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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 4

The Retired Emperor

The Qianlong Emperor gives up the throne to his son so as not to reign longer than his grandfather, but goes on ruling, and his son, the Jiaqing Emperor, waits three years in his shadow while the White Lotus rebellion spreads through the hills and the favourite Heshen grows rich. The episode follows Jiaqing from his accession to the old man's death and his first act of real power, the fall of Heshen, and asks what kind of empire he inherited. It is the season's richest episode in Chinese voices, with the court's own records and the rebels and critics heard alongside the Company's.

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Transcript

Last time, we went inside the system the British were trying to change. Since 1757 every Western ship had to trade at Canton and nowhere else, through a customs chief called the Hoppo and a handful of licensed Chinese firms, the hong merchants. We watched James Flint, the Englishman who sailed north to complain to the emperor, win his case against a corrupt Hoppo, and then spend three years in a jail at the edge of Macau for going around the system. And we watched what the system did to the hong merchants who stood guarantee for the foreigners. Shy Kinqua, once the most considerable merchant in Canton of the younger generation, was brought before his British creditors in chains, and ended in prison, beaten until he lost his teeth. This time we leave the port and go to the top, to Beijing, where an old emperor is about to give up his throne without giving up his power, and where his son will spend years waiting in his shadow. Alongside the sources we have leaned on all season, this episode also draws on the work of Julia Lovell. But we begin back in Canton, because the British have not given up. On the twenty eighth of December 1795, the supercargoes opened the packets that had just come out from England, and among them found five small boxes. Inside were letters: from King George the Third to the emperor, and from Secretary Dundas, from Lord Macartney, from Sir George Staunton and from the chairman of the East India Company to the officials at Canton. The king was writing again. The ship had brought presents for the emperor too, but of the ten cases from the king, only seven could be found for some days, and that made for a very serious complication. There was a bigger problem. A recent order from Beijing told the officials on the coast to find out the substance and object of every letter brought by a European power before letting it go on to the capital. And if a letter asked for any new privilege, or any change to the established customs and laws of the empire, they were to refuse it. The supercargoes were not surprised. Nobody who knew these people, they wrote, could expect an official to forward a letter that might incriminate him, when it was in his power to suppress it. Leading the British side was Browne, the Company's President at Canton, whom we met last time at Macau, refusing the pleas of a ruined man in chains. It was a grim season for the hong merchants. Before it was out, Munqua, one of the senior merchants who had walked Shy Kinqua into that room at Macau, found his affairs so tangled that he took his own life. He owed the Company two hundred and sixty seven thousand taels when he died. His brother took charge of the firm, the other merchants rallied round, and by the end of the season the debt was down to a hundred and forty one thousand. The governor of Guangdong, the hong merchants reported, seemed well disposed to receive the British, but he wanted to know what was in the king's letter before he took charge of it. Each province had a governor of its own, below the governor general who oversaw Guangdong and Guangxi together. The governor of Guangdong had his offices and his mansion inside Canton. Browne would not play along. The Committee told the merchants that they had not been given a translation of the letter, and that they "must absolutely refuse to break the seals in order to ascertain its purport". It was, they felt sure, purely a letter of compliments. The governor offered to have the letter collected by the magistrate of Nanhai county. The Committee refused to hand it to anyone but the governor himself. Then the prefect of Canton came in person to collect it, and got the same answer. A prefect governed a prefecture, the level between a province and its counties; the prefect of Canton had the city and the counties around it in his charge. The merchants were sure the governor would give way in the end, but they begged the British to find the missing presents quickly. The governor wanted the letter sent in time to reach the emperor before the new year. For at the new year, it was now said for certain in Canton, the emperor meant to resign the government to his fifteenth son. The missing presents turned up on the eighth of January 1796. That evening Browne, carrying the king's letter, and a colleague carrying the others, were taken in sedan chairs to the governor's palace. The hong merchants met them there, paid their compliments, and went off to attend the governor. A quarter of an hour later they came back to lead the British into the great hall of audience. As the British entered by a side door, a salute of three guns was fired. The officials rose and came forward to a table covered in yellow cloth, set halfway between the two parties, and there they stayed standing the whole time. Yellow was the emperor's colour, and anything that came from the throne, or went to it, travelled under yellow. Browne took off the silk cover and presented the letter to the governor, who opened it at once. With very little ceremony he broke the seal of the Chinese translation, which was eagerly read by everyone in the room whose rank allowed them to see it. Then he took up the English original and signed to Browne to open it. Browne declined. So the governor handed it to one of the hong merchants, who could hardly refuse, and who opened it at once. But without an interpreter nobody could make anything of it, and he laid it down again. Browne seized the pause to ask if he might also deliver the letters for the governor general. The governor declined: those letters were for another official, and he could on no account receive them. Browne turned to the Hoppo with the chairman's letter. The Hoppo declined it too. Both officials had plainly made up their minds beforehand, and it was useless to argue. The governor solved the problem by telling the gentlemen they might withdraw, gave them a slight inclination of the head, and walked back to the far end of the room. The king's letter was found satisfactory in tone and matter, and on the tenth of January it was sent on to Beijing. So the letter went north, to an emperor who was just about to stop being emperor. Or so it seemed.

On the ninth of February 1796, the first day of the lunar new year, the Qianlong Emperor gave up his throne. He had planned it for a very long time. Soon after he came to the throne in 1735, he issued an edict saying he hoped to rule as long as his grandfather Kangxi had, sixty one years, but no longer. Kangxi was the second Qing emperor to rule China, and the most admired, a byword for a wise and vigorous ruler. To outreign him would have been, in the eyes of the court, a failure of filial modesty. So, keeping his word, at least on the surface, at the close of his sixtieth year as emperor Qianlong staged an elaborate ceremony of abdication, and his son was made the new ruler of the empire. The son was his fifteenth, who would reign as the Jiaqing Emperor. Like Qianlong, Jiaqing was not a personal name but the title of a reign. It means something like excellent celebration. Jiaqing had learned in 1795 that his father had chosen him as heir. He was a broad, heavyset man, verging on forty, with a talent for archery, a conscientious and eager heir. The abdication, however, was meaningless. Outside the capital, every calendar in the empire now counted the new year as the first year of Jiaqing. But inside the capital, the only place where the emperor really mattered, it was the sixty first year of Qianlong. Two calendars were kept, and two sets of imperial annals. In one Jiaqing was emperor. In the other the old man reigned on, as the supreme retired emperor. Qianlong went on ruling in reality, while his son ruled in name only. And Jiaqing could do nothing about it. For three years he was a ceremonial figure, openly defied by his father's ministers and treated like a puppet. "When the retired emperor is happy, he is happy," wrote one observer at court. "When the retired emperor laughs, he laughs." Keep that image of the son in mind, smiling when his father smiled, because the man who was really running things in those years was neither of them. The old emperor was not what he had been. The year after Macartney's visit, a Korean envoy reported that Qianlong was behaving erratically; once he ordered breakfast just after he had finished his breakfast. In 1797 another Korean envoy reported that by evening the emperor could no longer remember what had happened that morning, or what he had done the day before. Korea sent regular embassies to Beijing as one of the Qing's most loyal tributary kingdoms, and its envoys wrote careful reports home on everything they saw at court. The man who stood between that failing mind and the rest of the empire was Heshen. We will come back to him, at length.

Meanwhile, the king's letter had reached Beijing, and the court answered it in the old emperor's name. The reply was dated the twenty ninth day of the twelfth month of the sixtieth year of Qianlong, the last day but one of his reign before he abdicated. On the thirteenth of March 1796 Browne went into the city again, and was received at the palace of the governor general, where all the principal officials were assembled. The presents for the emperor were set out on the right hand of the officials, near the entrance, and the presents from the emperor to King George on both sides of the room, nearer the officials. Browne announced, as agreed beforehand, that he had come with presents from the King of England to the emperor, and asked the officials to take charge of them. They came forward and made a show of examining them. Then the governor said that the emperor had received the king's letter and was very much pleased with its contents, and as proof of his good will had sent a letter and presents in return. The emperor's letter was brought out in a wrapper of yellow silk. And Browne, as agreed upon, knelt down and received it with both hands. He rose and passed it to the head linguist, who took it in the same manner and carried it out to his sedan chair. The presents for King George were a hundred and forty pieces of silk. Now look at what the governor had done with the ceremony. He did not kneel to receive the king's letter, but he required Browne to kneel to receive the emperor's. Nor did he insist that Browne stand while he sat. His solution was to stay on his feet himself, through both audiences. He gave way on ceremony as little as he possibly could, and never let the traders forget how far beneath a Chinese official they stood. The kneeling question had not gone away. It had only moved from the emperor's court to a governor's hall, where a British merchant had no bargaining power at all. And the voice that spoke through that yellow silk was still the old emperor's, weeks after he had supposedly stepped down. Soon afterwards Browne sailed for England on one of the last ships of the season, and his part in this story ends. The old emperor's attention, in any case, was elsewhere. Because six days after he gave up his throne, a rebellion had broken out in the hills of central China.

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

To understand it, we have to go to a place far from Canton and far from Beijing: the Han River Highlands, a mountainous country where the provinces of Hubei, Sichuan and Shaanxi pressed against each other, and where the government's grip had always been weak. It was thick with old forest and steep hills, and it had been among the last parts of central China opened to settlement. Bandit gangs lived comfortably there, and criminals could find sanctuary. In Qianlong's long reign China's population had boomed, and poor settlers poured into these hills from the crowded south and east to clear the slopes, burn charcoal and work as hired hands. By the time of this story the population had grown many times over, there was more pressure on the land than it could bear, and quarrels over water were settled, more often than not, with violence. Into this country came a rumour. In the spring of 1794, word went through the mountain counties that a True Master had appeared in Shanxi province. He was marked, it was said, with the character for the sun on his left hand and the character for the moon on his right. Together they made the character Ming, the name of the dynasty the Qing had overthrown. In the Master's home village, the story went, a great boulder had split open to reveal a hidden scripture. It read, in part: "A black wind will blow for a day and a night." White bones would be piled into mountains, it said, and blood would flow into an ocean. The only escape was to memorise the scripture, chant it, and start gathering guns, swords and powder for the Master's rising, set for the spring of 1796. The believers belonged to the White Lotus. White Lotus sects had been around in rural China for hundreds of years, a loose collection of teachers mixing Buddhism and Daoism. Most of the time they were harmless, centred on faith healing and protection from misfortune. But theirs was also a religion of the end of days. Its followers believed the Buddha would return as Maitreya, to destroy a world of corruption and suffering and build a new paradise for the faithful. The government knew that undercurrent well. White Lotus sects had sparked uprisings all the way back through the Ming. So the crackdown came early. In an edict in September 1794, Qianlong ordered every captured sectarian punished according to his guilt. Spiritual leaders were to be executed by being cut into pieces. Those who spread the teachings were to be beheaded. Mere followers were to be arrested and shipped to Manchuria as slaves. Manchuria was the homeland of the Manchu people in the far northeast, beyond the Great Wall, a cold frontier the dynasty used as a place of exile. There were not enough troops for house to house searches, so local thugs were hired to do them. They demanded bribes from the guilty and the innocent alike, threatening to have anyone who would not pay arrested as a sectarian. Those who paid, or proved themselves, were given placards for their doors marking them as good people. Everyone else stayed under suspicion. The officials oppress, and the people rebel. That would become the slogan of the whole rising, painted on banners, written into proclamations, repeated in the confessions of captured rebels whatever their background. When the explosion came, in the spring of 1796, it came faster than anyone could have imagined. News of the first rising spread by word of mouth, and other uprisings began exploding all through the hill counties of the Han River Highlands. There were far too few soldiers to meet them. Fighting with the Miao people in Hunan the year before had pulled most of the regular troops south, leaving whole counties with fewer than a hundred government soldiers each. The Miao were a non Chinese people of the southern hills, and the settlers' land grabs had driven them to revolt. In one county seat, a few dozen soldiers faced a rebel army massing outside the walls. The official in charge had the townspeople carve clubs from wood and cut bamboo into makeshift gun barrels, and set women and children to rolling stones against the wall and making firebombs. Qianlong saw religious risings as local trouble for local forces. He refused requests to send in the elite Manchu troops that had won the dynasty's wars in Inner Asia. Instead he gave the provinces money, which he could afford. Coming into the war, the Qing treasuries held a surplus of more than seventy million taels of silver. So the provinces raised militias, and the militias were a disaster. One witness watched a gentleman's private militia ride into a town, not to defend it but to loot what the refugees had left behind. He wrote that "if the White Lotus rebels are like an ordinary comb, the private militia are the fine-toothed one". The regular troops were not much better. The governor general of Sichuan reported that they faked victories, murdering refugees and dressing up the bodies as rebels. In truth, he said, the two sides scarcely met: "Where the rebels are, there are no government forces; and where the government forces are, there are no rebels." The government's soldiers were so savage that the peasants took to calling them the Red Lotus. And the war, in practice, was run by Heshen. As the old emperor read the reports night and day, barely sleeping or eating, Heshen controlled what reached him. He sent Qianlong invented reports of victories, and kept back the news of setbacks and defeats. For the first three years of the war, Heshen effectively controlled the central government's spending on it. Officers padded their rosters with the names of militiamen who did not exist, and pocketed their pay. A loyal scholar described the officials of Hubei before the war: "At first they nibbled away like worms, gradually taking more and more until they were gulping like whales." Their thefts, he wrote, began in hundreds of taels and ended in millions. Even Canton, a long way south of the fighting, felt the war. In April 1798 the Company heard that the emperor had ordered the Hoppo to raise six hundred thousand taels of duties, with the utmost speed, for the armies in the provinces. The hong merchants were alarmed. They had not expected to pay until July or August, and now the Hoppo demanded a hundred thousand taels from them within a month. The silver that came in for tea was going out to pay for a war in the hills. This war would grind on for years. By the time it was finally over, China had spent as much as two hundred million taels to suppress it. But numbers like that hide the people inside them. So let me tell you about one of them.

His name was Zhang Zhengmo, and he was a peasant in a remote mountain county of western Hubei. In the spring of 1794 he was thirty two years old, and he heard the rumour of the True Master from a travelling sect leader named Bai, who became his teacher. Zhang believed. He gave what little money he could to his teacher, began hoarding weapons, and recruited disciples of his own, the same way he had been recruited, with the story of the Master's coming. When the searches came near, Zhang left his home before the gangs could reach him, and went back to his native county nearby, where he knew the ground and could hide. He kept recruiting. By the late winter of 1796, by his own estimate, he had converted more than a thousand men and women. The general rising was set for the spring. But on the fifteenth of February, still two months early, Zhang learned that the local authorities were mounting a new crackdown that was likely to reach him. Fearing arrest, he struck first. He called his followers together and told them the time had come. In just a few days more than ten thousand White Lotus believers had gathered under his leadership, carrying swords, guns and powder on their backs. They plundered villages for food and pressed the villagers into their ranks. It troubled them very little: they had been taught that unbelievers would be destroyed when the Buddha returned anyway. Soon they numbered upward of twenty thousand. They barricaded the roads and took to the hills. Zhang led them deep into the mountains, to a pass he knew they could hold, and they built a camp of thousands of shacks of grass and wood, under white banners, wearing white headbands to mark themselves as rebels. They had swords and knives, three hundred matchlock guns, six cannon carved from chestnut wood and hundreds of poisoned crossbow arrows. They laid makeshift land mines on the mountain paths and built stone watchtowers stocked with logs and boulders to roll down on attackers. But they were poorly led. Zhang feared that if he took them down from the hills, the government's soldiers would slaughter them in the valleys below, so they stayed where they were as the months went by. Winter gave way to spring, and spring to summer, and in the heavy heat of June a plague killed two or three thousand people inside the camp. By July Zhang knew from his scouts that a ring of government troops was closing in. He burned the registers of his followers' names, hoping some of them could get away without leaving a record behind. And he knew something else: he was no real religious teacher. He had never laid eyes on the True Master, though his followers all believed he had. So, to give them what hope he could, he lied. He showed them an old sword he happened to own, and told them the True Master had given it to him with his own hands. He had expected White Lotus believers from miles around to join him. After the first days, they had stopped coming. He guessed they must have been caught and killed. Maitreya had not come. The world had not ended. Zhang held out for two more months. When the government troops finally broke into his camp in September, he led his followers in kneeling before them in surrender. Before he was executed, an interrogator demanded to know why. "You are all peasants," he said. "You receive the blessings of the emperor. He relieves you of taxes and tribute grain." They had human hearts, the interrogator went on, and they should feel gratitude and obey the laws. So why had they rebelled? "In the end, what was it you wanted?" Facing death, Zhang did not argue. "We have indeed received blessings from the emperor," he answered. "We were peasants, and we were grateful." But he had not joined the White Lotus out of anger, he said. "It was only because I wanted to encourage people to do good deeds and to avoid misfortune." Then the arrests intensified, and he saw that every believer who was caught was charged with heavy crimes. "So I became afraid." That was the heart of his confession, and it would be repeated by many others like him. The crackdown on the sect had made the rebellion; the only reason he rose against the government, he said, was that he was afraid of it. And by the time they took him, Zhang no longer mattered. His home province of Hubei was in flames, and the rising had spread across the borders into Sichuan and Shaanxi.

In Beijing, the old emperor could not understand it. After all the reports of victories Heshen had sent him, Qianlong was maddened and confused that the White Lotus leaders would not submit. "I left my rule," he wrote sadly in a poem in 1798, "but still I work diligently at government." "And now I see that in these past two years it has only gotten worse." By the time his long life came to an end, the war had already cost nearly a hundred million taels of silver, as much as the government took in over two whole years. The great surplus he had piled up before the war was gone, and there was no end in sight. It was the most expensive campaign the dynasty had ever fought, and its failure broke the old emperor's spirit. On the seventh of February 1799, three years after his abdication, the aged retired emperor Qianlong died. He was eighty seven years old. His reign was the longest in China's history, and one of the most successful. Counting his years as retired emperor, he had held power for more than sixty three years. But he died helpless, with the treasuries emptied, and the moral foundations of the empire shifting like sand beneath him. When George Staunton, the boy from Macartney's embassy and now a young man working for the Company, heard the news, he was pleased. He hoped Jiaqing might be kinder to foreigners than his father, and might welcome another embassy. In Beijing, at long last, Jiaqing ruled in his own name. And he did not wait.

Only a day after the supreme retired emperor's death, one of Jiaqing's first major acts was to order the arrest of Heshen. To see why, we need to know who Heshen was. Heshen first caught the Qianlong Emperor's eye in 1775, when he was a young imperial bodyguard stationed at the gate to the inner court of the Forbidden City. He was startlingly good looking. A Korean who saw him in 1780 described him as "elegant in looks, sprucely handsome in a dandified way that suggested a lack of virtue". Within a year, the emperor was fully smitten, and gave him a stunning run of promotions, including a seat on the Grand Council. The Grand Council was the emperor's small inner circle of advisers, which worked outside the regular government's supervision and could, in some cases, act in his name. In 1780, at the age of thirty, Heshen was made president of the Board of Revenue, with oversight of the imperial treasury. That same year his son married Qianlong's favourite daughter. The boards were the six ministries of the central government: civil appointments, revenue, rites, war, punishments and works. In 1784 he took over the Board of Civil Affairs as well, which controlled every appointment in the civil service. Heshen was a Manchu, and over the years he collected posts on four of the six boards. By the 1790s, even an outsider like Sir George Staunton, who had travelled with Macartney, could see that Heshen "might be said to possess, in fact, under the emperor, the whole power of the empire". He was also spectacularly corrupt. He treated great swathes of the bureaucracy as his own patronage network, and expected the men he appointed to pay him handsomely for it. Take the Yellow River. The government spent roughly six million taels of silver a year to stop it flooding. By the end of the century, only about a tenth of that money ever reached the dikes. The rest went on banquets, and on expensive gifts for Heshen. The Yellow River was so destructive in flood that it was known as China's Sorrow. Worse still, the river officials found it paid to let the river breach its dikes from time to time, so that the money would keep flowing. Everyone at court could see it, but nobody said it. To accuse Heshen was to accuse the emperor of having trusted him, which amounted to saying Qianlong had lost control of his own government. So the critics went after Heshen's men lower down the ladder, and Heshen himself remained untouchable. As long as the old emperor lived. Jiaqing, it seems, had seen exactly where the worst problems lay. While his father lived he was powerless to act. Now his father's favourite was under arrest. A British writer of the time saw it as one of the rare cases in China where an official's extortions from the people met the hand of justice. A scrap of popular verse from the time summed up how the public saw it: "After Heshen fell, Jiaqing ate well". The first minister of state, the man who had received Lord Macartney, was degraded, and his estates were confiscated.

The new emperor made the case against Heshen a public one. He set out the charges in an edict, and ordered the boards and high courts in Beijing, and the governors general and governors of the provinces, to pass a proper sentence on them. Here is what the edict charged him with. It charged him with taking women from the palace for himself. With pride and insolence, for countermanding the new emperor's order summoning the Mongol princes to his father's funeral. Jiaqing had excused the princes who had never had smallpox. Heshen had issued a new order of his own, with no one excused. Smallpox was a terror to the peoples of the steppe, and the court had long excused Mongol nobles who had never had it from coming to Beijing, where it was rife. With selling high offices to men completely unfit to fill them. With building his house of a precious cedar reserved for royal palaces, and laying out his house and gardens in the style of the emperor's own. With owning more than two hundred strings of pearls and a mass of jewels his rank did not entitle him to wear, among them a pearl so large that the emperor himself had none to equal it. With holding, in gold and silver alone, already found and confiscated, at least ten million taels. And then there was the charge the British found most curious of all. Heshen was accused of the deepest treachery for telling the new emperor about his father's plan to abdicate in his favour, one day before his father made it public, hoping by that to win his favour and affection. In the trial, the political crimes counted most. Besides tipping off the heir, there was hiding military reports on the White Lotus rebellion from the emperor, striking names off the lists of officials due for promotion, and fabricating imperial edicts. Questioned by a Manchu prince, Heshen confessed the whole of it to be true. After a swift and widely publicised trial, the Board of Punishments found him guilty and sentenced him to death. By the majority, the sentence was beheading. But as a special act of grace by the emperor, he was allowed instead to be his own executioner. A silken cord was sent to him, as a sign of the emperor's favour, and he had himself strangled by some of his own attendants. In keeping with his rank and with the favour of the late emperor, this was considered a far more honourable death than beheading. He died about a fortnight after the master who had made him. Then came the inventory. His main mansion had seven hundred and thirty rooms, with an east wing and a west wing of more than three hundred rooms each, and a second residence of six hundred and twenty more. He held more than a hundred and twenty thousand acres of good farmland. There were seventy two silver place settings for banquets, two hundred pairs of gold chopsticks and five hundred pairs of silver ones, and whole storehouses of jewels, jade and ginseng. He owned ten banks and ten pawnshops. One wall of his main house turned out to be filled with nearly five thousand pounds of gold. Forty tons of silver was buried in the basement. By repute, the lists ran on through furs and hides, thousands of outfits, and four hundred and sixty European clocks. The old emperor had cherished his collection of English clocks. His favourite, it seems, had outdone him. The wildest estimates of his fortune ran as high as eight hundred million taels. The more sober ones put it at around eighty million, more than the whole treasury surplus before the White Lotus war, and enough to make him as rich as the emperor. Heshen was blamed, in effect, for all the sins of the age, as if he alone had dragged the bureaucracy down into graft. And this is where Jiaqing made a choice that tells you what kind of ruler he meant to be. Many of his advisers wanted a great campaign against corruption. Jiaqing let it fade away. He knew how easily an anticorruption campaign could run out of control and turn into a general purge, because almost nobody was innocent. Officials would happily denounce their enemies, there was no telling where it would end, and it might leave too few honest men of talent to run any government at all. What he made his priority instead was the war. The day after his father's death, Jiaqing named the suppression of the sects the dynasty's most urgent business. "I have now received the weight of the empire," he wrote, "and every day that passes with the war still unfinished is a day that I must bear the guilt of being an unfilial son." And he put the blame where the rebels had put it. He accused the generals of dragging out the war for profit, and the officials of squeezing the peasants who had risen against them. "The peasants enjoy few fruits from their labor," he wrote, "so how can they possibly supply such insatiable demands? It is the local officials who provoked these rebellions." The officials oppress, and the people rebel. The new emperor had more or less agreed with the White Lotus.

Hong Liangji
Hong Liangji. 余集 绘, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Which raises a question. If the emperor himself said the officials were the problem, how far could his subjects go in saying so too? In 1799 a nervous, sleepless Confucian scholar named Hong Liangji decided to find out. Hong was unhappy that Jiaqing had refused to purge Heshen's followers. So he broke with precedent and wrote the emperor a bold letter demanding reform. The emperor, he wrote, should dig deeper into the corruption of his officials, restore moral government, and win back the respect officials had once had from the public and no longer did. And he should choose his advisers more carefully, because he was "frequently misled by buffoons and intimate associates". Hong admitted he did not have the rank to address the emperor directly; a mentor passed the letter to a prince, who passed it on to the throne. But he would not keep quiet. "The country," he wrote, "cannot be left without someone who dares speak out in the face of opposition." He went on for pages, for thousands of characters, through the problems facing the dynasty and the ways the emperor had failed to deal with them. For generations the Manchu emperors had been suspicious of Chinese scholars who gathered to talk politics. Their poetry societies and academies had been banned outright in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jiaqing did what his ancestors would have done. He had Hong arrested. The Board of Punishments almost at once sentenced him to death, for extreme indecorum. Then the emperor had a change of heart. He spared Hong's life, and instead banished him to the far west of the empire. He was sent to Ili, on the empire's remote northwestern frontier. As Hong travelled out to his exile, crowds came out to cheer him at every stop along the road. It felt, to them, like the dawn of a new era. In the spring of 1800, half a year after sending him away, Jiaqing pardoned Hong Liangji and let him come back to the capital. And then he did something no one expected. He publicly apologised. He had been wrong, he announced, to condemn an honest official who was only trying to correct his ruler's faults. He had not destroyed Hong's letter. He kept it by his bedside, he said, so that he would always be reminded of what it said. There had been a terrible drought in Beijing that year, and droughts were read as a sign of Heaven's displeasure with the emperor. The emperor ruled by the Mandate of Heaven, the belief that Heaven granted the right to rule to a virtuous dynasty and could withdraw it; floods, droughts and famines were read as warnings. According to the imperial records, on the day Jiaqing officially pardoned Hong Liangji, the rain began to fall again. It was a small thing, a pardon and an apology. But it told Chinese scholars that, under this emperor, criticism might no longer cost them their lives, and they began to speak up. So that is the empire Jiaqing inherited: a treasury drained by a war in the hills, a bureaucracy rotten from the top, and a new emperor who wanted to hear the truth, but did not dare to dig too deep. And while he turned to the rebels in the interior, a different kind of trouble was coming in by sea. Next time, we go back south, to Canton, where the boy who once spoke Chinese to Qianlong is about to come back as a young man, and where the empire is about to test whose law rules among the foreigners.

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