Interpretations of the Opium War (1840-1842): A Critical

Appraisal

Tan Chung

Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i, Volume 3, Supplement 1, 1977, pp. 32-46 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/398587/summary

[ Access provided at 27 Aug 2022 09:30 GMT from Jawaharlal Nehru University ]
 -32-

inTi-rwetationp ,->t the Opium Wai ??84··-««4??

A .ritira] Appraisal

Tan Chung
Department of 'hiñese and Japanese Studie?
University of Delhi

Interpretations oí thf Jpium War have primarily emphasized the role of

cultural conflict between China and Britain. The exponents of rnis school

range from John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), the sixth U.S. president, old China
hands like W. A. P. Martin 1 1827-3916) , H B. Morse (1855-1934), to the dean of

modern Western scholarship on China, John King Fairbank. The most articulate

theory of cultural conflict is, however, provided by Li Chien-nung whose un-

abashed plagiarism of £ H Pritchard's ideas on Si no-West em relations, and

unscrupled application of clasw'caJ Chinese terms and phrase? out of nontext are

only exceeded by his English translators' transgressions in t rulv rendering his

widely-read book on modern Chinese history. That the confín» -ould have been

a trade war or more particularly a war due to the rise and growth of the opium

trade has received, if at all, a secondary emphasis in the scholarly literature

The cultural conflict theory has evolved from instinctive prejudice — like

Adams ' s condemnation of China ' s "arrogant and insupportable pretensions , " Martin " -

approbation of "the progressive spirit of the Western world," and disapprobation

of "the conservatism of the extreme orient" to a deliberate distortion '-»f 'as-

tory. In the view that -he Opium War was basically a punitive expedition against

China's laggard politicn-socio-ethico-economic institutions, the followinq issue*-

have surfaced. the perception of "universal Kingship,' the "tributary system,"

stigmatizing of the foreigner, aversion to exotic products, "anti-commerciai "

tradition, antipathy to foreign trade, and judicial eccentrici Ly . Closely

 -33-

related is the theory of "Sinocentrism" propounded by J. K. Fairbank and elab-

orated upon by Hark Mancali and John Cranmer-Byng.

Much of the confusion about Chinese perception of "universal Kingship" is

caused by the Chinese terms t'ien-tzu and t' ien-hsia, and the Confucian maxim

of "T1 ien wu erh jih, min wu erh wang" ( ^- ^ ^- $ , 3f ^St ^. _J, ) . That
the maxim has been grossly misunderstood is exemplified by its English transla-
4
tion, transforming wang, a prince or a chieftain among hundreds during Confu-

cius' s time, into "emporer" which was first instituted in China in 221 B.C. —
some 258 years after Confucius' s death. This anachronism beclouds the true

meaning of the maxim, which only metaphorically likens a wang ' s absolute lord-
ship over his subjects to a single celestial body's shining upon the earth.
Fairbank has interpreted the traditional Chinese political conception of a
"Son of Heaven" as presiding over the "universe" (t' ien-hsia) , overlooking the
important transformation of Chinese polity from a pre-221 B.C. mini-world con-

federation with t'ien-tzu as a tutelar leader of numerous autonomous, absolute

rulers (wang) to a post-221 B.C. centralized, unitary empire reigned by a single

absolute ruler who was styled t'ien-tzu as a matter of convention. Neither
Fairbank nor any other scholar who thinks that imperial China was a Middle King-
dom (chung-kuo) rather than a typical pre-modern world empire has systematically
examined and convincingly demonstrated the institutional differences between the
two. Actually, Chung-kuo and its synonyms, Chung-t'u ( tr ¿. ) and Chung-yuan
( ir Ä?% ) as well as the term t' ien-hsia, were terms of the pre-imperial Chinese
confederation, with Chung-kuo denoting the tutelar leader t'ien-tzu' s domain,
and t' ien-hsia denoting all dominions within the confederation. After 221 B.C. ,
the two became synonymous. In the pre-221 B.C. context, the concept of Chung
(center) was applied in the political sense. After 221 B.C. as Chùng-kuo became
a misnomer, the concept of political "center" was totally lost. There was no
trace of any established theory among Chinese political thinkers that China
 -34-

occupied the "center" of the universe and hence the name of Chung-kuo. Only
under Buddhist influence did the Chinese become more direction-conscious in

coining geo-political terms: calling India "Western Heaven" (hsi-t ' ien ^J J^ )
and China "Eastern Earth" (tung-t'u ^ _ì_ ) .
"Tribute System" is more of a Fairbankian conception than a histórica]
reality. There was only a convention that certain neighbors of China regularly
sent tributary missions to her. The convention cannot be taken as a system be-
cause it had no binding force. The China-tributaries entente during Ming, Ch'ing
and earlier dynasties was an ancient Chinese version of modern NATO or Warsaw

Pact entente minus the formal treaty agreements. Even if this should be deemed
a system, this system never involved China's relations with distant countries,
notwithstanding the fact that the Chinese imperial records indiscriminately
counted all foreign delegations received by her emperors as "tributary missions."
There is no theoretical basis for a "tributary system" in any study of pre-Opium
War Sino-British relations. When the Ch'ing government included England and
excluded France and U.S.A. as a "tributary state" in 1815, it only meant that
an English "tributary mission" (led by Macartney) had visited China and no sim-
ilar missions had ever been sent by France and U.S.A.

Fairbank believes that by calling the English barbarian, yi^ ( ?? ) , the

Chinese sinned in "prejudging" and "stigmatizing" the proud bearers of the

White man's burden. But Vj1, a word etymologically free from derogatory conno-
tation, was not a stigma. The Jesuits who commanded high respect in Peking

from the 16th century onwards were y_i_. Macartney and his entourage enjoyed a
very comfortable stay at Canton in a yi-guest-house (Yi-kuan ¡Fj f? ) where
they were received, on their arrival, by all the top-ranking officials present

at Canton, including the Cabinet-ranking Canton viceroy. Macartney felt that

the Englishmen at Canton were so much liked by the Chinese that they could even
9
become hong merchants "if possessed of money and address." This clearly shows
 -35-

that they were neither "prejudged" nor "stigmatized."

Furthermore, after King George III had received Ch'ien-lung emperor's
letter in 1793, no one ever pointed out that the word y¿, which appeared fifteen
times in the letter, had a derogatory connotation. The first Englishman who

had doubts about the respectability of v_i_ was the sinologue-missionary, Dr.
Robert Morrison, who pointed out in 1827 that it was "a dubious word, never

used by ourselves." The fact, which must have been known to the East India

Company's Chinese interpreter at Canton, was that in every petition written in

Chinese which the Company submitted to the Canton authorities and was duly signed

by the President of the Company's Canton Committee, the word y_i_ was invariably
used to designate the British traders. I have reproduced elsewhere one such

petition signed by J. W. Roberts in 1809 which used y_i_ on five occasions to

qualify England and the English traders. That the learned English writers con-
tinued to indiscriminately render the classical Chinese terms for "foreign/
foreigner/foreign country" (yi, fan f. , hu ¿?! , etc.) into "barbarian," is
probably the worst example of translation abuse, considering the misperceptions

it produced, in history.

Li Chien-nung quotes maxims like "pu kuei chen-ch'i" ( _/^, -3¡ yi-- -?G )
and "pu pao yuan-wu" ( ]1> *** ; g iffi] ) as proofs of Chinese dislike of exotic
products. Any one who has studied China's historical contacts with foreign.

peoples can detect the Chinese predilection for foreign products and the extra-

ordinary Chinese quests for imported curiosities at great costs. Examples

stretch from the Chou King Wu's (conventionally dated 1122-1116 B.C.) fondness

for foreign gifts to the 19th century opium-mania. The two maxims cited by Li

were the very words which the Grand Duke Shao voiced to admonish the Chou King

Wu. They were repeatedly cited to serve as an antidote against the prevalent

craze for foreign imports. The Ch'ien lung emperor's reference to one of the

maxims in his letter to King George only betrayed his own obsession with European
 -36-

luxuries which even a casual foreign visitor like Macartney 'x>uld discern.

Ch'ien-lung and his successors' foreign trade policies were more influenced by

the Chinese top brass's demand for imported luxuries from sinq-songs to opium
rather than the empty professions of "not treasuring exotic products."

The general notion of traditional Chinese ant j -commercial ism relies on a

Chinese phrase "Shih nung kung Shang" f -Î" W. 3- ¡5] Ï and a Chinese slogan
"Chung-nung ch' ing-shang" ( -w ? f^ j^h ) - The phrase has been mistaken
as the hierarchical order of traditional Chinese society with the gentry (shih)
at the apex and the merchants (shang) at the very bottom even below the social
positions of the farmers (nung) and workers (kung) . In reality, the traditional
Chinese society had all the sharp contradictions between the exploiting and
exploited strata. Shang, the merchants, were an exploiting and upwardly-moving

class, while nung and kung held ambiguous positions, with nung embracing various

exploiting and exploited strata connected with farming, and kung included those

connected with handicraft industries. The slogan, no sociological analysis, was

simply a preference among China's upwardly mobile for particular professions,

like being a scholar-official was preferable to being a landlord (nung) , an arti-

san (kung) , and a merchant. The bottom of the social hierarchy was occupied by

the teeming landless peasants and industrial and urban workers who had nothing

to do with the nung and kung of the slogan. "Chung-nung ch 'ing-shang" origin-

ated with the Han emperor Wen's (I79-157 B.C.) new policy of -urbing the dominat-
14
mg influence of the big and speculative merchants. Under the influence of

this policy, then- emerald a tradition generally characterised by the maxim of

"chung-nung ch' ing-shang" (which should read as "enhancing the importance of

agriculture and reducing the dominance of the merchants"' — the Chinese proto-

type of the "physiocracy" programs that dominated the 18th-century French politics.

This was no more anti-commercial than the French physiocrats were.

Li Chien-nung finds in mo-tso ( j£ |? ' an additional proof of Chinese

 -37-

prejudice against commerce. His translators go a step further by rendering this

Chinese term as "trifle." They ignore the fact that mo-tso and its synonym, mo-
yeh ( Í Tl^ . were meaningful only in the company of their antonym pen-yeh
( 4S. Tf ? with pen ( /3N ? (written as a horizontal stroke on the lower part of
a tree ? and mo ? ;K t (a horizontal stroke on the top of a tree) connoting

"primary" and "secondary" respectively. In China's physiocratic tradition, agri-

culture was logically regarded as the "primary profession" and commerce and

industry the "secondary professions." without necessarily impiying any more

"preiudice" than was set in the choice of the priority

China's reputation u foreign trade was widespread enough to persuade Queen

Elizabeth I to address a letter to the Chinese emperor on July 16, 1596, asking

for the secret of China's success in trade. This seems not to have impressed

Li Chien-nung and others who believe that the Chinese were inherently suspicious
of foreign traders, and hence their antipathy to foreign trade during the 18th
and 19th centuries. Li particularly twists the famous Chinese maxim, Hua-yi

t' ien hsien ( JKp- ah f. ?& 1 . which originated from one of the T'ang Dyn-
asty Prime Ministers, Ti Jen-chieh 1607-700) , meaning that the natural boundaries
16
between China and the foreign countries should and could be respected. That
the Chinese seemed somewhat obsessed with the Hua-yi boundaries was the outcome

of repeated foreign invasions which periodically threatened China. But this

should not be confused with the triple fear that afflicted the Manchu government.

First, there was the Manchu minor i tañan fear of the Han Chinese subject

majority. This was demonstrated in the maintenance of a separate Manchu army,

the Eight Banners, above the Chinese provincia.) forces the Green Camps; in the
discrimination against and distrust of Han of fu .als. prohibitions against Manchu
officials' fraternizing then Han colleagues efforts in preserving Manchu iden-
tity an·.' resisting the assimilative force of the Han .-u I ture and enforcement

of Manen· iair style on Hai male subject» -.econdlv. tnt- Mam-nu feai of the
 -38-

sea was exhibited in a total ban on maritime activities from the early 1650's

to 1681, a total evacuation of coastal inhabitants of Kwangtung, Fukien, Che-

kiang and Kiangsu in order to create a 25-kilometer no-man's DeIt along the
coast during 1661-9: an embargo on Chinese ships sailing tu Southeast tsia dur
ing 1717-1729; and in the stringent regulations on Chinese maritime shipping.
Thirdly, there was the Manchu (and Chinese) fear of the Europeans, particularly

the latter's giant ships and lethal fire power, and their tendencies of tzu-

shih ( -~£¿ ^P ) > trouble-making.

Arising from this triple fear, the Manchu government was particularly

afraid of a collusion between the rebellious elements of the Chinese and the

European trouble-makers through the opportunity of trade contacts. It adopted

an ostrich-like policy with the following components: restraint on Chinese
maritime activities; abandonment of building a strong naval force: adoption of

the strategy of y_u hai-fang erh wu hai-ohan ( if ¦& PjT $J $t- ¿& SV 1 ,
having coastal defence but avoiding sea battle; restrictions on contacts between

Chinese and foreign citizens; and curtailment of the non-commercial activities

of the foreign visitors. It was this policy which manifested in the restriction
of foreign trade at Canton in addition to the notorious "Eight Regulations" at
the lone trading port.

Those who cite the Chinese judicial eccentricity fail to place it in the

context of the fact that China was a pioneer in legalist studies and in estab-
lishing the rule of law in government. The quality of Chinese justice during
the 18th and early l9th century was not altogether inferior to that administered

in contemporary Europe. Legal conceptions and practices always differ among

nations and when one country wishes to change the judicial tradition of another
by force, the cultural conflict theory that tends to support it sounds more

like a ruse than an explanation.

Cultural conflict theory posits seven pre-Opium War Sino-British tension
 -39-

areas: cultural differences, judicial disputes. Canton restrictions, British

desire for a foothold in China, hong debts to British citizens, unsettled mode
of diplomatic ties between the two governments, and British opium trade offen-
sive against China vis-a-vis the Chinese response. A process of elimination
will lead us to the root cause of the war.

Cultural differences might create difficulties in international contacts,

but seldom ignite an international war, which results from a clash of interests,

not that of cultures. The pre-Opium War documentary evidence does not suggest
that London, at any stage, intended to solve Sino-British cultural difficulties

by either peaceful or military means. During the post Opium War era the Bri-
tish government policy was to perpetuate the traditional Chinese superstructure
in preference to the insurgent movement of the Taipings which was culturally
more akin to the Western values. All this precludes cultural differences, how-

ever inevitable , as a root cause .

The major pre-Opium War Sino-British judicial disputes and the issues were:

1781, Captain John McClary's plunders at Macao and Whampoa (issue: collective
responsibility); 1784, Lady Hughes affair (issue: "a life for a life"); 1800,

Providence affair (issue: dignity of British naval officer); 1807, Neptune

affair (issue: judicial proceedings); 1810, Huang A-hsing tragedy (issue: judi-
cial procedure); 1814, British reprisal against U.S. ships (issue: Chinese sov-
ereignty); 1821-2, Topaze affair (issue: dignity of British navy vis-a-vis
Chinese sovereignty); 1830, Mrs. Baynes episode (issue: violation of Canton re-
strictions); and 1839, Lin Wei-hsi tragedy (issue: Chinese sovereignty).
The first dimension of these disputes was the British doubts as to the

rationality of Chinese judicial conceptions and practices, especially that of

18
collective responsibility and "a life for a life" principle. A second dimension
was the sacrosanctness of the Royal Navy before the Chinese justice, and the in-
admissibility of Chinese justice to British citizens in general, and British
 -40-

government officials in particular. However, the British side had shown ample

restraint to ensure the smooth running of the Chinese trade while the Canton

authorities had been conciliatory enough to allow the British offenders to get
away while the Chinese "face" (dignity) was maintained. In spite of these

disputes, the British did not miss a single trading season before 1839. And

the circumstances which seriously interrupted the British trade in 1839-40 had

very little to do with the Lin Wei-hsi tragedy. All this helps us to eliminate

the judicial disputes as the root cause of the war.

There was a huge gap between the British traders' expectations in non-

Christian countries and the treatment meted out to them by the Chinese author-

ities, especially through the Canton restrictions. This gap created a British

urge for a foothold on Chinese soil which would be under British naval protection

and beyond Chinese government interference. One such foothold already existed,

in Macao, which ironically belonged to a second-class European power, Portugal.

London hoped that Peking might cede another foothold after realizing that Britain

was the strongest power on earth. The three embassies in 1787-8, 1792-3 and

1816, especially the former two led by Lt. Col. Charles Allan Cathcart and Lord

Macartney, had the foothold ("Grand Depot") as their main aim. After Macartney

had failed in achieving it, London tried an alternative in taking over Macao in

1802 and 1808, attempts that were frustrated by the Sino-Portuguese opposition.
Through all this London became aware of the Chinese sensitivity to territorial

integrity and virtually dropped the demand for foothold in its dealings with
China in order to avoid Chinese annoyance, and disruption of the British trade
This shows that the foothold issue was no longer a major tension area and that
the Canton restrictions were not a major obstacle in trade relations between
the two countries.

Was the Opium War a trade war? The two important scholars who read "Opium"
as "trade" are Michael Greenberg, author of British Trade and the Opening of
 -41-

China, 1800-42 (Cambridge University, 1951) and Hsin-pao Chang, author of Commis-
sioner Lin and the Opium War (Harvard, 1964). Chang's opinion is typical, attri-
buting the "inevitable" clash to the basic conflict between "the British com-

mercial expansion" and the Chinese "containment" of it. Opium was a "vehicle"
of the "vital force" of British commercial expansion. If it had not been so,
there would still have been war between the two countries caused by such other

vehicles like "rice" or "molasses." Thus, the Opium War was actually an X war,
19
with the algebrai. symbol standing for any commodity.
It is not difficult to prove that the British commercial expansion in China

was never contained at any stage by the Chinese government. In the first quarter

century of the Canton trade period (1760-1784) the average bilateral trade was
2021
619,876 per annum, This increased to fc2,231,369 in 1815, and to over
22
three million pounds a year on an average during 1817-1835. British export of

Merchandise to China increased from i.60,019 (1760), to £>925,575 (1800), and to

23
Bl, 326,388 (1836) Much more substantial was the British import of Chinese

tea which increased from 2,911,231 lbs. (1761 1 to 8,961,687 lbs ( 1 T> ? ? , to

11,423,896 lbs. (1781! to 22,183,204 lbs. (17911, to 29,804, M9 lbs (1801),

24
to 12,856,997 lbs (1821) and to 48,520,508 lbs (1836)

But the spectacular expansion of trade was in the Britain-China-India trade

triangle in the last two decades of the Canton trade period. The trade triangle

was formed by the following staples- British woolens for China, Chinese tea
for Britain and India, Indian cotton for China, and Indian opium for China.

Below is a quantitative survey of the staples-

 -42-
Value in Spanish $
British Chinese Indian Indian
Woolens Tea Cotton Opium
Periods
Value Value % Value Value

1817-1820 11,27213.1 28,65433.4 22,82826.5 23,17527.0

1821-1825 13,43711.0 44,34536.3 23,53119.3 40,75733.4
1826-1830 12,8758.9 44,81531.1 29,31520.3 57,09639.'
1831-1835 10,8707.0 50,60932.3 32,83421.0 62,15139 ¦·

Sources : Morse: III, IV, passim; Chang, pp. 226-7.

Only woolens represented the "vital force" of Britain's industrial-commer-

cial expansion which Hsin-pao Chang considers irresistible. That the woolen

trade in China began to decline after the middle of the 1820' s cannot be attri-

buted to the non-opening of northern ports in China. The ups and downs of
British woolens in China were closely connected with the rise and fall of the
Devonshire interests in Britain's China trade. Under the dominating influence

of brothers John and Francis Baring, the East India Company went to the extent of

suffering heavy losses to barter long ells for tea to prolong the survival of
25
Devonshire's pre-Industrial Revolution worsted industry. Such patronage col-

lapsed with the conclusion of East India Company's China trade monopoly in 1833.
Whereas more than 200,000 pieces of long ells used to reach the Chinese buyers
in the hey-day of British trade in woolens in China during the 1820's, its sale
in China reached a new low of only 50,000 pieces in 1837, 1839, 1841 and 1842.
The quantitative expansion of Britain's import of Chinese tea defies the
logic of Industrial-Revolution-made-British-commercial-expansion-in-China-
inevitable. But the stable weightage of tea in the chart above provides a clue
to the mystery of British obsession with the ever-expanding import-oriented China
trade. The "vital force" of this expansion was generated by the last two staples,
i.e. Indian cotton and Indian opium, particularly the latter. The crux of the
question lies in the fact that the entire trade triangle was essentially a form
 -43-

of remittance of the "surplus" Indian revenue to Britain via China. Opium was a
27
systematically-devised funnel of this surplus revenue. By just depriving

Bengal several tens of thousands of bighas of fertile land for the cultivation

of poppy, the East India Company reaped a revenue of several tens of lakhs of
rupees a yeai 52 lakhs in 1801-1810, 74 iakhs in 1811-1820, "? lakhs in 1821-
28
1830 and 1 crore 4 i lakhs in 1831-1840.

The Canton System with its loopholes allowed for this incredible growth of
Indian opium trade in China. The hong merchants, who were few in number but

shared the monopoly rights over some of the world's largest international trans-

actions, could not surmount the difficulties of finding ready cash to support

their huge and complex trading operations (bringing large quantities of teas
from distant hills on human and animal backs and then to load them onto British

and other foreign ships on schedule) , in addition to satisfying the Manchu gov-

ernment's demands for tax remittance and innumerable compulsory "donations."

In the absence of modern banking and credit institutions, the hong merchants

were driven to surviving on East India Company's tea advances and on the usury

of British traders. The first made them divide their loyalty, turning them into

facilitators between British-Indian opium traders and Chinese smugglers, a tra-

vesty of the role which the Chinese government had assigned them; the second
made them the prey of British loan-sharks, creating a huge debt to private Bri-
tish traders which was ultimately settled in the Treaty of Nanking.

The issue of debt settlement, however, was not the one that ignited the

war. Although it had been an issue as long-standing as the Canton trade period,
the British government showed little sympathy for the loan-sharks during the pre-

war years. When hard-pressed by petitions to liquidate the debts, Henry Dundas,
in his instructions to the ambassador-designate, Lt. Col. Cathcart, on the eve
of the latter' s departure for China, tacitly agreed that "the debts were con-
29
tracted directly against the Laws and authority of the Chinese Government."
 -44-

A crucial factor which often escapes the attention of Opium War scholars

is the fact that instead of the very unstable and unsatisfactory state-to-state

relations between China and Britain, and despite loud protests of the British

hawks that the Chinese insolence had gone beyond British capacity of stomaching

insults, London's China policy was well summed up by Sir James Graham, First

Lord of British Navy (1830-4) in these words:

Our grand object is to keep peace, and... by a plastic adaptation

of our manners to those of the Chinese to extend our influence
in China with the view of extending our commercial relations. ^l
Empirical evidence bears out the fact that not only Britain was satisfied with

her pre-war China trade, but that this trade had provided a tensile strength to

neutralize the antagonistic forces in all the tension areas excepting the last,

i.e. the British opium trade offensive against China and the increasing weight

of the Chinese protest against it.

Hsin-pao Chang, in advancing the X-war theory, underplays all that his pains-
taking research has succeeded in demonstrating: the antagonistic Sino-British
contradiction was indeed caused by the opium trade. He has clearly shown that
when the Chinese had exhausted their tolerance towards the opium evil, they
launched an anti-Opium War in 1839, with Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu confining and

deporting British opium traders; destroying three million pounds of opium, most
of which was British property,- and imposing a penalty-bond on British traders.

The consequence of this "war" was the total collapse of the opium trade, which
in turn threatened to deprive the British of the valuable instrument in creating
and remitting "surplus" Indian revenues for Britain as well as offsetting the

multiple advantages of the China trade. In response to this anti-Opium War, the
British government decided in 1840 (not in 1839) to wage an anti-anti-opium war
which fulfilled its aims in 1842. The two negative prefixes cancel each other
out and the Sino-British conflict in 1840-2 becomes, by all means, an Opium War.
 -45-
FOOTNOTES

1.Li Chien-nung ¿G- £? J? Chung-Kuo Chin-pai-nien cheng-chih shih

^ Ü3 "fr "S" -^f" JJC -" & £. (Taipei, 3rd ed. 1962), "translated
and edited" by Ssu-yu Teng and Jeremy Ingalls, The Political History of
China, 1840-1928. Princeton. D. Van Nostrana Co., Inc., 1956

2.John Quincy Adams Memoirs, II, 30 and Martin's The Awakening of China
(London, 1907), p. 155 respectively.

3 See Fairbank, ed. The Chinese World Order (Harvard, 1968); Mancali:
"The Persistence of Tradition in Chinese Foreign Policy," Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 349 (Sept., 1963),
pp. 14-26; Cranmer-Byng, ed. An Embassy to China. Lord Macartney's
Journal, 1793-1794 (Longmans, 1962), Introduction: idem: "The Chinese
Attitude towards External Relations," International Journal, XXI :1 (Winter,
1955-6): 57-77; idem: "The Chinese View of Their Place in the World," The
China Quarterly, No. 53 (Jan. /March 1973), pp. 67-79.

4.Teng and Ingalls: p. 43.

5.Fairbank: Chinese World Order , p. 2.
6.For more discussions of the meanings behind Chung-Kuo and t' ien-hsia see
Tan Chung: "On Sinocentrism: A Critique," China Report, IX:5 (Sept. -Oct.,
1973) : 43-50

7.Fairbank: Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of Treaty
Ports, L842-1854 (Harvard, 1964), p. 9.

8.See Macartney's journal ed by Cranmer-Byng, pp. 203-4.

9.Ibid., p. 234.
10.H. B. Morse: The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China
(Oxford, 1926) , IV. 152

11.See Tan Chung: lo£. cit.. IX:6 (Nov. -Dec. 1973): 36.
12.Shu-ching -§?- ¿t9-. Ch. 13.
13.Cranmer-Byng: Embassy, p. 61.

14. Ku-chin t'u-shu chi-ch'eng -t /--^ iil -ï" {I p&(reprint, Taipei.

Î964T7"viîT
1964) , vol. 6T7.~¿~
677, p. W.---
38. V * *) 9 <' ^
15 M. E. Wilbur: The East India Company and the British Empire in the Far
East (Stanford University, 1945) , p. 318.

16 . Chiù t'ang-shu ft fe -J" , Chuan 89 .

 -46-

17.As a modern English scholar points out that while the Chinese emperor per-
sonally scrutinized every case of death sentence before its execution, a
poor Englishman in the 19th century could be put to death for stealing
five shillings while his rich compatriots evaded punishment even after com-
mitting murders. See Austin Coates: Prelude to Hong Kong (London, 1966),
p. 67-9.

18.The Killer of human life should be punished to death disregarding the in-
tentions of killing.

19.Chang: p. 15.

20.Calculation based on statistics in the Irish University British Parliamen-

tary Papers (Dublin, 1971), vol. 40, p. 20; Pritchard, p. 39.

21.Morse: III, 226-7.

22.Ibid., Ill, IV, passim; Chang: pp. 225-8; Irish University Parliamentary
Papers (IUPP), vol. 40, p. 186, 281.

23.IUPP, vol. 40, p. 20, 281.

24.Ibid. , vol. 37, App. p. 88; vol. 40, p. 296; E. B. Schumpeter: English
Overseas Trade Statistics, 1697-1808 (Oxford, 1960) passim.

25.W. G. Hosking: Industry, Trade and People in Exeter, 1688-1800 (Manchester,

1935) . p. 85; Morse: passim.

26.Irish University Parliamentary Papers, vol. 38, p. 146, 147.

27.See Tan Chung: "The Britain-China-India Trade Triangle (1771-1840) ,"

Indian Economic and Social History Review, XI: 4 (Dec, 1974).

28.Bengal Commercial Reports, Vols. 30-52. 1 lakh = 100,000; 1 crore = 100

lakhs .

29.Morse: II, 243.

30."The Commission of one twentieth part of [insulti by any other nation would
have carried fire and sword through its provinces," said Bengal Commercial
Reports , Vol. 31.

31.Cited in Edgar Holt: Opium Wars in China (London, 1964), pp. 47-8.