Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates

502 Pages·1998·5.03 MB·English

by  Peter Ward Fay

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The Opium War
1840–1842
Barbarians in the Celestial Empire
in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century
and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates Ajar
by Peter Ward Fay
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Copyright © 1975, 1997 by The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in
the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-30200 03 02 01 00 99 7 6 5
4 3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fay, Peter Ward, 1924-
The Opium War, 1840–1842: barbarians in the Celestial Empire
in the early part of the nineteenth century and the war by which they
forced her gates ajar = [Ya p' ien chan cheng] / by Peter Ward Fay.
p. cm.
Parallel title in Chinese characters.
Originally published: 1975.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8078-4714-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
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1. ChinaHistoryOpium War, 1840–1842. I. Title.
DS757.5.F39 1997
(cid:151)
951'.033dc21 97-35261 CIP

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CONTENTS
Preface to the Paperback Edition ix
Preface xix
Introduction xxi
List of Characters xxv

Part One
The Old China Trade
1 3
Papaver Somniferum
2 15
Canton and Macao
3 29
Managing the Barbarians
4 41
The Opium Traffic
5 53
The End of the Company

Part Two
Christ and Opium
6 67
The Napier Fizzle
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7 80
The Protestant Mission
8 98
The Catholic Mission
9 110
A Rising Tide
10 128
Peking in Earnest
11 142
Lin and the Twenty Thousand Chests
12 162
We Won't Go Back!
13 180
India and England Take Notice
14 196
The Coming of the War

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Part Three
The War
15 213
The First Expedition
16 228
At the Peiho
17 237
The Blockade and the Barrier
18 249
Chusan
19 261
Up the River to Canton
20 283
The City Spared
21 296
San-yuan-li
22 308
A Winter of Waiting
23 322
Hongkong
24 339
The Yangtze Campaign
25 356
China Opened
Appendix: Calcutta Opium Sales 375
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Notes 377
A Note on Sources 387
Index 395

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MAPS
South and East Asia viii
Gulf of Canton 16
The Factories 20
Macao 23
China in the Early Nineteenth Century 28
Chusan and the Yangtze 220
Canton and Vicinity 284

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PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
It's a place all ups and downs, the hills rising to gaunt granite peaks, the gullies falling to narrow
beaches and rocky coves. Two large islands and quite a few small ones embrace the Kowloon
peninsula, which pushes gently into the South China Sea, and if you could somehow bring the land
parts tidily together, you'd have a square only twenty miles on a side. So it's no more than a patch, this,
possessing no natural resources; in fact, not even gifted, given the narrowness of the shoreline and the
steepness of the approach, as a place nature intended for a port. A patch of ground that in the 1840s,
when it first began to get attention, could point to only a handful of inhabitants, most of them farmers
and fishermen, and offered no compelling reason why it should ever attract more. In short, a piece of
China that on the face of it ought never to have become what today it has become: a place packed with
over six million people, almost all of whom are Chinese, and almost none of whom farm or fish. A
place well known to westerners, many of them Americans, who come and go and even settle down,
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brought less by the tourist attractions than by the business opportunities it offersthe money to be madeat
the highest levels of commerce and finance. A place well known to a particular group among these
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westerners, a group brought for the same reasons but harboring a feelinga keen and now somewhat
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bitter feelingthat they have always been more than visitors: they belong there. And a government,
distant, acidly determined, that insists they never have and don't. The place, of course, is Hong Kong.
No one looking back to the moment when Hong Kong began to make a name for itself should have
expected that because it was barren and empty, barren and empty it would always be. Circumstances
have a way of invalidating expectation. The circumstance in this case was a decision on the part of the
British, shortly before the Opium War began, to take refuge there. Hong Kong island (eventually it
passed its name on to the colony as a whole) is some eight miles long and up to four miles wide. It lies
east to west just below the Kowloon peninsula and forms a "U" about Kowloon's tip but always a mile
or more away. The water there is deep but the bottom is not beyond the reach of an anchor. The wind is
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muffled (not alwaysa typhoon at Hong Kong can be disastrous) on the west by Lantao, the other big
island in the group, and on the east by an extension of the mainland. As a place to drop anchor in,
nothing more secure is available anywhere else about the Gulf of Canton. Indeed, so effectively does
the topography lock Hong Kong in that if you arrive one evening by sea, as tourists often do, when you
come on deck in the morning you may wonder how your ship got in at all.

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