Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  PART VI

  HONG KONG: MONEY AND DEMOCRACY

  16

  Hierarchies

  By any measure, China and Great Britain were two of the great powers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Each nation felt itself to be superior to all other nations and races in the world, by virtue of its history, its traditions and the special character of its people, and it was this feeling of superiority that brought them, inevitably, into conflict with each other. The contact between these two superpowers of the age was brought about by trade. Ever since Lord Macartney’s famous mission to Peking (as Beijing was then called in English) in 1793, the British had been trying to open China up to greater commerce.

  By the early nineteenth century, British merchants were already making a great deal of money from China and, more importantly, they were well organized and politically astute. The main source of the commercial income of the British merchant in China was the trade in opium. It has been estimated that by 1830 the opium trade in Canton (modern Guangzhou) was ‘the largest commerce of its time in any single commodity, anywhere in the world’.1 Despite the riches to be made in the commerce with China, there was very little respect for the Chinese themselves. One of the men who would later symbolize the fabulous wealth of the British merchants was James Matheson, a tough Scot who was an avid campaigner on behalf of British traders. He urged the government in London to protect British trade and merchants from the Chinese. In a pamphlet, written in 1836, he boasted of having been ‘engaged in active commercial pursuits at Canton for the last seventeen years’. Yet, despite his experience and increasing fortune, he found the Chinese to be ‘a people characterised by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit and obstinacy’. It was unjust, he believed, that the Chinese should possess a ‘vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth’ when they were not willing to share their wealth with foreigners by trading with them. The Chinese, in his view, were selfish; they merely wanted to ‘monopolize all the advantages of their situation’ and keep the foreigners, principally the British, out of their domestic market. Matheson greedily observed that, in China, there lived ‘a population estimated as amounting to nearly a third of the whole human race’; then as now, businessmen were beguiled by the prospect of selling to the Chinese, who, in the early nineteenth century, were likely to have formed an even greater proportion of the world’s inhabitants than they do today. (In 2010, China was estimated to constitute between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s population.) Ten years before the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846, Matheson invoked free trade as a justification for opening up trade with China.2

  Matheson was one of those Scots who typify the dynamism and commercial acumen of the British imperialist during this period. Born in Lairg in Sutherland in 1796, he had studied Science, Law and Economics at Edinburgh University, before going to Canton in 1819 to start his career in trade. A keen disciple of Adam Smith and his free-trade ideas, he was a writer of force and passion, convinced that it was the duty of the British government ‘to make a firm and decisive demonstration in favour of our oppressed fellow-subjects in Canton’. The problem British merchants faced was simply that the Chinese government did not want them there, especially as the British were fuelling the trade in opium and thereby promoting drug addiction among the Chinese. In the context of the modern debate on drugs, Chinese officials were merely being prudent and responsible. To Matheson, however, they were showing ‘contempt and injustice towards us’, and were not playing fair, because they had already threatened to ‘expel us from China’, and such an act would ‘not only be attended with the most destructive consequences to the trade’, but would ‘reflect intense dishonour upon the national character’. It would be dishonourable to surrender to the Chinese, because they were a weak nation; indeed, they were so weak that their emperor had ‘neither the inclination nor the power to resort to hostile measures . . . if he saw us disposed to offer a serious resistance’. Gunboats and force would suffice to show which nation was the real master in the East. The Emperor was far too conscious of ‘his weakness and our strength’ to start disrupting what was already a lucrative trade.3

  Initially, Matheson’s plea of 1836 received little attention in Westminster or Whitehall. Merchants from Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow were continually harping on the same theme, arguing that the Whig government, under the lackadaisical Lord Melbourne, needed to do something to place British trade on a ‘more secure footing than it at present enjoys’ in China. China was potentially an enormous market; everyone knew that. ‘No country presents to us the basis of a more legitimate and mutually advantageous trade than China,’ proclaimed the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures in February 1836.4 Britain’s trade with China, noted another merchant in the same year, was already ‘of equal if not greater importance than that with any other nation in the world’ and, if properly encouraged, would be ‘capable of almost unlimited increase’.5

  The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, enjoying the second of three spells in that office, was very conscious of the importance of China. He ruled over the Foreign Office in an imperious manner, commenting sharply on notes submitted in bad handwriting, especially when contrasted with his own beautiful free-flowing script. He was aged fifty-two in 1836, and was, even at this relatively early date, viewed as the most dynamic and powerful minister in the government. Lord Melbourne, the elegant Whig aristocrat, was nominally prime minister, but it was to the Foreign Secretary that the entreaties of the Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester merchants were so eagerly addressed. Even in the 1830s Palmerston was well on his way to becoming the legendary figure of his old age in the 1850s and 1860s. He was a famous seducer of women, who managed to marry his long-term mistress, the wife of Lord Cowper, only when he was fifty-five and she fifty-eight, even though smart society in London knew that they had been occasional lovers for twenty years. He was a sportsman who enjoyed boxing and field sports, but was also regarded as something of an intellectual and had, unusually, gone to Edinburgh University for a couple of years to learn some Philosophy and Economics, before resuming, at Cambridge University, the customary Classical studies he had pursued at Harrow.6

  With a practised diplomat’s eye, Palmerston could see that, in the early 1840s, competition among European manufacturers would make commercial markets on the continent of Europe difficult for British goods to penetrate. As a consequence of this competition, Britain should ‘unremittingly endeavour to find in other parts of the world new vents for our industry’. In modern business parlance, British manufacturers needed new consumers for the goods they were now producing in such abundance. The most logical market was China, which ‘at no distant period’ would give Britain ‘a most important extension to the range of our foreign commerce’.7

  The Chinese Emperor and the scholarly officials who administered his empire were as contemptuous and dismissive of the British as the British were of them. The problem was a fine instance of the clash of civilizations, the inability of two cultures to understand one another. All Chinese officials had won their honoured positions by passing strenuous competitive examinations in the Confucian classics and they despised commerce. Britain, on the other hand, had, since at least the seventeenth century, identified itself as a trading nation. Commerce, to the Chinese mind, was a ‘well-known barbarian idiosyncrasy’, one of the things that ‘made a barbarian what he was’.8 The Emperor himself would observe in 1849 that ‘it is plain that these barbarians always look on trade as their chief occupation’ and it was true that the English, of all the Western powers, were the ones most addicted to this low pursuit, for it was their aristocracy who, among all European nations, had most intermarried with wealthy traders. In China, the merchant was a totally contemptible figure, taking his place in society far below the scholar, and below the farmer and even the craftsman.9 This conflict of values lay behind the naval conflict now known as the first Opium War.

  The merchants themselves were quite open abou
t their desire for war. ‘What, then, would be the force requisite to coerce the Chinese empire, with its countless millions of inhabitants?’ asked one trader, an East India Company agent in China. Hugh Hamilton Lindsay answered his own question, confidently stating that a hostile power would need a seventy-four-gun ship, manned by 500 men, a large frigate and some troops, numbering about 3,000 in total.10 Of course, the merchants’ fond dreams of humbling the ‘celestial empire’ needed strong lobbying in London to prompt the otherwise lethargic ministers into action. Towards the end of 1839, an issue arose which was quickly exploited by another canny Scottish opium-dealer and stirred the young Queen Victoria’s ministers into action.

  William Jardine, Matheson’s business partner, had been born in 1784, the same year as Lord Palmerston. He had been trained at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and had spent the early part of his career as a ship’s surgeon with the East India Company. At the age of thirty-four, he had given up this career and set up a trading business in Bombay, where he met James Matheson, who was already speculating in the opium trade, and from Bombay they both went to Canton, where they shrewdly believed much more money could be made. In their commercial activities, Jardine and Matheson were successful, Jardine in particular being a natural businessman, a man who never offered visitors a seat when they called upon him in his office. This lack of courtesy was prudent because it meant that visitors spent less time in his office; more business could be carried out if negotiators had the discomfort of having to stand up during the whole transaction.

  By 1839, Jardine had grown rich and decided to leave China, while still maintaining his business interests. He took his leave in January that year and planned a leisurely trip back to London, passing through Bombay and crossing the isthmus of Suez. It was while he was on this return trip that he heard some startling news which, in its way, would change the history of the relationship between the two powers, Great Britain and China. When he stopped off at Naples, Jardine was informed that an energetic Chinese official, Lin Zexu, had seized and confiscated 20,000 cases of British-owned opium, worth £2 million. Jardine hurried on to London, where he arrived in early September; he lost no time in urging his friend John Abel Smith, an MP, to arrange a meeting with Lord Palmerston to explain the situation. The first interview, fixed for 16 September, was a fiasco, as the Foreign Secretary did not turn up. The next meeting, on the 27th, was more successful. Jardine spread out the maps and charts of the China coast on Palmerston’s desk and described the scale of armaments needed to punish the Chinese. A naval force was prepared that included sixteen men-of-war, four armed steamers and twenty-seven transport ships which carried 4,000 Scottish, Irish and Indian troops to China. It was this force which seized the island of Hong Kong in January 1841. Jardine, whose commercial expertise was valued by Lord Palmerston, decided to have a real voice in Westminster and got himself elected as MP for Ashburton in Devon that same year.

  After the Chinese fleet had been destroyed in a series of tragicomic battles, one of which lasted forty-five minutes, as twenty-nine Chinese junks were successively blown out of the water by British gunships, the Treaty of Nanking was signed in August 1842. This treaty confirmed British possession of the island.11 The ostensible reason was the defence of free trade, but the war was really about freedom to trade in opium, which Jardine described in 1830 as the ‘safest and most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of’. The rich Jardine never married and died in 1843, but his values and drive had made their mark.

  Hong Kong, from the start, fulfilled a basic commercial need. The idea of a free port in the East where goods could be warehoused and then resold was particularly appealing to a nation which was on the verge of adopting free trade. It was recognized that this free port would soon reap rich rewards. Even before the Treaty of Nanking, in April 1836, the Canton Register, an English newspaper founded by James Matheson and his brother in 1827, had recommended Hong Kong as the preferred site of a new British commercial base in the East: ‘If the lion’s paw is to be put down on any port of the south side of China, let it be Hong Kong.’ The ‘free’ nature of Hong Kong was enshrined in the third article of the Treaty of Nanking.12 The treaty also forced the Chinese to pay an indemnity to British merchants of 6 million silver dollars for the loss in opium-derived earnings, in addition to the war expenses incurred by the British, which would cost the Chinese government a further 12 million dollars; it was not surprising that the treaty was referred to as an ‘unequal’ one by the Chinese in the twentieth century.

  Hong Kong may have started as a merchant’s city, but it was soon encumbered by the formal structures of imperial rule. In April 1843, Sir Henry Pottinger was appointed governor but spent only a year in Hong Kong before returning to Britain. He was the first of a series of twenty-eight men who, ending with Lord Patten in 1997, set their mark in different ways on the island. More important than the figure of the governor was the idea of justice which the British worked hard, from the beginning of their association with Hong Kong, to establish as a characteristic of their rule.

  By 1857, the colony’s population had grown to nearly 90,000, as against the 5,000 inhabitants found on the island when the British took possession of it in 1841. The city was thriving and had already become a market where East and West met, and where people of many nations could be found selling their wares. There was the famous case in 1851 when a brothel was advertised in a Hong Kong newspaper; an Australian ‘actress’ had opened an establishment in Lyndhurst Terrace, her advertisement announcing that ‘at Mrs Randall’s a small quantity of good HONEY [sic]’ was to be found ‘in small jars’.13 The most sensational scandal of the decade occurred in January 1857, when bread produced in the main local bakery, called Esing, was laced with arsenic and supplied to the expatriate community for breakfast. The proprietor of the bakery, a local Chinese of the name Cheong Ahlum, had taken all the members of his extended family to Macau earlier that morning. He was a confirmed Chinese patriot and was alleged to have hatched a plot to wipe out the entire British population of Hong Kong. In the event, 400 people suffered from indigestion, but, at the trial that followed, nothing could be proved. Even though the presiding Chief Justice, J. W. Hulme, the attorney general and many of the European members of the jury had been victims, Cheong was acquitted, the burden of proof demanded being the customary common-law ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The Chief Justice, though he had expressed his suspicions, famously declared that ‘hanging the wrong man [would] not further the ends of justice’. The baker Cheong was expelled from the island, but the reputation of British justice had been established.14

  Despite the Chinese trust in British justice, the merchants themselves quickly established a reputation for arrogance and high living. Within only a few years of the colony’s settlement, dozens of merchant companies had come to Hong Kong and instituted a way of life which would later come to represent the worst features of expatriate excess. Jardine’s famously imported a chef from London, whereas Dent’s, at the time Jardine’s principal rivals, had brought a chef from Paris. The ‘taipans’ themselves, the managers and partners of the business, along with their assistants enjoyed in the mid-nineteenth century an extravagant lifestyle: for example, claret for breakfast and champagne for dinner, accompanying dishes of pheasant, partridge, venison and all kinds of fish. A Shanghai doctor of the time, in advising a moderate dietary regime, suggested a light breakfast consisting of ‘a mutton chop, fresh eggs, curry, bread and butter, with coffee or tea, or, preferably, claret and water’.15 Even though the expression ‘taipan’ was a Cantonese word which meant ‘general manager’, the taipans themselves were exclusively European. This didn’t mean that Chinese could not become very rich indeed. In fact, the richest inhabitants in Hong Kong were, from the earliest days of the colony, the Chinese businessmen who knew both the Chinese and Western mind, but European merchants quickly became known for their exclusivity and arrogance. As early as 1846, the Hong Kong Club had been established as the ‘touchstone of so
cial acceptability’, from which ‘shop keepers, Chinese, Indians, women and other undesirables were rigidly excluded’. The colony quickly, even by the 1860s, was known for its hierarchical and snobbish atmosphere, even though many of the most arrogant taipans were men who, in England, had not come from the ‘best families’ or been educated at the ‘best schools’. A genuine aristocrat, in Hong Kong, with a proper title was rare, yet the social arrogance of the merchants in Hong Kong became a byword for pettiness. The first demand for democracy came in 1894 from the merchants, 362 of whom signed a petition sent to the House of Commons asking to be given the vote for candidates for the Legislative Council, whose members were appointed exclusively by the Governor.16 Politicians in London dismissed this crude attempt to acquire power by an expatriate merchant class, who themselves disregarded the opinions of the Chinese, the overwhelming majority of the island’s population. Joseph Chamberlain, the arch-imperialist Colonial Secretary, observed rather acidly of the petition that the ‘Chinese community is the element which is least represented while it is also the most numerous’.17