For most graduates of Indian history, the Opium Wars of 1839-42 are a sideshow of imperialism, visible today only in the fast-fading grandeur of Raj architecture in Calcutta and in the Indian diaspora in south-east Asia and southern Africa and resurrected in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. For the Chinese those distant events, which saw the British use gunboat diplomacy to turn large swathes of the population into opium junkies, is what Sinologist Julia Lovell calls the ruling Communist regime’s “Pre-Eminent National Wound”.
Lovell’s history is rooted firmly in the present, the burden of her argument being that the key to understanding contemporary China lies in the way it chooses to view its history. Just as the Japanese invasion of the thirties is relentlessly hyped as an example of foreign humiliation, so the Opium Wars are, for the Chinese, the “first emblematic act of Western aggression: as the beginning of a national struggle against a foreign conspiracy to humiliate the country with drugs and violence”.
Why should the Chinese constantly need reminding of past humiliations? (Hindsight alert: in India, by contrast, the revolt of 1857 is touted as the First War of Independence by historians of a certain hue even though it resulted in the brutal imposition of direct British rule.) Lovell’s argument is that it is the ruling regime’s way of, to paraphrase Orwell, controlling the future by controlling the past. The aim was, she writes, to “persuade the populace to blame all China’s problems on a single foreign enemy; to transform the Opium War and its Unequal Treaty into a long-term imperialist scheme … thereby justifying any sacrifice that the party required of the Chinese”.
In other words, it is exploited as a means of blinkering the people to the many depredations of the one-party state: from Mao’s man-made famines and murderous Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square repressions right up to the present-day suppression of popular revolts.
China’s co-option of a historical event for lofty nationalist aims is ironic because the Opium Wars had their roots in a mundane, financial problem: a widening trade deficit and declining global stocks of silver. Though the British wanted Chinese tea (to which they were as addicted as the Chinese were to opium), silk and porcelain, the Chinese didn’t really crave British-made pianos or cutlery. Thus, Lovell writes, “From 1780 to 1790, the combined returns of the India and China trade failed to make even a £2 million dent in the £28 million debt left over from the conquest of India.”
Confined by the Qing dynasty to Canton (modern-day Guangzhou), the British found a perfect solution to their problems in smuggling opium. By the 1830s, the Qing rulers, long considered by mainland Chinese as foreigners from the north, started a crackdown on opium consumption (cloaking the need to conserve silver in a moral campaign) even as Britain’s “buccaneering money makers” started demanding lawful access for the opium trade and pushed their activities further up the coast.
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The almost tragicomic trajectory of the war takes up two-thirds of the book. It is written with a light and even-handed touch, the better for Lovell’s ability to read Chinese and therefore have access to the voluminous official correspondence. She is helped by the fact that this history was made by many swashbuckling characters — James Matheson, “a Scottish pillar of the smuggling community and co-founder with William Jardine of the great opium house Jardine Mathesons”, William Napier, Britain’s first short-lived official resident to China, Charles Elliot, his successor, and an ever-changing cast of self-serving British and Chinese bureaucrats, politicians and compradors.
It was, from the start, an unequal contest. It was not as though the British could not be defeated — the Afghans inflicted a humiliating defeat in 1839 and forces led by the feted British General Gordon were destroyed by ill-equipped Mahdist forces in 1884. But the Qing dynasty, founded in 1644, was suffering the classic symptoms of imperial over-reach — rebellious minorities and declining military strength. The dictatorship that kept decision-making centralised in the distant fastnesses of the Forbidden City was a poor match for the relative flexibility of a constitutional monarchy ruling over the world’s foremost technological power, with its all-iron battleships and well-equipped, well-drilled troops.
The reason the war ended on such humiliating terms for the Chinese via the Treaty of Nanjing was partly the outcome of sheer disinformation. Terrified at the consequences of reporting bad news to the emperor, his frontline men simply lied, turning resounding defeats into honoured victories. Given the three-month time lag for mail to reach the emperor, this was not hard to do.
In one telling passage, Lovell recounts how, two and a half years into the war, the Daoguang emperor lacked basic information. In a letter in 1842 he asks, “Where, in fact, is England? … Why are the English selling us opium? What are the Indians doing in their army? How is it that they have a twenty-two-year-old woman for a queen? Is she married?”
In contrast to many in the growing tribe of Western commentators, Lovell has provided an analysis that is both entertaining and dispassionate, making the book an invaluable contribution to recent writing on China.
THE OPIUM WAR
Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China
Julia Lovell
Picador; 458 pages; Rs 499
