A Tale of Two Poppies

Yesterday, David Cameron and his delegation were asked by their Chinese hosts to remove the remembrance poppies from their lapels.  It was explained to the Prime Minister that allowing his team to sport the symbol would cause offence by reminding the Chinese people of the tragic Opium Wars.  Characteristically, the Old Etonian's aide said, 'We tried to explain the importance of the poppy in Britain and informed them we would be wearing them all the same.'  The arrogance and lack of empathy of this remark dismayed and saddened me.

The Opium Wars, between China and the then British Empire, were the climax of trade disputes over Chinese attempts to stop British opium trafficking.  The chaos and devastation of opium to Chinese society prompted the Manchu Emperor to ban any opium from entering their ports.  He named the commissioner of Canton, Lin Tse-Hsu, to lead the campaign and he duly seized massive amounts of opium and threw them in the river.  This outraged the opium traders and they demanded that the British Government retaliate.  Sadly, the British agreed and in 1839 the first of the Opium Wars began.  The Chinese army, weakened by ten years of opium addiction, were no match for the British who attacked and decimated cities and blockaded ports.

The war ended in 1842 with a British victory.  A treaty was drawn up which guaranteed the opium traders the right to enslave an entire population with opium.  This treaty included: the full legalization of the opium trade in China, compensation for the stock-piles confiscated by Tse-Hsu, territorial sovereignty for the British Crown over off-shore islands and a demand that Traders, Britain and France be reimbursed for the cost of the war - a tidy sum of 20 million taels of silver each.  However, they made one demand too many; that all of interior China be open for uninterrupted opium traffic.  The Manchus resisted this and the second of the two wars, which began in 1856, escalated.  The Prime Minister of the time, Lord Palmerston, declared, ' We shall teach such a lesson to the perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport of fear.'  The British besieged Peking (now known as Beijing, where, ironically, David Cameron is now visiting) and sacked and burned temples and sacred shrines in an effort to show Britain's total contempt for China and her people.  Again Britain was victorious and in 1860 gave the traders the right to expand their opium trade all over China.  However, they were quick to point out that there would be no opium imported into Britain or, indeed, anywhere in Europe.

The story behind the Remembrance Poppy is decidedly more poignant.  Thanks to an American lady named Moina Belle Michael, this vivid red flower has become synonymous with great loss of life in war.  On the 9th of November 1918, Moina came across a poem in a magazine entitled, 'We Shall Not Sleep'.  It was written by Canadian, John McCrae, who had written it for a fellow soldier who had recently been killed in action.  Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae was inspired by the vibrant red poppies growing defiantly in the shattered, war-torn land of Flanders.  The first lines of the poem have become some of the most famous lines ever written in relation to the first World War.  More commonly known as, 'In Flanders Fields', it captures natures unyielding beauty amid the chaos of war:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.


However, it was the last verse of the poem that deeply moved Moina:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.


In her autobiography, entitled 'The Miracle Flower', Moina describes this experience as being deeply spiritual.  It inspired her to buy and sell some artificial poppies to be worn in remembrance of the soldiers who died.  Her work and experience with ex-servicemen after the war, led her to widen the scope of the remembrance idea. She thought it could be developed so that it could be used to help all servicemen who needed help for themselves and their dependants.  The rest, as they say, is history. 

Many historians believe that the mistrust the Chinese feel towards foreigners today is the direct result of the rampant greed and the worse of imperialism before, during and after the Opium Wars.  If only Mr Cameron and his aides had remembered this and, while still proudly wearing their poppies, apologised for any offence this may have caused.