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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 1

The Lord at the City Gate

For nearly eighty years every Western trader in China has done business only at Canton, only through licensed Chinese merchants, and never with an official; in 1834 Britain sends Lord Napier, a Scottish naval officer under orders to deal with Canton's viceroy as an equal, and the viceroy Lu Kun refuses to read his letter. The episode follows the two men through a summer of standoffs that ends with British frigates shooting their way up the Pearl River, and asks why neither side would bend over what looked like a question of manners. It leans on scholars, with the Qing court heard in the viceroy's and the customs chief's orders and the British in their own dispatches.

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Transcript

[previously] If you were with us last season, you left Lord Napier at sea, sailing for China with orders and instincts that pointed in opposite directions. And if you are just joining us, welcome. That voyage is where this season begins, and you need to know only a little about it. Napier sailed from Plymouth on the seventh of February 1834, on the twenty eight gun frigate Andromache, with his wife, Eliza, and two of their daughters. His instructions were cautious. Nothing must be done, they said, "to shock their prejudices or to excite their fears." Palmerston, the foreign secretary, told him not to negotiate with the Chinese officials at all, but to write home and wait. Somewhere past Madeira, Napier wrote himself a very different reminder: "must use force, not menace it". He reached Macau on the fifteenth of July 1834. At Canton the governor general was Lu Kun, a man who had earned his high post there through skill, and who would soon be locked in a head to head with Napier. This is the story of what happened when the two of them met, or rather, when they never quite did.

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

Welcome to the first episode of a new season. Over the next thirty years, China would fight two wars against Britain and lose both, open its ports to foreign trade under treaties it never wanted, and see a foreign army burn the emperor's palaces outside Beijing. In those same years a civil war called the Taiping rebellion would tear through the richest provinces of the empire and kill people in the tens of millions, more than any other war of the century anywhere on earth. The Qing dynasty would survive all of it, just. But the dynasty that came out the other side was not the one that went in. We are going to follow a handful of people through those thirty years, so let me introduce them. Lin Zexu, an official famous for his honesty, whom the emperor would send to Canton to stamp out the opium trade once and for all. Qiying, a Manchu nobleman of the imperial clan, who would be handed the job of making peace with the British, and of living with the peace he made. Hong Xiuquan, a village schoolteacher from the countryside near Canton who failed the state examinations again and again, and came to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. His cousin Hong Rengan, who would spend years among the missionaries of Hong Kong before joining him, and try to turn a rebellion into a modern state. And Zeng Guofan, a Confucian scholar and official from Hunan, a province in the middle of China, who would raise the army that saved the dynasty, and change it forever in the saving. None of them is in this first episode, or only barely. This episode belongs to two other men, and to a summer when an argument about manners turned into gunfire. This season stands on the work of Hosea Ballou Morse, Julia Lovell and Stephen Platt. And this episode also leans on the memories of William Hunter, an American who was at Canton that summer. To see why Lord Napier was going to Canton at all, we have to begin a few months before he got there, with a charter running out in London. First, though, you need to know how trade with China worked in those days, because it worked like nothing else in the world. Since 1757 the Qing emperors had allowed Western ships to trade at only one port, Canton, in the far south of the empire. Foreign ships anchored at Whampoa, a dozen miles downriver, and their cargoes came up to the city in Chinese boats. The foreign merchants themselves lived and worked in the factories, a row of buildings on a strip of riverbank outside the city walls, part office, part warehouse, part home. They were not allowed inside the city. They were not supposed to bring their wives. And when the trading season ended, they were expected to leave Canton and wait out the summer at Macau, the little Portuguese town at the mouth of the Pearl River. They could trade only with the hong merchants, a small group of Chinese merchant houses licensed by the state, who bought their cargoes, sold them their tea, and answered to the officials for everything the foreigners did. And no foreigner dealt with an official. If a foreigner had something to say to the government, he wrote it as a petition, and a hong merchant carried it in for him. That arrangement is usually called the Canton system, and for generations both sides had made a great deal of money out of it. There was one more thing the whole trade turned on, though nobody at Canton liked to say it out loud. Britain bought enormous quantities of Chinese tea, and for a long time paid for it largely in silver, because China wanted little that Britain made. The answer the British found was opium, grown in British India, much of it under the Company's own control, and sold at auction in Calcutta to private merchants. The emperors had banned opium. So the private merchants carried it to the China coast in their own ships and sold it to Chinese smugglers, and the silver they were paid helped buy the Company's tea. The Company kept the drug off its own ships and its hands, officially, clean. It did not need to touch it. Keep that in the back of your mind through this episode. It is the thing nobody in the story is talking about, and soon it will be the only thing anybody talks about. On the British side, for all those years, the trade had belonged to one company. The East India Company held a monopoly on Britain's trade with China. No other British merchant could legally bring a cargo of tea home from Canton. At Canton the Company's affairs were run by a Select Committee with a chief at its head, and every British subject in the port, including the merchants from India, was under its control. That suited the Chinese side very well. If an Englishman made trouble, there was one man who answered for it. But back in Britain the monopoly had powerful enemies. The manufacturers of England and Scotland saw the Company as the main thing standing between them and the Chinese market, especially for their cotton textiles. Between February and July of 1830, free trade organizations swamped the House of Commons with nearly two hundred petitions demanding that the monopoly be brought to an end. The loudest free traders at Canton were the private merchants, the opium houses among them, and they wanted the Company gone and a king's officer in its place. Their favourite argument was the Americans, who traded at Canton freely, ship by ship, with no company over them at all. The agitation worked. In the autumn of 1833 the news reached Canton: the Company's monopoly would not be renewed when its charter expired the following spring. It came to an end on the twenty second of April 1834. At Canton, the people with the most to lose from that news were not British. Howqua, the senior hong merchant, was by most accounts one of the richest men in the world, and much of his business had been done with the Company. He saw it coming plainly enough: "I fear we shall be overwhelmed with British goods of every description on the opening of the trades". The hong merchants went to the viceroy at Canton with a warning. Under the Company, they said, every British subject was under the control of one chief, and it was because everything came back to his single responsibility that there had been tranquillity for so long. Now the trade would go on in smaller ships, with merchants free from all control. "If they trade individually, affairs will not be subject to one control, and if not under one control, responsibility will be nowhere." They gave the viceroy a number to think about. Every year, fifty to sixty ships came from England and India, manned by several thousand sailors "of a fierce and intractable disposition". Without someone to restrain them, there would surely be trouble with the government's orders, and if the trade were cut off over it, where would the advantage be to anyone? So they asked the viceroy to order the Company's chief to write home to his king, and make sure that when the Company was gone, Britain would still send a chief to Canton to manage its merchants and ships. The viceroy's answer, in a mandate of the sixteenth of January, was that the whole story appeared to be only rumour. If it turned out to be true, the merchants could tell the English chief what they had suggested. The Company's men at Canton read the hong merchants' worry with a sharp eye. In their own record they noted that the end of the monopoly would actually suit the hong merchants as traders, since by combining among themselves they could dictate their prices to a crowd of separate British adventurers. What frightened them was the brawls and disturbances that were bound to come, for which they would be held responsible, with no means at all of preventing them. Hold on to that worry, because it turned out to be exactly right, and exactly wrong. Exactly right, because Britain did send a chief. The British government created a new post, the chief superintendent of trade, to take over from the Company's Select Committee in speaking for the British at Canton. And exactly wrong, because the new chief would not be anything like the old one. He would have no power to compel the free traders to do anything, which also meant he would have no power to withhold their trade from the Chinese. The most qualified man in Britain for the job did not get it. It went instead to one William Napier, a captain of the Royal Navy with no experience of trade or of diplomacy. Napier was a Scottish lord, and he was thrilled. "The Empire of China is my own," he wrote triumphantly in his diary. So the hong merchants had asked for a chief they could hold responsible, and Britain was sending them a lord who did not intend to speak to them at all.

Napier did not linger at Macau. He sailed into Canton at two in the morning on the twenty fifth of July 1834, and by daybreak the Union flag was flying high over the old East India Company factory. The way he got there mattered. Every foreigner needed a permit from the Chinese authorities to come up the river to Canton, and Napier had not waited for one. The factories stood in a row facing the river, thirteen of them, each with its nation's flag on a pole out front, and an open square between them and the water. He came up in a boat belonging to a country ship, the Fort William. A country ship was a privately owned British vessel trading between India and China, outside the Company. The hong merchant who had stood security for the Fort William was held responsible for the man she had carried. He was taken into the city and imprisoned. That is how the system worked. Someone always answered. It was just never the foreigner. Napier went straight to work, and he did it his own way. He at once wrote a letter to the viceroy, telling him of his arrival. When the hong merchants came to call, they were courteously dismissed, with word that Lord Napier would be communicating with the viceroy directly. Within two days he had broken six long established rules of the trade between Britain and China. He had come without a permit. He had come as an official, not a merchant. He had refused to go through the hong merchants. And he meant to put his own letter into the viceroy's hands. The viceroy was Lu Kun. A viceroy, or governor general, ruled two provinces at once, here Guangdong and its neighbour Guangxi, and he outranked the governor of each. Lu Kun was a seasoned official near the end of a long career, and Canton was one of the most delicate posts in the empire, since it was where the foreigners were. Napier's disregard for the rules did not endear him to Lu Kun, who began trying to edge him back into line. What followed was a war of words. In the Chinese documents, the name Napier was written with characters that meant, roughly, laboriously vile. Chinese writers matched the sound of a foreign name with characters that had their own meanings, and an official could choose flattering ones or ugly ones. Napier, for his part, came to call Lu Kun "a presumptuous savage". Watching all this from the factories was an American who had come back to Canton the year before, after a voyage of a hundred and thirty one days. Looking back on it later, he did not take Napier's side.

Carrying the letter to the city gate was Astell, one of Napier's staff, with orders to put it into the hands of an official and no one else. He was to avoid any communication through the hong merchants, which might afterwards be represented as an official channel of communication and a precedent. In other words, if Astell let a hong merchant carry the letter even once, the British would never be rid of the hong merchants again. So picture the scene. A British gentleman standing at the gate of a Chinese city with a sealed letter, waiting for an official to come out. He waited at the gate for over three hours, and suffered much indignity there. Officials came. To one after the other he tendered the letter, which each in turn refused to receive. Towards the end of the wait one more officer arrived, and he refused it three separate times. Howqua was there too, trying to find a way through. He asked that he and the officer might take the letter in together. That was refused too. It was Astell who would not allow it, insisting that the officer alone should take the letter, and so an opportunity was lost. It is worth asking why a letter mattered so much. Chinese official writing had its own grammar of rank. A superior sent orders down, an inferior sent petitions up, and only equals exchanged letters. That is why the rules gave a foreigner the petition, and never the letter. Napier's paper was a letter, and he refused the petition form outright. To accept it would have been to admit that the king of England's man stood level with the emperor's viceroy. No official at that gate was going to be the one who did that.

Lu Kun answered quickly, and he answered the old way. The viceroy issued his orders to the hong merchants, to be passed on by them to Lord Napier for his guidance. He did not address Napier at all. He addressed the merchants, and told them what to tell the barbarian headman. The word barbarian, in Qing documents of this kind, was the standard term for any foreigner, and the British resented it bitterly. The order is worth hearing at some length, because it sets out exactly how the Qing saw the whole business. First, the customs officers who had let Napier come up the river would be tried for neglect of duty and punished. Napier himself would be shown consideration, because he was presumed to be ignorant of the law. He could finish his inquiry into the conditions of trade, but then he must go back to Macau at once, and he must not come to Canton again without a permit. Then Lu Kun set out the principle behind it all, in words that any official in the empire could have written. The empire appointed officials, he wrote, "civilian to rule the people, military to intimidate the wicked", but "the petty affairs of commerce are to be directed by the merchants themselves. The officials are not concerned with such matters." If the barbarians wanted any regulation changed, the hong merchants were to consult together and send a joint statement to the customs superintendent and the viceroy, who would say yes or no. If any new question came up, it had to wait for a respectful memorial to the emperor, and the emperor's answer. A memorial was a formal report to the throne. Everything of weight in the Qing empire travelled to Beijing as a memorial, and came back as an edict. And then the line that answered the letter. "The great ministers of the Celestial Empire are not permitted to have private intercourse by letter with outside barbarians. If the said barbarian headman throws in private letters, I, the Viceroy, will not at all receive or look at them." As for the factories by the river, they were a place of temporary residence. The foreigners were permitted "to eat, sleep, buy, and sell in the factories." That was what they were for. Lu Kun reminded everyone that the English had traded at Canton for a hundred years and more under the approved regulations. Why should anything change because the English had changed the way they ran their own affairs at home? The order had teeth, but they were not pointed at Napier. If the barbarian headman did not obey, the hong merchants would be severely dealt with, and the interpreters would be in peril of their lives. That was the logic of the Canton system in one sentence. The foreigner was out of reach, so you squeezed the Chinese who stood next to him. And here is the trouble. To Lu Kun this was mercy and good order. To Napier it was an insult, and a threat to men who had done nothing wrong. Neither was lying.

Napier had made up his mind to remain at Canton. So on the fourth of August the hong merchants received an order from the Hoppo, which carried a communication from the viceroy re-enacting the most important of the existing regulations for the control of foreign trade. The Hoppo was the emperor's own superintendent of customs at Canton, appointed from Beijing, and the official the foreign merchants dealt with most. Notice that nothing new was being invented here. These were the old rules, read out again, slowly and loudly, for the benefit of a man who had not been listening. From now on, all boats were to stop at the customs stations to be searched for arms and contraband goods. The foreign merchants were not permitted to bring musketry or cannon up to Canton, and soldiers who let one slip through would be brought to trial and punished. "The barbarians are not permitted to bring foreign women clandestinely up to Canton". If they dared to defy it, their trade would be stopped at once, and the women sent back to Macau by force. That rule was not abstract. Napier's own family was at Macau. The hong merchants were to keep the foreigners lodged in their factories under diligent control, and not let them go in and out as they pleased, in case they made arrangements with traitors among the local people. And the foreigners were not to petition in person. "The barbarians are not permitted to presume to go to the city gate and present petitions themselves." That one was aimed straight at Astell's three hours at the gate. There was even a kindness, of a sort, re-enacted from an order of 1816. Since the foreigners were closely confined to the factories, it was feared they might fall sick, so they were permitted to go out to a temple across the river and to the flower gardens to stroll and take some relaxation. They could go three times a month, on the eighth, the eighteenth and the twenty eighth days, and no more than ten in a party. The linguists who went with them had to report at the customs houses as they passed, and have everyone back by sunset. They were not allowed to drink wine and make trouble, or to stay out overnight, or to wander about the villages and markets near the city. The linguists were Chinese interpreters licensed by the government, who handled the paperwork of the trade and spoke a trading pidgin rather than real English. These were all existing regulations, but reciting them in a special order caused no small sensation among the Chinese who worked for the foreigners. Within the next few days the crews of the sampans attached to the factories all ran away, and many of the office staff disappeared. Sampans were the small boats that ferried people and goods along the river. Without them, the factories were cut off from the shipping downriver. On the sixteenth of August the hong merchants, of their own accord, stopped doing business with the British. It is worth noticing who made the first move. Not the viceroy. The merchants, who knew whose heads were nearest the block.

There was one more attempt at talking, and it was a disaster before anyone said a word. On the twenty third of August, three officials came to the British factory to meet Napier on the viceroy's behalf, among them the prefect of Canton. This was not the viceroy. But it was officials, in person, and that was more than Napier had been given so far. In a formal Chinese meeting, the arrangement of the chairs announced the rank of everyone in them before anybody spoke. The seat of honour faced south, and the guests and inferiors sat to the sides. The Chinese side set out the chairs first, with the places of honour for the three officials alone, and the British to one side, with their backs to the portrait of their own king. Lord Napier rearranged the sitting. He brought in a table, and placed himself at it as the host, receiving his guests. The hong merchants spent two hours trying to persuade him to put the chairs back. He would not. The officials, meanwhile, would not come in until the chairs were settled. They arrived two hours late, having waited to see who won the battle of the chairs. If you are tempted to laugh, and it is funny, remember what was really being fought over. Who sat at the head of that table was the whole question. Was this man a merchant chief, who took orders through the hong merchants? Or was he an officer of a king who stood level with the emperor? The chairs said what neither side could say out loud. When the talk finally began, the officials had the viceroy's questions to put to him. To the first, he produced his commission as Chief Superintendent of British Trade for them to inspect. And to the question of when he would go back to Macau, he informed them that he would consult his own convenience. And in full assurance that he was winning, he publicly reprimanded the officials who had come to see him on the viceroy's behalf. And so he made both the viceroy and his officials lose face, and another opportunity was lost. The next day the prefect of Canton was removed from office. Napier had won the battle of the chairs. Somebody else paid for it.

Now Lu Kun had to decide what kind of viceroy he was going to be. He was answerable to Beijing for the peace of Canton, and for the revenue of its trade. A barbarian headman who sat in the factories, refused to leave, and lectured imperial officials was a failure he would have to explain. A Qing official was judged on whether his province stayed quiet. Trouble with foreigners, whoever started it, was trouble on his record. And then Napier went over his head, to the people of Canton. On the twenty sixth of August he issued a public notice, lithographed in Chinese, giving his own view of the state of affairs. He had it handed out, and it listed the sins of the local government. To a Qing official there could hardly be anything worse. A foreigner was appealing to the emperor's subjects against the emperor's viceroy. Napier's view of the contest fit in a sentence: "Act with firmness and spirit, and the emperor will punish the viceroy." On the second and third of September, the hong merchants worked out a compromise with the British merchant William Jardine and put it to the viceroy: Napier would go back quietly to Macau, and the trade would open again. At one point he was inclined to agree to a way out of the standoff, but he was talked out of it by the governor and other high officials, and the trade stayed stopped. By the second of September 1834, Napier's defiance had driven Lu Kun to stop the British trade and blockade the British factory. He ordered all the compradors, interpreters and hired servants withdrawn from the foreign factories. A comprador was the Chinese steward who ran a foreign house, kept its accounts, hired its servants and bought its food. Without them, the foreigners could hardly feed themselves. And all Chinese were forbidden, on pain of death, to sell provisions to the British. On the fourth of September the English factory was surrounded by troops, with armed boats moored in the river in front of it. That was the turn. From here on, both men had put their whole weight on the other one blinking first. Napier had already explained his thinking to London. "I feel satisfied your lordship will see the urgent necessity of negotiating with such a government, having in your hands at the same time the means of compulsion". The means of compulsion were waiting outside the river mouth: two frigates of the Royal Navy, the Imogene and the Andromache, the ship that had brought him out. And he was about to send for them.

The American was still at Canton when it began. On the fifth of September the viceroy's latest proclamation was pasted on a thin board and hung at the gate of the British factory, guarded by about twenty soldiers. It called Napier's refusal to deal through the hong merchants contumacy, a breach of the laws of the empire, and told him to go back to Macau, and that if he would not, no Chinese should serve him in any capacity. The Chinese still working in the building, half frightened to death and afraid the soldiers would come in, rushed upstairs to report it. "Lord Napier, who was at dinner with Sir George Best Robinson and others, instantly left the table and came down to the gate." The proclamation was taken down at once. Then Napier sent a messenger to the captain of the Imogene, outside the Bogue, to send him a guard of a dozen marines, and to bring his own ship and the Andromache up to Whampoa with all speed. The Bogue was the narrow gateway to the Pearl River, where the river met the sea, guarded by forts on both banks. To reach Canton, a warship had to pass it. Napier went back inside the factory with his staff, and the gate was bolted. At midnight Robinson slipped out of Canton in a small cutter to join the frigates. Very soon the marines arrived, and the square in front of the factories filled with Chinese soldiers, while war junks and boats gathered on the river. All communication with the shipping at Whampoa was cut off, and no English boat was to come up to the city. The viceroy even asked the American merchants not to let boats from their ships come up, except on urgent business. The whole foreign trade of the port stopped. On the sixth, the American got out. He could not find a Chinese boat, so he took his own small schooner yacht, the Ferret, and left Canton at four in the afternoon with an American captain on board. "We passed through a fleet of about fifty war boats, filled with men and armed to the teeth." On the way down they met a small English cutter carrying a captain just in from London, on his way up with the mail. The American told him it was useless to try to get through, and took him along. Meanwhile, the frigates came. On Napier's order, the Imogene and the Andromache forced the passage of the Bogue, under fire from the forts. They would not be the last British warships to fight their way past the Bogue. The forts' guns killed at least two British sailors, and wounded others. Sitting on the exposed deck of one of the frigates as it tried to blast its way upriver was a man named Charles Elliot. He sat there calmly beneath an umbrella. Elliot was a navy man, at sea since the age of fourteen, who had come to China in 1834 as Master Attendant to Napier's mission, and we will be seeing a good deal of him. The frigates got as far as Whampoa on the eleventh, and there they were too big to go any further. Lu Kun had ordered a series of boats sunk in the river behind them, and the two warships were stranded. Downriver, the American and his friends were stranded too. A few of them tried to row up to the factories with the latest letters from London, and at Howqua's Fort, about halfway, first one cannonball and then another flew over their heads. An interpreter on a war boat told them it was useless to go on. To prevent "the innocent from suffering with the guilty," the viceroy had ordered that no foreign boat could come to Canton. So they were all prisoners at Whampoa. They called themselves "the Canton refugees," and threw themselves on the hospitality of the captains of the six American ships at the anchorage. And this rather eventful day, he wrote, closed with dinner on board one ship and whist in the evening on another. For the Americans, at least, this was a British quarrel and an inconvenience, to be waited out over dinner and cards.

So here was the position by the middle of September. Napier had his marines in the factory, and his frigates stuck in the river. The factory was cut off, without servants or supplies, surrounded by soldiers. And Napier was ill. He had a fever, and it was getting worse. And the stoppage of the whole foreign trade, every day of it, was a very serious thing for every merchant in the port. On the fourteenth of September Napier sent word that he was willing to leave Canton, and that the frigates would leave at the same time. On the eighteenth, because of his continued illness, his surgeon, Dr. Thomas Colledge, took charge of the negotiations. Colledge was the Company's surgeon at Canton, who had married a young American lady from Boston at Macau the year before. So the king's man at Canton ended his great confrontation represented by his doctor. On the twenty first, Napier ordered the frigates away by letter, and on the same day he and his party took to the boats at Canton. As the frigates went down the river towards the Bogue, Napier's two boats went towards Macau by the inner passage. He went under a convoy of eight armed Chinese boats. It was an escort, and it was also a guard, and it moved at its own pace. It took five days. Napier reached Macau on the twenty sixth of September. His surgeons later wrote that the cruel, needless and vexatious detention on the river, and the noise the escort made around him, had brought on a relapse of his fever. At Canton, the trade opened again. It had been stopped entirely from the second of September to the twenty fourth. The American trader came back up to the factories on the twenty sixth, after twenty days as a refugee at Whampoa. He came up by the river, and near a pagoda his boats were stopped and ordered alongside a big official boat, crowded with a ferocious looking lot of men. They were half starved too, he thought, to judge by how eagerly they grabbed the biscuit the Americans threw them. The trip from Whampoa took four and a half hours. The streets were full of rowdies, he wrote, who shouted abuse at the foreigners and made signs as if beheading them. And the defences he passed on the way up showed how seriously the Chinese side had taken the frigates. There had been enormous preparations against an attack by their boats. Later, he put the whole affair in a single phrase. "Naturally, the 'Napier War,' or, as locally called, the 'Napier fizzle,' was the result." In his view the viceroy could not set aside a system the emperor had not repealed, nor deal in person with a foreign representative without special authority from the court. "The entire difficulty therefore was caused by Her Majesty's representative persisting in requiring of the Viceroy that which the latter could not grant." Britain, he thought, should either have got the emperor's government to recognise its man first, or simply have sent a consul, like other nations, whose dignity could not be hurt by being treated as one. Lord Napier had come to Canton to stay. He left it in a Chinese boat, sick, under Chinese guard.

He did not recover. Lord Napier died at Macau on the eleventh of October 1834, a little over two weeks after he arrived there. His surgeons put the origin of his illness wholly down to the severe labour and anxiety that had fallen on him while he was at Canton. And what of Lu Kun? His summer had not been a comfortable one either. The emperor he answered to was the Daoguang Emperor, on the throne since 1820, a frugal and hard working ruler who read his officials' reports closely. We will meet him properly next time. During the crisis an imperial edict stripped him of his rank and his official button, his decoration of the peacock's feather, his title of junior guardian of the heir apparent, and his office of viceroy. And yet he was told to stay at his post and keep doing the job he had just been removed from. The peacock feather was an honour the emperor gave his officials to wear on their hats. Losing it meant the whole city knew you were in disgrace. So the emperor did punish the viceroy, just as Napier had said he would. But the viceroy had yielded nothing, and the edict came when it was reported that the frigates had entered the river. Once the barbarian headman and his warships had been driven off, Lu Kun had the empty title and the decoration given back to him, though the other marks of his humiliation remained. In the empire's books, a foreign chief had come without leave, refused the rules and sent for warships, and the viceroy had driven off the chief and his warships both, and the trade had opened again. That was a victory. And by the rules of the world Lu Kun lived in, it was. In London, not everyone saw it as a defeat for China either. Remember the man Britain passed over for Napier's job? He was George Staunton. He had first gone to China as a boy with Lord Macartney's embassy forty years before, and he knew the country as well as any Briton alive. His verdict was that Britain had been, "in a national point of view, totally and entirely in the wrong". But that was not the lesson most people took. Napier's summer had moved Britain and China a long step toward war. And it had begun to recast the British urge toward war as a moral duty, even as an act of charity toward the Chinese. So why did neither of them bend? It is tempting to call it a quarrel about manners, about chairs and envelopes. But manners were how both sides wrote down who ruled whom. For Lu Kun, taking a letter from Napier would have meant telling the emperor that a barbarian headman stood level with his viceroy. No official could send that up to Beijing and expect to keep his post. For Napier, sending a petition through a merchant would have meant telling his king that the king's officer was a merchant's errand boy. And he had come to China already sure that the Qing gave way when pushed. Each man was standing exactly where his own world told him to stand. That is why it was so hard. The lessons, in the end, ran in opposite directions. Canton learned that a British chief who came uninvited could be shut up, starved of servants and sent away, and that the British would give way, as they always had. And the British at Canton learned that talking had got them nowhere, and they began to wonder what more than two frigates might do. Both lessons were half true. That is what made them dangerous. Napier was gone, and before long the officer under the umbrella, Charles Elliot, would be in charge of the British at Canton, trying courtesy where Napier had tried force. Meanwhile, with no Company left to restrain them, British and American traders were about to run opium straight into Canton's waters, and silver was flowing out of China to pay for it. In Beijing, the emperor would soon have to decide whether to tax the drug or crush it. And in Canton itself, a young schoolteacher from the villages was about to fail the state examinations again, fall ill, and have a dream. That's next time. Thanks for listening.

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