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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 10

Lintin

In 1820 the Daoguang Emperor, the prince who fought off the rebels in the palace, comes to the throne meaning to restore a frugal and honest government, and his first order to Canton is to end the opium trade. The episode follows the new emperor's order and Howqua, the hong merchant who answers for the foreign ships, through the execution of an American ship's sailor and a crackdown that drives the opium ships out of the river to the island of Lintin, and asks why the ban made the trade bigger. It hears the court's orders alongside the Company's records and the Americans who watched the execution.

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  1. Beijing
  2. Guangzhou
  3. Whampoa anchorage
  4. Nei Lingding Island
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Daoguang Emperor
Daoguang Emperor. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the Jiaqing Emperor wrote to the King of England that there was no occasion to send an ambassador so far ever again. At Canton, a British frigate shot her way past the forts at the Bogue, and the Company's Chinese comprador spent thirty five days in prison. And at Macau, in a single season, twelve hundred piculs of Malwa opium came ashore. This time, a new emperor goes to war against opium. A sailor pays for a jar with his life. And the trade the emperor means to stamp out finds a new home, out in the estuary, where his orders cannot reach it. The question is a strange one. How does a ban make a trade bigger? Let's begin with the man who wanted the ban most. In 1820 the Jiaqing Emperor died, and his son took the throne as the Daoguang Emperor. Before that he had been Prince Mianning, and in 1813, when rebels broke into the Forbidden City, he was the son whose bravery his father could take comfort in. Jiaqing had already chosen him as heir that day, though the prince did not know it. He was thirty eight when he took the throne, and he would reign for thirty years. A Chinese emperor's reign name was a kind of motto. Daoguang means something like the glory of the Way. The new emperor had a secret, and it bears directly on this episode. As a prince, Mianning smoked opium. Indian opium had made its way north to the capital, some said inside the yearly gifts sent up from Canton, and it found a home among the eunuchs who served the court, who outnumbered the imperial family they served by about forty to one. From the servants, smoking spread easily enough to the members of the household they tended, princes like Mianning among them. Rumours of it had even reached the outside world. In 1814 a British newspaper in India printed a letter claiming that the emperor's sons were "hedonists and opium smokers and only one or two show much promise as administrators of a great Empire." He wrote about it himself. "Bored and tired," he wrote, "I ask the servant to prepare smoke and a pipe to inhale. Each time, my mind suddenly becomes clear, my eyes and ears refreshed." People in the past had said wine had every virtue, he went on, but he called smoke "the satisfier", and he wrote it a poem. Its smoke, in one line of that poem, rose like mountains and clouds emerging from a distant sea. But knowing the drug did not make him gentler toward it. If anything, he seems to have feared its pull more than any emperor before him. His father had been worried too. In 1810, when a smuggler was caught trying to carry six containers of opium into the capital, Jiaqing wrote that those who smoked it could suddenly become excited and do whatever they wanted, and that before long it would steal their lives. By 1813 he saw with dismay that it was spreading among the elite, even among his own guards and officials. It was becoming respectable. He was also, unlike his fun loving father, a man of thrift and hard work. On becoming emperor he issued a cost cutting treatise on music, women, goods and profit, and he began going about in patched clothes. He cut his father's troupe of palace musicians and actors from some six hundred and fifty to about three hundred and seventy, and halved his father's army of four hundred cooks. He hung his rooms with exhortations to be respectful, honest, assiduous, and to correct his errors. There was another side to him. A day or two after he took the throne, he removed three key advisers for letting a mistake slip into his father's last edict. A couple of days later he took two of them back. That habit, of wavering and then blaming whoever was nearest, would serve him badly in the wars against opium and against the British that lay ahead of him. Opium was on his mind from the start. Early in his reign he called it "a great harm to the customs and morals of the people", and demanded an end to the smuggling on the coast. His particular target was the officials who took so called taxes, which is to say bribes, to let the shipments through. Anyone who did that, he wrote, or smuggled the drug himself, should be punished "immediately and severely in order to expunge this massing of insects." That same year, the official in charge of the great examination in Beijing reported that scholars from the coastal provinces, addicted to opium, had gone into such convulsions of withdrawal during the three day examination that some of them died in the hall. The examinations were how a man entered the government. To hear of candidates dying of opium in the examination hall was, for a Confucian emperor, about as bad as news could get.

But the order that Canton would be testing all through this episode had already gone out, in the spring of 1820, in the old emperor's last months. It came from the viceroy at Canton and from the Hoppo, and it was addressed to the hong merchants. Ruan Yuan was one of the most celebrated scholars of his age, a serious, learned official who had come to Canton as viceroy in 1817. The hong merchants were the handful of licensed Chinese firms through which every foreign ship had to trade. One of them was Wu Bingjian. The foreign traders called him Howqua, and so will we. He was about fifty, the head of a firm his family had built into one of the strongest at Canton, and he was the man officials and foreigners alike came to when something had to be settled. Every foreign ship had to be guaranteed by one of the hong merchants, its security merchant, who answered to the government for its conduct and its duties. So when the officials wanted foreigners to obey, they did not go to the foreigners. They went to men like Howqua. The proclamation began by recalling that opium had long been most strictly prohibited by imperial command, and that Macau and Whampoa should have been far more closely watched. Then came a line that sums up the whole Qing view of the matter. The empire, it said, "does not forbid you people to make and eat Opium, and diffuse the custom in your Native place." Smoke all you like at home, in other words. Just not here. Because here, vagabonds bought it and ate it in secret, and "become sunk into the most stupid and besotted State", wasting their strength and their lives. Macau got a special warning. The Portuguese there lived on the territory of the Celestial Empire, the proclamation said, and so they ought to obey its laws. If they made rules for themselves and schemed after illicit gains, they would be punished as severely as those in China who secretly spread the Christian religion. That was not an idle comparison. Christianity was banned in China, and its Chinese converts and the priests who served them could face exile or death. Five years before, the proclamation recalled, a viceroy had reported to the court and punished Macau merchants for buying and selling opium. From now on, every ship that arrived at Macau would be searched. If one ship brought opium, her whole cargo would be rejected and all trade with her refused. If every ship brought it, every ship would be turned away and sent home. At Whampoa, the anchorage below Canton where all the foreign ships lay, the viceroy gave every ship an attending officer, and the Hoppo posted customs watchers on each side of it. Even so, the proclamation admitted, the seamen were not all good men, and they found ways to deal with smugglers ashore. So more soldiers would search, and more watchers would watch. The hong merchants were to pass all of this on to the foreign chiefs. And they were to answer for it. If a ship was found with opium, it would be expelled, and the security merchant would be seized and punished. If he had connived, he would be broken and prosecuted without mercy. Do not treat this as a formality, the merchants were told, for once you are caught in the net of the law, escape will be "as impracticable, as it is for a man to bite his own navel." In July the merchants passed it on to the Company, begging the Committee to make every ship that season "yield a trembling obedience thereto", in case the merchants themselves were implicated. A second edict that month put the whole policy in one image. The only way to stop the stream, the viceroy and the Hoppo wrote, was to cut off its source. The proclamation denounced the laxness with which the trade had been watched, and called for more careful searches at Macau and Whampoa. But another year would pass before the viceroy drove the trade out of the river. Remember that image, the source and the stream. Everyone in this story is going to use it. Nobody is going to manage it.

When the test came, it did not start with opium at all. It started with a jar. The American ship Emily, of Baltimore, two hundred and eighty four tons, under Captain Cowpland, had arrived in May 1821, and by the autumn she was lying at Whampoa. The Americans had been trading at Canton since just after their independence. They had no great company like the British, only private merchants and their ships. On the twenty third of September the Emily had almost finished loading, and she was nearly ready to sail. Among her crew was a sailor named Francis Terranova, Italian by birth, from Sicily. A Chinese woman came alongside in a small boat, selling fruit. She and the sailor bargained over the price and could not agree. As the British at Macau heard it, the sailor, to get rid of her and make her move her boat away, carelessly threw an olive jar at her. It struck her on the head, she fell overboard, and she drowned. Officials heard of it, and an inquiry began. The British thought it could have been hushed up at first for a very trifling sum. Instead it became notorious. The authorities demanded that the sailor be handed over. The Americans refused, and the whole American trade was stopped. Then a compromise was found: the man would be tried, but on board his own ship. The Americans made their position plain. They declared that "we are bound to submit to your laws while we are in your waters" and that, however unjust those laws might be, they would not resist them. It is worth noticing how different that was from the British line, and we will come back to it.

The trial was set for Sunday, the sixth of October 1821. Nearly every American at Canton came aboard to watch, with the supercargoes and captains of the other ships in port. A supercargo was the merchant who travelled with a ship to manage the sale of her cargo. Early that morning the magistrate of Panyu, the county that took in Whampoa, came out from the city with an immense retinue. He stepped onto the Emily's deck, declared through the linguist that the ship and everything in her were under his protection, and took the chair set out for him. The hong merchant who had secured the ship, and her linguist, made the usual prostrations before him. The magistrate assured the Americans of his friendly intentions, and appealed to Heaven to judge his motives. Then he asked them what defence they meant to make. Here the sources disagree. The Chinese witnesses said the jar was thrown, and that the woman went over the side because of the blow. The Americans said the sailor had handed the jar safely into her hand, that she fell overboard thirty feet or more from the ship while sculling her boat, and that a man on a nearby English ship saw her fall. They believed the tide had swept her boat away from the ship, and that in her hurry to get back she missed her footing and struck her head on the pivot of the oar, or on the boat's sharp edge. And the Americans could not follow the evidence against him. Because it was not translated. The witnesses were the dead woman's husband, a woman from the Hoppo's boat lying astern of the Emily, and two children of eight to twelve. They gave their evidence on their knees, their heads bowed to the deck, and none of it was explained to the Americans. The chief witness, the woman from the Hoppo's boat, understood English far better than the linguist did, and the Americans asked that she speak to them in English. The request was refused. They pointed out that from where her boat was lying she could not have seen what happened, and that she had told several captains she knew nothing until a child's cries made her look up. She had given contradictory statements, the Americans said, so her evidence should be thrown out. Instead, the instruments of torture were brought out and shown, though not used, and she kept to her story. The children, the Americans said, had been brought from the shore some time after it all happened, and had seen nothing. The magistrate would not listen. Every time Howqua or the linguist began to explain what the Americans were saying, he silenced them. He said he had seen the woman and the jar himself. He believed the man guilty, and if he had judged wrongly, that was Heaven's business. Then he rose from his chair in a passion, as if the trial were over. The Americans turned on the hong merchants and accused them of breaking their word, for they had been promised a fair trial, and their witnesses had not been heard. Howqua prevailed on the magistrate to sit down again. An American seaman came forward to testify that the jar had been handed into the woman's hand, but the judge seemed determined not to hear him. After about half an hour of the utmost confusion, the magistrate left the Emily in a rage and went back to his own boat. Then the hong merchants, in his name, demanded the prisoner. The Americans' answer was the bravest thing they did in the whole affair. They acknowledged they were subject to the laws of the country, and said no resistance would be made. But the agreement had been broken, so they would not hand the man over. If the Chinese wanted him, they would have to take him, and with him the Americans would strike their flag and surrender the ship. "We are now in your power," they said, "the Ship is surrounded by War Boats, we are in number only about 40 you have as many hundred, take the Man, but the Flag shall never wave over the Head of those it cannot protect against injustice." That shook the magistrate. If striking the flag was the price, he would not take the man. Instead he had the linguist put in chains, and soon after, the hong merchant who had secured the ship. The British, watching, called the whole thing a complete mockery of justice, in which the accused was not even allowed to bring evidence in his own defence. Later, the foreign observers worked out what they thought had happened. The hong merchants, counting on the Americans to bend, and on their own cunning to get hold of the man one way or another, had carried false messages to both sides, deceiving the magistrate and the foreigners alike. If that is right, it tells you how the hong merchants lived: in the middle of every quarrel, answerable to both sides, and trusted completely by neither.

The flag stayed up for another two and a half weeks. The trade stayed stopped. The hong merchants were lavish with promises of a fair trial and even handed justice. And the British doubted the Americans could hold together for long, with so many separate interests among them. On the twenty fourth of October, Terranova was handed over to the hong merchants, who held him heavily chained in the Consoo house, their guild hall. On the twenty sixth he was tried there again. This time the doors were closed, and many Europeans who asked to be present were turned away. The next morning the chief criminal judge of the province came to examine him. The word was that the sailor had confessed to throwing the jar, not to hurt the woman, but merely to frighten her away from the ship. Nobody outside knew whether the confession had been coaxed out of him with a promise that it would get him off, or forced out of him with the threat of torture. But he had signed it. And everyone assumed the case would now go to Beijing, for the emperor to decide. It did not. At five o'clock in the morning of the twenty eighth of October, Francis Terranova was led to the usual place of execution and strangled. It was the same ground where, a few years before, several Chinese criminals had been executed for an outrageous attack on another American ship. His body was returned to the Emily, and the American trade was opened again. From the closed trial to his death had taken less than forty eight hours, and the report sent up to the emperor, the British believed, falsified the facts of the evidence and of how the trial had been run. Then the viceroy's office said something nobody aboard the Emily had said out loud. Looking over the ships caught in the crackdown, an edict from Canton picked out one that had brought only about a thousand catties of foreign tin, worth almost nothing, and paid more than fourteen hundred taels in port charges. A catty was a little over a pound, and a tael was an ounce or so of silver. So, the edict concluded, she had come for no purpose but to sell opium. "Infinitely detestable!" "Rightly did Heaven send down punishment," it went on. Heaven had made her own sailor, Terranova, commit a crime for which he was strangled. That is how the court saw it. Not a sailor and a fruit seller and a jar, but a smuggling ship that Heaven had found out. The British saw it very differently. James Urmston, of the Company's Select Committee, wrote confidentially to the chairman of the Company's directors in London of the unaccountable apathy of the Americans, who had done nothing to save the man, and who made not one word of protest afterwards, not even their consul. Other foreign observers went further: the Americans, who had barbarously abandoned a man serving under their flag, deserved "to be held in eternal execration by every Moral, honorable and feeling Mind." Nothing like it, they wrote, had happened since the case of the gunner in 1784. The British were sure the Chinese would now cite this case as a precedent every time a foreigner was accused, and that the Americans had made every future quarrel harder. And the lesson they took from it was blunt. Once a foreigner was in Chinese hands, no reliance whatever could be placed on Chinese promises, or on Chinese justice. A sailor given up was a sailor killed. In a report home, the Committee called the surrender of the man an indelible disgrace to everyone concerned. And if self defence was not accepted as a plea in cases of homicide, they wrote, no foreigner could for one instant be considered safe. The British had their own way of handling such cases, when they could. The season before, a stone thrown from one of the Company's ships had wounded a Chinese woman, and the Company's president had quietly paid three hundred dollars to settle it with the people concerned. Pay the family, keep the man. When paying would not do, there were other ways. In 1820, when a Chinese man was shot in a boat at Whampoa and no one could say by whom, a butcher on a Company ship killed himself in a fit of insanity, and the Chinese were allowed to believe he had been the culprit. That same year, after a mate of another Company ship ran away, the Committee admitted the charge had been got rid of by a most unworthy subterfuge, which they went along with for the sake of the trade.

Now, back to opium, because the Emily was not the only ship in trouble that autumn. In September 1821 a quarrel broke out between the officials who collected the illegal fees on opium at Macau and others closer to the viceroy. A minor official was arrested for a serious assault on another Chinese. He had been the go between through whom the officers of the Macau district received their fees for looking the other way, and he hoped to save himself by accusing them. His charges came out in public, and that forced the viceroy's hand. Once he was pushed onto the path of virtue, he was thorough about it. Which brings us back to Howqua. The prefect of Canton had a score to settle with him. Four years earlier, a ship called the Wabash had been caught smuggling opium in the prefect's old district, and the prefect had come close to being impeached and dismissed. Howqua had been the Wabash's security merchant, and had escaped the opium charge only because the authorities squeezed an enormous fine out of him. Now the prefect held a higher post, the charges reached him, and Howqua was a very rich merchant, well worth plucking. On the sixth of November, the Company learned that Howqua had been charged with conniving in the opium traffic, and that the viceroy had gone so far as to strip him of his button. The button was the knob on an official's cap that showed his rank. The hong merchants wore the button of a high rank, and unlike the officials who judged them, who had won theirs by examination, the merchants had paid money, a great deal of money, for theirs. The senior hong merchant was held responsible for everything that had gone on, and was fined accordingly. The Company's men thought the viceroy's report to the emperor, which blamed the hong merchants, was meant more for extortion than to stop the trade. They thought it most unjust to claim that opium could only have reached Whampoa with the merchants' help. Howqua and his colleagues took it very seriously. On the twelfth of November they told the Company plainly that the vessels being used as floating opium warehouses at Whampoa must leave the river within a week, or the merchants would have to inform the government against them. And Howqua raised a new idea. From now on, he said, every ship arriving ought to give a bond declaring that she carried no opium. Until that was done, he could not see how the merchants could secure any ship at all. Above them, the viceroy wrote in the voice of injured generosity. The Celestial Empire permitted tea and rhubarb to be sold to keep the foreign nations alive, and those kept alive by them every year came to more than ten thousand times ten thousand. "How Substantial a favor is this!" Officials believed, quite seriously, that foreigners needed Chinese tea and rhubarb for their health. And still, the viceroy went on, these foreigners felt no gratitude, but smuggled in opium, which flowed in and poisoned the land. The hong merchants spelled out to the Company what the order meant for them. Any ship that came with opium must not on any account enter the port, but set sail at once. If she came in and they found out, they positively could not become her security, and would have to report her. "This is an Affair which concerns our persons, families and lives," they wrote, "and we are compelled to proceed in the straight road of management." That is the voice of the hong merchants at their most naked. They did not smoke the drug or ship it, but their lives were pledged against every chest of it in the river. And the accuser who had started it all? In Beijing his charges, that officials were taking bribes to let opium in, made a profound impression. At Canton he was thrown into prison and tried under torture, and at first he swore the officials he had named really had taken the bribes. Then he was tortured three days running, until he confessed that he had falsely accused the officers of government, and that he had dealt in opium himself. And the officials, the Committee noted, sent word of this satisfactory news by express.

The ships came next. On the seventeenth of November 1821 the viceroy issued his edict. Under pressure from the government, the hong merchants had named three ships with opium aboard: two British country ships, the Merope and the Eugenia, and the American Emily. Country ships were the private British and Indian vessels that carried goods between India and China, under licence from the Company. "Opium is a commodity which is produced among foreigners beyond Seas," the viceroy wrote, "and from thence, flows in and poisons China." He recalled the old emperor's order from 1815: a ship that brought opium would have her whole cargo rejected and her trade forbidden. The goods the ships had already landed would be valued, half returned to their owners in goods and not in money, and the rest confiscated for the government. Everything not yet landed would be rejected. And it was to be the duty of Howqua and the other merchants to take the opium out of the ships and burn it, and the ships were to leave port and go home within five days. They were to be marked, and barred for ever from coming back to trade. As for the merchants who had carelessly secured ships carrying opium, by rights they should be broken and punished. But since they had made the disclosures themselves, they would be forgiven, as an act of clemency. Behind two of those ships stood a Scottish trader named James Matheson. The Merope and another ship, the Hooghly, were consigned to him, and so were four hundred and seventy chests of opium aboard the Merope and the Eugenia. On the Merope alone there were about seven hundred chests of the Company's own Bengal opium. Matheson asked the Company what he should do. The Committee, anxious not to be implicated in any way, told him that was his own affair, and warned him never to call any of it Company's opium, in case the Chinese government got the wrong impression. The Company grew the opium in Bengal and sold it at auction in Calcutta, but it never carried a chest of it to China in its own ships. That was what let it keep its hands clean at Canton. Matheson ordered his ships out of the river under a chop that let them leave the port, never to return. A chop was the foreigners' word for any official paper with a seal on it. They went only as far as the island of Nei Lingding, out in the estuary. There, the Hooghly finished taking on her cargo, and the Company, which needed to license any tea shipped to India, quietly issued a licence for tea that was to be passed across to her at the island. The Merope, the Committee reported, had left in the end not so much from force as because the guard against landing opium was too strict to slip past. Between them, she and the Eugenia had about twelve hundred chests aboard. At the end of March, five months after it all began, the two opium ships were still there. The viceroy, meanwhile, softened. The foreign merchants, he wrote, were in extreme distress, and they roared out their supplication "as under the agonies of a head-ache". So, in imitation of the emperor's tender kindness to foreigners, and because this was a first offence, he let them off the confiscation of half their cargoes. It was a very Qing kind of mercy. The penalty stood, the edict stood, and the viceroy could still show that he had been both stern and kind.

The real change was not the expulsion. It was a piece of paper. The viceroy now proposed that every country ship should be secured by the four senior merchants in turn, and that each of them should give the government a bond for her, swearing that she carried no opium. The merchants, for their part, would demand a counter bond from each ship's commander or agent before they pledged themselves, and without it no ship would be allowed to trade. And the four senior merchants, named in the viceroy's own order, were Howqua and three of the other richest men in the trade. The order said that, being substantial men, they would surely feel awe and dread for the sake of their own persons and families. On the eleventh of December, late in the evening, Howqua called on the Company's president to tell him how it would work. An American ship had just arrived. The viceroy had ordered Howqua and the merchant who was to be her security to go aboard, find out whether she carried opium, and if she did not, to give a bond saying so. The Americans mostly agreed to give the merchants the guarantee they needed. The ships that had opium aboard simply unloaded it outside the river first. The Company refused point blank to give any bond for its own ships. The Chinese authorities admitted that the Company's ships carried no opium, and the Committee ordered the private British ships to refuse too, on pain of losing their licences. They had a reason beyond pride. Under a bond like that, the punishment for any act of smuggling would be set not by how serious it was, but by how rich the security merchant was, or by how badly the officials wanted to annoy a particular foreigner. And they could prove they could not promise. Only a week after Howqua's visit, a little opium was seized from a Chinese servant of the purser of one of the Company's own ships. It belonged to an English servant aboard her. So the standoff came to the Company's ships themselves. When the Company ship Scaleby Castle reached Whampoa, a bond was demanded of her commander at once. He would not give it, and she and another Company ship were refused permission to unload. The Committee wrote home that the demands threatened the Company's interest, and that they felt it imperative to resist them to the utmost of their ability. The scheme, they noted, had grown out of a plan the merchants themselves had put forward, and the merchants now bitterly regretted handing the government a fresh means of squeezing them. In the end the viceroy gave way, and by a rescript of the eighteenth of March he excused the Company's ships from the bond. But for everybody else the bond stayed, and the Committee could see exactly what it would do. If it was enforced, the hong merchants, who had no stake in opium whatever, would do everything they could to keep it from reaching Whampoa. And they did. The trouble was where it went instead.

The opium ships at Lintin, China, by William John Huggins, 1824
The opium ships at Lintin, China, by William John Huggins, 1824. William John Huggins, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Nei Lingding is a small, steep island in the middle of the Pearl River estuary, out beyond the forts at the Bogue, a long way below Whampoa. Ships had long waited there for pilots, and warships had been told they could anchor there. Now it became something else. Through the summer of 1822, the Merope and the Eugenia hovered on the coast near the mouth of the river with opium aboard, and nobody took any notice of them. The Committee guessed what that meant. The government knew how hard it was to drive ships off the coast, and would let the opium trade relapse into what they called "that system of connivance which has hitherto marked the conduct of this extraordinary Traffick." With Macau and Whampoa both shut, the first step was to unload all the opium outside Chinese jurisdiction, into ships that stayed outside. The next step was to make those ships permanent: receiving ships that spent the winter months at Nei Lingding, and moved for safety in the summer monsoon to other anchorages, Hong Kong among them. Hold on to that name. You'll be hearing it again. Here is how it worked. A ship coming in from India called first at the island and offloaded her chests onto a receiving ship, a floating warehouse. Then she went on up to Whampoa with her hold clean for inspection. In certain money changing shops in the foreign quarter at Canton, her captain or supercargo met the English speaking agents of Chinese opium wholesalers, and agreed on a price. The foreign seller was paid in cash, and gave the Chinese buyer an order for delivery. The buyer made all the arrangements with the officials. Then the buyer's men went out to the island. The opium was taken out of its chests, which never left the ship, packed in mat bags, and loaded into fast armed boats with crews of fifty to seventy men. All this happened in broad daylight, often in full view of the government's guard boats going in and out of the anchorage. All the man keeping one of those floating warehouses had to do was stay put and keep the opium safe. He held other men's opium for a commission on every chest, and bore almost no risk at all. The Chinese smugglers carried it inland, and they also took care of bribing the officials so that no inspections were made, or at least that they were announced well in advance. There were Chinese warships on the far side of the island. They generally sailed around it only to collect their bribes from the smugglers, and then went back again. For one young New Englander who kept such a ship, and loved to sail, the hardest part of the job was having to stay in one place. For putting up with that, he earned an income worth, in today's money, more than eight hundred thousand dollars a year. The Company's men watched the whole thing with a kind of grim admiration. Within months of the crackdown, they reported that opium ships would in future be kept outside the port, but that with regular brokers ready to buy near the river, the change would make no difference to the traffic at all. The sales were checked only for a moment. Consumption that year did not fall. In a few years, the fees officials had been paid to look the other way had shrunk a great deal, the opium trade had almost entirely left Macau, and, in the Committee's words, it had been given a security at the island "which it has never previously possessed." The officials went on denouncing the traffic in public, and quietly taking their cut from it in private. Many of the country ships now stayed at the island for their whole time in China and never came up the river at all. Some found a neat trick. A ship that left with a cargo of rice was excused port charges, and since the Chinese had only a rough idea of a ship's capacity, a little rice could be made to cover a very large hull. By 1827 the Committee recorded that opium was being sold from the ships at the island with no real interference from the Chinese government at all. And it was no longer just opium. All kinds of goods were being transferred there, so that the ships escaped port charges altogether. The government's agents, meanwhile, kept blundering. One day in 1827 a war junk seized a Chinese boat carrying a letter out to an American ship at the island. The commanders of the English and American opium ships thought a foreigner had been captured, manned their boats and went to the rescue. They were met with stones, an order to fire was given, and the junk's crew abandoned their vessel. The boat, it turned out, had only been carrying a letter. Twice a month, official reports went to the viceroy on the number of foreign ships at the island, while the commanders of the Chinese war vessels announced that they had swept the seas of them. The ships stayed where they were. The trade had been driven out of Macau by the Portuguese, and out of Whampoa by the Chinese, and it had found a refuge in the islands, where it now ran at a far greater scale than before. It flourished, quite simply, under the stimulus of prohibition. Ten years after he took the throne, the emperor finally heard how it all worked. In the summer of 1831, Daoguang sent Canton the report of an informer. Foreign ships, it said, had dared to set up a place outside the Bogue, among the islands, "which they call the Opium Mart", and had a foreign chief anchored with them "in a Ship of War which they call a Convoy." Ashore, the informer went on, native vagabonds ran money shops that were really opium brokers, and these they called large furnaces. Some were in a street near the foreign factories at Canton itself. A buyer agreed on a price at a shop, took a paper as proof, went out to the mart and collected his opium. They called it writing a note. Then there were the smuggling boats, the fast crabs, one or two hundred of them, that came and went with the speed of flight, ran past the guard houses at night, and shared their bribes with the government's own cruisers. And every year, the informer said, not less than several millions in silver ingots went out of China to pay for it. The emperor's answer was an image you have heard before. "Unless the sources be cut off all measures taken will only be like neglecting the root and dressing the Branches." "The sources must be cut off and the root of the evil cleared away. Opium must not enter the interior, that future calamities may be prevented." The source and the stream, one more time. And by now the source was further out of reach than ever.

So what did the ban actually do to the trade? In the years just after Amherst's embassy, the demand for foreign opium held steady at about four or five thousand chests a year, each chest holding about a hundred and thirty three pounds. In 1820, the nearly five thousand chests coming in from India each year were enough to supply about forty thousand regular users across the whole empire. Then two things happened at once: the ships found their safe haven at the island, and opium got much cheaper. And there was no shortage of reasons to want it. Opium was worth more than three hundred times its weight in rice, easy to carry, and it could be sold for silver within days, where tea took half a year or more to bring a return. For the Chinese dealers at Canton, it was a fine way to build up the silver they needed to buy tea for the foreigners. And though they paid bribes, the trade was, in practice, free of tax. Nor was smoking it a disgrace. Merchants smoked to sharpen their minds for a deal, students for the clarity they hoped would carry them through the examinations, and the fashionable offered a pipe to guests after dinner. There is no sign that the emperor's moral exhortations caught on with the public in any meaningful way. The Company could control only its own Bengal opium. It could not stop the Malwa opium grown in the independent states of western India. So from 1820 it decided to fight Malwa head on. It grew far more poppy in Bengal to undercut its rival, and it even bought up Malwa opium itself, which only encouraged more growing. By the mid eighteen twenties, the price of a chest at the Calcutta auctions had fallen by nearly half. And as opium got cheaper in China, people beyond the very rich could start to use it. The numbers climbed year after year. In 1823, opium passed cotton for the first time as the largest export from India to China. The average import, about four and a half thousand chests a year from 1811 to 1821, rose to nearly ten thousand a year from 1821 to 1828. In 1828 alone, more than ten thousand chests came in, slightly more than half the value of everything the British brought to China. That year, the opium was worth more than all the tea the Company shipped home to England. The balance of trade, which had always run in China's favour, was starting to tip the other way. By the season of 1830 to 1831, the import reached eighteen thousand nine hundred and fifty six chests, nearly four times what it had been a decade before. They were worth nearly thirteen million dollars, and they were enough to supply more than a hundred and fifty thousand habitual users. And there is the silver. Between 1800 and 1810, around twenty six million dollars in silver flowed into China. Between 1828 and 1836, around thirty eight million flowed out. Why the silver turned, and how much of it opium is to blame for, is a question for another episode. For now, just notice the direction. So, how does a ban make a trade bigger? Not by failing to be enforced. At Whampoa it was enforced, and it drove the drug out of the river, away from the officials and the hong merchants who answered for it, to a refuge among the islands. Out there it was safer than it had ever been. And the man who had smoked it as a prince, and banned it as an emperor, now had to find a way to reach it. But before any of that, there was a fight on that same island. In the winter of 1821, sailors from a British frigate went ashore at Nei Lingding for water, and a brawl with the villagers ended with Chinese dead. Next time, the viceroy holds the Company responsible for that fight, and threatens to stop the British trade.

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