This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

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

The Rees Brothers: Big and Little Li

“We transshipped to the Col Young some opium and then proceeded to Chinchew bay to sell. Had been there about a week when Rees came up and requested me to go to Chimmo bay as he found it unpleasant to be near to his brother who he was very sorry to inform me was not a man of his word, that he had arranged prices with him and then undersold him.”

Captain Mackay to William Jardine, January 21st, 1836.*

The two men referred to in the Case against Shi Hou as “Macao-born foreigners Big and Little Li” were John and Thomas Rees, estranged brothers who were captains in the opium fleets of the rival firms Jardine-Matheson (John) and Dent & Co. (Thomas). Thomas, the elder brother, had been the captain of the “Lord Amherst” voyage of 1832, a trip organized by a coalition of British opium merchants to scout and map the Chinese coast for the purposes of commercial expansion.

During the mid-1830s, the two brothers were frequently stationed at the Shenhu Bay anchorage at the same time, competing with each other for the business of the brokers on shore. In the above quote, Jardine-Matheson's Captain Mackay discusses the tense relationship between the two Rees brothers, who were constantly feuding with one another over opium pricing in Shenhu Bay.

In the summer of 1836, the Rees brothers had become fed up with each other. There had been a constant string of lies and broken promises between the two men, and they decided to draw up a written contract to equalize sales and prices in Shenhu Bay. As noted in the text of the contract, the agreement accounts for “Manderrine fees of $10 per chest. (sic)”

John Rees erected Lexden Terrace in Tenby, Wales, upon his return from China. It remains today as a visible legacy of the Rees brothers' opium fortunes.

*Source: JM:B2 7 [R. 495, No. 76] MacKay to Jardine, 1.21.1836

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page has tags:

This page is referenced by:

The Coastal Opium Trade in 1830s Fujian 74 Peter D. Thilly image_header 4897 2021-09-30T10:33:29-04:00 Lintin 22.4167, 113.8000 Xiamen 24.48535, 118.08850 24.4167, 118.12743 24.35603, 118.15146 Shenhu Bay 24.6500, 118.6667 Canton 23.1167, 113.2500 22.40468, 113.80462 22.39706, 113.63021 22.28973, 113.94126 22.4142, 113.91534 Bombay 18.9750, 72.8258 London 51.5142, -0.0931 Quanzhou 24.86830, 118.67729 24.60943, 118.45738 24.52075, 118.56243 24.63106, 118.66553 24.66804, 118.67326 24.84062, 118.70554 24.82504, 118.76116 24.87738, 118.89505 25.03177, 119.05092 Yakou 24.66782, 118.64392 Beijing 39.92284, 116.40120 Shantou 23.35219, 116.67682 23.43193, 117.09911 Macao 22.17730, 113.54689 Yakou Village, Shenhu Bay 24.663469444444, 118.64524166667 Fuzhou 26.0614, 119.3061 Shanghai 31.24063, 121.48999 Singapore 1.2833, 103.8500 Calcutta 22.5626, 88.3630 Patna 25.59409, 85.13756 Benares 25.3167, 83.0104 Malwa 22.71956, 75.85772 Aceh 4.69513, 96.74939 Goa 15.29932, 74.12399 Zanzibar -6.16519, 39.19891 Mombasa -4.04347, 39.6682 Hosur 11.12712, 78.65689 Penang 5.41413, 100.32875 Manila 14.59951, 120.98421 Chaozhou 23.6567, 116.62275 Aden 22.19874, 113.54387 Lascars 12.78549, 45.01865 1832-1838 Peter D. Thilly Jardine-Matheson Yakou Village Fujian Jinjiang County Opium War
This module tells the story of how a transnational coalition of maritime traders came together to operate one of the largest illicit drug markets in history. The importation of opium into China prior to 1832 occurred exclusively in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, where Fujianese and Cantonese ships would load up on the drug for delivery to other parts of the empire.
By the late 1830s, a huge portion of the import trade had migrated north into Fujian province. Every day after 1834 or so there were around a dozen British ships permanently anchored in strategic bays along the Fujian coast, importing tens of thousands of chests of opium directly into Fujian and exporting jaw-dropping quantities of treasure.
This module allows users to explore this dramatic explosion in the Fujianese opium trade, by focusing on the local story of Shenhu Bay in Jinjiang County, and the interactions between the Shi Lineage of Yakou Village and the Rees brothers of Jardine-Matheson and Dent & Co.
Module Layout
1. Navigating Sources and Mapping the Opium Trade. Introduces the goals of the module, provides necessary background information, and summarizes my interpretation of the archival sources that make up the two main body paths of the module.
2. The Case Against Shi Hou: A Qing Document. Constructed out of a primary source from the Qing territorial administration, a criminal case against a man called Shi Hou for escorting British opium ships to his hometown of Yakou Village.
3. The Jardine-Matheson Global Network. A re-creation of the largest and most influential British opium-trading firm, divided up conceptually and geographically, interspersed with images, videos, and primary source text from the Jardine-Matheson archive.
4. A Spatial History of Profit. Three short essays on a spatial history of profit and corruption on the Qing maritime frontier.
5. Conclusion: Space as Process. The concluding page to the module.
Link: Jardine-Matheson Archives Catalog (holdings are at the Cambridge University Library)
Link: First Historical Archives in Beijing

Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.
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.
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
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.
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.
Environment and Physical Geography
Environment and physical geography played key roles in how actors sought to maximize their opium profits. Below I discuss one aspect of this history that appears within the sources, and gesture towards another that is relevant to this story but not included in this module. Visitors to the module are encouraged to find additional ways that environment and physical geography might have affected the history of the opium trade, and to use this concept to link this module to the others.
Where mountains meet the sea
The Fujian littoral is a place of jagged coastline, small bays, scatterings of islands, winding peninsulas, and steep mountains that ascend from the shoreline. In short, it was and remains an extremely difficult place for states to keep watch over. The region's first foreign Commissioner of Customs, F. Nevill May, wrote in 1865 that Fujian’s mountains and rivers present “so many obstacles to the construction of canals and railways that they will probably never be introduced into this part of China.”* Fuzhou and Wenzhou—a large city in coastal Zhejiang only 207 miles north of Fuzhou—were only recently connected by rail, in 2003. The construction necessitated the excavation of no fewer than 53 tunnels.
The map below is geotagged to Xiamen, Shenhu Bay, Quanzhou, and Fuzhou in order to enable users to view the entirety of the Fujian coast from above (much like how the Japanese state sought to use airplanes to achieve a new view of Inner Asia). Zoom in and consider for yourself how difficult it must have been for the Qing state to try and keep powerful lineages like the Yakou Shi from breaking maritime laws.
The jagged and winding nature of the Fujian littoral was clearly an important part of the success of the Chinese and foreign network of opium traders discussed in this module. Because the opium trade was nominally illegal, the ideal scenario for people like Shi Hou and John Rees was to keep their dealings entirely invisible from the state. Arranging clandestine meetups offshore was clearly the way to go.
As the years went on, it became impossible for a trade of this volume to go on without any government awareness. Recall the video of Shenhu Bay: any person in any of the villages that overlook the bay and any person that travelled to the bay would have been able to see the British opium ships and the boats of their Chinese opium customers. It simply isn't that big of a place. Thus, as discussed more extensively elsewhere in this module, the opium smugglers of Yakou village and their British partners offshore arranged for systematic bribery of local officials to keep the trade going. At that point, the utility of a geographic location like Shenhu Bay was that it was not visible from other, more well-garrisoned parts of the coast. Officials who took bribes, it should be remembered, also needed to keep their secrets.
Environment, topography, and opium cultivation
The cultivation of opium poppies and production of opium is another side of the history of opium profits, which for the most part is not touched on within the sources included in this module. Historian Rolf Bauer's new book The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India (Brill, 2019) is a fantastic place to start for anyone interested in this side of the story. Bauer's research into the production of Patna opium in India is exhaustive and wide-ranging, including detailed analyses of social formations, labor practices, and the changing interactions between peasant cultivators and the physical landscape over a century of opium production. Consider the following passage on irrigation in two environmentally very similar parts of India: Gaya, an opium producing region just south of the city of Patna, and Saran, just to the north of Patna. As Bauer shows us, there are rich possibilities for a spatial history of opium production, tracing out the interactions between human actors and the physical environment in the pursuit of opium profits:
Gaya's agriculturalists constructed irrigation facilities because the natural conditions basically forced them to. Saran's agriculturalists were less pressed to do so because the district's soil easily retained moisture… How can we explain this difference despite the similar conditions? Saran's relative progress was ascribed to the ambition of the local sub-deputy opium agent, then a Mr. Tytler, who was known for encouraging the construction of wells. On the one hand, this must be seen as a positive investment in Saran's infrastructure. On the other hand, the contracts for the construction of wells were a powerful tool to further press the cultivators.**
*Chinese Maritime Customs Microfilm, Reel 4, “Return on Trade at the Port of Foochow for the Year 1865.”
**Rolf Bauer, The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India (Brill, 2019), p. 107.
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.

This page has paths:

This page has tags:

This page is referenced by:

This page references: