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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 5

The Law at Canton

George Staunton, the page who spoke Chinese to Qianlong, comes back to Canton in 1800 as a junior clerk of the East India Company and becomes the one Briton who can read the empire's laws. The episode follows him and Robert Morrison, a young missionary who arrives in 1807 to learn the forbidden language, through the new ban on opium and the killings that test whose law rules at Canton, and asks how far the Qing could make foreigners answer to it. It leans heavily on the Company's own records, with the court heard in its edicts on opium.

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Transcript

Last time, the old Qianlong Emperor finally died, on the seventh of February 1799, and his son the Jiaqing Emperor ruled at last in his own name. Qianlong left behind a long and glittering reign, but he died helpless, his treasuries emptied by the war against the White Lotus rebels. A day after his father's death, Jiaqing ordered the arrest of Heshen, the old man's all powerful favourite, and after a swift and very public trial Heshen was allowed to strangle himself with a silk cord. Then a scholar named Hong Liangji wrote the new emperor a furious letter about everything still wrong with the empire, and was sentenced to death for it. Jiaqing spared him, sent him into exile, and half a year later pardoned him and called him home, and he let it be known that he kept that letter by his bedside. So that is our new emperor: a man trying to clean house, with an empire that badly needed it. And it is in those same first months of his own rule, at the far southern edge of that empire, that a quiet order goes out about a substance arriving by sea. I'm going to call it the season's slow fuse, because it is lit here, in this episode, and it will burn all the way to the end. The substance, of course, is opium. Opium is the dried sap of the poppy, smoked in China in this period, and the Chinese market was supplied largely from British India. On the second of December 1799, an edict to prohibit the sale of opium was published in the great southern port of Canton. It came down the official chain the way these things did, from the governor of the province to the Hoppo, the customs chief who ran the foreign trade, and from the Hoppo to the merchants licensed to deal with foreigners. The Hoppo was the emperor's own superintendent of customs at Canton, usually a man of the imperial household sent down from Beijing, and the post was famous for making its holder rich. Opium, the edict said, was a substance of a violent and powerful nature, with a fetid and odious flavour, but remarkable for exciting and raising the spirits. At first, the edict said, it was used only among vagrants and disreputable people, but it had since spread to the members of respectable families, to students, and to officers of the government. The users who went on, it said, took on the pale and sickly hue of doves, and the money ran out, and the weak died of want while the strong became thieves and robbers. Once, it said, the drug had been confined to the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, but now it had spread through the other provinces of the empire. And then comes the line I want you to remember, because it is the line this whole season turns on: foreigners, the edict said, by the means of a vile excrementitious substance, derive from this Empire the most solid profits and advantages. The opium came in through the Bogue, at the entrance to the river, and was carried up the river on the pilot boats and the armed guard boats stationed there, or it was landed bit by bit at Macau from small craft and smuggled on from there. Macau was the small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, where the foreign merchants lived when the trading season at Canton was over. And the customs officers at every station, the edict said, knew perfectly well what was passing them, and let it pass, being doubtlessly bribed to a large amount for that purpose. So every officer in the province was ordered to search, seize and punish, and the hong merchants were ordered to pass the ban on to the foreign chiefs, so that no ship would bring the drug in again. The hong merchants were the dozen or so Chinese firms licensed to trade with the West, and each foreign ship had to have one of them stand as its security, answering to the state for its cargo and its crew. In the capital, the Jiaqing Emperor issued his own edict forbidding opium from abroad and the growing of the poppy at home. Now, here is the thing about that ban. Until then, opium at Canton had been a cargo like any other, sold openly from a ship's hold through that ship's own security merchant, just like English broadcloth or Indian cotton. And the foreigners had welcomed the demand for it, because the West was pouring silver into China to buy tea, and anything the Chinese would buy in return helped slow that drain. The ban did not stop that trade. It only moved it. The East India Company and the hong merchants both stopped handling opium at Canton, and a depot was set up at Macau instead, where the Chinese officials found it easier to close their eyes. The East India Company was the London corporation that held Britain's monopoly on trade with China, and it ran that trade from a compound of offices and warehouses at Canton called the factory. The Company tried at first to stop opium being shipped to China from England or India at all, found it could not, and settled for forbidding the drug on its own ships. And by the spring of 1802 the Company's men at Canton were reporting home that the consumption of opium had no doubt greatly increased, notwithstanding the prohibitory regulations of this government. Some fifteen years earlier, they reckoned, the trade had been about two thousand chests a year; now the steady demand stood at around three thousand. At Macau, they added, the Portuguese carried on the opium trade on an extensive scale, and it was the principal source of the silver the Company itself took in at Canton, in exchange for bills payable in Bengal. Hold on to that, because it is the knot at the centre of everything that follows: the Company kept its own ships clean, and quietly lived on the silver that opium brought in.

Sir George Staunton, 2nd Baronet
Sir George Staunton, 2nd Baronet. Martin Archer Shee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Into this world, in January 1800, came a young man who had been to China before. His name was George Staunton, and if you heard the first episodes of this season you met him as a boy, the page in Lord Macartney's embassy, who learned Chinese on the way. On the long voyage out in 1793 he had learned the language from the embassy's interpreters, well enough that he spoke with the Qianlong Emperor himself. Now he was eighteen, and he arrived in the little world of the Company's factory compound at Canton as a writer. A writer was the lowest rung of the Company's ladder at Canton, poorly paid and extremely boring, mostly weighing crates of tea and copying documents, but it offered real prospects for advancement. These posts were the richest patronage the Company had to give, and even the lowly writerships normally went to the sons of its directors, so it had taken all of his father's influence, and help from Lord Macartney, to get George the job. And the Company, it is worth saying, showed no interest whatsoever in the fact that he could read Chinese. He did not want to be there. On the way out, when the captain told him they would reach Canton in about five more months, he wrote to his parents that he was perhaps the person on board the least anxious for that event. Now he was dropped among the rowdy bachelors of the Company's quarters, with their drinking and their dinner parties that ran until dawn, and he was embarrassed by what he called their coarseness and freedom of manners. His father was a baronet, but George was not of the same circle as the directors' sons, and he knew it; as he put it himself much later, I am fully conscious that I was not at first generally popular. He would remember these years as the most gloomy period of my life. I'll give you his plan, because it was a very young man's plan. He wanted to work hard, be promoted to the senior rank of supercargo, make enough money that he would never have to come back, and go home. A supercargo was one of the Company's senior traders at Canton, and the most senior of them formed the Select Committee that ran the Company's business there. And he wanted to find some use for his Chinese, which every supercargo told him, again and again, was unlikely to help him in trade. His one real hope was that Britain would send another embassy to the emperor, and when he heard that Qianlong had died, he hoped the new emperor might be more favourable to foreigners than his father had been. No embassy came. But something else came instead, almost at once, and it gave him his first chance.

One of the King's ships was lying at anchor at Whampoa. Whampoa was the deep water anchorage some miles down the river from the city, where the big foreign ships lay while they loaded their tea. Her name was the Providence, a schooner bought to serve as a tender to the Royal Navy's ships and to scout for enemy vessels. Between eleven and twelve on the night of the eleventh of February, a boat came up right under the schooner's bows, and though it was hailed three times, distinctly, nobody in it answered. The officer on deck was convinced the men in the boat had come to cut the schooner's anchor cable, and he fired a musket shot into the boat, and a Chinese man in it was shot through the body. He had reason to be nervous: the Providence had already had her cable cut three separate times. But a petition reached the local magistrate, charging that the man had been wounded and that another had been frightened into the water and drowned. The viceroy and the Hoppo then jointly demanded that the men implicated be brought up to Canton, where they would be tried, they promised, with the strictest impartiality and justice. The viceroy, properly the governor general, governed the two southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi and was the emperor's highest officer in the south. But the Providence was not a Company ship. She belonged to the King, and her senior officer, Captain John Dilkes of the warship Madras, did not see himself as answering to merchants at all. Dilkes came up to the city on the twenty second of February, with the avowed intention, as the Company's record put it, of bringing the King of England face to face with the Emperor of China, with no traders to throw a shadow on the countenance of either. And he would not hand his men over. Instead, Dilkes demanded that the Chinese arrest the men in the boat, whom he called thieves, and punish them. The hong merchants were in dismay, because Dilkes was refusing the whole system through which every foreign nation's business at Canton had been done; they used every argument to turn him, and failed. On the Chinese side, it was the viceroy who bent. He sent an officer to talk to Dilkes, who was conciliatory but clear that the men involved must be produced for examination, and then, deviating from the established customs of China, the viceroy agreed that Dilkes himself might attend. On the twelfth of March Dilkes and his witnesses were escorted into the walled city with all due respect, though the captain was required to deposit his sword at the city gate. And beside him walked the Company's eighteen year old writer, as his interpreter. They were taken before the provincial judge, sitting with the prefect of Canton and the two magistrates of the city, four officials at their tables with their seals of office in front of them. George wrote down what happened next. On entering the hall, he wrote, Captain Dilkes and he bowed respectfully to the judge, who took no notice, beyond directing them to come forward and stand at his right hand. The judge did not seem to know what Dilkes had come for. Speaking not to George but to the Chinese interpreter, he said that as the wounded man was still alive, no trial was needed yet. And then he offered what was, in fact, a way out for everyone: all prosecution would cease if the wounded man outlived the fortieth day after the shooting, and ten of those days were still to run. Under the Qing code, when someone was wounded, the law set a fixed period to wait, and if the victim died inside it, the attacker was guilty of murder; if he lived beyond it, the punishment was only for the wound. So the judge was telling Dilkes, in effect, wait, and this goes away. Dilkes did not want it to go away. He wanted his own charge heard first, that the boatmen had come to cut his cable. Dilkes pressed with some warmth, and when he found he could get no straight answer through the Chinese interpreter, who was afraid to translate properly, or through George, whom the judge did not want to hear, he began to examine the witnesses himself. The judge raised his voice and showed great displeasure, and ordered Dilkes and George out of his court. In George's own words, the officers of justice instantly put that order into execution in a rude and violent manner. In the end Dilkes agreed that his sailor would leave a written promise to reappear within ten days if he was wanted, and they were all allowed to go back to the factory. On the twenty second of March, the viceroy's officer came to say that the inquiry was over, ended in a satisfactory manner by the survival of the wounded man beyond the term of forty days. The viceroy added that the sailor was still punishable under Chinese law, but that he had chosen, out of benevolence towards the English, not to enforce it this time, and that he could not do so again. He even sent an apology from the judge for the rough handling at the court. Dilkes thanked nobody graciously. His note back to the Company was pure sarcasm: I beg leave to congratulate you, he wrote, upon this recorded acknowledgement of your entire independence of his Majesty's Service. After Dilkes had sailed away, the Committee later reported, the wounded man lingered for some time, and then died, apparently from the wound in his lungs. And a senior British naval officer, writing to the Committee about the affair, passed on a remark he had heard: that had the man died of his wound, it would be doubtful whether the seaman would have been acquitted had he been tried by an English jury. So the British had refused to hand a man over to Chinese justice, while one of their own officers let stand the thought that English justice might have convicted him too. The Company's President had asked one more thing of the viceroy in that settlement: a copy of the printed laws of China, so the English would know what they were expected to obey. The viceroy refused, politely. The code could not be shown to foreigners without the emperor's express permission, he said, so instead he had the articles that most concerned Europeans printed separately. George went around the refusal. Through his knowledge of the language the Committee was able to send London a translation of the law on wounds, and at the Company's expense he bought a copy of the entire Qing legal code, in a hundred and forty four volumes, and slowly began to translate it. For the first time since James Flint, there was a British interpreter at Canton, and his interests went well beyond the price of tea. In 1802 news reached him that his father was dead, half a year after it happened, and most of the letters George had written home had never been read by the man they were written to. When he left for home in January 1802, the Committee noted that he had been the only one of the Company's servants with any knowledge of the Chinese language, laws or customs. He spent two years in England, inherited the family's baronetcy, so that he was now Sir George, and by the time he sailed back to Canton in June 1804 the Company had promoted him to supercargo. He still called life in China a painful sacrifice.

In the winter of 1807, the question of whose law ruled at Canton came back, and this time a man died for certain. His name in the Company's books was Mowqua, the oldest of the hong merchants, and he had been trying for years to retire. At the end of the season of 1804 he had told the Company he meant to step down and hand his business to his brother in law, Chunqua, but Chunqua died suddenly in December 1806, and Mowqua put his plans on hold. Retiring was not simple: to get out of the trade, a hong merchant had to buy permission, from the Hoppo and his staff, probably from the viceroy and his staff, and perhaps from the governor too. Mowqua was the security merchant for the Company ship Neptune. Just a few months earlier, in November 1806, the Company had had a killing among its own sailors, when one seaman of the Alnwick Castle stabbed another to death while they were on shore leave in the city. His own captain put the killer in close confinement, to be handed over at the first place he could be tried, which would probably be England, and the Committee approved, and wrote down exactly why. To hand him over, they wrote, would admit the right of the Chinese to impose their laws on strangers, laws which they called very arbitrary and corruptly administered, and incompatible with European ideas of justice. No Chinese life was involved, so the Chinese did not intervene. The next time, one was. On the twenty third of February 1807, sailors from another Company ship were lured into boats, robbed of everything, and flung stripped into the river, and one of them was never seen again. So the next day, the liberty men from all the ships were in an angry mood. And on the twenty fourth of February there was a serious disturbance at Canton between local Chinese and the liberty men of the Neptune. The sailors rushed out with cudgels, the townsmen drove them back with volleys of stones and bricks, and late in the evening a customs shed on the quay was set on fire. In the morning a customs officer was found to have been wounded, and Mowqua stepped in quickly, promising the officer a present and the cost of his treatment, in return for his silence. For a moment, it looked as if money had settled it. Then, early on the twenty seventh, the Neptune's captain called on John Roberts, the Company's President, with the news that a Chinese man had died of the wounds he received in the riot. He was thought to be a man who had lain severely wounded on the quay for most of that first day. Mowqua was badly shaken, and he told the Company he feared it had gone too far to be settled with money. For two days the argument went back and forth: the Chinese authorities demanded the surrender of the man who struck the blow that caused the death, and the Committee replied that it had been a confused brawl with many on both sides, and no one could say who struck what. They told Mowqua that if the Neptune's sailors were brought up for trial, the trial would be held inside the Company's factory, and nobody would be taken away unless he was clearly proved guilty, and that any attempt to seize them by force would not be submitted to. The Hoppo answered the way Canton always answered. He issued orders stopping all shipments by the Company's ships, and forbidding sailors to come up to the city at all. That was the Qing state's great weapon at Canton: it did not need to fight the foreigners, it only needed to stop their trade. The Committee had ten ships held up, worth a million pounds, carrying an investment of over two and a half million taels. A tael was a weight of silver of about one and a third ounces, the unit in which Chinese accounts were kept. On the first of March the district magistrate issued a warrant calling on the security merchant and the chief of the English to produce the guilty man. And the next evening, Mowqua's purser came to the President to tell him that his master was being held at the magistrate's office, and would not be released until the Europeans were produced for examination. This is how the system worked. The foreigners were out of reach, but the merchant who stood surety for them was not. The Neptune's own captains questioned the crew and could not pin the killing on any one man, though they named seven sailors as the most active in the riot. The other hong merchants then told the Committee bluntly that only one thing would save Mowqua, and that was handing over the man who struck the blow, or bringing up every man who had been ashore that day for examination. Mowqua was being very harshly treated, they said, and they were afraid that the next day he would be taken to the viceroy's palace, where he would almost certainly be beaten. The President would not move. On the fourteenth of March he declared that he would never be the means of exposing any number of unconvicted British subjects to so dreadful a trial, or to any Chinese form of trial whatever, unless it was held inside the Company's own factory. If the mandarins wanted a Chinese trial, he said, they would have to use absolute force. Mowqua was released, but only as a prisoner at large, still under enormous pressure, and on the sixteenth of March he published a reward of twenty thousand dollars to anyone who could prove who had killed the man. Nobody claimed it. But Mowqua was so sure of the outcome that he signed a promise to produce the killer within ten days. Think about that for a moment: the oldest of the hong merchants, offering twenty thousand dollars for the denunciation of one miserable, drunken, rowdy sailor. Then the provincial judge stepped in, ordering the security merchant and the foreign chief to deliver up at once the man who had caused the death. On the twenty eighth of March the Neptune's captain was ordered to bring up to the city the fifty two sailors who had been ashore on the day of the riot, so they could be examined by the Chinese magistrates inside the Company's factory.

Scene inside the court at the trial of four British seamen, Canton, 1807
Scene inside the court at the trial of four British seamen, Canton, 1807. Chinese School, 19th century, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The men arrived on the evening of the twenty ninth. Even then the officials hesitated. At the last moment they suggested that, since interpreting was so hard, the President might examine his own men, find the culprit himself, and send him on to the magistrate. More days of meetings followed with the prefect of Canton, and finally, on the eighth of April, the first trial of the fifty two sailors was held in the old factory. Picture the room, because a Chinese artist painted it. The great hall of the Company's old factory was hung for the occasion with cotton cloth striped red and yellow, and the painting of that day ended up in London, in the rooms of a learned society for the study of Asia. The examining officials were seven in number, and they sat at tables at the head of the hall. On their left, which in China was the side of honour, sat four hong merchants, Mowqua among them, without tables. The four merchants wore the red coral button of the second rank on their hats, higher than the judges', though the judges had won theirs by examination and appointment, and the merchants had paid for theirs, much money. On the lesser side sat the British: a Royal Navy captain, Robert Rolles, whose ship the Lion had carried Lord Macartney to China, then the President and two other members of the Select Committee, and Sir George, writer and interpreter, twenty five years old. Two marines in red uniform stood guard with fixed bayonets. Rolles had wanted a bigger guard, to honour the judges, but the hong merchants gently hinted that more redcoats might inspire more fear than pleasure. It was the first Chinese trial at which Europeans were officially allowed to be present. The sailors were brought in five at a time and questioned by the prefect of Canton. Their stories were all the same. Every one of them denied striking any Chinese, nearly all denied having a stick, though some admitted to a light rattan cane, and most declared that they had been drunk, some of them dead drunk, through the whole affair. The next day the officials called back eleven men their own captain had named as the most turbulent on the ship, and one of them was a sailor named Edward Sheen. The record of his questioning survives, and it is worth hearing almost as it was taken down. Asked how many Chinese he had struck, he said, I struck none. Asked where his stick was, he said, I had only a tobacco pipe, and he said that a man had hit him with a stone. Then the mandarin tried something. He asked whether Sheen had seen a shipmate named Julius Caesar strike anyone. Yes, there was a sailor on the Neptune named Julius Caesar. Sheen said he had seen no one strike anyone. The mandarin then told him that Julius Caesar said it was Sheen who had struck the dead man, and Sheen answered, he cannot say it, I defy him. Captain Rolles broke in at once and said Julius Caesar had said nothing of the kind, and the mandarin replied, quite openly, that he had only said it to draw out the truth. Rolles told him that if they wanted the truth spoken to them they must speak it themselves, and he was very indignant that so disgraceful and unwarrantable a mode should be employed to obtain the kind of evidence that was desired. At the end of that day the officials made an extraordinary plea. They begged the Committee to make the real culprit confess; only that way could the affair be closed and the demands of the Chinese government satisfied. And the next day the senior hong merchants brought a proposal from the Hoppo: let the British simply pick a sailor, or find one, who would confess to having struck some Chinese and been active in the riot. That man would be held in the factory, the merchants pledged, and that would be the extent of his punishment, because the case would be reported to Beijing in such a way that the law could only give him some light penalty. To the officials and merchants, this seemed perfectly proper. To the Englishmen of the Select Committee, it was outrageous, and they refused. And remember what that refusal cost them: those ten ships were still waiting, and would have been released at once had they agreed to name any sailor at all for a merely nominal punishment. So on the thirteenth of April the Chinese announced that they would choose the culprit themselves. At a third trial, the eleven were questioned again one by one, and Sheen and Julius Caesar were called up a second time. Then the prefect told the President that Sheen had admitted being outside the factory during the riot, with a pipe in his hand, and had been wounded in the scuffle. On those grounds, the mandarins considered him the most culpable among the rioters, and they committed him to the custody of the chief of the Company until their superiors had decided. That was the compromise. A Chinese court had tried British sailors, on Chinese terms, but inside a British building, with British officers sitting in, and a British guard at the door. The Chinese had their culprit, and the British had not handed him over. Each side could tell itself it had not given way.

Edward Sheen was placed at once in custody inside the factory, and that same day, the thirteenth of April, permission was given to start loading the Neptune again. The other fifty one sailors went back to their ship. But the Committee still would not send its fleet home until it knew Sheen's fate, and it was the twenty eighth of April before a mandate came down from the provincial judge, on the instructions of the viceroy and the governor. Sheen, it said, having wounded a native of this country, should be judged according to the laws that made the punishment redeemable by a fine. Only then did the Committee let its Indiamen, the Company's great merchant ships, sail for home, sure now that they would not be asked to send a man to a violent death who had not been proved guilty of anything. That was not quite the end. Through the summer, the hong merchants pressed and pressed, and the Committee told them flatly that they would give no pledge about Sheen and would not surrender him, and that if need be they would send him for safety aboard a British warship, the Belliqueux, lying at Nei Lingding island in the estuary. The merchants then asked the Committee to report that Sheen was sick, which was apparently the customary way to ease such a case along, and the Committee refused to certify something that was not true. Mowqua and two other merchants even went down to Macau to explain how badly they, and Mowqua above all, would suffer if the viceroy's anger was not soothed. In November the provincial judge came to the factory in person, with the two magistrates, and the hall was set out as it had been for the trial. Edward Sheen was brought in for inspection, there was no ceremony, and the officials retired. A report went up to Beijing that month, telling the whole case in great detail, but making light of it, and treating the death as a regrettable incident. And on the fourth of March 1808, more than a year after the riot, Mowqua brought the Company the emperor's answer. The emperor approved the sentence: Edward Sheen, on payment of a fine of twelve taels and some fraction, about four pounds, was to be allowed to go home to his own country, and the next day the Committee put him aboard a ship ready to sail. Both sides now tried to stop it happening again. The Hoppo banned shore leave for sailors at Canton altogether, and so did the Committee. But the Committee saw what the Hoppo did not: that you could not keep men on board for the two or three months a ship lay at anchor a stone's throw from the shore, after five months at sea and with another five ahead of them. And what about Mowqua? On the very day the Committee was asked to pick a sailor for a mild penalty, he told them he had decided to retire immediately. But he was still in harness the next season, and every season after that, until his death in 1812. The affair had emptied his purse so badly that he no longer had enough money to pay for the privilege of retiring, and the strong likelihood is that he had paid heavily to make the whole case go away. One man dead, a sailor fined about four pounds, and a merchant who had paid far more than that. That was what justice cost at Canton.

The Thirteen Factories at Guangzhou, in a reverse glass export painting of 1805
The Thirteen Factories at Guangzhou, in a reverse glass export painting of 1805. Unknown Chinese artist, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the September of that same year, 1807, a ship from New York reached Canton with a passenger the Company did not want. His name was Robert Morrison, and he was twenty five, the round faced son of a maker of boot trees from Northumberland, with a mop of thick, curly black hair. He had no job with the Company, did not want one, and had no connections of any kind. What he had was an appointment from the London Missionary Society as the first Protestant missionary to China. The Catholic Church had sent missionaries to China for generations, but by now the Qing state had outlawed their work; a handful served the emperor in Beijing, and the rest lived in hiding. No Protestant had ever gone, and the East India Company liked it that way. Most of its directors saw missionaries as sanctimonious troublemakers who could upset the Chinese authorities, and so they refused Morrison passage on any Company ship. And the Company's ships were the only civilian ships sailing between England and China. So Morrison went the wrong way first. He was ordained in January 1807, and wrote in his diary, I have now to buckle on my armour. He crossed the Atlantic to New York, a disastrous voyage of storms, fire and snow, only to find no ship there willing to take him on to China. In Philadelphia he found one that would, for a thousand dollars, which was more than the Missionary Society had given him for his whole mission. It was Americans who rescued him: a network of Protestants who took him in, persuaded a captain in New York to carry him for the price of his food, and even got the secretary of state, James Madison, to write him a letter of introduction to the American consul at Canton. He sailed in May and arrived a hundred and thirteen days later, eight months after leaving England. Then the warm welcome ended. His fellow British refused to let him live in their factory, and the Catholic Portuguese did not want him at Macau. And he had not understood, until a foreigner explained it to him, that a Chinese who taught him the language could be put to death for it. So he turned to the one man who could help: Sir George. He carried a letter of introduction from Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, but Banks had been far less kind about him in a private letter written a few months before. Banks's private opinion was that the missionary would win the crown of martyrdom much more readily than a single convert to the Cross. Sir George, though, was glad to see him. He was due to go home on leave in January 1808 for two years, and without him the factory would have no Chinese interpreter at all, so he was eager to hand on the job. The Company's directors had been adamant that a missionary could not live in the British factory, so the American consul quietly let Morrison stay in the American factory, on one condition. He had to pretend to be an American. He rented an extra room just to hide his Chinese books and papers from the servants who came and went. And Sir George found him a tutor, a Roman Catholic named Abel Yun, who spoke fluent Latin and came secretly to his rooms every day. Morrison threw himself in. He ate only Chinese food, with chopsticks, wore Chinese clothes, grew a braid, and let his fingernails grow long. But it wore him down, and when he fell ill he gave it all up, cut his nails and his braid, and went back to his black preacher's clothes. His money was running out, and his rescuer turned out to be the President of the Select Committee himself, John Roberts, who became his patron, gave him a house in Macau for the off season, and kept the Portuguese from driving him out. Roberts's motives were not pure; he hoped Morrison would translate the Bible so that he could hand it to Chinese scholars, with a sneer, as the best of books. Morrison was not a lighthearted man, and plenty of his fellow Westerners found his mission ridiculous. A shipowner once teased him, And so, Mr. Morrison, you really expect that you will make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese empire? No, sir, Morrison replied. I expect God will. His orders assumed he would never be let into China proper. He was to learn the written language, make a full translation of the Bible himself, and somehow find a way to print it in great numbers and spread it inside China. Books, after all, could go where preachers could not. Keep an eye on Morrison, because we will be seeing a great deal more of him.

Meanwhile, years after the court had banned it, the opium was still arriving. In the summer of 1809, on the seventeenth of August, the viceroy and the Hoppo at Canton issued two mandates together, one enforcing the ban on importing opium, the other renewing the ban on taking the country's gold and silver abroad. Listen to how they talked about it. Opium, the first edict said, was produced in foreign countries and secretly brought to Canton in foreign ships, and it had been forbidden because it wasted property and destroyed the constitution. Yet the foreign ships, before they entered the harbour, sent their opium off by back roads and smuggled it over the passes, and a wicked people bought and sold it back and forth, and spread a public mischief we know not to what extent. Officers had lately seized some of the secret dealers, and pushing back to where they had bought it, the edict said, it was undoubtedly from the foreign merchants. And then it turned on the very men the empire had appointed to manage the foreigners. The hong merchants, it said, disregard the lives of the people, and only know covetous machinations after gain and their own advantage. They joined with the foreigners, the edict charged, to play with the law in a contemptuous way. So from now on, if a ship smuggled opium in, its security merchant had to report it, and the ship would be thrown out of the harbour and barred from trade. And if the security merchant helped hide it, he would be punished too, and every merchant securing a foreign ship had to send in a written statement that it carried no opium. From that year on, the hong merchants had to give a bond for every ship they secured, guaranteeing it carried no opium when it reached Whampoa. The bonds were always given, and they were worth about as much as the edicts behind them, which is to say that the ships kept bringing the opium. Then the second edict, the one about silver. It said the country's gold was being smuggled out to sea, and that the law forbade the country's gold and silver alike to go abroad. It blamed people in Hog Lane who shoot in the shade, as it put it, and secretly carry on the business of foreign ships. Hog Lane was the narrow alley of little shops that ran down between the foreign factories to the river. So the security merchants were ordered to settle every foreign ship's account in goods given in exchange, not in silver, so that no foreigner could pretend his goods had not paid for his cargo and carry the difference away in coin. Any shop caught selling the country's silver to foreigners would be severely dealt with, and any security merchant or interpreter who helped, the edict warned, would not find it expedient. Now, notice what has happened here. Two orders, issued on the same day by the same officials: stop the opium coming in, and stop the silver going out. For a century the silver had flowed one way, from Europe into China, to pay for tea. And the officials of the south were beginning to fear that foreigners were drawing it back out. It was not yet a flood. But the officials of the south had put the drug and the silver in the same breath, and that pairing is going to come back, louder and louder, for the rest of this season.

Sir George was not at Canton for any of this; he was on leave in England, and he was hoping for something big. A friend had tipped him off that he was likely to be named ambassador to China, and he went to the Company's headquarters in London, swelling with pride, to hear the news. Instead the chairman informed him, soberly, that the directors felt it would be inappropriate for a British embassy to be led by an employee of the East India Company. Forty years later, writing his memoirs, he was still burning over the mortification of that day, sure that he had been extremely ill used. His only consolation was that the plans for that embassy were scrapped, so nobody else got to be ambassador either. But during that same visit home, in 1810, he published the work he had been grinding at for nearly a decade, his translation of the Qing legal code. It was the first major work ever translated directly from Chinese into English. Until then, most of what Europe knew of Chinese writing had reached it through Latin and French, largely by way of the Jesuit missionaries. Sir George believed the code was the best possible window on China, containing the system and constitution of the government, the principles of its internal policy, and its links to the habits and character of the people. His China was an admirable place. He praised the sobriety, industry, and even intelligence of the lower classes, and he called its laws perhaps the most comprehensive, uniform, and suited to the genius of the people of any that ever existed. He even praised the Jiaqing Emperor, as a sober and talented ruler whose destruction of Heshen showed real political courage. Some reviewers loved it. One called it an extraordinary book in every point of view, though that review was written, anonymously, by his own patron and friend, the man he had dedicated the book to. Others read the same pages and saw something very different. All those carefully graded beatings, down to the size of the bamboo cane, struck some critics as the laws of an empire whose people were treated like a common ship's crew. One review declared that after reading the book, we are ourselves strongly inclined to consider the Chinese as a much more unimprovable race than any of the South Sea savages. And some went further: they said that to impose such a code on people like the British would be the most base and cruel of all atrocities. For those writers, the peoples of China and Europe were so far apart that they deserved to live under entirely separate systems of law. They did not say the next thing yet, but it was a short step from there to saying that no Englishman should ever be held to Chinese law, even on Chinese soil. So here is where our episode lands. The Qing state had shown, again and again, that it could make foreigners answer to its law, not by force, but by holding a merchant, or stopping a fleet, and then by offering a way out that let everyone save face. The British had answered by refusing to give up their men, by stalling, and now by reading that law for themselves, in English. But the British arguing over whose law should rule at Canton were arguing over a river. Out beyond the river mouth, the sea belonged to nobody's law at all. Next time, we go back a few years and head out into those waters, to meet the people who really ruled them.

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