Remarkably, in 1832 it was the East India Company’s factory—two years in advance of its dissolution—that took the radical step of funding Gutzlaff’s second voyage up the coast. Without approval from London, the select committee hired him to escort a Company ship full of cotton textiles in search of new markets for British goods. Within weeks of returning from his first voyage north, Gutzlaff had signed on as interpreter for the Company’s new mission. It was a convenient arrangement for him—he wanted to see more of the Chinese coast and distribute more religious tracts, and a Company ship would give him far more comfort and cargo space than the Chinese junk had. He could even bring full copies of Morrison’s multivolume Chinese Bible along. Gutzlaff had no moral compunctions about working for the Company, as that path had already long been cleared for Protestant missionaries by Robert Morrison, even if Morrison himself would never have been daring enough to go to sea for them. (His son, John Robert Morrison, however, would—and was rather put out that Gutzlaff was chosen for the Company’s mission over himself.)4 Furthermore, since the ship would carry only cotton and wool textiles, Gutzlaff would not be implicated in any way by the opium trade he so loathed.
Gutzlaff’s partner for the journey was a slippery character, a tall and handsome (if dissipated) thirty-year-old named Hugh Hamilton Lindsay who, like Gutzlaff, was yet another of Harriet Low’s admirers, though she did not trust him much. “His sincerity is much to be doubted,” she told her sister. “He is no favorite of mine.”5 An adventurer by nature and the son of one of the East India Company directors, Lindsay had worked for the Company in Canton since 1821 and had learned Chinese, though nowhere nearly as well as Gutzlaff. Their mission was meant to be a secret—even the directors in London knew nothing about it. Lindsay agreed to deny any involvement with the East India Company during the voyage, and to pretend instead to be a private British merchant who had been blown onto the Chinese coast by foul weather. The original plan was for Lindsay and Gutzlaff to sail on a Company ship named the Clive, but when its captain learned what they were up to he refused to take them. Casting about for a new vessel, Lindsay finally chartered a private ship at Lintin whose captain was willing to risk the voyage up the coast and was even eager to make charts along the way to improve the ones drafted during Lord Amherst’s mission sixteen years earlier. The name of the ship under his command was, perfectly enough, the Lord Amherst.
The voyage of the Lord Amherst would take significantly longer than planned—leaving in February 1832, it did not get back to Macao until September, three months after its expected return. But it would accomplish much of what they had hoped. It carried Lindsay and Gutzlaff all the way up the coast of China and beyond, into Korea, repeating the circuit of the Alceste after it dropped off Amherst in 1816. Along the way, it took them into ports never before visited by the British, causing much alarm on the part of Qing coastal officials. The rumor from Canton that a British war fleet was coming to China had spread up and down the coast, and in the ports they visited, the first assumption of the local officials was that the Lord Amherst must be the vanguard of that fleet. But Lindsay had Gutzlaff with him, to sweet-talk and console the government officials they encountered, to convince them that the Lord Amherst had nothing to do with any navy. It was just a private ship in unfortunate straits, insisted Gutzlaff (who had no qualms about lying to further his missionary cause). All the men on board wanted to do, he insisted, was sell textiles.
Gutzlaff succeeded beautifully. While officials in each port insisted they must leave, those officials were so anxious to avoid conflict with foreigners that they often gave them supplies, even money, to go away. The closest the ship came to being attacked was the occasional firing of a blank shot. In person, the Qing officials were friendly and insisted they had no personal animosity toward Lindsay and Gutzlaff and the others on board their ship; they just wanted them to leave so the officials themselves wouldn’t get in trouble with the emperor and lose their positions.
Meanwhile, they found merchants everywhere who were willing to defy the local authorities and meet secretly with them for trade. In contrast to the strained atmosphere at Canton, Lindsay reported “nothing but expressions of friendship and good will” from the villagers they met up the coast in their occasional forays onto land. In some places, he said, the locals even competed to see who could get Gutzlaff and the others to come into their homes and sit down for a bite to eat.6
Along with testing the demand for British textiles up the coast, the voyage of the Lord Amherst was also a propaganda mission. For Karl Gutzlaff, this meant Christian propaganda: he never went ashore without his pockets stuffed full of books and pamphlets. He handed out moral tracts in Chinese about the evils of gambling, opium use, and lying, distributed copies of Morrison’s Chinese Bible, and preached in person whenever he could.7 For Lindsay, by contrast, it was a chance to spread the gospel of free trade. His chosen weapon was a short work in Chinese titled “A Brief Account of the English Character,” written by a Company employee and translated into Chinese by Robert Morrison, which informed its Chinese readers that in spite of what the Qing government might tell them, the British only wanted their friendship and commerce.
Lindsay wasn’t supposed to have the pamphlet along. It was directly critical of the Chinese government, so the president of the select committee had refused to let him print it on the Company’s press and ordered him to hand over any copies in his possession before leaving on his journey. But Lindsay lied to his more conscientious colleague, promising that he had no copies of the tract while actually bringing along five hundred of them in his luggage. He posted them on walls along the journey and handed them out in towns and villages whenever they went ashore.8
According to Lindsay’s tract, which eventually reached the attention of the Daoguang emperor (who, to Robert Morrison’s embarrassment if he had known, found it barely readable), the Chinese government had long “falsely represented” the British as having territorial ambitions. That was wrong, it said. In fact, Great Britain’s territories were “already so large that the policy of its Government, is rather to diminish, than to enlarge them.” It proudly described the great expanse of Britain’s existing conquests—the territories in Europe and North America, the islands and strategic port cities like Singapore, the “hundred millions of subjects” in India. But these, it insisted, were only reasons to admire Britain, not to fear it. “The Government of so great an Empire has no thirst for Conquest,” it assured the reader. “The great object, and aim, is to preserve its subjects in a condition of happiness and tranquility.”9
All the British had ever wanted in China, said Lindsay’s tract, was peaceful and friendly trade. But they had been treated poorly in Canton—“heavily taxed and oppressed”—and the Chinese merchants they traded with were forced to pay bribes to officials. Lindsay was bringing the British case to the Chinese people themselves. “Why should not Chinese and English strive together?” his tract asked. Chinese merchants, officials, and everyday people should all just “treat foreigners with the respect and consideration to which they are entitled,” it concluded. “Then indeed there will be peace, union, and harmony between the Native and British Community in China.”
Though the voyage of the Lord Amherst had little effect in China beyond causing a flurry of agitated reports to the throne from coastal officials, in Great Britain and America it was a bombshell. For what Gutzlaff and Lindsay claimed to reveal in their accounts of the journey, which ran into multiple printings in Europe and the United States, was that China was no longer the closed empire of the past; the emperor was no longer fully in control, foreigners were no longer frozen out. Wishful as it may have been, the message Lindsay and Gutzlaff brought back—one that echoed Thomas Manning’s experience in Tibet twenty years earlier—was that the ordinary people of China were perfectly friendly and open toward foreigners. The Chinese themselves wanted free trade, they insisted, and it was only the officials of the Qing government who stood in their way. In other wo
rds, the British represented the will of the Chinese people better than their own government did.
In essence, Lindsay and Gutzlaff had identified a wedge they believed could be driven right through the firmament of China: a natural alliance of British trade interests and the multitude of Chinese merchants with their desire for free commerce, both of them set against the jealous government of the Manchus. All of the exclusiveness, the restrictions, and the close management of trade that had defined the Canton commerce for so long were, Lindsay claimed, the products of a government that no longer enjoyed the full support of its subjects. A simple push from the outside and the whole system would topple from within.
There were joyous reactions to the Lord Amherst’s voyage in Britain and America. In London, the Eclectic Review declared that it “places the character of the natives altogether in a new light, and opens to us the most cheering prospect as to the possibility of wholly breaking down the partition which has for ages separated from civilized society a fourth portion of the human race.”10 The Times lauded Gutzlaff’s revelations that “as a nation, China is politically weak,” that its naval defenses were “contemptible,” that the government had “no hold on the affections of the people,” and that the officials were “cowardly, corrupt, and excessively cringing.” But the ordinary people of China—the people!—were, the Times was delighted to report to its readers, “hospitable, kind, and eager to establish an intercourse with foreigners.”11
In America, newspapers called Gutzlaff “one of the most extraordinary men of the age.”12 Legions of missionary writers quoted his potent declaration, “We are entirely erroneous about China.” China was not a closed country, said Gutzlaff, but in fact “no country in Asia, ruled by native princes, is so easy of access.”13 According to believers on both sides of the Atlantic, be they believers in commerce or religion, the voyage of the Lord Amherst revealed the mysterious country of China in a new light: not as some impenetrable, reclusive empire but as a market for free commerce and a field for Christian conversion that was all but begging to be opened by the West.
In spite of all that, however, the Lord Amherst’s voyage was a very strange kind of mission for the East India Company’s factory to have undertaken. For one thing, by violating the rules of the Canton system it departed from seventy years of established precedent. For another, it had no advance approval from back home. The Company’s directors in London only found out about it after the fact, and when they did they were positively furious. In May 1833 they wrote a damning letter to the select committee in Canton expressing their fear that the journey would tarnish the honor of the East India Company and undermine British prestige in the eyes of the Chinese.
They were equally maddened by Lindsay’s propaganda work. Why shouldn’t the Chinese have been alarmed at the Lord Amherst’s approach, the directors asked, when Lindsay and the others were stealing up the coast “in disguise under foreign names . . . in direct violation of the laws and usages of the empire”? What would happen, they asked, if a Chinese vessel had attempted to do the same in Great Britain? What if a Chinese ship had come illegally to England, with an illegal cargo, and, when it was told to leave, had proceeded to “distribute throughout the coast papers complaining of the conduct of the Government, and calculated to incite the people against their rulers?” Britain would never tolerate such a provocation, said the directors, so “why then should we . . . act so decidedly in defiance of all common usage towards the Chinese, whose commerce we have sought and wish to retain?”14
But perhaps the voyage was never undertaken for the East India Company’s sake in the first place. Although the future of the monopoly was still up in the air when the Lord Amherst departed in 1832, its termination was likely enough that Lindsay could simply have been betting on a future of free trade, using his erstwhile position in the Company to underwrite a voyage whose real value was to the free traders waiting in the wings. (The news of his voyage would in fact catch the tail end of the parliamentary debates, where it would be used as yet another battering ram against the monopoly.) Lindsay would become a free trader himself soon after the dissolution of the Company’s factory, launching a private firm—Lindsay & Co.—that would give the others a run for their money.15
Furthermore, despite the Lord Amherst’s journey being outwardly a project of the East India Company supercargoes, William Jardine appears to have had a significant hand in organizing it from behind the scenes. In a letter from January 1832, shortly before the mission was dispatched, Jardine mentioned to James Matheson, “I had made up my mind to Mr. Gutzlaff being engaged for the Clive”—the Clive being the first ship Lindsay attempted to sail on—which suggests that it was in fact Jardine who had decisive power over choosing the mission’s interpreter.16 The letter further indicated Jardine’s involvement, telling Matheson that “the voyage required much management and great attention,” and that Jardine was hopeful that Gutzlaff “may collect useful information for future purposes . . . but I shall be very much pleased when I hear of the safe return of the vessel.” In any case, as galling as the Lord Amherst’s voyage was to the Company directors back home, the information it gathered was phenomenally useful for Jardine himself. For the bottom line of Lindsay’s research into the opening of new Chinese markets was that while there was little demand for British textiles up the coast, just about everyone, everywhere he went, wanted opium.
The voyage would not be repeated. With the condemnation of the directors, followed soon after by the dissolution of the factory, there would be no more Company-sponsored vessels attempting the Chinese coast with innocuous cargoes of cotton textiles. Only drug smugglers would follow in the Lord Amherst’s wake. And so in 1833, failing any other means of travel, and giving the lie to every moral complaint he had ever made about the curse of opium in China, Karl Gutzlaff went to work for William Jardine. He agreed to ride Jardine and Matheson’s smuggling ships and do their interpreting, and to sweeten the pill, they agreed to help underwrite the cost of his Christian publications. Displaying a stunning willingness to use any means necessary to pursue his “higher” calling, Gutzlaff was soon comfortably employed as Jardine and Matheson’s chief interpreter, escorting their opium ships up and down the coast as they peddled their poisonous wares, handing out his little biblical tracts all along the way.
In the nearly two decades since Morrison had published the first installment of his dictionary, the collective ability of the British in Canton to read Chinese books and documents had advanced dramatically (less so the Americans, who, excepting the missionaries among them, saw little point in trying to get beyond the confines of the Canton trading system and so never bothered with the language). The Canton Register and other English-language newspapers that cropped up to compete with it carried regular translations from imperial edicts and notices from various government officials, as well as translated Chinese reports of major events in the provinces. Compared to the generations before them, the Western community in 1830s Canton thus had access to far more information about the country’s interior. In 1832, Gutzlaff and a handful of other missionaries led by the American Elijah Bridgman even founded a magazine to try to bring this knowledge farther out into the English-speaking world. The Chinese Repository, as they called it, was dense with translations from Chinese history and literature, intended to stir up an interest among Western readers in the affairs of the Canton traders and especially the Protestant missionaries there.
From one direction, certain members of this new generation tried to use their increasing knowledge of China as a means to gain access where it hadn’t been allowed before. Gutzlaff was the archetype of this process. When, for example, the opium ship Sylph anchored near Shanghai with Gutzlaff aboard in 1833, its crew sent out a small boat bearing a flag emblazoned with a quotation from Confucius about welcoming friends from afar. According to a report from the voyage, hundreds of people crowded down to the waterfront and “were exceedingly delighted” with the flag.17 From a different direction, those w
ho desired access to China beyond Canton—who wanted to “open” China, as the language generally went—wanted to translate Western texts as a means to influence the thinking of the Chinese and encourage them to skirt their government’s limits on foreign contact.
For example, at one point in 1831 the Register reported on the desire of several merchants in Canton to have the “science” of political economy translated into Chinese. These proponents of free trade regretted that Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill were too obviously European and called for someone to write a treatise on free trade couched in the language of the Confucian classics.18 What they wanted, in other words, was some way to use traditional Chinese texts to “teach” the Chinese the virtue of getting rich (missing the point, apparently, that the country’s merchants had long ago discovered that virtue). An anonymous patron heeded their call and sponsored a contest for the best essay in Chinese on Western political economy, with a prize of £50, advising contestants to quote as much as possible from the Confucian classics so that their treatises on free trade would “carry conviction to the minds of Chinese readers.”19
Karl Gutzlaff took this project to its highest level. He was a polyglot linguist with limitless patience for making translations, who in the course of his career would publish more than sixty works in Chinese, along with others in English, Thai, Japanese, Dutch, and German.20 And much to the delight of the Jardines and Mathesons of Canton, he saw almost no distinction between spreading British doctrines of free trade and spreading Christianity. Each, he believed, helped the other.21
In the range of his publications in Chinese, Gutzlaff borrowed a strategy the Jesuits had once used of translating works on science to convince their Chinese readers that those who believed in the proper God had also mastered the secrets of the natural world. In an 1833 letter to his American supporters, published by newspapers in Boston and New York, Gutzlaff pledged that he would write not just moral tracts to correct the “prejudices, bigotry and national pride” of the Chinese but also scientific works “to counteract their narrow-mindedness and to humble the pride of a soi-disant Celestial government.” On the heels of his journey on the Lord Amherst he promised, in time, to undertake “a voyage which, if God grants success, will throw the whole interior of China open.”22
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