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

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.

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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.
What really happened to Shi Hou? 39 Questions about the final result of the Qing memorial on Shi Hou plain 2021-03-09T10:06:29-05:00 Peter D. Thilly
The memorial states that Shi Hou was sentenced to immediate strangulation for his crimes, but it also notes at one point that Shi Hou "died of illness" while in custody and awaiting sentencing, along with fourteen other unlucky prisoners. His sentence was posthumous.
Did the "real" Shi Hou die in jail?
Can we take the document at its word that the person the Qing officials arrested was indeed Shi Hou? Do we actually know that the person who was arrested under the name Shi Hou was the ringleader of the opium network? Was a person named Shi Hou really in charge of the Shi lineage smuggling operations at Yakou?
These questions are worth asking. I believe that there was an actual person who at some point went by the name Shi Hou. Here are two plausible stories about him:
1. Shi Hou was a minor figure in the opium ring.The Yakou Shi lineage was large enough that it contained internal class differences, between wealthy elites and the laboring poor. Perhaps Shi Hou was employed by someone from the top of the lineage hierarchy, and the Qing state's decision to charge him as ringleader was a compromise, a clear and symbolic punishment of the lineage as a whole, sacrificing an expendable member of the lower stratum of the lineage.
  
  If this were the case, the suspect’s decision to confess makes sense. By claiming that he had been the head criminal, and it had been his idea to bring Big and Little Li to Fujian, he acknowledged his grim fate and studiously implicated nobody else in the lineage. Such loyalty was the kind of thing that might ensure financial compensation for his family.
2. Shi Hou was the name of an important figure in the opium trade. Perhaps he was actually an instrumental figure in helping Jardine-Matheson establish themselves in Shenhu Bay. It is true that his name appears across a number of years and sources in Qing archives. Different people within the coastal administration knew this person’s name.
  
  If Shi Hou had been a high-level figure in the trade, with the requisite connections and finances, it would be reasonable to suspect that the prisoner “Shi Hou” who died in jail was a stand-in, a lower strata lineage member whose family would have been paid for his service as a substitute prisoner. This practice was not uncommon in late Qing Fujian.
Is Shi Hou in the Jardine-Matheson Archive?
I have found reference to the names of just four people in the Jardine-Matheson archive that can be reliably connected to the Shi lineage.
The first three names come from a letter in Chinese that the brokers at Yakou Village sent to Captain Rees, who they refer to as "Captain Li" (李船主). The letter is signed by three people, offering only given names and no surname: Yayang (亞樣), Yabo (亞伯) and Yazhen (亞朕). The second one, Yabo, is almost certainly the "Mr. Yabe" that appears throughout the Jardine-Matheson materials as a middleman between the ship and local brokerage firms. I was unable to find any of these three names (or indeed any of the names in the memorial) in unpublished Shi lineage genealogies.
The other reference is more intriguing: a man named Shik Po who spent a lot of time aboard the Jardine-Matheson receiving ships. One representative example of Shik Po's appearance in the sources is when Captain Forbes, visiting Shenhu bay in 1839 (two years after the arrest of Shi Hou), remarked that “Shik Po the Yakow man who took refuge with us last year has again come off and is now living on board.”* Could this not be the "real" Shi Hou? Based on local pronunciation it seems more plausible that Shik Po could have been Shi Shubao, the kinsman of Shi Hou who had learned English and was never captured.
The realms of possibility
The value in this kind of speculation is thinking through the webs of different structures that a man like Shi Hou would have been enmeshed with. The lineage structure of coastal Fujianese society would have been the most dominant structure in his life. But his illegal activity also placed him in the grasp of the political-military structures of the Qing state in his region. Qing officials like the Jinjiang magistrate and the Quanzhou prefect were outsiders - people who grew up in other provinces and were appointed to Fujian from Beijing. Meanwhile, the Fujian navy was a far more local institution, as the Manchu rulers from the northeast Asian hinterland were forced to rely on locals who knew how to sail and navigate the difficult Fujian coast.
New structures with new spatialities had also advanced into the world of Shi Hou. The rising tide of British imperialism undergirded an institution like Jardine-Matheson and enabled people like William Jardine and James Matheson to source their opium and hire labor for their ships and factories. By entering into a relationship with the Rees brothers, Shi Hou and his lineage members were thus also drawn into the rapidly transforming structures of the British empire. But Rees and his employers in Guangzhou did not see themselves as empire-builders: these men were engaged in the single-minded pursuit of profit. They were pioneers in one of the formative moments and contexts for the rise of global capitalism. This too structured the possibilities for a man like Shi Hou.
*JM B2.7, Reel 495, No. 247, Forbes to Jardine, 24 February 1839
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.

The expansion of the system

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