Free The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr

magistrates’ constables and soldiers from the army, who gather together dissolute youngsters from rich local families to indulge in the pipe where they can’t be seen. As most of the clerks in the magistracies share the same taste, they are sure to be protected. I beg your majesty to set a date a year from now after which all smokers who persist in their addiction will be put to death. For mark my words a man will bear the discomfort of a cure if he knows that by doing so he has earned the privilege of dying in bed, whereas indulgence in his craving will bring him to the execution-ground.
    But there were opponents of such forceful measures in the government as well, and not all of them were addicted to opium or agents of the trade. Some merely saw the practical problems: “If a man is to fall foul of the law just for taking a pipe of opium,” said one such official, “prisoners will be lined up along the roads, as there won’t be room for them in the gaols. The whole thing is absolutely impracticable.”
    In the end, the emperor gave his support to attacking not the demand but the supply side of the opium problem. In 1839 one of the great figures of Manchu history, Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü, arrived in Canton, forcefully penned the foreigners up in their factories, and flushed 20,000 chests of opium into the sea. It is possible that the Chinese did not realize the extent to which the Western presence in China depended on the drug; it is possible that they believed—of policy as of battle—that a defiant act and a great deal of noise would intimidate their enemy and cause his withdrawal. Instead, the British went to war with typically businesslike determination, andthe Chinese got their first taste of Western combat.
    It was a sobering experience. The British, said Chinese commanders, had steamships that could “fly across the water, without wind or tide, with the current or against it,” as well as amazingly accurate cannon that were “mounted on stone platforms, which can be turned in any direction.” As for the Chinese response, lamentedone official, not only were the empire’s cannon antiquated and her troops poorly trained and disciplined but “our military affairs are in the hands of civil officials, who are very likely admirable calligraphists but know nothing of war.” The outcome was inevitable. After putting things right in Canton, the British seized the ports of Amoy, Chefoo, and Ningpo. In June 1842 a British fleet entered the mouth of the Yangtze River and, on its way to Nanking, overpowered Shanghai easily. Nanking offered even less resistance, and on August 29, 1842, an infamous treaty destined to bear that city’s name was signed aboard the British warship Cornwallis .
    The Treaty of Nanking and the supplementary Treaty of the Boguea year later set the pattern of Chinese-Western relations for the remaining life of the Manchu dynasty. In addition to securing pledges of increased trade and tolerance of missionary activities, the English were allowed to establish settlements in four treaty ports besides Canton—Ningpo, Foochow, Amoy, and Shanghai—and were granted the privilege of extraterritoriality, of being governed by their own laws and courts while residing in a foreign country. The French soon secured the same rights the English had exacted, and in 1844 it was the turn of the Americans. Minister plenipotentiary Caleb Cushing negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, by which the Chinese granted the United States “most favored nation” status: Any advantages already given to any other power—as well as any advantages granted in the future—were automatically conceded to the United States as well.
    The Americans made much of their having obtained from the Chinese by friendly negotiation what the British had taken by force, and it was during this period that the peculiarly persistent notion that the Chinese preferred Americans to other foreigners took hold. The assertion was doubtless