The summer of the year 1870 in China saw two events which taken together have been recognised as marking the failure of the movement known to Chinese historians as the T'ung Chih Restoration, the rally of the dynasty which followed the successful suppression of the great T'ai P'ing Rebellion (1850–64). On 7 July 1870 the British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs announced in the House of Commons that the government had decided not to ratify the Alcock Convention, an instrument which the British Minister to China, Sir Rutherford Alcock, and the Chinese plenipotentiaries had signed in Peking on 23 October of the previous year. On 21 June there had occurred in the treaty port of Tientsin a violent anti-foreign outbreak, in which several lives were lost, known as the ‘Tientsin Massacre’. The rejection of the Alcock Convention marked the failure of the foreign policy associated with the T'ung Chih Restoration; the Tientsin massacre equally emphasised the triumph of reactionary forces opposed to the cautious programme of modernisation which the Restoration statesmen had pursued. Both events were the product of popular ill-informed chauvinism, in the one case inspired by the pretensions and greed of the European merchant community in China, in the other by the ignorance, pride and xenophobia of the Chinese people.

The British government had yielded against their better judgement to the clamour raised by the merchants of Shanghai and other ports in China, an agitation directed not merely against the fact that the stillborn Alcock Convention made some modest changes in the treaty relations between the two countries in favour of China, but even more against the policy which inspired the author of this diplomatic initiative.