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by Stephen R. Platt


  18. Staunton, Memoirs, p. 26.

  19. Staunton to his father, April 18, 1801.

  20. Staunton to his father, February 26, 1801.

  21. Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), vol. 2, p. 338.

  22. Staunton to his father, March 27, 1800.

  23. Morse, Chronicles, vol. 2, p. 342 (capitalizing the “h” in “His”).

  24. Staunton to his father, March 27, 1800.

  25. Staunton to his father, January 19, 1801; to his parents, June 27, 1800.

  26. Staunton, Memoirs, p. 39.

  27. William C. Hunter, The ‘Fan Kwae’ at Canton before Treaty Days, 1825–1844 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882), p. 126.

  28. Thomas Noon Talfourd, The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life (London: Edward Moxon, 1837), vol. 1, footnote on p. 208 (Talfourd’s words, not Lamb’s).

  29. Thomas Manning letter to Joseph Banks (draft, 1806), Manning Papers, TM/4/5, Royal Asiatic Society, London; most biographers give the year 1802 for the beginning of his plan, though Charles Lamb wrote to him in August 31, 1801, that “I heard that you were going to China”: Talfourd, Letters of Charles Lamb, vol. 1, p. 196.

  30. On the deficiency of Hager’s system, see William Huttmann, “Notice of Several Chinese-European Dictionaries which have Preceded Dr. Morrison’s,” in the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register, vol. 12 (September 1821): 242, which lists two subsequent works explicitly written to debunk Hager’s.

  31. A. J. Dunkin, “Only Passport to England Signed by Napoleon I,” in Notes and Queries, 2nd series, vol. 10 (August 25, 1860): 143–44.

  32. Manning to Joseph Banks (draft, 1806), Manning Papers, TM/4/5, Royal Asiatic Society, London.

  33. Charles Lamb to William Hazlitt, November 18, 1805: “Manning is come to town in spectacles, and studies physic; is melancholy, and seems to have something in his head which he don’t impart.” Talfourd, The Works of Charles Lamb. To which are prefixed, His Letters, and a Sketch of His Life (New York: Harper and Bros., 1838), vol. 1, p. 133.

  34. Talfourd, The Letters of Charles Lamb, vol. 1, p. 242. Lamb seems to have made up the word “smouchy”—the Oxford English Dictionary lists this letter to Manning as the only known instance of its use.

  35. Clements R. Markham, ed., Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (London: Trübner and Co., 1876), pp. clvi–clvii.

  36. Peter Auber, China. An Outline of Its Government, Laws, and Policy: and of the British and Foreign Embassies to, and Intercourse with That Empire (London: Parbury, Allen and Co., 1834), pp. 220–21.

  37. Quoted in Edward Smith, The Life of Sir Joseph Banks: President of the Royal Society (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1911), p. 269, n. 1; it is followed by the letter from Banks to Staunton.

  38. Lamb to Manning, December 5, 1806, in Talfourd, Letters of Charles Lamb, vol. 1, pp. 285–89.

  39. Baldwin, R. C. D. “Sir Joseph Banks and the Cultivation of Tea,” RSA Journal 141, no. 5444 (November 1993): 813–17.

  40. Susan Reed Stifler, “The Language Students of the East India Company’s Canton Factory,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 69 (1938): 46–82, see p. 57.

  41. Eliza Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, D.D. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839), vol. 1, p. 93.

  42. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 98.

  43. Quotations from ibid., vol. 1, pp. 94, 117–18. Preaching to ship’s crew: Christopher A. Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), p. 99.

  44. Eliza Morrison, Life and Labours, vol. 1, pp. 127–31.

  45. Marshall Broomhall, Robert Morrison: A Master Builder (Edinburgh: Turnbull & Spears, 1927), p. 52.

  46. Smith, Life of Sir Joseph Banks, p. 271.

  47. Eliza Morrison, Life and Labours, vol. 1, pp. 153, 162.

  48. Broomhall, Master Builder, p. 57 (emphasis added).

  49. Eliza Morrison, Life and Labours, vol. 1, p. 222; Stifler, “The Language Students of the East India Company’s Canton Factory,” p. 60.

  50. Eliza Morrison, Life and Labours, vol. 1, p. 153.

  51. On lack of smuggling: Patrick K. O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,” Economic History Review, new series, vol. 41, no. 1 (February 1988): 1–32, see p. 26.

  52. Morse, Chronicles, vol. 2, p. 117.

  53. H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 234, 245.

  54. Wakeman, “Drury’s Occupation,” p. 30; see also O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation,” p. 15 and table 4 on p. 9 (total customs was 30 percent of income in 1810). Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–1842 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 3, provides the widely repeated figure that Chinese tea provided one-tenth of the British government’s total revenue.

  55. Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), pp. 33–34.

  56. Select Committee’s report to Secret Committee, March 3, 1809, excerpted in Morse, Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 96.

  57. Wakeman, “Drury’s Occupation,” p. 29.

  58. Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company, vol. 3, p. 86.

  59. Ibid., p. 87.

  60. Stifler, “The Language Students of the East India Company’s Canton Factory,” p. 61; Eastberg, “West Meets East,” p. 158, n. 398; Morse, Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 93.

  61. Wakeman, “Drury’s Occupation,” p. 31.

  62. Auber, China, pp. 233–34, quotation on p. 233. Referring to himself, Drury wrote that “the sword is half-out of the scabbard, and his duty forbids him making war with China”: Wood, “England, China, and the Napoleonic Wars,” p. 149.

  63. Wakeman, “Drury’s Occupation,” p. 32; Da Qing Renzong Rui (Jiaqing) huangdi shilu (Taipei: Taiwan Huawen shuju, 1964), juan 202, pp. 29b–30a.

  64. Wood, “England, China, and the Napoleonic Wars,” p. 149; Drury to Roberts, November 8, 1808, excerpted in ibid., p. 150.

  65. Wood, “England, China, and the Napoleonic Wars,” pp. 150, 153.

  66. Morse, Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 88.

  67. Quoted in Wood, “England, China, and the Napoleonic Wars,” p. 156.

  68. Wakeman, “Drury’s Occupation,” p. 33, citing M. C. B. Maybon, “Les Anglais à Macao, en 1802 et en 1808,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, tôme 6, 1906, pp. 301–25; “Sun Yu-t’ing,” in Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: SMC Publishing, Inc., 1991), vol. 2, p. 684.

  CHAPTER 4 Sea and Land

  1. Harold Kahn, Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch’ien-lung Reign (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 259.

  2. Jiaqing edict of JQ4/zheng/16 (February 20, 1799), in Shiliao xunkan (Kowloon, Hong Kong: Fudi shuyuan chuban youxian gongsi, 2005), no. 6, pp. 398–401; Wook Yoon, “Prosperity with the Help of ‘Villains,’ 1776–1799: A Review of the Heshen Clique and Its Era,” T’oung Pao 98, issue 4/5 (2012): 479–527, see pp. 520–21.

  3. Eight hundred million taels of silver: Wook Yoon, “Prosperity with the Help of ‘Villains,’” p. 514. Total U.S. GDP in 1800 was about $350 million, as per Peter Mancall et al., “Conjectural Estimates of Economic Growth in the Lower South, 1720 to 1800,” in History Matters: Essays on Economic Growth, Technology, and Demographic Change, ed. Timothy Guinnane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 396.

  4. David Nivison, “Ho-shen and His Accusers,” in Confucianism in Action, ed. David Nivison and Arthur Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 209–43, see p. 241.

  5. Benjamin Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in
Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 278–82.

  6. Susan Mann Jones, “Hung Liang-chi (1746–1809): The Perception and Articulation of Political Problems in Late Eighteenth Century China” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1971), p. 162.

  7. Ibid., p. 158.

  8. Elman, Classicism Politics, and Kinship, pp. 287–90; Jones, “Hung Liang-chi,” pp. 159–60; Nivison, “Ho-shen and His Accusers,” p. 242.

  9. Elman, Classicism Politics, and Kinship, p. 289, citing Jones, “Hung Liang-chi,” p. 160, and Nivison, “Ho-shen and His Accusers,” p. 243.

  10. Jiaqing edict of JQ4/1/4 (February 8, 1799), in Wang Xianqian, ed., Shi chao donghua lu (1899), vol. 33, Jiaqing juan 7, p. 19b; also excerpted in Qing zhongqi wusheng bailianjiao qiyi ziliao, vol. 3, pp. 103–4 (hereafter QZQWS).

  11. Wang Wensheng, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 140.

  12. “E-le-teng-pao,” in Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: SMC Publishing, Inc., 1991), vol. 1, pp. 222–24; Pamela Crossley, The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800, an Interpretive History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 21–22.

  13. Gong Jinghan, “Ping zei yi,” in QZQWS, vol. 5, pp. 169–78; heavy loads as per QZQWS, vol. 5, p. 179.

  14. Daniel Mark McMahon, “Restoring the Garden: Yan Ruyi and the Civilizing of China’s Internal Frontiers, 1795–1805” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1999), p. 168.

  15. QZQWS, vol. 3, p. 170.

  16. Ibid., p. 171.

  17. Dai Yingcong, “Broken Passage to the Summit: Nayancheng’s Botched Mission in the White Lotus War,” in The Dynastic Centre and the Provinces: Agents and Interactions, ed. Jeroen Duindam and Sabine Dabringhaus (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 49–73, see pp. 69–70. On Eldemboo’s reputation for suffering hardship, see John Fairbank’s review of Suzuki Chūsei’s Shinchō chūkishi kenkyū in the Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 1 (November 1954): 104–6.

  18. Cecily McCaffrey, “Living through Rebellion: A Local History of the White Lotus Uprising in Hubei, China” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2003), p. 229; Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann, “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 142.

  19. On the jianbi qingye system, see Philip Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 37–63.

  20. Gong Jinghan, “Jianbi qingye yi,” in QZQWS, vol. 5, pp. 178–84.

  21. A February 13, 1800, edict mentioned that 448 of the baozhai in Shaanxi were built through local funding, while just 93 were built by officials; QZQWS, vol. 2, p. 293.

  22. Wei Yuan, Sheng wu ji (1842), juan 10, p. 34a.

  23. See edict of JQ8/7/15 (August 31, 1803), in QZQWS, vol. 3, pp. 344–46.

  24. Hummel, Eminent Chinese, pp. 222–24; Crossley, The Wobbling Pivot, pp. 21–22.

  25. Wei Yuan, Sheng wu ji, juan 10, p. 39b.

  26. Dian Murray, “Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction,” in Bandits at Sea: A Pirate Reader, ed. C. R. Pennell (New York: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 253–82. The comparison to the Spanish Armada is Murray’s; see p. 275.

  27. Owen Rutter, ed., Mr. Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates: Being the Narrative of Mr. Richard Glasspoole of the Ship Marquis of Ely: Describing His Captivity . . . (London: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1935), p. 57.

  28. Wang Wensheng, “White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Social Crises and Political Changes in the Qing Empire, 1796–1810” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2008), pp. 147–48, 151–52.

  29. Quoted in David Faure, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 173.

  30. Faure, Emperor and Ancestor, pp. 277–78.

  31. Robert J. Antony, “State, Continuity, and Pirate Suppression in Guangdong Province, 1809–1810,” Late Imperial China 27, no. 1 (June 2006): 1–30, see pp. 7–10.

  32. Chung-shen Thomas Chang, “Ts’ai Ch’ien, the Pirate King Who Dominates the Seas: A Study of Coastal Piracy in China, 1795–1810” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1983), p. 37; Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 101–5.

  33. Robert J. Antony, “Piracy and the Shadow Economy in the South China Sea, 1780–1810,” in Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas, ed. Robert J. Antony (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp. 99–114, see p. 111.

  34. Rutter, Narrative of Mr. Richard Glasspoole, p. 55; Murray, “Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction,” p. 259.

  35. Antony, “Piracy and the Shadow Economy,” p. 109.

  36. John Turner, A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Turner . . . among the Ladrones or Pirates, on the Coast of China . . . in the year 1807 (New York: G. & R. Waite, 1814), p. 12.

  37. Ibid., p. 33.

  38. “Substance of Mr. Glasspoole’s Relation, upon his return to England, respecting the Ladrones,” in Further Statement of the Ladrones on the Coast of China: Intended as a Continuation of the Accounts Published by Mr. Dalrymple, ed. Anon. (London: Lane, Darling, and Co., 1812), pp. 40–45, see p. 40.

  39. Rutter, Narrative of Mr. Richard Glasspoole, pp. 36–39.

  40. Jiaqing edict of JQ10/2/7 (March 7, 1805), in Qingdai waijiao shiliao (Beijing: Gugong bowuyuan, 1932–33), Jiaqing juan 1, pp. 21b–22a.

  41. Jiaqing edict of JQ10/10/17 (December 7, 1805), in Qingdai waijiao shiliao, Jiaqing juan 1, p. 33a.

  42. Wang, “White Lotus Rebels,” pp. 498, 501.

  43. Dian Murray, “Piracy and China’s Maritime Transition,” in Maritime China in Transition, 1750–1850, ed. Wang Gung-wu and Ng Chin-keong (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004), pp. 43–60, see p. 58.

  44. Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), vol. 3, p. 117.

  45. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 118.

  46. J. H. and Edith C. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers: Being the Adventures of Sir Francis Austen, G.C.B., Admiral of the Fleet and Rear-Admiral Charles Austen (New York: John Lane, 1906), p. 219; Morse, Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 121.

  47. Quoted in Hubback and Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers, p. 220.

  48. Hubback and Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers, p. 220; Morse, Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 122.

  49. Yuan Yonglun, Jing haifen ji (Guangzhou: Shanyuan tang, 1830), vol. 2, p. 5a, translation adapted from Charles Friedrich Neumann, History of the Pirates Who Infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810 (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1831), p. 59.

  50. Rutter, Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates, p. 56.

  51. Yuan Yonglun, Jing haifen ji, vol. 2, pp. 11a–12a, trans. Neumann, History of the Pirates, pp. 71–72.

  52. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 21b, trans. Neumann, History of the Pirates, p. 88.

  53. Murray, “Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction,” p. 260.

  54. The figure of two hundred million taels for the White Lotus suppression is from McCaffrey, “Living through Rebellion,” p. 196, and Wang, “White Lotus Rebels,” p. 104. Roger Knight, in Britain against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p. 386, gives the figure of £830 million for the total financial cost of the Napoleonic Wars to Britain between 1793 and 1815; he also gives £578 million for the size of the debt that was run up to pay for the war. Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Malabar, FL: R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1982), p. 139, puts the cost of the war at double that: £1.657 billion; at the standard exchange of three taels to one pound sterling, £830 million was worth 2.49 billi
on taels.

  55. Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies, vol. 31, no. 4 (October 1992): 309–29, see p. 323.

  56. Dai Yingcong, “Civilians Go into Battle: Hired Militias in the White Lotus War,” Asia Major, 3rd series, vol. 22, part 2 (2009): 145–78, see pp. 176–77.

  57. Rutter, Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates, p. 19; Morse, Chronicles, vol. 3, pp. 144–45.

  CHAPTER 5 Points of Entry

  1. George Thomas Staunton to Charles Grant, November 20, 1809, Staunton Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University, Durham, NC, accessed via Adam Matthew Digital, “China: Trade, Politics and Culture 1793–1980.”

  2. George Thomas Staunton, Memoirs of the Chief Incidents of the Public Life of Sir George Thomas Staunton, Bart., printed for private circulation (London: L. Booth, 1856), pp. 42–43.

  3. William Foster, The East India House: Its History and Associations (London: John Lane, 1924), pp. 139–40.

  4. Staunton, Memoirs of the Chief Incidents, p. 44.

  5. George Thomas Staunton, trans., Ta Tsing Leu Lee; being the Fundamental Laws, and a Selection from the Supplementary Statutes, of the Penal Code of China (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810), p. i.

  6. John Barrow, Some Account of the Public Life and a Selection from the Unpublished Writings, of the Earl of Macartney, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807).

  7. See “Staunton’s Translation of the Penal Code of China,” Critical Review, Series the Third, vol. 21, no. 4 (December 1810): 337–53, pp. 338–39.

  8. Staunton, Ta Tsing Leu Lee, p. xi.

  9. George Staunton, review of J. Marshman, A Dissertation on the Characters and Sounds of the Chinese Language, in Quarterly Review (May 1811): 372–403, see p. 396; in the latter quote he is himself citing a contemporary geographer.

  10. Staunton, Ta Tsing Leu Lee, p. 493.

  11. “Ta Tsing Leu Lee; or, The Laws of China,” Quarterly Review 3, no. 6 (May 1810): 273–319.

  12. “Penal Code of China,” Edinburgh Review, no. 32 (August 1810): 476–99, quote on pp. 481–82.

  13. “Staunton’s Translation of the Penal Code of China,” Critical Review.

 

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