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

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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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.
Exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network 52 Landing page for exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network plain 2021-09-30T10:58:25-04:00 24.6500, 118.6667 Chimmo (Shenhu Bay) 22.4167, 113.8000 Lintin 23.1167, 113.2500 Canton (Guangzhou) 22.17730, 113.54689 Macao 1.2833, 103.8500 Singapore 22.5626, 88.3630 Calcutta 25.59409, 85.13756 Patna 25.3167, 83.0104 Benares 18.9750, 72.8258 Bombay 22.71956, 75.85772 Malwa 51.5142, -0.0931 London Peter D. Thilly Jardine-Matheson Company
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
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.) 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.
Discrete Physical Spaces 29 A list of some of the discrete physical spaces important to the spatial history of profit plain 2021-10-01T18:08:26-04:00 24.6500, 118.6667 Chimmo (Shenhu) Bay 22.4167, 113.8000 Lintin 22.5626, 88.3630 Calcutta (Kolkata) 18.9750, 72.8258 Bombay (Mumbai) 1.2833, 103.8500 Singapore 24.66767, 118.64379 Yakou 22.1667, 113.5500 Macao 51.5142, -0.0931 London 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.
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.

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