by Robert Wang
She grew so accustomed to crying that she no longer noticed her tears. “Sister, why are you crying?” asked a young girl one morning while she was sweeping the orphanage refectory after breakfast.
Su-Mei touched her own cheeks, startled to find them wet. “I—well, I’m remembering some people I loved who are gone now.”
The girl nodded. “Your parents?”
“Yes!” said Su-Mei, surprised. “And my brothers and sisters, and someone else I loved dearly.” She looked around the refectory, which she had thought was empty. “Why are you sitting in here alone?”
The girl made a face. “Sister Theresa is punishing me for not learning my scripture verses. She says I’m disobedient and must sit here all morning.”
“Do you have a hard time reading your Bible?” Su-Mei asked. “I can help you if you do.”
“No,” said the girl proudly. “I’m the second-best reader in my class. But the garden was so pretty, and I didn’t want to sit indoors and study.”
Su-Mei smiled and reached out her hand. “Well, you’re not going to learn anything sitting on that stool. Why don’t we fetch your Bible, and we’ll go and study your verses in the garden. You can learn them just as well out there.”
The girl hopped off the stool, thrilled at her good luck. “Won’t Sister Theresa be angry with you?”
“She probably will,” said Su-Mei, “but I’m a little disobedient too.”
As her body grew and her energetic pace slowed, her prayers changed. Please, Blessed Virgin, help me do what is best for my child, for the last earthly remnant of my Travers. Help us both find peace.
In early December Sister Su-Mei gave birth to a beautiful, healthy son and gave him up to the orphanage. It was a choice that tore at her heart, but she knew she belonged in the religious life, and there was no room there for motherhood. Two years after her return to St. Anthony’s, she took the veil as Sister Catherine, choosing that name in remembrance of the typhoon that changed her life forever. She liked the idea of a constant reminder that life takes unexpected paths and God works in mysterious ways.
When Mother Amanda died at a venerable age, Sister Catherine was asked to take over the orphanage, a position she held until she was no longer able to work. If she had not been a widow, she might have been offered the position of mother superior. For her devotion and the care and love she gave to generations of orphans, Sister Catherine was invited to Rome to meet the pope, and she lived the rest of her life at the convent in peace and holy contemplation.
Her infant son was adopted by a Chinese family in Macau and grew up without ever knowing his background. A century later, a billionaire who owned and operated the most profitable casino in Macau reflected in an interview that his ancestors were of mixed race, but their identities had always been a mystery.
Epilogue
As soon as the British navy destroyed the forts at Fu-Moon and opened up the Pearl River’s entrance into Canton, opium ships from Jardine and Matheson started to bring in their cargo. Charles Elliot tried to delay them—it was too soon after the hostilities—but his orders were ignored. Matheson in Macau wrote to Jardine in England that “the opium bond in force before Lin’s time is to be revived.”
Many Chinese merchants had fled Canton, but when word reached them that the British were ready to resume trade, the lure of tremendous profits was enough to motivate them to return. With the special emissary discharged and the city in chaos, the smugglers were ready to deal with Chinese merchants who were ready to buy opium and sell Chinese merchandise to the country that had just bombed their empire, occupied their territory, and killed many of their own.
Outside Canton, when word got out that their homeland was under attack, many people took up arms to fight any British soldier they encountered. The emperor was distraught when news reached him of Fu-Moon’s defeat and Hong Kong’s occupation. He dispatched several thousand men to march toward Canton. Elliot, realizing that hostilities were about to resume, ordered troops to occupy the high ground north of Canton to meet the Chinese army. All the while, British and Chinese merchants conducted their trade inside the factories, trading millions of pounds of tea for Chinese silver.
The Chinese army was easily beaten back when they encountered the British. Elliot ordered limited retaliations to spare as many civilian deaths as he could. He worked hard to quell the aggressive urges of his commanders, who were eager to annihilate the Chinese and end the war. The object of these hostilities was to force China into a trade agreement that benefited England—conquering the entire country was never part of the plan. After all, Parliament had barely passed the resolution authorizing military force. Elliot’s motives were interpreted as weakness, and the generals began writing reports to England to complain.
Skirmishes erupted between resentful villagers and British troops; the most noteworthy happened at San-yuan Li, where the village militia caused severe casualties. The British ordered the governor of Guangzhou, Yu Baochun, to tell his militia to back down or they would burn Canton to the ground. The villagers in San-yuan Li were considered heroes nonetheless.
Back in Canton, Chinese officials were so afraid of British reprisals that they offered a ransom of six million pounds. Elliot accepted it, but it was nowhere near enough to cover the military expedition and pay back the merchants for their confiscated opium.
Meanwhile, the complaints about Charles Elliot’s leadership resulted in his recall to London. He was replaced by Sir Henry Pottinger, a veteran warrior eager to use all the power at his disposal to reach a final settlement. He wasted no time sending the Nemesis, the seventy-four-gun ships, and all necessary troops to attack Amoy, which fell easily. The expedition moved on to take Tinghai and then Ningpo. British troops looted the villages for food and anything else worth taking. Pottinger even sanctioned the theft of Chinese antiquities and silver.
The emperor sent his cousin Iching with troops and an imperial edict to “drive the British into the sea,” but Iching was no warrior, and he was no match for the ruthless Pottinger. More than five hundred of Iching’s troops were massacred at Ningpo when he failed to retake the city, resulting in not a single British casualty. There were small skirmishes that followed, but the Chinese military was beaten back every time and suffered heavy losses.
The British expedition in the Middle East was a different story, costing far more than expected in lives and pounds sterling, and power in Parliament was shifting. Prime Minister Melbourne resigned and was replaced by Robert Peel, and Lord Palmerston was replaced by Lord Aberdeen as foreign secretary. The new leaders were concerned about England’s losses and wanted to put an end to the costly Chinese expedition. They urged Pottinger to reach an advantageous resolution as soon as possible, sending him several more gunships and troops. These reinforcements gave Pottinger everything he needed to wipe out the Chinese resistance.
Before the reinforcements had arrived, Pottinger already had enough firepower to attack any city he wanted. He chose the walled town of Chapu, north of Hangchow, and won the battle easily. Outdated cannons, arrows, swords, and spears were no match for Baker rifles and modern long-range artillery, not to mention better-trained soldiers. Many Chinese of Manchurian descent killed themselves in Chapu rather than suffer the shame of defeat by Pottinger’s forces.
After Chapu the British generals elected to strike one devastating blow to bring the Chinese to the negotiating table. Their strategy was to choke off the Grand Canal where it crossed the Yangtze River, effectively blocking all commercial traffic. On June 13, 1842, Pottinger brought a full array of battleships to destroy all the defenses along the river. The Woosung forts fired all their 175 cannons against the Royal Navy— to no effect.
Pottinger moved on to attack Shanghai three days later. This was an important city for commerce and served as a terminal for ships delivering goods everywhere along the Yangtze, which was almost half of China. In three thousand years of history, the Yangtze River had never witnessed so many foreign battleships on its
waters.
When all the reinforcements sent by Parliament arrived, Pottinger decided it was time to move. He was in control of the Yangtze River, which led right into Nanking. Once the battle group arrived, regiments marched into Nanking, the former capital of the Ming Dynasty. It offered little resistance. The Chinese army concentrated its defense in the walled city of Chingkiang, and they fought bravely against the superior British ground troops. The resulting carnage was worse than Ningpo and Fu-Moon. After several days of hard-fought battle, Pottinger’s troops were victorious, and they plundered, burned, and sank anything that floated to intimidate the Chinese. Some smaller cities resorted to bribing the British military with silver to avoid attack—Yangchow paid Pottinger half a million silver taels, which he gladly accepted on behalf of the British government.
And the bad news kept coming for Emperor Dao Kwong. City after city fell and were plundered, but he was most concerned that the Yangtze River was choked off, as it was the conduit that fed the capital and most of China. He felt as if his entire empire was about to collapse and the British military would march right up to Peking. The Ching Dynasty would crumble, for the first time in China’s history, to a Western power. Left with no options, the emperor dispatched two special emissaries to negotiate. Kiying and Ilipu left Peking on April 15, 1842, on a mission to minimize China’s losses and save face for its emperor.
Pottinger refused to meet with them unless they had absolute power to make decisions without going back and forth to Peking. Both Kiying and Ilipu were afraid to take on such responsibilities and insisted that their representatives first meet with Pottinger so the details could be worked out ahead of time. Pottinger responded by moving his largest gunships directly in front of the walls of Nanking. He indicated that the battle group would advance to Peking if the negotiations didn’t move forward; but, knowing the emperor had to approve the terms, Pottinger first sent Kiying and Ilipu a draft of the treaty outlining Britain’s demands. Kiying and Ilipu dispatched the treaty to Peking with all haste for the emperor’s approval before they formally accepted it on his behalf.
The treaty made no mention of opium. It demanded payment of twenty-one million pounds in compensation for the military expedition and the “British merchandise” that was destroyed; the opening of five ports: Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai, for British settlements and “free trade” (meaning opium); and British consulates in those five cities. It also demanded open trade on all goods without going through the court-appointed hongs who held a monopoly on Western commerce. Most importantly, the treaty demanded that the island of Hong Kong be ceded to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, in perpetuity. Pottinger made it clear that this point was nonnegotiable, especially since British troops had already occupied Hong Kong without any treaties.
Emperor Dao Kwong couldn’t agree to every item in the draft treaty without losing face, so he denied the British the city of Foochow. Pottinger, understanding the delicacy of the situation, conceded. The treaty was formalized and signed on board the Cornwallis on August 29, 1842, with much fanfare from the British, who fired a twenty-one-gun salute to celebrate the end of hostilities. History would refer to this as the Treaty of Nanking.
With Hong Kong under British ownership, the Jardine and Matheson Company was quick to establish itself there with the drug money it had been accumulating for decades. William Jardine didn’t live to see how his company would dominate—he died of pulmonary edema on February 27, 1843. He never married and had no children, so his nephew, Andrew Johnstone, together with James Matheson, took over the company and quickly expanded into property, infrastructure, and a host of other businesses while continuing to smuggle opium into China. They finally stopped smuggling opium near the end of the nineteenth century, after the Second Opium War, which forced China to make even more concessions and made the entire kingdom feel like a Western colony until after the Second World War. Opium imports more than doubled during this period, and smugglers continued to profit.
Today descendants of the Jardine family from William’s sister, the Keswicks, still control the Jardine and Matheson Company, Limited, one of the largest conglomerates in Hong Kong. It’s now a publicly listed company with annual revenues of over US$80 billion, with the Keswicks firmly in control. The company owns prime properties in Hong Kong, including the famed Mandarin Oriental Hotels, the Excelsior Hotel, Exchange Square (super-prime office towers), and countless enterprises, including insurance, shipping, automobile dealerships, railways, and dairies, just to mention a few. Jardine Hills, Jardine’s Corner, and Jardine’s Lookout, where the wealthy own large estates in midlevel Hong Kong, recall the legacy of its founder. The company owned the Star Ferry (now owned by a Chinese real estate mogul), which connected Hong Kong to Kowloon. Britain signed a ninety-nine-year lease on Kowloon and the New Territories in 1898; the United Kingdom officially returned all of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories to China on July 1, 1997, ending over a century of British dominance.
Many statues have been erected in China to commemorate Special Emissary Lin Tse-Hsu’s efforts to stop the opium trade, but the ghosts of millions of drug addicts and soldiers killed defending their homeland continue to cry out for justice.
Acknowledgments
Many people supported my efforts while I did my research and during the writing process, and I owe my heartfelt appreciation for their kindness.
My wife and I took a trip to Guangzhou in December 2017 and visited Fu-Moon Fort, the Opium War Museum, and other historical sites that were relevant to the Opium Wars. The trip was arranged through our friend Dr. Min Zhou, professor of sociology and Asian American studies and director of the Asia Pacific Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, who arranged for us to meet with the best scholars in China on the subject. She and her husband, Sam Guo, were most gracious and helpful to us throughout the trip and continue their support even today.
Through Professor Min we were able to meet with preeminent scholars and administrators in China who have written or lectured on the Opium Wars. Specifically, I would like to thank:
Professor Haijian Mao of the University of Macau
Professor Zhiwei Liu of Sun Yat-sen University
Professor Guoxuan Cai, president of Guangzhou Institute of Socialism, who accompanied us to Humen (Fu-Moon)
I spent numerous hours with them, gleaning their cogent perspectives on what caused the Opium Wars.
Last, but not least, I would like to give my sincerest thanks for the excellent work done by The Artful Editor. Owner Naomi Kim Eagleson and staff editor Denise Logsdon did a stupendous job. Denise researched British vocabulary and idiom from the 1800s so the dialogue would sound authentic, and her excellent prose breathed life into my characters and added color and sparkle to my storyline. I am indeed fortunate to have worked with them!
Resources
For those who are interested in learning more about the Opium Wars, I would like to offer the following resources that I found quite useful in my research:
The Opium War, 1840–1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates Ajar by Peter Ward Fay, who meticulously chronicled actual events in his book
The Qing Empire and the Opium War by Mao Haijian, who exhibited a thorough understanding and analysis of events and characters who played a role
Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson by Richard J. Grace
Foreign Mud: Being an Account of the Opium Imbroglio at Canton in the 1830s and the Anglo-Chinese War that Followed by Maurice Collis
The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another by W. Travis Hanes and Frank Sanello
Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age by Stephen R. Platt
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China by Julia Lovell
Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century by Orvil
le Schell and John Delury
William Jardine
James Matheson
Sir Charles Elliot
Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China (1836-1841),
Administrator of Hong Kong (1841)
(Full credit: Pictures from History / Granger, NYC—All rights reserved.)
Sir Henry Pottinger
Supreme Commander of China military expedition after Charles Elliot was recalled
William Hutcheon Hall
Captain of HMS Nemesis
Lord Palmerston
A model of the Nemesis, England’s first steam-powered gunship
(Photograph taken at the Humen Naval Museum)
Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy
Commissioner Lin with an imperial commission from the Daoguange Emperor to halt the illegal importation of opium by the British, destroying thousands of chests of opium
Lin Tse-Hsu (Lin Zexu)
Imperial Special Emissary put in charge of eradicating opium
Emperor Daoguang
General Guan Tien Pui - Guan Tianpei
Commander of the Guangdong Water Force
Old Hong Kong
Modern-day Hong Kong
Jardine corporate tower in Hong Kong
Opium addict
Opium storage ships or floating godowns at Canton (Guangzhou) harbor, late 19th century
(Full credit: Pictures from History / Granger, NYC—All rights reserved.)
Foot binding
British and Chinese officials on board HMS Wellesley a day before the capture of Chusan in the First Opium War