The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  To Rob

  Preface

  On 8 November 2010, the British prime minister, David Cameron, led a substantial embassy to China. He was accompanied by four of his most senior ministers, and fifty or so high-ranking executives, all hoping to sign millions of pounds’ worth of business deals with China (for products ranging from whisky to jets, from pigs to sewage-stabilization services). To anyone familiar with the history of Sino-British relations, the enterprise would have brought back some unhappy memories. Britain’s first two trade-hungry missions to China (in 1793 and 1816) ended in conflict and frustration when their ambassadors – proud Britons, both – declined to prostrate themselves before the Qing emperor. These failures led indirectly to decades of intermittent wars between the two countries, as Britain abandoned negotiation and resorted instead to gunboat diplomacy to open Chinese markets to its goods – chief among which was opium.

  Despite happy snaps of David Cameron smiling and walking along the Great Wall in the company of schoolchildren, the 2010 visit was not without its difficulties. On 9 November, as Cameron and company arrived to attend their official welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square, a Chinese official allegedly asked them to remove their Remembrance Day poppies, on the grounds that the flowers evoked painful memories of the Opium War fought between Britain and China from 1839 to 1842.

  Someone in China’s official welcoming party had, it seemed, put considerable effort into feeling offended on behalf of his or her 1.3 billion countrymen (for one thing, Remembrance Day poppies are clearly modelled on field, not opium, poppies). Parts of the Chinese Internet – which, since it came into existence some fifteen years ago, has been home to an oversensitive nationalism – responded angrily. ‘As rulers of the greatest empire in human history,’ remembered one netizen, ‘the British were involved in, or set off, a great many immoral wars, such as the Opium Wars that we Chinese are so familiar with.’ ‘Whose face is the English prime minister slapping, when he insists so loftily on wearing his poppy?’ asked one blogger. ‘How did the English invade China? With opium. How did the English become rich and strong? Through opium.’

  In Britain, meanwhile, the incident was quickly spun to the credit of the country’s leadership: our steadfast ministers, it was reported, had refused to bow to the Chinese request. ‘We informed them the poppies meant a great deal to us,’ said a member of the Prime Minister’s party, ‘and we would be wearing them all the same.’ (In recent years, Remembrance Day activities have become infected by political humbug, as right-wing rags lambast public figures caught without poppies in their lapels. In November 2009, the then-opposition leader, David Cameron, and the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, used the commemoration to engage in PR brinkmanship, both vying to be photographed laying wreaths for the war dead.) In certain quarters of the British press, the incident was read as an echo of the 1793 and 1816 stand-offs, with plucky little Britain again refusing to kowtow to the imperious demands of the Chinese giant.

  Behind all this, however, reactions to the incident were more nuanced. For one thing, beneath the stirring British headlines of ‘David Cameron rejects Chinese call to remove “offensive” poppies’, it proved hard to substantiate who, exactly, in the Chinese government had objected. Beyond the occasional expression of outrage, as in the examples above, the Chinese cyber-sphere and press did not actually seem particularly bothered, with netizens and journalists calmly discussing the symbolic significance of British poppy-wearing, and even bemoaning the fact that China lacked similar commemorations of her war dead. The wider public response in Britain also appeared restrained. Reader comments on coverage of the incident in Britain’s normally jingoistic Daily Mail were capable of empathy and even touches of guilt. ‘Just because [poppy-wearing] is important in Britain doesn’t mean it means the same the world over. I’m sure some of us in Britain are highly ignorant of the importance of Chinese history in China – especially . . . the Opium War . . . no wonder they are a bit sensitive about it’.

  David Cameron’s poppy controversy was only the most recent example of the antagonisms, misunderstandings and distortions that the Opium War has generated over the past hundred and seventy years. Since it was fought, politicians, soldiers, missionaries, writers and drug smugglers inside and outside China have been retelling and reinterpreting the conflict to serve their own purposes. In China, it has been publicly demonized as the first emblematic act of Western aggression: as the beginning of a national struggle against a foreign conspiracy to humiliate the country with drugs and violence. In nations like Britain, meanwhile, the waging of the war transformed prevailing perceptions of the Middle Kingdom: China became, in Western eyes, an arrogant, fossilized empire cast beneficially into the modern world by gunboat diplomacy. The reality of the conflict – a tragicomedy of overworked emperors, mendacious generals and pragmatic collaborators – was far more chaotically interesting. This book is the story of the extraordinary war that has been haunting Sino-Western relations for almost two centuries.

  Contents

  Maps

  A Note About Chinese Names and Romanization

  Introduction

  One: Opium and China

  Two: Daoguang’s Decision

  Three: Canton Spring

  Four: Opium and Lime

  Five: The First Shots

  Six: ‘An Explanatory Declaration’

  Seven: Sweet-Talk and Sea-Slug

  Eight: Qishan’s Downfall

  Nine: The Siege of Canton

  Ten: The UnEnglished Englishman

  Eleven: Xiamen and Zhoushan

  Twelve: A Winter in Suzhou

  Thirteen: The Fight for Qing China

  Fourteen: The Treaty of Nanjing

  Fifteen: Peace and War

  Sixteen: The Yellow Peril

  Seventeen: The National Disease

  Eighteen: Communist Conspiracies

  Nineteen: Conclusion

  Principal Characters

  Timeline

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Maps

  1. The Contemporary People’s Republic of China

  2. The Qing Empire

  3. Overview of Theatres of the Opium War, 1839–42

  4. Canton and its Surroundings

  5. The East Coast Campaigns (1841–42)

  The Contemporary People’s Republic of China

  The Qing Empire

  Overview of Theatres of the Opium War, 1839–42

  Canton and its Surroundings

  The East Coast Campaigns (1841–42)

  A Note About Chinese Names and Romanization

  In Chinese names, the surname is given first, followed by the given name. Therefore, in the case of Liang Qichao, Liang is the surname and Qichao the given name.

  I have used the pinyin system of romanization throughout, except for a few spellings best known outside China in another form, such as Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi in pinyin). In addition, I have occasionally used the old, nineteenth-century anglophone spellings of some Chinese place names (for example Canton, for the city known in Mandarin Chinese as Guangzhou) to reduce confusion resulting from more than one name being cited in the main text and in quotations from primary sources, and also because anglophone historians still call the pre-1839 rules governing European trade with China ‘the Canton system’.

  In pinyin, transliterated Chinese is pronounced as in English, apart from the following sounds:

  VOWELS

  a (when the only letter following a consonant): a as in ah

  ai: eye

  ao: ow as in how

  e: uh

  ei: ay as in say

  en: en as in happen

  eng: u
ng as in sung

  i (as the only letter following most consonants): e as in me

  i (when following c, ch, s, sh, z, zh): er as in driver

  ia: yah

  ian: yen

  ie: yeah

  iu: yo as in yo-yo

  o: o as in stork

  ong: oong

  ou: o as in so

  u (when following most consonants): oo as in loot

  u (when following j, q, x, y): ü as the German ü

  ua: wah

  uai: why

  uan: wu-an

  uang: wu-ang

  ui: way

  uo: u-woah

  yan: yen

  yi: ee as in feed

  CONSONANTS

  c: ts as in bits

  g: g as in good

  q: ch as in choose

  x: a slightly more sibilant version of sh as in sheep

  z: ds as in woods

  zh: j as in job

  Introduction

  In 1832, a lord of the King’s bedchamber by the name of William Napier lost his seat as a Scottish peer and started looking for gainful employment. Within a year, something had come up: Superintendent of British trade in China – a new government position (at an attractive, ambassadorial-level £6,000 per annum) to replace the old Select Committee of the East India Company, whose monopoly over the China trade had just been abolished. Though Napier immediately made a play for the post, the Prime Minister, Lord Grey, stalled him on the grounds that he needed Cabinet approval. For on paper, Napier was not the strongest of applicants. He was a man of many talents: navigation; sheep-farming (on which subject he was a published authority); bagpipe-mending; playing the flute. Unpicking delicate diplomatic wrangles with one of the largest and most intricately cultured empires in the world was not, however, part of his skill-set.

  Yet Grey was not overwhelmed by more suitable candidates. The post had already been turned down by a colonial stalwart and future Governor of India, Lord Auckland, who had named Canton – the southern city in Guandong province to which European traders had been restricted since 1760 – ‘perhaps the least pleasant residence for a European on the face of the earth’.1 Britain’s relationship with China’s current overlords, the Manchu Qing dynasty, should have been straightforward. Britain wanted tea, and other desirables such as silk and porcelain; the Qing were happy to sell. The trade was thoroughly regulated. The dynasty’s fourth emperor, Qianlong, had in 1760 limited foreign commerce to a monopolistic Canton guild of merchants known to Europeans as the ‘Hong’ (Cantonese for company): purchases and sales, transit taxes, complaints, customs tariffs – everything was to go first through the Hong, who might pass outstanding queries on to the local official in charge of trade. He might, in turn, forward matters on to the provincial governor; and from there, eventually, they might move on to the emperor in Beijing. Rather than put themselves to the trouble of finding lodgings and warehouses in the city of Canton itself, China’s government ruled that European traders were to make themselves at home through the trading season (roughly September to January) in a row of ‘factories’ leased to them by the Hong. Situated deliberately outside Canton’s thirty-foot-high city walls, the factories offered merchants around fifteen acres of living and warehouse space, overlooking the Pearl River that led up to the city from the sea. Outside these months, the foreigners were to withdraw to the Portuguese-leased enclave of Macao, about seventy miles away, or return home. The Europeans, in sum, were at all times to be kept at a careful, bureaucratic distance from the authorities and populace.

  But if relations between the Chinese government and foreign merchants were wary, the true source of bad feeling was not bureaucracy – it was economics. By the 1780s, Britain was running up a serious trade deficit: while China’s government was quite happy to service the growing British tea addiction, it seemed to want little except silver in return. As East India Company profits failed to offset the costs of rule in India, British tea-drinkers pushed Asia trade figures further into the red. From 1780 to 1790, the combined returns of the India and China trades failed to make even a £2 million dent in the £28 million debt left over from the conquest of India.2

  By the 1820s, the British thought they had found a perfect solution to their difficulty: Indian opium, for which Chinese consumers had increasingly developed a taste over the preceding couple of decades. Between 1752 and 1800, a net 105 million silver dollars (approximately £26.25 million) flowed into China; between 1808 and 1856, 384 million travelled in the opposite direction, the balance apparently tipped by booming opium imports. From 1800 to 1818, the average annual traffic held steady at around 4,000 chests (each chest containing around 140 pounds of opium); by 1831, it was nearing 20,000. After 1833, when the Free Trade lobby terminated the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade, the market was flooded by private merchants hungry for tea and profits. Opium – in ever greater quantities – was the barter. By the close of the decade, sales had more than doubled again.3

  The greater part of the profits fell into the pockets of the British government, whose agents in Asia controlled opium production in Bengal. The East India Company did not publicly dirty its hands by bringing the drug to China. It commissioned and managed plantations of opium poppies across hundreds of thousands of Indian acres. It took care of the processing (the painstaking lancing of individual poppy seed pods for raw opium gum, setting and drying the gum in trays, pressing it into cakes, and coating these in crushed, dried poppy stems and leaves). Finally, it oversaw the packing of the drug into mango-wood chests, its shipping to Calcutta, and auctioning off. At that moment, the Company washed its hands of it, letting private merchants sail for the Chinese coast, where they anchored off the island of Lintin, at the mouth of the Pearl River. Eager Chinese wholesalers would then use silver to buy certificates from private trading offices in Canton and exchange them for opium; this silver would in turn secure teas and silks for the English market.

  On the face of it, the arrangement was as tidy as the earlier silver–tea trade: one side having something to sell, the other having something it wanted in exchange. But anxious members of the Qing government were no happier to lose silver than their British counterparts had been a few decades earlier, and were fretting about the corrupting effects of a booming drug culture. After a handful of attempted crackdowns in the eighteenth century, the Qing state’s war on opium began in earnest in the 1830s, and would continue – intermittently, inconsistently – over the next hundred years. Britain’s private opium-sellers were also dissatisfied. For India could provide as much opium as China would take and they resented the fact that the Qing’s trade controls had pushed them into the black economy. They craved a more respectable image, to establish commerce on a footing ‘equally advantageous and honourable’, and wanted a lawful way in to the China market, either through the legalization of opium, or through the opening of ports to other British goods – and preferably both, to which end they began, through the 1830s, impudently edging the trade further north up the coast.4

  These merchants were for the most part a crew of buccaneering money-makers, full of mockery for the empire outside whose walls they were held (or at any rate for the unrepresentative southern fragment that they glimpsed at Canton). They objected to what they saw as its pompous, often venal bureaucracy; its determination to keep them and their trade at a prudent remove; its antiquity, its smells, its absence of Christianity and decent water-closets; the offensive Chinese habit of staring at foreigners; the arrogant Chinese failure to stare at foreigners; and so on. The Chinese, as summarized by James Matheson, a Scottish pillar of the smuggling community and co-founder with William Jardine of the great opium house Jardine–Mathesons, were ‘a people characterized by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit and obstinacy . . . It has been the policy of this extraordinary people to shroud themselves and all belonging to them in mystery impenetrable . . . [to] exhibit a spirit of exclusiveness on a grand scale.’5

  Matheson and his collea
gues were joined in their impatience by the Protestant missionary community. The London Missionary Society had sent out their first man to south China, Robert Morrison, in 1807. Not long after his arrival, he had been asked whether he hoped to have any spiritual impact on the country: ‘No,’ he responded, ‘but I expect God will’.6 Thirty years later, he and his colleagues found themselves unable either to name or enumerate more than a handful of converts. Ill, depressed, stalled on the edge of the mainland, frustrated missionary observers of the 1830s spoke a pure dialect of imperialist paternalism: ‘China still proclaims her proud and unapproachable supremacy and disdainfully rejects all pretensions in any other nation to be considered as her equal. This feeling of contemptible vanity Christianity alone will effectually destroy. Where other means have failed, the gospel will triumph; this will fraternize the Chinese with the rest of mankind . . . [linking] them in sympathy with other portions of their species, and thus add to the triumphs it has achieved.’7 The missionaries became natural allies of the smugglers: when they first arrived on the coast of China, they docked among opium traders on the island of Lintin; they interpreted for them in exchange for passages up the coast, distributing tracts while the drug was taken onshore; and in the Chinese Repository, Canton’s leading English-language publication, they shared a forum for spreading their views on the urgent need to open China, by whatever means necessary. By the 1830s, merchants and missionaries alike favoured violence. ‘[W]hen an opponent supports his argument with physical force, [the Chinese] can be crouching, gentle, and even kind’, observed Karl Gützlaff, a stout Pomeranian missionary who would, during the Opium War, lead the British military occupation of parts of eastern China, running armies of Chinese spies and collaborators.8 The slightest provocation would do. In 1831, traders had written to the government in India, demanding a fleet of warships to avenge the Chinese authorities’ partial demolition of a front garden that the British had illegally requisitioned.9