Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 5

Qishan's Bargain

When the British fleet appears at the mouth of the river that leads to Beijing, the Daoguang Emperor turns from Lin Zexu to Qishan, a Manchu grandee who thinks the barbarians can be talked back to Canton. The episode follows Qishan and Charles Elliot as they bargain, fight and sign a deal that both their governments throw out, and asks what it cost each man to try to end the war on terms the other could accept. It hears the court in its own edicts and the British in their dispatches, with scholars between them.

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Transcript

Last time, a gang of drunken British and American sailors went ashore at Kowloon, wrecked part of a little temple and brawled with the villagers, and one villager, Lin Weixi, died of his injuries the next day. Charles Elliot, the British superintendent, tried to hush the death up with money. Then, that September, with Qing war junks at Kowloon cutting the British off from food and water, Elliot gave them half an hour to let provisions through, and then opened fire. In London, the House of Commons argued for three spring nights over whether this was a war for opium, and the government won the vote by a majority of nine. Back in London, Palmerston had already written out what the fleet was to win: the opium the merchants had surrendered, or its value if it had been destroyed, one or more islands on the coast, and, for Britain's envoys, a footing of entire equality with the emperor's. And then that fleet, twenty two warships and twenty seven transports, sailed straight past Canton, up to the island of Zhoushan, and took it after nine minutes of gunfire. Lin had told the emperor the fleet was simply a large opium smuggling operation, and by the time that report reached Beijing, the English had already held Zhoushan for twelve days. So the war has left the south. And today it comes knocking at the emperor's own door. This is an episode about two men who tried to stop a war by talking, and about what each of their governments did to them for it. One of them you know already. The other is a great lord of the Qing court, and his name is Qishan. The Bei River is the river that runs from the sea up to the city of Tianjin, and Tianjin is the port that serves as the doorstep of Beijing, a little over a hundred kilometres from the capital. Whoever holds the mouth of that river is, in a real sense, standing in the emperor's front garden. The river's mouth was guarded by the Dagu forts, a cluster of batteries on the mud flats that were the main defence of the sea road to Tianjin and the capital. Up in the gulf below the capital, the British now had five ships carrying a hundred and eighty guns, and a steamer with them. The morning of the eleventh of August 1840 dawned quietly over the dry flats of Tanggu, at the river's mouth, as Elliot's fleet came in. It is worth pausing on how little the court knew about what was coming toward it. The Daoguang Emperor had very little idea why English guns had been pounding his coast until the second week of that August, when the fleet sailed in to Tianjin. He had ruled for twenty years by then, a careful, thrifty and anxious man who read the reports of his officials closely and wrote his answers on them in red ink. And the reports from the coast were not encouraging. One imperial representative found that of the two thousand four hundred soldiers on his rolls, a mere six hundred could be mustered for immediate service. So the officials at the river's mouth did the thing that the Qing state did best, which was to receive a document. Bureaucrats squelched out through the mud, took possession of Palmerston's letter, and promised to hand it up the imperial chain to Qishan. Palmerston had spelled out the demands in his instructions to the envoys, and the letter carried them. First, the opium the merchants had been made to surrender was to be returned, or paid for if it had been destroyed. The envoys were to be treated as equals: Britain claimed no superiority for its envoys over the emperor's, and would allow the emperor's none over Britain's. And in the treaty Palmerston drafted, a Briton accused of a crime in China would be tried by a court the British superintendent set up, and punished, if found guilty, by the British. Which, if you remember the dead villager at Kowloon, is exactly the quarrel that started the shooting. The letter also complained bitterly of how Lin Zexu had treated British subjects at Canton, and at the Qing court it could be read as a plea for the emperor to right a wrong done by his own official. Hold on to that reading, because it is about to matter a great deal. Now let me introduce him properly, because he is the hinge of this whole episode. Qishan was a Manchu grandee from one of the great banner families, governor general of Zhili, the province that wraps around the capital, and one of the most trusted ministers the emperor had. The banners were the hereditary military order the Manchu conquerors had brought into China two centuries earlier, and to belong to one was to belong to the ruling people. A governor general ruled one or more provinces for the emperor, with the army and the civil officials of his region answering to him. He was also, by every sign, an old friend of the emperor's. The emperor had chosen to soothe the British rather than crush them, and Qishan was the man who would do the soothing. And Qishan's answer, when it came, was polite. He told the British that an answer would take ten days, and he advised them to amuse themselves until the twenty fifth. And on the thirteenth of August he sent out to the ships a liberal supply of bullocks, sheep and poultry. It is hard to imagine a gentler way of telling an invading fleet to sit down and wait. The British, for their part, had sailed halfway round the world to be sent some livestock.

Qishan's whole method came down to one idea, and it was an old one in Chinese statecraft. It was reciprocity: he would offer the British so many gifts, so many compliments and so many professions of friendship that they would feel too guilty to make war. And so, on the thirtieth of August, the two sides finally met. Qishan came dressed with restrained good taste, in a blue silk robe, white satin boots and a straw cap trailing a fine peacock's feather, and he received the British under a marquee lined with yellow silk. A peacock feather on an official's cap was a mark of honour granted by the emperor himself, and yellow was the imperial colour. The British side was led by two Elliots: Charles, and his cousin, Rear Admiral George Elliot, who commanded the fleet and shared the title of plenipotentiary with him. A plenipotentiary is an envoy given full power to negotiate and sign on his government's behalf. Charles Elliot was a captain in the Royal Navy who had served as Britain's superintendent of trade at Canton since the end of 1836. Elliot's first personal encounter with Qing officialdom, back in 1834, had been two heavy blows over the head. Now a minister of the court received him, as he remembered it, "with great courtesy". The talks went on for six hours, and one of the British party waiting nearby recalled that "the loud voices of the plenipotentiaries in high argument" kept reaching their ears. So this was not all bullocks and compliments. On the money, Qishan held his ground: for the emperor to pay for the opium, he said, was neither reasonable nor just, though he hinted that he might yet change his mind, and that further time was necessary for deliberation. And then came the letters. Over the next few weeks, Qishan kept writing to the British, much of it to the admiral, and those letters are worth hearing in his own words, as they were translated at the time. On the island the British wanted, he answered that "the Celestial Empire grants commercial intercourse to all Countries as an act of grace and privilege". In other words, trade is not a right. It is a gift. And a gift is not something you can demand at gunpoint. He reminded them that they had come for profit, and that the profit they had made since the empire allowed them to trade was beyond counting. People who came to beg the emperor's favour, he observed, hardly needed to bring a fleet of warships along with them. And then he laid out the whole Qing view of the world in one sentence: "Besides, under the whole Heaven, there lives none who are not the Children and People of the Great Emperor." His duty, he wrote, was to embody the emperor's feeling "that within and without, all form one family", and so, while he calculated for the Celestial Empire, he had to calculate for the British too. He praised the admiral, too, for keeping a respectful tone through a month of dealings, and for causing no trouble. As for Lin Zexu, the commissioner wrote, he had failed to carry out the emperor's true wishes, and by his violence had driven the superintendent to complain of oppression. And so the emperor, in his sacred favour, had granted an investigation. There it is. Palmerston's complaint, read in Beijing, had become a petition against Lin, and the emperor was graciously agreeing to hear it. It was not at all what Palmerston had meant. But it was a story the court could live with, and it let everyone step back from the edge. Here is the offer inside the courtesy. If the admiral would obey the emperor's pleasure and go back south, to Canton, a high minister would come there to settle the affair. And, he added, "although it is well known that the Value of the opium does not amount to much", every effort would be made to give the admiral something to take back to his sovereign, and Charles Elliot amends for his grievances. He even warned that if the admiral went home with nothing settled, whoever the Queen sent next would only be told to go to Canton as well. Notice what is happening here. The British came north precisely so as not to be sent back to Canton. And Qishan is sending them back to Canton. Palmerston's whole plan had been to go over the heads of the Canton officials and speak to the throne. Qishan was answering that the throne had heard, and that the conversation would now continue in the south. Meanwhile, in his reports to the emperor, Qishan described the English as seeming to show remorse, and as able to do nothing but fire their guns. That is a pattern worth noticing early, because it will run through this whole war: what the emperor is told and what is actually happening are two different things. And the British, for their part, came away impressed with him. Charles Elliot called Qishan "one of the very foremost men in this country". It is easy to read that as naive. But there were hard reasons, too, for the British to take the offer. Palmerston himself later supposed what those reasons were: the late season, the coming northerly monsoon, and the sickness among the troops on shore and the crews of the fleet. The winter monsoon on the China coast blows from the north east, which made it slow and dangerous for sailing ships to work their way up the coast and hold station there. The sick troops were the garrison of Zhoushan, where disease killed far more British soldiers that year than Qing guns ever did. So, after a brief consideration, the two Elliots agreed to go back to Canton. And now look at it from Beijing. The barbarians had come to the emperor's door, and Qishan had talked them away with nothing but a tent, a few letters and some livestock. In Beijing, someone had to be blamed for the trouble in the first place, and the emperor knew exactly who. That autumn the Daoguang Emperor dismissed Lin Zexu, blaming his harshness at Canton for the whole war, and sent Qishan south to take his place as imperial commissioner. An imperial commissioner was a high official sent out with the emperor's own authority to settle one great matter, above the ordinary officials of the province. It was the same title Lin himself had carried to Canton the year before, and Qishan would also act as governor general of Guangdong and Guangxi, the two southern provinces around the city. Lin, the man who had burned the opium, was finished. Qishan, the man who had made the barbarians go away, was the emperor's answer.

Qishan needed someone who could actually talk to the British, and the man he found is one of the strangest figures in this war. His name was Bao Peng, a forty seven year old chancer from near Macau, and Qishan took him on as his translator and adviser. Bao Peng had a past. He had made a lucrative career at Canton as an unlicensed agent for the Americans and British, and as an opium supplier to rich Cantonese, and in March 1839, when a Chinese interpreter threatened to denounce him to Lin Zexu, he decided to disappear north. That was the month of Lin's great crackdown on the trade, so Bao had left just ahead of the storm. Now that man was back, at the side of the emperor's own commissioner, and he was not shy about it. Bao boasted to his old master Lancelot Dent, the British merchant at the very top of Lin's most wanted list, in the pidgin English of the Canton coast: "My largo man, my have catchee peace, my have catchee war my hand". Pidgin was the trading language of Canton, a mix of English, Portuguese and Chinese words on Chinese grammar that foreign merchants and their Chinese partners used to do business. What Bao meant was simple enough. I am a big man now. I hold peace and war in my hand. To Qishan, a man who knew the British and their language was a tool. To his enemies at court, a former opium broker whispering in the commissioner's ear would look like something much worse. A scholar of the time wrote that once Bao was appointed, Elliot conceived "a greater contempt for China’s resources in men than ever". Keep Bao Peng in mind. He is about to become evidence.

Elliot and his party reached Macau on the twentieth of November 1840, but Qishan only announced himself officially on the twenty ninth. Macau was the small Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, the place where the foreign merchants lived when they were not at Canton. And delay suited the emperor's plan very well. The emperor had told Qishan exactly how to handle the British: "After prolonged negotiation has made them weary and exhausted, we can suddenly attack, and thereby subdue them." So the talks that followed were never quite what they seemed, on either side. The emperor wanted the talks to be a trap. Elliot wanted them to be a way out. Elliot's cousin, the admiral, fell ill and went home that winter, which left Charles Elliot to carry on the bargaining alone. And Charles Elliot had his own reasons for wanting a quick, cheap peace. He wrote that "it will better become me to incur the responsibility of departing from the letter of my instructions" than to load the country with the burden of a distant war, and the deep hatred it would leave behind. That sentence is the whole of Charles Elliot. He had seen what a war in China would cost, and he would rather take the blame himself than ask Britain to pay it. The trouble is that Qishan was under orders to give almost nothing, and Elliot was under orders to take a great deal. On the money, Qishan moved. Five million dollars, he said, would be paid for the destroyed opium. The dollars on the China coast were silver coins, Spanish and Mexican, and they were the money in which the whole foreign trade was counted. But on land he did not move at all. The request to grant territory, meaning Hong Kong, was, he said, inconsistent with reason. To the Qing, giving away a piece of the emperor's soil was a different kind of thing from paying money. Money could be explained as generosity. An island could only be explained as defeat. And a commissioner who gave away land would have to explain it to an emperor who had sent him precisely to make the barbarians go away. So the weeks went by, letters went back and forth, and Qishan conceded little. Behind the courtesy, he was also getting ready to fight. Between late December and early January he diverted some eight thousand reinforcements into the forts below Canton, so that each now held around three hundred and twenty men instead of sixty. And he set aside eleven thousand dollars to bribe the men to stay and fight. That is a telling detail. The commissioner was not sure his soldiers would stand without being paid extra to do it. Elliot's terms, by the way, were mild. Compared with what Britain would take from China a year and a half later, they were almost modest. Palmerston's instructions had pointed to five ports he hoped to see opened, Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai and Ningbo. Elliot's terms mentioned only Canton. But mild terms are no use if the other side will not sign them, and by the new year Elliot's patience had run out.

On the seventh of January 1841, after a few more days of stalling from Qishan, the British fleet started up the river. Its target was Chuanbi, a point of land at the outer mouth of the Bogue, and the fort across the channel from it. The Bogue is the narrow throat of the Pearl River below Canton, guarded by forts on both banks and on islands in the stream, and it was the city's main shield against anything coming from the sea. The forts were built of stone and earth, with their cannon set to face the channel, and most of their garrisons were soldiers of the Green Standard Army, the empire's Chinese troops, rather than Manchu bannermen. Three British steamers set out to land some fourteen hundred marines, infantry and artillery on the two sides of the channel. One of those steamers deserves a word of its own. Her captain noted with pride the astonishment of the Chinese, "unacquainted with this engine of destruction". It was the Nemesis, a brand new iron steamer, a hundred and eighty four feet long and twenty nine wide, burning eleven tons of coal a day. The Nemesis had been built in England for the East India Company, and her flat iron bottom let her go into shallow channels where the big wooden warships could not follow. Steam meant she could move against the wind and the current whenever she liked, which no war junk on the river could do. The fleet began to shell the highest fort on Chuanbi, and twenty five minutes later the British flag was flying over it. The commander of the fort, Chen Liansheng, fought on until every part of his skin was pierced by the gunfire raining down on him, and his son fell soon after. Many wounded Qing soldiers were burned alive, when the lit matches they carried for their guns set off the gunpowder strapped to their bodies. A matchlock was an old kind of musket, fired by touching a smouldering cord to the powder, which meant every man carried fire close to his own ammunition. Out on the water, a rocket from the Nemesis struck a war junk, and it blew up, in the words of a British witness, "launching into eternity every soul on board". After that, the crews of the other junks fled. An army doctor wrote, "The sea was quite blackened with corpses". The whole battle took an hour and a half. It left some two hundred and eighty Qing soldiers dead and four hundred and sixty two wounded. The English had thirty eight wounded, and no one killed. I want to sit with those numbers for a moment, because they are the shape of this whole war. It is not that the Qing soldiers would not fight. Chen Liansheng and his son fought to the end. It is that courage, at that range, against those guns, bought almost nothing. Remember that, because we will see it again and again, at fort after fort, all the way up the coast. Of course, that is not how it looked from inside the empire. When forts that should have held fall in an afternoon, people look for a traitor. A scholar of the day wrote that about two thousand Chinese traitors had climbed the hills and attacked the forts from the rear, far outnumbering the garrison of six hundred. And the rumours that swirled around those traitors pointed straight at the commissioner who had been bargaining with the enemy. The truth was simpler. Canton's forts fell because they were no match for British firepower, and the rumours about Qishan were most likely only rumours. But a rumour does not need to be true to destroy a man. It only needs to reach the emperor.

With the forts at Chuanbi gone and the road to Canton open, Qishan gave way. On the twentieth of January 1841, Charles Elliot announced to the British community that a preliminary agreement had been reached. The agreement was worked out in the days after the battle, while the British ships lay ready to move on the inner forts of the Bogue. It is known to history as the Convention of Chuanbi, and its terms were short. First, the island and harbour of Hong Kong would be ceded to the British crown, with duties on its trade still paid to China, as they were at Whampoa. Second, an indemnity of six million dollars to the British government, one million at once, and the rest in equal yearly instalments ending in 1846. Third, direct official dealings between the two countries on an equal footing. And fourth, the trade at Canton would reopen within ten days of the Chinese new year. The Chinese new year that winter fell on the twenty third of January 1841. Remember that third term, because it is the very question Lord Napier came to Canton to force: whether a British official could deal with a Qing official as an equal. Elliot also used the notice to say something that would shape British policy in China for a long time to come: that Britain sought no privilege in China only for its own ships and merchants, and would offer the protection of its flag on Hong Kong to the subjects, citizens and ships of every foreign power. And, until the Queen decided otherwise, there would be no port charges on Hong Kong at all. In other words, the island was to be open to the ships of every nation. That idea will outlive everyone in this story. On paper, it looked like a peace. Look closer, and you can see that neither man could really sign it. Qishan positively refused to let the imperial seal be put on the documents. And he refused again and again to admit that the payment of this compensation was an engagement on the part of the emperor himself. In other words, Qishan was offering something he could plausibly describe in Beijing as a local arrangement, a commissioner's gesture, not a surrender by the throne. And Elliot, for his part, accepted the cession of Hong Kong without authority. His instructions had asked for a good deal more than an island. Still, to Elliot the island was the prize. Britain had raised its flag on Hong Kong, with its exceptional harbour, and he counted that as the crucial gain. Hong Kong was a steep, rocky island off the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, thinly settled by fishermen and farmers, but its deep, sheltered harbour was one of the best on the whole coast. On the twenty third of January the order went out to give Zhoushan back, and on the twenty sixth Hong Kong was formally occupied. So in the same week, Britain let go of the island in the north that it had taken by force, and took hold of an island in the south. Britain would hold Hong Kong until 1997. Two men, both sure they had found a way out of a war. Both about to find out what their masters thought of it.

The emperor's answer came first, and it came hard. The emperor ruled on paper. Officials sent him memorials, formal written reports, and he answered with edicts, his written commands, which carried the force of law the moment they were issued. In fact, even before the terms reached him, Daoguang had begun to turn. An edict of the sixth of January ordered that any future petitions from the foreigners should be utterly rejected. And on the thirtieth of January, another edict named Yishan as general to put down what the court now called a rebellion. Yishan was a member of the imperial clan, of the same generation as the emperor's own sons. Notice that word. To the court, the British were not a foreign power at war with China. They were rebels against the emperor's order, to be crushed. The emperor ordered two thousand soldiers each from three inland provinces, Hubei, Sichuan and Guizhou, to hurry to Canton. Those were provinces deep in the interior, and their soldiers would have to march for weeks to reach the coast. Qishan's own reports did not help him. He told the emperor that he had devised a scheme for playing for time, and had only pretended to promise what the British asked. That was meant to sound clever. To a court that had already decided on war, it sounded like a confession. Qishan's concessions gave the war party at court its arguments, and it at once regained the upper hand. Then, around the middle of February 1841, a hot tempered fellow official named Yuqian denounced Qishan to the emperor. Yuqian's view of the enemy fitted in one line: "The English are simply treacherous merchants". Remember Yuqian. He will be back in this war, and he will hold to that view to the very end. And the emperor put his own decision in writing. It was time, he wrote, to send a punitive mission. "My mind is made up, there will be no wavering at all." Think about where that leaves Qishan. Last summer he was the man who had saved the capital. Now he is the man who gave away the emperor's land. First Lin had been broken for being too hard. Now Qishan was about to be broken for being too soft. And he was still at Canton, still the commissioner, with the British fleet sitting at the mouth of the river waiting for a peace that was never going to come.

When it became clear that the agreement was dead, the British went back to work. On the twenty fifth of February 1841 they began to batter the two lines of defence that still stood between them and Canton. The defenders had tried everything they could think of. On one of the fortified islands, a single band of soldiers was set to marching around the same hill, changing their clothes after each circuit, to make the British think there were endless numbers of them. It is the kind of trick that works in a story. Against the guns of a fleet, it did nothing at all. The forts were commanded by Guan Tianpei, the admiral of Guangdong's naval forces, a veteran of about sixty who had already faced the British in the first clash at Chuanbi in 1839. Before the assault, Guan pawned his own clothes to give his men a couple of dollars apiece. On another of the islands, the officers did something worse than run. They locked their rank and file inside the forts and fled, and the men they had abandoned turned their cannon on their departing officers instead of on the British. In Guan's own fort, the men tried to leave too. As Guan drew his sword to stop them going, a bullet hit him in the chest. So the old admiral died at his post, sword drawn, trying to hold his own men to the fight. Besides Guan, the British claimed six hundred Chinese lives and the capture of some four hundred and sixty cannon. Five British were wounded. Afterward, people looked again for treachery to explain it, and there were stories of a fifth column, of men inside the forts working for the enemy. The truth was less elaborate. The Qing guns were fixed and could not swivel to aim at the British ships or soldiers, and the gunners ran away. Guns built to cover one stretch of water, pointing at nothing, while the enemy came from somewhere else. That is the Bogue in one picture. The Bogue was the gateway to Canton. With it gone, there was nothing serious left between the British and the city. On the twentieth of March 1841, Elliot concluded an armistice, and with it the trade reopened, freeing twenty thousand tons of shipping and thirty million pounds of tea.

For Qishan, the end came quickly. On the thirteenth of March 1841, Qishan left Canton wreathed in chains, his property confiscated by the state, bound for the capital to await trial for treason. In Beijing he was charged on thirteen counts. The confiscated property, as it was reported, included gold weighing ten thousand nine hundred and twelve taels, and more than eighteen million taels of silver. A tael was the Chinese ounce, a weight of a little under forty grams, and silver was counted in taels throughout the empire. He was tried by the council of state and condemned to death. In the Qing system only the emperor could confirm a death sentence on an official, and he could reduce it as he pleased. Bao Peng fell with him. He was convicted of acting as an unlicensed comprador, and condemned to serve out his days as a slave in remote, freezing Xinjiang. A comprador was the Chinese agent who managed a foreign firm's dealings with Chinese merchants and officials, and at Canton the job was supposed to be licensed by the state. Xinjiang was the empire's far north western frontier, thousands of kilometres from the coast, and it was where the Qing sent the men it wanted to forget. So much for holding peace and war in his hand. Qishan's own story took a stranger turn. In time Daoguang commuted the death sentence to banishment, and then, in 1842, fully restored his old friend. And the Treaty of Nanjing, when it came, was Qishan's real justification, because its terms were far harsher than anything he had agreed to at Chuanbi. Still, every official watching took a lesson from Qishan's fall. Bargain with the barbarians, and you leave for the capital in chains. Tell the emperor what he wants to hear, and you might survive. Hold on to that, because in the next episode we are going to watch someone learn it very well.

Now here is the twist. While the emperor was tearing up the agreement in Beijing, his enemy was doing exactly the same thing in London. When the news of the convention reached London, Palmerston was deeply mortified. He told the young Queen Victoria that Captain Elliot seemed to have wholly disregarded his instructions, and that even when the success of the fleet put him in a position to dictate his own terms, he had agreed to very inadequate conditions. The list of complaints was long. The money fell short of what the opium had been worth, and nothing at all had been won for the cost of the expedition, or for the debts of the bankrupt Canton merchants. The guarantees for British residents in China had been abandoned, and Zhoushan, which was supposed to be held until every dollar had been paid, had been given up, Palmerston said, in haste and with discredit. Even Hong Kong, Palmerston complained, came tied to a condition about duties that made it not a possession of the British crown at all, but, like Macau, a settlement held by sufferance on Chinese soil. Victoria was just as angry. She wrote to the King of the Belgians that the Chinese business vexed them very much, and that all they wanted might have been had, but for Charles Elliot, "who completely disobeyed his instructions and tried to get the lowest terms he could." That is not a phrase you want a queen writing about you. And there is an irony buried in all this. Back in November 1837, Elliot himself had advised Palmerston to send a special envoy with an armed force, to set himself up at Zhoushan or somewhere further north, and not at Canton, before opening any talks. In the end Elliot had done the opposite of his own advice. He had given up Zhoushan, and he had bargained at Canton. At a cabinet meeting on the thirtieth of April 1841, it was decided that the government could not sanction any treaty based on the preliminary agreement. Britain would demand a larger indemnity and better security for trade, Zhoushan must be taken again, Charles Elliot must be recalled, and Sir Henry Pottinger would be sent out in his place. Sir Henry Pottinger was an army officer and diplomat who had spent most of his career in India. So here we are. Two governments, at opposite ends of the earth, looking at the same piece of paper. In Beijing, it gave away far too much. In London, it won far too little. And the two men who wrote it are now, both of them, disgraced.

Before the cabinet could send its official decision, Palmerston wrote Elliot a private letter. In it he told Elliot that he seemed to have treated his instructions as waste paper, to be ignored entirely. He told him that he had disobeyed and neglected those instructions, and that he had deliberately held back from using the force that had been put at his disposal. And on the question that had started all of this, the question of equality, Palmerston turned Elliot's own ground against him. Elliot had let Qishan take a tone of superiority, Palmerston wrote, and had taken up a position of inferiority himself. His personal rank was lower than Qishan's, Palmerston allowed, but "as the Plenipotentiary of The Queen, you were at least his equal, and you ought to have maintained that position." Think about that. Equality was one of the things Palmerston had sent the fleet to win, and now he was accusing his own envoy of giving it away. As for Hong Kong, the island Elliot counted as his great gain, Palmerston saw little future in it. It would no more be a centre of trade, he wrote, than Macau was, though he allowed that he might be mistaken. He would have much preferred Zhoushan, the northern island, which would have opened a new door for British trade up the coast. And then came the sentence the whole letter had been leading up to: "it is impossible that you should continue to hold your appointment in China". Palmerston added that he had told no one but his colleagues in the cabinet, and that Elliot would be informed as soon as possible who his successor was to be. With the letter came a table his office had drawn up, setting each of Elliot's instructions beside what he had actually done with it. Blockade the Canton river: done, it said, but not completely. Occupy Zhoushan: done. Send a copy of Palmerston's letter ashore at Ningbo: sent, and returned by the Chinese authorities. Sail on to the gulf below Beijing and wait for a reply: done. And if the reply held out no fair prospect of a settlement, carry on the war. Instead, the table noted, the envoys had judged the talks at the Bei River good enough to go back to Canton and negotiate there. He wrote that he did it with great and sincere regret, and that he thought it only right to tell Elliot himself, at the very earliest opportunity. Here is the thing about that letter. A letter from London to China went by sea, and it took months to arrive. And at so great a distance, British policy in China stayed in Charles Elliot's hands until that August. So for the whole of that spring and summer, Charles Elliot is a dismissed man who does not know it, still in command, still making decisions in the Queen's name. And on the other side, the emperor's new general, Yishan, is on his way south, with thousands of fresh soldiers ordered in from the inland provinces, to drive the British into the sea. Next time, we follow Yishan south to Canton, and we find out whether all those fresh soldiers can do what Lin and Qishan could not.

Sources

• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), pp. 217-218, 265-267, 269-271, 271-272, 272-274, 275-277, 277-278, 278-279, 279-281, 561-563, 627-629, 629-630, 630-631, 633-634, 635-636, 640-641, 641-642, 642-644, 644-645, 645-646, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)