What really makes this foreign influence important
in Chinese history is that to protect
themselves the foreigners demand, as a condition
of their presence, what's called extraterritoriality.
That means the foreigners working in these
Chinese ports are not subject to Chinese laws.
They're subject to their own laws.
So the British in Shanghai set up their own court system that adjudicates
their people. Increasingly, Chinese who were
living in the foreign concession areas are
also exempt from Chinese law and are
judged according to the law of the foreigners.
And the foreigners begin extending their legal protections
to their Chinese friends, including Chinese converts to Christianity.
Now, in my discussion of this so far, I've made it look like the Chinese
are pretty passive actors in all of this.
And indeed at first, the great Qing Empire regarded the
foreigners as a nuisance and these concessions as pretty modest.
But, by the 1860s, it's a much more serious matter. In 1862, a
British and French expedition actually marches all the way to Peking and burns
the Imperial Summer Palace, looting and pillaging, acting like the foreign
barbarians that the Chinese thought that they were.