The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  Rightly or wrongly, though, by the end of the 1830s, opium was starting to be identified as a scapegoat for all the empire’s problems. It was the further, unfortunate collision of two elements at court – an anxious, harassed emperor, and a clique of ambitious moralizers – that led to 1839’s confrontation with Britain.

  Chapter Two

  DAOGUANG’S DECISION

  To the casual onlooker, being Emperor of China – surrounded by palaces, empresses, slaves and kowtows – might have looked exquisitely pleasurable. The reality was rather different. It was not just the workload, though that was bad enough: a Qing emperor’s average day at the palace consisted of audiences and memorial-reading, followed by more audiences, then more memorial-reading, sometimes varied by having officials presented, or by assessing death penalties. Emperorship was also burdened with an oppressive sense of public obligation. During the first millennium BC (the formative centuries of Chinese statecraft) the ruling Zhou dynasty established the idea that emperors ruled by the mystical Mandate of Heaven. If a dynasty’s righteousness went into steep decline, Heaven would withdraw the Mandate – publicizing its decision through cataclysms such as rebellions, civil wars and comets – and pass it to someone else.

  Like most rulers of China before them, the Qing had won the country through military rather than moral supremacy. In 1644, bands of Manchu horsemen (disciplined into the Eight Banners – military units totalling between 300,000 and 500,000 men) had poured from the north-east through a pass in China’s great frontier wall, defeated a vast rival army of Chinese rebels and founded the dynasty in Beijing. Within another hundred years, the three great emperors of the high Qing, Kangxi (1654–1722), Yongzheng and Qianlong (1711–1799), had forcibly doubled the dimensions of the Chinese empire inherited from their predecessors the Ming, with Manchu cavalry pushing the old frontiers back into Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Gobi desert, Outer Mongolia, into the deserts and steppes of the Jungaria and Tarim basins and Tibet. But like most rulers of China before them, the Qing conquerors quickly sought to justify their violent acquisition of the Mandate of Heaven by presenting themselves as imperial sages. Consequently, the language of Qing government dripped with paternalistic self-justification: dwelling on the emperor’s ‘soothing’ and ‘cherishing’ of men from both near and far.

  British traders and diplomats – reading the turgid translations of official Qing documents that their linguists assembled – jibed at the condescending tones (‘our Celestial Government . . . nourishes, righteously rectifies and gloriously magnifies a vast forbearance’) of imperial addresses. But this rhetoric was not just pomposity or self-love (though there was a deal of that too). Taking the moral high ground was a crucial part of the emperor’s portfolio: to validate – through every public act and decision – his claims to superiority over the empire, and to the love and respect of peoples beyond. Both public and private spaces in the Forbidden City were hung with moral exhortations, in case emperors and their civil servants ever forgot their proper obligations: officials took their leave of audiences with their sovereign through the Gates of Luminous Virtue and Correct Conduct, while judicial verdicts were issued and assessed in the Halls of Diligence, Discernment, and Honesty and Open-Mindedness.

  Qing emperors needed to hold their nerve beneath this heavy weight of responsibility, and the omnicompetent rulers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – who oversaw such a massive expansion of China’s frontiers and population – had each adapted themselves to the task in their own way. Warrior, scholar, statesman, diplomat, Kangxi multitasked his way out of self-doubt. Qianlong – the beloved philosopher-emperor of eighteenth-century Europe’s chinoiserie craze – buried his anxieties (sorcery scares in the 1760s, growing fears about a decline in the martial Manchu spirit, apprehensions about British ambitions) in dazzling ritual and display. His son, Jiaqing (1760–1820), seems to have comfort-eaten his way through his reign: although one inauspicious rumour told that he had died after being struck by lightning, it was more likely a combination of obesity and heatstroke.

  Daoguang, the emperor who decided to fight the Opium War with the British, was unfortunately blessed with few temperamental gifts for the job. It had all started well enough for him. As a nine-year-old, in 1791, he had won the favour of his grandfather, the great Qianlong, by dispatching his first deer with bow and arrow in front of him while out on a hunting expedition. The emperor was so delighted with his precocious grandson (who succeeded in felling his first animal at an earlier age than he himself had done) that he immediately rewarded him with a bright yellow robe and a jade-green feather. Twenty-two years later, the future ruler also pleased his father – the pleasure-loving Jiaqing – by springing to the defence of the Forbidden City against millenarian rebels who had conspired with eunuchs to storm the palace gates on a quiet lunch-hour and assassinate the emperor. While on his way to enquire after the health of one of his several stepmothers, the crown prince spotted the intruders scrambling over the wall into the Forbidden City. He immediately decided to break the rule forbidding the use of firearms within the palace precincts, sent for knife, musket and powder, and dispatched two of the rebels.

  Once he took the throne in 1820, though, Daoguang’s nerve seems to have deserted him. Gaze at his official portrait – arrayed in the standard-issue bulky red turban, yellow brocade gown and beaded necklace of Qing emperorship – and he looks a different creature from his predecessors: the face pinched, angular, just a touch apprehensive, compared to his father’s expansive jowliness, or his grandfather’s patrician gravitas. He quickly abandoned displays of machismo for the laudable, but less charismatic virtues of parsimony and diligence. He draped his apartments with exhortations to ‘Be Respectful, Honest, Assiduous, Correcting of Errors’.1 On becoming emperor, he issued a cost-cutting ‘Treatise on Music, Women, Goods and Profit’, began going about in patched clothes and reduced his fun-loving father’s resident troupe of palace musicians and actors from some 650 to a more restrained 370-odd, while halving Jiaqing’s 400-strong army of cooks. As he aged, he left instructions that – contrary to custom – he modestly wanted no panegyric tablet erected at his tomb.

  Daoguang’s two least successful attributes were probably indecision and a fondness for scapegoating others. A day or two after he had succeeded his father, he removed three key advisers for letting a mistake slip into his deceased father’s valedictory edict; a couple of days later, he reinstated two of them.2 He even changed his mind about a choice of final resting place. Having spent seven years building one tomb, the would-be underground palace sprang a leak; reading this as deeply inauspicious, Daoguang punished the officials responsible and abandoned the project in favour of a new site. By the time it was completed, after another four years, the ‘Hall of Eminent Favour’ – the only Qing imperial tomb built entirely of unpainted cedar-wood – spoke of the emperor’s love of frugality. (Compare the 2.27 million taels of silver – almost 3.5 million silver dollars – and 4,590 taels of gold spent by Cixi, the last empress, on her own tomb, in which even the bricks were carved and gilded.)3 This talent for vacillation – and for censuring and replacing any commander who did not achieve impossible victories – would serve him badly in his wars against opium and the British.

  During the 1830s, there was much to occupy the mind of any emperor: a steep decline in public order, finances and – most worrying of all – in the Qing military machine, whose weaknesses were being exploited by a broad range of domestic rebels (vagrants, dispossessed ethnic minorities, secret societies).

  After recovering from the horrors of the seventeenth century – its wars, plagues and crop failures – the Chinese population under the remarkable Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong at least doubled between 1650 and 1800, to reach some 300 million. New World silver flowed through the empire, thanks in part to a healthy export trade, the proliferation of an empire-wide network of markets and the emancipation of previously servile labourers. But size, diversity and silver turned against
the Qing at the end of its eighteenth-century heyday. At this point, the empire was approaching its limits, as demographic explosion led to fierce competition for work and resources, ecological degradation, price rises, bureaucratic chaos and corruption. Critically, things also began to go wrong in the Qing military. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Qing’s earlier capacity for dominating its borders was looking more questionable. Three invasions of Burma between 1766 and 1769 were defeated or stalemated, as Qing cavalry became bogged down along the humid south-western frontier; an occupation of Vietnam in 1788 was chased out within a month, with the loss of 4,000 troops. The root cause of decline was the same as in other spheres of government: over-extension, and failure of funds.

  As the empire began to malfunction, so the population began to complain, with growing militancy. Starting in 1774, the White Lotus Rebellion – only the most sprawling and destructive of the some half-dozen major revolts of the late-Qianlong era – united north-eastern peasants, actresses, carters, monks and sellers of fish, vegetable oil and bean curd in an acute sense of grievance against the fin-de-siècle empire.4 Thanks to the decline of Qing armies, the uprising straggled on until 1805, and was finally put down only through the government authorizing local elites to generate their own militia. After 1800, the Qing empire was for the most part far too busy maintaining its costly frontiers and interior to size up new, well-armed European antagonists along the coast. Chinese-language accounts of the Opium War reveal a divided, distrustful society, with practically every grouping in conflict with another: Han Chinese with Manchu officials; northern Chinese with southern Chinese; central southern Chinese with deep southern Chinese; provincial gentry with central government; and the increasingly desperate hoi polloi with almost every group they encountered.

  But to give Daoguang his due, he dealt rather well with a variety of natural and man-made problems during the first decade of his reign: crumbling river dykes, salt-tax dysfunction and a jihad on the empire’s north-western frontier, during which the entire Qing garrison at Kashgar perished (‘from the vein of the earth a stream of blood boiled forth’, as one contemporary account put it), and which came to an end only after seven awful years, with the jihad’s leader being sliced to death in Beijing.5 On the whole, though, the emperor’s actions through the first decade of his reign were often those of a man trying to keep himself too busy to panic. He promoted, he demoted, he audited; he was a bureaucratic fidget. He obviously did not know what to do: he was facing an environmental, demographic, financial and social crisis for which the Confucian or Manchu empire-management manuals had no easy answers.

  The political culture of the late-imperial civil service did not help Daoguang keep a cool head. For much of imperial Chinese history, government service remained the most attractive career option for educated Chinese men (women, of course, were expressly excluded). The sanctity of emperorship – ordained, as it was, by the Mandate of Heaven – ensured that working for the imperial state would be viewed as honourable and righteous in all but the most exceptional circumstances (for example, when Heaven was in the process of handing its Mandate from an unworthy to a worthy recipient). By the Ming dynasty, the imperial government had succeeded in channelling educational aspirations almost wholly into passing the civil-service exams: the tests of Confucian orthodoxy that controlled the paths to wealth and social success.

  The life cycle of an aspiring bureaucrat began in the womb, with prenatal manuals lecturing pregnant women on maintaining the posture that would best aid the development of an embryonic graduand. Around two or three years after birth, formal training began: first with hours of memorizing characters – around 2,000 by the age of eight. Next came reading and memorization of the Four Books (The Analects, Doctrine of the Mean, Great Learning, Mencius) and the Five Classics (Of Poetry, Documents and Changes, The Record of Rites and The Spring and Autumn Annals) and others – perhaps as many as 518,000 characters in total, taking a five-to-twelve-year-old boy around seven years if he was memorizing 200 characters a day.

  Finally, in his teens, a youth would start to practise constructing – through more rote-study – the ‘eight-legged essay’: a densely allusive eight-paragraph exposition (no more than a few hundred characters long) on a laconic gobbet from one of the Classics, designed to demonstrate the candidate’s mastery of the terse exchanges of Confucius and his disciples. And even after a student ventured to attempt the lowest of the three rungs of imperial examinations (theoretically possible at fifteen, though twenty-one was a more usual starting age), the odds were stacked against success. During the Qing, around two million candidates sat for the lowest, county level of examinations, an opportunity available twice every three years; only 1.5 per cent passed. No more than 5 per cent would succeed at the next, provincial stage, and less than 1.5 per cent made it past the final, metropolitan rung.6 These ratios, if anything, probably deteriorated through the Qing dynasty, as appointment quotas failed to keep up proportionally with the eighteenth century’s doubling of population.

  As a result, late-imperial China was increasingly saddled with an ageing population of academic failures. In 1699, a man over a hundred was led into the examination by his great-grandson (who was trying his luck for the first time). In 1826 a hundred-and-four-year-old candidate failed the metropolitan examination yet again, but was awarded his degree out of sympathy.7 The majority swallowed their disappointment, and set about preparing for fresh attempts. A less restrained minority collapsed, went mad, died or violently rebelled, bringing mass slaughter and destruction to great swathes of the empire. The Ming dynasty was brought down in 1644 by insurrections led by a postman who happened also to be a failed examination candidate. The most destructive popular revolt of the nineteenth century, the Taiping, was led by a provincial schoolteacher who after repeatedly failing the civil-service examinations suffered a nervous breakdown in which he hallucinated that God told him he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. When his break-away Heavenly Kingdom was finally annihilated after fourteen years in 1864, it had left tens of millions dead and almost toppled the dynasty.

  Under the Qing, positive discrimination in favour of the minority of Manchu candidates made the process even more frustrating for the Han Chinese majority. In theory, Qing orthodoxy held that the Manchus formed ‘one family’ with the Han Chinese that they ruled. In reality, the Manchu population (outnumbered by their Han Chinese subjects three hundred and fifty to one) worked to keep a sense of their ethnic otherness alive. Emperors lectured their Bannermen on the simple, honest traditions (archery, horse-riding, proficiency in Manchu, frugality) that China’s conquerors must cultivate to justify their possession of the empire. Worried about the softening influence of Chinese culture, Qianlong (who also personally kowtowed to Confucius’s ancestral tablet and wrote some 40,000 classical Chinese poems) encouraged his countrymen to celebrate drunken ancestors who washed their faces in urine and used their parents’ corpses to trap sables.8 Bannermen were kept deliberately aloof from China’s majority civilian populations, segregated in walled garrisons that might occupy an entire half of a city’s area. Wander through the streets of Qing Beijing in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the traces of Manchu foreignness would be everywhere – not just in the thick garrison ring around the imperial city (imitating, in permanent form, the layout of tents on imperial expeditions), and in the persons of the city’s some 200,000 Manchu residents. The culture of the north-east also permeated the sights, sounds and smells of civilian life: in the songs beaten out on eight-cornered drums by Manchu street entertainers; in the pastry shops selling Manchu cakes and sweets; in the shaman shacks grafted onto the capital’s elegant warrens of courtyard residences. Manchu women stuck out, too, by their distinctive, sculpted hair-dos (kept rigorously in place by elephant-dung lacquer); by their flair for cart-driving; by their very presence at dinners and ceremonies – for Han Chinese women were not allowed to socialize publicly.9

  After 1644, Manchus were privileg
ed over Han at every point in the imperial bureaucracy. The civil-service examinations were dumbed down for Manchu candidates: if Bannermen (for whom a quota of passes was reserved) found the competitive Han curriculum too challenging, they had the option of simply translating passages from the Chinese classics (which they had memorized) into Manchu and passing an archery test. Quite simply, the maths of minority worked for the Manchus: ‘The path of promotion for Manchu officials is quicker than for Han officials because they are few and posts reserved for them are many’, as one nineteenth-century observer put it.10 Han Chinese men were spending lifetimes over-educating themselves to face demoralizingly low examination pass-rates, while watching less talented foreign rivals overtake them – a sure recipe for ill-feeling.

  This culture of pressure and rivalry tended to produce two, highly contrasted species of official: the creatively corrupt libertine, and the puritan. And it was the tension between the two that helped produce the Opium War, with all its unfortunate consequences.

  No individual better personified the talent for venality of Qing officialdom than the Qianlong emperor’s notorious Manchu favourite, Heshen, on whom the elderly ruler grew increasingly dependent – politically and personally, perhaps sexually – through the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In sole control of access to the emperor, Heshen accumulated a vast personal fortune, principally through inventive embezzlement and selling political favours. During his twenty-six years at the top of the Qing political tree after 1776, he acquired for himself appointments in four of the six key boards of central government (of Civil Office, Revenue, War and Punishments) in addition to supervising the palace examinations – all of which gave him ample scope to broaden networks of influence and obligation, filling local governments with his protégés, then extorting vast bribes to ensure future discretion. After he was impeached in 1799, an official, conservative estimate calculated his property to be double the government’s annual budget, at more than ten million ounces of silver, in items that reputedly included 600 pounds of top-quality ginseng, 550 fox hides, 850 raccoon dog hides, 56,000 sheep and cattle hides of varying thicknesses, 7,000 outfits, 460 European clocks and 600 concubines, all scattered thickly over his thousands of estates and residences. At the first possible opportunity, within a month of Qianlong’s death, the new emperor Jiaqing had taken the unfilial step of pronouncing a death sentence on his father’s pet, and confiscating his property. ‘After Heshen fell, Jiaqing ate well’, went one scrap of contemporary doggerel.11