Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  It was a potentially scandalous arrangement—the servant of God working for the disciples of Mammon—but Morrison could see no other way that he could stay in China or continue his work. And from the other side, with George Staunton home on leave in England, there was nobody else in Canton who could provide the select committee with the stream of translated edicts and regulations to which they had become accustomed. (There was Thomas Manning, of course, but compared to Morrison his translations were difficult to read and by his own admission he spoke Chinese “very imperfectly.”) 27 After the withdrawal of Drury’s fleet there seemed to be no more danger of getting embroiled with the Chinese authorities, so Morrison could look forward to doing his translation work for the Company quietly and safely from within the factory, with pen and paper. Thus the newly married preacher decided to swallow his moral qualms, and, knowing full well that he might be savaged by the missionary community back home for doing so, he accepted the position.

  The London Missionary Society, as it turned out, would be far more accepting of the arrangement than the East India Company. A rumor did pass around certain missionary circles in England that Morrison “had deserted the cause for which he had left his home and country,” but the directors of the society accepted the pragmatic necessity of his working for the Company. If nothing else, it relieved them of the burden of trying to fund him.28 The directors of the East India Company, however, were furious to learn that their Canton factory had employed a missionary, and they ordered that Morrison be fired as soon as George Staunton returned to China from his leave in 1810. But John Roberts’s successor as president of the select committee considered Morrison just as valuable as Roberts had, so he defied the orders. Reasoning that the directors in London couldn’t possibly understand how useful Morrison’s language services were, he told them the select committee intended to keep Morrison on its payroll unless the directors should issue further orders for his termination. It was convenient, for his purposes, that letters took roughly six months to travel each way between Canton and London—meaning that it would be another year before he could hear back from them.29

  Morrison’s acceptance into the British factory at Canton turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it greatly advanced his language work, especially his progress on the dictionary. He was even able to take on a few students: some of the junior writers from the factory, along with Beale, the independent British trader who spoke Cantonese, and a young Dutchman who had been rescued from pirates.30 However, his work for the Company was exhausting in its own right and cut deeply into the time he would otherwise have spent on his missionary projects. He had no time or energy to try to convert the local Chinese, and all of his efforts toward the Bible translation had to be kept secret, because even his supporters on the select committee did not want him working openly on religious texts in the factory.

  Most painfully, though, since Chinese regulations did not allow foreign women to live in Canton, Mary had to stay behind in Macao without him. Macao had a much larger Western community than Canton—several thousand people, compared to a few dozen in Canton—but almost all of them were Portuguese, which was a problem not of language (for Mary could speak some Portuguese) but of religion: they were Catholic, and Mary, the Protestant missionary’s wife, had almost no friends there. The Qing government did not permit free travel between Canton and Macao, so Morrison could only be with her in the summer. Even then, due to his frosty relations with the other Europeans their house was, in his words, a “lonely, solitary” one.31 From late autumn through the spring she was entirely alone, and the newly married couple were reduced to corresponding by letter despite being closer by distance than New York and Philadelphia.

  The times they did spend together were intimate, though, and in the summer of 1810 they welcomed a child. They christened him James, but he died a day after his birth, and Mary nearly followed him. In a cruel reminder of their isolation within the community, the Portuguese refused to allow Mary and Robert to bury their son in Macao’s lone foreign cemetery, on the grounds that it was only for Catholics. So they buried the newborn instead on a hillside, all by himself. Mary had already shown a propensity toward depression, which worsened with her isolation and pregnancy. With the loss of her child, she nearly slipped over the edge. “She walks in darkness,” wrote Morrison to a friend, quoting Isaiah, “and has no light.”32

  The early nineteenth century was a terrible time to be a Christian in China. The imperial government recognized only blurry distinctions between unorthodox religions (when it recognized any distinctions at all), so the war against the White Lotus sects gave way to a crackdown on Catholics as well—who, aside from the short-leashed European advisers in the emperor’s court, lived and practiced in secret. In 1805, Jiaqing issued an edict expressly forbidding the publication of Christian texts, at which time the wooden printing blocks for over two hundred books composed by the Catholic missionaries in Beijing were burned. Over the years that followed, his suppression of Christian religious activity escalated, and by 1812 he would designate the printing of Christian tracts a crime punishable by death. In 1815 a Catholic missionary who had been living secretly in Hunan province was strangled, as were all of his converts. The same year, an elderly French missionary was executed in Sichuan and his severed head was sent on a tour of the nearby districts as a warning.33 Nevertheless, against the rising current of danger Morrison kept at his work.

  By 1811, Morrison was able to convince a Chinese printer in Macao to begin producing a few small biblical tracts for him, printed with false covers to evade detection (a precaution the printer took on his own initiative). First came a Chinese translation of the Acts of the Apostles, in 1811, then the Gospel of Saint Luke and a tract on redemption the following year. Morrison had no converts to give his little books to, however, just his teachers, whom he tried in vain to woo away from Catholicism during their Sabbath breaks from work. Nevertheless, he happily reported his success to the directors of the London Missionary Society back in England to reassure them that his work for the East India Company had not derailed his missionary efforts completely.

  His bragging nearly got him thrown out of the British factory. The London Missionary Society proudly reported Morrison’s progress on his tracts in its 1814 annual report, a copy of which—in an uncharacteristic fit of playfulness—they forwarded to the East India Company’s headquarters in London. When the Company’s directors learned that Morrison was producing illegal religious tracts while working in their factory, they sent new, unequivocal orders for the select committee to fire him at once. They condemned Morrison’s “mistaken Zeal,” declaring that no matter how useful he had been as an interpreter, “he has not only been guilty of great imprudence on his own part but has put at risk the interests of the East India Company.” They warned that he could cause “serious mischief” to British trade as a whole if his illegal activities were discovered.34

  Still, the select committee did not want to lose Morrison’s translation services, so once again they defied the directors’ orders to get rid of him. In their reply to London, they assured the directors that Morrison was in fact so completely ineffective as a missionary—he hadn’t, they pointed out, managed to baptize even a single convert during his several years in Canton—that he posed no real danger of discovery. They were certain that his Gospel tracts would never gain any kind of wide distribution. They also promised that if the Chinese government should ever actually take notice of Morrison’s missionary work, they would sever ties with him at that time. In the end, the directors wound up deferring to the judgment of their personnel on the ground in Canton and allowed them to keep Morrison on as their interpreter. Morrison, for his part, wrote to the directors of the London Missionary Society and asked them to please be more prudent in the future.35

  While George Staunton and Robert Morrison were each trying to open a British pathway into China through the figurative gate of language, it was left to Thomas Manning to attempt an entry of the l
iteral kind: by land. Manning’s romantic vision of exploration, however, turned out to be more elusive than he had hoped. The select committee did its best to help him when he first arrived, even submitting a petition to the hoppo in November 1807 to propose that Manning might go to Beijing as a scientist—the accepted route for Catholic priests to be allowed into China—but the hoppo refused to forward their petition to the capital. He told them the emperor already had plenty of European scientists and didn’t need any more. Agitated and impatient, Manning took passage to Vietnam a few months later on an East India Company survey vessel tasked with charting the islands of the South China Sea, in hopes that he could get into China by somehow joining a Vietnamese embassy to Beijing (for which purpose he brought along a Vietnamese outfit as a disguise). When that didn’t work out either, he returned grumpily to Macao and threw himself back into his language studies. In that area, at least, he began to make progress. “The veiled mysteries of the Chinese language gradually open upon my view,” he wrote to his father in August 1808. He would do a bit of translation work for the Company in Staunton’s absence, and put his medical training to use in a doctor’s practice, but mostly he just bided his time, letting his beard grow and waiting for a better opportunity to come along.36

  In the winter of 1810 he finally made his move. Leaving Canton that February, he took passage on a ship bound for Calcutta in the British-controlled territory of Bengal. By this time he had decided to dress only in colorful silk Vietnamese-style clothing, which he had tailors make for him in Canton. His beard, a midnight shade of black, was more than a foot long, carefully coiffed, and proudly untouched by a razor, though he did trim back the mustache portion a bit once he got to India to make it easier to eat soup.37 (The other English were somewhat offended by his beard, but that didn’t bother him. “There is no accounting for some people’s want of taste,” he told his father.)38 The select committee gave him a letter of introduction to Lord Minto the governor-general, explaining that Manning had been learning Chinese in preparation to enter the country. They expressed faith that “whatever can tend to encrease the general knowledge of the Language and Customs of China, will prove of essential service to the interests of the Hon’ble Company, and our Country.”39

  In Calcutta, Manning began scouring the bars of the city for a Chinese interpreter—a “munshi,” as Manning would call him, using the Persian term for secretary—who could accompany him on the next stage of his journey, the plans for which he kept closely guarded. When not trolling for a Chinese interpreter, he linked up with a small group of Orientalist missionary scholars in Calcutta who held forth on religion and their various theories of the origins of Hindu and Chinese civilization over argumentative dinner parties that carried regularly into the wee hours of the morning.40 They were fine company, though when it came to their ideas about China he found them “a little weak in the upper story.”41

  In time, he found one willing candidate to be his munshi, a Chinese man named Zhao who was a Roman Catholic convert and had worked in the past for one of the Hong merchants in Canton. By his own account, Zhao had come to Calcutta the year before to work in a bar owned by a Chinese proprietor. As it happened, his employer died right about the time Manning started coming around asking about an interpreter, so he decided to throw in his lot with the bearded Englishman in his Vietnamese clothes.42 On October 11, 1810, Manning posted a cryptic letter to Charles Lamb. “Just going to leave Calcutta for God knows where!” he wrote.43 Then he disappeared.

  His goal was Tibet. If he couldn’t get into China through Canton, he reasoned, he would try to enter through the empire’s western frontier. In September 1811, nearly a year after his final letter to Lamb and after preparations of which he left almost no record, Manning and his “munshi” crossed over the border into Bhutan from Rangpur, leaving the British territory of Bengal far behind them to the south.44 Ahead of them lay the Himalayas. The two men traveled on foot, with a local guide and porters for their baggage. The paths along which they hiked were narrow and heavy with rocks, and in the lowlands they had to ford cold streams that came up to their waists. But as they made their way farther along up the switchbacks into the mountains, the crossings gave way to narrow, swinging rope bridges that spanned the dizzying chasms below.

  About two weeks into the mountains of Bhutan, Manning began having trouble with his munshi. On setting out from the town of Paro on October 16—on horseback now—he found that Zhao had apparently sold his spoons, which were silver, and replaced them with pewter ones. Their guide, and an unnamed “slave” who served him, seemed to be part of the deal. Manning demanded that they go back to Paro to retrieve the spoons, but the others all refused. It was a minor issue on its surface, but it awakened Manning to his own vulnerability. “It was not the value,” he wrote in his diary, “but the example. I am in bad, bad hands.”45 The next day, with snowbound peaks just coming visible in the distance, his misgivings deepened. “The Chinaman is as cross as the devil and will not speak,” he wrote. It later turned out that there had been a misunderstanding. The munshi had fallen off his horse and was angry because he thought Manning didn’t care. Manning hadn’t seen it happen. They patched things up and continued on.

  They traveled upward and northward through Bhutan, following a pilgrimage trail that carved its slow way along the edge of steep winding cliffs. At night Manning and his munshi slept in sheds or deserted houses when they could find them, outdoors when they could not. By mid-October they were waking up to frost in the mornings, and the trail wound still higher into the labyrinthine mountains. Finally, on October 21, they crossed the border from Bhutan into Tibet, reaching the frontier town of Pagri unchallenged. It had been five years since his departure from England, but Manning was finally inside the Qing Empire.

  Manning did not try to hide himself in Pagri, though he also did not advertise the fact that he was English. He even paid a visit to the local Chinese magistrate, who was quite civil. His munshi, however, was visibly agitated at being back inside the Qing domain. “He is always discontented and grumbling,” noted Manning.46 The magistrate paid his own visit to Manning after he had been in town a few days, and tried to sound him out as to where he had come from. He asked Manning if he were a Muslim and Manning said that no, he ate pork. The magistrate’s interpreter, he noticed, refrained from translating his little joke.

  Just as the British of the Macartney mission had sensed such clear distinctions of civilization between the Chinese settlers and the indigenous peoples they encountered along their way through Southeast Asia, Manning too saw a vast cultural gulf between the Chinese and the Tibetan “natives” they governed. “Chinese politeness, even in the common soldiers, forms a great contrast with the barbarians of this place,” he wrote in Pagri. The Chinese represented civilization to him, the Tibetans something much lower. “The Chinese are really civilized, and do not live like cattle,” he wrote farther on in the journey; “it is a comfort, after having lodged in smoke and dirt with the native animals of Tibet, to take shelter in a Chinaman’s house, where you are sure of urbanity and cleanliness at least.” He was, for his generation, the first to see China properly as an empire—here, where the Chinese, themselves ruled by the Manchus, had conquered Tibet and set up control over its people more than fifteen hundred miles from their own capital in Beijing. Compared to Canton, where all of the Chinese seemed alike to foreigners and could be imagined as some kind of monolithic society, Manning found in Tibet a stark polarity between the ruling and subject races that wasn’t so far different from the colonial world his own people were building a few hundred miles to the south. The resonance was not lost on him. “The Chinese lord it here like the English in India,” he wrote in his diary in Pagri.47

  Manning and his munshi were treated remarkably well in the border town. The magistrate gave them food and arranged permission for them to continue onward. Having figured out that Manning was English (or at least that he had come from an English territory), he said he would be intere
sted in opening a line of trade between Tibet and India through Bhutan. Manning thought that was a fine idea too, but he had no authority to negotiate an agreement on the Company’s behalf. He thought the British authorities should have given him, a Chinese speaker, some kind of diplomatic commission before he left India. “What use are their embassies,” he wrote scornfully in his diary, “when the Ambassador can’t speak to a soul, and can only make ordinary phrases pass through a stupid interpreter? . . . Fools, fools, fools, to neglect an opportunity they may never have again!”48

  When word spread in the town that Manning was a physician, some Chinese soldiers came to see him for various treatments. His ministrations were effective enough that they asked him to travel onward with them. And so when Manning and his munshi moved on from Pagri, leaving on horseback at four o’clock on a bitterly frosty November morning with snow visible in the mountains around them, they rode in the company of a Qing imperial army unit. The soldiers and the officers who led them were immensely friendly to Manning. They shared their food, loaned him sheepskin clothing to fight off the cold, and pitched a tent for him and the munshi when they camped.

  The soldiers’ commander, whom Manning referred to as “the General,” was a half-Manchu officer from Sichuan who came often to sit with Manning and smoke his pipe, sometimes playing songs for him on his lute while one or two of the soldiers sang opera. Manning enjoyed the General’s wine (if not so much his cooking), and the General for his part enjoyed lounging in Manning’s quarters in the sunshine of a morning, going on at length about the old days and how much tougher and hardier the imperial soldiers used to be when he was young, back in the time of Qianlong. He was quite taken with Manning’s long beard, seeming, in Manning’s words, “as if he never could sufficiently admire it.” At one point Manning brushed it out to its full, glorious length for him, and when the General “saw its tapering shape descending in one undivided lock, he . . . declared he never had seen one nearly so handsome.”49 Manning enjoyed the fraternity of his new companions. One afternoon, as they came upon a broad, frozen lake, he was disappointed not to have brought along his skates so he could show off for them.