Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  It was one thing to oppose the war on moral grounds when it was still just an idea, but as casualty reports began to make their way home—hundreds of young British and Indian deaths caused, in most cases, not by battle but by fever and dysentery—the drumbeat of antagonism to the war in Britain began to weaken. The critics were not entirely silenced, though. The Times, for one, kept heaping its derision on Charles Elliot and the Whig government as the war rolled on. In April 1841, well into the fighting, it ran a satirical letter from an imaginary Chinese opium addict thanking Charles Elliot for coming to rescue him from Lin Zexu. The addict had been arrested, he said, put in the cangue, his pipes broken and his opium seized—but then came the British fleet. He was released from his prison and “bought opium of thy soldiers.” He was “given back to liberty,” he wrote, “and I warble forth strains of unmingled joy.”8 But even as it satirized the grounds of the war, the Times—joined by many of the war’s former opponents—also shifted into an attack on the Whig leadership for failing to bring the conflict to an efficient close, for allowing it to drag on miserably, season after season, with no clear end in sight. That in itself, said the paper, was a separate kind of “disgraceful failure . . . an insult to our military prowess.”9

  Then came the twist: in the autumn of 1841, nearly two years after the cabinet meeting that launched the war, the Whig government fell, toppled by a successful vote of no confidence unrelated to China.10 Palmerston was out as foreign secretary. The Conservative opposition that had so vigorously attacked the war in Parliament formed a new government. James Graham, who led their condemnation of the war in 1840, became home secretary and the most intimate adviser to Robert Peel, the new prime minister.11 But by that time Britain was deep into a foreign campaign halfway around the world that had already gone on far longer than its instigators predicted. There were unexpectedly high numbers of British and Indian casualties, a vast squandering of funds the country could not easily spare, and nothing at all to show for it. So the Conservatives took a new approach. Rather than continuing to harangue the Whigs for their moral crime in starting the war, they attacked them instead (as the Times had) for letting it drag on for so long. As soon as the new ministers took power, they rapidly increased the size of Britain’s forces in China. They reinforced armies and sent in more artillery, more supplies, and more ships. Since the war could no longer be prevented, they reasoned, it should at least be won.12

  And so under the distant direction of those who had once tried to prevent it from starting, in August 1842 Henry Pottinger brought the Opium War to its close by forcing his fleet up the Yangzi River and threatening to destroy the major city of Nanjing, China’s alternate capital, at which point the Qing government finally capitulated. It was a tepid victory, to be sure. Even the Times, which had been a strong political supporter of the Conservatives, remained ambivalent about their successful closure of this “dishonourable war,” as the paper persisted in calling it.13 In a reflective editorial after news of the peace reached England, it said that even in victory the British must not forget the disgrace by which the war was started. How galling it must be for the Whigs, the paper imagined, to see all the credit go to the Conservative ministers for concluding a war they “had not disgraced themselves by originating” and for restoring a peace with China “which they had not interrupted.” The Conservatives would get the accolades for winning the war, while the Whigs would forever carry the ignominy of having started it. In the final count, though, the paper was sober as to how much celebration was merited on anyone’s side. Although the end of the China war seemed certain to bring great commercial benefits to Britain, it said, nevertheless “we should be ashamed of ourselves and our principles if we allowed its intrinsic brilliancy . . . to obscure its true character, or to render us forgetful of its most questionable origin.”14

  The treaty that resulted from Pottinger’s efforts, signed at Nanjing on August 29, 1842, was the first of what would come to be known as China’s “unequal treaties.” There would be many to join it over the course of the nineteenth century, for it marked a watershed in the Western discovery that one could get what one wanted from China through violence. Its basic terms gave Britain an indemnity of $21 million, mainly to cover the destroyed opium and the costs of the war. It opened five of China’s port cities to British trade and residence, including Canton (the city proper, that is), Ningbo, and, most important, Shanghai—which, being advantageously located at the confluence of the Yangzi River and the sea, would soon eclipse Canton as a center of trade and eventually become one of the largest cities in the world. The treaty gave Hong Kong to the British as a permanent colony. And it ended the monopoly of the Hong merchants—in all, effectively spelling the end of the Canton era.

  One thing the Treaty of Nanjing did not do, however, was to legalize opium. It simply would have been too crass. Palmerston took great pains to deny his opponents any further ammunition to claim the war was about supporting the drug trade, and though the Conservatives were in power at the end, they basically followed Palmerston’s lead. So Henry Pottinger did not demand legalization as part of the formal treaty negotiations. The only appearance of the word “opium” in the final treaty would be to describe the commodity whose value was being reimbursed with part of the indemnity. But that was only natural, for, aside from the government’s own fear of ignominy, the English manufacturers and other domestic proponents of free trade who supported the war were delighted by the prospect of newly opened ports but disavowed any sympathy for drug smugglers. The traffickers themselves, meanwhile, were in no position to ask for legalization, and in any case as with Jardine and Matheson they were generally better off without the competition it would bring. The one person on the British side who had most hoped for legalization was Charles Elliot, not because he supported the opium traffickers—he very much did not—but because he thought it would remove the threat of their causing a rupture at Canton. It was now too late for that, obviously, but in similar hopes of protecting the future peace of the legal trade from the dangers of the smuggling enterprise, Palmerston did ask Henry Pottinger to see if he could quietly persuade China’s government to legalize the opium traffic voluntarily—outside of the formal treaty negotiations, on its own initiative.

  Pottinger obediently broached the topic of opium in a private conversation during a lull in the main negotiations at Nanjing. His Chinese counterparts asked him why the British would not stop growing the poppy in India. Pottinger, speaking through Karl Gutzlaff, said that even if that could be done, which he doubted, it would mean nothing because others would still smuggle it. Far from acknowledging any British complicity in the traffic, he went so far as to blame the opium trade entirely on China, chastising the negotiators for their government’s failure to keep its subjects in line. “If your people are virtuous,” he told them, “they will desist from the evil practice; and if your officers are incorruptible, and obey their orders, no opium can enter your country.” Since China obviously couldn’t prevent its people from smoking opium, he told them, wouldn’t it be better “to legalise its importation, and . . . thereby greatly limit the facilities which now exist for smuggling?” According to a British witness, Pottinger’s Chinese counterparts were sympathetic to the logic of his proposal but said the emperor would never hear of it. Pottinger was not content to let the matter rest there, though. In a fit of liberal patronage, he went on to lecture them about how China must improve itself through free trade, drawing for them “a rapid sketch of England’s rise and progress from a barbarous state to a degree of wealth and civilisation unparalleled in the history of the world,” a rise he attributed mainly to “benign and liberal laws, aided by commerce.”15 It did not get him very far.

  Far from the common perception that the war was fought mainly to further the opium trade, it was a genuinely open question whether Britain’s direct involvement in that commerce would even survive the war. As early as September 1839, Lord Broughton, the president of the Board of Control, informed Lo
rd Auckland, the governor-general of India, that in light of the events in China, “Doubtless, you must gradually give up the cultivation of the poppy.” Shortly after the House of Commons debate he reported that he was drafting a proposal “to disconnect the government of India from the poppy cultivation.” By June 1840, Broughton was insisting to Auckland that the government in India must, at the very least, “restrict the cultivation considerably,” given “the monstrous outcry that has been raised against your wicked wish to poison a third of the whole human race, merely to fill your own coffers.” The Company’s Court of Directors resisted any measures to scale back their production of opium, but they were not unanimous—as one of them wrote to his peers in a scathing dissent, “Is there any man still so blind as not to perceive that [opium] has had a most injurious effect upon our national reputation? Can any man be found so hardy or perverse as to deny that it has led to the total derangement of our Trade with China?”16

  The Conservative government, meanwhile, carefully avoided any appearance of supporting the opium trade after the war. Lord Aberdeen, Palmerston’s successor as foreign secretary, told Henry Pottinger that even if he should convince the Chinese to legalize opium on their own terms, Britain’s representatives there should still “hold themselves aloof from all connexion with so discreditable a traffic.” A supplement to the Nanjing treaty would grant British subjects limited immunity to Chinese law in the treaty ports—extraterritoriality, that is—but again, the British government made it clear to Pottinger that this clause must never be invoked in the favor of drug smugglers.17 If a British merchant chose to concern himself with opium, said Aberdeen, he “must receive no protection or support in the prosecution of his illegal sale; and he must be made aware, that he will have to take the consequences of his own conduct.”18 Aberdeen’s words echoed those of Palmerston before the war, but by this time nobody could pretend they were taken by surprise if China should crack down in the same way again.

  Meanwhile, anti-opium activists in Britain were trying to find a way to clear the stain of Britain’s “Opium War” by agitating for a ban on the drug from their own side. George Staunton—who appears never to have had any regrets about supporting the war as one of national honor—continued to try to regain his moral footing vis-à-vis China by following up on his promise in Parliament to help end the opium traffic. He helped champion a bill in the House of Commons in 1843 that would have abolished the production of opium in British India, and in supporting it he warned that “our friendly relations with China cannot long co-exist with a large smuggling trade in opium on the coast of China under the British flag.”

  The end of the war could be the advent of a new era of peace and friendship between Britain and China, Staunton believed, but only if Britain stopped encouraging the smugglers by producing opium in India and selling it to them. If the opium trade were allowed to continue, he declared, the hard-won treaty with China would “be converted into a hollow truce, and probably, within a few months changed into a sanguinary war, of which no man can undertake to foretell the length or the result!” Staunton acknowledged that the campaign to suppress opium might prove to be a long and uphill battle, but he compared it hopefully to the campaign against slavery of Bishop Wilberforce, who, noted Staunton, eventually “lived to see . . . the complete triumph of his principles.”19 The bill would fail, though. And even the milder restrictions suggested by Broughton to Auckland would in time prove unnecessary as the war passed and the distant affairs of India and China slipped back into the shadows of British consciousness.

  Of all those who had an individual stake in the Opium War, Lady Napier was probably the person most unreservedly delighted by it. For as she saw it, the British government had finally gotten around to avenging her husband. In March 1840, she wrote to Palmerston to convey “the joy I felt when I this day read in the newspapers that War had actually been declared against China.” She reminded him that Lord Napier had been asking for just such a war in the weeks before his death in 1834. “I cannot but feel gratified that at length similar Views to those he entertained are to be acted upon,” she told Palmerston. “I knew the day of Retribution must come, and I . . . shall rejoice most sincerely when the Chinese are thoroughly humbled, a lesson they have long required.”20

  Meanwhile, if there was anyone in Britain one might have expected to denounce a war in support of opium traffickers, it would probably be Thomas De Quincey, the famous addict who had chronicled for a generation of British and American readers his desperate attempts to break free of dependence on the drug. However, the author of Confessions of an Opium-Eater, apparently lacking even a threadlike sense of irony, was in fact one of the war’s most rabid supporters. In an article he wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine on “The Opium and the China Question,” he insisted that it was ridiculous to say opium had anything to do with the war in China.21 As he reasoned, since the drug was so expensive and the peasants in China were so poor, the opium trade couldn’t possibly affect the laboring classes of China like people said. And if the only users in China were wealthy elites who should choose to indulge in their own homes, well, that was their own private business—“what a chimerical undertaking, to make war upon their habits of domestic indulgence!” he wrote. In any case, he blamed China itself for the opium trade just as he had implicitly blamed China and the rest of the Orient for his own opium addiction: namely, because he imagined it to be the original source of a taste for the drug, by which he had been seduced and polluted. China, he wrote, was “the original tempter, inviter, hirer, clamorous suborner, of that intercourse which now she denounces.”22

  If the war wasn’t about opium, then, De Quincey argued that it was instead about teaching the Chinese to respect the British—and here the old question of the “kowtow” began to emerge in a new form, touted as an indirect justification for Britain’s aggressions. According to De Quincey, those British who said that Amherst and Macartney should have performed the “servile prostration” of the kowtow when they went to Beijing were “anti-national scribblers.” If Amherst had kowtowed, he insisted, then surely China’s next demand would have been “a requisition of the English factory of beautiful English women . . . as annual presents to the Emperor.”

  That was the reason for the war, in his view: national dignity, and cutting through the bigotry of the Chinese—it was the natural, inevitable consequence of the failures of the Macartney and Amherst embassies. Britain “must not any longer allow our ambassadors to be called tribute-bearers, as were Lords Macartney and Amherst,” he wrote. “We must not any longer allow ourselves to be called barbarians.” China, as De Quincey saw it from afar, was a country “full of insolence, full of error, needing to be enlightened.” Far from condemning the drug that enslaved his own mind and precipitated the war, he instead commended the British government for standing up to the Chinese. Violence, he insisted, was “the only logic which penetrates the fog of so conceited a people.”23 The excruciating dissonance of Thomas De Quincey’s position would eventually catch up with him, though. His own son would serve in the Opium War as an army lieutenant, and would die near Canton in 1842.24

  These issues of national honor, of the “intolerable” symbolism of the kowtow, of the shabby treatment of Macartney and Amherst, gained in popularity as the war reached its end, and in the postwar era they became the hindsight logic that largely defined the war for its British defenders. For a century and more to come, apologists would say that the Opium War was destined to happen at one point or another, because China had demanded that westerners kowtow. But the kowtow had never been a serious issue. Macartney got around it in his way, and Amherst would have as well if he hadn’t misplaced his letter and his fancy outfit. It was a great source of awkwardness, to be sure, but it had never been a predictor of war. In any case, the absolute and total irrelevance of past diplomatic embarrassments to the events of 1839, in contrast to the central role of opium, was obvious to those who were there at the beginning. Charles Elliot, for one, could not
have put it more plainly. “The real cause of the outbreak with China in 1839,” he wrote after his recall, “was the prodigiously increased supply of opium from India after the Company had lost the monopoly of regular trade in the year 1834.”25 Even George Staunton, who supported the war as one of national honor, maintained afterward that he “never denied the fact, that if there had been no opium-smuggling, there would have been no war.”26

  The war’s leading proponents, meanwhile, had no want of respectability in Britain. William Jardine, Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, and James Matheson all got themselves elected to Parliament, the first two even as the war in China still carried on. Jardine entered the House of Commons in June 1841, serving until his early death in 1843 at the age of fifty-nine. In the one speech he made during that time, he argued that the first thing the government should do with its income from the China war, before covering any of the costs of the naval expedition, was to pay back the opium claimants (including himself, naturally).27 It was a fitting enough request, insofar as the main reason the Whig government had gone to war with China in the first place was because it didn’t have enough money to pay Jardine and the others what it owed them from Elliot’s pledges.

  Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, who would have a very successful career in the China trade after the war, served in the House of Commons from 1841 to 1847, joining with Jardine to defend the opium traders and later speaking against the failed bill in 1843 that would have abolished the drug’s production in British India. In his defense of opium, he insisted that not only was it perfectly harmless to the Chinese, it actually made their minds sharper. Even in 1843 he still had faith that the Qing emperor would legalize it.28 James Matheson succeeded in Jardine’s seat after the latter’s death and continued for an extended career of more than two decades in the House of Commons until his retirement in 1868 at the age of seventy-two. Matheson’s service would appear to have been mainly a social engagement, though, for in the course of twenty-five years he does not seem to have made so much as a single speech. Not that he really needed to, though, for his interests had been served quite well. Funneling the vast fortune from his China trade back into real estate in Scotland, Matheson would die the second-largest landowner in the entire United Kingdom.29