While much of the United States goes about its business under Christmas garlands of red and green in December 1999, across the Pacific the red and green flag of Portugal will fly over Macao for the final time, marking the end of more than four centuries of Western territorial presence on mainland China. On 20 December the tiny city reverts to Chinese control. The Portuguese, whose 16th-century explorers, seafarers, and traders gave the West its first toehold in China, are the last Westerners to leave.
Two years ago, another former European colonial power—Great Britain—hauled down its flag, and the former crown colony of Hong Kong became Chinese. Across China's Pearl River Delta 40 miles west of Hong Kong, residents of Macao now are contemplating the changes that will result when the red and yellow Chinese flag flies over their home.
Today, Macao is a small, crowded city with silted harbors and a population of 450,000—about 7% of Hong Kong's. Its residents—95% Chinese—live in an area 50 times smaller than Hong Kong. Taxes on legalized gambling pay for more than a third of the city's government expenses.1 Relatively few tourists visit Macao exclusively. Some tourist publications advise that three or four hours are sufficient to experience the city; others omit any mention of Hong Kong's smaller neighbor altogether.
Contrast Macao on the eve of its turnover to the Chinese with the prominent trading city administered by the Portuguese 160 years ago: There in 1839 British commanders plotted strategy that resulted in China's defeat in the Opium War (1839-42) and the ceding of Chinese territory for Hong Kong. Western trading companies, including some from the United States, maintained homes and offices to support the annual six-month trading season at Canton (Guangzhou)—the only Chinese city open to foreigners—located 100 miles upriver.2 Merchant ships, including an increasingly large number of the new Yankee clippers, called at Macao to receive their permits to proceed upriver to Canton.3 Other merchant ships, again including U.S. vessels, lay to in adjacent waters at night to transfer chests of opium, the illicit exchange commodity the Chinese called "foreign mud."4
Americans and Chinese Meet First at Macao
Chinese and Americans encountered each other for the first time at Macao and in nearby Canton, and Americans quickly adopted prevailing English attitudes toward the Chinese.5 A great cultural chasm, widely divergent views of respective Western and Chinese destinies, and European and U.S. preoccupation with commerce precluded any chance for diplomacy to influence the character of Chinese and Western relations by the mid 1830s.6 Thus it was that Warren Delano II, the senior partner in China for the U.S. trading firm of Russell and Company and the grandfather of future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wrote at the beginning of the Opium War: "Great Britain owes it to herself and the civilized world (in the west) to knock a little reason into these besotted people and teach them to treat strangers with common decency."7
In a quiet corner near the Monte Fort, isolated from the noisy city by a high wall, memorials to Americans included among the 178 interments that comprise Macao's Old Protestant Cemetery bear testimony to the city's historical importance to the fledgling United States.8 The English East India Company, and later the British government, permitted Protestants of all nations to be buried in the small cemetery from its beginning in 1814 until its closure in 1857.9 Europeans and Americans trading with the Chinese at Canton staged their operations from Macao.10 In the Old Protestant Cemetery are 52 Americans; U.S. merchant mariners and Navy officers and sailors make up about half of that total.
Prominent Americans Interred in 19th-Century Macao
Disease—including malaria, typhoid, and dysentery—summer tropical heat and humidity, and similar harsh conditions along the Pearl River Delta killed many early in their lives. Three members of historically prominent U.S. families who are buried in Macao's Old Protestant Cemetery died while still young men:11
- George Washington Biddle of Philadelphia, 33, a godson of George Washington and son of the Revolutionary Army's Commissary General during the bitter winter of 1778-79, died in 1811. His remains were re-interred in the Old Protestant Cemetery when a relative visited Macao in 1821.
- Daniel Cushman, 23, a quartermaster assigned to the sidewheeler USS Susquehanna, was a direct descendant of one of the co-organizers of the Mayflower Emigration of 1620. He died on 12 May 1852. The Susquehanna later joined Commodore Matthew C. Perry's mission to Japan.
- Lieutenant Joseph Harod Adams, 36, died on board the U.S. Steam Frigate Powhatan at anchor in the Cumsingmoon Passage near Macao. Lieutenant Adams's grandfather was President John Adams; President John Quincy Adams was his uncle. The Powhatan served in the U.S. Navy's East India and Japan Squadron.
Macao's Importance to Trade with the West
Macao owes its place in history to Portuguese explorers who arrived from Goa in 1513, completing another leg in a sea route to the Orient. This route would become vital to Europe, because Muslims controlled all overland routes from China. The Ming Court in far-off Beijing considered the new arrivals as "just another bunch of pirates—barbarians with beards, big eyes, and long noses."12 The Portuguese and other Europeans who followed desired trade, but contemporary Chinese culture placed little value on merchants or trade. Because the newly-arrived Western barbarians presented no real threat—or alternatively because the Ming Court seemed to take no further interest—the Portuguese were permitted to remain. In 1557, the Chinese granted territorial rights at Macao to the Portuguese as a reward for their suppression of gangs of pirates that infested the Pearl River Delta.13 Within decades, other Western nations were trading with the Chinese at Macao, Canton, Amoy (Xiamen), on a small island south of Shanghai, and on Taiwan.
Macao's historical importance to the United States was cemented in 1760 when the Qing (Manchu Dynasty) Emperor, concerned with the growing influence of Western traders and the priests and missionaries who accompanied them, decreed that all maritime trade with the West would be conducted at Canton. Like their Ming predecessors, the Qing nobles decided that trade with the Fan Kuei (barbarians) had some small potential value to the Empire, and the Fan Kuei could be controlled at a trading site very distant from Beijing.14 Chinese mandarins at Macao administered the trading at Canton. Until 1849, Macao paid an annual tribute to Beijing based on customs fees collected.15
The Chinese restricted trading at Canton to the six or seven relatively cool, dry months following late September.16 (Trade conducted by the Portuguese at Macao continued year-'round.) From October until the following March, malaria abated in the Pearl River Delta. This period also coincided with the arrival of fresh tea crops from China's interior.17 As trade increased, Macao grew in importance. It was the staging area for the Canton trading season, a banking and commercial support enclave, a year-'round residence for the families of Westerners trading at Canton, and a merchant shipping and naval support depot.
Major Thirst for Chinese Tea
George Washington Biddle's death in 1811 is the earliest memorialized in the Old Protestant Cemetery. He drank tea, as did his godfather, George Washington.18 The Biddles of Philadelphia and many other 18th-century colonials drank tea and used it as a vegetable relish. Across the Atlantic, the English, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish East India Companies and the Portuguese all strove to supply their respective nations' demands for Chinese tea. Tea had ranked with porcelain as secondary to Chinese silks in importance when regular trade began between China and England in 1700.19 By century's end, a growing European silk industry reduced some of the demand for Chinese silk, and the quality of European porcelain had improved. Tea became China's most important export.20
Tea was so popular, in fact, that Parliament slashed taxes on Chinese tea imported to England. Parliament's refusal to reduce fees on tea imported into the colonies resulted in the 1773 Boston Tea Party.21 The first U.S. merchantman to arrive after the Revolutionary War, the Empress of China, received its permits at Macao in August 1784 and proceeded upriver to load tea at Canton.22 By the end of the 18th Century, the British—whose traders had long since replaced Portuguese traders in both numbers and volume of transactions in the Canton-Macao trading area—were consuming 20 million pounds of tea annually. By 1820 tea consumption in England had risen to 30 million pounds per year—enough for two pounds of tea for each man, woman, and child.23 Tea's popularity in England required the East India Company to maintain a year's supply in warehouses to guard against interruptions in supply or shortages.24 In addition, the rest of Europe and the young United States had a big thirst for tea. All the tea came from China through Canton, and all the ships called first at Macao.25
Parliament ended the English East India Company's monopoly on trade between China and Great Britain in 1833.26 After 1834, tea cultivation for export began in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), and on Taiwan.27 Japan also grew quality teas, but until Perry's mission, that country was closed to the West.
The West Searches for a Trade Balance
A century-and-a-half after trade between Portugal and China began at Macao, the West still had not solved an original dilemma: The West wanted Chinese goods, particularly tea. But the Ming and then the Qing Dynasties considered their empire to be largely self-sufficient. The Qing considered Americans and other Fan Kuei as "pitiful in their desperation for Chinese goods." As for China: "The Celestial Empire possesses all things in abundance and lacks no products within its borders. There is no reason to import the manufactures of barbarians."28
At the beginning of the 19th century, Britain—and to a lesser degree the United States—had become successful importing cotton into China, which had decreased its cotton production to devote more land to tea cultivation.29 British cotton for the Chinese trade came from India; Americans traded using domestic cotton and some obtained in Turkey. Americans also brought ginseng, sealskins, and other furs to China.30 When North American fur supplies began to dwindle, the Yankees stripped sandalwood from Hawaiian forests and located additional supplies in the Dutch East Indies—where they also found a source for sea cucumbers—and transported both trading commodities to China.31
Western and Chinese traders in Macao and Canton used uncoined silver as their medium of exchange.32 The Celestial Empire could mine only a very small supply of silver, yet the Chinese coveted the metal.33 "When the Chinese smell silver, they will bring mountains of merchandise," a Portuguese trader noted in 1633.34Silver from Central and South America, via European traders, entered the Empire, as trade with the West gained momentum after 1600.
Ming China did not mint silver.35 Nevertheless, the Ming rulers required taxes to be paid in silver.36 When they overthrew the Ming in 1644, the Qing continued this policy.37 Multiplicity of silver tael units existed throughout the country.38 The prosperity and relative peace under Ming and the first century of Qing rule resulted in China's population exceeding 300 million by 1750; hence, this increase required an increase in the amount of silver in China so that people could pay their taxes. Westerners thought it extraordinary that the Chinese preferred silver to gold, the more valuable precious metal in the West.39 One result of the Chinese rulers' failure to standardize units of silver is that, concurrent with trade with the West, arbitrage was operating in Macao at least three centuries ago.40
A typical Qing mandarin at Macao, summarizing trade with the Western barbarians at the end of the Western calendar year of 1811—the year of George Washington Biddle's death—might have written:
This small city where we permit the Portuguese and other foreign devils to remain is the year-round depot for Guangzhou, the only other city in our Empire where our glorious Emperor permits trade with the West. Next to the "red-haired devils" (the English), the "flowery flagged devils" (the Americans) have become the most numerous western traders, and their merchant fleet is rapidly growing. As an item of trade, Chinese tea remains superior to anything the West can either provide or manufacture. Trade brings us a favorable balance of sycee (silver). Unfortunately, the amount of "foreign mud" entering illegally in our area continues to increase.41
Opium Traffic and the Chinese Response
By 1729, the year the Qing Emperor Yung Cheng proscribed opium's importation, the increasing use of "foreign mud" had become a problem for China.42 In Canton, 1,100 miles south of Beijing—and an additional 100 miles farther south in Macao—some mandarins and other officials charged with overseeing and regulating trade with the Fan Kuei ignored their Emperor's imperative. By 1800 Western traders in China, particularly the British, still lacked a legal trading commodity with a Chinese market demand and value comparable to that of tea. Moreover, a worldwide shortage of silver in the early 1820s had reduced British (and Chinese) supplies.43
The British obtained their opium—which was highly transportable—from nearby India.44 Chests, each carrying about 133 pounds (or one picul, enough to supply 8000 addicts for one month), could be transferred to opium-trading companies' storeships at Lintin Island 25 miles northeast of Macao.45 Chests of opium also were transferred to "fast crabs" (boats rowed by 60 oarsmen and armed for protection against pirates) or other craft farther up the Pearl River for redistribution.46 In 1835 the imperial ban on opium remained in effect. By then opium use was widespread, even among commoners, and more officials had been corrupted.47
The quantity of opium transported to China by the United States ranked considerably below that arriving by way of British merchantmen, but a longer supply line rather than higher morals characterized the Americans' performance. While the British loaded their opium in India, U.S. opium sources were located in Turkey, although smaller quantities came from India on consignment.48 In addition, the number of British trading companies outnumbered the Americans', and the British had been trading longer in China than the "flowery flagged devils."
In 1836 the Qing court considered legalizing the importation of opium.49 But the Qing ruled out that option, because the drain of sycee from the treasury to pay for the amount of opium required to satisfy demand would have bankrupted the Empire. In 1839 the Emperor appointed Lin Tse-hsu, the governor of two provinces, as the Imperial Opium Commissioner and empowered him to solve the problem of the foreign mud.50
Judged by standards of today or those of 1839, Commissioner Lin was the right mandarin for the job. As a provincial governor, Lin cut opium use by direct action against suppliers and addicts and 19th-century versions of education and health programs.51 Lin had earned the nickname "Blue Sky" for his incorruptibility.52 In March 1839 he surrounded the foreigners' trading area in Canton and isolated them from their warships in the Pearl River. The English companies were forced to surrender 20,280 chests of opium. And Russell and Company, the U.S. traders, gave up 1,540 chests.53 Lin then burned the opium and headed for Macao.
There, Portuguese officials hurriedly collected opium supplies and shipped the chests to Manila. Before Lin arrived at Macao, the entire British enclave decamped and sailed across the mouth of the Pearl River to the deep-water bay. The island and peninsula would become the British Crown Colony.54 During the ensuing Opium War, the Chinese suffered humiliating defeats in a series of mostly coastal actions fought with the British. The United States and other Western nations were non-belligerents
For his actions, Lin was sacked.55 Today, "Blue Sky" Lin remains a hero to Chinese school children. A review of the origins and outcome of the Opium War also records the view of prominent Americans in China toward opium and how the United States benefited from the fighting between the British and Chinese:
- Opium's Value—Only one U.S. trading company, the Philadelphia Quakers of the D. W. C. Olyphant Company, refused to trade in opium.56 Russell and Company was the largest of the 20-some Yankee traders in Macao and Canton.57 In an 1838 letter to his brothers, Warren Delano II, Russell and Company's senior partner in China, wrote: "I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view, but as a merchant I insist that it has been a fair, honorable, and legitimate trade."58
- Increased U.S. Shipping—During the Opium War the Royal Navy permitted U.S. merchantmen to pass through its Pearl River blockade.59 The British sold some of their merchantmen to the United States, which, as a non-belligerent, continued to have access to Canton and could pass through the Royal Navy's blockades. The British also chartered U.S. merchantmen. Aided to a degree by carrying cargoes for England from Canton and Macao during the Opium War, by 1851 the U.S. merchant fleet was the world's largest.60
- Leveraging the Royal Navy—The Treaty of Nanking (1842) forced the Chinese to cede Hong Kong to the British, to open four other Chinese ports besides Canton to the British for trade and residency, and to pay Britain for the opium destroyed and the cost of the war. Bolstered by the three warships of the U.S. East Asia Squadron, by way of the Treaty of Wanghia (1844) the United States received residency and trading rights in the same ports as the British.61 Captain James Biddle, commodore of the East Asia Squadron and a cousin of the deceased George Washington Biddle, helped negotiate the treaty, which was signed at the Kun Iam Temple in Macao on 3 July 1844. (The Americans later neglected to enforce antismuggling provisions of the treaty as promised.62)
Macao Remained Important to the United States
By 1850 Hong Kong had eclipsed Macao in trading volume, and the opening of other Chinese cities to Western commerce further had diminished the overall significance of Macao as the seaward entry station for merchantmen bound for Canton. But Macao continued to be important to the United States for at least another five years.
The U.S. Navy began stockpiling coal and naval stores at Macao in 1852 in preparation for its mission the following year to open Japan to U.S. trade and to establish coaling stations in Japan. In April 1853, Commodore Perry moved into Russell and Company's elegant mansion in Macao and began the final planning for his monumental undertaking.63 The sidewheeler Mississippi and the sloop-of-war Saratoga sailed from Macao in late April. In Shanghai, they were joined by the sidewheeler Susquehanna and the sloop-of-war Plymouth. When the four ships of his Black Ship Squadron departed Tokyo Bay in July 1853, Perry told the Japanese he would return the following year with more ships.64
During the autumn of 1853 the original four Black Ships and other U.S. Navy warships that would accompany Perry on his return to Japan in 1854 began to assemble in Cumsingmoon Strait, 12 miles north of Macao.65 The summer had been unusually hot, and the heat continued into autumn, causing the deaths of crewmen such as Lieutenant Joseph Harod Adams of the Powhatan.66
Ashore in Macao, U.S. merchant ship Captain John Williams of Utica, New York, assembled and tested the telegraph system that Perry would present to the Japanese people as a gift before the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa (31 March 1854).67 In July 1857 Williams died and was buried in the Old Protestant Cemetery; later that year the Portuguese authorities decided to close the cemetery. And in 1858, the U.S. government forbade U.S. merchants from trading in opium.68
1. Mike Edwards, "China's Gold Coast," National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 191, No. 3, March 1997, p. 30.
2. Sir Lindsay Ride, An East India Company Cemetery (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996), p. 3.
3. Ibid., p. 12.
4. Peter Booth Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1990), p. 140.
5. Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, 1840-1842 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 336.
6. Jonathan Spence, "Paradise Lost," Far Eastern Economic Review, 15 April 1999, p. 44.
7. Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882-1905 (New York: Harper & Row, 1994), p. 74.
8. Ride, p. 268.
9. Ibid.p. 64.
10. Wiley, p. 140.
11. Ride, pp. 85, 117, 140.
12. Merle Severy, "Portugal's Sea Road to the East," National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 182 No. 5, November 1992, p. 91.
13. Ride, p. 2.
14. Ibid., p. 8.
15. Ibid., p. 2.
16. Ibid., p. 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 140.
19. Ibid., p. 10.
20. Fay, p. 17.
21. Ride, p. 15.
22. Ibid.
23. Fay, p. 17.
24. Ibid., p. 17.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 19.
27. Ibid., p. 17.
28. Ward, p. 68.
29. Ride, p. 10.
30. Ibid., p. 16.
31. Ward, p. 67.
32. Ride, p. 10.
33. Fay, p. 115.
34. Nayan Chanda, "Early Warning," Far Eastern Economic Review, 10 June 1999, p. 47.
35. Ibid., p. 48.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ride, p. 10.
40. Chanda, p. 48.
41. Fay, p. 67.
42. Ride, p. 11.
43. Chanda, p. 48.
44. Ride, p. 11.
45. Ward, p. 72.
46. Ibid., p. 71.
47. Chanda, p. 48.
48. Ward, p. 71.
49. Fay, p. 117.
50. Arthur Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes (London: Ruskin House—George Allen and Unwin Ltd.), p. 14.
51. Ibid., p. 34.
52. Fay, p. 128.
53. Ward, p.74.
54. Ride, p. 22.
55. Fay, p.269.
56. Waley, p. 50.
57. Ibid., p. 58.
58. Ward, p. 71.
59. Waley, p. 101.
60. Wiley, p. 98.
61. Ibid., p. 136.
62. Ibid., p. 141.
63. Ibid., p. 153.
64. Ibid., pp. 319-320.
65. Ibid., p. 361.
66. Ibid., p. 364.
67. Ride, p. 101.
68. Ibid., p. 12.