Charles Elliot’s reflective assessment of the position at the start of 1839 contrasted sharply with the sense of urgency prevailing in Beijing. On 21 January it was reported in Canton that the Son of Heaven had appointed a special commissioner to go to Canton to solve the opium problem for good. He was given full powers and a rank which was senior to the Viceroy. Lin Zexu’s reputation for intellect, energy and incorruptibility preceded him. Local officials from the Viceroy down were duly worried.
Chapter Nine
Authority and Honour
The period from Lin’s arrival in Canton in March 1839 to the commencement of full hostilities the following year has sometimes been represented as a quasi-personal struggle between Lin and Elliot, the leading figures on the two sides. They each found themselves in a position in which their main objective – for Elliot protection and development of British trade, for Lin the eradication of opium – was both obstructed by the policy of a foreign power and made hugely more difficult by the activities of their own compatriots. Each was well aware of the complexities of the situation and the number of parties involved, and neither sought to personalise their countries’ differences.
Commissioner Lin’s ancestors had held high office in China, though his immediate parentage was less exalted. The son of a schoolteacher, he had achieved rapid advancement in the Chinese system of public service, a meritocracy which placed the greatest emphasis on intellectual ability. On the way he had acquired wide-ranging experience as a scholar, adjudicator, statesman, administrator and all-purpose troubleshooter.1 At 54, he was Elliot’s senior by sixteen years.
Within days of taking up his post Lin set about his task with a vigour and directness which must have surprised all but the most hardened members of the mercantile community, whether Chinese, British or other nationals. After embarking on a programme for the arrest of hundreds of local opium distributors and others involved in the trade, he issued two edicts to the Co-Hong. The first instructed them to pass on to the foreign traders, for whose conduct they were formally responsible, an order requiring them to give up all the opium held in their receiving ships and never to import the drug again:
Let them deliver up to government every particle of opium on board their store-ships…. Let it be ascertained by the Hong merchants, who are the parties so delivering it up, what number of chests is delivered up under each name, and what is the total quantity … in order that the opium … may be burnt and destroyed, and that thus the evil may be entirely extirpated. There must not be the smallest atom concealed or withheld.
At the same time let these foreigners give a bond … making a declaration of this effect: That their vessels, which shall hereafter resort hither, will never again dare to bring opium with them; and that should any be brought … the goods shall be forfeited to government, and the parties shall suffer the extreme penalties of the law.2
Lin’s second command was for the Hong merchants themselves. Having severely reprimanded them (at some length) for their longstanding and deep involvement in the opium trade, he threatened to have one or two of them – he did not specify which one or two – executed if they failed to ensure the surrender of the foreigners’ opium chests and the signing of a bond. The Hong merchants
should acquire an earnest severity of deportment, that the energetic character of the commands may be clearly made to appear. They must not continue to exhibit a contumacious disposition or to color over the matter, nor may they give utterance to any expression of solicitation…. Three days are prescribed, within which they must obtain the required bonds, and report in reply hereto. If it be found that this matter cannot at once be arranged by them, it will be apparent, without enquiry, that they are constantly acting in concert with depraved foreigners, and that their minds have a perverted inclination. And I, the high commissioner, will forthwith solicit the royal death-warrant, and select for execution one or two of the most unworthy of their number…. Say not that you did not receive timely notice. A special edict.3
When he received news of the two edicts Elliot was in Macao, expecting the focus of the Commissioner’s action to be there, at Lintin, and in the waters of the Pearl River estuary.
Charles Elliot had had a difficult few months. After anxious soul-searching he and Clara had eventually decided, with much sadness, that Harriet and Hughie, now aged 9 and 7 respectively, should return to England. As well as wishing to safeguard their education he had concluded, correctly, that the situation would before long deteriorate to a point at which continued residence at Macao by foreign personnel would become unsafe, and he doubtless thought it likely in any case that his duties in Canton and on the river in the coming months could mean long periods of absence from his family. The two children sailed on the Melbourne in mid-March; they were to join their young brother Gibby, now aged 5, at Charlton under the care of Emma and Sir Thomas Hislop. Elliot wrote to his sister, briefly but movingly commending Harriet and Hughie to her:
I had resolved to write you a long letter by this sorrowful ship the Melbourne, but now the time has come I find I can do nothing but grieve. And in addition to this, I have upon my shoulders a great burden of public anxiety. When you see and know these dear loves you will judge what a pang it has cost us to bid them farewell.
Harriet promises to be a glory to me, and what is better far, a dutiful and good child. Sweetly pretty and intelligent as she is, the qualities of her heart, are still higher and more lovable. My own darling Hughie, the plague and pleasure of my life, is just what Fred was at Madras in appearance, but with a bottle of quicksilver dancing through his veins instead of blood. With steady and gentle firmness, however, he is docile. The dangerous part of his character, is his extreme sensibility.4
Days after the Elliot children’s departure the foreign traders’ Chamber of Commerce met on 21 March to discuss both the threat of execution issued to the Hong merchants and the now sizeable – and highly visible – Chinese military presence in and around Canton. They persuaded themselves that they were merely agents of the East India Company and could not give up something which was not strictly theirs, but with considerable reluctance some of them agreed to surrender some opium. The quantity to be handed over amounted to a little over a thousand chests, a very small fraction of the stocks held and an even smaller one of the total traded each year.5 It was shortly to be dismissed by Lin as a completely inadequate response to his demand.
Elliot heard about the edicts on 22 March. His reaction was that of a man provoked; gone, suddenly, was his conciliatory approach, to be replaced by firm and immediate action. After forwarding Lin’s edicts to Palmerston, he ordered all British ships standing off the Pearl River estuary to make without delay for Hong Kong ‘and hoisting their national colours, be prepared to resist every act of aggression on the part of the Chinese government’.6 He then went immediately to Canton, where he indulged in some patriotic flag-raising himself, ‘For I well knew, my Lord’, he wrote on 30 March to Palmerston,‘that there is a sense of support in the sight of that honoured flag, fly where it will, that no one can feel but men who look upon it in some such dismal strait as ours’.7 His next action was to summon a meeting of the foreign traders, subsequently reporting that he ‘enjoined them all to be moderate, firm, and united. I had the satisfaction to dissolve the meeting in a calmer state of mind than had subsisted for several days past’.8
Elliot’s intervention may have served, temporarily, to lower the temperature a little among the foreigners, but Commissioner Lin was bent on pressing on vigorously. The square and the area around the Factories began to fill with soldiers and militia irregulars, making much noise and seeking to intimidate the foreign community. Lin cannot realistically have expected the merchants to have agreed to his demands within the three day limit he had set; but after six days without progress, on 24 March, he tightened the screw further, closing off all access to the Factories area except for one street, reinforcing the military presence, and ordering not only the cessation of trade but the withdrawa
l of all Chinese servants, compradors and other personnel working for the foreigners. His determination was unequivocal: ‘If there is any attempt to evade these restrictions I, the Governor-General, and the Governor will obtain permission from Peking to close the harbour to them and put a stop to their trade for ever.’9
The blockade of the Factories moved the dispute between the British and the Chinese onto new ground. For Charles Elliot it was not now wholly, or even mainly, about opium, and still less about the development of trade in general, but about physical aggression by one empire against another and the infringement of personal liberty. He had been clear in his instructions to British shipping that any such behaviour by the Chinese should be resisted. He had also, in the context of the treatment of individuals, earlier declared to Palmerston that, ‘till I am differently instructed, I should hold it my duty to resist to the last, the seizure and punishment of a British subject by the Chinese law, be his crime what it might’.10 The question of how jurisdiction for the British community in China was supposed to operate had for a long time been a matter on which he had sought, without success, definitive guidance from the home government. To the Chinese, including the Co-Hong, it was simply incomprehensible that Elliot, known to all as the Chief Superintendent, could not exercise control over British subjects in China. They were at a loss to know exactly what it was he was superintending. The distinctions between the merchants’ legal commercial activities and other aspects of their conduct, and between legitimate and illegitimate trade, in terms of Elliot’s ability to exercise authority, were alien concepts to the Chinese. Equally alien, to the British, were the principles of group responsibility where an individual miscreant could not be identified, and arbitrarily imposed responsibility for the actions of others (which they had seen at first hand in the Chinese government’s treatment of the Co-Hong).
Whatever Elliot’s views of the principles at stake and of the broader picture, he had to respond pragmatically to the situation in which the British and other foreign traders now found themselves. With Lin’s measures of 24 March the usual daytime noise around the Factories had abated completely as the premises were vacated by all except the foreigners, who numbered around 350. As well as the merchants they included a number of sailors and Indian servants, and the officers of the Superintendency: Charles Elliot, the Deputy Superintendent A.R. Johnston, the Secretary Edward Elmslie, and the interpreter J.R. Morrison. They were confined by more than a thousand soldiers, police and coolies, all armed with weapons of various kinds, and blockaded from the river by three rows of boats. At night the besieged community was kept awake by a constant cacophony of gongs and horns.
It was something of a shock to the foreign merchants’ systems to have suddenly to turn their hands to cooking and other domestic tasks, but after a short while the atmosphere in the Factories became generally good-humoured. At the start of the blockade Elliot had written dramatically to Palmerston informing him that
The native servants were taken from us, and the supplies cut off on the same night … and before the gate of this hall the whole body of Hong merchants and a large guard are posted day and night, the latter with their swords constantly drawn. In short, so close an imprisonment of the foreigners is not recorded in the history of our previous intercourse with this empire.11
Reports to London of significant events and fast-changing situations were of course especially vulnerable to the length of time between dispatch and receipt. Elliot’s communication of 30 March, along with two subsequent letters of 2 and 3 April, did not reach the Foreign Office until 29 August, nearly four months after the blockade had ended and by which time events on the China coast had moved on apace. In reality, life for the foreigners became a good deal more comfortable than might have been inferred from Elliot’s initial dispatch. The Hong merchants and the interpreters played a valuable role in encouraging their coolies to ensure that a variety of food and other provisions found their way into the Factories; aided by the staff of the Hong merchants and the linguists, cooking and cleaning duties were shared among all who had been confined: sailors, Indian servants, and the foreign merchants and officers themselves. James Matheson wrote home to Jardine on 1 May, three days before the end of the six-week blockade, that ‘By the kindness of Heerjeebhoy in lending us his Indian servants, with the assistance of some sailors who happened to be up, we have not only lived comfortably all along, but have entertained the remaining inmates.’12
So with some difficulty to start with, and with inventiveness and goodwill, the merchant community’s material needs were on the whole met. They could not escape the fact, though, that their movements were being forcibly restricted by a foreign power. The humiliation and frustration were deeply felt, and by none more than Charles Elliot. His responsibility as the senior representative of Her Majesty’s Government in China overrode all other considerations now, and he had to find a way out of the current difficulties. His decision, made within days of the imposition of the blockade, was startling and risky. Whatever was to happen thereafter, the priority was the ending of the blockade, and the only way to achieve this was to undertake to surrender the opium as required by Commissioner Lin. In the light of Elliot’s previously robust stance this was, to all appearances, a remarkable volte-face. He could not have contemplated such a move without providing the merchants with a guarantee of compensation; his plan, fraught with political risk, was that appropriate compensation would be supplied in due course by the British government. Such a commitment to the merchants had to be made immediately if there was to be progress, despite there being no evidence that the government would feel obliged to honour it. The traders not only took Elliot at his word, but thought they could demand a good price. Though some of the Hong merchants considered that the promise to hand over all the opium was an overreaction, Elliot was satisfied that thus far he had made the right decisions.
Charles Elliot was able to smuggle out letters to Macao to reassure Clara of his personal safety; he also set out, with mild sarcasm and a small dose of self-congratulation, his current thinking (though in rather guarded terms) on the state of play in the stand-off with the Chinese. Ten days into the confinement he wrote to her:
I have some promise of getting these few lines to you, and I know it will be a joy to you to hear that I am well and happy, (if I could forget your anxieties). The great point now is to get this opium delivered, so that having fulfilled my public engagement I may make my bow to his Excellency and all their other Excellencies till we come to Him in another sort of form and with another kind of business in hand.
It was obviously his purpose to bully the merchants into forced and separate surrenders of their property … But I burst in upon Him, and his measures met an officer with all the train of consequences that his treatment of me has produced….
In the meantime be of good heart. Console everybody about you, and never fear for me. I shall turn up the right end uppermost.13
Elliot saw the surrender of the opium, as well as being necessary to secure the ending of the blockade, as a measure that would prompt British government retaliation. Such a reaction by the British would in due course cause the Chinese to be brought to terms, an essential step towards the broader objective of breaking Chinese resistance to the expansion of trade. The aim was reculer pour mieux sauter. His references to ‘another sort of form’ and ‘another kind of business’ indicated that he had already decided that confrontation in the form of military action was now almost inevitable, a view swiftly translated into action in a flurry of letters to Palmerston. Now nearly two weeks into the blockade, he supplied the Foreign Secretary with a preliminary account of how his intentions had been thwarted by Lin’s threatening behaviour:
It was my fixed purpose, my Lord, when I left Macao … either to cause the merchants of my country, engaged in trade at Canton, to make solemn promises that they would abstain from connexion with the opium traffic in future, or myself, on the part of Her Majesty’s Government, to undertake that no recla
mation should be made if they were forthwith expelled….
The situation … has been entirely altered by the High Commissioner’s proceedings; and his continuance of the state of restraint, insult and dark intimidation, subsequently to the surrender, has certainly classed the whole case amongst the most shameless violences which one nation has ever yet dared to perpetrate against another.14
In a passage which encapsulates his approach he continued with his thoughts on what should have been done, and his recommended way forward:
It is not by measures of this kind that the Chinese Government can hope to put down a trade, which every friend to humanity must deplore; great moral changes can never be effected by the violation of all the principles of justice and moderation. The wise course would have been to make the trade shameful, and wear it out by degrees in its present form. The course taken will change the manner of its pursuit at once, cast it into desperate hands, and with this long line of unprotected coast, abounding in safe anchorages, and covered with defenceless cities, I foresee a state of things terrible to reflect upon…. I feel assured, that the single mode of saving the coasts of the empire from a shocking character of warfare, both foreign and domestic, will be the very prompt and powerful interference of Her Majesty’s Government…. There can be neither safety nor honour for either Government till Her Majesty’s flag flies on these coasts in a secure position.15
In other words, a short, sharp (and overwhelming) intervention by the Royal Navy, by preventing much more serious conflict, would be in Chinese as well as British interests. Whatever tactical advantage may have been gained by Elliot’s promise to surrender the opium, compliance with Lin’s other demand, that the foreign merchants sign a bond undertaking not to trade in opium again, was an impossibility for the British. Elliot was under no illusion about the meaning of ‘extreme penalties of the law’; it meant summary execution for any signatory whom the Chinese subsequently considered to be trading in opium. Exercising his newly operational de facto authority, he made it clear to Lin that while accepting the need for foreigners to abide by the law of the host country, the terms of the bond were so far removed from the principles of English justice that acceptance of them was out of the question. If it were insisted on, all British traders and vessels would have to leave Canton. The death penalty as a consequence of non-compliance was explicitly spelled out in the text of a ‘voluntary bond’ presented via the Hong merchants at a meeting of the General Committee of the foreigners’ Chamber of Commerce. Considered by the Committee on 5 April, it also required the Chief Superintendent to be in touch with the Queen:
Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong Page 13