On May 23, 1862, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of China, the British Empire, and the Second French Empire began peace talks in Shanghai to end the Far East War, and the United States, Italy, Prussia and other countries also participated in the negotiations as mediators. The Chinese delegation was headed by Wang Minyun and supplemented by Li Hongzhang and Shen Baozhen; the British and French were composed of Sir Collington, Sir Elgin, and French Minister Blomble; and others, such as American Minister Anson Po, Italian Minister Casapa, and Prussian Minister to China Li Fuss, also participated in the delegation.

The meeting took place in the ballroom of the Shanghai International Hotel, an American property that has just been completed and is one of the city's leading new landmarks.

The negotiations were extremely difficult at the beginning, and after a few brief remarks, China, Britain and France began to express their opinions, mainly expressing themselves as the victim of the war and the other side as the one who started the war. Negotiation is to find the bottom line of the other party in the mutual temptation, and then exert pressure on the other party from various aspects, so as to force the other party to meet its own requirements.

So far, Britain and France have refused to admit defeat, and whenever the Chinese mention the word defeat, Sir Colrington always stands up very excitedly and says that the coalition forces are not defeated, their navy is still fighting, and if there is no dawn for peace, then they will mobilize more troops from the colonies and the mainland into the Far East.

The largest colonies of Britain and France were in India and Africa, Canada and Australia were far from the level of World War I and World War II at this time, and the number of soldiers who could be recruited was very limited, and India had just experienced a major uprising. After only a few years of pacification, the British were busy maintaining stability in the area. But they can't afford to draw troops from these places. The African colonies had already drawn the most troops from the last two expeditions, and the French had recruited the largest number of North African legions. And then these people are now in the prisoner of war camps of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

At this time, Britain and France's control and influence on the colonies were far from reaching the level of World War I and World War II in later generations, and they were still coercing the colonies.

Between 1825 and 1875, the conquest of new colonies by European countries, with the exception of Britain and France, largely ceased. It was replaced by a movement of emigration to overseas colonies. As far as Britain is concerned, a quote by former British Prime Minister Disraeli in 1851 can be said to be the best summary of Britain's attitude towards colonies during this period: "Colonies are a heavy grinding plate hanging around our (Britain's) necks". In the case of the two British colonies in The Gambia and the Gold Coast in Africa, the commercial tax revenues were far from keeping up with the administrative costs, and the British Parliament recommended several times that the colonies should be reduced or abandoned altogether, only because the Royal Navy's West African Squadron needed to establish a naval base in the Gulf of Guinea that the British finally retained these two areas.

The Chinese personnel involved in the negotiations had all been specially trained before, and they had a general idea of the overall strength of Britain and France through the information collected by various countries and the information introduced by Hong Yun'er, a historical encyclopedia. Indeed, as the British and French say, once they are all mobilized. As an industrial power, their potential is indeed very strong, but the mobilization of the whole country or the operation of the wartime economy is very fatal to the development of the country itself. It is absolutely impossible for Britain and France to be stupid enough to mobilize the whole country and give up their own economic development to fight a trade war in the Far East, so the Chinese personnel have always been aware of this kind of intimidation by Britain and France.

Thereupon. Li Hongzhang got up and spoke for a long time, in which he made an analysis of the situation in the British and French colonies. There is not a single word of rebuttal mentioned in the rebuttal, but everyone who understands it knows what the Chinese side meant. That is, your intimidation is unwarranted, and the situation in your colonies is so bad that you cannot afford to levy a large army.

Seeing that the two sides were a little crooked, Pu Anchen had to cough lightly and reminded the two sides to return to reality, and he enumerated the trade losses of various countries since the outbreak of war in the Far East, although the countries did not stop their trade activities under the protection of the "Wartime Far East Trade Treaty", but the war still had a huge impact on the trade and trade of the Far East, and the trade quota between Britain and France that he listed in the past two years has been even more miserable. Finally, Pu Anchen said: "Gentlemen, it is time to end the war, what the Far East needs is a peaceful atmosphere of free trade, not war, and I hope that the participating countries will be more pragmatic." ”

Well, the topic returned to the negotiations themselves, where each side put forward its own outrageous conditions, and a new round of disputes began, which ended in nothing. The first round of negotiations lasted for three days, and the two sides were in a dispute with each other, and Pu Anchen and other ministers could not do anything, so Pu Anchen suggested that the two sides adjourn for a day and resume negotiations on the fifth day.

On the day of the adjournment, Sir Colrington was allowed to inspect the British and French Concessions, where he saw a bleak scene. The valuable things in the concession were gone, and it was not caused by the robbery of the Taiping army, the Taiping army still only sent troops to blockade the concession, they did not enter the concession, and anything valuable in the concession was used by the British and French in the concession in exchange for food, medicine and other necessities of life.

When Sir Colrington saw the people who had been holding the concession, the British and French in the concession were crying, in fact, they could not resist any attack by the Taiping army, they were just a group of captives besieged in the besieged city.

Sir Colrington saw Midile, who had lost a whole circle, and the British consul in Shanghai could already be described as withered, and Midile said only one sentence to Sir Collington, which was, "For God's sake, end the war and get them out." ”

Sir Corrington was devastated and in the afternoon he visited the Allied prisoner of war camp in Shanghai, where the prisoners of war were not many Allied soldiers captured in the battles of Shanghai and Zhoushan, numbering just over a thousand people, but they repeated the same words as Medile. To the plea of these people, Sir Colrington could only solemnly promise that the country had not forgotten them.

The Shanghai prisoner of war camp was only the smallest of the Allied prisoners of war in the Far East, and the larger ones were in Guangzhou and Beijing, and Sir Colrington saw that although they were not mistreated, as prisoners of war, they had lost their freedom and had to work every day to get food, and the scene was very bleak.

Sir Elgin told Sir Corrington that most of the officers and above were treated slightly better, and the soldiers and ordinary people were treated much worse, and Sir Corrington was very unhappy with this.

When negotiations resumed on the fifth day, Sir Corrington began with a strong protest against the Chinese side's misuse of captured soldiers. In this regard, Li Hongzhang of the Chinese side only retorted: "They are all aggressors, and our country will never be polite to aggressors and unfriendly people!" Their treatment has been calculated, and if you are interested, you can go to the north and see what kind of life the Russian prisoners of war lived! ”

Sir Collington continued to protest loudly, and as a result, the negotiations ended in vain, and finally Anson asked the Chinese to stop using prisoners of war for work, and the Chinese were very talkative, but they demanded that the Allied forces must pay the living expenses of more than 35,000 prisoners of war every day until the end of the war, starting with the cessation of prisoner labor.

Sir Colrington could only pinch his nose and admit that he had paid 100,000 pounds for living expenses in advance, and the Chinese side simply stopped working as prisoners of war, but it seemed that the food was still at the same level, and there was no improvement, in the words of the Chinese personnel, these were just in exchange for not having to work.

Negotiations continued, and the two sides finally began some more practical contacts, the first of which was the war reparations, and the British and French sides offered not to admit defeat, so they refused to pay war reparations, but they could pay the prisoners of war ransom. There was no exchange of prisoners of war between the two sides, and in the two years of fighting, Britain and France did not capture a single Taiping soldier, and the navy did capture some crew members after the ship sank in the naval battle, but they found that most of these people were pirates, and the number was less than 500 people, which was basically less than a fraction of the number of captured by the coalition forces, and even after the exchange of prisoners, the coalition forces still had nearly 35,000 people waiting to be ransomed.

As for the price of the ransom of the captives, officers and soldiers were naturally different, officers and generals were different, and the ransoms were different for Anglo-French white soldiers and colonial soldiers. The price of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was an average of 1,000 pounds per soldier, which is indeed a bit sky-high, and 30,000 soldiers was 30 million pounds, not counting the officers and generals. Britain and France were quite dissatisfied with this, but the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom personnel also said that this price could be reduced, so let's talk about war reparations first.

Therefore, for the sake of face, Britain and France basically agreed to raise the ransom in exchange for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's demand to give up the war reparations, and finally after several negotiations between the two sides, the ransom was determined to be 28 million soldiers and prisoners of war, in addition to 7 million pounds sterling for the officers and generals. Well, the face of Britain and France has been saved, and the money of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is available, no matter what the name, the real money is only real when it is in hand.

Next is the revision of the previous unequal treaties, which is not much of an obstacle, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is indeed more pragmatic and open than the Qing court, they also need international trade and open markets, although the concession was withdrawn from the right of security and consular jurisdiction, but Britain and France got what they wanted, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom continued to open the ports and markets in the north, and the trade quota was further increased. Sir Colrington believed that the domestic parliament would not dwell on the loss of two unimportant powers, and that they would value the expansion of the trade market more than that.

Finally, there was the issue of Hong Kong, where the British did not agree to the exchange, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom insisted on its return, and the two sides were at loggerheads. The two sides were entangled in this question for three days, and when Sir Collington and Ser Elgin were still in their apartment to discuss how to bring the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to its knees, the Americans brought bad news that the Russians had made peace with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom alone, and they signed the Sino-Russian Treaty of Ili, and the Russians withdrew from the war without permission...... (To be continued......)