William Jardine left Canton for good in late January 1839, entrusting his partner James Matheson with the business they had built over two decades. He was fifty-four years old and had been living in China for nearly twenty years, with itinerant visits dating back to his younger days as a surgeon for the East India Company. He had been planning his retirement for some time, having accumulated a great deal of wealth and wishing to enjoy it with a wife in Scotland. Conveniently, as it turned out, the timing of his departure would remove him from Canton before Lin Zexu’s arrival.20
The Canton Register—a partisan source, founded as it was by his partner—pronounced Jardine’s departure to be the most triumphant exit from Canton ever made by a Western merchant.21 Jardine’s only truly bad blood in the factory compound was with his chief competitor, a rival opium merchant named Lancelot Dent. Otherwise, no matter what any of the traders, missionaries, or newspapermen felt about Jardine’s work and his influence from a moral standpoint, most of them respected him as the long-standing leader of their social community. Even Charles Elliot, who was so maddened by the smugglers, saw Jardine as a respectable man distinct from the rascals who were causing the most trouble—respectable enough, in fact, to give him a letter of introduction to Lord Palmerston suggesting that the foreign secretary might profit from Jardine’s “perfect knowledge” of the China trade.22
Jardine’s farewell dinner took place on the evening of January 23 in the grand dining hall of the old British factory. The pillars on its broad terrace were done up with flowers and bunting, with Jardine’s initials spelled out in lanterns. It was the sunset of an era, though none of the guests had any intimation of that. More than 130 British, Parsi, and American merchants sat down to dinner that night, attended by an army of stewards and a band playing Scottish airs. The British and Americans sat inside, while the Parsis kept their own table outside on the terrace. Slowly drinking themselves silly on sherry and punch, the Anglos in the grand hall sang “God Save the Queen” and toasted the health of Queen Victoria. Hugh Hamilton Lindsay stood up to toast the president of the United States, declaring that British hearts beat with “joy and exultation” at the success of the Americans in Canton, just as “a father glories in and rejoices over the strengths, talents, and enterprize of his children.” Whether or not the Americans felt patronized by this, they joined the others to sing a round of “Hail, Columbia.” The crowd toasted the health of Jardine (“respected, esteemed, and beloved, even beyond your own knowledge or expectation”) and sang him “Auld Lang Syne.” Jardine himself got up to make a speech about his regrets on leaving. He spoke of his admiration for the courtesy of the Chinese and said he had always felt safe in Canton—safer than in any other place in the world. He defended the character of the foreign merchant community: “We are not smugglers, gentlemen!” he bellowed, to the wild applause of his audience. It was the Chinese officials and the East India Company who were the real smugglers, he said. His conscience was “quite at rest on this point.”23
They toasted the East India Company, Charles Elliot, the future of steam power, and any number of other persons and causes, for on that one drunken night all hostilities and rivalries were forgotten (except for Lancelot Dent, who did not attend and was never toasted). They toasted the two missionaries present, who returned thanks for the financial support Jardine had given their cause. Elijah Bridgman, the frail American pastor who had once written that opium was “death to China” and still railed against it in the Chinese Repository, stood up to express his hope that Jardine would find happiness with “the fairest of women” when he got home. Jardine replied that he’d settle for “fat, fair and forty.”24 Robert Bennet Forbes took a raucous part in the festivities, toasting the Scots of his own blood, much to their delight, and drinking himself into oblivion with the best of them. After dinner and toasting, the party spilled out onto the terrace to drive out the Parsis, staggering men dancing in partners to “negro melodies” played by a duo from Philadelphia, guzzling more punch and champagne as they reeled around the floor. A partner in Russell & Co. named Warren Delano (whose grandson would be Franklin Delano Roosevelt) lost grip on his waltzing companion and went sailing into a flowerpot, cutting open an inch-long gash in his head. The party went past three, ending with a small group of die-hards cheering into the night under Jardine’s darkened window. Robert Bennet Forbes didn’t get home until 4 a.m., at which point he woke up his colleague next door, vomited profusely, and then went to sleep.25
Lin Zexu had no shortage of advice from his colleagues about how to conduct himself at Canton. Perhaps the most blunt counsel came from Qishan, the governor-general in Zhili responsible for the recent opium seizure. They met in December while Lin was on his way to the capital to see Daoguang, and Qishan warned him not to start a war with the foreigners.26 Others were more belligerent but still advised caution. Lin’s appointment as imperial commissioner was a victory for the faction of reformist Chinese scholars who had, as far back as Bao Shichen’s first efforts in the 1820s, argued for taking a hard line against foreign trade. Over the years, however, their uncompromising demands to sever contact with foreigners had been tempered by a greater realism. It was clear, at least to those who had read the accounts of scholars experienced in foreign relations, what kind of military power the British and other Western countries possessed, and that direct conflict with them should be avoided. Nevertheless, there were other ways of going about things.
One prominent member of this faction, a forty-six-year-old named Gong Zizhen, wrote to Lin Zexu to offer his services as an assistant.27 He was a member of the same literary society as Huang Juezi, the champion of the suppression policy, and he was himself rabidly anti-opium; smokers, he told Lin Zexu, should be executed by hanging, while dealers and producers should have their throats cut. Nevertheless, in writing to Lin Zexu he worried that if Lin should try to shut off the source of opium directly at Canton, then both the foreign dealers and the Chinese “traitors” who worked with them might revolt together and China wouldn’t have sufficient military power to control them both.
Instead, Gong Zizhen recommended a gradual approach: first, Lin Zexu should take action simply to reduce imports, rather than trying to cut them off completely, and along with opium he should also restrict the imports of foreign durable goods like woolen products, glass, and clocks (which Gong Zizhen, like others before him, considered wasteful to China’s domestic economy). Furthermore, he advised that those import restrictions should only target Chinese merchants and consumers; though Lin Zexu should be firm with the foreigners, said Gong Zizhen, he should avoid conflict with them. At the same time, though, he also recommended strengthening the military defenses around Canton. As there was no chance that China’s existing naval forces could ever match the British on the high seas, he said Lin should focus his efforts entirely on coastal and inland defenses. In time, Gong implied, there would be nothing to fear from shutting out the foreign merchants completely.
Of all Lin Zexu’s meetings for counsel on the way down to Canton, his most significant was with Bao Shichen himself, the conservative scholar who had been the leading voice in the calls dating back to 1820 to shut down all foreign trade in order to prevent the drain of wealth from China. Passing near Bao Shichen’s home on a rainy, cold day in February during his southward journey to Canton, Lin Zexu invited the elderly political thinker onto his boat and spent a day questioning him about matters of statecraft.28 As regarded the mission to Canton, Bao Shichen later recounted his basic advice to Lin Zexu: “To clear a muddy stream you must purify the source. To put a law into effect you must first create order within.” It was a cryptic philosophy, but Lin Zexu took away a clear meaning from it. As he interpreted Bao Shichen’s advice, “first create order within” meant he should begin by arresting all the government officials who had violated the ban on opium. And by “purifying the source” he understood that he must shut off completely the flow of foreign drug imports coming into Canton. After his meeting with Bao Shichen,
Lin Zexu continued on down to Canton, where those twin measures—cracking down hard on the local population and severing the main artery of foreign trade—would be the pillars of his strategy to put an immediate and decisive end to China’s opium problem. But even Bao Shichen, who had long before given up on the possibility of shutting down foreign trade, knew how dangerous such measures could be. Later he would say that Lin Zexu had misunderstood him completely.29
By early March 1839 the entire trading community of Canton was on edge in anticipation of Lin Zexu’s arrival. Some said he was known to go among the people in disguise to gather intelligence, so it was possible he was already there. Others said he was still just crossing the mountains on his way south. They all knew how great the commissioner’s powers were—literally imperial, in that he acted on behalf of Daoguang and held authority over all civil and military officials in the region—but nobody knew how he would use them.
Some even looked forward to his arrival, believing that he would soften the extreme measures Deng Tingzhen had taken against smugglers in recent months. Word in the foreign community was that if Commissioner Lin wasn’t coming to legalize opium per se, he was at least going to make the trade easier than it had been in the past couple of years.30 Some of James Matheson’s Chinese contacts said that since Lin Zexu was a native of Fujian province just up the coast from Canton, and since the elites of Fujian were great connoisseurs of opium, “it is thought the Commissioner may be disposed to view it with indulgence.” Others assured him that there wasn’t much to worry about because Lin Zexu was said to be a “man of a mild disposition and not likely to act with harshness.”31
They could hardly have been more wrong. Lin Zexu arrived on March 10 and immediately struck hard. He began with mass arrests of known Chinese dealers (orders for which he had issued even while still on the road). He put up proclamations announcing his mission to destroy the opium trade completely, ordering merchants to abandon the trade and calling on users to hand over their pipes to be smashed. In one such proclamation, he blamed Canton for the entire nation’s opium problem.32 His men began confiscating thousands of pounds of raw opium and tens of thousands of pipes from the local population. All told, in just three months following his arrival in March 1839, Lin Zexu would arrest five times as many people for opium crimes as Deng Tingzhen had done in the entire two years of his own suppression campaign.33
With his plans for the native population of Canton set in motion, Lin then broke with all precedent—as well as the advice of his colleagues—and set his sights on the foreign merchants in their little factory compound. On March 18, he issued an edict ordering the British merchants to surrender all of their opium stocks to him, giving them three days to comply. Initially it was the Hong merchants who felt the fullest brunt of his demands, even though some of them did not take part in the opium trade themselves. As the traditional mediators between the foreign community and the Chinese government, they bore the heaviest blame for allowing the traffic to continue, and when Lin Zexu began his investigations they were the first ones he brought in for interrogation—on their knees, under threat of execution if they should lie. Houqua, as their leader, was both the most responsible and the most vulnerable. At seventy years old, he suffered from failing health, and with such tremendous pressure from Lin Zexu, he confided to Robert Bennet Forbes that he wished he were already dead.34
The foreign merchants initially made no motion toward surrendering any of their opium. They wanted to see if Lin Zexu was really serious about using his powers against them, and Lin, who was not accustomed to being disobeyed, quickly lost patience. On March 19 he announced that no foreign merchants would be allowed to leave the Canton factory compound until all of them had fulfilled his orders, adding that they must also sign bonds never to sell the drug again, under penalty of death. He threatened that if the foreigners should continue to defy him after the three-day grace period was up, he would execute Houqua and another of the Hong merchants on the morning of March 22. At a hastily convened meeting with the Hong merchants late on the night of the twenty-first, the British merchants caved slightly and voted “under solemn protest” to hand over one thousand chests of opium in the morning. Houqua and the others assured them that this would be enough to prevent any executions.35
The chests were never handed over, though. Word came back to the British the next day that a thousand chests wouldn’t be enough and perhaps they should try offering four thousand instead. Meanwhile, trying a different angle, Lin began to summon the most notorious British opium dealers individually into the walled city for interrogation. William Jardine had already left for England (and conveniently for James Matheson, it was by Jardine’s name that their firm was known in Chinese), so the first merchant Lin summoned, on March 22, was Jardine’s rival Lancelot Dent. Dent saw no point in resisting, so he prepared himself to go into the city and submit to questioning. But then another foreign resident, who had done some reading in “several old works,” pointed out to him that this was just what had happened to James Flint when he was arrested back in 1760: Flint had been summoned alone into the city, just as Dent was, without anyone to protect him, and he wound up in a Chinese prison for three years. Dent changed his mind and refused to go, preferring to take his chances with the others in the factories instead.36
The next morning, Houqua and another of the Hong merchants were paraded around the square in chains with iron collars around their necks. Lin Zexu threatened again to execute them if Dent didn’t come into the city for questioning—though by this time the merchants were starting to wonder whether his threats were just a show. Robert Forbes, for one, noticed that Houqua’s “chain” was actually so thin it was more like a necklace.37 And while the merchants were wary of Lin Zexu, they were also starting to wonder how much power he really had over them. Their opium wasn’t even in Canton—it was on ships in the outer waters and up the coast and could easily be put out of his reach—so other than shutting off the tea trade they didn’t think he could do much if they refused to give it up. Some noted that the three-day deadline had come and gone without event, the handover of any opium at all lost in a vague negotiation over whether a thousand chests would be sufficient. Even Lin Zexu’s threat to execute Houqua seemed like so much bluffing. It was starting to seem clear that they should take Lin Zexu’s bluster with a grain of salt.38
That was not how Charles Elliot saw it, though. To him, it was at last the great crisis he had been dreading for so long, the realization of all his fears. He was in Macao when he first heard the news of Lin’s demands on the foreigners, and he convinced himself that if Lancelot Dent should submit to Lin Zexu’s interrogation, he would surely wind up getting his head chopped off—and he would be only the first. There would be a mass execution of British merchants, guilty and innocent alike. But Elliot thought he could save them. He understood the Chinese (he imagined) and he knew what to do. The last thing he wrote to Palmerston before he dashed into Canton to save the merchants was that he was certain “a firm tone and attitude” was all he needed to defuse the “unjust and menacing disposition” of Lin Zexu. He would stand up to the imperial commissioner, but also appease him, using his “best efforts for fulfilling the reasonable purposes of [the Chinese] Government.” Through cooperation and respect, Elliot would make peace.39
Charles Elliot arrived at the Canton factory compound at sundown on March 24 in a rowboat, standing at the stern dressed in his full post captain’s uniform with a cocked hat, sword in hand, to take Lancelot Dent under his personal protection. He was, as James Matheson described him, “a good deal excited.”40 He called a meeting of all foreigners of every nationality and read them a public notice. Given the “imminent hazard of life and property,” he said, and given the “dark and violent” nature of Lin’s threats, they should begin immediate preparations to evacuate the Canton factories.41 If Lin Zexu refused to grant them passage from Canton to Macao within three days, Elliot said he would conclude that the Chinese intended to hold them
hostage. He promised them he would intercede. He would get them passports to leave the city and would escort them to safety. He had always been willing to comply with the Chinese government, he said, “so long as their proceedings were moderate, defensible, and just,” but now he had to stand his ground. He called on all the foreigners to unite as one, and grandly offered his protection to all. “I will remain with you,” he shouted, “to my last gasp!”42 They burst into cheers. For once, maybe for the first time, he was loved.
That night, Lin Zexu ordered all the Chinese servants out of the factory buildings. Valets, porters, cooks, compradores, linguists, and the multitudes of other attendants all packed up their belongings and left. Then he shut off supplies of fresh food to the compound. He was employing the same tactics that had been used with such success against Lord Napier in 1834, and against Baynes and his wife in 1830—namely, to isolate the unruly foreigners until they gave up.43 At the open sides of the factory compound, he stationed lines of soldiers with drawn swords to prevent anyone from passing. The rear entrances to the factories were bricked up. The foreigners’ small boats were all hauled up onto dry ground in front of the factory buildings, rudders unshipped and sails removed so they couldn’t be used to escape. On the water, guard boats arranged themselves in three tight, concentric arcs to block access to the factories from the river. The only entrances left were the three little lanes packed with shops and bars—soon to be empty—that ran in gaps between the factory buildings to the street behind. Eventually, workers showed up and bricked off Hog Lane and New China Street, leaving just one lone alley—Old China Street—as the sole means of communication with the outside. It, too, stood under heavy guard.
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