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Documentary, BBC Two - The Story of China 5 The Last Empire - 影片
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00:00In 1644, Ming Dynasty China, the greatest civilisation in the world, went through a devastating foreign conquest.
00:21The Chinese people were left haunted by dreams of lost peace and visions of war.
00:30The invaders were Manchus from the north, people the Chinese saw as barbarians.
00:38The Ming Emperor committed suicide and the Manchu armies swept south.
00:45When the city of Yangzhou resisted, it was plundered and burned in a ten-day reign of terror.
00:53300,000 people died.
01:00Afterwards, the writer Zhang Dai visited the West Lake in Hangzhou, once China's paradise on Earth.
01:10As he sailed along the shore, he was shocked by the aftermath of the fighting.
01:20I thought I was in a nightmare, he said. The loss seemed irretrievable.
01:25But China had been through such cataclysms before, and would go through them again.
01:32And being a great and ancient civilisation, the people had the inner resources to rebuild.
01:39And that's what happened next. The Manchus were foreigners, non-Chinese, but it was they who would institute the next rebuilding and becoming Chinese in the process.
01:55And they were the last imperial dynasty of China, the Qing.
02:00And they were the last imperial dynasty.
02:03They were the last imperial dynasty of China which was the same.
02:05And they were the last imperial dynasty, the Qing.
02:08The Qing.
02:23So China's last empire was forged in war.
02:42The Manchu conquest took 30 years.
02:46It climaxed in the 1670s in a savage struggle in the south
02:51when three great provinces rose against the Manchus
02:54and their teenage emperor, Kangxi.
03:01The war lasted eight years,
03:03and by the end the Qing government had half a million troops
03:07fighting in these wild mountains of the southwest.
03:14At that moment China could have fallen apart, but it didn't.
03:18The war was the making of Kangxi,
03:22and when it ended in 1681, he was 27,
03:26and he would become the longest ruling
03:28and some would say the greatest of all the Chinese emperors.
03:41For all its glories, the Ming had ended as a decadent, broken empire.
03:46Now the foreign Manchus set out to make sure
03:54that the mistakes they had made were not repeated,
03:57that the new rulers of China should be men
04:01with a sober sense of public duty,
04:04and Kangxi, the upright one, was such a man.
04:07Kangxi was the first of three great Qing emperors,
04:24father, son and grandson, who ruled for 133 years.
04:29They built China's largest empire
04:31and created the essential shape of China today.
04:37You get an idea of the immense size of the Qing empire
04:40when you fly out from Beijing to Xinjiang in the far west.
04:45It takes seven hours.
04:49By road, it's 2,700 miles from the capital to Kashgar.
04:54Under the Qing, China entered a new phase of its history,
05:06for they defined China not as an exclusively Han civilization,
05:10but as a great multi-ethnic empire.
05:13So for the first time since the Tang Dynasty,
05:18China ruled over the Central Asian peoples of Xinjiang.
05:22among them were the Wiikos.
05:33Hello.
05:34This is my wife, and this is my mother-in-law.
05:39Very nice to meet you. Thank you.
05:41So this is my family.
05:47Hello. Thank you so much.
05:50That's lovely. Thank you.
05:51Before the Qing Dynasty,
05:53this area was controlled by the Djungar Mongols,
05:57you know, the descendants of Chinggis Khan.
06:00The leader of the Djungar Mongols,
06:02he invaded the western territory of the Qing Dynasty,
06:06and so the emperor of the Qing Dynasty, the Kangxi,
06:09he led a big army by himself,
06:13and he had waged two big wars with the Djungar Mongols,
06:15and finally defeated them and kicked them out of this region and took this region.
06:21Under the Qing, the Kangxi emperor, it almost doubles the size of China, doesn't it?
06:29Yes, yes, yes.
06:30It's a huge, huge area in this part.
06:32So what happens here in Tufan, then?
06:34The government built new towns just next to the original town.
06:39So in many cities in Xinjiang, even now, we have an old town and a new town.
06:45The old town was also called Uyghur town or Hui town, Hui, like Muslim, or yes.
06:52And the new town was named Man Town or Han Town, like Han Cheng or Man Cheng, by Chinese name.
06:59Many different races meet in this point in China, don't they?
07:02Many different histories, I suppose.
07:11So the Silk Road became again an axis of world history,
07:16linking the great Asian land empires of Iran and Russia,
07:20Mughal India and Qing China.
07:23Watch, watch!
07:24And today, with China's new Silk Road,
07:30Central Asia is once more becoming a crossroads of commerce and peoples.
07:39If you see the different hats, you can buy the pattern or colour,
07:43the flowers on the hat, you can tell where they are from.
07:47Turpan or Hu-chan or Kashgar or Ili.
07:50So each different places, they have a different pattern for the hats.
07:53All the Silk Road places, Mothan, Turpan, have different hats, yeah.
08:00The Qing initially adopted a light touch towards their ethnic minorities,
08:05leaving their local leaders in place.
08:08They also allowed religious autonomy,
08:11and Muslim culture soon gained a new vitality in Chinese civilisation.
08:15In the old Muslim communities of China, founded back in the Tang,
08:27Chinese Muslim scholars wrote books showing how loyalty to Islam
08:31and to the mandate of heaven went hand in hand.
08:34Walking through the mosque, you see all these inscriptions,
08:41not only in Chinese, but in Arabic and in Farsi, Persian.
08:45They welcomed outsiders for their food and their luxuries,
08:52their money, their ideas and their expertise.
08:55You may think of China in its history as being an inward-looking civilisation,
09:00but most of the time it wasn't like that at all.
09:02This was a rich age for Chinese Muslim philosophy with debates about the role of women.
09:14And one fascinating and surprising by-product of the age
09:17is women's mosques with women imams.
09:21There are ten small women's mosques here in Kaifeng,
09:46part of the changing scene of Chinese Islam from the late 1600s.
09:51I have travelled many places in the world
09:56and filmed with Muslim communities in many different countries,
09:59but I have never seen women's mosques like this.
10:04Is this a special Chinese tradition or a special Kaifeng tradition?
10:09New Qingen寺 or New Musulian?
10:11So this is a Kaifeng or a Chinese tradition?
10:16Chinese?
10:17Chinese?
10:18Yes.
10:19It's a special Chinese tradition.
10:20So here, even today, you can see the results of the religious policies of the Manchus.
10:27Tibet, too, long and independent kingdom, was freed from the rule of the Dzungar Mongols.
10:34Kangxi restored the Dalai Lama and brought Tibet into the Qing Empire as a Chinese protectorate.
10:41The Qing rulers built a huge replica of the Qing rulers built a huge replica of the Patala in Lhasa back home.
10:48The Qing rulers built a huge replica of the Patala in Lhasa back home.
10:56Fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism they had private chapels in their own palaces.
11:03For Tibet, it was a time when Chinese rule promoted Tibetan culture.
11:10Tibet, it was a time when Chinese rule promoted Tibetan culture.
11:17So China's new expanded frontiers were secured.
11:24And at home, the Manchus were keen to be seen to rule in the Chinese tradition.
11:31Before they even come in, they learned the Chinese way of governing.
11:38Once they come in, they learn the Chinese way of governing.
11:41Once they come in, they learn the Chinese way of governing.
11:46Once they come in, they put up a face to represent that they are authentic Chinese rulers.
12:02The Confucius rulers, the classical Confucian education, civil service, discrimination,
12:09these are all the things they pay a lot of attention to.
12:12To reinforce their right to rule, the Manchus returned to the roots,
12:24giving new life to the old rituals of the Chinese state.
12:33In one ceremony, the Manchu emperor joined hands with a poor Chinese peasant.
12:40We're on a platform here, and the platform looked out onto a field.
12:45And the field was where the sports ground is there.
12:49Every year, on the auspicious day in the second month of spring,
12:55the emperor ploughed eight furrows of this field with a great yellow plough.
13:01The minister of finance had the goad prodding the oxen, and the chief prefect sowed the seed.
13:16It was to show solidarity with the workers,
13:21to show that agriculture was the very basis of the Chinese state,
13:25and to revere the very first ancestor who invented agriculture.
13:32To get his message across, Kangxi issued 16 maxims, guidelines for the people,
13:38which were posted in every town and village.
13:46They were read out twice a month, a custom which lasted until the 20th century.
13:51On great tours of the south, Kangxi talked to the people and listened to their grievances.
14:09He was an autocrat, but stories about his common touch,
14:14and that of his grandson, Qianlong, became legend among the Chinese people.
14:20Ancatelong Huang, as the emperor of the Irish,
14:23the king of the Irish,
14:24he was посмотреть the whole man's life.
14:25The king of the Irish, Grand Thea Queen,
14:26are the king of the Irish.
14:27And the poor father's lion,
14:29he gained a whole life.
14:30The father of the Irish and mayor were the king of the Irish.
14:32He also gained his father's son and his father's son.
14:34The king of the Irish and mayor was the king of the Irish too.
14:36He was the king of the Irish and a poor son.
14:39He recovered his dad's father,
14:41and he had the firstborn in the Irish country,
14:42and he was the king of the Irish.
14:45F Tripoli.
14:47He started his father's father.
14:49.
15:12And as for the daily business of ruling, wrote Kangxi,
15:15that takes a lot of energy.
15:17I once handled 500 documents in a single day.
15:22Sometimes I don't go to bed till after midnight.
15:29Labelled in Chinese and Manchu in the Imperial Archive,
15:32their dispatch boxes are empty now,
15:35but still scented with the camphor that kept insects from the paper.
15:42Isn't that great? You can still smell it after all these centuries.
15:47The smell of history.
15:52The other great task Kangxi set himself was cultural.
15:57Well, I think Kangxi, as a Manchu emperor,
16:00knew very well that he couldn't actually cope with the whole of China
16:03that he had conquered and which he was going to rule
16:06without the Chinese help.
16:08So he mounted a charm offensive to a lot of the intellectuals
16:13who were loyal to the previous dynasty.
16:16He worked hard by getting these people to get involved
16:20in the editing of so much of Chinese works, like this one,
16:25which is the Quan Tang Shi, the complete Tang poems.
16:29And, my goodness me, you can see there is quite a lot.
16:32How many poems do we know?
16:3448,000 plus.
16:3548,000 plus.
16:37Yeah.
16:38So, it's quite a project.
16:40A hundred woodblock carvers were employed all under the supervision
16:46of a servant, Cao Yin, who was Han Chinese, not Manchu.
16:52Cao Yin was, in theory, a bond servant or a slave of the Manchus.
16:58His family had been captured by the Manchus before they actually took over
17:03the rule of the whole of the Chinese empire.
17:07And, as a slave person, he remained very close to the emperor in his household.
17:19And, not only that, that actually Cao Yin's mother was made one of the nurses for the Kangxi emperor.
17:27And, they also say that it's not proven that Cao Yin may have been one of the people
17:32who was a sort of reader companion to the emperor when he was a small boy.
17:37This sort of very close bond between them went on.
17:47And, apart from making him the titular head of this project, because he was Chinese,
17:53he also made him a kind of spy and to make private reports to the imperial palace alone
18:04of what he saw in the course of his duties.
18:10So, the bondsman, Cao Yin, oversaw the huge printing job.
18:15The collating, cutting, binding and sewing.
18:20He published the complete Tang poems in 1708,
18:24and on the frontispiece was a kind gesture by the emperor to the boy he'd grown up with.
18:30His name on the front page.
18:34Cao Yin wrote back,
18:36Who am I that I should be on this list of names?
18:40I do not know what happiness can ever compare with this.
18:48The great enterprise was done in the very city destroyed by the Manchus in the horrors of 1645.
18:55Yanzhou was rising again with Manchu patronage.
19:02They, I think, have learned the art or the craft of looting China in a Confucius way very well.
19:10So, what you see in Yanzhou is a bit of a snapshot of some of the prosperity
19:15that's coming out of a relatively peaceful and stable period.
19:26If Suzhou was the place to be in the Ming, in the Qing it was Yangzhou.
19:30So, what you see is relatively secure property rights of the land, in a relatively free market.
19:38And commerce was, you know, I wouldn't say protected, but at least in many cases undisturbed.
19:42Visitors here in the 18th century describe it as a fusion of southern elegance and northern vigour.
19:53In its streets you saw wealth and culture all around you.
19:57Like Georgian London it was a trendsetter, a capital of culture.
20:01And as one of China's four ancient cuisines, its cooking was famous too.
20:09As it is today.
20:12Even the fast food.
20:14Just a day for this.
20:16It's so cold, isn't it?
20:21Fantastic. Wonderful.
20:23Situated on the Grand Canal, Yangzhou was a centre of commerce where millions were made through the lucrative salt monopoly.
20:44At the time of the early industrial revolution in Europe, China itself was developing the first shoots of capitalism.
20:53But the Chinese way.
20:54YANGZO LIUANGSHAO
20:59And salt always very important in the story of Yangzhou.
21:07And salt always very important in the story of Yangzhou.
21:12All of these things have a little bit of a connection with yian.
21:15For example, Yangzhou's food,
21:19and the other buildings and furniture,
21:25they have a huge connection with yian.
21:30So Yangzhou's 200 salt merchants
21:33became major players in the economy.
21:38One of them came from a village we've already met in this story,
21:41Tang Yue, home of the Bao family.
21:45Bao Zhe Dao became one of the richest men in China.
21:49Because they make a big business in Yangzhou,
21:52and they're getting richer,
21:54so they have the ability to build this kind of building.
21:57So this is like Grand Bankers today in London
22:00building their mansions with their swimming pools and everything else,
22:03but this is much more ritually-centred and historically-centred.
22:07It's a corporation here.
22:09The three-day party is good for making business,
22:13and they donate the land, they donate money,
22:16they collect the money together,
22:18and exactly the wording is share.
22:22So if you want to know who is the shareholder,
22:24just open the genealogy and see the activity
22:27of who is joining the ritual activity,
22:31so you will know the membership of this corporation.
22:34So in China, the lineage, the family,
22:39is the corporation and the shareholders,
22:41where at this time in London or in the West,
22:45private companies start to be the shareholders.
22:48Back here in his home village,
22:54Bao Zhe Dao is still remembered by his family for his Confucian values.
22:59The Confucian way was against excess.
23:13Be thrifty but don't hoard.
23:16Spend wisely.
23:18That's what he sees with me when you stand.
23:20But I could shove it over and try it out.
23:21If you have a financial service here,
23:22I try to do something."
23:23Still, nothing but regretful for you may
23:31blow the land,
23:33I'll throw it brush as well with needles.
23:35This was a compound-chickening needle.
23:36So наверное it is a compound and fair.
23:39So China thrived again under Manchu rule.
23:44In the 18th century, it had the biggest GDP in the world.
24:09And the Yangzhou merchants made the most of it.
24:15In their gardens, they held cultural gatherings.
24:18Their guests were poets, painters and book collectors.
24:23Looking at it with Western eyes,
24:25you might say this looks very much like an Enlightenment society.
24:30These guys were the equivalent of billionaires today
24:34and they made their wealth on the backs of the poor.
24:38But they were also public-spirited men.
24:42Bao Zhidal had the streets of his part of town repaved.
24:47He established an insurance system for the boatmen
24:50who ran the salt barges.
24:52He built charitable schools for children at the gates of the city
24:57and he ploughed money back into his native village.
25:01He may look very different to us in his great silk-blue gowns
25:07and his long moustaches and pigtails.
25:10But he's the very model of what would later be the Victorian philanthropist.
25:16In the 18th century, China was already developing a civil society.
25:21And in the rich cities of the south, the merchants were also great patrons of opera and drama.
25:35Well, it's a very cold and rainy, snowy day at the end of a New Year's festival.
25:44And we're heading out into the countryside from Yangzhou to see the performance
25:48of the traditional Yangzhou drama by the main acting troupe.
25:53a tradition which has been passed down across all the wars and revolutions
25:58over the last couple of hundred years.
26:03So what show are you doing this afternoon?
26:05It's called Après室子情園
26:12It's a sad story?
26:15Or...
26:16It's now changed.
26:17It's a great movie.
26:19It's the time of a movie.
26:20The viewers don't like to see the movies,
26:24they just like to see the movies.
26:25And then they made the movie into the back of the ending.
26:28It's now this...
26:30It's like this.
26:31In the Qing, travelling companies like this crisscrossed the south, playing in the new
26:45market towns which were springing up all over the countryside, providing entertainment
26:51to the expanding bourgeoisie and to ordinary folk too.
26:57Their shows adapted famous novels, but Qing drama also dealt with history.
27:03The fall of the Ming, the sack of Yangzhou, contemporary themes with many lessons for Chinese
27:09audiences still coming to terms with the Manchu conquest.
27:27Today is my grandma's 90th birthday celebration, so it is a tradition for us to invite every
27:47family member and friends and neighbors to watch opera.
27:58During the ancient time, if you are rich, you have an opera stage in your home, and if you
28:04have any kind of celebration, you will invite this kind of opera team to your home to share
28:09your happiness with everyone.
28:23But such a flourishing culture did not mean freedom.
28:29The Qing state was an autocracy.
28:33Freedom of the system was dangerous.
28:35As in England dramatists were censored, books could be banned and burned.
28:41So as so often in Chinese history, writers and artists learn to speak in code.
28:52Some people only see the surface of things, wrote a Qing philosopher.
28:56They focus on appearances and miss the essence.
29:05But in the human world, and in nature, there are things that cannot be transmitted through
29:11words.
29:14Over a century before the European Expressionists, one group of Yangzhou painters broke with tradition
29:21to try to get beyond the world of appearances.
29:26What's so special about the Yangzhou painters, does your father think?
29:30The colonial people of the society are the main ones.
29:34They are a leader, a leader, a leader, a leader, a leader.
29:40They are not satisfied with the traditional colonial people.
29:48So far away from the conservative culture of the capital, Chinese artists and thinkers were
29:54beginning to explore different pathways to modernity.
30:01Always aware of the watchful eye of the state, they were developing new modes of expression,
30:10challenging the old meanings of history and ethics, and looking for new ways to represent
30:16the inner life.
30:19What one Qing writer called the domain of the demonic and mysterious.
30:28But the 18th century also saw a huge explosion of popular culture, which reached down even
30:35to the illiterate.
30:36Hello.
30:37Hello.
30:38Hello.
30:39Hello.
30:42There used to be three teachings, it was said, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.
31:09But now there's a fourth, popular fiction, and everybody loves it.
31:15This is the water marching.
31:19It's really the Chinese equivalent of Robin Hood, the bunch of good outlaws who live out
31:25on Mount Lian, the Chinese equivalent of Sherwood Forest, there's even a Buddhist monk, kind
31:31of Chinese friar tuck, drinks just as much but a little more violent.
31:43But under the Qing, the water margin and other tales were periodically banned as subversive.
31:51The outlaws' exploits, it was thought, might encourage seditious anti-Manchu sympathies.
32:09By now, Kangxi himself was getting old.
32:18His boyhood friend, the bond servant, Cao Yin, was dead now.
32:23The emperor had cared about him to the end.
32:26You're not well, Kangxi wrote, take this, it's Western medicine, but it really works.
32:32But take care of yourself, take care.
32:40Now in his late 60s, the emperor was conscious of his own mortality too.
32:46When I was young, he wrote, I didn't know what sickness was.
32:49Now I'm getting thinner and weaker.
32:52I have dizzy spells.
32:56Officials can retire, but I can't.
32:58I'm old, but I can't rest for a minute.
33:01If I die without trouble breaking out for China, I will die happy.
33:06Kangxi died in 1722 after a reign of 61 years, longest in Chinese history.
33:24And he left his sons this advice.
33:27The great rulers of the past, he said, followed two guiding principles in governing China.
33:32Number one, have reverence for the laws of heaven,
33:35and number two, have reverence for the ancestors.
33:43Work hard, he said, take care, mix strictness with leniency,
33:50and expedience with principle.
33:53And that way, you'll find a long-term vision for the nation.
33:57And Kangxi did have a vision for the nation.
34:04He was a benevolent dictator.
34:07But the Qing was still an autocratic state,
34:09and imperial favour could vanish overnight.
34:14The new emperor was Kangxi's 43-year-old son, Yongzheng.
34:19Don't think I'm a novice, he said.
34:21I've spent my life in the real world.
34:24There were purges and show trials.
34:26And among those caught in the net were the family of the late bondsman Cao Yin,
34:43their intimacy with Kangxi now forgotten.
34:46Just imagine it, the emperor's troops crashing into the house,
34:51the servants taken away for questioning,
34:55the inventory made of your possessions,
34:57and then the show trial and the inevitable verdict.
35:02And all that was watched, wide-eyed, one imagines,
35:05by Cao Yin's 13-year-old grandson,
35:07who at that moment remembered granddad's favourite old saying,
35:11when the tree falls, the monkeys will be scattered.
35:14The Cao family moved to these alleys in Beijing,
35:18and here, Cao Yin's young grandson,
35:30Cao Xiuqing grew up, a watchful, clever child,
35:41wary of all power, having seen the family crushed by the state.
35:45crushed by the state, and he grew up in the life of the imagination.
35:54He wanted to be a writer, but in Emperor Qianlong's day,
35:57that was fraught with jeopardy.
35:59There were book burnings.
36:00Over 50 writers were executed for criticising the government.
36:06So these lanes around the lake were his haunts.
36:10He didn't have a good degree, so he never got a good job.
36:13He worked for a while in a wine bar, slept in a stable.
36:19He got jobs as a tutor to the children of rich families
36:24in the great mansions the other side of the lake.
36:29Final one, he got sacked for having an affair with the maid.
36:33Never got employed again.
36:35Ended up down and out in North Beijing.
36:43But that bohemian life in these streets gave the young man his own perspective
36:57on the tensions underneath Chinese society.
37:04In the teeming alleys of the capital, there were many kinds of stories.
37:08For a while, he rented a cottage in the hills outside Beijing,
37:11at a peppercorn rent, through a family friend.
37:13And there, an idea began to take shape.
37:16And there, an idea began to take shape.
37:19And there, an idea began to take shape.
37:22The reminders of my poverty were all around me, he said.
37:27The old stove, the hard bed, the thatched roof, the latticed window.
37:31But such things are not necessarily obstacles to the creative illusion.
37:34The old stove, the hard bed, the thatched roof, the latticed window.
37:39An idea began to take shape.
37:45The reminders of my poverty were all around me, he said.
37:50The old stove, the hard bed, the thatched roof, the latticed window.
37:56But such things are not necessarily obstacles to the creative imagination.
38:01In fact, the view from my front door, the landscape, the trees and the autumn leaves, the wind, were positive encouragements to write.
38:18What was to stop me turning the whole thing into a story?
38:23And what a story.
38:32It's nothing less than the great Chinese novel.
38:36A window into the Chinese imagination.
38:40Surreal, poignant, romantic.
38:43This book is written about 250 years ago, right?
38:54But as a person from modern times, I still can feel really related to it.
38:59Because the love and freedom, the eternal topic.
39:05I feel like the main character, Jia Bao Yu, he's a rebel.
39:09He's the hero.
39:10He is not hero.
39:11Kind of hero.
39:11Well, yeah, but he's a rebel.
39:14And I think that's more important than being a hero.
39:19The book tells the tale of a family over four generations, until as granddad Cao Yin had feared, the tree falls and the monkeys are scattered.
39:30Best part of this novel is actually the humanity carrying and universal value inside of this book.
39:37The people inside of this book, they are not afraid to express themselves.
39:41They are brave enough to stand up for love.
39:45They are having this hope.
39:47And Cao Xueqin has this hope for women, for the servant, for everyone who has a dream, who has the chance to love.
39:56He doesn't discriminate them.
39:58He doesn't like thinking the reality is better than the servant.
40:02He thinks everybody is the same.
40:04Everybody has the right to love.
40:06And everybody deserves respect.
40:12Cao Xueqin, the bondsman's grandson, died in 1763, his heart broken by the death of his only son.
40:19His novel was finally printed in 1791, censored, it was rumoured, but brilliantly capturing the glory that was Qing China and the knife edge on which that glory balanced.
40:34When he wrote, in the mid-1700s, China was still the greatest civilisation in the world, and in time, no doubt, would have found its own form of modernity.
40:49Many people think that was the height of the Qing dynasty.
40:53The population has nearly tripled, and the territory doubled.
40:59So, I guess it was at that time, this is maybe the peace before the storm.
41:18It's China! It's China!
41:21But now, China came into contact with a rising maritime power, from a small island 7,000 miles away, off the shore of Europe, the British.
41:32In the story of civilisation, the British couldn't compare with China and its 4,000-year-old tradition.
41:51But they would change the course of Chinese history.
41:54This is the Pearl River, and this is the great city of Guangzhou, what the Europeans call Canton.
42:04And it was here, in the mid-1700s, that the destinies of China and the British began to intertwine.
42:15The British were becoming the great power in India, and opening up a global trading network for the first time in history.
42:24And they wanted to get in on the Chinese market.
42:26They wanted luxuries and silk and textiles, but above all, they wanted tea.
42:35They'd started to drink tea back in the 17th century, paying for it with hard currency, silver.
42:42But that soon became a problem for their balance of payments.
42:45During the course of the 18th century, tea became a British obsession, their national drink.
42:54And by then, they were importing millions of pounds' weight of tea every year.
43:00It was 10% of the national revenue.
43:03No wonder, then, that people said, if the China tea trade was endangered, the British nation was in trouble.
43:11But the problem was that China was self-sufficient.
43:17It didn't need the outside world.
43:20Europeans and British in particular were buying a lot from China.
43:24And China wasn't buying a lot from Britain and Europe.
43:29There was nothing really that they needed.
43:35So the British set out to create the demand.
43:38And the British and other traders, the Portuguese, the Dutch, were all thinking,
43:46what is it that the Chinese would buy so that we can get that silver out and then we can buy more tea?
43:54And by the 1790s, I think, they figured out that the Chinese were buying a little bit of opium every time.
44:05And that number was increasing.
44:08The key to the opium trade was British control of India, where the opium was grown.
44:20The East India Company bought raw cotton from India and then sold it back to them as finished textiles.
44:27They then bought up Indian opium and sold it to China, buying tea in return.
44:34And so they created a trading triangle.
44:37The profits were high, but so was the risk.
44:41So in 1793, the British sent an embassy to China to try to get favoured trading nation status.
44:52Its leader was Sir George McCartney.
44:55Born in County Antrim, McCartney had served in the Caribbean and India.
45:00He coined the phrase, the empire on which the sun never sets.
45:04China is picturesque beyond comparison, he wrote.
45:13The rice paddies, the fields of sugar cane, the tea plantations.
45:19The common people of China, he said, are patient and industrious, cheerful under the severest labour.
45:28Hardy and loquacious, they are by no means the sedate, tranquil people they've been represented.
45:34But the poorest, he added, detest the mandarins, whose arbitrary powers they fear,
45:47whose injustice they feel, whose rapacity they must feed.
45:57The emperor wouldn't meet them in Beijing because the British refused to prostrate themselves, or kutou.
46:04So they set up their gifts from Birmingham and Manchester manufacturers outside the capital at the Summer Palace.
46:14By now, the British were frazzled.
46:17Nine months sea journey, the weeks overland to Peking.
46:23And the emperor took them by surprise.
46:24He came unannounced.
46:31British were very impressed by him as a man.
46:3583 years old, but didn't look a day over 60.
46:38His manner dignified and affable.
46:43He asked if anybody in the embassy spoke Chinese.
46:46And a 12-year-old page boy called Staunton had learned a bit of Chinese on the journey.
46:52The emperor was so delighted that he gave little Staunton his fine yellow silk purse that hung by his belt,
47:00containing his favourite oreca nuts.
47:03Well, that was quite optimistic for the British, but what followed wasn't.
47:09The emperor went round looking at the presence, the orreries and the celestial globes, the planetarium, the telescopes,
47:24without a flicker on his countenance.
47:28And he picked up the air pump and then said,
47:31these things are not good enough to amuse a child.
47:36Deflated by his failure, McCartney returned to Macau, dismissing the Qing state as a crazy old man of war, no longer seaworthy.
47:53As he saw it, the Qing government was holding the Chinese people back from the benefits of modern civilisation.
48:01And a nation that does not advance, he said, must retrograde and finally fall back into barbarism and misery.
48:10But the British simply couldn't take no for an answer.
48:27If any link in their global trading network was broken, their economy could face disaster.
48:34Our aim, said McCartney, should be to mould the China trade.
48:40To the shape that best suits us.
48:44Any stopping of that trade would have a severe effect on our position in India, to which it is already immeasurably valuable.
48:55It would have an immediate and heavy blow on our own woolen industries and manufactures back home, the ancient staple of England.
49:04And all our other growing imports and manufactures would be instantly convulsed.
49:10So the Honourable East India Company continued to smuggle opium, despite public outrage back in Britain.
49:20And soon the ravages of the drug became apparent in the streets of China, with millions of addicts.
49:26By the 1820s, opium addiction became visible socially, which means opium days on the street, people dying off, dozing off on the street.
49:40It's becoming a social problem.
49:43Suddenly, there's a huge increase of court documents relating to this.
49:50If you search 1790s, there's none.
49:53Then if you go to 1810s, maybe a few, if you go to 1820s, it's a lot, if you go to 1830s, it's a huge amount.
49:59So I think by mid-1830s, 1835, 1836, I think it's obvious they have to do something about this.
50:12Shocked by the social effects of the opium trade and by its drain on their silver supply, the emperor and his advisers debated what to do.
50:27The emperor spent time looking for an upright official, because opium is something you could sell and make a lot of money.
50:37So you need someone who is upright and very confused and very moral.
50:42Such a man was the incorruptible Commissioner Lin.
50:48Of his appointment, an old friend wrote,
50:50Our great land needs thunder and lightning to revive it now.
50:55Lin gave the orders to destroy all the opium held in British warehouses.
51:08Commissioner Lin began the destruction of the British opium in early June 1839.
51:14There were 1,200 tonnes of it.
51:20It took 500 workers more than three weeks to get rid of it all, burning it, mixing it with lime and dumping it in these ponds.
51:33And at the same time, the commissioner wrote a letter to Queen Victoria, a letter that's touching in its almost naive belief in Confucian morality.
51:44We learn that your country is 60 or 70,000 li away from China, he said.
51:51And yet foreign vessels come here to make great profit out of the wealth of our country.
51:57But by what right in return do they sell us this poisonous drug which does so much harm to the Chinese people?
52:04They may not necessarily intend to hurt us, but by putting profit above all things they are disregarding the harm they do to others.
52:15So we ask you, where is your conscience?
52:19But the British were in no mood to discuss Confucian ethics.
52:29The fact that China had 50 times their population and lay the other side of the world was of no matter.
52:35They were a maritime nation. The Chinese were not.
52:40In fact, the Chinese didn't really have a navy at all.
52:44Did they understand that the balance of power in the world was changing because of maritime power?
52:50Yeah. I think for us historians, we always ask that.
52:53Don't they realise that they were no match? Don't they know what's going on in the world?
53:01I think the answer, I can be quite definite in that, is no.
53:06They still think we are the Middle Kingdom and all under heaven respects China, admires Chinese civilisation.
53:17Bringing ships and men from India, the British gathered a task force and sailed to China.
53:24In New Year 1841, they entered the Pearl River.
53:28And there, the Chinese found themselves hopelessly outgunned.
53:41The Chinese had defended the estuary in depth.
53:44They had outer fortifications towards the sea and then at the narrows, these big fortresses with heavy guns.
53:51To the soldiers who were waiting here so anxiously, it must have seemed that they had a chance of defeating the British.
54:02In fact, the Chinese guns were useless with their fixed positions and fixed range against a mobile enemy.
54:09The British fleet had three 74 gun warships out in the estuary, a flotilla of smaller vessels.
54:19They had 15 troop ships carrying native Indian regiments who were going to fight alongside the British when they stormed these fortresses.
54:28And their secret weapon was a nearly 200 foot long boat made entirely of iron.
54:35And on it, swivel and pivot mounted heavy weaponry and a rocket launcher that could send incendiary projectiles.
54:46And the name of the boat was the nemesis, Retribution.
54:54At the climax of the battle, a British rocket hit the powder store of the flagship Chinese junk, which blew up in a tremendous explosion.
55:01The British then rampaged up the coast and stormed the port city of Ningboa.
55:19It was shock and awe, 19th century style.
55:22Rocked by their defeat, the Qing government sued for peace in the very place where 400 years before, Admiral Zheng He had given thanks after his great voyages.
55:39Here, in this room in Nanjing, they negotiated the first of what the Chinese call the Unequal Treaties.
55:49...
55:55...
55:56...
55:57...
55:58...
55:59...
56:02...
56:03...
56:07So power had come from the barrel of a gun.
56:09of a gun. The British had got what they wanted, trading rights, silver and a foothold in China,
56:16five treaty ports on the Chinese coast.
56:22The treaty was signed out on the Yangtze River in the Admiral's cabin of HMS Cornwallis,
56:29and so began what has come to be seen as China's century of humiliation.
56:37But as Dr Tianzhen explained to me, that time has left its mark on China till today.
56:43Actually, the support of the humiliation is one of the words in the world.
56:49A country who really knew the meat,
56:55was prepared to push a horse in the middle of a horse.
57:02The meat itself is a form of inner strength.
57:07History, the Chinese say, is a mirror.
57:15In Chinese history, every dynasty has reached a peak and then declined,
57:19and needed outside influence to bring change.
57:23This time, the catalyst was the British.
57:27Among the treaty ports was a small town that would become the greatest city on earth, Shanghai, and an uninhabited island, Hong Kong.
57:41And all this was the unintended consequence of the first Opium War.
57:45All there was here was a few wooded islands and promontories,
57:49kind of native fishing villages, and a wonderful anchorage, which is why the British wanted it,
57:55and it would become one of the greatest trading cities in the world.
58:03So out of these traumatic events would come new forces and new ideas that would transform China in the modern age,
58:11in ways no one could have foreseen back in 1841.
58:21Next time, the end of the empire, civil war and revolution, and the amazing transformation of modern China.
58:31The story of China is available to pre-order on BBC DVD,
58:39and you can buy, download, and keep through BBC Store and other suppliers.
58:43And for more content from BBC Two's China season,
58:46you can watch the first episode of our new three-part drama, One Child, available now on BBC iPlayer.
58:52Well, next night, the gloves are off as boxing great Ricky Hatton joins the Claire Balding Show.
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