who was determined to run his opium in. Which made the Manchoo Mandarins wild with outraged pride, and more high-handed towards foreigners than ever, with the result that war broke out in 1840. Being Chinese and useless, they lost, and had to cede Hong Kong to us and open up Treaty Ports to European trade. And the poppy-running went on as before, only more so.
You’d have thought that would teach ’em manners, but not a bit of it. Instead of realising that foreign trade had come to stay, they convinced themselves that we were only there on sufferance, and they could treat our traders and emissaries as dirt, evil-smelling foreign savages that we were. They knew China was the centre and master of the world, and that everyone else was barbarian filth, lurking on their outskirts plotting mischief, and needing to be brought to heel like untrained curs. What, admit us as equals? Trade freely with us? Receive our ambassadors at Pekin? (The Chinese for “ambassador” is “tribute-bearer”, which gives you some notion of their conceit.) It was unthinkable.
You have to understand this Chinese pride – they truly believe they have dominion over us, and that our rulers are mere slaves to their Emperor. Haven’t I heard a red-button Mandarin, a greasy old profligate so damned cultivated that his concubines had to feed him and even carry him to the commode to do his business, because he’d never learned how – haven’t I heard him lisping about “the barbarian vassal Victoria”? As for the American President – a mere coolie. (And you won’t teach John Chinaman different by blowing his cities apart with artillery, or trampling his country underfoot. Well, if a footpad knocks you down, or a cannibal eats you, it don’t follow that he’s your superior, does it? Fiercer and stronger, perhaps, but infinitely lower in the scale of creation. That’s how the Chinese think of us – and damn the facts that stare ’em in the face.)
So, even after we’d licked them, and gained a trade foot-hold in the Treaty Ports, they continued as arrogant as ever, and finally over-stepped the mark in ’56, boarding the British ship Arrow (though whether she was entitled to fly the Union Flag was debatable) and arresting her Chink crew because one of ’em was believed to be a pirate (which some said he wasn’t, but one of his relatives might be). The usual Chinese confusion, you see, and before you could say “Snooks!” we had bombarded Canton, and the local Mandarin was offering thirty dollars for British heads.
I believe it might have blown over if the clown Cobden, abetted by Gladstone and D’Israeli (there’s an unholy alliance, if you like), hadn’t worked himself into a sweat in Parliament, saying it was all our fault, and it was a scandal the way our opium-traffickers abused the Chinese, who were the most saintly folk on record, while British bounce and arrogance were a byword, and we were just picking a quarrel, more shame to us. This had Palmerston spitting his false teeth all over the shop; he damned Cobden and the Chinks for rascals both, said our honour had been flouted, and anyway we had only bombarded Canton with the “utmost forbearance” (good old Pam!), and was Cobden aware that the Manchoos had beheaded 70,000 folk at Canton in the past year, and were guilty of vices that were a disgrace to human nature, hey?
Fine Parliamentary stuff, you see, and when Pam lost the vote and had to go to the country, he won a thumping majority (which was what the old scoundrel had been playing for all along) and the Chinese war was on with a vengeance. It was a scrappy business, but after we took Canton the Chinks had to climb down and agree to a new treaty, admitting us to inland trade, with Ambassadors at Pekin. But being still as arrogant as ever, they dragged their heels about signing, and when we sent a fleet up the Peiho to persuade ’em, damned if they didn’t have a sudden burst of martial valour, and handed us a splendid licking at the Taku Forts. So now, in the spring of ’60, with an uneasy truce between Britain and China, Hope Grant was coming with an army of British and Frogs, to convoy our ambassador to Pekin, and make the Emperor sign.2
You must bear with my historical lecture, for I have to show you how things stood if you are to understand my tale. For all the official coolness between Pekin and ourselves, commerce was still going on between our traders and Canton (which we continued to hold) but the Carpenters were right to wonder how long it might continue, with our invasion imminent. Which brings me back to the point where I agreed to escort their cargo of poppy up the Pearl, with the prospect of a jolly river cruise, sixteen hundred sovs, and a fine frolic with dear Phoebe when I got back to Hong Kong.
Mind you, as I leaned on the rail of the lead lorcha bearing up beyond Lintin Island two days after our picnic, with the rising sun rolling the fog-banks up the great estuary, I could honestly say it wasn’t either the cash or the lady that had made me turn opium-runner. No, it was the fun of the thing, the lure of sport-without-danger, the seeking for fresh sights and amusements, like this magnificent Pearl River, with that wondrous silver mist that I suppose gave it its name, and its fairy islets beyond the Tiger’s Gate, and the dawn breeze rippling the shining water and filling the sails of the stubby junks and lorchas and crazy fisher-craft – and the pug-nosed, grinning Hong Kong boat girl rolling her poonts on the thwart of a sampan and shouting: “Hi-ya, cap’n! Hi-ya! You wanchee jiggee no wanchee jiggee? You payee two hunner’ cash, drinkee samshu? Jollee-jollee!”
“Who you, Dragon Empress?” says I. “Come aboard, one hunner’ cash, maybe all-same samshu.” They’re the jolliest wenches, the Hong Kong boaters, plump little sluts who swim like fish and couple like stoats. She squealed with laughter and plunged in, reached the lorcha in a few fast strokes, and was hauled inboard, all wet and shiny and giggling in her little loin-cloth. Anything less like an angel of Providence you never saw, but that’s what she was; if I’d guessed, I’d ha’ treated her with more respect than I did, slapping her rump and sending her aft for later. For the moment I was content to muse at the rail, enjoying the warm sunshine and the distant green prospect of Lintin, where the coolies could be seen languidly pursuing the only two occupations known to the Chinese peasant: to wit, standing stock-still up to the knees in paddy-water holding a bullock on a rope, or shifting mud very slowly from one point to another. Deny them these employments, and they would simply lie down and die, which a good many of them seemed to do anyway. I’m told that Napoleon once said that China was a sleeping giant, and when she awoke the world would be sorry. He didn’t say who was going to get the bastards out of bed.
I put this to Ward, the skipper commanding the two lorchas which made up our little convoy. He was a brisk, wiry, bright-eyed little Yankee about ten years my junior, and though he hadn’t been in China more than a month or two, you couldn’t have wished for a smarter hand at the helm of a lorcha, or a sharper tongue when it came to keeping the Chinese boatmen up to the mark; he was a young terrier, and had learned his trade on American merchantmen, with a mate’s ticket, damn-your-eyes, which was fair going at his age. For all that, he had an odd, soft streak; when one of the Chinks was knocked overside by a swinging boom, and we lost way fishing him out, I looked to see Ward lay into him with a rope’s end for his clumsiness, or hang him from the rail to dry. But he just laughed and cuffed the Chink’s head, with a stream of pigeon, and says to me:
“I fell overboard on my first voyage – and what d’ye think I was doing? Chasing a butterfly, so help me, I was! Say, I was a lot greener than that Chink, though! C’mon, ye blushing Chinese cherubs, tailee on makee pull! Pullee, I say! Tell ye what, colonel, it takes an awful lot o’ these beggars to do one man’s work!”
That was when I observed that the Chinese were the idlest rascals in creation, and he frowned and chuckled all together.
“I reckon,” says he. “But they could be a fine people, for all that. Give ’em some one to lead ’em, to drive ’em, to show ’em how. They got the prime country in creation here – when they find out how to use it. Say, and they’re smart – you know they were civilised while we were still running around with paint on? Why, they had paper an’ gunpowder centuries before we did!”
“Which
