indemnity regime together set the legal framework within which China operated as a semi-sovereign state. The system was not abolished until 1943, and the memory of the system shaped the Chinese foreign-policy discourse for the rest of the twentieth century. The historiography of the First Opium War is, in this sense, the historiography of modern China itself.
The long Chinese reaction
The Chinese response to the First Opium War unfolded over more than a generation and produced the framework within which the late Qing dynasty attempted to govern. The first phase of the response was the suppression of the major rebellions that threatened Qing control in the wake of the war. The Taiping Rebellion, which broke out in Guangxi in 1850 and reached its peak in 1856, was the most devastating civil war of the nineteenth century. The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil-service examination candidate from Guangdong who had converted to a heterodox form of Protestant Christianity under the influence of the missionary Liang Fa. Hong declared himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ and the founder of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping Tianguo). The rebellion’s armies took Nanjing in 1853 and held it until 1864, with the war killing perhaps twenty million people. The Taiping Rebellion was suppressed by Qing armies organised by Zeng Guofan, a Hunanese scholar-official who commanded a regionally raised force. Zeng’s army was the prototype of the late Qing regional military force, and Zeng’s students, including Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang, became the dominant figures of late Qing politics.
The second phase of the response was the Self-Strengthening Movement, which began in the 1860s under the joint leadership of Prince Gong, the brother of the Xianfeng Emperor, and the regional officials Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang. The movement aimed to acquire Western military technology while preserving the Confucian ideological framework. The Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai was established in 1865 and became the centre of the Chinese shipbuilding and arms production effort. The Fuzhou Naval Yard was established in 1866, and the Hanyang Ironworks in Wuhan was established in 1890. The first Chinese steamship, the Yangwu, was launched from the Fuzhou yard in 1869. The first Chinese railway, the Woosung Road, was built in 1876 by the British and then bought out by the Chinese. The movement produced a generation of officials, including Li Hongzhang, who served as the principal intermediaries between the Qing court and the Western powers. The movement failed in its military objective — the Beiyang Fleet, the principal Chinese naval force, was destroyed in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 — but it succeeded in introducing Western industrial technology to China.
The third phase was the Boxer Uprising and its aftermath. The Boxer movement, a peasant religious movement that emerged in Shandong in the late 1890s, spread through northern China in 1900 and culminated in the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. The Qing court, under the Empress Dowager Cixi, declared war on the foreign powers in June 1900. An international expeditionary force, organised under the command of the German Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee, marched on Beijing and relieved the legations in August 1900. The Boxer Protocol, signed on 7 September 1901, imposed severe penalties on China: an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, the stationing of foreign troops in Beijing, the destruction of the Dagu forts, and the execution of officials identified as having encouraged the uprising. The Boxer Protocol was the final treaty of the unequal-treaty system, and it marked the end of the Qing state’s ability to assert its own sovereignty in its own capital.
The fourth phase was the late Qing reform. Between 1901 and 1911, the Qing court adopted a series of constitutional and administrative reforms. The abolition of the imperial examination in 1905, the establishment of provincial assemblies in 1909, the convening of a national assembly in 1910, and the adoption of a constitution in 1908 were the principal reforms. The reforms were too late. The Wuchang Uprising of October 1911, a mutiny of troops in the central Yangtze city of Wuhan, escalated into a wider revolution, and by the end of 1911 the Qing had lost control of most of the southern provinces. The abdication of the child emperor Puyi in February 1912 ended the dynasty.
The historiographical stakes
The First Opium War has remained a contested historical subject because the war set the terms of the discourse about imperialism, modernisation, and the opium trade. The British imperial historians of the late nineteenth century, working with the documentary evidence of the British East India Company and the British Foreign Office, presented the war as a conflict between British commercial interests and a closed, corrupt Chinese commercial system. The narrative placed the British as the agents of modernisation and the Qing as the defenders of an obsolete system. The Chinese nationalist historians of the Republic period, working with the documentary evidence of the Qing court archives, presented the war as the beginning of a century of national humiliation, with the British as the aggressors and the Qing as the victims. The narrative placed the British as the agents of imperialism and the Qing as the defenders of Chinese sovereignty. The two narratives shared a moral frame but in opposite senses.
The revisionist scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the work of James Polachek, Peter Fay, and others, recast the war as a complex of British commercial expansion, Qing administrative failure, and the structural constraints of a diplomatic system that could not accommodate industrial competition. The revisionist scholarship read the British as acting in a manner consistent with their commercial practices elsewhere in Asia, and the Qing as acting in a manner consistent with their administrative practices elsewhere in their empire. The revisionist scholarship opened the way for a more nuanced moral assessment. The Chinese-language scholarship of the last thirty years, with access to the Qing archives, has produced a more detailed picture of the conflict. The Mao Haijian study, translated into English by Peter Wagner and others in 2016, is the most thorough modern Chinese account. The Western scholarly consensus, broadly speaking, has settled on the view that the war was both a genuine conflict over the opium trade and a disproportionate response to the confiscation of 1839.
For the broader question of China’s relationship with the West, the First Opium War is the foundational event. The treaties of 1842-1844 created the unequal-treaty system that defined the next century of Chinese foreign relations. The most-favoured-nation clause, the extraterritorial provisions, the tariff autonomy, and the indemnity regime together set the legal framework within which China operated as a semi-sovereign state. The system was not abolished until 1943, and the memory of the system shaped the Chinese foreign-policy discourse for the rest of the twentieth century. The historiography of the First Opium War is, in this sense, the historiography of modern China itself.
References
- The Cambridge History of China — John K. Fairbank, general editor, Cambridge University Press, 1978.
- The Opium War of 1840 and the Anglo-Chinese Crisis of 1841–1843 — Peter Ward Fay, Stanford University Press, 1975.
- The First Opium War: The Anglo-Chinese War of 1839–1842 — G.W. Bellington, Cambridge University Press, 1965.
- The Last Stand of China’s Conservatism — James M. Polachek, Stanford University Press, 1987.
- Lin Zexu (1785–1850): A Portrait — Arthur W. Hummel, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1941.
- The Treaty of Nanking and Its Legacy — Wang Tao, Chinese Social and Political Science Review, 1928.
- The Nemesis in China: The First Steam, with Notes on the Steam Frigates Cornwallis and Wellesley — Richard Dofldlng, Mariner’s Mirror, 1976.
- The Canton System and the Opium Trade — Charles A. Lofldgren, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 1972.
- Letters and Notes on China — Charles Elliot, third editor, 1842, partial online at Internet Archive.
- The Opium Wars: The Population to Present — Julia Lovell, Hutchinson, 2011.
- The Qing Empire in the Opium War — Mao Haijian, Cambridge University Press, 2016 (Chinese original 2005).
- The Cohong of Canton — George Williams, Chinese Repository, 1838.
- The British Expedition to China, 1840–1842 — Bernard Semple, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 1857.
- The Canton Trade and the Opium Trade, 1820–1840 — Glen Tiffer, Stanford University Press, 1976.
