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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 12

The Committee's Gamble

William Baynes, the head of the Company's Select Committee, decides in 1829 to force better terms at Canton by holding the ships back, and then brings his wife to live in the city against Chinese law, and for two years he and the Daoguang court push each other toward a showdown. The episode follows Baynes from the stoppage through the dispute over his wife to the governor's raid on the factory in 1831, and asks who the Canton system was really serving by then. It hears the court in the emperor's own orders and regulations alongside the Company and the private traders.

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Transcript

Last time, a fight on the shore of Nei Lingding left two Chinese dead, and the viceroy at Canton stopped the East India Company's trade until someone was handed over. Nobody ever was. The frigate whose men had done the shooting sailed away, and two weeks later the viceroy issued an edict letting the trade start again. That November a great fire burned every foreign factory in Canton to the ground. Through the rest of the decade, silver grew dearer and dearer against the copper coins ordinary people lived on, and China's own silver was leaving the country to pay for opium. Canton got its first commercial newspaper, the Canton Register, the hong merchants were made to share part of their trade with the outside shopkeepers, and Wu Bingjian, one of the hong merchants, put a teenage American to work shipping his tea under an American name. The foreign traders called him Howqua, and so will we. And in the Company's factory, some of its men had had enough of bargaining around the edges. This episode belongs to one of them, a man named William Baynes, and to the emperor he decided to push. It covers barely two years, and in that time the Company's men will hold back their ships, bring their wives into a city where foreign women are forbidden, march armed sailors into the factory, and hand the factory keys back to the Chinese in protest. And on the other side, the Daoguang Emperor will answer by ordering eight regulations put in force against them. So this is a duel. Let's meet the man who started it. The Company's business at Canton was run by its Select Committee, a handful of senior merchants called supercargoes, whose head, the president, spoke for every British subject in the port. The Committee spent the trading season, from autumn into spring, in the factory at Canton, and the summer months down the coast at Macau. And the Committee's own future was in doubt. The Company's monopoly of the China trade ran out in 1834, and in London, Parliament had begun to ask whether it should be renewed at all. So the men in the factory had every reason to want to show that they, and only they, could get results out of Canton. By now the Committee was at war with itself. Its president, William Plowden, and the rest of the board fought over every proposal, each side looking for ways to block the other. William Baynes won that fight. He became president by what amounted to a small coup against his predecessor, and Plowden boarded a ship called the Bridgewater and left. And the cause at the centre of it all was a bold one: hold back the whole British trade until Canton gave them better terms. They had a real grievance. For years there had been eleven hong merchants, the licensed Chinese firms the foreigners were allowed to trade with. Now four of them had gone bankrupt, leaving only seven. And it was common knowledge that a big part of what had broken them was the steady drain of official extortion. Whenever the court needed money, for a flood, a famine or a war, the hong merchants were expected to contribute, and every official who touched the trade expected his own share as well. Fewer hong merchants meant fewer buyers and sellers to bargain with, and the survivors carried the weight of every debt the bankrupts left behind. The plan was a quiet one, at first. When the Company's ships arrived for the season, they would simply stay outside the river. The Committee would give no official reason. It would let it be understood that the ships were waiting for the health of their crews, and meanwhile it would press for more hong merchants. Behind that, the Committee drew up a full list of demands, and one of its members insisted in a draft to the Hoppo that the points "must all be granted together, not one picked out and conceded, while the others are refused." The Hoppo was the emperor's own customs superintendent at Canton, the official who collected the duties on foreign trade and the fees on every foreign ship. So the Committee imposed an embargo on all British trade at Canton, to force redress of its grievances. And here is the trouble. The Chinese authorities considered the foreign trade of the port perfectly well regulated as it was, and wanted no change at all. The Hoppo's answer was magnificent. "The National Treasury is quite full," he declared, "and does not fundamentally depend upon the petty cargoes of the foreign ships of various nations to supply revenue". That is the line to remember from this whole episode. The foreigners believed the Chinese could not do without their trade. The Chinese officials said, at least, that they could. The Committee then tried to go over the heads of the local officials. It sent a memorial addressed to the emperor himself. The viceroy sent it back. Foreign nations, he wrote, in all their affairs "are not allowed to take upon themselves to report abruptly, by a side path, their Affairs in the Imperial presence." The Hoppo had also been sent a copy for the emperor, and he returned it with its seals unbroken. On the twenty fourth of November the viceroy issued a proclamation calling the Committee's petitioning "conduct plainly indicating rebellious opposition." And the hong merchants, as always, were caught in the middle. On the thirtieth of December they wrote reminding the Committee that back in the spring they had contracted for black teas and made advances on green teas, and the Committee had taken none of either. Then the viceroy gave a little. One new hong merchant had already been appointed, he said, and he had a reasonable hope of getting seven or eight more. It was enough. Satisfied, the Committee ordered the Company's ships, and allowed the private ships, to go up to Whampoa without further delay. So the first round ended with a promise, and the Committee took it. Whether the promise would be kept was a question for another day.

So what had the Company won? Every foreign ship that came up to Whampoa paid heavy charges of its own, on top of the duties on its cargo. The first was called the emperor's present, though it was no present at all; it was a fixed fee on every ship. In 1830 the Company finally got it cut, from one thousand nine hundred and fifty taels to about one thousand six hundred. In Spanish silver dollars, the coin the whole trade ran on, that was a cut from about two thousand seven hundred dollars a ship to about two thousand two hundred. A tael was the Chinese measure of silver by weight, a little over an ounce, the unit every account at Canton was kept in. Another was the fee for entering the port, and that came down too, from about one thousand and thirteen taels to about eight hundred and eleven. It was a real saving, and it came straight after the season the Committee had held its ships back. But look closer. For the smaller ships the saving made little difference, because it came with an increase in other rates. So for months of stoppage, quarrels and petitions, the Committee had shaved a few hundred taels off each big ship's bill and left the system itself exactly where it was. And Baynes was about to push again.

For the hong merchants the lesson was different again. When the British pushed, it was a Chinese firm that got hurt. Take the case of a hong merchant the Company called Goqua. At the end of November, while the quarrels over foreign wives and sedan chairs were boiling, the Committee heard that Goqua's uncle, the manager of his firm, had been arrested and sent before the magistrate of Nanhai. Nanhai was one of the two counties the city of Canton was divided between, and its magistrate was the official who judged ordinary crimes there. The magistrate had him severely beaten and then imprisoned. Under torture, he confessed that he had acted as an agent to get a sedan chair for the foreigners. A sedan chair was a seat carried on poles by bearers, and in Canton riding in one was a mark of rank that the foreign merchants were forbidden to claim. The charges spread to the firm itself. Another hong merchant, Mowqua, assured the Committee that the edicts against Goqua's hong were "a tissue of falsehoods from beginning to end." On the eighteenth of December the Committee's diary noted: "Poor old Goqua by to-day’s report has offered money for his release, but it has been rejected by the Viceroy." And worse, at the magistrate's office they were even talking of strangling him. That is the price of a sedan chair, for a Chinese merchant. In those same December days the hong merchants came to the Committee, on the tenth and again on the fourteenth, begging it to order the British ladies to leave the city. The Committee refused both times. On the twenty ninth of December orders arrived from the emperor himself. The foreign women must go, and foreign merchants were forbidden to ride in chairs. And then, on the first of January, the viceroy told one of the hong merchants that the residence of English ladies in the city was really a matter of small importance. Small to the viceroy, perhaps. Not small to Goqua. To understand how a sedan chair and a few wives could bring a hong merchant to the edge of the strangler's cord, we need to go back to the start of that year, and to Mrs Baynes.

For as long as anyone could remember, the rules at Canton had said that foreign women could not come to the city. The foreigners' wives lived down the coast at Macau, and their husbands went up to the factories for the trading season without them. The point of the rule was to keep the foreigners what the court wanted them to be: visitors who came for a season, did their business and left, not settlers with households and families. William Baynes did not accept that. In February 1830, he quietly brought his wife into Canton. She was a sensation. Several enterprising Chinese with boats on the river charged people admission to come and see her. The authorities knew, and let it pass, and by April she and the other two British wives who had come up were safely back in Macau. So far, a quiet scandal. Then in the autumn, Baynes did it again, and this time openly. Mrs Baynes arrived at Canton at the opening of the trading season, on the fourth of October 1830. A week after their arrival, the viceroy ordered that she must leave the city at once, as the regulations required. Baynes ignored him. The viceroy's assistants then covered the factory district with notices in Chinese, explaining how immoral the British had become. On top of that, the annual proclamation about the foreigners' servants was pasted on the walls of the British factory itself, and the Committee called its language the most grossly insulting and opprobrious, full of hints at crimes it would not even name. Some of these insults had even been reprinted, in a toned down form, in the Canton Register, the private traders' newspaper, which by now, the Committee noted, circulated all over the East. The viceroy also complained that foreigners were presuming, against the law, to ride in sedan chairs. The Committee replied with a remonstrance to the viceroy, full of quotations from the Chinese classics, declaring that all within the four seas were brothers. On the sedan chairs, it informed the viceroy that the Company's young men were the sons and brothers of country gentlemen. It also mocked the idea that hong merchants and linguists of such defective education were fit to lead the foreigners into the paths of higher civilization and to curb their pride and profligacy, which was what the proclamation had told them to do. One of them, Mr Astell, the man the ban had been aimed at, was the son of a man who had often been at the head of the Company itself and sat for many years in the Great Council of the British Nation, which is to say Parliament. How could anyone, the Committee asked, "talk of his overstepping his rank by sitting in a chair"? On the wives, the Committee explained that by the laws of England every man could marry only one wife. So the people the edict called foreign women were the wives of foreign merchants. And the Company's men were required to be in Canton for six months or more every year. And then came Baynes's own appeal, sent in Chinese: "How does it accord with reason and the feelings of human nature to declare that the wife shall not accompany her husband and quietly reside in the factory with him!" It is a fair question. It is also a question asked by a man who had been told the rule, broken it twice, and gone looking for the argument. The private British traders, meanwhile, saw their chance. William Jardine and James Matheson, two private traders who loathed the Company's monopoly, led a group of twenty six private merchants in a letter demanding that the Company do something about this offence to their nation. William Jardine was a former ship's surgeon turned opium merchant, and James Matheson was his partner. Their letter complained that the placards were grossly insulting, "holding up Foreigners to the eyes of the Chinese, as an inferior and abject class." What they really wanted was to push the Company's Committee into taking a harder line against the Chinese government. Here, in other words, were the private traders working the Company like a lever, the same way the Company was trying to work the Chinese. Then, on the twentieth of October, the viceroy answered, not in writing but in a spoken message carried by Howqua. Foreign women in Canton, the message said, were forbidden by the old law. It could never be permitted, and the chief must send the lady away at once. And if the chief refused: "If the Chief says he will not remove the Foreign Lady, in two or three days, if she still be here, soldiers will be sent" to the factory to seize her and drive her out. Think about who had to carry that message. Howqua, a man the Americans reckoned was worth twenty six million dollars, telling the head of the Company's Committee that soldiers might come for his wife. The Committee took alarm at once. Not at losing Mrs Baynes, but at the principle. If soldiers could be sent into the factory for any cause, they wrote, they would be liable every hour of every day to the intrusion of an armed force, and that would be the abandonment of the only protecting privilege they had in China.

So Baynes and the Committee raised the stakes. They resolved, as they put it, "to resist this menace of violating the Precincts of our Factory, hitherto held sacred, to the utmost extremity." They wrote to the senior commander of the Company's ships, directing him to send up one hundred armed seamen and two quarter deck carronades to protect the factory. A carronade was a short, heavy ship's gun that fired a big ball over a short range, a weapon made for smashing things up close. By the morning of the twenty first of October, the sailors had landed at Canton, and they and their guns were inside the factory. On the same day the hong merchants came with a message. The viceroy had declared that the presence of the ladies was "not of sufficient importance to employ force to drive them away". They urged the Committee to treat the threat of soldiers as a burst of temper, and to trust the hong merchants' own collective guarantee for their safety. The Committee refused. The guard would stay, they said, until they had a document from the viceroy promising that their persons and property were safe from any armed force inside their own factory. Any measure that looked like a concession on such a point, they wrote, would be highly injurious to the interests and honour of the British nation, "of which we are in this Country the Representatives." The viceroy's formal answer came the same day, as a long order to the hong merchants. On foreign women, he cited precedent. In 1751 a Dutch merchant had brought up a foreign woman, and she was sent back to Macau in custody. In 1769 an English merchant brought up a foreign slave woman, who was likewise taken to Macau in custody, and the hong merchants, linguists, compradors and government messengers involved were severely punished and degraded. Linguists were the licensed Chinese interpreters who handled the foreigners' dealings with officials, and compradors were the Chinese agents who supplied the factories and ships with food, servants and everything else. Notice who the viceroy said was punished in 1769. He named no punishment for the English merchant, only for the Chinese around him. On sedan chairs, the viceroy was almost reasonable. If the foreigners were sick, or it was raining, a chair might be excused, but the general ban was old and could not be set aside. And the annual proclamation the foreigners found so insulting, he explained, had been renewed every year since 1792 as a kindness, to warn strangers who knew nothing of China's language, history, laws or customs, so they would not be caught in the net of the law. Turning that kindness into an insult, he said, "shows their ignorance of the substantialities". All these rules were of old standing, he concluded, and they must be enforced. On the twenty fifth, and again on the twenty eighth, the Committee wrote back, in what it called temperate terms, protesting against the attempt to enforce such ridiculous prohibitions and against the repeated public insults. On the twenty ninth, another letter came from the viceroy through the hong merchants. The Committee read it carefully. Its wording did not quite give the pledge they had demanded, but they believed it was meant as a peace offering, and that left them free to take it that way. In another order the viceroy said that since the foreigners had become penitent and were seeking his protection, he would certainly not send soldiers to surround the factory. The British had marched in armed sailors. The viceroy described them as penitents. Both sides could live with that. On the thirty first of October, Baynes claimed a kind of victory, since his wife had not been carried off, told the sailors to stand down, and sent them back to their ships. Mrs Baynes was not the only foreign woman in Canton that autumn. A young American named Harriet Low had come up from Macau with her aunt to see the city, and she wrote down what she saw. She kept a long diary of her years on the China coast, one of the liveliest records of foreign life there, and she did not always take her own side. She wrote in her diary that the Chinese were "much more civil than either American or English people would have been" if a Chinese woman had appeared in their streets, dressed in the clothes of her country and walking on her tiny feet. It is a generous line, and a sharp one. Imagine the crowds a Chinese lady with bound feet would have drawn in Boston or London. But the Americans did not have a hundred sailors and two cannon. When the authorities threatened the ships of the American firm Russell & Company, the American women were ordered out, and Harriet Low complained that she had to go back to Macau while the English ladies stayed and enjoyed themselves. When the two women left on the thirtieth of November, every man in the American factory went down to the dock to see them off.

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

Now we turn to the other duellist, in Beijing. The Daoguang Emperor had come to the throne in 1820, and early in his reign he had demanded an end to the opium smuggling on the coast, and to the corrupt officials who took bribes to let it through. In February 1831, the viceroy, the governor of Guangdong and the Hoppo sent him a joint memorial proposing new regulations to guard against the foreigners. A memorial was a formal report sent up to the emperor; his answer came back written in red ink, the vermilion brush that only the emperor could use. Their memorial began with history. Back in the Qianlong reign, after the English had broken the empire's prohibitions, a governor at Canton had drawn up five regulations to keep the outside barbarians under control. Over the long years since, the memorial said, those rules had been gradually neglected and their enforcement relaxed. Then it explained why they were needed now. In the ninth year of Daoguang's reign, which was 1829, the English had long put off entering the port to get the port charges reduced. And last year they had secretly brought foreign women to live in the factories. The foreigners had backed down in the end, the officials wrote, "still the disposition of Barbarians being deceitful and crafty, it is absolutely necessary to carry into effect with severity the inhibitory orders and to strengthen the guards against them." They also pointed out how much bigger the problem had grown. In the Qianlong Emperor's time, no more than thirty or forty foreign ships came to Canton in a year. Now it was seventy or eighty, or even a hundred. The aim, they wrote, was that when strictness at home had become a habit, trouble from the outside barbarians would be rooted out, and "the principles of a good Charioteer in restraining and soothing his horse" would be carried into effect. That is a perfect picture of how the Qing saw the whole system at Canton. Not a wall to keep the foreigners out, but reins to keep them in hand. The emperor approved. The eight regulations proposed in February were ordered into force. The first said foreign merchants must not stay over the winter in Canton, though in practice it was softened into an order to keep a constant guard on them. Another said all the balances the hong merchants owed to foreigners must be paid within three months. The foreigners' household servants had to be hired through the comprador from among local people, with their names reported to the hong merchants. The fifth regulation dealt with women. Last year, it said, the English chief had broken the law and brought them, and they had already been driven back to Macau. If foreigners deliberately disobeyed again, the trade would be stopped at once and they would be sent under escort to Macau. The same regulation said foreigners must not come ashore at Canton in sedan chairs. The sixth was aimed at something else from the year before, when, it said, a foreigner had suddenly and by stealth brought muskets and guns into a foreign factory in Canton. The regulation named no one. It did not need to. And the eighth regulation narrowed the last side door. On any very important affair, a petition had to go through the senior hong merchant or the security merchant: "It is not allowed that foreigners should presume to go to the City Gate and present it themselves." Only if the merchants refused to pass it on could the foreigners take it to the gate. Every move the Committee had made over two years was answered here, one rule at a time. The officials also ordered the soldiers and police to keep up a constant patrol and guard, and told the hong merchants and linguists to watch faithfully over everything the foreigners did.

Howqua
Howqua. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The regulations were published at Canton on the twelfth of May 1831. And on that same day the officials came to the British factory in person. The Committee was away at Macau. The viceroy was away too, and the governor of Guangdong province was acting in his place. The governor ranked just below the viceroy and ran the civil government of the province; the foreigners called him by his Chinese title, the Fooyuen. He arrived with the Hoppo and a strong body of armed attendants. What brought him was the ground in front of the factory. The great fire of 1822 had thrown masses of rubble and debris into the river in front of the factories, and the water there had silted up into new ground. The Company had built on that new land. Earlier it had sent boats and seamen from its ships to fill a hollow with rubbish and put up a fence to keep people out, and by now there were walls, trees and a stone quay for landing cargo. In English law, land like that, built up by the river, would have belonged to the owner of the bank. By Chinese law it belonged to the Crown. Inside the factory, the governor ordered his attendants to uncover the portrait of the late King, and sat himself down in front of it. The King in the picture was George the Fourth, who had died the summer before. He reportedly sat with his back to it. Either way, the Committee recorded that the covering was torn down from His Majesty's picture, which the officials chose to treat "with the most marked disrespect." Then he sent for the linguists. To the British, the portrait in their hall stood for the King himself, and for the nation the Committee claimed to represent in China. To the governor, it was a picture in a building that stood on the emperor's ground. He ordered chains brought from a mandarin's house nearby, and had them put on Atam, the senior linguist. He threatened to have Atam's head cut off if, within two days, the premises were not put back the way they had been three years before. Two days, to put the river front back the way it had been three years before, with a man's life held against it. Then he called in Howqua. The senior hong merchant was threatened with immediate imprisonment and death, for his connection with the English, and made to stay on his knees for more than an hour. Only then, at the Hoppo's urging, were his punishment and Atam's let off. It is worth noticing who asked for mercy. The Hoppo's whole office lived on the foreign trade, and a hong merchant in prison, or a linguist without a head, was bad for business. Afterwards Wu described the governor's coming to the Committee. He had come upon them, he said, "like Thunder, and would not listen to a word of Reason, but treated them as slaves." Here is the senior hong merchant, on his knees for more than an hour in the Company's own factory, because of a quay and some trees. The next morning, workmen started pulling down the walls and uprooting the trees. On the evening of the fifteenth they started breaking up the stone quay. Several hundred men were set to the work of destruction, and they kept at it even through the night. Two members of the Committee hurried up from Macau to seek redress. Their application went unanswered, and the destruction went on. The outer gates of the factory were pulled down and broken to pieces, the ground laid waste, and most of it dug up and thrown into the river. And a proclamation followed, forbidding foreigners to leave their factories without permission, banning their Chinese servants, and putting a guard of soldiers on the ships at Whampoa. Why now? Wu believed the governor must have had special orders from Beijing. The Committee doubted it. The Committee's own theory was local politics. The governor, the Manchu general commanding the city's garrison, and the Hoppo had acted together, they believed, while the viceroy was away, because they disliked his foreign policy, which for a Chinese official they thought unusually liberal. Whatever the reason, the Committee wrote that it now faced a resolute and systematic determination to reduce the foreigners to the lowest and most restricted condition possible. Against it, they wrote, there was only the choice between silent acceptance and temperate but firm remonstrance and resistance. They had resolved, they added, to refrain from anything like the expression of angry feeling.

The Committee had one answer left, the same one it had used before: threaten to stop the trade. They decided to warn the authorities, by some positive act, that if the regulations were enforced they would be resisted, even to the point of abandoning the trade. The act they chose was symbolic. They would send one of the Company's men, Mr Lindsay, up to Canton to hand the keys of the Company's factory to the hong merchants, to pass on to the governor. Lindsay was the son of one of the Company's directors in London, and about thirty years old. Hold on to his name. Their letter explained why. Having no present power to protect their property, they abandoned it, and they had sent the governor the keys of the British factory. Among the outrages it listed was the fate of a Chinese linguist, seized for his connection with the British, thrown into chains in the hall, and threatened with immediate death. And it set a deadline. Unless the evils were removed, or security obtained against their happening again, British trade with China would be suspended on the first of August. At the same time, they sent a ship to Calcutta with a letter to the governor general of India, asking him to send a naval squadron to uphold their nation's honour in China. In their report on all this, the Committee explained the beauty of their deadline. It gave the Chinese government plenty of time to reflect, and meanwhile, they wrote, "we bind ourselves to no definite course of measures". In other words, the threat was real, unless it turned out not to be. The Chinese side did not blink. The governor's proclamation had already warned that foreigners who refused to obey would be expelled from the country and forbidden for ever from coming to Canton to trade. Not every Briton in high office agreed with them. One put it bluntly in these years: "Trade with China is our only object; conquest there would be as dangerous as defeat". Trade never thrived, he said, where it had to be propped up by force. He added: "No glory is to be gained in a victory over the Chinese." In June, learning that the emperor himself had ordered the regulations into force, the Committee quietly dropped its deadline of the first of August.

But the keys had been noticed by someone else: the private British merchants. Most of them made their money carrying cotton and opium from India, and they had never loved the Company that licensed them and spoke for them at Canton. On the thirtieth of May, twenty one of them met in Canton and passed a set of resolutions of their own. They had seen, they said, the attack on the Company's property, and with deep regret, "the cruel treatment and death of an innocent Hong Merchant on the false charge of traitorous connection with the English". The Committee's own public statement, they said, had listed only a part of the vexatious exactions endlessly made on European commerce in China. They were not impressed by the regulations as such, "it being well known that the Chinese Authorities issue Laws, which they never mean to enforce". But put together with the violent entry of the factory, the destruction of property, the insult to the King's portrait, and the refusal to hear any protest from the Company's men, they concluded that "a deliberate plan to oppress and degrade British Subjects is clearly manifested". And to endure it in silence, they added, "would prove them deserving of even the insults they are exposed to." Since the local government would not even receive the Committee's protests, they declared, the most decisive steps were now advisable, if Britain wished to keep any profitable trade with China at all. For the long run, they said, it would be better to resort to extreme measures of resistance than to watch the trade grow every year more precarious under rising exactions and endless petty disputes. And they reached into history for proof. Ever since an English captain with a single merchant ship had seized the fort at the Bogue in the middle of the seventeenth century, they argued, down to the day a navy captain silenced the same fort with one broadside from his frigate, firmness and even violence had always produced a spirit of conciliation, while tame submission only brought more oppression. The broadside was the frigate Alceste's, when she forced her way up past the forts at the Bogue while Lord Amherst's embassy was still on its way back from Beijing. For now, they backed the Company, approving the Committee's measures as good for British commerce. But notice what had changed. The private merchants were no longer content to let the Company speak for them. They were speaking for themselves, and what they were saying was force.

In Beijing, the emperor's attention was on something the merchants' resolutions never mentioned. In the summer of 1831 his command reached Canton, based on an informer's report. The informer described the opium trade in detail. There were wholesale smuggling boats called fast crabs, which came and went with the speed of flight, from one to two hundred of them. These were fast armed boats with crews of fifty to seventy men, which took the opium off the store ships in mat bags, in broad daylight. They ran at night, and if they passed a guard post where the soldiers beat the gong, they would even fire on it, and the men on duty dared neither stop them nor report them. The government's own patrol boats, the informer said, took bribes from the smugglers and divided them up in shares. And opium was sold, he said, in towns, villages and market places, wherever there were money shops. The places the opium was sold on, he said, reached all along the coast: Xiamen in Fujian province, Tianjin in the far north near Beijing, and the districts of Leizhou and Hainan in the far south. The emperor's verdict followed. "Opium is a flowing poison in degree immense." He knew the drug personally. As a young prince he had tried it himself, and it had not made him any softer on its use and sale. He had often sent orders to the governors of the provinces to stamp it out, he wrote, but most of the opium came from abroad and gathered at Canton. "Unless the sources be cut off all measures taken will only be like neglecting the root and dressing the Branches." So he commanded the viceroy to find out whether the report was true, and to work out how opium could be stopped from being smuggled to the coast and sold. "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." And he closed with a promise. If the viceroy and the others could remove from China a great evil, "their merit will not be small." It is a remarkable order. The emperor saw the problem clearly, named the source, and expected his officials to fix it. It took the viceroy five months to finish his inquiries. On the ninth of February 1832, just as the trading season was about to close, he sent his order down to the hong merchants. At Canton, as far as giving commands went, the authorities performed their full duty. It was only in carrying them out that there was any laxity. Notice the difference between this order and the eight regulations. On wives, sedan chairs and quays, the court could make the foreigners bend. On opium, it could only issue commands. The reason was in the informer's own report. The patrol boats sent to stop the smugglers were sharing the smugglers' bribes, and the guard posts they fired on dared not even report it. An order from Beijing could reach the viceroy. It could not reach a patrol boat captain with a share in the profits.

The Committee made one last try that year. On the twenty eighth of October 1831, it sent the governor a formal requisition, a long list of reforms. The factory, it asked, should be restored to the state it was in before the governor's violent attack in May. Chinese subjects should not be persecuted or punished for an alleged traitorous connection with the foreigners. More hong merchants should be appointed, as many as fifty, for British subjects to trade with. Fifty, when for years there had been eleven at most. Even the viceroy's own hope, as the stoppage ended, had been seven or eight more. The port charges, which the Committee said had more than doubled through exactions, should be cut to half their present amount. A year earlier, the Company had got the emperor's present cut by under a fifth. Now it was asking for the port charges to be halved. And if a Chinese died by accident or in self defence, the life of a British subject should not be demanded for it. That request came straight out of the last ten years: the gunner of 1784, the American sailor strangled in 1821, and the two dead men on the shore of Nei Lingding, for whom the viceroy had demanded two lives. In return, the Committee promised to seek powers from its own government to try, convict and execute any British subject found guilty of murdering a Chinese. Put plainly, the Committee wanted no British life demanded for an accidental death, and offered British justice for real murders in exchange. It added that Britain had "no ambition of conquests or of further territorial acquisitions in any part of the world". And it quoted the standing orders it had always had from England: "Continue to cultivate an amicable intercourse with the people of China, but never submit to arbitrary oppression". Read those requests as a list and you can see the whole argument of the next decade in them. The British wanted more merchants to deal with, lower charges, their own law for their own people, and the right to speak to officials directly. And the eighth regulation had just told them that a petition must go through the senior hong merchant or the security merchant, and that only if those merchants refused could they take it to the City Gate themselves. So the two sides were not even arguing about the same thing anymore. The Committee was asking for a new system. The court had just reaffirmed the old one, in writing, with the emperor's approval. None of it was granted. The trade simply went on. In the 1832 season the Company loaded twenty ships with tea for London, and three more for British North America. So whom was the system at Canton serving by now? Not the hong merchants, down to a handful, threatened with strangling over a sedan chair and kept on their knees in the factory over a quay. Not the Company, which had held back its ships, marched in sailors and handed back its keys, and had a cut in one port fee and eight new regulations to show for it. The court still believed it set the terms, and on wives and quays it did. But on the opium that mattered most, its orders were given and not carried out. The ones it served best, perhaps, were the men the Committee could not control at all: the opium sellers at Nei Lingding, whose trade never had to pass through the factory at all. And some of them had started to wonder why they needed Canton at all. In 1832 the Company itself paid for a voyage by a ship called the Lord Amherst. Next time, we sail with her up the China coast, past the ports the emperor had long closed to foreign trade, to see whether they would trade anyway. Would the coast open where Canton would not?

Sources