Chapter 12 The Colonial Period 457wrote: “During the nearly nine years I was attached to the Banares Agency, I
never knew one solitary instance of impaired health amongst natives resulting
in use of the drug, not even in the factories, where people passed 12 hours a day
in an opium atmosphere and ate as much as they could consume” (Fay
1975:185). The opium merchants pressed England to reimburse the two mil-
lion pounds value of the opium as Elliot, the British official in Canton, had
promised the government would do. Where to get the money? Times were hard
in England, and no better in India where the future of opium was in doubt;
why not make China pay?
But that was not the main rationale of Britain to engage in war with China.
Rather it was the interruption of international trade that would have such far-
reaching consequences. Further, it was the refusal of the Chinese government
to enter into the culture of the emerging nineteenth-century world system. The
pretense that the emperor was the highest monarch on earth, the Son of
Heaven for all, was absurd. This pretense of the Chinese was worse than a
mere legitimating device to shore up authority at home; for refusing to commu-
nicate with other nations on equal terms or to permit envoys to negotiate with
Beijing directly, China had to receive a harsh challenge from abroad.
So it was that five warships blockaded Canton while a large force headed
up the coast and initiated half a dozen engagements. It soon ended with humil-
iation for the Qing government and their forced acceptance of the Treaty of
Nanjing in 1842. This treaty began the saga of Hong Kong.
The treaty provided that foreign nationals would be subject to their own
laws under their own resident consuls, a principle known as “extraterritorial-
ity.” China agreed to pay an indemnity for the value of the confiscated opium
and the cost of the British operation against them. Fair tariffs, the right to deal
directly with customs collectors, and the freedom to trade at designated “treaty
ports” were guaranteed. The island of Hong Kong was granted to Britain in
perpetuity as their main East Asian base.
The First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing thus began what is often
called the “Treaty Century,” a period from 1842 to 1949 when China had its
most continuous and pervasive encounters with other nations, and ending with
the reclosing of all those doors after the Communist Revolution. Two more
opium wars as well as treaties with France, the United States, and Russia were
forced on China. The first five treaty ports were eventually expanded to more
than 80, all located along China’s eastern seaboard where large enclaves of for-
eigners lived under their own laws and introduced their own churches, arts,
and lifestyles. “Free trade” was a form of imperialism benefiting these nations,
since Chinese industries were kept infantile against the new products of the
Western industrial revolution by the simple device of forcing agreement to low
tariffs in the treaties. Opium continued to flow from India until 1917.
From the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 to the Nanjing Massacre in which
100,000 Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese invaders in 1937, China’s
“Treaty Century” of “openness,” “free trade,” and interaction with the outside