Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  And what did it all mean for China? When Lin Zexu was at his peak of confidence, in the summer of 1839—after all of the opium had been destroyed but before the British fleet arrived—he wrote a letter to Queen Victoria. He did so with the emperor’s approval, and it was loosely modeled after Qianlong’s letter to King George III. Queen Victoria herself never actually received a copy, though she might have seen it if she happened to read the Times on June 11, 1840, where it was published in English translation after a private merchant brought a copy back to London. In his letter, Lin Zexu chided Victoria at length for allowing her subjects to sell opium in China. It was especially unconscionable for her to do so, he said, because, as he understood, the British had banned it in their own country in recognition of “how hurtful it is to mankind.” For two hundred years, he wrote, all of the wealth that made England a “rich and flourishing kingdom” had come from its trade with China. And the products that the people of China sold to the British—tea, silk, and so on—were all beneficial in some way. In fact, not only were they beneficial, they were so essential that Britain surely “could not exist a single day” without them. In that light, he asked, “By what principle of reason, then, should these foreigners send in return a poisonous drug, which involves in destruction those very natives of China?”50

  The moral grounds of that letter were both impeccable and timeless. Aside from certain limitations of Lin’s knowledge about Britain (the British did not, for example, ban opium in their own country), the basic argument that Victoria’s subjects had turned a healthy and profitable commerce of two centuries into a cesspool of poison and greed was a powerful one that resonated in its own time as strongly as it does today. His letter was reprinted and quoted widely by the opponents of the Opium War in Great Britain, and it would later establish Lin Zexu in his nearly permanent position in China’s historical pantheon as the voice of moral reason who stood up on behalf of his people against the imperialist drug dealers of Great Britain. That is the Lin Zexu who endures as the hero of textbooks in China, whose birthday is celebrated in Taiwan, whose statue stands vigil over New York City’s Chinatown on a granite pedestal inscribed PIONEER IN THE WAR AGAINST DRUGS.

  In the China of his own time, however, Lin Zexu was not a national hero by any means. To many—including the Daoguang emperor—he was a disgrace to the empire whose high-handed dealings with the British had provoked a destructive and unnecessary coastal war. The righteousness of his cause aside, that view was not without its merits; if he had handled affairs at Canton differently, especially if he had been more welcoming of Charles Elliot’s willingness to cooperate, he might have been able to do permanent damage to the opium trade without giving Britain grounds for a war of reprisal. If he had been even slightly more flexible, China might have been far better off.

  The general view of Lin Zexu’s peers was not that he was wrong for confiscating the opium, but rather for shutting down the legitimate trade and locking up all the foreigners in Canton for six weeks. Those actions, they believed, were what had provoked the war, not the confiscation of opium per se.51 This was a view with strong resonance on the other side as well, for without the “siege” of Canton, the manufacturers in England would have suffered no losses and would have had no standing to lobby for reparations. Without Lin’s threat of violence against British subjects—even as a bluff—the thin foundation of the British government’s rationale for a war of honor (the one that George Staunton supported) would have been taken away. Palmerston’s war barely made it past Parliament as it was, in spite of the scandalous fact that drug smugglers were involved; there is no way he and his supporters could possibly have sold Parliament and the public on a war whose only purpose was to pay back drug smugglers (even if, privately, that was his primary reason in seeking it). The insults to Elliot, the threats to execute foreigners, the shutting down of the legitimate trade at length and without warning—those were the essential “outrages” that fueled the public argument for war. Without them, no matter how many chests of opium might have been confiscated, no matter how many private smugglers might have been ruined, the Opium War simply would not have happened.

  The most prominent Chinese account of the war from its own time was written by a geographer and military historian named Wei Yuan who had worked closely with Lin Zexu. Although Wei was an admirer of Lin and inclined to take his side, he saw the conflict in far less stark moral terms than its Western critics did. To him, it was not in its essence an opium war but rather a general conflict over China’s management of foreign trade, one to which opium was incidental. He also saw it as having been eminently avoidable. In his judgment, Charles Elliot did not have an inherently “rebellious” nature. Wei noted that Elliot had offered early on to help find a way to end the opium smuggling trade, though Lin Zexu rebuffed him. (That, according to Wei, was one of the major mistakes of the time.) Later, Elliot went along willingly with the confiscation of property, and even though he refused to hand his men over after the murder of the villager in Kowloon, he did offer a reward to try to identify the killer. As Wei depicted him, Elliot was hardly spoiling for a fight.52

  Wei Yuan understood the British to be motivated entirely by their desire for open trade, which he generally supported. He agreed with others that the regular commerce at Canton should never have been so suddenly cut off—it was, after all, something that could be used to strengthen the country. But he singled out for praise Lin’s efforts against opium, as well as a proposal Lin made to divert funds from the Canton customs toward improving local defenses. Indeed, such improvements, to Wei’s mind, were what China needed most of all for the future.

  In an echo of Napoleon’s warning to his Irish physician that a British war would only awaken China and cause it to start strengthening itself for revenge, Wei Yuan went on to argue that China must now begin arming itself with Western ships and cannons, and stock itself with foreign rockets and gunpowder. Those purchases could be made as exchanges through trade, he said, or even in lieu of tariffs, which would effectively redirect the millions of taels of annual customs revenue from Canton into building a modern Chinese military. By such means, he wrote, “the special skills of the Westerners would become the special skills of the Chinese.” Once the naval fleets and coastal defenses of Canton were fully modernized, they could do the same in the other treaty ports up to Shanghai. It would open a new era of Chinese naval power, he predicted, such as had not been seen in a thousand years.53 Unfortunately for his countrymen, it would be a long time before any Chinese government took such recommendations seriously.

  In the final count, Wei Yuan’s greatest regret about the war was that China hadn’t used it as an occasion to end the importation of opium.54 And indeed, as for the commerce in the drug, the illegal trade along the coast picked right back up again just as soon as the fighting got under way. It would soon resume its previous proportions even as the aboveboard British trade in cotton and tea was still shut down at Canton. After the war, the Daoguang emperor would issue repeated edicts calling for local officials to punish traders and users of the drug, just as he had done in the past, but those edicts would never again have the same effect they did in the years just before Lin Zexu’s arrival in Canton.55 Enforcement would be weak, corruption seeped back in, and fewer and fewer criminals were prosecuted for opium offenses, to the point that just a handful of transgressors each year appear to have been punished in China through the 1840s.56

  For all the protestations of Palmerston and his supporters that the war was not meant to support the opium trade, it certainly proved a great boon for that commerce. In the years that followed the war, opium exports from India, mostly destined for China, surpassed their previous highs and went on to reach new ones—forty thousand chests per year by 1846, fifty thousand by 1849, more than seventy thousand by 1855.57 As the opium trade regained steam thanks to the war, even the Americans of Russell & Co.—proving themselves more pragmatic than angelic—joined right back in again. The East India Company, meanw
hile, annexed the territory of Sindh in northern India (now part of Pakistan) in 1843, which cut off the last overland route for independent producers in central India to transport their opium to the Portuguese ports of Daman and Diu, thus cementing Britain’s total control over the export of the drug from the subcontinent. With the shipping of opium through non-British ports made effectively impossible, the Company sharply hiked its transit duties on Malwa opium, raising them more than three times over by 1848 to dramatically increase its income from the free growth and production of opium by independent farmers who were not British subjects.58 British India’s financial dependence on opium grew accordingly. Whereas opium revenues had made up less than a tenth of the Bengal government’s income at the time of the Opium War, by the 1850s the share had risen to nearly one-sixth.59

  Within China, opium was still technically a clandestine trade after the war (if more omnipresent than ever), but by the mid-1850s, faced with a gigantic rebellion by the quasi-Christian peasant forces of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom—an insurrection to make the White Lotus look like a tempest in a teapot—some provincial officials resuscitated the dormant issue of legalization, proposing domestic taxes on opium to help fund the war effort.60 And though George Staunton continued with his ineffectual efforts to force an end to Britain’s involvement in opium after the war, by 1856 he conceded that such efforts were no longer necessary because the trade was by that time effectively legal in China.61 That de facto legality would be made concrete in 1858 on the heels of another war, with Britain and France, after which the British plenipotentiary Lord Elgin would, much to his own mortification, sign a document setting a formal tariff for the import of opium into China. But already by that time, the only limit to the growth of the drug’s use in the Qing Empire was its price, and Chinese farmers were responding by growing poppies and processing large amounts of cheap native opium to compete with the more expensive varieties coming in from India.

  With the advent of a free, legal, and open Asian commerce in opium, the native merchants of India and China moved to dominate the trade, squeezing out the Europeans who had acted as go-betweens in the past. By the 1870s, the India-China opium trade was so firmly locked up in the hands of native traders on both sides that there was no longer much money to be made by the Western firms that had pioneered the “country” trade in the early part of the century. In the face of declining profits, Jardine, Matheson & Co. (now run by a slew of nephews and other descendants of the founders and their partners) pulled almost entirely out of the opium trade in 1873, joined by other large Western firms.62 Domestic production in China, meanwhile, kept rising—ultimately to such stupendous heights that it would dwarf the continued imports of the drug from India. The dawn of the twentieth century would find China producing ten times as much opium internally as it imported from abroad, an explosive abundance of cheap domestic narcotics that would create a public health emergency worlds beyond even the most exaggerated estimates of what had existed in the 1830s prior to the Opium War.63 So much for the virtues of legalization.

  In spite of the best efforts of moral activists at home, the British government would ultimately do nothing to scale back the dependence of British India on opium revenues or otherwise try to help prevent the growth of the drug’s use in China. Meanwhile, the Qing dynasty would continue in its failure to suppress or even regulate the use of opium by the general public in China, wallowing in a quagmire of official corruption it could not escape. Up to the twentieth century, though, Britain’s role in that process would be dwelled upon more by westerners than by the Chinese. It was the English-speaking world that condemned it as “the Opium War” from the beginning, while Chinese writers through the nineteenth century, including Wei Yuan, simply referred to it as a border dispute or foreign incident. To them, opium was a domestic problem and the war was a minor affair in the grand scheme of China’s military history. Only after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 did historians in China begin to call this war “the Opium War” in Chinese, and only in the 1920s would republican propagandists finally transform it into its current incarnation as the bedrock of Chinese nationalism—the war in which the British forced opium down China’s throat, the shattering start to China’s century of victimhood, the fuel of vengeance for building a new Chinese future in the face of Western imperialism, Year Zero of the modern age.

  But did it have to end that way? The lasting encouragement the war gave to the opium trade, which rightfully cemented its status as an “opium war,” was its effect but had never been its intention. To the contrary, the conflict marked a point where it seemed likely that the recent surge in the illegal opium trade from India could in fact be brought to an end or at least severely curtailed—and furthermore at a time when opium was still an expensive luxury good in China, when its users still numbered only in the hundreds of thousands among a population in the hundreds of millions. Such disparate figures as Lin Zexu, Wei Yuan, Charles Elliot, and George Staunton, among other significant actors in China and Britain, shared a hope that one positive outcome of this regrettable war might be the permanent elimination of the drug trade that had provoked it. Those hopes were realistic even if they were not in the end to be realized.

  Nevertheless, it is important to remember just how arbitrary and unexpected the outcome of this era really was. The Opium War was not part of some long-term British imperial plan for China but rather a sudden departure from decades, if not centuries, of generally peaceful and respectful precedent. Neither did it result from some inevitable clash of civilizations. On the whole, the foreigners and Chinese who came together at Canton got along quite well over the long term, with serious conflict being the exception rather than the norm. Both the violent turn of the smuggling trade in the late 1830s and the war that it provoked were sharp aberrations from the past. Viewed in its broadest form, Canton was—when governments and navies stayed out of it—a largely peaceful intersection of civilizations, an effective center for an international trade that served as a major engine of the world’s economy. Those more positive aspects of the old China trade were destined to be washed away by the bitter memories of the Opium War.

  And yet. If Charles Elliot had not let his panic get the best of him when he so dramatically overreacted to Lin Zexu’s threats. Or if Lin Zexu himself had been more open to working with, rather than against, Elliot; if they had cooperated on their shared interest in bringing the British opium smugglers under control. Or if just five members of the House of Commons had voted differently in the early hours of April 10, 1840—we might be looking back on very different lessons from this era.

  CODA

  Houqua and Forbes

  John Murray Forbes was already getting out of the China trade by the time the Opium War began. When his brothers had first gone to work in Canton for their uncle in the 1820s, and when he followed them there in 1830, it was for lack of any comparable opportunities closer to home. But once he was back in New England as a man of independent means, he found himself lured away from Russell & Co. into new directions. By the 1840s there were opportunities beginning to offer themselves in America’s westward expansion that simply hadn’t existed when his uncle first started sending ships to China after the Revolution, opportunities that seemed to John “better than Trade & far less troublesome”—less troublesome, that is, than the darkening clouds of Canton.1

  Back when he was still living in China, John had savaged his older brother Robert for investing in a railroad (“cutting a paltry dash in a paltry city of a paltry country”), but by the time he got back to Massachusetts in the late 1830s he could see for himself the potential that rail held. By 1843 he was putting his China money into American railroad bonds, and by 1846, at a time when there were about five thousand miles of track total in the United States, he judged the field suitably mature that he entered into it himself. For an investment of $200,000, he bought a 10 percent share of the Central Railroad originating at Detroit—a line then only a quarter finished and being sold off at 70
cents to the dollar by a bankrupt state of Michigan. The investment was made possible not by the personal funds he had brought home with him from China, which were far from sufficient, but rather from the half million dollars of investment funds Houqua had entrusted to him.2

  Forbes became president of that railroad, soon renamed the Michigan Central, which when complete would connect Lake Erie all the way to Lake Michigan. From that starting point he went on to become one of the leading railroad magnates in the antebellum United States, building a new American fortune on the foundations of the old Canton trade. He was conservative but smart about his investments, and though he let plenty of opportunities slip past (turning down, for instance, the option to buy a huge tract of land in what would eventually be the city limits of Chicago for $1.25 an acre), his holdings of land and railroad securities grew dramatically over the decades to come. He bought up land to build an expansive estate in Milton, Massachusetts, where he fashioned himself a country squire, planted twenty thousand trees, and began resettling his extended family. He bought the seven-mile-long island of Naushon next to Martha’s Vineyard that is still privately held by his descendants. He invested widely in New England land mortgages and western rolling stock. He spoke of wanting to connect Boston to the Mississippi River and then build the first railroad in China.3

  Throughout the expansion of his railroad empire, John Murray Forbes continued to invest Houqua’s money in the same ventures where he put his own funds, effectively continuing the partnership they had first established in Canton when he was all of eighteen years old and Houqua sent his cargoes of tea abroad under the young Forbes’s name. Their partnership had always been informal, based on trust and affection rather than contracts, and Forbes kept to its spirit assiduously as he represented Houqua’s interests in the United States. In contrast to the dominant currents of the Canton trade, where the foreigners in their ships all converged on the Middle Kingdom from their far-flung nations, while the merchants of Canton sat fixed at the center and let the world revolve around them, here was evidence that the flow of capital could work just as well in the other direction, that a Chinese merchant could buy into the expanding economy of the United States. By the time John Murray Forbes began returning the funds to Houqua’s heirs in the latter part of the century, the Hong merchant’s U.S. investments would represent major holdings in railroad securities that read like a map of the opening of the American Midwest—the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad; the Dixon, Peoria and Hannibal; the Carthage and Burlington; the Illinois Grand Trunk Railway; the American Central.4