The 'Second
Opium War' or 'Arrow War' was a war of the
United Kingdom and
France against the
Qing Dynasty of
China from
1856 to
1860.
Background
The
1850s saw the rapid growth of
imperialism. Some of the shared goals of the western powers were the expansion of their overseas markets and the establishment of new ports of call. The French
Treaty of Huangpu and the
American Wangxia Treaty both contained clauses allowing renegotiation of the treaties after twelve years. In an effort to expand their privileges in
China,
Britain demanded the Qing authorities renegotiate the
Treaty of Nanjing (signed in
1842), citing their
most favoured nation status. The British demands included opening all of China to British merchants, legalizing the
opium trade, exempting foreign imports from internal transit duties, suppression of piracy, regulation of the
coolie trade, permission for a British ambassador to reside in
Beijing and for the English-language version of all treaties to take precedence over the Chinese.
The
Qing Dynasty court rejected the revisionary demands from Britain, France, and the US.
Outbreak
The war may be viewed as a continuation of the
First Opium War (
1839-
1842), thus the title of the Second Opium War.
On
1856-10-08, Qing officials boarded the ''Arrow'', a Chinese-owned ship that had been registered in
Hong Kong and was suspected of
piracy and
smuggling. Twelve Chinese subjects were arrested and imprisoned. The British officials in
Guangzhou demanded the release of the sailors, claiming that because the ship had recently been British-registered, it was protected under the Treaty of Nanjing. Only when this was shown to be a weak argument did the British insist that the ''Arrow'' had been flying a
British ensign and that the Qing soldiers had insulted the flag. Faced with fighting the
Taiping Rebellion, the Qing government was in no position to resist the West militarily. This has come to be known as the "Arrow Incident"
[1].
Although the British were delayed by the
Indian Mutiny, they responded to the "Arrow Incident" in
1857 and attacked Guangzhou from the
Pearl River.
Ye Mingchen, the governor of
Guangdong and
Guangxi provinces, ordered all Chinese soldiers manning the forts not to resist the British incursion. After taking the fort near Guangzhou with little effort, the British Army attacked Guangzhou.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, there was an attempt to poison the entire European community in January. However, local bakers, who had been charged with lacing bread with
arsenic bungled the attempt by putting an excess of the poison into the dough, in sufficient quantities to be detected. Criers were sent out with an alert, averting disaster
[2].
The
British Parliament decided to seek redress from China based on the report about the "Arrow Incident" submitted by
Harry Parkes, British Consul to Guangzhou. France, the USA, and
Russia received requests from Britain to form an alliance. France joined the British action against China, prompted by the execution of a French
missionary, Father
August Chapdelaine ("Father Chapdelaine Incident"), by Chinese local authorities in Guangxi province. The USA and Russia sent envoys to Hong Kong to offer help to the British and French, though in the end they sent no military aid.
The British and the French joined forces under Admiral Sir
Michael Seymour. The British army led by
Lord Elgin, and the French army led by
Gros, attacked and occupied Guangzhou in late 1857. Ye Mingchen was captured, and
Bo-gui, the governor of Guangdong, surrendered. A joint committee of the Alliance was formed. Bo-gui remained at his original post in order to maintain order on behalf of the victors. The British-French Alliance maintained control of Guangzhou for nearly four years. Ye Mingchen was exiled to
Calcutta,
India, where he starved himself to death.
The coalition then cruised north to briefly capture the
Taku Forts near
Tianjin in May, 1858.
Treaties of Tianjin
In June 1858 the first part of the war ended with the
Treaties of Tianjin, to which France, Russia, and the
United States were party. These treaties opened eleven more ports to Western trade. The Chinese initially refused to ratify the treaties.
The major points of the treaty were:
# Britain, France, Russia, and the United States would have the right to establish diplomatic
legations (small embassies) in
Peking (a closed city at the time)
# Ten more Chinese ports would be opened for foreign trade, including
Niuzhuang,
Danshui,
Hankou, and
Nanjing
# The right of all foreign vessels including commercial ships to navigate freely on the
Yangtze River
# The right of foreigners to travel in the internal regions of China, which had been formerly banned
# China was to pay an indemnity to Britain and France in 2 million
taels of silver each
# China was to pay compensation to British merchants in 2 million taels of silver for destruction of their property
Treaty of Aigun
On
May 28 1858, the separate
Treaty of Aigun was signed with Russia to revise the Chinese and Russian border as determined by the
Nerchinsk Treaty in
1689. Russia gained the left bank of the
Amur River, pushing the border back from the
Argun River. The treaty gave Russia control over a non-freezing area on the Pacific coast, where Russia founded the city of
Vladivostok in
1860.
Continuation of the war
In June 1858, shortly after the Qing Court agreed to the humiliating treaties, more hawkish ministers prevailed upon the Xianfeng Emperor to resist encroachment by the West. On June 2, 1858, the Xianfeng Emperor ordered the Mongolian general
Sengge Rinchen to guard the Dagu Fort in Tianjin. Sengge Richen reinforced the Dagu Forts with added artillery. He also brought 4,000 Mongolian cavalry from Chahar and Suiyuan.
In June, 1859, a British naval force with 2,200 troops and 21 ships, under the command of Admiral Sir
James Hope sailed north from Shanghai to Tianjin with newly-appointed Anglo-French envoys for the embassies in Beijing. They sailed to the mouth of the
Hai River guarded by the Dagu Fort near Tianjin and demanded to continue inland to Beijing. Sengge Rinchen replied that the Anglo-French envoys may land up the coast at Beitang and proceed to Beijing but refused to allow armed troops to accompany them to the Chinese capital. The Anglo-French forces insisted landing at Dagu instead of Beitang and escorting the envoy to Beijing. On the night of June 24, 1859, a small batch of British forces blew up iron obstacles that the Chinese had placed in the Baihe River. The next day, the British forces sought to forcibly sail into the river, and shelled Dagu Fort. They encountered fierce resistance from Singge Rinchen's positions. After one day and one night's fighting, four gunboats were lost and two others severely damaged. The convoy withdrew under the cover of fire from a naval squadron commanded by
Commodore Josiah Tattnall. Tattnall's intervention violated U.S. neutrality in China. For a time, anti-foreign resistance reached a crescendo within the Qing Court.
In the summer of 1860, a larger Anglo-French force (11,000 British, 6,700 French) with 173 ships sailed from Hong Kong and captured the port cities of
Yantai and
Dalian to seal the Bohai Gulf. Then they carried out a landing near at
Bei Tang(also spelled
Pei Tang), some from the Dagu Fort on August 3, which they captured after three weeks' on
August 21. After taking Tienstin on
August 3, the Anglo-French forces marched inland toward Beijing. The Xianfeng Emperor then dispatched ministers to for peace talks, but relations broke down completely when a British diplomatic envoy,
Harry Parkes, was arrested during negotiations on September 18. He and his small entourage were imprisoned and tortured (some were murdered by the Chinese in a fashion that infuriated British leadership upon discovery in October). The Anglo-French invasion clashed with Singge Rinchen's Mongolian cavalry on September 18 near Zhangjiawan before proceeding toward the outskirts of Beijing for a decisive battle in
Tongzhou District. At
Baliqiao, Sengge Rinchen's 10,000 troops including elite Mongolian cavalry were completely annhilated after several doomed frontal charges against concentrated firepower of the Anglo-French forces, which entered Beijing on
October 6.
With the Qing army devastated, Emperor Xianfeng fled the capital, leaving his brother,
Prince Gong, to be in charge of negotiations. Xianfeng first fled to the
Summer Palace in
Chengde and then to
Jehol in
Manchuria.
[3] British-French troops in Beijing began looting the
Old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) immediately (it was full of valuable artwork). After Parkes and the surviving diplomatic prisoners were freed,
Lord Elgin ordered the Yuan Ming Yuan be destroyed starting on October 18. However Beijing was not occupied; the Anglo-French army remained outside the city.
The destruction of the
Forbidden City was discussed, as proposed by Lord Elgin to discourage the Chinese from using kidnapping as a bargaining tool, and to exact revenge on the mistreatment of their prisoners.
[The Times''.3 The Russian envoy Count Ignatiev and the French diplomat Baron Gros settled on the burning of the summer palace instead, since it was "least objectionable" and would not jeopardize the treaty signing.]
Chinese historians have argued that the destruction was a cover-up for widespread looting. That the summer palace was looted before being destroyed is certain but it is not surprising. Elgin was acutely sensitive to the charge of looting , as it was his own father, Thomas Bruce (1776–1841), who, from 1799 to 1803, removed from the Acropolis in Greece what are now known as the Elgin Marbles to Britain, where they remain to this day, a subject of rancor between the Greek and British governments.
Aftermath
After the Xianfeng emperor and his entourage fled Beijing, the June 1858 Treaty of Tianjin was finally ratified by the emperor's brother, Yixin, the Prince Gong, in the Convention of Peking on October 18 1860, bringing The Second Opium War to an end.
The British, French and - thanks to the schemes of Ignatiev - the Russians were all granted a permanent diplomatic presence in Beijing (something the Qing resisted to the very end as it suggested equality between China and the European powers). The Chinese had to pay 8 million taels to Britain and France. Britain acquired Kowloon (next to Hong Kong). The opium trade was legalized and Christians were granted full civil rights, including the right to own property, and the right to evangelize.
The content of the Convention of Peking included:
# China's recognition of the validity of the Treaty of Tianjin
# Opening Tianjin as a trade port
# Cede No.1 District of Kowloon (south of present day Boundary Street) to Britain
# Freedom of religion established in China
# British ships were allowed to carry indentured Chinese to the Americas
# Indemnity to Britain and France increasing to 8 million taels of silver a piece
# Legalization of the opium trade
Two weeks later, Ignatiev convinced the Manchu to sign a "Supplementary Treaty of Peking", in which the Manchu signed away some 300,000 to 400,000 square miles (777,000–1,036,000 km²) of land to the Russians. The defeat of the Imperial army by a small Anglo-French military force (outnumbered at least 10 to 1 by the Manchu army) coupled with the flight (and subsequent death) of the Emperor and the burning of the Summer Palace was a shocking blow to the once powerful Qing Dynasty. "Beyond any doubt, by 1860 the ancient civilization that was China had been thoroughly defeated and humiliated by the West." [4]
Footnotes and references
1. Tsai, Jung-fang. [1995] (1995). Hong Kong in Chinese History: community and social unrest in the British Colony, 1842–1913. ISBN 0231079338
2. John Thomson 1837–1921, Chap on Hong Kong, Illustrations of China and Its People (London,1873-1874)
3. ''The Rise of Modern China'', Immanual Hsu, 1985, pg. 215.
4. Immanuel C.Y. Hsu ''The Rise of Modern China'', 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2000: 219.
Further reading
★ ''Personal narrative of occurrences during Lord Elgin's second embassy to China'', 1860 by Henry Loch, 1869.
★ ''The Rise of Modern China'' by Immanual Hsu, 1985.
★ Jack Beeching, ''The Chinese Opium Wars'' (1975), ISBN 0-15-617094-9
★ Erik Ringmar, ''Fury of the Europeans: Liberal Barbarism and the Destruction of the Emperor's Summer Palace''
★ W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello, ''The Opium Wars'' (2002), ISBN 0-7607-7638-5
★ ''The Second China War'' by Bonner-Smith and E. Lumley, 1944.
The Second Opium War in popular media
★ Flashman and the Dragon, , George MacDonald, Fraser, Knopf, 1986, ISBN 0-394-55357-8 — A portion of the memoirs of the fictional Harry Paget Flashman recounting his adventures during the Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion.
See also
★ Unequal treaties
★ David Sassoon
★ Anglo-Chinese relations
★ Imperialism in Asia
★ Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864)
★ Charles George Gordon
★ British military history
★
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