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

Lintin

I have again the pleasure to announce the return of the Fairy with about $60,000, Rees having sold all his Bengal drug but only I believe about thirty chests of the Malwa.

Captain Mackay aboard The Fairy at Lintin to William Jardine in Canton, March 7th, 1835.*

The model for offshore opium trading in places like Shenhu Bay was forged in the waters off the island of Lintin in the Pearl River Delta during the 1820s. Once Jardine-Matheson and its rival companies began sending ships north to Fujian, Lintin became the key site for fast ships like The Fairy to pick up opium for delivery to Rees and the other captains stationed in Fujian, as well as the site for depositing the profits gained at the northern opium stations. Above is excerpted a short portion of a letter from Captain Mackay of The Fairy, stating his return from the Fujian opium stations with $60,000 earned by Captain John Rees in Shenhu Bay and Quanzhou Bay.

*JM:B2 17 [R. 31, No. 19] MacKay to Jardine on Treasure Shipments, 3.17.1835

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Background Information
Opium was illegal in the Qing empire during the 1830s, but British merchants brought enormous quantities of the drug from India to the southern coast of China. Over the course of the 1830s, the trade expanded in volume as it migrated northward from Lintin off the coast of Guangdong province to Fujianese ports like Xiamen and Shenhu Bay. This northward migration was partly responsible for the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839.
Continue below for more background on these points. Or, continue to the next page.
Opium's legality:
The sale and consumption of opium was extraordinarily widespread in China during the 1830s, but it was entirely illegal. This meant that all of the opium sold and consumed in the Qing empire during these years had to be smuggled in and distributed illegally. As a consequence, there were infinite opportunities for corruption and government participation in the illegal trade, from the moment of import, at each node in the distribution network, down to the retail and smoking of the drug.
Opium trading practices:
The opium sold in China in the 1830s was grown in India and smuggled into the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou (Canton) by primarily British merchants. Americans and various British colonial subjects (especially the Parsee community of Bombay) were also involved in the transport trade from India to China.
Since at least the mid-1820s, the central location for opium transactions between foreign and Chinese merchants was an anchorage off the island of Lintin in the Pearl River Delta near present-day Hong Kong. At this remote offshore island, British firms permanently anchored large "receiving ships," which were stationary vessels that operated as floating warehouses. Chinese buyers would go to money-lending shops in Guangzhou (Canton) to make payment, then take a receipt out to a foreign receiving ship anchored near Lintin to receive their opium. In this way the British and Chinese merchants involved in the trade could keep their transactions out of the immediate surveillance of the high officials in Guangzhou.
Opium's northward migration:
The Lintin system of offshore opium transactions expanded north from Guangdong province into neighboring Fujian province around 1834, when British firms established receiving ship stations in various locations along the southern Fujian littoral. This migration of the trade from the Pearl River Delta north into Fujianese ports like Xiamen and Shenhu Bay is the primary subject of this module. The timing of the trade's migration in 1834 is due to the British East India Company relinquishing their monopoly over British trade in China that year, which opened the door for new British firms like Jardine-Matheson and their competitor Dent & Co. to expand the trade into new markets.
The aftermath:
The events of this module take place in the years just before the Opium War of 1839-1842. That war began in the wake of an incident wherein a Qing official named Lin Zexu determined to confiscate and destroy the opium holdings of Jardine-Matheson and a number of other firms. William Jardine spent the duration of that war in London lobbying the British Government to secure compensation for the opium that Lin destroyed.
This module thus explains one of the central reasons for that war: the rapid expansion of the trade in the mid-1830s, and the movement of foreign opium merchants up the coast towards Fujian. Jardine-Matheson and their Chinese partners established a hugely successful opium import market in the waters off Fujian province. For anti-opium officials like Lin Zexu (himself a native of Fujian), one of the unforgivable actions of the opium traders was in moving their boats up the coast from the Pearl River Delta, which had an established system of legal trade for Europeans, and anchoring instead in Fujian, where foreigners from Europe were not allowed to travel.
The Receiving Ship System
The receiving ship system refers to the network of ships employed by firms like Jardine-Matheson, wherein larger vessels would station themselves offshore from key marketing areas and serve as floating warehouses for opium and silver, with faster ships moving between the anchorages carrying the drugs and money. The practice was modeled after how the opium trade had operated at Lintin in the preceding decades, where opium traders stationed huge ships permanently as warehouses for the opium coming from India and the silver coming from their Chinese purchasers. The map above compiles the locations all of the receiving ship anchorages I have been able to confirm through the Jardine-Matheson archive.
The expansion of the system
In July of 1832, Jardine dispatched John Rees in the brig Dansbourg up the coast towards Xiamen to try and sell opium directly to Chinese purchasers in Fujian. Rees left Lintin with 467 chests of opium, most of which belonged to Jardine and his partner Magniac, though 174 of the chests belonged to a Chinese broker known as Ahant. After a six-week coasting tour, selling modest consignments averaging ten chests per sale over to local smugglers, Rees returned with $131,750. The sales records do not account for the opium delivered on behalf of Ahant, who presumably payed Jardine for delivery of his 174 chests of opium to partners in Fujian. All in all it was a promising start for the new firm.*
Following the initial voyage of the Dansbourg, William Jardine sent John Rees, William MacKay, and James Innes north on the Colonel Young, John Biggar, and Jamesina, all large and well-armed ships. Within months of these exploratory voyages, Jardine had set up what was called the “receiving ship” system, which would remain in place for over two decades. Faster ships like the Sylph would transport opium up from Lintin to larger, often older and not terribly sea-worthy vessels, which would remain at the main anchorages in and around Xiamen and Quanzhou.
The Quanzhou Prefect Shen Ruhan knew all of the pertinent details:
Two smaller lorchas built in a similar way to the big ships and capable of carrying one thousand catties often bring up opium from Guangdong, transfer it to the big ships, and carry the silver from the big ships back down without waiting around. [YPZZ-MT, 291-295]
By 1837, there was an average of 15 foreign receiving ships (owned by Jardine, Dent, as well as a collection of American and Parsee merchants) regularly anchored off the Fujian coast at any given moment.** The map of anchorages and lineages referenced in this module's introduction offers a sense of where these anchorages were located along the southern Fujian coastline.
*JM A7.346, 1832-1833.
**China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. And the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong 1827-1843, ed. Alain le Pichon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 312.
Exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network 36 Landing page for exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network plain 2021-03-09T13:05:31-05:00 Peter D. Thilly
There are multiple ways to explore the materials I've assembled for this path. First-time visitors and anyone wishing to get the "whole story" should consider clicking through in order, but non-linear exploration is encouraged. To that end, on this page I've grouped the entire contents of the path to serve as a menu and map of the contents. The first six pages of the path center around the people and practices, and the remaining pages are built around locations of importance within the Jardine-Matheson global network.
People and Practices
- The Rees Brothers: Big and Little Li
- The Receiving Ship System
- Brokers and Middlemen
- Experts and Specialists
- Lascars and Manilamen
- Corruption and Bribery
Global Connections
- Chimmo (Shenhu Bay)
- Lintin
- Canton (Guangzhou)
- Macao
- Singapore
- Calcutta
- Patna
- Benares (Varanasi)
- Bombay (Mumbai)
- Malwa
- London
Discrete Physical Spaces 26 A list of some of the discrete physical spaces important to the spatial history of profit plain 2021-01-28T10:12:39-05:00 Peter D. Thilly
People pursued opium profits within discrete physical spaces. These spaces shaped decision making, instilling confidence or exposing vulnerabilities, embodying opportunities to enhance profitability, decrease risk, or manipulate the competition. Below is a list of some of the spaces that I have identified as important to the spatial history of profit. Visitors to the module are encouraged to compile their own lists, and to connect the significance of some of these physical spaces to those occurring in other modules.
Boats:
- The receiving ships at Lintin and in Shenhu Bay and along the coast. These were stationary vessels captained by British employees of Jardine-Matheson and their competitors, and crewed by sailors from all over the world. These ships rarely moved locations, and operated as floating warehouses. One of the fullest pictures of life on these receiving ships can be found in a travelogue by the American dentist, B.L. Bell (this account is from over a decade after the events of this module take place).
- Smaller, fast ships like the Fairy that made rapid and repeated voyages between the receiving ships anchored on the coast in places like Shenhu Bay and the company's central receiving ship at Lintin.
- Opium clippers like the Red Rover that voyaged between India (Calcutta or Bombay), Singapore, and the receiving ships at Lintin. Perhaps the most exciting examination of life aboard these opium clippers can be found in the Ibis Trilogy by author Amitav Ghosh.
Villages, Towns, and Cities:
- Yakou Village, a small coastal town dominated by the Shi lineage. This is where Shi Hou and his kinsmen operated a massive smuggling ring, positioning themselves as middlemen between Chinese buyers and British opium importers.
- Macao, a Portuguese colonial outpost in the Pearl River Delta near Lintin. One important function of Macao as a physical space was as a meeting place and job market for Chinese brokers to link up with British ship captains like the Rees Brothers to arrange trips up the coast.
- The Canton Factories, just outside of the Guangzhou city gates. This is where the leadership of the Jardine-Matheson company kept their offices, arranging deals with prominent Chinese merchants, interacting with the representatives of the Qing state, and overseeing the correspondence of the company's global network.
- Other cities like Calcutta, Singapore, Bombay, and London.
Anchorages:
- Neither fully on shore, nor fully out at sea, anchorages like Shenhu Bay and Lintin were also important physical spaces in this story. As the video I took from the beach at Yakou demonstrates, the anchorages were in plain sight of the shore. In the 1830s, a veritable fleet of fishing and trading sailboats would have passed back and forth past them each day.
A Deal is Struck at Lintin, Shi Shubao becomes a Translator
Original: 道光十五年六月間施猴因挑運煙土不便，起意勾引夷船泊放閩洋販賣，與施漱寶商允。又各出資本洋銀一千六百元，同赴廣東澳門零丁外洋向夷人大李、小李議定煙土價銀每箱四百八十元，汁土四十塊。施猴等將番銀三千二百元買得煙土多箱，並囑其多帶煙土一併運往設法代為銷售。該夷人大李等即來夾板船裝載煙土，並邀通事陳阿跳、陽明同往正欲開行。王麻執聞知其事亦買得煙土，租駕紅頭裝載，令陳阿跳在船驗受，與大李等夷船一同駕至。
In the sixth month of the fifteenth year of Daoguang (June of 1835), Shi Hou decided that transporting the opium himself was too inconvenient, and contrived the idea of enticing the foreign boats to come anchor off the Fujian coast and sell opium. He shared the idea with Shi Shubao, and each invested 1,600 in silver taels.
They brought the money to Lintin near Macao and gave it to the foreigners Big and Little Li, who had set a price of 480 taels of silver per chest (each containing 40 bricks of opium). Shi Hou and the others handed over their 3,200 taels, and began trying to figure out how to transport and sell the opium.
Big and Little Li had just then purchased a lorcha, and they invited on two other Chinese middlemen (Chen A-Tiao and Yang Ming) who were just then thinking of starting a business. When Wang Mazhi heard about this, he too bought a large amount of opium and hired Chen A-Tiao to rent a "Redhead Boat" [a boat from Chaozhou, in Guangdong Province] and travel along with the others up the coast.
Original: 施漱寶因時與夷船交易漸曉夷語，與澳門生辰之紅毛夷人大李、小李熟知。
Shi Shubao, due to prolonged interaction with foreigners, gradually learned to speak and comprehend the foreign language. He became intimately acquainted with the Macao-born red-hair foreigners Big and Little Li.
Source: Junji chu Hanwen lufu zouzhe (Grand Council Chinese-Language Palace Memorial Copies, often cited as LFZZ), Beijing: First Historical Archives, 03–4007–048, DG 18.10.29.
Conclusion: Space as Process
The history of the opium trade in coastal Fujian shows how discrete physical spaces unfold into “space as process.” Discrete physical spaces and locales constitute, transform, break down, and reconstitute distinct spatialities through the movements, actions, and decisions of people.
The Jardine-Matheson Company’s global network was a collection of ports and sailboats between Great Britain, India, and China. The geospatial location of the ports can be mapped with numerical precision, lending these ports the aura of transcendental place. The assumption of the absolute-ness of location shapes how we see the visual media that represent these sailboats: not as wayfaring vessels seeking out moving locales in the shifting media of the ocean (wind, waves, etc.) (Peters 2015) but as objects in transit between two fixed points in the network. But the points were not so fixed as we might assume. The meaning, function, and distance between—and therefore, the location of—the Jardine-Matheson company's network of ports and sailboats between India and China changed appreciably over the course of the early nineteenth century. Clipper ships like the Red Rover fundamentally changed the nature of the spatialities of profit and information management for Jardine-Matheson. The actions of people like William Jardine, James Matheson, and their partners and employees transformed the possibilities of the technology into new patterns of trade, investment, and profit. The island of Lintin did not move locations, and neither did the ground upon which people built the cities of Singapore and Calcutta. But the work that these ports did to generate profits for Jardine-Matheson, and the distance between them, changed, bringing Lintin, Singapore, and Calcutta closer to each other and closer to London. These efforts worked in parallel with the efforts of the British Empire to produce new geopolitical frameworks for profit. The Treaty of Nanjing (1843), which concluded the Opium War, further changed the place of ports in the Jardine-Matheson network. Lintin lost its significance, replaced (in part) with the new British colony of Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the opening of two treaty ports in Fujian (Xiamen and Fuzhou) meant that people living in the coastal hinterland in places like Shenhu Bay had to create ways of trading, investing, and profiting from opium.
Space as process reveals the dynamic nature of narratives of place and personhood. The evolving commercial network between people like Shi Hou and John Rees precipitated the emergence of shadow or echo spatialities within the politics and worldviews of Qing administrators and patriotic Han Chinese onlookers from outside of the region. Coastal Fujian had long possessed the reputation of a place with outsized (and dangerous) lineages, along with illegal (and dangerous) commercial and migratory connections to various parts of Southeast Asia. But beginning in the 1830s, the connotations of coastal Fujian's connections and interactions with the outside world began to change. The actions of these people and the networks they operated came to represent the core essence of treason as China entered the modern era. Coastal Fujianese opium traders like Shi Hou came to personify treason during the rise of modern Chinese nationalism. The sources of the documents in this module underscore this. I found Shi Hou in a Chinese archive devoted to Qing history—an example of many legal cases the Qing administration brought against coastal residents who participated in the opium trade. In contrast, John and Thomas Rees and the Jardine-Matheson Company live on in modern glory—a dedicated archive at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, named buildings that continue to mark the coastline of the People’s Republic of China and Wales, and dozens of monographs devoted to understanding and analyzing their empire.
Manipulating Space and Time
Time was an essential component of how actors calculated their actions in the pursuit of opium profits. Below I explore two avenues through which to understand the role of time in a spatial history of the opium trade, but visitors are encouraged to develop their own arguments about time and to use the materials in this module to link up with the others.
Monsoon seasons and Asian commerce in the age of sail
In the age of sail, the movement of people, objects, and boats between China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent was almost entirely dependent on the yearly pattern of monsoon winds. A single boat could only make the journey from India to China and back (or the reverse) but one time per year. This is because travelers going from India to China could only set sail during the southwest summer monsoon, and the trip would take two to three months. Likewise, the journey from China to India had to take place during the northeast winter monsoon, and again this trip would take nearly three months. The monsoon seasons therefore structured and limited trade between China, Southeast Asia, and India for most of recorded history.
Then, in 1832, the leadership of Jardine-Matheson and a coalition of other opium merchants got together to purchase an opium clipper known as the "Red Rover," which quickly became the first ship in recorded history to sail to China from India against the wind. This new technology enabled firms like Jardine-Matheson to bring ever-increasing quantities of opium from India to China, at record speed. As discussed below, one important consequence of more rapid connections between India and China was that it changed the calculus of opium pricing in Lintin and along the China coast.
Opium prices, the movement of information, and a race against time
Directly related to the history of sail technology and the centrality of the monsoon to Asian trading patterns, opium profits were highly dependent on taking advantage of differences in opium prices between locations. One example of this from the module is the quote from Captain Rees that headlines the Malwa page. In that example, Captain Rees discusses how the brokers in Shenhu Bay had managed to acquire information about the price of Malwa opium at Lintin and were consequently purchasing large amounts. For Captain Rees, setting prices was a matter of constant anxiety, as he was under pressure to sell as much opium as possible but at as high a price as could be obtained. The ability of his customers in Yakou Village to keep abreast of the price at Lintin limited Rees' ability to sell at inflated prices. For both parties, buying and selling opium was a constant race against time for the latest and best information.
The British East India Company opium auctions in Calcutta were another place where Jardine-Matheson and their competitors had to engage in complex calculations about time. The company's purchasing agents in Calcutta, like Rees in his station on the China coast, were under constant pressure from William Jardine in Guangzhou to make advantageous purchasing decisions, a calculation that could change unpredictably based on the activities of Chinese purchasers and government officials thousands of miles away. In the quote that headlines the Calcutta page of this module, we see Jardine complaining to Rees about the company agent in Calcutta's lack of awareness in failing to ship enough Patna and Benares opium to Lintin. On other occasions, Jardine became furious when the Calcutta agent sent too much opium to China and brought down prices.
It is easy to imagine an organization like the Shi lineage engaging in a similar range of time and price calculation. Like Jardine-Matheson, the Yakou Shi were a diversified and complex business organization, purchasing opium in Shenhu Bay for shipment to places like Taiwan, Ningbo, and ports in North China. A full range of sources do not exist to demonstrate the point, though the combination of materials in the British and Chinese archives do enough to give a clear sense of the size and scope of the Shi lineage's opium operations.
Canton (Guangzhou)
Our friend Allum, the opium broker, has come to represent to us that a friend of his is building a smuggling boat somewhere in your neighbourhood, and requests that we will ask the favour of you to endeavour to afford him any protection which may be in your power, in the event of his being molested by the Mandarins. You must not of course go to the length of committing any acts of violence against the Mandarins, but he thinks the Mandarins will be deterred from giving annoyance by a mere show on your part of a disposition to protect the boat building operation.

William Jardine in Canton to Captain Grant on board the Samarang at Lintin, 1832.*
Common practice in the opium trade was for Chinese buyers to pre-arrange their purchases from the ships at Lintin at the money shops in Guangzhou. For most of the 1830s, William Jardine operated out of the foreign factories in Guangzhou (pictured above), constantly interacting with local Chinese merchants as well as sending and receiving letters with his agents in Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, London, Macao, Lintin, and along the China coast in places like Shenhu Bay.
In the quote above, William Jardine describes how one of his Chinese partners approached him in Guangzhou in order to request that Jardine's ship at Lintin protect a shipbuilding operation near Lintin from interference by the Chinese government.
* China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. And the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong 1827-1843, ed. Alain le Pichon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162.
Malwa
Malwa has been much inquired after during the last week. They must have heard of the price in Canton. I do not think we could get more than 40-50$ more than the Canton prices. We should have 100 chests up for this market to sell with the Bengal drug.

Captain Rees in Shenhu Bay to William Jardine in Canton, 15 June 1836.*
The historical region of Malwa produced an alternate to the East India Company's monopoly opium from Patna and Benares. Indore, where this page is geotagged, is the largest present-day city in what was once called Malwa.
Malwa opium was packaged in cakes, rather than balls, and exported out of Bombay (Mumbai) rather than Calcutta (Kolkata). Because Malwa was produced outside of the British East India Company monopoly in Patna and Benares, its quality and pricing by the time it reached China was more volatile. The Shi lineage of Yakou Village purchased a great deal of Malwa for resale in Taiwan and North China during the mid-1830s.
The above quote from Captain Rees contextualizes the place of Malwa in the Shenhu Bay opium market during 1836. As Rees tells Jardine in the quotation, the brokers (people from Yakou village and the surrounding area) had a close eye on pricing in Guangzhou and Lintin. Both Rees and his Chinese partners were therefore trying to take advantage of price discrepancies between different opium markets on the China coast.
*Source: JM B2-7, Reel 495, No. 1, 6/15/1836.
London
The nominal price of Malwa is about 480 dollars a chest, but deliveries continue to be made at Namoa at 540 dollars, though latterly on a very limited scale owing to the competition arising from so many vessels (about 15 in number) scattered on different parts of the Coast. The legalization of the trade is no longer thought of; and government is evidently making a strong effort for the entire suppression.

James Matheson in Guangzhou to Captain Alexander Grant in London, 20 October 1837*
London, the capital of the British Empire, was a lynchpin within the Jardine-Matheson Global Network. At the beginning of the 1830s, London's importance to the firm was chiefly commercial and financial: it is where deals were arranged for the import of tea from China and the export of Manchester cloth to China, and was the heart of the financial wheeling and dealing the firm was famous for. The quote above shows that by the late 1830s, the firm also was keeping their agents in London abreast of the latest news about the illegal opium trade. Captain Grant, the recipient of the letter above, was actually the former captain of Jardine-Matheson's opium hulk at Lintin, the distribution center for all the opium arriving in China.
By the late 1830s, London was also assuming increased importance for the firm as a place for political lobbying. William Jardine left China in January 1839, erecting a new home in London's Upper Belgrave Street (pictured above). The Opium War erupted during his journey home, and Jardine rushed to London to advise Prime Minister Palmerston on how he believed the war should play out, while also lobbying incessantly for the British Government to ensure Jardine-Matheson would be compensated for the opium destroyed by Lin Zexu in March of 1839.
*China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson &Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong, 1827-1843, ed. Alain le Pichon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 312.

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The opium ships at Lintin, China, 1824