Read Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China for Free Online

doubled in half a century and exceeded 300 million. Another fifty years later, it was well over 400 million. The country’s traditional economy was unable to sustain this dramatic population growth. Lord Macartney observed: ‘Scarcely a year now passes without an insurrection in some of their provinces. It is true they are soon suppressed, but their frequency is a strong symptom of the fever within. The paroxysm is repelled, but the disease is not cured.’
    Virtually throwing out Lord Macartney, Emperor Qianlong wrote aggressively to King George III, threatening to use force to repel British cargo ships, should they come to his coast, ending his letter with: ‘Don’t blame me for not serving you proper warnings!’ He was behaving like an animal raising its hackles at the smell of danger. Emperor Qianlong’s closed-door policy was born of alarm and calculation, not ignorant conceit, as is so often claimed.
    His successors, his son and grandson, stuck to this closed-door policy, as the empire grew increasingly weak. Then, half a century after Lord Macartney’s failed mission, the closed door was pushed ajar by Britain through the Opium War (1839–42), China’s first military clash with the West.
    The opium was produced in British India and was smuggled into China by (mainly) British merchants. Beijing had prohibited the import, cultivation and smoking of opium since 1800, as it was well aware that the drug was doing tremendous damage to its economy as well as to the population. A contemporary description of addicts painted a vivid picture: ‘Their shoulders hunched, eyes watering, nose running, and breath short, they look more dead than alive.’ There was great fear that if this went on, the country would run out of fit soldiers and labourers, not to mention silver, its currency. In March 1839, Emperor Daoguang, Cixi’s future father-in-law, sent a crusading drug fighter, Lin Zexu, as the Imperial Commissioner to Canton, along whose shore foreign ships anchored. Commissioner Lin ordered the merchants to hand over all the opium in their possession and, when his order was resisted, he had the foreign community cordoned off and declared that it would only be released when all the opium in Chinese waters was surrendered. In the end, 20,183 chests of opium, containing more than one million kilos, were delivered to Commissioner Lin, who then lifted the cordon. He had the opium destroyed outside Canton, first melting it and then pouring it into the sea. Before releasing the drug, the Commissioner performed a sacrificial ritual to the God of the Sea, begging him to ‘tell the fishes to swim away for the time being to avoid the poison’.
    Commissioner Lin knew that ‘the head of England is a woman, and quite young, but all orders come from her’. He penned a letter to Queen Victoria, who had been on the throne since 1837, asking her for cooperation. ‘I hear that opium-smoking is strictly banned in England,’ Lin wrote. ‘And so England knows the harm the drug does. If it does not allow it to poison its own people, it should not allow it to poison the people of other countries.’Emperor Daoguang approved the letter. It is unclear to whom the Commissioner entrusted it, but there is no record of Queen Victoria receiving it. fn2
    Major trading companies and Chambers of Commerce from London to Glasgow were up in arms. Lin’s action was said to be ‘injurious’ to British property, and there were calls for going to war to seek ‘satisfaction and reparation’. Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, an exponent of ‘gunboat diplomacy’, was in favour of war. When the matter was debated in Parliament on 8 April 1840, the then-young Tory MP and future Prime Minister, WilliamGladstone, spoke passionately against it:
. . . a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of. The right hon. Gentleman opposite spoke last