The English Historical Review Advance Access originally published online on November 10, 2008
The English Historical Review 2008 CXXIII(505):1470-1503; doi:10.1093/ehr/cen275
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
The Chinese Myth of Universal Kingship and Commissioner Lin Zexu's Anti-Opium Campaign of 1839*
University of Lethbridge
Correspondence: Professor Luke Kwong, Department of History, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada TIK 3M4, kwong{at}uleth.ca
‘Under the wide heaven, all is the king's land. Within the sea boundaries of the land, all are the king's servants’. The ancient Chinese myth of universal kingship was premised on a twofold belief: the ruler's centrality in mundane space and his command over all others who served him as pliant, labouring bodies. The alien Manchus who founded the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) constructed an ideological framework based in part on Chinese imperial idiom and practices and adopted similar notions of supremacy in treating Westerners who came to the China coast for trade. The Guangzhou trade system was established in the mid-eighteenth century and aimed, for purposes of control, to reduce Western traders to regulated bodies in confined space. The escalation of the illegal traffic in opium, however, exposed the weaknesses of the Qing design. This article seeks to explain how Commissioner Lin Zexu's anti-opium campaign in Guangdong province in 1839 represented a major Qing attempt to restore the space-body coordinates of maritime control. The outbreak of the Opium War (1839–42) and, in particular, the treaty system that subsequently developed not only repudiated the Qing ability to dictate foreign contact on its own terms but also relegated Lin's earlier mission, in hindsight, to the last stand of universal kingship in Chinese history.