The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  A large number of ladies also turned out to greet the returning hero who, beneath his sizeable Victorian beard, ‘appeared highly gratified’ by his reception.2 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – delighted to be presented with plundered novelties from the emperor’s own bedroom (a jewel-encrusted, silk-tasselled cap, a jade-covered edition of Confucius’s sayings and a fluffy Pekinese that some wag had christened Looty) – were both anxious to meet him. Loch himself had no doubt as to the significance of what he had experienced: the war and treaty just past ‘happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civilized nations.’3

  A British traveller of 1849, though, had reached different conclusions on the voyage home from China. He was not a disinterested observer of relations between the two countries over the past decade: his family – uncles, cousins, nephews – was steeped in the opium trade. He was not only a veteran of ten years’ commercial service in China, but also a witness to the first Opium War – he had helped ensure that the conflict had not disrupted opium supply to China by overseeing the unloading of opium onto British-occupied Zhoushan in 1840.4 His name was Donald Matheson, nephew of the more famous James. By 1849, his conscience had ordered him to abandon the clan business; within another eight years he would become a luminary of the newly founded Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (SSOT). After 1896, when his aunt Mary, James Matheson’s widow, died and the family property passed to Donald, this guilt-ridden Presbyterian would get the opportunity to wage his personal war on the drug from the magnificent Gothic pile that Uncle James had paid for with opium profits.5 His early ‘China-opening’ career and later dedication to the nineteenth-century anti-opium cause would exemplify the way in which the mercantile sinophobia and bad conscience of the first Opium War would conspire together to poison Sino-Western relations.

  For decades after 1842, Britain failed to make up its mind about opium, and its effects on China. ‘The ravages of opium we meet with here on every hand,’ claimed an impassioned missionary in 1856, ‘and the deterioration of the morals of the people we meet with generally, I cannot but ascribe, in great part, to the use of this ensnaring and destructive drug.’6 ‘Nowhere in China are the people so well off,’ an observer of western China contradicted him in 1882, ‘or so hardy, and nowhere do they smoke so much opium.’7 ‘Why, the slave trade was merciful compared with the opium trade’, Karl Marx quoted a radical anti-opium pamphleteer in 1856. ‘We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans . . . we did not debase their natures, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls.’8 ‘I would recommend the well-intentioned persons who have of late been raising such an outcry on the subject of opium’, a botanist argued back, ‘to reform their own [rum-sodden] countrymen . . . the Chinese are just as capable of taking care of themselves as their would-be guardians are.’9

  Through the middle decades of the century, the British also went on liberally eating and drinking the drug. Until the 1868 Pharmacy Act (which limited opium sales to chemists’), grocers’ catalogues were full of opium-enriched patent potions, listed next to jam and barley-sugar.10 Opium consumption remained particularly high in the Fens, where shop counters stockpiled 3–4,000 vials of laudanum for Saturday nights.11 It was used against pain, spasms, insomnia, to induce perspiration and reduce bronchial mucus, for diabetes, for melancholy, for overexcitement, for drunkenness; laudanum mixed with ox-gall served for earache, insanity, hysteria and toothache; with egg yolk, for piles.12

  Commentators found it similarly difficult to agree on whether or not the events of 1839–42 had had anything to do with opium. Certainly not, argued one David Wells in a learned American journal of 1896: they all sprang from a ‘deliberate insult’ to foreigners in Canton. If ‘England had not undertaken the task of teaching the Chinese this initiatory lesson, the government of the United States would sooner or later have had to have done it.’13 Poppycock, rebutted a subsequent issue: ‘the seizure of contraband opium . . . was the direct cause of the war . . . We (the British people) are responsible not only for supplying the Chinese with an enormous quantity of poison from India, but also for setting agoing its widespread cultivation in China.’ The war was ‘a national disgrace.’14

  But as early as the 1880s, the tone of the opium debate in countries like Britain was changing – for Chinese use of the drug was rising at a disturbing rate. However hard some individuals disputed the accusation that the most recent Anglo-Chinese war had been connected with opium, discussion of how exactly it was to be legalized in China occupied six pages of Elgin’s official correspondence with the Foreign Office. Despite efforts to conceal the fact, the treaty that concluded the second China war in 1860 had discreetly added opium to a list of legitimately dutiable goods. Although the tax on opium was supposedly prohibitive (thirty taels of silver per chest), Chinese imports steadily grew: from 75,822 chests in 1859, to 84,528 in 1879.15 In Beijing, went one report from 1869, ‘there are opium shops in almost every lane, and two or three in larger ones.’16 Use now spread beyond the smart coastal cities to the countryside. ‘Over the past thirty to forty years,’ remarked one 1878 almanac, ‘smokers have become as common in the remote countryside as they used to be in the cities. These days, a town spends more money on opium than it does on rice.’17

  In response to this increase in opium-smoking, a British anti-opium lobby – offspring of the middle-class pressure-group politics that, in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, had mobilized such vocal opposition to slavery – began to organize. It was all right, still, for respectable society to use the drug responsibly and creatively: ‘Drops, you are darling!’ Wilkie Collins hymned his bottle of laudanum. ‘If I love nothing else, I love you!’ He sipped his opium tincture all the way through the writing of The Moonstone (1868); when the novel was done, he claimed no memory of having written the thing. It was also acceptable for knowledgeable doctors to minister ever stronger, larger, more addictive doses (administered by the hypodermic syringe, invented in the 1850s) of synthetic opiates in the form of morphine (isolated from raw opium around 1805) or later of the miraculously potent Heroin (patented in 1895). But educated opinion was increasingly appalled by negligent labouring mothers who drugged their infants by day to keep them quiet with minders; by working-class users who abused opium syrups and pills as a stimulant cheaper than booze; and by the back-street grocers who supplied them.

  To help establish its own credentials for defining, controlling and prescribing drugs, the medical profession now began to reclassify unregulated use of opium (of any kind – moderate or extravagant, regular or irregular) as a self-inflicted disease called addiction: a ‘vice’, a sign of ‘moral bankruptcy’ or ‘moral insanity’ that required expert policing.18 The new theorists of drug use and addiction mixed their claims to scientific rigour with a language of ethical disapproval; self-prescribed consumption of opium was increasingly condemned out of hand in tones never applied to alcohol or tobacco. ‘The familiar use of opium in any form’, pronounced Sir Clifford Allbutt, inventor of the clinical thermometer, ‘is to play with fire, and probably to catch fire.’ ‘Habitual use’, lectured the President of the Royal College of Surgeons, ‘is productive of the most pernicious consequences’. In 1908, the Secretary of the British Medical Association proposed that a drug habit should be classified as a form of mental disease, of ‘moral infirmity’, requiring some form of committal.19

  The anti-opium lobby’s disapproval took on a new racial dimension when it was directed against use of the drug in China (which had emerged, in recent decades, as undoubtedly the world’s biggest opium market). Over the course of the nineteenth century, as Asia and Africa had fallen before Western science and industry, theorists of the European empires had sought convincing explanations for their supremacy, fixing the world into racial types distinguished by immutable characteristics – with the whites clearl
y at the top, and the ‘yellows’ and ‘blacks’ below. The conspicuous popularity of the drug amongst the Chinese became a symptom of the moral weakness and torpor of this alien, inexplicable race. The campaign that fought the opium trade in China was, therefore, a contradictory creature. On the one hand, it betokened a special sympathy for China and guilt about the role of the West (and especially Britain) in foisting the drug on the population. On the other, it could not conceal a certain disgust for the Chinese themselves. The opium trade produced a rationale for the Christian presence in China, turning the country into a depraved mass of opium sots to be disciplined and improved by salvation-hungry missionaries. ‘I am profoundly convinced’, declared the founder of the China Inland Mission, ‘that the opium traffic is doing more evil in China in a week than Missions are doing good in a year.’20 In other words, the Western presence in China had first created a problem then provided the service to solve it – the opium trade both generated and justified the civilizing mission.

  In 1874, the new Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade formally began its crusade. It divided into committees, it held essay competitions, it lobbied MPs, it threw petitions at the House of Commons, it paid bonuses to anti-opium medics to add science to the campaign. Above all, it published: a stream of tracts, pamphlets, books and a journal called the Friend of China, all chorusing the noxious nature of the drug (‘Truly, it is an engine in Satan’s hand’) and of the trade itself (a ‘great and grievous sin’). ‘One of the fallacies put forth’, argued an 1847 forerunner to the campaign, ‘to palliate the enormity of this crime, is that the vice of opium smoking is not worse than that of gin drinking; but this is on a par with another fallacy, that if Englishmen did not supply the Chinese with opium, another nation would. How sunken must be the morals of an individual, when crime is measured by crime!’21 Yet the anti-opium lobby’s pronouncements were also underpinned by a horror of Chinese degeneracy. It oversimplified the dangers of opium use, refusing to distinguish between the great variety of types and patterns of Chinese smoking (medical, recreational, daily, frequent, occasional and so on). In the testimonies of anti-opium missionaries, opium use could only be ‘bad, utterly bad . . . Morally – demoralizing, Physically – weakening, Socially – degrading’.22

  In time, this ‘deplorable’ national addiction was presented as a defining characteristic of the Chinese race, corroborating the belief that they were ‘immured in darkness . . . intrinsically an immoral and sensual nation . . . in a sleepy or dreaming state’ (in contrast with the expansive vitality of Europeans).23 ‘The phlegmatic temperament and indolent habits of the Asiatic make him more liable to contract the habit’, testified one China-based missionary, because of their ‘love of pleasure and vice. The opium dens are moral sinks, and opium smoking is associated with gambling and gross sensual indulgence.’ Opium, another missionary confidently reflected, ‘is the judgment of God on a dishonest race.’24 The hardy, extrovert race of Europeans would never take to it, claimed other analyses, because they preferred the fiery effects of alcohol and, in any case, it was too ‘uncomfortable to lie down for any length of time wearing a pair of tight trousers and ordinary boots.’25

  In time, then, the guilt that had originally generated the anti-opium movement morphed into denigrations of the ‘Chinese national character’. This in turn opened the door to the comforting idea that China’s yen for opium had, in fact, very little to do with British gunboats and profit margins, and everything to do with the base instincts of the Chinese themselves. One reverend reported that his anti-opium sermons in China were at times interrupted by the heckle, ‘Who sells Opium?’ ‘My answer has been, I fear, not a very Christian answer: “Who smokes the Opium?” I have thus silenced them hundreds of times.’26 A happy historical coincidence further lightened consciences about Britain’s opium-trading activities in the late-nineteenth century. By the 1880s, Chinese domestic production of opium had begun to equal imports. At last, the British could point at statistics to prove that the Chinese were determined to poison themselves.

  Even the most vigorous critics of Britain’s opium-running activities in China were sinophobic. Donald Matheson, for example, refused to blame the British for the Opium War. A student of history, he remarked, would be misguided to assume hostilities sprang from the seizure of opium: the casus belli was ‘one more deep-seated and more remote in point of time . . . the arrogant assumption of supremacy over the monarchs and people of other countries claimed by the Emperor of China for himself and for his subjects’.27 ‘In the beginning and the very origin of the quarrel we were distinctly in the wrong’, admitted Justin McCarthy, SSOT’s spokesman on Chinese history. At the same time, though, ‘the whole principle of Chinese civilization . . . was . . . erroneous and unreasonable . . . As the thought of having to go a day unwashed would be to the educated Englishman of our age . . . so was the idea of innovation to the Chinese of that time . . . The one thing which China asked of European civilization and the thing called Modern Progress was to be let alone.’28

  Yet a guilty terror of retribution for past iniquities lingered on. By the late-nineteenth century, this fear was decades old. In April 1840, only days after the Opium War vote had squeaked through Parliament, The Times had named it ‘the mother of a brood of conflicts . . . so far as the colonial scepter of Great Britain waves . . . her reputed power . . . shall have offered provocation to . . . vengeance.’29 An anti-opium agitator of 1847 had agreed: ‘We stand convicted before the nations of the world, as well as before an Omniscient Deity from whom nothing can be hidden, as a government and people actively and legally engaged in the perpetration of murder and desolation, on a scale of such magnitude as to defy calculation . . . We are all involved in the guilt, and participants, even by our silence, in a sin [that] must ere long bring on us that Divine vengeance which though slow, is sure, and never invoked in vain!’30 For if, as those who had fought and won the Opium Wars argued, the Chinese hated foreigners, it stood to reason that they would exact vengeance for the humiliations suffered at the hands of the West.

  The puzzle was working out how exactly revenge would be taken. All that was clear was that it should be ingenious and horrible: for whatever the faults of the vice-laden Chinese as told by popular stereotype, China was also (in Victorian estimation) a proud, ancient civilization ‘with a literature and laws and institutions of its own.’31 If the Chinese were to be hated, they were also to be feared. Retribution, when it came, would be fully worthy of their elaborate capacity for treachery and cruelty (a capacity that had been abundantly confirmed by the British experience of fighting them in two Opium Wars).

  In 1886, a forty-nine-year-old Scottish globetrotter called Constance Gordon Cumming thought that she had cracked the mystery: ‘If . . . a taste for opium should once gain a footing in England, as it has already done in America, there may be reason to fear lest the poison which Britain has so assiduously cultivated for China, may eventually find its market amongst our own children – a retribution too terrible to contemplate, though one against the possibility of which it were well to guard.’32 British bad conscience was merging with imperialist loathing for China: the outcome would be the ‘Yellow Peril’.33

  Through the 1890s, the popular boys’ comic Chums devoted most of its pages to informing sons of the empire about stamp-collecting, rugby and famous swords of the Middle Ages, and to answering such key questions as ‘Why do boys who have left school always have a great affection for masters who flog?’ In late November 1892, though, its editors took a break from their standard repertoire to dispatch a ‘Chums Commissioner’ to carry out a spot of contemporary London reportage by investigating ‘the terrors of the opium den’. Guided by a knowledgeable clergyman, the journalist tramped through the ‘foul alleys’ of Stepney and Shadwell in search of ‘the deadly juice’, until the two men reached their destination: ‘one of the most noted of the opium dens in the East-end’.

  It was a dark, claustrophobic hole of a place, its twenty bunks
occupied by prostrate, insensible bodies ‘reaping their reward’ from their ‘fill of poison’. The Chums mission was greeted in pidgin English by a sinister, ingratiating Chinese proprietor with ‘little pigs’-eyes’ and ‘decayed and discoloured teeth’: ‘Bring you friendey. No smokey pipey?’ ‘It will probably make me ill,’ the indomitable commissioner thought, ‘but it is as well to try things just as an experiment.’ As soon as the pipe reached his lips, however, he ‘began to choke. My throat seemed closed, my nostrils afire, my brain swam . . . my head was sinking into my body, while my legs were momentarily growing shorter . . . I was breathing blue flames – and then I suddenly regained my senses and was violently sick . . . Such was my experience on the occasion of my first and last visit to an opium den.’34

  The message of the piece was not particularly subtle. It was a parable on the horrors of racial pollution: a lesson to British boys on the dangerous, degenerate presence of Chinese poison in the very heartland of the empire. What is more interesting, perhaps, is that by 1892 this dread had become sufficiently mainstream to permeate even the usually cheery, wholesome pages of children’s comics. And to understand how this had come about requires a brief diversion into the paranoid world of European racial science in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Some racial theorists concluded fairly soon after the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species that, in the general Darwinian struggle for survival, inferior races were bound to be extinguished by the (white) master-race (whose global domination was justified and maintained by its command of modern science). As one commentator put it, ‘the weaker races are perishing off the face of the land from inherent inability to stand before the superior race.’35 Belief in the rigidity of divisions between the world’s races was reaffirmed by the ‘unspeakable horrors’ of the Indian Mutiny, in which Hindu sepoys – suspecting a mass British conspiracy to Christianize them – massacred British women and children, then were themselves (in far greater numbers) massacred by vengeful British troops. Uninterested in local explanations for this sudden eruption of Indian violence, many shocked readers of dispatches judged instead that it was simply proof of inveterate barbarity. ‘One stands aghast’, observed a shuddering John Bright, ‘at the reflection that after a century of intercourse with us, the natives of India suddenly exhibit themselves greater savages than any of the North American Indians who have been brought into contact with the white race.’36