Ye Mingchen - Legacy

Legacy

The Cantonese community is said to have respected Ye Mingchen for his intransigence against the British, but also ridiculed his inability to resist them on the battlefield. In Guangzhou he was known as the "six nots": "he would not fight, not make peace and not defend; he would not die, not capitulate and not run away." Ye briefly won the favor of the Xianfeng Emperor, but his policy fell out of favor when hostilities broke out. Contemporary British public opinion regarded "Commissioner Yeh" as the embodiment of Chinese xenophobia and he was frequently caricatured in British media. But his image in the West was not unanimously negative. For instance, the German writer Theodor Fontane, who learned about Ye while working in London in the late 1850s, was touched by Ye's fate and later published an essay on the official.

In official Chinese historiography, Ye was long given the blame for precipitating the Second Opium War, but now he is frequently hailed as an early Chinese patriot and a monument have been erected in his memory in Guangzhou.