In the summer of 1846 several enterprising Englishmen on the island of Hongkong decided to buy a junk and sail her home. Though their government had only recently signed a victorious peace with the Chinese, though the union jack flew over the island and merchants from Europe and America traded with relative freedom at Canton and four other ports, they had to go about their business with caution; for Chinese law still forbade the sale of vessels to foreigners, Unobtrusively they located a likely deep-water junk, bought her, named her after Kiying (Ch’i-ying Eng-Keying), the Chinese governor-general at Canton, engaged a crew two-thirds Chinese and one-third European, and prepared for sea. By early December the Kiying was ready. Sir John Francis Davis, first Civil governor of Hongkong, paid her the courtesy of a visit; and on the sixth, to a salute from warships, she sailed. Strong headwinds in the Indian Ocean stretched her passage to the Cape past sixteen weeks. Another two brought her to St. Helena. Then continuous gales drove her so far to the west that she was obliged to put into New York. There she lay for several months, refitting, while thousands of the curious trooped across her deck. Early in 1848 she moved up to Boston, sailed from that port for England, sighted Land’s End twenty-one days later (a fast passage even for the packets of the Black Ball Line), and on the last Monday of March entered the Thames and anchored at Gravesend. The Illustrated London News sent a man down to have a look.

The papers that Spring were full of revolution on the Continent. Louis Philippe of France had lost his throne, patriots and liberals were up in arms in Italy and Germany, Metternich had fled Vienna. The News was naturally much occupied with these events and filled its pages with eyewitness accounts of street fighting and pen and ink drawings of barricades. But towards the back of the first issue in April the editor found room for the Kiying. To the story he attached a sketch. His readers saw a floating half-moon of a vessel 160 feet long and a little over 30 feet wide, her stern towering above the waterline, her bow rising almost as high. With masts quite naked of yards or standing rigging, sails of matting ribbed with bamboo, ropes of plaited rattan, anchors of ironwood, and a large eye painted in brilliant colors on either side of her bow, there was not on the Thames, nor had there ever been, a ship remotely like her. And that was not surprising. For the Kiying was the first Chinese vessel ever to reach England.

After some time she moved up the river to Blackwall. There she was visited by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Duke of Wellington. Presumably they were as struck by her curious lines and strange appearance as the man from the News had been. What ought to have astonished them, however though it probably did not was the fact that she had been brought to London at all, and by Englishmen. How could there be, on the island of Hongkong in the summer of 1846, Englishmen in a position to buy a junk and fit her out? How could there be an English governor to pay her a courtesy call and a union jack to do it under?

For at the beginning of the nineteenth century the English were scarcely to be found east of Calcutta. There were Dutch on the island of Java and Spanish at Manila, but their being at those places constituted only a modest extension of the West past the Bay of Bengal, one that reached into southeast Asia only. China, the heart and the bulk of the true East, remained almost untouched remained, in fact, closed; if not fully closed like Japan, nevertheless much more nearly closed than were India and the Arab world. A tiny Russian colony at Peking, a few dozen Catholic missionaries scattered furtively about the interior, a few hundred Portuguese roosting idle and neglected on the tiny peninsula of Macao, and a handful of merchants carrying on a limited trade at Canton made up the sum of the western presence in the immense Chinese Empire. And the sum was not significantly inflated during the first third of the century.

By 1846, however, things were different. Different in actuality. Very different in prospect. China was not closed any more. A war had decided she must open. And though she had not opened very far by the time the English bought the Kiying, it was already clear that the process, for some time at least, was irreversible. China was going to open further.

This is about the first China War, not western relations with China. Nevertheless it may be worth observing how odd, how unexpected, that process and those relations have been. For suppose the Chinese had been the openers instead of the opened.

Suppose the sighting of Land’s End by an expedition sent from China early in the sixteenth century. Suppose mandarins in silk gowns demanding audience of James I, merchant junks discharging teas and loading wool and tin at London Bridge, the breaking out in 1801 of the so-called “Gin War” (it began when Pitt tried to stop the importation into England of grain spirits from the great Chinese dependency on the Mississippi and ended when twenty-five junks of war caught Nelson’s numerically superior squadron off the Goodwin Sands and destroyed it), the consequent cession to the Chinese of the Isle of Wight and a strip of the mainland along Southampton Water, the irresistible demand of the Japanese and the Straits Malays for equivalent trading concessions at Bristol and Hull, and the development of the International Settlement at Liverpool with its smartly drilled mixed Oriental police and its famous Institute for the Propagation of Confucian Ethics. Suppose, finally, a party of Chinese buying one day a Glasgow side-wheeler and steaming her home around the Horn.

You might, in short, have expected China to force herself upon Europe. She had, after all, such a head start. When Confucius taught his sophisticated ethics in the sixth century B.C., Rome was only a village and England a savage waste. Two thousand years later, when a united and highly civilized China prospered under the Ming, Christian Europe was hardly more than the sum of her kings and princes, with moribund Moors at her western extremity and Turks battering at the east. Over all this extent of time the flow of influence, if any, had been from China towards Europe not the other way around. Paper, porcelain, printing, gunpowder, the compass, the wheelbarrow, and the fore-and-aft rig are among the things China gave Europe. And when, early in the eighteenth century, European admiration for Chinese society and things Chinese was at its height, the admirers still imagined (as they had always and with perfect accuracy imagined) that the object of their admiration was as powerful as it was advanced. Yet for all that it was Europe that shortly forced herself upon China bringing Christ and opium.