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 give convincing evidence that the fee was actually part of a government protection scheme.
Opium sales resumed in Shenhu Bay for several years after the 1837 arrest of Shi Hou and his compatriots, and the practice of attaching a fee to the sales continued on and off. The evidence suggests that protection was arranged at a high level, with British opium ship captains and lineage elders or high-volume brokers arranging deals with local magistrates or naval commanders. Moreover, the top British and Chinese opium merchants competed with each other to be in charge of bribing the government, the British worrying that if they trusted it to their Chinese partners the “fees” might be embezzled by the brokers themselves.
*Source: MS.JM/B2 7 [Reel 495, No. 69] Mackay to Jardine, 11.29.1835
**Source: JM B2 7 [Reel 495, No. 194], Rees to Jardine, 19 May 1838
