Mandarin-Gold (22 page)

'You can
demand
what you like,' he called back, but only from inferiors, never from an equal or superior. So, Captain Ferguson, I will sell at any price I like. That, I believe, is Dr Jardine's business philosophy, and it is also mine. And I stay here until we have sold every box — even if we come down to a dollar a time. You can stay with us, or pull up your anchors and sail away. The choice is yours, captain. I wish you no harm, but I state my case.'

They waited for five minutes, and then they heard shouts of command from the
Bosphorus.
Up came the anchors, down clattered the great canvas sails. The clipper began to move.

'You will hear about this in Macao. We will be there before you. Jardine will not like this, and he is a very powerful man. Also, he owns shares in your company.'

'He is not the majority shareholder,' shouted Gunn. 'I will outvote him.'

'I do not wish to argue and quarrel in front of natives,' retorted Ferguson. 'I find your behaviour most suspicious. I believe you have done away with Mr Crutchley in some way. If you have, I will see to it that you are hanged! All of you.'

Then the
Bosphorus
was past them, sailing slowly out to sea.

Gunn turned to MacPherson.

'We've done it!' he said triumphantly. 'We've
done
it!'

'We still have to meet them back in Macao,' replied MacPherson in a worried tone.

'As a shareholder in Crutchley & Company, you can leave that to me. There's another thing I must do when we dock, and that is change the name of the company. Crutchley is out of it for good. He belongs to the past. What shall we call it now?'

'What about Gunn-MacPherson or MacPherson-Gunn?'

'No. I do not wish to use our names, because if one of us left, we would have to change it again. There would be no continuity, and continuity is important It is good for trade.

'I'll tell you what. We seized this clipper by claiming that a mandarin who doesn't exist had found gold that wasn't there. Well, it's going to be there from now on for both of us. Well call our company Mandarin-Gold. Everyone knows a mandarin is powerful, and that the whole world turns on a golden axle. That's our name, MacPherson. One day it will be known not only along the China coast, but round the world. Now, come below deck. You tell me I have a patient to treat.'

Jardine lit a long cigar, blew out the lucifer and turned to his partner, Matheson. They were seated in an upper room of Creek Factory. The hour was evening, with candles lit; the river's shining floor reflected the coloured paper lanterns on the quay. Through the window, they could see the clock on the chapel spire of the English factory. This was the only public clock in Canton; everyone regulated his watch as- they passed it; Jardine did so now, out of habit.

'If you ask me, we're making damned fools of ourselves,' he said slowly. 'Our views must carry weight, and the Americans also agree we simply cannot allow this situation to continue.

'We're just specking away along the coast of China, when if we could only secure diplomatic representation at Peking, we could open up the whole country, with corresponding benefits to the whole community here as well as to our own companies.'

'You heard what happened today with Napier?' asked Matheson.

'Yes,' agreed Jardine shortly. ‘I heard.'

He hated to think of the supine way in which the British were conducting their negotiations, when a couple of gunboats up the river, with maybe the despatch of some troops ashore, could instantly transform the absurd pretensions of the Chinese. He had seen Napier's despatch to the government in London in which his lordship had expressed a similar opinion: 'Three or four frigates or brigs, with a few steady British troops, not sepoys, would settle the thing in an inconceivably short time. It would have brilliant consequences for the British firms in China and the American contemporaries, and for the other European merchants as well.'

It could be done so easily, too, Napier had added, ‘with a facility unknown, even in the capture of a paltry West Indian island.' But these were only words, not deeds. Everyone knew that the Chinese army had arrows and pikes and shields and swords, but little else. They were badly disciplined, and their guns were useless. The shore batteries along the Bogue were contemptible, and capable of lobbing shots into the water and nothing, more. Why, the gunners had sold so much of their gunpowder to British opium ships for their armament that they had to adulterate their remaining stocks with one measure of sand for every two of powder.*

Yet despite these ludicrous weaknesses, the Chinese still possessed inexplicable confidence in their own superiority. This had been evidenced when Lu had quite unexpectedly asked for Lord Napier to arrange a. meeting at eleven o'clock one morning recently in the English factory. Three mandarins desired to attend. Optimism among Lord Napier's party was high; no doubt they wished to conclude some kind of agreement.

In China, the direction in which authority traditionally faced was always south. Thus the Chinese interpreters set out three chairs for the mandarins in a semi-circle facing south. The chairs for the British were on the east and west sides of the hall.

Napier agreed; on no account would he stand while inferiors sat. In any case, one row of chairs had their backs to the portrait of George IV, and this, surely, was insulting to the Sovereign? He had already been insulted when the Emperor had refused to accept the picture as a gift. A further slight would be insupportable. Napier therefore ordered that all the chairs should be reversed so that no-one sat with their back to the King's picture, and he chose the centre seat for himself, with a mandarin on either side, and facing the third.

When the Hong merchants arrived to check arrangements for the meeting, they immediately begged Lord Napier to put the chairs back as they were. The mandarins would be offended beyond all apology if they did not face south. They would fine the Hong merchants heavily, and maybe even cause them to be beaten with bamboos, for they would be blamed for this calculated affront.

'I cannot alter anything now,' retorted Lord Napier when this was translated to him. ‘This is
our
factory. They will sit as I say.'

Usually, he would have replied in a more conciliatory way, but something about Canton, the hot, humid climate and the endless prevarications of the Chinese to what he regarded as reasonable requests, with Jardine on one side demanding fierce and instant action, and Elliot on the other advising caution, provoked a mounting irritation about his assignment and its vague responsibilities.

He sent back his reports to London, but to receive any reply would take six months — assuming that the Foreign Secretary wrote immediately, which was unlikely. After all, European problems were infinitely more pressing than what did or did not happen on the other side of the world to a handful of British merchants and privateers, even allowing their vast financial contribution to the East India Company. And in any case the problem would have resolved itself, for good or bad, long before Napier received his Government's instructions. He had to make his own decisions — but how could he do so when the Chinese acted without any reference to realities? Also, he had not been feeling well for some weeks. Each night he would lie awake in his hot bedroom, shutters closed against the noxious fumes of night, listening to gongs and firecrackers and the high-pitched wailing that the Chinese called music, wondering how his wife and daughters were faring at Macao, how his estate in Scotland was being managed, whether his sheep were being given the care he could have given them were he home instead of in this nightmare, alien land.

At eleven o'clock precisely Napier sat down in the centre chair. He and his staff waited, but no mandarins arrived. Half-past eleven; twelve; one o'clock passed and still no mandarins. Then at a quarter past one they walked in, hands in their sleeves, smiling and bowing.

'You're late,' Napier greeted them through his interpreter. His head was aching and his eyes burned like hot ashes. He contained his anger with difficulty; how could
anyone
treat with these people?

'Were you not aware that the time was fixed, at your wish, for eleven o'clock?' he asked them, and without waiting for a reply, went on: 'This is an insult to His Britannic Majesty which cannot be overlooked a second time; Whereas, on previous occasions, you have only had to deal with the servants of a private company of merchants, you must understand that henceforth your communications will be held with officers appointed by His Britannic Majesty, who are by no means inclined to submit to such indignities!'

The mandarins sat impassive, as though they heard nothing and understood nothing. Napier was not aware that, under their own peculiar etiquette, they had purposely arrived two hours after the appointed time, for this was the accepted custom when calling upon inferior personages of lesser rank, such as Barbarians. Had they been invited by a person of superior rank for eleven, they would have arrived at nine.

Because the mandarins had smiled and bowed their heads when his message was translated, Napier assumed they had accepted his superiority and acknowledged their error. He did not realize how deeply he had insulted them.

Napier then asked the senior mandarin, the Prefect, why they wished to see him. The senior mandarin replied that Viceroy Lu had asked him to discover what Lord Napier was doing in Canton without official permission, and when he proposed to leave.

Napier explained that when the East India Company, which had previously conducted trade with the Hong merchants, had surrendered its monopoly in China, the Viceroy in Canton had specifically asked for some new person to represent the English merchants. He was that person. He would return to Macao when he wished to do so.

But you are
not
a merchant, the Prefect pointed out quickly, you are an official. This means that the King of England wishes to change the system. The correct procedure would have been for the King to inform the Viceroy of this desire, and then seek the orders of the Son of Heaven. Instead, he had simply sent Lord Napier, who, doubtless out of ignorance rather than ill will, had arrived in Canton intent on changing in a day a system of regulations that had existed for generations.

Once more, Napier produced his personal letter for the Viceroy, but they refused to accept it. The meeting ended with forced smiles and sweetmeats and wine, but nothing was agreed and nothing had changed.

Napier then drafted a notice which he had translated into Chinese and displayed on the factory walls. This claimed that 'thousands of industrious Chinese must suffer ruin simply through the perversity of their government, unless they opened their frontiers to trade,'

Lu replied with posters pasted on every vacant wall. They described Napier as 'a Lawless Foreign Slave, a Barbarian dog named Laboriously Vile,' and reminded him that it was a capital offence to incite the people against their rules. Anyone would therefore be justified in decapitating him and displaying his head on a pike as a warning to others.

Now, Jardine remembered Napier's astonishment when the translation was read out to him.

'But I don't understand it,' he said in a shocked voice. 'This is utterly ridiculous. We are trying to open up China for the good of the Chinese people as much as for our own profit. Cannot they
see
that?'

‘There's worse to come, sir,' reported Elliot. ‘The Viceroy is withdrawing all Chinese labour from our factories and the quay. All commercial transactions between Chinese merchants and everyone in the.factory is coming to a standstill.'

'For how long?' asked Napier.•

'Until you leave.'

'I'll
never
leave,' said Napier.

‘Then it would appear, gentlemen,' said Elliot, 'that we have reached an impasse. The shopkeepers, I am told, are under penalty of death if they sell us any goods. We cannot trade, so the whole purpose of being here is nullified.'

'You are too defeatist,' replied Jardine. 'You should be in commerce like me. Then you'd have to find ways around difficulties, over them, under them. You don't just accept them and say we're at an impasse and there's nothing we can do. You break the impasse.'

'And how do you propose to do that, doctor?' asked Elliot sarcastically.

'I would tell you how I'd do it, if Lord Napier asked my opinion,' replied Jardine.

'I am asking you,' said Napier immediately. 'How
would
you do it?'

'First, I'd take the
Andromache,
and the frigate
Imogene,
that's just come over from India to relieve her, and I'd sail up this river and fire on their stone forts. Make the Chinese realize that they cannot go on as they are. They'd ask for terms — and our terms would include an Ambassador at Peking.'

'I disagree completely,' said Elliot. 'There are literally millions of Chinese and a handful of us. It's of no real concern to the Emperor in Peking what happens in this remote part of his kingdom.

'A few shells fired at some mud fort? The Emperor would not capitulate for that — and the Viceroy would not dare to, even if he wished he could.'

'You don't know the East like I do,' Jardine assured him earnestly. 'I know these people's minds. I have to, or I could not survive commercially. They're tortuous, but like anyone else, they respect success. They will bow down to the strongest man.' Napier turned to Elliot.

'There's sense in what he says,' he said. 'Damn it, we'll never make progress with this Viceroy pasting up messages all around the town.'

'But with respect, sir,
you
pasted up the first notice?