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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 2

Legalise or Destroy

With no company to restrain them, British and American traders run opium straight into Canton's waters, silver flows out of China to pay for it, and in Beijing the Daoguang Emperor has to decide whether to tax the drug or crush it. The episode follows the court's great debate and Charles Elliot, Napier's successor, trying courtesy where Napier tried force, while in the same city a failed examination candidate named Hong Xiuquan falls ill and sees visions, and it ends with the emperor choosing Lin Zexu to end the trade. It hears the court in its own memorials and Hong in the Taiping's later account of his dream, alongside scholars and British officials.

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Nei Lingding Island Guangzhou Beijing Guangdong
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Charles Elliot
Charles Elliot. "courtesy of the office of the Prime Minister, Trinidad.", Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, in the summer of 1834, Lord Napier came to Canton as Britain's first chief superintendent of trade, and tried to deal with the viceroy as an equal. The viceroy, Lu Kun, would not so much as look at his letter. The barbarian headman, he said, should talk to the hong merchants, the licensed firms that handled the foreigners, and then go back to Macau. Napier dug in. Lu Kun stopped the British trade, pulled the servants out of the factories and surrounded them with troops. Napier sent for two frigates, which shot their way past the forts at the Bogue, the gateway to the Pearl River, and then sat stranded below the city. He left Canton sick, under Chinese escort, and died at Macau on the eleventh of October. Once he was gone the trade opened again, and the viceroy could report to the emperor that the barbarian headman had been driven from Canton. This episode also draws on the work of Augustus Lindley. And it begins with something nobody in Napier's story had wanted to talk about. The Company was gone, and nothing was restraining the private traders now. Off the island of Nei Lingding lay the store ships. They were big, old, heavily armed hulks, anchored for months at a time, floating warehouses for one cargo only. That cargo was opium. Opium in China was smoked. A smoker lay on his side on a couch, heated a bead of the prepared paste over a little lamp, and drew the smoke through a long pipe. It had begun as a luxury of the rich and the idle, officials, merchants and their sons. By the 1830s it had reached soldiers, clerks, servants and labourers, and those who could not stop found it eating their wages, their health and, often, their families' land. The opium came from British India, in chests, each holding a little over a hundred and thirty pounds of the drug. The emperors had banned it, again and again. So the foreign ships that brought it never came up to Canton. They unloaded it at Lingding, into the receiving ships, and went up the river to Whampoa clean, with cotton and other lawful goods. Until then the foreign merchants had stayed in their offices at Canton and done no more than supply the Chinese buyers. Now they began to smuggle it themselves, from the store ships at Lingding right to the buyers on shore. The amounts were enormous. For the four years from 1835 to 1839 the import averaged at least thirty thousand chests a year. The American who had lived through Napier's summer at Canton knew how the business ran. During the summer monsoon, he wrote, ordinary business was slack, but opium was very active, because that was when the new crop arrived. Sales were made to brokers, for cash only, against orders on the receiving ships. That set opium apart. Lawful goods were often hard to turn into money at all, but opium was always sold for prompt cash, in advance of delivery, so the money was there at once. The brokers sent their orders down to Lingding in the smuggling boats. They were long and very broad in the beam. "The crews numbered from sixty to seventy men, who, like all Chinese boatmen, were singularly good sailors, intelligent and very active." "They plied the oars sitting on low benches ranged on both sides of the deck, while additional propelling power was provided in an enormous mainsail and a foresail made of mats, bamboos, and rattans." They carried a big gun in the bows, swivel guns, spears and flintlock muskets bought from foreign ships. You could tell them from the government's own patrol boats because they were armed a little more lightly, and their hulls were bright varnished instead of painted black and red. For every chest delivered, the receiving ship took a fee of five dollars, and two dollars more if the order was not presented within a week. The dollars here were Spanish silver dollars, the coin the whole China trade ran on. He was amused, too, by how the Chinese at Canton talked about the foreigners, and to them. To the Chinese, all foreigners were foreign devils, but there were varieties. The English were red-haired devils, and the Americans were flowery-flag devils. In the bookshops near the factories you could buy, for a penny or two, a little pamphlet called Devils' Talk, with a drawing on the cover of a foreigner in a three cornered hat, a long skirted coat and buckled shoes, the dress of the century before. It taught the trading talk of Canton, English words written out in Chinese characters that roughly matched their sound, and it was always in the hands of servants, porters and shopkeepers. Red candles, the American thought, should be burned on altars to the memory of the man who wrote it. He never found out who that was. That was the depth of understanding on which the whole trade ran. Now, the government patrol boats existed to stop all this. In practice they were often part of it. The officials whose job was to enforce the ban took their cut instead, and up and down the service, men connived at the breach of the law as long as they found their own profit in it. That arrangement had a kind of stability. The smugglers paid, the officials looked away, and the opium came ashore. What broke it was the foreigners cutting the officials out. When the foreign merchants started running the opium in themselves, the fees stopped flowing to the officials, and a war of memorials, edicts, proclamations, orders and repression began. Many of the foreign merchants, English, American and others, had no hesitation or moral scruple about it. They took consignments of opium and sold as many chests as they could get their hands on. Watching it grow was Charles Elliot, the naval officer we last saw sitting under an umbrella on the deck of one of Napier's frigates. Elliot reported home that the number of English boats running opium between Lingding and Canton had vastly increased, and that they were exchanging fire with the Chinese patrol boats. There were some fifty of the bigger smuggling boats, from thirty to three hundred tons, outside the Bogue, and thirty or more inside the river. A British officer, writing to London that British boats were shooting it out with the emperor's police on the emperor's own river. That is the problem this episode is about.

Canton's first answer, though, was not about opium at all. It was about Napier. In March 1835, a new set of regulations for the foreigners came down, in eight articles. The officials had drawn their own lesson from Napier's summer, and it was that the rules needed tightening, not changing. Foreign ships of war coming to protect merchant ships were forbidden to enter the river. If one did, the trade would be stopped. That was the frigates answered. The foreigners were to send their petitions through the hong merchants, as before. And, in four plain words, "Letters will not be received." That was Napier's letter answered. Trading anywhere other than Canton was strictly prohibited. Some foreign ships had begun sailing up the coast, looking for buyers outside Canton. An order went out to suppress that trade along the east coast and to the north. Elliot had stayed on after Napier's death, as one of the British superintendents who were left. And notice what the new rules did not say. There was a great deal in them about warships, and letters, and where a foreigner could and could not go. There was nothing in them about the opium pouring in at Lingding. To Canton, the danger was a foreigner who would not keep his place. The drug was a problem for another day.

Daoguang Emperor
Daoguang Emperor. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In Beijing, though, someone was starting to count. The man on the throne was the Daoguang Emperor. He had reigned since 1820, and he was a careful, frugal, hard working ruler, who read the reports his officials sent him and wrote his answers on them in red ink. He had come to the throne at thirty eight, the second son of the emperor before him, and he had inherited an empire that was bigger, more crowded and more expensive to run than any of his ancestors had known. What worried him most was not the drug. It was the silver. To understand why, you need to know that the empire ran on two metals. Ordinary people were paid and bought their food in copper coins, called cash, strung together in strings of a thousand. But taxes were reckoned in silver, by weight, in taels, a tael being a little over an ounce. Opium let the foreign merchants balance their trade without shipping silver in, since the cash from it could buy tea and silk. And before long, silver was going out. And as silver grew scarce, it grew dear. A tael that once bought a thousand copper cash now cost twelve or thirteen hundred. For a farmer selling his crop for copper and paying his taxes in silver, that was a tax rise of a quarter or more, without anyone in Beijing raising anything. So the question in front of the emperor was not simply whether opium was wicked. It was whether the empire could afford to go on fighting it the way it had, and losing. In the summer of 1836 a memorial reached him that offered a startling answer. Instead of deciding it himself, the emperor sent it out for comment. On the twelfth of June, an imperial rescript ordered that the memorial be sent to the viceroy and governor at Canton, to be considered and reported on with the Hoppo, the customs chief. A rescript was the emperor's own brief note on a memorial, telling his officials what to do with it. By sending it to Canton, Daoguang had opened the opium question to the men who knew the trade best, and stood closest to it.

The memorial came from Xu Naiji, a senior official of the court of sacrifices, and what he proposed was to make opium legal. He began with the numbers. The import had grown to upwards of twenty thousand chests, and the drain on the country amounted to a full ten million taels. The foreigners, he wrote, no longer needed to bring silver into China. They had begun to take it out. And the people were being impoverished by it. Cutting off the whole foreign trade to stop the opium was impossible. And the ban itself, he argued, had become the problem. "The laws and enactments are the means which extortionate minor officials and worthless scoundrels use to benefit themselves", he wrote, and "the greater the severity of the laws, the larger and more numerous are the bribes paid to the extortionate underlings". In other words, every new penalty was a new price list for the people paid to enforce it. A tough policy, he warned, would only spread terror among the people, and robbers pretending to be government agents would plunder in the name of the law. As for the smokers, Xu did not think much of them. They were idle, lazy, useless vagrants, undeserving even of contempt, and if they wanted to smoke themselves to death, the empire could spare them. What the empire could not spare was its silver. So his plan was this. Repeal the laws against opium, which did not work anyway. Let it in, on payment of the customs duty, as a medicine. But it was to be sold only to the hong merchants, and only in exchange for goods, not money, and the export of silver, in coin or in ingots, was to be forbidden. Opium for tea, in other words, and not a tael leaving the country. Officials, scholars and soldiers would still be forbidden to smoke, but with moderate penalties, which were more likely to be enforced. It would not lower the dignity of the government, he wrote, to allow the use of opium while checking its abuse, and the great gain would be to stop the precious metals flowing out of the empire. At Canton, the reaction was close to delight. The viceroy was a new man, Deng Tingzhen. He enthusiastically endorsed the plan, and told the hong merchants to give the opium traders the nod. The Canton officials who reported on the memorial fully approved the proposal to legalise the traffic and admit opium on payment of duty. The hong merchants were asked for their views too, and sent them in during July. The silver smuggled out in ingots, they said, was not their doing. It was the work of outside men, whom they had no power to check. They recommended that their own way of exchanging foreign imports for Chinese goods carry on just as it was, which is to say, that nobody should touch their monopoly. And they pointed out that it would be impossible to make every sale of opium be paid for in goods carried away by the same ship. By all means legalise it, in other words, as long as nothing else changes. On the British side, Charles Elliot exulted at the prospect of "very important relaxations" in the trade. The argument seemed to be over.

It was not over. Before long, a senior official named Zhu Zun sent the emperor an answer. He began by taking apart the idea that the law had failed for lack of trying. The laws relating to opium had grown more and more severe, so there was no want of regulation. The trouble was enforcement, and the people who defeated it were Chinese. The foreigners, he said, had to rely on Chinese, who smuggled "with all the audacity of pirates." He reminded the emperor of what had already been done. The foreigners had been driven from Macau to Lingding in 1821. Why, he asked, invite them back? If the export of silver dollars could be stopped, why not the import of opium? Nor would growing more opium at home help, as some suggested. Zhu Zun said he could speak for Yunnan, in the far southwest, where the poppy was already cultivated all over the hills and open plains, and produced several thousand chests a year. And still silver flowed out. Then he came to his real objection, and it was not about money at all. Opium's effect on trade, he wrote, was a minor matter. The chief objection to it was that "it corrupts and enfeebles the people". And he believed the British meant it to. It was "for that purpose", he wrote, "that the red-haired English have introduced it into China". The red-haired was the old Cantonese name for the Dutch and the English. He pointed to the Dutch, the other red-hairs, who, he believed, had used opium to conquer Java. He reminded the emperor how his late father had told the viceroy at Canton to handle the barbarians, back in 1818: be lenient and forbearing when they transgressed, but if they persisted, adopt strong measures. Give up good farmland to the poppy instead of food, he warned, and it would be like treating a sore on the skin by driving it inward. The morals of the common people were low already. Remove all restraint, and they would be debauched, and opium would become their daily meat and drink. Opium was ruining the army, and "nothing short of total prohibition will save the soldiers from ruin". The officials and the scholars would go the same way. He urged the emperor to order every viceroy and governor in the provinces to redouble his efforts, and to warn every offender of the full penalty of the law. At the same time another official, a censor, sent in his own memorial for total prohibition. A censor was an official whose job was to criticise, to watch the bureaucracy and report its failings to the throne. Silver was getting scarcer every day, he wrote, and that could only happen through officials neglecting their duty. At this rate the drain would come to hundreds of millions in ten years. If you let in opium, he asked, how could you go on forbidding the export of silver? Deal first with the Chinese smugglers, and then with the foreigners, on the old maxim, "First to govern one's self, and, then only, to govern others". Here, then, were the two sides of the great debate. Xu Naiji said the ban had failed and was making things worse, so manage the trade and save the silver. Zhu Zun said the ban had never really been enforced, and that legalising a poison would rot the empire from within. Legalise, or destroy. And the emperor, for now, did neither. But the argument was beginning to turn against Xu, and at Canton, few seemed to notice.

On the British side, there was a new man in charge. After Napier's death the post of chief superintendent had passed first to one of the old Company men, and then to another, Robinson, who kept quiet and ran things from a ship at Lingding. On the fourteenth of December 1836, Robinson handed over the archives and seals of the office to Captain Charles Elliot. By then Elliot had risen to Napier's old job, chief superintendent of the China trade. Elliot was a captain in the Royal Navy and the grandson of an earl, and in 1830 he had gone to British Guiana as Protector of Slaves, where the work turned him into a fervent abolitionist. He had watched Napier break himself on Canton, and he drew the opposite lesson. Where Napier had insisted, Elliot would ask. He would win Canton by courtesy. He did what Napier never would. He wrote to the viceroy in the petition form, through the hong merchants, and in return he was allowed to come up and live at Canton. It worked, up to a point. He got his foot in the door. But it made him no friends among his own people. Writing home in January, he admitted that the policy of conciliation was unpopular with the British merchants at Canton, and was "the least popular task I could have proposed to myself". The merchants who had cheered Napier on wanted a superintendent who would stand up to the Chinese. Instead, they had one writing petitions.

And then London found out what he was doing. Palmerston, the foreign secretary, had been firm on the point. Letters between the superintendent and the viceroy were to be exchanged direct, and were not under any circumstances to be sent or received through the hong merchants, and never in the petition form. So Elliot tried to do what he was told. He asked the viceroy to accept his letters directly, as from one official to another. The viceroy was inexorable. On the twenty ninth of November 1837, Elliot hauled down his flag, as a consequence of trying to follow Palmerston's instructions, and withdrew to Macau. So the courteous approach had ended exactly where the rude one did, with the British superintendent outside Canton and the viceroy unmoved. Elliot wrote home with a suggestion of his own. He was persuaded, he said, that a letter from the foreign secretary to the cabinet in Beijing, written by the queen's command and sent up to the mouth of the river below Beijing in a ship of war, would at once draw from the emperor an order settling the point in Britain's favour. A letter, delivered by a warship. That was the courteous man's idea of how to get a hearing. Napier had wanted to talk to the viceroy over the hong merchants' heads. Elliot now wanted to talk to the emperor over the viceroy's. And meanwhile the thing he had been sent to manage was growing out of anybody's control. Think about the position Elliot was in. He answered to a government in London that would not let him bow, and to a viceroy at Canton who would not let him stand up straight. He was supposed to protect British merchants whose most profitable business was against Chinese law, and he had no power to stop them doing it. And every letter home took months to arrive, and every answer months to come back. Whatever happened at Canton, he would be facing it on his own.

Hong Xiuquan
Hong Xiuquan. Ford & West Lith., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now I want to leave Elliot at Macau for a while, and go to a village in the hills north of Canton. Every few years, the young men of Guangdong province who hoped to become officials came to Canton to sit the state examinations. The examinations tested candidates on the Confucian classics, the ancient books every educated man in China knew by heart, and passing them was the only respectable road to office, to rank, and to lifting a whole family out of the village. Thousands sat them. Only a tiny share passed. One of the young men who sat them in Canton that year was Hong Xiuquan. He came from a family of Hakka farmers, a people who had moved south generations before and kept their own dialect and customs, often at odds with their neighbours. His family had scrimped to educate him, and he earned a little as a village schoolteacher. He was their great hope. He had failed the examination before. In 1837 he failed it for the third time. The disappointment, and what he saw as the gross injustice and partiality of the examiners, so affected him that he went home very ill. He went back to his village and took to his bed, and believing he was going to die, he called his parents to him. "My days are counted, and my life will soon be closed". Then the visions came. In his dream a dragon, a tiger and a cock came into his room, followed by musicians with a sedan chair, and they carried him away to a "beautiful and luminous place". There, old men took a knife, slit open his body, took out his organs, and put in new ones, red in colour. He was brought before a venerable old man in a black robe, who wept over the world. All the people of the world, the old man said, took the things he had given them, and with them worshipped demons. "They purposely rebel against me, and arouse my anger. Do not thou imitate them." The old man then gave Hong a sword for killing demons, and a seal, and a yellow fruit to eat. He also saw the old man reprove Confucius, the sage whose classics Hong had studied since the age of seven, for failing to set out the true doctrine clearly in his books. "Confucius seemed much ashamed, and confessed his guilt." Back in the village, his family could only see what his body was doing. His brothers kept the doors locked, and sometimes caught him leaping about his room, slashing at the air and shouting, "Kill the demons!" At one point he woke up claiming to be the emperor of China. His father, sure that evil spirits had got into his son, called in magicians to drive them out with spells. The visions came and went for forty days. Then they stopped. Hong got up, recovered, and went back to teaching. Years later, the Taiping would tell this dream in their own verse, as the founding story of their faith. In their telling, the old man was God, and Hong was his son, sent down into the world. "God also gave him a seal, And conferred upon him a sword Connected with authority And majesty irresistible." And God bade him, together with his elder brother, Jesus, drive away the demons, with the help of angels. The same verses told China's history as a long fall. Ever since the first emperor of the Qin went chasing after immortals, the nation had been deluded by the devil, for two thousand years. The Taiping called God by an ancient Chinese name, Shangdi, the Lord on High, a name far older than Confucius, which some Protestant missionaries had borrowed to translate the word God. But that is the dream as it was told long afterward, by men who already knew what it meant. In 1837, his family were only ashamed and worried, and the neighbours came to look at the madman as he slept. To his relatives the whole thing was strange indeed, and nothing more. There was one clue lying about, though no one thought to look at it. On an earlier trip to the examinations at Canton, Hong had been handed a set of Christian tracts in Chinese, written by a Chinese convert. He had glanced at them and put them away. Hold on to those tracts. They are going to matter a great deal.

Back on the coast, 1838 was a year of uncertainty and confusion. The foreigners went on running opium in. The Chinese authorities alternated between doing nothing and cracking down hard. When the crackdowns came, many of the native smuggling boats were destroyed, and many smugglers were thrown in prison. The trade did not stop. It found new channels. The opium moved to the foreign passage boats, and to the Chinese government's own boats, whose owners were sometimes earning several thousand dollars a week. And the seizures had a way of not staying seized. In one case eight chests were seized. Four disappeared in the very act of seizure. The other four were handed over to the police, and in the hands of the police, they turned into common earth. I will leave you to imagine where the opium went. Behind the comedy there was real suffering. The crackdown brought much cruel punishment to the Chinese caught up in the trade. Lawful trade was suffering too. It now took ten days before a ship could even find a security merchant to stand for her and begin unloading her cargo. And the British merchants went on dealing, because, for all the noise, it still paid.

In December, the opium came to the factories themselves. On the third of December 1838, the equivalent of about two chests of opium was seized in the act of being landed from a boat in front of the factories. The porters said it was meant for a Briton named James Innes. The authorities ordered that Innes and the ship the opium came from should leave within three days, and they stopped the trade until he did. The security merchant who had stood for the ship was put in the cangue and publicly exposed. The cangue was a heavy wooden collar, locked around the neck, so wide a man could not feed himself in it, worn in a public place for everyone to see. So once again the Chinese who stood nearest the foreigner paid for what the foreigner had done. For a while there was confusion over who the real culprit was. Thanks to a muddle over names, the authorities came to the conclusion that the original importer was an American named Talbot. It was Innes, and Innes did not leave in three days. In the end his own security merchant threatened to pull down his house, and on the sixteenth of December, Innes left for Macau. The officials had made their point. And at the same time, they were making it again, much more loudly.

On the twelfth of December, an officer arrived in the square in front of the factories with the cross and other tools for a strangling. He had brought with him an opium dealer under sentence of death, and he began setting up the cross in front of the Swedish factory. The square was the open ground between the factories and the river, where the foreigners walked and took their exercise. The American from Napier's summer was there. "The Cross was already driven in the ground, and in a few minutes it would have been all over," he wrote, when the hubbub caught the attention of some foreigners on the square. The news flew from factory to factory, and all the foreigners they could muster, perhaps seventy or eighty, rushed out to stop it. He acted as spokesman for them all, and protested against the square being turned into an execution ground. The officer in charge answered that his orders must be carried out, and that the square was a portion of His Celestial Majesty's Empire. The foreigners answered that that might be, but it was leased to them as a recreation ground, and they would not permit it to be desecrated by a public execution. "This was a bold thing to say." And for a few minutes the scene was a strange one. There was the cross, and beside it the condemned man with a chain around his neck, held by two jailers, all of them looking on with a quiet curiosity. The officer's servants kept bringing him freshly filled pipes. His soldiers and his chair bearers seemed more amused than anything else. And then a boat's crew arrived. They were sailors from a British ship down at Whampoa, who had come up that morning and been wandering about the square. They drifted over to see what was going on. "Seeing the drift things were taking, suddenly they seized the cross, smashed it in pieces, and began to lay them over the heads and shoulders of the executioners and any Chinamen within reach." "The gaolers dragged the prisoner away." The sailors tore down the tent that had been put up for the officer, and knocked over his chairs, his table, his teapot and his cups. They would have gone for the officer himself, if the merchants had not stepped in to protect him. The officer and his aides were carried off unharmed, and the foreigners found themselves in possession of the ground. And one sailor called out to another, "I say, Bill, we don't get such a lark as this every day!" It did not stay a lark for long. The crowd that gathered around the factories that afternoon numbered eight or ten thousand. It attacked any foreigner it caught outside, and several were hurt. Then it laid siege to the factories, hurling stones and broken bricks at the windows and the gates. They tore up the heavy posts of the little enclosures in front of the factories and used them as battering rams. Inside his own factory, they scattered broken bottles all along the main entrance, since the crowd was barefoot, and rolled great casks of coal against the other door. "We were not gratified by seeing the efficacy of the first protection." At about four o'clock, the district magistrate arrived with a body of about twenty soldiers, and cleared the crowd away with rattan canes. The officer, meanwhile, had withdrawn and carried out the execution in a street just outside the factories. The American consul struck his flag in protest at the factory garden being turned into an execution ground. And when the foreigners complained to the viceroy, he replied that it was presumptuous of them to complain, and warned that there would be more executions on that very spot. The point of an execution on that square was to cast shame on the foreigners. Think about who had come out of that afternoon looking bad. Not the smugglers. The officials, who had been chased off their own ground by sailors, in front of a crowd of thousands. Canton was beginning to run out of patience, and so was Beijing.

Because in Beijing, the debate had come back, harder. An official named Huang Juezi sent the emperor a memorial that named a single culprit for the impoverishment of the realm: opium. And behind opium, he saw a foreign plot. His remedy was simple. Smokers would be given a year's grace to give up the drug. After that, they would be put to death. And to make sure no one escaped, every five households would be bound together in a common bond, pledged to keep watch over the others and denounce anyone who broke the new laws. The emperor sent it round his senior officials for their views. Over the next four months, twenty nine responses drifted back to the capital. Only eight supported the death penalty for smokers. Most of the rest were against it, and some explained why in numbers. "In Fujian and Guangdong", one response complained, "seven or eight out of every ten persons smoke opium." Executing them all would mean killing people by the hundreds of thousands. The emperor wavered for months. On the twenty third of October, he put the question to yet another working party, this time his grand council. The grand council was the small group of senior ministers who met the emperor every morning, before dawn, and drafted his decisions. And then he decided it himself. He summoned to an audience one of Huang Juezi's eight supporters, an official from Fujian province named Lin Zexu. Lin was already a viceroy, in his fifties. He had passed the highest level of the state examinations in his twenties, and been chosen for the Hanlin Academy, where the empire kept its finest scholars. He governed the provinces of the middle Yangzi, and in a service where nearly everyone took something, he was famous for his honesty. In Hubei and Hunan he had already run a hard campaign against opium, seizing pipes and drug, and sending the emperor reports of his results. And he had a plan for opium, which he described as "using strong medicine to blow up the root of the sickness." If opium were left alone, Lin warned, then in a few decades the empire would have no soldiers fit to resist an enemy, and no silver to pay them with. That was the argument that joined Zhu Zun's fear for the people to the emperor's fear for the treasury. Opium was not only a vice. It was a threat to the dynasty itself. On the last day of 1838, the emperor decided to appoint Lin Imperial Commissioner to Canton. An imperial commissioner was the emperor's personal agent, sent with the emperor's full authority to deal with one particular crisis, and outranking the regular officials wherever he went. Lin was appointed to investigate and deal with the situation at Canton. Whatever it took. Xu Naiji's plan to legalise opium was finished. The emperor had chosen to destroy.

Lin had arrived in Beijing on the twenty sixth of December, and over the next month or so the emperor received him in audience nineteen times. Most officials could go a whole career without being received by the emperor that often. At one audience, the emperor wept. How, he asked, "can I die and go to the shades of my imperial fathers and ancestors, until opium is removed!" The emperor had granted Lin the rare honour of riding on horseback inside the palace grounds. But he noticed that Lin looked uncomfortable in the saddle, and offered him something more: "You seem unused to riding. Try a sedan chair instead." Lin was a southerner from Fujian, and no horseman. A sedan chair inside the palace was a greater honour still, and everyone at court knew it. They talked about what to do with the smokers. Lin proposed giving them a year under a suspended sentence of death, to break the habit. "The difficulty lies not with giving opium up", Lin reasoned, "but in changing smokers' minds." Not everyone at court was pleased. Qishan, one of the emperor's most trusted ministers, urged Lin not to set off any frontier disturbances. In other words, crush the opium, but do not start a war with the foreigners doing it. Think about how far the court had come in this episode. Three years before, the smart money said opium would be made legal. Now the emperor had chosen the one man most certain to wage war on it. Lin left Beijing early in January 1839, and took the long road south to Canton, more than a thousand miles. He was going with more personal trust from the emperor than almost any official of his generation, and that cut both ways. If he succeeded, he would be the man who saved the empire's silver and its soul. If he failed, there was no one else to blame. Down at Canton, the foreign merchants were about to meet the first Chinese official who meant every word of the law. And Charles Elliot, at Macau, was about to find out what courtesy was worth against him. That's next time. Thanks for listening.

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