Throughout a century and a half of dealings at Canton, European traders enjoyed the same degree of liberty: they were all free to pay whatever prices or imposts the Chinese Hong merchants and customs officials chose to demand. The Chinese wanted neither foreign goods nor foreign traders, but if the latter persisted in buying and selling at Canton, they were expected to submit to strict Chinese regulations or get out.
There were rules forbidding any foreigner to live in Canton except during the six-month trading season, rules denying foreign women the right to enter the city, rules against possessing firearms and an absolute ban against bringing foreign warships past the Boca Tigris (Tiger’s Mouth), the fortified strait on the Canton River estuary leading to the city.
In practice, the rules were a kind of game; few were consistently enforced unless the Western traders raised a howl over Chinese customs duties or bumptiously insisted on dealing directly with the officials of the Celestial Empire instead of its merchants. Then the reins were yanked up tight, and the commercial interlopers had to obey every restriction to the letter.
Foreigners at Canton remained in a weak bargaining position until a few European traders, particularly the English, discovered one product that the Chinese passionately desired. It was compact, easy to ship, extremely valuable, and it brought full payment in hard cash upon delivery. It could be brought from British India in prodigious quantities, and because it contained great value in a small package, it could slip through Chinese customs without the disagreeable formality of paying import duties. This was opium—the most convincing Western proof of the validity of the profit motive since the opening of the China trade.
The Chinese appetite for opium became almost insatiable, spreading upward to the Emperor’s official family and draining away most of the foreign exchange gained by exporting tea and silk. The alarmed Emperor issued a denunciation of this “vile dirt of foreign countries” in 1796, and followed it with a long series of edicts and laws intended to stop the opium traffic.
The East India Co., worried by repeated threats of imperial punishment, relinquished its control of the opium trade and dropped the drug from its official list of imports. Private traders with less to lose immediately took up the slack, and after opium was barred from Canton, simply discharged their cargoes of dope into a fleet of hulks anchored off the entrance of the Canton River estuary. From the hulks it was transshipped to the mainland by hundreds of Chinese junks and sampans. Chinese port officials, well-greased with graft, never raised a squeak of protest.
The Emperor himself seethed with rage, vainly condemning the sale of opium as morally indefensible and ruinous to the health and property of his people. Meanwhile, the trade rose from $6,122,100 in 1821 to $15,338,160 in 1832. The British government took a strong official line against the traffic and denied its protection to British traders caught smuggling, but left the enforcement of anti-opium laws in Chinese hands. A joint Sino-British enforcement campaign was out of the question, since the Chinese had not granted diplomatic recognition to the British Empire.
This insuperable obstacle to combined action was the natural child of Chinese xenophobia. When Lord Napier broached the subject of establishing diplomatic relations between Britain and China in 1834, the Emperor’s representatives stilled his overtures with the contemptuous question, “How can the officers of the Celestial Empire hold official correspondence with barbarians?”
The glories of a mercantile civilization made no impression on a people who regarded themselves as the sole heirs of the oldest surviving culture on earth. To the lords of the Manchu empire, English traders were crude, money-grubbing upstarts who had neither the knowledge nor the capacity to appreciate the traditions and philosophy of China. What could these cubs of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution contribute to a civilization of such time-tested wisdom? They could contribute to its collapse, as the Chinese were to learn when their medieval war-machine collided with the striking power and nineteenth-century technology of the British Navy.
After the East India Co. lost its monopoly on the China trade in 1833, the British government sent its own representatives to settle a fast-growing dispute between English and Chinese merchants. Once again the Chinese snubbed these envoys and emphasized their unwillingness to compromise by appointing a new Imperial Commissioner to suppress the opium trade.