The Opium War
Page 3
The PRC’s state media work hard to convince readers and viewers that modern China is the story of the Chinese people’s heroic struggles against ‘imperialism and its running dogs’. (In reality, the story of modern China could probably be told just as convincingly as a history of collusion with ‘imperialism and its running dogs’; China has about as rich a tradition of collaboration with foreigners as any country that has suffered regular invasion and occupation.) But self-loathing and introspection, rather than the quest for foreign scapegoats, have dominated China’s efforts to modernize. Eyewitness Chinese accounts of the first Opium War blamed the empire’s defeat not on external aggression but on the disorganization and cowardice of its own officials and armies.
The complicated history of Chinese reactions to the Opium War, and to imperialism in general, does not remotely lessen the racist stridency of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western attitudes to China, as expressed in the writings and actions of politicians, soldiers and popular commentators. Even as he argued, in Discovering History in China, that historians had simplified the impact of imperialism on China, Paul Cohen wrote: ‘Let there be no question about it. Everyone – or, at any rate, almost everyone – today regards imperialism as bad.’33 As many have demonstrated, China’s encounter with Western imperialism was often deforming and dehumanizing.34 But the Opium War and its aftermath do expose how fragmented this place we call China is: how even a seemingly straightforward act of external aggression can generate a variety of responses (indignation, admiration, self-loathing) and loyalties.
And today, many Chinese people waste little time fuming over British gunboat diplomacy when left in peace by the state’s patriotic education campaign. Ask Beijing taxi-drivers (an overworked, underpaid labour-force more than entitled to a generalized sense of grievance against the world) what they think of Britain, and you are more likely to get a sigh of admiration (about how modern and developed Britain is, relative to China) than vitriol. Ask them about the Opium War, and they’ll often tell you what’s past is past; they’re too busy thinking about managing in the present (or they don’t listen to anything the government says). Even as secondary-school history textbooks and examinations still strive to indoctrinate young minds with the ‘China as Victim’ account of modern history, always starting with the Opium War, classroom discussions of the Opium War easily lapse out of anger towards the West, and into disgust at nineteenth-century China’s corruption and military weakness. Start a conversation about the Opium War and someone, sooner or later, is bound to come out with the catchphrase luohou jiu yao aida – a social Darwinist sentiment that translates as ‘if you’re backward, you’ll take a beating’; China, in other words, had it coming. Beneath the angry, hate-filled narrative of the Opium War and its aftermath told by Chinese nationalism, then, lies a more intriguing story: that of a painfully self-critical and uncertain, but open-minded quest to make sense of the country’s crisis-ridden last two centuries.
This book will begin with the dramas of the war itself – Qing China’s expansive interactions with the world beyond its borders; the miscalculations of the court’s anti-opium lobby; the mutual incomprehension that pushed both sides towards war; the opportunistic hypocrisy of the British; the terrible bloodshed resulting from Britain’s overwhelming superiority and China’s dearth of military realism. It will then range across the subsequent hundred and seventy years, plotting out the construction of the Opium War myth in both China and the West, via China’s intensifying sense of guochi (national humiliation) at the hands of imperialism – the second Opium War of 1856–60, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, the Boxer Uprising and subsequent Allied expedition against China of 1900, the Japanese invasion of the 1930s – and ending in the Communist Party’s self-interested efforts to harness historical memory.35 Through this larger narrative will be woven the strange, contradictory stories of opium’s attackers: the prohibitionist hysteria of Western missionaries; the doctors who tried to detox smokers with arsenic, heroin and cocaine; the narcotic puritanism of twentieth-century China’s two great dictators, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong – both sworn public enemies of opium, both bankrolled by drug-trade profits.
I will close in a journey around contemporary China’s opinion-makers (politicians, journalists, schoolteachers, bloggers) and sites of public history (exhibitions, museums, memorials), to reflect on the paradoxes of Chinese nationalism today. Why, when China is more open to (and dependent on) global forces than at any other time in its history, has the government chosen to mobilize a nationalism fuelled by resentment of the West’s historical crimes against China? Why, at a time when China is supposed to be on the edge of superpower status, are its people so regularly reminded of an abject history of ‘humiliation’? To what extent is the Communist Party in control of the anti-foreign nationalism in which it has schooled its people? Behind the screens of nationalist and imperialist legend, the Opium War and its afterlives expose the struggles and dilemmas that have beset the search for modern China: how Western misperceptions have fuelled China’s national myths; and how these myths have rebounded to mould China’s interactions with the West.
Before I go on, I would like to add a brief note about the coverage of the book. Chinese histories tend to merge the first Opium War into the second, seeing them as part of a single continuum of Western aggression. The second Opium War is, without doubt, as interesting a conflict as the first: for its political symbolism, its historical ironies and its confusion of domestic and international violence. But for two reasons, this book concentrates more on the historical detail of the first Opium War. One is intellectual. Given its importance in Chinese historiography – as the beginning of the ‘Century of Humiliation’ – I particularly wanted to explore its realities and the way in which distorted understandings of the war have shaped the last century and a half of the Chinese past. My treatment of the second Opium War here becomes part of the first war’s afterlife, showing how the delusions about China sown by the earlier conflict generate further spirals of violence, prejudice and guilt. The second reason is practical. At the time of writing, there was (to my knowledge) no book-length account of the first Opium War in English that made use of both anglophone accounts and the large collections of Chinese sources compiled and published in the 1990s. As I began to write, I realized that the richness of this material and of the historical questions that it suggested (concerning Sino-Western relations, Chinese–Manchu tensions, the functioning and malfunctioning of the Qing empire) was a good deal more than enough for one book. Although historians such as John Wong and James Hevia have produced brilliant accounts of key aspects of the second Opium War (its legality, its symbolism, its economic and political context), anglophone readers still lack a conventional narrative history of this later conflict that thoroughly combines and compares Western and Chinese sources. Regrettably, for reasons of space, I could not incorporate such a study into the present book. I hope very much, however, that the events of 1856–60 will in time receive the definitive, multilateral treatment that they deserve.
Chapter One
OPIUM AND CHINA
Consider a late-imperial photograph of Chinese opium-smokers. In one typical shot, two men recline on a couch, enveloped in long, padded jacquard silk gowns. One has an arm draped around a young woman, who is also reclining back on top of him (and looking a touch discomforted – perhaps by the smoker’s attentions, perhaps by the camera). Necks propped up against the headboard, both men stare down the couch at the camera: eyes half-closed, mouths expressionless. (One of the smokers happens inexplicably to be clutching a model dog.) Even today, when synthetic opiates make opium look tame, and decades after Brassaï photographed the Parisian avant-garde rebranding the drug as bohemian chic, the image is somehow troubling; more so than a comparable shot of, for instance, a couple of Caucasian drinkers, even though the pair of smokers here are clearly well-to-do, and appear not to be indulging to great extremes. Perhaps to modern eyes there is something particula
rly decadent about lying down to take your narcotic of choice, something abject about the supine state. As the smokers gaze levelly back at us, through (we imagine) dope-clouded eyes, they seem to be defying us: ‘We are deliberately, happily smoking ourselves into oblivion. What are you going to do about it?’
However liberal our politics, we are likely to have absorbed a mix of moral and scientific prejudice against opium that began accumulating in the West (and China) just over a hundred years ago: that reinvented it as a sinister vice enjoyed by social degenerates or masters of villainy. Beyond the opprobrium, though, that is now attached to opium-smoking lies a more complex social phenomenon: one that was widely debated through the nineteenth century, before Western missionary and medical opinion, and then the Chinese state, decided to condemn China’s opium habit as sick and deviant – a national disease of the will that lay at the base of all the country’s problems.
A late-nineteenth-century photograph of Chinese opium smokers.
Opium has been an extraordinary shape-shifter in both the countries that would fight a war in its name in the early 1840s. In Britain and China, it began as a foreign drug (Turkish and Indian, respectively) that was first naturalized during the nineteenth century, then – at the end of that same century – sternly repatriated as an alien poison. For most of the century, neither popular nor expert medical opinion could agree on anything concerning opium, beyond the fact that it relieved pain. Was it more or less harmful than alcohol? Did it bestialize its users? Did it make your lungs go black and crawl with opium-addicted maggots? No one could say for sure. ‘The disaster spread everywhere as the poison flowed into the hinterlands . . . Those fallen into this obsession will ever utterly waste themselves’, mourned one late-Qing smoker, Zhang Changjia, before observing a few pages on, ‘Truly, opium is something that the world cannot do without.’1 The clichéd image of opium-smoking is of prostration and narcolepsy; to many (including Thomas de Quincey, who walked the London streets by night sustained by laudanum), it was a stimulant. China’s coolie masses would refresh their capacity for backbreaking labour with midday opium breaks. One reverend in the late-nineteenth century observed that such groups ‘literally live on the opium; it is their meat and drink’.2 Things were little different in the Victorian Fens: ‘A man who is setting about a hard job takes his [opium] pill as a preliminary,’ wrote one mid-century observer, ‘and many never take their beer without dropping a piece of opium into it’.3 To add to the confusion about opium’s effects, British commanders in China between 1840 and 1842 noticed that Qing soldiers often prepared themselves for battle by stoking themselves up on the drug: some it calmed; others it excited for the fight ahead; others again, it sent to sleep.
Even now, after far more than a century of modern medicine, much remains unknown about opium’s influence on the human constitution. Whether eaten, drunk or smoked, the drug’s basic effects are the same: its magic ingredient is morphine, a lipid-soluble alkaloid that is absorbed into the bloodstream and (within seconds or minutes, depending on the strength of the preparation, the route of administration and the individual’s susceptibility) presses buttons – the opioid receptors – in our cells. Once triggered, one of these buttons – the μ receptor – reduces the release of chemical transmitters from the nerve endings involved in the sensation of pain. The analgesia produced by morphine and its many analogues, such as diamorphine (heroin), can seem almost miraculous, relieving agony in minutes. And opium is good for far more than analgesia. As it enters the blood, it travels to the intestines to slow the movement of the gut, giving pause to diarrhoea and dysentery. It soothes coughs, by suppressing the brain centres that control the coughing impulse. Most famously, perhaps, it encourages the release of dopamine, the hormone that governs the brain’s pleasure principle. Put more simply, opium makes us euphoric.
Like all drugs, opium has its unwanted downsides. One disadvantage is its talent for generating nausea (a response elicited in 40 per cent of patients to whom morphine is administered).4 If taken for pain relief rather than diarrhoea, it can cause troublesome constipation. Its greatest immediate drawback is its habit of slowing, or even putting to sleep, the centres in the brain that control breathing. In excess, opium will kill you by fatally depressing respiration. Because of the quietness with which opium overdosers generally meet their ends, opium has of old been the friend of faint-hearted suicides and the ally of assassins. While dopamine intensifies feelings of contentment, moreover, it can also heighten other, less enjoyable sensations. Encouraging and enlarging perceptions of fear and menace, it is an agent of paranoia, suspicion and schizophrenia – hence De Quincey’s visions.
Opium’s final flaw is that (like many dopamine-generated responses, governed as they are by the sense of pleasurable reward generated), it induces a craving for the whole thing to begin again. Without external stimulation from substances such as opium, the opioid and dopamine receptors exist quietly within us in unnoticed equilibrium. Once a receptor is triggered, however, it can become desensitized and unbalanced, demanding a regular, and perhaps increasing supply of the original stimulant. If the neural and chemical balance in the body has come to rely on external medication, a sudden withdrawal of the supply will bring unpleasant (and indeed dangerous) symptoms in response – trembling, exhaustion, fever, goose-pimples (the origin of the phrase ‘cold turkey’), nausea, diarrhoea and insomnia – relieved only by hair of the dog.
Opium’s historical guises through the past century and a half of Chinese history have been almost as diverse as its chemical effects. For Europeans (who began trading it early in the seventeenth century), it offered first a way into Chinese markets (‘transactions seemed to partake of the nature of the drug’, reminisced one smuggler from retirement, ‘they imparted a soothing frame of mind with three percent commission on sales, one percent on returns, and no bad debts!’), and then ethical justification for saving China from its bad, addictive tendencies (‘the Chinese are all of them more or less morally weak,’ explained one post-1842 British missionary, ‘as you would expect to find in any heathen nation; but with the opium smoker it is worse’).5 After around 1870, Western disapproval of China’s opium habit joined with other, older prejudices to create the Yellow Peril. The non-Christian Chinese love of opium, the logic went, destroyed any possibility of normal human response in them: it was ‘a form of mania’, a ‘potent necromancer’ that left them all the more inscrutably amoral, a mindlessly drugged army of xenophobes plotting revenge on the West.6 To many Chinese, opium brought benefits (as well as the perils of addiction): profit, relief from minor or chronic ailments, and narcotic, even aesthetic pleasure. And even after it metamorphosed, at the close of the century, into a foreign poison foisted upon China by scheming imperialists, it did not stay that way for long. Indignation at the West easily subsided into self-disgust: the British might have brought us the opium, went the subtext of nationalist moral panic, but we allowed ourselves to become addicted. In 1839, on the eve of the crackdown that would trigger a war with Britain, Chinese anti-opium campaigners – including the uncompromising Lin Zexu – confidently condemned it as a plague ‘worse than floods and wild beasts’; as a ‘life-destroying drug threatening to degrade the entire Chinese people to a level with reptiles, dogs and swine’.7 If only it had been that simple.
Opium began life in the Chinese empire as an import from the vaguely identified ‘Western regions’ (ancient Greece and Rome, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan); the earliest Chinese reference (in a medical manual) occurs in the first half of the eighth century. Eaten or drunk, prepared in many different ways (ground, boiled, honeyed, infused, mixed with ginger, ginseng, liquorice, vinegar, black plums, ground rice, caterpillar fungus), it served for all kinds of ailments (diarrhoea and dysentery, arthritis, diabetes, malaria, chronic coughs, a weak constitution). By the eleventh century, it was recognized for its recreational, as well as curative uses. ‘It does good to the mouth and to the throat’, observed one satisfied user. ‘I
have but to drink a cup of poppy-seed decoction, and I laugh, I am happy.’8 ‘It looks like myrrha’, elaborated a court chronicle some four hundred years later. ‘It is dark yellow, soft and sticky like ox glue. It tastes bitter, produces excessive heat and is poisonous . . . It enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies . . . Its price equals that of gold.’9 Opium was supposed to help control ejaculation which, as sexological theory told it, enabled the sperm to retreat to feed the male brain. Opium-enriched aphrodisiacs became a boom industry in Ming China (1368–1644) – possibly contributing to the high death-rate of the dynasty’s emperors (eleven out of a total of sixteen Ming rulers failed to get past their fortieth birthday). In 1958, as part of a final push to root out the narcotic in China, the new Communist government excavated the tomb of Wanli, the hypochondriac (though long-lived) emperor of the late Ming, and found his bones saturated with morphine. Enterprising Ming cooks even tried to stir-fry it, fashioning poppy seeds into curd as a substitute for tofu. Opium was one of the chief ingredients of a Ming-dynasty cure-all, the ‘big golden panacea’ (for use against toothache, athlete’s foot and too much sex), in which the drug was combined with (amongst other things) bezoar, pearl, borneol, musk, rhinoceros horn, antelope horn, catechu, cinnabar, amber, eaglewood, aucklandia root, white sandalwood; all of which had first to be gold-plated, then pulverized, turned into pellets with breast-milk, and finally swallowed with pear juice. (Take one at a time, the pharmacological manuals recommended.10)