Opium, Gunboats, Rebellions and Unequal Treaties: How Modern China Was Forged
China Deep Dive II (1800-1900): Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern
You have heard that the 1840s Opium War began China’s ‘Century of Humiliation.’ But did you know by 1900 China fought back in the Boxer Rebellion? And that rebellion was ignited by a burning archive?
Welcome to the second instalment of my eight-week deep dive into Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping. This deep dive series complements the China leg of my World History tour by reading one leading scholarly history of modern China.
The second instalment looks at the nineteenth century crisis of Qing China, beset by external attacks through the Opium Wars, civil strife in the Taiping Rebellion, environmental crisis, and the spread of new ideas of modernity, which exploded in the Boxer Rebellion.
After you read this post, set aside some time to watch or listen to this MUST WATCH interview with Ukrainian historian, Marta Havryshko.
In Part One Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko reveals her story as a war refugee, & how her research exposes far-right ethno-nationalism in Ukraine.
Marta Havryshko is a Faculty Member, Clark University, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Department of Contemporary History. She presents research on Holocaust, WWII, USSR, Russia-Ukraine war, far-right, neo-Nazis, Ukrainian nationalism, antisemitism, gender, sexual violence in war, and memory politics.
Part Two is coming tomorrow. Marta will reveal how Ukrainians are suffering from war mobilisation and social conflicts.
Please follow Marta’s work at https://x.com/HavryshkoMarta
The Nineteenth Century Crisis of Qing China
The first deep dive into Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping highlighted how the institutions of modern China began in the Age of Glory between 1644 and 1800 when China was the most powerful Eurasian empire of its time.
This deep dive looks at how the Chinese world was reordered during the late nineteenth century, and the predicaments that the rolling social crisis presented to the late Qing Dynasty, which would collapse in the early twentieth century.
Four great historical events drove the Qing into the dust by the end of the nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, civil strife in the Taiping Rebellion, environmental and economic crises, and the spread of both European and Asian forms of modernity.
Two Opium Wars were fought against China in the mid-nineteenth century. The First Opium War (1839–1842) was fought between China and Britain. Britain coerced China to open its society to trade in opium, harvested in British imperial India and sold by British merchants in Canton. Through military action, Britain diplomatically seized the treaty port of Hong Kong. The Second Opium War (1856–1860) involved Britain and other Euro-Atlantic powers, which demanded greater concessions, including legalizing the opium trade. The war culminated in the Treaty of Tianjin (1858) and the Convention of Beijing (1860), which extended the extra-territorial privileges, treaty ports and semi-colonialism of the Euro-Atlantic powers.
The Second Opium War was fought during a long civil war, known as the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). The rebellion was led by a messianic Christian, Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ and sought to overthrow the Qing dynasty. In 1853 his forces captured Nanjing, and declared the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping Tianguo). Taiping (太平) translates to "Great Peace" in Chinese. Hong Xiuquan established a millenarian Christian state advocating social equality, land redistribution, and anti-Manchu policies. After fourteen years of war, however, the rebels were defeated. External powers deepened their extraction of wealth from China. The war had caused 20 to 30 million deaths, and devastation across many provinces of China. Taiping brought humiliation, not a Great Peace.
The Taiping Rebellion opened deep fissures in Chinese social institutions. It was both cause and consequence of the poverty, famine and social distress that spread through China during the nineteenth century. Environmental crisis exacerbated these problems further. The environmental crisis worsened the devastation wrought by war, drugs, external invasion, and economic plunder. Ecological constraints led to humanitarian catastrophes of drought, flood, famine, poverty, and the rebellions of the nineteenth century.
In this stressed social environment ideas catalysed changes to social practices. Hong Xiuquan’s millenarian Christian state was a strange amalgam of Chinese and Western ideas. Other more practical ideas found their way into the fissures of Chinese society and had an impact. There was both resistance and adaptation of foreign influences. Chinese adaptations of traditional, modern, military, and national ideas created a ferment. That ferment boiled over in the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), which I feature below the paywall.
The Burning of the Summer Palace, 1860
The devastation of the Qing’s Age of Glory was symbolised by the burning and looting of Beijing’s Summer Palace in 1860, a shocking event central to the story of the Opium Wars and domestic rebellions.
The Summer Palace, originally named Qingyi Yuan ("Garden of Clear Ripples"), was commissioned in 1750 by Emperor Qianlong. It was destroyed and looted primarily by British forces in 1860 during the Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion. The story is superbly told in Stephen Platt’s books that I will feature on Saturday. This act of vandalism shocked the world. It happened only three years after Britain’s savage destruction of Delhi in an act of reprisal for the Indian Mutiny (First War of Indian Independence) of 1857. The Palace and Gardens were rebuilt in 1888 by Emperor Guangxu for Empress Dowager Cixi, and renamed the Summer Palace.
In 2003 I walked through the Palace and Gardens which since 1998 have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I could see the traces of the violence of British and Euro-Atlantic forces, the Boxer Rebellion and the Cultural Revolution. We will return to the Summer Palace and China’s twentieth century struggles over the meaning of its civilization-state in later deep dives.
How China's 'Century of Humiliation' Really Happened
On Saturday I will share two outstanding books by the historian Stephen Platt on the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion.
But first let’s dive deeper into Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping to understand how China's 'Century of Humiliation' really happened. And how the Boxer Rebellion began with a burning archive.
