Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [32]
This was as comprehensive a failure as a trade mission could accomplish, even though when they returned to England the delegation did their best to belittle China: Macartney talked of it as a ‘tyranny of a handful of tartars over more than three hundred million of Chinese’, while his valet regaled the reading public with news that the Chinese ate the fleas they picked off their clothes and his comptroller reported that ‘there is not a water closet, nor a decent place of retirement in all China’. It was he, too, who provided the most resonant epitaph on the trade mission: ‘We entered Peking like paupers; we remained in it like prisoners; and we quitted it like vagrants.’ Macartney’s tedious and expensive journey had accomplished nothing. Yet the need to find something the Chinese might be prepared to buy became ever more pressing, as the British succumbed more and more to that most harmless of vices, drinking tea, whose fashionability is said to have been established by Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza, and which was soon being described as a ‘necessity’ of life. The trade was wonderful business for what an anonymous pamphlet called ‘the lordly grocers of Leadenhall Street’, where the East India Company had its imposing headquarters.* The Company, meanwhile, knew it certainly had one commodity it could sell to the Chinese in exchange. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Red Barbarians returned, and this time they came not with trinkets but with warships.
Because in a factory at Ghazipur the East India Company was refining massive quantities of opium.* It was not a commodity either introduced or invented by the British, as Mughal emperors of India had been exporting the drug for years (and some had acquired something of a taste for it themselves). Like much else in the commercial development of the subcontinent, opium now became the subject of an East India Company monopoly. It was not that the Company was unaware of its disabling, addictive properties for its Governor General in Bengal, Warren Hastings, had declared that the drug was ‘not a necessity of life but a pernicious article of luxury, which ought not to be permitted’. Unfortunately, the sentence did not end there, but continued with the clause ‘but for the purpose of foreign commerce only’. Opium may have been pernicious, but it was also precious. The main export market was in China.
The British were not the first foreigners to run drugs into China – the Arabs had been there before them, and both Dutch and French trading companies had developed lucrative businesses in the seventeenth century. What was different about the British was the scale and ruthlessness of the trade. By the middle of the 1830s over 30,000 cases of opium – each about the size of a small chest of drawers – were being smuggled into China each year. To protect the good name of those involved, the British deployed the usual subterfuges of illicit trades. Rather than being sold directly, the drug was first passed on to middlemen, some of whom might in other circumstances have passed as elders of the kirk. The most prominent of these were a couple of Scotsmen, William Jardine, a former ship’s surgeon, and James Matheson, the grandson of a Highland minister. The company the two men founded became one of the greatest imperial trading houses, whose gleaming Hong Kong headquarters