by Julia Lovell
For the Qing – as a conquering minority – uneasiness about security was a way of life, directed at every ethnic group within its sprawling frontiers, including the Han Chinese majority who helped administer the empire. ‘If our government were to become weak,’ the Kangxi emperor had prophesied near the end of his life,
if we were to weaken our vigilance over the Chinese in the southern provinces and over the large number of boats that leave every year for Luzon, Batavia, Japan, and other countries, or if divisions were to erupt among us Manchus and the various princes of my family, if our enemies the Eleuths were to succeed in allying with the Tartars of Kokonor, as well as our Kalmuk and Mongol tributaries, what would become of our empire? With the Russians to the north, the Portuguese from Luzon to the east, the Dutch to the south, [they] would be able to do with China whatever they liked.22
Antagonism between Manchus and Chinese (and, for that matter, between Chinese from different regions) would consistently undermine Qing efforts throughout the Opium War to come.
Qianlong’s lofty public denial of interest in ingenious foreign articles (belied by his French, Tibetan and Mongol residences, by his profusion of exquisite European ‘spheres, orreries, clocks and musical automatons’ that, Macartney noted, made the British gifts ‘shrink from the comparison’) is perhaps best understood as part of a careful strategy of imperialist control. The emperor was informing a potential rival of his determination to define and monitor his empire’s need for ideas and objects.23 His rhetoric suggests an insular overconfidence in his empire’s possessions and achievements. His contrasting actions – his collections of exotic artefacts and religions, his expansionist campaigns – reveal an aggressive interest in the outside world.
The Qing appetite for foreign languages, objects and ideas grew directly out of the preoccupation with security that nineteenth-century European accounts read as xenophobia. Emperors made excellent diplomatic use of their own cosmopolitanism: ‘when the rota of Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans come every year to the capital for audience,’ proclaimed the sexalingual Qianlong emperor, ‘I use their own languages and do not rely on an interpreter . . . to conquer them by kindness.’24 They used Manchu to correspond secretly with distant officers in the field, outside Chinese lines of communication. Well aware of the political uses of multilingualism, the Qing did its best to prevent non-resident Europeans from acquiring Chinese and Manchu, and therefore the means to communicate independently with the native population: in early nineteenth-century Canton, teaching a foreigner Chinese remained a capital offence. ‘The shrewd Chinaman’, William Hunter observed, ‘succeeded in supplying [foreigners’] absence of the knowledge of his own language by cleverly making himself familiar with sounds of foreign words’.25 Most Western writers quoted pidgin – the linguistic bridge between Canton’s European and Chinese merchant communities – to ridicule the Chinese into whose mouths they put it; Hunter’s analysis remade it into a grand intelligence scheme.
In short, the British made an error of judgement in assessing their first, influential encounter with high Qing diplomacy in 1793, allowing the ceremonial facade of the tribute system to obscure the pragmatic reality of Qing foreign policy. According to the tributary ideal, no ruler of China ever needed to lift a finger against its neighbours as – mesmerized by the glitter of Confucian civilization – all would voluntarily prostrate themselves before the Son of Heaven. The great military enterprises of the Qing dynasty tell a different story: this was an ambitious conquest backed by all available technical or political means – Central Asian, Confucian, Tibetan, European – of securing the resulting empire. As a result, by the start of the nineteenth century, it becomes remarkably difficult to define what European observers so confidently called China. What we have instead is a cross-bred state, held together by coercive cosmopolitanism: by a sense of unbounded entitlement to rule and control, justified by the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, the Manchu Way, Tibetan spirituality and European firepower. The great Qing emperors tried to be all things to all their people: great conquerors, preaching the superiority of their ethnic heritage; learned Confucian poets, scholars, receivers of tributaries; Buddhist messiahs. While the foundation stones of the empire – the economy and the army – were prospering, success seems to have kept this multi-ethnic balancing act in place. But once these same things sank into decline at the close of the eighteenth century, the whole edifice of empire began to shake.
As European opinion on China turned through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, erudites from Montesquieu to J. S. Mill and beyond produced lazy general hypotheses to explain what was wrong with China (or rather, what they disliked about it): to justify why the old Qing Chinese way was doomed to be swept away by the modern European, or British, way. But these theories fell some way off the mark: economic, ecological and imperialist overextension would poise the Qing for a nineteenth-century tumble. The Chinese empire (as it remains today) is probably best seen as an impressive but improbable high-wire act, unified by ambition, bluff, pomp and pragmatism. At any one moment – as an ethnic minority cajoled, blustered and compelled into allegiance any number of territories that could just as easily have floated off into independence – there were far more logical reasons for the Qing empire to fall apart than for it to hold together. A glance across the two centuries of Qing history that preceded the outbreak of the Opium War tells us that this was a state capable of all manner of responses to Britain in spring 1839 (force, ceremonial, economic concessions or diplomatic realism). Misfortune – the distractions of protracted economic and social crisis – rather than blind conceit turned it in on itself, and pushed it towards confrontation with Palmerston’s gunboats.
At 9 a.m. on 4 September 1839, Charles Elliot – in a fleet of three small ships – sailed from the northern shore of Hong Kong towards the Qing junks at Kowloon that were blocking British access to fresh food and water. Just off the mainland, he dispatched Karl Gützlaff to hand a couple of letters to the authorities, stating that if the war junks did not withdraw, violence would result. Chinese representatives declined to take them, on the grounds that they were not empowered to do so. At 2 p.m., with the Cantonese sun blazing down, Elliot communicated that if he did not get provisions in half an hour, he would fire on the Qing ships. When the deadline came and went, Elliot stuck to his word. To the British consternation, the junks did not flee, but returned the fire, and well. Nonetheless, at 4.45, as the junks drew alongside the English ships, ‘we . . . gave them three such Broadsides that it made every Rope in the vessel grin again’, one of Elliot’s shaken clerks later wrote home. ‘We loaded with Grape the fourth time, and gave them Gun for Gun. – The shrieking on board was dreadful, but it did not frighten me; this is the first day I ever shed human blood, and I hope will be the last.’26
But full-blown war was still not inevitable. Immediately afterwards, local traders were once more allowed to supply to the British, although at slightly higher prices than before; and the signs marked ‘Poison’ disappeared from watering holes. By 15 September, Lin was allowing a few of the English (including the troublesome Elliot) to drift back to Macao, and the two men succeeded in exchanging relatively peaceable communications for almost a month. Elliot offered a compromise: officials could search newly arrived ships, and cargos that contained any opium would be confiscated; he also pledged 2,000 dollars in the search for Lin Weixi’s murderer. It was not exactly harmonious; but neither were the two sides firing broadsides at each other – even if Lin had amiably threatened to ‘annihilate’ the English on 28 September, if they continued to refuse to hand over the homicide. Trade, meantime, was thriving, because the Americans had signed their own version of a bond (which, they claimed, made no mention of a death penalty), and were shifting British goods by the boatful into Canton, then tea and silk out.
Soon, though, Elliot’s luck soured again. On 14 October an old East India Company ship, the Thomas Coutts, approached the China coast from Singapore carrying nothing but Indian cot
ton, rattan and pepper, bypassed Hong Kong, and headed straight to Humen, where its captain signed Lin’s bond and was waved up to Canton. Lin now abandoned the idea of compromise, and bid once more for a mass signing of the bond. How much quicker and easier, he told Elliot, the bond was than a search: sign, and the ‘usual privileges would be restored’.27 Lin, meanwhile, assembled at Chuanbi – the eastern bank of the river mouth leading up to Canton, where a mass of British merchant ships was waiting to finalize the revised bond with Lin – a fleet of war junks and fire rafts. The next day, Elliot set off from Hong Kong to mediate, in the Volage and the Hyacinth, the frigate and sloop that had arrived from India at the very end of August. When he arrived on 2 November after five anxious days beating up against adverse winds, the captain of the Volage, Henry Smith, planned to pass a letter to the commissioner, asking the latter to reconsider his order.
There are at least three accounts of what happened next. Elliot claimed that an infuriating diplomatic dance began: the Qing admiral, Guan Tianpei, refused to receive the letter, and yet again asked for the murderer of Lin Weixi; yet again, Elliot stated that he did not know who the murderer was. At noon, Captain Smith calculated that the risk of leaving the merchant fleet exposed overnight to possible Qing attack was too great, while retiring ‘was not compatible with the honour of the flag’.28 (Had he been dragged all the way from India, he was perhaps asking himself, merely to deliver post?) After consulting Elliot, he opened fire.
The Chinese version is rather different. According to Lin’s memorial to the emperor, as the second English ship to sign the bond, the Royal Saxon, prepared to enter the river to approach Canton, the two English warships ‘forcibly ordered [her] to return, and prevented her from entering the port’. Just when a surprised Admiral Guan was making enquiries regarding the matter, ‘the Hyacinth began cannonading, and advanced her attack’.29 The admiral now returned the fire and ordered his own fleet to advance, ‘standing erect before the mast, wielding his sword and roaring “Death to deserters!” He did not flinch even when injured by a cannon ball that took the side off one of the masts’. He ‘blasted the figure-head off one ship, causing many foreign sailors to fall into the sea’. (‘Outstanding’, noted the emperor.) As the British ships shortly tried to flee the scene, the Qing navy decided to let them limp off.30
Now back to Elliot. ‘[We] ran down the Chinese line, pouring in a destructive fire . . . the terrible effect of [which] was soon manifest. One war junk blew up at about pistol-shot distance . . . three were sunk; and several others were obviously waterlogged . . . the Admiral’s conduct was worthy of his station,’ Elliot conceded, ‘manifesting a resolution of behaviour honourably enhanced by the hopelessness of his efforts. In less than three quarters of an hour, however, he and the remainder of his squadron were retiring in great distress to their former anchorage; and as it was not Captain Smith’s disposition to protract destructive hostilities, he . . . discontinued the fire and made sail for Macao.’31 One light injury – to a British sailor – was sustained.
Despite the difficulties (or even impossibilities) of his position, Elliot was in the wrong. By 3 November, he had not only repeatedly flouted Qing law, but had also used force to prevent two British ships from complying with this same law, and authorized a clash with Chinese ships. Nevertheless, when it comes to war, the principle of natural justice sometimes needs to be sidelined by more pragmatic considerations. The engagement at Chuanbi should have confirmed to Lin that Qing ships and cannon were no match for the British and that, for the time being, open conflict was best avoided. Even if he had drawn that cautious conclusion, though, the English Cabinet would soon take the decision for war out of his hands.
Chapter Six
‘AN EXPLANATORY DECLARATION’
On 29 August 1839, Lord Palmerston – Free Trader, libertine, arch-villain of Chinese historiography – went to work as usual at the Foreign Office. In the 1830s, this institution was wedged into a corner of the Downing Street cul-de-sac, not far from a malfunctioning sewer. The integrity of the whole structure – a rickety amalgam of two eighteenth-century houses – was threatened by the weight of the printing apparatus up in the attic, which sent ominous cracks through the building.1 Palmerston was so dissatisfied with the accommodation that when a fire started in one of the rooms in 1836, he reportedly could not bring himself to call for help with any great urgency. It was eventually on his recommendation that the old place was demolished in 1861, and replaced by the purpose-built classical palace that houses the FCO in Whitehall today.
That day in late summer 1839, he would have found on his desk – at which he always worked standing up, sometimes for up to seven hours at a time (his theory being that if he fell asleep at the job, he would wake up when he hit the floor)2 – a dispatch from the Queen’s man in China, Charles Elliot, with news of what was happening out there: the threats, the blockade, the extraction of the opium. Concluding his dispatch, Elliot suggested a course of action: ‘It appears to me, my Lord, that the response to all these unjust violences should be made in the form of a swift and heavy blow unprefaced by one word of written communication.’3
According to contemporary Chinese historians, what happened next is straightforward. With his eyes on imperialist expansion, Palmerston – in alliance with Britain’s rapacious merchant lobby – grasped the pretext delivered to him by Lin’s destruction of British government property and prepared for war. For Palmerston, like Elliot, is accused of many things in PRC history books. His sins go back to 1833, when he is supposed to have instigated the Napier fiasco, ordering Lord William to set off a diplomatic incident to justify a military invasion of China. (One might cautiously observe that it was not a very well-planned invasion, as he failed to tell British India to provide any ships.) In June 1836, the PRC case against him continues, he promoted Charles Elliot to the position of chief superintendent in China and abolished any junior positions, so as to give the wicked captain absolute power over China policy. (English sources give a more prosaic explanation: Palmerston wanted to reduce costs.) Palmerston, in summary, ‘was the evil inciter and organiser of the Opium War . . . a total pirate’.4 In Communist China, Palmerston’s decision to send out the gunboats is read as a long-planned conspiracy, with Elliot’s manoeuvring through 1839 merely providing an excuse for an inevitable war.
To which Palmerston might have ruefully responded: if only he had had time that year for such luxuries as elaborate global conspiracies. The viscount had first been appointed to the Foreign Office in 1830; in 1839, it remained an organization under severe pressure. To some, diplomacy remained a bastion of gentlemanly amateurism: ‘neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’, went one contemptuous observation. A ‘nursery’ at the top of the Downing Street house was fitted out with fencing foils, boxing gloves and a piano, with which young bloods fresh out of university could entertain themselves. Palmerston’s staff, both in London and abroad, certainly included its fair share of dilettanti, womanizers and gamblers, and Palmerston was periodically importuned by well-born chums, colleagues and his own prime minister for preferential placements for ill-qualified junior relatives, resulting in a number of unwise appointments. In 1851, the Consul-Generalship to the Mosquito Indians was granted to an individual, according to one account, ‘as mad as Bedlam, vulgar, & mental & quarrelling with all classes & people’.5 Palmerston’s man in Belgium in the early 1830s took pride in the fact that he did not read ‘the trumpery Belgian papers’ or ‘mix with the trumpery Belgian people . . . his time was passed in a state of besotted irritation, carrying on warlike correspondence with quarrelsome English gentlemen, and amatory correspondence with accommodating French & Belgian ladies.’6 ‘There is positively nothing to do here’, complained Berlin’s legation secretary in 1835. ‘I am always at Potsdam shooting wild ducks.’7 Extracting useful intelligence from such sources could be a trial. ‘Tell us now and then’, Palmerston mildly wrote to a minister in Naples (w
ho also happened to be his brother) who failed to report on anything beyond the movements of the royal family, ‘what the Neapolitan government think or mean to do about the affairs of the world – Spain, Greece, Italy, Morocco; what is the internal state of the country, as to commerce, finance, army, etc. We hear of a war between Naples and Morocco: is it true, and what is it about?’8
If the efficiency of Palmerston’s operations in Europe was questionable, how much greater was the scope for things going wrong between London and China, where cultural and political barriers rendered most kinds of entente cordiale implausible, where linguistic competence was scarce, where official instructions – travelling in the pre-telegraphic 1830s by opium clipper, steamer, sidewheeler and camel or donkey litter – lagged months behind events. As Elliot endured the Canton summer of 1839, his dispatches moved towards his minister in Downing Street with distressing slowness: it took five months for his account of the blockade and request for military backup to land on Palmerston’s desk. It would take another six months for Palmerston’s decision to send a fleet to return to Elliot.9
