The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  Like Yang Fang before him, Yishan’s lies became more fluent with practice, and his version of the peace negotiations of 26–27 May (during which, within twenty-four hours, he crumbled before all Elliot’s demands, pledging to ‘take full responsibility’ for making good his promises; and during which Yang Fang had chatted over the city wall with Hugh Gough, and even thrown down some golden bangles at him as a token of his esteem84) was a masterpiece. Although it admitted that the British had (through the timely help of hundreds of Chinese traitors) taken the forts to the north of the city, the rest of the account was almost an exact inversion of what actually happened.85

  The foreigners outside the walls waved at us, as if they had something to say . . . Apparently, they wanted to petition me with their grievances. ‘How could our Generalissimo possibly agree to see you?’ my general roared. ‘His only orders are to make war.’ The foreign officers immediately removed their hats and made an obeisance . . . Apparently, because the English hadn’t been allowed to trade and their goods haven’t been allowed to move freely in and out of the city, they were facing bankruptcy . . . so they had come to beg the General to communicate sincerely to the Great Emperor that he should take mercy on them, permitting trade and ordering the Hong merchants to make good their debts. Then they would immediately leave the river . . . and not make any more trouble.86

  The whole plan was risky: Yishan was trying to disguise the ransom paid after the defeat as the debts owed by insolvent Hong merchants to the British. Amazingly, it worked. ‘The nature of these foreigners’, Daoguang sighed on 18 June, after receiving this account, ‘is like that of dogs and sheep. It isn’t worth trying to bargain or reason with them . . . Now they’ve taken their hats off and bowed, begging for imperial mercy . . . I forgive you.’87 As for the debts, the Hong merchants would cover those. On 30 June, Yishan received imperial authorization, and promptly reported to Daoguang the British response: ‘Their commanders were overjoyed, removing their hats and prostrating themselves with emotion, crying out that they would never dare make trouble in the province again.’88 When, two weeks later, the emperor received this happy confirmation, he ordered the demobilization of the forces he had so expensively convened over the past six months.89 Everyone was delighted: Yishan’s work won him the coveted Order of the White Jade Feather, and promotion or rewards for 554 of his subordinates, while Daoguang could reduce military spending, believing the foreigners had been chastised. And no one needed to feel any financial pain apart from those wretched traitors, the Hong merchants.

  What was entirely lost on Daoguang – because Yishan had deliberately not told him, and he lacked the time or energy to corroborate his servant’s version of events – was that this new peace applied only to Guangdong. Twice, on both 5 June and 15 July, Elliot emphasized to Yishan that ‘the struggle between the two countries is not yet resolved and we still have grievances to settle with the emperor . . . we will continue to fight until everything is settled. But we will withdraw our troops from Guangdong . . . this province need not fear further injury.’90 To Daoguang, though, this was no national conflict – it was a trade dispute local to the south. And surely now it was at last at an end; or so he must have thought.

  Chapter Ten

  THE UNENGLISHED ENGLISHMAN

  As Charles Elliot scrambled on shore to Macao, having narrowly escaped a trip to Beijing that would have ended in a slow and painful execution, a surprise awaited him: a reunion with a long-lost brother, Ned, who (in the way of things in the South China Sea) had turned up at Macao en route to Singapore from Sydney. But there was more news. An officer came up and told him the latest from England: Elliot had been recalled, and his successor, Sir Henry Pottinger, was expected any day. ‘To be cast ashore at Sanchuen, and find [oneself ] adrift at Macao’, Elliot is supposed to have responded (struggling, in his Manila hat and striped trousers, to hang on to what dignity he could), ‘was more than a man had a right to expect in one week, be he Plenipotentiary or be he not.’ After a decent meal and a rest, a line from Dryden came to him: ‘Slack all thy sails, for thou art wrecked ashore.’1 Fresh back from a near-death experience, having spent the last six months leading (often from the very front line of battle) a campaign up the waterlogged maze of the Canton River delta with a price of 100,000 dollars on his head, Elliot now found himself thrown to one side by the country for which he had sacrificed personal safety, profit and family life.

  It was perhaps the dismissal of Charles Elliot that marked the true turning point in this war: from here on, the campaign would be more about gunboats than diplomacy. True enough, back in the spring of 1839, Elliot had brayed as loudly as anyone for an instructive war that would ‘teach’ China to fall in line with civilized European trading norms. But once he’d got his war, he spent a curious amount of time avoiding it: calling regular pauses for talks, for trading, for elaborate negotiating banquets. Violence, he actually believed, was to be minimized at all costs. He was fighting, he argued, ‘a just and necessary war; but it is not to be forgotten that the acts of the Chinese authorities which made it so . . . [were] preceded by serious errors on the part of British subjects.’2

  But with Elliot gone, so was any spirit of self-critical compromise. He was replaced by no-nonsense hardliners: professional men of the British army and navy who were there to do a military job – to subdue the Qing empire as expediently as possible – or by representatives of a chauvinistic new breed of rulers of British India. Gone was any sense that sympathy or familiarity with Qing customs or sensibilities might, in the long-term, more effectively open the empire to trade with Europe. No, the Chinese empire wanted blasting into line. ‘The body social of the Chinese’, one missionary expressed the sentiment well, ‘is too inert, too lifeless, for the whole body to be affected by a rap on the heel; it must be on the head.’3 It was, perhaps, with respect to China that the Victorians began wholeheartedly to embrace attributes that we now think of stereotypically Victorian: a strident patriotism that shouted about the civilizing missions of Christianity and Free Trade, while trampling over other political, economic and cultural visions. Sino-Western relations are still paying the price of the Opium War’s quick fix today.

  The case against Elliot had started building back in October 1840, when his cousin, Lord Auckland, began agitating – a whole two years before Britain would be finished talking, fighting and ratifying in China – about how long operations were taking. ‘I do not like the state of things there, for while all of good result is uncertain, it seems at least to be sure that your ships will be wearing and incurring danger and my fine regiments will be wasting and breaking down on Zhoushan, and a year of expense will have passed, and for all military objects, we may be much weaker than we were some months ago.’4 While Elliot’s cousin George remained on the expedition, the latter carried much of the blame. ‘The admiral has made a shocking mess of China’, commented Auckland’s merciless sister, Emily. ‘[T]he force and the ships and the money have all been wasted, leaving things just as they were a year ago.’5 But once George had abandoned the campaign in December 1840 – pleading ill health – all recriminations fell on Charles: for pulling his punches, for being too tender with the Chinese, for allowing himself to be put off, fooled and generally humbugged over and over again. ‘The Chinese have bamboozled us,’ wrote one London diarist, ‘that is the plain truth.’6

  On 8 April, details of the treaty that Elliot had thrashed out with Qishan on 20 January reached Britain. No sooner had The Times rejoiced in the ‘Successful Termination of the Affair in China’, though, than the disappointed complaints began.7 ‘I am very mad with it all’, grouched Auckland from India.8 Queen Victoria, in a letter to her cousin King Leopold of the Belgians (later infamous for his appalling colonization of the Congo), stamped her little foot at the whole affair. ‘The Chinese business vexes us much, and Palmerston is deeply mortified at it. All we wanted might have been got, if it had not been for the unaccountably strange conduct of Charles Elliot . . . who completel
y disobeyed his instructions and tried to get the lowest terms he could.’9 A letter from a disgusted resident of Macao went into more detail: ‘Regarding the terms of Captain Elliot’s treaty with the Chinese, I have not temper to speak. He had the Chinese at his feet, and might have done what he wished; and what has he got? A few paltry dollars and a barren island . . . The Chinese are already chuckling, and say they have got the best of it. It makes me quite sick to think of it.’10 The Chinese, it would seem, had not been terrorized and humiliated nearly enough.

  On 20 April, Palmerston sent Elliot a tetchy two-columned document comparing his original instructions with what his plenipotentiary had actually achieved. He had failed to use occupied territories to extract solid concessions concerning indemnities and extraterritorial rights for British citizens; to agree reasonable tariffs and duties on British imports; to negotiate on terms of diplomatic equality; to open northern ports; to force the Qing to abolish the infuriating monopoly of the Hong merchants. Finally, he had failed to ensure that whatever unsatisfactory agreement he reached was even ratified by the Qing. ‘You seem’, Palmerston concluded, ‘to have considered that my instructions were waste paper . . . and that you were at full liberty to deal with the interests of your country according to your own fancy.’11 A fortnight later he felt, if anything, even more peeved. ‘Her Majesty’s Government’, he wrote on 3 May to Elliot, ‘do not approve of the manner in which, in your negotiations with the Chinese Commissioner, you have departed from the instructions with which you have been furnished . . . her Majesty has determined to place the conduct of her affairs in China in the hands of another Plenipotentiary . . . on the arrival of whom . . . you will accordingly return home at your earliest convenience.’12

  To this was added the hostility of the British trading community, who were almost united in their ingratitude to Elliot. In their very interests, in March 1840, Elliot had stopped the fighting to allow the season’s tea to be shuttled out of Canton, thereby enraging his military commanders, his foreign secretary, his sovereign and the British press. ‘Here we are at the island of Hong-Kong’, wrote Hugh Gough in April, ‘in the most delicious state of uncertainty . . . You are aware the trade is open. Captain Elliot only thinks and dreams of this, as if its being so was the sole object of the frightful outlay of money expended and expending.’13 (Elliot took a different view of budgetary matters. He estimated that in the two years up to August 1841, his policy of restraint had maintained a trade of more than ten million pounds, generating eight million pounds’ worth of customs duties for Her Majesty’s Treasury, while the expedition itself had cost a mere half-million pounds.14) But were the men of money grateful? Not a bit of it: they set about writing letters to influential London and Indian newspapers concerning ‘the indignation and disgust which Charles Elliot’s proceedings have excited amongst all classes of British subjects both in India and in China. Not only has he neglected the just claims of private individuals, but he has sacrificed the honour of his country.’15 They had clearly never forgiven Elliot for making his disgust for the opium trade so very obvious before the war. The only trader with a touch of tenderness for Elliot was, improbably, James Matheson, who found it hard to forget that Elliot had, through the manoeuvres of January, agreed to a temporary ceasefire that conveniently allowed a million and a half pounds of Jardine–Matheson tea out of the river and on to London. When Matheson’s rivals threatened to petition London with complaints about Elliot’s handling of events, he told Jardine to ‘pay liberally any lawyer or other qualified person who will defend him in the newspapers.’16

  By the time that Elliot returned to England from China, in November 1841, public opinion had been poisoned further by the dyspeptic dispatches of Major-General Hugh Gough who – all the while cohabiting cordially with Elliot in Macao and Hong Kong – had written with ‘grievous mortification and disappointment’ of Elliot’s refusal to let him rape and pillage Canton.17 That winter, everything that Elliot had done was publicly dismissed, demonized or, at best, mocked. The journalist George Wingrove Cooke – who would send poison-pen reports from the front line of a second China war in 1857 – sneered at this ‘gallant, wrong-headed little man’ unable to understand the basic political and military principle that ‘omelettes’ were not to be made without ‘breaking eggs’.18 On reporting a rumour that Qishan was to be sawn in half for his role in the reviled treaty, The Times commented that ‘Elliot’s head, trunk, and limbs should be made into a thousand cylindrical sections, as a warning to all his family.’19 (For years after the war, Qishan believed Elliot had indeed been beheaded by his Queen. ‘A dreadful fate, that of poor Elut’, he is supposed to have told a French visitor to north-west China in 1846. ‘He was a good man.’20)

  For Elliot, the balance of accounts after he left China probably looked something like this. Since sailing east in 1834, he had sacrificed all possibility of normal family life through separations from his children and often his wife. He had been poorly paid: even though his salary was increased from £800 to £3,000 a year when he was appointed plenipotentiary, this was half what was offered to his successor. When he returned to England under a cloud, he had to petition and pester to be paid the rest of his salary and expenses, and to secure himself a pension. Eventually he was handed a governorship in what he termed a ‘den of villains, misery, murder & musquitoes’ (Texas) as his only future way of earning a living.21 ‘No man’, he summarized, ‘can rob me of the signal distinction of being about the worst treated public officer of my day.’22

  But Elliot remained determined to show that he was not bothered, and concentrated on holding his head high at society dinner parties and dances. ‘Very amusing with his accounts of China’, recorded the diarist Charles Greville a couple of weeks after Elliot’s arrival in London. ‘He seems . . . animated, energetic, & vivacious, clever, eager, high-spirited & gay.’ At a ‘grand fancy ball’ given by the Queen, he appeared in ‘a superb Chinese costume as Commissioner Lin’.23 What sustained him through this thoroughly awful press? The conviction, perhaps, that he had been right.

  Elliot’s moderate China policy – despite all the stops and starts it had brought to the war (at the height of the Canton crisis in April 1841, Gough called him ‘whimsical as a shuttlecock’) – had a careful scheme behind it. For Elliot was fundamentally pessimistic about what could reasonably be achieved in China, preferring to measure success not by the criterion of how much could be won, but rather by that of how much mischief had been prevented. ‘The least that is necessary for your purposes in China is best,’ he mused, after the signing of the tough Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, ‘and those purposes, or that purpose, is the security of your trade. A safe seat for your commerce is all you require in China, and all you can have without damage to yourselves . . . Avoid political combinations as much as possible, and endeavour rather to link yourselves to the people and system of China (wonderfully pliant) than force them into your Pall Mall fashions and usage.’24 Free trade secured by Hong Kong, then, would slowly but surely solve all Britain’s problems with China: winning over local populations by appealing to their pocket-books and letting the Chinese quest for profit slowly open the rest of the country.

  Defending himself against the charge of excessive tenderness towards the Chinese, he riposted that this ‘was a war in which there was little room for military glory . . . success must be attended with the slaughter of an almost defenceless and helpless people, and a people which . . . was friendly to the British nation.’25 At times, this belief verged on the paternalistically imperialist, as he daydreamed optimistically about the love and respect that the Cantonese could reasonably feel for people who were, at best, money-grubbing foreign traders, and at worst, terrifying invaders. The people of Canton, he wrote in April 1841, ‘so dependent upon Foreign Trade, have been pushed by the Court to the verge of endurance, and when we had happily placed ourselves in a situation of mastery over Canton, it at once became manifest that the local government had no choice between immediate excl
usion [of British merchants] with the hearty dissent of the masses of the people . . . or an immediate, direct, and formal disregard of the Emperor’s will.’26 In blasting his way up to Canton in the Nemesis, Elliot felt he was absolutely acting in the best interests of the local Chinese.

  For all this self-delusion, Elliot did think it important not to humiliate the Chinese utterly. The British should demand recompense for what they had lost in the destruction of the opium – but anything more would be counterproductive. Much better for the long-term to bank good will than hard cash. Therefore, to finish the war on the terms negotiated with Qishan in January 1841 was quite sufficient. Six million dollars would do for the opium and the costs of the expedition so far. The Hong debts did not need pressing: such was the easy, informal understanding between British and Cantonese merchants before the war that, Elliot believed, the whole business was best resolved privately. Crucially, Britain had raised the flag on Hong Kong, with its exceptional harbour, and usefully close but safely distant position from the mainland, which (Elliot confidently predicted) would become ‘within a very few years one of the most important, and perhaps the most interesting possession of the British Crown’.27

  There was plenty of common sense behind Elliot’s policy of moderation. No particular military genius was required to work out, given the state of things inside Canton in late May, what would have happened if the British had stormed its gates. At best, occupying the city would have tied up soldiers needed for operations elsewhere. At worst, Elliot predicted ‘the disappearance of the municipal authorities and the police, the flight of the respectable inhabitants, the sacking of the town by the rabble, its certain desolation, its not improbable destruction by fire, and our own hurried departure from the ruins.’28 The army was furious to have been denied a chance of plunder, but Elliot was sure that if the city had been taken, the six-million-dollar ransom that he successfully extracted would have swiftly melted away: ‘The Chinese rabble are expert looters.’29 His gentle influence was celebrated in Canton: ‘Elliot! Elliot!’ one Briton said he heard boomeranging around the walls on 26 May while rumours of a ceasefire comforted the terrified city, ‘as if he had been their protecting joss’.30