And presto! Credit to @Zmflavius and others not on this forum for proofreading the Chinese sections, and to @Thande for proofreading the narrative. Anyone who wants more Palmerston should go read his Not an English Word immediately after this.
A House Divided #20: Little Trouble in Big China
“I am satisfied that the interest of England is the Polar star—the guiding principle of the conduct of the Government; and I defy any man to show, by any act of mine, that any other principle has directed my conduct, or that I have had any other object in view than the interests of the country to which I belong.”
***
From “The Qing: A History” [1]
(c) 1988 by Alfred Simmons
Sacramento: North California State University Press
It is a common thread through Chinese historiography that the strength of the emperor is the strength of the nation – that a strong emperor will bring about a prosperous China, and a weak emperor will bring China to its knees. It is of course debatable to what extent this holds true for most periods, but if we look at the 19th century, we find it is largely accurate. The reign of the Qianlong Emperor correlates to the peak of the Qing Dynasty’s power and wealth, with its rule extending from Ladakh in modern-day Panjab to the Okhotsk Sea, yet as symbolized by the Macartney Expedition of 1793 [2], Chinese supremacy was rapidly becoming challenged from all directions. It would take more than half a century from Qianlong’s death in 1799 until China again began to be able to assert herself, and the emperors of this era – the Jiaqing and Daoguang Emperors – were not known for their intellectual fortitude or aptness for the most exalted position in the Chinese order.
The Jiaqing Emperor ascended to the throne in 1796, at the age of 35. His father the Qianlong Emperor was still alive at the time, and continued to rule from behind the scenes until his death three years later. Qianlong had abdicated so as to preserve the legacy of his own grandfather, the great Kangxi Emperor, as the longest-reigning Emperor in Chinese history. It had not been unknown in ancient China for an abdicated emperor, given the courtesy title of Taishanghuang (Retired Emperor), to continue to wield power, but Qianlong was the first emperor to do so since the Song Dynasty.
The Qianlong Emperor - the high point of the Qing dynasty, and in many ways also the cause of its downfall
By the time of Qianlong’s abdication, the systemic rot of the imperial court was in full view. Heshen, the Emperor’s favorite [3], had directed the Ministry of Revenue at a time when it engaged in particularly blatant corruption. Officials were appointed and abrogated at Heshen’s whim, taxes were repeatedly raised, military campaigns were deliberately prolonged so that the officials leading them could receive additional state funds, and embezzlement of public funds on a massive scale became the accepted norm. Matters came to a head when the Yellow River flooded repeatedly in the early 1790s, causing many thousands of deaths both from the floods and the ensuing crop failures – much of this would have been preventable had Heshen’s appointed officials not taken money from local flood defense funds and diverted them to their personal fortunes. In the middle of it all, Heshen himself amassed a fortune of approximately one billion liang [4], equivalent to the entire revenue of the imperial government for a fifteen-year period. Qianlong refused to allow his favorite to be prosecuted for as long as he was alive, but immediately upon his death in January 1799, the Jiaqing Emperor presented an edict declaring Heshen guilty of abuse of power and “defiance of imperial supremacy”, the punishment for which was death by lingchi [5]. However, in view of the fact that Heshen was the father-in-law of the Emperor’s sister, the Emperor commuted Heshen’s sentence to having his property confiscated and being forced into committing suicide, which the courtier dutifully did on February 22.
Heshen’s death, while making an example for corrupt officials in theory, did almost nothing to eliminate corruption in practice. Most of the officials appointed by Heshen were allowed to remain in power, and the imperial court carried on living in the manner to which it was accustomed – the manner that was seen fit for the rulers of the greatest and wealthiest nation on earth. Unfortunately, while this had been indisputably the case for much of China’s history, matters were rapidly changing. Firstly, Heshen’s machinations, and more generally the actions of the imperial government, had resulted in the massive growth of popular discontent in the provinces, chiefly manifested in the resurgence of the White Lotus Society. The White Lotus was a secretive religious group that had its roots in the 14th century, when China was ruled by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. They subscribed to a millenarian worldview taking inspiration from Buddhism, Chinese folk religion and Manichaeism, and believed that the Han Chinese people should rule themselves – it had been their members who founded the Ming Dynasty after overthrowing the Yuan, and they opposed the Qing as well. In 1794, tax protests in the Qinling mountains [6] were taken over by the White Lotus, who promised salvation for anyone who would join them, and the resulting White Lotus Rebellion spread across large parts of China.
It would take until 1805 before the rebellion had been put down, and the Green Standard Army had to be complemented by some seven thousand banner troops from Manchuria and tens of thousands of volunteers in order to achieve it [7]. This was still an acceptable expense for the imperial government, since beside the still healthy tax revenues, the balance of trade with the West remained extremely favorable and British and French silver continued to flow into Guangzhou at a prodigious rate. That was about to change…
The American, French, British and Danish trading posts in Guangzhou, circa 1850
…To understand the Opium Crisis one must understand the conditions under which foreign trade with China was carried out. When the West made contact with China in the 16th century, several ports were opened to trade, but from 1757 all foreign trade was restricted to the port of Guangzhou in the south of the country and subject to a complex web of regulations known as the Canton System [8]. Under the Canton System, foreign merchants were restricted to a single part of the city which they were forbidden from leaving, and their trade was restricted to a guild of local merchants known as the Cohong [9] who could set their own prices and regulations under the supervision of an imperial official. This system did not sit well with the westerners, who were used to significantly more lax trade regimes in their home countries.
Britain, in particular, gradually came to suffer a massive trade deficit in the first decades of the 19th century as every facet of British culture embraced the consumption of tea, which at the time was only grown in China. This was compounded by the insistence of the Cohongs on only allowing payment in silver bullion, accepting neither British gold currency nor the exchange of British goods for Chinese ones. The Honourable East India Company, which controlled all British trade in Asia, attempted repeatedly to secure broader access to the Chinese market, attempting to treat with Beijing under the Qianlong, Jiaqing and Daoguang Emperors [10], all of whom were shocked at the insolence of the westerners in failing to go through official channels and instead appealing to the imperial court directly, and the HEIC’s overtures were consequently rejected each time. Their attempts at negotiation frustrated, the HEIC turned into a less sporting method of evening the trade balance: the covert importation of opium on a massive scale…
…By the mid-1830s, the opium trade had turned the British trade deficit into a Chinese trade deficit, and more and more silver began to flow out of China, increasing the scarcity of the metal and potentially threatening imperial tax revenue [11]. Add to this the havoc caused by the meteoric rise in opium consumption, and the imperial court began to sit up and take notice. In 1837, the first proposals for legalizing the drug and imposing taxes on it to halt the outflow of silver were made, but nothing came of it as the imperial court was uninterested in such a stopgap solution. Instead, four years later the Daoguang Emperor appointed a commissioner, Lin Zexu, to Guangzhou to curtail the opium trade. Lin wasted little time in cracking down on opium in all its forms, confiscating stocks, imprisoning Chinese opium traders and issuing ultimatums to foreign traders to cease selling opium at once or face the consequences. The British traders refused, and ultimately their trading posts were besieged by the local Green Standard troops – the siege lasted from the 3rd to the 6th of April before the traders agreed to surrender their opium stocks, totaling twenty thousand chests at a value of roughly two million pounds [12]. Lin arranged to have the stocks taken to the town of Humen, where they were burned with lime and the residue flushed into the Pearl River.
***
From “A History of Empire”
(c) 1997 by George Schultz
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
The seizure and destruction of British opium stocks caused great dismay among the British public, whose reaction was not so much in support of the opium sale as opposed to the wanton disregard for property expressed by the Chinese [13]. The government was divided between the majority, who wanted China punished for disrupting British trade, and the minority who believed the opium trade had been immoral to begin with and preferred to reimburse the traders and drop the matter. Both sides claimed their position was grounded in high principle – on one side was the principle of British sovereignty and supremacy, on the other was the principle of Christian morality. The only member of the cabinet who seemed to be indifferent was ironically also the one whose influence would be greatest: the Foreign Secretary, Lord Ellenborough [14]. Ellenborough, who had succeeded Lord Melville a mere four months earlier, was a man of great impatience, but not one of strong conviction. On the issue of China he leaned toward punitive action, as did the Prime Minister, but was open to conviction either way. This meant that the decision effectively fell to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, who would be responsible for the concrete actions; in early 1841 this post was held by the Viscount Palmerston, a man whose fondness for foreign adventures was well-known. Palmerston was able to convince Ellenborough of the need for action, but midway through the crisis, events overtook him…
***
10 Downing Street
Westminster, United Kingdom
2 May 1841
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, had not been told why he was being summoned to the office of the Prime Minister on such short notice. Nor had he given the fact a significant amount of thought – being in the middle of a foreign crisis for which he had some degree of responsibility, he blindly assumed that he was being called upon to advise the Prime Minister on the situation in China. He didn’t see eye to eye with Wellington on much in politics – he was a staunch Canningite and reform advocate in what little time he spent on domestic policy, whereas the Prime Minister had been lukewarm at best even on the common-sense issue of Catholic emancipation, and outright hostile to most of the other reforms that had been passed in the last decade. But he was a Tory, and so was Palmerston [15]. And far more crucially, he was a national icon – the liberator of Spain, the hero of Waterloo, the man who had finally sent that tyrant Bonaparte packing after decades of war. That, probably, was why he was now the Prime Minister. King Augustus needed a man who agreed with him, but wouldn’t alienate Parliament. It would’ve been a tough position to fill, in any other situation.
Ascending the staircase inside Number 10, Palmerston met William Gladstone, the President of the Board of Trade. They passed by each other without uttering a word, and a good thing it was too. Neither man had much fondness for the other, and why should they? Palmerston was a man of the 19th century, Gladstone very much a man of the 17th. The man spent his afternoons arguing about church liturgy. There were rumours he walked the streets of London’s poorer quarters at night preaching to… fallen women, trying to convince them to give up their trade. Such things were fine and good for ministers of the Lord, but not ministers of the Crown. Not that he would’ve been much more use if he devoted all his time to Parliament. His politics were naïve at best and insane at worst. One day he was demanding the Government take action to clear the gutters of the East End or impose stricter laws on public houses, the next he was actively lambasting Palmerston’s own work to secure Britain’s place abroad. High principle was well and good, but it did one few favours in international politics. The only principle that mattered there, besides freedom of trade, was national interest.
There was a short wait, then Palmerston was summoned into the office itself. Wellington was at his desk – a weathered man of seventy, but still sharp-witted most of the time. He still had some of the fire that brought the Corsican to his heels left in him.
“Lord Palmerston, good to see you,” he said.
Palmerston opened his mouth to speak, and only then noticed that the Duke of Richmond was sitting in a chair in the back corner of the room. “Your Grace..es,” he said, betraying his reputation for good composition somewhat.
“The Lord President and myself have reviewed your record, along with that of the other junior Ministers,” Wellington began, and Palmerston immediately understood why Gladstone had been at Downing Street too. “We are of the belief, as is His Majesty, that this government needs a firmer sense of direction than it has previously had. George Canning and his ideas about Parliamentary co-operation were well and good in their time, but the world is changing. Rebellion, discontent, national fractures – I fear the climate of thirty years since is returning once more.”
The other Duke in the room rose from his chair and began to speak. “The recent events at Canton are part and parcel of these developments, of course. England’s position is being compromised by what’s happening there, and we feel that firmer measures need to be taken.” Good, Palmerston thought, they’ve finally decided to support me. I’m sure Ellenborough will come around within the week as well.
“We simply cannot continue to claim to stand up for Christian civilisation while our countrymen peddle drugs by the boatload to helpless Chinese addicts,” Richmond continued, and now Palmerston was starting to get a very bad feeling about this conversation. “It represents a mockery of everything this country stands for.”
Two million pounds, up in smoke.
“We’ve decided, and Lord Ellenborough agrees with us, to negotiate with China for the reimbursement of the merchants whose property was seized.”
“But you can’t do that!” Palmerston exclaimed. “If we give way to the Chinese in this matter we not only surrender two million pounds worth of English goods, we surrender our place in the world! China needs to know its place, and not to interfere with English commerce. What happens next time some country decides to rob our merchants of their wares? Do we quietly demur and ‘reimburse’ the victims of those actions as well?”
“Of course not,” Richmond interjected, “and the implication that this is comparable to a simple theft is beneath you. The Chinee has a wife and children who will be ruined by opium as surely as those of the denizens of the London rookery are by gin. And I doubt the Celestial Empire has the Poor Law to defend them [16].”
“No one is a firmer believer in the supremacy of England than I,” said Wellington, “but in this case pressing our claims too hard would be… unwise. This is also His Majesty’s position.”
Now Palmerston began to see what was going on. No doubt the King had received word of that damned “letter” being circulated around, supposedly written by that dastardly Lin character [17]. He’d had a few words with Wellington, and the Prime Minister had surrendered to his sense of duty. Unto the very last, the man was a soldier at heart.
“Gentlemen,” Palmerston says, “I hope you understand that this is not something I can countenance while the War Office is under my leadership.”
“We do understand,” Richmond says. “That’s why we called you here – perhaps you saw young Mr Gladstone outside?”
“So that’s it then.”
“In the years I’ve been in politics,” says the Prime Minister, “I’ve known you to be a figure of great ability. I’ve even found myself agreeing with you from time to time. But when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, one or the other must yield.”
“You shall have my resignation in the morning, gentlemen. I hope for the country’s sake that you know what you’re doing.”
***
From “A History of Empire”
(c) 1997 by George Schultz
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
In June, Lord Ellenborough appointed a delegation of three seasoned diplomats, under the direction of Sir Henry Pottinger [18], to treat with Lin or whomever else the Chinese would appoint to discuss the opium situation – the letter to the Emperor was worded in such a way as to make it clear that they wanted the trade ended. It’s unknown whether the letter actually did reach the Emperor himself, but it did reach the court, and ultimately Qishan, a Manchu nobleman, was appointed imperial commissioner with the task of conducting negotiations with Britain.
There was some contention over where the delegates would meet – the British preferring a neutral location while the Chinese desired to conduct the negotiations at Whampoa – but ultimately the lightly-settled island of Hong Kong in the outer Pearl River Delta was decided upon, and the business of negotiation began. In September, the Convention of Hong Kong was signed by the delegates, granting the cession of the opium trade at the hands of British traders in exchange for the granting of an indemnity payment of three million dollars – not enough to cover the value of the destroyed opium, but still a significant sum – as well as the concession of a permanent British representative at Beijing in addition to the one at Guangzhou and restrictions on the Cohong’s power to set regulations [19].
The Chinese government showed signs of displeasure with the agreement, but following its ratification by Westminster on October 7th, the Emperor agreed to ratify it as well. The crisis was over, but the opium problem was not…
***
[1] A note on Chinese romanization: I will (try to) consistently use Hanyu Pinyin, or rather a version of it without the tonal marks above the vowels, as is customary in OTL contemporary English texts on China. Of course, nearly every consistent romanization system came about well after the PoD, so it’s unlikely at best that this would match TTL usage, but not being equal to the task of actually creating an alternate romanization system from the ground up, I will do it this way instead. Of course, a lot of the English would likely be quite different ITTL as well.
[2] This will have been covered in an earlier chapter of the book, so here’s an overview: the British send a mission led by veteran colonial administrator George Macartney (otherwise perhaps best known for coining the phrase “the sun never sets on the British Empire”) to discuss expanding trade with China, they’re eventually received by the Emperor at his summer retreat, a fracas breaks out over Macartney’s refusal to kowtow, this passes and they get down to business, but the Chinese a) have no need for foreign trade and b) view the mission as an attempt to pay tribute rather than a negotiation between equal parties, so nothing much comes of it in the end except a very good setpiece example of how China viewed its place in the world at the time. I’m glossing over quite a lot here, but I encourage you to look into this – as with most Chinese history it’s underexplored and fascinating.
[3] Heshen will also no doubt have been introduced in an earlier chapter, as it would be impossible to cover the Qianlong Emperor’s reign without mentioning him. He was the scion of a minor Manchu noble house who came to the Emperor’s attention in the 1770s and eventually rose to the exalted post of President of the Ministry of Revenue (before anyone asks, the reason Chinese imperial ministries had Presidents and not Ministers is simply because of clunky translation conventions), controlling the imperial census and tax collection network.
[4] A liang, sometimes known in English as a tael (from tahil, the Malay name for the same unit) was a basic unit of weight measurement in the Chinese cultural sphere that was slightly larger than the Western ounce. I’ve found no estimate for the value of a liang of silver in the era concerned here, but during the later Ming (the 16th century, roughly) it’s estimated that its value was equivalent to 660 yuan, or approximately $100.
[5] Lingchi, or “slow slicing”, was a form of capital punishment practiced in China for particularly severe offenses. The victim was tied to a wooden post in a public place and parts of their body gradually sliced off with knives until they bleed to death. This process was sensationalized in Western sources as “death by a thousand cuts”, starting with the gouging of the victim’s eyes and then moving on to limbs and finally the torso, lasting several days, but in fact Chinese law did not specify the precise details of the method and executions by lingchi would last anywhere between a few minutes and an hour or two. It was undoubtedly not a humane way to die, but nor was it quite as horrific as Western sources often made it out to be.
[6] The Qin or Qinling Mountains straddle the border between Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces, and is traditionally considered part of the boundary between northern and southern China.
[7] The Banners were the elite of the Qing army, consisting of a mixture of Manchu tribesmen (in fact the term “banner” originated from the division into eight banners of the Manchu people) and Han and Mongol recruits. They formed the backbone of the army that conquered the Ming in the 17th century, but as control over China was cemented they came to be supplanted by the Green Standard Army, a massive mostly-Han force of lightly trained soldiers who came to serve as more of a local constabulary force than an actual army.
[8] From the common European name for the city that had always been known in Chinese as Guangzhou – the name “Canton” derives from a Portuguese mishearing of “Guangdong”, the name of the province in which the city lies.
[9] Technically the gonghang in Pinyin, but as they were universally known to westerners as the Cohong, for sake of simplicity that’s the name I shall use too.
[10] The Jiaqing Emperor died in October 1820, seven years before our PoD.
[11] Before the introduction of the yuan in 1889, China had two parallel systems of currency. Most everyday transactions were conducted using copper coins known in English simply as “cash” and in Chinese as wen, while the imperial government used silver bullion denominated in liang for its business. Taxes were required to be paid in silver, and most people purchased silver using their copper cash to pay their taxes. This meant that if silver were to become more scarce, people would have a harder time paying tax to the imperial government, which would of course have disastrous consequences for it.
[12] Two million pounds is quite a lot of money today – in 1841 it was a shitload of money. Like, “larger than most countries’ defense budgets” kind of money.
[13] This in spite of the fact that the British had flaunted Chinese law in an even more tasteless manner by selling astronomical quantities of opium, which I will remind you was illegal to possess in China.
[14] IOTL, Ellenborough was Lord Privy Seal and unofficial deputy Foreign Secretary under Wellington’s ministry (1828-30), then served as Governor-General of India during the early 1840s, at a time when the subcontinent was engulfed by low-level rebellions and border wars. That was a position that suited him very well; the home front arguably less so.
[15] IOTL Palmerston split with the Tories over Wellington’s ministry and remained a somewhat neutral figure in politics, eventually throwing in his lot with the Whigs when Lord Grey offered him the Foreign Office in 1830. ITTL, with the survival of the Canningite project, he remains a somewhat lukewarm pro-reform Tory. For now, anyway.
[16] Unlike many of the other Whig reforms of OTL, the indoor relief system was accepted by everyone very quickly, explaining why Richmond would defend it despite being extremely Tory.
[17] IOTL, Lin wrote a letter to Queen Victoria describing the suffering brought to the Chinese people by opium and pleading with her to stop the importation of the drug. It very likely never reached her, and it was several years before it became generally known of to the British. ITTL, one way or other, it does reach London, and the King, being very much a moral conservative of the old school, sees reason in it.
[18] Pottinger was a colonial administrator who helped negotiate the peace with China after the First Opium War IOTL and later became Governor of Hong Kong. I don’t know much of his actual politics, but he seems to have been a man who was happy to follow orders from London for the most part.
[19] Compared to the OTL Convention of Chuanbi, which was drawn up only after the British had already sent in the gunboats, this agreement is more favorable to the Chinese – IOTL the indemnity was six million dollars (why this was defined in dollars rather than a currency either power actually used is beyond me), and Qishan also agreed to cede Hong Kong Island to the British. Of course, this convention was rejected by both the Emperor, who believed it conceded too much, and Palmerston, who was enraged that it failed to deal with the opium situation that had started the entire affair to begin with.
A House Divided #20: Little Trouble in Big China
“I am satisfied that the interest of England is the Polar star—the guiding principle of the conduct of the Government; and I defy any man to show, by any act of mine, that any other principle has directed my conduct, or that I have had any other object in view than the interests of the country to which I belong.”
***
From “The Qing: A History” [1]
(c) 1988 by Alfred Simmons
Sacramento: North California State University Press
It is a common thread through Chinese historiography that the strength of the emperor is the strength of the nation – that a strong emperor will bring about a prosperous China, and a weak emperor will bring China to its knees. It is of course debatable to what extent this holds true for most periods, but if we look at the 19th century, we find it is largely accurate. The reign of the Qianlong Emperor correlates to the peak of the Qing Dynasty’s power and wealth, with its rule extending from Ladakh in modern-day Panjab to the Okhotsk Sea, yet as symbolized by the Macartney Expedition of 1793 [2], Chinese supremacy was rapidly becoming challenged from all directions. It would take more than half a century from Qianlong’s death in 1799 until China again began to be able to assert herself, and the emperors of this era – the Jiaqing and Daoguang Emperors – were not known for their intellectual fortitude or aptness for the most exalted position in the Chinese order.
The Jiaqing Emperor ascended to the throne in 1796, at the age of 35. His father the Qianlong Emperor was still alive at the time, and continued to rule from behind the scenes until his death three years later. Qianlong had abdicated so as to preserve the legacy of his own grandfather, the great Kangxi Emperor, as the longest-reigning Emperor in Chinese history. It had not been unknown in ancient China for an abdicated emperor, given the courtesy title of Taishanghuang (Retired Emperor), to continue to wield power, but Qianlong was the first emperor to do so since the Song Dynasty.
The Qianlong Emperor - the high point of the Qing dynasty, and in many ways also the cause of its downfall
By the time of Qianlong’s abdication, the systemic rot of the imperial court was in full view. Heshen, the Emperor’s favorite [3], had directed the Ministry of Revenue at a time when it engaged in particularly blatant corruption. Officials were appointed and abrogated at Heshen’s whim, taxes were repeatedly raised, military campaigns were deliberately prolonged so that the officials leading them could receive additional state funds, and embezzlement of public funds on a massive scale became the accepted norm. Matters came to a head when the Yellow River flooded repeatedly in the early 1790s, causing many thousands of deaths both from the floods and the ensuing crop failures – much of this would have been preventable had Heshen’s appointed officials not taken money from local flood defense funds and diverted them to their personal fortunes. In the middle of it all, Heshen himself amassed a fortune of approximately one billion liang [4], equivalent to the entire revenue of the imperial government for a fifteen-year period. Qianlong refused to allow his favorite to be prosecuted for as long as he was alive, but immediately upon his death in January 1799, the Jiaqing Emperor presented an edict declaring Heshen guilty of abuse of power and “defiance of imperial supremacy”, the punishment for which was death by lingchi [5]. However, in view of the fact that Heshen was the father-in-law of the Emperor’s sister, the Emperor commuted Heshen’s sentence to having his property confiscated and being forced into committing suicide, which the courtier dutifully did on February 22.
Heshen’s death, while making an example for corrupt officials in theory, did almost nothing to eliminate corruption in practice. Most of the officials appointed by Heshen were allowed to remain in power, and the imperial court carried on living in the manner to which it was accustomed – the manner that was seen fit for the rulers of the greatest and wealthiest nation on earth. Unfortunately, while this had been indisputably the case for much of China’s history, matters were rapidly changing. Firstly, Heshen’s machinations, and more generally the actions of the imperial government, had resulted in the massive growth of popular discontent in the provinces, chiefly manifested in the resurgence of the White Lotus Society. The White Lotus was a secretive religious group that had its roots in the 14th century, when China was ruled by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. They subscribed to a millenarian worldview taking inspiration from Buddhism, Chinese folk religion and Manichaeism, and believed that the Han Chinese people should rule themselves – it had been their members who founded the Ming Dynasty after overthrowing the Yuan, and they opposed the Qing as well. In 1794, tax protests in the Qinling mountains [6] were taken over by the White Lotus, who promised salvation for anyone who would join them, and the resulting White Lotus Rebellion spread across large parts of China.
It would take until 1805 before the rebellion had been put down, and the Green Standard Army had to be complemented by some seven thousand banner troops from Manchuria and tens of thousands of volunteers in order to achieve it [7]. This was still an acceptable expense for the imperial government, since beside the still healthy tax revenues, the balance of trade with the West remained extremely favorable and British and French silver continued to flow into Guangzhou at a prodigious rate. That was about to change…
The American, French, British and Danish trading posts in Guangzhou, circa 1850
…To understand the Opium Crisis one must understand the conditions under which foreign trade with China was carried out. When the West made contact with China in the 16th century, several ports were opened to trade, but from 1757 all foreign trade was restricted to the port of Guangzhou in the south of the country and subject to a complex web of regulations known as the Canton System [8]. Under the Canton System, foreign merchants were restricted to a single part of the city which they were forbidden from leaving, and their trade was restricted to a guild of local merchants known as the Cohong [9] who could set their own prices and regulations under the supervision of an imperial official. This system did not sit well with the westerners, who were used to significantly more lax trade regimes in their home countries.
Britain, in particular, gradually came to suffer a massive trade deficit in the first decades of the 19th century as every facet of British culture embraced the consumption of tea, which at the time was only grown in China. This was compounded by the insistence of the Cohongs on only allowing payment in silver bullion, accepting neither British gold currency nor the exchange of British goods for Chinese ones. The Honourable East India Company, which controlled all British trade in Asia, attempted repeatedly to secure broader access to the Chinese market, attempting to treat with Beijing under the Qianlong, Jiaqing and Daoguang Emperors [10], all of whom were shocked at the insolence of the westerners in failing to go through official channels and instead appealing to the imperial court directly, and the HEIC’s overtures were consequently rejected each time. Their attempts at negotiation frustrated, the HEIC turned into a less sporting method of evening the trade balance: the covert importation of opium on a massive scale…
…By the mid-1830s, the opium trade had turned the British trade deficit into a Chinese trade deficit, and more and more silver began to flow out of China, increasing the scarcity of the metal and potentially threatening imperial tax revenue [11]. Add to this the havoc caused by the meteoric rise in opium consumption, and the imperial court began to sit up and take notice. In 1837, the first proposals for legalizing the drug and imposing taxes on it to halt the outflow of silver were made, but nothing came of it as the imperial court was uninterested in such a stopgap solution. Instead, four years later the Daoguang Emperor appointed a commissioner, Lin Zexu, to Guangzhou to curtail the opium trade. Lin wasted little time in cracking down on opium in all its forms, confiscating stocks, imprisoning Chinese opium traders and issuing ultimatums to foreign traders to cease selling opium at once or face the consequences. The British traders refused, and ultimately their trading posts were besieged by the local Green Standard troops – the siege lasted from the 3rd to the 6th of April before the traders agreed to surrender their opium stocks, totaling twenty thousand chests at a value of roughly two million pounds [12]. Lin arranged to have the stocks taken to the town of Humen, where they were burned with lime and the residue flushed into the Pearl River.
***
From “A History of Empire”
(c) 1997 by George Schultz
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
The seizure and destruction of British opium stocks caused great dismay among the British public, whose reaction was not so much in support of the opium sale as opposed to the wanton disregard for property expressed by the Chinese [13]. The government was divided between the majority, who wanted China punished for disrupting British trade, and the minority who believed the opium trade had been immoral to begin with and preferred to reimburse the traders and drop the matter. Both sides claimed their position was grounded in high principle – on one side was the principle of British sovereignty and supremacy, on the other was the principle of Christian morality. The only member of the cabinet who seemed to be indifferent was ironically also the one whose influence would be greatest: the Foreign Secretary, Lord Ellenborough [14]. Ellenborough, who had succeeded Lord Melville a mere four months earlier, was a man of great impatience, but not one of strong conviction. On the issue of China he leaned toward punitive action, as did the Prime Minister, but was open to conviction either way. This meant that the decision effectively fell to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, who would be responsible for the concrete actions; in early 1841 this post was held by the Viscount Palmerston, a man whose fondness for foreign adventures was well-known. Palmerston was able to convince Ellenborough of the need for action, but midway through the crisis, events overtook him…
***
10 Downing Street
Westminster, United Kingdom
2 May 1841
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, had not been told why he was being summoned to the office of the Prime Minister on such short notice. Nor had he given the fact a significant amount of thought – being in the middle of a foreign crisis for which he had some degree of responsibility, he blindly assumed that he was being called upon to advise the Prime Minister on the situation in China. He didn’t see eye to eye with Wellington on much in politics – he was a staunch Canningite and reform advocate in what little time he spent on domestic policy, whereas the Prime Minister had been lukewarm at best even on the common-sense issue of Catholic emancipation, and outright hostile to most of the other reforms that had been passed in the last decade. But he was a Tory, and so was Palmerston [15]. And far more crucially, he was a national icon – the liberator of Spain, the hero of Waterloo, the man who had finally sent that tyrant Bonaparte packing after decades of war. That, probably, was why he was now the Prime Minister. King Augustus needed a man who agreed with him, but wouldn’t alienate Parliament. It would’ve been a tough position to fill, in any other situation.
Ascending the staircase inside Number 10, Palmerston met William Gladstone, the President of the Board of Trade. They passed by each other without uttering a word, and a good thing it was too. Neither man had much fondness for the other, and why should they? Palmerston was a man of the 19th century, Gladstone very much a man of the 17th. The man spent his afternoons arguing about church liturgy. There were rumours he walked the streets of London’s poorer quarters at night preaching to… fallen women, trying to convince them to give up their trade. Such things were fine and good for ministers of the Lord, but not ministers of the Crown. Not that he would’ve been much more use if he devoted all his time to Parliament. His politics were naïve at best and insane at worst. One day he was demanding the Government take action to clear the gutters of the East End or impose stricter laws on public houses, the next he was actively lambasting Palmerston’s own work to secure Britain’s place abroad. High principle was well and good, but it did one few favours in international politics. The only principle that mattered there, besides freedom of trade, was national interest.
There was a short wait, then Palmerston was summoned into the office itself. Wellington was at his desk – a weathered man of seventy, but still sharp-witted most of the time. He still had some of the fire that brought the Corsican to his heels left in him.
“Lord Palmerston, good to see you,” he said.
Palmerston opened his mouth to speak, and only then noticed that the Duke of Richmond was sitting in a chair in the back corner of the room. “Your Grace..es,” he said, betraying his reputation for good composition somewhat.
“The Lord President and myself have reviewed your record, along with that of the other junior Ministers,” Wellington began, and Palmerston immediately understood why Gladstone had been at Downing Street too. “We are of the belief, as is His Majesty, that this government needs a firmer sense of direction than it has previously had. George Canning and his ideas about Parliamentary co-operation were well and good in their time, but the world is changing. Rebellion, discontent, national fractures – I fear the climate of thirty years since is returning once more.”
The other Duke in the room rose from his chair and began to speak. “The recent events at Canton are part and parcel of these developments, of course. England’s position is being compromised by what’s happening there, and we feel that firmer measures need to be taken.” Good, Palmerston thought, they’ve finally decided to support me. I’m sure Ellenborough will come around within the week as well.
“We simply cannot continue to claim to stand up for Christian civilisation while our countrymen peddle drugs by the boatload to helpless Chinese addicts,” Richmond continued, and now Palmerston was starting to get a very bad feeling about this conversation. “It represents a mockery of everything this country stands for.”
Two million pounds, up in smoke.
“We’ve decided, and Lord Ellenborough agrees with us, to negotiate with China for the reimbursement of the merchants whose property was seized.”
“But you can’t do that!” Palmerston exclaimed. “If we give way to the Chinese in this matter we not only surrender two million pounds worth of English goods, we surrender our place in the world! China needs to know its place, and not to interfere with English commerce. What happens next time some country decides to rob our merchants of their wares? Do we quietly demur and ‘reimburse’ the victims of those actions as well?”
“Of course not,” Richmond interjected, “and the implication that this is comparable to a simple theft is beneath you. The Chinee has a wife and children who will be ruined by opium as surely as those of the denizens of the London rookery are by gin. And I doubt the Celestial Empire has the Poor Law to defend them [16].”
“No one is a firmer believer in the supremacy of England than I,” said Wellington, “but in this case pressing our claims too hard would be… unwise. This is also His Majesty’s position.”
Now Palmerston began to see what was going on. No doubt the King had received word of that damned “letter” being circulated around, supposedly written by that dastardly Lin character [17]. He’d had a few words with Wellington, and the Prime Minister had surrendered to his sense of duty. Unto the very last, the man was a soldier at heart.
“Gentlemen,” Palmerston says, “I hope you understand that this is not something I can countenance while the War Office is under my leadership.”
“We do understand,” Richmond says. “That’s why we called you here – perhaps you saw young Mr Gladstone outside?”
“So that’s it then.”
“In the years I’ve been in politics,” says the Prime Minister, “I’ve known you to be a figure of great ability. I’ve even found myself agreeing with you from time to time. But when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, one or the other must yield.”
“You shall have my resignation in the morning, gentlemen. I hope for the country’s sake that you know what you’re doing.”
***
From “A History of Empire”
(c) 1997 by George Schultz
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
In June, Lord Ellenborough appointed a delegation of three seasoned diplomats, under the direction of Sir Henry Pottinger [18], to treat with Lin or whomever else the Chinese would appoint to discuss the opium situation – the letter to the Emperor was worded in such a way as to make it clear that they wanted the trade ended. It’s unknown whether the letter actually did reach the Emperor himself, but it did reach the court, and ultimately Qishan, a Manchu nobleman, was appointed imperial commissioner with the task of conducting negotiations with Britain.
There was some contention over where the delegates would meet – the British preferring a neutral location while the Chinese desired to conduct the negotiations at Whampoa – but ultimately the lightly-settled island of Hong Kong in the outer Pearl River Delta was decided upon, and the business of negotiation began. In September, the Convention of Hong Kong was signed by the delegates, granting the cession of the opium trade at the hands of British traders in exchange for the granting of an indemnity payment of three million dollars – not enough to cover the value of the destroyed opium, but still a significant sum – as well as the concession of a permanent British representative at Beijing in addition to the one at Guangzhou and restrictions on the Cohong’s power to set regulations [19].
The Chinese government showed signs of displeasure with the agreement, but following its ratification by Westminster on October 7th, the Emperor agreed to ratify it as well. The crisis was over, but the opium problem was not…
***
[1] A note on Chinese romanization: I will (try to) consistently use Hanyu Pinyin, or rather a version of it without the tonal marks above the vowels, as is customary in OTL contemporary English texts on China. Of course, nearly every consistent romanization system came about well after the PoD, so it’s unlikely at best that this would match TTL usage, but not being equal to the task of actually creating an alternate romanization system from the ground up, I will do it this way instead. Of course, a lot of the English would likely be quite different ITTL as well.
[2] This will have been covered in an earlier chapter of the book, so here’s an overview: the British send a mission led by veteran colonial administrator George Macartney (otherwise perhaps best known for coining the phrase “the sun never sets on the British Empire”) to discuss expanding trade with China, they’re eventually received by the Emperor at his summer retreat, a fracas breaks out over Macartney’s refusal to kowtow, this passes and they get down to business, but the Chinese a) have no need for foreign trade and b) view the mission as an attempt to pay tribute rather than a negotiation between equal parties, so nothing much comes of it in the end except a very good setpiece example of how China viewed its place in the world at the time. I’m glossing over quite a lot here, but I encourage you to look into this – as with most Chinese history it’s underexplored and fascinating.
[3] Heshen will also no doubt have been introduced in an earlier chapter, as it would be impossible to cover the Qianlong Emperor’s reign without mentioning him. He was the scion of a minor Manchu noble house who came to the Emperor’s attention in the 1770s and eventually rose to the exalted post of President of the Ministry of Revenue (before anyone asks, the reason Chinese imperial ministries had Presidents and not Ministers is simply because of clunky translation conventions), controlling the imperial census and tax collection network.
[4] A liang, sometimes known in English as a tael (from tahil, the Malay name for the same unit) was a basic unit of weight measurement in the Chinese cultural sphere that was slightly larger than the Western ounce. I’ve found no estimate for the value of a liang of silver in the era concerned here, but during the later Ming (the 16th century, roughly) it’s estimated that its value was equivalent to 660 yuan, or approximately $100.
[5] Lingchi, or “slow slicing”, was a form of capital punishment practiced in China for particularly severe offenses. The victim was tied to a wooden post in a public place and parts of their body gradually sliced off with knives until they bleed to death. This process was sensationalized in Western sources as “death by a thousand cuts”, starting with the gouging of the victim’s eyes and then moving on to limbs and finally the torso, lasting several days, but in fact Chinese law did not specify the precise details of the method and executions by lingchi would last anywhere between a few minutes and an hour or two. It was undoubtedly not a humane way to die, but nor was it quite as horrific as Western sources often made it out to be.
[6] The Qin or Qinling Mountains straddle the border between Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces, and is traditionally considered part of the boundary between northern and southern China.
[7] The Banners were the elite of the Qing army, consisting of a mixture of Manchu tribesmen (in fact the term “banner” originated from the division into eight banners of the Manchu people) and Han and Mongol recruits. They formed the backbone of the army that conquered the Ming in the 17th century, but as control over China was cemented they came to be supplanted by the Green Standard Army, a massive mostly-Han force of lightly trained soldiers who came to serve as more of a local constabulary force than an actual army.
[8] From the common European name for the city that had always been known in Chinese as Guangzhou – the name “Canton” derives from a Portuguese mishearing of “Guangdong”, the name of the province in which the city lies.
[9] Technically the gonghang in Pinyin, but as they were universally known to westerners as the Cohong, for sake of simplicity that’s the name I shall use too.
[10] The Jiaqing Emperor died in October 1820, seven years before our PoD.
[11] Before the introduction of the yuan in 1889, China had two parallel systems of currency. Most everyday transactions were conducted using copper coins known in English simply as “cash” and in Chinese as wen, while the imperial government used silver bullion denominated in liang for its business. Taxes were required to be paid in silver, and most people purchased silver using their copper cash to pay their taxes. This meant that if silver were to become more scarce, people would have a harder time paying tax to the imperial government, which would of course have disastrous consequences for it.
[12] Two million pounds is quite a lot of money today – in 1841 it was a shitload of money. Like, “larger than most countries’ defense budgets” kind of money.
[13] This in spite of the fact that the British had flaunted Chinese law in an even more tasteless manner by selling astronomical quantities of opium, which I will remind you was illegal to possess in China.
[14] IOTL, Ellenborough was Lord Privy Seal and unofficial deputy Foreign Secretary under Wellington’s ministry (1828-30), then served as Governor-General of India during the early 1840s, at a time when the subcontinent was engulfed by low-level rebellions and border wars. That was a position that suited him very well; the home front arguably less so.
[15] IOTL Palmerston split with the Tories over Wellington’s ministry and remained a somewhat neutral figure in politics, eventually throwing in his lot with the Whigs when Lord Grey offered him the Foreign Office in 1830. ITTL, with the survival of the Canningite project, he remains a somewhat lukewarm pro-reform Tory. For now, anyway.
[16] Unlike many of the other Whig reforms of OTL, the indoor relief system was accepted by everyone very quickly, explaining why Richmond would defend it despite being extremely Tory.
[17] IOTL, Lin wrote a letter to Queen Victoria describing the suffering brought to the Chinese people by opium and pleading with her to stop the importation of the drug. It very likely never reached her, and it was several years before it became generally known of to the British. ITTL, one way or other, it does reach London, and the King, being very much a moral conservative of the old school, sees reason in it.
[18] Pottinger was a colonial administrator who helped negotiate the peace with China after the First Opium War IOTL and later became Governor of Hong Kong. I don’t know much of his actual politics, but he seems to have been a man who was happy to follow orders from London for the most part.
[19] Compared to the OTL Convention of Chuanbi, which was drawn up only after the British had already sent in the gunboats, this agreement is more favorable to the Chinese – IOTL the indemnity was six million dollars (why this was defined in dollars rather than a currency either power actually used is beyond me), and Qishan also agreed to cede Hong Kong Island to the British. Of course, this convention was rejected by both the Emperor, who believed it conceded too much, and Palmerston, who was enraged that it failed to deal with the opium situation that had started the entire affair to begin with.
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