Sculptural fragment of a woman’s head, Song dynasty, China.
Part of a sculpture of a woman’s face, dated to the twelfth century, during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), and kept today at The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden. The British Government sought to justify another war with China by persuading Parliament that the country was backward and barbarous, and Lord Palmerston duly got his war, which brought all he could have hoped for with the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858. On October 18th, 1860, after news emerged that nineteen British and French soldiers had been captured, tortured and killed by the Chinese authorities, James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, led a systematic destruction of the palace. Under his direction, four thousand men razed it to the ground in three days. The palace had stood there since 1707, and thousands of priceless works of art had been housed on the grounds.
Part 1 of 2
I hope we shall not hear it said in this house — as it has been in another place* — that these are barbarous people, and that you must deal with them by force. I tell you, that if you attempt to deal thus with them, it will be a difficult matter, and one, too, that will be costly to the people of this country. You will be disappointed, and deservedly so, if relying upon the supposition that you will be able to coerce the Chinese Government by force — you will be disappointed if you think that you will be repaid by increased commerce for the employment of violence. If you make the attempt, you will be disappointed again, as you have been disappointed before.
And are these people so barbarous that we should attempt to coerce them by force into granting what we wish? Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilisation of the world — one which 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education — which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period — that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago!
* ‘Another place’ is Parliamentary code for the House of Lords, which by convention is never named on the floor of the Commons. For more background to Cobden’s speech, see Bullies to the Weak, Cowards to the Strong.
Part Two
Governor Ye Mingchen, Viceroy of Liangguang, by Robert Morrison.
Ye Mingchen (1807-1859), Viceroy of Liangguang from 1852 to 1858, and Grand Secretary of the Tiren Library from 1855 to 1857. During the debate in the Commons in February 1857, a ‘blue-book’ of correspondence was placed before the House, supposedly containing overwhelming evidence of China’s insults to the mother of Parliaments. Conjuror-like, Cobden produced a sheaf of letters which had somehow escaped the notice of the Foreign Office, and which cast a completely different light on the whole affair. Ye’s letters were among them. “One of Governor Yeh’s letters” said Cobden “might have been penned by the Duke of Wellington — it is so sententious”, using the adjective in its older sense of ‘pithy and full of wisdom’.
They are the very soul of commerce in the East. You find them carrying on their industry in foreign countries with that assiduity and laboriousness which characterise the Scotch and the Swiss.
You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own — but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to such a state as to become horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. There must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If, in speaking of them, we stigmatise them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy — at least of some justice — at the hands of conservative England? To the representatives of the people in this House I commend this question, with full confidence that they will do justice to that people.
