Chapter 6 real cause

1840, this is a very special year, because a major event happened in the Qing Dynasty! It's not that nothing happened before the Qing Dynasty, but this time it's different.Because of a war that determined the fate of the Qing Dynasty—the first Opium War broke out! The result of this war is now known to everyone: the Qing Dynasty was completely defeated.But we have to focus on the reasons why this war broke out.Up to now, many people still think that the Opium War, as the name suggests, was a war for opium, wrong!In fact, the causes of many things are not as simple as they appear on the surface.

Things have to start with foreign trade. You must not think that the foreign trade at that time was as convenient and developed as the import and export trade formed today. The foreign trade in the Qing Dynasty was mainly divided into two parts, one was tributary trade, and the other was market ship trade. Tributary trade was not invented in the Qing Dynasty, it existed before the Tang Dynasty.Tributary trade is easy to understand: foreign envoys come to meet the Chinese emperor, submit and accept diplomatic documents from the two countries, and pay tribute to the Chinese emperor with some precious local specialties, and the Chinese emperor also returns gifts according to the value of the items paid At the same time, many merchants in the team accompanying the envoys also came to China with a large amount of goods for trading, which is the so-called tribute.

However, this type of trade is less than ideal. First of all, the frequency is small, because you can’t come at any time. Except for close vassal countries such as North Korea and Vietnam, which can pay tribute once a year, most countries can burn incense if they can come once every three to five years. Then there is the unequal value, and China is in a panic, because the emperor will sacrifice economic interests for political significance in order to show his status as a celestial kingdom—as long as you bow down to me, the celestial emperor, as long as you admit that my celestial kingdom is your suzerain, I am the co-lord of the world, so I am not afraid to spend money!Therefore, the emperor often purchased the tribute goods at dozens of times higher than their normal prices.

Naturally, this unreasonable trade method cannot last long, so a trade system that kept pace with the times came into being, which is the market ship trade. Again, this was not invented by the Qing Dynasty.As the name suggests, the ship trade is carried out in port cities, and its nature is a bit similar to today's market economy. It can be regarded as a commercial exchange of equivalent value between Chinese and foreign businessmen, and is no longer a one-off transaction of unequal value dictated by the imperial court. Of course, this kind of trade is definitely to make money for both the court and the locality.Therefore, the imperial court set up a special agency "customs" (called "shibosi" before the Qing Dynasty) to manage, and its functions were similar to today's customs.

However, it may be that the imperial court is afraid that officials will communicate with foreign countries, and it is inconvenient for Chinese officials to deal with foreigners directly. So the officials entrusted businessmen with all tasks, such as receiving foreign businessmen, trade settlement, and collecting customs duties, etc., and the officials were only responsible for supervision. Specifically, the ship trade in the Qing Dynasty was like this: the Qing Dynasty should be regarded as a closed country, but it was not completely closed.Even Qianlong left an external port—Guangzhou.At that time, almost all the country's import and export trade was carried out in Guangzhou, and its posture was very similar to the current "Canton Fair" (Guangzhou Fair).There is only such a customs in the whole country, which is called "one-port trade".

At that time, all import and export trade was monopolized by a merchant organization called "Guangzhou Shisanhang". This Guangzhou Thirteen Banks is called Thirteen Banks, but in fact there are not only thirteen commercial firms, but they often increase and decrease. It is only because it was originally composed of thirteen commercial firms, so it is called Thirteen Commercial Firms.Because it is a foreign trade firm, it is also called a merchant or a foreign firm. The Qing Dynasty also had a regulation with the characteristics of the Qing Dynasty. The key word is "not free": All foreigners are not allowed to enter Guangzhou casually.Note that this is only for entry, and you need to apply again when you leave Guangzhou.And after entering Guangzhou, you can't walk around at will, you can only stay in the Thirteen Banks Commercial Pavilion area specially built for foreigners, which is roughly equivalent to today's trade offices.If a foreigner commits illegal acts in China, it is easy to deal with it, and the guarantor is used for surgery, so the fate and interests of the foreigner and the merchant are tightly tied together.

Of course, this way of working also provided excellent corruption opportunities for corrupt officials in Guangzhou. The fees and money extorted by foreign businessmen and merchants for filial piety to officials, big and small, were not much less than tariffs. The most ridiculous thing is that officials have always set low standards for themselves, but they have high requirements for local prostitutes: you must have patriotic sentiments, and you are not allowed to take business from ghosts. By the way, foreigners can come to Guangzhou to do business, but their wives are not allowed to come, so the wives of foreigners usually live in Macau, the base camp of foreigners. The Portuguese obtained the right of residence in Macau from the Ming Dynasty emperor, and other foreigners also Follow up.

But what does all this have to do with Britain, with the Opium Wars? Of course it matters. The Qing Dynasty and the United Kingdom have been conducting non-free trade through the Guangzhou Thirteen Banks for many years. The tea, raw silk, and rhubarb (a kind of Chinese medicinal material) of the Qing Dynasty are sold well in the United Kingdom. For industrial products such as clocks and watches, the people of the Qing Dynasty did not have much interest in consumption, so most of the time it was the Qing Dynasty that made money from the UK, and on average it earned several million pounds a year.

For a country like the United Kingdom, which was founded on commerce and Adam Smith's free trade ideology is deeply rooted in its bones, the trade deficit that has lasted for so many years will obviously cause it some pain, so the British must find ways to reduce the trade deficit as soon as possible. The solution that the British came up with was to use diplomatic means to take a high-level route, and let the officials of the two countries formally contact to see if they could use the power of the central government of the Qing Dynasty to win the right to free trade and open up the Qing Dynasty market.

So before the Opium War started, the Qing Dynasty had already had contact with Britain. The first official contact between China and the British Empire began in 1793.