Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  One of the strongest responses to the opponents of foreign trade came from a man named Cheng Hanzhang who had served in a series of high offices, including as a provincial governor, and who had spent more than twenty years working in Canton. Although Cheng shared Bao Shichen’s concerns about the loss of silver, he insisted nevertheless that foreign trade on the whole must be allowed to continue. While admitting that “of all the products that are made by foreign countries, nothing is a necessity for China,” he pointed out that in a typical year the Western merchants brought to Canton tens of millions of taels’ worth of cotton and wool textiles, fragrant woods, metals like copper and tin, medicines, and other products, exchanging goods for other goods with no need of actual silver to change hands. “This is something that was never harmful to China in the past,” he observed. The only thing that departed from this pattern was opium, which he called “a poison that the foreigners do not use themselves but still sell to China, harming our people, consuming our wealth to the tune of millions of taels per year, all secretly in exchange for silver that will leave and never come back.”47

  Thus Cheng Hanzhang saw the same long-term risk of silver loss to the opium trade that so worried Bao Shichen, but he strongly disputed the notion that the solution lay with shutting down all foreign commerce. “Some,” he wrote (and here he meant those who followed Bao Shichen), “say that if we clamp down on the ports and major sea lanes, and order customs to refuse to accept the foreigners’ tariff money, then we can prohibit them from coming.” But it was absurd even to conceive of shutting down foreign trade, he said. China simply didn’t have the military power to enforce such a ban. “Our coastline is extremely long and there are places everywhere to land,” he wrote. “Even with a hundred thousand soldiers we could not police it.”48

  Nevertheless, the impossibility of closing the coastline was just a prelude to his main concern, which was how the foreign traders might react. “These foreigners have been trading with China for hundreds of years already,” he said. “If we were to suddenly cut them off, they would unite and join their forces together to make trouble for us. We would be ravaged by constant warfare and it would take decades to restore peace.” So not only was it unrealistic for China to enforce a ban on foreign trade, but even attempting to do so was likely to provoke a war—and he was far less sanguine than Bao Shichen about what the outcome of such a war might be. To avoid a disastrous conflict, Cheng concluded, the foreign trade at Canton should be continued in all traditional commodities. Rather than trying to blame foreigners for China’s opium problem, he said, the Qing government should redouble its efforts on the domestic front: work harder to police smuggling, and try to reduce the demand for opium by treating the users themselves, using public education to teach them how to quit their habits.

  This burgeoning private debate about how the Chinese government should deal with foreigners and the opium problem begs the question of just what the scholars involved actually knew about the other countries involved. For none of them had been abroad, and while Europeans had a limited familiarity with China via the writings of Jesuit missionaries and the experiences of traders who had gone to Canton, there was no similar movement in the other direction, no sustained tradition of Chinese travelers to Europe or America who could enlighten their countrymen back home. Few of the Chinese scholars who discussed the merits and dangers of international trade during Daoguang’s reign had even been inside the compound where the foreign merchants lived outside the Canton city walls. And yet there was more information available to them than one might expect.

  In the early 1830s as concerns were rising about foreign trade, at least one Chinese scholar took it upon himself to make a serious study of Great Britain as the most powerful of the countries that traded with China. The scholar in question was a geographer named Xiao Lingyu, a close friend of Bao Shichen (who wrote him a letter in 1826 predicting that within ten years the opium trade would cause problems on the coast as destructive as the pirate fleets that had plagued the Ming dynasty).49 Originally from Jiangsu province in the east, Xiao worked in the customs bureau in Canton and spent some time there gathering information about the British and their interactions with China. He rooted around in local archives, conducted personal interviews, and read various accounts by other scholars, pulling them all together in 1832 into a treatise on the British that represented the best knowledge of the time in China.50

  Xiao Lingyu’s account, titled, plainly enough, “An Account of England,” was remarkable for how much he was able to learn about the British from Chinese sources—especially considering the common assumption that the Chinese of this time had no inkling whatsoever of British military power. Writing in the early 1830s, Xiao was able to give detailed and specific data on British ships that had been observed near Canton: how many guns they could carry, how many marines could ride on them, the arrangement of their sails, and how impressively they could navigate. He gave measurements for the height of their masts, the depth of their drafts, and the thickness of their wooden hulls. He described how their bottoms were coppered so they would not rot, and listed the variety of weapons they carried (long guns, short guns, repeating guns). In contrast to the matchlocks used in China, which required a burning piece of hemp to ignite the powder, he explained that the British possessed modern “self-firing” guns that used a piece of flint. He was especially awed by the British cannons—which, he explained, were aimed by using telescopes and could reach targets miles away. “They never miss,” he wrote.51

  Xiao Lingyu was also aware that those ships and guns were instrumental to Britain’s quest for economic power. In a section on British imperial expansion he explained that India was a British colony, something not commonly understood in China at the time.52 He explained as well that Britain controlled several islands and strategic ports in Southeast Asia, including most recently Singapore, which it had acquired in 1824. Britain had conquered those colonies with its navy, Xiao wrote, and now it received a regular share of their annual wealth in the form of “tribute and taxes.” He thus understood that Britain’s imperial expansion was motivated by trade and the search for profit (in contrast to the Qing Empire, whose expansion had been driven primarily by security needs, to pacify threats on its borders). And though Xiao Lingyu noted that the two empires butted heads where Tibet bordered on India, he sensed a more potent contact via Singapore since it was just a few days’ sail from Canton—a fact about which Bao Shichen was especially worried, since there were Han Chinese subjects of the British in Singapore whom he feared could be used to infiltrate China in a way white Englishmen could never do.53

  Given that Xiao Lingyu was using Chinese sources, the most accurate parts of his account related to interactions in Canton and the wider sphere of Chinese maritime trade in Southeast Asia; as he reached farther afield to describe British society itself, his ideas became somewhat more quaint. In England, he explained, women chose their own husbands and controlled household finances. Their husbands were not allowed to have concubines. “From the king on down,” he wrote, “there is not a single person who does not value women more than men.” He explained that the British had an alphabet rather than written characters (though he believed many of them could speak and write Chinese, a fact that would have pleased George Staunton), and since they “all believe in Catholicism or the Jesus-teachings” they used a Christian dating system. Britain’s territory was great, wrote Xiao, but its fields were few. The British farmed with horses, and though they could grow beans and wheat, their national custom was to seek profit overseas (thus their excellence at building ships). Physically, they were tall, with blue-green eyes and red or yellow hair. When two men met, it was customary to remove their hats, and “to show the highest respect, they put their hand to their forehead” (that is, they saluted). In a reminiscence of the tensions over Macartney and Amherst, he explained that the British never knelt under any circumstances—even before their own king, he said, they remained standing.

  Xiao
Lingyu, significantly, did not consider opium to be a matter of concern for foreign relations. Rather, he saw it as a purely domestic problem and disputed those who tried to blame it on the British. “Some say the English sell opium to corrupt China,” he wrote, “but the fashion for opium dates back only to the early 1800s and the English have been industriously making textiles and trading them at Canton for a great many decades now. Their woolen fabrics can be found everywhere; it is not as if they have only sold opium from the start. And if people in China did not smoke opium, then the English would not be able to sell it.”54

  Even as he absolved the British from blame for the opium trade, however, Xiao warned against underestimating their military strength. “Some also say that China would have no difficulty copying the excellence of Britain’s ships and cannons,” he went on. But he pointed out that during the Ming dynasty the Chinese had imported French cannons for use on the frontier but the officers and soldiers of the Chinese military were unable to operate them properly. Furthermore, those old guns weighed less than a hundred pounds each, while Britain’s new brass cannons weighed thousands of pounds and were far more difficult to control. “If we don’t have men who know how to use them,” he wrote, “then I fear they could turn around and benefit the enemy.”

  Xiao then laid out a longer-term history of China’s trading relations with the British, looking for lessons in how to deal with them. He wrote about James Flint’s imprisonment in 1760, and the restriction of British commerce to Canton that followed. He listed the rules for foreigners in the factory compound. He wrote in detail about the Macartney mission in 1793 (which, in his words, came to present “tribute”) and how Qianlong refused the British ambassador’s demands. He wrote about Admiral Drury’s invasion of Macao in 1808, suggesting that trade was China’s most powerful weapon in determining the outcome of that crisis. In spite of Drury’s intention to attack, he wrote, the English merchants themselves were “afraid” that the Chinese would not approve, and “did not dare” to openly occupy Macao. Once the invasion was under way, it was the closure of trade that struck fear into the hearts of the merchants and turned them against Drury. As Xiao quoted one angry British captain, “If you offend China and they shut down trade, then even if we capture Macao, what good would it do us?”

  This was not, however, a blindly patriotic account of Chinese superiority. Although China had prevailed in its showdown with Drury—the closest the British and Chinese had ever come to war—Xiao made it clear that it was trade that had won the day: the British merchants were afraid of losing their market, so Drury left and commerce was restored. Yet China did not have a strong enough military option available as a fallback. As witnessed by the inability to control the native pirate fleets that rose up after Drury’s departure, Xiao argued that China’s naval forces near Canton were completely insufficient to defend the coast. “Our navy had no means to resist the pirates,” he wrote, “yet the pirates themselves were quite fearful of the foreign ships.” He judged that a single foreign ship was a match for at least ten native vessels. China’s own coastal forces, in other words, were not even remotely comparable to what the British possessed.

  The last episode in Xiao Lingyu’s history was the Amherst mission, by which point he had become almost sympathetic to the earnestness of the British. Although he noted the ambassador’s refusal to perform the kowtow, Xiao also described in detail the long and arduous journey to the capital that had preceded Amherst’s aborted audience. Following on Jiaqing’s condemnation of the “Duke” for forcing the audience at too-short notice, Xiao forgave Amherst for his various insults to the throne, explaining how the diplomat was exhausted after traveling through the night over stony roads, and that his ceremonial outfit had not arrived.

  Xiao Lingyu was not aware, or at least he chose not to imagine, that there was any lasting resentment on the British side for the failure of Amherst’s mission. His account ended with a banquet given by the Qing governor-general for Lord Amherst in Canton just before he sailed home. At the banquet, the governor-general explained how the emperor did not value exotic foreign things and so there was no need for England to send tribute anymore, adding that if the British felt they really must continue to send tribute, they could simply deliver it to Canton rather than going through the trouble of sending ships to the north (to which Amherst, according to Xiao, nodded agreement). The governor-general then reminded Amherst how valuable the China trade was to Great Britain: that Amherst’s countrymen had been coming to Canton for a hundred years, that the market was worth tens of millions every year, that the British profited enormously from the trade—far more so, he said, than China did—and so they should do everything possible to ensure that the situation did not change.

  In deciding to end his account of British-Chinese relations with Lord Amherst in 1817, besides just implying that the intervening years up to 1832 had been peaceful (which they had, for the most part), Xiao also gave Amherst—or at least Xiao’s version of him—the final word. The account ends just after the governor-general’s speech about the value of Chinese trade to Great Britain, with Lord Amherst responding, forthrightly, “China and my country both profit from this trade; we British are not the only ones who value it.”55 Xiao Lingyu thus ended on a relatively optimistic note: Lord Amherst, the British ambassador, acknowledging the great value his country attached to the trade at Canton, quibbling only that the commerce was beneficial to China as well (a fact that would be readily acknowledged by the Chinese traders of Canton, if not their government). Xiao—and by this point, his readers—knew full well that the British could not be controlled by military force. Britain’s weapons were vastly superior to China’s, their ships were incomparably stronger than the pitiful Qing navy, and their empire was expanding in Asia. Nevertheless, running through his full account was the promise that the British could be controlled through trade. From what Xiao Lingyu could tell about relations between the two countries by looking backward from 1832, whatever the tensions that had arisen over the years, it was obvious that the Canton trade was so important to the British financially that they would never do anything to risk losing it.

  There is no reason he should ever have thought otherwise.

  CHAPTER 9

  Freedom

  The new round of troubles at Canton began, innocuously enough, with a new British factory chief who could not stand to be away from his wife. His name was Baynes, a “nervous, sickly man,” as one woman in Macao described him.1 He was a protégé of John Roberts, who had caused so much trouble back in 1808 by trying to goad Admiral Drury into attacking Canton. Baynes was just as inclined to support a hard line against the Chinese as Roberts had been (and so he was also just as completely at cross-purposes with the desire of the Company directors to maintain a peaceful trade). Baynes had become president of the select committee by staging a minor coup against his predecessor in 1829, unifying the junior members of the committee to demand that the Company withhold its trade from the Chinese until certain grievances were addressed by the hoppo. The president of the select committee opposed making threats against the Chinese authorities, which he saw as pointless and damaging, but he was outvoted by the three junior members led by Baynes. In frustration, he left Canton to return to England and the upstarts assumed power in his place.2

  As it happened, the headstrong if sickly Baynes was blessed with the loveliest wife of all the men in the British factory, and he was resentful that she—like all of the other wives who had accompanied their husbands to China over the years—should have to stay behind in Macao during the October-to-April trading season while he was in Canton.3 So in February 1830, he snuck her into Canton. Dressing her up in disguise, he brought her along when he sailed from Macao and smuggled her into the luxurious British factory to live with him. The plan sent the Western community of Macao into a tizzy; nobody had any idea what would happen. The rule against foreign women in Canton had never been tested. But to everyone’s surprise, it seemed to turn out well (well eno
ugh, at least, that two more British wives soon went over to join her).

  The Hong merchants, far from raising an alarm, came to pay Mrs. Baynes their respects and did their best to help keep her presence secret from the authorities—they were, after all, liable for the foreigners’ behavior and could be punished for her being there. She even got to go out walking around a bit, which led to something of a mob scene as the local Chinese tried to crowd in for a glimpse of the Englishwoman—who, abandoning her travel disguise, went out dressed in full, unadulterated London fashion, puffy-sleeved dresses and all. Several entrepreneurial Chinese with boats on the river charged admission to see her.4 But the authorities, who clearly knew she was there, did not press the issue, apparently considering it a minor enough matter to let pass. By April, she and the other two British wives were back safely in Macao, regaling anyone who would listen to them about their great adventure.