The Andromache arrived at Macao on July 16, 1834, in the midst of a brutal heat wave in which daily temperatures were topping ninety degrees in the shade.40 Lord Napier disembarked, dressed proudly in his full naval captain’s uniform in spite of the heat. It was just as the king had asked of him. Robert Morrison was there to greet Napier and his family at the Chinese customs house—nervously, for Morrison knew that Napier’s arrival signaled the end of the Company’s factory and therefore the end of his job of twenty-five years (for which the Company did not intend to give him a pension). Morrison assisted one of Napier’s daughters in getting off the boat, and was flattered when Lady Napier mentioned that she knew his name already by reputation. That afternoon, Lord Napier assembled the factory members in Macao and read his commission aloud. To Morrison’s relief, Napier asked him to serve as his official Chinese secretary—a step up from Morrison’s position for the East India Company, for now he would work for the British government itself. He accepted eagerly, and Napier asked him to get rid of his preacher’s gown and find a vice consul’s uniform to wear instead.41
Napier tended to interpret his instructions as he saw fit, but on one minor point he chose to follow them to the letter: Palmerston had told him that when he got to China he should go straight to Canton and announce himself directly to the Chinese authorities. It was an odd request, in that it contradicted the long-standing practice by which foreigners would wait in Macao for permission from the authorities to proceed to Canton, and then would communicate with the officials of the government only indirectly, through the medium of the Hong merchants. The wording of that passage in the instructions reflected only Palmerston’s ignorance of how things worked at Canton, not any particular intent, but Napier took it perfectly literally.42 Indeed, he was quite happy to ignore past practice because, as he saw it, he had been sent by the king (and imagined himself practically an ambassador), so he should have every right to travel where he wished, when he wished, and to address the officials of the Qing government as an equal.
Following those defective instructions, on July 23 Napier sailed onward to Canton with Morrison in tow, without asking for permission. They had to leave the Andromache at anchor below the Tiger’s Mouth forts—in the “outer waters,” as they were known—because foreign ships of war were not allowed past the forts into the Pearl River. They then proceeded the rest of the way up to Canton in a small cutter and arrived early in the morning of July 25. At the sweltering factory compound in Canton, Napier again read his commission aloud to an assemblage of British traders and gave a copy to the editor of the Canton Register for publication in his newspaper. Then he put Morrison to work composing a letter in Chinese to announce his arrival directly to the governor-general—again, following the arbitrary wording of his instructions to the letter.43
The governor-general, whose name was Lu Kun, would not accept the letter. Since Napier had come to Canton unannounced, without applying for a permit, Lu Kun had no idea what his business was, only that he had arrived in Macao on a warship and claimed to be in charge of British trade. The British at Canton had always had a taipan, a “chief merchant,” the president of the select committee. And the taipans had, with rare exception, communicated only via the Hong merchants. This had been the practice for generations. Indeed, when Lu Kun’s predecessor first learned that the East India Company’s monopoly might come to an end, he was sufficiently concerned about disorder that he had the Hong merchants tell the British traders they must send home and have their government appoint a new taipan to represent them.44 Napier, however, insisted that he was not a taipan—not some lowly merchant. He wanted to be treated differently. But he still had no permission to be there.
Lu Kun understood that Napier’s arrival meant that the East India Company’s role was at an end and a new set of regulations for trade were going to be needed. But he did not have the authority to establish any such regulations himself, without orders from the emperor. So he asked Houqua to meet with Napier, sound out his business, and report back so he could send a memorial (an official government dispatch) to Daoguang asking how trade should be handled going forward. Accordingly, on July 26 Houqua and a colleague visited Napier and explained the governor-general’s request that he communicate through them as the British taipans had done in the past. But Napier brushed them off, saying that he didn’t need their help. He said he preferred to communicate directly with the governor-general “in the manner befitting His Majesty’s Commission and the honour of the British nation.”45 Ignoring Houqua, Napier then sent a delegation of British merchants through the suburbs to the Canton city gate to present his letter for delivery to Lu Kun.
Nobody would take it. After an hour of the British delegates standing outside the gate in the wilting heat while a succession of officials came and went, all of them refusing to accept Napier’s message for delivery, Houqua arrived. He pleaded with them to go through himself instead. Following Napier’s directions, they gave him the cold shoulder and kept waiting. After a while another official came along and, like the others, refused the letter. Houqua asked if he could just carry it in for them (an offer which Napier later described to Palmerston as “an insidious attempt” to circumvent his authority). Again they ignored him. After several more hours of waiting and chasing around fecklessly after other officials who happened to pass through the gate, the delegation gave up and returned back through the narrow streets of the suburb to the factory compound with Napier’s Chinese letter undelivered.
The next day, Houqua came again to visit Napier (who had by this time taken an intense dislike to the elderly Hong merchant, imagining him full of “cunning and duplicity”). Trying to smooth the waters, Houqua suggested that Napier could perhaps just change the address on his message to the governor-general from “letter,” which implied equality, to “petition,” implying Napier’s supplicant status. Napier was aghast. Houqua also shared some documents with Robert Morrison in which it turned out that a mischievous secretary somewhere along the line had given Napier a Chinese name that sounded vaguely like “Napier” but whose literal meaning, Morrison explained delicately, was “Laboriously Vile.” Napier was even more aghast.46
And that was only part of it. Since Lu Kun did not know what title to use for Napier—being that he insisted he wasn’t a taipan—he instead referred to the new chief superintendent as an yimu, a term meaning “headman” that was used for tribal chiefs and the like. In one of the more bizarre mistranslations of the time, someone rendered the characters for yimu into English literally, and out of context, as “Barbarian Eye.” The title was inexplicable, but so, as the British thought, were many things about the Chinese. So nobody questioned it at the time (or later, except for George Staunton, who insisted that the term, properly understood, was actually a perfectly acceptable Chinese rendering of “Foreign Superintendent”).47 In any case, the bizarre translation turned what was at most a mildly derogatory term into something almost menacingly silly. The translated documents sent back to London were full of it, so Palmerston could sit down at his desk at the Foreign Office and puzzle over such constructions as “an English ship of war brought to Canton a Barbarian Eye,” and “the said Barbarian Eye did not obey the old regulations.” He could read the governor-general’s accusation that “the said Barbarian Eye has not at all told plainly what are the matters he has come to attend to,” and, when things got out of hand, that “the whole wrong lies on the Barbarian Eye.”48
Napier’s greatest error was that he did not understand that he was not dealing with “China” but rather with one individual official—a powerful one, the governor-general, but still one who was subject to losing his position if he should disappoint the emperor. It didn’t matter what Lu Kun felt personally about how Napier communicated with him. What Lu Kun cared about was following established protocol and not inadvertently setting some new precedent, creating expectations in the British that might cause trouble down the road. He had no authority to negotiate a new system of communicat
ion or trade, and would do so at the peril of his career. Any of the Company veterans who remained in Canton could have explained to Napier that this was an impossible situation (and if Staunton were the superintendent, this is the point at which he would have retreated to Macao—had he even gone so far as Napier in the first place). But Napier did not trust the Company and he did not want the advice of anyone connected to it.
As it happened, the closest relationships Napier built among the British population in Canton were with the men most likely to advise against peaceful acquiescence to the demands of the Chinese government: namely, his fellow Scots Jardine and Matheson. With Jardine especially, who hailed from the same county in Scotland as he did, Napier struck up a quick friendship. Along with the other free traders in their camp (known to others in Canton as the “Scots faction”), Jardine and Matheson provided a social center for Napier in his new home, “a regular Scots party,” as he described it. In a personal letter on August 6, he reminisced about how he “dined with Jardine—drank tea by starlight on a terrace on top of the house and had a long crack about Dumfriesshire.” Jardine, he bragged, was “the first merchant here and said to be worth thousands and perhaps millions.”49 Writing home to Charles Grant, the president of the Board of Control, Napier insisted he kept his own counsel and was not influenced by any of the factions within the Canton British community, but he did confess that his views on China and trade matched so well with those of the prominent Scottish trader that it might appear he had “fallen into the hands of Jardine.”50
Nearly lost in the middle of Napier’s diplomatic tangle was that on August 1, suffering from an illness that had been bothering him since before the superintendent’s arrival, Robert Morrison died at only fifty-two years old. Though in many ways Morrison had been a failure as a missionary per se, having converted no more than a dozen Chinese to Christianity after nearly thirty years of labor, he would be remembered as a larger-than-life figure: the pioneer of China missions, the one who first opened the gates for the masses of Protestants who would flock to China in the century to come. He left a troubling legacy, however, in the disconcerting marriage of convenience that made it possible for him to remain at Canton. With his language work he had made himself useful in a way that legions who came after him would repeat—indeed, the Protestant missionaries in China would always be deeply tied to the forces of trade and the state; they would be the interpreters, the enablers, the explorers. Morrison had lived a tenuous balance between his religious work and his service to the Company’s trade (and in the end, to the government). But where others saw moral conflict, he plowed his way through and made his compromises and hoped always for the best. In some ways, though, it was better for him that he did not live to see what was to come.
By August 9, Napier was still unable to get his letter delivered to the governor-general and his nerves were starting to fray. He wrote to Palmerston, complaining of confusion over his instructions from home and expressing frustration over the constant demands that he leave Canton and return to Macao. His anger boiled over as he recounted an attempt by Houqua and some other Hong merchants to convene a general meeting where he was certain they would try to turn the British traders against him. He bragged of his defiance in staying put: his mere presence at Canton, he told Palmerston, was actually a sign of strength. There were reportedly forty thousand Chinese troops on garrison duty in the city who could toss him out anytime the governor-general wanted, yet they had not, which he attributed not to Lu Kun’s forbearance but to the “imbecility of the Government.”51
Napier did not suffer his humiliation easily, and his reports—a one-way conversation with Palmerston, given how long it would take for any response to get back to him—veered ever more dizzily away from the spirit of his instructions. On August 14, he declared to the foreign secretary that in dealing with a country like China, “His Majesty’s Government [should not] be ruled by the ordinary forms prescribed among civilized people.” Governor-General Lu Kun was a “presumptuous savage,” he wrote. China’s dynastic rulers weren’t even Chinese, he told Palmerston, they were alien Manchus, and the Daoguang emperor himself was nothing more than an “intruder” in the country. The real people of China—that is, the Han Chinese, at least those who weren’t government officials—all wanted British trade (of this, Lindsay and the ever-hopeful free traders had convinced him); it was just their illegitimate government that was holding them back. The Manchus may have been fierce and strong once upon a time, wrote Napier, but now, after generations of rule, they were “a wretched people, inconceivably degraded, unfit for action or exertion.”52
What it all came down to, Napier told Palmerston, was that the British would be best off using their military power to force the Manchu government to open China’s ports once and for all. Britain’s government should tell the Daoguang emperor, “Adopt this, or abide the consequences.” Napier admitted that those consequences might include “the horrors of a bloody war against a defenceless people,” but if it came to that, he was certain that it could be pulled off without any loss of British life (of this, again, the free traders and Lindsay had convinced him)—“and,” he insisted with the utmost confidence, “we have justice on our side.” After less than three weeks in Canton as the new superintendent charged with maintaining a peaceful trading relationship, Napier had already made up his mind that what China really needed was a war.
For all of Napier’s complaints about Chinese obstinacy, however, whenever Lu Kun made any show of compromise Napier gloated as if in triumph. On August 22, he learned from Houqua that the governor-general was sending three high-ranking prefectural officials to see him the next day, a concession Napier reported to Palmerston as “a strong instance of their vacillation, or want of steady purpose and determination.”53 But then the officials showed up late, and Napier was back to feeling insulted. He chastised them, through Morrison’s son John Robert, that whereas in the past they had only dealt with the employees of a private merchant company, they were now dealing instead with “the officers appointed by His Britannic Majesty,” who were “by no means inclined to submit to such indignities” as being made to wait for meetings to start. When they asked, on behalf of the governor-general, when he was planning to return to Macao, he responded stiffly that it would be decided “entirely according to his own convenience.” After a tense and inconclusive meeting, one of the officials confided to him that it would be “very unpleasant were the two nations to come to a rupture.” Bristling, Napier replied that it wouldn’t necessarily be so unpleasant for the British.
Giving up on his government channels, and faced with a threat that trade would be suspended if he did not leave, Napier took his case to the people. Certain that all of the shopkeepers in Canton were rooting for him because they wanted free trade, he got Morrison’s son to draft up a Chinese poster, which was lithographed and plastered all over the street corners near the factory compound on August 26. In the poster, Napier declared that he had been insulted and humiliated by the corrupt governor-general Lu Kun, whose “ignorance and obstinacy” were allowing the Hong merchants to shut down Britain’s trade at Canton. Napier tried to turn the local Cantonese against the officials who governed them: “Thousands of industrious Chinese who live by the European trade must suffer ruin and discomfort through the perversity of their Government,” he wrote. He promised that the only thing his people wanted was “to trade with all China, on principles of mutual benefit,” and that the British would never rest until they reached that goal. The Qing governor-general would “find it as easy to stop the current of the Canton river, as to carry into effect the insane determination” of shutting down trade.54
It is unclear what Napier thought his poster would accomplish (a popular uprising of Chinese tailors and tea porters, apparently), but a propaganda battle in Chinese waged on the walls of Canton was not conducive to ending in his favor. The next day, another poster went up, this one from the Chinese authorities. “A lawless foreign slave, Napier, has iss
ued a notice,” it began. “We know not how such a dog barbarian of an outside nation as you, can have the audacious presumption to call yourself Superintendent.” The tone went downhill from there, suggesting along the way that Napier’s head should be cut off and displayed on a stake.
On the evening of September 4, Lord Napier was in the middle of dinner with five guests in the cavernous, nearly empty dining hall of the British factory when all of the servants in the complex rushed into the room at once to warn him that armed men had appeared at the front gate. Rising from the table with his guests, he trotted downstairs to find that Chinese soldiers had surrounded the building and a large crowd of onlookers was congregating in the plaza in front. An official was nailing an edict from the governor-general to the factory wall, announcing the official shutdown of trade and ordering all Chinese employees to vacate the British factory immediately. The large building quickly emptied of its servants, porters, and guards, leaving Lord Napier and his handful of companions all alone inside its echoing shell. Someone said the crowd was going to burn the factory down that night.55
So Napier called in the gunboats. He had two at his disposal, the Andromache and another called the Imogene, both sixth-rate Royal Navy frigates with fifty-four guns between them. Judging the crisis sufficiently extraordinary to defy his instructions from Palmerston and Grey to prevent British ships of war from entering the inner waters, Napier ordered them to force the passage of the Tiger’s Mouth forts—whatever the resistance—and take up positions in Whampoa “for the more efficient protection of British subjects and their property.” No longer the successor to Macartney and Amherst, he would now carry forth the legacy of Captains Weddell and Maxwell. After sending his instructions to the ships, he addressed a letter to the governor-general and Hong merchants declaring that they had “opened the preliminaries of war.” Referring to his good friend King William IV, Napier warned that “His Imperial Majesty will not permit such folly, wickedness, and cruelty as [you] have been guilty of, since my arrival here, to go unpunished.”56 (Actually, Napier had no way to know just how wrong he was about that; the British government’s response to his call for a war against China—which would not reach Canton until far too late—told him sharply to follow his instructions and behave. As the foreign secretary chided him, “It is not by force and violence that His Majesty intends to establish a commercial intercourse between his subjects and China.”)57
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