TRAVEL

Ziying's Brush

Humen stands as a reminder of the ruthless mercantilism of the East India Company in the 19th century heyday of British imperialism.

THERE is a place in Guangdong province’s Pearl River (Zhujiang) estuary whose serenity belies the fact that one of the most wrenching episodes of China’s modern history played out on its shores. Perhaps only its ominous name – Humen or Tiger’s Gate, provides a clue to the fury and exasperation that 170 years ago inspired the Qing dynasty’s Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu, famed for his incorruptibility, to take on the rapacious British East India Company.

Humen resides in Dongguan city to the east of Guangzhou. A short distance from the lazy waters of the Zhujiang sits a Naval Battle Museum (Hai Zhan Bowuguan), also known as the Humen Lin Zexu Memorial Hall (Humen Lin Zexu Jinianguan).

Although the museum’s layout is somewhat confusing, it offers an in-depth account of the two Opium Wars which resulted in China’s “hundred years of humiliation”, supported by artefacts, maps, statistics, photos, illustrations, reconstructions and copies of manuscripts from the period.

Particularly interesting is the section on the Imperial Commissioner from Fujian, Lin Zexu, whose integrity and rectitude contrasted dramatically with the duplicity and lack of moral conscience of the British East India Company.

He wrote manuals and treatises like “7 Methods of Encouraging Soldiers to Suppress Foreign Invaders” with diagrams of naval battle formations and is considered a hero who led what can justly be called the first outright war against drug smuggling in history.

The British had attempted to trade with China since the 1600s, offering manufactured items like woollens in exchange for Chinese porcelain, silk and most of all, tea. However, as British products were of little interest to the Middle Kingdom, they had to pay for Chinese goods in silver; further, the Qing court restricted such trade to Guangzhou.

The explosive demand for tea led to a trade deficit for the British, and since there was no market for their products, they turned to drugs, or rather, drug smuggling.

Their poison of choice was opium which they produced in India and sold at inflated prices in China. This highly addictive substance had for decades been imported into China in small quantities for medicinal purposes, but in league with corrupt local officials and collaborators, the British East India Company created a new demand, a “market” for its recreational use.

The flow of British silver into China thus rapidly reversed while the moribund Qing dynasty could do little to stem the burgeoning drug trade. When the imperial government outlawed the narcotic, the East India Company resorted to smuggling through intermediaries.

In 1839, the distinguished Commissioner Lin arrived in Guangzhou with full discretionary powers to do battle against opium but failed to make any headway with the recalcitrant British. Consequently in June the same year, he ordered 20,000 chests and 2,000 bags of opium (a total of 1.1 million kilos), which represented roughly half of annual imports, destroyed on Humen beach. A year later in 1840, British gunboats arrived and blockaded the Zhujiang estuary in retaliation, precipitating the first Opium War which saw similar British attacks on Fujian and Zhejiang.

The poorly-equipped Qing army with their antiquated weapons was defeated and in 1842, China was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing which ceded Hongkong and opened five “treaty ports” – Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai – to British trade. China had to pay reparations, give the British extra-territorial rights as well as refrain from intervening in the opium trade which flourished.

This first of several lopsided treaties was the beginning of what many consider the darkest period in the history of the Middle Kingdom. Similar humiliating unequal treaties were signed with the Americans and French, while other western powers as well as Japan soon joined in the feeding frenzy, attacking China at will on flimsy pretexts and carving out spheres of influence.

Still not satisfied despite the many concessions exacted from the Qing government, the British East India Company set about to break China’s dominance in the tea trade. In perhaps one of the earliest instances of industrial espionage, a botanist named Robert Fortune was sent to spy on Chinese tea production processes and steal plants for cultivation in India.

The thief travelled disguised as a local Chinese, and flouting Chinese laws, pilfered specimens from key tea-growing regions which he smuggled to Darjeeling, India, together with skilled Chinese tea workers. Fortune’s “success” weaned the British off a dependence on Chinese tea and led to a rapid decline in China’s tea exports.

With Fortune’s theft of Chinese tea plants, the British East India Company decimated the very industry for which they had destroyed innumerable lives with opium, leaving China with not only a much-reduced tea sector but even more damaging, a large population of enfeebled drug-users.

Today, the debauched mercantilism of the British East India Company is often obscured by romantic myths and nostalgia for the days of the “Raj”. In the face of clever marketing and watered down accounts of history, it would do us well to spare a thought for the millions of lives ruined by the Company’s unbridled lust for profit.