by Julia Lovell
Lin Zexu, then, was in 1839 a man brimful of self-belief: an individual who had made his way through diligence and self-control, and who was confident that this work ethic could crack the most complex of questions. He was also a man just a touch obsessed – though not, in fact, primarily with opium, the substance that would propel his name into the history books. Back in 1833, long before he began waging war on the drug, he had actually been rather pragmatic about what to do about it, proposing that – to combat the financial damage that opium imports were inflicting – China should simply grow its own.3 His pet ambition – on which he lavished much time and ink – was to reform the expensive system of grain transport along canals up to the capital by irrigating the dry plains that ringed Beijing. Western observers of Lin’s campaign against opium reached for grand diagnoses for his actions: this was, they proclaimed, a collision of civilizations (the landlocked, anti-mercantile Qing versus the adventurous, free-trading British). The reality was more mundane, however, and concerned with the internal politics of the Chinese empire, as well as the activities of a gang of ill-behaved British merchants. Lin wanted to make a quick success of the Canton job, to win him governorship of the wealthy Jiangsu area, in which the capital grain-transport chain began.4 He was no inveterately xenophobic crusader, however hard his British merchant antagonists tried to demonize him as such; he was a careful bureaucrat with a passion for freight management. Back in the nineteenth century, China – as it remains today – was a big and busy place, its priorities governed by domestic, far more than international considerations. To a degree, the Opium War – and all that it led to – was set off in a fit of bureaucratic haste.
Following his imperial summons, Lin arrived in Beijing on 26 December 1838 and, over the next month or so, enjoyed nineteen audiences with the emperor. Daoguang was showing signs of strain: ‘Alas!’ he wept before his official, ‘how can I die and go to the shades of my imperial fathers and ancestors, until opium is removed!’5 He lavished unusual care and attention upon Lin: on 29 December, as a very rare privilege, he authorized him to ride a horse in the Forbidden City. The next day, solicitously noting Lin’s discomfort on horseback, he offered an extra concession: ‘You seem unused to riding. Try a sedan chair instead.’6
Lin offered this overwrought emperor one precious resource: certainty. To every one of Daoguang’s doubts, he had a confident answer. His first step would be to confiscate all smoking apparatus. His second step was simpler still. ‘The difficulty lies not with giving opium up’, Lin reasoned, ‘but in changing smokers’ minds.’ And how was this to be done? By threats. All smokers were to be put on a year’s suspended death sentence, and if they failed to reform themselves within this time, and obliged the state to execute them, they would only have themselves to blame. ‘It is really no pitiable thing to inflict the death penalty on reckless souls who persist to refuse repentance and fear of the law.’7 How were smokers to be detected? By mass public surveillance of their capacity (or lack of it) ‘to subsist without smoking’. Gather all those accused of smoking in a public place, Lin advocated, search them thoroughly and lock them in a room, ‘where they should be seated apart without being allowed to communicate with one another . . . from ten in the morning until after midnight.’8 On the off-chance that fear didn’t work, there was always Science. Lin boasted of knowing a failsafe prescription to treat opium addiction: ‘Once you’ve taken it, the very smell of opium will be repellent; if you smoke it, you’ll vomit . . . I’ve also heard there’s one with white plums in . . . and that willow-peach blossom is the best of all . . . though I can’t say whether that’s true or not.’9
Like those of Huang Jueci, Lin’s proposals suffer from one curious oversight: little thought was given to the effect of prohibition on foreign traders, the source of all this narcotic trouble. Even though many officials suggested that anti-opium measures be focused on Canton, the centre of legal and illegal European trade, few who supported the crackdown seem to have worried much about the reaction of the foreign community there: any opposition or procrastination would simply be ‘properly dealt with’.10 Those who raised concerns about the likely British response, by contrast, have been denounced in China for spineless treachery. On his way out from the capital on 22 December, Qishan – the man who would be vilified for negotiating an early peace with the British after the first disastrous engagements of the war – exhorted Lin ‘not to set off any frontier disturbances’.11 (The seven-year troubles just past in Xinjiang had set the imperial treasury back a dismaying ten million ounces of silver, or even more.) Two years later, as the Qing’s coastal defences were falling before British bombardment, Lin would bluster that he had foreseen the entire conflict. The events of the war proved otherwise: in every engagement, the Qing were surprised by the power of the British response. It seems certain that, as Lin prepared to strike hard against opium, he had not seriously considered the possibility of war with Britain – and certainly not the kind of war that actually ensued.
On 10 March 1839, Lin was welcomed into Canton after his two-month journey from Beijing. True to his incorruptible reputation, he had travelled from the sallow plains of the north-east down to the emerald rice-fields of the south in minimalist style. His entourage he pared down to one outrider, six men-at-arms, a chief cook and two further kitchen aides, who were at all times to travel with him (to prevent them from going on ahead to squeeze local innkeepers along the route).
Once arrived, he acted quickly. His first move was to put pressure on Chinese smugglers and smokers. He organized the people of Guangdong into ‘security groups’ (baojia): units of five individuals, each responsible for guaranteeing the narcotic hygiene of the other four. He lectured the degenerates of the city (‘no province has as bad a reputation for opium offences as Guangdong’) that resistance was useless: ‘This time we are going on until the job is finished.’12 On his journey down to Canton, he had reviewed a few case-histories indicating the scale of the problem – that of a certain Wang Zhengao caught his eye. After being dismissed from the army for malfeasance, Wang had somehow been appointed a coastal patrol, taking bribes of forty silver dollars for every couple of hundred pounds of opium that he ignored. The hundreds of chests of opium that he had confiscated, he had sold on for silver, which he then pretended he had seized from smugglers. For these actions, he had been not only rewarded but also promoted.13 Within two months of his arrival, Lin had arrested 1,600 people for opium offences, and confiscated nearly fourteen tons of opium and almost 43,000 opium pipes; within another two months, he had imprisoned five times more opium-felons than the provincial governor had in three years.14
Lin reserved some of his best anger for the Hong merchants, whom he summoned to an audience on 17 March at his campaign headquarters. After ordering them to kneel on the hard floor before him, he treated them to a lengthy disquisition on their perfidy. It was they – they – who were responsible for the magnitude of the opium problem, he informed them. For twenty years, they had waved up the river to trade at Canton vessels that were clearly laden with opium: ‘Are you not indeed dreaming, and snoring in your dreams? . . . It is as if a man, to guard his house at night, should appoint a watchman, and that, nevertheless, his property should be bundled up and carried away, while yet the watchman should declare that there had been no thief.’ Every level of the trade administration, Lin continued, was mired in smuggling (transporting, storing, buying, packaging the drug); and yet the Hong merchants did not just look in the opposite direction – they aided and abetted the foreigners. They paid them visits; they gave them secret information; they lent them sedan chairs (a criminal offence; foreigners were meant to walk). ‘All now are equally involved in the stench of it, and truly I burn with shame for you.’15 (The quotations above are taken from Lin’s written edict to the merchants; the oral version was probably less circuitous in tone.) All this was perfectly true: a mere glance at the Hong merchants’ accounts would have revealed how deeply entangled they were with the British, from who
m they had borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for the unpredictable extra levies that the government squeezed out of them – repayment of this money would be one of Palmerston’s demands during the war to come. The richest of them all, Howqua, promptly tried to buy Lin’s acquiescence. ‘The Great Minister does not want your money’, Lin told him. ‘I want your head.’16
Lin next moved to put the foreigners under similar pressure. He began by drafting a lengthy letter to Queen Victoria, initially forgiving her for being ignorant of the Qing empire’s recent measures against opium, then exhorting her to eliminate opium production in her dominions. ‘I now give my assurance that we mean to cut off this harmful drug for ever . . . what has already been manufactured Your Majesty must immediately search out and throw to the bottom of the sea . . . Our Heavenly Court would not have won the allegiance of innumerable lands did it not wield superhuman power. Do not say you have not been warned in time.’17 On 17 March, he told the Hong merchants to order the foreigners to submit all the opium currently in their possession at Canton and to sign a pledge not to import any more. Otherwise, both foreign traffickers and their Hong allies would be executed. ‘No have see so fashion before’, the alarmed Hong merchants told the foreigners as they delivered Lin’s messages.18 By 23 March, the commissioner was no longer passing his messages on in writing. Instead, he was dispatching the two richest Hong merchants in chains to repeat his demands in person.
For the time being, he felt well satisfied with the start he had made: the day after his arrival in Canton, he had crowed to the emperor that Jardine had fled for England on hearing of Lin’s appointment. (The tough Scot arrived in London just in time to advise Palmerston on how to make war with China.) Lin sat back and waited for a response.
History has been kind to Lin Zexu. In contemporary China, he is venerated as the great pioneer of Chinese nationalism: as ‘the first National Hero of our modern history . . . a true man of action of the reformist landlord class’.19 Posterity has done less well by his chief British antagonist and later plenipotentiary to China during the Opium War, Charles Elliot. For the past century and a half, British commentators have lambasted him for being foolish and indecisive – for lacking proper imperialist firmness when it came to dealing with China. (He would be sacked halfway through the war for having persuaded Qishan to cede Hong Kong – one of the world’s great natural harbours.) Chinese accounts are far less positive. In the two Mainland blockbusters about the war, Lin Zexu (1953) and The Opium War (1997), Elliot is a lecherous villain (with a particularly evil leer), machinating to enslave the Chinese people with opium. But was he as incompetent or as diabolical as his detractors have claimed, or just a harassed servant of the British state doing his best in difficult circumstances?
Historians have long struggled to make sense of how the British empire – the largest in human history – came to hold sway over a quarter of the world’s land and population. Old-school answers to this question blustered about the civilizing missions of Christianity and Free Trade, or muttered something about John Seeley’s theory (a brilliant appeal to the English love of amateurism) that the empire was acquired in a ‘fit of absence of mind’. Twentieth-century Chinese interpretations (heavily indebted to Marx and Lenin) favoured conspiracy theories: that the empire in general, and the Opium War specifically, were a long-plotted land- and resources-grab, driven by industrial expansion and greed. More recently, in Britain, other explanations – the quest for military glory, for safe sea-routes, for new investment opportunities – have been suggested. But what big theories tend to leave out is the inevitably extemporized nature of the empire: British policy abroad was usually designed under exceptional pressure, in alien environments, by operatives without local linguistic competence and isolated (in the pre-telegraphic age) for months at a time from counsel back home.20 Charles Elliot, architect of Britain’s Opium War with China, personifies this whole confusion: of imperialist ambition and opportunism; of duty and scruple; of hypocrisy and self-deception.
Like Lin, his background was orthodox. He came of good establishment stock: grandson of an earl, son of a soldier-diplomat who had ‘distinguished himself by a truly British courage’ against the Turks in 1772.21 In 1815, the fourteen-year-old Charles made a career choice popularized by national hero Nelson (who had died a decade earlier at Trafalgar): he took himself off to sea. Fourteen character-forming years’ experience under naval fire – scrambling up swaying topmasts and over rolling decks, feasting on weevil-filled hard tack – would prepare him well for the perils of the China station: he steps first out onto the stage of nineteenth-century Sino-British entanglements as Master Attendant to Napier’s ill-fated venture of 1834, seating himself calmly beneath an umbrella on the exposed deck of one of Lord Napier’s frigates as it attempted to blast its way upriver to Canton. In 1830, he jumped ship to join the Foreign Office, serving as ‘Protector of Slaves’ in British Guiana, in the West Indies. Within two years, his experiences there had transformed him into a fervent abolitionist: ‘What should be given to the Slaves’, he wrote in 1832 to a friend, ‘is such a state of Freedom as they are now fit for.’22 (One of his uncharitable Chinese biographers nonetheless labelled him ‘a long-term oppressor and enslaver of local populations in English colonies’.23)
In 1834 he was redeployed to China, where his conscience was again tested by his official duties. For Elliot – this aristocratic abolitionist – instinctively disliked the opium trade and everything bound up with it: both its moral dubiousness and its ungentlemanly, profit-hungry merchants. His weakness was to see a little of everyone’s side: he understood the economic imperative of the opium trade, even while he hated the vulgarity of its perpetrators; he understood that his duty was to protect the British flag in Canton, even while he detested what some of Britannia’s children were doing in the China seas. He was a man locked into the assumptions of his time: a fervent upholder of the national dignity and dutiful servant of the British empire, bound to protect its citizens (whatever they had done) from alien attack. Above all, he believed in the liberating virtues of Free Trade: that, in extremis, a war to introduce these virtues was justified; and particularly if such a war would do away with Britain’s unsavoury dependence on opium sales.
By 1836, Elliot had been promoted to Napier’s old job: Chief Superintendent of the China trade. Although in the two years since Napier’s death the British and Chinese had avoided open warfare, the job still had its difficulties. In late 1834, Elliot – in full, decorated captain’s uniform – was set upon by Qing soldiers and knocked twice over the head, as he petitioned outside the city walls for the recovery of a twelve-strong merchant crew shipwrecked up the coast and taken captive by the authorities. But Elliot’s greatest problem was the lack of clarity in his official instructions. The superintendent was, his foreign secretary Lord Palmerston had ordered, ‘to avoid giving offence to the Chinese authorities’ while at the same time refusing to ‘deal subserviently with the . . . Chinese authorities’.24 He was to keep the peace and maintain the legal trade (to ensure the supply of tea and silk to British markets), but was given no authority over the illegal opium trade. Although Elliot personally considered the smuggling business ‘a trade which every friend to humanity must deplore’, he fervently hoped that the Qing court would legalize it, because it would force the Chinese to take full responsibility for its moral dubiousness and – by lowering prices of the drug – deter the British from trading in it.25 ‘It cannot be good’, he reasoned in 1836, ‘that the conduct of a great trade should be so dependent upon the steady continuance of a vast prohibited traffic in an article of vicious luxury, high in price, and liable to frequent and prodigious fluctuation.’26 Elliot, it seems, barely tried to conceal from the luminaries of Canton and Macao society – Jardine, Matheson et al. – his thorough distaste for them. ‘No man entertains a deeper detestation of the disgrace and sin of this forced traffic on the coast of China than the humble individual who signs this dispatch’, he reminded Pal
merston on the brink of the Opium War. ‘I have steadily discountenanced it by all the lawful means in my power, and at the total sacrifice of my private comfort in the society in which I have lived for some years past.’27 (Jardine and company returned the compliment in full, carping in their letters home at his ‘unpopularity’, ‘impolicy’, ‘sad mismanagement’, and so on.28)
Yet without opium, Elliot knew, Britain would slide into deficit with China. ‘The interruption of the opium traffic’, as he put it on 2 February 1837, ‘must have the effect . . . of crippling our means of purchasing in this market . . . The failure of the opium deliveries is attended with an almost entire cessation of money transactions in Canton. And in the glutted condition of this market, your Lordship will judge how peculiarly mischievously the present stagnation must operate on the whole British commerce with the empire.’29 When faced in 1837 with the choice of joining the Qing government’s renewed campaign against smuggling (in which perpetrators faced strangulation), or sheltering those Britons responsible, he had to side with the latter, writing to Lord Auckland, the Governor of India, for ‘a man-of-war . . . with instructions to afford such countenance to the general trade as may be practicable, without inconveniently committing His Majesty’s Government upon any delicate question.’30 Deprived of clear authority, Elliot remained duty-bound to protect the lives and property of British subjects. At the same time, though, he asked the Foreign Office for an extension of his powers so that he might maintain ‘due order amongst the seafaring class of Her Majesty’s subjects, who visit this part of the Empire’, a request that the Admiralty refused.31 Socially isolated by the foreign merchant population in Macao, separated from his family (although his wife, Clara, had sailed out to China with him, they had been forced to leave three of their beloved children in England), politically and linguistically challenged in Canton, and infuriated by contradictory instructions from London, Charles Elliot in 1839 was a man under significant strain.
