by Martin Booth
So began the second Sino-British conflict. Known as the Second Opium War or the Arrow War, the hostilities lasted from 1856 to 1860, the campaigns being far bloodier than in the previous opium war.
This time, however, the British were not alone. After the Battle of Fatshan Creek to the west of Canton, in June 1857, the French joined in in response to the murder of a French missionary. The Chinese militia was no match for the highly trained European forces and was beaten. During the war, in June 1858, the Treaty of Tientsin was signed. Opium was not specifically included in the treaty but it was made abundantly clear to the Chinese that, unless it was legalised, relations between the countries would remain fragile. Lord Elgin, who had been sent from London to negotiate a peace, was confidentially informed that opium was the most important matter to which he was to address himself.
Despite the Treaty of Tientsin, the war continued. Eventually, British troops marched into Peking, razing the Summer Palace and 200 other Imperial buildings to the ground. On 24 October 1860, Lord Elgin signed the Convention of Peking. Prince Kung, the equivalent of the Foreign Minister and brother of the Emperor Hsien feng, conceded to the British demands that new treaty ports be established, the Yangtze River be opened to trade and foreigners be given unhindered access to the Chinese interior. With such concessions and those of subsequent treaties, credit and transport systems developed, banks were founded or expanded, insurance and shipping companies burgeoned and blossomed. Hong Kong, as the hub of transport and commerce with China, flourished.
The most important of the Convention terms, however, was the placing of a tariff on the importation of opium which more or less legalised the trade.
The duty, identical to that placed upon ordinary goods under the Treaty of Nanking, was set at 30 taels (39.75 ounces) of silver per picul (approximately 133.5 pounds) of opium. It was much lower than the Chinese had requested: the British kept it down so as not to upset the Indian exporters and rock the Indian revenue boat. As Sir Rutherford Alcock, a British Ambassador to Peking, informed the British Parliament in 1871, ‘we forced the Chinese Government to enter into a Treaty to allow their subjects to take opium.’
Ironically, the Convention allowed for missionaries as well as traders to enter China, the preaching of the gospels being legalised along with opium. Many missionaries did not approve of this and petitioned Queen Victoria to change the situation regarding the drug trade, but to no avail. Understandably, a good number of Chinese identified Western evangelism with the drug trade. Opium and morphine – which was sometimes erroneously employed by well-meaning missionary doctors to cure opium addiction – were frequently referred to as ‘Jesus-Opium’. Such was the link between the Christians and opium that when Alcock left Peking in 1869, Prince Kung told him if he removed opium and missionaries from China, traders would be welcomed.
The Convention provided not only for an excise duty on opium but also led to the foreign administration of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs which, under predominantly British control, developed into a highly effective organisation usually beyond the taint of corruption. Their efficiency produced a downturn in smuggling activity, although some running continued because even the low duty was considered worth avoiding. Smuggling, however, increased again after 1876 when, under the Chefoo Convention between Britain and China, the inland revenue on opium (known as li kin), was gathered along with the import duty. Amounting to a total of 110 taels per picul, it was considered well worth evading.
Not only immediate concessions were granted the foreigners. The Treaty of Tientsin had included a revision clause allowing a reassessment of the terms every decade and intended to give the British a chance to rewrite the rules without recourse to more gun-boat diplomacy. Yet this cut both ways and, in 1869, the Chinese Foreign Office sent an appeal to the British government. It read in part:
From Tsung-li-Yamen to Sir Alcock, July, 1869
… the Chinese merchant supplies your country with his goodly tea and silk, conferring thereby a benefit upon her; but the English merchant empoisons China with pestilent opium. Such conduct is unrighteous. Who can justify it? What wonder if officials and people say that England is wilfully working out China’s ruin, and has no real friendly feeling for her? The wealth and generosity of England are spoken by all; she is anxious to prevent and anticipate all injury to her commercial interests. How is it, then, she can hesitate to remove an acknowledged evil? Indeed, it cannot be that England still holds to this evil business, earning the hatred of the officials and people of China, and making herself a reproach among the nations, because she would lose a little revenue were she to forfeit the cultivation of the poppy!
The writers hope that His Excellency will memorialise his Government to give orders in India and elsewhere to substitute the cultivation of cereals or cotton. Were both nations to rigorously prohibit the growth of the poppy, both the trade in and the consumption of opium might alike be put an end to. To do away with so great an evil would be a great virtue on England’s part; she would strengthen friendly relations and make herself illustrious. How delightful to have so great an act transmitted to after ages!
This matter is injurious to commercial interest in no ordinary degree. If His Excellency the British Minister cannot, before it is too late, arrange a plan for a joint prohibition, then no matter with what devotedness the writers may plead, they may be unable to cause the people to put aside ill-feeling, and so strengthen friendly relations as to place them for ever beyond fear of disturbance. Day and night, therefore, the writers give to this matter most earnest thought, and overpowering is the distress and anxiety it occasions them. Having thus presumed to unbosom themselves they would be honoured by His Excellency’s reply.
This appeal was accompanied by a confidential memorandum from Sir Rutherford Alcock who pressed for it to be taken seriously. For months, the Chinese waited in anticipation of a response. None was ever forthcoming.
Alcock, who was personally dismayed by the evils of the opium trade, warned Parliament in 1871:
There is a very large and increasing cultivation of the poppy in China; the Chinese Government are seriously contemplating – if they cannot come to any terms or arrangement with the British Government … – the cultivation without stint in China, and producing opium at a much cheaper rate. Having done that they think they will afterwards be able to stamp out the opium produce among themselves.
Small quantities of opium from countries other than India were still arriving in China but it was the Chinese home product which started to hit at Indian profit margins. The trade in domestic opium was almost exclusively Chinese operated. Some had long been grown in China, especially in the western and south-western provinces, and by 1800 domestic production was greater than imported opium, despite the 1799 prohibition. In 1830, poppy farming had been recorded in the provinces of Chekiang, Fukien, Kwangtung and Yunnan whilst six years later, when the debate on legalisation was raging in Peking, a large imperial correspondence dealt with the domestic product. By the 1860s there was a considerable increase in poppy cultivation, much of it successfully hidden from the authorities.
There were those in China, as Alcock reported, who advocated an opium industry. This had so alarmed the Indian Board of Revenue an envoy was dispatched to China in 1868 to study the situation. He reported Chinese opium, previously thought to be very inferior to Indian, to be now of much better quality and observed Chinese addicts mixing their native drug with only small quantities of Indian opium. This, he suggested, would lead to a taste in Chinese opium and he recommended his superiors ‘send in future such increased quantities of opium to China, and at such low prices, as to prevent indigenous cultivation and competition.’ Eventually, when the price of the Chinese opium dropped well below that of imports, many of the British traders were not only worried but also indignant, arrogantly believing the Chinese did not have the right to compete with them.
The majority of Chinese were concerned by the growth of their national opium industry w
hich increased addiction and disrupted agriculture. Land which had previously been put over to food production was lost to poppies: in some districts, food shortages occurred and even starvation was reported. The problem was that more money could be earned from poppies than from wheat or rice: furthermore, the poppies were hardy and not prone to disease.
In 1870 the Censor, Yew Peh-ch’uan, warned against poppy farming, declaring opium was the greatest national danger to food production. His estimate was that 10,000 mow (approximately 17,000 acres) were dedicated to poppy cultivation at any one time. The situation markedly deteriorated, as was mentioned in an article in The Times of December 1888:
By 1887 the relations between the Chinese and the Indian drug are found to have altogether changed … In all parts of the Empire, except the islands of Formosa and Hainan, it is said to be produced in substantial quantities. It is estimated that a third of [Yunnanese] cultivation is devoted to poppy fields [and] this huge stock of Chinese opium is raised for the supply of scores of millions who never smoked before. Si-chuen [Szechuan province], for instance, contains 70,000,000 of inhabitants. Seven-tenths of the adult male population, it is computed, now are opium-smokers. Probably twenty-five years ago only a fraction had contracted the habit …
The founder of the China Inland Mission and one of the first Englishmen to travel deep into the Chinese interior, Revd J. Hudson Taylor, commented in 1893: ‘When I first reached China [in 1854] the opium habit was comparatively rare, but it has spread very rapidly during the last twenty years, still more rapidly during the last ten; it is frightfully prevalent now.’ As he visited ten of the eighteen provinces of China, his comments are an even more terrible indictment of the opium trade.
Until 1890, Chinese poppy cultivation had been unofficial but that year the emperor revoked all the prohibition edicts and Chinese opium was legitimised. The move was not made because of a sudden official change of heart, an acceptance of opium, but as a means of quashing imports. It was a desperate act and it was to do more harm than good for it merely encouraged an even wider use of opium, making it harder than ever to eradicate in the long run.
Meanwhile Hong Kong prospered, remaining a more stable place in which to live than China: much of the nation was in turmoil with the Taiping Rebellion which raged between 1851 and 1864. Despite the risks from civil unrest in China, piracy, occasional typhoons and other natural disasters, substantial profits were made in Hong Kong. By 1892, the colony had a population of a quarter of a million, dealt with 40 per cent of China’s trade and had an annual turnover exceeding £20 million.
Economic, religious and political refugees fled to the colony in ever increasing numbers, bringing their opium habit with them. By 1882 the sale of opium, which had gone back to being an annually renewed ‘farm’ monopoly in 1858, accounted for one-sixth of colonial revenue. The opium was provided by the farm concessionaire who sold it to divans or dens whilst, at the same time, collecting a tax from it. Smoking took place either in the divans or at home, the drug also being sold on a take-away basis.
As in China, opium crossed all the class barriers in Hong Kong Chinese society, from scholars and merchants to rickshaw pullers and coolies. The wealthy, who tended to smoke in the privacy of their homes, owned their own opium pipes which were expensive and often beautiful works of art fashioned from jade, ivory, tropical hardwoods, silver and even gold. Today, a genuine, top-quality antique pipe costs thousands of dollars for they are rare: when opium was finally banned completely, pipes were confiscated by, or surrendered to, the police and destroyed, creating objets d’art. Those who could not afford their own pipe and had no private place in which to indulge their habit frequented the divans or dens where they used pipes provided by operators.
The licensed opium divans, along with the beautiful Oriental whores who occupied the brothels, built an exotic reputation for Hong Kong but this apparent climate of vice was in fact still strictly controlled. To operate a divan, the proprietor had to prove to the chief police magistrate he was a fit and proper person who could furnish ‘suitable accommodation for the use of customers, in order to prevent nuisances or offences to decency.’ A divan was obliged by bye-laws to give on to a public thoroughfare and it had to keep to strict opening or licensing hours: the opening times were regulated as being from midday to ten o’clock on Monday to Saturday. In theory, divans were closed on Sundays out of deference to the Christian community. In fact, these restrictions were often ignored by both the authorities and the proprietors. It was impractical to restrict a man’s craving to a rigid timetable.
For most of the nineteenth century, opium was smoked but, in 1893, a new phenomenon began to appear, as it had already done in the West – the injection of morphine solution with a hypodermic syringe.
In Hong Kong dens, just as was to happen later in opium shops and pharmacies in Shanghai, opium smokers or coolies buying pills for medicinal purposes were on occasion given a free morphine injection and told they could have another ex gratia shot with their next purchase of pills. Once hooked, of course, the injections were charged for, though they were up to a sixth cheaper than smoking.
While the hypodermic syringe was a convenient method of drug taking for European addicts, the syringe had a drawback in the East. With a native ignorance of hygiene, many syringes were rarely cleaned, needles were usually dirty and not disinfected between users and contaminated water was used to make the morphine solutions. The result was a widespread incidence of abscesses, blood poisoning and hepatitis.
The injections were not at first self-administered but given by Chinese doctors whose surgeries were little more than morphine dens. The Hong Kong government analyst, a Mr Crow, visited a doctor’s surgery and wrote:
I entered, and observed three men asleep on mats, and about twelve or fifteen standing in the verandah. Some had just had injections; the others were waiting their turn. There were numerous puncture scars on their arms. The quantity used depended on the amount of opium the patients had been in the habit of smoking.
The holder of the opium monopoly at the time was the Hau Fook Company. The directors officially complained to the government, accusing the doctors of an unethical infringement of their monopoly. As the charge for an injection was so low – at 1 cent a shot – they were losing business. The police investigated the matter and discovered eighteen morphine surgeries but the government took no action until 1923 when it set up a dangerous drugs ordinance.
By 1880, opium imports were dropping. Chinese domestic production and sound commercial sense were the main cause, most of the merchant houses diversifying as China opened up to more general trade. Even Jardine Matheson had stopped dealing in opium in 1872. In the 1890s, the trade declined even further because of price rises in India and the improved strength of Chinese opium. Commercial commentators also reckoned, as China reduced her opium imports, she would have more income with which to import a general range of manufactured goods.
Yet there was another, uncommercial reason for giving up the lucrative trade: it was the increasingly vociferous criticism of opium back in Britain. The ‘Saints’, as Matheson had sarcastically called them, were blowing their trumpets and calling for justice. Humanitarian interests were merging with commercial selfishness.
Public opinion in Britain against opium had started to gain a voice in the 1870s, spurred on by the devastating effects of the trade in China and upon the native population of India which was such that, at times, the amount consumed in India exceeded the amount exported. It was proving impossible to prevent addiction in the country of manufacture where workers had started to pilfer from the godowns of Patna and Benares to feed an addiction either acquired by illicit eating or by absorption through the skin whilst handling huge quantities of the raw drug.
The move against opium was not restricted to British activists. In 1881, the government of Bombay prevented the government of India from promoting poppy cultivation in its domain on the grounds that it demoralised the work-force. They cited what
had happened in the state of Gujarat where crime and corruption had soared after the introduction of poppy farming.
The opium trade had developed purely as a business founded on the basic commercial principles of supply and demand and ready profitability supported by the premise of if-we-don’t-sell-it-somebody-else-will. Morality did not come into the equation and only slowly evolved over many decades. There were always a few enlightened observers or critics and, at the time of the opium wars, there were anti-opium organisations but they were short-lived and carried no influence.
For many years, the Earl of Shaftesbury was associated with anti-opium work. In 1843, as Lord Ashley, he had introduced a Parliamentary motion stating the opium trade and monopoly were ‘utterly inconsistent with the honour and duties of a Christian kingdom’; fourteen years later, he raised the opium question in the House of Lords but to little avail. Others were equally condemnatory, even those who saw a good side to opium. A missionary, Revd James Johnstone, although accepting the opium trade had a beneficial side, admitted: ‘I shall have to present such an array of dark facts on the other side that you shall pronounce the whole trade to be a foul blot on the fair name of England, as well as a curse to India, and a deadly wound in the heart of China.’
At last, by the 1870s, British public opinion was roused against the trade. Addressing a meeting in London in 1874, a Chinese speaker against opium, Ng-a-Choy, said:
There cannot be, I think, two opinions about the desirability and necessity of abolishing the opium traffic, because of the pernicious effects produced by the use of opium. The whole nation of China has been demoralised by it. It is a proverb among us that of the four common vices, drunkenness, gambling, fornication and opium smoking, opium smoking is the worst.
A reform movement grew up to fight opium cultivation and trade in the British Empire but, from the start, the reformers knew they were up against the odds. This was poignantly outlined by Sir John Strachey who wrote ‘Next to the land revenue, the most productive source of the public income [in India] is opium.’ When it became realised, people were appalled to find 17 to 20 per cent of the gross national product of the Indian subcontinent was entirely due to the demoralisation of millions of Chinese.