|
A gateway of Shanghai
19 th. Century
 |
Scene on the Grand
Canal by W. Alexander, the artist who accompanied
the Macartney embassy to Beijing in 1793. The Grand
Canal connected the Yangtze basin and Nanking, the
southern capital, with Beijing, the northern
capital. From the Collection of The Hongkong and
Shanghai Banking Corporation, London.
|
|
Scholar
Fusilier |
|
All pictures and the text below are from the Book
Wayfoong,
The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation |
A interesting perspective into trade in China.
China Trade up to 1860
THE PORTUGUESE discovered how to get to India by sea
and arrived there a hundred years before the
British. They extended their trade eastwards and in
1557 the Chinese Emperor granted them a piece of
land in the estuary of the Pearl River which leads
up to Canton, on which they built the city of Macao.
With the turn into the seventeenth century other
European powers began to appear on the scene. The
Portuguese were not strong enough to resist the
Dutch to whom they rapidly lost
 the
greater part of their empire. In 1622 the Dutch, who
had made Java and the other Spice Islands the centre
of their trade, conceived that if they could take
Macao they would get possession of the China trade.
They assaulted it but were beaten off. In the course
of the seventeenth century they made two efforts (in
1655 and 1664) to induce the Chinese emperors to
give them permission to trade at some port in China.
Both their missions failed. The Chinese thought it
dangerous to increase trade with the nations of the
west, who had recently been encroaching upon Asia,
particularly the British in India and the Dutch in
the great islands. However, in the year 1685 the
Emperor K’ang Hsi changed his mind and opened the
port of Canton to a limited trade with those he
termed the Ocean Barbarians. Europeans were allowed
after a time to build warehouses on the shore of the
Pearl River at a spot just below the walls of
Canton. Trade had to be carried on through the
Emperor’s representatives; it was not an open trade.
The first East India Company ship called there in
1689, but it was not until 1720 that it could be
said that the China trade had fully come into being.
Tea became the staple export, as a taste for it had
developed in Charles II’s reign. At the Canton
warehouses (or factories as they were called) there
resided not only the agents of the East India
Company but also Dutch, French, Danish and other
European merchants. They were only allowed to live
there during the winter shipping season. In summer
they retired down the river to houses at Macao,
which they rented from the Portuguese.
The British had the major share of this trade, such
as it was. But they traded under grave disabilities.
After they had paid all trade and customs dues, they
were not free to buy at the market rate from local
dealers; all transactions had to be through the
trade commissioner, called the Hoppo, and his
committee of merchants, known as the Co-Hong. These
people fixed the prices.
 There
was no appeal to superior officials against sharp
practice, nor was any schedule published fixing the
exact amount of the various dues that might be
demanded.
By the beginning of the last decade of the
eighteenth century, the East India Company, despite
the stringency of the regulations at Canton, had
largely increased its export of tea, of which trade
it had a monopoly. By 1783 the Company was importing
into England some six million pounds weight, in
spite of heavy duty. After 1784, when the duty was
reduced from 100 per cent to 12 1/2 per cent, the
import rose to 15 million pounds.
While the British public had shown itself eager to
buy an increasing quantity of tea, the Company was
experiencing difficulty in finding a commodity which
the Chinese would buy and we were obliged to pay for
tea with silver. This was not a wholly satisfactory
way of conducting trade. The Company had to buy the
silver, whereas if a saleable commodity could be
found, a double profit would be made—the sale of
that commodity in China and the sale of the tea in
England. At last they hit upon something that the
Chinese would buy; this was opium, a high quality of
which was grown in India. This discovery enabled
them to finance the tea trade. Cultivated in India
by the
Chinese trade outpost south China Sea harborHistory,
Shanghai, China, information, temple,
international settlement, concessions. |
Company in increasing quantities, opium was
sold at public auction in Calcutta to private
merchants who carried it to China.
There they sold
it for silver, the bulk of which they made over to
the East India Company in Canton in return for bills
on London or Calcutta. The silver more than sufficed
to pay for the tea. The balance was exported.
|
The
opium trade steadily increased. In 1800 4,500 chests
were imported, by 1830 over 18,000 went in. The
Chinese had always smoked opium to some extent and
finding it offered to them in a high quality and at
a fairly cheap price, their taste for it increased.
It has to be remembered that the East India Company
was not only a trading company but had by this date
acquired the political possession of the greater
part of India. For the administration of that
country it depended upon what revenues it could
raise. The sale of its opium in the Calcutta
auctions was an important additional source of
revenue, amounting sometimes to as much as one-fifth
of the whole.
All might have gone
smoothly had it not been that opium was contraband
in China. The Chinese
 had
various reasons for wanting to keep it out, the most
practical of which was that its purchase drained
away their silver, on which the stability of the
currency depended, for more silver was paid out for
opium than was paid back for tea. But the Manchu
dynasty, which by this date was in decline, was
unable to prevent the opium from coming in. They had
no adequate preventive service attached to the
customs and they had no ships which could have
seized the clippers from Calcutta as they
approached. The buyers of opium in Calcutta auctions
had no great difficulty in establishing a base at
Lintin Island in the vicinity of Canton, from which
they could sell the opium to Chinese smugglers. A
host of such men came in little boats to the hulks
on which was stored the opium, and bought it for
silver dollars. It was a question how long such a
state of affairs could continue. A smuggling trade
was highly objectionable to the Chinese government
as they made nothing out of it. To let in opium on
payment of a duty was the obvious course, but it was
feared that smuggling would still continue. Some
solution had to be found.
The East India Company continued to trade as before
from its warehouses at Canton, purchasing its tea
and paying for it in silver. But down the river at Lintin the trade run by merchants, not members of
the Company, and who were completely outside the
control of the Chinese authorities, had become by
1820 greater than the trade of Canton. Lintin had,
as it were, by-passed Canton. The merchants there
enjoyed in practice, though not by agreement, many
of the essentials of free trade with China, the very
thing which the East India Company had attempted to
obtain without success. To demand it two embassies
had been sent, the Macartney in 1796 and the Amherst
in 1816, with no more success than the Dutch
embassies of the previous century. Yet here at
Lintin was a big establishment, supported by
clippers faster than the East Indiamen, and in
league with Chinese boatmen and corrupt officials of
all kinds, high and low. The trade was chiefly a
contraband trade in opium, yet so uncontrolled had
it become that a certain amount of other goods were
also sold to smugglers there free of duty.
In 1833 the Crown
refused to renew the East India Company’s monopoly
in China, and the whole trade was thrown open. The
Company’s agents had always followed a cautious
policy and had sought to avoid offending the
Chinese. When the monopoly was abolished, the
merchants who had been accustomed to the freedom of
the contraband trade at Lintin, found it hard to
submit to what they considered the humiliating
conditions under which the East India Company’s
agents had lived at Canton. With the abolition of
the monopoly went also the supercession of the
Company’s so- called
Select Committee at Canton, whose place was taken by
a trade commissioner responsible direct to the
Crown. The first trade commissioner, Lord Napier,
represented the new forward policy of the opium men
to stand no more cringing to the Hoppo. England was
by this time the most powerful nation in the world,
though at Canton it was hard to believe so. Napier’s
instructions were to ignore regulations. He was to
go straight to Canton and act as Consul, negotiating
over the head of the Hoppo and the Co-Hong. He
failed, however, to overawe the Viceroy as he was
not backed with sufficient force and had to withdraw
from Canton to Macao where he died shortly
afterwards.
This fiasco made it clear that the forward policy
advocated by the opium merchants could not succeed
without military support from England. At the
instance of William Jardine, the most influential of
these merchants at this time, a petition was
presented to King William IV at the end of 1834
asking the government to send out warships to demand
free trade with China. The government, however,
hesitated to back a policy which seemed too risky.
Encouraged by the discomfiture of the Ocean
Barbarians, the Emperor in March 1839 appointed a
Special Commissioner at Canton, called Lin Tse Hsu,
with full powers to eradicate the drug traffic.
Hitherto the merchants (who by now included
Americans as well as Dutch, French and Danish) owed
their immunity largely to the corruption of Chinese
officials, who not only failed to arrest smugglers
but actually had a share in the smuggling
themselves. The appointment of Lin was a new
departure; he could not be bribed and he frightened
his subordinates into being honest. In March 1839 he
demanded that the opium import for that year should
be delivered up. As the European merchants had no
military force on the spot and as Lin was able to
surround the factories and cut off their supplies,
they were obliged to hand over the whole import,
amounting to some 20,000 chests. This opium Lin
destroyed. The merchants were then released from
detention and hastened to leave Canton, retiring to
Macao. With them went their clippers, which they
anchored off Hong Kong, an island some thirty miles
east of Macao. Hong Kong was inhabited only by a few
fishermen. It was a barren mountainous tract, hardly
susceptible of cultivation, separated from the
mainland by a strait of only a mile broad, which
formed a superlative harbour.
The merchants were not unduly apprehensive. Lin, by
confining them to their warehouses in Canton, had
indeed forced them to deliver a whole year’s supply
of opium, but he was not in a position to prevent
new opium being imported to Lintin and distributed
from there as before to the smugglers. They resolved
to continue the drug trade. To do this successfully,
however, they would require some military and naval
support from England. An agitation was now got up in
London. Palmerston, after a final interview with
William Jardine, who had managed to convince him
that the whole China trade was in danger and that
the tea export might be stopped, on 6 February 1840
ordered the Governor General of India to send a
fleet of sixteen warships. With this backing it was
thought that the merchants would be able to insist
upon the freer kind of trade which they had desired
from the beginning. The warships arrived in Hong
Kong in June 1840. Lin had no means of meeting this
threat. After a short stay at Hong Kong, the fleet
sailed northwards and occupied an island called
Chusan at the mouth of the Yangtze, whence they
proceeded to the mouth of the Peiho river, the
gateway to the capital, Peking. Here a letter was
sent direct to the Emperor demanding free trade and
compensation for the opium destroyed. The Chinese
tried every device to get rid of the Barbarians
without having to consent to terms. They succeeded
in inducing them to return to Can¬ton where a new
Special Commissioner had been appointed to go into
the whole matter. But when negotiations were slowed
up, it was found necessary to bombard the forts
leading to Canton in January 1841. A Convention was
then immediately signed by the Special Commissioner
ceding the island of Hong Kong as a place where the
British could settle and trade. Compensation was
also promised for the confiscated opium.
Immediately after the signature of this Convention
the merchants, who had been living for the last two
years partly on their ships and partly in Macao,
began to build houses on Hong Kong along the harbour
front on its north coast. House sites one hundred
feet square were auctioned on 14 June 1841 and went
for sums ranging from two hundred to two hundred and
fifty pounds, prices then considered very steep.
Twenty-seven of the well-known Canton firms were
provided for in this way, including Jardine,
Matheson & Co., which bought one of the best sites
at East Point on this frontage.
Meanwhile, when the Convention was referred to
Peking for confirmation, the Emperor refused to
recognize it and things were back as before. A new
demarche in force was required. Palmerston
accordingly sent out more troops, this time under
the command of a distinguished general, Hugh Gough.
Gough arrived at Hong Kong on 2 March 1841 and
wasted no time. First he took the city of Canton in
May. Then he sailed northwards in August to clinch
the affair by an advance on Nanking, a key city of
the Yangtze basin, the richest part of China. In the
spring of 1842 he was outside the walls of Nanking
and the Chinese, having tried every trick to get rid
of him, were finally brought to bay and obliged to
accept the Convention, which was not only confirmed
but enlarged by the Treaty of Nanking, signed on 29
August 1842.
The Treaty of Nanking gave the British nearly
everything they had been trying to get for a century
and a half. In addition to Canton, the ports of
Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai, gates to the
immense trade of central China, were opened.
Foreigners were allowed to reside there and buy and
sell in the open market. They would not have to deal
through any type of Co-Hong organization such as
that which hitherto had existed at Canton. The
medium of communication between the merchants and
the Chinese authorities would be through British
consuls stationed at the ports. A fixed tariff of
import, export and other dues would be published.
The head British authority or superintendent of
trade at each port would have the right to address
the Viceroy or high officials in Peking direct. In
addition, there was to be an indemnity of 21 million
dollars, six millions of which was to pay for the
value of the opium delivered up at Canton in March
1839. Smuggling of opium would continue, unless the
Chinese allowed its import on payment of a
reasonable duty.
Thus the first Anglo-Chinese war, as it was called,
left the opium position unchanged. Opium, in fact,
remained contraband until 1860, when its import was
allowed on payment of duty. The Treaty of Nanking
was a turning point in Anglo-Chinese relations.
|
|
The
west had now obtained a real lodgement in China.
After being held at arm’s length for nearly 300
years, it had got in at last. Old Asia’s days were
numbered.
With the opening of the ports the great
industrial and scientific changes which had been
taking place in Europe, and which had made it so
much richer and more powerful than stationary Asia,
would flood in and transform a continent whose
population exceeded that of the rest of the world.
--- much more
here |
|