The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  Ultimately, though, Elliot’s policies won him few friends on either side of the conflict. ‘Everybody wonders what will be the next news’, wrote Emily Eden on 12 April 1841. ‘Probably, he will prevent Sir Gordon Bremer from taking Canton, for fear it should hurt the feelings of the Chinese, and the Emperor will probably send down orders that our sailors are to wear long tails and broad hats, wink their eyes, and fan themselves, and Charles Elliot will try to teach them. I don’t think my national pride ever was so much hurt.’31 ‘Much travel’, Elliot himself admitted, ‘has pretty nearly unEnglished me, and the generous treatment I have received in [Britain] has not kept alive so much of my prejudice as to prevent me looking at things there much as a foreigner might do.’32 And of course in China today, he remains the arch-villain of the conflict: the enemy of oppressed colonial peoples everywhere.

  But in early 1841, there was still a chance that a moderate line would prevail. In January, even the petulant Queen Victoria could accept that there was a moral high ground to be gained by restraint: ‘it will be a source of much gratification to me’, she remarked, opening Parliament on 26 January, ‘if [the Qing] Government shall be induced, by its own sense of justice, to bring these matters to a speedy settlement by an amicable arrangement.’33 Up to this point, there was more than one way to define ‘national pride’. Back in March 1840, when the war in prospect had been so bitterly criticized in several of the country’s newspapers, there were many who felt that the national honour was committing suicide by even contemplating conflict with China on such grounds. But even after the decision to go to war had been taken, professional men of war were still capable of taking a relatively nuanced view of the effects of violence: ‘the object was to gain our point by firmness and determination,’ wrote the campaign’s military secretary in 1841, ‘but they do not imply rapine and bloodshed . . . war, undertaken against a nation so puerile in that art, would better deserve the name of murder, and could certainly add no laurels to British valour.’34

  On the eve of Elliot’s recall, on 2 May 1841, the views of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, were out of step with those of his infuriated foreign secretary. ‘Palmerston is, or was, for disavowing Elliot and the treaty . . . I have grave doubts of this. The treaty as it stands saves our honour and produces all the necessary moral effect. To renew the war would keep the whole thing alive, which it is of the utmost importance to close [and] the Chinese will be convinced that we never meant to observe that or any other treaty.’35 ‘POISON UNPAID FOR’, an Irish newspaper mocked those disappointed at Elliot’s January treaty. ‘The war with China is, for the present, over. No more European money, or Oriental blood, is to be expended this year in the promotion of immorality, and the extension of colonial empire.’36 The Whigs were, Chartist papers declared, ‘ruffian-poisoners’.37

  But some time between the outraged lampooning of the proposed ‘Opium War’ in April 1840 and the summer of 1841, many British – their politicians, parts of their press, Queen Victoria herself – seem to have shed their moral uncertainties. They now fixated on extracting what they felt was due to them (without consideration of any point of view except their own, uniquely civilized one), cheering any feats of ‘gallant’ modern violence that furthered these ends. Seeing off a new admiral of the China expedition in May 1841, the Lord of the Admiralty looked forward to meeting him next, ‘somewhat richer than you are now, some three years hence, when you will return to us . . . loaded with the spoils of China.’38 An underlying cause of this change seems to have been economic, as much as particularly political or sinophobe: the cavernous budget deficit that the Whig administration had generated. Two arguments had allowed the proposal for war with China to squeeze its way past Parliament: that it would be quick, easy and cheap; and that, once it was done, it would secure all-important revenues from the China trade. When reports from the front claimed swift ‘brilliant successes’ in Zhoushan and Tianjin, and that the Elliots had been ‘received with distinction’ by the emperor, public opinion for the government’s war just about held out: ‘Such are the great results,’ smugly declared the government, ‘accomplished by means of little wars.’39 While the dispatches were full of success, The Times preached mercy: if only Britain’s war party could remember that although the Chinese ‘have tails on the top of their heads, and round faces, and no whiskers, yet really are not made of paste or earthenware, but have life and flesh and nerves and sensations, and a sense of justice, and that they who kill 100 Chinese kill 100 men . . . we might perhaps hear a little more about Chinese peace and contentment, harmless dispositions . . . and difficulties of understanding the necessities of foreign nations, and less about stagnation of intellect, dogged unsociability, servility and idleness.’40 But when reports about the fleet’s withdrawal from north China and about Elliot’s moderate treaty with Qishan revealed in early 1841 that the plenipotentiary had agreed that only six million dollars of British costs would be covered while a quarter of the thousands of men on Zhoushan had died of sickness there, or were unfit for service, the whole business became an embarrassingly ‘unsuccessful’ contest. If there was one thing worse than an ‘inglorious’, ‘immoral’, or ‘disgraceful’ campaign, it was an ‘ineffectual’ one. ‘The expense incurred by the country in maintaining that drivelling expedition has been enormous’, The Times now declared. It was ‘an insult to our military prowess . . . a foul scandal to our diplomatic arrangements.’41 ‘Without going into any defence of our hostile demonstration against China,’ reasoned a correspondent in April 1841, ‘we had declared war against her . . . and it was necessary to prosecute it to a successful termination.’ He thought Elliot’s decision to protect the ‘defenceless and helpless people of Canton’ frankly weak-kneed. ‘It was impossible to make any distinction between the people and her government, or to forego any measure that could distress both.’42 This theory of civilized warfare went thus: the harsher the British were, the sooner the war would end, the better for the Chinese. ‘Something approaching to absolute terror must be inflicted’, opined one of the armchair strategists of 1841, ‘before arrogancy so great, and self-confidence so deeply-rooted, can be expected to give way . . . There is now, unhappily, but slight apparent chance of terminating this affair without the infliction of some fearful specimen of the horrors of war.’43 Far from humanizing the Chinese, newspapers now turned them into fairy-tale cartoons: the emperor became ‘the embroidered doll’; his officials ‘flurried petticoats’; while the granite fortifications in which hundreds of soldiers had been gunned down or burnt alive were ‘gingerbread forts’.44

  For sure, it was Palmerston and the rest of his ‘miserable Cabinet’ – rather than the unwitting Qing empire – that such public opinion really meant to round upon. ‘Can anything be more degrading to British arms than a Whig expedition like this?’ asked The Times, while the Conservatives mocked the Chancellor for ‘sitting on an empty chest, fishing for a budget.’45 Knowing this, though, would not have brought much comfort to those subjects of the empire who felt the heat of British impatience between 1840 and 1842. By the close of hostilities with Canton, when Elliot estimated that around 5,000 Qing soldiers had lost their lives, the British troops were growing increasingly inured to large-scale slaughter of the Chinese, and impatient at their plenipotentiary’s regular hoisting of the white flag. Back in 1839, a novice sailor had fervently hoped he would never see battle again, after the two-hour Battle of Kowloon. On 8 January 1840 (while the British command tried to instruct the Chinese in ‘the different usages of civilised warfare’46) an army surgeon commented that ‘the appearance of [the] flag of truce was very disheartening to all who, flushed with the success of yesterday, and not satisfied with the quantity of human bloodshed, were eager to dip their hands more deeply into it.’ The next day, a group of sailors were dispatched to pile Chinese dead – around 200 of them – into a pit. ‘The road to gloary’, ran a board they fixed over it.47

  And so it was that, in early summer 1841, Elliot was recalled a
nd replaced by Henry Pottinger, a fifty-one-year-old veteran of the British Indian Army and intelligence services with a luxuriant moustache and a determination not to ‘allow himself to be humbugged’, as the Canton press introduced him to the foreign community out there: ‘A better man you could not have’, they added.48 (Accompanying him was a new admiral, William Parker, who so reviled tobacco that he wouldn’t let any of his sailors touch the stuff on board. Heaven only knows what opinion he had of opium.) So far in China, one commentary wearily announced, ‘every succeeding negotiation has only served to show the faithless and reckless character of the Celestial Government [while] our humanity has only passed for cowardice.’49 Pedagogical imperialism was the new fashion for the campaign. ‘At present,’ considered another editorial, ‘Sir Henry is teaching them the A, B, C of international and maritime law. No doubt his pupils are by no means over docile; but still, by seeing the enterprising character of British commerce, and the amazing powers of steam navigation, as well as the overpowering equipments of our naval and military forces, the probability is that a conviction of their prodigious inferiority may at last dispose them to be . . . more deferential to strangers . . . redounding ultimately to the common benefit of mankind.’50 The appointment of Pottinger was one of Palmerston’s last acts as foreign secretary, before he was ousted in the summer’s general election. The Conservatives – who had argued so verbosely against the war – swept into power on a wave of criticism of the campaign’s meekness; and therefore committed to prosecuting it with new ruthlessness.

  In a depressing way, the hardliners were right. The emperor, as it turned out, would not authorize true plenipotentiaries, with authority to negotiate and settle on his behalf, until – a year later – the British had reduced key garrisons along the east coast to rubble, and were preparing to do the same to the empire’s second city. By this point, Britons would be shooting disarmed, fleeing Chinese soldiers ‘as coolly as if they were crows, and bayoneting to death those who fell wounded’.51 The common benefit to all mankind, indeed.

  Chapter Eleven

  XIAMEN AND ZHOUSHAN

  Between the last days of August and the beginning of September 1841, Daoguang could contemplate another thick and rather confusing bundle of correspondence. It began on 23 August, when he received a message from the Governor of Zhejiang reporting a rumour that the British ships were on their way north and were intending to attack Zhoushan again. Would it therefore be all right, the governor asked deferentially, to ignore His Majesty’s command of 28 July to withdraw the soldiers garrisoning the coastal defences? Daoguang’s response was characteristically parsimonious. ‘Get on with demobilizing the soldiers, to save on supply costs.’1

  On 5 September, a little more information arrived – a memorial from Yishan, the hero of Canton, composed on 23 August. A new English leader had arrived, apparently: just a new superintendent of trade, probably, by the name of Pu Ding Cha. Although Yishan had sent the Prefect of Canton (the ill-treated Yu Baochun) over to Macao on 15 August to meet him, this Pu Ding Cha had already sailed north ‘to beg for ports’. Yu Baochun had sternly informed his deputy, a certain Ma Gong, that now – thanks to the emperor’s benevolence – the old trade system could be restored and that Pu Ding Cha had no business going north to make further demands. Ma Gong, therefore, should hurry after him as fast as he could to stop him. The Englishman had, apparently, nodded repeatedly at the sagacity of the plan and promised to do his best, but observed with regret that since setting out, Pottinger had been sped on by fast southerly winds and he might already have arrived. Still smarting at his dismissal (Ma Gong had told Yu), Elliot had taken revenge by concealing from Pu Ding Cha the fact that Yishan and the emperor had permitted the old trade to restart down in Canton, thereby fooling his successor into setting off up the coast to make new trouble.2

  What could it all mean?

  Probably that, as usual, Daoguang’s most trusted subordinates had been systematically misleading him. On 27 August (nine days before Yishan’s memorandum reached Daoguang), a whole new island, Xiamen, on the east coast, had fallen to British guns, under the leadership of the new plenipotentiary, Sir Henry Pottinger. Daoguang would find out about it only on 13 September. By 5 September (the day that the emperor read Yishan’s report), the British were leaving Xiamen to occupy Zhoushan, and two new ports on the mainland.

  This is perhaps what really happened. On 10 August, Pottinger had sailed into Macao. On 12 August, he announced to the fledgling colony of Hong Kong that ‘the slightest infraction [by the Qing] will lead to an instant renewal of active Hostilities . . . such an event is . . . highly probable, from the well understood perfidy and bad faith of the Provincial officers themselves.’3 The next day, he dispatched his secretary, Malcolm (Yishan’s Ma Gong), to Canton to carry letters to the authorities there, explicitly outlining his purposes in sailing to China: that he was fully invested, by the British government, to negotiate for the terms stipulated in Palmerston’s first letter to the Emperor of China, and that until those terms were met, the British fleet would continue to make war further north. Worst of all, Pottinger wanted the Canton authorities to report all of this to the emperor in Beijing.4

  At this, Yishan may well have panicked – for Pottinger’s announcement threatened to blow his earlier tissue of lies to pieces. On 18 August, he had sent his subordinate, Yu Baochun, to Macao to have emergency words with Pottinger. But in a deliberate parroting of the Qing haughtiness that had so infuriated earlier British envoys, Pottinger flatly refused to see any Chinese official who was not authorized (as he was) to negotiate on behalf of his country’s ruler. Bravo, applauded British expatriates and officers, who took a childish glee in the snub. ‘Alas how are the mighty fallen!’ crowed the captain of the Nemesis. In Pottinger, he rejoiced, the British at last had a man who acted ‘with an intimate knowledge of the Oriental character’.5 On 21 August – seven days after Yishan claimed – the fleet had left for Xiamen, the bustling, prosperous port island off the coast of Fujian. Yishan, yet again, had lied virtuosically to the emperor: about who Pottinger was, about the ‘submissiveness’ of the British, about the reason for the fleet’s departure north. Yet again, thanks to the best efforts of his representatives, Daoguang was no closer to understanding who the British were and what they wanted.

  If Elliot’s accusers carped that all his years in the east had ‘orientalized’ him – leaving him too soft on indigenous sensibilities – probably the reverse could be said for his successor to the China job. By background, the two men were not so very different. Pottinger began his career with establishment credentials every bit as impeccable as Charles Elliot’s. The Pottingers were an old Anglo-Irish family, who claimed direct descent from Alfred the Great’s grandfather. Through much of the eighteenth century, the clan was well established at Ballymacarrett in a mansion they had grandiloquently dubbed Mountpottinger. But by the birth of Henry in 1789, the family’s fortunes were looking a little shakier: most of the holding at Ballymacarrett had to be sold off in 1782; in 1811, Mountpottinger also had to be relinquished, eight years after Henry – along with four of his brothers – had left to seek fame and fortune in India.

  Once in India, Henry proved himself a faithful servant of often dubious British interests and ambitions. Throwing himself into the patriotic adventure of the early Great Game, he was dispatched to Baluchistan and Sind, the Indian kingdoms that gave onto Afghanistan, and therefore the buffer zone between British, French and Russian imperial interests, to explore and survey these regions with an eye for political opportunity. Out there, he made himself very useful, filling his reports with statistics, geographical information and scornful generalizations about the ‘Oriental character’. The tribes of the Sind he found ‘avaricious, full of deceit, cruel, ungrateful and strangers to veracity’, while the local women were ‘usually ugly’. As for the Persians, he noted, ‘good faith, generosity and gratitude are alike unknown to them’. With a strong-minded consciousness of the national dignity that
he would showcase in China, he refused to rise to show respect to the emissary of a local ruler.6 By the late 1830s, while Britain’s first war against Afghanistan brewed, a chance to strengthen the British position presented itself. As an honourable climax to Pottinger’s India stint, in early 1839 the governor-general charged him with turning the tribal rulers of the Sind into taxable subjects, to help finance Britain’s ventures in Afghanistan; by 1 February, a Bengal army had secured the British just that. Pottinger’s only dissatisfaction with the agreement he had authored was its lack of honesty, for the final treaty paradoxically claimed to leave the Sind ‘in separate independence under British protection’. ‘It would be better’, argued Pottinger, ‘at once to take possession by force, than leave it nominally with the Ameers, and yet deal with it as our own. One line is explicit and dignified and cannot be misunderstood; the other I conceive to be unbecoming to our power, and it must lead to constant heartburnings and bickering, if not to a rupture of all friendly relations.’7 Fine, steal their sovereignty, he seemed to be arguing; but unless we are clear and open about it, the natives will be unhappy. By the time he reached China, Pottinger was, in a pretty fair recent summary by a Chinese historian, ‘an old hand at colonial invasion activities in eastern countries’.8