Mandarin-Gold (18 page)

'I do not wish to treat the outer Barbarians slightingly, but national laws are strict. Let him return. Should he oppose or disobey, it will be because
you
and the other Hong merchants have mismanaged the affair, and the law will instantly be brought down on you in all its utmost force and severity.'

'You mean there could be death for some of us, Your Excellency?' asked the'merchant nervously.

'I mean that,' agreed Lu. 'As wheels revolve, so sloth and insolence are punished. I will pick out the worst offenders among you and deal with them publicly so that others can learn from their folly. I have no power nor even the faintest wish to modify Imperial Edicts. You know that.'

'I do indeed know that, Your Excellency, and the knowledge weighs like rocks upon my heart. And unless the gods and our ancestors come speedily to our aid, then truly our troubles will be as the waves of the sea, without number and without end.'

Napier paced up and down the library of the British factory, looking out across the river. Next door, in the billiards room, a game was in progress; he could hear the click of the balls. The sound was faintly irritating; maybe because it seemed frivolous when great issues were at risk; or maybe because he still felt unwell.

'I just
cannot
understand the way these peoples' minds work,' he said, baffled. 'In any other country in the world an ambassador — which I am in all save name — would be treated with courtesy and civility. He delivers a letter, he receives a reply.'

'China is like
no
other country, sir,' replied Jardine. 'Hundreds die every week in Canton. They die in the streets — anywhere. They've even got a courtyard in a western suburb where the poor devils are supposed to drag themselves so they can die at the least inconvenience to their fellow men. You will not find that attitude in any other country I have heard of.

'If a child is ill or unwanted, the parents simply put it out to die with a mat over its body. There's a curious kind of poor law whereby anyone can go into a shop carrying a couple of pieces of bamboo, and bang these together until the shopkeeper gives them money to clear out.'

'How much money?'

'Cash,' said Jardine. 'The smallest coin in use. The tenth part of a ha'penny. They use up so much energy going from shop to shop beating their bamboos that it's never worth their while to do it instead of working!'

'Nothing like so long as I have,' interrupted Jardine. 'And every time I've tried to increase trade I've been told by someone or other that we've got to respect this Chinese rule or that, whatever it may be. But I've always ignored them all, and gone my own way — and look at me now.

'I started at eighteen as a doctor in a ship with nothing except my pay. And now, gentlemen, James Matheson and I control possibly the most prosperous trading company east of Suez.'

'There may be a price for such an achievement, Dr Jardine, that others may be asked to pay in the future,' said Elliot.

'I'm not concerned with what others
may
be asked to pay in the future. I'm concerned with what I have to pay now, what
I
am doing
now.'

He suddenly remembered fields as far as his eye could stretch, some red like new-shed blood with poppy blooms, others like snow with white poppies. In between the rows, each planted a foot apart, natives in loincloths and wearing white turbans against the heat, carried glistening hogskins of water, pausing to give each poppy a drink, and then going on.

'These plants are far better looked after than humans out here,' Elliot had said to the East India Company manager, with whom he was staying.

'Of course they are,' the manager agreed. 'They are also more expensive and far more productive. And I'll tell you this. We are producing one pound of opium in India for every ounce that our nearest rival, Turkey, can extract. Our quality's better, too. The Americans have to take the Turkish stuff for their China trade, but the Chinese like ours better. Here's the proof. Twenty years ago, here in Bihar, we had less than six and a half thousand acres under poppies. We've now twice that amount.'

'What's the difference in profit — if you sowed this acreage with grain, for instance?' asked Elliot.

'There is just no comparison. You'd get barely enough grain out of this poor soil to feed the fellows who grow it, and give them the strength to go back and grow some more. And that's not how anyone gets rich, Elliot. My God, no.'

The manager shrugged; how natives lived then was their concern, not his. If they did not want work they could go elsewhere. If there was no other work, then they could squat on their haunches in the dust in the sun, and cast dice or smoke rolled-up leaves and wait for better times.

'On average, over twelve months, they get around thirteen shillings a year. That's if their wife is working, too, of course, and they have a couple of kids who can help crop the stuff.'

'What's the sequence of events?'

'We plough up the soil three times with oxen, or men sometimes — they're cheaper than oxen. Then we scratch out the troughs where we mean to plant the poppies, and if there's any water we dig irrigation dykes as well.

'We sow the poppy seeds in November and by March the petals have dropped and we're ready to cut. We send the fellows down for these seed cases. I'll show you one.'

The manager leaned over and pulled the head from a poppy. Under the stamen Elliot saw a bulbous growth, green and fleshy. The manager took a knife with a hooked blade, and slit this with four vertical cuts. Almost at once, white juice began to bleed from the wounds.

'If the farmers — the fellows we use — can't afford to buy their own knives or won't steal them, they'll sharpen up a freshwater mussel shell and use that. They're very skilful, I can tell you.

'We try to cut the stuff in, the afternoon, then it oozes out all night, and next day the sun hardens it into a black sticky gum. That is your raw opium. Another set of fellows scoop it off with a sort of iron spoon, like the trowels gardeners use back home.'

'Does that take long?'

'A deuce of a time. A fellow can work all day and collect barely an ounce. You can't hurry it, you know. Come on, I’ll show you the depot where we do the processing.'

They walked down a hard, trodden path to a wooden building, sixty or seventy feet tall. From inside came the sound of singing and chanting; all around it the air hung with the dreadful sweetness of poisoned honey.

The manager pushed open a door. Pyramids of opium balls wrapped in poppy leaves stood at one end of the vast floor, and Indian children were carrying two at a time, each as big as their head, to the far end where sliding ladders had been set up against racks that reached up to the roof. These balls were carefully handed up from one worker to another, until all the spaces were filled. They sang as they worked, endless repetitive ditties.

The building looked like some grotesque library, with shelves' packed not with books, but opium balls to give more deadly pleasure to the people who used them than any book could ever do.

'We've got it well organized here,' said the manager proudly. 'At one end, as you can see, they're rolling the stuff into balls. They're so expert that each one weighs almost exactly two pounds. Then we measure 'em on those scales and pare 'em down a bit or add a bit. Then we wrap 'em in leaves and store 'em until they're wanted.

'When they get the hang of things, these young 'uns can produce a hundred balls of opium a day. There's a fortune under this roof. Maybe half a million pounds of mud.'

'Won't the opium rot if it is' not used?'

'Oh, we've got fellows up there, agile as monkeys to stop that lark. They turn those opium balls round every day and dust them with crushed poppy petals. That keeps away the insects and mildew and moths.'

'What happens after this?'

'We pack the mud balls in chests of mango wood, because it's sweet. We fit about seventy to a chest, which is enough to supply six-fifty or seven hundred addicts for a year.'

'How much will an addict smoke a day?'

'It depends how far gone he is. Ten grains to start with. Up to forty when they are really caught. They're not much use after that, you know. They just sit and dream, whether they're smoking or not. That is why the East India Company forbids
any
smoking here. Absolutely most rigorously.'

'Yet their directors don't mind exporting the stuff?'

'Well,
they
don't export it. Someone else does. A few years ago we only pushed out about a thousand chests from Calcutta. This last year, we're selling fourteen thousand. But we sell it to others who ship it. That is not our affair.'

‘Do you grow it all here?'

'No. Some we move out through Bombay. That's been grown in Malwa, in the north. The Company don't have anything to do with that area, but it's got to cross Company land, so the directors slapped a transit tax on it thirty years ago.'

'What do you make out of
that
a year?'

'Me personally, nothing, more's the pity. But I tell you, the Company made nearly a third of a million pounds last year. Just out of the tax!'

'What's the profit on this stuff?'

'We make between four and five hundred per cent net, when everything's taken off. The dealers on the coast will make several hundred per cent on what
they
shift, and the buyers, I don't know, maybe two or three hundred per cent, because they often adulterate it to make it go further. Add sugar or molasses or even cow-dung. There's a fortune in opium for everyone involved.'

'Not everyone,' said Elliot dryly. ‘Not for those men out there with their wives and families, slitting the pods, gathering it in at an ounce a day for about a shilling a month pay between them. Or for the others who finally pay what they can't afford for a few hours oblivion. They do not draw much benefit from any of these processes or transactions — yet without them there would be no Coast Trade at all!'

'Come, come, captain. You can't look at everything in terms like that. We have to make a profit or no-one could stay in business doing anything. A lot of money we make from this goes to the shareholders. We plough more back into works in India. So it helps everybody in the end.'

The old argument that if the British did not grow the stuff, then others would, was very convincing. But to be convincing was not always the same as being right; and sitting now in the factory at Canton, with Jardine looking at him belligerently, Elliot once more experienced that same sense of depression he had felt in the poppy fields of Bihar.

'I can't believe there, is any lasting virtue in a trade like this,' he said. 'No matter how many people it makes rich. We're undermining the whole fibre of the workmen in the country.'

'There are hundreds of thousands who never smoke the stuff,' retorted Jardine. 'It would take centuries to undermine them all. They're dam' glad to be undermined, too, I'll tell you.

'What with their living conditions, I look upon myself as a merchant who does not only deal in the obvious commodities like tea and silk and British machinery. I'm a merchant of dreams, a pedlar of oblivion.

'Look at our own country. Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence — you know the slogan, don't you? How many mothers have I seen feed a little child a spoonful of gin or some elixir that contained opium because they could not afford food, nor could they bear to hear the hungry child cry any longer!'

'I would prefer to increase our legitimate trade, as opposed to this dealing in mud.'

'That is why I am so anxious to get the country opened up,' agreed Jardine. 'Once we have an ambassador in Peking, and the Chinese send an ambassador to London on a proper basis, there will be no need to go scuttling up the coast, bribing all these people, wondering who can be trusted, who can't. We would trade in an open way. We've got the navy; we've got the merchant fleet; we've nothing to beat — except these iron-headed Chinese. They call me the Iron-Headed Old Rat. Did you know?'

'I had heard.'

'But they're the ones themselves with the stupid iron heads. They can't see any new idea. They think they can go on sheltering behind their Great Wall, as - they have done for thousands of years, ignoring all the inventions, all the progress of the nineteenth century. Well, they'll have to change one day, and we're in a position to make them do it. But we don't want to. The War of the Iron Rats. That's going on all the time. Has been, I suppose, ever since Marco Polo landed. East against West. Privilege against progress, yellow against white. Yet I like the people. Although they are so stupidly advised, they are courteous and industrious and honest. Who would be the victor in a war against such a reluctant enemy?'

'Who indeed?' echoed Elliot. 'Who indeed?'

'Even so,' said Jardine. 'All this soft talk we hear about humouring the Chinese, abiding by their rules and regulations, is quite the wrong tack to take. Next thing, we'll have them here telling us we've got to get out.'