73 CHAPTER 3:
THE COOLIE TRADE IN MACAO, C. 1851-1874
This chapter examines the gradual relocation of the coolie trade from its original centers of Amoy, Swatow and Cumsingmoon to the Portuguese colony of Macao along the decade 1850-1860. This transition was triggered by a complex set of internal and external factors: on one hand, the growing popular hostility to the traffic in South China—amidst severe social and political strife—pushed coolie traffickers to relocate their business in safer havens; secondly, the collapse of the Portuguese coastal trade in the mid-1850s liberated material and human resources for the coolie recruitment chain. The most important cause for the takeoff of Macao’s coolie circuit, however, was external: the global spread of a powerful anti-coolie trade press campaign, which undermined the legitimacy of the trade in the eyes of an increasingly influential international public opinion.1 As a consequence, by the early 1860s, Canton, Amoy and Swatow-based British and North American traffickers were forced to withdraw from the business by their respective governments, while French, Spanish, Peruvian, Portuguese and Italian speculators based in Macao jumped in to seize their shares.
The second part of this chapter analyzes the policies issued by the Portuguese government and the local Macao authorities in relation to the so-called “abuses” that allegedly plagued the coolie trade until its abolition. Moving out of a flat assessment that has prejudiced most of the historiographical coverage of this topic, we stress the dynamic character of such policies and their complex interplay with the internal political struggles of the Macanese society. A clear discontinuity in the Portuguese authorities’ stance towards the coolie traffic surfaced in the late 1860s, as a result of the unprecedented “Annamese” scandal (1867) and the affirmation of a reformist faction in the government of the colony.
3.1 The historical context: Macao and the coolie trade between the Opium wars The first shipment of coolies from Macao to Peru took place in late 1850 or early
1 Some historians have recently coined the term “colonial public sphere” to define the system of English and native-language communications and press in the nineteenth century colonial Southeast and East Asia. See Mark Ravinder Frost, “Asia’s Maritime Networks and the Colonial Public Sphere, 1840-1920,” New
Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 63–94. These networks were integrated in a global web of
communications through the transoceanic telegraphic cables, which reached Macao and Hong Kong in 1867.
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1851.2 In the following year the first Portuguese ship, owned by the Macanese merchant José Vicente Jorge’s Sophia, also entered the trade, transporting 250 (or 260) coolies to Cuba.3 These initial experiments benefited, most likely, from intercepting the spontaneous migratory drive of the California gold rush. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Macao had been active as a collecting point for the migration of Chinese to California at least since 1849, although in smaller proportions than Hong Kong.4 It is not entirely clear if these emigrants, like those departing from Hong Kong at this stage, shared with the coolie trade some form of contractual term of engagement.5
Until 1856-1857, at any rate, the volume of departures from Macao to Peru and Cuba remained relatively insignificant, compared to the ports of Swatow (and Namoa), Cumsingmoon, and Amoy. After 1856, and especially during the Second Opium War, on the other hand, it rose exponentially, from 681 coolies exported in 1855, 2,943 in 1856, and 7,438 in 1857.6
How can we explain this pattern? What were the special features that favored the Portuguese colony over its competitors, in the long run? A close-scale historical scrutiny
2 Some authors, including Robert Irick and Elizabeth Sinn, have reported the first shipment of coolies from Macao as early as in 1847. The source of this information, however, is of dubious reliability: it builds on a story recalled by the polemicist Russel Conwell, in the 1870, which seems to conflate elements of the Amoy and Macao coolie trade, into a totally unconfirmed voyage of a Portuguese vessel called “Dom Pedro” with three hundred coolies to Peru, of which there is so far no record. A study of the Peruvian shipping entries could help dispel this quagmire. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 15; Irick, Ch’ing Policy Toward
the Coolie Trade, 8; Russel H. Conwell, Why and how. Why the Chinese emigrate, and the means they adopt for the purpose of reaching America (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1871), 82–84. The
incertitude between 1850 and 1851 is given by the unreported cargo of the ship Coromandel, departed from Macao to Callao the 8 May 1850, and then again in 1851 with 409 coolies. The date of 1851 is reported by the Portuguese Superintendent Marques Pereira in 1861; he admitted, though, that his sources were disputable: “apezar das diligências que empreguei, e não obstante ser recente ainda a época do começo d’esta emigração, não me foi possível encontrar d’ella esclarecimentos sufficientes. As repartições publicas competentes nada podem fornecer sobre o assumpto, pois que a intervenção da auctoridade só se declarou em 1853.” Marques Pereira, Relatorio da Emigração Chineza em Macau, 18.
3 White to Walcott, Canton, 8 January 1853, BPP, Papers Relating to Chinese Immigrants Recently
Introduced into British Guyana and Trinidad, 1854, 110. Some sources report it brought coolies to Callao
as early as 1851, but there are no records on the Peruvian side: Teixeira, O comércio de escravos em
Macau: The so called Portuguese slave trade in Macao, 28; Marques Pereira, Relatorio da Emigração Chineza em Macau, 18. Not casually, José Vicente Jorge held the charge of Spanish consul in Macao
between 1851 and 1853: Maria Teresa Lopes da Silva, “As relações entre Espanha e a China em meados do séc. XIX. A proposta de Sínibaldo de Mas para o dominio de Macau,” in Estudos sobre a China VIII, vol. 2 (Lisboa: Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, 2006), 860.
4 Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 95.
5 Sinn, for instance, provide evidence of three contract of indenture signed by a Chinese passenger to California, although at much better conditions ($12 or $15 monthly wages instead of $3-4) than the standard for Cuba and Peru. Ibid., 52. The three contracts can be consulted online at the Online Archive of California, California Historical Society, Jacob P. Leese Papers: “Indenture of Ahine, Chinaman,”
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hbl00000v8/?brand=oac4; “Indenture of Awye, Chinaman,”
http://www.0ac.cdlib.0rg/ark:/13030/hb587003vc/?brand=oac4; “Indenture of Atu, Chinaman,”
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb6z09n88s/?brand=oac4 (accessed 05/14). 6 Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 121.
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suggests that the foundations of the Macao coolie traffic rested upon the peculiar institutional framework assumed by the Portuguese settlement in the 1840s.
From a political point of view, this period represented a major watershed in Macao’s history: it signaled the end of the centuries-old “Macao Formula”—the mixed Sino-Portuguese administration of the city, established in the sixteenth century7—and the beginning of what historian José Vicente Serrão has labelled the age of Macao’s “colonization”.8 The corollary was a confrontational policy towards the Chinese Empire, lasting until the celebration of the Sino-Portuguese treaty of 1887.
From an economic perspective, instead, the decade of the 1840s marked a restructuration of the settlement’s economic base. The history of Macao has been analyzed as an almost regular alternation of cycles of prosperity and stagnation, linked with the waves of the international market.9 Since the late seventeenth century, the Portuguese entrepôt had been integrated as a crucial component of the Sino-Foreign “Canton Trade” system in the Pearl River Delta. As shown by Van Dyke’s groundbreaking work The Canton Trade (2005), and other valuable recent studies, the role of Macao in the Canton commercial system was not limited to the accommodation of the foreign merchants (and families) after the authorized winter trade season—from October to January—but included the provision of pilots and a network of information, compradors and interpreters.10 As explained by Puga,
Macau, para além de porta de entrada europeia no Imperio do Meio, é, desde cedo, uma plataforma de encontro entre tripulações […] local de: reabastecimento, reparação, e protecção de embarcações […] espera e recolha de informações sobre a situação em Cantão […] encontro inicial com o hopu e de assinatura de contractos comerciais com os chineses, bem como de tradução de documentação chinesa, armazenamento de mercadoria, refugio e espera enquanto os problemas ou crises em Cantão se resolvem, destino de informações vinda de Cantão […] e de origem de relatos da chegadas de barcos europeus, […] e, posteriormente, espaço de habitação,
7 The term “Macao formula” was first employed by historian Fok Kai-Cheong, and later Wu Zhiliang, to identify the peculiar management of the Portuguese settlement by the Chinese imperial authorities during the Early Modern era: Fok Kai-Cheong, “The Macao Formula: A Study of Chinese Management of Westerners from the Mid Sixteenth Century to the Opium War Period” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1978); Wu Zhiliang, Segredos da sobrevivência: História política de Macau (Macau: Associação de Educação de Adultos de Macau, 1999).
8
Serrão, “Macau,” 723. 9 Ibid., 744.
10 Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005); Paul A. Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao: Politics and
Strategies in Eighteenth-century Trade (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011); Weng Eang
Cheong, Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-Western Trade, 1684-1798 (Richmond: Curzon, 1997).
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convalescença e descanso, aprendizagem da língua chinesa, de compra de escravos aos portugueses, de prisão […] e ainda de recolha e envio de flora local11
At the same time, the Portuguese colony prospered as the center of major smuggling network for opium and other illegal goods, conveyed to Canton through the internal channels of the Pearl River Delta. Since the 1820s, however, the city started to feel the signals of an economic downturn, accelerated by the increased pressure of the Chinese authorities on the opium traffic (1820), and the subsequent relocation of the bulk of the South China opium smuggling network in the Lintin Island and the Lintin-Whampoa sea route. 12 The coup de grace on Macao’s economy, nevertheless, came only after the First Opium War, as we argue below.
3.1.1 The birth of Hong Kong and the “colonization” of Macao under Ferreira de Amaral
Following a longstanding diplomatic tradition, Macao took a stance of “benevolent neutrality” towards Lin Zexu and the Chinese authorities during the 1839 opium dispute, and refused to support the British in the subsequent conflict. In fact, it has been argued, the Portuguese were more afraid of the consequences of a British victory than of a British loss, and feared as well the possibility of a British takeover of the settlement. 13 In response the British forces looked for an alternative foothold in the Pearl River Delta to organize their military campaign. The choice fell on the nearby island of Hong Kong, equipped with a natural deep sea port (August 1839).
After the end of the hostilities, the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, and the opening of the five “treaty ports” to Western merchants, further materialized the worst nightmares of Macao’s administrators. The inauguration of a direct route for the tea-growing provinces of the East (Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu), combined with the establishment of Hong Kong as free port threatened to suffocate the economic base of the Portuguese settlement and strangle its already suffering commerce, while the transferring of the Western merchant community from Macao to the new British colony menaced to destroy the once thriving Macao’s “touristic” sector.
11 Rogério Miguel Puga, A presença inglesa e as relações Anglo-Portuguesas em Macau (1635-1793) (Lisboa: Centro de História de Além-Mar, 2009), 88.
12 Paul A. Van Dyke, “Smuggling Networks of the Pearl River Delta before 1842: Implications for Macao and the American China Trade,” in Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling and Diplomacy on the South
China Coast, ed. Paul A. Van Dyke (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 49–72. See also
Angela Guimaráes, Uma relação especial: Macau e as relações Luso-Chinesas 1780-1844 (Lisboa: CIES - Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia, 1996); Serrão, “Macau,” 747.
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The crisis also carried an ideological dimension. As observed Munn, since its very foundation, Hong Kong proudly defined its identity as a “true colony” in opposition to the decadent Sino-Portuguese compromise adopted at Macao.14 For the subsequent forty years, the Portuguese authorities attempted to emulate the status of their British neighbors, first by a de-facto occupation of Macao’s territory (polítca do facto
consumado) and then in a desperate bid to certify their de-facto sovereign rights through a
treaty with the Chinese Empire .15
The blueprints of this strategy were first laid down during the short government of José Gregorio Pegado (1843-46), but they were mainly posed in execution under the rule of his “ironfisted” successor, João Maria Ferreira de Amaral (1846-49).16 The purpose was, according to the instructions sent by the Portuguese Marine and Overseas Minister Falcão to Amaral in 1846, to “refundir e criar enteiramente de novo” the stettlement of Macao and, that way, redesign the character of the Portuguese presence in the Far East.17
In order to understand the consequences of these institutional transformations, we may analyze Pegado and Amaral’s reformist action in some detail as the sum of five major breaks with the preexisting political order. First of all, in 1844, Macao was separated from Goa and elevated to the status of “autocephalous” province (Provincia de Macau, Timor e Solor). This move increased the executive powers of the governor and reduced the previously influential Leal Senado, Macao’s elected municipal chamber, to a merely advisory board. Next, Macao was, following the example and in competition with Hong Kong, declared a “free port”, open to the trade of every nation and without duties (20 November 1845). Third, consequential to this development, Amaral ordered the expulsion of the Chinese fiscal and judicial authorities from the settlement: the mandarin Zuotang (1847), and the customs officer Hopu (1849). At the same time, the city ceased to pay the annual tribute of 500 tael of ground rent (foro do chão) to the authorities of Xianshan County.
14
Munn, Anglo-China, 38. 15 Saldanha, O Tratado Impossível.
16 Zhiliang, Segredos da sobrevivência, 174, 181–204.
17 MMU to Gov. Amaral, Lisbon, 20 January 1846, AHU, Correspondência Expedida para Macau, Livro 3°, reprinted in António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, “‘Um estabelecimento a refundir e criar de novo’. Macau e a politica externa Portuguesa na China (1842-1853),” in Estudos sobre as Relações Luso-Chinesas (Lisboa: Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, 1996), 385–386.
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These actions effectively transposed the Chinese population of Macao from the jurisdiction and de facto sovereignty of the Qing Empire into the hands of Portuguese magistracies, like the Procurador dos Negócios Sínicos, suddenly entrusted with much more effective—and according to contemporary critics tyrannical and arbitrary— powers.18 Conforming to the general scheme of legal pluralism promoted by the Portuguese in their colonial space, the Chinese residents of Macao were relegated to a special category of colonial subjects, later formalized under the label of indígenas, not without resistance.19
Fourth step was the physical expansion of Macao’s borders, with the occupation of the territory between the Christian city and the Porta do Cerco (which included several autonomous Chinese villages: Mong-Há, Patane, San Kiu, Sá-Cong; see fig 3.1), and the stationing of a garrison on the islands of Taipa and, after Amaral’s death, Coloane.20 Fifth, Amaral asserted his authority on the Chinese of Macao trough the imposition of a head tax and several indirect duties. These policies triggered the so called “revolta dos
faitiões” on 6 October 1846,21 an insurrection led by the Chinese boatmen in the inner harbor, violently repressed by the Portuguese troops. After this bloody confrontation, Amaral dissolved a shutdown of the Chinese shopkeepers of the Bazaar (the Chinese downtown), threatening artillery fire on the protesters.22
18 The title of Procurador had originated in the late sixteenth century from the necessity of the Leal Senado to negotiate with the Chinese authorities of Guangdong province. After Amaral’s reforms and the expulsion of the Chinese officers in 1849 it assumed new and incomparable relevancy, as it became the single magistracy empowered with the jurisdiction over the Chinese ‘indigenous’ population of Macao, administered through the “interpretation” of the Chinese customary law. This exceptional and largely arbitrary power was severely criticized by many voices in Macao’s society, leading to a major process of reform and regulation in the 1880s. See in particular Relatório ácerca das atribuições da procuratura dos
negócios sínicos da cidade de Macau dirigido a s. Ex.o Governador de Macau e Timor (Macau:
Typographia de José da Silva, 1867); Uma pagina negra nos annaes da Procuratura de Macao (Macau, 1869); A polémica acerca da procuratura dos negócios sínicos de Macao (Macau: Typographia Popular, 1870); there is almost no literature on the historical role of this magistracy: the sole exceptions are José Gabriel Mariano, “A procuratura dos negócios sínicos (1583-1894),” O Direito, 1991; Maria Carla Faria Araújo, “Direito Português e populações indígenas. Macau (1846-1927)” (Unpublished MA Thesis, ISCTE-IUL, 2000).
19
This topic is part of a large and hot debate in the current Portuguese historiography. See for an introduction, the fundamental work of Ana Cristina Nogueira da Silva, Constitucionalismo e Império: A
cidadania no Ultramar Português (Coimbra: Almedina, 2009). Many contemporaries in Macao saw as na
absurdity the conflation of the wealthy and cultured Chinese population of Macao with the “indígenas mais ignorantes e menos civilisados” of the African possession of the Portuguese Empire;” O Echo do Povo, 10 February 1869 in A Polémica Acerca da Procuratura, 6.
20 Maria Teresa Lopes da Silva, Transiçao de Macau para a modernidade 1841-1853: Ferreira do Amaral
e a construção da soberania portuguesa (Lisboa: Fundação Oriente, 2002), 147.
21
Ibid., 127–135.The faitiões were the fast boats used for the daily transport of passengers, food and sundries between Macao and the inner Pearl River Delta.
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Fig. 3.1. Macao in the 1870s. Source AHM, B0022 (modified by the Author).
These events consolidated Amaral’s fame of an ironfisted unflinching ruler, but eventually costed him his life. On 22 August 1849, the Governor was murdered by a party
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of six people while riding his horse on the road he had lied down between the Porta de
Sant’Antonio and the Porta do Cerco (Estrada do Campo). His only arm and his head
were severed and taken by the murderers, who fled to the Chinese territory crossing the strip of land that connected Macao with the mainland.23
Portuguese historian Teresa Lopes da Silva has conducted a full-scale investigation of the details of Amaral’s murder, trying to individuate the plausible motives and its probable instigators.24 The leader of the assassins, Shen Zhiliang, interrogated and executed by the Chinese authorities in Canton, asserted he had plotted the crime alone, to vindicate the demolition of his ancestor’s shrines during the construction of the Estrada
do Campo.
The removal of Amaral’s head and hand, however, seems to confute Zhiliang’s version and suggest instead that the murder could have been commissioned. The instigators, Silva argued, could have been either the Chinese Viceroy (Governor General) of Guangdong Guanxi, Xu Guangjin, who refused to consign Zhiliang to the Portuguese alive, and, it is said, sadly regretted his execution; the Chinese hong merchants of Macao, damaged by the expulsion of the hopu; or even an hostile Macanese faction, harbored in the dispossessed Leal Senado. Not casually, she concluded, the murder took place after a grave Anglo-Portuguese incident (the Summers-Keppel case),25 which had isolated, conveniently, Amaral from his most valuable political and military supporters in the event of a confrontation with the Chinese authorities.
The death of Amaral drove the colony in a state of disorder and anarchy, which seriously presented the Portuguese authorities in Lisbon with the option to sell the settlement to a third European power, in particular Spain.26 Amidst raging fears of an imminent Chinese invasion, the providential victory in a small-scale military confrontation outside the Barrier Gate—the capture of the fort of Latashi (Passaleão) by a thirty-five men squad led by the legendary lieutenant coronel Vicente Nicolao de Mesquita (25 August)27—reassured the spirits and became the symbolic cornerstone of Macao’s claim of sovereignty by right of conquest.28
In the following years Macao reemerged from this traumatic period with renewed
23 Zhiliang, Segredos da sobrevivência, 205–206. 24
Silva, Transiçao de Macau para a Modernidade, 137–142.
25 The violent release of a British subject, James Summers, from Macao’s gaol, executed by captain Keppel with armed marines, on 7 June 1849: Fei, Macao 400 years, 240.Also, Gunn, Ao encontro de Macau, 89. 26 Silva, “As relações entre Espanha e a China...”; David Martínez-Robles, “Perspectives for the Spanish intervention in Macao in the 19th Century,” Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies 16 (2008): 107–17. 27 Fei, Macao 400 years, 242.
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impulse. The chaotic 1850s, in particular, posed the basis of a new cycle of economic development, which will last well into the 1870s.
The results were felt quickly. In August 1855 the new Governor Guimarães proudly announced to Lisbon the colony’s first budget surplus after years of difficulties.29 In the following years, Macao repaid its debts with the metropolis and became a neat contributor to the frail balance of the Portuguese Empire. This upturn was the result of the development of three new economic sectors: the coolie trade, the coastal convoy trade, and the implementation of the so-called regime of the exclusivos—governmental licenses of monopoly for the trade in opium, meat and the opening of fantan gambling houses.30
As commented by Serrão, in spite of the “decadentist” 31 image portrayed systematically by the contemporaries, the economic situation of Macao in these years witnessed a major growth linked to the three aforementioned industries. It was a process of pragmatic adaptation, he explains, to a subsidiary role in regards to the neighboring entrepôt of Hong Kong, which brought forth, Serrão asserts, “uma prosperidade relativa que não terá sido inferior, porventura pelo contrário, à situação vivida durante todo o século e meio anterior.”32
3.1.2 The lorcha trade system and the 1857 Ningbo massacre
There is a strong correlation between the flowering of the so-called Portuguese lorcha convoy trade in the early 1850s South China Sea, as well as its subsequent demise at the end of the decade, and the simultaneous evolution of the coolie trade in Macao. Unfortunately, very little research has been dedicated to this specific node. The convoy trade has been marginally covered by the historiography on nineteenth-century Macao,33 as well as by some classic studies of the Sino-Western interactions,34 but its links with the contemporary Chinese piracy and the coolie trade need further investigation.35
As illustrated by several authors, the chaotic post-Opium War era in Southern China
29 Gov. Guimarães to SEMU, Macao, 7 July 1855, in AHU, SEMU, DGU, Correspondência de Macau e Timor, cx. 21 (1855); also cited in Alfredo Gomes Dias, “Diáspora Macaense: Macau, Hong Kong, Xangai (1850-1952)” (Universidade de Lisboa, 2011), 95.
30
Figueiredo, “Os vectores da economia.” The first fantan and cow meat licenses were assigned in 1849 by Amaral; Silva, Transiçao de Macau para a Modernidade, 214.
31 Serrão, “Macau,” 723. 32
Ibid.
33 Especially Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, 319–331; Dias, Sob o signo da transição, 127–139; Serrão, “Macau.”
34 Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Vol 1: The Period of Conflict
1834-1860 (New York: Paragon Book Gallery, 1910), 403–408.
35 Silva, Emigração de cules, 32, 43–44; Serrão, “Macau,” 749; Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, 260– 270.
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stimulated the resurgence of the traditional Cantonese piracy and its geographical expansion in an area spanning from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Fujian-Zhejiang region.36 The general collapse of the Qing maritime power also favored a surge in smuggling and other “grey” activities at the edge of legality, including the still unlawful, but informally tolerated, opium trade, and the recruitment of coolies in non-treaty port villages.
In this setting, Macanese businessmen, and other Westerners, saw occasions to profit from offering protection to Chinese coastal traders and fishing vessels against the threat of piracy. According to the documentation in the Portuguese Marine and Overseas archives, the first significant Portuguese escort convoys in the Chinese East Coast were organized in 1843. Consequently, Macao turned into a major shipbuilding center specializing in the construction and equipment of lorchas, heavily armed and robust Sino-Western vessels, loaded with cannons and light weaponry.37 In 1851 Macao counted 67 registered lorchas, and about one thousand Portuguese and Chinese sailors/gunmen;38 five year later, this fleet increased to a peak of 162 ships,39 operating in an area stretching from Southeast Asia and the Malay straits southwards, to the Shandong peninsula northwards. As competition grew, the escort fees dropped from about $1,200 to 1,500 to around $500 per ship per month after the first years, but stabilized in the 1850s. 40
With these prices, noted by Hosea Ballou Morse, the escort business was only “a short step to levying blackmail on all peaceful traders.”41 In fact—as many contemporaries observed—the practices of these escorts closely resembled the protection fees traditionally extorted by the Chinese pirates. In the crucial Amoy-Ningbo-Shanghai trade route, or at Zhoushan Island, for example, the Portuguese established and imposed a sort of organized monopoly of the protection business, forcefully collecting escort tariffs from the local villagers, and operating de facto as an extortion cartel.42 The authorities in
36 Ei Murakami, “The Reorganization of the Maritime Order in Coastal Area of South China during the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The British Royal Navy and the Pirates of Fujian and Guangdong,” Tōyō shi
kenkyū 65, no. 4 (2007).
37Lorchas were hybrid Sino-Western vessels with Western hulls and Chinese rigs, usually between 50 and 150 t.r. They often carried a dozen four or six pounders cannons, occasionally pieces of heavier calibers. Crews were of about fifteen men, both Chinese and Portuguese (or Macanese), usually armed with rifles, pistols, sabers. AHU, Maços José Torres, cx. 538-539, pt. Navios de Macau 1637-1864.
38 According to the official registers, these 67 lorchas carried 304 rifles, 423 lances, 182 swords, 81 machetes, 54 pistols, and 15,725 ammunitions; “não empregam quando saem ao mar menos de 380 a 420 portuguezes e 480 a 525 chins.” AHU, Maços José Torres, cx. 538-539, pt. Lorchas 1835-1851.
39 AHU, Maços José Torres, cx. 538-539, pt. Navios de Macau 1637-1864. 40 AHU, Maços José Torres, cx. 538-539, pt. Lorchas 1835-1851.
41 Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Vol 1: The Period of Conflict 1834-1860, 406. 42
Às 60 que trabalhavam em princípios de 1851, 2 eram no estreito de Malaca, 36 estavam no norte em comboio [...] e as restantes no commercio costeiro e outro serviços. AHU, Maços José Torres, cx. 538-539, pt. Lorchas 1835-1851
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Macao initially supported this evolution. Special consulates were established in Ningbo and Fuzhou to manage and assist the lorchas, 43 which appointed an unofficial “commodore” to coordinate, direct and control the fleet with a quasi-military discipline and organization.44 The profits at stake were huge: in the sole year of 1852, the convoy trade in Zhejiang yielded $90,000, to split among about thirty lorchas.45 According to Morse, the overall annual return of the East Coast convoying could be estimate to about $500,000 a few years later.46
These attempts to monopolize this business, unsurprisingly, attracted on the Portuguese lorcheiros widespread hostility. Competing English, French and other Western nations’ escort fleets, as well as Cantonese pirates, for instance, complained against the Portuguese cartel. They openly challenged the Portuguese lorchas, often by armed means.
The Chinese authorities, too, accused the Portuguese of perpetrating acts of piracy, ransom and plunder sheltered behind their—unofficially recognized—status of extraterritoriality. The Portuguese consuls ashore were accomplices in these occurrences, as peaceful vessels ad their cargoes were confiscated under false accuses of piracy.47 Several times, moreover, Portuguese lorchas had turned into pirates tout court, and
43 “O governador da Provincia de Macao, Timor e Solor determina o seguinte: Tendo-me representado muitos dos proprietários de lorchas desta praça a necessidade de estabelecer em Ningpò um Consulado portuguez para o registo dos Contratos das mesmas lorchas que navegam entre Amoy e Shangae, offrecendo meios para sustentar o referido Consulado, que deve servir de agência commercial aos dittos proprietários, e tendo a tal respeito ouvido o conselho do Governo e mandado consultar os próprios donos das Lorchas, a fim de proceder com toda a equidade a bem dos seus interesse e da dignidade nacional, mais de uma vez comprometida por homens turbulentos da tripulação na mesma Lorchas [...] é criado um Consulado portuguez de Ningpo e Fuchaw, e o respectivo Consul.” BO, 27 March 1852. These consulates were entirely directed from Macao, and as far as we could inquire, had no correspondence with the Portuguese mainland.
44 See the description in Ball, Rambles in Eastern Asia, including China and Manilla, during several years’
residence, 247. Ball took a passage on the lorcha of one Sino-Portuguese “commodore” en route to Ningbo,
and describes with interesting details the organization and features of the lorcha convoy system. 45
AHU, Maços José Torres, cx. 538-539, pt. Lorchas 1835-1851.
46 Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Vol 1: The Period of Conflict 1834-1860, 406. According to the correspondent of the Times George Wingrove Cooke the revenues amounted to $200,000 in the sole Ningbo area: George Wingrove Cooke, “The Ningpo Massacre,” in “The Times” special
correspondence from China in the years 1857-1858 (London: G. Routledge & Co., 1858).
47
“Um bando de Portuguezes e Chinas de Macao […] terem à força tomado posse de uma soma [junk] neste porto tendo pedido entregue mais de 200 patacas do dono, e recusarão entregar a soma, nem soltar o mestre da prisão [...] ate quem mais 300 patacas lhe fossem pagas.” Cons. Hague to Placido de Mello (extract), Ningbo, 31 July 1851, AHU, Maços José Torres, cx 540, pt. Gov. Cardoso; “An illustrative case occurred in September 1852, when a Portuguese lorcha captured a junk laden with sugar, and took her into Ningpo; the Chinese authorities, after investigation, declared that she was a peaceful trader, armed for her own protection ; the Portuguese consul, after an independent investigation, decided that she was a pirate and declared her a lawful prize, taking, it is said, the vessel for himself, and dividing the cargo among her captors.” Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Vol 1: The Period of Conflict
84 cooperated with Cantonese pirate fleets.48
Scattered evidence shows that these lorchas were frequently involved in the purchasing, kidnapping and transshipping of coolies for the Macao emigration system.49
In 1855, for instance, especially gruesome details emerged after the discovery of 44 female child slaves, all between 3 and 8 years old, purchased for 8 dollars each at Ningbo by the Portuguese lorchamen Antonio Martinez, and embarked on the British emigrant ship Inglewood, chartered by Tait & Co., to be unloaded in Macao, and then dispatched overseas.50 Subsequent investigations by British agents exposed a wider business organized by the Macanese entrepreneur Albino de Encarnação51, and the already mentioned José Vicente Jorge, aimed at providing female emigrants to Cuba, or eventually Manila.52 Martinez expected to gain about 36 dollars for each girl.
This background is necessary to put in context the events of the so-called “Ningbo Massacre” of 1857. The origins of this incident can be tracked back two years, to the Zhejiang provincial authorities’ appointment of a notorious Cantonese pirate, Po-Ling-Yee (also referred as Apack), as third rank military mandarin, with the mission to compete and dislodge the Portuguese lorchamen in the local wood convoy escorts of the Amoy area. The situation escalated when the French and British consuls in Ningbo joined in the complaints, conspiring with the Governor General of Zhejiang-Fujian Wang Yide to employ these pirates to completely repel the Portuguese from the area.
48 See, for instance, the depositions of the Portuguese officers of the lorcha n.62, captured by a fleet of 14 Chinese and Western pirates, including two Macanese (n.106 and n.71) in the trial of Eli Boggs, North American pirate, in Hong Kong Supreme Court: “the prisoner [Boggs] appeared to be consulting with the head pirate and asked the witness what was the value of the cargo. The prisoner did not appear to have any authority amongst the Chinese. The Chinese spoke to Boggs as if he was an equal.” Friend of China, 8 July 1857.
49 “As authoridades Ingleza, Franceza e Chineza acabam de prender em Cantão, na manha de 7 do corrente, duas lorchas implicadas no arrebatamento de Culis. Uma dellas levava a nossa bandeira, e a outra estava no outro dia em Macao sem mastros. Dizem que a lorcha Portugueza não somente furtava Culis mas quando os não encontrava, se occupava em piratear.” O Echo do Povo, 15 April 1859.
50 Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise...,” 91–93; Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 87. See the process n.41, Acting Secretary Woodgate to Mr. Hammond, Hong Kong, 14 March 1855, (and inclosures), BPP,
Correspondence upon the subject of emigration from China, 1855, 75-92.
51 Later editor of the first Portuguese-language newspaper in Shanghai, O Aquilão, published in 1867-1868. See his self-defense against the accusation of involvement in this traffic, which he also claims was the humanitarian rescue from extreme poverty, in O Aquilão, 6 July 1867.
52
Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise...,” 219; Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 86. Depositions taken from the Inglewood’s crew discorded about the final destination of the girls. According to one American sailor, Eli Moore Boggs, Martinez had been purposely ambiguous about it: “He told me that he was going to send them to the Havana, to a large cigar factory. He spoke English very well, so that there could be no mistake. I believe he told some others they were to go to Manilla, but he distinctly said to me the Havana. He informed me that when he took them to Macao, the Spanish Consul there would take them off his hands, and he would make a profit of 1,600 dollars by them.” Deposition of Eli More Boggs, inclosure 21, BPP,
Correspondence upon the Subject of Emigration from China, 1855, 89-90. We do not know if this Boggs
was the same person (most likely), or just homonymous of the aforementioned Eli Boggs, North American, sentenced as pirate in Hong Kong in 1857.
85
The pretexts for the subsequent fights were a series of small engagements occurred in March 1857. As a side note, these events also displayed the presence of Italian and Genoese adventurers in the complex “water world”53 of the mid-nineteenth-century South China Sea, and what was ironically the first appearance of the Italian flag in China, even before the Italian unification.
According to the Portuguese consul in Ningbo Francisco João Marques, the first skirmishes originated when the Genoese Ignacio Sonza, captain of the Portuguese-flagged schooner Aurora, violently contested the fraudulent use of the Sardinian (Italian) green-white-red tricolor by a lorcha of the French firm Guilbert & Co., also manned by an Italian—Benedetto Capurro,54 most likely related to an Italo-Peruvian family of Recco.55
The use that the French made in their boats of a Flag of three vertical colours, being green white, and red, which may be Genoese, Sarde, or Mexican flag, gave rise (as you know) to the quarrel, and for the sake of this flag, the Master of the Portuguese Schooner, Ignacio Sonza, who is a Genoese, or Sarde, by birth, asked them who had authorized them to use the flag of his nation. About who was the first to point the guns, there are different reports, but the Master of the Schooner Ignacio Sonza says that he turned the fore pivot gun, which was necessary for him, to weight anchor to come up the river [...] but the Frenchmen loaded, not only all their guns with grape shots, but Mr. Dubarry was about to fire one of the guns, and he was prevented by the Master of the boat, who is Italian by the name of Thomas, that took out the match from his hand56
After these events, Marques reported, an attempt of conciliation failed, and in return the French lorchamen kidnapped and beat the Chinese comprador of the Portuguese fleet leader, Mr. Soeiro, at Zhenhai (the outer port of Ningbo):
On that very day at two o’clock in the evening a Chinaman “Alock,” employed by Mr. Soeiro, as his Máchim (Broker) was seized in the principal landing place at Chinhae [Zhenhai], by some Chinese-in the service of the Frenchmen, and taken to the French house, where after shutting the door inside he has been beaten, and the Frenchmen were present at this scene of violence, without preventing it, and laughing at the poor victim, who was after liberated by one Portuguese from being killed there by the Chinese.57
This escalation attracted in the Ningbo-Zhenhai area the fleet of the aforementioned
53
Expression borrowed from Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast 1790-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 3.
54 Testimony of Benedetto Capurro to the French Consul Edan, Ningbo 29 April 1857 (copy), in AHM, CJDCM, C0158.
55 Vendita del Pailebote Generoso fatta dal sig. Capitano Giovanni Accame al Signor Giuseppe Capurro [...] di Antonio, nativo di Recco, marino di professione, pure residente al Callao; Consolato italiano a Lima, 20 Giugno 1863, in ACS, Ministero della Marina, DGMM, Miscellanea Affari Diversi 1865-1869, b.286 56
Marques, Consul in Ningbo to Meadows, acting French Consul, Ningbo, 9 April 1857 copy in The
Ningpo Massacre (Hong Kong: Noronha’s Office, 1857), 4.
86
Apack, under the command of his brother Aliunkay. Supported by the French and Mr. Guilbert, the Cantonese started to replace the Portuguese in the local escort business, forcing the local fishermen to replace the Portuguese “protection flags” with their own.58 In response, in early June 1857, a Portuguese squadron of fifteen lorchas raided and plundered one of Apack’s main bases, located in the fishermen village of Si-ping (Shipu). According to some reports, they razed the entire village to the ground and killed five women and a dozen men.59
The retaliation that followed brought the almost complete eradication of the Portuguese presence at Ningbo. On their return at Zhenhai, in fact, Soeiro’s lorchas were met by a fleet of ten or twelve Cantonese and French lorchas under the command of Aliunkay and utterly defeated. On 26 June, a prolonged land-naval battle ensued, where the Portuguese encampment ashore was overwhelmed and the Portuguese of Zhenhai chased house by house by their enemies.60 The hostilities culminated in the final assault and destruction of the Portuguese consulate, last redoubt of the lorcheiros, at the outskirts of Ningbo. Consul Marques, who had played indeed a more than ambiguous role in the management of his countrymen’s shady enterprises,61 hid into the local French mission, and was later rescued by the French man-of-war La Capriceuse, dispatched by the French consul to put an end to the strife—but actually accused by Marques of having openly sided with the Cantonese, French and Western “pirates.”62
58Carta do Vicerey de Fokien e Chekiang para o Consul Frances Edan, 16 May 1857, trans., AHM, CJDCM, C0158.
59 Munn, Anglo-China, 177. Also China Mail, 5 November 1857: “Francisco Merlini. Piracy. The prisoner […] was Captain of a lorcha in the Portuguese fleet cruising off Amoy and the particular crime charged against him, amongst several others, was perpetrated at a large village called Sim-pim, near Ningpo, where according to the depositions, the most fearful atrocities were committed: five women, and twelve men were murdered and every house but one in the place destroyed. They also proved the prisoner to have been on shore and actively engaged with the pirates. [...] The jury found the prisoner Guilty, but strongly recommended him to mercy on account of his previous good character and the Court passed the very lenient sentence of Twelve Months’ imprisonment.” The Friend of China, 7 November 1857, argued against the sentence stating that Shipu was a pirate cove.
60 "Sir, I have, the honor to inform you, that the Taomans of Cantonese pirates, which came yesterday into this port, with three Portuguese Lorchas seized by them, had the audacity of attacking to-day at noon other nine Portuguese Lorchas,which were lying in this port, and seized them; after that the said pirates made a descent on shore, and went to attack and kill some Portuguese, and Manila-men in their houses, plundering and destroying every thing that was found there. […] To-day the Portuguese Consulate was invaded by the said Cantonese pirates, who hauled down the Portuguese Flag, and pillaged every thing that was there in money and household furniture, destroying even the doors and windows of the house. On board the Cantonese Taomans there were some English, Americans, and Italians.” The Ningpo Massacre, 26
61 Marques to Meadows, 22 May 1857, in The Ningpo Massacre, 3.
62 According to an anonymous pamphlet published in Hong Kong’s Noronha’s typography, 23 Westerners, including 5 Americans, 8 British, 3 French, 6 Italians (Benedetto Capurro, Toscan Natal, Antonio Richa, Joseph Paretta, Gassard, Francis Fazzy), and a Greek, participated in the fights against the Portuguese at Ningbo. Ibid., 28.
87
Fig. 3.2. Pamphlet denouncing the use of the Sardinian (or Italian) flag by the French and Cantonese force in the “Ningbo Massacre” of 1857. According to the caption “this flag was the cause of all quarrels.” Source: AHM/ LR0348.
In the aftermath of the incident, the Portuguese brig Mondego, sent from Macao to pursue the Cantonese and reinstate the Portuguese interests in the area, was also blocked by the French and British reaction. A Maltese, Francisco “Frank” Merlini was also captured and sentenced for conviction in Hong Kong for his participation in the Portuguese raid on Shipu and other minor charges.63
The Portuguese lorchas failed to recover from this defeat, and ceded to the subsequent British and French pressures dropping out from the East Coast convoy market. The almost two hundred Portuguese lorchas, however, did not disappear. According to contemporary sources, many were captured by pirates, or sold to Chinese merchants, and reequipped as “taomões”;64 but others continued to engage in different trades, especially in the Southwestern Coast of Guangdong. Large numbers of Portuguese lorchas, finally, engaged in the recruitment of coolies in Southern China during and after the Second Opium War, most likely dropping the Portuguese flag—hence disappearing from the official records—after the 1859 and 1860 legislations (see below). Exactly in 1857, not
63 Friend of China, 7 November 1857.
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coincidentally, Macao surpassed Amoy and Swatow and rose as the major coolie trade port in China.
3.1.3 The takeoff of the Macao recruitment hub
In parallel with these events, the coolie trade was slowly but steadily moving its barycenter from Amoy and Cumsingmoon to Swatow, Canton and Macao. The Amoy hub, as we have seen, was substantially disrupted by the riots of 1852. After about a year, however, it had recovered to a considerable extent; Amoy continued to export about six hundred to one thousand coolies yearly to Latin America until 1858. Despite moving the core of his business to Swatow, Tait recovered part of his business in the city in the mid-1850s.65
Cumsingmoon exported 1,350 and 1,370 coolies in 1852 and 1853, but its output faded to only 325 in 1854 (a single ship), and ceased altogether in 1855. The reasons for this decline are not entirely clear. In his recent thesis on this topic, Thomas Statsko has tried to solve the issue, emphasizing the native response against the kidnappings,66 and the role of the 1855 Chinese Passenger Act. In line with Arnold Meagher, as well, he also drew attention on the contrasting interests of the opium and coolie merchants, and the formers’ connections with both the British and Chinese authorities.67 His answer, however, does seem to underestimate the degree of continuity between the traffic in Cumsingmoon and other departure ports, as well as the positive incentives and framework given to the traffic by the Portuguese rule in Macao after 1855, in the context of an ongoing revolt in the Guangdong province. The simultaneous activity of the two coolie brokers based in Cumsingmoon Sevilla (or possibly his brother)68 and Robinet in Macao and Canton, only
65 According to Fei, at this date James Tait had established the center of his business in Macao, but the information is unsubstantiated: Fei, Macao 400 years, 265. No reference to this movement is made by Wang, The Organization of Chinese Emigration; or Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise...,” 94.; according to the latter, Tait’s firm abandoned the coolie business somewhere in 1857. The Friend of China shipping returns in 1856, 1857 and 1858 do not mention Tait & Co. as a consignee for Macao’s coolie ships, although this do not constitute a definitive proof of his non-involvement.
66 Statsko, “Moving Through the Gate of Venus,” 76. Statsko quotes an article from the Sydney Morning
Herald, 9 April 1855, reporting that “in Heang-shan district, in the neighbourhood of Cumsingmoon, have
collected a fleet of twelve or fifteen junks for protection to their husbandmen while gathering the harvest” against the triads and the kidnappers, in the context of the Red Turban rebellion (see below). In fact, self-protection patrols and other forms of popular opposition against the coolie brokers’ activities will remain a common and permanent feature of the traffic even in its most flourishing phases.
67 Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 101. The opinion that the opium trader were unsatisfied about the expansion of the coolie trade in proximity to their centers of operations was shared by several contemporaries; e.g., Bowring to Malmesbury, Hong Kong, 5 January 1853, CO 885/1/20, Correspondence Relative to the Emigration of Chinese Coolies 1853, 63
68 “Summary of facts elicited concerning the Barque Susannah”, Mr. Lloyd to Colonial Secretary, Arica, 1 June 1852, CO 885/1/20, Correspondence relative to the Emigration of Chinese Coolies 1853, 11. It says
89
a few miles down and upstream, should be accounted as well; Robinet, in particular, held the charge of Peruvian consul in the three ports, indispensable to manage the inconveniences of the traffic and exercise some extraterritorial authority rights, and continued to operate in the California passenger trade from Hong Kong and Macao at the same time. A more detailed study of Robinet’s correspondence with the Heard opium firm might be necessary to dispel, conclusively, these doubts.
The year 1855 also coincided with the zenith of Swatow’s emigration network; 7,320 coolies departed from the non-treaty port city that year, 4,232 in 1856, 4,856 in 1857 and 2,101 in 1858. There were attempts to establish coolie station in Fuzhou and Shanghai in 1857 and 1859, but they were obstructed by the local authorities and the open hostility of the local population, which started patrols to rescue the victims of kidnapping. 69 In July and August 1859, in particular, Shanghai experienced also a series of open popular uprising comparable to those occurred in Amoy, especially after the sight of 40 corpses thrown in the Wusong River by the French coolie ship Gertrude exasperated the residents’ patience.70
The trend, however, was clearly moving towards the concentration of the traffic in the Pearl River Delta area, and specifically in Macao. This became evident in 1856, 1857, 1858 and 1859, when the Portuguese city exported respectively 2,703, 7,256, 10,053 coolies, to fall back to 8,476 and 7,871 in 1859 and 1860, in concomitance with the first significant batches of international criticism and humanitarian regulations.
Macao’s authorities favored this outcome and welcomed the new source of revenue. As Governor Guimarães commented in 1857, the indirect benefits of the coolie system surpassed the trafficker’s profits and embraced a large part of the local residents:
Desta emigração chineza resulta grande vantagem para Macao por que traz aqui os navios que os devem exportar, empregam gente nos depósitos e deixa na terra muito dinheiro em arranjo dos navios compra de vestuários, mantimentos etc, etc, e este tráfico promete ser mais duradouro do que outros ramos de comércio que hoje aqui aluguem71
A second cause, but also an effect, of this takeoff was the dramatic increase of the
there were two Sevilla brothers, one in China and the other in Peru. A Juan Pastor Sevilla, head of the Pastor y Saco firm will be a prominent trafficker at Macao in the 1860s, but we can only speculate about their eventual relationship.
69 Vice-Consul Hale to Bowring, Fuzhou, 23 February 1857, CO 129/65. 70
Irick, Ch’ing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade, 68–76; Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 114–115.
71
Guimarães to MMU, Macau, 7 August 1857, AHU, SEMU, Conselho Ultramarino, Consultas, Lisboa 09.04.1867, pt. 54-2364.
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Portuguese colony’s population produced by the outbreak of the Red Turban rebellion. As we have seen, the main area of recruitment for the Cuban and Peruvian traffic were situated in the hinterland of the Pearl River Delta, and particularly its poorer sze yup area and the Xiangshan and Yangjiang districts. The Red Turban revolt in 1856-1857, well described by the classical work of Wakeman Strangers at the Gate,72 devastated this area and drove a major flow of refugees into Macao and Hong Kong. This resulted in a steep rise in Macao’s Chinese population, well recorded by the local censuses. As reported by the Portuguese Minister João Andrade Corvo,73 in 1822 the population of Macao comprised 4,315 Cristãos, 537 slaves and 8,000 Chinese; in 1849, 4,587 Cristãos, 490 slaves,74 and about 25,000 Chinese. According to the 1867 census, finally the estimated number of Chinese inhabitants had risen to 56,252; plus 15,590 “boat dwellers” living in the inner harbor on about 2,471 boats. The large majority of them were new immigrants: 48,617 were native of the Guangdong province, less than two thousands of Fujian and other Chinese provinces, and only 5,726—or 16,529 considering the maritime population—were born in Macao.
Beside this demographic factor, however, the ultimate affirmation of Macao as principal port for the emigration of coolies will be driven by the Second Opium war, the Anglo-French occupation of Canton (1856/7-1860), and the subsequent Sino-British process of regulation of the contract emigration from the treaty ports.
3.1.4 The Second Opium War and its aftermath: rise and demise of the “Canton system”
In the late 1850s the crisis of the political structures of the Chinese Empire had reached a pinnacle. The Qing dynasty seemed to the verge of collapsing, under the combined pressure of the Taiping rebellion (1851-1864), natural disasters—like the catastrophic flooding of the Yellow River in 185575—and a number of local insurrections. Crime, smuggling and piratical activities were rife, too.
72 Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861, 139–158.
73 João de Andrade Corvo, Relatorio e documentos sobre a abolição da emigração de Chinas contratados
em Macau, apresentatdo ás Cortes na sessão legislativa de 1874 pelo Ministro e Secretario d’Estado dos Negocios da Marinha e Ultramar (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1874), 72–73. Cf. AGM, Núcleo 90 Relatório da repartição de estatística de Macau acerca da população chineza da mesma colonia, (Macau:
Typ. José da Silva, 1868); BO, 6 May 1867; BO 27 May 1867; BO 10 June 1867: BO 23 September 1867; BO, Supplemento, 31 December 1880.
74
Slavery was declared extinct in Macao in 1856: AHU, Maços José Torres, cx. 532-533-534. 75
The flooding changed the river’s course from the south to the north of the Shandong peninsula. See Randall A Dodgen, “Hydraulic Evolution and Dynastic Decline : the Yellow River Conservancy,” Late
91
The most severe menace to the Celestial Emperor was the Taiping revolt. Moving through a sequence of military successes, the Taiping rebels had advanced from their bases in the southern regions in the Guangxi-Guangdong border to occupy the mouth of the Yangzi, in the fertile East. In March of 1853 Hong Xiuquan, leader and ideologue of the millenarian movement, established the capital of the Taiping Tianguo (Heavenly Kingdom of great peace) in the city of Nanjing, renamed Tianjing, “Heavenly Capital.”76 From there, the Taiping consolidated for over a decade a vast dominion extending over large parts of Hubei, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangsu, until their defeat in the mid-1860s.
Further threats came from the South of the Empire. As we mentioned, in the mid-1850s the Guangdong province experienced a major insurrection fomented by the “Heaven and Earth Society” triads (Tiandihui 天地會), also known as the Red Turbans revolt, who sieged the provincial capital and ravaged its surroundings in 1854 and 1855. The revolt lost momentum in the next year and was followed by a brutal repression culminating in tens or hundreds of thousands executions.77
Taking advantage of this situation of chaos, the Western Powers saw the opportunity to expand their influence in China by extorting additional concessions from the troubled Qing government. In the eyes of the hawkish British merchants in China, two of the fundamental reasons behind the first Opium War had remained unsettled. European products, excepting opium, had not flooded the Chinese market as envisioned by the British free-market advocates. For the symbolic issue of the parity of international relations, foreigners had not been yet allowed to settle in the Capital. Moreover, Western merchants had been left out of the walled city of Canton by Governor's Xu Guanjin in the years 1847-1849. The merchants of treaty ports attributed their commercial difficulties to the impossibility to penetrate directly into the country, in particular through the waterway of the Yangzi, and complained about the non-exemption of their internal transit duties (lijin), introduced in 1853 as measure to support the Qing army in the suppression of the widespread internal conflicts.78
76 Jürgen Osterhammel, Storia della Cina moderna : (secoli XVIII - XX) (Torino: Einaudi, 1992), 220–223; Jean Chesnaux and Marianne Bastid, La Cina: dalle guerre dell’oppio al conflitto franco cinese 1840-1895, vol. 1 (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), 91. For an introduction to the Taiping revolt, see Spence, God’s Chinese
Son: The Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.
77 Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861, 139–158.
78 Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire 1832-1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 195; Chesnaux and Bastid, La Cina.
92
These points were raised in 1854 by the British in the attempt of revising the Nanjing treaty, according to a contested interpretation of the Sino-American Wangxia treaty (1844), but the Chinese authorities refused to comply. Another push, many argued, was necessary to convince the Emperor.
The casus belli for the conflict was found in a relatively minor and largely fabricated incident.79 On 8 October 1856 Qing officials arrested the Chinese crew of the lorcha
Arrow, nominally captained by the Irish Thomas Kennedy and registered in Hong Kong
as a British ship (but with an expired license), suspected of smuggling pirated merchandise. The British consul in Canton Parkes, informed by Kennedy, accused the Chinese of insult to the British flag, which he alleged was flying on the ship. Despite this being later contradicted by several witnesses,80 and the fact that the British registration of the Arrow had expired, Parks and the Governor of Hong Kong Bowring hastily organized a naval bombardment of Canton in retaliation for the offense.81 Hostilities escalated gradually over the following year, as the French joined the war in vengeance of the execution of a missionary, Father Auguste Chapdelaine, captured by the Qing authorities in Guanxi province in violation of the treaties.82 After several months of stalemate, troops under the command of Lord Elgin, sent to Hong Kong after the repression of the Indian Mutiny, attacked and occupied Canton (1858-1861) capturing Governor General Ye Mingchen in January 1858. The theatre of war then moved northwards to the Dagu-Bohai region.83 After a first defeat the Chinese signed a truce at Tianjing (1858), but hostilities resumed and an Anglo-French expedition marched and occupied Beijing, plundering and destroying the Emperor’s Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), on 18 October 1860, forcing the Qing negotiators, led by the Imperial prince Yixin (Prince Gong), to capitulate and sign the humiliating Beijing Convention two days later.84
79 As convincingly demonstrated in John Y. Wong, “The ‘Arrow’ Incident: A Reappraisal,” Modern Asian
Studies 8, no. 3 (1974): 373–89.
80 In particular that of the Portuguese crew of the Lorcha n.83, as soon disclosed on the Hong Kong press of the time: Ibid., 385; See also John Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the Arrow War
(1856-1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55–56.
81
Bickers, The Scramble for China, 143. 82
Giorgio Borsa, La nascita del mondo moderno in Asia Orientale: la penetrazione Europea e la crisi delle
società tradizionali in India, Cina e Giappone (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), 223. According to the Chinese
authorities, Chapdelaine was disguising himself as a Chinese, and had been executed for assisting local rebels: Par Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in
Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 56–58.
83 Governor Ye will starve himself to death under captivity. Wong, Deadly Dreams, 6.
84 The Treaty of Beijing 1860, extorted further concessions. To the original treaty ports of Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, opened by the Treaty of Nanking, it added the ports of Zhenjiang, Niuzhuang, Chefoo (Yantai), Hankou, Jiujiang, Tainan, Danshui, Qiongzhou, Swatow (Shantou), Nanjing and Tianjin. Taking advantage of this favorable situation in the Russian Empire and obtained vast territories
93
If these circumstances triggered a major surge in the coolie business in the Pearl River Delta, they also unfolded the first concerted measures of the Qing government and the Western powers to regulate the traffic and curtail its most blatant abuses.
The decade of the 1860s witnessed a radical turn in the Western powers, and especially the British policy towards the Qing Empire, aimed now at promoting forms of collaboration and to ensure the survival of the dynasty and protect the interests secured through the signed treaty. Fundamental pieces of this strategy were the creation of the Zongli Yamen, a foreign affairs bureau led by the above mentioned Yixin, and the
Imperial Maritime Customs (IMC) service, a Sino-Foreign bureau for the collection of
maritime duties. Under the lead of the Irish commissioner Robert Hart (from 1863 to 1909) the IMC fulfilled the dual purpose of granting to foreign traders the respect of treaty set tariffs and ensure the remission of its heavy war indemnities, but also offering to the Qing dynasty a reliable source of revenue and a powerful instrument of maritime policing and, in some cases, international relations.85
Paradoxically, a more efficient control of the emigration under the joint supervision of Chinese and European authorities emerged as direct consequence of the liberalization of emigration imposed by the Allied powers during the occupation of Canton and officially sanctioned by the 1860 treaty settlement.
As well pointed out by some of the seminal works on the coolie trade, British statesmen were deeply convinced that only the collaboration of the Chinese authorities could impose a truly “civilized” stream of migration. The main obstacle to that, they argued, was the century old official prohibition of emigration, which allegedly impaired the Qing authorities from taking open measures in protection of their subjects.86
occupied in Manchuria to the rivers Amur and Ussuri (1858 to 1860). “Opium Wars”, in Thomas Benjamin, ed., Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450 (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007), 878–880.
85
There has been a prolific spate of literature on the Imperial Maritime Customs in recent years, accompanying the cataloguing of the IMC archives in Nanjing and Taipei. See Donna Brunero, Britain’s
Imperial Cornerstone in China: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1949 (New York:
Routledge, 2006); Robert Bickers, “Revisiting the Chinese Maritime Customs Service , 1854 – 1950,” The
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 2 (2008): 221–26; Richard S. Horowitz, “Politics,
Power and the Chinese Maritime Customs: the Qing Restoration and the Ascent of Robert Hart,” Modern
Asian Studies 40, no. 03 (2006): 549; Hans Van De Ven, “Robert Hart and the Chinese Maritime Customs
Service,” Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 03 (2006): 545; a short synthesis in Italian in Andrea Francioni, “Imperialismo e modernizzazione nella Cina degli ultimi Qing. Alle origini delle Imperial Maritime Customs,” Africana, Rivista di Studi Extraeuropei XVI (2008): 45–55.
86 “As the old law forbidding Chinese to leave the country, however obsolete and practically ineffective, was the ostensible cause of a system of obtaining coolies radically vicious, by stamping all engagements with the brand of illegality, so I conceive the legalization of free emigration is calculated not only to strike at the root of the crimping system, by depriving it of all plausible pretext, but to open wide the door for the supply of as much labour as may be required, and under conditions of the most unexceptionable and
