Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  Officials throughout the province were caught unprepared. In one county seat about a hundred miles northwest of where Zhang Zhengmo holed up with his followers, a scant force of a few dozen imperial soldiers with insufficient weapons faced a much larger army of rebels that massed outside the city’s walls in preparation to invade. Wildly outmatched, the ranking city official was reduced to ordering the townspeople to start carving sticks of wood into clubs and cutting bamboo into sections to be used as makeshift gun barrels. He put the women and children to work rolling stones into place to buttress the city’s wall, and assembling firebombs. Across the province, overwhelmed and underprepared government forces resisted the rebels with whatever weapons they could muster—matchlock guns, fireballs, giant stones, vats of boiling water. They called for reinforcements from neighboring provinces. But the rebellions were too much for them to control.24

  With such a severe shortage of imperial soldiers, local gentry in the various towns began taking self-defense into their own hands, raising small, improvised militias by hiring peasants and giving them weapons. These mercenary forces did little to help anyone other than their own masters, however. One witness in a town about thirty miles north of Zhang Zhengmo’s camp recalled seeing a private militia arrive on the scene, the gentryman on horseback and dressed richly in furs, escorted by private soldiers carrying pikes and swords. Rather than setting up some kind of defense for the town, however, they looted it. “The so-called militia soldiers,” wrote the witness, “just continued the work of stealing everything the refugees had left behind in their houses. There wasn’t an empty hand anywhere . . . if the White Lotus rebels are like an ordinary comb, the private militia are the fine-toothed one.”25 And those were the more disciplined groups. Other “militias” he saw were just gangs of bandits, who dressed themselves in red sashes on which they had written the characters for “village militia.” They killed with impunity—entire families when they felt like it—and if anyone asked then why they had killed someone they would just say that they had found them in possession of a piece of white cloth, which proved they were part of the rebellion.26

  The rebels were all called “White Lotus” by the government, but they had many other names for themselves, for in reality they represented a wide range of religious sects that had little direct contact with one another. Nevertheless, although these separate sects had originally competed with each other for members and funding before the rebellion, once it was under way they coalesced in common resistance to their shared enemy: the Qing government. “The officials oppress, and the people rebel” became the slogan of the White Lotus rebellion writ large, painted on banners and written in proclamations, a constant incantation in the confessions of captured White Lotus followers no matter what their backgrounds. And it was a vicious cycle, for as the government redoubled its efforts to extinguish the sects, their justification to rebel became all the more strong, and their uprisings all the more fierce.27

  Although the rebellion did not begin until after Qianlong abdicated his throne, there was no question that he would be the emperor to direct its suppression; he did not trust his son Jiaqing with such responsibilities. But Qianlong saw religious uprisings as local problems that should be dealt with by local forces. To him, internal unrest was of a far lower degree of danger to the empire than a frontier war, so he denied requests to send in the elite Manchu forces that had been almost universally victorious against the Qing dynasty’s enemies in Inner Asia. Instead, he required provincial officials to use their own resources to combat the religious sectarians.28 Even though he would not send elite government troops, however, he did give the local officials generous financial support—which he could do because coming into the White Lotus rebellion the Qing treasuries were flush with a surplus of more than seventy million taels of silver.

  Failing to secure the deployment of Manchu troops from the capital, and short on regular forces, provincial officials followed the lead of local gentry and began to organize their own militias of armed peasants, on a larger scale than the privately led forces that had preceded them. At the outset of the rebellion, these government militias were still modest—a few hundred informal soldiers in most counties, sometimes as many as a few thousand. But as the rebellion spread into neighboring provinces and the military funding from Beijing increased, their numbers exploded. By 1798, the province of Hubei would have nearly four hundred thousand militiamen registered on its books, while the neighboring provinces of Sichuan and Shaanxi each raised their own militia armies of comparable size. In concert with the roughly one hundred thousand regular army soldiers transferred in to fight the rebellions, the three provinces reported a total of more than one million men in arms spread across the entire White Lotus war zone. In just two years, the uneasy border society of settlers in the Han River Highlands had broken down into almost complete militarization.29

  Far from proving effective against the rebellion, however, these legions of militia soldiers did far more harm than good. Militia soldiers could come from any background, as reliable and stable as farmers, or as rootless and unknowable as unemployed migrants, and a substantial number were petty criminals who joined the militia ranks for the good pay that was offered—pay that was equal to or better than the salaries of the regular military, without the long-term commitment or the same kind of discipline. It was an attractive option for anyone who wanted to take advantage of the breakdown of order—safer, at any rate, than individual banditry, and it came with license to carry weapons. Also, since the militia soldiers had no allegiance beyond the money they were paid, under the right conditions they readily defected to the side of the rebels. This happened with such frequency that by the later years of the war, half the White Lotus armies were thought to be made up of former militia troops.30

  Among the regular government troops, furthermore, cowardice and poor discipline reigned. The governor-general of Sichuan province reported with disgust that when government forces went into battle they made the militia charge in ahead of them and then hung back where they would be safe. If the militiamen got turned back by the rebels and started to run away, the government soldiers just ran after them. He described the kinds of false victories that were being reported—where government soldiers would wait for the rebels to move on from a camp, and then after the rebels had been gone for a few days they would start firing their cannons and charge in, murdering innocent refugees from nearby villages and setting their bodies up in the abandoned camp to make it look like they had been rebels. In fact, he said, the two sides scarcely even encountered each other: “Where the rebels are, there are no government forces; and where the government forces are, there are no rebels.” In the final count, the depredations and abuses of the government troops were so awful that the peasants had begun calling them the ‘Red Lotus,’ because they were even more violent and murderous than the rebels were.31

  Meanwhile, Qianlong’s deepening senility, coupled with his insistence on maintaining personal control over the campaign, meant that the real command of the dynasty’s war against the White Lotus fell into the hands of Heshen, who treated it as the greatest opportunity for self-enrichment of his entire career. As Qianlong obsessed over details of the fighting, reading reports night and day—so worried, according to his son, that he was barely able to sleep or eat—Heshen was able to control what information would or would not reach him. He provided Qianlong with fictionalized reports of victories against the rebels to make it seem as if the campaign was progressing well, and prevented him from seeing reports of setbacks and defeats. He installed his protégés in key military positions and created honors to reward them for victories that never occurred. He whitewashed the massacre of civilians by government troops, channeled military funds into his own pockets as well as those of his followers, and protected incompetent officers who paid him tribute.32

  For the first three years of the war, Heshen effectively controlled the central government’s disbursement of military funds, and under his patrona
ge an extraordinary level of fiscal corruption crept into the White Lotus campaign. It would later turn out that a substantial portion of the hundreds of thousands of militia soldiers who had been recruited to fight the White Lotus did not in fact exist. Military officials had been padding their rosters with fake names so they could pocket the salaries of the nonexistent soldiers (along with the funds for the equipment they did not need and the food they would never eat). Furthermore, for the militia soldiers who did exist and were killed fighting the rebels, corrupt officers found ways to embezzle their death benefits, which in many cases never reached their families—thus also creating a perverse incentive for officers to have more of their soldiers die in battle. Militia-related expenses claimed the lion’s share of the exorbitant military funds the central government funneled into the White Lotus war, and at least half of those funds, the Jiaqing emperor would later determine, were siphoned off by corrupt military commanders before they could ever be spent on the war itself.33

  The violence and tenacity of the White Lotus uprisings were thus tightly intertwined with the corruption of the government. Rebel leaders blamed cruel and self-serving officials for having forced them to revolt in the first place, while dishonest military officials in turn botched the suppression so badly that they fanned the rebellions to greater and greater heights. If the slogan of the rebels was “The officials oppress, and the people rebel,” in time a good number of upright officials loyal to the dynasty would come to see the war in exactly the same terms. As one loyalist scholar described the corruption of officials in Hubei during the years leading up to the war, “At first they nibbled away like worms, gradually taking more and more until they were gulping like whales. In the beginning, their embezzlements could be reckoned in hundreds and thousands of taels, but presently nothing less than ten thousand would attract notice. Soon amounts ran to scores of thousands, then to hundreds of thousands, then to millions.”34 Another supporter of the dynasty declared that among the lower-level officials, “Not even two or three out of ten behaved uprightly.”35 Such critics maintained that there was no way the Qing government could suppress the White Lotus uprisings until it cracked down on its own corrupt bureaucrats, who continued to give the insurgents a justification to rebel.36

  Qianlong had expected an easy victory against the White Lotus. In falsifying so much of their expenditures, the commanders in the field created on paper what should have been a rout, with hundreds of thousands of militia soldiers mobilized to suppress sectarian groups that numbered only in the thousands or tens of thousands. Yet the war did not end. After all of the positive reports of victory that Heshen had forwarded to him, Qianlong was maddened and confused by the refusal of the White Lotus leaders to submit. The war weighed on him, obsessed him in his final years, occupied his full attention—or at least what remained of it in his decline. “I left my rule,” he wrote sadly in a poem in 1798, “but still I work diligently at government. And now I see that in these past two years it has only gotten worse.”37

  By the time Qianlong reached the end of his long life, in 1799, the cost of fighting the relentless White Lotus rebellions had already reached nearly one hundred million taels of silver—a monstrous sum equal to two entire years of the imperial government’s revenue.38 It had completely exhausted the huge treasury surplus that predated the war, but there was no end in sight. It was the most expensive campaign the dynasty had ever fought, and its lack of success broke Qianlong’s spirit. After his unparalleled reign—the longest and one of the most successful in China’s history—he died in a position of helplessness, the treasuries emptied, the moral foundations of the empire shifting like sand beneath him.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Edge of the World

  Five hundred miles to the south of the Han River Highlands, the grand port city of Canton was isolated from the turmoil of the ongoing rebellion but not from the rising tide of corruption that had helped provoke it. Given the vast amounts of money that traded hands in Canton—it was the third-largest city in the world at the time, surpassed only by London and Beijing—official appointments there were plum positions, some of the ripest in the empire for individual graft.1 Canton was the capital of populous Guangdong province and home to a large civil government overseen by a provincial governor, then, above him, a governor-general. The governor-general was responsible for both Guangdong and neighboring Guangxi province, and he answered directly to the emperor—but as the saying went, “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.” The governor’s lavish offices and mansion were inside the city of Canton itself, while the governor-general, though formally based in a different town, also kept offices in Canton and spent much of his time there.

  Foreign trade followed a separate path of authority than the civil government. At the level of actual face-to-face commerce, a small group of Chinese commercial families known as the Hong merchants, typically numbering about a dozen, were given a monopoly over commerce with foreigners. All Western trade had to come through them—if you were a foreign ship’s captain, your cargo would have to be guaranteed by one of the Hong merchants before you could sail up the river to Canton. Only that Hong merchant could rent you warehouse space, and he alone was supposed to be able to arrange with you for the purchase of whatever tea or silk you wished to bring home. Personal relationships were key, and a close friendship with an individual Hong merchant was an immensely valuable boon for any foreigner involved in the Canton trade. However, the Hong merchants were also accountable for the conduct of all personnel on the ships that they guaranteed. So if a drunken sailor got into a fight with a local Chinese, an event that happened with some frequency, it was the Hong merchant who was held responsible.

  With such a small number of Hong merchants controlling the full trade of China with Great Britain, America, and the European continent, the opportunities to get rich were abundant. However, the Hong merchants also had to manage enormous business risks. They had to calibrate gigantic shipments of tea from the Yangzi River valley more than seven hundred miles away, ensuring the quality and amount of the product, orchestrating its packing and transportation on rivers and overland to Canton, making sure that it all arrived on time for loading onto the foreign ships that sailed once a year. They had to bear the risk of market fluctuations as poor weather, floods, and crop shortages—and, now and then, rebellions—drove up prices on commodities for which they had contracted with foreign traders. From the other direction they had to bear the risk of falling demand for fashionable import products (like seal skins) that they purchased from abroad.

  Above all, though, their access to capital made them primary targets for exactions by the government—large, involuntary donations to support military campaigns and disaster relief. Sometimes the amounts involved could be huge; their “contributions” to the White Lotus campaign, for example, amounted to more than three million taels of silver (worth more than four million dollars at the time, which the Jiaqing emperor celebrated as if the donations had been voluntary). The Hong merchants thus comprised some of the richest men in China, but they also went bankrupt with great regularity. And this cycle was difficult to escape, for an individual Hong merchant was not allowed to resign without permission from the very officials who squeezed him.

  The senior superintendent of foreign trade at Canton was the imperial customs commissioner, known to foreigners as the hoppo, whose offices were located just to the north of the factory compound. He reported directly to the Board of Revenue in Beijing, and all of the Hong merchants were responsible to him. It was the hoppo who was responsible for ensuring a proper flow of tariff income to the capital, and of all the government positions in Canton, his was the one with the greatest opportunities for self-enrichment.

  The hoppos were often unpopular with the foreign traders at Canton, and they hardly fared better in the eyes of their Chinese contemporaries. A popular Chinese novel published in 1804 and set in Canton, Mirage, gives a clear enough picture of how the holders of this office were seen by th
e cynical Chinese around them. The story’s villain was a newly arrived hoppo named Master He—who, the novel tells us, “had schemed to be the superintendent of the Canton Customs for the sole purpose of getting rich and indulging in sex.”2 The story begins with his arrival in the city, saddled with enormous debt from the bribes he had paid to get his position. His first order of business was to make good on his debts by arresting all of the Hong merchants, charging them with corruption, and threatening them with beatings and exile until they came up with a huge payment of several hundred thousand taels—which was worth more than the actual value of their businesses.

  The foreign traders in their comfortable factories were only dimly aware of the White Lotus rebellion that raged deep within China’s interior in the mid-1790s, and so, knowing as little as they did of events closer by, their much greater concern was that Britain and France had gone to war. In January 1793, the Jacobins beheaded Louis XVI, sending a shock wave through the monarchies that had initially welcomed France’s revolution. Eleven days later, the French Republic declared war on Great Britain—a war that, through changes of leadership and shifting alliances, would embroil the two powers and span the globe in its fighting for the better part of the next twenty-two years. Macartney had learned about the events in France while he was still in Beijing, from, of all people, Padre Cho, the interpreter who had abandoned them in Macao, who had come to Beijing by an interior route to avoid association with the foreign embassy and brought the latest news from Canton. Captain Gower of the Lion learned of the declaration of war while he waited on the coast for Macartney, and on his way down to Macao he even managed to capture a French-flagged vessel as a prize. Unfortunately for the five seal hunters the British embassy had encountered on remote Amsterdam Island during their outbound voyage, that French ship was the one that was supposed to retrieve them when their contract was up. Its capture by the Lion left them stranded on their island in perpetuity.3