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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 3

The Commissioner

Lin Zexu reaches Canton in March 1839 determined to end the opium trade in a season, and within a week he has three hundred foreigners sealed inside their factories. The episode follows Lin and Charles Elliot through the six week siege and Elliot's gamble of handing over every chest of British opium in the Queen's name, then Lin's destruction of the drug at Humen and his letter to Queen Victoria, and asks whether Lin won or walked into a trap of Elliot's making. It hears Lin and the court in their own edicts and letters, and the British in their dispatches.

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Transcript

Last time, the court of the Daoguang Emperor spent more than two years arguing over a single question: should the empire tax opium, or crush it? The question was urgent because of what opium was doing to the empire's money. By the late 1830s foreign ships were bringing in an average of at least thirty thousand chests of opium a year, and silver was flowing out of China to pay for it. One senior official put the loss at ten million taels of silver a year, and said that a tael, which used to buy a thousand copper cash, now cost twelve or thirteen hundred. A tael was about an ounce and a third of silver, a weight rather than a coin, and the unit the state kept its accounts and collected its taxes in, while cash were the copper coins ordinary people were paid in and spent; when silver grew dear, a farmer who earned copper but owed his taxes in silver paid more. That same official argued that the ban had failed, that it only fed the bribes of minor officials, and that opium should be made legal, taxed and paid for in goods instead of silver. Others answered that the drug corrupted and enfeebled the people, and that nothing short of total prohibition would save the soldiers from ruin. And on the last day of 1838, the emperor chose to crush it. He decided to send a Fujianese official named Lin Zexu to Canton as Imperial Commissioner, to deal with the situation there. An Imperial Commissioner was an official sent out by the emperor himself for one particular task, carrying the emperor's own authority over the local governors for as long as that task lasted. Lin had been received by the emperor nineteen times in little more than a month before he set out. At Canton, meanwhile, the British had a new man in charge of their trade, Charles Elliot, a former naval captain who had tried courtesy on the Canton authorities, got nowhere, and struck his flag. And the winter there had ended in a riot. When officials tried to strangle an opium dealer in the square in front of the foreign factories, foreign sailors smashed the cross to pieces, and a crowd of eight or ten thousand Chinese surged around the factories. The factories were the row of buildings on the river bank outside Canton's city walls where the foreign merchants were allowed to live and do business. And somewhere in the south, a man named Hong Xiuquan had failed the state examinations for the third time, and then lay for forty days in visions that came and went, in one of which he was given a sword for killing demons. Hold on to him. He will be back, and in the end he will matter more than anyone else in this season. But for now, all eyes are on the road from Beijing, and on the man coming down it. This episode belongs to Lin Zexu. So who was he? Lin Zexu came from Fujian, on the southeast coast, and by the age of fifty-five he was already a viceroy. He had got there the way every senior official in the empire got there, by passing the state examinations in the Confucian classics, rung after rung, and then rising through the civil service post by post. A viceroy, or governor general, usually ran two or three provinces at once, and it was the highest post an official could hold outside the capital. He was born in 1785 in Fuzhou, the son of a poor teacher, and he passed the highest examination, in the capital, while still in his twenties. As governor of Jiangsu he had made his name repairing waterways and feeding the hungry in years of flood, and he had a name across the empire for honesty and for hard work. And as governor general of Hubei and Hunan he had already run a campaign against opium of his own. In the great debate at court, he had stood with the hard minority, one of only eight officials who backed the call to put opium smokers to death. So the emperor knew exactly what kind of man he was sending. And Lin had a plan. It had three parts, and it is worth walking through them, because the whole of this episode is the story of what happened to that plan when it met the real Canton. The first part was the smokers. Lin proposed that a smoker be given a year's grace, under a suspended sentence of death, to give the habit up. Within that grace period, smokers were to wean themselves from the habit, on penalty of death. His reasoning was almost gentle, for a man proposing to execute people. "The difficulty lies not with giving opium up", he argued, "but in changing smokers' minds." Give them time, in other words, and the fear of death, and their minds would change. The second part was the Chinese dealers, the brokers and boatmen and shopkeepers who carried the drug from the foreign ships into the country. Alongside them, many of the boats running the drug up the river were now foreign owned or foreign run, and their deliveries often ended in gunfire with the government's patrol craft, while officials of every rank, from the viceroy down, looked the other way for a share of the profit. The year before, the provinces had already destroyed many smuggling boats and jailed many smugglers, and the trade had simply found new channels. Lin meant to close those channels, and he moved fast. Within two months of reaching Canton, he had arrested sixteen hundred people for opium offences, and confiscated nearly fourteen tons of opium and almost forty-three thousand opium pipes. That is a number worth sitting with for a moment. Forty-three thousand pipes, in one province, in two months. And the third part was the foreigners. The foreign merchants were to hand over all the opium they held at Canton, and sign a pledge never to bring any more. Cure the smokers, punish the dealers, and dry up the supply at its source. On paper, it was a clean plan, and Lin believed in it completely. He had left the capital with a warning from a senior colleague still in his ears, an exhortation not to set off any frontier disturbances. Keep that warning in mind, because the third part of Lin's plan is exactly where frontier disturbances come from.

Commissioner Lin Zexu, in a picture of 1843
Commissioner Lin Zexu, in a picture of 1843. From a drawing by a native artist in the possession of Lady Strange, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the tenth of March 1839, Lin Zexu was welcomed into Canton, at the end of a two month journey from Beijing. He arrived on that day and took up residence in one of the city's collegiate halls. These were the halls where scholars studied and stayed, and they were among the more dignified addresses in the city. It was a fitting place for him, in its way. Lin was a scholar before he was anything else. And then he did something that unsettled everyone. He did nothing at all, at least nothing anyone outside could see. For eight days he took to inform himself, while the foreign community waited with bated breath. I want you to picture that week from the factories. Day after day, the foreign community waited for a word from him. No edict, no summons, no proclamation. Just silence from the collegiate hall. What Lin was doing in that silence was studying his opponents. He questioned the officials and merchants who dealt with the foreigners, and he set translators to work on the foreigners' own newspapers and books, so that he could read what they were saying among themselves. That was unusual for an official of his time, and it says something about him. He did not think the foreigners were worth understanding for their own sake, but he did think an opponent was worth understanding. Still, there were things that eight days of reading could not teach him. And one of them, as we are about to see, was how the British government worked.

On the seventeenth of March, Lin summoned the Hong merchants. The Hong merchants were the dozen or so Chinese firms licensed by the state to trade with the foreigners, and each foreign ship had to have one of them stand surety for it, answering to the government for its cargo and its crew. For decades they had been the hinge between the empire and the foreign trade, and some of them had grown very rich on it. Lin ordered them to kneel on the hard floor before him, and then treated them to a lengthy lecture on their perfidy. They had let the opium trade go on under their noses for years, he told them. "Are you not indeed dreaming, and snoring in your dreams?" The most famous of them was Howqua, the senior Hong merchant, an old man by now and said to be one of the richest men in the world. When Howqua tried to buy him off, Lin's answer was short. "The Great Minister does not want your money", Lin told him. "I want your head." He was not speaking loosely. Lin warned the Hong merchants that if the opium was not given up, one or two of them would be executed. Then, through them, he gave his orders to the foreigners: hand over all the opium in your possession at Canton, and sign a pledge never to import any more. Lin's edict to the foreign merchants is worth hearing, because it shows how he saw the whole business. He began by reminding them of the emperor's favour. China allowed them to carry its tea and rhubarb away across the seas, year after year, and if they were duly grateful for that, they should stop bringing opium to the land. Tea and rhubarb, Lin believed, were essential to the foreigners' lives; if they were deprived of them, he wrote, "you lose the means of preserving life". Rhubarb root was a prized medicine in this period, used as a purgative, and Chinese officials had long believed that foreigners, living on rich meat, could not stay healthy without it. The laws against opium had been strengthened, the edict went on, smoking itself would soon carry the death penalty, and foreigners should pay no less respect to the laws than natives. Then came the orders. The foreign merchants were to deliver up to the government every particle of the opium on board their store ships, and the Hong merchants would list what each firm handed over, so that all of it could be destroyed. "There must not be the smallest atom concealed or withheld." The store ships were the old hulks anchored out in the estuary, where the opium sat until Chinese buyers came to collect it. And then the second demand, the one that would turn out to matter even more. Every foreigner was to sign a bond, in both Chinese and his own language, declaring that his ships would never again bring opium, and that if any were found on board, the opium would be forfeited, and those responsible would suffer the extreme penalties of the law, and submit to it willingly. The extreme penalty, of course, was death. Lin added a sweetener and a threat. Foreigners, he had heard, set great store by good faith; if they obeyed, he would commend them to the emperor. If they made pretexts to evade him, they would be caught up in the same severe punishment the new law laid down for everyone else. And then he made a promise that tells you everything about the man. He had brought from the capital full powers, he wrote, and "so long as the opium traffic remains unexterminated, so long will I delay my return." He swore that he would see the matter through from its beginning to its ending, "and that not a thought of stopping halfway shall for a moment be indulged." Public feeling against opium was so strong, he warned, that even without the emperor's soldiers, the armed people of Canton alone would be more than enough to place every foreign life in his power. And he offered the honest traders, the ones who did not deal in the drug, a reward if they would point out their depraved fellows and take the lead in giving the bond. So there it was. Hand over the drug, sign away your lives against ever bringing it again, and inform on your neighbours. And the foreign merchants did what merchants do when faced with an order they do not like. They held a meeting.

The foreign merchants gathered to decide their answer, and the Hong merchants came along to hear it, so that they could carry the decision straight back to the commissioner. Among the foreigners in the factories was a man who worked for Russell & Company, the American firm with the largest stake in the opium trade, and he was in the thick of these days. An hour or two before the meeting, Howqua himself appeared at Russell & Company's office, and asked its chief to add a hundred and fifty chests of opium to whatever the firm meant to offer, which Howqua would pay for out of his own pocket. The cost of those chests would have been a hundred and five thousand dollars. That was how badly the Hong merchants wanted this to end quietly. They were the ones with their necks on the line. A chest of opium held something over a hundred pounds of the drug, packed in balls, and a single chest could be worth several hundred dollars. At the meeting, the firms between them subscribed one thousand and thirty four chests, worth seven hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. It was meant as a compromise, some of the opium rather than all of it. Lin did not have to wait to be told what they had decided. The Hong merchants had been sent to the meeting precisely so they could report back, and the commissioner knew the decision between five and seven the next morning. It was offered to the commissioner, and disdainfully refused. Lin had not come all this way for a token. So he raised the stakes, and he chose a target. Lancelot Dent was one of the biggest British dealers in Canton, the head of Dent and Company. Dent and Company was, after Jardine Matheson, the greatest British house in the opium trade, and between them the two firms carried a large share of all the opium coming into China. And now an invitation, purporting to come from the commissioner, arrived for Mr Lancelot Dent, asking him to come into the walled city. Nobody in the factories had any doubt what that meant. If Dent went in, he would be held as a hostage, to make sure the other merchants did as they were told. Dent did not go. The foreign merchants sent delegates instead, and they were told plainly that if Mr Dent did not come, he would be brought in by force. And then, on the twenty third of March, the Hong merchants came before the foreigners in person, and the foreigners saw what refusing the commissioner looked like. They came stripped of the buttons on their caps, to show that they had been degraded from their official rank, and Howqua and another of the senior merchants wore chains around their necks. The button on an official's cap was the badge of his rank, a coloured ball of coral or crystal or gold, and to lose it in public was a terrible disgrace. Imagine that scene for a moment. The richest merchant in China, an old man, standing in front of the foreigners in chains, as a hostage for their good behaviour. The message from Lin could not have been clearer. These men will pay for your stubbornness. But the merchants would not give Dent up. Meanwhile all communication with the shipping at Whampoa was cut off, and soldiers gathered near the factories and on the river. Whampoa was the deep water anchorage some miles down the river, where the big foreign ships lay while they loaded and unloaded. Several days earlier, all the gates opening onto the back of the factories had been bricked up. The foreigners could not quite see it yet, but the trap was already closing around them. And just as it closed, the one man with the authority to speak for the British Crown came racing up the river and walked straight into it.

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

Charles Elliot was at Macau when the news reached him. Macau was the small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, where the foreign merchants lived when they were not at Canton. Elliot was the Superintendent of Trade, the British government's official at Canton, a man with authority over British subjects but no power at all to make the Chinese authorities listen to him. He was a navy man through and through. Five years earlier, when Lord Napier's frigates had tried to blast their way upriver to Canton, Elliot had sat calmly beneath an umbrella on the exposed deck while the shot flew. Before China he had served the Crown in British Guiana as the official protector of slaves, and privately he detested the opium trade, though it was the trade nearly all his countrymen at Canton lived on. Last time we saw him try politeness and fail. This time he tried something else. Before he left Macau, he had the British flag hoisted at Hong Kong, a sheltered anchorage down the coast, and ordered the British ships lying outside to put themselves in a state of defence. He also left with the Chinese authorities at Macau a paper declaring his readiness to meet the emperor's will on the illegal opium trade. And then he pulled on his full naval uniform, sailed straight to Canton, docked at the foreign factories, and flew the flag. He reached the factories at six in the evening on the twenty fourth of March. His first step was to raise the British flag again, which had been struck back in February, at the request of the whole community. His next was to take Lancelot Dent under his own personal protection, in his official residence. In other words, if Lin wanted Dent, he would now have to go through the Queen's representative to get him. It was a brave gesture, and a very naval one. And Lin's answer came two hours later. At eight o'clock that same evening, Lin ordered every Chinese servant out of the factories. If that sounds familiar, it should. Five years earlier, when Napier defied the viceroy, the compradors, interpreters and servants had been withdrawn from the factories in just the same way, and the sale of food to the British forbidden on pain of death. A comprador was the Chinese manager who ran a foreign firm's household and its local dealings, and the factories could hardly function without them. Canton had a way of dealing with defiant foreigners, and it did not involve soldiers storming anything. It involved making them do their own washing. The natives were cleared out, and a triple cordon of boats was placed along the river in front of the whole row of factories. The foreign community of Canton, three hundred and fifty strong, was now shut in, guarded by a thousand armed men, and it would stay there for the next forty seven days. No food, not even a bucket of water, was allowed into the factories. So the merchants of Canton's great trading houses found themselves doing their own cooking and their own chores. Men who had not boiled an egg in years were now drawing water and sweeping floors. Elliot, the Queen's representative, was inside with them. Lin now had the man he really needed. And the Hong merchants were held personally responsible that the superintendent, having come into the net, should not escape from it. Two days later, on the twenty sixth of March, a proclamation from the commissioner was posted on the walls of Elliot's own residence. It set out, in four chapters, the reasons why the opium should be given up quickly. The first was the reason heaven had placed in everyone, and Lin listed the foreigners heaven had already punished. Lord Napier, it reminded them, had bolted through the Bogue, "but, being overwhelmed with grief and fear, almost immediately he died". The Bogue was the fortified narrows at the mouth of the Pearl River, the gateway to Canton. The second reason was the law of the land. The foreigners obeyed the laws of their own country, so why not those of China? The third was their own interest. If the whole trade were stopped because of opium, would they not lose more? Could they live without tea and rhubarb? Why risk everything for opium alone? And the fourth was simple necessity. The empire was angry, the opium must be surrendered, and then trade would resume and praise would follow. It closed with a line that I find rather striking, coming from a man who held all the cards. "The choice of happiness or misery, glory or disgrace, is in your own hands." The next day, every ship at Whampoa was forbidden to load or discharge cargo, or to leave port without clearance, for as long as the commissioner stayed in Canton, and the pilots were ordered not to guide them. That order came from the Hoppo, the emperor's own superintendent of customs at Canton, who ran the foreign trade and grew rich on it. So now the ships were trapped too, down at their anchorage, full of cargo that could neither be sold nor taken away. Elliot, for his part, had tried the formal route from the start. Moved, he said, by urgent concern for the lives and property of all his countrymen and for the peace between the two countries, he demanded from the viceroy that passports be issued within three days for all the English ships. A passport here meant an official permit to leave, without which no ship could pass the forts down the river. He had come up the river demanding passports, but saying nothing about the opium that was the cause of the whole crisis. The reply came from the commissioner, not the viceroy. The orders must first be obeyed and the opium given up, and then passports would be sent. Lin, entirely unused to Western ways of doing business, simply ignored the demand, went over everything that had happened, dwelt on the benevolence and power of the emperor, and ordered Elliot to surrender all the opium, quickly and in full. And then Elliot did something revealing. He wrote asking for his earlier letter to be returned, and apologised for any disrespectful language it might contain. The man who had come up the river in full uniform was learning, very fast, where he stood. Inside the factories, life settled into a strange routine. No one was allowed beyond the square, and no provisions were supposed to come in at all. But this was Canton, and there was always a way. The Hong merchants, on the grounds that trouble might break out, sent their own porters to keep watch with the guards at the gates, and those porters stealthily brought in firewood and food. So the Hong merchants, two of whom had stood before the foreigners in chains, were now feeding them on the quiet. There were real fears, too. The man from Russell & Company worried that if the armed ships at Whampoa tried to blast through the blockade, the Chinese would probably fall upon and massacre the foreigners. But no one tried, and no one was massacred. In fact, the greatest physical risk of the siege turned out to be too much food and too little exercise. I will let you decide what that tells you about how hard the blockade really was. The siege was real enough to frighten. It was not, in the end, a siege that starved anyone. But Elliot did not know how it would end, and he could not wait to find out.

On the twenty seventh of March, three days into the siege, Charles Elliot made his move. He issued a public notice to every British subject in Canton. Constrained, he wrote, by paramount motives affecting the safety of the lives and liberty of all the foreigners present in Canton, and by other very weighty causes, he made a demand in the name of the British government. He did "enjoin and require all her Majesty's subjects now present in Canton forthwith to make a surrender to me for the service of her said Majesty's government" of all the opium under their control, to be delivered over to the government of China. They were to send him a sealed list of every chest of British owned opium they held, and put the ships carrying it under his direction. And then came the crucial sentence. Elliot held himself responsible, in the most full and unreserved manner, on behalf of the British government, to every merchant who surrendered his opium into his hands. And if they failed to surrender it by six o'clock that day, he declared, the British government would be wholly free of any responsibility for it. Think about that the way the merchants in the factories must have thought about it. When the British government created the superintendent's post, it gave him no compulsive authority over the British traders at all, no power even to stop their trade. So Elliot could not simply order the merchants to give up their property. What he could do was buy it from them, with a promise. Elliot was not ordering them to hand their opium to Lin. He was ordering them to hand it to him, to the British government, which would then hand it over to China, and which now promised to answer to them for it. You can imagine how quickly the merchants answered. The bold demand was promptly answered by the immediate surrender of twenty thousand two hundred and eighty three chests, worth at cost prices ten or eleven million dollars. At eleven in the morning on the twenty seventh of March, Elliot agreed to hand over to Lin twenty thousand two hundred and eighty three chests of British opium. To put that in proportion, foreign ships had been bringing in an average of at least thirty thousand chests a year, so Lin was getting a large part of a year's supply. And he was getting it from the Queen of England. So why did Elliot do it? His own answer was that he had no choice. He described himself as forcibly detained by the provincial government, along with all the merchants of his own and other nations, without supplies of food and without servants. The superintendent, as British officials would put it later, gave the orders required of him in order to save the lives of his imprisoned countrymen. And within days he was writing home in a very different tone. This, he wrote on the second of April, was the first time in Britain's dealings with China that the empire had taken an unprovoked, aggressive step against British life and property. Now here is the real weight of what Elliot had done. By pledging the Crown to pay for the opium, he turned a private quarrel between some merchants and a Chinese official into a matter of state between the Queen and the emperor. Until that morning, the opium had been the merchants' property and the merchants' problem. Now it was the British government's property, seized by a foreign power. And it had a price. The opium had cost two million pounds, and in London a debt of two million pounds would prove far more persuasive as a reason for war than any insult to British dignity. That was an enormous sum, far more than any minister could simply pay out without asking Parliament for the money. In fact, when Elliot had to buy five hundred and twenty three chests to make up a shortfall in what he had promised, the bills he drew on the Treasury in London were dishonoured, and were paid only after an indemnity from China came in. Not everyone on the British side thought Elliot a hero, either. His enemies accused him of meddling, and of inflaming the stand off, even of provoking the blockade in the first place. So, did Lin win? On the face of it, completely. He had wanted all the opium, and he had got more than twenty thousand chests of it. But think about what he had actually received. Not the confiscated goods of a few smugglers, which any state is entitled to seize, but property that a foreign government now said it would answer for. Whether Elliot planned it that way, or simply grabbed the only lever he had, the effect was the same. Lin had won his battle, and in winning it he had handed Britain a reason to go to war. It is tempting to see Elliot as the cleverer player here, springing a trap on a commissioner who did not understand how Britain worked. But look at it from inside the factories. Elliot was a prisoner with no food coming in, no servants, armed men at the doors, and no way to make the merchants do anything. The one thing he could offer was the government's credit, and he offered it. Whether he saw where that would lead, or simply hoped that London would sort it out, the trap was sprung either way. And it was sprung on both of them. Lin had taken the opium, and Elliot had committed his government to a bill it had never agreed to pay. And Lin did not yet see any of it. He still had one more demand to make.

Nine days after Elliot agreed to hand over the opium, Lin reminded him of his second demand. That was the bond: the written pledge that any ship found carrying opium in future would lose its cargo, and the men responsible would suffer the extreme penalty of the law. Elliot would have none of it. The opium he could give up. The bond was another matter. Signing it meant conceding on paper the principle of extraterritoriality in China. Extraterritoriality was the claim that a country's subjects abroad should be tried only by their own country's courts and under their own country's laws, wherever they happened to be, and Britain had been edging toward that claim at Canton for decades. To sign Lin's bond was to agree, in writing, that a British sailor caught with opium could be executed by a Chinese court. In the court's debate, the man who led the call for a crackdown had proposed binding every five households together, each pledged to watch the others and denounce any breach of the new laws. A bond of that kind, where a whole group answered for each member, was an old and ordinary tool of Qing government. Lin was asking the foreigners to do no more than the empire asked of its own villages. But to a British officer, it meant handing his countrymen over to a legal system he did not trust, for a crime his own country did not even recognise. That was the line Elliot would not cross. And when the bond was brought to him, he did not argue over the wording. "I tore it up at once," he wrote, "and desired them to tell their officers that they might take my life as soon as they saw fit". It was a brave line, and by now the threat behind it was real enough. For more than four weeks there had been men with naked swords before their doors, day and night. What Lin wanted was for the entire foreign community to have but one neck. Meanwhile the opium chests were slowly coming in, ship by ship, to Lin's officers, and the question of the bond hung over everything. Lin had his opium. What he did not have was a promise about the future. And without that promise, there was nothing to stop the whole trade starting up again the moment his back was turned. To Lin, the bond was the part of the plan that made the rest of it last. To Elliot, it was the one thing his country could never give. Neither man was going to move.

And now Lin had to decide what to do with more than twenty thousand chests of opium. The emperor's answer was that the opium should be destroyed on the spot, at the coast, so that the people of the coast and the foreigners at Canton alike might see and hear, and know and tremble. Lin chose a place near Humen, the fortified town at the Bogue, and had great trenches dug there. Burning would not do. Burnt opium leaves a residue that can be scraped up and smoked again, and Lin meant to leave nothing at all. So the method was water, salt and lime. The destruction began on the third of June, and it went on day after day until it was finished. Over three weeks, somewhere between six and ten million dollars' worth of opium was thrown into vast trenches filled with water, salted, mixed with lime, and finally washed out to sea. Workmen broke the balls of opium apart and churned them into the trenches, and the lime turned the drug into a foul sludge that could never be recovered. Before he let any of it go, Lin did something that tells you he took this as a moral act, not just a police action. He offered a prayer to the Spirit of the Sea, apologising for the poison he was about to pour into its waters. The creatures of the water, he advised, should vacate the area before the drug was released. I find that a rather lovely moment, honestly. The most powerful official in southern China, at the edge of the estuary, warning the fish. Lin wrote that the people of the coast were coming in throngs to watch the opium destroyed, though they were kept outside a fence, for fear that some of them might help themselves. Some foreigners came to watch too, and Lin was sure of what he saw on their faces. What they saw was an official order carried out honestly, though there was money to be made, and thoroughly, though a lax job would have been less trouble. The foreigners, he wrote, felt heartily ashamed, and "the foreigners are trembling in awe." It is at least as likely that what he saw on their faces was queasiness, but Lin took it for conscience. He was in such a good mood that he composed a poem to lychees. Lychees were the sweet red fruit of the southern summer, the fruit Canton was famous for. It is the last time in this story that we will see Lin Zexu quite this happy. Because the trenches at Humen solved one problem, the opium, and did nothing at all about the other one, the people who had brought it.

By the time the first chests went into the trenches, the British were already gone from Canton. Let me take you back a few weeks. Elliot had told Lin that the bond was incompatible with English law, and that if Lin insisted on it, English men and English ships would simply have to leave. Lin's reply was cold. "After you have thus returned, you will not be allowed to come again." Lin was ready to have Elliot's bluff called, because he was convinced that the foreigners would die without China's tea and rhubarb. Sooner or later, he thought, they would have to come back and sign. It was a reasonable bet if you believed, as Lin did, that the foreigners needed China far more than China needed them. The trouble was that the foreigners did not see it that way at all. For the British, the trade was not a favour granted by the emperor. It was a right, and now, thanks to Elliot, it was a grievance too. The siege lasted forty seven days in all, and on the twenty third of May, Elliot ordered all British ships out of Canton, and retreated to Macau to ponder his next move. By the first of June, only about twenty five foreigners remained in Canton, every one of them an American. The American merchants had decided to stay on and keep trading, and before long they were doing very nicely carrying cargoes for the British who could not. So Canton, after all those years of struggle over the rules, had very nearly emptied itself of the British. He had made the Queen's government answerable for more than twenty thousand chests of opium, and the Chinese had taken them. And in his own dispatches, he and his countrymen were the victims of an unprovoked attack on British life and property. Now he waited, at the edge of China, for an answer from the other side of the world that would take months to come. A letter from Canton to London went by sailing ship, around Africa or partly overland through Egypt, and an exchange of letters took the better part of a year. And Lin, at Canton, did much the same thing from his side. He wrote a letter.

Lin's letter was addressed to the Queen of England. He wrote it together with the viceroy and the governor at Canton, and it was about one thing only. Opium was the sole subject it treated. Before it went out, Lin wanted to be sure the English version said what the Chinese said. So the man from Russell & Company was asked by the senior Hong merchant to translate the English version back into Chinese, so that the commissioner could judge it for himself. He spent four hours of a very cold day at the Consoo House doing it, watched over by a delegate from the commissioner, an official of the fourth rank, along with a lesser officer, Howqua's grandson, two others and two interpreters. He thought it a most extraordinary document, grand and bombastic in its style, the work of men who had never had to learn how foreign states wrote to one another. But underneath the grandeur, the argument was very simple, and very hard to answer. The foreign merchants, the letter said, dealt in opium regardless of the injury it inflicted on the Chinese people, because an inordinate thirst for gain controlled their actions. Lin believed that England forbade the smoking of opium at home with the utmost rigour, which proved that it was harmful; so how could it be right to send it to another nation, and to China above all? He was wrong about the law, as it happens. Opium was perfectly legal in Britain at the time, sold by chemists and grocers and taken by the spoonful as laudanum. But Lin's point did not really depend on English law. Selling opium to seduce others, he wrote, was to seek one's own livelihood by exposing other people to death. And then came the passage that has been quoted ever since. "How can these opium-sellers bear to bring to our people an article which does them so much harm, for an ever-grasping gain?" Suppose, it went on, that people of another nation went to England and induced the English to buy and smoke the drug. Then it would be right for the Queen to hate and abhor them. He had heard, he wrote, that the Queen's heart was full of benevolence, and that she would not do to others what she would not have others do to her. It is the golden rule, put to a queen by a Confucian official. And it carried a warning. "I now give my assurance that we mean to cut off this harmful drug for ever". Whatever had already been made, he told her, she must search out and throw to the bottom of the sea. And it spoke of the emperor in the grand manner. "Our great Emperor maintains Celestial lands and foreign nations in equal favour; he rewards merit and punishes vice". The emperor's heart, the letter said, was as pure and incorruptible as the heart of heaven and earth. The letter closed in the same style, reminding the Queen that the Celestial Dynasty ruled over ten thousand nations, and that by sincere and reverent obedience both sides would enjoy the blessings of great peace. Obedience, you will notice. Not agreement between equals. Obedience. No reply ever came, and there is no sign that the Queen ever read the letter. And that, in the end, is the shape of Lin's whole season of triumph. He had studied the foreigners and their trade. He had shut them in, taken their opium and washed it out to sea, and written to their sovereign in words that still read as plain moral sense. What he had not grasped was that he was no longer dealing with merchants. Elliot had made the opium the Crown's business. And the Crown was very far away, and very slow, and very, very large. In the meantime, the British turned out of Canton were at Macau and on their ships off Hong Kong, where fresh food and water were hard to come by. And next time, on a summer day across the water at Kowloon, a party of English and American sailors ashore gets drunk and brawls with the villagers, and a Chinese villager named Lin Weixi dies of his injuries. Who should answer for his death, and under whose law, is the question that finally breaks the peace. That's next time.

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