Imperial Twilight

PROLOGUE
The Journey of James Flint

In the summer of 1759, James Flint sailed up the coast of China and almost didn’t come back. He was at the time the only Englishman who knew how to speak and write in Chinese, a talent that made him extremely valuable to the small community of East India Company traders who lived for a few months of the year in the factories outside the port city of Canton. Those British traders, known as “supercargoes,” had recently learned that the emperor would no longer allow them to visit other cities up the coast, which frustrated them not only because they wanted access to multiple Chinese ports for the sake of competition, but also because the senior customs official in Canton (known to them as the “hoppo”) was corrupt. He regularly demanded bribes from them and charged higher duties than he was supposed to. Their only recourse, as they saw it, was to try to appeal directly to the emperor in Beijing, in hopes that he might discipline the hoppo and allow them access to one or two other ports for their trade. As Flint was the only one among them who could communicate in Chinese, it fell to him to bring their appeal north.
James Flint’s path to learning Chinese had not been in any way a product of his own hopes or interests. As a child in England, he had been adopted in the 1730s by a ship’s captain named Rigby who brought him halfway around the world to the trading enclave of Canton and left him there, just a boy at the time, with instructions to learn the local language so he might make himself useful and perhaps get a job with the East India Company. Rigby then sailed away, intending to reunite with the boy sometime in the future. It was three years before young James finally heard from Rigby again, in a letter summoning him to Bombay. James took passage from Canton, but Captain Rigby died in a shipwreck not long after writing the letter, and by the time James got to India there was no one there to greet him. The British administrators in Bombay, at a loss as to what to do with the orphan boy, put him back on a ship to Canton, alone and penniless.1
With no money for a passage back to England, and nobody to care for him there even if he could get back, young James found a home with the East India Company’s supercargoes. He grew up over the years under their guardianship in Canton and the nearby Portuguese settlement of Macao—an adolescent, then a young man with a long Chinese braid, who dressed like the English when their ships were in port but wore clothes like the Chinese when they were not. He had no family but the East India Company, no home but the hybrid trading world in the small compound outside the broad stone walls of Canton where the foreigners stayed. Along with his native English he learned to speak the local dialect of Cantonese and a bit of the official dialect of Mandarin, and he could read and write in Chinese as well.
It was, as Captain Rigby had hoped, enough to make him a living. The British ships that came and went from Canton paid Flint a respectable fee to negotiate their terms of trade with local merchants. Without him, they had to rely on native translators, who charged high fees and usually took the side of their Chinese patrons. When discussions got thorny, the native translators were useless. The British supercargoes had long wanted one of their own kind to represent them in their business dealings, someone they could trust to put their interests first, and with Flint they finally had that. In time he was made a supercargo himself, and by 1759 when the others sent him up the coast to try to reach the emperor, he had put in more than twenty years of service at Canton.2

Flint sailed from Macao on the morning of June 13, 1759, on the Success, a little English snow with an eight-man crew and three servants, their course set for the port of Ningbo midway up the coast. He carried a formal petition in Chinese, addressed to the emperor, that his Chinese teacher had helped him write. Along with asking the emperor to investigate the Canton hoppo, Flint’s petition also requested permission for the British to trade at Ningbo, which was closer to the centers of production of tea and silk (and closer to the northern climates where there might be a better market for English woolens than at subtropical Canton). The British had traded at Ningbo in the past and knew that the merchants there still wanted their business—Flint himself had ascertained as much during a series of short voyages up to the city a few years earlier. But the officials in Canton were jealous of other ports siphoning off their business. And the government in Beijing enjoyed a steady income from the taxes on land transport for all of the goods that were carried down to Canton, income that would be lost if the trade went on in more convenient places. For those reasons, and to keep foreign relations focused and closely supervised, the emperor seemed intent on restricting the British to Canton alone.3
The initial stage of the voyage was unpromising. Upon his reaching Ningbo in late June, the officials in the port told Flint that his ship was forbidden to remain there. Flint pleaded that he carried a petition for the emperor, asking that the officials at least forward it for him to Beijing, but they would not accept it or even allow anyone from his ship to disembark. They told him to go back to Canton. He could not do that, though; it was impossible to sail back down against the winds in that season, and would be until September at least, when the strong southwest monsoon that swept up the coast of China during the summer months would reverse itself. So, absent any welcome from shore, Flint gave up on Ningbo and the Success continued on its plaintive course northward into the unknown.
On July 10, after two more weeks of feeling its way up the coast without a chart, the Success finally arrived at the broad, turbid mouth of the White River in northern China (known today as the Hai River), the maritime gateway to the inland city of Tianjin. Beyond Tianjin, a road led overland to Beijing. An official from one of the large forts that guarded the shallow river’s mouth came out in a junk to inform Flint that his ship was forbidden to proceed inland. But everything was negotiable, and after some further conversation the official said perhaps he could represent Flint’s case to his colleagues in Tianjin. For a fee, he could tell them that the Success hadn’t come on purpose but had simply been blown to this part of the coast by foul weather, and in that case Flint might be allowed up the river. The price he named for his services was 5,000 Chinese taels, a bribe worth nearly $7,000 at the time, or about $200,000 in today’s currency. Flint protested that he didn’t have that much money on board, but the official said he wouldn’t risk his position for anything less than half that sum. He gave Flint one night to think about it.4
Flint could not turn back. Aside from the adverse winds that made a southbound cruise impossible, the unsanctioned voyage of the Success up the coast would soon become known to the jealous officials down in Canton, who, if they knew the English had failed to get the attention of the emperor, were likely to become even more antagonistic. So Flint finally gave in and offered the man 2,000 taels—less than he had demanded, but still an astronomical bribe. He would pay two-thirds down, the remainder when he left. The official was true to his word, and on July 21, Flint continued upriver to Tianjin, where the senior official in charge of the city gave him a polite reception. Less polite, though, were the ordinary residents of Tianjin, who got into such a commotion over the arrival of a foreign ship that soldiers had to be called in to prevent a mob from storming it. An official transmitted Flint’s petition to the emperor in Beijing, and Flint himself was moved into housing on land to wait for a response, in a Buddhist temple surrounded by guards to protect him from the mobs. There were twenty of them, which proved barely enough to keep the locals at bay.
A response from the capital came one week later. As much as Flint was given to know of its contents, the emperor had been moved by the foreigners’ complaints about corruption at Canton and was appointing a commissioner to investigate the hoppo. So Flint’s petition had been at least partially successful. Indeed, the British complaints about excessive customs charges at Canton were welcome to the ears of an emperor keenly interested in maintaining control over the remote distances of his vast empire, who knew that legitimate reports of official misconduct were far more difficult to come by than bland cover-ups.
Since Flint was the complainant, though, he was made responsible for seeing the accusations through. The emperor ordered him to leave the Success and its crew behind at Tianjin, and rather than sail back down the coast with them in the autumn as he had planned, he was to proceed immediately overland to Canton in the company of the imperial commissioner in order to provide him with proof of the hoppo’s corruption. Flint and the commissioner left the next morning, beginning a journey down the north–south axis of the empire along an inland route through China never before traversed by an English-man. Flint did not leave a record of what he saw, but he arrived safely in Canton six weeks later. The Success and its crew, however, would never be heard from again.5
Regrettably for James Flint, it turned out that there was more to the emperor’s response than he knew. The hoppo was indeed removed from office and replaced by someone more honest, but beyond that, the emperor had also been disturbed by Flint’s audacity in circumventing the established channels of communication. In particular, Flint had sailed an English ship into ports where foreign vessels were forbidden, and he had submitted a petition in Chinese directly to the sovereign despite having no rank or status within the empire.
And so it was that another edict arrived, not long after Flint got back to Canton, ordering his arrest for those crimes.6 The local authorities at Canton gladly took him into custody and locked him up in a jail at the edge of Macao. As he languished there for months, and as those months turned into years, the British supercargoes were completely powerless to secure his release—or even to visit him, for that matter. At one point during his long incarceration, the Qing governor in Canton went so far as to write a letter to the king of England extolling the Chinese government’s generosity in merely sentencing James Flint to prison, calling his punishment “such amazingly gracious treatment that he should think of it with tears.” He said that all the British who had come to China for trade “have been so drenched with the waves of the imperial favour that they should leap for joy and turn towards us for civilization!”7
The only sense in which Flint’s treatment might be termed “gracious” was in how it compared to the fate of his Chinese teacher. As the emperor saw it, Flint could not have made his voyage, and thus could not have committed his various crimes, if native Chinese subjects had not helped him learn the language and write the petition. They were the ones most to blame. And so, by the emperor’s further orders, on the same day that James Flint was arrested, his Chinese teacher was taken into custody as well and decapitated.8 The teacher’s head was then hung on display as a public warning to any other Chinese at Canton who might in the future think of helping one of the f