Bill for the Use of a Body by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online Page A

to buy silks, Chinese porcelain and other things for which Europeans were willing to pay a high price. The Company’s representatives had a far from happy time there. They were not allowed to take their wives to Canton, or to mix with the Chinese or learn their language. They were forbidden to have weapons or ride in a rickshaw or go out after dark; and they had to do all their business through a corporation of Chinese merchants that was called a
Hong
. But at least they had their foot in the door and they determined to use the
Hong
for their wicked ends.
    â€˜In India the Company grew opium on a very large scale and sold it to the people there at a big profit. But it happened that in the 1830s they had a large surplus of the evil drug on their hands. In those days opium was hardly known in China, except for medicinal purposes, so the British said, “Let us encourage the Chinese to smoke it, then we will kill two birds with one stone. Wewill have made a market for our surplus stock and pay for the tea with that instead of with silver.”
    â€˜The
Hong
merchants were just as unscrupulous as the British and willingly agreed to market the drug. During the next few years thousands of chests were imported and tens of thousands of unfortunate Chinese became drug addicts. Greatly distressed by this, in 1839 the Emperor issued an edict sternly forbidding all further traffic in the drug.
    â€˜The British Government were greatly upset by this; but they soon found a way round it. The Company, as the Government’s agents, stopped importing opium into China; instead they sold it to big trading houses such as those of Mr. Matheson and Mr. Dent, who were quite willing to smuggle it in, and the
Hong
, anxious not to lose its big profits, continued to distribute it almost openly.
    â€˜This resulted in the Emperor sending a Mandarin named Lin Tse-hsu as Viceroy to Canton to put a stop to the smuggling. That caused the smugglers no uneasiness because they assumed that all that would happen was that they would have to give away a small fraction of their huge profits to the
Hong
so that it could give the new Viceroy a somewhat bigger squeeze than it had been paying the old one, and that by putting up the price of opium in a few months time they would soon get their money back.
    â€˜But things did not turn out at all like that. Viceroy Lin proved an upright man. Far from proving bribable, he threatened the merchants of the
Hong
with death if they did not surrender their stores of opium, and ordered the British merchants to disgorge theirs as well. To save themselves the Chinese sent in a thousand chests, but the British stood firm and Captain Elliot of the Royal Navy had the Union Jack run up over the trading post in Canton. Viceroy Lin retaliated by withdrawing all Chinese labour and surrounding the post with troops.
    â€˜Captain Elliot had only one sloop of eighteen gunsunder him and that was down river, so rather than risk their all being killed he told the smugglers that they must give up their opium. Furious but helpless, they handed over two million pounds’ worth of it and the honourable Lin had the satisfaction of employing five hundred coolies to mix it with salt and lime then throw it into the river.
    â€˜Trade having come to a complete standstill in Canton the disgruntled British retired to the Portuguese colony of Macao. They had hardly had time to settle in before fresh trouble arose. Some of their ships were lying in the bay here. A party of sailors came ashore, got drunk and started a fight with some of the Chinese fisherfolk, one of whom was killed. Captain Elliot punished the men severely and compensated the bereaved family. But that did not satisfy Viceroy Lin. He demanded that one of the British sailors should be handed over for execution. Captain Elliot refused, so Lin attempted to blockade Hong Kong harbour and forced an approaching supply ship to unload her cargo. For Captain Elliot that proved