The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  Although Palmerston and his consuls tried hard to manufacture an ethical justification for war, the main cause of British discontent was economic; and opium was once more implicated. Since four new ports had been opened to British commerce in 1842, it had been assumed that purchases of British manufacturers ought to quintuple. But by 1848, official exports to China were actually less than in 1843, while British consumers remained as hooked on tea and silk as ever (sales of tea more than doubled between 1842 and 1856; silk imports increased more than twentyfold).29 A return to the bad old days of trade deficit resulted: in 1854, Britain found its balance of payments to China more than £8 million in the red (rising to £9 million in 1857). Reducing exports from China was no solution – they contributed too much to import duty in Britain, and to the costs of the Royal Navy. Palmerston decided the problem was caused by the limitations of the Nanjing Treaty, and that the Chinese interior – not just checkpoints along the coast – had to be opened to free trade. ‘I clearly see’, he told British consuls in China, as they pushed (fruitlessly and illegally) to revise the treaty, ‘that the time is fast coming when we shall be obliged to strike another blow in China.’ He left it to The Times to give a moral sheen to the quest for profit. Britain, the newspaper proclaimed, must ‘enforce the right of civilised nations to free commerce and communications with every part of this vast territory’; it was no good ‘treating with such a power as if it belonged to the enlightened communities of Europe.’30

  Opium was apparently the only thing saving the British balance of payments from ruin. Although pianos and cutlery did not appeal to Chinese consumers through the 1840s and 1850s, drugs still did. As Palmerston candidly admitted in March 1857, ‘At present the nature of our commerce with the Chinese is such that we can pay for our purchases only partly in goods; the rest we must pay in opium and in silver.’31 ‘The fumes of opium’, one British missionary, a Reverend Smith, remembered as he sailed into Zhoushan in 1845 ‘wafted on the breeze, [infecting] the whole atmosphere around.’ Business on board Shanghai opium ships, he later observed, was ‘painfully animated.’32 Through the 1840s, the Chinese Repository estimated that profits from the opium trade would leap from $33.6 million to $42 million, between 1845 and 1847 alone.33 However loudly England’s politicians and merchants bellowed about the civilizing mission of Free Trade, the fact remained that into the 1850s and beyond, opium sales in China (produced under British monopoly in India) underwrote much of the British empire: they funded the Raj (by 1856, opium revenue represented almost 22 per cent of British India’s total revenue), they generated the silver for Britain to trade along the Indian Ocean, and in China they bought tea and silk.34 To some extent, they kept the world economy moving: after British bills bought American cotton, American traders used these bills to buy tea in Canton; the Cantonese then swapped them for Indian opium.35 Acknowledging the economic importance of its opium monopoly, in 1843 the British annexed a new slice of west India, the Sind, at least in part to hike up transit fees on opium grown outside British Bengal, thereby helping to make production of the drug beyond British-controlled territories unprofitable.36 Through the 1840s and 1850s, after Pottinger had failed to legalize opium in 1842, British politicians remained nervous of a repeat of the 1839 campaign against the drug (which would jeopardize British profit margins), and pestered (without result) the Qing government to lift the official prohibition on the trade.

  In 1856, Harry Parkes – newly appointed acting consul in Canton – barged into this vexed situation. Long before his appointment, Parkes had been convinced that entry to Canton was at the centre of the China problem – and had told Palmerston as much while on a brief trip home in 1850. In 1856, on another visit to Britain, he had enjoyed a second private interview with the prime minister in which he may well have been directly encouraged to find a pretext on which to force the question. Parkes was more than ready to generate some excitement, for the boredom of his new posting seemed expressly designed to infuriate him. There was nothing for him to do, except draft reports on coolie emigration, marry romancing expatriates and take walks around the hills nearby to work up an appetite for excessive colonial dinners. (Parkes was a maniac for fresh air: on a whirlwind grand tour around Europe in 1850, he yomped across the Alps for six days at the rate of twenty-six miles a day.)

  On 8 October 1856, his opportunity arrived, provided by the Chinese governor of the province, Ye Mingchen, who committed the strategic error of requisitioning in Canton a Chinese pirate ship (of Chinese ownership, Chinese-crewed) by the name of the Arrow that was – allegedly – registered in Hong Kong and flying the British flag.37 (Ye was a busy man, responsible for fighting the fires of the Taiping Rebellion in China’s anarchic southern provinces, and the piratical Arrow was a part of the general climate of violent lawlessness pervading the south. As guardian of public order – through the 1850s he executed tens of thousands of local rebels – Ye was sensibly suspicious of the ship’s activities.) Hearing of this ‘outrage’, Consul Parkes immediately rushed onto the scene to rescue the Chinese pirates, as if they were fine, upstanding British citizens. In the fray, he was struck. That same day, his cheek and pride still stinging, he dispatched a furious letter to Ye, informing him that unless reparation was rapidly forthcoming the British would be calling in the Commodore of H.M. Navy in the China seas: ‘An insult so publicly committed must be equally publicly atoned.’ The seizure of the ship, Parkes explained to the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, was ‘a declaration on Ye’s part that he will respect neither British flag nor British register.’38 Over the next three days Parkes took a variety of unreliable, embellished testimonies from Western observers of the affray: most notably, from the boat’s twenty-one-year-old Irish master, one Thomas Kennedy, who – it slowly emerged – had been making the vessel available as a floating warehouse for stolen goods. Chinese witnesses, in the meantime, upheld that the flag had not been flying, as did the only independent witness (a Portuguese sailor). Another interesting fact surfaced: both Parkes and Governor Bowring knew that the Arrow’s register at Hong Kong had expired on 27 September, so even if it had been flying the Union Jack, it would have had no legal right to do so.39

  Casting aside such legalistic detail, on 11 October Parkes informed Bowring that ‘it is only by active measures on our part that . . . reparation can be obtained . . . for so gross an insult.’40 Luckily for Parkes, Bowring – a learned, fractious Englishman with a fine command of Latin and an ignorant impatience with China – was delighted to seize the pretext to threaten Canton’s authorities. The Hong Kong governorship had rescued him from a string of business failures, and since arriving in 1852 he had been desperate to secure his reputation with a grand diplomatic success. He was convinced that gaining entry into Canton was his ticket into the history books – to the degree that an uncomprehending House of Lords dismissed him as a monomaniac.41 Through October, both men deliberately, cynically and illegally warmongered to vent their dissatisfactions with China and the post-1842 status quo. ‘Cannot we use the opportunity and carry the City question?’ Bowring secretly wrote to Parkes on 16 October. ‘If so, I will come up with the whole fleet.’42 When Ye offered to return most of the sailors, Parkes refused them and instead drew up a plan for obliterating Canton’s forts, while demanding to enter the city. ‘Want of personal access’, he wrote in the middle of the crisis, ‘has been the occasion of the present trouble.’ The business with the Arrow, he more or less admitted, was a smokescreen.43

  On 16 October, hostilities were opened when Parkes ordered the capture of a Chinese warship. On 29 October, British guns broke through the city wall and set about destroying Ye’s government offices. By 3 November, British forces were shelling the old southern city, and Britain was again at war with the Qing empire. Through December and January, regular British bombardment turned the southern stretches of the city into ‘one mass of smoke’, with Chinese firefighters working frenetically under showers of ‘shot and shell and Minié balls’.44 ‘We are so
strong and so right,’ Bowring rejoiced. ‘We must write a bright page in our history.’45

  Back in Britain, however, opinion was deeply divided at the turn events had taken in China. On hearing of the storming of Canton and the loss of civilian life in November 1856, the inhabitants of Manchester wrote to the Queen of their ‘feelings of shame and indignation’.46 The Daily News concurred: ‘a more rash, overbearing and tyrannical exercise of power has rarely been recorded than that upon which it now becomes our painful duty to comment.’47 The Morning Post disagreed: ‘As far as past years teach us anything on the subject, there seems no way of reaching the heart of China but by the sword.’ And China had so much to gain from being forcibly opened: Britain’s merchants, missionaries and travellers would bring with them the ‘seeds of civil advancement’ – steam, gas, printing presses, schools, churches, railways, the House of Commons. ‘Right or wrong,’ the paper concluded pragmatically, ‘we are in the quarrel, and there is nothing but to go on with it . . . To yield to [such savages] were to imperil all our interests, not only in the East, but in every part of the world.’48 ‘The plain English of it is,’ Punch summarized in a parodic rewriting of Bowring’s letters to Parkes, ‘that we haven’t a legal leg to stand upon, so I have ordered up [the Admiral] and the big guns.’49

  A sense of horror spread to both Houses, where the question of war with China was debated in March 1857. The Lords found Parkes’ behaviour ‘grotesque’, and Bowring’s ‘unworthy . . . of a great and civilised country.’50 Pursuing such a war, they added, ‘will cast disgrace upon our name and our flag, and will bring ruin upon our trade with [China].’51 In the Commons, attacks from the Tory opposition were fully to be expected. A more serious problem for the government was that plenty of its own people were appalled by Palmerston’s plans to fight: the Under-Secretary to the Colonies, Frederick Rogers, declared the business ‘one of the great iniquities of our time’, and Sir John Bowring ‘a fool’.52 A vote of no confidence in the government, on the grounds that its representatives in Canton had indulged in unjustified violence against China, was tabled by the Liberal Free-Trade and Peace Campaigner Richard Cobden. ‘The Government of England’, he told the House, are ‘bullies to the weak and cowards to the strong.’ ‘In dealing with nations less civilized than ourselves’, concurred the Conservative Edward Bulwer-Lytton, ‘it is by lofty truth and forbearing humanity that the genius of commerce contrasts the ambition of conquerors.’53

  The question of opium entered the debate on the very first day: he had been told, remarked a former chief justice at Bombay, ‘that they ought to shut their eyes to this . . . but he asserted that it had all to do with the question, for it had produced those deep feelings of hostility to the English merchants and the English Government on the part of the Chinese, and a reciprocal feeling of animosity on the part of the English, so as satisfactorily to account for the truculent sentiments displayed by nearly all the British residents in China.’54 Palmerston – tired, septuagenarian and gout-ridden – tried to set patriotic pulses racing by denouncing Governor Ye as an ‘inhuman monster’, who had executed 70,000 Chinese in the last year alone. If we do not fight, he argued, we will be committing our countrymen in China ‘to the mercy of these barbarians’.55 He made little impression on his audience. ‘Very dull in the first part,’ the diarist Charles Greville pronounced his speech, ‘very bow-wow in the second’.56

  After four long days of debate, the government was defeated: the House had decided that the government proposed ‘by force to increase our commercial relations with the East’ – and that this was not acceptable.57 Cobden’s motion was carried by sixteen votes, doing, acclaimed Gladstone, ‘more honour to the House of Commons than any [division] I ever remember.’58 Among the rebels was Sir Francis Baring – seventeen years earlier, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had financed the Opium War. Back in 1840, the confusion of motives that had built up to war with China – greed, opium, opportunism – had come within a whisker of bringing down the government. In 1857, it actually did.

  But as soon as the administration had been unseated by bad conscience over affairs in China, Palmerston fought back by bombarding voters with self-justifications. While the fallen government prepared to fight what became known as the ‘Chinese election’ of spring 1857, its supporters waged a xenophobic scare campaign, bombarding pictorials with shocking propaganda images of Chinese tortures and executions, of ‘disjointing, chipping to pieces, tearing the body asunder by pullies, skinning alive etc.’ ‘Really the whole civilised world’, went one commentary, ‘ought to combine together . . . to teach these wretches the common principles of humanity.’59 The commercial community rallied about Palmerston, for ‘upholding the honour of Great Britain . . . in a determination to protect the lives and property of British subjects, peaceably engaged in commercial intercourse with China.’60 The war party’s rhetorical strategy was simple: to repeat loudly that violence against China was honourable and inevitable until, in the popular imagination, it became so. The focus of debate about the war was adeptly shifted from a nice point of international law to emotional questions of patriotism and national interest.

  The Protestant missionary lobby – shedding crocodile tears – also quickly joined the Palmerstonians: ‘We weep over the miseries let loose on [the Chinese]; but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact, that nothing but the strong arm of foreign power can soon open the field for the entrance of the Gospel. If “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall”, then it was inevitable that chastisement from some power would sooner or later result.’61 For the missionaries, like the merchants, were disappointed with the results of 1842; they, too, wanted the great Chinese hinterland opened up to them: to be able to live, travel, build schools and churches wherever they liked – a privilege due ‘to the honour of Great Britain, to the great principles of liberty, and above all to the interests of Christianity.’62

  Not that Palmerston needed others to speak for him. He slandered the Chinese wherever he could: at diplomatic dinners thrown by the Lord Mayor, at constituency addresses, in newspaper articles (the ‘Chinese election’ was the first in British history in which the prime minister personally addressed the entire British nation in print) and in blatant lies. Claiming fictitiously that the heads of ‘respectable British merchants’ had been displayed ‘on the walls of Canton’, he labelled Ye ‘an insolent barbarian [who] had violated the British flag [and] broken the engagements of treaties . . . and planned . . . murder, assassinations, and poisons’ of British subjects. The politically informed wrote of their contempt for Palmerston’s ‘electioneering claptrap’.63 But the public seemed to like it. Palmerston’s actions, The Times applauded, were ‘spirited’, ‘wise’ and ‘British’.64 And after 7 April 1857, when the votes were counted, Cobden and other key members of the peace party were out, rejected by the electorate as ‘un-English’; Palmerston was back in. Despite the distaste of the Houses of Commons and Lords, the great British electorate had returned the warmongers on a platform of jingoistic sinophobia. Palmerston was free to fight the China war that, less than a month earlier, Parliament had denounced. ‘Almost for the first time in our history’, mourned Earl Grey, ‘we were engaged in a war which had not been formally made known to their Lordships by a Message from the Crown, and which Parliament had not been called upon to consider up to the moment when a large force was being despatched from this country.’65 The last time this had occurred had probably been the first Opium War.

  Britain’s finest legal minds had debated through the winter of 1856–57 for nothing. Since September 1856, the British had been in secret negotiations with potential allies (the French, the Americans, the Russians), planning a joint operation to China. By 27 November, the principles of cooperation with the French had been established.66 By early February 1857 (again, as with the first Opium War, weeks before the question was actually debated in the Houses of Commons or Lords), the Cabinet had already sent instructions east. Its representative
s in India were to dispatch forces to China to coerce the country into revising the old treaty. China’s hinterland (not just its treaty ports) was to be opened to British enterprise; an extra dispatch (stamped ‘secret and confidential’) ordered that opium was to be legalized.67 On 10 March, seven days after the war vote was lost, it was announced that Lord Elgin – a former governor of Jamaica and Canada – had been appointed plenipotentiary to the expedition.

  ‘Our position is certainly an embarrassing one,’ even Parkes, the mastermind of the imbroglio, admitted, ‘but it is one from which we cannot recede, and it is only by maintaining it and working on the fears of the people that we can be successful or escape defeat which would be most injurious to our interests.’ War, in other words, would have to do again. Or as Punch satirically ventriloquized Bowring a second time, ‘we have gone too far to recede. Tell [the admiral] to blaze away . . . My heart bleeds for these infatuated Chinese.’68

  Once the expensive decision to fight had been taken, it took on a compelling logic of its own. From time to time, members of parliament would haul themselves to their feet to denounce this ‘miserable war’ (a war, moreover, that threatened to distract Britain from the far more serious business of the Indian Mutiny).69 But the voices of doubt were drowned out by the politicians, businessmen and pressmen who had claimed the moral high ground for the conflict. The Times demonstrated the importance it attached to the war by appointing, for the first time, a Special Correspondent to China, George Wingrove Cooke. ‘It is [the Chinese merchants and mandarins] who have rendered all this necessary’, he wrote from Canton amid showers of British rockets and crashing Chinese roofs. ‘Even in the interest of the Chinese, Canton must fall.’70 His letters from China were – by wild popular acclaim – promptly reprinted in book-form in 1858; by 1861, they had run to a fifth edition, almost every page laced with venom towards the Chinese. ‘Humanity, self-denial, and that true courtesy which teaches Western nations that it is a part of personal dignity to respect the feelings of others’, he wrote as Anglo-French guns mowed down thousands on a pretext invalid in international law, ‘is in China dead in fact, and alive only in pantomime.’71