252. Victorian Narcos: Selling Drugs To The Queen (Ep 6)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. And we continue our Victorian Narcos series with, well, the last episode, the opium crisis was in full swing. We were talking about Jardine and Matheson, two men who really have cornered the market on opium sales. And, you know, the whole thing, just give us a quick, in a nutshell, recap of what the state of China is with these two men pumping in the opium into the country. Both these men continue to operate centre stage. I've been reading, in a sense, several episodes ahead, and they continue to be at the center of things in a way that I had forgotten from my reading.

1:10They are these two Scotsmen, one a self-made man, one a down-at-heels aristocrat and clan chief, who come together along with their brilliant Parsi partner. And they almost single-handedly, A, create the crisis, which resolves in the Opium War, but also are the kind of cheerleaders for the war. They are cheering on for conflict with the Chinese. They come out with a whole range of incredibly, to our years, completely racist statements about what the Chinese are, how they're not creating this problem of opium addiction. They're merely servicing a demand and talking about how the British need to get serious with the Chinese.

1:50And the poor Chinese are seeing their whole coastal region fall into anarchy as these drug gangs take over. Jardine and Matheson don't do the distribution for the drugs themselves. They just bring them to some of the islands off Hong Kong. And there they hand over the opium to a whole variety of Chinese brigands and coastal pirates and so on. And these guys become incredibly rich themselves and incredibly disruptive themselves. And they bring about a whole range of different problems. On one hand, they're obviously creating addiction and more and more people that are becoming economically useless as they just sit back on their hips, hence the phrase hipster, and puff opium.

2:32But also, they create, like in Colombia during the Medellin cartel, they create an armed criminal set of gangs that disrupt activity. And in the final analysis, it's the amount of silver leaving the country, this sudden moment when the Chinese court authorities in Beijing realized that they're running out of silver, that silver is just leaving the country. There's nothing to make coins with. There's nothing in reserve. And this is the point at which the young emperor, the Daoguang emperor, realizes that he's got to take this problem seriously. Now, the Daoguang emperor himself had been quite a sort of amateur opium smoker himself in his youth, and he even wrote a nice poem about it.

3:15Yeah, but I mean, but not a serious opium adding. But his problem was, we're talking about a reign that stretches from 1820 to 1850, is that he is a weak, weak man. He allows his court officials to do whatever they want. A lot of that opium that's smuggled in is because, as Jardine and Matheson point out, there's so much corruption in the court. You can make the court work for you. There's basically no wall to stop their operations. And opium traders are operating, I mean, it's sort of covertly off the port of Canton. on, but everybody knows it. A stronger man would have been able to take a stronger hand against them.

3:52But you've got a weak emperor in place who's just unable to make, either to hear the truth of what's going on, because maybe his corrupt officials aren't telling him, or just too weak to do anything and take a stand against him. And I'm not sure which it is, William, whether he's just not hearing the problem or acknowledging the problem or hiding from the problem, or just completely blissfully unaware of the whole problem. Well, as this episode will show, There are still many strengths to the Chinese system. And I think it's important to recognize that the civil service of China, the Mandarin system, which has been since time immemorial connected to a series of super competitive and difficult exams on the Confucian classics since the time of the Tang Dynasty, if not earlier.

4:34These produce often officials of great brilliance. This is definitely a country that has a problem, one that's largely caused by these two Scotsmen. But I think one should also accept that this is the second largest empire in the world after the British at this period. The Chinese court rules over an area the size of Europe. And the officials who rise to the top are often men of extreme high caliber. And we're going to talk about one of those in this episode, Commissioner Lin. Incidentally, we should also say that the competitive examinations for the civil service are the things that give the British the idea to have competitive exams in their service, which is only introduced at this period after contact with China.

5:19And this is one of the points that Amitav Ghosh makes in his wonderful Smoke and Ashes in his final chapter, that while the British are quite capable of being rude about the Chinese, they're not so obtuse as not to learn from them. Oh, that's really interesting. Because initially, I mean, the ones who go out are sort of the sons of friends. Yeah, absolutely. Thick, like milkshake, thick and sweet and not very capable. But then when the competitive exam comes along, you have a whole different cadre of people who are much more active in the Indian civil service. I don't remember the date that competitive exams are introduced into the East India Company and indeed the British Civil Service, but it is the mid-19th century.

5:56It's this period. And I think there is a strong argument to be made that it is on the Chinese model. Tell me about Commissioner Lin, because I'm absolutely fascinated, because he is a man with a straight back and who is not corrupt and who is very much somebody to be admired. So, I mean, tell us about Lin Zeshu, who certainly seems like a man of great capability who rises through the ranks. He certainly is. And he's from a family of declining aristocrats and landholders, very similar, fun enough, to the same class that often feed the East India Company. It's often those people who've fallen on relatively hard times, but have memories of Grandia who send their kids out to India with a view to reestablishing the family fortunes.

6:37So this is very much what Lin Zexu is doing. His family are from Southeast China, a declining landholding clan. And they've actually been progressively bankrupted by preparing generations of sons for this examination system. His father allegedly ruined his eyesight through fruitless examination preparation. And he puts his son into the same harness, trying in a sense to redeem the family name. He did not succeed, but he hopes that his son Lin will do so. And Lin, who becomes a very celebrated figure and is again now a celebrated figure, there's actually a statue to him in Chinatown in New York as this epitome of an uncorruptible official.

7:17He, in his letters or memoirs later in life, recalls studying the Confucian classics through freezing days and endless nights in a broken down three room department with the north wind howling angrily, one lamp on the wall. Young and old were sitting next to each other doing our reading and our needlework till the night was out. And age 12, he passes the first easiest level of the exams. Age 19, he passes the provincial exams. He goes up a stage from the local to the provincial. Seven years later, in 1811, he passes the Metropolitan exam on his third attempt. And finally, the Imperial exams in 1811 at the age of 26.

7:57By this point, he's got the name Lynn Clear as Heaven. He's regarded as incorruptible, as incredibly honest. and he is the equivalent of the topper in the ICS exams. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one who gets the highest mark. So, I mean, the jobs that he's given, first of all, they really test his mettle as an administrator. I mean, they're not glamorous jobs, but they're ones that you need to really be on top of everything in a huge sort of sprawling network of human beings. And it's important. So water management and flood relief. And he gets a reputation for actually putting the welfare of the people first.

8:29You know, we really need to look at what is effective for the greatest number of people. So people begin to know his name, Lin, clear as heaven. And he becomes very quickly one of the emperor's favorite ministers. And what is the rank that you get when you're a favorite of the emperor? Commissioner. Commissioner. So that's it. That's as high as it gets. I'm not sure it's the highest rank. There's provincial governors and so on. But certainly he's done very well to get there by the age of 26. And he is consulted on this issue in 1833. On opium, on the drug issue. On opium, on what to do with this growing criminalization, with this loss of silver, and with this growing problem of people who are just sort of not getting up from their beds all day.

9:12And in 1833, he writes a formal memorial to the emperor, to Da Guang. And he, in the first round, suggests encouraging Chinese farmers to grow poppies and legalize it, so you're not selling the money out. And what's interesting is that although the British at this stage don't have a very good intelligence network or indeed any means of assessing what the court opinion is, this memorial gets to Canton and it gets into the hands of a man called Charles Elliott, who's another key character in this episode and who will become the man who has to grapple with the brilliant Commissioner Lin. And this is the same Charles Elliott, who's the British superintendent of British trade in China.

9:54So I mean, this is right in his backyard, because this is the most important trade that's going on at the moment. Exactly. And this character is given a post that is created at the moment that the East India Company loses its monopoly. Up to this point, the East India Company has had a monopoly of trade with China. And so the only legal representative of the British is the East India Company. But after the East India Company lose that position, the government has to step in and appoint someone to be in charge of this sort of raucous bunch of Scottish brigands who are busy with smuggling rackets and so on.

10:26But at the same time, try to organize an honest trade with tea. This is always the two way trade. They're selling opium and buying tea. And so one half of their trade is covered and one side of their trade is overt. So he's there as the British superintendent of British trade in Canton. and it's a thankless task because he's really there to control these free traders who are richer than him and better paid and who are more influential who don't listen to anyone and what I've heard about Charles Elliott is that he is quite nervy not very strong doesn't like a conflict would rather sort of bumble his way through something rather than tackle it head on is that a fair assessment that is a very fair assessment well I'm interested though Elliott is actually not born in Britain, though.

11:13He's born in Dresden. Why is he born in Dresden? But he does certainly come back and he joins the British Navy aged 14. So, I mean, it's just an interesting aside, probably leads us nowhere. Just looking at him in photographs, because we have photographs now, I mean, he looks distinguished. He looks like a geography teacher than anything else, sort of white-haired, staring off into the distance, a slightly weak chin. He doesn't strike a ferocious image. And he's had these slightly hopeless and thankless tasks all his career. He's previously been a protector of slaves in Guyana. So he's one of the officials whose first job as a young man is to keep an eye on would-be slavers coming off the west coast of Africa.

11:57So twice in his life, he's basically put in charge of stopping British brigands from breaking the rules that have been established. And he quickly becomes very unpopular among the likes of Jardine and Matheson, who don't want to obey this man. They can't see why they have to have some Brit stopping them. And they kind of do swat him away. And there's not much he does about it at first. I mean, there's not much he can do about it. Which is why when he reads Commissioner Lynn's paper saying we should legalise opium, he's thrilled with it. because that's going to solve his problems. If Opium is legal, he doesn't have to fight with Jardine and Matheson, who are two complete Rottweilers or pit bulls.

12:34And no one in their right mind really wants to take off. And Elias is like, no, I don't want to fight. I don't want to argue. Can't we all just get along? And he forwards Commissioner Lynn's paper to Palmerston with a letter that says, these documents are remarkable as a series of papers as has ever emanated from the government of this country in respect to foreign trade. And he wants to believe it, so he does believe it. He presents it to Palmerston that the drug is about to be legalised, that opium is going to suddenly become an uncomplicated commodity like any other. But by the time that he is reading this and has had it translated and has sent it on to Palmerston, it's already outdated.

13:11You're quite right. It is out of date. By the time Eliot is saying to the government, this is great, it's going to be legalised, we're going to be fine, happy days. I can actually be the bureaucrat I was born to be and I can just navigate this trade. I don't have to deal with assholes anymore and they can't shout at me and they can't threaten me. And it is completely wrong because another high-ranking commissioner in the imperial Chinese court, Huang Juzhe, I hope I said it right, has submitted another memorial on OPM. And he has a whole new approach of tackling it. What he says we should do is not legalise it, Commissioner Lin.

13:47That's not the answer. That is not what we do. We need a ruthless campaign of suppression. we need to target Chinese consumers saying actually you know they're the ones who are the problem we need to go after them and if there were no users if we could get rid of them then there would be no foreign interference and no foreign trade going on here He's quite hardcore He is like draconian punishments I mean tell us what he was sort of saying should happen to those people who take drugs He proposes a one year grace period where everyone can wean themselves off their opium Basically get clean or we get mean And after that, not just get mean, anyone who's found smoking opium should be executed.

14:26Okay, that's quite mean. That's fairly mean. You kill the trade by killing the consumers. Right. Okay. Good. It stands to reason. Fab. Okay. And he incorrectly believes that Western countries like Britain already have a death penalty for opium smokers. So he says we should just do what they do. That's why they don't have an opium problem like we do. because they just killed them. Now, this, of course, isn't the case, but it goes down very well at court. And the Daoguang Emperor circulates this memorial. And before long, it becomes the new court policy. The old idea of possibly legalizing, finding a way around this is put on hold.

15:06Particularly, I think what was really upset the emperor is the fact that silver's running out. He's very worried by this. He thinks the whole system's going haywire and he can't make his sums add up in the palace. So he endorses this. And Lin Shih-Zu, seeing the way that the wind is blowing, also endorses this proposal and makes a shift and now sort of joins, if you like, the war on drugs, the Chinese 19th century version of. You sort of say he sees which way the wind is blowing. I mean, what we know about him and being quite a moral man, I mean, I suggest he's probably convinced by it that, you know, my way is probably not right.

15:43My way won't work. And we can have this sorted in a year is probably what he's thinking because the proposal is pretty black and white. But you know what bureaucrats are like when they see their bosses changing their opinions they very quickly change their opinions too and he then comes up with his own detailed plan to support suppression and what he suggests what Lin-Shin Zhu says is you've got to confiscate and destroy opium pipes there should be moral campaigns by officials public education on the evils of opium, the suppression of opium dens and corrupt officials. This sounds just like American prohibition, by the way.

16:18Smashing stills, invading speakeasies, arresting anybody who's peddling booze anywhere. I don't think in prohibition they've suggested executing whiskey drinkers. You have a year to dry out or we'll kill you. No, that's true. They don't go as far as that. But there is the whiff of that kind of prohibition. We'll smash everything up so this thing doesn't exist anymore. It's not a problem anymore. Commissioner Lin comes up with some very sort of liberal ideas. He wants to establish hospitals to treat users and this sort of thing. He's a subtle man, and we see this throughout his career. And he goes to work where he's initially posted, which is in Hunan.

16:57And he sends all these reports to the emperor detailing the collection of thousands of pipes and thousands of ounces of opium. And he's very pleased with how it's going. And by 1838, which is when the crisis begins to set in, he is now the favored son of the Chinese civil service. So when the order comes that they've got to crack down at the source, which is obviously Canton, and when there's a large opium seizure that highlights that all the opium is actually coming from Canton and there's one portal that if they can control, they can stop opium entering the country. This is the moment that Commissioner Lin is appointed as Imperial Commissioner, granting him extraordinary powers to act on the Emperor's direct behalf, answerable to no one locally.

17:50He's acting directly on the Emperor's orders. He's given command even of the naval forces near Canton. All the local officials have to support him. And so in January 1839, even as our friend Charles Eliot is optimistically writing letters to Lord Barmston saying… They're going to legalise it. It's all going to be fine. It's all going to be fine. Commissioner Lynn is on his way south with sort of extraordinary powers to smash everything up. Just reflecting on what you said before, you know, he saw which way the wind is blowing. I mean, you may be right, because there is a very public display from the emperor of punishing any of those who do still push for legalization, because it doesn't go away.

18:32You know, Lynn writes the initial memorial on this saying, I think we should legalize it, we'll make more money. He then abandons it. But there are others still in the court who say, actually, can we just talk, instead of putting people to death in a year, could we maybe just talk about taxes? Can we just have a chat about it? And the emperor does. I mean, you know, for a weak emperor, he takes very decisive action and he just weeds them all out of court. So Lin has jumped to the right side just in time, really, because this sort of, you know, his war on drugs happens about the same time. So he's rising and rising.

19:04When does it dawn on Charles Eliot that he may have got this wrong? Well, Charles didn't have any idea what's about to hit him. And instead, Lin Shenzhou is making a sort of imperial progress with all his assistants and his new grand office. And he leaves Beijing in early January 1839. And he visits all the officials that he's sort of jumped over in his rapid promotion on the way. And he's a modest enough man to go to each of them on the way and ask for advice. and in particular his old boss is a guy called Bao Shichan and Bao advises him to clear a muddy stream you must purify the source to put a law into effect you must first create order within and Lin interprets this as meaning that he should first arrest the corrupt officials and then completely cut off the foreign opium imports so that's what's in his mind when finally in March 1839.

20:01And this is now when the metaphorical materials begin to hit the fan. I was kind of thinking the same thing. Yes, I was like, this is the moment. You just heard it. Yes, this is it. Okay. And so 10th of March, he arrives in Canton and rather like sort of Trump getting into office and creating complete mayhem from day one. This is what happens in Canton. The day he arrives, he initiates a mass arrest of all known Chinese opium dealers. Because I think everyone's known who's been dealing with it. Yeah, it's not a secret. You know where to buy from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're getting rich. I mean, basically round up the people with the biggest houses over the last five years.

20:43And we're wearing very expensive silks. Round them up as well. Yeah. So he's going after the dealers. He's going after the corrupt officials. And then he begins to go after the materials. So he confiscates thousands of pounds of raw opium and tens of thousands of pipes. He just takes them and breaks them up. And he arrests five more people for opium crimes than the previous governor had done in the last two years. He does it a week. Wow. Two years. It's a real round them up situation. Can I point out one thing? He also issues these proclamations which blame Canton as an entity, saying, you have poisoned the nation, Canton.

21:26We find you guilty, Canton, of making the whole Chinese nation addicted to apiom. So Canton is in the dock, which is, I mean, quite comical. It is such an extreme thing that, you know, the man who gave him the clear and muddy stream speech actually says, hang on, I didn't mean that. What are you doing? That's not what I meant. As he's rounding up relatives and everybody else, you know, this is not what I said. But Lin is undeterred. And he has realised by December what is blindingly obvious, but I don't think the penny had completely dropped, that it's obviously the British that are behind all these problems.

22:05He'd always been focused on the sort of Chinese end of things. He's very much a local Chinese official and he's dealing with the Chinese people. I've got a theory about this. Do you want a theory? I mean, it seems blindingly obvious that you want to stop the source. If you want to stop the source, you're not growing the stuff. Okay, so where is it coming from would be the obvious question. But this man is a domestic bureaucrat. So, you know, when I sort of mentioned that he sort of rises to power dealing with water and flood relief and stuff, what he knows is domestic. What he knows is domestic policies and the valves to press.

22:33So when you're kind of almost blinkered that way, you can't look at foreign policy. You're not a foreign policy Mandarin, if you like. But on December the 3rd, a small shipment of opium is captured right outside the British factory compound. I remember from the last episode that you have this very small area of Canton Riverfront, which is where the foreigners have been penned into for 200 years. A factory. Yeah, they're called the factories, not because things are made there, but because it's full of factors, which are the East India Company officials. and one by one they're lined up on the riverbank with the national flags the french the americans but the biggest one is the british and on december the 3rd they make this enormous capture of a shipment of opium and in response they decide they're going to make a demonstration in front of the british factory so on december the 12th a small body of soldiers appear in the plaza area in front of the factory, not on the riverside, but on the backside of the factory compacts.

23:39And they rather ominously erect a wooden cross in preparation for an execution. Crucifixion? I mean, why a cross? I think he's going to be certainly tied up on the cross, but he's going to be strangled rather than crucified. Oh, okay, right. And the guy in question is the proprietor of a local opium den who's very well known, he's Chinese. And he's not anything to do with the foreigners, but Lin wants the foreigners to know that they're in the crosshairs now. And so this cross is erected and a scuffle takes place because apparently it's some sailors take offense at the idea of a sort of crucifixion.

24:21And they try and tear the scaffold down. And a large crowd gathers and watches these sailors dismantle the gallows. And then the more rowdy sailors begin to shove the crowd and they hit the people with sticks. And that's the point at which the crowd says, hang on, we're not standing for this. So the crowd pushes back, someone throws a rock and it becomes a riot. And so things are not looking good. And the British and the Americans who have got involved in this, what had been a scuffle and is now a full scale riot, have to run back into their factory compounds and lock the gates. And by this stage, several thousand people are pelting foreigners with a hail of rocks and bricks from outside.

25:03They are hitting the windows and the Venetian blinds of the factory. It's a real mess. Anyways, soldiers arrive. So we're talking about Chinese soldiers who come to maintain order, right? Yes, there are no British soldiers at this moment anywhere near here. Can you just clarify that? Is that because in the factories you're not allowed British soldiers? Or, I mean, there's no armed presence to look after the British interest in the factory? I presume there must have been some sorts of guards, but they're probably in the pay of the government. And one of the things that's very interesting is that the British do not own their own factory.

25:33It's not exactly like an embassy compound where, you know, you have your own soldiers and your own laws. So by the time that Charles Elliott turns up, because he has got ships and he's got his armed sailors and marines, he turns up that evening, having heard this, having come, I think he's been in Macau. And so that evening, he turns up with 120 armed sailors. And all is actually peaceful. Everything is calmed down by the stage. It's evening time. Everyone's gone home and having their dinner. But he realizes that this is a crisis point. And he's quite shaken by the scale of the riot. And apparently one of the British sailors or one of the British traders inside the compound had fired a pistol.

26:17And he missed his target. But Eliot writes a letter that night saying that if it hadn't missed, he was worried that there would have been a scene rather like the Iranians breaking into the British embassy in Tehran in 1979, where they would have been overrun. And so Eliot realizes this is now a very serious escalation that had a gun as fired. Luckily, no one's actually been killed. But unless he takes firm action against smuggling, he now needs to intervene. So controversially, and this is the beginning of what will be a charge sheet that is put up against him, in the days after the riots, he issues a proclamation ordering all British vessels carrying opium to depart the inner waters of Canton immediately.