In June 1839, on the shore at Humen near Canton, workers dug trenches, filled them with water, salt and lime, and dissolved more than 1,000 tons of opium before flushing it out to sea. The official in charge, Lin Zexu, destroyed seized foreign opium at Humen, and he composed a prayer apologizing to the spirits of the sea for the pollution. Within a year Britain and China were at war.

Tea, silver and opium

From 1757 the Qing ran the Canton system: Western trade was limited to Canton (Guangzhou) and licensed Chinese merchants, the Cohong. Britain bought enormous quantities of tea but had little that China wanted, so it paid in silver. Opium grown in British-ruled India offered a way to pay for tea without shipping silver. The East India Company sold it at auction in Calcutta to private traders, who smuggled it into China. Imports rose from about 4,000 chests a year around 1800 to some 40,000 by the late 1830s, silver began flowing out of China, and addiction spread. Lin Zexu was sent to stop the trade, and he wrote to Queen Victoria asking how Britain could sell to others a drug he believed it forbade at home.

The Opium Wars and the treaties

Britain sent a fleet. Not every Briton approved. In 1840 the young William Gladstone told Parliament: "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know." British steamships and modern guns overwhelmed Qing forces. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 ceded Hong Kong Island and opened five ports to British trade, and required a large indemnity. Supplementary agreements gave British subjects extraterritoriality, meaning they were tried under their own law, and other powers won the same terms. Chinese later called these the unequal treaties.

A Second Opium War (1856 to 1860) opened more ports, legalized the opium trade and allowed foreign envoys to live in Beijing. In 1860 British and French troops looted and burned the Old Summer Palace outside the capital.

The Taiping Rebellion

The worst disaster was internal. Hong Xiuquan, a village teacher from near Canton, failed the provincial examination several times. After reading a Christian pamphlet he came to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus, sent to rid China of demons, by which he meant the Manchus and the old idols. His Taiping Heavenly Kingdom drew the poor and dispossessed, promised land held in common, and banned footbinding, opium and alcohol. In 1853 it took Nanjing and made it the capital. The war lasted until 1864 and is commonly estimated to have killed 20 to 30 million people, though such figures are very uncertain.

The court's own forces failed. The rebellion was crushed by regional armies raised by gentry officials such as Zeng Guofan, with help from a Western-officered force. Victory came at a price: power shifted toward provincial leaders with their own troops.

Self-strengthening and defeat

Officials such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang led the Self-Strengthening Movement, building arsenals, shipyards and translation schools while keeping the old order of government intact. The limits of this approach showed in 1895, when Japan defeated China and took Taiwan. In 1898 the young Guangxu emperor launched the Hundred Days' Reform, decreeing changes to schools, the army and the examinations. It ended when the Empress Dowager Cixi seized power in a coup, put the emperor under house arrest and executed six reformers.

In 1900 the Boxers, a peasant movement that attacked missionaries and Chinese Christians, besieged the foreign legations in Beijing with court support. An eight-nation force took the capital, and the settlement imposed a crushing indemnity. Afterward the court tried serious reforms: it abolished the examinations, built new schools and promised a constitution. It was too late. On 10 October 1911 an army mutiny at Wuchang set off revolts across the provinces. Sun Yat-sen became provisional president of a new republic, and on 12 February 1912 the boy emperor Puyi abdicated, ending more than two thousand years of imperial rule.

Worked example: whose crisis?

Historians explain the Qing collapse in two broad ways. One stresses foreign pressure: wars, treaties and indemnities drained the state and humiliated it. Another, associated with Philip Kuhn and others, stresses internal strains: a population that had doubled under a government that had not grown, an economy squeezed as silver flowed out, rebellions, and the rise of armed provincial elites. Test the two against the Taiping. It began with a failed examination candidate reading a missionary tract, so foreign influence played a part, yet its recruits were driven by poverty and land hunger that predated the Opium War. Most historians now combine the explanations. The lesson for any citizen is to be wary of a story with a single villain. The same nineteenth-century disaster can be told as imperialism or as misgovernment, and the evidence supports both. Holding two true causes in mind at once is harder than blaming one, and it is usually closer to the truth.