Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  Imperial Twilight

  ALSO BY STEPHEN PLATT

  Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom:

  China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

  Provincial Patriots:

  The Hunanese and Modern China

  Imperial Twilight

  The Opium War and

  the End of China’s Last Golden Age

  STEPHEN PLATT

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Stephen R. Platt, 2018

  The moral right of Stephen R. Platt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-486-3

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-488-7

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-487-0

  The illustration credits on p.528 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd

  Designed by Soonyoung Kwon

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

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  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For Francie, Lucy, and Eliot

  Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.

  There is no wall left to this village.

  Bones white with a thousand frosts,

  High heaps, covered with trees and grass;

  Who brought this to pass?

  Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?

  Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?

  Barbarous kings.

  A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn . . .

  —LI BO (701–762), TRANS. EZRA POUND,

  “Lament of the Frontier Guard”

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,

  “Kubla Khan”

  Contents

  Maps

  Introduction: Canton

  PROLOGUE

  The Journey of James Flint 3

  PART I

  Gracious Spring

  CHAPTER 1

  A Time of Wonder

  CHAPTER 2

  Black Wind

  CHAPTER 3

  The Edge of the World

  CHAPTER 4

  Sea and Land

  CHAPTER 5

  Points of Entry

  CHAPTER 6

  Hidden Shoals

  PART II

  The Milk of Paradise

  CHAPTER 7

  Boom Times

  CHAPTER 8

  Fire and Smoke

  CHAPTER 9

  Freedom

  CHAPTER 10

  A Darkening Turn

  CHAPTER 11

  Means of Solution

  CHAPTER 12

  The Last Honest Man

  PART III

  Blood-Ravenous Autumn

  CHAPTER 13

  Showdown

  CHAPTER 14

  Will and Destiny

  CHAPTER 15

  Aftermath

  CODA

  Houqua and Forbes

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction: Canton

  If you stand outside the wall, it is impossible to gauge the size of the city. Canton is built on a plain, so the low, flat buildings of brick and wood that lie inside are invisible from where you stand. The wall is thirty feet high and crenellated, built from large blocks of sandstone at its base and smaller bricks above. It stretches as far as you can see in either direction, with forts visible on top at regular intervals, cannons peering outward. Near you is one of the twelve massive wooden gates that open into the city, a shadowed cave guarded by soldiers and horsemen. The gates creak open each morning at dawn, and close again each evening around 9 p.m. Not that you will be allowed in. As a foreigner, you are stopped at the gate and turned away. You will not see the fantastic warren of narrow streets inside, paved with thick slabs of granite. You will not see the dense brick houses with their sloping tiled roofs, the vast examination hall with its thousands of cells, the lavish mansions, the temples, the gardens, or the government offices that lie within.1

  Instead, you stay outside and wander back through the suburbs, the sprawling and amorphous settlements surrounding the wall where you could walk for miles without any sense of their coming to an end. It is steamy weather, so humid your sweat seems to just blend into the air around you. The paved streets are twisting and so very narrow that you can sometimes touch the walls on both sides at the same time. The buildings here, fronted with fragrant carved wood, are mostly two stories high, with tall shutters on the windows. Above you, laundry hangs to dry on lines stretched across the top of the alley, creating a canopy effect. It is hard to hear over the din of the hawkers and the shouting of porters and chair-bearers as they try to push their way through. Everywhere is the press of humanity—people traveling on foot or carried in sedan chairs, lounging in the alleyways, eating in open-air restaurants as street performers and beggars ply them for money.

  If there are other foreigners about in the suburbs you might overhear a few snatches of Pidgin English, the local trading language. It is a hybrid of the Cantonese dialect of the city and the European tongues native to the foreigners who come to trade here (“pidgin” means “business”). For the most part it is made up of English words, sometimes with a bit of Hindi or Portuguese, set to Chinese grammar and pronunciation. It is a meeting ground between vastly different languages and will take some getting used to. Fragments of it will be absorbed back into English—having a “look-see” or eating “chow,” asking someone to hurry up “chop-chop” or telling them “Long time no see.” In its full-blown form it is a colorful singsong of a language. “I saw a man eating” becomes “My look-see one piecee man catchee chow-chow.” “He has no money” translates to “He no hab catchee dollar.” “You belongy smart inside” means “You’re very smart.”

  Vertical signs hang from the sides of most buildings with Chinese characters announcing what is for sale in the shops on the ground floor. You can’t read them. But you may be relieved to see that some stores have signs written out in English letters to lure you in. You enter one of these shops through a tall central doorway flanked by two large open windows. It is cooler inside, out of the sun. There is a counter near one of the windows, piled with writing materials. A clerk flips the beads of an abacus rapidly with one hand while he writes down calculations with the other. It is quiet except for the clicking of the abacus. The shop is crammed to the rafters with silk of every description.

  Back out in the alley you continue on your way, past shops selling tea, medicine, porcelain, a hundred other goods. A great deal of money changes hands here. There are craftsmen and artists—cabinet makers, blacksmiths, tailors, painters. The painters work in oil, on glass or canvas. They can
produce Chinese or European images for you with equal skill, easily replicating anything you bring to them. They will even hold sittings for a visitor like yourself to get your portrait painted. Some of the foreigners say their oil portraits aren’t always so flattering. But as the joke goes, when they complain the painters just tell them, “No hab got handsome face, how can hab handsome picture?”

  It is not a clean city—though neither, for that matter, are London or Boston. It is especially filthy near the Pearl River, which is where we are headed. The sluggish water of the canals feeding into the river is thick with sewage and refuse from the nearby houses. Rows of sampans are tied up several deep in the river, where the boat people live. Piles of garbage are strewn along the bank. The smell of refuse stewing in the humid warmth is something you will stop noticing in time.

  Now we come to the factory district at the edge of the river. This is where you belong.

  What you will notice first as you enter from along the river is the relatively enormous amount of open space before you. You have seen nothing like it in the tightly packed suburbs, where alley gives way to alley and there are no open public areas (the great gardens of the suburbs are private and lie behind walls). But here is a wide expanse of hard-trodden dirt with space to walk around freely. This plaza of reclaimed land—the square, as it is known—slopes gently down to a muddy riverfront densely crowded with ships. The ships here are all small ones, for the river is fairly shallow; all of the giant oceangoing vessels you might have expected to see are about ten miles downriver at a deeper anchorage called Whampoa.

  There are small groups of Chinese wandering around on the open square, and if you turn away from the water you will see what they have come for. Jarringly out of place in comparison to the low wooden houses of the suburbs, here is an imposing row of thirteen large buildings of brick and granite, higher than anything you have yet seen in Canton—higher even than the city wall. They are distinctly European in appearance, with columned verandas and terraces. Several have tall flagpoles out front that fly the national flag of a Western country: Britain, France, the United States.

  These are the factories, where the foreigners live. In spite of the name, they are not sites of manufacturing (a “factor” is a term from India meaning a trader). They contain living quarters, warehouses, and offices. Each one has a Chinese “compradore,” or chief steward, who staffs it with a small army of servants—cooks, valets, butlers, even menial servants to pull the ropes that keep the ceiling fans spinning in this oppressive heat. They keep the factories well supplied with food and other necessities. Some have a few head of livestock or a milk cow on hand. If a factory is inhabited by a single national group, it gets to fly its flag out front. The ones without flags host a variety of foreign businessmen, many from India.

  For the most part the factory buildings have been built touching one other to economize on space, but there are three gaps between them—short, busy streets filled with single-story Chinese shops. Even on this small scale there are important gradations, better or worse parts of “town.” The more respectable alleys are New China Street and Old China Street—toward the left if you face the factories from the water. About twelve feet wide, they have orderly rows of retail stalls and tailor shops, a place for temporary visitors to pick up souvenirs and get clothing made. The less respectable alley, a narrower and dirtier one off to the right, is called Hog Lane, and it is mainly crammed with bars catering to foreign sailors from the ships down at Whampoa, who occasionally get a few days of shore leave, which—as in any other port they might encounter—they mainly spend getting drunk. The Chinese proprietors of the bars have adopted English names like “Jolly Jack” and “Tom Bowline.” Their liquor shacks are so tiny they don’t have benches or a bar per se, just a rope over which a sailor can hang by his armpits and drink until he passes out.

  In all the compound, it is the British factory that is most striking. Larger than the others, it has its own fenced-in space in front that reaches all the way down to the riverbank. Standing out in front under the limp Union Jack on this sultry afternoon you can see the factory’s broad, columned terrace with a view up and down the river, where the merchants of the East India Company can enjoy their tiffin and sometimes catch a bit of a breeze. If you go through the front gate, past the vigilant Chinese guard with his rattan cane, entering through the shade of the veranda, you will find upstairs a European world that might make you forget where you are. Along the wide hallways you will find counting rooms, tea-tasting rooms, and parlors. There is a chapel with a spire that holds the only public clock in the compound. There are well-appointed living apartments, a dining hall with room for more than a hundred guests, a billiard room, a library of four thousand books.

  Looking around inside the vast, chandeliered British dining hall—the portrait of a king on one wall, a former ambassador on another—drinking your sherry as a bustling crowd of servants prepares to serve a dinner of roast beef and potatoes with gravy, you could be forgiven for imagining you had stumbled into some colonial outpost. But this is not India. The British are not in charge here. The Chinese are. These buildings are, all of them, owned by Chinese merchants, who rent them out to the foreign traders so they will have a place to stay and do their business. The armies of servants answer to their Chinese superiors, not to those they wait on. They report what goes on with the guests. Watched over at all times, the foreigners feel sometimes like grubby infants—coddled and helpless, attended always by their nurses. They need permission to do just about anything.

  As opulent as these surroundings may be, the residents sometimes feel that they have volunteered to become prisoners here. Despite the feeling of open space outside on the square, the compound is quite limited in size. It runs for just three hundred yards along the waterfront, and between the square out front and the extensive factory buildings behind, it is about two hundred yards deep. The longer you are here, the smaller it will feel. Foreigners are not permitted to go into the city itself, and they can only wander through the very nearest parts of the suburbs. Farther on, and throngs of young boys will materialize to throw rocks at them and call them foreign devils. Even farther, and Chinese soldiers will come to escort them gently home. Every ten days a small group is allowed to take the air in a nearby garden. Other than that, this is their gilded cage. There is nothing else like it in the world. The entire formal trade of Europe and America with China, the largest empire in existence, goes on here in a space of just twelve acres—less, some like to point out, than the footprint of one of the pyramids in Egypt.

  You may not want to spend too many years of your life here, but as you see it in the early 1830s, Canton hardly seems the kind of place to start a war.

  No event casts a longer shadow over China’s modern history than the Opium War. Sparked by an explosive series of events that took place in the Canton factory compound in 1839, the war would end in 1842 with China’s humiliating defeat and a treaty all but dictated by the British aggressors, setting a disastrous pattern for the century to come. Textbooks in China on “modern” history, as a rule, take the Opium War as their starting point, the moment when China left its traditional past behind and was dragged forcibly into the world of European imperialism. The war occupies that place not because it was so destructive; in fact, it was relatively small and contained. It caused none of the large-scale social dislocation that China’s major internal wars of the nineteenth century like the Taiping Rebellion did. It did not topple the ruling dynasty or even remotely threaten to do so. There weren’t even that many battles fought.

  But the symbolic power of the Opium War is almost limitless. It has long stood as the point when China’s weakness was laid bare before the world, the opening of a “Century of Humiliation” in which Western (and later Japanese) predators would make war on China to bully it into granting territorial concessions and trading rights. It marked a sea change in relations with the West—the end of one era, when foreigners came to China as supplicants, and the da
wn of another, when they would come as conquerors. And it carries especially strong power because China unquestionably had the moral high ground: as remembered since, and as charged by critics at the time, Great Britain unleashed its navy on a nearly defenseless China in order to advance the interests of its national drug dealers, who for years had been smuggling opium to China’s coast against the laws of the country. The shocking grounds of the war have provided the very foundation of modern Chinese nationalism—from the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the rise, first of the Republic, and then the People’s Republic of China, the Opium War has stood for the essence of everything modern China has tried to leave behind: weakness, victimhood, shame.

  Because we live in a world so heavily shadowed by this memory, it has been easy for westerners of more recent generations to imagine that this was always the case—that weakness and victimhood were somehow inherent to China’s nature. Through the twentieth century, China was a poor, vulnerable, and frequently chaotic nation that never seemed a contender for power. A third-world nation in the eyes of the wealthier countries, it was alternately a pariah or an object of sympathy. For that reason, the country’s worldly aspirations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—to play a leading role in the UN, to host the Olympics, to put a man on the moon—were initially viewed by outsiders almost with bemusement, as if it were an overly ambitious upstart forgetting its proper place. That bemusement has now given way to alarm in many quarters as China strengthens its naval power to unprecedented levels and lays claim to vast swaths of contested maritime territory, asserting its power in ways completely unknown to living memory.

  But over the long term, China is anything but an upstart. And as its economic and military power today grow far beyond anything it seemed capable of in the twentieth century, it is coming to resemble far less the weak, bullied nation that suffered the Opium War than the confident and central empire that preceded it. If we take this war not as a beginning but as an ending, and shift our sights instead back into the era before it took place, back before that ostensible dividing line with the modern era, we find a China that was powerful, prosperous, dominant, and above all envied. The memory of that lost era looms ever larger in China today, as a reminder of its potential (some would say rightful) place in the world, a nostalgic vision of what it could be once again.