Then and There Coming next Search

The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 14

The End of the Monopoly

The free traders win: Parliament ends the East India Company's monopoly on China and sends a Crown officer, Lord Napier, to take over, and George Staunton, now an MP, warns that the change will lead to war. The episode follows Staunton through the campaign and the vote, and Napier from his appointment to his arrival off Canton in July 1834, and asks what the free traders and the Crown expected to change at a Canton whose rulers still believed they set the terms. It leans on scholars and the British government, with a single Chinese voice, a Canton scholar's essay on opium.

Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify

London Plymouth

Beyond the map: Guangzhou

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

Transcript

Last time, a private ship called the Lord Amherst, on a secret mission for the Company's men at Canton, sailed all the way up the China coast and into Korea, and the officials who were ordered to drive her away often gave her supplies, even money, to leave. Back in Britain, The Times told its readers that China was politically weak and its naval defences "contemptible". The missionary who had talked the ship along the coast, Karl Gützlaff, went to work for William Jardine, as interpreter on the opium ships. And a Chinese writer, Xiao Lingyu, looking back over the history of British dealings, concluded that the Canton trade mattered so much to the British that they would never risk losing it. This time, in the last episode of the season, we find out what the British who mattered had decided to risk. It's a story mostly told in London, in committee rooms and on election platforms, far from the river. But everything decided there was going to land at Canton. We're going to London, because that is where the old system was taken apart. And we'll follow it through one man in particular. He first went to China as an eleven year old boy, with his father, as page on Lord Macartney's embassy. He learned Chinese on the voyage, and became the boy who spoke to the Qianlong Emperor in his own language. He grew up to be the Company's interpreter at Canton, the man who bought the entire Qing legal code and set about translating it, and by 1816 his country's leading expert on China, who went with Lord Amherst's embassy to Beijing. His name was George Staunton, and by 1830 he was Sir George, a baronet and a member of the House of Commons. He had helped found the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and he was the closest thing Britain had to a China scholar in public life. And in 1813, when Parliament renewed the Company's charter, it was largely his argument, that China was not India and had to be handled differently, that kept the China trade in the Company's hands. Twenty years on, that charter was running out, and this time the other side was ready. First, a word on what was at stake. The East India Company was a private company, chartered by the Crown in 1600, that had ended up ruling much of India with its own army. By law it alone could carry British trade with China, and what it carried home above all was tea. Tea was Britain's national drink by then, and the duty on it brought the government millions of pounds a year. Every twenty years or so the Company's charter came up for renewal, and Parliament had to decide what privileges to give it next time. Between February and July of 1830, free trade organisations across England and Scotland swamped the House of Commons with nearly two hundred petitions demanding that the Company's monopoly on the China trade be brought to an end. The British manufacturers, the cotton men above all, were sure that the monopoly was the main thing standing between them and the China market. Picture the mill towns of Lancashire. They could make cloth faster and cheaper than anyone on earth, and here was a country of hundreds of millions of people where only one company was allowed to sell it. That was how it looked from Manchester, at any rate. Whether the Chinese actually wanted the cloth was a question few of them asked. We heard last time what the Lord Amherst found up the coast. Little demand for British textiles, and everyone wanting opium. A writer in one of the great reviews put the case in a sentence in January 1831: "Its abolition will redound to the advantage of every man in England, the 'gentlemen' of the factory only excepted." Parliament set up a committee to investigate the Company's affairs, and in 1830 Sir George was appointed to it. He served there as something of a champion of the Company's interests. The hearings kept coming back to one point. The main threat to Britain's economic interests in China, witness after witness said, was not the Chinese government, nor even the Company as such. It was the United States. American firms, they charged, were cutting deep into Britain's share of the China market because they could buy and sell whatever they wanted, whenever they wished, while British hands were tied by the Company. The government made up its mind early. Charles Grant, the new president of the India Board, told the Company's directors that as far as His Majesty's Government was concerned, their China monopoly was done for. The India Board was the government department in London that oversaw the Company. The directors had good reason to go quietly. They were promised a dividend of ten and a half per cent to help buy their acquiescence. And they feared losing their government of India, which was a threat the prime minister, Charles Grey, dangled in front of them to keep them quiet about China. Yes, the tea is said to be named after him. So the Company would keep India, for now, and lose China. The question was what would take its place. And in all of this, notice whose voice is missing. The Qing government's.

Joshua Bates
Joshua Bates. BPL, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the strangest witnesses in the whole affair was an American. Joshua Bates was a Massachusetts man who had become a partner in Barings, one of the great banking houses of London. He testified in March 1830, and he turned out to be one of the most influential witnesses of all. If the Company's monopoly was lifted, he told the committee, the American share of the commerce at Canton would decline. The Americans did well at Canton because the British were held back. Take away the Company, he predicted, and private British firms would come to dominate the global tea trade, to the cost of the Americans. He knew what free trade at Canton could do for a man. The partners of the Perkins firm, he observed, had all gone home very wealthy. The Perkins house was one of the leading American firms at Canton, and like most of them it dealt in Turkish opium as well as tea. And the Americans had a great advantage in what they paid with. Between 1805 and 1834, fully a third of all the silver Mexico produced was carried to China by Americans. Bates himself would go on to run Barings, and to give Boston much of the money for its first great public library. The committee wanted to know whether the Chinese made trade difficult. Bates's answer was simple: "The trade has always gone on very well," he said, "and without any difficulty." The Chinese at Canton, he told them, seemed very fond of trade, and "there is no unwillingness to deal with foreigners." So here was a witness telling Parliament that the system worked, and that the people it worked worst for were British merchants who were not allowed to use it. Notice too that he was arguing against his own country's interest. That made him all the more believable. For the free traders, that was the whole argument. The problem at Canton was not China. It was the Company. But there was a second argument coming, and it came from Canton itself.

In December 1830, still nursing the insults of the past months, and angling as always for a way to damage the Company, William Jardine, James Matheson and forty five other private traders at Canton joined together to send a petition to the House of Commons. The names were headed by a Jardine and a Matheson, and pointedly did not include anyone from the rival firm of Dent. It took six months for those pleas for help to reach London. What the petition said about China was blunt. "Even violence has frequently received friendly treatment," the merchants wrote, "while obedience and conformity to its arbitrary laws have met only with the return of severity and oppression." They wanted a king's officer at Canton, with the backing of the Crown behind him. And the lawmakers who read the petition understood quite clearly that it was a veiled call for military force. They didn't like it. As one lawmaker put it, "There should on no account be even a threat of an appeal to arms, for the matter could easily be arranged by much better means." A Tory member, Charles Forbes, said he wished he could ask the men who sent it "whether they would rather be treated there according to the laws of that empire, or according to the laws of Great Britain?" To his mind the answer was simple. In China they could smuggle freely without punishment. Did they really want to trade that for clear regulations and strict policing, as in England? The House of Lords was even less sympathetic. In December 1831, when news arrived that the Company's men at Canton had asked India for warships, Grey observed that the factory at Canton had, it did appear, "displayed a great deal of improper conduct." Lord Ellenborough, who had recently run the India Board, pointed out how much revenue British India would lose if the Canton market were shut. The Company would be crippled, and the government would lose millions of pounds a year in taxes on its tea. Instead of sending warships, he suggested, the government should "issue orders, directing the British merchants to obey the laws of the country in which they resided." Even the Company's own directors wrote to Canton to "decidedly condemn the requisition you made to the Bengal government, for the aid of Ships of War." As they put it later, they had no more right than the subjects of any other nation to "dictate to the Chinese government" the terms on which alone China would carry on its trade with foreigners. And the First Lord of the Admiralty, James Graham, told the governor general of India that the traders at Canton "must not imagine that great national interests are to be sacrificed to their notions of self importance". The debate concluded that no ambassador, let alone any fleet, should be sent to China to relieve the merchants of their alleged distress. It was a terrible moment for the British at Canton to be making fools of themselves over national honour. While their committee was calling for gunboats to avenge its uprooted trees, the Company's charter was under heavy political attack at home. Jardine's people never forgot it. They held that it was Sir George, the Company's champion, who had sunk their petition. Remember that, because it will cost him.

Then British politics changed under everyone's feet. In the autumn of 1830 the old Tory government fell, and Grey's Whigs came in, pledged to reform Parliament itself. The Reform Act of 1832 swept away dozens of tiny boroughs whose seats had been in the gift of a patron, and gave the vote to much of the middle class of the new industrial towns. Sir George had sat for exactly that kind of seat for years. Now, in 1832, at the age of fifty one, he had to campaign in a democratic election for the first time. His home was in Hampshire, at his estate of Leigh Park, so that was where he stood. He was not a natural. He was shy, bookish and proud, a scholar more at home in his library than on a platform. He ran for the two seats of South Hampshire in December 1832, together with Palmerston. Palmerston was the Foreign Secretary, an old hand at politics, and as you will hear, not a man who would ever be shy about China. On the stump, Sir George said as little as possible about the East India Company and its charter. It didn't help. His opponents went after him hard. "I was perfectly astounded," he wrote later, "by the virulence of the invectives with which I was assailed." He and Palmerston won, by a narrow margin. Hold on to that pairing. The scholar who feared a war with China, and the Foreign Secretary who, a few years later, would send the fleet to fight one, sharing a ticket. So when the vote on the Company's future came, a member who could speak and read Chinese, and had been on both of Britain's embassies to Beijing, was in his seat.

In the spring of 1833, as the vote to end the Company's monopoly loomed, Sir George swallowed his anxieties and moved a series of China resolutions in the House of Commons. He did not try to save the monopoly. That fight was lost. What he wanted was a plan for the day after. For more than a century, the Company had been the one body at Canton that spoke for the British and answered for them. His proposal was that the Company's role as go between should be allowed to lapse only after a treaty had first been agreed with the Chinese authorities, letting a British government officer live at Canton. The order of things was the whole point. The Qing had never received a foreign official at Canton as an equal, and would not start because London announced one. Get the treaty first, then send the man. What frightened him was a free for all, with British traders who had never dealt with the Chinese suddenly turning up at Canton and getting themselves into trouble, and no organised body to represent them. Think of the cases this season has already shown us. An American sailor's earthen jar that struck a woman in a boat, and the Americans submitting to Chinese law. A fight on an island in which two Chinese were killed, and the Company's whole trade suspended. Now imagine cases like those with nobody at Canton to speak for the British. Unless some higher power, some public representative, were sent there to control both the Company's men and the free traders, he warned, there would be trouble. You've heard him say this sort of thing before. His years at Canton had taught him one thing above all. The Qing would not be hurried, and they would not be threatened into treating a foreigner as an equal. He had to wait for his chance. It came on the fourth of June, 1833. It was the first time that British relations with China had ever come before Parliament as a question in its own right. There were more than six hundred and fifty members of the House of Commons. When Sir George rose that afternoon, there were not even forty left in the chamber. The Commons needed forty members present to do business, and any member could ask for the House to be counted. His carefully prepared speech was cut off in the middle of a paragraph, and he never got to finish it. His resolutions were struck down at once, without a vote. Sit with that for a moment. A man who had spent his life learning how the Qing thought stood up to explain it to the people about to change everything, and they went home. That was it. Parliament's first real look at China as a question in its own right, and it ended for want of an audience. Charles Grant, for the government, made the case that carried the day. The right to carry on the China trade, he said, "ought not to be confined to one body of men." As for the Company's supercargoes at Canton, their position, he said, "was ambiguous and embarrassing, and occasionally, very invidious." The bill passed that summer and received the royal assent in August 1833. From April 1834, any British ship could trade with China. The same act ended the Company's trading altogether. From then on it would only govern India, on the Crown's behalf. So the Company's men at Canton were not just losing their monopoly. They were losing their jobs.

William Napier, 9th Lord Napier
William Napier, 9th Lord Napier. "courtesy of Lord Napier and Ettrick", Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

So who would speak for the British at Canton now? The government's answer was a new post, a chief superintendent of trade, who would take over from the Company's Select Committee in representing the British subjects at Canton. He would not be alone. There would be a committee of three superintendents, two of them former Company men still at Canton. One of them was John Francis Davis, a former president of the Select Committee. Davis was a scholar of Chinese in his own right, and a translator of Chinese plays and novels. Three Orders in Council were issued to regulate the trade that was coming. An Order in Council is a law made by the Crown on the advice of its ministers, without a vote in Parliament. One of them even provided for a British court at Canton, to try British subjects for crimes. Whether the Qing would put up with a foreign court in one of their own cities was, apparently, a question for later. And there was one large hole in the design. The new superintendent would have no compulsive authority over the free traders, which meant he would have no power to withhold their trade from the Chinese. Think about what that means. The one real weapon the Company ever had at Canton was the threat to stop its ships. The Crown's man would not have it. Under the chief there would be a master attendant, to supervise the British ships anchored in the inner waters near Canton. The job went to a naval officer named Charles Elliot. Elliot had been a captain in the navy, and had lately served in the West Indies as the official protector of slaves in British Guiana. He was a cousin of the Earl of Minto, well connected and ambitious, and the master attendant's post was a minor one. It would not stay that way. Remember his name too. And the Crown's man would need Chinese. The post of Chinese secretary and interpreter went to the one Briton who had spent his whole adult life in the language, the old missionary Robert Morrison. He was past fifty by then, worn out, and ill.

Jardine feared the post would go to Sir George, the man the Commons had just cut off, and still the most qualified man in Britain to fill it. The superintendency went in the end not to Sir George, but to one William Napier, a naval captain with no experience at all of trade or diplomacy. He was Lord Napier, a Scottish peer, who had gone to sea as a boy, served as a midshipman at Trafalgar, and later retired to the Scottish borders, where he wrote a treatise on sheep farming. Grey dragged out the appointment for several months, and then gave in to pressure from the king. The new king, William the Fourth, had served in the navy himself as a young man. Napier was forty seven, and nothing in his life so far had anything to do with China. A Royal Commission was issued on the tenth of December 1833, appointing Lord Napier chief superintendent. The salary was an attractive, ambassador level six thousand pounds a year. Lord Auckland, who had turned the post down, called Canton "perhaps the least pleasant residence for a European on the face of the earth". Napier did not see it that way. "The Empire of China is my own," he wrote triumphantly in his diary. It is hard to think of a sentence that would have alarmed Sir George more. Jardine, for his part, had already shown what he wanted. When a report reached him that Sir George had got the post, he wrote to Matheson, "We consider this very so-so news, and would have preferred someone who had never served the Company in China". Then came the instructions, and they pulled in two directions at once. Grey's were gentle. "Nothing must be done to shock their prejudices or to excite their fears." Persuasion and conciliation, Grey wrote, "should be the means employed", rather than "anything approaching to the tone of hostile and menacing language." Palmerston, Grey's Foreign Secretary, told Napier not to negotiate with the officials at Canton at all. If anything new came up, he was to write home and wait. In other words, go to Canton, represent the Crown, and do nothing that might start anything. Any such further instructions would take about a year to reach him. That is worth pausing on. Whatever happened at Canton, Napier would have to face it on his own. Napier asked for secret powers to negotiate as a plenipotentiary, a full envoy of the Crown. Palmerston flatly refused. So he would be sent to deal with a provincial government that did not recognise him, with no authority over his own merchants, no power to negotiate, and a year's wait for any answer. What he did have was a navy officer's confidence. He imagined how easily "a gun brig would raise a revolution and cause them to open their ports to the trading world." A gun brig was one of the navy's smallest warships, a two masted vessel with a handful of cannon.

The hong merchants had seen it coming. Rumours had reached them that the Company would come to an end in the thirteenth year of Daoguang, and they spoke of it with alarm. They wrote to the governor general. The other nations' ships and merchants, they explained, each worked for their own benefit, but the British trade had always been under the sole control of one Company, run by a Select Committee with a Chief at its head. Every British subject, even those from India, was under the control of that Chief, and because everything came back to his single responsibility, there had been a long time of mutual quiet. Now they had heard that the trade would go on in smaller ships, with merchants free of all control. "If they trade individually," they wrote, "affairs will not be subject to one control, and if not under one control, responsibility will be nowhere." In any one year, they reminded him, fifty to sixty ships came from England and India, "manned by several thousand sailors of a fierce and intractable disposition". If anything led to the trade being cut off, they asked, where would be the advantage to anyone? So they begged the governor general to have the British Chief write home to his king, asking that when the Company was dissolved, a Chief should still be sent to Canton to manage the British merchants and ships, so that someone would answer for them. Notice what the hong merchants were asking for. A British chief, sent by the king. They were asking for something very like what the free traders had asked for, for the opposite reason. The governor general replied on the sixteenth of January that the report of the Company's end appeared to be only a rumour. If it turned out to be true, he told the merchants, they were to instruct the English Chief in the way they had recommended. On the twenty fourth, the merchants came to the factory in a body with a sealed letter, and the Committee at first declined to send it on. They wrote that they had considered the matter again, and a fourth time, and only wished that once the Company's three years were up, it would be set up again as before. The Company's men knew why. As they recorded, the merchants could have done very well out of a crowd of separate traders, by fixing prices among themselves. What scared them was the riots and fights they would be held responsible for, with no means of preventing them. Remember how this season has gone for the hong merchants. Every time a foreigner broke a rule, it was a hong merchant who was fined, or chained, or made to kneel. Now they were being told there would be thousands of foreigners answering to nobody. In the end, the rumours turned out true. Jardine's early intelligence was that the Company would not even be allowed to keep trading in China at all. In the autumn of 1833 word reached Canton that the monopoly would not be renewed when the charter expired the following spring. The free merchants, in this last year of monopoly, could see the dawn breaking ahead of them, and were impatient of the few months they still had to wait. The senior hong merchant, Wu Bingjian, saw it more plainly than anyone. The foreign traders called him Howqua, and so will we. "I fear we shall be overwhelmed with British goods of every description on the opening of the trades," he warned. The old missionary was worried too, less for trade than for China itself. "How few," he wrote sadly to Sir George, "consider the welfare of China in all their speculations about free trade". The free traders were already moving. The Sarah, of four hundred and eighty eight tons, the first free ship from Canton to London, was sent off by Jardine, Matheson and Company on the twenty second of March, 1834. A month later, on the twenty second of April 1834, the Company's China monopoly came to an end. After more than two centuries, a British merchant no longer needed anyone's permission to send a ship to China. All he needed was the ship.

The port of Canton, in an oil painting of about 1830
The port of Canton, in an oil painting of about 1830. Sunqua, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

At Canton, the Company's men began to wind up their trade for good. The Company had been trading at Canton, on and off, since the late 1600s. The East India Company stopped sending ships to China in 1834, and so did its Danish counterpart, the last two companies in the trade. All the foreigners at Canton were now private traders, and they were also very well informed about the history of the trade. They knew every fee, every rule and every precedent going back decades, and they had no intention of putting up with them. For decades the private traders had been held in check by the companies. Only when those conflicts of interest ended in 1834 did they become the dominant force. With the companies gone, the private traders began to unite and speak with a common voice. Had the Qing side eased the fees and rules that weighed on the private traders sooner, it might have calmed them, and perhaps turned events in a different direction. It hadn't, and now they were in charge of the British side of the trade. And the first thing they wanted was to end the fees that discriminated against them and to open up the trade. That was a very different kind of British presence at Canton. For the hong merchants, the loss was simple. The system had been built around one great customer that came every season, on contracts made a year ahead, and that customer was leaving. The Company had been slow and stubborn, but it paid its debts, it planned years ahead, and when something went wrong there was always a Chief to talk to. The hong merchants had spent decades learning how to deal with that one Chief. In its place came dozens of small firms, each answering to nobody, many of them with opium to sell, and the loudest of them wanted the hong merchants gone as well. And the opium was flooding in. Imports rose from 16,225 chests in the season of 1831 to 1832 to 28,307 chests in 1836 to 1837.

Inside Canton, Chinese scholars were watching the same flood, and some of them were thinking hard about it. This is the season's last Chinese voice, and it's worth hearing properly, because the argument he made was about to divide the whole court. By now Lu Kun held the high post at Canton. He had put down several internal rebellions and earned that post through skill and achievement, and far from being a mere instrument of the court, he was open to new ideas. The argument that caught his attention was an essay by a scholar named Wu Lanxiu, who directed one of the city's Confucian academies. It was called The Alleviation of Suffering. A Confucian academy was a college where scholars taught the classics and the men preparing for the civil service examinations. To see why silver mattered so much, remember what we heard a few episodes back. In normal times a tael of silver was worth a thousand copper coins. By 1830 it took 1,365. Ordinary people were paid in copper but owed their taxes in silver, so as silver grew dearer, the peasants of China saw their real tax burden rise by nearly forty per cent. Wu Lanxiu began with trade. To shut down foreign trade to stop the flow of silver, he argued, would cause China far worse problems than it solved. "The countries of the Western seas have been sending their ships here to trade for over a thousand years," he wrote, and westerners had lived in Macau for more than two centuries. "The only ones that sell opium are the English." "So should we cut off trade just with Great Britain? Or should we cut off trade with all of the Western countries?" Shutting out Britain alone would not work. And so many Chinese lived by the legal trade, directly or not, that closing it would be a disaster. "Tens of thousands of our people who live along the southeastern coast will suddenly lose their jobs," he wrote. With no living, at best they would band together as criminals and pirates, and at worst they could start a rebellion. "This is how major trouble in the southeast could begin." If you remember the pirate fleets of the south coast earlier this season, you'll know he wasn't exaggerating. Then he turned to the ban itself. "It's not as if the laws are not already strict, or the punishments not severe," he wrote, "yet the bad practices continue as before." Why? Because corrupt government staff used the laws to enrich themselves. "The stricter the laws, the larger the bribes." And then he said the thing nobody at court wanted to hear. "To an individual it may seem like opium is a major problem while silver is a small one," he wrote. "But from the perspective of the empire as a whole, it is opium that is minor. Silver is the major problem." His answer was to bring the trade into the open. "If you look at the old regulations, opium was taxed as a medicine," he wrote. "Why not order the foreign traders to pay this tax as before?" Then the foreigners could exchange their opium directly with the hong merchants for tea. If the opium were bought openly at Canton, the merchants would pay for it in foreign dollars and goods, not in Chinese silver, and in time the flow of silver would turn around. The economy of the southeast, as he saw it, depended on the Western trade far more than critics nearer the capital imagined. "In ten years," he promised, "the economy will recover." In other words, legalise it, tax it, and barter it for tea. It was a startling idea from a Confucian scholar, and a practical one. It treated opium not as a moral evil to be stamped out, but as a trade to be managed. Within two years, a version of that argument would reach the Daoguang Emperor himself, and the court would have to decide, at last, what it was going to do about opium. Hold on to Wu Lanxiu's essay. We'll hear its echo in Beijing.

While Canton argued, Lord Napier was at sea. He sailed from Plymouth on the seventh of February 1834 on the twenty eight gun Andromache, with his wife, Eliza, and two of their daughters. The route ran south down the Atlantic, round the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean, and in the age of sail it took months. He spent much of the five months at sea schooling himself on the situation at Canton. And somewhere past Madeira, he wrote himself a reminder: "must use force, not menace it". Set that next to Grey's instructions, persuasion and conciliation, and you can see the problem. The man and his orders were heading for China pointing in opposite directions. In his own mind he was nothing less than the successor of Macartney and Amherst. Amherst's embassy, he decided, had been too cumbrous to succeed, with too many attendants and too many gifts. He read through the history of the trade and drew his own lesson. "Every act of Violence on our part," he jotted in his notebook, "has been productive of instant redress and other beneficial results". He read Hugh Lindsay's report of the Lord Amherst's voyage, and asked himself why the British should not "use all means in our power to oblige and coerce that intrusive government to restore the old order of affairs". The intrusive government was the Qing itself. Its emperors were Manchu, from beyond the Great Wall, who had conquered China in the 1640s. Napier's plan, in his notebook, was to "expel the Intruder beyond the Wall and restore the Chinese dynasty on our own terms." He thought the forts at the Bogue, the narrow entrance to the river below Canton, could be taken, and that a British force could "destroy every battery and gunboat along the coast". As for the cautious China expert back in the Commons: "Sir George may be deeply versed in Chinese literature, but in politics he is a Driveller." So the man who had been cut off in the Commons had now been passed over too, and the man who got the post thought him a fool. So that is the man now sailing toward Macau. The old missionary would be waiting there to serve as his interpreter. His orders told him to announce himself by letter, directly to the governor general at Canton, as one officer of a sovereign to another. And the rules said that any petition from a foreigner went through the senior hong merchant, and that only if the hong merchants refused to pass it on could a foreigner take it to the city gate himself. So what did everyone expect would change? Jardine had wanted a superintendent with no sympathy for the Company and its old ways, and in Napier he had got one. The government in London wanted him above all to keep the peace. Its instructions said to conciliate, not threaten, and to write home and wait. And the Qing expected what they had always had: a head man of the British, a taipan in their word, who answered for his people through the hong merchants and did as he was told. The hong merchants had asked for exactly that. What was coming was not that. On one side, a Crown officer under orders to deal with Canton's rulers as equals, with no power to bargain and a head full of gun brigs. On the other, Lu Kun, the capable official in the high post at Canton, who would soon be locked in a head to head with Napier, even as he was being won round to new ideas about opium. And behind Lu Kun, a court that was sure, still, that it set the terms. At the start of this season, Lord Macartney refused to kneel, and the empire simply sent him home. The man who came after him, two generations later, was not planning to go home. Look back over the whole season for a moment. An emperor who told a king he needed nothing from Britain. A boy who learned Chinese on the voyage out and spent his life trying to explain one side to the other. Hong merchants who answered for every foreigner, and paid for every foreign quarrel. An embassy that would not kneel, and another that never got the chance. And under all of it, year after year, the chests of opium and the silver going the other way. That was the old system, and it was about to be tested as never before. [handoff] How the Qing empire that turned Macartney away became the China of today is the story of this whole series. The next chapter begins where we leave Lord Napier, at sea and sailing for Canton, with orders and instincts that point in opposite directions. That's next season. Thank you for listening.

Sources