Dan Snow's History Hit - The Opium Wars

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

2/2. The British Empire aggressively pursued the opium trade well into the 19th century, fueling an addiction epidemic within China. The Qing government was determined to stamp out this destructive trade, leading to the First and Second Opium Wars. But the British Royal Navy was at its apogee, and re-exerted British control over the Chinese state. In the infamous final chapter of this story, British and French forces looted and destroyed the Imperial Summer Palace in Beijing stealing everything from priceless art to the Emperor's Pekinese dogs.In the second episode of a two-part mini-series Dan and Dr Jeremiah Jenne, a professor of Late Imperial and Modern China, delve into the history of the Opium trade in the British Empire, how it brought crisis to China and started a war that still impacts China's relationship with the west today.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is the second episode of our two-parter on the British Empire, its relationship with China and the trade in opium, and how that history is absolutely essential to understanding the relationship between China, Britain, and the West today. Yesterday, my excellent guest, Jeremiah Jenny, an expert in modern Chinese history who's called Beijing home for the last two decades. He helped me trace the story of the British Empire's monopoly really on opium production in South Asia and its aggressive export into China in the early 19th century. The East India Trading Company used smugglers and local dealers to push opium into opium dens and the homes of millions of Chinese people who became addicts. He told me

how the Qing government was determined to stamp out opium use and its trade due to destabilising social, political and economic effects. Now in 1839, China confiscated and destroyed a vast quantity of opium. Britain retaliated with force. It wanted to protect its commercial interests, and the result was the so-called First Opium War, that forced China to open its ports to so-called free trade. Well, that was free trade, and it was a trade that was rich in opium. It was a huge win for Western powers like Britain, France, and the US.

China was weakened, and its government was humiliated, both at home and abroad. That is largely a forgotten war in the West. It's certainly remembered in China. It's famous for Britain exploiting its enormous maritime advantages. The Royal Navy at this point had a technological and administrative advantage over the Chinese that just fought the largest war in British history, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy was really in a period of global hegemony, its apogee. It was an enormously capable weapon of war. It was able to take the fight, hard to believe, thousands of miles on the other side of the globe from Britain's naval bases, home ports. It was able to defeat Chinese forces along the coast and then push inland, push up the key rivers, the arteries of China, and exert a stranglehold on the Chinese

state. The Treaty of Nanking, important in itself because Nanking is pretty far inland, shows how far the British had pushed and how deep the Royal Navy had thrust into China's vital organs. The Treaty of Nanking concluded with Hong Kong being ceded to Britain. Five other ports were opened to foreign trade. Huge indemnities were received from the Chinese government. The Chinese had to pay for the war. And the legal status of foreigners, of Europeans and Americans within China was transformed. They had rights. They were made a different class of person

to the indigenous Chinese population. It was the first so-called unequal treaty, which the Chinese regard to this day as a stain on their history, a day of infamy. And tragically for China, this was just the beginning. Far worse was to come, as we're about to hear. Another war, the destruction of unimaginably priceless cultural artefacts, when French and British forces ransacked the beautiful summer palaces. So if you missed the

first episode, you can find that in the show notes or on your podcast player. Otherwise, listen on now for the next part of this astonishing story. Okay, Jamar, we're back for part two of this opium war extravaganza. Let's finish with where we left off yesterday. Let's finish where we left off on the previous podcast. China's been weakened. Well, certainly this was a shock. Maybe not to everybody, but there were many officials who were looking at what happened and thinking, okay, we should not have lost this war.

And there was a surprising number of scholars who were asking questions about, okay, how did we lose? What do we do now? And some of them identified immediately the issue of technology. How do we get those guns and those ships? Others, you know, looked also inwardly and said, what's going on in our own administration, in our own kind of way we run our military that can allow this to happen. And a lot of them were concerned about what else these European, American, Western traders, merchants, and now random people living in our ports were going to want next. And speaking of ports, Britain has got the excellent deep water

harbor at Hong Kong, but there are other so-called treaty ports now popping up along the coast where foreign nationals are allowed to live and actually live with impunity. Yeah, it's an interesting scenario because other than Hong Kong and to a certain extent Macau, China's never colonized in the same way as India is colonized. It's a status that some people refer to as semi-colonized. I mean, what's worse in a situation like this? It's different. And it's different in a way that could be almost as insidious. That is to say, you're making an existing indigenous power structure work for you to further your aims, which may not be as effective in some ways as direct administration, but has the effect of eating away at the morale

and the faith that the people have in their existing institutions and setting the stage for the collapse of those institutions later on. Is it the only factor in the collapse of the dynasties? No. But it's an important thing that accelerates and just makes that collapse so much more spectacular when it occurs at the turn of the 20th century. Yeah, and we see this in European colonization a lot, don't we? Initially, the impetus is to try and work with the local elites. It's cheaper. You don't have to send regiments full of redcoats marching down the main square, right? You just try and get the local law-giving, law-maintaining authority to do what you want them to do. And then you just do the trade and collect the money. But the problem is, it's like getting into bed with the mob. You're always going to have to

pay them, and they're always going to want more. And those officials who, after the first opium war, were concerned, what else are these foreigners going to want, were quite correct. Because the ink wasn't even dry yet before the requests and demands for greater concessions, better enforcement of existing concessions, all of those things would start. And it didn't take long also for some of the more hawkish commercial interests and political interests outside of China in the West to start thinking, you know what would get this job done? A bloody good war. And problem was, you can't just start a war for no reason. You've got to wait for one. But this is the 19th century.

So reasons to start a war, that's a pretty low hurdle. And I guess you can imagine a situation where people at this imperial frontier, they push, they push, they push, they push. The Chinese government then finally comes down on them hard. And they then go squealing to their national parliaments in DC or London and go, they've broken the treaty. You know, there's the sacred bond that should exist between nations, which is always a great, very convenient cause for war.

It's interesting, too, because a lot of the governments in the West are not unaware of this dynamic, because there are other groups around. You know, one of the things that happens after the first opium war, missionaries, for example, aren't allowed to go anywhere they want in China. In fact, this becomes an issue that many of the missionaries go beyond the ports that are opened into the interior and often end up dying quite horrible deaths at the hands of local officials. But there are missionaries in those treaty ports, and they don't have a lot of sympathy for opium traders. So they're reporting back what's going on. Not everyone's involved, for example, in the opium trade. There's lots of people there who are involved in other forms of trade as well.

There are people who feel that maybe we need to be more accommodating with China. That's the best way for business. And there are others who want to push hard. So there's a lot of different perspectives here. But it is true that the more hawkish elements were the ones who bleated the loudest. They got the best key out. They got the best tunes. And you get this situation in capital cities where you get politicians going, hold on, we got these traders who are making a ton of money. And then when they get in hot water through entirely mistakes they might have made or their own actions, they then want taxpayer funded red coats, gunboats, the military deployed to basically support their enterprises.

That's absolutely true. And their first recourse in that situation is to go to the representatives of their countries. And now, after the Opium War, you don't have representation in Beijing. You don't have ambassadors at court. That's still something that the court won't allow. But you do have consuls. You do have representatives, government representatives in these ports. Some of these people had been sent there, sometimes at a young age, as sort of student interpreters had grown up in the China coast, in the diplomatic service, had served for consuls for many years. Some of them had been there for a long time. And some of them, and this is still a species that you see quite regularly in bars in Beijing,

were the guy who's been in China about six months too long and really should go home for a while. And one of those guys was the British representative down in the South China, a man named Harry Parks. Let's talk about Harry Parks. So let's just get the background here. Harry Parks is down there representing British interests. The Chinese are not happy about their loss in the First European War. They're under pressure to make more concessions or to fully implement the concessions they have made. And they're not going to moving fast enough. They're not jumping quite high enough when the Brits ordered them to.

Is that right? Some of the Chinese officials are standing on principle, right? We will give you exactly as little as we can. I get it. They're breaking the treaties, but it's hard not to sympathize with some of these officials who are saying, you know, listen, you want full access to my city, but I know what you're going to do when you get in here. You're going to cause trouble. Frankly, it could be for your own good, because if you cause trouble here, I'm not sure I can protect you from an angry mob. So I'm not going to necessarily just give you whatever you want. In this particular case, one of the things that Harry Parks wanted was full access to Guangzhou. And the governor there, Governor Ye, was not interested in really

working with Harry Parks. And the two of them had a poor working relationship, which became an issue when in 1856, off the coast of Guangzhou Canton, where the first Opium War started, a ship that may or may not, we're not totally sure of, had been flying the British flag, may or may not have been registered in Hong Kong, had a British captain who may or may not have been on board, and with a Chinese crew who almost certainly were smugglers and pirates, was boarded by customs inspectors or its agents from Guangzhou. The ship was seized.

The crew was arrested. And this is the Arrow. The Arrow, yes. Infamous name. Infamous name. And in a century in which there were some truly, truly stupid reasons to start a war. Let us all pause for a moment and remember the main. This was one of the dumber ones. And Harry Parks insisted they release the crew and release the ship. Governor Yeh was like, dude, come on. And they exchanged some not very diplomatic language.

And eventually that led to some even less diplomatic exchange of cannon fire. And Harry sent word back to London, oh, by the way, we may or may not be at war with China again. by the way, we may or may not be at war with China again. And at this point, the government in London was just kind of beside themselves. The opposition could not believe that this had happened again. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they ended up having to call for a general election in 1857. Palmerston's government got censured in parliament. And it was so weakened that he then was forced to call a general election. So I mean, causing a political crisis back in the UK. Absolutely. And when the dust settled, they were able to get the support they needed to

authorize this military action against China again. And, you know, one of the reasons they were able to do that was a lot of those merchants who had been involved in the opium trade back in the 1830s, 1840s, many of them had converted their positions into wealth and influence back home. The trade in opium continued. It increased with all the number of ports. It was still illegal, but fortunes were being made in Britain. Fortunes were being made in Britain. Fortunes were being made in America. Some of the great families in places like New England and New York, you know, the Forbes family,

not the magazine, but the ancestors of John Kerry, who was a secretary of state and the ancestors of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Delano family, they made their money in this trade. This is all going on at this time. So you've got big money lobbying. There's also just this powerful impetus to war when a nation is seen to have disrespected another nation. And the arrow, you mentioned it with Mayo, may not have had the Union jack fly. But this becomes a huge thing, doesn't it? That you cannot, a foreign nation cannot just, especially in rural Britannia, Britain at this moment is at the absolute zenith of its maritime imperial hegemony. You cannot allow, it was said, you could not allow hostile states just to snatch up British ships on the high seas. If you are an empire of colonies, if you are an

empire in which your prestige and the fear of your mighty military is one of the pillars of maintaining this empire. You can't allow any weakness because news travels. And so the idea is even if this seems like a relatively minor incident, you have a combination of opium merchant interests, other economic interests, commercial interests. And of course, as you said, you had people who are protecting. It's a matter of national honor. So between these things, once again, we have a war. And it's so interesting. People familiar with 20th century history will think about the ways Hitler really plotted out, I'm going to just call out a huge empire in Eastern Europe. And it's strategy driven from the center. These seem to be like trade disputes that get wildly out of hand. So rather than the British and Chinese empires, these two great empires

deciding to go at each other in a kind of Thucydidean way, these are bubbling from the bottom up, right? Yeah, there's a certain idea of like, oh, whoops, we now control India. I think if we take a look at the history of warfare in general, the number of wars that have started with disastrous consequences as a result of bumbling misunderstanding and just general incompetence are far more numerous than the ones in which an incredibly diabolical, nefarious plotter mapped it out from the beginning. And certainly, this is the case in this war. mapped it out from the beginning. And certainly this is the case in this war. I mean, you had two personalities, extraordinarily principled, somewhat obstinate governor in Guangzhou, Harry Parks, who just on temperament and just being in China for too long, sometimes personalities matter. And as a result, I mean, you know, you have what becomes known as the Second Opium War, which, like most sequels,

had a bigger budget, a bigger cast, and wasn't nearly as good. But here we go. And we call it the Second Opium War. We talked about the ship, the Arrow. A lot of people at the time said it was the Arrow instant. This was the Arrow war. There was a lot of reluctance to talk about, even if you were interested in the commercial possibilities of the opium trade, you generally didn't want to label your war after that.

So naming the war after the ship that was at the start of the incident, it was just better marketing. Right, exactly. So that's a good point. So this is not a war to make sure we can sell more opium to the Chinese. This is a war because one of our ships, one of Britannia's vessels, the Arrow, was disrespected. It was impounded. It was captured on the high seas in contravention of all the treaties and all the agreements and all the ideas about free trade that we can now embrace. Quite conveniently, we were threatened. We didn't start it. No, exactly.

We can find out how the war progresses after this break. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. I'm back with Jeremiah. The British ship, well, it's said to be a British ship, the Arrow, has just been impounded by the Chinese off the coast of Guangzhou. This has caused us belly for the British. We're very sensitive when it comes to oceanic trade. What happens now in this Arrow War or Second Opium War? What are the first moves? Well, once a decision is made to go to war, ships and troops are mobilized to travel to China. But it's not just the British this time.

Britain's good friends, longtime allies, and stalwart boon companions, the French, are like, so where are you guys going? And we're going to go smack China around a little bit. Ah, can we come? And the reasons why are kind of interesting. One, they don't want the British to get anything that they can't get. But the French also have kind of an interesting problem. They don't have the same commercial interest in China. But what they do have a desire to establish a religious protectorate there. Their kind of reason for being there is to protect Catholicism in that part of the world. And even though China, various ports have been open to trade, missionaries who travel to China were

not always content to stay in those ports. Many of those missionaries, particularly Catholic missionaries, particularly French Catholic missionaries, were finding themselves, for example, locked in like three foot by three foot by three foot bamboo cages and being beheaded. And of course, they were traveling illegally in the interior of China, but the way they were being executed was quite brutal. And so in order to get restitution for some of the more, what the French felt to be some of the more violent and egregious executions of missionaries, they wanted to join this war effort as well. So it became a joint effort. And this is a 19th century phenomenon because you get this in the Ottoman Empire as well. The Russians and the French are jockeying around for so-called protection of the Christians in the Holy Land and the Holy Sites. So this is something that might not be that familiar to

people, but it was a very, very common idea in this period. And it was a very powerful idea too. So what ends up happening is these ships and these troops get mobilized for China, and then right away they get diverted to India. Oh yeah, of course. Because you have the Indian rebellion at the same time. And so it takes a little bit of time to then, when that conflict concludes, to free up the men and materials to then get them to China. So it's really, we're talking like 1857, late 1858, that the same playbook gets pulled out from the previous opium war, blockade the ports, blow the hell out of cities, move up the coast. Finally, the Anglo-French force is threatening Tianjin. Now, for those people who aren't familiar with the China coast, Tianjin is a port city. It's a pretty big city. It's located just to the southeast of Beijing,

the capital. It controls a point where the rivers come in from the sea and the Grand Canal comes up from the south, and those both connect to a canal that then leads to the capital. So, Tianjin is like the water gate for Beijing. And as a result, when Tianjin is threatened, the capital feels vulnerable. Once the British and French forces threaten Tianjin, then the court decides we got to negotiate. And so once again, negotiators come out, they sign a treaty of Tianjin that opens more ports to trade, that in a subsequent agreement ends up legalizing opium. It gets included in a commercial treaty. Two other important points. Missionaries can now travel wherever they want. And for the first time, the Western powers, foreign powers can have

their representatives stationed permanently in the capital in Beijing. This is something that the foreign powers had wanted for a long time. Many of the foreign governments actually thought that the emperor was on their side. It was only those corrupt officials in the ports that had to do it and run around them. Well, when that treaty was negotiated, everyone was signed. The British and French forces were like, good, we'll be back next year with our diplomats. And then someone had to go tell the emperor what they had just agreed to. I just love, before we move on, I just love the idea of the British and French. You can imagine the British and French side-eyeing each other around the table. The British have got all of

these commercial opportunities of access. And the French are like, yay, and missionaries can go anywhere they like. And you can imagine the Brits going, yeah, well done. That's a really exciting concession you've won there. who have their own interests, but are trying to keep themselves positioned as more of the friends of the court. And, you know, we'll try to help you as much as you can, because you can't trust these Westerners. And so in these treaty negotiations, these are the parties that are involved. The Russians get a whole section of territory in Siberia they've wanted for a couple of centuries. The Americans get their commercial treaty. The French and British get what they want. And of course, someone has to go tell the emperor this. And when they go tell the emperor, there's an emperor on the throne. He's only about 30 years

old. His father was the one who had dealt with the opium war. He was not going to make the same mistake again. And when they told him what was in the treaty, he's like, yeah, no. Absolutely. Yeah, no. And they're like, I don't think you know how this works. And he's like, I don't think you know how tenuously your head is attached to your shoulders. And as a result, he's like, no, I'm just not going to sign this. And they're like, should we tell the foreigners? And he's like, I don't see why that would be important. French ships, American ships all show up off the coast of Tianjin preparing to enter the river to go down to Tianjin and from there sail on the canals

up to Beijing. Bringing their diplomats in. Bringing their diplomats in and when they get to the mouth of this river, now this river called the Sea River has a huge fort on either side. In the year earlier they had managed to destroy that fort or at least damage it and it was supposed to be empty.

And as they start sailing up the river, they look up and they see a couple of guys, but they're like, this doesn't seem too bad. And all the windows are covered with matted straw. It looks empty. But as they get into the middle of the river, there's a huge boom across the river and chains, and they get stuck there. And when they stop to try to clear the booms, they look up and they realize that the mats of straw covering the windows are gone and they've been replaced with cannons. Inside is a Mongolian prince named Sung Ge-lin Shin, a major general of the Chinese court. And he's hidden his soldiers inside the fort. And the British and French ships look up and they see two fully operational forts pointing

down at them and they open fire. In the ensuing battle, there's a couple hundred casualties on the British and French side. It's a rout. The British and French ships, there's casualties. Many of the ships are destroyed. They're forced to retreat. One of the things that ends up saving the day are the Americans who are tailing behind neutrally.

But the captain of this American steamship, a guy named Josiah Tottenall, who go on to great success in the Civil War for his home state of Georgia, says, blood is thicker than water. One of those great 19th century battle cries, sails his ship in and he kind of helps out. But the point of it is, is that they're not able to get into the river. They're forced to retreat. Sunga Linchen is a hero. In the Forbidden City, they are doing high fives and like, we'll never have to worry about that foreign problem ever again. Well done, everybody, all, you know,

Baijiu all around. Year later, they're back. And this time in 1860, they're bringing as many ships, they're bringing thousands of troops. They're bringing troops in from60, they're bringing as many ships. They're bringing thousands of troops. They're bringing troops in from India. They're bringing troops in from everywhere. And they're bringing in new toys, things like the Armstrong guns, guns that can be fired really quickly, weapons that were designed and tested in colonial situations where you got to fight a lot of people. And they're exactly the kind of weapons

that they need to occupy North China. And they're not messing around. The British and French commanders destroy the forts at Dagu. Lots of casualties. And then they march on Tianjin. Tianjin, this port city, kind of like China's answer to Philadelphia. They occupy the city and prepare for their assault on Beijing. And as they do, they fight a great battle outside of Tianjin on the way to Beijing. They rout this Mongolian prince's cavalry in the field, and they march up to the walls. And then they have to have a negotiation about the occupation. Where are they going to camp? What's the occupation going to look like? And to handle the negotiations, the commander of the British forces sends Harry Parks.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes,

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and gets into a disagreement with his opposite number and ends up angering the Chinese side so much that the Chinese side orders the arrest of Harry, a journalist from the London Times, the secretary of the British commander, many troops from India, and they throw them in a dungeon, and many of them will not survive their incarceration. But these are diplomats negotiating under flag of truce. So, of course, from the British side and the French side, this is a treacherous, heinous war crime. Selling opium, that's okay. Under flag of truce, arresting diplomats, definitely not.

And the result is that the commander of the British forces, Lord Elgin, and if the name sounds familiar, his dad boosted the marvels from the Parthenon, this is kind of the family business, was like, I've got it. We need to punish the court. And the decision was came down. All right, we're going to do this. Let's burn the Forbidden City. So they're going to burn the Forbidden City in Beijing? Well, that was one of the ideas that was, you know, they pulled out the whiteboard and okay, what are how are we going to punish the emperor? And like, let's burn the Forbidden City. And there was some discussion about this. And it's not totally clear who was the one who talked them out

of it. But the logic was, listen, you want to sign all these treaties with this dynasty. We've touched on this, but it's worth noting for your listeners, in the background, there is a massive civil war in China in which a pseudo-Christian kingdom has carved out its own state in the middle of their empire. That's what the courts really focused on. So the feeling is if you burn down the Forbidden City at this time, the dynasty falls and it'll become a you broke it, you bought it situation. And since the British especially already had one subcontinent-sized colony that hated them, adding a second one didn't make a lot of sense.

So they were like, OK, we're not going to do that. What else do we got? And they thought, the summer palaces. OK, so what is a summer palace? We say summer palace. They weren't just for the summer,, they weren't just for the summer and they weren't just palaces. Imagine if you had all the money in the world, all the time in the world, and access to an

endless supply of cheap non-union labor, and you wanted to create Disneyland just for you. That's what these were. These were an amazing acres and acres and acres of gardens and buildings. These were actually the primary residences of the emperors. They didn't spend a lot of time. The Forbidden City was their Buckingham Palace. Okay, this is their Versailles. This is their Versailles, or this was there they spent most of their time.

And so this was a punishment that was decided would affect the emperor specifically, but leave the city of Beijing alone. And so it would be a more targeted punishment, and also would not necessarily lead to the collapse of the dynasty. And so in October of 1860, British and French forces marched on these gardens, these summer palaces, and the first thing they did was they looted the place. Because the 19th century, right, you paid your soldiers with loot. And it was apparently a free-for-all. It was supposed to be organized.

But the British diaries are like, the French, my God, they'll steal anything that's not like nailed down. They're like, you see these guys carrying like eight scrolls and like three fur coats and like two crowns. And of course, all the French diaries are like, Les Anglais, mon dieu. You know what I mean?

So anarchic. I mean, it got so bad. This is the great story. I'm sure people have heard this. In addition to all the priceless ceramics and treasures and paintings and silks and everything they were stolen, they boosted the emperor's puppies. So there's a kennel of Pekingese dogs, which are, if you're not familiar, Google bug-eyed small dog in China, and you've got an idea.

And a kennel of these was part of the property removed from the summer palaces. And the puppies were divvied up among the British officers who brought the puppies home. And then one of the officers gave their puppy to Queen Victoria as her share of the loot. And this puppy became quite famous in the mid 19th century because Queen Victoria named her puppy Ludi. Yeah. There's a reason why this is called the century of humiliation in Chinese history. And there's a beautiful portrait of Ludi that you can still check out. Ludi was a celebrity pooch.

So after that was done, then the next step was, of course, to destroy the gardens. Lord Elgin, when he came back, got a lot of criticism from people about his decision to destroy these gardens. Lord Elgin, when he came back, got a lot of criticism from people about his decision to destroy these gardens. Victor Hugo wrote a very famous open letter criticizing this decision. These massive, amazing gardens were destroyed not because they got caught in the crossfire, it's because there was a decision made to destroy them and the royal engineers went in and like set charges building by building and obliterated it in a systemic clear the land. I'm not justifying that in any way. It was one of the great acts of cultural vandalism in history. Doesn't mean I don't sympathize a little bit with Elgin who was of the mind of like, listen,

you weren't there. You didn't see the condition of the bodies of these guys when we got to them in prison. They would have been tied up with wet ropes. So when the ropes dried, they would constrict and crush bones and split skin, and they would die of infection and other gruesome tortures. And I'm not, again, in any war, there are atrocities. But in an age just before telegraphs, you had to trust your commanders to make decisions in the field. And some of those decisions had long-range effects. What was the immediate effect of the destruction of the palace? Did the imperial court negotiate? The imperial court wasn't around to see it. Once the British and the French had threatened Beijing,

this emperor who had kind of started the whole thing, he fled beyond the Great Wall to another set of palaces that they kept kind of at the border between North China and Manchuria. And he left behind his little brother, who is known in history as Prince Gong, to clean up this mess. And frankly, Dan, I would have loved to have been part of that conversation. Like, hey, bro, how you doing? Got a little vacation time built up, gonna be taking it right now. Can you feed the fish in the Forbidden City? A massive army of hairy barbarians about to sack our capital. Did I mention the fish?

Bye. And then he just takes off. And boy, Prince Gong is in charge of kind of cleaning up this mess and does an adequate job. The emperor goes beyond the Great Wall and never returns. he ends up dying up there of a broken heart over the loss of his gardens but that's okay he's got an heir who's four years old the boy's mother is a piece of work however she's basically al capone in a silk dress and she's a woman that will later be known as the empress dowager so if anyone's ever wondering in chinese history where she comes from she's kind of the next step.

This is her backstory. If this were a Marvel movie, the end credit scene would be her holding the four-year-old heir going, my turn. Yeah, revenge. So we've got another catastrophic loss, Western powers. Interestingly, I guess it gets the end of the request that you can possibly make, because you want to keep the Chinese state alive, right? You want to use its central nervous system and its still beating heart to run this gigantic place while you just extract whatever you want in terms of commercial deals or looking after missionaries. Absolutely. And I think that's why this era is remembered in this way as being such a traumatic time for the Chinese people.

It was a time of subjugation, a time of humiliation. And I know that these are words that get thrown around a lot in the 20th century and now in the 21st century. And it's easy to hear these words being spoken, particularly by the current Chinese government, and dismiss it as propaganda or nationalism. And yes, there is an element of that, don't get me wrong. But just because it is used and sometimes abused by the current government to prop up their legitimacy doesn't mean it is not also an incredibly traumatic thing, and that people do remember it. Even at the time, people knew it was

a humiliation. In the early 20th century, under Chiang Kai-shek, they talked about national humiliation. And of course, part of this too, I talked about how the current government uses it. But in the new origin story of modern China, as it's told in China today. And this is an origin story that has become kind of part of the educational system since the 1990s, after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, when it was determined that class struggle and Marxism just weren't getting the job done. It is a story that gets told, and it's reinforced in movies and in the media. It is a story in which, for 5,000 years, there was a glorious civilization. And then one day, at the hands of these evil foreigners and their traitors, collaborators

within our own country, keeping in mind that in 1860, when the British and French were marching on Tianjin, they were being assisted by lots of laborers from Guangzhou and from southern China. Our country was laid low. And throughout this hundred years, from 1842, when the first opium war ended, until 1949, many people tried to save our country. None could. Until one man, one party, starting at chairman, six feet tall from the Hunan Polytechnic Teachers College, Mao Zedong. And the idea that the party is the only force that was

able to redeem China from this era of humiliation is an important part of their own legitimizing narrative. That doesn't mean that it's only propaganda, that people in China do feel very strongly that the actions that were taken in the 19th century were a violation of their human rights. It's not my place to judge this human right versus that human rights. Times change. Errors are different. But even if I don't always agree with it, I totally understand why people I know in China today, when the US or Britain or France go on about human rights in China, they're like, well, where was this moral fiber in 1842? There are reasons why that may not be the most fair comparison.

I don't always agree with that comparison. But anyone who wants to understand China has to understand why that comparison works, or why that comparison resonates in China today. Before we finish, let's just finish off the opium story. Well, if it ever truly finishes, the sort of fundamental reason that these two wars took place. When did China manage to break the hold of opiates? By the end of the 19th century, the imports of opium had started to decline. Part of that was because opium was being grown closer to home. That was part of it. In 1907, there was an agreement to limit the sales of import of opium into China. And then there were sporadic attempts by Chinese governments to enforce a ban on the trade. After 1949, the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party made it a part of their campaign slogan to eradicate opium, throwing like thousands

of addicts into prisons to undergo cold turkey. Although there is some suggestions that the Communist Party, along with a lot of other groups in China in the early 20th century, may have funded some of their military activities through the sale of opium. I think sometimes it gets a little exaggerated because I think everyone was doing it, but there was that. In many ways, they were quite effective. One of the things that people talk about, those foreign visitors who went to China in the 1980s talked about was how shocked they were with the economic liberalization that some of those, not necessarily opium, but other narcotics started to come back in and

that sign that things had changed. Jeremiah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and taking us through the century of humiliation in the opium trade. Yeah, not a happy subject for a historian of China, but a really important one for understanding the relationship that China has with the rest of the world. If we don't think about what China went through, it's hard to understand why many people in China might support the kind of government that they do and why they might be a little bit skeptical about some of the overtures from the rest of the world that claim to

have China's interests at heart. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But it's worth knowing why people in China may ask questions about the sincerity of it. Brilliant, what a great ending. Thanks, bud. Sure. you you