Lin Zexu’s primary concerns—indeed, his sole concerns early on—had been domestic, in particular the conditions under which people lived in his jurisdictions. Foreign relations could not have been further from his mind—which was only as it should have been, for Western trade was the exclusive business of the officials in Canton far to the south. His first taste of foreign affairs did not come until 1832 when the Lord Amherst arrived in a coastal province where he served as governor, carrying Hugh Hamilton Lindsay and Karl Gutzlaff on their mission to scout out new ports. Even then, he saw the problem of the Lord Amherst as a domestic one. He wasn’t really concerned about the ship or its passengers, only that they should leave. His main concern was rather the Chinese “traitors” (as he called them) who tried to make contact with it. His efforts were spent not on combating the ship but on setting up a cordon to keep the local Chinese away from it—they, after all, were his direct responsibility. The foreigners were not.
Lin took no part in the early debates on opium and the silver drain, but he traveled in some of the same intellectual circles where it was discussed. He was quite conservative, an admirer of Bao Shichen, though his earliest thoughts on drug policy actually fit best with the legalizers: in a memorial he submitted to Daoguang in 1833, he suggested that if the primary danger from the opium trade was the drain of silver out of China, then China’s farmers should be encouraged to grow poppies and process the drug themselves. If Chinese consumers could get all of their opium from local suppliers, he reasoned, then they would have no need to buy it from foreigners and the silver drain would stop. It was not a view to which he would remain wedded, but it was a typically pragmatic solution for a man concerned above all with the livelihood of peasants.
Lin Zexu’s support for suppressing opium in 1838 was based on his abiding faith in moral suasion. Lin believed in the power of Confucian government to set a model for the people, to care for them and guide them. Though he had not been involved with opium policy per se prior to 1838, Huang Juezi’s memorial marked a turning point for him. He seized on the issue almost as a religious crusade. In his own response, he offered the Daoguang emperor a detailed plan to support Huang’s call for action. To begin, he recommended the confiscation and destruction of opium pipes and other equipment for using the drug. Local moral campaigns led by government officials would follow, ramping up in stages over the course of the grace year—including public education to teach people the evils of opium and active suppression of opium dens and corrupt officials.
Lin also recommended the provision of medical treatments to help wean addicts off their drug habits, for along with his astounding faith in the power of moral example, he also believed in the power of medicine. In an attachment to his memorial he described several methods for breaking addiction, including various recipes for pills and elixirs used to combat opium dependence. In one, patients would be given daily pills made of opium ash mixed with certain herbs and other substances to make them sick to their stomachs, with the expectation that after a full course of treatment they would be so revolted by the smell and taste of opium that they could never use it again.49 Together, the active confiscation of drug paraphernalia, moral education, and medical treatment would—he believed—leave no more than a small fraction of users still addicted at the end of the year.
After sending his memorial in support of Huang Juezi, Lin Zexu took the initiative to put his plans into practice locally. In August 1838 he launched an intense legal and moral campaign against opium users in Hunan and Hubei. He set up hospitals to treat users, jailed dealers, and issued proclamations condemning the use of opium. He ordered local officials to round up and destroy whatever opium or opium-smoking equipment they could find. He sent reports up to the emperor detailing their successes: thousands of pipes collected through the autumn of 1838, tens of thousands of ounces of opium confiscated (though to keep some perspective, those tens of thousands of ounces of opium amounted to only about ten or twelve chests’ worth, at a time when upwards of thirty thousand chests were being shipped to China each year). The pipes were smashed into pieces and the opium publicly burned, with the ashes thrown into a river—which was crucial, because if the destruction were not public then everyone would assume that the officials involved had just smoked the opium themselves or sold it for their own profit.50
Lin’s reports to the throne were increasingly triumphant as he reported his successes in Hunan and Hubei. His tone also increased in urgency, arguing that such measures should not be limited to his own territories alone: in late September 1838, he declared opium to be the most fundamental problem facing the empire. “Before opium was widespread, those who smoked it only harmed themselves,” he wrote to Daoguang. “The punishments of caning and exile were enough to keep them in line. But when its evil influence has penetrated into the whole country, the effect is tremendous. Laws should be put into rigid enforcement. If left in a lax state, then after a few decades, there will be no soldier in this Central Empire to fight against invaders, nor money to bear the military expenses.” China would be helpless, he warned. “I have the fear,” he concluded, “that if the evil be suffered to grow at this critical moment, there may be no more chance for remedy.”51
By October 1838, Daoguang was leaning heavily in favor of suppression. Although Charles Elliot still labored under the illusion that Xu Naiji’s proposal to legalize opium was right on the brink of approval, on the twenty-sixth of that month Daoguang punished Xu Naiji with a demotion in rank and removed him from office—signaling, definitively, that the legalization initiative was dead (Xu Naiji himself died soon afterward).52 As deliberations in Beijing continued, on November 8 a Manchu named Qishan who served as governor-general of Zhili province in the north reported the largest drug seizure ever recorded in the empire. The opium was confiscated in the city of Tianjin, close to Beijing, but Qishan emphasized that it had come originally into the country through Canton, bought by Cantonese traders who shipped it north.53 Though Huang Juezi had called for a national campaign against opium users, such a large-scale crackdown would be enormously complex and difficult to orchestrate (to say nothing of the logistics of sentencing tens if not hundreds of thousands of users to death). But as Qishan’s report suggested, since all opium appeared to derive from Canton, perhaps a focused crackdown there could solve the entire empire’s problem.
This, apparently, finally made up Daoguang’s mind. The day after the opium seizure in Tianjin, he summoned Lin Zexu to come north to Beijing. Lin arrived in the capital on December 26, 1838, and over the course of eight audiences beginning the following day, the two men discussed the opium problem at length. On the fourth day of their meetings, Daoguang charged Lin with the singular mission of obliterating the trade at its heart in Canton.54 Lin Zexu would travel south as an imperial commissioner, holding the power to act on Daoguang’s behalf, answerable to none of the local officials. He would have command of all naval forces in the vicinity of the port. As for the governor-general on site, Deng Tingzhen, Daoguang sent him separate instructions that he should act in Lin Zexu’s support.55 And so in early January 1839, even as Charles Elliot still waited in confident expectation that the ban on opium would be lifted any day, Lin Zexu was starting on his way down to Canton with full powers to put an end to the traffic for good.
PART III
Blood-Ravenous Autumn
CHAPTER 13
Showdown
Charles Elliot was a well-meaning man but far out of his depth at Canton. Aside from imagining that he understood more than he did about the Chinese and their government, he worried constantly about his lack of power over the British under his supposed supervision. As his anxieties mounted that the opium smugglers would provoke a crisis under his watch, his behavior became increasingly erratic. Though he had no instructions allowing him to impose order on the anarchic British free traders at Canton, out of a sense of duty (or at least out of a sense of not wanting to be blamed) he kept trying to find some way to control them. To that end he
played his cards close, refusing to share his instructions from London with any of the other British and keeping all of his communications from Palmerston secret so nobody would know the truth of his limitations. The local English newspapers repeatedly asked him to clarify just what he was or was not authorized to do on behalf of the home government, but he refused to answer them.1
It wasn’t just the small British smuggling vessels that worried him, running opium as they were into Whampoa and exchanging fire with Chinese enforcers farther afield.2 The crews of the larger ships were also a concern. The sailors hailed from all over the British Empire and were usually kept apart from the Chinese on land so they couldn’t get into fights, but they had started causing trouble on the ships themselves, resisting the beatings used by their officers to keep them in line. After a mutiny on one British ship in the harbor, Elliot organized a naval police force of sorts, drafting regulations to give the captains the means to come to each other’s aid. But even that wasn’t part of his job; when Palmerston learned about it he scolded Elliot for overstepping his bounds and reminded him that “you have no power of your own authority to make any such regulations.” Elliot’s plan amounted to “the establishment of a system of police at Whampoa, within the dominions of the Emperor of China,” said Palmerston, who told him Britain could not possibly sanction such a violation of “the absolute right of sovereignty enjoyed by independent States.”3
By the early winter of 1838–39, it seemed increasingly likely that Governor-General Deng Tingzhen’s ongoing crackdown on Chinese opium smugglers would be decisive—suggesting that even if Lin Zexu had never been sent to Canton, the trade might well have withered away without any further complications.4 “Not a Broker to be seen, nor an Opium pipe; they have all vanished,” wrote William Jardine to one of his coastal captains that December. The authorities in Canton had been especially vigilant of late, he wrote, “seizing smokers, dealers, and shopkeepers innumerable.” (Ever the optimist, though, Jardine added, “We must hope for better times and brisker deliveries.”)5
Up to that point, nothing in the Canton government’s opium suppression efforts had targeted the foreign community. All of Deng Tingzhen’s energies were aimed at native traffickers. Though occasional shots were fired between government boats and foreign smuggling vessels, those were isolated incidents provoked by the Europeans involved. But on December 3, a small shipment of opium was captured right inside the factory compound, carried from a boat at the riverside by two Chinese servants who quickly confessed that they worked for a British merchant. In response to that incident, Deng Tingzhen decided to make a statement to the foreign community at large. On December 12, a small body of soldiers appeared in the small dirt plaza in front of the factory buildings and hammered up a wooden cross in preparation for executing a convicted opium dealer by strangulation. The convict, the proprietor of a local opium den, was Chinese, and no foreigners were directly implicated in his crime, but Deng Tingzhen’s unusual choice for the site of his execution was a clear warning to the foreigners: You, too, are responsible for this.
It was unclear in the scattered reports afterward exactly who acted first. Elliot was at Whampoa, so he didn’t witness it, and the “gentlemen” traders disclaimed any responsibility. Perhaps it was sailors, they suggested. But a few foreigners who took offense at the prospect of an execution being carried out in front of their homes walked over to the scaffold and started trying to tear it down. When the Chinese soldiers did not resist, several others joined in and helped them. A crowd of Chinese formed—out of curiosity more than anything—to watch them dismantling the gallows. Everything was still peaceful until a few of the more rowdy British (here is where the sailors were blamed) started shoving their way into the Chinese crowd, hitting people with sticks to make them back up. The crowd pushed back, and grew. Someone threw the first rock. Then the riot burst out for real—open fighting between Chinese and foreigners on the plaza, a quick and furious rout that sent the British and Americans running for the gates of their factory buildings.
The angry Chinese mob grew and crowded in—several thousand people by all accounts, pelting the foreigners from outside their gates with a hail of rocks and bricks, smashing all the front-facing windows and venetian blinds in the factory buildings and tearing down fences to use as battering rams. Mercifully for the traders barricaded inside, a detachment of Chinese soldiers eventually came to their rescue and dispersed the crowd, ending the afternoon’s siege. The execution scaffold was taken away. The opium dealer was strangled elsewhere. By the time Charles Elliot showed up that night, leading 120 armed sailors from the merchant ships, all was at peace again.6
The main thing Lord Palmerston wanted to know when he learned about the riot was not whether the British subjects at Canton needed better protection, but what had possessed them to think they had any right to try to stop the execution in the first place. On what grounds, he asked Elliot, did the traders imagine themselves “entitled to interfere with the arrangements made by the Chinese officers of justice for carrying into effect, in a Chinese town, the orders of their superior authorities”?7 Palmerston’s letter was yet another in a long list of injunctions from the British government to the residents in Canton reminding them that they had to respect the authority and jurisdiction of the Chinese government. And like all the others, it would take half a year to reach its recipient, though some of the more conscientious expatriates in Canton already saw things in the same terms. If the merchants were so offended that an opium dealer might be executed in front of their homes, wrote one correspondent to the Canton Press, then they should pay heed to their own fault in the matter. “The quicker the Foreign Community abandon the opium trade,” he wrote, “the fewer executions may they be obliged to witness at their doors.”8
Elliot was profoundlly shaken by the riot and redoubled his efforts to find some way to prevent the opium smugglers from causing a major crisis. He knew he wasn’t supposed to interfere with them, but rationalized an intervention on the basis (as he explained to Palmerston) that the “danger and shame” of the opium trade had reached a point where it was falling “by rapid degrees into the hands of more and more desperate men” and would “stain the foreign character with constantly aggravating disgrace.”9 The riot on December 12 could just as easily have ended in a massacre, he believed—someone in the British factory had fired a pistol, and if it hadn’t missed its target he feared the foreign compound would have been turned into “a terrible scene of bloodshed and ruin”—all for the sake of a handful of desperadoes who considered themselves “exempt from the operation of all law, British or Chinese.”
So Elliot finally took firm action against the British smugglers. On December 18, six days after the riot, he issued a proclamation ordering all British vessels carrying opium to depart the inner waters of Canton immediately. Having no authority on his own to confiscate their cargoes or arrest them, he fell back on the power of the Chinese government: if any smugglers refused to leave the vicinity of Canton, he warned, he would personally turn them in to the Chinese. Since the smugglers had broken Chinese law in carrying their opium to Canton, he declared, parroting his recent instructions from Palmerston, “Her Majesty’s Government will in no way interpose if the Chinese Government shall think fit to seize and confiscate the same.”10 A few days later, he wrote to the governor of Canton pledging his support for the local government’s campaign to stop opium smuggling. “The Government of the British nation will regard these evil practices with no feelings of leniency,” Elliot promised him, “but on the contrary with severity and continual anxiety.”11
The opium traders were livid. As they saw it, Elliot, as British superintendent, was supposed to protect them, or at least stay out of their way—certainly he was not supposed to be helping the Chinese government police their trade. James Matheson complained to a correspondent that Elliot had “adopted the novel course of assisting the Government in this, against his own Countrymen.”12 The Canton Register condemned his “
readiness to aid the local government,” suggesting that “it appears to be the intention of Captain Elliot to offer himself as a kind of chief of the Chinese preventive service.”13 A week later, the same paper accused him of “lackeying the boots of the governor of Canton” and volunteering to serve China “against those whom by his office he is bound to at least endeavor to protect.”14 For Elliot, it was Guyana all over again.
In spite of all the trouble Elliot was having with his countrymen, he at least had moral support from the Americans. Robert Bennet Forbes, for one, approved fully of Elliot’s efforts to drive out the opium smugglers from Whampoa, “as it is unfair that the innocent and the guilty should suffer together.”15 Forbes was shocked at how much the opium trade had changed during the six years of his absence. Far from the genteel, lazy days of his service on the Lintin, when the trade had been all but legal due to the regular connivance of Chinese officials and lack of enforcement, by the time he arrived back in China at the end of 1838 it had taken on a far more sinister character. Noting the government’s “vigorous measures to suppress the trade in the drug,” he admitted to his wife in December that the opium trade “is no doubt demoralizing the people.”16 He predicted it would not last for long.
Despite Russell & Co.’s sizable business in opium in the past, as the Lintin drug trade ground to a halt the main priority for the firm’s partners was to preserve their tea and silk profits, which outweighed the diminishing share of their business that concerned risky drug consignments. To add to their pressure, in January 1839 Houqua threatened to cut off the firm’s access to his tea if it didn’t stop handling opium on the side.17 Shocked by the execution of another Chinese opium dealer in front of the factories in late February 1839—this time carried out with swiftness and efficiency by a large guard of soldiers so there was no chance for anyone to protest—Robert Forbes wrote to his wife that the opium trade had devolved into a renegade commerce “carried on in spite of law & reason by a parcel of reckless individuals.” The era of its being effectively legal was clearly at an end, and he and the other partners in Russell & Co. could no longer be so sanguine about their roles in it. “When the dreadful effects are brought before our very eyes,” he told his wife, “we cannot compromise ourselves by dealing in it.”18 Regretting only the loss of what had been one of their greatest sources of profit in recent years, he and his partners finally did what their British counterparts would not do. On February 27, 1839, Russell & Co.—the American firm with the largest share of the Chinese drug trade—issued a public circular announcing that it would no longer do business in opium.19
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