by Lucy Inglis
The late seventeenth century was a time of organized chaos in the Pearl River Delta, so Canton fell back on its own guild system to maintain control. Unlike European guilds, which brought together merchants from different places under the umbrella of a single trade, Chinese guilds were based upon what they called their ‘native place’, reflecting the deep Chinese attachment to their ancestry. More personal connections were often formed with secret societies which, although they had their roots in political movements, from the late seventeenth century onwards were an increasingly important part of business life in China, and particularly in the south. Like merchant guilds, they were patriotic, patriarchal and deeply loyal. They also retained the trappings of most secret societies, such as hierarchies, initiations, oaths and special systems of communication. These interwoven groups were difficult for native Chinese to access, and impossible for Europeans. They also enabled corruption and bribery to become endemic within the system, giving foreign merchants a way into the market. In Canton, Chinese merchants, or hongs, formed a trade monopoly from a series of warehouses called factories along the shore. Compradors worked as intermediaries between them and the Europeans, dealing with their opposite number on-board ship, known as the supercargo. Supercargoes were arguably the most important men aboard, and charged with finding out conditions on the ground as soon as the ship dropped anchor: many had set sail up to a year before, and prices and supply chains always changed in that time. Once business had been done, the comprador reported to the hong merchant, who attended the government trading house to pay the government taxes. Government supervisors were known as hoppos.
The hong merchants, the Cantonese, and the Europeans benefitted substantially from the opening up of trade coupled with the Second or Mexican Silver Cycle, which picked up at the beginning of the eighteenth century and lasted for five decades, until the Chinese demand for bullion levelled off once more. To put this enormous supply into context, the Second Silver Cycle delivered to China more than twice the silver bullion than the total supply of the previous two centuries, and made the Mexican peso the default currency for trading in the East Indies until the early nineteenth century. The EIC and the VOC struggled to raise the cash to compete in this market and Isaac Newton wrote in Lords of the Treasury in 1717 that the Chinese trade ‘carries away the silver from all of Europe’.55
The traders as a whole also benefitted from the rapidly rising population in China’s interior who were thriving on the new food crops imported from the Americas. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Chinese population had reached 268 million, but unlike Europe, which was becoming increasingly urban, China relied upon the basic unit of the rural household in what was still an almost completely rural population.56 In the first half of the eighteenth century China, fuelled by the money flooding in, population increase and a stable dynasty, almost doubled the size of its territory and the Han population boomed. The acreage under cultivation expanded by approximately half again. It was cultivated mainly by China’s indentured labourers, the coolies, who mitigated their back-breaking and, in the case of rice farming, wet work with the trio of tea, tobacco and opium. The opium was particularly important for the rice farmers. It quelled the symptoms of the endless water-borne fevers and diarrhoea that plagued the rice paddies, allowing a steady but unremitting pace of work, as well as alleviating arthritic pains and boredom. Fevers and rheumatic problems were also endemic to the subtropical hills of southern China. The Chinese had also realized that unlike alcohol, such as the dangerous ‘ardent spirit’ and gin equivalent samshu, and other intoxicants, opium smoking did not create a tolerance, so the same effect could be had day after day with no increase in consumption, and thus spending.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the VOC was providing Canton with most of its opium out of Batavia. To put the importance of this opium trade into context, the detailed records of the VOC show that between 1702 and 1781 opium, mainly from Malwa, made up 52 per cent of its Batavian spice trade. Pepper, always perceived to be the giant of the spice industry, was a mere 12 per cent and beaten even by cinammon at 14 per cent.57 This sort of trade dwarfed the French and English companies who sent one or two ships a year between 1699 and 1714. The EIC had adopted a more structured system of finance over the previous century and in 1714 took an office in Hog Lane, Canton, a far cry from its vast bureau on Shoe Lane in the City of London. The following year, the pope issued another papal bull against Chinese funerary practices, still mistakenly under the impression that China was remotely interested in Rome’s opinion on their centuries-old customs. China promptly expelled all Western missionaries not attached directly to court, and the mandarins became even more contemptuous of the greedy, insolent Western barbarians.
In 1720, China granted the monopoly on South China Sea trade to a group of hong merchants operating from the ‘Thirteen factories’ on the Pearl River at Canton. The Cohong, as they were known, became immensely powerful in one stroke, and held the monopolies on tea and silk, both now in high demand in Britain. The EIC was one of the first to react to this new development, and did so with surprising subtlety. Even with the help of the supercargoes and compradors, the hong merchants were hard to deal with. The discussion of facts and figures Europeans considered essential in the general course of business was viewed as distasteful conflict by the hong merchants, who were clannish and secretive.
These two events caused the EIC to reconsider how they did business in Canton. They had previously employed compradors who spoke Portuguese, but that was out of favour. Or, they had given French/Chinese-speaking missionaries free passage on their ships in exchange for translation services. With neither a viable option, the EIC began to train employees to speak fluent Chinese, rather than the ‘chop’ Chinese favoured by London business houses for the previous century. One of these employees, James Flint, was particularly successful in learning the language when he was abandoned in Canton in his mid-teens after sailing with the EIC ship the Normanton in 1736. Three years later, as a bilingual English–Chinese speaker with a Chinese alias, he was shipped to India on company business, before returning to China after a further three years, this time as a language student fully funded by the EIC. In 1741, he started work in the office in Hog Lane, and was soon the essential English linguist for all the EIC ships arriving in Canton. As Britain fought the War of Austrian Succession back in Europe, with Flint’s help, and others like him, the EIC began to dominate trade with the Cohong. By the end of the war, the EIC had outgrown Canton and were looking to establish trade depots up the main south-east China coastline, beginning where they had left off an attempt in Ningbo some years earlier. Flint was integral to these machinations, and made direct overtures to Beijing, something utterly forbidden by protocol. After a messy squabble, the EIC were halted in their tracks in their attempt to open up Chinese trade; a Fujianese interpreter was publicly executed in Canton as a warning not to get too friendly with the barbarians, and Flint was imprisoned on Macao for three years. Upon his release, he went to America to farm soybeans and make soy sauce. He also introduced Benjamin Franklin to tofu.
Meanwhile, Flint and his actions under the aegis of the EIC had serious commercial consequences for European traders. In 1757, trade with foreigners was restricted entirely to Canton, strengthening the Cohong again, and delivering opportunities for huge amounts of smuggling and corruption. Foreign merchants were not allowed to be full-time residents in Canton, and it became illegal for them to learn or speak Chinese, making them even more dependent upon the comprador system, as well as sowing deceit and obfuscation. Worse, it was increasingly apparent to the mandarins that plenty of opium was still getting into southern China through smuggling, despite the 1729 restrictions. There had been no slowing down of opium consumption in China, and prohibition had only seemed to speed up the smuggling, as an ever-greater proportion of the working population relied upon it as a panacea. The Chinese rightly identified the British merchants as the main culprits, but having
concentrated their authority so narrowly in Canton, they were powerless to stop the endless covert offshore and coastal trading that the British, and to some extent the Dutch and Portuguese, used to offload their opium cargoes.
It can be safely said that British–Chinese relations were at a low in 1757, yet elsewhere, the EIC was about to alter the course of not only a nation, but a subcontinent. That same year, the increasingly militarized EIC won the Battle of Plassey over the Nawab of Bengal, putting them in control of India’s cheapest and best opium. The company knew precisely the market for it: Canton, despite the ban on opium imports. Desperate for Chinese tea, and rich in opium, the EIC spent the next two decades working their way around the problem. Their solution would change the histories of India, China and Britain forever.
PART TWO
In the Arms of Morpheus
Chapter Four
THE ROMANTICS MEET MODERN SCIENCE
The Three Empires
‘There is no supremacy and grip on the world without means and resources; without land and retainers, sovereignty and command are impossible.’1
Babur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal Empire
The Battle of Plassey and the capture of Calcutta marked the consolidation of the British India that had been under construction since 1600, and established a British stronghold in the Mughal Empire that enabled them to bypass the Ottoman and Safavid empires that had dominated trade routes from the Balkans to the Bay of Bengal since the fourteenth century.
These three vast empires not only dominated trade, but they also became distant dreams, as tales of the wonders to be seen and had there finally made it back. Those who had returned from the Crusades had rarely spoken of wondrous places and gold-bedecked palaces, but soon, these three dynasties, covering combined lands almost too large to be comprehended in Western Europe, figured large in its imagination.
From 1520 to 1566, the Ottoman Empire was under the control of Suleiman the Magnificent, who instigated a period of change for this vast area, transforming a turbulent, aggressive ideology into a more settled and urban way of life, which included the creation of a bureaucratic system to rule such a gigantic territory, from Istanbul. A new Ottoman identity as the protectors of Sunni Islam was also created. These amalgamated realms had long been plagued by bandits and warlords, and rebellions were common. Anatolia, where opium growing was a flourishing trade, was the site of persistent protests, such as the Celali Rebellions of the late sixteenth century. Most Ottoman protests were made up of farmers recruited as irregular troops during times of taxation or hardship, led by the local smugglers, troublemakers and headmen. This period of the Ottoman Empire laid the foundation for modern organized crime in Turkey. Trafficking, in any kind of profitable goods and people, had been the business of these bandits since time immemorial and opium was widely exported along with other goods. In 1546, French naturalist Pierre Belon visited Asia Minor and Egypt and was stunned to see a fifty-camel caravan, packed with Turkish opium. He commented on the widespread use of opium amongst the Ottomans, writing, ‘There is no Turk who would not buy opium with his last penny; he carries it on him in war and peace. They use opium because they think that thus they will become more daring and have less fear of the dangers of war. In war-time such quantities are purchased that it is difficult to find any left.’2
Ottoman sultans seem to have taken opium as a matter of course, and this was often attributed by witnesses to the fact they didn’t drink, but the men in the street also took a range of narcotics freely and as part of their ordinary social interactions. Not only did they take opium, they ‘smoked a green powder made from the leaves of wild hemp’, from ‘hookahs, the Turkish pipe with smoke inhaled through the water’.3 Again, as in Marco Polo’s time, it was noted that it was the rougher sort of men who smoked hemp. Another drug popular in Istanbul was tatula, or Datura stramonium, best obtained from apothecaries, who had in turn obtained it allegedly from Jewish smugglers; it was deemed especially dangerous when smoked along with opium.
The Safavids, one of the greatest Persian empires, were also cultivating and using large amounts of opium recreationally, and all attempts to curb it failed, even when restrictions were backed by strict Shiite Muslim ideology. It became commonly associated with death in Persia in 1577 when Shah Ismail II was poisoned with it after a rowdy night out on the town. After 1600, when the East began to open up to travellers, tales of the wonders of the Safavid Persian court began to filter back to western Europe. From opposing sides, they shared the common enemy of the quarrelsome and overbearing Ottomans, and so the stories of high culture and the astonishing sight of Isfahan held even more appeal for readers in the West. A French jewel dealer, Jean Chardin, arrived in the royal capital for the first time aged twenty-two, and later wrote that it ‘consists particularly of a great number of magnificent palaces, gay and smiling houses, spacious caravanserais, very fine canals and bazaars and streets lined with plane trees . . . from whatever direction one looks at the city, it looks like a wood’.4 He also observed that perhaps nine out of ten Persian men took opium pills. Another visitor related how the young shahs were raised in tents, guarded by ‘black eunuchs within and white eunuchs without’, taught only about religion rather than politics or statesmanship and that they ‘abandon him to women and indulge him in every kind of sensuality from his most tender years. They make him chew opium and drink poppy water into which they put amber and other ingredients which incite to lust, and for a time charm with ravishing visions but eventually cause him to sink into an absolute insensibility. On the death of his father they seat him on the throne and the court throw themselves at his feet in submission. Everyone tries to please him but no one thinks of giving him any good advice.’5
The free availability of locally produced opium throughout these huge empires meant that it was not only an elite habit. Opium eating was particularly prevalent in all levels of Ottoman and Persian society. In the East Indies as a whole, opium eating had already become a generally accepted habit, even amongst the poor. As Portuguese writer Cristobal Acosta noted in 1592, they regarded it ‘in the way that a worker looks upon his bread’, although he thought the use of it as a sexual stimulant ‘repellent’.6 He also noted, on his return journey when in charge of sick Turkish and Arab captives on the ship, that they were habitual users and in danger of dying if he could not supply them with the drug. Instead they had to make do with large quantities of wine.
If even the most ordinary of men were enslaved to opium for survival, there were those who took it to new extremes, and to the east lay the most ostentatious opium eaters of all: the Mughals. The Great Mughal Empire of India was founded by Babur in 1526. The Mughals claimed ancestry to Timur and Genghis Khan, and were Muslims displaced from Central Asia. In creating a new empire, they retained some of their own customs, but also adopted those from elsewhere and their court culture was heavily influenced by the splendour of the Persians. Yet they kept their nomadic ways and never remained anywhere for too long. This had the effect of concentrating the notion of royalty in the personage of the emperor, and the Mughal rulers became ever more splendid in their personal appearance. They were both emperor, and capital of the empire embodied.
By the time the Mughals were established, the ruling classes of all three empires had cultivated a strong opium culture, but unlike the other two empires and despite their religion, the Mughals also liked to drink wine. A great deal of wine. This was not restricted to the men, and women were also allowed to join the royal parties, although it is unlikely that they were permitted to imbibe. The youngest daughter of Babur, Gulbadan Begim (c.1523–1603), described what it was like to attend the annual Mughal mystic feast, to celebrate their dynastic good fortune. Of all of the ninety-six well-born women who attended, she picks out two women, named Shad Begim and Mihrangaz Begim, who ‘had a great friendship for one another, and they used to wear men’s clothes and were adorned by various accomplishments, such as the making of thumb-rings and arrows, playing polo a
nd shooting’.7
From the tales of their feasting, carousing, eating and hunting, the Mughals were consumers on a tremendous scale. Humayun, Babur’s son and Gulbadan Begim’s half-brother, admitted freely to being an opium eater, as was his son after him. They paled in comparison to Jahangir, though, ruler of the Mughals from 1605 until 1627. Even the name he chose for himself, which translates to ‘Seizer of the World’, is a bold declaration of his intentions to enjoy life to the full. Both his brothers had died of alcoholism, and Jahangir was so inebriated by his wine and opium habits that from 1611 his wife Nur Jahan ruled almost in his stead, after his first wife Man Bai killed herself with an opium overdose in 1605. Jahangir lived in monumental style, and when the court was on the move, he was accompanied by a personal guard of 8,000 men, up to another 100,000 mounted warriors and hundreds of thousands of animals and people, with a procession stretching over a mile and a half.
Jahangir was the most mobile of all the Mughal emperors although, unlike his ancestors, this was probably more to do with evading any real responsibility than fleeing from the Uzbeks. His wandering progress was, allegedly, spiritual and there is no doubt he was educated in spiritual and religious matters and made genuine attempts to reconcile the diverse faiths of Hindustan with Islam. He was also a collector, naturalist and a keen observer of the country around him on his travels. He greatly expanded the royal library and kept his own inventory of books acquired, the first Mughal emperor to do so personally. In Gujarat and Portuguese Goa he had agents who were charged to source exceptional European artefacts, timepieces in particular, and he assembled an impressive royal menagerie, featuring a North American turkey, a zebra from Abyssinia and an orangutan. The memoirs he wrote himself are fine pieces of imperialist propaganda.