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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Julia Lovell
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March 23 - May 3, 2023
By the 1820s, the British thought they had found a perfect solution to their difficulty: Indian opium, for which Chinese consumers had increasingly developed a taste over the preceding couple of decades.
the emperor and his men still had trouble dignifying it with the term ‘war’, preferring to name it a ‘border provocation’ or ‘quarrel’
Even while they were routing, with the newest military technology of the day, badly trained and directed Chinese armies, the British were identified in court documents of the time as ‘clowns’, ‘bandits’, ‘pirates’, ‘robbers’, ‘rebels’ (occasionally, the ‘outrageous rebels’)30
strange, contradictory stories of opium’s attackers: the prohibitionist hysteria of Western
In Britain and China, it began as a foreign drug (Turkish and Indian, respectively)
‘A man who is setting about a hard job takes his [opium] pill as a preliminary,’ wrote one mid-century observer, ‘and many never take their beer without dropping a piece of opium into it’.
Its greatest immediate drawback is its habit of slowing, or even putting to sleep, the centres in the brain that control breathing. In excess, opium will kill you by fatally depressing respiration.
The argument was well made, for in Gützlaff’s own mind, it really was that simple – commerce (by whatever means) and Christianity went hand in hand:
Between 1805 and 1839, imports of opium increased considerably more than tenfold,
Opium use increased at just the right moment to be fingered as the culprit for a rich repertoire of late-Qing ills: economic stagnation, environmental exhaustion, overpopulation, decline of the army and general standards of public order.
By an unhappy coincidence, the empire was simultaneously struck by floods, droughts and famine. When even nature began conspiring against the Chinese empire – where political legitimacy depended so heavily on Heavenly favour – panic was likely to set in.
In the absence of a clear sign from Heaven,
the time of his death, the richest of the mid-nineteenth-century Hong merchants, Howqua, was ten times wealthier than Nathan Rothschild.
He was no inveterately xenophobic crusader, however hard his British merchant antagonists tried to demonize him as such; he was a careful bureaucrat with a passion for freight management.
It seems certain that, as Lin prepared to strike hard against opium, he had not seriously considered the possibility of war with Britain – and certainly not the kind of war that actually ensued.
(a brilliant appeal to the English love of amateurism)
In 1830, he jumped ship to join the Foreign Office, serving as ‘Protector of Slaves’ in British Guiana, in the West Indies. Within two years, his experiences there had transformed him into a fervent abolitionist:
And that is how a publicly declared enemy of opium ended up begging his government to fight an Opium War.
a gun salute had accidentally killed a Chinese man – open-and-shut manslaughter, by British law. The Chinese authorities stopped trade until the accidental murderer had been handed over then quietly strangled him.
the unwillingness of British merchants to play by another state’s rules on that state’s territory (the very issue triggering the factory siege) was publicly recast as something far nobler.
Perhaps even British detractors would have changed their minds, if they had taken the trouble to look at a map, or study a little history.
Across the next century, Jesuits served variously as cannon-makers, artillery instructors and negotiators in arms sales between the Qing and European merchants in Canton.
European sailors of the two centuries before Macartney’s arrival had not been on their best behaviour when approaching the Chinese coast. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to make a concerted effort to penetrate mainland China under the Ming dynasty, had barged undiplomatically up to Canton – building a fort, buying Chinese children, trading at will.
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.
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.
In the early months of 1839, India’s governor-general, Lord Auckland, dispatched a 10,000-strong British army across the Indus and up the mountainous valleys towards Kabul, to replace the Afghan ruler (rumoured to be friendly to the Russians) with a weak exile called Shah Shuja. The awful finale of the expedition – a retreat back to India in which only one Briton survived out of the 16,500 who began it
scattered with admissions that forts were adequately planned, placed and supplied, and would have cost the invaders many lives to capture – if only the Qing troops had fought, and not fled.
Once we banned opium, ninety-nine per cent of the navy’s income went up in smoke. How could we expect them to resist the English rebels?’
Perhaps because he had been so long in China, he seems to have never believed he would get what Palmerston was asking for.15
Lin had planned to use masters of Daoist breathing techniques, who claimed to be able to walk on riverbeds for up to ten hours at a time, to dive down and drill holes in British ships. After repeated rehearsals, it was discovered they were good only for bobbing about in the shallows.
Twenty-five minutes after the fleet had begun to shell the highest fort on Chuanbi (on the eastern bank of the estuary), the British flag fluttered over its walls,
Many wounded Qing soldiers were burned alive when, falling to the ground with their matchlock guns, their matches set fire to the packages of gunpowder that they carried strapped to the chests and waists of their cotton-padded uniforms.
the loyalty of the local population was highly questionable: ‘I have found, through careful examination, the main characteristics of the people of Canton to be falsehood, ingratitude and greed … [They] are used to mixing daily with the foreigners, and regard them like brothers.’
Forts designed to be manned by sixty soldiers now contained, on average, around 320.
a single band of soldiers was set to marching around the same hill, changing their clothes after each circuit to give the impression of infinite forces.
who locked their rank and file inside the forts to prevent them from running away, then fled in small boats as soon as the firing began. As a result, their abandoned subordinates fired their cannon at their departing superiors, rather than at the British.
In the engagements of January to March, the Chinese Repository estimated, the Qing had lost more than 2,000 men; the British had suffered one dead of his wounds, and three killed by their own weapons.
the factories were almost deserted, beyond a handful of profit-fixated American merchants.
Treachery rather than foreign aggression, many thought, was the real cancer eating at the empire. Through the summer of 1841, patriotic resistance became a front for the pursuit of vendettas.
Fresh back from a near-death experience, having spent the last six months leading (often from the very front line of battle) a campaign up the waterlogged maze of the Canton River delta with a price of 100,000 dollars on his head, Elliot now found himself thrown to one side by the country for which he had sacrificed personal safety, profit and family life.
Eventually he was handed a governorship in what he termed a ‘den of villains, misery, murder & musquitoes’ (Texas)
Generally speaking,’ observed the captain of the Nemesis, ‘the collecting of any considerable body of troops together in any particular province or locality in China, so far from strengthening the hands of the authorities, is more likely to occasion disturbance among the inhabitants
Yijing had made room in the budget to buy nineteen monkeys: the idea was to tie firecrackers to their backs then fling them onto English ships moored nearby.
But the poverty in the south-east – where there were so many pleasurable ways to while away idle hours – was at least genteel.
‘I am sick at heart of war’, wrote General Gough who, only a year before, had railed so at Elliot’s refusal to allow him to set his guns on the civilians of Canton.42
The very term ‘Opium War’ – satirically coined through the debates of early 1840 to draw attention to the ‘misdeeds’ in China of the ‘disgraceful’ Whig government –
The British, it announced, had fought a war to push an addictive, illegal narcotic on the Chinese population. It was, one strand of opinion held, ‘the most disgraceful war in our history … we lost about 69 men, and killed between 20,000 and 25,000 Chinese. There is no honour to be gained in a war like that.’
opium sales in China (produced under British monopoly in India) underwrote much of the British empire:
The focus of debate about the war was adeptly shifted from a nice point of international law to emotional questions of patriotism and national interest.
The new Treaty of Beijing quadrupled the indemnities agreed in 1858, as well as yielding everything for which politicians, merchants and missionaries had agitated between 1842 and 1856
