People & Histories
1839–1842 and 1856–1860

The Opium Wars and the start of the 'century of humiliation'

Britain goes to war to force open China's markets, including to opium, beginning a long era of defeat, unequal treaties and internal collapse that Chinese remember as the "century of humiliation".

  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)
  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations — Zheng Wang, Columbia University Press (2012)
  • Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War — Stephen R. Platt, Alfred A. Knopf (2012)

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In the eighteenth century China under the Qing dynasty was the largest and one of the richest states in the world. It sold Europe tea, silk and porcelain and wanted little in return, so silver flowed into China. The British East India Company found an answer: opium, grown in British-ruled India and smuggled into China, where addiction spread through the population. By the 1830s silver was flowing out.

  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)

The First Opium War

In 1839 the Daoguang emperor sent the official Lin Zexu to Guangzhou (Canton) to stamp out the trade. Lin confiscated and destroyed more than 20,000 chests of British opium. Britain sent a naval expedition. Steam warships and modern guns overwhelmed Qing defences along the coast and up the Yangzi.

  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)

The Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain “in perpetuity”, opened five ports to British trade, fixed low tariffs and required China to pay an indemnity. Further treaties gave foreigners extraterritoriality, meaning they were tried by their own consuls, not Chinese courts. Chinese people would later call these the “unequal treaties”.

  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)
  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations — Zheng Wang, Columbia University Press (2012)

The Second Opium War

A second war, fought by Britain and France from 1856 to 1860, ended with Anglo-French troops in Beijing. In October 1860, in retaliation for the torture and killing of British and French prisoners, Lord Elgin ordered the burning of the Yuanmingyuan, the emperor’s vast Summer Palace garden complex, after it had been looted. Its ruins have been preserved as a patriotic education site. The treaties of Tianjin and Beijing legalised opium, opened more ports, allowed missionaries into the interior and ceded Kowloon to Britain. Russia used the moment to take a huge stretch of territory in the northeast.

  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)

Collapse from within

Foreign pressure struck a dynasty already under strain. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus, set up a rival kingdom based in Nanjing. The civil war that followed was one of the deadliest in history; estimates of the death toll run from about 20 to 30 million.

  • Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War — Stephen R. Platt, Alfred A. Knopf (2012)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)
Other rebellions shook the northwest and southwest.

The “century of humiliation”

The Opium Wars opened what Chinese textbooks call the “century of humiliation” (bainian guochi), running from 1839 to 1949. It includes defeat by France (1884–85) and Japan (1894–95), the scramble by the powers for concessions in the late 1890s, the occupation of Beijing by eight foreign armies after the Boxer Uprising in 1900, and above all the Japanese invasion.

  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations — Zheng Wang, Columbia University Press (2012)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)
Political scientist Zheng Wang shows how, especially after 1989, the Communist Party made this memory central to “patriotic education”, presenting itself as the force that ended the humiliation.
  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations — Zheng Wang, Columbia University Press (2012)

For many Chinese people the lesson is simple: “the backward will be beaten” (luohou jiu yao ai da). That conviction runs beneath the drive to modernise, the pride in China’s rise and the sharp reaction to anything that sounds like foreign lecturing.

  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations — Zheng Wang, Columbia University Press (2012)
  • Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-First Century — Orville Schell and John Delury, Random House (2013)

How it's seen
Chinese national memory

An unprovoked aggression by a drug-dealing empire against a country trying to protect its people from addiction, followed by a century of invasion, looting and unequal treaties. The burning of the Summer Palace in 1860 is remembered as an act of cultural vandalism.

  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations — Zheng Wang, Columbia University Press (2012)
  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)

British justification at the time

Many British officials and merchants framed the war as about free trade, diplomatic equality and protecting British subjects, not opium as such. Critics in Britain disagreed even then: the young William Gladstone called it a war "more unjust in its origin" than any he knew.

  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)
  • The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)

Many historians today

The opium trade and British gunboat diplomacy were central, but the Qing's decline also had internal causes: population pressure, corruption, rebellion and a court slow to adapt. Julia Lovell argues the "humiliation" narrative was largely built in the twentieth century for nationalist purposes, though the events it describes were real.

  • The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China — Julia Lovell, Picador (2011)
  • Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations — Zheng Wang, Columbia University Press (2012)
  • Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War — Stephen R. Platt, Alfred A. Knopf (2012)

Why it matters today

China

The "century of humiliation" (1839–1949) is taught in every Chinese school and anchors the national story: China was weak, so foreigners carved it up; the lesson is never to be weak again. It explains much of the sensitivity to foreign criticism, and why the return of Hong Kong in 1997 felt like closing a wound.