Ilipu was the elderly, mild-mannered mandarin who had met Elliot on the Chekiang coast in the autumn of 1840 and arranged the November truce. When early the following year it dawned on the emperor that Kishen, that “honest advocate of timely yielding,” was in fact yielding much more than he ought to at the Gulf of Canton, and Ishan was sent in his place to drive the English out, Ilipu was simultaneously instructed to recapture Chusan. Of course the old gentleman was utterly without the means of doing so and pleaded excuses, with the result that he was recalled at the same time as Kishen, stripped like him of honors and titles, and sentenced to exile. Ilipu had not actually given anything away, however. (Kishen had surrendered Hongkong.) When, in the autumn of 1841, the English took Chinhai and occupied Ningpo, the governor of Chekiang remembered the old man’s skill at managing the barbarians and asked for him back. Months passed; the request was renewed. Early in April 1842 Ilipu was given high military rank and ordered south. With him went Kiying, the officer just mentioned.
Kiying was considerably younger than Ilipu. He lacked Ilipu’s experience with provincial administration—his career had been almost entirely in and about the capital—and he had never dealt with the English. This, however, actually gave him the advantage over Ilipu who, though in demand because he had once managed the barbarians successfully, was also suspect because of it. Too many Chinese had collaborated with the red-haired devils, in the opium traffic (else how did it continue?) and now in this war. Pu Ting-pang, the traitorous comprador, had been caught and decapitated, but there must be hundreds of other Pu’s—as indeed there were: the Nemesis, for example, carried native firemen, and when out hunting junks employed two Chinese to hail her prey—and if so many ordinary Chinese kept on close and treasonable terms with the English, a high officer of state who got along with them certainly bore watching. Thus while Ilipu’s reputation for barbarian management obtained him the April appointment, it denied him the chief direction of things. That would lie with Kiying.
It was Ilipu, however, who was to make the first overture. Indeed the English supposed, in what followed, that they were dealing with a brace of high commissioners and that of the two it was Ilipu who mattered. The misunderstanding quite suited the Chinese. The English, they knew, remembered Ilipu and liked him. If anyone could coax and cajole them into leaving the Yangtze, it would be he.
To coax and cajole was not at first Ilipu’s commission, nor Kiying’s either. They were to manage the barbarians all right, but that did not mean giving way to them. At times—as when the English unexpectedly abandoned Chapu or approached Soochow by steamer and then suddenly withdrew—Peking recovered its hopes for military victory and instructed the pair to do whatever was necessary to achieve one. Bit by bit, however, the difficulties and dangers both real and imagined drove Peking, with many backward glances, down a different path. The Yangtze lay wide open. Barbarians had never come that way before, and defensive improvisations however ingenious (one involved enlisting divers to approach the English under water and bore holes in their hulls) were not likely to be of much use there. Far more serious, however, was what might follow once the English had ravaged the river. It was hardly plausible that they battered at the empire’s gates simply to trade. They had taken Hongkong; like all barbarians before them, they must have designs on this province or that; eventually they would try to seize the capital itself. The prospect made the court frantic, so frantic that it hurried reinforcements to Tientsin, and also (it was the key to a route traditionally used by invaders from inner Asia, and the English had reconnoitered that way) to the point where the Great Wall came down to the sea.
If the English reached Peking and took it, the shock and shame of the thing would destroy the dynasty. Preserving the dynasty was every Manchu’s first duty. Chinese might place detestation of invading barbarians above mere considerations of dynastic survival. Manchus would not. And since the emperor’s official entourage was dominated by the Manchu interest, since his chief councillor and virtual prime minister was a Manchu, it was probably inevitable that, as news from the south grew worse and worse, the task set Kiying and Ilipu should perceptibly alter. When they set out from Peking on 15 April, that task was to control the English by a combination of threats, conciliation, and calculated delay. In the end—though they had always to watch over their shoulders in case Peking changed its mind again—it was to make a settlement no matter what the cost should be.
On 9 May they reached Hangchow. On the eighteenth Chapu fell. Two days later the pair made their first approach, Ilipu at Kiying’s direction sending a minor military officer (whom the English jocularly christened “Corporal White”) to see Gutzlaff. Weeks passed. The English evacuated Chapu and disappeared. Kiying was instructed to proceed to Canton and look into the possibility of recovering Hongkong—“why should the rebellious barbarians be allowed to keep it permanently?”—and then the English appeared again, entered the Yangtze, and took Woosung and Shanghai. Meanwhile the full extent of the Chapu disaster (at Chapu a regular Tartar garrison had for the first time been overwhelmed) became known at Peking, and Kiying’s reassignment was canceled. On 20 June, Ilipu again sent “Corporal White” to sound the English out. Kiying’s purpose was partly to discover what the English intended to do next, it being very difficult to predict where these wily barbarians, moving swiftly in their ships, would turn. But the burden of the overture, and of the ones that followed with increasing frequency, was that Pottinger should rein in his forces, cease ravaging the river, and prepare for a round of talks.
It was exactly what Pottinger was determined not to do. Elliot had been humbugged that way; he would avoid the same fate by imposing the most severe conditions upon any cessation of hostilities. Kiying and Ilipu must negotiate in person. Subordinates like “Corporal White,” and a certain Chang Hsi who began to appear in August, would not be allowed to speak for them. The negotiators, moreover, must carry plenipotentiary powers, so that there could be no alleging the incapacity to concede this or do that, no pleas for time while Peking was consulted. The two conditions put Kiying in an awkward spot. It was unusual for principals in such a matter to meet face to face until the hard bargaining had been completed and the path cleared of possible indignities. The subordinates in question, particularly Chang (a retainer of Ilipu who had helped with the Chekiang truce of late 1840), were among the most experienced and trusted men at his disposal. And Kiying did not have plenipotentiary powers in the western sense. He did not even have detailed instructions. He carried a general mandate; he would be judged, as a ch’in-ch’ai always was judged, by what he in general obtained. Given Peking’s vacillating temper, he would be well advised to put off negotiating a surrender until sentiment in the capital was unequivocally favorable to one.
So the English continued up the river, and Kiying and Ilipu followed uncertainly, keeping always to the south and east. Chinkiang fell. Peking at last authorized Kiying to act as circumstances required. By now, however, there was almost no time left. On Friday, 5 August, the Queen steamer brought Pottinger to join the Cornwallis before Nanking’s walls. This news, with its clear warning of an imminent assault, reached Kiying and Ilipu late that night at Wusih, seventy miles away, and alarmed them very much. Chang Hsi started for the city at once. Ilipu, who was suffering from heat prostration, hurried after him. Monday morning they conferred with Niu Chien, the Nanking governor-general, and that afternoon Chang went aboard the Queen carrying a request from Ilipu that the attack not take place. In the interview that followed, with Pottinger present and Morrison and Thom doing the interpreting, Chang took a surprisingly belligerent line. It was impossible, he asserted, for the emperor to admit that things had been handled badly at Canton. “How can he acknowledge any mistakes before you foreign barbarians?” The warning that the Peiho and Peking itself would be the next English objective drew from him the retort that the foreigners had thus far been unopposed only because of the kindness of the emperor, “who cannot bear to kill or injure human creatures,” yet who would, if pushed too far, call upon his people to rise, men, women, and children—“every bush will be a soldier.” When reproached by Thom for the maddening Chinese habit of designating the English in derogatory terms, Chang demanded angrily what did they expect. “You kill people everywhere, plunder goods, and act like rascals; that is very disgraceful; how can you say it is not like bandits? You alien barbarians invade our China, your small country attacks our celestial court; how can you say you are not rebellious?”1 At this point, indeed, Chang by his own account pounded the table and spat upon the floor.a The English thought he was actually going to strike Thom. But the request to stay hostilities came from the gentlemanly and well-disposed Ilipu, the English had preparations to make, and so they held their hand.
On Tuesday, the ninth, Ilipu sent over what purported to be his commission as plenipotentiary. Morrison declared it inadequate; the Cornwallis moved to a position from which it could batter the walls at the point where they approached the river; a brigade went ashore and worked its way along the eastern perimeter. (Nanking, though much reduced in population, still covered a large area.) Once more it looked as if the dreaded assault was about to begin, so very early Thursday morning Ilipu promised an immediate ransom of $3 million and negotiations the moment Kiying should arrive. Approaching the Queen with this offer, Chang passed through swarms of small boats putting troops ashore, and feared the worst. Gough, however, needed more time for reconnaissance and for landing his artillery—it included a Madras troop with proper horses, which left their transport now for the first time. On Friday a little progress was made. Major Malcolm, Pottinger’s secretary of legation, produced the draft of a settlement and got the Chinese to receive it. But these signs of a lessened military resolve encouraged Kiying (who had now arrived) and Ilipu to resume the normal tactics of evasion and delay, a thing perhaps made easier for them by the fact that the talks took place not in the middle of the menacing fleet but in a temple some distance from the river. Their representatives at these talks—for Kiying and Ilipu were not ready to appear in person—could not show evidence of plenipotentiary powers, and they did not bring to a later meeting the draft settlement Malcolm had given them, with the result that it could not even be discussed. By Saturday afternoon, therefore, Malcolm was sure he saw humbug developing, humbug of the kind that had done Elliot in, and he announced that the guns would speak and the men move at dawn the next day.
He meant it. It was obvious he meant it. Anyone watching from the walls of the city could see that the English were numerous and ready. If something was not done immediately it was going to be Chapu and Chinkiang all over again. Very early, therefore, on the morning of Sunday, 14 August, Chang Hsi came a last time to the Queen and said that, if the English would call their attack off, Kiying’s full commission would be produced and serious negotiations on the basis of Pottinger’s terms immediately follow.
That was enough. At the temple later that same day Kiying’s commission was examined by Morrison and Thom and pronounced sufficient. Next the skeleton text of a treaty was drawn up in both languages, and with a certain amount of coming and going between officers of the middle rank—Pottinger no longer insisted on face-to-face meetings—the terms were worked out. On the seventeenth Pottinger formally requested Gough and Parker to suspend hostilities. On the nineteenth the Chinese accepted Morrison’s rough text and sent a copy off for the emperor’s approval. Next morning Kiying, Ilipu, and Governor-General Niu paid a ceremonial visit to the fleet, the little Medusa steamer bringing them down the east wall canal as far as the river, Parker’s barge conveying them to the Cornwallis. There they were shown about the ship and offered tea and cherry brandy. It was the Englishmen’s first opportunity to study Kiying, and they liked what they saw. “A fine manly honest countenance, with pleasantness in his looks” was young Parkes’s verdict.2 Niu by contrast seemed a dull fellow; Ilipu looked old and ill. There happened to be a picture of Queen Victoria in the great cabin. When her identity was explained to the three Chinese, they rose and bowed.
Time had to pass before Peking could signify its assent, and it passed in a state of rising Chinese impatience. The English were determined that the written text of the treaty should be correct in all particulars and in both languages. Not so the Chinese. “All their anxiety, which was too powerful to be concealed,” remembers Loch, “was centered upon one main object—our immediate departure.”3 The days went by with more exchanges of visits and the negotiation of unresolved details. Pottinger, Parker, and Gough called on their counterparts, received a salute from a couple of crude Chinese pieces placed perpendicularly upon their breeches, and took tea and sweetmeats. (It was now that Anstruther shook hands with Ilipu, the man who had set him free.) Two days later Pottinger went right into the heart of the city. There, at a long working session, he broached the topic that was, after all, central to the war. That topic was the opium traffic, and if anything was needed to demonstrate how single-mindedly the Chinese concentrated on getting the English out of the river and on their way home, it was their reaction now.
“They unanimously declined entering upon the subject,” writes Loch, “until Sir Henry assured them he did not wish to speak of it but as a topic of private conversation.” They then showed considerable interest. They wanted to know why the English did not stop the cultivation of the poppy in their Indian dominions. Pottinger gave the stock answer: if opium was prohibited in British India, it would migrate to other places. The true remedy lay with the Chinese themselves. “If your people are virtuous, they will desist from the evil practice; and if your officers are incorruptible, and obey their orders, no opium can enter your country.”4 As neither was the case, would it not be better to legalize the drug, put a duty on it, and at least benefit the treasury? It was a point Pottinger felt strongly about, it was a point his government had much on its mind—and he pressed it warmly. But it was clear that the Chinese were not going to follow his advice.
So the settlement said nothing about the opium traffic. It did not treat the mission question either. Elliot’s instructions had not breathed a word about that subject, nor had Pottinger’s; though the men who translated and interpreted for the plenipotentiary were almost to a man committed to the rapid extension of Christianity, though the expedition as a whole was sympathetic, in all of the memoirs and correspondence there is nowhere a hint that Pottinger was under any pressure to include a clause that would explicitly open China to the cross. No missionaries as such were with the river force. No men of business, in opium or anything else, were with it either. Christ and opium! The bearers of the first were more insistent than anyone else that China be opened. The traffic in the second was unquestionably the occasion, and quite possibly the cause, of the war that began the opening. The Treaty of Nanking dealt directly with neither.
Instead it provided that the Chinese pay an indemnity of $21 million, six of these earmarked as compensation for the famous confiscated chests. The five ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai were to be open to English residence and trade. Consuls were to be permitted at these five places, the Cohong was to be abolished, and a rational schedule of customs duties arranged. Future relations between England and China were to be on a basis of perfect equality. The island of Hongkong was to pass to Her Majesty in perpetuity. Chusan and Kulangsu were to remain in English hands until the $21 million had been paid; indeed, the fleet would not leave Nanking until it had loaded the first six. These and a bit besides, in thirteen articles, were the terms agreed upon—though not, it must be pointed out, with Peking’s unqualified assent. Right to the end Kiying had been obliged to manage his emperor as well as the barbarians and to practice as much deception on the one as he would have wished to practice upon the other. An edict of mid-August, for example, had commanded him not to meet Pottinger until a settlement was reached and the barbarian fleet had left the river. An edict five days later had declared that Foochow was on no account to be opened and that, at places that were, the foreigners were not to reside permanently. By taking Hongkong, Pottinger, too, had exceeded his instructions. All the same, there was no comparing the two plenipotentiaries. In confidence of action, in the openness with which each faced his master and was treated by him, the advantage lay all with the Englishman.
On the twenty-seventh Peking’s permission—for as much, that is, as Peking had been told about—reached Kiying and was passed immediately to Pottinger. There was a day’s further delay because Ilipu was ill. On the twenty-ninth, however, he felt well enough to be carried to the great cabin of the Cornwallis. There everybody who could squeezed in: Pottinger, Parker, and Gough, of course; Kiying and Niu Chien; Cécille, the Erigone’s captain, just arrived from Woosung in a commandeered junk and given a suspicious welcome; more mandarins; and on the English side every officer of field rank or its equivalent, as well as Hall of the Nemesis and young Parkes (because Pottinger had taken to him so). The treaty was laid out in four silk-bound copies, each containing an English and a Chinese version. Morrison affixed Pottinger’s seal. A mandarin did the same for Kiying. Pottinger signed. The Chinese triumvirate signed. Then there was a handsome lunch, the union jack went up at the mizzen and the yellow flag of China at the main, and the guns fired a twenty-one gun salute. “Some of the mandarins went to see this done,” says Parkes, “but came running up again much frightened. Soon after this they took their leave. Each party seemed satisfied, and pleased with each other.”5
The fighting was over at last. It was a moment for reflection, and Mountain for one seized it. “To see a crowd of mandarins in their cumbrous boots, long petticoats, and conical caps,” he wrote a friend that evening, “like beings of another planet, mingled in amity on the quarterdeck of a British ship with our military and naval officers, is a sight novel and striking, which leads the mind to future visions of God’s purposes, and to the hope that this day has begun an era of blessing to China.”6 It is doubtful, however, that any Chinese saw the matter quite this way. For them the blessing was not that the English had arrived but that most of the English were leaving. “There is quiet along the seacoasts,” wrote Chang Hsi sometime later in the course of a visit to his parents. “Soldiers and civilians rejoice at their work, country people and villagers enjoy the good fortune of great peace, and flesh-and-blood relatives have secured the family happiness. How extremely enjoyable and fortunate this is.”7 There were even Chinese who assumed that their side had won. Laribe, the French Lazarist, reported from the interior not many months later that the green standard men he saw returning from the lower Yangtze carried themselves as men do who have met the enemy and cut them to pieces.
For many years, indeed, the Chinese did not perceive that anything fundamental had been altered by the war and by the treaty. If anyone had told them that an irreversible act of penetration had occurred, they would have looked incredulous. They recognized the power of the English ships and men. They did not feel obliged on that account to remake their view of the world. These particular barbarians had come by sea, to the coast and up the Yangtze, which was embarrassing because it had proved impossible to resist them there, but they were barbarians just the same. When China had caught her breath she would manage them in the old familiar way. Nothing of substance had been conceded. The living and trading area outside Canton, to which the English and other foreigners had been confined from time immemorial, was to be reproduced now at four other ports. (Canton city itself would be no more accessible to foreigners than it had been before, as the English to their annoyance quickly discovered.) Allowing consuls at these ports was entirely in keeping with the ancient principle that a community of foreigners ought to be superintended by a taipan drawn from among themselves. The placing of a resident English ambassador at Peking—certainly the sign of signs that China was at last entering the family of nations—figured nowhere in the treaty; it was, in fact, delayed for twenty years; and since the emperor, when it did occur, happened to be a minor, the question of his receiving a western envoy without the kowtow was avoided for another ten. What did it mean anyway, this family of nations? As Fairbank remarks somewhere, to the Chinese the phrase suggested a patriarch surrounded by obedient children. If that was the picture the mind’s eye gave them, why should they treat the barbarians as anything better than rough country cousins?
The tenacity of the Chinese world view was amazing. So was the resilience and recuperative power of the state. Both survived Nanking for many years; indeed, if in the 1860s the westerners had quietly packed up and gone home, it might have been discovered that, though the Ch’ing dynasty was too far down the path of decline to survive, the system as a whole was not. The westerners, however, did not go home; they had never intended to. It does not require feats of hindsight to perceive that after this war and this treaty—which at best left the opening of China half effected—it was going to be China open all the way. Neither subterfuge nor open resistance nor pretending that it was otherwise could check the process.
How, then, further acts of penetration followed this war, some bloodless, others violent, and how the progression to a China fully opened was interrupted from time to time by furious efforts at reversal—one of which, the Boxer Rebellion, is probably better known to ordinary westerners than any other piece of modern Chinese history—is another and a longer story, and has no place in this book. By the turn of the century there was hardly a self-respecting western nation that did not move freely along China’s coasts and up her rivers, that did not fly its own flag, direct its own gunboats, practice its own law, and effectively protect its own citizens on Chinese soil. The foreigners did not carve China up as they carved up Africa. They did not take her over as the English took over India and the Russians central Asia. They riddled her through and through, and in the end could live, work, travel, and proselytize in her with an absolutely colonial confidence, existing not so much in enclaves (though the more than forty treaty ports were the underpinnings of the system, the places where at any given moment most of the foreigners were to be found) as in a sort of special layer that ran through, but was separated from, the Chinese society around—and too often communicated with it in the old, serviceable, stultifying pidgin. They were very active people, these foreigners. They built factories, ran steamships, managed banks. They published newspapers, raised hospitals, founded universities. They preached, converted (here the Catholics kept their lead), and spread the fabric of Christian life, not simply in its devotional aspect, but in social service and education and technical training. They advised admirals, reorganized government departments, administered the post, and supervised the collection of the customs. When the things they tried to teach the Chinese did not take, they tried again. To change China involved an enormous amount of repetition.
To change China was a large part of what opening China meant. For the technical experts, the teachers, and the missionaries it was the whole of it. Whether the West went about the job properly, or ought even to have attempted it, is for us a moot question. It is otherwise to a great many Chinese, who return an answer as simple and even simplistic as the film they once made about the Opium War, with Lin (I understand) the spotless hero, Kishen the traitor, and Dent the dark-dyed villain. As for what the westerners did to China, the effect they had on her, that is debatable too and is nowadays usually approached by shifting the terms a little and asking—it is the explicit title of one well-known book and the implied title of a dozen—what was China’s response to the West? Some day, perhaps, we shall reverse the coin and begin to look closely at how the West responded to China. Not to China before 1842, there has always been a great deal of attention to that, but to China after—particularly the West’s response to the fact of China closing, the bitterness and the dashed hopes.
For China remained open for hardly more than a century. On 20 April 1949 the English frigate Amethyst was fired upon by Communist guns as she navigated a stretch of the lower Yangtze that the men-of-war of western powers had moved freely over for years and years, that Parker and Hall and the others must have been quite familiar with—was held motionless for weeks and then one dark night stealthily slipped her cables and got away down the river to the sea. She never reentered. Neither did any other western warship. From that moment, if a moment must be picked, China was closed again. If the door has since opened a crack, it is for a different purpose and with a very different hand upon the knob.
The Treaty of Nanking was signed on 29 August. For some weeks longer the expedition lingered outside the city. Parties of officers and men visited the famous Porcelain Tower, climbed to the top, and chipped pieces for souvenirs until Gough made them stop. It rained a good deal, in the intervals becoming sultrier than ever; sickness spread so alarmingly through the fleet and army that, though the instrument of imperial ratification had yet to return from Peking and the $6 million in instant indemnity were not completely in hand, Parker started a number of ships down the river. Some were in very bad shape indeed; the Belleisle, carrying the unfortunate 98th, was a floating disaster; but even skeleton crews were able to manage them. When the Dido went bow first into a rice field, Keppel laid out anchors, offloaded his guns into a couple of commandeered junks, and warped clear, all in less than twenty-four hours with half his men helpless. Although many soldiers and seamen died in the river and many more after they had reached the open sea, the bulk of the force survived. It could not have done so had it been obliged to move by land.
The rest of the coast felt the sickness too. At Kulangsu half the garrison was in hospital by the middle of August. Further south the “Hongkong fever” took its annual toll. (Among the dead on Hongkong was young Horatio De Quincey of the Cameronians, recently come out with an ensign’s commission purchased for him by his grandmother. It was as close as his father, England’s most celebrated opium eater, would get to the war that bore in a sense his name.) As the autumn advanced, however, cooler weather brought the usual improvement, and attention turned to other things. Early in October the last of the fleet cleared the Yangtze. There was a rendezvous off Chusan; then most of the ships and men set off on the first leg of the long journey home. Ahead of them on the Auckland steamer hurried Major Malcolm, Pottinger’s secretary of legation, with the imperial instrument of ratification in his bag. Word reached the coast that survivors of the shipwrecked Ann and Nerbudda were alive on Formosa. Parker sent a 10-gun brig to fetch them; she returned with Denham of the Ann and nine other men; almost three hundred more, it seemed, had died on the island in the course of the past twelve months, starved, beaten, or deliberately beheaded by the mandarins there. The appalling story, when it reached London, quite eclipsed the Anstruther and Noble affairs and confirmed Englishmen in their general opinion as to who, between themselves and the Celestials, the real barbarians were.
This was some time after these same Englishmen had learned that the war was over. The news had arrived late in November, simultaneously with word of important successes in Afghanistan, and there was no mistaking which commanded the greater notice. The Nanking settlement was perfectly satisfactory. “It secures us a few round millions of dollars and no end of very refreshing tea. It gives an impetus to trade, cedes us one island in perpetuity, and in short puts that sort of climax to the war which satisfies our interests more than our vanity and rather gives over glory a preponderance to gain.” The Illustrated London News, which advanced this judgment, nevertheless devoted twice as much space to the recapture of Kabul as it did to the Yangtze campaign. The Times was even less enraptured. No doubt Chinese arrogance needed piercing; no doubt “that silly and presumptuous despot,” the emperor, had to be brought down a peg. The war had arisen, however, over a quarrel that the Times had never been able to believe just, a~d it had been fought in a manner that brought very little credit to British arms. What pleased the paper most, indeed, about the China news was the thought that its readers would no longer be obliged to hear by each Indian mail that the successors in arms to the heroes of the Peninsula were busy “sweeping away with cannon or bayonet whole crowds of poor pigtailed animals.”8
About the Gulf of Canton there was considerably more enthusiasm. “China is not now fast shut up as beforetime but is in very truth a land of promise,” wrote Lockhart to his London Missionary Society. “What changes there will be,” observed Libois of the Missions Etrangères, adding a few months later that it seemed to him “easier than ever to get into China.”9 At Jardine’s, however, Alexander Matheson wondered privately whether peace would be good for the firm. “For years to come we shall not be in a better position, or trade to so much advantage, as during the continuance of the war, especially if the opium trade is to be hampered, as I suspect it will be.”10 Fortunately it was not. Though excluded from the five treaty ports, the traffic prospered openly at anchorages nearby (Woosung serving Shanghai, for example) as well as at Hongkong and the old coastal stations like Namoa, until in 1858 Peking at last recognized fiction for fact and made the whole thing legal. Legal it remained for more than half a century. World War I had passed before the last chests of Indian opium were burned, with considerable publicity, on a Shanghai dock, and by that time the poppy was so extensively cultivated within China itself that prohibiting imports meant almost nothing. All that came later, however. For the moment what mattered was that the trade recovered from the uncertainties and interruptions placed upon it by the war, and resumed its normal course.
The year ran out. Early in December there was a short, sharp riot at the factories, with several deaths and a good deal of looting and burning. Peter Parker, who had returned from America to reopen the Hog Lane hospital and had brought a young wife with him, thought it prudent to slip her into the relative safety of a hong merchant’s residence. Since the houses affected were those in the Creek, Dutch and New English that had been half wrecked in May 1841, and since the riot itself seemed to have been provoked by unruly lascars up from Whampoa, many agreed with Pottinger that the affair was no augury of the future (they were wrong). By now the bulk of the expedition had reached Hongkong. On 20 December fifty ships, Gough aboard one, sailed for Singapore, India, and beyond. Christmas came and went. On the thirty-first Pottinger sat in Government House on what was now incontestably English soil and gazed across the water at China two miles away. The Good Success unloaded raw cotton and Malwa practically at his feet; the Red Rover waited at Calcutta for the first opium sale of the season; the Ariel and the Hellas beat up the Fukien coast with chests for Jardine Matheson’s floating drug depots. Gutzlaff played civil magistrate on Chusan with his usual insensitivity and gusto. Milne explored Ningpo (it pained him that women and children bolted at the sight of him). Bridgman prepared to conclude the month’s number of the Repository. As the Lord has chosen England to chastise and humble China, he wrote, so will He likely employ her “to introduce the blessings of Christian civilization and free intercourse among her millions.”11 And Lin, the valiant and incorruptible, Lin who had tried and failed to make all this impossible, pursued the exile’s life in cold and lonely Ili.
Far away in London on this last day of 1842, Peking’s instrument of ratification having been safely delivered by Major Malcolm, the great seal of England was affixed to a copy of the Treaty of Nanking at the lord chancellor’s house in Great George Street—and the war in every formal sense was over. That night Queen Victoria danced the new year in at Windsor Castle. Did anyone tell her that she was now Sister to the Emperor and Aunt to the Moon?
Having resisted so long in the matter of compensation for the twenty thousand chests, Her Majesty’s government did not hesitate to resist a little longer. It was not until August 1843 that the holders of opium scrip (receipts for opium surrendered, which were often bought and sold like bills of exchange) were summoned to the treasury chamber in Whitehall and paid. What they received averaged about $300 a chest, far less than Dent, Matheson, and the others had originally clamored for—but much more, as many people pointed out, than they could possibly have realized by selling in the depressed China market of early 1839. In the end most felt that the figure was reasonable.
Jardine was not alive to agree. He had died in February at his Upper Baker Street house, aged fifty-nine, unmarried and not much noticed. It was otherwise with James Matheson. Good health and fortune preserved him for another thirty-five years. He sat regularly in Parliament, kept busy with this and that, and for a time served as chairman of the P and O—which by then was active on the China coast. Quite early he bought the island of Lewis in the outer Hebrides. Some say this made him the second largest landed proprietor in the United Kingdom. For his efforts to relieve the sufferings of his island tenants during the great potato famine he received, only naturally, a baronetcy.
What happened to all the other “Early Victorian Vikings” (as Arthur Waley likes to call them) it would be impossible as well as tedious to relate. Pottinger became governor of Madras but did not distinguish himself in the post. Charles Elliot served his country well if obscurely as governor successively of Bermuda, Trinidad, and St. Helena. Hall left the Nemesis for the Royal Navy proper, commanded steam yachts and frigates, and in the Crimean War took a seventy-four rebuilt as a 60-gun screw ship into the Baltic—she was in fact our old friend the Blenheim. It was Gough who rose the highest. Made commander-in-chief in India after Nicolls, he fought the two Sikh Wars, became viscount and field marshal, and was honored in death with a large bronze statue in Phoenix Park, Dublin, cast partly from cannon he had brought back from China. Little Winston Churchill was taken to see this statue dedicated, and never forgot it, but it is probably fancy to suppose that at the moment of the unveiling an Early Victorian Viking spoke somehow to a Late.
John Morrison died suddenly at Hongkong on the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. A few days later Old Howqua succumbed to acute diarrhea at his home on Honam, leaving a large fortune and a name so well known outside China that years later his likeness was still to be seen at Madame Tussaud’s. Lin also received that accolade. “The Author of the China War,” his label read, adding (since it was what the English chiefly remembered him for) that he had destroyed British property worth £2.5 million! He had been called out of exile in 1845, given other posts, and was on his way to a fresh assignment when he died near Canton in the autumn of 1850. The Repository noted his demise with respect. Two years later it too was dead, of natural causes. Bridgman survived another decade and lies buried in Shanghai. Williams accompanied Perry to Japan (which he had visited before, you will remember), became secretary and interpreter to the American Legation at Peking, and after more than forty years in China retired to Yale, preceded in reputation by the enormous book that he called The Middle Kingdom—the book that made him the foremost American Sinologist of his day.
Perboyre obtained immortality in another way. He was beatified in 1889, the first of the China martyrs to be thus recognized. It was another eleven years before the same honor was bestowed on his older colleague and model, Clet.
The Nemesis was last heard of in Burma in the early fifties. The Volage became a powder hulk, the Cornwallis a jetty at Sheerness, the Wellesley a Thames training ship—until, under another name, she was sunk by German bombs in the fall of 1940. Russell and Company’s first receiving ship was sold to the Chinese, who made a western-style man-of-war of her and stationed her near Canton. One night a flood tide threw her on a rock and she foundered. Then the Chinese cut away her masts except for part of the fore, hung out a lantern, and called her a lighthouse, the river’s first. “When I last saw the stump of the mast twenty-eight years after,” remembers Hunter, “a great bank of mud had formed round the hull, and a faint glimmer from a penny dip in a small paper lantern marked the last resting place of the Lintin.”12 As for the opium clippers, they went on with their lucrative, hazardous voyages until more often than not they just disappeared somewhere. That is what happened to the Red Rover one season in the Bay of Bengal.
Curiously, however, the china dinner service that Clifton had commissioned and put into this ship of his—this first of all opium clippers—survived. When Clifton’s grandson, a Somerset solicitor, died at Crewkerne a few years ago, the service passed by bequest to Matheson and Company, Ltd., of London. For Matheson and Company is decidedly in existence today. In the late 1840s it succeeded Magniac and Smith, and it still handles the London business of Jardine, Matheson and Company—which is alive too and very active on the China coast. Of course the firm does not now traffic in opium. It got out of that a hundred years ago when the trade was at its height, when Indian exports to China sometimes reached eighty thousand chests a year. Nor does it do business inside China. That has not been possible for some time. But it does business with China—indeed, from its headquarters in Hongkong and its lesser offices about the Pacific’s rim it keeps an eye out for whatever may turn up anywhere in that immense basin, and if the thing seems promising, moves into it as shrewdly, as forcefully, as aggressively even, as ever the first Jardine or Matheson did. There are none of that name in the firm any more, but there are others as enterprising, some third and fourth generation, and the proportion who are Scots is still high.
If you go around, then, to 3 Lombard Street, you will find Red Rover’s dinner service, and portraits and other things from the old days of the China trade, as well as a keen recollection of Jardine Matheson’s beginnings and a still keener interest. The same is not true of the Ghazipur opium factory. Elsewhere in India there are reminders of the Opium War. In the old Bombay town hall now become a public library, just off the reading room where newspapers in English and eleven Indian languages doze upon the racks, stands a marble statue of Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, the first Parsee baronet, knighted in the spring of 1842 for his public services and his philanthropy, with never a hint upon his benign countenance that a part of his immense fortune was amassed out of the Malwa he consigned to Jardine’s. In the museum at Fort St. George, Madras, they keep the cage Anstruther recovered from Ningpo and three Chinese war helmets picked up nearby. At Ghazipur, however, they have no time for antiquities. It is not much over sixty years since the last cake-maker sat to his work in the caking room there, petal sheets on one side, lewah and poppy trash on the other, brass cup before. Over the century or more that Ghazipur supplied opium for the pipes of China, there must have been thousands of those brass cups required. Surely a few are still lying around. But if you ask them to show you one, if you even ask them to describe one, they will look blank, it will be plain they do not know what you are talking about, and for a moment you will wonder whether the old Indian opium trade ever really existed at all.