What Is Lin Zexus Goal in Writing the Letter to Britains Queen Victoria?

The Opium War and Foreign Inroad

• Introduction for Teachers
• Reading for Students: The Opium War and Foreign Encroachment
• Lin Zexu, Letter of Communication to Queen Victoria, 1839
• Primary Source: The Treaty of Nanjing, August 1842
• Discussion Questions and Suggested Activities

Introduction for Teachers

Information technology is highly recommended that this unit of measurement be used with the educational activity unit on Macartney and the Emperor. Once students accept read about China's negative response to Cracking United kingdom'southward ambitious demands for the expansion of trade and commutation of ambassadors, they volition be prepared to appreciate more fully the Chinese perception of the Opium War and the conditions imposed upon the state in the "diff treaties" that followed. China'southward experience of Western aggression in the 1800s continues to be an of import factor shaping both the nation'south strange policy and its drive for modernization.

Reading for Students:
The Opium War and Foreign Encroachment

Two things happened in the eighteenth century that made it hard for England to balance its trade with the East. Start, the British became a nation of tea drinkers and the demand for Chinese tea rose astronomically. Information technology is estimated that the boilerplate London worker spent five per centum of his or her total household budget on tea. 2nd, northern Chinese merchants began to send Chinese cotton from the interior to the s to compete with the Indian cotton that Britain had used to assist pay for its tea consumption habits. To foreclose a trade imbalance, the British tried to sell more of their own products to Cathay, just there was not much need for heavy woolen fabrics in a country accepted to either cotton wool padding or silk.

The only solution was to increase the corporeality of Indian goods to pay for these Chinese luxuries, and increasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the item provided to China was Bengal opium. With greater opium supplies had naturally come an increase in demand and usage throughout the country, in spite of repeated prohibitions by the Chinese government and officials. The British did all they could to increase the trade: They bribed officials, helped the Chinese work out elaborate smuggling schemes to get the opium into China's interior, and distributed costless samples of the drug to innocent victims.

The cost to China was enormous. The drug weakened a large percent of the population (some estimate that 10 percentage of the population regularly used opium past the belatedly nineteenth century), and silver began to flow out of the country to pay for the opium. Many of the economic problems China faced later on were either directly or indirectly traced to the opium trade. The government debated near whether to legalize the drug through a government monopoly similar that on salt, hoping to barter Chinese goods in render for opium. Only since the Chinese were fully aware of the harms of addiction, in 1838 the emperor decided to send one of his nearly able officials, Lin Tse-hsu (Lin Zexu, 1785-1850), to Canton (Guangzhou) to do any necessary to end the traffic forever.

Lin was able to put his first 2 proposals into effect easily. Addicts were rounded up, forcibly treated, and taken off the habit, and domestic drug dealers were harshly punished. His third objective — to confiscate foreign stores and forcefulness foreign merchants to sign pledges of good acquit, like-minded never to trade in opium and to exist punished by Chinese constabulary if ever found in violation — somewhen brought war. Opinion in England was divided: Some British did indeed feel morally uneasy nearly the trade, but they were overruled by those who wanted to increment England'south Prc trade and teach the arrogant Chinese a practiced lesson. Western war machine weapons, including percussion lock muskets, heavy artillery, and paddlewheel gunboats, were far superior to China'south. United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland'southward troops had recently been toughened in the Napoleonic wars, and Britain could muster garrisons, warships, and provisions from its nearby colonies in Southeast Asia and India. The consequence was a disaster for the Chinese. By the summer of 1842 British ships were victorious and were even preparing to shell the onetime capital, Nanking (Nanjing), in central Communist china. The emperor therefore had no choice but to accept the British demands and sign a peace agreement. This agreement, the commencement of the "unequal treaties," opened China to the West and marked the kickoff of Western exploitation of the nation.

Other humiliating defeats followed in what i historian has chosen Prc's "treaty century" (major aspects of the and then-chosen "unequal treaties" were not formally voided until 1943). In 1843, France and the United States, and Russian federation in 1858, negotiated treaties like to England's Nanking (Nanjing) Treaty, including a provision for extraterritoriality, whereby foreign nationals in Cathay were immune from Chinese law. To compel a reluctant China to shift from its traditional tribute based foreign relations to treaty relations, Europeans fought a second war with China from 1858-1860, and the terminal Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin) and Convention of Peking (Beijing) increased People's republic of china'south semi-colonial condition. More ports were open to foreign residence and merchandise, and foreigners, especially missionaries, were allowed gratuitous move and concern anywhere in the country.

Conflicts for the rest of the century wrung more humiliating concessions from China: with Russia over claims in China'south far west and northeast in 1850 and 1860, with England over access to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in 1876, with France over northern Vietnam in 1884, with Japan over its claims to Korea and northeast China in 1895, and with many foreign powers afterward 1897 which demanded "spheres of influence," peculiarly for constructing railroads and mines. In 1900, an international army suppressed the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion in northern China, destroying much of Beijing in the procedure. Each of these defeats brought more than foreign demands, greater indemnities that Cathay had to repay, more strange presence along the coast, and more foreign participation in Mainland china's political and economic life. Petty wonder that many in China were worried by the century's finish that Communist china was being sliced up "like a melon."

Acknowledgment: The consultant for this unit was Dr. Sue Gronewold, a specialist in Chinese history.

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The Treaty of Nanjing, August 1842

In The Treaty of Nanjing, August 1842 [PDF], students will notice several clauses that forced the Chinese to grant to the British precisely those rights they had denied them fifty years earlier.

Discussion Questions and Suggested Activities

Questions

1. Compare the Treaty of Nanjing with the Chinese emperor's answer to Lord Macartney. What sort of rights did the Chinese give to the British that they previously refused to give?
2. If the word "imperialism" is divers as "the policy of seeking to dominate the affairs of weaker countries," do y'all remember Chinese today are justified in saying that China suffered from Western "imperialism" begun past the British?

Activities

• Imagine you are diplomats charged with final these treaties for the Qing country on the 1 hand and for foreign powers on the other. Write a report detailing your negotiations. What are your primary concerns? What are different means yous could wait out for your interests?

• In your textbook, in the library, or on the Net, locate maps which show the increase over fourth dimension of treaty ports (by 1900 there were more than 100) and the "spheres of influence" claimed past foreign powers in Cathay. When did the greatest number of concessions occur? What else occurred at this time to explain how greater demands could exist made by foreigners? Which parts of China were near heavily involved? Least involved? Was the result of foreign presence and ability in Cathay the same everywhere? Why?
  [Suggested maps: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/images/lt19cmap.gif; or in Patricia Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History: China, 241; or in Barraclough et. al, The Times Atlas of World History, "Dismemberment of the Chinese Empire, 1842-1911."

• Locate copies of the treaties China concluded with foreign powers from 1842 until 1905, including the entire Treaty of Nanjing, the Treaty of the Bogue and Treaty of Wanghui in 1844, the Treaty of Tianjin of 1858 and Beijing Convention of 1860, the Zhefu Convention in 1876, the Tianjin Convention of 1876, the Treaty of Tianjin of 1885, the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, the Boxer Protocol of 1900, and Japan'south 20-One Demands of 1915. Trace the development over fourth dimension of greater concessions and indemnities imposed upon China. Given what y'all know of China'southward state of affairs and foreign powers, evaluate these treaties. Were they "fair," "just," or defensible?

• Research the long-term furnishings of the dissimilar foreigners agile in Cathay at this time. For example, trace the long-term bear upon of the missionaries, charting the number of Christian converts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, by 1949, and on into the 1980s. Where are the largest communities of Christians located? What does this say about long-term cultural contact and the effects of imperialism? Also, wait at the long-range economic impact of imperialism in China by tracing the nineteenth and twentieth century histories of tea, porcelain, sugar, tobacco, and textiles.

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Source: http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1750_opium.htm

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