Introduction
When the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China (hereafter, the Society) was founded in Canton on 29 November 1834, its committee declared:
We are now, then, to make the trial, whether the celestial empire, after it has defeated all efforts to bring it into an alliance with the civilized nations of the earth, will not yield to intellectual artillery, and give to knowledge the palm of victory.
The committee were ‘glad to engage in a warfare’ that involved the publication of books in Chinese—the intellectual artillery.Footnote 1 Through publication and distribution of these books, the founding members of the Society—which consisted of Anglophone merchants and missionaries in Canton—believed that the Chinese would have access to the information barred by the Qing Dynasty and would subsequently understand the true character of the Europeans and be willing to engage with them.
Thus began the information war in the years before the First Opium War of 1839–1842, a war against the Qing authorities, which aimed to win the hearts and minds of the Chinese by familiarizing them with Europeans.
The year 1834 marked the end of the monopoly of the English East India Company in China. The atmosphere of the Canton foreign community was buoyant, while the self-confidence of the British merchants was high, both in their national power and in the ‘progress’ of the Europeans, even though the Western merchants were still allowed to trade only in Canton, and missionaries were theoretically banned from entering China. The merchants, tapping into the discourse of the free trade, were eager to remove restrictions in order to access the vast Chinese market, whilst a wave of missionary zeal that swept through revivalist movements in Britain and America reached the coast of Qing China. Together, the merchants and missionaries believed that both trade and gospel would benefit the Chinese and bring China into the ranks of the civilized nations.
The Qing Empire had been tightening its grip on foreigners in China since the mid eighteenth century, after closing down ports other than Canton and banning Christianity a few decades earlier in 1723. European merchants in Canton were allowed to trade and communicate with Qing officials only through a limited number of Chinese merchants, whilst being subject to strict regulations on their personal movement.
In limiting contact between Chinese and foreigners, the Qing erected an information barrier to prevent foreigners from knowing China, and Chinese from interacting with them. The information barrier was established for security reasons, in the light of Qing concerns that Europeans might conspire with rebels, especially on the southern coast, to overthrow the empire. Given Qing control, the justice in the information war was well-founded. In establishing the Society, the Westerners meant well, and believed that the new knowledge being passed on to the Chinese would benefit them as much as it had the Europeans, particularly the British.
Research on the decades before the First Opium War, in particular since John King Fairbank and Susan Barnett, has highlighted the Protestant missionaries’ legacy concerning the spread of Christianity and their role in China's modernization.Footnote 2 The equally rich literature on the opium trade and the opium war explores the effects of that war in opening up China to direct Western influence and thereby inaugurating the entangled relations between China and the West.Footnote 3 Based on these well established studies and attempting to go beyond, this paper focuses on the foreign community in Canton. This shift of focus seeks to shed light on the history of these decades in its Cantonese context, and in particular to contextualize the publications of the Society in a Canton where Westerners were trying to break out of their containment by Qing China.
The Society itself has been a sideline investigation of three papers, seen either as one of the earliest attempts to bring the fruits of modernization into China or as an alternative to war. This paper broadly agrees with the modernization thesis but will revise the war alternative argument.Footnote 4 By extensive research into the history of the Society that hitherto has not been achieved, this paper argues that in the context of Sino-British relations, the information war was a third form of British engagement with the Chinese, along with the diplomatic attempts of 1793 and 1816 and the military war of 1839–1842.Footnote 5 The war metaphor employed in establishing the Society also contributed to the discourse that led to the waging of the military war, by making the war ‘imaginable’.Footnote 6 The information war is analytically separable from the military war, for it was initiated and achieved in Canton by the merchants and missionaries, and thus differs from diplomatic attempts and the military assault, which heavily involved the actions of the metropolis. To the tradition of British imperial historiography this paper makes a case that actors on the periphery of the informal empire—with certain connections to the metropolis—created by themselves a form of engagement with the Chinese: the information war.Footnote 7
Establishment of the Society
Since the late 1820s, the trade of independent ‘country traders’, which consisted mainly of opium, had overtaken that of the East India Company. The end of the Company was on the horizon, and nobody expected that its monopoly charter would be renewed. A new spirit was in the air.Footnote 8 This was the milieu in which the concept of ‘diffusion of useful knowledge’ appeared.
The Canton Register (published 1828–1846) in 1831 ran a competition for the best political economy essay which could impart the free trade ethos to the Chinese. The advertisement explained that the ‘prize is given by a gentleman who wishes to patronize the diffusion of useful knowledge in the Chinese language’.Footnote 9 The Canton Miscellany (1831), in its first issue, argued: ‘The Nations around us are, notwithstanding all their arts and industry, not yet civilized. . .the Evil being apparent, the next thing is to find a remedy’. The authors considered that individual ‘effort is unequal to the task’, so they proposed that ‘local Societies be formed in India, the Straits, and China, for the diffusion of useful knowledge in the Native language’. They believed that ‘the Merchants seem the best men to commence the work’.Footnote 10
The next year, 1832, the Register published an article entitled ‘Progress Society’, which commented that in China, ‘knowledge and civilization have rather decreased than increased for many centuries; and unless a European intercourse of literature take place, they are likely to be stationary or retrograde for many centuries to come’. The article called for the foreign community in Canton ‘to set up a Chinese Press, from which Newspapers, Reviews &c., should be issued’.Footnote 11 Up to this point, the concept of useful knowledge was mainly concerned with imparting ‘free trade’ to the Chinese, which was, at best, a self-appointed civilization mission.
The call for the ‘diffusion of useful knowledge’ took a new turn in May 1833 when another call for a ‘Chinese Press’ clearly spelt out the connection between knowledge diffusion and the image of foreigners that the Chinese supposedly possessed. It stated that the publications in Chinese were to be ‘calculated to remove the absurd prejudices of this people, and give them a juster [sic] idea of foreigners, their sciences, arts, and discoveries’.Footnote 12 Now the spread of the ‘European intercourse of literature’ was designed to remove the ‘prejudices’ of the Chinese. Two weeks later, in answering this call, the Prussian missionary Karl Gützlaff (1803–1851) advertised his ‘Prospectus of a Monthly Periodical in the Chinese Language’ in the Register, appealing for patronage. Gützlaff presented his idea for a magazine as a counter to the ‘high and exclusive notions’ of the Chinese by making them ‘acquainted with our sciences and principles’.
Gützlaff argued that the ‘empty conceit’ that stemmed from the lack of information concerning the West on the Chinese side ‘has greatly affected the interests of the foreign residents at Canton’.Footnote 13 Gützlaff explicitly made the point that the restrictions placed on Westerners were due to inadequate and insufficient knowledge of the West. This connection was meaningful to the Canton foreign community because the Canton System, with its tight regulations, had long been a source of dissatisfaction to them.
William Jardine (1784–1843) answered Gützlaff's appeal and underwrote the first six months of the magazine in exchange for Gützlaff's interpreting work, and his medical service on board the opium-selling voyage of the clipper Sylph along the eastern coast of China.Footnote 14 In the following two years, Gützlaff published the Dongxiyangkao meiyue tongjizhuan 東 西 洋 考 每 月 統 紀 傳 (Eastern Western Monthly Magazine, 1833–1838) with the aim of making the Chinese understand Westerners better. The magazine did cause a certain excitement when it was distributed to the Chinese. The Register, the Chinese Courier (1831–1833) and the Chinese Repository (1832–1851) all reported the popularity of this magazine; the Register vividly described that some issues ‘have been read with eagerness’ and ‘portions of their contents have been copied and hawked about the streets for sale’.Footnote 15
The idea of employing ‘intellectual artillery’ came into focus in the English public sphere at Canton and took on the form of a society when news reached Canton that a ‘Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’ (hereafter, London Society) had been founded in London in 1826.Footnote 16 Facing increasing criticism from other publishers in Great Britain for publishing much cheaper books and magazines aimed at lower-class people, the London Society decided at their fifth annual meeting that they should counteract these criticisms by launching a media campaign to disseminate pamphlets defending their position. One such pamphlet arrived in Canton and was published in the 1833 November issue of the Repository.Footnote 17 Three appeals for the formation of a similar society were advertised after news of the London Society's establishment had spread. The third appeal promised the publication of a ‘prospectus’ in ‘a short time’.Footnote 18
The plan was, however, brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of Lord William John Napier (1786–1834) in July 1834 as the first Trade Superintendent to China; his position replaced the Select Committee of the East India Company in charge of the trade. Napier requested to communicate with the Viceroy of Canton directly that he was to be recognized as a representative of the British Empire. The Canton authorities refused to interact on his terms, and he untimely died of fever in September of that year. His death was grieved by those of the Canton foreign community who had hoped the new appointment would bring changes to trading conditions in China, especially when they believed that Napier would not have deteriorated so rapidly had the Chinese allowed him to go down to Macao sooner and by direct river routes.Footnote 19 It was not until late November that the whole ‘Napier Fizzle’ was brought to an end. Now, with exasperation and discontent, and an even greater sense of community, the Society began operations in earnest, in late November 1834.Footnote 20
The Society's inspiration, the London Society in London, was part of a wider social reform movement that had developed in the first part of the nineteenth century. The major force behind the London Society was Lord Henry Brougham (1778–1868), who had just helped push through the Reform Act of 1832, two years before the founding of the Society. A mild reformer, Brougham viewed the London Society partly as a provider of educational opportunity to the lower classes, and partly as a means to divert radical revolutionary forces that were gathering strength among them.Footnote 21 In addition to the affiliation of the Society to the London Society, a connection between Brougham and Canton also existed through the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), of which Brougham was one of the founders and from which the major Canton newspapers often reprinted progressive ideas. When the inspiration of the London Society's social reform ideas about ‘diffusion of useful knowledge’ came to Canton, they mingled with the pressing issue to open up China for trade and for proselytizing Christianity.
Planning ‘intellectual artillery’
When the committee of the Society declared that the preparation of ‘intellectual artillery’ was intended ‘to engage in a warfare’ at their meetings, it was less than two months after Lord Napier's untimely death. The anguish and dismay amongst the British community, especially the group of merchants associated with Jardine Matheson & Co, was palpable. The rhetoric in Canton was moving towards war as a solution to their plight, and the funding of the Society was one way they expressed this frustration.
In the five years following the foundation of the Society, the merchants and missionaries regularly held meetings in Canton to discuss their plans of operation for the Society when the trading season started in early autumn.Footnote 22 These plans were then published annually in the Repository and occasionally in the Register and the Canton Press (1835–1844), and were therefore available to the Canton foreign community, as well as to subscribers of the newspapers and journals in Singapore, Sydney, Bombay, Cape Town, Hamburg, England, America, and elsewhere.Footnote 23
The meetings were a process through which committee members learned about both the Chinese and their own interests. The first year report, published in December 1835, showed that the Society had only got as far as deciding to publish material on universal geography and world history. They believed these subjects would teach the Chinese that the world was more than the Middle Kingdom—which was a Sinocentric idea, often grounded in their own understanding of China—and that foreigners were not barbarians—an equally exaggerated understanding.Footnote 24
In the second annual report, the committee formulated a detailed plan covering eight subject areas which the committee deemed necessary to introduce to the Chinese. These were ranked by the Society in order of priority: history, including biography; geography, including travel; natural history; medicine; mechanics and mechanical arts; natural philosophy; natural theology; and belles lettres. Additionally, there was also another category for ‘miscellaneous subjects’, which included magazines and other publications.Footnote 25
By the time of the third annual meeting, the committee felt that it was necessary to examine what was already available in Chinese before they could continue the work of the Society. John Robert Morrison (1814–1843) presented his investigation of Chinese knowledge by going through the ‘catalogue of works contained in the imperial library at Peking’, or the Siku Quanshu 四 庫 全 書 (‘Complete Library of Four Branches of Books’, 36,304 volumes, 1782). Morrison compared the Complete Library with the knowledge developed in the West and claimed that the classic branch (jing 經), the first branch of the four, is a ‘philosophy, which, leaving alone all speculations concerning the origin and future state of man, confines itself almost wholly to the relations between man and man in this life’. The history and geography branch (shi 史), he said, is ‘almost exclusively national. . .while the existence of other nations, and the practical lessons to be learned from the rest of mankind, are almost wholly forgotten’. John Robert Morrison was also dissatisfied with the ‘useful arts of life’, which were a part of the branch of the collections (ji 集); he reported that only agriculture and weaving were available for study, whilst astronomical and mathematical sciences were ‘chiefly derived from Europeans’. Thus, he concluded: ‘Seeing that so many are the defects of Chinese literature, it becomes our imperative duty to exert our utmost energies to supply their lack of knowledge’.Footnote 26
By assuming that the Complete Library represented the knowledge of the Chinese in its entirety, the report falls into the discourse of the Confucianist outlook that set out to compile this giant collection in the Qianlong 乾 隆 Emperor's time (1736–1795). Take the jing, for example: Confucian learning may be the only learning listed in this category, but the Daoist classics and the lengthy, translated, well-developed Buddhist canon, which were rather underrepresented in the Complete Library under the Confucian worldview, were put into the category of zi 子 (masters’ works), which would have been compatible with what John Robert Morrison named the knowledge concerning the ‘origin and future state of man’. It would be more justifiable, for instance, for Morrison to have compared Christianity with these writings, since Christianity and Confucianism are rather more compatible in the aspects of their relationships with authorities and their ideological roles to those authorities.
The knowledge in the shi department that most concerned the meeting may not have correlated with the knowledge of history and geography of the West—or as the Society called it, ‘our own knowledge’,Footnote 27 but it was sufficient to prove that there was abundant geo-historical information about Westerners, compiled mainly by Jesuits in the seventeenth century, and Chinese language travel accounts of foreign lands. Had the committee not from the beginning set out to identify the deficiencies within Chinese knowledge, they would have noticed that the existing information was rich enough for any Chinese reader to learn of the existence and states of the ‘outside world’, including the West.Footnote 28 This might have suggested to the Society, to the Western community in Canton, and to readers of the Canton print media in the port cities of Asia, Europe, and America, that the explanation for the restrictions placed upon foreigners might lie somewhere else, namely in the Qing's security concerns. Nevertheless they believed that lack of knowledge was the reason the Qing confined trade to Canton, and why Christianity was banned. Thus presenting knowledge to the Chinese received its justification.
In its fourth year, the committee took great interest in the Chinese book market in order to understand what the Chinese were reading and what books were most popular. Two types of books, the ‘Chinese almanac’, or Yellow Calendar (huangli 黃 曆/皇 曆 or tongshu 通 書) and the ‘Collectanes of elementary and useful information’ were identified by the Society as candidates for publication, for these books were widely found in Chinese households. They planned to replace the maps in the Yellow Calendar with world maps and put Western geographic and historical knowledge into the ‘Collectanes’ that were consulted by ordinary Chinese in everyday life. In this way, the information of the Westerners and the wider world could reach every Chinese.Footnote 29
These ideas, along with some other plans for publications, were never put into practice by the Society. When the fourth annual report was presented to the meeting, the opium confiscation in Canton, that would later lead to a three-year war, was less than four months away. Some of the plans, however, would have their influence in the late period of missionary publications in China. Publication of the almanacs, for instance, was carried out by the missionary Davie Bethune McCartee in Shanghai under the title Pingan Tongshu 平 安 通 書, with four issues appearing between 1850 and 1853 that contained numerous maps and geo-historical articles.Footnote 30
The longer the Society members waged their information war, the more they learned about the Chinese. The Society, however, could not afford to have a high opinion of the Chinese, for the very existence of the Society was, to a great extent, built upon a necessarily negative representation of China. The situation is akin to the Protestant missions’ opinions concerning China, whereby ‘to say something positive about the Chinese would serve to undermine the rationale of the missionary enterprise’.Footnote 31
Preparation for writing, translating, and printing
Although British merchants had been trading in China since at least the mid seventeenth century, in the 1830s, there were only a handful of people who could speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Daily business was conducted in pidgin. When the Society was founded in 1834, there were only three people—John Robert Morrison, Bridgman, and Gützlaff—who were able, with the help of Chinese assistants, to write in Chinese for publication.
With these limited resources, the results of preparing ‘intellectual artillery’ were not at all satisfying to the committee. They knew very well that simply being able to write was not enough to attract attention in a Chinese society where literati-style was regarded as a basic skill. This problem surfaced in the committee's third annual report. John Robert Morrison commented on a manuscript they had received, saying that the style of the writing was ‘necessarily tainted with foreign idioms and adapted to foreign modes of thought and expression’.Footnote 32
From the very beginning, the society attended to the problem of translation. They wished to make their transliterations as close as possible to the ‘pronunciation of the court (or mandarin) dialect’. Neologisms such as huo zheng chuan 火 蒸 船 (fire steam boat) and huo zheng che 火 蒸 車 (fire steam car) were coined to translate ‘steam boat’ and ‘steam train’, respectively. The Society also needed the Chinese nomenclature to contest the negative designations of foreigners. Examples given by the American missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801– 1861) of terms to be contested included hung-maou kwei (hongmao gui 紅 毛 鬼), ‘red-haired devils’, and keang-koo kwei (jianggu gui 講 古 鬼), ‘old-story-telling devils’, meaning missionary preachers of the gospel.Footnote 33 They preferred that the Chinese call them by the names they wished to be called rather than regard them as ‘devils’.Footnote 34
Printing was another problem the Society faced. From the very beginning, the Society commissioned two movable metallic types. One was made by Reverend Samuel Dyer (1804–1843), who was inspired by Robert Morrison (1782–1834) to come to Asia and specialize in making a movable type in Penang, and the other was made in Paris by Marcellin Legrand, with the help of sinologist Jean-Pierre Guillaume Pauthier (1801–1873).Footnote 35 By 1839, when the fourth annual report was published, these two movable types were not yet constructed. The Society also made an application for the use of the former East India Company's movable type, which was constructed by P. P. Thoms in order to publish Robert Morrison's A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–1823).Footnote 36
These moveable types may not have helped the Society's publications, even if they had been available in Canton, because a series of events that took place throughout the second half of 1830s prompted the Qing government to reinforce its ban on foreign printing. Lord Napier's appeals to the Chinese public, conveyed via placards posted throughout Canton during the summer of 1834, moved the Qing authorities to issue a reinforcing edict banning all Chinese printing houses from undertaking any work for foreigners. Following the tract-distributing trips made by Gützlaff and Edward Steven to Fujian in April 1835, the Qing government kept a vigilant watch on the movements of the foreign community.Footnote 37 Prior to this reinforcement, Gützlaff could, albeit illegally, publish his monthly magazine inside Canton city using Chinese printing facilities in 1833.Footnote 38 The result of this ban was that the Society needed to find alternative printing facilities ‘beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese’. Two places were proposed for this purpose by William Jardine; one was onboard the ships moored at Lintin Island (Lingding 伶 仃) at the lower end of the Gulf of Canton, where the merchants stocked their opium shipped from India and other smuggled goods. These vessels had their own cannons and guards, and they were beyond the reach of the Chinese government. The other proposed location was the Straits Settlements in Malaya, under the control of the British Empire and the Europeans. In the end, the Society's publications were printed in Singapore.Footnote 39
Publications and their impact
With a safe place established in Singapore for printing, at least eight of the eighteen items proposed for publication (see Chart 1, numbers 1–8) were published between 1838 and 1839, before the war started. As they were prioritized, the treatises on history and geography were among the earliest books published. A general history of the world, A universal geography, and A history of England were written by Gützlaff, one of the Society's two Chinese Secretaries in charge of writing in Chinese, who at this time was also the interpreter to the Superintendent of British Trade. The other Chinese secretary, Bridgman, turned out one treatise on America and one chrestomathy for learning Cantonese. These books, along with the Society's magazine, were published on the eve of the First Opium War and were the major ‘intellectual artillery’ of the Society's five years of labour.
Proposals and Publications by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China
The Society also needed to address the problem of distributing the books to the Chinese. The Chinese booksellers were not prepared to risk their businesses by dealing with Westerners, especially after the Napier affair.Footnote 41 The only other option was to sell or distribute the books personally via the members of the Society; this was a logical plan, as the missionaries were familiar with this type of direct contact with lay Chinese.
By the time the fourth and final annual report was presented at the general meeting in November 1838, the first few publications were ready to be printed.Footnote 42 The first publication available for distribution during the four years was the Dongxiyangkao Meiyue Tongjizhuan (Eastern Western Monthly Magazine). In 1835, one thousand sets of the two volumes of the 1833 and 1834 magazines, which Gützlaff had published prior to the establishment of the Society, were reprinted by the Society. These magazines seemed to have been handed out alongside sacred tracts in the Fujian province when Gützlaff and Edwin Steven undertook their tract-distributing voyage in 1835.Footnote 43 It also seems that after this incident, the publication of this magazine was moved to Southeast Asia. By March 1837, another one thousand copies of the newly-edited two volumes of the magazine were sent to be printed. From 1837 onwards, this magazine would be more or less regularly published each month, until about November 1839. All these late printings of the magazines were completed in Singapore, and they could only be distributed among the Chinese communities in the Indonesian Archipelago, such as Batavia, Singapore, Malacca, and Penang.Footnote 44 Even so, they hoped these books and the information contained in them would somehow reach China. Dr Reverend Parker gave a personal account of how Gützlaff's magazine was received in Singapore in 1835.
I have had opportunity to see the estimation in which the magazine of Mr. Gützlaff is held by the Chinese. While at Singapore a question of chronology came up; the inquiry was made, ‘do you know any book that will solve it?’ ‘Yes’. The magazine was produced and the question answered. ‘Is this book correct?’ All affirmed that it was. I adduce this example to show that the works of Europeans are appreciated.Footnote 45
Bridgman's Meilige heshengguo zhilue 美 理 哥 合 省 國 志 略 (A History of the United States) was completed around the end of 1837 and was published in November 1838. The treatise was not only circulated in Southeast Asia, but Bridgman also presented the books to the prominent Chinese, including the Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu (1785–1850), during the opium wars and negotiations. Bridgman would revise this treatise twice and republish it in 1846 in Canton and in 1862 in Shanghai.Footnote 46
It was the First Opium War that gave the publications of the Society an impact in mainland China. After the Qing Empire was defeated by the British, scholars such as Wei Yuan 魏 源 (1794–1856), Xu Jiyu 徐 繼 畬 (1795–1873), and Lian Tinglan 梁 廷 枏 (1796–1861) witnessed or became concerned with the power of the maritime nations, and made efforts to understand these foreigners. When these scholar officials wanted to gather materials to write treatises on the new maritime nations, the publications of the Society were available to meet this need.
Upon his arrival in Canton to implement the ban on opium in March 1839, Commissioner Lin employed Chinese translators and interpreters and commissioned the translations of C. T. Downing's The Fan-Qui in China in 1836–7, The Encyclopaedia of Geography (1834) by Hugh Murray, and English newspapers published in Canton—mainly the Canton Press and Canton Register. He then asked Dr Reverend Parker, a member of the Society, to translate part of the Elements of International Law (1836) by Henry Wheaton. Later, he would also ask Parker to help translate a letter written to Queen Victoria.Footnote 47 When Lin's opium prohibition campaign was brought to an abrupt end in 1841, by factionalism in the Qing court, he gave these materials (which would probably have included the copy that Bridgman had presented to him), to Wei Yuan and asked him to use them to write a book about the maritime nations.Footnote 48
Wei Yuan published Haiguo tuzhi 海 國 圖 志 (Illustrated Treatise on Maritime Countries) in 50 juan (chapters) in 1842, the same year that the First Opium War ended. Later, in 1847, he would revise and expand it into 60 juan and 100 juan in 1852, adding more materials available in Chinese. Haiguo tuzhi resembles an organized scrapbook in that materials from different books were cut and pasted, with minor changes, and sorted by continent and subcategorized by nation. Research shows that items related to the Society occupied a large portion of the 1852 edition; this included 57 entries from Gützlaff's Wanguo dili quanji (Universal Geography), 26 from the Dongxiyangkao meiyue tongjizhuan (Eastern Western Monthly Magazine), 14 from Maoyi tongzhi (General Account of Trade) and 24 from Bridgman's Meilige heshengguo zhilue (A History of the United States). Haiguo tuzhi, in turn, was one of the most important reference books on the subject of world geo-history in the second half of the nineteenth century. The scholar-officials of the Qing Empire referenced this source when it was forced to learn more about the new world power struggles between maritime empires. Haiguo tuzhi also eventually made its way into Japan. In 1850 and 1853, it was banned there, but in 1854, after Japan was forced to open its ports to the Americans, it was reintroduced and made an impact on the Japanese reform era.Footnote 49
Xu Jiyu's Yinghuan zhilue 瀛 寰 志 略 (A Brief Description of the Ocean Circuit), published in 1848, along with Haiguo tuzhi, influenced both Qing China and Japan. Xu wrote the book in his own words after he had digested materials collected in Chinese and interviews with foreigners on the subjects of global geography and world history. One of the foreigners he consulted several times was George Tradescant Lay (1799–1845), who was one of the most vocal members at the fourth annual meeting of the Society. Xu met Lay when he was Treasurer of Fujian, while Lay was in the service of the British Consul at Fuzhou 福 州 after the war. Lay's Chinese name, Litaiguo 李 太 郭, was mentioned three times in the book.Footnote 50
Liang Tinglan's Heshenguo shuo 合 省 國 說 (Accounts on the United States, 1844) and Lanlun oushuo 蘭 倫 偶 說 (Accounts of London, 1845) also relied heavily upon Meilige heshengguo zhilue (A History of the United States) and the Dongxiyangkao meiyue tongjizhuan (Eastern Western Monthly Magazine), respectively. At least until the 1880s, these Chinese publications were the main sources contributing to the understanding of the maritime nations in the new situation of the Qing Empire.Footnote 51 They were the channel through which the Society's publications had their impact upon China.
Convergence of interests and the war metaphor
The existing explanations for the founding of the Society, namely those of Fred W. Drake, argue that the foreign community intended ‘to open China by peaceful means to trade, Western civilization, and consequently to Protestant Christianity’. Michael C. Lazich makes this line of argument explicit by stating that ‘the undertaking was seen as a favourable alternative to military engagement’.Footnote 52 Both these aims indicate a distaste for belligerence. The events at Canton show the opposite—that a war was advocated in the 1830s by the group of merchants associated with Jardine Matheson & Co, especially after the Napier Affair.Footnote 53
In the heat of the aftermath of Napier's death, the British merchants sent ‘a petition home asking for warships to exact reparations for injuries recently inflicted’.Footnote 54 James Matheson (1796–1878), who accompanied Napier's widow, carried the petition back to England and launched a war campaign back in London in 1835.Footnote 55 They believed that the insult to Napier was an issue of national honour and a reasonable justification for war. The petition was signed by 35 native British merchants, as well as their clerks and captains in Canton, among them William Jardine, James Matheson, James Innes, Richard Turner, Robert Thom, John Slade, and Thomas Fox; almost all the British members of the Society added their names to the petition. The preparation of a petition for a military war and the founding of the Society—the information war—were in fact undertaken in the same month, November 1834, by the same group of people.Footnote 56 As a result, the war discourse permeated the establishment of the Society. Ulrike Hillemann has argued that the First Opium War only became imaginable after British knowledge of China had evolved in both Canton and London from Sinophilia to a civilianizing mission.Footnote 57 Rubinstein, too, has argued that a process embedded in the American missionary zeal of the early nineteenth century empowered the missionaries, through their interpretations of the scriptures, to employ a war metaphor for their missions in China.Footnote 58 Thus the Society's relation to the military war should be revised: rather than offering an alternative, its establishment was part of the war discourse that initiated and eventually achieved the employment of military force in Canton, on the periphery of the informal British Empire, and in its own right it constitutes a war of information.
To further piece together and theorize the reasons for the Society's establishment, it is worth examining the committee membership, and their interest in the Society. In general, the Society ran with John Robert Morrison and Bridgman in charge of its day-to-day operations, whilst the merchants used their financial weight to sway the direction in which the society was headed. Passages written by Gützlaff and Bridgman allude to the benefits of an open China in commercial terms. In the Objects of the Society, Gützlaff stated:
Our intercourse with China has lately been extended and will, under the auspices of a free trade, expand, until it embraces all the maritime provinces of the empire and considers the flourishing region of the Yangtsze Keang as a fair field for mercantile enterprise. There will be thus a wide door open for the dissemination of truth.Footnote 59
The first year's report, which was prepared by Bridgman, also explicitly points out the commercial opportunities presented by a vast China:
Such are the wants of man that they are never satisfied: the wants of this nation are great; its natural productions are also great: these have given rise to an extensive commerce, which, so long as those wants continue and those productions are needed, will not cease; and if the first increase as they doubtless will, the latter will do so also; and commerce in the hands of enlightened and philanthropic men will prepare the way for the wide diffusion of useful knowledge.Footnote 60
The benefit of an open China leading to greater commercial opportunity was very much underlined by Gützlaff and Bridgman; it served as an acknowledgement of the merchants’ needs by the missionaries, as well as calling for their financial support to the Society.
Each year, the Society selected one president, one treasurer, three general committee members, two Chinese secretaries, and one English secretary. For all five years, the Chinese secretary positions were filled by Gützlaff and Bridgman, while the position of English secretary was held by John Robert Morrison; these three together occupied a total of 15 among the 41 committee positions available over five years. These were the three people on the committee who could write articles in Chinese. In addition to Bridgman and Gützlaff, the only missionary on the committee was Dr Reverend Parker, who held a position on the general committee once in the third year.
The Society was dominated by opium merchants. There were at least ten of them on the committee, occupying 20 of the 41 committee memberships, and most of the time, they filled the posts of president and treasurer—theoretically, the heads of the Society. James Matheson was president for the first year and treasurer for the fourth and fifth years, whilst his partner, William Jardine, was president for the second and third years. Together they guaranteed that Jardine Matheson & Company had a person in the Society's executive posts every year. When an extra English secretary position was created in the fifth year, it fell to Robert Thom, a clerk at Jardine Matheson & Co. at that time. It is safe to say that Jardine Matheson & Co. exerted great influence on the Society. Other opium merchants, such as Robert Inglis and John Cleve Green, also filled the president or treasurer posts, whilst other opium dealers, including Richard Turner, William Wetmore, James Innes, and Russell Sturgis, all served on the committee. Non-opium merchants included American merchants D. W. C. Olyphant and his staff member, Charles King, who were accompanied by former East India Company employees John Robert Morrison and H. H. Lindsay.Footnote 61
Having opium merchants as members of the Society did not necessarily mean that it was devoid of genuine philanthropic motives. In fact, the same group of people also financed the missionaries’ charitable societies. After Robert Morrison died in the summer of 1834, the Morrison Education Society was founded in his honour in 1836. It was run by missionaries, with financial support from this same group of merchants. When the idea of the Medical Missionary Society was put into practice in 1838, the same group of merchants again participated.Footnote 62
Both societies were founded during the time of the Society, also with the agenda of ‘opening China up’ alongside their primary medical and educational missions. In an appeal for the establishment of the Medical Missionary Society, the idea of medical training and care as a means to approach ‘isolated’ China was noted.
And that inquiry after medical truth may be provoked, there is good reason to expect: for, exclusive as China is, in all her system, she cannot exclude disease, not shut her people up from the desire of relief.. . . At any rate, this seems the only open door; let us enter it.Footnote 63
In its Second Annual Report, the Society announced its cooperation with the Morrison Education Society, promising that some Chinese students would be trained in both English and ‘their native language’ and that ‘these are the persons who must be mainly instrumental in diffusing useful knowledge among the Chinese, their country men’.Footnote 64 Christian values were used to appeal to the merchants in these two societies, but certainly the opening up agenda of these two societies was no less attractive to the merchants. The missionaries who initiated these two societies knew that by upholding the flag of ‘opening up China’, they could always attract financial support from foreign merchants in Canton.
The ambiguous designation ‘opening China up’ allowed the two main constituents of the Society, the merchants and missionaries, to read their own meanings and interests into the proceedings. For the merchants, an open China meant one open to free trade; for the missionaries, it meant a China open to the Christian God. The formation of knowledge about China, along with the war metaphor, was therefore embedded within the context of the Canton foreign community in their wish to break out of their containment by the Qing for the purposes of extensive trade and free proselytizing.
Asserting Christianity
In the first two years of the Society, no Christian-related items were proposed for publication. When the Society's publication plan eventually suggested that this subject area should be introduced to the Chinese, the ‘natural theology’ of William Paley (1743–1805) was put in seventh place on the list, above only belles lettres in priority. Considering that proselytization was the very reason the missionaries were willing to risk their lives to break the law of the Qing Empire, that two of the three hands that were able to write materials in Chinese were missionaries, and that John Robert Morrison was the son of Robert Morrison, the pioneer of the Protestant mission in China, the Christian voice in the Society had been surprisingly quiet thus far.
Two months before the foundation of the Society, Bridgman had commented on the prospects of publications in Chinese that ‘knowledge and science are the handmaids of religion’.Footnote 65 To a great extent, this explains the missionaries’ dispositions regarding the Society and the diffusing of useful knowledge in China. Three books concerning Christianity were proposed for publication in the third year, out of 15 books that had been proposed thus far. All three books were drawn from Robert Morrison's early writings, which included A Short Treatise on the Being of a God; A History of Jews, and Xiyou diqiu wenjian luezhuan (A Voyage Round the World).Footnote 66
At the fourth annual meeting, things took a new direction, and the missionaries became more assertive. After the presentation of the annual report, long speeches concerning Christianity were made by Bridgman, Dr Reverend Parker, and George Tradescant Lay. One possible reason for the missionaries’ newfound assertiveness was that Lay, a representative of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and thus a strong financial backer, had arrived in Canton. In 1815 the Bible Society had paraded its generosity by giving Robert Morrison £2,000 to support his translation, printing, and distribution of the New Testament.Footnote 67 It is not impossible that Lay tipped the balance in favour of the missionaries with his ties to strong financial support. Just three months earlier, the Register had noted that the Society was ‘nearly paralyzed at present for the want of funds’.Footnote 68 With highly-charged self-confidence, Lay evaluated the Society in the ordering of a Christian world:
As to the rank of this society, we shall soon perceive that it lays claim to no mean relationship and affinity. If the Bible Societies hold the first place, because they propose to give the word of God to every human being; if missionary societies take the second, because their object is to send men to teach all nations the way of salvation; societies like this may fairly come into the third, because they labour to diffuse among all classes of a community that knowledge, which is the best of all worldly gifts—as it is the grammar and interpretation of God's works, an analytic and synthetic account of those very lessons which they teach.Footnote 69
This spelt out how the Society was linked to Christianity and justified it as missionary work. It contrasted with the situation hitherto, in which the missionaries, entirely dependent on the support of the merchants, had alluded to commercial interests in the meetings. Lay promised that when he was back in England, he would ‘endeavour to create sober and enlightened views of her condition [the Society], and, as opportunity shall serve, strive to awaken feeling and sympathy in favour of the praiseworthy and truly excellent undertaking which we are now met to consider’. After this delivery, it was motioned by Bridgman and seconded by James Matheson that the Society change its regulation that the ‘resident members shall include native and foreign gentlemen’ instead of ‘resident members shall include native and foreign gentlemen in China’. Footnote 70 This was to welcome Lay's continuing membership and possibly to attract other gentleman in England to the Society. The extension also meant that any further financial support was welcome.
By and large, in its first four years of existence the Society was financed by merchants whose profits derived mainly from the opium trade. Adding to the controversy of the missionaries’ cooperation with merchants, Gützlaff joined the opium ship of Jardine Matheson & Co. as an interpreter, as mentioned above. Gützlaff together with Bridgman and John Robert Morrison all provided their linguistic services either during the war or the signing of the treaty thereafter.Footnote 71 Their cosy relations with the merchants and the imperial state were characteristic of the Canton era: missionaries could only operate under the auspices of merchants because they were banned by the Qing, while the Qing policy of disengagement afforded Western nations no choice but to employ the pioneering missionaries’ knowledge of China and Chinese.
Following the First Opium War, the fully-functioning Society, with the high spirits and newly-charged energy of its fifth year, disappeared amid the turbulence. After the war, merchants and missionaries were free to live and trade in the treaty ports. The missionaries gradually established their missionary enterprise, first at treaty ports and then moving inland, preaching Christianity as well as modern Western knowledge.Footnote 72 Some merchant members of the Society returned to their home countries, like James Matheson, who, with the fortune he had made in Canton, went back to Scotland and bought the Isle of Lewis to build Lews Castle. Matheson also became a Member of Parliament in Great Britain in 1843, representing the constituency of Ashburton, a seat first won in 1841 by Matheson's Canton partner, William Jardine.Footnote 73 John Cleve Green (1800–1875) took his fortune back to America, and with further investment, became a major benefactor of Princeton University.Footnote 74
A war of information in Canton
Throughout its presence in Canton, the foreign community had been gathering knowledge of China, including military intelligence, especially after the 1831 voyage along the eastern coast. The Canton Register, Chinese Courier, Canton Miscellany, Canton Press, and Chinese Repository, all of which were launched between 1827 and 1834, served as the community's printed public sphere. This was where the idea of war and the ‘Jardine plan’—the backbone of the military strategy after 1841— were generated.Footnote 75 Though the foreign community was divided and a small group of merchants, led by Dent & Co. with the Canton Press as their mouthpiece, developed an anti-war outlook, the war argument was nevertheless the dominant voice, if not necessarily that of the majority. Napier's ordeal was reminiscent of Lord MacCartney's and Lord Amherst's frustrated embassy journeys, and through it a discourse formed that national honour was at risk. This further fuelled the idea of both the information war and the real one. William Jardine personally brought this emotive rhetoric and the intelligence established in Canton back to London, bringing it to Lord Palmerstone's attention.Footnote 76 The gunboat strategy was then deployed in Canton, at the new maritime frontier of the emerging British Empire.
The power of the knowledge that made it possible to imagine a war was ultimately supplied by the Canton foreign community in their collective brainstorming within their English language public sphere. Also, in the context of the early nineteenth century post–Enlightenment era, the foreigners in Canton believed in the power of knowledge and its realization in printed media. The Canton foreign community contrasted with the social reform movements in London chiefly in that its target was the Chinese rather than the London lower classes. Lord Brougham's passion for social reform, expressed in his establishment of the London Society, travelled across the world to Canton, and in the end prompted the information war waged by the Society.
Their own cultural outlook convinced the Canton community that Confucianism was the reason the Chinese viewed foreigners as barbarians and unworthy of engagement, and thus was the source of the restrictions they faced. They were confident that once the Chinese understood Westerners, especially their scientific knowledge and arts, the Chinese would respect them. Another related theory was the belief that the real Chinese were repressed by the Tartar Qing, and they would welcome the Europeans, and even mount a challenge to the despotic Manchu regime, once they understood the true character of the Europeans.Footnote 77 Napier's strategy of appealing to the Cantonese people was based on this underlying understanding, which suggests that the Sinophilia originated by the Jesuits was still in circulation amidst the growing trend of perceiving the Westerners’ presence in the non-Western world as a civilizing mission.Footnote 78
The foreign community could not, or were unwilling to, see that the Qing Empire employed a containment strategy to control the Europeans for reasons of dynastic and imperial security. The Qing dreaded that foreigners might conspire with southern coastal anti-Qing sectors, and with religiously-empowered rebels in the hinterland, and they feared trouble breaking out from this distant corner of the empire. Christianity was blocked precisely for this reason.Footnote 79
European merchants were concentrated at Canton so that they could be more easily managed. Pilots were used to count and report the ships that came in and out of Canton, and compradors were planted in their factories to collect intelligence on their activities after landing. Personal and ships’ passports, required for arrival and departure at the port, were another means of controlling foreign presence. Hong merchants were collectively held responsible if trouble broke out from the foreign community. On top of all this, foreigners were banned from learning Chinese, buying Chinese books, and using Chinese printing facilities. Leisure walks were only allowed after lengthy petitioning, but were restricted to an island opposite their factory and were required to be held in the company of Chinese linguists, who also reported to the Canton authorities.Footnote 80 Daily contacts with the Chinese were limited to these authorized functionaries, thus preventing Europeans from learning about any aspect of the Empire and, equally as important, preventing Chinese from interacting with foreigners. The reality was, however, that the number of foreigners learning Chinese in the 1830s was increasing; at least Gützlaff, Bridgman, Robert Morrison, John Robert Morrison, and Robert Thom could speak and write Chinese. When Robert Morrison returned to London for furlough in 1823, he carried with him nearly 10,000 volumes of Chinese books.Footnote 81
The information war waged with ‘intellectual artillery’ by the merchants and missionaries in Canton represented another form of engagement with Qing China after Lord MacCartney's and Lord Amherst's frustrated embassy journeys to Beijing in 1793 and 1816. The diplomatic engagement was formed with the understanding that the Qing Empire was a great world power to be reckoned with, and conceived by the East India Company, which as a trader and a semi-official institution, was on relatively friendly terms with the Qing and did not want to disrupt its lucrative tea trade. The war metaphor was created within the context of Western encounters with the Chinese in Canton, as the Westerners attempted to break out of the security apparatus that kept them contained there. The information war also anticipated the military engagement that began in 1839 and provided both the theoretical framework and justification for a military war. The interests behind both wars were the convergent aims of the merchants and missionaries of opening China up to trade and proselytizing.
It was by no means accidental that when Commissioner Lin arrived in Canton, among the first things he did was to collect information on the Westerners for the implementation of the opium ban. Yet ironically, the information barrier erected by the Qing for more than 85 years now prevented them from ascertaining the reality of the Europeans. Lin underestimated the strength of the foreign powers and had no grasp of the power of the collective identity behind the merchants—British imperialism—let alone the readiness of Palmerstone's gunboat diplomacy. The Society's publications and other translated information could only afford him a basic knowledge of the nations of the West, but not enough to plan an effective opium policy or a successful war.
By the 1830s, after eight decades of implementation, the security agenda the dynasty had built into its bureaucracy had become mechanical, whilst its justification via Confucian discourse had become the accepted wisdom among bureaucrats. It would take another three decades and a Second Opium War (1856–1860) that brought foreign troops to the gates of the capital, for the bureaucracy to grasp the strength of Westerners and the necessity of reform, first in the military and economic sphere, and then in the political system.
The information war by the Westerners in Canton was a direct counterattack against the Qing barricade of information in and out of China. The Qing policy of containment stemmed from a shrewd understanding of internal threats to the dynasty's security, but it backfired—the information barriers put up to implement the policy ultimately increased the danger by blinding Qing bureaucrats to the external threat they faced. For their part, the foreigners in Canton were led by Qing ideological camouflage to interpret its policy simply in cultural terms. Whether they were genuinely taken in by the colourful Confucian ideology, or wilfully chose to ignore realpolitik, they refused to acknowledge that eminently pragmatic security concerns might lie behind Qing policy—concerns that nothing as genteel as ‘diffusing useful knowledge’ could do much to allay.
