The Voyage To Cathay

CXXXI

China in 1910, just before the fall of the Qing (Ch’ing, or Manchu) Dynasty

European trade with China dated back to antiquity. Even in the days of the pre-Roman Celts imports from China --- chief among them silk, porcelain, jade, and tea ---  were considered indicators of great wealth and status in Europe, and so a difficult, roundabout, often uncertain trade route stretched from Western Europe to Eastern China. Even during the European Dark Ages some trade remained, managed mostly by a Jewish clan called the Radhanites who were responsible for keeping the “Silk Road” open. At its greatest, the Silk Road reached from Tara in Ireland to Edo in Japan, and goods and thoughts moved back and forth across the Eurasian landmass, bringing Buddhists to Rome and Catholics to Kyoto.   

Radhanite trade routes in the Old World

At its peak, the influence of Chinese culture in Asia had been vast, profoundly impacting the cultures of the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, and other Asian peoples. China also absorbed elements of culture from India, Tibet, and other lands. The Chinese invented paper and gunpowder and printing with movable type long before those ideas came to Europe. The most famous (though not the first or only) European traveler to China, the Venetian Marco Polo, is sometimes credited with bringing lo mein back to Italy with him circa 1300, inspiring the popular Italian fare, spaghetti. 

 

The modern-day remains of a Radhanite hostel in Kyrgysztan

 

The Europeans called it "Cathay," and the Chinese considered their nation the “Middle Kingdom” from which all culture flowed. A central exponent of Chinese culture was Kong Qui, better known to Chinese as “Master Kong” and to Westerners as Confucius. Confucius’ lifetime spanned the years around 500 B.C.E., and though Europeans often credit him with founding a religion, he really was responsible for systematizing a social and ethical code that was widely adopted throughout all Chinese kingdoms. Confucius’ teachings permitted the diverse, populous Chinese to live within a uniform, structured social system that allowed each person to be aware of his rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis others. It was not a perfect system, and it did not ensure political tranquility, but it endured until the dawn of the 20^th Century.  

Master Kong

 

While Confucius did not invent the Mandarin system of government it found its greatest expression in Confucian thought. Chinese society was strictly hierarchical, with the Emperor exercising autocratic power. In order to do so, the Emperor (through his minions) would appoint regional leaders, called Mandarins. The Mandarins started out as mere bureaucrats; however, their offices usually became hereditary as long as their heirs could pass a series of usually-complex civil service exams. As long as a son could pass the necessary tests he could inherit his father’s rank (in remoter areas the tests were given by fathers to sons). 

The Mandarin was often the only literate man in a given district, but literacy did not necessarily equate with education and even less so with so with intellectual curiosity. A classic example of fossilized Mandarin thinking dates from the 19^th Century, when a group of terrified villagers came to the Mandarin telling him of a fearful sight upon the water --- later recognized to be a smoke-belching sidewheel steamship.  Roused from lethargy, the Mandarin came down to the beach, viewed the contraption, went home, and consulted his ancient tomes. Returning to the beach, he announced that the creature was a dragon --- it could be nothing else. He muttered a few superstitious imprecations in the “dragon’s” general direction, and after a while the thing faded into the distance, proving the efficacy of the Mandarin’s own power. 

A Mandarin’s Dragon

Just at the peak of the European Renaissance, the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) instituted a Maritime Ban on all Chinese ports. Ostensibly meant to dissuade “dwarf pirates” (possibly Japanese or Indonesian raiders) from attacking China’s coastal cities, the Ban hardened over time. Castaways and shipwrecked sailors were routinely killed when discovered. Even under the succeeding Manchu Dynasty, the Maritime Ban remained in place with varying levels of enforcement for almost the next two centuries. The overland “Silk Road” route remained open, though the expansion of Islam throughout Central Asia made travel more hazardous for Christians. 

Ming vase

The earliest standing exception to the Maritime Ban was the south coastal port city of Macao (“The Mirrored Sea”), on the Pearl River. First occupied by the Portuguese Empire in the early 1550s after they had doubled the Cape of Good Hope, it was ceded to Portugal by the Ming in 1557. Macao (and thus Portugal) became China’s exclusive trading partner with the West. It became, and remains, one of the world’s single wealthiest cities.

Modern Macao is a city of casino hotels, import-export companies, and banks. It is the most densely populated place on earth

As the Portuguese Empire became senescent, other European powers began to demand trading rights with China. Circa 1680, the new Manchu Emperor opened the single city of Canton (near Macao on the Pearl River) to general European trade. Thirteen “Factories” or guilds were permitted to make items for European export and Europeans were allowed to live in Canton, though not to move into the hinterlands. Canton, like Macao, became (and remains) wealthy. 

Macao, Hong Kong, and Canton on the Pearl River. Kowloon is part of Hong Kong. The South China Sea lies to the south

The single greatest stumbling block to normalizing trade relations between Europe and China was China’s disregard for anything Western, whether goods, technologies, or ideas. Entirely self-sufficient, the Chinese government rejected European attempts to modernize China or otherwise disrupt its traditions, some of which were terribly ossified by the Nineteenth Century.  

19^th Century Canton

By way of forcing the China trade, Great Britain introduced opium to China in the 1830s. Within months, demand for the narcotic was so great that users were said to indulge in “the Chinese pipe,” though the poppy plant itself and the drug production facilities were based in British India. Realizing that the British had managed to make addicts of a large portion of their upper and middle classes, the Imperial government tried to ban the opium trade and then to evict the British.  A series of conflicts collectively called the Opium Wars led to the defeat of the Manchu army, and the British forced the Chinese to cede to them a colony in 1842.  It lay on the Pearl River estuary across from Macao and was named Hong Kong or “Fragrant Harbor.” 

Hong Kong today. The wealthiest piece of real estate on the planet, it has the greatest number of skyscrapers anywhere

British goods flooded into Hong Kong and began to make their way among the population of China, including opium and its cheaper derivative heroin, which was sold to poorer Chinese. Tea, silks, porcelain and jade flooded out, including Chinese antiquities.  This was also the age of the great China tea clippers which made American families such as the Trippes and the Asquiths (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s matrilineal line) rich. 

Tea ClipperThermopylae loading tea at Foochow, 1850s

Lesser-known “Opium Clippers,” often owned by the same concerns, brought opium from India to China. By 1884, 81,000 chests of opium, each weighing 140 pounds (or 11,340,000 pounds of opium and heroin in total) were being brought to China yearly by the British.  

Opium Clipper Water Witch shipping a cargo of narcotics from Calcutta to Canton, 1850s

In exchange for opium, Chinese dealers sold priceless antiquities at throwaway prices to Westerners throughout the latter half of the 19^th Century. This jade vase is an example. The plundering of China’s artifacts for money goes on today

Dazed smokers expressing fascination with textures, a common side effect of opium use. Within a few years, use of “the Chinese pipe” had spread among expatriate Chinese communities worldwide. When opium dens began appearing in Western cities and attracting European addicts the habit was decried, called a moral failing, and blamed on Chinese immigrants 

An opium den for well-heeled users in Paris, late 19^th Century

A modern opium tray

Opium ultimately brought down the Manchu Empire. After the establishment of Hong Kong, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Russia, and other countries demanded “Concessions” in China.  These “Concessions” were cities from which the Chinese themselves were usually banned and which operated as extraterritorial enclaves of European power. Much of the great port city of Shanghai became an “International Settlement.”  

In 1899, the United States, a relatively late player in the China trade, called for an “Open Door Policy” in China rather than nationalistic trading Concessions. The idea was sold as more democratic and respectful of Chinese territorial integrity, but in fact the United States had banned Chinese immigration to the States through a series of Exclusion Acts beginning in 1882.  Despite this racist policy, many American missionaries, representing numerous sects, came to China to spread the gospel. Ironically, Christianity served to erode the Confucian social structure rather than reinforce it.

Western leaders carve up China as a desperate Mandarin looks on in this French political cartoon of the 1880s. “The Great Game” led to the collapse of a culture that had endured for a thousand years

The opium trade and the widespread addiction it caused, particularly in the large urban centers of China, resulted in a breakdown of the traditional Mandarin system. Crime, gangs, and syndicates began to flourish in the cities. In the hinterlands, local Mandarins, bereft of direction from the Imperial Household, began running things as they saw fit. China began to fragment.

In 1900, there was an attempt to reassert Chinese power. The Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, called the Boxers by Westerners, tried to purge the country of Western, particularly Christian, influences. Violence flared throughout China and most of the Western Concessions were besieged. The Western powers raised a multinational force to challenge the Boxers. The Boxers, believing themselves immune to bullets, were cut down in thousands. The Boxer Rebellion ended in disaster in 1901, when the Manchu government, at Western behest, arrested and executed most of the Boxer leadership. Unfortunately for the Manchu Dynasty, most Chinese saw its actions as a betrayal of traditional Chinese culture. Diverse movements began to arise, hoping to replace the failing Manchu Dynasty.  

The terrible execution of captive Boxers, carried out by the Imperial Household they had supported

Ironically, the Boxer Rebellion led the Western Powers to support the acquiescent Manchu Empress against continuing Japanese and Russian encroachment. To do so, the West attempted to undercut developing Western-style political movements in China, whose new Westernized universities were turning out educated and thoughtful young Chinese leaders.

Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925), “The Father of Modern China” is revered by all Chinese. A true democrat, his premature death from illness led to the tragic schism in modern Chinese history that divided the nation in two

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek (1887-1975) took over leadership of the Kuomintang Party after Dr. Sun’s death. Unlike Dr. Sun, he was autocratic, anti-democratic, and duplicitous. After the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949, Chiang ruled over a remnant of non-Communist China, the island of Taiwan (Formosa) still held by the Kuomintang

Mao Tse-Tung (1893-1976), an early admirer of Dr. Sun, split off politically to form the Communist Party of China. As mainland China’s leader between 1949 and 1976, Mao was an authoritarian demagogue who foisted a cult of personality upon the Chinese people and brutally suppressed any dissent, real or imagined. He was always violently critical of Chiang Kai-shek, but, except for Chiang’s avaricious nature, the two men were cut from the same dictatorial cloth

Three of these early leaders were Dr. Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek, who established the Kuomintang Party dedicated to establishing a democratic and republican China along American lines, and Mao Tse-Tung who wanted to create a proletarian state along the lines of the Soviet Union. Dr. Sun was successful in leading the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, and in 1912 he established a Chinese Republic. 

Dr. Sun’s Republic was predominantly a cosmopolitan creature made up of educated Chinese urbanites. Outside of the cities, the remnant Mandarins and other local leaders became warlords. Rural China was engulfed in waves of violence that could have been called civil war if anyone really agreed what the individual combatants were fighting for and against. 

Mao, who felt that the needs of the peasants were being ignored by Dr. Sun’s intellectuals, began a rebellion against the Republic (though his Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng, or Communist Party, was likewise made up of citified intellectuals). Although Mao's troops battled Chiang's forces, they also fought alongside each other to drive the Japanese out of mainland China.

The Chinese Revolution of 1911. The Manchu Dynasty had already lost Korea and Taiwan (Formosa) to the Japanese, as well as the two score foreign Concessions. Tibet and (Outer) Mongolia and Tannu Tuva, autonomous regions, all declared their complete independence from China in 1912. Of the three, only Mongolia remains independent today. Tannu Tuva was occupied by Stalinist Russia in 1945. Tibet, still claiming independence, was occupied by Mao’s forces in 1949 and forcibly annexed in 1959. Tibet’s leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India, where he, and a large Tibetan refugee community, live today

Part of the crisis in China was due to the primitive state of the country. Western medicine was virtually unknown. There were few roads. Transportation was often via foot or sedan chair, carried by servants. There was no telephone system outside of the city centers, nor sewage systems. Crossing the country could take a very long time, if it could be crossed at all. The trip from Peking, China to Lhasa, Tibet took eight months one way --- and that was assuming that warring factions and bandits didn’t interrupt or end the trip.  To overcome the dangers and the vast distances of China, and to assert more effective control of the nation, the Kuomintang established CNAC, the Chinese National Aviation Corporation in 1929.  

CNAC