Asia After the Meddling British, French and Americans Arrived

Lloyd Lofthouse author photo

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.

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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.

My Splendid Concubine cover image

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?

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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.

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Japan Before “Shogun”

I. J. Parker author photoRelevant History welcomes historical mystery novelist I. J. Parker, who has followed the exploits of her eleventh-century Japanese detective, Akitada, in short story and novel since 1996. Her story “Akitada’s First Case” won the Shamus award in 2000. Her novels have been translated into several languages. In addition to the Akitada mysteries and stories, she has written three novels set during the Heike Wars at the end of the twelfth century, and one about eighteenth-century Germany. For more information, visit her web site.

Note: the Akitada novel Death on an Autumn River will be free in Amazon Kindle format 23–26 November.

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Japanese womanI first discovered Asian history, and more precisely that of Japan, through its literature, especially the great novel Genji, written by a court lady in the first decade of the eleventh century and thus the first novel in the world. This book astonished me by its sophistication, its understanding of the psychology of men and women, its emotional and poetic response to nature, and its probing of the human condition.

Not long after exploring Japanese literature of this period, I became interested in writing mysteries and decided to write about early Japan. I was convinced that others would also come to love this strange, wonderful, and exotic culture and discover another world while spellbound by a mystery plot.

Let me caution you. Eleventh-century Japan is not the time of shoguns and samurai. Life was far more decorous then—at least on the surface. The country was still ruled by an emperor and a complex central government. Influenced by Tang China, Japan’s culture had reached its height of elegance and artistic achievement by the eleventh century. The arts flourished, and both men and women of the upper classes played musical instruments, painted, read and wrote poetry and prose in both Japanese and Chinese. They had universities, elegant palaces, huge temple complexes, exquisite gardens and parks, and whole cities neatly laid out by the ancient rules of feng shui. The upper classes dressed in silks and brocades, enjoyed games like backgammon, chess, and go, and engaged in sports like football, wrestling, archery, fishing, and hunting.

But this advanced and luxurious culture was controlled by a large, rigid bureaucracy and supported by the labors of peasants, fishermen, artisans, and merchants. Many of the common people were very poor and lived in densely-packed, rat-infested neighborhoods. Some resorted to crime in city streets and on the highways. And in distant provinces, warlords were busily building their armies. Unlike the Chinese, who took swift and brutal action against traitors and criminals, Japan’s system of law and order forbade the taking of life, and consequently criminals flourished because they could not be effectively restrained. Except for rare special cases, exile with hard labor or imprisonment were the only available punishments, and these were frequently nullified by sweeping imperial pardons.

Japanese manAgainst this background, I conceived of men like Akitada, a civil servant representing the law, a man of honor and duty. Such men would have had their hands full, especially when crimes were committed by the privileged who could count on support from powerful men in the government. In such cases, considerable personal danger would be involved, as Akitada discovers in Rashomon Gate and in the short story “Akitada’s First Case.”

Akitada is a member of the upper classes, but his family has fallen on hard times. Because he excelled at his law studies at the university, he was given a lowly position in the Ministry of Justice where his interest in “low crime” keeps him in constant hot water and gets him various punitive assignments to unpleasant places. However, this means that he makes interesting friends (like Tora, Genba, and Hitomaro) among the less privileged but more colorful members of his society. We learn from history that human beings don’t change much over the centuries or geographic distances. Basic human traits are constant, and knowing this allows us to understand the past by identifying with its people.

Japanese building and snowAkitada has taken me on many exciting adventures. We have explored Buddhist monasteries, visited the imperial palace and its surroundings, traveled to a penal colony, delved into a gold mine, and attacked a warlord’s fortress. We have been to brothels and bathhouses, shopped at markets, viewed aristocratic gardens, and roamed among professors and students at the university. The people Akitada introduces me to are princes and paupers, officials and outlaws, monks and courtesans. We have visited eleventh-century entertainers and sword smiths, wrestlers and martial arts practitioners together.

You may wonder how true to actual fact all these details are. I enjoy research, and have been working on this period for thirty years now. I know the scholarly and primary materials and do additional research for each new novel or story. But I write fiction, not history, and sometimes facts have to be bent to the story. I try to do as little of this as possible and add a historical note at the end of each novel to explain the background and any liberties I may have taken. For example, scholars don’t know for certain how long the famous Rashomon gate stood at the southern entrance to Kyoto, but the gate has enormous symbolic significance for early Japanese culture and is familiar to many western readers from the Japanese film by the same name. I used the gate for its historical connotations but explained the problems of dating in the end note.

In the process of our imaginary travels, I have become very fond of my protagonist. Akitada is by no means a perfect man. He is shy, introverted, stubborn, rash, and judgmental. He makes mistakes and suffers the pangs of conscience for them. But he does not rest until the wrong has been righted, even if it means risking his career, his life, or the lives of loved ones. In spite of all his flaws, he is ultimately a man of great courage and intelligence, though he is completely unaware of this. The women in his life love him and he loves them back, but he is an awkward and unintentionally insensitive partner. Akitada is a man of early eleventh-century Japan, but he is always human, I hope, and human nature does not change much over the centuries.

I look forward to future adventures and to watching him change from the naiveté of the very young man in The Dragon Scroll to a wiser, sadder, and perhaps more troubled middle age. The eleventh novel in the series, Death of a Doll Maker, was released this past summer, and there are many others waiting, I hope.

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Rashomon Gate book cover imageA big thanks to I. J. Parker. She’ll give away one copy of an Akitada book to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET. Then the winner may select either Rashomon Gate in hardcover or The Hell Screen in trade paperback Delivery is available within the U.S. only.

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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.

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