Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
pirate. When the British protested the boarding, the Chinese coolly
informed them that this was none of their affair: the ship was owned
by Chinese and was boarded by Chinese in Chinese waters. The ship's
flag was all that mattered to the British, and in response they shelled
Canton for five days in late October. After this the British sent Lord
Elgin (who had been Governor-General of Canada from 1847 to 1854)
at the head of another expeditionary force, this time joined by the
French, to chastise the Chinese. In December 1857, marines under
Elgin's command stormed Canton, captured the defiant and xenopho-
bic governor-general who resided there, and carried him away in cap-
tivity to British India. Elgin's force then sailed northward to Tianjin in
early 1858 and menaced the city. The terrified Qing government sent
negotiators to deal with the British, and Elgin bullied them into sign-
ing the Treaty of Tientsin on June 26, 1858. The treaty provided for res-
idential British diplomacy in Beijing, the opening of several new ports,
indemnities for Britain and France, and unrestricted travel through all
parts of China for all foreigners, including Protestant and Catholic
missionaries. (Before the treaty, missionaries and other foreigners had
been allowed only in the treaty ports.)
But the fighting was not over yet. InMarch 1859 the Qing government
offered minimal resistance when the British ambassador attempted to
travel to Beijing to take up his post there. This provoked Britain into dis-
patching another expeditionary force against China, once again led by
Lord Elgin. This time British and French ground troops made it all the
way into Beijing, and eventually they burned the Manchu emperor's
Summer Palace (Yuanming Yuan) to the ground. This was the first time
a modern imperialist power had ever stormed into a Chinese capital,
and tales of it still elicit Chinese indignation. (The site of the ruins of
the Summer Palace is preserved today as a hallowed, nationalistic
ground for the Chinese, much as the hulk of the U.S.S. Arizona,lying
at the bottom of Pearl Harbor and marked with a monument, is for
Americans.) On October 24, 1860, Lord Elgin dictated to the Chinese
the Convention of Peking, which allowed the British once and for all
to station residential diplomats in Beijing. Other provisions included
more indemnities, the cession to Britain of the Kowloon Peninsula
opposite the island of Hong Kong, and the right of French Catholic
missionaries to own property in the Chinese hinterland.
THE TAIPING REBELLION
If the intrusion of the British and other Westerners was China's great
external calamity of the nineteenth century, by far its most disastrous
