Unfortunately for Napier, the ships of war caused less of a stir than he had hoped. They did indeed force the passage of the Tiger’s Mouth, but due to adverse winds they got bogged down and were caught up in a long and stubborn exchange of cannon fire with the forts. In the heaviest fighting yet between Chinese and British forces, Napier’s two frigates unloaded more than seven hundred rounds of shot into the Chinese defenses.58 Two British sailors were killed and several more wounded before the forts were hammered into silence. But by the time the Andromache and Imogene finally dragged themselves into the anchorage at Whampoa, delayed further as Napier dithered over what orders to give them, Chinese forces had sunk heavy obstacles upriver to block their further progress toward Canton. So, despite the hostilities, the ships of war never got close enough to Canton to be visible from the factory compound and they failed to strike the awe and panic Napier intended.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the most damning problem for Napier was that the British merchants refused to follow his lead. They were of a dozen different minds as to how he should act, but mostly all they cared about was getting their trade reopened. Jardine and Matheson supported Napier’s taking a hard line, but others did not, asking him instead to please give up and return to Macao, to obey the governor-general’s orders so the ban on trade would be lifted. Some of them questioned whether Napier really had any authority at all, and said that if the Chinese would not recognize the chief superintendent then his mission had no purpose. They started sending him petitions to complain of the financial losses he was causing them.59 Meanwhile, Governor-General Lu Kun made it clear that he had no issues with the merchants themselves—Napier alone was the reason why trade had been shut down, and normal commerce would resume if he left. Napier felt undermined by his own people. The merchants from Liverpool, Glasgow, and London, he complained to Palmerston, “care not one straw about the dignity of the Crown or the presence of a Superintendent.”60 Though Napier had assumed that the British free traders would all rally to him as their protector and champion, in the end they did not. Such was the nature of freedom.61
Embarrassed by the failure of his countrymen to fall into line behind him, Napier also felt desperately vulnerable inside the huge, empty factory building, out of reach of his gunboats and eating salt provisions from storage since the Chinese soldiers outside wouldn’t let any food past his gate. He knew that he would bear the consequences if British trade suffered serious harm from his personal actions. He was also, coincidentally, starting to feel an illness of some kind coming on. So finally he backed down. The governor-general had called his bluff; Napier had no power at all. On September 21, he sent word to his two gunboats that their services were no longer needed. Then he left Canton, his spirit broken. Trade resumed as normal a few days later. Britain’s first chief superintendent of trade, the proud veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and personal friend of King William had, as he saw it, been brought low by the likes of Houqua and the “presumptuous savage” Lu Kun. After a slow and brutally uncomfortable five-day trip down from Canton with unexplained delays under heavy Chinese military escort, Napier arrived pale and feverish at Macao on September 26. Two weeks later he was dead.
CHAPTER 11
Means of Solution
Conditions in China were getting worse under Daoguang’s reign. By the time he took the throne, and to some degree beginning even with his father, Jiaqing, it becomes easier to speak of the empire each sovereign inherited rather than what he created or built. They, and the emperors and regents to follow, would have their successes—the dynasty would, after all, survive into the early twentieth century—but rarely did they leave China in a more solid position than they had found it. By the early nineteenth century, an inexorable process of decline was setting in, the slow setting of a sun that had reached its zenith under Qianlong in the late 1700s. Jiaqing had done his best, making strong efforts to rein in the corruption of the military and suppress the White Lotus and other rebellions. But under the rule of his son Daoguang, new problems would plague the empire even as old ones kept coming back in different forms.
Patronage, bribery, and embezzlement were the accepted norm among civil officials, especially in the lower orders. Population pressures on the land continued unabated, and Han Chinese settlers seeking an escape from the crowding continued to move into mountainous regions of the empire that had long been home to indigenous peoples, sparking incidents of ethnic violence. A breakdown of trust between the government and peasants worsened. The military was weakened by Jiaqing’s cost-cutting measures after the White Lotus campaigns. Through the 1830s, internal rebellions erupted in different parts of the empire with regularity, every year or two—some led by religious sects similar to the White Lotus, others by rebel factions bonded together by regional or ethnic ties. The many divisions that ran naturally through a vast and diverse multiethnic empire were turning more frequently and more visibly into fractures.
Opium wove its way right through the tattering fabric of this restive society, the single most visible symbol of the Chinese government’s inability to control its people. In spite of Daoguang’s strong desire to control the drug, coastal enforcements on smuggling had failed so completely that by the later 1830s when a foreign ship materialized near the coast it would find not naval patrols but thousands of buyers standing along the shore and whistling to it in hopes that it would drop anchor and sell to them.1 A major north–south land transport route for opium through Hunan province formed the locus of a series of uprisings that took place in central China in 1836, and imperial troops transferred inland to pacify them turned out to be such heavy users of opium themselves that they could barely fight. Ironically, they had acquired their drug habits in the course of their previous mission, which was to police the smugglers on the coast near Canton.2
China’s rising domestic unrest caught the attention of foreigners in Canton, who worried about damage to tea and silk production from the disturbances in the interior. However, some of them also sensed opportunity in the ones that took place on China’s periphery. In 1833, an explosive revolt of aborigines on Taiwan threatened Qing imperial control of the island for several months, in the midst of which it was announced in Britain’s parliament that Taiwan had “declared its independence of the Chinese.”3 Some foreigners had already begun touting Taiwan as a potential British colony, a base from which they could conduct their trade with China free from the restrictions of Canton. They argued that, morally speaking, to take control of Taiwan would be nothing like trying to seize territory on the Chinese mainland, because Taiwan had been a Dutch possession prior to its conquest by Qianlong’s grandfather Kangxi, so they judged it to be merely a colony of the Qing Empire rather than essential Chinese territory. According to one Canton English-language newspaper, the Taiwanese were a conquered people, “vassals of China; not willingly, but in consequence of bloody wars,” and so even foreigners who opposed aggression toward China shouldn’t object to the British taking control of the island, which the paper judged would be praiseworthy even if only for the sake of “ridding its people of the tyranny of the Chinese.”4
While outbreaks of rebellion and interethnic violence were urgent threats to the government, they were still localized. More widespread by far, and therefore more insidious, were growing problems in the Chinese economy. By the mid-1830s, Daoguang’s empire was cascading into depression. Grain prices deflated, driving down farming incomes. Unemployment rose and the government’s already insufficient tax revenues declined. It became prohibitively expensive to build and maintain public works like flood-control dikes properly, which led to shoddy construction and neglected maintenance, giving way in turn to destructive episodes of flooding. To compound the failings of human government, nature sent China wildly unpredictable rains during several of those years, gutting agricultural productivity and afflicting parts of the empire with episodes of famine.5
There was nothing the government could do about the weather, but the root cause of the economic turm
oil in the 1830s, and the problem from which many of the others grew, was a human one: China’s monetary system had gone haywire. It was mainly a problem of currency, of which the Qing dynasty had two primary forms: copper for small transactions and silver for large ones. Copper came in minted coins (with holes through the middle so they could be strung on a loop for convenience), while domestic silver—nearly pure and known in English as “sycee”—was unminted, traded by weight in units of measurement called taels that were just under an ounce. In normal times, a tael of silver was worth a thousand copper coins, and, value for value, the excessive difficulty of moving large amounts of copper between provinces meant that silver was the medium through which all long-distance trade was conducted within the empire. Silver was also, significantly, the basis on which tax quotas were assessed. By contrast, copper was the medium of the rural marketplace and menial wages.6 Nearly all of the income and savings of the lower classes of China—farmers, hired laborers, craftspeople—were in copper coins.
The crisis was that the value of silver had begun to rise sharply, and as it rose the exchange rate between silver and copper skewed out of control. From the ideal rate of 1,000 copper coins per tael of silver in the eighteenth century (even less at times, which was a boon for peasants since it meant their copper money was worth more), it had risen to 1,200 by the time Daoguang came to the throne. By 1830 it reached 1,365 copper coins per tael of silver and showed no signs of stopping.7 Since taxes were assessed in a fixed amount of silver, which had to be purchased with copper currency, this meant that by the early 1830s the peasants of China had suffered a nearly 40 percent increase in their effective tax burdens for reasons none fully understood. And as with nearly every problem in the empire, the corruption of officials made a bad situation even worse, as tax collectors commonly charged even higher rates of exchange so they could pocket the proceeds. By the late 1830s, some regions were reporting copper–silver exchange rates as high as 1,600 to 1, with tax collectors independently demanding as much as 2,000 copper coins per tael of silver owed.8 This dramatic decline in the worth of copper currency was disastrous for the general population, piling economic hardship on the poor who could scarcely bear it and sparking widespread tax protests that layered on top of all the other sources of dissent against the government. But although the emperor could occasionally grant tax amnesties to regions afflicted by floods or drought, the government quite desperately needed every tael of revenue it could get and so the exactions continued.
According to some Chinese scholars, in particular the admirers of Bao Shichen, the fundamental culprit was obvious: it was all the fault of foreign trade. As they saw it, the situation was just as Bao had predicted back in 1820 when he warned that China’s silver would eventually disappear into the hands of foreign merchants. As the value of silver rose through the 1830s, it was an easy case to make that the metal was expensive because it was becoming scarce, and it was becoming scarce because it was pouring out of the country through the commerce with foreigners—especially the foreign drug wholesalers. By that line of reasoning, the economic miseries of a peasant in Jiangsu province, a thousand miles from the center of Western commerce in Canton, could nevertheless still be blamed on the foreign ships that anchored at Lintin and Whampoa and plied their secret courses up and down the Chinese coast.
They were partially correct. Payments to foreign opium dealers were indeed made largely in sycee silver, which was illegal to export. So in those transactions, domestic Chinese silver passed into the hands of foreigners like Jardine and Matheson. However, foreigners were also buying huge amounts of tea and other commodities from the Hong merchants in Canton, so most of that silver should have been able to flow right back into China via the aboveboard trade. The catch, though, was that the Hong merchants refused to take sycee silver as payment for tea or silk. Since it was illegal to export sycee in the first place, even to receive it back from a foreigner would implicate the Chinese merchant with the taint of illegality. The Hong merchants thus would only take silver in the form of Spanish dollars, the sole legal currency for use in China’s foreign trade (insofar as they originated outside the country). The odd cohabitation of legal and illegal commerce at Canton thus meant that bulk sycee silver could come out of China (illegally) but it had no way to go back in. As supplies of it piled up uselessly in the hands of country traders, the East India Company—aided by Jardine and Matheson—finally began shipping it back to London, where it could simply be melted down and sold as bullion, with the proceeds remitted to the opium traders’ accounts in India.9
Even with that outflow of sycee silver, however, the inflow of Spanish dollars to purchase tea and silk at Canton should have been able to maintain a relatively steady overall silver supply in China (and in fact, since the late eighteenth century Spanish dollars had been preferred even over native sycee in some of China’s most important domestic markets).10 But on that count, a range of forces far beyond China’s borders came into play. First, it had been American merchants who brought most of the silver to China in the early nineteenth century (fully one-third of Mexico’s entire silver output between 1805 and 1834 was carried to China by Americans). But a shift in U.S. government monetary policy in 1834 made silver more expensive for American merchants, so they switched abruptly to using bills of exchange—which were acceptable to the Hong merchants but resulted in a decline in the amount of tangible silver entering the country from abroad. With the drop in American imports, China, which for centuries had been the world’s largest net importer of silver, unexpectedly turned into an exporter of the metal.11
In the even bigger picture, though, what the Chinese scholars who blamed foreign trade and opium for the scarcity of silver in China did not realize was that it wasn’t just a Chinese problem: by the 1820s, silver was becoming scarce everywhere. Most of the world’s supply at this time had come from mines in Spanish Mexico and Peru (thus the importance of the Spanish dollar), but national revolutions in Latin America that began in the 1810s shut down those mines and choked off the world’s largest fonts of the precious metal. Global production of silver declined by nearly half during the 1810s—the same time its value began to creep upward in China—and it continued to decline during the decade that followed. The ramping up of the opium trade in 1820s China thus coincided fatefully with the onset of a global slump in silver output that would last for the next thirty years.12
Regardless of where the specific blame lay, it was a devastating confluence of economic forces for China: the loss of sycee through the opium smuggling trade, the global scarcity of silver after the Latin American revolutions, and the drying up of American silver imports into China together helped cause a catastrophic decline in the empire’s supply of the metal. And it was a vicious cycle, for as silver became more valuable in China, wealthy families and businessmen would hoard it, removing even more from circulation and making the problem worse.
Given that most of these factors were beyond the ken of China’s scholars and government officials, by the mid-1830s a consensus was emerging that the economic crisis was primarily, if not entirely, the fault of illegal foreign trade. And while the moral effects of opium smoking had long been disparaged by the emperor (if ignored by the people and most officials), it was becoming increasingly clear that the economic effects of the drug trade might be far more threatening to public order than anything having to do with public health or moral virtue. Even peasants who did not use or deal in opium, even those who lived hundreds of miles from the foreign trade on the coast, suffered the economic distress of their copper money plummeting in value. That distress could provide the fuel for new rebellions, even a revolution, and so the silver crisis—which was to say the opium crisis—finally emerged as the single most urgent problem for Daoguang’s government.
The question remained of how to solve it. Shutting down foreign trade, as Bao Shichen had once recommended, was clearly unrealistic (even Bao himself no longer supported this position). As Cheng Hanzhang and others had wa
rned, even if the Qing navy could police the entire coast—which it couldn’t—closing down foreign trade entirely would likely provoke a war with Great Britain that China had no capacity to fight. Such warnings were confirmed by the relative ease with which Napier’s two gunships had forced their way past the Tiger’s Mouth forts in 1834, bringing home in shocking fashion the unpreparedness of Chinese forces to hold off Britain’s ships of war, for those forts were supposed to be the strongest point of defense on China’s southern coast. Governor-General Lu Kun tried to minimize the scale of the defeat in his reports, but Daoguang responded with a contemptuous edict ordering the degradation of the commander who led the defense of the Tiger’s Mouth against Napier’s ships. He also criticized Lu Kun for having “sacrificed the prestige of our nation and failed in the duties of his position,” but allowed him to continue as governor-general under strict warning not to fail again.13
It was clear that military force was not an option for keeping the British under control. The only measure that had ever worked with them—and, importantly, it had worked yet again when Lu Kun stood his ground against Napier—was the threat of withholding trade. That threat, however, applied only to the commerce in tea and silk at Canton; the opium trade at Lintin and along the coast was so far outside the government’s control that withholding it from the British was simply not an option. Of course, if the main problem was simply the loss of sycee silver, the government could have attacked it from the Chinese side by cracking down harder on domestic traffickers who sent silver out of the country—but many provincial officials were reluctant to try harder to suppress those domestic criminal networks out of fear that they would just provoke further incidents of mass local violence like the uprisings the dynasty could already barely contain.
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