The Opium Lord's Daughter Read online

  The Opium

  Lord’s Daughter

  A Novel Based on Historical Events of the First Opium War

  By

  Robert Wang

  Copyright © 2019 by Robert Wang

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. It draws on the historical events surrounding the First Opium War, and many of the real-life persons associated with those events appear in this work as characters. However, insofar as this work expresses any opinions or theories about the First Opium War or persons involved, those opinions and theories are solely the product of the author’s imagination.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Edition, 2019

  Editing by The Artful Editor

  Cover design by Singer Design Studio

  Interior design by Damonza

  ISBN: 978-0-578-50292-2 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-578-50291-5 (e-book)

  Published in the United States of America

  I dedicate this book to my family:

  —to my wife, Cindy, who has stood by me and supported all my endeavors for over forty years and to whom I owe every ounce of true joy I have ever felt.

  —to my most accomplished, kind, and beautiful daughters, Stephy (whose face is featured on the front cover), Jenny, and Lisa, who make me whole and so very proud!

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Resources

  Author’s Note

  Every superpower in history has had a dark side—you could argue that it’s a prerequisite—but history, written by the victors as it is, tends to emphasize the glory days more than the dark ones. Ask any college student what they know about the French Revolution, and most will have some knowledge of what happened and how it shaped the modern world, but ask the same students what they know about the Opium Wars, and I doubt many will have heard of them. Yet the Opium Wars between China and the British Empire played a meaningful role in how China, now a superpower, relates to the Western world, both economically and politically.

  I grew up in Hong Kong, a place known to most of the Western world as a tourist destination, a glittering marketplace of luxury goods and exotic dining. But the island has a dark past. It was ceded to England as a British Crown Colony as the result of the First Opium War, which ended with the Nanking Treaty of 1842. Kowloon and the New Territories were leased from China for ninety-nine years in 1898, and on a rainy July 1, 1997, all of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories were returned to China, ending an era that the Chinese referred to as one hundred years of shame. As a modern-day superpower, China is making it clear to the world that it will not be bullied by a foreign power ever again.

  The term “Opium War” already implies that it had to do with drugs, but how did a military conflict take place over an illegal drug? There are history books written about the two Opium Wars, but the general public is woefully uninformed about the causes and outcomes of these wars.

  I wanted to write a historical novel about this conflict between England, the superpower of that time, and China, the world’s most populated country (over four hundred million people in the 1840s). England wanted Chinese luxury goods such as porcelain and silk, and the British were addicted to tea, importing millions of tons per year. But China would only take silver in trade, which would have bankrupted the British treasury. So what did England do? It decided to sell opium to China for Chinese silver and then use that silver to buy those coveted Chinese products. After twelve million Chinese citizens became addicted to the drug, disrupting the social order and corrupting government officials at every level, the emperor acted to halt the trade.

  The main characters in this novel are fictional, but I also incorporated real historical figures and events to tell the story. If the lines are blurred and the reader is engaged, then I will have succeeded in sharing the history of the First Opium War without the reader having to crack a history book. I certainly welcome readers to explore the subject further to get a true historical perspective, and I have included a list of excellent resources at the end of this book.

  I took some liberties to simplify the many complex details that a history book would have included to keep the reader interested, so I apologize in advance to those with a passion for strict accuracy. My goal is to tell a story that is powerfully relevant to our times, when opioid addiction is once again in the headlines. England was an institutionalized drug pusher in the nineteenth century, supporting smugglers and sending the Royal Navy (the best in the world at that time) to attack China to protect “free trade.” Illegal opium imports to China more than doubled after the First Opium War, with the full knowledge and support of the British Empire.

  It has been a longtime ambition of mine to write about the Opium Wars. Growing up in Hong Kong, I witnessed the remnants of its effects more than one hundred years later: rickshaw pullers, coolies, ordinary people, all strung out in public; families destroyed by addiction; and the robust drug trade that fueled the so-called Triad gangsters who took over the opium and heroin trade. I have witnessed firsthand how certain “colonial masters” in Hong Kong treat their “Chinese subjects”; I have experienced racism, arrogance, and the pompous behavior of British colonial secretaries who felt they owned Hong Kong. Those attitudes have changed in recent decades as local business tycoons have taken over Hong Kong’s economy, especially since the handover of Hong Kong back to China. For many years these experiences colored my beliefs about the British. It was not until I visited the United Kingdom in the 1990s that I realized that most British folks are indeed “gentlemen and gentle ladies”—sincere, down to earth, and quite civil.

  My view of the opium trade also changed as I began my research for this book. Of course it was morally unjustified and completely wrong for England to use opium to trade for Chinese merchandise, but the environment of runaway corruption, poor government policies, ignorance, and fear of the outside world in Imperial China played a key role in making it possible for England to get into the opium trade in such a big way. The Imperial Court did not welcome Westerners—or any outsiders—let alone trade with them, unless it was for something China needed, and China didn’t need anything from England, or so its people thought. China certainly could have used an upgrade to its ships and weaponry from the navy that made the British Empire an unparalleled global superpower, but the Chinese were too proud to accept foreign technology.

  The Imperial Court despised the “white foreign devils” because they didn’t understand them. Many of these early Westerners were in China to spread a religion that centered around one deity and his son who saved the world—a belief that threatened the Imperial Court, as the emperor was anointed by the heavens to rule the world. Everyone in Chin
a lived under rules set forth by key philosophers: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and Mengzi, to name a few. The only acceptable religions were Buddhism and Taoism. The Imperial Court did not want outside forces meddling with the best management tool they had for a large and diverse population with a long history of rebellion.

  History is more than academic theories—it is the stories of real people affected by events put in motion by other real people. I hope that by the end of this book, you, the reader, come away with an understanding of how and why the Opium Wars took place and are intrigued by both the fiction and the history. I’d like to leave you with the words of Thomas Arnold, a British educator and historian, written on March 18, 1840:

  This war with China…really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men’s minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring? I really do not remember, in any history, of a war undertaken with such combined injustice and baseness. Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority.

  Fu-Moon, February 26, 1841

  Lee Da Ping, his hands shaking, watched as gray dragons breathed fire, spewing smoke that spun into rose petals and then burst into fireworks. The hulls of the junks glowed red where sailors had painted them with dog blood to ward off the foreign devils, and the markings transformed into snarling canines with fiery eyes. Da Ping, at the age of fifteen, had been addicted to opium for two years, but he had never experienced a high like this. He forgot all about resupplying the cannons that were supposed to protect the fort just outside the mouth of the Pearl River. Fu-Moon, meaning Tiger’s Gate, was the last defensive line protecting the city of Canton, together with a handful of island forts with Chinese war junks and rusted cannons. With or without Da Ping’s efforts, it didn’t have a prayer against the British armada.

  The Nemesis, built in Liverpool, represented the best seafaring technology in the world, made possible through the technological development brought about by the industrial revolution in Britain. It was the first steam-powered British warship cased in iron to protect its wooden hull, and its armaments included two pivot-mounted thirty-two-pound cannons, four six-pound cannons on swivels, and a contemporary rocket launcher. Many British warships with similar firepower were sailing into battle against a fleet of wooden junks with weapons that had been out of date for decades.

  Chinese weapons and navigation had rivaled those of the Western world for centuries—China had, after all, invented gunpowder and firearms. But the empire had become complacent. The Imperial Court refused to believe that a faraway foreign power would ever attack, and its current ships were more than enough to put down any pirates or petty rebellions.

  Da Ping was convinced the gunboats were morphing into something supernatural that would rain death on his people.

  “I must tell General Kwan!” he shouted to no one in particular over the roar of the enemy guns. “These cannons are worthless. Let the foreign devils sell the fucking opium and buy the fucking tea and silk—whatever they want!” As an addict, he didn’t see what was so wrong with a free flow of opium off the foreign ships anyway.

  Enemy troops on landing boats were already approaching Fu-Moon’s shores, and he felt he should alert General Kwan so he would send more troops to fight them off. Da Ping thought he saw the general—or someone who looked like he was in command—so he summoned what felt like boundless stores of courage and leaped up to get this man’s attention. Cannonballs be damned—the opium had made him invincible.

  Chapter One

  Canton, 1826

  Screams of excruciating pain rang out through Lord Lee Shao Lin’s home, the largest private estate in Canton. Shao Lin’s daughter, Su-Mei, at four years old, had shocked her parents by refusing to have her feet bound, as all noble little girls did at that age. He couldn’t believe she would dare disobey him—it was unheard of! If she didn’t start her foot binding now, to attain the “gold” standard of feet no longer than three inches when she was fully grown, her feet would grow to normal size, and she would be the laughingstock of the noble class. So, he had had her tied up and the binding forced upon her. She bellowed in protest.

  In a room nearby, Su-Mei’s mother and Shao Lin’s Number One Wife, Mei Li, was in labor with her second child and also crying out in pain. She had secretly taken the herbalist’s potion to induce labor so she would give birth before Number One Concubine Yu Bing. Both were racing to earn the honor of delivering Shao Lin’s Number One Son. Both women prayed earnestly for a son, but the goddess Kuan Yin would answer the prayers of only one.

  Lee Su-Mei screamed as loud as she could, out of frustration as much as from pain. The sound bounced off the silk hangings on the walls and seemed to drop to the floor. No one heard, no one came to her rescue. Her ankles had been tied with long ribbons to the legs of a low stool, and her wrists were crossed behind her back and tied together, then tied to the back legs of the stool. Master Fu had tantalized her with the silk ribbons, so long and pretty! He had said they would give her the most beautiful tiny feet, just like her Honorable Mother, and all the pain would be worth it when she was a proper lady with a wealthy husband from a noble family. He had bent over her toes and wrapped them tightly to the soles of her feet in an attempt to break them, and the bones throbbed. She couldn’t move, couldn’t tear off the ribbons that were causing such agony.

  Lord Lee Shao Lin felt that he’d already suffered enough inconvenience for one morning. Number One Wife had started her labor about the same time the foot herbalist had come for Su-Mei’s binding, and the house was in disarray, every servant rushing here and there to boil water and heat blankets or fetch the midwife and the astrologer. There had been nothing but tea and cold noodles for his breakfast, and now the best foot herbalist in the city was failing to control a small child.

  “Tie her up!” he had ordered. “If she will not obey, she must be made to obey.” The firstborn daughter of Lord Lee Shao Lin, one of the wealthiest men in Canton, would marry into the family of a high-ranking guan, and to do that, she would have to have small feet. How his daughter’s feet reached that size was none of his concern.

  Lee Shao Lin couldn’t have explained why Chinese men were so attracted to women with feet so small that young girls were forced to have their toes broken and feet reshaped into dainty little hooves. The feet, trussed in silk bandages, were of no use; they made it impossible for women to walk without pain even in adulthood. When little girls’ toes rotted away from lack of circulation, the stench was overpowering, and the servants had to use the most expensive perfumes to disguise it. There were ratings for bound feet: The smallest, at three inches in length, were “gold”; four-inch feet were “silver”; and anything over four inches was dismissed as “iron.” Women with gold feet could command a husband from the wealthiest and most respectable families, but to win such a prize, a girl had to suffer excruciating pain from the beginning of the binding process until adulthood. Countless women who had achieved the gold standard subsequently lost their lives in fires or other disasters because they couldn’t run away to safety on their tiny, useless feet.

  Foot binding dated back to the tenth century, when the emperor’s most-favored concubine was a dancer with tiny feet. She had bound them to reshape them into little hooves. Other concubines who sought the emperor’s attention began binding their feet, and the practice spread among noblewomen. Habit and erotic fancy among the idle rich had kept the practice alive, and Lee Shao Lin would keep it going in his house. The tantrums of a child could not be allowed to hinder her bright future.

  Master Fu, with the help of a household servant, had managed to tie Su-Mei, kicking and sc
reaming, to the stool. Then he had packed his ribbons and strong-smelling ointments and left. He would return the next day to tighten the binding.

  Alone now, Su-Mei struggled, trying with all her strength to break or stretch the ribbons. As she wriggled on the stool, warm liquid flooded her pants and tunic. Her cheeks burned with shame. She was a big girl, nearly five years old, and she hadn’t wet herself in years! She hated Master Fu, and she hated her father. Ragged sobs tore at her chest, and huge tears dripped down her face. Furious, she tried to wipe them on her shoulders, but she couldn’t reach.

  “My lady?”

  Su-Mei’s head snapped up. “Bao?”

  A round face appeared in the doorframe. It was the maid of First Concubine, who Su-Mei knew as Second Mother. The maid’s name wasn’t really Bao, but everyone called her that because she was so short and fat, like a dumpling.

  “Bao! Where is everyone? Can you let me go? Please, please! I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Hush, my little lady—stop your crying.” Bao wiped the girl’s face with her sleeve and bent to untie her arms and legs. “Don’t you know? Everyone is busy with your Honorable Mother. She is about to give you a baby brother or sister!”

  Su-Mei sniffed. She didn’t think she wanted a baby brother or sister. “Where’s Nanny?”

  “Nanny is helping her grandmother with the birth preparations.” The last knot came loose. “There! That’s better, isn’t it?”

  Su-Mei tore frantically at the bindings on her feet. When she’d ripped them free, her toes went from white to deep red, and pain streaked up her legs. It would take minutes for the agony to abate; nevertheless, she was flooded with relief. “Oh, thank you, Bao!” She pointed at her dressing table. “Master Fu left me some sweets—that is all I can offer you for helping me.”