The Second Opium War

What the Second Opium War Was

The Second Opium War, sometimes called the Arrow War from the incident that set it off, ran from 8 October 1856 to 24 October 1860. It was fought between the Qing empire of China on one side and an Anglo-French alliance on the other, with Russia and the United States playing supporting parts. By the time it ended, the Qing had signed the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858 and the Convention of Peking in 1860, had opened eleven more treaty ports to Western trade, had legalised the import of opium for the first time, had ceded the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain, and had watched the Old Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, burn in a punishment action ordered by Lord Elgin. The war is sometimes treated as a footnote to the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842, but it was larger, more destructive, and more politically significant. It settled the opium question. It embedded the Western powers in Beijing. It was the moment at which the Qing empire stopped pretending it could keep the Western barbarians at the coastal fringe and accepted that the treaty-port system would reach inland.

The war has been described, variously, as a war about opium, as a war about diplomacy, as a war about missionary protection, and as a war about the legal status of the Qing tributary system. Each of these descriptions captures something true. None of them captures the whole. The Second Opium War was the moment at which the Qing empire’s nineteenth-century crisis became visibly and irreversibly structural. By 1860 it was no longer possible for any serious Qing official to believe that the dynasty could manage its foreign relations through a combination of strict trade restrictions, regional barriers, and intermittent military action. The Western powers were now in Beijing with permanent legations; they were on the Yangtze with steam gunboats; they were in the inland provinces with missionaries and consular agents; and they were in the imperial treasury through opium duties and indemnity payments. The Second Opium War made that condition irreversible.

The Second Opium War is also, in the longer arc of Chinese history, the war that closed the era of the old tributary system and opened the era of the unequal treaties. The treaties signed between 1858 and 1860 fixed the framework that would dominate China’s foreign relations for the next eighty years, until the unequal-treaty regime was finally dismantled in the 1940s. The institutions that the war created — resident foreign legations in Beijing, inland travel for missionaries, the right of foreign warships to navigate the Yangtze — were the institutions that the Qing reformers of the 1860s and 1870s tried to imitate, and that the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century tried to abolish.

The war was not, despite its name, only about opium. Opium was one of the issues. The other issues were the revision of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, the right of Western diplomats to reside in Beijing, the opening of more ports, and the safety of Christian missionaries in the Chinese interior. The combination of those issues, together with the opium question, made a war of some kind almost inevitable once the Qing court refused to renegotiate the Treaty of Nanking on terms acceptable to Britain and France. The war that resulted was less a coherent strategic plan than a sequence of crises that escalated, each side’s restraint eroding under the pressure of small incidents.

It is also worth noting what the war was not. It was not, in any meaningful sense, a war about the legal status of opium as a substance. The Qing court had tried, since the 1830s, to suppress the opium trade by outlawing import and use of the drug. The British government, after a long internal debate, had decided that the opium trade, though morally questionable, was too commercially important to the British Indian economy to give up. By the 1850s the British position had shifted from outright defence of the trade to a position that the trade should be legalised and taxed rather than prohibited. The war was, on the British side, partly an effort to force that position on a Qing court that was still rhetorically committed to suppression. The Qing position was, however, weakening; within a few years of the war, the Qing would accept the legalisation of opium for revenue reasons. The Second Opium War did not create that outcome; it merely accelerated an internal Chinese debate that was already underway.

The Arrow Incident and the Outbreak of War

The immediate trigger was the seizure of a small Chinese-owned lorcha, the Arrow, by Qing officials in Canton on 8 October 1856. The Arrow was registered in Hong Kong as a British vessel; it was owned by a Chinese merchant; its crew was Chinese. The registration had, in fact, lapsed by the time of the seizure, so the Qing case that the vessel was not properly British had some force. The Qing officials, acting under the authority of the viceroy of Liangguang, Ye Mingchen, boarded the lorcha, arrested twelve of its fourteen Chinese crew members on suspicion of piracy, and reportedly lowered the British flag that was flying from the mast. The acting British consul in Guangzhou, Harry Parkes, demanded the immediate release of the crew and an apology. Ye delivered most of the crew but refused to release the rest, and on 23 October British gunboats opened fire on the forts near Canton.

The Arrow incident has to be set in the context of the running dispute between the Qing provincial authorities in Canton and the British community in Hong Kong. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking had opened the five treaty ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai, and had ceded Hong Kong to Britain. It had not, however, given the British the right of access to Beijing, had not legalised the opium trade, and had not opened the inland river routes. The Canton authorities, under Ye Mingchen, had made a speciality of obstructing British traders. Ye refused to let the British into the city proper. Ye obstructed the entry of foreign goods. Ye was, in the eyes of the British community in Hong Kong, an obstructionist and a hostage-taker, and the Arrow incident became the occasion for his removal.

The British government, then under Lord Palmerston, decided that the Arrow incident was the moment to press for a fuller revision of the 1842 settlement. A naval force under Vice-Admiral Sir Michael Seymour was dispatched to the China coast. The French, partly in solidarity with the British and partly to avenge the murder of a French missionary, Father Auguste Chapdelaine, in Guangxi province in early 1856, joined the British expedition. By late 1857 a joint Anglo-French force attacked and occupied Canton. Ye Mingchen was captured, deported to Calcutta, and died there in exile. The governor of Guangdong surrendered, and a joint committee of the alliance administered the city.

The Canton operation of 1857 was less a pitched battle than a coordinated amphibious demonstration. The Anglo-French force bombarded the river forts, landed marines, and occupied the foreign factories along the Pearl River waterfront. The Qing garrison was heavily outgunned; the European warships outranged the shore batteries and could stand off and shell the city with little risk of return fire. The British and French also benefited from better intelligence: Harry Parkes, who had been consul in Canton at the time of the Arrow incident, had prepared detailed maps and plans for an assault on the city, and these plans were now used by Seymour. The surrender of the city was negotiated rather than forced, but the Anglo-French terms were sufficiently harsh that the governor was replaced and a committee of the alliance took over the administration of the city for the next three years. The Canton episode was a rehearsal for the much larger operations that would follow at Taku and Beijing.

The British position in 1857 was, however, complicated by the political situation in London. The war was unpopular in Parliament; Lord Palmerston was defeated in a vote on the conduct of the war in February 1857 and dissolved Parliament; the general election that followed produced a Conservative majority; and the new government of Lord Derby sent out Lord Elgin as a special envoy with instructions to reach a settlement that the Qing court would actually sign. Elgin arrived at Hong Kong in July 1857, but it took several more months for the alliance to be ready to move north. The first major engagement of the war, in European terms, was the assault on the Taku Forts in May 1858.

The Taku Forts and the Treaty of Tianjin

The Taku Forts, sometimes called the Dagu Forts, stood at the mouth of the Hai River, where the river entered the Gulf of Bohai, about sixty kilometres southeast of Beijing. They were the maritime gate to the Chinese capital. To force the Qing to negotiate, the Anglo-French alliance had to take the forts and sail upriver to Tianjin. The first attempt, in May 1858, succeeded. A combined fleet of British and French warships silenced the shore batteries, landed marines and soldiers, and stormed the forts. From Taku the alliance sailed upriver to Tianjin, the regional metropolis and the city whose name would attach to the treaties.

The Treaty of Tianjin was signed in June 1858 by Qing commissioners and the representatives of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. The four treaties were separate but largely parallel. The major provisions were the right of foreign legations to reside in Beijing, the opening of ten more Chinese ports to foreign trade (including Tamsui in Taiwan, Niuzhuang in Manchuria, Hankou on the Yangtze, and Nanjing on the Yangtze), the right of foreign vessels to navigate the Yangtze freely, the right of foreigners to travel in the Chinese interior, and the right of Christian missionaries to operate freely in the interior and to build churches. The indemnities to Britain and France were substantial: four million taels of silver to Britain, two million to France, plus compensation for destroyed British property in Canton. The opium question was deferred for further negotiation.

The Treaty of Tianjin was, by any reasonable measure, a much more intrusive document than the 1842 Treaty of Nanking. The 1842 treaty had opened five ports and ceded Hong Kong; the 1858 treaty opened ten more ports, allowed legations in Beijing, and gave foreigners the right to travel and to missionise in the Chinese interior. The treaty was a wholesale revision of the unequal-treaty regime, not a piecemeal adjustment. The Qing commissioners who signed it understood what they were signing; the Xianfeng Emperor, who ratified it reluctantly, understood what he was ratifying.

For the next year the question was whether the Qing would actually implement the treaty. The emperor, advised by a hard-line faction at court, refused to ratify the agreement in full. The most contentious provision was the right of foreign diplomats to reside in Beijing; the emperor regarded the presence of permanent foreign envoys in the capital as an intolerable affront to the dynasty’s dignity. In June 1859, when the Anglo-French alliance sent a small fleet up the Hai River to force the issue of the treaty’s ratification, the Taku Forts opened fire. The fleet was repulsed, with several ships sunk and British and French casualties. The war, which had paused, was about to resume on a much larger scale.

The 1859 Taku repulse was the worst single military reverse the Anglo-French alliance had suffered since the Napoleonic Wars. The British and French fleets had been overconfident; the Qing gunners had been well trained; the forts were stocked with heavy ordnance and protected by mud batteries that absorbed return fire surprisingly well. The damage to British and French prestige was considerable. Lord Elgin, who had been on board one of the ships that came under fire, was reportedly furious. The British press denounced the Qing for what it called their treacherous attack on a fleet under a flag of truce. The episode stiffened British and French resolve to return in force, and it gave the alliance a propaganda reason to portray the war not as a war of aggression but as a defensive war against an obstinate and unreasonable Qing court.

The 1860 Campaign and the March to Beijing

In 1860 the British and French sent a much larger force to China, under the command of General James Hope Grant and General Cousin-Montauban respectively. Lord Elgin, the British High Commissioner, and Baron Gros, the French plenipotentiary, accompanied the expedition. The alliance landed at the head of the Gulf of Bohai in August 1860, away from the Taku Forts, and marched overland to the rear of the fortification. The forts, attacked from both sides, fell. From Taku the alliance advanced upriver to Tianjin and then overland towards Beijing.

The march on Beijing in late September and early October 1860 was one of the more difficult military operations of the war. The Qing army, though weakened by years of fighting against the Taiping Rebellion, was still capable of mounting a serious defence, and the alliance’s supply lines were stretched. The Qing general Sengge Rinchen, a Mongol, attempted to stop the advance at the Battle of Baliqiao on 21 September 1860. The Anglo-French force, with better artillery and better infantry tactics, won the engagement and continued towards Beijing. The Qing sent envoys to negotiate, including Harry Parkes, the British consul who had been involved in the Arrow incident four years earlier.

Sengge Rinchen’s army was a substantial force by the standards of the day — perhaps ten thousand men with cavalry, infantry, and artillery. Sengge had made a serious effort to modernise his troops with Western-style training and equipment, and the Qing court had high hopes that he would be able to stop the Anglo-French advance. The battle did not go as the Qing hoped. The British and French had brought with them long-range artillery that could outrange the Qing guns, and they had trained infantry that could deliver coordinated volleys. The Qing cavalry charges, though brave, were repulsed by disciplined fire. The Qing army retreated from Baliqiao in some disorder, and the road to Beijing was open.

It was during these negotiations that the war produced one of its most notorious episodes. Parkes, accompanied by a small party of British officers and Indian and French personnel, advanced under a flag of truce to a meeting place outside Beijing. The Qing seized the party, took them to the Board of Punishments in Beijing, and tortured them. About twenty of the prisoners, including Parkes (he survived, badly wounded), two other British envoys, the Times journalist Thomas Bowlby, and several Indian and French members of the party, were killed or died under torture. The news reached Lord Elgin at the alliance’s camp near Beijing. Elgin’s response, decided upon after deliberation with his French counterpart and his own staff, was to inflict a punishment on the Qing court rather than on the city of Beijing itself.

The Burning of the Old Summer Palace

Lord Elgin’s chosen target was the Old Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, the great imperial garden complex eight kilometres northwest of the walls of Beijing. The Old Summer Palace had been built during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the Qianlong Emperor and his successors. It contained an enormous accumulation of artworks, books, ceramics, and other treasures. It was not the imperial residence in the formal sense — that was the Forbidden City inside Beijing — but it was the place where the Qing emperors spent much of their time, and it was the symbol of the dynasty’s wealth and taste.

The decision to destroy the Old Summer Palace has been debated ever since. Elgin’s stated reasoning was that the Yuanmingyuan was the emperor’s own property, and that destroying it would punish the emperor without punishing the people of Beijing, who had not, in his view, been responsible for the torture and killing of the prisoners. Elgin also considered destroying the Forbidden City, but he was advised that the destruction of the Forbidden City would make a peace settlement impossible, because the Forbidden City was where the negotiations would have to take place. The Old Summer Palace, by contrast, was outside Beijing and could be destroyed without impeding the negotiations.

On 18 October 1860, Anglo-French troops entered the Yuanmingyuan, looted what they could carry, and set the rest on fire. The complex burned for several days. The fire was so large that it was visible from Beijing. The destruction was enormous. Estimates vary, but a substantial fraction of the cultural property of the Qing imperial collection was destroyed in the fire, and a further substantial fraction was looted and dispersed into European collections. The French troops, according to some accounts, were less enthusiastic about the destruction than the British; some French officers openly protested the burning. The French position, as recorded in some sources, was that the destruction was a useless act of vandalism, and that the Anglo-French alliance would have done better to seize the contents of the palace intact and use them as bargaining leverage in the negotiations.

What is not in doubt is that the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan left a deep mark on Chinese historical memory. The palace had been the pride of the Qing dynasty’s eighteenth-century golden age. The Qianlong Emperor had built it up over decades, and the collection it contained was the largest single accumulation of art and antiquities in the Chinese empire. The fire destroyed not only the buildings but also a substantial library of rare books and manuscripts, much of the Qianlong imperial collection, and thousands of pieces of porcelain, jade, and other precious objects. The loss has been a recurring theme in Chinese historical writing ever since, and it remains a focal point of Chinese nationalist feeling about the nineteenth century.

The Convention of Peking was signed on 24 October 1860, six days after the burning began. Prince Gong, the emperor’s brother, who had been left in Beijing to negotiate while the Xianfeng Emperor fled to the summer palace at Rehe (modern Chengde), signed the convention. The Convention of Peking ratified the Treaty of Tianjin, increased the indemnity to eight million taels of silver for each of Britain and France, opened Tianjin itself to foreign trade and residence, ceded the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain as part of Hong Kong, and granted French Catholic missionaries the right to own property in the interior. It also, separately, settled the long-running dispute between Britain and Russia over the Amur region: Russia received Outer Manchuria and the coast south to the modern port of Vladivostok, in exchange for which Russia agreed to the Anglo-French convention.

Consequences: Opium Legalised, Missionaries Inland, and the Slide Towards 1895

The Convention of Peking left China in a weaker position than at any previous point in the nineteenth century. The Qing had lost the Old Summer Palace, had been forced to accept the residence of foreign envoys in Beijing, had legalised the opium trade in a follow-on agreement signed in Shanghai later in 1858, and had seen their provincial authorities humiliated in Canton and elsewhere. The indemnity payments drained the imperial treasury. The opening of more ports increased the area of China that was effectively under Western commercial control. The inland-travel and missionary provisions brought Western institutions into the Chinese interior in a way that the 1842 treaty had not.

The indemnity burden was substantial. The original Treaty of Tianjin had set the indemnity at four million taels for Britain and two million for France. The Convention of Peking increased the total to eight million taels for each power, plus compensation for specific losses. By the standards of the Chinese imperial finances of the 1850s, these sums were significant. The Qing did not have a modern tax system that could easily extract additional revenue from the economy; the imperial treasury was largely dependent on the land tax and the customs receipts, both of which were already under strain. The indemnities had to be paid out of existing revenues, and the burden fell particularly heavily on the customs service, which became increasingly dependent on Western-staffed foreign inspectorates for its operation. The Imperial Maritime Customs Service, established under Robert Hart in 1863, was partly a response to the need to guarantee the customs revenue that would service the indemnities.

The legalisation of the opium trade, in particular, was a turning point. Opium had been prohibited by Qing law since the early nineteenth century; the prohibition had been the trigger of the First Opium War. After the Convention of Peking, the import of opium into China was no longer prohibited. The British Indian opium trade, which had been conducted in defiance of Qing law for years, was now legal under the treaty regime. The opium trade continued to grow through the 1860s and 1870s, and it was one of the principal sources of the late Qing financial crisis. By the end of the nineteenth century, opium imports into China were estimated at over a hundred thousand chests a year, generating substantial customs revenue but also producing widespread addiction. The social and economic consequences of the opium trade would be felt in China well into the twentieth century, and the abolition of the trade after 1949 became one of the defining accomplishments of the new Chinese state.

The missionary question was equally consequential. The Convention of Peking gave Christian missionaries of all denominations the right to travel in the Chinese interior, to build churches, and (in the French case) to own property. The missionary presence in inland China grew rapidly in the 1860s and 1870s, and it provoked a series of antiforeign incidents that the Qing court was unable to suppress and that the foreign powers were increasingly willing to punish. The Tianjin Massacre of 1870, in which a French consul and several nuns and priests were killed by a mob, was one such incident; the retaliation that followed was severe. The missionary question fed directly into the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which itself produced another Western military intervention and another unequal treaty, the Boxer Protocol of 1901.

The treaties signed between 1858 and 1860 also set the legal framework for the further concessions that would be imposed on the Qing over the next half-century. Russia took advantage of the Qing weakness to extract the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the unequal Convention of Peking (1860), which together gave Russia control of the Amur region and a coastline on the Pacific. France obtained concessions in southern China and in Indochina. Britain took Burma in 1885 and pressed the Qing for further commercial concessions in the Yangtze valley. Japan, modernising rapidly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, would defeat the Qing in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895 and take Taiwan, the Liaodong Peninsula, and a large indemnity. The treaty-port system that the Second Opium War had completed was the system that all of these later encroachments operated within.

The Qing response to the Second Opium War was the Self-Strengthening Movement of the 1860s and 1870s, a programme of selective Westernisation under the leadership of Prince Gong, the Tsungli Yamen, and provincial officials such as Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang. The Self-Strengthening Movement tried to import Western military technology, shipbuilding, railways, and telegraphy, while preserving the Confucian political order. It produced the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai, the Fuzhou Naval Yard, the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, and the beginnings of a modern Chinese navy. By the time of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, however, it was clear that the Self-Strengthening Movement had not produced the kind of deep modernisation that would have allowed the Qing to defend itself effectively against a determined Western or Japanese power.

The Self-Strengthening Movement is often described as a Chinese response to the Second Opium War, but the description needs to be qualified. The programme was already being sketched in the late 1850s, in the years between the two phases of the war, and it was being implemented while the war was still being concluded in 1860. It was the work of provincial officials who had been fighting the Taiping Rebellion for years and who had been forced to use Western arms and to hire Western advisers in order to defeat the rebels. The Self-Strengthening Movement, in other words, was not so much a response to the Western powers as it was an attempt to apply the lessons of the Taiping suppression to the larger problem of the Qing’s military and industrial weakness. The Second Opium War made the weakness visible; the Self-Strengthening Movement tried to address it.

The Second Opium War is, in short, one of those wars that looks at first like a discrete event and turns out to be the hinge between one era and another. The era before 1856 was an era in which the Qing still hoped to manage the Western presence at the coastal fringe; the era after 1860 was an era in which the Western powers were entrenched in Beijing, in the Yangtze valley, in the missionary interior, and in the opium trade. The Convention of Peking did not, by itself, cause the fall of the Qing — that was still fifty years away. But it fixed the diplomatic, commercial, and missionary framework inside which the fall of the Qing would happen. The Second Opium War, more than the First, was the war that made the nineteenth-century unequal-treaty regime real.

It is also worth saying a word about the memory of the war. In Chinese historical writing the Second Opium War has been treated, on and off, as part of the larger nineteenth-century humiliation, but it has not attracted the same level of detailed scholarly attention as the First Opium War or the Boxer Rebellion. Part of the reason is that the war’s outcome was so comprehensive that there was less to debate; the treaty regime was imposed, the indemnity was paid, the territory was ceded, and the conventions were signed. The war did not, like the First Opium War, produce a great Qing reforming emperor or a great national resistance. It produced the Self-Strengthening Movement, which was a serious reform effort but which did not generate a single iconic figure in the way that Lin Zexu did for the First Opium War. The principal Chinese actor in the Second Opium War was the Xianfeng Emperor, who fled Beijing rather than negotiate, and his brother Prince Gong, who signed the convention. Neither became the centre of a national mythology.

In the West, the memory of the Second Opium War has been complicated by the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan. The burning of the Old Summer Palace is, for many Western historians, an unambiguous act of vandalism; for others, it was a justified retaliation for the torture and killing of prisoners. The argument has been running since 1860 and shows no signs of resolution. What is clear is that the destruction of the palace removed a major centre of Chinese imperial art from the world, that much of what survived the fire was looted, and that the consequences of that loss are still felt today in disputes about the repatriation of Yuanmingyuan objects held in European and American collections.

The Second Opium War was, in the end, a war about imperial presence. The Qing wanted the Western barbarians out of the capital and out of the interior; the Western powers wanted to be in Beijing, on the Yangtze, and in the inland treaty ports. The war resolved the question in favour of the Western powers, and it left the Qing with a much-reduced capacity to manage its own foreign relations. The diplomatic system that resulted — legations in Beijing, consular courts in the treaty ports, missionary activity in the interior — would persist, with modifications, until the Second World War. The opium trade that the war legalised would continue, and grow, until the Communist victory of 1949. The unequal-treaty regime that the war consolidated would last until the Republican government of the 1920s and 1930s began to dismantle it, and the process was completed only in the 1940s. In that sense, the Second Opium War is not a closed chapter. Its consequences are still being worked out.

The treaty ports that the Second Opium War opened or expanded became, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the principal sites of Western commercial and missionary activity in China, and they became, in turn, the principal sites of Western-educated Chinese modernity. Shanghai, Tianjin, Hankou, Ningpo, Fuzhou, Xiamen — each of these cities was, in some sense, a product of the Second Opium War and its treaties. The Chinese modernisers of the early twentieth century, including the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, were for the most part educated in the treaty ports or had been influenced by people who were. The legal and political framework inside which twentieth-century Chinese modernity emerged was, in large part, the framework that the Second Opium War had fixed. The shapes of the modern Chinese economy, the modern Chinese legal system, and the modern Chinese political vocabulary all reflect that inheritance, sometimes directly and sometimes by way of later efforts to repudiate it.

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