STEPHEN R. PLATT
Imperial Twilight

Stephen R. Platt is a professor of Chinese history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His last book, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, was a Washington Post Notable Book and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and won the Cundill History Prize. Platt lives with his wife and children in Northampton, Massachusetts.

"Excellent. . . . A beautifully written and expert account of Western aggression in nineteenth-century China. . . . Platt writes beautifully, with a novelist's eye for detail. He skillfully weaves through the book a cast of eccentric characters."
— Julia Lovell, The Guardian

"A procession of gloriously eccentric characters. . . . Good men do bad things, roads to hell are paved with good intentions, and golden opportunities are missed.
In short, Imperial Twilight is a rip-ping yarn."
—Ian Morris, The New York Times Book Review

"A fast-paced story that focuses on the individuals who made the history. . . . Wonderful. . . . For many years, [the Opium War] was explained not as a war waged by a nation on behalf of its drug lords but as a necessary evil designed to open up a country that had cussedly closed itself off to the benefits of interaction with the 'civilized' world. . . . Platt's book upends these stereotypes."
— John Pomfret, The Washington Post

"Everyone with experience in China has heard about the legacy of the Opium War and subsequent 'Century of Humiliation.' But Stephen Platt presents the buildup to this confrontation in a vivid and fascinating way, which challenges many prevailing assumptions in both China and the West (including some of my own). This is narrative and analytic history of a high order, which will be read with enjoyment by audiences around the world." — James Fallows,

author of Our Towns and China Airborne

"A vivid picture of the history of relations between Britain and China from the mid-eighteenth century up to the outbreak of the war . . . . This thoroughly researched and delightful work is essential for anyone interested in Chinese or British imperial history."
— Library Journal (starred review)

"Clear writing and an excellent sense of story and scene-setting mark Platt's compelling reexamination of the causes of the First Opium War ... Platt brings to life the people who drive the story, including the missionaries desperate to learn more about China and its language, the drug smugglers who made so much money they still have name recognition, the officials desperate to handle a growing crisis of widespread opium addiction, and even a pirate queen and Jane Austen's older brother."
— Booklist (starred review)

"A fluent, well-written exercise in revisionism, one of interest to students of modern geopolitics as well as nineteenth-century history."
— Kirkus Reviews

"A fresh perspective on the First Opium War, the conflict that allowed Western merchants to pry open China's riches and gain unprecedented trading privileges .... Platt's research is impeccably presented in this winning history of British and Chinese trade."
— Publishers Weekly

"Charming. . . . Meticulously researched.. . . A rich and finely balanced account of how Britain and China came to blows." — John Keay,
Literary Review (London)

"With a great canvas to play upon and vivid Western and Chinese sources into which to dip his brush, Platt paints a superbly engaging portrait of Anglo–Chinese relations across five deeply consequential decades." —Christopher Harding,
The Telegraph (London)

"Stephen R. Platt . . . is that modern-day rarity, a highly qualified academic historian who is also a first-rate writer."
— The Washington Times

"Nuanced, subtle, intelligent . . . . We need just this kind of analysis right now in dealing with China."
— The Australian

Introduction: Canton

If you stand outside the wall, it is impossible to gauge the size of the city.
Canton is built on a plain, so the low, flat buildings of brick and wood that lie inside are invisible from where you stand. The wall is thirty feet high and crenellated, built from large blocks of sandstone at its base and smaller bricks above. It stretches as far as you can see in either direction, with forts on top at regular intervals, cannons peering outward. Near you is one of the twelve massive wooden gates that open into the city, a shadowed cave guarded by soldiers and horsemen. The gates creak open each morning at dawn, and close again each evening around 9 p.m. Not that you will be allowed in. As a foreigner, you are stopped at the gate and turned away. You will not see the fantastic warren of narrow streets inside, paved with thick slabs of granite. You will not see the dense brick houses with their sloping tiled roofs, the vast examination hall with its thousands of cells, the lavish mansions, the temples, the gardens, or the government offices that lie within.

Instead, you stay outside and wander back through the suburbs, the sprawling and amorphous settlements surrounding the wall where you could walk for miles without any sense of their coming to an end. It is steamy weather, so humid your sweat seems to just blend into the air around you. The paved streets are twisting and so very narrow that you can sometimes touch the walls on both sides at the same time. The buildings here, fronted with fragrant carved wood, are mostly two stories high, with tall shutters on the windows. Above you, laundry hangs to dry on lines stretched across the top of the alley, creating a canopy effect. It is hard to hear over the din of the hawkers and the shouting of porters and chair-bearers as they try to push their way through.

Everywhere is the press of humanity — people traveling on foot or carried in sedan chairs, lounging in the alleyways, eating in open-air restaurants as street performers and beggars ply them for money.

If there are other foreigners about in the suburbs you might overhear a few snatches of Pidgin English, the local trading language. It is a hybrid of the Cantonese dialect of the city and the European tongues native to the foreigners who come to trade here ("pidgin" means "business"). For the most part it is made up of English words, sometimes with a bit of Hindi or Portuguese, set to Chinese grammar and pronunciation. It is a meeting ground between vastly different languages and will take some getting used to. Fragments of it will be absorbed back into English — having a "looksee" or eating "chow," asking someone to hurry up "chop-chop" or telling them "Long time no see." In its full-blown form it is a colorful singsong of a language. "I saw a man eating" becomes "My looksee one piecee man catchee chow-chow." "He has no money" translates to "He no hab catchee dollar." "You belongy smart inside" means "You're very smart."

Vertical signs hang from the sides of most buildings with Chinese characters announcing what is for sale in the shops on the ground floor. You can't read them. But you may be relieved to see that some stores have signs written out in English letters to lure you in. You enter one of these shops through a tall central doorway flanked by two large open windows. It is cooler inside, out of the sun. There is a counter near one of the windows, piled with writing materials. A clerk flips the beads of an abacus rapidly with one hand while he writes down calculations with the other. It is quiet except for the clicking of the abacus. The shop is crammed to the rafters with silk of every description.

Back out in the alley you continue on your way, past shops selling tea, medicine, porcelain, a hundred other goods. A great deal of money changes hands here. There are craftsmen and artists — cabinet makers, blacksmiths, tailors, painters. The painters work in oil, on glass or canvas. They can produce Chinese or European images for you with equal skill, easily replicating anything you bring to them. They will even hold sittings for a visitor like yourself to get your portrait painted. Some of the foreigners say their oil portraits aren't always so flattering. But as the joke goes, when they complain the painters just tell them, "No hab got handsome face, how can hab handsome picture?"

It is not a clean city — though neither, for that matter, are London or Boston. It is especially filthy near the Pearl River, which is where we are headed. The sluggish water of the canals feeding into the river is thick with sewage and refuse from the nearby houses. Rows of sampans are tied up several deep in the river, where the boat people live. Piles of garbage are strewn along the bank. The smell of refuse stewing in the humid warmth is something you will stop noticing in time.

Now we come to the factory district at the edge of the river. This is where you belong.

What you will notice first as you enter from along the river is the relatively enormous amount of open space before you. You have seen nothing like it in the tightly packed suburbs, where alley gives way to alley and there are no open public areas (the great gardens of the suburbs are private and lie behind walls). But here is a wide expanse of hard-trodden dirt with space to walk around freely. This plaza of reclaimed land — the square, as it is known — slopes gently down to a muddy riverfront densely crowded with ships. The ships here are all small ones, for the river is fairly shallow; all of the giant oceangoing vessels you might have expected to see are about ten miles downriver at a deeper anchorage called Whampoa.

There are small groups of Chinese wandering around on the open square, and if you turn away from the water you will see what they have come for. Jarringly out of place in comparison to the low wooden houses of the suburbs, here is an imposing row of thirteen large buildings of brick and granite, higher than anything you have yet seen in Canton — higher even than the city wall. They are distinctly European in appearance, with columned verandas and terraces. Several have tall flagpoles out front that fly the national flag of a Western country: Britain, France, the United States.

These are the factories, where the foreigners live. In spite of the name, they are not sites of manufacturing (a "factor" is a term from India meaning a trader). They contain living quarters, warehouses, and offices. Each one has a Chinese "compradore," or chief steward, who staffs it with a small army of servants — cooks, valets, butlers, even menial servants to pull the ropes that keep the ceiling fans spinning in this oppressive heat. They keep the factories well supplied with food and other necessities.

Some have a few head of livestock or a milk cow on hand. If a factory is inhabited by a single national group, it gets to fly its flag out front. The ones without flags host a variety of foreign businessmen, many from India.

For the most part the factory buildings have been built touching one other to economize on space, but there are three gaps between them — short, busy streets filled with single-story Chinese shops. Even on this small scale there are important gradations, better or worse parts of "town." The more respectable alleys are New China Street and Old China Street — toward the left if you face the factories from the water. About twelve feet wide, they have orderly rows of retail stalls and tailor shops, a place for temporary visitors to pick up souvenirs and get clothing made. The less respectable alley, a narrower and dirtier one off to the right, is called Hog Lane, and it is mainly crammed with bars catering to foreign sailors from the ships down at Whampoa, who occasionally get a few days of shore leave, which — as in any other port they might encounter — they mainly spend getting drunk. The Chinese proprietors of the bars have adopted English names like "Jolly Jack" and "Tom Bowline." Their liquor shacks are so tiny they don't have benches or a bar per se, just a rope over which a sailor can hang by his armpits and drink until he passes out.

In all the compound, it is the British factory that is most striking. Larger than the others, it has its own fenced-in space in front that reaches all the way down to the riverbank. Standing out in front under the limp Union Jack on this sultry afternoon you can see the factory's broad, columned terrace with a view up and down the river, where the merchants of the East India Company can enjoy their tiffin and sometimes catch a bit of a breeze. If you go through the front gate, past the vigilant Chinese guard with his rattan cane, entering through the shade of the veranda, you will find upstairs a European world that might make you forget where you are. Along the wide hallways you will find counting rooms, tea-tasting rooms, and parlors.

There is a chapel with a spire that holds the only public clock in the compound. There are well-appointed living apartments, a dining hall with room for more than a hundred guests, a billiard room, a library of four thousand books.

Looking around inside the vast, chandeliered British dining hall—the portrait of a king on one wall, a former ambassador on another — drinking your sherry as a bustling crowd of servants prepares to serve a dinner of roast beef and potatoes with gravy, you could be forgiven for imagining you had stumbled into some colonial outpost. But this is not India. The British are not in charge here. The Chinese are. These buildings are, all of them, owned by Chinese merchants, who rent them out to the foreign traders so they will have a place to stay and do their business. The armies of servants answer to their Chinese superiors, not to those they wait on. They report what goes on with the guests. Watched over at all times, the foreigners feel sometimes like grubby infants — coddled and helpless, attended always by their nurses. They need permission to do just about anything.

As opulent as these surroundings may be, the residents sometimes feel that they have volunteered to become prisoners here. Despite the feeling of open space outside on the square, the compound is quite limited in size. It runs for just three hundred yards along the water-front, and between the square out front and the extensive factory buildings behind, it is about two hundred yards deep.

The longer you are here, the smaller it will feel. Foreigners are not permitted to go into the city itself, and they can only wander through the very nearest parts of the suburbs. Farther on, and throngs of young boys will materialize to throw rocks at them and call them foreign devils. Even farther, and Chinese soldiers will come to escort them gently home. Every ten days a small group is allowed to take the air in a nearby garden. Other than that, this is their gilded cage. There is nothing else like it in the world. The entire formal trade of Europe and America with China, the largest empire in existence, goes on here in a space of just twelve acres — less, some like to point out, than the footprint of one of the pyramids in Egypt.

You may not want to spend too many years of your life here, but as you see it in the early 1830s, Canton hardly seems the kind of place to start a war.

—

No event casts a longer shadow over China's modern history than the Opium War. Sparked by an explosive series of events that took place in the Canton factory compound in 1839, the war would end in 1842 with China's humiliating defeat and a treaty all but dictated by the British aggressors, setting a disastrous pattern for the century to come. Textbooks in China on "modern" history, as a rule, take the Opium War as their starting point, the moment when China left its traditional past behind and was dragged forcibly into the world of European imperialism. The war occupies that place not because it was so destructive; in fact, it was relatively small and contained. It caused none of the large-scale social dislocation that China's major internal wars of the nineteenth century like the Taiping Rebellion did. It did not topple the ruling dynasty or even remotely threaten to do so. There weren't even that many battles fought.

But the symbolic power of the Opium War is almost limitless. It has long stood as the point when China's weakness was laid bare before the world, the opening of a "Century of Humiliation" in which Western (and later Japanese) predators would make war on China to bully it into granting territorial concessions and trading rights. It marked a sea change in relations with the West — the end of one era, when foreigners came to China as supplicants, and the dawn of another, when they would come as conquerors. And it carries especially strong power because China unquestionably had the moral high ground: as remembered since, and as charged by critics at the time, Great Britain unleashed its navy on a nearly defenseless China in order to advance the interests of its national drug dealers, who for years had been smuggling opium to China's coast against the laws of the country. The shocking grounds of the war have provided the very foundation of modern Chinese nationalism — from the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the rise, first of the Republic, and then the People's Republic of China, the Opium War has stood for the essence of everything modern China has tried to leave behind: weakness, victimhood, shame.

Because we live in a world so heavily shadowed by this memory, it has been easy for westerners of more recent generations to imagine that this was always the case — that weakness and victimhood were somehow inherent to China's nature.

Through the twentieth century, China was a poor, vulnerable, and frequently chaotic nation that never seemed a contender for power. A third-world nation in the eyes of the wealthier countries, it was alternately a pariah or an object of sympathy. For that reason, the country's worldly aspirations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — to play a leading role in the UN, to host the Olympics, to put a man on the moon — were initially viewed by outsiders almost with bemusement, as if it were an overly ambitious upstart forgetting its proper place. That bemusement has now given way to alarm in many quarters as China strengthens its naval power to unprecedented levels and lays claim to vast swaths of contested maritime territory, asserting its power in ways completely unknown to living memory.

But over the long term, China is anything but an upstart. And as its economic and military power today grow far beyond anything it seemed capable of in the twentieth century, it is coming to resemble far less the weak, bullied nation that suffered the Opium War than the confident and central empire that preceded it. If we take this war not as a beginning but as an ending, and shift our sights instead back into the era before it took place, back before that ostensible dividing line with the modem era, we find a China that was powerful, prosperous, dominant, and above all envied. The memory of that lost era looms ever larger in China today, as a reminder of its potential (some would say rightful) place in the world, a nostalgic vision of what it could be once again.

This is a book about how the Opium War came to be — that is, how China declined from its eighteenth-century grandeur and how Britain became sufficiently emboldened to take advantage of that decline. The central question of the war, as I see it, is not how Britain won, for that was never in serious doubt — in military terms the Opium War pitted the most advanced naval power in the world against an empire with a long and vulnerable coastline that had not needed a seagoing navy in more than a hundred years and so did not have one. Rather, the central question is a moral one: how Britain could have come to fight such a war in China in the first place — against, it should be noted, savage criticism both at home and abroad.

A sense of inevitability has always been projected backwards onto this era in hindsight, as if the war were always meant to be, but when viewed in the light of its own time the Opium War could hardly have been more counterintuitive. Aside from the audacity of sending a small fleet and a few thousand troops to make war on the world's largest empire, critics at the time pointed out that Britain was putting its entire future tea trade at risk for only the vaguest and least justifiable of goals. It seemed paradoxical in the 1830s that a liberal British government that had just abolished slavery could turn around and fight a war to support drug dealers, or that proponents of free trade would align their interests with smugglers. If we revisit these events as they actually unfolded, rather than as they have been reinterpreted afterward, we find far more opposition to this war in Britain and America on moral grounds, and far more respect for the sovereignty of China, than one would otherwise expect.

One reason a reader might not expect such opposition to this war is that we too easily forget how much admiration China used to command. Because of its great strength and prosperity in the late eighteenth century, Europeans viewed China in a dramatically different light than they did the other countries of the East. At a time when India was an object of British conquest, China was an object of respect, even awe. Occasional calls for the use of naval power to advance trade there were struck down as self-defeating, while British traders in Canton who made trouble were generally ordered home or at least reminded to behave themselves. In commerce, China held all the cards. In stark contrast to the British Orientalist vision of India in the late eighteenth century — lost in the past, childlike and divided, a prize to be captured and controlled — China represented instead a strong, unified empire and another living civilization.

For that reason, readers who are familiar with the East India Company as a force of imperial conquest in India will find a very different face of it in China. When young Britons went to work for the Company overseas, it was India that attracted the military adventurers, the administrators, those with dreams of empire. The bean counters, by contrast, went to Canton. (And remarkably, it should be noted that in the early nineteenth century those bean counters in their quiet factories served the Company's bottom line in London far better than the conquerors of India did.) Even as goods — especially cotton and later opium — flowed steadily from India to China, there was almost no professional circulation between the two regions, where Company agents developed largely separate worldviews. VVhen visitors acculturated to British India intruded into the separate world of Canton, they would often cause problems — not just with the Chinese, but with their more experienced countrymen as well.

The Opium War would force those two worlds together, tainting the old admiration and respect for China with a taste for blood. The war would never be universally popular in Britain, however, and fierce opposition to the use of force in China would linger for a long time afterward (another controversial China war in the 1850s would entail the dissolution of Parliament and new elections to disempower the British lawmakers who tried to stop it). Nevertheless, by the time the war finally began, an ongoing collision of two competing worldviews — between those British who respected China's power and prosperity and those who said it was no more enviable than India — reached a crucial threshold.

Thus, while the Opium War was ultimately a war over trade, the story of its origins is, to a significant degree, the story of how the grand mystery of China faded in the cold light of knowledge as British subjects first began to learn the language and explore the interior of the country — and, pursuant to those projects, how the admiring Western views of China that were so prevalent in the late eighteenth century came to be eroded over time by disillusionment and contempt. Within that shift lies the key to understanding how Britain's government could come to a point in 1839 where it was willing to consider, for the first time in two hundred years, the use of violence to further its economic ends there.

Western histories of the Opium War for general readers have long told the story with a wink as the predictable triumph of West over East, a lesson taught to a childish people who dared to look down on the British as barbarians and tried to make them "kowtow" (a loaded term that used to indicate a specific ceremony of kneeling before the Qing emperor but now lives on in our language with the general meaning of "showing obseqious deference"). In such accounts, China typically appears as an unchanging backdrop, a caricature of unthinking traditions and arrogant mandarins stuck in the ancient past who are incapable of appreciating the rise of British power.

With this book, I aim instead to give motion and life to the changing China that lay beyond the confines of Canton in the early nineteenth century — the rebellions, the spread of corruption, and the economic troubles that preoccupied the country's rulers and formed the wider context for the issues of foreign contact that lie at the story's center. Though the Chinese of this era have long been depicted as oblivious to the outside world, that is a false view. Coastal officials in China were fully aware that they had no capacity to resist a European navy; they knew what the British were capable of if given cause for war. Their naiveté, such as it was, resulted not from ignorance but from their faith in the stabilizing power of trade — in particular, their assumption that as long as the British enjoyed profitable commerce in Canton they would never have reason to resort to violence (a belief that was shared along the way, incidentally, by nearly everyone in the British government who had a say in the matter).

On the Western side of my story is a cast of British and American sojourners who tried to get beyond their limited confines in Canton — traders, explorers, missionaries, government agents, and smugglers who, for a variety of reasons both commendable and not, tried to see, contact, and understand more of the country than they were supposed to. Together, they embodied the long Western dream of opening China — "opening" here not to mean that China was always and universally closed (it was not), but to capture how it was experienced by the British and Americans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were tightly restricted in their ability to conduct trade, they were forbidden to learn the Chinese language, and they were kept within exceptionally close boundaries with no ability to travel farther into the empire or interact with the general population. Some wished it were otherwise, and their efforts in that direction would have great repercussions.

On the Chinese side, meanwhile, this is the story of an empire in decline from a lofty, almost unimaginable height — a wealthy, powerful, civilized state controlling roughly a third of the world's population, riven by internal pressures of overpopulation, official corruption, and sectarian dissent (all three of which, notably, count again among the Chinese government's most pressing concerns today). The characters on this side will include emperors and officials who tried to maintain the order of the state, rebels and others at the fringes of society who tried to subvert it, and reformminded Confucian scholars who — far from clinging blindly to tradition — proposed creative and pragmatic solutions to the problems of their time. Together, the Chinese and Western sides of the story are meant to give the reader a broader vision of this grand eclipse of empires in the early nineteenth century — China, crossing its meridian and entering into a long decline, while Britain rose to new nationalistic heights through its victories in the Napoleonic Wars and beyond. The Opium War was the point where those two arcs finally crossed.

In closing, a word on inevitability. Although this early age of contact between China and the West has long been treated in retrospect as if it were somehow always destined to end in war, it was not. The Opium War did not result from an intractable clash of civilizations, as it would later be framed in the West. Neither did it represent the culmination of some grand imperial master plan, as it is generally understood in China. To nearly all parties concerned, including even the government ministers who launched it, the war was all but unthinkable until it actually began. The truth is that over the long term, the foreigners and Chinese who came together at Canton found far more common ground than conflict. This book will have much to say about the individuals who made the war possible, but they are by no means the whole story. It is also a book about the many others, now mostly forgotten, who stood against the more familiar currents of their time and can remind us how differently the course of events might have gone — among them British activists who opposed the opium trade, Chinese scholars who counseled pragmatism in foreign relations, and Americans whose relationships with their Chinese counterparts set a more positive pattern than most of the British. As we look to the future of our own era, with China's arc once again ascendant, such figures are every bit as important for us to remember as the ones who caused all the trouble.