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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 9

Do Not Come Again

The Jiaqing Emperor writes to the King of England that no more embassies are needed, while Lord Amherst's party makes its way south and its warship shoots its way past the forts at the mouth of the river to reach Canton. The episode follows the emperor and Amherst through the aftermath, as the Company's ship and comprador pay for the embassy's failure, and asks what each side took from two failed embassies. It hears the court in the emperor's letter alongside the Company, foreign observers and the British government.

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Transcript

Last time, Lord Amherst's embassy was rushed through the night to the emperor's palace outside Beijing, and arrived at dawn, dishevelled and stinking. He was put in a waiting room, and then the grandees of the court took him by the arm and pushed him toward the hall where the Jiaqing Emperor was waiting to receive him. His court dress was still somewhere behind him in the baggage, and so was the Prince Regent's letter he was meant to hand over. He said he would not go. When the officials closed in, Amherst threw off their hands and shoved the Duke in charge of him backwards. The Duke then snatched a whip from a guard and beat a path through the crowd to get him out. The emperor, angry at what he had been told, ordered the whole embassy back the way it had come, through a second night, to Tongzhou and then on to Canton. Within a few days Jiaqing found out that his escorting officials had misled him about the ambassador's misgivings, and had never told him the man had been on the road all night. In an edict, he wrote that he was ashamed to face his ministers. And that is where we pick up: with a humiliated emperor, a humiliated ambassador, and a long road south. This time we also have the published journal of Henry Ellis, kept day by day on the embassy. He was one of its three commissioners, the men who led it. I'm going to call this episode the bill. An embassy has failed, and the question is who pays for it. The emperor writes his answer to the King of England. At Canton, a ship, a Chinese servant of the Company and a row of river forts all find out what the failure costs. And by the end, each side will have drawn its own lesson from two failed embassies. They will not be the same lesson. Let's start with the man who had to put the thing in writing. The Jiaqing Emperor was the son of the old Qianlong Emperor, who had received Lord Macartney's embassy in 1793, and he had ruled in his own right since his father's death in 1799. His answer to the King of England is dated the eleventh of September 1816. Jiaqing was in his middle fifties that year, a serious, hardworking man who had spent much of his reign putting down rebellions and trying to clean up a corrupt government. It opened in the grand style of every imperial letter: the Supreme Potentate who had received the government of the world from Heaven issued a mandate to the King of England, "with which let him be thoroughly acquainted." The King of England in question was George the Third, old, blind and out of his mind, and it was his son, ruling as Prince Regent, who had sent Amherst. Then the emperor told the story as he understood it. The day of the ceremony, and every detail of what was expected, had been laid out for the ambassador in advance by his great officers. And, Jiaqing wrote, the ambassador had told those officers face to face that when the time came he would obey, and perform the kneeling and the bowing of the head to the ground. Here the sources disagree. The emperor's letter says Amherst promised, plainly and in person, that he would kowtow. The British say the ambassador and his commissioners only ever professed themselves ready to perform it as a mere ceremony, and only if the court gave up the claim that came with it. What is certain is that the men escorting the embassy told the emperor what he wanted to hear, and kept from him the ambassador's misgivings. And Jiaqing had wanted this audience. Three days before it, he had written in an edict that the Duke should be flexible, if he had to be. "Generally speaking," he told his officials, "it is better to meet with them than to send them away." While the embassy was still on its way north, he had even sent a friendly message to a boy travelling with it, asking how old he was and whether he had read any Chinese books. That is not a man looking for an excuse to slam the door. Which makes the letter he wrote afterwards all the more striking. Either way, the letter goes on to the morning itself. On the appointed day, it said, the ambassador had reached the palace and the emperor was about to enter the Hall of Audience, when the ambassador suddenly declared that he was exceedingly ill and could not move a step. Jiaqing allowed that a man might fall ill suddenly. So he sent for the two assistant ambassadors instead, and both of them declared that they were ill too. "This was rudeness, which was never exceeded." Even so, he wrote, he had not inflicted severe punishment. He had simply sent them away the same day with an order to go home. And because the ambassador had never seen him, the king's letter had never been presented. It was going back to him in the same state it had come. Now comes the careful part, and it is worth slowing down for. The emperor separated the king from his servant. The ambassador's failure to show proper veneration was the ambassador's fault. The king's own respect and obedience, Jiaqing wrote, he really did perceive. From among the presents he had kept only maps, landscape prints and portraits, and he praised the king's devotion just as if he had accepted all the rest. In return he sent the king a ruyi carved in white stone, an emblem of prosperity, with a string of court beads, two large purses and eight small ones, to show his tender and indulgent treatment. A ruyi is a short, curved sceptre, the kind of gift a Chinese emperor gave as a wish for good fortune. And then, the real message. England, the letter said, was simply too far from the central and flourishing empire. Sending an ambassador across such a distance of sea was no easy business. Besides, the ambassador could not understand or practise the rites of the Central Nation, a subject, the emperor wrote, that "involves a severe labour of the lips and tongue, to hear which is by no means pleasant." That is about as close to a sigh as an imperial edict gets. The Celestial Empire, he wrote, "does not value things brought from a distance", nor did it think of England's curious and ingenious products as rare pearls. What the emperor really commended, he wrote, was for the king to keep his own people at peace and look to his own borders. And then the sentence the whole letter had been building to: "Hereafter there is no occasion for you to send an Embassador so far, to be at the trouble, passing over mountains and crossing seas." If the king would only pour out his heart in dutiful obedience, he did not need to send to court at stated times to be counted among those who turned toward the civilising influence of China. "This Imperial Mandate is now given that you may for ever obey it." So what kind of letter is this? It is not angry with the king, and it does not threaten anyone. It is calm, it is courteous in its own terms, and it closes a door. Twenty three years earlier, Jiaqing's father had answered Macartney with a famous letter telling George the Third that China had no need of his country's manufactures. The son's letter says something simpler. Do not come again.

Now we go south to Canton, where the bill for the failure was about to come due. Canton was the one port in China where Western ships were allowed to trade, and every ship that came had to deal there with officials who answered to the emperor. The man at the top of the province was the viceroy, the governor general of Guangdong and Guangxi, and the emperor's customs chief for the port was an official the foreigners called the Hoppo. The first to feel it was a ship, the General Hewitt, an East India Company merchantman under Captain Walter Campbell. She had sailed out from England with the embassy, carrying the presents for the emperor. So to the officials at Canton, she was not just another Company ship. She was the tribute ship. She was the first to come back, arriving off Nei Lingding, an island in the estuary below Canton, on the twelfth of September. She sent to Macau for a pilot to take her up the river. Macau was the small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the estuary, and no foreign ship was meant to go up the river without a licensed Chinese pilot. On the viceroy's orders, the pilot was refused. Two weeks later, on the twenty sixth of September, a chop came down from the Hoppo. A chop was the foreigners' word for any official paper with a seal on it, from a permit to an order. This one said the General Hewitt must stay at the Second Bar, and that the embassy's two warships, the Alceste and the Lyra, must not enter the Bogue. The Bogue was the narrow mouth of the river itself, guarded by forts on both banks. The Second Bar was an anchorage inside it, still some way short of Whampoa, where foreign ships normally lay to load. Even before that chop, the ship's provisions had been stopped. To see why that hurt, remember what the Company was there for. It sent eighteen to twenty great ships to Canton every year, and brought home about thirty million pounds of tea. Tea was the whole point of the voyage, and the Company's profit on it was enormous. On the eleventh of October a mandate spelled it out. The tribute ship must remain at the Second Bar. She must keep her cargo of lead on board, and she must not begin to load tea, until the ambassador arrived. In other words, a merchant ship with a hold full of lead was being held as a pledge for the good behaviour of an embassy hundreds of miles away. The Company's business at Canton was run by a small board of its senior men, called the Select Committee. While the embassy was away, its chief was Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, and the officials told him plainly where he stood. Metcalfe, they said, "must respectfully conform to the Laws and prohibitions", and quietly wait until the ambassador came back. The Committee did not want a fight. It wrote to Captain Campbell that it relied on his prudence, and that it hardly needed to point out how real the danger of bloodshed was. Campbell's prudence lasted until the nineteenth of October. That day he made visible preparations for unmooring, unbending his sails and loading his guns. The Chinese guard boats asked him to wait. And he did wait. Then a local official, finding the captain would not be moved, took it on himself to let the ship go on up to Whampoa. Somebody, you notice, had decided that a ship at Whampoa was less trouble than a ship loading its guns at the Second Bar. She anchored at Whampoa on the twenty second of October. When the Committee wrote to ask for a permit to start loading, the Hoppo refused even to accept the letter. So now the ship was in, and still could not trade. Then an edict came from the emperor himself. The tribute ship could take on a cargo, and as a favour that cargo would be free of export duties. But she was still to stay until the ambassador came. That is the Qing state in one paragraph: generous with a favour, and absolutely firm about who grants it. In the end the Committee refused to sign any more guarantees for the ship. The Chinese merchants signed a bond instead, and the shipments were allowed again. These were the hong merchants, the handful of licensed Chinese firms through which all the foreign trade had to pass, and who answered to the officials for every foreigner they dealt with. Notice who signed. When the British would not put their names to it, Chinese merchants did. Hold on to that, because the next person to pay was Chinese too.

Every foreign firm at Canton had a comprador, a licensed Chinese agent who bought its food, hired its servants and ran its household. In the autumn of 1816, the Company's comprador was arrested, accused of having conducted the Europeans. The Committee wrote it down at once. "He has been severely beaten and tortured in a manner used towards the lowest Criminals and thrown into prison." He was not the only one. Two of the linguists were seized and treated the same way, and so was a Chinese man who had carried messages to the Committee's president that very morning. The linguists were Chinese interpreters licensed by the government, who handled every paper that passed between the foreigners and the officials, and who were held responsible for what passed through their hands. The Company's head comprador had to run and hide, with police runners out looking for him. None of this was new. Only a couple of years before, a linguist working for the Company had been seized, beaten and imprisoned, and reported to the emperor for treasonable practices. The officials could not touch the British directly. They could always reach the Chinese who worked for them. The Committee took the only stand it had. It told the officials that until the comprador was freed, it could not consider any other business whatsoever. The mandarins answered by ordering the comprador and the linguists to be beaten again. Mandarin was the foreigners' word for any Chinese official. What stopped the second beating was the merchants. They threw themselves down before the officials and stayed there, pleading for the prisoners, for half an hour. Think about that picture for a moment. The British had refused to perform the kowtow before the emperor. Now Chinese merchants lay on the ground before Chinese officials, to spare Chinese men a second beating. The comprador stayed in prison for thirty five days. He was released on the thirtieth of November. The Committee recorded that he was much disfigured, and "evidently suffers great pain from the severe treatment he endured." He was a man whose job was to buy the Company's food. He had no part in the quarrel between an emperor and a king, and he paid for it with his body. It would not be the last time a Chinese man at Canton paid for what the British did.

Murray Maxwell
Murray Maxwell. Thomas Charles Wageman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And while the comprador sat in prison, the embassy's warship was running out of patience outside the river. The Alceste was a Royal Navy frigate, and her captain, Murray Maxwell, had carried Amherst out from England. After landing the embassy in the north, the Alceste and the little Lyra had gone exploring the coasts of Korea and the Ryukyu Islands, and then come south to wait for the ambassador at Canton. A frigate was a fast, single decked warship, the cruiser of its day. Maxwell was a veteran of the long naval war against France, and he had already fought the Alceste in battle in the Mediterranean. The order was clear: the warships were not to enter the Bogue. When Maxwell pressed to bring his ship up the river, a representative of the viceroy answered by taunting him with the news that Amherst had been sent away from the capital without an audience. After a week of waiting, Maxwell decided he would force his way up the river without a pass. He had a precedent in mind. In 1793 a royal warship, the Lion, had been allowed inside the Bogue, and Maxwell meant to keep that privilege, so he determined to go in. The Lion was the warship that had carried Macartney to China. A courtesy once shown to Macartney had become, in a British captain's mind, a right. Off Chuanbi, at the entrance to the narrows, a Chinese commander sent a man out to tell the Alceste to anchor, or a gun would be fired. The guns were fired. But they had no shot in them, so Maxwell took them as a compliment, and politely returned a salute. Then real shot began to come, from the boats and from the forts. Maxwell answered with a single shot, fired over the Chinese commander's boat merely for the honour of the flag, and it silenced the whole flotilla. Further up, the forts at the Bogue opened a brisk cannonade from ninety or a hundred guns. One shot fell on board the Alceste, and two lodged in her bows. Maxwell kept coming. When the frigate was within half musket shot of the forts, she poured in a broadside. The lights on shore went out, and the forts on the starboard side fell silent. Her guns were thirty two pounders, and that broadside silenced a fort and reportedly killed forty seven Chinese soldiers. The Alceste did not lose a single man. She sailed on and anchored at the Second Bar. Let that sink in for a moment, because people in Britain certainly would. The embassy had been sent away from the emperor's door. The warship had refused to stop, shot its way past the emperor's forts, and anchored exactly where it wanted to be. Now watch how Canton handled it. The viceroy's answer was that the frigate's commander had been too impetuous, and that the orders to let her into the river had simply been sent too late to stop the forts from opening fire. The Committee had already judged, from the merchants' conduct just after the firing, that the viceroy meant to hush the affair up and never admit that guns had been fired at all. It thought he had gone beyond his authority. And then came the strangest scene of the whole business. The hong merchants came in a body to the Company, sent by the viceroy, to offer their congratulations on Captain Maxwell's conduct. A cannonade, a broadside, and then congratulations. Saving face, it turns out, can run in any direction you need it to.

William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst
William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst. Arthur William Devis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

All this time the embassy itself had been making its way south, overland and by river and canal, the length of China, and it reached Canton at the turn of the new year. It went by the Grand Canal to the Yangzi, up through the lakes and rivers of the interior, over a mountain pass into Guangdong, and down to the coast: about four months on the road. For a party that had come to see the emperor and been refused, it was a very long and very scenic way out. One ceremony was left: handing over the emperor's letter. Amherst was in his early forties, a peer whose only diplomatic post before this had been as envoy to the court of Sicily. He had come all this way for an audience with the emperor, and what he would get instead was a handover from the viceroy. The officials started by hinting that here was a chance to win back the emperor's favour, and proposed that the ambassador kneel to receive it. The proposal was rejected. The ambassador pledged only to bow, and the mandarins could perform their own ceremony to the letter in a separate room. Then the officials trimmed it down to the bare handing over: no kneeling on one side, and no prostration on the other. Then came the argument over chairs. The officials wanted only the ambassador and his commissioners seated on the British side, while on the Chinese side four mandarins would sit besides the viceroy and the provincial governor. In the waiting days, one member of the embassy went shopping in China Street, where he found the goods made for the European market, better for their materials and workmanship than for anything typically Chinese. The shopkeepers and merchants there spoke a peculiar English of their own, built on the idiom of Chinese and spoken with Chinese pronunciation. It was the pidgin of the China coast, the working language of the whole trade. On the fourth of January, a Portuguese translation of an imperial edict to the viceroy arrived from Macau. It laid the whole blame for the embassy's dismissal on the ambassador and his commissioners. The viceroy was to get them out as soon as possible. But first he was to give them an entertainment, as hospitality required, and make the ambassador a speech that amounted to a reprimand. In the edicts the British had seen before, the blame had fallen on the emperor's own officials. In this one it had been shifted entirely onto the British, who were treated as culprits. The British were not going to sit still for a public telling off. But they could not say how they knew it was coming, without endangering the people who had passed them the edict. So they sent word that nothing should be said about what had happened at Yuanmingyuan, the palace where the audience had failed. And they let the mandarins know that the ambassador's manner would be governed entirely by the viceroy's. Any offensive word would be answered in a way that would be publicly disagreeable to both sides. On the chairs, they insisted on equality, and the Chinese gave way. Their side would be the viceroy, the governor and the Hoppo. Rather than admit as many Englishmen as they had wanted mandarins, the Chinese withdrew their extra men, and the seats on the left, the more honourable places, were left to the British. On the seventh of January, at about one in the afternoon, they met in the principal hall of a temple. The viceroy took the letter from an attendant, in a hollow bamboo case. He held it up on both hands, level with his head, and without a word he gave it to the ambassador. It was wrapped in yellow silk, and Amherst received it with a deep bow. Throughout the meeting, the viceroy's manners betrayed "extreme embarrassment and constraint". Afterwards they moved to a smaller room for a short conversation. For a moment the viceroy tried to take the high tone the British had expected, and when it was resisted at once, he dropped it. But one exchange was recorded, and it is worth hearing. The viceroy said, "You depend upon Trade, We do not". Amherst answered that England depended on trade no more than China did, and that the trade of Canton did China every bit as much good as it did Britain. Two empires, each sure the other needed the trade more. That argument is going to run through the rest of this season, and well beyond it. Back in private, Amherst opened the bamboo case. Its ends were pasted over with paper stamped with a Chinese seal, and inside was the letter, in Chinese and in Latin, on a sheet of yellow paper folded many times. Robert Morrison, the embassy's interpreter, copied the Chinese and translated it himself. Comparing it with the Latin, he found that the high tone of superiority, and the contempt toward the king and his ambassador, had in places been left out of the Latin or softened. He was a Protestant missionary who had lived at Canton for nearly ten years, learning a language the Qing did not allow foreigners to be taught. The Latin had been supplied by a missionary, and whatever he meant by it, the Committee did not want London misled by a well meant softening. It kept only the blunt translation, from the Chinese. So the letter you heard at the start of this episode is the blunt version, the one the British chose to keep.

There was one more piece of business, and it was personal. George Staunton was the Company's chief at Canton, and Amherst had raised him to second rank in the embassy. As a boy of twelve he had been there with Macartney in 1793, and now he was the embassy's own eyewitness to what had happened then. He had inherited his father's baronetcy by now, so everyone called him Sir George. On the road to Beijing it had been Sir George who argued hardest against the kowtow, and in the end Amherst had taken his opinion as final. Back at Canton he was president of the Select Committee again, and on the eighteenth of January 1817 he wrote a minute into its records. A minute here meant a formal statement, entered in the Committee's books so that it would stand on the record. Amherst's report to the Committee, he noted, had laid special stress on the opinion Sir George had given him about the ceremony. In other words, the ambassador's own account put the decision at Sir George's door. And Sir George wanted the record to show why he had made it. The story, as he told it, went like this. The ambassador, with his fellow commissioner agreeing, had brought himself to accept the ceremony, as long as Sir George did not think it would harm the Company. Amherst had come to that because of encouragements from the Duke if he gave way, and certain mysterious threats from other quarters about what would happen to the British and their trade if he did not. So the question had landed on Sir George, and it was no longer just about whether the embassy would be received. He had felt bound to reconsider it with the utmost caution. The Duke's encouragements, he wrote, were easily disposed of. They had not been freely offered, but drawn out by the British themselves, from a man who was plainly anxious and personally interested to get his way. And the Duke had already tried to get it by intimidation and gross insults: holding a conference with the ambassador standing, asserting loudly that the emperor was the sovereign of all nations, and threatening immediate dismissal. All he had offered was a gracious reception, and his own help and friendship afterwards, "promises, which it was easy to make and still more easy to violate". Even in courts much less false and corrupt than that of China, Sir George added, nobody would have relied on them. The threats were harder to wave away, and Sir George admitted they made him uneasy. He could not be sure that the disappointed pride and careless ignorance of a despot would not lead to some hasty revenge on the English and their trade. But against that he set the self interest of every provincial official, and the cooler judgment of the court's ministers, through whom the emperor would have to act. And then the heart of it. The worst that refusing could do, he wrote, was probably temporary, while submitting to intimidation, "being a dereliction of principle was certain and permanent". To have given way at that moment would have meant abandoning Macartney's precedent and adopting, to a large degree, the precedent of the Dutch. A Dutch embassy had reached Beijing at the start of 1795, performed every kowtow that was asked of it, and gone home with nothing. That, Sir George wrote, "would have been to have purchased degradation and disgrace without even the shew of an equivalent". And the real stake, for him, was not Beijing at all. It was Canton. The British had built up at Canton a confidence in what he called the firm adherence to principle of the British character, and that confidence, he wrote, was "our best ally" in every quarrel with the Chinese. Lose it, he warned, and the local officials would settle into a systematic oppression that, the way British feeling now ran, could only end in a rupture between the two countries. Keep that sentence somewhere you can find it again. The man who counted himself his country's leading expert on China was already picturing how the whole relationship might break. And he was also, of course, defending himself. Amherst had taken his opinion as final, and the embassy had come home without its audience.

The embassy sailed for home in the Alceste, and never got there in her. She was wrecked on a reef in the straits between Sumatra and Borneo, and the party had to reach home in another ship. By the time Amherst was back, Britain had already made up its mind about what had happened. Amherst himself could not get over the difference between the two reigns: the decorous welcome the old emperor had given Macartney, and the way his son's court had treated him. He had come away with a low opinion of Jiaqing's hold on his own country, too. The reign, he reported, had been "frequently and very lately disturbed by insurrections of his subjects." Some of it was simple scorn. The Times said the embassy had failed in the objects for which the British government had prepared it and sent it out. But the Quarterly Review saw a victory. The national character, it said, had been upheld by Lord Amherst's refusal "to comply with a disgusting and degrading ceremony." And it drew a lesson from it. "The less that is conceded to this pusillanimous and insolent people, the more will their fears for the consequence begin to operate." Pusillanimous means cowardly. That is the idea this episode leaves behind in Britain, and it is worth saying plainly. Concede nothing, and China will give way out of fear. And the Alceste's broadside at the Bogue looked, to anyone who wanted to see it that way, like proof. It was not yet a policy. It was a mood, and it had found its first readers. Not everyone shared it. A critic in the Edinburgh Review thought the kowtow did not appear much more humiliating than other court ceremonies. And he urged something more radical than a better embassy: let the China trade, as soon as good faith and the laws allowed, be made free. Free, here, meant free of the East India Company, which still held a monopoly of all British trade with China. Hold on to that one too. It will come back louder, and it will win. As for Amherst himself, the failure did him little harm. In 1823 he was sent out to govern British India as governor general.

Napoleon
Napoleon. Jacques-Louis David, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the voyage home, the embassy called at Saint Helena, the speck of rock in the South Atlantic where the British held Napoleon prisoner, and Amherst was taken to meet him. Napoleon talked the embassy over with his doctor, Barry Edward O'Meara, and he did not take Britain's side. O'Meara was an Irish surgeon from the Royal Navy, appointed to look after the most famous prisoner in the world. Napoleon had been on the island since late 1815, after his final defeat at Waterloo, and he had a great deal of time to talk. "You have no right to send a man to China to tell them, that they must perform certain ceremonies, because such are practised in England," Napoleon said. O'Meara replied that it did not much matter whether Britain had the friendship of the Chinese. Britain had the Royal Navy. Napoleon was not impressed. "It would be the worst thing you have done for a number of years, to go to war with an immense empire like China," he said. "You would doubtless, at first, succeed," he went on, "but you would teach them their own strength." They would build a fleet, he said, "and, in the course of time, defeat you." A prisoner on a rock in the Atlantic, handing his jailers a forecast about the other side of the world. I'll leave it to you to decide how much of it came true, and when. So what did each side take from two failed embassies? The court took the view that these people could not understand the rites and need not come again, and its viceroy at Canton told them to their faces that they depended on the trade and China did not. The British took two lessons, and they pulled against each other. One said that firmness, even force, would make China bend. The other said the problem was the Company, and the cure was free trade. Notice how lopsided that is. The court came away believing the problem had been dealt with by sending the British home. The British came away believing the problem was the court, and arguing only about which tool to use on it. Neither lesson was about to be tested in Beijing. Both were going to be tested at Canton, and in the waters around it.

Because while emperors and ambassadors argued about kneeling, something else was changing in those waters. It was opium. Opium had been banned in China for years. The Company grew it in Bengal under its own monopoly, sold it at auction in Calcutta, and left it to private traders to carry it to China. But there was another opium, grown in Malwa, in the princely states of western India beyond the Company's control, and it was cheaper. The port where it came in was Macau, and Macau's Portuguese officials had found a way to profit from it. The man the Company saw behind it was Miguel de Arriaga, the Portuguese crown judge at Macau, and the most powerful man in the settlement. He set a charge of forty dollars a chest on the buyers, as a fund to be shared out among the local officers of government. On two thousand five hundred chests a year, that came to a hundred thousand dollars. The dollars were Spanish silver dollars, the coin the whole China trade ran on. The Committee at Canton kept count. The season before, it reckoned, China had consumed eleven hundred piculs of opium not grown in British territory. A picul was the standard weight of the trade, about as much as one man could carry on a pole, a little over a hundred and thirty pounds. And in the season of 1817, the Malwa opium landed at Macau alone came to twelve hundred piculs. For the Company, that was a rival eating into its market. For China, it was something worse: more opium, and cheaper opium, coming in through a back door. Nobody at the time could see where it was heading. But this, more than any embassy, is the change that will remake the trade. And in Beijing, the Jiaqing Emperor did not have long left. He would die in 1820. His heir was the son who, in 1813, had fought off the rebels who broke into the Forbidden City. Next time, that son is on the throne, and he means to stamp out the opium trade. We'll see what that order does. And we'll meet the hong merchant who has to answer for every foreign ship in the river.

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