The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  It is not recorded what Elliot said when this unwelcome news reached him. Here was yet another public-relations disaster, another source of extraterritorial conflict between the British and Chinese, another example of British disregard for law and order. Like the pragmatic diplomat that he was, however, he immediately began hushing it up, advancing (via one ‘Lo San’ – presumably one of many cooperative Kowloon locals) ‘a sum of 1,500 dollars to the family of the deceased, a further sum of 400 dollars to protect them from the extortion of this money by the lower mandarins in the neighbourhood, and 100 dollars, to be distributed among the suffering villagers, with the hope to soothe the irritation which the late event was calculated to create.’ Following all of which, he informed Palmerston, ‘the relatives of the deceased have forwarded me a paper, declaring that they ascribe his death to an accident, and not wilfulness’.9

  But the damage had been done. ‘Sudden changes from fine to rain’, ran Lin’s diary for 12 July. ‘Heard that at Kowloon Point sailors from a foreign ship beat up some Chinese peasants and killed one of them. Sent a deputy to make inquiries.’ He was soon taking the matter very seriously indeed – even asking a local American doctor to translate a Swiss tract on international law, from which he learnt that ‘any foreigner who commits a crime must be punished by the law of the country’. On 2 August, Lin made his position clear in notices pasted up around Macao, reporting that he knew all: ‘how many sailors there were ashore – what ships they belonged to – how they possessed themselves of the club or staves with which they struck or wounded Lin Weixi, till he dropped down’, as well as a number of other interesting snippets, such as the quantity and source of the hush-money. ‘Produce the foreign murderer, that . . . he may forfeit the life for the life he has taken’, for the ‘ghost of the dead man may still be longing for revenge in the regions below . . . Is this reasonable or not?’10

  Elliot had no intention of surrendering a Briton to Chinese adjudication. But neither could he satisfactorily resolve the case himself. Although Lin was sure that fingering the felon would be easy, Elliot would have found it tricky to work out who exactly had dealt the homicidal blow: it was a drunken group affray (involving Britons and Americans) and the man died the following day – the precise cause of death would have been almost impossible to identify. On 12–13 August, Elliot held an on-board trial of the six sailors involved, as a result of which ‘five men were found guilty on an indictment of riot and assault’ and given fines and prison sentences. Elliot might as well not have bothered. After the seamen were sent home, they were allowed to vanish into the civilian population – for Captain Elliot, the British judiciary deemed, possessed no such authority over British citizens. (Yet again, Elliot’s attempts at legal fair play were foiled by the establishment that he served.) And the show failed to satisfy Lin Zexu, who responded that ‘if Elliot genuinely maintains that, after going twice to the scene of the murder and spending day after day investigating the crime, he still does not know who committed it, then all I can say is, a wooden dummy would have done better’.11 Lin now stepped up the pressure by forbidding local servants, compradors and shopkeepers to work for or supply in any way the English on Macao. Signs began to appear at Hong Kong springs notifying that the water had been poisoned; from one, a weighted bag was fished out, stuffed with leaves and another mysterious substance that persuaded thirsty sailors to leave well alone. Military reinforcements around Macao seemed to be thickening also: on 15 August, Lin – in the company of 2,000 troops – paid a visit to a town forty miles north of the Portuguese settlement. Fifty-seven English families – including Elliot, his wife and their two-year-old son, Frederick – now fled Macao for merchant ships floating off Hong Kong. Lin, as usual, was confident they would soon be begging for mercy: ‘they have on their ship a certain stock of dried provisions’, he informed the emperor as August turned to September, ‘but they will very soon find themselves without the heavy, greasy meat dishes for which they have such a passion.’12

  Driven off dry land in somewhat dubious company (a shipful of opium-smugglers and a jittery Irish painter on the run from his wife), deprived of greasy food (and, more importantly, a guaranteed supply of water), Elliot might well have concluded that the Qing empire was dedicated to making his life miserable.

  In truth, the Qing authorities did not take him quite seriously enough for that. Lin would later be lionized by nationalist admirers for his wisdom in seeking out foreign intelligence to defend China against alien imperialists. Much modern Chinese ink has been spilt on analysing his zeal to understand the West: on his hiring of linguists to translate foreign books and local anglophone newspapers into Chinese, on his quizzing of foreign residents about English attitudes to opium and activities in India, and so on.13 Yet Lin seems to have failed to apply this knowledge usefully, underestimating the nature of the British threat and dismissing them in communications to the emperor as empty ‘swashbucklers’. (In any case, a question mark hangs over the competence of Lin’s translators. When Lin showed a version of his letter to Queen Victoria, rendered by his chief interpreter, to a crew of shipwrecked Englishmen, one member of his audience reported that he ‘could scarcely command my gravity . . . Some parts of it we could make neither head nor tail of.’14)

  On 1 May, Lin made the following report to the emperor. ‘After I arrived in Canton, I investigated the feelings of the foreigners. On the outside, they seem intractable, but inside they are cowardly. If in future we fear them setting off border provocations, the ulcer of trouble they bring will grow day by day . . . They are the minority, we are the majority. Though their ships are strong and their guns quick, they can only be victorious at sea – they cannot play their tricks in port, and Guangdong is well fortified . . . Although there have been some ups-and-downs so far, the situation as a whole is under control.’ On 4 June, he wrote that those who went on smuggling were courting destruction and that they could easily be destroyed by fire rafts, or by militia hired from the local fishing populations.15 On 1 September, he informed Daoguang that, ‘despite their guns, the foreign soldiers are not skilled at infantry engagements. Their legs and feet, moreover, are closely bound by their tight trousers, which makes bending and stretching inconvenient. When they reach shore, they are thus powerless, and their strength can be easily controlled.’16 As news of the approaching British fleet reached the Chinese coast, three times Lin dismissed them as ‘rumours’. When the fleet did reach Canton in the middle of June 1840, Lin insisted to the emperor that it was simply a large-scale opium-smuggling operation. By the time this assessment reached Beijing the English forces had occupied the eastern island of Zhoushan for twelve days.17

  In September 1839, Daoguang asked Lin to verify a story that the British were buying up thousands of Chinese children. ‘Abroad,’ Lin replied, consulting a text at least thirty years old dictated by a sailor once employed on European ships, ‘the population is very sparse, so great value is set on every human being, and as it is also well known that they prize women even more than men, it is improbable that they would kill little girls for the purposes of black magic.’18 It has been suggested elsewhere, he further informed his sovereign, that the foreigners’ opium is made by mixing poppy-juice with human flesh. ‘But I have ascertained’, he rationalizes, ‘that it is mixed with the corpses of crows. Now it is known that foreigners expose their dead and let the crows peck away the flesh. That is why the crows shown in pictures in foreign books are of such enormous size, sometimes several feet high.’19

  Europeans interpreted this ignorance as evidence that the Qing government felt itself far above needing to enquire seriously into the condition of these English ‘barbarians’. Certainly, a note of imperial pomposity is threaded through Lin’s communications with England (which, officially, the Qing regarded as one of the ‘ten thousand humbly submissive countries’): ‘Although it is the maxim of the Celestial Court to treat with great tenderness and mildness men from afar,’ ran one typical sermon, ‘yet it cannot suffer them
to indulge in scornful and contemptuous trifling with us.’ Lin’s tone towards Elliot veers between the schoolmasterish (‘Looking over the some hundred words in your address, I find but one sentence to approve of . . . How is your mind so void of clear perception?’) and the Old Testament (‘Repent and you will again have indulgence shown you . . . now is the time for foreigners to repent of their faults and turn themselves over to the side of virtue [in order to receive once more] the dewy influences of the favour of the Celestial Court.’)20

  But his relative blindness towards the British suggests also a basic failure of focus: neither the emperor nor his commissioner seems to have felt that Sino-British relations merited serious, long-term concentration. In early September, as the British population bobbed off Hong Kong and just before both sides began firing at each other, the emperor urged Lin once again to tidy things up quickly in Canton then hurry on east, to begin his new job. Daoguang was, like his commissioner, oblivious to the potential consequences of confrontation with the English: ‘What you have done is supremely gratifying!’ he noted (in the vermilion ink reserved exclusively for the emperor’s annotations) on a memorial describing the confiscation of the 20,000 chests.21 ‘Terror before mercy’, he would advise a few weeks later, before clarifying: ‘Do not disrupt things lightly, but at the same time do not be fearful and weak’.22 By early 1840, with the dispute no nearer resolution, he was sounding weary of the whole business, issuing Lin with a demotion following the collapse of a dam in Hubei, where Lin had previously served as governor-general.23 By the time the British fleet arrived in the summer of that year, the emperor’s attention had long drifted elsewhere.

  Lin’s ignorance also shows, again, how little he trusted the Cantonese locals in his struggle to bring the British to heel. Theoretically, he had to hand at least a dozen wily ‘experts’ who had made careers and fortunes dealing with the foreigners: the Hong merchants (not to mention the thousands of compradors, cooks, cleaners and tradesmen who made their livings servicing the needs of the foreigners). Yet Lin made it very clear that he had the greatest disgust for such individuals – one of his first acts on reaching Canton had been to lecture the Hong merchants on their collaboration with the British and threaten to behead their ringleaders. Qing China on the eve of the Opium War was a place too wrapped up in its own insecurities to put its best energies into dealing with the British.

  Chapter Five

  THE FIRST SHOTS

  Neither the short nor the longer-term antagonisms behind the outbreak of Sino-British hostilities of 1839 were hard to discern. British merchants wanted to sell their goods (and especially contraband narcotics) legally and freely all the way along the eastern coast; the Qing imperial government wanted to confine trade to Canton and ban opium. The British wanted extraterritorial powers over their subjects; the Qing wanted to maintain judicial authority over crimes committed within their borders. In short, the British wanted everything in China to be exactly as they liked. While the Qing state, not surprisingly, disagreed.

  This conflict of interest was in due course rationalized by Britain’s mercantile war party into honourable justification for international armed conflict. Over the key months of 1839–40 (when the Cabinet took the decision to go to war), the unwillingness of British merchants to play by another state’s rules on that state’s territory (the very issue triggering the factory siege) was publicly recast as something far nobler. A well-orchestrated pamphlet and press campaign turned their cause into the modern free world’s righteous resistance to an evil empire fossilized into an ancient superiority complex and determined to keep the forces of civilization and progress at bay.

  Such views had long been expressed in the pages of the Chinese Repository. ‘We,’ held forth one merchant in 1834, ‘with our principles of forbearance, have been fixed in a corner of China; ourselves insulted, our fellow subjects unjustly slaughtered, and insult and contumely showered upon us most unsparingly. Has not the nation been disgraced by its extreme humiliation in the face of insult of the grossest nature?’1 After 1834, these voices took advantage of the pathos of Napier’s untimely death to seek a domestic British audience for their complaints. ‘This truculent, vain-glorious people’, James Matheson described the Chinese in 1836, ‘have been pleased to consider all other inhabitants of the earth . . . as BARBARIANS.’2 As tensions with the Qing government intensified, so did British merchants’ efforts to occupy the moral high ground in the conflict. In early 1839, the trader William Jardine had returned to London from China to lead the merchant lobby, taking with him $20,000 and some sound advice from his partner Matheson: ‘You may find it expedient to secure the services of some leading newspaper to advocate the cause’, and perhaps to engage ‘literary men’ to draw up ‘the requisite memorials in the most concise and clear shape’.3 Between 1839 and 1840, Lin’s siege of the factories (throughout which Chinese merchants had made nocturnal deliveries to British smugglers of bread, capons, hams, boxed lunches and suppers) was recreated, in a series of stirring published accounts, as a second Black Hole of Calcutta in which ‘a despotic and arbitrary government . . . [that] has always been unjust and oppressive in their treatment of foreigners’ deprived innocent Britons ‘of their liberty; debar[red] them of food or water; threaten[ed] their lives . . . Dearly will they pay for the insults and outrages offered to the British nation’, wrote Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, an old East India Company hand, and another of the leaders of the merchant lobby.4

  This animosity flowed into a broader current of anti-China feeling that in the second half of the eighteenth century had begun to compete with the more admiring views of the French and English Enlightenment. As Britain’s economic dispute with China gathered pace over these years, it became intellectually fashionable to obscure the petty, pounds-shilling-and-pence nature of the quarrel with systemic diagnoses of all that was wrong with the empire, concealing the simple fact that what Europeans really found objectionable was the Qing’s desire to control trade on its own terms. Where China was a vast, conservative, static unity, European states (and especially England) were small, nimble, fast-changing. While China’s slavish people had been homogenized into ‘speaking one language . . . and sympathising in the same manners’, reasoned David Hume, England’s ‘great liberty and independency, which every man enjoys, allows him to display the manners peculiar to him’.5 Herder, Hegel and others concurred, finding China languishing in ‘shameful stagnation’, ‘an embalmed mummy, wrapped in silk, and painted with hieroglyphics: its internal circulation is that of a dormouse in its winter sleep’.6 Once established in the minds of philosophers, China’s immobility became the expression of a more fatal malaise: a refusal to improve, or to learn from other, more civilized powers. If China carried on as it was, the assumption went, it was doomed.

  As the eighteenth century changed to the nineteenth, therefore, China was reinvented as a rogue state: a massive, militarized, alien, hostile nation that refused to play by the rules of the international game so recently invented by Europe. In 1840, British merchants and diplomats asserted that the only appropriate riposte to this impossible country was war. ‘It is earnestly expected’, went a pamphlet composed by a ‘Resident in China’ in 1840, ‘that the wisdom of Government will be exercised in the choice of some strong and efficient measure, to lower the pretensions of a people so arrogant and unjust.’7 The quarrel with China was no longer about Britain’s economic greed, or drug-smuggling: it was about China’s contempt for national dignity – contempt that Britain was honour-bound to avenge through military action.

  Once the decision to go to war had been made, a turning point was reached in popular impressions of China. The story that the impossible Chinese had driven the British to violence had to be maintained, overriding all empirical evidence to the contrary. Passing judgement in 1841, the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, blamed the eruption of hostilities on ‘the kowtow – the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China, that she will hold commercial interc
ourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relations between lord and vassal’.8 The euphoria of victory further reinforced Britain’s view of its own correctness. How, if Qing China had not taken the losing side of History, could it have been so soundly thrashed by the forces of Progress and Free Trade?9

  China’s rulers, it should be noted, would probably not have recognized themselves in the stereotype that Britain’s war party had devised; nor would many of those on the fringes of the empire (who had first-hand experience of the Qing’s voracious interest in the world at its borders) have seen much resemblance.10 Perhaps even British detractors would have changed their minds, if they had taken the trouble to look at a map, or study a little history. Far from a community turned in on itself, Qing China was a vast, multi-ethnic jigsaw of lands and peoples. British opinion- and policy-makers of the 1830s made the mistake of – or deliberately deceived themselves into – simplifying the territory they called China into a complacent unity: an obstinate duelling partner from whom satisfaction must be extracted. It was nothing of the sort. This was an empire that could not even agree upon a single word for itself – changing shape and name according to whichever dynastic house happened to have acquired it – until discipline-conscious nationalists took matters into their own hands at the start of the twentieth century and settled on Zhongguo (literally, the ‘Middle Kingdom’, an ancient term for the individual state occupying the centre of what is now China).