A final shipment of goods — silk, copper, tutenag and mercury — was loaded onto the Company’s vessels. They were of good quality and would turn a profit in London. If nothing else, and rather late in the day, Catchpoole had learned that if the Company was willing to part with enough silver it could trade successfully on Chusan. But silver did not grow on trees, and the Company had wished for so much more: no permanent settlement had been established, and all they had to show for their troubles was a suite of rented rooms and warehouses from which they could be evicted at a whim, or which could just as easily become their prison. The game was not worth the candle. By December 1703, just three years after they had first arrived, the Company’s ships had left for the South China Sea, taking with them English dreams of a settlement on Chusan.
Catchpoole had often recommended to the Company’s Court of Directors in London that it annex instead the tiny island of Con Son, fifty miles off the Mekong delta, as a permanent base of operations in the China seas. It was far less trouble than Chusan. The Court disagreed: Con Son’s harbour was far from ideal, and it was not secure from surprise attack. They wrote to Catchpoole, then residing in the small English settlement on Con Son, ordering him to remove his stock to Borneo. He never read the letter: on March 3rd 1705, in the dead of night, the troops who occupied Con Son in the name of its Cochin-Chinese rulers burned the English factory and murdered Catchpoole and fifteen other Englishmen. Such were the terrible risks that Company men ran to make their fortune. [15]
The South Gate of Tinghae in 1793.
2. The Great Emperor and the men with red hair
In 1707 the kingdoms of England and Scotland united to become Great Britain. The fact that ships continued to drop anchor at Chusan under the new Union Jack for another half century is testament to the East India Company’s faith that liberal trade could overcome the inertia of China’s vast and mercenary bureaucracy. If the coming to the throne in 1736 of a new emperor, Qianlong, was remarked upon by British merchants, it certainly made no practical difference to them, for each one to visit Chusan faced the same intrigues and extortions, and each ultimately left disappointed and emotionally drained. Then, at last, fearing the loss of income that a successful Chusan venture might mean, the powerful guilds that had come to monopolize trade in Canton lobbied to close the island to foreigners once and for all. In 1757 Qianlong signed a decree raising the taxes on foreign trade upon the islands of the Chusan archipelago to double those in force in Canton, a simple move that made commerce all but impossible. In 1758 the Onslow sailed from Tinghae after negotiating a lading at great cost, her merchants having been warned that no more British vessels would be suffered to drop anchor. The following year the Chesterfield was, true enough, turned away empty-handed. [1]
Nobody could have argued that the British had not tried their damnedest to trade on Chusan. The plain truth — as over the course of half a century they had come to realize — was that self-sufficient China had no need of British manufactures, that her merchants and mandarins wanted nothing but silver dollars in exchange for their teas and silks. Accepting a little broadcloth besides, and some fancy gimcracks from the workshops of Birmingham and Manchester, was little more than humouring these persistent barbarians who set so much store by crude commerce. In the decades following the departure of the Chesterfield from Chusan, the emperor found no reason to question his edict confining foreigners to distant Canton, out of harm’s way. These men from the distant land of Yingjili (the Chinese, following the rules of their own grammar, did not discriminate between ‘England’ and ‘English’ when they spoke of this new country) had tamely submitted to him.
The years went by, and generations of British merchants continued to buy silks, porcelains and other luxuries on the Canton market, but as time passed it was tea that became the mainstay of the China trade. As Britons from the middling and working classes developed a taste for it, by 1760 the East India Company was importing 3,000,000 lbs of leaf each year, and fully three times as much come 1790. Across Britain, people were drinking tea from China cups decorated with Minton’s fanciful willow pattern and imagining a Chinoiserie world where their twankey and lapsangsoochong were grown; in Brighton, the future King George IV built a seaside pavilion chock full of the most sumptuously gaudy imaginings of Chinese aesthetics.
Half a world away in steamy Canton, by contrast, the onerous restrictions under which the tea trade was suffered to carry on was looking more and more at odds with Britain’s growing global prestige as each year passed. On the Pearl River there, upon a site safely outside the city walls, two-thirds of a mile of waterfront had been set aside for the foreign factories (for not just Britons but also Americans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards and others lived here during the trading season). It was not that the factories were inherently unpleasant; far from it: sturdily built of brick and granite and fitted with colourful blinds and shady verandahs, they were furnished much like a Pall Mall gentleman’s club, with billiard rooms, libraries, dining rooms and private quarters, and they were certainly far better suited to Western ideas of comfort than even the very richest residences of Canton’s mandarins. But when hundreds of men lived confined to these few acres for months on end their attractions faded. The Cantonese man in the street was openly contemptuous of foreigners, physically violent even. Wives and daughters were forbidden there. The local merchant guilds kept a tight rein on the Westerners, whose only avenue of appeal was through those very same guilds about whose abuses they wished to complain. The Chinese were forbidden from teaching their language to outsiders on pain of death, making the commercial stranglehold of the guilds all the more asphyxiating. And for Britain — the world’s foremost industrial nation — to be running an enormous trade deficit with agrarian China was not just an insult to national pride but a huge drain on the exchequer. If only, the British lamented, they could produce something for which the Chinese truly had a yen…. [2]
It is not clear precisely how ‘yen’, originally a Chinese word, came to mean an intense craving in the English language, for there are two similar-sounding characters which fit the bill, one meaning ‘addiction’, the other ‘smoke’ — opium smoke. It turned out to be that hitherto minor Indian export which finally set Britain and China on a collision course over the island of Chusan. The trickle of Bengali opium arriving in Canton at the start of the eighteenth century became first a torrent then a flood, the demand so strong as to elicit silver from Chinese merchants without negotiation, cumshaw or politicking. Opium quite simply turned the China trade on its head. It was the Chinese now who were desperate to get hold of British goods, and trading with them had become easy. [3]
Opium was produced legally in India (the refined sap of Papaver somniferum was in fact a widely used medicine in Britain), but its sale inside China had been banned by imperial edict since 1729 for the simple reason that it sapped the mind and body of vitality and destroyed the lives of upright young men from good families. The emperor’s reasoning might have been wrapped up in the Confucian ethics of the day, but, after all, this is fundamentally the same reason why heroin (an opium derivative) is today a controlled drug across the globe. The British government for its part did not question China’s right to ban the import of any item of trade (or such at least was Britain’s avowed position), but felt that if China wished to do so then enforcement should be the responsibility of Peking rather than of London. The French, went one analogy of the day, could ban the import of British products through Calais, but Whitehall would not be obliged to enforce that ban on Britons who wished to break French law. The British would try time and again to persuade Peking to legalise opium, for at least this would allow the emperor to profit from its sale, but the emperor would not sacrifice his moral principles or accept advice from foreigners. The fact that China’s long-standing opium ban was a dead letter most of the time played into the hands of those who thought the Chinese hypocritical: the trade in the drug was, after all, connived at and even monopolised by the relatively l
owly mandarins in coastal ports — men like generals Lan and Shi on Chusan — who for the British merchants were their only experience of Chinese officialdom. [4]
The East India Company, at least, pretended not to deal in opium bound for China, for fear of jeopardizing the agreements under which it traded in Canton. Instead the drug was sold in India to private merchants who entrusted its sale to agency houses on the China coast. Those agencies placed the opium into receiving ships, who sold it to Chinese smugglers who undertook the illegal act of landing and selling it on, while tier upon tier of bribable mandarins turned a blind eye and took their cut on the deal. The silver which had paid for the opium then found its way to the East India Company’s offices in Canton to be exchanged for IOUs that could be cashed with clean hands in London. It was, in modern parlance, little short of money-laundering, though quite legal. The very same silver, meanwhile, was used by the Company in Canton to buy the tea which, when imported into Britain, provided the Treasury with valuable tax revenue. In essence, as the eighteenth century drew on, the British public was imperceptibly becoming addicted to tea, the Chinese to opium, and the Treasury to the money that the trade was generating. Yet despite the remarkable about-turn in the trade deficit which opium would make possible, the same old complaints still festered in Canton as they once had on Chusan: the arbitrary taxes and cumshaw remained, as did the unwholesome conditions in cramped residences beyond whose bounds Britons feared to tread (they had become, it was commented, little better than a commercial leper colony). Something had to be done.
And so a suitable man was chosen to lead Europe’s first full-scale diplomatic mission to Peking, to seek better terms for British merchants and to win over the Chinese with a demonstration of Britain’s achievements in science and industry. George Macartney, Viscount of Dervock, was an Irish peer, an ex-governor of Madras, and a proponent of the understandable view that Britain was the most powerful nation on Earth. Lord Macartney left Portsmouth in September of 1792 aboard the 64-gun man-of-war Lion, with the East Indiaman Hindostan and others following close behind. His embassy, comprising doctors, scientists, painters, musicians and scholars, was the largest ever to have left Europe bound for the imperial court. Its holds were crammed with gifts from King George III, chosen with care to demonstrate that Britain was fit to be treated as an equal. There were terrestrial and celestial globes, orreries, a planetarium, the most advanced clocks, barometers and telescopes, the most perfect glass lenses yet ground, Wedgwood porcelains, musical instruments, sprung carriages, a hot-air balloon, air guns, rifles, cannons, a perfect scale model of the navy’s pride and joy the 110-gun Royal Sovereign, the finest cloths and carpets… the inventory simply went on and on. [5]
The Qianlong Emperor, the same man who in 1757 had agreed to smother the Chusan trade with punitively high duties, was still on the throne at the age of eighty-two (though he was piously to abdicate in 1795 in favour of his son rather than enjoy a longer reign than his grandfather Kangxi). Besides hoping — naïvely, in retrospect — to impress this conservative old Manchu with the fruits of Europe’s Enlightenment, Lord Macartney carried a list of practical aims. Of these, the most important was the opening of Chusan’s principal town Tinghae, amongst other ports, to British trade. Then there was an end to the humiliating conditions in Canton to be discussed, and the permanent cession of an island in Eastern China to negotiate — it was assumed this would be Chusan, already known to occupy an unrivalled position — where Britons might live and work freely under extraterritorial British law. It was almost a century now since Allen Catchpoole had laid similar requests before a mandarin in Tinghae. Generals Lan and Shi, like Catchpoole, were long dead, but Lord Macartney was soon to learn how little things had changed.
On June 23rd 1793, having visited Macao, the Lion and the Hindostan passed within sight of an island known locally as Hong Kong without giving it a second thought, pressing on northeastward to drop anchor in Chusan’s waters. Soon they could scarcely manoeuvre for the press of sampans and junks crowding about their hulls. The Lion alone was hemmed in by some three hundred, while hundreds more were visible all the way to a thunderous horizon. Supplies were eagerly offered — bullocks, goats, fowl and fish — and presently the decks were so crowded with curious fishermen that the crew was obliged to turn them off to make room for new arrivals. They watched as men gaped at the height of the masts and measured heel-to-toe the length and breadth of the ships, the like of which had not been seen in those parts since the departure of the last East Indiaman a generation before. Wandering quite at will, some of these smiling fishermen chanced upon the Lion’s great cabin and the portrait of the Qianlong Emperor that Lord Macartney had hung there. Falling to their knees, they prostrated themselves and kissed the floor. [6]
‘On rising,’ Lord Macartney’s deputy Sir George Staunton would later recall, ‘they appeared to have a sort of gratitude towards the foreigner who had the attention to place the portrait of their sovereign in his apartment.’ Presently Sir George, a personal friend of Macartney from the days when his lordship had been governor of Grenada and, later, Madras, headed for Tinghae to enquire after pilots for the trip northward. The navigation to the mouth of the Peiho River (for this was the closest one could reach to Peking by sea) had only been attempted once before by a British captain, and even this was now some thirty years gone. Lord Macartney himself remained aboard the Lion, proudly determined that his first encounter with Chinese bureaucracy would come in Peking. He desired, it seems, to make as grand an entrance as could be stage-managed.
As the day’s tide turned, Staunton’s ship the Clarence moored off a tiny islet her charts called Tree-a-top (though it had lost its sole defining feature to a log-pile). A landing party rowed across to the neighbouring island of Lowang, and there the embassy of the Court of St James set foot on Chinese soil. [7]
Sir George walked unchallenged for some time until, descending a valley, he and his party met with an astonished-looking young peasant. In loose blue trousers and with a conical straw hat tied with twine beneath his chin, he was a fitting archetype. As this unlikely welcoming committee led them toward his village, the Englishmen were beckoned to enter an isolated farmhouse amidst a grove of bamboo and fan palms. Farmer and son stood and stared in wide-eyed amazement, as if the men before them had fallen from the sky, though their visitors were most struck not by their hosts themselves but by their apparent poverty. Sir George recalled the scene:
The house was built of wood, the uprights of the natural form of the timber. No ceiling concealed the inside of the roof, which was put together strongly, and covered with the straw of rice. The floor was of earth beaten hard, and the partitions between the rooms consisted of mats hanging from the beams.
A pair of spinning wheels sat abandoned by womenfolk who had been whisked away at the men’s approach. How different things would have been had a party of Chinese landed on the Scilly Isles and stumbled into a sturdily built cottage. The embassy was yet a thousand miles from Peking, and already China was proving to be like a different world.
The Clarence was escorted into Tinghae’s inner harbour on the early morning tide the next day, firing a blank salute that only served to irritate the islanders and mooring half a mile from the former Red Hair Hall. A brightly painted junk presently came alongside bearing an elderly man, a merchant who in his youth had dealt with the East India Company. Despite the passing of over several decades he still spoke a little English and recalled with affection Fitzhugh and Bevan, two of the Company’s agents. Sir George Staunton’s delegation was welcomed ashore the next day and in Tinghae was treated to plays and entertainments just as Allen Catchpoole had once been. Of Tinghae itself Sir George was especially attentive, aware that Lord Macartney planned to ask the emperor for the right to settle in the archipelago. He would later write an account of the day, a depiction that would find a receptive audience in a British public eager to have its love of Chinoiserie flattered:
Of the towns of Europe, Ting-h
ai bore the resemblance most of Venice, but on a smaller scale. It was, in some degree, surrounded, as well as intersected, by canals. The bridges thrown over them were steep, and ascended by steps, like the Rialto. The streets, most of which were no more than alleys or narrow passages just a dozen feet wide, were paved with square flat stones; but the houses, unlike the Venetian buildings, were low, and mostly of one story. The attention, as to ornament, in these buildings was confined chiefly to the roofs, which, besides having the tiles that cover the rafters luted and plastered over, to prevent accidents from their falling in stormy weather, were contrived in such a form as to imitate the inward bend of the ridges and sides of canvas tents, or of the coverings of skins of animals or other flexible materials, effected by their weight; a form preferred, perhaps, after the introduction of more solid materials, in allusion to the modes of shelter to which the human race had, probably, recourse before the erection of regular dwelling houses.
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