Accommodating Foreigners in a Littoral Borderland: The Lower Pearl River Delta during the Opium War

Abstract

This article traces the Chinese accommodation of foreigners in the lower section of the Pearl River delta during the Opium War to the region’s social ecology in late imperial times. With a long tradition of living with foreign sojourners and their vessels, Chinese people in the delta congregated on an unprecedented scale at the outer anchorages within the present-day Hong Kong region in 1839–1841 to trade with Euro-American merchants and the British expedition. As mobile and violent provisioners and opium dealers, they flourished in the littoral borderland between the Qing and British empires. Their cross-shore ventures constituted an intensification of their prewar activities and an economic adaptive strategy in the competitive society of mid-Qing Guangdong. Centering on the socioeconomic lives of ordinary Chinese people, this article problematizes the usage of “Hanjian” and “collaboration” as nationalist and statist labels to summarize Chinese assistance to foreigners in times of external war in modern China.

Keywords

Opium War Pearl River delta Hong Kong borderland collaboration Hanjian

In May 1841, the Chinese populace in Sanyuanli, on the northern outskirts of Guangzhou, organized themselves to repel the British expeditionary force that besieged the city and invaded their land. This local resistance during China’s first war with Britain—or the “Opium War” as it is commonly known—evolved into militarized xenophobia in the Pearl River delta for the next two decades, and is still enshrined on the Chinese mainland as the first of a series of nationalist struggles against foreign imperialists in the modern era. Yet, at the time of the Sanyuanli resistance, 120 kilometers southeast of Guangzhou in the mouth of the Pearl River, the British were building a new town along the north shore of recently occupied Hong Kong Island with the help of many Chinese newcomers. On July 10, 1841 the Canton Press, then based in Macau, reported that in Hong Kong “1500 workmen are employed in cutting roads, leveling ground, building temporary barracks and houses for the Government officers &c.” “From May to August [1841],” the Canton Press later added, “the population increased most rapidly, and an extensive bazaar shortly followed this congregation of people. [. . .] They are hard-working, industrious, and cheerful” (January 15, 1842).

How can we explain the contrasting wartime experiences of Sanyuanli and Hong Kong Island, both of which are located within the Pearl River estuary in South China? Frederic Wakeman’s focus on the rural-urban contradiction in his classic on the mid-nineteenth-century xenophobia in the Pearl River delta has overshadowed the region’s lower section where coastal strips and waters were scattered with countless islets, bays, and channel (Wakeman, 1966). The social ecology of this littoral borderland in late imperial times, this article argues, accounts for the large-scale Chinese accommodation of the floating foreign community and the British forces around Hong Kong Island and its deltaic environs during the anti-opium campaign led by Qing imperial commissioner Lin Zexu 林則徐 in Guangdong in 1839–1840 and the Qing-British war in 1840–1842. While the Opium War scholarship focuses on protagonists who were politically, economically, and socially prominent figures in the Qing and British empires, this article combines a bottom-up approach and a local history perspective to reveal the business ventures of the ordinary Chinese people who lived on the watery fringes of South China where the two empires collided. With a long tradition of living with foreigners and their vessels, many of the Chinese people in the lower Pearl River estuary, and across the delta at large, were much less hostile to and more cooperative with the West than the anti-opium heroes and wartime patriots portrayed in China’s textbooks and political discourse. This study interweaves the socioeconomic history of South China’s littoral with the histories of the Opium War, the Qing frontier, and British imperialism in modern China.

The Qing authorities divided the “sea frontier” 海疆 of the empire into tenuously ruled “outer waters” 外洋 and more tightly controlled “inner waters” 內洋. Mainly lying within the outer waters, the lower Pearl River delta was home not only to the migratory fishers and pirates who lived in a mobile water world but also to the villagers who settled and farmed in the coastal territories or on outlying islands. Since the sixteenth century, the region had sheltered maritime Europeans, and later Americans as well, coming to China. The Chinese coastal people’s association with foreign peoples and regimes such as Japanese warlords and samurai, the Dutch East India Company, and Vietnam’s Tay Son rulers has been a main theme in scholarship on late-imperial China piracy (Chen, 1957; Hang, 2017; Murray, 1987; Antony, 2014). Instead of concentrating on the political and transnational dimensions of Chinese-foreign cooperation, this article focuses on the socioeconomic aspects of Chinese people’s interactions with maritime foreigners on a local level. While Peter Thilly (2017) has examined active Chinese involvement in the foreign opium trade that expanded to 1830s coastal Fujian, my article takes into consideration various dealings with and services for foreigners in the Pearl River delta. Endowed with their own rhythms and dynamics, the Chinese accommodation of foreigners, under the Canton system and beyond, had been integral to the delta’s economy and society long before the Opium War.

From March 1839, when Commissioner Lin started to suppress the opium trade in Guangzhou, to April 1841, three months after the British first seized Hong Kong Island, an unprecedented number of vessel-dwelling foreign sojourners and British forces congregated at various anchorages across the lower Pearl River delta. This influx and the resultant exceptional demand for supplies led to a new organizational form of Chinese-foreign cooperation: huge Chinese beachside bazaars, waterfront settlements, and congregations of watercraft emerged beside the foreign mercantile and British naval fleets to sell provisions to and purchase opium from them. Although the Qing tightened their grip over both the inner and outer waters, the ad hoc littoral assemblages thrived thanks to the armed (though limited) foreign protection and the establishment in mid-1840 of a British frontier in the lower delta. The Chinese provisioners and opium dealers active in the lower delta, moreover, were so mobile that they could take advantage of the administrative fissures in secluded harbors, venture across the shorelines, and shift anchorages to seek shelter and evade state control. They even resorted to self-defense to resist the local government’s coercion. As on the late-imperial Sino-Vietnamese water frontier, mobility and violence were the lower-estuary people’s instruments of survival on the “porous border” (to use Eric Tagliacozzo’s term) between the Qing and the British empires during the anti-opium campaign and the Opium War (Wang, 2014; Tagliacozzo, 2005).

Who were these Chinese people and what were the watercraft that congregated at the lower-delta anchorages? Why did they dare to do business with the British when opium and the English yi 夷 were the Qing government’s chief enemies during the hostilities?¹ Their food provisioning and opium smuggling constituted an escalation of the multifarious Chinese accommodation of foreigners across the delta in the preceding decades. Economic gains remained the dominant reason for trading with foreigners among the lower-estuary Chinese, whose lowly status was reflected in their poorly paid and unskilled jobs prior to 1839 and the generally small scale of their businesses. The involvement of elites in such institutions as the military and lineages as well as better-off merchants—often seen in late-imperial maritime smuggling (Macauley, 2009; Szonyi, 2017; Thilly, 2017)—was essentially nonexistent among the lower-delta opium and provisions dealers, who predominantly came from the lower strata of society. They relied on friendships, relations with colleagues or crew on their own craft, and family links (usually narrow) to form business partnerships with several others. Their pursuit of profits amid diplomatic-military conflict is one example of the variety of economic survival or adaptive strategies found in the socially competitive environment of mid-Qing Guangdong.²

Indigenous cooperation with foreign rulers in times of war and colonial rule has often been described in academic studies as “collaboration,” a term that owes its rather recent popularity to the French experience of German occupation during the Second World War. In scholarship on modern China, “collaborators” refers to those who worked with foreign invaders, voluntarily or not, to facilitate their aggression, such as during the Japanese invasion and occupation of 1931–1945 (Robinson, 1972; Fu, 1993; Mitter, 2000; Brook, 2005). Far from being a comprehensive analysis of Chinese collaboration with the British during the Opium War, this article uses the case of the lower Pearl River delta to problematize “collaboration” as a statist, morally loaded, and undifferentiating category that summarizes all kinds of Chinese accommodations to foreign invaders or “imperialists” in modern China. The wide spectrum of responses to the foreign presence during the anti-opium campaign and the Opium War in the lower estuary, from joining the Qing’s paramilitary forces to recruiting local helpers for the Hong Kong colonial authorities, suggests that the delta Chinese people lacked any unified political consciousness. This history, however, has been overshadowed by narratives of later Chinese historians who categorized all the Chinese associated with foreigners during and even before the hostilities as Hanjian 漢奸, a term that has largely been interpreted as “traitors to the Han” or “Han traitors selling out their own country” since the rise of nationalism in China in the late nineteenth century. The deeds of Chinese opium traders, in Thilly’s words, “came to represent the core essence of treason as China entered the modern era” (Thilly, 2017: 189). Collapsing all sorts of Chinese cooperation with foreigners into treason or “collaboration,” in short, has obscured the deep historical roots of and the real motivations behind the different ways foreigners were accommodated by the shore-crossing Chinese people in the Hong Kong region and its environs in the lower Pearl River delta during Lin Zexu’s anti-opium campaign and the Opium War.

No records have been left by the lower-delta Chinese people themselves during the Opium War.³ The surviving materials that come closest to firsthand accounts are the testimonies of people captured by the Qing Guangdong authorities for “colluding with the outer yi” 勾結外夷 that were incorporated into trial reports to Beijing. Employed extensively in this article, these legal records provide an excellent window on the socioeconomic features of the Chinese in the littoral assemblages. In addition, this article consults and compares textual and visual materials produced or compiled by Qing central and local officials, Chinese literati, British diplomats, expedition officers, and other Euro-Americans in China. This includes the Canton Press and Canton Register, the two English newspapers based in the Pearl River delta, which published many firsthand observations on the ventures of the lower-delta Chinese people and the Opium War in general. This study also benefits from historical and archaeological writings on local communities in the Hong Kong region, which comprises all the main lower-delta berths taken by foreign merchants and the British expedition in 1839–1841.

The Lower Pearl River Estuary: The Geopolitical and Socio-ecological Setting

As Robert Antony (1993: 75) has noted, “South China’s jagged littoral provided numerous channels and small harbours, and was dotted with a fringe of innumerable islands and sandy shoals.” In his chart of the lower Pearl River delta, the famous London cartographer James Wyld (1840) delineated all the major islands, bays, and passages discussed in this article (see Figure 1). Lintin 伶仃 (Inner Lingding Island 內伶仃島) commanded the Pearl River entrance. To its southeast lies the tombolo of Tongkoo 銅鼓/龍鼓 and the islets of Sawchow 筲洲/沙洲 on the western edge of contemporary Hong Kong. Tongkoo Bay 龍鼓水道 lies within the passage of water bounded by Tongkoo, Sawchow, and the mainland in the present-day New Territories 新界. South of Tongkoo Bay is Lantao 大嶼山, the largest island in today’s Hong Kong, with the Capsingmoon 急水門/汲水門 strait at its northeastern tip opposite Ma Wan Island 馬灣. Further east is Hong Kong Island, its northern shore facing Hong Kong Harbor (Victoria Harbor) and the peninsula of Kowloon 九龍. The Tsimshatsui 尖沙嘴/尖沙咀 area lies on the eastern side of Kowloon facing Hong Kong Bay (Kowloon Bay 九龍灣).

Figure 1.

The lower Pearl River delta (map by Yee Lam Wan).

The Qing rulers applied the relational concepts of “inner” 內 and “outer” 外 to hierarchize and administer the regions on the empire’s sea frontier stretching from Guangdong to the northeast (Murray, 1987: 20–22; Wang, 2014: 99–105; Po, 2018: 62–77). This inner-outer dissection, as Wensheng Wang succinctly describes it, “functioned primarily to set limits on the reach and responsibilities of the state and to regulate government operations across the fluid, dangerous ocean space.” Geopolitically speaking, the outer waters can be divided into two: the faraway blue ocean, lacking any effective state control, and the coastal waters, islands, and seashores within Qing naval jurisdiction but beyond the reach of local administration, customs, forts, and military garrisons (Wang, 2014: 102). In the lower Pearl River estuary, Lintin Island, the Tongkoo-Sawchow isles, and the Capsingmoon channel belonged to the second type of the outer-water areas in the 1830s.⁴ As Lintin lay on the edge of Xiangshan 香山 and Xin’an 新安 districts, officials in either district could blame the other when trouble arose (Van Dyke, 2010: 63). Similarly, Tongkoo and Sawchow were outlying islands on the western border of Xin’an where the Guangdong administration neither established outposts nor practiced the baojia 保甲, a subdistrict-level household registration apparatus-cum-self-surveillance system (Hsiao, 1960: 43–83). Adjacent to Capsingmoon, the insular military station 汛 and the maritime customs branch on Ma Wan Island traceable to the early Qing had probably been deserted by the mid-1830s (Guangzhou Prefectural Gazetteer, 1879: juan 8, 18–19; Bard, 1993: 6; Xiao, 1994: 135; Hayes, 1993: 155–56).

The official division of the maritime space, however, mattered little to the lower-delta Chinese people, who often traversed the artificial demarcations for their own livelihood (Wang, 2014: 104). Tongkoo and Sawchow were unsettled islands frequented by migratory fishers. On one of the Sawchow islets a temple was built in the 1840s dedicated to Tin Hau 天后, one of the most popular deities in maritime South China. The worshippers were mainly fishers from the opposite mainland areas and Lantao (Schofield, 1969: 66; Antiquities and Monuments Office, n.d., “Historical Appraisal”; Antiquities and Monuments Office, n.d., “Historical Building Appraisal”; Watson, 1985). In the lower delta, people fished, dried and sold their catch, and anchored and repaired their watercraft by traveling between harbors, islands, and shores across the administratively classified inner- and outer-water regions. Their patterns of activities depended on ecological and economic factors such as water depth, distance from shore, monsoons, and the distribution of fish.

Foreigners taking the Pearl River entrance called the first archipelago they often encountered the Ladrones, the Portuguese name for bandits or pirates. In late imperial South China, petty piracy continued unabated as a supplementary job for fishers, sailors, and other poor folk (Antony, 1993). In the lower estuary, the omnipresence of piracy was reflected in the dispersion of walled fortresses and garrisons on the region’s islands and seashores dating back to early Qing or even Ming times. A bay north of Lantao Island harbored a pirate fleet in 1809 during the rise of pirate confederations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Xiao, 1982; Xin’an District Gazetteer, 1974 [1819]: 59). Like fishing, piracy transcended the official categorization of the maritime space. Piracy and its protection networks spread along the coast from Shandong to Vietnam across the dichotomized inner- and outer-water areas (Zhang Zhongxun, 1986: 167). Also like fishery, occasional piracy “followed definite seasonal patterns according to the rhythms of monsoons and trade” (Antony, 1993: 83).

Dian Murray has characterized the South China coast as “a maritime frontier where sedentary settlement patterns gradually yielded to those of maritime nomadism” (Murray, 1987: 14). This linear development does not neatly apply to the lower Pearl River delta, where marine and farming lives coexisted or were mixed. Before British rule, Hong Kong Island was home to a few hamlets and larger coastal villages that served as market towns and home ports for boat dwellers and visiting watercraft. Their inhabitants were mostly farmers and fishers living on local fields and coastal waters (Hayes, 2003: 5, 12). On the eastern shore of Kowloon Peninsula, a village took root at Tsimshatsui not later than the early nineteenth century. Given Tsimshatsui’s proximity to the sea and scarcity of flatland, many villagers supplemented their earnings with fishing. They rented land from the Deng lineage, the largest landowner in the Hong Kong region before 1841. Often traceable to the aftermath of the coastal depopulation imposed by the early Qing state in the mid-seventeenth century, the rural settlements in the lower delta were home to many inhabitants who lived a settled life similar to that of inland villagers (Xin’an District Gazetteer, 1974 [1819]: 93; Bird and Cleverly, 1863–1864; Hayes, 1983; Hayes, 2003: 22–27; Zhang, 2003; Xiao, 1986). Their farming lives contrasted sharply with those of the mobile seafarers even though both lived in the same littoral world on the southern periphery of the Qing Empire.

The Topography of Chinese Cordiality

In addition to Chinese fishers, pirates, and farmers, Euro-Americans going to China by sea were active in the lower Pearl River estuary in the late imperial era. Lintin, Tongkoo-Sawchow, Capsingmoon, Hong Kong Harbor, and many other islets, inlets, and roadsteads across the lower delta share a long history of harboring foreigners and their vessels. Three decades before settling in Macau, the Portuguese founded trading and military bases and resisted the Ming forces at anchorages around the islands of Lantao and Sawchow in the late 1510s and early 1520s (Chang, 1933: 32–60; Lin, 1985; Zhang Zengxin, 1986). In the following centuries, the lower embouchure had recurrently lodged incoming foreign diplomats and their ships. In 1816, the ships of the British embassy led by Lord Amherst stopped by and watered on the southwestern shore of Hong Kong Island. As the British chief superintendent of trade in China in 1835–1836, George Robinson once resided in Lintin, where he managed British trading affairs. Commercially, foreign merchantmen often sojourned in the lower-delta waters before or after their trade in Guangzhou or Macau. In the early nineteenth century, foreign ships engaged in clandestine trade concentrated at several regular “outer anchorages,” as they were known, particularly in times of gale and Sino-foreign conflict. In 1821, the Guangdong authorities stopped the British trade after some Lintin islanders were killed or wounded in a scuffle involving a British frigate. The British merchant fleet then withdrew from Huangpu 黃埔 (Whampoa), their only legal port, and sought refuge in Tongkoo Bay (Sayer, 1937: 23–24; Morse, 1910: 105–6, 154; FHA, 1992: 1.34–35; Le Pichon, 2006: 85; Bernard, 1844: 220).

The Qing administrative-military fissures across the outer-water sections of the lower delta encouraged the emergence of foreign ships at the outer anchorages. In theory, the Qing’s “outer-water forces” 外洋水師 patrolled their demarcated jurisdiction periodically and were responsible for crimes committed in the localities; in practice, the Guangdong officials permitted foreign armed vessels convoying merchantmen to remain in the outer waters. Guan Tianpei 關天培, Guangdong naval commander-in-chief during the Opium War, even conceded that the outer waters had “long been places where ships of war and merchantmen from different countries anchored” and so they were not to be expelled (FHA, 1992: 1.36–37, 2.97; Guangdong haifang huilan, 2009 [1838]: 148–64, 680–98; National Archives, January 8, 1841, FO 682/1974/4). Lintin rapidly developed into a trafficking center in the 1820s and 1830s, whereas opium clippers, hulks storing opium, and other foreign smuggling ships increasingly visited Capsingmoon, Tongkoo Bay, and Hong Kong Harbor in the early nineteenth century (Van Dyke, 2010; Murakami, 2016).

Long before 1839, trading with and working for foreigners was part and parcel of the socioeconomic fabric of the lower Pearl River estuary and the entire delta region at large. The Chinese had conducted business with Portuguese merchants since they first arrived in the early sixteenth century. After decades of maritime disorder and the Qing’s rescinding of the “sea ban” 海禁 in the 1680s, the European trade with Guangzhou as the nexus was firmly established in the late seventeenth century (Zhao, 2013). Under the Canton system (1757–1842), Chinese hong (trading house) merchants, pilots, compradors, and linguists as well as their families, agents, business partners, and servants relied on serving the foreign communities and their vessels in Guangzhou, Huangpu, and Macau. Compradors procured provisions for foreigners from various suppliers—hence any interruption of foreign trade would set off a chain reaction affecting numerous local people. Although the Canton system restricted social interaction between Chinese urbanites and foreigners to the latter’s residence-warehouse quarters known as “factories,” for most of the time before the mid-1830s foreign traders were generally satisfied with the system, which the Qing authorities sanctioned or at least tolerated (Van Dyke, 2005; Cheng, 2010; Lampe, 2014: 120–21; Carroll, 2010).

Beyond the Canton system, many Chinese served foreign visitors along the Pearl River and its branches. According to the 1830 edition of Encyclopedia Americana, “Nearly a league from Canton is the boat-town [original emphasis], which consists of about 40,000 barks, of various kinds, arranged close to each other in regular rows, with passages between them, to allow other vessels to pass” (Chinese Repository, September 1832: 1.164–65). Many of the water dwellers attended passersby for a living and maintained a close relationship with their customers and regular visitors. These people worked on towing and buoy boats that assisted navigation; “chop boats” transporting cargo between Huangpu and Guangzhou; boats selling liquor and other provisions; “lob-lob” boats that attended foreign sailors seeking sex; and sampans that catered to other needs of the foreign voyagers. The local authorities usually turned a blind eye to or exacted a fee on private dealings with foreigners along the river (Downing, 1838; Van Dyke, 2005; Van Dyke, 2011).

While the Qing authorities prohibited all unauthorized transactions with foreigners, foreign trade in China was impossible to maintain without secret Chinese-foreign contacts. Under the Canton system, pilots often provisioned small merchantmen in private whereas many ship compradors smuggled opium (Van Dyke, 2005: 38, 65). The Qing prohibition against unsanctioned dealings with foreigners was even weaker in the lower delta. Guangdong officials memorialized in 1800 that next to where foreign vessels berthed in Lintin, some Chinese erected mat stalls selling supplies to foreigners without official permission (Lu, 1834). Given the mixture of seafaring and farming lives in the lower-delta region, the local private dealers included both mobile mariners and sedentary cultivators. An American missionary stopping by Lintin in 1830 described the island as “the resort and habitation of fishermen, and the possession of a few families, who cultivate the ground, and supply the [foreign] shipping with provisions” (Abeel, 1834: 47). In the early nineteenth century, a huge number of Chinese people from various backgrounds had played various roles in the opium trade networks that centered on the lower delta and reached other regions and provinces, maritime and inland alike (Murakami, 2016: 62–143; Thilly, 2017). Each year from the 1780s to the 1830s, up to hundreds of Chinese even worked on foreign vessels that called at Lintin and Macau (Van Dyke, 2018).

The Chinese did not necessarily serve foreigners on a regular or long-term basis. Foreign ships often suddenly arrived at a particular spot and requested services. Though they often encountered pirates in the Pearl River mouth, foreign travelers reported the courtesy of local inhabitants and their readiness to help. Henry Parish, an army officer in the British Macartney embassy in 1793, recorded that at a western point of Ma Wa Island, the “inhabitants who were fishermen were civil” (Cranmer-Byng and Shepherd, 1964: 110). An 1806 English guide to navigation on the South China coast said of Hong Kong Island: “You will be supplied here with almost every kind of refreshment; especially fish, hogs, beef, and poultry. We found the Inhabitants very civil” (Hayes, 2003: 16). When foreign ships unexpectedly appeared in a harbor, Chinese fishing craft and bumboats often assembled and temporary bazaars emerged within a short time to cater to the foreigners (Anderson, 1795: 75; Abeel, 1834: 116–17).

Chinese accommodation of foreigners in the Pearl River delta and Chinese piracy in South China in the late imperial era resembled each other in a number of ways. Both corresponded to the cycle of the foreign maritime trade. As in the case of piracy, some Chinese worked for foreigners full-time whereas many had other jobs but turned to serving foreigners when the chance arrived. The ad hoc formation of a pirate group when a target appeared is comparable to the sudden gathering of provisioners or opium dealers when a foreign ship unpredictably arrived. Also like South China pirates, the lower-estuary dealers and servants for foreigners often traveled across bays, island fringes, and shores regardless of the inner-outer boundary of the maritime regions.

Yet, while piracy was entirely illegal within the Qing state, accommodating foreigners was not. Granting help to the yi from afar constituted an official pacification measure, and the Guangdong authorities manipulated the strictly controlled accommodation of foreigners under the Canton system in order to “control the yi” 制夷 in contentious times. In 1808 Wu Xiongguang 吳熊光, Guangdong-Guangxi governor-general, embargoed Britain in response to its aggression toward Macau. He ordered all the Chinese servants of the British in the Guangzhou factories to quit and stopped supplying the British soldiers and cargo ships in Macau and Huangpu. The British gave in. William Drury, who led the Macau expedition of 1808, sent sampans into the river entrance to seize food from the factories, which provoked a Qing military reaction. Drury finally conceded partly due to the vulnerability of the British under the Canton system (Wakeman, 2004: 31–33).

Accommodating Foreigners during the Hostilities: Chinese Assemblages in the Qing-British Borderland

To rid China of opium, Lin Zexu “controlled the yi” by taking a leaf from the playbook of his Guangdong predecessors. On March 24, 1839, two weeks after arriving in Guangzhou, he incarcerated all foreign merchants in the suburban factories, withdrew their Chinese servants, and restricted their provisions, thereby forcing them to surrender their opium. When Charles Elliot, British chief superintendent of trade after Robinson, failed to surrender the foreign sailors involved in the murder of a villager at Tsimshatsui in July 1839, in August Commissioner Lin banned supplies to the British and ordered their compradors and servants in Macau to withdraw. Lin clearly stated in his memorial that he followed the approach of Wu Xiongguang in the Drury affair of 1808 (Chang, 1964: 141–60, 196–99; Editing Committee, 2002: 3.184).

Before the arrival of Commissioner Lin, Guangdong’s increasing suppression of the maritime opium traffic had already propelled foreign opium vessels to retreat from Lintin to other anchorages in the lower estuary in early 1839 (Deng, 1839a; Deng, 1839b; FHA, 1992: 1.496). During the hostilities, the foreign merchants countered Lin’s forceful measures also by following their predecessors’ footsteps: they evacuated with their vessels to the outer anchorages in the lower Pearl River estuary. On March 22, 1839, two days before Lin’s detention order, Elliot called on “all ships of H. M. subjects” to “proceed forthwith to Hong Kong.” In response to this, the majority of the British merchantmen anchored opposite Tsimshatsui in Hong Kong Bay. Including both British and non-British vessels, the merchant fleet at the Tsimshatsui anchorage was later joined by the British who resisted Lin’s coercion and fled Guangzhou in May 1839 as well as Macau from August 1839 (Canton Press, March 23, March 30, and August 24, 1839; Canton Register, August 27, 1839; FHA, 1992: 1.669–72).

The flotilla did not remain at one anchorage. In mid-November 1839, most of the vessels proceeded westward from Hong Kong Bay to Tongkoo Bay. (Some opium-laden vessels loitered at or returned to Tsimshatsui in late 1839 and early 1840.) In April 1840, the merchant ships berthing in Tongkoo Bay shifted to the Capsingmoon strait (Editing Committee, 2002: 4.413; Canton Press, November 30, 1839, May 30, 1840; FHA, 1992: 1.672, 1.680, 2.108–9, 2.129). Joined in June by the British expedition’s detachment stationed in the mouth of the Pearl River, the foreign shipping returned to the Tongkoo-Sawchow anchorage in October 1840. They had been based in Tongkoo Bay until April 1841, when the foreign floating community and the expedition began moving to the recently occupied island of Hong Kong. The merchantmen docked mainly in Hong Kong Harbor (Cree, 1841: 19; Canton Register, April 13, 1841).⁵

While the foreigners had required supplies from the Chinese in the lower delta for a long time, their need during the sojourns in 1839–1841 was urgent and unparalleled in scale because they and their vessels in the region were unprecedentedly numerous. In October 1839, Hong Kong Bay sheltered more than eighty vessels (mostly British), which accommodated, Elliot claimed, “several thousands of men of the English Nation.” The fleet was home to the foreign community members quitting Guangzhou and Macau (diplomats, businessmen, and commercial staff), sailors (British and non-British alike), and their families (Canton Press, October 26, 1839; Hoe and Roebuck, 1999: 166; National Archives, September 4, 1839, FO 17/32, 224). In July 1840, the British expedition in the mouth of the Pearl River comprised four warships and several hundred soldiers. The majority of the expedition had been concentrated in the lower delta since November 1840, and virtually all the British forces in China were assembled in the river entrance in late February–August 1841. Although some foreigners sold luxury items at the lower-delta anchorages during the hostilities and supplies for the expedition were prepared in India, Australia, and Singapore (Canton Press, July 18, 1840; National Archives, March 22, 1840, PRO 30/12/36/5, 77), the Qing criminalization of provisioning the British and the extraordinarily large congregations of foreigners combined to create at the outer anchorages a strong demand for provisions, especially fresh food.

The foreign merchants needed not only food, but also Chinese assistance to maintain their opium trade in the lower Pearl River estuary during Lin Zexu’s anti-opium campaign. By 1838, opium smuggling in the lower delta had been conducted under the “Lintin system,” which, with Lintin as the nexus of the trade in sea-imported opium, comprised foreign storage ships at the lower-delta anchorages, Chinese and foreign merchants in Guangzhou, boaters who distributed opium, and the Qing officials and cruisers that maintained the traffic (Thilly, 2017: 163; Van Dyke, 2010). The stringent anti-opium operations in Guangdong starting in 1836, however, diminished the foreign-Chinese opium trade within the lower delta, and from then on many Chinese sailed in small groups to purchase opium from foreign vessels (Murakami, 2016: 116; Deng, 1839a; Deng, 1839b). During the Opium War, the foreign opium traffic by clippers able to sail upwind burgeoned in many coastal areas beyond the lower estuary (Lubbock, 1967 [1933]: 167–69, 179–89). Yet, within the lower delta, the opium trade seemed to halt in April–May 1839, when Lin confiscated twenty thousand chests of opium. Afterward, “the yi,” according to Lin, “privately send boats loaded with opium to sneak into isolated harbors, each bearing a wooden placard that states the price of an opium ball in silver dollars. [. . .] With their bargain prices, they lure people into buying [opium]” (FHA, 1992: 1.671).

How did the Chinese in the Pearl River delta respond to the foreigners’ pressing demand for provisioners and the presence of foreign opium traffickers at the outer anchorages during the hostilities? Many of them erected temporary sheds on shore to provision the foreign transients. In early August 1839, Lin Zexu complained that “several shops for the sale of rice, wine, and miscellaneous articles” were opened on the seashore of Tsimshatsui to cater to the foreign shipping (Canton Press, August 17, 1839). Later, when the foreigners anchored by Tongkoo and Sawchow between November 1839 and April 1840, many Chinese set up provisional food stalls along the shore and conducted business on the beach where foreigners boated to buy their foodstuffs. The ad hoc shacks also served as transitory lodging (FHA, 1992: 2.46–49). When the merchant vessels returned with the British forces from Capsingmoon to Tongkoo Bay in October 1840, the beach bazaar had grown into a huge cluster of houses “formed of bamboo poles and mats” (Bingham, 1843: 408–9).

Alongside the littoral sheds, Chinese craft of various sizes and sorts assembled next to and amid the foreign fleet. In early August 1839 “daily upwards of 100 comprador’s boats” 辦艇, small craft laden with supplies, were reportedly active in Hong Kong Bay (Canton Press, August 17, 1839; Deng, Qi, and Wenxiang, 1837). Elliot noted in January 1840 “a native population amounting to at least 2000 souls” in Tongkoo Bay who lived afloat and supplied the ships (National Archives, January 19, 1840, PRO 30/12/36/5, 45). The Qing’s attacks on the Tongkoo-Sawchow anchorage in February 1840 resulted in the burning of a big seagoing vessel, a cabin-craft 艚船, a big comprador’s craft, a big rowing craft, three “shrimp-net comprador’s boats” 蝦苟辦艇, one craft selling assorted items, and fifteen “flat boats” 扁艇 selling fruit and cakes (FHA, 1992: 2.28). While many Chinese craft spread over the anchorages, many others assembled to become what a British naval officer nicknamed “a musquito fleet,” a “floating town” where boats of various purposes anchored in rows (Bingham, 1843: 410; Canton Press, January 9, 1841).

Among those afloat were also the Chinese traders who procured opium in small quantities at the outer anchorages, thereby contributing to sustain the foreign opium trade within the lower delta during the hostilities. While some of them acted as a group (see below), others ventured individually. For example, Deng Sandi 鄧三娣 navigated his own small boat to the Tsimshatsui anchorage three times and purchased in total 61 jin 斤 of opium (roughly equivalent to twenty opium balls) in mid-1839, amid Lin Zexu’s strict anti-opium campaign. Some foreigners even allowed the Chinese who had traded with them once or twice to procure opium on credit. Satisfying the foreigners’ want for both food supplies and opium buyers, many Chinese bartered provisions for opium (FHA, 1992: 1.728, 2.108, 2.129).

The expansive beachfront bazaars and assemblages of boats emerging in the lower delta were successful in accommodating the foreign floating community and the British forces during the hostilities. Alexander Johnston, a senior administrator of British-occupied Hong Kong, granted allotments on the island in 1841 to Chinese “who have on various occasions supplied the Fleet when it could not otherwise obtain provisions” (National Archives, January 8, 1842, CO 129/10, 216). The provisions available were not only abundant but also wide-ranging. They included flour, cattle, chickens, geese, ducks, fish, fruit and vegetables of all sorts, and pastries, biscuits, and wine. This indicates that Lin Zexu and his Guangdong colleagues failed to control the yi and expel foreign opium merchants by cutting off their supplies.

Though they flourished at the outer anchorages, the Chinese living alongside the foreign shipping in the lower Pearl River delta in 1839–1841 were not free from threats from the local authorities, who endeavored to sabotage their illicit dealings with foreigners. The Tsimshatsui anchorage lay within the inner waters of Guangdong’s sea frontier, which were usually subject to a tighter military grip than the outer waters. In late August and early September 1839, some local forces were stationed at various entrances to Hong Kong Bay and stopped the passage of boats carrying provisions. At the same time, the commander of the brigade that patrolled the Tsimshatsui waters led three “large men of war junks” to eradicate local supplies. They anchored in line at the head of the detachment and protected the battery at the port of Jiulongshan 九龍山 in the northwest corner of Hong Kong Bay. After their clash at Jiulongshan with a British detachment procuring local provisions in early September, Qing defenses around Hong Kong Bay were strengthened (Canton Press, September 21, 1839; Guangdong haifang huilan, 2009 [1838]: 151–52; Guangdong Gazetteer, 1822: juan 175, 697–98; FHA, 1992: 1.679, 1.727, 1.755, 2.71; National Archives, September 5, 1839, FO 17/32, 212–13). Guangdong’s officials, moreover, stretched their military reach into the lower estuary’s outer waters. Civil and military officers led coastal soldiers and paramilitary “water braves” 水勇 in a series of assaults against both the foreign shipping and their Chinese dealers at Tongkoo-Sawchow and Capsingmoon and their environs. In the raid against Capsingmoon in June 1840, eleven Chinese supply craft were set ablaze, nine mat sheds were burnt down, and thirteen dealers were captured (FHA, 1992: 2.46–49, 2.129–30; Canton Press, December 14, 1839, June 13, 1840; National Archives, June 9, 1840, FO 17/40, 42–43).

Despite the Qing menace, the Chinese littoral assemblages prospered. This was partly due to the protection provided by the vessels of foreign merchants and the British navy. When Qing-British relations worsened in early September 1839, the Volage, the only British warship then in China, guarded an entrance of Hong Kong Harbor against hostile “war junks” and fire rafts (National Archives, September 5, 1839, FO 17/32, 271a). At the same time, all the other foreign vessels were “well armed & ready to repel any enemy,” a British aboard one of them confidently wrote (Kerr, 1996: 166). Before the expedition arrived in mid-1840, two skirmishes in the mouth of the Pearl River, one at Jiulongshan and the other at Chuanbi 穿鼻, had already weakened the Guangdong forces. Arriving in mid-1840, the expedition established a wartime regime in the lower estuary that overlapped with Guangdong’s sea frontier, thereby further enlarging the Qing administrative-military fissures in the region where Chinese assistance to foreigners flourished. In June 1840 the British announced a blockade of the Pearl River mouth, under which watercraft associated with the Qing authorities were to be detained at Capsingmoon. In August, British forces disabled eight “warjunks” in a battle at Guanzha 關閘 on the northern edge of Macau. In late 1840, some of the British military were stationed on one of the Sawchow islets, which was fortified and converted into a naval store (Canton Press, August 8, August 22, and December 5, 1840; Bingham, 1843: 383–84; Ellis, 1866: 142; National Archives, December 7, 1840, FO 17/50, 70–71; MacKenzie, 1842: 4–5). In early January 1841, the expedition defeated the Qing forces at Shajiao 沙角 and Dajiao 大角 and conquered the two forts there. In late January, they seized Hong Kong Island, which became permanently detached from the Qing Empire and attracted numerous delta people (Luk, 2016: 411–14; also see the quotations in the first paragraph of the present article). Preoccupied with the expedition, the Guangdong authorities launched no more attacks against the outer anchorages after mid-1840.

Nevertheless, the foreign shipping offered only limited shelter for their Chinese traders and servants at the lower-delta anchorages. Comprising three warships at the most and none at the least, the British squadron in the region before mid-1840 was too thin to safeguard the foreign floating population, not to mention neighboring Chinese communities. To compensate for the inadequate foreign protection, Chinese travelers to the outer anchorages took full advantage of the lower delta’s geopolitical setting. The region was dotted with what the Qing officials called “secluded harbors” 僻港, ports beyond Qing civil, customs, and military control outside the heavily guarded river entrance of Humen 虎門 (the Bogue). Under Qing law, officers and soldiers were exempt from the responsibility of supervising the movement of civilian vessels that departed from secluded harbors. From these administrative-military fissures, many Chinese people sailed to join the foreign shipping. Nearly a year and a half into his anti-opium campaign, Lin Zexu bemoaned in July 1840 that “those going seaward to buy opium venture back and forth by following the tide and taking secluded harbors” (Guan, 1836: 88; FHA, 1992: 1.728, 2.108, 2.111, 2.178).

The local opium trade continued in the lower-delta region during Lin’s tenure in Guangdong thanks to the Chinese dealers who traveled by watercraft across the rural areas, waters, and shores of the coast and islands to procure opium from foreign vessels in small amounts and then redistribute it, traversing the areas artificially divided as inner- and outer-water regions. In early September 1839, Peng Yakai 彭亞開, a fisher, became a partner in the opium trade with Ou Yazhu 歐亞豬 and Liang Yabao 梁亞寶. Peng and Ou sailed a craft (probably Peng’s) to Tsimshatsui, bought six opium balls from a foreign vessel, and handed the goods to Liang for resale at a mainland bazaar called Xinxu 新墟. In another example, in June 1839 Chen Yacheng 陳亞成, also a fisher, and two others shipped provisions to the Tsimshatsui anchorage and bartered them with a foreign vessel for half a jin of opium. They carried it to an island called Changzhou 長洲 and sold their goods to Lan Yahui 藍亞惠, Li Yasi 李亞四, and Lu Yaquan 盧亞全.⁶ Lan and Li then retailed their small quantities of opium (FHA, 1992: 1.727–28, 1.755–56).

Unlike Tsimshatsui, where there was a rural settlement, no settlers resided on the uncultivated islets of Tongkoo and Sawchow. An archaeological report describes Tongkoo as “a small and solitary island without continual fresh water supplies” and its natural environment as “not ideal for prolonged settlement” (Au, 1994). The numerous foreign ships could still enjoy abundant provisions at the Tongkoo-Sawchow anchorage in 1839–1841 because of the cross-shore ventures of Chinese provisioners. In early 1840, Elliot wrote that the Chinese food dealers in Tongkoo Bay procured their goods from “the people of the neighboring villages,” who sold “their supplies with the utmost readiness” (National Archives, January 19, 1840, PRO 30/12/36/5, 45). The spot on the mainland shore facing Tongkoo-Sawchow is Longgutan 龍鼓灘 (see Figure 1), where several villages existed in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Although the history of the “shoreline-crossing” food dealers remains obscure, Qing trial records provide clues about how they maintained the supply network that connected Tongkoo Bay to its opposite area on the mainland.⁷ Lin Yachang 林亞長 and Chen Yafu 陳亞復, peddlers in Xin’an district, partnered to provision the foreign shipping in Tongkoo Bay in mid-February 1840. They procured food of various kinds in the Longgutan area or its neighborhood, crossed the strait by a fishing craft, and hawked their goods on a beach at Tongkoo. Lin and Chen transported the earnings from Tongkoo to other places, and they erected a mat shed on the beach as a residence. They had conducted this business for at least two weeks before being seized, which suggests that they had sailed back and forth between the Tongkoo-Sawchow anchorage and the opposite coast many times (FHA, 1992: 2.47–48).

The high mobility of the “migratory bipeds,” as the naval officer John Bingham (1843: 409) called the Chinese active in the lower-estuary anchorages, was a serious headache for Guangdong’s officials. The “comprador’s boats,” they complained, went to the berths “from every creek and inlet” and their movements were unpredictable (Canton Press, August 17, 1839). The “migratory bipeds” were so flexible that they followed the foreign ships en masse when the latter switched from one anchorage to another. Bingham was highly impressed with the adaptability of the “bamboo town” that was relocated with the foreign floating community from Capsingmoon to Tongkoo Bay in October 1840:

it was strange to see with what rapidity it presently sprang up on a sandy barren spot, four-and twenty hours sufficing for the operation. [. . .] No nails were required, no carpenter wanted, and the whole being bound together with thin strips of bamboo. (Bingham, 1843: 408–9)

In January 1841 the bamboo settlement migrated again, this time following the British force that took over Hong Kong. The “floating town” also migrated from Tongkoo to Hong Kong Island in 1841 (Canton Register, February 16, 1841; National Archives, June 24, 1841, CO 129/12, 305–6).

Without adequate foreign protection, the lower-delta Chinese people relied on themselves in their encounters with Qing local agents. When the principal part of the British squadron had navigated upriver for the Shajiao-Dajiao battle in early January 1841, some Qing soldiers in a boat were spying on the “musquito fleet” in Tongkoo Bay. “One of these soldiers in an unguarded moment [. . .] ‘let the cat out of the bag.’” After a scuffle that resulted in the loss of several lives, the mob grabbed several soldiers and tortured them.

The chief they boiled alive in oil, and the five others, bound hand and foot, were chained in a boat which had previously been filled with combustibles of every description, and drifting out to sea with the tide, suffered a fearful and awful death. (McPherson, 1843: 63)

The Tongkoo incident interested several contemporary Europeans. Bingham considered it a “horrid vengeance” against the “miserable spies” (Bingham, 1843: 409). Edmund Moller, editor of the Canton Press, described it as an “atrocious cruelty” of “the most desperate characters of the floating community at Tungkoo” and abhorred their “horrid and wanton cruelty and revenge.”

We suppose the perpetrators of this foul deed think themselves safe from the reach of the law, and this act of cruelty committed by people generally mild and humane, is but another proof of the many history records, of how prone men are to relapse into barbarity whenever the wholesome restrictions society has imposed for its protection, are moved, and the fear of punishment no longer restrains them from evil. (Canton Press, January 9, 1841)

Moller aptly attributed the violence of the “outlaws” to the virtual absence of state control. On the one hand, while the Qing local authorities sought to tighten control over the lower delta, their sway over the outer anchorages was actually precarious. On the other hand, although the British forces, along with the foreign merchant fleet, attempted to protect their Chinese helpers, they failed to gain control over the entire lower-estuary region. Between the Qing Empire (its rule over the sea frontier weakened but far from collapsing) and the British Empire (its naval power rising but far from dominating), the lower-delta Chinese organized and armed themselves against the menace of Qing coercion. Analogous to James Scott’s argument that many lowland people migrated to the Southeast Asian massifs to evade state control, during the Opium War many Chinese moved to and flourished in the lower estuary, a Qing-British littoral borderland where a dominant military power was absent. Their anti-state violence was, to borrow Scott’s term, an “art of not being intimidated” (Scott, 2009). Mobility and violence, in short, were their means of surviving in the watery world of late imperial South China.

Motivations and Organization

Rather than a critical departure from the past, the Chinese accommodation of foreigners in the lower Pearl River delta in 1839–1841 can be regarded as, at different levels, a deepening and extension of practices predating 1839. In terms of Qing officials’ mindset, the Guangzhou trade-centered assistance for foreigners “inside” the river entrance of Humen extended to the anchorages “outside.” In January 1841, the Canton Press (January 9, 1841) vividly described the thriving “floating community” alongside the littoral “bamboo settlement” at Tongkoo that catered to the various needs of foreign sojourners. This “floating town” in Tongkoo Bay during the hostilities resembled a “regular town on the water” along the Pearl River in peacetime (Downing, 1838: 1.247):

Since the English shipping have made Tungkoo their anchorage, a number, daily encreasing, of all kinds of Chinese tradesmen carrying on their business in boats, have gathered there, until at the present time there are so many, that they present the appearance of a floating town, the boats being moored in regular lines, forming streets, each boat being a shop in which most necessaries and even some luxuries of life are offered for sale. In some of the boats their occupants are carpenters, in others blacksmiths; here you see a tailor’s shop, there a disciple of St Crispin plies his awl; on one side visitors are eased of their loose cash by the allurements of a gambling table, and on the other the anti-temperance men may find ample opportunity of satisfying their propensity in a ginshop. [. . .] In short, that part of Tung-koo bay presents exactly the same sort of business as is found in maritime towns near the harbour.

Many of the Chinese dealers at the lower-delta berths in 1839–1841 had earlier been in frequent contact with foreigners. Prior to their opium enterprise at Tsimshatsui, Peng Yakai had often moored his fishing craft next to foreign ships and Deng Sandi had conveyed passengers and cargo along the Pearl River. Both knew pidgin English, the lingua franca in Chinese-foreign communication. Peng had already befriended some foreigners before he went into business; he heard from one on board a foreign vessel that opium could be procured (FHA, 1992: 1.727–28; Van Dyke, 2005: 77). Some people simply continued their pre-1839 dealings with foreigners during the hostilities. Huang Tianhua 黃添化, for example, became a servant for a Dutchman in Guangzhou in 1823 and worked in the factories for seven years. He began provisioning a British vessel at a lower-delta berth in 1834 thanks to a referral by Huang Cheye 黃車葉, a private comprador of a “country ship” 港腳船 in the China-India trade. Tianhua rented a small boat, employed He Yaniu 何亞牛 and Huang Yaqing 黃亞清 as sailors, procured supplies, and shipped them to Cheye, who then sold the goods to the vessel he served. In 1835 and 1838, Cheye recommended Tianhua to an American vessel and a country ship, respectively, to work as a private comprador. Taking advantage of his pidgin English, Tianhua intermediated between a foreign opium craft and Chinese buyers. His service for lower-delta foreign traders straddled Lin Zexu’s arrival in Guangzhou. Before he was arrested in June 1839, Tianhua had been a private comprador at Tsimshatsui for the Carnatic of Jardine, Matheson & Co., the leading British trading firm in China, helped again by Yaniu and Yaqing in provisioning the ship (Chinese Repository, June 1839: 112; FHA, 1992: 1.726–27).

Although Guangdong’s officials condemned “coastal villains” 沿海奸徒 for accommodating the “outer yi,” they recognized that clandestine trade with foreigners was widespread because it was profitable. “The greater the profits, the more trivial the value of life becomes,” they remarked about those who risked trading food and opium with the yi (FHA, 1992: 2.27). The hostilities, as far as the lower delta is concerned, enabled Chinese opium dealers to make a quick profit. In mid-1839, Deng Sandi heard that the sales from opium vessels at Tsimshatsui were sluggish and opium prices had plummeted. In August he bought 12 jin of opium from a foreign ship at $64 (Spanish or Mexican dollars), that is, about $5.3 per jin. He profited handsomely by reselling the opium for $120, that is, $10 per jin (FHA, 1992: 1.728).

The vast majority of the Chinese at the lower-delta assemblages, as indicated in Qing trial records, were natives of Xin’an, the district that enclosed Hong Kong Harbor, Tongkoo-Sawchow, Capsingmoon, and adjacent districts (Xiangshan, Panyu 番禺, Dongguan 東莞, and Guishan 歸善). Before 1839, these people worked in multifarious low-income jobs. Some were fishers, while others were hired laborers, peddlers on land or river, boaters transporting passengers and goods, sailors on fishing craft or official cruisers, compradors, and servants in the service of foreigners. They performed land-based, aquatic, or amphibious jobs on a full-time, part-time, or temporary basis and often shifted between occupations to make ends meet. Their testimonies betrayed their desire for improving their lives by grasping whatever opportunities were created by the conflicts between the Qing and the foreigners. For example, in early 1840, Chen Shuisheng 陳水生 learned of the opportunity of supplying food to the Tongkoo Bay shipping from Huang Tianfu 黃添幅, who had already profited from trading provisions with foreigners for opium. Finding it difficult to make ends meet, Chen pleaded with Huang to introduce him to the crew of the ship Huang served. In another example, one day in June 1839 Wu Yawu 吳亞五 and Li Yawan 李亞晚 visited the boat of their friend Chen Yacheng, the aforementioned fisher, and they all complained about the difficulty of earning a living. Since some foreign vessels were berthed at Tsimshatsui, they decided to become partners and exchange provisions with the foreign ships for opium (FHA, 1992: 1.755, 2.47–48).

The essentially small scale of Chinese-foreign transactions at the lower-delta anchorages during the hostilities is a reflection of the low economic status of most of the Chinese traders. Among the Chinese opium trading groups operating in the lower estuary but crushed by Lin Zexu during his tenure in Guangdong, only one included Qing coastal forces and lineages or clans, scholar-gentry, and better-off merchants. This single group was akin to the smuggling networks under the extensive Lintin system and in coastal Fujian (FHA, 1992: 2.108–9). Only rarely did elites participate in the lower-estuary smuggling; given Lin Zexu’s pervasive anti-opium operations in the Pearl River delta, it is improbable that the wealthy and connected largely avoided arrest. The vast majority of the trafficking was in fact ad-hoc and far from well organized. It entailed only a few dealers, investments hardly exceeded several hundred dollars, and transactions involved not more than a dozen or so opium balls (or the equivalent in jin of opium). Unable to invest much, many opium traders were obliged to form partnerships with others to raise capital. The provisions trade required even less investment. Chen Yacheng, Wu Yawu, and Li Yawan, for instance, each contributed 2,500 copper coins (several dollars) only to buy poultry and fish to be sailed to Tsimshatsui (FHA, 1992: 1.755).

Without the socioeconomic capital enjoyed by the elite, the lower-delta provisioners and opium traders organized themselves based on the connections that, interestingly, also bound together pirate and bandit groups in mid-Qing South China (Antony, 2003: 82–104; Antony, 2016: 105–69). Like bandits and pirates, many of the lower-estuary dealers became partners based on friendships or acquaintanceships. As noted earlier, they sometimes asked their friends or acquaintances to recommend them to the crews of foreign vessels whom the latter had already served. Also like mid-Qing banditry and piracy, the formation of business relationships in the lower delta often followed territorial and occupational lines. For example, the Xin’an hawker Qiao Yaxian 喬亞先 traded food for opium at the Tongkoo-Sawchow anchorage with Liang Desheng 梁得勝, who peddled in the same district (FHA, 1992: 2.48). As with the transformation of a fishing craft into a pirate ship and its crew into pirates, in some cases a fishing craft and its crew became a comprador’s or smuggler’s boat and a band engaged in smuggling in the lower delta (FHA, 1992: 2.133–34). And as in the case with banditry and piracy, family connections were crucial in the formation of many lower-estuary partnerships. Deng Jingtai 鄧景泰, for instance, used his own small fishing boat—with himself, his wife, his brother, and his youngest son on board—to transport and sell opium (FHA, 1992: 1.809). Although in many cases it is unclear whether provisioners and opium dealers with the same surname were from the same family or clan, kinship certainly was not the basis for the accommodation of foreigners and the trade in opium in the lower delta in 1839–1841. The poor either did not belong to any lineage, or at best were marginal members, and thus enjoyed no lineage resources that could be advantageous to their commercial ventures. Like occasional piracy, provisioning and the opium trade were predominantly conducted by small groups.

Also like the mid-Qing pirates and bandits, those trading with or serving foreigners at the lower-delta anchorages included women. Bingham (1843: 408) noted in late 1840 that the “whole male and female population” erected the bamboo settlement at Tongkoo. The scant records on lower-estuary women point to their contributions to the provisioning and opium trade and the variety of their activities. For instance, an old woman named Yakai 亞開婆 rented her boat to Huang Tianhua, who used it to ship provisions to a foreign vessel. Qu Quanfu 屈權復 hired his own aunt, Mrs. Liang (née Deng) 梁鄧氏, to transport the opium he bought from Deng Sandi (FHA, 1992: 1.726, 1.728). One of the watercolors by the naval surgeon Edward Cree shows “two boats with about 30 Chinese girls” coming alongside his troopship in Hong Kong Harbor in an evening in April 1841 (Cree, 1841: 19). They were probably prostitutes.

In a broader context, overpopulation, scarcity of economic resources, and socioeconomic inequality drove many of the poor of Guangdong—male and female alike—to switch between legal and illegal work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During that time most Chinese pirates “were not idle vagabonds but rather working-class people who were unable to make ends meet” from their honest jobs and found waterborne banditry or other crime a necessary supplement. Violence was regarded as a normal and even legitimate way of making a living (Antony, 2003: 84; Antony, 2016: 12). Similarly, as an economic adaptive strategy in the competitive society of mid-Qing Guangdong, most of the Chinese venturing to the lower-delta anchorages in 1839–1841 during the hostilities switched from legal but unstable jobs, such as peddlers and hired laborers, to working for or trading with foreigners, both of which were then officially prohibited. Lacking the economic and social privileges (such as lineage connections) of the elites, they mobilized whatever social networks that were available to them. Their mobility both in traversing the littoral borderland to conduct business and in shifting between jobs (legal or illegal), and also their violent resistance to state intervention, characterized the fluid watery world of late imperial South China.

Rather than one reaction, there was in fact a wide range of reactions to Lin Zexu’s anti-opium campaign and the Opium War in the littoral society of the Pearl River delta. At one end was active assistance to the British expedition. For example, Wen Dongfu 温東幅, a Guangdong militia leader, was accused of working on board a British naval vessel and recruiting Chinese servants on its behalf (FHA, 1992: 5.304–5). Many coastal people purveyed provisions to and piloted the expedition vessels (Carroll, 2005: 23). At the other end, fishers, sailors, and other water dwellers joined the Qing’s water braves against the foreign opium merchants, British forces, and Chinese “coastal villains.” The Guangdong authorities also recruited armed Chinese watercraft, many of which were probably pirate ships (FHA, 1992: 4.304–5; Ding, 2010). Between the two ends were enterprising Chinese people who used the conflict to advance their own interests by helping both or neither side. In December 1839 Du Yadi 杜亞娣, who had the same native place as the aforementioned Deng Jingtai, reported Deng’s movements to the Qing military officer Zeng Ri’en 曾日恩, who then caught Deng and his family. Later Zeng changed his mind and extorted money from Deng Jingtai in return for his release. Submitting to Zeng’s blackmail, Du Yadi was rewarded with two of the opium balls found on Deng’s boat (FHA, 1992: 1.809–11). In another example, many Chinese armed ships engaged in a protection racket and conducted piracy in the delta waters between the Qing and British empires during the war (Liang, 1954 [n.d.]: 26). The various responses to the hostilities can be regarded as different tactics of adjusting to the unstable political-military circumstances adopted by the ordinary people who lived in a volatile socioeconomic environment. Like most mid-Qing pirates and bandits, no cohesive political consciousness—whether anti-Qing or anti-British—united any of the Chinese parties active in the lower Pearl River delta during the Opium War.

Conclusion: Demythicizing the Accommodation of Foreigners

The Qing authorities referred to both Chinese opium traffickers and the traitorous Chinese in the British camp—despite their various backgrounds, motivations, and activities—as “Hanjian” during the hostilities.⁸ From that point on, the term “Hanjian” has become a mythicizing label. The Hanjian and “coastal villains” became scapegoats for the Qing’s failure to suppress the maritime opium traffic and defeat the British (FHA, 1992: 1.753–54; Mao, 2005: 306). Since the Opium War, officially and unofficially identifying and eliminating Hanjian persisted throughout the late Qing period into the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) and its aftermath, within China and beyond (Wakeman, 1966: 42–51; Elliott, 1990; Wang, 2012; Murakami, 2016: 144–84; Wu, 2010a; Wu, 2010b; Xia, 2018). The Chinese experience with the Japanese invasion has deepened the public’s hatred of Hanjian, a category of the worst criminals that must be eliminated to protect the Chinese state and nation. In English-language scholarship, those who assisted the British forces during the Opium War have been called “collaborators” (Munn, 2001; Carroll, 2005). As with the condemnation of Hanjian on the Chinese mainland, “collaboration” is tagged as moral failure in the West. Though emerging from different contexts, “collaborators” and “Hanjian” share the same effect of summarizing the Chinese experience of wartime assistance to foreign invaders and incorporating this experience into the larger narratives of anti-foreign nationalism and the rise of China as a nation-state in the modern period.

This article has historicized the Chinese accommodation of foreigners in the lower section of the Pearl River delta during the Opium War as a step toward demythicizing “Hanjian” and deconstructing “collaborators” in the modern China context and rescuing the people so labeled from nationalist and statist narratives. Long before 1839, living with and working for foreigners had been an inseparable part of life in the Pearl River delta, particularly its southern section where land and waters were intertwined and seafaring and farming were mixed. In 1839–1841, foreign sojourners’ need for local provisioners and opium dealers stimulated congregations of shore-crossing Chinese at the lower delta’s outer anchorages on an unprecedented scale. Their mobility and violence, fixtures in the social ecology of the late-imperial water world of South China, enabled them to thrive in the littoral borderland between the Qing and the British empires. Their congregation at the littoral assemblages represented a deepening of the longtime association of local people with foreigners across the estuary region, and was a means, even though illicit, for ordinary people to adapt to the precarious socioeconomic environment of mid-Qing Guangdong. Neither “Hanjian” nor “collaborators” as an essentializing category, and neither the anachronistic notion of nationalism nor the patriot-traitor dichotomy, can explain the historical origins of the Chinese accommodation of foreigners in the lower Pearl River delta during the Opium War. In fact, the origins can be traced back to the first arrival of the Portuguese from the sea more than three centuries earlier.

In short, challenging the nationalist-statist discourse and deemphasizing high politics in the elite world, this article brings to center stage the ordinary Chinese people in the Qing-British littoral borderland, a subject that has been overlooked due to the emphasis on the rural-urban divide in Opium War studies and on postwar treaty ports in modern China scholarship. The ordinary people on the lower Pearl River delta’s watery fringes ventured across the outer anchorages, roadsteads, inlets, and coastal villages and bazaars to accommodate maritime Euro-Americans during Lin Zexu’s anti-opium campaign and the Opium War, thereby making the British imperial endeavors in China possible.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

James Bonk, John Carroll, Henrietta Harrison, Tobie Meyer-Fong, Steven Miles, Rana Mitter, Micah Muscolino, Matthew Neufeld, Barend ter Haar, Peter Thilly, and Paul Van Dyke provided useful comments related to this study. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia, and the Institute of Modern History of the Academia Sinica. I am grateful to Mary Brazelton, Timothy Brook, Chang Chi-Ying, Loretta Kim, Leo Shin, Hans van de Ven, and other participants for their valuable questions and feedback.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Academic Participation Fund of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE 3287) and the Power and Postan Fund of the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Notes

Author Biography

Gary Chi-hung Luk is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of From a British to a Chinese Colony? Hong Kong Before and After the 1997 Handover (Institute of East Asian Studies, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 2017) and has recently published in Frontiers of History in China and Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies. He is writing a book examining the profound impact of the Opium War on the coastal and river regions in southeastern China.

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