Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 4

A Death at Kowloon

In July 1839 drunken British and American sailors beat a villager named Lin Weixi to death at Kowloon, and the killing becomes a contest over whose law rules foreigners in China. The episode follows Charles Elliot and Lin Zexu from that death through the first shots of the war, and Palmerston's cabinet and Parliament deciding in London to send a fleet, and asks the season's first big question: was the war fought over opium, over free trade, or over equality between states. It leans on British officials and scholars; the Chinese side of the slide to war is heard only a little in Qing documents.

Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify

Transcript

Last time, Lin Zexu came to Canton as the emperor's commissioner, shut the foreign merchants inside their factories, and made them give up their opium. Charles Elliot, Britain's Superintendent of Trade, ordered the merchants to surrender every chest to him, in the name of the British government, and handed more than twenty thousand chests to Lin. With that one promise, Elliot turned a merchants' quarrel into a matter of state between the Queen and the emperor. Lin had the opium broken up in trenches of lime and salt water at Humen and washed out to sea, and he wrote to Queen Victoria to ask how England would feel if foreigners sold poison there. But Elliot tore up Lin's second demand, a bond pledging that the British would bring no more opium, on pain of death. So the British left Canton. On the twenty third of May, Elliot ordered all British ships out, and retreated to Macau to ponder his next move. Macau was the small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, down the river from Canton, where the foreign merchants lived when they were not at the factories. And that is where we pick up, with the British crowded into Macau and onto their ships in the estuary, and nobody quite sure what happens next. This episode is about how two proud, stubborn, in many ways admirable men slid into a war that neither of them could stop. And it begins, as wars so often do, with something small and stupid. Before we get there, I want you to have both men clearly in your mind, because they are going to spend the next six months misreading each other. On one side is Lin Zexu, the emperor's commissioner, a scholar and a magistrate who believes that law is law, that the empire's law runs everywhere under heaven, and that a foreigner who comes to China to trade comes as a guest who must obey his host. On the other is Charles Elliot, a naval officer with a conscience, who privately hates the opium trade, but who believes just as firmly that no British subject may be handed over to a justice he does not trust. Neither of them is a villain. That is what makes the next year so painful to watch. Shut out of Canton, the British merchant ships had gathered at anchor off Hong Kong, waiting for the quarrel to end. They were full of sailors, and sailors with nothing to do want to go ashore. On the seventh of July, a group of English and American sailors landed somewhere on the shore of the Kowloon peninsula, looking for refreshment. Kowloon was the mainland peninsula facing Hong Kong island across a deep, sheltered stretch of water, dotted with farming and fishing villages. At a village called Jianshazui they found what they were looking for, a supply of samshoo. Samshoo was a cheap, strong spirit distilled from rice, and the foreign sailors in China drank it in quantity. Having drunk it, they partly demolished a small temple, and then they brawled with the villagers. One of those villagers was a man named Lin Weixi. He was beaten in the fight, and the next day he died of his injuries. That is nearly everything we know about him: his name, his village, and how he died. But his death would become a question that two empires could not answer. Elliot's first instinct was to make the problem go away. He hushed the affair up with money: fifteen hundred dollars to the dead man's family, a further four hundred to protect them against extortion, and a hundred more for the villagers. In return, the family acknowledged that the death had been an accident. The Chinese authorities, naturally, treated that as bribing witnesses to lie. And from that point on, the case would not go away. Until now, Elliot had mostly done what British officials at Canton had always done: wait, and write home, and hope for instructions. The death at Kowloon drove him out of that quiet policy for good. Because the question was no longer what had happened to Lin Weixi. It was who had the right to judge the men who did it. And that question, unlike the death itself, was one that neither empire could afford to lose.

Lin Zexu heard about it within days. On the twelfth of July he wrote in his diary: "Heard that at Kowloon Point sailors from a foreign ship beat up some Chinese peasants and killed one of them." To Lin, the case was simple, and it was a matter of law. A man had been killed. The killer must answer for it. Under Qing law, a killing was answered with a life, and the officials of the district where it happened were expected to produce a culprit, or answer for it themselves. On the second of August, Lin had notices pasted up demanding the killer. "Produce the foreign murderer," the notices ran, so that he might forfeit the life for the life he had taken. His demand grew sharper as the weeks passed. In its last form it was an ultimatum: the murderer must be given up for trial within ten days, and delay might bring down measures of extermination. And here Lin ran straight into the wall he had met over the bond. Elliot did not know who had struck the fatal blow, and it would have been hard to find out. It had been a drunken brawl among British and American sailors, and the man had died the next day. And even if he had known, he would not have handed the man over. Two years earlier, he had written that he would never give up accused men to any other form of trial than the one he had pledged himself to, meaning a British one. The British at Canton had a long memory on this point. The last Englishman surrendered for trial and execution had been the gunner of a ship called the Lady Hughes, in 1784. The gunner had fired a salute from his ship that killed two Chinese boatmen. He was handed over, and the Chinese authorities strangled him. The Americans had learned the same lesson more recently. In 1821 a sailor on an American ship called the Emily was accused of killing a Chinese woman in a boat alongside; the Americans gave him up to keep their trade open, and he was strangled. To the foreigners at Canton, those cases proved that Chinese justice wanted a body, not the truth. In Qing courts a conviction rested on a confession, and magistrates were allowed to use torture to get one; to British eyes, that alone ruled Chinese justice out. To Qing officials, the British position looked just as monstrous: a foreign community that could kill a man in the emperor's own country and then declare itself beyond the reach of his law. For more than fifty years after that, no British subject had been handed over, and the merchants had come to believe that no British subject ever should be. And what Lin was demanding, as the British saw it, was not justice but a scapegoat: someone, anyone, to hand over, so that a life could be paid for with a life. That was the one demand Elliot could not meet. And Lin could not drop it either. A commissioner with the emperor's full powers could hardly report to the throne that a foreigner had killed one of the emperor's subjects on the emperor's soil, and walked away. The Daoguang Emperor had sent him south to make the foreigners obey, and here was the plainest test of obedience there could be. So both men dug in, and each believed, quite sincerely, that he was standing up for the law. The trouble was that they meant two different laws.

Elliot's answer was to try the sailors himself. He held his own court aboard a British ship, with himself as judge, and a grand jury of twenty three men to decide whether there was a case to answer. They considered a bill charging an English boatswain with murder, and another charging five sailors with taking part in the riot. The murder charge was thrown out. Nobody could say who had struck the blow. But five men were found guilty on a charge of riot and assault. Elliot fined them and sentenced them to three or six months in prison, to be served in the United Kingdom. He sat as judge under a government order of 1833 that provided for just such a court, though London had told Lord Napier to hold off putting it into effect. Lin was not impressed. A wooden dummy, he said, would have done better than Elliot at finding the culprit. And then, months later, came the sequel in England, and it was almost a joke. The British judges held that Elliot had possessed no such authority over British citizens, and could not try them at all. So the five sailors walked free and vanished into the civilian population. No one was ever convicted of killing Lin Weixi, and none of the five ever served his prison sentence. That was all the justice two empires could find for him. Hold on to that, because it is one of the hidden threads running through this whole season. Elliot would not hand a Briton over to a Chinese court. But the British courts would not let their own man in China act as a judge either. So a death in a Chinese village fell into the gap between two systems, and simply disappeared.

Lin's patience, meanwhile, had run out. If the British would not give up a killer or sign a bond, he would make them hungry. He cut off food to the British at Macau, and ordered every comprador, servant and Chinese employee of the English to leave their service within three days, or be punished with the utmost rigour of the law. A comprador was the Chinese manager who ran a foreign firm's household and its local business; without them, the British in Macau could hardly buy a loaf of bread. The orders were promptly obeyed. Lin was confident that the English would soon be begging for mercy, once they found themselves without the heavy, greasy meat dishes they loved so much. And then, on the fifteenth of August, he came south himself, to a town some forty miles north of Macau, with two thousand troops. Macau was Portuguese, but it lived on Chinese sufferance and Chinese food, and its governor knew exactly how much protection a few hundred Portuguese soldiers could offer against the empire. Elliot did not wait to be thrown out. Fearing that he would compromise the English merchants further, he went on board ship on the twenty first of August, and two days later he left Macau for Hong Kong. On the twenty fourth, the governor of Macau was called upon to expel all the English merchants and their families. That same day, a British schooner called the Black Joke was attacked by pirates halfway between Macau and Hong Kong, and it frightened the English community badly. Some of the British were sure that Chinese officials were behind the attack, though there was never any convincing evidence of it. The Portuguese governor told them he could no longer guarantee their safety, and at a public meeting they voted unanimously to leave at once. The embarkation took place on the twenty sixth of August. It was "men, women, and children, all alike being hurried from their residences, to seek a secure retreat on board their ships." "The little fleet, consisting of small boats, schooners, and lorchas, crowded with passengers, presented an affecting spectacle as it moved slowly away from the harbour." A lorcha was a small, fast coasting vessel built on a European hull with Chinese sails, and the waters around Macau were full of them. Picture it. Whole families crowded into small boats, watching Macau fall slowly away behind them. Fifty-seven English families fled Macau for the merchant ships lying off Hong Kong, and among them were Elliot himself, his wife, and their two-year-old son, Frederick. I want you to notice that detail. The Queen's representative in China was now living on a ship with a toddler, because a Chinese commissioner had cut off his food. Hong Kong, in 1839, was not a city. It was a steep, rocky island with a few fishing villages, and almost no one outside the merchant fleet had paid it any attention. What it did have was the harbour, deep and sheltered between the island and Kowloon, where the British ships had already learned to ride out the weather. The day before the families sailed, Lin and the viceroy issued a proclamation from Xiangshan that set out, very plainly, what the British had to do. Under the new laws, it said, any foreigner caught secretly selling opium would be beheaded if he was the principal, strangled if he was an accomplice, and his property confiscated. Ships that brought no opium could announce themselves, be examined, and unload. Ships that had opium could surrender it, and their offences would be forgiven. Ships that would not enter the port could go home, and would not be pursued. And the fourth head of the proclamation: let the murderer who took the life of Lin Weixi be given up at once, and not implicate all foreigners in the same crime by hiding him. For half a year, the proclamation said, the death penalty had been waived for anyone who handed over his opium of his own accord. That grace was now ending. By these heads, Lin and the viceroy declared, they "show our compassion for you foreigners", leading them onto a new path. But anyone who stayed obstinate, or tried to sell his cargo secretly in some quiet corner of the coast, would be sentenced under the new law whenever he was caught. To Lin, that was a generous offer. To the British floating off Hong Kong, it was the same two demands they had already refused, the bond and the killer, with the food cut off until they gave in. A few days later, Lin himself paid a visit to Macau, now empty of the British, and was received with ceremony by the Portuguese. It was the commissioner showing everyone, the Portuguese included, exactly whose coast this was. And they were running out of food. For weeks the British lived aboard the ships in the harbour, men, women and children together, buying what they could from the shore and rationing what they could not. And every day the Chinese war junks anchored off the Kowloon shore made it a little harder.

At nine in the morning of the fourth of September 1839, Charles Elliot set out in a fleet of three small ships toward the Qing war junks at Kowloon. He was not looking for a battle. He was looking for dinner. Chinese villagers on the shore had been willing to sell provisions to the British ships, and the war junks anchored there were making them take back food the British had already bought and paid for. Elliot spent five or six hours in delay and irritating evasion, trying to talk the junks into letting the food through. Finally he gave them an ultimatum. If he did not get provisions within half an hour, he would fire on the Qing ships. The half hour passed. Elliot, who had once sat calmly under an umbrella while frigates traded fire with the Bogue forts, fairly lost his temper, and opened fire on the war junks. The Bogue was the fortified narrows at the mouth of the Pearl River, the gateway to Canton. The junks fired back, and fired well. At a quarter to five, as the junks drew alongside, the British gave them three broadsides. A war junk was a wooden sailing warship of the Qing navy, armed with cannon along its sides and crewed by soldiers as well as sailors. The fight lasted about two hours. A clerk in the British boats wrote home afterward that the shrieking was dreadful, and that "this is the first day I ever shed human blood, and I hope will be the last". It was not the last day for very many people. Even so, full-blown war was still not inevitable. And here is the strange coda. After the fighting, provisions came to market again, and at prices close to normal. So Elliot got his food. For almost a month afterwards, Lin and Elliot exchanged relatively peaceable letters, and Lin even let a few of the English, Elliot among them, drift back to Macau. But these were the first shots of the war that would change China. They were fired over groceries, and almost nobody at the time understood what they had started.

Now we have to go to London, and to the strange time lag at the heart of this whole story. It took five months for Elliot's account of the blockade of the factories, and his request for armed support, to land on the desk of the Foreign Secretary, Palmerston. Palmerston was a famously combative foreign secretary, a man who believed that British subjects anywhere in the world should be able to count on the protection of the Royal Navy. He had run British foreign policy for most of the decade, under a weak Whig government led by Melbourne that clung to power by a thin majority, and he would later be prime minister twice. So by the time London was deciding what to do about Lin, Lin had long since moved on, and so had Elliot. Each side was always answering a letter about a world that no longer existed. The opium merchants got there first. William Jardine had gone home to London early in 1839 to lead the merchant lobby, taking twenty thousand dollars with him. Jardine was a Scot, a former ship's surgeon who had gone into the opium business and built Jardine Matheson into the biggest foreign firm on the China coast. In Canton they called him the iron headed old rat, after a Chinese attacker once struck him on the head with a club and he barely seemed to notice. He reached London as the expert on China, and he wanted war. In London, the siege of the factories was recreated, in a series of stirring published accounts, as a second Black Hole of Calcutta. The Black Hole of Calcutta was the tiny prison cell where, in 1756, British prisoners of a local ruler in Bengal were said to have died of suffocation overnight, and every Briton of the time knew the story. The comparison was, let us say, generous. In the factories, as you may remember, the greatest physical danger had been too much food and too little exercise. Palmerston saw Jardine, kept him waiting for two hours, and then pumped him for information about the China coast and the force that would be needed, promising nothing in return. That tells you how far things had already moved. Palmerston was not asking whether to use force. He was asking how much. On the thirtieth of September, eight members of the government, Palmerston among them, sat down to an extended crisis meeting of the Cabinet at Windsor Castle. China was not the only crisis, and they did not get to it that day. When they did, Palmerston made it sound easy. He claimed that a small squadron, a single battleship, two frigates and a few small armed vessels with two or three steamers, could blockade the whole coast of China from the river of Beijing down to Canton. And then he came to the money. Suppose, Palmerston suggested, the Chinese were made to foot the bill for the confiscated opium? The young Thomas Babington Macaulay, at his first Cabinet meeting, applauded the suggestion that China should pay. Macaulay had just come home from four years in India, where he sat on the governing council and drafted a penal code for the whole subcontinent; he knew exactly how much British India lived on opium. Not a penny of the two million pounds needed to cover the destroyed opium would be advanced by the British government. It would come from the Chinese. For John Hobhouse, who ran the government's Indian affairs, the main thing was obtaining redress for the outrage on Elliot, which they all agreed was indispensable for the national honour. The discussion dragged on so long that Hobhouse grew impatient and picked up his hat, ready to leave. But he understood what they had done. As he told Macaulay afterwards, they had resolved upon "a war with the master of one-third of the human race." And remember the timing. This Cabinet met at the end of September. The shots at Kowloon had been fired on the fourth. Nobody in that room knew that the shooting had already started. It would take another six months for Palmerston's decision to send a fleet to get back to Elliot.

So let's stop here, in the gap between the decision and the fleet, and ask the question this whole season keeps circling. What was this war for? Here the sources disagree. One side says it was an opium war, plain and simple: the British government began forcing the opium trade on China the day the East India Company's monopoly ended, and the war was how it finished the job. The other side says opium was the occasion and not the cause: the war was fought over trade and over equality, over Britain's refusal to go on dealing with China as a humble tributary, and not to uphold the trade in opium. In the Qing view of the world, foreign states were not equals but tributaries, who sent missions bearing gifts to the emperor and received his favour in return, and trade was part of that favour. The Qing documents called the British yi, a word the British translated as barbarian and came to resent bitterly. Let me give each of them its due, because both have real evidence on their side. Even the name points one way. In English it is the Opium War, and in Chinese it goes by the same name. For the opium side, start with the money. Britain's demands included payment for the opium Lin destroyed, and the opium merchants pressed the government hard for their compensation. And behind the merchants stood an empire. The opium trade, as the merchants reminded London, had been encouraged by the government of British India, and lately earned it some two million pounds a year. In Britain, the duty on tea, which opium silver helped pay for, brought in about a tenth of the government's revenue. Opium was not a side business. It was a load bearing wall. To the Chinese, opium was the one reason for the war. And it was opium that the Daoguang Emperor had wept over, when he told Lin that he could not go to his ancestors until it was removed. Britain's own letter of complaint to China conceded that the reason given for what it called violent outrages was the contraband trade in opium, which Chinese law forbade. And when British negotiators were later told to make no demand about opium, because Britain had no right to, they were also told to urge China to put the opium trade on a regular and legalised footing. "Her Majesty's Government make no demand in regard to this matter, for they have no right to do so." In other words, Britain would not insist on opium, but it would very much like China to make it legal. For the other side, start with what Britain actually asked for. Britain expected its envoy to be treated by the emperor's envoy "upon a footing of perfect equality". And the Qing answer, in a letter from one of the emperor's ministers to the British commander in 1840, was that "the Celestial Empire grants commercial intercourse to all Countries as an act of grace and privilege". Trade, in other words, was not a right. It was a favour, granted to those who showed a reverential sense of duty. "Besides, under the whole Heaven, there lives none who are not the Children and People of the Great Emperor." In a lecture in Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams went so far as to say that opium was a mere incident, and that the cause of the war was the kowtow. The kowtow was the full ceremonial prostration before the emperor, kneeling and knocking the head on the ground, and to Western diplomats it had become the symbol of everything they meant by inequality. Two British embassies had already gone all the way to the emperor's court, in 1793 and 1816, and come home with nothing, the second sent away without even an audience after a quarrel over that ritual. And when Lord Napier had arrived at Canton in 1834, Chinese documents had written his name with characters meaning laboriously vile. Lin's own letter to the Queen, for all its moral force, had ended by asking for obedience, not agreement. And war had been hanging in the air since Lord Napier's protest five years earlier, long before Lin destroyed a single chest. What made it come when it did was that the Chinese had forced a crisis by their vigorous campaign against opium. So which was it? My own view, for what it is worth, is that you cannot pull the threads apart. The British went to war for a debt, and the debt was opium. They went to war for equality, and the equality they wanted was the freedom to trade, opium included, on their own terms. And Lin went to war, if he can be said to have gone to war at all, to defend his empire from a poison, and to defend the idea that the emperor's law was the only law under heaven. Each of them was defending something real. And each of them had something the other could not live with. Now, back to Canton, where one British captain was about to show Lin that the British were not quite as united as Elliot claimed.

In October 1839, a British merchant ship called the Thomas Coutts arrived in Chinese waters. Her master had taken legal advice in Calcutta, and he had been told that Elliot had exceeded his authority in placing an embargo on the English trade. So he ignored the embargo. He took his ship straight to Whampoa, and he duly signed the opium bond. Whampoa was the deep water anchorage some miles below Canton, where the big foreign ships lay to load and unload. Lin had been preparing for exactly this kind of argument. He had had passages of a European treatise on the law of nations translated into Chinese, to find out what the foreigners' own rules said about a state's right to ban harmful goods and punish those who brought them. What he found there was that any foreigner who commits a crime must be punished by the law of the country. To Lin, this was proof that he had been right all along. The British could be split. Elliot's refusal was not the refusal of a nation, it was the stubbornness of one official, and a sensible captain could see through it. It was the act of the Thomas Coutts, against the superintendent's authority, that inspired the commissioner to revive the battle. Lin now abandoned the idea of compromise, and made one more bid for a mass signing of the bond. Later, it was the master of the Thomas Coutts whom Lin trusted to carry his letter to Queen Victoria back to London. If one ship could sign, so could all of them. And if they would not, they would be driven off. Lin set a deadline for the British ships to sign the bond and come in to trade, or leave Chinese waters altogether, and he gathered war junks and fire ships to make the choice for them. Fire ships were old boats packed with fuel and set alight, to be drifted down onto an enemy's anchored ships, and the Chinese navy had used them for centuries. Elliot, for his part, now faced the thing he feared most: his own countrymen undermining him in front of the Chinese. So he called up the only real force he had.

That force was two British warships, the frigate Volage and the smaller Hyacinth. On the third of November 1839, at Chuanbi, near the mouth of the Pearl River, they faced a Qing squadron. That same morning another British merchant ship, the Royal Saxon, tried to follow the Thomas Coutts up the river to sign the bond, and the Volage fired a shot across her bows to turn her back. So the day began with British guns fired at a British ship, to stop it obeying Chinese law. Twenty-nine war junks were seen coming toward the two English ships. They were commanded by Admiral Guan Tianpei, the old commander of the Bogue forts. Guan was nearly sixty, a career soldier who had risen from the ranks, and he had spent the past years strengthening the forts that guarded the river. And the admiral sent a message that made it perfectly clear what the whole confrontation was about. All he wanted at this moment, he said, was the single foreigner who had killed Lin Weixi. Elliot answered again and again, solemnly, that he did not know who the killer was. Which was true. And which was not going to make the slightest difference. Two ships against twenty-nine. On paper, the admiral had every advantage. What happened next depends on whose account you hear. In Elliot's version, the captain of the Volage judged that to retire in front of the junks was not compatible with the honour of the flag, and after consulting Elliot, he opened fire. In Lin's version, the admiral was still making enquiries when the Hyacinth began cannonading and pressed her attack. Either way, the British ships opened fire, and the result was not close. In Elliot's report, one war junk blew up at close range, three were sunk, and the British side suffered one sailor lightly injured. In the Chinese telling, the admiral stood erect before his mast, wielding his sword and roaring, "Death to deserters!" And the report that reached the emperor read as a victory. Elliot himself paid the old admiral a soldier's compliment. He praised his resolution, honourably enhanced, as he put it, by the hopelessness of his efforts. I find that sentence one of the saddest in this whole story. The British knew exactly how hopeless it was. In Beijing, they were told it was a triumph. And that gap, between what happened at sea and what the throne was told, is going to cost the empire very dearly. That winter, the emperor ordered all trade with the British stopped for good. In Beijing it looked like strength. At Canton it meant that the only thing left between the two sides was force.

In London, meanwhile, Palmerston was writing his orders. On the twentieth of February 1840, his instructions to the commanders of the expedition set out exactly what the fleet was to win. He named two plenipotentiaries to carry them out, Charles Elliot and his cousin, Rear Admiral George Elliot, who would command the fleet. A plenipotentiary was an envoy with full powers to negotiate and sign a treaty on his government's behalf. For Charles Elliot, that was vindication of a kind. The man who had surrendered the opium was now to collect the bill for it. First, they were to demand the return of the surrendered opium, or, since it had been destroyed, payment of its value. The first operation was to be a blockade of the Pearl River. The next was to occupy the islands of Zhoushan, off the central coast. Zhoushan was a group of islands off the coast south of the mouth of the Yangzi, close to the rich heart of the empire and its great ports, and far closer to Beijing than Canton was. Britain wanted somewhere to stand. It would accept the cession of one or more islands off the coast, to be chosen by the naval commander and the superintendent, as satisfaction and security. Or, if China preferred, a treaty guaranteeing the safety of British subjects and free trade, in which case Britain would give up any permanent hold on an island. Palmerston named the ports he had in mind: Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai and Ningbo. Any Briton accused of a crime in China was to be tried by a court set up by the British superintendent. There, in one line, is Lin Weixi's death, and the bond, turned into British policy. And then there was the principle at the heart of it all. Her Majesty claimed no superiority for her envoys, and would allow none to China's. Equals. That was the word Britain meant to make the emperor accept, at gunpoint if necessary. Think about what an island meant to the British. The Portuguese had Macau. Now the British wanted a Macau of their own, a place on the coast where British law ruled and no Chinese commissioner could cut off the food. After this summer at Hong Kong, nobody had to explain to Elliot why that mattered. And there it is again, the knot from the last section: payment for opium in the first paragraph, and equality in the last.

Before the fleet could do any of this, the government had to survive Parliament. In the spring of 1840 the opposition moved a motion of censure on the government's handling of China, and the House of Commons argued about it for three spring nights. The motion, moved by the Tory Sir James Graham, did not attack the opium trade itself. It attacked the government for failing to foresee the crisis and for leaving its superintendent without proper instructions or powers. But once the debate began, opium was the word everyone reached for. The debate ran to a hundred and fifteen thousand nine hundred and twenty two words, not counting the heckles and cheers. Outside Parliament, The Times had already called the idea of going to war unthinkable. And it put the opium trade bluntly. "Our sin", it said, in growing and encouraging the opium trade, was "one of the darkest that ever invoked the wrath of the Most High God upon a people." The opium men answered for themselves. James Matheson, Jardine's partner, declared that in twenty-one years in China he had never seen a native in the least bestialised by opium smoking. That claim tells you rather more about the man making it than it does about opium. Then the young William Ewart Gladstone rose to attack the trade. He was thirty years old, deeply religious, and decades away from the four terms as prime minister that lay ahead of him. His own sister Helen would struggle for years with laudanum, the opium tincture sold by chemists all over Britain. Gladstone attacked the opium trade as infamous and atrocious, and said the British flag had been hoisted to protect a contraband traffic. He had never known or read of, he told the House, "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace". Palmerston answered by talking about something else entirely. What mattered, he said, was the honour of the British flag and the dignity of the British Crown. Macaulay, the Secretary at War, made the same case with more colour, conjuring up the picture of British men and women besieged at Canton by a hostile power, and the flag that had come to protect them. Not opium. The flag. And that was the genius of the government's case. Nobody in that chamber had to stand up and defend opium. They only had to defend a British officer, besieged and threatened, and the flag he had raised over the factories. The opium was there all the same, in the two million pounds that somebody was going to have to pay. And the government had already decided who that somebody would be. And when the House divided, the ayes were two hundred and sixty two, the noes two hundred and seventy one. The government survived by a majority of nine. Nine votes. That was the margin between a censure and a war. Had five members voted the other way, the censure would have passed. They did not, and it was not. The war that most of Britain would remember as the Opium War had passed through Parliament without anyone voting on whether to fight it.

By then the fleet was already on its way. Its first ships reached Hong Kong in June 1840, and in all it numbered twenty-two warships and twenty-seven transports, carrying three thousand six hundred Scottish, Irish and Indian infantry. And it did not stop at Canton. It sailed on north, up the coast, to Zhoushan. On the cliffs of the island, the Qing officials watching the great ships arrive were puzzled at first, and then the explanation occurred to them, and they guffawed with joy. They thought the foreigners had come to trade. On the fourth of July the British set their terms: the island should surrender within six hours, or face the consequences. It did not. Fifteen British ships lined up opposite a file of Qing war junks, and held their fire until half past two in the afternoon. Then they fired, for nine whole minutes. Nine minutes of broadside from fifteen ships against wooden junks and an old town wall. On the fifth the British occupied Dinghai, the island's capital, the defenders being quite unprepared to make any resistance. The Qing admiral lost a leg to a round shot and died days later on the mainland at Ningbo, and the island's governor drowned himself in a small pool. Only twenty-six Qing soldiers died in the fall of Zhoushan. Twenty-six men. The rest had run away before they could come to any harm. It was hardly a battle at all. It was Commodore Bremer who had summoned the town to surrender, and now Zhoushan's capital was in British hands. They would soon find it was easier to take than to hold. Over the months that followed, sickness in the crowded, swampy town killed far more British soldiers than the Qing guns ever had. And here is the last of this episode's time lags. Lin, at Canton, had been sending his reports to Beijing, assessing the English threat and how to meet it. He had spent the winter and spring preparing for an attack on Canton, strengthening the forts at the Bogue, buying foreign cannon, and drilling local militia. He had assured the emperor that the English were formidable only at sea, and that on land their soldiers, with legs so tightly bound they could hardly bend them, would be no match for Chinese troops. By the time one of those assessments reached the capital, the English had already held Zhoushan for twelve days. Lin had spent a year fighting the British at Canton, on ground he understood. And the British had simply gone around him. Canton was a long way from Beijing, and the emperor could afford to let a commissioner manage a quarrel there. Zhoushan was a different matter. It sat off the coast of the empire's richest provinces, on the sea road to the north. And the British were not finished. Palmerston's letter for the emperor's ministers still had to be delivered, and Palmerston had told them where to deliver it. The war had arrived at the emperor's door. Next time, the fleet keeps sailing north, to the mouth of the river that leads to Beijing itself, and the Daoguang Emperor has to decide whether Lin Zexu is the man to save him, or the man to blame. And a very different kind of official steps forward, a Manchu grandee who thinks the barbarians can be talked back to Canton. That's next time.

Sources

• Augustus F. Lindley, Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh: The History of the Ti-Ping Revolution (1866), p. 560-561, https://archive.org/download/tipingtienkwohh03lindgoog/tipingtienkwohh03lindgoog_text.pdf
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), pp. 215-217, 224-225, 236-238, 238-239, 239-240, 240-242, 242-243, 243-245, 245-246, 246-247, 253-254, 264-265, 272-274, 621-622, 627, 627-629, 629-630, 630-631, 633-634, 658-659, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)
• William C. Hunter, The 'Fan Kwae' at Canton before Treaty Days, 1825-1844 (1882), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42685