Kindle Notes & Highlights
China was, after all, the Middle Kingdom, whose emperor ruled by the Mandate of Heaven. It was big enough and rich enough to ignore and snub the outside world. The Chinese grew all the food they needed and produced all the luxuries (porcelain, silk, jade) that its most privileged citizens required to adorn their palaces with an opulence of which the monarchs of Europe could only dream. China also saw itself as too big and strong to subjugate and colonize.
When the Portuguese traders introduced tea to the West, Europeans could not get enough of it. By the mid-1700s, England was hooked. Because of its expense and exotic origins, drinking tea became an elaborate social ritual. For the rich, this also meant purchasing new precious objects—filigreed silver and porcelain tea sets—that were manufactured in their home countries.
From Houqua, John learned the ultimate negotiating trick, as he explained to a relative: “The great art of making bargains is to find out other people’s ultimatum without letting out yours, and this can be done with most people by letting them talk.”14
The drug, of course, had terrible social consequences. Once the pastime of the wealthy, opium smoking had spread to all strata of society, affecting countless middle-class and poor Chinese. Unlike taverns, which were social (and often political) gathering places, opium dens were antisocial spaces. Pipe-smoking addicts would lie comatose, surrounded by pungent blue smoke, drifting into their own private dreams. Addicted breadwinners spent themselves into debt and left families destitute. If an addict didn’t get his fix, the withdrawal could be excruciatingly painful.
But these ills could be ignored by those who profited from the trade, especially the Western merchants cocooned in the luxurious seclusion of the Canton Factories. Addicts got their fix out of sight, hiding from the authorities in back alleys and opium dens. “Opium was never for sale in Chinese shops in Guangzhou,” Hunter observed, “nor were there any signs by which one could judge it was being prepared for smoking, it being used in no other form.”
Laudanum, an alcohol-based herbal medicine containing about 10 percent opium, had been used as a painkiller and sedative since the sixteen hundreds; mothers and nurses soothed cranky infants with it. Now it had become popular among the creative figures of the Romantic Era;
Yet the British companies refused to comply with the Chinese order or acknowledge the illegality of the trade. Opium was their lifeblood, and their trade in the drug was their royally granted prerogative.
The Chinese formally capitulated to the British in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which ceded the island of Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River as a Crown colony. In addition, it granted Western traders access to four additional Chinese ports: Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. As a final insult, the Chinese government was obligated to pay a staggering £21 million indemnity to the British Crown,
due in full by December of the following year. Only upon receipt of a first portion of the payment, the treaty asserted, would Her Britannic Majesty’s forces retire and “no longer molest or stop the trade of China.” For the Chinese, the treaty ending the First Opium War was the start of the Century of Humiliation.”40
John Quincy Adams declared that the Chinese had been at fault: “[T]he cause of the war is the Kotow!—the arrogant and insupportable pretentions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of relation between lord and vassal.”41 (A Kotow was when Westerners were forced to act in a deeply subservient manner to Chinese officials.)
His brother Warren, in New York, was planning not only to do just that but also to invest his newfound riches in a new type of ship, one that would exploit the newly opened China.
Washington Irving, America’s first professional author, was one of them. He had gained international fame as the creator of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. He moaned that New York, founded in 1625 as the dignified old Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam, was now being overrun by the crassly commercial, money-grubbing Yankees: “a long-sided, raw-boned, hardy race of whoreson whalers, woodcutters, fishermen, and pedlers [sic], and strapping corn-fed wenches; who by their united efforts tended marvelously toward populating those notable tracts of country called Nantucket, Piscataway
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During a time in American history marked by extreme financial instability, the sudden infusion of California gold into the US economy promised two things. First, that Americans would be liberated from European banks, finally having
their own source of stable, gold-backed currency. The second was that all Americans, regardless of their birth or circumstances, could go to California and earn a “competence” of their own.
Aspinwall may have visited the Delanos at Algonac, as his sister Mary Rebecca had recently married a nearby squire, the reclusive physician Isaac Roosevelt, whose Rosedale estate was just across the Hudson. Of this alliance of old Dutch pedigree and Yankee shipping money, Isaac’s grandson Franklin would write one day, “Thus the stock kept virile and abreast of the time.”9
By the late 1850s, steamships finally had the range to make the opium run between India and China, although they had to pause for coal along the way. For now, the long, oceanic run between New York or London and China still seemed secure. But within a decade, Alfred Holt & Company (popularly known as the Blue Funnel Line) would launch the steamship Agamemnon, the first of three vessels that would sail regularly between Liverpool and Hong Kong, with a coaling stop at Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. The voyage would take a mere fifty-eight days.
A Second Opium War had broken out in 1856, the year before the panic. This time traditional enemies Great Britain and France joined forces to strong-arm the Chinese government into legalizing the opium trade completely, opening all remaining Chinese ports to Western trade, and establishing diplomatic legations in the Chinese capital. After four years of fierce fighting and broken treaties, British and French forces would reach Peking, burning large portions of the city to the ground, including the emperor’s summer palace.
For the Chinese, the defeat would be total. The once-mighty
mighty Celestial Kingdom would now be at the mercy of the Western powers. During the next fifty years, England, France, and others would carve up China’s coast into “spheres of influence.” While China never became a colonial possession like India, and its imperial family nominally remained in power, it was powerless to stop the settlement of its port cities b...
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America had, however, ventured into the imperialist arena—in Japan, in 1853, when it sent a fleet of steam-powered US Navy warships into Edo Harbor. Japan had coal, and the American government wanted a fueling station for its military vessels. Commodore Matthew Perry offered the Japanese government an ultimatum: open up to Western trade or face withering American cannonfire. The US shipping industry also had a special grudge against the closed, forbidden country: shipwrecked whalers who washed up on Japan’s shores had long been subjected to imprisonment and death. It was a strange echo of the
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An estimated 400,000 became opium addicts on both sides as a result of their morphine treatments.26
The tea and opium trade had caused Hong Kong’s population
explode from a mere 8,000 in 1841 to almost 95,000 by 1860.46 The British Crown enforced a rigid apartheid system: the colony’s roughly 3,000 English and American residents lived on the east side of the island, while the Chinese were crammed onto the west.47
In 1880, the twenty-six-year-old Sara Delano, now a regal and striking young woman, married fifty-three-year-old widower James Roosevelt, whose mother Rebecca had been the niece of William Henry Aspinwall. Tall and white-whiskered, “Squire” Roosevelt had promised Warren Delano that his bride would live in the utmost security and comfort at his own Hudson River estate at Hyde Park. The October wedding was held at Algonac. Some of the women present in the Delano parlor wept with sadness that “such a lovely girl should
marry an old man.”16 James and Sara Roosevelt’s only child, Franklin Delano, was born on January 30, 1882. Sara and her son traveled frequently to Algonac, where he spent many pleasant days with the growing brood of Delano cousins.
Warren Delano II died in 1898 at the age of eighty-nine. The patriarch left each of his six surviving children $1.3 million, making him one of the few hundred richest men in America. The Delanos’ fortune was secure, as was their place in the nation’s ruling elite.
The president kept a model of the clipper ship Surprise displayed prominently near his desk, one of more than two hundred models in his collection. He had built this Surprise himself.