Second Opium War

The Second Opium War was a conflict between Qing China and the alliance of Britain and France, fought in several phases between 1856 and 1860. It is also called the Arrow War, after the ship whose seizure started it. It is called the “second” opium war because it followed the First Opium War (1839–1842), which had ended with the Treaty of Nanjing, the opening of five Chinese ports and the cession of Hong Kong Island to Britain.

The war was not mainly about a single incident. Britain and France wanted to revise the earlier treaties to open China further to trade and Christian missions, to station diplomats permanently in Beijing, and to put relations with China on the European model of equal sovereign states, rather than the Chinese model in which foreigners approached the emperor as tributaries. Opium, grown in British India and smuggled into China in huge quantities, was central to the trade that Britain wanted to protect.

The war ended with Chinese defeat, the occupation of Beijing and the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, a vast imperial garden-palace. The treaties that followed shaped China's relations with the West for decades.

In the early nineteenth century British merchants bought tea, silk and porcelain from China but had few goods that the Chinese wanted in return. Opium from India filled that gap. Although the Qing government banned it, smuggling grew rapidly, and opium became a major source of revenue for British India. Addiction spread in China and silver flowed out of the country. When the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed British opium stocks in 1839, Britain went to war and won the First Opium War.

After 1842 tensions continued. British merchants were disappointed that trade did not grow as much as they had hoped. The people and officials of Guangzhou resisted British demands to enter the walled city. Britain pressed to revise the Treaty of Nanjing, and France and the United States also wanted wider rights. In February 1856 the French missionary Auguste Chapdelaine was executed by local officials in Guangxi, where foreigners were not legally allowed to preach, giving France a reason to act.

The immediate spark came on 8 October 1856, when Chinese officers boarded the Arrow, a Chinese-owned ship registered in Hong Kong, and arrested its Chinese crew on suspicion of piracy. The British consul Harry Parkes and the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, claimed the ship was under British protection and that the British flag had been insulted, although the ship's registration had actually expired. When the viceroy Ye Mingchen refused a full apology, British warships bombarded Guangzhou.

Britain led the war. The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, strongly supported action. When the House of Commons passed a motion criticising the government's conduct over the Arrow in March 1857, Palmerston called a general election and won an increased majority, showing that much of the British public supported a forceful China policy. Lord Elgin was sent as special envoy with an expeditionary force.

France, under Emperor Napoleon III, joined Britain, citing the Chapdelaine case and eager for prestige and influence in Asia. Its envoy was Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros. Russia and the United States did not fight as allies, but their envoys followed the campaign and negotiated their own treaties, gaining the same privileges.

On the Chinese side, the Qing dynasty under the Xianfeng Emperor was already fighting a far larger war at home: the Taiping Rebellion, which controlled much of central China from its capital at Nanjing. The Qing could therefore commit only limited forces against the foreigners. The main commanders were Ye Mingchen in Guangzhou and the Mongol prince Sengge Rinchen, who defended the approaches to Beijing.

After the first bombardment in late 1856, fighting around Guangzhou continued on a small scale, and the city's foreign factories were burned. Large-scale operations were delayed because the Indian Rebellion of 1857 broke out and British troops heading for China were diverted to India. In December 1857 a combined British and French force of under 6,000 men attacked Guangzhou, and the city fell on 1 January 1858. Ye Mingchen was captured and sent to Calcutta, where he died in 1859. The allies governed Guangzhou through a Chinese puppet administration for several years.

The allies then sailed north to the Gulf of Bohai to pressure the court directly. In May 1858 they captured the Dagu forts at the mouth of the Hai River and advanced to Tianjin, the port of Beijing. The frightened court agreed to negotiate, and in June 1858 China signed the Treaties of Tianjin with Britain, France, Russia and the United States. They provided for foreign legations in Beijing, the opening of additional ports including ports on the Yangtze River, the right of foreigners to travel in the interior, freedom for Christian missionaries, and indemnities. Supplementary tariff rules agreed later in 1858 effectively legalised the import of opium.

The treaties were supposed to be ratified in Beijing in 1859. The Qing court, deeply unwilling to accept foreign diplomats in the capital, asked the envoys to use a different route, and Sengge Rinchen strengthened the Dagu forts. In June 1859 a British flotilla tried to force its way past the forts and was badly defeated, losing several gunboats. The American commodore Josiah Tattnall, although officially neutral, helped the British, reportedly justifying himself with the words “blood is thicker than water”.

In 1860 Britain and France returned with a much larger force of roughly 11,000 British (many of them Indian troops) and about 6,700 French soldiers. They landed at Beitang in August, captured the Dagu forts on 21 August and occupied Tianjin. During negotiations in September, Qing forces seized the British negotiator Harry Parkes, the diplomat Henry Loch, the Times correspondent Thomas Bowlby and others under a flag of truce. Many of the prisoners were tortured, and nineteen British, French and Indian captives died; Parkes, Loch and about fourteen others were released after roughly two weeks. On 21 September the allies defeated Sengge Rinchen's army, including Mongol cavalry, at Baliqiao near Beijing. The Xianfeng Emperor fled to the summer retreat at Chengde (Rehe), leaving his brother Prince Gong to negotiate.

In early October French and then British troops reached the Yuanmingyuan, a vast complex of palaces, gardens and pavilions built by Qing emperors over the previous 150 years, including European-style buildings designed by Jesuit missionaries. The soldiers looted it of porcelain, jade, silk, books and art. Then, on 18 October, Lord Elgin ordered the palace burned as punishment for the treatment of the prisoners, choosing a target that would hurt the emperor personally rather than the population of Beijing. The fires burned for days. Beijing opened its gates, and on 24 and 25 October Prince Gong signed the Conventions of Beijing with Britain and France.

What was lost at the Yuanmingyuan is hard to measure. The complex covered about 3.5 square kilometres, several times the size of the Forbidden City, and held imperial collections of paintings, calligraphy, bronzes and rare editions, including one of the few complete manuscript copies of the great eighteenth-century library known as the Siku quanshu. Officers and soldiers auctioned loot among themselves on the spot, and objects were later sold across Europe; some were presented to Queen Victoria and to Napoleon III. The destruction was not total in 1860: some buildings survived, but they were damaged again during the Boxer upheaval of 1900 and later stripped for building materials.

Figures for this war are uncertain. British and French combat losses were small, in the order of a few hundred killed in action, although more died from disease. Chinese military losses are commonly estimated in the thousands, but the Qing kept no reliable totals and some Western figures are clearly incomplete. Civilian deaths from bombardments, street fighting and looting in Guangzhou, Tianjin and villages near the Bohai coast and Beijing were never systematically recorded.

The war's civilian impact went beyond deaths. Guangzhou was occupied for nearly four years. The bombardments destroyed parts of the city and its suburbs. Looting by troops and by local criminals accompanied the advance on Beijing. The destruction of the Yuanmingyuan erased one of the world's great collections of art, architecture and books; according to some accounts, around 300 eunuchs and palace maids who had hidden in locked rooms died when the buildings were burned, although such figures cannot be verified.

The treaties also encouraged the recruitment of Chinese labourers for work overseas. The Conventions of Beijing allowed Chinese subjects to emigrate on British and French ships, giving legal cover to the “coolie trade”, in which many labourers were deceived or coerced and suffered harsh conditions in places such as Cuba and Peru. Meanwhile, the legalisation of opium removed a barrier to its spread; opium consumption in China continued to grow for decades.

The Conventions of Beijing confirmed the Treaties of Tianjin, raised the indemnity to eight million taels each for Britain and France, opened Tianjin to foreign trade, and ceded to Britain the Kowloon Peninsula opposite Hong Kong Island. Foreign ministers took up residence in Beijing, and in 1861 the Qing created the Zongli Yamen, a new office for foreign affairs, which was a sign that the old tribute system could no longer manage relations with the West.

Russia was the biggest territorial winner, though it fired no shots. Through the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and its own Convention of Beijing (November 1860), negotiated by Nikolay Ignatyev, who presented himself as a mediator, Russia gained the lands north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri River, roughly 1 million square kilometres, including the site where it founded Vladivostok. China thereby lost its coastline on the Sea of Japan.

Inside China, the defeat shocked parts of the elite. After the Xianfeng Emperor died at Chengde in 1861, a coup brought Prince Gong and the empress dowagers, including Cixi, to power. The new leadership cooperated more with the Western powers, which now helped the Qing against the Taiping, and began the Self-Strengthening Movement, building arsenals, shipyards and translation schools. In East Asia more widely, news of Beijing's fall alarmed neighbouring states. In Joseon Korea, envoys reported the emperor's flight, and the event is often seen as one factor behind the later policy of seclusion associated with the regent Heungseon Daewongun; in Japan it reinforced fears of Western power during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate.

In China the Second Opium War is a core chapter of the “century of humiliation” (bainian guochi), the period from the First Opium War to 1949 in which China was invaded and forced into unequal treaties. The ruins of the Yuanmingyuan, especially the broken marble arches of its European-style palaces, were kept as ruins and are used for patriotic education. Many Chinese people see the looted objects in foreign museums and private collections as stolen property. Auctions of bronze zodiac heads from the palace's fountain, especially in 2009, provoked strong protests, and some heads have been returned to China by donors.

In Britain the war is little remembered today, although it was controversial at the time: the 1857 parliamentary debate saw politicians such as Richard Cobden and William Gladstone condemn the Arrow affair as unjust. Karl Marx, then writing for the New-York Daily Tribune, also criticised the British opium trade and the war. Victorian accounts praised the campaign and often justified the burning of the palace as a response to the torture of prisoners.

In France, too, the war is not widely known, but one text is famous: in 1861 the exiled writer Victor Hugo, in a letter to a Captain Butler, condemned the looting as a crime by “two bandits”, France and England. Objects from the Yuanmingyuan are displayed in the Chinese Museum of Empress Eugénie at the Palace of Fontainebleau. The different memories, national humiliation in China, near-forgetting in Britain and France, reflect the unequal power relations of the time.

British sources are abundant. They include parliamentary papers (“Blue Books”) on the Arrow case and the negotiations, the journals and letters of Lord Elgin, published after his death, memoirs of officers and diplomats such as Henry Loch's account of his captivity, and reports by newspaper correspondents. These sources give detail but also reflect the justifications of the British government, and parliamentary papers were selected for publication.

French sources include official correspondence, the memoirs of officers and of General Cousin-Montauban (later made Count of Palikao after the battle of Baliqiao), and letters describing the looting. Chinese sources include memorials and edicts in the Qing archives, collected in compilations on the management of barbarian affairs (Chouban yiwu shimo), and writings by officials such as those around Prince Gong. They reveal the court's debates about whether to resist or negotiate and its intense opposition to diplomats in the capital.

Historians must compare these sources carefully. Numbers of troops and casualties differ widely, and each side's accounts of the prisoners' capture and of the palace's destruction serve different purposes. Chinese documents from the Beijing area were themselves partly lost in the chaos of 1860.

Older Western accounts often presented the war as a clash between a modern, commercial West and a proud, isolated China that refused normal diplomacy. Critics have long challenged this. J. Y. Wong's Deadly Dreams (1998) argued, using British and Indian financial records, that the war was driven above all by the economic importance of opium to British India and to the British imperial economy, and that the Arrow incident was a pretext. Other historians give more weight to diplomatic aims such as the residence of envoys, which Britain saw as essential for enforcing treaties.

Cultural historians have examined the war as a clash of ideas about sovereignty and ritual. James Hevia's English Lessons (2003) analysed how British diplomacy and violence, including the looting and burning of the palace, were meant to “teach” the Qing to accept Western forms of international relations. Erik Ringmar's Liberal Barbarism (2013) explored why self-described liberal and civilised European powers destroyed the Yuanmingyuan, and how the event was justified and remembered.

Chinese historiography, especially in the People's Republic, has treated the war as part of the story of imperialist aggression and national humiliation, emphasising the unequal treaties and the plunder of cultural heritage. Recent scholarship in China and abroad has also looked at the Qing court's own decisions, its simultaneous war against the Taiping, and the role of Russia. Debates continue over how much the war changed Qing policy and whether it should be seen primarily as an opium war, a trade war or a war over diplomatic equality.