The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (12 page)

Imperial Mandate to the King of England

Whereas your country, lying far beyond the wide seas, was sincerely desirous of attaining the blessings of civilisation...you sent a special mission to pay homage.

You live at such a great distance from the Middle Kingdom that these Embassies must cause you considerable inconvenience. Your envoys, moreover, are wholly ignorant of Chinese ceremonial procedure, and the bickering which follows their arrival is highly displeasing to my ears. My dynasty attaches no value to products from abroad; your nation’s cunningly wrought and strange wares do not appeal to me in the least, nor do they interest me.

For the future, O King,...pray do not trouble to dispatch missions all this distance; they are merely a waste of time and have their journey for nothing. If you loyally accept our sovereignty and show dutiful submission, there is really no need for these yearly appearances at our court to prove that you are indeed our vassal.

We issue this mandate to the end that you may perpetually comply therewith.

It was a culture clash of prodigious proportions. On the one hand were the industrial revolutionaries of the West, awash to the gunwales with manufactured goods in need of a market, and avid for tea, lacquerwork, silk, enamel and the many other aspects of chinoiserie then in vogue in Europe. Like the adherents of ‘globalisation’ at the end of the twentieth century, the Europeans believed in ‘free trade’, in the free movement of goods around the world (controlled only by appropriate regulations and tariffs). Traders, provided they paid reasonable tax and customs duties, must be allowed to trade where and when they pleased, unfettered by too much ‘red tape’. Free trade plus Christianity were seen as the shock-troops of civilisation, spreading the blessings of ‘progress’ to benighted natives across the globe.

Set against them was the agrarian-scholar society of Confucius, supremely confident in its own superiority and neither valuing nor needing any ‘blessings’ from the West. Trade was not seen as the lifeblood of the nation, and merchants were ranked towards the lower end of the social scale. The idea of commercial or mercantile law was foreign to the Chinese mind. Trade was looked on with suspicion, its only value lying in the ‘squeeze’ that could be extorted for the government (or for unscrupulous officials) from the mercantile class. China was self-sufficient, uninterested in innovation and, as Emperor Chia Ch’ing had stated, ‘attaches no value to products from abroad’.

But the Emperor was wrong. There was one product to which the Chinese attached great value.

Opium.

Strangely, while we all conceive of opium as a drug of the exotic East, it was first discovered and domesticated during prehistoric times in the Mediterranean Basin. Opium was traded regularly between Cyprus and Egypt in the second millennium BC, and is listed in Greek medical texts between 300 and 400 BC. As the drug does not appear in Chinese pharmacopoeiae until the eighth century AD, some eleven hundred years later, it is believed that Chinese knowledge of opium came from the West, via established trade routes through the Near East to India and thence to the Middle Kingdom.

While the medicinal properties of opium were well understood, it was not until the 1400s that its ‘recreational use’ was first discovered, in either Persia or India. And as use of the drug was addictive, the commercial possibilities were soon recognised. During the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556–1605) vast areas were placed under cultivation in the Ganges valley in Bengal, and in western India at Malwa, close to the city of Bombay. These two regions were still growing the ‘best’ opium when Yehonala entered the Forbidden City and would continue to produce the drug long after she had died.

In China, recreational use of opium was almost unknown, and the drug remained primarily medicinal until the arrival of the first Europeans, the Portuguese. These daring sailors, and the Spanish and Dutch who followed them, were eager to find a commodity other than gold or silver to trade for the Chinese silk they had travelled so far to buy. These products had made China a ‘tomb of European moneys’ since Roman times.
¹
In the sixteenth century, as much as twenty per cent of all silver mined in Spanish America came directly across the Pacific to Manila and thence to China to pay for silks and porcelains. No less than 345,000 kilograms of silver were brought to the Middle Kingdom in 1597 alone, more silver than China herself could produce in fifty years.
²
In desperation, the Spanish and Portuguese carried tobacco half-way around the world from their Brazilian colonies in the hope that the heathen Chinese would become addicted to the dubious pleasures of nicotine. The plan failed, but the pipe that was introduced along with tobacco proved to be the key: when the Chinese tried smoking tobacco in combination with Indian opium they were quite literally hooked, and suddenly they could not get enough of the ‘Western smoke’. The opium habit spread rapidly throughout the Celestial Kingdom, causing the authorities such disquiet that in 1729 the Emperor Yung Chen issued an edict banning the drug and condemning the practice as barbarous.

But neither the Indian merchants (who held a monopoly on the Bengal opium supply), nor the European mercantile fleets (who carried the drug from India to China) would allow the Emperor’s commands to hold them back from such rich pickings. The Dutch soon joined the Portuguese in these tropical waters and, once they had established a permanent presence in Indonesia, at Jakarta, they began feeding opium to Java’s newly addicted populace, realising enormous profits of four hundred per cent on each shipment. They also discovered that native ships would visit Jakarta to buy opium for distribution in China and elsewhere along the coast. Between 1660 and 1685 the Dutch East India Company’s imports of opium rose from 0.6 metric tons to 72.3 metric tons, an astonishing 12,050 per cent increase in just twenty-five years. Sales to China were especially high in later years, prompting the Emperor Yung Chen’s ban on the drug in 1729. In retrospect, the ban may well have been a mistake. It merely made the product harder to obtain and so drove up the price, which in turn made it more profitable for the Indians and Europeans to flout Chinese law and smuggle more opium into the Middle Kingdom. Some scholars believe that it might have been better to legalise the drug and to allow it to be grown within China (as was later done on a massive scale). That strategy would have reduced prices, destroyed the incentive for continued smuggling, and perhaps maintained opium consumption at bearable levels.
³

The British changed the face of the opium trade when ‘John Company’ (the British East India Company) sent troops inland from Calcutta and, in 1764, conquered opium-rich Bengal.

Within nine years they had ousted the native cartel, and set up their own monopoly in the trade, controlling opium farming, merchandising and international trade in the product. But the British East India Company at least limited exports to 4,000 chests (280 tons), which brought in just enough revenue for them to purchase China’s tea crop–and so make a further handsome profit selling ‘cha’ to the caffeine-addicted British.
⁴
This commercial paradise lasted for more than fifty years. But once the Company’s monopoly lapsed, in 1834, there was a further explosion in the trade, up from around four hundred tons to a staggering 2,558 tons in 1840. The profits were enormous. Throughout the 1800s, opium provided between six and fifteen per cent of British India’s tax revenues, and helped finance the establishment of the British ‘Raj’. The British government needed this source of wealth. It stopped at nothing to encourage the sale of opium to China, and well into the nineteenth century Britain can rightly be accused of state-sponsored drug trafficking.

In 1838, when Yehonala was still a babe in arms, the incumbent Emperor Tao Kwang, fearful of the haemorrhage of silver bullion from his nation’s coffers, and the growing inventory of Chinese addicts, launched an anti-opium crusade that for a while seemed capable of halting illicit import. He charged his most honest and forthright commissioner, Lin Zexu, with the task of cleaning up Canton, the most intractable of the opium-importing areas. Lin confiscated over twenty thousand chests of opium, confined the barbarians in their ‘factories’ on the outskirts of the city, and demanded that each provide a signed document swearing that they would never again smuggle opium into China. The British responded to this reasonable request for foreigners to respect Chinese laws by dispatching six warships to the region, bombarding and capturing Canton in May 1839. Negotiations on a peace treaty dragged on between the two sides for years, with the Emperor refusing in 1841 to sign the first treaty that had been drawn up. The British fleet was then moved to threaten Nanking, the ‘southern capital’, at which point the Chinese capitulated.

This First Opium War ended with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, China abjectly agreeing to almost every British demand. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain ‘in perpetuity’, the British were paid a huge indemnity, and five more coastal towns were opened to ‘free trade’. The Chinese were forced to accede to ‘extraterritoriality’ (foreigners accused of crimes in China were to be tried by their own countrymen) and to recognise the concept of ‘most favoured nation’ (where any agreement between China and one of the European Powers immediately applied to all of them). But still the Emperor refused to rescind the opium prohibition. Nor would he agree to meet any foreign representatives or ambassadors in Beijing.

This last European demand was considered by the Chinese as a great affront and of much more moment than the opium question. For the foreigners were adamant that they would not perform the traditional obeisance, the three prostrations and nine
ketau
(kowtows), before the Son of Heaven. This refusal verged on the blasphemous for the Chinese and it had been a point of contention between the Middle Kingdom and other nations for more than a thousand years. As early as AD 713 an Arabian envoy from the Caliph Walid asked to be excused from prostrating himself before the Tang Emperor Hsuan Tsung, stating
⁵
‘In my country we only worship Heaven, we never do a Prince.’ He was instantly handed over for execution ‘for seeking to commit an unpardonable breach of the usages of the country’. While the unfortunate envoy was later pardoned and sent back to his own country, the incident reveals the depth and gravity with which the Chinese viewed the question of the kowtow. Just as a single sun presided over the sky, so a single prince, their Emperor, held sway over all terrestrial creation. To their mind, it was simply right and fitting that emissaries from subordinate kings and princes should kowtow to the Celestial Prince. Such obeisance was a logical and natural extension of a culture where each layer of society kowtowed to those above. They simply could not abandon this principle, which acted as the glue holding the whole of Chinese society together.

For their part, the Western nations were equally adamant. Their
umwelt
was based upon the concept of nation states, sovereign and equal. And, for reasons of economics and of principle, they were determined that their ambassadors, the representatives of the Western heads of state, must meet with the Emperor on equal terms–there must be no talk of kowtowing.

In southern China, far from the Forbidden City and the true centres of power, the Western traders remained unperturbed by this recondite diplomatic brouhaha. Nor were they concerned that opium trading was still illegal. Demand was brisk, and they soon discovered ways of shipping their product to their customers. It was carried from India to the Chinese coast in European ships, and transferred, just below Canton City, in the estuary of the Pearl River, to Chinese smuggling boats nicknamed ‘fast crabs’ and ‘scrambling dragons’, whence, via myriad Chinese trading networks and with the connivance of bribable mandarins, it was carried far into mainland China. Business blossomed after the Treaty of Nanking, with opium shipments climbing to a peak of 4,810 tons in 1858.

Long before then, in 1850, Emperor Tao Kwang had died, and the Hsien Feng Emperor had ascended to the Dragon Throne, setting in motion the long train of events that would lead to Yehonala’s fateful call to the Forbidden City. Yehonala’s ignorance of the foreigners was profound, but like most of the Manchu elite, this did not prevent her from regarding them with contempt. Once she had attained the title of Empress of the Western Palace, and had secured her power base and rid herself of her enemies, she would become one of the most vociferous advocates of abrogating the unequal treaties. Nor was she afraid of the consequences. If the Western barbarians continued with their unreasonable and sacrilegious demands, then in her arrogance and conceited naivety, she believed that the Chinese forces would inevitably sweep the ‘long-noses’ into the sea.

Another of the periodic crises between the Middle Kingdom and the West occurred in 1856 when Chinese sailors boarded the
Arrow
and arrested twelve Chinese members of its crew for piracy, ignoring the fact that the vessel was British-registered and captained by a British national.
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This relatively minor incident was seized upon as a pretext by the British government: despite the fact that the
Arrow
’s registration had lapsed eleven days before the incident occurred. Harry Parkes, the British Consul in Hong Kong, demanded an apology. Yeh Ming-chen, the stubborn and intransigent governor of Canton, refused, and dug his country an even deeper political hole by denying that the British flag had ever been flown on the
Arrow
. For the British this response was a godsend: gunboats were immediately dispatched to avenge the insult to Queen and Country. They ‘opened’ Canton to free trade by bombarding the city into submission and carrying off its governor to India, where he subsequently died.

But the British were not satisfied. Aided by the French (who had a pretext of their own in the murder of a French missionary in Guanxi Province) Palmerston sent James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, to demand reparations and to force revisions to the recent treaty, giving the European powers even greater advantages within the Chinese mainland. The French emissary was the nobleman Baron Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gros, whose slow progress from France caused Lord Elgin much frustration. But finally, in October 1857, a full year after the
Arrow
incident had taken place, the combined fleet of Britain and France were ready to sail north to Tientsin, the coastal port guarding the approaches to Beijing and the Emperor. The red barbarians were coming to demand an audience with the Solitary Prince within his sanctum of the Forbidden City. And they had no intention of kowtowing.