The China Mirage Page 3

  Let your highness immediately, upon the receipt of this communication, inform us promptly of the state of matters, and of the measure you are pursuing utterly to put a stop to the opium evil. Please let your reply be speedy…

  P.S. We annex an abstract of the new law, now about to be put in force. “Any foreigner or foreigners bringing opium to the Central Land, with design to sell the same, the principals shall most assuredly be decapitated, and the accessories strangled; and all property (found on board the same ship) shall be confiscated. The space of a year and a half is granted, within the which, if anyone bringing opium by mistake, shall voluntarily step forward and deliver it up, he shall be absolved from all consequences of his crime.”11

  As Timothy Brook and Bob Wakabayashi write in their masterly book Opium Regimes, “The British Empire could not survive were it deprived of its most important source of capital, the substance that could turn any other commodity into silver.”12 Queen Victoria speedily dispatched her navy in November 1839 to bombard China’s coast, shocking the government mandarins who had built the Great Wall to keep northern intruders out, never imagining their kingdom would be humbled by sea barbarians who had gained entry through distant Canton. Thus began the First Opium War, which lasted until 1842.

  Back in America, Delano’s congressional representative John Quincy Adams told the country that opium smuggling was “a mere incident to the dispute; but no more a cause of the war than the throwing overboard of the tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American revolution. The cause of the war is the pretension on the part of the Chinese, that in all their intercourse with other nations, political or otherwise, their superiority must be acknowledged, and manifested in humiliating forms.”13

  The First Opium War was a boom time for Delano. English traders were forced to observe the British blockade of China, yet valuable cargoes from other sources continued to arrive. Responding to (and encouraging) demand, Delano rented or purchased every ship he could, then charged high transport fees. Delano’s accomplishments were recognized in the midst of the war when, on January 1, 1840, the thirty-one-year-old was named the senior partner of Russell and Company.

  Russell and Company senior partners often served as U.S. consuls to Canton, an honorific but empty title, because the Chinese would still not countenance state-to-state relations with barbarians. Appointed U.S. consul in 1841, Delano cheered the British bombing of China and welcomed the first U.S. warship, commanded by Commodore Lawrence Kearny, dispatched to China to protect American interests.

  The Chinese had no effective way to defend themselves against the superior arms and technology of a modern industrialized military. Ravaged on land and sea, China reluctantly capitulated and signed the Treaty of Nanking, the first of what many Chinese still consider the odious “unequal treaties” by which the West would chip away at old China’s sovereignty. China was forced to pay Britain an indemnity of millions and abolish the Canton system. Most alarming, the Treaty of Nanking required China to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain and to open five ports to trade. In these New Chinas (called treaty ports), foreigners enjoyed extraterritoriality—freedom from Chinese laws and the right to try their own transgressors. Now, just like the first European incursions onto the American continent in the 1600s, white Christians had created an archipelago of trading hubs where Western ways could root and flourish.

  With the Canton system destroyed, the drug trade exploded. Soon the British governor of Hong Kong wrote his London masters, “Almost every person… not connected with government is employed in the opium trade.”14

  By early 1843, Delano had spent a momentous decade in the China trade. He had achieved his financial competence and risen to become the head partner of the biggest American firm dealing with China. He had witnessed the destruction of the hated Canton system, the humiliation of the Chinese government, and the creation of New Chinas. Over those ten years, he had seen Westerners transform themselves from huddled supplicants into victors who dictated terms. Delano decided to return to Massachusetts for a short vacation. Commodore Kearny gave him a copy of the Treaty of Nanking to take triumphantly back to the United States for American officials to study as a model for a comparable U.S.-China treaty.15

  Delano’s Chinese partner in crime, Howqua, gave him an elaborate send-off feast, which a witness reported as “about 15 courses—bird’s nest soup—shark fins—pigeons eggs—quail & c—sturgeon’s lip, etc. We were 13 hours getting thro’ with it. It is many years since Howqua has given a Chinese dinner at his own house and perhaps never before did he give to a friend the like of this.”16

  In the nineteenth century, the West forced China to grant it special rights in treaty ports, Christian outposts where foreign devils could live by their own rules.

  Upon his return to Massachusetts, Delano was viewed as a wealthy young man who had made his fortune in China by dealing in tea, silks, and porcelain. Though considered one of a handful of American experts on China, Delano had never explored the country or its culture. The nation that Delano described to his listeners was a mirage; that China could not be internally reformed, and the pitiful, drug-addicted, backward pagan mess of a place was lucky to have Americans on its coast to civilize it via American values and beliefs.

  On July 3, 1844, a meeting that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier took place between American and Chinese government officials. At a table in the Temple of Kun Yam in Macao, Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts contemporary of Delano’s, sat across from a Chinese official and signed a U.S.-China agreement modeled on the Nanking treaty. For half a century, relations between the United States and China had been strictly commercial. Now, after his country had been pummeled by the combined might of a number of Western navies, a Chinese official had greeted a representative of the United States to negotiate the U.S.-China diplomatic and economic relationship. The Treaty of Wangxia allowed five New Chinas, districts where, extraterritoriality established, Americans would rule supreme. They could buy land and erect homes and businesses in these protected pockets without Chinese interference.

  As a show of goodwill, Caleb Cushing noted in the treaty that the Chinese had been just in declaring the opium trade illegal. This was a meaningless concession because Americans in their New Chinas could not be tried by Chinese courts, only by U.S. consuls. The consul at the time was Paul Sieman Forbes; he had succeeded Warren Delano in that position, as well as in the position of senior partner in Russell and Company. Therefore, the man who was head of the U.S. consular court was also the man overseeing the biggest American opium-smuggling operation.

  Every American who came to China after the Treaty of Wangxia could consider himself a member of a superior civilization—a co-conqueror of the world’s oldest empire. Americans named Delano, Russell, Cushing, Perkins, Forbes, Low, and Green, among others, had helped transform coastal China into a quasi-colony of the sea barbarians.

  Warren Delano returned to the China trade, leaving the United States at the end of 1843 with his new wife, eighteen-year-old Catherine Lyman, whom he had met through John Murray Forbes, another man made wealthy by smuggling opium. For three years, the couple lived in Macao in a grand mansion called Arrowdale. When they returned to the United States in 1846, they assumed their place in the ranks of East Coast society. They purchased a sumptuous town house at 39 Lafayette Square in New York City, where their neighbors included Washington Irving and John Jacob Astor.

  Opium merchants like Delano provided the seed corn for the economic revolution in America. Delano invested his new fortune in a host of ventures: New York waterfront property, railroads, copper mines in Tennessee and Maryland, and coal mines in Pennsylvania, where a town was named Delano in his honor. The Perkins family, who had pioneered the transport of Turkish opium to China, built Boston’s Athenaeum, the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Perkins Institution for the Blind. America’s first railroad—the Quincy Granite Railway—was built to carry stone from Perkins’s quarries to the sit
e of the Bunker Hill Monument.

  Opium money funded any number of significant institutions in the eastern United States. John Perkins Cushing’s profitable relationship with Howqua helped finance the construction of America’s first great textile manufacturing city, Lowell, Massachusetts.

  America’s great East Coast universities owe a great deal to opium profits. Much of the land upon which Yale University stands was provided by Russell family money. A Russell family trust still covers the budget of Yale’s Skull and Bones Society, and Russell funds built the famously secretive club’s headquarters. Columbia University’s most recognizable building is the Low Memorial Library, honoring Abiel Abbot Low, who worked in China with Warren Delano in the 1830s. John Cleve Green was Delano’s immediate predecessor as a senior partner in Russell and Company, and he was Princeton University’s single largest donor, financing three buildings. (Green also founded America’s oldest orthopedic hospital—Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery—from his opium fortune.)

  Among the railways financed with opium money were the Boston and Lowell (Perkins), the Michigan Central (Forbes), the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy (Forbes), and the Chesapeake and Ohio (Low), among others.

  The influence of these opium fortunes seeped into virtually every aspect of American life. That influence was cultural: the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson married John Murray Forbes’s daughter, and his father-in-law’s fortune helped provide Emerson with the cushion to become a professional thinker. It was found in technology: Forbes’s son watched over his father’s investment in the Bell Telephone Company as its first president, and Abiel Abbot Low provided start-up money for the first transatlantic cable. And it was ideological: Joseph Coolidge’s heirs founded the Council on Foreign Relations. Several companies that would play major roles in American history were also the product of drug profits, among them the United Fruit Company, started by the Coolidge family. Scratch the history of an institution or a person with the name Forbes attached to it, and there’s a good chance you’ll see that opium is involved. Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry’s great-grandfather was Francis Blackwell Forbes, who got rich selling opium in China.

  In 1852 Warren Delano and his growing family moved to their dream house, a brown-and-buff mansion on six acres overlooking the Hudson River. Delano named the home Algonac and furnished it with Chinese décor. In the parlor hung a portrait of Howqua. Now in his forties, Delano regaled guests and associates with colorful stories of trading tea and silk in China, but he rarely mentioned opium. This was in line with custom: American drug dealing was downplayed in polite East Coast society, the finger pointed mostly at Britain.

  Delano lived luxuriously until stocks crashed and banks collapsed in the financial panic of 1857, and his investments soured one by one. Delano was suddenly faced with a grim financial future. Forty-eight years old and slowly going broke, he thought long and hard about how to reconstitute his fortune. He still had sterling contacts with leading businessmen across the United States. He had been an investor in railroads, property, copper, and coal mines. He was healthy, and, despite the crash, the American economy still offered plenty of opportunity. But with a growing family (his seventh child was born in 1857) and an expensive manor lifestyle to support, he wanted to make a lot of money quickly. So Delano returned to the most profitable business in the world.

  It wasn’t an easy decision. Opium smuggling was a young man’s game. Delano had been twenty-four years old when he’d first sailed to China; now he was twice that. The trip to Hong Kong was an arduous four-month-long voyage and he risked contracting malaria or life-threatening dysentery in hot and humid South China. But after fourteen years of playing by the rules in the U.S. economy, he was confronting a reduced standard of living. It was time, he concluded, to go back to the game with no rules.

  It took almost two years for Russell and Company to repost Delano to Hong Kong. By then, at fifty years old, he had eight children, and his wife, Catherine, was pregnant with a ninth. Delano gave an empty stamp book to five-year-old Sara and promised the tearful girl that he would send her letters and stamps. In 1859, Delano sailed to the British colony of Hong Kong, where he became once again the senior official in the biggest American firm in New China and proceeded to rebuild his fortune.

  The tables had most certainly turned since the days when he’d apprenticed to Samuel Russell. The Barbarian Management Bureau mandarins had naively assumed that the sea barbarians would be satisfied with Hong Kong and the five treaty ports granted in 1843. But now that the inch had been given, the mile was insisted upon. The British, French, and American foreign devils wanted China to rescind its prohibition and legalize opium, exempt internal trade by foreigners from duties, adopt English as the official language of all future treaties, and allow official state-to-state relations. The foreign devils were demanding the right to poison three hundred million people with their opium while continuing to stay beyond the reach of the emperor’s jurisdiction. Just as shocking to the Chinese, the barbarians demanded that foreign-devil ambassadors be allowed to reside in Beijing near the Son of Heaven.

  When the Barbarian Management Bureau refused these demands, the British, French, and American navies retaliated with the Second Opium War, this time ravaging not only coastal cities and forts but also the country’s interior; they invaded Beijing, chased the emperor out of town, and, in an orgy of fine-art and jewelry looting, destroyed the Versailles of China, the old Summer Palace.

  Overwhelmed again, China bent. A new, even more unequal treaty gave the United States and other nations the right to station their diplomats in Beijing; in addition, it pried open ten more New China treaty ports to foreign trade and allowed foreign vessels—commercial and military—to navigate freely on the Yangtze River, thus giving the foreign devils access to the deepest heart of the Middle Kingdom. Crucially for the Americans, the agreement also provided religious liberty for Chinese Christians and ordered the Chinese government to stop using the word barbarian in reference to Westerners. Finally, the Barbarian Management Bureau was abolished and replaced by a foreign ministry forced into relations with barbarian countries.

  When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a young boy, his mother’s favorite stories from her own childhood revolved around an adventure in a faraway land. Sara Delano Roosevelt told her son how her mother, Catherine, had packed up Algonac and, on June 25, 1862, sailed out of New York Harbor on a fully crewed ship with nine children, two maids, an upright piano, crates of clothes and books, and a hold stuffed with caged pigs, ducks, geese, and chickens. Over four months of sometimes stormy nights and many becalmed days, Sara’s mother passed the time by reading aloud to her children from Nathaniel Hawthorne novels and old issues of Vanity Fair. On September 21, 1892, the Delano family was in the Indian Ocean, and they celebrated Sara’s eighth birthday with a dinner of roast goose, boiled ham, corn, peas, tomatoes, rice, and cake.

  On the morning of October 31, 1862, the Delanos’ ship sailed into the Hong Kong harbor. “Papa!” little Sara squealed as Delano came into view, standing at the tiller of a Russell and Company launch rowed by a dozen white-uniformed Chinese. Delano came aboard, embraced his family, and held baby Cassie—born after he left Algonac—for the first time. Little Sara hugged her father’s leg.

  A procession of sedan chairs took the Delano family up through Hong Kong’s steeply inclined streets to their Rose Hill mansion. This large procession of American barbarians proudly asserting their place in New China naturally caught the attention of passing Chinese pedestrians, a few of whom shouted words that young Sara had of course never heard: Fan kuei. Both of Sara’s parents knew what fan kuei meant, but there is no record that they explained it to their eight-year-old daughter. Catherine later wrote in her diary about the Chinese taunts: “I feel very oddly to be again a Fanqui.”17

  Rose Hill, Hong Kong. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather and mother lived on this Russell & Company estate. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)

  The
stories young Franklin heard from his mother of the two years she spent in Hong Kong were mostly about her experiences within the confines of the Rose Hill estate. Those two years were pleasant but monotonous. Sara mingled with the same small group of people and ventured out only for American-style pursuits, like a day at the racetrack or to ride her horse (and then only if she was escorted by her father or an adult male Russell and Company employee). She never learned the Chinese language. Other than Delano’s Chinese servants, little Sara had almost no contact with the locals. She could later tell Franklin stories about peacocks on the property and recall in detail Thanksgiving dinners, but Sara passed on no insights about the real China. How could she?

  It’s likely that Sara Delano’s single foray into a Chinese person’s home was on a family visit to a hong merchant’s fabulous Canton mansion in February of 1863 when she was nine years old. This would be the equivalent of a foreigner in America dining at the Astor mansion and nowhere else. Sara wrote that before this adventure, “Papa told us children to pretend that we liked Chinese food though it was very strange to us.” After five months in their New China sanctuary, the Delano children had apparently not eaten any Chinese food and certainly did not know how to use chopsticks.

  Sara and the family marveled at the merchant’s opulent mansion as they strolled through rooms furnished with polished ebony and gleaming marble, priceless carved ivory panels and stained-glass windows. When they sat down to dinner, Sara noted in relief that “as it was a very rich and luxurious house, there were knives, forks, and spoons for the strangers.”18