The History of China - #322 - Opium War 7: The Throat of the Empire

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

The new envoy from London arrives at Qing's doorstep in August 1842 with a simple mandate: stop allowing Britain to be "humbugged" & finish the war Elliot started. What follows is the British Empire at its most efficient & brutal... and a treaty that, somehow, doesn't mention opium once...Time Period Covered:Aug. 1841–Aug. 1842 Major Historical Figures:The Qing Empire:The Daoguang Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Minning) [r. 1820–1850]Yijing, Imperial Commander [1793–1853]Qiying, Imperial Commissioner [1787–1858]Yilibu, Imperial Commissioner [1772–1843]Niu Jian, Governor-General of Liangjiang [1785–1858]Zhang Xi, intermediary [1840s]Yuqian, Zhejiang Imperial Commissioner [1841] The British Empire:Queen Victoria [r. 1837–1901]Sir Henry Pottinger, Plenipotentiary to China [1789–1856]Sir Hugh Gough, Commander of British Land Forces [1779–1869]Admiral Sir William Parker, Commander-in-Chief, East India Station [1781–1866]Captain William Hutcheon "Nemesis" Hall, HMS Nemesis [c. 1797–1878]Captain Henry Keppel, HMS Dido [1809–1904]Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff, Prussian missionary & Civil Magistrate of Ningbo [1803–1851] Colonel George Mountain [1789–1863]Harry Smith Parkes, attaché to Pottinger's staff [1828–1885] Major Sources Cited:Fay, Peter Ward. The Opium War, 1840–1842. Wakeman, Frederic Jr. "The Canton Trade and the Opium War" in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10.Lovell, Julia. The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 322, The Throat of the Empire. The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war. Erasmus 1500. The situation now is like riding a tiger. It is difficult to dismount. Former Imperial Commissioner Linza Ship, quoting an old Chinese proverb from exile in Ili, 1842.

How could matters have come to this? The Daugong Emperor, 1842. Last time, we left Charles Elliott, where many a disgraced man has ultimately found himself, waiting for the mail to arrive. He'd known since the summer of 1841 that London had decided that his services were no longer required. Heck, even the queen herself had waited. in on the matter, and the Foreign Secretary Palmerston was rather less regal about it. The man had been handed a war, and somehow managed to barter it down to a glorified real estate

transaction, trading the strategic paradise of Joe Sean for some rocky malarial outcropping near Canton. His replacement was to be Sir Henry Pottinger, veteran of the Anglo-Afghan campaigns, and a man whose entire career could be summarized as almost Alexandarian. There is no problem so complicated or intractable that the simple application of overwhelming force could not solve it. Where Elliot had been conflicted and perpetually searching for some off-ramp to the crisis, Pottinger had received his instructions with crystal clarity. The war was on, and wars were meant to be prosecuted to their conclusion, not managed, not wound down, prosecuted, and won. A better man you could not have, wrote one correspondent to a colleague,

in Macau when news of his appointment arrived. He was, quote, up to all the tricks and chicanery of the native courts, end quote, and would not the letter promised allow himself to be humbugged. Elliot departed by Steamer in August of 1841, reportedly in good spirits, more relieved than humiliated, which tells you a little something about the kind of war it had been to manage thus far. He would eventually be reassigned as the British representative to the Republic of Texas, a posting that suggests either a very specific bureaucratic sense of humor in Whitehall or a punishment so baroque that it looped all the way back around to being interesting. But that's the story for a completely different podcast.

In any event, it was at the height of August's withering heat that Pottinger at last arrived. And with him, the humbug era was officially over. The strategy, if you care to dignify it with any such word, was remarkable. simple. Go north, blow things up, keep going north. No brilliant military finesse, nothing really to write home about, just the application of modern arms to obsolete fortifications, and the same basic operation repeated time and again up the Chinese coast with only the names of the cities changing. As British satirist Heler Belak put it with skewering precision half a century on, quote, whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun,

and they have not. From the moment he stepped ashore, Pottinger had made it crystal clear that from here on out, the war was going to be fought differently. No more dilly-dallying, no more half-measures. They were in it to win it. The English, wrote the missionary bridgeman quite approvingly, quote, Now make war, end quote. And war they made.

On August 21, 1841, the fleet departed Macau, numbering at 15 transports, a pair of 74-gun ships to the line, half a dozen lesser warships, and four iron-clad steamers, including the nemesis. The army aboard numbered about 4,000 men. They carried with them 32-pound shot by the thousands, percussion muskets by the hundreds, powder by the ton, and among the medical supplies, because it was, of course, a medical necessity, a hefty quantity of opium. Amoy, we already know, we covered it last time.

Pottinger had barely gotten his feet under the desk when the fleet swept in, spent an hour or two battering the mile-long stone battery defenders had spent a year building up, and then walked around the back of it and marched in through and opened up the gate. The garrison had packed up and left before anyone had even reached them. It was, as these things go, almost insultingly easy. Which meant their real northern campaign started at Joshan. Zhou Shan, you may recall, had already been taken once, seized in the opening moves of the war, and then handed back as part of Elliot's negotiated settlement.

Then immediately and enthusiastically re-fortified by the Qing, who had apparently decided that a second battery would fix the problems that only having one hadn't solved. General Gousband arrived on a fine October afternoon, climbed the adjacent hill, took it in a brisk exchange, and came down into the town. The 18th regiment, searching for billets, found, their own company numbers still chalked on the doors of many of the houses from their previous time's occupation. One soldier discovered the gravestone of a comrade buried during the first posting, his name being Oglander, which had now been set decoratively into a local's doorstep. The house

was subsequently raised to the ground. Of all these early targets, Jun Hai would prove the toughest nut of the three. The city sat on a narrow peninsula commanded by a great rock over 200 feet high with a citadel on top, and the raking mandarin defending it was one Yuchin, described by Faye as, quote, determined and even ferocious, a man who had already demonstrated his seriousness by having a prisoner decapitated and his head hung in a cage by way of greeting the English arrival. With Yuchin in command, everyone expected a real fight. and a fight they got, but a short one. Gao landed 1,500 men at dawn, sent one column to threaten the front, while another swung around behind.

A class of sharp fighting followed, then the Chinese lines broke and fled toward the river. The Navy then towed two ships to within 1,300 yards of the Citadel, anchored them carefully in the mud at high tide, and allowed them to methodically pound it into rubble. Marines scaled the rock, chased the garrison down the backside, and took the town. A habit that had apparently caught on somewhere along the coast was the British soldiers cutting the queues, that is the braided hair, off of their prisoners as souvenirs, almost like taking scalps. A practice which was apparently known to the officers, but nevertheless not discouraged. Yu Qian surveyed the wreckage of his city defense, walked to a pond, and attempted

to drown himself. His attendants dragged him out and rushed him inland, where he then found the thematically perfect solution, opium, and proceeded to finish the job. With that, all resistance ceased. Ning Bo, the second city of Jujang province, population in 1840 around 300,000, which makes it a modern-day Pittsburgh, fell without a single shot. Four steamers, two brigs, a gate open from the outside, and the band of the Royal Irish playing St. Patrick's Day in the morning as they marched in. It was all too easy. But Ningbo also was, as Faye puts it, as far as the barbarians got. The problem was what the problem was always going to be with a small island trying to dominate a huge inland empire. It's the numbers, stupid. General Gao had begun the northern campaign with

about 2,500 effective soldiers. He had to leave garrisons at Kulang Si, at Dinghai, and at Zhenhai. In the process, naturally, some soldiers had been killed, wounded, or taken ill. By the time he marched in a Ningbo that October afternoon, fewer than 700 fit men were left to continue Gao's march, and from those 700, he had to find guards and patrols for a city of 300,000. The nemesis seemed upriver towards Hangzhou, the provincial capital, to see if it too could be put to the British guns. She got as far as the Ningbo suburb of Yu Yao, where a stone bridge blocked the way and the rain came down in buckets, forcing her to turn back. Peasants lined the riverbanks and gaped at the iron monster passing by. Gao walked the five miles of Ningbo's city's

walls each evening after dinner, waiting with ever-going impatience for the reinforcements promised him from India. Yet it would be there in Ningboa that for the next several months, the British occupation would be forced to settle in for a winter that it had not been prepared for. The official dispatches from the Ningbo garrisons that winter were, as Faye dryly observes, quote, as brisk and breezy as ever, and quote, full of gallant deeds nobly performed, of cold weather cheerfully endured and a disciplined British soldiery making the best of difficult circumstances.

And to be fair, some of that was even true. There was at least a veneer of pleasantness to those early weeks of occupation. The rains gave way to frost and occasional snow, and life in Ningboa became, by the peculiar accounting of men who'd been fighting a war for two years in a subtropical climate to this point, almost agreeable.

The men, still lacking the great coats that India had been asked for too late, instead fashioned bedding and improvised uniforms out of the quilted cotton that the Chinese used. They ate well enough, local eggs, pork, poultry, and Chinese bread. Officers even went shooting for wild fowl outside the walls in the afternoons. Then came back to sit over charcoal braziers in the evenings, burning furniture and window frames in improvised fireplaces. Four or five Chinese musket barrels stacked together, made for an excellent grading, they discovered.

All the while, the machinery of occupation cranked steadily forward. Pottinger had entered Ningboe fully intending a general plunder, and had only reluctantly abandoned the notion because of the absence of any resistance, making it difficult to justify such a measure in his dispatches. Thus he pivoted to the next best thing, a systematic confiscation of public property, and come December, a 10% levy on what remains, of private goods in the city.

Gao objected strenuously, on the pragmatic grounds that harshness towards the civilians would not bring Beijing to terms, and that the most annoying thing the British could possibly do was to demonstrate, by their moderation, that everything the Chinese had been told about barbarian behavior was a lie. Gao was, however, overruled. The granary was opened and rice sold at a dollar a sack until the prize fund was growing by $1,000 a day. The great bell of what the garrison had taken to calling the Bell Pagoda, for reasons that

probably won't surprise you, was pried loose and shipped off to Calcutta. The copper cash from the city treasury was threaded onto strings, packed into sacks, and sent off to India, too. One account puts the value at something like $160,000 worth. Running the civil side of things was Karl Goetzlough, Prussian missionary, veteran opiators, ship surgeon, polyglot, and the only foreigner for a hundred miles who spoke any Chinese at all. Faye's summary of his administrative style is insensitivity and gusto, which about covers it. Dispensing a summary justice from his magistrate's dais, that was by all accounts impressively

effective, effective enough at least, that a local poet composed a satirical song about him, Daddy Quo, the song called him, and in the poem Daddy Quo sits briskly settling cases of fraud and petty theft, then pauses, picks up a brush, and writes out in a large hand the British justification for the war, which is 20,000 chests wrongfully confiscated, which must be paid for. The people in the courtroom read it, some dutifully copied it. Daddy Quo chuckles and offers everybody biscuits.

Goodsloff also ran spies. And those little birds of his, early in the new year of 1842, begin tripping about something worrying, troop buildups taking place out in the countryside. This was apparently being done under the auspices of the Triumvir E. Jing, who we know best as cousin to the Daogong Emperor, who'd been dispatched from Beijing with the title of Jingni, or pacifier general of the rebellious, and a mission to drive the English into the sea. Gao responded the only way he really knew how. Little probing expeditions into the countryside, chasing soldiers and militia braves across the frozen rice fields into knee-deep snow.

Destroying whatever arms and ammunition they found, before turning around and heading back to Ningbo. Typically in good spirits, with some trophies and a few more silver sices, quote-unquote, confiscated into their own pockets. Yet in spite of these forays, the Chinese troop buildup continued to matter. And as they did, the city itself, likewise, began to turn on its forcible guests. This next part didn't make it into any of those cheery dispatches. A junior officer walking alone through Ningbo's alleys risked being abused, pelted with refuse, or worse. Several men of the 55th were fed poison, fatal in at least one case. A private of the 49th was found dead, and beyond that, mutilated, stuffed into a bag.

hands bound behind his legs, a walnut forced into his mouth with the sides of his mouth cut open to get it in. On a single afternoon, the Chinese managed to abduct one of the Modest's Marines and two of the Anstruthers gun Laskars. An infernal machine, what we would probably call a booby trap or an IED, exploded near Goetzloff himself in the street. No sensible officer, Fay notes, went anywhere without at least a loaded pistol. for protection. The British response was as predictable as it was ugly. They burned the quarter where their man had been found in the bag. They scoured the countryside, bringing suspects back, humiliatingly bound together by their hair cues. Law and order, such as it had ever been under the British occupation, collapsed entirely. Those Chinese who remained in the city now had burned

and in plundered what little the occupation had left them. Whole sections of Ningbo were gutted. Most of the population that hadn't already fled now did so, leaving a hollowed-out, hostile city that the British could hold but not pacify, and the British as the force therein that the Chinese could hurt but not expel. Then, on the night of March 9, 1842, Ejing made his move. He hit the South and Westgate simultaneously, in darkness and rain, with the ground turned to mud by the breaking of frost.

For a short time, in the confusion, it nearly worked. The picket at the south gate was overwhelmed and forced back along the top of the wall. Chinese troops broke through and got as far as the central market. At the Westgate, the heaviest assault, the British held. And at dawn, 150 of Gao's men dragging a single field piece pushed out of the gate and into the suburb, finding a small army of Chinese crammed into a narrow street and open fire with grape shot and repeated musket volleys. Each file firing, retiring to reload, and then coming forward to fire once again.

In the span of just ten minutes, the street was choked waist high with dead and dying. Even veterans of the Peninsular Wars said that they'd never seen so many bodies in so small as space. Chinese dead neared 500, while the British didn't lose a man. After that, Eging attempted nothing beyond a few fireboat attacks, none of which accomplished anything of note. The British could not be dislodged or made to suffer meaningful losses, but on the other hand, they couldn't really go anywhere either, not with the numbers they had. They were at an impasse. It was a perfect summary of the entire war thus far. A military force so tactically dominant it couldn't lose and so strategically constrained that it couldn't yet win.

Something was going to have to change. That critical shift would come the following spring when word was received in Ningboa. At last, reinforcements were on the way. Here we need to step back and reframe our view of this in terms of the broader global dealings of the British Empire. Because there's something important to understand about this war in the spring of 1842. Despite the moral outrage that had nearly derailed it in Parliament just two years prior, by this point virtually nobody back home was paying attention to it at all. Afghanistan, you see, was on fire. Big shock, I know.

The Grand Imperial Project of installing a friendly client state on the Afghan throne, which had begun in 1839 with such confidence. squagger, had by November 1841 collapsed into one of the most catastrophic military disasters in British imperial history. The garrison at Kabul, outnumbered and mismanaged, had negotiated what they believed was a safe passage out. The Afghans had agreed to let them go. But then it turned out, just kidding. The column of roughly 16,000 soldiers and camp followers that set out in the bitter January cold were harassed, ambushed, and picked apart from the heights the entire way. Gilzai tribesmen, with their handcrafted Jazeel long rifles, outranging anything

the British carried, firing down into them in the narrow mountain defiles from cliff-top positions that none could reach. Combined with the cold, the snow, starvation, and the complete collapse of military order, the column simply ceased to exist over the course of about a week. Of the 16,000 who set out, one man managed to reach the relative safety of Jalalabad. A Scottish army surgeon named William Bryden, covered in wounds, his sword broken off at the hilt, and riding a horse that collapsed under him and died of exhaustion shortly after he staggered in. That was it. That was what remained of the British presence in Afghanistan. As some reports put it, Briden himself would manage to reply when asked where the rest of his army was, I am the army.

Army. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember, 988 Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. Compared to that, the China War was, as the Times of London ever helpfully observed, quote, impossible to view with the same exciting interest that attaches to the terrible realities of our Afghan warfare." China was a sideshow, an expensive, dragging, inconclusive sideshow that Parliament was tired of reading dispatches about, that the new Governor General of India, the Earl of Ellenborough, regarded primarily as a drain on the treasury that he needed for his army of retribution,

and that the new foreign secretary Aberdeen had inherited from Palmerston the way one inherits an elderly incontinent dog, unwillingly, and with a clear sense that the thing needed to be resolved one way or another. The resolution Ellenborough proposed was simple. Just finish the damn thing already. Throw enough men and ships of the problem to make delay impossible and extract a settlement. And then they could all get back to the real war at hand. Rather than recall regiments, which would look like weakness, reinforce, accelerate, dominate.

On reaching Calcutta, he wrote Pottinger that China was costing a great deal of money and that every rupee was needed to repair the Afghan disaster, but that he preferred to press on and finish the business with all possible dispatch. The allotted men and ships duly arrived that, spring and early summer of 1842, accompanied by now a fifth European regiment, the 98th, direct from England itself. The existing four regiments were brought up to strength. Additional artillery, sappers and miners, Indian artillery auxiliaries, called guns Laskars, and a fresh regiment of Bengali volunteers. The whole apparatus of Indian colonial military power momentarily freed from its

Afghan entanglement and now redirected eastward. At the start of winter, Gao had commanded maybe 3,000 men, but now in early summer that had swelled to 10,000, along with 75 vessels, including the nemesis and her iron sisters, and enough coal, shot, and powder to drive this war's stake directly into Qing's decrepit heart. The war had proven definitively and repeatedly that the coastal provinces and fortifications were ultimately irrelevant to Beijing's calculations or any British plan. of forcing it to the negotiating table. It can and would readily leave any of its limbs behind to protect the greater whole. The Emperor himself remained well shielded from the devastating reality of this conflict. He kept sending cousins and generals down to be embarrassed, kept receiving their dispatches full of artful omissions and creative interpretations of events, and seemed genuinely unaware

of quite how badly things were going. though to be fair to him, his entire imperial apparatus of state was working overtime to keep him just so blissfully ignorant. No, if the emperor was going to be made to understand, the message had to be delivered somewhere he could not ignore it. Somewhere that would make the fiscal reality of defeat undeniable, the threat to dynastic survival concrete. The heart of the empire wasn't the coastline, but it's in turn. internal waterways. The Yangza River, it's aorta, the Grand Canal, its jugular. Late that spring, Pottinger assembled his fleet off the Jijang coast and turned the whole apparatus west. They waited for the Yang Zed to be scouted and buoyed. In the meantime, good old Captain

Nemesis Hall, who could never remain idle, took a cutter one particularly dark and stormy night all the way into the mouth of the Wusong forts, landed on a beach, and, and, and, you could never remain idle, took a cutter one particularly dark and, peered through a gap in the walls that the Chinese soldiers stationed within. He then began intercepting fishing junks for the ice they routinely carried, fresh fish and chilled wine being in his estimation the absolute first priorities of any competent naval operation. On June 16, the attack on Wusong began. Wosong had 175 guns across its river forts.

These guns had terrifying names inscribed into them. robbers' judgment, tamer and subduer of foreign devils, and one 12-foot brass monster simply called the barbarian. They were spread along hundreds of yards of riverfront, immovable, each piece fixed to face exactly where the Chinese had decided that the attack would come from. The British commander, Admiral Parker, had his ships towed to their firing positions by steamers, anchored carefully, and then began replying in kind. By 8 in the morning, the Chinese, the Chinese Chinese guns had been silenced and Marines sent ashore. The outer walls of the main fort, Faye notes, were found, quote, riddled like a sieve, end quote.

Inside, broken jingles, heavy mounted guns of Chinese infantry, dismounted guns, arrows, spears, loose powder, and discarded hats lay scattered about. Three days later, Shanghai. At that point, a significant but not yet truly remarkable commercial hub, sitting as it does at the natural terminus of both the Youngs of Trade and the coastal junk routes, was taken by a double column as simply part of an afternoon's work. The British noted with interest the volume of trade moving through its stone warehouses and the density of junks on its waterfronts. They had, without quite realizing it, just walked into what would become one of the most consequential port cities on Earth.

But that would be later. For now, it offered no resistance to speak of. The advance party scaled the city walls by means of a conveniently positioned old house, found the ramparts deserted, opened the gates, and the bugles struck up. Shanghai was held for less than a week. Gao had no interest in actually garrisoning another city he didn't need, for Nanjing was the real prize. As such, the fleet pulled back to Wusong, reorganized, and waited for the last reinforcements to filter in.

Finally, on June 6th, the signal was given to Wei and, anchor and set out once again. Young Captain Keppel of the Corvette Dido described what happened next. Quote, on a signal from flag to fleet to weigh, in a few minutes you saw a white cloud three miles in extent moving up the river. And when darkness fell, a forest of masts succeeded the white cloud, end quote. The French frigate, Eragon, which had sailed up to observe, watched far off at anchor. Her captain, Cecile, had been told politely but unambiguous.

ambiguously that no pilot or steamer would be forthcoming. He was welcome to watch. Nothing quite like this armada had ever been seen on the Yangtze, and as this was the twilight era of the sailing man-of-war ship of the line. Nothing quite like it would ever truly be seen again. The trip up river took 30 days for the fleet's flagship, the Cornwallis, 36, for the last transport to follow in. The mighty Yangza had never been a particularly

kind body to navigate. Just ask Sao Cao. Calms, contrary winds, violent eddies that spun frigates around like toys, mudbanks that swallowed ships whole and left them waiting an entire tide to release once more. Fourteen-year-old Harry Parks, traveling on Pottinger's staff and keeping a meticulous journal, had already seen it coming. Quote, everyone is much dissatisfied with these large ships coming in, especially at the Admiral leading the way in that monster, the Cornwallis. If he gets on shore, all the fleet will have to stay for him if it takes a week." Indeed, the Cornwallis managed to ground itself on the very first day, and then broke her capstan in the morning, halting the whole fleet for 24 hours while repairs were made. Young Master Parks had been right on the money. Repairs made onward they pushed.

As the fleet continued upriver, everything that moved was stopped, commandeered, or sunk. Trading junks by the hundreds were driven from their horses, stripped of their cargoes, coal, rice, oil, salt, dried fish, non-keen, cloth, or simply burned on the water. Young Joe, a city almost opposite the main objective, paid half a million dollars in silver just to be left alone. Young Harry Parks went junk hunting on a cutter for sport, chasing down a fast sail and boarding her by force when she wouldn't stop. Keppel went foraging in the lightest of spirits, his method being to catch, quote, a fat Chinaman, generally the chief of the village, end quote, give him until four in the afternoon to supply him 25 heads of cattle, or else have his cue cut off, which Keppel notes with satisfaction, quote, had the desired effect, end quote.

This was not, let's be clear, the behavior of an army with moral qualms about what it was doing. The Yangtze Valley was being squeezed, deliberately and systematically, until the pressure became unbearable. As one of the Chinese negotiators' assistants wrote to Triumvir Chi Ying on August 5th, as the British fleet dropped anchor under the walls of Nanjing, quote, the Yangza River is a region like a throat, at which the whole situation of the country is determined. Now they have already cut off our salt and grain transportation, and stopped the communication of merchants and travelers. That is not a disease like a ringworm, but a trouble in our heart and stomach." Surprisingly, there was, on this entire 200-mile-up river trek, only one real battle.

45 miles short of Nanjing, where the southern branch of the Grand Canal joined the Yangza from the east, laid the walled city of Zhenjiang. On July 21, 1842, Gao put his army ashore. What he had expected by this point was much of the same. Some show of resistance, a brief exchange, a broken line retreating toward the interior. What he got in said was the Manchu Bannerman, something completely different. You'll remember the Bannerman, of course, the hereditary military garrisons planted in key cities across the empire since the conquest, organized under their clan flags and maintained an imperial expense as the iron spine of Qing military power.

By 1842, they were, in truth, something closer to what had become of many aristocrats in the 19th century. Landed and privileged paupers. Stipans that hadn't kept pace with their proliferating families, skills atrophied through two centuries of much pomp and little circumstance. Equipment and training both, old and neglected. Truth be told, they'd proven, on the whole, no more effective than the green stage. standard army that the British had already been swatting aside all year. But they were monchus, and to surrender, to be taken prisoner by barbarians, to be led away alive from the ruins of their quarter, was for most of them beyond the pale of acceptability.

Jun Jung's garrison numbered perhaps 2,000 bannermen. Gao brought two full brigades, a better part of six regiments with Marines and armed seamen besides, In all about 5,000. They scaled the walls, blew in the gate, and then fought their way through the streets. Even so, the Manchus refused to break. They fought from house to house, from alley to alley, refusing to surrender or even run, dying instead where they stood. Those who could not fight their way to their own quarter in time,

gathered their families around them, and made an end of things. Women and children first, then themselves. and by whatever means might be available. When the British finally swept through the Manchu quarter, they found the dead in family groups. When Gao finally pulled back, Fay writes, quote, The desolation and the stench of death far exceeded anything experienced at Ningbo or at any other place, and quote. British losses here were significant. Not catastrophic by the measure of European battles,

but the kind of losses that produce silence in a mess tent afterwards rather than celebration. Sunstroke had killed as many men as Chinese fire. This was July, after all, in the Yangtze Valley and the British in their woolen redcoats. Colora adjacent illness was spreading throughout the fleet as well. The 98th Regiment, still mostly aboard their troop ship, the Belle Isle, sweltered in its airless lower decks throughout the midsummer heat to deadly effect. Gao left a garrison outside the ruined walls of Jinjiang, blew an enormous breach in those walls so that he could re-enter instantly if needed and then moved on. Behind him, the Grand Canal, that great arterial waterway connecting Beijing to the rice-producing south, the economic spine of the empire, and the thing that the emperor's court could not function without, had been severed.

In Beijing, the news from Jenjiang arrived by Special Courier on July 26th, just four days covering 700 miles. The careful fiction in the forbidden city's court that the empire was managing its barbarian problem quite simply could not survive this latest dispatch. The Yangza strangled, the Grand Canal cut, and now the British fleet riding at anchor under the walls of the southern capital itself, waiting.

It was time to face cold, hard facts. The only way the British were least, leaving the Yangtze was with a treaty in hand. Qiying and Ilibu arrived at the walls of Nanjing on August 5, 1842, traveling in the wake of this disaster. They had been sent south from Beijing back in April with a mandate of authority, that nevertheless had shifted under their feet every few weeks as the news from the coast grew steadily worse. When they'd first departed the capital, their task had been to manage the barbarians, delay, deflect, by time, perhaps arrange some face-saving gesture that would let the emperor announce a satisfactory

resolution without anyone in Beijing having to quite confront what had happened. Yet, by the time Zhenjiang fell and the Grand Canal was cut, their mandate had become something else, a far more desperate, almost whispered directive. Settle, whatever it costs. Just get them off the river. Chiying was the younger of the two and the real power. His career had been spent largely in the capital, which meant that he had the advantage of being untainted by previous dealings with barbarians, which in Beijing's current political climate was a credential. Elybu was older, courtly, and visibly ill.

He'd been recalled from disgrace, specifically because he was remembered as capable of managing the English, which also meant that he was suspected of being too comfortable with the English, which meant that in spite of his seniority, Qi Ying would be the one holding actual authority. It was a characteristically Byzantine piece of Qing administrative design, but the man with the experience where he could be useful and the man with the power where he could be watched. Their intermediary, a sharp tongue retainer named Zhang Shi, got their first.

Zhang went aboard Podinger Steamer, the HMS Queen, on August 8th carrying a request to hold off their attack. He delivered it in a manner that Fay describes with detectable admiration as surprisingly belligerent. The Emperor, Zhang Shi informed them, could not possibly acknowledge any mistakes. Quote, how can he acknowledge any mistakes before you foreign barbarians? The foreigners had thus far been unopposed only because of imperial mercy. His emperor, quote, who cannot bear to kill or injure human creatures, end quote. But if pushed too far, every man, woman, and child would rise against them.

Quote, every bush will be a soldier, end quote. When the interpreter, Robert Tom, reproached him for the Chinese habit of referring to the English in derogatory terms, Zhang demanded to know what exactly they expected. Quote, you kill people everywhere, plunder goods, and act like rascals. That is very disgraceful. How can you say it is not like bandits? You alien barbarians invade our China. Your small country attacks our celestial court.

How can you say you are not rebellious? End quote. At this point, by his own account, Zhang Shi pounded the table and spat on the floor. The English even thought he was about to strike the interpreter. And then he politely asked them to please hold off the assault while his principles arrived. The English held off. They had preparations to make anyway. and Elibu was already a known quantity.

The English liked him, which was precisely why he'd been brought along. Chiing also arrived. Credentials were examined and debated, drafts produced and then ignored. Deadlines set and guns moved menacingly closer to the walls. By the evening of August 13th, Pottinger's secretary Malcolm had concluded that humbug was developing, the exact variety of humbug that had once undone Elliot. The delays, the inadequate credentialing, the drafts that never came back, the principals who were never quite ready to appear in person, I mean, he'd read this whole playbook before. He announced that the guns would speak at dawn.

And he meant it, and everyone can see that he meant it. Very early the next morning, Sunday, Zhang Shi came to the queen a last time. If the English would stand down the assault, Tying's full commission would be produced, and serious negotiations on Pottinger's terms would begin immediately. That was, it proved enough. What followed over the next two weeks was, depending on your perspective, either a negotiation or an extremely elaborate performance of one. Pottinger's terms were essentially fixed.

He had his instructions, and he had Elliot's example firmly in mind as to what not to do. The Chinese side had their own parallel performance to man. manage. Because Chiang wasn't merely negotiating with the British, he was simultaneously managing the Da Guang Emperor, who was all the while issuing edicts from Beijing that bore only a tenuous relationship to what was actually being agreed to less than 50 yards from the British cannons. An edict of mid-August commanded Chi-Ying not to meet Pottinger until a settlement was reached and the fleet had departed. An edict five days later declared that Fujo was on no account to be opened, and that foreigners at the treaty ports were not to reside permanently.

The treaty text that was sent to Beijing for approval omitted certain clauses that Qiying had reason to believe the emperor would not approve. Chiying, in other words, was deceiving his emperor at least as busily as he was negotiating with the British, not as an act of treachery, but because it was the only viable play. The dynasty had to survive. And that meant making a settlement. And making a settlement meant maybe telling the emperor somewhat less than the full story. When Chiying, Ilibu, and the Nanjing Governor General came aboard the Cornwallis on August 20th for a ceremonial visit, the English studied them with a frank curiosity.

Chiing impressed everyone. Young Harry Parks, penned in his meticulous journal that would make him a useful diplomat for decades to come, described him as having, quote, a fine, manly, honest countenance, with pleasantness in his looks, end quote. Ilibu, on the other hand, looked old and exhausted. Someone pointed out a portrait of Queen Victoria hanging in the great cabin, and the three Chinese rose and bowed to it. The terms were settled by the 27th, when Beijing's permission, for as much as Beijing had

been told about it at any rate, came through to Chi Ying. There was one more day's delay because old Ilibu had become too ill to travel. As such, it was on August 29th, when he again felt well enough to be carried to the great cabin of the Cornwallis. The treaty was laid out in four silk-bound copies, each containing an English text alongside a Chinese version. Pottinger signed. Chiey signed. Neoghien, the Governor General of Nanjing, signed. The Union Jack was raised up at the Mizan, the yellow pennant of Great Qing, at the Maine, and a 21-gun salute thundered out across the harbor. Some of the mandarin's who went out to watch the salute being fired came running back suddenly

in considerable alarm at the Great Commotion, and then lunch was served. The terms of what would become known thereafter as the Treaty of Nanjing, as it had been ratified that afternoon in the great cabin of the Cornwallis on the Yangza River, were as follows. China would pay an indemnity of $21 million, 6 million of it earmarked for the confiscated opium. Five ports, Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningboa, and Shanghai would be permanently opened to British residents and trade, with British consuls permitted at each. The Kohong, that labyrinthine system of licensed monopoly merchants that had governed the Canton trade for generations, was formally abolished. Future relations between England and China would be conducted on the basis of the basis of the country. of perfect diplomatic equality.

And the island of Hong Kong would pass to Her Majesty the Queen in perpetuity. In spite of the $6 million earmark, it's notable that there was no actual mention of opium in this, the treaty ending the Opium War. Pottinger had raised it in what he described as a private conversation, and the Chinese had listened with apparent interest, and then unanimously declined to put anything in writing. Three years of fighting across hundreds of miles of coastline, and the settlement contained not a single word about the very substance that had started it. That evening, Colonel George Mountain of the 90th wrote a letter to a friend. He'd watched

the signing from the crowded great cabin, the mandarin's in their cumberous boots and long robes and conical caps, the British officers in their dress uniforms, the silk-bound treaty going hand-to-hand. He wrote, quote, To see a crowd of mandarin Like beings of another planet Mingled in Amity on the quarterdeck of a British ship With our military and naval officers Is a sight novel and striking

Which leads the mind to future visions of God's purposes And the hope that this day has begun an era of blessing to China End quote Mountain was a good officer And by the evidence of his letters at least, a decent fellow He meant what he said But it's worth positive. on that phrase, beings from another planet, because it captures something real about what had

just happened. Two civilizations had spent three years battering at each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension so vast that even at the moment of settlement, standing in the same room, signing the same document, neither side still fully understood what the other thought they had agreed to. The British believed that they had opened China to trade and could now proceed on with the jolly good show of high imperialism. The Chinese believed that they had effectively managed the barbarians, extracted a temporary nuisance from their side, and could return to business as usual once the red-haired devils had sailed away. The Green Standard soldiers making their way back from the Yangtze Valley carried

themselves a French missionary would report, like men who had met the enemy and cut them to pieces. For many years, Faye observes, the Chinese did not perceive that anything fundamental had really been changed. They were wrong, but it would take him a long time to find that out. Next time, we'll take stock of what was actually in that treaty, and perhaps more importantly, what wasn't. We'll see off the men who made this war to wherever their empire saw fit to send them next. We'll watch the opium trade resume quietly and efficiently, as if nothing had ever interrupted it at all. and will begin to reckon with what the Treaty of Nanjing actually set in motion.

Not just for China and Britain, but for the entire century to follow. The war is over. But the consequences are just getting started. Thanks for listening. Shush! William Shatner has something to say. Cat and Jethro, box of oddities. The show has examined weird things. What do you do when the woman you love dies?

Well, of course you dig her up and you live with her. Aw. That is really mysterious. The strange, the bizarre, the unexpected. Cat and Jethro, Box of Oddities. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The Box of Oddities.