by Lucy Inglis
Many of the place names are from this early time and reflect the variety of companies on the island. There is, of course, Jardine’s Bazaar, but also Jardine’s Lookout, a 433-metre high point where a lookout was stationed to spy Jardine Matheson ships approaching. The Jardine firm is inextricably linked to the history, culture and landscape of the island, even down to the soundscape, as outside the East Point premises a cannon known as the Noonday Gun was fired each day. The stories differ as to quite why this happened, but the midday firing became such a part of Hong Kong’s daily life that when the cannon was destroyed by the Japanese in the Second World War, the Royal Navy replaced it after the occupation.
One dramatic difference with the merchant’s return to Hong Kong was that the ships were now coming under steam power, indifferent to the tides and winds of the South China Sea and the Pearl River Delta. Opium was still by far the most profitable cargo, and it was responsible not only for the British colony on Hong Kong, but the success of the island itself. This success did not come immediately and initially the island was beset by piracy and raiding, as well as malaria, which killed almost a quarter of the British garrison in 1843. They were buried quickly, but soon afterwards the foundations for the new island road meant the coffins were unearthed and the bones disturbed. They were still lying by the side of the road years later, exposed to the ‘vulgar gaze’.38
For the great British merchant houses, now widely called hongs in their own right, and their owners taipan, meaning ‘great manager’, these risks and rough conditions were worth it. They were making full use of the excellent harbour for their trade, although the climate and early conditions left a lot to be desired. In 1844, Robert Montgomery Martin, the colonial treasurer, recommended abandoning the island as unfit for general trading.
This was premature. The sheer power of the hong merchants and their opium trade on Hong Kong was acting like a magnet not only for Chinese from the Pearl River Delta and Canton, but for people all over the world, and ‘people from all countries, from England to Sydney, flock to the Celestial country, and form a very motley group’.39
Hong Kong’s vast harbour allowed islanders to diversify into shipping, and new steamship companies created fleets as a business rather than a sideline like Jardine, such as the Apcar Line, founded in 1819 and operating out of Calcutta to bring opium to southern China, and the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (still operating as P&O), which went into the Bengal opium business in 1847 with the modest aim of monopolizing all opium routes east of Suez. These steamships soon became a regular sight off the coast of the island.
The rapid colonization of Hong Kong, which brought not only permanent settlers and families but ships’ crews and other visitors like Fortune, did not, as might be thought, displace the local population. If anything, relationships between the different nationalities, including the Indian traders as well as the indigenous people, seemed peaceable. Chinese peace officers with the same duties and rights as constables were drafted in 1844, on the principle that no one outside a Chinese community would have any success in governing it.
A considerable number of the Hong Kong population had been collaborators during the First Opium War, perhaps because they already had strong trading ties with the foreign merchants who called on the island, which had benefitted them more than the Canton System located ninety miles up the river. Unsurprisingly, some of the most enthusiastic of these collaborators were the Tanka water-people. Some of these men emerged as the most important local liaisons on the island for the new settlers, becoming wealthy and popular in their own right. One such was Loo Aqui, who had provisioned the Royal Navy during the war, for which he was rewarded with a large plot of land in the island’s Lower Bazaar, making him a rich man. In later life he was widely suspected of heavy involvement with the Triads, police corruption and even piracy, but he was also known in the community for assisting those who were ‘distressed, in debt, or discontented’.40 Another was Kwok Acheong, who joined the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company as a young man, and later began his own line of steamships. By 1876, he was the third largest taxpayer in the colony, and the steamship industry was an integral part of the trading there. The building of the Man Mo Temple in 1847 on the island’s Hollywood Road was an important moment for the Chinese islanders. Still standing today, it became Hong Kong’s focal point for Chinese people of all backgrounds.
The Chinese population on Hong Kong grew rapidly, from 7,500 in 1841 to 22,800 in 1847 and 85,300 in 1859.41 This was a rare source of tension between the colonists and the Chinese, particularly regarding Chinese living conditions in some parts of the island, and also burial customs, or the distinct lack of them. The poorer Chinese had a custom of laying people near death in a final resting place and leaving them without care. Sometimes they were laid out next to those already dead. This created a public scandal in 1869 and led to the creation of the Tung Wah Hospital, still in operation. Later, the colony made the hospital embrace Western medicine when the death rate amongst the Chinese population through disease remained significantly higher than that of the colonists.
Many of these Chinese came as builders, constructing in less than two years from 1841 housing for more than 15,000 people and also a magistrate’s court, a gaol and a post office, as well as the myriad governmental administrative offices needed to deal with the amount of business the huge firms like Jardine Matheson were conducting. With them grew the Nam Pak Hong trade, a sort of southern Asian entrepôt including everything from rice to pearls to silk and herbal medicines. The Nam Pak Hong trade caused a huge rise in the number of junks arriving in Hong Kong, and the junk trade rose from 80,000 tons in 1847 to 1.35 million tons exactly two decades later, and created fifty-three junk yards on Hong Kong by the late 1850s.42 The thriving Chinese population hugely outnumbered the colonists, and the shopping and food culture reflected this. They were also the largest ratepayers, as many had invested in land.
Service culture and industry – embodied in men such as Loo Aqui and Kwok Acheong, and the Nam Pak Hong trade – were particularly important for Hong Kong from the start, with the whole island dependent on trade and foreigners arriving. One thing that was becoming increasingly important on the island was credit, and to that end the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was established there in 1865. Initially it was started to offer credit to the local steamship businesses that were springing up over the island, or to small industry in the interior, but soon it was working with London’s Westminster Bank and was in the very rare position of being a colonial bank able to play off local silver against British sterling. It was able to provide credit in the sorts of numbers the burgeoning industries such as shipping needed, and provide the steady, trustworthy banking system so helpful to the opium trade.
The success of HSBC, now the largest bank operating in the world today, proves the pivotal importance of Hong Kong’s location. It may have been rocky, steep, impossibly humid, disease-ridden and prone to typhoons, but this ‘wild and uncouth state’ had opium, and on that one commodity, it rapidly built one of the world’s great trading centres.43
The Second Opium War/The Arrow War
For the British, the Second Opium War, lasting from 1856 to 1860, was a conflict distinct from the first; for the Chinese, the Arrow War was simply another insult in a long line of barbaric behaviour towards the Celestial Empire.
In October 1856, a British ship, the Arrow, was captured by pirates then resold by the Chinese government at Canton. It was flying the British flag when Chinese marines boarded it, pulled down the flag and carried off the crew, much to the outrage of the captain, Thomas Kennedy, who was aboard at the time. The Chinese had contravened the principle of extraterritoriality once again, and the British consul in Canton contacted the viceroy Ye Mingchen directly, now permitted after the Treaty of Nanking, and demanded the release of the crew and an apology for the insult to the British flag. The viceroy released only part of the crew, and no apology was forthcoming. Brit
ish ships fired heavily on Canton, and on 29 October entered the city, where the US consul James Keenan, somewhat unwisely, chose to fly the American flag from the viceroy’s residence.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, negotiations were a stalemate, and the British continued to bombard Canton periodically until January 1857, when they returned to Hong Kong. The British government, preoccupied with an upcoming general election, was less than sympathetic to the problems in the Pearl River Delta and not interested at all when the Indian Mutiny rose up in May. However, when a French missionary was executed in mainland China, the French envoy, Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros, lobbied for action and the British and French joined forces to take Canton, which they did in late 1857. Ultimately, Britain and France occupied the city for almost four years. America and Russia, despite the British requests for help, remained neutral.
In December 1857, Britain and France threatened the viceroy with a total bombardment of Canton if the crew of the Arrow were not released within twenty-four hours. And they still wanted their apology. They received the former, but not the latter, yet were victorious in what became popularly known as the Arrow Incident.
Back in Britain, opinion on what had happened was divided, and was a frequent subject of parliamentary debate. Richard Cobden, the MP for the West Riding of Yorkshire, recorded his opinion: ‘the papers which have been laid on the table fail to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent measures resorted to at Canton in the late affair of the Arrow’.44 The House of Commons passed a resolution against the war, with a majority of just fourteen. The Arrow Incident was a controversial issue in the general election, but the pro-war faction were returned to power.
In June 1858, the British government, now allied against China with America, France and Russia, proposed the Treaties of Tientsin, which would essentially open up China to free trade with the rest of the world. Over two years ensued of battles and diplomatic incidents involving captures of British officers and grisly torture. Southern Chinese ‘coolies’ fought with the British and French forces, engaging their enemies with sharpened bamboo. The Qing government, meanwhile, was also under huge pressure from the Taiping Rebellion in south-eastern China, where a group of rebels were declaring their freedom to practise their own form of Christianity. For the Qing administration, it was an utter disaster.
Karl Marx, at that time the European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, wrote a piece called ‘Trade or Opium’ in which he said Tientsin had ‘succeeded in stimulating the opium trade at the expense of legitimate commerce’.45
On 6 October 1860, Anglo-French forces entered, looted and burned the splendid Old Summer Palace of Peking. The British also proposed to burn the Forbidden City, but their allies discouraged it, believing it might jeopardize the signing of the treaties. On 18 October, at the Convention of Peking, the emperor’s brother, Prince Gong, ratified the Treaties of Tientsin. They had been somewhat modified, and the result for the Chinese was catastrophic. Not only did they have to pay 8 million taels of silver (the equivalent of 400 tons) in compensation to the British and French, they had to open up Tientsin, cede Kowloon to the British, grant freedom of religion, and the right for missionaries to preach in China; the ‘coolie trade’ in which indentured Chinese servants were carried to America was to be permitted. And finally, the opium trade was to be fully legalized in China. It was the worst outcome they could have hoped for. Then, a fortnight later, the Russians forced what was left of the Qing government to sign a further codicil regarding coastal rights, which allowed them to found Vladivostok in the same year.
Britain and its allies had achieved their aim of forcing China’s hand once and for all in terms of free trade. America, desperate for cheap labour after its own civil war, had a new, legalized slave army, and Britain added Kowloon to her rapidly expanding Hong Kong territory. Christianity was pushed onto a people who had survived and flourished without it for thousands of years. But most important of all, the trade in tea and opium would continue, now unchecked and completely legal. There would be no way to check the ravening demand for opium in mainland China, and supply would be unbridled. The Chinese regard this crushing compromise as both the birth of modern China and their most humiliating defeat at the hands of the West.
Ye Mingchen, the viceroy who made what turned out to be such a grave error in Canton, was exiled to Calcutta, where he starved himself to death.
China’s Opium Missionaries
‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature’46
As Chinese coolie labour flooded out of southern China, both opium and Christian missionaries flooded into what had been a closed country. While the early Roman Catholic missions, aside from the Jesuits, had largely met with failure, it was now predominantly American Evangelical Protestants who wished to go and preach to the Chinese people.
There had already been Protestant missionaries in China, notably the Briton Robert Morrison (1782–1834), who arrived there in 1807 on behalf of the London Missionary Society, and in defiance of the EIC’s total ban on British missionary activity anywhere in their mandate. To circumvent this, Morrison pretended to be an American.47 Canton’s missionaries throughout the nineteenth century used print to try and spread the word of God. Morrison, who produced a Chinese translation of the Bible as well as a book on Chinese grammar aimed at the English and American markets, was determined to foster a better cultural understanding between East and West. He also founded the Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca.
Both he and his notional successor in Canton, the American Evangelist E. C. Bridgman, were gravely concerned with the effect of opium upon the population. Bridgman, who immersed himself in the Chinese language well enough to write fluent letters to the emperor upon the subject, was particularly keen to see the trade abolished. The Chinese Repository was a periodical that ran in Canton between 1832 and 1851, with the aim of informing missionaries working in Asia about the history of China, cultural differences and current events. Bridgman was a keen contributor and in 1836–7 published seventeen articles on the history and state of the opium trade.
The First Opium War was, for many missionaries, a time of hope that the trade had ‘received its death blow’. Bridgman wrote back to the American government in 1839, during the Lin Zexu period in Canton, that ‘Our little community has been held these two months constantly in painful-fearful suspense. England, India – and Christendom – must now awake to the evils of this “hurtful thing”.’48 Bridgman had a good relationship with Lin, and it was Bridgman who printed Lin’s letter to Queen Victoria in the Chinese Repository and distributed it in Canton. The new importance of printed propaganda in the Canton trade was mobilizing not only the missionaries, but also the merchants, who printed their own magazines. Jardine Matheson bought at least one printing press, and the Qing government, used to having absolute control of what was publicly circulated, was unable to stop the flood of new pamphlets and periodicals debating Canton and the opium trade.
With the outbreak of the war, Bridgman and his compatriots, now well established in Canton and immersed in the culture of the factories, felt they could be more vocal about the evils of the opium trade. But they still had one significant problem: Jardine Matheson and Dent, in the spirit of Christian fellowship in the face of the Chinese, or for public relations reasons, were generous contributors to the various missionary projects. Such a detail moderated Bridgman’s language, but did not stop him speaking out about the trade in print. The only problem with the missionary press in Canton was that the matter was given over to the merchant-missionary debate about the opium trade, rather than the realities of the situation. Whilst the missionaries were no doubt doing good work on the ground, their printed debates made the subject a theoretical and theological one. However, their published works, when exported back to America, where people had never seen an opium den, but were filled with evangelical faith, had a powerful effect on public opinion.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
was a powerful lobbying group, and had backing from Olyphant & Co., one of the few foreign hongs in Canton who would not participate in the drug trade, restricting themselves to silk and fancy Chinese articles. Peter Parker, a missionary and doctor at the hospital in Canton, travelled back to America to speak to the American Board about the problems with opium in the Canton population, and went to Washington ‘to call the attention of the men in power to the relations of America to China’.49 He was persuasive and influential in shaping American policy towards China during the Opium Wars and subsequently. The reduction of the opium trade to a basic ‘good versus evil’ argument had begun in earnest.
The mercantile reality across China was somewhat different. In a cash-poor rural society, where opium poppies could now be grown practically if not legally – the central government would not remove the ban until 1890, but turned a blind eye to production – opium latex was as good as money, and something that had previously had to be imported was now available in the fields outside. Crucially, for a government ever desperate for money, it could also be taxed. Levels of addiction were also rising rapidly. At the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839, imports of opium into Canton stood at 2,500 tons, but by 1880, this had risen to 6,500 tons. When domestic production was legalized in 1890, imports fell dramatically, but opium cultivation and consumption boomed until, in 1906, China was producing a gargantuan 35,000 tons per year and an estimated 25 per cent of the male population were not only users, but addicts, and it was consumed at every level of society.50 British and American missionaries wrote ever more impassioned tracts on the nature of the opium trade, never mentioning that, back at home, trouble was brewing.