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Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age - Softcover

Platt, Stephen R.

 
9780345803023: Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345803027 ISBN 13: 9780345803023
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War.
 
As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STEPHEN R. PLATT is a professor of Chinese history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His last book, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, was a Washington Post Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and won the Cundill History Prize. Platt lives with his wife and children in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Chapter 1

A Time of Wonder

On the morning of September 26, 1792, several days of cold English rain came to an end, a light wind picked up from the north, and HMS Lion, a sixty-­four-­gun ship of the line, unfurled its sails and weighed anchor to depart the harbor at Spithead. It was a time of peace for Great Britain, and the First Lord of the Admiralty felt he could spare the vessel for a two-­year voyage to China to ensure that Lord Macartney, the ambassador who sailed on board, would arrive at the court of the Chinese emperor in a suitably impressive fashion. The Lion carried four hundred passengers and crew, and was accompanied for its journey by the Hindostan, a fifty-­six-­gun East Indiaman (a merchant ship of the East India Company’s fleet, armed as well as many a naval man-­of-­war), which carried the members of Macartney’s large entourage who couldn’t fit as passengers on the Lion, as well as most of the six hundred crates and packages of cargo that he was bringing to China as gifts for the emperor. If the voyage should meet with success, Macartney would be the first ambassador from Great Britain ever to pay his respects in China; his lone would-­be predecessor, a Lieutenant Colonel Charles Cathcart, had sailed from England five years earlier but died at sea on the long outbound journey.

Macartney had had a long if somewhat rocky career as a diplomat. A courtly and determined man with a square jaw and sharp eyes, he had been knighted at age twenty-­seven and in his younger years served as an envoy to Russia, where he would have been made ambassador if he hadn’t managed to seduce not one but two women of Empress Catherine’s court while in the country. By the time of the embassy to China he was middle-­aged and a bit on the portly side, but still considered a fine example of British manhood. Since Russia, he had served as governor of Grenada and spent a contentious term as governor of Madras. At the end of his service in Madras he was offered, but declined, the governor-­generalship in Bengal. Macartney was proud and optimistic, and imagined himself fully prepared to accommodate the strange customs and practices of the country to which the king now sent him.

In excited anticipation of the Oriental splendor of the Chinese court—­at least as he had read about it in fanciful accounts and extrapolated from his experiences in India—­Macartney had prepared the most colorful and grandiose outfit he could muster: “a suit of spotted mulberry velvet,” as his valet described it, “with a diamond star, and his ribbon; over which he wore the full habit of the order of the Bath, with the hat, and plume of feathers, which form a part of it.”  Dressed up like a peacock, he felt certain to make a grand impression in a country that he, and most of his entourage, to say nothing of his countrymen, had only ever encountered in their imaginations.

Macartney’s mission was a joint venture of the British government and the East India Company, the latter of which bore its costs. Its primary goal was the expansion of British trade into Chinese ports north of Canton—­the same request James Flint had brought to the emperor more than thirty years earlier, with such discouraging results (though some, including Macartney himself, believed that if Britain had sent a royal ambassador to Beijing back in 1759, rather than a mere interpreter, things might have gone differently). Nevertheless, the situation for British traders in China had improved considerably in the intervening years. By 1792, the East India Company’s share of the Canton trade had grown to eclipse that of all of its continental rivals. The young United States had sent its first trading ship to Canton in 1784, almost immediately upon achieving independence, but compared to the mighty fleet of the East India Company, which sent six ships to Canton for every one of theirs, the upstart Americans still posed no competition worth speaking of.

Best of all for the East India Company, in 1784 the British government had dramatically lowered its tariff on tea imports to combat smuggling from Europe, reducing the tax from upwards of 100 percent to a flat 12.5 percent across the board, so profits were pouring in. The Company’s tea imports had tripled, and British cotton textiles were selling well to Chinese merchants in exchange. The London Times in 1791 noted hopefully that the China trade was “in the most flourishing state. All English Manufactures find a ready sale there; and the Chinese begin to think that our cottons are superior to their own.”  Thus the Company itself was actually quite lukewarm about the embassy. Its directors were comfortable in their supremacy, suitably rich, and deeply aware of precedent (or rather the lack thereof) in their direct relations with the Chinese throne. They worried that any new requests from Britain might be taken as impertinence, offending the emperor and damaging rather than advancing their trade in Canton. But industrialists in northern England were demanding expanded markets for their goods, so an optimistic home secretary made sure that the mission went forward against the Company’s misgivings.

The sailing routes from England to Macao and Canton in south China were well known thanks to a long history of direct trade, but the Lion’s planned course beyond Canton, up the coast of China and through the Yellow Sea to Beijing, was as yet uncharted by European sailors. So to command the Lion, Macartney chose a Royal Navy captain, Sir Erasmus Gower, who had been around the world twice and was experienced at the careful business of navigating large ships through unknown waters. No expense was spared; the government gave Gower the freedom to choose all of his own officers, of whom he brought an outsized complement of what one member of the embassy proudly described as “young gentlemen, of the most respected families, glowing with all the ardour and enterprise of youth.” 

Dangers aside, the unknown nature of the waters through which they were planning to sail was one of the main attractions of the voyage, an ancillary goal of which was to gather naval intelligence. The Yellow Sea was bordered by both the Qing Empire and Korea, and “no fairer occasion,” one passenger noted, “could offer for penetrating into it, and adding so much to marine knowledge, without creating suspicion or giving offence to the court of Beijing.”  After all, there was no way for Macartney to get to Beijing without sailing through that unknown sea, unless he were somehow to disembark in Canton and travel a thousand miles overland to the capital with his entire retinue and many tons of fragile baggage. If nothing else, a basic chart of the coastline would open the way for other British ships in the future, of which they hoped there would be many.

The essential strategy of Macartney’s mission was reflected in the presents that crowded the hold of the Hindostan. Some were industrial goods—­textiles and manufactures—­that the British hoped Chinese traders might be induced to purchase, thus opening new avenues of commerce. Even more important, though, were the scientific and mechanical gifts, which represented the most recent technological developments in Europe. The British assumed that these were unknown in China, and since the public at home viewed them with wonder there was no reason to think they would amaze and delight the Chinese any less. Macartney, and the British government, hoped that the mission’s technical marvels (to say nothing of the combined 120 guns of the Lion and Hindostan) would gently impress upon the emperor of China the power of British civilization and, consequent to...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345803027
ISBN 13 
9780345803023
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
592
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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Osnabrück
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Deutschland

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