Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  They made their way north, toward the Great Interior, the soft underbelly of the Forbidden City where the empress and the princes lived. Two guards appeared in their way with clubs. The intruders stabbed them with their knives, leaving them to bleed on the ground as they rushed onward. But the alarm was spreading. They were attacked again, and three were taken down; the other two (and the two eunuchs) continued racing northward toward the gate to the Great Interior, whose guards had left it unwatched at the noon hour, but once they got through it they were finally caught. One of the traitor eunuchs slipped away and disappeared, while the other turned on his charges and made a show of helping to capture them. Prince Mianning saw the scuffling, and took a cousin to go check on the empress in her quarters to make sure she was all right.

  There was another group, however, that was mounting a mirror-image attack from the western gate, and it found better luck. On that side, the rebels rushed the gate against no opposition, shutting it behind them to keep soldiers from entering; about seventy of them made it through into the Forbidden City. Like the first group, they charged north toward the Great Interior, threading their way through the passages, attacking guards and palace staff who challenged them, picking up more eunuchs along the way who were part of their plot—which was, boldly enough, to take control of the Forbidden City and then, when the emperor arrived back from Jehol the next day, to murder him and his family.

  The group coming from the west made it as far as the last gate standing between them and the inner quarters, but it had taken them too long. The gate was shut, the guards on full alert, and the invasion turned into a bloodbath as the rebels, cornered, turned and fought against guards who now rushed in from several quarters. They scattered and ran, looking for places to hide. A couple of them managed to scale the smooth wall, taking to the sloping yellow-tiled rooftops of the interior, traversing their way to the north in their hunt for the members of the imperial family.

  Prince Mianning was still on his way to check on the empress when he heard the new commotion at the western gate. He saw a man up on a rooftop, a white cloth tied around his head. There were eunuchs running around below, but their only weapons were clubs. There were strict regulations against using firearms inside the Forbidden City, and the eunuchs couldn’t get up the wall to catch him. The prince, however, took matters into his own hands. He sent a servant running to fetch his hunting musket and powder, regulations be damned. The rebel was still up on the roof when the servant got back. Loading and taking careful aim from where he stood, the prince shot the rebel and watched him fall from the wall. Then he ran into the neighboring courtyard where another rebel was up on a roof waving a white banner and shouting out to the others to climb the wall and follow him. Mianning reloaded, took aim again, and shot him dead.

  The Jiaqing emperor arrived safely at the Forbidden City the following day, powerfully shaken by what had taken place. He issued a public edict to condemn the invasion. The tone was uncertain and penitent; Jiaqing blamed himself, as a good emperor would do, but said that he did not know what he had done to invite this attack on his family. “Our great Qing dynasty has ruled the empire for one hundred and seventy years,” he wrote. “My ancestors, with their profound benevolence and favor, loved the people like their own children. . . . I have done nothing to harm or oppress the people. I do not understand what has changed.” The fault must lie in himself, he went on, for somehow lacking in virtue, for somehow setting a poor example for those below him. “My ministers . . . have been lazy in their government, to the point of causing something like this to happen,” he wrote, acknowledging the corruption of the time. Jiaqing pledged to correct himself in order to “relieve the anger of the people.” The tone throughout was bleak. “My brush,” he concluded, “traces the path shed by my falling tears.”3

  It took two days for the palace gendarmes to hunt down the rest of the invaders, who were cowering in their scattered hiding places. Those who hadn’t already committed suicide were executed, as were the eunuchs who had plotted with them. Security was restored. But the fact remained: in spite of decades of government suppression, and despite the dynasty’s ostensible victory in 1805 in its all-out war against the White Lotus rebels, the sect had not been eradicated. And while the rebellions of Qianlong’s time had taken place hundreds of miles from the capital, now the rebels had penetrated all the way into the innermost recesses of the imperial city itself. Somehow they had recruited the emperor’s own palace servants into their ranks. It was a fearful time to be ruler.

  There was, at least, one thing in which Jiaqing could take solace on that day in 1813: the bravery of his son. Prince Mianning did not know it, but Jiaqing had already chosen him to be the sixth emperor of the Qing dynasty.

  The invasion of the palace only worsened the image of the Qing as a dynasty in decline. Rumors spread in China that the rebels had been aided by members of the imperial family—that Jiaqing’s own relatives had plotted to assassinate him—and even if the rumors were not true they still diminished Jiaqing’s prestige and encouraged the perception of an aging emperor watching helplessly as his kingdom slipped further into corruption, plotting, and sedition. The rumors reached Canton easily, from where they traveled out into the English-speaking world. A British Indian newspaper in 1814 published a letter from a correspondent who reported confidently that three cousins of the emperor had taken part in the attempt to kill him along with the eunuchs and the rebels. From what that writer had heard, the emperor and his own corrupt family were at least partly to blame for inviting rebellion in the first place. “Whilst the Emperor was away from Beijing,” he wrote, “he left his nine sons in charge. They are hedonists and opium smokers and only one or two show much promise as administrators of a great Empire.”4

  Rumors were rumors, though, and a British writer in Canton had no avenue to gain accurate knowledge of events inside the Forbidden City. From the writings Prince Mianning left for posterity, however, it appears that the stories were at least partly correct: Jiaqing’s heir apparent was indeed an opium smoker. “Bored and tired,” Mianning wrote on one occasion, “I ask the servant to prepare smoke and a pipe to inhale. Each time, my mind suddenly becomes clear, my eyes and ears refreshed. People in the past said that wine is endowed with all the virtues, but today I call smoke the satisfier. When you desire happiness, it gives you happiness.”5 He went on to write a poetic ode to the drug, which read in part:

  Inhale and exhale, fragrance rises,

  Ambience deepens and thickens.

  When it’s stagnant, it is really as if

  Mountains and clouds are emerging from a distant sea.6

  In 1820, as the opium trade from British India was about to begin its inexorable rise, the Jiaqing emperor died and that same young connoisseur—now to be known as the Daoguang emperor—took the throne. His personal experience of the pleasures of opium did not, however, make him any more indulgent toward the drug’s use and sale. Rather the opposite—as if in knowing it so well, he feared its powers of seduction more than any of his ancestors had done.

  The British had not introduced opium to China. Although it is unclear exactly when the drug first arrived, poppies were already being cultivated in China during the Tang dynasty in the eighth century.7 The flowers had many uses—they were beautiful in their own right, and their shoots and seeds could be eaten as a delicacy (the latter being called “imperial rice”). By the twelfth century, Chinese medical texts listed a range of known uses for the plant, in suppressing coughs, curing intestinal ailments, and the like. They also noted that it was poisonous. Poppy cultivation continued to spread in China over the centuries that followed, and the variety of its medicinal uses expanded. By the fifteenth century, the Chinese term for the drug opium (yapian) first appeared, and both the Ming and early Qing dynasties taxed it as a legitimate medicinal product.8

  The fateful change in China’s relationship with opium came with the discovery that it could be mixed with tobacco and smoked—a means of ingestion
that produced more euphoric effects than simply eating it. The practice of opium smoking first originated on the island of Java in the seventeenth century, from where the Dutch transmitted it to their (then) colony on Taiwan off the eastern coast of China. From Taiwan it spread via commercial traders to China’s coastal provinces. By 1729, the smoking of the drug was prevalent enough in China that the Qianlong emperor’s father, the Yongzheng emperor, issued an edict prohibiting it. He called for a ban on the use, sale, or transport of opium—though the harshest punishment (strangulation) was reserved not for the smugglers or smokers but only for the proprietors of opium dens. That was fitting, because Yongzheng’s opium ban was just one of a series of edicts in which he condemned those who harmed public morality by seducing or confusing others—a series that also included bans on prostitution and the teaching of martial arts, as well as mandating the confinement of the insane. In any case, Yongzheng’s opium ban was largely symbolic; there would be no more edicts against the drug for the rest of his reign, nor for the entire sixty-three-year reign of Qianlong. From the 1730s all the way up into the first decade of the nineteenth century, there is not a single known case of a clear-cut prosecution for opium offenses within the Qing Empire.9

  It wasn’t until the 1810s that Jiaqing would revive his grandfather Yongzheng’s opposition to the drug. Prior to the Patna-Malwa competition that would so greatly increase its supply in the 1820s, opium was still an expensive and relatively rare commodity, a luxury for only the wealthiest to enjoy. After taking root in Canton and in prosperous cities in the east, Indian opium had migrated north (contained, some said, in the annual gifts sent to the capital from Canton), where it found a home among the abundant eunuch servants in Jiaqing’s court. From the servants, who outnumbered the royal family they served by roughly forty to one, opium smoking spread easily enough to the imperial household members—like Prince Mianning—whom they tended.10

  Jiaqing first expressed his concern about opium in 1810 when a smuggler was caught attempting to carry six containers of it into the capital. The emperor’s primary concern, like that of his grandfather, was the demoralizing effect of the drug. “Opium has a most intense effect,” he wrote at the time. “Those who smoke it can suddenly become excited and capable of doing whatever they want without restraint. Before long, it will steal their life and kill them.”11 By 1813 he noted with dismay that it was spreading further among the elite than he had previously known. Even imperial guards and government officials were using it. It was becoming socially respectable.12

  After Jiaqing’s death in 1820, Daoguang carried forward his father’s opposition to the drug. Early in his reign, he called opium “a great harm to the customs and morals of the people” and demanded an end to coastal drug smuggling, targeting especially the corrupt officials who collected “taxes” (that is, bribes) to allow opium shipments through. “If there are traitors who try to collect taxes [on opium] to enrich themselves,” Daoguang wrote, “or who personally smuggle it into the country, punish them immediately and severely in order to expunge this massing of insects.”13 But disturbing reports of the consequences of opium use continued to arrive. That same year, the head of the civil service examination in Beijing reported that there were opium-addicted scholars from the coastal provinces who had come north to take the exam, and who went through such convulsive withdrawals during the course of the three-day test that some of them died in the examination hall.14

  It is unclear how many Chinese smokers of opium in the early nineteenth century were what we might call addicts. Some certainly were, but given how much was being imported they could not have been many relative to the size of the empire. By the start of Daoguang’s reign in 1820, the nearly five thousand chests being imported from India each year were enough to support about forty thousand average habitual users empire-wide, or as many as one hundred thousand of the lightest daily smokers, so at most a few hundredths of a percent of the population.15 Furthermore, most users at this time seem not to have been terribly debilitated by opium—they led productive lives and were not outcasts from their families or professions. Indeed, opium smoking was a generally open, public act and there were many socially encouraged reasons to take part in it. Medicinal reasons aside—and there were dozens of those—businessmen smoked opium to focus their minds and help them make smarter deals (at least they imagined that was the effect). Students smoked it for the clarity it brought, thinking it would help them succeed on the civil service examinations. For the stylish it was a relaxant to be offered to guests after dinner. For the privileged with little to do, like the eunuchs of the Forbidden City or Manchu courtiers with few responsibilities, it was an escape from boredom.16

  Opium was, in other words, perfectly acceptable in respected circles. An aesthetic culture of gorgeously wrought pipes and other accessories grew up around its use by the wealthy, the very expense and extravagance of those tools elevating the act of smoking itself. The Chinese fashion for smoking, moreover, was quite profligate in comparison to the eating of the drug that went on in Britain; much was wasted in the process, and a smoker could easily go through an amount of opium in one day that would kill someone who ingested it directly.17 For those in more humble situations who couldn’t afford to smoke it themselves, employment in the opium trade still provided a chance for income as couriers and petty dealers.

  From a purely economic standpoint opium had its advantages. Valuable and easy to carry (it was worth more than three hundred times its weight in rice), foreign opium was a very good business proposition for Chinese merchants in Canton.18 Being illegal, it could be turned around quickly for a profit in silver—within a few days in most cases, as compared to tea, which involved large cultivation and transportation networks, and generally took half a year or more to produce a return on each year’s investment. Since the Canton traders made more back from their customers inside China than they paid to the foreign suppliers, trading in opium also served as a convenient way for them to increase their own silver stocks, which they could then use to procure tea for sale to the foreigners. And though they had to pay bribes to officials, the illegal trade was otherwise, de facto, free from taxes.19

  There is no evidence that the moral exhortations of the Daoguang emperor caught on with the general public in any meaningful way.20 The widespread public opposition to opium on moral and public health grounds for which China would be known in the twentieth century was at this time entirely absent. Though perhaps the public’s resistance to imperial moralizing was only to be expected; in the early seventeenth century, the Ming dynasty had tried to suppress tobacco for reasons very similar to the Qing dynasty’s ban on opium—even to the point of ordering execution for anyone who cultivated or sold it—but they did not succeed.21 By the time of the Qing dynasty, those prohibitions were long forgotten and tobacco was an accepted staple of daily life in China. There was no reason the Jiaqing or Daoguang emperors’ edicts against opium should have been more likely to find success.

  The Chinese of the early nineteenth century are often described as being uniformly insular and scornful of anything foreign, thanks mainly to an overly literal reading of the boilerplate language in Qianlong’s edict to George III where he claimed that he did not value foreign things. But this was not really the case. For wealthy urbanites in China, Western goods were all the rage by the 1820s—furs, glass, intricate clocks, cotton textiles, and other products of the Canton import trade, which were highly sought after by those with sufficient money to buy them. Far from encountering any kind of disdain for foreign objects, Chinese retailers in the early nineteenth century found that attaching the adjective “Western” to their merchandise was in fact the key to a higher selling price.22

  This consumer fashion for foreign products helps explain why the opium from British India became so popular in China. Against latter-day nationalist claims that the British came and forced opium down the throats of helpless Chinese consumers, there was in fact an existing system of domestic opium production in
China already in place to compete with the import market at Canton (especially in the empire’s western and southwestern provinces). There were also separate avenues for importing the drug overland from Central Asia—and opium from all of those sources was much cheaper than the Indian opium the British brought to Canton.23 But opium was a luxury good, and its wealthy consumers weren’t looking for a bargain; they were looking for status. Fashionable users of the drug in urban China preferred the opium from British India (the Patna, with its East India Company seal of quality) largely because it was “Western” and therefore seen as far more sophisticated to buy and smoke.24

  By the late eighteenth century, when British traders began carrying Indian opium in meaningful quantities to Canton, they did so because they knew a market was already waiting for them there. They could not force the drug down anyone’s throat—indeed, they couldn’t even get themselves into the country; all they could do was to carry their opium to China’s southern coast and sell it to Chinese agents. Everything from there on into the Qing Empire was entirely in Chinese hands. Moving forward into the nineteenth century, the extensive smoking of opium emerged as an almost uniquely Chinese social custom, the Canton market for the drug growing to become, primarily for domestic reasons, the most demanding in the world. If opium was illegal in name, it was almost never so in practice, a fact as apparent to outsiders calling at Canton as to insiders within the Qing Empire. As one British dealer testified to a government committee in 1830, “Every now and then there is a very strong edict issued against the trade; but, like other Chinese edicts, it is nearly powerless. It imposes a little difficulty perhaps for the moment, and enables the Mandarins to extort from the dealers.”25