Map of the Chinese collapse between 1850 and 1900. The Chinese state would face rapid and violent collapse in the face of changing economic conditions and increased Western imperialism.
While the development of internal Colombian capitalism was, at several points, somewhat rocky, it must be said it was greatly aided by a triple godsend to the national economy, which started to be exploited since independence, but truly exploded in importance starting in 1850: the Triple Boom, which consisted of the rise of exports of coffee and Yerba mate, guano and gold, the three “great resources” that would provide the majority of Colombia’s exports until the oil boom starting in the 1900s. The three resources became extremely valuable for different reasons; Yerba Mate and coffee’s demand rose as British conflicts in India and China turned most European states off tea consumption, increasingly under British dependence (while the rising price of tea in the first half of the 1850s, as China spiralled out of control, led to many Britons looking to Yerba mate as a relatively cheap replacement), guano became increasingly important in the processes of intensive agriculture and arms manufacturing, and gold had been recently discovered first in middle California and soon afterwards in the Venezuelan mine of El Callao, bringing much-needed respite to the silver mines in Upper Peru.
However, while this was very helpful to the Colombian economy with the first of the “extractivist booms” that would characterize the greatest moments of Colombian economic growth in the XIX and XX Centuries, it’s also true that the growth of a native tea industry in Colombia and British India heavily hurt the Chinese government, which was already dealing with its own problems. Pressure between the British and Chinese governments had been present since 1820, and had strongly intensified as the Latin American wars of independence stopped giving Britons a reliable source of good-quality silver coinage. The
Carolus Rex coinage of the 1790s and 1800s, minted off Peruvian silver, had been seen as greatly desireable by Chinese authorities, which trusted the silver content of the coins and had an easier time managing the currency than they did bullion – therefore, the price for
Carolus coins was up to 15% higher than that of bullion.
However, as the economy of Spanish America contracted and its currency began to be debased to pay for expensive independence endeavors, the Chinese authorities stopped trusting in European coinage, instead returning to pure demand for bullion. This was not favorable to British traders, and the British crown soon saw significant trade deficits with the Great Qing as more and more gold and silver left storage in London to be exchanged for tea and porcelain. Eventually, the situation could not hold.
Opium trade, which had already started to be used as another way to export goods to China, was seen as a great alternative to bullion by the indebted East Indies Company, which had extensive land ownership in prime opium-growing land in northeastern India. Therefore, the Company opened the opium trade to China starting in the 1780s, relinquishing its monopoly in the 1790s and bringing a floodgate of European investers who wished to get into Chinese trade but could not afford consistent trading in bullion. The efforts of a multi-millionaire corporation and several major European powers pressuring Chinese trade were too much for the Canton Trade Authority to deal with and soon the country found itself flush with opium.
Despite strongly increasing tensions between the Great Qing and Britain, however, the
status quo held as Colombian stability throughout the 1830s and 1840s brought new and readily available silver coinage to European hands in a far greater quantity than what had been previously permitted under the mercantile policies of the Spanish Empire. This benefitted Britain, especially, as Colombia entered the British sphere of influence and thus integrated with its trade empire. Chinese officials held off on persecuting opium as strongly as the waves of opium from the greatest of the importers in the country staved off, replaced once again with worthy
Victoria Regina coins. Moreover, the Qing had fallen into strong arrears due to the addiction crisis in the country and constant famines which led to national unrest and poverty, and thus was more strongly in need of silver. While
Carolus Rex coins in the 1790s were up to 15% more expensive than bullion in China,
Victoria Regina coins of the 1840s crossed the 20% mark.
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A graph showing silver exportation from Colombia to China and Colombian emission of coinage. Control of the Colombian coinage by the Imperial authorities in the 1830s and 1840s resulted in the return of Chinese trust in Colombian silver. By the time of the Republic, China was importing more silver from the Americans than ever before.
The economic crisis in China led to a rapid increase in civil unrest. Although debate has long ranged over the different sources of rebellion, modern historians believed that the strongest tensions come from ethnicity. Han were swept in distaste for Manchu minority rule and strongly reacted against any sort of Manchu imposition, while within the Han, conflict between different ethnicities also stoked the flames, especially between the Cantonese speaking Punti and the Hakka ethnicity. The ethnic conflict in Guangdong, which would rapidly spread throughout southeastern China, got a religious flavor as most Puntis supported a folk religious-secret organization, the Chinese salvationist Tiandihui, which descended from the Ming-era White Lotus. On the other hand, Salvationist Christianity, born in the United States, took a deep root among many Hokkien, who developed syncretic Christian views which coalesced in the Baishangdihui, or God-Worshipping Society.
The fact that the strongest events of ethnic conflict were seen in the region of Canton would ultimately prove to be disastrous to the Chinese, which had barely staved off British intervention in the 1830s and which the British had been circling for the last 20 years seeking any excuse to intervene. When, in April 10th of 1850, a brawl between Hakka and Yue people resulted in a fire that ended up burning a British storage to the ground, including five British sailors.
The ensuring popular outrage led the British government to demand personal audience with the Xianfeng Emperor, which had been avoided by skillful Qing diplomacy up until this point. However, when the British send an ultimatum stating that the Canton Office would allow a personal delegation to set residence in the Forbidden City (along with other demands, including forcing an end to the Hakka-Punti conflict, opening the cities of Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing and Tainan to trade, and ceding an island off Canton to Britain) or face war, the offer was haughtily refused. What followed was British declaration of war on the Great Qing.
Qing forces were easily swept off the Pearl River Delta by the heavily superior British naval technology. The Chinese forces had not faced any European enemies in the last 30 years and believed they had extreme military superiority, due to the nature of the conflict as essentially an invasion of China. However, blind optimism turned to panic as the British swept all junks thrown by the Chinese at them, and then to an open rout as a British force supplemented by French aid took the Dagu Forts in Tianjin with ease, with only a small contingent of troops led by general Sengge Rinchen starting a shameful withdrawal west.
While British troops began a slow and harsh route up the Peiho, morale amongst the Chinese forces began to collapse. Canton, which had fallen under British occupation, soon became a hotbed of revolutionary activity against the Great Qing, as both the White Lotus and God-Worshipper forces grew in strength and popularity. 1851 came to a close with the Qing increasingly losing their hold over most of Canton and Southeastern China, with greatly demoralized armies and a British expeditionary force in the outskirts of Beijing.
The peace deal achieved by the Xianfeng Emperor, who during this time seemed to be more interested in hunting than on addressing the issues his country was under (the British legation notoriously was forced to wait for the arrival of the Emperor from Manchuria in the Summer Palace), was embarrassing for the Qing Empire. The Nansha wetlands, Hong Kong and the Kowloon Peninsula were ceded, in perpetuity, to the British; the Shanghai Peninsula was leased for 99 years; and Tianjin became an “international port” where the British, French and Russians would jointly administer many matters of civilian administration. China was forcefully opened to European trade. Over half of Outer Manchuria was ceded to the Russian Empire in an attempt to keep it from intervening in the Empire, with the border being set in the Sungar and Nen Rivers – Jilin suddenly became a border town. And China acquired strong obligations in regards to reparations to Western powers and in protecting Western traders and missionaries. China was brutally and violently forced to its knees to European influence.
Yet, things would not stop here; instead, the collapse of the Qing dynastic order would only hasten. As Changsha fell to Hakka rebels, a large Qing contingent defected to the rebellious forces, supporting the messianic candidate Hong Xiquan, and after his freakish death in a lightning storm over the Yangtze River, his heir Yang Xiuqing. The Hakka rebellion (often called the Red Sheep Rebellion, after the Chinese characters 洪楊之亂, referring to the rebellion’s greatest leaders – Hong Xiquan, Yang Xiuqing) only grew in fervor after this, calling Hong the “New Messiah” and proclaiming his resurrection once the Manchus were overthrown. The violent fervor of the Hakka rebels led to their storming and taking of the city of Nanjing, renamed Tianjing, where the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace was declared by the rebels.
At their point of extreme weakness, the Qing Government had turned to the British to enforce their side of the deal and help with Chinese enforcement of what remained of the Empire. However, soon they realized that, unlike previous revolts, which seemed worrying and foreign to other powers, the Taiping Rebellion and the White Lotus revolt were welcomed with open arms, first by the British public, and then by the British Government itself, after diplomatic missions were received from the Empire.
European missionaries initially saw the Taiping Rebellion with apprehension; after all, Hong Xiquan was a strange and worrying figure who claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ himself, and who led a bloodthirsty rebellion against the Manchu ruling class which seemed to want to expel any and all foreign elements in the country.
Hong Xiquan's perception is varied and controversial. Amongst many in China, he is a savior of the nation; amongst many Hakka, he is the creator of their nation; amongst Hakka Dominionists, he is their saviour. Thus attests the Statue to Heavenly King Hong (left) in Taiping, a thirty-meter tall replica of which was constructed in 2001. However, to many others, he's a tyrant or an oppressor, or even a comic figure (right), as shown in the Calle Junín play "The Book of Hong" (bottom), a widely lambasted comical play about Protestant missionaries who try to convert the Chinese to Mormonism but instead become devout followers of the God-Worshipping Society.
Everything changed with the fall of Nanjing, however. In the conflagration that led to the fall of the city, Hong Xiquan died in a freak accident where he was supposedly struck by lightning the day before the battle of the city. This was used by Taiping rebels to claim the martyrdom of Xiquan, who they said sacrificed himself to his Heavenly Family to ensure the fall of the Manchu. However, eyewitness accounts recall no lightning; instead, it seems like Xiquan was pushed off the edge of his ship by Yang Xiuqing during a storm, and drowned. Xiuqing assumed leadership over the Empire.
The Martyrdom of Hong, traditional Chinese depiction of the Taiping Rebellion and the death of its prophet, Hong Xiquan.
After a short but brutal power struggle within the walls of Nanjing, renamed Tianjing by the Red Sheep, a new agreement was reached in which Hong Xiquan’s cousing Hong Rengan would assume the title of Prince Gan (干王), the equivalent to a Prime Minister, with overreaching powers over civilian administration and foreign relations. Yang Xiuqing would assume the title of Heavenly King (天王), taking a mostly ceremonial religious approach to his position. Finally, the army would be in charge of the Lord of Five Thousand Years (翼王五千歲), Shi Dakai. This “First Triumvirate”, as anyone could see, was destined to fall apart. However, during most of the period of the war, it was shockingly effective.
Statues of the First Triumvirate: Prince Gan (left), moderniser and diplomat; Yang Xiuqing (center), religious leader; Shi Dakai (right), military mastermind. All three would rapidly turn against each other but today remain an essential part of Chinese Christian and Hakka identity.
Prince Gan was able to skillfully manipulate public opinion due to his close relationship with Protestant ministers. Despite Yang’s more Confucian approach to the Heavenly Faith, which included the return of dragons as icons of the Empire and the establishment of an exam system in administered territories, Prince Gan had the capacity to sell this as a merely cultural affect; religiously, he claimed, the Heavenly Empire adhered to Western tenets of Christianity. Furthermore, Gan claimed, the Heavenly Kingdom would openly admit European traders in the region and trade freely with them, not only limited to silver, which proved a great attractive to European investment. The British, especially invested into Chinese affairs at this moment and trying to get the most out of the collapsing situation of the Qing state, and pretty sure that the Taipings would come out on top, were the first to jump in. British investment in the region would soon soar, which would over time lead to Britain owning most Chinese assets. By the end of the century, the Taipings would essentially be a British protectorate.
Further to the south, the Hakka forces of Guangdong had been mostly expelled by the Tianmenhui rebels in Canton, with great ethnic violence resulting from the conflict. However, the Tianmenhui were not precisely amenable to continued government by the Manchu, who they saw as foreign devils, either. Instead, the wide net of secret societies and fraternal organizations that composed the Tianmenhui decided that now was the time to strike. A low-level rebellion against the Qing had already been mostly going on within the region, with the hope of restoring the Ming Dynasty. While this would prove to be impossible, soon enough the debilitated Canton garrison would give way to troops that had already taken over smaller provincial authorities. With tacit British support towards possible regimes more amenable to its commercial interests in Southern China than the Qing dynasty, which was seen as fatally wounded by the Red Sheep, the territory occupied by mostly Yue Tianmenhui rebels rapidly spread. The Great Cheng Kingdom (大成国) was pronounced in 1859, spelling an end to Qing dominance in southern China.
Images of the Dacheng forces in the film Heroes of the South, 2021. The Dacheng are complicated in official Chinese historiography; while current accounts mostly place them as a strongly ethnic-supremacist nationalist organization that looked to either revive the Ming or establish a Yue nation-state, historically portrayal has been more varied, from epic saviors of the South of China from Manchu oppression and Western conquest to pushover drug-addicted lackeys for criminals that sold out their nation to the West.
Dacheng rule was complex over most of the southwest. Firstly, while the Tiandihui system in the south of China was deeply entrenched and permitted deep approaches towards even small villages throughout the country, it was also true that the system was only truly representative of Yue people, which was especially problematic in such an ethnically diverse region of China as its south. Furthermore, the ideals of the Dacheng were complex. For a long time the main purpose of the Hongmen was to be a religious and political movement that sought to restore Ming rule, but this did not occur. When presented with the chance to create their own nation, then, the society mixed their own internal organization with Western nationalism, creating a particularly unique system of government mostly based on the organized secret society, especially in the region of Canton. Initially, relations with the Red Sheep and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were warm; but when Hakka violence spiralled out of control without Qing or colonial authorities to interfere, the two countries became hostile to each other.
A Hongmen meeting in Canton, c. 1888. Hongmen organization was not entirely hierarchical, requiring input from the over 2 million members of the Tiandihui. The relatively democratic nature of these triads and the marked Westernization of many Yue Hongmen would provide a lot of good faith to the Dacheng kingdom by Western authorities.
In regions where the Hongmen were not as powerful, such as Guizhou and Yunnan, as well as in more isolated Hoklo communities in Fujian, however, Hongmen direct rule quickly fell apart. Instead of trying to brutally reassert their direct rule or abandon those territories, the Hongmen went with the route of autonomy. Previous revolts by Hui Muslims in Yunnan and Miao people in Guizhou had created a large area of lawlessness in China's southwest that was now taken advantage of by the Hongmen, supporting several warlords over others to ensure a degree of loyalty to their regime; more than anything, to continue getting the income from those territories. Thus, the kingdom of Pingnan Guo was extended to all of Yunnan (although shakily), as a Chen protectorate, while the lawless and rowdy areas of Guizhou became a series of small but more or less loyal Miao protectorates. The Zhuang of Guangxi, on the other hand, were mostly oppresed and cowed into submission, showing the great variety of Tiandihui approaches to governance.
With Canton basically under Chinese occupation and depending on Western trade to continue existing, the Dacheng would also rapidly come under the aegis of Britain, although they would not forever remain there, instead eventually moving closer to France. However, few areas in China opened themselves up to modernization as rapidly as Dacheng, with investors from around the world happy to finally find a place in China that would not only take silver coins, but was happy to do so, at a discount, in order to rapidly modernize. The inherent contradictions of a Ming salvationist organization trying to adopt new radical reforms would not be lost on few, but little was done about it in the first few decades.