The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  But long after he had obeyed the emperor’s command to commit suicide amid the pleasant courtyards and lotus ponds of his palace just north of the Forbidden City, Heshen continued to leave his mark on Qing politics. After decades of scholarly grind, many graduands were anxious to make profitable use of their years in bureaucratic power. In addition to a fixed salary, an official post offered civil servants abundant opportunities for self-enrichment: in bribes and favours extracted from and granted to cronies, in access to public funds and goods, in unofficial extra charges and taxes passed on to the general populace. Reinforced by Heshen’s example, patronage swiftly became a deciding principle in public life. And with profit-creaming becoming more important than imperial service, public-works budgets began to disappear. In the early nineteenth century, for example, perhaps only 10 per cent of the annual six million taels of silver earmarked for Yellow River Conservancy found their way to Yellow River Conservation, the rest washing away in official banquets and entertainments.12 Even after Heshen’s disgrace, officials were still expected to actively flaunt their wealth. When one of Daoguang’s less corruptible officials retired to his native place, his family filled boats with eighty wooden crates loaded with bricks so locals would think it was gold hoarded in the course of a five-decade career.13

  There was a counterpoise, however: such abuses could also generate a kind of inflexible asceticism. The examination system was designed to indoctrinate imperial China’s educated elites with a humourless service ethic, drummed into them through their decades of studying the submissive virtues (loyalty, filiality, modesty and so on) of the classical curriculum. Part of the great genius of the Confucian school of political education is its talent for persuading its practitioners to police themselves, through a reproachful emphasis on self-criticism, as stipulated in the fourth injunction of The Analects: ‘I examine myself three times a day. When dealing on behalf of others, have I been trustworthy? . . . Have I practised what I was taught?’14 The downside to this was a certain unyielding self-righteousness. After so many exhausting, enervating years of training in Confucian statecraft, it was inevitable that some civil-service literati would become fixated on their mission to set the empire in order – a feeling sharpened by resentment at being often excluded from the top ranks of government by a less qualified foreign minority. And by Daoguang’s reign, there was, by common acknowledgement, a good deal to set in order. Evidence from the provinces indicated that the rot had set in deep: that the conspiracy of self-interest and neglect encouraged by people like Heshen was destroying the bonds of government and society. Faced by the nineteenth century’s dismaying variety of social, environmental, political and economic problems, earnest Confucian officials began to blame the whole sorry business on a massive failure of public standards.

  After the 1810s, groups of the empire’s educated Chinese elite started to form themselves into clubs – though the overtones of the word in English are perhaps too comfortable. At annual poetry banquets held in Beijing, members luxuriated in a melodramatic sense of crisis, rather than in the Chinese imperial equivalent of cigars, fine wines and roomy leather armchairs. At one such meeting, an associate later recorded, although no wine was served, the ‘six or seven brethren present worked themselves into a state of high emotion’: writing poetry, admiring facsimiles of fourth-century calligraphy, debating whether literary style was a true gauge of moral character, bemoaning the general state of things and considering radical bureaucratic solutions to the ills of the empire.15 Tame stuff to twenty-first-century eyes, perhaps, but in the highly regimented world of Qing politics, to form this kind of association was a daring step. The Manchu regime had a particular horror of private clubs like this, linking them with sedition and instability. In the years after it was founded in 1829, one of the most influential of these groups – the ‘Spring Purification Circle’ – searched for an opportunity to persuade the emperor that they were the men to set the empire to rights.

  As China entered its troubled 1830s, then, an anxious ruler was searching for a scapegoat for the country’s many troubles, while a group of ambitious literati were looking for a cause that would win imperial favour and help wrest guardianship of the empire from venal Manchu privilege. Enter opium. For China’s growing habit seemed to embody all that was wrong with the place: the empty, conspicuous consumption that was sending the empire’s silver up in so much smoke and causing its subjects to forget their proper social roles; and the universal disregard for state laws tolerated by slick, self-serving official corruption.

  In 1832, Daoguang’s fears of looming crisis converged in one defeat: thousands of Qing troops were trounced by aboriginal rebels in the subtropical hills of north-west Guangdong. An imperial commissioner sent to investigate concluded, rather lamely, that the government forces ‘were not used to the mountains’. He then added, more alarmingly, that ‘many of the troops from the coastal garrisons were opium smokers, and it was difficult to get any vigorous response from them’.16 Most of the troops had been stationed along the coast before they had been dispatched into the mountains; most of them, therefore, had been busily extracting bribes from the smuggling networks, doubtless while smoking a good deal of opium themselves. By an unhappy coincidence, the empire was simultaneously struck by floods, droughts and famine. When even nature began conspiring against the Chinese empire – where political legitimacy depended so heavily on Heavenly favour – panic was likely to set in.

  Daoguang was seriously shaken. On 24 July 1832, at the marble Altar of Heaven on the meridian due south of the Forbidden City – the centre of the Chinese world – and dressed in pleated yellow and embroidered purple, the emperor took the exceptional step of publicly asking the celestial powers where he had gone wrong. First, he tried propitiating them by cremating a sacrificial buffalo, offering incense, jade and silk, reciting prayers and drinking the Wine and eating the Meat of Felicity. He then spoke his mind.

  This year the drought passes all precedent . . . Mankind is bowed beneath calamity, even the beasts and insects cease to live. I, the Son of Heaven, am Lord of this World. Heaven looks to me that I preserve tranquillity. My bounded duty is to soothe the people. Yet, though I cannot sleep, nor eat with appetite; though I am grief-stricken and shake with anxiety; my grief, my fasts, my sleepless nights have but obtained a trifling shower.

  Without waiting for a response, he suggested his own interpretation of events.

  The atrocity alone of my sins is the cause, too little sincerity, too little devotion . . . Have I been negligent in public business, lacking in the diligence and effort which was due? Have my rewards and punishments been equitable? . . . Have unfit persons been appointed to official posts, and petty and vexatious acts oppressed the people?

  ‘Prostrate,’ he eventually concluded, ‘I implore Imperial Heaven to pardon my ignorance . . . I have made the Three Kneelings, I have made the Nine Knockings. Hasten and confer clement deliverance . . . Oh, alas, Imperial Heaven, give ear to my petition!’17

  In the absence of a clear sign from Heaven, Daoguang decided to start by taking stern measures against opium – this dark, sticky symbol of corruption and extravagance. He sacked the official responsible for the Guangdong debacle (who had clearly been waving opium shipments up the river, after letting his soldiers take their pick of the cargoes), and ordered his successor to strike hard: to ‘pull up the roots and block off the source’ of the drug. ‘Do not muddle along’, he added, ‘with your gaze wrapt only upon the immediate tasks at hand and entirely oblivious to the longer-term interests of the state!’18

  Yet soon, characteristically, he wavered again. Within a few years, anti-opium ardour had been dampened by bureaucratic inertia down in Canton and by the city’s chastening encounter with Lord Napier (in which two British ships had given the supposedly impregnable forts protecting Canton a very hard time). The deep maritime south could breed a more pragmatic variety of Chinese official than the dry, landlocked north: one steeped in the ambiguities (and profits)
of the smuggling trade. If trade were cut off, then the silver that washed about the city would also dry up. At the time of his death, the richest of the mid-nineteenth-century Hong merchants, Howqua, was ten times wealthier than Nathan Rothschild. Something had to be done to make the emperor see reason – to persuade him that opium would in fact not prove a convenient scapegoat.

  And so, in 1836, a legalization lobby spoke up. A former judicial commissioner at Canton argued that banning opium and cutting off the trade there would achieve nothing. A tough policy would spread only terror among the people: ‘bandits, under the pretence of preventing the smuggling of opium by order of the government, [will] seek opportunities for plundering’. Resistance was futile: the Qing government did not possess the necessary policing muscle to engage the forces (whether native or foreign) of lawlessness along the coast. As for the physical risks of opium, he continued in Malthusian vein, ‘New births are daily increasing the population of the empire . . . the smokers of opium are idle, lazy, useless vagrants – undeserving even of contempt’ – let them smoke themselves to death.19 The deal must have seemed almost done: the Governor-General of Guangdong enthusiastically endorsed the plan, and told the Hong merchants to give the opium traders the nod. The British superintendent of trade, Captain Charles Elliot, exulted at the prospect of ‘very important relaxations’ in the Sino-British trading relationship.20 A happy ending was in sight.

  Not long after, the anti-opium lobby found its voice – led by one Huang Jueci, a president of the Sacrificial Court and founding member of the Spring Purification Circle, who dashed off a lengthy memorial on the subject to Daoguang. After expressing unctuous regret for all the sleepless nights and disrupted mealtimes his beloved emperor was suffering, Huang’s memorial nominated a single culprit for the impoverishment of the realm: opium. The opium trade, he explained, was a foreign plot that began when the red-haired Europeans ‘seduced the nimble, warlike people of Java into the use of it, whereupon they were subdued, brought into subjection and their land taken possession of’.21 ‘In introducing opium into this country’, echoed one of his allies, ‘the English purpose has been to weaken and enfeeble the central empire. If not early aroused to a sense of our danger, we shall find ourselves, before long, on the last step toward ruin . . . Of this there is clear proof in the instance of the campaign against the Yao rebels in the twelfth year of our sovereign’s reign . . . great numbers of the soldiers were opium smokers, so that although their numerical force was large, there was hardly any strength to be found among them.’22

  A sharp, shocking crusade was needed, to awaken the empire from its moral daze. Huang’s solution was simple: execute the consumers, and watch demand (and therefore imports) dry up. Give smokers a year to repent, he added, sweetening his advocacy with a touch of Confucian benevolence, in the course of which, he estimated, eight or nine out of ten ‘will have learned to refrain . . . Such are your majesty’s opportunities of exhibiting abundant goodness and wide-spreading philanthropy!’ And to enforce the suppression, he would make use of the punitive Legalist techniques of government invented by the ministers of one of Chinese history’s most notorious tyrants, the First Emperor of China (259–210 BC): every five households would be bound together in a common bond, pledged to keep watch over the others, and denounce any infringement of the new laws; failure to report an offender would bring collective punishment down on the group. ‘This’, Huang concluded, ‘will indeed be a fountain of happiness to the rulers and the ruled in ten thousand ages to come.’ Except for those executed, of course.

  Alien conspiracies, military and social decline, memories of 1832: the campaign was well judged to alarm the emperor. One other key point emerges from Huang’s analysis: his ignorance of foreign traders. ‘Among the red-haired race’, he expounded, ‘the law regarding such as daily make use of opium is to assemble all of their race as spectators while the criminal is bound to a stake, and shot from a gun into the sea . . . Hence England and other nations – which imports opium into China – have only preparers, not consumers of the drug.’23 Huang’s suggestions, moreover, seem not to have considered how the British might respond to a blow to their pocket-books.

  His view was not a majority one. After receiving this fiery memorial, the emperor put the whole question out to tender, soliciting views from the empire’s top officials, both civilian and military. Over the next four months, twenty-nine responses drifted back to the capital: only eight supported the death penalty for smokers; the rest wanted to concentrate suppression on opium’s point of entry – Canton – and on the smugglers who brought it into the country.24 Perhaps they objected for Confucian, humanitarian reasons; or then again, out of indolence, maybe. ‘In Fujian and Guangdong’, one response complained, ‘seven or eight out of every ten persons smoke opium. There would have to be hundreds of thousands of executions, or even more.’25 In addition to being grisly to implement, it would also be exhausting. If the problem of opium addiction was as severe as the prohibition party claimed, 1 per cent of the county’s 400 million-plus population would theoretically face the death penalty – not to mention all those involved in the trade, a proportion estimated as being as high as 90 per cent in some parts of the country. The advantage of focusing punishment on the smugglers was that they existed beyond the pale of regular society: if you were skilful or diligent enough to catch one, you enjoyed the credit. If not, no one would find you particularly wanting. But if civilian opium smokers were the ubiquitous presence in local society that the prohibitionists reported, officials would have to work much harder to find an excuse for failing to crack down. Perhaps sensing this lack of enthusiasm, Daoguang continued to waver for months after Huang’s memorial arrived. Making use of that universal bureaucratic fallback, on 23 October he put it out to another working party – this time, his grand council of advisers.

  But at last, two weeks later, on 9 November 1838, he acted: summoning a Fujianese official called Lin Zexu – one of Huang Jueci’s eight-strong minority of supporters – to an audience, to discuss his plans for annihilating ‘the evil influence of opium . . . using strong medicine to blow up the root of the sickness.’26 What finally swayed the indecisive Daoguang? Was it the ruthless simplicity of the scheme (particularly as he only had to authorize executions)? Or family problems, perhaps? On 25 October 1838, a report reached him that one of the princes of the blood, together with one of the ‘lords of suppressing the realm’, had been discovered smoking opium in one of the Forbidden City’s temples. On 8 November, Daoguang received a second report, from one of his most trusted ministers, Qishan, revealing that 130,000 ounces of opium had just been seized at Tianjin – the port town a hundred miles or so south of Beijing that supplied much of the capital’s needs. This was the largest single seizure of opium since 1729. Qishan added that the opium was all from Canton: bought there, transported from there, by Cantonese merchants.27

  On the last day of 1838, the emperor decided to appoint Lin Imperial Commissioner to Canton. After a century of fits and starts, the Qing war on opium was about to begin in earnest.

  Chapter Three

  CANTON SPRING

  Lin Zexu’s background was conventional. He was born on 20 August 1785 in south-east China, into a declining landholding clan that had been slowly bankrupted by preparing their sons for the examination system. When Zexu was born, the Lin clan had not won an official posting for four costly generations. All this failure seems only to have hardened the resolve of Lin’s father (who had ruined his eyesight through fruitless examination preparation) to see his own son graduate to a state job. The adult Lin – who began studying the classics at the age of three – would recall how, ‘through freezing days and endless nights, in a broken-down three-roomed apartment, with the north wind howling angrily, one lamp on the wall, young and old would sit next to each other, doing our reading and our needlework . . . till the night was out.’1

  His father’s efforts paid off. Aged twelve, his son managed the lowest level of the civil-ser
vice exams, producing a solid Confucian essay on ‘The Great Treasure That Is Being Benevolent to Relatives’. Aged nineteen, he passed the provincial exam; seven years later, in 1811, he advanced through the metropolitan exam on his third attempt, and finally stabilized the family finances with the iron rice-bowl of an official posting.

  Once past these obstacles, Lin’s career could have taken him along two different paths. The first would have been to make as much money as possible from his position, then retire on the proceeds. But his spartan upbringing pushed him in another direction. In the two and a half decades before his famous intervention in the opium question, he became renowned for his bureaucratic virtuousness: hunting down pirates, fixing dams, relieving floods, managing the salt tax. He was, in short, a tremendous administrative asset – though his work–life balance could probably have used some fine-tuning. ‘He never had any hobbies’, commented an early biographer. ‘Although he didn’t mind books, paintings and inscriptions, he never bothered much with them. Instead, he preferred to be tirelessly diligent, day and night . . . When he saw the people in trouble, he felt as if his heart were on fire, his liver being stabbed.’ His stint as judicial commissioner in the south-east during the 1820s won him the nickname ‘Lin Qingtian’ (Lin Clear-as-the-Heavens) in recognition of his incorruptibility. Transferred subsequently to river-conservancy work, his profligate predecessors ‘became terrified their misdeeds would be exposed. Lin set about washing away the filth with honesty.’ Temperamentally, he was the perfect match for the parsimonious Daoguang, from whom he received more than once the highest accolades of praise: ‘I’ve never known such a diligent river superintendent’, ran one encomium; ‘you have not committed any mistakes’ went a second; or a third, ‘you are careful and reliable’.2