Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  The naval war stretched to every corner of the world that a French or British ship might sail, so for Macartney’s homeward journey the Lion took on escort duty for a convoy of thirteen East Indiamen, including the Hindostan. Captain Gower drew up a line of battle for the ships, which together carried two thousand sailors and an arsenal of nearly four hundred cannon, with the heavily armed Lion at the center of the line.4 The collective force of the China fleet was formidable enough to scatter any French vessels and pirates they encountered on the way home, and the millions of pounds’ worth of cargo they carried remained safe even as the dangers of the war mounted. The Lion and its convoy were still rounding the Cape of Good Hope in late May 1794 when, six thousand miles to their north, the largest naval battle of the war was being fought between British and French fleets totaling more than fifty enormous ships of the line. The “Glorious First of June,” as it would be remembered, was a British triumph in which Earl Howe’s Channel fleet decimated a tenacious force of Republicans defending the path of a grain convoy from America. The Lion and its charges were fortunate to avoid such fighting themselves, though they did encounter Howe’s victorious fleet in the English Channel as they neared home.5

  Canton may have been far from the crucial battles between Britain and France, but it still felt the effects of the European conflict. For one thing, the war spelled the end of a meaningful French presence in China. France’s commerce at Canton had always been weak in comparison to its trade in Cochin-China (modern-day Vietnam), but that commerce diminished further after the revolution, then all but disappeared once the war was fully under way. The neutral Americans readily filled in the gap, sending more ships to make up for the reduction of French activity and eventually taking over the defunct French factory in Canton as their own, raising the Stars and Stripes on the pole in front where the tricolor had once flown (an occasion on which one especially spiteful Yankee declared, “We raise the fortunes of the United States on the wreckage of France”).6

  More ominously, the war brought a new and sustained British military presence to the vicinity of Canton. The East India Company’s China fleet contained some of the richest prizes on the ocean, laden with silver on their voyage to Canton and crammed with valuable cargoes of tea and silk on their way home, so the advent of war meant the arrival of Royal Navy cruisers in Chinese waters to protect and escort the Indiamen as they came and went. They were a destabilizing force. In the past, relations between the British and Chinese in Canton had always been conducted by civilians—the Company supercargoes on the one hand, and the Hong merchants on the other, who in turn represented the foreign merchants to the hoppo and provincial officials. That system worked, and generations of trust and predictability had been built in to it. But the British warships did not answer to the East India Company, and their captains did not take orders from merchants, so their looming presence was unsettling to all concerned.

  The flash point for trouble turned out to be Macao, the Portuguese settlement eighty miles south of Canton. Macao was not a Portuguese colony per se, being Chinese territory governed ultimately by the Qing Empire, but in a unique arrangement the Portuguese had been granted the right to live there since the sixteenth century (originally for helping the Ming dynasty with pirate suppression), and they were allowed to exercise their own government over the port city. The local Portuguese maintained control over the comings and goings of foreign ships from Macao, as well as authority over who could and could not live there. Since foreigners were not permitted in Canton outside the immediate trading season of the fall and winter months, Macao was a crucial base for half of the year. Also, the Chinese did not permit foreign women to come to the Canton factory compound (to make sure the traders did not become too comfortable there and attempt to settle down), so any foreign merchant who brought his family with him to China would have to station his wife and children year-round in Macao and visit with them during the off-season.

  The Portuguese had long been a neutral presence in Macao, a waning power that did not pose any competition for trade. But in June 1801 Portugal signed a treaty with France that included a provision that all Portuguese ports would be closed to the British. Suddenly Macao mattered. The Admiralty in London worried that the French would send a fleet to take control of the port, and either (at best) exclude the British from residence there, to the detriment of their trade, or (at worst) use it as a base from which to attack British shipping in south China. To head off those disasters, they authorized Lord Wellesley, the governor-general in Bengal, to send a naval fleet from India to preempt the feared arrival of French troops.7

  The East India Company supercargoes balked. Writing to Wellesley and the Admiralty, they warned of “dangerous consequences” if the British should threaten naval action in Chinese waters. They, far better than their countrymen in India and England, understood that any interference with Macao would not just involve the British and Portuguese, but could easily draw in the Chinese government as well. However, their letters did not arrive in time, and a fleet of six British warships arrived all the same in March 1802. When the Portuguese refused to allow the fleet to anchor at Macao to blockade the city peacefully, its commander threatened to attack.

  The supercargoes tried to stand in the way. They were adamant that conflict with the Chinese must be avoided at all costs (the prospect of losing their trade, the only reason for their presence in Asia, terrified them). Writing to the Company’s directors in London, they warned that “the only and invariable rule of Conduct, to be observed [in China] . . . was on no occasion to give offense to the Chinese government.”8 Nevertheless, against their protests the British naval commander insisted on trying to open negotiations. In a message to the governor-general in Canton, he explained that the British fleet was peaceful and had only come to protect Macao against the aggressions of the French. The governor-general did not believe him—and neither did the Jiaqing emperor, who after he read the governor-general’s report from Canton called the British commander’s justification “lying words.” “We do not have to lend any credence to these comments,” said Jiaqing, “because the intention of the English was no more than to dissemble their project to take the town.”9 He ordered the governor-general to ensure that Britain’s warships were sent away, and the governor-general accordingly shut off the fleet’s access to food supplies and fresh water.

  Tensions would have risen from there, but much to the relief of the traders in Canton, the news soon arrived from Europe of the signing of the Treaty of Amiens—which ended, at least temporarily, the hostilities between Britain and France. The British fleet stood down and, after waiting for the monsoon to shift, sailed back to India and left Canton and Macao in peace.10

  When the Macartney mission had failed in 1793, Macartney himself wasn’t the only one personally disappointed by the outcome. His secretary, George Staunton, had agreed to come along largely because he expected to stay on afterward as the British minister at Beijing. In accepting that prestigious role, Staunton had turned down a less prestigious but more lucrative position offered to him at the same time, to be president of the “select committee” of the East India Company’s supercargoes at Canton. The president of the select committee, also known as the “taipan” or chief, was the top-ranking Company figure in Canton, a situation that would be certain to make him a fortune and likely buy him a seat in Parliament when he returned home. But when faced with the choice between money and prestige, Staunton had gambled on prestige and lost. After Qianlong refused to allow the British to station a permanent diplomat at his capital, George Staunton had to return home to England as empty-handed as Macartney, regretting that he hadn’t taken the position in Canton instead. His only hope was that a shift in Company personnel at the factory, or a second attempt at an embassy, might eventually call him back to China again.

  It was not to be. Staunton suffered a stroke soon after his return home that left him partially paralyzed, unable to take part any longer in public life. His dreams of a Ch
ina fortune and a seat in Parliament were shattered. But at least he still had his son, the boy who had spoken to the emperor in Chinese. After that audience, Staunton had decided the boy’s linguistic ability might give him some prospects in the future, so when the mission was passing through Canton on its way out of China he had hired two Chinese servants to come back with him to England and continue young George’s instruction at home. After the stroke, he pinned all of his thwarted plans and hopes on the boy, relying on him to do what the father no longer could. And so in 1798, after more than a decade with young George at his side, traveling the world with him and molding the boy in his own image, Staunton put his unhappy child back onto the Hindostan to sail once again for Canton—this time all alone—knowing that he would probably never see him again.11

  To judge by his letters on the voyage that followed, the younger George Staunton seems to have had no real notion of why he was going back to China. He followed his father’s instructions dutifully, though. He brought his Chinese servants along with him so he could study for a few hours each day on the ship, insisting that they should only speak to him in Chinese, and his reading ability progressed to the point that he could start working through the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the classics of Chinese literature. He learned enough, furthermore, to understand that there were multiple dialects at work—the residents of Canton all spoke Cantonese, which was unintelligible to someone who spoke the Mandarin dialect of the court. If he was going to use his Chinese to talk to officials, he realized, his servants from Canton would not be much help.

  Staunton was eager to please his father, who had set him on the task of learning Chinese, but he admitted in letters home that everyone thought it was a waste of time. The supercargoes who accompanied him on the Hindostan, he wrote, “express a very contemptible idea of the use and advantage of the knowledge of the Chinese language to the Company’s servants in China.”12 It was a conservative community within the British factory, which did not value those who broke with past practice—especially if what they were doing might risk good relations with the Hong merchants and the officials in Canton. So he worried about being alienated from his colleagues. “I hope to succeed as well as any other,” he wrote, “and as to my knowledge of the Chinese . . . [it] will certainly tend to make the situation somewhat pleasanter or somewhat less pleasant to me than to others, which [circumstances] only will determine.”13 He was, however, not at all eager to learn the answer to that question, and actively dreaded his arrival. In July the captain told him they should reach Canton in about five more months. “I am, perhaps, the person on board, the least anxious for that event,” he told his parents.14

  When young George Staunton, now eighteen years old, finally did arrive in the little world of the Canton factory compound on January 22, 1800, the door opened onto what he would later describe as “the most gloomy period of my life.”15 With help from Lord Macartney, his father had managed to finagle him a position at the East India Company’s factory as a writer. It was the lowest of jobs available, poorly paid and extremely boring (consisting mostly of weighing crates of tea and copying documents), but offering significant prospects for advancement. The positions at Canton were the richest patronage positions the East India Company in London had to offer, and even the lowly writerships normally went only to sons of the Company’s powerful directors.16 Despite young George’s nascent skills in Chinese—in which the Company showed no interest whatsoever—it had taken all of the elder Staunton’s social capital to get his son the job.17

  It was a bleak life for such a sheltered young man. As an only child educated mostly by his father, George had rarely associated with anyone his own age—or for that matter, with anyone outside of his own home. Even his one brief period of study at Cambridge prior to his departure for Canton had given him little social contact because his parents moved there so he could continue living with them instead of in his college; in any case, his father soon pulled him from the university in anger because the faculty didn’t give his son a prize in Latin. Now Staunton was severed for the first time from his domineering father—who sent a long, wistful letter after him promising the boy that all this was for his own good, that he should only stay as long as necessary to come home with a fortune, and that he could always return earlier if he just couldn’t bear it. Not only was he somehow to make a home in a strange country, but among the rowdy bachelor luxuries of the Company quarters—the drinking, the boyish frolicking, the long dinner parties that lasted until dawn—he felt completely out of place. The “coarseness and freedom of manners” of the other Englishmen in Canton embarrassed him. Also, despite his father being a baronet, he was not of the same social circle as the sons of directors, which made him something of a pariah from the outset. As he later put it sadly, “I am fully conscious that I was not at first generally popular.”18

  The work quickly consumed him, though—endless copying of bills, letters, diaries, dispatches, and consultation books, and attending at the weighing of teas—so there was little time to brood about what to make of his life. But when he did brood, he had three primary goals, two of which were straightforward and the other less so. The straightforward ones were, first, to learn the work and do it well enough that he could eventually get promoted into the ranks of the supercargoes, which would boost his salary significantly. And second, because he did not relish the idea of waiting patiently for such a promotion, he wanted to find some means of alternate income, separate from his Company job. The writer position paid very little and he didn’t expect to be able to go home again until he had made so much money that he would never have to come back.

  There weren’t many ways to make money on the side if you were a Company writer. If you had the connections, you could act as the Canton agent for one of the major private firms in India that sent cargoes to Canton. (Though the East India Company had a monopoly on direct trade between England and China, as well as between England and India, its monopoly did not apply to the third leg of the triangle, the so-called country trade between India and China.) Another way to generate income without taking time away from your Company duties was to loan money to the Hong merchants, who always needed capital and paid between 15 and 18 percent interest. But Staunton had neither connections in India nor large sums of capital to invest. So in hopes of accelerating his return home to England, he asked his father to send him as much money as he could, even to borrow more from friends to add to the sum, so that young George could invest it with the Hong merchants. Specifically, he hoped that his father might be able to raise £10,000, which would be equivalent to nearly a hundred years of his starting salary.19

  Staunton’s other goal, the less straightforward one, was to figure out what to do with his Chinese language ability. He admitted that it was unlikely to help in any trade-related capacity—the supercargoes all told him that, repeatedly. He learned with disappointment that there was an Englishman already in Canton, a private merchant by the name of Beale, who could speak Cantonese fluently but didn’t derive any advantage from it; of course, he couldn’t speak Mandarin, or read and write as Staunton was learning to do, but still his example was uninspiring. Despairing of any encouragement from the Company, Staunton banked everything on the hope that Great Britain would send another embassy to Beijing—the one instance in which he could imagine all of his hard work paying off. On that count he was pleased to learn of the death of Qianlong, because the beginning of Jiaqing’s proper reign seemed like a fine time for Britain to try again to send an ambassador, and he hoped that Jiaqing might be more favorable toward foreigners than his father had been. Nothing materialized, however, and the Company—as it always had—worried that an embassy might cause more harm than good. One prominent director held simply that it was “most advisable to let the government of China alone.”20

  It was the tensions around the Royal Navy presence in Chinese waters that gave Staunton his first opening. Just a few months after his arrival, local Chinese authorities ordered the a
rrest of several sailors from a British man-of-war, HMS Providence, for having shot at a boat full of Chinese men, one of whom appeared likely to die from his wounds. The captain of the Providence, John Dilkes, refused to hand his men over and said that they had only been defending their ship—the Chinese they shot were thieves, he insisted, who had come up alongside the Providence at night to cut the ship’s anchor cable. Not only did Dilkes refuse to hand over his men, but he demanded that the Chinese arrest the thieves and punish them.

  Under normal circumstances, the supercargoes would probably have grudgingly followed past practice—which was, in short, to hand over the ostensibly guilty parties in order to preserve the trade. The starkest precedent was in 1784 when a British ship had fired a salute that accidentally killed two Chinese. After much protest, the gunner was finally handed over by the Company and executed. The supercargoes regretted the outcome, but they were in no position to push the issue, and the Chinese authorities had the power to shut down their trade. This time, however, the accused sailors were from a navy ship, and Captain Dilkes made it very clear that he was in no way answerable to the supercargoes; as a “King’s officer,” he told them, he “could not . . . submit to their interference or mediation.”21 This was, as he saw it, an issue between the king of England, represented by himself, and the emperor of China. The Company had no say in the matter.