Napoleon’s oft quoted remark on China reflected his ignorance of the splendor and power of the Chinese Empire, for at that time China enjoyed the greatest extent that the Empire had ever experienced. Her frontiers had been pushed outward in all directions, and many new territories had recently been added to the realm.
Today, when the Sino-Soviet split looms large on the world scene, there is speculation that the China of Mao Tse-tung, remembering the glories of the past, might wish to restore the realm to its former magnitude.
Let us look back to an earlier China—before the time of Napoleon—back to the time of China’s first diplomatic relations with the European states, to the time of the first territorial acquisitions by foreign interlopers at China’s expense. Let us build up the roster of China’s lost lands and consider where they fit into the world picture today.
At various periods in past ages, the Chinese Empire attained a pre-eminence and power of great magnitude. Lands as far from Peking as Indonesia and Ceylon sent annual or decennial tribute to the emperor in acknowledgment of his hegemony over them, and often the emperor held undisputed sway over such neighboring lands as Tibet, Mongolia, and Turkistan. In those earlier times—throughout the centuries of contact with the west by overland caravan routes through Central Asia—China remained in large measure isolated from the effects of western imperial expansion.
Then came a period in which the imperial forces suffered repeated defeats by grotesquely smaller forces of western “barbarians.” These humiliations were doubly hard to bear, coming close on the heels of one of China’s great periods of imperial grandeur, of haughty disdain and superior scorn for the “foreign devils” and “big noses” with their outlandish sailing craft and their greed for Chinese commerce.
The winds which were to blow a growing sea trade toward China were the winds of change, destined to sweep across the Empire, a western gale which ultimately would strip China of its power and bring the proud nation to its knees.
First out among the seaborne traders were the Portuguese, who raided the China coast on trading missions from Malacca in 1514. By 1557, they had established at Macao the first permanent European colony on Chinese territory, one they formally annexed three centuries later, when China was embroiled in troubles with several other European states. During the 400 years that Portugal has held Macao only occasional clashes have occurred with the giant neighbor to the north, the latest having been an unplanned border incident in mid- 1952 which erupted into a three-day small- scale artillery duel. At the time, there was speculation that Portugal might invoke its 600-year-old mutual assistance pact with Great Britain, but the incident passed. Portugal today retains its colony at Macao: two small islands and a tiny peninsula, totaling less than six square miles.
With the successful penetration of the China coast by the early European merchant vessels, the advantages of sea trade caused a shift of emphasis from the old caravan routes. Bulk cargoes, more rapid delivery, elimination of the many middlemen along the old caravan routes, who consistently took their cut of the profits, combined with the West’s insatiable demand for the products of the Orient, insured a booming sea trade.
There were obstacles, however: China’s refusal to recognize other nations as her equal and the inability of European traders to acknowledge Chinese suzerainty over their lands, led to a political standoff and to a paucity of official dealings between China and the seafaring nations which carried on that trade.
To some extent this was offset by provincial Chinese officials, who, far from the seat of power in Peking, found the trade with the Europeans personally profitable, and encouraged dealings at an unofficial level.
Macao remained for over 200 years the chief European trading port on the China coast and China’s most important point of contact with the West. Eventually the rivalry for Portugal’s pre-eminent position there led to a time of troubles for China, as other European nations vied with each other to acquire similar entree to China.
While maritime contacts were being made in the south, other encounters—destined to have equally unhappy long-range effects—- were taking place in the north. The 17th century was to witness the significant expansion eastward by land of another European power, Czarist Russia.
The Russians succeeded in conquering the Tartars of Kazan and Astrakhan in the mid- 1500s, and the way was open for rapid expansion to the east, the lure of the fur trade furnishing added impetus to the opening of new lands. Russian exploration to the east was encouraged by the crown, and immigrant settlements sprang up behind the explorers in the valleys of Siberia’s great northward flowing rivers.
Early Russian settlers founded Yeniseisk on the Yenisei River, in 1618, and Yakutsk on the Lena River in 1632. In 1644, the year in which the Manchus swept down from Manchuria to overthrow the Ming Dynasty and establish their own under the name Ch’ing, the tide of Russian settlement reached the Amur River, the present northern boundary of Manchuria. Russian explorer Vasili Poiar-kov explored the Amur region in 1643-46, and Erofei Khabarov—for whom the city and region of Khabarovsk were named—built a fort on the river at Albazin in 1651.
Russian arrival on the Yenisei and the Lena provoked no significant Chinese response, but the Amur valley was a different matter. This was part of their original homeland and the Manchus made clear their intent to brook no transgressions in the basin of that great river.
Albazin, situated near the northernmost tip of Manchuria, was captured by a Manchu force in 1685, and its Russian occupants were expelled. Following a few years of sporadic fighting, the Chinese and Russians signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, the first treaty between China and a European state. Chinese control of the Amur basin was reaffirmed and the Chinese-Russian border was fixed along the crest of the Stanovoi Mountains, well to the north of the Amur.
Soon after the accession of the Ch’ing Dynasty in 1644, China flourished under two sovereigns whose combined span of rule, with a brief interval between, was to encompass more than 120 years.
The first was K’ang Hsi, whose reign commenced in 1661, the year after the Restoration of Charles II to the Stuart throne in England. It was during his reign that the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed. During his 61 years on the throne of China, Formosa for the first time became a part of the Empire, the western Mongols were subdued, and Tibet was conquered and added to the realm.
It remained for his grandson, Ch’ien Lung, perhaps China’s greatest emperor, to carry the borders of empire to an extent never known before. (The boundaries of the Yuan Dynasty of the 14th century encompassed more territory, but China at that time was in reality only a part, albeit a major one, of a greater Mongol Empire.) In 1736, when Ch’ien Lung ascended the Dragon Throne, George Washington was only four years old, and Napoleon would not be born until more than a quarter of a century later.
While the French and Indian War was being fought in the American wilderness, the regime of Ch’ien Lung subdued Mongolia and Sinkiang and added them to the realm. At the height of his power, Ch’ien Lung received tribute from vassal states which included Tonkin, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Korea, Nepal, and Afghanistan.
In the 60th and final year of Ch’ien Lung’s reign, the young Corsican on the other side of the world was just winning his first renown as a general in the Italian campaigns, while further to the west, the first President of the infant United States was making his Farewell Address and retiring from active politics.
Only half a century later, China was to be toppled from the pinnacle of might which she had enjoyed under Ch’ien Lung and she would commence the rapid decline, to the harassed, revolution-torn China of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, beset on all sides by predatory European nations whose goal was her economic dismemberment.
After defeating the Spanish Armada, ±\. Great Britain had pushed rapidly to the forefront in the sea-borne commerce with China. As early as 1637, during the rule of the Ming Dynasty, a British squadron had forced the Pearl River defenses and made its way to Canton. By the end of the century, the British were firmly established in the China trade.
While the government at Peking continued to discourage contacts with the West, the increase in the coastal trade brought with it a parallel growth in attempts to exploit the exploiters—attempts by local officials to control ports of entry, levy customs, apply economic blackmail, and swell their own coffers. Profits in the China trade were large, and the international competition for the political advantage which gave access to those profits was fierce. It was inevitable that a serious collision should occur.
The pretext was small, the cause ignoble, and the conflict quite limited; but the so- called Opium War of 1839-42 between China and Great Britain had several significant results. Militarily, the situation demonstrated that China was incapable of significant resistance when matched against western ruthlessness and modern weapons of the day. Second, by demonstrating that fact, the war signalled a turning point in the fortunes of China, the decline of the once mighty Man-chu Empire. Finally, the settlement terms set the pattern for concessions to be wrested from China again and again during the next hundred years.
By the terms of the Treaty of Nanking which ended the Opium War, China ceded to Great Britain the island of Hong Kong and agreed to open five “treaty ports” to trade with the foreigners—Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai.
Internal troubles, too, plagued the Empire in succeeding years. Soon after the Opium War, China was racked by a veritable rash of banditry and revolts, the most serious being the 17-year Taiping Rebellion. This rebellion was eventually put down in 1865 with the assistance of foreigners, among whom was Charles George Gordon—the “Chinese” Gordon destined to die 20 years later defending Khartoum, half a world away.
In the same period, China was involved in another foreign war, this time with both Great Britain and France in the years 1856 to 1860.
Meanwhile in Petrograd, Czar Nicholas I had not forgotten the Amur River region. In 1847, he appointed Count Nicholas Muraviev to be Governor-General of Eastern Siberia and in contravention of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, assigned him the secret task of acquiring the Amur area for Russia.
With Muraviev’s encouragement, Lieutenant Commander Nevelskoy led an expedition to explore the Amur River estuary and, in 1849, founded the town of Nikolaevsk at the river’s mouth. Muraviev moved swiftly to colonize the area, and, to hold his gains in the Amur basin, he raised a local army of political exiles, released prisoners, and serfs from the royal gold mines of Nerchinsk and the Altai Mountains.
In 1858, during the second war with Great Britain, while China was negotiating the Treaty of Tientsin and was plagued by the Taiping Rebellion, Count Muraviev succeeded in obtaining Chinese signature to the Treaty of Aigun. By the terms of this treaty, China ceded to Russia all land north of the Amur River.
The treaties of Tientsin (1858) and Peking (1860), which ended China’s war with Great Britain and France, provided, inter alia, for the opening of 11 more Chinese ports to European trade, and permitted foreigners to travel freely within the empire. Under the territorial clauses of the latter treaty, Great Britain received the Kowloon area, on the mainland opposite Hong Kong Island. Russia, benefiting from an agreement negotiated while China was hard pressed by Great Britain and France, gained title to all land east of the Ussuri River—the so-called Primorski Krai, or Maritime Territory, including the site of the port of Vladivostok.
With the acquisition of Amursk and Primorsk, the Amur and Maritime Territories, Russia gained an area two-thirds the size of Alaska (nearly as large as Hudson’s Bay, or equal to the combined areas of F'rance and Spain) together with some 1,500 miles of coastline—all of the Asian coast north of Korea.
In addition to losing some of her northern territory to the overland encroachments by the Russians and to suffering humiliating defeats at the hands of Westerners in 1842 and 1860, China also lost control of some of her vassal states to the south.
France, especially, was troublesome in this area, acquiring three provinces of Cochin China in 1862, some territory of Annam in 1867, and engaging in further hostilities with China over Annam in 1833 and 1884. Meanwhile, Great Britain became ever more deeply involved with another of China’s vassal states, Burma, and ultimately annexed that kingdom in 1895.
In 1898, the British completed the formation of their present Crown Colony of Hong Kong by taking a 99-year lease on the New Territories. These consisted of the mainland area adjacent to Kowloon and the area between that city and the Shumchun River, together with several nearby islands.
Other powers, not to be outdone, also leased Chinese port areas in that same year: France leased Kwangchowan; Germany, Tsingtao; and Russia, Port Arthur and Dairen.
The same period of Chinese history saw a rash of revolts in widely scattered areas within China. The most serious of these involved Moslems in Yunnan, 1855 through 1873, Miao tribesmen in Kweichow, 1855 through 1881, and Moslems again in Shensi and Kansu, in 1862 through 1873.
Taking advantage of the Moslem revolt in the far west, the governor of Russian Turki- stan in 1870 moved over the Sinkiang border and occupied the area of the Ili River valley under the usual pretext of restoring order. China’s protests were prompt, but Russia balked at evacuating the area. It was not until a forceful Ch’ing general, Tso Tsung- tang, had suppressed the Moslem rebels and turned his attention to Ili, making clear his intent to restore it to China, that the Russians abandoned the effort and finally withdrew in 1881—but not permanently.
In the period 1935 to 1942 the Ili area once again became a thorn in China’s side, when Stalin laid the groundwork for a similar territorial maneuver. His plot, however, aborted, and the Russians once more disengaged.
That this stretch of the Chinese-Russian frontier is a constant source of friction is clear from other developments in recent years: For instance, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1961, the Russians formed “volunteer armed detachments” to assist the Soviet Frontier guards in the apprehension of border violators.
As a further indication of Chinese sensitivity in that area, Red China’s anti-Soviet pronouncements of September 1963 may be noted. According to press reports, Communist China charged the Soviet Union with fomenting and abetting a Moslem rebellion which occurred in Ili in the period April to August 1962, during which 50,000 to 70,000 Moslems allegedly fled across the border to Soviet Kazakhstan.
Japanese interest in Korea goes back many years. The first Japanese forces invaded that peninsula in 1592, during the Ming Dynasty, defeating two Ming armies before withdrawing to Japan a few years later. Korea became a Manchu Dependency in 1637, seven years before the Manchu conquest of China. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 had been preceded ten years earlier by a clash between China and Japan in Korea, and the War itself was essentially a conflict over the status of Korea.
After Japan’s victory, the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki required China to cede to Japan the Pescadores, Formosa, and the Liaotung Peninsula, and to recognize the independence of Korea. This was followed in 1910 by Japan’s outright annexation of Korea, which she continued to hold, along with Formosa, until the end of World War II.
Japan’s tenure in the Liaotung Peninsula, however, was cut short. She was compelled almost immediately by other powers, jealous of her advantage, to give up her rights there. It was, therefore, with some chagrin that she saw Russia, in 1898, acquire a 25-year lease to the Port Arthur-Dairen area, together with railway construction and other economic rights in Manchuria. Following the Russo- Japanese War of 1905, however, Japan took over those Russian rights for herself. After World War II, the Russians resumed occupancy at Port Arthur and Dairen, but voluntarily withdrew in 1955, turning the leasehold back to Communist China.
Along the rugged Tibetan-Indian border are three small mountain kingdoms, all of which once acknowledged the overlordship of the Emperor Ch’ien Lung. These are Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal.
The British invaded and conquered Bhutan in 1865, and thereafter assumed responsibility for managing its foreign affairs. In 1890, Great Britain concluded a convention with China by which the latter acknowledged the authority of a British protectorate over Sikkim. As the successor state to the British in this region, India now occupies the role formerly played by Great Britain in relation to both Bhutan and Sikkim.
Nepal acknowledged Chinese suzerainty in 1792 following a war between China and the Gurkhas of that mountain kingdom. Like Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal is situated on the steep southern slopes of the Himalayas. It has thus been more open to Indian than to Chinese influence. British penetration into and influence in India, by extension, reached also into Nepal. During much of the past century and a half Nepal has had more or less the status of a British protectorate.
Tibet, which had been added to the realm in the time of K’ang Hsi, was the subject of a British armed invasion, the Younghusband Expedition, in 1904. Subsequently the British and Russians publicly acknowledged Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, but by 1912, Chinese troops had been driven out of most of the country, and, in 1914, Great Britain and Tibet agreed on Tibetan autonomy.
In 1950 and 1951, while engaged 2,000 miles away in the Korean War, Communist China undertook the reconquest of Tibet. Since then she has repeatedly had to crush anti-Red revolts in that remote and desolate land.
Outer Mongolia, meanwhile, was chafing under Chinese rule. When the 1911—12 revolution burst out in China proper, Mongolia seized the opportunity to reassert its autonomy. At that time, Tannu Tuva was considered an integral part of Outer Mongolia.
The Russians also took advantage of the opportunity to further their aims in the area. In 1907, a Russian explorer had reported Tannu Tuva to be the point of least resistance on the Chinese-Russian frontier. With the onset of the revolution and its attendant disorganization, Russia proceeded to plant settlers in Tannu Tuva, to extend Russian civil and criminal codes to the area, and eventually to prevent access to Tuva by representatives of Mongolia. By 1917, there were some 12,000 Russians in Tuva, compared to only 60,000 Tuvinian natives. Although both Tuva and Mongolia were reoccupied briefly by Chinese troops during the Russian revolutionary period, the Red Army succeeded in setting up a new Republic of Tannu Tuva in 1921, and the Soviet Union and a new pro-Soviet regime in Outer Mongolia formally recognized its existence soon after. The Soviet Union eventually dropped its mask and annexed Tannu Tuva outright in 1944, and it is now an “autonomous region” of the Soviet Union.
Outer Mongolia, having proclaimed its own autonomy during the Chinese revolution, remained under Czarist tutelage and protection until the Russian revolution of 1917. In the period 1917 to 1921 Mongolia fought a continuing national revolution against Chinese, Japanese, and White Russian intervention.
The Czarist recognition accorded Mongolia in 1912 was reasserted by the Soviet regime, and Soviet penetration of Outer Mongolia was extensive in succeeding years. The Mongols proceeded to model their government and economy on the Soviet pattern. The Cyrillic alphabet was introduced after 1941 and has since become the official alphabet of Mongolia.
After World War II, a Mongolian plebiscite on independence versus Chinese sovereignty brought returns overwhelmingly in favor of the former. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government, with Allied persuasion, ratified the plebiscite results in January 1946.
In the current Sino-Soviet split, Mongolia appears to be in the Soviet camp, a fact which no doubt makes her autonomy doubly galling to the Communist Chinese regime. However, relations between Mongolia and Communist China have remained generally amicable, at least outwardly. A comparison of Communist Chinese atlases published in the last decade indicate recent reductions in Communist Chinese claims to what most Western atlases show as Mongolian territory. As recently as December 1962, Mongolia announced the settlement by peaceful arbitration of a number of outstanding boundary differences between the two countries.
Of course, from the Communist viewpoint no account of unredeemed lands of the Chinese Empire would be complete without final reference to Taiwan, mentioned several times above by its other name, Formosa.
With the Communist Chinese conquest of the mainland in 1950, the government of the Republic of China and its surviving military forces withdrew to Taiwan, to lick their wounds and rebuild their strength, with the ultimate aim of launching a campaign of liberation onto the mainland. Taiwan thus represents a particularly irritating thorn in the Red dragon’s side, one the Red Chinese are bent on removing at an early date.
In recapitulating the territorial losses of the Chinese Empire—whether Ch’ing or Communist—it will be noted that essentially three categories of territory are involved.
The first may be classified as neighboring principalities or kingdoms, which, though usually not occupied by Chinese armed forces, nonetheless felt constrained in the past to acknowledge Chinese overlordship and to send periodic tribute to Peking in token thereof. Except for Korea, these were primarily to the south of China, and their connections with China were severed through the efforts of the maritime nations of the West, principally France and Britain. Many of these countries now enjoy independence, though at least two, North Korea and North Vietnam, have been drawn back into the Chinese fold as semi-dependencies.
The second category is that of the peripheral borderlands to the north and west of China, inhabited primarily by nomadic tribesmen. These peoples were from time to time subdued by force and their lands occupied by Chinese military forces. Encroachments here at China’s expense were by the Russians, and Russia not only has not disgorged any of these areas, but evidence suggests she may still intend to further her penetration of these Chinese fringe lands.
Finally, the third classification is that of the land of China proper, usually in the form of small enclaves with port facilities. Many of these have long since been returned to Chinese control, for example, Weihaiwei, Tsing- tao, Shanikuan, Kwangchowan, and the foreign concessions in Shanghai. Most recently returned to Red Chinese control was the Liaotung Peninsula area with Port Arthur and Dairen. Still outstanding are two others, mentioned earlier: Macao and Hong Kong.
In addition to the problem of her lost lands of empire, there is also the matter of several recent or pending border disputes about the periphery of Red China today. They range in seriousness from conflicting claims to some 20 miles of swampy islands opposite Khabarovsk, at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, to the contest on China’s southern frontier for control of certain vitally significant and strategic mountain passes.
In the case of the Amur islands, no overt contest has ensued. It is only by perusal of maps published by Communist China and the Soviet Union that one learns they both claim those inconsequential bits of real estate.
At the other extreme has been the Sino- Indian border war of 1962, culminating in the successful Chinese occupation of not only the Aksai Chin area of Ladakh, but also of a considerable portion of the Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA) of easternmost India. In the latter case, Communist China gained control not only of passes over the mountain barrier, but also of much of the forward (southern) slopes leading down to the fertile valley of the Brahmaputra.
Somewhere between the Amur island problem and the Sino-Indian border dispute in degree of violence, but perhaps more sinister in long-range implications, is the matter of Communist China’s gains of small but strategically important bits of territory on her southern border, gains achieved by negotiation. For example, the March 1963 agreement between Pakistan and Communist China on the frontier of the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir gave China land vital to the protection of the flank of the Aksai Chin area which she had seized from India. Further to the south, by her 1961 agreement with Burma, amended in 1962, Communist China, gained control of strategic mountain pass positions controlling avenues of access to the south in return for relinquishing claims to unimportant jungle areas which did not belong to her.
The problem of Communist China’s control of key passes and all-weather roads leading into Southeast Asia is one which deserves a separate and detailed analysis. Suffice it to say that in recent years she has improved her strategic position in this regard, a fact which may indicate a possible intent to try to regain her lost lands to the south.
What of the future? In the recent spate of mutual recrimination and name calling by the Soviet Union and Communist China, the Russians, perhaps ill-advisedly, taunted their erstwhile Chinese partners with failure to eliminate foreign imperialism in China, specifically, their failure to oust the Portuguese and British from Macao and Hong Kong. This blast drew the predictable response that Russia, too, has been guilty of imperialism at China’s expense, and, in fact, today continues to hold more former Chinese territory than the Western powers held in their heyday.
The vigor of that counterblast from Peking indicates the sensitivity of the Chinese with regard to Russia, Russians, and Soviet control of what Communist China may consider to be rightfully Chinese territory.
Whether Communist China intends the territorial issue as simply one more subject area in which to vent her spleen in the current split with the Soviet Union, or whether the regime seriously considers undertaking efforts eventually to restore those unredeemed lands to Chinese control, is a matter which only the future can tell.
Chinese history over the centuries has demonstrated that when a strong dynasty achieved power in China, it invariably undertook to extend the borders of the Empire by conquest of states about the periphery of China. Militarily, China’s Communist regime on the mainland is stronger than any previous Chinese empire of China’s long history.
The unredeemed lands which the China of the Emperor Ch’ien Lung held but which she lost during the past hundred years, may well rankle like thorns in the side of the Red Dragon. Who can say when she may decide to pluck them out?