In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
And it builds by the end into a mounting, hypnotic terror:
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
One of the first people to hear “Kubla Khan” was Charles Lamb, to whom Coleridge recited it in 1816 before it was published. The poem was a “vision,” wrote Lamb to William Wordsworth afterward, “which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it.”63 The romance of his drug-induced dreams, however, led into a prolonged struggle against addiction that would torment the poet for the rest of his life and leave him at times unable to take part in public life or even leave his bed. Unlike De Quincey’s very public addiction, Coleridge’s struggle was a private one—at least until his death in 1834, when De Quincey (whose own career was faltering by then) wrote a long piece on his friend titled “Coleridge and Opium-Eating” in which he exposed the famous poet’s crippling dependence for all the English-speaking world to read.64
Nevertheless, such powerful and widely read depictions of opium’s power to consume a man and ruin his life did not impinge in any direct way on the brute fact of the foreign traffic at Canton, by which certain countrymen of the horrified readers of De Quincey’s accounts—respectable ones, no less—were by the early 1830s pouring that very same drug into China in amounts totaling more than two and a half million pounds by weight each year. But that was happening far away, halfway around the world. And when those who sold it came back home, they did not speak of it.
As for the Canton foreign community of the time, what few voices of misgiving about opium can be found there came mainly from the small group who alone professed to care about the Chinese people themselves: namely, the Christian missionaries. But as the Protestants who came to China followed in the path of Robert Morrison, and as Morrison held such an important position working for the East India Company—the very body that orchestrated the opium trade from behind the scenes—the question of their own complicity was especially acute. In 1823, a young English missionary new to China wrote to Morrison that he considered the opium trade to be inconsistent with the morals of the Gospel. He said that he could not in good faith accept support from the merchants in Canton as Morrison had always done. “A Chinese author,” the young missionary wrote, “says, that the truly ‘virtuous man is one who sacrifices all earthly considerations to the maintenance of heavenly principles’; and shall I be less virtuous than a pagan? God forbid! Could I hold out the bread of life to the Chinese in one hand, and opium in the other? Could I bestow, with any propriety, in the service of religion, that money which accrued from the demoralization and consequent misery of a large portion of my fellow-creatures?”65
Unable to stomach the same compromises Morrison had made in order to stay in Canton, that young missionary wound up leaving China altogether, devoting himself instead to fighting what he saw as Britain’s other great moral crime of the age: West Indian slavery. Those two terrible trades, he told Morrison—opium and slavery—had in common that no matter how abhorrent they were in the eyes of God, even the most respectable of Britain’s trading houses did not hesitate to engage in them. There is no record of Morrison’s response to his young friend. Beyond the occasional remark disparaging the Chinese for using too much of the drug, he found little to say on the matter of opium.
It wasn’t just Morrison. Broadly speaking, the foreign community at Canton and Macao simply did not like to talk about opium in anything other than financial terms. Those who did question the morality of selling it generally weren’t the ones who received profits from the trade, and they feared repercussions from those who did. An American working for Russell & Co., whose outspokenness had gotten him fired as editor of Matheson’s Canton Register after just six issues, declared the amount of opium consumed in China in 1830 to be “startling.” Fully convinced of the drug’s addictive properties, he wrote that “those who habitually smoke opium, are in the intervals between the excitement of one dose and the period of its renewal, the most miserable and nerveless creatures, the artificial tone of their spirits being only purchased by their devotion to this destructive habit.”66 When a newly arrived missionary from Massachusetts named Elijah Bridgman sent home the first installment of his journal from Canton that same year, he added a warning in case his overseers should publish it. “Perhaps the paragraph on the Opium Trade had better be omitted,” he told them, “for here it is a most delicate subject to touch upon—but it is death to China.”67
Amid the thundering rise of opium into the 1830s, it is easy to lose track of the fact that there were still other viable models of foreign commerce at Canton that did not involve the smuggling of illegal drugs. John Murray Forbes, for one, had nothing directly to do with opium—not for any moral reason but simply because it was not part of his duties in Canton, where he helped with the legitimate side of Rus-sell & Co.’s business and left the opium to his brother Robert at Lintin. John’s lack of direct involvement with opium proved to be a great boon for his career, however, for although at seventeen he was too young to start out as anything more than a clerk at Russell & Co., his limited responsibilities for the firm left him free to accept other engagements in Canton—in particular, a part-time position as English-language secretary for one of the Hong merchants, a man by the name of Wu Bingjian who was known to the foreigners as Houqua.
Forbes got his introduction to Houqua from a cousin named John Perkins Cushing, twenty-six years older than he, who had been raised by their mutual uncle Perkins and had preceded John’s older brothers in China. When Cushing first handed over the reins of the family business to Thomas Forbes in 1828, he told him that “Houqua as a man of business I consider the first in the Country.” In a long memo advising Thomas on how to navigate the business community of Canton, Cushing repeated several times that Houqua was the only man one could work with on a basis of complete trust—and not just among the Chinese merchants, either. “With other foreigners in this place,” he also wrote, “I should not be desirous of having any concerns in business.”68 Cushing had intended to retire for good in 1828, but after Thomas Forbes’s death in 1829 he had rushed back to Canton to oversee the transition of Perkins & Co. to new management. He overlapped with John Murray Forbes for about a month, and in that time he introduced his young cousin and Houqua to each other, passing on their families’ years of accumulated trust.
In a commerce driven by personal relationships, there was no individual in the Canton trade more influential than Houqua. He was in his mid-sixties at the time John met him, wizened and frail-looking beyond his years, with a long neck, drooping eyes, and pointed goatee. He struck John as an intellectual man, temperate and sedate. John’s brother Robert described him as “a man of remarkable ability [who] in any community would have been a leader.” Houqua handled all of the business of the East India Company factory in Canton, along with other foreign traders he chose to work with, and—notably—he was not only adamant about keeping his hands clean of the opium trade, but he also demanded the same of his foreign partners. (Later in his life, Robert Bennet Forbes would recall Houqua teasing him that among the three Forbes brothers, there was “only one bad man”—meaning Robert himself, for his work with opium at Lintin.)69
Representing as he did the best of the proper, legal trade at Canton, Houqua was revered by the foreign community for his honesty and business acumen. Teas marked with hi
s imprimatur were considered the best that could be had in the world, and, uniquely among his countrymen, he became a household name in England and America. The name of Houqua, as a writer from a later generation put it, was “a symbol of the integrity of the Chinese . . . a mark of genuineness and excellence that few traders could do without.”70 Due entirely to Houqua’s personal reputation, he reflected, “the honesty of the Chinese has become proverbial.”
Houqua also happened to be likely the richest man in the world. The Americans in Canton reckoned his net worth to be $26 million in the early 1830s—a figure that, for comparison, far outstripped the fortune of John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest American of the time.71 Houqua lived on an island across from the city proper, in a sprawling complex of buildings and gardens housing his own family and the families of his sons. As luxurious as his home was, however, his place of business in the factory compound was noted for being the opposite: severe, spartan, unadorned.72
It was in that spare office that John Murray Forbes went to work for Houqua as his secretary, supplementing his long hours of clerical work for Russell & Co. by helping the Hong merchant keep up with his English-language correspondence. Though Houqua was fluent in the Pidgin English of the port, with which he could easily communicate with any of the foreign traders in person, he needed a native interpreter to deal with the formal, written side of his commerce. Not that he cared much for contracts per se—one of his American trading partners insisted that after many years of dealing with the Chinese merchant, the only thing resembling a written contract he could find was a single small slip of paper with the words “forty thousand dollars, Houqua” written on it.73 But Houqua did keep up a steady correspondence covering details of various transactions for tea and every other kind of commodity other than opium that was to be bought or sold in Canton.
Perhaps it was something about John Murray Forbes’s youth, coupled with the inherited affection Houqua carried for his cousin and deceased brother, but John’s service to Houqua soon expanded beyond just maintaining the merchant’s letter book. Houqua came to trust young Forbes intimately, viewing him almost like a son and believing that Forbes understood his way of thinking better than any other foreigner.74 Within the year, he was using Forbes as an agent to invest in shipping ventures of his own. In contrast to the largely one-way course of the traditional commerce, where foreign traders came and went in their ships while all transactions for the Chinese merchants took place on the ground in Canton, Houqua sent his own cargoes abroad for sale under his own terms, reaching beyond the confines of China and the Canton system. By the time John Murray Forbes turned eighteen, Houqua had him chartering multiple ships loaded with Houqua’s own cargoes of tea, which sailed from Canton under papers that made them appear to be owned and controlled by Forbes alone. Houqua gave him a generous 10 percent commission, and by his own estimate John Murray Forbes soon had more than half a million dollars of investment property under sail in his own name, underwritten entirely by Houqua.75
It was a swift path to growing up. “John is well and his character has become much matured by his intercourse with men,” wrote his brother Robert to their uncle about a year after his arrival; “he’s a general favourite and I trust will bye and bye make up to us in some manner for the miserable loss we have sustained.”76 Always John would live in the shadow of his dead brother Thomas, and always there would be the imperative to support their family. But he embraced the role. “I soon found myself playing a man’s part,” he later wrote with pride. He was starting to look the part as well: though a very small person who weighed little more than a hundred pounds, he was already going bald—which, he thought, made him look older than his actual age and gave him an additional measure of authority.77
In retrospect, one of the most remarkable things about the partnership between the old Hong merchant Houqua and the young American John Murray Forbes was how much it represented the great potential of the Canton era, and yet also showed by contrast what would be lost in the broader interactions between China and the Western nations of the time. The relationship between Houqua and Forbes was one of trust, affection, and respect. It worked to the advantage of both. It was personal, and it would be enduring. It did not involve any kind of conflicting systems of behavior or belief—commercial capitalism was for them a common language, one that, on the larger scale, Britain, America, and China spoke on a national level at the best times of their interactions. The foreign commerce at Canton—the legal side of it, at least—was necessary, it was profitable to many, and it connected countries and empires together in a way that gave advantage to all participants. In an era of Chinese-Western relations that would later be depicted almost entirely in terms of arrogance and antagonism, Houqua and Forbes represented something more hopeful at work.
CHAPTER 8
Fire and Smoke
The Jiaqing emperor’s second son was still just a prince on October 8, 1813, when the palace was invaded. A slender thirty-one-year-old, Prince Mianning was studying as usual that morning in the palace school at the southeast corner of the Great Interior, the northern district of the Forbidden City in Beijing where the emperor’s family lived in their peaceful isolation attended by eunuch servants. It was a deeply contained world. Near the school was a heavy wooden gate that controlled access through the thirty-foot red stone wall to the rest of the Forbidden City. Farther beyond, through another gate in another wall, lay the Imperial City where the Manchus lived, and beyond that, through yet another wall, was the Chinese city. Beyond that, finally, through the massive outer walls of Beijing, was China. The prince had recently returned from Jehol, the imperial summer retreat north of the Great Wall, and his father, the emperor, was expected home the next day.1
Outside of the Forbidden City’s eastern gate with its broad steps and sloping yellow tile roof was a bustling street of tea and wine shops that catered to secretaries from nearby government bureaus and officials waiting for an audience. On this morning outside the eastern gate the shops were quieter than usual, given that the emperor was away, but still there were customers sitting around tables enjoying a leisurely morning of conversation. An astute observer might have noticed that some of those customers seemed anxious, a little out of place and unsure of themselves. Even the astute observer, however, would not have been able to see the headbands of white cloth they carried hidden under their clothing, or the knives.
The Manchu amban who had so feared Thomas Manning’s arrival in Lhasa had not been the only one to see the great comet in the autumn of 1811 and wonder what it might mean. It had been visible around the world. In Russia, wrote Tolstoy in War and Peace, it “portended all kinds of horrors and the end of the world,” presaging the bloody invasion of Russia by Napoleon. In the Mississippi Valley, its appearance preceded a series of mammoth earthquakes that devastated Missouri, rattling homes and ringing church bells as far away as Ohio and South Carolina. In Beijing, the imperial Board of Astronomy declared hopefully that the comet was a sign of glory for the dynasty, but not everyone believed that. In particular, the leaders of an offshoot of the White Lotus sect—which, despite the government’s exhaustive efforts, had not in fact been fully suppressed—looked up at the sky and saw in that same gleaming comet a sign that the turning of the kalpa was finally at hand. On this early October morning in 1813, following two years of careful preparation after the appearance of that heavenly sign, the new sect’s plan was finally ready to be put into action.2
Small groups of sect members had been arriving outside the eastern gate of the Forbidden City since midmorning in scattered order, dressed in ordinary clothes, whiling away their time buying breakfast or looking at curiosities in the street. Most had never been in Beijing before and were unfamiliar with its expansive warren of streets, so they relied on guides. One of the guides was a puppeteer who often came into the city for performances and knew his way around. Others, significantly, were eunuch servants from the imperial household, who had come to believe in the same White Lotus teachi
ngs as the others and secretly followed their same Master. Coming into the city that morning, the men had tried not to show their fear as they passed through the succession of gates—Chinese city, Manchu city—carrying their weapons under their clothing or hidden under baskets of persimmons and dates. Several lost courage and turned back before they even reached this place.
A little before noon, two eunuchs came out of the gate from the Forbidden City and entered one of the wine shops, where they sat down with one of these groups of men. They talked quietly with them. Then, at noon, they stood up and started walking back toward the open gate. This was the signal. Scattered patrons from the tea and wine shops along the street stood up in groups, pushing back their chairs and setting down their cups, and began following them toward the gate. There were about sixty of them in total. Some pulled out their white cloths and tied them around their heads. Two unfurled a banner reading “Entrusted by Heaven to Prepare the Way.” Then they drew their knives and ran for the gate.
The guards spotted them coming, and once it dawned on them what was happening they frantically began wheeling shut the massive wood-and-iron doors of the gate. Some of the rebels heard the grinding sound of the doors and knew they wouldn’t make it, so they tore off their white headbands and fled back through the narrow streets of the city, dropping their knives into canals or sewers as they ran. The gate slammed shut, but it wasn’t quite in time. Five had made it through with the two eunuchs, and they disappeared, running, into the mazelike red-walled passages of the Forbidden City as the alarm went up that rebels were inside the imperial sanctum.
Imperial Twilight Page 25