Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  On August 30, Qishan invited Charles Elliot to come meet with him at a reception tent a few miles inland from the mouth of the White River to settle terms of peace. The officials who escorted Elliot were chatty, and one remarked in passing that he liked to smoke a pipe of opium now and then.54 Qishan himself was polished and polite, and he mentioned that he would soon be leaving for Canton to look into Lin Zexu’s actions, explaining to Elliot that he and the other officials held Lin fully responsible. He even suggested the British had been right to defy him.55 In any case, Qishan convinced Elliot that they should return to the south to settle their treaty at Canton rather than trying to do it on the spot. The change of venue would remove the immediate British threat from the vicinity of Beijing, which Elliot agreed to as a sign of good faith, but it also delayed the negotiations for several months while the fleet sailed back down the coast and Qishan made his way across the empire by the inland route. By December they would finally reconvene to negotiate an ending to what appeared at the time to have been a very brief war.

  The instructions Palmerston sent Elliot to guide his negotiations were bold—much bolder than Elliot had expected—and they represented far more the avaricious desires of the free traders than the rightful claims of the British nation as Elliot understood them. Palmerston had no wish to deal with China again (indeed, so scant was his attention for the country, and so peripheral did he consider this conflict to his larger scope of responsibilities, that at least one major recent biography of him manages to skip over the Opium War entirely).56 To make sure there would be no issues left unresolved, he threw into the hopper nearly every claim or demand the traders had nagged the British government with over the years.

  This wasn’t something Palmerston was coy about with Elliot. In a private note tucked in with Elliot’s official instructions, Palmerston advised him to be firm in negotiations, to use the power at his disposal, and to treat the Chinese just like Europeans. The people of China might have different dress, language, and customs, he wrote, “but depend upon it, the inward man is the same all over the world.” In a strikingly candid passage, the foreign secretary acknowledged that the pretext for the war was so thin that Elliot should grab everything he could possibly get “because we should not again for a small Quarrel, send a similar Force to the China Sea; and we ought to settle all our matters, now that we have on the Coast a Force which is sufficient to compel Concession to all we ask.”57 In other words, the chance would likely never come again to demand so much from the Chinese, with so much force, for so little justification.

  Among Palmerston’s many demands, he wanted China to pay for the opium—the “ransom,” as he put it, “extorted as the price of the lives of British subjects arbitrarily imprisoned.”58 He also wanted China to pay Britain’s expenses in sending a naval expedition. Then came the territorial claims. In his final instructions, which Palmerston issued shortly after meeting with Jardine, he asked Elliot to secure the outright “cession of one or more islands on the coast.”59 He wanted ports opened for trade beyond Canton, along with the right of residence in such ports for men and women alike, “freely and without restraint.” He demanded an end to the monopoly of the Hong merchants, requiring that the British be able to trade with whomever they wanted. And in a particularly insidious encroachment on China’s sovereignty—one that echoed the harshest criticisms of Staunton’s translation of the Qing legal code—he demanded what was known as “extraterritoriality”: that British subjects in China should be subject only to British laws. This meant that any British who happened to reside on Chinese soil would be accountable only to their own country’s consular courts, and effectively immune to prosecution by the Chinese.

  All of these demands were unknown to Parliament, for Palmerston did not share with them his instructions to Elliot. Even the speakers who most energetically supported Palmerston’s war had not claimed any right for Britain to force trading concessions on China or demand access to sovereign territory from which foreigners had long been barred. The war they had argued so hard to justify and the war Palmerston decided to wage were two entirely different things.

  Elliot, to his credit, refused to push for Palmerston’s terms. In his first flush of anger, back when Canton was still under lockdown, he had fantasized about such things. But after having a year and a half to calm down he decided that such demands would be morally untenable. He believed that the British did have a right to demand compensation for the opium Lin Zexu had seized under duress, and that the British merchants deserved a guarantee of safety in their future trade, but beyond that he felt it would be inconsistent with “the character and dignity of England” to demand more. Specifically, he felt it would be morally wrong “to exact by fire and sword and desolation not merely ample indemnity but the means of redressing the effect of a glutted market”—particularly when that market was glutted “mainly by overproduction and overtrading in a prohibited article.”60 In other words, Britain should not use the war as an excuse to further the ends of the free traders who had caused all the trouble in the first place.

  Despite the overwhelming amount of naval firepower at his disposal, Elliot was reluctant to use it to force major concessions from Qishan.61 He worried that a protracted war would provoke the “deep hatred” of the Chinese people, and so he refrained from pressing many of his military advantages for fear of causing too many civilian casualties. Thus, although he dutifully brought up Palmerston’s desired terms with Qishan, he did not push the issue when the imperial minister turned them down one after the other. Eventually Elliot backed off from nearly all the demands that involved interference in how China governed and controlled its own territory: he did not force access to new ports, or special legal status for the British in China, or any of the other wishes that derived entirely from, and mainly benefited, the private traders who had Palmerston’s ear.

  Instead, in his negotiations with Qishan at Canton, Elliot agreed to a settlement that seemed acceptable to himself. Britain would receive an indemnity of $6 million to cover the cost of the opium that Lin Zexu had destroyed (which Qishan indicated would be a private arrangement: the Hong merchants would pay it rather than the government in Beijing, and Daoguang would not even be notified of it).62 The British would also be allowed to set up residence on Hong Kong—though not independently, for a Chinese customs house would be established there and the British would agree to pay the same fees and taxes on shipping at Hong Kong as they did at Canton. Finally, he and Qishan agreed that Canton would be reopened for normal trade once again.

  Elliot would be utterly savaged for his “conciliation” of the Chinese, as Palmerston and the local free traders saw it. He had gained only Hong Kong—“a barren Island with hardly a House upon it,” grumbled Palmerston, who was certain that it would never become a center of trade.63 And since the Chinese government would have a customs house on Hong Kong, it seemed clear the island would not be a British colony but merely a place of residence on Chinese soil, like Macao was for the Portuguese. The indemnity of $6 million wasn’t even enough to cover what Britain owed to its opium traders, let alone pay the expenses for the war as Palmerston had specified. Furthermore, Elliot had agreed that the indemnity could be paid out in installments over several years, which meant that its actual cost would probably fall on the British traders themselves, who would surely be forced to pay new import duties at Canton to cover the indemnity payments. Most important, there would be no change to the situation of the British merchants in China proper—they would still be restricted to trading in Canton, under nearly the same conditions as before. There would be no expansion of British trade into northern ports, no taking by force the rights Amherst and Macartney had failed to gain by diplomacy. Elliot had done nothing to open the country.

  Meanwhile, to secure even those limited concessions Elliot had agreed to withdraw Britain’s forces from the large and populous island of Chusan that represented their most important conquest to date and their greatest lever of influence against the
emperor. With such an overwhelming advantage of military force, the British on the scene had expected Elliot and his cousin to demand far more. Equally angry about the settlement, though, was the Daoguang emperor—for even as the British government would determine that Elliot had settled for far too little, when Daoguang learned of the agreement at Canton he thought Qishan had given up far too much. Qishan quickly met the same fate as Lin Zexu. Neither government would ratify the agreement, and before long the war would resume on a larger scale.

  Elliot did not last much longer than his Chinese counterparts. Palmerston took his refusal to demand greater concessions from China as a personal insult and removed him from service with a withering private letter of April 21, 1841, in which he accused Elliot of treating his instructions as “waste paper.” Elliot had deliberately disobeyed his orders, said Palmerston, and dealt with Britain’s national interests “according to your own Fancy.” Under such circumstances, he wrote, “it is impossible that you should continue to hold your appointment in China.”64 He ordered Elliot home as soon as his replacement—a far more aggressive envoy named Henry Pottinger, with nearly forty years of experience in India, who would share none of Elliot’s respect or affection for the Chinese people and would be determined to drive the war in China to its fullest and most profitable end—should arrive. In a prelude to the disgrace that awaited Elliot in Britain, there were already rumors that he had suffered a breakdown of some kind in Asia. His own cousin, Lord Minto, told a cabinet minister that Elliot “seemed to have lost his head; and, by his long residence in China, to have become more of a Chinese than an Englishman.”65

  They didn’t know the half of it. Somewhere in the tumultuous cascade of events that began with his intervention to make the British merchants surrender their opium—the panicked, poorly conceived intervention that made the entire war possible—Elliot had indeed begun to lose grip on his sanity. “I have fancied, (and the fancy is terrible) that my mind is not quite steady,” he wrote to his sister in May 1840, a month before the British fleet arrived. He begged her to keep his state of mind a secret. “For God’s sake do not mention this,” he wrote. “I have had great difficulty at times in preserving a hold, a firm hold over my thoughts.”66 The pressure had just been too great, the terror of failure too all-consuming, the whole economy and safety of the empire (as he imagined) resting on his shoulders alone. “No man has had a harder task to perform,” he pleaded to his sister, “and never was a hard task more successfully worked out. The results are before the world.” He was positive that he had done the right thing in forcing the merchants to surrender their opium, and in provoking a national war, but he was mad with alarm that the rest of the world might not see it that way. “I shall be abused, and probably removed,” he insisted, “but I can show that I have saved as terrible a commercial whirlwind as ever threatened British India.” He was a hero, he repeated to himself, surely he was a hero.

  CHAPTER 15

  Aftermath

  There is no more perfect emblem of Britain’s ambivalence toward the Opium War than the first medal that was struck to commemorate it. In a remarkable display of chutzpah that the designer apparently thought appropriate to the occasion, it depicted a lion wearing a crown, representing Britain, with its forepaws firmly planted on the back of a dragon, representing China, and crushing it to the ground. That was certainly how many people in the world saw the war, but it wasn’t exactly the tone the British government had intended to set. So that initial design for the China campaign medal with its brazen image of subjugation was rejected in favor of a much blander design that merely shows a palm tree with some British war equipment arranged underneath—a field gun and naval cannon draped with the Union Jack, an anchor and a capstan, various rifles and priming irons—to indicate that the war was just an exercise in British arms to set the China trade back on a solid footing, not some campaign of imperial conquest. The Chinese were now our friends, it implied, not our victims. The Latin inscription across the top of the medal read Armis Exposcere Pacem. Loosely translated: “They demanded peace by force of arms.”1

  . . .

  In gambling that Britain could fight a focused war without invoking the combined wrath of three hundred million people, Palmerston had relied heavily on the intelligence reports Lindsay and Gutzlaff brought back from their voyage on the Lord Amherst—which, as it turned out, were accurate enough: China was at that time a sufficiently divided country that the people would not unify against a British attack. It was not the empire of one mind that James Graham had imagined for Parliament; there was no longer any possibility, as Macartney and others had feared, that the emperor could with a wave of his hand shut the British out of China’s rich markets forever. The government simply didn’t have that kind of control over its population. Far from triggering popular boycotts of British trade, the war instead opened existing fissures within Qing imperial society itself, pitting Han Chinese against Manchus, merchants against officials, abusive militia soldiers against angry locals—who, as some Chinese officials complained, were more afraid of their own country’s troops than they were of the British. At times when the guns were not actively firing, the British found it relatively easy to buy their provisions from the ostensibly loyal subjects of the emperor with whom they were at war.2

  The Qing dynasty’s meager navy had barely managed to hold its own against Shi Yang’s irregular pirate fleets thirty years earlier, and its land forces were still suffering from the severe funding cuts Jiaqing had implemented after the corruption of the White Lotus campaign. The soldiers’ weapons were old and rusty, and, needless to say, they had no chance at all of prevailing in battle against the most powerful and modern navy in the world. And the British held nothing back, deploying even the first ironclad steamship to appear in Asia, the Nemesis, which proved impervious to Chinese cannons and could steam against the wind and current wherever it pleased. The outcome of any given battle was predictable as long as the fighting took place along the water—for as Lindsay and Jardine and the others who helped shape Britain’s strategy knew, the empire’s internal trade in the east and south depended heavily on transportation routes along inland canals and rivers, and so China’s most crucial cities in the the-ater of war were located on the water, fully vulnerable to naval attack.

  The Daoguang emperor had little clear information about what was happening in the field against the British, for many of the reports from his commanders—even from Lin Zexu and Deng Tingzhen—contained fabrications and claims of victory and destruction of British forces that never occurred.3 Viewed from Beijing, as from London, it seemed the war could not possibly last long. And so there was no motion on the Chinese side to make a major recalibration of the empire’s forces as had been done under Jiaqing against the White Lotus. Daoguang did not deem the war with Britain to be even remotely worthy of drastic measures like his ancestor Kangxi’s evacuation of the coast in the seventeenth century. Chinese forces tried valiantly to defend the cities under attack, but they did not try to draw the British forces inland, away from their ships and their most crucial advantages—which they might have been advised to do, for British armies on their own were hardly invincible; in January 1842, even as China’s coastal cities were falling with ease, three thousand miles to the west in Afghanistan a British army of forty-five hundred men was massacred in its entirety in the mountains outside Kabul as it tried to retreat, with only one European survivor to tell the tale. But that did not happen in China. Neither did China, as one official allegedly proposed to the emperor, muster an army of three hundred thousand soldiers and send it on campaign westward, across Russia and Europe, to sack London.4

  As it was, the battles were generally swift and bloody and ended in Britain’s favor. No amount of bravery could have changed that. In the entire course of the war China won at most one skirmish, a minor one fought by angry peasants rather than imperial forces, and they were greatly aided by foul weather. Faced with overwhelming odds despite their greater numbers, Chinese o
fficers resorted to desperate measures like locking the gates of their forts so the soldiers couldn’t run away.5 At Ningbo, one commander purchased nineteen monkeys, intending to strap fireworks to their backs and then have someone fling them onto the British ships to set them on fire and hopefully blow up their powder magazines. But nobody dared to get close enough to throw them.6

  Nevertheless, in spite of this drastic imbalance of military power the war still dragged on for more than three years all told, a succession of fierce, one-sided battles punctuated by long quiet seasons of waiting for instructions from London or responses from Beijing. The victories were increasingly self-defeating for British morale as their troops racked up atrocities against helpless Chinese civilians and soldiers without finding any way to compel the Qing government to surrender. A sense of mortification runs through many of the writings left by British officers in the war. One described his horror of a sea “quite blackened with floating corpses” after a battle, the inside of a fort “bespattered with brains.” Another confessed in his journal that “many most barbarous things occurred disgraceful to our men.” At one point in 1842, the admiral of the British fleet practically begged Lord Minto to spare his forces from having to invade any more Chinese cities because “our visitations are so calamitous to the wretched inhabitants.” It was, wrote Charles Elliot in 1842 after he was no longer a part of it, “a war in which there was little room for military glory.” The only path to the kind of victory Palmerston desired, he warned, was through “the slaughter of an almost defenceless and helpless people, and a people which, in a large portion of the theatre of war, was friendly to the British nation.”7