Conclusion: What Bodies? What Structures?
One body that has haunted me for years is that of Shi Hou, the supposed mastermind of the Shenhu Bay opium network. Here I am referring to the actual physical body of the man. The memorial that makes up the first path of this module states that Shi Hou was sentenced to immediate decapitation for his crimes. Not included in the sections of the text I translated for this module, the authors of the memorial at another point also state that Shi Hou died of illness in jail while awaiting sentencing. His sentence was posthumous, assuming we take the document at its word that the person the Qing officials arrested was indeed Shi Hou.
Can we be sure? Can 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 lineage smuggling operations? Was the person who died in jail actually named Shi Hou? Certainly there was an actual person who at some point went by the name Shi Hou. He may have been a minor figure in the opium ring, 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 cause the lineage elders to extend some compensation to his family.
It is also possible that Shi Hou was the name of an important figure in the opium trade. Different people within the coastal administration knew this person’s name. Of course, even if there was an important opium broker named Shi Hou, we cannot be sure that the man who died in jail was he. 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 (a not uncommon practice in late Qing Fujian). We cannot know. The only reference to the names of people in the Shi lineage that I have found in the Jardine-Matheson materials are a person called "Mr. Yabe" and another called "Shik Po." The Shik Po reference is intriguing, if inconclusive. Captain Forbes, visiting Shenhu bay in 1839, 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 Shi Hou? Based on local pronunciation it seems plausible that Shik Po was actually Shi Shubao, the kinsman of Shi Hou who had learned English and was never captured.
I relate my uncertainty about our ability to truly know what happened, because it forces us to think creatively about the realms of possibility, to consider 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 the life of such a man. 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.
The advancing structures of British imperialism, meanwhile, 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 pioneeers 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. Each of these structures, and a multitude of others not mentioned, must be part of any explanation for how the body of a man supposedly named Shi Hou died in jail while awaiting sentencing for opium crimes.
*JM B2.7, Reel 495, No. 247, Forbes to Jardine, 24 February 1839
