Chinese Empire

Crises of the Late Qing Dynasty: Opium Wars, Unequal Treaties, and the Great Rebellions

The mid-nineteenth century was the moment when the Qing dynasty, the largest and wealthiest state in the world at the start of the century, was forced to recognize that it had fallen behind. Between the First Opium War in 1839 and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, the dynasty suffered a series of military defeats, lost territory, paid massive indemnities, and was forced to accept a system of unequal treaties that compromised its sovereignty. The dynasty also nearly collapsed in the bloodiest civil war in human history. For the comprehensive account, see the [history of the fall of imperial China] (../). For the full sweep of late imperial China is in the history of the Qing and Ming.

The crisis had several layers. It was a military crisis, as the Qing army proved unable to match Western and Japanese forces on the battlefield. It was a political crisis, as the dynasty was forced to concede extraterritoriality, fixed low tariffs, and the loss of territory. It was a fiscal crisis, as indemnities, silver flight, and the costs of rebellion drained the imperial treasury. It was an intellectual crisis, as the Confucian order that had legitimated the dynasty for two thousand years was no longer self-evidently adequate. The deeper background of the Qing crisis is treated in the history of imperial China.

The First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking (1839–1842)

The first major crisis was the First Opium War, in which British gunboats forced the Qing to accept the Treaty of Nanking (1842). The treaty ceded Hong Kong, opened five treaty ports to foreign trade, fixed a low tariff, and established the most-favored-nation principle. The treaty was the first of a long series of “unequal treaties” — a phrase that captured both the legal and the moral imbalance between a sovereign state forced to concede and a foreign power able to dictate terms.

The economic history of the late imperial crisis describes the structural background: a chronic trade deficit for Europe, the silver flight, the opium trade, and the inelasticity of Chinese demand for European goods. The military history of the Qing crisis describes the war itself: a conflict in which British steam-powered gunboats and percussion-cap muskets defeated an antiquated Qing defense. The destruction of opium at Humen in 1839 by the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu is still commemorated in China as a heroic moment.

The peace was deceptive. The treaty did not legalize the opium trade, but the trade resumed almost immediately and grew rapidly. Within a decade, the annual opium inflow had doubled. The Daoguang emperor, having lost the war, was unable to enforce the anti-opium policy that had caused it. The wider crisis of the late Qing state explains why the war’s lessons were so hard to learn.

The Second Opium War and the Treaties of Tianjin (1856–1860)

The Second Opium War (1856–1860) was, in its origins, a dispute over the enforcement of the Treaty of Nanking. In 1856 Chinese officials boarded a Hong Kong-registered ship, the Arrow, and lowered its flag; the British used the incident as a pretext for renewed hostilities. The French joined in 1857 over the execution of a French missionary. The allied forces, under Lord Elgin, captured Canton in 1857 and Tianjin in 1858, and dictated the Treaties of Tianjin in 1858.

The treaties opened ten more ports, legalized the opium trade, allowed foreign legations in Beijing, allowed Christian missionary activity in the interior, and fixed a uniform low tariff. The Qing tried to resist; in 1859 the British and French attacked the Taku forts. In 1860 an Anglo-French force marched on Beijing, defeated the Qing army, and sacked the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), the Qing imperial retreat, burning it to the ground in an act of destruction and looting that has never been acknowledged or made good. The Convention of Beijing (1860) legalized the cession of the Russian maritime territory in Manchuria, the opening of Tianjin as a treaty port, and the permanent stationing of foreign diplomats in Beijing. The wider crisis of the late Qing state is the context in which these treaties were imposed.

The Self-Strengthening Movement (c. 1861–1895)

The Self-Strengthening Movement was the Qing response to the crises of the 1850s and 1860s. Led by Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang, the movement built modern arsenals, shipyards, and naval forces, and it sent students abroad. The Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai, founded in 1865, and the Fuzhou Navy Yard, founded in 1866, were its most visible industrial achievements. The Beiyang Fleet, the most ambitious project, was briefly the most powerful navy in East Asia.

The movement failed in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, when Japan — a country that had begun its own modernization only twenty years earlier — destroyed the Beiyang Fleet and the Liaodong army, and dictated the Treaty of Shimonoseki. China had to cede Taiwan, pay a 200-million-tael indemnity, and open four more ports. The defeat discredited the entire self-strengthening approach. The intellectual history of the late Qing crisis describes the new ideas that emerged from the failure.

The Sino-French War (1884–1885)

The Sino-French War was a conflict over the control of Vietnam, which the French were in the process of turning into a colony. The war went badly for the Qing. The French destroyed the Fuzhou Navy Yard and the Fujian Fleet in a single afternoon at the Battle of Fuzhou in August 1884. The French blockade of Taiwan forced the Qing to recognize the French protectorate over Vietnam in the Treaty of Tientsin of 1885. The defeat was a further blow to the self-strengthening project and to the prestige of Li Hongzhang, who had hoped to use the war to consolidate his political position. The wider crisis of the late Qing is the context in which the war occurred.

The war was fought in Indochina and in the south China sea. The French had a clear technological and tactical advantage: their steam gunboats dominated the Fuzhou roadstead, and their army was experienced in colonial warfare. The Qing was unable to mount an effective resistance, and the court’s attempts to use the conflict as a vehicle for a wider anti-foreign policy failed. The defeat was, like the loss to Japan nine years later, a blow to the prestige of the self-strengthening program. The intellectual context of the late Qing crisis describes the new ideas that emerged from the failure.

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)

The First Sino-Japanese War was the most consequential of the late Qing defeats. It was fought over the control of Korea, which both China and Japan claimed as a tributary. The war began in July 1894 with a Japanese attack on the Beiyang Fleet and a Japanese amphibious landing in Korea. The Qing army was routed at the Battle of Pyongyang in September 1894, and the Beiyang Fleet was destroyed at the Battle of the Yalu River on 17 September 1894. The Japanese occupied the Liaodong peninsula and Port Arthur, the strategic southern tip of Manchuria. The Treaty of Shimonoseki of April 1895 required China to cede Taiwan, the Pescadores, and the Liaodong peninsula, to pay a 200-million-tael indemnity, and to open four new ports to Japanese trade. The history of Chinese imperial dynasties puts the defeat in the context of a long decline.

The European powers used the moment to extract further concessions. The Triple Intervention of April 1895, in which Russia, France, and Germany forced Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula, opened the way for the Russian lease of Port Arthur and Dalian, the German lease of Jiaozhou Bay, the British lease of the New Territories of Hong Kong, and the French lease of Kwangchowan. Within three years, the foreign powers had effectively partitioned the Chinese coast into spheres of influence. The crises of the late Qing state are explained by this scramble for concessions.

The Scramble for Concessions

The 1890s saw the great powers divide China into spheres of influence. Germany seized Jiaozhou Bay in 1898. Russia leased Port Arthur and Dalian. Britain leased Weihaiwei and the New Territories. France leased Kwangchowan. Japan claimed Fujian. Italy demanded a lease of Sanmen Bay. The United States, having been excluded from the scramble, proclaimed the Open Door in 1899–1900, calling for the preservation of China’s territorial and administrative integrity and for equal commercial access for all foreign powers. The policy was largely unsuccessful; it did not prevent the powers from consolidating their positions, and it did not protect Chinese sovereignty. The wider context of the late Qing crisis is the background in which the scramble took place.

The result was a system of unequal treaties, foreign concessions in the treaty ports, foreign-controlled railways and mining, and the stationing of foreign troops in Beijing and along the railway lines. The Qing state, the largest and wealthiest in the world at the start of the nineteenth century, was by 1900 a semi-colony. The history of the fall of imperial China treats this moment as a turning point.

The Causes of the Qing Crisis

The Qing crisis had deep structural causes that went back to the eighteenth century. The population of the Qing Empire had grown from perhaps 150 million in 1700 to over 400 million by 1800, a doubling in a hundred years, with consequent pressure on the land. Per capita grain output had been falling for a century. The state’s revenue, however, was largely fixed by an antiquated land tax; it could not easily grow with the population. The economic history of the imperial crisis describes the structural background in detail.

The fiscal weakness was compounded by corruption. The Yongzheng emperor had reformed the system of “melting fees” in the 1720s and 1730s, but by the nineteenth century the central treasury was being drained by the costs of rebellion, the cost of maintaining the Eight Banners (the Manchu military establishment), and the cost of imperial extravagance. The Qianlong emperor’s Southern Tours, the construction of the Mountain Resort at Chengde, and the Siku Quanshu compilation had been enormously expensive. The history of imperial Chinese government explains the institutional context.

The political crisis was no less severe. The major imperial dynasties had always suffered from factionalism, and the late Qing was no exception. The Heshen corruption scandal of the 1790s had weakened the central administration. The Jiaqing emperor’s accession in 1796 was followed almost immediately by the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804), an eight-year uprising in central China that cost the imperial treasury perhaps 200 million taels. The rebellion revealed that the Qing army was no longer capable of putting down large-scale uprisings, and it was suppressed only by relying on local militia forces, the precedent for the regional armies of the 1850s. The military history of the imperial crisis describes the late-Qing military situation.

The Macartney Mission and the Closed-Door Policy

The Qing crisis had been brewing for nearly a century before the First Opium War. In 1793, the British government under William Pitt the Younger sent a mission under Lord Macartney to the Qianlong emperor, seeking to open China to British trade, to establish a permanent British legation in Beijing, and to negotiate a fixed low tariff for British goods. The Qianlong emperor refused, famously writing to King George III that “the Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.” The philosophical background of the closed-door policy is treated in the larger site.

The closed-door policy had been in place since the late Ming and had been reinforced by the Qing. Foreign trade was confined to the single port of Canton, and was conducted through a guild of Chinese merchants, the Cohong. The British, the Americans, the French, the Dutch, and the Swedes each had their own factories (trading warehouses) on the riverbank, but the system was rigid and humiliating. The British East India Company lost its monopoly on the China trade in 1834, and the new British “free trade” merchants in Canton, who lacked experience of the system, repeatedly clashed with the Qing officials. The history of the late Qing crisis describes the resulting conflict.

The Long-Term Consequences

The crises of the late Qing had several long-term consequences. The treaty port system, which lasted until 1943, integrated the Chinese economy into the world economy on unequal terms. The indemnities, particularly the Boxer indemnity of 1901, were a permanent drain on the imperial finances. The scramble for concessions was the immediate background of the Boxer Rebellion, the desperate anti-foreign uprising of 1899–1901. And the loss of prestige of the Qing court, which had been unable to defend the country, was the political background of the revolution of 1911.

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