Misery and monkey bombs: dark truth of the Opium Wars NICK RENNISON
BEGINNING in 1839, the British and the Chinese faced one another in what became known as the Opium War. It was a one-sided affair: the Royal Navy was the most powerful in the world, while the Chinese possessed weaponry that was centuries out of date.
The Chinese were reduced to desperate measures. One commander hatched a plan to strap fireworks to the backs of monkeys and catapult the poor creatures onto the British ships in the hope that they would blow up their powder magazines. In the event, nobody could get close enough to launch the monkey bombs at the enemy.
The war was the end result of a decadeslong, often fractious relationship between China and Britain, characterised by misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides.
Eighty years earlier, in 1759, there was only one Englishman, James Flint, who knew how to speak and write in Chinese. His attempt to present a petition to the Chinese emperor on behalf of the East India Company ended with Flint imprisoned for three years and the man who had taught him Chinese decapitated.
In 1793, Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing, bearing gifts from King George III including telescopes, a planetarium and a hot air balloon. The Emperor announced that they were ‘good enough to amuse children’. Macartney left Beijing having achieved little.
It was trade that finally brought the two nations together, but there were, unfortunately, two kinds.
One consisted of legal commodities such as cotton, silks and tea. The other was in opium, which the East India Company smuggled from India into China, where demand was high.
The two countries had very different attitudes to opium. In Britain, the drug was legal and sold by apothecaries and tobacconists. There was even a tonic for teething babies called Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.
But China’s growing addiction problem was devastating its cities. Opium was illegal and punishments for using it grew ever harsher.
The war was precipitated by the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, who confiscated vast amounts of the drug and threw it in the sea. (He wrote a prayer to the god of the sea apologising for his defilement of the waters.)
Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of the British in Canton, sent a furious despatch to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, demanding military action. Some months later Elliot got what he wanted.
The Opium War was not the British Empire’s finest hour. The Times described it as ‘nothing less than an attempt, by open violence, to force upon a foreign country the purchase of a deadly poison’.
But the twilight of Stephen Platt’s title was not that of Britain’s empire. It was China that was in decline — and worse was to come. Now that China is once again one of the world’s great powers, knowing the history of its relationship with the West becomes ever more important. Platt’s book makes a scholarly, but enjoyable, contribution to that knowledge.