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|  | BPP Catalog:Area Studies:China and Japan:China
 | Civil Disorder
Most foreigners in China seemed insensitive to Chinese customs and rights,
and when through this insensitivity incidents like the one at Hwang-chu-ke
occurred, official British reaction was one of extreme outrage, thus
aggravating the problem still further. Each incident also paved the way for
increasing demands on the Chinese; the more horrible the attack on
foreigners, the more demanding the concessions wrought from the Chinese
Government with respect to trade and commerce. This volume contains
papers dealing mainly with the early period of such troubles, and also some
papers respecting further anti-foreign riots in the 1890s. |
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| Consular Establishments
The papers concentrate especially on diplomatic and consular expediture in
China and the volume includes comprehensive technical details about
consulates and the problems involved in running them. |
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| Coolie Emigration
The papers in the first volume devoted to coolie emigration contain the first
efforts at investigating the whole system; what type of person was
emigrating; what was the attitude of local authorities toward the matter;
how did people emigrate; what illusions were the coolie emigrants under.
Further papers take up the problem from the point of view of the destination
of the emigrants, usually British Guiana and Trinidad. The bulk of the papers
of volume 4 deal with the Macao coolie traffic, while a few papers of the
1880s and 1890s take up the matter of coolie emigration to the Australasian
Colonies. |
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| Diplomatic Affairs
This volume consists of treaties and conventions entered into by China with
Great Britain and other major European powers such as Germany, France
and Russia. There are also papers concerning China’s relations with Japan,
particularly over Korea in the 1890s. The papers deal with such matters as
diplomatic representation, commercial relations, the protection of foreigners
in China, the occupation of Port Hamilton by Great Britain, the junction of the
Chinese and Burmese telegraph, the Russo-Chinese Bank and the Russian
railway interests in China. |
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| Embassy and Consular Reports
The commercial reports from British embassy and consular sources in China
have been gathered together and arranged chronologically in volumes, so
that the historian is clearly guided in his search for all commercial material
from 1854 right up to the end of the century. The reports comprise two
types of material. The annual reports contain general summations by British
consulates on commercial activity of a particular district. The miscellaneous
reports are more specific and deal with particular social and economic
situations or problems. For example, the fall in the value of silver during the
1890s resulted in a report on its effects on the prices of commodities in
China (Sess. 1893-94).
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| Exploration
One of the provisions of the Treaty of Tientsin (1858) was that foreigners
were to be permitted to travel into the interior of China and such official
sanction for travel and exploration in general was the beginning of many
journeys into the interior undertaken in the second half of the nineteenth
century by members of the British consular service in China. Such consular
journeys were mainly exploratory in nature and provided a wealth of
geographical and demographical detail on the territories through which
consular personnel travelled. |
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| Foreign Concessions, 1898-99
The last few years of the nineteenth century in China saw a renewed push
for concessions on the part of the major powers. This ‘scramble for
concessions’ greatly weakened the Chinese Government and paved the way
for both the Reform Movement and the Boxer rebellion. Two lengthy
parliamentary papers effectively describe this troubled period in Chinese
history through the eyes of British observers. The papers also include
accounts of outrages by Chinese on British and French settlers and the
beginnings of anti-foreign riots which were to culminate in the Boxer
activities of 1900. |
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| Hong Kong
The Treaty of Nanking, 29 August 1842, provided for the cession of the
island of Hong Kong to Great Britain. The problem involving the civil service
which plagued Hong Kong’s early years gradually gave way to more
orthodox ones like sanitation, gambling, relations with neighbouring
Chinese, and contagious diseases. In this last respect an outbreak of
bubonic plague in the 1890s is the subject of several papers in volume 24
with the result that much interesting information is provided about this
rarely-encountered but notorious disease. A third type of paper to be found
in the Hong Kong volumes is essentially a statistical one such as the annual
reports for the colony which by the end of the century were appearing
regularly, or reports on the general condition of the garrison which were
published at various times throughout the colony’s history. |
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| Military Affairs
The most important of the papers in these volumes dealing with military
affairs in China is the Select Committee Report of 1866 which inquired into
the high troop mortality brought about by the hot climate of southern China
during the summer months by poor sanitary conditions in military
establishments. The report contains a detailed picture of ordinary living
conditions for troops, hospital arrangements, diet, clothing, and other
relevant matters. A miscellaneous paper of some length treats of the case
of General Gordon (who, of course, later fell at Khartoum) who had been
given position and reward in the Chinese army after the fall of Soochow;
correspondence between Sir Frederick Bruce and Earl Russell debates the
propriety of Gordon’s accepting the rewards. |
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| Missionaries
By the terms of the Treaty of Tientsin (1858) the activities of Christian
missionaries in China were sanctioned, and Christians, both foreign and
Chinese, were guaranteed freedom in the practice of their faith. But the
theory of religious toleration was not greatly applied in practice and bigotry,
ignorance and fear were the real causes of many outrages against
missionaries. Perhaps ignorance of the motives of missionaries was the
greatest obstacle to the development of Christianity in China. This is
emphasized in a very long report in the volume on the circumstances
surrounding the massacre of European missionaries at Tientsin on 21 June
1870 (where twelve years before the treaty of toleration had been signed). |
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| Opium War and Opium Trade
The papers record how foreign merchants were compelled to surrender
their stocks of opium for destruction and how pressure was put on them to
ensure that they would no longer engage in its importation. When Britain
objected, hostilities broke out in November 1839 and the so-called Opium
War began. The papers for the years 1839 to 1842 trace the events of the
struggle, as well as its origins in the period after 1834. The papers for the
period following 1860 deal with the opium traffic between India and China
as a commercial venture. Matters such as the taxation and duty levied on
opium as well as the problem of opium smuggliing are fully covered. |
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| Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion, the greatest of several that shook the imperial
structure of China to its foundations, broke out in the year 1850. The
rebellion cost millions of lives and devastated many of China’s richest
provinces. Britain observed a diplomatic neutrality during these years of civil
war but she was sometimes compelled to intervene when British citizens
were attacked or her trade was threatened. The papers deal chiefly with
the problems of British policy in this situation. |
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| Treaty of Tientsin
These three volumes, devoted to the treaty of Tientsin, cover three more or
less distinct phases: the military action at Canton and the background of the
negotiation of the Treaty itself, the agitation in the 1860s for revision of the
Treaty, and the background of the revisions of October 1869, which were
never ratified, chiefly because of protests from British merchants. |
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| Trade
There were no fewer than four Select Committee inquiries into the trade
between China and Great Britain during the first half of the nineteenth
century, a fact which in itself provides some indication of the importance
with which China was considered by British parliamentarians. These
reports, consisting of minutes of evidence, indexes, and lengthy appendices,
present a comprehensive picture of the difficulties and problems of the
trading situation between the two countries during the period, in effect
supplementing the material contained in the Embasssy and Consular reports
which began in 1854. |
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| Western China
The majority of papers in this volume are devoted to attempts in the 1860s
and early 1870s to open an alternate trade route to China by means of a
railway from Rangoon in Burma. |
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| Miscellaneous
This volume is devoted largely to the postal arrangements in force between
Great Britain and China during the nineteenth century.
The second significant group of papers in this volume consists of three
reports on the famine which took place in northern China during the 1870s,
while other papers deal wih surveys of Chinese waters, superannuation
acts, and bank charters. Though some of these papers are of distinctly
minor importance, they complete the picture of China as seen in the British
Parliamentary Papers of the nineteenth century. |
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