It would not turn out to be an easy job, though Elliot’s difficulties had less to do with the Chinese than with the other British. He promised to maintain a “conciliatory disposition” toward the Chinese government, he told Palmerston, but that was the opposite of what Jardine and Matheson’s faction wanted.11 In that sense, his new role in China quickly began to resonate with his experience as protector of slaves in Guyana—in both cases, he understood the home government’s intentions to be essentially benevolent, desiring him to rein in the depredations and scofflaw tendencies of British subjects overseas who sought profit at any moral cost. The merchants were “a rapacious and ravenous race of wolves,” wrote his wife, “each howling after his prey.”12 Elliot warned Palmerston in January 1836 that the “peaceful and conciliatory policy” by which the British government wanted to promote its commercial intercourse with China was “not very generally approved amongst the fifty or sixty resident Merchants at Canton.” On a personal note, he added with regret that his determination to put that policy into effect was “not the most popular task I could have proposed to myself.”13
In his concern over how to keep peace at Canton without having any coercive power over British traders, Elliot was thrilled to hear the rumors that opium might be legalized. By early February 1837 he had in hand a full translation of Xu Naiji’s memorial recommending an end to the opium prohibition, along with Governor-General Deng Tingzhen’s positive response from the previous September. Excited, he wrote to Palmerston that those documents were “as remarkable a series of papers as has ever yet emanated from the Government of this country in respect to the foreign trade.”14 Some foreigners doubted whether the government of China would actually legalize opium, he admitted, but he was optimistic. Given the unwillingness of Chinese officials to take risks, he believed that Xu Naiji would never have submitted the memorial unless he knew there was already a strong faction at court in favor of it. Correctly, Elliot ascribed the legalization initiative to a fear of China losing control as more foreign ships plied its coast, along with worries about a continued loss of silver.
It is remarkable how much Elliot understood about imperial politics despite being new to China and having no understanding of the language at all. But he benefited from the legacy of Robert Morrison (and before him, George Staunton) in that he had ready access to reams of translations being prepared by the local English-language newspapers and the writers for the Chinese Repository, to say nothing of the official diplomatic translations undertaken by John Robert Morrison after his father’s death. Nor was that all; while the Canton newspapers and young Morrison relied on Chinese documents that were shared with them by local contacts (especially the Hong merchants), an entirely separate stream of intelligence was coming in through Karl Gutzlaff, who in 1835 added the role of spy to his broad repertoire. Shifting his primary employment from Jardine and Matheson to the British government, Gutzlaff prepared long and detailed reports on the inner structures and systems of the Qing Empire: the imperial bureaucracy, social relations, the functioning of the economy, the organization of the military, and a range of other subjects. He based his reports on personal interviews from his clandestine travels up and down the coast, as well as broad reading in Chinese works on history and administration. The reports were sent home for Palmerston’s benefit as well as being used by Elliot and others on the ground in Canton. They were intensely detailed—hundreds of pages in dense handwriting—and they provided a much deeper explanation of the workings of the Qing Empire than had ever before been available to the British.15
Not that all of those translators and interpreters served the same ends, however. While the newspapermen, especially the editor of Matheson’s Canton Register, served the interests of free traders (including the opium smugglers among them), the writers for the Chinese Repository were mostly missionaries who frequently attacked those same smugglers’ interests. There were regular grim reports on opium in the magazine, where one writer asserted, “There is no slavery on earth to name with the bondage into which opium casts its victim.”16
Elliot had similar feelings about the opium trade, but for the sake of duty he suppressed his personal concerns in favor of the higher imperative of ensuring peaceful relations between the British traders and the Chinese authorities.17 A couple of weeks after his first report on legalization to Palmerston, he wrote again to say that it appeared the government was already taking steps to relax the ban on the drug. Though he found the trade itself deplorable, he nevertheless hoped that its legalization “would afford His Majesty’s Government great satisfaction.”18 Indeed, Elliot understood that the opium monopoly was quite valuable to the economy of British India. He regretted how heavily the Company had come to rely on opium production in Bengal, but at least it seemed that if Daoguang should endorse Xu Naiji’s proposal to remove the Chinese ban it would put the trade on a more respectable footing. At least it would no longer necessitate smuggling. “The proposed measures of the Chinese Government seem to me to furnish the best hope for our safe extriction from an unsound condition of things,” he told Palmerston. The opium trade was shaping up to be a national embarrassment for Britain, but its voluntary legalization by China could be their way out.
Meanwhile, as the British were entangling themselves ever more deeply in China, the Americans coursed along on their independent path with almost none of the tensions that faced their former colonial rulers. Their small population of sojourners continued to churn as always. Harriet Low, much to the dismay of the bachelors of Macao and Canton, returned home with her aunt and uncle in the autumn of 1833 and left many a disappointed suitor behind. Before she left, though, someone did manage to win her heart: an American named William Wood who published a local newspaper called the Chinese Courier, an oddball character with a lively wit and a predilection for writing doggerel and political commentary. He was the son of a prominent Shakespearean actor back in Philadelphia, and seems to have inherited his father’s dramatic flair. The match wasn’t what others expected; Harriet Low had a keen eye for beauty, while Wood was reputed to be one of the two ugliest Western men in China (his roommate at Russell & Co. described him as being so pockmarked that his face “resembled a pine cone”).19 But he was brilliant and funny, and he taught her to draw, and she fell completely in love with him. In Macao in the summer of 1832, they were secretly engaged to be married. When Low’s uncle found out, however, he forced her to break off the engagement because he disapproved of Wood’s financial prospects. She would eventually marry another man after her return from China, a banker from Boston who promptly hauled her off to live with him in London. The banker seemed more likely to give her financial security than the whimsical and romantic Wood could have, though in the end all he really gave her was five children to take care of before he went bankrupt and drank himself to death.20
Russell & Co. plowed ahead, with John Murray Forbes becoming a full partner in the firm on his return to China in 1834. Despite his continued youth (barely twenty-one years of age) and his diminutive size (128 pounds), he was already one of the major figures in the American China trade. “Now I am known as a partner of the most respectable American House in this part of the world,” he wrote to his new wife back home in 1835, “and from having the management of a large business, I have acquired a confidence that would enable me to undertake any business in any part of the world.”21 He continued to manage Houqua’s overseas investments under his own name, a service for which Russell & Co. took a cut, and his uniquely intimate, confidential relationship with the wealthy Hong merchant made him the envy of his peers. It was that friendship with Houqua, he confided to his wife, that was the real foundation of his success, giving him “great advantages over any one in Canton.”22 He told her he might already be rich enough to come home if instead of bothering with Russell & Co. he had just worked exclusively for Houqua from the beginning.
The ultimate goal for John Murray Forbes—as it had been for George Staunton and any number of other young men f
rom Britain and America who came to Canton in the early nineteenth century to seek their fortunes—was simply to make enough money that he could return home permanently. But along the way Forbes had a better time of it in Canton than Staunton had, if only because he had none of Staunton’s social hang-ups. The young New Englander made the best of it with his American friends, playing baseball (after getting a local craftsman to make him some bats and balls) and racing rowboats up and down the river against British and mandarin gigs alike. He procured a small sailboat to explore upcountry, and a pony on which to trot around the square in front of the factories. The expatriates, be they American or British, were like a gang of boys—for a while, the big game in town was leapfrog, played at all hours by fully grown men. Even “the gravest people of Canton,” Forbes told his wife, could often be spotted hopping about and heaving themselves merrily over their squatting coworkers.23 But no matter the ways he and the others found to pass their odd bits of leisure time, they all wanted most of all to go home.
Robert was the first of the two Forbes brothers to reach the point where he could do that. He had made up his mind to leave as early as April 1832, confident in his finances after two years running the Lintin receiving ship. His other reason for leaving, though, belied any Western claims that opium was harmless—he was suffering from poor health and finally realized that the thing making him sick was that he lived in a floating drug warehouse. He wrote to his uncle that “the effluvia of the Opium” was causing his illness, for every time he got away from the Lintin for a few days he felt like a new man. It was enough to convince him that “this climate and this mode of life will not answer.”24 So he sold his opium ship to Russell & Co. and returned home with the money he had made, ready to put it to work in Boston.
Robert turned out to be a better sailor than he was an investor, though, and he lived a lavish life back home that did not bode well for his continued fortune. Within a couple of years of his return, John Murray Forbes was sending his older brother outraged letters from Canton chastising him for the idiocy of his investments and the extravagance of his lifestyle. Indeed, Robert managed to lose most of the money he had made with his opium ship in risky investments that failed spectacularly in a financial panic that whipped through New England in the spring of 1837. The crash of 1837 caused widespread business and bank failures on both sides of the Atlantic—a wave of catastrophe that rolled onward to swamp many Western merchants in Canton as well, though Russell & Co. managed (barely) to survive as several of its competitors went under. Even after the worst initial shocks were past, though, it left a depression that would last for the next several years. It handily wiped out everything Robert had accumulated during his opium days, leaving him with the lone option of going back to Canton to try to start from the beginning again.
At least the timing of his return to China was convenient, for it followed not long after John Murray Forbes (much to Houqua’s chagrin) finally amassed sufficient funds—$100,000, or a “moderate competency,” as he described it—that he decided to return home too.25 So with another turn of the revolving door, in the spring of 1837 he arrived home in New England a confident and relatively wealthy young man with a hundred thousand dollars of his own—and entrusted, furthermore, with half a million dollars of Houqua’s own funds to invest in the United States as he saw fit—while his older brother Robert left for Canton early the following year a ruined man, glad to be able to take over the partnership at Russell & Co. his younger sibling had vacated.26 It was thus Robert who would be in Canton when the crisis came, while John was safely home in Boston, starting to explore the new world of investments an industrializing American Northeast was just beginning to open up.
Much to Charles Elliot’s concern, the Chinese government did not move forward with opium legalization as quickly as he had thought it would. In fact, through the spring and summer of 1837 the reality at Canton was that local authorities seemed to be taking even stronger interdiction measures against Chinese smugglers than they had before. These renewed efforts to suppress the opium traffic were especially mystifying because they were orchestrated by Deng Tingzhen—who, as Elliot and the others at Canton knew, personally supported legalization. Although Elliot had access to intelligence that was far better than anything available to previous generations, it still had its limits, but he did not fully appreciate that fact. He thought he knew and understood much more than he actually did. Despite ready access to government documents that circulated openly in Canton, and even despite Gutzlaff’s personal interviews and wide research, much of what went on in China’s central government was still a closed book.
One thing Elliot and the others did not seem to know was that quite soon after sending his memorial in support of Xu Naiji, Deng Tingzhen had received a whole series of edicts from the Daoguang emperor ordering him to renew his efforts to cut off the opium traffic at its Canton source and stop the outflow of silver. Xu Naiji’s proposal for legalization was not in fact progressing as smoothly as Elliot thought. It was in limbo, neither advancing nor being rejected. It had met with some strong criticism from other officials at court, and for the time being the legalization plan was simply on hold. In the meantime, Daoguang wanted the existing laws enforced. Despite having expressed personal support for legalization, Deng was a man of duty and he readily followed Daoguang’s orders while he waited for a final policy decision from the throne.27
This new crackdown came even as the opium trade was suffering from its own problems, bloated from too much competition after the end of the Company monopoly, the market already glutted by too many British, Indian, and American speculators—some of them betting on legalization with the same optimism as Charles Elliot (though for different reasons; they wanted profit, he wanted peace). As time went by with no implementation of Xu Naiji’s proposals, however, it began to seem less and less certain to them what course the emperor would follow. “All hopes of the drug market being admitted on a duty have for the present vanished,” William Jardine wrote to one of his coastal ship’s captains on April 25, 1837. The investors in Calcutta, he wrote, were “anxious, beyond measure” because they had been banking on opium being accepted as a legal commodity, “as they had been led to believe it would be, by this time, from the correspondence of some of our neighbours.”28
Through the summer of 1837 and into 1838 the opium trade all but collapsed in the face of strong enforcement efforts under Deng Tingzhen. With an energy never seen before, government agents chased down Chinese smugglers and destroyed their transport ships. They went after dealers on land, breaking the supply lines. Given the increasing dangers of the trade, Chinese smugglers demanded higher and higher fees from foreign wholesalers to carry their opium to the coast or upriver—fees that cut into already low prices as local demand for the drug crumpled under the same government crackdown. Jardine wrote a succession of worried letters to Bombay, warning of the “precarious state” of the once-flourishing opium traffic. “The drug market is becoming worse every day owing to the extreme vigilance of the Authorities, and we see no chance of amendment,” he reported in November 1837.29 The prospects for their trade continued to worsen into the winter, with Jardine predicting in January 1838 that “violent and determined measures on the part of the Chinese authorities, steadily persevered in, may lead to ruinous losses.”30 Still, he held out hope that the government’s suppression could not last forever, if only because the officials stood to gain so much from their collusion in the trade.31
This dangerous turn to the trade also worried Charles Elliot, who feared an outbreak of violence between Chinese government forces and the increasingly desperate British opium traders. As early as June 1837 he had warned a contact in the Foreign Office about the changing character of Canton under free trade, especially with regard to local relations between the Chinese and British. “The altered state of this Trade,” he wrote, “has filled Canton with a class of People who can not be left to their own devices amongst the natives of this Country, without the utmo
st risk to the safety of this Trade, and to the respectability of the national character.” He worried especially about the high-handed racism of British newcomers toward the Chinese around them. “I never put my foot out of doors that I do not observe evidence of a growing dislike upon the part of the common people to our Countrymen,” he wrote. “It is the fashion of the young men particularly to treat the Chinese with the most wanton insult and contumely.” Without power to control them he worried that “we shall have ugly matters to deal with.”32
As Chinese enforcement efforts continued, the foreign traffickers took greater risks, crowding more ships onto the Chinese coast to evade Deng Tingzhen’s suppression efforts near Canton and Lintin. Whereas in the past no more than two or three foreign vessels had risked such journeys, by the autumn of 1837 there were more than twenty. Elliot worried that those European ships would be vulnerable to pirates, but even more dangerous were reported conflicts with the Chinese navy. “There is every reason,” he warned Palmerston in November 1837, “to believe blood has been spilt in the interchange of shot . . . between them and the Mandarin boats.”33
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