This is a book about how the Opium War came to be—that is, how China declined from its eighteenth-century grandeur and how Britain became sufficiently emboldened to take advantage of that decline. The central question of the war, as I see it, is not how Britain won, for that was never in serious doubt—in military terms the Opium War pitted the most advanced naval power in the world against an empire with a long and vulnerable coastline that had not needed a seagoing navy in more than a hundred years and so did not have one. Rather, the central question is a moral one: how Britain could have come to fight such a war in China in the first place—against, it should be noted, savage criticism both at home and abroad.
A sense of inevitability has always been projected backwards onto this era in hindsight, as if the war were always meant to be, but when viewed in the light of its own time the Opium War could hardly have been more counterintuitive. Aside from the audacity of sending a small fleet and a few thousand troops to make war on the world’s largest empire, critics at the time pointed out that Britain was putting its entire future tea trade at risk for only the vaguest and least justifiable of goals. It seemed paradoxical in the 1830s that a liberal British government that had just abolished slavery could turn around and fight a war to support drug dealers, or that proponents of free trade would align their interests with smugglers. If we revisit these events as they actually unfolded, rather than as they have been reinterpreted afterward, we find far more opposition to this war in Britain and America on moral grounds, and far more respect for the sovereignty of China, than one would otherwise expect.
One reason a reader might not expect such opposition to this war is that we too easily forget how much admiration China used to command. Because of its great strength and prosperity in the late eighteenth century, Europeans viewed China in a dramatically different light than they did the other countries of the East. At a time when India was an object of British conquest, China was an object of respect, even awe. Occasional calls for the use of naval power to advance trade there were struck down as self-defeating, while British traders in Canton who made trouble were generally ordered home or at least reminded to behave themselves. In commerce, China held all the cards. In stark contrast to the British Orientalist vision of India in the late eighteenth century—lost in the past, childlike and divided, a prize to be captured and controlled—China represented instead a strong, unified empire and another living civilization.
For that reason, readers who are familiar with the East India Company as a force of imperial conquest in India will find a very different face of it in China. When young Britons went to work for the Company overseas, it was India that attracted the military adventurers, the administrators, those with dreams of empire. The bean counters, by contrast, went to Canton. (And remarkably, it should be noted that in the early nineteenth century those bean counters in their quiet factories served the Company’s bottom line in London far better than the conquerors of India did.) Even as goods—especially cotton and later opium—flowed steadily from India to China, there was almost no professional circulation between the two regions, where Company agents developed largely separate worldviews. When visitors acculturated to British India intruded into the separate world of Canton, they would often cause problems—not just with the Chinese, but with their more experienced countrymen as well.
The Opium War would force those two worlds together, tainting the old admiration and respect for China with a taste for blood. The war would never be universally popular in Britain, however, and fierce opposition to the use of force in China would linger for a long time afterward (another controversial China war in the 1850s would entail the dissolution of Parliament and new elections to disempower the British lawmakers who tried to stop it). Nevertheless, by the time the war finally began, an ongoing collision of two competing worldviews—between those British who respected China’s power and prosperity and those who said it was no more enviable than India—reached a crucial threshold.
Thus, while the Opium War was ultimately a war over trade, the story of its origins is, to a significant degree, the story of how the grand mystery of China faded in the cold light of knowledge as British subjects first began to learn the language and explore the interior of the country—and, pursuant to those projects, how the admiring Western views of China that were so prevalent in the late eighteenth century came to be eroded over time by disillusionment and contempt. Within that shift lies the key to understanding how Britain’s government could come to a point in 1839 where it was willing to consider, for the first time in two hundred years, the use of violence to further its economic ends there.
Western histories of the Opium War for general readers have long told the story with a wink as the predictable triumph of West over East, a lesson taught to a childish people who dared to look down on the British as barbarians and tried to make them “kowtow” (a loaded term that used to indicate a specific ceremony of kneeling before the Qing emperor but now lives on in our language with the general meaning of “showing obseqious deference”). In such accounts, China typically appears as an unchanging backdrop, a caricature of unthinking traditions and arrogant mandarins stuck in the ancient past who are incapable of appreciating the rise of British power.2
With this book, I aim instead to give motion and life to the changing China that lay beyond the confines of Canton in the early nineteenth century—the rebellions, the spread of corruption, and the economic troubles that preoccupied the country’s rulers and formed the wider context for the issues of foreign contact that lie at the story’s center. Though the Chinese of this era have long been depicted as oblivious to the outside world, that is a false view. Coastal officials in China were fully aware that they had no capacity to resist a European navy; they knew what the British were capable of if given cause for war. Their naiveté, such as it was, resulted not from ignorance but from their faith in the stabilizing power of trade—in particular, their assumption that as long as the British enjoyed profitable commerce in Canton they would never have reason to resort to violence (a belief that was shared along the way, incidentally, by nearly everyone in the British government who had a say in the matter).
On the Western side of my story is a cast of British and American sojourners who tried to get beyond their limited confines in Canton—traders, explorers, missionaries, government agents, and smugglers who, for a variety of reasons both commendable and not, tried to see, contact, and understand more of the country than they were supposed to. Together, they embodied the long Western dream of opening China—“opening” here not to mean that China was always and universally closed (it was not), but to capture how it was experienced by the British and Americans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were tightly restricted in their ability to conduct trade, they were forbidden to learn the Chinese language, and they were kept within exceptionally close boundaries with no ability to travel farther into the empire or interact with the general population. Some wished it were otherwise, and their efforts in that direction would have great repercussions.
On the Chinese side, meanwhile, this is the story of an empire in decline from a lofty, almost unimaginable height—a wealthy, powerful, civilized state controlling roughly a third of the world’s population, riven by internal pressures of overpopulation, official corruption, and sectarian dissent (all three of which, notably, count again among the Chinese government’s most pressing concerns today). The characters on this side will include emperors and officials who tried to maintain the order of the state, rebels and others at the fringes of society who tried to subvert it, and reform-minded Confucian scholars who—far from clinging blindly to tradition—proposed creative and pragmatic solutions to the problems of their time. Together, the Chinese and Western sides of the story are meant to give the reader a broader vision of this grand eclipse of empires in the early nineteenth century—China, crossing its meridian and entering into a long decline, while Britain rose to new nationalistic heights through its victories
in the Napoleonic Wars and beyond. The Opium War was the point where those two arcs finally crossed.
In closing, a word on inevitability. Although this early age of contact between China and the West has long been treated in retrospect as if it were somehow always destined to end in war, it was not. The Opium War did not result from an intractable clash of civilizations, as it would later be framed in the West. Neither did it represent the culmination of some grand imperial master plan, as it is generally understood in China. To nearly all parties concerned, including even the government ministers who launched it, the war was all but unthinkable until it actually began. The truth is that over the long term, the foreigners and Chinese who came together at Canton found far more common ground than conflict. This book will have much to say about the individuals who made the war possible, but they are by no means the whole story. It is also a book about the many others, now mostly forgotten, who stood against the more familiar currents of their time and can remind us how differently the course of events might have gone—among them British activists who opposed the opium trade, Chinese scholars who counseled pragmatism in foreign relations, and Americans whose relationships with their Chinese counterparts set a more positive pattern than most of the British. As we look to the future of our own era, with China’s arc once again ascendant, such figures are every bit as important for us to remember as the ones who caused all the trouble.
Imperial Twilight
PROLOGUE
The Journey of James Flint
In the summer of 1759, James Flint sailed up the coast of China and almost didn’t come back. He was at the time the only Englishman who knew how to speak and write in Chinese, a talent that made him extremely valuable to the small community of East India Company traders who lived for a few months of the year in the factories outside the port city of Canton. Those British traders, known as “supercargoes,” had recently learned that the emperor would no longer allow them to visit other cities up the coast, which frustrated them not only because they wanted access to multiple Chinese ports for the sake of competition, but also because the senior customs official in Canton (known to them as the “hoppo”) was corrupt. He regularly demanded bribes from them and charged higher duties than he was supposed to. Their only recourse, as they saw it, was to try to appeal directly to the emperor in Beijing, in hopes that he might discipline the hoppo and allow them access to one or two other ports for their trade. As Flint was the only one among them who could communicate in Chinese, it fell to him to bring their appeal north.
James Flint’s path to learning Chinese had not been in any way a product of his own hopes or interests. As a child in England, he had been adopted in the 1730s by a ship’s captain named Rigby who brought him halfway around the world to the trading enclave of Canton and left him there, just a boy at the time, with instructions to learn the local language so he might make himself useful and perhaps get a job with the East India Company. Rigby then sailed away, intending to reunite with the boy sometime in the future. It was three years before young James finally heard from Rigby again, in a letter summoning him to Bombay. James took passage from Canton, but Captain Rigby died in a shipwreck not long after writing the letter, and by the time James got to India there was no one there to greet him. The British administrators in Bombay, at a loss as to what to do with the orphan boy, put him back on a ship to Canton, alone and penniless.1
With no money for a passage back to England, and nobody to care for him there even if he could get back, young James found a home with the East India Company’s supercargoes. He grew up over the years under their guardianship in Canton and the nearby Portuguese settlement of Macao—an adolescent, then a young man with a long Chinese braid, who dressed like the English when their ships were in port but wore clothes like the Chinese when they were not. He had no family but the East India Company, no home but the hybrid trading world in the small compound outside the broad stone walls of Canton where the foreigners stayed. Along with his native English he learned to speak the local dialect of Cantonese and a bit of the official dialect of Mandarin, and he could read and write in Chinese as well.
It was, as Captain Rigby had hoped, enough to make him a living. The British ships that came and went from Canton paid Flint a respectable fee to negotiate their terms of trade with local merchants. Without him, they had to rely on native translators, who charged high fees and usually took the side of their Chinese patrons. When discussions got thorny, the native translators were useless. The British supercargoes had long wanted one of their own kind to represent them in their business dealings, someone they could trust to put their interests first, and with Flint they finally had that. In time he was made a supercargo himself, and by 1759 when the others sent him up the coast to try to reach the emperor, he had put in more than twenty years of service at Canton.2
Flint sailed from Macao on the morning of June 13, 1759, on the Success, a little English snow with an eight-man crew and three servants, their course set for the port of Ningbo midway up the coast. He carried a formal petition in Chinese, addressed to the emperor, that his Chinese teacher had helped him write. Along with asking the emperor to investigate the Canton hoppo, Flint’s petition also requested permission for the British to trade at Ningbo, which was closer to the centers of production of tea and silk (and closer to the northern climates where there might be a better market for English woolens than at subtropical Canton). The British had traded at Ningbo in the past and knew that the merchants there still wanted their business—Flint himself had ascertained as much during a series of short voyages up to the city a few years earlier. But the officials in Canton were jealous of other ports siphoning off their business. And the government in Beijing enjoyed a steady income from the taxes on land transport for all of the goods that were carried down to Canton, income that would be lost if the trade went on in more convenient places. For those reasons, and to keep foreign relations focused and closely supervised, the emperor seemed intent on restricting the British to Canton alone.3
The initial stage of the voyage was unpromising. Upon his reaching Ningbo in late June, the officials in the port told Flint that his ship was forbidden to remain there. Flint pleaded that he carried a petition for the emperor, asking that the officials at least forward it for him to Beijing, but they would not accept it or even allow anyone from his ship to disembark. They told him to go back to Canton. He could not do that, though; it was impossible to sail back down against the winds in that season, and would be until September at least, when the strong southwest monsoon that swept up the coast of China during the summer months would reverse itself. So, absent any welcome from shore, Flint gave up on Ningbo and the Success continued on its plaintive course northward into the unknown.
On July 10, after two more weeks of feeling its way up the coast without a chart, the Success finally arrived at the broad, turbid mouth of the White River in northern China (known today as the Hai River), the maritime gateway to the inland city of Tianjin. Beyond Tianjin, a road led overland to Beijing. An official from one of the large forts that guarded the shallow river’s mouth came out in a junk to inform Flint that his ship was forbidden to proceed inland. But everything was negotiable, and after some further conversation the official said perhaps he could represent Flint’s case to his colleagues in Tianjin. For a fee, he could tell them that the Success hadn’t come on purpose but had simply been blown to this part of the coast by foul weather, and in that case Flint might be allowed up the river. The price he named for his services was 5,000 Chinese taels, a bribe worth nearly $7,000 at the time, or about $200,000 in today’s currency. Flint protested that he didn’t have that much money on board, but the official said he wouldn’t risk his position for anything less than half that sum. He gave Flint one night to think about it.4
Flint could not turn back. Aside from the adverse winds that made a southbound cruise impossible, the unsanctioned voyage of the Success up the coast would soon become known to the jealous officials down in Canton, w
ho, if they knew the English had failed to get the attention of the emperor, were likely to become even more antagonistic. So Flint finally gave in and offered the man 2,000 taels—less than he had demanded, but still an astronomical bribe. He would pay two-thirds down, the remainder when he left. The official was true to his word, and on July 21, Flint continued upriver to Tianjin, where the senior official in charge of the city gave him a polite reception. Less polite, though, were the ordinary residents of Tianjin, who got into such a commotion over the arrival of a foreign ship that soldiers had to be called in to prevent a mob from storming it. An official transmitted Flint’s petition to the emperor in Beijing, and Flint himself was moved into housing on land to wait for a response, in a Buddhist temple surrounded by guards to protect him from the mobs. There were twenty of them, which proved barely enough to keep the locals at bay.
A response from the capital came one week later. As much as Flint was given to know of its contents, the emperor had been moved by the foreigners’ complaints about corruption at Canton and was appointing a commissioner to investigate the hoppo. So Flint’s petition had been at least partially successful. Indeed, the British complaints about excessive customs charges at Canton were welcome to the ears of an emperor keenly interested in maintaining control over the remote distances of his vast empire, who knew that legitimate reports of official misconduct were far more difficult to come by than bland cover-ups.
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