Relevant History welcomes Lloyd Lofthouse, award-winning historical fiction author of My Splendid Concubine, the love story of Sir Robert Hart and a Chinese woman. For more information, check out Lloyd’s web site and author blog, and read the first chapter of his latest novel, multi-award winner Running with the Enemy.
*****
It could be argued that the British Empire and the United States are responsible for World War II in the Pacific and Mao Zedong winning China’s Civil War in 1949.
Before my wife told me in 1999 about Sir Robert Hart, I knew little about Japan and China. My knowledge of Japan, for instance, was the bombing of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (April 18, 1942) and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.
I knew less about China, but that changed after my wife introduced me to Robert Hart. First, I read his journals and letters that had been published by Harvard. It was while researching for several years and writing My Splendid Concubine—based on Robert Hart’s real-life love story with a Chinese concubine named Ayaou—that I discovered the horrors that had been forced upon Asia in the 19th century by countries like Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.
The British and the French fired the first salvo starting the Opium Wars in 1839–1842 and then again in 1856–1860. The reason: China’s emperor refused to allow the British and merchants of other western countries—including the U.S.—to sell opium without restrictions to the Chinese people. In addition, the treaties allowed Christian missionaries the freedom to go anywhere in China and convert and save the souls of heathen Chinese.
As Christian missionaries were saving these souls, they converted a failed Confucian Scholar, Hong Xiuquan, who soon claimed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ; he published a Bible in Chinese after writing and including his own gospel. Then he led the 19-year Taiping rebellion that’s considered the bloodiest rebellion in human history with 20–100 million Chinese killed by the time he was defeated. And because God’s Chinese son was against the opium trade, Christian British and French troops joined in the fight, including American mercenaries, to defeat the Taipings. As for Japan, in 1846, America made its first attempt to open Japan for trade. Commander James Biddle anchored in Tokyo Bay with two ships, including one warship armed with 72 cannons, but his requests for a trade agreement were unsuccessful.
The Japanese, similar to the Chinese, didn’t want anything to do with the Western barbarians, but those barbarians weren’t about to accept no for an answer and miss an opportunity to find new markets for their growing consumer-based economies. Customers were to be gained; cheap labor was to be had, and this would lead to increased profits for European and American companies.
A few years later in 1852, Commodore Matthew C. Perry returned to Japan and turned his canons on the town of Uraga. The Japanese demanded he leave. In answer, Perry ordered some buildings in the harbor shelled. When Perry returned in February 1854 with twice as many ships, the Japanese agreed to virtually all of President Fillmore’s demands for trade with America.
It would take Japan almost a century to transition from a primitive, feudal agricultural-based economy to an imperial industrial power ready to wage war in 1937 with a goal to take Asia back from the Western powers that were exploiting and colonizing the region. To achieve this objective, Japan attacked China because it needed China’s resources.
If America had left Japan alone, Japan may have stayed an agricultural-based economy, and there would have never been the invasion of China in 1937.
It was Japan’s invasion of China that eventually caused the defeat of the Nationalist Chinese led by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong won the civil war that had raged from April 1927 to December 1937—with a break during World War II as both the Nationalist (KMT) and the Communists fought Japan. The Chinese Civil War resumed in March 1946.
Fighting Japan cost the KMT 1.3-million KIA; 1.8-million WIA and the CCP 500,000 KIA/MIA. The KMT fought a traditional war while the Communists practiced guerrilla warfare. During World War II, most Chinese lost trust in the Nationalists who clearly wanted to return China to the way it had been before the Civil War when the average life span was age 35, and more than 95% of Chinese lived in extreme poverty and were often treated worse than animals by those at the top of the economic pyramid.
By June of 1949, the Red Army had four million troops fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s 1.5 million. What would have happened to China and Japan in the 20th century if the United States and Great Britain had not forced both countries to open markets to unwanted products and religions in the 19th century?
*****
A big thanks to Lloyd Lofthouse. He discusses his research for My Splendid Concubine in this video and presents a timeline of China’s history here.
**********
Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne’s free newsletter.
Hi Lloyd. I see that My Splendid Concubine is a novel. How close to a biography is it? JJ
Welcome back, JJ Toner! You’ve asked something that I’ve wondered about, so I hope that Lloyd checks in with us soon.
JJ Toner,
I can’t put a number to how much of my novel is biographical because Robert Hart—shortly before his death in England—burned seven years of his journals that covered his first ten years in China—the period that my novel covers. He also went through the journals he did not burn and blacked out passages that he could find that might reveal what his life was like with Ayaou.
But we do have the first year and that year shows a very different Hart from the one that appears years later in the surviving journals.
Very little survived about his life with Ayaou exists other than the three children. He didn’t burn the journal that covers his first year in China because Ayaou wasn’t in his life then and that material reveals a conflicted young man who wanted a woman in his life–he was horny. He was fascinated with the idea that he could buy a concubine, but his Christian guilt plagued him too.That much is very obvious, but God’s influence on his life diminished significantly in the journals that continue his story several years later. Also, after Ayaou, his desire for women was all but gone. Whatever happened with Ayaou must have filled his every fantasy and then more. I think no other woman in his life, even his wife, could compare to Ayaou.
In one of his letters to his London agent more than a decade after Ayaou was gone from his life he called himself a black-hearted fool and Ayaou one of the most sensible people he’d ever known. What did he mean by “black-hearted fool”?
We also have the journals from his Canton years during the Arrow War when Ayaou, for her own safety, lived in Macao supported by money Hart sent to her through a serving girl or cousin. When the Arrow War ended and he sent for her to live with him in Canton after he was working for the Chinese, he missed deleting one comment in his journal that said “his boat girl was back”.
Lloyd, have you seen “The Economics of Happiness?” It deals with the negative side of globalization, just as you’ve done.
No, I haven’t real “The Economics of Happiness”.
A wealthy friend summed it up best: “It’s better to be miserable and rich than miserable and poor.” And of course, it’s probably easier to be in a better state of mind if one doesn’t have to worry about money, shelter and starvation all the time.
Divorce studies show that the major reason for divorce is linked to a lack of money. And we now know from many studies that children living in poverty often suffer from malnutrition and do not develop their full mental capacity—ability to function 100%. Many children who live in poverty often suffer from learning disabilities and an inability to concentrate in the classroom.
Gee–one more instance of the indigenous population of an area being told that the high and mighty WASP knows what is better for their culture :-0
There’s an extremely valid argument for isolationism but unfortunately many of the mistakes of the past are still affecting out global future.
Lloyd, you have opened my eyes to things I didn’t know about Eastern cultures–I look forward to reading your book(s).
Thanks for stopping by, Linda. Yeahhhh, why is it that humans keep imposing values on each other?
On a similar note, my wife and I watched “Gandhi” the film (1982) and finished it last night. We’ve both seen it before. When my wife first saw it, her English wasn’t that good, and the last time I saw it was probably in the early 1980s. I’d forgotten many of the details.
This film offers a reminder of how brutal the West was and how some Westerners treat minorities as if they are worth less than animals.
The French and British in Southeast Asia. The British in India. The West’ wars motivated by profits against China.
But not everyone in the West is bad. There are people who speak out and sometimes they get killed for speaking out.
In China during the Opium Wars there were voices in the British Parliament and the US Congress who spoke out against what the West was doing to China but at first the majority supported the profit motive for the private sector.
Eventually, during the 2nd Opium War, the opinion that it was wrong shifted in the US Congress and America pulled its troops out. In fact, when China was forced to pay the Western nations for a war the West started, the US returned that money to China and China built Tsinghua University [considered the MIT of Asia] in Beijing with that money, its leading university today. Stanford even has a partnership with Tsinghua.
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/cgbe/globalexperiences/step.html
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/programs/mba/academic-experience/global-experiences
There are always two sides to every issue. Slavery in the US was a hot button issue for decades leading up to the Civil War.
The battle to change the laws in the US regarding Women’s rights and children being sold into a form of slavery known as servitude. The Child Labor Laws [1938] changed all that and made it mandatory that all children should attend school. And women did gain the right to vote and own property a few earlier in 1920, but the Equal Rights Amendment still languishes with a few votes needed but states that are controlled by GOP/Tea Party majorities stand in the way.
There is no doubt that “the west” has a lot to answer for, the conquistadors in South America and the treatment of the native Americans spring to mind. But “the east” had just as bad a record. Look at the Japanese treatment of pows and of their neighbors. Nowadays, what about the Shias and the Sunnis in the middle east, the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the tribal massacres in Africa. Back to the west for “Ethnic cleansing”. History (and contemporary life) is full of examples of man’s inhumanity to man. The “west” don’t have a monopoly on atrocities!
Have you heard of or read “Guns, Germs, And Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared M. Diamond? It won the Pulitzer Prize.
What’s interesting is when we compare what China did when it had an advanced fleet during the Ming Dynasty that no other nation could have stopped but the Emperor decided to stop the trading and explorations, destroy the fleet and any evidence of how to build ships that advanced. The Chinese invented the compass, gunpowder, rockets, canons, napalm and knew how to avoid scurvy.
China could have done the same thing to the world that the west has done but said no.
Is China still saying no? 😉
OOPS–“out” in the second paragraph was supposed to be “our”. I need to wear my glasses when typing LOL.
I understand. I make typos all the time in my comments and in Blog posts I write. Even after reading a draft several times and using spell check, they slip by. When I catch them, I usually correct if I can.
There were still typos in “My Splendid Concubine” after the novel had been edited exhaustively by me and six other pair of eyes.
And I’m sure there are typos in my comments here.