Bejeweled jade pipes, silver lamps for heating, red sandalwood couches and claims of mind-opening pleasure compete with an image of addiction and lassitude, and the engine for foreign domination. People are never likely to agree on the status of opium, except for the fact that it’s the most effective natural pain-killer known to mankind.
This double-sidedness is at the heart of Julia Lovell’s The Opium War, though not as applied to opium itself. She concentrates on the first of the two Opium Wars fought by the British against elements of the Chinese Empire — “elements” because she comments that at one stage the emperor wasn’t really convinced that something as momentous as a war was actually taking place.
Nevertheless, what the author — a professor of Chinese at London University who conducted research in both Cambridge and Beijing — sets out to do is to present the first Opium War (1839-1842) in all its complexity and detail. The significance of this is that in modern times the event has been homed in on as the marker par excellence of the beginning of China’s decline, a victim to Western imperialism and forceful arm-twisting.
It wasn’t only the opium that afflicted the Chinese, so the argument goes, but also the way the open ports (those where trade with China was allowed) and extra-territoriality (foreigners being subject to their own laws, not China’s, in these ports) leached China’s self-confidence and autonomy. This was only made worse by huge indemnities, to be paid in silver, demanded by an increasing number of European powers throughout the 19th century for even the smallest border incident involving alleged harm to a foreigner.
China, in other words, was becoming viewed as a gigantic rotting corpse whose immense wealth could be plundered with scarcely any risk to the plunderers.
There don’t seem to be any two ways to look at the grotesque indemnities, but opium, and the two Opium Wars, are perhaps a different matter. Opium, as Frank Dikotter demonstrated in his eye-opening Narcotic Culture (reviewed in the Taipei Times on Dec. 12, 2004), had a long history in China as a free-time relaxant and social lubricant, and with all social classes. By growing the opium poppy in India and then selling its oozing white paste in China, the British were certainly attempting to balance their trading books, in serious deficit from the enormous thirst for Chinese tea in the UK. But Chinese merchants were as eager to participate in the trade as a vast proportion of the adult population — possibly 70 percent — was to use its end-product.
Furthermore, the first Opium War can’t be described simply in terms of voracious foreigners marauding against a patriotic but relatively helpless populace. Many of the local Cantonese were quick to earn a fee by acting as guides to the stumbling British, while officials sent south from Beijing often had little idea of what was going on, and systematically lied to the emperor about the progress of hostilities. Furthermore, Hong Kong, established as a British colony in the terms of the peace treaty, was soon to prove an immensely desirable money-making location that many Chinese would risk their lives to get to.
Even so, the damage and death dealt out by the British was terrible indeed, especially by their iron steam-driven warship Nemesis, against which the wooden Chinese junks were largely helpless. The sack of Canton and the bombardment of the smaller but strategically significant town of Zhoushan are vividly described.
Meanwhile, back in London, the Cabinet wasn’t concerned by the morality of such warfare, Lovell reports, but rather by the twin questions “Can it be done?” and “How much will it cost?” (As regards foreign military adventures, little seems to have changed.) And on the South China coast, two self-made Scottish entrepreneurs, Jardine and Matheson, were growing very rich indeed from the opium trade. Jardine ended up buying the large Hebridean island of Lewis — for half a million pounds — while Matheson was satirized by the young Disraeli in his novel Sybil as “Mr Druggy,” a member of the UK parliament denouncing corruption while his pockets bulged with opium.
The gist of Lovell’s book is that the propaganda image of a humiliated Chinese population, led by an enfeebled imperial house, succumbing to opium imported by the wicked foreigner is too simple. She ends her account, which is largely taken up with the first Opium War and mostly omits the second (1856-1860), with a personal survey of modern China’s attitudes to these events. They have become iconic, she writes, and became even more central to the official national ideology after the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, when past humiliation compared to modern resurgence became central to all school history lessons.
But propaganda feeds on simple images, whereas reality is almost always more complex.
What Lovell also demonstrates is that in the 1930s both the Nationalists and the Communists, while condemning opium consumption (with the Nationalists executing repeat offenders), were happy to fund their war efforts from taxes on the still-flourishing opium trade.
How does this play out? By and large, I’m convinced of the ambiguous picture of opium consumption in China, but remain horrified by the British resort to arms, let alone the widespread victimization of China by the European powers that followed it. Lovell’s book, then, is an absorbing account of the first war (she claims no account in comparable detail exists) while remaining largely anecdotal on China and Chinese attitudes today. It’s a reasonably good read, though the contradiction between its two parts and their different narrative modes, bound together between the same covers, sometimes proves hard to swallow.
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