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

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.

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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.
Introducing the Source
The text of this path is drawn from File Number 03-4007-048 (DG 18/10/29) in the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing, in the Grand Council Chinese-Language Palace Memorial Copies collection (junji chu Hanwen lufu zouzhe).
This source is a Qing memorial: a report from a Provincial Governor to higher officials in Beijing. A memorial on a legal case like this is the final wrapped-up version of the case, written almost a year after the events it describes took place, based on the Governor’s reading of reports and documents on the case from the county, prefecture, and provincial judicial administration. The person who wrote this source was not present for the arrest or original interrogation of the subjects, and relied on reports forwarded from local officials. Documents like this can flatten testimony into judicial tropes, and can obscure information that might have created trouble for the lower officials who conducted the original arrests and interrogations, especially when there were potential implications of bribery and corruption.
The memorial that forms the base of this path describes the opium operations of a man named Shi Hou (Monkey Shi), a native of Yakou Village, Jinjiang County, Fujian Province. The memorial describes how Shi Hou and his fellow Shi lineage members “enticed” foreign opium merchants “Big and Little Li” north from Guangdong into Fujian in order to establish a smuggling depot in Shenhu Bay. At the end of the case, 111 individuals are listed as having been arrested or “at large” and wanted for opium crimes related to the case.
A note about the main character:
Shi Hou, along with many of the other people tied up in this case, were members of a large territorial lineage known as the Yakou Shi. Even today, the Shi lineage are the dominant surname group in Yakou village. In the Qing dynasty, the Yakou Shi occupied a position of power and privilege, dating back to the patriarch Shi Lang (1621-1696), who was the first Admiral (shuishi tidu) of the Xiamen Navy and helped the Qing put down Zheng Chenggong's maritime rebellion. By the early nineteenth century, maritime lineages like the Yakou Shi were a powerful and fiercely independent forces in local society. They were economically and politically diversified, sending off sons and nephews to Confucian academies or the Navy, or alternatively packing them on boats bound for Macao or Singapore. It is not irrelevant to this case that the lineage that Shi Hou came from was incredibly powerful, and lineage members continued opium trading after the arrests described here.
Spatial History Questions for The Case Against Shi Hou
What is the spatiality of profit in this branch of the opium trade? What is the role of space in the methods used by the actors in this path (Shi Hou et al) to make their money?
Thinking in terms of the environment and physical geography that makes up the spatial setting of this story, how do the people in this case manipulate distances to their advantage, whether in terms of acquiring opium, selling opium, extorting money, or evading arrest?
Thinking in terms of discrete physical spaces (a boat, a small bay, a village, etc), what spaces are important to this history? What are the different ways one could evaluate the significance of spaces like the opium receiving ships, Shenhu Bay, and Yakou village?
Thinking more critically about applying the notion of “space as process” to this case, what different connections and transformations can we document as arising through the actions of the people in this case? How did Shi Hou, Big and Little Li, and the other actors described in this case build and transform different geographies of profit?

Archival Discoveries (2)

Big and Little Li (大小李), a.k.a. John and Thomas Rees

The Shadowy World of Corruption

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Quantifying the Opium Trade

Mapping the Coastal Opium Network

A note about the main character:

Spatial History Questions for The Case Against Shi Hou

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