Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  7. Thomas Noon Talfourd, ed., The Works of Charles Lamb (New York: Harper and Bros., 1838), vol. 1, p. 262.

  8. Lindsay Ride, An East India Company Cemetery: Protestant Burials in Macao (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996), p. 253. Description of aviary and parrot: Harriet Low Hillard, Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life: The Journal of Harriett [sic] Low, Traveling Spinster, ed. Nan P. Hodges and Arthur W. Hummel (Woodinville, WA: The History Bank, 2002), vol. 1, p. 120.

  9. Marshall Broomhall, Robert Morrison: A Master Builder (Edinburgh: Turnbull & Spears, 1927), pp. 127–30.

  10. Canton Register, November 15, 1830.

  11. Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), vol. 4, pp. 254–55; specifically, there were twenty members of the Company’s factory, thirty-two private British traders, twenty-one Americans, and forty-one Parsis.

  12. William W. Wood, Sketches of China (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830), p. 64.

  13. “The Opium Trade,” Canton Register, April 12, 1828. Money-changing shops: Jonathan Spence, “Opium Smoking in Ch’ing China,” in Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, ed. Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Carolyn Grant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 162.

  14. Paul A. Van Dyke, “Smuggling Networks of the Pearl River Delta before 1842: Implications for Macao and the American China Trade,” in Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling, and Diplomacy on the South China Coast, ed. Paul A. Van Dyke (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), pp. 49–72, see p. 63.

  15. Robert Forbes made $30,000 in 1831 alone. See Jacques Downs, “American Merchants and the Opium Trade, 1800–1840,” Business History Review 42, no. 4 (Winter 1968): 418–42, see 436, n. 65. Comparison in value as per calculator on Measuringworth.com.

  16. Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life (London: W. Taylor, 1719), pp. 249, 274.

  17. Morse, Chronicles, vol. 1, p. 215.

  18. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 239.

  19. 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), p. 238.

  20. Robert A. Morrison, A Memoir of the Principal Occurrences during an Embassy from the British Government to the Court of China in the Year 1816 (London: 1819), p. 197; Clarke Abel, Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China, and of a Voyage to and from That Country in the Years 1816 and 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), pp. 213–14.

  21. John F. Davis testimony to the Committee of the House of Commons on the East India Company’s Affairs, 1830, in Parliamentary Papers Relating to the Opium Trade . . . 1821 to 1832 (Collected for the use of the Committee of the House of Commons on China Trade, 1840), p. 30.

  22. Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay (Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective, 2006), p. 39.

  23. David Edward Owen, British Opium Policy in China and India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 87.

  24. Ibid., pp. 69–72, 80–101; Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 94.

  25. Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–1842 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 81, 88–90, 105, 106; Richard J. Grace, Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), p. 92, citing Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), pp. 126–41. My data is taken from Charles Marjoribanks’s “Statement of British trade at the port of Canton, for the Year ending 30th June 1828,” submitted as part of his 1830 testimony to the House of Commons select committee on the affairs of the East India Company. See First Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company (China Trade), House of Commons, July 8, 1830, pp. 56–57. Specifically, the value of all British imports in the year ending June 1828 was $20,364,600. Of that, Patna and Malwa opium together were worth $11,243,496. The Company’s tea exports that year were 5,756,872 taels, or $7,656,640.

  26. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, p. 95.

  27. Each chest of raw opium contained about 100 catties by weight (133 pounds), which would render half that amount in smokable extract, so 50 catties. A catty was equivalent to 16 taels by weight, so each chest contained roughly 800 taels of smokable opium extract. Anecdotal accounts from this era generally put the amount of opium smoked by regular users in a range from 0.1 taels/day for light smokers up to one full tael per day for the most inveterate addicts. For more precise figures, in 1869 the Scottish physician John Dudgeon, director of the London Missionary Society’s hospital in Beijing, reported his conclusions after observing several hundred opium smokers over the course of five years. According to his study, the breakdown of their daily usage was as follows: 20 percent of smokers in the study used 0.05 taels per day, 20 percent used 0.1 taels, 20 percent used 0.2 taels, 30 percent used 0.3–0.4 taels, and 10 percent used a full tael or more. By his numbers, the average smoker thus used 0.28 taels per day. A chest of opium with its 800 taels of smokable extract would have been sufficient to supply the annual needs of eight regular users, and the nearly 19,000 chests imported by 1830–31 would have been enough to supply a little over 150,000 habitual daily users throughout China. See J. Dudgeon, M.D., “On the Extent and Some of the Evils of Opium Smoking,” The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, February 1869, pp. 203–4. Zheng Yangwen cites these statistics as a “benchmark” in The Social Life of Opium in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 158. A similar figure for average daily usage (0.3 taels) was also found in a study by Robert Hart of China’s Imperial Customs Service in 1879; see Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 53.

  28. Scholars constantly refer to the opium trade with China as being “the” largest commodity trade of its time, an exaggeration that traces back to a statement on p. 104 of Michael Greenberg’s often-cited British Trade and the Opening of China that opium was “probably the largest commerce of the time in any single commodity.” Greenberg misread his own source, though, which was a treatise from 1836 that only implied opium was one of the largest. See John Phipps, A Practical Treatise on the China and Eastern Trade (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1836), p. viii.

  29. Richard Grace, “Jardine, William (1784–1843),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–13); Maggie Keswick, ed., The Thistle and the Jade: A Celebration of 175 Years of Jardine Matheson (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), p. 14.

  30. Grace, Opium and Empire, pp. 94, 99–100, 106 and passim.

  31. In 2016, Jardine Matheson had 440,000 employees and revenues of $37 billion: http://beta.fortune.com/global500/jardine-matheson-273 (accessed February 21, 2017).

  32. Richard Grace, “Matheson, Sir (Nicholas) James Sutherland, first baronet (1796–1878),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Grace, Opium and Empire, p. 104.

  33. E. J. Rapson, “Jeejeebhoy, Sir Jamsetjee, first baronet (1783–1859),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Orphaned: Cooverjee Sorabjee Nazir, The First Parsee Baronet, Being Passages from the Life and Fortunes of the Late Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Baronet (Bombay: The Union Press, 1866), pp. 5–7. Jeejeebhoy’s account of the capture of the Brunswick is in the Bombay Courier, April 19, 1806.

  34. Nazir, The First Parsee Baronet, pp. 27–28.

  35. On Jeejeebhoy’s charity starting in 1822, see ibid., pp. 30–72.

  36. William Wood, Sketches of China, p. 68.

  37. John Murray Forbes journal, Forbes Family Business Records, vol. F-2, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

  38. He Sibing, “Russell and Company, 1818
–1891: America’s Trade and Diplomacy in Nineteenth-Century China” (Ph.D. dissertation, Miami University, Ohio, 1997), p. 60.

  39. The figure of 5 percent is from Hao Yen-p’ing, “Chinese Teas to America,” in America’s China Trade in Historical Perspective, ed. Ernest R. May and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Studies in American–East Asian Relations, 1986), pp. 11–31, see p. 28.

  40. There are many accounts of the diverse range of goods scoured from across the oceans by American merchants to sell in Canton, but James Fichter’s chapter on “America’s China and Pacific Trade,” in So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 205–31, is especially good.

  41. Hao, “Chinese Teas to America,” pp. 22–23, 25.

  42. Meriwether Lewis journal entry of January 9, 1806, in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company), vol. 3, p. 327, cited in Fichter, So Great a Profitt, p. 213.

  43. J. R. Child, logbook of the Hunter, pp. 47, 129–30, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

  44. This account of a typical American ship based in part on Roger Houghton’s summary in his capacious exploration of the Canton Register in the 1830s (and beyond), which he has made available online at http://www.houghton.hk; see in particular Houghton’s entry for the Canton Register of August 2, 1830. He Sibing, “Russell and Company,” pp. 90–92.

  45. Hao Yen-p’ing, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-Century China: the Rise of Sino-Western Mercantile Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 215.

  46. “The Opium Trade,” Canton Register, April 12, 1828.

  47. “Foreign Vessels Visiting China,” The Canton Register, Apr. 19, 1828.

  48. As William Wood observed in 1830, “captures of opium boats are unfrequent, and seldom accomplished without a severe contest”: Wood, Sketches of China, p. 208.

  49. Ibid., p. 209.

  50. Jardine to R. Rolfe, April 6, 1830, quoted in Grace, Opium and Empire, p. 108.

  51. Dr. Duncan, Wholesome Advice Against the Abuse of Hot Liquors, Particularly of Coffee, Chocolate, Tea, Brandy, and Strong-Waters (London, H. Rhodes and A. Bell, 1706), p. 15.

  52. Anon., An Essay on the Nature, Use, and Abuse, of Tea, in a Letter to a Lady; with an Account of its Mechanical Operation (London: J. Bettenham, 1722), pp. 30 and 39.

  53. Ibid., p. 44.

  54. Anon., An Essay on Modern Luxuries (Salisbury, UK: J. Hodson, 1777), pp. 7, 13, 14, 26–27.

  55. Mike Jay, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2000), p. 73.

  56. Robert Bennet Forbes, Personal Reminiscences (Boston: Little, Brown, 1882), p. 17.

  57. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 3rd ed. (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823), p. 91.

  58. On Lamb’s aid in getting De Quincey published, see the introduction to the 1888 edition of Confessions (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1888), p. 7. It was, incidentally, rumored at the time that the true author of the work might be Charles Lamb himself, or even Samuel Taylor Coleridge: see the review of Confessions in the Monthly Review for March 1823, p. 296.

  59. De Quincey, Confessions (1823), pp. 4–5.

  60. Ibid., pp. 171, 172–73.

  61. Ibid., p. 169.

  62. M. H. Abrams, The Milk of Paradise (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), p. x. The original manuscript is in the British Library, Add. MS 50847.

  63. Thomas Talfourd, ed., The Works of Charles Lamb, with A Sketch of His Life and Final Memorials (New York: Harper and Bros., 1875), vol. 1, p. 437.

  64. Grevel Lindop, “Quincey, Thomas Penson De (1785–1859),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  65. Eliza Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, D.D. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839), vol. 2, p. 203.

  66. Wood, Sketches of China, pp. 206–7.

  67. Michael C. Lazich, “E. C. Bridgman and the Coming of the Millennium: America’s First Missionary to China” (Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY Buffalo, 1997), p. 259.

  68. John P. Cushing memo to Thomas T. Forbes respecting Canton Affairs, March, 1828, Forbes Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  69. John Murray Forbes’s impressions: Reminiscences of John Murray Forbes, vol. 1, p. 140; “a man of remarkable ability”: Robert Forbes, Personal Reminiscences, pp. 370–71; There are many examples of Houqua’s avoidance of opium, but see, for example, Michael D. Block, “New England Merchants, the China Trade, and the Origins of California” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 2011), pp. 386–87; “only one bad man”: John D. Wong, “Global Positioning: Houqua and his China Trade Partners in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2012), p. 133.

  70. Sydney Greenbie, “Houqua of Canton—A Chinese Croesus,” Asia, vol. 25 (October 1925): 823–27 and 891–95, quotation on p. 823.

  71. The figure for Houqua’s fortune comes from William C. Hunter, The ‘Fan Kwae’ at Canton before Treaty Days, 1825–1844 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882), p. 48. Astor’s New York real estate holdings would be worth around $20 million upon his death in 1848, which as a share of the U.S. GDP was equivalent to a fortune of about $116 billion today (and it should be noted that Astor’s accumulation of real estate was funded in part by his early domination of the fur trade to Canton, another reminder of how much wealth could be derived from China in this era). Anna Youngman, “The Fortune of John Jacob Astor: II,” Journal of Political Economy 16, no. 7 (July 1908): 436–41, see p. 441. “The Wealthiest Americans Ever,” New York Times, July 15, 2007.

  72. Elma Loines, “Houqua, Sometime Chief of the Co-Hong at Canton (1769–1843),” Essex Institute Historical Collections 89, no. 2 (April 1953): 99–108, description on pp. 99–100.

  73. State Street Trust Company, Old Shipping Days in Boston (Boston: Walton Advertising & Printing Co., 1918), p. 24.

  74. As Houqua wrote to young Forbes in one letter, “I find that you enter into and assist my view much more readily than any other foreigner”: Houqua to John Murray Forbes, January 25, 1834, Forbes Family Business Records, vol. F-5, p. 56, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

  75. John Murray Forbes, Reminiscences of John Murray Forbes, vol. 1, pp. 141–42.

  76. Robert B. Forbes to Thomas Handasyd Perkins, October 25, 1831, Forbes Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  77. Henry Greenleaf Pearson, An American Railroad Builder: John Murray Forbes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1911), p. 6; Forbes, Reminiscences of John Murray Forbes, vol. 1, p. 142.

  CHAPTER 8 Fire and Smoke

  1. This account based on Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 166–84; also Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: SMC Publishing, Inc., 1991), vol. 2, p. 574.

  2. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Leo Weiner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1904), vol. 2, p. 537; Walter Barlow Stevens, Missouri: The Center State, 1821–1915 (Chicago–St. Louis: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1915), vol. 2, p. 545; Elizabeth Rusch, “The Great Midwest Earthquake of 1811,” Smithsonian, December 2011; Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion, pp. 89, 314.

  3. Da Qing Renzong Rui (Jiaqing) huangdi shilu (Taipei: Taiwan Huawen shuju, 1964), juan 274, pp 8a–9b; translation based on Robert Morrison, Translations from the Original Chinese, with Notes (Canton: P. P. Thoms, The Honorable East India Company’s Press, 1815), pp. 4–8.

  4. January 29, 1814 (changing “Peking” to “Beijing”), as transcribed by Roger Houghton at http://www.houghton.hk/?p=84. It is unclear exactly which Indian newspaper was his source.

  5. Zheng Yangwen’s translation in The Social Life of Opium in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 57 (changing “yan” to “smoke
”).

  6. Based on Zheng Yangwen’s translation in ibid., p. 57; see the same for her argument that this cannot represent a tobacco pipe.

  7. Hu Jinye, Zhongguo jinyan jindu shi gang (Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 2005), p. 6.

  8. Paul Howard, “Opium Suppression in Qing China: Responses to a Social Problem, 1729–1906” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998), p. 40.

  9. Hu Jinye, Zhongguo jinyan jindu shi gang, pp. 6–13; Howard, “Opium Suppression,” pp. 77–80; Zhu Weizheng, Rereading Modern Chinese History, trans. Michael Dillon (Boston: Brill, 2015), p. 178; David Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), p. 118.

  10. Zheng, Social Life of Opium, p. 58.

  11. Da Qing Renzong Rui (Jiaqing) huangdi shilu, juan 227, pp. 4a–b.

  12. Ibid., juan 270, p. 12a.

  13. Edict dated DG2/12/8 (January 19, 1823), in Yu Ende, Zhongguo jinyan faling bianqian shi (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1934), p. 40. N.b.: Yu Ende has the Western-conversion year wrong for this document.

  14. Zheng, Social Life of Opium, p. 66.

  15. See note 27 in chapter 7 for general calculations on opium usage. Assuming 0.28 taels/day for an average daily user of the drug, and 800 taels of smokable opium extract in a typical chest of opium, five thousand chests per year would be enough to support about forty thousand regular opium smokers. A light smoker would use only about 0.1 taels per day, though that was considered a small enough dose that it did not damage the health of the user in any noticeable way; serious addicts used much more. See W. H. Medhurst, “Remarks on the Opium Trade,” North-China Herald, November 3, 1855.

  16. Jonathan Spence, “Opium Smoking in Ch’ing China,” in Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, ed. Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Carolyn Grant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 145.

  17. Medhurst, “Remarks on the Opium Trade.”