University of Kentucky UKnowledge Christianity Religion 1996 Crusaders Against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874-1917 Kathleen L. Lodwick Pennsylvania State University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Lodwick, Kathleen L., "Crusaders Against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874-1917" (1996). Christianity. 3. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_christianity/3 CRUSADERS AGAINST OPIUM This page intentionally left blank CRUSADERS AGAINST OPIUM Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874-1917 KATHLEEN L. LODWICK THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1996 by The University Press of Kentucky Paperback edition 2009 The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8131-9285-7 (pbk: acid-free paper) This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Member of the Association of American University Presses This book is dedicated to the memory of my maternal grandparents: Edith Tremayne Worthington, 1882-1972, who always encouraged my love of reading, and Edward Stephen Worthington, 1879-1954, who, though our years overlapped but few, never refused my request to hear again the story his grandfather had told him of Edward Worthington, who had served as paymaster for George Rogers Clark at the battle of Vincennes in the American Revolution. Grandfather's story always ended as he carefully unrolled his photostatic copy of the payroll he had obtained at the National Archives and helped me read the handwriting of our long-ago ancestor, then a very real person to both of us. Thus I came to know and love history. This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 ONE Opium in China in the Late Nineteenth Century 11 TWO Missionaries Organize to Oppose Opium 27 THREE The Pro-Opium Forces and Government Investigations 72 FOUR The Anti-Opium Lobby Comes of Age 116 FIVE Success and Failures of Opium Suppression 148 Conclusion 181 Appendix 186 Notes 188 Bibliography 203 Index 210 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Opium suppression in China, and particularly the role of Protestant missionaries in it, is a subject that has drawn my attention from time to time over many years. I first worked on the subject as part of my dissertation at the University of Arizona but later was distracted from the subject by the periodical The Chinese Recorder through which the mission­ aries had organized their anti-opium campaigns. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant led me to work on an index to The Chinese Recorder for a number of years, the first of which I spent at the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. During that year, 1978-79, the Chinese-made film, titled in English, The opium War was shown in Cambridge and became the topic of lunch­ time conversations as more and more people at the Fairbank Center viewed it. In one of these conversations, Professor Benjamin Schwartz remarked that one thing we still did not know was why so many Chinese had taken to opium at that moment in their history. That remark stayed with me over the years, and although I moved on to other topics, namely Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942 (University Press of Kentucky, 1995) and a history of the Presbyterian mission on Hainan island on which I am still working, I never gave up my in­ terest in the topic of opium suppression. From time to time as I studied various aspects of the missionaries' anti-opium activities, I was increasingly struck by the similarities of the arguments about drugs a century ago in China to those in the news media in the United States today. x ACKNOWlEDGMENTS In Cambridge for the memorial service for Professor Fairbank in 1991, I reminded Professor Schwartz of his re­ mark, which he recalled; he added that we did not know then that the United States would soon also have a huge drug problem and that no one would know why so many Americans had taken to drugs. I still do not know why indi­ viduals in any society take to drug use; perhaps it is a ques­ tion to which the answers are so varied and personal that no historian will ever be able to identify them with any cer­ tainty. But it is clear that academic interest in this subject is growing, as demonstrated by the number of papers on the subject of China's opium problem that have been presented at academic conferences in recent years. This work, which focuses solely on the missionaries' role in the suppression campaign, is my contribution to this growing field. A number of people have provided me with assistance in this endeavor. Jessie G. Lutz, professor of history emerita of Rutgers University, and Murray Rubinstein, professor of history at Baruch College of City University of New York, read the manuscript and provided many suggestions. My longtime friend Christine W. Kulikowski read both the drafts of the manuscript and the page proofs with her pro­ fessional editor's eyes and made many suggestions. Gene Slaski, academic officer of Penn State's Allentown campus, provided encouragement and financial assistance, and John V. Cooney, campus executive officer, also provided help. Also at Penn State's Allentown campus, Sue Snyder and Nancy Eberle provided secretarial help and Kay Stokes and Kathy Romig, both of the library staff, obtained numerous items for me. Thanks, too, to Suzanne Wilson Barnett, pro­ fessor of history at the University of Puget Sound; Daniel Bays, professor of history at the University of Kansas; David Buck, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin­ Milwaukee; Lawrence Kessler, professor of history at the University of North Carolina; Judith Liu, professor of so­ ciology at the University of San Diego, and Victoria Siu, ACKNOWlEDGMENTS xi adjunct professor of history, at the University of San Fran­ cisco, for their friendship and help over the years. Thanks are also due to the staffs of the Library of Congress and the libraries of Washington University in St. Louis and Georgetown University for their assistance. Thanks to Dominik Fellner for his assistance in the final stages of the project. Thanks, too, to my longtime friends John F. and Vivian Cady of Ohio University, who have long encouraged my interest in Asia. Special thanks are also due to my mother and father, Kathryn E. and Algha C. Lodwick, for their help and encouragement over the years. A NOTE ON ROMANIZATION In this work I have used the Wade-Giles romanization sys­ tem, which was used in most of the source materials cited. For consistency I have used Taiwan only, instead of both Taiwan and Formosa. Sir Alexander Hosie's Joumeys Author's Routes Roads Railways Fu Cities • Sir Alexander Hosie's Journeys. DEASY Geographies. This page intentionally left blank Introduction Dazzling fields of flowers, magnificent to the eye of the be­ holder, stretched across the Chinese countryside. Far be­ yond the horizon more flowers bloomed in India. Beauti­ ful as they were these flowers were not grown to please the eye; with them bloomed international controversy, war, greed, degradation, misery, and death. These were no or­ dinary blossoms-they were opium poppies. Opium was the subject of controversy in China through­ out the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. No one could say how many Chinese were addicted to the drug, but addicts surely numbered in the millions, and their families, who suffered indirectly, added many more to the list of those harmed by the drug. Opium was an emotional issue for the Chinese. Its use had been prohibited by the Yung-cheng emperor in 1729, but as trade with the West increased opium imports to China gradually grew from about two hundred chests a year early in the eighteenth century to about one thousand chests a year in 1767. In 1781 the British East In­ dia Company took over the British part of the trade from private merchants, and by 1790 the company's trade in opium amounted to 4,054 chests. A Chinese imperial edict prohibited all importation in 1796, but it was openly ignored, and by 1830 the amount of opium entering China was 16,877 chests. The amount had grown to 20,619 by 1838, just be­ fore the Opium War of 1839-42. The Opium War, the first war in which the Chinese were defeated by the Europeans, was fought largely over the foreigners' right to sell opium in China. Following the hostilities, 50,000 chests of opium :2 CRUSADERS AGAINST OPIUM were thought to have been imported in 1850, and 85,000 chests entered in 1860 when the trade was legalized by treaty.! Once the trade was legalized opium imports were recorded by the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Ser­ vice.