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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 7

Rebels in the Palace

In 1813 rebels break into the Forbidden City and are fought off by the emperor's own son, the future Daoguang Emperor, and the Jiaqing Emperor blames himself, while at Canton the court begins to suspect that George Staunton, now the Company's leading man, knows too much. The episode follows Jiaqing and Staunton through the years from 1811 to 1815, as Britain renews the Company's China monopoly and the court arrests the Chinese who work with foreigners, and asks whether these were years of decline or of a court tightening its grip. It leans on Company records and scholars; the court's own voice is thin here.

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Guangzhou Lhasa Forbidden City Macau

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Transcript

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

Last time, the pirate fleets that had owned the south China coast for a decade came in from the sea. Their leader, Zheng Yi Sao, the widow who had taken supreme command of the fleets when her husband died in 1807, went up to Canton herself to arrange the surrender of her whole force with the viceroy. Between January and April 1810, more than four hundred junks, mounting two and a half thousand guns, and twenty-four thousand men gave themselves up. Not long before that, a British admiral who had landed troops at Macau had been made to take them away again before the trade would open, defeated without the loss of a man on either side. So within a few years the Qing state had seen off both of those challenges. This time we stay in the years that followed, and we watch that same state turn its attention inward: to rebels inside the emperor's own palace, and to the foreigners at Canton and the Chinese who worked for them. New to our shelf this episode are translations of official reports and imperial orders, made by the missionary Robert Morrison and printed at Canton in 1815 on the East India Company's press. At the center of the British side of this story is a young man some of you have been following since he was a boy, George Staunton. At eleven he had sailed with his father on Lord Macartney's embassy to the Qianlong Emperor, and on the long voyage out he picked up Chinese from the embassy's interpreters. At the audience the old emperor gave the boy a small embroidered purse from his own waist, as a token of his esteem. He came back to Canton on 22 January 1800, eighteen years old, as a writer, the lowest job the Company had, which mostly meant weighing crates of tea and copying documents. The Company's men lived and worked in a row of trading houses called factories, on a narrow strip of riverbank outside the walls of Canton, and in the months the trade was closed they had to withdraw down the coast to Macau. He later called those first years "the most gloomy period of my life." His father, who had been Macartney's second in command, died the following year, and the son inherited his baronetcy, so from here on he is Sir George. In 1810 Sir George published an English translation of the Qing legal code, the first major work ever translated directly from Chinese into English. He was, in other words, one of the very few Britons anywhere who could read what the empire said about itself. His Chinese had made him useful. It was about to make him conspicuous. One day he went to dinner with the viceroy at Canton. In British usage the viceroy was the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, the emperor's highest official in the south, and the man the whole foreign trade finally answered to. Over the meal the viceroy told his guest that he meant to govern according to "the established Laws and ancient Customs" and that the British ought to be satisfied with that. Sir George had brought a gift, a history of vaccine inoculation written in Chinese, and by his own account the book "was very well received" by his hosts. Vaccination against smallpox, with matter taken from cowpox, was then less than twenty years old in Europe, and the Company's surgeon at Macau had been giving it to Chinese children for several years. So far, a pleasant evening between two men who respected each other's learning. Then the viceroy asked to see the Chinese custom of bending the knee to great mandarins, and he put it plainly: "pray let me see you perform that ceremony". The ceremony he meant was the kowtow, the full kneeling and knocking of the head to the ground that the court expected before the emperor and his symbols. It was the same ritual Lord Macartney had refused in 1793, offering to go down on one knee instead, and it had shadowed every British dealing with the court ever since. Sir George wrote that he "was obliged to decline paying him the compliment he required, as our English customs forbad it." The viceroy did not let it go. He began by threatening the loss of his friendship, and he ended with threats of "the entire loss of the trade". Sir George still would not kneel. To be fair to the viceroy, in the Qing world a man who would not make the proper bow was not standing on principle; he was being rude, and he was telling everyone watching that he did not accept the order of things. And to Sir George, as to Macartney before him, kneeling as the emperor's subjects knelt would have said that the King of Britain was the emperor's vassal. So both men were defending something they thought mattered, over a dinner table, and neither could give way. So: a question of manners over dinner, and by the end of it the most powerful man in south China was talking about shutting down Britain's trade with the empire. The kowtow had followed the British to Canton, and it was going to follow Sir George all the way to Beijing.

Thomas Manning
Thomas Manning. attrib. J. M. Davis (active 1800–1840), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While Sir George was refusing to kneel at Canton, another Englishman who knew that city was on a far stranger road. His name was Thomas Manning, a Cambridge mathematician with a passion for China, who had spent years at Canton looking for a way into the empire. Late in 1811, with no permission from anyone, he crossed the Himalayas from British India and reached Lhasa, the first Englishman ever to set foot there. Manning had even been received by the Dalai Lama, then a small boy of about six, and he wrote fondly of the child's grace and his smile. He had studied some medicine, and in Lhasa he treated the sick, which made him friends and, inevitably, made him noticed. Tibet was then under the protection of the Qing, and in Lhasa sat an amban, a Manchu official sent by the emperor as his resident, to watch over Tibetan affairs and report back to Beijing. The Qing had kept ambans in Lhasa since the 1720s, and after an invasion of Tibet from Nepal in the early 1790s the Qianlong Emperor had sent an army over the mountains and tightened his hold on the country. Manning wore Chinese glasses as a disguise, and he kept quiet about his years at Canton. It did not work very well. The amban questioned him and concluded that he was either a Catholic missionary or a spy, without being able to settle which. And the amban had his own reasons for thinking hard about the British. He had once held a far better post, at Canton, and the Jiaqing Emperor had taken it from him after the British admiral's landing at Macau in 1808. Now he was serving at the far end of the empire, and he blamed the British for his fall. He told Manning that he worried about Britain's conquests in India, and that Europeans would come and take the country. "These Europeans are very formidable," he said. Then there was the comet. All through the second half of 1811, a great comet hung in the night sky, bright enough to see with the naked eye for months, all over the world. The amban took it as an omen, and he told Manning he thought it might be him. I like that moment, and I want you to hold on to the comet, because in a few minutes we are going to meet some other people who were watching it too. The amban sent a report to the emperor, informing Jiaqing of his suspicion that this strange visitor was a Catholic missionary posing as a Buddhist. Manning was ordered out of Tibet the next spring, and in time he made his way back to Canton. Here is the thing to notice. One Englishman turns up in Lhasa, and a report on him goes straight to the emperor, from an official who already blames the British for Macau and fears their conquests in India. Whatever else it was, this was not a court that was blind to what happened at its edges.

Meanwhile, in London, the East India Company was fighting for its privileges. The Company was a private company with a royal charter, and the charter gave it the sole right to British trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, renewed by Parliament every twenty years or so. The charter came up for renewal in 1813, and the manufacturers and merchants of towns like Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow petitioned hard for the eastern trade to be thrown open to them. Britain had been at war with France almost without a break for twenty years, and its manufacturers, shut out of much of Europe by Napoleon's blockade, were desperate for new markets. The prize at Canton was tea. By now the British drank it by the millions of pounds a year, and the duty on it was one of the largest single sources of the British government's revenue. Parliament settled it that year: a new charter was granted, but for twenty years only. The trade of India "was thrown open" to any British merchant who wanted it. But China was another matter. The monopoly of trade between Britain and China stayed with the Company, as of old. Parliament drew that line heeding strong arguments from Sir George himself, that the trade with China was a unique situation and not to be treated like India. The same act did open one other door, and it is worth a mention given who else is in this episode: it allowed Christian missionaries into British India for the first time. He warned that the Chinese government was deeply suspicious of foreigners, and that letting independent British traders loose at Canton would provoke the local authorities and might damage the tea trade. The free traders lost that round, but only that round. Twenty years from the new charter, the China monopoly would come up again. Keep that clock in mind. It starts ticking here, and it runs out at the very end of this season.

Portrait of Lin Qing, whose supporters attacked the palace, made about 1813
Portrait of Lin Qing, whose supporters attacked the palace, made about 1813. Unknown person of the Qing dynasty, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now we go north, to Beijing, and to the most frightening day of the Jiaqing Emperor's life. Jiaqing was the son of the Qianlong Emperor, the ruler Macartney had met, and he had been on the throne since his father stepped aside in 1796. He had spent the first years of his reign fighting the White Lotus rebellion, a rising led by a religious sect in the hill country of central China. That war was won. And then, much closer to home, came another. In the countryside south of Beijing, a web of religious sects known as the Eight Trigrams had been growing for years. They were heirs of the White Lotus tradition, ordinary farmers and townspeople who believed that the present age was ending and that the faithful would be saved into the new one. Their leaders looked up at that same comet, the one the amban had watched over Lhasa, and saw in it a sign that the turning of the kalpa was finally at hand. A kalpa is a Buddhist age of the world; its turning meant the end of this world and the beginning of the next. They decided to help the turning along. Their plan was to take control of the Forbidden City and then, when the emperor arrived back from his summer retreat at Chengde the next day, to murder him and his family. The Forbidden City was the walled palace at the heart of Beijing, where the emperor lived and ruled, and where no ordinary subject ever set foot. Chengde was the summer palace and hunting park beyond the Great Wall, where the Qing emperors went each year to escape the heat and to ride and hunt as their Manchu ancestors had. The rebels had inside help: they had recruited servants of the palace itself, eunuchs who plotted with them. Eunuchs were the castrated household servants who staffed the inner palace, and they had been a fixture of Chinese courts for two thousand years. The day was 8 October 1813. In the tea and wine shops outside the eastern gate of the palace, men sat waiting, with white cloth headbands hidden under their clothing and knives hidden with them. Two eunuchs sat among them. Then, at noon, the eunuchs stood up and started walking back toward the open gate, and that was the signal. About sixty men made for the eastern gate. On the other side of the palace, about seventy more came through the western gate and made it into the Forbidden City. Two of them unfurled a banner. It read "Entrusted by Heaven to Prepare the Way." Inside the palace, the emperor's second son, Prince Mianning, was at his lessons in the palace school. He was about thirty years old, a grown man with his own household, and he was still a student in the way all imperial princes were, under tutors in the classics and in archery. When the alarm came, he did something no one in the palace was supposed to do. Firearms were forbidden inside the palace, and he sent a servant running to fetch his hunting musket and powder anyway. A rebel had climbed onto a wall. The prince loaded, took careful aim from where he stood, and shot him, and watched him fall from the wall. Another rebel appeared. Mianning reloaded, took aim again, and shot him dead. The group coming from the west made it as far as the last gate standing between them and the inner quarters, where the emperor's family lived, but it had taken them too long. What had been an attack turned into a bloodbath. Those rebels who had not already killed themselves were executed, and so were the eunuchs who had plotted with them. The emperor was not in the city for any of it. He was on the road back from Chengde. And so the first thing the empire heard about the attack came from his own brush. In Beijing the court published official reports and imperial orders every day; copies went out to the senior officials in every province, who let such parts as they chose be copied and sold to the public. That is how this next document travelled. It was received at Canton on 5 November 1813, and the missionary there put it into English. Its title, as he translated it, was a proclamation to announce what had happened, "and to take blame to myself." An edict in which the emperor blamed himself was a rare and solemn thing. The emperor ruled by the mandate of Heaven, and a disaster was a sign that Heaven was displeased, so in the worst times an emperor could accept the fault publicly as his own. In it he looked back over his reign: a sect that had thrown four provinces into confusion, eight years of war to subdue it, and then the hope that his people might at last enjoy peace and repose. He had received the throne from his father, he wrote, and from that day had never let himself rest or neglect the business of government. Then a sect of what he called "a banditti of vagabonds" had risen in the countryside, far from the capital, and he had sent an army against them. But then, he wrote, "rebellion arose under my own arm." More than seventy men had forced the forbidden gate and come inside. The young missionary who translated it added that the document was issued by the emperor's own hand, and described him as "trembling with apprehension" for the safety of his person and his throne. Then the emperor tried to understand it. He wrote that he had "done nothing to harm or oppress the people" and could not understand what had changed. He turned on his officials. His ministers, he wrote, "have been lazy in their government, to the point of causing something like this to happen". And he ended with an image you do not expect from an emperor. "My brush," he wrote, "traces the path shed by my falling tears." There was one comfort in it for him. His son had stood and fought, and Jiaqing had already chosen Mianning to be the sixth emperor of the Qing dynasty. Under the Qing the heir's name was written down and sealed in a box behind a tablet in the palace, to be opened only when the emperor died. So the prince with the hunting musket would one day be the Daoguang Emperor, and he is going to matter a great deal to the rest of this season. He would come to the throne in 1820, and he would still be on it when Britain finally went to war with China. As emperor he would be known as a careful, dutiful and famously frugal man. But the comfort did not go very far. Rumours spread through China that members of the imperial family had helped the rebels. Out in the countryside the risings of the Eight Trigrams were crushed within a few months, and their leader in the capital region, a man named Lin Qing, was caught and put to death. Mianning was rewarded with a new princely title, and the court made a great deal of his courage. And the invasion of the palace only worsened the image of the Qing as a dynasty in decline. So here is the question this episode keeps asking. Was this an empire falling apart, with rebels walking into the palace? Or an empire that, frightened, was about to start holding on much more tightly? Watch what happens at Canton next, and decide for yourself.

Rebellion is expensive, and someone always has to pay. Putting down rebels was expensive, and in a crisis the Qing court often turned to its richest subjects for gifts. These were called contributions, and they were formally voluntary, often rewarded with honorary rank, but a merchant who lived by the state's licence could hardly say no. And at Canton the richest subjects of all were the hong merchants. The hong merchants were the handful of Chinese firms licensed by the state to trade with foreigners at Canton; each foreign ship had one of them as its guarantor, answering for its duties and its crew's behaviour. One of them was Wu Bingjian, who had run his family's hong since around the turn of the century, and whose firm would grow into the richest in Canton. The foreign traders called him Howqua, and so will we. Like several of the great hong families, the Wus had come to Canton from Fujian, the tea country up the coast to the northeast. Remember him. He is going to be the Chinese face of the trade for the rest of this season. In 1814 the Company learned that the government required six million taels "to meet the exigencies of the State", and that the leading men of Canton were expected to help raise it. A tael was the Chinese ounce of silver, a little more than an English ounce and a third. By then the salt merchants and the hong merchants of the province had together put in four hundred thousand taels, a hundred and sixty thousand from the salt merchants and two hundred and forty thousand from the hongs. The salt merchants held the state's licence to sell salt, the other great monopoly of the south, and with the hong merchants they were the two purses the government reached for first. Then came the demands on individual houses. One leading merchant and the sons of another each paid twenty thousand taels. Another merchant was told he should pay fifty thousand, and yet another thirty thousand in addition to what he had already given. And of one merchant a Company man reported that he "has had the address to escape", which is a lovely way of saying he had found a way not to pay. The hong merchants were rich on paper. But the money they handled was mostly other people's, the foreigners' silver passing through on its way to tea and silk. Every tael the court took from them was a tael they did not have to pay their debts, and as we will see at the end of this episode, those debts were piling up.

Now to the great quarrel of that same year at Canton, the year the Company found out what its one real weapon was. It began with a war on the other side of the world. Since 1812 Britain had been at war with the United States, and the war followed American ships into Asian waters. An American trader called the Hunter made it to China, only to be captured at Macau by a British frigate, the Doris. The Chinese side of it was that the Hunter had already set out for home when the British cruiser intercepted her, would not let her go, and brought her back. The Chinese prefect responsible for Macau demanded that the British release the American ship at once, and so atone for violating "the laws of the Celestial Empire." The Celestial Empire was how the Qing styled itself to foreigners, the realm under Heaven. Behind that demand was a principle the Qing took seriously. Foreigners came to Canton to trade by the emperor's grace, and they did not bring their wars with them into his waters. The Company's Select Committee, the senior Company men who ran its business at Canton, answered that a state of war existed with America, that the capture was outside Chinese jurisdiction, and that by the law of nations it was fully justified. Sir George was one of the three men on that committee, and when it came to talking to the Chinese, he was the one they sent. The viceroy answered by suspending the English and American trade, in retaliation for what he saw as a breach of neutrality. He also demanded that if the British wished to address him, "it must be in English." That sounds like a small thing. It was not. A letter in English had to be put into Chinese by the port's own interpreters before any official read it, while a letter in Chinese from Sir George said exactly what the British meant. On 20 October Sir George went up to Canton himself to argue the case. As the Company recorded it, the conduct of the local government at length became so hostile that the supercargoes judged it "their duty to proceed themselves to the suspension of the British Trade." The supercargoes were the Company's senior commercial officers at Canton, the men who bought the tea and sold the woollens. And the Committee did something the British had never done. Instead of begging for the trade to be reopened, they shut it down themselves, kept all British ships from entering the river and withdrew them from Canton until the British should be treated better. Then Sir George ordered all British subjects to quit Canton. Think about who that hurt. Stopping the trade was the very move the viceroy had just made against them. Now the British were pointing the same weapon the other way. The hong merchants depended on the British ships, the customs house depended on the duties, and the court in Beijing depended on that revenue. So as Sir George went down the river toward the sea, someone came after him. Howqua overtook him before he reached the Bogue, and persuaded him to come back. The Bogue is the river's gateway, where the channel narrows between forts on either shore; past it lay the open estuary, Macau and the sea. The stoppage had already worked once: finding that the British ships would not come in, the viceroy had taken back some of his hostile measures and reopened the trade for the ships already inside the river. In the settlement, the Committee was to be allowed to send its communications to the higher officials in the Chinese language, with one exception: not a letter announcing an embassy. Hold on to that exception. It is going to matter. On the question of the Company employing Chinese, Sir George could obtain no satisfaction, though the Committee professed itself content with some assurances. Still, the Company counted it a win. Its own record later said that the vigorous determination of the Committee to stop its trade had brought the local authorities, for that time, "in a good degree to reason." Note the words for that time. And the Company had learned a lesson it would come back to again and again: at Canton, the threat to walk away was the only weapon it had.

But that quarrel had a cost, and the people who paid it were not British. At Canton the linguists were the Chinese interpreters licensed by the state to handle every foreign ship's paperwork with the customs; most spoke only the pidgin trading English of the port. One of them was a linguist named Ayew. On 8 October 1814, in the thick of the dispute, he was arrested by order of the viceroy. The viceroy, it was supposed, was annoyed at the Committee for keeping its ships out of the river. From prison Ayew smuggled out a letter. If he did not confess, he wrote, "I shall be beaten to death". On 4 November he wrote to Sir George with news from inside: the viceroy was about to order the hong merchants to have the ships begin unloading within three days, and if they did not, Ayew's own head would be cut off. He was a prisoner, and still he was sending the British the news they needed. Then the case went to Beijing, and the emperor took it in hand. The imperial order told the viceroy to test whether Ayew was a Christian, in the most direct way possible: "Moreover order him to tread over the Cross." Christianity had been banned in China for nearly a century, and treading on a cross or a holy image was a test Qing officials used to prove a man had given it up. Ayew declared his loyalty to the religion of his ancestors, and he trampled the Cross. It did not save him. He was transported to Ili. Ili was the far northwestern frontier, in what is now Xinjiang, thousands of miles from Canton, where the empire sent the men it wanted out of the way. The Committee paid for the upkeep of Ayew and his family, five thousand dollars that year alone. The Company's silver dollars were Spanish coin, the currency of the whole China trade. Money was something. It would not bring Ayew home. The message to every Chinese who worked for the foreigners was impossible to miss. The British could stop their trade and start it again. The man who carried their letters could disappear to the edge of the world.

And the court had not finished with Sir George. The man who wrote the Company's Chinese letters knew he was in danger. The Committee's translator, the missionary, warned them in writing that the duties of Chinese translator "are attended with considerable personal hazard." Translating a letter to the emperor, one that accused the local government, would bring him suffering from the Chinese, he wrote, long after the present quarrel was over. He reminded them that the local government had persecuted and revenged itself on translators before, and he named two cases, a man called Flint and a priest. Flint was a Company man who in 1759 had sailed north to complain to the emperor about the Canton trade, and spent three years in a Chinese prison for it. After a long consultation the Committee told him that they alone would be responsible for anything done on their authority. When the blow came, though, it did not fall on the missionary. It fell on Sir George. On 3 March 1815 the Committee got hold of copies of two secret papers: a memorial the viceroy had sent to the emperor on 30 November 1814, while the year's disputes were still unsettled, and the viceroy's orders to the senior merchants carrying the emperor's reply. A memorial was a written report to the throne; the emperor answered in his own hand or through his inner council. The emperor's instructions told the viceroy to open a secret inquiry into Sir George. And Jiaqing remembered him. He recalled the boy from 1793. He was youthful and cunning then, the emperor said, "and on the way home he made careful maps of the terrain of our mountains and rivers." "I fear that before long he will cause trouble." The order as it reached the Company called him a man who "from a youth was artful as an Imposter," and who knew the state of the interior far too well. The emperor said this foreigner, who understood Chinese, was leading the English astray, and "apprehended that in time it will occasion disturbance." The viceroy was told not to expel him and let him go home. Instead it was "proper to pluck out his errors or slips and contrive to remove him to some other place, where he may be guarded against and kept under controul." Read that again: not expelled, removed somewhere and kept under guard. The same order passed on something else the emperor had heard: that the debts owed by Chinese to Europeans had very much increased of late years. The Committee wrote in its minutes that if there were any chance of the government acting on the order, they would have to get Sir George to safety at once, and pull every British subject out of Chinese reach. That the Canton government did not use its new imperial licence, they wrote, owed nothing to any sense of justice to foreigners; it was a conviction that such measures would have the most serious consequences. And then the hong merchants did something quietly brave. In answer to the viceroy's order, they certified to the customs superintendent that "the said foreigner" had "always remained quietly in his department, observing the laws." They added that there were no traces of his ever having led foreigners into improper acts. The customs superintendent, known to the British as the Hoppo, was the emperor's own man at Canton, sent from Beijing to collect the duties of the trade. The merchants had stood up for him. But after that edict, some of them warned their friends in the British factory that Sir George should not go with the next British embassy to Beijing. He went anyway. So by the spring of 1815, the boy who had charmed the Qianlong Emperor had become, in the eyes of Qianlong's son, a dangerous man. He had done exactly what made him valuable to the British: he had learned the language, read the laws, and written to officials in their own words. To Beijing, those were the very reasons not to trust him.

In the same year that the emperor was asking how to be rid of Sir George, the missionary finished something that made himself impossible to do without. He had come to Canton in 1807 to learn Chinese, with secret help from a Chinese Catholic who came to his rooms every day. The Company's directors had once refused him passage on their ships. In 1809 the Company hired him as its Chinese translator, and the salary let him stay. He had also been translating the Bible on the side, quietly, and his Chinese New Testament was finished in 1813, which was rather more than the Company had hired him for. What he finished was the first part of his dictionary of the Chinese language. It was built on the great Kangxi Dictionary of 1716, compiled under the Qianlong Emperor's grandfather, which contained forty thousand different characters. Chinese has no alphabet. Each character stands for a word or a part of one, and a dictionary has to be ordered by the shapes of the characters, by a set of a little over two hundred root elements called radicals. It followed the Kangxi Dictionary's order, character by character, with the meanings, the sounds and example sentences in English. His first volume ran to nearly a thousand oversize pages, and it was still only the first of nine planned installments. The entry for the character meaning to study went on for a full thirty-nine pages of explanation. The Company had its own press at Canton, which printed his translations of the court's papers by order of the Select Committee. The Company paid to print the dictionary too, on that same press. The full run would likely cost up to twenty guineas. That is not a book you buy on a whim. A guinea was a gold coin worth a pound and a shilling. In Britain, a leading review called it "the most important work in Chinese literature that has yet reached Europe." Think about what that meant at Canton. Of the two Britons at Canton who could really work in Chinese, the court had just ordered an inquiry into one. The other, the quiet one with his dictionary, had made himself the Company's indispensable translator. And when London next wanted someone to speak to the emperor, he would be the one in the room.

We end where the money is. Under the Canton system, the hong merchants were collectively answerable for each other's debts to foreigners, and for the duties every foreign ship owed. So when one house failed, the others had to pay for it, and a failure could drag down the whole guild. While all of this went on, the hong merchants were sinking. That season, seven of the ten hongs were in a critical state, and the Committee was keeping them afloat. On a single day at the beginning of August 1814 the Committee advanced those seven hongs two hundred and twenty-six thousand taels to pay their duties, and on one day in January 1815 another two hundred and thirty-one thousand four hundred and eighty. Why would the British lend money to the men they bought from? Because the Company could only trade through the hongs. If they went under, it had nobody to buy its woollens or to sell it tea. So the Company did what a sensible monopoly does with a supplier it cannot replace. It kept them alive, and it kept them in its debt. The seven struggling merchants declared that in three years they had paid a million three hundred and four thousand taels, and that what they owed was now down to a million sixty-one thousand. One merchant alone declared debts of three hundred and thirty-eight thousand taels, and asked for six years to pay them. The Chinese officials wanted the debts reported to them. The Committee refused, on the ground that the publicity would endanger the stability of the merchants. The customs superintendent was impressed by these arguments, and the pressure on the junior merchants was relaxed. There was also a rumour that the merchants had put together a hundred thousand taels to bribe the officers of government. Rumours like that ran all through the Canton trade, and nobody could ever quite prove them. Some of the hongs were weathering it better than others, and Howqua's firm was one of the few that stayed sound. So look at the board as these years close. The emperor has had rebels in his palace and has blamed himself for it. The court has ordered a secret inquiry into Sir George, and has sent a linguist who served the British to the far frontier. The Company has a dictionary, a monopoly with a twenty year clock, and merchants it has to keep alive. Was this decline, or a court tightening its grip? At Canton, at least, it looked a lot like a grip. The emperor could not keep rebels out of his own palace, and he said so, in tears, to the whole empire. But the same court could reach into a prison at Canton and send a linguist to the edge of the world, and it could reach into the Company's own house and put its best man under watch. That is not the picture of a state that has stopped paying attention. It may be the picture of a state that was frightened, and that dealt with its fear by watching harder, squeezing harder, and trusting no one who stood between it and the foreigners. And that is worth remembering, because the next time the British came knocking, they would meet exactly that court. Meanwhile, far away, the British were drawing their own conclusions. The Company's men at Canton reckoned the court was in no mood for compliments from foreigners. In London, the government decided to send a second embassy to the emperor anyway. Next time, Lord Amherst's embassy sets out for Beijing, and Sir George, warned to stay away, goes with it.

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