The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  It was yet another import – in the shape of tobacco from the New World – that led to the smoking of opium. Introduced to China at some point between 1573 and 1627 (around the same time as the peanut, the sweet potato and maize), by the middle of the seventeenth century tobacco-smoking had become an empire-wide habit. As the Qing established itself in China after 1644, the dynasty made nervous attempts to ban it as ‘a crime more heinous even than that of neglecting archery’: smokers and sellers could be fined, whipped and even decapitated.11 But by around 1726, the regime had given up the empire’s tobacco addiction as a bad job, with great fields of the stuff swaying just beyond the capital’s walls. And somewhere in the early eighteenth century, a new, wonderful discovery had reached China from Java, carried on Chinese ships between the two places: that tobacco was even better if you soaked it first in opium syrup (carried mainly in Portuguese cargoes). First stop for this discovery was the Qing’s new conquest, Taiwan; from there it passed to the mainland’s maritime rim, and then the interior.

  It was smoking that made Chinese consumers take properly to opium. Smoking was sociable, skilled and steeped in connoisseurship (with its carved, bejewelled pipes of jade, ivory and tortoiseshell, its silver lamps for heating and tempering the drug, its beautiful red sandalwood couches on which consumers reclined). It was also less likely to kill the consumer than the eaten or drunk version of the drug: around 80–90 per cent of the morphia may have been lost in fumes from the pipe or exhaled. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, China made opium-smoking its own: a chic post-prandial; an essential lubricant of the sing-song (prostitution) trade; a must-have hospitality item for all self-respecting hosts; a favourite distraction from the pressures of court life for the emperor and his household.12 Opium houses could be salubrious, even luxurious institutions, far from the Dickensian den-of-vice stereotype (like an ‘intimate beer-house’, a surprised Somerset Maugham pronounced in 1922 – a mature stage in China’s drug plague), in which companionable groups of friends might enjoy a civilized pipe or two over tea and dim-sum.13

  Somewhere near the start of the nineteenth century, smokers began to dispense with the diluting presence of tobacco – perhaps because pure opium was more expensive, and therefore more status-laden. Around this time, thanks to the quality control exercised by the diligent rulers of British India (who established a monopoly over opium production in Bengal in 1793), the supply also became more reliable, no longer regularly contaminated by adulterants such as horse dung and sand. A way of burning money, smoking was the perfect act of conspicuous consumption. Every stage was enveloped in lengthy, elaborate, costly ritual: the acquisition of exquisite paraphernalia; the intricacy of learning how to cook and smoke it (softening the dark ball of opium to a dark, caramelized rubber, inserting it into the hole on the roof of the pipe bowl, then drawing slowly, steadily on the pipe to suck the gaseous morphia out); the leisurely doze that followed the narcotic hit. The best families would go one step further in flaunting their affluence, by keeping an opium chef to prepare their pipes for them. The empire’s love affair with opium can be told through the beautiful objects it manufactured for consuming the drug, through the lyrics that aficionados composed to their heavy, treacly object of desire, or in bald statistics. In 1780, a British East India Company (EIC) ship could not break even on a single opium cargo shipped to Canton. By 1839, imports were topping 40,000 chests per annum.

  One further point needs to be made about opium as it acquired its hold over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China: it had been illegal since 1729. Somehow, over the ensuing century, it turned into a prestigious contraband bought, sold and prized by the empire’s best people (as well as by some of its worst). Contemporary China’s line on opium transforms it into a moral poison forced on helpless Chinese innocents by wicked aliens. The reality was more troublingly collusive.

  As the British entered the trade at the end of the eighteenth century, they insisted that they were simply providing a service: satisfying, not creating demand. Those Britons involved were at pains to present it to audiences back home as quite the most honourable line of business in the East. Invest in opium, warmly suggested William Jardine to a friend in Essex, as the ‘safest and most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of’.14 It may have seemed that way from East Anglia. It was also a hands-off and sure source of revenue for East India Company employees in India, who only had to look after the opium as far as Government House in Calcutta, letting private British and Indian, and then Chinese sellers handle the dirty business of getting it to the Chinese coast, and inland. ‘From the opium trade,’ summarized an 1839 text on the subject,

  the Honourable Company have derived for years an immense revenue and through them the British Government and nation have also reaped an incalculable amount of political and financial advantage. The turn of the balance of trade between Great Britain and China in favour of the former has . . . contributed directly to support the vast fabric of British dominion in the East . . . and benefit[ed] the nation to an extent of £6 million yearly without impoverishing India.15

  From closer quarters, though, the opium trade looked a good deal more raffish than its leading British supporters liked to argue. Jardine and Matheson, the two doyens of the Canton opium trade (and leading sinophobe warmongers of the 1830s), were hardly gentlemen by background, however diligently they worked to convert hard cash into respectability. Born on a Scottish farm in 1784, Jardine lost his father at the age of nine; as a teenager, he scraped through Edinburgh’s medical school only thanks to his older brother’s support. He learnt the East Indies trade among the bilge and gore of ship’s doctoring: the pay was not terrific (£10 a month), but a perk of the job was the opportunity to develop commercial sidelines – officers were allowed two tons of their own goods to buy or sell. Jardine soon learnt to make the most of it. On his second voyage, he forfeited his £40-wages because the ship and its official freight were lost through damage incurred in a Canton typhoon, and assault by a French warship, after which he ended up a prisoner of war. Nevertheless, he still made around £175 from selling on his own tonnage, which he had been wise enough to send home by a separate ship from Bombay. By 1818, he had made the leap to management, winning a nomination as agent to a private trading house in India; within another year, he had migrated to the Canton opium business.16

  Matheson’s progress to private trader was smoother: family business influence secured him merchants’ indentures from the EIC aged nineteen, when he was fresh out of Edinburgh University. Once he had arrived in Asia, the decision to trade in opium does not seem to have required conscious thought, opium imports to China having doubled between 1800 and 1820. Although by no means a blemish-free ethical choice, the move into opium by British traders was not, as claimed by contemporary historians in the People’s Republic, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese empire; it was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports (clocks, watches, furs). ‘Opium is like gold’, wrote James Matheson’s first partner, Robert Taylor, in 1818. ‘I can sell it any time.’17 Even that was untrue: the Qing state’s erratic, ongoing campaign against the drug through the early decades of the nineteenth century, together with opportunistic over-production in India, made profit margins wildly variable. Before Matheson joined more successfully with Jardine in 1825, he twice faced ruin in Canton, from over-extension in opium. Only another unpredictable about-turn in price and an audacious push to trade along the east coast saved him.

  Management faced physical risks, too: at one point, presenting a petition at the gate through which official communications could be passed from foreigners at Canton, Jardine sustained (though did not seem to notice) a severe blow to the head, thereby winning the Chinese nickname that translated as ‘Iron-Headed Old Rat’. Both Jardine and Matheson were far too eager to make money to waste any time themselves on appearing like bumbling gentlemen speculators: Jardine is supposed to have kept only one chair in his off
ice – for himself – to discourage loquacity in his visitors. But once his fortune had been made, Jardine seemed to forget all that, becoming an enthusiastic propagandist for the sedate security of the business, naming it ‘by far the safest trade in China’.18 (This in 1840, when over the past two years the Qing government had begun publicly executing native opium-smugglers in front of the foreign factories, had imprisoned the British trading community in Canton, destroyed their stock and driven them from the mainland to the edges of that barren rock, Hong Kong.)

  In the end, though, opium money did make them gentlemen: Jardine first, returning to London in 1839, where he served as military adviser on China to Palmerston, then in 1841 took an unopposed seat in the House of Commons. (In truth, he did not succeed in quashing every sceptical view of his own past. ‘Oh, a dreadful man!’ Disraeli thinly fictionalized him in 1845 in Sybil. ‘A Scotchman, richer than Croesus, one Mr Druggy, fresh from Canton, with a million in opium in each pocket, denouncing corruption and bellowing free-trade.’19) When Jardine died of pulmonary oedema a year after the Treaty of Nanjing that closed the Opium War, he passed both his seat and the directorship of the firm to Matheson, who then promptly retired from the trade, bought the Hebridean island of Lewis for half a million pounds and reinvented himself as a laird of good works. The inscription (composed by his wife) below a posthumous snowy-white bust of the great man looking loftily out over the Atlantic from the grounds of Lewis’s Stornoway Castle tells his story truly and well:

  he was a child of God, living evidently under the influence of His Holy Spirit: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ (Matthew, xxv.21) . . . [He] was long resident at Canton and Macau and was one of the founders of the eminent House of Jardine, Matheson & Co. During his and Mr. Jardine’s partnership, the House acquired that high repute for honour, integrity and magnificent hospitality which gave a free passport to all using its name throughout the East.

  The opium trade also struggled to glean some respectability from its association with the missionary effort, both enterprises depending on each other – the traders on the linguistic skills of the men of God, the latter on the passages up the coast that the former offered. (After 1842, of course, missionaries would take aggressive advantage of the Opium War’s ‘opening’ of China.) There seems to have been little sense of contradiction between drugs and faith in the minds of some of the most successful of the traders: ‘Employed delivering briskly’, goes the diary entry for 2 December 1832 of one devout pusher, James Innes, on an audacious mission up the east coast, to Fujian. ‘No time to read my bible.’20 No single figure embodied this collaboration better than Karl Gützlaff, the Pomeranian missionary and later agent of the British occupation of China (‘short, square . . . with a sinister eye’, summarized his cousin-in-law), who enjoyed a career in the pay of opium interests that was both varied and remunerative (though not overly long: he died in 1851, a mere nine years after the Treaty of Nanjing, of disappointment after discovering a large-scale fraud by his converts).21 ‘Tho’ it is our earnest wish’, went Jardine’s first petition for his services in 1832,

  that you should not in any way injure the grand object you have in view by appearing interested in what by many is considered an immoral traffic yet such a traffic is absolutely necessary to give any vessel a reasonable chance . . . the more profitable the expedition the better we shall be able to place at your disposal a sum that may hereafter be usefully employed in furthering the grand object you have in view, and for your success in which we feel deeply interested.22

  The argument was well made, for in Gützlaff’s own mind, it really was that simple – commerce (by whatever means) and Christianity went hand in hand: ‘Our commercial relations’, he hectored the British reading public in an influential 1832 account of China, ‘are at the present moment on such a basis as to warrant a continuation of the trade along the coast. We hope that this may tend ultimately to the introduction of the gospel, for which many doors are opened.’23 Fluent in both self-deception and China’s south-eastern dialects (to the point that locals mistook him for a native ‘son of Han’), he had more interpreting offers than he could handle: ‘I would give 1,000 dollars for three days of Gützlaff’, sighed Innes on his Fujian trip.24 Gützlaff’s excursions up the coast gave him an opportunity to reach potential converts, whom he lectured – as the mood took him – on their horrible gambling, idolatry, conceit, opium-smoking and so on. His Bible tracts went ashore alongside the chests of opium, finding – according to Gützlaff – many ‘eager and grateful readers’ (though what these precious bits of paper were really used for – patching holes in walls, perhaps, or something else altogether – we will never know).25 He was good, moreover, for far more than interpreting and preaching: when six official boats tried to inhibit Chinese opium-dealers from approaching a Jardine–Matheson ship, ‘Doctor Gützlaff, dressed in his best . . . paid them a visit . . . He demanded their instant departure and threatened them with destruction if they ever again anchored in our neighbourhood. They went away immediately saying they had anchored there in the dark by mistake, and we have seen nothing more of them.’26

  For those at the coalface of the trade – the European captains and Chinese distributors – the business delivered a miscellany of glamour, profit and risk. By the 1820s, the maritime rigours of the drug trade had given birth to the nimble opium clipper, which outmoded the large Indiamen by its ability to beat up against the monsoon and far greater speed: ‘cutting through the head sea like a knife, with . . . raking masts and sharp bows running up like the head of a greyhound.’27 Officers on opium ships were well paid: for shaving days off passage times, for task-mastering potentially mutinous men, for pirate-fighting. Violence was to be expected: from Qing government ships, from sea bandits, from their own crews. Local pirates (called, in Chinese, ‘wasps of the ocean’) were the greatest terror – from small-time fishing boats that moonlighted with a little sea robbery when the opportunity presented, to more professional, multi-vessel outfits. In 1804, Portuguese-run Macao almost fell to a seventy-strong fleet of them. Practically anything served for warfare: conventional firearms, of course, but also stink-pots (earthen pots filled with gunpowder and Chinese liquor) that they lit then tossed at merchant vessels, blinding their victims with the smoke. The desperateness of pirates’ living conditions (ships swarmed with rats, which ‘they encourage to breed, & eat . . . as great delicacies’, recalled one prisoner) and the certainty of death if caught made them vicious to their prisoners: one captain died in 1795 having spent several days bound naked over the deck, being occasionally fed a little water and rice. This was not racially motivated violence, however: natives of the coast could be treated much worse. An officer captured from the Chinese navy had, while still alive, ‘his bowels cut open and his heart taken out, which they afterwards soaked in spirits and ate’.28

  But foreign traders of the early nineteenth century had only a partial role to play: distribution deep into the mainland was carried out by native – Chinese, Manchu, Muslim – smugglers. The clippers sailed up to Lintin, a small, nondescript island about a third of the way between Hong Kong and Canton. There, they discharged their cargo onto superannuated versions of themselves: retired hulks serving as floating depots. Long, slim Chinese smuggling boats – known in the trade as ‘centipedes’, ‘fast crabs’ or ‘scrambling dragons’, and rowed by twenty to seventy thoroughly armed men apiece – would then draw up, into which opium was loaded, to fulfil orders purchased at the factories in Canton. From here, the drug entered the empire’s circulatory system: along the south coast’s threadwork of narrow waterways, and into Canton itself – amid consignments of less contentious goods, under clothes, inside coffins. At every stage, there was employment for locals: for the brokers, couriers and ‘shroffs’ (who checked for counterfeit silver) on board European vessels and in European pay; for the tough Tankas who made the dragons scramble; for the smugglers who brought it ashore; for the Cantonese middlemen; for the proprietors of opiu
m shops, restaurants, tea-houses and brothels.

  And every stage in the trade required officialdom to look the other way – which for the most part they obligingly did, even as the traces of the business surrounded them. One of Matheson’s Calcutta associates put it nicely, wondering sarcastically that the agency’s opium clippers ‘have ever been able to trade at all. A European-rigged vessel gives the alarm against herself whenever she appears, and lodges an information in the hands of every individual . . . Only think of the Chinese going to smuggle tea on the coast of England in a junk!’29 Generally, all that was required to land opium was cash outlay and sometimes a touch of doublespeak. If an opium consignee was lucky, the responsible mandarin would simply demand a businesslike bribe per box of opium – like a species of duty, as if the cargo were nothing more controversial than cotton, or molasses. If he were less fortunate, he would suffer a lecture administered first on the evils of the opium trade, or perhaps a personal reading of the emperor’s latest edict on the subject, then be allowed to hand over the bribe. But connivance – because of the profit to be made from it – seems to have been the basic rule: one exploratory trade mission by the EIC up the north China coast in 1832 was greeted by disappointment all the way, as the ship, the Lord Amherst, had neglected to bring opium.30

  When – and only when – the clippers were safely unloaded and preparing to return to India, Qing government ships would, one sardonic observer of the mid-1830s noted, at last mount a sham pursuit: ‘twenty or thirty Chinese men-o-war junks are seen creeping slowly . . . towards them . . . never close enough to be within reach of a cannonball, and if, for the sake of a joke, one of the clippers heaves to, in order to allow them to come up, they never accept the invitation, but keep at a respectful distance . . . a proclamation is [then] issued to the entire nation, stating that “His Celestial Majesty’s Imperial fleet, after a desperate conflict, has made the Fan-quis [foreign devils] run before it, and given them such a drubbing, that they will never dare show themselves on the coast again.”’31 Thus, summarized an American trader of the 1830s, ‘we pursued the evil tenor of our ways with supreme indifference, took care of our business, pulled boats, walked, dined well, and so the years rolled by as happily as possible.’32