White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and NZ 1790-1950
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White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and NZ 1790-1950
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| ISBN-13: | 9781927322833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Otago University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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White Ghosts, Yellow Peril
China and New Zealand 1790-1950
By Stevan Eldred-Grigg, Zeng Dazheng
Otago University Press
Copyright © 2014 Stevan Eldred-Grigg and Zeng DazhengAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-927322-83-3
CHAPTER 1
FUR AND TEA 1790–1840
Introduction: suns and meteors
New Zealand and China in 1790 were unknown to one another, seemed unlikely to come into contact for years, and were in many ways opposites. China, an immense subcontinent whose people had been writing books and building cities for more than three thousand years, glowed like a sun in the middle of a complex satellite system of colonies and protectorates. New Zealand, a young archipelago, was home to a tribal people who had lived there for only 500 years.
The two countries were very different, very far away from one another, but they were about to come into contact for the first time.
'China' was a Western word, of course, used as shorthand to speak about the states governed by Manchu clans and their supporters under the reigning dynasty, the Qing. The empire was strong and had been growing still stronger for most of the eighteenth century. Wealth from a booming economy paid for colonial conquest of territory in the north and west, where the Qing in the 1750s rolled their power right over the whole of Mongolia and Turkestan, or what the West at the time called Tartary. The system of states controlled by Beijing at the end of the eighteenth century was home to far more people than any other empire in the world. 'Our heavenly empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms!' wrote government official Lin Zexu.
The 'heavenly empire' itself had no single word to describe its own complexity. 'Middle Land' (Zhongyuan) defined the core provinces, thickly peopled, tightly tilled, where subjects of the imperial government mostly spoke one or more of the many languages and dialects today grouped together by linguists as Chinese. The delta provinces at the mouth of the big rivers were very rich, their highly fertile fields yielding raw material for long chains of selling, processing and reselling that made a good living for thousands of crowded cities and constantly plying fleets of ships.
Manchuria (Manzhou), the homeland of the dynasty, was a state of forests and steppes sprawling northwards from China. The people were mostly Manchu, speaking a language more closely akin to Mongol and Turkish tongues than to Chinese. They were citizens rather than vassals, and their wide-open spaces were forbidden to the subject peoples of China.
Outside the two core states was a ring of satellite colonies and protectorates. Making matters still more complex, though, the imperial government in its ceaseless proclamations had begun to blur boundaries between China and Manchuria, and between the two core states and some of the protectorates. Tibet, Mongolia and Turkestan were increasingly spoken about as though they belonged, together with the core states, to one empire known interchangeably by the imperial court as Middle Land and 'Qing Land' (Qingguo). Mongolia was split between a vast protectorate, known to Westerners as Outer Mongolia, and a zone called Inner Mongolia (Nei Menggu) in which states were neither imperial provinces nor protectorates. China also was in constant contact with Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Europe and China, subcontinents at the western and eastern ends of the same landmass, had been trading goods and swapping thoughts in a small way for several hundred years. Chinese intellectuals occasionally examined the philosophical and scientific thinking of Europe. European intellectuals occasionally examined the philosophical and political thinking of China. Leibniz, a leading German philosopher at the end of the seventeenth century, portrayed the other end of the continent as a model society. China, he wrote, surpassed the West 'in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics'. Opinions were a little less glowing by the middle of the eighteenth century. Montesquieu, a leading French philosopher, wrote in 1758 that while the goal of Chinese governments was 'to make their subjects live in peace and tranquility', the empire nonetheless was 'a despotic state, whose principle is fear'. Western opinion in the last years of the eighteenth century swung more and more to the latter point of view. John Stuart Mill, a leading Scottish philosopher, by the middle of the nineteenth century found in China a 'warning example' of what could have been the social, economic and political fate of Europe. The empire, he wrote, had 'become stationary' for thousands of years.
Yet the empire really was very dynamic. New techniques were always being worked out and applied on the land and in the workshops, mills and mints. The population was growing strikingly fast, soaring from 138 million at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 381 million within four generations. Imperial subjects were streaming out from its home provinces to colonise new lands in Southeast Asia.
Not, as yet, New Zealand.
What did the peoples of the empire know about New Zealand? World maps printed in the Qing realm since the late seventeenth century had shown an island to the southeast of what we now call Australia. The first, published in 1674 on the orders of the imperial government, showed Xin Selandiya not as a narrow archipelago but as one plump island. The map was copied throughout the eighteenth century. Chinese officials now knew, should they wish to know, that there was a Xin Selandiya. Otherwise they knew nothing. Western learning was suppressed by the imperial government from early in the century, which meant the voyages of French and British explorers from 1769 onwards, showing that New Zealand was a big group of islands peopled by Polynesians, were not known in China.
China was even less known to the New Zealanders.
Not that they called themselves New Zealanders, or their archipelago New Zealand. They knew themselves by the names of their tribes, and their islands by various names, among others Te Wai Pounamu and Te Ika a Maui. The two main islands and smaller islands sweeping in a shallow crescent through the southwest Pacific were home to a peasant society, a tribal people living in villages of wood and reeds. Their ancestors had begun crossing the seas from Southeast Asia several thousand years earlier but since then they had evolved their own way of life half a world away, with no trade or other contact with East Asia. New Zealand was still a small meteor well outside the orbit of the two powerful solar systems of Europe and China.
A first fleeting encounter with Europeans had taken place near the middle of the seventeenth century, but not until the last decades of the eighteenth century did a wave of Western ships set in for its shores. Maori met the newcomers, parleyed, played, made love and sometimes fought with them. The tribespeople of the archipelago were as dynamic in their way as the peoples of China. They were curious about goods brought by explorers on foreign ships. Often they were willing to work for long hours at backbreaking tasks growing food crops and processing flax in order to trade.
The hustling and huckstering of Europeans across continents was bound to bring sweeping change. European interlopers, above all the British, during the 1790s would link China and New Zealand for the first time in history by working out a way to coin cash in the archipelago and set up a commercial export trade.
Afterwards, three generations would be born before Chinese sojourners walked down gangways onto the wharves of Te Wai Pounamu, by then known as the Middle Island and still later as the South Island. They would find the land, its laws and folkways odd, even frightening. Yet the Ah Kews and Ah Kees of Guangdong, having bought tickets to travel so far, would not be easily thrown off their stride. Country and town life in their homeland by no means followed a timeless pattern of celestial tranquillity. Cantonese clans of peasants, artisans and shopkeepers sending sons out into the wider world were everyday experts at navigating strong, sometimes swift, tides of change.
Nation and empire: money
Those tides were sweeping. A Western industrial revolution driven by new technology and the new economic system of capitalism was releasing powers so swollen, so awesome, perhaps awful, that a few years later they would be embodied by Mary Shelley as a monster made by Frankenstein. Mill, for all his belief that China had become stagnant, was shocked by the 'dark satanic mills' of a rancorous and reeking new Europe. Adam Smith, on the other hand, looked upon the new order far more cheerfully. China and the Chinese were well placed to make money in the modern world, he wrote, for capitalism fitted the habits of the nation and, while European paupers lay about 'indolently in the workhouse', living off a dole as social parasites, industrious Chinese were 'continually running about the streets with the tools of their respective trades, offering their service'. Smith made only one complaint, quite uncharacteristic of his views overall: those hardworking Chinese were able to wring from employers nothing more than what seemed to him very poor wages.
Certainly money was there for the making. China was such a rich and thriving system of states that some twenty years after the turn of the nineteenth century its gross domestic product was nearly three times what it had been at the turn of the eighteenth century. Also, the empire was yielding nearly one third of the combined gross domestic product of the whole world. Average yearly earnings in the imperial states were rather more than half those available for the citizens of France, and only a little less than half those for citizens of the United States.
The Qing Empire, in other words, was very wealthy.
The imperial government grandly denied any need for a trade in Western goods or other dealings with overseas lands. The Qianlong emperor wrote to the British government that his empire possessed 'all things in prolific abundance' and lacked 'no product within its own borders'. China was willing to export tea, silk and porcelain out of kindness, since those goods were needed by Europe, but not out of necessity: 'I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.' The imperial government when it made such sweeping claims was speaking for diplomatic purposes, hoping to deal with outside powers from a position that might seem strong. Nor could officials opt for a more pragmatic discourse in such matters without raising quite a few domestic eyebrows. Qing pretence to heavenly mandate was flowery wallpaper hiding many cracks in the state.
The truth about Chinese trade with the world was complex. Merchants carried out a thriving export trade in silks, porcelain and other highly refined products – along with hefty shipments of tea, in which the empire held what was more or less an international monopoly – not from kindness, of course, nor for reasons of state, but because the empire, despite the words of the Qianlong emperor, did not possess 'all things in prolific abundance'. China indeed lacked many resources within its own borders. Southeast Asia had for several hundred years been supplying the empire with teak, mahogany and other hardwoods needed by the furniture and building industries. Silver was needed, too: imports of the ore worth 6.3 million taels at their first peak early in the eighteenth century surged to a whopping second peak of 16.4 million taels late in the century.
Also, again in spite of magnificent words from the imperial throne, many people in the empire felt a craving for 'strange or ingenious' overseas goods. 'Foreign things are the most fashionable now,' wrote a scholar, Chen Zhan. Opium was one of those things.
The soothing sap of the poppy seems to have first come into the empire during the Tang dynasty – not smoked but swallowed – to heighten the sexual pleasures of men of high rank at court while they romped with courtesans and boys. Opium smoking started in the eighteenth century. Lan Dingyuan noted: 'one is alert the whole night and it increases sexual desire'. Fu Shen's memoir Fu Sheng Liuji portrayed the pleasures of sex and drugs on the 'flower boats', the floating brothels of Guangzhou. Chinese historians in later years would blame the gunboats of the British Empire for the spread of opium smoking. The habit was well established, however, long before white foreigners made any reckoning about likely profits. Yu Jiao claimed as early as 1801 that 'among the four classes of people, only peasants do not taste it'. Zhao Guisheng, a government official, wrote poetry in the 1830s about the delights of smoking:
That unique odour,
that exquisite rarity
from overseas trade,
rises like steam and cloud.
Guangzhou, sprawling and expansive, second city of the empire and third-largest city in the world, was the entry point for opium and also, from 1757, the only seaport allowed by law to carry overseas trade. Guangdong, the province of which the prodigious city was capital, developed an economy that was very forward-looking. The peasantry thronging the delta of the slow and silty Pearl River had stopped growing rice and other food for their own families and begun growing new cash crops – mulberry for the silk industry, sugarcane for big new refineries and cotton for big new mills. A traditional peasantry had, in other words, become a modern farming class oriented to the commercial market. Foshan, near Guangzhou, became a national centre of the iron industry, making tools to be sold throughout China. The expansive outlook of the province would suddenly bring it into contact with New Zealand.
Seal furs were another foreign fad sweeping through the wealthy households of the Qing Empire: warm and sleek, they were sought after for coats, muffs and other luxury trimmings. 'It's distinctly very cold, to-day,' says a character to a young lady in Hong Lou Meng, the great novel written by Cao Xueqin and commercially printed in 1791, 'how is it that you are so contrary as to go and divest yourself of the pelisse with the bluish breast-fur overlapping the cloth?'
Fur seals, unaware of the price on their heads, calved on the southern coasts of New Zealand. One of the quickest ways to make money in the archipelago and its outlying islands was to slaughter those seals and ship the pelts to China. All that was needed was gangs of cheap labour – men to club the seals and skin them at shore stations. Furs won so cheaply and hauled into the hulls of ships could be sold for costly clothing not only in Guangzhou but also in London and Amsterdam. There were so many seals, so readily available, and so much money to be made. Sir Joseph Banks, traveller in southern waters, wrote with amazement: 'The beach is encumber'd with their quantities, and those who visit their haunts have less trouble in killing them than have the servants of the victualling office who kill hogs in a pen with mallets.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from White Ghosts, Yellow Peril by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, Zeng Dazheng. Copyright © 2014 Stevan Eldred-Grigg and Zeng Dazheng. Excerpted by permission of Otago University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Front Cover,Title Page,
Copyright,
Acknowledgements,
ONE: FUR AND TEA, 1790–1840,
TWO: COOLIES FROM CHINA? 1840–60,
THREE: NEW GOLD MOUNTAIN, 1860–80,
FOUR: WHITE NEW ZEALAND, 1880–1910,
FIVE: AN OLD HOUSE FALLEN, 1910–30,
SIX: HOT WAR, COLD WAR, 1930–50,
Afterword,
Endnotes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Back Cover,