The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  He was in Macao when news of Lin’s brusque new measures reached him. On hearing about the commissioner’s ultimatum, Elliot pulled on full naval uniform and sailed straight to Canton where he docked at the foreign factories and flew the flag (to, he reported back to Palmerston, resounding cheers).

  He found there a divided foreign community. James Matheson, characteristically, was unfazed by Lin’s demands, reporting the Hong merchants’ appearance in chains as ‘the most complete exhibition of humbug ever witnessed in China’.32 Others lacked the British sang-froid: Howqua, an American trader reported, was ‘crushed to the ground by his terrors . . . the Hong merchants were in instant fear of their lives and properties’.33 In Elliot’s absence, the trading community had done its best to stall Lin, producing vague declarations about the ‘almost unanimous feeling in the community’ against the opium traffic. Lin was unimpressed: ‘if opium was not delivered up’, the Hong merchants reported his response, ‘he would be at their headquarters tomorrow at 10 o’clock, and then he would show what he would do’. The foreigners asked if Lin meant to carry out his threats of execution. ‘As [His Excellency] says, so will he act’, responded the Hong.34 British traders then tried compromise: about 1,000 chests of opium would be given up. Useless, they were told; Lin wanted all the opium, and he now issued an arrest warrant for one of the leading British smugglers, Lancelot Dent. Dent refused to go and see the commissioner; Lin’s deputy declared he would camp out at Dent’s house until the latter came with him. Dent told him dinner and a bed would be made available.

  Elliot strode fearlessly into this impasse, taking Dent under his personal protection and dashing off impassioned dispatches to Palmerston (‘it was my resolution to reach those factories, or to sacrifice my life in the attempt’).35 Under pressure from Lin, Elliot seems to have undergone a curious metamorphosis. Back on 17 December 1838, he had reviled the ‘deep disgrace’ of the opium trade, expressing his readiness to leave British smugglers to their fate under harsh Chinese jurisdiction. Now, he solemnly vowed to resist ‘aggression against foreign persons and property . . . This was my capital duty as the Queen’s officer’.36 Dent, too, had changed: no longer a diplomatic embarrassment, he became (in Elliot’s words) ‘one of our most respected merchants at Canton’.37 A harassed government functionary and a fractious gaggle of foreign smugglers, in other words, were starting to reinvent themselves as a united community of persecuted innocents.

  Irritated by Elliot’s interference, Lin called off all trade and swore to blockade the factories until all tradable opium had been handed over. At 8 p.m. on 24 March, he ordered all Chinese servants off the premises; within half an hour, they were as ‘places of the dead’.38 (In the normal way of things, the area was internationally famed for its raucousness. Bemused Europeans wrote of the ‘ten thousand different sounds coming from every quarter and with every variety of intonation’, of the crowds of boats ‘of all sizes, shapes and colours’, of the clamour of gongs, trumpets, clarions and fire-crackers. ‘The whole place teems with speculation’, observed one Scottish visitor in the mid-1830s – with ‘shopkeepers, barbers, quacks, thieves, rogues, vagabonds and coolies’, with fruit-sellers and freak-shows, with layabouts catching lice from the folds of their clothing and cracking them between their teeth, with beggars and malnourished children, with foreigners shouting orders to Cantonese sailors or yelling for their servants.39) And there the 350-strong foreign population of Canton stayed for the next forty-seven days, the streets between the factories and the city filled with 1,000 armed police, soldiers, servants and coolies, the waterways south of the city barricaded with a triple row of junks. Even the Hong merchants were drawn into the surveillance effort, stationed in large chairs (that by night doubled as beds) just by the old East India Company building.

  It was a pretty mild sort of imprisonment. Food was not a great worry: sugar, water, oil, bread and capons had been smuggled in before the blockade tightened, while a well-connected trader like William Hunter had his breakfast and dinner brought to him in boxes by one of the Hong’s Chinese translators. The greatest physical risk the prisoners suffered, Jardine–Mathesons’ authorized historian has concluded, was ‘too much food and too little exercise’.40 Boredom was another discomfort, alleviated by improvised entertainments: cricket, leapfrog, scrambling up the flagstaff, gossiping over beer with their guards. When these amusements grew stale, the prisoners laughed at their own domestic incompetence: at their inability to ‘roast a capon, to boil an egg or potatoe’.41

  Three days into this siege, at 11 a.m. on 27 March, Elliot did two things that Chinese historians have unanimously regarded as evidence of his scheming genius. First, he agreed to hand over to Lin 20,283 chests of British opium. Second, he promised the horrified merchant community that the Crown would take responsibility for the confiscated property. In two brisk moves, Elliot turned a private economic quarrel into a matter of state: a negotiation between the Queen of England and the Chinese emperor. When news of the blockade reached England some six months later, the British government would find £2 million (the cost of the opium) far more persuasive as a casus belli than emotive protestations about Lin’s ‘insults to national dignity’. (Palmerston had barely noticed when Elliot reported in 1834 that local officials had struck him twice over the head.)

  Why did Elliot act as he did?

  In his despatches to Palmerston, Elliot insisted that his hand was forced by the desperateness of his situation. ‘This is the first time, in our intercourse with this empire,’ he wrote on 2 April, ‘that its Government has taken unprovoked initiative in aggressive measures against British life, liberty and property, and against the dignity of the British Crown . . . They have deprived us of our liberty, and our lives are in their hands.’42 Elliot’s enemies, by contrast, accused him of meddling unnecessarily in the Canton stand-off between Lin and the British traders, of inflaming the situation (and provoking the blockade in the first place) by placing himself between Lin and the opium traders. British life and property, William Jardine told a House of Commons select committee in 1840, were under no threat at the time of Lin’s measures.43 Why, Elliot’s detractors ask, did he oppose then abruptly capitulate to Lin’s demand, and capitulate in such an extreme fashion? ‘What for he pay so large?’ wondered the Hong merchants at his massive pledge of opium. ‘No wantee so much!’44

  We will never know exactly what Charles Elliot meant to achieve – he left no diary or memoir for us to dissect. While noting his enemies’ accusations against him (of calculation, incompetence, rashness and self-aggrandisement) we should also remember the difficulties of the situation. Lin was a different creature from his predecessors: an implacable, incorruptible anti-opium crusader. Did Elliot have any realistic alternative to involving himself in the affairs of these private traders, when Lin was issuing threats against British citizens and property? (With Lin threatening a stoppage to both smuggling and legitimate trades, his measures also had clear repercussions for Britain’s supplies of tea, silk and bullion.) Although no one was starving in the factories, no one would escape either without a British climb-down of some sort. The besieged community did, moreover, fear that the phoney war might become real, under the right sort of provocation: if the armed foreign ships left at Whampoa ventured to blast through the blockade up to Canton, speculated the usually imperturbable William Hunter, ‘the Chinese would probably fall upon and massacre us’.45

  Most of all, by 1839 Elliot was an exasperated man: worn out by Palmerston’s inconsistency, by his own dislike of the opium trade and by his inability to do anything to regulate it. Repeatedly, he found himself in the humiliating position of having to tell Qing officials that he had no power to expel British opium ships: ‘can he yet’, his Chinese interlocutors mocked him in response, ‘be considered fit for the office of Superintendent?’46 By surrendering the opium, he perhaps hoped to provoke some kind of unequivocal response from his foreign secretary. Like Napier before him, he seems genuinely to have believed in
the purgative benefits (to both sides) of a short, sharp, clean war: ‘I feel assured’, he wrote on 11 April,

  that the single mode of saving the coasts of the empire from a shocking character of warfare, both foreign and domestic, will be the very prompt and powerful intervention of Her Majesty’s government for the just vindication of all wrongs, and the effectual prevention of crime and wretchedness by permanent settlement. Comprehensively considered, this measure has become of high obligation towards the Chinese government, as well as to the public interests and character of the British nation.47

  And that is how a publicly declared enemy of opium ended up begging his government to fight an Opium War.

  Chapter Four

  OPIUM AND LIME

  In May 1839, Humen – a small, unexceptional town on the south China coastline – bore witness to what would later become one of the most celebrated moments in nineteenth-century Chinese history: Lin Zexu’s destruction of the 20,000 chests of opium surrendered by Charles Elliot. The spot is still marked, of course. The trenches from which the opium was flushed out to sea are now stagnant lotus ponds, set within a small park named after the commissioner. The local tourist board has done its best to whip up visitors’ patriotic fervour. Inside the entrance stands a huge, angry, rust-red sculpture in high socialist realist mode: a montage of bare-chested, pitchfork-wielding peasant heroes, their hair and clothes rippling in the imaginary wind. ‘The brave sacrifice of the people’s heroes in the Opium War’, reads the plaque, ‘will never be forgotten!’ Just behind stands a tall, dignified statue of Lin. ‘The British colonialists’, the inscription explains, ‘used every illegal trick to smuggle in opium . . . This accursed sickness paralysed our sacred land’s economy, afflicted production, and weakened the army’. It’s a quiet spot these days: a pleasant refuge for China’s leisured classes (the retired, the unemployed) to meditate in, or for parents to give their toddlers a run-around (the Opium War-period cannon to the left of the statue are a favourite place for a photo opportunity).

  A hundred and seventy years ago, though, the place would have looked (and smelled) very different. On 11 April that year, Elliot’s opium began arriving – 7,000 of the total 20,000-odd chests from the great house of Jardine–Matheson’s alone. In early May, Lin began destroying it, pausing only to inform the Sea Spirit apologetically that he would shortly be releasing the drug into the great ocean and that the creatures of the water should therefore be advised to vacate the area. Over the next three weeks, somewhere between six and ten million dollars’ worth of opium were thrown into vast, water-filled trenches specially dug at the mouth of the Canton River, scattered with salt and lime, then washed out to sea. After 1949, the scene was immortalized at the public heart of Communist power: outlines of improbably muscular Chinese workers hurling British opium into Humen’s trenches were carved onto one side of the Monument to the Heroes of the People, the grey, thirty-seven-metre-high obelisk at the centre of Tiananmen Square. Lin himself put a slightly different spin on local Chinese enthusiasm for the spectacle. ‘The inhabitants of the coastal region’, he wrote to Daoguang, ‘are coming in throngs to witness the destruction of the opium. They are, of course, only allowed to look on from outside the fence and are not permitted access to the actual place of destruction, for fear of pilfering.’1 Of the British merchants come to witness the work, he happily observed that ‘the foreigners are trembling in awe. I should judge from their attitudes that they have the decency to feel heartily ashamed . . . probably they will not dare to repeat the same [crime].’2 (Lin may have mistaken biliousness for bad conscience: the combination of opium, salt and lime smelled foul, he recalled.3)

  He rejoiced at his progress. ‘The real sympathy and sincerity thus shown, are worthy of praise’, he congratulated Charles Elliot. ‘Now is the time for foreigners of all nations to repent their faults.’4 A delighted Daoguang dispatched in late March a gift of roebuck meat – its Chinese name, baolu, punning with the phrase meaning ‘promotion guaranteed’ – to which Lin was careful to kowtow nine times. A few days after inspecting his arrangements for destroying the opium in trenches near Canton, he was in such a good mood that he composed a poem to lychees. ‘Mists and rains from foreign seas darken Lintin’, he recited to the (probably nonplussed) orderly who had brought him a gift of the fruit from Canton’s governor-general. ‘Suddenly I received a carved platterful of stars / Eighteen smiling young ladies. / Your kindness refreshes like the green of the lychees.’5 On 22 April, the promised promotion came: Daoguang elevated him to the Governor-Generalship of Jiangnan and Jiangxi – once matters at Canton were settled. How marginal this fuss with the foreigners is, the emperor seemed to be saying; finish it up quickly and get on with the real business of the empire.

  Elliot and Lin, however, were soon caught up in another sticky negotiation. Nine days after Elliot agreed to hand over the opium, Lin reminded him of his second demand: for the British to sign a bond pledging not to bring any more of the drug into the empire, on pain of death. When the Hong merchants brought him a copy of the bond to sign, Elliot responded with the Victorian equivalent of a tantrum. ‘I tore it up at once [according to one account, into a thousand pieces, which he then threw into the fireplace], and desired them to tell their officers that they might take my life as soon as they saw fit, but that it was a vain thing to trouble themselves or me any further upon the subject of the bond.’6 From this point on, his rather stiff despatches to his foreign secretary take on a more histrionic colour, telling of ‘protracted outrage . . . spoliation of the very worst description . . . the most shameless violences which one nation has ever yet dared to perpetrate against another’.7

  Elliot was against the bond for sound reasons. It meant conceding on paper the principle of extraterritoriality in China that the British had been fighting to establish for almost sixty years. (In the decades preceding the struggles of 1839, Sino-Western relations had periodically broken down during disputes over how injuries or damage caused by Western traders should be handled. The most notorious case concerned the trading vessel the Lady Hughes, from 1784, in which a gun salute had accidentally killed a Chinese man – open-and-shut manslaughter, by British law. The Chinese authorities stopped trade until the accidental murderer had been handed over then quietly strangled him. Among the horrified British trading community, the whole episode quickly became shorthand for the Oriental cruelty of the Qing that, under the present Canton system, they were powerless to resist.) Also, given the diligence with which the British trading community dealt in opium, agreement would have led to a bloodbath. Yet again, Elliot found himself in an impossible position: ‘It is beyond dispute’, he admitted to Lin at a calmer moment, ‘that those who will come to Canton to trade, must act in obedience to the laws. But the new regulation regarding these bonds is incompatible with the laws of England. If . . . these bonds be absolutely required, there will remain no alternative but for the English men and vessels to depart.’ Fine, responded Lin: ‘After you have thus returned, you will not be allowed to come again.’8 Elliot’s difficulty was that Lin was ready to have his bluff called – he had no fear of stopping the Canton trade. For the commissioner’s actions sprang from a conviction that the foreigners would die without China’s tea and rhubarb (later, he conceded that only tea was truly essential to their well-being), while foreign trade was of only incidental importance to the Chinese empire. On 23 May, Elliot ordered all British ships out of Canton, and retreated to Macao to ponder his next move.

  He was soon to discover the wisdom of the old Chinese proverb: when you’re stuck down a well, someone is bound to throw a rock on your head.

  As relations grew increasingly tense through the spring and early summer of 1839, the community of opium vessels had found a new anchorage: along the northern edge of the island of Hong Kong. They had chosen well: it was a deep natural harbour, sheltered to the west by the larger Lantao Island, and to the right by the sandy finger of Kowloon Peninsula pointing down from the mainland. Better still,
the island itself was so steep and rocky – dipping in and out of granite mountains and tangled jungle – that it was practically deserted (barring a few villages of fishermen and pirates), and a safe forty-odd miles from the Bogue (the entrance to the Canton riverways). At some point in the 1830s, the opium trade had begun migrating to this new berth, anchoring at a promontory insolently renamed Possession Point. Showcasing their capacity for laissez-faire, the Qing authorities seem to have done little to interfere, beyond stationing a handful of war junks nearby to keep an eye on things. But the spot had its inconveniences, too: most notably, a shortage of fresh victuals and water, for which crews and Chinese middlemen had to go over to Kowloon. On 7 July, consequently, a group of English and American sailors had landed somewhere on the shores of the peninsula and set off through the countryside in search of refreshments. At the small village of Jianshazui, they found it: a stash of samshoo – a potent local rice liquor usually laced with arsenic. Having drunk it, they part-demolished a small temple, brawled with the villagers, one of whom (by the name of Lin Weixi) died of his injuries the next day, and returned to Hong Kong, tired but happy.