The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  The Chinese invented movable type four hundred years before Johannes Gutenberg was born. China built a suspension bridge two thousand years before one appeared in the West. It took the civilized Aryans seventeen hundred more years than it did the Chinese to figure out how to make porcelain. Cast iron, the crank handle, deep drilling for natural gas, the belt drive, the fishing reel, chess, matches, brandy, gunpowder, playing cards, the spinning wheel, the umbrella, and countless other innovations—such were the products of China’s inventive genius.

  Europeans would eventually borrow such Chinese innovations as the plow and experience an agricultural revolution. Similarly, literacy spread as the Europeans exploited paper and printing, both Chinese inventions. The British public would become addicted to drinking tea from China mixed with adrenaline-pumping sugar from its Caribbean colonies. This was the heady stimulant that would eventually transform the English from agricultural laborers to alert, regimented cogs in Britain’s new factories. But when the English asked the Chinese to accept their manufactured goods as payment for tea instead of expensive silver, the Son of Heaven wrote dismissively to King George III in 1793, “We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”2

  The Chinese insistence upon silver as payment for tea was a serious economic threat to the British Empire and a huge windfall for the Chinese. As the historian Carl Trocki writes in Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy:

  The 1700s were boom times for the Middle Kingdom as English silver flooded into China. China’s population over that period tripled from about one hundred million to over three hundred million. The constant importation of Asian products into the European markets caused a permanent drain of gold and silver from Europe towards Asia. Only a small trickle of precious metals must have re-entered Europe…. The greater part of gold and silver remained in Asia never to return to Europe.3

  To the British Empire’s financial rescue came a very clever colonial official, Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal in northern India. Bengal had long produced opium, for centuries used across Asia as a medicinal and social drug. Portuguese sailors in Asian waters had observed a profitable Bengal-to-China opium trade conducted by Arab merchants. The Portuguese muscled in on this trade, also bringing to the Chinese market tobacco from their Brazilian colony. Tobacco mixed with Indian opium proved to be a pleasing combination to the Chinese, and opium smoking soon became popular. Realizing the harm to his people, the Son of Heaven banned opium’s sale and use in China.

  Nevertheless, his edict meant little to those Foreign Devils hoping to profit and restore a more favorable (to them) trade balance. England controlled a vast swath of prime opium-growing country, stretching five hundred miles across Bengal, and the British Empire invested enormous sums in state-of-the-art opium farming and production systems. More than two thousand British opium agents oversaw the efforts of one million registered Indian opium farmers. Opium sap was dried into balls, each weighing 3.5 pounds, then placed on floor-to-ceiling factory shelves, where Indian boys would rotate each ball a quarter turn once every six days as it dried. Each opium ball was then stamped with the coveted trademark brand Patna or Benares.

  Patna opium factory. Opium grown in British India and sold in China was the most profitable commodity trade of the nineteenth century and accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire’s revenue. (Drawing by Lt. Colonel Walter B. Sherwill, London Weekly Magazine, June 24, 1882)

  White Christian opium smugglers could not legally sell the banned drug on Chinese soil, so they installed floating wooden warehouses in the Pearl River Delta, where they sold their booty to Chinese criminals who rowed out under the cover of darkness.

  Before long, opium accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire’s revenue, as the Bengal-to-China opium business became the “world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century.”4 Western banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies sprouted to serve this enormously profitable trade. As Carl Trocki notes, “The entire commercial infrastructure of European trade in Asia was built around opium.”5 It was Christians who smuggled the poisonous drug into China, so the Chinese called it “Jesus opium.”

  This Christian drug running was nearly fatal to the Middle Kingdom. Between 1814 and 1850, the Jesus-opium trade sucked out 11 percent of China’s money supply.6 China lost more silver in thirty years than had flowed into the country in the 125 years leading up to the opium trade. As the Chinese money supply contracted, silver became unnaturally scarce, peasants had trouble paying their taxes, counterfeiting rose, waves of inflation and deflation whipsawed the economy, and unrest grew.

  The Jesus-opium trade also tore at the moral fabric of Chinese society. Since the sale of the banned drug was illegal, the Christian smugglers’ Chinese business partners were criminal lowlifes who now got rich and gathered power.

  The Son of Heaven finally put his foot down and dispatched a royal representative to Canton in 1839 to stop the Foreign Devil drug trade. Buckingham Palace shook at the news. Queen Victoria was just twenty years old at this point, on the British throne less than two years, but when the Chinese leader threatened to cut her largest single source of income, she understood the dire financial consequences. Opium production and smuggling not only paid for imports from China that England could not afford in silver, but the drug trade also provided the easy money that most sustained her empire. Victoria dispatched her industrialized navy to enforce Britain’s ability to push an illegal drug. What followed were the two Opium Wars—one from 1839 to 1842, the other from 1856 to 1860. What Victoria spent on these military operations against China was paltry compared to her take of profits from the illegal Jesus-opium trade.

  Victoria also grabbed Hong Kong as part of the spoils in the first of her two Opium Wars. Sir John Francis Davis, governor of Hong Kong from 1844 to 1848, admitted: “Almost every person… not connected with government is employed in the opium trade.”7 The British Empire grew fat on Chinese silver drained from the formerly richest country in the world. The sums were so enormous that Queen Victoria stands as history’s largest drug dealer.

  AS SECRETARY TAFT CUT through the night on his way from Hong Kong to Canton that September evening, he was passing the homes of the Pearl River Delta families who had more experience dealing with American Foreign Devils than people in any other part of China. Starting with the California Gold Rush, it was primarily the families of the Pearl River Delta that had sent their sons to the United States in search of opportunity.

  These Cantonese had brought with them their ancient habits of hard work, cooperation, self-denial, and thrift. Compared to the White workers, the Chinese mined more gold more efficiently, saved more of their earnings, drank and caroused less, behaved better, and almost never caused trouble. An American minister, Augustus Loomis, testified to the Chinese workers’ diligence, steadiness, and clean living: “They are ready to begin work the moment they hear the signal, and labor steadily and honestly until admonished that the working hours are ended. Not having acquired a taste for whiskey, they have few fights, and no ‘blue Mondays.’ You do not see them intoxicated, rolling in the gutters like swine.”8

  White workers claimed that the Chinese competed unfairly because the Mongolians could live cheaper on their diet of rice and rats. But in truth, while the Whites ate a bland diet—“boiled beef and potatoes, beans, bread and butter, and coffee”—the Cantonese “ate healthy, well-cooked, and tasty food… an astonishing variety—oysters, cuttlefish, finned fish, abalone meat, Oriental fruits, and scores of vegetables, including bamboo sprouts, sea-weed, and mushrooms. Each of these foods came dried, purchased from one of the Chinese merchants in San Francisco.”9 The Chinese drank tea from boiled water. “The Americans drank from the streams and lakes, and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses.”10

  Chinese Immigration

  The Chinese emigrated from one large Pacific bay
to another.

  Some admired the Chinese miners’ superior work and living habits. The White miners did not. Unable to compete on a level playing field, the Whites soon employed state laws to hold the Chinese back, as Stephen Ambrose explains in Nothing Like It in the World:

  California law discriminated against them in every way possible, and the state did all it could to degrade them and deny them a decent livelihood. They were not allowed to work on the ‘Mother Lode.’ To work the ‘tailing,’ they had to pay a ‘miner’s tax,’ a $4-per-head so-called permission tax, plus a $2 water tax. In addition, the Chinese had to pay a personal tax, a hospital tax, a $2 school tax, and a property tax. But they could not go to public school, they were denied citizenship, they could not vote, nor could they testify in court. Nevertheless, they paid; more than $2 million in taxes. If Chinese dared to venture into a new mining area, the whites would set on them, beat them, rob them, sometimes kill them. Thus the saying, ‘Not a Chinaman’s chance.’11

  “A Picture for Employers.” Puck, August 21, 1878. Chinese laborers smoked opium and ate rats while the manly White laborer came home to wife and family.

  Nevertheless, the Chinese workers continued to outperform the White laborers. George Hearst, later a U.S. senator from California, who observed Chinese miners for ten years in four different states, proclaimed worriedly, “They can do more work than our people and live on less. They could drive our laborers to the wall.”12

  In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln called for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Two teams of White workers—one proceeding west from the Mississippi River and one working east from the Pacific Ocean—began work on the giant undertaking. Those proceeding west over the Great Plains made progress, but those proceeding east from the Pacific coast hit the solid granite of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The White workers laid down their picks in defeat. The Chinese, from the country that had built the Great Wall, filled the gap and succeeded where the Aryan had tried and failed. Governor Leland Stanford of California wrote President Andrew Johnson, “Without the Chinese it would have been impossible to complete the western portion of this great National highway.”13

  The U.S.-China Treaty of 1868 finally offered a formal welcome: “The United States of America and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively, from one country to the other, for the purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.”14 By then, the railroad was edging closer and closer to completion, a national goal impossible without the Chinese.

  Most American textbooks feature the May 10, 1869, photograph depicting the east and west construction teams meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah, to drive the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad. Although there were many Chinese on the scene—some who had that very morning laid the last ties—when history’s flashbulbs were about to pop, the Aryans self-consciously pushed aside the yellow men who had succeeded where the Whites had failed.

  With the transcontinental railroad completed, the workers who had built it were dismissed and they dispersed across the West. The pop culture image of the American West is based more on the films of director John Ford and Monument Valley than fact. This Hollywood version features John Wayne walking through a White town. What’s missing is the Chinese hotel that John Wayne would have slept in, the Chinese restaurant where he would have dined, the Chinese laundry where he would have done his wash, and the Chinese general store where he would have purchased his provisions. Notes the historian Stephen Ambrose, “In nearly every Western railroad town there used to be a Chinatown.”15

  With their better work and living habits, the Chinese produced services and sold goods of higher quality at a lower price, driving out their humiliated White competitors. And to those who viewed the world through the prism of Aryan superiority and following the sun, the threat went well beyond the economic. If 10 percent of the Chinese in China came to the United States, China would still have 360 million people. But if 40 million Chinese crossed the Pacific, they would become America’s majority race.16 And those Chinese might breed with White women, causing Aryan westering to halt.

  Luckily for civilization, the Aryan instincts came to the fore. The media consistently presented the Chinese as opium-besotted, rodent-eating, filthy creatures, whose lifestyle and lack of morals threatened the White race. In 1877, the Order of Caucasians for the Extermination of the Chinaman declared its goal: “to drive the Chinaman out of California… by every manner and means within the thin gauze of the law.”17 Anti-Chinese labor unions such as the Knights of Labor and the Workingman’s Party spread their slogan across the land: “The Chinese Must Go.”

  Senator James Blaine of Maine warned that those “who eat beef and bread and drink beer… will have to drop his knife and fork and take up Chopsticks [if] those who live on rice”18 are allowed to stay in America. “Either the Anglo-Saxon race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolians will possess it.”19 In 1877, the United States Congress established a Joint Special Congressional Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration. The White Christian male legislators concluded:

  There is not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese to furnish motive power for self-government. The Mongolian race seems to have no desire for progress and to have no conception of representative and free institutions. There is no Aryan or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese as a class.20

  California’s second constitution, ratified in 1879, prohibited companies from employing “directly or indirectly, in any capacity, any Chinese or Mongolian”; prohibited the employ of Chinese “on any state, county, municipal, or other public work, except in punishment for crime”; and mandated that the legislature “delegate all necessary power to the incorporated cities and towns of this state for the removal of Chinese without the limits of such cities and towns, or for their locations within prescribed portions of those limits, and it shall also provide the necessary legislation to prohibit the introduction into this state of Chinese after the adoption of this Constitution.”21

  From America’s inception in 1783 to 1882, a period of ninety-nine years, there had been no concept of illegal immigrants in the United States. That changed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For the first time in U.S. history, an immigration gate was erected with the specific goal of blocking non-Whites. Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts described the Chinese Exclusion Act as “nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.”22 But because of the dire race threat presented by the yellow men, most Americans had no problem with the new legislation. Twenty-four years old and just out of Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1882, “No greater calamity could now befall the United States than to have the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population.”23

  ROCK SPRINGS, WYOMING, WAS a mining town that produced almost half the coal that fueled the transcontinental railroad. Approximately six hundred Chinese and three hundred Whites lived in the dust-blown settlement. On the evening of September 1, 1885, the Rock Springs chapter of the Knights of Labor held a “Chinese Must Go!” meeting. The next day, the race cleansing began. “White men fall in” was the call to arms.

  “The Nigger Must Go” and “The Chinese Must Go.” Harper’s Weekly, September 13, 1879. The caption reads: “The Poor Barbarians Can’t Understand Our Civilized Republican Form of Government.” (Courtesy of HarpWeek, LLC)

  Armed White miners surrounded Chinatown. The local Chinese laundryman was in his washhouse when a bullet shattered his skull. White wives and daughters laughed and clapped as their men shot fleeing Chinese and then searched their pockets. White women who had earlier taught English classes to the Chinese now looted their students’ homes. Chinese who escaped into the countryside were picked off by waiting Knights of Labor snipers.

  The first Wyoming state official to arrive in Rock
Springs described the scene: “Not a living Chinaman—man, woman or child—was left in the town… and not a single house, shanty, or structure of any kind, that had ever been inhabited by a Chinaman was left unburned. The smell of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west.”24 In the court trials that followed, there were no convictions.

  The Rock Springs Massacre. Rock Springs, Wyoming. Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “No greater calamity could now befall the United States than to have the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population.” Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1885. (Library of Congress)

  Rock Springs was just the beginning. All across the West, the American Aryan raged against the Chinese. From California, north to Alaska, west to Colorado, and south to New Mexico, posters told the Chinese to get out and those who hesitated would face the barrel of a White man’s rifle. In Fresno, a mob killed Chinese workers in their beds. In Tacoma, the mayor led hundreds of armed Aryans in rousting the Chinese from their homes and pushing them onto waiting trains. In Seattle, the chief of police led a mob who marched the local Chinese at gunpoint up the gangplank of a waiting ship.

  Theodore Roosevelt deemed the Chinese a “race-foe” and called upon the United States to maintain “race-selfishness” to exclude “the dangerous alien who would be ruinous to the white race.”25 When he became president, Roosevelt inherited two competing U.S. approaches regarding China. In America, voters demanded Chinese exclusion. In China, U.S. businessmen demanded “The Open Door.”