The cuppa that launched a thousand ships

Happy Sunday Reader!
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Having watched rather too much David Attenborough over the festive break and convincing myself that microplastics were staging a hostile takeover of my internal organs—brain included—I did what any sensible person would do: I ditched the tea bags and bought a teapot together with some organic loose-leaf tea.

Terribly quaint. I hadn’t brewed a proper cup of tea since I was sixteen.

I kid you not, what a revelation. I’d forgotten how wonderful a decent cup of tea could taste. No bitterness, just the smooth, aromatic delivery of that daily fix we Brits have been imbibing since the mid-17th century.

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By the 1830s, the British were consuming 30 million pounds (in weight) of tea each year. That’s 6,000 of today’s London double-decker buses filled to the brim with leaves. Imagine the entire bus fleet trundling around London packed with Earl Grey instead of passengers.

In the 168 years since Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza, had made tea a fashionable court beverage in 1662, it had trickled down from the aristocracy’s teacups into every working-class household in Britain.

On average, 5% of a worker’s wages were spent buying tea—the equivalent of a modern London bus driver handing over £1,650 a year for tea leaves.

Which brings me to an uncomfortable truth about addictions—someone always pays for them. It might seem a stretch to blame two Opium Wars on our national obsession with tea. But, indirectly, there it is.

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Out of Curiosity

United Kingdom annual tea consumption today stands at 250,000,000 pounds (113 million kilograms), approximately eight times that of 1830. To put it another way, each year the UK consumes a wellie boot-full of tea per person, three to four times as much as 100 years earlier.

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Britain began sourcing tea from India in 1839. Up until that point, most of the tea imported was from China. This caused a problem. There was little that Britain produced that China wanted. While the Brits craved for tea, porcelain and silk, the Chinese saw British goods as ‘barbarian and inferior’. Apparently, they weren’t clamouring for heavy woollens, Protestant hymn books and boiled mutton.

For the most coveted goods, the Chinese would only accept silver. Britain’s reserves were haemorrhaging.

Empires, however, were rarely built on fair play. The solution was elegantly simple, if morally bankrupt: create a market where none existed. To satisfy the British consumer’s addiction to tea, the Government would engineer a Chinese addiction to something far more potent—Opium.

Using the British East India Company’s foothold in India, British authorities turned Bengal’s fields over to opium poppies. They sold the harvests to private traders who smuggled them into China. By 1838, 40,000 chests of opium a year were crossing the border.

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By 1840, opium addiction had spread to government officials, the imperial court and even the ranks of the military.

Chinese buyers paid for the smuggled opium in silver. British merchants then used that same silver to buy the tea, silk and porcelain for shipment home. By the 1830s, opium revenues alone covered Britain’s entire tea habit.

The trade imbalance had been spectacularly reversed. As opium sales flourished, silver that once flowed out of Britain into China was now moving in the opposite direction.

This ‘silver drain’ accelerated as addiction spread. Families spent themselves into bankruptcy, children were left to fend for themselves and China drifted towards a social and economic abyss.

Towards the end of 1838, Emperor Daoguang dispatched one of his most trusted officials, Lin Zexu, to shut down the trade. Lin set about the task with ruthless efficiency: 1,700 Chinese dealers arrested, thousands of opium pipes destroyed, foreign trading posts blockaded until merchants surrendered their entire stocks.

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Charles Elliot, the British Chief Superintendent of Trade, was in a pickle. His blockaded staff had endured six weeks on warehouse scraps. Water was scarce, food supplies dwindling. On the bright side, they had plenty of tea. And twenty thousand chests of opium.

Elliot’s solution was as bold as it was unauthorised. He promised the British merchants that the government would compensate them for their opium if they surrendered it to Lin. They did.

Lin’s men spent three weeks destroying the opium. Crisis averted, everyone happy. Everyone except the British government, that is, which was incandescent. Paying out for lost opium was offensive enough. But having British citizens imprisoned for six weeks by a foreign power? Intolerable.

War was inevitable.

Parliament was split on whether to go to war. Numerous MPs opposed war on the basis that peddling opium was morally indefensible. A young William Gladstone, the future Prime Minister, was particularly vocal in his disgust.

Nonetheless, Lord Melbourne’s government carried the vote on the grounds that…. well… the opium trade was just too profitable to give up.

So the First Opium War erupted in 1839, and by June 1840 the main British naval expeditionary force had arrived. The war was a mismatch. The might of the British navy tore through fleets of Chinese junks with their antiquated cannons.

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In an effort to prevent further escalation, Charles Elliot and Qishan—successor to Lin Zexu, disgraced after his crackdown precipitated the war—drafted the Convention of Chuenpi, one hundred and eighty-five years ago this Tuesday, 20 January 1841.

Qishan and Elliot hammered out terms: China would pay £6 million in compensation for the destroyed opium, trade would resume at Canton, and—almost as an afterthought—one small, barren island would be ceded to Britain.

The island was called Hong Kong.

The convention achieved what diplomacy rarely does: complete agreement between the two rival powers. Both rejected it as worthless.

Emperor Daoguang couldn’t understand why Britain would wage war for the right to sell poison, while the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, dismissed Hong Kong as "a barren island with hardly a house upon it".

Elliot proceeded regardless. On 25 January 1841, Captain Edward Belcher of HMS Sulphur landed a party on Hong Kong Island’s northern shore. The following morning, Commodore Sir James John Gordon Bremer raised the Union Jack and claimed Hong Kong Island for Queen Victoria.

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Out of Curiosity

In the Batting the Breeze Original Stories podcast, I interviewed Bill Renwick, a former member of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. Bill shared the story of his part in one of Asia’s highest profile drugs busts of the 1980s, Operation Clinker.

Think of The French Connection meets Popeye with a sprinkling of Keystone Kops, and you have all the ingredients for this fabulous story. Check it out here.

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The entire ceremony probably lasted less than an hour. Six thousand Chinese inhabitants weren’t consulted.

The war continued.

In May 1841, British forces stormed Canton. Once again, Elliot negotiated a settlement. Once again, Palmerston was apoplectic. Withdrawing from Canton in exchange for a mere £60,000? Derisory. Elliot was dismissed.

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By August 1842, British forces had reached the outskirts of Nanking (modern Nanjing), once the imperial capital of the early Ming Dynasty.

The Qing government capitulated immediately and signed the Treaty of Nanking—the first of what China would come to call the 'unequal treaties'. Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain ‘in perpetuity’ and the Chinese paid an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars.

Worst of all for the Chinese, the British continued to trade in opium. This was the beginning of their ‘century of humiliation’.

That barren island with hardly a house upon it became one of the world’s great commercial centres and remained under British control until it was handed back in 1997.

Of course, China had the last laugh.

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Dates with History

Today…

King Henry VII married Elizabeth of York at Westminster Abbey 540 years ago today, 18 January 1486.

The Wars of the Roses had been a 30-year bloodbath. It came to a close when Henry seized the crown at the Battle of Bosworth the previous August, killing the incumbent Richard III in the process.

Henry, a Lancastrian, married Elizabeth of York as a political gesture—an attempt to reconcile the Yorkists to his rule. Given that Elizabeth was Richard III’s niece, it must have made for some awkward family dinners.

From this union came the Tudor rose—the white rose of York merging with the red rose of Lancaster. After 331-years, the Plantagenets were done.

The Tudor dynasty had begun.

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Wednesday…

And with that, Hercule Poirot made his entrance into Agatha Christie’s first novel and into the minds of millions of readers.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was first serialised in February 1920, published in the United States later in the year, with the UK edition following 105 years ago this Wednesday, 21 January 1921.

Two billion book sales later, it is thought that only the Bible has outsold Christie, though to be fair she’s running neck and neck with William Shakespeare.

Agatha Christie died 50 years ago last Monday, 12 January 1976.

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Friday...

Anna Pavlova was born in St Petersburg in 1881, the daughter of a washerwoman. By the time she died in The Hague 95 years ago this Friday, 23 January 1931, she was widely acclaimed as the most celebrated ballerina of her age. She was only forty-nine years old.

Having left Russia, Anna Pavlova settled in London in 1912, using it as a base to tour the world with her own ballet company.

She is remembered for her signature piece, The Dying Swan, which she performed a reputed 4,000 times. Pavlova is also remembered for creating a home in Paris in 1920 for Russian refugee children who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution.

Let’s not forget the 'Pavlova', a light, fluffy meringue-based dessert, christened in her honour.

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Saturday...

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus became Rome’s third emperor in 37 CE at the age of twenty-four. Caligula, or ‘little boots’—a nickname from his earlier days as a child mascot in his father’s army—proved to be a deceptively cute label for the brutality that lay within him.

Less than a year into his reign, something snapped. Caligula declared himself a living god and demanded worship. He promoted his horse Incitatus to the role of consul and held debates with the moon. (I’ve done that by the way…. talked to the moon that is, not promoted a horse.)

Caligula’s cruelty was legendary, plundering treasure, staging executions for his amusement and turning the imperial court into a theatre of terror.

Eventually, his bodyguards—the Praetorian Guard—had had enough. Thirty stab wounds ended Caligula’s four-year reign of terror 1,985 years ago this coming Saturday, 24 January 41.

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Out of Curiosity

Caligula’s assassination fell 725,000 days ago last Friday.

Gone missing?

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This will let your email provider know that I am not SPAM and hopefully your copy of The Breezer will end up in the right place next time. Thanks.

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Question of the Week

20th January is a memorable date in the calendar for a United States citizen. Ratified on 23 January 1933, the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution moved the start and end dates of presidential terms to noon on that day, replacing the previous 4th March provision.

As such, US Presidents have been inaugurated on 20th January since Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for his second term in 1937. Although the public inauguration ceremonies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were held on 21st January (because the 20th fell on a Sunday), these presidents still took their oaths privately the day before.

Four such presidents were:

• John F. Kennedy
• Ronald Reagan
• Richard Nixon
• Gerald Ford

Which of these was born first?

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And Finally…

In August 2014, workers at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo faced a problem that would have made any pharaoh’s embalmers weep into their papyrus scrolls.

Someone had knocked the beard off King Tutankhamun’s iconic burial mask.

Now, accidents happen, even to 3,300-year-old golden masks. No problem, this was fixable. Conservators trained in delicate restoration work deal with this sort of thing all the time.

Except the museum didn’t call the conservators.

Untrained museum workers took it upon themselves to reattach the detached beard using the Egyptian equivalent of superglue. Perfectly suitable for garden gnomes, less so for pharaohs.

In their haste, the workers were too generous with the adhesive. Epoxy oozed from behind the reunited beard and solidified on the mask’s golden surface. To compound the problem, an effort to scrape off the glue with a spatula left even more visible scars.

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Months later, a German conservator noticed the misdemeanour during a routine inspection.

Ten years ago this Friday, 23 January 2016, the eight museum workers were referred for trial in Cairo. All eight were found guilty of gross negligence. They were suspended from their posts, fined, but spared a prison sentence.

Tutankhamun’s beard was eventually reattached properly using beeswax—the same adhesive the ancient Egyptians themselves had used over three thousand years earlier.

If all else fails, read the instructions.

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Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

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Question of the week… answer

Ronald Reagan. The answer might instinctively appear odd since Reagan was president 17 years after Kennedy’s assassination. However, Reagan was sixty-nine when he took the oath. Kennedy had been forty-three.

John F. Kennedy, born 29 May 1917

Ronald Reagan, born 6 February 1911

Richard Nixon, born 9 January 1913

Gerald Ford, born 14 July 1913

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