The Opium War, 1840-1842

Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by which They Forced Her Gates Ajar

Peter Ward Fay

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807861363
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Chinese History

This book tells the fascinating story of the war between England and China that delivered Hong Kong to the English, forced the imperial Chinese government to add four ports to Canton as places in which foreigners could live and trade, and rendered irreversible the process that for almost a century thereafter distinguished western relations with this quarter of the globe-- the process that is loosely termed the "opening of China."
Originally published by UNC Press in 1975, Peter Ward Fay's study was the first to treat extensively the opium trade from the point of production in India to the point of consumption in China and the first to give both Protestant and Catholic missionaries their due; it remains the most comprehensive account of the first Opium War through western eyes. In a new preface, Fay reflects on the relationship between the events described in the book and Hong Kong's more recent history.

Part One
The Old China Trade

1 Papaver Somniferum

On the banks of the Ganges some distance east of Benares, in the most wretched and neglected part of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, lies the little town of Ghazipur. It is not much of a place. In April and May, when the thermometer stands at well over a hundred in the shade and terrible dry storms drive the dust so high into the air you may look the sun full in the face without flinching, it is hard to imagine anyone doing anything at Ghazipur save wait for the rains of the summer monsoon to sweep up from the Bay of Bengal. But in fact there is activity here even at this time of the year. For Ghazipur is one of the few places in the world where opium is still openly and legitimately prepared for market. And it is during these particularly trying months that the raw drug comes in from the villages.

It is brought directly to the Government of India Opium and Alkaloid Works, a collection of brick buildings scattered about ten or twenty acres on the north bank of the river. A high brick wall broken by watchtowers surrounds the area. There are guards on the towers; if you are rash enough to approach along the river bank (the channel long ago shifted leaving a quarter of a mile of blinding white sand between the bank and the water), an officer will appear and lead you firmly around to the main gate. There you will be asked your business and perhaps relieved of your camera, for the Government of India does not welcome tourists to its Ghazipur factory. Though Benares is only a few dozen miles away, the literature about that famous city does not mention the place. It may be that New Delhi is not anxious to have its opium activities made much of, entirely respectable and aboveboard though they are. It may be, too, that it does not care to have its factory cased. A dacoity there would fetch a king’s ransom in opium.

Opium is obtained by collecting the latex that exudes from the partially ripe seed capsule of papaver somniferum, the opium poppy. If you slit a capsule just after the petals have fallen but before it is fully ripe, a thick milky-white juice will ooze from the cut and harden upon the surface into a dark brown gum. This gum is raw opium. It is secreted by the skin of the capsule; it does not come from the seeds themselves, which may be used quite safely for other things. There are fields of the poppy right in Ghazipur District. But most of the opium received at Ghazipur, the only major opium factory left in India, comes from distant parts of Uttar Pradesh and from the neighboring states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The year’s crop begins to arrive about the middle of April. After inspection and weighing it is poured into large rectangular stone vats standing side by side in a warehouse. The smell is the smell of new-mown hay, but the look is the look of tar. Later, in the dry weather before the rains come and in the dry weather after, the drug is taken out of the vats a little at a time and carried to an open space near the high brick wall. There it is spread in shallow wooden trays set upon concrete platforms. Mechanical stirrers on rails move noiselessly across the trays, stirring the gummy stuff to expose it fully to the air. Monkeys wander here and there; and though they do not touch the opium, they perhaps drink from the ditch just outside the wall, for they seem always a little bit dopey.

At any given moment there will be hundreds of gallons of opium drying thus—opium is soluble in water, absorbs moisture readily, and must be hardened before it can be packed—and it is hard to imagine that all of it oozed a drop at a time from multiple incisions on the surface of seed capsules no bigger than crab apples. These incisions, explains a certain John Scott in a Manual of Opium Husbandry published at Calcutta in 1877, are made by a knife called nashtar or nurnee. “It consists of four concave-faced, sharp-pointed blades tied together with cotton at about the one-thirtieth of an inch apart, the parallel lines of incisions rarely exceeding one-eighth of an inch.” (Except that the blades used nowadays span as much as three-eighths of an inch, a century seems to have made little difference in the knife.) “When the plants have been in bloom for some time,” explains another manual, this one published at Benares in 1861,¹ “the green capsules become slightly coated over with a fine transparent white colored surface and the pods become less yielding to the touch.” It is then time to cut, and on an afternoon in February the work begins. “The lancers,” continues Scott, “move backwards through the fields and expertly catch with their left hand the sufficiently mature capsule, draw their lancets perpendicularly over it, slip it, catch another, and so on.” To cut properly requires patience and some skill; for if the incision is too shallow no juice exudes, and if it pierces the capsule the juice flows inward and is lost among the seeds. Twenty lancers should be able to cover one acre in an afternoon. Next morning they return to collect the opium that has exuded during the night. Moving this time forwards so as not to brush against the drugbearing capsules, they grasp a capsule in one hand, scrape its incised surface with an iron scoop held in the other, and from time to time empty the scoop into earthenware pots. Two days later the capsules are incised again at a different place. The process is repeated at intervals—perhaps as little as four times, perhaps as often as eight—until nothing more seeps out.

To produce an appreciable quantity of opium requires, therefore, the repeated incision of a great number of capsules: at half a gram a capsule (the figure suggested by the chief chemist at the Ghazipur factory), about eighteen thousand capsules to yield the twenty pounds that appears to be the minimum return per acre throughout India—today as well as a hundred years ago. Of course an acre of papaver somniferum produces other things as well: about two hundred pounds of poppy seeds, which in India are used in curries or pressed for oil; and several dozen pounds of the petals once thought essential to the preparation of the drug for export. But opium itself is obtained only by the application of a great deal of labor. With the consequence that though the opium poppy will grow wherever the corn poppy does, it is not likely to be cultivated in areas of high labor cost—not as long as it can be cultivated in areas where cost is low. In 1830 an Edinburgh man succeeded in getting fifty-six pounds of raw opium from one acre of the plants. The experiment was apparently never repeated. Cheap as agricultural labor was in Great Britain, it was not as cheap there as on the Ganges plain.

From the drying yard hardened opium is taken to an adjoining shed. There it is pressed into blocks, wrapped in polyethylene, and put into mango-wood chests the size of small footlockers. That is the end of the process in this part of the factory; nothing more is done to the drug before it is shipped. Exactly how much is turned out it is not easy to discover. In 1954 the Ghazipur factory produced not quite four hundred and eighty tons of opium, drawing for the purpose on 50,000 acres of the poppy. Of this quantity 290 tons—at 170 pounds of opium to the chest, about 3,400 chests—left Ghazipur for points overseas, enough to satisfy between a quarter and a third of the world’s annual legitimate medical requirements. The figures for the years since cannot have been much greater and may have been less.

More or less, however, 3,400 chests is a very small figure next to what used to leave India in the late nineteenth century. Then the Ghazipur works drew on over 400,000 acres of the poppy. Then another factory down the river at Patna, since closed, received the juice from almost half a million. From these two places, and from the Malwa area of west central India, not three or four thousand chests but twenty times that number went overseas each year, not a few hundred tons but approximately six thousand! In the shipping season, which for the Ganges plain meant late autumn when the rains were over and the heat had gone, enough chests were made ready at Ghazipur alone to fill a special train to Calcutta every fourth day. Even in the 1830s half a century earlier, though Ghazipur lagged well behind Patna in production of the drug, it turned out more chests than it does today. It was opium that made it the “very handsome place” a contemporary gazetteer calls it. Opium, not the tomb of Cornwallis or the government stud farm, built it up to a civil station of sufficient size to justify the brick and granite church that stands to all appearances empty and abandoned now. In 1838 over seven thousand chests of Benares were sold at the Calcutta auctions—twice as many as left Ghazipur for that city in 1954.

Then as now a part of each year’s production was consumed right in India. Known as akbari or excise opium, it was prepared much as it is prepared today. “The opium intended for akbaree purposes,” an English opium examiner named Eatwell wrote in 1850,² “is brought to a consistence of 90 percent by direct exposure to the sun, in which state it is as firm and as easily moulded as wax. It is then formed by means of a mould into square bricks of one seer weight each, and these are wrapped in oiled Nepaul paper and packed in boxes.” If you ignore the division into twopound bricks and read polyethylene for “Nepaul paper,” nothing at first sight has changed.

Yet there is a difference. A large part of today’s akbari is converted right at the Ghazipur factory into the opium alkaloids morphine and codeine. In Eatwell’s day none of it was. Morphine had been isolated about the time of Waterloo. Codeine, and the synthetic alkaloid heroin with which we are so painfully familiar, appeared later in the century. But until the development of the hypodermic needle, these alkaloids were not much used. Instead physicians prescribed opium in water—or more usually, opium in alcohol. It was tincture of opium that the druggist handed De Quincey when the latter tried to get relief from the neuralgic pains of the head and face that were torturing him. Coleridge began taking laudanum (camphorated tincture of opium) about the same time and for much the same reason. At that moment in Middlemarch when his tormentor Raffles lies dying, it is an “almost empty opium phial” that Bulstrode puts out of sight lest Lydgate discover that his patient has been given an overdose. Opium, not its alkaloids, was the essential ingredient in the innumerable remedies dispensed in Europe and America for the treatment of diarrhea, dysentery, asthma, rheumatism, diabetes, malaria, cholera, fevers, bronchitis, insomnia, and pains of any sort. At a time when the physician’s cabinet was almost bare of alternative drugs, it was impossible to practice medicine without it.

The ancient Mediterranean world knew opium and used it widely. From the eastern Mediterranean and the lands immediately beyond, where the opium poppy was then’ principally cultivated, the Arabs carried the drug to India. In India, however, opium came to be accepted not simply as a medicine but as a general restorative, its qualities in this direction being readily apparent to all who took it, and there being no wine to compete. An English doctor serving with the 3rd Bombay Native Infantry describes how his men, when a halt in a long march sounded, “would break themselves up into small groups of four or five, and sit for a while, and then one of the group would in a quiet way take from his pocket a little lump of opium and proceed to divide it with those sitting with him; and there they would sit awhile meditating, swallowing the opium and meditating; and by the time the halt was at an end and the regiment reformed and marched on, they were fully refreshed and perfectly steady.”³ Rajput camel drivers fortified themselves with opium water before setting off across the deserts of Sind. “I have often thought,” observed one retired Indian civil servant before the Royal Commission on Opium of 1893, “that the best practical answer to those who inveigh against the use of opium would be, if such a thing were practicable, to bring one of our crack opium-drinking Sikh regiments to London and exhibit them in Hyde Park.”⁴ Of course it was not practicable. But in its final report the commission did recommend that opium in India ought not to be confined to occasional medical use. So the drug remained the ordinary Indian’s remedy for malaria, his rejuvenator in old age, the agent of his relief from fatigue and pain—no more to be frowned upon than bhang or hashish.

There was, however, another way to take opium, and that was to smoke it. Within India very few people did. Though the “half-caste” woman who looked after Kim smoked, the much more usual reference in literature is that of the heroine in Tagore’s The Home and the World, whose sight is clouded over “like an opium-eater’s eyes.” But in parts of Assam and Burma, in Thailand and Cambodia, in Laos and Vietnam, throughout the East Indies, and above all in China, the person who turned to opium for relaxation or stimulation usually used the pipe. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, when opium was everywhere consumed more publicly than it is today, this change in the manner of taking the drug became so marked east of Calcutta that one was tempted to associate opium smoking quite simply with Mongoloid features, with high cheekbones and the epicanthic fold.

Yet no one can really say why the peoples east of the Indian Ocean got into the habit of assimilating the drug in this way. Opium came to them as it had come to the Indians, through the Arabs. For years they ate and drank it as the Indians did. After a while they began to combine it with chopped tobacco or betel leaves in a mixture called madak. (Some Assamese still smoke it this way or did so forty years ago.) From the East Indies madak passed to the South China coast, as plain tobacco had done before it. And somewhere along the way the leaf was allowed to drop out—or so we must suppose, though it leaves unexplained why Indians (or Europeans for that matter) did not make the same experiment and arrive at the same result.^a Whatever the reason, however, by the second half of the eighteenth century the Chinese were in firm possession of the technique of smoking opium, a technique whose delicate ritual and profound physiological effects may afford the devotee a higher and a keener pleasure than he will ever get by simply eating or drinking the drug. Thereafter wherever the Chinese went, to railroad construction sites in Nevada and canal digging in Panama, they carried the technique with them.

To smoke opium you need, of course, a pipe. But it is a pipe like no other, a pipe you cannot stuff with anything and for which matches are useless. In the memoirs he wrote as he sailed home an invalid in the middle of the Opium War, Lieutenant Bingham of Her Majesty’s corvette Modeste describes an opium pipe he happened to pick up on an island at the mouth of the Canton River. “The stem of this pipe, in cane, perfectly black from use,” he writes, “is seventeen inches long, and one inch in diameter, having a turned mouthpiece of buffalo’s horn; six inches of the opposite end are encased in copper beautifully inlaid with silver. Midway on this is a round copper socket three inches in circumference, in which is placed the bowl, formed of fine clay handsomely chased, and resembling in shape a flattened turnip, with a puncture about the size of a pin’s head on the upper side; the diameter of this bowl is nearly three inches.”⁵ Apparently Bingham did not attempt to use his handsome souvenir. But Duncan MacPherson, a surgeon with the 37th Madras Native Infantry in the same campaign, was more daring. “I had the curiosity to try the effects of a few pipes upon myself,” he explains.⁶ If he mastered the technique, what he did must have gone something as follows.

Settling himself comfortably on his side upon a couch, he took up a drop of gum-like opium on the point of a long needle and held it over a spirit lamp. Under the heat of the flame the drop gradually turned pale, softened, swelled, and began to bubble and sputter. Before it could actually turn to vapor, MacPherson carried it still on the point of the needle to the surface of the pipe bowl, tipped the bowl over the flame, put the stem of the pipe to his lips, and inhaled. The opium passed into his lungs in the form of a heavy white smoke. Two or three puffs entirely consumed the drop; MacPherson repeated the operation several times; and very soon he began to feel the effects of the drug.

What these effects were MacPherson does not really say. Perhaps he was lucky, like the American traveler Bayard Taylor, who tried opium smoking at Canton a few years later; after his sixth pipe he began to see brilliant colors that floated before his eyes “in a confused and cloudy way, sometimes converging into spots like the eyes in a peacock’s tail, but oftenest melting into and through each other, like the hues of changeable silk.”⁷ Perhaps the opium only made him sick, as it often does beginners. Whatever his first reaction, however, with time the smoker (and the eater too) learns to expect the sensations that the heroin user of today is accustomed to. The cares and distractions of daily life drop quite away. Though in reality dulled, the senses appear to have become keener, and the user feels intensely aware, able to perceive the imperceptible, on the point of passing on weightless feet into——but words desert him, the thing is ineffable. If he is a Coleridge and his opium habit only in its infancy, he may subsequently manage to rework the linked words and images of his opium reverie into a fragment the like of Kubla Khan.^b Otherwise he simply lies wrapped in a tranquil and sustaned euphoria. Opium dens are quiet places. Jean Cocteau describes one he visited in the 1920s, the crew’s quarters in a steamer on the Marseilles-Saigon run. The purser, a friend of his and an opium smoker, took him there one night, slipping him stealthily past the watch. Sixty Annamite “boys” lay smoking on two tiers of planks. Opium cooked over a row of lamps. Except for one man whom a nightmare convulsed, the smokers were as inert as vegetables. “Opium,” observes Cocteau with remarkable single-mindedness, as if the other natural narcotics are to be dismissed, “is the only vegetable substance that communicates the vegetable state to us.”⁸ A person under the influence does not talk, does not sing, does not quarrel with his neighbor or fall upon him in maudlin good fellowship. There is no such thing as an opium-crazed mob or an opium-induced orgy; nor does opium arouse the sexual appetite, though its withdrawal may. (The scene in Perelaer’s late nineteenth-century novel Baboe Dalima or the Opium Fiend in which a Javanese villager shamelessly attacks his wife while under the influence of the drug, does not prove the contrary. It simply reflects the widespread feeling that opium addiction ought to be titillating as well as bad.) The taker of opium turns in upon himself and attends an experience entirely passive. He does not try to create a masterpiece. He becomes one, a masterpiece without form and without judges; or rather, he becomes the scene of a masterpiece, “the meeting place for the phenomena which art sends to us from outside.” Thus it is useless to remonstrate with a man who is taking opium, to tell him he degrades himself. For it is like saying to paper that Shakespeare soils it, to silence that it is broken by Bach.

But when the drug wears off, the euphoria wears off with it, and the opium user is back where he began. And if he makes opium a habit (Cocteau regularly smoked three pipes in the morning, four in the afternoon, three more at night), sooner or later he will experience, should he try to stop, not simply the absence of bliss but positive misery: the withdrawal pains—as if that modest phrase could convey the agony of it!—that the heroin addi...