The Forbidden Game
Brian Inglis
6. The Opium Wars
THE GIN PLAGUE OF LONDON HAD SHOWN HOW A GOVERNMENT, and a governing
class, could encourage the spread of drug-taking in its own financial
interest, with destructive consequences; but at least it had been
possible for them to reverse the policy when those consequences
became apparent. A plant drug which grew in Britain's new colonial
territory in India was to prove even more profitable; and as the
bulk of it was sold away from British territory, there was no
need to worry what the consequences might be.
Opium had long been manufactured from the sap of the poppies grown
in the Middle East and in India; and traveller after traveller
in those regions had reported that unlike in Europe, where it
was employed mainly as a sedative, it was taken as a stimulant,
particularly when Dutch courage was required. 'There is no Turk
who would not buy opium with his last penny', the French naturalist
Belon noted in the sixteenth century, 'because they think that
they become more daring, and have less fear of the dangers of
war.' In India, John Fryer observed in the 1670s, wrestlers took
it to help them to perform feats ordinarily beyond their strength,
and warriors, 'to run up on any enterprise with a raging resolution
to die or be victorious'.
Had the British arrived in India as colonists, they would probably
have felt bound to try to suppress opium consumption as a danger
to law and order—and to health; it could create a powerful craving,
as Robert Clive, who became addicted to it, was to find. But apart
from the risk of addiction, opium represented no threat to the
East India Company, so long as it remained primarily a mercantile
body. The Moguls possessed a monopoly of opium production in Bengal,
and they were disposed to restrict consumption, as far as possible,
to themselves and their circle. They were willing, though, to
sell it to the Company; and the Company's ships began to take
it to the East Indies and to China.
Warren Hastings
Opium had long been used in China medicinally; and in the seventeenth
century people had begun to burn small quantities of it in the
flame of a candle, to inhale the fumes—the idea presumably deriving
from seeing tobacco smoked. Disturbed by reports of the spread
of the new fad, the Emperor decreed in 1729 that opium must no
longer be imported, except under licence. But by this time it
had won too many adherents. The flow continued in defiance of
the ban, just as with tobacco in those countries which had tried
to enforce prohibition a century before.
Most of the opium was brought in from the Middle East by the Portuguese,
through Macao; but when the East India Company inherited the Mogul
empire after Clive's victory at Plassey, they also inherited the
Mogul's opium monopoly, and the prospect of selling more of it
in China, with her estimated 300,000,000 population, was attractive.
There was a snag, however: foreigners were permitted to trade
with China only through Canton. The Company enjoyed a monopoly
of British trade there—including opium brought in under licence.
Its rights might be forfeited if it were caught smuggling. The
Company therefore began to sell its opium in India to the owners
of merchant ships who were prepared to smuggle it into China;
and these 'country ships', as they came to be called, took it
to Macao.
For a while, the operations were on a very small scale; but when
Warren Hastings took over the management of the Company in 1772,
becoming Governor-General of British India, he soon grasped the
tremendous potential of the traffic and set about expanding it
for the benefit of the Company's finances. Hastings had no illusions
about what he was doing. He described opium as a 'pernicious'
commodity, 'which the wisdom of the Government should carefully
restrain from internal consumption'—that is, from consumption
in British India. Foreign commerce was a different matter. When
war with the Dutch temporarily closed the opium market in their
colonies in the East Indies, Hastings switched a consignment to
Canton, in a privateer armed at the expense of the Company. The
venture was not a success. Blackmailed by the Canton merchants'
guild with the threat of disclosure, the Company's Canton agents
had to sell the opium to them for a derisory price. But the 'country
ships' continued to provide a safe and increasingly lucrative
method of distribution.
Shortly before the end of the century another imperial edict against
opium was promulgated; and it was to be followed by many more,
pleading, warning, threatening. Far from paying any attention,
the 'country ships' began to extend their activities; 'some ill-disposed
individuals', the Emperor was informed in 1807, had even begun
to carry the opium they brought over the mountain passes into
the interior. Soon, it reached Pekin. In 1813 he discovered to
his horror that members of his bodyguard, and some of the court
eunuchs, had become enslaved by the habit. Stiffer penalties were
decreed, flogging and the wearing of the cangue—a kind
of portable pillory; but without success. The lower classes, it
was found, were taking to the habit; 'vagabonds clandestinely
purchase and eat it' a further edict complained in 1815, 'and
eventually become sunk into the most stupid and besotted state,
so as to cut down the powers of nature and destroy life.'
The situation was unprecedented. Doubtless the French Government
had been very willing, a century earlier, that French wine and
brandy should continue to be smuggled into Britain, the proceeds
going to help the French wine industry, and at the same time depriving
the British Government of needed revenue. But the French Government
had not itself acted as a principal; whereas the Government of
British India—as the Company had virtually become—were by
this time purchasing the entire poppy harvest in their territories,
with the deliberate intention of processing the opium and sending
the bulk of it to China. To avoid jeopardising their legal commercial
undertakings—in particular, the tea trade, which had reached
massive proportions—they still had to pretend that they were
not engaged in smuggling. Nor, technically, were they, as the
'country ships' did not sail under the Company's flag. But they
were licensed by the Company—no ship could take opium out of
India without such a licence. Their operations, too, were financed
by the Company, whose Canton agents received the price for the
opium from the Chinese merchants who purchased it. The Company's
money was also laid out, where necessary, in bribes. When a new
Governor from Pekin arrested some of the Cantonese who were involved
in the traffic, and compelled them under torture to confess, the
Company's Canton agents warned that sales might be subject to
some delay; but they made it clear that this would be only until
a new bribery scale had been agreed with the 'officers and police
people employed to prevent the sales', to compensate them for
the additional risk they had run.
If criticised for this involvement in drug smuggling, the Company's
line was that it was up to the Chinese, if they wanted, to enforce
their own laws; and in this the Company was doing its best to
help by restricting production, and keeping up the price, so that
most people would not be able to afford it. 'Were it possible
to prevent the use of the drug altogether', the Governor-General
virtuously claimed in 1817, 'except strictly for the purpose of
medicine, we would gladly do it in compassion to mankind'. The
Company's directors in London expressed their approval, but added
that restriction of the supply was a policy which would be acceptable
only so long as it meant higher profits; otherwise, 'the expediency
of proportionately increasing the annual provision will naturally
engage your attention'.
Very soon, the Indian Government's attention was duly engaged.
Attracted by the rising price of opium, Princes in the Indian
Native States were beginning to encourage production; and in quantity
and quality 'Malwa', as it was known, began to rival the Company's
opium from Bengal. The Company hastily abandoned its policy of
restricting consumption, reduced its prices, and in 1827 resorted
to what was described as a policy of 'voluntary persuasion' of
the Princes to sell their opium only through the Company, in Calcutta
or Bombay. The voluntary persuasion took the form of telling the
Princes that they had to make a choice between keeping the friendship,
or incurring the enmity, of the British Government. Past experience
had shown that an Indian ruler who incurred the enmity of the
British Government was liable to lose his throne, and sometimes
his life. Friendship, on the other hand, meant a subsidy to compensate
for the loss of revenue from opium. It was not long before the
great bulk of the Malwa opium produced in the Native States was
under the Company's control.
The Napier incident
At the Canton end the Company had also had a setback; but it,
too, had turned out in the end to be an advantage. By 1820 the
system of bribery had become so well-established that the 'country
ships' were actually sailing up the Canton estuary to Whampoa,
the port of Canton, confident that officials would look the other
way when the consignments were unloaded. Once again, however,
a new Governor, determined to carry out Pekin's instructions—or
at least appear to be carrying them out—arrested a number of
the Chinese involved. He also ordered that all ships coming up
the Canton river must be searched; any ship found carrying any
opium would have not merely the opium, but its entire cargo confiscated,
and would thereafter be banned from the China trade.
The smugglers departed—but only as far as Lintin island, at
the mouth of the estuary. There, they set up what was in all but
name, a British base. The opium clippers were fast and well-armed,
more than a match for Chinese junks which were sent to intercept
them. They brought their cargoes to Lintin, packed in chests-of-drawers,
containing about 140 lbs of opium made up into balls about the
size of a small grapefruit; discharged the chests in depot ships;
and returned to India for more. From Lintin, the opium was either
taken by country ships farther along the coast, or transferred
locally to 'fast crabs', or 'scrambling dragons'—the names
by which the Chinese authorities denounced them, in a proclamation
in 1826—shallow-beamed boats manned by thirty or forty oarsmen,
designed so that they could skim over bars and shallows, and along
remote creeks. The penalty for being caught was death; but this
actually helped the traffic, because the smugglers had no hesitation
in fighting it out if, owing to some breakdown in the bribery
chain, they were intercepted. Lintin was ideally suited to 'fast
crab' activities. It also saved port dues for the larger ships;
and it was free from Chinese interference. During the 1 820s,
as a result, the amount of Indian opium imported into China quadrupled.
There was no question, as yet, of the Company's trying to justify
the opium traffic on any other ground than caveat emptor.
The taking of opium for pleasure was still regarded as a destructive
vice—and not just in India; Stamford Raffles denounced it as
a malign influence on the people of Java, 'degrading their character
and enervating their energies'. De Quincey's Confessions,
too, when they were published in 1821, alerted public opinion
at home to the agonies of addiction. So when the House of Commons
Committee was set up to investigate the affairs of the East India
Company in 1830, the Company's line was that it must be allowed
to retain its opium monopoly, because only in that way could production
be restricted, and consumption kept down by 'making the price
as high as possible'. It would have required little research by
the Committee to find that so far from trying to keep the price
up and consumption down, the Company was selling four times as
much opium to the Chinese at a considerably lower price than it
had ten years before; but the Company had another argument in
reserve, which was to prove decisive. The value of the opium sold
in China amounted to well over two million pounds—getting on
for half the amount then annually devoted to paying for the Crown
and the Civil Service in Britain. If the Government of India was
deprived of the revenue from opium, it would have to be raised
from other sources, and the British taxpayer might have to be
called upon. It would not be desirable, the Committee recommended,
'to abandon so important a source of revenue as the opium trade,
the duty upon opium being one which falls principally on the foreign
consumer'. The Government gratefully accepted the recommendation;
and although the Company was stripped of its other privileges,
the opium monopoly was retained.
This meant, in effect, that the British Government was now directly
responsible for the opium traffic, through the Government of India,
'the Company' being hardly distinguishable from the Indian civil
service. Even the pretence that production was being kept down
to keep prices high and consumption low was abandoned. The Company's
agents were instructed to put pressure on the Bengal peasants
to sow more poppies; as the agents were paid on a commission basis,
they needed no inducement, using various forms of blackmail to
bring recalcitrant peasants into line.
Largely due to the pioneer efforts of Jardine Matheson's 'opium
clippers', too, new areas were opened up to the smuggling traffic
along the Chinese coast to the north of Canton. Language was a
difficulty; William Jardine shrewdly solved it by employing a
missionary, Charles Gutzlaff, as interpreter. 'We look up to the
ever-blessed Redeemer, to whom China with all its millions is
given', Gutzlaff wrote; 'in the faithfulness of His promise we
anticipate the glorious day of a general conversion, and are willing
to do our utmost to promote the good work'; the good work being
the introduction of the Chinese to the bibles, tracts, and ointments,
which he distributed wherever his duties as interpreter, in the
haggling over opium prices—which brought much satisfaction and
profit to Jardine Matheson—permitted.
Some members of the Whig Government, though, were uneasy about
the traffic. It did not pass unnoticed abroad that the Government
which, in 1833, had paraded its devotion to the cause of humanity
by abolishing the slave trade, had now taken over the role of
principal in the most massive smuggling operation the world had
ever known, designed to keep the Chinese people supplied with
a notoriously dangerous drug, consumption of which was generally
restricted, and in some places prohibited, on British territory.
The remedy, Lord Palmerston decided, was to persuade the Chinese
Government to end the Canton monopoly, and to open up other ports
to foreign trade—which would be accompanied, the expectation
was, by the legalisation of opium. In 1834 he despatched Lord
Napier to China, to negotiate the deal.
A naval officer turned sheep farmer, Napier knew nothing of China
or the Chinese, and succeeded only in irritating the Canton authorities.
Recriminations followed; and the viceroy put a ban on trade of
any kind by British ships. Napier's reply was a show of force:
two British frigates managed to fight their way up the river to
Canton. The Chinese blocked their way back, with stakes and fireships.
Napier realised he was trapped. Harassed, and suffering from fever,
he had to accept the offer of a Chinese boat for his return journey
from Canton down to the sea. It deposited him at Macao where,
a few days later, he died.
The prohibition debate
Up to this point, information about the effects of the opium on
the Chinese had been scanty; and it was never to be wholly reliable.
But in 1832 two American missionaries founded the Chinese Repository,
a monthly magazine which, amongst other things, provided translations
of Chinese documents ranging from imperial decrees to fly-posters;
and the evidence pointed to growing alarm about the drug. The
army, in particular, had succumbed. Of a thousand soldiers sent
as reinforcements to help put down a rising in the province of
Canton, the commanding officer had had to reject two hundred as
unfit for service; and opium was blamed when the rebels defeated
the imperial force. The son of the Governor of Canton, it also
transpired, had been smuggling it through to his friends in Pekin
in the equivalent of the diplomatic bag. Chinese historians have
suggested that this attraction opium smoking had for the sons
of men of wealth and position may have been decisive, in what
was to follow: for the Emperor himself—Tao-Kwang, who had succeeded
to the throne in 1820—was a victim; his three eldest sons all
died of opium addiction.
The difficulty which confronted the Emperor was how to suppress
the opium traffic, now that it had obtained such a hold. The story
of the opium in the diplomatic bag had come out only because it
turned out to be of such poor quality that the merchant concerned
was to be proceeded against, just as if it were legal merchandise;
and how deeply both merchants and civil authorities were involved
was revealed again in 1834. The Repository reported that the new
Governor of Canton (the old one having been sacked for his failure
to suppress the traffic), angry at finding that he had been overcharged
for his opium supply, had attempted to arrest the suppliers, only
to find they had already absconded. When the authorities did take
action against smugglers—the Repository explained—it
was not to stop smuggling, but to ensure that it was kept in existing
channels: 'it would seem that the smuggling trade is becoming
a monopoly of the Government.'
The fact, too, that so many respectable citizens—or their sons—were
opium smokers encouraged extortion and blackmail. Since the beginning
of the century, the American merchant Charles W. King—one of
the very few merchants of any nationality in Canton who had refused
to have anything to do with the traffic—complained in a letter
to the British Superintendent of Trade:
the British merchants, led on by the East India Company, have
been driving a trade in violation of the highest laws and the
best interests of the Chinese empire. This cause has been pushed
so far as to derange its currency, to corrupt its officers, and
ruin multitudes of its people. The traffic has become associated,
in the politics of the country, with the axe and the dungeon;
in the breasts of men in private life, with the wreck of property,
virtue, honour and happiness. All ranks, from the Emperor on the
throne to the people of the humblest hamlets, have felt its sting.
To the fact of its descent to the lowest classes of society, we
are frequent witnesses; and the Court gazettes are evidence that
it has marked out victims for disgrace and ruin even among the
imperial kindred.
Law-abiding citizens were not necessarily safe as Gutzlaff was
to lament, when he came to write the life of the Emperor. The
great bane of China, Gutzlaff—of all people—argued, had been
the introduction of opium by foreigners. The rewards offered to
informers in the attempt to suppress it made them 'both numerous
and unscrupulous; whoever had a grudge against his neighbour,
denounced him as a transgressor of the laws against the drug';
and the excuse 'searching for the drug', had been used by officials
to commit thefts, and other outrages. Thousands of innocent people,
Gutzlaff lamented, had been the victims.
The failure of the prohibition policy, and the disastrous consequences
arising out of the effort to enforce it, had attracted the attention
of some of the teachers at an academy which had been founded in
1820 in Canton. Perhaps because it had not settled into the traditional
academic grooves, the possibility of legalising opium imports,
subject to a duty, had been discussed; and among those influenced
by the arguments in favour of that course was Hsü Nai-chi,
who had later become an imperial official in the province of Kwantung,
and seen for himself the effects of the failure of prohibition.
In May 1836 he addressed a memorial to the Emperor, putting the
case for admitting opium legally, on payment of duty.
Hsü did not dispute that 'so vile a practice', and the evils
arising out of it, should if possible be stopped. His argument
was that prohibition not merely had failed to stop the evils,
but had created many more; and the severer the interdicts against
it became, 'the more widely do the evils arising therefrom spread'.
When it had first been found that prohibition was not working,
flogging and the cangue had been introduced; then, exile,
imprisonment, and even death. Yet 'the smokers of the drug have
increased in number, and the practice has spread almost through
the whole empire'. Supporters of the prohibition policy had been
forced back on the argument that it was not the regulations, but
how they were carried out, that was the trouble; 'it is said,
the daily increase is owing to the negligence of officers in enforcing
the interdicts!' But this negligence, Hsü insisted, was the
fault of the interdicts. The more severe they became, the greater
the incentive to criminals to employ violence, or corruption,
or both.
In its general approach, the memorial was remarkably similar in
its line of argument to Bathurst's in the House of Lords nearly
a century before. But Hsü's analysis went a little deeper
in its recognition of why the severity of a penal code, so far
from helping in the effort to suppress a drug, must make it easier
for the importer. As he was not himself at risk, the penalties
did not matter to him. At worst, all that he had to worry about
was having to pay out more in bribes. But even that could be,
in the end, to his advantage. The higher the payment offered,
the easier it became to find officials who would succumb.
The Emperor was sufficiently impressed by Hsü's memorandum
to refer it, in June, to the Governor of Canton, Teng T'ing-chen,
who had taken office earlier that year. Teng had already been
converted to the legalisation policy: his recommendations followed
the line Hsü had laid down. But other advisers expressed
horror at the proposal—in much the same terms as Hervey and
Chesterfield had used about the Spirits Licensing Bill. 'When
have not prostitution, gambling, treason, robbery, and suchlike
infractions of the laws afforded occasion for extortionate underlings
and worthless vagrants to benefit themselves, and by falsehood
and bribery to amass wealth?', Chu T'sun, Sub-Chancellor of the
Grand Secretariat, asked. 'But none, surely, would contend that
the law, because in such instances rendered ineffectual, should
therefore be abrogated!' The consequences of such a step would
be disastrous:
The laws that forbid the people to do wrong may be likened to
the dykes which prevent the overflowing of water. If any one,
then, urging that the dykes are very old, and therefore useless,
should have them thrown down, what words could express the consequences
of the impetuous rush and all-destroying overflow!
The damage, Chu feared, might already have been done, simply by
the knowledge that there was a move in favour of legalisation:
'the instant effect has been, that crafty thieves and villains
have on all sides begun to raise their heads and open their eyes,
gazing about and pointing the finger, under the notion that when
once these prohibitions are repealed, thenceforth, and forever,
they may regard themselves as free from every restraint'.
Another memorialist added a recommendation which may well have
been decisive. The opium sellers, he pointed out, were actually
living in Canton: even Jardine himself. Why? Why not arrest them,
for breaking the imperial law? Why not send all their ships back,
and allow no resumption of trade of any kind until all opium smuggling
activities had ceased? 'If commands be issued of this plain and
energetic character, in language strong, and in sense becoming,
though their nature be the most abject—that of a dog, or a sheep—yet,
having a care for their own lives, they will not fail to seek
the gain, and to flee the danger.'
This was the policy that the Emperor elected to follow. For having
raised the hopes of the opium smokers that the drug might be legalised,
Hsü Nai-chi was removed from his post. An official who had
sent in detailed plans showing how prohibition could be enforced,
Lin Tse-Hsü, was despatched early in 1839 to Canton as Imperial
Commissioner, charged with the suppression of the opium traffic.
The first Opium War
The story of Lin's commissionership, which provoked the first
Opium War, has often been told; in recent years by, among others,
Maurice Collis, in Foreign Mud; Arthur Waley, in The
Opium War through Chinese Eyes; and Hsin-Pao Chang in Commissioner
Lin and the Opium War. It represents the classic example of
the limitations of honesty, integrity and assiduity in carrying
out a campaign to suppress the traffic in a drug. Yet Lin felt
he was well-placed to achieve his aim. He had a half-Nelson on
the British merchants, because he knew they could not afford to
risk the loss of the tea trade, through Canton; and he determined
to exploit the hold this gave him. The British merchants, he announced
after his arrival, must surrender all their opium stocks. When,
thinking to placate him, they offered to surrender a thousand
chests, he took the opportunity to show that he knew exactly how
much more opium they had, and to inform them that until they handed
it over, all trade with British vessels, and all movement of British
shipping up and down the Canton river, would cease.
At this point the Chief Superintendent of Trade, Captain Charles
Elliot, managed to get up to Canton. As Chief Superintendent,
he was a kind of unofficial British Consul in China; and he had
written time after time to Palmerston to warn him that if the
opium traffic was allowed to develop unchecked, a crisis must
develop. It now had; and, though he had no official powers, he
decided there was no help for it but to hand over all the opium:
more than 20,000 chests. Lin put an end to the blockade, took
delivery of the opium, and personally supervised its destruction.
It was mixed with salt and lime, dissolved in water, and flushed
away into the sea.
Lin had achieved his first objective; but it availed him nothing.
Elliot ordered all British subjects and all British ships out
of the Canton river, so that they could no longer be held virtually
as hostages—the American merchants, most of whom had been involved
in the opium traffic, staying in Canton to act as agents for the
British, so that the tea trade would not be disrupted. The opium
arriving from India was simply switched to points along the coast,
as an Imperial Censor, Pu Chi-t'ung, had warned would happen,
in a memorial to the Emperor. And Lin found himself unable to
check the smuggling. After the destruction of the opium, he intended
to have a purge of the customs officials; but too many of them,
he found, were implicated in the traffic. Even where he managed
to stir them to action, this only—as he explained to the Emperor
in the spring of 1840—led to the smugglers adopting more ingenious
ruses to circumvent them. Sometimes opium would be hidden in the
rear apartments of houses, where the women lived, their presence
embarrassing the searchers. Sometimes it was buried in forests,
or in the precincts of temples. It had even been put into chests
disguised as coffins, and laid to rest, until required, in tombs.
And Lin was finding it hard to get informers, because they were
no use to him unless they knew the traffic—in which case they
would work for the smugglers, who could afford to pay them more.
What was being demonstrated, for the first time on such a large
scale, was the impracticability of prohibition as a way to suppress
the traffic in a drug, particularly in a drug as addictive as
opium. Addicts, who felt they had to have it, would pay whatever
the smugglers charged. If supplies dwindled owing to more effective
customs work, the price rose, allowing a bigger margin of profit
out of which to bribe the customs officials into connivance. And
as smuggling was so extensive, many thousands of people, from
the rowers of the fast crabs to the opium smokers, had a common
interest in breaking the law, and protecting others who broke
it. Where respectable citizens or officials were involved, there
were opportunities for extortion and for blackmail; and the higher
the legal penalties for opium offenses, the greater the risk that
those involved would commit acts of violence and even murder,
rather than allow themselves to be caught.
All this, Lin was to learn in the months which elapsed between
the departure of the British from Canton, and the arrival of the
expeditionary force which Elliot had asked for, to punish the
Commissioner for his presumption. Elliot had not altered his views
about opium. 'No man entertains a deeper detestation of the disgrace
and sin of this forced traffic', he wrote to Palmerston, in November
1839 'than the humble individual who signs this despatch. I see
little to choose between it and piracy.' But British property
had been extorted by compulsion, and destroyed; that, he felt,
was 'the most shameless violence which one nation has ever yet
dared to perpetrate against another'. While awaiting Palmerston's
instructions, he used the small naval force he had at his disposal
to protect the British merchant fleet, which lay at anchor off
Hong Kong, and to inflict some punishment on presumptuous Chinese
naval junks.
The British force arrived in June 1840; including what Lin described
as 'cartwheel ships, that can put the axles in motion by means
of fire, and can move rather fast'. Still more important, the
new steamships could move in a flat calm, or directly up wind.
They did not, however, waste any time trying to move up the river
to Canton. They went north, to put more direct pressure on Pekin.
Lin, who had been basking in the Imperial favour, was abruptly
removed from his post, and sent into exile. His mistake—as the
Censor, Pu, had realised—lay in imagining that the threat of
closure of the legitimate British trade would suffice to bring
the opium traffic to an end. It mattered little to the British
merchants that instead of picking up their tea at Canton, they
had to leave the Americans to collect it there, and receive it
from them at Hong Kong. What was vital was that the flow of their
imports of opium should continue; and Lin had been unable to stop
it.
It was not seriously impeded even by the hostilities which followed,
as militarily the resistance was insignificant. By some judicious
diplomatic manoeuvres and some injudicious attempts at deception,
the Chinese managed to avoid capitulation until the summer of
1842, when they were finally compelled to accept the British terms.
By then, the opium traffic was back to normal.
The treaty of Nanking
The war had not, admittedly, been fought exclusively to legitimise
the opium traffic. Palmerston could claim that he was mainly concerned
with compelling the Chinese to accept free trade. But opium happened
to be by far the most profitable commodity involved. 'Had there
been an alternative', Commissioner Lin's biographer Hsin-pao Chang
commented, '—say, molasses, or rice—the conflict might have
been called the Molasses War, or the Rice War'. But there was
no alternative. Not merely was opium the only British import for
which there was any substantial demand in China: the demand had
grown enormously. In the late 1820s the Company exported an average
of less than 10,000 chests annually to China; that figure had
increased, in the year before Lin was appointed, to 40,000. Palmerston
was fully aware of the situation; Sardine, who had returned to
England just before Lin arrived at Canton, had been called in
to brief him, 'I have to instruct you'—Palmerston accordingly
informed Captain Elliot—'to make some arrangement with the Chinese
Government for the admission of opium to China as an article of
lawful commerce.'
Palmerston knew, though, that it would be unwise to make this
instruction public. The Chinese plenipotentiaries, he went on,
must not be given the idea that it was 'the intention of H.M.
Government to use any compulsion'. Had H.M. Government been seen
to be forcing the Chinese to legalise opium, its enemies abroad
and at home would have been handed a serviceable weapon; and its
shaky majority, which had narrowly survived a debate on its China
policy in the Commons in 1840, would have been again imperilled.
The line to take to the Chinese, Palmertson suggested, was that
they should offer to legalise opium in their own interest. They
should be reminded that they could not stop it coming in, for
even if the supply of opium from India could be checked, 'plenty
of it would be produced in other countries, and would thence be
sent to China'; and they should allow themselves to be gently
persuaded to profit out of necessity by taxing it.
When Elliot was sacked in 1841, similar instructions were given
to his successor, Sir George Pottinger. The British Government,
the Chinese plenipotentiaries were to be told, did not insist;
but it must be impressed on the Chinese how very much in their
own interest the legalisation of opium would be. Pottinger duly
presented Palmerston's view, only to be met with a blank refusal
even to discuss the possibility of legalisation. Opium, they told
him, was an evil, growing daily worse. They could not, even if
they wanted to, countenance the proposal, as the Emperor would
repudiate them. Pottinger's instructions left him no room to manoeuvre;
and the change of Government in Britain in 1841 promised to make
his task still more difficult—the Tories in Opposition having
come out strongly against the opium traffic in a debate in the
Commons the year before.
In the event, though, the Tories' principles underwent a rapid
change when they crossed the floor of the House. They did not
care to put any further pressure on the Chinese to admit opium;
Pottinger was told he could accept the continuance of the ban.
But he was instructed to warn the Chinese that, so far as British
shipping was concerned, they 'need not trouble themselves whether
our vessels bring opium or not'. In other words, British ships
suspected of smuggling must not be searched. As the Chinese would
presumably ask the British Government, in these circumstances,
not to allow British ships to be used for smuggling, Pottinger
was told he should instruct their owners to conform—leaving
the traffic to 'Chinese fast boats and other craft', as before.
And it was this system—'mutual connivance', as Pottinger's successor
Sir John Davis tetchily described it—that came into operation
after the peace settlement.
The Arrow War
Mutual connivance was an unsatisfactory basis for peace. It survived
only because in the immediate post-war period, the Chinese were
in no mood to risk a resumption of hostilities. In 1850 the new
Emperor, Hsien-feng, issued a fresh edict against opium smoking,
giving offenders a brief period of grace in which to break the
habit, after which anybody caught would be beheaded, and his family
sent into slavery. But a few months later the Taiping—the 'long-haired
ones'—rose in rebellion; and although they were opposed to the
use of drugs of any kind—tobacco smoking, even, was punishable
by death—their victories benefited the opium traffic. The leaders
of the Taiping were too preoccupied with the struggle against
the imperial troops; and at the same time, it became difficult
for the Emperor to enforce prohibition, even in those regions
which still nominally adhered to his cause.
The traffic, too, was greatly facilitated by the fact that under
the terms of the Treaty of Nanking the British had taken Hong
Kong. Pottinger had assured the Chinese plenipotentiaries that
the exportation of opium from Hong Kong to China would be forbidden;
and it was. But the ban was never enforced. There was nothing
to prevent opium from being smuggled out to the mainland. As soon
as the smugglers realised that the Canton authorities, rather
than risk precipitating another war, were not searching British
vessels, they began to register the smuggling craft as British,
and sail them openly up the Canton estuary, with the Union Jack
as their flag of convenience.
Opium also poured into Northern China through Shanghai which,
as the northernmost of the ports opened to foreigners by the Pottinger
treaty, served a hitherto largely inaccessible region. In the
ten years following the treaty, the opium traffic to China doubled.
This roused British hopes that the Emperor, realising his ban
had failed and needing funds to mount more effective operations
against the Taiping, might be converted to the policy of legalisation,
as some of his courtiers desired. But he remained determined to
stamp out opium smuggling. To this end, he had sent Yeh Ming-Chen,
a disciple and friend of Commissioner Lin's, to Canton to resume
Lin's policies. Caution, and the need to deal with the Taiping,
meant that there was no immediate confrontation of the kind Lin
had precipitated; but Yeh cleverly fanned the anti-British feeling
which had arisen since the war among the Cantonese. There were
ugly incidents, and the British merchants began to realise that
they and their commerce were in growing danger.
An excuse would be needed, though, for a new campaign. Yeh provided
it in the autumn of 1856, when Mandarins arrested the crew of
the lorcha Arrow, lying off Canton. Lorchas were a hybrid
species, with a Western-style hull and eastern-style sails; they
had been found convenient for smuggling, and the Arrow
was one of many which, though Chinese-owned, had been registered
as British for that purpose in Hong Kong. For form's sake, the
master was British; but the crew were Chinese, some of them being
criminals known to the Chinese authorities. So far as the British
authorities were concerned, this made no difference. Criminals
or not, they were under the protection of the British flag. (The
discovery that the Arrow's registration had expired, so
that it was no longer a British vessel, caused only momentary
embarrassment; it could legally have re-registered, the explanation
was, the next time it arrived in Hong Kong.) When Yeh refused
to apologise, the navy was called in, and proceeded to shell his
official residence in Canton.
The Tory Opposition were outraged. The Arrow affair, they
complained, was a shoddy excuse for the war which Palmerston now
clearly proposed to wage; and in an impassioned debate in the
Commons, they did what they had failed to do in 1840, winning
the Radicals to their side and defeating the Government in a vote.
It was just the opportunity Palmerston had needed. He held a general
election, taking care to ensure it was fought on the issue of
the insult to the British Crown. 'An insolent barbarian wielding
authority at Canton,' he told the electors of Tiverton, 'has violated
the British flag, broken the engagement of treaties, offered rewards
for the heads of British subjects in that part of China, and planned
their destruction by murder, assassinations and poisons.' The
electorate, their patriotic passions aroused, enthusiastically
voted him and his supporters back into office.
The Emperor managed to delay the final capitulation, as his predecessor
had, by some judicious stalling, and some injudicious deception.
Lord Elgin, leading the British expeditionary force, had to occupy
Pekin and burn down the Emperor's Summer Palace, to convince him
that when terms were accepted, even under duress, they must be
kept. And one of the terms imposed, on this occasion, was that
in future imports of opium would be legally permitted, on payment
of a duty. As before, it was possible to maintain that this was
not what the war had been fought about—a view which suited Elgin,
who personally thought the flimsy Arrow pretext scandalous,
and was so disgusted with what he saw of the effects of opium
in China that he declined to treat it as a significant item on
the negotiation agenda. It had, in fact, by this time become part
of a much wider set of objectives: shared by the French, who had
commercial designs on China, and had joined in the fighting, and
the Americans, who had helped in spite of their neutrality. The
common aim was to compel the Chinese to conform to the ways of
the West in diplomacy and in trade. Nevertheless opium was still,
for the British, the main consideration. The returns of the years
between the wars had shown no great improvement in legal exports
to China; the East India Company and the opium merchants, not
British manufacturers, had been the chief beneficiaries of the
opening of Shanghai to foreigners. How much importance the British
delegation attached to opium was demonstrated when they persuaded
the American plenipotentiary, William B. Reed, who had been formally
instructed to accept the right of the Chinese to maintain prohibition,
to repudiate his brief.
As expected, legalisation produced a rapid increase in the demand,
which the manufacturers in India were ready to meet. From fewer
than 60,000 chests in 1859-60, the figure rose almost to 90,000
ten years later, and to over 105,000 in 1879-80. And as it was
no longer possible to hope that opium could be kept out, the Chinese
had a powerful incentive to cultivate poppies, from which to manufacture
their own. There had been occasional reports since the early 1830s
of illicit poppy cultivation, but not on a scale sufficient to
cause the Imperial government much alarm. Now, farmers who grew
poppies could feel they were performing a patriotic duty, helping
to reduce the drain of currency out of the country. For a while,
though, the home product did not pose any threat to imports. In
the Treaty negotiations the Chinese plenipotentiaries, anxious
to demonstrate that there had been no change of view—that the
drug was still objectionable on moral grounds—had argued for
a high import duty, to reduce consumption. The British, determined
to keep the price of their product competitive, demanded the right
to decide what rate of duty should be levied, and reduced by half
the rate the Chinese had proposed, so that when the cost of smuggling
operations was taken into account, the new selling price need
not be substantially higher than the old. As the Indian product
was considered greatly superior, there need be no immediate fear
of any abatement of demand.
For form's sake, the Government's argument was that the Chinese
had voluntarily abandoned prohibition; but few who were in a position
to know their attitude were deceived. 'Nothing that has been gained
was received from the free will of the Chinese', Sir Thomas Wade,
one of the British negotiators, was to write ten years later;
'the concessions made to us have been from the first to the last
extorted against the conscience of the nation—in defiance, that
is to say, of the moral convictions of its educated men.' And
Wade was in no doubt that the consequences for the Chinese had
been terrible. In all the cases in his experience, opium had led
to 'the steady descent, moral and physical, of the smoker'.
Opium: bane or benefit?
Up to this point, the assumption that opium was injurious to the
health and morals of the Chinese had hardly been questioned. The
most commonly cited authority on the subject was the missionary
W. H. Medhurst, who had gone out in 1816, and whose book China
was published in 1840. By his reckoning, the amount of opium smuggled
in at that time was enough to demoralise nearly three million
people
When the habit is once formed, it becomes inveterate; discontinuance
is more and more difficult, until at length, the sudden deprivation
of the accustomed indulgence produces certain death. In proportion
as the wretched victim comes under the power of the infatuating
drug, so is his ability to resist temptation less strong; and
debilitated in body as well as mind, he is unable to earn his
usual pittance, and not infrequently sinks under the cravings
of an appetite which he is unable to gratify. Thus they may be
seen, hanging their heads by the doors of the opium shops, which
the hard-hearted keepers, having fleeced them of their all, will
not permit them to enter; and shut out from their own dwellings,
either by angry relatives or ruthless creditors, they die in the
streets unpitied and despised.
The opium habit, Medhurst estimated, reduced life expectation
by about ten years, destroyed health while life lasted, and at
the same time ruined countless families because of the drain on
the smoker's resources.
In the 1840 Commons debate, a few voices had been raised in opium's
defence, but the contention had been simply that its evils had
been greatly exaggerated, and that its effects were no worse than
those of over-indulgence in ardent spirits, all too familiar in
the West. Between the opium wars, however, there were occasional
intimations that opium need not have dire effects. The comments
from Chinese sources remained implacably hostile, and so did the
bulk of the reports from missionaries; but Dr. Benjamin Hobson,
who had worked for years as a doctor among the poor in Canton,
was one of those who realised that there was not necessarily any
inevitability about the process of degeneration, even for addicts.
'I have found' he wrote,
the habitual use of opium even compatible with longevity...
though its tendency is to undermine the constitution, and only
support the system by a false and dangerous stimulus, yet, if
it can be taken regularly and of good quality, it does not abridge
the duration of life to the extent that might reasonably be expected
that it should do.
The opium merchants took their cue. The ending of prohibition
after the second Opium War relieved them of their worries in China;
but they still had to watch public opinion in Britain. The Palmerston
era was ending; the Conservatives had always been hostile to his
China policy; and the anti-opium campaign, led by Lord Shaftesbury,
was gaining influential non-party support. It was time, the merchants
realised, to present their wares in a more positively favourable
light; and on November 28th, 1867, Jardine Matheson put them in
a letter to the Governor of Hong Kong. The ugly picture formerly
drawn of the effects of opium on the Chinese, they claimed, had
been forgotten; 'since 1860 it has been rendered abundantly clear
that the use of opium is not a curse, but a comfort and a benefit
to the hard-working Chinese'.
Had it been only Jardine Matheson who took this line, it could
safely have been ignored. And when similar views were expressed
by British consuls in the Treaty Ports in China, and transmitted
to the Foreign Office, it was possible to suspect that they might
be more concerned with British trade than with British moral prestige.
But the cause was eventually supported by men who had no direct
interest in opium, and who were unlikely to have been deluded
or suborned; including Sir George Birdwood, a former Professor
of Materia Medica in Bombay. Opium smoking, he told the
readers of The Times in a letter published on December
26th, 1881, was 'almost as harmless an indulgence as twiddling
the thumbs, and other silly-looking methods of concentrating the
jaded mind'. The following year a book by William Bretherton,
a retired Hong Kong solicitor, cited a number of testimonials
to opium from men of standing on the island; and in 1892, an even
more impressive array of its supporters was paraded by G. H. M.
Batten, a former Indian civil servant, in a paper read in London
to the Society of Arts.
The opportunity to solve the mystery came in 1893, when the pressure
of public opinion in England, and a motion in the House of Commons,
pushed the Government into setting up a Royal Commission to investigate
the subject. Their verdict was that opium in general was used
in moderation, and led 'to no evident ill effects'. One member
of the Commission, admittedly, dissented in a scathing minority
report; and later, Joseph Rowntree was able to produce quite a
damning critique of the report itself—showing, for example,
that although forty-nine out of the fifty-two missionaries from
China who had given evidence had condemned opium, the report had
quoted only the opinions of two of the three who had been less
critical. Nevertheless the minutes of evidence showed that as
well as merchants and colonial civil servants, many doctors and
some missionaries believed that the opium habit was on balance
harmless, and could even be regarded as socially desirable.
How was it possible that two such mutually contradictory sets
of evidence could each be supported by so much knowledgeable and
trustworthy testimony? There was one obvious clue. Most of the
witnesses who condemned opium had worked in China. In India, where
the Commission had held most of its sittings, most witnesses were
in opium's favour. Could it not be—some of them had suggested—that
the explanation was simple; the Chinese smoked opium, whereas
the Indians ate it, or drank it?
But evidence from other colonies failed to support this proposition.
In the Malay peninsula, the colonial authorities agreed, the reverse
was the case; 'Opium eating in all its forms', the Auditor-General
of the Straits Settlements claimed, 'when once established as
a habit, produces an invariable bodily and mental condition which
imperatively calls for a constant, if graduated, increase of the
drug. Now, this is not the case with opium smoking.' And evidence
from the same region upset another hypothesis; that the Chinese
might be in some way hereditarily susceptible to addiction. In
the Straits Settlements, Major McCullum informed the Commission,
only the 'indolent Malays' suffered ill-effects from the drug.
For the Chinese it was 'a harmless, even a beneficial stimulant'.
Reading between the lines it is clear that the Royal Commission,
baffled, came to assume that the explanation must be looked for
in the circumstances in which opium addiction was observed. The
'anti-opiumists', as they were described, must have seen the effects
of the abuse of opium; they must have seen, or heard about, only
the addicts, and been thereby misled into thinking that addiction
was inevitable. Again and again, in the reports from China, the
emphasis was on the inescapable nature of the perdition awaiting
the opium smoker. As the Rev. A. Elwin, a missionary in China
for over twenty years, put it, there was no such thing as a moderate
smoker; 'the dose is always, I believe, increased by degrees'.
But there were scores of witnesses in India to demonstrate this
was nonsense—including missionaries; Dr. H. Martyn Clark testified
that he knew of no 'hardier, thriftier or more careful people'
than the peasants of the Punjab, where he had worked; yet most
of them regularly took opium, a habit which 'seems to interfere
neither with their longevity nor with their health'. The most
reasonable explanation, therefore, was that the missionary, an
alien in China, had been dealing with the cast-offs, the derelicts;
whereas in India, he was familiar with all levels of the community.
Although there was a measure of truth in this, it would not account
for the whole range of different reactions to opium described
over the course of the century, in different regions—or in the
same region, in different periods. When opium had been introduced
into Assam, along with cheap labour for the new tea plantations,
an official had protested in 1839 that in the course of a few
years the opium plague had 'depopulated this beautiful country,
turned it into a land of wild beasts'; and in the process, it
had 'degenerated the Assamese from a fine race of people to the
most abject, crafty and demoralised race in India'. Yet fifty
years later, though the consumption of opium there was higher
per head than in any other part of India, it was giving no trouble.
'They take their opium', Commissioner Driberg reported, 'just
as a good Englishman would take his "peg".'
Again, R. L. Stevenson's surmise—that it was the rapidity of
the social changes which was disruptive, leading as it did to
the abuse of drink or drugs—seems the most likely explanation.
Opium had come suddenly into Assam, along with an influx of cheap
labour, disrupting the community's old way of life. It did the
same in Burma, the only British colony where it gave serious trouble.
And it was a menace in China, in those regions which the smugglers
could reach to 'push' the Indian produce. But in India itself,
it posed no problem, being used mainly not as a narcotic, but,
like coca in Peru, as a way of 'enabling the taker to undergo
severe and continuous physical exercise'—Dr. Francis Anstie
noted in his treatise on drugs in the 1860s—'without the assistance
of ordinary food'. It was for this purpose, Dr. W. Myers told
the Royal Commission, that the chair-bearers, couriers and coolies
of Formosa took opium. He had been forced to alter his 'preconceived
prejudices with reference to the universally baneful effects of
the drug', when he found that they used it every day, as a matter
of course, rarely needing to increase the amount.
Significantly, where the Chinese were allowed to smoke opium,
outside their own country's jurisdiction, they did nothing to
disturb the authorities. The opium smoker learned to discriminate,
choosing his own brand, and savouring it with the relish of a
connoisseur. In a book describing his experiences as an attaché
in Pekin, published in 1900, A. B. Freeman Mitford—the future
Lord Redesdale—could seriously claim that to deprive the Chinaman
of his Indian opium, and to condemn him to the 'miserable substitute'
grown in China, 'would be like forbidding the importation of champagne
and Chateau Lafitte into England, and driving our epicures and
invalids to the necessity of falling back on cheap and nasty stimulants'.
Mitford, though, had lived in a region where the inhabitants had
come to terms with opium. He had never seen, as missionaries had
seen, the destruction and misery that the drug could cause before
it was domesticated. In any case, the British Government could
not claim that it had only been trying to keep the Chinese supplied
with an agreeable pastime, because it had not made that its excuse.
Throughout the century, its aim had been to make the maximum profit
from the drug, regardless of its effect on the Chinese. For a
brief period at the beginning production had been restricted,
but this was to increase profits; the pretence that it was to
keep down consumption was abandoned the moment profits began to
fall. Two campaigns—three, if Napier's is included—had been
undertaken mainly to compel the Chinese to take the drug, preferably
legally. The reasons given, that they were designed to punish
the Chinese for seizing British property, and for insulting the
British flag, were transparently spurious; the property was a
smuggled drug, in the first instance, and the flag was flown by
a drug smuggler in the second. It was the most protractedly sordid
episode in British Imperial history; and it was also an intimation
that where revenue was involved, a government could be just as
grasping, and just as unscrupulous, as any entrepreneur. Governments
have since often thundered out denunciations of the men who manufacture
and sell opium and heroin. It was a Government which taught them
how.