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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Archival Discoveries (2)

Big and Little Li (大小李), a.k.a. John and Thomas Rees

In the Jardine-Matheson archive, I found volumes of letters from the captains of the ships that anchored in places like Shenhu Bay. One of those captains was named John Rees, and one storyline in the archive revolves around John's feud with his brother Thomas, who was the captain of the rival Dent & Company opium ship that also frequented Shenhu Bay. It did not take me long to figure out that the foreign opium merchants known in the Shi Hou memorial as "Big and Little Li" were in fact John and Thomas Rees.

The Shadowy World of Corruption

As I explored further into the Jardine-Matheson archive, it became clear to me that the major arrests that took place in Yakou during early 1837 (i.e. the arrest of Shi Hou and his compatriots) most likely happened as a result of the failure of the Chinese opium traders to make good on their annual Lunar New Year bribe to the local government.

The Jardine-Matheson representative in Shenhu Bay, John Rees, wrote on January 2nd of that year that trade was stopped in Shenhu Bay for five days “in consequence of a party having cheated the Mandarines out of their customary fees.” Then on January 15 a group of government officials descended on Yakou village for the purpose of “recovering their fees,” and again stopped all boats from coming out for a period of three days. On the 21st Rees lamented that trade was completely stopped in Shenhu Bay due to the fact that “the Mandarines are about collecting their fees prior to the New Year and I believe are squeezing the brokers that we deal with rather hard.”

It was the Lunar New Year, a traditional time for the settling of debts and bribes, and not coincidentally the period during which Shi Hou and his compatriots were arrested. A month later, after sending a Chinese employee ashore to reconnoiter the situation, Rees reports that a new official stationed near Yakou “had burnt several houses and destroyed some boats…in consequence of the brokers not coming to terms with him. They have not paid the Mandarines 1/3 of their fees, and several of the brokers have absconded.”

The Qing document that describes Shi Hou's arrest does not in any way suggest that local officials may have been complicit in the trade, profiting from the trade, and seeking vengeance on the Shi lineage for failing to pay their usual bribe. This is to be expected, and does not diminish the value of the Qing memorial as a historical source. As we shall see, the memorial describes (sometimes in surprising detail) testimony about 111 individual people, providing access into local Fujianese society in a way that the Jardine-Matheson sources never could.

Sources: JM B2.7 [Reel 495] No. 131, 2 January 1837; no. 132, 15 January 1837; No. 133, 21 January 1837; No. 140, 28 March 1837.

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Archival Discoveries (1)
This page and the next page summarize what I learned about the opium trade in 1830s Fujian when I first read the materials from the Chinese and British archives.
Quantifying the Opium Trade
Part of figuring out the opium business involves quantifying the trade. How much opium did these people sell? One conclusion I quickly reached from reading the British and Chinese sources together is that the scope of the opium trade described by the Fujian Governor in The Case Against Shi Hou is severely underplayed. In contrast to the Qing memorial, which claims that foreign opium traders "Big and Little Li" sold just twenty-seven chests of opium total in their stay in Shenhu Bay, we have evidence from the Jardine-Matheson archive that "Big and Little Li," also known as Thomas and John Rees, could sell twenty-seven chests of opium in Shenhu Bay on a slow afternoon. One clear example of this is a report from Captain Jauncey of the Jardine-Matheson barque Austen about selling 320 chests of Malwa opium at $610/chest in just one day while stationed in Shenhu Bay during August of 1835, several months before Shi Hou supposedly lured Big and Little Li up from Macao.*
I subsequently compiled the Jardine-Matheson reports about their sales along with reports on the opium sales of their chief competitor Dent & Company, and found that these two firms sold between 1,400–2,000 chests of opium per month in Fujian for $840,000–$1,600,000. All told, the total imports into Fujian by these two firms during the years 1835–1838 ranged between 16,800–24,000 chests per year for an annual sum of $10,080,000–19,200,000. More than half of the opium that was shipped from India to China during the years prior to the Opium War was bought and sold through the Fujian receiving ship network.
Mapping the Coastal Opium Network
Reading the Qing memorial and the British sources together also helped me to understand the network of people that operated the opium trade in coastal Fujian. Qing sources indicate clearly that the Yakou Shi were ultimately just one of many coastal lineages involved in the trade, and Jardine-Matheson materials show that Shenhu Bay was but one of several important anchorages for the British opium traders. Dozens of coastal lineages along the Zhangzhou-Quanzhou coastline in southern Fujian during the 1830s were able to marshal the boats, people, and money necessary to make it big in the opium trade. Indeed, the region became China’s second most important opium market during the 1830s.
The above map is based on a 1840 investigation by two high officials sent down to Fujian from Beijing to investigate opium crimes, and it indicates the location of large lineages (including the Yakou Shi) who were known to collude with foreigners in the smuggling of opium in Jinjiang County. Each X on the map indicates a location that Jardine-Matheson commonly anchored their receiving ships. This small slice is indicative of a much larger reality: the map does not include the anchorages of Jardine's competition, and on shore the other counties (such as Tongan, Huian, etc.) each had their own cadre of lineages, ship-owners, and smugglers.**
*JM B2.7, Reel 496, No. 56, 12 August 1835.
**Peter Thilly, "Opium and the Origins of Treason: The View from Fujian," Late Imperial China 38, No. 1, 2017, (155-197) 175-176.