Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question:

Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire1

Eric Kwan-Wai Yu
National Chiao Tung University

The uneasy Anglo-Chinese relations in the nineteenth century, cresting with two
Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860), stirred the English writer Thomas De
Quincey (1785-1859) deeply and, as James Hogg bluntly puts it, roused all the John
Bullism of his nature (Uncollected Writings 7). De Quincey first published an
article entitled The Opium and the China Question (1840) in Blackwoods Magazine,
which was followed by Canton Expedition and Convention (1841). Incidentally,
his son Horace, who had joined the British expeditionary force, died of fever near
Canton in 1842. De Quinceys bitter hatred of China and all things Chinese, in his
biographer Grevel Lindops words, was more than ever confirmed (347). In 1857,
he contributed a series of three articles on the Chinese questions to Hoggs Edinburgh
periodical Titan, which later appeared with additions as a pamphlet. Recent De
Quincey studies, influenced by colonial discourse theory, have duly attended to this
facet of De Quinceys works. John Barrells The Infection of Thomas De Quincey
(1991) devotes some 7 pages to De Quinceys writings on China and the Opium Wars,
trying to relate his private childhood traumas to the fully social guilt in a
psychopathology of British imperialism. Nigel Leasks British Romantic Writers
and the East (1994) contains a section titled Opium Wars, highlighting
simultaneously De Quinceys deep fears of the East and his rhetoric in firm support of
imperial violence. Daniel OQuinns article Murder, Hospitality, Philosophy: De
Quincey and the Complicitous Grounds of National Identity (1999) deals with the

I would like to thank Daniel Roberts (Queens University, Belfast) for having directed me to
the sources of De Quinceys 1857 essays on China. His solid scholarship on De Quincey and
remarkable hospitality have always been inspiring to me.

Received: February 27, 2007Accepted: October 3, 2007

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 25 (Summer 2008)25-40

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

psychological and narrative aspects of the imperial subjects self-consolidation,

intriguingly linking the oriental dreams in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to
the journalistic article The Opium Question with China in 1840. Charles J. Rzepka
has also written on De Quinceys particular version of Gunboat Diplomacy
regarding China in relation to what he calls De Quinceys literature of power (The
Literature of Power and the Imperial Will).
These fine studies, unfortunately, have not yet explored in enough depth the
meanings of debt and (in-)hospitality in De Quinceys pieces on China, two related
themes which happen to figure prominently elsewhere in his life and works. Lindops
biography offers us vivid descriptions of how De Quincey, careless with money and
having to support a growing family, was often hard pressed by his creditors. Between
1832 and 1840, he was put to the horn and arrested no less than 9 times. (Lindop
303) Commenting on Suspiria de Profundis, Matthew Schneider reminds us that De
Quinceys narrative of childhood ends with the story of first debt (126), which,
associated with violence and bereavement embodied in his sisters sudden death and
supposed mistreatment by a nurse, undermines the Romantic dream of imaginative
freedom (127-29). Josephine McDonagh, on the other hand, turns to the textual
economy of Confessions, arguing that De Quinceys rich narrative production offers
recompense for the guilt of unpaid debts (87). She also argues that debt and desire
are at the heart of De Quinceys eccentric economic theory, where the consumer is
burdened with wants and needs that will never be fulfilled and accumulating debts
that will never be repaid (88). One might as well add that unacknowledged literary
debt was recognized as an embarrassing problem with De Quinceys entire writing
career. Responding to William Hazlitts charge of plagiarism, he wrote in 1823 that
not any abstract consideration of credit, but the abstract idea of a credi tor (often
putting on a concrete shape, and sometimes the odious concrete of a dun), has for
some time past been the animating principle of [his] labours (9: 25).
(In-)hospitality is another prominent De Quinceyan concern, well exemplified by
the Malay episode in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. What we have there is
rather ambivalent textually.

In the episode, a ferocious looking Oriental is

discovered in De Quinceys house -- in the kitchen of Dove Cottage at Grasmere, to

be precise. At the beginning, the writer implies that the Malay is a potential threat to
his young maid and a little child from a neighboring cottage clinging to her for
protection (56). Miraculously tamed by De Quinceys recitation of some lines from

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

the Iliad, this stranger, a tiger-cat in De Quinceys wording, worships him in a

most devout manner (57). At the Malays departure, De Quincey presents him with a
piece of opium enough to kill three dragoons and their horses, allegedly in
compassion for his solitary life (57).

Finding that the uninvited guest has

dangerously bolted the whole in one mouthful, he apologizes for not intervening by
appealing to the law of hospitality: he just could not have the Malay seized and
drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening him into a notion that we were going to
sacrifice him to some English idol (57). And then comes the residual fear after the
Malay is gone, followed by the admission that this intruder from the East has been a
fearful enemy for months in his own oriental dreams (72). The visitation narrative is
open-ended with respect to the Malays fate. In OQuinns interpretation, filling or
closing the Opium-eaters lack of knowledge [] aligns one against the Malay,
either complicit with the poisoning or exculpating the deadly gift, either
completing the crime or covering it up (153).

For E.S. Burt, De Quinceys

ceremonial welcome of the guest is a purely ritualistic performance of hospitality,

and inasmuch as he keeps haunting De Quinceys dreams ever after, the exchange
hardly leads to a revived ethical relation and a triumphant celebration of community
for the host (891). In Rzepkas entirely different reading, this episode has much more
to do with De Quinceys guilt-ridden psychology in relation to his intense early
worship of William Wordsworth than with anxieties of empire as such. Able to see
through his false reputation of Oriental scholarship, the Malay as the demonic
incarnation of Wordsworth arouses in De Quincey Oedipal fear of and hostility
toward his literary father (De Quincey and the Malay184), the former occupant
of Dove Cottage. Killing the Malay accidentally-on-purpose, as Rzepka has it, is a
passive-aggressive act of symbolic parricide directed at Wordsworth. Developing
his arguments about De Quinceys anxiety over literary authority (29), Rzepka
further speculates in his book Sacramental Commodities (1995) on the meanings of
opium and literary text as gifts, a concept akin to hospitality.
In what follows I shall demonstrate that Anglo-Chinese relations addressed by
De Quincey at length in a series of journalistic essays, though probably devoid of the
subtle psychological mechanisms and textual economy characterizing his fascinating
autobiographical writings, are no less interesting, involving the closely related themes
of debt and (in-)hospitality and implicated in knotty discourses of morality and
othering. Leaving the dark labyrinth of De Quinceys mind, which has already

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

been explored by quite a few psychoanalytical and discourse theorists, we shall be

able to see rather different manifestations of these themes in a clearer historical light.

I. Indignation of the Uninvited Guest

Opium smuggled into the Celestial Empire, unlike what De Quincey offered
the Malay, was no free gift. Before the first Opium War, opium was not yet widely
cultivated in China and had been imported primarily from India. (Janin 41) Between
1838 and 1839, some 40,000 chests of opium were shipped to China. With the
flourishing opium trade in the nineteenth century, the Indian interests used China to
channelize the remittance of Indian revenue and to replenish the British drain of
Indian resources (Tan 226) in a triangular trade relationship. The opium trade
contribute[d] upwards of three millions sterling per annum, acknowledged De
Quincey in 1840 (Collected Works 14: 167). The Chinese Emperor Daoguangs
determination to ban the contraband trade precipitated all the on-going frictions
between the two empires, brought into contact because of Britannias national
expansion (De Quincey, Collected 14: 350). Long before the rise of the opium trade,
one might contend, Anglo-Chinese relations had already been a history of imperial
inhospitality, as De Quincey repeatedly reminds the reader in his journalistic essays.
It will be instructive to begin with Emperor Qianlongs edict to George III, issued
during Lord Macartneys embassy to China on the occasion of Qianlongs eighty-third
birthday in 1793. There Qianlong is at once kind and inhospitable: he expresses his
appreciation of George IIIs sincerity and has, as he said, extended [his] favor and
courtesy to the British envoys (Cranmer-Byng 134); at the same time he hastens the
guests, seen primarily as tributaries, to return home and refuses all their requests for
establishing what the British side sees as equal diplomatic relation on the ground that
such policies go beyond traditional regulations of the Celestial Empire (135).
Assured of Chinese cultural superiority, Qianlong explains in a somewhat
condescending tone:
The Celestial Empire, ruling all within the four seas, simply
concentrates on carrying out the affairs of Government properly, and
does not value rare and precious things. [] In fact, the virtue and
power of the Celestial Dynasty has penetrated afar to the myriad

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

kingdoms, which have come to render homage, and so all kinds of

precious things from over mountain and sea have been collected
here [] Nevertheless we have never valued ingenious articles, nor
do we have the slightest need of your Countrys manufactures. (qtd.
in Cranmer-Byng 136-37)
In Gerald Grahams words, uncomprehending, complacent, and apparently secure
China looked down in contempt on the bustling intruders from across the seas (12).
This myth of Oriental self-sufficiency and supremacy would be falsified, with a
vengeance, by De Quincey and others, and eventually shattered by British gunboats.
The first British embassy to China, well received, turned out to be a diplomatic
failure, and an even more glaring failure recurred in 1816, when Lord Amherst and
his deputies refused Emperor Jiaxings summons and were sent home immediately.2
(Tuck xxxi-xxxii) The kowtow controversy concerned and other charges of Chinese
inhospitality, as we shall see, work very effectively in De Quinceys Opium Wars
pieces, justifying British imperial violence by shifting the focus from economic and
military interests to high moral concerns: the distant Chinese empire must be
punished for her arrogance and inhospitality; the indignant guest from afar must
defend his honor and the natural right of commerce, or to retrieve some sort of
secret, unacknowledged debt. This is not to deny that De Quinceys nakedly racist
discourse supported by straightforward imperialist arguments based on military and
economic gains could have worked equally well in swaying the public opinion. This

Following James L. Hevia and others, Eric Chia-Hwan Chen argues that early Chinese
images of the British were not as negative as many sinologists, including John King
Fairbank, have claimed. Having recourse to a number of written documents, he shows that
Chinese people of imperial China regarded their early British visitors as an ordinary
Western tribe not different from the Italians, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Belgians or the
French (Constructing the Others 8). During the Ming Dynasty especially, a significant
number of priests from these other countries were recruited by the court and highly respected
by their Chinese associates. Chens doctoral dissertation reminds us that Sydney Thelwalls
The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China: being a Development of the Main Causes
which Exclude the Merchants of Great Britain from the Advantages of an Unrestricted
Commercial Intercourse with that Vast Empire (1839) strongly criticizes the dishonorable
business of smuggling opium into China and recommends the cooperation with the Chinese
government to ban the trade. But Chen also admits that the nationwide anti-opium movement
in late 1839 must have been weakened by De Quinceys influential anti-Chinese journalistic
writings. (Chen 215-16 Images of the Other)

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

paper focuses on De Quincys more subtle rhetorical moves involving the

appropriation of moral discourse and the curious interpretation of an economic theory
simply because these aspects of his journalistic writings have not yet been probed into
in any depth.
Anglo-Chinese trade before the nineteenth century was unfavorable to Britain
because the Chinese were not much interested in her manufactures, particularly
textiles, while Chinese tea had become, arguably, a daily necessity in Britain. It was
not until the rise of opium smoking as a widespread addiction in China during the
nineteenth century that the trade deficit started to tilt toward the opposite side. 3 By
the 1830s, the opium trade contributed much to Britains further colonization in India.
(Wakeman 173) But what counted simply as favorable free trade for Britain was
perceived by China in terms of fiscal crises and moral threats. As De Quincey
mentions in his 1840 article on China, the foreign opium caused a yearly drain of
silver, detrimental to the Chinese economy (Collected 14: 166). Indeed, Chinese
officials attributed the deflation of their copper currency to the unstoppable outflow of
silver. Even worse, opium as a moral poison to the Chinese government not only
threatened peoples physical health but also their morality. Corruptions bred by the
illegal trade, imperial decadence, and the apprehension that local traitors were
assisting the barbarians to corrupt the Celestial Dynasty prompted some highminded officials to pursue severe policies to deal with opium sales and addiction.
Commissioner Lin Zexu, sent by Emperor Daoguang to Canton to confront the
serious opium problem, tried to send a letter to Queen Victoria in 1839, in which he
elucidates the Chinese point of view and exhorts the young queen to stop the opium
trade:
We are of the opinion that this poisonous article is clandestinely
manufactured by artful and depraved people of various tribes under
the dominion of your honorable nation.

Doubtless you, the

honorable sovereign of that nation, have not commanded the

manufacture and sale of it. [] But in order to remove the source
of the evil thoroughly would it not be better to prohibit its sale and
3

Sanjay Krishnan claims that by the late eighteenth century, opium-as-narcotic did by De
Quinceys reckoning for the human body: restoring equilibrium and generating a surplus of
dynamic power (209).

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

manufacture rather than merely prohibit its consumption?

Though not making use of it ones self, to venture nevertheless to
manufacture and sell it, and with it to seduce the simple folk of this
land, is to seek ones own livelihood by exposing others to death, to
seek ones own advantage by other mens injury. Such acts are
bitterly abhorrent to the nature of man and are utterly opposed to the
ways of heaven [.]
We now wish to find, in cooperation with your honorable
sovereignty, some means of bringing to a perpetual end this opium,
so hurtful to mankind: we in this land forbidding the use of it, and
you, in the nations of your dominion, forbidding its manufacture
(qtd. in Chang 135)
Commissioner Lins understanding of the issue, as we shall see, was absolutely
different from De Quinceys own. And it is with reference to such anxieties of
empire on the Chinese side that we should examine De Quinceys analysis of the
first Opium War, in particular his treatment of Lin. Neither the Queen nor De
Quincey had the opportunity to read Lins letter. In De Quinceys two early articles
on China, Lin appears as the most cunning knave, sublime of rascals (Collected 14:
176). In what follows, I shall examine how De Quincey in these articles deflects the
problematic from material considerations to high moral concerns and to theories of
debt and rights, in a series of eloquent rhetorical moves.
The Opium and the China Question was published in June 1840, exactly the
same month when the expeditionary force left Macao for northern China to begin the
military action. (Kuo 138) As a Tory, De Quincey wished to clarify his stance by
claiming that even though he found faults with the Whig governments foreign
policies, he fully supported the policy of war and hoped that the war would be
conducted with exemplary vigour (Collected 14: 163). The article is divided into
two parts. The first tries to refute the moral objection against the British campaigns,
while attacking Whig foreign policies vehemently; the second insists that the war was
needed for the sake of British honor and justice, rather than for instant economic gains
like the indemnity for the opium resolutely destroyed by Lin. 4 De Quincey first
4

It is regrettable that, when discussing how De Quincey is othering the Chinese, representing them as barbarian and resistant to progress in order to fashion a superior British national

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

introduces the pro-China view: we have before us the spectacle of a wise and
paternal Government; and it recommends such wisdom powerfully to a moral people
[] nobly stemming a tide of public hatred, and determined to make its citizens
happy in their own despite (Collected 14: 165). In a sensational metaphor, he paints
the situation in China as follows: A great conflagration is undermining all the social
virtues in China; the Emperor and Commissioner Lin are working vast fire-engines
for throwing water upon the flames; and, on the other hand, our people are
discharging columns of sulphur for the avowed purpose of feeding the combustion!
(165-66) This dramatic spectacle, however, is immediately tainted: Scandalous!
we all exclaim; but, [] the loveliest romances are not always the truest (166). To
reverse the perspective, De Quincey lists three purely selfish reasons why the
Chinese wanted to ban opium. First, Lin and other Chinese only fought for their own
interests because they themselves had some thousands of acres laid down as poppy
plantations (166). Second, the foreign opium required the export of silver, hurting
the domestic economy. Lastly, Peking was jealous of the British power in India and
would like to undermine it by cutting its financial resources. The first point has
proven to be utter slander, even if the other two bear some truth. To create a sense of
objectivity, De Quincey concedes that documents are wanting for either view: any
inference, for or against the Chinese, will be found too large for the premises (167).
Besides, even if China had her selfish interests, De Quincey asks us: Have not
nations a right to protect their own interests? (167) Yet the apparent neutrality does
not last long, for soon he moves on to contend that the sudden leap into the anxieties
of parental care is a suspicious fact against the Chinese government (167-68).
Sudden leap is the key phrase here, reminding the reader of an earlier sentence,
Chinese government [has] long connived at the opium trade (166). In historical
fact, toleration of the illegal opium trade can be partly explained by official
corruption: not only had some Chinese officials and merchants gained benefits from
it, even part of the royal income came from custom duties derived from the trade,
collected by the Hoppo, officials delegated by the Imperial Household to Canton on a
three-year term. But as the historian Hsin-pao Chang rightly argues, government

identity, many critics fail to attend to the Britishs internal difference, such as the Tory-Whig
divide evidenced here. Obviously in this article De Quincey tries to elevate himself and fellow
Tories from what he despises as the buccaneering tendency in the Whigs. The effectiveness
of such rhetorical moves necessitates the appeal to higher ethical concerns rather than falling
back on conventional jingoism.

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

corruption does not repeal the law; [] official connivance does not make a
disreputable practice less so (176). Contrary to most British merchants wishful
thinking, this time Emperor Daoguang did mean business and Commissioner Lin was
absolutely earnest in his moral insistence. Trying to refute opium as a serious moral
problem for the Chinese, De Quincey resorts to economic speculations. Having no
intimate knowledge of the Chinese situation, he appeals to the Indian example,
arguing that even where the consumption of opium is enormous, it is limited to the
higher class. Because [w]ages are far lower in the opium countries, it really
appears to be impossible that the lower Chinese should much abuse the luxury of
opium, hence the claim that opium seriously affects the general national industry is
insupportable (168).

As for the higher class, he exclaims: what a chimerical

undertaking to make war upon their habits of domestic indulgence! Yet the sad fact
is, in 1836, foreigners estimated that there were about 12.5 million smokers.
(Wakeman 178) Among them there was a high proportion from the scholar-official
class, the pillar of the Chinese bureaucracy. Ignorant of the extent of opium addiction
and blind to Confucian moral seriousness, the English opium-eater dismisses the
Chinese view as mere delusion (Collected 14: 168), no realer than his own opium
dreams. Putting the blame on the Chinese as well as the Whigs, De Quinceys
discourse of moral indignation artfully diverts us from naked British imperial
aggressions that he himself was hardly innocent of.
What comes next in The Opium and the China Question is the simultaneous
attack on Commissioner Lins exquisite knavery and stupidity of Charles Elliot, the
chief superintendent of the British trade in China (Collected 14: 174). On Lins
demand, the Whig superintendent surrendered more than 20,000 chests of opium,
gathered from the British merchants, to the Chinese authorities in 1839. One obvious
reason is that the foreign community in Canton had been detained, and Chinese
servants and compradors were ordered to leave the factories, or, as Elliots wife puts
it, the merchants were under threats of punishment starvation etc etc [] until they
had given up every chest of opium in their possession to a Commissioner especially
sent from Pekin to abolish the opium trade (qtd. in Hoe and Roebuck 71-72). There
is, actually, yet another reason for the incredibly meek submission: the opium trade
practically ceased owing to the severe prohibition, and British opium dealers were
more than happy to offer the opium to Elliot in the hope that their government would
compensate them. (Chang 165-66) In De Quinceys account, however, the plot is

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

much more dishonorable. He maintains that since [n]o considerable part of [the
opium] was on shore or in the Canton factory (Collected 14: 169), Lin had absolutely
no right to confiscate it. The very most that China could in reason have asked was
that the opium ships should sail away, and not hover on the coasts, he insists, and
the English opium ships were acting under no recognized maritime law when they so
foolishly surrendered their cargoes. (173) At any rate, he questions the sanity of
complying with Chinese laws at the cost of two and a half millions sterling (173).
Lin must, he surmises, have cheated Elliot by promising to indemnify the opium but
then ate his own words. In historical hindsight, it is clear to us that Lin never
promised any pecuniary compensation for the surrendered opium; [a]ll Lin
promised was to entreat the emperor to pardon the importers past crimes. (Chang
143-44) But this is not exactly the point I wish to labor here. More pertinent to my
concern is how De Quincey implicates the Whig government in the alleged scandal,
and then how, in the second half of the article, British nationhood is reconsolidated by
further othering the common enemy, the supposedly deceitful, arrogant and
foolish Chinese, resorting to a genealogy of imperial inhospitality.
To De Quincey, Lin used Elliot to cheat the British merchants (Collected 14:
174), inflicting irreparable injury on them (Canton 684). The Whig government,
however, was just as blamable, for, through Elliot, it allegedly promised to repay the
merchants but then refused to do so. There is thus a curious complicity between the
Chinese and the Whigs: Lin picks the left-hand pocket, first of opium, and secondly
of [the opium] trade: the [Whig] Government then step in whilst the merchants are all
gazing at Lin, and pick the other pocket of money: both speaking at first through
Elliot, but finally speaking directly in their own persons. (Collected 14: 174)
Refusing to pay the debt, the government waged war against China for the indemnity
instead of fighting for honor and justice. That is why in Canton Expedition and
Convention, De Quincey can claim that the Canton Convention, signed between
Elliot and Qishan but not recognized by their respective governments, is a
bucaniering treaty (Canton 679).

Elliot is criticized for misrepresenting the

purposes of the Canton expedition. He surrendered the opium out of his miserable
conceit (683) and foolishness, and then he wanted to get back the indemnity
shamelessly in such a hurry. The money due is not, as stipulated by the Convention,
being entirely for the use of the crown of England; rather, De Quincey declares, it is
to make up for the Whig superintendents own private debt (684, emphasis added).

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

Rhetorically, the force of De Quinceys attack on Elliots blunder in Canton

Expedition and Conventions depends in turn on othering the Chinese. Elliot must
have given Lin the vast amount of opium, inflicting irreparable injury on the
unhappy opium traders (684), either because Lin promised to pay for the debts, or
to offer certain general advantages to the British merchants in exchange for the
opium (683). But how could Elliot have so naively believed in the inhospitable
Chinese, De Quincey queries, who recognized no such obligations [as honor and
good faith] as binding upon their intercourse with foreigners (684)? Who forced
him into this [pathetic] situation? The answer De Quincey gives us is Elliots own
miserable conceit (683) and imbecilities (684). The nastiest mockery of Elliot in
Canton Expedition and Convention is found in the part describing his haste to sign
a bucaniering treaty with the Chinese without even consulting the British
expeditionary leaders like Sir Hugh Gough: What was it, then sing, heavenly
muse! that prompted this explosion of sudden love love at first sight, one may call
it between [] Elliot and the Commandant of Canton? (680) There is, De
Quincey stresses with a sexual innuendo, something most vicious and most
corrupt behind Elliots rush[ing] so hastily to meet the Commandants advances
(681). What is most shameful is not that Elliot, putting on a bucaniering face, had
completely disfigure[d] the spirit of [British] policy, and to falsify [British] motives,
but that he shamed Britain by degrading her, in front of the Chinese, to the same level
of these absolute barbarians in their feeble twilight of intellectual glimmering, []
incapable of conceiving the relation between any two states as other than that of utter
dependency, as between mother and child, or between the empire and its tributaries
(681). And yet to borrow the characteristic reading strategy in John Barrells book
The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, Britain was already infected, for we can
glimpse such symptoms of Oriental savagery as greed, violence, arrogance and
stupidity in the Whig superintendent due to his scandalous liaison with the Chinese.
It should be noted in passing that The Opium and the China Question is still
rather restrained with respect to imperial violence. While agreeing to go to war with
China, De Quincey does not really think that seizing Taiwan or Canton would be
particularly profitable, warning that we must stay for some years to gather in any
considerable harvest (Collected 14:177).

For all his complaints about Chinese

inhospitality in the court and in Canton, what he recommends is to win honour for
the name of Britain and a secure settlement planted in law and self-respect for our

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

establishments in China (203). And the proper means suggested is an armed

negotiator rather than a negotiating army (195). What comes next in the essay
Canton Expedition and Conventions, published almost a year and a half later, is
much more jingoist; there one detects a curious ambivalence: De Quincey reacts
excessively against the supposed Chinese barbarity, yet at the same time he seems to
be partaking of it. Because the Chinese, he claims, lack moral obligations and are
prone to violence, he remorselessly recommends imperial violence and annexation for
self-defense. Stressing the generosity of English nature, its habitual tendency to
bear no malice, its carelessness of confidence, and indisposition to suspect, he
nonetheless warns of a fatal catastrophe yet to come (687) and prescribes to
revolutionize China by founding a number of presidential stations at Pekin, and
other great cities of China, on the model of those in India (688). He even suggests
taking military possession of a province [] and maintaining a permanent
establishment of from six to ten thousand men, with every equipment of engineering,
science, and modern improved warfare (688).

Then will mighty deserts be

discovered, such as may offer a new field of expansion to British population, and
from such an inland centre it is, that eventually we shall operate upon China (688).
Finally, many times must the artillery score its dreadful lessons upon [the Chinese]
carcasses, before they will be healed of their treachery, or we shall be allowed to live
in the diffusion of peaceful benefits (688), so De Quincey contends. The indignant
guest, backed by superior weapons and purportedly higher morals, now threatens to
play the rightful host.

II. Hospitality, Debt, and the Natural Right of Commerce

In regard to De Quinceys first essay on the China question, Barrell has
discussed the remarkable strategy to represent [the] belligerent policy as an attempt
to forestall a series of acts of revenge not yet even committed by the Chinese against
Europeans (151). Attending to the unreason or excessiveness of the move, Barrell in
effect highlights the pathological aspect of De Quinceys discourse, trying to relate
it through involutes, or compound experiences marked by interwoven images, to his
remembered or imagined afflictions of childhood (154). Rereading the second half
of The Opium and the China Question, my emphasis lies more in the public realm
of Anglo-Chinese relations amply treated there. Rather than implicitly serving the

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

paranoiac logic of forestalling Chinese violence, as discussed by Barrell, De

Quinceys rhetoric of empire there in fact speaks extremely eloquently with respect to
the themes of inhospitality, debt, and natural rights. It is toward this more public side
that I wish to turn, drawing examples from The Opium and the China Question as
well as the 1857 pieces on China.
For De Quincey, the origin of British discontents comes from Chinese
inhospitality, exemplified by the kowtow requirement and the problematic Canton
system of foreign trade. All our misfortunes or disgraces at Canton have arisen out
of one original vice in the foundation of our intercourse, which began under the
unhappy contracting sponsors, -- a great and most arrogant emperor on the one side, a
narrow company of mercantile adventurers on the other (Collected 14: 181). This
undignified phrase for British traders in The Opium reminds us of De Quinceys
indictment of Captain Elliots improper liaison and of the bucaniering Whig
cause of fighting for the opium indemnity. Instead of dwelling on the merchants
narrowness or the Whigs disgrace, the second half of The Opium, the last few
pages of Canton Expedition and much of the 1857 China pieces attempt to
reconsolidate British nationhood by appealing to honor and justice. De Quincey
attributes the ultimate guilt of the West to the Russian ambassador M. de Isameloff
(Leon V. Izmailov), who reached Peking in 1720 and prostrated in front of the
Emperor, knocking his head nine times against the floor.

Because Russia was

incomparably the biggest potentate in Christendom, De Quincey reasons, the

Chinese must have believed that since the greatest Western nation agreed to kowtow,
all other Western comers would naturally follow this humble practice (Collected 14:
361). For a very imbecile people cherishing their peculiar style of obstinacy, this
precedent must have nurtured their unredeemable arrogance: Once having conceded
a point, you need not hope to recover your lost ground. (Collected 14: 360) Actually,
Izmailov was not exactly the first Russian ambassador to bow in front of the Chinese
emperor: Nikolai G. Spathary already did so in 1675. Of the seventeen embassies
from the West to China between 1655 and 1795, all except Lord McCartneys did
perform the kowtow ritual. (Hsu 133) But for De Quincey, out of the catastrophe of
Izmailovs humiliating concession, and the wrath which followed it, grew ultimately
the opium-frenzy of Lin, the mad Commissioner of Canton; then the vengeance which
followed; next the war, and the miserable defeats of the Chinese (364). All this,
De Quincey announces, followed out of the attempt to enforce the [kowtow]; which

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

attempt never would have been made but for the encouragement derived from
Ismaeloff, the ambassador of so great a power as Russia (364). Interestingly, now
the original sin justifying British imperial violence has been displaced to Chinas
arrogance and Russias primal complicity, whereas commercial interests have
silently receded to the background. De Quinceys closely related line of argument is
to trace the genealogy of Chinese inhospitality, accompanied by all sorts of negative
Orientalist stereotyping, to the effect that British honor must be defended, and the
guests rights reclaimed, inevitably by force.
On De Quinceys list of inhospitality one finds examples old and new. In
addition to the humiliating kowtow, he mentions the Lady Hughes case in 1784, when
a gunner of an Indiaman accidentally killed two minor mandarins while firing a salute
(Pritchard 148). In De Quinceys account, the incident took place in 1785, only a
Chinese was killed, and the gunner was an elderly Portuguese, who had for many
years sought by preference the service of the British flag (Collected 14: 187, 188).
Handed over to the Canton authorities, this poor injured man suffered on a Chinese
gallows by hanging for having fulfilled his duty on the deck of a British ship (189).
For De Quincey, indiscrimination between accidental killing and vile murder is
precisely the proof of brutal stupidity of the Chinese (188): Centuries make no
reforms in a land open to no light. (189) Always, as against aliens, the Chinese
have held the infamous doctrine that the intention, the motive, signifies nothing.
(366) For a people incurably savage in the moral sense, the British must use an
adequate demonstration of [] power to get the message across (193), and the only
logic which penetrates the fog of so conceited a people is fears (175). We British
have traversed the whole distance from savage life to the summit of civilization;
China, starting with such advantages, has yet to learn even the elements of law and
justice, so claims De Quincey (204-205). For him, the means of the civilizing
mission is indeed not far removed from imperial aggression. Repeatedly he avers
that only the show of military force and punitive actions will render the savage
Orientals more sensible. Although he qualifies his plea for violence, occasionally,
with such expressions as extreme forbearance in using [power] (202), often his
rhetoric smacks of his own highly developed capacity for malice and vengeance, to
borrow Barrells words (154).

Schneider, incidentally, has pointed out that the

passage from representational to actual violence is a recurrent pattern in De

Quinceys autobiographical works, that he often vacillates between delighted

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

fascination and abject terror (17). Frederick Burwick has also investigated into De
Quincceys aesthetics of violence, though he concludes that De Quinceys case for
murder as a fine art is grounded not in the perpetrator, nor in the deed, but in a
peculiar sympathy with the victim (78). In the China pieces, unfortunately, no such
sympathy could be detected. There De Quincey does not always appeal to honor or
moral duties; at times he speaks unpretentiously about the necessity of violence for
imperial self-defense.

Warning the reader of Chinese vindictive subtilty, he

recommends that to murder is the one sole safeguard against being murdered; []
not to be crushed by the wheels of the tiger-hearted despot, you must leap into his
chariot, and seize the reins yourself (Canton 687) The 1841 Nerbudda incident
(Collected 14: 365, Barrell 152), involving alleged poisoning of one thousand British
troops stationed in the island of Chusan (Collected 14: 365), and the vile mob of
Canton, who would feed on British flesh and blood if Britain exercised the legal
right of entry solemnly acknowledged by the emperor (Uncollected 17, 18) in the
Treaty of Nanking, are cited among the extreme instances of atrocious inhospitality
(22) that serve well for De Quinceys purpose.
Perhaps the most interesting, and unfortunately also the most often neglected
part of De Quinceys anti-Chinese rhetoric is his curious invocation of an economic
theory of rent to subvert the host-guest relation between China and Britain. Robert
Maniquis contends that De Quinceys principles and ideas, even economic and racial
ideas, serve deeply personal fears, above all the fear of an imposed and unjust guilt
(qtd. in Baxter 180). Edmund Baxter explains that De Quincey finds a generalized
version of an individual death-wish in economics, particularly in Ricardos doctrine
of rent, which is a theory of scarcity and ruin (154). In The Opium and the China
Question, amidst the indignant charges against Chinese inhospitality, one finds the
surprising claim that Ricardos theory applies to China as well. 5 A much longer
elaboration of the doctrine of rent in relation to the Chinese is found in a substantial
part of the last China essay written in 1857. There, the tone is extraordinarily calm
and rational though; in fact nowhere can we readily detect any sign of assumed
private fears. The main thrust of his argument is to demonstrate that the commercial
5

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was a famous British political economist in support of free trade.
In his theory, rent is the difference in the costs of the production between different tracts of
land. In the situation that multiple grades of land are being used, rent will increase with the
higher grades of land. In brief, increased land utilization in the wake of economic development
will lead to the cultivation of poorer lands to the benefit of the landowners.

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

value of England to China is so enormous that if Anglo-Chinese trades were

suspended, China would suffer irrecoverably. With reference to the economy of land
use in the tea districts of China, De Quincey alleges that the British demand for tea
had stimulated the cultivation of the lower-quality lands: Not only has [the British
demand] been large enough to benefit the landholder enormously, by calling out lower
qualities of land, [ and] has stimulated the counteracting agencies in the more
careful and scientific culture of the plant; but also it has been in a positive sense
enormous [,] running up at present to 100,000,000 pounds weight annually
(Uncollected 33). Yet on the withdrawal of this English stimulus, a corresponding
retrocession will take place on every quality of soil; every quality must sink in rent
instantly (Collected 14: 182-83). The Chinese economy would then utterly collapse
and myriads will be ruined [] out and out. As a result [j]ails will be filled,
suicides will multiply, taxes will be unpaid [] (183) There is no doubt that the
Emperor and all his arrogant courtiers have decupled their incomes from the British
stimulation applied to inferior soils, that but for us never would have been called into
culture. (Uncollected 34) And yet [n]ot a man amongst them is aware of the
advantages which he owes to England (Uncollected 34). Ricardos doctrine of rent
applied to China therefore becomes a theory of secret debt, undermining Oriental selfsufficiency and wisdom. The British merchant as guest, welcomed or not, turns out to
be the rightful, unacknowledged benefactor, entitled, to pursue De Quinceys
argument, to retrieve a huge debt that the Chinese themselves scarcely recognized.
De Quinceys economic theory of rent is subtly linked to his theory of the
natural right of global commerce. He argues that there must be some kind of
right of commerce so that even a narrow and selfish distribution of natural gifts, all
to one man, or all to one place, has in a first stage of human interrelations been
established, only that men might be hurried forward into a second stage where this
false sequestration might be unlocked and dispersed (Uncollected 29).

The

practical liberation and distribution throughout the world of all good gifts, he
continues, has been confided to the secret sense of a right existing in man for
claiming such a distribution as part of his natural inheritance (30). Besides, often the
survival of a nation might depend entirely upon the right to force a commercial
intercourse (30). In this discourse of right, there is a law of hospitality which
authorizes the guest to stay on against the hosts will: at the first stage of the relations
between two parties, the field was open to any possible movement in either party;

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities_ 27

but once commerce had already been established in the second stage of their
dealings, one of the parties could not suddenly terminate the relationship. With
respect to Anglo-Chinese relations, China might say Go, or she might say, Come; but
she could not first say, Come; and then, revoking this invitation, capriciously say, Go
(29). [H]ad the Chinese a right, under the law of nations, to act upon their malicious
caprice? (28) The answer for De Quincey is an absolute No. Once you have
invited a guest, not to say your benefactor, and agreed to do transactions with him or
her, you have in effect surrendered your right to stop the guest from coming back.
This logic of irrevocable commercial relation, for De Quincey, even applies to
the opium trade outlawed by the Chinese government ever since Emperor
Yongzhengs 1729 edict. De Quincey challenges Chinas right of asking the opium
ships to sail away, because she had for years invited this contraband commerce,
cherished it, nursed it, honoured it (Collected 173, emphasis added). Now the
imperial West has one more justification for forcing open the Chinese market, not
even dependent on the emotional appeal to patriotic feelings or on the high-sounding
discourse of white mans burden. In this connection, a historian has given us a brief
but perceptive account of Chinese-Western relations in the nineteenth century, worth
quoting here: The [Westerners] insisted on international relations according to the
law and diplomacy of Europe; but the Chinese would not sacrifice their cherished
system. In effect they said, We have not asked you to come; if you come you must
accept our ways, to which the Wests reply was, You cannot stop us from coming
and we will come on our terms. (Hsu 134) De Quinceys complicated rhetorical
operations in his essays on China, as we have seen, offer some curious contributions
to the debate about imperial (in-)hospitality, debt, and trading right concerning EastWest encounters. Most noticeable here is not his vehement yet rather conventional
othering of China, but his elaborate moves to turn Britain into the rightful
benefactor and China the most ungrateful host. Focusing on De Quinceys rhetoric of
empire rather than his much better known autobiographical dream-text, this
preliminary study, I hope, will fruitfully divert our critical attention away from the
aspects of private fears and social guilt that have haunted De Quincey scholarship for
more than a decade and a half.

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

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Abstract

28_Hospitality, Debt, and the China Question: Thomas De Quinceys Rhetoric of Empire

For well over a decade and a half, literary critics have been much obsessed with the
complex psychology in Thomas De Quinceys works. Influenced by postcolonial
theory, scholars like John Barrell have also tried to relate De Quinceys personal
traumas to his anxieties about the British imperial project. Such interesting studies,
however, tend to belittle De Quinceys copious journalistic writings and fail to
recognize him as one of the leading essayists of his times. The cruder kind of Leftist
scholarship, on the other hand, often attacks his apparently imperialist pieces without
bothering to go into any detailed textual analysis. This paper focuses squarely on De
Quinceys political essays on China, particularly those concerning the two Opium
Wars. Exploring his complicated rhetorical moves with reference to such notions as
(in-)hospitality, debt, and the natural right of global commerce, I wish to
demonstrate that De Quinceys rhetoric of empire, though devoid of the subtle
psychological mechanisms characterizing his celebrated Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater, is equally interesting and worth exploring.
Key words: nineteenth-century English literature, Orientalism, hospitality,
Thomas De Quincey, debt, rhetoric of empire