Document 1
The key player in the prelude to the Opium Wars was a brilliant and highly moral Chinese official named Lin Tse-hsü. His express purpose was to cut off the opium trade at its source by rooting out corrupt officials and cracking down on British trade in the drug. Seeing that the opium trade, which gave Europe such huge profits, undermined his country, Lin composed a letter to Queen Victoria of England requesting that the British cease all opium trade.
1839. Letter From Lin Tse-hsu to Queen Victoria
After a long period of commercial intercourse, there appear among the crowd of barbarians both good persons and bad, unevenly. Consequently there are those who smuggle opium to seduce the Chinese people and so cause the spread of the poison to all provinces. Such persons who only care to profit themselves, and disregard their harm to others, are not tolerated by the laws of heaven and are unanimously hated by human beings. His Majesty the Emperor, upon hearing of this, is in a towering rage.
All those people in China who sell opium or smoke opium should receive the death penalty. If we trace the crime of those barbarians who through the years have been selling opium, then the deep harm they have wrought and the great profit they have usurped should fundamentally justify their execution according to law. Fortunately we have received a specially extended favor from is Majesty the Emperor, who considers that for those who voluntarily surrender there are still some circumstances that he will allow to excuse them from punishment.
We find that your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile] from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries - how much less to China!
Document 2
Excerpt of the treaty ending the Opium Wars
1842. The Treaty of Nanjing
Article I
There shall henceforth be Peace and Friendship between ...(England and China).
Article II
His Majesty the Emperor of China agrees that British Subjects, with their families and establishments, shall be allowed to reside, for the purpose of carrying on their commercial pursuits, without molestation or restraint at a number of port cities.
Article III
His Majesty the Emperor of China cedes to Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, etc., the Island of Hong-Kong, to be possessed in eternity by her Britannic Majesty.
Article VII
It is agreed that the total amount of twenty-one million dollar shall be paid as follows: $6 million immediately, $6 million in 1843, $5 million in 1844, and $4 million in 1845.
Document 3
Wood carving depicting the Chinese people stripping off the bark of trees and digging up the grass roots for food.
1876-1879.
The glowing sun is in the sky and the locusts cover the ground. There is no green grass in the fields and no smoke of cooking from the houses. They caught rats, or spread their nets for birds, or ground the wheat-stalks into powder, or kneaded the dry grass into cakes. Alas! What food was this for men! They were at last reduced to the straits seen in the picture.
Ye who spend large sums every day on your food, will you not give these sufferers a cup of soup?
Document 4
This selection is a Chinese woman's account of the period.
1887-1888.
Day after day I sat at home. Hunger gnawed. What could I do? My mother was dead. My brother had gone away. When my husband brought home food I ate it and my children ate with me. A woman could not go out of the court. If a woman went out to work the neighbors all laughed. They said, "So and so's wife has gone out to service." Or they said, "So and so's daughter has gone out to service." I did not know enough even to beg. So I sat at home and starved. I was so hungry one day that I took a brick, pounded it to bits, and ate it. It made me feel better.
How could I know what to do? We women knew nothing but to comb our hair and bind our feet and wait at home for our men. When my mother had been hungry she had sat at home and waited for my father to bring her food, so when I was hungry I waited at home for my husband to bring me food.
My husband sold everything we had.
There was a fur hat. He wanted to sell it. But I begged him not to sell it.
"Let's keep this." It was my uncle's. "Take my coat." He took the coat and sold it for grain. When he came home for food he drank only two bowls of millet gruel. I wondered why he ate so little. I looked and found that the hat was gone, and knew that he had sold it for opium. Those who take opium care not for food....
One year after my mother died I got a stick and a bowl and started out begging. It was the spring of the year and I was twenty-two. It was no light thing for a woman to go out of her home. That is why I put up with my old opium sot so long. But now I could not live in my house and had to come out. When I begged I begged in the parts of the city where I was not known, for I was ashamed. I went with my begging stick (the little stick with which beggars beat off dogs) up my sleeve, that people should not see it. Every day we went out begging. My husband carried the baby and led Mantze. When we came to an open gate I would send her in, for people's hearts are moved by a child....
Document 5
Born in Sichuan province in West China in 1885 to a merchant family, Zou received a classical education but refused to sit for the civil service exams, preferring instead to work as a seal carver. He gradually became interested in Western ideas, and went to Japan to study in 1901, where he was exposed to radical revolutionary and anti-Manchu ideas. This tract, published in Shanghai in 1903, is his most important work and one of the most important radial tracts published in China before the 1911 Revolution. Zou was arrested for publishing the tract, and died in prison in 1905.
1903. “The Revolutionary Army” by Zou Rong
Introduction:
Sweep away millennia of tyranny in all its forms, throw off millennia of slavishness, annihilate the five million and more of the furry and horned Manchu race, cleanse ourselves of 260 years of harsh and constant pain, so that the soil of the Chinese subcontinent is made immaculate. How sublime is revolution, how majestic!
I plant the standard of independence, ring the bell of freedom. My voice re-echos from heaven to earth, I crack my temples and split my throat in crying out to my fellow-countrymen: revolution is inevitable for China today. Stand up for Revolution! I here cry at the top of my voice to spread the principles of revolution throughout the land.
Revolution is the universal principle of evolution. Revolution submits to heaven and responds to men's needs. Revolution rejects what is corrupt and keeps the good. Revolution is the advance from barbarism to civilization. Revolution turns slaves into masters
The Purport of Revolutionary Independence:
The widening of the gulf between rich and poor and the abandonment of the principle of protecting the peoplewere the reasons why French militants and men of high principles did not shrink from revolution; such were the causes of the French Revolution. Heavy tea duties, the lack of the legislative assembly, the quartering of troops on civilians: such were the themes of the criticisms leveled at the British and the American flag of revolt floated on Bunker Hill.
I do not begrudge repeating over and over again that internally we are slaves of the Manchus and suffering from their tyranny, externally we are being harassed by the Powers, and we are doubly enslaved. The reason why our sacred Han race, descendants of the Yellow emperor, should support revolutionary independence, arises precisely from the question of whether our race will go under and be exterminated.
With the rapid advances in science, the superstitious doctrine whereby a man becomes an emperor through the gift of heaven and the spirits can be destroyed. With the rapid advance in world civilization, the system whereby the rule of a single man in a despotic form of government can cover the whole country may be overthrown. With the rapid advances in wisdom, everybody will be able to enjoy his or her natural rights. If today our great Han people are to throw off the bonds of the Manchus, to retrieve all the rights we have lost, and is to take its place among world powers, we cannot avoid carrying out a revolution and safeguarding our right to independence. Wary and fearful I have carefully modeled (my proposals) on the principles of American revolutionary independence. I have summarized to my most revered and beloved 400 million countrymen of the great Han people to prepare them for the path they are to follow.
China is the China of the Chinese.
-Not to allow any alien race to lay their hands on the least rights of our China
-First, to overthrow the barbaric government set up by the Manchus in Peking
-To expel the Manchus settled in China or kill them in order to revenge ourselves
-To kill the emperor set up by the Manchus as a warning to the myriad generations that despotic government is not to be revived.
To set up a central government, which will act as a general body to run affairs.
-Assemblies and presidents to be elected by vote in public elections.
-The whole population, whether male or female, are citizens.
-All men have the duty to serve as citizen soldiers
-Everybody has the duty of bearing the burden of taxation.
Everybody in the country, whether male or female, is equal. There is no distinction between upper and lower, base and noble.
-All inalienable rights are bestowed by nature.
-The freedom to live and all other privileges are natural rights.
-Freedoms, such as that of speech, thought, the press, etc. cannot be infringed on.
-If, at any time, the actions of a government lead to an infraction of people's rights, they have the right to carry out a revolution, and overthrow the old government to retrieve their peace and contentment.
Conclusion:
You 400 million of the great Han race, carry out this revolution. It is the bounden duty of one and all. Think of it as the food and drink which is your daily necessity. You should not act rashly or throw your lives away. Your lands occupy two thirds of Asia: countrymen, you are a fifth of the peoples of the globe. Your tea can provide drink for the countless millions of the world and more; your coal could provide fuel for the whole world for two thousand years and not run short. You possess government, run it yourselves; you have industries, administer them yourselves; you possess lands, watch over them yourselves; you have inexhaustible resources, exploit them yourselves. You are qualified in every way to revolutionary independence. Throw caution to the winds; be prepared to lose your lives in the struggle. Gallop against your hereditary enemies the Manchus. This is in revolution, in independence.
Document 6
Map of China in 1900.