Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  Not everyone was happy to listen to them, however. In particular, an American woman in Macao named Harriet Low found herself especially envious. Low was the most eligible Anglo-American bachelorette in town. A twenty-year-old from Salem, Massachusetts, she had come to Macao the previous year as a companion to her aunt, who was married to one of the partners in Russell & Co. In a rather catty diary Low kept for the sake of her sister back home (it was she who described Baynes as sickly), she noted that it wasn’t such a big deal that all those Chinese people had turned out to see Mrs. Baynes. It wasn’t as if the same thing wouldn’t have happened if the tables were reversed. “Now I think the Chinese are much more civil than either American or English people would have been, if a China woman had appeared in our streets dressed in the costume of her country with little feet,” she wrote in her diary. “Why she would be mobbed and hooted at immediately.”5

  Harriet Low was accustomed to being the belle of the ball in Macao, the center of a small social world of Anglo men and seasonally single wives set against an exotic backdrop of rolling sea views and Portuguese Catholic pageantry. Her little community was a constant parade of dinner soirées and singing parties at which she would dance quadrilles deep into the night. She had hordes of suitors—ship’s captains came to woo her, as did the East India Company’s chaplain (aggressively) and friends of various relatives from New England. The Forbes brothers, who worked with her uncle, were regular visitors when they were in town (she found the little balding one, John Murray Forbes, nice enough but “not much indebted to nature for beauty”).6 During the off-season when Robert Morrison was in residence she spent her Sunday mornings listening to his sermons, though not always with full attention. She became close friends with his daughter.

  It was only when the British wives went to Canton that Harriet Low really felt her Americanness deeply—for they could go because they had the Company behind them. Her uncle’s firm, Russell & Co., would never put its trade at risk for the sake of her freedom to travel about. Generally speaking, Harriet Low had always been mistrustful of the British, never having met one of them until she got to Macao. She had expected to dislike them for their notorious pomposity, but in time found them to be more genial and charming than she had assumed. In any case, the British wives were a significant part of her small social world in Macao and she did not take well to being left behind when they went to Canton. It was lonely enough already during the trading season when most of the men were gone, and she did not relish losing the women as well.7

  When autumn came around again and trading resumed, Baynes decided to repeat his experiment. This time he brought his wife to Canton right at the opening of the season, arriving on October 4, 1830, though by that point the patience of the authorities had worn thin. A week after their arrival, the Qing governor-general ordered that Mrs. Baynes must leave Canton immediately, as per the regulations. Mr. Baynes ignored him. The governor-general pointed out that along with bringing women to Canton, foreigners had also been seen riding in sedan chairs, which was likewise forbidden. He ordered them to stop defying the rules of the compound. Still, Baynes stood his ground. In response, the governor-general’s assistants plastered the factory district with notices in Chinese explaining how immoral the British had become, and calling upon the Hong merchants and Chinese linguists to do their best to teach them how to act like civilized people.

  At that point, what should have been a harmless situation began to escalate out of control. The catalyst was a third party: a group of British free traders led by William Jardine and James Matheson. As private traders, there was little Jardine and Matheson loathed more than the Company, whose monopoly stood in the way of expanding their business to Europe. But if they couldn’t ignore that monopoly, they could at least push the Company’s select committee to take a more aggressive stance in representing their interests against the only thing they loathed even more—the Chinese government with its strict limitations on foreign trade. And whatever the outcome of that might be, they were always happy to help their Company rivals embarrass themselves.

  The private British traders and the staff of the East India Company’s factory may have been competitors but all of them were British, and that was the lever the private traders pulled. As soon as the governor-general’s placards went up denouncing the British for their uncivilized behavior, Jardine and Matheson led a group of twenty-six private merchants in writing up a letter demanding that the East India Company do something about this allegedly terrible offense to their nation, charging that the governor-general’s “grossly insulting” posters were “holding up Foreigners to the eyes of the Chinese, as an inferior and abject class.”8 Overblown of a reaction as it may have been, Baynes had no choice but to push the issue; if he didn’t, he risked being branded a coward by the private traders (and, more importantly, by their newspaper, the Canton Register, which, they happened to mention in their letter, had subscribers throughout the British Empire).

  Goaded to stand up for British honor, Baynes rallied the Company’s translators and issued a remonstrance in Chinese to the governor-general, seeded with references from the Confucian classics, in which he protested the notion that the British were in any way uncivilized or unruly. He also asked that his wife be allowed to stay. “How does it accord with reason and the feelings of human nature to declare that the wife shall not accompany her husband and quietly reside in the factory with him!” he asked.9 The governor-general responded on October 20—informally, in a verbal message relayed by Houqua—that Mrs. Baynes really must go. He asked Baynes to give a date by which his wife would return to Macao, and warned that if he refused to do so, soldiers might be sent to remove her from the factory.

  The utterance of “soldiers” and “wife” in the same breath was enough to send Baynes over the edge. He immediately called for an armed force to protect his wife, and by the next morning one hundred British sailors from the Company’s trading ships were landed at Canton with carronades—“to resist,” in the words of the select committee, “this menace of violating the Precincts of our Factory, hitherto held sacred, to the utmost extremity.” As if the governor-general’s troops were poised right at the gate to the English factory in preparation for spearing Mrs. Baynes through, the committee declared that anything less than a forceful response to this threat “would be highly injurious to the Interests and Honor of the British Nation of which we are in this Country the Representatives.” Jardine and his private traders had managed to turn the situation into a national crisis, and now it was no longer simply a matter of an impetuous Company employee breaking the rules to spend more time with his wife. It was now a defense of British national honor against the “menace” of the Chinese government.10

  The Qing governor-general, apparently mystified by Baynes’s overblown reaction, almost immediately issued a clarification via Houqua that he didn’t actually intend to send soldiers into the factory on mere account of a foreign woman living there. But still Baynes held his ground, demanding a promise in writing that the factory would be untouched. Talking him down, the governor-general reminded him that the regulations against women and sedan chairs had been in place since 1760 and there was no reason they should suddenly have changed. Finally, on October 31, claiming a victory of sorts (insofar as his wife hadn’t yet been hauled off), Baynes told the sailors to stand down and had them return to their ships. The governor-general complimented him for being penitent but reminded him to behave himself or trade would suffer. Baynes’s destabilizing role came to an end three weeks later, on November 23, when a Company ship arrived from London carrying orders for his removal. Like Roberts before him, Baynes was relieved of his duties in China and ordered home along with his pretty wife.

  In the midst of all this commotion, Harriet Low, not to be outdone, managed to make the trip to Canton herself, along with her aunt, the two of them establishing themselves as the first American women to visit the city. They traveled in disguise under heavy robes and hoods, and joined Low’s un
cle with the rest of the Russell & Co. personnel in the Swedish factory. However, she, unlike the British women, did not have any troops to protect her, and neither were the Chinese merchants inclined to cover for her as they had done for Mrs. Baynes. One of the senior Hong merchants explained regretfully that he had already told the authorities that Mrs. Baynes’s presence was necessary because Mr. Baynes was sick and needed her to care for him. He had passed off another English wife as being Baynes’s cousin, saying that Baynes was in fact so sick he needed two attendants. For Low, however, he had nothing. “I no can talky sick any more,” he apologized in Pidgin. “Now I know not what talky.”11

  Sure enough, Harriet Low was promptly ordered out of Canton, under threat that two Russell & Co. ships at Whampoa would not be allowed to unload their cargoes until she did. Her uncle had no intention of intervening on her behalf, so she took her aunt and left in a huff. “We shall have to go back to Macao,” she complained, “while the English ladies stay here and enjoy themselves.” Nevertheless, Low’s brief glimpse of the all-male world of the Canton factories left her with a good impression. “You have no idea how elegantly these bachelors live here,” she wrote to her sister. “I don’t wonder they like it.”12

  Her presence reputedly caused quite the hullabaloo among those same bachelors, a number of whom had been living year-round in the factories and hadn’t seen an unmarried American woman in years. A clerk from Russell & Co. described the antediluvian men of the American factory, unaccustomed to female company, tripping over one another as they tried to impress Low. “Old codgers were seen in immense coats, which had been stowed away in camphor trunks for ten or fifteen years,” he wrote in his diary, “and with huge cravats on, and with what once were gloves”—all on their way to pay homage to Harriet and her aunt. When the two women left for Macao on November 30, all of the men in the American factory bustled down to the dock to see them off. After they were gone, one curmudgeon declared in relief that he hoped Canton wouldn’t be “bothered with ladies” again, though the clerk noted in his diary that the complainer was “a notoriously crusty old fellow.”13

  So no harm came to Mrs. Baynes or Harriet Low, but the frictions between the British merchants and the Chinese authorities continued to build into 1831. The new select committee was not nearly so provocative as Baynes and his followers had been, but they were still vulnerable to being labeled cowards if they failed to stand up for their nation’s honor. And the private traders kept pushing the issue. In December 1830, refusing to let go of the “insults” of the previous months (and angling, as always, for a way to damage the prestige of the Company), Jardine, Matheson, and this time forty-five other private traders in Canton joined together to send a petition to the House of Commons. Complaining that they had “long submitted in silence to the absolute and corrupt rule of the Chinese government,” the private traders asked the British government to take a strong hand to put the trade at Canton on a new basis.

  In light of the “total failure” of both the Macartney and Amherst embassies, as they put it, the petitioners argued that the “refinements of diplomacy” were useless in China. The Chinese government would never grant any concessions of its own free will; anything that had ever been gained, they offered, had been gained by standing up to it. “Even violence has frequently received friendly treatment,” they said, “while obedience and conformity to its arbitrary laws have met only with the return of severity and oppression.” They gave the example of Admiral Drury, who they said was humiliated after backing down in the face of Chinese threats and accomplished nothing. Yet the leader of the pirates who plagued China’s coast afterward (meaning Shi Yang’s adopted son Zhang Bao) was “invested with a robe of honour, and ultimately nominated to an important official situation.” Which was to say that a British admiral who submitted to the authority of the Chinese government was “despised and treated with indignity,” while a mere pirate who stood up to that government wound up being “ranked among the nobility of the land.” The lesson was clear.14

  The traders complained about the governor-general’s placards depicting them as “a barbarous, ignorant, and depraved race, every way inferior.” Bemoaning their lack of “free air and exercise” in the small Canton factory compound, denied the “sacred ties of domestic life” by the prohibition on women, they begged the British government to send a royal diplomat to supplant the East India Company in representing their interests in China. But given that China had refused to allow them to station a permanent ambassador in the country since the Macartney mission, the petitioners tiptoed around just how exactly they hoped Britain might establish him. They wouldn’t come right out and say it, but the lawmakers who read their petition understood quite clearly that it was a veiled call for military force.

  As the private British were writing to Parliament, the Company supercargoes were dealing with separate problems of their own. For years they had been trying to expand the small piece of land on which their factory rested (even though they had explicitly been told not to) by sinking wooden piles into the soft ground and building stone piers out into the river, seeking access to deeper water. They had even planted a shrubbery on the reclaimed land, of which they were quite proud. In May 1831, while they were in Macao for the off-season, they learned that the Canton governor had ordered their new shrubbery to be torn up and the reclaimed land with its piers demolished. At the same time they also learned that the governor had entered their factory in their absence, had poked around, and had reportedly called for a portrait of King George IV in the dining hall to be uncovered, then sat down with his back to it. The governor would later insist that he had no idea who the man in the portrait was (he said he assumed it was someone unimportant since it was at the end of the hall, whereas the place of honor for a Chinese portrait would have been at the center).15 But no explanation could console them: the governor, as they understood, had insulted their former king.

  Once again Jardine’s private traders went on the offensive. In a resolution adopted on May 30, 1831, styling themselves “The British Merchants of Canton,” they declared that the Canton governor’s “gratuitous insult offered to the picture of the King of England,” along with his “demolition” of the shrubbery, his “violent entry” into the Company factory, and other slights, demonstrated “a deliberate plan to oppress and degrade British Subjects.”16 The Company supercargoes took it from there. With enthusiastic support from their brethren in the private trade, they sent a ship to Calcutta with a letter asking the British governor-general to dispatch a naval fleet from India to uphold their nation’s honor in China. They chased that ship with another to London carrying a secret letter for the East India Company’s Court of Directors. “We have used every means available to us to preserve our national character and interests unimpaired,” they warned the directors ominously. “If we fail, it can only be from want of sufficient power to maintain them.”17

  As an American watching from the sidelines while the crisis unfolded, John Murray Forbes’s older brother Robert was tickled by the absurdity of the British grievances. In June 1831 he joked in a letter to his cousin John Perkins Cushing that the Qing governor “had the temerity to enter their Hall and turn his back to the King’s portrait,” adding, “Their grievances were thought matter of sufficient import to dispatch a ship to Calcutta.”18 Later, while waiting to see if a British fleet would arrive from India, he told his uncle that those same British traders who called for military intervention might well come to regret their actions. If the “belligerents,” as he called them, should “get up the shadow of a War the drug trade will be very dull and there will be no means to pay for it.” Without an opium trade, he imagined that “the ‘British Merchants of Canton’ who have been crying out for redress of imaginary wrongs will be very glad to see things going on as usual.”

  He then made a crucial point—one that others would make as well—that for all of its flaws, the Canton trade was in fact, in its jury-rigged and semilegal fashion, already one of
the freest systems of commerce in the world. “Who would barter the present free trade in all description of goods,” he asked, “for a regular commercial System of duties, entry permits and a myriad of forms like those in London. The facilities for trade have always been remarkable here and those who have had most experience are perfectly willing to put up with a continuation of the same.”19 The impatience of the British over their minor confrontations and perceived insults in China, to his mind, simply betrayed their ignorance of how good they really had it.

  It wasn’t just the foreign traders who were starting to test their boundaries. In the summer of 1831, around the time the British factory’s shrubbery was being torn up, a twenty-seven-year-old missionary named Karl Gutzlaff was making his first attempt to get inside China. A dark-haired Prussian who was fluent in multiple languages and would marry a succession of Englishwomen (as well as flirting with Harriet Low, though pretty much everyone did that), Gutzlaff was, at his essence, a fusion of his forebears Robert Morrison and Thomas Manning.20 Like Morrison, he was a zealous Protestant who had mastered spoken and written Chinese and felt himself called to bring the Gospel to the Chinese. He was thus deeply indebted to Morrison’s groundbreaking work on the dictionary and Chinese Bible. But Gutzlaff was also imbued with “a love for adventure,” as one colleague put it mildly, and so, like Thomas Manning (and very much unlike Morrison), he aimed to get into the country proper.21 He wanted to see China firsthand rather than suffer the confines of Canton—and to do that, he was willing to put on a disguise and risk his life by entering illegally.

  Rather than bothering with Canton, Gutzlaff had spent his first years as a missionary in Southeast Asia—modern-day Malaysia and Thailand, especially—where he could work with more freedom among the overseas Chinese populations. From friends and converts he learned to speak the dialect of Fujian province on China’s southeastern coast. In time, he gave himself a Fujianese name and even claimed to be a naturalized subject of the Qing Empire after allegedly getting himself adopted by a Fujianese family.22 For the sake of travel, his disguise was far more promising than Thomas Manning’s—with his dark eyes and swarthy complexion, his genius at picking up languages, dressed fully in Chinese clothes (and without a distracting beard), Gutzlaff could easily pass as a Chinese from Fujian. The only way in which he held back in his disguise was that he didn’t grow a queue—the long braid that signified subservience to the Qing Empire. Instead he wore a head wrap, which he could remove when he needed to prove to someone that he was actually a foreigner.23