In the meantime, while Matheson and Lindsay were agitating unsuccessfully in London for a war, in China the domestic initiative to legalize opium was taking a dramatic step forward. Wu Lanxiu’s essay on relaxing the opium ban had languished in Beijing after Lu Kun sent it to Daoguang in 1834, but in June 1836, around the time James Matheson was embarking for his voyage back to Canton, a vice minister in the Court of Imperial Sacrifices in Beijing named Xu Naiji—a high official of the central government with genuine influence, who was a four-year veteran of service in Canton and connected to the same networks as Wu Lanxiu—sent a memorial to the Daoguang emperor recommending the legalization policy in his own name and advising that it be implemented as soon as possible.
With Wu Lanxiu’s essay as his foundation, Xu Naiji put together an extended argument in favor of making the opium trade legal in China. His proposal was not by any means a defense of opium itself, though, for he recognized how destructive the drug could be. “After it has been used for some time,” he wrote, “the user must continue to smoke it at specific times; this is called ‘addiction.’ Time is squandered, the user stops working, and he comes to rely on the drug for his very survival.”53 Xu Naiji noted as well that opium had horrible physical effects—weak breath and a hollow body, ashen face and black teeth—yet even though its users could clearly see the harm it was doing to them, he wrote, they could still not stop themselves from using it. He believed that of course it should be prohibited if possible.
Xu Naiji’s central argument, however, was that it was not possible to suppress opium, so the government must focus instead on mitigating the harm it caused. The policy of suppression had done nothing to stop the drug from spreading, he insisted. Although punishments had increased greatly over the years, nevertheless “the users have continued to multiply, to the point of filling nearly the whole empire.” Whereas opium had once been openly traded for tea at Canton, now it was secretly purchased with illegal currency—leading to the drain of silver from China, the skewing of the exchange rate, and all the economic effects resulting therefrom. Furthermore, in spite of prohibition the trade in opium had grown enormously, from a few hundred chests per year in the early 1800s to more than twenty thousand at the time of his writing, with a total annual value of more than ten million taels of silver.
Responding to those who wanted to solve the problem by shutting down foreign trade at Canton, Xu Naiji repeated Wu Lanxiu’s warning that doing so would put hundreds of thousands of southern Chinese out of work and cause social unrest. Furthermore, he pointed out that the foreigners could just take possession of an island in the outer waters and avoid Canton completely (which was, of course, exactly what some of them wanted to do). If that happened, then China’s coastal merchants would gladly sail out to trade with them there and the Chinese government would lose the power to levy any taxes on the tea and silk trade. Finally, he pointed out just how much opium was being sold by foreign ships up and down the Chinese coast in spite of the government’s best efforts to drive them off—which indicated that even if Canton should be closed to them, the British would still be able to go on selling their goods however they wished.
Xu Naiji, like others, believed that the Qing dynasty’s recent laws against opium smoking had served primarily as a means for corrupt government workers to enrich themselves. From his years of experience in Canton he described the massive illegal trading entrepôt in the region: the foreign receiving ships at Lintin, the “fast crabs” and other armed smuggling vessels that connected them to the coast, the bribed military outposts and corrupted customs houses, the quick violence of the Chinese opium smugglers when challenged by government boats, the pirates who boarded unsuspecting ships by disguising themselves as officials hunting for opium. And through it all, he said, the common people were no help at all. “The commoners’ fear of law and punishment is nothing compared to their desire for profit,” he wrote. “There are times when the law has no effect on them at all.”
As it pertained to those commoners, the most heartbreaking aspect of Xu Naiji’s proposal was his grim acceptance that suppression was impossible, for which reason he essentially recommended that the government should abandon common opium addicts to their own self-destruction. In the future, as he saw it, the government should only pursue active prohibition efforts against public officials and soldiers—men who held positions of responsibility, whose impairment from opium might harm the public good. As for the multitudes of the common people (or at least those who could afford the drug), he said the government should “pay no regard” to whether they bought or used opium. China’s problems had nothing to do with the loss of population, he said—new people were born every day, and opium did nothing to diminish the country’s size. Opium smokers by nature were “lazy and shiftless with no aspirations.” They died young, and even when they didn’t they were still “worthless people.” The government should not concern itself with them at all, he proposed. Instead, it should focus on salvaging China’s economic resources. Opium addicts could be safely ignored, but the government must act immediately to stop the loss of silver.
Xu Naiji concluded that China’s only option was to go back to the old system: opium should be taxed as a medicinal import. The Hong merchants should be allowed to take it in exchange for tea and other goods so that silver would not leave the country. Import duties on opium could be set lower than what the smugglers were paying in bribes to corrupt officials, which would ensure that they would voluntarily comply with the new regulations. Once the opium trade was brought fully into the open, the government could outlaw the export of silver in any form, either sycee or dollars. More than ten million taels a year would be saved, he reckoned. And while government officials and soldiers would be forbidden from indulging in opium at the peril of their jobs, the common people of China would be free to buy, sell, and use it as they saw fit. Faced with a choice between addressing the threat to China’s economy from the loss of silver, and the threat to its public health from individual opium use, there was no question in his mind which was the more serious problem.
This time, the Daoguang emperor paid attention. After giving Xu Naiji’s memorial a fair reading, in June 1836 he referred it to the authorities in Canton for deliberation. Lu Kun had died in office in 1835, and the new governor-general who replaced him was a man named Deng Tingzhen, a sixty-year-old scholar and veteran administrator. Deng had little experience in southern China, having served for the previous nine years as governor in Anhui province up on the Yangzi River, so he had no vested interest in foreign trade, but he was open to the needs of the port city. He was also aware of the region’s vulnerabilities, and one of his first actions as governor-general had been to ask permission to strengthen the local coastal defenses.54 Daoguang asked Deng Tingzhen to deliberate over the legalization proposal with his subordinates and with the hoppo who supervised trade, and then to report back to the throne with his own recommendations on the subject. This boded well for Xu Naiji, insofar as the very fact of the emperor’s referring his memorial to Canton indicated that Daoguang was substantially in favor of implementing the plan.
In October, writing jointly with the Canton governor who served under him and the hoppo at the customs bureau, Deng Tingzhen sent a memorial to the Daoguang emperor giving his full and unreserved support to Xu Naiji’s proposal. Along with voicing support for legalization, Deng also submitted a list of draft regulations to govern the new era of open trade in opium at Canton. “In setting regulations, it is important to accord to the nature of the times,” he wrote, arguing that while Xu Naiji’s proposal to legalize opium might have been a departure from recent precedent, it was perfectly appropriate to the circumstances, “motivated entirely by the needs of the times.”55 Foreigners tended to imagine China’s dynastic government as being stubbornly wedded to traditional, unchanging policies (and indeed this was sometimes the case), but Deng Tingzhen’s memorial points to a rather different phenomenon that emerged when the emperor so desired—a deliber
ative government seeking pragmatic policies to suit actual conditions.
The autumn of 1836 thus found the highest-ranking imperial official at Canton laying the groundwork for a legalization of the opium trade. As he planned it, the receiving ships at Lintin and the smugglers along the coast would be welcomed back to Canton to exchange their wares directly for tea, paying low taxes that undercut the bribes and commissions the Chinese agents had been charging them. The legal and illegal branches of commerce that had existed so uneasily side by side for the past decade would finally be brought back together into a rational, unified system of trade under the supervision and control of the Qing government. The dangerous flow of silver out of China would be cut off, and the growing risk of a violent collision between foreign smugglers and Qing naval enforcers would be removed. In its way, it was the most hopeful moment in years for the peaceful future of the foreign trade at Canton.
CHAPTER 12
The Last Honest Man
Few British officials were as intimately familiar with the brutality of slavery as Charles Elliot. A light-haired, thin-lipped captain in the Royal Navy, in 1830 he had been appointed “Protector of Slaves” in British Guyana, a newly created position in which he was supposed to investigate the most abusive practices of the British plantation owners and represent the interests of the slaves who suffered at their hands. The British government had outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, and the Royal Navy had long been tasked with enforcing that ban on the high seas, but in 1830 the institution of slavery was still legal in British territories even though a groundswell of popular support for emancipation meant that it would not remain so for long. Thus the British plantation owners in Guyana still controlled their slaves legally according to British law; they were merely forbidden to import any new ones. The colonial governor in Guyana had at least tried to improve the condition of the slaves in bondage—establishing rules forbidding certain kinds of excessive cruelty, mandating periods of rest from labor, providing a means for them to purchase their freedom, and creating the office of “protector” to defend their rights.
As Protector of Slaves, Charles Elliot had regular, close contact with men and women suffering horrific abuse at the hands of their British masters. He did his best to serve them, interviewing the victims and trying to represent them legally against their tormenters in a colonial court. He sent home grim reports to the British government depicting the savage cruelty of the plantation managers toward the enslaved men and women who grew much of Britain’s coffee, sugar, and cotton, detailing the punishments they inflicted with abandon. But it was in many ways a hopeless position. He was “desperately unpopular,” as he described it, working constantly in opposition to British planters who resented him for interfering with their operations, yet he had little actual power to help the slaves under his protection. The experience hardened him into an abolitionist.1
Elliot could never have imagined how quickly he would have to transition from policing slave owners to supervising opium traffickers, but such was his lot. In 1833 the Whig government in Britain called him home from Guyana to advise them on the abolition of slavery, which was passed into law later that year on the same surge of liberal political energy that had carried through the Reform Act and toppled the East India Company’s China monopoly. Once Elliot’s expert advice to the government was given, however, he was no longer needed, and so Palmerston, who saw in him a convenient person at the right time, sent him almost immediately out in the other direction, accompanying Lord Napier to China. Elliot was appointed master attendant under Napier, a minor position in which he would supervise the British ships that anchored in the inner waters near Canton—really, little more than a glorified harbormaster. It was a pitifully low station, nothing to compare with that of chief superintendent.
Unlike Napier, Elliot had never asked to go to China (though in common with Napier, his assignment there would turn out to be the defining episode of his life). He thought the appointment as master attendant was beneath him, and it came with a low salary to match. “I feel all this to be a humiliation, and a very sore one too,” he complained to his sister just before he left for China. He came from an illustrious family—one of his cousins was Lord Auckland, who would serve as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1834 and then governor-general of India, while another cousin was the 2nd Earl of Minto, who would succeed Auckland at the Admiralty in 1835. Elliot’s own failure to achieve such stature despite his family connections made the lowliness of his position in China all the more regrettable. He suffered under debts he would never be able to pay off with the master attendant’s salary, and was bitter about having to sacrifice his family’s financial prospects for an arbitrary national cause, on a mission he had not chosen. “I go to this place . . . with a fixed determination to do all I can for my family and myself,” he told his sister, “and to do for the public, not a whit more than my barest duty.”2
Elliot was a calculating man in his way, obsessively aware of how his actions would be interpreted back home, constantly angling for improvements to his career. And though he resented being sent off to China, he did sense an advantage of sorts in that it gave him “the touch of true bitterness and real selfishness, without which there is no success in this world.”3 In any case, most of his bitterness and disappointment came to be directed at Lord Napier, fifteen years his senior and incomparably higher than he in salary and prestige. Sarcastically, Elliot called him “My Emperor” behind his back, and his dislike of the superintendent extended to Napier’s family as well. Lady Napier, in Elliot’s letters, was “sly,” her daughters “unmitigatedly disagreeable.”4 On the voyage over, Elliot was resentful that the arrogant Napier treated him and his wife with frigidity despite the fact that both men held equivalent rank in the navy.
All that changed after Napier’s death. First, when John Davis took over from Napier he appointed Elliot as secretary to the committee of superintendents, a healthy promotion from master attendant. Davis took a strong liking to him, which pleased the career-minded Elliot to no end. In particular, Davis was drawn to what he saw as Elliot’s pragmatic and flexible attitude, which he judged a necessary opposite to the headstrong rigidity by which Napier had caused so much trouble. In Elliot’s own words, he was a sailor who when things went wrong knew “how to duck my head to the storm, and hope for better weather.” Davis knew that because of his own East India Company background he wouldn’t last long as chief superintendent—only as long as it would take for Palmerston to send someone without Company ties to replace him—so he resigned preemptively and left for home in January 1835. When he resigned, though, he lobbied Palmerston to make Elliot the new chief superintendent. Among Elliot’s qualifications for the job (besides the implicit fact of his being untainted by connection with the East India Company), Davis emphasized that Elliot had the right kind of “temper”—a dig at the late Napier, who did not. Davis insisted that the situation in Canton would have been far better if Charles Elliot had been made chief superintendent in the first place instead of Lord Napier. “I really shall be uneasy for the state of affairs there unless Elliot is immediately put in charge,” he told Palmerston.5
Palmerston agreed. Having recently fended off James Matheson’s and Hugh Hamilton Lindsay’s calls for a military intervention in China, Palmerston wanted to see a superintendent in Canton who could rein in the free traders and prevent them from causing serious trouble with the Chinese. He knew Elliot was the man to do that, based on reports Elliot had sent to a correspondent in the Foreign Office expressing hope that the government might take a firm hand with the British in China. Indeed, Palmerston’s appointment of Elliot came just a week after he read one such report in which Elliot complained of “the very heedless temper at Canton” and warned that the most aggressive faction of the free traders was becoming dominant.6
Similar concerns had come to Palmerston’s attention via merchants unaffiliated with the likes of Jardine and Matheson, such as an association of London merchants calling
themselves the “East India and China Association” who petitioned him in June 1836 to send to China a commercial agent with “Judicial Functions” who could “prevent as far as may be practicable, the infraction of the Chinese Laws by British subjects.”7 Those who relied on the China market as a place to sell their goods were naturally concerned about the harm that might come to it from smugglers. Palmerston fully supported such measures, and after appointing Elliot superintendent he wrote to the Treasury in November 1836 to recommend that whatever the relationship between Great Britain and China might be in the future, the chief British agent on the ground must be given some kind of legal authority to control His Majesty’s subjects in that region. Only by having the power to “enforce obedience” to regulations, he argued, could such a figure ensure “the peaceable maintenance of our commercial relations with the Chinese.”8 It was unclear, though, how such authority could be granted.
By the end of December 1836, Charles Elliot was happily in receipt of his new appointment from Palmerston. It had taken a bit of sleight of hand from the Foreign Office to arrange it, and some rejiggering of titles, so Elliot became “senior” (rather than “chief”) superintendent of trade, but still he effectively took over the position first held by Napier. Due to budgetary concerns his salary was only half of Napier’s—£3,000 rather than £6,000—but it was still more than he could believe, and easily enough to discharge his lingering debts.9 His wife, who lived in Macao with their children (and was pregnant with another), could not have been more delighted with “Charlie,” as she called him. He would make his mistakes in time, but as the year 1837 opened he was flying high.
With Napier out of the picture, Deng Tingzhen, the new governor-general, was able to start afresh with Charles Elliot, and the two found common ground with ease. In January 1837, Deng reported to the throne his receipt of a petition from Elliot (who, apparently for behaving well, was given a Chinese name, “Righteous Law,” that wasn’t derogatory in the slightest). In the petition, Elliot presented his credentials as the new superintendent of trade and explained that since the British trading ships carried many sailors who were ignorant of the Qing dynasty’s regulations, he wished for permission to come to Canton and keep them in line. It was a replay of the encounter between Napier and Lu Kun, but this time around Elliot’s approach was polite and respectful, it fit with protocol, it addressed Chinese interests, and it worked—proving, sadly, that none of Napier’s bluster had been necessary in the first place. The emperor approved Elliot’s petition, and the governor-general welcomed him to Canton to take up residence in the old British factory as the superintendent of trade, acting under the same regulations that had governed the taipans of the past. In Chinese he was referred to as a “consul” (lingshi), a respectable title that nobody could possibly confuse with a Barbarian Eye.10
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