Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  As for solutions, Lu Kun reported on the sad state of military affairs to Daoguang in early November 1834, in a quiet moment after Napier had removed his war ships from Canton and returned to Macao (though before Lu Kun knew of the superintendent’s death). It appeared that the tensions with the British had been settled, so the governor-general reflected on the bigger picture. “What the English rely on is nothing more than their ships,” he told the emperor. “Those ships are large and strong and they can carry a great number of cannons. But our own naval vessels must be able to patrol in shallow coastal waterways so they cannot be as large as those of the foreigners.”14 Lu Kun worried that Chinese naval forces were unable to police foreign opium vessels—if the forces from one province drove one off, it would just sail out to sea and then return to another province to resume its selling. He worried especially that the British smugglers were becoming too familiar with the topography of China’s coastline and could easily find their way around the ports and islands. “This is very wrong,” he wrote.

  He was tentative in his recommendations, though, mainly forwarding without endorsement various suggestions he heard around him in Canton. One idea was to open more ports. “Some say we should go back to the old regulations and let them trade at Fujian again,” he wrote, “levying taxes and exchanging only goods for goods.” In other words, the emperor could revert to the system in place before James Flint, before Qianlong restricted the British to Canton. Lu Kun presented that suggestion only secondhand, distancing himself from it in case it should displease the emperor. But there was another, even more radical idea floating around Canton, which Lu Kun also mentioned in passing, in just as noncommittal a way as the first. “Some others,” he wrote, “say we should relax the ban on growing poppies.”

  Indeed, the idea had been gaining traction in certain academic and official circles in Canton that the most effective solution to the smuggling crisis would be for China to legalize opium. And despite his hesitancy in bringing it up to the emperor, Lu Kun was in favor of that policy.15 The “presumptuous savage,” as Napier had called him, was in fact a remarkably pragmatic and flexible administrator. He had successfully led the suppression of multiple internal rebellions and had earned his high position at Canton through skill and accomplishment. Far from being some kind of unthinking automaton, even as he was embroiled in his diplomatic head-to-head with Napier in 1834 he was already being won over to the sensibility of a new policy that would completely upend the measures Daoguang had pursued for his entire reign.

  The specific argument that got Lu Kun’s attention was an essay by a scholar named Wu Lanxiu who directed one of Canton’s Confucian academies. In that essay, titled “The Alleviation of Suffering,” Wu Lanxiu argued that to shut down foreign trade in order to stem the flow of silver would cause far worse problems for China than it would solve. “The countries of the Western seas have been sending their ships here to trade for over a thousand years,” he wrote, “and westerners have lived in Macao for more than two centuries. The only ones that sell opium are the English. So should we cut off trade just with Great Britain? Or should we cut off trade with all of the Western countries?”16 Cutting off trade with Britain alone would not solve the problem, he went on (presumably because other countries would step in to take their place). But given how many Chinese people were involved directly or indirectly with the legal foreign trade, if the government were to shut it down the blow to the domestic economy would be terrible. “Tens of thousands of our people who live along the southeastern coast will suddenly lose their jobs,” he wrote. “They would have no means of making a living, and at best they would wind up banding together as criminals and pirates. At worst, they could start a rebellion. This is how major trouble in the southeast could begin.” The economy of southeast China was, as he saw it, far more dependent on Western trade than critics nearer the capital imagined.

  The solution, Wu Lanxiu argued, lay not in changing how China dealt with foreigners but in changing how it dealt with opium. He argued that the harsher the government’s laws against the drug had become, the more counterproductive they had proven to be. “It’s not as if the laws are not already strict, or the punishments not severe,” he wrote, “yet the bad practices continue as before. Why? Because corrupt government staff use the laws to enrich themselves. The stricter the laws, the larger the bribes.” There was, he believed, no realistic way under the imperial bureaucracy as it then existed to suppress opium by force of law—which suggested that the government’s long-term obsession with punishment was misguided. “To an individual it may seem like opium is a major problem while silver is a small one,” he wrote. “But from the perspective of the empire as a whole, it is opium that is minor. Silver is the major problem.”

  Wu Lanxiu argued that for the sake of ending the silver drain and rebalancing China’s economy, the opium trade should be brought back into the open and treated like the commerce in any other commodity. “If you look at the old regulations, opium was taxed as a medicine,” he wrote. “Why not order the foreign traders to pay this tax as before? Then they can exchange their opium directly with the Hong merchants for tea.” If the transactions for opium took place in the open at Canton, then merchants would use only foreign dollars in their trade with outsiders, not Chinese sycee. Eventually the flow of silver would be reversed again and the currency crisis would end. “By such means, we can trade in all the goods of the world but still keep our silver in the country,” he concluded. “In ten years, the economy will recover.”

  Lu Kun was far too cautious to forward such a radical proposal to Daoguang under his own name. Since it so dramatically contradicted the emperor’s existing policy it was risky even for a senior provincial official like himself (especially as he had been put on notice for failing to keep Napier’s ships from entering the Pearl River). But he was nevertheless, in the words of a contemporary, “filled with admiration” for Wu Lanxiu’s essay.17 Along with a handful of writings by other scholars from his academy arguing similar themes, Lu Kun in the end forwarded Wu Lanxiu’s essay to the capital in the form of a small book bearing the innocuous title The Private Views of the Canton Scholars.

  Without official endorsement, it was questionable whether Wu Lanxiu’s proposal would gain any kind of consideration from the emperor, but at least Lu Kun ensured that it had a chance of reaching beyond Canton itself. Nevertheless, the trend toward suppression continued. That same year, Daoguang issued a new slate of harsher punishments for opium use. Existing punishments of officials would increase. Commoners and soldiers convicted of smoking opium would now be punished with one hundred strokes of the heavy cane and two months in the cangue (a plank of wood into which their neck and hands were locked, similar to the stocks of Puritan New England). The new punishments extended even to the users’ families: if a young man was caught with opium, his father would be punished for the crime of failing to control and guide his children.18

  In England, meanwhile, a different conversation on the Chinese opium trade was beginning to take shape. One effect of the intense debate over the East India Company’s monopoly in the early 1830s had been that the opium trade finally came into public view in Great Britain. Witnesses before the East India committees of Parliament testified at length about the nature of the India and China trades, regaling the committee members with intricate descriptions of the overall smuggling commerce—how the opium was grown under Company monopoly in Bengal, how it was transported and sold at Lintin, how much money it brought in, and especially how much the Company had come to rely on the opium monopoly for its bottom line (convincingly enough that the House of Commons committee acknowledged, against George Staunton’s protest, that “it does not appear advisable to abandon so important a source of revenue”).19

  As the full scale and moral implications of the illegal trade came to light, the traders involved did not find a warm reception. Indeed, the very fact of the opium commerce was raised as yet another reason why the East India Company’s control over t
rade with China should be abolished. As James Buckingham, a champion of the free press in India who represented the industrial borough of Sheffield in the House of Commons, put it, the East India Company “cultivated this opium for no other purpose than for smuggling it into China, against the laws and edicts of the empire; and as had been truly said, of poisoning the health, and destroying the morals of the people of that country.” It was painful, he said, “to think what a vast amount of evil had been already created by this trade.”20

  Although Jardine and his faction in Canton, and the industrialists in Great Britain, were technically on the same side of the free-trade issue, their moral principles varied widely. Buckingham (as with many of the industrialists) did not countenance the smuggling of contraband as part of his vision of what free trade really meant. In his vision of the future, since private merchants would be at liberty to carry ordinary British manufactures to China instead of just the “deleterious drug” from India, they would in time be able to abandon the opium trade completely. A “wholesome and reciprocally beneficial commerce would be created,” he said, “instead of the mischievous and demoralizing traffic” that existed. He did not blame the individual country traders for selling opium, though—rather, he laid all guilt for the trade squarely on the East India Company. “It was they who furnished the opium from India,” he said, “and their supercargoes at Canton who licensed the smugglers in China, so that the beginning and the end of this illicit and contraband trade was theirs.”

  With the lifting of the East India Company’s monopoly, responsibility for the conduct of British opium traders in China shifted from the Company to the British government itself—little as that government wanted to deal with it. In 1833, with the end of the monopoly looming, a former president of the Canton select committee wrote an open letter to Charles Grant, the president of the Board of Control who had shepherded the free-trade legislation, to tell him, in so many words, that the British government now owned the problem of its national drug dealers. “To any friend to humanity it is a painful subject of contemplation that we should continue to pour this black and envenomed poison into the sources of human happiness and well-being,” he wrote. “The misery and demoralization which it creates are almost beyond belief; but we console ourselves with the reflection, that if we did not poison the Chinese at this round rate, someone else would.”21 The breadth and scale of opium consumption in China, he warned Grant, were shocking: the Canton governor-general’s palace had recently burned down because one of his secretaries had fallen asleep while smoking opium. He relayed Karl Gutzlaff’s report that the Daoguang emperor’s eldest son, the heir apparent, had died of an opium overdose. The country traders’ imports of the drug from India had by 1833 reached twenty thousand chests per year—worth more than their imports of cotton and making up more than two-thirds of all the private commerce that went on in the shadow of the Company’s tea monopoly.22 The traffic was not about to go away of its own accord.

  Nevertheless, the government initially tried to pretend the trade did not exist. Though Palmerston’s instructions to Napier made euphemistic reference to the “adventures” of British traders who were sending ships up the coast, he told Napier not to encourage them, but, in keeping with the self-contradictory nature of those instructions, he also told Napier not to interfere with them either. Napier himself never expressed any concrete opinion on the subject; his only concern was Canton, where the “real” trade went on, not the amorphous world of Lintin and the coast. But public opposition was rising, especially among the missionary community (even Karl Gutzlaff, despite his work for Jardine, always condemned opium publicly).23 In the liberal wave of 1830s Britain, an era of political reform, free trade, and surging moral campaigns, opium had few defenders. A stream of vivid and damning reports made its way back to England by way of personal letters and reprinted articles from the Canton and Calcutta press, describing in grim detail the misery of Chinese opium smokers. By 1834, emboldened by the successful abolition of slavery after a decades-long fight, some moralists in England began agitating for an end to what they were coming to think of as Britain’s other great crime against humanity.

  The first major broadside in the anti-opium movement came from a pair of activists, one a director of the London Missionary Society and the other a layman (a deliberate combination, to make the point that this wasn’t just a religious cause), whose 1835 pamphlet No Opium! described itself as “the first public call for the Abolition of the Opium Trade.”24 The key word there was “abolition,” for against those who claimed that the opium trade was no worse than selling tobacco, they argued that it should instead be understood in the same terms as the slave trade. “Our great manufacturers themselves will not long submit to the degradation of being identified abroad with smugglers,” they predicted. “Public opinion will soon, and as surely, put down all such traffic, as it has annihilated the slave trade and slavery.”25

  The authors framed their pamphlet in commercial terms, arguing that opium undermined beneficial trade by keeping “real goods subordinate to the sale of poison,” as well as lowering the character of the British in Chinese eyes. In the explicit language of free trade, they quoted an American merchant who charged that opium “destroys industry, and annihilates its products.” Those who traded in it were no more respectable than if they “ministered to suicide in China,” the authors wrote, supplying as they did “that which kills both the body and the soul at the same time.”26

  The authors acknowledged that some of their British readers might be surprised to hear the opium trade described in such depraved terms, given how rarely it had been discussed, let alone called a crime, in Great Britain. But they promised that this sense of newness would fade in time. They would continue to bring forward public evidence to back up their claims about the horror of opium, they promised, “until they are as familiar as the horrors of slavery and the Slave Trade.” Britain’s poisoning of China, as they saw it, should no longer be allowed to remain invisible. “‘NO OPIUM!’” they declared, “must be made as loud and general a watch-word, as ‘NO SLAVERY’ was, if we would, as a nation, ‘fear God or regard man.’”27

  Jardine and Matheson, meanwhile, wasted no time in trying to capitalize on Lord Napier’s death. The superintendent hadn’t been in the ground two months before they submitted a petition to the king in council, demanding satisfaction for China’s heinous insults to Lord Napier and the British nation. Sixty-four British in Canton signed it, a group that included several of their fellow opium smugglers (not so described, of course), along with sundry employees of their firms and some supportive ship’s captains who happened to be in port at the time. All coyness from their previous petition was abandoned. This time they demanded, unequivocally and without mincing words, a naval attack on China. They called on the king to send a full-fledged ambassador, backed up by a war fleet, to demand reparation for China’s crimes—among which were the insults “wantonly heaped upon” Napier by the authorities in Canton (whom they blamed for his death); an ostensibly degrading reference to King William IV as “reverently submissive” in a Chinese edict; and, in a truly baffling contortion of logic, the “insult offered to your Majesty’s flag” when Chinese defenders had fired on the Andromache and Imogene as they forced their way past the Tiger’s Mouth forts.28

  One of their petition’s most pernicious claims—which would become a mantra of sorts for the proponents of war—was that there was no risk to Britain in undertaking such a mission. Even with just a small force (“two frigates and three or four armed vessels of light draft, together with a steam vessel, all fully manned”), they insisted it would be a simple matter to blockade most of the waterborne trade of the Qing Empire, “intercepting its revenues in their progress to the capital, and . . . taking possession of all the armed vessels of the country.” Having thus promised that a fleet of six or seven British vessels could capture the entire Chinese navy and cripple the trade of an empire numbering more than three hundred million people, t
hey went on to assure the king that such an action would also be unlikely to provoke a full-scale war with China. Rather, they insisted in yet another bewildering flight of fancy, it would be “the surest course for avoiding the danger of such a collision.” In other words, the best and perhaps only way to avoid a prolonged war with the Chinese was to attack them immediately and decisively. With that petition—which they wrote, organized, and were the first to sign—William Jardine and James Matheson stepped forth from the shadows and staked out their clear position as the leaders of the war faction.

  Outside of Jardine and Matheson’s group, however, others in Canton did not see what all the fuss was about. Houqua, for one, thought the matter was already settled. As he explained to an American friend, “We have had great trouble with a high officer sent here from England who knew nothing of our customs and was not fortunate in his advisers. He ordered his vessels of war to commit certain outrages with the expectation of thereby intimidating our Government, but was at last compelled to yield every point and return to Macao.”29 The showdown was over, normal trade had resumed, and it seemed that life in Canton would go on as before.

  In a similar vein, John Murray Forbes told a London correspondent that he didn’t expect “any serious ill effects to the trade from the defeat of Lord Napier.” Indeed, the superintendent’s failure to intimidate the governor-general at Canton struck him as clear evidence that the cowardice of the Chinese had been exaggerated. Contrary to what Hugh Hamilton Lindsay and William Jardine would have others believe, it appeared the Chinese government was not likely to back down and grant concessions if threatened with violence. Forbes predicted that the British would abandon their demand for direct communication with the governor-general and “it will be found best to intrust British interests to a consul who shall negociate as other consuls have so long done with the Hong merchants.”30 In other words, a peaceful return to the status quo. (He was thus amused to learn that Jardine and Matheson’s group were actually asking for a military strike intended, as he joked to his cousin, to “avenge the insult the governor-general put upon their beloved Sovereign in calling him ‘heretofore Reverently Obedient and submissive.’”)31