by John Keay
Echoing the exponential growth in Britain’s tea imports, China’s imports of Indian opium topped 13,000 chests in 1828 and had doubled again by 1836. By then, ‘total imports came to $18 million, making it the world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century’.12 The syndicates and agency houses that handled the shipments – mainly British but also American – looked to the company’s influence at Guangzhou for protection and made the proceeds of their trade available to the company for its tea purchases; it was the ideal way to convert – or launder – opium profits (and other perks of Eastern empire) into London stocks, country estates and parliamentary seats. As of the late 1820s, therefore, foreign tea purchases no longer required an outlay of bullion; opium credits more than sufficed. Silver no longer flowed into China; it flowed out. By the 1830s it was flowing out at the rate of 9 million taels a year. The balance of trade had reversed. It was now imperial officials in Beijing who worried about the national interest and complained of ‘the drain of specie’. Within China, and especially in the south, the demand for silver pushed up its value against copper cash, causing the same distress as in Ming times among the cash-earning but silver-taxed classes. ‘Reduced growth, unemployment and urban unrest (another of the clusters of problems associated with dynastic decline) are directly attributable . . . to the sudden impact of this dramatic and disastrous shift in the balance of payments.’13
Under the Daoguang emperor (r. 1821–50) official concern about opium and its consequences mounted. Opinion was canvassed, memorials submitted and debates held. Many officials argued for legalisation, for a state monopoly and licensed dealers. As they saw it, prohibition had failed; penal deterrents were hard to enforce, and enforcers were too readily corrupted; both consumption and corruption could be better contained by punitive tariffs; these would also bring in substantial revenues; and state control would make the foreign traders more amenable to regulation.
The last was especially relevant because in 1833 the British government, under pressure from British manufacturers keen for access to China’s markets, had seen fit to end the East India Company’s monopoly of the China–London trade. The out-and-back trade with India had been opened to all twenty years earlier; both deregulations were part of a protracted assault on the company that left it a mere scapegoat for official policy. In China the move meant the replacement of the company’s supervision of Guangzhou’s foreign trading community by that of the British government. His Majesty’s first superintendent arrived at Macao in 1834 in the person of Lord Napier. Representing a sovereign power rather than a trading company, Napier had been instructed to deal only with mandarins of equivalent status, like the Qing governor-general of the southern provinces, not with Co-hong merchants or customs officials. The change had not, though, been notified to Beijing, let alone authorised there, nor was it remotely acceptable. Napier, who had advanced from Macao to Guangzhou, stood his ground. Ordered to depart, he refused and was blockaded; he summoned a couple of warships and sent to India for troops. But trade had been halted, and the merchant community grew restless. On their insistence, after a couple of weeks Napier withdrew in disgust back to Macao and there died of dysentery. Both sides then misread the incident. The British took it to be a national affront that cried out for redress; the Chinese took it as proof that state intervention in the form of blockades and embargoes could bring the foreigners to heel.
Relishing this triumph, in the debates of 1836–38 other senior Qing officials argued against the legalisation of opium and in favour of stronger measures to suppress both the trade and the habit. Lin Zexu, an able scholar and experienced administrator, stressed the moral aspect: opium addiction undermined the social relationships so essential to Confucian society. He accepted that addicts could not simply be executed. They must be encouraged to reform; treatment as well as penalties must be offered. But above all it was imperative to staunch the flow of the ‘poison’ by clamping down on dens, dealers, suppliers and shippers. As governor-general of Hubei and Hunan provinces, Lin had successfully pursued such a policy. ‘Glow[ing] with the confidence of a man who had never made a serious mistake in his life’, in early 1839 he headed for Guangzhou as Imperial Commissioner for Frontier Defence with a special responsibility ‘to sever the trunk from the roots’ in respect of opium smuggling.14
Commissioner Lin wasted no time. As well as propagandising, rounding up dealers and confiscating all opium pipes, he boldly targeted the foreign importers. Ordered to surrender all existing stocks of opium with no offer of compensation, they refused. A contemptuous 1,000 chests were offered, whereupon Commissioner Lin demanded that Lancelot Dent, a leading offender and head of one of the agency houses, must stand trial. If he was not handed over, Lin threatened to execute two Chinese merchants in his stead. Down at Macao Captain Charles Elliot, the new British superintendent, took this as ‘the immediate and inevitable’ prelude to war. Just like Napier, he called for reinforcements, sailed hastily up to Guangzhou, and was there blockaded. Meanwhile Dent had not been surrendered and Lin had therefore embargoed all trade. The commissioner still hoped to avoid war; but to the British it was seeming more desirable by the day.
In early 1839 it failed to materialise. Superintendent Elliot lacked the authority, as well as the means, to prosecute hostilities; and the agency houses, with heavy opium stocks on their hands in anticipation of possible legalisation, badly needed unfettered access to their Guangzhou buyers. After six weeks of being cooped up on Shamian Island, Elliot, like Napier, backed down and was allowed to withdraw to Macao. Lin’s gamble had paid off. Twenty thousand chests (over 1,000 tonnes, 980 tons) were duly surrendered and, under tight security, were destroyed in lime pits, like infected livestock. Lin himself looked on and afterwards apologised to the spirit of the Southern Ocean for defiling her waters with the ‘poisonous’ effluent. He kept the emperor apprised of his triumphs; and more famously, employing a mix of reasoned argument, paternal exhortation, provocative bombast and bureaucratic rectitude, he wrote to Queen Victoria.
There were two letters; one was never sent, the other never arrived; but their tone and content were similar. ‘The Way of Heaven holds good for you as for us,’ Lin told the queen; all peoples are aware of what is good for them and what not; the Celestial Empire shares with others only its good things, such as rhubarb, tea and silk; but ‘a poisonous article is manufactured by certain devilish persons subject to your rule’ who ‘tempt the people of China to buy it’; Your Majesty, though surely in ignorance of your subjects’ involvement, must be aware of the drug’s harmful effects.
Our Heavenly Court’s resounding might . . . could at any moment control their [the opium traders’] fate; but in its compassion and generosity it gives due warning before it strikes. Your Majesty has not before been thus officially notified . . . but I now give my assurance that we mean to cut off this harmful drug forever . . . Do not say that you have not been warned in time. On receiving this, Your Majesty will be so good as to report to me immediately on the steps that have been taken at each of your ports.15
The translation here paraphrased and abbreviated comes from that made by Arthur Waley (1889–1966) in a work based on Commissioner Lin’s writings which is devoted to presenting the Opium War ‘through Chinese Eyes’. The finest translator of his generation, Waley never visited China; and its history interested him less than its literature – either of which may explain a significant difference between his translation of the letter and that offered in most other works of Western scholarship. For Waley, whose knowledge of written Chinese was unrivalled, translated the Chinese character rendered by the Pinyin word yi as ‘foreigner’, not as the pejorative ‘barbarian’. The equation of yi with ‘barbarian’ seems to have originated with a Pomeranian missionary who was serving the British as a translator at the time; it is not evident in earlier works, such as Macartney’s or Ricci’s journals. A small mistake perhaps, it surfaced in the run-up to the Opium War and gained a wide and notorious currency. The
Chinese insisted that yi had always signified merely those non-Chinese peoples who were ‘easterners’ (the British frequented the east coast) – just as man did those who were ‘southerners’, rong ‘northerners’ and di ‘westerners’. They were directional, not objectionable, terms. But the British declined to find yi as other than highly insulting, indeed indicative of a wider, deeper contempt for themselves and for all the norms of international discourse.
The ramifications of the mistake, if that is what it was, were enormous. More even than opium, this tiny monosyllable poisoned diplomatic exchanges, and would require an article of its own – number 51 – in the 1858 Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tianjin. It infected the translation of other Chinese characters and slewed the interpretation of whole passages, invariably rendering them more reprehensible to foreign readers. It fouled Anglo-Chinese social relations; it permeated racial stereotyping; and it corrupted – and still does – most non-Chinese writing on the entire course of China’s history. A British equivalent would be substituting ‘wog’ for every mention of ‘foreign’ or ‘foreigners’ in the archives of the Public Record Office. ‘Never has a lone word among the myriad languages of humanity made so much history as the Chinese character yi,’ writes Lydia Liu. Indeed, in a fine study of the subject, she does not overstate the case by entitling her book The Clash of Empires.16
Behind the arguments over opium, over trading rights and commercial access, over protocol, diplomatic representation and extraterritorial jurisdiction, there yawned throughout a chasm of linguistic misapprehension and mutual suspicion. Napier and Elliot were decent men, more often perplexed than apoplectic. And the British, of all people, should not have been surprised by another nation’s presumption of moral superiority and international centrality. But in supposing such attitudes to be more contemptuous and adversarial than they were, in making them an excuse for aggression and in reciprocating in kind (the phrase ‘half-civilised governments such as China’ featured in one Palmerstonian pronouncement), they were being woefully provocative.
Commissioner Lin, another honourable and conscientious man, tried to understand his adversaries. When asking an American doctor for information about the treatment of opium addicts, he is known to have requested a translation of a Western work on international law (though what he made of it is not known). The Qing government could be surprisingly pragmatic. In Lin’s first letter to Queen Victoria, it was hinted that the opium issue might be resolved by an offer to replace the drug with British or Indian imports of a less pernicious nature. As for protocol, the problem had already been resolved in respect of the Russians; equal status had been conceded in the treaties of Nerchinsk and Kiakhta, and trading arrangements, including regular Russian commercial missions to Beijing, had since been established. More surprisingly, when in the 1830s Napier and Elliot in Guangzhou were demanding official recognition and the extraterritorial right of administering justice to their own subjects, far away at the other end of the empire in Xinjiang precisely these rights were in fact being extended to nationals of another foreign government.
Xinjiang had been racked by incursions and rebellion throughout the 1820s. The trouble stemmed from neighbouring Kokand, an independent Muslim khanate west of Kashgar and astride the old Silk Roads. There, leading members of the Khoja fraternity, the ex-rulers of Xinjiang, had taken refuge when the Qianlong emperor first conquered Xinjiang. Muslim solidarity and a major interest in Xinjiang’s commerce later led Kokand to support Khoja rebellions in Xinjiang and claim control of its trade. The Qing responded harshly; but the administrative and military costs of holding down the remote oasis-cities proved exorbitant. Instead, in 1835 an agreement – sometimes billed, like Nerchinsk, as ‘China’s first “unequal treaty” settlement’ – was signed in Beijing with a Kokandi ambassador. Kokand got the right to station a ‘resident political representative’ at Kashgar and commercial representatives at five other cities, including Yarkand (Suche), Aksu and Turfan (Turpan). And all these officials enjoyed full consular, judicial and police powers over foreigners in their jurisdiction, plus the right to levy duties on their trade. Napier or Elliot might have settled for less.
Accommodation was possible, then; indeed, following the transfer of several military and administrative officials between Xinjiang and Guangdong, the Qing government would eventually ‘apply the lessons of [Xinjiang] to its difficulties with the British on the China coast’.17 But Kokand, unlike London, was not oversolicitous of its international image; nor were its treaties subject to parliamentary scrutiny. To obtain the treaty, the khan’s representatives had accepted China’s idiosyncratic attitude to foreign relations and conformed to tributary tradition. For the British, this was impossible – as impossible as it was for Commissioner Lin to disavow 2,000 years of managing neighbours, most of them predatory nomads, on the understanding that dialogue signified submission and that trade counted as tribute.
By mid-1839 the die was cast; events now assumed a momentum of their own. In Guangzhou, Commissioner Lin followed up his success in extracting opium from the foreigners by demanding that they sign bonds never again to carry the drug. On Elliot’s advice the British, as usual, refused. Lin then pressured the Portuguese into expelling them from Macao. Now baseless, Elliot and his countrymen sailed across the Pearl River estuary to a high and largely uninhabited island composed of uncultivable rock but with a sheltered anchorage. Its name they understood as ‘Hong Kong’. From there, in late 1839 while requisitioning provisions on the neigh-bouring mainland and in several encounters at sea, gunfire was exchanged. Lin reported victories and fortified the approaches to Guangzhou; the British logged the junks they had sunk and bided their time. In London, Elliot’s request for troops had been rejected by foreign secretary Lord Palmerston. But then, under pressure from opium barons and manufacturing interests, it was granted. A large naval and military force set sail from India in early 1840.
The fleet carried a letter from Palmerston to the Qing court that ‘demand[ed] from the Emperor satisfaction and redress for injuries inflicted by Chinese Authorities upon British subjects . . . and for insults offered by those same authorities to the British Crown’. To this end, there were to be no negotiations. The fleet was to blockade Chinese ports, detain Chinese vessels and take possession ‘of some convenient part of the Chinese territory’ until such time as satisfaction was forthcoming in a signed treaty and an agreed reparation for the expenses incurred.18 Opium was mentioned in the letter; Palmerston conceded that Beijing had every right to ban it; but he contended that, since the ban was not rigorously enforced by Chinese officials, who were often complicit in breaking it, it was unfair to expect foreign suppliers to respect it – a logic from which smugglers the world over may have taken comfort.
The British fleet arrived off the Pearl River in June 1840 but did not test Lin’s new defences by sailing up to Guangzhou. Nor was Palmerston’s letter delivered. Instead the fleet sailed out to sea again, leaving only a token force to blockade the mouth of the river. Lin thought his defences had done the trick. But ten days later the fleet reappeared, this time off Zhoushan in Zhejiang. The city was heavily bombarded, forced to surrender and occupied. The fleet then continued north, round the Shandong peninsula and towards the mouth of the Beihe, the river on which Beijing lies. Palmerston’s letter was now handed over; but it was concern for the capital’s safety which persuaded the Daoguang emperor to dispatch an envoy to treat with the British. Meanwhile Commissioner Lin, who had totally misrepresented the strength of the enemy and had now exposed the capital to attack, was disgraced and sacked pending disposal.
The new Qing envoy and plenipotentiary, a provincial governor general called Qishan, talked the British into sailing back to Guangzhou on the understanding that he would there address their grievances in full. This he did to the extent that, with Guangzhou now at the mercy of Britain’s naval gunnery, an agreement was reached in January 1841: British superintendents at Guangzhou were to have access to Qing officials, Hong Kong was to be h
anded over, a $6 million indemnity paid, and trade to be reopened. In return the British were to leave Zhoushan. But though the terms were immediately effective, the agreement was swiftly repudiated. The emperor was so horrified by the severity of the concessions, especially the cession of Hong Kong, that he now sacked Qishan, while Palmerston was so appalled by their leniency (no reimbursement for the destroyed opium, no new ports, only ‘a barren island’) that he too suspended his plenipotentiary.
By the time a replacement arrived in August 1841, the war had resumed. The British fleet had twice sailed up to Guangzhou, demolishing shore batteries, sinking junks and landing troops. An iron-built, steam-driven paddle-steamer proved especially effective, defying wind and tide and greatly embarrassing its still pedal-powered Chinese equivalents. In guns as in ships, the technological gap was not that great; Chinese yards and foundries would soon be turning out serviceable copies of anything the British could deploy. But the gulf between what pre-industrial China and post-industrial Europe made of the technology, and the confidence with which it was handled, was painful to contemplate. The only Qing seaborne counter-attack was a disaster; in a matter of days, seventy-one junks were destroyed and Guangzhou’s waterfront razed.
Naval superiority was conceded; but on land the Chinese still supposed that their forces would be more effective. Troops had already been sent to Guangzhou and local militias raised there. Additionally, large bodies of incensed Guangdong villagers and ‘braves’, some under the command of local gentry or popular leaders, had been encouraged to arm themselves and repel the invader. At Sanyuanli, a village north of Guangzhou, in May 1839 these irregulars gathered en masse after some of their women were violated by the invading troops; then, amid heavy rainstorms, they engaged and briefly repelled a force of Indo-British infantry, inflicting minor casualties. Wildly exaggerated – and swiftly disowned by the Guangzhou authorities who had just agreed an armistice – the ‘battle’ of Sanyuanli would assume mythic proportions and come to be seen as the first triumph of popular resistance against the foreigner. ‘A Bunker Hill and an Alamo rolled into one,’ as Frederic Wakeman, an American authority on southern China’s insurgent movements, puts it, Sanyuanli stimulated a bewildering upsurge of other irregular bands and secret societies operating independently of the Qing authorities and often in defiance of them.19 The Qing were seen as incapable of dealing with the foreigners, and even as acting in collusion with them. From this eruption of anti-Manchu sentiment would originate, within no great distance of Sanyuanli, the cataclysmic Taiping Rebellion.