Restless Empire by Odd Westad Read Free Book Online Page A

trade concessions. When the Qing Court resisted, British and French troops landed at ports in the north and moved toward Beijing. Initiallybeaten back, the attacks were reinforced in 1860. At the western edges of Beijing, in a place called Baliqiao (Eight Mile Bridge), the Qing’s Mongol cavalry made its last stand. It was destroyed by French artillery, which it confronted head-on. The Qing army may have lost 5,000 men, but there were considerable losses on the Western side too. Prisoners on both sides were killed, as were a large number of Chinese civilians who happened to get in the way of the Western advance. 14
    After occupying Beijing, the British and French generals decided to burn Yuanmingyuan, the Gardens of Eternal Brightness that the Qianlong emperor had built at the height of the Qing empire. The hundreds of palace buildings—art pavilions, pagodas, temples, and libraries—burned for several days, while soldiers and officers tried to get away with as much plunder as they could. A French soldier wrote: “I was dumbfounded, stunned, bewildered by what I had seen, and suddenly Thousand and One Nights seem perfectly believable to me. I have walked for more than two days over more than 30 million worth of silks, jewels, porcelain, bronzes, sculptures, [and] treasures! I do not think we have seen anything like it since the sack of Rome by the barbarians.” 15

CHAPTER 2
IMPERIALISMS
    F OR THREE GENERATIONS FOLLOWING the Qing’s defeat by Britain in the war of 1839–1842, imperialism and incursions by other states defined the framework for China’s relations with the rest of the world. For some Chinese, the economic and social orders created by the overseas presence offered new opportunities for trade, travel, and social advancement. As we shall see, many of the networks—commercial and otherwise—that operated within the Western imperial structures were Chinese in origin and in operation. For the Confucian elite, however, the reach of foreign empires into East Asia was reason for despair. Westerners’ contempt for Chinese tradition and their attacks on the Chinese state were appalling and humiliating. While it took another hundred years or so—right up to the end of the twentieth century—for values, products, and forms of exchange created by the encounter with the West to penetrate rural China, the stage was set for a transformation in ideas and politics that the country had not seen since the Buddhist revolution of the sixth century and the Qing revolution of the seventeenth respectively. And the first act within the new drama was the confrontation between the Qing empire and its imperial opponents, now established within the heart of Chinese territory.
    The outcome of the confrontation between China and foreign empires was in no way a given in the mid-nineteenth century. There is reason to believe that if it had not been for the internal challenges that theempire faced, it could have held its own for a longer time against its foreign challengers. As it were, the great rebellions had reduced the Qing to its lowest point ever, and the foreign empires recognized its weakness. Many Westerners were predicting the immediate collapse of the Chinese state, either through internal rebellions or external pressures. The fate of the Ottoman empire was the parallel often used, meaning the gradual breaking away of smaller parts of the whole until some form of “core only” remained.
    But in the 1870s and 1880s, the Qing made a remarkable comeback. It was almost as if the elites within the empire had taken a hard look at their culture and decided to come out in its defense. Their Self-strengthening Movement was based on the idea that Western form—in defense and science, especially—could be combined with Chinese essence, meaning Confucianism. China could use Western weapons and technology to defend itself, but without losing its soul: Chinese culture would remain the unwobbling pivot of the empire. It is hard to say