Jiaqing, however, made it clear to his ministers that the suppression of pirates was a matter of imperial prestige. As he saw it, even a small reliance on foreign aid would be an embarrassment, tantamount to admitting that the dynasty was unable to secure its own territory. In March 1805, after learning that the British were sending gunships to protect their merchant vessels against pirate raids as they sailed up to Canton, he wrote in a scathing edict that “if foreigners get plundered by pirates after they have already entered Macao—a port in our internal waterways—then how can we not be a laughingstock to them?”40 He ordered the governor-general to redouble his efforts to strengthen the region’s coastal defenses and discipline the imperial soldiers “so the pirate traitors will take themselves far away, the foreigners will have nothing to fear, and the maritime border will be peaceful.” In the same edict, he referred to a recent letter from King George in which the British monarch had said vaguely that he would be glad to provide any services the dynasty might require. Jiaqing took that as a veiled offer of military assistance, which he found insulting. “Apparently he has heard of occasional instances of robbery on the ocean and thinks we might need his military power to join with our own,” Jiaqing wrote. “Do we now have to borrow help from vassal states to eliminate pirates?!” Nine months later, in a response to the king, he told him bluntly, “We have no need for the services of your state.”41
Nevertheless, the pride of the emperor in Beijing and the pragmatism of the officials on the ground in Canton—who actually had to deal with the enormous pirate problem up close—were two different things. Jiaqing had seen only paintings of European naval ships, but many of the officials in Canton had been on board them and were perfectly aware of how useful they might be against the pirates. Since those officials were ultimately answerable to the emperor, however, any direct (or at least recorded) effort on their part to recruit military aid from foreigners risked punishment from Beijing if it should be revealed. So while they did begin asking for help, politics dictated that they be secretive and informal about doing so. The foreigners they approached, however, wanted neither secrecy nor informality; they wanted credit for their aid, and they wanted leverage for commerce.
By the time Shi Yang reached the peak of her power in 1809, relations between the Chinese and Western traders were back on decently strong footing again after the mess of the Drury incident. (Drury, incidentally, in the course of trying to justify his invasion of Macao, claimed at one point that he had been sent to help China fight pirates—a claim that Jiaqing called “utter nonsense.”)42 In August 1809, pirate forces put chase to five different American ships in the vicinity of Macao and captured a Portuguese vessel belonging to the governor of Timor.43 That same month, the Hong merchants in Canton privately purchased a little English brig of 108 tons, the Elizabeth, which they planned to outfit for pirate suppression at their own expense.44 They also commissioned a foreign ship, the three-hundred-ton Mercury, and staffed it with fifty American volunteers, though it was too small to be very effective.45 The new governor-general, a man named Bailing, found himself in an intensely awkward position. His predecessor had just been sent into exile by Jiaqing for being too gentle with the British. He knew he was supposed to maintain a hard line against foreigners. Yet he also knew that their help against the pirates could be extremely useful.
A promising opportunity materialized in September 1809 with the arrival of the sixty-four-gun St. Albans, a Royal Navy ship of the line on convoy duty escorting a fleet of twelve East Indiamen. The captain of the St. Albans was Francis Austen, an officer of great accomplishments (whose talents nevertheless paled in comparison to those of his younger sister, Jane Austen). A few weeks after his arrival in Canton, a mid-level official visited Austen at the British factory and asked him informally, on behalf of the governor-general, if he would organize and lead a naval campaign against the pirates. Given that the Company’s ships wouldn’t be needing his services until their return voyage several months hence, Austen said he was open to the idea. But he did have two conditions: first, that he be allowed to sail freely to and from Canton without a pass (which was normally required of foreign warships), and second—the sticking point—that since he was in effect being asked to kill Chinese subjects, he needed the governor-general to give him a formal written invitation. But he was strongly inclined to help, and even offered advice on how to better equip Qing naval junks to make them more effective (chauvinistic advice it was, though: along with outfitting the junks with Western guns, he also recommended they be manned by European sailors instead of Chinese).46
An appointment was set for Captain Austen to meet in person three days later with Governor-General Bailing at the hoppo’s offices just outside the factory compound. Austen was not happy about what ensued. Expecting courtesy appropriate to the magnitude of the favor that was being asked of him and his country’s service, he complained afterward that he was instead made to wait “nearly half an hour in a close dirty kind of lobby, exposed to the stare of every blackguard who could squeeze himself into the passage leading to it.”47 Bailing never showed up. Instead, he asked the hoppo to meet with Austen in his place, which Austen refused, wanting to deal only with the imperial governor-general rather than a mere customs official. Austen finally left the hoppo’s offices in a huff, demanding that if the governor-general wanted to see him, he should come find him in the British factory. Given that he had no idea of the pressure Bailing was under from a watchful emperor in Beijing who considered foreign aid a sign of weakness, Austen simply chalked up the governor-general’s failure to attend the meeting to “imbecility, and a struggle between pride and the conviction of his own inability to arrest the progress of the pirates.”48 There would be no follow-up.
The Qing forces did, in the end, bring the pirates to heel without significant help from outside, and they did so on their own terms. The way they accomplished this was a sharp contrast to the forceful military suppression of the White Lotus, with its armies in the tens of thousands, in that it invoked the other major tool in the dynasty’s arsenal: namely, forgiveness, and the lure of a peaceful and settled life in China. Once the White Lotus war was over, the government began shifting resources into developing stronger naval capacities on the coast near Canton—which, in conjunction with coastal embargoes to break the pirates’ supply lines, started to gain traction by late 1809. Newly built and freshly armed government fleets fought pitched battles with the pirates on water, sometimes involving more than a hundred ships and lasting for days. Such measures alone, however, could not prevail. “The pirates are too powerful,” as one Chinese admiral wrote plaintively, “we cannot master them by our arms; the pirates are many, but we are few . . . we are unable to engage with this overpowering force.”49
It was the other side of the dynasty’s strategy that ultimately prevailed. To complement its military effort, the provincial government put up proclamations offering amnesty to pirates who surrendered peacefully. It was an attractive offer for outlaws who otherwise faced only the prospect of execution if they should be captured. As embargoes made life on the water more difficult, food supplies became scarce. (The English prisoner Glasspoole had nothing but boiled caterpillars and rice for an entire three-week stretch, and described his captors eagerly devouring the rats in the ship’s hold.)50 Combined with the government’s steadily increasing military presence on both sea and land, fractures began to appear in the large pirate alliance. Lesser captains who turned themselves in were quickly rewarded by the government and then unleashed on their former comrades.
By the end of 1809, under growing pressure, a rift broke out between the leaders of the two largest fleets—the red fleet under Shi Yang’s adopted son Zhang Bao, and the black fleet under a rival. Fearing an attack, the head of the black fleet drew up a petition of surrender to ask the government for clemency. “We now live in a very populous age,” he wrote; “some of us could not agree with their relations, and were driven out like noxious weeds. Some after having
tried all they could, without being able to provide for themselves, at last joined bad society. Some lost their property by shipwrecks; some withdrew into this watery empire to escape from punishment.” In the familiar lament of the time, he claimed that his men had become pirates only because a crumbling society had driven them into a life of crime. And now, like wayward children, they wanted to come back home. “It was from necessity,” he went on, “that the laws of the empire were violated, and the merchants robbed of their goods. . . . But now we will avoid these perils, leave our connections, and desert our comrades; we will make our submission.”51
Alarmed at the prospect of the black fleet’s leader joining the government’s forces against her, Shi Yang took the government’s offer of amnesty herself. In February 1810, she landed at Canton with a small number of women and children from the red fleet, and met with Bailing at his offices to negotiate a surrender. Bailing, according to one account of the meeting, told her he was “commanded by the humanity of his Majesty’s government not to kill but to pardon you.”52 Zhang Bao, Shi Yang’s adopted son and the commander of the red fleet, turned himself in shortly afterward. The Qing officials welcomed him with gifts of food and money for his men, and—rather than being arrested or cut into pieces—he was made a lieutenant in the imperial navy. Some of his men joined him in service to the government, while others were given money to renounce their past crimes and resettle themselves into new lives on land, welcomed back into the imperial fold.
Thus, in contrast to the scorched-earth destruction of the White Lotus, the Qing government brought the pirates back under control largely by means of aggressive persuasion. Rather than mounting enormous armies and militias as it had done in the land war in central China, the dynasty addressed the pirate threat on the coast with only modest improvements to its navy, relying more heavily on embargoes and offers of amnesty that were far more cost-effective. Zhang Bao would continue to serve the dynasty as a loyal officer until his death in 1822. Shi Yang, the prostitute who had risen to command a fleet of seventy thousand pirates, would live out the rest of her life as a civilian in Canton, running a gambling house and living in peace until she came to her natural death in 1844 at the age of sixty.53
. . .
By 1810, the empire was back on a much more secure footing than in the final years of Qianlong’s reign. Jiaqing’s chosen commanders had suppressed the rebellion of the White Lotus in the interior and calmed the problem of coastal pirates on the periphery. They had demonstrated the continued ability of the huge Qing government bureaucracy, given sufficient time, to adapt to new threats and defeat them. Internal security aside, there were no serious border conflicts with the empire’s neighbors, and after the brief problem with the fleet under Admiral Drury—which, notably, had ended because the British feared provoking a war with China—there was peace with the foreign traders who called at Canton as well. Jiaqing had slowed down the spiraling decline of his father’s final days, overseeing at least a partial return of order. It was far from perfect, but there was room for optimism.
However, a more global recalibration of power was under way. In the years when China’s government was developing its capacities to deal with internal rebellions, mobilizing gigantic land armies to fight deep-rooted insurgents in the interior, Great Britain had been focused ruthlessly on developing its sea power. Both empires expended huge amounts of money on military actions during this time—China spending as much as two hundred million taels on its eight-year White Lotus suppression, Great Britain spending the equivalent of about twelve times that on its twenty-two-year war with France—but Britain, even though it ran up a monstrous national debt that reflected more than two-thirds of its war expenses, would come out of its contest in 1815 strengthened and invigorated.54 By the time Britain defeated Napoleon it had doubled the size of the Royal Navy, building it into the most powerful maritime force in the world, a tool it could easily repurpose for the control of a vast and profitable waterborne empire spanning much of the globe (and to which many new strategic outposts had been added in the war’s course). By 1820, the British Empire would exercise control over a quarter of the world’s population, coming nearly to rival the size of China.55 Meanwhile, China, battling enemies within its own borders and along its own coast, losing much of its war funding to corruption, would, though likewise victorious, emerge from this era weakened rather than strengthened.
Victory over internal rebellions, moreover, held scarcely the same unifying prestige as victory over a foreign enemy, and the Qing dynasty did not, after the suppression of the White Lotus, enjoy the same rising faith in its national strength that Britain did after defeating Napoleon. Quite the opposite, in fact. The banner of rebellion against the Manchus had flown for eight years by the end of the White Lotus war, then continued under Shi Yang’s fleets, damaging imperial prestige and giving encouragement to other disaffected groups within the empire. Furthermore, the economic costs of fighting these wars—especially the White Lotus—would significantly hinder the Qing government going forward.
As the full accounts of the White Lotus war started to come clear, Jiaqing slashed the budgets of the military and instituted strict cost-control measures to prevent a repeat of the widespread embezzlement that plagued the army under Qianlong and Heshen.56 Such measures would stanch the dangerous bleeding of government funds, but they also ensured that the Qing dynasty’s military would in the future have less funding, wield older weapons, and suffer from lower morale than it had enjoyed back when Qianlong was at his prime. The dynasty’s forces were still the preeminent military power in Asia, and they still had deep resources on which they could rely in times of emergency, but by 1810 the emergencies seemed to be over. In expectation that the coming era would be one of peace for the empire, and facing an economic reality that was bleaker than he would have hoped, Jiaqing effectively mortgaged the future improvement of China’s military to preserve the near-term stability of its government.
The British actually did, in the end, offer a more selfless assistance to help China fight its pirates. In 1810, Lord Minto in India prepared a squadron of warships and a detachment of artillery that he proposed to send to China to work with the Company’s ships in destroying Shi Yang’s fleets. By the time his offer was received in Canton, however, it was no longer needed. Bailing, the governor-general, was busy negotiating the surrender of the remaining pirates, and the governor below him responded to Lord Minto on August 12, 1810, that the pirates were “separated, exterminated and at rest: the whole number is reduced to profound tranquility, so that there is no need for assistance.”57
There was peace in the South China Sea, no help needed from the Royal Navy. However, a chance for meaningful cooperation between two empires with deeply shared interests in the prosperity of trade at Canton had been lost. Jiaqing could go forward in confidence that his dynasty’s military forces were self-sufficient and had no need for outside aid in strengthening themselves to maintain the security of south China. The British, for their part, could go on believing that Jiaqing was barely able to keep control over the mutinous elements within his own empire, but that he was too proud and oblivious to ask for their help.
CHAPTER 5
Points of Entry
While George Staunton was home in England on leave in 1809, he began to lobby for a second embassy to Beijing. In a letter to the chairman of the East India Company, he proposed that Britain should send a royal ambassador to repair the damage Admiral Drury had caused when he invaded Macao. Specifically, Staunton thought the new ambassador should reassure the Jiaqing emperor that the British government had never authorized Drury’s actions and did not sanction hostility of any kind toward China, an empire with which it wanted only “the most amicable and mutually beneficial relations.”1 The ambassador could even be provided with British government documents translated into Chinese, he suggested, to prove his case and restore the Jiaqing emperor’s good opinion of Great Britain. Even if that were all the ambassador accomplished,
Staunton said he would count the mission as a success. As for other possibilities—the expansion of trade into new ports, exchanges of ambassadors, and so on—there was no way to tell what might come; it depended on the negotiating skills of whomever was sent. And at that point, Staunton’s roundabout proposal finally made it clear who he thought that person should be. If the king’s ambassador, he wrote, “should happily have the opportunity, such as never yet has been afforded, of conversing unreservedly and without the aid of Interpreters, with those who influence the Emperor’s Councils . . . it will not be too much to expect the most important and beneficial results.” The key words there were “without the aid of interpreters”: the ambassador, he believed, should be himself.
The proposal met with interest. Staunton had a well-connected patron named John Barrow, an old friend of his father’s who had been along on the Macartney mission and was now second secretary of the Admiralty, who tipped him off secretly that he was “almost certain” to be sent to Beijing as a royal ambassador and should expect to be summoned immediately.2 Sure enough, Staunton soon found himself called in for a meeting with the chairman of the Court of Directors at the East India Company’s headquarters on Leadenhall Street in London. Swelling with pride, he entered the august edifice of the East India House, newly expanded to represent the Company’s rising status as a territorial power—in he went, past the fluted Ionic columns of the sixty-foot entrance, passing below the figure of Britannia riding a lion (flanked by a smaller figure of Asia, riding a camel), into the smoky, candlelit warren of hallways and stairwells within—eager to hear the news he had been hoping for since his parents first put him on the Hindostan back to Canton.3
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