The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  But by the close of a nineteenth century that in many respects appeared to have belonged to Great Britain, confidence was seeping out of the imperial enterprise and its sense of racial triumphalism. As the question of Irish Home Rule dominated debates of the 1880s, the very principle of imperial unity seemed in doubt. Soon, opponents of Ireland’s independence were convinced, ‘every subject race . . . would know that we were no longer able to cope with resistance’. The disastrous state of public health exposed by Boer War recruits, and Britain’s shrinking economy (between 1870 and 1906, its share of global manufacturing capacity retracted from 32 per cent to 15 per cent) further confirmed forebodings of decline.37 ‘The big smash is coming one of these days’, Kipling prophesied in 1897.38

  The fear arose that current racial distinctions between populations might not be immutable – for if all species changed and evolved according to their environment, they might not only progress, but also regress. Troubled fin-de-siécle theorists made an intellectual industry out of degeneration fears, classifying a host of physical, psychiatric and social disorders (hernias, goitres, pointed ears, phobias, alcoholism, prostitution) as hereditary pathologies that were undermining European populations. Such thinking combined with growing public hysteria about deviant social groups (criminals, the insane, the poor, homosexuals, communists) to feed the idea that the white races in countries like Britain and France might be in decline. And if that were so, the outcome of the inevitable conflict between races would be in doubt. ‘Civilisation’, speculated a Secretary of State for India after 1905, ‘is in real danger, near, sinister and terrible from the uprising of Asiatic power, yellow, brown, and black against all the forces of the West.’39

  In the nineteenth-century hierarchy of races, the Chinese had always been a little hard to place. To European minds, they had long been more than simply inferior to the whites. Although back in the eighteenth century, Linnaeus – the Swedish father of taxonomy – had confidently classified the Chinese as Homo/Monstrous, on a level with the Hottentots, many of his contemporaries had lauded the country as a political, cultural and social utopia.40 Even during the scornful decades of the nineteenth century, China presented a challenge to Britain. It was a long-established, literate and sophisticated empire, albeit (in the dominant Victorian view) an underperforming one. By the early years of the twentieth century, Western anxieties were growing that this ‘sleeping lion’ seemed ready to turn on its former aggressors. As usual, the primary source of unease towards China was economic. One of the clauses of the 1860 Treaty of Beijing had forced the Qing emperor to legalize emigration of his subjects. By 1900, Chinese workers had begun to disperse through the global economy, forming sizeable communities of cheap labour: around 31,000 in Australia, 15,000 in British Columbia, 3,000 in New Zealand and 1,000 in Great Britain.

  This seemed to turn the tables on British imperialism. For two decades up to the 1860s, British gunboats had been busy penetrating China. Now the Qing empire was striking back by infiltrating white society. Britain – transfixed by fear of decline – responded by viewing this diaspora as an unprecedented threat to ‘Anglo-Saxon values’. The simple truth was that Chinese labourers in Australia, South Africa, America and Britain were quieter, harder-working, more reliable and more sober than their white counterparts. Given the practical superiority of Chinese populations, white workers therefore had little choice but to shift the grounds of attack: from a question of labour efficiency to one of a moral, racial clash between Asians and Anglo-Saxons. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a hate campaign against the Chinese flourished in Britain, the United States and settler societies such as South Africa and Australia, accompanied by draconian legislation restricting immigration.

  Almost wherever Chinese communities went, they were accused of vice, violence and mutiny, of being a secretive, alien, xenophobic community that refused to integrate with Anglo-Saxon society. ‘Colonies of Chinese’ were ‘being founded in all the chief ports of the British Isles’, announced scaremongers. ‘An imported horde of underpaid Chinese starvelings’ threatened to take over ‘the great traditions of the British sea dog.’41 While suspicion and violence grew, relations inevitably deteriorated, neatly reinforcing earlier prejudices about the sinister exclusiveness of the Chinese. As police and judges began to assume that any violence in Chinese communities was Triad warfare, these communities tried to resolve disputes between themselves rather than throw themselves onto the unsympathetic mercies of the law courts. Meanwhile, Chinese immigrants who tried to assimilate – by learning English, by wearing European clothes, by marrying local women – were ridiculed, or suspected of trying to penetrate English society for invidious reasons.42 Respectable middle-class magazines spread dread further up the social scale. In ‘The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem’ (an article distributed liberally around the Home Office), one hack journalist warned of ‘a vast and convulsive Armageddon to determine who is to be the master of the world, the white or yellow man.’43

  The denouement of the Boxer Rebellion (quickly dubbed the ‘Yellow Horror’ by contemporary observers) seemed to vindicate the prophets of race war.44 Until this point, the milder advocates of British imperialism – Charles Elliot’s intellectual heirs – argued against blanket stereotyping of the Chinese. It was only the government that was anti-foreign, they argued; the ordinary, commercially minded people, by contrast, welcomed the British and their trade. The events of 1900 demolished that idea. Local violence against European missionaries in north-east China had steadily grown through the 1890s until around 1898 anti-Christian feeling coalesced into a secret society identified in foreign press reports as ‘the Boxers’ (for the style of martial arts that, its members claimed, rendered them invulnerable to bullets). In spring 1900, after thousands of these desperate, leaderless rebels converged on Beijing, a nervously wavering Qing government decided to support the movement.

  On 20 June, Boxer groups began to lay siege to the foreign legations in the capital. While the Western press inaccurately reported that the entire foreign community in the capital had been massacred, a combined force of American, British, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Russian and Austrian troops stormed the city, having devastated in the process the countryside and towns they had passed through en route. By the end of the fifty-five-day siege of the legations in Beijing, some 200 foreigners had been killed across China in incidents of both popular and state-sanctioned violence (the most notorious being the execution of forty-four men, women and children in the north-west under orders from the local governor who had called them to his provincial headquarters with the promise of protection).

  The Boxers – drawn substantially from the lowest ranks of society – seemed to offer conclusive proof of the evil impulses of the Chinese race. It did not matter that local circumstances – famine, impoverishment, the imperialist scramble for north China and dubious missionary manoeuvres to seize land and protect ‘Christian’ bandits through the 1890s – made the Boxer explosion of anti-missionary violence explicable, if no less horrendous for those involved. Neither did it matter that, over the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese immigrant populations in North America, Australia and Europe would suffer far more xenophobia than the Boxers meted out to Westerners through the 1890s. The debacle confirmed all the West’s worst and oldest prejudices about China; press and publishing were flooded by missionary and military accounts of the horror and violence, which seemed to justify the unleashing of any kind of retributive humiliation on the Chinese people as a whole. In the aftermath of the rebellion, as thousands of foreign soldiers ravaged north China, anything Chinese was vulnerable to defilement. Every enclosed, sanctified space was to be blasted open in a great ‘punitive picnic’: villages and towns were razed; one of Beijing’s city walls and a cemetery were dynamited to make way for a railway line; the vast white courtyards and vermilion pavilions of the Forbidden City were occupied for a memorial service for Queen Victoria. Privates played hoc
key around the dynasty’s most sacred temples, picked over the private apartments of the emperor and empress, and lolled about on imperial thrones. Captured on Kodak Reloadables, their sacrilegious actions thrilled audiences at home.45

  The populace was punished too, in beatings, bayoneting and mass public executions (often thronged by victorious crowds of soldiers, missionaries and photographers). In one particularly horrific incident, a man with suspected (though unproved) Boxer connections was first punched and kicked (by Americans); shot through the head (by a Frenchman); then had his skull ‘stomped’ in (by a Japanese soldier). Even so, the man survived for an hour longer, while his tormentors stood about, roaring with laughter at his death agonies.46 ‘[W]here one real Boxer has been killed since the capture of Pekin,’ observed the American commander of the Allied reign of terror, ‘fifty harmless coolies or labourers on the farms, including not a few women and children, have been slain.’47

  Western fear of China and the Chinese was given a keener edge by the modernizing reforms introduced by the Qing government after the Allied invasion of 1900. As the dynasty sent out embassies to study the political, technical, social and military institutions of the West and edged towards constitutional monarchy, journalistic hostility only intensified. China was, The Times concluded, ‘a nation teeming with vitality . . . slowly modernised, then suddenly eager for expansion, perhaps for conquest, for world-power, if not for revenge for wrongs inflicted upon it by nearly every European power.’48 When the Chinese empire refused to participate in the Western-dominated international system, it was attacked as an arrogant, xenophobic threat. When it began to play by Western rules (sending its subjects to work abroad, modernizing and Westernizing its armies, schools and government), it was accused of plotting to use Western technology against the West.

  Back in Britain, and other Western countries in which Chinese labourers had settled, inchoate fears of the retributive Chinese ‘invasion’ coalesced in a dread of the Chinese opium den. For opium was the perfect instrument of degeneration: this Oriental poison subtly permeating Britain and its people with its vengeful smoke. Trying hard to forget recent Western readiness to provide opium to the Chinese, late Victorian and Edwardian journalists (including the Chums commissioner) portrayed the smoking establishments set up by Chinese immigrants in cities like London as vice-ridden headquarters of Oriental iniquity. After an excursion in 1866, Charles Dickens provided one of the earliest templates for these accounts, filling pages with descriptions of bestial Asiatics piled on top of each other, of their ‘livid, cadaverous, corpse-like’ faces and ‘stolid sheep-like ruminations’.49 One contributor to Strand Magazine in 1891 found everything in the den that he visited similarly dreadful: the evil-looking proprietor with his ‘parchment-coloured features’, ‘his small and cunning eyes . . . twisting and turning so horribly’; the filthy yellow walls; even the staircase was ‘the most villainously treacherous . . . which it has ever been my lot to ascend’.50 ‘Oriental cunning and cruelty’, observed another visitor to an opium establishment in 1904, ‘was hall-marked on every countenance’.51 ‘A great many people’, remarked a report of a Whitechapel den, ‘despise the Chinese: they say they are untruthful, and sly, and cruel, and conceited, and very dirty . . . there is a good deal of truth in all this; but then we must remember that they are heathens . . . the love of opium deadens a man’s conscience and makes him ready to do any wicked deed.’52

  The curious fact is that while panic about opium dens was taking hold – through the closing years of the nineteenth century – there were few Chinese in Britain as a whole, and far fewer opium dens. Until the 1860s, there were no more than around 100 Chinese in the country, climbing to only 1,100 in 1911.53 In 1884 – almost twenty years after Dickens had made his investigative foray into Limehouse – there were an estimated six smoking establishments in East End London. ‘It was not repulsive’, concluded a calmer observer that year. ‘It was peaceful. There was a placid disregard of trivialities . . . which only opium can give.’54 Opium-smokers, reported another witness from 1908, were ‘ordinary working people . . . they have their pleasure time . . . as long as their money lasts.’55

  The deepest fear was that the Chinese would infect with their ‘hideous vice’ those on whom the protection and well-being of the empire and the white race as a whole depended: fertile white women and their vigorous sons. Opium-smoking, as one popular novel put it, is ‘bad enough in the heathens, but for an Englishwoman to dope herself is downright unchristian and beastly’.56 A stock character in opium-den reportage was the British wife of the Chinese proprietor, in whom (as described by appalled journalists) the dread processes of degeneration were visibly occurring. ‘Her skin was dusky yellow,’ sighed one pitying observer, ‘evidently she had, since her marriage, taken such an Oriental view of life, that her organs of vision were fast losing their European shape . . . It was killing her, she said, this constant breathing of the fumes of the subtle drug her husband dealt in.’57 (It was, such accounts refrained from pointing out, strict British immigration policy – which prohibited Chinese workers from bringing their families with them into the country – that obliged Chinese men to marry British women.) The Chinese and their opium, as penny-dreadful and literary opinion saw it, were deliberately corrupting the vulnerable British race. Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, began with a Kent choirmaster entering a London opium den, whose English proprietress ‘has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his colour are repeated in her.’

  Back in 1883, commentators on the opium question could remember enough of Britain’s recent activities in China to account for the intense unease that opium-smoking generated in British minds. ‘We really have’, warned a former missionary to Canton that year, ‘a new habit, prolific of evil, springing up amongst us . . . It is coming close to us with a rapidity and spring undreamt of even by those who have dreaded its stealthy and unseen step.’ This opium plague ‘spreading and attacking our vitals’, he explained, was the ‘retributive consequence of our own doings.’58 Within another twenty years, this historical consciousness had been obscured by the growing mass of journalism, fiction, plays and eventually films stereotyping the Chinese as an ‘Oriental canker’ plotting the destruction of the white world. ‘Very many of these celestials and Indians are mentally and physically inferior,’ an 1897 short story carelessly remarked, ‘and they go on smoking year after year, and seem not very much the worse for it. It is your finer natures that suffer, deteriorate and collapse. For these great and terrible is the ruin.’59 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, British tabloid readers were transfixed by a string of sensational stories in which beautiful young British women were seduced (sometimes with fatal consequences) by Asiatic drug-peddlers. In 1918, a wealthy Shanghai dilettante called Brilliant Chang was implicated in the death by overdose of the cocaine-snorting darling of the London stage, Billie Carleton. Four years later, three sisters, Florence, Gwendoline and Rosetta Paul, were found in an opium stupor next to a dead Chinese man in the bedroom over a Cardiff laundry. ‘The features of the women were so yellow’, their discoverer reported, that for a time he ‘did not realise they were white girls.’60

  Around 1910, a former clerk of Irish-Birmingham stock by the name of Arthur Henry Ward sat down with his wife Elizabeth to divine his future. Elizabeth was an aspiring West End artiste, balancing bird cages and spinning plates on the music-hall stage while she waited for her big break. Arthur’s background was slightly more white-collar. His first career plan had been Egyptology. When this hope came to nothing, he wound up as a bank clerk, a venture that ended badly after he thought he might try to burgle the vaults by hypnotizing his colleagues. But like his wife, his sights were set on show-business: on trying to make a name for himself as a writer of short stories and comic songs for the musical theatre. Sick of rejection letters, he sat down with Elizabeth at the Ouija board, to work out his next step. Their
hands, as Arthur later told it, spelt out ‘C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N’. Three years later, after he had discarded Arthur Ward for the more Aryan ‘Sax’ (Anglo-Saxon for ‘blade’) and the more romantic ‘Rohmer ‘(‘he who roams’ – the born freelancer), the bestselling Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu resulted.

  We would be wise to be sceptical of most of what Sax Rohmer has to say to us, either through his own books or his biographer, his acolyte Cay Van Ash, for he was a professional fantasist.61 Alongside his fifteen bestselling volumes on Fu Manchu, Rohmer had an indulged passion for the inter-denominational occult, in works such as A Guide to Magic, Witchcraft and the Paranormal: the Romance of Sorcery. But this much is true: his novels about the insidious Dr Fu Manchu, plus their spin-off radio plays and films, made him a celebrity. Few authors are lucky enough to be posthumously remembered; and yet, thanks to Fu Manchu and his global Chinese conspiracies against the white race, Sax Rohmer is not yet forgotten, half a century after his death.