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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 13

Up the Coast

Karl Gutzlaff, a Prussian missionary who passes for Chinese, and Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, a young Company man, sail up the China coast in 1832 on the Lord Amherst to see whether the forbidden ports will trade, and find officials ordering them away and people who want to buy. The episode follows the two men from Gutzlaff's first coastal voyage to Lindsay's survey of the ports, alongside the founding of William Jardine and James Matheson's firm, and asks whether the coast was open for the taking. It leans on scholars and foreign observers, with one Chinese voice, a writer describing England for Chinese readers.

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Tianjin Guangzhou
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Karl Gützlaff
Karl Gützlaff. S. H. Gimber, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the Company's men at Canton pushed the system as hard as they dared, and the system pushed back. In May 1831 the acting governor of Canton came to the British factory with the Hoppo and a strong body of armed attendants, had the late king's portrait uncovered, and sat himself down in front of it. One of the hong merchants was released only after an hour on his knees, the linguist Atam was put in chains, and over the next days workmen pulled down the walls, uprooted the trees and broke up the stone quay. The foreign traders called him Howqua, and so will we. The Select Committee answered by sending the keys of the factory to the governor, and warning that British trade would stop on the first of August unless the wrongs were put right. In October they sent him a long list of requests: fifty hong merchants instead of a handful, port charges cut to half, and the factory put back the way it had been before the raid. Their orders from home, they told him, were to "cultivate an amicable intercourse with the people of China, but never submit to arbitrary oppression". And in Beijing, the Daoguang Emperor told his officials at Canton to cut off the opium trade at its source, because anything less would be "like neglecting the root and dressing the Branches." You can probably guess how far a list of requests got anyone at Canton. So some of the British stopped asking. If the front door was shut, why not try the rest of the house? This time, for the first time, we hear from two men who sailed that coast and wrote down what they saw: the missionary Karl Gützlaff, and a Company man named Hugh Hamilton Lindsay. You'll meet them both properly in a moment. If you're just joining us, here is how things stood. Every Western ship that came to China had to trade at Canton, and nowhere else. It dealt through a customs chief called the Hoppo and a handful of licensed Chinese firms, the hong merchants, who answered for every foreigner and every debt. The British side of that trade belonged by law to one body, the East India Company, and at Canton the Company was run by its Select Committee. Private British traders could work there only on the Company's sufferance, and more and more of them had come to hate it. To see why the coast mattered, start with the opium. After the crackdowns of the early 1820s, the opium ships stopped coming up the river at all. Permanent receiving ships lay out at Nei Lingding island in the estuary through the winter months, floating warehouses beyond the reach of Canton's bonds and searches. A ship from India would offload her chests onto a receiving ship at Nei Lingding, then sail on up to Whampoa with her holds empty of anything illegal. Payment was arranged ashore, in money changing shops in the foreign quarter, with the agents of Chinese wholesale dealers. Then the opium was taken out of its chests, packed in mat bags, and loaded into fast armed boats with crews of fifty to seventy men. There were Qing war junks stationed on the far side of the island. They generally sailed round it only to collect bribes from the smugglers, and then went back where they came from. The officials denounced the traffic in public and quietly levied their own charges on it in private. In the Company's own words, the trade at Nei Lingding went on "with no material interference or interruption from the Chinese Government." The emperor's own informer described them: smuggling boats called fast crabs, which "go and come with the speed of flight", and which would even fire on a guard house that beat its gong at them. A chest of opium held about a hundred and thirty three pounds of the drug. It came packed as balls, cakes of raw opium wrapped in dried poppy petals, and the Chinese buyer boiled them down into the paste that was smoked in a pipe. But why stop at the mouth of the river, when there was a whole coast beyond it? So from 1828, other ships began to follow in the wake of the Merope, the first to trade opium along the coast to the east and north. The Merope was one of the opium ships driven out of Whampoa a few years before. Up the coast the price was better. A chest fetched about a hundred dollars more than at Canton, or a hundred and twenty five, and sometimes a hundred and fifty or higher. And on the coast there was no Hoppo, no hong merchant and no Select Committee. The bargain was between the man on the deck and the man in the boat. The same informer named the places where opium was sold: Xiamen in Fujian, Tianjin in the north, and Leizhou and Hainan in the far south, and he reckoned that silver worth several millions went abroad every year to pay for it. In the years from 1828 to 1835 the imports averaged 18,712 chests a year, nearly double what they had been before. And it was cheaper than it used to be, so people well beyond the richest could now afford the habit. Meanwhile China's silver was draining away. Between 1800 and 1810, around 26 million dollars had flowed into China. Between 1828 and 1836, around 38 million flowed out. To make sure the chests got delivered on the east coast, the foreign sellers did something new. For the first time, they set about buying the officials themselves. The officials, for their part, wrote memorials to the throne and put up proclamations. But beyond that flight of paper, nothing was done to enforce the ban. By the early 1830s two of the big private houses at Canton, William Jardine's and the Dents', were sending their own ships up the coast to look for new markets. And before long, one of the two men I just introduced would be dressed in his best, ordering six Qing official boats to leave one of Jardine's ships alone. He was a missionary. How he got there is this episode's story.

In the summer of 1831, a twenty seven year old missionary named Karl Gützlaff was making his first attempt to get inside China. He was born in Prussian Pomerania, and had gone out to the East for a Dutch missionary society, working among the Chinese emigrants of Java and then in Bangkok, the capital of Siam. In Bangkok he put on Chinese clothes, learned the Fujian speech of the emigrant sailors and traders, and was adopted into a Fujianese clan, taking a Chinese name. He went by that name, Guo Shila, and at a little distance, in the right clothes, he could pass for a man from Fujian. Earlier that same year, in Bangkok, his young English wife had died after giving birth. Unlike Robert Morrison, the veteran Protestant missionary at Canton, Gützlaff wanted to see China firsthand, and he was willing to put on a disguise and risk his life by entering illegally. Foreigners were forbidden to travel inside China, or to land anywhere on the coast but Canton and Macau. Like many evangelicals of his day, he believed that hundreds of millions of Chinese were waiting for the Gospel, and that the door only had to be pushed. He sailed from Bangkok on a two hundred and fifty ton trading junk bound for Tianjin, with a Cantonese captain and a crew of fifty Chinese sailors. A junk was the Chinese seagoing ship, square at the bow and high at the stern, with sails of matting stiffened by bamboo battens. Tianjin was the great port of the north, on the river that led up toward Beijing. The junk was close to a floating opium den. The ship's officers all "partook freely of this intoxicating luxury", he wrote, and were left unfit for duty. So the first thing China showed this missionary, before he ever saw its coast, was a pipe. At Tianjin, Gützlaff turned doctor. Some remedies he tried on men who wanted to break the habit of smoking opium worked so well that they drew general notice. Mandarins even stooped to visit him and asked for his help, telling him the emperor was highly enraged that so many of his subjects had taken up the practice. Mandarin was the Europeans' word for any Qing official, civil or military. Then the Chaozhou and Fujian men saw how many local patients were crowding in, and got angry. "This is our doctor, and not yours", they said, and they drove the poor fellows away by force. Within a few days his whole stock of medicines was gone, and he had to send away, with regret, people who really needed his help. Meanwhile the crew got on with their trade. Officers who had farmed the duties watched over the unloading, the duties were light, and the sailors' own goods went almost free. The resident merchants bought as soon as the goods reached the warehouses, and paid at once in sycee silver, in a manner he found quiet and honest, and good for both sides. Sycee was silver cast into ingots and weighed out by the tael, an ounce and a third or so, rather than counted as coins. There was little profit on sugar and tin, but on the sapanwood and pepper that made up most of the cargo the profit ran past a hundred per cent, and European calicoes made fifty. Sapanwood is a red dyewood from Southeast Asia. Opium, for once, was not selling. The bans were severe, a Canton merchant had been seized by the government, and large quantities of the drug brought up from Canton could find no buyers. Many a trick was played to dodge the duties, he noticed, light as they were. The trade of the place amazed him. More than five hundred junks came every year from the southern ports, from Siam and from the south of Vietnam, and the river was so thronged, so full of life and motion, that it reminded him strongly of Liverpool. The land around Tianjin grew little, and the capital nearby swallowed immense stores, so the place had to import a great deal to feed its people. Goods sold at a good price, and in no other port of China, he judged, was trade so lucrative. But nowhere else were there so many dangers. A great many junks were wrecked every season, and that ate up much of the profit. He was surprised by how much silver was about. Thousands of taels could be raised at the shortest notice, and some firms issued bills that passed as freely as banknotes in England. A tael there was worth between thirteen and fourteen hundred copper cash. In normal times a tael of silver was worth a thousand copper coins. In other words, the silver crisis we watched begin a couple of episodes back was already there in the market at Tianjin, if you knew what to count. And the city, he wrote, "would open a fine field for foreign enterprise". There was a great demand for European woollens; only their high price kept people from buying more. Notice what has happened. A man who came for souls is writing like a commercial traveller. He had his admirers. A wealthy man living across the street offered to buy him outright, for two thousand taels of silver. From Tianjin the junk went on to the coast of Manchuria before turning south again for home. He arrived at Macau on the thirteenth of December, and the veteran was there to welcome him after his six month journey. It was the first journey up the coast and into the north of China by a Westerner since Lord Amherst's embassy, and the first without official sanction since James Flint. Flint was the Company man who sailed north in 1759 to complain about Canton to the emperor, and spent three years in prison for it. Gützlaff wrote the voyage up as a journal, and it was soon being read by every foreigner on the coast. And what it told them was simple. Up there, beyond Canton, were people who wanted to buy.

Now meet the second man. Supercargo was the Company's word for its trading officers in China, the men who bought the tea and sold the cargoes, with the Select Committee of senior supercargoes at their head. Hugh, the son of a Company director in London, was about thirty. He was a senior supercargo, just below the Committee, and they gave him secret instructions to find out how far the northern ports of the empire might gradually be opened to British commerce. It was a remarkable step. In 1832 it was the Company's own factory, two years before its time in China ran out, that paid for Gützlaff's second voyage up the coast. Without approval from London, the Committee hired him to go with a Company ship full of cotton textiles in search of new markets for British goods. The orders were clear on one point. "You will be most careful to prevent any Opium being received into or vended from the ship." The ship, the Lord Amherst, carried the name of the same man whose embassy Beijing had sent packing sixteen years before. Hugh agreed to deny any link with the Company the whole way, and to pose instead as a private British merchant who had been blown onto the Chinese coast by foul weather. He took a Chinese name for the voyage, and Gützlaff took his own Chinese name too. He also packed a tract about the British, written by a Company man and put into Chinese, to hand out as he went. The Committee's president had ordered him to hand over any copies; he promised he had none, and then brought along five hundred in his luggage. Among other things, it assured its readers that "The Government of so great an Empire has no thirst for Conquest". Gützlaff went along as interpreter and doctor, and as the voice that did the talking. He brought along crates of Christian tracts and medicines too, and handed them out at every stop. The Lord Amherst carried the two of them all the way up the coast of China and beyond, into Korea. The pattern was set early. Off Xiamen, the great trading port of Fujian, a deputation of mandarins came out one morning with an edict, and Gützlaff copied it down. It came from the naval commander of the whole province of Fujian, and it repeated an order handed down just after Lord Amherst's embassy. If any barbarian ship turned up on the coast of Fujian or Zhejiang, it was to be driven away at once. Its men were not to go ashore, and local boats were rigorously forbidden to go near it. The word the edicts used for foreigners was the court's ordinary word for outsiders, and the British translated it as barbarian. The commander ordered soldiers spread along the coast and harbours to stop any contact, and he sent a colonel out to the ship to tell the foreigners "that the prohibitions of the Celestial Dynasty are severe in the extreme. Its fixed laws do not permit them to cast anchor, and it is absolutely necessary that they set sail on this very day." The Celestial Dynasty was how the Qing described itself, the dynasty that ruled under Heaven. Any local boat that came near was to be reported and its people seized for trial. And the order ended the way such orders did: "Tremble at this." These orders, the edict said, "have been respectfully obeyed from former times until now, as is on record." It was dated in the twelfth year of the Daoguang Emperor, in the third moon. The Qing counted years by the reign, and months by the moon. The third moon of that year fell in the spring of 1832. Then the same mandarins said that if Hugh wished to see the commander, he was ready to give him an audience, and they were very liberal with professions of good will. Hugh answered, rather indignantly, that their professions did not match their deeds. They had surrounded the ship with war boats and were treating them like enemies instead of friends, and he pointed to the placard on one of the war boats. The whole party loudly denied any such feeling, and seemed particularly annoyed at his using the word enemy. It's a small scene, but the whole voyage is in it. Officials with orders to drive the ship away, and no wish at all for a fight. Gützlaff did most of the persuading. He convinced official after official that this was a private ship, and those officials were so anxious to avoid trouble with foreigners that they often gave them supplies, even money, to go away. At Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian, some trade was even done with the mandarins' tacit consent, while the strictest edicts were issued against it. The edicts that reached Canton all said the ship had been driven off the coast by imperial cruisers. In fact the only means ever used to make her leave were entreaties, or giving her what she wanted, and once, an offer of money. The closest the Lord Amherst came to being attacked was the occasional blank shot. Think about it from the side of a local official. His orders said drive the ship away. He had no warship that could make her go, and if he admitted that, it was his career. So the ship was given what she asked for, she sailed on, and the report said she had been driven off. Everyone was satisfied, except the next official up the coast. From Fujian they went on north to Ningbo, and to Shanghai near the mouth of the Yangzi, then a busy county town whose river was crowded with junks. At Shanghai, when the local intendant's gates were shut against them, they simply pushed their way in to hand over their petition. After China they sailed on to Korea, and on the way home they called at the Ryukyu islands, the little kingdom that sent tribute to both China and Japan. And at every stop they looked hard at the forts and the war junks, and wrote down what they saw. Everywhere they went, the two men said, the ordinary people were friendly. It was only the officials of the Qing government who stood in their way. But the people wanted something the ship was not carrying. There was little demand up the coast for British textiles, and just about everyone, everywhere Hugh went, wanted opium. The voyage was met with disappointment all the way, because the Lord Amherst had neglected to bring any. So there's your answer to whether the coast was open. It was, in a way. Just not for calico. Hugh had been told to be back no later than the first of June. He did not get back until the fourth of September. In China, the voyage caused little stir beyond some agitated official reports. In Britain and America it was a bombshell. The Times told its readers that "as a nation, China is politically weak," and that its naval defences were "contemptible". Gützlaff put it more bluntly still. "We are entirely erroneous about China." For forty years the British had treated the Qing empire as a power to be handled carefully, from Macartney's day on. Now two men had sailed a single merchant ship along its whole coast, and nobody had stopped them. The Company's directors in London were appalled. In May 1833 they wrote a damning letter to the Committee at Canton, afraid the voyage would tarnish the Company's honour and undermine British prestige in Chinese eyes. They complained that Hugh's party had crept up the coast "in disguise under foreign names", in direct breach of the laws and customs of the empire. They were right about that. They were also, by then, about to lose the argument.

William Jardine
William Jardine. George Chinnery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While the Lord Amherst was somewhere off the coast of China, one of the private firms back at Canton changed its name. The firm of Magniac and Company was wound up on the thirtieth of June 1832, and from the first of July it was Jardine, Matheson and Company. William Jardine was a Lowland Scot who had trained in medicine at Edinburgh and gone east as a surgeon on the Company's ships. In 1817, after fifteen years in the Company's service, he quit to become a free merchant. A free merchant was a private trader working under the Company's licence in the country trade, the trade between India and China, which meant above all the opium trade. Three years into that new life, he met his lifelong partner, a fellow Scot of higher birth named James Matheson, who had likewise been drawn into the country trade by the profits in cotton and opium. From 1828 the two worked together, taking control of the firm called Magniac and Company. Private British traders had no right to stay in Canton without the Company's leave, so the free merchants found ways round it. Matheson, for years, was in Canton as the consul of Denmark. Jardine was the older and harder of the two, and Matheson the smoother. Between them they would build the greatest British trading house in Asia, and it is still in business today. And after the Lord Amherst came back, Jardine and Matheson sent two opium ships of their own up that same coast, the Sylph and the Jamesina. In 1833, for lack of any other way to travel, and giving the lie to every moral complaint he had ever made about the curse of opium in China, Karl Gützlaff went to work for William Jardine. The letter that invited him was frank. The firm's main hope for the voyage, Jardine wrote, was opium, and the more money it made, the more there would be to help his mission. He had already told British readers that the trade along the coast should go on, in the hope it would "tend ultimately to the introduction of the gospel, for which many doors are opened". The man who had tried to cure opium smokers at Tianjin now sailed as interpreter on the ships that sold it. In return, Jardine and Matheson agreed to help pay for his Christian publications. One of those coasting ships, the Sylph, got as far north as the coast of Manchuria. Another came back with 330,000 dollars in silver, the proceeds of her sales. The supercargo of the Jamesina looked at the results and drew the obvious lesson: "the only chance of pushing English manufactures on this Coast is by having them a small item in an Opium cargo". When six official boats tried to keep Chinese opium dealers away from one of the firm's ships, Gützlaff, dressed in his best, paid them a visit. He "demanded their instant departure and threatened them with destruction if they ever again anchored in our neighbourhood". The boats left. One of the private traders put a price on him: "I would give 1,000 dollars for three days of Gützlaff". Gützlaff handed out his Christian tracts from the same decks. Jardine, Matheson's great rival on the coast was the house of Dent, and the two firms would compete, and loathe each other, for years. And Jardine, Matheson and Company, born that July, would become the loudest voice among the free traders, first against the Company, and in the end for war.

Step back and look at what the year had shown. The court's orders said the coast was closed, and on paper it was. But the officials who were meant to close it would rather pay a foreign ship to leave than fight it, and some of them would trade with it on the quiet. The people on shore would buy, and what they wanted to buy was opium. And the men who wanted the coast open had now seen how thin its defences were, and they had a firm, and a missionary, ready to go back. Now let's turn the telescope around. In 1832, the same year the Lord Amherst went up the coast, a Chinese writer named Xiao Lingyu pulled together a treatise on the British, the best knowledge of them to be had in China at the time. He worked from archives, from interviews, and from what other scholars had written. Chinese readers had had a few accounts of the far West before, such as the Record of the Seas, dictated in 1820 by a blind former sailor who had travelled on foreign ships. This was something more careful and more complete. He explained that India was a British colony, which was not commonly understood in China then. That mattered more than it might sound. India was where the opium came from, and the Company that ran India was the same Company that bought China's tea. Some of what he told his readers about the British is charming. In England, he explained, women chose their own husbands and ran the household money, and husbands were not allowed concubines. From the king on down, he wrote, "there is not a single person who does not value women more than men." After all the fuss at Canton over whether one Englishwoman could live in a factory, that is a line to enjoy. The British used an alphabet instead of characters, and since they "all believe in Catholicism or the Jesus-teachings", they counted their years from the birth of Christ. Britain's territory was great, he wrote, but its fields were few. They farmed with horses, grew beans and wheat, and made it their national custom to seek profit overseas, which was why they were so good at building ships. They were tall, with blue green eyes and red or yellow hair. When two men met they took off their hats, and to show the highest respect they put a hand to the forehead. And with an eye on the quarrels over Macartney and Amherst, he explained that the British never knelt, under any circumstances. Even before their own king, they remained standing. If you've been with us since the start of this season, that is the whole kowtow fight in a sentence. He was awed by their guns. British gunners aimed their cannon with telescopes. "They never miss," he wrote. Some said China could easily copy Britain's ships and cannon. Xiao pointed out that under the Ming, China had imported French cannon for the frontier, and its officers and soldiers had never learned to work them properly. The Ming were the dynasty before the Qing, overthrown in 1644. Those old guns weighed less than a hundred pounds each. Britain's new brass cannon weighed thousands of pounds, and were far harder to handle. "If we don't have men who know how to use them," he wrote, "then I fear they could turn around and benefit the enemy." On opium, he took a line that might surprise you. Some said the English sold opium to corrupt China. Not so, he answered. The fashion for opium went back only to the early 1800s, and the English had been making textiles and trading them at Canton for a great many decades. Their woollens could be found everywhere; it was not as if they had sold only opium from the start. "And if people in China did not smoke opium," he wrote, "then the English would not be able to sell it." To him opium was a domestic problem, a matter for China's own government, and not a question of foreign relations at all. He also set out the long history of the trade, looking for lessons. He wrote about James Flint's imprisonment, about the rules for foreigners in the factories, and in detail about Macartney's mission, which in his words came to present "tribute", and how the Qianlong Emperor refused the ambassador's demands. He wrote about the British admiral who landed troops at Macau in 1808, and drew the moral that it was the closing of the trade, more than any army, that made the British merchants turn on him. Trade, in other words, was China's most powerful weapon. Looking back over that history from 1832, one thing seemed obvious. The Canton trade mattered so much to the British, for their money, that they would never do anything to risk losing it. And nothing in that history gave him any reason to think otherwise. Hold on to that. On the guns, Xiao was exactly right. On the British, he was reading the last forty years correctly, and the next ten wrong. Because the British who had to be kept happy were changing. The Company's charter, and with it its monopoly of the British trade with China, was due to run out in 1834, and in London, Parliament was about to decide whether to renew it. The men who mattered most in that trade were no longer the Company's. They were the free traders, with Jardine and Matheson at their head. Next time, we go to London, where the vote is coming, and where the one member of the House of Commons who actually speaks Chinese is about to try to warn everyone else what happens next.

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