Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  And so it was that the Western merchants who carried opium to Canton would insist to their dying days that they were merely filling a need they themselves had not created. Any moral questions concerning the opium trade, they maintained, were Chinese questions—for the Chinese themselves to ask and to answer. It was a self-serving view, but it contained at least a grain of truth. Given the utter powerlessness of foreign traders at Canton over the long term, especially since the days of James Flint, it was easy for them to make the case that they had no influence at all on the country or its laws or customs, and therefore they could not possibly be held responsible for the dark side of China’s foreign trade.

  By 1830, following a decade of rising imports and spreading usage, the Daoguang emperor’s concern was giving way to alarm. “Opium is flooding into the interior,” he wrote in an edict that January. “The multitude of users expands day by day, and there are more and more people who sell it; they are like fire and smoke, destroying our resources and harming our people. Each day is worse than the last.”26 He asked for reports from senior provincial officials on the state of the opium trade in their regions, and the accounts they sent back over the following year revealed a shocking level of drug use by government bureaucrats and their legions of assistants. One report said that in Zhili province in the north, “there are opium smokers everywhere, especially in the government offices. From the governor-general all the way down through the ranks of officials and their subordinates, the ones who do not smoke opium are very few indeed.”27 Other reports from across the empire—not just the coast, where the foreign traffic was centered—described networks of bribery, large numbers of users and petty dealers, smuggling vessels that could sail almost anywhere they wished, soldiers who were too addled by opium to fight.28

  Opium smuggling in China was by this time an efficient and tightly choreographed enterprise. As soon as a deal was struck between a foreign importer and an agent in Canton, Chinese smuggling boats would be dispatched for Lintin Island. Known as “fast crabs” for their crowding of fifty to sixty oars, and locally called “glued-on wings”for their speed, these long and narrow boats were easily swift enough to leave any government pursuers behind.29 A clerk from the Chinese agent’s office would ride on board to supervise the unloading of the cargo from the foreign receiving ship, separating the contents of the chests into small matted parcels for ease of transport and weighing each ball to ensure proper quantity before bringing the shipment back to a depot.30 The opium was then divided up to travel inland: on secondary waterways, along backwoods land routes and over mountains, on narrow paths through areas with scant official presence. A courier on foot could carry the drug easily under his clothes, or in larger amounts inside sacks of other commodities like grain or salt. Points of inspection were the most troublesome—getting past the gates of walled cities, crossing major bridges—but if a courier was familiar to the men who worked as inspectors and paid them bribes, he could pass unmolested. Opium was available everywhere; travelers could purchase small amounts of it easily at inns, even at some Buddhist temples. Shopkeepers in the towns and cities sold it under the table to improve business.31

  The violence that was so conspicuously absent from the “gentlemanlike” world of the opium wholesale trade near Canton was by contrast very much present along the routes of transit into the country itself. The “fast crabs” were heavily armed to ward off government vessels along the riverways, and did not hesitate to fire their guns when approached. In coastal Fujian province, rival clans fought viciously for control over local opium markets, hiring mercenaries to protect their interests by force.32 Throughout the empire, travelers carrying opium made a perfect target for robbers since the drug was at once expensive, easily carried, and simple to resell. Also, since it was illegal in the first place, imperial security forces were of no help to the victims in getting it back.

  In response to the dramatic reports that reached him in 1831, Daoguang demanded greater efforts to suppress opium smuggling. But the government still proved incapable of getting at the larger forces behind the traffic: the clan-and regional-based syndicates that did the bulk of the wholesale buying, transportation, and resale of the drug. Beijing was unable to control them because—as in many similar cases worldwide—the drug kingpins showed themselves to be better providers for the locals in their areas of operation than the distant central government was. They gave rural people employment, income, and security, and by consequence the opium syndicates were both more respected and more feared locally than the remote powers of the state.

  During the government’s inland crackdowns, locals would close ranks to protect their own. In some cases village mobs attacked government enforcers who had been sent in to arrest opium dealers, driving them away. Prosecutions across the board were remarkably few, and prosecutions of the elite—scholars, wealthy merchants, syndicate members, corrupted officials—were all but nonexistent. The people who were arrested and tried on opium charges during Daoguang’s reign tended to be marginal figures unprotected by local patronage: migrants living outside of their home region, poor shopkeepers and itinerant peddlers, ethnic minorities, people without influence or strong connections.33

  Daoguang had been warned that this might be the case. Since official corruption was such an unavoidable fact in the empire, some of his advisers cautioned that any general campaign to stamp out opium smoking would be unlikely to change the actions of the people who were actually behind the trade, but it could easily prove harmful to the ordinary people who used the drug. One top provincial official warned in 1831 that stronger laws against smoking opium would do nothing but give underlings in the district government offices a new means of harassing commoners and extorting money from them under threat of enforcing those laws (a process similar to what unfolded during the late Qianlong era, when gangs of thugs went from house to house demanding bribes under the guise of hunting down White Lotus followers). Petty opium smokers were already suffering financial hardships, he warned, and punishing them would just make things worse—they would go bankrupt even sooner and their families would be broken up. He reminded the emperor that the whole point of having prohibition laws in the first place was to protect the people from harm, but if the laws became too harsh then the addicts would have no hope at all; their lives might as well already be over.34 By that line of reasoning—which Daoguang, to judge by his actions, found appealing—leniency toward the common users of opium was the most benevolent approach, the sign of a ruler who truly cared about his people and wished to relieve their problems rather than compound them. It also, however, allowed usage to continue spreading unchecked through the general population.

  One man who grew up in this deteriorating world and wanted to do something to make it better was a scholar named Bao Shichen. Bao, who possessed deep-set eyes and a drooping mustache, was a self-made man. He was born in 1775 in a rural part of Anhui province in central China where his father had been a village schoolteacher, and though his father kept the family out of poverty, he did not provide much more than that. For several of his younger years, Bao Shichen supported his family by farming a rented plot of land and selling vegetables at a nearby market. But he also learned to read and write, and immersed himself in the Confucian classics that were the basis of the civil service examinations. In 1808, when he was in his early thirties, he passed the provincial examination in Anhui’s capital. It was a great accomplishment, but that was as far as he could go. To qualify for a meaningful official position you had to pass the national examination in Beijing, which was only offered every three years. Though Bao would travel to the capital thirteen times over the course of his life to take that exam, he would fail it every time.35

  Then again, Bao Shichen also did not have the strict focus on the traditional classics that might have gotten him further on the examinations. From an early age he had become distracted by the problems of his time. “I was born in the Qianlong reign,” he once wrote to a friend, “and by the time I was a you
ng student, everything was falling apart. Bribery was pervasive and open, the administration was contaminated and vile, and the people’s energy was taut like a spring, as if there might be a rebellion.”36 Concerned by the economic problems and rising tensions of the society around him, Bao found himself drawn toward more practical kinds of scholarship that were not tested on the civil service exams—agriculture, law, the arts of war. While the exams privileged poetic skill and the writing of intricately constructed essays, Bao would in time become one of the leading figures in a field known broadly as “statecraft” scholarship, an informal movement of Confucians who were deeply concerned with real-world issues of administration and policy.37

  Even though Bao Shichen could not become an official himself and would never have the ear of the emperor, he began writing policy essays that gained wide circulation among officials and other scholars who were also concerned about the apparent decline of the empire. Through those writings he would emerge as one of the most influential members of a new generation of well-connected Han Chinese scholars, many of whom were not directly affiliated with government. Like Bao, most of these scholars were graduates of the provincial-level exams but had not succeeded at the national level. Nevertheless, through their own social networks in academies and poetry societies, and by gaining employment as assistants and secretaries to high-level provincial officials, they began to exercise a greater collective influence from behind the scenes during the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns than others of their kind had done since the beginning of the dynasty.

  Bao Shichen and his fellow reform-minded Confucians were the intellectual descendants of Hong Liangji, the scholar Jiaqing had first sentenced to death and then pardoned after he wrote the emperor a long letter in 1799 calling for reform and the punishment of Heshen. Bao was nearly thirty years younger than Hong, but they were connected by a shared patron, and Bao agreed with the elder figure that Jiaqing should have undertaken a much larger overhaul of the civil service after Heshen’s trial in order to root out corruption. Following in Hong Liangji’s footsteps, Bao and the others in his generation were heirs to an age-old tradition of Confucian remonstrance against the errors of China’s government, one in which the role of the scholar was not to follow the emperor blindly but to advise and guide him—and, when necessary, to correct him. Although Han Chinese scholars like themselves had been silenced under the Manchus since the days of the Yongzheng emperor, forbidden for generations from forming associations and meeting in groups, when Jiaqing pardoned Hong Liangji he had given them an opening to resume their roles from the past.

  By the time Daoguang sat on the throne in the 1820s, this new generation of Chinese scholars was actively engaging in debates on a wide range of policy issues—food supply, grain transport, the management of water-control systems, monetary reform, and other matters of national interest that they believed the government was failing to manage properly. After the better part of a century of suppression they were cautious about being too outspoken—they shied away from direct criticism of the emperor, and were careful to avoid appearing to have too much influence—but in their academies and literary societies, and through writings that they circulated informally, they began to advocate various proposals for reform that they ultimately hoped the government would adopt and make into policy.38 Among them, it was Bao Shichen who first began to sound warnings about the effect of the opium trade on China’s economy.

  Bao was, as many who admired him would be, intensely nativist and conservative. Like those in Britain who condemned tea for squandering the meager resources of England’s poorer classes, he couched his initial concerns about opium in a wider critique of the economic costs of everyday luxuries in China. He believed there should be strict sumptuary laws to prevent people from wasting their money on unnecessary goods—for example, that citizens should only be allowed to wear simple clothing, and only in particular colors depending on their occupations.39 Living at a time when chronic overpopulation made life difficult for the common subjects of the empire, he argued that growing luxury crops like tobacco, or grain for distilling alcohol, was a waste of land, labor, and fertilizer that should have been reserved for the growing of food instead.40

  From tobacco and alcohol, Bao’s attention turned naturally to opium, but he considered it to be a different kind of problem, because unlike tobacco and alcohol, which were fully supplied by domestic production, opium was a product of foreign trade. (He was in fact aware of the domestic production of opium in China, though through a technicality he believed that all Chinese opium was sold via Macao to foreigners for reimport, and thus counted as foreign.)41 The problem of opium thus involved more than just the wasting of domestic resources, because it also opened an international vulnerability for the empire as a whole.

  Bao Shichen had long been hawkish on foreign trade—as early as 1801, when he was still in his twenties, he advocated closing down the entire coastal import-export trade and expelling foreign merchants permanently from Canton. He also recommended at that time that foreign products like British textiles and clocks should all be banned and any Chinese who continued to import them should be beheaded.42 By his own statistics (which were sketchy and almost absurdly impressionistic), he estimated that in 1820 there were a total of almost three million regular opium users in China, whom he believed collectively spent more than one hundred million taels of silver per year on their habit, a sum greater than the government’s entire yearly tax revenue. (For comparison, the crushing cost of suppressing the White Lotus rebellion had been as much as two hundred million taels, spent over nearly a decade.) The financial cost of all that opium smoking was borne by the Chinese users, he argued, and all of the profit—as he saw it—went to British and American merchants. He thus warned that China’s wealth was flooding out of the country into the hands of foreigners.43

  The only way to make certain that China’s silver would not leave the country, he argued, was to shut down the foreign import trade altogether. He admitted that by doing so the government would lose out on millions of taels’ worth of annual tariff income it would otherwise have taken in through Canton. Nevertheless, he felt that the economic benefits to the people of China as a whole would be limitless. Bao knew that his proposal would be unpopular. “Some might worry that since we’ve had import markets for so long, if we suddenly close them down there could be trouble,” he wrote. The foreign merchants, after all, would not take lightly to losing the source of their wealth. But to his mind (again, as a hard-nosed nativist) that was a baseless concern. “Of all the countries that come here to trade, the British are considered the most powerful,” he wrote, “yet their territory and population don’t even equal one hundredth of China’s.” He saw nothing to fear from the British from their tiny, faraway island, and maintained that the only reason any officials on the coast might warn about conflict was because they themselves were getting rich from foreign trade and didn’t want it to end. He suggested that such officials were just exaggerating Britain’s strength in order to browbeat the central government into leaving their region’s commerce alone.44

  Bao Shichen was only the first of his generation to suggest that foreign trade was causing long-term economic harm to China, and his early views would anchor the hardest line in the debate to follow. Others who came after him repeated the call for China to shut down foreign trade while amplifying Bao’s basic points—that the trade at Canton was unnecessary for China, that it threatened to drain the empire of its silver. Another scholar in this vein, a man named Guan Tong who worked as a secretary in the offices of the Anhui provincial governor, targeted especially the fashion for foreign goods that was so prevalent among wealthy urban Chinese. Writing in the later 1820s, he argued that China’s economy was threatened not just by opium, but by everything fashionable from abroad—woolen fabrics, clocks, glass, and so on. He gave a parable of a prosperous family (representing, of course, China) whose neighbor began to seduce it with exotic but useless objects for sale. The children of the fa
mily came to love those objects and in time gave all of their money to the neighbor, leaving the family with nothing. “Today,” he wrote, “all of the foreign goods imported to China are what you would call intriguing and useless things. And yet for decades now, everyone has been raving decadently about ‘foreign goods.’ Even when it makes them poor, they continue to impoverish themselves just to take part in this fashion.”45

  Guan Tong argued that anything that was not traditionally Chinese was by definition unnecessary. When Chinese consumers bought foreign products they gave their wealth to outsiders, and in time they would wind up like the family in the parable. So in his opinion the Daoguang emperor’s laws against opium weren’t nearly enough—rather, China should ban all foreign goods and not just focus exclusively on drugs. Exchanging money for poppies or for foreign luxuries both equally “harm the people and sicken the country,” he wrote. “But today, all we do is ban poppies and we do nothing about the rest; we know about the one, but we are ignorant of the other.” His conclusion was stark: “Chinese and foreign merchants should have no commerce with each other. Any of their goods that remain in our country should be destroyed and not used. Anyone that goes against this should be treated as a criminal. Do this, and in just a few years China’s wealth will be once again abundant.”46

  Against such calls for shutting down foreign trade, however, a very different set of opinions began to emerge from Canton itself. Most of the hard-liners had never muddied their hands with foreign affairs, but the scholars who lived and worked for long periods in Canton were more experienced. They understood more clearly the rewards and risks of the maritime trade, to say nothing of the naval strengths of the British—and because they understood those better, they were more cautious in advocating for changes to the system. It was one thing for a nativist from a distant part of China to recommend choking off relations with outsiders. Bao Shichen had never met a foreigner when he first called for the trade to be shut down. He had never seen one of their ships, and his livelihood at the time, as well as those of the people around him, did not depend on foreigners at all (though he would in fact put in a short stint at the hoppo’s office in Canton later on, in 1826, after which his views would begin to moderate). The scholars based in Canton, however, knew just how much the region’s economy had come to depend on trade with foreigners, and some of them worried about what might happen if it were to end.