Notes 1 Mission to Canton 1. Quoted in Susanna Hoe and Derek Roebuck, The Taking of Hong Kong; Charles and Clara Elliot in China Waters (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999). This is a particularly careful and detailed study. 2. The equivalent figure in Aug. 2002 pounds sterling was over £291,000, according to comparative tables issued by the Bank of England. Throughout this book these comparisons are given in the following form: £6000 (tv: £291,000). 3. London Gazette, 12 Dec. 1833. 4. I have given contemporary nineteenth-century names/spellings, in brackets, where that seemed convenient. 5. Quarterly Review, Jan. 1834, quoted in the Morning Post, 3 Feb. 1835, p.3. 6. Quoted in the Liverpool Dispatch and cited in the Morning Post, 22 Jan. 1835, p.2. 7. In 1832 there were 26 British country traders at Canton. By 1837 there were 156. 8. Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (3 vols), vol.1, The Period of Conflict 1834–1860 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), p.120. 9. Correspondence relating to China (hereafter referred to as CRC), 1840, p.18; Chinese Repository, Aug. 1834. 10. CRC, 1840, p.18. 11. An English translation of the instructions, apparently in full, is printed in the Morning Post, 3 Feb. 1835, p.1. 12. Chinese Repository, Sept. 1834. 13. CRC, 1840, p.24; Chinese Repository, April 1839. 14. North China Herald, 15 March 1851, quoted in Morse, The Period of Conflict, p.132. 15. Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). 16. Morse, The Period of Conflict, p.139–53. 17. Chang Hsin-Pao, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p.57. 18. CRC, 1840, p.29. 19. Gentleman’s Magazine, Jan. 1834, p.99. 20. Ibid. p.156. 21. Letter from Clara Elliot to her sister-in-law, dated 24 Aug. 1834, quoted in Hoe and Roebuck, The Taking of Hong Kong, p.27. 22. CRC, 1840, p.71. 23. Napier to Palmerston, CRC, 1840, p.15; also quoted in Morse, The Period of Conflict, p.142. 218 Notes to pages 14–25 219 24. Napier to Lord Grey, CRC, 1840, p.28; also quoted in H.B. Morse and Harley F. McNair, Far Eastern International Relations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), p.86. 25. His letter – the writer was not named – was dated 7 Sept. and summarized in the Morning Post in Feb. 1835. 26. Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War, p.58. 27. Quarterly Review, see note 5 above. 28. Morning Post, 4 Feb. 1835, p.3. Similarly, a letter from Canton dated 19.8.34 and printed in the Weekly Dispatch, 1 Feb. 1835, p.1 said simply ‘The British trade is at present stopped, as Lord Napier will not obey the order of the Viceroy to leave Canton.’ 29. John W. Foster, American Diplomacy in the Orient (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903, reprinted Da Capo Press, New York, 1970), p.63. 30. The Duke, by this time the Grand Old Man of British public affairs, was famously terse and to the point. Once, when asked by some clergyman what he would like the next sermon to be about, he replied ‘about ten minutes.’ 31. Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War, p.61. 32. Quoted in Parliament by Sir James Graham, Hansard, House of Commons, 7 Apr. 1840, col.682. 33. Letter of 13 Sept. 1837 to the Secretary of the Admiralty, quoted in Hoe and Roebuck, The Taking of Hong Kong, p.65. 34. The Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1835, pp.267–9. 2 Palmerston’s England, the World and China 1. Lady Campbell to Emily Eden in 1822, Bourne Collection of Palmerston papers, London School of Economics Library (hereafter referred to as ‘Bourne Papers’). 2. Charles C.F. Greville, Memoirs, ed. Henry Reeve, 3 vols (London: Longmans Green, 1874). 3. See A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press 1780–1850 (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949), pp.191, 238. More generally, Jeremy Black, The English Press 1621–1861 (London: Sutton Publishing, 2001). 4. Donald Southgate aptly entitled his excellent work on Palmerston (using Lord Palmerston’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph) The Most English Minister (London: Macmillan, 1966). 5. West Somerset Free Press, 7 Sept. 1861, quoted in a column by Paul Johnson, Spectator, 19 Aug. 2000, p.25. 6. Leeds Mercury, 24 June 1843. 7. Lord John Russell (later Earl Russell), Early Correspondence, ed. Rollo Russell, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), vol.2, pp.238–9. 8. Kennan’s famous 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ from the Moscow Embassy to Washington was summarized as ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ in the July 1947 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym of ‘Mr X’. 9. Hansard, House of Commons, 16 July 1844, col.931. 10. Hansard, House of Commons, 18 May 1841, cols 654–5. 11. Bentham, ‘Emancipate your Colonies! addressed to the National Convention of France, Anno 1793. Showing the uselessness and mischievousness of 220 Notes to pages 25–32 distant dependencies to an European State’, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, vol.IV (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1843), pp.407 et seq. 12. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s review of Lord Mahon’s History of the War of Succession in Spain, Edinburgh Review, vol.LVI, 1932, pp.499–541. 13. Sir William Molesworth, Hansard, House of Commons, 6 March 1838, cols 476 et seq. 14. Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) Parlimentary Papers 1837 (425) VII, p.76. 15. To Bulwer 22 July 1840, in Henry Lytton Bulwer, The Life of John Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston: with Selections from his Diaries and Correspondence, 2 vols (London, 1870), vol.2, pp.318–19. 16. Public Records Office (Gifts and Deposits) The Russell Papers 3. Lord John was the younger brother of the Duke of Bedford. 17. E. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher and P. Jackson, 1835), pp.360–1, 432. 18. Donald Read, Cobden and Bright: A Victorian Political Partnership (London: E. Arnold, 1967), p.110. 19. Cited in W. Baring Pemberton, Lord Palmerston (London: Batchworth Press, 1954), p.141. 20. Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, trans. Sampson S. Lloyd (London: Longmans Green, 1885), p.293. (This is a translation of List, Das Nationale System der politischen Oekonomie, Stuttgart, 1841.) 21. Even Sir Charles Webster’s magisterial two-volume The Foreign Policy of Palmerston scarcely mentions the Celestial Empire. Wellington’s biography by Elizabeth Longford has no mention of China either. 22. The underlying principles are hardly peculiar to China. As Gibbon reminds us in a comment on the Emperor Severus ‘The true interest of an absolute monarch generally coincides with that of his people. Their numbers, their wealth, their order, and their security, are the best and only foundations of his real greatness; and were he totally devoid of virtue, prudence might sup- ply its place, and would dictate the same rule of conduct.’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Dent [Everyman’s library], 1978), vol.I, Ch.V, p.118. 23. Joseph Fletcher, ‘The Ch’ing in Inner Asia’, in Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (eds) Cambridge History of China, vol.10, The Late Ch’ing 1800–1911 Part I, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Ch.2, p.36. 24. ‘In transliterating foreign names, the Chinese shrink from signifying them by using characters which should have a pleasing meaning or should simulate a Chinese, i.e. a truly civilized name … This Chinese practice is not, perhaps, a direct insult, but it illustrates the national tendency to belittle the foreigner and to treat him as outside the pale of civilization.’ Morse, The Period of Conflict, pp.126–7. 25. Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–1842 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p.42n5. 26. In Tsun’s memorial of 1835 to the Emperor, quoted in Greenberg, British Trade, p.45. 27. J.L.Cranmer-Byng (ed.), An Embassy to China: Lord Macartney’s Journal 1793–94 (London: Routledge, 2000), p.340. Notes to pages 32–42 221 28. In addition, the port of Amoy (Xiamen), with its access to the tea production of Fukien (Fujian), was open to Spanish trade, but this was not of great sig- nificance, since Chinese ships could transport goods to and from the Philippines more cheaply than the Spaniards. 29. Greenberg, British Trade (quoting House of Lords Select Committee) p.3n3. 30. James B. Eames, The English in China (London: Pitman, 1909), p.448. 31. At first it was smoked like tobacco, giving the smoker around 0.2 per cent morphine. Then smokers began to put pills of pure opium into pipes over a flame, inhaling the combined water vapour and opium. That yielded 9–10 per cent morphine. 32. Greenberg, British Trade, pp.142–3; P.C. Kuo, A Critical Study of the First Anglo- Chinese War, with Documents, Shanghai, Commerical Press, 1935, Chs V&VI. 33. Jack Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1800s to the 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1990. 34. Greenberg, British Trade, pp.14–15. 35. Quoted by Lord Ashley, Hansard, House of Commons 4 April 1843, cols 362 et seq. 36. One estimate suggests that the opium monopoly came to yield about one- seventh of the total revenue of British India. Cf. D.E. Owen, British Opium Policy in China and India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934). 37. Letter of 1 July 1835 from Sir George Robinson to Lord Palmerston, received in London 28 Jan.