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

Corruption and Bribery

The smugglers and Mandarins have come to an arrangement in this place, that they are to be paid $10 for every chest we deliver. Captain Hadley and myself agreed to it, and accordingly rose the prices of all that much. In my opinion is the best thing that could have happened, for all parties. We have a man put on board, who receives the cash and a chop has been delivered to me.

Captain Mackay in Chimmo Bay to William Jardine in Canton, November 29th, 1835.*

Most of the business which has been conducted in Chimmo bay has been carried on by the parties which traded with us two years ago. We do not pay the $10 fee but give the mandarins of the station a present now and then.

Captain Rees in Chimmo Bay to William Jardine in Canton, May 19th, 1838.**

In The Case Against Shi Hou, the government officials who prosecuted the case noted that Shi Hou was in the practice of charging a $10 commission for every chest sold to customers that he brought out to Big and Little Li's ships in Shenhu Bay. As the above quotations illustrate, the Jardine-Matheson records also feature the practice of somebody charging $10 fees for every chest sold. But whereas in the Qing account the practice is coded as a brokerage fee that captured suspect Shi Hou was charging other Chinese merchants for access to the foreign ships, in the Jardine records the British opium captains portray the fee as part of a government protection scheme, which is consistent with the records from other anchorages.

The matter of the ten-dollar fee in Shenhu Bay was part of a broader pattern of corruption and bribery developing between the British opium ship captains, the coastal lineages, and the Qing civil and military authorities in Xiamen and Quanzhou. During May and June of 1836, for instance, Rees went into negotiations with an official with jurisdiction over Shenhu Bay known in the Jardine sources as “Luo Toa” (laoda, local parlance for “elder brother” or “the big man”). In May, Rees reported having negotiated with his brother to fix prices for the bay and subsequently combine together to offer the laoda an annual fee of $20,000 in order to secure the trade and also “not to allow strangers to trade” (i.e. not allow competing British, Parsee, and American opium ships into the bay).***

Jardine-Matheson captains were in direct negotiation with local authorities on the coast. A month later Rees reported that the laoda had “sent off to say he cannot accept less than $24,000 fees for accommodation for both ships. For this sum he says he can protect the trade in case strange ships should come in … He is certainly authorized to treat with us by the authorities at Chinchew [Quanzhou].” Negotiations like this appear repeatedly throughout the Jardine-Matheson archive.****

*Source: JM B2 7, Reel 495, No. 69, November 29, 1835

**Source: JM B2 7, Reel 495, No. 194, Rees to Jardine, May 19, 1838

***Source: JM B2.7, Reel 495, No. 99, May 21, 1836.

****Source: JM B2.7, Reel 495, No. 102, June 15, 1836.

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Background Information
Opium was illegal in the Qing empire during the 1830s, but British merchants brought enormous quantities of the drug from India to the southern coast of China. Over the course of the 1830s, the trade expanded in volume as it migrated northward from Lintin off the coast of Guangdong province to Fujianese ports like Xiamen and Shenhu Bay. This northward migration was partly responsible for the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839.
Continue below for more background on these points. Or, continue to the next page.
Opium's legality:
The sale and consumption of opium was extraordinarily widespread in China during the 1830s, but it was entirely illegal. This meant that all of the opium sold and consumed in the Qing empire during these years had to be smuggled in and distributed illegally. As a consequence, there were infinite opportunities for corruption and government participation in the illegal trade, from the moment of import, at each node in the distribution network, down to the retail and smoking of the drug.
Opium trading practices:
The opium sold in China in the 1830s was grown in India and smuggled into the Pearl River Delta near Guangzhou (Canton) by primarily British merchants. Americans and various British colonial subjects (especially the Parsee community of Bombay) were also involved in the transport trade from India to China.
Since at least the mid-1820s, the central location for opium transactions between foreign and Chinese merchants was an anchorage off the island of Lintin in the Pearl River Delta near present-day Hong Kong. At this remote offshore island, British firms permanently anchored large "receiving ships," which were stationary vessels that operated as floating warehouses. Chinese buyers would go to money-lending shops in Guangzhou (Canton) to make payment, then take a receipt out to a foreign receiving ship anchored near Lintin to receive their opium. In this way the British and Chinese merchants involved in the trade could keep their transactions out of the immediate surveillance of the high officials in Guangzhou.
Opium's northward migration:
The Lintin system of offshore opium transactions expanded north from Guangdong province into neighboring Fujian province around 1834, when British firms established receiving ship stations in various locations along the southern Fujian littoral. This migration of the trade from the Pearl River Delta north into Fujianese ports like Xiamen and Shenhu Bay is the primary subject of this module. The timing of the trade's migration in 1834 is due to the British East India Company relinquishing their monopoly over British trade in China that year, which opened the door for new British firms like Jardine-Matheson and their competitor Dent & Co. to expand the trade into new markets.
The aftermath:
The events of this module take place in the years just before the Opium War of 1839-1842. That war began in the wake of an incident wherein a Qing official named Lin Zexu determined to confiscate and destroy the opium holdings of Jardine-Matheson and a number of other firms. William Jardine spent the duration of that war in London lobbying the British Government to secure compensation for the opium that Lin destroyed.
This module thus explains one of the central reasons for that war: the rapid expansion of the trade in the mid-1830s, and the movement of foreign opium merchants up the coast towards Fujian. Jardine-Matheson and their Chinese partners established a hugely successful opium import market in the waters off Fujian province. For anti-opium officials like Lin Zexu (himself a native of Fujian), one of the unforgivable actions of the opium traders was in moving their boats up the coast from the Pearl River Delta, which had an established system of legal trade for Europeans, and anchoring instead in Fujian, where foreigners from Europe were not allowed to travel.
Archival Reasoning and Spatial History 58 Instructions for Reading Treacherous Waters plain 2021-09-30T10:35:23-04:00 Peter D. Thilly
Archival Reasoning
Using historical archives to try and understand how people made money in illegal drug trading can be a bit tricky. If we only rely on government sources about the arrest and prosecution of drug traders, we are limited by the government's limited understanding of the mechanics of the trade. Perhaps more concerning, these sources only contain stories about unsuccessful drug traders: the ones who got caught. Sources from the point of view of the drug traders, meanwhile, are exceedingly rare.
Lucky for us, there are two uniquely good archives about the drug trade in 1830s China. The archives of the Qing government include volumes of detailed cases on the arrest and prosecution of opium traders. Meanwhile, the British firms engaged in illegally importing the drug into China kept meticulous records, in part because the owners of these firms felt that their personal views about “free trade” excused them of any guilt about breaking the laws of a government they did not consider worthy of respect. This context is extremely helpful to historians interested in triangulating between different source bases to try and better understand what happened.
As such, the two central paths of this module are created out of these two archives of primary sources. The first path is a legal case from the Qing archives. The second is a diverse collection of materials taken from British archives. This format is specifically designed to enable visitors to actively participate in the sort of archival reasoning that historians use when they triangulate between sources.
In the final two pages of this introductory path, I lay out my own interpretation of the two archives that make up this module. I approached these sources with an explicit desire to understand how the opium trade worked: I wanted to know who was doing what, and to understand what people did to make this illegal offshore trade so enormous. My hope is that visitors to this module might have other questions to ask of these sources, and might discover other connections, and craft different narratives.
Spatial History
This module also seeks to contribute to the methodological aims of the larger Bodies and Structures project, which called upon module authors “to identify, explore, and analyze the shared and distinctive dynamics of place-making within a particular historical space.” Archives shape and limit how we as historians understand a process like place-making: they reveal and highlight certain dynamics, while excluding or minimizing others. As such, the existence of two such radically different archives about the same historical space is lucky indeed.
The organizing principle of my approach is a “spatial history of profit.” I wanted to understand how the people who bought and sold opium made their money, and I have approached this question by considering the testimony of opium suspects captured by the Qing state together with the sales reports of the British opium ship captains. Here the focus is on the roles of distance, space, travel, and time in the story of opium profits.
The conclusion to the module offers a fuller explanation of the following themes:
- The intersection of space and time. How both Chinese and British opium traders operated in a complex race against time when it came to pricing, each side seeking to use timely information to maximize profits.
- Environment and physical geography. The physical landscape had a structural impact on the intertwined stories of profit and corruption on the maritime frontier. The Fujian coast is a place where secluded bays are set into a jagged coastline closely abutted by steep mountains: a notoriously difficult environment to surveil and police. For the British opium captains and their Chinese partners on shore, this geography was a godsend. For the Qing officials charged with rooting out the illegal trade, it was an enormous obstacle.
- Discrete physical spaces. Here I consider the boats, buildings, beaches, bays, and villages that the people in the module occupied, and consider how these spaces were constructed and used, and what role these spaces had in the history of opium profits.
- Space as process. The concept refers to an approach to spatial history that considers how different spatialities are constituted, transformed, broken down, and reconstituted through the movements, actions, and decisions of people. In the conclusion, I consider how different spatialities of commodity and information circulation emerged out of technological and diplomatic breakthroughs like the advent of clipper ships and the conclusion of the Opium War in 1842. I also discuss how cases like the Shi Hou one that makes up the first path of this module indicate a spatiality of treason that structured interactions between the Qing state and Fujian's coastal residents.
- I also consider the spatiality of law enforcement and corruption on the Fujian coast at various points within the two main paths of this module. After all, an important part of the project of opium profiteering involved not getting arrested and punished by the state. The geography of Qing rule helps to explain why some people were arrested and others not, and space played an essential role in structuring how states and state actors selectively enforced or ignored laws.
Exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network 52 Landing page for exploring the Jardine-Matheson Network plain 2021-09-30T10:58:25-04:00 24.6500, 118.6667 Chimmo (Shenhu Bay) 22.4167, 113.8000 Lintin 23.1167, 113.2500 Canton (Guangzhou) 22.17730, 113.54689 Macao 1.2833, 103.8500 Singapore 22.5626, 88.3630 Calcutta 25.59409, 85.13756 Patna 25.3167, 83.0104 Benares 18.9750, 72.8258 Bombay 22.71956, 75.85772 Malwa 51.5142, -0.0931 London Peter D. Thilly Jardine-Matheson Company
There are multiple ways to explore the materials I've assembled for this path. First-time visitors and anyone wishing to get the “whole story” should consider clicking through in order, but non-linear exploration is encouraged. To that end, on this page I've grouped the entire contents of the path to serve as a menu and map of the contents. The first six pages of the path center around the people and practices, and the remaining pages are built around locations of importance within the Jardine-Matheson global network.
People and Practices
- The Rees Brothers: Big and Little Li
- The Receiving Ship System
- Brokers and Middlemen
- Experts and Specialists
- Lascars and Manilamen
- Corruption and Bribery
Global Connections
- Chimmo (Shenhu Bay)
- Lintin
- Canton (Guangzhou)
- Macao
- Singapore
- Calcutta
- Patna
- Benares (Varanasi)
- Bombay (Mumbai)
- Malwa
- London
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.
Environment and Physical Geography
Environment and physical geography played key roles in how actors sought to maximize their opium profits. Below I discuss one aspect of this history that appears within the sources, and gesture towards another that is relevant to this story but not included in this module. Visitors to the module are encouraged to find additional ways that environment and physical geography might have affected the history of the opium trade, and to use this concept to link this module to the others.
Where mountains meet the sea
The Fujian littoral is a place of jagged coastline, small bays, scatterings of islands, winding peninsulas, and steep mountains that ascend from the shoreline. In short, it was and remains an extremely difficult place for states to keep watch over. The region's first foreign Commissioner of Customs, F. Nevill May, wrote in 1865 that Fujian’s mountains and rivers present “so many obstacles to the construction of canals and railways that they will probably never be introduced into this part of China.”* Fuzhou and Wenzhou—a large city in coastal Zhejiang only 207 miles north of Fuzhou—were only recently connected by rail, in 2003. The construction necessitated the excavation of no fewer than 53 tunnels.
The map below is geotagged to Xiamen, Shenhu Bay, Quanzhou, and Fuzhou in order to enable users to view the entirety of the Fujian coast from above (much like how the Japanese state sought to use airplanes to achieve a new view of Inner Asia). Zoom in and consider for yourself how difficult it must have been for the Qing state to try and keep powerful lineages like the Yakou Shi from breaking maritime laws.
The jagged and winding nature of the Fujian littoral was clearly an important part of the success of the Chinese and foreign network of opium traders discussed in this module. Because the opium trade was nominally illegal, the ideal scenario for people like Shi Hou and John Rees was to keep their dealings entirely invisible from the state. Arranging clandestine meetups offshore was clearly the way to go.
As the years went on, it became impossible for a trade of this volume to go on without any government awareness. Recall the video of Shenhu Bay: any person in any of the villages that overlook the bay and any person that travelled to the bay would have been able to see the British opium ships and the boats of their Chinese opium customers. It simply isn't that big of a place. Thus, as discussed more extensively elsewhere in this module, the opium smugglers of Yakou village and their British partners offshore arranged for systematic bribery of local officials to keep the trade going. At that point, the utility of a geographic location like Shenhu Bay was that it was not visible from other, more well-garrisoned parts of the coast. Officials who took bribes, it should be remembered, also needed to keep their secrets.
Environment, topography, and opium cultivation
The cultivation of opium poppies and production of opium is another side of the history of opium profits, which for the most part is not touched on within the sources included in this module. Historian Rolf Bauer's new book The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India (Brill, 2019) is a fantastic place to start for anyone interested in this side of the story. Bauer's research into the production of Patna opium in India is exhaustive and wide-ranging, including detailed analyses of social formations, labor practices, and the changing interactions between peasant cultivators and the physical landscape over a century of opium production. Consider the following passage on irrigation in two environmentally very similar parts of India: Gaya, an opium producing region just south of the city of Patna, and Saran, just to the north of Patna. As Bauer shows us, there are rich possibilities for a spatial history of opium production, tracing out the interactions between human actors and the physical environment in the pursuit of opium profits:
Gaya's agriculturalists constructed irrigation facilities because the natural conditions basically forced them to. Saran's agriculturalists were less pressed to do so because the district's soil easily retained moisture… How can we explain this difference despite the similar conditions? Saran's relative progress was ascribed to the ambition of the local sub-deputy opium agent, then a Mr. Tytler, who was known for encouraging the construction of wells. On the one hand, this must be seen as a positive investment in Saran's infrastructure. On the other hand, the contracts for the construction of wells were a powerful tool to further press the cultivators.**
*Chinese Maritime Customs Microfilm, Reel 4, “Return on Trade at the Port of Foochow for the Year 1865.”
**Rolf Bauer, The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India (Brill, 2019), p. 107.
Chimmo (Shenhu) Bay
I expect the coast will take off at least 5000 chests of the new Bengal drug, providing we are not interrupted by the Mandareens. Merchants from other ports make a point to come here for their opium.

John Rees in Chimmo Bay to William Jardine in Canton, 1.18.1836*
Shenhu Bay (深滬灣), known to the British opium merchants as Chimmo (also Chimo, Chimmoo), is an inlet approximately four miles across and strategically situated between the large ports of Xiamen and Quanzhou. The bay is big enough to provide shelter in rough seas, but small enough to defend effectively. It was also far enough away from seats of government power to avoid constant surveillance, but located along a major coastal shipping line between two large ports. With Xiamen twenty-five miles to the south and Quanzhou fifteen to the north, the bay was perfectly suited for Jardine-Matheson's purposes. Shenhu Bay remained an important opium smuggling depot all the way until 1860, when implementation of the 1858 the Treaty of Tianjin de facto legalized the importation of opium.
Though it was located out of the way from the two neighboring ports, the anchorage at Shenhu bay could not have been “secret” in any meaningful way. The area was densely populated, and no local residents would have missed the arrival of foreign opium ships. As the above photograph and this video both illustrate, anyone with access to the water would have seen the British opium ships, which were anchored in the bay every day between 1833 until 1860. Any boats from shore that visited the ships would also have not been able to do so in secret, unless at night. But the Jardine-Matheson archives record daytime sales in abundance. People for the most part felt safe and secure enough to paddle out to the ships in the middle of the day and purchase large quantities of opium. Perhaps they paid an attached fee that made them feel more confident in their security.
*Source: JM:B2 7 [R. 495, No. 74] Rees to Jardine, 1.18.1836
The Rees Brothers: Big and Little Li
“We transshipped to the Col Young some opium and then proceeded to Chinchew bay to sell. Had been there about a week when Rees came up and requested me to go to Chimmo bay as he found it unpleasant to be near to his brother who he was very sorry to inform me was not a man of his word, that he had arranged prices with him and then undersold him.”

Captain Mackay to William Jardine, January 21st, 1836.*
The two men referred to in the Case against Shi Hou as “Macao-born foreigners Big and Little Li” were John and Thomas Rees, estranged brothers who were captains in the opium fleets of the rival firms Jardine-Matheson (John) and Dent & Co. (Thomas). Thomas, the elder brother, had been the captain of the “Lord Amherst” voyage of 1832, a trip organized by a coalition of British opium merchants to scout and map the Chinese coast for the purposes of commercial expansion.
During the mid-1830s, the two brothers were frequently stationed at the Shenhu Bay anchorage at the same time, competing with each other for the business of the brokers on shore. In the above quote, Jardine-Matheson's Captain Mackay discusses the tense relationship between the two Rees brothers, who were constantly feuding with one another over opium pricing in Shenhu Bay.
In the summer of 1836, the Rees brothers had become fed up with each other. There had been a constant string of lies and broken promises between the two men, and they decided to draw up a written contract to equalize sales and prices in Shenhu Bay. As noted in the text of the contract, the agreement accounts for “Manderrine fees of $10 per chest. (sic)”
John Rees erected Lexden Terrace in Tenby, Wales, upon his return from China. It remains today as a visible legacy of the Rees brothers' opium fortunes.
*Source: JM:B2 7 [R. 495, No. 76] MacKay to Jardine, 1.21.1836

This page references:

The Case Against Shi Hou: A Qing Document