In this grand vision of opening China, the Protestant missionaries indulged themselves in the language of a military campaign—conquest, attack, victory—an affectation that caught on among their supporters. Reporting on the departure of a new American missionary in the spring of 1834 who planned to help Gutzlaff in “penetrating the Chinese empire,” the Boston Recorder related that the American would try to work in eastern China “while the indefatigable Gutzlaff attacks the Center.” How long, the writer wondered, would it take before the two men would meet in the middle “as conquerors of this vast kingdom, [raising] the banner of freedom over the many millions of China?”23
This project of culture-as-warfare culminated in the founding at Canton, in 1834, of a “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China,” led by Gutzlaff and Elijah Bridgman as Chinese secretaries, and with James Matheson and William Jardine as its first and second presidents, respectively. The society’s avowed goal was to produce “intellectual artillery,” as they called it—Chinese-language tracts with which to smash the walls of ideology that closed off the vast population of China to Western religion and trade. Violent as the society’s rhetoric may have been, however, its founders believed—deep down, fundamentally—that everything they did and hoped for was for the collective good of mankind.24
More deeply, though, the most aggressive of the free traders believed in the power of information and the written word to further not just the cause of commerce but also, if necessary, conquest. As the editor of Matheson’s Canton Register put it, the right of the British to demand that China open up to free trade was the exact same right by which “the aborigines of North America and New Holland [were] driven from their indisputable homes by the governments of the United States and Great Britain”—namely, the right that “barbarism must vanish before civilisation, ignorance succumb to knowledge.” That principle, he declared, was not just “a law of nature” but also “the will of God!”25
The question remained of what would happen to the trading system at Canton after the East India Company was removed from the scene. Ignoring George Staunton’s warning that the Company’s role in Canton must be preserved until a new system could be agreed upon with the Chinese, the British government went ahead with creating a new position, a “chief superintendent of trade,” to take over from the Company’s select committee in representing the British citizens in Canton. (All told, there would be a committee of three superintendents, two of whom were designated to be former Company men still in Canton, but the only one who really mattered was the chief who would be sent from London.) The chief superintendent would hold an ambiguous position, far below the status of an ambassador yet more official than the president of the select committee (in that he would answer to the British government rather than the Company). So although the superintendent was supposed to represent British interests in China, he would have no plenipotentiary powers to act independently on behalf of his country. And though he was supposed to supervise the free British traders at Canton, he would have no compulsive authority over them—which also meant that he would have no power to withhold their trade from the Chinese, which was the only bargaining lever the British had ever used with success.26
William Jardine worried that the position would go to George Staunton—who, even if he opposed its creation, was still the most qualified man in Great Britain to fill it. At one point, Jardine received news that Staunton had in fact been appointed superintendent, and he wrote immediately to James Matheson (then in Bombay) to say, “We consider this very so-so news, and would have preferred someone who had never served the Company in China.”27 Jardine’s wariness of Staunton was tied up with a larger concern that the East India Company’s influence would linger on even after its monopoly had ended, especially the model it had established for patient and (as he saw it) acquiescent relations with the Chinese authorities. Nobody then alive was more directly responsible for that model than George Staunton.
To the free traders, George Staunton was the enemy. Even before his opposition to ending the monopoly he had become notorious to Jardine’s faction for allegedly sinking their December 1830 petition in which they claimed oppression at the hands of the Chinese government.28 Given Staunton’s opposition to free trade in China, his strong ties to the Company, and his longtime advocacy of a respectful, diplomatic approach to the Qing government, he was unlikely to look favorably on their smuggling concerns. Equally troubling, he was also unlikely to pursue the hard line Jardine wanted toward opening up new sites for British trade and pushing back against the power of the officials in Canton. What Jardine wanted in the new superintendent, in other words, was a free trader like himself, someone with no sympathies for the fading East India Company and its old-fashioned, overly scrupulous ways of doing things in China.
Jardine got his wish. The superintendency went in the end not to Staunton but to one William John Napier, a tall and gallant captain of the Royal Navy and veteran of the Napoleonic Wars whose specific qualifications to supervise trade in China amounted to exactly nothing. He had no experience in trade (though he sympathized, on principle, with the free traders). He also had no experience in diplomacy. And to complete the trifecta, he knew almost nothing about China prior to his departure. What he did have, though, was an excellent pedigree—he was the 9th Lord Napier, a Scottish nobleman descended from the mathematician who discovered logarithms—and he was a personal friend of King William IV, with whom he had been shipmates back in the day.29
Napier was not exactly humbled by the responsibilities of the office he sought. “The Empire of China is my own,” he wrote triumphantly in his diary upon learning that his chief rival for the position had just withdrawn from consideration (that rival being not George Staunton, as it turned out, but Henry Ellis, Lord Amherst’s cynical secretary). Napier fantasized about the power he might wield in China, which he understood (being off by an order of magnitude) to be an “enormous Empire of 40,000,000 [that] hangs only together by a spider’s web.” He contemplated what a “glorious thing” it would be to station a naval squadron along the coast, and “how easily a gun brig would raise a revolution and cause them to open their ports to the trading world.” If he could just become the chief superintendent, thought Napier, then he could be the man to break China open.30
Given Napier’s lack of qualification, and perhaps divining his less than charitable motivations in seeking the position in China, the prime minister, Earl Grey, was reluctant to give it to him. Grey dragged out the appointment process for several months, only to cave in the end under pressure from the king, who interceded forcefully on Napier’s behalf.31 Even then, after the appointment was made and Napier was preparing to depart, Earl Grey sent him a private letter to forestall what he apparently sensed (accurately) were the new super intendent’s private ambitions. Politely, asking that Napier not take it as any kind of sign of distrust, the prime minister reminded him to exercise “the most careful discretion in all your dealings with the Chinese.” Given the “jealous and suspicious character” of the Qing government and the Chinese people, Grey wrote, “Nothing must be done to shock their prejudices or to excite their fears.”
Lord Napier was expected above all to keep the peace at Canton and do nothing to harm trade relations with the Chinese government. In all of his dealings with the Chinese, Earl Grey told him, “persuasion and conciliation should be the means employed—rather than anything approaching to the tone of hostile and menacing language.” In the very worst case, should persuasion and conciliation fail him, Napier was to show “submission for a time” and wait for new instructions from home; he was forbidden on his own initiative to pursue “a vigorous enforcement of demands” no matter how “just” they might seem. Napier read that letter, even copied it into his notebook. He wrote back to Grey to say that he couldn’t agree more. There is, however, little evidence that any of it sank in.32
Napier’s instructions from Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office, meanwhile, showed a similar desi
re to keep him on a short leash. Like the prime minister, Palmerston insisted that Napier’s highest priority must be to prevent any kind of conflict with the Chinese. To that end, he forbade Napier in most cases to act on his own initiative or judgment—telling him, for example, that while it would be desirable to try to establish a line of communication with Beijing, since Napier was not an ambassador he should not actually go to Beijing himself, even if an opportunity arose, because he might “awaken the fears, or offend the prejudices” of the government. In the same vein, Palmerston asked Napier to find out if a survey could be made of the Chinese coast but added that Napier should not actually make such a survey, only write back to Palmerston to let him know whether it could be made. And even though Napier’s arrival in China would signal the advent of a new system of relations between the British and Chinese at Canton—one that had never been discussed with, let alone approved by, the Chinese government—Palmerston instructed Napier not to negotiate with the officials there. If an opportunity for negotiation should arise, said Palmerston, Napier was simply to write home and then wait for further instructions as to how to proceed. Given the distance between Canton and London, any such further instructions would take about a year to reach him.33
Napier sailed from Plymouth on February 7, 1834, on the twenty-eight-gun Andromache, accompanied by his wife, Eliza, and two of his daughters (his other four children, including two sons, remained behind with governesses and tutors). Voyages to Canton were especially grueling for women, who had to stay sequestered in their cabins most of the time and, despite being months at sea, were still expected to keep up their appearances—a typical packing list would include at least seventy-two changes of underwear, since clothes couldn’t be washed properly in salt water.34 Lady Napier and her daughters were violently seasick for the first several weeks of the voyage, while Lord Napier, long accustomed to shipboard life, spent much of his time during their five months at sea schooling himself on the situation in Canton. He had a small library in his cabin that included eleven volumes of state papers and a long manuscript memoir prepared by the East India Company on British-Chinese relations since 1600, all of which Palmerston had given him for the Canton archives.35 He also had his own copies of several recent books on China, among them an account of the Macartney mission by George Staunton’s father, Henry Ellis’s account of the Amherst mission, and various recent writings on China by Staunton himself and others.
Palmerston had made it strenuously clear to Napier that he was not an ambassador (and when Napier asked just before his departure if he could be supplied secretly with plenipotentiary powers, just in case an opportunity to meet with the emperor arose, Palmerston flatly refused). Nevertheless, it is evident from the journal Napier kept on board the Andromache that in his own mind he was nothing less than Macartney’s and Amherst’s successor. In his readings he focused intently on the failings of those two previous embassies, with an eye toward correcting them—especially the problems of Lord Amherst, who Napier thought was doomed by having too many attendants and gifts along, making his embassy “too cumbrous” to succeed.36
As for his readings, Napier was appalled that Amherst should have refused to go to the audience with Jiaqing in 1816—especially after the Duke had told him he wouldn’t have to kowtow. “The unexpected and unasked for opportunity of a private audience was lost,” he wrote, “and why? merely because the Embassador during his journey had separated himself from his Court dress and official Dispatch.” As Napier saw it, Amherst had botched his embassy through vanity over his outfit and irresponsibility in not keeping better track of his documents. He faulted him with “culpable neglect.” As for the kowtow itself, Napier agreed with Henry Ellis that it was “merely a Court ceremony” that did not imply Britain’s subservience. He thought Amherst had further bungled his mission by fussing so much over it and listening to the advice of George Staunton and the other Company men. Such a ceremony, thought Napier, “may be and ought to be performed by Foreigners seeking favour at that Court.”37 Given the hoped-for opportunity, he planned to do things differently. (And it is worth noting here that, as counterintuitive as it might seem, those British who disdained China the most, such as Napier or Ellis, were generally the ones most in favor of performing the kowtow. By contrast, those who tried hardest to avoid it, like George Staunton, and Macartney before him, tended to be the ones with the greatest respect for the country.)
Napier’s free-trade sympathies were already in place before he left Britain, and he read nothing on the way to China to improve his opinion of the East India Company. Indeed, there were only two figures in the entire history of British-Chinese relations he considered worthy of admiration. The first was Captain Weddell, the one who had blasted his way past the Tiger’s Mouth forts in 1637 to open British trade at Canton for the first time. The second, of a piece with the first, was Captain Maxwell of the Alceste, who in 1816 had opened fire on those very same forts during the Amherst mission. In every other crisis, where British commanders or Company representatives had backed away from conflict with the Chinese, Napier judged that they had lost ground. As a naval captain himself it is perhaps natural that he would have sympathized with Weddell and Maxwell, but in any case the conclusion to which they led him was a powerful one. “Every act of Violence on our part,” he jotted in his notebook, “has been productive of instant redress and other beneficial results.”38
Those were issues of the past, though, and as Napier looked toward Britain’s future in China he had two guides in his library: George Staunton, the voice of caution, on the one hand, and—very far away on the other hand—Hugh Hamilton Lindsay and his recently published account of the Lord Amherst’s secret voyage. As for Staunton, Napier despised him. Napier’s position of superintendent only existed because the East India Company’s monopoly had been revoked, and loyalty to the principles of his appointment aside, he believed the Company had long set a feeble example for British dealings with China. The Company directors were jealous of their trade and “thought of nothing more than pocketting their Dividends,” he wrote, even as they had to pay high salaries to their agents in Canton “as a set off to the indignities they daily suffered.” In other words, they cared nothing about honor and everything about money. George Staunton was their figurehead and their most prominent public supporter, and so Napier (in a fact that would gratify Jardine) did not trust him.
After reading through several of Staunton’s shorter writings that warned against the chaos that might be unleashed by free British trade in China, Napier dismissed them out of hand and commented that “it is clear that Sir George has only viewed the question as a favourite Servant of the Company might have been expected to have done. It is little more than a very unfortunate piece of special pleading in behalf of the old interests.” He questioned Staunton’s diplomatic legacy, especially his long-standing opposition to the kowtow (“why not conform to the rules of the Court?” Napier wondered). As for the speech in Parliament in 1833 in which Staunton was cut off while warning about the necessity of a gradual transition from monopoly to free trade in Canton, Napier judged it to be “nothing but the exuding of a perverse spirit.” He added, somewhat cruelly, “It is not surprising that he did not ‘get a hearing’ in the House.” All told, the new superintendent’s opinion of George Staunton boiled down to, in his own words, that “Sir George may be deeply versed in Chinese literature, but in politics he is a Driveller.”39
Napier was drawn instead to the other side, and nothing in his readings excited him more than Lindsay’s account of the voyage of the Lord Amherst, with its claims that the Chinese people were oppressed by an alien dynasty, that they liked foreigners, and that they wanted free trade. The reports from Lindsay and Gutzlaff further convinced Napier that his fantasy of a blockading squadron off the coast of China was all that would be needed to force the Qing government to open every port in China to British trade—which, Lindsay argued, had been the natural state of things before Qianlong confined Western commerc
e to Canton in 1760. “I see no reason,” Napier wrote after mulling over Lindsay’s account, “why we should not use all means in our power to oblige and coerce that intrusive government to restore the old order of affairs, to respect the feelings and wishes of their conquered people, and to conduct themselves towards other nations on the principles of reciprocity as acknowledged by all civilised states.”
If the British people wished it, Napier believed, it would be easy enough to capture the Tiger’s Mouth forts and “destroy every battery and gunboat along the coast.” The navy could at the same time mount a propaganda campaign like Lindsay’s—to distribute pamphlets along the Chinese coast “assuring the people that we wage no war against them or their property.” The Chinese people would flock to the side of the British, who (as Lindsay promised) shared their desire for free trade, and together the British and the Chinese people would turn against their common enemy, the Manchus who ruled the Qing dynasty. It would then be a simple matter, imagined Lord Napier in one of the most baldly imperialistic proposals any Briton had ever made about China, “to expel the Intruder beyond the Wall and restore the Chinese dynasty on our own terms.” A new dynasty would reign in Beijing, put on the throne with British aid and answerable to British power behind the scenes. It would be a first step toward turning China into another India.
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