The Chinese government expressed its alarm at the opium invasion with a decree in 1799 that condemned the trade more forcefully than previous bans had. An Imperial edict proclaimed, "Foreigners obviously derive the most solid profits and advantages, but that our countrymen should pursue this destructive and ensnaring vice is indeed odious and deplorable." It was also inexorable. The East India Company paid lip service to the ban by forbidding British ships to carry opium. That didn't prevent the Company from selling opium in India to independent British and Indian merchants, who would then smuggle the drug into China. The profits were too enormous for the Company to ignore. It sold opium at auction in India for four times the amount it cost to grow and process. In 1773, opium earned the Company Twenty years later, the annual revenue from opium sold in China alone had ballooned to E250,000. The popular drug was incrementally beginning to reverse the imbalance of trade between Britain and China. Between 1806 and 1809, China paid out
seven million Spanish dollars for opium.
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, opium addiction in China grew slowly. The East India Company kept the price artificially high, which meant that only the upper classes could afford it. It wasn't just profit motive that made opium expensive and beyond the budget of most Chinese. The drug was officially illegal, and the East India Company didn't want to antagonize the Chinese government by either bankrupting the Imperial treasury or rubbing the government's nose in the illicit trade by
Imperial treasury or rubbing the government's nose in the illicit trade by increasing imports and thus lowering prices. The five thousand chests of opium sold per annum during this period neatly balanced trade between the two nations without bankrupting the Chinese treasury. Then, a technological innovation in Britain upset this equilibrium. The invention of the steam engine in the previous century had resulted in the mechanized production of cotton by factories in the north of England. Soon, the market was flooded with mass-produced textiles. The surplus found a ready market in India, whose merchants paid for the product in cash. But to pay for the ever-increasing amount of cotton, the Indians needed to cultivate and sell more opium. As a result, opium flooded into China, but its distribution remained bottlenecked at Canton. Britain wanted more ports opened to its merchant fleet and, to that end, sent another aristocrat in 1816 to negotiate with the Jiaqing Emperor. This legation would be even more disastrous than Lord Macartney's. Marx apocryphally said that history repeats itself—first as tragedy, the second time as farce. Lord Macartney's embassy to China wasn't tragic, it was merely unsuccessful. However, the next visit by a representative of Britain, Lord Amherst, did have its farcical elements. William Pitt Amherst, Earl Amherst of Arracan, was born in 1773 at Bath, the son of General William Amherst and Elizabeth Patterson. His uncle on his father's side was Field Marshall Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who was created the first Lord Amherst in 1788 after a distinguished military career that included being named Governor-General of British North America after his successful capture of Ticonderoga and eventually Montreal from the French in 1860. William's mother died several years after giving birth to his sister, and their widowed father raised the two children by himself at St. John's on the Isle of Wight. In 1781, however, the General died and William and his sister went to live with their aunt and uncle at Lord Amherst's estate,
with superiors. In 1816, Britain was the world's greatest superpower, its position much like that of the United States's World War II. The nation had just defeated Napoleon, and its navy was all-powerful. Although other advisors urged Amherst to bow before the Emperor, Amherst accepted Sir George's advice. The stakes were high, after all—nothing less than equality between the two nations would be acceptable to the British. The mandarin courtiers thought up a face-saving gesture that they hoped would satisfy both sides. They volunteered to clear the throne room and have Amherst kowtow to the Emperor's empty chair! Amherst agreed to bow and even genuflect, but he refused to put his face on the floor—and certainly not nine times. The Chinese officials were deter- mined to get around the symbolically crucial bit of protocol. In a comic- opera scene, they woke the ambassador in the middle of the night and escorted him to a private room where the Emperor's throne had been relocated for a quick, surreptitious kowtow. They hoped that Amherst, half- asleep, would be too tired or disoriented to resist. As the ambassador went down on one knee, a courtier shoved him in an attempt to make him put his head on the floor. But Staunton grabbed Amherst by the elbow and In 1833, a reform-minded British Parliament abolished the East India Company's monopoly in China. With China open to all comers, within a year the amount of tea imported into Britain quadrupled. The trade in opium to pay for all this tea also dramatically increased. In 1830, eighteen thousand chests of opium were imported from India. Three years later, the number of chests had soared to thirty thousand. The devastation wrought by opium in Chinese society can hardly be overstated. While the British didn't introduce the Chinese to opium, they Copy r Disastrous Etiquette 25 were more efficient at supplying the drug than previous importers. Innovations in China's use of the drug also fueled the demand, which British merchants were only too willing to supply. Typically, opium had been had been swallowed. Then, in the eighteenth century, China's wealthy youth found a more potent way to ingest the drug. The parallels to cocaine use in this century are eerie. Inhaled, cocaine addicts its users, but not as powerfully and quickly as smoking its rock incarnation does. Similarly, the Chinese found that smoking opium, especially when mixed with another addictive drug, nicotine from tobacco, increased the intensity and prolonged the "high" This expensive pastime of the idle jeunesse dorée gradually made its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Shopkeepers, servants, soldiers, and even Taoist priests were loading opium pipes and drifting off into weeklong escapes from productivity, responsibility, and consciousness. China's powerful elite were not blind to the mess that the foreign import had caused. One courtier estimated that four million Chinese were habituated. A British doctor in Canton suspected that the figure was three times that. The economy, government services, and standard of living all declined because of substance abuse.
In 1839, Lin decided to approach the British government directly to halt the pernicious traffic in opium. In a letter to Queen Victoria, Lin began with an appeal to a universal sense of right and wrong: "The Way of Heaven [Tao] is fairness to all. It does not suffer us to harm others in order to benefit ourselves. Men are alike in this all the world over: that they cherish life and hate what endangers life. Your country lies twenty thousand leagues away; but for all that the Way of Heaven holds good for you as for us, and your instincts are not different from ours." Lin's dis- consolate message to the Queen has the ring of today's zero-tolerance advocates and the same hopelessness of U.S. efforts to end the drug trade.
seven million Spanish dollars for opium.
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, opium addiction in China grew slowly. The East India Company kept the price artificially high, which meant that only the upper classes could afford it. It wasn't just profit motive that made opium expensive and beyond the budget of most Chinese. The drug was officially illegal, and the East India Company didn't want to antagonize the Chinese government by either bankrupting the Imperial treasury or rubbing the government's nose in the illicit trade by
Imperial treasury or rubbing the government's nose in the illicit trade by increasing imports and thus lowering prices. The five thousand chests of opium sold per annum during this period neatly balanced trade between the two nations without bankrupting the Chinese treasury. Then, a technological innovation in Britain upset this equilibrium. The invention of the steam engine in the previous century had resulted in the mechanized production of cotton by factories in the north of England. Soon, the market was flooded with mass-produced textiles. The surplus found a ready market in India, whose merchants paid for the product in cash. But to pay for the ever-increasing amount of cotton, the Indians needed to cultivate and sell more opium. As a result, opium flooded into China, but its distribution remained bottlenecked at Canton. Britain wanted more ports opened to its merchant fleet and, to that end, sent another aristocrat in 1816 to negotiate with the Jiaqing Emperor. This legation would be even more disastrous than Lord Macartney's. Marx apocryphally said that history repeats itself—first as tragedy, the second time as farce. Lord Macartney's embassy to China wasn't tragic, it was merely unsuccessful. However, the next visit by a representative of Britain, Lord Amherst, did have its farcical elements. William Pitt Amherst, Earl Amherst of Arracan, was born in 1773 at Bath, the son of General William Amherst and Elizabeth Patterson. His uncle on his father's side was Field Marshall Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who was created the first Lord Amherst in 1788 after a distinguished military career that included being named Governor-General of British North America after his successful capture of Ticonderoga and eventually Montreal from the French in 1860. William's mother died several years after giving birth to his sister, and their widowed father raised the two children by himself at St. John's on the Isle of Wight. In 1781, however, the General died and William and his sister went to live with their aunt and uncle at Lord Amherst's estate,
with superiors. In 1816, Britain was the world's greatest superpower, its position much like that of the United States's World War II. The nation had just defeated Napoleon, and its navy was all-powerful. Although other advisors urged Amherst to bow before the Emperor, Amherst accepted Sir George's advice. The stakes were high, after all—nothing less than equality between the two nations would be acceptable to the British. The mandarin courtiers thought up a face-saving gesture that they hoped would satisfy both sides. They volunteered to clear the throne room and have Amherst kowtow to the Emperor's empty chair! Amherst agreed to bow and even genuflect, but he refused to put his face on the floor—and certainly not nine times. The Chinese officials were deter- mined to get around the symbolically crucial bit of protocol. In a comic- opera scene, they woke the ambassador in the middle of the night and escorted him to a private room where the Emperor's throne had been relocated for a quick, surreptitious kowtow. They hoped that Amherst, half- asleep, would be too tired or disoriented to resist. As the ambassador went down on one knee, a courtier shoved him in an attempt to make him put his head on the floor. But Staunton grabbed Amherst by the elbow and In 1833, a reform-minded British Parliament abolished the East India Company's monopoly in China. With China open to all comers, within a year the amount of tea imported into Britain quadrupled. The trade in opium to pay for all this tea also dramatically increased. In 1830, eighteen thousand chests of opium were imported from India. Three years later, the number of chests had soared to thirty thousand. The devastation wrought by opium in Chinese society can hardly be overstated. While the British didn't introduce the Chinese to opium, they Copy r Disastrous Etiquette 25 were more efficient at supplying the drug than previous importers. Innovations in China's use of the drug also fueled the demand, which British merchants were only too willing to supply. Typically, opium had been had been swallowed. Then, in the eighteenth century, China's wealthy youth found a more potent way to ingest the drug. The parallels to cocaine use in this century are eerie. Inhaled, cocaine addicts its users, but not as powerfully and quickly as smoking its rock incarnation does. Similarly, the Chinese found that smoking opium, especially when mixed with another addictive drug, nicotine from tobacco, increased the intensity and prolonged the "high" This expensive pastime of the idle jeunesse dorée gradually made its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Shopkeepers, servants, soldiers, and even Taoist priests were loading opium pipes and drifting off into weeklong escapes from productivity, responsibility, and consciousness. China's powerful elite were not blind to the mess that the foreign import had caused. One courtier estimated that four million Chinese were habituated. A British doctor in Canton suspected that the figure was three times that. The economy, government services, and standard of living all declined because of substance abuse.
In 1839, Lin decided to approach the British government directly to halt the pernicious traffic in opium. In a letter to Queen Victoria, Lin began with an appeal to a universal sense of right and wrong: "The Way of Heaven [Tao] is fairness to all. It does not suffer us to harm others in order to benefit ourselves. Men are alike in this all the world over: that they cherish life and hate what endangers life. Your country lies twenty thousand leagues away; but for all that the Way of Heaven holds good for you as for us, and your instincts are not different from ours." Lin's dis- consolate message to the Queen has the ring of today's zero-tolerance advocates and the same hopelessness of U.S. efforts to end the drug trade.
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