The History of China - #323 - Opium War 8: Perfect Equality

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

The war is over. The treaty is signed, sealed, & delivered. Yet though the smoke has cleared, the haze of uncertainty over what - exactly - just happened... lingers on. And that misunderstanding will echo for the next century. While Qiying writes love letters to Pottinger and the opium clippers resume business at anchorages just outside the new treaty ports, the machine set in motion by the Treaty of Nanjing is only just beginning to roll out. Time Period Covered:Aug. 1842 - c. 1860 Major Historical Figures: The Qing Empire:The Daoguang Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Minning) [r. 1820–1850] Qiying, Imperial Commissioner and chief negotiator [1787–1858] Yilibu, Imperial Commissioner and senior negotiator [1772–1843] Zhang Xi, retainer and intermediary [fl. 1840s] Lin Zexu, former Imperial Commissioner [1785–1850] Howqua (Wu Bingjian), senior Hong merchant [1769–1843] Hong Xiuquan, failed examination candidate [1814–1864] 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] Charles Elliot, former Chief Superintendent [1801–1875] Captain William Hutcheon Hall, commanding HMS Nemesis [c. 1797–1878] William Jardine, co-founder, Jardine Matheson [1784–1843] James Matheson, co-founder, Jardine Matheson [1796–1878] John Robert Morrison, principal interpreter [1814–1843] Other: Captain Jean-Baptiste Cécille, commanding French frigate Erigone [1787–1873] Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff, missionary and civil magistrate [1803–1851] William Lockhart, missionary physician [1811–1896] Napoléon Libois, procurator, Missions Étrangères [1805–1872] Major Sources Cited: Fay, Peter Ward. The Opium War, 1840–1842Wakeman, Frederic Jr. "The Creation of the Treaty System" in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10Fairbank, John K. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 323, Perfect Equality. To change China involved an enormous amount of repetition. Peter Ward Faye in the Opium War, 1840 to 1842. We have now been engaged in the same work for upwards of a year. Though our persons seem two, yet our hearts are absolutely as one. Chiying to Sir Henry Pottinger, 1843 December 2nd, employed, delivering briskly.

No time to read my Bible. Journal of a Dardine Matheson opium ship captain on the South China coast, undated. Captain Jean-Baptiste-Cessile of the French frigate Aragon had spent the better part of the summer of 1842 watching. He'd sailed his ship to Wussong at the mouth of the mighty young and watched the British fleet there assemble. The British had made it clear that he was welcome to do so, from afar. Thus he watched, as one by one, the dispatches began coming back.

Jun Jiang fallen, the Grand Canal cut, Nanging itself under the guns. And then, when it became clear that a treaty was actually going to be signed, Cecile commandeered a junk and came upriver to be present for it, arriving just in time to witness the signing. France had fought no part in this war, yet it would, in due time, receive most of its benefits through the treaty's so-called Most Favored Nation Clause. Cecil well understood that this would be the case. It was, after all, why he'd come.

That same autumn, Zhang Xi, one of the most unlikely figures in the history of Chinese diplomacy, that sharp-tongued retainer who'd gone aboard the British steamer, pounded the table, spat on the floor, and then somehow still worked out a ceasefire, sat down to write to his parents about what he too had witnessed. He'd also watched the treaty signed, and then the British fleet began its slow course back down the Yangtze. And now he wrote his family, quote, There is quiet along the sea coasts.

Soldiers and civilians rejoice at their work. Country people and villagers enjoy the good fortune of great peace, and flesh and blood relatives have secured the family happiness. How extremely enjoyed it. and fortunate this is." He was being sincere. After all, the barbarians were at long last leaving them in peace. How could that not be worth celebrating?

On the very last day of 1842, Sir Henry Pottinger sat in the government house of Hong Kong, what was now incontestably sovereign English soil, and gazed across the two-mile expanse at the vastness of China itself. The ship, good success, unloaded raw cotton and Malwa opium, practically at his doorstep. The Red Rover waited at Calcutta for the first opium sale of the season. The Ariel and the Hellas beat their way up the Fujian coast with chests for Jardine Matheson's floating drug depots. Far away in London, at the Lord Chancellor's house, the Great Seal of England was being affixed to a copy of the Treaty of Nanjing. That night, young Queen Victoria danced in the New Year at Windsor Castle. Meanwhile, for Lin Zishu, the valiant, incorruptible former commissioner who had tried and failed to chart a course out of all this,

rang in that same new year in cold, distant E. Lee, exiled to the edge of the universe for his failure to prevent the inevitable. This is how the first opium war ends. Not with a bang, not even really with the signing, but with four men at four corners of the world, each certain that he understood what he understood, what had just happened here. And all of them, it would turn out wildly wrong. The British, of course, believed that they had opened up China, not just prized open a door, but fundamentally altered the terms on which the world's most populous empire would henceforth engage with the outside world. Five ports open, irrational tariff, consoles, diplomatic equality. That ancient suffocating tribute system cracked open at last, and British commerce pouring

through the breach. They had gone to war over an illegal drug, yet come home with a new world order. Or at least, that was how they saw it. The Chinese believed that they had managed the barbarians. It had cost them. A lot, yes, undeniably. They'd been inconvenienced, temporarily. Embarrassed, certainly. These particular barbarians had come by sea, which had been especially awkward because it had proved impossible to resist them there, but they were still barbarians just the same. Yet the situation had been managed, and on their logical terms. When China caught her breath, she would deal with them in the old familiar ways. Because from their perspective, looking at the treaty, what had actually been conceded? The living and trading area outside Canton, to which

foreigners had been confined from time immemorial, was to be reproduced it for more. ports. Allowing British consuls at those ports was entirely consistent with the ancient principle that a community of foreigners ought to be supervised by a Taipan drawn from among themselves. The treaty said nothing about a resident British ambassador in Beijing. In fact, that would not happen for another 20 years, and when it did, the emperor was conveniently a child, allowing the lingering and ever-delicate question of the kowtow to quietly be shelved for another decade beyond that. The Koh-Hong system had been abolished, but that had already been a problem for the Chinese side,

too. Nothing of substance, as Fay put it, had been conceded. At least that was how they saw it. A French Lazarist missionary traveling in the interior, not many months later, reported a striking sight. The Green Standard Army soldiers returning from the Yangtze Valley, carrying themselves with the bearing of men who'd met the enemy and defeated them utterly. Both sides could tell themselves that they had actually won.

Both were wrong, though in asymmetric ways and on asymmetric timescales. The British would find out that they'd won rather less than they thought relatively quickly. The Chinese would take considerably longer to understand quite how much they'd actually lost. But as of the morning of August 30, 1842, in the quiet aftermath of a handsome lunch aboard the 74-gun ship of the lunch, anchored on the Yangza River, all that still lay ahead of them. For now, it was just the quiet lapping of the riverbank, the silk-bound treaty, and the 21 gun salute still echoing somewhere in the hills. So let's actually look at what was in this treaty, and often more importantly, what wasn't? The Treaty of Nanjing, in its 13 articles, provided for the following.

China would pay Britain an indemnity of $21 million, with 6 million earmarked for confiscated chests of a... Uh, property. The five ports of Canton, Amoy, Fujo, Ningboa, and Shanghai would be permanently open to British residents and trade, with British consuls stationed at each. The Kohong, that labyrinthine century's old system of licensed monopoly merchants through which all foreign trade had been filtered, was formally abolished. future relations between Britain and China

would be conducted on a basis of what the treaty called perfect equality and of course the island of Hong Kong would pass to Her Majesty the Queen in perpetuity but wasn't in it opium pottinger had raised the issue in what he described as a private conversation

with the Chinese negotiators in the days before the signing he had suggested not unreasonably that since the trade plainly could not be stopped the sensible thing would be to legalize it, levy a duty on it, and at least benefit the Chinese treasury in the process. The Chinese had listened politely, and then just flat out declined to have anything put into writing. All of which meant that trade remained in its same legal gray zone, officially illegal in China, officially unacknowledged by Britain, and in practice completely unstoppable on both sides.

The five treaty ports, once opened, would be off limits to opium vessels by the terms of the treaty. But what about the anchorages just outside those ports? That was another matter entirely. Wusong, just outside of Shanghai, Nemoa off Fujian, anchored in the roads outside of every new treaty port, almost before the consuls had even unpacked their bags, were the receiving ships. The floating drug warehouses that had been the backbone of the backbone of the country.

the illicit trade for decades, resuming business as if the war had only been a minor interruption, which for them, essentially, it had been. By 1845, there were 80 clippers engaged in carrying opium to and from Hong Kong, and little more than a decade later, in 1858, when Beijing finally gave up the fiction that the trade could be stopped and simply legalized it in the treaties of Tianjin, the annual import had actually doubled. That growth would continue on, effectively unimpeded, for the remainder of the 19th century. In fact, according to Fay, quote, World War I had passed before the last chests of Indian opium were burned, with considerable publicity on a Shanghai dock, and by that time,

the poppy was so extensively cultivated within China itself that prohibiting imports meant almost nothing, end quote. The war that opium built had ended, but the opium trade that it was built to protect, never had, not in the slightest. Back in London, the news of the treaty signing arrived as of late November 1842, simultaneously with word of British success finally in Afghanistan, and there was no mistaking which commanded the greater public interest. The illustrated London news allowed that the Nanjing settlement was perfectly satisfactory. It secured, the paper observed, quote, a few round millions of dollars and no end of very refreshing tea, end quote, ceded one island in perpetuity and gave trade unempitous,

satisfying British interests, quote, more than our vanity, end quote, and giving, quote, over-glory a preponderance to gain, end quote. Having rendered this verdict, the paper then proceeded to devote twice as much column space to the recapture of Kabul. The Times of London was even less enraptured. The war had arisen, the paper reminded its readers, over a quarrel it had never been able to believe was just, and it had been fought in a manner that brought very little credit to British arms. What pleased the Times most about the whole business, in fact,

was simply that its readers would no longer be obliged to read, by each Indian male, that the successors to the heroes of the peninsula were busy, quote, sweeping away with cannon or bayonet whole crowds of poor pig-tailed animals, end quote. To Jardine Matheson, Alexander Matheson, wrote privately that he worried peace might not actually be good for the firm. He confided, quote, for years to come, we shall not be in a better position, or trade to so much advantage, as during the continuation of the war, especially if the opium trade is to be hampered, as I suspect it will be, end quote. Fortunately, for him, it wasn't. While the fleet was still anchored under Nanjing's walls,

Chiing had already begun practicing his real diplomatic strategy. Not the one that he'd described to the British, the other one. In a memorial to the Daugong Emperor, written while the ink on the treaty was barely dry, Qiying laid out his thinking. The key to managing the barbarians, he explained, was understanding their nature. And once you understood it, controlling them was not so different from the ancient art of catching tigers in Geelian province. He wrote of the tiger catchers, quote, In their hands, they have no bits of iron.

They just take a leather robe and put it over the tiger's head, and so the tiger is caught alive. Today, if we thoroughly know their nature, we can get hold of their minds and subdue their courage, end quote. This was yet another, and almost comically literate. expression of the long-standing Chinese foreign management strategy, known as Dimi, or loose rain and tether. Older than the dynasty itself, it was a toolkit developed over centuries for managing the troublesome peoples of Inner Asia. Give the tribes and their cons just enough trade and personal friendship to keep them satisfied, invoked the rules of civilized hierarchical behavior to set firm limits on what they could actually do, and use the treaties themselves.

once signed as a cage rather than a key. The British thought the treaty had opened China. Qiying wrote that the Qing must, like they had the jungars before them, now fence them in, and, as the old wisdom said of all such raw barbarians, let them cook. The instrument of this strategy was personal friendship. Not diplomatic cordiality, actual warm, almost performatively personal intimacy. Qiying had studied the British carefully enough to understand that they responded quite strongly to it. And so, in the months after Nanjing, he set about becoming Pottinger's closest friend.

During an unprecedented five-day visit to Hong Kong in June 1843, the first time a senior Qing official had ever visited the colony, Qiying was, in Wakeman's description, most ingratiating. He addressed Pottinger in correspondence as his intimate friend, borrowing the English term phonetically and rendering it in Chinese characters as Yin Ti Mi Te, which is to say, rather like an unscrupulous tattoo artist, Qiying, one of the most senior officials in the Qing Empire, had essentially given Pottinger a random set of Chinese characters and told him it was profound. Sir Henry was, of course, delighted. He secured an exchange of portraits of their wives, explaining to the emperor privately that, quote,

the English barbarians think much of women and little of men, end quote, hence the portrait gambit, which was intended to suggest a depth of personal bond, that would make it awkward for Pottinger to press too hard on treaty enforcement. And then, in his parting letter to Pottinger, which Wakeman notes, quote, reads almost like a love letter, and quote, Chiing reached heights of diplomatic affection that are genuinely difficult to read with a straight face. But I'll try. Quote, we two have now been engaged in the same work for upwards of a year, and have alone been known to each other as men whose hearts are entirely devoted to their country. Thus actuated by no selfish motives, influenced by no wish to deceive, in speaking or transacting

business, our hearts appear to be stamped with each other's impress. so that there is nothing which we may not consult about. In time it may be said of us, though our persons seem too, yet our hearts are absolutely as one. The time of parting is at hand, and I know not in what year or in what spot I may again have the pleasure of meeting you face to face, the thought of which is almost insupportable." End quote.

Pottinger, one imagines, was genuinely touched. Chiying, probably not so much. But the Piesce de Resistance of Chiing's barbarian management acumen came when the question arose of Pottinger's son. Chiing, having no son of his own, proposed to adopt the boy. He was in England, of course, finishing his schooling, and couldn't come to Beijing just yet. That was fine, Chiang replied serenely.

Quote, he is my adopted son from this day. Frederick Chi-Ying, Pottinger, end quote. Again, this wasn't him getting swept up in the sentimentality of it all. This was statecraft of a very particular and very old kind. Gifts, marriages, adoptions, personal bonds. For centuries, when China had found itself militarily outmatched by troublesome peoples on its periphery, those had been its go-to toolkit to create obligations, to soften demands. and to buy precious time, and ultimately to turn their haters into their waiters at the table of prosperity.

The Han Dynasty had sent Chinese princesses to the Xiongnu Chanius and paid annual tribute in silk, and they'd been happy to call it peace and friendship policy while they did it. It had worked well enough until China grew strong enough to impose a proper tribute relation in return. Qiying was merely now doing the same thing with Pottinger that the Han court had done, with the steplords, just with portraits of wives and adopted sons instead of imperially procured princesses to wed and bolts of silk. So it bears asking, how did it work? In the short term, actually pretty well.

The treaty ports opened on a staggered schedule through 1843 and 44. A supplemental treaty, known as the Bogue Treaty, signed in October, filled in the details of the main settlement, including the most favored nation clause that would prove that, in retrospect, to be one of the most consequential pieces of legal language in modern Chinese history. Chi-Ing's program of personal appeasement kept the British mollified enough that actual enforcement of the treaty's more ambitious provisions remained, at least for now, comfortably vague. But it was working, Wakeman notes, only because Chi-ing's application of the strategy was fundamentally one-dimensional. He was trying

to tame the tiger with friendship. He wasn't, studying why the tiger had come, where it intended to go next, or whether his grip on its tail was going to hold. And spoiler alert, it wasn't. At Desjardin, our business is helping yours. We are here to support your business through every stage of growth, from your first pitch to your first acquisition. Whether it's improving cash flow or exploring investment banking solutions, with Desjardin business, it's all under one roof. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us, and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk. Business. In the years immediately following the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, while Chiying was busily

buttering up Pottinger, the Qing court itself had been very busy with its own dealings. Korea sent annual tribute missions to Beijing, the Kingdom of Ryukyu, the Pacific archipelago today called Okinawa, sent them in seven of the next ten years. Vietnam and Siam each sent three missions. The Mongol and the Inner East Asian dignitaries continue their homage through the Li Fan Yuan, the Court of Dependencies, with every formality and record maintained down to the last detail.

The bureaucratic machinery of the tribute system round on without interruption. And in official documents, the British were still occasionally referred to as Yingni, those English rebels. They were members of the Imperial World Order, which centered itself around Beijing, but naughty offenders against it. Their resort to violence, in this worldview, had been disobedience,

and as such their further demands would be handled accordingly. This was not delusion exactly, or at least not entirely. It was the tenacity of a worldview so deeply embedded in the structures of governance and self-understanding that it had a tremendous amount of momentum behind it. And just like physical systems, it could thus absorb an enormous amount of contrary evidence without fundamentally altering its trajectory. The tribute system had been bent, yes, at the coasts, in a few ports,

but bent by a group of oceanic barbarians whose fundamental nature remained in the Qing official mind, perfectly legible. The British were greedy and materialistic, They were, in the memorable phrase of one official document, possessed of, quote, the nature of dogs and sheep, and quote. The fact that they stressed trade above anything else

indicated, obviously, moral underdevelopment. As another official analysis put it, quote, Barbarians consider the merchant important and the official unimportant. Everything they wish to undertake must first be schemed out by the crowd of merchants. The whole country of England makes a country of England makes its living from the trade of the merchant crowd. Superiors and inferiors compete against each other. No one seeks anything but material gain."

End quote. I mean, imagine venerating mere merchants and hucksters above the learned and literary, truly a mark of a benighted civilization that had mistaken up for down. This crassness, the analysis concluded, was actually weakness. A people so consumed by profit drive

could be managed through material concession. give them their ports, their tariffs, their consuls, keep them focused on trade. The treaties could serve as a cage as much as a breach in the Chinese wall. British trading interest, once established in the five ports, would become hostage to its own fortune, and sufficient Chinese pressure on that interest could keep the foreigners in line. War would itself become unthinkable, too much a disruption to business as usual to ever again be contemplated. It was, Wakeman notes, quote, a sound enough theory, but wanting the necessary basis in Chinese power, end quote.

One is also inclined to look ahead some six decades to very similar arguments being made across Europe, the confident assumption that commercial interdependence had made war between great powers simply too expensive to contemplate. The theory also turned out to want a necessary basis in reality. Viewed through Qing eyes, the treaty ported, The ports didn't look like a rupture of the old order at all. They looked like the old order just slightly rearranged. The residential and trading areas at the ports for foreign nationals,

well, that was pretty much just the Canton system, now with just a few more franchise locations. The consul's jurisdiction over British subjects, well, that was just the Taipon principle, made a bit more formal. The most favored nation clause, eh, the Chinese officials could work with that. Chiying used it to ensure America and France got the same privileges as Britain, specifically in the hope of eventually playing them against each other.

None of it, as institutions, initially seemed to run counter too old custom or the logic undergirding it. And Canton City itself, the very pressure point of Anglo-Chinese relations for more than a century, and where this whole can of worms was opened up in the first place, still remained absolutely shut to foreigners. The treaty opened five ports to British residents and trade. It said nothing about the right of foreigners to enter the cities proper. The British discovered this almost immediately and were, as Faye puts it, quote, annoyed, end quote.

The Chinese were not surprised at all. Let the barbarians have their waterfronts. The cities were another matter. The opium war may figure today as a cataclysm in retrospect, but at the time it was not recorded as such. When the King of Riuquo complained in 1844 that a Frenchman had been left on his island, and again in 1847 that a British medical missionary had established himself there, the Daugong Emperor's response was entirely in keeping with this old way of imperial thinking.

France and England, he observed, ought not to annoy China's depend. countries. Unless this could be stopped, he wrote, quote, we certainly would be neglecting the grand idea of soothing and managing the outer dependencies, end quote. Pretty words, duly transcribed and promulgated, but they were increasingly little more than just that. It's just that nobody in Beijing had quite noticed yet. The British, meanwhile, were likewise characteristically, adopting a stiff upper lip at these annoyances, keeping calls. and carrying on. The missionaries were, as ever, first out of the gate.

Quote, China is not now fast shut as before time, but is in this very truth a land of promise, end quote, wrote famed missionary physician William Lockhart to his London missionary society in the months after the signing, quite evidently barely able to contain himself.

Napoleon Lebois of the Missions Exchangeré observed that it seemed to be, quote, easier than ever to get into China, end quote, and added a few months later, what changes there will be? The Protestant missionaries, cooped up in Macau and the Canton factories for years now, translating scripture and watching the war unfold from afar,

were now able to fan out into the new ports, men at long last released from an exceedingly pious waiting room. They brought their families, kept their Western habits, and planted themselves in the foreign settlements on the waterfronts. The Catholics, meanwhile, knowing better, the church having navigated China's interior for centuries before these upstart Protestants had arrived, were far more likely to slip inland, adopt Chinese dress, and quietly disappear into the countryside. In the end, Wakeman observes, the Protestants approach would make them more subversive of Chinese tradition,

though not in the way they probably intended. The merchants were, if anything, even more optimistic and considerably more honest about why. The great agency houses, Jardine Matheson, Denton Company, the American firm of Russell and Company, moved into the new treaty ports and began building the infrastructure of permanent commercial presence. Go-downs, warehouses, banking, insurance, real estate. Along the foreshores outside the walled Chinese cities, the buns took shape, those waterfront promenades that would become the physical signature of every China treaty port. Foreign settlements perched at the water's edge, just outside the jurisdiction.

of the Chinese authority, with the sea always at their backs. The numbers themselves were, at first, somewhat less than overwhelming. The foreign community in Amoy, in the first decade under the treaties, hovered at around 25 people. At Fujo and Ningboa, about a dozen each. Even Canton, the old center of the entire Anglo-Chinese relationship, remained closed to foreign entry within its walls. The real growth was happening at Shanghai.

a dozen firms and a hundred foreigners in the mid-1840s, growing steadily toward 70 firms and 300 foreign residents by the mid-1850s, with eight consulates and 36 Protestant missionaries. And running underneath it all, like the sewer beneath the streets, was the opium trade. It flowed via two distinct channels. The legal trades, consisting of teas, silks, peace goods, and ordinary commerce of nations, occupied the five. new official treaty ports. The opium trade occupied double that number of receiving stations on the coast just outside those ports, where two or three dozen armed receiving ships lay at anchor at any given time, conducting business with the efficiency of long practice, officially invisible within the treaty system, but in reality impossible to miss.

Residents of the smaller ports found that the opium captains were often their most reliable means of cashing checks. The mail, too, came in on the opium clippers. James Matheson instructed his chief opium ship captain to keep a low profile. The trade was very unpopular in England, he wrote. They could not be too cautious in keeping it, quote, as quiet and as much out of the public eye as possible, end quote. Quietly, then, out of the public eye. The trade recovered from the uncertainties of the war years and resumed its normal course. By 1845, 80 clippers. By 1858, when the fiction of illegality was finally abandoned and opium simply legalized in the treaties of Tianjin, the annual import had effectively doubled. And the grand vision that had animated the free trade

advocates, that opening China's ports would unleash an enormous pent-up demand for British manufactured goods, that the 400 million consumers of the Celestial Empire were about to discover a passion for Lancashire cotton and Sheffield Steel, turned out to be, in Lord Elgin's later, and rather candid assessment, considerably overstated. The Chinese were, as he wrote with some evident frustration, quote, the most universally and laboriously manufacturing, end quote, people on earth. They didn't need British goods. particularly. They needed, or at least their merchants needed, and their officials needed, and the whole creaking system of Sino-foreign commerce needed, silver. And the only thing that

reliably generated silver on the Chinese coast in the years after Nanjing was opium. The war that opium built had opened China, and China, having been opened, was being kept open by opium. It was a perfect circuit and perfectly invisible to almost everyone involved. Speaking of everyone involved, let's take stock of where they all wound up. Some prospered. Hugh Gao rose the highest of any of them, Commander-in-Chief in India, two Sikh wars, Viscount, Field Marshal, and at the end, a large bronze statue in Phoenix Park, Dublin, cast partly from a cannon that he'd brought back from China.

Young Winston Churchill was taken there to see the statue dedicated and never forgot it. James Matheson had a similarly comfortable trajectory. Parliament, the P&O chairmanship, buying the Isle of Lewis in the remote outer Hebrides, some accounts suggesting that this made him the second largest land proprietor in the UK, and a baronetcy for his relief efforts during the potato famine among the island's tenants. Thus did Sir James Matheson, Baronet, die in 1878, respected and comfortable. The holdings firm bearing his name is still in business and still headquartered in Hong Kong. They got out of the opium trade at its high watermark about a century back.

They don't do business inside China anymore. That hasn't been possible for quite some time. But they do business across the region, and they're always keeping an eye out. Some faded. Henry Pottinger, the man who had come not to be humbugged, who had driven the war to its conclusion with such a crisp efficiency, became the governor of Madras. He did not distinguish himself there. Charles Elliott, the man who had tried to be reasonable

and thus been recalled in disgrace for accepting too little, went on to serve his country well, if obscurely, as governor successively of Bermuda, Trinidad, and St. Helena. The empire, it turned out, had further use for him. just considerably further away and at steadily declining salary scales. He lived 1875, which means he survived long enough to see the second opium war, the burning of the summer palace, the Taiping rebellion, and the full unfolding consequences that he had in his own cautious way tried to prevent.

Whether he found any satisfaction and having been right about the general direction of things, the historical record does not say. William Dardine had the most abbreviated exit of all. He died in February 1843 at his house in Upper Baker Street, age 59, unmarried, and, as Faye puts it, quote, not much noticed. He did not live to collect his share of the opium indemnity. Some died young. John Morrison, son of the first Protestant missionary to China, the expedition's principal interpreter, the man who had examined Qing's credentials and pronounced them sufficient.

died suddenly in Hong Kong on the first anniversary of the treaty signing. He was 30. A few days later, Hao Kwa, old Wu Bing Jian, the senior Hong merchants and indispensable hinge of the Canton trade for decades, whose portrait hung in counting houses from Boston to London, succumbed to acute diarrhea at his home in Hunan Island, leaving a large fortune and a name so well known in the West that for years later his likeness could be seen at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. And some managed to outlive their moment. Lin Zeshu ended up at Madame Tussaud's too, eventually.

The author of the Chinese War, his label read, a designation that surely would have infuriated him, given that, from his perspective, he'd been trying to prevent it most of all. He would be recalled from his Ely exile in 1845, given other posts, and was on his way to a fresh assignment to combat a religiously inspired rebellion

brewing in the south, when he suddenly died near Canton in the autumn of 1850. Nemesis Hall, William Hutchin Hall, the man who had scorched his arm to save his crew and earned his legend, left the HMS nemesis for the Royal Navy proper, and in the Crimean War took the Blindham, our old friend, into the Baltic. He lived 81 and died at home in 1878. And Qiying, the Intimita friend of Poddine, was recalled from his diplomatic post in 1848, spent the next decade in semi-discraise, and in 1858 was sent north one last time in a last-ditch effort to work his charms again on the British. It would not prove very effective. But more on all that when we get there.

And as for the ships, the nemesis was last heard of in Burma in the early 1850s. The Cornwallis, the treaty ship itself, became a jetty at sheer. The Wellesley became a training ship on the Thames, until under another name, she was sunk by German bombs in the autumn of 1940. And on New Year's Eve of 1842, while the treaty ratification was being formally sealed at the Lord Chancellor's House, while Queen Victoria danced in the New Year at Windsor Castle, Sir Henry Pottinger sat in government house on what was now incontestably English soil and gazed across the two-mile watery expanse. full transport vessels beat up the Fujian coast with chests bound for opium clippers. Far away in London, the Great Seal of England was affixed to the copy of the treaty, and the war was in every formal sense over. Did anyone tell Queen Victoria that she was now sister to the emperor and aunt to the moon?

Probably not. There were far more pressing matters of empire to get on with. The treaty system, the framework of unequal treaties, extraterritoriality, most favored nation clauses and gunboat diplomacy that the 1842 settlement inaugurated, was not a finished structure. It was a machine that had only just been switched on, and was still very much in beta. Over the next two decades, it would grow, deepen and expand, driven by the same combination of British commercial ambition, Chinese institutional rigidity, and the same cycle of recurring mutual incomprehension that had produced the Opium War.

in the first place. The problems started in almost immediately. Canton City remained closed, in defiance of what the British had thought they understood the treaty to guarantee. The Cantonese gentry organized militias. There were stonings, beatings, and even riots. In 1847, the British minister sent warships to spike 827 ching cannons at the Bogue forts in a single 36-hour operation, and got nothing for it but the

promise that the city gates might open in maybe two years if the weather was right. Such words easily vanished with the wind. Six Englishmen on a bird hunting excursion in the countryside were killed by one of these militias. Chiying, as mentioned, still trying to hold the line with his own brand of personal diplomacy, was recalled in 1848, judged too accommodating, replaced by a governor who simply mobilized popular xenophobia as state policy, and was reversed. rewarded with imperial honors for it. The stalemate at Canton would eventually produce a cases belli so thin that it was almost comic.

In 1856, Chinese authorities boarded a vessel called the Era, a Lorcha, or a Chinese rigging atop a foreign hull, owned by a Chinese resident of Hong Kong with a Chinese crew, and with a registration that had expired 11 days earlier. They proceeded to arrest several crew members on suspicion of piracy. The British consul, Harry Parks, fresh from London where Palmerston had agreed Britain must take a high tone on any Chinese affront, demanded instant redress. The result would be the Arrow War, or as is better known to history, the Second Opium War, which brought an Anglo-French expeditionary force to Beijing itself, burned the Summer Palace, and produced the treaties of Tianjin and the Convention of Beijing. A whole new layer of unequal treaties, more ports, more concessions, opium legalized, a British minister resident in the capital at last. But all that,

again, to come. By 1860, though, the complicated machinery that was the treaty system, was fully armed and operational. Extraterritoriality, foreign warships in Chinese waters, foreign troops on Chinese soil, administration of the maritime customs. A special layer of foreign privilege running under Chinese society like iron beneath porcelain. Neither exactly colonialism nor anything with a cleaner name. And beneath even that, darker and more consequential than any treaty provision, was something that the settlement of 1842 had not caused, but had certainly accelerated, and that was the internal unraveling of the Qing Dynasty itself. The war had critically weakened imperial prestige.

This latest appeasement of the barbarians had begun eroding the dynasty's claim on the mandate of heaven itself. And out in Guangxi province, at almost precisely the moment that the ink was drawing on the Treaty of Nanjing, a young, thoroughly disaffected man named Hong Xiu-Cen was sitting with a set of Christian missionary pamphlets that, he'd been carrying around for years having never properly read them. Pamphlets that, once he did read them, would connect to a set of visions that he'd experienced six years earlier during a nervous breakdown after failing the imperial examinations for a third time. Within a year, he would fail them a fourth time, read the pamphlets, understand the visions that he'd been having, and conclude

that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. within a decade the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom would be born in blood but that all of that is still yet to come for now it's enough to sit with what

Faye called the central fact that China forced open through war remained open for hardly more than a century on April 20th 1949 the British frigate amethyst was fired upon by communist guns on that same

stretch of river held motionless for weeks, and then one dark night slipped her cables and got away to the sea. She never re-entered. Neither did any other Western ship. From that moment, the era that the Treaty of Nanjing had inaugurated was over. The door forced open in the great cabin of the Cornwallis had remained so for 107 years, and then it slammed shut once again. If it has since reopened, it's been done so on entirely different terms, at the invitation of a very different China. And for purposes that William Jardine, James Matheson, and Sir Henry Pottinger would find both familiar

and yet still utterly alien. The trade continues. It always has. The terms are just no longer theirs to set. Thanks for listening. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare state. 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.