CHINESE MEDICAL THEORY traces illness back to natural pathogenic factors penetrating into the body. Of course, the human body is a closed system, which heat, moisture, cold and wind – to name only the four most important natural factors – cannot simply pierce unaided. Heat, moisture, cold and wind have to find a gap – xu – in the defences into which they can embed themselves. Only then are they able to penetrate the body, establish themselves there and trigger all kinds of pathological consequences.
Therefore – according to the theory – the individual cannot permit this gap to materialize. By behaving appropriately, he or she can stay healthy. Preventative conduct, then, is the best protection against outside intruders. According to a common Chinese adage, those who place their trust in medicines for healing are like homeowners who repair the breach in their house’s walls only after the thieves have entered. Another analogy would be to start digging a well only after one feels thirsty or beginning to forge weapons when the war is already raging – in other words, much too late.
Though it may have been economical in terms of extending the empire’s hegemonic claims on land, China’s destruction of its maritime capabilities in the sixteenth century left a gap where, as historical chance would have it, the European prowlers immediately found purchase, thereby commencing the beginning of the end for the Chinese Empire. Wind, cold, heat and so on are all eminently useful as long as they contribute to the natural growth and decay of things outside the human organism. Once they find a hole and enter an alien organism where they do not belong, then the good becomes the bad, crippling the involuntary host.
It was the same process with the Europeans, who from the fifteenth century sailed to sea, scouting coastlines, learning to cross oceans, penetrating where they did not belong and establishing themselves on foreign soil to exploit their involuntary host countries. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British, the first maritime nations that struck out onto the high seas, were well-liked and civilized as long as they remained in their ancestral regions. As soon as they invaded other lands they morphed into personified evil, causing the most appalling and enduring traumas and destroying or at least profoundly harming indigenous life. When the Chinese, one of the more distant targets of this mischief, recognized this and searched for ways to heal their wounds, it was already almost too late. The moment they had declared the logbooks of Zheng He to be waste paper and committed them to the flames, they had opened the breach in their own house wall.
The European powers’ depredations in North and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia and finally East Asia have been amply documented. Portugal and Spain led the way into the era of European colonialism. Unlike Russia and China, which could keep expanding into their immediate periphery without encountering nations able to stem their advance, European states had to cross the seas to subjugate other peoples and take possession of their natural and mineral resources. Even a country as diminutive as the Netherlands could capitalize on the administrative, economic and technological gulf between Europe and non-European regions to occupy territories many times larger than its own geographical size. France and Britain followed, finally becoming the mightiest colonial powers of all. The Germans, whose country was unified only in 1871, joined late. Yet they still had nearly five decades in which to add to the calamities that Europe’s overseas expansion caused practically everywhere it went.
The causes of this process were varied. The quest for grandeur, keen competition – first among feudal states and later nation-states – as well as population pressures in some parts of Europe stimulated the exploitation (always enthusiastically supported by national clergies) of foreign resources. With its sense of the white man’s superiority, the world-view these states espoused likewise justified violence. Once secured, the resources fuelled – first and foremost in the United Kingdom – the rise of great industries that in turn became the driving forces behind the opening of global markets. Demand for the riches of East Asia stimulated improvements in navigation. The old land routes had been blocked after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century. Trade monopolies belonging to a handful of Mediterranean city-states required that alternative routes take enormous detours around Africa’s southern cape. The ‘discovery’ of North America itself came about through efforts to find an unimpeded route to East Asia. Technological advances from Arab and Persian cultures found their way to Europe, resulting in the evolution of Viking long-ships and Mediterranean galleys, suitable mainly for voyages close to coastlines, and the cogs with various mast sizes that greatly reduced the risks of oceangoing travel.
From its beginnings in 1513, the tiny Portuguese outpost of Macao was tolerated by Chinese authorities for more than three centuries. Only in 1849 did Portugal declare its colony independent of China. After some limited military engagements, it took until 1887 for the Chinese, weakened by domestic and external afflictions, to finally recognize Portuguese sovereignty over Macao.
The mainland Chinese paid little attention when in 1582 the Portuguese, in 1624 the Dutch and, two years later, the Spanish occupied Formosa, an island off the coast of the Chinese province of Fujian populated chiefly by peoples of Malay origin. These pinpricks off the empire’s southeast coastline were still too small and insignificant. More of a nuisance was the retreat of some loyalists of the fallen Ming Dynasty to the island that the Chinese call Taiwan in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1683 forces of the Manchu Qing Dynasty invaded the island and drove out the Europeans.
For China, dealing with irksome barbarians from who knows where who cause trouble along this or that coastline through piracy or pillage was nothing new. The Europeans were regarded as exactly that kind of temporary coastal nuisance when they appeared off the empire’s shores. Yet this time the Chinese were wrong. The British had bigger goals in mind, especially after taking control of India with relatively little difficulty. Their attention had turned to the even bigger prize of China.
Precious Chinese goods had been brought to Europe by land or sea ever since Roman times. With the dawn of the modern age, interest in China’s manufactures rose again. Porcelain and silks were especially popular among European royal courts and those commoners able to afford them. Even imitations of Chinese porcelain and fine arts, furniture and handicrafts – high-quality fakes known as chinoiserie – flooded Europe. Chinese producers responded with porcelain designs adapted to what they supposed were European tastes and sold huge quantities of goods they called ‘export porcelain’ to European buyers in commercial ports, especially Manila. Since maritime navigation was officially banned for Chinese merchants, foreign ships (and smugglers) provided transportation. The Dutch East India Company and, later, the British East India Company dominated the business.
Besides the perennial bestsellers – tea, silk and porcelain – ceramics, spices, lacquers and fine cotton cloth also made their way from China to Europe to supply an ever-growing market. In 1761, for example, the British East India Company moved more than 2.5 million lb (11.3 million kg) of tea worth over £830,000 to Europe. In 1794 the British government drastically cut import taxes on tea, producing a corresponding jump in Chinese exports. In 1800 more than 3.5 million lb (15.9 million kg) of tea left the country for Europe.
On the other hand, no European product generated comparable interest, and therefore demand, in China. The country imported tin, copper, lead and woollens, but these products did not even begin to offset the Europeans’ trade deficit with China. In the early nineteenth century some 200 European merchant ships landed annually in the commercial centre of Canton. On the voyage to China they carried 90 per cent ballast in their holds. Silver was the only equivalent value that could offset that of the Chinese treasures. It has been estimated that between 1719 and 1833 Chinese merchants took in coins equalling 6,000 tons of pure silver for their exports.
This skewed trade was unfortunate in several respects. It forced the advent of the first global trading network that bound China with Europe, the U.S. and the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. The silver was mined in the Americas and then brought across the Pacific to Manila, where Chinese merchants accepted it as payment for their wares. These goods were then shipped to Europe, which was also conducting a growing trade with America. For many decades the system functioned fairly well, but the disadvantages of payment in silver grew increasingly onerous, as production and transport of the precious metal grew prohibitively expensive. Then a solution to the dilemma seemed to be found: opium.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to import Indian opium, initially mixed with tobacco, to Taiwan, from where it continued on to the Chinese mainland. Chinese medicine took note of opium as early as the Tang era in the eighth century, in the recipe for the legendary antidote theriac, which was first manufactured under the ancient king Mithridates VI of Pontus (c. 132–63 BCE) and would go on to become one of the most widespread medicines in the European pharmacopoeia. Yet the composition of the medicine remained unknown to Chinese doctors. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the rapid expansion of pure opium, whose early names a-fu-rong and ya-pien mimicked the drug’s foreign name, likewise took place through pharmacy. The wealthier classes could afford opium as a sexual stimulant. Its use would not end there.
Over time, opium abuse spread through all social classes with devastating effects. The thieves found the breach and swarmed in. Chinese authorities became aware of the crisis only slowly. Another complicating factor was that in China, neither end users nor the countless individuals who profited from the various stages of the trade had any interest in stemming the drug’s constantly expanding importation.
An imperial ban from 1729 calling opium a product that ‘cunning barbarians sell to Chinese so as to swindle their money’ had no notable effect. At that point 200 cases of opium, each weighing 63.5 kg, were entering the Chinese mainland annually. Sales and use in China climbed slowly at first. By 1773 imports had increased fivefold to (still only) 1,000 cases. With the forcible removal of the Dutch from India and Bengal and Britain’s de facto attainment of a trade monopoly over Bengali opium, the foundation had been laid for expanded opium production and the use of this economical and easily transportable narcotic as an ideal currency for the China trade – ideal because it was the first, and so far, the only, product that seemed capable of gaining the entire Chinese population as users.
By 1790 the volume of opium exported annually to China from India had further quadrupled to 4,000 cases. The scruples of some British parliamentarians who banned the (still legal) importation of opium to China by the East India Company in 1784, forcing the company to hand the lucrative trade over to private merchants, proved only a temporary obstacle to the unrestricted expansion of opium as a means of payment in China. Profits from opium trafficking still flowed into the British East India Company’s coffers, flimsily disguised as licensing fees paid by the private traders.
On the Chinese side the merchants authorized to deal with the Europeans were also quick to see the prospects offered by selling the contraband on the mainland. Many illicit networks were set up on both sides. Even American merchants got involved in the business, shipping opium from Persia and Turkey to China. Between 1775 and 1795 a full one-third of the British East India Company’s total revenue came from licence fees paid by private opium merchants. By the time the Chinese emperor outlawed the use of opium in 1796 and its trade in 1800, the structures had become so well established, and the profits so lucrative for all concerned, that the imperial prohibitions were doomed to fail.
Moreover, to the delight of the British, the flow of silver in the China trade was changing direction. In 1807 the British East India Company recorded the movement of 3.4 million silver pesos from Canton to Calcutta. Less than two decades later there was already a net outflow of silver from China. By this time the East India Company had lost its opium monopoly. Numerous European and American trading companies competed to sell opium in China. Once again, in 1813, the far-away imperial court tried to stop opium imports by tightening penalties – and failed again.
A few years later opium supplanted cotton as China’s leading import. To escape state repression, in 1821 Chinese merchants founded a big depot at the mouth of the Pearl River, beyond the reach of the governor of Canton, who had been appointed to enforce the ban. In 1832 the quantity smuggled into the country climbed to 23,570 cases and in 1838 to more than 30,000.
The profits from the opium trade with China are well documented, especially those of Britain. Poppy cultivation and opium sales helped fill British coffers. The East India Company saw its revenues from the contraband trade grow exponentially, from 2.3 million rupees in 1800 and 8.2 million in 1815 to nearly 30 million by 1838. Given numbers like these, the House of Commons in London was utterly unwilling to bow to the critics of this ‘immoral’ trade and obstruct the cultivation of opium in the Southeast Asian colonies. Again and again, groups in the UK tried to put a stop to their country’s involvement in opium smuggling. Yet the opium trade, which continued to expand unchecked for decades, illustrates clearly how dependent lawmakers had become on commercial macro-interests.
Profits from the drug trade helped Britain to finance the purchase of raw materials from the United States for its cotton industry around Manchester and the administration of its colony in India and the more recent colonies in Singapore and Hong Kong. The effects an abrupt end to these cash flows would have for the overall British economy so frightened policymakers in London that only in 1907, after substantial quantities of opium were being produced in China itself, would a Sino-British treaty be concluded that enshrined the complete end of British deliveries within the next ten years. The U.S. government, which drew far less advantage from the opium trade than the British, forced American merchants to get out of the opium business as early as 1880.