Opium

by Martin Booth

  In retrospect, one of the most important facets of the war occurred in January 1841 when Elliot sent five warships to attack the Bogue forts. The forts were captured and Elliot signed the Convention of Chuenpi, a treaty of his own devising which he hoped might end hostilities. Conscious the British needed a land base from which to regroup, Elliot demanded he be granted possession of the island of Hong Kong. His demand was met but again he had acted without permission from London. When Palmerston received news of the latest British possession, he was annoyed Elliot had not pressed for more far-reaching concessions.

  With hindsight, the war was little more than a series of skirmishes, British occupation of various towns and insignificant naval clashes. The Chinese methods of warfare were outdated and they were usually defeated. The British suffered comparatively few losses from gunfire: most of the casualties in the 10,000-strong force which arrived from Ceylon in April 1840 died of malaria and, ironically, dysentery which could have been cured with opium.

  The fighting was spasmodic. Neither the legitimate nor opium trades were halted by the war although they were inconvenienced. Several truces came into force but were broken. Through the early months of 1840, letters passed between Lin and Elliot containing proposals about shipping, trade and opium, with Lin still keen to settle the murder of Lin Wei-hsi.

  The war, over which neither London nor Peking had any direct control, sputtered on until August 1842 when, with Shanghai taken, the Royal Navy sailed up the Yangtze River (closely followed by vessels carrying opium) and reached Nanking. There, aboard HMS Cornwallis, the Treaty of Nanking was signed. Known with some justification by the Chinese as the ‘Unequal Treaty’, it ended the war.

  The treaty opened up China as never before. Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai were termed ‘Treaty Ports’ and became centres for foreign trade. An indemnity of 21 million silver dollars was imposed to cover, among other things, the opium destroyed by Lin and Hong Kong was ceded in perpetuity to Britain. The Hong merchants in Canton lost their monopoly, fixed tariffs being set for all imports from Britain. Opium was hardly mentioned in any of the negotiations, nor in the peace terms: the only reference to it was oblique – ‘it is to be hoped [that the] system of smuggling which has heretofore been carried on between English and Chinese merchants (in many cases with open connivance of Chinese custom-houses officials) will entirely cease.’ By this omission, the treaty allowed for the continuance of the opium trade.

  The primary reason why opium was not touched upon in the Treaty of Nanking was because, by mentioning it, the British government would have had to plan a future policy for the trade and they preferred China to do this instead by legalising it. Both Sir Henry Pottinger, by now the Chief Superintendent of Trade and his successor, Sir John Davis, tried to force the Chinese hand but failed. Smuggling continued.

  Opium imports rose sharply. Criticism of the trade increased in the British Parliament. The future seventh Earl of Shaftesbury spoke for many when he stated in 1843, ‘I am fully convinced that for this country to encourage this nefarious traffic is bad, perhaps worse than encouraging the slave trade.’ Yet nothing altered. Colonial policy was untouched and the Indian economy was preserved.

  It was considered with hindsight that the war had been inevitable. Opium was merely one of the pretexts. The British considered the issues were more fundamental and involved forcing China to open up to world trade, although Sir George Staunton, an authority on Sino-British relations, declared in Parliament, ‘I never denied the fact, that if there had been no opium smuggling, there would have been no war.’ From the Chinese viewpoint, however, opium was the principal cause.

  For many in London, the Chinese opinion was valid. Dr Thomas Arnold condemned it as ‘so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude’ whilst Gladstone denounced it with the words, ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know and I have not read of.’

  Two political casualties of the war were Elliot and Lin who, in their own ways, were joined in a fight against opium. Lin was dismissed in late 1840: Elliot lasted until Pottinger was appointed in his place in August 1841.

  They both made mistakes. Elliot demanded less from the Chinese than his government had instructed, whilst acting on his own initiative, and Lin failed, through no fault of his own, because the mission he had been sent upon was impossible. They were both naïve, too honourable for the dirty business into which they became embroiled, and they had such forces massed against them – the military power of the British, the corruption of the Chinese government and the devious immorality of the opium dealers.

  Lin finally left Canton on 3 May 1841, exiled to Turkestan. Throughout the war, his Emperor blamed him and the Chinese military leaders for the failure to drive the barbarians out. It was not their fault: they were fighting superior, experienced soldiers and politicians. Yet Lin was humbled. He had caused the Emperor to lose face. As for Charles Elliot, he was appointed British chargé d’affaires to the newly constituted Republic of Texas, a British diplomatic posting equivalent at the time to Turkestan. Despite Queen Victoria’s opinion of him as a man ‘who completely disobeyed his instructions and tried to get the lowest terms he could’, Elliot went on to become governor of Bermuda, Trinidad and St Helena and, when he died in 1875, he was an admiral with a knighthood. Yet to this day, no mention is made of his part in founding Hong Kong: the British Dictionary of National Biography ignores the fact completely.

  International relations between Britain and China remained unstable. The Opium War might have been over but it settled nothing.

  With the increased amenities offered by the five treaty ports and the new colony of Hong Kong smuggling continued, expanding dramatically. The losers were China, which did not rid itself of either opium or foreigners and Britain whose international standing was reduced by the iniquities of the war.

  In short, opium was not only the cause of the first Anglo-Chinese conflict but also the winner.

  8

  The Government of Opium

  Without opium, Hong Kong would not have evolved. Not only was it originally obtained as a result of a skirmish over opium but its initial fortunes were linked irrevocably to the trade. Within a year of being established, it had become the main opium trading centre on the China coast. The receiving ships of Lintin Island were superseded by well-built storehouses in Hong Kong.

  Not only the British moved to the embryonic colony. So too did other nationalities, especially Americans and non-Europeans such as Parsees. By the mid-1840s, about 100 foreign businesses were competing with each other along the Chinese seaboard. The British free-trade policy and colonial political climate were ideal, providing a stability the merchants had not had in Canton and were unable to find not only in China but also in Siam, Japan, Formosa, Vietnam and the Philippines. Needless to say, under British rule of law, a lack of Imperial Chinese regulations – not to mention an absence of corrupt officials – enabled not only general traders to thrive: so did opium merchants who were free to get on with their work. Opium dealing was the colony’s main business alongside tea and the smuggling of salt which was an imperial monopoly.

  Around the opium trade was built a substantial Hong Kong shipping business. Vessels were made in the colony as well as serviced and provisioned and crewed by Chinese sailors. Local businessmen founded banks which acted as bill-brokerage firms and insurance agents. Ships’ chandlers arrived. A local currency was established, based upon South American silver dollars, especially the Mexican dollar. Within five years, the northern coast of Hong Kong island was lined with impressive European trading houses whilst the mountain behind was being encroached upon by private homes, a burgeoning native quarter, military barracks and the trappings of colonial administration. The slow development of the treaty ports and their non-colonial status aided in the colony’s rapid growth.

  As a result of the Treaty of Nanking, China was increasingly opened up to foreig
n cultural and economic incursions. Close to the treaty ports, Western fashions started to creep in. The Chinese merchant élite began to mix with foreigners, especially at the racecourse: the Chinese being inveterate gamblers, horse-racing was quick to catch on wherever Europeans set up race clubs. Yet, despite such social minglings, the Chinese were generally cautious of doing business with foreigners, and the British in particular. They were also far less inclined to import from Britain as the traders had hoped. Only those merchants whose commerce was based upon opium prospered, trading in which continued into the twentieth century.

  Indeed, opium controlled not only its millions of addicts but it also orchestrated British expansion into China, other nations quickly following the vanguard. The British government relied upon the opium traders for political and economic intelligence whilst the traders added their own interpretations of what they gleaned and saw, and even suggested policy. When the government required, the merchants provided ships, experienced coastal pilots, cartographical data and effected introductions. In short, the traders who operated a business for which their government still refused any responsibility were de facto spies and surreptitious diplomats.

  The official British attitude towards the opium trade was to ignore it. In a dispatch to London in January 1843, Sir Henry Pottinger, the first Governor of Hong Kong, whilst simultaneously Superintendent of Trade, expressed the situation bluntly:

  HM Government have not the power to put a stop to this trade … but they may perhaps impede it to some degree by preventing the Island of Hong Kong or its neighbouring waters from being used as the point from whence British smugglers shall depart on their illegal adventures.

  Yet this was wishful thinking. The British government had banked on China legalising the trade after the Treaty of Nanking so it could be controlled through taxation, yet during treaty negotiations the Chinese had affirmed the emperor’s prohibition was to remain. And, of course, the British had to keep on with opium dealing because India’s economy was reliant upon it.

  Knowing this, the British merchants ignored an attempt by Pottinger to control them. Matheson, one of the doyens of the merchant community, was forthright in his response: ‘The plenipotentiary has published a most fiery proclamation against smuggling but I believe it is like the Chinese edicts, meaning nothing and only intended … for the gratification of the Saints in England.’

  A suggestion was made to ban opium clippers from Hong Kong harbour, the finest – indeed, only – all-weather, non-silting natural harbour on the coast of China from Vietnam to Shanghai. The Foreign Office declared excluding opium vessels would merely shift the trade elsewhere: Pottinger subsequently reasserted the opinion that the Chinese were responsible for withdrawing their own people from trading in opium, ultimately concluding it was ‘neither desirable nor necessary to exclude our opium trading ships from Hong Kong harbour.’

  Aware now the trade was to be neither hindered nor legalised, the traders set up camp. Jardine Matheson anchored a receiving vessel, the Bomanjee Hormusjee, in the harbour, from which opium was sold straight to Chinese craft. With other traders, they erected substantial godowns on shore. It was only months before Hong Kong became a more stable version of Lintin Island. By 1844, the situation prompted the new governor, Sir John Davis, to report ‘almost every person possessed of capital who is not connected with government is employed in the opium trade.’

  It was boom time. Profits from opium soared as the Chinese authorities virtually gave up trying to stem the flood of imports. In 1845, eighty vessels based in Hong Kong were running opium, nineteen of them owned by Jardine Matheson which also maintained fourteen receiving ships along the coast of China. One, moored at Woosung, close to Shanghai, sold opium up the Yangtze River, thus spreading the drug into the heartland of China.

  By 1849, an average of 40,000 chests of opium were stored in Hong Kong and 75 per cent of India’s opium was traded through the colony, to the tune of £6 million a year: against this, other trade consisted of £11.5 million of British-made goods and £1.5 million of other goods, mostly manufactured in India.

  Clipper crews were the highest paid merchant seamen in the world, smartly uniformed and as disciplined as the Royal Navy. The speed of clippers, such as the Jardine Matheson ships Mazeppa and Lanrick, was such that the colonial authorities and the government used them as official mail carriers. This was not the only service provided by the opium traders: they also furnished banking facilities to British consuls, the receiving ships being safe deposit vessels such as at Ningpo where all the consulate’s money came from a receiving ship owned by Dent, anchored 12 miles downriver from the town.

  Opium was also retailed to local Chinese in Hong Kong. Within weeks of the Union Jack being raised on the island, the Canton Register predicted ‘Hong Kong will be the resort and rendezvous of all the Chinese smugglers. Opium houses and gambling houses will soon spread; to those haunts will flock all the discontented and bad spirits of the empire.’

  The assessment was correct for crime and vice soared. Brothels provided for the needs of sailors, military personnel and the hordes of lonely Chinese men who migrated to Hong Kong from the hinterland of Kwangtung province to seek their fortunes. Large numbers of opium dens or divans sprang up. Aware of the potential revenue, the governor set up a local monopoly by which the right to deal in opium in Hong Kong was sold annually to the highest bidder. The opium franchise was known as an opium ‘farm’, the noun deriving from the verb ‘to farm’, meaning to pass responsibility, the successful bidder for a farm monopoly agreeing to pay a certain annual amount by way of a licence, with whatever he could make on top of this being his profit. It proved impossible to enforce so the monopoly was dropped and, from 1847, a system of licensing dens was introduced with the stipulation that owners had to display their licences on the premises, could retail opium only for cash and were obliged to keep armed persons out.

  Tension between Britain and China remained high, however. Humiliated by losing the conflict and still burdened by opium, the Chinese authorities deeply resented the foreign presence in their kingdom. Opium addiction was rapidly growing, the treaty ports became hives of corruption, crime burgeoned and imperial authority was increasingly undermined. This led to another problem. Piracy and banditry burgeoned.

  In 1847, the receiving ships at anchor between Amoy and Foochow were all attacked, their crews massacred: then two opium vessels, the Omega and the Caroline, were boarded and the crews killed. Even the Sylph, Jardine Matheson’s clipper, was taken in 1849. When the Chinese commander of the Bogue forts reprimanded local pirates in 1844, they kidnapped him, sliced off his ears, then ransomed him.

  Some pirates sailed under British protection for a large number of the Chinese racketeers involved in opium based themselves in Hong Kong and gained British nationality. In addition, a colonial ordinance was instituted whereby a Hong Kong Chinese-owned vessel could be granted a British register, allowing it to fly the British flag and come under the same protection as a British-owned vessel. This meant a fair number of China coastal pirates sailed under the British flag.

  Not only Chinese pirates preyed on shipping. In 1845, an English pirate named Henry Sinclair was sentenced in Hong Kong to transportation for life but the most infamous was an American, Eli Boggs. He operated – as did Sinclair – throughout the South China Sea. Boggs commanded a fleet of thirty war-cum-fighting junks crewed by Chinese. He attacked numerous vessels before being caught by the Royal Navy in 1857. His actual murdering of captured crews not being able to be proven, he was sentenced to Victoria prison in Hong Kong.

  Of the many Chinese pirates who attacked opium clippers or general cargo vessels, the most notorious were Chui A-pou and Shap Ng-tsai. They raided the whole South China coast with substantial fleets of junks, taking any vessel they could or charging a toll on passing ships. Chui A-pou’s fleet of junks, based in Bias (now Daya) Bay north-east of Hong Kong, was destroyed on the night of 1 October 1849 by HMS Columbine and HMS Fury. Within
a fortnight, Shap Ng-tsai’s fleet was cornered, 58 of his 64 junks being destroyed with 3150 men killed. Shap Ng-tsai escaped with 400 men and set up a pirate base on Hainan Island: he was subsequently persuaded to give up piracy and was made an Imperial naval civil servant.

  The last major skirmish against pirates was the Battle of Hahlam Bay on 4 August 1855, when the USS Powhattan and HMS Rattler sank 10 junks and killed 800 pirates: this was a rare instance of the Royal Navy and the United States Navy joining forces to protect trade routes – especially those carrying opium. Thereafter, piracy was conducted by small bands who were more easily handled.

  With such a volatile situation, it was certain to be only a matter of time before something happened. In October 1856, it did.

  The Arrow was a Chinese-owned, Hong Kong-registered lorcha: a lorcha was a type of craft unique to the Far East, being a vessel with a Western-type hull but rigged with junk sails and frequently carrying Chinese-type superstructure – it may still be seen in Hong Kong waters, without the sails and powered by marine diesels. Although flying the British flag, she was attacked by armed Chinese junks, sequestered in Canton and charged with piracy. Crewed by Chinese, the Arrow was commanded by an Englishman. Theoretically, she should have been safe but for the fact her annually renewable certificate of registry had expired eleven days before. The captain and crew were returned unharmed to Hong Kong but their ship was impounded.

  The British dismissed the expired registration as a minor administrative matter and requested the craft be restored: the Chinese authorities were adamant. After a series of failed negotiations and using the incident as an excuse to take on the Chinese who refused to revert certain parts of the Treaty of Nanking which the British required altered, a British naval force under the command of Admiral Seymour attacked the Bogue forts. In retaliation, the Canton factories were torched and the passengers on a steamboat, the Thistle, were massacred.