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

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.

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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.
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?
Introducing the Source
Jardine-Matheson & Company was founded in 1832 by the Scottish merchants William Jardine and James Matheson. Upon the dissolution of the British East India Company's monopoly over the China trade in 1834, Jardine-Matheson quickly became the most important firm in the opium trade between India and China. The company archive is currently held at the University of Cambridge library in the United Kingdom.
The structure of this path differs significantly from The Case Against Shi Hou. Where the first path is a relatively linear navigation through a single legal case about a collection of Chinese opium traders, this path recreates the global network that a British firm created and adapted in order to pursue profits in the opium business. The next page includes a map and menu that enable visitors to circumvent the linear path format and pursue their own unique journeys through the network.
Spatial History Questions for the Jardine-Matheson Global Network
What is the spatiality of profit for a company with this kind of a global network? How did the Jardine-Matheson company managers and opium ship captains make their money?
What discrete physical spaces (boats, bays, buildings, towns) were important to the operation and evolution of the Jardine-Matheson Company? What are the different ways one could evaluate the significance of spaces like the opium receiving ships, Shenhu Bay, and Macao?
How did environment and physical geography influence the company's operations and methods of seeking profit? How did Jardine-Matheson manipulate time and distance to their advantage, whether in terms of acquiring opium, selling opium, or selling insurance on opium?
This portion of the module is an ideal place to consider the concept of “space as process.” What different connections and transformations can we document as arising through the actions of the people involved in the Jardine-Matheson Global Network? How did William Jardine, James Matheson, John Rees and the other actors described in this path build and transform different geographies of profit?

Environment and Physical Geography

Where mountains meet the sea

Environment, topography, and opium cultivation

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Archival Reasoning

Spatial History

A note about the main character:

Spatial History Questions for The Case Against Shi Hou

Spatial History Questions for the Jardine-Matheson Global Network

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