Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  As Elliot saw it, stewing angrily in the heavily guarded factory compound with nothing to show for his flamboyant attempt at a rescue, he had tried all along to cooperate with the Chinese government. From the beginning he had deliberately distanced himself from Napier’s arrogant and aggressive precedent and tried to act respectfully toward the Qing officials. He had done what he could to keep the British free traders in line, no thanks to his impotent instructions from Palmerston. He had even helped the local authorities to drive the opium smugglers out of Whampoa, for which the local English press accused him of serving the Chinese over his own people. So the anger that now boiled up within him was something like that of a lover betrayed: a sudden, explosive desire for revenge every bit as strong as his sense of injury in being scorned by the Chinese commissioner he had imagined himself helping and supporting, whose gratitude he had expected as his due.

  And so on April 3, nine days before Lin Zexu would write to the emperor of his great success at Canton, Elliot had sent off a blistering secret dispatch to Palmerston begging for a naval fleet. “It appears to me, My Lord,” he wrote even as Lin was taking measure of his easy victory, “that the response to all these unjust violences should be made in the form of a swift and heavy blow, unprefaced by one word of written communication.” In the language of the dispatch—which was so vicious and direct that most of it would be redacted before it was ever shared with Parliament—he might as well have been channeling the ghost of Lord Napier. Elliot called for a British naval blockade of Canton and the Yangzi River. He called for the capture of the enormous island of Chusan on the eastern coast, followed by an expedition northward to demand “the disgrace and punishment” of Lin Zexu and Deng Tingzhen. He wanted Daoguang to be forced to apologize for “the indignities heaped upon the Queen,” and to pay an indemnity to satisfy British losses. The time had come, wrote the once conciliatory Elliot, that the Chinese government “must be made to understand its obligations to the rest of the world.” He concluded his dispatch with a warning that if the British government failed to respond decisively, if it should simply tolerate the Chinese government’s actions as it had always done in the past, then Lin Zexu would think he could act with impunity and the tensions at Canton would continue to mount “till they reach a pass when such extensive measures will be necessary as would probably break up the whole fabric of society in this portion of the globe.”68

  Writing to his wife, Clara, in Macao the following day, Elliot made clear his faith that the British government would back him up. “The great point now is to get this opium delivered,” he told her, “so that having fulfilled my public engagement I may make my bow to his Excellency, and all their other Excellencies till we come to Him in another sort of form, and with another kind of business in hand.”69 He focused nearly all of his anger on Lin Zexu, accusing him of treachery and cruelty in locking up the foreigners and threatening them with violence. “This wild creature from Beijing, charged with the business of mending the Emperor’s watch, has done him the favor to perform that office by smashing it with a hammer,” he told Clara. “All sense of security for property at Canton is broken in pieces. And I confess I am not sorry for it.” Indeed, he welcomed the breach in relations, welcomed what he hoped would be a final, forceful solution to the free-trade anarchy he had worried over since he first assumed the office of superintendent. “Our good friends in Downing Street will find a more hopeful seat for trade without much difficulty,” he predicted. The British could seize an island, build a settlement on it, make it their own center of trade. Canton and its idiosyncratic trading world, with its factories and gates and rules and monopoly merchants and servants and hoppos and alleyways and smugglers, would all slip away into the oblivion of history.

  In all, the detention of the foreign population in Canton would last for six weeks, until late May 1839. It was no simple matter to get all of the promised opium into Lin Zexu’s hands. Aside from much of it being on ships that had to be recalled from distant ports in Southeast Asia, some of the coastal captains read between the lines of their orders and tried to sell what they had on the way back down to Canton. By the second week of April the drug was slowly beginning to arrive at a depot Lin Zexu had established near the Tiger’s Mouth forts.70 By early May the total was getting close to what Elliot had promised, and a release of the merchants seemed imminent, but it turned out there had been errors in his original figures. Some of the distant owners refused to send their opium back for confiscation, and there were chests that had been promised twice: once by the firm that owned them, again by the firm that held them on consignment. It turned out there were not actually 20,283 chests available, and Elliot feared if he didn’t make good on his pledge then Lin would never let them leave Canton. He went around the firms, begging them nervously to come up with more opium somehow. “For Heaven’s sake, gentlemen,” they recalled him pleading, “enable me to keep my pledge with this man, and to fulfil the whole agreement.”71 In the end, perversely enough, Elliot convinced Lancelot Dent’s firm to make up for the shortfall by purchasing five hundred more chests of opium from a vessel that had just arrived from Bombay with the new season’s crop, promising to pay them back.

  If Lin Zexu had merely put the opium into storage, there might have later been a way out. Some of the traders assumed the Chinese government would sell off the confiscated drugs through a state monopoly and use the money to reimburse the traders, thus clearing the balance sheets before shutting down the trade completely.72 In this they were encouraged when rumors said the Daoguang emperor had asked Lin Zexu to ship it all up to Beijing, and there were reports that Lin was sorting the chests according to quality (and thus price, suggesting that they would be sold at some point). But the emperor quickly reversed those orders—it would be too difficult to prevent theft during the long transport of the valuable cargo up to Beijing. Instead, he instructed Lin Zexu to dispose of it on the spot.73 Lin obeyed.

  Over the course of three weeks in June, Lin Zexu destroyed all of the British opium in a specially built site near the Tiger’s Mouth. The American missionary Elijah Bridgman was on hand as a witness. Behind a palisade of sharpened bamboo stakes, the muddy compound contained three large rectangular pools about seven feet deep, with planks and piers laid across them, their insides lined with flagstones and logs. Each pool was first filled a couple of feet deep with water, then workers—under extremely close supervision—carried individual balls of opium out over the water on the planks, crushed them with their feet, and kicked them into the water. Other workers stood in the muck, stirring the thick stew of opium and water into a froth. Then they covered the whole surface with lime and salt and left it to ferment for a few days, to ensure that none of the drug could be salvaged. Each pool had a small trench with a sluice gate leading into the river, and once its load of opium was fully decomposed, the sluice was opened and the vile liquid emptied into the river to be washed out to sea. In preparation for the first discharge, Lin Zexu composed a prayer for the god of the sea, apologizing for his defilement of the ocean and suggesting that the various beasts of the water might wish to move out of the way for the time being.74

  Palmerston first learned about Elliot’s confiscation of the opium not from Elliot himself but from the faster lines of communication in the merchant community—who framed it for him not as a matter of safety or national honor but of compensation. The opium traders wanted their money. On August 18, 1839, eleven days before Elliot’s panicked dispatch of April 3 would reach his desk, Palmerston received a forwarded excerpt of a private letter, written by an unidentified Canton trader to his London correspondent, announcing “the astounding intelligence of Capt. Elliot having ordered the surrender to him of all opium in China, for the service of the British Government, which is pledged to surrender its full value.”75 The author of the letter urged his partner to begin working with friends in London to put pressure on the government in order to “expedite satisfactory payment in England.”

  The man who gave
Palmerston this anonymous extract was John Abel Smith, a member of Parliament from Palmerston’s Whig party who also happened to be a partner in the trading firm Magniac & Co.—which was Jardine and Matheson’s correspondent firm in London (and where Jardine would take up a partnership when he arrived from China). To avoid any appearance of trying to influence Palmerston, however, Smith presented himself as a disinterested lawmaker, assuring the foreign secretary that the letter had not been written to himself, nor to his firm, so no personal interests were at stake in the urgent news it conveyed. That was a lie, though—Smith himself was the recipient of the letter, its author was James Matheson, and by forwarding the letter to Palmerston he was launching the campaign to make the government pay up.76

  As the news rolled in from Canton, Palmerston was deluged with letters and petitions from investors in Britain and India requesting (then demanding) payment for the opium they had signed over to Charles Elliot at Canton. The international network of traders mobilized quickly—Matheson, for one, sent off a barrage of letters to correspondents in India at the same time he wrote to John Abel Smith, gearing them up to put similar pressure on the British authorities in Bombay and Calcutta. He told Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy to “do all you can to influence your Government” to follow Elliot’s plan.77 Those Bombay merchants in turn lobbied not just the British authorities in India but the home government as well. In a particularly ominous turn, the Canton Register reported that two prominent Parsi merchants in Bombay had committed suicide, fearing financial ruin due to Elliot’s actions. It predicted that “more suicides among the same class may be expected unless the government give prompt assurances that Captain Elliot’s engagement will be redeemed.”78

  The opium traders knew what they were up against in asking to be paid for contraband, but they made their arguments in near unison. Elliot had promised compensation, they maintained, and the British government must make good on his promise. He had taken their property forcibly, ordering the agents at Canton to hand it over to him without discussion. Whether or not Elliot actually had the authority to do so, the agents had taken him at his word, their obedience (as they pointed out) being proof of their loyalty to the British crown. British and Indian claimants alike argued that the East India Company had long encouraged their trade—for as everyone knew, the Company still monopolized the production of Patna opium in Bengal and sold it at auction for the sole purpose of its being resold in China. It charged transit fees on all Malwa opium exported through Bombay in order to rake in income from that realm of production as well.

  Even the government back home, they argued, had sanctioned the traffic—citing as their evidence the by now much regretted statement by the House of Commons select committee in 1832 that with regard to the opium monopoly, “it does not appear advisable to abandon so important a source of revenue.” (Which, in context, meant only that the Company would be financially better off keeping a monopoly over opium production rather than allowing its free cultivation by Indian growers; it was not intended as a judgment on the merits of opium itself.)

  Their arguments were largely spurious. While the East India Company was indeed deeply implicated, the British government itself had scarcely supported them in any active capacity. Rather, it had done its best to ignore them, and Palmerston had disavowed the opium smugglers outright when Elliot warned they might get the other traders at Canton into trouble. Furthermore, although British India had indeed milked the opium trade for all it was worth in recent years, that dependency was a fairly recent development and did not have to continue. The governor-general in Calcutta at the time, Elliot’s cousin Lord Auckland, predicted that the government in British India would in the future disconnect itself from opium production, instituting some kind of export tax to make up for the lost revenue from the drug monopoly. In other words, the economy of British India would evolve and survive in the absence of direct involvement in opium.79

  Elliot’s pledges were just one part of the problem, though, for one major side effect of the opium crisis was that the legal, aboveboard trade had also been shut down since March 1839 with, as far as the British back home could tell, no end in sight. Ships full of cotton textiles from Britain were stuck at Macao, unable to sail to Canton to unload their wares. Tea shipments could not depart from Whampoa. And so, quite separately from the narrow community of opium claimants, the much larger community of British manufacturers started lobbying Palmerston to reopen the market for their goods at Canton.

  These domestic petitioners were explicit about distancing themselves from the opium smugglers. The Londoners said they did not want “to mix up in this address the question regarding the trade in Opium,” while the Bristol firms made clear that they were not “in any manner connected with the Opium Trade.” Instead, they represented weavers of cotton cloth and yarn in Manchester, producers of woolens in Leeds, importers of tea to Bristol—that is, firms that had benefited enormously from the end of the East India Company’s monopoly in 1834, but who now found their rich markets ripped out from under them.80 In financial terms, the group from Manchester alone estimated it was on track to ship £850,000 worth of cotton goods to China that year, that one city’s production worth nearly half the value of the opium at question, all of it unsellable if Canton remained closed.81

  Collectively, the domestic manufacturers wielded a political weight that was orders of magnitude greater than that of the opium claimants (to say nothing of being free of the moral taint that clung to them), and while they had little to say about the opium seizure itself, they did, in a coordinated voice, demand “prompt, vigorous, and decided measures” to reopen Canton and put the regular China trade “on a more secure and permanent basis.”82 In other words, they wanted a treaty—by force if necessary—to protect their markets in China from such arbitrary stoppages in the future.

  With the most impeccable of timing, William Jardine arrived home in September right on the crest of the news from Canton. He, too, threw himself into lobbying for compensation, though he was not optimistic about success—mainly because he realized that ordinary people in Britain, to the extent that they knew about the opium trade at all, considered it a scandal. Politicians were loath to say anything positive about those who dealt in it, even if the matter of Lin Zexu’s seizure and destruction of opium was arguably a matter of national honor for which the specific commodity at issue was irrelevant.83

  The embarrassment of the opium trade certainly argued strongly for the government to make the whole matter disappear as quickly as possible, but the fact was that the amount of money owed to the traders for Elliot’s opium pledges was enormous, and there was no obvious source from which it could be obtained. The Times, in its own review of the compensation question, determined, “Whether the loss is to fall on the importing merchants, the East India Company, or the exhausted Treasury of England, is, we believe, alike a matter of complete uncertainty to all.”84 In any case, the country appeared to be “wholly unprepared to meet it.” Harshly critical of the speculations that had led Britain to this point, the Times commented that ordinary investors who had profited from the opium trade “would do well, in living upon their gains, to remember the guilty source from which they are chiefly drawn.”

  Buffeted from all sides, Palmerston finally turned back to the pleas for an armed expedition against China he had always rejected in the past. If the situation really were so dire as Charles Elliot made it out to be—and the urgent, loud demands for compensation from British and Indian merchants ensured that Palmerston had neither the time nor the political leeway to wait and see if Canton would right itself as it had always done before—there was an alternative waiting for him in his files.

  All the way back to Macartney’s aggrieved exit from China in 1793, there had been Britons who recognized the enormous advantage their navy would possess in the watery regions of coastal China where the foreign trade went on. With just a few warships, Macartney had imagined, all navigation on the Chinese coast could be destroyed, the Tiger’s
Mouth forts demolished, the river blockaded, the whole trade of Canton ruined, and millions of people “reduced to hunger and insurrection.”85 More recently, Palmerston had his letters from James Matheson and Hugh Hamilton Lindsay in 1836 calling on him to send a fleet to China in reprisal for Napier’s death—letters arguing in detail how a small and inexpensive naval force from India could force its will on China and open a new era of trade. Their hawkish proposals had been there for him all along, lying dormant and unwanted. But in the fall of 1839, for the very first time—not just for himself but for anyone who had ever served in his office—Palmerston wondered whether the situation at Canton had deteriorated so far, and had become so acutely untenable and dangerous, that Britain might be justified in putting such a proposal into action.

  Palmerston brought his thoughts on China to a cabinet meeting at Windsor Castle on October 1, 1839. It had been a little over a month since he received Elliot’s secret dispatch calling for war, and the intervening weeks had been marked by intense pressure from business lobbyists demanding action. In normal times China was not a country British politicians paid attention to, other than to be glad for the large stream of revenue that derived from tea imports, and in the fall of 1839 there were other international crises that overshadowed the inconvenient events unfolding in China. There was a war in the Ottoman Empire that pitted Britain against Russia by proxy and threatened Britain’s crucial routes to India and the Persian Gulf. A dispute over the border between Maine and New Brunswick was stoking tensions with the United States. An invasion of Afghanistan was under way, likewise driven by the rivalry with Russia, that would occupy much of the military force available to British India for the foreseeable future. The ministers did not want to distract themselves with China any more than was absolutely necessary.86